Reviews Will Hasty: The Medieval Risk-Reward Society: Courts, Adventure, and Love in the European Middle Ages. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2016. 312 pp. $ 99.95. In the 2001 film adaptation of Sylvia Nasar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Nash, the inspiration for his major contribution to Game Theory occurs in a social setting where students vie for the affection of a young woman deemed the most attractive� Nash observes the equilibrium of strategies on the part of the competitors, whose attentions focus exclusively on their objective� He is then free to bypass the competition, ask someone whom the other players see as less desirable, and succeed in winning a dance� In examining the genre of courtly romance, Hasty employs Game Theory and its co-component, Probability Theory, as a new methodology for literary historians to not only deepen our understanding of a hitherto neglected social and literary construct, namely, “the medieval risk-reward society,” but also to do so in an innovative, well-researched study that illuminates and traces the development of this paradigmatic mindset of life as a game and gamble into the early modern period and beyond to the “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth century� Achieving a synthesis of this magnitude, one that is also applicable to literary analysis in our own age, is no small feat� The reader can hardly fail to be fascinated by this new approach� Hasty offers us a phylogenetic exploration, a literary family tree if you will, of courtly romance from its mid twelfth-century French roots in the works of Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes to its major German branches in the canonical late twelfth and early thirteenth-century works of Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram von Eschenbach� Not surprisingly, Hasty’s new interpretative optic provides us with a perspective on the reception of courtly literature remarkably different from the conventional currency of German medieval studies� The reader will find a particularly striking exemplification thereof in Hasty’s reframing of Gottfried’s Tristan� Apart from universal acclaim for Gottfried’s verse and artistry, the overall evaluation among German medievalists of the lovers’ courtly behavior has remained a pronounced negative one� Be it in the form of nineteenth-century imposed moral values or the oppositional metrics of church-mandated behavior versus courtly love ideals as promulgated in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries� Hasty breaks the accepted interpretative frame and successfully challenges the given consensus 396 Reviews of scholarly opinion� To do so, he introduces a new vocabulary to accommodate his new conceptual agenda� Approaching the representation of courtly love in Tristan, he does so under the rubric of “love as a cultural wager” predicated on expertise of the game, i�e�, its rules and how one needs to play it well� In other words, the game at hand demands a broad educational base in a wide range of subject matter expected of an educated courtier� As such, Tristan and Isolt demonstrate that they are consummate practitioners of the entire skill set required of courtly men and women� Tristan, in particular, even exceeds expectations by introducing an all but unachievable high standard of accomplishment that ever threatens to elicit the dark side of courtly existence, namely, envy, jealously and Schadenfreude on the part of his outperformed fellow courtiers� By the same measure, it is also an invitation to assume control in pursuing one’s own purpose� Hasty calls our attention to this daring self-initiative: “The lovers may be ‘utterly’ lost in love at the moment, but we observe that in identifying what ails them and in finding the solution in each other, they are already beginning to find their way again� Thanks to their knowledge of the subtleties of linguistic meaning and their ability to reason things out by process of elimination - skills honed in their studies and life experience - Tristan and Isolt here begin to turn to their own advantage what is controlling them� Here they are no longer merely suffering a love that is happening to them but also taking initiative and making love happen - as only they can� The way is difficult for Isolt and Tristan at the beginning of their love, and it will continue to be so� This seems to be one of the main points Gottfried makes in this groundbreaking romance�” (198) The balancing act between courtly norms of behavior and the demands of love remains precarious� This intrinsic instability that underlies the “game” transforms love into a dynamical system that players can control only up to a point before predictability begins to waver� The risk of provoking collective enmity toward a seemingly unassailable rival acts as a narrative goad to amplify the post-love potion episodes� Yet Tristan and Isolt succeed in navigating the shoals of courtly intrigue in a remarkably consistent fashion that could well awaken collective admiration among auditors acquainted with the challenges of life at court� Hasty rightly calls our attention to the affectus of joy that the successful intrigues of the two lovers promulgate at Marke’s court� Auditors may well then have found in his courtly romance a positive affirmation of love as a game worth playing, albeit one scarcely winnable for the rank and file� As Hasty clearly states: “Few courtiers will reach the high standard Gottfried holds forth here - perhaps just Tristan and Isolt in the imaginary action of his romance, and the ‘noble hearts’ among the poet’s audience” (199)� By pinpointing a venerable pedagogical and narrative technique so often overlooked in Germanic medieval Reviews 