Verbalized "Experience" and Medieval German Women's Literature

2024/10/31

My specialty is the texts of women who lived in the German-speaking world during the Middle Ages. In medieval Europe, it was not common for women to write about their experiences and opinions and make them public. Nevertheless, in the history of German literature, the 12th to 14th centuries, corresponding to the High and Late Middle Ages, are an important era of "female writers." What they wrote about was none other than their "encounters with God."

We experience many things, often without being consciously aware of it. And through language, we can share these events with others by saying things like, "I went to a cafe" or "I saw a beautiful sunset." Of course, the experience is not conveyed perfectly, but general communication is possible. But what if the experience was an event or sensation that could not be put into words at all?

In the Christian world, the experience of knowing God directly is considered to be precisely such an ineffable one. This is because in Christianity, God is a being beyond words and concepts, meaning that neither God nor the experience of God can originally be verbalized. The women who believed they had experienced God desperately wove words, but it was something that could never be truly shared, a fact understood by both writer and reader. Something that cannot be verbalized, something that probably cannot be conveyed. Nevertheless, many people in medieval Europe wrote about it.

In reality, even our daily experiences cannot be completely conveyed to others. However, the interesting aspect of this medieval literary genre is that it emphasizes the impossibility of verbalization while simultaneously using every possible word to verbalize the experience. The fact that women exclusively left behind such texts is closely related to the social background that "women were not allowed to engage in matters of Christian doctrine at all." But at the same time, it is also true that there was a major movement surrounding these women, one that sought to speak of the unspeakable—God—and demanded that it be spoken of.

Through the medium of this unique literary form, I conduct research focusing on the acts of reading and writing, and the relationship between literature and society.

*Affiliations and job titles are as of the time of the interview.