Adam Schubart's early modern "Tyrant She-Man": female misbehavior, gender, and the disciplining of hybrid bodies.

Herr Sieman, the ambiguously gendered figure of the She-Man that finds representation in texts and images from the late fifteenth through the early seventeenth century, has received scant attention by literary scholars and has typically been read as a metaphor for imperious wives who wish to rule over husbands and households. In this article, I offer a reading of the early modern She-Man as an allegory of gender. Focusing on Adam Schubart's Der Sieman / das ist wider den Hausteuffell (The She-Man / this is against the house-devil) of 1564, I demonstrate that the author, in fashioning the figure of the She-Man, privileges gender as a category guaranteeing social order. At the same time, however, Schubart's text bespeaks a deep anxiety around the issue of visibility of difference. I argue that in negotiating this anxiety and in pointing toward the body and to sexuality as the loci on which gender difference can and must be inscribed, Schubart performs the quintessentially modern gesture of relating gender to anatomical difference and sexuality. (KAJ)

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In a recent article on ideals of femininity and masculinity in German didactic literature of the Middle Ages, Ingrid Bennewitz and Ruth Weichselbaumer draw attention to Thomasin of Zerclaere's early-thirteenth-century directive that a courtly lady ideally ought to have just enough intelligence and spirit "that she may act in a courteous and well-mannered way and show an agreeable disposition through delightful speech and a chaste state of mind." If a courtly lady has more than this required amount of intelligence and knowledge, however, Thomasin advises her to display it sparingly lest she appear to be outwitting the men around her: "If, in addition, she also possesses reason and education, she ought to have enough decency and be sufficiently cultured that she will not reveal how much reason she has: after all, one would not want her as authority." (1)

This issue of Obrigkeit, of authority, as it plays out in gender relationships, is present in medieval articulations of the roles of men and women in society. But oftentimes it is present implicitly only, and rarely is it addressed as explicitly as in the text passage quoted above. However, by the fifteenth century the question of "who is on top" in gender relations becomes an issue of primary concern to the writers of conduct literature and satire, as well as to the publishers of broadsheet prints and pamphlet literature. Certainly, the Middle Ages has its stories of Phyllis riding Aristotle and of imperious wives attempting to subvert their husbands' authority. (2) But it is the early modern printing revolution that makes possible the seemingly limitless multiplication and wide distribution of texts and images that depict a gendered world turned upside down. During this time of enormous upheaval--spiritual, political, and social--images and texts that portray the world out of joint seem both to speak to as well as rouse people's anxieties about the tenuously stable world in which they live, and disorderly women who defy their husbands' authority frequently function as symbols of a world turned upside down.

It is precisely during this time that Herr Sieman or Master She-Man--a term most commonly read as designating the married woman who assumes more power in the household than she is entitled to--enters the scene and becomes a presence in a number of satirical and didactic texts as well as in the visual culture of early modern Germany. (3) Herr Sieman attains his/her most prominent position in an eponymous and ostensibly popular text by the otherwise little known Lutheran minister Adam Schubart. (4) In his Der Sieman / das ist wider den Hausteuffell (The She-Man / this is against the house-devil), Schubart writes: "The powerful tyrant She-Man is now attacking our country. Comes marching along with the power of armies and wants to prove his dominance. He wants to conquer all countries and presses for all men to be first and foremost obedient to their wives" (252; lines 57-64). (5)