In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France 9780226459080

Citation preview

in the skin of a beast

in the skin of a beast

Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France

peggy m c cracken

the university of chicago press chicago and london

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26  25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17   1  2  3  4  5 isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­45892-­2 (cloth) isbn-­13: 978-­0-­226-­45908-­0 (e-­book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226459080.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Michigan toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McCracken, Peggy, author. Title: In the skin of a beast : sovereignty and animality in medieval France / Peggy McCracken. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016044826| isbn 9780226458922 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226459080 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: French literature—To 1500—History and criticism. | Hides and skins in literature. | Human-animal relationships in literature. | Sovereignty in literature. | Hides and skins—Symbolic aspects—France—History. | Animals— Symbolic aspects—France—History. | Hides and skins—Political aspects— France—History. | Human-animal relationships—Political aspects—France— History. Classification: lcc pq155.h43 m33 2017 | ddc 840.9/001—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016044826 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

contents

List of Color Plates Acknowledgments

vii ix

Introduction

1

1.

Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty

12

2.

The Social Wolf: Domestication, Affect, and Social Contract

37

3.

Becoming-­Animal, Becoming-­Sovereign: Skin, Heraldry, and the Beast

68

Snakes and Women: Recognition, Knowledge, and Sovereignty

97

4. 5.

Becoming-­Human, Becoming-­Sovereign: Gender, Genealogy, and the Wild Man

Epilogue

126 157

Notes Bibliography Index

163 191 213

v

c o l o r p l at e s

Following page 94 1.

Master of  Thomas of Maubeuge, King Noble’s Court, illumination from

2.

How Adam and Eve decided to do penance, illumination from Lutwin,

Le roman de Renart (fourteenth century) Eva und Adam (fifteenth century) 3.

God gives Adam and Eve garments of skin, illumination from La bible historiale (1372)

4.

Dido founding Carthage, illumination from Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris (ca. 1460)

5.

Boucicaut Master, Pierre Salmon presenting his book to Charles VI, illumination from Pierre Salmon, Réponses à Charles VI (ca. 1409)

6.

Yvain’s battle with Harpin de la Montagne, illumination from Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion (thirteenth century)

7.

Yvain saves the lion from a dragon, illumination from Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion (thirteenth century)

8.

Yvain saves the lion from a dragon, illumination from Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion (1300–­1350)

9.

Boucicaut Master, The story of the Fall, illumination from Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1413–­15)

10. Boucicaut Master, The temptation of Eve, illumination from Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1413–­15) (detail) 11. Boucicaut Master, God creates Adam, illumination from Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1413–­15) (detail) 12. The temptation of Eve, illumination from Rudolf von Ems, Barlaam und Josaphat (1469) 13. How Adam and Eve were betrayed by the serpent, illumination from Lutwin, Eva und Adam (fifteenth century) vii

viii

color plates

14. Eve and Seth encounter the snake, illumination from Lutwin, Eva und Adam (fifteenth century) 15. A contented wild man, illumination from “La ballade d’uns home  sau­ vage estant en le creux d’un arbre” (fifteenth century) 16. Attributed to the Getty Froissart Master, Le bal des Ardents, from Jean Froissart, Chroniques (ca. 1480)

ac k n ow l e d g m e n t s

T

his book has been fun to write because a lot of people were willing to talk with me about it, and it is a pleasure to thank some of my many generous readers and interlocutors here. First and foremost, heartfelt thanks to Kathryn Babayan, Artemis Leontis, Yopie Prins, and Elizabeth Wingrove, fellow members of the world’s greatest writing group. Kathryn, Artemis, Yopie, and Liz read every word between these covers at least twice; they challenged me to think harder and better, and their advice improved my book immeasurably. Valerie Traub read the entire manuscript with her characteristic rigor and generosity, and she helped me to make my argument sharper and more precise. Don Herzog also read the whole thing as I was writing and pushed me to think more carefully about sovereignty. Jennifer Nelson’s scrutiny of my final manuscript saved me from several errors and helped me think further about my claims. Virginie Greene and Rebecca Zorach read a rough mapping of my project for the Press and gave me advice that helped to shape it. William Burgwinkle and Simon Gaunt were Press readers for the final manuscript and I am grateful to both for valued feedback and some important corrections. Lauren Benjamin, Clara Bosak-­Schroeder, Zeynep Gürsel, Adrienne Jacaruso, Sarah Linwick, and Eliza Mathie all read chapter drafts and offered patient and welcome advice. Geneviève Creedon has long been a crucial interlocutor in animal studies. Catherine Brown, Gillian Feeley-­Harnick, Simon Gaunt, Miranda Griffin, Sarah Kay, Elizabeth Morrison, Eleonora Stoppino, and Valerie Traub suggested ideas that became important for my analysis. E. Jane Burns inspired my thinking about snake women. Sarah Kay and I have been working in tandem on medieval animals over the past few years and it has been valuable and fun to share questions and insights. Sharon Kinoshita, Catherine Sanok, and Zrinka Stahuljak have been my interlocutors throughout, and conversations ix

x

acknowledgments

with many other colleagues over many years have shaped my thinking. In addition to those mentioned above, I thank Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Catherine Cassel, Alison Cornish, Susan Crane, Noah Guynn, George Hoffmann, Donald S. Lopez Jr., Karla Mallette, Deborah McGrady, Matthias Meyer, Helen Solterer, and Karl Steel. For more than two decades, Karma Lochrie, James A. Schultz, and I have shared conversations and celebrations, shoe shopping and opera, and I am ever grateful for their friendship as well as for the willingness of Doug Anderson, Mitch Matsey, and Elizabeth Cure to join in. Thanks also to Jim for help with MHG. Gardening, hiking, traveling, shared dinners, and well-­ earned happy hours with Valerie Traub and Brenda Marshall are cherished parts of my life. Albert and Pauline McCracken, Tricia Clement, Nancy McCracken, and Charles McCracken make North Carolina still feel like home. On my main home front, Doug Anderson listened to my ideas, sent me references to weird animal stories in the news, organized trips, baked bread, and generally made my life very happy while I was writing this book. Sprocket didn’t help at all, but she did occasionally check on my progress. I had the great good fortune to complete part of this book at the Getty Research Institute; I am immensely grateful to the GRI for the idyllic working conditions, and to Elizabeth Morrison for her generosity and expertise. Thanks also to Daniel Spaulding for crucial research assistance. I also wish to acknowledge with gratitude a generous publication subsidy from the University of Michigan that made the color plates possible. Many thanks to my editor Randolph Petilos for his encouragement and enthusiasm for this project. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. : : : Part of chapter 2 appeared in an earlier version in “Skin and Sovereignty in Guillaume de Palerne,” Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistiques 24 (2012): 361–­75. Parts of chapter 5 appeared in earlier versions as “Nursing Animals and Cross-­Species Intimacy,” in From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 39–­64; and as “The Wild Man and His Kin in Tristan de Nanteuil,” in L’homme et l’animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe-­XVe s.)/Human and Animal in Medieval France (12th–­15th c.), ed. Irène Fabri-­Tehranchi and Anna Russakoff (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2014), 23–­42.

Introduction

I

t is surely fair to say that in the stratified society of medieval Europe, one thing that every person had in common was dominion over animals. Even those who had little political or social agency probably felt that they were different from beasts. Daily experience as well as theological reasoning taught that in the “natural” hierarchy of the world, humans should be the masters of animals, following God’s decree in Genesis that man should have dominion over all living things. Medieval fictional narratives endorse this view, but they also challenge it, particularly in representations of encounters between humans and animals. My argument in this book is that literary texts use human-­ animal encounters to explore the legitimacy of au­thority and dominion over others. When animals and humans meet, sover­eignty comes to the fore. In Claude Lévi-­Strauss’s oft-­repeated phrase, ani­mals are “good to think”; the animal world suggests “a mode of thought,” he tells us.1 In the Middle Ages, animals are taken as a mode of thought in several different kinds of discourse. According to Christian theology, the natural world reflects and instructs on divine truth and, by extension, on the divinely ordained hierarchies among living beings. As part of the natural world, animals, too, reflect and instruct.2 In their subjection to human mastery, for example, they recognize the “natural” superiority of humans, and—­so the logic goes—­dominance hierarchies among animals explain how some persons can licitly exercise power over others.3 Animal behavior is taken as exemplary for humans in literary as well as theological texts. Fables anthropomorphize animals to offer moral lessons for people, and bestiaries translate the “natural” qualities and habits of animals into demonstrations of Christian truth. But portrayals of animals in medieval literature extend well beyond these didactic genres. Latin beast poetry includes a range of forms—­animal satires, dream visions, novels, and epics—­and in medieval French texts, my primary focus, animals 1

2

introduction

appear as protagonists in romance narratives about companion animals, in saints’ lives where animals respond to holy authority, in moralizing poems where animals speak, and in beast fables, like Le roman de Renart (The Romance of Renart), where animals live in a society organized according to human political and social structures.4 In this popular compilation of stories about Renart the fox, composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the lion King Noble rules over a menagerie of animal subjects. King Noble’s name may reference the aristocratic lineage that grounds his authority, and he is often represented with the accouterments of royal status. In plate 1, for example, from a fourteenth-­century manuscript, he sits on a throne wearing a crown and holding a scepter. This monarch assumes a rather debonair pose: his legs are crossed, his left paw posed on his knee, and he looks upward in a contemplative gaze. Gesturing with his right hand, he seems to address the animals assembled before him. A fox, a goat, a rabbit, a stag, and an ass stand in front of the king as though summoned, and in the foreground, the fox raises a paw, perhaps to address the sovereign lion. In Le roman de Renart, animality meets sovereignty in the parodic use of animals to describe human political structures and the contests for power that take place within those structures. Animals stand in for people in Le roman de Renart. Even though King Noble may retain characteristics of his animal identity, the lion king is like a human sovereign and he rules over other animal subjects whose desires and motivations are like those of human subjects. But when we move beyond the parodic anthropomorphism of the lion king and his court to examine relations of dominion more broadly, we find that sovereign relations are particularly evident in literary representations of human-­animal interactions. The legitimacy of dominion and sovereignty over others is debated in encounters between humans and animals in which relations of mastery and submission are at stake. Medieval people learned what it meant to be under the authority of others and to have authority over others from their own experiences, of course, but also from a variety of media, including literature.5 In the Middle Ages, political thought “is everywhere and it invades all genres,” one historian observes, and medieval writers puzzled over the nature of political order—­and whether political order was part of nature—­in literary texts as well as in scholarly treatises.6 Literary texts contribute to an understanding of medieval political theory by imagining sovereign relations in terms of animal-­human relationships defined by exploitation, acquiescence, affection, and protection. My inquiry into such representations is shaped by the persistence of the vocabulary of sovereignty in descriptions of encounters between humans

introduction

3

and animals. Literary representations assume the superiority of humans over animals, but they also question the origins and the stability of such a hierarchy; they represent the benefits of contractual governance and also debate the desirability of the constraints it imposes; they identify the sovereign as a noble human, but also suggest the contingency of this identity. The literary texts I examine here reveal that animals are “good to think” because they both invite and disrupt ideas about “natural” relations of dominion and power. However, animals are not merely symbols in medieval narratives. Ani­ mals have a history, and even a point of view, and scholars in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies have insisted that inquiry into representations of nonhuman creatures should take into account animals’ own experiences, affects, and ways of being in the world.7 In medieval studies, the critical understanding of animals as living creatures rather than merely symbolic figures was inaugurated by Joyce Salisbury’s 1994 book, The Beast Within, a work that studies animals as property, food, and sexual objects, and explores their relationships to human social worlds.8 More recently Karl Steel has studied animal-­human relations in medieval literary texts to argue that the human domination of animals and the violence that secures it are central to medieval understandings of the distinctiveness of human identity.9 Even more recently, Susan Crane has shifted attention from the violent exploitation of animals to the many ways in which medieval texts describe a proximity with animal being that may counter the narrative of human uniqueness and human superiority over the nonhuman animal.10 In my own approach to medieval animals I am, like Steel, interested in representations of human dominion over animals and, like Crane, I will explore literary representations of encounters between human and nonhuman animals. However, I focus not on descriptions of human-­animal difference in reiterations of the violence that guarantees animal submission, nor on the ways texts may question human superiority over the animal. Instead, I argue that literary representations of encounters between animals and humans figure an interrogation of the forms of legitimate dominion and sovereignty over others, both human dominion over nonhuman animals and the power of some humans over others. I am, then, valorizing the symbolic meaning of animals in literary texts, but I also insist on the use of actual animals, and especially the use of their skins, in displays of human power relations.

Medieval Sovereignty To speak of sovereignty in the Middle Ages risks confusing medieval political structures with modern forms of power and particularly with modern

4

introduction

notions of state sovereignty. As historian Susan Reynolds cautions: “No medieval ruler . . . was sovereign in the way that later theorists of the sovereign state or sovereign nation-­state would require.”11 We know that the notion of a “sovereign nation-­state” does not apply to the territorial governments of the Middle Ages, but does the notion of sovereignty depend on a recognition of the state? Is there a “state” in the Middle Ages? Historians differ on this question. The Latin term status does not have the connotations of the modern term “state” before the fifteenth century, and it is not until the eighteenth century that the state becomes what Quentin Skinner calls the “the master noun” of political argument.12 The notion of the “state” sets “conceptual booby-­traps” for the unwary historian, according to Rees Davies, because it privileges one kind of authority—­kingship or the state—­over other sources of authority and power. Davies describes what he calls the historian’s “dilemma”: how to write about a past society using its language and concepts without becoming incomprehensible to a current audience, but also how to employ current concepts and vocabulary without distorting the past.13 Some scholars are reluctant to use “state” at all because the term may imply the ideology, constitution, and technology associated with the modern state, but for others, the lack of a medieval term for the state does not mean that it did not exist in the Middle Ages.14 In Jean-­Philippe Genêt’s summary, the state emerged between 1280 and 1360 when Western rulers, engaged in constant wars, called on those living in their lands to contribute service and goods to the protection of the territory and the institution of new modes of taxation upended feudal social hierarchies and practices.15 Bernard Guenée insists that we can speak of a state “once the population of a limited area is subject to government,” and Reynolds uses the notion of “an organization of human society within a more or less fixed area in which the ruler or governing body more or less successfully controls the legitimate use of physical force.”16 Reynolds further argues that the absence of the word “state” in its modern senses from medieval writings about politics does not mean that their authors had no concept of the state: “Those who considered problems about limiting the power of rulers, or about their relation to law or to the Pope or each other, were concerned with something like what we might call problems of the state and its sovereignty.”17 But state-­like practices were not the only, or even the normative, forms of rule in medieval Europe. Governance took the form of “flexible justice, mercy and anger, gifts, bribes, and compromises, tacit understandings, rewards,” in John Watts’s formulation. Rather than seeing through the lens of a single form of power—­the rising nation-­state—­Watts suggests that we rec-

introduction

5

ognize “the interaction of a multiplicity of valid and effective power forms and power types.”18 Davies uses the notion of lordship (dominium in Latin, seigneurie in Old French) to describe such distributed power relations, and he stresses the variety of such relationships in medieval Europe as well as what I would call their intimacy: power was described and structured on the model of familial or personal relationships.19 Yet during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, proliferating claims to lordship, land, and power over others were enacted not, or not only, through affective bonds but also through violence. During this period, castles, knights, and fiefs held by knights proliferated in many regions of France; each castle formed a lordship, and these lords (domini) sought to extend their fiefs through the domination of peasants. This “feudal revolution” transformed power relations by putting thousands of peasants under the lordship of untitled masters.20 In this early period, men could achieve lordship without being nobly born, but over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, birth and family came increasingly to be seen as what qualified one person to dominate another, and kings were the most obvious beneficiaries of the assimilation of nobility to lordship. As people in need turned to the great nobles and ultimately the king, regardless of their specific commitments of dependence, the authority of the monarch was strengthened and lesser lordships weakened.21 “Lordship” became increasingly associated with genealogy and lineage, but even as nobility became a legitimating qualification for authority over others, personal relationships continued to support and articulate the exercise of power, even for kings.22 When they describe political relations, medieval authors use words like dominium, jurisdictio, maestas, and regimen to indicate dominion or lordship over others; in Old French, we find seigneurie and maistrie.23 Historian Brian Tierney insists on the importance of jurisdictio (jurisdiction), used as synonym for maiestas, or sovereignty, in the later Middle Ages. Tierney notes that some historians question whether such a notion of sovereignty is appropriate for medieval political relations, and he acknowledges that it is not much in evidence in early feudal society, where the right to govern was confused with other rights and powers, and rulership was based on personal loyalty to a lord, not on a collective obligation to a public ruling office.24 But with the revival of Roman and canon law in the twelfth century, Tierney argues, the doctrine of sovereignty, or “supreme jurisdiction,” was widely understood as a “power of ruling” conceptually separate from the notion of personal authority.25 In the thirteenth century, Philippe de Beaumanoir described the king as soverain over all the barons and claimed that “whatever pleases the prince should be held as law.”26 The sovereign—­the pope or the medieval

6

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king—­was not subject to judgment by his subjects because they had not conferred the office on him: the king was above the law.27 The sovereign exception was articulated in several ways by medieval thinkers, who grappled with the relationship of the king to the law in sometimes surprising ways. Alain Boureau has shown, for example, that explanations of the Immaculate Conception structured articulations of the sovereign exception in the fourteenth century, and in chapter 3, I argue that the notion is explored through animal embodiment in representations of sovereigns in animal skins.28 Even as some discourses described the sovereign as above the law, medieval writers still debated consent to be ruled. From the thirteenth century on, medieval jurists and scholars questioned how people came to be bound by obligation and to be unfree, and such questioning was contextualized by the pervasive forms of contractual and corporate social organization in medieval society.29 The development of a notion of sovereign power was then accompanied by debates about consent to be ruled.30 Considerations of contractual rule and the consent to be governed are focal points for the interrogation of sovereignty in medieval Europe (and well represented in literary texts, as I argue in chapter 2). If the notion of sovereignty can seem foreign to medieval political structures, that is in part because of historiographical traditions of periodization, as Kathleen Davis has pointed out in her analysis of the relationship between what she calls “the historiographical becoming-­feudal” of the Middle Ages and the formation of political concepts considered central to modern politics.31 Davis argues that periodization itself functions as a sovereign decision, cutting off the feudal Middle Ages from the alignment of the secular, the modern, and the sovereign.32 More recently, Kathleen Biddick has argued for the importance of medieval literary and historical texts and archives for an understanding of biopolitical sovereignty, exploring medieval texts alongside modern theoretical claims about sovereignty and modernity.33 These studies address the “historian’s dilemma” of how to employ current concepts and vocabulary without distorting the past by revisiting the periodization that defines some concepts as properly medieval and others as properly modern.34 But this is not to say that all medieval relations of dominion and power over others are sovereign relations if, to use an abstract definition, sovereignty is “the claim to be the ultimate political authority, subject to no higher power as regards the making and enforcing of political decisions.”35 Layers of obligation and authority define medieval political structures, and any ruler is subject to a higher power, since even the most powerful king is subject to God. Literary texts fully recognize—­and debate—­this complexity.

introduction

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They represent the multiple ways in which obligation is shared among lords and vassals in medieval culture, but they also imagine sovereign figures that claim “ultimate political authority.” In what follows, I use “sovereignty” to describe such figures and the relations of power in which they are imbricated. I also use “sovereignty” to insist on the coincidence of modern theoretical considerations of sovereign relations and medieval literary texts. Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Giorgio Agamben are among my interlocutors; the work of these theorists makes visible some of the imaginative and ideological workings of medieval texts, even as the medieval texts modify or revise some of the theoretical models.36

Sovereignty and Animality As part of the natural world, animals participate in the “natural” hierarchy of creation. Their own social organization demonstrates this order for medieval scholars, and I mentioned above that dominance hierarchies among animals were taken to explain how some people could licitly exercise power over others.37 Such interpretations read nature as a source of knowledge about God’s design for the world; relationships among animals illustrate divine truths for humans.38 Animals are also “natural” models for human social relations in literary texts like bestiaries and fables which originate in antiquity but are rewritten in both Latin and vernacular languages to show that animal behavior reveals Christian truths and morality. These didactic texts also use relationships among animals to offer lessons about sovereign relations among humans, and I explore such lessons in chapter 2, but a more vivid demonstration of the “natural” hierarchy of God’s creation was seen in human dominion over animals, sanctioned by God in Genesis and taken as a model for relations among humans in a variety of medieval discourses. The Genesis story is a touchstone of my analysis, not only because it defines human authority over the natural world but also because medieval authors used the story to debate the extent to which human dominion over animals is a model for human sovereignty over other humans. Some medieval rewritings of the Genesis story trouble this model, representing the contested nature of human sovereignty over animals after the Fall. They debate postlapsarian relations of authority and power over animals, and they imagine models of sovereignty shared among humans and between humans and nonhuman creatures.39 My analysis moves among texts and images composed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries and focuses on vernacular bibles and biblical commentary, fictional narratives, moralizing poems, and some of the

8

introduction

manuscript illuminations that accompany these texts. My goal is not to trace an evolution or to read literary texts and images in relation to particular historical events or developments, but rather to insist on the repetition of motifs or characterizations that put animals and humans into contact around questions of mastery, dominion, or sovereignty. I examine a collection of narratives in which animal skin is taken as a material representation of human sovereignty in symbolic displays of power; another set of texts describes the sociability of the wolf and imagines the wolf’s desire for human companionship and care. I read several narratives that represent the use of animal images to publicize human identity in heraldic insignia and of animal skin as a disguise. In another group of stories, women and snakes meet and converge in representations of self-­sovereign claims to territory and noble status. Finally, I explore narratives about wild men, situated at the boundary between the human and the animal. My claim is that the repetition of motifs across different texts—­the use of animal skin, the domestication of the ravening wolf, the merging of woman and snake, and the emergence of the human man from an animal-­like existence—­suggests that the encounter between human and animal is “good to think,” in Lévi-­ Strauss’s formulation, and that such encounters are good to think because they allow for a thinking about sovereign relations. Intimacy and affect come to the fore in these encounters. Medieval narratives may use animals and figures of animality to represent adversity and disputed dominion, but in the texts I examine, human-­animal encounters are also described in terms of intimacy and affection. The sovereign protection of animals and other humans is characterized by care, and even love; a mirroring gaze on an animal recognizes the self-­sovereign subject; and shared intimacy with animals redefines human kinship structures. It is perhaps not surprising that political relationships might be described as affective bonds, since feudal allegiance is conventionally described in terms of love for a lord, but when animals come into view, the affective relationships that coincide with dependency and mastery are indexed to perceptions of “natural” affinities and alliances. That is, affective relations between humans and animals are defined with respect to the “natural” capacities and desires of animal subjects, grounded in notions of human ability and animal inability. Throughout this study, I argue that human dominion over the natural world—­represented in many of the texts I examine as mastery over animals—­figures other hierarchies and other power relations, but this is not to say that the animal is merely a figure for subjection, or that the “real” animal disappears in my analysis. I highlight the ways in which the use

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of animals to represent truths for humans appropriates animal being and animal experiences, but I also suggest ways in which such appropriations can speak against themselves, giving ethical purchase to the animal voices they ventriloquize, for example. Yet even as I interrogate representations in which the boundaries between the human and the animal become indistinct, I will insist on the human perspective that imbues these texts. For this reason, I characterize my project in terms of animality, rather than as a study of animals. Accordingly, I use the impersonal pronoun “it” when speaking of most animals. In Old French, as in modern French, pronouns are gendered by the noun they replace (elle for la bête, il for le chien) and may or may not recognize a particular animal as male or female. In an effort to preserve some of this ambiguity and in order to underscore what I see as a generic rather than individualized view of animals in the texts I examine, I will not use gendered pronouns when discussing animal protagonists.40

In the Skin of a Beast Medieval narratives are inscribed on animal skins, and they describe animal pelts worn by humans for warmth and protection or in displays of power and prestige. Animals also wear their own skins and in some stories animal skin represents an essential animality, as for the wolf that cannot change its skin or its nature, or the ermine that speaks to protest the use of its fur in luxury garments for humans. In other medieval narratives, animal skin covers human identity and suggests a human inhabitation of the animal, whether in accounts of people who adopt an animal pelt as a disguise or in descriptions of a shared animal-­human being, as for the werewolf or the snake woman. The imbrications of nobility, gender, and humanity come into view when sovereign relations are defined in relation to animality, and the essential qualities that define sovereign humanity—­lineage and gender, for example—­are revealed as mobile and contingent. Each of my chapters traces shifting relationships among animals and humans in which relations of sovereignty and dominion are at stake, and each chapter moves among several texts to explore repeated motifs or images. In chapter 1, “Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty,” I explore the use of animals, and particularly the use of their skins, as a technology of sovereignty. Moving among medieval bibles and biblical commentary, the fourteenth-­century Conte du papegau (Tale of the Parrot), and a presentation image from a book prepared for a king, I trace representations of animals killed and flayed in displays of human sovereignty that reinstate human dominion over animals as well as over land and other human subjects.

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introduction

I suggest that a consideration of nonhuman actors reveals the biopolitical structure of premodern sovereignty’s management of lives, and I turn to the twelfth-­century moralizing poem Le roman des romans to argue that the imagined protests of animals used by humans articulate an ethical demand. In chapter 2, “The Social Wolf: Domestication, Affect, and Social Contract,” I explore literary debates about the contractual nature of sovereign relations. In selected saints’ lives, Marie de France’s fables, and her Bisclavret, a wild wolf’s consideration of voluntary domestication structures a representation of consensual subjection to mastery and rule. Skin structures my inquiry in chapter 3, “Becoming-­Animal, Becoming-­Sovereign: Skin, Heraldry, and the Beast,” where I argue that romance representations of sovereign relations defined by protection and exile invite a consideration of the shared being of the beast and the sovereign. I read Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion (Knight of the Lion) as a romance about the use of animal skins as armor and animal images as heraldic emblems, before turning to the thirteenth-­century Guillaume de Palerne (William of Palermo), where skins represent both disguise and animal transformation. In chapter 4, “Snakes and Women: Recognition, Knowledge, and Sovereignty,” I turn to self-­sovereignty in order to interrogate the relationship between autonomy, choice, and desire, and authority over others. I begin with portrayals of Eve in the twelfth-­century Jeu d’Adam (The Play of Adam), in manuscript illuminations of the temptation scene, and in thirteenth-­century translations of the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve, and I argue that medieval representations of Eve’s encounter with the serpent suggest that Eve is tempted not just by knowledge, but by a vision of self-­sovereignty that promises sovereignty over others. By contrast, when snakiness and sovereignty are represented in the thirteenth-­century Bel inconnu (The Fair Unknown) and Jean d’Arras’s fourteenth-­century Roman de Mélusine (The Romance of Mélusine), a knight’s specular relation to a snake woman’s body produces knowledge that defines a sovereign position for the knight even as it exiles or distances the woman from a position of authority and power. Finally, in chapter 5, “Becoming-­Human, Becoming-­ Sovereign: Gender, Genealogy, and the Wild Man,” I argue that the notion of a symbolic kinship with animals puts into question the purely human, noble identity that grounds notions of aristocratic privilege and rule. I focus on two chansons de geste: the account of the swan knight ancestor of Godefroy de Bouillon in the thirteenth-­century Old French Crusade Cycle and the fourteenth-­century Tristan de Nanteuil (Tristan of Nanteuil). Both epics recount the story of a wild boy, raised by an animal in the forest, who must become fully human in order to assume his place in a noble genealogy.

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These stories assume that their animal-­like protagonists retain an essential humanity, even as they represent an intimacy with animals that disrupts the reintegration of the human youth into a securely human, noble lineage. In a short epilogue I conclude with claims about the relationship of artifice and sovereignty in a turn to Jean Froissart’s account of the so-­called “Bal des Ardents” (Dance of the Burning Men) at the court of Charles VI.

chapter one

Wearing Animals: Skin, Survival, and Sovereignty

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edieval notions of sovereignty are decidedly not modern, or so the logic usually goes, and they are decidedly not biopolitical. In Foucault’s well-­known formulation, the premodern sovereign’s authority is de­ fined by the power to let live and make die; modern sovereign power is located in the capacity to make live and let die.1 However, medieval literary texts repeatedly return to questions about the use, management, and production of life, and particularly of animal life. Biopolitics comes to the fore in human relations with animals, particularly in the conflation of survival and slaughter that justifies the human use of animals for food, clothing, and labor. In this chapter I examine the repeated representation of a relationship between flaying animals and the enactment and display of human sovereignty. I focus on the use of animal skins to argue that the technology of human sovereignty includes the slaughter of animals, but I also show that animals may resist the material and symbolic use of their skins in displays of human power. I begin with Genesis and some of its vernacular translations in order to explore the conflation of survival and slaughter in the story of the first humans. I then move to the fourteenth-­century Conte du papegau (The Tale of the Parrot) to explore a romance representation of flaying that uses animal skin to map the contours of human sovereignty. An examination of the ostentatious furs worn by noblemen in late medieval courts extends my claim about the display of human sovereignty using animal pelts, and finally I turn to Le roman des romans, a moralizing poem in which animals chastise the humans who wear their skins in a call for ethical engagement.2

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In the Beginning Relations of dominion and rule are created along with humans, at least according to the biblical account of creation, where God gives man authority over the animals that inhabit the earth. In the relatively short account in Genesis 1, we find two iterations of the divine decree that man should rule over the animals: And [God] said: “Let us make man to our image and likeness, and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and the beasts and the whole earth and every creeping creature that moves upon the earth.” And God created man to his own image; to the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, saying, “Increase, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea and the fowls of the air and all living creatures that move upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26–­28)3

The passage cites, first, God’s plan for his creation of man and, second, his command that the first humans should increase and multiply and enjoy dominion over the earth and all that live upon it. In medieval commentaries on this passage, both Jewish and Christian writers focused more on sexuality and the command to multiply than on dominion, as Jeremy Cohen has shown, but vernacular bibles and some Christian commentaries explored the human-­animal hierarchy defined in the creation story in terms of political order.4 In particular, the notion of a divinely ordered hierarchy of dominion strongly influenced the biblical commentary known as the Glossa ordinaria, a collection of glosses written alongside or between the lines of the biblical text and developed from around 1100 to 1330.5 In the Glossa ordinaria, as Philippe Buc explains, clerics used Genesis to posit that “legitimate power [ potestas] is symbolized, rendered legitimate, and clarified by the superiority of man over animals.”6 The hierarchies of dominion that structured the order of creation in Paradise offered models for the human exercise of legitimate power over animals, and extending those hierarchies to human social relations, medieval theologians describe human dominion over animals as symbolic of human power over other humans. For example, in Genesis 1:24–­25, where God commands that the earth bring forth creatures according to their kind, “cattle and creeping things and beasts” (“iumenta et reptilia et bestias”), glosses identify reptilia as clerics, bestias [bestiae] as powerful lords, and iumenta as faithful

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lay people; all are under the dominion of man (homines), identified as the sovereign, he who is not subject to any secular judge.7 In other words, some medieval theologians understood God’s command that humans should have dominion over the animals as a figural expression of social and political hierarchies among humans. This analogy is further stressed in vernacular translations of the Latin bible. When the Genesis passage is translated into Old French, the Latin verbs “praesum” (to rule, to be set over) and “dominor” (to rule, to have dominion over) are rendered as “to have sovereignty/ dominion over” (avoir seignorie), a more familiar term of human political organization for medieval translators.8 “Avoir seignorie” also translates “dominor” in Genesis 3:16, where God declares that Eve will be under Adam’s dominion: “tu seras souz la poosté d’ome et il avra seingnorie sus toi.”9 Within the divine hierarchy of creation, man has authority over both animals and woman; gender and animality are the differences that matter in the biblical definition of hierarchy and dominion. But does dominion mean sovereignty in this context? Medieval theologians disagreed about the meaning of sovereignty in Paradise. While some took man’s dominion over the animals as a model for human political organization, others posited that political hierarchy originated not in God’s decree that man should have dominion over animals in Paradise, but in the postlapsarian world. According to this logic, in the harmonious world of Paradise a natural order recognized by both humans and animals eliminated the need for relations of power, and relations of dominion over others entered the world only after humans sinned. As Buc shows, theologians moved between the two explanations of the origins of power and political organization.10 On the one hand, social hierarchy could be understood as a divine invention that predated the Fall and allowed for the restraint of human excesses; on the other hand, power over others could be understood as a diabolical consequence of the fall. It is only in the postlapsarian world, however, that sovereignty corresponds to the ability to kill.11 Once humans sin, their peaceful dominion over the animals in Paradise is lost, and postlapsarian relations between human and nonhuman animals are defined by enmity. Man should have the upper hand in this adversarial relationship, according to God’s reordering of human-­animal relations after the flood. He commands that “the fear and dread of [man] will be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the fowls of the air and all that move upon the earth.” God then gives Noah permission to consume animals: “All the fishes of the sea are delivered into your hand. And every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you” (Gen. 9:2–­3).12

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Genesis describes two forms of human dominion over animals. The first is part of the divine order of Paradise: man shall rule over the animals. The second is defined by human predation in the use of animals for food (“every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you”). After humans are expelled from Paradise, human dominion over the natural world is enacted through the use of animals—­eating them, wearing them, using their labor—­ and this use of animals is sanctioned by God. The divine decree that animal lives may be taken to sustain human life receives particular attention in medieval vernacular bibles—­not in relation to animals as food, but as clothing. The divinely sanctioned use of animals is represented with particular emphasis on the use of animal skins to cover human nakedness.

Adam and Eve in Furs Most of the texts known as medieval French vernacular bibles are not direct translations of the Latin bible into French. There were a few literal translations of the bible, but they seem to have been less popular than paraphrases of the biblical narrative that included glosses, elaborations, and com­men­tary borrowed from other sources or invented by the translator.13 So, for example, Guiart de Moulins’s thirteenth-­century Bible historiale is a fairly close translation of Peter Comester’s twelfth-­century summary and explanation of the biblical narrative in the Historia scolastica.14 Another thirteenth-­century French bible, conventionally called La bible anonyme, gives a rhymed translation of the Vulgate, but it also includes developments from apocryphal sources and adds narrative detail; the so-­called Bible française du XIIIe siècle alternates an Old French translation of the biblical text with extensive commentary drawn from the Glossa ordinaria, the collection of glosses of the Vulgate bible I mentioned above. Such bibles seem to have been intended for lay readers and they script an understanding of Genesis in light of the New Testament.15 The commentary in medieval vernacular bibles is typological, but it is also anticipatory. It looks forward not just to Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection, but also to what will happen next in the narrative. In Genesis accounts, this anticipatory reading compresses the gap between the expulsion from Paradise and the flood, effectively eliminating the period of time between Adam and Eve’s departure from Eden and the point at which, after the flood, God sanctions the consumption of animals. In vernacular bibles, animals are available for human use from the moment of creation. For example, La bible historiale records that God created animals for man’s use:

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God knew that man would soon become mortal through sin, even though before he sinned he was immortal, and he gave him animals to eat and to clothe him and to help him in his labor. And before man sinned, God had given man and animals only plants and the fruit of the trees as food. Car Dieu qui sauoit bien qu’il seroit tost fait mortel par pechie, qui deuant le pechie estoit non mortel, lui donna les bestes pour mengier et pour lui vestir et pour lui aydier a son trauail. Et deuant le pechie il n’auoit donne aux hommes et aux bestes a mengier fors les herbes et les fruiz des arbres. (La bible historiale, 22)

In passages like this one, vernacular bibles describe the human consumption of animals as part of creation’s order.16 They anticipate the loss of vegetarianism at the moment when sin enters the world and violent enmity displaces the formerly peaceful cohabitation of humans and animals. Vernacular bibles locate the beginning of humans’ use of animals for food well in advance of God’s decree to Noah that “every thing that moves and lives shall be food for you.” Neither the biblical text nor the vernacular bible’s commentary that describes God’s gift to man (“he gave him animals to eat and to clothe him”) directly addresses the question of whether eating animals and wearing their skins means killing them. Probably because of the Leviticus definition of an animal that has died naturally as unclean, medieval translators and theologians seem not to think that God intended for people to eat or flay animals only after they died naturally, though as David I. Shyovitz has noted, some Jewish interpreters suggested that in Paradise Adam and Eve were allowed to eat animals that had died of natural causes.17 Christian commentaries on Genesis seem to puzzle over God’s gift of animals to humans, and the question of animal death arises in representations of the first instance in which animals are subjected to human use: in another gift to humans, a parting gift, God clothes Adam and Eve with animal skins before he banishes them from Paradise. The Genesis account specifies that “the Lord God made for Adam and his wife garments of skins (tunicas pellicias) and clothed them.”18 Early Jewish and Christian commentators identify these tunicas pellicias metaphorically, as skin-­like garments or as human skin, that is, as humanity: to be clothed in skin is to shed the garments of glory worn in Paradise and to become human and mortal. Some commentators understood the garments of skin more literally, as animal skins or as clothes made from animal skins. The animality of the skins then stresses the mortality of sin and the ani-

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mality of the sinner.19 But the literal understanding of the garments of skin as animal skins raised a particular set of disturbing questions for late antique and early medieval scholars, as Jean Pépin has noted. For example, if animals were created male and female, and two skins were taken, wouldn’t their slaughter destroy an entire species? And what happened to the meat, since humans had not yet been authorized to eat animals?20 Other theologians countered that the Bible cannot be judged by human logic; the early Christian scholar Origen dismissed as absurd the idea that God should be seen as some sort of butcher.21 But the question of where the garments of skin came from persisted, and for some medieval writers, the nature and origin of the animal skins continued to invite explanation. In his creation narrative, the fourteenth-­century writer Lutwin eliminates the skins altogether, indicating that that God gave Adam and Eve woolen garments. Lutwin’s Eva und Adam is a German translation of The Life of Adam and Eve, an apocryphal text that elaborates the adventures of the first humans after they are banished from Paradise, and the narrator records, in his typically practical style: After their disobedience the woman and the man were clothed with two garments by God. The tunics were woolen. Nothing could have been more uncomfortable, and I imagine that they would have liked needles, scissors, thread, and a thimble. (Eva und Adam, 250)22 Nach der ungehorsam Wurt das wip und Adam Myt zweyen röken angeleit, Domitte su gott bekleit. Die röcke worent wüllin. Es mochte do nit weher gesin, Wanne ich wene, in ture weren Nodelen und scheren, Vadem und vinger hüt. (Eva und Adam, lines 734–­42)

An illumination from the Lutwin manuscript gives an idea of how the artist imagined the tunics (plate 2).23 Adam’s garment seems to be made of unprocessed wool, though for a modern viewer it also looks something like a fringed leather costume from an American Western. Eve seems to have somehow transformed the wool into courtly garb (maybe she found needles, scissors, thread, and a thimble, and made herself a dress). According to the

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rubric, the image illustrates “How Adam and Eve decided to do penance,” and here the artist seems more interested in the first couple’s deliberations than in their clothes. Adam gestures toward Eve with authority, commanding her to join him in a penance ritual so that God will allow them back into Paradise. Eve acquiesces with what seems to be a gesture of submission, already enacting God’s decree that woman will be under the dominion of man. Lutwin’s description of the “uncomfortable” clothes God gives the first couple emphasizes rough wool rather than rough skins, effectively replacing slaughter with shearing. However, bibles insist on the pelts that God gave Adam and Eve, as the image in plate 3 illustrates. This illumination from a fourteenth-­century copy of La bible historiale represents the expulsion from Paradise.24 On the left God gives Adam and Eve the garments of skin; on the right the angel banishes them. Here the garments of skin are very different from the well-­fitted woolen tunic Adam wears in the Lutwin manuscript. These skins are not shaped or fitted, and the illuminator has emphasized the animality of the garments in the bear-­like heads still attached to the pelts. In fact, it looks like the animals themselves have been thrown over the human bodies; only the drape of the skins suggests that the animals have been flayed. On the left, the animal’s head covers Adam’s genitals, emphasizing that the fall is also a fall into sexual sin.25 In both scenes, Adam looks back toward God and toward Paradise; Eve’s gaze is averted, even downcast, and in the scene on the left, her breasts are still uncovered; perhaps the illumination associates the shame of nakedness more with Eve than with Adam, who is already covered with the genital-­menacing skin. On the far left, God clothes Eve, and his stance is strangely like that of a man helping a woman to put on a fur coat. The solicitous gesture focuses attention on God’s care for the banished humans, rather than on the possibility that God killed animals to make the garments he provides, even as the heads and tails still attached to the skins emphasize that these garments were living animals. If some accounts of the tunicas pellicias seem to elide the question of where the skins came from, another vernacular bible, La bible française du XIIIe siècle, directly addresses it. This text notes that skins were taken from animals to make the garments God gave Adam and Eve, but the translator insists that it is foolish to think that God had to flay the animals: God made them tunics of skin to cover their entire bodies and dressed them in the garments to signify that they were guilty in body and in soul. . . . It would be foolish to ask how or with what the skins were

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taken from the animals, for he who can make all things from nothing can do this whenever and however he wishes. Ja leur fist Dieux cotes de piaus por couvrir tout leur cors et les en vesti en senefiance qu’il estoient corpables en cors et en ame. . . . Ce seroit fole demande d’enquerre coment ne par quoi les piaux furent ostees des bestes, car cil qui de neant fist toutes choses pot ice faire quant il volt et si come il volt. (La bible française du XIIIe siècle, 117)

The text subsumes the messy business of flaying into divine intention. It deflects attention away from the origin of the skins and toward the practical and symbolic use of animal pelts: they cover the naked human bodies and they signify disobedience and sin. When God decrees that animals should live in dread of man and provide food for him and uses animal skins to make clothing for Adam and Eve, the value of human life over animal life, and, by extension, the human slaughter of animals, is cast in terms of human need. This is a postlapsarian construction: before the fall, humans and animals were vegetarians, and the first garments that Adam and Eve put on are the aprons they make from fig leaves after they eat the forbidden fruit and discover their nakedness. When Adam and Eve are banished from Paradise, their relationship to the natural world changes. They lose not just the bountiful plenitude of the garden, but also the peaceful dominion over animals they enjoyed there. In the postlapsarian world, survival and relations of dominion are intertwined: the making of clothes from animal skins, like the consumption of animals for food and the use of their labor, is a technology of sovereignty that defines practical survival as inseparable from relations of dominion.

Animal Skin When the concerns at stake in thirteenth-­century bibles are taken up in romance narratives, the killing and flaying of animals are motivated by needs more clearly related to secular claims to sovereignty. Romances are not directly influenced by Genesis accounts of human dominion over animals, though like other medieval discourses, they may endorse the violence that insures the submission of animals to human mastery; Karl Steel reads this violence as constitutive of the very category of human being.26 My own reading of such violence focuses on the use of animals as a technology of sovereignty that constructs an essential relationship between human survival and animal slaughter. The exploitation of animals, defined as necessary for

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human life, also enacts and displays sovereign relations. As I’ve suggested above, the human use of animals introduced in Genesis is elaborated, commented on, and puzzled over in vernacular bibles from medieval France, even as these texts confirm animal death as necessary for human life. In vernacu­ lar literary texts the flayed skin of an animal is the material, symbolic emblem of the relationship between human survival and animal slaughter, and in the romance narratives I now turn to, the production of animal skin for dis­play grounds claims to human sovereignty. In medieval romances, knights prove their valor by fighting other knights. They may hunt animals or they may confront animals in various kinds of adventures, but their opponents are usually other human knights, even though these adversaries may have supernatural or monstrous qualities. In Le conte du papegau (The Tale of the Parrot), a late fourteenth-­century prose romance, King Arthur confronts one of the latter, a monstrous knight-­animal whose humanity is both confirmed and denied from his first appearance in the story. Ultimately, though, he is identified as animal-­like when he is killed and flayed. In this text, flaying defines animality, and animal skin maps the territory of human sovereignty. Long neglected or denigrated as a derivative tale exemplary of the decadence of late medieval Arthuriana, Le conte du papegau has received renewed critical attention in recent years, particularly for its representations of human-­animal encounters.27 The romance recounts the early adventures of King Arthur and opens on his coronation festivities, during which a damsel arrives to request that a knight come to the aid of her lady, the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds (the Golden Haired Lady). This lady’s lands are under attack from “the knight who lives in the sea” (“le chevalier qui converse en la mer”), a fierce predator who has devastated the land and defeated sixty of the lady’s best knights.28 The king himself responds to the lady’s plea for help and sets out with the damsel for the domain of the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds. Along the way, Arthur rescues a lady, wins a parrot, and adopts the sobriquet “le Chevalier du Papegau” (the Knight of the Parrot). When the king arrives in the land of the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds, he encounters “the most hideous and horrible knight ever seen” (“le plus ydeux et le plus orrible chevalier par semblant qui mais fust veu,” 100), a giant figure astride a horse as big as an elephant. Arthur engages the strange predator in a long and arduous battle, and he is puzzled to see that his blows to his adversary’s shield and armor seem to draw blood. The battle continues and the Chevalier du Papegau repeatedly strikes his opponent. Bleeding profusely from his wounds, the giant adversary finally falls and dies. The king goes to inspect the defeated knight’s body.

