4 “The Pleasure Never Told”: Men's Fantasies and Women's Laughter in Love Lyric

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.