Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.11
{"title":"Frequently Used Abbrevations","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.11","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122179267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.93
Let’s imagine a situation: a beautiful young woman and her husband are travelling alone, far from their court, when she unwillingly attracts the attention of a boisterous and vain nobleman and is about to be snatched away from her husband by brutal force. Despite her pleas and appeals to the villain’s reason, the situation is becoming desperate: unless she yields and agrees to become his mistress, her husband will be killed and she herself will face rape and abuse. Luckily, the woman reveals a remarkable presence of mind and turns the situation to her advantage by distracting the attacker and giving her companion time to save both of them. The evil is defeated, and the couple is free to continue their travels and face new adventures. A student of medieval literature will easily recognize in this description an important episode from the famous tale of the love and trials of a married couple—the Arthurian knight Erec and his ever-patient wife Enite. In both
{"title":"3 “Men Are Not of One Mind”: Medieval Conduct Literature for Women","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.93","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.93","url":null,"abstract":"Let’s imagine a situation: a beautiful young woman and her husband are travelling alone, far from their court, when she unwillingly attracts the attention of a boisterous and vain nobleman and is about to be snatched away from her husband by brutal force. Despite her pleas and appeals to the villain’s reason, the situation is becoming desperate: unless she yields and agrees to become his mistress, her husband will be killed and she herself will face rape and abuse. Luckily, the woman reveals a remarkable presence of mind and turns the situation to her advantage by distracting the attacker and giving her companion time to save both of them. The evil is defeated, and the couple is free to continue their travels and face new adventures. A student of medieval literature will easily recognize in this description an important episode from the famous tale of the love and trials of a married couple—the Arthurian knight Erec and his ever-patient wife Enite. In both","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124238046","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.131
The debate in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Das Frauenbuch has touched upon the poetic tradition of honoring and venerating women (Frauenehre), but what can better represent this discourse than courtly love poetry? In fact, one may wonder if a different treatment of laughter and femininity might be found in the texts that openly promote the ideals of love, service, respect, and humility ; that put the woman on a pedestal and impose the duties of sacrifice and self-improvement on the man. Is the lofty lady of the courtly love song, so consistently presented as the epitome of virtue that her purity cannot be doubted even in a moment of anger, safe from the overt sexualization and stereotypes that accompany laughter? The answers to these questions are not as obvious as one may initially think. The German manifestation of the worldwide phenomenon of medieval love lyric, commonly known under its German term Minnesang, is a highly sophisticated art that portrays a fictitious relationship between a knight and his highborn lady. Despite this seemingly rigid and limiting configuration, the Minnesang displays, as Gibbs and Johnson point out, a great variety of expression and diversity of form and content. One would expect the textual treatment of laughter to vary or change within the corpus that developed over the course of two centuries (from its earliest mid-twelfth-century native poems through the late-thirteenth-century, post-Blütezeit songs) and shows both liberal borrowings from other vernacular traditions and remarkable individuality. And yet, a diachronic look at the Minnesang reveals that even though laughter and smiling indeed appear to be accepted in medieval courtly lyric, this genre relies on familiar paradigms and symbolism that characterize other discourses already examined in this book.
{"title":"4 “The Pleasure Never Told”: Men's Fantasies and Women's Laughter in Love Lyric","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.131","url":null,"abstract":"The debate in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Das Frauenbuch has touched upon the poetic tradition of honoring and venerating women (Frauenehre), but what can better represent this discourse than courtly love poetry? In fact, one may wonder if a different treatment of laughter and femininity might be found in the texts that openly promote the ideals of love, service, respect, and humility ; that put the woman on a pedestal and impose the duties of sacrifice and self-improvement on the man. Is the lofty lady of the courtly love song, so consistently presented as the epitome of virtue that her purity cannot be doubted even in a moment of anger, safe from the overt sexualization and stereotypes that accompany laughter? The answers to these questions are not as obvious as one may initially think. The German manifestation of the worldwide phenomenon of medieval love lyric, commonly known under its German term Minnesang, is a highly sophisticated art that portrays a fictitious relationship between a knight and his highborn lady. Despite this seemingly rigid and limiting configuration, the Minnesang displays, as Gibbs and Johnson point out, a great variety of expression and diversity of form and content. One would expect the textual treatment of laughter to vary or change within the corpus that developed over the course of two centuries (from its earliest mid-twelfth-century native poems through the late-thirteenth-century, post-Blütezeit songs) and shows both liberal borrowings from other vernacular traditions and remarkable individuality. And yet, a diachronic look at the Minnesang reveals that even though laughter and smiling indeed appear to be accepted in medieval courtly lyric, this genre relies on familiar paradigms and symbolism that characterize other discourses already examined in this book.","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"177 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121283097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.13
{"title":"Introduction. Liberated Yet Controlled: The Problem of Women's Laughter","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"129 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120972607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.165
S. Jaeger
