"Nieman siht gelîches iht [Nobody Sees Things the Same Way]: Femininity, Laughter, and Power in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauenbuch.”
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
In contrast to the stifling atmosphere of the Early Middle Ages, the high-medieval era is often described by scholars as the period in which laughter is “liberated.” However, a careful study of both religious and secular texts as well as of medieval art from the 11th-13th centuries reveals that the terms “liberation and control of laughter” suggested by Jacques Le Goff reflect much more accurately an ambivalent high-medieval attitude towards this bodily expression. The uncertainty accompanying laughter, especially the laughter of women, becomes obvious in medieval didactic literature, whether written by clerics or by lay authors. Middle High German conduct, or courtesy, texts are no exception and reveal the presence of two opposite viewpoints: one prohibiting laughter – obviously influenced by the contemporary misogynist view of women as carnal, inferior, and susceptible to sin – and one allowing and even encouraging it.
Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Minnerede Frauenbuch addresses both of these viewpoints like no other work. Belonging to the tradition of “defense of women,” this remarkable text makes clear that the laughter of women is always involved in a complicated discourse on power and, with its help, points out an inherent contradiction within courtly society, requiring of women to be virtuous and desirable at one and the same time. It also reveals that the ultimate goal of both the pro- and anti-laughter discourses is male control over female sexuality, the ideology of courtly love as a man’s game of domination and subordination. Ulrich successfully uses his mastery of the contemporary literary conventions – both clerical and secular – in order to create a wonderfully ambiguous work: a work intended to educate women while chastising men; a work in which women are given the power of voice and will as well as the courage to object to men, and are simultaneously silenced by the reinstated world order; a work that with the help of its rhetoric seems to elevate women and at the same time locks them up within the confines of the traditional patriarchal gender system.
