Widows: Their Social and Moral Functions According to Medieval German Literature, with Special Emphasis on Erhart Gross's Witwenbuch (1446)

Summary

The world of the Middle Ages is not alien in comparison to our own, and an examination of the social and moral functions of widowhood in medieval times proves to be as relevant as such a scrutiny would be today. Anthropologist Helena Znaniecka Lopata offers the following observation about the plight of a married woman facing the loss of a husband; her future “depends on the status that she can achieve or that is relegated to her after his [her husband's] death and her becoming a widow, if there is such a role.” Widows in premodern societies have only recently become the focus of socio-historical research, and literary scholars have paid only scant attention to widowed women. In order to remedy this paucity of scholarship, my article will address medieval and early modern authors' attitudes toward widowhood, and explore the ethical roles as well as social functions ascribed to this particular group of women. The field of widowhood has hardly ever been charted in German medieval scholarship, and widows in English, French, Spanish, and also Italian medieval literature have been only tangentially discussed in recent research. On the other hand, a number of social historians have investigated cases of widowhood in medieval England in light of these women's economic and social conditions, and scholars in religious history have focused on widows in hagiographic literature and in religious plays. I will begin with an overview of the widow figure in medieval German literature, especially that of the fifteenth century, when a Carthusian monk, Erhart Gross, wrote the first instructional book for widows (1446).