History, Fiction, Verisimilitude: Studies in the Poetics of Gottfried’s Tristan

This study of Gottfried von Strassburg discusses the narrative technique of his romance Tristan (c. 1210) against the double background of Latin rhetoric and poetics on the one hand, and the developing written vernacular tradition on the other. It argues that Gottfried’s poetics represents the attempt to mediate between opposing tendencies in vernacular narrative, the one historiographic and archival, the other fictional and experimental. Verisimilitude, the res ficta quae tamen fieri potest, occupies an intermediate position between the res factae of history and the res fictae of poetry; it is on this middle ground that Gottfried situates his narrative.