The Transvestite Knight: Ulrich’s Frauendienst in Performance

Ulrich’s Frauendienst is odd and obscure enough that perhaps some general readers could learn something from a simple description. This fresh impression, recorded after a first reading, adds yet one more voice to the conversation among the work’s readers, a conversation which reveals, I think, as much about each critic’s sensibility as about Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s.


The greatest medieval European epic-length narrative poems were composed in German around the turn of the twelfth century. The Nibelungenlied, Gottfried’s Tristan and Isolde, and Wolfram’s Parzifal are encyclopedic, culture-defining works, illuminated by the ancient motifs of Celtic and Germanic paganism. Sophisticated narratives woven of masterful poetry, each has a broad array of thematic implications embracing politics, love, death, and the divine.

Only a few years later Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Frauendienst (Service of Women or the Woman) was rooted in the shallower soil of courtly love. That term has, of course, been questioned and indeed such ambiguity is Ulrich’s chief theme and mine. Before relating something of the reception history of the concept of courtly love and of Ulrich’s own version of it, though, a summary of his narrative, though it will have no value for those who have read it, may intrigue some who have never previously heard of it. The plot is nothing short of outlandish.

Frauendienst is a first-person narrative in stanzas containing a number of interpolated poems in other forms. In his youth Ulrich, the persona, serves a noble lady and develops such a devotion to her that he drinks the water with which she washes. Later as a knight he dedicates his service to her despite her rejection of his love-messages. When she criticizes the appearance of his lip, he immediately seeks out a plastic surgeon. To honor his beloved and all women he disguises himself as Venus and, dressed as a woman, tours from Venice to Vienna, challenging all he meets to “break lances” in jousts. A lady in church sees through his costume (which could hardly be convincing to anyone) when she is to give him a “kiss of peace” only to kiss him anyway in the best of humor. An unknown admirer covers him with flower petals when he is in his bath (while pretending to be a woman). His lady convinces him to join the lepers who wait for alms outside her castle with the promise that she will eventually admit him. As he waits there the watchman urinates on him. He later undertakes another pilgrimage in the person of King Arthur serving a different, more obscure damsel who barely enters the story, but the latter part of the work abandons the more or less continuous narrative of these adventures and substitutes more poems and apothegms with a scattering of fragmentary narrative passages.

This sketch is sufficient to make the absurdity of the story abundantly clear. Strange as it may seem to contemporary readers, the earlier scholars commenting on Ulrich’s work concurred in considering the work as essentially an authentic autobiography. For Tieck in 1812 the book was simply the “Geschichte und Liebe des Ritters und Sängers Ulrich von Liechtenstein von ihm selbst beschrieben.” For years readers assumed the story was factual. Reinhold Bechstein in his 1888 edition unreservedly calls it a “Selbstbiographie” [1] and goes yet further, declaring that “Ulrich’s narration makes such an impression of candor that we can have no doubt of his love of truth, indeed, all the less, since he reports many things that are in no way flattering to him.” [2] Based on the assumption of the text’s literal truth, it was studied for many years more as a historical than as a literary document.

While modern readers smile at what seems the credulity of earlier generations, more recent readings of the text have ranged from the reasonable and productive to anachronistic and fanciful. The suggestion of Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler who consider the work “a sincere autobiographical romance,” an Ich-Roman that relays “the author’s psychological states, his unconscious or only semi-conscious fears, anxieties, and even obsessions,” is highly suggestive. [3] Albrecht Classen, denying significant autobiographical content, finds the poem an analysis of “the theatrical nature of courtliness,” revealing “the precariousness and thus the extreme value of courtly culture” and allowing performer and audience “self-confirmation” though he gives scant attention to its comic elements. [4]

Ulrich’s translator and editor J. W. Thomas to whom the Frauendienst is a humorous “fiction” focuses on the poems relation to other poems, finding in it a catalogue of Minnesang conventions in the lyrics accompanied by a humorous parody of the same conventions in the narrative passages. [5] While this seems eminently reasonable it leaves open the questions of theme and reception.

More suspicious are such conclusions as those of Ingrid Bennewitz to whom Ulrich’s cross-dressing represents his “insecurity with his male body” [6] or Lisa Perfetti for whom the poem “subverts the lyric genre’s conventional silencing of women” and exposes the “pretense of the male voice” which claims to be “dedicated to serving women as a sham.” [7] Andrea Moshövel’s characterization of cross-dressing as "a “misogynistic and homophobic expression of anxieties over the dissolving of gender boundaries.” [8] sounds like an exportation of contemporary attitudes backwards in time.

