“Where Love Meets Love”

This chapter examines how Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Middle High German chivalric romance Parzival from the early thirteenth century, inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’s Tale of the Grail , endorses the virtues of mutual and faithful love. By contrast, the tried-and-tested feudal model of desire is frequently portrayed as a contractual relationship devoid of genuine emotion. Since Wolfram spuriously presents his work as a translation of an Arabic text, he – or rather his narrator – is allowed at any time to distance himself from the work’s numerous representations of such old-fashioned erotic meritocracy, possibly echoing the contemporary clerical misgivings about the (alleged) erotic license at the feudal courts and elsewhere. Time and again, the work’s narrator appears as a spokesman for a more intimate emotional culture, culminating in marriage as well as spiritual fulfilment.