The focus on inner space unites two topical areas of cultural anthropology: space as a structural paradigm, and the focal differentiation between the categories of inner and outer. The literature of medieval Germany, in staging such interior space in a variety of ways, poses questions about difference, liminality, and transgression, and thus allows abstract concepts and processes to be articulated: in a culture otherwise dominated by that which is present and visible, inner space conveys notions of psychological, cosmological or textual order.