The disputed terrain between those who take Ulrich’s quests in behalf of love as straightforward amatory heroism and those to whom his adventures are primarily comic, ironic, or subversive mirrors critical attitudes toward courtly love as a whole. Brought into common usage with Gaston Paris [9], the term had become generally accepted, particularly after C. S. Lewis’s popular The Allegory of Love. Courtly love seemed to have settled into the realm of received ideas until the sixties when D. W. Robertson declared it “an impediment to the understanding of medieval literature”[10] and a couple of years later E. Talbot Donaldson wrote of “The Myth of Courtly Love.” [11] J. J. Wilhelm argued for dropping the term entirely. Without surveying the vast bibliography on this topic, it is sufficient here to observe that the issue as a whole has been deeply contested.

Even more broadly, on strictly formal grounds, every convention has the potential to bring to birth a panoply of variations in a process I name “transformation of convention.” [12] The establishment of a steady rhythm, for example, allows the listener to perceive the absence of a beat or a change on tempo. In this way the semantic density of the aesthetic work is greatly heightened. Conventions provide a dynamic technique for poetry’s exploration of ambiguities and contradictions.

The performative aspects of medieval literature are often neglected as moderns read in library or study. Yet Frauendienst was in fact recited and its lyrics sung in a social situation, and the context of Ulrich’s poem shapes its substance. The poem offers ample opportunity for performative elements apart from the text. Many passages in which Ulrich comments with satisfaction on his feminine garments would almost inevitably be presented with mincing gestures. The repetitive description of jousting matches with specific opponents, often characterized in the most general terms, may bore modern readers, but in the original context, they likely represented “shout-outs” to individuals whose friends and relatives, if not they themselves, were in the audience. The comic aspect of the story, unnoticed for years, would have been explicit. Surely the singer’s sly glance around the room would accompany Ulrich’s sudden brief mention of interrupting his love-service for a few days to look in on his wife or his “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. [13]

The reception of the narrative must be of a piece with that of the interspersed lyrics, despite apparent contradictions. Imagining this dramatic situation it is natural to take courtly love poems in general as sophisticated flirtatious courtly entertainments, celebrating the men of the nobility as warrior-lovers and the women as paragons of beauty, the more alluring for their discreet reserve. The courtly love paradigm regularly casts the he-man and the glamour girl in leading roles, but they are not always presented straightforwardly. The hefty measure of idealization does not foreclose possibilities such as irony, comedy, or obscenity, possibilities necessary to reflect the range of human responses to love.

Ulrich is telling a tall tale, but his extravagances are far from arbitrary. For courtly love as a whole, the essential datum is the power of sexuality. The primary signification of the love-service is the lover’s feeling of helplessness in the experience of erotic desire at least from the male point of view. [14] He may experience such vulnerability even in a patriarchal society. To address the lady as “my lord” (Midons)as the Old Occitanian poets did, expresses an authentic emotional truth while not altering the balance of social, economic, or political rule in the least. All courtly poetic practice occurs within the complex ironies of this realization.

Through poetry which enacts the dynamic contradictions of desire, the court became a theater of erotic play. Ulrich is telling a tall tale based in his own sexuality. His status as a supreme athlete for love is confirmed by his endurance of harsh treatment at the lady’s hands, his lying with lepers, his determination taken to the point of absurdity, all this accumulates to suggest that he is, in fact, the greatest lover the world has ever known. It is immaterial that in a realistic situation a man would surely either divert his attentions to a more welcoming quarter or, in some circumstances, force his will upon the woman.

Thus Ulrich’s Frauendienst is realistic in depicting the coercive imperium of sexuality at the same time as it is recognizes the irony of this female power in a patriarchy through fantastic parody. An outright boast of sexual prowess might have found fewer listeners than Ulrich’s whimsical and self-mocking tale. Apart from increasing entertainment value, the two-sided meaning of the love epic is in fact more true to human nature than either half of its vision would be. Ulrich does not seek to dismantle the social order of feudal society; rather he performs the role of an artist by pointing toward its contradictions and tensions, the delights and the shackles of the world in which he lived, the most important of which are little changed in the three-quarters of a millennium since.



