Murder or Self-Defence: Heinrich Kaufringer
We encounter an even more complicated case of triple murder in Heinrich Kaufringer's late medieval German tale ‘The Innocent Murderess' (c. 1400),[1168] where a princess, who is about to marry the king, finds herself in a horrible dilemma, having been deceived by a knight who pretended to be her fiance and thus could have sex with her the night before the wedding.
Foolishly, he subsequently admits it, but then falls asleep. In her panic, she takes a knife and cuts off his head, thus taking her revenge. But the body is too heavy for her, so she begs the gatekeeper for help,; however, he demands that she first sleep with him. Under this duress, she has to submit, but when they later try to throw the corpse into the castle well, she manages to lift the keeper off his feet and to toss him into the well, killing him as well. When the wedding night arrives, she convinces one of her maids to sleep with the king in order to pretend that his wife is still a virgin. Tragically for the queen, the maid then refuses to abandon her position in bed because she wants to be queen herself. In her desperation, the wife sets fire to the room, rescues her husband, but locks the door and thus has the maid burn to death.Can someone like her be innocent? She clearly committed three murders, but her husband does not reproach her when she finally admits her guilt to him thirty-two years later. Instead, he explicitly praises her for her deep sense of honour, for her hard struggle to protect his own honour, and for her love for him: ‘“You had to pay dearly for me,” he said to the lady. “I want to live with you forever as your loyal servant because you have suffered much on my behalf, no doubt about it”' (79-80). In other words, she is not incriminated, her violent behaviour is even acknowledged as justified, as a form of self-defence, which thus leads to the narrative aporia of having a murderess who is identified as innocent. The lady committed egregious acts of violence, and yet we are invited to feel deep sympathy for her since she was caught in a terrible dilemma and could only resort to those murderous acts in order to protect herself, her honour, her family, and her future husband. But would that have justified her actions altogether?