Important aspects of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm.have already been treated in some detail in chapter four. After the catastrophic first battle, Willehalm fetches reinforcements to replace his annihilated Christian army in order to offer battle a second time to the invading Muslim force. At a war council preceding that second battle, his wife, Gyburc, the former Muslim queen and now Christian countess of Provence, makes a speech to the Christian troops that will be the primary analytical focus of the present chapter.1 Her medial or liminal position as a hybrid liaison between the two cultures, while not having full membership in either, focuses attention on this speech and her role in the narrative’s prevailing political discourse in a way that a speech by any other countess in crusader epic might otherwise not have done. It is in fact Gyburc’s interculturally liminal position in the narrative that is the focus of the defining tension and narrative interest in the text, for one of her character’s obvious narrative purposes is to function as a mediatrix between the representatives of the Christian and Muslim communities in the text. Claudia Brinker-von der Heyde thus provides her with a conventional characterization as female, motherly, tender, affectionate and simultaneously strong, courageous, brave, and combat-ready; she loves and suffers, is burdened with guilt and redeemable; in short: she is officina omnium [source of all things], a human being in the broadest sense: a homo medietas [mediating human].2