[SCA-AS] [Fwd: TMR 08.05.19 Classen, Erotic tales of medieval Germany (Petkov)]

Thu May 29 12:40:07 CDT 2008

Thought you all might enjoy hearing about this book...

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: TMR 08.05.19 Classen, Erotic tales of medieval Germany (Petkov)
From:    "The Medieval Review" <tmrl at indiana.edu>
Date:    Thu, May 29, 2008 10:10 am
To:      tmr-l at indiana.edu
         bmr-l at brynmawr.edu
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Classen, Albrecht, ed. and trans. Erotic tales of medieval
Germany, with a contribution by Maurice Sprague and an edition of
Froben Christoph von Zimmern's "Der entt&#228;uschte Liebhaber." Tempe,
AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Pp. x,
170. $11.80. ISBN-13: 978-0-86698-374-7.

   Reviewed by Kiril Petkov
        University of Wisconsin-River Falls
        kiril.petkov at uwrf.edu

In this sleek volume Albrecht Classen offers translations of twenty
tales of love, sex, marriage, and a good deal of wishful thinking on
erotic subjects in which medieval Germans of all walks of life appear
to have delighted. The tales are known as maeren: Middle High
German short verse narratives mostly composed between ca. 1250 and
1500. The earliest tales have been attributed to an Austrian
goliardic poet known by his artistic pseudonym "the weaver" who lived
some time in the early thirteenth century; the genre remained popular
until the late sixteenth century. Most of the maere seem to
have been composed by urban literati. Some are clearly the product of
the poetic dabbling of the lower nobility or the court officials
affiliated with them. Over two hundred of these narratives are
extant, some in just one manuscript, others in a dozen or more copies.
As a literary genre the maere bear resemblance to the Old
French fabliaux, the Latin ridicula, or the entertaining
stories of Italian provenance so admirably rendered by Boccaccio. In
fact, in function, style, composition, subject-matter, and didactic
bent the maere display several features characteristic of other
vernacular genres. Literary "contamination," such as borrowing and
sharing motives and plots, transpires in most of the tales; at least a
dozen are almost direct correspondents to prototypes first developed
in the fabliaux and the novelle and fazetiae.

But the maere have a distinct Middle High German ring to them,
and it is visible not only in the implicit references to the courtly
romance canon of Middle High German literature and the familiarity
with it that the audience was expected to possess. While the urban
setting and courtly and noble personages are frequent features of all
related genres of entertaining narratives in verse or prose, the
maere's ethos stands apart from that of other vernacular
traditions. The value systems informing the tales, the moral lessons
their authors sought to impart, the social and literary agency and
their parameters, the perceptions of social order and its
transgressions, and the role of love and sex in weaving these issues
together as well as the expressive style of their authors put the
maere in a category of their own.

The implicit and explicit conventions of the tales make the point
clear.  All women are beautiful and nicely shaped, most burghers are
hard-working fellows, and almost all knights are decent men, except
when besotted by sexual desires.  The knightly ethos in the spirit of
the courtly romance is a strong leading thread in several of the
tales.  The expressive style is very restrained, with a decency that
borders on the prudish.  Graphic--and even less so, pornographic--
sexuality, so beloved by the fabliaux, is practically lacking.
Eroticism is at times so thickly veiled, as in von Zimmern's
"Disappointed Lover," for example, that one is hard put to detect it.
Female honor is at premium.  Chaste ladies are praised more, and more
often than the woman who would reach for sex as a device of self-
fulfillment.  The horror story of "The Innocent Murderess" is a case
in point.  Even when a bit of extramarital sex is involved, the woman
meant nothing but to uphold the honor and social standing of her
husband, as the noble lady in "The Belt" does, teaching her husband a
lesson to boot.  The trope of the chaste, worthy, and faithful wife
and the foolish husband is a commonplace, "The Search for the Happily
Married Couple" and "The Two Merchants and the Loyal Wife" being
perhaps the best examples.  And even the straying woman would be, as
in the very first tale, "The knight underneath the bathing tub," a
fabliaux-derivate, sincerely in love.  Illicit sex almost always goes
with that ennobling spark of love, which rationalizes and justifies
it.  Characters tend to talk more than they act.   Misogyny is muted:
women may know many tricks and be predisposed to play them but it is
men's fault that they fall for them and fail to measure up to, or
satisfy, or realize the virtues of their women.  The bourgeois ethos
of "hold onto what you have" is underlying theme in such cases.  It
is, however, mocked as well, as in "The Little Bunny Rabbit" and "The
Knight with the Sparrow-Hawk."  The inherent mobility and instability
of the bourgeois world is thus limited to the extreme.  Wit does,
occasionally, out-weigh morality, mostly when applied by clever women
caught in trespass, but it mostly serves to uphold rather than
challenge the conventional order of the day.  The main characters,
knights and honorable burghers as well as their wives and women rarely
turn sex into a commodity, and when they do, as in the "Warm Donation"
it is, again, to reinforce a lesson about traditional Christian
values.  The abject commodification of sex is reserved for the lower
classes, the servants and the squires mired in their base
circumstances, and they get their just deserts.  The didactic
intention is very strong too and at times overwhelms the entertaining
component of the tale.  Eroticism is a means, not an end in itself.
While the medieval German audience could have had a different sense of
what constitutes a "real fun story," to the mind of the present
reviewer some of the tales might have better served as instructional
reading for both men and women.

With all this the maere do make a fine comparison to the other
medieval vernacular traditions indulging in erotic themes. Their
complexity and multi-layered narratives will certainly repay a closer
scrutiny in literature and history classes aiming at disentangling the
fascinating world of sex, love, and marriage in the medieval Western
experience. Classen has done a fine job rendering in a readable and
flowing prose the habitually coded and occasionally inscrutable Middle
High German verse. Each of the tales is prefaced by a short blurb
with literary and historic background information and references to
their critical editions. The short bibliography is a helpful tool for
those enticed to look up further reading.

-- 
-- Jenne Heise / Jadwiga Zajaczkowa
jenne at fiedlerfamily.net