The Dynamics of Gender-Specific Honor and Shame in the Middle Ages

Abstract

At first glance, making gender-based differentiations between honor and shame seems appropriate within the context of medieval literature. Whereas honor is the one quality that male protagonists seek more than any other through battle and their loyalties, a sense of shame is one of the most important virtues that female characters need in order to become suitable objects for love and marriage. I have already suggested such a differentiation in my analysis of the love potion episode in Tristan und Isolde by Gottfried von Straßburg (see Eming, 2015). However, one will also find that in medieval literature, female characters are at least as obsessed with honor as their male counterparts, and that shame, especially public shaming, is one of the experiences that knights (Parzival) fear the most. In general, the interconnectivity of honor, shame, and social values differs greatly from what would be expected in modernity. What’s more, in literary contexts, questions of honor are not clearly defined, but (re)negotiated, typically by way of a severe conflict. This chapter will examine just such a conflict between the main female characters in the medieval Nibelungenlied. By displaying a whole cluster of emotions and their expressions— anger, hatred, joy, tears, and grief—Kriemhild and Brünhild famously become fiercely opposed to one another over the question of whose husband is higher in rank, and what this means for their own social status and interaction. With justification, this has often been interpreted as a key scene for the development of the tragic plot of the Nibelungenlied as well as the rituals and unwritten rules of feudal society. My chapter will concentrate specifically on the question of how standards of gender-based social behavior are discussed in the episode in exemplary ways through the problematizing of the female characters’ honor and shame.