Women Writers and Women Rulers: Rhetorical and Political Empowerment in the Fifteenth Century

The first prose novels in the German language have been attributed to two writers of the late Middle Ages, Elisabeth von Nassau-Saarbrücken (c. 1393-1456) and Eleonore von Österreich (1433-1480). These Early New High German texts have been typed by scholars as Trivialliteratur, a classification this essay questions. Eleonore and Elisabeth transform their source texts, chansons de geste, to increase the political role for women. I argue that the authors' own international political skill and marital experience affected their revisions. Rhetorically, women are depicted as speaking honestly, unlike the characterization of women's speech so prevalent in medieval misogynistic texts. Finally, this essay suggests future theoretical approaches for analyzing these works. (SSM)