Crusade in the Bedroom

Abstract

This essay offers a new reading of Carmen Buranus no. 48 as an integrated Latin-vernacular hybrid in which secular courtly love, represented in the stanza from the Tagelied by Otto von Botenlouben that concludes the Latin poem, is conscripted into a crusading agenda and subverted. The call of the dawnsong watchman, taken up by the lady, becomes the call to crusade for the knight. The proposed dating and context is ca. 1213, during the propagandistic run-up to the fifth crusade, which caused controversy in German courtly circles (Walther von der Vogelweide, Thomasin von Zerklaere).