›Praeceptum‹ and ›consilium‹. Narrating Divine and Human Counsel in Early Middle High German Epic Poetry (›Eneas Romance‹, ›Song of Roland‹, ›Münchner Oswald‹)

Abstract

In the medieval tradition of Eneas, Roland, and Oswald, narrative accounts of counseling often seem redundant in terms of plot and motivational logic. They tell of counseling (consilium) in matters that have already been decided by divine instruction (praeceptum). The article offers two explanations for this phenomenon. First, such scenes of counseling evidence a narrative orientation toward smaller, preformed plot patterns (›scripts‹) that must be prototypically invoked in certain storytelling contexts. Second, the narrative intertwining of divine praeceptum and human consilium serves to address the question of how a ruler’s charismatically founded power of decision-making relates to the necessity of building collective consensus.