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He found him mounted on the horse as he had been when alive, and saw that his armor was black, as though colored by smoke. He circled him, looking at the knight and his horse. When he had examined [the knight], he took his helm in his hands to see how heavy it was, and he found it was warm. He tried to remove it, but couldn’t, and he wondered why. When he had examined [the knight] thoroughly, he found that the helm was attached to the head and that it was a single thing; the head had the shape of a helm, completely round, and the hide was black like a snake’s hide. And his hauberk was as well, but it appeared to be covered by chain mail, like other hauberks, and it looked exactly like a hauberk. The Knight of the Parrot examined the dead knight thoroughly and discovered that the knight, horse, hauberk, helm, shield, sword, and lance were a single thing. And he wondered where the knight could have come from. Il le trouva seant sur le cheval, ainsi com il faisoit quant il estoit vif, et vist les armes noires et enfumees par semblant, et va tout entour regardant luy et le destrier. Et quant il a tout regardé, si le preist parmy le heaulme pour veoir com il estoit legiers, pour ce qu’il le vist si grant, si le trouva chaut. Et aprés le cuida oster, mais il ne pot, si se merveilla moult pour quoy ce fu. Et quant il ot bien serchié, si trouva que il se tenoit en la teste et que tout estoit une chose, mais elle est faicte comme ung heaulme, tout ront, et le cuyr dehors estoit noir ainsi come le cuyr d’un serpent. Et autel estoit son haubert, mais qu’il estoit maillié dehors par semblant, ainsi que sont autres haubers, si que ne paroyt se haubert non. Tant chercha le Chevalier du Papegau l’autre chevalier qui estoit mors, qu’il trouva que le chevalier et le destrier et le haubert et le heaulme et l’escu et l’espee et la lance fut tout une chose. Si se merveilla moult dont tel chevalier estoit venus. (Le conte du papegau, 106)

The monstrous knight embodies a merged animality and humanity, perhaps a literal version of the “humanimal” that is the Chevalier du Papegau himself in Virginie Greene’s reading.29 The narrator insists on the integrity of this being: it is “a single thing” (“tout une chose”). Its monstrous nature is defined not by a combination of animal and human, but the lack of a distinction between them.30 The defeated knight is more than knight and horse, though, since his composite being also includes armor and weapons, the parts of his body that have most solicited his opponent’s curiosity. Arthur identifies the combination of knight, horse, and armor not with a centaur, a logical comparison, but with a snake (“the hide was black like a

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snake’s hide”), perhaps anticipating that, like a snake, this knight will lose his skin. Arthur does not bury the body of his dead adversary, nor does he attempt to cover the body with tree branches, as he does for a defeated giant later in the story. The strange knight’s body is treated more like an object or animal to be marveled at than a corpse to be buried. It is repeatedly scrutinized in the story. First Arthur inspects the body. Then as he rides toward the nearby city, he meets four knights and returns with them to the battlefield to look at the defeated invader’s corpse. Then after the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds and her people have celebrated the Knight of the Parrot’s victory, the whole court journeys back to the battle site. The lady and her entourage observe the knight’s body from all angles, and they conclude it is the most monstrous thing they have ever seen. The Dame aux Cheveux Blonds then decides how the body will be disposed: The lady commanded her marshal to flay it and take the hide to the Amorous City and put it in a place where it would always be recognized as a wonder. And he did as the lady commanded. And when he had flayed it, he found a single skin over the knight and the horse. And no wonder, for it was a single thing. Et lors commanda la dame a leur mareschal que il le face escourchier et porter le cuir en l’Amoureuse Cité et luy face mectre en tel lieu et porter ou il soit tousjours veu pour merveille; et il si fist quant la dame l’ot commandé. Et quant il l’ot fait escourchier, si ne trouva fors ung cuir du destrier et du chevalier. Et ce ne fu pas merveille, car c’estoit toute une chose. (Le conte du papegau, 118)

The knight’s skin is to be displayed as a marvel, the lady claims, perhaps intended as evidence of the strange nature of the predator, or perhaps as a trophy of his defeat. The skin is a wonder, but it is also no wonder, the narrator says, that the flaying produces a single skin, for the horse, knight, and all his equipment are a single thing, contained by the skin.31 Here skin is an envelope for composite being, but for a strange, curious being that is strangely and curiously without self or subjectivity. This knight roars, but does not speak. We understand him through his actions, that is, through his predations, and in this sense he is animal-­like, even though, apparently mounted on a horse, he resembles a knight. At the end of the episode the narrator intervenes to identify this composite creature:

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And we find in the book called the Mappemundi that there is a monster that lives in the sea called the Fish Knight that seems to have horse, helm, hauberk, lance, shield and sword, but these are all part of his own body, and this one was like that. Car l’en trouve en livre qu’on appelle Mapemundi qu’il est ung monstre qui en mer a sa conversion que l’en clame Poisson Chevalier, qui semble avoir destrier, heaulme et haubert et lance et escu et espee, mais il est tout de luy mesmes, et tel estoit celluy. (Le conte du papegau, 118)

Although the word “mappemundi” often refers to a world map, it also names the geographical section of a medieval encyclopedia, and when the narrator refers to “the book called the Mappemundi” to authorize his identification of the Fish Knight, he most likely refers to an encyclopedia. Such works included discussions of the so-­called monstrous races, including the zitiron, described by Albert the Great and other medieval authors as “a sea animal that . . . resembles an armed soldier, for its head is crested with a hard corrugated skin that looks like a metal war helmet; as if hanging from its neck is a long broad sturdy shield.”32 Monstrous races were also represented on actual maps, though, so it is possible that the author’s “book called the Mappemundi” was a map in a book.33 However, Le conte du papegau consistently makes more use of earlier romances than it does of encyclopedic, scientific, or cartographical works.34 Although the narrator refers to an encyclopedia that describes the Fish Knight, it’s more likely that the source of the figure is an earlier romance, and probably the fourteenth-­century Perceforest, which itself cites a famous adventure from the earlier Roman d’Alexandre, the biography of Alexander the Great, translated into many versions over the course of the Middle Ages.35 We see then a series of representations, each borrowing from an earlier version, and the repeated portrayal of a “knight who dwells in the sea” conforms to the notion—­found in Pliny, as well as in medieval authors—­that the world under the sea is like the terrestrial world, with similar beings and similar hierarchies of being.36 One of Alexander the Great’s best-­known exploits is his underwater exploration of the sea. Alexander has a glass vessel built so that he can descend under the water and discover how the inhabitants of the sea live. He sees big fish eating small fish, and he learns how to avoid the traps and ruses that attract the small fish to their demise. Alexander claims that he learned the art of chivalry from these fish; he learned how to do battle using finesse as well as force.37 In the version of this adventure repeated in the fourteenth-­ century Perceforest, Alexander sees not just fish, but fish knights under the

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sea. These chevaliers de mer have heads shaped like helms and they carry arms and practice battles against each other. Fish knights reappear in a later episode of the Perceforest when the knight Berthidés is magically transported to a deserted island and must do battle against fish knights who come out of the sea to attack him as they attempt to protect the island they claim as their own.38 In the Perceforest, the fish knights have become something more than the fantastical zitiron, part fish and part man: these fish knights can walk on land, and in Le conte du papegau, the Fish Knight’s composite nature has expanded to include not just helm, shield, and sword, but also a horse. If Alexander’s voyage under the sea is the ultimate literary source for Le conte du papegau’s marvelous Fish Knight, another of Alexander’s adventures may elucidate the decision by the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds to flay the defeated monster. During their voyage through India, Alexander and his men encounter an animal called Dentirant. This fierce beast has three great horns protruding from the front of its head, so it, too, is an animal that might seem to combine body and weapon under a single hide. The twelfth-­century Roman d’Alexandre recounts the slaughter of the animal in gruesome detail, and then describes how Alexander and his men use the animal’s pelt: Dentirant was killed with violent blows, and then they flayed it and washed the hide. They wanted to display it as a marvel; the hair on it was so beautiful that it seemed gilded. The hide was presented to the king along with the white flesh, and they spread [the skin] on the green meadow in front of his tent. It was so large that one hundred knights reclined on it, playing checkers, chess, and dice games. A maus et a cugniés fu Dentirans tüés, Et puis l’ont escorchié, s’en fu li cuirs lavés, Et veulent qu’a merveille soit par tout esgardés, Que le poil a si bel qu’il semble estre dorés. Li cuirs o la char blanche fu au roi presentés, Devant son tref l’estendent sor l’erbe vert des pres; Cent chevalier i gisent, tant par est grans et les, Qant il geuent as tables, as eschés et as des. (Le roman d’Alexandre, 382; III:1398–­1405)

The slaughtered animal’s hide becomes part of Alexander’s collection. It is a marvel from India, and it is marvelous because of its exotic beauty and

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wondrous size. One hundred knights take their places on the skin; it is as though they inhabit the gigantic hide, as if the flayed skin were a metonymy of the lands Alexander has conquered. Like the other beings and things he collects, the animal’s hide is a trophy of Alexander’s conquering march across India, and a tribute to his sovereignty. It is both a sign and a product of his quest for empire.39 In Le conte du papegau the pelt of the Chevalier Poisson has a similar function. As in Le roman d’Alexandre, it is a trophy and a tribute, here a trophy of Arthur’s victory and a tribute to the Dame aux Cheveux Blonds: skin symbolically figures the lady’s regained sovereignty over her lands. The association of a female sovereign and a territory mapped by skin may have been a familiar one for medieval audiences. The story of Dido’s purchase of the amount of land that could be encompassed by an ox’s hide was known from the twelfth-­century Old French Roman d’Eneas, or from later texts that use Dido as an exemplary figure. In stories about Dido, the French texts significantly expand Virgil’s account of the queen’s use of a skin to claim sovereign lands: they emphasize her agency and her imperial ambitions.40 Le roman d’Eneas recounts that: She arrived in this land and went to the prince of the country. With great cleverness she asked him to sell her as much of his land as the hide of a bull would enclose, and she gave him gold and silver for it. The prince agreed, not suspecting a trick. Dido cut the hide into very thin strips. She took so much land that she founded there a great city. Then she conquered so much by her wealth, knowledge, and prowess that she held the whole country, and the barons submitted to her. En cel paÿs est arivee; au prince vint de la contree par grant engin li ala querre qu’il li vendist tant de sa terre com pourprendroit .I. cuir de tor; donna l’en et argent et or, et li princes li otroia, qui de l’engin ne se garda. Dydo trencha par coroietes le cuir, qui moult erent graillettes, a celi a tant terre prise qu’une cité y a assise, puis conquist tant par sa richece,

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par son savoir, par sa prouesce, qu’elle avoit tot le paÿs, et les barons a souz soy mis. (Le roman d’Eneas, lines 278–­93)

The narrator insists on Dido’s “trick” (angin), which may be explained as a precise use of cutting techniques to create the thin strips of skin that constitute and map her empire. Dido’s use of the skin is repeated by another literary female sovereign: Mélusine, founder of the Lusignan dynasty, counsels her new husband, Raymondin, to request from his lord the amount of land that can be marked off by a stag’s pelt.41 In Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, another medieval text that cites Dido’s ox-­hide trick, Dido has the hide cut into strips instead of cutting it herself. An illumination from a fifteenth-­century French translation of the text portrays the episode with great attention to the process (plate 4).42 At the top, Dido gestures to instruct the man cutting the ox skin, or perhaps she opens her arms to measure or embrace the land she will claim. At bottom, two men encircle Dido’s purchase with a long skin cord, tied in a neat bow. The animal head floating between the pairs of trees seems to merge with the headless pelt in the upper part of the frame, calling attention to the dismemberment that produces the thin strips of skin that map Dido’s territory. Dido literally claims her sovereign land with the flayed skin of an animal, cut into tiny strips; such a claim is also a mapping, perhaps recalling that medieval maps were drawn on parchment, as was the romance that records Dido’s trick. In Le conte du papegau, too, skin and sovereignty are linked, but symbolically, in the flayed skin of the Fish Knight that serves as a marvelous emblem of the lady’s regained dominion over her lands. The pelt of the Fish Knight is like a text to be read, perhaps something like “the book called a Mappemundi” that the author references to explain his iden­ tification of the creature. Both of these are skin texts; both remind us that the romance’s description of the marvelous all-­encompassing skin is also written on a skin, on a parchment page.43 Medieval texts may invite readers to make connections between their content and the skin on which they are written, Sarah Kay has suggested, arguing that some manuscripts highlight the materiality of the parchment or vellum page.44 Although the manuscript pages of Le conte du papegau do not display cuts or other marks that would obviously draw attention to the flaying that produced them, as do some of the manuscript pages Kay studies, the story inscribed on those pages insists on the materiality of skin. Whether displayed as a symbolic map of regained

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lands, or processed and inscribed in the production of a mappemundi, the skins to be read in the text invite us to see the skin pages that record the narrative. Book, map, and skin converge in the slaughter of the Fish Knight recounted in Le conte du papegau. The flayed skin symbolically maps the lady’s claim to her lands, and it materially proclaims human sovereignty over the animal-­like adversaries that would dispute it. Although the Fish Knight is initially portrayed as a chivalric opponent—­he appears to ride a horse and bear armor—­he is finally revealed to be a marvel, a composite being covered in a single hide.45 In the view of all who scrutinize it, this body is a curious artifact to be observed and an animal-­like trophy to be displayed. The Fish Knight’s failure to speak also dehumanizes him. Although rocks and trees reverberate with his cries when he arrives ready for battle, the Fish Knight never addresses his adversary, not even to demand mercy as his wounds increasingly incapacitate him. Because he never explains why he invades the lady’s land or what he wants from it, the Fish Knight’s actions appear to be motivated by an animal-­like instinct rather than political intention, and if he is an animal, so the logic seems to go, his body is available for use: the Fish Knight’s skin is taken as a map of the lady’s sovereignty both over her own land and over strange adversaries who would challenge her for it. The flaying of the Fish Knight is an example of what I am identifying as a technology of sovereignty, the use of animals to serve human needs. I suggested earlier, with reference to Genesis narratives, that such use reveals a conflation of survival and sovereignty. In the postlapsarian world, human nakedness justifies the slaughter of animals that provides pelts for clothing and reinstates human dominion over nonhuman animals. In Le conte du papegau, the conflation of survival and sovereignty justifies the death of the animal-­like Fish Knight. Arthur eliminates a threat to life and lands by killing the monstrous knight, and the lady has the threatening Fish Knight flayed and displays his hide as a marvel.46 Arthur’s defeat of the giant knight may implicitly recall the lesson about politics articulated by Alexander after he observes the behavior of fish under the sea, that is, that finesse and strategy are as important as strength on the battlefield. More important, though, as the story describes the act of flaying the animalized Fish Knight, it takes skin as the material for a symbolic display of sovereignty. And nowhere is animal skin more clearly associated with displays of power and domination than in the opulent furs worn by noble men and women in late medieval France.

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Sovereign Display Animal pelts were increasingly used for human adornment over the course of the Middle Ages, and historian Robert Delort has detailed the environmental conditions, trade networks, and technologies of production that supported the display of human prestige through the managed killing and processing of animals.47 Luxury furs are a “necrofashion,” in Michelle Warren’s term, and they reinforced social status and power relations, as Warren shows in a discussion of sumptuary laws in medieval England.48 In late fourteenth-­century France (where Le conte du papegau was composed), the ostentatious display of furs reached the height of its popularity in the form of the houppelande, a huge fur cloak. A single cloak could be as large as twelve or thirteen square meters and require the pelts of five hundred sables.49 Royal figures wearing the houppelande are represented in plate 5, a frontispiece image from Pierre Salmon’s Réponses à Charles VI that shows King Charles receiving the book from the author. The king’s houppelande is lined with ermine and covered with the royal fleur-­de-­lis, which is also represented on the cushion at his feet and on the wall tapestry.50 Pierre Salmon, the king’s secretary, wears clerical garb. Two sumptuously dressed figures confer on the right. The man on the far right raises his hand in an emphatic or didactic gesture; this is the king’s cousin, Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy, and he wears a black robe covered with his emblems of the carpenter’s plane and level and lined with brown fur.51 The Duke of Burgundy’s houppelande rivals the king’s in lavish construction, a visual reminder that the duke rivaled the king in more than just dress. He was one of the contenders for power in the court of the mentally ill king, and one of a group of nobles who were, as Marie-­Christine Pouchelle has noted, great consumers of furs. In Pouchelle’s words, “it would seem as if . . . the princes’ appetite and greed for power were translated in vestimentary terms by the splendid and menacing signs of the power they craved,” that is, by royal furs.52 Royal sovereignty is further invoked in the image through Pierre Salmon’s gift to Charles. Salmon offers the king a book about government entitled Les demandes faites par le roi Charles VI touchant son état et le gouvernement de sa personne, avec les réponses de Pierre Salmon (Questions asked by King Charles VI about his status and conduct, with Pierre Salmon’s responses). The first section of the book is a mirror for princes, a book about how to govern and how to be a ruler.53 It’s a book written on parchment, on animal skin. The banner Salmon holds in his right hand is a Latin citation of Eze­ kiel 3:3: “Viscera tua replebuntur volumine isto” (Your bowels shall be filled

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with this book).54 This passage is often glossed as referring to biblical study and the memorization of scripture, Anne D. Hedeman has noted, and she suggests that, along with the images, the manuscript of Salmon’s Réponses encourages those who look at it to “devour” its contents and place them in the storehouse of memory.55 The citation makes a rather audacious claim for Salmon’s book by implicitly comparing its wisdom to the wisdom of God’s word, and it does so using a metaphor of consumption. Salmon does not intend for the king literally to eat his book, but rather to digest it, as the Ezekiel citation is usually glossed. Yet the image’s representation of the citation banner alongside opulent furs and a vellum book emphasizes consumption, and in particular, the consumption of animals. Animal skins are here the material, symbolic support for claims to sovereign power. Processed animal pelts make the pages of the book that teaches the king to govern and the ostentatious clothing that displays wealth and power; the reference to filling the king’s bowels might even further suggest the animals that are killed for the king’s meals. The technology of sovereignty that appropriates the use of animals as a symbolic and material support for human life, whether social, biological, or political life, is a biopolitics: it calls on the power to regulate, administer, even produce life. Foucault famously identifies a modern shift from classical sovereignty to biopolitical sovereignty, that is, from the so-­called classical sovereign power to let live and make die, to a modern, biopolitical sovereignty in which power is located in the capacity to make live and let die. Foucault writes, “This was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena particular to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques. . . . For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence.”56 It may be a particular tendency of medievalists to protest claims that begin “For the first time in history,” especially when coming from Foucault, whose thought has been so productive for medieval studies but whose own understanding of the Middle Ages—­particularly medieval sexuality—­was so un-­Foucauldian, as Karma Lochrie has explained.57 But the medieval texts I am examining here—­vernacular bibles, Le roman d’Alexandre, Le roman d’Eneas, Le conte du papegau—­suggest that when we take animal life into account, biological existence is reflected in political existence, and the distinction between classical sovereignty and biopolitical sovereignty becomes less clear. Medieval literary texts allow us to account more broadly than Foucault does for forms of regulation and subjection and for the subjectivities they define. To be sure, the power of the sovereign to let live and make die describes medieval political structures; but sovereignty conceived more broadly, as a

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relationship that requires material and symbolic legitimation, is grounded on the regulation of animal life. Animals are killed in the display and enactment of human sovereignty; such demonstrations require not just animal deaths, but also the management of their populations, whether through husbandry or controlled hunting, whether for fleecing or flaying, whether for labor or food.58 Animals have to live to be killed; the human use of animals depends on the production and maintenance of animal populations. Human sovereignty takes as its originating mode human dominion over animals, and this dominion is demonstrated in the production, management, and taking of animal lives. In other words, human sovereignty is always already grounded on the capacity to regulate life. Although notions of biopower do not normally account for animals, considering them is crucial to understanding power relations that include nonhuman actors, Cary Wolfe has argued.59 Emphasizing Foucault’s rethinking of the political subject as a subject “before” the law in both senses of “before”—­as in front of and as prior to the law—­Wolfe identifies what he calls the “political payoff” of Foucault’s analyses of governmentality as the identification of “how the machinery of power races to maintain control over the forces it has brought into its orbit—­forces that derive in no small part from animal bodies (both human and nonhuman) that are not always already abjected.”60 Wolfe follows Foucault in defining biopolitics as a “relation of bodies, forces, technologies, and dispositifs,” that is, as the coordination of power relations, but he insists that resistance and freedom are constituted not by persons or subjects in the traditional sense, but by “forces and bodies that only partially coincide with what we used to call the ‘subject.’ ” By expanding the notion of who can act, we see that resistance and agency may overlap, but they are not always coterminous and they are not always located in a human subject.61 I find Wolfe’s argument particularly useful for the distinction it makes between resistance and agency; such a distinction allows for an articulation of resistance to technologies of power in which resistance does not align with human agency. What might such a notion of resistance look like, what might such a resistance—­a resistance not necessarily coterminous with agency—­sound like? In the Middle Ages, it might sound like animal voices, the voices of the sable and ermine killed and flayed to provide the furs that adorn noble men and women.

Speaking Skin I turn, finally, to the twelfth-­century Roman des romans, an Anglo-­Norman moralizing poem that imagines the reproaches of the animals made into the

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furs worn by humans.62 In Le roman des romans the anonymous poet recalls the mortality of the human body and censures the worldly appetites that corrupt the soul. Among the worldly practices the poet targets is the wearing of fur, and he condemns the desire for the accouterments of prestige and honor that require animal deaths. The poet’s primary concern is the eternal life of the human soul, and he emphasizes that people should be more worried about their souls than about how well they dress. He scoffs at concern for the well-­being of a body that will die, a body that from a Christian perspective is always already dead. In the poet’s view, vanity inhabits a dead body clothed in corpses. Here are the two stanzas that open the poet’s turn to animal skins:

Our flesh is a putrid decaying carcass Sensitive to heat and cold; It needs mortal beasts for cover And it takes pride in the skin of others. For this reason, I think we are worth little When what we most value is not in ourselves; By wearing the dead bodies and fleeces of others We are almost able to forget our sorrows. Nostre char est charoine e pureture: Tendre est a chaut e tendre est a freidure, De mortels bestes lui estoet coverture: Si s’orgoillist por altri peleüre. Por ceo me semble que malveis pris avons Quant n’est de nos iceo que nos preisons; Por altrui roifes e por altrui toisons, Nos dolentez a bien proef oblïons. (Le roman des romans, lines 133–­40)

The poet begins by describing the vulnerability of the human body, “sensitive to heat and cold,” implicitly referencing the human need to cover the body for warmth, and linking human survival to animal death.63 But then he condemns the desire for animal pelts as an expression of vanity and pride, and he aligns the “putrid decaying [human] carcass” with the corpses of the animals that cover it.

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The poem is a fairly straightforward condemnation of vanity up to this point, even if perhaps unusual in its explicit description of furs as the dead bodies of animals. But then the poet makes a more unusual move. He vivifies furs: that is, he condemns human attachments to the worldly display of privilege and wealth not just by chastising worldly people, but also by imagining the reproaches that could be voiced by the victims of human vanity and human need. “But if the animals could speak,” he says: They would reproach us very harshly That we must cover ourselves with their skin, Eat their flesh, and work their pelts. They could charge us with pride And plead a claim in their own interests; Whoever would judge according to the body Should prize the beast much more than the man. Mes se les bestes seüssent ja parler, Molt nous peüssent laidement reprover Qu’il nous estoet de lor quirs afubler Lor chars manger e lor peals manovrer. Sur nous peüssent nostre orgoil chalengier E a lor oes pleinement desrainier; Qui nous voldreit solom le cors jugier, Molt mielz que home devreit beste preisier. (Le roman des romans, lines.141–­48)

“But if the animals could speak”: the poet imagines a situation contrary to fact; he imagines a world in which animals could speak to protest the carnivorous and vestimentary needs and desires of humans.64 With this “if,” the poet introduces a claim for fiction and the ethical force of imagination, and animals are vehicles for the poet’s moralizing chastisement. Animal bodies are superior to human bodies, the poet claims, because animals survive without wearing the skin of others, and this self-­sufficiency authorizes the animals’ reproaches. And once imagined, the animals’ voices resonate be­ yond the poet’s concern for human salvation to articulate an ethical claim on their own behalf. “But if the animals could speak,” says the poet, “se les bestes seüssent ja parler.” I’ve hesitated over how to translate “les bestes,” that is, over whether

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or not to include the article: “But if animals could speak”—­or—­“But if the animals could speak.” Both “animals” and “the animals” would be correct. “Animals” would indicate an abstract category and “the animals,” a specific group, perhaps specifically those skinned and made into garments or, perhaps, animals as a group of living beings that speak to resist a political order in which their bodies are appropriated and used as material indications of status and power. I could, alternatively, translate “les bestes” as “l’animot,” the neologism Jacques Derrida uses to indicate the plural of an­imals heard in the singular (animot, a singular form, is a homonym of the plural noun animaux; written with the singular article, l’animot is jarring to the ear). Derrida also uses the neologism “l’animot” to emphasize the word itself, le mot, and, by extension, the ability to name, of which the animal is deprived. This privation—­among others—­is often taken to define the animal in opposition to the human: people can speak, animals cannot. But, Derrida suggests, we might question the purity of the terms that structure such a division.65 As he further argues, “it is not just a matter of giving back to the animal whatever it has been refused. . . . It is also a matter of questioning oneself concerning the axiom that permits one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived of.”66 In other words, it’s not just a matter of reversing the definition of animal/human difference according to human ability and animal inability, of giving back to the animal whatever it is deprived of. Simply according voice to animals does not in itself subvert the privation model, nor does it disrupt power structures or hierarchies. So in Le roman des romans, the imagined voices of the animals do not necessarily break down the relations of dominion that subjugate animal bodies to human need. The ethical purchase of the voices imagined by the Le roman des romans is not in the animals’ ability to voice reproaches to humans, but in their call for response. A strong focus of Derrida’s interrogation of animal privation is the idea that animals are capable only of reaction. According to this notion—­which Derrida draws primarily from Lacan—­animals can react but they cannot respond, and they cannot access the concept of responsibility that derives from response; in particular, so the logic goes, they cannot access a notion of ethical responsibility because they cannot respond.67 Such privation would preclude the animal’s ability to enter into governance relations—­to agree to be a subject—­and exclude the animal from full reciprocity in the affective bonds that structure sovereign relations in medieval texts. Le roman des romans offers an elaboration of Derrida’s exploration of the permeable boundary between reaction and response.68 Here, animals not only respond

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to the human use of their skins with reproaches, they call for an ethical re­ sponse from humans. “But if the animals could speak”: in the Le roman des romans, the poet imagines fur as revivified, as the sable, the squirrel, and the little ermine that wear their own fur “without anyone’s objection,” as the poet puts it. Without anyone’s objection the sable Wears its fur every day, But a king takes it as a sign of great prestige When his cloak is bordered all around with it. The squirrel and the little ermine Dress the queen with their small skins, We think it an honor to wear another’s dead body, But our own is food for worms. Whoever would take the skin from a dead man Would shock the living greatly, But you could not name a beast so lowly That it would agree to wear [that skin] out of need. La sabeline, sanz nul recusëor, Est de sa pel vestue a chescun jor; Mais a un roi semble il grant henor Quant sis mantels en est orlez entor. Li cisemus e la petite hermine De lor pelettes afublent la reïne: Henor nos semble d’aveir altrui morine, Mais la nostre est norreture a vermine. Qui d’un mort home voldreit le quir oster, Molt en porreit les vifs espoanter; Mes ne savez si vil beste nomer Qui s’en deignast par bosoing afubler. (Le roman des romans, lines 153–­64)

Insisting again on the fur-­clad human body as a corpse wearing a corpse, the poet again condemns pride, here contrasting the animal that wears its

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own fur and would never wear the skin of a human to the people who think more about the prestige and honor of wearing animal pelts than about their own souls. To be sure, the animal here serves as a vehicle for human voice, the poet’s condemnation of vanity and pride. Animals are doubly instrumental here: they are made into fur, and they ventriloquize the narrator’s reproaches. But the imagined voice of the animal also speaks for the animal, and that’s what makes the passage so interesting and even moving. Animals’ voices insist on the injustice of animals’ deaths in the service of human vanity, human pride, and human life. But they also call for ethical engagement. The idea that animals “would charge us with pride / And plead a claim in their own interests” describes an ethical reproach articulated in legal language; it imagines an animal perspective in which living with humans demands human ethical obligation to fellow creatures. If the animals could speak, they would condemn as unethical a sovereignty that proclaims itself by displaying the corpses of its subjects. These imagined animals are “animals before the law,” in Wolfe’s formulation. As they voice resistance to the human technologies of sovereignty that appropriate their bodies to material need and symbolic display, these imagined animals call for an ethical response from the humans who use their bodies for food and clothing. Their imagined reproaches unsettle the poem’s moralizing gesture of characterizing human violence toward animals as just one among many examples of human vanity and pride. Through poetic imagining—­“if the animals could speak”—­animals “plead a claim” against humans for the failed empathy that enables and justifies the use of animals. If the animals could speak, the poet imagines, they would dispute the definition of animal death as necessary for human survival and would “reproach us very harshly / That we must cover ourselves with their skin, / Eat their flesh, and work their pelts.” h In tracing a series of medieval narrative representations of animal skins used by humans for material and symbolic purposes, my goal has not been to posit an evolution, but to insist on repetition, on a repeated return to the conflation of material and symbolic use that grounds human dominion over animals and, by extension, over human subjects as well. But such use is not only a display of power over animals, or over other humans. It is also, I’ve been trying to suggest, a site of interrogation for medieval thinkers. The

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human use of animals—­as clothes, as food, for their labor—­is both a lesson of the creation story and a question about creation: did God really kill and flay animals? On the one hand, human dominion over nonhuman animals is repre­ sented as part of a world order, and human sovereignty over the terrestrial world is confirmed in the defeat of the strange creatures that would come from the sea to contest it: the Fish Knight’s pelt represents such a reaffir­ ma­tion of human dominion over the known world. On the other hand, though, medieval texts also imagine that flayed animals might resist the “natural” law that subordinates them to human dominion and human use. The identification of human dominion over animals as an exemplary sovereignty, as both a practice of power and a display of power through the use of animal skins, also opens a space of resistance in which animal voices call for ethical response, interest and justice extend to nonhuman actors, and human dominion is contested in terms of animals’ claims to wear their own skins.

c h a p t e r t wo

The Social Wolf: Domestication, Affect, and Social Contract

I

n chapter 1, I argued that the human use of animals is a technology of sovereignty, a symbolic and material deployment of animals and their bodies for the display of human dominion. I call it a technology to empha­ size that the use of animals requires human work and skill: animals have to be slaughtered to be eaten, they have to be flayed to provide skins, and they have to be trained to labor for humans. In this chapter, I explore a differ­ ent, though related technology of sovereignty that takes the management of animal bodies as its object: animal domestication. The processes that force animals to submit to human mastery and human need are often violent, and Karl Steel has convincingly argued that such violence is constitutive of the very category of the human.1 But as I will argue here, human mastery over animals is not imagined only in terms of violence. Literary texts also imag­ ine human dominion over animals in terms of an affective, mutually ben­ eficial relationship, sometimes codified in an agreement between animal and human subjects.2 Such representations are fantasies of a social order in which human dominion benefits animals, and they imagine a contrac­ tual harmony between humans and some animals. To imagine contractual agreement from an animal’s perspective defines submission to mastery as voluntary, or even desirable. Yet in representations of animals as subjects that consider or desire a relationship with humans, medieval literary texts also explore the limits of a social contract that would define human mas­ tery as a response to animal desire. It may seem anachronistic to speak of a social contract in relation to texts written four or five centuries before social contract theory is explicitly defined. I discussed a similar historical “dilemma” in relation to notions of the state and sovereignty in my introduction.3 Here, I use the concept of social contract not to make a claim about origins or anticipations, but to 37

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identify structures of thought and understandings of sovereign relations. Historians have recently begun to explore figurations of consensual politi­ cal contracts in medieval political theory, and although medieval monar­ chies and social relations are different in important ways from later ones, there is nonetheless a distinct recognition of the grounding of social rela­ tions in consensual agreements.4 In this chapter, I argue that literary texts, too, recognize and debate the possibilities and limits of social contracts and the relationships of sovereignty they define. In what follows, I explore representations of the human domestication of animals as characterized by intimacy, dependency, and even love. The pro­ tagonist of my chapter is the wolf, an exemplary wild animal in medieval texts, yet also an animal repeatedly represented in miraculous or marvel­ ous affective relations with humans or other animals. I first examine a set of vernacular creation stories that represent wolves and other animals in explanations of how animals came to be divided into domestic and wild. These origin stories—­two biblical, one from a secular romance—­adopt ani­ mal perspectives to explain how humans lost sovereignty over the natural world. They gloss over the violence that reestablishes human dominion over the animals used for clothing, food, or labor, and they define human-­ animal relationships in terms of affective bonds. I then examine two mira­ cle stories that describe the taming of wolves as a demonstration of a saint’s authority but that also characterize the miraculous domestication of the wild beast as the animal’s acquiescence to care. I turn to a set of fables that imagine animals’ desire for intimate, domestic relationships with humans to argue that these short, exemplary tales enter into the animal’s perspec­ tive by imagining not just an animal’s affective response to care or com­ mand, but also its deliberations about the advantages and disadvantages of a life shared with humans. The animal perspective is pointedly at stake in Marie de France’s Bisclavret; as I demonstrate, this story about a werewolf juxtaposes a king’s gaze with a beast’s and insists on the animal’s point of view. Each genre—­vernacular bible, romance, saint’s life, fable, lai—­makes possible a different kind of thinking, but read alongside each other, these texts collectively describe dominion as an affective relationship desired by animals that live under human mastery, and—­implicitly or explicitly—­they extend these ways of envisioning governance to human interdependence. As a technology of sovereignty, these fabulous and fictive texts work out social agreements through fiction, using representations of animals to con­ ceptualize social relations in terms of mutually agreed upon and mutually beneficial forms of governance.

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Categories of Creation As I indicated in chapter 1, vernacular bibles expand the creation story found in Genesis, explaining the consequences of human sin for relations of dominion in the natural world. In Paradise, humans ruled over animals according to divine fiat, and animals willingly submitted to human mastery and served man “in peace and without strife,” according to the thirteenth-­ century Bible anonyme (“Tout le servit en pais, sans guerre,” line 116). In the perfect world of Paradise, peace also characterizes relations among the animals themselves; there is neither predator nor prey, and all animals are united under the dominion of man. The wolf lies beside the ewe; neither is wary of the other. The stag lies beside the lion, the bear and the griffon are at peace, and the crane is be­ fore the falcon; none moves because of the other. The rabbit is beside the hound, and the eagle beside the hawk. All the animals were intimate, and none was opposed to the other. And the birds and the fish were in peace without strife. Each animal served man according to its abilities. Lai est li loux joste l’oaille, Li uns por l’autre ne soumoille, Li cers dejoste lou lion, Em pais li ours et li grippons Et devant le faucon la grue, L’un por l’autre ne se remue; Li lievres joste lou levrier, L’aigle joste l’oistour muer. Chascune beste estoit privee, N’iert l’une de l’autre adesee Et li oisel et li poisson Erent en pais et sans tançon. Chescunne riens selonc sa guise Rendoit a home son servise. (La bible anonyme, lines 387–­400)

The passage lists the animals by pairs, and the verses appear to be structured by the doubling of animals, yet the pairings also anticipate the enmities that will characterize postlapsarian animal relations. First in the list of compan­ ionable couples is the archetypal predator the wolf and its frequent victim,

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the vulnerable ewe (“Lai est li loux joste l’oaille”), a pairing that brings to­ gether hunter and prey, male and female, wild and domestic.5 But in Para­ dise, these differences are not apparent before the humans sin. According to La bible anonyme, all the animals share a generalized intimate or familiar (“privee”) relationship. Differences among them are secondary to unity, and the text suggests that this unity is defined by their service to humans. Vernacular bibles stress that human sin disrupts the peaceful paradisia­ cal co-­existence of humans and animals. Animals’ submission to human rule lasts only as long as humans are obedient to God’s commands. When sin enters the world, animals revolt against human dominion and begin to fight with each other. The animals turned against Adam when he transgressed the interdiction given to him. They all shunned him and drew away from him and his wife, and they went to war against them. Each animal knew in its own way [in its nature] that [Adam and Eve] had gone too far and openly trans­ gressed God’s commandment. This caused strife among the animals. Preirent les bestes hardement Contre Adan qui ot trespassee Obedïance commandee: Toutes li firent laide chiere Et chasconne se trait arriere Et de lui et de sa moillier Et se prirent au guerroier. Chascunne scoit en sa nature Qu’il avoient passé mesure Et passé le commandement Dou creator apertemant. De ce vint guerre entre les bestes. (La bible anonyme, lines 494–­505)

The animals seem to share God’s perspective as they judge the humans and shun them because they have sinned; the animals know “naturally” (“Chas­ cunne scoit en sa nature”) that human disobedience to God disrupts the order of Paradise and delegitimizes human sovereignty over other creatures. Once they revolt against human dominion, animals lose the unity defined by their submission to Adam’s rule and their relations with each other are characterized by violent strife, as the vocabulary of the above-­cited passage stresses (guerroier, guerre). In La bible anonyme’s account, violence enters

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the world through animals, but because of human sin: after the first humans disobey God’s command, the animals revolt against human dominion and they go to war against each other. We may assume that the wolf and the ewe no longer lie down together in peace. La bible anonyme gives wildness an origin. Wildness is not a natural animal state to be converted into domestication by human dominance, but rather, it is a perversion of a natural state of dominion and domesticity. An­ other thirteenth-­century vernacular bible, La bible historiale, gives a some­ what different account. Here, after Adam and Eve sin, some animals remain submissive to humans. When it describes the animal revolt against human dominion following the Fall, La bible historiale distinguishes between the domestic animals that continue to serve the humans and the wild animals that oppose them. Following his primary source, Peter Comester’s Historia scholastica, the narrator explains that the sin re-­orders man’s relationship to animals: Note here that because of his sin, man lost sovereignty over large ani­ mals like the lion so that he would know that he lost sovereignty be­ cause of his sin. And he also lost sovereignty over small animals like flies, so that he would know his own base nature. And he retained sov­ ereignty over medium-­sized animals so that they could comfort him and so that he would know that he had sovereignty. Et notez cy que l’omme perdi la seigneurie par son pechie es grans bestes si comme es lyons a fin qu’il sache qu’il perdi tele seigneurie par son pechie. Et es petites bestes perdit il aussi la seigneurie si comme es mousches a fin qu’il sache la vilte de lui. Et es moiennes bestes a il la seigneurie pour lui solacier et a fin qu’il sache qu’il y eust seigneurie. (La bible historiale, 22)

The repetition of the word seigneurie in this passage is striking. I translate it as “sovereignty,” a near cognate, but seigneurie also means “dominion” or, in a feudal vocabulary, “lordship.” All these translations reflect La bible historiale’s insistence that man’s relationship with the animals, divided into three kinds in the postlapsarian world, can only be conceptualized in terms of contested dominion.6 Man’s continuing dominion over “medium-­sized animals” is described as a solace and a confirmation of his place in the sovereign order of the postlapsarian world; domestic animals exist to remind him of this natural dominion which is, we understand, a solace to him. In other words, man’s

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relationship with domestic animals confirms his “natural” dominion over animals even as animals are divided into domestic and wild, that is, into those that live with humans and serve them and those that run free. The notion of comfort and solace also hints at the affective bonds between hu­ mans and some domestic animals, perhaps recalling that God first brought the animals to Adam as his companions, so that the first man would not be alone (Gen. 2:18). Affect and sovereignty are joined here, as another ver­ nacular rewriting of the creation story featuring the trickster fox Renart em­ phasizes. Like the vernacular bibles that are its contemporaries, Le roman de Renart describes some animals as living with humans and other animals as living outside the reach of human mastery, and it uses the categories of domestic and wild to describe human dominion over some animals, but not others. The Old French Roman de Renart is a compilation of twelfth-­and thirteenth-­century narratives that recount the exploits of the fox Renart. The various sections of the narrative, known as branches, recount episodes in which Renart tricks other animals or humans, usually to steal food, and the narrative returns again and again to the adversarial relationship be­ tween Renart the fox and the wolf Isengrin. The origins of that enmity are recounted in the branch of the story known as the Enfances Renart (Ren­ art’s Youth), the opening episode in one set of Renart manuscripts.7 The nar­ rator promises to explain the origin of the fox and the wolf, and of the fierce and enduring war between them (“. . . la guerre, / Qui mout fu dure de grant fin, / Entre Renart et Ysengrin,” lines 10–­12), as he finds it written in a book by a certain Aucupre.8 The narrator starts at the beginning (“le conmence­ ment,” line 20), with a postlapsarian version of the biblical creation story. In its unique rewriting of Genesis, Le roman de Renart recounts that Adam and Eve have been expelled from Paradise, but God takes pity on them and gives them a staff, telling them that if they find themselves in need, they have only to strike the sea with the staff. Adam is first to use it: Adam took the staff in his hand and struck the sea before Eve. As soon as he struck the sea, a ewe came out of the water. Adam tint la verge en sa main, En mer feri devant Evain. Si tost con en la mer feri, Une brebiz fors en sailli. (Le roman de Renart, lines 51–­54)

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This account is odd, to say the least, and its relationship to the Genesis creation story is tenuous at best. Does Adam actually create the ewe when he strikes the sea? Or does he somehow call forth an animal he had known in Paradise? The Renart’s creation story is brief, recounted in fewer than sixty octosyllabic lines, and not explicitly contextualized with respect to Genesis.9 It introduces several themes that will be developed throughout the Renart compilation, as other critics have shown. I focus here not on the episode’s relationship to the rest of Le roman de Renart, but on its relation­ ship to other vernacular creation stories.10 As in La bible anonyme, the wolf and the ewe are an exemplary couple, but in the Renart they never dwell together in an intimate prelapsarian unity. In Le roman de Renart, animals are either domestic or wild from the moment they are called out of the sea. When the ewe appears, Adam tells Eve to care for it. Already imagining how to use the animal and process its products, he says that the ewe will provide the humans with milk and cheese. Eve thinks it would be nicer to have a pair of sheep instead of just the one, so she takes the staff and strikes the sea again.11 A wolf emerges from the water, snatches the ewe, and runs into the forest.12 Eve calls for help, and Adam comes to her aid by striking the sea again with the staff. A dog emerges and it runs after the wolf, rescues the ewe, and returns the animal to the humans. Adam regains possession of his dog and his ewe, and he is full of joy and happiness (“Adam ot son chien et sa beste, / Si en ot grant joie et grant feste,” lines 81–­82). He continues to strike the sea and docile animals emerge; Eve strikes the sea and when animals emerge, they run away into the forest. The narrator steps back from the story to summarize its meaning: The lesson of the book is that [Adam’s] two animals cannot live or sur­ vive long if they are not with people. You cannot imagine any animal less able to do without them. Each time Adam struck the sea, an ani­ mal came forth. They kept this animal, whatever it was, and tamed it. [Adam] could not keep any of those that Eve brought forth. As soon as they came out of the sea they went into the woods like the wolf. Eve’s became wild and Adam’s became tame. Selonc la sentence del livre, Ses .ii. bestes ne puent vivre Ne durer mie longuement, S’eles n’estoient avec gent. Ne savez beste porpenser

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Miex ne s’en puisse consievrer. Toutes les foiz c’Adam feri En la mer, que beste en issi, Cele beste si retenoient, Quele que fust, et aprivoient. Celes que Eve en fist issir, Ne pot il onques retenir. Si tost con de la mer issoient, Aprés le leu au bois aloient. Les Evain asauvagisoient, Et les Adam aprivoisoient. (Le roman de Renart, lines 83–­98)

Here domestication is a species characteristic: living with humans is in the nature of dogs (“You cannot imagine any animal less able to do without them”; “Ne savez beste porpenser / Miex ne s’en puisse consievrer”). The Renart’s narrator suggests that domesticity is a consequence of animals’ natural dependency on people rather than the result of humans’ use of ani­ mals for food, labor, and even companionship.13 Adam’s joy in the posses­ sion of his animals (“Si en ot grant joie et grant feste”) emphasizes the affec­ tive bond between the first man and the animal companions that will live with him and serve him. It obscures the animal labor that will ensure hu­ man survival: the ewe will give them milk and cheese, Adam says, and the dog will guard the ewe.14 But Le roman de Renart also suggests that people cannot live without dogs and, in particular, that people need dogs to protect them from the depredations of wolves. Mutual dependence is described as a mutual affection between humans and domestic animals. Wild animals escape both dependency on humans and access to their affections. Domestic and wild are gendered categories in the Renart’s creation story. Eve’s animals become wild, and Adam’s become tamed, the narrator tells us succinctly (“Les Evain asauvagisoient, / Et les Adam aprivoisoient”), defining the first woman as the creator of wildness and adversity, and the first man as the inventor of husbandry and industry. Postlapsarian human sovereignty is gendered by the alignment of the first woman with the wild animals that escape human mastery, the implications of which I address more directly in chapter 4. Here I note simply that Adam’s inability to tame Eve’s animals associates her (yet again) with the introduction of disorder and adversity into the world, even as it genders mastery and social order in Adam’s ability to form affective bonds with the domesticated animals that will serve him.

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The first animals to be created in Le roman de Renart’s account—­the sheep, the wolf, and the dog—­form an exemplary trio, and their various inter­ actions are explored in a variety of didactic literary genres, including bestiar­ ies, miracle stories, and fables. The wolf incarnates the paradigmatic pre­dator, the sheep, the vulnerable domestic animal, and the dog is characterized by its affection for and devotion to a human master. These conventional traits are reinforced through repetition in a variety of stories, but literary texts also imagine that animals might act against expectations, as, for example, when a wolf acts like a dog.

