Violence and Crime in the Private World

To narrow our focus, here I examine only concrete forms of violence mostly within a domestic setting in medieval literary texts since they serve exceed­ingly well as textual witnesses of a discourse throughout the entire period through which both the phenomenon of violence itself was exposed and strategies could be developed to combat this problem.

We would be hard pressed to identify a literary text in which violence would have been the sole raison d’etre, but this would not be much different in modern narratives. In other words, we are not dealing with sado-masochistic themes avant la lettre. Instead, as our analysis will indicate, all depictions of violence have specific purposes behind them, since the patrons of those works and the poets themselves undoubtedly intended to achieve a certain effect. In most cases, the drastic if not graphic representation of violence was aimed at criticising and condemning such behaviour, especially when it was directed against women.^[1146] However, we will also observe cases in which women were the perpetrators, whether justified in their actions or not.

What types of violence can we expect to encounter in medieval literature? Here, excluding the themes ofknightly combat, tournaments, jousts, etc., we regularly learn of warfare and duels, but then also of domestic violence, almost always with women as the victims at their husbands' hands.^[1147] Medieval poets did not shy away from discussing issues such as incest, rape, kidnapping, beating, manslaughter, murder, and many other forms of physical violence, especially because they never hesitated to reflect ordinary life as much as possible.

We can illustrate this powerfully with Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (c. 1205), where the young protagonist enters the world of King Arthur after his mother Herzeloyde has given him some bad advice. Taking that too literally, he abuses lady Jeschute, not even knowing what he is doing to her honour and well-being. Subsequently he kills his uncle Ither whose armour he wants to acquire, again without knowing who that person is and why he could not really demand that armour from him.

In fact, as scholarship has long recognized, young Parzival leaves a trail of violence until he finally begins to learn how to adjust to the norms of the Arthurian world, but it takes him much longer to understand what the Grail court is expecting from him, though he can thereby ultimately establish peace and family bonds with his half-brother Feirefiz. Parallel to Parzival, his friend Gawan struggles hard to win the love of the Duchess Orgeluse, and in this process has to overcome the evil machinations of the rapist knight Urjans and fend off the brutal operations by the magician Clinschor, a kins­man of Virgil, liberating a large number of noble ladies kept as prisoners.^{[1149] [1150] [1151]}

But there other forms of questionable violence that pertain to the domain of knighthood, as when the young knight Segramors and then the court seneschal Kay attack Parzival while he is in a trance and stares at three drops of blood in the snow. The discussion of violence thus depends heavily on the circumstances, the direction of the physical or psychological action, the formal framework, the ethical and moral norms, religious ideals and political conditions. As to be expected for a medieval poet, Wolfram consistently idealises knightly activities, which involve tournaments, hence jousts and the melee (group fight, also bohort), but as soon as there are innocent victims, especially women, he raises his critical voice and indicates through the narrative development how much he was truly opposed to non-legitimate types of violence.11