Perspicuity, Acuity, and Illuminating Vision: Medieval and Early Modern Optics, Religion, and Literary Reflections of the Gaze in Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Walter Map, Hartmann von Aue, the Melusine Romances (Jean d’Arras), and Froben Christoph von Zimmern

Abstract

Medieval literature often seems to be a remote, irrelevant, incomprehensible world of narrative texts lost in heroic, religious, or courtly themes, limited to stories about King Arthur, courtly lovers, military heroes, and religious martyrs, saints, and prophets. In reality, as any expert can easily confirm, when we turn our full attention to pre-modern literature from across Europe (and also other parts of the world), we can often recognize the true extent to which poets utilized their narratives for spiritual, philosophical, religious, scientific, and medical explorations that have much to tell us today and prove to be deeply meaningful in a timeless manner. One key aspect, which was shared among virtually all medieval artists, poets, and theologians, consisted of the unique experience by an individual who is entitled through a physical opening to see into the depth or the height of all existence and can thus discover a wholly different world. Through this motif of the gaze, an entire epiphanic realization can set in, which thus quickly transforms the purely entertaining narrative medium into a narrative catalyst of profound spiritual experiences, helping the individual to gain inspiration from the Godhead (e.g., mysticism). Indeed, numerous times, medieval poets employed the motif of the visionary gaze, developed in very concrete terms, to trace and explain the process of perspicuity and accompanying acuity which ultimately leads to new intellectual, emotional, and religious understandings and experiences. While many intellectuals already embraced this notion of a visionary concept of spiritual comprehension, it might come as a surprise that secular and religious poets also operated quite intentionally with the concept of a hole in the wall or some other opening as a springboard for intellectual and spiritual experiences, directly drawing from the concepts of the optical sciences as understood at that time. Oddly but highly significantly, Christian and pagan notions tend to intersect in those narrative moments, particularly in late medieval literature, merging the visionary experience with the monstrous within human society, associating the gaze with the erotic and religious dimension.

1. Introduction

All human existence is determined by the innate drive to achieve happiness, harmony, peace, and a sense of community. All this is predicated on the concept of the search for meaning and relevance, as countless poets, theologians, and philosophers have already expressed in a myriad of narratives, images, and other media. Both Aristotle and Saint Augustine of Hippo could be cited here, or Boethius and Thomas Aquinas. Upon closer analysis, a diligent reader can easily recognize how much those intellectual predecessors had already gained deep insights into the purpose of our existence here on earth, and their texts simply wait for our investigations and discoveries.

After all, there are very few universal truths, and those are re-examined and rediscovered throughout the ages. Whether we really progress in moral and ethical terms in the course of time, especially in the twenty-first century, remains a rather speculative matter. This is not to deny that today we enjoy vast physical improvements compared to our ancestors, at least in medical or technological terms. In most parts of our world, we have available running water, electricity, a high level of hygiene, good medical care, sufficient food supplies, and adequate clothing and shelter, as long as we hold a job and are taken care of by the system. Naturally, the homeless and the poor perceive the entire situation very differently, but the need for spiritual illumination has remained the same throughout the ages for all people across the world, even though there are, of course, also die-hard atheists who deny the existence of anything non-physical. However, it seems to be a universal realization since ancient times that the optical function of our eyes and assisting instruments (glasses, microscope, telescope, laparoscope, etc.) is powerfully complemented by spiritual optics enabled either through our minds/hearts/souls or a divine vision (mysticism). We could argue that the emergence of all religions has always been predicated on some forms of those illuminations, an optical phenomenon.

The focus of this paper rests on three, if not four, terms that deeply characterize medieval culture in the Western world: perspicuity, acuity, and cognition or revelation. We might find just the same approaches in the East or in the South, but that would be the subject of another paper. Many medieval poets and artists demonstrated an acute interest in exploring the phenomenon of the gaze, which leads to perspicuity and perception based on acuity. This was primarily a key component in medieval Christian thinking.

2. Structural Outline

After a broad overview of relevant examples in medieval optics, religion, art history, and even medicine (e.g., studying the internal organs), this paper will identify a persistent and most meaningful literary motif of an individual looking through a hole or any kind of opening. In that process, the protagonists consistently experience a dramatic transformation of their own self and their social environment when they are allowed to look, made capable of gazing, or when they are simply granted the privilege of looking through a crack in the wall into another world. Much work has already been done regarding medieval optics and medieval religious art, whereas the corresponding motifs of the spiritualizing or cognitive gaze that we can discover in numerous literary works have mostly remained below the radar screen of scholarly attention.

The concept of the ‘gaze’ has already been investigated from various perspectives, especially psychoanalytically, by the film critic Laura Mulvey (1975), identifying it as a typically male instrument to engage with women or to live out sexual desires (cf. also Hobson 2002; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze; last accessed on 27 November 2025). My interest here, however, is limited to the spiritual function of the gaze in medieval and early modern art and literature (cf., e.g., Onofre 2025). Gazing empowers the individual, and it is also a grace granted to him/her by the divine. But we also need to keep in mind the new developments in thirteenth-century optics that tremendously intensified the understanding of light, vision, and scientific experiments (cf. Marcacci 2024).

On the basis of a close reading of a number of vivid examples of the visionary gaze in medieval art as a gateway to heaven, this study will subsequently trace the topic of the perspicuous look in the literature from the tenth through the sixteenth century, adding acuity to the observer’s comprehension of his/her life. As we will observe, while religious and philosophical perspectives stupendously aligned with scientific, i.e., optical discoveries at that time, literary writers also intensively relied on the motif of the spiritual gaze through which the individual was empowered to experience a profound transformation and spiritualization (see the contributions to Becker et al. 2024, regarding spiritual experiences within monasteries). Our examples come from literary works composed throughout medieval Europe, so if the selection means anything, we will hence be able to confirm that the poetic discourse at that time was intimately associated with the religious and the scientific discourse, remnants or reflections of which can still be discovered today in the design and architectural realization of Gothic cathedrals, medieval artworks, instruments for measuring time (in the Arabic and the European worlds), and manuscript illuminations (Dalarun 2011; McKendrick and Doyle 2016). This all carries deep meaning for us today as well because the quest for spiritual enlightenment continues for everyone here on earth. This paper hence argues that a better understanding of the motif of the gaze and the metaphorical hole or crack in the wall empowers us to recognize the translucence of our material framework as well and suggests means of how to transcend our physical limitations. The medieval and early modern examples will thus shed light–certainly a deliberate pun–on human rationality and spirituality.

3. The Gaze Toward the Inner Sanctum

One of the best, most striking examples of the phenomenon to be discussed here can be found in the Hour Book produced for the Duchess, Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482), wife of Archduke Maximilian, the later Emperor, today held in the Austrian National Library, Codex Vindobonensis 1857, created by an anonymous Flemish artist and his workshop around 1477. The main scribe was the Flemish Nicolas Spierinc, and the illustrations were created by at least nine different artists (Unterkircher 1993; Inglis 1995; Kren 2010; for good copies of illustrations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hours_of_Mary_of_Burgundy; last accessed on 21 November 2025; see the Figure 1 below, public domain).

This famous and bibliophilic spectacle contains many extraordinary full-page manuscript illuminations, among which we also find a most intriguing case showing the patron, Mary, sitting at an open window reading the Bible, which she holds resting on top of a green cloth into which the manuscript had been folded before. The spectator lingers on her delicate figure only for some time before the eyes are unavoidably attracted toward the center, where the window opens up into the inner space of a Gothic church/cathedral. Right before the altar, the Virgin Mary is seated, holding the nude infant Jesus on her lap. While she is dressed in a dark bluish dress, a cloth or carpet of the same green color rests on the floor before the retablo altar behind her. The correspondence between the two textiles deserves particular attention. Several people kneel in worship before the Virgin, and the woman on the left might actually be a representation of Duchess Mary once again. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stundenbuch_der_Maria_von_Burgund (last accessed on 22 November 2025).

