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.