1. Page VIII.

2. Page IX. The translation is mine.

3. Ulrich Müller and Franz Viktor Spechtler, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein,” in German Literature of the High Middle Ages edited by Will Hasty and James N. Hardin. Müller goes too far when he claims in another article that “Ulrich seine Rolle als Mann und Ritter nicht akzeptiert.” (“Ulrich von Liechtenstein und sein Männerphantasien; Mittelalterliche Literatur und modern Psychologie,” in Ich -- Ulrich von Liechtenstein, ed. Franz Viktor Spechtler).

4. Albrecht Classen, “Moriz, Tristan, and Ulrich as Master Disguise Artists: Deconstruction and Reenactment of Courtliness in ‘Moriz von Craû’, ‘Tristan als Mönch’, and Ulrich von Liechtenstein's Frauendienst,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp. 475-504.

5. See J. W. Thomas, “The Minnesong Structure of Ulrich von Liechtenstein's 'Frauendienst,'” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 102. Bd., H. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1973), pp. 195-203 and his introductory material in Ulrich von Liechtenstein’s Service of Ladies.

6. Ingrid Bennewitz, “Der Körper der Dame. Zur Konstruktion von ‘Weiblichkeit’in der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in ‘Aufführung’ und’ Schrift’ in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, 222-238.

7. “‘With them she had her playful game’ The Performance of Gender and Genre in Ulrich von Lichtenstein’s Frauendienst,” in Women & Laughter in Medieval Comic Literature, ed. Lisa Perfetti.

8. My translation. Andrea Moshövel, “Ulrich von Liechtenstein” Wîplich man. Formen und Funktionen von ‘Effemination’ in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten des 13. Jahrhunderts, Aventiuren Bd. 5.

9. In his "Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette" in Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde. The term not only described a set of conventions recognizable to any reader of medieval literature; it occurred only perhaps twice in Old Occitanian (“cortez amors” in Peire d'Alvernhe and “amor cortes” in Flamenca). Some prefer the term fin’amor because it and variations occur far more commonly, but poets often refer to love as essentially courtly. For Marcabrun “cortesia es d’amar” in “Cortesamen vuoill comenssar . . .” The opening phrase also identifies the court with artfulness.

10. In “Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love ,” in The Meaning of Courtly Love.

11. In Speaking of Chaucer. John A. Yunck, reviewing Donaldson’s book for Criticism : a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts (Vol. 13, No. 4 [Fall 1971]) called courtly love a “scholarly figment” as though the issue was settled.

12. A number of articles on this site employ this term and offer fuller explanation of it. See, for instance, “Transformation of Convention ,” “William IX: A Study in Transformation of Convention,” “Transformation of Convention in Early Minnesang,” “The Mule in Blues Imagery,” and others.

13. See, for instance, st. 989 in which the local noble jokes about Ulrich’s change from female to male or st. 134 in which bystanders laugh at the lady’s insulting him. His visit to his wife is st. 707. He also spend a “pleasant” time among the Viennese women. (994)

14. A particularly rich body of work survives by trobairitz, female Troubadours. Accessible anthologies include those by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner (Songs of the Women Troubadours) and Magda Bogin (The Women Troubadours). See also Peter Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages.

Der von Kürenberg

Little is known of the first of the Minnesingers, called the Kürenberger (der von Kurenberc) apart from an approximate date (fl. mid-twelfth century) and a general region along the Danube somewhere near Melk and Linz. His work survives only in the fourteenth century Codex Manesse (the Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift). Unlike later lyricists, he uses the same strophic form as the Nibelungenlied. He and Dietmar von Aist are often said to be independent of influence from the Occitanian Troubadours, though this judgement rests on a rigid notion of courtly love. To me Kürenberg seems to play with the courtly conventions that some later poets simply reproduced.

I have not attempted to reproduce Kürenberg’s strophes exactly. The caesurae have all but vanished in my effort to make something readable in English, but I am no looser than my author in attention to form. Slant rhymes and errant syllables are not uncommon in the MHG, though of course they would have been less obtrusive, even imperceptible in musical performance. I have used iambic tetrameters and pentameters for the most part, rhyming abcb.


“Wîp vil schœne . . .”

O lovely lady, come with me,
and highs and lows I’ll share with you
my whole life long I’ll love just you
your loving a lesser I won’t allow.


“Aller wîbe wünne . . .”

