Besprechungen / Reviews 385 with the spiritual forces of the Christian religion,» Diu Crône is, by contrast, «an unequivocal endorsement of a secular, Arthurian ideal which clearly maintained its appeal in Germany well beyond the ‘classical’ period of the first decade of the thirteenth century» (212). The essays that follow also maintain a high standard, namely, Michael Resler’s concise article on «Der Stricker»; Elizabeth A. Anderson’s essay on «Rudolf von Ems»; the essay on «Ulrich von Liechtenstein» by Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler; Rüdiger Brandt’s article on «Konrad von Würzburg»; and finally a welcome mention by Ruth Weichselbaumer of «Wernher der Gärtner» and his work, Helmbrecht, as symptomatic of the late thirteenth-century socioeconomic paradigm shift in German-speaking lands. In the fourth and final part, «Historical Perspectives,» Hasty wisely includes two valuable essays dealing with significant social and historical issues that frame the previous essays well, William H. Jackson’s «Court Literature and Violence in the High Middle Ages» and «Mobility, Politics, and Society in Medieval Germany» by Charles R. Bowlus. The reader will discover that the bibliography of «Primary Literature» and «Select Secondary Literature» occasionally reiterate the end notes in the individual essays. Yet, with an editorial project of this magnitude, a modicum of repetition is to be expected. In sum, Will Hasty and his contributors are to be commended for a volume well done. Truman State University Ernst Ralf Hintz J AMES A. S CHULTZ : Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2006. 242 pp. $ 39. Tristan and Isolde were not heterosexuals; they were aristophiliacs. This claim, startling on the surface, is substantiated in James A. Schultz’s important book on courtly love as it is found in Middle High German masterworks from the period around 1200. It is not easy to come up with a new theory of courtly love. Schultz succeeds where other scholars with much longer books have failed by convincing us to unthink our Freudian and Lacanian convictions about sexuality and take a new look at the key texts to find out what they actually say (and do not say). The astringent readings he performs reveal a system of love that truly deserves the name «courtly» because it exists only through courtly forms and functions. Courtly love is the love of the courtliness through which individuals gain distinction and public acclaim (xviii). In the introduction, Schultz develops his sophisticated theoretical standpoint by asking his readerships to become aware of their own blind spots. He requires medievalists who have not paid attention to work in the history of sexuality to attend to its findings, particularly regarding heterosexuality. Like homosexuality, it is a recent invention whose strictures about the origins of desire in physical dimorphism distort our understanding of the distant past. Schultz also requires historians of sexuality who tend to focus on transgression not to overlook the authorized sexuality of dominant social groups such as the medieval nobility. He refers to studies inspired by 386 Besprechungen / Reviews Foucault of socially dominant groups whose «regular sexuality» cannot be classified according to heteroor homosexual object choices. Schultz’s practice of close reading, no longer the self-evident methodology of literary studies, is as interesting as his theoretical standpoint and as important to the success of the book. In Chapter 1 he goes to work with deconstructive precision, starting with the famous scene where Parzival’s mother and her ladies observe the penis of the newborn child. Wolfram’s striking mention of the penis, Schultz reasons, is simply his concrete variation on a convention of birth scenes in which the sex of the child is declared. The ladies’ caresses do not signify heterosexual desire, as most English translators assume, but rather the child’s heroic potential based on the size of his limbs. If the discussion of Parzival’s penis illustrates what we think we see that isn’t there, then the rest of the book illustrates what we haven’t seen that is there. It is organized into four large sections, each named after one of Aristotle’s four causes as outlined in the Physics and Metaphysics. Schultz does not explain this organization, although one reason is evident in his annoyance with a feminist misprision of Aristotle’s heterosexism (53-54). His choice is also a droll response to the Platonism - the lady draws the lover toward the good and/ or improves his moral worth - that is productive in notable work by C. Stephen Jaeger and Rüdiger Schnell. As a system for giving an adequate account for the existence of a thing, the Aristotelian causes are an elegant way to structure an inquiry that starts with a clean slate. Inspired close readings provide the evidence in all four sections of the book, but here I can indicate only Schultz’s conclusions. The first section investigates the causa materialis: what sorts of bodies are involved in courtly love? These bodies are not sexually dimorphic but nearly identical in men and women, an innovation in German texts over their French sources. Pictures of courtly lovers in the Codex Manesse, Cpg 848, support this view (examples are reproduced on the dust jacket). Schultz coins the term «aphrodisiac body» for this love-inducing body lacking «natural» sexual markers. Gender does matter, but only when aphrodisiac bodies are put on display as in Isolde’s famous entrance to the Irish court. Authors elaborate on women’s bodies much more extensively than on men’s in such scenes, and they depict a stronger, decidedly possessive reaction from the court public. Schultz concludes: we make a distinction between «opposite sexes,» but MHG writers distinguish between the sexually unmarked body of the beloved in the lovers’ dyad and the gendered body that is displayed at court (47). It is one of several examples of how we err in our analytical categories. The next step in the argument concerns the causa efficiens: in a system without desire, what gets courtly lovers going? Potential lovers become courtly lovers, Schultz finds, when they see a courtly body. Seeing is not a passive activity. The seer is literally overpowered by the sight of nobility that manifests itself through bodily radiance, sumptuous unisex clothing, courtly qualities (virtues that are also gender-inflected), and courtly behaviors such as the staged entry to court or the tournament. Courtly love, in other words, is aristophilia - the love of the court as manifested in a courtly body. In this section Schultz deepens his disagreement with scholars who rely on desire and heterosexuality as analytical concepts. He contends that they naively ignore at least three incommensurate medieval explanations for what caused people to want Besprechungen / Reviews 387 sex: the external force of love (courtly discourse), appetite (medicine), and concupiscence (theology). The