Ingrid Kasten, Frauenlieder des Mittelalters (Reclam, 1990)

Introduction

[Section 1, translated by RFMB; underlinings also by RFMB:]

‘Women’s Songs’ [das Frauenlied] as a literary-historical concept

Women’s songs were amongst the oldest folk poetry to be recorded when texts began to be written down in the Middle Ages, and if only for this reason they have great cultural and literary importance. They are songs whose persona is a woman. From time to time in the specialist literature they are referred to as ‘women’s monologues’ [Frauenmonologe] or, thanks to the elegiac tone which characterizes many of them, as ‘women’s laments’ [Frauenklagen]. Often they consist of only a single strophe or of a few lines which may act as the introduction to a story. Mostly, however, they comprise several strophes.

Whilst the persona of these songs is a woman, that does not mean, however, that they were also composed by women. Indeed, most were written by men, since, during the medieval period the tradition of literature was borne almost exclusively by men. Women are certainly attested sporadically as poetesses – such as the Provençal ones – and there has been some discussion of the possibility of female authorship for the anonymous women’s songs found in German-speaking areas, but as a rule it was men who imagined and gave poetic form to the thoughts and emotions of women. Medieval women’s songs are thus almost always examples of poetic role-play [Rollenlyrik].

The fact that we are thus dealing with a literature in which the experiences have been ‘imagined’, not ‘lived through’, may possibly disappoint the expectations of present-day readers, male or female, but, given the medieval concept of poetry, there is nothing surprising about it. Generally speaking, writers did not attempt to give shape to particular, individual experiences but rather to make manifest what was regarded in the period as being universally true. Thus, even when telling the story of an individual, the objective was to make visible in exemplary form what is universal and typical. Individual characteristics were not regarded as the essential thing about a person, but rather as accidentals, and no special attention was to be paid to them.

Artistic creation inspired by the concepts just outlined tends to result in the formation of types. This is true not just of the period’s literature but also of its fine arts. Thus the respect accorded to literary figures in the society of that period was measured not according to their ‘originality’ but according to their ability to re-work and vary already well-known themes and subject-matter artistically – and that meant doing so according to contemporary principles of prosody and rhetoric. Thus the innovative quality of poetry was found not so much in its subject-matter as in its re-shaping and re-interpreting of already existent, known texts.

This conception of art also determines the nature of medieval lyric poetry which, with its relatively limited body of genres, themes and motifs is an art-form devoted in large measure to the principle of variation. It follows, then, that women’s songs, which are a part of this corpus of poetry, will appear to be uniform – at least at first sight. They always presuppose the same basic situation, i.e. a woman in love separated from the man she loves; and it is always similar motifs – derived from the tension between yearning for love and the pain of separation – which dominate the medieval women’s songs. These motifs include: a woman lamenting at the misery of separation, affirmations of love and fidelity, expressions of yearning for her lover, an evocation of everything that links her to him despite their separation, complaints about external hindrances which impede their relationship, memories of past happiness in love and, finally, her fear that her lover may turn to another woman, a ‘rival’.

But, however similar the motifs may be, their selection, the particular emphases and the manner in which they are combined is never identical. In the subtle variation of familiar material, in the nuance whose aesthetic quality could only be grasped by connoisseurs well-acquainted with the poetic subject – it was in aspects such as these that the medieval hearers of these songs found their real satisfaction. It is clear furthermore that the apparent uniformity of the woman’s song conceals an unusual variety of opportunities for differentiation. This is clear as soon as one surveys the genre in 12^th and 13^th German poetry, but it is even clearer when examples are taken for comparison from other medieval literatures. Thus in, for example, the lyric poetry of Middle Latin, Old Provençal and Old French, particular motifs and motif-complexes are accorded special prominence within their particular tradition to the extent that different genre-types have developed. The explanation as to how these different genre-types developed and whether they are bound up in some way with particular non-literary factors within the above-named cultures has not yet been sufficiently researched.