Most marvelous of ladies, still a maid,
I send in loving notes the praise you’re due.
You know I’d be there, but I am discreet.
I doubt your mind, while mine is fixed on you.


Though the first of these quatrains is pared down to a largely timeless declaration of love with only a hint of rivalry, the second includes some aspects of the common conventions of the love poetry of the times, the extravagant praise of the beloved, the communication by messages, and the nosy figures hostile to love, while maintaining the lover’s total devotion.


“Ich stuont mir nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night alone I stood upon the tower.
I heard a knight whose voice rang out in song.
A song of Kurenberc’s rose from the crowd –
If he stays here he will be mine ere long!”

“So quick bring me my armor and my horse!
A lady forces me to ride away!
She wants me to submit to her and serve.
Without my love I swear she’ll have to stay.”


The critique of courtly manners is suggested first by the woman’s aggressive desire to dominate a man who has made no gesture in her direction. Seeking independence rather than love-service, he must depart, reversing the ordinary pattern of devotion to the female in conscious self-subordination .


“Jô stuont ich nehtint spâte . . .”

“Last night I stood beside your bed,
but didn’t wish to break your rest.”
“For that may you be cursed!” she said.
“Am I a boar to gore your breast?”


Compare the opening words to those of the previous song. This lyric provides one of the clearest examples of the transformation of convention. In the very dawn-time of vernacular love poetry, the courtly tradition rises not alone but accompanied by a range of variations that may validate, extend, or emphasize the original convention, but also may twist or distort it, most commonly by denial, reversal, inversion, or parody. While the knight is decorous and respectful, as proper at any rate as one can be while slipping up on someone’s bedside, the woman is freer. Using colloquial language and a dramatic image, she expresses what can only be disappointed lust. The effect is surely comic.


“Swenne ich stân aleine . . .”

I stand in nightgown all alone
and think of you, my noble knight.
I blush the shade of rose mid thorns
and muse upon my lonely plight.


The lovely simplicity of this lyric resembles the fragment traditionally attributed to Sappho Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα. One thinks also of the Mughal miniatures showing lone women experiencing love-longing.


“Ich zôch mir einen valken . . .”

I trained my falcon longer than a year.
When I had tamed him well to suit just me
and gilded all his plumage tastefully,
he rose right up and flew to some far tree.

Since then I’ve seen that lovely bird in flight
with silken bonds still on his feet above.
His feathers shone so grand, so red and gold!
May God bring love to those who long to love!


The falcon is an appropriately aristocratic image, but again here, the lover/bird, though trained for a solid year, resists her control and flies away. His absence may be only temporary. Line four, in which I have jettisoned some information to seize a rhyme by translating “in anderiu lant” as “some far tree,” suggests service in war, perhaps a crusade, after which he may return to her. The gilded feathers have much the same implication of the expression “a bird in a gilded cage." The final line reminds me of the hauntingly lovely chorus of the Pervigilium Veneris “Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet” ("Let he who never has loved find love tomorrow, and let the lover love tomorrow").


“Wîp unde vederspil . . .”

All females and all falcons may be trained.
They come to one who knows how to entice.
A handsome knight did thus attract a dame.
My spirit soars with love to paradise.


In this quatrain the falcon has become the woman, a clear example of the early transformation of Minnesang convention.


“Der tunkele sterne . . .”

A faint star knows just how to hide.
Learn how my dear when I am near
to gaze upon another man.
No one must guess you are my dear.


Here the emphasis on “tougen minne” or hidden love allows Kürenberg to play with the widespread figure comparing the lady to a star. Reversing the usual implication that suggests her bright preeminence casting rivals into shadow, here she is advised to seek obscurity to conceal her relationship.

The Floating World of Ihara Saikaku

A study of a Japanese author by one who reads no Japanese may first be justified as a suggestion of reading for others with no access to the original, yet as a comparatist, I like to think that non-specialists can sometimes bring fresh insights of interest even to the experts.

Quotations are drawn from The Life of an Amorous Woman, translated and edited by Ivan Morris. Since the episodes are so brief and others may use different editions, I cite only the chapter.



