Gender & Sexuality Studies 2026

Abstract

With the emergence of the earliest courtly love poems in the southern Provence of France early in the twelfth century, the entire discourse on gender was launched. At first, only men participated in this discourse, but when the various crusades emptied the lands of men who fought and died in the Holy Land, women engaged in this discourse as well, the troubairitz. We know roughly twenty names and have their texts available. Those voices, however, disappeared again by the end of the twelfth century. Through my archival research, I was able to discover a new group of female poets in fifteenth-century German songbooks. This discovery has, unfortunately, not changed much at all in the way how scholars of the history of women view that period, maybe because the general notion that women were simply subdued and silenced makes the modern analysis easier (though not more correct). Indeed, the concerns and topics by those women proved to be quite similar to those of the troubairitz, so we can identify a continuous discourse despite the ca. 200 years separating both groups. The critical question of this paper will focus on how those female voices expressed their gender identity and how they evaluated the experience of courtly love for themselves, and this over the course of time and in two language groups.

Biography

ALBRECHT CLASSEN received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of German and European literature from about 800 to 1600. He has currently published 132 books and well over 800 articles dealing with comparative issues, gender topics, environmental concerns, and cultural historical themes. Most recently appeared Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (2021), Charlemagne in Medieval German and Dutch Literature (2021), Tracing the Trails in the Medieval World (2021), Wisdom from the European Middle Ages (2022), The Secret in Medieval Literature (2022), Globalism in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age (ed., 2023), and Der Niederrheinische Orientbericht, c. 1350 (trans., 2024). A new book on court criticism and of evil kings in medieval literature appeared in 2024. In 2017, he received the rank of Grand Knight Commander of the Most Noble Order of the Three Lions.