The nuns tournament
The nuns Tournament ( "The Turney of the czers") is a Middle High German Mare by an unknown author from the 15th century . Because of its sometimes grotesque erotic comedy, it is one of the crude stories in German novelism .
content
In the prologue of the nuns' tournament, the lyrical narrator calls for the music and dancing to be stopped so that stories from those present can be recited in the further course of the evening. Here the narrator begins with his Âventiure .
The actual plot is divided into two parts: The first part includes the self- emasculation of a knight and begins with the knight explaining to his partner in love to leave her the next day. She then wants to take revenge by telling the knight that women would love him even more if he had no more teeth (penis). Since the knight is portrayed as quite naive, he - after a dispute with Zagel - takes the lady's advice and emasculates himself. The knight's genitals are hidden under a staircase in a nunnery. When the knight announces the successful castration to his beloved, she sends him into the desert.
This is followed by the second part of the plot: After the knight's death in the desert, his genitals begin to take on a life of their own and migrate to the cloister of the monastery, where it is discovered. The nuns initially seem appalled by what they find, but soon argue about who can take the tag into the cell. Based on the proposal of the abbess of the monastery, a tournament is organized, but it turns into a terrible fight. During the tournament, however , the tag disappears . The story ends with the nuns agreeing to keep quiet about the incident. The two parts of the nun's tournament are clearly separated from each other by an analogous choice of words by the author. So it says at the beginning (verse 1 f.):
|
Heredity, |
Dear people, shut up now, |
The second part is introduced with the following words (verse 289 f.):
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Nu sult ir quietly, |
Now shut up, |
Lore
The nuns' tournament is only recorded in one manuscript . This is the manuscript k, which was probably created between 1430 and 1435 in northern Swabia. This contains texts from the 14th and early 15th centuries. In view of the author's choice of language, which seems very careless due to unclean rhymes, verse and word dropouts, one can assume that the fair originated in the 15th century. The volume is 602 verses.
Text output
- Adelbert von Keller (ed.): Tales from old German manuscripts (library of the literary association in Stuttgart 35). Stuttgart 1855, pp. 443-459.
- Hanns Fischer (ed.): The German fairy poetry of the 15th century (MTU 12). Munich 1966, pp. 31-47, 528 (No. 3).
- Ursula Schmid: Codex Karlsruhe 408 (Bibliotheca Germanica 16). Bern / Munich 1974, pp. 162–177.
- Thomas Cramer (ed.): Maeren poetry. Vol. 2 (Late Medieval Texts 2). Munich 1979, pp. 159–172 (reprinted from Keller).
- Klaus Grubmüller (ed.): Novellistics of the Middle Ages. Fairy poetry. Edited, translated and commented by Klaus Grubmüller (Library of the Middle Ages 23, Library of German Classics 138). Frankfurt a. M. 1996, pp. 944-977.
literature
- Werner Williams-Krapp: 'The nuns tournament'. In: The German literature of the Middle Ages. Author Lexicon. Vol. VI, Berlin 1987, Col. 1180-1182.
- Ralf Schlechtweg-Jahn: Gender identity and court culture. For the discussion of gender models in the so-called priapeian mars. In: Ingrid Bennewitz, Helmut Tervooren (eds.): Manlîchiu wîp, wîplich man. On the construction of the categories 'body' and 'gender' in German literature of the Middle Ages (supplements to the magazine for German philology 9). Berlin 1999, pp. 85-109.
- Jutta Eming: The fight for the phallus: body fragmentation, desire for text and grotesque aesthetics in the nuns' tournament. In: The German Quarterly. Fall 2012. Vol. 85 (4), pp. 380-400.
- Friedrich Michael Dimpel: you are all virtuoso - reception control in the 'nuns tournament'. In: Archive for the Study of Modern Languages and Literatures 249, 2012, pp. 31–49.