With these words, she turned her back. It was full of snakes and vipers and toads, of ulcers and sores, wherein flies and ants teemed and vermin crept. An abominable stench arose; her rich silken dress looked ash pale; and thus she went hence. But Wirent von Grafenberg, the spoiled child of the World, perceived the perdition of the soul in the service of the world; he left wife and children and the pleasures of the world, took the Cross, fought against the heathen, atoned for his sins, and obtained divine forgiveness and eternal bliss.
This story, evidently of clerical origin, proves the position of Church and clergy toward the life of chivalry and the ideals of the Minnesingers. They condemned the service of the world of love and power which, they averred, led only to eternal damnation. Earthly ideals, with their inner sins, were symbolized by the poetic picture of Lady World, which was even plastically represented on the Cathedral portals at Worms and Basle.
As here the typical knight is turned from the joys and aspirations of the world, thus the women of that brilliant period were drawn from their delight in earthly life and love; Christ was shown to them as the bridegroom of their souls; ideal joys of the world beyond were depicted to them in attractive colors. Numberless German hymns are devoted to Mary, but so little was it possible to get away from the realism of the love of the time that the sublime glow of holy fire makes room for the almost frivolous ardor of the time of chivalry. The Holy Virgin becomes more and more an earthly queen, whose court is provided with all the luxuries of the time. Religious sentimentality changes into passion. The piety of the noble ladies by no means deprives the minstrel knights of their due, or, as Scherer ingeniously says, "the result of the hundred years' struggle of the clergy against the world ends in the triumph of the latter." But not entirely so, for again and again there stirs in the German conscience the eternally spiritual element.
The Church placed in the field new troops, who did their work with victorious energy. Orders of beggar monks arose, and the Popes soon realized what a valuable instrument they were. The Dominicans and Franciscans had begun to settle in Germany. As preachers and confessors, they strove for dominance over souls. They inveighed passionately against the courtly life. Sinful was the tournament, sinful the luxuries of the table and courtly dress and fashions, sinful the dance and the minne, the worldly song and the service to women out of wedlock. Their influence upon women became very marked; many ladies began to turn from the world, sat like nuns, hid their bosoms and faces, and wore scapulars. "Instead of going with us to dance, you stand day and night in church," is a knightly complaint.
Not only piety and mysticism, but scholarship, which also was in conflict with chivalry, destroyed the minnesong. The great Italian Dominican, Thomas Aquinas, furnished to German mystics a considerable part of their philosophy. The essence of mysticism, poetically conceived, is the conviction that the soul is a bride of Christ. Mystic theology described the passionate emotions of the soul, in her ascent to, and union with her heavenly bridegroom. Eckard, Tauler, and Suso are the great leaders of the mystic movement which, seizing especially the minds and souls of women, transfers the nature of earthly minne to heavenly minne.
In this connection, we must mention a princely woman whose self-abnegating virtue rises well-nigh to the superhuman: Elizabeth of Thuringia. She was a daughter of King Andrew of Hungary, and in 1218 was married to Ludwig of Thuringia, after whose death she was treated most brutally by her brothers-in-law. Her confessor, the monk Konrad of Marburg, a dark fanatic, who tried to introduce the Inquisition the horrible Spanish institution into Germany, and who was killed in 1233 by a band of robber knights, tortured the pious princess with his gloomy ascetics. This princess devoted her life to charity and noble deeds for the poor and sick, whom she nursed and tended with her own hands. She died at the age of twenty-six, after having rejected the suit of the great and romantic Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II.; she is said to have earned her living during her last years by spinning wool. The saga has illumined the fame of that saintly royal woman with the aureole of glory and affection.
Pious women nursed the entire mystic movement. Mathilda of Magdeburg (1277) describes in her fragmentary and profoundly passionate revelations the mingling of the soul with God. Many ecstatic women followed her. Visions became a fashion in the fourteenth century. The ecstatic state of passionate love for the divine which shook her frame was considered the union with God, and the blissful rapture of one nun wrought a holy contagion among all her sisters. All the cloisters were drawn into the nervous whirlpool of religio-sensuous emotions. Ladies who formerly found satisfaction in the charms of the minnesong retired to the cloisters and passed through all the stages of the emotions of love toward the divinity, the Creator of all life.
Such was the period of the Minnesingers, and such the reaction against them. The cultural forces of the epoch can be expressed only by describing the literary trend of the events of life. They are correlative and interdependent. If, therefore, this chapter should appear to the reader to be unduly literary rather than historical, we can defend it by stating the fact that this was an era of song, and that this literature bears everywhere the stamp of truth. It is the faithful reflection of an infinitely rich time from which only the brilliant melodies of saga and song ring down to our prosaic and materialistic century.