Bibliographical Essay

To understand what violence meant in medieval literature requires a solid understanding of the cultural context, which Joachim Bumke, Hofische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), has illuminated most comprehensively; English translation by Thomas Dunlap: Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Attitudes to violence are the result of general mentalities that provide the relevant framework, as scholars such as Peter Dinzelbacher have discussed at length: Peter Dinzelbacher (ed.), Europäische Mentalitätsgeschichte: Hauptthemen in Einzeldarstellungen, 2nd rev. and expanded edn (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 2008 [1993]). Violence emerged both in simple physical form (crime), see Albrecht Classen and Connie Scarborough (eds.), Crime and Punishment in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Mental-Historical Investigations of Basic Human Problems and Social Responses (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), and in its often very harsh punishment, see Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), while the entire world of knighthood was based on the concept of controlled violence for the purpose of defending a country, see Richard W. Kaeuper, Medieval Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). It was also an essential component of religious history, pitting especially Christians against Jews during the Middle Ages, see Anna Sapir Abulafia (ed.), Religious Violence between Christians and Jews: Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002). Nevertheless, throughout the Middle Ages major attempts were made to combat violence and war and to achieve peace, as the contributors to various volumes have demonstrated, see Diane Wolfthal (ed.), Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000); Albrecht Classen and Nadia Margolis (eds.), War and Peace: Critical Issues in European Societies and Literature 800-1800 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011).

Violence directed at women within civil society is the topic of the contributors to a volume edited by Albrecht Classen, Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature: A Casebook (London: Routledge, 2004), and of his study Sexual Violence and Rape in the Middle Ages: A Critical Discourse in Premodern German and European Literature (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011). The larger process of containing violence and establishing civilising forces in medieval society was explored seminally by Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994; orig. published in German in 1939).

Modern criticism has also alerted us to the many forms of violence in the domestic sphere, which is often mirrored both in legal documents and in literary texts from the Middle Ages, see Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin and Merrall Llewelyn Price (eds.), Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Consequently, the topic of rape as reflected in medieval French literature, for instance, has also been studied at length by Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), and by the contributors to a volume edited by Noah D. Guynn, Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013). As Helmut Brackert has shown, in ‘“Der lac an riterschefte tot”: Parzival und das Leid der Frauen', in Rüdiger Krüger, Jürgen Kühnel and Joachim Kuolt (eds.), Ist zwivel herzen ndchgebür: Günther Schweikle zum 60. Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Helfant, 1989), pp. 143-63, analysis of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival reveals how the young protagonist involuntarily commits many acts of violence before he can reach his ultimate goal, the Grail. Many poets, however, exposed the dangers of violent behaviour and outlined ways to establish peace, as discussed by Albrecht Hagenlocher, Der guote vride: Idealer Friede in deutscher Literatur bis ins frühe 14.

Jahrhundert (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), Stefan Hohmann, Friedenskonzepte: Die Thematik des Friedens in der deutschsprachigen politischen Lyrik des Mittelalters (Vienna: Bohlau, 1992) and James Turner Johnson, The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Most heroic and saga literature is predicated on violence that needs to be met and overcome, or on violence as the basic modus operandi, as in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, where the final battle between the Burgundians and the Huns turns all of the men into berserks, see Jan-Dirk Müller, Spielregeln für den Untergang: Die Welt des Nibelungenliedes (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1998). Recent studies on medieval literature have thus removed the traditional sheen cast on those texts and exposed the true dimension of violence addressed there.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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