The Wolf, the Sheep, and the Dog Augustine and other medieval authors writing in Latin about animals make the distinction between pecus (cattle) and bestia (beasts), categories that correspond roughly to domestic and wild. The Latin terms are used in a variety of medieval discourses, as Pierre-­Olivier Dittmar has shown, but they do not have equivalents in the vernacular texts discussed above.15 Old French bibles describe a divinely ordained human sovereignty (seigneurie) over animals that seem by their submission to be domestic animals, and La bible historiale also suggests an affective relationship between humans and the (domestic) animals that comfort them. Le roman de Renart extends this affective relationship to include a mutual dependency, and it also sug­ gests the voluntary association of animals with the people who protect and care for them. Within the category of animals that live with people, mod­ ern zooarchaeologists and historians of animals recognize a further distinc­ tion between domestic animals and domesticated animals, that is, between populations of animals in which humans have controlled breeding, and in­ dividual animals that “voluntarily” associate with people.16 Although the distinction is not in general use in studies of animals—­the terms “domes­ tic” and “domesticated” are used interchangeably to name animals that live with humans—­the notion that animals act “voluntarily” suggests that animals may have agency in establishing relationships with people. In fact, zooarchaeologists posit that domestication presupposes a “social medium,” that is, animal populations must reach a certain level of social evolution in order to participate in a symbiotic relationship with humans.17 Le roman de Renart describes domestic animals’ dependence on humans (the ewe and the dog “cannot live or survive long if they are not with peo­ ple”); medieval bestiaries insist not on dependency but on affection: “It is the nature of dogs not to be able to exist without people,” not only because they

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depend on their masters but also because they are devoted to them.18 The early thirteenth-­century bestiary attributed to Pierre de Beauvais elaborates: There are several kinds of dogs. Some hunt beasts, some birds, and others guard houses. And they love their lords so much that it happened that a rich man was seized by his enemies and his dogs rescued him: such is a dog’s love. Plusors manieres sont de chiens. Li un prenent les bestes, li autres oiseax, li autres gaitent les maisons; et por ce aiment tant lor segnors que il avint jadis c’uns rices hom fu pris de ses anemis, et si chien l’en ra­ menerent devant ses anemis: itel amor a li chiens. (Le bestiaire, 226–­27)

Dogs serve humans out of love, the bestiary explains, and it describes a scene of rescue that parallels Le roman de Renart’s account in which the dog res­ cues the ewe from the predatory wolf. In the bestiary, however, the stakes are considerably higher, since the prey the dogs retrieve is their master him­ self, not their master’s animal. The bestiary describes the dog’s affection for its master, but whereas the description of reciprocity or even of a social relationship between human and animal may obscure the violence of training or the manipulation of breeding that domestication requires, it also recognizes the dog as a social being. The dog depends on people for shelter and for food, but also for love, as the bestiary account stresses. The dog’s love makes it forget its master’s violence: “Such is [the dog’s] nature: if its lord beats it and then calls for it and greets it affectionately, the dog comes to its lord and bows before him” (“Sa nature est tele: se ses sires l’a ferus et il le rapele et li fait lie chiere, il revient a son segnor et s’umelie devant lui,” Le bestiaire, 227). A dog usu­ ally crouches or sits, but I’ve translated “s’umelier” as “to bow” in order to preserve the act of feudal deference and submission the verb suggests, par­ ticularly in relation to the dog’s “lord” (“sires”). The affective bond between the dog and the man is stressed even as the dog demonstrates its submission to its master. By contrast, the bestiary characterizes the wolf by its adver­ sarial relationship to dogs, the sheep they guard, and the people they serve; the wolf’s relationship to humans is defined not by love, but by enmity. Gender also distinguishes the loyal (masculine) dog from the treacher­ ous female wolf. In the description of the wolf found in the bestiary attrib­ uted to Pierre de Beauvais, the general characteristics of the predator come first: it cannot turn its neck to see behind itself and it kills other animals for food. Then the narrator turns to the female, explaining when and where the

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she-­wolf bears pups and how it steals lambs. The she-­wolf hunts by night, we learn, and quietly approaches lambs just like a trained dog (“altresi con un chiens afaitiés”); it stays upwind so that dogs will not smell it and wake the shepherd (Le bestiaire, 225). The bestiary’s simile—­the wolf moves like a trained dog—­does not explicitly suggest that the wolf consciously imi­ tates the dog, but the text implicitly recognizes the resemblance between dogs and wolves, and it even suggests that a wild wolf may act like a do­ mesticated dog.19 The wolfish origins of dogs were already lost in the distant past by the time that humans began to record history, though medieval people no doubt recognized the resemblance of the two species.20 It is likely that dogs and wolves sometimes interbred, and it is also likely that medieval people tamed wolves on occasion, perhaps domesticating pups found in the wild. In the early fourteenth century Count Robert of Artois kept a (semi)domesticated wolf in his household, as we know from records of the payments the count had to provide in compensation for his “pet” wolf’s depredations.21 It seems unlikely that this wolf “voluntarily” associated with the count, and what­ ever social relations the animal developed with people must have resulted from training as much as affection. However, training never entirely over­ rode this wolf’s predatory nature, if we judge by its occasional attacks on local sheep, and the notion that a wolf can never really abandon the wild is a persistent one. So too is the notion that a wolf’s apparent desire to change its nature must be a deceptive ploy to take advantage of the unsuspecting: think of the wolf’s impersonation of a grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood or, for a biblical example, Jesus’s characterization of false prophets as wolves in sheep’s clothing.22 In the pastoral culture of medieval Europe, wolves were a persistent threat to flocks and herds, and to the people who depended on domestic animals for food. Although wolves prefer game to livestock, badly guarded domestic animals were easy targets for the predator, and as the size of livestock herds and flocks increased over the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, so did the threat from wolves.23 Frequent wolf hunts were used to control popula­ tions, and there was even a professional designation for wolf hunters, known as “louviers.”24 The name of the wolf itself derives from the word for “ravish­ ment,” the bestiary explains, following Isidore of Seville’s etymology from the Greek and pointing to the animal’s predatory nature.25 The bestiary also genders the wolf’s habit of stealing by naming a human female analogue: foolish women (or prostitutes) are called she-­wolves because they wastefully spend all their lovers’ money (“Et por ce sont apelees les foles femes louves qu’eles degastent les biens de lor amans,” Le bestiaire, 225).26

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The ravening wolf is the opposite of the loyal dog, at least in terms of behavior, yet whether inspired by the idea that a wolf might become a dog or by the comforting fantasy that what predators really want is love, a num­ ber of medieval narratives imagine the domestication of the wolf. It is no coincidence that these are exemplary stories. Like bestiaries, miracle stories and fables use animals to demonstrate truths that matter to humans: as­ cetic devotion to God is demonstrated in a saint’s authority over a ravening wolf, and wolves contemplate the advantages of human care and company in a valorization of “natural” human-­animal hierarchies. In the short narra­ tives I examine here—­episodes from saints’ lives, a select set of fables, and a lai—­wolves “voluntarily” associate with humans, or consider association with humans. These stories emphasize animal agency and choice, and hu­ man mastery over these animal protagonists corresponds to the animals’ de­ sire for the benefits of submission, represented as care and companionship. Dominion is represented as a form of sociability, an affective relation be­ tween humans and their domestic animals that may model other forms of dominion, not just between ruler and ruled, but between husband and wife or father and child.

Miraculous Domestications The thirteenth-­century Vie de seinte Modwenne (Life of Saint Modwenna) recounts that after this British saint establishes her first abbey, she sends her young ward to watch over the abbey’s cow and calf in their pasture. A wolf comes from the woods and snatches the calf. The frightened shepherd boy flees and returns to Modwenna, reporting that a dog has stolen and killed the calf (“Un chien le vus ad tolu / A force pris e abatu,” La vie de seinte Modwenne, lines 255–­56).27 The boy’s identification of the wolf as a dog, also found in the Latin source, is not explained in the text.28 Perhaps the mistake is due to the boy’s fright, or perhaps it anticipates this wolf’s fate, since Modwenna will discipline it to a dog-­like service. In any case, the saint understands that the boy refers to a wild wolf and she tells him to take her staff and return to the field where the wolf is devouring the calf. He should strike the wolf with the staff and order the animal to come to her.29 The boy obeys and, compelled by the saint’s command and perhaps by her miracle-­working staff, the wolf goes to the saint and falls at her feet, crying for her mercy “in its manner” (“en sa manere”).30 Modwenna declares that the animal must change its life; this wolf and all its descendants will no longer prey on domestic herds; they will hunt only wild animals (“Ja mes ne fras dammage / De nule beste, se n’est salvage,” lines 279–­80). But the

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saint does not simply restrict the wolf’s predations; she also imposes an af­ fective relationship on the wild animal. The wolf will now stand guard over the cow, she declares, and they will love each other: “Against your nature, you will love it and follow it like a mother, and it will love you just as it did the calf you ate” (“Encuntre nature le ameras / E cum ta mere siweras / E tu serras de lui amé, / Cum fud li veel, que as mangé,” lines 283–­86). The wolf’s nature has changed, the narrator tells us explicitly, and it becomes “a son and a shepherd” to the cow it now loves (“Or est cum filz e cum pastur,” line 297). This miraculous transformation affects not just the wolf that killed the abbey’s calf, but all its descendants. They are domesticated and tame, “damaches e privez” (line 305), a description that seems to name a relationship to both humans and cattle. These domesticated wolves serve the abbey by protecting the pasture and the cattle from wild wolves. They are “privez,” a word that emphasizes their domestication, but that may also name their intimate bonds with the cattle they guard.31 Recall La bible anonyme’s description of prelapsarian relationships among animals as intimate or familiar: “Chascune beste estoit privee” (line 395). The wolves and cattle seem to have recovered a paradisiacal companionship through a sovereign imposition that is both human and divine; the saint commands through the authority of God. The domesticated wolves’ affective husbandry of the abbey’s cattle is part of the miracle story’s representation of the cross-­species relationships of pastoralism, in Susan Crane’s reading. The wolf, the livestock, the shep­ herd, and the saint are interacting members of a shared environment, she argues, noting the affective language that characterizes their interactions.32 Affective relations are not evenly distributed in the story, however. The wolf loves the cow, but it serves Modwenna, compelled to obey her when struck by her staff. Here domestication is not an affective relationship with a mas­ ter, but with another submissive animal, the surrogate mother that licks the wolf and treats it like a calf. This emphasis on the shared affection of the two animals may seem fanciful or even superfluous. After all, the story of the wolf’s transformation as a recognition of the saint’s authority would not seem to require the two animals to love each other; the transformation of a wolf from a predator to a defender is a change of nature dramatic enough to qualify as miraculous. However, as Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne has pointed out, La vie de seinte Modwenne is a didactic text that consistently moves from the presentation of wonder and marvel to instruction.33 One of its lessons, I suggest, is about the rewards of domestication, described not in terms of an affective relationship between animal and master, but in terms of a shared bond with another animal. The story imagines the harmonious relationship

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between the two animals as an affective compensation for the wolf’s loss of its wild companions, and it promotes the advantages of domesticity and, by extension, the advantages of submission to authority. This is an entirely anthropomorphized idea, of course—­why would a wolf wish for the love of a cow?—­but it posits the benefits of submission and dominion for both animals and humans. In La vie de seinte Modwenne, the wolf is not shown to contemplate its change of nature, nor is it shown to have any choice about its transforma­ tion from a calf-­eating predator to a cattle-­loving guardian. By contrast, in a miracle story about Saint Francis from a fourteenth-­century compilation, a wolf is shown to agree to the saint’s command that it cease its depredations. During a stay in Gubbio, Francis learns that a ravening wolf plagues the town. The saint confronts the animal, reproaches it severely, and demands that it cease its destruction. The wolf immediately submits to the saint’s authority. It lowers its head and lies at the saint’s feet, “as though it had be­ come a lamb” (“jam factus quasi agnus”).34 Francis leads the wolf into town and it follows him, “just like a very gentle lamb” (“tanquam agnus mansue­ tissimus”).35 The description of the wolf’s lamb-­like behavior emphasizes its docility in contrast to its earlier violence, but it also puts the wolf in the place of its usual victim. This wolf comes to occupy the place of a domestic animal, cared for by humans. It does not work for people, like Modwenna’s wolf, but rather agrees to an exchange: the townspeople will provide it with food so that it need not hunt and kill.36 Saints’ lives and miracle stories include many examples of wild beasts voluntarily serving holy men and women, and Francis is particularly known for his attention to and care for animals.37 But Francis’s taming of the wolf of Gubbio is not so much a demonstration of his empathy and understand­ ing of nonhuman creatures as it is a restoration of human dominion over animals, as David Salter has pointed out.38 The saint’s peaceful solution to the town’s woes requires negotiation: the townspeople will feed the wolf every day if the wolf will cease its depredations. When the arrangement is put to the wolf, it nods to show its agreement, and when Francis demands a pledge, it places its front paw in Francis’s hand, an act it later repeats before the townspeople as well. The wolf makes an agreement, even a contract, with the people of Gubbio; this story about the miraculous domestication of a ravening wolf imagines a social contract. It’s not a contract between equals; after all, the townspeople have Saint Francis on their side and could expect the saint to compel the wolf to cease its depredations, as Modwenna does. But Francis doesn’t simply order the animal to obey his command; he arranges a pact between the wolf and the humans, and the wolf’s repeated

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gesture of agreement stresses the negotiated nature of that pact. This mira­ cle story imagines that social order might be established and maintained in a consensual contract between humans and an animal. Contractual relations were omnipresent in thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­ century Europe, whether ephemeral or formally constituted. Nobles and non-­ nobles alike entered into consensual contracts, and corporations defined by mutual agreement proliferated: confraternities were the most visible exam­ ple of such arrangements, but there were others.39 The contractual nature of social order extended to royal power, which was constituted through a set of constantly renegotiated agreements between the king and his subjects. The king benefited from the preeminence of his sovereign position even as that position was constituted and confirmed through negotiations that cul­ minated in the consent to rule and be ruled, and the language of such agree­ ments often expressed consent in terms of mutual feudal love.40 In other words, political order was described in terms of affective relations. Within this context, considerations of the contractual nature of secular power emerged, as Alain Boureau has shown in his study of the thirteenth-­century Francis­ can Pierre de Jean Olivi. The notion of a contractual relationship between sovereign and subject does not in any way diminish the sacral character of royal power in Olivi’s treatise, Boureau notes; political agreement does not necessarily mean democracy. But Olivi defines royal power as a relationship founded on voluntary agreement.41 It’s unlikely that the cleric who recorded the wolf of Gubbio story knew Olivi’s work, even though both authors were Franciscans. In any case, Olivi is concerned about relationships among humans, or between humans and their God; he does not identify animals as contracting subjects. But the wolf’s agreement with the people of Gubbio is clearly a consensual contract. To be sure, in Francis’s wolf story, as in Modwenna’s, beastly acquiescence to human dominion is a response to sanctity and a submission to holy authority. These wolves are not shown to reason about the advantages or disadvantages of life under human care, and both stories emphasize that the animals profit from the change of nature they accept. One wolf gains love; the other, regu­ lar sustenance. If these animals instruct their readers, the lessons they offer are about the rewards and even the pleasures of submission to dominion. However, such lessons become more complicated in fables that represent wolfish debates about domestication. In their portrayals of wild wolves that contemplate the advantages of living with humans, fables imagine a bestial desire for domestication; even though these wolves ultimately refuse to live with humans, fables imagine reasoning animals that debate the attractions of living under human dominion.

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Fabulous Pedagogy Miracle stories are about marvelous transformations that demonstrate a saint’s access to God, and holy power is demonstrated in counternatural ef­ fects: a wild predator guards cattle and a ravening wolf patiently waits for a daily meal provided by grateful townspeople. By contrast, in the logic of fa­ bles, animal nature never changes. Fables use animal behavior to illustrate lessons for humans: the greedy and foolish dog will always drop the cheese it carries in order to grasp the cheese it sees reflected in the river and the voracious predatory wolf will always devour the lamb.42 To be sure, not all fables represent obviously recognizable animal behaviors. The beetle is not usually seen as a proud, overweening creature, as it is in the fable about the beetle that disdains its home in a dunghill and desires to fly like an eagle. But fables consistently represent species characteristics as inescapable: the beetle fails to soar into the sky and returns to its humble abode chastised and resolved to inhabit its proper place in the world. Animal protagonists in fables ultimately remain bound by their species. Nonetheless, they de­ bate whether it is possible to change species characteristics, and the wolf’s desire to participate in human domesticity is one such form of deliberation. Wolves do not become dogs in fables, but these stories represent the pos­ sibility that they might—­not because humans could domesticate them, but because wolves might choose to live with people. Fables circulated widely in medieval Europe and not just in literary col­ lections. They were cited in sermons and illustrated on manuscript pages; scenes from fables decorate the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry. Most were translated from ancient sources, but some were adapted from medieval nar­ ratives like Le roman de Renart.43 Fables share a consistent form; in Jill Mann’s concise definition, the fable “is a story with a moral, it is brief, and it represents animals (or trees or plants or non-­sentient objects) as talk­ ing.”44 A moral, or epimythium, usually concludes the fable and translates animal interactions into a lesson for the story’s human readers. Like besti­ ary accounts that use animals to illustrate religious or spiritual lessons (the dog that returns to its vomit represents those who foolishly return to the sins for which they have been absolved, for example), fables, too, may use animal behavior to teach lessons about faith or piety.45 But fables also offer lessons about human social relations: the dog that drops the cheese it car­ ries in order to try to grasp the second cheese reflected in the river offers a lesson to greedy people: they should take heed, for they will lose what they have and they will not gain more from others.46 The use of fables to repre­ sent lessons about social and, in particular, feudal relations is particularly

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apparent in Marie de France’s twelfth-­century collection, which will be my focus here. Marie’s compilation of fables includes 102 stories and was prob­ ably composed between 1189 and 1208; it is the first attested translation of fables into a European vernacular language.47 When Marie translates the fables, she makes descriptions more precise and the action more dramatic, but her most distinctive intervention is to situate the stories in a feudal context using a vocabulary of lordship, fealty, and betrayal.48 Social rela­ tions among the animal protagonists often suggest feudal hierarchies, and these hierarchies are located in contemporary human social relations when Marie rewrites the lessons that conclude the stories. Social relations be­ tween animals and humans are the subject of several fables, including sto­ ries in which wolves contemplate abandoning the wild to live with humans. Fables are stories that interpret themselves; the concluding moral in­ terprets animal behavior as a lesson for human readers. Often written in relatively simple Latin, fables were teaching tools, used for both grammati­ cal and moral instruction.49 One widely circulating example of the genre, included in Marie de France’s fable collection and others, may reflect on fabular pedagogy.50 In The Priest and the Wolf, the wolf learns the alphabet from its teacher, the priest. The animal repeats its letters after its teacher, “A . . . B . . . C.” Then the priest asks the wolf to say the letters on its own. “I don’t know how,” the wolf replies. The priest encourages the wolf: “Say what you think, spell it!” The wolf’s immediate reply: “Lamb!” (“Li lus li dist: ‘Jeo ne sai quei.’ / —­‘Di que te semble, si espel!’ / Respunt li lus, il dit: ‘Aignel!’” 81:10–­12). The moral of the fable warns against speaking thought­ lessly: “The mouth reveals thoughts when it should speak of other things,” in Marie de France’s concise conclusion (“la buche mustre le penser, / tut deive ele dë el parler,” 81:19–­20). The zoomorphic representation of a bad student as a clueless animal “depressurizes the educational process,” Susan Crane argues, and the species incongruity in this scene of learning suggests the (failed) possibility for change: the priest hopes to civilize the “cruel and cunning” wolf.51 But fables also invite a literal reading, and if we read the characters in the pedagogical relation not as a wolfish human student who fails to learn from his teacher, but as an animal taught by a human—­we might see that the priest attempts to train the animal, and even, perhaps, to train predation out of the wolf by substituting reading for killing and eating. In other words, The Priest and the Wolf imagines the possibility of changing the wolf’s nature through instruction. The Priest and the Wolf emphasizes that thoughts will out: “As for the thoughts, so for the mouth,” the priest says (“tel en pensé, tel en la buche,” 81:14). In Sarah Kay’s reading, the beast that so frankly speaks its desires

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puts into question the uniqueness of human language as it calls for a recon­ sideration of the relationship of language to appetite in human speech.52 As Kay shows, in The Priest and the Wolf desire is revealed in bestial speech, but other fables reveal that speech also imposes the hierarchies of power and justice under which the wolf will realize its desire for the lamb. In one of the most famous Aesopian fables, The Wolf and the Lamb, the two epon­ ymous animals drink from the same stream. The wolf complains that the lamb disturbs him. The lamb replies, using a language of political deference: “How so, my lord?” (“Sire, de quei?” 2:10). The wolf claims that it cannot drink because the lamb has troubled the water. When the lamb points out that it is downstream from the wolf, the wolf challenges it: “What? Are you insulting me?” (“ ‘Quei!,’ fet li lus, ‘maudiz me tu?,’ ” 2:18). The lamb replies that it meant no disrespect. The wolf then complains that the lamb’s father similarly prevented it from drinking six months earlier. The lamb questions why the wolf reproaches it for that incident, since it wasn’t yet born. The wolf’s response: “And what difference does that make to me?” said the wolf. “You con­ tradict me and you do what you shouldn’t do.” Then the wolf seized the small lamb, strangled it with its teeth and killed it. “E ke pur ceo?” li lus ad dit. “Ja me fez tu ore contrere e chose que ne deussez fere.” Dunc prist li lus l’aignel petit, as denz l’estrangle, si l’ocit. (Les fables, 2:26-­30)

The relationship between the wolf and the lamb is defined by power and predation, but doubly articulated through language: the fable tells the story, of course, identifying its protagonists in the first line (“Ci dit del lu et de l’aignel,” 2:1), and the two animals define their differences through a lin­ guistic exchange in which the contentious wolf always has the last word over the naively contradicting lamb. That is, the fable moves from menac­ ing speech to predatory power, and the concluding moral extends the lesson about wolfish predation to human social relations. In an elaboration of her source, the Latin Romulus Nilati, Marie de France reproaches the rich lords, viscounts, and judges who exercise their power unjustly. They exploit the less powerful, she writes, and “take their flesh and skin, just as the wolf did to the lamb” (“la char lur tolent e la pel, / si cum li lus fist a l’aignel,”

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2:37–­38).53 Marie’s epimythium stresses an analogy between animal and hu­ man behavior: powerful men treat the less powerful like the wolf treats the lamb, but her example of such behavior—­taking flesh and skin—­also refer­ ences the exploitation of animals by people, a use of animals that I defined as a technique of sovereignty in chapter 1. The Wolf and the Lamb is a fable about power, and in La Fontaine’s ver­ sion it gives us the aphorism “might makes right,” or more literally, “the reason of the strongest is always the best” (“la raison du plus fort est tou­ jours la meilleure”). Reasoning and power are joined in speech, as Jacques Derrida has emphasized in a consideration of this same fable, where he un­ derscores the performative nature of fabulous discourse: “The point is, as the fables themselves show, that the essence of political force and power . . . passes via the fable, i.e. speech that is both fictional and performative.”54 In other words, the fable offers an example of political force and power issuing from the fictive speech, and the fable itself is exemplary of fictive speech that articulates political force and power: the fable is both a fiction about speech and power and a performative conjoining of the two. And in this fictional performance, the wolf figures the sovereign in that it simultaneously speaks in the name of the law and violates the law. In its use of feudal vo­ cabulary, Marie’s version of the fable stresses the contractual nature of the feudal relation between the wolf and the lamb, even as the wolf violates the pact, suspending law and logic to devour the lamb.55 Derrida stresses the etymological grounding of the genre in speech (“fa­ ble” comes from the Latin for, fari, “to speak”). The Old French verb fabler (or fabloier) glosses the nature of this speech: fabler means to speak, to tell, to recount, but also, to lie; the substantive fable means a story you can learn from as well as a something you shouldn’t believe.56 Fabler is then different from vocare, the discursive performance of dominion that describes Adam’s naming of the animals. Vocare means both to name and to call, and for many medieval authors, Adam’s naming of the animals according to species is taken as a moment in which human dominion over animals is enacted.57 Vocare articulates an act of sovereign decision, differentiating the animals from each other and from the human who names them; Adam calls nonhu­ man animals into subjection. By contrast, fabler insists on fictive speech. It describes telling and recounting rather than naming and calling, and defines a kind of storytelling: here the animals that speak and act in order to illus­ trate moral lessons for humans may also question species hierarchies and reveal the workings of power. And nowhere is the fabular nature of fables more apparent than in stories about the wolf’s desire to leave the wild and live with humans.

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The Attractions of Domestication Fables circulated long before the social changes in thirteenth-­century Eu­ rope that historians have characterized as constituting a contracting so­ ciety.58 Even so, some fables suggest the grounding of power relations in mutual agreement. Such a social arrangement is represented not in their moralizing interpretations, but in the stories themselves. Wolves consis­ tently fail to become dog-­like in fables, where species characteristics are generally shown to be immutable, but by opening the possibility that the wolf might change, fables introduce the idea that wolves might wish to live with people, to share the abundance of their homes and the pleasures of their company. Such representations initially define relationships of dominion in terms of intimacy and mutual benefit, but the benefits of domestication are ultimately revealed to be structured by hierarchies of labor and privilege.59 These fables view domestication from the animal’s perspective: wolves seek the advantages of domesticity, but refuse the chain of domestication. There are many fables about wolves; in Marie’s collection, the wolf ap­ pears in more fables than any other animal. It is most often a resolutely predatory beast, and its nature will always manifest itself, as the priest’s failed attempt to teach a wolf illustrates in The Priest and the Wolf: a wolf can only ever think of predation. The brief account preserved in The Wolves explicitly makes this point. According to an old example, I recount here that wolves grow old in the skins they are born in. They wear them all their lives. You can teach a wolf to be a priest, but it will still be a wolf, sly and cruel, ugly and hideous. Par veille essample recunte ici que tuit li lu sunt enveilli en cele pel u il sunt né; la remainent tut lur eé. Ki sur le lu meïst bon mestre quil doctrinast a estre prestre, si sereit il tut dis gris lus fel e engrés, leiz e hidus. (Les fables, 65b:1–­8).

The shift from the generic “wolves” (“wolves grow old”) to the example of “a wolf” (“you can teach a wolf”) emphasizes that individuals are always bound

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by species characteristics. A priest’s robes may cover the wolf’s skin—­this image may recall the biblical warning about false prophets who are wolves in sheep’s clothing—­but holy attire cannot change the wolf’s nature. The inherent constancy of animal behavior precludes moral judgment of the animal, since it acts according to its nature. It is only the translation of animal behavior into a lesson for humans that gives a moral meaning to animals’ acts. The fabular notion that a “sly and cruel” wolf could change its behavior is very different from the marvelous change of nature found in miracle stories about wolves, where the animal is compelled to change and compensated with affective connections. Fables open the possibility that a wolf might be taught, that it might be trained out of its predatory nature, even as they always return to the “inevitability of animal behavior.”60 In other words, fables ask the questions: might the wolf change, might it be disciplined or taught? Or will it always return to its “nature”? The narrator of The Wolves cites an “old example” (“veille essample”) that illustrates the wolf’s inability to change its skin. This “old example” could easily have been the exemplary story The Priest and the Wolf, and in fact, the short narrative in The Wolves could well serve as an alternative epi­ mythium for that fable. It is a fragmentary text and the story it was attached to has not survived, so we don’t know if the fable it moralizes included a representation of the wolf’s desire to change, or simply to deceive, or if it represented the wolf’s desire at all. A fuller account of the wolf’s own con­ templation of change is found in two other fables from Marie’s collection. The Wolf and the Dog makes domestication a choice of the wild ani­ mal. It asks not whether a wolf can become a dog, but whether a wolf will become a dog. In Marie de France’s version of the fable, when the dog and wolf meet, the wolf expresses envious admiration for the dog’s sleek and well-­fed appearance. The dog explains its well-­being in an enumeration of the pleasures of domestication: “I eat well and I have enough, and all day long I sleep in a soft place. I lie at my lord’s feet and every day I gnaw on bones, that is what makes me big and fat.” “. . . jeo manguz bien, si ai asez, e suëf gis puis tut le jur; par devant les piez mun seignur puis chescun jur runger les os, dunt je me faz e gras e gros.” (Les fables, 26:8–­12)

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Submission brings rewards, the dog claims; by lying at its master’s feet, the dog never has to worry about having enough to eat. It seems that the dog shares the benefits of its master’s dominion over other animals, since it chews on their bones. In this account, domestication confers comfort and privilege. The dog invites the wolf to join him. If the wolf will agree to obey a mas­ ter, it will never go hungry.61 Convinced by the promise of abundant food, the wolf agrees to act like the dog—­that is, to submit to human mastery—­ but hesitates when it sees the chain around the dog’s neck. The dog explains that its master uses the chain because otherwise the dog would bite and damage things; it is released at night to guard the house from thieves. The wolf balks at such restriction: “What?” says the wolf, “you mean that you can only come and go with his permission? You stay and I will go, for I would never choose a chain! I would rather be a wolf and free than to live well in chains, since I have the choice. You go to town, I will go to the forest.” “Quei?” fet li lus, “est il issi que aler ne poëz fors par li? Tu remeindras, jeo m’en irai; ja chaene ne choiserai, meuz voil estre lus a delivre que en chaeine richement vivre, quant uncore pois estre a chois. Va a la vile, jeo vois al bois.” (Les fables, 26:33–­40)

In the wolf’s refusal to become a dog, the claim that “I would rather be a wolf and free” aligns its wolfish identity with wildness, and wildness with freedom; the wolf would never give up its ability to choose when and where it goes. If the chain is the price of meat and bones, the wolf will remain hungry and free. Marie’s fable ends with the brief lesson: “The chain put an end to their friendship and companionship” (“Par la chaene est departie / lur amur e lur cumpaignie,” 26:41–­42). There is no further narratorial intervention to explain the lesson of this short fable; its meaning seems to be condensed in the concluding lines that describe the short-­lived friendship between the wild animal and the domesticated one. The chain is the emblem of this failed unity; the mark of the dog’s submission to a human master is also

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the mark of the incompatibility between the wolf and the dog.62 If we read the wolf’s desire to live freely (“a delivre”) in relation to human political hierarchies, the last lines of the fable could offer a subversive lesson about the value of freedom over the constraints of feudal subordination, however, such a reading seems unlikely for a medieval audience composed entirely of people subordinated to the authority of others in some form or other. And in fact—­unusual for her collection—­Marie’s version of the fable does not explicitly extend its lesson to humans. There are many medieval versions of The Wolf and the Dog, and in all its versions, the fable centers on the opposition of wildness and domesti­ cation, and it is always structured as a debate about the relative value of each. The story was included in virtually every medieval compilation of fables, and it was also used in sermons and other moralizing genres, but the narrative offered two possible (and contradictory) readings, as Jean Batany has shown.63 In the first, commonly found in fable collections, the dog that speaks for its master recalls the reprehensible behavior of those who serve powerful lords and use their positions to exploit subordinates. In the second interpretation, found primarily in sermons and exempla, the dog’s chain represents Christian order and obedience to God, while the wolf is “the sin­ ner devoted to the worldly corruption, pleasure and vanity that bring more tribulation and pain than service to God,” in the words of Jean Gobi’s early fourteenth-­century Scala Coeli.64 The two interpretations reflect the differ­ ent values of constraint: in the first, voluntary submission to a secular lord is a strategy of those who would use that lord’s position to gain and abuse power over others; in the second, constraint is associated with voluntary and salvific submission to God. The protagonists of the story are not always a wolf and a dog. In a late twelfth-­or early thirteenth-­century collection of fables translated into He­ brew by Berechiah ha-­Nakdan, a hungry lion meets the fat dog. Here the dog mocks the suffering lion, then counsels it to “be among men and keep guard for them, to carry their burdens and serve them as a slave.”65 The lion reproaches the dog for its pride. It accuses the dog of failing to discern be­ tween honor and disgrace and associates the dog with a heritage of servitude in “the custom of your fathers who were bound to flocks of sheep to keep them, and fixed by a nail to the crib of an ass” (109). The lion further claims it is better “to be without a ruler and meager of fatness than to be a willing slave for the sake of abundant food,” adding that it would be better to suffer in freedom than to dine on loaves of bread while enslaved (109). The moral advises the man whom the king honors to heed the lion’s admonition, and the narrator adds that it is better to be among those of lesser power than to

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be bound to the table of others. Here, domestication is synonymous with slavery and constraint is opposed to freedom. But constraint is not always seen as slavery, as we’ve seen, and as a version of the story found in the fourteenth-­century Dialogus creaturarum further demonstrates. Translated into French by Colart Mansion in 1482, this version features a wild hoopoe and a domesticated parrot, and the lesson of the story chastises those who would envy religious people because they appear to have plenty of food and drink and seem to work only at singing and praying. When those envious people try to enter into religion, they will learn how hard it is to live a virtu­ ous life, “enclosed under the will and power of others.”66 In all versions of the story, the encounter of the wild beast and the do­ mesticated animal—­usually the wolf and the dog—­is less a confrontation between the two animals than an internal conflict for the wild animal, Bat­ any notes. The wolf discovers that becoming a dog means wearing a chain—­ “s’enchienner, ce serait aussi s’enchaîner” is Batany’s apt characterization (“becoming dog would also mean becoming chained”)—­and must decide if the rewards of domestication are worth its costs.67 The fable indicates that the wolf has a choice in its own domestication, and it shows the wolf delib­ erating and rejecting that choice. The Wolf and the Dog imagines the possibility of an affective relation­ ship between two animals united under a human master which might re­ semble that described in St. Modwenna’s miracle. Of course, in the miracle story the wolf is compelled to submit to the saint’s rule, it does not choose, and its friendship with her cow compensates its loss of freedom. In the fable, the friendship between the wolf and the dog is imagined, but then is lost when the wolf chooses not to wear a chain in submission to humans. If miracle stories suggest the possibility of social contract in stories about wolves living with humans, fables emphasize deliberation and choice, and they may also imagine an animal’s desire for social relations not just with other animals, but also with people. In The Two Wolves, another of Marie’s fables, the wolf protagonists la­ ment that people shun and avoid them: “no man dares to be with them, even when they do not intend to steal from him” (“. . . nul hum nes osot atendre, / tut ne vousissent il rien prendre,” 87:3–­4). The two wolves decide that they will do a good deed to earn humans’ trust and respect. They see peasants at harvest and go to help them. The people shout at them to scare them away, and the first wolf complains to the second: “Look,” he said, “see how they shout at us, they wish us ill, and they promise even worse! Our good deeds are no more valuable to these

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people than our bad ones. Let’s retreat quickly to the woods and live like we used to.” The wolves promised and swore that they would never again do any good deed. “Veez,” fet il, “cum nus escrient: mal nus veulent, e pis nus dient. Nostre bienfet ne vaut nïent plus que li maus vers ceste gent. Hastivement al bois alums, seüms si cum nus sulïums.” Iluc jurerent e pramistrent, jamés bien ne ferunt, ceo distrent. (Les fables, 87:23–­30)

The fable describes a failure to communicate; the people do not understand the wolves’ intention or even that the wolves might have an intention that is not threatening.68 Wolves hunt, they don’t harvest, or at least this is the per­ spective of the people working in the fields. Like other fables, The Two Wolves ultimately endorses a status quo that corresponds to settled species behavior. But the fable also questions whether change is possible, and it represents wild animals that wish for a different relationship to humans.69 The fable imagines wolves that want to be like dogs; they offer their labor in exchange for affec­ tion. However, accustomed to wolves that take rather than give, the humans do not recognize that the wolves offer their labor in exchange for social rela­ tions. These wolves have not contracted with the humans, like the wolf of Gubbio, but their contemplation of a gift that is also an exchange suggests a desire for recognition that would lead to mutual benefit.

Wolf and Man Humans exercise dominion over the natural world through the domesti­ cation of animals, according to vernacular bibles; in Le roman de Renart creation divides animals that live with people and serve their needs from those that threaten people and menace the animals humans keep. Miracle stories describe ravening wolves compelled to live peacefully with people and even to serve them; fables imagine wild wolves that contemplate the attractions of domesticity but refuse domestication. All of these texts imag­ ine power relations in terms of a willing animal submission to human sov­ ereignty, whether in figures of animals that enjoy the affective and material rewards of domestication, animals that refuse human mastery, or animals

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that fail to communicate effectively their desire for social relations with humans. The contested relationship between a desired domesticity and the requirements of domestication is at stake in all of these stories; in Marie de France’s lai about a wolf-­man the relationship between domesticity and domestication takes a more menacing form. Bisclavret begins with a scene of troubled domesticity. An unnamed wife reproaches her husband for his weekly absence from home; she fears that he goes to visit a lover. The knight reassures her and in response to his wife’s persistent questioning, reveals that for three days each week he transforms into a werewolf. The wife uses this information to betray her husband. She goes to a neighbor who has long sought her love and she promises to marry him if he will steal the clothes her husband leaves hidden when he takes wolf form. The neighbor complies and the knight is trapped in the form of the bisclavret, a word that the text uses for both the werewolf’s name and his kind.70 Bisclavret then lives in the forest until the king comes upon him while out hunting. The wolf runs to the king and embraces his foot, dem­ onstrating his submission and soliciting the king’s protection.71 Responding to this extraordinary gesture, the king takes the animal under his protection and ultimately makes it possible for the knight to resume human form. This story has several medieval analogues, and all of them describe the king’s care for the beast. Marie de France’s version emphasizes the feudal relationships that structure the story, and she aligns dominion and domestication in the representation of the wolf as a vassal who chooses submission to a lord.72 Many readers of Bisclavret have emphasized that the king recognizes the wolf’s gesture of submission as demonstrating the beast’s human-­like intelligence—­that is, he understands that this is no ordinary wolf.73 When the wolf kisses the king’s foot, the king identifies the beast’s voluntary sub­ mission as a marvel: “Lords,” he says to his men, “come and look at this marvel, how this animal bows down. It has the intelligence of a man, it asks for mercy” (“ ‘Seignur,’ fet il, ‘avant venez / e ceste merveille esguar­ dez, / cum ceste beste s’umilie! / Ele a sen d’ume, merci crie,’ ” lines 151–­ 54). The king’s speech recalls the bestiary account of the dog that bows down (s’umelie) before its master to show submission; in Bisclavret the wolf chooses to become dog-­like.74 The dog’s submission is in its “nature,” according to the bestiary; the wolf’s is not. In Marie’s lai, the wild wolf’s recognition of the king’s authority is marvelous not just because the wolf is a wild animal, but also because it uses a gestural vocabulary that the king understands.75 And although the king takes the wolf’s submissive gesture as a demonstration of its human-­like intelligence, submission could also be seen as an animal-­like quality, or even as the very definition of an animal, as

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Karl Steel suggests.76 The king’s description of the bisclavret suggests both identities. On the one hand, the wolf willingly submits to human mastery, and the king treats it like a dog.77 He takes the animal back to court and has it watered and fed. The wolf accompanies the king like a loyal canine; it sleeps in the king’s chamber and appears fully domesticated.78 On the other hand, the king insists that the wolf has human intelligence. The wolf that submits to the king’s authority acts like a vassal. The king sees the reflection of human intelligence in the wolf’s act of feudal submission, but he also sees a recognition of his own authority: the king’s sovereignty is re­ flected back to him in the beast’s act of homage. We might even say that the king sees himself from the beast’s perspective. The domesticated wolf is an intimate of the king and lives peacefully at court until it unexpectedly attacks the knight who collaborated with the bisclavret’s wife to betray him; later it attacks the wife as well, biting off her nose. The wolf’s violence is puzzling to the king and his courtiers. In an attempt to make sense of the animal’s unusual behavior, one of the king’s advisers notes that the wolf has never acted violently before; it must have some grudge against the woman and the man it attacked (“alkun curuz a il vers li / e vers sun seignur altresi,” lines 249–­50). Critics usually take this judgment as another recognition of the wolf’s human-­like intelligence. The attack is not explained by instinct or some notion of the animal’s natural wildness; rather, the wolf must have acted for some reason intelligible to humans. But the bisclavret’s attack on the woman and her new husband has also been identified as the wolf’s most dog-­like behavior; for Susan Crane, it recalls stories of avenging dogs, like that of the Dog of Antioch that iden­ tifies and attacks its master’s murderer. As Crane notes, the bisclavret is both the dog-­like avenger and the human victim of betrayal.79 The wolf’s behavior is human-­like or it is dog-­like, but it is also very wolf-­like. The at­ tack on the knight and particularly the vicious nose-­amputating attack on the wife demonstrate the predatory behavior of a ravening wolf. From this perspective, the wise man’s words to the king seem to identify a lapse of do­ mestication: “It has never before attacked a man or shown malice” (“Unkes mes hume ne tucha / ne felunie ne mustra,” lines 245–­46). The king’s counselor suggests that the way to understand the wolf’s be­ havior is to see from the wolf’s perspective: it must have some reason for act­ ing as it did. This wolf can communicate using conventional signs of feudal submission, as when it asks for the king’s mercy by kissing his foot. Such a gesture is extraordinary when performed by an animal, but legible because it conforms to a conventional sign of fealty to a king. The wolf can make signs, but it cannot speak to explain its actions, and through signs, it communicates

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submission, but not the reasons for its aggression. Or to put this another way: the wolf’s communication of submission to the king’s mastery is intelligible to the king, but its enmity toward the king’s vassals needs explanation. And in order to know what the mute beast thinks, the wise man suggests that they have the wife tortured. She will speak for the wolf: “Torture the lady so that she will tell you why this animal hates her so. Make her say it if she knows! We have seen many marvelous adventures in Brittany.” “Kar metez la dame en destreit, s’alcune chose vus direit, pur quei ceste beste la het. Faites li dire s’el le set! Meinte merveille avum veüe ki en Bretaigne est avenue.” (Bisclavret, lines 255–­59)

The king’s counselor suggests that the wolf’s aggression is either a marvel or will be explained by a marvel. The relocation of the marvelous is no­ table here. The wild wolf’s submission to human mastery is no longer the marvel it was when the wolf kissed the king’s foot. This wolf has become dog-­like; when it acts like a wild wolf, it’s the wolf-­like behavior that must be explained by a marvel and it appears that the wolf’s marvelous behavior can only be explained in the lady’s voice: she must speak because the beast cannot, she must explain the wolf’s point of view to the king and his cour­ tiers.80 Even when refracted through the lady’s knowledge, the text insists on the wolf’s point of view: “She will tell you why this animal hates her so” (“vus direit, / pur quei ceste beste la het”). The appeal to the wolf’s perspective is repeated when the king restores his clothes to the wolf. The animal ignores them, and the wise man once again counsels the king to try to understand the animal’s perspective. “It will never put its clothes on in front of you or change its beastly form. You do not understand. It suffers from great shame. Have it led into your chamber and take the clothes with it, and leave it there for a while. Then we will see whether it will become a man.” “Cist nel fereit pur nule rien, que devant vus ses dras reveste

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ne mut la semblance de beste. Ne savez mie que ceo munte. Mult durement en a grant hunte. En tes chambres le fai mener e la despueille od li porter; une grant piece l’i laissuns. S’il devient huem, bien le verruns.” (Bisclavret, lines 284–­92)

The notion that the wolf is ashamed implies that for the wolf to put on clothes, it would have to show itself as naked, and shame at its nakedness prevents it from changing form in front of onlookers. Shame is a particu­ larly human emotion when described as a reaction to nakedness, and the wise man’s insistance on the bisclavret’s shame recognizes the humanity under the wolf’s skin: this wolf is a werewolf. Miranda Griffin notes that the distinction between nudity and the awareness of it is crucial in the un­ derstanding of the human within the beast in Bisclavret.81 The story’s em­ phasis on nudity and shame points to an awareness of the human within the beast in Bisclavret and other, similar werewolf narratives, and the wolf’s transformation into a man once left alone with his clothes seems to confirm the wise man’s suggestion that it was ashamed to change in public. The werewolf’s shame may suggest that the human man is never fully wolf, but retains the sensibilities of a man even in beastly form. However, the king and his vassals cannot know that the wolf is one of their own before the wife confesses her crime and speaks for the mute beast. Their appeals to the wolf’s perspective suggest not just that the wolf has the intelligence of a man, but that the beast might have a point of view.

