Self-Enactment of Late Medieval Chivalry: Performance and Self-Representation in Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the world of courtly literature must be measured and evaluated by different criteria than those used for modern literary texts, the alterity of the Middle Ages requiring different lenses than those through which we view our own world (Jauss; Reinhard). Courtly love poetry and epics alike – Minnesang, for example, or Hartmann von Aue's Erec and Iwein – prove to be complex literary fora in which the protagonists act out concrete situations and the audience is invited to join a discussion about the individual positions taken by the heroes or characters (Schweikle). Whether Minnesang reflects the emotions of the singer or is an exclusively formalistic, rhetorical art representative of courtly culture remains a debated issue (Willms 59-88). Yet the poetic statements seem to deny the possibility of love's happy fulfilment, while the ladies, the more the knights woo them, accept or acknowledge all the less the poets' confessions of love (Kaplowitt 167-84). Consequently, some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that the intricate complexities of the entire corpus of Minnesang poetry – the dawn song (tageliet) excepted – might well have been the product of a psychological neurosis among the knightly class, the result of deepseated frustrations of male performers soundly rejected by all their ladies. Ulrich Miller has even identified Minnesang as the literary reflection of an ekklesiogene Kollektivneurose. That term he might have meant tongue-in-cheek, yet he was right in arguing that this phenomenon of courtly love poetry illustrated an element of public mentality or disposition common among all members of the court. Muller identifies these tensions as the result of Aufbruch and Emanzipation with regard to the traditional dogmas of the Christian Church (236), basing his theory on the observation that, while the medieval Church strictly opposed extramarital love and rigidly fought against the sinfulness of sexuality, secular society strove for an outlet of its inner desires and physical needs (see also Kay). As the famous example of Dante's Vita Nuova indicates, however, the primary purpose of courtly love poetry was not the realization of erotic desires.