This chapter explores how these tensions within the male ego reach a point of total breakdown in the German prose debate “The Plowman of Bohemia” in which a widowed plowman berates Death for taking away his beloved wife. Conventionally read as a scholastic dispute between Man and Death, I argue that it actually reflects the split within the male self between the courtly lover and his misogynistic alter ego. The second half of the chapter compares this German text with the Middle English elegy “Pearl” where this split within the male psyche is resolved through the figure of the pearl-maiden who functions as a reassuring maternal superego.