Codex Manesse (Germany)

• An illuminated compendium of Minnesang (medieval courtly love poetry), featuring portraits of noble poets engaged in gestures of idealized love, social gamesmanship, and performative identity.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Codex Manesse operates as both a monument to aristocratic self-expression and a manuscript of profound ethical aesthetics. Through Foucault’s conceptual framework, particularly the "care of the self," we can interpret this manuscript not merely as a poetic anthology but as a codification of an art of living—one shaped by performative refinement, affective restraint, and stylized desire.

In its pages, noble figures are presented in finely orchestrated postures of courtly expression: jousting, serenading, meditating, even engaging in stylized conflict. These scenes are more than social spectacle—they are acts of subjectivation, in which the self is shaped through ritualized adherence to the ethos of Minne (courtly love), fidelity, and poetic excellence. Here, poetry becomes an ethical regimen—language sculpted not just for truth but for self-stylization and the construction of erotic sovereignty.

Foucault emphasizes in The Care of the Self that ancient ethics involved the aestheticization of one's own being through active self-fashioning. Likewise, each poet-knight in the Codex Manesse inscribes their name, image, and ethos within a performative register: love becomes a path of discipline, not of passion; gestures become instruments of political and erotic negotiation. These illuminated pages therefore enact what Foucault calls an ethopoetic project—a poetics of character, where the refinement of self and language is inseparable.

Moreover, the codex exhibits a technology of erotic truth, not in the confessional Christian mode (as Foucault critiques), but through public avowal and symbolic engagement with norms of affection and virtue. The verses and images do not reveal a hidden inner truth; they construct selves through games of discourse, spectacle, and symbolic conduct.

The Codex Manesse thus illuminates how ethical being was dramatized through a visual-linguistic regime—a courtly biopolitics in miniature, where desire was governed not through repression, but sublimation and display.