397 studies, namely, the abiding influence of Affectlehre, Hasty lends contour to a fundamental dimension of Gottfried’s work� As a result, the conventional concern with “meaning” shifts dramatically to “feeling�” The contemporary interest in “affect theory,” e�g�, in the work of the literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, bears out the impact of affective action, especially in a “fantasy of the good life,” for her purposes, the so-called “American dream�” For Hasty’s purposes, one might say the “courtier’s dream�” One can also say with a measure of certainty that both involve risk and the possibility of settling for less� Gottfried invests in a higher love - a love that only a specialist courtly population of noble hearts is able to appreciate - and thereby gives “high” a new and very different sense (vis-à-vis the Christian parameters of love)� But he also hedges his bets by conceding vröden (“courtly joys”) - though doubtless less refined and valuable ones than those to which the noble hearts have access - to the ‘world of the many’ (see vv� 45-53) (115)� Arguably, one of the most valuable insights of Hasty’s book is one that has long eluded literary scholars, namely, that the binary between pursuing divine love and courtly love is not mutually exclusive� As Gottfried paradoxically exemplifies through the love between Tristan and Isolt, the very act of loving another person in this transient world, even if by strict definition adulterously, can still be a path to loving God� What students of medieval German literature have long regarded as oppositional within the inflexible binary and ecclesiastical standard of “worldly” or “non-worldly” becomes then a means to re-evaluating Gottfried’s work as a radical affirmation of the salvific potential of courtly love� As Hasty aptly observes: “If in courtly love, the beloved toward which this concentration of all the capacities of self is oriented is not God, this does not necessarily mean that the way to God is closed, at least not for courtiers” (163)� The final chapter of Hasty’s work, “The Modern Self in Play,” is remarkable and attests to his rare ability to synthesize a range of seemingly disparate materials from other epochs� His summative reflection from the penultimate chapter sets the tone: “Love and adventure are among the first global moves for perishable goods that will increasingly shape the cultural action of the later Middle Ages and modernity� As such they are trendsetters” (204)� Hasty exemplifies this trend through Mark Twain’s dark humor in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court� Key to the “pursuit of adventure and love” is the calculated investment, i�e�, the risk of self, life and property for the sake of profit� As in all honest studies of cultural action, Will Hasty leaves the evolution of the contemporary risk/ reward society open-ended� His view of “culture as action” reveals a new dimension within medieval studies that encompasses the post-medieval world as well� In Augustinian terms, “the present of future things” comes into being through new beginnings, and accordingly, through new risks that may lead to the fulfillment of “self” along a continuum between totalitarian distopia and Kant’s utopian “kingdom of the ends�” I am certain that the reader will find this groundbreaking study to be as rewarding as I have� Truman State University Ernst Ralf Hintz Robert C. Holub: Nietzsche in the Nineteenth Century. Social Questions and Philosophical Interventions. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. 536 pp. $ 85.00. The nine chapters that constitute Robert Holub’s book on Nietzsche in the nineteenth century focus on questions of Education, Germans, Society, Women, Colonialization, Jews, Evolution, Cosmology, and Eugenics� The volume positions Nietzsche within “the discursive universe of the late nineteenth century in Europe, but in particular in Germany,” aiming “to understand how and what Nietzsche learned from these discourses, and how his thought then participated in the larger concerns of the era” (7)� Holub’s Nietzsche is not primarily a thinker who debates philosophical questions raised by the ancients, Kant, or German idealist philosophers� As Thomas Brobjer observed, Nietzsche’s library did not contain a single work by Hegel, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Kant, even though Nietzsche began to draft a dissertation on the latter� Holub’s research shows very clearly that Nietzsche responded to a large variety of discourses, some of which may seem to be quite uninteresting in themselves� He refused “to distinguish between the abstract and the historical, the philosophical and the mundane” (7)� Some may find it surprising that “[m]ost often he [Nietzsche] possessed only a partial view of a complex situation, and he was apt to draw conclusions from a paucity of information, his own ‘insights’ into human psychology, and personal predilections frequently influenced by perceived allies or foes” (219)� Taking Holub’s view of Nietzsche seriously should curb the overenthusiasm for the (self-fashioned) philosopher and ferocious critic� Holub notes the work of several scholars who have concentrated on the writings and numerous contemporary developments upon which Nietzsche drew, such as Thomas H� Brobjer, Christian J� Emden, Gregory Moore, and Robin Small� By comparison, however, Holub’s book is much larger, wider, and diverse in scope� We learn that, with but few exceptions, Nietzsche did not engage in heated Auseinandersetzungen with the most influential philosophers either of his own or former times� Hence, “an understanding of several of his [Nietzsche’s] main convictions and propositions is possible only if we pay sufficient 398 Reviews