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Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 Peddling Devotion: Mothers and Daughters in Conversation Through Books -- 2 Why Siegfried Has to Die: Gender, Violence, and the Social Order in the Nibelungenlied -- 3 “If You Are Desired, Then You Are Worthy”: Mothers, Daughters, and Paradoxes of Femininity in the Middle High German Tristan Sequels -- 4 Maternal Bonds in Konrad Fleck’s Flôre und Blanscheflûr -- 5 Teaching a Daughter Sexual Desire and Love Lore: Herzeloyde’s Mentorship of Sigune in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Titurel and Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s Jüngerer Titurel -- 6 Mothers and Daughters Revisited: The Mother-Daughter Songs in the Context of the Later Neidhart Tradition -- 7 Rivalrous Masculinities: Competing Concepts of Knighthood in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon In Praise of the New Knighthood and Hartmann von Aue’s Novella Gregorius -- 8 A Fate Worse than Death? Virgil’s “steinîn wîp” in Jans der Enikel’s Weltchronik -- 9 Love and Disgust: Ambiguous Genres and Ambivalent Feelings in Herzmäre -- Index While Gender Studies has made its mark on literary studies, much scholarship on the German Middle Ages is largely inaccessible to the Anglo-American audience. With gender at its core as a category of analysis, "Gender Bonds, Gender Binds"uniquely opens up medieval German material to English speakers. Recognizing the impact of Ann Marie Rasmussen’s Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature, this transatlantic volume expands on questions introduced in her 1997 book and subsequent work. More than a mere tribute, the collection moves the debates forward in new directions: it examines how gender bonds together people, practices, texts, and interpretive traditions, while constraining and delimiting these things socially, ideologically, culturally, or historically. As the contributions demonstrate, a close, materially focused analysis produces complex results, not easily reduced to a platitude. The essays steer a firm course through the terrain of gender bonds and binds, many of which remain challenging in the present. Herein lies the broader reach of this volume, for understanding the longevity of patriarchy and its effects on human relations demonstrates how crucial the study of the past can be for us as a society today
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