Consensual Social Contracts My claim in this chapter is that literary texts use an animal’s point of view to think about the nature and limits of social contracts. The question of what or how an animal sees is a recurrent question in animal studies, and if the goal is to understand how an actual animal sees or understands the world, fictional texts may appear to be a particularly unlikely place in which to interrogate an animal’s point of view. The animals of fables, in particular, would seem to offer little insight into an animal’s perspective; even the most critical anthropomorphism brought to bear on fables is unlikely to find much to say about the animal’s view of its own world, or how it experi­ ences its environment, or what matters to an animal in its own existence.82

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My concern, however, is not to discover what medieval literary texts may tell us about the animal’s experience of its world, but to understand what the appeal to an animal’s perspective may suggest about the human subjects who composed, read, recited, and enjoyed those texts, and in particular, about the domestication and the mastery of animals as a model for relations of dominion that extend into humans’ relations with other humans. In historian Eric Baratay’s understanding, “point of view” names both a stance from which to see and a perspective informed by that stance.83 For Baratay, taking animals’ points of view into account is not an attempt to see only as the animal sees—­that is, to capture a purely animal perspective, unmediated by human texts or records. Such a perspective is inaccessible to the historian, he claims, but human records, read differently or with atten­ tion to different aspects of their content, may allow for an understanding of how animals experience and shape their relationships with humans.84 Medi­ eval fiction more obviously deploys animal perspectives to support human objectives, as a reading of Marie de France’s werewolf story through her wolf fables suggests. The reasoning, speaking wolves that debate the advantages of domestication in fables make visible the alignment of domestication and feudal loyalty in Bisclavret. And although the lai repeatedly returns to a claim for the wolf’s perspective, such a point of view—­expressed by a wolf-­ man and refracted through human interpretation—­explains animal-­like be­ havior in terms of human acts: the wolf’s animal-­like gesture of submission is a sign of feudal fealty, its brutal attack on the wife is an act of revenge, its failure to change form is motivated by shame. However, even as literary texts fictionalize animal perspectives to endorse human social hierarchies, they acknowledge the affective relationships that organize human-­animal interactions and the sociability that shapes them. They imagine that social relations of domesticity, that is, of animals and humans living together, are defined not just by a divinely decreed human dominion over the natural world, but by the choice of animals to be ruled by humans. The political work of these literary texts is to put dominion into relation with desire and consent and to represent governed subjects as willingly subjected, even as they reveal ambivalence about whether such a choice results from a “natu­ ral” desire or an interested calculation. And this is where the lai may inform a reading of Marie’s fables. By insisting on the animal point of view, Bisclavret draws attention to the ani­ mal perspectives imagined in the fables. Although wolves contemplate or even desire the advantages of domestication, they ultimately reject submis­ sion to human mastery and to the sociability that masks it. Fables use the animal’s point of view to represent animals’ resistance to the intimate sov­

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ereign relations that define domestication and domesticity; they represent animals as subjects that can choose or reject a human master. But as the fables and the lai represent both the perspective of the wild animal that re­ fuses the benefits of domestication in order to live hungry and lonely in the wild and the view of the wolf-­man whose voluntary submission confirms the king’s sovereignty, these texts redefine sovereignty as an elective, affec­ tive relationship, seen in relation to animals.

chapter three

Becoming-­Animal, Becoming-­Sovereign: Skin, Heraldry, and the Beast

T

o wear the skin of another being is a sign of power and prestige in the noble courts of medieval France. Elegant luxury furs display human dominion over the natural world, but they more obviously signify position and privilege, as well as the power of particular humans over others. When noblemen and women wear the prized furs of small animals, they proclaim an identity, but they do not identify with the beasts; wearing an ermine is different from being like the small animal. Shared human-­animal being is imagined in medieval stories about werewolves, but even as the human in the skin of the wolf adopts some of the beast’s behaviors and perspectives, an enduring human identity persists.1 Werewolf stories emphasize the humanity of the beast, but other texts insist on human access to beastly qualities, imagining that an animal’s skin may transfer its qualities to the human who wears the pelt. Icelandic sagas represent many such mergings. In the thirteenth-­century Prose Edda, for example, Loki puts on a hawk’s pelt and is able to fly, and a number of texts describe the berserker, a warrior who dons a bear or wolf skin to adopt the animal’s fierce qualities. The Old Norse term berserkr may mean “bear-­shirt” (derived from ber, “bear”) or “bare-­shirt,” that is, partly naked, without armor or mail, as described by Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth-­century Ynglinga saga: “[Odin’s] men went [into battle] without mail coats and were as wild as dogs or wolves, they bit their shields, were as strong as bears or bulls; they killed people, but they themselves were hurt by neither fire nor iron; this is called going berserk.”2 Whether their name is derived from what they did wear (bear-­shirt) or what they didn’t (bare-­shirt), the berserkers were known as warriors who became animal-­like when wearing animal pelts. The mad rage that contributed to the warrior’s ferocity in battle was a transformation that resulted from putting on an animal’s hide, whether a bearskin or a wolf skin.3 68

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Transformation is semantically aligned with animals in the Old Icelandic word “hamr,” which means “shape,” including the nonhuman shape assumed by someone with special powers, but it also names animal skin or the wings and feathers of a bird.4 This semantic relationship between transformation and animal skins takes narrative form in sagas about humans who become like animals when they wear their pelts. In another example, from the thirteenth-­century Volsunga Saga, Sigmund and his son Sinfjotli come upon two sleeping, spellbound men, sons of kings. Wolf skins hang over them and they can shed them only every tenth day. Sigmund and Sinfjotli don the skins and find they cannot remove them. They have become like wolves, and they speak and understand the wolves’ language: “The weird power was there as before: they howled like wolves, both understanding the sounds.”5 The wolf-­men communicate with each other, apparently using a wolfish tongue, and they adopt the behavior of wolves, running through the forest and attacking the men they encounter. When they are finally able to come out of the wolf skins, they burn them to destroy their spell. Stories about men who become like animals by wearing their skins rep­ resent a transformation analogous to what Deleuze and Guattari have called “becoming animal.” Becoming is not about what one becomes, but the pro­ cess of becoming, they explain; it is about relationships rather than systems or structures. Becoming is anomalous, it changes dimensions, it deterritorializes: “Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-­ animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become.”6 Me­ dievalists have used this critical concept to think about both fantastic and ordinary bodies: the becoming-­wolf and becoming-­human of the werewolf, or the becoming-­animal that characterizes the assemblage of horse and rider in the figure of the knight.7 We might also describe the berserker use of animal skins as a becoming-­animal, or a becoming-­bear. Such examples expose a dynamic space of indifferentiation between the animal and the human, a narrative moment in which hierarchical identity categories are in flux and in which the animal and the human encounter each other in new ways: as concepts, as identities, and as protagonists. To be sure, medieval romance representations of becoming animal usually end in the firm reinstatement of human identity, and usually noble human identity.8 But in moments of animal-­human encounter that represent a becoming-­animal, we discover the symbolic and material processes through which human distinction from the animal is repeatedly reinstated, even as such processes are revealed as never fully complete.

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In this chapter, I examine two Old French romances in which animal and human identities merge. Both romances were composed at around the same time the sagas were recorded, and although they do not represent the warrior culture of the Old Norse texts, I suggest that like the sagas, they describe a becoming-­animal that ultimately enhances the protagonists’ humanity or humanness, even as it suggests the imbrications of human and animal. In Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier au lion (The Knight of the Lion), the protagonist Yvain takes the identity of his fierce companion animal. This late twelfth-­century romance represents the appropriation of an animal’s identity not just through naming, but also through heraldry, a symbolic use of the animal’s image. Displayed on arms and armor, heraldic insignias are abstract representations that signify identity for individual knights and for noble fami­ lies, and in Le chevalier au lion, the lion is both protagonist and sign, companion and symbol for the Knight of the Lion. A more literal inhabitation of animal identity is represented in the early thirteenth-­century Guillaume de Palerne (William of Palermo), where animal pelts disguise human identity and emblazoned shields reveal it. In both these romances, animals communicate as signs and through signs; in both romances, disguise and recognition of human identity—­and ultimately of sovereign status—­are described in terms of animality. In both these texts, though in different ways, animal-­ human relationships articulate relationships of protection and exile which, in turn, establish relationships of dominion and sovereignty. Ultimately these romances represent not just sovereign humans in the skin of an animal, but also the sovereign in the beast.

The Bear and the Lion In courtly romances, if noble knights identify with animals, this iden­ti­ fication remains metaphorical; chivalric skill is based on innate ability or training and practice, and although knights may be compared to animals (Yvain fights “like a hungry lion among deer” in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion), courtly knights do not seek to appropriate animal qualities by wearing their pelts.9 The animal skins worn by knights are luxury garments that demonstrate status and wealth; only peasants and those who live outside court culture wear unprocessed hides. This sartorial distinction is underscored in Le chevalier au lion, a romance that repeatedly uses animal skins to stress the difference between protagonists who participate in courtly culture and those who live outside it.10 Early in the romance, knights seeking adventure encounter a giant herdsman who guards wild bulls and wears their freshly flayed skins; later the knight Yvain, suffering from madness and

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living like a wild man in the forest, brings the animals he kills to a friendly hermit, who flays them, cooks the meat, and sells the skins. And still later in the story, Yvain begins his adventures as the Knight of the Lion in a battle with a giant clothed in a bearskin. Yvain and his lion have taken lodging with a nobleman whose lands are besieged by Harpin de la Montagne, a cruel giant who has captured the nobleman’s sons and demands his beautiful daughter in exchange for the sons’ lives. These children are the nephews and niece of Yvain’s companion, Gauvain, and Yvain wishes to protect them out of love for his fellow knight, so he agrees to do battle with the giant. Harpin arrives and demands the daughter, whom he plans to give to his men for their pleasure, as he describes with somewhat startling precision: “A thousand naked flea-­ridden wretches will be with her constantly; debauched and base men will abuse her” (“De garchons ara un millier / Avoec li souvant et menu, / Qui seront pooulleus et nu / Tix com ribaus et torchepos / Qui tuit y metront lor escos,” Chevalier au lion, lines 4114–­18). The giant’s threat provokes the knight, whose anger seems motivated as much by the mixing of classes as by the promised rape: “It would be a great misfortune if such a beautiful high-­born creature were given to wretches” (“Trop seroit grans mesaventure / Se si tres bele creature / Et de si haut parage nee / Estoit a garchons ja donnee,” lines 4135–­38). The threat to the young woman from the brutal, apparently lowborn giant strengthens Yvain’s resolve to defend her and rescue her brothers. The difference between the courtly knight and the menacing Harpin de la Montagne is emphasized in the text. The giant’s enormous size, his brutality toward the nobleman’s sons, and his crude threats to the nobleman’s daughter all mark him as a monstrous being who lives outside of courtly culture and courtly codes. The giant’s garb also marks his outsider status: he is clothed in a bear’s pelt. The bearskin suggests animality, not only because it is a pelt and not a tailored garment but also because the lack of courtly clothing has already been associated with the loss of reason and human culture in the representation of Yvain as a naked madman earlier in the romance.11 Dress underscores the opposition between the primitive giant and the courtly knight. Whereas the giant wears only a bearskin, Yvain is covered by his armor. [Yvain] goes to strike [the giant] in the middle of his chest which he had armed with a bearskin. The giant advances from the other side with his stake. Sir Yvain strikes him in the middle of the chest with such a blow that he pierces the skin; blood stains the point of his lance like a sauce. The giant strikes him with his stake and makes him bend down.

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Sir Yvain draws his sword, with which he could strike great blows. He found that the giant was unprotected, for he was so confident in his strength that he did not deign to put on armor. Ferir le va en mi le pis Qu’il ot armé d’une piax d’ors. Et li jaians revint le cours De l’autre part atout le pel. En mi le pis l’en donna tel Mesire Yvains que la pel fausse. El sanc du cors en lieu de sausse Le fer de le lanche le moulle; Et li jaians del pel le roulle Si que trestout ploier le fait. Mesire Yvains l’espee trait Dont il savoit ferir grans cox; Le jaiant a trouvé desclox Qui en sa forche se fioit Tant que armer ne se deignoit. (Le chevalier au lion, lines 4190–­4204)

I have used the awkward translation “his chest which he had armed with a bearskin” to stress the verb armer (to arm) and to underscore the conflicting perspectives of the knight and the giant. The narrator tells us that the giant wears a bearskin as armor, but the knight does not recognize the pelt as a protective covering. Yvain thinks the bearskin demonstrates the giant’s hubris, since apparently he does not consider armor necessary in the battle with the knight. The passage plays on the similarity—­to the eye, if not to the ear—­of “le pel” (the stake) and “la pel” (the pelt), identifying them as the giant’s arms and armor, and the passage assimilates the bear’s pelt and the giant’s own skin when it describes the blow with which Yvain “pierces the skin” (“la pel fausse”) and wounds the giant. Yvain’s encounter with the bearskin-­wearing giant brings together not just the courtly knight and the brutal giant, but also two animals and two ways of using animals, since the noble knight Yvain also covers himself with an animal. After encountering the lion that becomes his companion, he hides his identity beneath the sobriquet le chevalier au lion, which could mean “the knight of the lion” or “the knight with a lion.” But whereas the text stresses the relationship between the knight and his living lion, the illuminators of the two extant illustrated manuscripts of the romance double

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the lion with a symbolic representation: they show the knight with arms bearing an image of the animal.12 In Princeton Garrett 125, a thirteenth-­century copy of the romance, Yvain’s defeat of Harpin is illustrated with an image of the knight carrying a shield emblazoned with the figure of a lion rampant (plate 6). Harpin de la Montagne is on the right, as tall as Yvain on his horse. The giant raises his sharp stake as Yvain strikes his uncovered neck and the lion comes to the aid of the knight, threatening the giant from behind. The illuminator has represented Harpin in a cloth robe; his bearskin is absent and he appears unarmed apart from his stake. The posture of the lion that attacks Harpin on the right is literally echoed in the lion rampant represented on Yvain’s shield; both lions reach forward, their claws spread like fingers in an animating reach that enlivens the symbolic image on the knight’s shield.13 The shape of the shield is continued by the horse’s head, bowed into the point of the triangle. The composition suggests that the image on the shield is a use of the animal similar to the use of the horse. That is, the use of animals for labor is aligned with the symbolic use of an animal as a sign of human identity and prowess. And in the prominent display of the knight’s shield and the elision of the giant’s bearskin armor, the image represents not just Yvain’s victory over the giant, but also the triumph of heraldic symbolism over the literal use of an animal’s pelt. The lion has displaced the bear in this image, and the symbolic appropriation of the companion animal has displaced the use of an animal’s pelt as armor, suggesting that heraldry is the refined, courtly way to cover oneself in animality. The episode in which Yvain confronts the bear-­clad Harpin de la Montagne stages several cultural shifts. The knight—­who has earlier fallen in love while watching a lady read from a psalter—­is aligned with a literate, bookish world. He is a romance character who belongs to the court and to clerical culture.14 Harpin’s crude threats, violent actions, and bearskin armor locate the giant outside of courtly culture and the customs of chivalric battle that organize it, but also perhaps in a past time when warriors wore skins instead of metal.15 Whether or not the confrontation suggests a temporal or technological shift from skin to metal armor, the victory of the courtly knight accompanied by the lion over the brutal bear-­clad giant points to what Michel Pastoureau has identified more broadly as a displacement of the bear by the lion in medieval symbolism. Venerated in early European cultures, the brown bear became the target of what Pastoureau describes as a millennium-­long campaign by the Church to eradicate pagan ursine cults, and the twelfth century was the culminating moment of this change.16 By the time of Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion, then, the bear had lost

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its place in the symbolic hierarchy of animals, and the Knight of the Lion’s victory over the bearskin-­clad giant may echo the victory of the lion over the bear in the contest for symbolic primacy in medieval Europe.17 More important for my argument, however, the episode stages a confrontation between the use of an animal’s skin for protection and perhaps inspiration and the symbolic display of an animal as an identifying sign. If the displacement of the bear by the lion is implicitly at play in Yvain’s confrontation with Harpin de la Montagne, so are two ways of using animals to display identity and power.

The Heraldic Animal Yvain meets the lion that becomes his companion as he travels through the forest. He hears a loud cry of pain and follows it to find a lion fighting with a fire-­breathing serpent, or dragon (serpent). The serpent holds the lion by its tail and breathes fire over its back. The knight thinks he should intervene, but he hesitates: he does not know which animal he should save. He decides to rescue the lion because it is a noble beast and the serpent is evil and cruel.18 Yvain kills the serpent and then turns to protect himself from the attack he expects from the lion. However, the lion demonstrates not its wild nature, but a submissive gratitude: Hear what the lion did then: it acted nobly and honorably, showing that it submitted to the knight. It stood on its hind legs, joined its forepaws and reached them toward the knight, and bowed toward the ground. Then it knelt down again and its face was wet with tears, a sign of humility. Sir Yvain is certain that the lion asks him for mercy [or: thanks him] and that it bows before him because he saved the lion from death by killing the serpent. Oyés que fist li leons donques: Il fist que frans et deboinaire, Quë il li commencha a faire Samblant quë a lui se rendroit; Et ses piés joins li estendoit, Puis se va vers tere fichier, Si s’estuet seur .ii. piés derrier, Et puis si se ragenoulloit Et toute se faiche moulloit De lermes, par humilité.

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Mesire Yvains par verité Set que li leons l’en merchie Et que devant lui s’umilie Pour le serpent qu’il avoit mort Et lui delivré de la mort. (Le chevalier au lion, lines 3392–­3406)

The narrator’s direct address to his audience draws attention to the extraordinary behavior of the lion (“Hear what the lion did then”). It kneels before the knight in a gesture of both feudal homage (“Semblant quë a lui se rendroit”) and animal submission (“devant lui s’umelie”). Its tears demonstrate its affective response to the knight, and the lion devotes itself to Yvain in gratitude: “It will stay with him always, for it wants to serve and protect him” (Tous jours mais avec li sera, / Que servir et garder le veut,” lines 3414–­15).19 Yvain has become the Knight of the Lion. Yvain is one of  King Arthur’s best-­known knights, probably at least in part because of his appearance in Chrétien’s romance, and he appears in a number of subsequent Arthurian narratives. When his arms are described in these texts, his shield is always emblazoned with a lion.20 Similarly, in collections representing the heraldic insignia of Arthurian knights—­a relatively popular genre in the late Middle Ages—­Yvain’s emblem is always the lion.21 Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion recounts how Yvain comes to be identified as the Knight of the Lion, earning renown under this name while hiding his true identity. The association of Yvain and the lion proves to be an enduring one, and it is translated into heraldry, as in the illumination representing the battle with Harpin de la Montagne in plate 6. The appearance of coats of arms in Western Europe was connected to the evolution of military equipment in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As armor became increasingly complete, covering faces and making recognition difficult, shields were emblazoned with signs to identify their bearers.22 Le chevalier au lion references this practice in two ways. First, after his lady repudiates him, the knight Yvain adopts the identity of the Knight of the Lion, defined both by his companion animal and the image emblazoned on his arms. For Yvain, the symbolic use of the animal hides his true identity and proclaims the adopted one. Second, in a later episode, Yvain and Gauvain confront each other in a judicial battle in which the fully armed knights cannot identify each other. They do not see each other unarmed, and each wears armor different from his usual, recognizable arms: Gauvain has put on different armor and Yvain claims the identity of the Knight of the Lion, a personage unknown to Arthur and his court. The knights are equally

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matched and the judicial question is resolved only at the end of the day when they discover each other’s identity and refuse to continue the battle. Le chevalier au lion never explicitly says that Yvain adopts the animal’s image as an emblem, as does, for example, Guillaume de Palerne in the ro­mance I will discuss below. Chrétien’s narrative specifies only that the knight adopts the name of his companion animal. Illuminators make this as­sociation, however, as in plate 6. In fact, in the two extant illuminated manuscripts of Le chevalier au lion, the knight is represented with the blazon of the lion even before the lion becomes his companion. In plate 7, also from the Princeton manuscript, Yvain is represented on the left holding a shield emblazoned with the lion rampant as he strikes the serpent that holds the lion’s tail in its mouth. The tall and skinny lion looks back at the knight and its mouth is open in a gesture hard to interpret: perhaps it signals its gratitude, or perhaps its open mouth is meant to signal the possible attack that Yvain fears. A later manuscript insists more on the entanglement of lion and serpent in the scene. In BNF fr. 1433, produced in France in the first half of the fourteenth century, both the knight’s shield and his horse bear the lion insignia (plate 8). At left, the knight intervenes in the battle between the entwined serpent and lion. In the direct center of the image, the horse’s head and stylized lion’s head on the horse’s robe meet, suggesting—­like the merged shield and horse’s head in plate 6—­the close relation between the two chivalric uses of animals, one practical and one symbolic. At bottom right, the lion kneels before the knight, his body parallel to that of the lion represented on the horse’s robe. It demonstrates its gratitude and shows its submission, looking up at the knight in a gesture that brings its nose to the foot of the stylized lion, as though the living lion submits to the heraldic animal. The manuscript illuminations insist on the symbolic use of the lion, parallel, in Virginie Greene’s reading, with the fictional use of the lion. Yvain’s animal is an “adstraction,” in Greene’s neologism, that is, it results from an act of imagination that pulls the general toward a fictional particular. This “nonexistent particular,” the fictional lion, is a site of thought, Greene argues; it marks a moment in which the text calls attention to its own fictionality and to the operation of logic that fiction articulates. For example, in the moment of narrative delay in which Yvain considers animal nature, the knight uses his knowledge of lions and serpents in general to decide whether to res­ cue the lion or the dragon he sees before him. Heraldic images are also adstractions, Greene explains: a general understanding of lions is particularized in a sign of individual identity.23 And in this sense, the fictional lion and the heraldic lion come together; both are adstractions, that is, both are particu-

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larized examples of a general notion of “the lion,” a notion that recognizes the qualities associated with the animal without necessarily knowing the animal. After all—­and we see evidence of this in the images—­how many medieval people had ever seen a lion? The relationship between the fictional lion and the logic of heraldry is further represented in the romance itself. In what Eugene Vance describes as Chrétien’s best semiotic trick, the Knight of the Lion arrives at a castle with a lion on his shield, in this instance not the representation of a lion, but the lion itself, wounded in a battle and carried on the shield as on a litter.24 But the lion is not the only heraldic beast portrayed in the romance. Yvain’s encounter with the lion—­the encounter in which he uses his knowledge of the universal to characterize the particular—­includes both a lion and a serpent. Lions and serpents appear to have been among the first figures used for heraldic representation.25 Yvain’s deliberation about which animal to save when he encounters the fighting lion and serpent is then a comparison of two heraldic animals. His choice is based on an understanding of animal nature, but it echoes the priorities of heraldic representation. The lion is the most commonly portrayed animal in medieval heraldry. Around the year 1200, 60 percent of coats of arms representing animals featured the lion.26 Pastoureau claims that in the earliest French and Anglo-­Norman literary texts, the lion was the most commonly represented emblem for Christian knights, whereas pagans’ shields featured the dragon or the leopard.27 It seems that Yvain’s reading of the contest between the lion and the dragon has Christian overtones, even if the knight does not make them explicit. The lion, a representation of Christ in medieval bestiaries, confronts the serpent, an animal embodiment of Satan in creation narratives, as I will discuss in chapter 4. In other words, Yvain’s choice has symbolic meaning, and the lion becomes not just his companion but also a symbol and the knight’s most distinctive trait, included in his name and emblazoned on his shield as an identifying mark. The heraldic emblem is a kind of text. As a sign of identity, it is meant to be read or, sometimes, misread. Knights disguise their identities by changing the blazons on their arms, as Gauvain does in the episode I mentioned from the end of Le chevalier au lion. But regardless of whether it reveals or hides identity, heraldry functions as a cover. In Vance’s words, “It is a social outside of an identity which has willingly concealed itself inside a coat of armor and has become, thereby, private and inscrutable.”28 The emblazoned armor, like the adopted name, covers the knight, both hiding and displaying the Knight of the Lion’s identity.29 Yvain’s adoption of the identity of his companion lion in his name and heraldic insignia is a symbolic becoming-­animal; the romance does not

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suggest that the knight himself becomes a lion. But the knight’s passage through leonine identity allows him to regain his lady and his position as lord and protector of her lands. In this text sovereignty—­here lordship over a wife and a fief—­is defined in terms of protection. The Lady of Landuc needs a champion who can defend her fountain, and for this reason, she is willing to marry Yvain and “make him lord of her lands and of herself” (“Je le feray . . . Segneur de ma terre et de moy,” lines 1805–­6). When Yvain leaves her lands to participate in tournaments, the text does not specify who defends the lady of Landuc’s lands, but after she repudiates Yvain for his failure to return as promised, the fountain and the territory are without a protector. And just as she was persuaded to marry the knight because she needed a protector for her fountain, after her estrangement from Yvain, the lady is persuaded to reinstate him as “lord of her lands and of herself” because, again, she needs a knight to protect her lands. Le chevalier au lion puts animal identity, protection, and sovereignty into relation. It represents a knight’s passage through a symbolic animality that ends in a sovereign position defined by the ability to protect and defend. A similar trajectory is represented in Guillaume de Palerne, a romance that brings together protection, animal identity, and animal skins in a more explicit becoming-­animal in which sovereignty itself is at stake. Here animal identity—­as a disguise or as emblazoned on a shield—­is like a second skin, an essential identification, but one that can be adopted, removed, or changed at will.30

Hand and Hide The thirteenth-­century Guillaume de Palerne represents skin as both immutable and mobile, as both a constraint and as a means to escape constraint. Disputed successions and contested sovereignty organize the plot of Guillaume de Palerne, and in its focus on exile and protection in descriptions of human identity lost and recovered and of animal transformations and animal disguises, the romance suggests that sovereignty is aligned with animality: second skins foreground an alliance of the beast and the sovereign. The romance begins with two plots to thwart proper succession to a throne. Alfonso, the son of the king of Spain, is transformed into a werewolf by his stepmother, who wishes to secure the kingdom for her own son. Alfonso will be trapped in the wolf’s body until the spell can be reversed.31 This lost heir in the skin of a wolf is doubled in the story by Guillaume, the lost son of the king of Apulia, kidnapped as a baby by Alfonso the werewolf to save him from a murder plot. The wolf cares for Guillaume until the child

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is found and taken in by a cowherd who raises the noble boy as his own son. The emperor of Rome meets Guillaume while out hunting one day and recognizes the boy’s noble bearing. The emperor takes him back to court, where the adolescent Guillaume and the emperor’s daughter Mélior fall in love. No sooner do they reveal their love for each other than they learn that the emperor of Rome has agreed to Mélior’s marriage to the king of Greece’s son. The young lovers decide they must flee Rome. Mélior’s cousin and con­ fidante Alexandrine comes up with the idea that they should disguise themselves in animal skins. There in the kitchen are many flayed animals, goats and does and stags and bears. These are frightening beasts, none will see them and not back away rather than approach them because they are so cruel and strong and fierce. I do not see any other way, but if you could be sewn inside the pelts, you would never be recognized. In that way, I think you could be protected and leave this land. I do not see any other solution. Laval en cele grant quisine A escorcié bestes pluisors, Chevrex et dains et cers et ours; Ce sont bestes c’on molt resoigne, Nus ne les voit qui ne s’esloigne Ains que vers eus ost aprismer, Tant sont cruel et fort et fier; N’i puis autre conseil veoir, Mais se poiés des piax avoir Et dedens fuissiés encousu, Ja n’estrïés reconneü; Ensi porrés, je cuit, garir Et de la terre departir; N’i voi nule autre garison. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 3012–­25)

Alexandrine points to the slaughter and flaying of animals for food since the pelts—­located in the kitchen, not in a tannery—­seem to be a surplus by-­ product of butchering. These skins could become second skins, she proposes, and the disguise would have the added benefit of inspiring fear. Inhabiting animal skins is a solution to the lovers’ dilemma. Alexandrine goes to the kitchen to procure skins in which to disguise the lovers. The narrator insists on the butchery that happens there:

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She goes straight to the kitchen, and she knew to go straight to the flayers who were flaying stags and bears and many kinds of animals. From them she chose two large intact skins, two from white bears and one from a serpent. A la quisine s’en vint droit, Bien i sot faire son esploit Et va droit as escorcheors Qui escorchoient cers et ors Et bestes molt d’autres manieres. .ii. en choisist grans et plenieres De .ii. blans ors et d’un serpent. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 3057–­63)

This is a curious passage. First, there’s a contradiction in the text: it describes taking two skins and then describes three. And why are there bears and serpents in the kitchen? Bear was an exotic meat and it was not commonly consumed in the Middle Ages; we might assume that serpent was an even less common dish. Eating or serving bear may have been a marker of status or wealth, perhaps implicitly recalling a dangerous hunt and the feat of overpowering and killing a ferocious wild beast.32 That would certainly reinforce Alexandrine’s claim that the bearskins would inspire fear, but it doesn’t explain why they are white. It may be that the white skins suggest a magical quality of some kind, as do representations of white animals, especially deer, in other medieval literary contexts: Alexandrine’s choice might then imply that people would stay away from the white bears because they feared magical or marvelous creatures.33 We can assume she takes skins large enough to cover the lovers, but otherwise we can only speculate; the text does not state why Alexandrine takes bearskins, and there is no explanation for why there are white bearskins in a southern Italian kitchen.34 Mélior and Guillaume don the skins, after forbidding Alexandrine to join them in their flight from Rome (presumably she would have worn the serpent’s skin). When the lovers are covered in the skins, they are so well disguised that they don’t recognize each other’s humanity: When they were sewn inside the skins they did not recognize each other. No matter how long anybody looked at them, they would not seem to be anything other than fierce frightening bears.

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Quant es piax furent encousu, Si sont andoi desconneü: N’est nus qui tant les esgardast Qui autre chose li samblast For que d’un ors felon et fier. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 3105–­9)

In these lines, the rhyme emphasizes sewing and disguise (encousu/desconneü); the “natural” threat of the bears is constructed by the clever seamstress. Alexandrine worries, though, about how the disguised lovers will eat during their flight: “But God help me, I do not know what to say about how you will eat” (“Mais, si me face Diex pardon, / De vo mengier ne sai que dire,” lines 3026–­27). Guillaume doesn’t share her concern. The lovers will live from their love, he says, and from herbs, flowers, and plants—­they will need nothing more. It turns out, though, that they do need more; although Guillaume initially dismisses Alexandrine’s concern, her question about how the lovers will obtain food anticipates their need for the werewolf’s help. The lovers’ encounter with Alfonso the werewolf underscores the difference between becoming a beast and wearing a disguise: the werewolf hunts like an animal, whereas Guillaume and Mélior are helpless in their skins.35 The lovers fear discovery too much to seek (or steal) food from a passerby on the road. The wolf has no such fear, and it attacks a peasant, takes the food he carries, and brings the meal to Guillaume and Mélior at the end of their first night of travel. The lovers hear the wolf approaching and they fear the emperor’s men have found them, so when they see the animal they are puzzled but not afraid. The wolf lays the meal before them and Guillaume and Mélior marvel that God sends them sustenance through “a mute beast” (“une beste mue,” line 3310). This identification notes the animal’s lack of reason, but also underscores the difference between the beast that cannot speak, the man Alfonso transformed into a wolf, and the beasts that speak, the humans Guillaume and Mélior in their animal disguises.36 The short scene that follows further emphasizes the humanity beneath the animal skins. First, the wolf brings the lovers bread and cooked meat; Guillaume and Mélior eat human food, not the raw meat that wolves (or even white bears) would eat. Second, the lovers eat like people. They bring their hands out of the skins to eat the food the wolf has brought them. Each one draws a naked hand from under the skins they had put on, for she who put them in the skins left an opening so that they could use

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their hands as they wished. They pass each other pieces of food through the mouths in the skins, but they have no sauce or salt and they have no wine or anything else to drink. But if the wolf can provide they will have something to drink before they finish eating. Cascuns a traite sa main nue Fors de la pel c’avoit vestue, Car cele qui es piax les mist A l’enkeudrë ensi le fist Que chascun puet sa main avoir Si com lui plaist, a son voloir. Par les geules qui sont es piax S’entrepaissoient des morssiax, Mais il n’i ont sausse ne sel N’il n’i boivent ne vin ne el; Mais se li leus puet esploitier, Ançois que laissent le mengier Aront il, se il puet, a boire. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 3321–­33)

The narrator describes the skins as clothing: the lovers are dressed in them (vestue), and the pelts have been tailored and fitted to their bodies. But the passage also draws attention to the humanity of the hand drawn out of the animal skins. It emphasizes the utility of the hands the lovers use to feed each other, and it gestures implicitly toward the skillful hand that sewed the lovers in the skins, leaving an opening through which they might reach out. Up to this point in the story, the lovers have used their hands as animal feet, as the narrator explains in a curious comparison: “They go on all fours like a hound” (“A .iiii. piés vont comme viautre,” line 3147). Although the enterprising Mélior had tried to gather berries and nuts before the wolf brought food, and presumably she had used her hands to pick the fruit, the narrator does not say so explicitly. He saves the description of the lovers’ ability to reach out through the openings in the skins for the scene of eating and for an emphasis on the lovers’ use of their hands to feed each other. What I am identifying as an insistence on the humanity of the hand that reaches out to eat is echoed in other medieval medical and scientific understandings of the human hand. For some ancient and medieval philosophers, the hand demonstrates human distinction from other animals, particularly in relation to eating. Aristotle notes that the joints of human arms bend in the opposite direction to those of quadrupeds “to facilitate the bringing of

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food to the mouth, and other uses to which they are put.”37 Isidore of Seville writes that “the hand, manus, is so named because it is of service, munus, to the whole body. It gives food to the mouth, does all work and carries out all things; by it, we give and receive.”38 William of St. Thierry describes a crucial physiological distinction of humans as dependent on the hand that allows man to eat without taking his food directly from the ground. His mouth and lips are more refined than those of animals, and can thus cultivate an “articulated and modulated” voice with which to speak reason.39 In William’s view, humans speak because they have hands. And hands and mouths together serve reason through writing: “It is a great gift to reason that we can speak through our hands through writing, that the sound of letters can in some way be compressed into characters made by our hands.”40 Writing may also be subtly recalled in the description of the disguised lovers’ hands reaching out from the skins: “Each one drew a naked hand from under the skins they had put on” (“Cascuns a traite sa main nue / Fors de la pel c’avoit vestue,” lines 3321–­22). Although the verb vestir (to put on, to dress in) suggests that the disguise is like clothing, the animals skins the lovers wear might recall the animal skin of the page on which their story is written. The juxtaposition of human hand and animal hide could then figure the inscription of texts on skins through the faculty of the human hand. That is, the story may recall the making of the book that records it.41 Sarah Kay has called this kind of recall a suture, “a short-­circuiting between the usually distinct levels of text and book which might entirely escape conscious perception, but which nevertheless obtrudes on the reader.” Kay asks, “To what extent do texts written on parchment give readers the sense of having an animal skin?”42 Such a question is especially pertinent for Guillaume de Palerne. The romance is found in a single thirteenth-­century parchment manuscript that also contains Jean Renart’s Escoufle. The pages of the manuscript contain a number of holes and—­more interesting for my purposes—­a number of tears that have been sewn shut in the margins. It is clear that the holes were in the skin before it was written on, since on some pages the text is written around them, and it seems likely that the repairs in the parchment were also made before the pages were inscribed. Folio 109 of the manuscript begins “si encousu es .ii. piax d’ors” (“sewn in two bearskins,” line 3878), and the manuscript page is literally sutured together in the margin. Readers would then have read a work about lovers sewn into animal skins on pages of skin stitched together in the margins.43 Although only humans wear the skin of other species as clothing, and although Alexandrine sews the lovers into the skins as though into clothing,

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the text always describes these coverings as skins (piax), not as furs.44 But we also learn that the lovers wear clothes under the skins.45 The skins are a disguise to be put on or taken off at will, and when their bearskin disguise is discovered, the lovers remove the white bear pelts and put on deerskins to continue their journey.46 The story describes the lovers’ adaptation to the animal skins: they walk on all fours during the day, the narrator tells us, and they look more realistic when they go on all four feet than when they walk on two (lines 3385–­90). Although the lovers do not become as animal-­like as the man transformed into a wolf, they are reluctant to abandon their animal skins, even after reaching the relative safety of Palermo and the garden of Queen Felise. Guillaume is with his lover on the cool and lushly green grass. They amuse themselves together there, playing, conversing, and laughing. They speak of their situation and whether they can be finished with the skins or if they should stay in them. In the end they decide that they will not leave the skins until their beast gives them permission; this they promised each other. Guilliaumes est avec sa drue Sor l’erbe verde, fresche et drue, Iluec ensamble s’esbanient, Jouent et parolent et rient Et devisent de lor afaire, Comment a chief en porront traire, Se plus es piax se maintenront. Mais en la fin devisé ont Que ja des piax n’isteront fors, Ja ne descoverront lors cors, Se de lor beste n’ont congié; De ce se sont entrafichié. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 4909–­20)

The lovers’ relief is clear in the emphasis on their amusement and pleasure, but even though they seem to have found a refuge, Guillaume and Mélior still describe their dependency on the wolf. They imagine an end to their flight as the freedom to leave the skins, but they defer such an end by deferring to the judgment of the beast that has protected them on their journey. This passage marks a transition in the narrative. The narrator’s use of the possessive article points to a relationship or alliance between the lovers

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and “their beast,” the werewolf Alfonso, and that relationship is described in terms of obedience. Although Guillaume and Mélior have depended on the wolf for food and guidance, this is the first time they have explicitly expressed their obedience to its directions, and their deferral to their beast’s permission (“se de lor beste n’ont congié”) articulates a recognition of the wolf’s authority that has not yet been directly stated in the story. The lovers’ submission to the wolf defines a relationship between protection and obedience; the lovers recognize the sovereign authority of the wolf.47 And this implicit identification of the beast as sovereign corresponds to a shift of narrative focus from the lovers’ flight to the wolf’s exile; as the lovers are reintegrated into human society, the wolf’s exclusion from court becomes a central concern of the narrative. The account of exclusion and protection in Guillaume de Palerne—­explicitly described in terms of a ban—­uses language strikingly similar to that used by Giorgio Agamben in his definition of the homo sacer, but in terms that underscore the animality of the exiled protagonist, as I will explain below. This moment in the narrative also prepares the werewolf’s move from the forest, where it is the beast that is also sovereign, to the court, where it is the beast that underlines the paradox of the sovereign. Guillaume, too, is implicated in the romance’s representation of the sovereign in the skin of an animal. On a literal level, second skins are a disguise in Guillaume de Palerne, voluntary for the lovers and involuntary for the werewolf Alfonso. But even as they define animal identity as secondary to the humanity that lies under the skins, these second skins position the protagonists in relation to structures of protection and exile that underscore a relationship between sovereignty and animality in which recognition is at stake.

Second Skins After the lovers, led by their wolf, have found the safety of Queen Felise’s garden, the queen looks out, sees the two lovers in their deerskins, and marvels at the love these two animals demonstrate for each other. Then she notices that the pelts have begun to dry and shrink. She sees the clothing underneath the skins and understands that these are people wearing deerskins. The queen’s councilor Moysans has heard of the lovers’ escape from Rome and he identifies Guillaume and Mélior.48 Queen Felise decides to approach the fugitives, and she apparently thinks that these disguised people will respond more readily if she meets them wearing a deerskin like theirs.49 The disguised queen comes into the garden on all fours and lies down close to the lovers. When Guillaume and Mélior see her, they marvel that

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the animal is not afraid of them; if it knew what they really were, it would not stay with them, Guillaume says to Mélior (lines 5199–­202). Then the queen speaks to the lovers from inside the deerskin, and Guillaume and Mélior are frightened. Guillaume, also speaking from inside a deerskin, demands to know if the deer speaks through the power of God or if she is some other, more dangerous kind of spirit. The queen replies that she is a beast like Guillaume; she shares his appearance and his nature (“Si sui tex beste comme vos, / D’autel samblant, d’autel nature,” lines 5224–­25). Queen Felise names herself as animal and human, like the disguised young man, but in claiming to be a beast like Guillaume, she inadvertently but accurately claims that he is like her, a beast and a sovereign, though Guillaume’s sovereignty has yet to be revealed to any of the characters present. The first step toward that revelation seems to be the uncovering of his human body. When the lovers understand that the speaking deer is a woman wearing an animal skin, they agree to abandon their own deerskins. They also exchange the protection of their wolf for the safety of Queen Felise’s fortress. The lovers’ curious failure to recognize the queen’s deerskin disguise adds yet another instance of misrecognition to the encounter.50 Although the queen learns the identity of the disguised lovers, and although she unwittingly suggests that she and Guillaume share a “natural” likeness, she does not know that Guillaume is the son she lost. Nor does Guillaume recognize his mother, and none of the three characters disguised in deerskin knows that the wolf, too, is a man in the skin of a beast. Only the werewolf Alfonso knows the hidden relationships among the characters and the intrigues that have separated mother and son, exiled Guillaume from his rightful throne, and denied Alfonso himself his birthright. But this mute beast, this beste mue, cannot speak to reveal them. If the lovers’ decision to obey the beast that protects them identifies the sovereign position of the guardian wolf, the subsequent restoration of both the wolf and Guillaume himself to their proper places in noble lineage depends on the wolf’s ability to communicate the secrets it keeps. Throughout their flight from the Emperor of Rome’s men, the wolf guides, feeds, and protects Guillaume and Mélior, and it wins their trust through its actions. As it leads them, it communicates with the lovers through gesture: “It makes a sign to them, bowing its head, that they should follow, and they do so” (“Samblant lor fait, cline sa teste, / C’aprés lui voisent, il si font,” lines 4570–­71). The wolf’s signs indicate its intelligence, according to Guillaume: “I think you understand and that you have reason and intelligence,” he says to the wolf (“Bien pens et croi que entendés / Et que raison et sens avés,” lines

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4377–­78).51 However, the nature of the wolf’s “reason and intelligence” is debated by the other characters in the story. Although Guillaume and Mélior had earlier stated their obedience to the wolf’s instructions, once they leave their skins and their dependency on the wolf, they seem to think that the animal has nothing to communicate. Whereas in the forest, the animal’s gestures were signs of its “reason and intelligence,” after they leave the forest, the wolf’s gestures are only signs. For Guillaume, the wolf’s signs are portents, signs of things to come, but not a reasoned communication. Instead, Guillaume himself communicates through the wolf: he has the wolf’s image emblazoned on his shield. When Guillaume agrees to defend Queen Felise from the king of Spain, who besieges her lands and demands her daughter in marriage, the queen asks what sort of shield she should have made for him. Guillaume specifies that it should feature a wolf: My lady, God save me, a golden shield, but there should be a wolf painted in the middle and it should be portrayed as large and strong and with a fierce face. Dame, se Diex mon cors garisse, .i. escu d’or, mais qu’en mi lieu I ait portrait et paint .i. leu Grant et corssu et fier de vis. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 5394–­97)

Although Guillaume never calls himself “the Knight of the Wolf,” he makes the transition represented in illustrations of Le chevalier au lion: his companion animal becomes a heraldic animal. The symbolic use of the wolf emphasizes its qualities, now claimed by Guillaume: “large and strong and with a fierce face.” The focus of the story has shifted from the wolf’s labor to the wolf’s meaning and how the wolf makes meaning. The wolf is claimed as a symbol and the wolf itself communicates symbolically, according to Guillaume. And whether the wolf can communicate any way other than symbolically is centrally at stake in the resolution of the story. After Guillaume defeats the army of the king of Spain, the wolf appears in the queen’s garden and gestures to those who observe him from the window. They look down and see that the wolf has entered the garden. But no one ever saw such a marvel. The fierce beast joined its feet and put them on

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its head; then it stood on its back feet. With an open and trusting face, it bowed toward the chamber, the tower, and the ladies and the lord, and then it returned to the woods. Gardent aval, el vergier voient Ou li garox i ert venus; Mais tel merveille ne vit nus: Les piés ot joins et sor la teste Les avoit mis la fiere beste; Si se drece sor ceus derriere. A simple vis, a simp[l]e chiere Encline la chambre et la tor Et les dames et le signor, Puis se refiert en la gaudine. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 5838–­47)

The animal’s performance is a marvel because of the contrast between its appearance and its gestures. The author names the fierce or cruel beast (“la fiere beste”) and then describes its simple, open face and the curious movement of joining its feet and bowing. The queen thinks that the mute beast has made a sign to them (“. . . ceste beste mue, / Com fait samblent nos a ci fait?” lines 5854–­55). She asks Guillaume what the wolf wants to communicate, and he answers that the animal’s gestures signal the honor and good that will come to them. In Guillaume’s reading, the wolf is a symbol, and its gestures are a portent rather than a language. Whereas the queen thinks the wolf makes a sign, Guillaume thinks the wolf is a sign: the wolf is a premonition, and Guillaume provides an interpretation.52 Later, after Guillaume defeats the king of Spain’s younger son in another battle, the wolf appears again and kneels to bow to Guillaume and the queen. Queen Felise again questions what this beast is and what it wants from them. The day before it bowed once and this time it bows twice—­ these gestures must have some meaning, she claims (“N’est pas doutance / Que ce ne soit senefiance,” lines 6391–­92). In the queen’s view, the wolf asks for a response (“Ceste beste qu’a et que velt, / Qui nos requiert?” lines 6387–­88), but Guillaume again reads the wolf’s gestures as a symbol to be interpreted, rather than as a language to be understood: “I never saw such a noble beast. I believe that it signifies the honor and joy and sovereignty that will surely come to us soon” (“. . . ainc si france beste ne vi. / Si croi qu’ele nos senefie / Honor et joie et signorie / Qui nos vendra par tans, je cuit,” lines 6396–­99). Although he earlier recognized that the wolf under-

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stood him and claimed that the wolf had reason and intelligence (line 4378), Guillaume’s reaction casts the wolf’s gesture as a sign rather than as a communication. While dependent on the wolf’s protection, the young man in animal disguise seems to have responded to the wolf’s communications, but once he leaves his animal skins behind, Guillaume fails to understand that the wolf’s gesture may invite a response, and Guillaume himself reacts instead of responding. When the defeated king of Spain comes with his men to surrender to Queen Felise, the wolf appears a third time. It enters the castle and comes into the room where the king and his entourage have assembled along with Felise’s court. Then it approaches the king of Spain. Then the werewolf came into the middle of the room and in front of them all it knelt before the king; its tears wet the king’s feet. With its two paws it took his foot and embraced it tightly. Through these signs, it requested that the king respond to something. Then as it left, it bowed to the king, and then to Guillaume and the queen and the maidens. Atant es vos que li garox Par mi la sale, voiant tous, Tres devant le roi s’agenoille, De lermes tot les piés li moille. A ses .ii. poes prent son pié, Estroitement l’a embracié; Ensement par samblant l’opose C’on l’aprovast d’aucune chose. Atant s’en part et puis l’encline Et puis Guilliaume et la roïne Et les puceles ensement. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 7207–­17)

The description of the wolf’s submission and supplication before the king anticipates Guillaume’s own gesture of feudal affection when the emperor of Rome later arrives in Palermo: “He leaps down from his horse and runs to embrace his leg” (“A terre saut les son destrier, / La jambe li cort embracier,” lines 8569–­70). A similar gesture is made by the werewolf in Marie de France’s Bisclavret, as I mentioned in chapter 2, and it also recalls the lion’s submission to Yvain in Le chevalier au lion. As in the wolf’s earlier demonstrations, here, too, the expressive animal feet communicate through gesture, “par semblant.”

