Masculinity Challenged: German Medieval Romances and Verse Narratives Revealing the Underbelly of the Courtly World

As much as medieval courtly romances and verse narratives idealized masculinity, we regularly observe strange problems and hidden challenges for the hero, and at times even a direct collapse of the protagonist because he fails to live up to the public and self-imposed expectations. After all, the ideal of masculinity was basically the result of a specific public discourse, and courtly poets appear to have been centrally in command of trying to cast seemingly reliable images of the model male figure at King Arthur’s court, such as Gawein or Lancelot. However, the literary discourse also reveals deep troubles at court among its male members and significant struggles by the individuals to live up to those projected concepts. This finds its expression already in Chretien de Troyes’s Yvain (Calogrenant and even Yvain) and in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (Gahmuret), all worthy knights at first sight, but also individuals fraught with many character flaws. In the thirteenth century, the efforts to sustain the increasingly fragile ideal of the courtly male intensified, as we can easily observe in numerous short verse narratives, such as in the fabliaux and maeren. In this study, I will investigate these conflictual struggles by male protagonists in light especially of the anonymous Mauritius von Craun, Dietrich von der Gletze’s “Der borte,” and Thüring von Ringoltingen’s prose version of the Melusine novels (late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). As we will observe, the literary discourse could apparently not fully maintain the old dream of the strong and self-sustained male hero because he soon enough faced deep internal and external challenges and could hardly rely any longer on the myth of masculinity as the all-determining ideal within heroic or courtly society, and this already since the late twelfth century. We might even have to wonder whether masculinity has ever been a stable element in the search for individuality, both in the Middle Ages and today.