Preface

PREFACE Demonstrating the sometimes surprising—and, for the editors, at least, highly satisfying—way that contributions to the Women in German Yearbook often resonate with one another, this volume presents an array of articles that span eight centuries and, we hope, yield notable new insights into a wide range of periods, texts, and authors. Arranged chronologically, they nonetheless fall into several distinct clusters that should also persuade readers unfamiliar with particular fields of the vitality and range of feminist scholarship in German. The first three articles reflect feminist interests in medieval and early modern literature, periods that have sometimes been underrepresented in our endeavors. John Jeep discovers telling evidence pertaining to the early history of friendship among women in an eleventhcentury convent community. Drawing on the Sankt Trudperter Hohes Lied, an anonymous twelfth-century German translation of and commentary on the "Song of Songs," he contrasts the nature of the friendship that emerges in a community of women with more androcentric depictions of love and friendship in medieval texts contemporaneous with the Sankt Trudperter text. By focusing on this dimension of reflective religious writing, Jeep demonstrates that its concern with women 's issues "predates, and conceivably contributes to the later emergence of, women authors in religious communities, the most productive of whom are the mystics." In a sixteenth-century songbook commissioned by Ottilia Fenchlerin of Strasbourg, Albrecht Classen detects traces of women's voices and women's themes that lead him to suggest that this text may represent the first major body of secular women's poetry in the history of German literature. Classen reaches this conclusion through a detailed analysis of exemplary pieces in the collection. Comparing them with the medieval tradition of Frauenlieder composed by male poets and Provençal trobairitz poetry undoubtedly created by women, he argues that the surprisingly radical fashion in which women 's issues and concerns are addressed in Fenchlerin's songbook is without precedent in the history of early German literature. Concluding this cluster, Mara Wade's study uncovers and recovers the history of published works by three seventeenth-century Saxon sisters. In her demonstration of the importance of primary bibliographical research ? Women in German Yearbook 14 for feminist scholarship of the Early Modern Period, Wade leads the reader to an understanding of the prayers, Lieder, and commentaries they published in German on the joyous and tragic events of the life cycle: birth, marriage, and death. To ignore their writings, Wade shows us, is to miss important contributions to both German Protestantism and Lutheran court culture. The next cluster of articles focuses on literature around 1800. Drawing attention to Charlotte von Hezel, the first woman to publish a magazine for women using her own name, Melanie Archangeli points out particular journalistic innovations in Hezel's Wochenblatt fürs schöne Geschlecht, including a health column directed especially to women and weekly literary reviews written by Hezel herself. Archangeli compares Hezel's journal with Sophie von La Roche's betterknown periodical, Pomona, to suggest that the unconventional style, literary values, and gender relations depicted in Das Wochenblatt may have represented an uncomfortable challenge to established social and literary practices and thus contributed to the lack of resonance of Hezel 's "alternative voice." In a provocative reexamination of Schiller's Jungfrau von Orleans, Gail Hart employs Schiller's own description of the feminine in his theoretical essay "Über Anmut und Würde" to explore the distinction between gender attributes (masculine and feminine ) and gender attributions (men and women) in his drama. Schiller, she argues, was aware of the contingency and transportability of the attributes that signal gender. In his attempt to create a counter-model to the medieval "sex-gender" assumptions that underlay the execution of the historical Joan of Arc, however, Hart uncovers slippages and dissonances that mark Schiller's play as a highly experimental, but only partially successful work that failed to satisfy conventional assumptions yet did not quite succeed in countering them. Finally, in another analysis of gender coding, Lisa Roetzel reads Bettina von Arnim's epistolary novel Die Günderode as a rewriting of the Romantic concept of genius in feminine terms. In Roetzel's reading, the dialog between the fictional...