The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations

This volume explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Wigalois / Viduvilt adaptations grow from a multistage process: a German text adapted into Yiddish adapted into German, creating adaptations actively shaped by a minority culture within a majority culture. The Knight without Boundaries examines five key moments in the Wigalois / Viduvilt tradition that highlight transitions between narratological and meta-narratological patterns and audiences of different religious-cultural or lingual background.

Annegret Oehme, Ph.D. (2016), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of German Studies at the University of Washington. She has published articles on pre-modern German and Yiddish literature in The German Quarterly, Ashkenaz, Daphnis, and Arthuriana, and a short monograph (＂He Should Have Listened to His Wife.＂ The Construction of Women’s Roles in German and Yiddish Pre-modern Wigalois Adaptations [De Gruyter, 2020]).