third step answers the question: how do they fashion themselves into courtly lovers to preserve love, life and reputation? Under the rubric of the causa formalis, Schultz offers some surprising twists on well-known genres and literary conventions. A chapter on the minnesinger stresses his singleness, not his attachment to his lady. Alone but in public, the single singer turns anxiety and subordination into a courtly discipline and receives courtly acclaim in return. He most completely illustrates Schultz’s claim that love service is «a stylization of male behavior that is accomplished by men for men» (164). Chivalric couples of narrative texts, by contrast, signal and reciprocate love through the conventions of courtly behavior: formal greetings, entrances, festivals, knightly combat, etc. Schultz’s distinction between couples for whom love is under control and couples for whom love is in control is an illuminating ordering of two narrative conventions. For the former, knighthood comes first and love is the happy byproduct (Lavinia and Eneas). For the latter, however, knighthood and its masculine privileges are subordinated to the control of women or love, with results that can be deadly. In a revolutionary reading of Das Nibelungenlied, Schultz explains Siegfried’s service to Gunther out of love for Kriemhild, with its catastrophic results, as an example of deadly love in control. But in either case, love service is a courtly discipline that brings distinction to men, an insight that Schultz fully elaborates in the last chapter on the historical context of courtly love. Finally there is the causa finalis, or: what do they get out of it? An analysis of the MHG diction for the sex that is the reward of service shows that it cannot be linguistically parted from the eroticization of the court, nor can it be assimilated to the modern category of sexual intercourse. Schultz gives the causa finalis a larger scope, however, by asking why noble men would support a literature that celebrates their subordination to women, a reversal of the «natural» order that they would not accept in real life. The explanation in the last chapter takes the crucial but difficult step from the text to the historical context. It begins with a presumed crisis in masculinity around 1200 caused by constraints on fighting (enforcement of Landfrieden) and constraints on men’s traditional sexual privilege (ecclesiastical control of marriage). The culture of the historical courts demanded similar constraints with respect to violence and the treatment of women, but offered distinction in return through the approval of a lord (or the Lord). Fictional courtly love, Schultz argues, is not merely homologous to all of these developments. It intensifies and organizes them by imagining men’s fighting actually under the control of women or love. All this control inevitably raises anxiety about masculinity, which is obsessively explored in the texts: «It is striking how the literature of courtly love fixates on the times when men are constrained and subordinate, on the times when masculine autonomy and precedence are put into question» (182). The answer to the question of what they get out of it rests in the notion of fiction as consolation for masculine anxiety. Consolation comes in three forms: 1) the sustained narrative focus on male characters signals to men in the audience that their submission to love is more interesting than women’s; 2) courtly love fiction lets men feign submission without giving up real power; and 3) the intensifications of courtly love literature let men explore the civilizing process 388 Besprechungen / Reviews beyond its historical possibilities (imagine fighting for a woman without armor! ) and contemplate even greater rewards for their discipline (182-85). Schultz offers these ideas on the Sitz im Leben of courtly love with circumspection, creating an opportunity for discussion that I will take briefly in closing. I find his assertion that without the interest of noble men, the literature of courtly love would never have been written to be puzzling in its silence on possible influences from noble women (188). Wolfram, for one, is famously defensive about a lady’s judgment on his story, an anxiety that hints at a noblewoman’s role in cultural production. The underlying issue is how to think about gender - as a mode of rhetoric, as a regime of discipline (as Schultz does), but also as a system through which masculinity and femininity are related, inseparable from class and sensitive to religious, legal, and political change. The fiction tells us that the crisis in noble masculinity also placed new stresses on what it meant to be female and empowered. If gender at court was «constricting» for men, it was «conflicting» for ladies who were at once powerful and subordinate, both lords and «natural» women. Schultz’s contention that women are not the focal point in courtly fiction because their subordination to love was a continuation of their subordination in society overlooks the powers that noble women do exercise in fiction and the possible ways they might relate to history (183-84). What the fictional imprint of class and womanhood can look like is illustrated by Schultz’s own comment on the autonomy of Herzeloyde at the tournament at Kanvoleis: «institutions that [Herzeloyde] has established and over which she presides - the tournament, the court - determine the meaning of [Gahmuret’s] fighting, which is the meaning she wants it to have» (182). Gahmuret may be the focal point, but through Herzeloyde Wolfram gives us the idea of a woman whose social position gives her ultimate power, the power to determine what things mean. It relates to his anxiety about the judgment of the lady on him and his poem. Wolfram also provides Herzeloyde with an extensive biography in which lordship and womanhood are in almost continuous conflict. His biographical gesture is extraordinary but surely not pure fantasy. He does it again with Orgeluse, another lady who, to the distress of Gawan, determines what things mean, at least for the best part of the story. Wolfram is not unique: Kriemhild and Laudine also represent empowered lives played out through conflicted notions of relational gender. Although my observations move beyond courtly love and the history of sexuality per se, a richer notion of gender is relevant to their understanding. These fictional women may end well or badly, and be subordinated happily or unhappily to male privilege in the end, but how they get there is a very exciting story that we can’t afford to miss. Rice University Sarah Westphal-Wihl M ATT E RLIN : Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P, 2004. xiv + 219 pp. $ 45. Matt Erlin’s study of the discourse on Berlin in writings from the second half of the eighteenth century, a contribution to scholarship on Germany’s literary and cultural history, investigates the role of Prussia’s capital in the «evolution of modern historical