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Social historians have often overlooked the evidence of popular literature as a reflection of common cultural conditions and the history of everyday life. But if we want to understand sixteenth-century society, such as in the Holy Roman Empire where the Protestant Reformation had brought about major upheavals, we would be well advised to consider the value of jest narratives that appealed to wider audiences, and this well into the seventeenth century. One of the issues in recent social-historical research has been gender relationships, whether we think of love, sexuality, marriage, or divorce. To shed light on this concern, relevant for all adults throughout early modern society, this article examines the statements about women and their relationships with their husbands in the Lalebuch (first printed in 1597) to gain a better understanding of the dominant patriarchal concepts and their challenges. Even though the anonymous author did not intend, as far as we can tell, to provide specific information about the gender relationship, in the background of the narrative we can discover numerous references of relevance for the exploration of the everyday life situation at the end of the sixteenth century concerning women's roles within marriage and within their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it proves to be a difficult task, we still can identify more literary texts from the Middle Ages addressing homoerotic love than we might have expected. Even when poets voiced severe criticism and radically condemned homosexuality, their comments serve us well to identify more specifically the actual discourse behind the official scene. Although legal and Church authorities consistently characterized 'sodomy' as one of the worst sins a Christian could commit, since late antiquity, and certainly throughout the Middle Ages, the phenomenon, a biological fact, existed, of course, and was also addressed in veiled or open language. This article examines a selection of relevant literary and didactic works that shed more light on this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the assumption that literary texts can be employed already in the first German language classes, we are confronted with the question how to select the right texts and whether there might be historical criteria. This article argues that medieval German literature can also be included, if it is dealt with in a pedagogically and didactically skillful manner. The messages of the medieval texts often prove to be astoundingly meaningful, and this even for us today, not only because they develop alternative perspectives, but also because they address basically the same problems as today, even though from their own perspectives. Based on a selection of literary texts from the twelfth through the late thirteenth century this article illustrates what texts could be used well in German as a Foreign Language and in a literature class to meet specific learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

However much Gottfried scholars have examined the spiritual meaning of the famous love cave in his Tristan from many different perspectives, and hence of the fundamental meaning of the love pursued by the two protagonists, no satisfactory answer has yet been provided as to where the poet might have received the most critical inspiration from. Two most promising avenues have been to look into twelfthcentury religion and humanistic thinking. Those sources can certainly not been dismissed. But by the middle of the twelfth century Hildegard von Bingen began to create her visionary accounts that exerted a tremendous influence far and wide. She was known in virtually all circles of her time, and enjoyed similar popularity even posthumously. This article investigates whether Gottfried might have been familiar with some of her mystical observations, such as those expressed in her Scivias. Gottfried would not have had linguistic problems comprehending her Latin texts. Hildegard seems to have visited Strassburg at one time. Many of the imageries that she refers to when describing her visions bear striking similarities to the love cave, although there is no shared identity. Final proof escape us, of course, but this paper presents the available evidence and suggests that Gottfried's Tristan was, indeed, composed also under the influence of Hildegard's mystical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]