Introduction

Sara S. Poor, Alison L. Beringer, and Olga V. Trokhimenko Introduction One would be hard pressed to find a person today, in 2021, particularly a scholar, who has not heard of gender and feminist studies. Its methodology and vocabulary are so familiar, so widely applied in, and so deeply interwoven with numerous disci- plines from literary criticism to history, cultural studies, and art history (to say noth- ing of social sciences like anthropology and sociology) that it is hard to imagine a time when terms such as “gender,”“femininity,” or “masculinity” sounded innovative or even radical. This collection of essays, Gender Bonds, Gender Binds,honorsAnn Marie Rasmussen, a scholar whose book, Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (1997), appeared at a time when using this vocabulary to frame the argu- ment of a study of medieval German literature was in fact a courageous act. The book was among the first studies in the field of medieval German literary criticism to use gender as a central category of analysis. 2017 marked the twentieth anniversary of this fascinating and deeply thorough analysis of several well- and also (at the time) lesser- known medieval German texts featuring mothers and daughters in conversations about love and/or sex. Yet, going beyond what German scholarship calls Motivge- schichte [thematic study], Mothers and Daughters did more than simply draw the read- er’s attention to the plight of female characters in premodern literary texts as the victims of patriarchal society. Its innovation lay rather in the author’s willingness to examine the complexity of the workings of gender in these medieval texts. These workings become clear as Mothers and Daughters explores the literary depictions of women teaching each other how to be in the world not only as mothers, wives, and lovers, but also as public figures, professionals, and rulers of empires. Rasmussen’s study also highlights the methods and strategies that women develop in order to transfer knowledge to one another. Put another way, it is a book about narratives of being a woman in a male-dominated culture and of producing and transmitting (often controversial and counter-cultural) knowledge in this culture. In examining and unpacking these mother-daughter narratives, Rasmussen’s path-breaking study deftly demonstrated the potential applications of cross-disciplin- ary theory for a range of medieval genres. Drawing from the then current feminist work on the psychology of the mother-daughter relation, and at the same time, grounding the adoption of terms and concepts from this work in a thorough understanding of the medieval historical and political context, Mothers and Daughters offered striking new readings of the following works: Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneasroman,theNibelungen- lied, Kudrun, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan, Die Winsbeckin, the poems of Neidhart, and the fifteenth-century dialogues known as Stepmother and Daughter.1 Exposing the 1 See below, Appendix A, for a complete Table of Contents as well as a full summary of the book. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110729191-001 2 Sara S. Poor, Alison L. Beringer, and Olga V. Trokhimenko ways that gender was both inflected and negotiated in the dialogic encounters between literary characters, these readings moved the study of gender roles in medieval German literature out of the realm of first wave feminism’s focus on exposing patriarchal structures. In doing so, Rasmussen’s new approach had the effect of opening doors for many to follow in her footsteps. One cannot therefore overestimate the impact of Rasmussen’s Mothers and Daughters on medieval German studies specifically and on medieval studies generally. While the objects of study in Rasmussen’s book are medieval texts, the gender bonds and binds discussed continue to strike our present-day audience as unset- tlingly familiar, which undoubtedly is why Mothers and Daughters continues to res- onate so strongly in medieval German studies and beyond even now, more than two decades later.2 This continued resonance was a significant motivation for this project. It seemed time not only to celebrate Rasmussen’s achievement, but to ex- plicitly carry it on. As the essays in the present volume demonstrate, the ideas and frameworks produced in 1997 remain relevant and have clearly inspired new gener- ations of scholars, who apply these paradigms in an ever-wider range of texts, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts. Just as the mothers in the texts that Rasmussen studied tried to give their daughters tools with which to negotiate the contradic- tion-filled worlds of married life and courtship – at court, in the town, or in the country, Rasmussen’s book also provides tools that help unpack gender bonds and binds visible in other narratives and historical contexts.3 Finally, Rasmussen’s study of medieval German mother-daughter discourses remains an important work in general for present-day readers as well: after all, understanding the longevity of