Other suggestions are that the reading woman represents Margaret of York, Mary’s stepmother who had gifted this Book of Hours to her (Kaplan 2022, pp. 27–29, 168–69), but for our purposes, suffices it to recognize here a prime example of how medieval artists and their contemporaries perceived the sacred space within the church as the crucial domain of sanctity which only the truly devout or divinely graced individuals could perceive or enter. The spectator, together with the Duchess Mary herself within the choir, is granted a vision of the infant Jesus, which initiates, as it is implied through the artistic design, a mystical transformation within the spectator. Everyone in this painting meaningfully gazes into the depth, the person in front attentively reading the bible, or this Book of Hours, while the individuals within the choir are already elevated and granted a much higher or more intense level of vision in the direct presence of these sacred figures. Hence, there are three dimensions of the experience of a vision, beginning with the outside observer, then turning to the spiritually infused reader, and ending within the choir space where the miracle of the Virgin Mary and the babe Jesus has appeared to the pious individuals. Crucially, both the main figure sitting at the window and we as the spectators are invited to comprehend the ultimate function of the written text (the Bible or the Book of Hours itself, which would be a fantastic correlation between the image and the book itself) as a springboard for spiritual revelations. The act of reading thus becomes an act of praying, or spiritual meditation, which certainly characterizes the entire genre (Classen 2012a).

Not surprisingly, following countless other examples within Books of Hours and other artworks, here we also come across a delightful annunciation scene (fol. 19v), an image of Mary and the Jesus child placed on the crescent moon (fol. 24r), of the Evangelists, and many other biblical figures from the New Testament. All of them encourage the viewer to wander into sacred space and to reflect on the biblical messages, which means that the spectator and the artist, if not also the scribe/s and other contributors to this major artwork, were all collaborating to achieve a mystical perspective toward the divine world as it had manifested itself once before during Christ’s life and passion (Classen 2007).

The artists always made sure to provide a frame for the illumination that serves as the gateway for the viewer to glance into the depth where the holy events take place, such as on fol. 35v, where the Virgin with the Jesus child is seated on a throne, while angels surrounding her perform music. Turning to the very end, on fol. 188v, we are confronted with a picture of a monstrance placed in a green landscape, with a blue and star-studded sky in the background. The gaze does not seem to travel far, but the sacred object, the host, is right in front of us, whereas the divine glory awaits the spectator in the background. Mary of Burgundy was thus in a unique position to wander back and forth from her material context into the spiritual space hidden in her book, which translated the deep glory of the New Testament and the subsequent history of martyrs into visual representations (see now the contributions to Depreter et al. 2021; cf. also the contributions to Bendheim et al. 2025).

Throughout the entire Middle Ages, optical aspects served exceedingly well to illuminate the true nature of spiritual enlightenment, either by way of religious labor or via the mystical realization. Optics, thus understood, was the divine vehicle to transport God’s messages to the human receiver or the visual medium for the visionary, viewer, gazer, or spectator to gain a deeper understanding of the divine nature of all existence. Of course, the light beam or the opening in the wall, or the window itself, the crack, or the gaping hole was reserved only for the select few predetermined by the Godhead to receive the image and thus to become elevated as the chosen initiates to join the spiritual world of the divine, and this already here on earth (Collins et al. 2024).

There are countless examples captured in manuscript illuminations, stained glass windows, architectural spaces, and also mechanical devices (Azevedo Ramos 2014). Some of the most impressive examples would be the depiction of the “Construction of the World” created by the famous magistra, mystic, scientist, linguist, and composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) in her Liber divinorum operum copied ca. 1210–1240, today held in the Bibliotheca Statale in Lucca, Italy, BS-Lu. ms. 1942, fol. 9. The image is very well known, but it deserves to be commented on here once again because it clearly illustrates the profound symbolism of light, the gaze, the vision, and the ultimate perspicuity demonstrated by this mystical author. Although she is seated only as a small figure in the lower left corner, she is graced with the vision of the divine cosmos, with the nude body of Adam (?) standing in the center of multiple concentric circles which are upheld by Christ and, on top of it, God Father who is visible only on the outer edges displaying His arms and feet (one foot shows a hole, but not the other one, so it remains unclear whether this is supposed to be Christ or the Holy Spirit).

The visionary does not only gaze directly toward Christ, but the light beams also hit her tablets upon which she scribbles her vision. The image, which reflects the wider understanding of Hildegard’s mysticism long after her death, is appropriately called “Wheel of Life” and reveals powerfully the essence of Hildegard’s visionary experience, being a small human figure deeply daunted by the cosmic perception (Campbell 2018; but the image is present on many websites; e.g., https://www.hildegard-society.org/p/liber-divinorum-operum.html [last accessed on 23 November 2025]; cf. also Salvadori 2021; Collins et al. 2024, frontispiece 2, and Figure 27; see the Figure 2 below, public domain).

In her so-called “Riesencodex” (Hessische Landesbibliothek, Wiesbaden, Hs. 2, ca. 1200), Hildegard had already created her own images, and those were all determined by the visionary quality of her experiences encountering the Godhead and perceiving the divine universe. See this example (Figure 3):

There are countless examples of visionary depictions of the relationship between the human individual and the divine, whether in science (optics), manuscript illuminations, or in drawings illustrating the cognitive and mystical process in the effort to gain deeper insights while transgressing the material limitations. Every medieval church with stained glass windows operated with light and darkness and used the optical effects for teaching purposes because the individual confronting the visions was hence graced with the unique opportunity to encounter the ineffable, the apophatic, and hence the divine by means of light. Of course, once the sun shone through those Romanesque and later especially Gothic windows, the colored images disappeared and gave way to a natural illumination, a direct message from God. Both here and in the image of Mary of Burgundy in her Book of Hours, the mystically inspired reader continues to hold on to the text, the Scriptures, but it has already become a medium of spiritual illumination. The image thus encourages us as the spectators and readers to follow the outlined path and to accept the essential task of gazing into the beyond and thus of learning to comprehend the divine message contained in another space or dimension. If we extended our study also to include the major scientific achievements, especially in the area of optics since the thirteenth century, we would easily gain solid confirmation of the paradigm shift in visionary potentials not only in nature, but especially in spirituality and hence in contemporary literature and the arts. Scientists such as Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1175–1253), Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–1294), John Pecham (ca. 1235–1292), Peter of Limoges (1240–1306), and Witelo (ca. 1230–1280/1314), not to forget the major Arabic astronomers and researchers Ibn al-Haytham (fl. 1010s), Avicenna (980–1037), or Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Ma’udh (second half of the eleventh century), laid the foundation of all optics and set the new standards for the investigation of light and space. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that hence spiritually influenced poets and artists picked up those new insights and applied them to their own works dealing with perspicuity and visions as the crucial stepping stones in gaining a new understanding of the divine world (Lindberg 1976, 1992; Darrigol 2012; for the impact of optical theory on late medieval literature, especially allegorical texts, see Akbari 2004, 43 et passim).

Similarly, the mysterious world of gems and jewels, of crystals and gold, was consistently regarded as a simulacrum of the divine spheres. In Cynthia Hahn’s words, “The ineffable and contradictory qualities of the stone–its status as always two things at once–are a key aspect of the medieval value of rock crystal. It is bright and present but also transparent and ready to disappear, it is considered both water and stone, both of earth and of heaven, and it is both the means and the end of vision” (Hahn 2024, p. 95).

One of the best examples for the intimate combination of the physical splendor and the spiritual messages of the gemstones would certainly by the private chapel for Emperor Charles IV on Karlštejn Castle west of Prague built around 1350, although many art historians tend to ignore it in their investigations of the lapidary sciences and light in the Middle Ages (but see Legner 1978; cf. now the contributions to Fajt 2003; Uličný 2023; for a solid overview of the historical and architectural aspects, see https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/1564/; last accessed on 23 November 2025). The brilliance and translucence of those stones/gems signal to the spectator that the hard physical barrier of the walls or the gems can be transcended because the divine reality is waiting behind or within them and is expecting the devout person to enter into the transcendental space behind them.

