Abstract

The programme of bringing together Literary Studies and Intellectual History (›Geistesgeschichte‹) has its foundation in the notion of context. At first sight, literary text and historical context look as if they could be separated from each other with ease. However, each text carries with it contextual elements just as much as each context is always already imbued with textuality. What seems to be at stake is their relation. This is above all taken into account by functionalist approaches less interested in the attribution of functions to seemingly pre-existent structures than seeing structure as following function. It clearly undermines the commonsensical assumption that structure precedes function – just as much as it destabilizes the hermeneutical relation between question and answer and the epistemological precedence of the real over the imaginary: obviously, the contextual ›seat in life‹ seems to have the same impact on text-making as textual meaning has in relation to its context; wherever the construction of a ›reality‹ looks like a plausible imaginary answer to the question of what the world is, imagination in literature and art seems to be the site of turning the answers back into questions. In the premodern period, seen as the epoch of a shift from a predominantly analogical world-view, characterized by a cosmological closure guaranteed by God, to the open concept of reality as the result of a temporal and causal, man/woman-made individual realization, this seems to be one of the decisive driving forces affecting the modification of the social imaginary, both in its framing and in its truth-finding methods, with regard to the process of ›epochal‹ change.