Over 500 different examples of minnerede have been preserved. The texts, in which a first-person subject articulates his experience of courtly love or his knowledge about it, testify to the strength of a continuous fascination with this topic in the Late Middle Ages. Concentrating on the genre of minnerede, the twelve papers in this volume develop innovative approaches to the relationship of text and culture in the Middle Ages. The starting point is an at first provocative initial thesis, which however leads to the surprising conclusion that what modern readers might find ‘trivial’ in a pejorative sense was a source of great fascination for medieval readers of these discourses of courtly love. Thus attention centres around the density of repetition, the availability of rhetorical gestures, the conventionality and the breaks with convention, the metaphorical indulgence and the construction of gender roles.