Finally, we can also agree with Collins and Turner that every religious ceremony, irrespective of the creed, constitutes a performance the attendee is invited to participate in, if not active, but then at least through spectating, smelling (of incense), listening to the music (chants and liturgical singing), and admiring the priest’s actions during Mass. As they comment, “Medieval sacred spaces were rich sensoria, spatial experiences of light and visual phenomena, choreographed movements, and ritual performances, layered with sonic, olfactory, and tactile encounter” (Collins and Turner 2024, “Aura and Performance,” p. 157). Referring to the stained glass windows in Western Europe, they note insightfully: “The windows allowed medieval Christians to channel divinity through the creation of ambient luminosity and directed the viewer’s gaze to the Latin church’s often complex theological imagery” (p. 161; see also Chieffo Raguin 2003; Rudolph 2011, and the contributions to Carson Pastan and Kurmann-Schwarz 2019; Gertsman 2024). Undoubtedly, the same phenomenon can be identified in other cultures and religions as well, but this would be the topic for future, especially transcultural investigations.

Measuring time, figuring out spatial categories within the cosmic spheres, perceiving Christ in a vision, or gazing into heaven were all the same operations, combining the rational intellect and the spiritual perception. Intriguingly, which art historians, historians, and historians of science, among others, might not yet have recognized, contemporary poets were often deeply informed by these artistic and scientific methods and strategies to build direct bridges between the human and the divine, and this specifically by means of the motif of the gaze through a hole. Some of those examples did not always directly lead over to a religious manifestation, but we can be certain that vision, spiritual understanding, perception, perspicuity, and hence acuity and cognition were certainly of central importance also in vernacular texts from the early to the late Middle Ages and also far beyond. One early sixteenth-century example, a miniature in a Book of Hours from Amiens, beautifully illustrates this phenomenon.

Here we see, already within a typical Renaissance frame, St. John the Evangelist on Patmos seated before a reading desk, looking up and discovering the image of the Virgin Mary hovering in the air, holding the infant Jesus in her arms, surrounded by the rays of the sun, and standing on the moon’s crescent. St. John, in the midst of writing his gospel, apparently receives inspiration from this vision while holding up his quill. Although the frame and the background of the image clearly situate the illumination in the early Renaissance, the visionary experience proves to be exactly the same as in the earlier period: perspicuity continued to be of central importance for theology, philosophy, and the sciences (Heck 2011, ill. no. 287, p. 250).

While the West façade of most Gothic cathedrals and also churches was reserved for a sculptural program reflecting the entire history of the Old and the New Testament, artists working on the illumination of books of hours had many more opportunities, almost similar as the artists of stained glass windows, to operate with the fundamental elements of light and hence the visual representation of the divine sphere, accessible through an optical performance for the privileged Christian reader and spectator (for a comprehensive discussion of medieval spiritual hermeneutics, see Brinkmann 1980).

4. The Gaze in Medieval Literature: Preliminary Reflections

Famous Cases in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan und Isolde

Before I pursue a logical, chronological path through the history of medieval and early modern literature on the quest for the motif of the gaze, let us begin with two extremely important and well-known examples. On his way home to visit his mother again, who had, however, already passed away without the protagonist being aware of it, young Parzival in the eponymous romance by Wolfram von Eschenbach (ca. 1205; Wolfram von Eschenbach 1998; Edwards 2004), suddenly comes across a field unusually covered by snow during the month of May (?). This is in the vicinity of King Arthur’s camp, unbeknownst to Parzival. Just before his arrival, a falcon had tried to capture and kill a goose, but the prey got away in the last second. Nevertheless, three drops of blood have been spilled and now mark the white-glistening carpet of snow on the Plimizel plain (Book VI, ch. 283). The protagonist pauses, rests in sight of this wondrous phenomenon, and falls into a trance, thinking about his love for his wife Condwiramurs: “these colours resemble you! God desires to enrich me with blessings, since I have found your likeness here. Blessed be God’s hand and all His Creation! Condwiramurs, here lies your semblance, since the snow has offered whiteness to the blood, and that makes the snow so red” (Edwards 2004, p. 119). As Parzival muses, he recognizes in two of the drops of blood his wife’s cheeks, and in the third her chin. The vision he experiences could almost be compared to the one depicted by Hildegard (see above), determined by purity and sincere love: “Mighty love held sway over him there, his wife causing him such distress” (ibid.).

Though it would be impossible to claim it, we are, of course, immediately reminded of the fairy tale, “Sneewittchen” (Snow White) by the Brothers Grimm (1812), where the female protagonist is equally described with these colors. Her biological mother accidentally stabs her finger while doing needlework when she happens to look out of the window onto the snow. Again, three drops of blood fall onto the snow, so the queen wishes for a child as white as snow (skin), red as blood (lips and cheeks), and black as the wooden frame of the window (hair). Indeed, she becomes pregnant, and the girl she delivers is hence called “Sneewittchen.” Tragically, the queen dies as a consequence of the birth, which puts the girl onto a trajectory of suffering and pain (Grimm 2002, pp. 359–74), but she is ultimately saved because a poisonous apple which her stepmother had sent her to eat happens to fall out of her mouth after she had been placed on a bier out of glass for a long time—the prince’s servants stumble and thus make the bier move in an unusual way. The prince, who thus rescues her from her coma, then marries her, and the evil stepmother is cruelly executed.

Parzival is challenged twice by Arthurian knights, who do not know anything about his spiritual and erotic trance. In the last moment, he awakens and immediately defeats them. Finally, the courtly knight Gawan appears and understands the reason for the strange knight’s behavior. While the stranger does not respond to his greeting words, Gawan proves to be an expert in matters associated with love. Recognizing where the other man is staring, he suddenly grasps the power of the three symbolic dots of blood that hold the stranger in their sway: “He observed the Waleis’ line of sight, where his eyes were directed” (ch. 302, p. 127), so he takes an elegant Syrian cloth and places it on those three drops, which ends the vision for Parzival, though not his strong feelings of love for his wife: “Eyes’ mist has taken you from me in the bright sun here, I don’t know how” (ibid.).

In many ways, we could almost identify this scene as a mystical moment where the colors send signals to Parzival, reminding him of his deep love for Condwiramurs. In contrast to Hildegard, the image projected here, certainly determined by optical principles as well, was conceived by Wolfram to convey a vision for his protagonist in secular terms, but the deep feelings of pure love for his distant wife can certainly be equated with the mystic’s sensation of spiritual love for the Godhead. As Joachim Bumke has already elucidated for us, Wolfram definitely operated here within a broader theological and philosophical context determined by thinkers such as William of St. Thierry, Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, and others who in turn had drawn from the teachings by St. Augustine of Hippo according to whom erotic love and rational thought processes would have to be seen as the opposite sides of the same coin. As William formulated it: “cognitio … et amor idem est amor ipsa intellectus est” (quoted from Bumke 2001, p. 43; Cognition and love are the same, love is by itself the intellect). The rational engagement with the world operates, according to Augustine and then Hugh of St. Victor, on two levels, first the material dimension (scientia), and next, the spiritual one (sapientia) (Bumke 2001, pp. 43–44).

Wolfram’s contemporary, Gottfried von Strasbourg, also operated with a similar image, highlighting the double meaning of the material traces and signals in his Tristan and Isolde, where the gaze reveals the truth as well, but here to the protagonists’ grave endangerment (ca. 1210; Tomasek and Schäfer 2023; Whobrey 2020). After the two protagonists have fallen in love with each other, they try hard to keep their intimate relationship a secret, but one night, Tristan’s friend Mariodoc the Seneschal realizes that Tristan is no longer in bed next to him. So, he gets up, goes outside, and discovers the protagonist’s footsteps in the snow. Since suspicion has grown in him, he “followed the tracks through a small orchard. The light of the moon guided him through the snow and the grounds that Tristan had crossed earlier, up to the chamber’s door” (ch. 20, p. 171). Although a large chessboard has been set up at the entrance, Mariodoc manages to enter the room, and there, in the darkness, he reaches the bed and thus learns what is going on. “He was deeply hurt and his heart was broken, because he had long loved and venerated Isolde himself. All that now turned to hatred and pain” (p. 171). Later Tristan returns to the bedroom, but the two former friends no longer talk to each other, and thus the danger for the lovers begins and lasts until the very end of the romance because the footsteps in the snow had revealed their secret relationship: “the secret was out and his affair had been discovered” (p. 171). In contrast to the similar episode in Wolfram’s romance, here the snow had fallen as a consequence of the cold winter temperatures. But we get a clear sense of Tristan no longer paying good attention to observing the erotic secret because he should have been aware of the natural setting: “The path had been covered by snow that night, and the moon shone brightly and clearly. Tristan did not see any danger nor was he aware of any trap, and so he quickly went to the agreed-upon secret meeting place” (p. 170; for the poetic treatment of snow, see Classen 2011b). Curiously, here it is not Tristan who gazes into the snow, but his competitor, which sets the long process of suspecting, testing, defending, accusing, and hiding into motion.