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When Guillaume sees the familiarity and the signs that the wolf shows to the king of Spain, he must ask, if the king knows, that he tell him what this beast means. Guilliaumes, quant voit l’acointance Qu’a fait li leus par demoustrance Le roi d’Espaigne et son samblant, Ne laira pas ne li demant . . . S’il set por voir, que il li die Que cele beste senefie. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 7259–­62, 7269–­70)

Guillaume’s question about what this beast means (“Que cele beste senefie”) could be a question about what this beast represents. That is, Guillaume may read the beast as an “adstraction,” to return to Greene’s neologism; he reads the wolf as a particularized example of a general notion of “the beast.” As in his earlier readings of the wolf’s gestures, such logic would cast the wolf as a symbol or an abstract animal-­as-­sign. But here, he seems to recognize that the wolf is an agent of meaning that communicates something in its demonstration of familiar fealty to the king, and here “what this beast means” recognizes that the wolf makes meaning. The wolf’s gestures are finally read as a communication when it takes the king’s feet in its own, and the description of this gesture emphasizes the wolf’s animal anatomy: “It takes the king’s foot in its two paws” (“A ses .ii. poes prent son pié,” line 7211). The narrator distinguishes between the wolf’s animal feet, poes, and the king’s foot, his piés, mentioned twice in the passage, but the wolf uses its poes as though they were hands, to reach out, to take, and to hold. The wolf makes a gesture of homage, but also of entreaty: “Through these signs, it requests that [the king] respond to something,” the narrator explains (“Ensement par samblant l’opose / C’on l’aprovast d’aucune chose,” lines 7213–­14). The verb oposer (to request, to ask) in this context may suggest a feudal or even a filial obligation to respond, and the king begins to understand it as the latter. The wolf’s eloquent gesture, the entreaty it communicates by signs (“par samblant,” line 7213), causes the Spanish king to remember rumors he had heard about his wife’s transformation of his elder son into a wolf. Although he didn’t believe the stories before, he now understands that they were true. The wolf’s ability to access human understanding is not surprising, of course, since this wolf is a werewolf, a man transformed into a wolf; the ges­ tural literacy of the werewolf may simply serve to identify the humanity

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that inhabits the wolf’s body. But the emphasis on the wolf’s feet insists on animality. The wolf gestures because it cannot speak, a characteristic of its animality recalled in the repeated description of the animal as a “mute beast” (beste mue); the ability to speak, like the ability to reason, is one way of figuring human difference from other animals. In medieval literary texts, speaking animals are magic or marvelous beings, like the prophesying stag in Marie de France’s Guigemar, or they are anthropomorphized figures of human behavior, as in fables or Le roman de Renart. Medieval literature also contains examples of animals whose gestures convey meaning—­I have already mentioned Bisclavret, and Guillaume de Palerne offers another example when the Count of Apulia’s fierce warhorse recognizes his master’s son, Guillaume: “It goes toward him demonstrating submission and shows him great love” (“Vers lui s’en vait humeliant, / De grant amor li fait samblant,” lines 5503–­4). Both the werewolf’s gesture of homage and the horse’s gesture of recognition are examples of submission. Accordingly, the wolf’s ability to communicate submission through gestures could locate it more securely in animality, as taking its place under the human dominion that defines animal-­human relations, rather than as revealing its hidden humanity.53 But although the wolf has served the lovers, it has not been domesticated to their will; instead, the lovers obeyed the sovereign wolf that protected them. This wolf is neither domesticated nor hunted, and its anomalous relation to humans makes it something of a liminal being. Although the wolf accompanies a man, hunting for him and serving him like the lion in Le chevalier au lion, the wolf does not benefit from the cultural prestige of the lion; if Yvain had come across a wolf being scorched by a dragon, his deliberations about which animal to save might not have been so easily resolved. Guillaume’s adoption of the wolf as a heraldic animal seems more a recognition of his own wolf than an appeal to the symbolic qualities of wolves in general—­not what Greene calls an adstraction, but an homage. The wolf—­especially perhaps a werewolf—­inspires fear, and in this sense, it is like the disguised lovers, clad in the skins of the frightening white bears. Guillaume and Mélior do not fear the wolf, however; it is their companion and protector. Yet after the lovers reach the safety of Palermo, the fearful wolf needs Guillaume’s protection as it is exiled from the court and from the political order of the court. The romance’s account of this banishment uses the vocabulary of the ban, an articulation of exile that coincides with Giorgio Agamben’s use of the ban to describe the homo sacer. In Roman law, the homo sacer (sacred or accursed man) was a banned person who could be killed with impunity but could not be sacrificed in a religious

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ritual. In Agamben’s reading of this figure, the homo sacer is the outlaw, a figure who lives in a state of exception because he is outside the law.54 In this respect, the outlaw is like the sovereign. Both are outside the law, the homo sacer because he is banned, and the sovereign because he has the power to suspend the law.55 Guillaume de Palerne uses a similar vocabulary of exclusion, but locates it in a description of sovereign protection. As the wolf leaves the king of Spain after making its supplication, the men in the court leap up to chase after it, but Guillaume forbids them to kill the wolf: From all sides the people ran to take lances and javelins, spears and scythes, and they raised the cry after the wolf. It would have been killed from all sides, but the noble Guillaume sprang forward and swore to Almighty God that if any man harmed it, no matter whom, he should know well that Guillaume would take vengeance on him. De totes pars saillent la gent; As lances corent et as dars, Prendent guisarmes et faussars; Aprés le leu est grans li cris. Ja fust de totes pars ocis, Quant li bers Guilliaumes saut sus Et jure Dieu et ses vertus, Se nul i a qui mal li face, Ja n’iert tex hom, tres bien le sache, N’en prenge de son cors venjance. (Guillaume de Palerne, lines 7218–­27)

The wolf is exiled from the court, but it cannot be killed. Guillaume has his ban cried throughout the city, and it guarantees the safety of the wolf (“Puis que li bans fu entendus, / Bien fu gardés et bien tenus,” lines 7237–­ 38). Guillaume assumes the position of sovereign protector formerly held by the wolf. Guillaume’s order both recognizes the exclusion of the wolf and demands protection for the animal; it enacts what Agamben describes as “bare life,” that is, life excluded from the law and outside of the political body, but at the same time, included under the rule of law in the very form of its exclusion.56 Bare life then names a space in which the law is both suspended and established. Guillaume’s order of protection defines a similar space for the

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wolf. It outlaws the wolf, exiles him to the forest, even as it declares the exemption of the wolf from the armed men’s violence. But if bare life and sovereign power meet in Guillaume’s order of protection for the exiled werewolf Alfonso, so too, the outlaw and the sovereign converge in the figure of the young prince who dons an animal skin to flee Rome and the emperor’s law. The indistinction of animal-­human difference troubles the representation of sovereign authority in the articulation of the ban; in Guillaume de Palerne, neither outlaw figure is securely animal or human, and the exceptional status of human identity comes into question.57 In particular, Guillaume de Palerne questions human exceptionalism in terms of animal communication. The animal gesture foregrounded by the contrast of poes against piés focuses the debate about what the wolf’s gestures signify: can animals communicate? Such a question may be related to a renewed interest in animal gestures and their communicative possibilities in the twelfth century, when, Jean-­Claude Schmitt tells us—­in a gesture of his own toward Claude Lévi-­Strauss—­“the gesture became good to think again” (“le geste est redevenu bon à penser”).58 Animal gestures came to be understood as a kind of language and, it was thought, if animals used language, then language could not be a sign of human distinction. For example, Guibert de Nogent writes that beasts communicate among themselves with gestures and with voice almost as well as men do. Man’s superiority over animals is not then located in his ability to speak, but in his ability to reason and in his proximity to the divine.59 Implicit in Guibert’s description is the conviction that animal communication does not include reason, because only humans have the ability to reason. Since reason belongs only to people, animals may communicate through gesture and even through sound, but for medieval philosophers the inability to reason makes such communication utilitarian and instinctual. Animal language is a code, a speech without reason; we might describe it as reactive rather than responsive. The opposition between response and reaction has been taken as a defin­ ing difference between humans and other animals. In chapter 1, I discussed Jacques Derrida’s critique of this distinction, where he claims that “the most powerful, impassive, and dogmatic prejudice about the animal did not consist in saying that it does not communicate, that it does not signify and that it has no sign at his disposal, but that it does not respond.”60 Elaborating on the implications of a distinction that opposes human response and animal reaction, Derrida notes that values such as freedom, responsibility, and decision are associated with the human ability to respond, whereas animal reaction is seen as instinctual, hard-­wired, or fixed.61 Derrida questions

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the validity of such a broad distinction between reaction and response; it does not hold, he claims, even within the human.62 Guillaume de Palerne, too, brings together reaction and response, but inflects the opposition between the two terms with a third: recognition. After recounting that the lovers reach Queen Felise’s court and resume their human identities, the romance points to a convergence of animal gesture, outlaw status, and human response in the wolf’s communication, where the verb oposer indicates that its gestures solicit a response, but here the request for a response is also a request for recognition—­that is, for a recognition of the prince in the beast.

In the Skin Once the Spanish king suspects that his own son appears before him in the skin of a wolf, he sends for his wife and she admits that she used magic to disinherit Alfonso. She takes out her charms to reverse the spell. “Let us see,” she says, “what kind of beast this skin covers” (“Mais or verrons . . . Quel beste ceste piax acuevre,” Guillaume de Palerne, lines 7690–­92). She uses a magic ring to transform the wolf back into a man and to liberate him, she says, from the prison of the wolf’s skin that has covered him for so long: “Ci sui por toi garir venue / Et toi geter de ceste mue / Qui tant longement t’a covert” (lines 7687–­89).63 The king’s son is thus freed from the covering prison, the mue, the animal skin of the mute beast, the beste mue. The animal skin mutes not just voice, but identity, and not just human, but chivalric identity.64 In this, it is the opposite of the heraldic animal on the knight’s shield. The phrase that the queen used to describe Alfonso (“Let us see what kind of beast this skin covers”), repeats a phrase Guillaume used to describe himself earlier in the romance. As the lovers fled from the emperor’s men, he lamented that he did not have his arms so that he could do battle against them to protect Mélior: “If I had my arms, horse, shield, sword and lance, then they would see my power and they would know from the beginning what beast this skin covers” (“Se j’avoie mes garnemens, / Cheval, escu, espee et lance, / Par tans verroient ma puissance, / Saroient au commencier l’uevre / Quel beste ceste piax acuevre,” lines 4050–­54).65 In Guillaume de Palerne the “beast” under the skin is always a human. Moreover, for Guillaume and Alfonso, the “skinning” of the animal reveals not just a man, but also a sovereign: Guillaume receives the rule of Apulia, and Alfonso is reinstated as the king of Spain’s heir. It is as though Guillaume de Palerne were a fable, avant la lettre, of some of Derrida’s claims about the shared being of the beast and the sovereign:66

Plate 1. King Noble and his subjects. Illumination by Master of Thomas of Maubeuge in Le roman de Renart, Paris (1310–­15). BnF ms. fr. 1580, fol. 55. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 2. How Adam and Eve decided to do penance. Illumination in Lutwin, Eva und Adam, Austria (­fifteenth century). Österreichische National­bibliothek Codex Vindob. 2980, folio 24v. Photograph: ÖNB Vienna.

Plate 3. God gives Adam and Eve garments of skin. Illumination in La bible historiale, Paris (1372). The Hague, Museum Meermanno, ms. 10 B 23, f. 11v. Photograph: National Library of the Netherlands.

Plate 4. Dido founding Carthage. Illumination in Giovanni Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris, France (ca. 1460). The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. Ms. M.381, fol. 23r. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–­1913) in 1909. Photograph: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

Plate 5. Pierre Salmon presenting his book to King Charles VI. Illumination by the Boucicaut Master in Pierre Salmon, Réponses à Charles VI, France (ca. 1409). BnF ms. fr. 23279, fol. 2r. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 6 (opposite). Yvain’s battle with Harpin de la Montagne. Illumination in Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion, France (thirteenth century). MS Garrett 125, fol. 56v. Photograph: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Plate 7. Yvain saves the lion from a dragon. Illumination in Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion, France (thirteenth century). MS Garrett 125, fol. 37r. Photograph: Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Plate 8. Yvain saves the lion from a dragon. Illumination in Chrétien de Troyes, Le chevalier au lion, France (1300–­1350). Paris, BnF ms. fr. 1433, fol. 85. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 9 (opposite). The story of the Fall. Miniature by the Boucicaut Master in Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Paris (1413–­15). The J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. 63, fol. 3. Photograph: Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, Los Angeles.

Plate 10. The temptation of Eve. Illumination by the Boucicaut Master in Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Paris (1413–­15). The J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. 63, fol. 3 (detail). Photograph: Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, Los Angeles.

Plate 11. God creates Adam. Illumination by the Boucicaut Master in Giovanni Boccaccio, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Paris (1413–­15). The J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. 63, fol. 3 (detail). Photograph: Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, Los Angeles.

Plate 12. The temptation of Eve. Illumination by a follower of Hans Schilling, from the workshop of Diebold Lauber in Rudolf von Ems, Barlaam and Josaphat, Alsace (1469). The J. Paul Getty Museum, ms. Ludwig XV 9, fol. 1v. Photograph: Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program, Los Angeles.

Plate 13. How Adam and Eve were betrayed by the serpent and disobeyed God’s command. Illumination in Lutwin, Eva und Adam, Austria (fifteenth century). Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Codex Vindob. 2980, fol. 31r. Photograph: ÖNB Vienna.

Plate 14. Eve and Seth encounter the snake. Illumination in Lutwin, Eva und Adam, Austria (fifteenth century). Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Codex Vindob. 2980, fol 69r. Photograph: ÖNB Vienna.

Plate 15 (opposite). A contented wild man. Illumination in “La ballade d’uns home sauvage estant en le creux d’un arbre,” France (fifteenth century). Paris, BnF ms. fr. 2366, fol 3v. Photograph: Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Plate 16. Le bal des Ardents. Illumination attributed to the Getty Froissart Master in Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Bruges (ca. 1480). London, British Library, ms. Royal XVIII EII, fol. 206r. Photograph: © The British Library Board.

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The beast being the sovereign, the sovereign being the beast, the one and the other being each engaged, in truth changed or even exchanged, in a becoming-­beast of the sovereign or in a becoming-­sovereign of the beast, the passage from the one to the other, the analogy, the resemblance, the alliance, the hymen depending on the fact that they both share that very singular position of being outlaws, above or at a distance from the law, the beast ignorant of right and the sovereign having the right to suspend right, to place himself above the law that he is, that he makes, that he institutes, as to which he decides, sovereignly.67

Derrida’s description of the resemblance between the beast and the sovereign echoes Agamben’s emphasis on the sovereign exception, but insists not on the bare life of the homo sacer, but on the shared being of the sovereign and the beast. Guillaume de Palerne, too, describes the beast and the sovereign as outlaws that move from one position to the other. But the romance is not just a literal representation of the shared identity of beast and sovereign. It is a story that turns on the beast’s gestures and on the werewolf’s request for a response from his father, the king. This beast—­a wolf-­ man—­is not ignorant of right or rights, and seeks a recognition that will allow the animal to regain its sovereign humanity as both filial son and prince. As they describe the shared being of the beast and the human, whether in the symbolic use of the animal’s name and image, in material appropriations of its pelt, or in human inhabitations of animal bodies, Le chevalier au lion and Guillaume de Palerne imagine that identities may be hidden or disguised, only to emerge in dramas of recognition that restore sovereign humanity. The lady of Landuc recognizes her repudiated husband in Le chevalier au lion; Queen Felise is drawn to her son, Guillaume, disguised in a deerskin; the king of Spain responds to the gestures of a beast. In these examples, the passage through animality is temporary; the restoration of sovereign humanity is articulated in terms of a right to lost privilege and position, and sovereign privilege and power are demonstrated through acts of protection. Yet if sovereign status is defined in terms of protection or the ability to protect, then the difference between the beast and the sovereign is not as clear. Protection is reciprocal in the two romances about knight-­animals I’ve examined here. Yvain saves the lion from a dragon’s attack, then the lion protects him in combat; the wolf guides and protects Guillaume and Mélior as they travel, then when the humans reach safe haven, Guillaume protects the wolf. Beast and sovereign converge and diverge in these stories, but so

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do notions of right and rights. These romance narratives imagine interactions between animals and noble knights as sovereign relations defined by reciprocity, recognition, and response. As they describe exchanges of protection and care and negotiations of communication and response, they imagine not just the shared qualities of the beast and the sovereign, but also the extent to which sovereign right and rights may belong to animals.

chapter four

Snakes and Women: Recognition, Knowledge, and Sovereignty

I

n earlier chapters, I have argued that sovereignty is at stake in literary representations of animal-­human relationships, whether those relationships are adversarial or amicable. The use of animals is a technology of sovereignty, I argued in chapter 1, which distinguishes between human and nonhuman animals, but also marks the power of some humans over others. In chapter 2, I explored a set of narratives in which wild wolves contemplate the advantages of living under human mastery; these stories describe sovereign relations as desired by the animal subjects of human dominion. And in chapter 3, the use of animals in symbolic displays of identity and status in romance narratives opened an interrogation of the shared characteristics of the beast and the sovereign, defined in terms of protection. In this chapter I extend my analyses of choice and recognition in the context of self-­ sovereignty, that is, “the condition of being an independent self-­determining agent.”1 In contractarian political theories, self-­sovereignty is anchored in the notion of choice, “in the possibility of being subject only to those forms of authority to which you have yourself consented,” as Patchen Markell puts it in Bound by Recognition.2 Fictional wolves that debate the advantages of living with humans might be seen to exercise self-­sovereignty when they refuse human mastery, but in human political worlds such an absolute autonomy is always impossible to grasp, since it denies the interdependencies that define social interactions. However, in the texts and images I explore in the first part of this chapter, self-­sovereignty figures the fantasy of an autonomous agency that leads not to the consent to be a subject, but to sovereignty over others; in these sources, “the condition of being an independent self-­determining agent” is linked to the promise of rule over others, and this promise is grounded on knowledge and recognition.

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Recognition “anchors sovereignty in knowledge,” in knowing one’s own social identity and seeing it recognized by others, according to Markell.3 Recognition can also bring something new into being, and Markell gives the example of recognition among states and the condition of statehood: the recognition of a state calls statehood into being, according to some political theorists.4 Recognition has, then, both cognitive and constructive effects; it creates both knowledge and sovereign relations. Starting from Markell’s study of the politics of recognition, I too will focus on knowledge, recognition, and self-­sovereignty, not in order to critique modern formulations of the politics of recognition, as does Markell, but to analyze the shifting relationships among knowledge, choice, and desire in a set of medieval narratives about human-­animal encounters in which questions of recognition and difference bring gender to the fore. These narratives about women and snakes describe recognition in terms of mirroring. Sight is privileged in encounters with snake women in which sovereign status is at stake. I begin this chapter with an exploration of the temptation of Eve in Paradise, as represented in a series of medieval texts and images, and then I turn to snake women in two romance narratives, the fourteenth-­century Roman de Mélusine (Romance of Mélusine) and the twelfth-­or early thirteenth-­century Bel inconnu (The Fair Unknown).5 My claim is not that the Genesis account explains the romance representations, but rather that both medieval representations of Eve and the serpent and romance portrayals of snake women use gender to think about sovereignty.6 The representations of Eve that I examine here—­in a play, manuscript illuminations, and an apocryphal account of the postlapsarian lives of the first humans—­implicitly or explicitly describe Eve’s desire for knowledge in terms of a desire for sovereignty; by contrast, the romance texts imagine sovereign relations through a knight’s specular relation to the snake woman’s body. But in all of these literary and visual texts, a human-­animal encounter has gendered implications for a sovereign claim.

Figuring Sovereignty The Genesis account of the first sin is brief. The serpent tells Eve that contrary to God’s warning, she and Adam will not die if they eat the fruit from the forbidden tree.7 Rather, their eyes will be opened and they themselves will be like gods, knowing good and evil. In the biblical story, Eve’s desire is solicited not just by the serpent’s promise, but also by the appealing vision of the fruit. “And the woman saw that the tree was good to eat, and fair to the eyes, and delightful to behold, and she took of the fruit thereof and ate,

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and gave it to her husband who ate.”8 The Genesis account emphasizes Eve’s gaze. She looks at the fruit and desires to have what she sees. Medieval commentaries on Genesis interpret Eve’s gaze in terms of discernment: she was unable to see the difference between truth and lies, and she was ruled by a desire for dominion. “She was easy to sway,” La bible historiale elaborates; “she became proud and wanted to be like God” (“elle fu legiere a flechir . . . Adonc s’enorguilli la femme et voult ressembler Dieu,” 32). According to this logic, Eve’s pride was manifested in her desire to be like God. In some medieval representations of Eve’s response to the snake’s temptation, what it means to be like God is debated in terms of sovereignty or absolute authority over others. In the twelfth-­century Jeu d’Adam (The Play of Adam), Satan’s tempting words define a choice between obedience to God’s command and a knowledge that offers parity with God. The snake invites Eve to recognize herself as queen of the world. Le jeu d’Adam, also known as Le mystère d’Adam and the Ordo representationis Adae, is the earliest extant play in vernacular French.9 The play has close ties to the liturgy and it has three parts: the first recounts Eve’s sin and the expulsion from Paradise, the second represents Cain’s murder of Abel, and the third features a procession of prophets announcing the coming of Christ. The dialogue is in Old French verse, a biblical reading in Latin opens the play, and there are also Latin choral responses in the text; the play’s most unusual feature is that it contains extensive stage directions in Latin prose. The bilingual play draws attention to translation: not just the linguistic translation from Latin to vernacular, but also the translation of text to performance, the translation of the divine order of Paradise to a world structured by feudal hierarchies, and the translation of sovereign knowledge into a gendered sovereign agency.10 Le jeu d’Adam was most likely performed in or just outside a church, though we cannot be certain where or when it would have been staged, since there are no records of its performance history.11 The church setting and the prophecies of the play’s third act emphasize the redemption of humanity by Christ’s sacrifice, spatially and narratively framing the story of the first sin with reminders of a promised salvation. This redemptive trajectory is also suggested from the very beginning of the play when the representation of God, identified as “Figura” in the play’s text, enters to instruct Adam and Eve on the order of the world. “Figura” names a figure that appears on stage, a human man playing God, but the name also points to figural interpretation: Figura, or God, prefigures his son, Christ. As Erich Auerbach points out, “God’s role in what actually takes place [in the play] is merely that of

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the law-­giver and the judge who punishes transgression, yet the redeeming Savior is already figurally present in him.”12 Figura is both sovereign father and redeeming son. For the Christian audience of the play, the need for redemption is a given: Eve has always already been seduced by the devil, and humans have already fallen into sin. The play explores not whether Eve will take the forbidden fruit, but why, and the representation of Eve’s response to the snake establishes a relationship between gender and sovereignty. Eve is third in the hierarchy of Paradise. Man was made in God’s own likeness, Figura explains to Adam (“Je te ai fourmé a mun semblant; / A ma imagene t’ai feit de terre,” lines 105–­6). Adam should obey him, as should Eve, but she is also subject to Adam’s authority (“Ele soit a tun comandement, / E vus ambedeus a mun talent,” lines 118–­19). Figura insists on this gendered hierarchy: Adam rightly rules over Eve, he explains (“Tu la governe par raison,” line 124), and turning to Eve, God commands the first woman to recognize her creator as her lord and submit to Adam’s discipline (“Aim e honor ton creator / E moi reconuis a seignor . . . A [Adam] soies tot tens encline, / Nen issir de sa discipline,” lines 133–­34, 139–­40).13 A divinely sanctioned gendered hierarchy defines creation: God is the lord of Adam and Eve, and Adam rules Eve. The devil—­“Diabolus” in the play’s text—­also appears as a protagonist in Le jeu d’Adam. In an unusual addition to the Genesis story, he speaks to Adam before turning to Eve, perhaps in recognition of the gendered hierarchy of creation.14 In human form—­that is, as a human actor—­Diabolus tells Adam that he could be God’s equal and share his power; Adam would no longer be subject to an overlord, or “seignor” (line 412).15 When Adam rejects his advice, Diabolus goes to Eve, describing the forbidden fruit as full of grace, power, sovereignty, and knowledge (“En celui est grace de vie, / De poëste, de seignorie, / De tut saver, bien e mal,” lines 520–­22).16 The play uses a feudal vocabulary to describe power relationships (gouverne, signor, seigneurie), and the devil suggests that they also connote political authority. Eve deserves such authority, Diabolus continues: With your beautiful body and face, you deserve to be queen of the world, of the high and the low, and you should know what is to come/everything that exists, and be a good master of all. A ton bel cors, a ta figure Bien covendreit tel aventure Que tu fusses dame del mond, Del soverain e del parfont,

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E seüsez quanque a estre, Que de tuit fuissez bone maistre. (Le jeu d’Adam, lines 527–­32)

Diabolus appeals to Eve’s vanity, praising the beauty of her body and her face (figure), and linguistically linking Eve’s beautiful figure to Figura, or God. The name “Figura” appears only in the play’s text; on stage God is never addressed by this name, so spectators of the play would not catch the echo of Figura in the devil’s praise of Eve’s beautiful face, or figure. Nonetheless, the repetition suggests that an ironic mirroring could be heard in the devil’s seductive suggestion. Just as Figura figures Christ, Eve might figure God. She too could be a sovereign; she could be queen of the world.17 Diabolus then leaves the stage and the serpent enters. Although the serpent does not speak, the play’s stage directions suggest that it continues the campaign begun by the devil: Then a cleverly constructed serpent ascends the forbidden tree and Eve turns her ear toward it as if she were listening to its counsel. Then Eve takes the apple and offers it to Adam. Tunc serpens artificiose compositus ascendit iuxta stipitem arboris vetite, cui Eva propius adhibebit aurem, quasi ipsius ascultans consilium. De hinc accipiet Eva pomum, porriget Ade. (Le jeu d’Adam, lines 598–­601)

The text describes a double artifice or instrumentality for the serpent. It is “cleverly constructed,” that is, the serpent is a stage prop or perhaps a disguise for an actor, but it is also a proxy for the devil. This notion is common in both Christian and Jewish understandings of the Eden snake, although the biblical account does not explicitly describe the serpent as inspired by Satan. Genesis simply states that “the serpent was more subtle than any of the beasts of the earth which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman: ‘Why has God commanded you, that you should not eat of every tree of paradise?’ ”18 In Le jeu d’Adam, the serpent takes the place of Diabolus on stage, and although this serpent does not speak, it is identified as the devil when the first humans regret their sin. Adam laments: “Dolorous Eve, you were misled when you believed the advice of a snake!” (“Eve! dolente! cum fus a mal delivre / Quant creütes si tost conseil de la guivre!” lines 949–­50). Eve, too, says that the snake tricked her: “The felonious serpent, the evil snake made me eat the apple against my will” (“Li fel serpent,

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la guivre de mal aire / Me fist mangier la pome de contraire,” lines 986–­ 87).19 Adam blames Eve, and Eve blames the snake, denying the desire that led her to taste the apple. “You could be queen of the world”: the devil offers Eve a sovereignty that includes both parity with God and self-­sovereignty, the ability to act “as an independent, self-­determined agent,” in Markell’s words.20 It may seem anachronistic to use the terms of modern political theory to understand the motivations ascribed to Eve in a twelfth-­century play, but even though the play’s audiences may not have thought in such terms, they could have recognized Eve’s response to the devil’s promise as both a desire for sovereignty and a recognition of herself as sovereign, a position defined by knowledge, in the devil’s account. Recognition is an act of knowledge and of creation, of cognition and construction, as Markell notes, but here cognition and construction come apart. As Eve chooses knowledge, she loses the sovereign position she hoped to create for herself by knowing. Figura reproaches Eve for her credulity: You thought he could make you like me? Have you no discernment? Before you had mastery over everything that lives, how did you lose it so easily? Now I see you are sad and unfortunate! Did you win or did you lose? Par lui quidas estre mon per? Ses tu ja bien deviner? Oreinz aviez la maistrie De quanque doit estre en vie: Cum l’as tu ja si tost perdue? Or te voi triste et mal venue! As tu fait gain ou perte? (Le jeu d’Adam, lines 812–­18)

Figura’s question—­did you win or did you lose?—­has only one answer in medieval Christian thought: Eve lost. By trying to gain more, she lost what she had.21 She was deceived, Figura insists, when she thought the devil could make her God’s equal (“Par lui quidas estre mon per?”). Eve recognized herself in Diabolus’s description (“With your beautiful body and face, you deserve to be queen of the world”; “A ton bel cors, a ta figure / Bien covendreit tel aventure / Que tu fusses dame del mond,” lines 527–­29), but what she recognized was her own desire, reflected back to her in the promise of sovereign knowledge.

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For some medieval writers, recognition was a prominent way of explaining Eve’s susceptibility to the serpent. Recognition is a form of knowing, and in representations of Eve’s response to the snake’s temptation, it is taken as a form of self-­knowledge, that is, Eve recognizes herself in the serpent, as Peter Comester explains in the Historia scholastica.22 Because [Lucifer] was afraid of being found out by the man, he approached the woman, who had less foresight and was [like] “wax to be twisted into vice” and this by means of the serpent; for the serpent at that time was erect like a man, since it was laid prostrate when it was cursed. . . . He also chose a certain kind of serpent . . . which had the countenance of a virgin, because like favors like; and he moved its tongue to speak, though it knew nothing itself, just as he speaks through the frenzied and the possessed.23

In Comester’s account, Eve is already judged more susceptible to the devil’s blandishments than Adam, and she is susceptible, it appears, because she recognizes her own likeness in the woman-­headed serpent. Comester claims to repeat a description by Bede, and although modern scholars have not located any such mention in Bede’s writings, Comester’s attribution suggests that he himself did not invent the notion, but repeats an idea already in circulation.24 Whether taken from Bede or original with Comester, the account of the woman-­headed serpent in the Historia scholastica was hugely influential.25 Because it was translated in the popular Bible historiale, the description circulated widely in Old French, along with visual rep­ resentations of the figure.26 Comester’s account was repeated by Gervase of Tilbury, Bonaventure, Vincent of Beauvais, Thomas of Cantimpré, and Guido delle Colonne in the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth, it was included in the anonymous Speculum humanae salvationis (The Mirror of Human Salvation), a text that circulated throughout Europe, usually with an illumination program that included the maiden-­headed snake.27 Visual representations of the figure were everywhere, not only accompanying written accounts of Eve’s temptation but also appearing in chronicles and books of hours, and sculpted on cathedrals.28 The curious figure of a snake with a human head may not have been difficult to imagine for medieval thinkers familiar with the widely circulating Physiologus.29 As Henry Ansgar Kelly has pointed out, they would have found there a variety of human-­headed serpent-­like animals: sirens, the maiden-­faced scorpion, sphinxlike creatures, and above all, the viper.30 According to the description in the Physiologus, the male viper has “the

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face of a man, while the female has the form of a woman down to her navel, but from her navel down to her tail she has the form of a crocodile.”31 The figure of the woman-­headed serpent could also have been inspired by sculptural decoration on cathedrals, as John Philip Coletta has suggested, or by medieval theatrical representations of the serpent and Eve, as J. K. Bonnell has argued with reference to Le jeu d’Adam’s “cleverly contrived” serpent.32 The identification of the various possible origins of the woman-­ headed serpent underscores the many ways in which hybrid human-­snake forms were imagined in medieval culture and makes it unlikely that there is a single origin for the figure. Nor was there universal agreement about the Eden snake’s form. Visual representations of the snake vary considerably. In some portrayals, the snake stands erect, in some it has a man’s face or a human face in which gender is hard to discern, and in others it does not have a human face at all.33 Some theologians denied the very idea of a woman-­headed snake. Nicolas of Lyre, writing in the fourteenth century, claims that God would not have allowed the devil to take such a pleasing form: “The demon’s entering into the serpent for this purpose was not a thing chosen by him, but rather was arranged by God, who did not allow man to be tempted by the devil in a pleasing and noble appearance, through which he could be more easily deceived, but rather in a horrible appearance, in which the demon’s fallaciousness could be more quickly perceived. Nonetheless some say that that serpent had a pleasing and virginal face; but this has no scriptural authority, and therefore the first interpretation seems better.”34 The devil’s false promise could only be delivered through a monstrous form, according to Nicolas, who seems to insist that Adam and Eve should have recognized the snake as the devil. And in fact, the idea that Satan took the form of a woman-­headed serpent was abandoned by scholars and theologians by roughly the fifteenth century, though the figure continued to be popular among visual artists.35 Images of Eve confronting a woman-­headed snake persisted and continued to be produced well into the sixteenth century. Manuscript illuminations that represent this encounter make visual sense of Comester’s claim that like responds to like; by suggesting a mirroring of Eve’s human face in the snake’s, they link recognition and the promise of sovereignty.

The Mirror of Sovereignty The Latin word used in the Vulgate bible for the Eden serpent is serpens, which may be translated as “serpent” or as “snake.” Similarly, the Old French serpent and guivre (both used to name the Eden serpent in Le jeu d’Adam)

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may be translated as either “serpent” or “snake,” and accordingly, I use the two words interchangeably, as do my Old French texts. Both the Latin and Old French words for serpent may also connote a fire-­breathing or winged dragon-­like creature, like the serpent in Le chevalier au lion. This ambiguity is evident in visual representations where the Eden serpent sometimes appears as a winged dragon, sometimes as a coiling creature. In the Latin Vulgate, the Genesis snake (serpens) is gendered masculine, as is the devil, and some representations of the human-­faced Eden serpent give it masculine features.36 However, in many images, the snake has a woman’s face, and many images insist on the snake’s likeness to Eve, as in plate 9.37 This illumination accompanies the story of Adam and Eve as recorded in a fifteenth-­century manuscript copy of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (On the Fates of Famous Men), translated by Laurent de Premierfait into French and illustrated by the artist known as the Boucicaut Master (or by his workshop).38 The illumination represents the pre-­and postlapsarian lives of Adam and Eve. The snake’s temptation of Eve is represented in the center, and as the largest scene and focal point of the image, it defines the encounter with the snake as the most important episode in the story of the first humans. Left of the central image, an angel chases Adam and Eve out of Paradise in a representation of the consequences of their sin; Adam looks back with regret, while Eve looks resolutely forward. At the bottom right, the elderly Adam and Eve make their way toward Boccaccio, represented at his writing desk at bottom left, to tell him their story; their stooped postures contrast with the upright, graceful poses of the figures in the central temptation scene. The top of the image shows Adam and Eve in their postlapsarian travails; Adam cultivates the land on the left, while Eve spins, sitting among her sheep on the right. In the central temptation scene, a woman-­headed snake is wound around the tree and reaches toward Eve (plate 10).39 The snake’s head is smaller than Eve’s, but otherwise they are identical, down to the delicate tendrils of hair that frame their bodies. Eve and the snake lock gazes and Eve holds the apple that she has yet to taste or offer to Adam. The artist has represented the moment of temptation rather than the moment of sin, and the image emphasizes that the snake’s tempting words are made all the more persuasive by the familiar face that utters them. On the left, Adam looks at Eve; his hand is raised, perhaps to warn her of the serpent’s deception. Adam already has the white hair and beard he will have as an old man, a curious representation explained by the creation scene medallion in the lower right margin of the page where Adam’s white hair and beard mirror God’s (plate 11).40 The image represents likeness as mirroring: Adam is represented visually as the image

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of God, whereas Eve’s face is reflected in the snake’s.41 Eve has taken the apple but not yet tasted it. Her decision is never in doubt, of course, and the rest of the image elaborates its consequences, but by featuring the moment of temptation, the artist insists not just on the importance of Eve’s choice for humankind, but also on the coincidence of act and recognition: Eve takes the apple from a snake that looks like her. The Boccaccio image emphasizes recognition, but it does not identify what Eve desires when she responds to the snake. The extraordinary illumination reproduced in plate 12 opens Rudolf von Ems’s German translation of Barlaam and Josaphat and offers a more suggestive image of what Eve wants.42 This illumination was produced more than fifty years after the Boccaccio manuscript, in Germany rather than France, and it accompanies an entirely different text. But it too represents the temptation episode along with several other scenes from Genesis. The assembly of fish, birds, and mammals in the foreground and the sun and the moon in the background represent the creation. On the right side of the image, God raises his arm to command Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit. The serpent is twisted around the tree trunk and a woman’s torso emerges from its mouth, a literal embodiment of the serpent’s appeal to Eve’s vanity: the woman’s face mirrors Eve’s. With her right arm, the serpent woman offers an apple to Adam and Eve, and with her left she reaches up to take more fruit. The woman’s torso is clothed in a finely detailed courtly gown; the lacing of the sleeve is even visible on her left arm. Her hair is styled in a noble fashion, and she wears a crown. Eve does not look at the snake in this image. Adam and Eve gaze at each other, and the snake also seems to look at Adam, following Eve’s gaze. Eve offers an apple to Adam, who reaches to take it, but since he covers himself with a branch, there is also the suggestion that he has already tasted the forbidden fruit and recognized his own nakedness. The branch Adam grips looks curiously like his penis and although Eve’s arm extends under Adam’s to embrace him, the couple’s arms are awkwardly drawn; on first glance, Eve may appear to be gripping Adam’s penis. She is actually reaching behind Adam, perhaps to urge him forward and toward the apple she holds in her other hand. The couple’s embrace shifts the shared intimacy of temptation from Eve and the serpent to Adam and Eve, even as it emphasizes the likeness of Eve and the snake. The image links temptation, sin, and sexuality, while the serpent’s crown suggests that all these are related to sovereignty. The illumination clearly aligns Eve and the snake woman. Eve’s twisted posture echoes the serpent’s tail twined around the tree; more pointedly, the

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curls on her long hair repeat the raised ridge on the serpent’s back; this vi­ sual echo is repeated by the toes of Eve’s left foot, on which the end of the serpent’s tail seems to rest. Through the proximity of the snake and Eve, the similar positions of their bodies, their aligned gazes, and the repeated shapes of their features, the image suggests a mirroring, not just of faces, but of entire bodies; the image makes visible the resemblance of Eve and the snake found in textual claims: “like favors like.” And here the snake’s crown suggests that, as in Le jeu d’Adam, what Eve recognizes and desires in the snake’s likeness is sovereign agency as well as sovereign knowledge. The Barlaam illumination is not as finely painted as the Boccaccio man­ uscript’s representation of Eve and the snake, and it would be possible to dismiss this image as a somewhat fanciful take on the commonly represented temptation scene. The woman-­headed snake is not mentioned in Barlaam and Josaphat and its inclusion here suggests the circulation and popularity of the image among illuminators. However, the themes represented in the illumination are repeated in other manuscripts, especially in visual representations of the temptation scene that include a crowned woman-­headed snake.43 In such images, the crown references pride, according to Nona C. Flores, and to be sure, Eve’s pride explains her susceptibility to the devil’s flattery for many medieval writers; La bible historiale explains that “she became proud and wanted to be like God,” or, more literally, that she “wanted to resemble God” (“Adonc s’enorguilli la femme et voult ressembler Dieu,” 32).44 But the crown—­the most prominent symbol of royal sovereignty in medieval European discourses about rule—­suggests that a desire for authority and power subtends Eve’s mirroring gaze on the crowned snake.45 Images of Eve and the crowned woman-­headed snake make visible the role of mirroring and recognition in the encounter. The mirroring of Eve’s face in the snake’s extends Comester’s oft-­repeated claim that likeness makes Eve less afraid or more favorably disposed to the snake’s words; it suggests that Eve recognizes herself in the crowned snake’s face, and that what she recognizes is the possibility of sovereign agency. Mirroring and recognition are also linked to self-­sovereignty in the medieval genre of advice literature called mirrors of princes.46 Beginning in the thirteenth century and roughly contemporaneous with the circulation of woman-­headed serpent images, mirror literature of all kinds proliferated in Europe. Books with mirror titles may offer factually informative reflections of the world, like Honorius of Autun’s encyclopedic work, the Speculum mundi (Mirror of the World), but the speculum genre also includes manual or conduct guides like the Speculum virginum (Mirror of Virgins).47 Although

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the first treatise on government to appear with the title Speculum is Godefroy de Viterbe’s Speculum regale (The King’s Mirror) from the late twelfth century, manuals of advice for princes that use the metaphor of the mirror first appear in Antiquity and continue to be composed throughout the Middle Ages.48 Didactic mirrors of princes describe the virtues of the ideal sovereign and instruct him on the necessity of governing himself. Instead of describing the impersonal facts of government, they locate the position of authority in the person of the ruler and they describe the ways in which the prince should occupy his position. Mirrors of princes parse a system of rule “where courts provided opportunities to acquire the favours, the pleasures and the advantages which were the bases of power in a world co-­ordinated by patronage.”49 Mirrors of princes are part of a Latin didactic genre, written by clerics for noble patrons. There are few vernacular treatises that can be classified as mirrors for princes, as Dominique Boutet has noted, and none appears before the end of the thirteenth century. Moreover, in vernacular texts that claim to address issues of governance for the prince, the actual advice is directed more broadly to knights or nobles, rather than specifically to the king, and such advice is usually contained in short sections of larger didactic works. For vernacular reflections on the model prince we need to look to representations of good kings in literary texts, Boutet claims, that is, in historiographical, epic, and romance narratives.50 But when it comes to representations of good governance, literary texts offer exemplary portraits rather than didactic instruction, and they are more likely to portray the good king’s rule over others than to instruct the king on self-­governance. However, both vernacular literary texts and Latin mirrors for princes assume that the king’s conduct of himself is aligned with his conduct of the kingdom. Self-­sovereignty is realized in the sovereign actions of the prince, and the legitimacy of rule may be reflected in the qualities of the self-­governing and self-­sovereign prince. By contrast, Eve loses sovereignty over others when she reaches for self-­ sovereignty. Not only does Eve’s choice fail to gain her the parity with God promised by the snake; it also causes her to lose the “sovereignty over every living thing” that she already had, as Le jeu d’Adam puts it, using maistrie, a word that connotes dominion and mastery, rather than a reciprocal feudal relation of lordship (“la maistrie / De quanque doit estre en vie,” lines 814–­ 15). The sovereignty Eve already had was presumably dominion over the nonhuman animals in Paradise; as I indicated in chapter 2, the revolt of animals against human rule is one of the consequences of sin according to medieval vernacular bibles. Le roman de Renart genders this loss of dominion;

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in its rewriting of Genesis, Adam is associated with domesticated animals and Eve with the wild animals that escape human mastery. The gendered consequences of sin are explored further in relation to dominion over animals when Eve meets the snake for a second time in the apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve.

The Return of the Snake An account of the postlapsarian adventures of the first humans, The Life of Adam and Eve was first composed in Greek, then translated into Latin and into European vernaculars.51 In Chapter 1, I briefly discussed Lutwin’s German translation, and I return to that version here.52 Earlier versions of the story begin with the expulsion from Paradise, but Lutwin has elaborated the story considerably and extended it to include the creation story and the snake’s temptation of Eve. The Devil, in the guise of a serpent, lifted himself up into the branches of the tree, for he knew that Adam and Eve were under it without their guardians. He did what false men still do, who delight in pretending that they are being of service to people and yet ruin those who follow their counsel. The evil offspring of all that is evil, the terrible Devil, assisted by his lies, quite shamelessly and faithlessly proceeded to cajole Eve, flourishing his tail and making other gestures as though he meant her no harm. (Eva und Adam, 244) Jn einer slangen wise Hup er sich in des boumes este, Wanne er dar under weste Adam und Eua sunder hüt. Er det als nach der valsche düt, Der sich liebet domit, Das er mit dienstes sit Den lüten sich erzöiget Und doch domit feiget Den, der nach syme rote düt. Alles ubels ein ubele brut, Der tüfel ungehüre, Mit der lugen stüre Begunde er also losen One truwe mit Eua kosen,

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Mit dem zagel umbe varen Und dem glich gebaren, Als er jr gütes gunde. (Eva und Adam, lines 397–­414)

Lutwin does not say that the serpent has a woman’s face; in fact, if he genders the serpent, it is masculine like the devil and like the “false men” who resemble him. The snake cajoles Eve, but not by impersonating a woman. This serpent uses its animality to reassure Eve, “flourishing his tail and making other gestures as though he meant her no harm.” Lutwin’s description stresses the difference between Eve and the serpent: it is gendered masculine and its animality is foregrounded. Yet the illuminator has chosen to represent the serpent with a woman’s face (plate 13). In this temptation scene the snake is wound around the tree and faces Eve, its gaze locked with hers. As in the image from Barlaam and Josaphat (plate 12), the snake’s hair is styled like a courtly lady’s and it wears a crown, though here the joining of the woman’s head and the snake’s body is marked by a band that resembles a collar, as though the snakeskin were clothing. In contrast with the snake’s coifed appearance, Eve’s hair flows freely and she is naked. Eve already holds an apple, and the snake’s persuasive words are figured by the offering of another apple from its mouth, conflating speech and material seduction. Adam reaches forward, his eyes on the snake. The illuminator has no doubt called upon a conventional representation of the temptation to compose the scene, since Lutwin does not describe a woman-­headed serpent. He uses the same image later in the text when he illustrates a second encounter between Eve and a snake. At the end of Adam’s life, he sends Eve and their son Seth back to Paradise to seek oil from the tree of mercy which will ease his pain. A snake confronts them on their way and attacks Seth. Eve rebukes the snake: how dare it approach and harm Seth “who bears both the sign and image of God?” (“der gottes zeichen / Und sine forme um ym hat?” Eva und Adam, lines 2545–­46). The snake speaks back to Eve, reproaching her for her sin, and in Andrius’s French translation—­roughly contemporaneous with Lutwin’s—­the snake reflects Eve’s own language back to her: Then Eve said to the serpent, “Cursed beast, how do you not fear to harm the image of our lord, and how do you dare approach him? How were your teeth so brave as to dare to approach him?” Then the serpent replied and said . . .”But you, Eve, tell me how your mouth was so brave that it dared to eat the fruit that God had forbidden and that you tasted.”

