Scenarios of Counseling – Literary Drafts in the Pre-Modern Era. An Introduction

Abstract

Premodern narrative texts depict a multitude of scenes of formal and informal counsel that have not yet received systematic attention in studies on MHG literature. Drawing on sociologist Thomas Luckmann, the introduction to this volume develops a model of counsel as a ›communicative format‹ and situates it on a praxeological level. Conceiving situations of counsel and consultation as scenarios outlines the tension between predictability and openness to outcomes, in which pre-modern texts regularly situate them. This tension is related analytically to the levels of the narrative world and its pragmatic contexts and, methodologically, to the historical-hermeneutic question of implicit practical knowledge.