However, in the subsequent episodes, the lovers manage, after all, to defend themselves successfully for a long time, using all kinds of rhetorical and performative strategies to protect their secret and to avoid leaving tracks behind that could expose their love. Tristan proves to be highly attentive to traps set for them, such as when he wants to meet Isolde in the orchard but discovers the shadows of King Mark and the dwarf Melot, who try to catch the two in flagrante. In this case, Tristan quickly understands the danger and can thus alert Isolde by means of his odd behavior and veiled language (vv. 14679–699). Whereas before he had ceded the task of reading the signs in the snow to Mariodoc, now he perceives the treacherous shadows first and can thus prevent falling into the trap together with Isolde. In other words, here he has sharpened his vision and perceives precisely what was supposed to be hidden (Sieber 2020). The situation does not involve a hole or crack, but it is certainly predicated on the optical–spiritual gaze.

But eventually, the evidence pointing toward their affair becomes so overwhelming that they are forced to leave the court. Tristan knows of a secret love cave deep in the forest where they retire and spend their time like in a utopia (Tomasek 1985). It is an erotic utopia because the interior space is perfect in physical beauty, design, and smoothness; the inhabitants do not need to eat and drink; they entertain themselves and are happy in their solitary existence (for utopias in the pre-modern world at large, see Hartmann and Röcke 2013).

For Haiko Wandhoff, the cave represents the essence of the love between the two protagonists. The story of this utopian space represents “true love unfolding in the very moment that it reveals the truth of the whole story. For what is actually hidden in the mystery of the cave is nothing but Love herself as represented in her finest heroes, Tristan and Isolde” (Wandhoff 2012, p. 60). Yet, at one point, King Mark goes on a hunt, and a white deer leads one of the huntsmen to the love cave, who then informs Mark, who is astounded to discover the two lovers resting inside, sleeping. The entire situation with him espying down to them through one of the three holes in the ceiling confirms strikingly that Gottfried here had the same condition in mind that determined the artist in the hour book of Mary of Burgundy, or, closer to Gottfried’s time, the mystic and magistra Hildegard of Bingen who painted basically the same scenario, a vision connecting the human individual with the divine sphere (for a comparison of Gottfried’s Tristan with some of the visions projected by the mystic, see Classen 2011a).

The huntsman describes Isolde as a “goddess” (ch. 25, p. 213): “She is more beautiful than a fairy. There can be nothing so beautiful on earth that is made of flesh and bones” (ibid.). However, he is baffled by the fact that a naked sword lies between her and Tristan, who appears to him as an ordinary human being. Mark is not able to enter the cave through the door, so he has to climb to the top and then gaze through one of the holes (windows) him peering down upon the lovers: “He recognized his nephew and his wife, and his heart, indeed his entire body, was frozen from both pain and love” (ibid.; as to King Mark as a tragic lover, as this scene clearly illuminates, see Classen 1992).

He wants to believe that these two people are not lovers, and yet the image presented to him virtually tells him the opposite, although the sword between them confuses him after all. As the narrator emphasizes: “Golden innocence, embellished by Love, seductively steered his eyes and his senses toward the place where all his joy lay, as on Easter Day” (p. 214). The image of her which the vision sends up to him hopelessly enflames Mark, who finds Isolde more beautiful than ever before: “her face and coloring were as warm and enchanting as a white and red rose as it shone up at the man. Her mouth was fiery and burned like a glowing ember” p. 214). Does the king perceive an illusion, or is Isolde’s beauty a true force that overpowers him helplessly?

Before, Mark had not demonstrated a clear comprehension of and love for Isolde, especially on the wedding night when Brangaene, Isolde’s niece and maid, had substituted for her, since the latter was no longer a virgin, so as to deceive the husband (ch. 18, p. 159). Here, by contrast, as a result of his gaze upon his wife, the king proves to be completely enamored and a true lover. He goes so far as to cover one of the windows to protect Isolde from the dangerous sunshine. In fact, upon his departure, he “returned to the hounds in sadness and called off the hunt. He did this because he didn’t want anyone else to come and discover the couple” (ch. 20, p. 215). In fact, Mark performs like a priest in worship of the divine because his vision has transformed him deeply: “He gave the beautiful woman his blessing and placed her in God’s hands as he left in tears” (p. 215). The parallels to similar visions I have discussed above prove to be startlingly close because we recognize here a profound merging of the religious with the erotic, both being part of the same phenomenon resulting from the gaze into the depth where the divine figure rests. Tragically, however, the narrator then intervenes and destroys this idyllic image himself, emphasizing that Mark was simply deceived by the image and could no longer discriminate between right and wrong: “The point is this: he wanted her so much that he overlooked everything about her that caused him pain” (p. 217).

To make sense out of this statement we would have to discriminate between Gottfried the moralist and Gottfried the poet because the latter had already approved earlier the cheating and secretiveness that made the love between Isolde and Tristan possible and had scoffed at human efforts to use the ordeal of the hot iron to find out the truth about this alleged love affair, giving Isolde his full support (ch. 22, p. 194) who is here entirely supported by Christ in her false oath because He is “supple like a sleeve” (ibid.) and comes to the rescue of any lovers under whatever circumstances. But even Mark has the ability to recover his visual senses because at the end he catches the lovers by surprise, in flagrante, and can no longer deny to himself the truth that these two people are “pressed so closely together that if a likeness had been cast of bronze and gold it could not have been joined together more closely” (ch. 26, p. 222; for a preliminary exploration of visuality in the Tristan versions, see the contributions to Eming et al. 2012).

5. The Literary Motif of the Spiritual Vision and Illuminanting Gaze in the Pre-Modern World

We have so far demonstrated that medieval artists were deeply invested in exploring the spiritual gaze connecting the human individual with the Godhead and the celestial space. Then we have observed that this motif finds full reflections in these two major Middle High German romances, Parzival and Tristan und Isolde. To flesh out this motif further, next I will examine a variety of other examples, mostly more mundane and physical, where literary protagonists are granted the opportunity to gaze through a hole or a crack and thus begin to understand the full truth behind the hidden wall in metaphorical terms. Significantly, as we will notice, neither Wolfram nor Gottfried was the first nor the last to utilize this element of perspicuity through which the protagonists are confronted with another reality and can thus move on in their lives or are deeply disturbed, which then has almost the same effect on them.

Time and space move in a different dimension when the gaze can penetrate an opening and perceive another world deep inside or behind a wall (for the hermeneutic function of the gaze, see, for instance, Spaulding 2018; for an art-historical approach, see Lugli 2019). While many medieval and early modern mystics recognized this experience as their central vehicle to leave their own bodies behind and to encounter the Godhead through a vision, contemporary medieval poets experimented with the motif of the gaze in a variety of contexts.

5.1. Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Religious Visions, Female Chastity, Theatrical Performance

The truly amazing tenth-century Saxonian canoness Hrotsvit is famous today, perhaps even more than in her own time, for her plays and religious narratives, not to forget her two chronological poems. Her accomplishments as a poet are unparalleled for her time, if not for the entire Middle Ages, and we can recognize this also by focusing on one small motif included in her play “Dulcitius”, where three Christian virgins fight against the Roman emperor Diocletian and his insistence that they revert to the old pagan religion. Because of their recalcitrance and complete dedication to their faith, the emperor turns them over to his governor, Dulcitius, to kill them in a brutal fashion (martyrdom). But the governor decides first to abuse these women sexually before he would put them to death, although he is married. When he approaches the building where the virgins are kept prisoners, the soldiers warn him about the women’s spiritual strength and the impossibility to bend their will. However, Dulcitius does not care, believing in his masculine–sexual prowess, and enters the room where he assumes he will find the virgins. In that moment, God intervenes and confuses the man’s mind (Berschin 2001; for an English translation of some of Hrotsvit’s works, see Wilson 1998).

