There are many approaches to literature, which could be viewed as a medium of entertainment, as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a cultural-historical element, or as a political status symbol.

Literature in general is not concerned so much with reality, but reflects it in myriad ways, responding to particular aspects in society and nature, often suggesting or outlining alternatives or dream images (utopias or dystopias).

This allows poets to analyse the human condition through a fictional lens, which is just as valuable as a factual lens insofar as the literary text presents both the possible/imaginary and the real, particularly reflecting on fears, desires, apprehension, wrath and other emotions. It may even be possible by means of literature to penetrate deeper into the human psyche or mind-set, to comprehend better the history of mentality, the everyday life conditions, the world of emotions, and religious, spiritual but also highly personal concerns by way of a literary analysis than through scientific measures, as recent research has amply demonstrated.¹

Violence, unfortunately a constant element in all of human life, can be studied highly productively through a literary investigation. After all, a large percentage of world literature has been predicated on the experience with or performance of violence, whether we think of heroic epics, courtly romances, modern war novels, tragedies, police or detective novels, and so forth, with writers continually endeavouring to come to terms with this phenomenon, either to contain or even suppress it, unless they have deliberately glorified war and violence as a heroic mode of operation.^{^[1140]} ^{^[1141]}

This chapter is concerned with violence in medieval literature, a topic which offers intriguing bridges to historical analysis because the premodern world was deeply determined by military conflicts, both in defensive and offensive terms. The textual examples chosen here are the lai ‘Equitan’ by the Anglo-Norman writer Marie de France (c.

1190), the anonymous Middle High German epic poem Nibelungenlied (c. 1200), the anonymous sentimental verse romance Mai und Beaflor (c. 1280), Boccaccio’s Decameron (c. 1350) and the early fifteenth-century verse narrative ‘The Innocent Murderess’ by Heinrich Kaufringer (c. 1400), hence a wide spread from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and from various languages and countries. Of course, we could easily expand our scope and include also the Old Norse Egil's Saga (middle of the thirteenth century) or Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken’s Konigin Sibille (1437), since we can discover there also many examples of violent, brutal, unjustified violence driven by personal envy, anger, jealousy, fear or sexual lust. Early medieval literature likewise contains many examples of violent behaviour, but whether we think of the Old Norse sagas, of the Old High German ‘Hildebrandslied’ (c. 820) or of the Anglo-Saxon ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (after 991), there the issues of violence are mostly correlated with war situations or personal struggles to survive in a hostile world. Only since the high Middle Ages do we encounter literary examples where we are specifically confronted with private conditions, personal suffering or individual conflicts commonly viewed by the poets/narrators rather critically. In other words, my interest centres on the presentation of physical violence which we today would identify as a crime, whereas physical actions within a war setting belong to a different category characterised by works such as the Old French Chanson de Roland (c. 1160-70) or the devastating struggle in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm (c. 1218-20).

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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

There are many approaches to literature, which could be viewed as a medium of entertainment, as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a cultural-historical element, or as a political status symbol.

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