patriarchy and its effects on human relations reminds readers how crucial the study of the past can be for the understanding of where we are as a society today. The present volume serves as a tribute to this important milestone in medieval feminist studies4 and even more so, to its extraordinary author, now at the height of her career, who has been either a teacher, mentor, or colleague (if not all three) to all the contributors of this volume. The essays feature new work on gender in medieval 2 Since the publication of Rasmussen’s study, scholarly interest in the topic of mothers and daughters has persisted across various fields. See, for example, Heller 2016; Sperling 2013; Kaldellis 2006; Davis and Müller 2003; O’Reilly and Abbey 2000; Bowers 1996. For a selection of recent work that engages specifically with Rasmussen’s Mothers and Daughters and/or the articles growing out of this book project (Rasmussen 1996 and 2003), see Lienert 2019; Trokhimenko 2014; Bulang 2012; Buschinger 2012; Michaelis 2011; Dorninger 2008; and Classen 2007. 3 See, for example, Hebert 2013 (English and French); Karras 1999 (English); Zimmermann 2009 (modern German literature); Feros Ruys 2005 (medieval Latin); Millet 2000 (Spanish); and Koller 2000 (Spanish). 4 The idea for the volume emerged after a GSA panel celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Mothers and Daughters organized by Katja Altpeter and Alison Beringer. The papers that became chapters one, two, and four, were first presented on this panel. Introduction 3 German literature that highlights the matter and media in which these bonds and binds appear and are negotiated. In this regard, the collection below could be seen as an extension of the tripartite methodology of Mothers and Daughters.Deftlyengag- ing feminist theory, philology, and social history, Rasmussen’s seven chapters taken together demonstrated how medieval fictions could “rehearse conflicting assump- tions about medieval cultural norms” and “play out contradictions in medieval society at large” (222). They also showed not only how important social history can be for the interpretation of literature, but more significantly, how literature can provide insights into aspects of history that are not legible in the documents upon which historians generally rely (court records, wills, property transactions, genealogies). Rasmussen’s chapters elucidate precisely how, for example, changes in aristo- cratic concepts of lineage and kinship left “a recoverable” and we might add material trace in the literary record (222). Taking inspiration from the methodology demonstrated in Mothers and Daughters, as well as its extension to the study of material objects in Rasmussen’s more recent work on badges (for example, Ras- mussen 2017), the essays below also examine medieval literature as material that can contribute otherwise elusive insights into the history of gender. While the majority of the essays use Rasmussen’s arguments as starting points (though in varying ways),5 several essays show Rasmussen’s impact more indirectly, either by growing out of collaborations with her (Kraß), or connecting with Rasmussen’s more recent work on materiality, insofar as they address how the representation of objectification functions in literature and its accompanying images or imagery (Beringer, Eming). All of the contributions, however, demonstrate what hardly seemed possible when Mothers and Daughters first appeared, namely the immense intellectual rewards of opening up medieval German literature and culture to an analysis that takes gender into account. The first six essays take up Rasmussen’s analysis of mother-daughter bonds and the binds to which relations between genders lead in a number of textual situa- tions. For example, Mothers and Daughters begins with the account of a historical mother-daughter conflict about the daughter’s refusal to marry the husband chosen for her and her subsequent rebellious choice of a Dominican convent as her preferred life path – rebellious because her mother would have preferred her to enter a different convent that was supported by the family and in a more traditional order. The first essay in the present volume, by Sara S. Poor, takes this example as its springboard, but examines a situation in which a daughter does enter the family affiliated convent. In this case, the daughter becomes abbess and her mother, the countess, appears to have helped the daughter in her efforts to reform the convent during the so-called “Observance Reform.” Our access to this connection is not only 5 See also the notes to the chapter summaries in Appendix A. 4 Sara S. Poor, Alison L. Beringer, and Olga V. Trokhimenko through texts written long ago but rather through the medieval codices that were clearly transferred between the two women. Agnes von Werdenberg (c. 1400–c. 1471), the Countess of Oettingen from 1420 to 1440, gave her daughter Magdalena, the abbess of the Cistercian convent in Kirchheim am Ries from 1446–1496, at least six books of devotional readings.

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