In a genius cinematographic process turning the male gaze around and granting female characters visionary power (again, see Mulvey 1975, for modern reflections on the hegemonic, masculine gaze), Hrotsvit focuses on the virgins who are deeply engaged in singing their hymns when they suddenly notice all kinds of noises from the neighboring room. Knowing only too well what Dulcitius’s intentions with them would be, they are deeply worried and pray to God for protection. Then one of them, Hirena, looks through a crack in the wall and invites her sisters to join her in gazing into the other room, the kitchen. Agape and Chionia at first do not understand what is going on until Hirena explains to them that Dulcitius is mistaking the sooty pots and pans for them, hugging and kissing those kitchen utensils, turning completely black from the dirt. Although the situation for these three women is deadly serious, what they witness through the hole turns out to be simply hilarious, and they enjoy watching Dulcitius’s ridiculous confusion, which proves to be the very opposite of what Mulvey had observed in modern movies. Not content with having enjoyed this scene, the virgins then even peep out of their prison cell to watch how the governor, now completely covered by black soot, is greeted by the soldiers outside who confuse him with a devil and run away out of fear.

Undoubtedly, Hrotsvit here created a truly comic situation, allowing us as viewers/readers to follow the individual moments quite vividly, and hence to laugh about the governor who had wanted to rape the women but then was forced by God to turn involuntarily to fetishism, not understanding what is going on here (Classen 2025). There are subsequently no other scenes predicated on laughter or on the performance of gazing through a hole. Hence, this singular episode in “Dulcitius” deserves closer analysis, especially in light of our introductory observations regarding medieval optics and spirituality. Considering the color differences, we might recognize here the polar opposites of heaven (virgins) and hell (Dulcitius), with the women performing their liturgical tasks and practicing their pious devotion, whereas their male oppressor is turned into an outcast equated with a devil.

Hrotsvit does not tell us much more about the background and the actual process of gazing through the crack, but it undoubtedly serves the critical function of exposing the governor’s evil intentions which take him, already in this life, down to hell, though he does not yet know it and seemingly enjoys the erotic embraces with the virgins, or rather, pots and pans. The virgins enjoy the scene in front of their eyes and laugh at the fool, but we also need to consider his actual transformation brought about by divine intervention. Although the virgins certainly look into the kitchen, in reality, they witness God’s action on their behalf and are thus infused with happiness and delight because they thus know that they are graced by Him and can calmly face their martyrdom (Newman 2004; cf. also the contributions to Brown and Wailes 2013). Agape and Chionia are thrown into the flames but die quickly, with no blemishes showing on their bodies, while their souls are freed and can thus join with the Godhead. The soldiers under Sissinus’s command observe this miracle with deep astonishment and incomprehension at the same time because what they see does not make sense to them: “Oh, marvel, oh stupendous miracle! Behold their souls are no longer bound to their bodies,/yet no traces of injury can be found” (p. 50).

In a certain way, we could call the scene with the three women and their observation of the events in the other room as teichoscopic, considering the highly effective management of the two spaces at the same time. But there is more to be noted because the dark kitchen suddenly turns into a sacred space where God’s working can be discovered through Dulcitius’s confusion and subsequent foolish behavior, substituting the pots and pans for the women. Of course, he is not a fetishist, but Hrotsvit subtly plays with this notion and condemns it outright, elevating the three virgins as pure and innocent victims, whereas the male culprit is appropriately punished by God. As Agape comments: “it is only right that he should appear in body the way he is in his mind: possessed by the Devil” (p. 48). In short, when the women look through the crack, they become witnesses of God’s intervention on their behalf and delight in this divine grace bestowed upon them.

When Sissinus then tries to scare Agape and Chionia, warning them that he would burn them alive if they would not worship the old gods, the two women scoff at him by encouraging him to follow the orders he had received from the emperor. Chiona goes so far as to urge him: “It is only proper that you should obey the orders of your Emperor, whose decrees we disdain, as you know” (p. 50). Of course, they then die in the flames, but they remain pure and holy, which their executioner observes with puzzlement and hence without understanding. Sissinus’s subsequent effort to punish Hirena also fails because she knows only too well that sending her to a brothel would not work because God is on her side: “He whose foresight rules the world” (p. 51). At first, she is rescued by two angels, but later, when the soldiers try to shoot her with their arrows upon Sissinus’s order, they only hear what the young woman has to say to them: “This is the greatest joy I can conceive … thus I will enter the heavenly bridal chamber of the Eternal King” (p. 53). Although she is at that moment placed on the top of a hill where she then succumbs to her death, this creates another setting determined by the gaze, but this time by the audience who watches with amazement her suffering and boldness, her strength in her faith, and her triumph over the men’s futile efforts. They manage to kill her, but she, in her elevated position, triumphs over them all, and thus the play comes to a conclusion. Twice, hence, the gaze proves to be the key rational strategy underscoring the vast spiritual distance between the Christian martyrs and the pagan men.

5.2. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich

Arthurian literature was essentially introduced to the high Middle Ages by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes, and some of his romances were then translated into Middle High German by Hartmann von Aue (Erec, ca. 1170, and Iwein, ca. 119). The latter is famous for these accomplishments, but he also composed the religious verse narrative Gregorius (ca. 1200) and, long before that, his best-known verse novella, Der arme Heinrich, not to mention his intriguingly psychologizing debate poem involving body and soul, Das Klagebüchlein (for the English translation of his complete works, see Tobin et al. 2001; for the critical edition, see Gärtner 1996). Many scholars have already insightfully investigated Hartmann’s works, but here I want to focus only on one small scene where the gaze also matters, and this in close parallel to the contemporary artworks and to Hrotsvit’s play, though Hartmann was most probably not familiar with them and rather followed the archetypal concept of perspicuity that leads to a spiritual transformation.

Prince Heinrich enjoys his life to the fullest with no impediments when he suddenly contracts leprosy. The medical expert in Montpellier cannot help him, nor can the doctor in Salerno. But the latter knows of a secret pagan remedy, the blood of a nubile young woman willing to die for him. Heinrich knows only too well, in general, and probably also from religious teachings, that this would constitute murder and cannot be accomplished; so, he gives up and waits for his death to occur, staying with a rich farmer whom he himself had always favored extensively before.

The latter’s young daughter, when she finally learns about the secret remedy, decides to become his sacrifice, although both her parents and Heinrich, and then also the doctor in Salerno, protest against it vehemently, citing many powerful arguments. However, the girl, never being named here, overwhelms them all with her rhetorical skills and rather spurious claims that this would be the best solution for them all (for a religious interpretation, see Duckworth 1996).

It is important to note that there seems to have been an erotic attraction between both since she spent so much time with him while he waited for his final moment: “She never wanted to budge one foot from her lord. To receive his greeting and his favor she served him constantly with her kind attention. Also, she was so charming that in her loveliness she would easily have been the emperor’s daughter” (p. 220). Even though the narrator identifies her as a “girl,” the gifts that he showers on her are certainly erotically highly charged: “hair ribbons belts, and rings” (p. 221). Moreover, “she became so close to him that he called her his bride. The dear child seldom let him be alone, thinking of him as completely healthy” (p. 221). To understand the message conveyed by Hartmann in this famous verse novella, we have to accept the metaphorical nature of the literary discourse, so it would be anachronistic to insist on charging Heinrich with the crime of statutory rape.

Leaving all the deliberations by the parents and also the sick lord aside, disregarding the girl’s certainly troubling young age, and ignoring the deep social class difference between them, we can turn to the final scene in Salerno where the doctor is preparing the surgery to cut out the young woman’s heart to heal Heinrich. He is filled with pity for the poor victim and tries to make her death as pain-free as possible, so he sharpens his knife well. That noise, however, awakens Heinrich’s curiosity, and in his desire to see the girl one more time before her death, he searches through the door until he finds a hole that makes it possible for him to look inside and see her naked, bound body, which bedazzles him deeply.

