Medieval Literature as Provocation, Challenge, and Discourse: The Erotic, the Philosophical, and the Religious Elements Predicated on Obscurity and Ambivalence

At close analysis, we can easily identify numerous medieval and early modern texts where the modern reader might find him/herself rather puzzled because the narrator seems to defy deliberately the essential purposes and strategies of all storytelling, that is, providing a logical plot, clear messages, relying on coherence, and offering a concrete conclusion. Of course, when we turn to didactic literature, which was highly popular throughout the Middle Ages and far beyond, the opposite was the case because the moralizing ending commonly and explicitly tells the audience what to expect and what to make out of the fictional account in moral, ethical, religious, or philosophical terms. But, what is also true, didactic accounts still require interpretation, even when there is no intentional obscurity. In essence, however, we might misunderstand the very meaning of many literary, especially courtly texts if we attempt to identify the critical lesson or the poet’s motivation in straightforward terms, especially when we distinguish between the author and the text as an independent entity. In other words, we would go badly wrong if we searched for rigid and unequivocal messages within the narrative framework of many medieval accounts because human words tend to defy all those didactic purposes or are used for very different ones than we might have expected. Of course, to look at it from another perspective, there were countless instructional texts (chronicles, letters, wills, medical treatises, sermons, etc.) which are clearly determined by the writer’s intention and do not leave much wriggle room for the audience. At the same time, especially when we consider courtly literature, the entire issue becomes rather murky, which might be closely associated with the phenomenon itself, courtly love, a paradox in itself. This paper will highlight a number of major medieval narratives where obscurity, ambivalence, even confusion and duplicity emerge as significant literary strategies that force the audience to become actively involved and to engage with the text as an intellectual, ethical, religious, or philosophical challenge. An intensive reading from the modern perspective actually confirms that medieval audiences must have felt similarly puzzled and provoked to discuss a specific text, even if the manuscript record does not necessarily confirm this. Identifying this epistemological phenomenon will enable us to grasp much more in depth the actual intellectual process behind the presentation of a fictional text to a medieval audience, which then will shed innovative light on the ultimate purpose of much of pre-modern but also modern literature.