SOURCE: "Christian Allegory in Hartmann's Iwein," in The Germanic Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 4, November, 1973, pp. 247-59.

In the following excerpt, Clifton-Everest examines religious didacticism in Iwein and insists that Iwein, in pursuing a chivalric ideal, allegorically represents the quest for Christian virtue..

In [The Rise of Romance (1971)] E. Vinaver speaks of the "common intellectual origin of the interpretative nature of romance on the one hand and of the exegetic tradition on the other." Scriptural exegesis is what he has in mind. He argues that the formal education of the twelfth century romancers involved a great deal of training in biblical exegetic method, since such techniques constituted an important part of the trivium. His implication is that the romancers composed their own works with a conception of the narrative literary art profoundly influenced by the exegetic practice of the time, particularly as regards the relationship of story and meaning...