‚Anschauungen‘. Wolframs ›Parzival‹-Roman im Spiegel der arabischen Optik

In recent decades the poetics of the visual has attracted increased scholarly interest in cultural and historical studies; but so far the topic has rarely been considered in intercultural perspectives. A revealing example of this is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval poem 'Parzival', composed shortly after 1200, that suggests that his author was – at least to some extent – familiar with the Arab learning of his time, as transmitted through the Iberian translation centre of Toledo. The metaphorical language of the poem evokes contrasts of light and darkness, the phenomenon of haziness and the play of colours. So far, there has been no attempt to relate these motifs to contemporary Arab optics. Influential thinkers such as Alhacen (Ibn al-Haytham) or the Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm studied the radiation of light, the quality of darkness, and the effects of colours. Whereas these ideas would spread in occidental science only over the course of the 13th century (via Roger Bacon and others), Wolfram's 'Parzival' 'reflects' elementary components of Arab optics already in an earlier period. The project analyses relevant episodes of the poem (including textual variants occurring in the manuscript transmission) and confronts them with statements in Arab science.