“‘Believing That Which Cannot Be’: (De)Constructing Clerical Masculinity in Des Münches Not.”
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
“Wann ist ein Mann ein Mann?” asks a song by the popular German singer Herbert Groenemeyer. The flurry of responses—flustered, supportive, or openly aggressive—to the recent news about a transgendered Oregonian man who announced himself to be pregnant proves the continual relevance of this question. Even in the 21st century, such blurring of gender boundaries arouses both morbid fascination and deep anxiety.
Medieval tales about male pregnancy suggest a preoccupation with masculinity and maleness of their own. Humorous stories of folly or sexual naïveté, such as Aucassin and Nicolette, Marie de France’s fable “A Peasant and Beetle,” or various late-medieval German Mären, push the gender boundaries only to reinforce them: they portray their feminized protagonists as incorrigible idiots, reaffirm child-bearing as a prerogative of women, and reinforce popular misogynous stereotypes. Among these stories, however, the fourteenth-century Middle High German tale “Des münches not” clearly stands out. While sharing the main premise of a man believing himself to be pregnant and to give birth, this particular Märe complicates the common plot by making its protagonist a celibate monk and therefore exploring the tensions not only between masculinity and femininity, but also within masculinity itself. By comparing the tale of a pregnant monk to a roughly contemporaneous story about a pregnant miller, this paper addresses medieval culture’s deep anxiety about clerical celibacy. It explores how the tale repudiates the clergy’s masculinity and simultaneously insists upon it, thus reaffirming only one acceptable model—that of virility, sexual prowess and aggression.
