The European Middle Ages were certainly an age dominated by patriarchy, and we can easily find countless documents where fathers, brothers, or husbands dominated if not subjugated their daughters, sisters, or wives. This comes along with scores of examples of a husband’s domestic violence directed against his wife. Hence, the common assumption has regularly been that women in the Middle Ages were mostly helpless victims of men’s abuse. It is pretty likely that this general picture holds true to some extent because both the royal courts and male society supported this viewpoint, although law experts and theologians might have seen it somewhat differently. The reality, however, easily proves to be much more complex than we might have thought, as we commonly discover especially in romances, poetry, verse narratives, and drama. Granted, it might be debatable to what extent literary texts could serve well enough in place of historical documents, but those are also nothing but written sources composed by an individual with very specific concerns, vested interests, and an agenda. Anyone who examines a wider range of literary texts, for instance, where the poet reflects on the gender relationship, will quickly realize the true extent to which the public discourse on the gender relationship was much more diverse than we might have assumed. This paper tests both the traditional viewpoint regarding men’s dominance in medieval society and the critical counter-perspective, whatever it might have entailed, and this in light of the verse narratives by the thirteenth-century German/Austrian poet Der Stricker (fl. ca. 1210–1240). Both in his mæren and in a variety of other texts (mostly fables, or bîspeln, here not considered), this poet demonstrates a much greater willingness to view gender relationships from various perspectives than we might have assumed for his society and the later Middle Ages.