So far, the uneasy relationship between women’s laughter and virtue in medieval vernacular tradition has been examined for the most part in terms of clerical influence on the secular aristocratic society, as a reflection of the overall ambiguous treatment of laughter and its connection to female sexuality based on the symbolic equivalence between the mouth and genitals. However, it has also become clear that the lay and religious worlds in the Middle Ages were engaged in a constant and productive dialogue, sometimes challenging, sometimes adopting the other’s ideas. Ecclesiastical discourse responded to the politics and morality of secular society, while the latter accepted or questioned religious authority, views, and pastoral guidance. As the last two chapters have shown, the belief in the inherent weakness and sinfulness of female nature coexists side by side with a different view of femininity promoted in courtly culture—the figure of a beautiful and virtuous aristocratic lady whose smile encourages, inspires, and welcomes the interest of male suitors. The enormous popularity of this image in the High Middle Ages and beyond leads to a question about the potential reverse impact of this seemingly positive alternative in religious iconography of virtue and vice: Could laughter ever grace a chaste female body? Art, particularly sculpture, lends itself well to answering this question. Thanks to its size and ability to accurately reproduce human features and bodies, portal sculpture presents vast opportunities for deepening our understanding of medieval emotions. The contemporary debates on women’s laughter and virtue are reflected and further tested in the depictions of the popular biblical parable
{"title":"5 “She Is Beautiful and She Is Laughing?” Courtly Smiling in the Iconography of Virtue and Vice","authors":"S. Jaeger","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.165","url":null,"abstract":"So far, the uneasy relationship between women’s laughter and virtue in medieval vernacular tradition has been examined for the most part in terms of clerical influence on the secular aristocratic society, as a reflection of the overall ambiguous treatment of laughter and its connection to female sexuality based on the symbolic equivalence between the mouth and genitals. However, it has also become clear that the lay and religious worlds in the Middle Ages were engaged in a constant and productive dialogue, sometimes challenging, sometimes adopting the other’s ideas. Ecclesiastical discourse responded to the politics and morality of secular society, while the latter accepted or questioned religious authority, views, and pastoral guidance. As the last two chapters have shown, the belief in the inherent weakness and sinfulness of female nature coexists side by side with a different view of femininity promoted in courtly culture—the figure of a beautiful and virtuous aristocratic lady whose smile encourages, inspires, and welcomes the interest of male suitors. The enormous popularity of this image in the High Middle Ages and beyond leads to a question about the potential reverse impact of this seemingly positive alternative in religious iconography of virtue and vice: Could laughter ever grace a chaste female body? Art, particularly sculpture, lends itself well to answering this question. Thanks to its size and ability to accurately reproduce human features and bodies, portal sculpture presents vast opportunities for deepening our understanding of medieval emotions. The contemporary debates on women’s laughter and virtue are reflected and further tested in the depictions of the popular biblical parable","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125279965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.63
{"title":"2 A Deeply Serious Matter: Laughter in Medieval Ecclesiastical Discourse","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.63","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.63","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"344 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116237142","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.27
{"title":"1 “You Are No Longer a Virgin”: The Two “Mouths” of a Medieval Woman","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.27","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116238954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-14DOI: 10.14220/9783737001199.191
What do Enite’s treacherous smile, Isolde’s fake virtue, or the medieval fetish for smiling red lips tell the modern reader? Why should it matter how these imaginary heroines laugh, they who did not even exist except in the minds of their authors? Laughter and smiling are basic human responses that despite continuous study remain elusive, always raising new questions about their origins, meanings, functions, and universality. One way we can explore these issues is by studying textual laughter. As Sebastian Coxon points out, fictional texts serve as a window—albeit an indirect one—onto social reality. They contribute to a critical discussion of the culture that engendered them and do so “through the imaginative realization of certain values and principles of behavior recognizable and comprehensible to a contemporary audience.” The red-lipped smiles of medieval literary beauties uncover a society that walks a tightrope between the patristic rejection of laughter and its Aristotelian acceptance as an inherently human expression; between the ecclesiastical removal of joy to the afterlife and the courtly ethos that treats it as an indicator of harmonious existence on earth; and between the threat of social intercourse to female chastity and the need for affability and seduction to guarantee smooth interactions between the sexes. The very variety and sheer number of texts discussed in this book and collected in Table 1 in the appendix bespeaks the impressive discursive heterogeneity of this period. Laughter is examined from starkly different angles: theological, clericaldidactic, natural-philosophical, secular courtly, and obscene carnivalesque.
{"title":"Epilogue. “Those Days Are Over”? Inhabiting a Tradition","authors":"","doi":"10.14220/9783737001199.191","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.14220/9783737001199.191","url":null,"abstract":"What do Enite’s treacherous smile, Isolde’s fake virtue, or the medieval fetish for smiling red lips tell the modern reader? Why should it matter how these imaginary heroines laugh, they who did not even exist except in the minds of their authors? Laughter and smiling are basic human responses that despite continuous study remain elusive, always raising new questions about their origins, meanings, functions, and universality. One way we can explore these issues is by studying textual laughter. As Sebastian Coxon points out, fictional texts serve as a window—albeit an indirect one—onto social reality. They contribute to a critical discussion of the culture that engendered them and do so “through the imaginative realization of certain values and principles of behavior recognizable and comprehensible to a contemporary audience.” The red-lipped smiles of medieval literary beauties uncover a society that walks a tightrope between the patristic rejection of laughter and its Aristotelian acceptance as an inherently human expression; between the ecclesiastical removal of joy to the afterlife and the courtly ethos that treats it as an indicator of harmonious existence on earth; and between the threat of social intercourse to female chastity and the need for affability and seduction to guarantee smooth interactions between the sexes. The very variety and sheer number of texts discussed in this book and collected in Table 1 in the appendix bespeaks the impressive discursive heterogeneity of this period. Laughter is examined from starkly different angles: theological, clericaldidactic, natural-philosophical, secular courtly, and obscene carnivalesque.","PeriodicalId":431241,"journal":{"name":"Constructing Virtue and Vice","volume":"146 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121642950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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