These studies of narrative and lyric court poetry composed in the German High Middle Ages (including the love lyrics, courtly romance, and heroic epics such as the Nibelungenlied) examine ways in which courtliness is involved in military and monastic forms of aggression and dominance, situating the poetry in a time when, as the historian Benjamin Arnold has put it, "the German aristocratic mentality took for granted violence on a considerable scale."
In these studies "courtliness" shows itself to be a manner of managing and employing aggression in the interests of dominance, rather than as a mode of (inter)action that is opposed to or beyond aggression - as which it has been understood in much of the scholarship dealing with German court poetry.
In these studies "courtliness" shows itself to be a manner of managing and employing aggression in the interests of dominance, rather than as a mode of (inter)action that is opposed to or beyond aggression - as which it has been understood in much of the scholarship dealing with German court poetry.