     During the seventeenth century in Japan as in Europe printed books became widely available as the middle class increased in size and prosperity. Whereas much earlier literature had been either courtly (such as waka and sonnets) or popular (inaka bushi or ballads), a distinctly bourgeois literature then arose. Authors could make a living from the sale of their books rather than depending on noble patronage or the coins of onlookers. Accompanying the shift in audience and medium were new forms and values. In England one might think of writers like Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, while in Japan Ihara Saikaku represented the taste of the chonin class, meaning “townsperson” (like bourgeois), producing work that was considered almost subliterary in its own day.
     Saikaku founded the ukiyo-zōshi (books of the floating world) prose genre, among the first Japanese works to be published for profit. After beginning his career as a poet, composing haikai, itself a colloquial and often comic form arising from the aristocratic renga, he turned to fiction. He found great popularity with his stories of the affairs of the middle class and the intrigues of the “floating world,” the pleasure districts with brothels, theaters, and places of entertainment, the same districts that inspired the ukiyo-e artists. He also wrote of most the popular genre categories, including romance, detective, and ghost stories.
     Ivan Morris did English-speakers a service with his edition of a number of Saikaku’s stories in The Life of an Amorous Woman with its helpful introduction and invaluable notes. I particularly applaud this careful annotation since the volume is clearly meant for the general educated reader rather than for specialists. (How many publishers today would expect such an audience for a centuries-old Asian writer? Though my British Corgi paperback from 1964 does promise “high eroticism” on its cover, it cost only six shillings.)
     Saikaku does write a good deal about the “floating world,” as the entertainment quarters were called. These were forbidden to samurai, the exclusive province of the middle-class patron, full of theaters, teahouses and drinking spots, as well as houses of prostitution catering to men looking for either female or male partners. Saikaku is also representative of his class in his interest in economic fortunes. One of his books focuses on ways of making money, emphasizing industry and straight dealing. Against the general backdrop of Buddhist truisms, his stories illustrate with lively realism the mores of his day.
     Saikaku sometimes drew his plots from what claimed to be accounts of real events and they can sometimes read like a Tokugawa edition of The National Inquirer, retailing the lurid stories of the entertainment world and the demimonde for readers to cluck at and condemn. His readers could enjoy the titillation of vicarious sins while neither practicing nor endorsing such behavior themselves. His style is colloquial and casual and accommodates miniature essays on topics such as bathhouse attendants or the decline of the priesthood, at times sounding like those urban American magazines with articles on food, entertainment, and style. Like much early fiction in China and in Europe his work is highly episodic, never approaching the unified structure of a more modern novel. Though Morris’s volume is called a “novel” on its covers, in fact, the brief narrations are self-contained. Morris, in fact, has included portions of four different publications here. Even those who eschew abridgments will find his selection satisfying, surely the best introduction to the author in English. [1]
     Saikaku’s stories are punctuated with Buddhist commonplaces commenting on the impermanence of worldly things and the prevalence of suffering in human life. Thus, the reader is reminded “evanescent is this Floating World and uncertain the life of man.” [2] “No life is more certain than a bubble on the river’s surface” in “this grief-laden world of ours” [3] “The blooms scatter, the trees wither away, and when evening comes all are thrown into the hearth and burned.” [4] The uncertainty of fortune is also a highly conventionalized theme: “little do we know what fate has prepared for us.” [5]
     This is the basis for his obeisance toward Buddhist ideals of detachment. The heroine of The Life of an Amorous Woman repeatedly blames the disorder and suffering of her life on her sexual desire. When she briefly works as a celibate seamstress she considers herself “innocent of sin” within view at least of “The state of True Buddhahood.” [6]
     Yet Buddhism is also criticized. Just as Chaucer and Langland attacked the corruption of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, Saikaku makes fun of hypocritical monks and describes “Worldly Temples.” He even suggests that the Buddha himself may have sexually indulged at least in his youth or would, at least not condemn those who do. The “amorous woman” becomes the mistress of a bonze in a decidedly “Worldly Temple.” In another tale, monks who receive a bequest instantly run off to the whorehouse to spend it. [7] Though Saikaku says it is “the noonday of Buddhism” he describes rampant dissipation among the monks and digresses on the decline of the priesthood. [8]
     The symmetrical sexual lust of both men and women is taken for granted in these stories, and most people, it seems, are bisexual. Saikaku wrote an entire volume of stories concerned with gay relationships. If a customer is offended by the woman whose favors he has purchased he may turn to young men. [9] In general men out for a night on the town often visit the gay brothels after they are sated in the straight ones. [10] “Great lords” are said to be difficult for women to reach as they are often attached to “young lads with their forelocks.” [11] “What difference does it make,” Saikaku says, “the love of men or the love of women?” [12]
     In general life at court is “ever flavoured with the spice of love.” [13] His The Life of an Amorous Woman is balanced by The Life of an Amorous Man in which the protagonist boasts of having had sex with more than 3,000 women and almost 900 men, apparently besting Don Giovanni in both quantity and variety. The “amorous woman” persists in her sexual adventures though her life is repeatedly disordered by her uncontrollable appetites. Combined with this intensity of desire in general is a certain casualness about individual liaisons. When the protagonist has sex with her employer she is sent away but his wife is said to simply be “amused” at the incident. [14]
     There is a sinister side to all this love-making. One man is enervated by too much sex to the point that his becomes ill, neglects himself, and, perhaps worst of all, when people speak of “delightful women,” he can only “shake his head with a bitter look.” [15] Another likewise becomes “haggard and uncomely.” [16] A relationship may lose passion and appeal, as is said to happen generally with married couples [17] or it may devolve into a dominance/submission: “I got him into my hands and made him my own creature.” [18] In the end physical relations are characterized in terms that would have been familiar to a medieval Christian monk: “carnal pleasure between man and woman is but the mutual embrace of stinking bones.” [19] Many of the stories have melodramatic folk-tale denouements. For following their passions one lover is imprisoned, others are executed, and another goes berserk. [20] Even the inveterate “amorous woman” eventually retreats to a hermitage to try to do penance for her errors after undergoing a vision of all the babies whom she has aborted [21] and sees old lovers in every image of Buddha. [22]
     The tensions inherent in Saikaku’s view of sexuality are encapsulated in a single dramatic line: “A beautiful woman is an axe that cuts off a man’s very life.” [23] Though many of his tales specifically suggest the hazards of transgressive behavior such as promiscuity or violation of class boundaries, his oeuvre as a whole accepts the peremptory demands of all-too-human love while also recognizing the Buddhist teaching that desire always brings suffering.
     Lives are lived in this ambivalence. Eros is thanatos. Benedick dies in Beatrice’s lap. La petite mort. If one believes Isolde, Tristan’s dying is his “höchste Lust” (“greatest joy”). Biologists tell us that it is literally true, while cells that reproduce by fission are essentially immortal, with sexual reproduction comes death. All corporeal bodies will walk the ridgepole of that duality until they dissolve “in des Welt-Atems wehendem All” (“in the blowing totality of the world’s breath”). Saikaku made of this contradiction some highly diverting stories to peruse while awaiting that dissolution.