At this moment, which we might want to characterize as determined by magnificence and the sublime (Jaeger 2010), the protagonist looks both inside and outside and suddenly realizes how wrong he had been to accept her death for him to survive:

Her body was quite lovely. He looked at her and then at himself, and a new way of thinking took hold of him. What he had thought before did not seem good to him, and he suddenly changed his old way of thinking into a new goodness … [He said to himself:] “Since you must die anyway, you really don’t know what you are doing, that you do not bear very willingly this wretched existence God has given you. And besides, you do not even know whether the death of the child will cure you. Whatever God has assigned for you, let it all be done. I will not see the death of the child”.

(pp. 230–31)

Curiously, however, when he announces to the doctor and the girl that he does not want her to give her life for his, she becomes greatly angry and fights with all her might against this decision, because she is afraid of having lost “the splendid heavenly crown” (p. 231) and does not know how to go on living back home in the secular context of her parents’ farm. But none of that changes Heinrich’s mind since he is already deeply transformed through the gaze toward the inside, where he has witnessed the most beautiful being and knows that he himself, on the outside, is ugly and cannot narcissistically let her die so that he can live.

However, at this moment, God, who is fittingly identified as “Cordis Speculator” (p. 233; spectator of the heart), perceives that Heinrich has profoundly changed and submitted under His rule, so he returns health to him, which constitutes, of course, a happy end, especially because later, having returned home, he announces to his friends and family that he wants to marry the girl, which thus concludes the verse novella in the form of a literary utopia (Classen 2012b). In a previous study, I have ventured to identify the girl as a representative of Heinrich’s soul, which is really sick and wants to die (Classen 2003). This would make sense, particularly if we consider his quick recovery granted by God once he has rejected her decision to sacrifice herself for him, has recognized her divine beauty and his own horrible physical appearance, and, most importantly, has entered the room where the surgery was to take place, preventing the deadly operation because he has finally accepted his own mortality. Once the gaze has opened his mind, he no longer wants to see her dead, so his soul, as angry as it might be with him, is forced to return to his body, which thus initiates the healing process for both (Bulang 2022), which could intriguingly be correlated to the same process of the merging of body and soul in many medieval mystical accounts (e.g., Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian of Norwich, etc.).

This, in turn, is described with the image of the divine gaze into his heart, certainly a spiritual process often utilized by contemporary mystics and artists from throughout the Middle Ages, whether depicting the Virgin Mary, Christ, God the Father, or the Holy Spirit. A most impressive example would be Geerten tot Sint Jans’s (ca. 1455–1496) painting of “The Glorification of the Virgin” (ca. 1490–1495; today in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2450; see Collins and Turner 2024, plate 59, p. 125; cf. also online at: https://www.boijmans.nl/en/collection/artworks/3730/the-glorification-of-the-virgin, accessed on 21 November 2025). Most delightfully, the naked infant holds a sort of bells in his hands and chimes into the music by the angels that glorify Him. See the Figure 4 below (public domain at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Geertgen_tot_Sint_Jans_-_Virgin_and_Child_-_WGA08518.jpg, accessed on 21 November 2025): The message conveyed here within the secular-literary context underscores the intimate relationship between body and soul, which the optical introspection can strengthen or recover, as initiated here by God as the speculator of the human heart. The parallels between Heinrich’s gaze at the innocent girl, representing absolute human beauty by herself in perfect terms, and God’s gaze into Heinrich are most significant and allow us to understand the ultimate power of the spiritual illumination at work here.

6. The Gaze Toward Another World: Pagan or Folkloric Perceptions

The Monstrous Woman in Human Existence

So far, we have identified the gaze with the Christian notion of spiritual discovery and transformation, perhaps most idyllically represented by the universal motif of the spectator’s gaze upon the Christ child and the Virgin Mary in the animal stable in Bethlehem, hence the ubiquitous Christmas scene. But we can also identify the gaze in different contexts not influenced by Christian teachings. Walter Map, a major Welsh courtier at King Henry II’s court in England, was probably the first medieval poet to engage with the Melusine motif and hence the breaking of the taboo by way of the gaze, which gained real prominence not until the later Middle Ages. In his famous De nugis curialium (Trifles of Courtiers), which he composed between 1181 and 1182, we hear of many anecdotes from classical-Roman literature and also from oral poetry antedating the early medieval Christianization also of England and Wales, including accounts of ghosts, demons, revenants, and stories about the ancient British King Heral (Dist. 1, ch. xi) and of Henno with the Big Teeth (Dist. 4, ch. ix; James [1914] 2010; for an English translation, see Tupper and Bladen Ogle 1924; for a modern anthropological approach, see Vàrvaro 1994).

Henno encounters, mysteriously, a most delightful lady in a cove on the coast of Normandy. Her father had wanted to marry her off to the King of France, but then, by accident, left her behind in that locus amoenus. Henno is immediately enamored with her, takes her home, where he marries her and entrusts her to his mother’s care. The couple soon has many children, but his mother notices one day that her daughter-in-law never allows herself to be sprinkled with Holy Water and always leaves the church before the celebration of the Eucharist. Having grown suspicious, she spies on her and has one of her servants drill a small hole in the wall of her bedroom. To her great surprise, when looking inside, she discovers that the strange woman turns into a dragon when she steps into the bath. Once having completed her bath, the young woman/dragon steps onto a mantle and tears it into pieces, which thus allows her to return to her original human figure.

Alarmed, the mother asks a priest to come to her, and when the daughter-in-law does not suspect anything, the priest sprinkles her with Holy Water, which immediately dismantles her human shape, and now being a dragon again, she jumps high up and flies away through the roof. She screams in a terrifying manner and then disappears for good. In the conclusion, which might be a bit incoherent, the narrator unexpectedly refers to God/Christ, who had ascended to heaven after His resurrection, which the audience ought to believe. Hence, as Map emphasizes, He even allowed the vilest creatures, such as this secret dragon, to copy his behavior, after which they are all dragged down again, but then to hell.

The reception history of this short account extends via Gervase of Tilbury (ca. 1150–1220)—see his Otia imperialis, a Book of Marvels, ca. 1210–1220—to Jean d’Arras (1393), Couldrette (ca. 1400), and Thüring von Ringoltingen (1456). As soon as Johann Gutenberg had invented the movable type around 1450, both the German and the French versions were printed and soon experienced a widespread and long-lasting reception history. Among many other themes and topics, we always hear of the central theme, the spying by the male protagonist on his wife, who regularly disappears from public view on Saturdays. Melusine had imposed a taboo on her future husband never to investigate her whereabouts on those days, but in the course of time, he could not control himself any longer because his brother had aroused jealousy in him, claiming that his wife must be committing adultery during those unique times of the week. In his typically male worldview, there could not be any other explanation for this woman’s mysterious behavior.

Whereas Walter has the husband’s mother spy on the wife, the late medieval authors transfer that operation to the husband himself, and the situation with the hole in the wall and the spectator’s gaze thus gains in erotic power because he is both attracted to her beautiful though fearful appearance and repelled as well because her monstrous figure terrifies him due to his utter lack of understanding of the meaning. Let us examine the earliest version by Jean d’Arras more in detail, whereas Thüring primarily followed Couldrette’s version, though he also essentially repeated the French source. But, to be sure, the popularity of this narrative material continued far into the seventeenth century, so we can certainly identify this account as a late medieval ‘bestseller’ already in the modern sense of the word (Maddox and Sturm-Maddox 2012; see the contributions to Urban et al. 2017; for the reception history, see Zeldenkrust 2020).

Jean d’Arras offered his own version of the Melusine romance, which differs in various ways from the later versions, but the essential aspects or motifs remain the same everywhere, irrespective of structural changes. Young Raymond accidentally kills his uncle, Count Aimery, and runs away from the site where they had both been attacked by a wild boar. Completely discombobulated, he rides through the forest without any orientation until he comes to a significant landmark within the wilderness, the Fountain of Thirst, where three ladies are ‘waiting’ for him, one of them Melusine, who knows everything that has happened with him. She offers herself as his wife in marriage and promises much wealth and other resources as long as he would submit under her taboo:

Swear to me, with all the oaths befitting an honorable man, that never on a Saturday shall you seek to look upon me, or inquire as to my whereabouts. And I swear to you, on peril of my soul, that never on that day shall I do anything whatsoever that will not bring you great honor; on that day I shall devote myself entirely to thinking how best to increase your personal worth and your estate.