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Lors dist Eve au serpent beste maudite por quoi n’eus tu paour de meffaire al ymagene de nostre signor ne coment te osas tu aproismier de lui. Ne coment furent ti dent si hardi qui oserent touchier a lui. Lors respondi li serpens e si dist . . . Mais tu Eve respont moi coment fu ta bouce si hardie que ele osa mangier le fruit que Diex t’avoit deffendu dont tu ne goustaisses. (La pénitence d’Adam, 82)

Eve’s own shame should keep her silent, the snake declares; she has no authority to rebuke it (“tu n’as loi de parler contre moi nule riens,” 82). The parallel rhetorical questions that Eve and the snake address to each other (“how are your teeth so brave . . . how is your mouth so brave . . .”) align Eve’s sin and the snake’s attack, perhaps emphasizing the consequences of Eve’s act for her descendants, following Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmities between you and the woman, and your seed and her seed.” But whereas the snake rejects Eve’s authority to speak, her son Seth, “the image of God,” is able to command the animal: And Seth spoke and said to the snake, “Wretched beast, may God curse you. Keep quiet and listen, and close your mouth which never loved truth, and remove yourself from before the image of our Lord back to the place where God will put you according to the reward you deserve.” Then the snake said to Seth, “I cannot move except to remove myself from before you, as you have demanded.” Then the snake went away. Et dont parla Seth et dist au serpent, beste malaventureuse Diex te maudie. Escoute toi et si te tais et si clo ta bouce qui onques n’ama verite et remue toi de devant l’ymage nostre singnor jusques la ou nostre sire te metera selont le gerredon que tu auras deservi. A dont dist li serpens a Seth, je ne puis muer que je ne remu devant toi si come tu as demande. Lors s’en ala li serpens. (La pénitence d’Adam, 82)53

Seth invokes his identity as “the image of God” in order to authorize his mastery over the snake. Seth’s resemblance to God references the gendered hierarchy of creation: according to the biblical narrative, Adam was created in the image of God, and Eve was created from Adam.54 But it also emphasizes Eve’s loss of sovereignty after her sin, not just in the text’s account of her inability to rebuke the snake, but also in the illumination that accompanies the episode in Lutwin’s text, where the snake that Seth subdues appears identical to the snake that tempted Eve in Paradise: it has a woman’s head and wears a crown (plate 14).

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Eve stands slightly behind Seth. She is dressed as a matron, with her head covered and her hand to her heart, and she seems to react to the snake’s rebuke. Seth admonishes it, raising one hand as though to order the snake’s retreat. Seth points toward the snake with his other hand, perhaps indexing for the viewer the woman-­headed snake that has already appeared in the earlier illustration of Eve’s temptation.55 And indeed, this snake does not appear particularly threatening. It recalls seduction more than enmity and appears to be looking at the viewer rather than at Seth or Eve. In all the Latin and vernacular versions of The Life of Adam and Eve, the snake is the animal adversary encountered by Eve and Seth on their way to Paradise; however, in the earliest Greek versions of the story, the animal they meet is identified only as a wild beast and seems to represent the more general revolt of animals against human mastery.56 In translations of the source text, the animals’ rebellion comes to be represented as the snake’s revolt against Eve. As I mentioned above, the evolution of the story is probably influenced by God’s curse of the snake from Gen. 3:15 (“I will put enmities between you and the woman, and your seed and her seed”): Eve cannot rebuke this snake precisely because she responded to the Eden snake. Her son Seth can, and his authority is confirmed in a representation of recognition and mirroring. But here, recognition is a response to power, not an attempt to seize it: the snake recognizes divine authority in Seth, “the image of God,” and submits to his rebuke. By contrast, Eve is mirrored in the accusing snake and like the snake, she is subject to the authority of her husband and her son, as the text also stresses.57 Recognition and mirroring have come apart here, as difference is valorized over likeness and gendered hierarchy is reaffirmed. The snake looks at Eve and recognizes enmity; it looks at Seth and recognizes the image of God. When Eve herself looks at the snake, she no longer recognizes a promise of sovereignty: if Eve still sees herself mirrored in the snake, it is not as a sovereign agent, but as a chastised sinner. The crowned woman-­headed snake presents to Eve an image of what she desired and lost. The widespread representation of Eve’s encounter with a woman-­headed snake in medieval Europe demonstrates the circulation of a motif among clerical writers and artists. That circulation could be explained by convention, or by the intriguing nature of the snake woman, or even by a desire to demonize Eve by associating her more closely with the snake through re­ semblance. However appealing the image itself may be, however, its repe­ tition in images and in texts suggests that it also explains something about the Genesis narrative. These representations offer a causal logic, suggesting

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that Eve responded to the devil’s promise of knowledge because she recognized it as a promise of sovereignty. But the import of this logic does more than gloss the Genesis story: sovereignty itself comes under scrutiny in representations of Eve and the serpent where gender and animality structure relations of mirroring and recognition. Such representations reveal the tenuous construction of sovereignty, and the terms of its disputed na­ ture are those of two forms of difference: gender and animality. And it is not incidental that these two forms of difference coincide. Self-­sovereignty and sovereignty over others—­so firmly united in mirrors for princes—­come apart when the promise of sovereignty is mirrored in the female face of a snake.

Snake Women Like the Eden story, Le roman de Mélusine and Le bel inconnu interrogate the relationship between self-­sovereignty and sovereignty over others, and they represent the desire for knowledge and mastery in an encounter with a snake woman in which self-­sovereignty is at stake. But in these stories, the desiring gaze on the snake woman is that of a knight, not another woman, and this regendering redefines the relationship of recognition to agency and sovereignty. Medieval stories about snake-­tailed women or women transformed into serpents are derived from folklore or popular sources, and the animal transformation is usually the result of a magic spell. While the romance narratives are not directly inspired by the woman-­headed snake in the Genesis account, their representations of women-­beasts are similar, as at least one thirteenth-­century writer noted. In the Otia imperialia Gervase of Tilbury describes the snake that seduced Eve (“serpente qui Euam seduxit”) and he repeats the idea that the snake’s face won Eve’s favor (“similia similibus applaudunt”). He then shifts his focus to popular stories about women who change into snakes; particularly interesting is his description of the crown-­ like white band that encircles the women’s heads.58 We must not fail to mention what Bede says in treating of the serpent which seduced Eve. He claims that the devil chose a particular kind of serpent with a woman’s face, because like approves of like, and then gave its tongue the power of speech. On the subject of serpents, popular tradition has it that there are some women who change into them; they can be recognized by a white band or fillet which they have on their heads.59

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Gervase composed the Otia imperialia in the early thirteenth century for Emperor Otto IV. A book of entertainment and instruction, an encyclopedia as well as a mirror for a prince, it includes an account of the creation and early history of the world, chronicles of the world’s people, and a collection of marvels. Gervase draws on a variety of learned sources, including commentaries on Genesis, but he also insists that stories from “popular tradition” are not to be discredited: in England men have been known to change into wolves and in Greece and Jerusalem, he claims, and women have changed men who spurn them into asses. Gervase then relays the “reliable account” of a knight who meets a beautiful richly dressed woman by a stream and marries her. The new wife forbids her husband to see her naked and warns that if he transgresses the interdiction, he will lose his wealth and the prosperity he has enjoyed with her. One day the knight, called Raymond, cannot resist the desire to see his wife in her bath, and when he pulls back the curtain to look on her, she immediately turns into a serpent.60 Gervase’s account is one of many Latin and vernacular stories about women who change into snakes; as critics have long noted, it is a summary of the Mélusine story.61 Jean d’Arras, author of the first French vernacular Roman de Mélusine, completed in 1393, explicitly cites Gervase as a source.62 In studies of the romance’s origins, critics have tended to focus on Gervase’s accounts of women who change into snakes rather than on his mention of the Eden serpent. Only E. Jane Burns has fully explored the link between the woman-­headed Eden serpent and the part-­serpent women found in the Otia imperialia and echoed in Le roman de Mélusine, describing Mélusine as “a fully secularized version of that ambiguous configuration represented in the thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century images of the woman-­headed Eden serpent.”63 The snake woman Mélusine does not represent seduction, but sovereignty, Burns notes, emphasizing that her hybrid, boundary-­crossing body figures the expansionist politics of the story.64 Mélusine’s part-­snake body also comes to figure sovereignty for her husband, Raymondin, as I will argue below. Mélusine is responsible for the geographical expansion of Lusignan territory recounted in the romance and enacted in history, as Burns emphasizes; I mentioned her use of animal skin to claim land in chapter 1. The mythical ancestor of the Lusignan family, the daughter of a fairy, Mélusine assumes the form of a serpent from the waist down (“du nombril en aval,” 134) every Saturday, a description that recalls popular legends like those cited by Gervase of Tilbury and others, and may also recall representations of the Eden serpent like that in plate 12.65 Mélusine will become fully human only if she can marry a man who will agree never to see her on Saturday. The knight

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Raymondin agrees to this condition and willingly marries the fairy Mélusine, who accumulates vast territories and gives birth to ten sons who conquer many lands. Faithful to Mélusine’s interdiction for many years, Raymondin is ultimately provoked to spy on his wife by his brother’s suggestion that Mélu­ sine’s seclusion allows her to meet a lover. Raymondin pierces a hole in the door of Mélusine’s chamber and discovers her in her bath. And he saw her in the bath, and she had the form of a woman down to her navel, and was combing her hair. From the navel down, she had the tail of a serpent, as wide as a barrel of herrings and extremely long, with which she slapped the water so hard that it splashed to the ceiling of the room. Et voit Melusigne en la cuve, qui estoit jusques au nombril en figure de femme et pignoit ses cheveulx, et du nombril en aval estoit en forme de la queue d’un serpent, aussi grosse comme une tonne ou on met harenc et longue durement, et debatoit de sa coue l’eaue tellement qu’elle la faisoit saillir jusques a la voulte de la chambre. (Le roman de Mélusine, 660)

We see Mélusine along with Raymondin, and his gaze seems first to recognize her human form, then to discover her serpent tail.66 Raymondin’s gaze on the hybrid body of his wife provokes neither revulsion nor attraction, but remorse. He laments his own actions in terms of an animality that mirrors Mélusine’s part-­snake body. Speaking from the other side of the door to Mélusine’s chamber, he describes himself as a snake: Alas, my sweet friend, I am the false cruel asp and you are the precious unicorn, and I have betrayed you with my traitorous venom. Alas! You cured me of my first cruel venom! Now I have repaid you cruelly by betraying you and breaking my faith. Las, ma tresdoulce amie, je sui le faulx crueux aspis et vous estes la licorne precieuse, je vous ay par mon faulx venin trahie. He! Las, vous m’aviéz mediciné de mon premier crueulx venin! Or le vous ay je crueusement mery quant je vous ay traÿee et menty ma foy envers vous. (Le roman de Mélusine, 664)

Mélusine is doubly animal here: first Raymondin sees her in her hybrid state as part snake, and then he describes her as a precious or inestimable unicorn. Although the animal bodies overload the scene with possible

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phallic images, the more relevant reference is to the purifying virtues of the unicorn’s horn. According to some medieval accounts, the unicorn dips its horn in water poisoned by the serpent to clean the water and make it safe for other animals.67 The unicorn is the very opposite of a serpent in this description, and if the poisoning serpent may figure the devil, in medieval bestiaries the unicorn figures Christ. Although Raymondin sees his wife’s literal, if temporary, animal embodiment, his characterization of the wife he has betrayed draws on a metaphorical animality and re-­envisions her part-­serpent body as the healing, restoring Christ-­like body of the unicorn.68 Raymondin puts himself in the position of the snake: “I am the false, cruel asp,” he says. The “traitorous venom” (“faulx venin”) of his betrayal is all the more unjust, he claims, since Mélusine earlier saved him from his own venom, a metaphorical reference to the accidental murder of his lord that Mélusine helped him to hide. Raymondin also tries to hide his own betrayal of Mélusine. After seeing his wife through the hole he has pierced in her door, Raymondin “runs to his room and takes the wax off an old letter he finds there and stops up the hole” (“Il court en sa chambre et prent la cire d’une vieille lettre qu’il trouva et en estouppa le pertuis,” 660). Raymondin seals the hole in the door with a seal from a letter, doubly concealing his betrayal, since he hides the evidence of his transgression with the wax of another’s seal. But more important in relation to the mirroring effect of gazing on the snake woman, Raymondin’s act of sealing—­here sealing off the sight of his wife in her weekly snaky transformation—­recalls the asp’s habit of sealing another of its senses, as recorded in the second-­family bestiary: “They say that when [the asp] begins to give in to the snake-­charmer, who calls it forth by certain of his songs in order to draw it out of its hole, if [the asp] does not want to go out, it presses one ear against the ground, covers and stops up the other with its tail, and not hearing those magical notes, does not go out to the snake-­charmer.”69 Raymondin’s asp-­like effort to stop up the hole in his wife’s door is another example of the uneasy intersection of sexual and Christian symbolism in the episode’s imagery, but Raymondin’s intention is not to resist his wife’s charms, but to hide his transgression. In fact, the scene of his wife’s transformation does not seem to hold his attention. Raymondin sees Mélusine in her snake form, but he focuses on his own betrayal (“I am the false, cruel asp”) rather than on Mélusine’s hybrid body. Raymondin’s great lament turns out to be premature, though, since his act has no immediate or obvious consequences in the story. He does not lose his wife or his wealth, as Mélusine threatened he would, nor does his relationship with her appear to change. It is only later, when Raymondin blames

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his wife for their son’s violence, that he reveals his betrayal in an angry accusation: “You evil serpent, by God, you and your works are nothing but illusions” (“Hee, tresfaulse serpente, par Dieu, ne toy ne tes fais ne sont que fantosme,” 692). Raymondin regrets his outburst immediately, but this time he cannot hide his transgression behind a sealed door. Once he speaks his accusation, Mélusine takes the form of a winged serpent and flies away. Raymondin loses his wife not when he first gazes on her part-­serpent body, but when he recognizes her serpent identity by naming it (“Hee, tresfaulse serpente”). Although this moment of naming provokes the consequences of Raymondin’s betrayal, it recalls the earlier description of Raymondin’s reaction to the sight of Mélusine in her bath. That episode offered the first glimpse of Mélusine’s part-­serpent body, for the reader as for Raymondin, and its later consequences underscore the importance of the moment of discovery. Choice and self-­control are at stake in Raymondin’s desire for hidden knowledge about his wife, and he initially betrays Mélusine in an attempt to discover her betrayal of him. This specular motivation is reflected in the mirroring rhetoric of the passage: “I am the false, cruel asp.” In the moment of discovery, Raymondin looks at a snake and recognizes himself, but in the later moment of anger in which he names the “false serpent,” Raymondin looks at the woman and sees a snake. Through this loss of recognition, Ray­mond loses what he wants to hold onto. As in the Genesis narrative, in Le roman de Mélusine the figure of a snake woman provokes a desire for knowledge that threatens the very sovereignty such knowledge would seem to offer; Raymondin acts on his desire to know and loses what he wants to hold onto. But he does not lose his lands or his rule over them, and in Raymondin’s loss of his wife, the Lusignan dynasty acquires a serpent woman as ancestor.

A Snake’s Kiss Le roman de Mélusine is one of several medieval texts in which a desire for sovereign knowledge takes the form of an encounter with a snake woman in which choice is at stake. Raymondin regrets his choice, as we’ve seen, and mirrors the object of his transgressive gaze in a description of himself as a snake. A similar dynamic is at stake in the thirteenth-­century Bel inconnu, where a knight recognizes his own agency in a snake’s kiss. Whereas Le roman de Mélusine is a story about gendered sovereignty that explains female sovereignty and power as the effects of fairy magic and casts the female sovereign not just as supernatural, but also as partly animal, Le bel inconnu represents

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the female sovereign as imprisoned in an animality from which she must be freed in order to share her sovereign position with her chivalric rescuer.70 Le bel inconnu is attributed to Renaud de Beaujeu (or Bâgé) and preserved in a single thirteenth-­century manuscript that has been described as a Gauvain cycle because the nine Arthurian romances it reproduces all give a prominent role to King Arthur’s nephew.71 Le bel inconnu carries the narrative cycle forward into the story of Gauvain’s son, Guinglain, who remains unidentified until the midpoint of the romance; he is known simply as the Bel Inconnu (the Fair Unknown). There are several other medieval versions of the story: a fourteenth-­century English romance based on a French original, an early thirteenth-­century German version, a fifteenth-­century Italian narrative, and a prose French romance from the beginning of the sixteenth century.72 The many versions of the story suggest it was popular, perhaps because of the way it rewrites episodes from earlier romances, perhaps because it portrays a hero with two love interests, or perhaps because it features a snake woman. An unknown knight arrives at Arthur’s court, his identity a mystery even to himself. Since he is quite handsome, he is called the Fair Unknown, le Bel Inconnu. Shortly afterwards, a young woman arrives to ask Arthur for his best knight; she seeks a champion to save her lady, Blonde Esmerée, the queen of Wales, in the challenge of the fier baiser, the proud or the perilous kiss. The unknown knight asks the king to grant him the adventure. The Bel Inconnu then sets out for the challenge of the Fier Baiser, undertaking a series of adventures along the way and proving his chivalric skill and prowess. In one of his first challenges, he delivers the Demoiselle aux Blanches Mains from a suitor who tries to win her by force. The knight falls in love with this lady, but must leave her in secret—­for she will not permit his departure—­in order to fulfill his promise to save Blonde Esmerée in the con­ test of the Fier Baiser. He arrives at the devastated Gaste Cité where he will meet his challenge and enters the castle. First he confronts and defeats two demon adversaries in chivalric combat. As he waits in a dark room for the next contest, a huge snake, une guivre, comes out of a cupboard and approaches the knight. Then [the knight] saw a cabinet open and a snake came out. It shone with light like a candle and illuminated the entire room, none had ever seen such light, and it had a bright red mouth. Fire issued from it, and it was enormous and hideous. A tant vit une aumaire ouvrir Et une wivre fors issir,

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Qui jetoit une tel clarté Con un cierge bien enbrasé; Tot le palais enluminoit. Une si grant clarté jetoit Hom ne vit onques sa parelle, Que la bouce ot tote vermelle. Par mi jetoit le feu ardant, Molt par estoit hidosse et grant. (Le bel inconnu, lines 3127–­36)

The fire from the snake’s mouth illuminates the dark chamber and allows the knight to see that the snake is twenty-­four feet long and as wide as a wine barrel. Its eyes glow like gemstones, its tail is marked with every color in creation, its underside is golden, and it has a bright red mouth. The enormous snake provokes fear and uncertainty. The knight thinks it is a kind of demon or devil, the narrator tells us (“si fait dyable,” line 3152), a logical conclusion since he has just defeated two demonic magicians in battle. This guivre is in fact a woman transformed into a snake by the very magicians the knight has just defeated. The merging of the demonic and the feminine in the transformation of the woman into a serpent suggests a link between the guivre and the Eden serpent, Romaine Wolf-­Bonvin has suggested, and in fact, the fourteenth-­century English version of the story explicitly represents the snake as a woman-­headed serpent like those found in representations of the tempting Eden snake.73 In Libeaus Desconus, we learn that “A worme ther ganne oute-­pas / With a womanes face.”74 The English version of the Fair Unknown story is like a Marian miracle (the knight calls on the Virgin Mary for help at the beginning of the adventure), and as Caroline Jewers has argued, it suggests the convergence of religious iconography, folklore, and imaginative literature.75 Renaud’s version does not call on the iconography of the woman-­headed snake, but the vocabulary that describes the snake’s bright red mouth suggests a distinctly human feature. The knight prepares to strike the snake as it comes toward him, but the passage emphasizes the snake’s submission: its slow progression toward the knight is marked by repeated gestures of deference. The knight responds to the snake’s gestures by holding back his blow, all the while his gaze fixed on the snake’s bright red mouth: The snake inclines again before him and gently shows its submission. He holds back and does not strike it; he looks at it attentively and

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without moving. And he marvels at the mouth that is bright red. He is so absorbed in looking at the mouth that he cannot look away. The snake leaps toward him and kisses him on the mouth. When it had kissed him, it turned back. The Unknown Knight prepares himself and draws his sword to strike it, and the snake pauses, bows in a sign of submission, and then leaves. The knight withheld his blow. His generosity prevented him from striking it, because it had submitted to him. La guivre autre fois le rencline, Vers lui doucement s’umelie; Il se retint, ne le fiert mie, Il l’esgarde, pas ne s’oublie, Ne de rien nule ne fercele; Et si a il molt grant mervele De la bouce qu’a si vermelle. Tant s’enten en li regarder Que d’autre part ne pot garder. La guivre vers lui se lança Et en la bouce le baissa. Quant l’ot baissié, si se retorne. Et li Descouneüs s’atorne, Por li ferir a trait l’espee; Et la guivre s’est arestee, Sanblant d’umelité li fait, Encliné l’a, puis si s’en vait. Et cil a soi son cop retint. De molt grant francisse li vient Que il ferir ne le valt mie Por ce que vers lui s’umelie. (Le bel inconnu, lines 3176–­96)

The knight appears entranced by the snake, and time seems to slow as he watches its movements. As Wolf-­Bonvin has noted, the triplets of feminine rhymes in lines 3177–­82 work to suspend time and to emphasize the knight’s own suspension in contemplation.76 The narration slows as the knight focuses on the snake’s mouth and his contemplative gaze is interrupted by an abrupt touch when the snake suddenly leaps forward to kiss him, and then again makes a sign of submission. The snake bows as if to reassure the knight both before and after it kisses him, and its gestures communicate in several registers. The text uses the

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verbs “encliner” and “rencliner” (to incline, to bow) to describe the snake’s gestures, but it also repeatedly uses “s’umelier” (to bow in submission), a verb that adds intention to the gesture. The snake’s humility might be understood as a gesture of feudal deference, but it also emphasizes the snake’s animality and the animal’s submission to human mastery. As I noted earlier, the bestiary uses the verb “s’umelier” to describe the dog’s attitude before its master, and Yvain’s lion bows (“s’umelie”) to show its submission to the knight who saved it.77 Moreover, the language of the passage also links the snake’s gesture to the beloved lady: the snake’s sign of submission (“sanblant d’umelité,” line 3159) anticipates the narrator’s concluding request for a sign from his lady, “un biau semblant” that signals her acceptance of his love.78 The snake’s repeated signs of reassurance indicate feudal submission, animal obedience, and a woman’s acquiescence. The snake communicates from the several identities it incarnates. This guivre is a woman transformed into snake form, and its bright red lips have been read as displaced female genitalia, “vestiges of a disturbingly alluring female sexuality which haunts the repellent beast” in Miranda Griffin’s summary. Griffin insists on the snake’s mouth as figuring the “frightening fusion of the feminine and the animal” in this episode. I too read the snake’s bright red mouth as significant, not because it represents a merging of identities, but because the serpent’s mouth reveals what lies beneath its spectacularly colored skin.79 To be sure, a fire-­spitting serpent’s mouth would not seem to be a human feature; it is more usually the feature of a fantastical or even diabolical animal. However, the narrator describes this snake’s mouth as a human mouth, a bouce (bouche) rather than a gole (gueule), as used elsewhere in this romance to name an animal’s mouth.80 If, as some critics have claimed, Renaud’s serpent is modeled on the fire-­spitting serpent in Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion, Renaud has changed the vocabulary to emphasize the humanity of the snake’s mouth: whereas Chrétien describes the fire-­breathing animal’s goule (“Si li saut par la goule fus,” line 3360), Renaut describes a very red bouce from which the serpent throws fire: “No one has ever seen the like, for its mouth is bright red, and it spits out a burning fire” (“Hom ne vit onques sa parelle, / Que la bouce ot tote vermelle. / Par mi jetoit le feu ardant,” lines 3133–­35). As Cristina Noacco has noted, the vocabulary reveals that for the narrator and his readers, this snake is a woman.81 And indeed, Alice Colby-­Hall argues, the snake’s bright red bouce is like a courtly lady’s mouth (“tote vermelle,” line 3134; “si vermelle,” line 3182).82 Earlier in the romance a courtly lady has been described in similar terms: La Demoiselle aux Blanches Mains has “bright red lips” and—­not incidentally—­a mouth made for kissing (“Les levres avoit vermelletes . . . Boce bien faite por

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baissier,” lines 2237–­39). Again, all these red lips could have symbolic meanings, but the episode turns on kissing. Like the red mouth of the Demoiselle aux Blanches Mains, the snake’s mouth too is made for kissing—­not, however, for receiving, but for giving kisses. The challenge of the Fier Baiser, it turns out, is to receive the kiss, not to give it. The knight does not recognize the woman in the snake, even though he is fascinated by the snake’s bright red mouth and its gestures of submission. After the snake leaps forward to kiss him, the knight reaches again for his sword, but the snake again bows to signal its submission, and he holds his blow. He watches the snake re-­enter its cabinet, the door to the cabinet closes, and the knight remains in the dark room. Only then does he speak and only then does he regret the kiss. But notably, the knight’s lament reverses the action: he complains that he gave a kiss, not that he received it. The knight thought about the kiss. He sat down at the table. “Lord, God,” he said, “what will happen to me because of the Cruel Kiss that I gave? I gave a dolorous kiss. Now I am betrayed and the devil has enchanted me, when I kissed against my will. Now my life is in danger.” Et cil del baissier fu pensis: Delés la table s’est asis. “Dius, Sire, fait il, que ferai Del Fier Baissier que fait i ai? Molt dolerous baisier ai fait; Or sui je traïs entresait. Li diables m’a encanté, Que j’ai baissié otre mon gré. Or pris je molt petit ma vie.” (Le bel inconnu, lines 3203–­11)

Here the mouth made for kissing can be both a mouth that kisses another and a mouth that returns a kiss. The reversal of agency—­the snake kisses the knight, the knight worries about the kiss he gave—­underscores reciprocity, but it also rewrites the knight’s trance-­like passivity as an active, even if regrettable response to the challenge.83 “I gave the Fier Baiser,” the knight says, then repeats: “I gave a dolorous kiss,” implicitly claiming his success in the challenge he traveled to undertake.84 The monstrous and seductive snake woman, the victim of a magic spell, seems to invite a specular reversal in which the knight takes the snake’s place. This mirroring is analogous to the specular effect of Raymondin’s gaze on the snake-­tailed

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Mélusine. When Raymondin breaks his wife’s interdiction and sees her in her snake form, he describes himself as a snake, a traitorous asp, and although he subsequently loses Mélusine as a result of his betrayal, he does not lose the empire she has won for him. In Le bel inconnu, the unknown knight’s encounter with the snake woman brings both knowledge and sovereignty: he learns his own noble identity and he wins the hand of the lady he has saved, the beautiful queen of Wales. The figure of the sovereign snake woman in Le bel inconnu is probably derived from folklore sources. She is an avatar of the Celtic divinity Eriu, or the Sovereignty of Ireland, a personification of the land and its kingship that was half-­goddess and half-­allegory. As D. D. R. Owen describes the figure, “she was adept at shape-­shifting and would appear now in loathsome, now in lovely form; and her transformations have been held to reflect the changing aspect of the land as it passes from barren winter to summer’s green.”85 Roger Sherman Loomis identifies two clearly distinguished offshoots of the Eriu concept. In one, which includes The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath, the figure of sovereignty takes the form of a monstrous hag, transformed into a beautiful maiden by a kiss. Gauvain is the hero in this tradition and it seems not to have reached beyond England. In the other offshoot of the folklore tradition, the sovereign woman is transformed into a serpent or dragon. Le bel inconnu and the roughly contemporaneous German Lanzelet belong to this branch of the tradition.86 The meaning of the figure of sovereignty in Celtic sources does not dictate the significance of the snake woman in Le bel inconnu, of course. The romance imports the figure to a courtly context in which its meanings are shaped by the conventions of chivalric heroism, courtly love, and prior romance uses of the Celtic merveilleux. However, an acknowledgement of the snake woman’s possible Celtic antecedents underscores her association with sovereignty and highlights the salient features of the story: a spell causes the metamorphosis of a figure of sovereignty and the restoration of the sovereign woman’s human form tests the knight who would save her, whether through a kiss, as for Guinglain, or by keeping a promise, as for Raymondin. Both knights choose to confront the snake woman, and both knights see themselves mirrored in the snake they confront.

Mirroring Animals The notion that animals may mirror human behavior is a grounding premise of exemplary literature like fables, but it also has a broader theological importance in the notion of God’s creation as exemplary. As one twelfth-­century

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writer put it, “Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture to us, and a mirror; a faithful representation of our life, our death, our condition, our end.”87 Animals are part of the specular exemplarity of the book of nature, and the “natural” behaviors of animals reflect salvation history, as in the bestiaries. But animals mirror in a variety of ways, as the texts I’ve examined here suggest; in the Eden story, the seductive figure of the snake woman reflects not salvation, but loss, and in romance narratives the figure is both familiar and fearful, alluring and estranging. When read alongside each other, the woman-­headed Eden snake, the snake woman Mélusine, and the woman turned into a snake in Le bel inconnu suggest that sovereignty comes under consideration in the encounter with a snake woman through an emphasis on knowledge and choice articulated through representations of mirroring and recognition. These narratives suggest that sovereignty is gendered not in the figure of snake woman, but in the encounter with this hybrid creature. Eve’s gaze on the Eden snake, Raymondin’s discovery of his wife’s part-­serpent body, and Guinglain’s fascination with the giant snake’s mouth are moments in which a choice to act is described in terms of sight, recognition, and knowledge. In the Eden story, the moment of choice is also a moment in which self-­sovereignty is at stake, and I insist on the notion of self-­sovereignty, “the condition of being an independent self-­determining agent,” as well as on the notion of sovereignty itself, where the choice to act is related to a claim of authority and dominion that includes power over others. In other words, sovereignty and self-­sovereignty are connected in a fantasy of recognition: Eve gazes on the snake and imagines that if she acts according to the desire elicited by its promise, she will be queen of the world. In the romances, the reflexivity of the encounter with the snake is gendered differently. The knight that encounters the snake is already an independent agent in the story, and the encounter with the snake provokes a rhetorical mirroring: Raymondin sees his wife’s part-­snake body and names himself an asp; Guinglain receives a kiss and claims to have kissed the snake. For these knights, a claim to lordship and authority results from a specular encounter with a snake woman in which sovereignty over a land and its people passes from the lady to the knight. Raymondin acts to gain knowledge about his wife, and although he initially describes himself as reflected in the snake, his subsequent recognition of his wife as a “false serpent” separates him from Mélusine, exiling the snake woman while preserving his dominion over the lands she has won. Guinglain, too, appears to see his own actions in the snake’s, and as a result of the kiss he claims to have given, he learns his own identity and

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becomes a self-­sovereign actor, and he gains a royal wife and sovereignty over her domain. Whereas in the Eden narrative, the woman’s recognition of herself in the crowned snake is a misrecognition, a fantasy that self-­sovereignty also promises sovereignty over others, in the romance narratives, the knights who see themselves reflected in snake women gain or retain a sovereign position over land and people. Women are doubly distanced from authority and dominion in these stories, and animality is what makes this distancing visible. Confronted by her own image in the face of a snake, Eve reaches for authority and power and loses both; conflated with a snake in a composite being, the romance snake women lose whatever claim to sovereignty their own knowledge might have gained them, as their hybrid bodies reflect back to the knight his own identification as sovereign.

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Becoming-­Human, Becoming-­Sovereign: Gender, Genealogy, and the Wild Man

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n chapter 4, I argued that in narratives about snake women, scenes of recognition and mirroring underscore a gendering of authority and dominion that excludes women or uses female figures to accord sovereignty to the men who gaze upon them. In representations of Eve’s encounter with the Eden snake, medieval texts and images describe self-­sovereignty as the promise of sovereignty over others, which Eve loses as soon as she reaches for the forbidden fruit. In romance narratives, I suggested, the knight’s reflexive gaze on the snake woman produces knowledge that consolidates a sovereign position, even as it marginalizes the snake woman. In all these stories, animality may characterize female rule as somehow monstrous or diabolical, but the romances in particular cast animality as abject, as a curse to be undone, or as the imprisonment of a human in the skin of a beast.1 The abjection of animality is tied to a becoming-­human as well: humanity is restored by a kiss in Le bel inconnu; Mélusine will become fully human if she can marry a man who will agree never to see her on Saturday. Despite the sovereign positions of these female figures, their becoming-­human depends on the actions of a knight in a predictably gendered representation of rescue: no matter how powerful, the woman must be saved by a man. In this chapter, I turn to another example of becoming-­human in the figure of the wild man, an animal-­like being whose humanity must be recuperated if he is to return to human culture.2 Literary and visual representations of wild men proliferate in medieval Europe, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In most of these representations, the wild man’s body has become animal-­like: he is covered in pelt-­like hair that looks like fur and his nails are sharp claws.3 He has lost the accouterments or abilities of human culture: he is usually naked, he does not know how to interact with people, and in some accounts, he cannot speak human languages. The wild 126

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man always lives outside human society, exiled by accident or by choice. He may have been lost in the forest as an infant and raised by animals; he may be a courtly knight fallen into madness, or he may be a penitent hermit. He may be irrational or he may be logical, and when brought back into human society, he may act aggressively and need to learn the constraints and forms of human social interactions, or he may effortlessly adapt to human culture in ways that identify wildness as a mere interlude, a momentary forgetting of human identity. Whether he lives in the forest because he has been lost to human society or whether he chooses isolation and exile, the wild man has typically been seen as a figure outside of human culture and sociability. Yet, as I will argue here, the opposition between human culture and animal wildness is not as secure as it might seem in representations of wild men. I begin by reading a fifteenth-­century moralizing poem that uses a wild man to praise the sufficiency of nature for human needs. Even as the wild man extolls the virtues of God-­given natural resources over the frivolities of human culture, the poem’s neat opposition of nature and culture is blurred, and it seems to question just how wild the wild man is. A similar question subtends the two epic narratives I turn to next, particularly in the opposition they construct between the wild protagonist’s animality and his lost noble human identity. In the thirteenth-­century Naissance du chevalier au cygne (The Birth of the Swan Knight), a wild child’s reintegration into human culture passes through the recognition of a lineage that both restores human identity and maintains its link to animality. The Swan Knight narrative provides a context for my extended reading of the fourteenth-­century Tristan de Nanteuil (Tristan of Nanteuil), which includes an extraordinary story about a child raised by animals in the forest. Gender is key to the becoming-­human of the eponymous character, the wild Tristan: he leaves behind animality as he moves into human manhood and noble lineage, even as ties with animality persist in what the text presents as an alternative kinship tie. In both epic texts, human identity is indexed to nobility and rule, and it is articulated through the recognition of gendered bodies.

The Wild Man Speaks In the curious fifteenth-­century poem entitled “La ballade d’uns home sauvage estant en le creux d’un arbre” (The Ballad of a Wild Man Living in the Hollow of a Tree), a wild man extols the virtues of his life in the forest: “I live according to what Nature teaches, without care and speaking of many happy things” (“Je veiz scelon que m’a apriz Nature, / sans soussy, mil faictz diz joyeusement”).4 This wild man finds himself perfectly content with

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what God has provided in nature, as a recurring refrain emphasizes: “And for this, praise God, I have enough” (“et pour ce ay Dieu mercy souffisance”). Found in a fifteenth-­century manuscript containing what appears to be a miscellaneous collection of poems, the ballad has four stanzas of eight decasyllabic verses, each ending in the refrain cited above; an envoi closes the composition. “La ballade d’uns home sauvage” is a moralizing poem: the wild man describes the sufficiency of nature in order to reproach those who care more for the comforts of the world than for the state of their souls. Similar to Le roman des romans, the didactic text discussed in chapter 1, “La ballade d’uns home sauvage” calls for a rejection of worldly pleasures like fine food and rich clothing, but instead of the voices of animals flayed to produce meat and furs, it uses the voice of a man who lives without both. I take no pleasure in fine meats or strong drinks; I eat only wild fruits and for that, praise God, I have enough. . . . I have no need to wear clothes, my skin covers me well enough and I fear neither heat nor chill. Nor do I need to sleep on a soft bed, for I learned throughout my childhood to sleep simply on the grass, and for that, praise God, I have enough. Quant a viandes souefves nullement n’en fors brevaiges, ne prens poinct de plaisance; de francs fructaiges me repais seullement, et pour ce ay Dieu mercy souffisance. . . . Je n’ay besoing de porter grant vesture; mon poil me cueuvre assez suffizanment; pour ce ne crains ne grant chault ne froidure. Ne a dormir sur coyte mollement pas ne requier, car jamais aultrement je n’ay apriz de toute mon enfance que sur l’erbe me coucher simplement, et pour ce ay Dieu mercy souffisance. (“La ballade d’uns home sauvage,” lines 5–­8, 17–­24)

The ballad’s theme is the sufficiency of nature for the needs of humans, and nature’s provisions include wild fruits for food and grass for bedding, but not the products of hunting or cultivation. This wild man does not consume meat, but survives on the fruits of nature readily available in the forest; he does not wear animal pelts, but covers himself with his own skin. The poem directly contradicts the notion that human survival requires the killing and flaying of animals, and it also subverts the notion of a human sovereignty enacted and

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displayed in the use of animals, whether for practical or symbolic ends. If this wild man makes any claim to sovereignty, it is—­paradoxically—­in isolation from other living beings. When the heat is overwhelming or when he is beset by storms and cold, the wild man takes a “sovereign” view: “To see in a sovereign way, I take comfort and live in the hope that the sun will soon shine, and for this, thank to God, I have enough” (“De par ainsi pour veoir souveraynement / je prens confort et veiz en esperance / que le souleil luyra aprés briefvement, / et pour ce ay Dieu mercy souffisance,” lines 29–­32). I’ve emphasized the vocabulary of sovereignty in my translation of “veoir souveraynement” as “to see in a sovereign way.” This wild man doesn’t rule over anybody else. He locates sovereignty in detachment from human society and values, and in submission to the provisions of nature, such as the wild fruit he finds to eat and the grass on which he sleeps.5 In his detachment, the wild man seems to make a claim for self-­sovereignty, but in terms of submission rather than agency and authority, as is appropriate to the moralizing message of the poem. He extols a life lived outside of human culture, entirely dependent on God’s natural creation. An ink drawing accompanies the poem in the manuscript where it is found (plate 15).6 The wild man stands before his home in the hollow tree and leans on his cudgel. He appears as the poem describes him, wearing only his own skin, though well covered in hair. His face, hands, feet, and genitals are clearly human, as is his contemplative pose—­this is a somewhat philosophical wild man, as his words also suggest. However, while the image emphasizes the wild man’s rejection of clothing and conventional shelter, it also suggests that the “nature” in which he lives may not be quite as natural as it seems. The wild man stands in the hollow of what appears to be a pollarded tree, that is, a tree that has been cut back to produce leafy foliage for feeding stock or easily accessible wood or fruit that can be harvested without killing the tree.7 Pollards are cut above the reach of animals to protect new growth; the animals that are absent in the wild man’s description of his environment may be referenced implicitly in this image. Although we cannot be sure how far the artist’s botanical knowledge extended, he may have known that pollarded trees are prone to become hollow, a characteristic that would make the pollard a logical setting for a poem about a wild man who lives in a hollow tree. But whether or not he associated pollarded trees with hollow trees, the artist has represented his wild man standing before what appears to be a cultivated tree. While the moralizing poem uses the wild man’s voice to promote the sufficiency of the natural world and condemn worldly goods and pleasures, the image that accompanies the poem suggests that the nature

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the wild man extols may not be quite as untouched by human culture and values as he imagines. In the poem’s envoi, the wild man directly addresses his poem to a sovereign figure, an unnamed prince. Prince, what is it worth to live pridefully and to pillage in order to have a great feast, since no one will carry to his death but a single shroud that must suffice? Prince, que vault vivre orgueilleusement et rapiner pour mener grant bonbance quant nul n’emporte à son trespassement qu’un seul linceul pour toute souffisance? (“La ballade d’uns home sauvage,” lines 33–­36)

The wild man’s reproach targets not the legitimate use of authority over others, but the misuse of power by this prideful pillaging Prince, who will inevitably submit to death. As in the earlier stanzas, the wild man calls for a life of simple poverty, condemning refined food and other worldly pleasures.8 He also implicitly criticizes the Prince’s taste for fine clothing in the reminder that all he will take to the grave is a shroud. The poem’s concluding admonition that all men will die reminds the Prince that hierarchies of human privilege and power will disappear after death. The implication is that since God’s is the only enduring sovereignty, what God has provided should be sufficient for human life. In his repeated praise for God’s provision through nature, this wild man is something like a Christian noble savage, an idealized outsider who demonstrates the corruption of human society and its customs—­though as I’ve suggested above, the pollarded tree in which he lives complicates the naturalness of the nature he praises.9 The idealized view of the wild man living in nature, outside of human social structures, casts human society as a corruption of nature’s perfection—­ one of two understandings of wildness that emerged by the end of the Middle Ages, according to Hayden White. In the other view, the wild man—­and again, they are mostly men—­is seen as abject, as having an animal nature, as “the antitype of the desirable humanity, as a warning of what men would fall into if they definitively rejected society and its norms.”10 Many medieval representations of wild men fall in line with the second view. The knight who goes mad and flees to the forest when rejected by his lady is a prominent example, represented in Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion, discussed in chapter 3.

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In these representations, especially prominent in courtly romances, the man who lives with animals becomes animal-­like. But such stories are usually about rescue: a character is lost to human culture and becomes animal-­like, and then he is brought back into human culture to regain his social identity. This narrative trajectory assumes that the protagonist retains an essential humanity, even while he lives like an animal in the forest, and that he can only become fully human through reintegration into culture and society. As White and others have emphasized, the wild man myth defines an opposition between human society and animal wildness, but just as the wild man’s pollarded tree suggests that human cultivation may shape “natural” wildness, so too, the difference between the two views of what wild men represent may not be so easily distinguished from each other. Moreover, in stories of rescue, the wild man’s return to humanity may be represented as a marvelous rescue—­as in the application of a magic unguent that cures the mad knight Yvain—­or it may be described as an extended apprenticeship in becoming human, as in the texts I examine here.11 As Deleuze and Guattari define it, “becoming” is not a transformation, not something one becomes, but a process that has no defined endpoint. “Becoming produces nothing other than itself,” they tell us; “it lacks a subject distinct from itself, it has no term, since its term exists only as taken up in another becoming.” Becoming destabilizes, it crosses boundaries; it works by alliance, rather than by filiation.12 Alliance and filiation come to the fore in the two stories about wild children I examine here. In La naissance du chevalier au cygne (The Birth of the Swan Knight) and Tristan de Nanteuil (Tristan of Nanteuil), becoming-­ human means reintegration into human culture and human social and political hierarchies. But in each narrative, the security of becoming human is troubled by persistent ties to animality. Becoming-­human, it turns out, involves enduring kinships with animals.

Swan Children La naissance du chevalier au cygne opens the Old French Crusade Cycle, a compilation of epic narratives in which the first five books recount the curious genealogy of Godefroy de Bouillon, one of the leaders of the First Crusade and the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem. Godefroy is described as belonging to the lineage of the Swan Knight, “li lignages del chisne” (Les enfances de Godefroi, line 2302), and these narratives explain Godefroy’s successes in relation to an illustrious genealogy that includes the Swan Knight. The identification of a noble part-­animal ancestor for Godefroy de Bouillon

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gives his lineage a legendary, even mythological prestige, and in this it is similar to the representation of the snake woman Mélusine as the founder of the Lusignan dynasty. La naissance du chevalier au cygne begins with the marriage of King Oriant to Beatrix, a woman of unknown ancestry.13 Beatrix becomes pregnant, and when she gives birth, only the king’s mother, Matabrune, attends her. As a daughter and six sons are born, fairies appear and place silver chains around their necks. The chains, we subsequently learn, are instruments of fairy magic: they protect the children from death and guarantee their human form. The children take them off and become swans; they put them back on to take human form. If they ever lose the chains, they will remain swans forever.14 The scene of birth is a pivotal moment in the story. The evil Matabrune thinks Beatrix is unworthy of her son and seeks her demise. She sends the newborn babies away to be drowned and substitutes a litter of puppies in their place. She then tells her son that his wife has given birth to this monstrous progeny.15 The implication is that Beatrix has coupled with dogs, and later in the story her husband says exactly that: “She lay carnally with dogs, body to body, and then she gave birth to seven dogs” (“ele giut as ciens cors a cors carnelment / Et si en ot .vii. ciens,” lines 923–­24). The link between multiple births and multiple sexual partners was introduced in this story when the childless Queen Beatrix claimed that a mother of twins must have slept with two men, and the seven offspring could suggest that Beatrix herself had seven (canine) lovers.16 But the mother-­in-­law’s accusation introduces animality as well as adultery into the story. Well before the children are transformed into swans, the text associates them with animals when they are taken from their mother and puppies are put in their place. While the seven siblings are never called a litter, the substitution of the puppies for the children suggests the association; the multiple births are somehow animal-­like. I use the term animality rather than bestiality to describe the human-­ animal relations in this story because representations of animality extend well beyond Matabrune’s false accusation of the sexual crime of bestiality. She claims that the children are the offspring of dogs, then substitutes dogs for the human infants, and the children later demonstrate the ability to transform into swans. But the children share yet another relationship to animality, which is occluded in the resolution of their story when all but one of the swan-­children are restored to full humanity. Soon after Matabrune’s servant abandons the newborn babies in the woods, a parenting couple saves the children. A hermit finds the abandoned infants in the woods and calls for God’s help to save them. A doe immediately comes out of the woods to suckle the children.

