page_title: Der Rosendorn
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Der Rosendorn / Background
caption_attribution_description: Melk Benedictine Abbey Library
context_page_description: Der Rosendorn is a thirteenth-century German poem. It tells of a virgin who is separated from her vagina, and her dialogue with it forms the structure of the piece. They argue about what it is that men want in a woman: the woman claims that men want for herself and her beauty, whereas the cunt dismisses this, claiming that she is all men really want. The two go different directions to discover the truth; neither is successful, and both are treated badly by the men they meet. To conclude the story, the maid is physically reunited with her cunt with the assistance of a passing young man.
  Originally thought to have been written in the 15th-century, a recently discovered portion of the text was discovered in an Austrian library, as part of another book's binding; this has been dated to around 200 years earlier. Poems of this vintage were not uncommon in medieval literature, with other examples known from France, and in England, sexual vulgarity was a frequent theme of Geoffrey Chaucer's poetry.
context_section_description: Poems such as Der Rosendorn were uncommon but not unknown in the Middle Ages, particularly in German literature, and often-satirical writers were not afraid to use the foulest of language—mentula (cock), cunnus (cunt) and futuo (to fuck), for example—to emphasise their points. Usage words such as zers and zwetzler (German slang for cock) and fut (likewise for cunt) went much further than the usual mild terms favoured by popular literature, and, indeed, were diametrically the opposite to what would be expected in the Romantic literature of the age. The Germanist Coxon suggests that their closest relative in ribaldry would have been the Fastnachtsspiele of carnival and shrovetide. 
  Brono Roy argues that the medieval motif of "the talking cunt" was a pan-European one, as similar fabliaux exist in French also. The scholar Jane Burns also writes that fabliaux "draw attention to the rich mythical heritage behind the medieval association of mouth and vagina". In contemporary English literature similar freedom with obscenity can be found. Chaucer, for example, frequently alluded to both male and female sex organs, often in slang, in The Canterbury Tales. For example, "The Nun's Priest's Tale" talks of the priest's "coillons" (bollocks), while in his tale, the pardoner tells the priest he can kiss his "olde breech" (underpants). In "The Miller's Tale" Absalon kisses what he hopes will be Alisoun's lips but is instead her "ers" (arse)—"nether ye"—which allows for further humour based on the hairiness of Alisoun's lips. The scholar Nichola McDonald has suggested that, while the Middle Ages as a period seems to have "accommodated ... the rude, bawdy or obscene", this did not mean that it was "devoid of the power to shock or offend".
  Der Rosendorn reflected a number of popular themes of medieval German literature. Eavesdropping, for example, says Rasmusson, was "an astonishingly popular subject among a large number of late-medieval German Minnereden".
caption: The library of Melk Abbey, where the fragment was discovered in 2019
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