The courtly romance of the Classical Middle High German period, roughly 1170 to 1230, was fundamentally concerned with marriage, and specifically with the marriage of two consenting individuals that was based on their love for each other. In this, the German texts often differed from their French sources, where marriage as such was not necessarily such an important issue; as an example, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is full of marriages, including of couples who are unmarried in his source, Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, which contains no marriages at all. The German adaptations of French romance often tend to bring particular themes into much sharper focus than their sources, and this is certainly true regarding the matter of marriage and consent; in this, they also reflect the history of law over the course of a “long” twelfth century, a period that saw a great deal of change across many areas of intellectual, legal, and artistic spheres of life. The notion that consent was required for a marriage to be considered valid was not a new one in this period, but it was first formalised in the Decretum Gratiani (1139/50) and further discussed and clarified in the legal commentaries and tracts published in the wake of the Decretum over the following century. Jonathan Seelye Martin therefore quite rightly supposes that the German romances provide a discourse that reflects an increasingly important contemporary legal reality, and sets out to show how marriages are constituted in a selection of romances, and how this relates both to the legal discourse and also to specific examples of historical marriages and attempts to annul them.
Martin’s corpus of literary works comprises mainly well-known texts of more or less canonical status: Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneasroman; Eilhart von Oberg’s Tristrant; Hartman von Aue’s Erec and Iwein; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival; and Gottfried von Straßburg’s Tristan. One rather obscure text is also included: Otte’s Eraclius. Drawing on André Jolles’s concept of the “case” or Kasus as one of the simple forms of narrative from which larger and more complex narrative structures could be made, Martin examines episodes of marriage in these texts that demonstrate Jolles’s concept of one norm being contrasted against another, higher one, with the reader being placed in judgement over them. Each of his case studies from his literary corpus is set against the relevant legal opinions from the Decretum and commentaries on it as well as some other works of law, and also placed against the background of historical cases regarding which some documentary matter has survived, though for the most part the historical evidence—as opposed to the legal and literary—comes from beyond the period discussed here. After an introduction that sets out the framework of the study and introduces the legal background and the texts to be examined, the book comprises five substantive chapters on consent as constitutive for marriage, coerced consent, consent being insufficient, abusive but consensual marriages, and divorce. Each chapter presents the legal background, a couple of examples from the historical record, and then close readings of the texts, not all of which receive equal weight in each chapter.
The almost myopic focus on a very specific issue mostly pays dividends: Martin’s careful close readings demonstrate to my mind quite conclusively that his texts are concerned with debating the notion of consensual marriage, and in fact seem to find consent if anything even more fundamental than the law claimed it to be. In all cases, the literary works are strongly in favor of consent as the bedrock of a marriage, and this seems more or less to override other considerations. Despite the reality of marriages in this period among the elites who are depicted in the romances—while consent might well have been obtained from both parties, marriages were nevertheless largely political affairs and any consent was likely to have been attained by persuasion at the very least, if not coercion—the romances present consent based on mutual affinity as being more important than anything else, and coerced and non-consensual relations are always depicted in a negative light. The romances are not so radical, however, as to critique explicitly the legal support for an abusive marriage, namely that the husband had the right to discipline his wife. Although the fact of the abuse might be presented in such a manner as to indicate that the author wishes the husband to be understood as behaving incorrectly, they do not allow for the possibility of any outside interference as a means of stopping the abuse; the husband’s absolute rights are not questioned, even if his making use of these rights is presented negatively. The outlier in this respect is Wolfram’s Parzival: here, marital abuse—Orilus’s mistreatment of Jeschute—is not only presented as unfair and adds to the negative impression given of Orilus; Orilus is also defeated in battle by Parzival and then compelled to make amends to Jeschute. This “suggests a position that was outside the norms” of this period (133), not just in terms of the strength of opposition to abuse, but also in the legitimacy granted to outside intervention to end the abusive situation.
Written clearly without the use of unnecessary jargon, with all texts provided with good translations and a set of appendices with plot summaries of all the German texts, this book is clearly the result of a concerted effort to make its subject accessible even to persons unfamiliar with Middle High German language and literature. It can—and I sincerely hope will—be read by scholars and students interested in the interaction of law and literature in this period, as well as those seeking fresh perspectives on the texts examined. The interdisciplinary method works: juxtaposing the law, historical cases, and literary texts, proves effective in execution, and Martin is able to demonstrate effectively the Sitz im Leben, the place in real life, of the literature; his additional argument—that the literature allows us a window into how (elite) people thought about the laws coming down from the ecclesiastical hierarchy—is also compelling. It is reassuring to see that even at this rather dismal moment for modern languages in Anglophone universities, research of high quality on Middle High German is still being produced. Would that this would be sufficient to stem the tide of redundancies that have made this subject very much endangered in the English-speaking world.