“‘Simplicity Becomes Women Well’: Medieval Feminist Critique and Modern Scholarly Bias in the Case of Winsbeckin.”
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In the thirteenth-century, the didactic author Thomasin von Zerclaere wrote that “nobody wishes women in a position of authority, for simplicity becomes women well.” Until recently, much literary scholarship appears to have shared this view of gendered intelligence and has at best attributed to female-authored or female-voiced texts artlessness and naïve expression of feeling, or at worst branded them as low-brow and, therefore, undeserving of serious study. This is precisely the case of with the female-voiced medieval German didactic treatise Winsbeckin (literally, “The Lady of Winsbach”). Transmitted together with its male-voiced counterpart Winsbecke, the mother-daughter dialogue has been traditionally seen as its foil and described as an inferior work, “superficial, flat, and focused more on formal education than character building.” In contrast to Winsbecke, seen to address such profound issues as noble conduct, ethics, and salvation, Winsbeckin was thought to deal only with love and marriage, the narrow prerogatives of women. This view, however, is based solely on the standard edition, i.e. a non-existent composite, of the text and ignores the manuscript variant J (mgf 474) whose major deviations in structure substantially alter the tone and message of the work. Ms. J opens with two powerful proto-feminist stanzas written in the collective female voice (“we women”), which until now have been dismissed as inauthentic. With their help, the text transcends the mere love discourse and raises such important questions as injustice and oppression of women in medieval society. By addressing the issue of authenticity of the two stanzas on various levels (structural, paleographic, and metatextual), this paper takes to task the scholarly bias that until now has suppressed what appears to be one of the earliest proto-feminist works in the European tradition.