1. A good many other translations of Saikaku exist, including those by Mary Holman, Kenji Hamada, Paul Gordon Schalow, Wm. Theodore deBary, E. Powys Mathers, Thomas M. Kondo and Alfred H. Marks.

2. “The Tale of Gengobei, the Mountain of Love”

3. “The Tale of Seijuro”

4. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”

5. “A Beauty of Easy Virtue.” Similarly “there is no telling a man’s destiny in this world” in “The Wind that Destroyed the Fan Makers Shop in the Second Generation.”

6. “The Drawing Found in a Wanton Robe”

7. “The Ten Virtues of Tea That All Disappeared at Once”

8. In “A Bonze’s Wife in a Worldly Temple.” In fact Saikaku’s era was a time of decline for Buddhism, both in purity and in influence.

9. “A Beauty of Easy Virtue”

10. “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker”

11. “The Fair Mistress of a Provincial Lord”

12. In “The Tale of Gengobei, the Mountain of Love.” The predominance of bisexuality here as well as in ancient Greece and Rome, in medieval Muslim courts, Renaissance Florence, and other cultures implies a more fluid sexual identity than many would assume today.

13. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”

14. “The Pleasures of the Maiden Dance”

15. “The Woman’s Secret Manual of Etiquette”

16. “The Fair Mistress of a Provincial Lord”

17. “A Townsman’s Parlourmaid”

18. “A Paper String Cord of Guilt”

19. In “Mystery Women Who Sing Ditties” the line is quoted from Su Tung-p’o.

20. In order the stories of which I am thinking are “The Tale of Seijuro,” “What the Seasons Brought the Almanac Maker,” and “A Townsman’s Parlourmaid.”

21. “Song for a Woman of the Streets”

22. “The Five Hundred Disciples Who Found a Place in My Heart”

23. “An Old Woman’s Hermitage”