<i>Vrouwen lop</i>: Of “Hermaphrodites,” Alchemists, and Pregnant Ladies

This article is a study of the Minneleich by the Middle High German poet Frauenlob (d. 1318) that includes a complete literary translation of the long poem (the first English translation ever). The Minneleich is a dense, highly crafted philosophical text touching on sexual physiology, childbirth, and the conventional and not-so-conventional praise of women. I focus on the character Selvon’s vision of a “hermaphrodite,” which occupies a unique place in the history of nonbinary gender because it has nothing to do with sodomy or monstrosity, antedates its closest analogues (the fifteenth-century alchemical androgynes) by almost one hundred and fifty years, and is explicitly gendered “she,” even though masculine pronouns were normally used for hermaphrodites. The meaning of this vision has been much contested by Germanists. I argue that it celebrates not just fertility in the abstract, but a specific event: it was composed by the poet as a gift for his wife to celebrate the birth of their first child. I further analyze Frauenlob’s controversial redefinition of the vrouwe (the “lady” of Minnesang) to denote a mother, along with his polemical intent in extending the courtly “praise of ladies” to honor motherhood in both affective and biological senses. This agenda includes explicit representations of pregnancy and labor, which are extremely rare in the genre of praise-poetry.