Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany

by Albrecht Classen

"Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies)"

Genres: Medieval History, Germany

176 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2007

About the author

Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.

Reviews

[Highlyeccentric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure why this took so long for me to read (just as I'm not sure why I'd owned it for so long without reading it). I loved Dietrich von der Glezze's The Belt, but I knew that - I'd interlibrary loaned just that chapter long ago. Plenty of other fun bits - several variations on the 'give me your Euphemism / give it back to you again' joke. A lot of sexist tropes, of course, but that's par for the course with medieval fabliau and related genres.

[Lulu]

13th-16th


About 200 examples are known of the genre maeren, short verse German narratives with erotic, didactic, or moral contents, mostly written between 1250 and 1500. Classen has selected and translated 20 of them, primarily for his students of Medieval German literature. He introduces each with information about its date and provenance, its author, and its published or manuscript source.