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134 T he prose dispute Tkadleček (The weaver) (1407/9) is an example of a genre that was extremely popular in the medieval schools.1 It consists of two disputants, the Weaver—whose name is disclosed through cryptogram as the lover Ludvík —and Misfortune. As the plaintiff , Ludvík instigates the dispute by complaining to the defendant, Misfortune , that he has recently been jilted by his lover, whose name is revealed by cryptogram as Adlička. This dialogue between two warring parties is characteristic of the medieval debate form; in similar medieval Czech examples of the same genre we find disputes between water and wine, soul and the body, death and man.2 Since there are traditionally only two speakers involved, the problem that faces the dispute may be said to mirror its mimetic dilemma as allegorical form: torn between two mutually antagonistic parties, each representing a distinct point of view, the work cannot achieve its intended goal of presenting a stable, truthful picture of reality without tilting the balance in favor of one side or the other. As Roman Jakobson reminds us, medieval disputes have an a priori known result.3 In fact, the binaries we find in the dispute —soul/body, wine/water, death/man, reason/emotion—are all predicated on the assumed superiority of one element over its opposite: the “soul,” for example, prevails over the “body,” “death” over “man,” and so on. To achieve closure and allow the truth to be revealed, medieval writers were sometimes compelled to interfere with the dialogue. In The Dispute between the Soul and the Body (Spor duše s tělem), for instance, the argument between the parties is so unrelenting on both sides that a third party —in the guise of the traditional mediator between God and man, the Virgin Mary —is required to intervene and provide a fitting conclusion.4 This tripartite variation on the standard bipartite form is a clear example of the coercive intentionality that underlies the dispute as a whole. Each work is programmed to conclude in a particular way so that the arguments proffered in the course of the work are mere formalities geared toward a predetermined outcome. The need to stack the cards in favor of one point of view and the occasional further need to impose a third mediating element to ensure a desired result only serve to underline the instability facing any written work that purports to possess the absolute authority of philosophical truth. In The Weaver it is Misfortune CHAPTER 9 ✣ Writing and the Female Body The Weaver, the Wycliffite Woman, and The Dispute between Prague and Kutná Hora who has the last word, and it is he who embodies the text’s ideological message against Ludvík’s advocacy of the courtly ethic. This chapter will explore how the dispute genre is profoundly gendered in the way it promotes its argument. In The Weaver, for example, Misfortune ’s male-connoted discourse is aligned with absolute truth while the Weaver’s courtly discourse is equated with the distraction of the female body. As the text unravels, however, its closure is undermined by its inability to preserve the Aristotelian distinction between true/false and soul/body as, respectively, male and female. The arbitrariness of the textual gendering of truth also characterizes The Dispute between Prague and Kutná Hora, where instead of male versus female we have a conflict between a beautiful virgin (Prague) and a harridan (Kutná Hora). Here truth is equated with the virgin, untruth with the harridan. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, works of allegory are particularly common at times of theological, political, and ideological uncertainty, when the very status of truth is at stake.5 The dispute’s mimetic instability may be said to mirror the larger epistemological crisis of truth in a society torn between the claims and counterclaims of orthodox belief and religious dissent. As we have already seen in previous chapters and will continue to see in this one, anxiety about the female body is inseparable from the late medieval crisis of truth. The Weaver The anonymous author of The Weaver —almost certainly a graduate of Prague University and like the German author of Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, Johannes von Tepl, probably a member of the imperial chancellery —exemplifies the new generation of clerk-courtiers. It has been suggested that The Weaver was written for the king’s consort, Queen Sophie, at her regional court of Hradec Králové.6 As a...

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