Relics and the Anxiety of Exposure in Konrad Von Würzburg's Herzmaere

A jealous husband vindictively feeds his wife her lover's heart. When he reveals to her what she has just consumed, she faithfully follows her lover to the grave. The story of the heart has exercised its grisly fascination on readers and poets in many forms. Filostrato's tale on Day 4 of Boccaccio's Decameron and the Roman du châtelain de Coucy are only the best-known among myriad medieval versions.¹ Konrad von Würzburg's Herzmaere occupies a special place in this tradition because of its unsettlingly ambiguous treatment of all three characters and the uneasy place of religious motifs in the tale. The husband is a treacherous villain but upstanding, noble, and justified in his actions. The jeweled casket containing the knight's heart is both a token of love and a reliquary. Indeed, the Herzmaere is a perfect case in point for what Barbara Newman calls the "principle of both/and,"² by which medieval narratives relish aporia, double meaning, and paradox, especially between sacred and secular motifs. Jan-Dirk Müller has recently interpreted the tale along similar lines, seeing the courtly and religious aspects of the poem as two value systems that coexist but never converge.³ Although religious and courtly elements certainly both inform the tale, this approach (or at least Müller's application of it) suffers from a conceptual drawback. I argue that seeing the religious and the courtly as monolithic and internally coherent cultural systems obscures the subtlety and even the continuity of the religious allusions in the Herzmaere.

Konrad's story begins in medias res with the lady and the knight already in love. "Ein ritter unde ein frouwe guot / diu haeten leben unde muot / in einander sô verweben, / daz beide ir muot unde ir leben / ein dinc was worden alsô gar" (ll. 29–33; a knight and a good lady had their lives and spirits so interwoven in each other that both their spirits and their lives had completely become one thing).⁴ They cannot deny their affection for each other, even though the husband keeps such close watch that their love remains unconsummated. Nevertheless, the husband decides to quench the affair preemptively by separating the lovers and declares his intention to bring his wife on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The lady convinces the knight to depart for Jerusalem instead, arguing that his departure and absence will better alleviate suspicion and allow them greater freedom after his return. Knowing that this separation means his death, the knight sails for Jerusalem and, as predicted, dies of heartsickness abroad. With his last breath, he commands his page to cut out his heart, preserve it in a jeweled box and bring it to the lady. The page attempts to deliver this grisly gift but is intercepted by the husband, who confiscates the heart and, understanding what it is, commands his cook to prepare it as a delicacy for the lady. The lady relishes the tasty morsel but, upon learning what it is she has eaten, dies upon the spot.

Even in this extremely abbreviated precis, it is clear that religious allusions mark key events in the narrative. The stasis of the love triangle is interrupted and the plot set in motion through the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The knight's death is memorialized as a martyr's death through the enshrinement of a body fragment in a reliquary-like casket. Finally, the lady's anthropophagic last meal evokes Eucharistic celebration. A great deal of ink has been spilled over these religious allusions in the Herzmaere, much of it in debate over whether the metaphors "work." David Blamires, in an early interpretation of the poem, notes that "a continual opposition between minne and religion is apparent, though the religious element is muted in tone. The interplay of the two is rather curious, and the religious references imply a certain criticism of the action of the poem, for none of the pious wishes uttered by the lovers is fulfilled."⁵ Indeed, upon closer examination it appears that none of the religious...