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When the infants sensed the nursing beast, each one took hold of a teat and pulled on it. The six boys were gratified and the girl was restored. When the hermit sees what God sends him, his heart is full of wonder and joy. He takes all seven of the children, wrapping them in a cloth, and goes directly to his hermitage and the beast follows behind, as God directs them. The beast nurses the children and the hermit prays daily to God that he will set them in the right path. The hermit and the beast raised the children in a great wood. . . . The beast and the hermit willingly raised the children for more than ten full years. Quant li enfant sentirent le beste kes alaite, Cascuns a sa mamiele sacie et a lui traite. Bien s’en sunt li .vi. fil et la fille refaite. Quant li hermites voit cou que Dex li envoie En son cuer s’esmervelle et si en ot grant joie. Les enfans prent tous .vii., en la pane les ploie. A son ostel s’en va toute la droite voie Et la bieste de prés tout adés le convoie Desi a l’ermitage, la u Dex les avoie. La beste les alaite et li hermites proie Dameldieu cescun jor kes mette a boune voie. Les enfans ont noris, ne soit nus ki nel croie, Entre lui et la beste dedens la grant arbroie . . . Les enfans ont noris de gré et volentiers La beste et li hermites plus de .x. ans entiers. (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 372–­84, 390–­91)

The hermit recognizes the doe as an answer to his prayers and the infants recognize the doe as a suckling mother, pulling its teats toward them as though by instinct. The doe, too, seems to act out of instinct. Like other stories about cross-­species nursing, the story about the swan children and the doe is a story of rescue, and here the rescue is both providential and “natural.” The hermit prays to God, who sends the doe to save the infants, but in its description of the doe following the children back to the hermitage, the text suggests the deer’s willingness to suckle the human children and, it appears, to care for them for ten full years. Like other stories about animals that suckle human children, La naissance du chevalier au cygne posits maternal instinct as somehow so natural that it transcends species: a mother responds to infant need, whether or not the infant is her own or of her own kind.

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After the hermit and the deer have cared for the swan children for ten years, Matabrune discovers that Beatrix’s progeny are still alive and sends one of her men to steal the silver chains they wear to assume human form. This servant goes to the forest and finds six of the children in the hermitage; the seventh has gone into the woods with the hermit. Matabrune’s man takes the six chains from the children, who transform into swans and fly to a lake near their father’s castle.17 The one boy who remains unchanged lives with the hermit in the forest and visits the lake frequently, taking bread to the swan siblings who have lost their human form. Once Matabrune believes she has successfully dispatched the children, she turns her sights to their mother, who has spent fifteen years in prison and whose death Matabrune ardently desires. She pressures her son finally to enact justice against the imprisoned Beatrix, and King Oriant calls his nobles to an assembly where he will pass judgment on his wife. If God does not defend her, he declares, she will be burned. God does indeed come to the aid of Queen Beatrix, through the agency of a son she has not seen since his birth.18 An angel appears to the hermit and reveals the abandoned children’s parentage, Matabrune’s treachery, and Beatrix’s impending execution. The condemned mother will be saved by her son, the angel announces, the one sibling who was not transformed into a swan. This boy is an ignorant wild child. He has no clothes except those the hermit makes from leaves, and his animal-­like appearance gives him the look of a madman: He had no clothing other than that you have heard me describe [clothing made of leaves], and he was as hairy as a chained bear. He had long nails and matted hair; his unkempt hair had not been often washed, and he carried a squared-­off club. Anyone who saw him from a distance would think he was mad. De reube n’avoit plus que vous dire m’oés Et si estoit pelus con ours encaienés, Les ongles grans et lons et les ceviaus mellés. La tieste hulepee n’ert pas souvent lavés. Si tenoit .i. baston ki desous ert quarés, Qui de loing le veoit bien sambloit forsenés. (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 797–­802)

The narrator’s comparison to a chained bear offers a strange image of domesticated wildness and underscores the animal-­like appearance that makes the

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boy seem mad. But although the narrator repeatedly records the townspeople’s assumption that the boy must have lost his sanity along with human culture, when describing the boy directly, he insists on his beauty: “The boy was big and strong and very handsome. His limbs were well shaped and his body well formed, and his hair fell to his feet” (“Li enfes fu mout biaus et par creüs et grans, / De membres ert bien fais et de cors couvenans, / Les ceviaus avoit lons jusque as piés trainans,” lines 524–­26).19 If the narrator stresses the boy’s natural beauty, the angel’s revelation of the boy’s identity insists on the corollary quality of nobility: “I will not hide it from you: God sends me to tell you that you have a most noble child. You do not know who he is, and that is why he reveals it to you. He will be a man of great worth and great nobility.” When the hermit heard the angel, he bowed before him, and the angel recounted the story of the seven children. “Par moi te mande Dex, nel celerai toi mie, Que tu as .i. enfant de mout grant signorie. Tu ne sés ki il est, raisons est k’il te die. C’iert .i. hom de grant pris et de grant signorie.” Quant li hermites l’ot vers l’angele s’umelie Et li angeles li conte des .vii. enfans la vie. (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 650–­55)

The parallel phrases in the angel’s speech announce the transition this fifteen-­year old boy will undergo: a child of great nobility (“.i. enfant de mout grant signorie”) will become a man of great nobility (.i. hom . . . de grant signorie”). The repetition of the noun “signorie” as a qualifier could simply connote the child’s nobility, as I’ve translated it here, but as I detailed earlier, signorie (or seigneurie) is also used to indicate lordship and sovereign relations, and in this passage it points to the boy’s identity as the son of a king. The angel’s revelation signals that one day this wild boy will be crowned. Seeming and being are at stake throughout the account of the boy’s reintegration into human society. He has the appearance of an uncivilized mad man, but his true identity is demonstrated in his underlying beauty and no­ bility. And in fact, his physical appearance changes as he learns courtly conduct. When he arrives at court he asks to be baptized, following the hermit’s instructions, and an abbot complies, first civilizing the boy’s appearance by shaving him and cutting his hair and nails, and then baptizing him with the name Elias. If the boy’s unkempt appearance has an animal-­like quality, he

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is easily tidied up to look like a man, and baptism and naming confirm his human identity. His ignorance of human culture is harder to remedy, however. When the angel announces that the boy must undertake a judicial battle to save his mother, the hermit protests that the boy is not a knight; he has never even seen arms or weapons (“Il ne vit onques arme ne lance ne escu,” line 686).20 The wild boy knows nothing about chivalric culture and he seems equally ignorant about human kinship. When the hermit tells him that he must go to defend his mother, the boy has to ask for an explanation: “Sire,” the boy asks, “what is a mother? Is it something you eat? Is it like a bird or a beast?” “Son,” the hermit replies, “a mother is a woman who carried you in her womb.” “Sire,” fait il, “qu’est mere? Et s’on le mangera? Samble oisiel u beste? Nel me celés vous ja.” “Fius, ains est une fame qu’en ses flans te porta.” (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 747–­49)

The wild boy’s guess that a mother might be “a bird or a beast” reveals his ignorance of human reproduction. The hermit enlightens him, defining a mother in exclusively human terms as a woman (“une fame”). Although the hermit describes pregnancy and not nursing when he defines what a mother is, if he had defined maternity in terms of nurture rather than childbirth, the boy’s question would have had a different answer. His mother would then have been a beast, the doe that suckled him and that partnered with the hermit to raise him (a mother is something you eat, in this sense, though not a meal to be devoured, as the boy’s question seems to suggest). Ten years of intimacy with the suckling deer have shaped the child’s understanding of what we might call maternal species, just as his life in the forest has removed him from the genealogical relationships that define noble families.21 The boy goes to court to defend his human mother, and with God’s help he defeats the queen’s champion and saves Queen Beatrix. After he reveals Matabrune’s treachery to the king, the swans in the king’s pond are identified as his siblings. Five of the six swans are able to resume human form when the silver chains stolen by Matabrune’s servant are recovered and returned to them, but the sixth swan cannot change because his chain has been destroyed, melted down to make two silver goblets. Elias eventually succeeds

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his father as king, but leaves his court to seek adventure, traveling in a boat pulled by his brother swan. The swan sibling gives his brother the “Swan Knight” name, and becomes something like an attribute or a heraldic animal. In this way, animal embodiment is preserved as an emblematic, heraldic identity for the Swan Knight, a former swan.22 Nonetheless, the animality of becoming swan, or even of becoming deer, is suppressed in the heroic adventures that follow Elias’s defense of his mother and restoration of his siblings to human form and noble status. In his first adventure, the Swan Knight defends the lady of Bouillon and marries her daughter, forbidding his new wife ever to ask his name or lineage. He engenders a daughter, the saintly Yde, who will be the mother of Godefroy de Bouillon. After seven years of marriage, his wife breaks his interdiction and asks the Swan Knight’s name; as he threatened, the Swan Knight leaves her, again pulled in a boat by his brother swan, and returns to his own kingdom where he is received with great joy by his mother and siblings. However, even as they celebrate their reunion, they mourn the fate of the swan that cannot return to human form. As they lament, a white boat arrives, carrying a man dressed in white who gives a letter to the swan and takes its boat away with him. The letter that arrives so mysteriously explains how the swan can become human. The set of silver goblets made from his chain should be remade into chalices and placed on two altars in the church; the Swan Knight immediately complies. The swan then lies on a rich bed between them; as the mass is sung, the bird is miraculously transformed into the most handsome young man ever seen, a change that occurs at the very moment of the eucharistic transformation: As I heard it told, at exactly the moment in which Jesus our Savior, who saves us all, changed the bread on the altar into his flesh and the wine into his blood in order to save his people, at that moment the swan turned immediately into the most beautiful young man one could find. Tout droit a icele eure, si con j’oï conter, Que Jhesus, nostre Sire ki tout a a sauver, Fist le pain en l’autel ens en sa car müer Et le vin en son sanc pour son peule sauver, A cele eure tout droit fist le cisne müer El plus biel baceler que on pouist trouver. (La fin Elias, lines 703–­8)

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Religious symbolism merges with romance motifs: the man dressed in white who arrives in a white boat seems to be a divine messenger, but he also figures the swan itself. The transformation of the silver goblets made from the child’s silver chain into chalices for the altar recasts the magical chains as miraculous objects, transforming the products of Matabrune’s treachery into a gift to God. The transformation of the swan into a man at the very moment of the eucharistic transformation aligns two simultaneous instances of becoming human: the transformation of an animal into a man and the transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood. This somewhat startling alignment puts two kinds of sovereignty into relation. As God intervenes to restore the noble human identity of the Christian knight, divine authority and royal human lineage converge; this double authority grounds the claim to Western Christian rule of Jerusalem that Godefroy de Bouillon, grandson of the Swan Knight, will inaugurate.

A Rescued Child The animality that inheres in Godefroy de Bouillon’s lineage is left behind as his mythical ancestors are integrated into fully human identity and take their places in an illustrious genealogy; in the long term, animality persists only as an attribute of the Swan Knight, pulled in his boat by his brother swan. Such a becoming-­human is the outcome of most wild man stories; when the wild man is reintegrated into human social relations, ties of human lineage replace whatever bonds he might have shared with animals in the forest. The forest is not a world of recognized sociability, and that is precisely what distinguishes it from human culture, or so the logic goes. La naissance du chevalier au cygne troubles this opposition in the representation of the parenting couple of the hermit and the deer that raise the swan children in a blended family that is part animal, part human, and the distinction between the untamed forest and the civilized world of human culture is further questioned in the fourteenth-­century Tristan de Nanteuil. This late epic narrative calls on many of the conventions that define the wild man, but disrupts many of the oppositions on which they are grounded in the story of a foundling raised by animals in a forest where social relations among the animals mimic some of the structures of human society. In its account of the eponymous hero’s childhood and youth, Tristan de Nanteuil follows the relatively widespread narrative model of a lost child saved by animals in the forest but reverses its terms, emphasizing the sociability of animal society and describing human identity in terms of nature and embodiment. As in La naissance du chevalier au cygne, the wild child will

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be reintegrated into a noble human lineage, but here the becoming-­human of the wild youth is enacted through a series of encounters with gendered bodies. Moreover, the representation of a symbolic kinship with an animal questions the security of genealogical identification and offers an alternative model to the social authority a lineage founded on bloodlines would seem to offer. Tristan de Nanteuil is the last installment in the so-­called Geste de Nanteuil, an epic cycle, and it was probably composed in the mid-­fourteenth century by an author from Hainaut.23 As the story begins, Gui de Nanteuil and his pregnant wife, Aiglentine, sail toward Aufalerne. Aiglentine gives birth as a violent storm blows the ship off course. After four months of travel the ship reaches shore, and Gui debarks to seek provisions. While he is gone a merchant takes Aiglentine captive and sends the ship back out to sea without her or her husband. The child is alone on board and he will die, the narrator tells us, if God does not help him—­but God does indeed provide. He sends a siren to suckle the child for fourteen days until the boat comes to shore in Armenia. There a fisherman finds the ship and seizes the siren and the child. He takes the infant Tristan to his wife, who nurses him. He plans to sell the siren, and as he takes her away to market, her breasts release a bowlful of milk that the fisherman stores in his house. During the night a hind enters the house, drinks the siren’s milk, and immediately grows monstrously big. The deer then kills the fisherman, his wife, and their six children, but carries the baby Tristan gently into the woods, nurtures him and raises him there. Tristan de Nanteuil rewrites the most basic element of the familiar narrative about a child lost in the forest and saved by an animal.24 The hind that takes the baby Tristan is not a gentle suckling maternal animal, but a fierce protector.25 The narrator never explains why the hind kills the fisherman and his family but not the infant Tristan. It may be the child’s Christian lineage that saves him, since we learn that the giant hind kills only Saracens, a characteristic that identifies the animal as a participant in religious strife and repeats the primary conflict between human characters in this narrative about Western Christians in Muslim Armenia. But another kind of kinship may also motivate the hind’s actions. The animal’s bond with the child may originate in their shared relationship to the siren who suckled Tristan in the boat and whose milk the hind drank in the fisherman’s house: they are milk siblings.26 Like other late medieval epics, Tristan de Nanteuil is very long (twenty-­ three thousand lines), and Tristan’s story is only one narrative thread in this multigenerational story that emphasizes noble lineage in relation to its

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characters’ loss, recuperation, or redefinition of identities, especially gender identity. The epic laisses, or stanzas, that recount the story of the lost Tristan’s infancy and youth in the forest alternate with stanzas that recount other developments in the narrative, including the fates of his parents and grandmother, and the birth and youth of his half-­brother.27 Jane Taylor has identified this structure as the “strenuous interlace” of late medieval chansons de geste, and it reflects the movements of the characters: their stories separate, then converge, then separate again.28 Like other epics, Tristan de Nanteuil recounts the multiple ways in which succession and sovereignty are threatened as families are separated by accidents, wars, and even by love; like other examples of the genre, it is full of repetition, as the narrator tells us about an event, then tells us again. But a distinctive feature of this story is that it includes episodes that repeat, revisit, or revise earlier developments in the plot. That is, an episode may rewrite or recall a similar event from earlier in the story. This repetition puts the two episodes in dialogue with each other; it invites us to read similar episodes alongside each other and to ask how they speak to each other, how they interpret each other, and what each might reveal about the ideological work they do in the narrative.29 Read alongside episodes from later in the epic, the wild man story underscores the text’s persistent return to the vicissitudes of human genealogy and its repeated emphasis on the precarious nature of a social structure grounded on the vagaries of blood kinship.30

Animal Nurture The hind takes the infant Tristan from the fisherman’s house and carries him into the forest. It makes a bed for the infant and licks his face. Again, this hind does not suckle the human foundling, as in La naissance du chevalier au cygne and other medieval stories about deer that rescue lost children, but steals butter and cheese for him to eat.31 The fact that the deer nurtures but does not suckle the child is particularly noticeable given the series of nursemaids the child has before being taken by the hind. First, his mother suckles the newborn Tristan on their sea journey. When their ship finally comes within sight of land, Gui de Nanteuil’s first thought is to promise his infant son a wet-­nurse: “Ah, Tristan, if I can reach the shore, I will bring you such a good nursemaid that with God’s blessing, your body will grow” (“Hé! Tristan, dist ly duc, se j’arrive deça, / A sy bonne nourrisse mon corps vous mettera / Qu’a l’aïde de Dieu vo corps s’y croistrera,” lines 69–­71). Gui does reach shore, but he is stranded there when Aiglentine is captured and her ship set out to sea, so the baby has no nurse at all. God

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intervenes to bless Tristan with a marvelous nursemaid, the siren who cares for the child for fourteen days in the boat. Finally, when the fisherman finds the siren and the infant, his wife suckles the baby Tristan. It would seem quite logical then that when the deer steals the baby—­and it’s a female deer, after all—­it too might nurse the child, but that is not what we find. This striking innovation in the story might be explained by the milk kinship that has developed between the child and the hind through the shared siren’s milk. Although they share the same nursemaid, the human child and the hind experience different effects from the siren’s milk. The text does not explicitly cite the widely held belief that mother’s milk conveys the qualities of the nursemaid to the child she suckles and the siren’s milk is not shown to have any particular effect on the baby Tristan.32 However, it transforms the hind: Siren’s milk has such virtue and power (seignorie) that if an animal (beste) drinks of it, it grows so tall, great, and strong that none can defend against it, no matter how great his chivalry. Il est de tel vertu et de tel seignorie Que se beste en a beu, elle devient fournye, Sy grand et sy poissant, nel tenés a folie, Que nul ne dure a lui, tant ait chevallerie. (Tristan de Nanteui1, lines 1647–­50)

I’ve translated seignorie as “power” in the passage above, but the word points to a sovereign power conveyed to the hind, which becomes the most powerful animal in the forest, growing to seven feet tall and twenty feet long, ruler over the other animals and the human infant. Although only the deer experiences the physical effects of the siren’s milk, the human child shared this nurture, too, and the siren’s milk seems to define a bond between the hind and the child. This symbolic kinship must explain why the hind takes Tristan into the forest after killing the fisherman and his wife. And indeed, Tristan is the only human the hind tolerates. It devastates the countryside, killing people who live there, and making the forest impassable. The deer’s violence protects its human foundling. When King Galafre of Armenia offers the hand of his daughter Blanchandine to any knight who can kill the marauding deer, King Lucion of Ivoirie accepts the challenge and travels with his squire to the deer’s den, where he is surprised to find a human child playing with a monkey. The king’s squire enters the den, the

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monkey screams a warning, and the hind returns, carrying provisions for the infant Tristan. Before attacking the intruders, the hind places the meal before the child. The narrator tells us twice that the deer sets the food in front of Tristan before attacking the king of Ivoirie and his squire. We even learn that the monkey fed the infant, whom he loved wisely (“Et le singe le pest qui l’ama sans folie,” line 1663). In this scene and others, the text emphasizes the animals’ care and provision for the infant: The hind fed the infant Tristan with fine white bread and he lived for a long time on raw and cooked meat. He became so wild that he didn’t understand anything and he raced through the forest with the animals. He went completely naked and barefoot in the rain and wind. Hair hung around his face and fell below his chin. He accompanied the hind often, and there wasn’t a leopard or a serpent in the forest that did not know this child. L’enffant Tristan nourry de bon pain de fourment, Et de char cuite et crue vesqui moult longuement; Tant devvint sy sauvaiges que de rien ne s’entant, O les bestes ou bos couroit moult vistement, Tout nus et tout deschaus a la pluie et au vent. Au dessoubz son visaige avironneement Aloit balant le poil trestout certainement; Avec la serve aloit ly enffes bien souvent; Il n’avoit ens ou bos ne liepart ne serpent Ne cogneüst l’enffant dont je fais parlement. (Tristan de Nanteuil, lines 816–­25)

Tristan’s body is like an animal’s body, and the wild child is on his way to becoming a wild man. Again, the physical description of the wild child is somewhat conventional; forest life and the hind’s nurturance shape him and he becomes animal-­like. What is more unusual, though, is the representation of the animal society of the forest. Tristan is a fellow creature or even a companion to the animals in the forest; they know him, the narrator tells us. Tristan lives in a forest where animals form bonds with each other and with the human foundling, and they organize themselves into hierarchies of authority; twice they gather to protect Tristan in what the narrator describes as an army, with the hind as its leader. To be sure, this is a mirroring of human society: animal society is imagined in human terms, as sharing human social structures. But such representations suggest that

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the difference between human and animal is not primarily social, since both humans and animals live and interact within similar structures. Nor is it clearly physical, since the wild child shares physical characteristics with the animals and even, like the animals, consumes human flesh. When the deer and the monkey attack King Lucion and his squire, they wound the fleeing squire, but they kill the king. The deer “cuts him into a thousand pieces” and devours him; the child has a portion of the meal, the narrator tells us (“Il abati le roy et sy le devora, / Mille pieces en fist, celle nuyt en menga. / L’enffes en ot sa part que la beste garda,” lines 1692–­94). The man-­eating moment is unique in the text and mentioned only briefly, but because it closes an episode in which the hind has left the child to seek food for him and delivered the provisions before attacking the intruders, it emphasizes the kind of nurture the hind provides for Tristan: it steals food from people and, in at least one instance, it kills people for food. The animals’ consumption of the king suggests a forest mirroring of human society, where people regularly cut animals into a thousand pieces and devour them. In Tristan de Nanteuil, relationships among the animals are defined by the same structures that define human relationships: the family, disbursed and reconfigured, and the feudal army. After King Lucion’s wounded squire returns to the king of Armenia and reports that the savage deer cares for a two-­year-­old child in its den, the hind emerges from the forest, leading a host of serpents and wild boars: they cover the field as far as the eye can see (“Serpens et pors sauvages avec lui amena; / Couvers en fut le champ sy loing c’on regarda,” lines 1715–­16). The deer is like a lord who assembles his men, and the animals are like a crusading army mobilized to protect the Christian child, Tristan, against the Saracen Armenians. The forest mirrors the structures of human society in the family-­like group of animals that care for the young Tristan and in the hind’s army, but here kinship bonds are defined through shared nurture, rather than through shared blood. The forest is imagined as a natural, Christian world in which animals serve the interests of a human child, but this forest is not a bucolic, idealized place where the human rules over compliant animals. The human child is shown to belong to this world, but he does not govern it. In fact, we learn that the hind “governs” (gouverner, line 2375) the child: it raises, teaches and disciplines him.33

The Child’s Nature In Tristan de Nanteuil, the difference between human and animal is not primarily social, since both humans and animals live and interact within

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similar structures, nor is it clearly physical, since the wild child shares physical characteristics with the animals. Tristan de Nanteuil undermines the common opposition of human sociability and animal wildness that conventionally defines the wild man in medieval narratives; the boy Tristan is wild, but not because he is without social ties. The story also troubles the common opposition of human reason and animal embodiment by locating the child’s discovery of human identity not in social relationships, but in gendered bodies and instinct.34 While Tristan is still a child, his grandmother, Aye d’Avignon, disguised as the knight Gaudion, leads a Saracen army through Armenia to rescue King Galafre’s daughter, Blanchandine, now besieged in a tower by the king’s enemy, Urbain of Aumarie. As they pass through the forest, the fierce hind attacks Aye’s army, killing most of her companions, and Aye learns about the hind’s continuing depredations from the people who live nearby. She also learns that the hind cares for a child it stole from a fisherman. The boy is three years old, she is told, and he follows the beast through the forest on all fours. Aye vows that she will see this marvel. She prays to God for protection from the hind’s violence, and an angel appears to reassure her that she will not be harmed. The angel also reveals that the child is Aye’s own grandson. Still disguised as a knight, Aye finds the deer’s den, goes inside, and discovers an animal-­like child whose body is covered with hair, but whose shining white face reveals his humanity. She thinks it is a miracle that God has allowed such a small child to survive, “without any lady or young woman to suckle him, and nurtured only by a wild beast in the forest” (“Qui se petit enffant sans dame et sans meschine / Fais nourrir en ce bos avec la sauvagine,” lines 2469–­70). Aye addresses the fierce hind in God’s name and demands to approach the child; the deer kneels before her to show its acquiescence. Aye wants to take the child in her arms, but he is wild (“l’enffant fut sauvage,” line 2473) and resists her embrace. He “jumps like a fish” (“tressault con poisson de marine,” line 2479) and runs away on all fours. The forest echoes with his cries of protest until Aye calms him by displaying her breasts. She showed him the breasts that nurtured his father; she took them out so the child could see them. He lay back, pressed against her breasts. This is the nature of a child; this is why he allowed her to hold him. Lui monstra ses mamelles dont son pere nourry, Hors de son sain les trait que l’enffes les choisy;

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Par dessus les mamelles se coucha et cati: C’est nature d’enffant, pour ce c’y assenti. (Tristan de Nanteui1, lines 2539–­42)

He slept on her breasts, the narrator tells us, “and even though he had been raised by the hind that loved him, Nature made him forget its lessons” (“Dormoit sur les mamelles, quoy qu’euÿst nourriture / De la cerve du bois qui l’amoit d’amour pure; / Nature lui faisoit lesser son apresure,” lines 2593–­95). The moment of human connection is brief, however. When Aye tries to take Tristan away with her, the hind makes a great noise to summon an army of more than one hundred animals to protect the child: bears, lions, stags, does, and monkeys surround Tristan’s grandmother and she releases the boy. The animals depart with Tristan, then the hind returns to escort Aye out of the forest. The narrator claims that the child’s nature (“nature d’enffant,” line 2546) leads him to recognize the maternal human body and forget the hind that loved him and raised him. Tristan’s attraction to Aye’s breasts may also suggest a “natural” and even reasoned recognition of paternal lineage: the child is comforted by his grandmother’s breasts, the “breasts that nurtured his father.” Such comfort does not imply suckling. In fact, the narrator consistently says that Tristan is “nurtured” by the hind that raises the child and gives him food. In the terms of the text, the child is allied with the hu­ man through nature and with the beast through nurture and instruction. The relationship between the two terms is hard to pin down precisely here, but “nature” most often names an innate identity and, frequently, innate nobility.35 Here the text emphasizes the child Tristan’s “nature,” portrayed as a recognition of his noble grandmother’s breasts and perhaps of her noble body (“dame Aye au gent corps seignory,” line 2538), but this moment of “natural” recognition does not immediately lead to the child’s reintegration into human society. In fact, it sets up a contest for the child between his grandmother and his fiercely devoted guardian, and, implicitly, between Aye’s ancestral maternal breasts and the milk of the shared siren nursemaid—­that is, between the dynastic kinship of blood and the adopted kinship of milk. Anthropological studies of milk kinship have shown that in a number of cultures, the relationship between milk siblings is understood as a kinship tie to which incest prohibitions apply: a man and a woman who shared a nursemaid may not marry, a man may not marry the sister of a man who shared his nursemaid, nor may suckled children marry the children of their nurse, and so on.36 Milk kinship puts individuals and their extended

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families into relation, and families may even send children to be suckled to deliberately construct such relations. Although there are codified notions of milk kinship in some Muslim cultures, there is little evidence that such relationships were widely recognized in Christian cultures. In fact, if bonds of milk kinship ever existed, they were displaced by the relationships defined through baptismal sponsorship; a child’s relationship to his or her godparent establishes alliances and defines kinship ties that preclude marriage within prohibited degrees.37 Milk kinship seems then to have had little importance in medieval Chris­ tian cultures and it is not frequently represented in literary texts. Even when it does appear, milk kinship does not seem to have much symbolic value.38 Instead of describing sibling relationships defined through a shared nursemaid, literary texts insist more often on the preservation of the virtues of a lineage through a mother’s suckling of her own infant. Tristan de Nanteuil is unusual in its use of milk kinship, and especially in its use of this relationship to describe a bond between a human and an animal. To be sure, this is not a relationship that has direct implications for marriage alliances, and the relationship between the hind and the human does not define incest prohibitions. But it does have implications for genealogical dynasty. The Nanteuil lineage has already been disrupted by the vicissitudes of war, travel, and the dispersion of this Christian family in Saracen lands. The heir to Nanteuil has been lost to a human culture organized by genealogical succession and integrated into a forest society of animals where milk kinship, as a model of horizontal alliance, challenges the descent model of patrilineal dynasty that organizes human society. The hind’s attachment to the human child is not explicitly explained as an effect of the shared siren’s milk. Given the relationship between medieval French epic narratives and religious strife, there is a certain logic in the hind’s rescue of the Christian infant after the massacre of the Saracen fisherman and his family, though the hind’s relentless persecution of Saracens is never explained. However, the text’s emphasis on the several nursemaids who suckle the human infant and then on Aye’s maternal breasts sets up a contrast between the sibling bond defined by the shared nursemaid and the noble genealogy confirmed by human maternal nurture, and between Tristan’s relationship to the hind and his relationship to his human lineage. This contrast is further emphasized when the siren’s miraculous rescue of the baby Tristan is read alongside a later episode from the epic in which the lady Clarinde is alone at sea with her newborn child, Gilles. She has no food or water, and after three days, she has no more milk in her breasts and cannot suckle her son. Clarinde knows that her baby will soon die, and

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she decides to throw herself overboard. She thinks that if the child is alone and helpless, God will cause the ship to arrive at some port where the baby will find nourishment.39 As Clarinde prepares to leap into the sea, she offers a final prayer, and she feels milk return suddenly to her breasts. She turns back to feed her child and as the infant Gilles suckles at her right breast, Clarinde feeds herself from her left. Her breasts release a boatful of milk and the mother and child survive for three more days until their boat comes to shore. The ordeal of Clarinde and her infant son and the perilous sea journey of the baby Tristan are parallel episodes in which divine intervention saves a child: God provides a marvelous siren as nursemaid for the infant Tristan in the earlier episode and restores the starving Clarinde’s breast milk to save the baby Gilles and Clarinde herself in the later one. Just as the captured siren’s breasts release a bowlful of surplus milk as she is taken away from her nursling, Clarinde’s miraculously abundant breast milk fills the boat, nourishing the mother as well as the child. The two episodes about babies in boats point to two models of kinship: an adoptive kinship characterized by a trans-­species bond anticipated in the part-­human, part-­animal nature of the siren nursemaid and a genealogical lineage characterized by a recursive logic manifest in the mother who suckles her own breast. The first is defined through milk kinship, the second by blood. Both kinship models might be understood as forms of blood kinship, since in medieval physiology mother’s milk is understood as a form of blood, that is, a transformation of mother’s menstrual blood into the breast milk that nourishes a child. However, the text’s explicit description of the effects of the siren’s milk on the hind, but not the human child, is yet another way that the distinction between milk kinship and noble human lineage is reinforced. Only a human mother’s blood conveys noble human “nature.”40

Human Manhood Tristan de Nanteuil brings the wild child Tristan into a “natural” recognition of his noble humanity in an encounter with gendered embodiment, “the breasts that nurtured his father.” Breasts are not gendered uniquely female, of course, but the narrator’s emphasis on Tristan’s “natural” recognition of “the breasts that nurtured his father” identifies his grandmother’s breasts as nurturing breasts, even if they do not suckle the infant Tristan. Aye d’Avignon is disguised as a knight when she meets her grandson, and she has convincingly inhabited this disguise for some time in the story. The image of Aye drawing her grandmotherly breasts out from under her armor

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is incongruous for the reader, though perhaps not for the child. Tristan’s attraction to his grandmother’s breasts suggests that gendered anatomy here articulates something more than gender: Aye d’Avignon’s human breasts recall the wild child to what the text represents as his humanity. Beasts have breasts, too, they suckle their young, but only human breasts recall lineage and nobility, and only human breasts recall the child to his “nature.” In this admittedly strange episode, the suckling breast is a marker both of gendered identity and of human identity. This conflation is also apparent when the text turns to the wild boy’s own gendered anatomy. The few people who encounter the wild Tristan in the forest recognize him as a human boy. His white and shining face belies the animal-­like hair that covers his body and as he becomes older, he begins to walk upright instead of running on all fours. He wears a single leaf as clothing, and he can speak human languages. Just as God’s providence allowed the infant to survive, nursed by a siren then nurtured by a beast, God also ensures that the young Tristan can speak, sending an angel to teach him every language in the world. The human boy grows to manhood in the forest, and although the text never describes Tristan’s apprehension of his own difference from the animals he lives with, it stresses Tristan’s humanity quite pointedly in descriptions of his penis. The human male is not the only animal to possess a penis, nor is a penis necessary for a successful male gender performance in this narrative, as the examples of women cross-­dressed as knights demonstrate.41 Like the suckling female breast, male genitals seem to mark not just gender but also human identity in Tristan de Nanteuil. The narrator describes the young man Tristan’s body much as he described the wild child’s body, until he gets to his penis. He lived like a wild man, he was strong and quick, and his body was big and strong. He was sixteen years old at this moment in my narrative. In summer as in winter, he covered himself only with a single leaf. His feet were hard and his nails sharp. His body was covered with hair, his face was white, and he had beautiful lively bright eyes. The lower member, which I will not name, bobbed stiffly in front of him and he touched it constantly. He pulled on it all day long and it was marvelously big. He had never slept with a woman, and he was full of desire. Ainsy c’uns homs sauvages s’aloit il gouvernant, Fors estoit et leger, s’ot le corps fort et grant,

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.xvi. ans avoit ly enffes au temps dont je vous chant. Në esté në yver n’aloit l’enffes vestant Fors seul une feullie dont il s’aloit couvrant. Ly piét lui furent dur et ly ongle tranchant; Velu avoit le corps et le vïaire blanc; Ly eul lui sont ou chef bel et vert et rïant; Le membre par dessoubz dont pas ne vois parlant, Luy estant et balie, adés le va tastant; Toute jour le tiroit, a merveilles l’ot grant: Ains n’ot jeu avec femme, sy l’aloit desirant. (Tristan de Nanteuil, lines 4368–­79)

Again, there is nothing uniquely human about the penis or even about Tristan’s preoccupation with it. However, the narrator emphasizes the wild man’s desire for a woman, and particularly a human woman (femme), even though Tristan hasn’t seen one since he was an infant. Moreover, the description of Tristan’s manly penis prefaces the account of the wild man’s encounter with Blanchandine, the same Blanchandine who was promised to King Lucion of Ivoirie, besieged in the Gayette Tower, and liberated by Tristan’s grandmother Aye. In the latest episode of the princess’s adventures as a marriage prize, she is being sent to wed an ugly old man, an ally of her father. Tristan is present when the hind attacks and kills the Saracens accompanying Blanchandine. He sees the princess and Nature inspires him to love her (“Nature lui apprent et sy le semonnoit / D’amer la damoiselle; doucement l’acoloit,” lines 4458–­59). The hind carries Tristan and Blanchandine away, and Tristan demands the lady’s love; in fact, he will have her love whether she wishes it or not, he says. He rapes her, and then she falls in love with him: That night, Tristan, the young man I describe to you, took her by force the first time and had his way with Blanchandine, but I will not tell you that the lady was not tamed. God and love caused the lady to give herself to Tristan the second time. She showed him good love and good delight. Tristan le damoiseaulx dont je vous signyffie, Fist par force la nuyt la premeraine fye Son bon de Blanchandine, mais je ne vous dy mye Que ne s’aprivoisast la danzelle jolye. Dieu et amour y a sy belle euvre fournye

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Que la danzelle c’est donnee et ottroÿe Au vouloir de Tristan a la .ii.e fye; Luy monstra bonne amour et bonne druerye. (Tristan de Nanteuil, lines 4572–­79)

Kathryn Gravdal has demonstrated the persistence with which force is redefined as acquiescence and rape subsumed into love in medieval texts.42 Similar to some of the narratives Gravdal describes, Tristan de Nanteuil does not question this translation, but neither does it hide the rape. In a repetition typical of chansons de geste, the narrator tells us again that Tristan took Blanchandine by force the first time, but she gave herself freely the second time. Contextualized in the social relations of the forest, this change suggests a movement from a relationship of power over another to a consensual sovereignty: Blanchandine accepts and even welcomes Tristan’s power over her. She is tamed by love, aprivoisée, a term that might be used for taming a wild beast and recalls human mastery over domesticated animals, but, in fact, it is the wild animal-­like Tristan who is “tamed” by love and who learns to live as a human. The Saracen Blanchandine asks Tristan whether he believes in Mohammed or Saint Mary. He replies that he knows neither, he believes only in Blanchandine and wishes to give himself to her. Tristan seems to have a kind of rudimentary grasp of love rhetoric, but then he continues, diverting from his discourse of love to ask for clothes. “Never in my life did I wear any clothes, and I would like to have some nice ones. I want to cover myself with a doublet and also to cover my head. I no longer wish to live like a hunted beast.” “Oncques en mon vivant je n’eux coste vestye, Mais j’en vourray avoir une belle jolye, Et se vourray mes os couvrir d’une cuirie Et ma teste ensement; jamés jour de ma vie Ne me veul maintenir come beste escachie.” (Tristan de Nanteuil, lines 4586–­90)

The rapidity of the narrative development is striking here: a description of Tristan’s penis leads directly to his capture of a lover, and a sexual initiation leads immediately to a desire for clothes. Tristan the wild man is domesticated by sex and by love, and then dressed in doublet, shirt, tunic, belt, shoes, stockings, and cap, all procured by the hind, which even finds

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a serving woman for Blanchandine. But notably, Tristan’s desire for sex and clothing do not lead to an immediate integration into human culture. He remains with the serving woman, his lover, and—­nine months later—­their child, in a little house they build beside the hind’s den in the forest.43 The text imagines the wild man as tamed by sex and love, and it also imagines the possibility of a human domestic life in the wild. Such an idyll cannot last, however, in a story that moves relentlessly toward dynastic recovery and Christian conversion. In subsequent episodes, Tristan will leave animal society to become a noble, Christian knight.

Loss and Lineage I suggested earlier that the narrative recounts episodes that repeat, revisit, or revise earlier developments in the plot, as in the two episodes about infants at sea. The later account repeats the outlines of the earlier one, and this repetition puts the two episodes in dialogue. And there’s another account that features the revelation of a noble human penis. While the adult Tristan lives peaceably with Blanchandine, their son, and their serving woman in the forest, Tristan’s mother, Aiglentine, goes to the hind’s den in search of her lost son, Tristan, and finds his baby alone in the forest. She takes the child and when Tristan and Blanchandine discover the infant’s absence, they set out in search of their child. The sultan captures Blanchandine as she leaves the forest, and when the hind tries to save her, it is killed. Tristan becomes separated from Blanchandine, thinks he has lost her and returns to his forest refuge where he discovers the slaughtered hind. Poor Tristan has lost his nourrice, the text tells us (line 6258). He mourns the deer, embracing its body and lamenting his loss. Then he takes arms from the dead Saracens killed by the hind and says that he will no longer live in the forest, but will follow the laws of chivalry. The story follows a trajectory that may appear unsurprising: a child is raised in the forest by a wild animal; he lives like an animal and becomes somewhat animal-­like, but he retains features that define him as human. A sexual encounter and love domesticate him; he puts on clothes and builds a home in the forest where he lives with his lover and son. The loss of his human family and the death of the nurturing hind cause him to leave the forest for human society, where he hopes to recover his lost family. The narrator’s insistence on the prompting of Nature gives the trajectory an apparent inevitability (line 6327), yet Tristan’s decision to leave the forest comes only after he discovers the dead hind. He enters the human world only after he loses his affective connection to the forest.

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Tristan’s entry into noble manhood shares several features with Blanchandine’s subsequent adventures at the court of the Saracen Queen Clarinde (the same Clarinde who will later find herself at sea with an infant son). Blanchandine and Tristan have been reunited and married and Blanchandine has converted to Christianity, but the couple has again been separated and Blanchandine believes Tristan has been killed in a battle. She is disguised as the knight Blanchandin and her masculine performance wins Clarinde’s love. In order to avoid revealing her disguise, she agrees to marry the queen, but just as Blanchandine is about to undress and reveal her female body, God saves her from discovery by sending a distraction: a fierce stag crashes through the room and then escapes into the forest. Blanchandine takes up arms and follows the deer. When she comes upon the animal, the stag bows before her and an angel appears. This messenger from God asks if Blanchandine wishes to be transformed into a man. Since she believes she has lost her beloved husband and since she is already married to another woman, Blanchandine agrees, and “God gave her all the nature of a man, everything she needed of a man, but her face did not change” (“Toute nature de home tant que besoing en a / En maniere d’un home et tout lui ottroya, / Mais oncques son semblant qu’ot devant ne changa,” lines 16198–­200). Blanchandine becomes Blanchandin and the newly masculinized knight praises Jesus Christ, takes out a knife, goes to the stag, and cuts off its head. He goes back to Clarinde carrying the stag’s head on his lance and after demanding a bath, he shows off his new attributes: Blanchandin does not hesitate to take off his clothes, and when he was completely naked he walked toward the bath, he got into it naked in front of many maidens. His member was clearly visible to her, it was big and thick, and Clarinde saw it well, it was big and well formed, and she wouldn’t have been happier if she had received thirty kingdoms. Blanchandins se desvest, ne s’y est arrestés, Et quant il fut tout nuz, vers la cuve est allés, Devant mainte pucelle est nuz dedens entrés. La lui paroit le membre qu’estoit gros et quarrés; Que bien le vit Clarinde—­bien estoit figurés—­ Dont ne feust aussy lye pour .xxx. royaultés. (Tristan de Nanteuil, lines 16354–­59)

This is an unusual account, and it’s the second time in this narrative that we read a description of coming into manhood that focuses on an

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ample penis. This instance deserves attention for its suggestion that gendered anatomy might be read as a supplement. Here the penis is miraculously added to Blanchandin’s body; it supplements her already successful performance as a knight. To read the penis as a supplement is to recognize it as added to something that was already self-­sufficient and complete. But Jacques Derrida has taught us that the supplement also exposes incompleteness in the original: the very fact that the original can be supplemented demonstrates an incompleteness that was not earlier apparent. The supplement adds to and replaces, it completes—­and in completing, it exposes a prior incompleteness.44 On the one hand, it would be easy to see Blanchandin’s penis as a supplement that completes a lack—­she’s impersonating a man and doesn’t have a penis. On the other hand, Blanchandin was already doing a perfectly credible gender performance as a knight; after all, her masculine appearance and demeanor had been convincing enough to persuade a queen to fall in love with her and demand marriage. If the miraculous addition of a penis is a supplement, the incompleteness it compensates is symbolic as well as anatomical: it inscribes the body in the genealogical logic of the text. The penis brings the body into marriage and reproductive sex, and not incidentally, into noble lineage. But there is another way in which the supplementary penis inscribes the body into reproductive, dynastic logic. We don’t know what Queen Clarinde saw when she looked at the transvestite knight and fell passionately in love with her. Maybe she saw a man. Or maybe she saw a woman dressed as a man.45 What exactly the queen desired is hard to pin down in this kind of narrative, where motivations are very briefly sketched. But the manly penis that Blanchandin displays for his wife dispels any lingering uncertainty about the knight’s gender and locates the queen’s desire within securely heterosexual boundaries, and within the social structures that define sexual desire as leading to dynastic procreation. Blanchandin’s manly penis first seems to promise pleasure and not incidentally, sovereignty over others (Clarinde sees it and is as happy as if she’d inherited thirty kingdoms), but the promise of sexual pleasure is quickly subsumed into procreation in this story—­Clarinde becomes pregnant, and once the anatomically male Blanchandin is inscribed in noble genealogy by becoming a father, we hear nothing more about his splendid penis. By naming gendered anatomy as a supplement, I do not mean to suggest that the body is somehow liberated from gender or that anatomy is separate from the gendered organization of the body, but rather to underscore the belatedness of masculine gender in this narrative.46 If gendered anatomy is a supplement, an addition, it also exposes incompleteness; it is, in Derrida’s

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words, a “supplementary mediation that produces the sense of the very thing it defers.”47 And what the penis produces is not, or not just, masculine identity, but human identity as defined by participation in a bloodline. As a supplement, gendered anatomy produces a noble identity that is—­quite literally—­reproducible. The use of gendered embodiment in this narrative looks simultaneously backward to noble lineage and forward to reproductive futurity. That is, it looks backward, as in the wild child’s recognition of the ancestral breasts that nursed his father, and forward, as in the wild young man’s discovery of a bobbing penis and, almost immediately afterward, his engendering of a son. Gendered anatomy is a supplement that brings the protagonist’s noble body into the reproductive logic that governs human cultures defined by the sovereignty of blood; it also exposes the animal kinships in which the hero has participated.