(p. 34)

The gaze upon her body thus proves to be the critical aspect, as we observe later, and so as well the timing, on Saturdays. But at first, Raymond happily accepts all the conditions for their marriage without asking any further about the reasons for this curious and inexplicable demand. Instead, he follows all her instructions and can, thus, in the course of time, acquire much power and wealth and establish a large family.

However, no taboo would matter if the outsider/s would not feel attracted to learning the truth behind it, as we know already from Genesis in the Old Testament, with both Eva and Adam breaking the ban issued by God not to eat the fruit from an apple tree, or the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 2:16–17; cf. Yadin-Israel 2023). After much time has passed, Raymond is visited by his brother, the Count of Forez, and this is on a Saturday. Since Melusine is not there, the brother wonders aloud about her absence and raises the suspicion that she might entertain a sexual affair with another man, or that she might be “an enchanted spirit who does penance on Saturdays” (p. 181). No longer able to control himself, Raymond grabs a sword and rushes to the building where his wife always retreats on those special days. Although a thick iron door blocks his entrance, he manages to dig a hole in it and can thus gaze inside, where he discovers a large bathroom. Melusine sits in the water, combing her hair, but “from the navel down [she] took the form of a massive serpent’s tail, extremely long and as thick as a herring keg, and splashing the water so hard that it splattered the vaulting of the chamber” (p. 181). Curiously, her husband does not reveal any terror about this sight; instead, he badly regrets his breaking of the taboo, a betrayal so great that he is afraid of losing all his life’s happiness. He almost would have slain his brother for having aroused this wrong suspicion, but he cannot commit fratricide and only sends him away with severe cursing. Raymond himself then falls into the greatest pain and laments: “Now I have lost beauty, goodness, sweetness, affection, wisdom, curtesy, charity, humility, all my joy, all my comfort, all my hope” (p. 182). He fully acknowledges that Melusine had bestowed everything upon him that had provided him with happiness, love, pride, honor, and dignity, even God’s grace, but he is severely afraid of having lost it all due to his own foolishness. There is no word of reprimand against Melusine, there is no expression of fear of her demonic or monstrous hybridity. Raymond knows that, having gazed into his wife’s private realm, he broke her trust, and he almost despairs at that moment. Nevertheless, his wife then returns and pretends not to know anything about his transgression because “he had revealed it to no one” (p. 183).

The tragedy, however, cannot be avoided since the taboo has been broken. Although the couple continues to lead a comfortable and pleasant life, deep troubles arise among their sons. The mighty Geoffroy learns that his brother Fromont has joined a monastery, which irrationally incenses him so badly that he attacks the abbey, hurls evil curses at the entire community, including his brother, and burns them all to death. But shortly thereafter, he suddenly realizes his madness and the horrible crimes he had committed, and this then leads to the real catastrophe bringing down the entire family. When Raymond learns the truth, he is so distraught that he publicly accuses his wife of being a dragon woman who was responsible for the entire development. When she finally arrives at the castle where he stays, Mervent, she tries to calm him down, referring to God’s infinite wisdom that remains inscrutable to people, which hence would explain why Geoffroy had committed that horrible deed. Moreover, they would have enough resources to rebuild the monastery, while their wild son would “atone, if it please God and men” (p. 191).

Although her husband knows only too well that her arguments are not only most rational but also pious and devoted to God, he cannot control his emotions and screams out in public: “Ah! you deceitful serpent, by God, you and your deeds are nothing but phantoms, nor will any heir you have borne ever come to a good end! …” (p. 191). This is the final straw, and now the taboo is truly broken, which forces Melusine to depart from this world and to return to her previous existence as a fairy or dragon, waiting out her time until the Day of Judgment because this is what God willed for her. The two lament piteously, but nothing can prevent the tragic outcome. Melusine entrusts the care of their children, their castles, and the entire dynasty to him, submits under the divine decision, and then disappears, metamorphosing “into a massive dragon some fifteen feet in length” (p. 194).

Although this would evoke ancient and pagan concepts, it is all identified as part of God’s plan. Because of Raymond’s betrayal, per his gaze into Melusine’s secret and private space, she is forced to depart from humankind, never to be seen again. The people on the ground observe this phenomenon with great amazement and terror, but it also carries specifically Christian elements, such as the dragon’s circling the town three times and lamenting plaintively in the voice of a woman. Melusine, however, secretly returns for a while to comfort two of her young children, as Raymond learns from the wet nurses, but he can never bring her back to his life; the monstrous woman, though certainly God’s creature as well, has been eliminated for good, which no lamentations, crying, or begging can remedy (Lecouteux 1982; Harf-Lancner 1984; Kelen 2012).

The basic elements of this account also determine the Melusine versions by Couldrette and Thüring von Ringoltingen. Each time, on Saturdays, the woman is mysteriously separated from the man, her husband, through a wall behind which she enjoys her bath and transforms into the hybrid figure. Melusine consistently demonstrates her clear belief in the Christian God; she is a good Christian, and yet she belongs to another world, which becomes known to Raymond only once he has gazed through the hole and thus has learned the ultimate truth. Unfortunately for him, this knowledge then destroys him and diminishes the entire dynasty because the illumination remains incomprehensible, unsettling, and actually constitutes the breaking of a taboo.

In contrast to the art-historical evidence, consistently determined by a Christian worldview, both here in Jean d’Arras’s verse romance and already long before that in Walter Map’s De Nugis curialium, the hole serves primarily for an optical and cognitive purpose, revealing a truth which the humans in their small minds cannot grasp which, hence, drives them to destroy the wife, whatever the other being might be. The gaze creates terror, and it also reveals the spectator’s inability to comprehend the world of fairies, dragons, and other creatures who are all identified, at least most specifically in Jean’s work, as part of God’s creation. Surprisingly, the myth of Melusine found already expression in the twelfth-century mosaics covering the floor of the cathedral of Otranto displaying not only all kinds of animals, biblical figures, and King Arthur, but also Melusine, obviously a fully acceptable member of the conceptual panopticon of the learned ecclesiastics and their artists (Barba 2005; for images, see https://mabotranto.it/virtualtour/mosaico_en.html?startscene=0; last accessed on 27 November 2025).

Research has, of course, already incorporated the study of all these examples and offered many different interpretations. However, in our context, we discover a unique perspective that deserves further elaboration because all the poets and artists discussed so far embraced the gaze as a crucial catalyst or turning point that brings about a profound transformation within the spectator. Melusine is never described as an evil person, as a monster from the netherworld, or as an ominous threat to humanity. On the contrary, she rescues her future husband from almost certain catastrophe, she founds an entire dynasty for him, and she brings much fertility, productivity, and joy to this world. However, she is doomed to disappear again because her husband’s breaking of the taboo. But in reality, as the narrator in Jean’s romance underscores, there is a deep and dark history of transgressions in Melusine’s family long before Raymond enters the picture, which remains in the background and yet needs to be kept in mind to understand the global development (pp. 19–26).

The common denominator always remains the gaze, which opens perspectives and allows the protagonist to look into an unknown depth or height and thus to gain a glimpse of the other world, either in religious or in rational terms. This phenomenon has been critically important for all religions and cultures, whether we think of Stonehenge or the Pyramids, medieval Books of Hours or liturgical manuscripts, gem-studded chapels or Romanesque chapels, and we can now also identify it in a variety of medieval and early modern literary works.

7. “The Disappointed Lover”: A Chronicler’s Use of the Optical Perception for the Erotic Discourse

As a final confirmation for this phenomenon, let us conclude with a brief discussion of one of the verse narratives contained in the voluminous family chronicle by Froben Christoph von Zimmern (1519–1566), compiled during the last years of his life (Jenny 1959; for an online summary, see now https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Froben_Christoph_von_Zimmern; last accessed on 26 November 2025). Research has so far practically ignored this story, but it carries great meaning and strongly supports our arguments in this paper. Fact and fiction are almost difficult to distinguish here because the literary texts are hardly marked as such, which was not unusual for late medieval chronicles.

