Constructing Virtue and Vice

£42.74 £56.99

Constructing Virtue and Vice

Name: Constructing Virtue and Vice
Brand: Brill Deutschland GmbH
Price: 42.74 GBP
Availability: InStock

Femininity and Laughter in Courtly Society (ca. 1150–1300)

Written by Olga V. Trokhimenko, Jutta Eming, Arthur Groos, Volker Mertens, Matthias Meyer, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Hans-Jochen Schiewer and Markus Stock

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The study examines textual representations of women’s laughter and smiling and their imagined connection to female virtue in a wide variety of discourses and contexts of the German Middle Ages, including medieval epic, ecclesiastical texts, conduct literature, lyric, and sculpture. By engaging with the competing, and at times contradictory, views of female laughter, it reaffirms a disputatious nature of medieval culture, in which multiple views of femininity, sexuality, and virtue stood in a conflicting, yet productive, dialogue with one another. The society that emerges when one looks at medieval German texts is always ambivalent: it thrives on and enjoys talking about sensuality and eroticism, while being constrained by the conventions of polite behavior and the fear of sin; it relies on the ritual use of laughter, while marking it as a sign of lust and perdition. Women’s laughter thus offers an important way into understanding medieval views of gender because it combines physicality with shifting and conflicting cultural norms.

Olga V. Trokhimenko is an Associate Professor of German at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She received her M.A. in German from the University of Vermont and her Ph.D. in German Studies from Duke University. Her areas of research are medieval and early modern German studies, gender and feminist studies, and literary folklore.

ISBN-13: 9783847101192
Publisher: V&R unipress
Imprint: Brill Deutschland GmbH
Publication date: 14 May 2014
Format: Hardback
Pages: 253
Dimensions: 235 x 160 mm
Illustrations: with 18 figures
Language: English