University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 "A Lock Upon All Conduct:" Modesty in German Courtly Literature (c. 1175-1220) Kathryn Ann Malczyk University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, German Literature Commons, and the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Malczyk, Kathryn Ann, ""A Lock Upon All Conduct:" Modesty in German Courtly Literature (c. 1175-1220)" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 667. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/667 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/667 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "A Lock Upon All Conduct:" Modesty in German Courtly Literature (c. 1175-1220) Abstract This dissertation examines notions of modesty in behavior and appearance as represented in romance and conduct literature of the German Middle Ages. I look to the Winsbecke poems and Thomasin von Zirclaria's Der Welsche Gast as representative samples of conduct literature, considering them alongside the four core courtly romances: Hartman von Aue's Iwein and Erec, Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. The project is guided by four central areas of inquiry. First, I investigate the "cleavage" between the two genres of romance and conduct literature, exploring the ways in which they cling to each other as reference points and split off from the other's constructs. Second, I pay close attention to gender differences in the practice of modesty, investigating precisely what they are and how they structure gender roles and courtly identity.