In the “Enttäuschte Liebhaber” (“Disappointed Lover”), we find a remarkable case of a more or less direct copy of one of the stories contained in Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350), being the seventh one told on the sixth day. Heinrich Schlüsselfelder had published the first German translation in 1472 (Erotic Tales, ed. Classen [2007] 2009, no. 20, pp. 127–72, with the English translation accompanied by the original German text), which exerted a tremendous influence far into the seventeenth century and beyond.

The most remarkable feature in this story, which until today has hardly ever been discussed by researchers, proves to be the intricate narrative structures with various narrators involved almost at the same time. The chronicler relates this story to his audience without introducing the account as such; there is a narrator who is identified as a young knight who reports his erotic but rather frustrating experiences in a town near Aachen (today close to the Dutch border in Northwestern Germany);. There are the exchanges between the knight and his friends who can barely tear him away from his admired lady. The lady he has fallen in love with already has a lover, a monk, while her old husband tries in vain to prevent her from committing adultery and hence to cuckold him. Throughout the story, those three men compete against each other, though they do not meet or argue about who should be the woman’s exclusive lover/husband.

The knight then turns into an observer who overhears the lady’s conversation with her husband, and he later gazes (!) through a crack in the wall into the couple’s bedroom, with the husband fighting bitterly against his disloyal wife and her pretending to be completely innocent and suffering from the uncalled-for charges against her. Thus, with this report, we face a story within the larger story and become the witnesses of the arguments between the two, which is even more sophisticated as a result of her telling a story from Boccaccio’s Decameron to defend herself against his accusations (for a number of parallel cases, see the contributions to Haferland and Mecklenburg 1996; our story, however, is not discussed at all).

The lady performs her role as a tender and innocent victim of her husband’s misogynist tirades exceedingly well and appears to collapse, seemingly dying right there. This terrifies the old man so badly that he forgets all his previous charges and laments bitterly her passing away. Once she has recovered from her fake coma, she convinces her husband that he had suffered from an illusion when he thought that he had seen her with her lover, and this was the result of his drunkenness. While she had countered his charges already before, and then had acted out her near-death, now, having taken the old man through a severe emotional rollercoaster, she can completely control him. This is also the reason why she then tells him the Boccaccio story, which confirms that she is fully entitled to pursue extramarital love once she has satisfied her husband’s sexual desires to the fullest (as to the issues of gender, sexuality, marriage, and bastards as discussed by Froben Christoph von Zimmern, see Hurwich 2006, pp. 173–245; however, she does not discuss our story). The knight observes all that and hears the entire story, and then he switches his role and becomes the narrator again, addressing his audience, relating his experiences from a historical perspective: “Now, my lords, notice what happened” (p. 134).

Thereupon, the discourse immediately switches back to the lady, which entails that the audience is allowed to gaze through the hole along with the knight and thus to witness the conclusion of the exchanges between husband and wife. The old man completely submits under her control and promises to attribute any observations of her being together with the monk to his illusion: “If I imagine such things once again, attribute this to my foolishness” (p. 134). Then he turns over the keys to all his property to her and allows her to take complete control so that she would no longer feel cross with him. In fact, the lady has made him blind with open eyes, an uncanny allusion to the knight on the other side of the wall who watches everything like in a theater production: “Only sometimes the old man caught a glimpse [of the truth] with his eyes. Otherwise she knew how to manipulate her old husband well and make him believe everything she said” (p. 135).

Subsequently, the story switches back to the knight who encounters his lady early in the morning when she suddenly promises her love to him and pledges that she will never speak to the monk again, as her old lover. In reality, of course, she fools him, and when he peeks through the same hole in the wall, he observes to his great chagrin that she has now invited the monk in and spends time with him in her own bedroom, where she had previously argued with her husband. The poor man on the other side of the wall witnesses their lovemaking and now knows that she had only played with him, as she had done with her old husband.

Out of deep frustration, he finally abandons the spot with the hole, refrains from wooing this manipulative woman from then on, and returns to his friends, relating to them everything that has happened to him, creating thus yet another narrative platform, especially because the friends then interact with him and make every effort to safeguard him from this sophisticated and ruthless temptress. The protagonist has a hard time separating from this seductive and deceptive woman, but with the help of his friends, he finally manages to leave that location, never to see her again. Curiously, the narrator concludes with the group’s agreement not to divulge anything about these adventures so that they can avoid the young knight’s embarrassment (p. 141). However, the entire story reveals everything after all, insofar as we, as the audience, are the witnesses of each of the individual scenes and follow the various accounts.

Froben Christoph von Zimmern created here a highly sophisticated mære characterized by numerous narrative levels determined by the gaze, either with the knight looking at the lady during the dance event at the beginning of the story, or through the hole in the wall, or when the two meet again early in the morning in public. The opening in the wall serves exceedingly well to project teichoscopically the convoluted and dramatic exchange between the old husband and his young wife. By means of the hole, the knight witnesses what occurs in the other room, observes the exchanges, her acting out the role of the dying wife, and her telling the Boccaccio story. We, as the audience, participate in the knight’s watching and listening, so the story consists of several narrative stages, all intricately interwoven with each other. The poet proves to be a master of theatrical operations in miniature format, much focused on the hole and hence the gaze. But we, as the audience, are right with the knight and look into the other room as well and gain full information of the discussion between husband and wife, which the latter manipulates magisterially. We are here, of course, far away from the spiritual vision projected in much of medieval religious art or in some of the previous narratives, but the cognitive function of the hole remains the same.

8. Conclusions

By means of our interdisciplinary approach, this study has demonstrated that the motif of the gaze was of great significance in the Middle Ages and the early modern age, serving in a complex and sophisticated manner to enable and facilitate perspicuity, acuity, and spiritual insights. In contemporary art, the common emphasis rested on providing the spectator with images of the optical–spiritual connections between the pious person and the divine. Mystics regularly operated with the notion of the gaze because it turned into a visual portal to transcend their physical dimension (body) and to allow the soul to reach out to the Godhead. Scientists in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as Roger Bacon (ca. 1219/20–ca. 1292), were at the forefront of new optical discoveries, while many different poets relied on the motif of the gaze to illustrate the workings of epiphany, visions, spiritual transformations, and the consequences of encounters with a foreign world.

Whereas the gaze primarily operated as a spiritual catalyst in the early and high Middle Ages, literary works from the following centuries integrated this motif increasingly for secular and erotic purposes, as the stories of Melusine and then finally the narrative account in Froben Christoph von Zimmern’s chronicle demonstrate. However, the parallels remain strong features and indicate a fascinating syncretism of Christian and pagan notions even in the early modern age, as the example of the “Lüsterweibchen” in countless sixteenth-century castles across Europe indicates—an adaptation of the Melusine figure serving as a candelabra consisting half of a woman’s body and half of antlers upon which the candles are placed. The fascination with the monstrous or the world of the fairy actually increased in its intensity, though the marriage between Raymond and Melusine is bound to fail.

Watching scenes and events through a hole in the wall was and continues to be deeply teichoscopic in nature (cf., e.g., Shakespeare’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe contained as a separate story performed by the mechanicals in his A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1595/1596). Looking into another space constitutes a fundamental rational and spiritual process happening at the same time, leading to a vision, a profound intellectual transformation, and a spiritual experience. The works of art discussed here provided throughout the ages relevant illustrations of this process, though always in a religious context. The various poets implemented this motif many times as well but increasingly turned away from the spiritual components and considered rather the uncanny, monstrous, and then, finally, erotic and dialogic. The gaze can thus be identified as an essential instrument for illumination and understanding, though the danger of the illusion was also present in many cases.

Not surprisingly, pre-modern spectators were constantly invited to follow the model of the Virgin Mother of God who gazes with great intensity onto the newly born Jesus child, an act which is copied by angels in her company staring down to the infant with equal delight, amazement, and love. In this model, the countless artists did not rely on a physical opening, but on the direct vision of the Son of God lying in front of the Virgin and the angels, later also of the shepherds and the three Magi. This scene, which was foundational for Christianity, consistently repeated the spiritual learning process or visionary experience because the situation in the shed outside of Bethlehem was determined by profound perspicuity, acuity, and also mystical cognition. See, as one fitting example, the image below where the miracle of the birth of Christ is visualized through the intense gaze by the Virgin Mary and the angels surrounding her (Figure 5).