Clara Hedtrich

Between Power, Weakness and Dependency
The Challenging Concept of Counseling in German Court Novels of the Twelveth and Thirteenth Century

My project focusses on the representations of counseling in the literature of the 12th and 13th centuries. The political concept of counselling is decisive for the social order of the Middle Ages and the relations between counsellors and rulers influence the political decisions of that time. By portraying diverse literary constructions of dependency between counselors and rulers, the texts problematize the flaws of the social systems. From a corpus of almost one hundred texts the most interesting figurations of the dependency of counselors as well as the interdependency of rulers and counselors will have to be singled out and to be examined and analyzed with regard to the narrative functions of dependencies. It is my aim to investigate the hidden structures of dependency by deconstructing the idealizing agenda of these narrative texts.

2016–2022                 
Ph.D. in German Medieval Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2011–2015                 
M.A. in German Medieval Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2008–2011                 
B.A. in German Language and Literature (research focus on German Medieval Language and Literature) and History, University of Bonn, Germany