Becoming Human The supplementarity of gendered anatomy recursively inscribes the body into securely human, noble genealogy, but in its belatedness, it also exposes earlier alternative models of kinship, like Tristan’s alliance with the nurturing hind, an alliance established not just by the deer’s care, but by the symbolic kinship of shared milk. The child Tristan’s recognition of the breasts that suckled his father displaces the memory of the part-­human/part-­animal siren’s breasts that also nurtured the hind. The kinship of the boy and the deer, a rhizomatic kinship of alliance or a becoming-­animal in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, must be supplemented and supplanted by a becoming-­ human, defined here as taking a place in human lineage. The story represents an animality that gendered anatomy supplements, masks, repudiates, and even mourns; this animality inheres not in the wild man’s body, but in his symbolic kinship with the deer.48 Tristan de Nanteuil recounts two episodes of coming into human manhood followed by a sexual initiation: first it describes Tristan’s preoccupation with his penis, his rape of and lovemaking with Blanchandine, and the birth, nine months later, of their son; subsequently Blanchandin reveals a splendid new penis to his new wife and immediately engenders a son who will become a saint. Both episodes recount the death of a deer in relation to the assumption of human manhood. In the coincidence of animal death and becoming-­human, they may suggest, as Karl Steel has argued, that the repeated and violent dominance over animals is constitutive of the human.49 But here and throughout Tristan de Nanteuil, human identity is defined not just as difference from the animal, but as participation in a lineage, and

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animal deaths mark the protagonists’ passage not just into human manhood, but also into paternity. In other words, the animal deaths symbolically serve noble human lineage. The stag killed by Blanchandin has an obviously symbolic and even supernatural role: sent by God to save Blanchandine from the discovery of her transvestite disguise, it subsequently submits to its own sacrifice in the ritualized slaughter by the transformed Blanchandin. The hind that nurtures and loves Tristan, like the stag, is an animal of marvelous proportions and inclinations, but in contrast with the symbolic role it gives the stag, the narrative insists on the hind’s practical and intimate relations with its young human charge. Whether the hind’s care for the human child is an instance of divine providence or of natural inclination, the text’s insistence on nurture and nursemaids suggests that Tristan and the hind share a bond as milk siblings. Ultimately, though, blood kinship triumphs over milk kinship, and in this story of dynastic succession, the hind is sacrificed so that Tristan may leave the forest to claim his position as heir to Nanteuil. Tristan de Nanteuil shares the narrative trajectory of other stories of wild children or wild men: the foundling raised by animals must discover his noble lineage. La naissance du chevalier au cygne is an example; another, more closely related to Tristan de Nanteuil, is Valentin et Orson, where a savage wild man, suckled and raised by a bear, ultimately assumes his proper identity as a king’s son.50 In this respect, Tristan de Nanteuil conforms to one of the models of the wild man I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: it recounts the loss of human identity as a consequence of living in the wild. But the epic also troubles the opposition between the untamed wild and human society in its representation of the forest as a place organized by social relations among the animals that include the human boy and later, when he is older, his family.51 The wild Tristan does not need to leave the forest to lose his animal-­like features. He lives as a human in the wild with a house, family, servant, and a nice wardrobe. Blanchandine teaches him about human culture, and their life in the forest is imbued with human values and human social hierarchies (there’s a serving woman, after all); the narrative imagines a human life lived among animals in the wild. The forest is not so much a place of exile as a contested land, protected by a fierce deer and its army, and home to a human family lost to the bonds of genealogical identity but kin to the hind. Tristan de Nanteuil speaks in unsettling ways about human distinction as both “natural” and acquired, as both embodied and learned, as both lost and found. Yet even as it questions conventional notions of human distinction from the animal and locates human identity in the body and in instinct, the narrative also persistently describes the human in terms of

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noble lineage. This is where the text’s contribution to understandings of sovereignty and sovereign relations come to the fore. By the time Tristan de Nanteuil was composed in the fourteenth century, nobility was a legitimizing qualification for authority over others. Primogeniture was widely established, and genealogy defined the succession of wealth, authority, and power. Tracing the increasing alignment of genealogy and privilege over the course of the early Middle Ages, R. Howard Bloch claims that “the radicalness of aristocracy’s lineal ‘reorientation’ lies less in the notion of race, dynastic order, or house than in the growing consciousness with which it began to manage what can only be described as a ‘biopolitics of lineage.’ ”52 Such management strategies included arranged marriages, primogeniture, and property laws that consolidated family structures and tied them to land. Bloch sees chansons de geste as a privileged location of such a biopolitics and identifies a “homological identity” between the text and familial model: “In the chanson de geste more than anywhere else lineage serves to organize an entire literary mode.”53 But Sarah Kay has disputed the homology Bloch finds in the relation of the textual and the social, arguing that “texts are involved as much in the occlusion of and struggle against historical givens as they are in consoling conformity with them.”54 Late medieval epics like Tristan de Nanteuil participate fully in this occlusion of the biopolitics of lineage. Even as they ground their characters’ identities in noble genealogies, these narratives recount the many ways in which families are dispersed and disempowered and family structures redefined: lost children, disguised gender and religious identities, and intimate relations with animal milk siblings persistently question the logic and logistics of genealogical succession. The cross-­species bond of intimacy and loyalty shared by animals and humans in the forest posits an alternative model of social organization, troubling the security of dynasties grounded in part on the violent subjugation of animals to the needs, both material and symbolic, of humans.

Epilogue

I

n my exploration of the ways in which medieval literary texts use animals and animality to debate the legitimacy and forms of sovereign relations, I’ve focused primarily on imaginative literature, but history too features a sovereign in a bestial skin. On January 28, 1393, the French king Charles VI and five of his courtiers dressed up as wild men in a masquerade organized by one of the courtiers, Hugues de Guisay, on the occasion of the remarriage of the queen’s lady-­in-­waiting, Catherine l’Allemande.1 The duke of Orléans, apparently wishing to scrutinize the disguised men, approached them with a torch and ignited the costumes covered in “hair.” The king took refuge under the skirt of the duchess of Berry and one of the courtiers managed to plunge into a tub of water, but the other four costumed noblemen were burned to death. There are four accounts of the event known as the Bal des Ardents (Dance of the Burning Men); the most extensive is in the fourth book of Jean Froissart’s chronicles, composed between 1390 and 1404.2 Froissart’s narrative of the episode and the rich manuscript illuminations that accompany it have been well studied, but I turn briefly to the account to suggest some of its implications for how animality impacts our understanding of sovereignty.3 Froissart’s description of the disguises commanded by Hugues de Guisay stresses their hairiness: He commanded that six tunics of canvas should be procured and taken to a chamber, and that cut flax should be sewn on them in the form and color of hair. . . . When they were all six dressed in the fitted tunics, and when they were closed and sewn inside, they looked like wild men, for they were covered in hair from head to foot.

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Il fist pourveir six cottes de toille et mettre à part dedens une chambre et porter, puis semer sus délyé lin en fourme et en couleur de cheveuls. . . . Quant ils furent tous six vestus de ces cottes qui estoient faittes à leur point et ils furent dedens enjoinds et cousus, ils se monstroient à estre hommes sauvages, car ils estoient tous chargiés de poil du chief jusques à la plante du piet. (Chroniques, 85)4

The costumes are made to order, and the king and his courtiers are sewn into them. Froissart’s description may recall Alexandrine’s act of sewing Guillaume and Mélior into bearskins in Guillaume de Palerne, except that here the costumes are not animal skins, but cloth made to look like fur. Froissart insists on the hair-­covered bodies as the feature that identifies the king and his courtiers as wild men, using both “cheveuls” (usually human hair) and “poil” (used for animal hair), but this “hair” is not fur, but flax cut to look like hair. The king’s willingness to abandon royal vestments for bestial disguise signals his misunderstanding of the symbolic power invested in clothes, Lorraine Stock argues, suggesting that “Froissart exploits the symbolic po­ tential of costume signifiers to indicate that Charles VI’s choice of the wrong apparel, even worse, his rejection of the garments of sovereignty, attests to his utter failure as a king.”5 Instead of the lavish furs he might wear in a royal audience (as in plate 5), here King Charles has himself become furry. Froissart twice describes the hair-­covered bodies, but he does not explicitly characterize the wild men as animal-­like. However, he may implicitly refer to animality in his description of the cord that ties the disguised men together; Florent Pouvreau suggests that the wild men would have looked like captured animals. Pouvreau links Froissart’s description of the wild men’s constraints to other late medieval images of wild men tied or chained in po­ sitions of submission to ladies or knights, and he argues that Froissart’s des­cription of the bound men suggests the wild man’s inferiority and submission, a characteristic that here applies to the king himself. Emphasizing Charles’s abandonment of his royal clothing, the bestial disguise he assumes, and his humiliating refuge under a woman’s skirts, Froissart’s account offers a political commentary on the mad king’s failure effectively to inhabit his office.6 Noting the prominence of the Bal des Ardents in manuscripts of Froissart’s Chroniques made for princes—­the scene is illustrated in all of them—­Pouvreau further suggests that Froissart’s account functions as a countermodel to the mirror for princes; the Bal des Ardents offers a model of how not to be a sovereign.7

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An illumination from a late fifteenth-­century copy of Froissart’s Chroniques made for King Charles IV of England emphasizes the king’s un­ kingly appearance (plate 16).8 The illumination includes only five of the six disguised men. Here they are no longer tied to each other, but they still wear cords around their waists. Ogier de Nantouillet plunges into a tub of water in the front left of the image, and at the rear the king ducks under the duchess’s skirt; the other three disguised courtiers are in flames. The king is shown without his robes of office and he can be identified only because of his proximity to the duchess. Royal sovereignty is nowhere on display. The king’s head is under a woman’s skirts, his back is to the spectator, and he leans forward, raising his hands helplessly as the duchess of Berry smothers the flames that have engulfed his costume.9 In other manuscript illuminations of the scene, the masquerade gone tragically awry is staged before a crowded audience, but here there are few witnesses. The queen and her ladies are on a dais at left, and a man looks at the scene from over their shoulders. In the center of the image, a kneeling man looks in shock at one of the burning courtiers, and two other men stand on the right. Laurence Harf-­Lancner identifies the prominent undisguised figure at the right front of the image as the king’s brother, the duke of Orléans, responsible for the conflagration. He still holds his torch and Harf-­ Lancner suggests that the image recalls the accusation of betrayal found in Burgundian chronicles, where the duke is described as having deliberately started the fire.10 The duke’s expression is hidden behind a mask, and although the mask indicates his participation in the festivities, he appears detached from the event, much like the golden statue of a saint perched high above the ladies at the top left of the image and which, like the duke, looks out toward the reader. The duke appears to look away from the chaos in the room, and his averted gaze may also suggest his guilt, particularly when compared to his companion’s pose; the unidentified courtier beside the duke on the far right of the image looks toward the burning men and raises his hand to his heart in apparent distress. Froissart does not specify that the disguised men wore masks, but in other manuscript illustrations of the Bal des Ardents, they wear beards or masks that represent the grotesque wild man. Here are they shown barefaced or with red or green masks that do not coordinate with their costumes. These are festival masks, according to Harf-­Lancner, who notes their bright colors and long noses and suggests that the artist’s representation of them here shows that the episode was remembered as a charivari.11 These wild men also wear stylish hats. Like the masks, the hats are scattered about the

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floor; only the disguised courtier in the left foreground of the image still wears both. And like the brightly colored masks, the feathered hats worn by the furry men suggest an artifice that is not otherwise visible in the artist’s rendering of the hairy bodies. Disguise is the whole point of a masquerade, of course, and records indicate that the wild man disguise was a popular one in public spectacles; wild men appeared frequently in plays, festivals, and the pageantry of royal entries beginning in the thirteenth century.12 In this image, though, the disguises are rendered invisible. Even as the masks and hats emphasize the artifice and incongruous juxtaposition of courtly and wild identity, it’s hard to see that the king and the courtiers are wearing costumes. The cords around their waists look a little like belts and make their hairy costumes look something like clothing, and the furry “skin” does not cover the men’s faces, but otherwise, the artifice is not visible. The seamless nature of the skin-­like disguise is particularly apparent at the men’s feet where hair extends over their ankles. As Pouvreau notes, the image represents not disguised men, but wild men; the courtiers and the king seem to have become wild men.13 I would further suggest that the image suggests how easily men may lose the qualities that identify them as members of a courtly, ruling class. It may especially highlight the fragility of the human quality of reason; the disguises would then parody Charles VI’s mental incapacity, particularly if they recall the literary motif of the knight who goes mad and flees to the forest to live as a wild man. Yet the wild man disguise worn by the king points to a curious reversal of literary accounts of wild men like those I examined in chapter 5. Fictional narratives recount a becoming-­human that depends on the recovery of an essential humanity that lies beneath the wild man’s hairy skin and ignorance of human sociability. The masquerade enacted by King Charles and his courtiers represents not a becoming-­animal, since wild men are not animals, but something like a becoming-­bestial—­and specifically, a becoming-­bestial of the king. In Froissart’s chronicle, sovereignty and animality converge in a highly mediated encounter. The bestial wild man is a product of artifice, a disguise effected through a cloth costume. This hairy disguise may reveal more than it hides, especially if the wild man’s untamed behavior suggests the king’s periodic incapacity to rule due to mental illness. The episode implicitly underscores and undermines one of the most fundamental claims about human-­animal difference: that humans have reason and animals do not. In this sense, the mad king’s “bestiality” will be shed only temporarily when he removes his wild man costume and clothes himself in the royal furs that proclaim his sovereign status. In the merging of the bestial and the sover-

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eign staged in the Bal des Ardents episode, artifice converges with animality not just to question the king’s authority, but also to underscore the artifice that maintains the royal authority of a king who frequently loses his reason and, by extension, the artifice of all sovereign claims that depend on human exceptionalism. h Literary texts emphasize forms of rule, rather than forms of the state. In representations of sovereignty, they privilege relationships more than political structures; hierarchies of authority and dominion are articulated through affective relations. To be sure, medieval narratives may represent or debate contemporary forms of governance, but in the texts I have examined, negotiations of dominion and power over others are articulated in affective relationships with animals and identifications with animality, and in human encounters with animals and human inhabitations of animality. Reason, recognition, and knowledge ground self-­sovereignty in human agents, even as representations of the wildness that may overtake knights and kings trou­ ble the secure identification of the reasoning human agent and specular encounters with animals and woman-­animal hybrids link recognition with disavowal. Animal becomings obscure human identities, and affinities with animals redefine human lineage. The gendering of self-­sovereignty and sovereignty over others takes exemplary form in representations of Eve’s sin, but in other narratives, it is negotiated in the imbrications of noble identity, gendered bodies, and maternal species. Reason, recognition, gender, and affect are all at play in literary constructions of the human subject of sovereignty and in their articulations of what it means to have power over others. In medieval literary texts, human dominion over animals is revealed as a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-­animal difference that expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism even as they reinstate its claims. The uncertain boundary between animal and human has been at stake in many of the narratives I’ve examined in this book: fish knights, werewolves, contracting wolves, snake women, swan children, and bestial sovereigns put into question essential humanity and the hierarchies that it inhabits. As I’ve argued throughout, these strange, hybrid, and fantastic figures raise questions about who has power over whom, how that power is related to one’s own agency and choices, and what it may mean to share power rather than dominate with it.

notes

introduction 1. Lévi-­Strauss, Totemism, 89, 13. 2. For the sake of simplicity, I refer throughout to nonhuman animals simply as animals. 3. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 43. 4. Ziolkowski, Talking Animals. 5. On literature and notions of sovereignty, see Ingham’s claim for the imaginative work of literature in relation to medieval British history and politics in Sovereign Fantasies. Boutet identifies the reflections on kingship that produce the literary and mythical figures of Charlemagne and Arthur in Charlemagne et Arthur. 6. Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 11. 7. Baratay, Le point de vue animal; Delort, Les animaux ont une histoire. 8. Salisbury, The Beast Within. For a valuable overview of the evolution of medieval animal studies and its relation to theoretical work in the field, see Steel, How to Make a Human, 1–­23. For an early contribution to medieval animal studies in French, see Bichon’s L’animal dans la littérature française, an exhaustive catalog of animals in twelfth-­and thirteenth-­century French literary texts. Other relatively early contributions to medieval animal studies include Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human; Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes; Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts. 9. Steel, How to Make a Human; a preview of Steel’s argument is in his article, “How to Make a Human.” 10. Crane, Animal Encounters. 11. Reynolds, “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” 111. 12. Skinner, “The State,” 123, cited by Davies, “The Medieval State,” 292. 13. Davies, “The Medieval State,” 293. 14. Though, as Reynolds notes, such scruples do not prevent social anthropologists and ancient historians from discussing states outside the context of the modern nation-­ state (“The Historiography of the Medieval State,” 109). 15. Genêt, “L’état moderne,” 261–­81. Ullmann identifies the emergence of territorial sovereignty in the thirteenth century in A History of Political Thought, 195–­99.

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notes to pages 4–7

16. Guenée, States and Rulers, 6; Reynolds, “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” 110. Reynolds notes that she is inspired by Max Weber’s definition of the modern state. 17. Reynolds, “The Historiography of the Medieval State,” 112. 18. Watts, The Making of Politics, 32–­33; see also 35. 19. Davies, “The Medieval State,” 295. 20. Bisson, “Medieval Lordship,” 749. Bisson notes the “peculiarly harsh and violent mode of lordship associated with the multiplication of castles, castellans, and knights,” 752–­53. See also Bisson, “The Feudal Revolution,” and for vassalage more generally, Luscombe, “Introduction.” 21. Bisson, “Medieval Lordship,” 754. 22. Ibid., 757–­58. 23. On dominium, see Davies, “The Medieval State,” 295; Black, Political Thought in Europe, 7–­8. On regimen, see Senellart, Les arts de gouverner. 24. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 30. 25. Ibid., 32. On political thinking in scholasticism, and for an argument that the notion of the republican state originates in scholastic thought in the second half of the thirteenth century, see Boureau, La religion de l’état. 26. Ullmann, A History of Political Thought, 155–­56. 27. Ullmann, A History of Political Thought, 29, 132. According to Ullmann’s somewhat positivist argument, the king’s role as feudal overlord mitigated the exceptional status accorded him in royal theocracy (146–­47). 28. See Boureau’s chapter on “Une exception perpétuelle: La souveraineté au-­dessus des lois,” in La religion de l’état, 233–­57. 29. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 36. 30. Ibid., 42. 31. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 7, Davis’s emphasis. 32. Ibid., 81–­82. 33. Biddick, Make and Let Die. 34. Davies, “The Medieval State,” 293. For another critique of periodization, see Senellart’s argument against notions of both rupture and continuity, insisting instead—­ using the language of geography—­on strata of political discourse that form through sedi­ ment, displacement, shift, or collapse (Les arts de gouverner, 45–­47). Senellart traces what he identifies as the persistence of the royal pedagogy modeled in the mirror of princes, the specular relation of the prince with his perfect model, even as the emergence of a new idea of political action leads to a technique of government determined by the interests of the state. On mirrors of princes, see my chapter 4. 35. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. 36. For important models of such work, see Biddick, Make and Let Die; Holsinger, The Premodern Condition; Cole, The Birth of Theory. 37. Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 43. 38. Such a view of nature is not limited to Christian writers. For a twelfth-­century example from Muslim Andalusia, see Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. 39. For an important study of the political use of Genesis and cross-­species relations in the early modern period, see Shannon, The Accommodated Animal.

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40. For the (mostly bad) implications of such a decision, see Gilquin and Jacobs, “Elephants Who Marry Mice”; on the differential use of “who” for some animals and not others, see Gupta, “Foxes, Hounds, and Horses.”

chapter one 1. For a critique of this distinction that focuses on temporality, see Biddick, Make and Let Die. 2. I do not know how to translate “Le roman des romans.” It’s not a romance, so “The Romance of Romances” doesn’t make sense, and although it could mean something like “The Vernacular of the Vernaculars,” that doesn’t make much sense either. 3. “Et ait, ‘Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, et praesit piscibus maris et volatilibus caeli et bestiis universaeque terrae omnique reptili quod movetur in terra.’ Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam; ad imaginem Dei creavit illum; masculum et feminam creavit eos. Benedixitque illis Deus, et ait, ‘Crescite, et multiplicamini, et replete terram, et subicite eam, et dominamini piscibus maris et volatilibus caeli et universis animantibus quae moventur super terram.’ ” Vulgate Bible, Gen. 1:26–­28. I have modernized and sometimes silently modified the Douay-­Rheims translation. 4. Cohen, “Be Fertile and Increase.” 5. Buc describes the evolution of the Glossa ordinaria in L’ambiguïté du livre, 29–­39. 6. “La bonne potestas est symbolisée, rendue légitime, et explicitée par la supériorité de l’homme sur la bête.” Ibid., 73; discussion on 71–­122. 7. Ibid., 75–­76. 8. See, for example, La bible française du XIIIe siècle, 100–­101. 9. Ibid., 115. 10. Buc, L’amigüité du livre, 74. See also Lambertini, “Nature and the Origins of Power.” 11. Coleman notes that following the thirteenth-­century rediscovery of Aristotle’s political and ethical writings, government came to be seen as natural, something that existed even in Paradise before the Fall (A History of Political Thought, 44). 12. “Et terror vester ac tremor sit super cuncta animalia terrae et super omnes volu­ cres caeli cum universis quae moventur in terra. Omnes pisces maris manui vestrae traditi sunt. Et omne quod movetur et vivit erit vobis in cibum.” 13. Sneddon, “The Old French Bible.” For an important study of translation in relation to textual production and interpretation, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation. 14. On the identity of Guiart des Moulins and on the development of La bible historiale, see Fournié, L’iconographie de la “Bible historiale,” 7–­16; a list of 144 extant manuscripts is on 107–­10. For studies of La bible historiale, see Patterson, “Silent Job,” and Lobrichon, “The Story of a Success.” 15. On late medieval lay readers and their reading practices, see Hoogvliet, “Encouraging Lay People to Read the Bible in the French Vernaculars,” and “The Medieval Vernacular Bible in French as a Flexible Text.”

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notes to pages 16–23

16. For an overview of conflicting views among medieval theologians on whether animals would have killed and eaten each other in Paradise, see Minnis, From Eden to Eternity, 143–­45. 17. Leviticus 11:39: “If any beast die of which it is lawful for you to eat, he that touches its carcass shall be unclean until the evening, and he who eats or carries any part of it shall wash his clothes and shall be unclean until the evening.”; “Si mortuum fuerit animal quod licet vobis comedere, qui cadavar eius tetigerit inmundus erit usque ad vesperum, et qui comederit ex co quippiam sive portaverit lavabit vestimenta sua et inmundus erit usque ad vesperum.” David Shyovitz, “ ‘How Can the Guilty Eat the Innocent?’ ” typescript 14–­15. As Shyovitz further notes, for many interpeters “the question was not why God had allowed Noah and his descendants to eat animals, but rather why meat had ever been prohibited in the first place” (typescript, 15). 18. “Fecit quoque Dominus Deus Adam et uxori eius tunicas pellicias et induit eos.” (Gen. 3:21). 19. Discussion in Pépin, La tradition de l’allégorie, 146–­65. See also Anderson, “The Punishment of Adam and Eve,” 57–­74; and Bartholeyns, “L’artefact anthropologique,” 263–­68. 20. Pépin, La tradition de l’allégorie, 147. 21. Ibid., 159. 22. The text is preserved in a single manuscript, Vienna Codex Vindob. 2980, from the mid-­fifteenth century. Halford has translated “wüllin” as “skin,” presumably to bring Lutwin’s text in line with the biblical account; I have silently modified the translation. 23. For a study of the manuscript illuminations, see Halford, Illustration and Text in Lutwin’s “Eva und Adam.” 24. The vellum manuscript was ordered by Jean de Vaudetar for King Charles V of France and produced in Paris in 1371–­72. The scribe has been identified as Raoulet d’Orléans and the illuminators as Jean Bondol, First Master of the Bible of Jean de Sy, and others. 25. And perhaps identifying the moment of the fall as an entry into a symbolic order defined by castration anxiety; see Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 26. Steel, How to Make a Human. 27. On the question of the “decadence” of the romance and on its relationship to earlier Arthurian romance, see Taylor, “The Parrot, the Knight, and the Decline of Chivalry”; Berthelot, “Arthur, ou le Chevalier du papegault”; Victorin, “Le perroquet en cage et le chevalier Arthur”; Gaucher, “Le chevalier au papegau.” 28. Le conte du papegau, 74. 29. Greene, “Humanimals.” 30. Douchet, “La peau du centaure,” 302. 31. Griffin underscores the ambiguous distinction between inside and outside produced by flaying in this episode in Transforming Tales, 133. 32. Albert the Great, Man and the Beasts, 379. For a discussion of the zitiron, see Steel and McCracken, “The Animal Turn,” 88–­100. 33. For examples, see Van Duzer, Sea Monsters. 34. In Greene’s apt phrase, “The Papegau is not only a remake of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances and Renaud de Baujeu’s Li Biau Desconnu, but also a remake of remakes such

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as the German Wigalois, the Italian Carduino, the English Lybeaus Desconus, and probably others” (“Humanimals,” 124). Greene takes the notion of “remake” from Malfait-­ Dohet, “La fonction épique d’Arthur,” 187. For a detailed account of remakes in the romance, see editor Victorin’s introduction to Le conte du papegau, 9–­56. 35. Ferlampin-­Acher, Fées, bestes et luitons, 299–­304, and Perceforest et Zéphir, 97–­102. 36. Leclercq-­Marx, “L’idée d’un monde marin parallèle du monde terrestre.” For illustrations, see Van Duzer, Sea Monsters. 37. Alexandre de Paris, Le roman d’Alexandre, 324, III:500–­520. On the history of this episode, see Bellon-­Méguelle, “L’exploration sous-­marine.” On the repetition of the episode in the Perceforest, see Gaullier-­Bougassas, “La réécriture inventive.” 38. Perceforest. Troisième partie, tome II, 273–­85. For a discussion of this episode, see Steel and McCracken, “The Animal Turn”; Huot, Postcolonial Fictions, 59–­63; Le Cornec Rochelois, “Des poissons mythiques.” 39. On Alexander’s sovereignty in relation to taking tribute, see my “The Human and the Floral.” 40. On the treatment of Dido’s purchase as a manifestation of feminine power in Virgil and subsequent elaborations, see Baswell, “Dido’s Purse.” On medieval versions of Dido’s story, and on the Roman d’Eneas, see Desmond, Reading Dido; on Dido in Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies, see Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters, esp. 220–­21. 41. Jean d’Arras, Roman de Mélusine, 180; Coudrette, Le roman de Mélusine, lines 717ff. On the skin motif in Le roman d’Eneas and Le roman de Mélusine, see Vincensini, “De la fondation de Carthage à celle de Lusignan.” 42. Morgan Library ms. 381 is a vellum manuscript produced in France around 1460 and contains twenty-­five tales from Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus, translated into French. For discussion of the manuscript, see Avril and Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 36–­37. The manuscript is fragile and could not be rephotographed in color for this book. 43. Le conte du papegau is found in a single vellum manuscript, BnF fr. 2154, from the early fifteenth century. The manuscript contains only this romance; see description in Le conte du papegau, 9–­12. 44. Kay, “Original Skin,” “Legible Skins,” and “Surface and Symptom.” 45. Douchet argues that the flaying of the creature breaks the continuity of the skin that makes the composite character a single being, re-­establishing a distinction between the normal and the monstrous through the classification of the skin as an object of knowl­ edge. I am suggesting that the skin serves the further symbolic function of mapping sovereignty. Douchet, “La peau du centaure,” 302–­3. 46. For an account of a flayed human, see Kay’s discussion of skin, display, and the flaying of St. Bartholomew in “Original Skin.” 47. Delort, Le commerce des fourrures. See also Pluskowski, “Communicating through Skin and Bone.” 48. Warren, “On the Line,” 113. Warren, too, focuses on the discourse of death in biopolitics, arguing that sumptuary discourses reveal the entanglements and mutual dependencies of sovereignty and biopower. 49. Delort, Le commerce, 1:294.

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notes to pages 28–31

50. On the emblems of Charles VI and royal use of devises more broadly, see Beaune, “Costume et pouvoir.” 51. For a discussion of the emblems, see Roux, Les Dialogues, 53–­99. According to Roux, Jean sans Peur adopted the plane emblem in counter to the gnarled branch adopted by his rival, Louis d’Orléans, since the plane can cut down the branch (82). Hedeman notes that inventories and accounts of expenses demonstrate that the king and the Princes of the Blood were attentive to the careful orchestration of emblems and devices; see “Making Memories,” 170. On the artist, identified as the Boucicaut Master, see Sterling, La peinture médiévale, 1:341–­69. On the use of emblems and devices at the end of the Middle Ages, see Pastoureau, Figures et couleurs, 125–­37. In chapter 3, I discuss heraldry, a symbolic use of animality in emblems. 52. “Il semblerait que, dans leur débridement, les appétits de puissance et les avidités des princes se soient traduits au niveau vestimentaire par l’ostentation superbe et menaçante des signes de la puissance coivoitée” (Pouchelle, “Des peaux de bêtes et des fourrures,” 407). On sumptuary laws detailing who could wear which furs, see Delort, Le commerce des fourrures, 1:537–­60, and Warren, “On the Line,” 113–­17. Warren notes discourses that defended luxury furs as necessary and as responding to “the ‘needfulness’ of lords to be better housed than those they rule” (118). 53. Salmon does not specifically advocate for wearing furs in his book, but he does detail the importance of the symbolic accoutrements of kingship: clothing of purple or some other royal color, the crown, the scepter, and the orb. See Les demandes faites par le roi Charles VI, 23. This is a partial edition of the text. Hedeman has shown the relationship among the three sections of the book, focusing in particular on a second presentation image at the beginning of the third section. See “Pierre Salmon’s Advice,” “Making Memories,” and Of Counselors and Kings. I discuss mirrors for princes in more detail in chapter 4. 54. For the identification of the passage, see Beaune, Le miroir du pouvoir, 23. 55. Hedeman, “Making Memories,” 170–­71; Hedeman cites Carruthers’s discussion of the passage as a directive to consume or memorize material in biblical study in The Book of Memory. 56. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 142. 57. Lochrie, “Desiring Foucault.” See also Biddick, Make and Let Die. 58. On the commerce in furs, see Delort, Le commerce des fourrures, 179–­276. Delort notes that hunting produced most pelts; sheep husbandry produced pelts, but usually as a by-­product of meat. 59. Wolfe, Before the Law, 27. 60. Ibid., 31–­32. Animals are of course literally before the law in medieval animal trials. The classic treatment is Evans, The Criminal Prosecution. For important recent studies, see Cohen, “Law, Folklore and Animal Lore”; Dinzelbacher, “Animal Trials”; Enders, “Homicidal Pigs”; and Pastoureau, “Une justice exemplaire.” 61. Wolfe, Before the Law, 34, Wolfe’s emphasis. 62. The poem is extant in nine manuscripts. For the latest manuscript discovery and account of the tradition, see Ewert, “An Early Manuscript.” My thinking about Le roman des romans was inspired by an engagement with Susan Crane’s Animal Encounters. I thank Miranda Griffin for bringing the poem to my attention. See Griffin’s own discussion of this little-­studied text in Transforming Tales, 119–­20.

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63. On furs and the protection of the body, see Delort, Le commerce des fourrures, 2:486–­505. 64. A riddle from the Anglo-­Saxon Exeter Book represents a sheep describing its own slaughter and flaying to make parchment, but does not include a reproach or moralization. For discussion see Holsinger, “Of Pigs and Parchment”; Kay, “Legible Skins,” 19. On actual animals speaking back, see Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity.” 65. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 47–­48. 66. Ibid., 95. 67. On response, see Derrida’s discussion of Lacan in ibid., 119–­40; on ethics, see his discussion of Levinas, ibid., 106–­18. Haraway notes that when Derrida meets his cat’s gaze in the well-­known scene recounted in The Animal That Therefore I Am, he himself fails to respond (When Species Meet, 19–­23). 68. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 125.

chapter two 1. Steel, How to Make a Human. 2. See Haraway’s discussion of domestication as a mutually beneficial evolutionary strategy for humans and dogs in The Companion Species Manifesto, 26–­39. 3. Davies describes the historian’s dilemma of using modern concepts to describe the past in “The Medieval State,” 293. 4. See below, note 39. 5. A restablished peace among animals is prophesized in Isaiah 11:6 where the wolf and the sheep are again exemplary: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.” 6. Dittmar also makes this point about La bible historiale and argues for the importance of the domestic/wild distinction for thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century thinkers in “Le seigneur des animaux.” On theological debates about whether man was given dominion only over domestic animals, see Jobling, “ ‘And Have Dominion.’ ” 7. For a detailed account of the changes in these manuscripts, known as the gamma family, see Bellon, “De la chaîne au cycle?” Sunderland provides a succinct overview of the manuscript tradition in his study of the cycle form’s revision of the meaning of the romance in “Le cycle de Renart.” The Enfances Renart is dated to around 1250 by Foulet, ed., Le roman de Renart, 96. 8. Fukumoto, Harano, and Suzuki, eds., Le roman de Renart. Selected episodes are reedited from this edition by Bianciotto in Le roman de Renart. All citations refer to the Enfances Renart section of the Bianciotto edition. Scheidegger suggests that “Aucupre” is a self-­conscious wordplay that invokes the author and his text (Le roman de Renart, 176–­80). Levy speculates that the name is parodic, either a mock-­Arabic form or a garbled form of “Apocre(phe)” (Apochyrpha) that identifies the Adam and Eve story as the equivalent of Scripture (“The Gospel,” 122–­25). Baumgartner is surely right to argue that “Aucupre” is probably a parodic invention (“Les prologues,” 216). 9. As Greene notes, “Aucupre’s apocryphal story works as a transition between Scripture and scripture, the Bible and romance, Belief and belief” (Logical Fictions, 80). Levy

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notes to pages 43–47

describes the Genesis episode as a parable, probably because it is a biblical narrative, but as a narrative about talking animals, it is more like a fable, as I will explain further below (“The Gospel,” 114–­15). 10. Sunderland argues that the manuscripts that include it “regloss” the Renart material, characterizing the fox as inherently evil from its creation and recasting problems of justice in the compilation (“Le cycle de Renart”). Simpson uses the creation episode to stress the proliferation of meaning in the narrative as a disruption of any notion of originary or single meaning (Animal Body, esp. 28). Dragonetti and Scheidegger see the creation episode as an elaborate allegory for the invention or writing of the text itself: the staff recalls the pen, the instrument of the story’s composition, or even the branch (branche) used to name the episodes that form the composite Roman de Renart (Dragonetti, “Renart est mort,” 795; Scheidegger, Le roman de Renart, 189). Dittmar briefly discusses Le roman de Renart in relation to creation narratives in “Le seigneur des animaux.” 11. Baumgartner notes the covetous nature of Eve’s desire for another ewe, but also sees Eve’s creative acts as representative of an “écriture renardienne” that creates new and untamed variation, even as it reproduces prior forms (“Les prologues,” esp. 216). 12. We assume that the wolf takes the sheep because it is carnivorous, but alimentary distinctions are not fundamental to my reading of the episode. Cf. Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux,” esp. 248–­50. 13. For a somewhat idiosyncratic study of the values of domestication in the episode, see Bellon, “Du temps que les bestes parloient,” 21–­33. For a study that uses modern an­ thropological and scientific definitions of domestication, see Zemmour, “Le Roman de Renart.” 14. Haraway notes that an economy of affection is different from a respect for and valuing of labor (The Companion Species Manifesto, 38). 15. Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux”; see also Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes, 10–­14. 16. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, 10. The terms are often confused. Cf. Clutton-­Brock, Domesticated Animals, 104. 17. Zeumer, A History of Domesticated Animals, esp. 36–­40. On the “consensual” domestication of dogs, see Larson and Fuller, “The Evolution of Animal Domestication”; on animal-­human communication in training, see Hare, Brown, Williamson, and Tomasello, “The Domestication of Social Cognition”; on the social relations of humans and domesticated animals in medieval and early modern Europe, see Durand, ed., L’homme, l’animal domestique, et l’environnement; on domestication and evolution, see Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto. 18. “Quorum postremo naturae est extra homines esse non posse” (A Medieval Book of Beasts, 145). 19. For a discussion of the animal’s inability to pretend, another example of the notion that animals are distinguished from humans by what they lack, see Derrida’s discussion in The Animal That Therefore I Am, 33–­34. 20. Wolves were among the first animals to be domesticated by humans—­along with sheep and goats—­and as early as 6000 BCE. Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals, 22, 63, 79–­111. See also Müller, “The Domestication of the Wolf,” 34–­40.

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21. Vale, The Princely Court, 181–­82; Jordan, “Count Robert’s ‘Pet’ Wolf.” See also Farmer’s discussion of the park where the wolf roamed, the animals that inhabited it, and the complex relationship between power and landscape that it structured in “Aristocratic Power and the ‘Natural’ Landscape.” 22. Matthew 7:15. Marvin uses the figure of the wolf’s clothing to make a claim for wolves’ participation in culture, offering historically specific studies of their interactions with people in “Wolves in Sheep’s (and Others’) Clothing.” 23. The shepherd’s skill was crucial to the protection of sheep, and essential to the shepherd’s work was his dog. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, 80, 91. On wolves in late medieval Burgundy, see Beck, Les eaux et forêts, 349–­77. 24. Milin, Les chiens de Dieu, 23–­34; Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, 94–­109. 25. “Etymologies” of Isidore of Seville, 253; Le bestiaire, 225. 26. On the Roman use of “lupae” to name prostitutes, continued by Church Fathers, see Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes, 76–­77. 27. The Anglo-­Norman Vie de seinte Modwenne is translated from Geoffrey of Burton’s twelfth-­century Latin vita (Life and Miracles of St. Modwenna). Geoffrey’s Life is based on an earlier version of the saint’s life by Conchubranus, which in turn is based on an earlier vita, possibly composed as early as the seventh century, but no later than the eleventh. See Bartlett’s discussion in Life and Miracles of St. Modwenna, xi–­xv. 28. “ ‘Canis,’ inquit, ‘ueniens rapuit eum et abstulit et adhuc super illum iacet.’ ” Life and Miracles of St. Modwenna, 20. 29. Modwenna’s staff is called a bastun, but it may recall the verge that Adam and Eve used to call animals from the sea in Le roman de Renart. 30. “Quant la voiz ad entendue, / Oez merveille de beste mue, / A la dame est tost venue / E as piez li est cheue. / En sa manere merci li crie.” (La vie de seinte Modwenne, lines 269–­73). 31. The Latin text uses domesticus (Life and Miracles, 20). 32. Crane, “Medieval Animal Studies: Dogs at Work,” Oxford Handbooks On-­Line, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.103; Price [Wogan-­Browne] similarly sees the wolf’s descendants as a race of cattle dogs (“La vie de sainte Modwenne,” 183). 33. Price [Wogan-­Browne], “La vie de sainte Modwenne,” 180. 34. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 2:1349, Actus Beati Francisci, 79. For the wolf of Gubbio story, see The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 2:1348–­51, and for other texts that describe the incident, see 2:1502–­4. 35. The Little Flowers of St. Francis, 2:1350; Actus Beati Francisci, 80. 36. Steel, citing Crane, describes the wolf as like a mendicant in its dependency on care (How to Make a Human, 63–­64). I am emphasing the contractual nature of the arrangement between the wolf and the villagers. 37. See in particular Crane’s discussion of the “cohabitation” of animals and holy men in Animal Encounters, 11–­41; for a collection of stories and anecdotes about saints and animals translated from the Latin, see Beasts and Saints; for a broad discussion of saints and animals, see Voisenet, Bêtes et hommes, 208–­18. 38. Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts, 29–­32. Salter counters White’s claims about Francis’s exceptionally democratic relationships with animals articulated in “The Historical

172

notes to pages 51–53

Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” For ancient parallels to the wolf of Gubbio story, see Hellmann, “Antike Berichte.” 39. Gauvard, “Contrat, consentement et souveraineté”; Boureau, “Essor et limites théologiques du contrat politique,” 231; Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 42–­46. 40. Gauvard, “Contrat, consentement et souveraineté,” 229–­30. 41. Boureau, “Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 165–­67. For a fuller development of the relationship between the individual and the state, see Boureau’s La religion de l’état. Boureau notes that although Olivi’s definition of consensual power may seem unique, it is grounded in the Augustinian branch of Scholastic thought, which Olivi pushes to its limit (“Pierre de Jean Olivi,” 167). 42. Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 39–­40; Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, 158–­64. 43. See Boutet, “Le roman de Renart”; Mann discusses the overlap of Marie de France’s fables with the Renart tradition in From Aesop to Reynard, 10. On the possible Arabic origins of some of Marie’s fables, see Amer, Esope au féminin. 44. From Aesop to Reynard, 28. See also Mann’s broader discussion of “How Animals Mean” in From Aesop to Reynard, 28–­52. Wheatley argues for the importance of the genre as defined by its association with Aesop in Mastering Aesop, 7–­31. For a concise descrip­ tion of Latin fable collections, see Ziolkowski, Talking Animals, 19–­20. 45. “Et ce que li chiens repaire a ce que il a rendu senefie cels qui repairent folement a lor peciés dont il erent devant confés” (Le bestiaire, 227). 46. “Pur ceo se deivent chastïer / cil ki trop sulent coveiter. / Ki plus coveite que sun dreit, / par sei meismes se recreit; / kar ceo qu’il ad pert il sovent, / et de l’autrui n’a il nient.” The Dog and the Cheese in Marie de France, Les fables, 5:13–­18. All further references to Marie’s fables are noted by fable number and verse. I have silently accepted editor Brucker’s emendations to the text in order to preserve the octosyllablic lines. For an introduction to Marie de France’s collection of fables, see Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, 35–­44. For a concise description of the transmission history of fables, see Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 2–­8. 47. Marie de France, Les fables, 1–­2; Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 9. Although Marie says that she translates from English, it is more generally thought that she translated from Latin. See Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, 35–­44. The fables were probably composed in England, by a woman from France, though the identification of the author with any historical figure remains disputed. For a concise listing of the various historical candidates, see Mann’s appendix 1, 309–­11; for the most recent identity claim, see Rossi, Marie de France. 48. Marie de France, Les fables, 12–­19; see also Jauss, Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tiersdichtung; Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 57. Marie’s emphasis on feudal social relations has long been noted; for a survey of early examples of such readings, see Jambeck, “The Fables of Marie de France,” 60–­62. For a summary of the social, political, and juridical concerns of Marie’s fables, Pickens, “Courtly Acculturation,” 32. 49. Wheatley, Mastering Aesop; Lerer, Children’s Literature, esp. 40–­47; A Medieval Book of Beasts, 98–­113. For a precise account of the grammatical and moral lessons of Walter the Englishman’s Latin fables for Florentine schoolboys, see Gehl, A Moral Art, esp. 122–­32.

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50. On versions of this fable, including her own discovery of an otherwise unknown fragmentary version, see Kay, “‘As in heart, so in mouth.’” Kay notes that this fable’s use in pedagogy makes it “inevitably self-­reflexive” (6). 51. Crane, Animal Encounters, 47, discussion on 42–­48; “mut ert fel e enginnus,” Les fables, 81:4. Enginnus is not always pejorative, as noted by Kay, “ ‘As in heart, so in mouth,’” 9–­10; Lerer, Children’s Literature, 48. 52. Kay, “‘As in heart, so in mouth,’” 13. 53. The wolf represents the greedy nobleman in Marie’s fables, and not, for example, a rapacious outlaw. Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, 88; Salisbury, The Beast Within, 102. 54. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:217. Lerer stresses that fables are about literature itself: “The fables teach ideas of authorship, notions of audience, ideals of verbal action” (Children’s Literature, 35). 55. Balke, “Derrida and Foucault on Sovereignty,” 78. 56. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:34. 57. Muratova, “‘Adam donne leurs noms aux animaux,’” 369n4, and Dittmar, “Le seigneur des animaux,” 227–­32. 58. Gauvard, “Contrat, consentement et souveraineté”; Boureau, “Essor et limites théologiques du contrat politique.” 59. Crane notes that “the fable form could even be indicted for exploiting the pleasures of intimacy with animals in order to insist on the difference of the human,” Animal Encounters, 48, emphasis in original. For a different exploration of intimacy, using Agamben’s notion of the “intimate caesura,” see Griffin, “The Beastly and the Courtly,” 139–­50. 60. Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 33–­34. 61. “Si vus volez od mei venir, / e vus li voliez obeïr / si cum jeo faz, asez averez / plus vïande que ne vodrez” (Les fables, 26:13–­16). 62. Archeological evidence suggests that iron collars were put on dogs to protect them from wolves (Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness, 89). 63. Jean Batany, “Une liberté ambiguë.” 64. Cited by Batany, “Une liberté ambiguë,” 8. Batany further notes that this interpretation of the fable was embraced by the Dominicans, the Dogs of God (domini canes), who mistrusted the liberty so dangerously endorsed by later redactors of the story. See also Jacques de Vitry’s use of the fable in his collection of exempla, where the moral also condemns the wolf: “Cum igitur stultus saciatur cibo terra corporis movetur ad immundiciam libidinis” (The Exempla, 90). 65. Fables of a Jewish Aesop, 108. 66. “Ainsi sont au jour d’hui pluiseurs qui parlent et murmurent sur les religieux et gens d’eglise, disans: ‘Ces prestres et religieux sont bien eureux en ce monde, car ilz boivent et menguent a leur saoul et gaignent leurs vies en chantant et ainsi sans grant labeur demeurent en leur cloistre gras et en bon point.’ Mais, quant iceulx gouliars se veullent esprouver a entrer en religion et illecq demourer encloz soubz la voulenté et puissance d’autrui, certes, ilz se repentent qu’ilz n’ont plus leur propre liberté” (Le “Dialogue des créatures,” 176). An early sixteenth-­century English translation is found in The Dialoges of Creatures Moralysed.

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notes to pages 60–66

67. Batany, “Une liberté ambiguë,” 11. 68. On medieval anthropomorphism as structural rather than subjective, see Das­ ton, “Intelligences.” For a critique of the common charge of anthropomorphism when considering animal thought, see Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, 50–­51. 69. On the persistence of stability in the fables, see Barban, “Lai ester”; Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, 131–­35. On the potential for change in the Fables, see Crane, Animal Encounters, 47–­48. 70. On the ambiguity of the distinction between individual and species, see Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France, 169–­71. On the Breton etymology of “Bisclavret,” see Boyd, “The Ancients’ Savage Obscurity.” 71. I use “wolf” rather than “werewolf” to reflect the characters’ perspective. 72. On Marie’s persistent attention to feudal relations in all her works, see Kinoshita and McCracken, Marie de France. 73. I myself have made this observation in “Translation and Animals,” where I also argue that the king, too, is like an animal, and that Marie imagines resemblance going both ways: the man is like a wolf, and the wolf is like a man. 74. “Such is [the dog’s] nature: if its lord beats it and then calls for it and greets it af­ fectionately, the dog comes to its lord and bows before him” (“Sa nature est tele: se ses sires l’a ferus et il le rapele et li fait lie chiere, il revient a son segnor et s’umelie devant lui,” Le bestiaire, 227). For exploration of the canine in the story, see Langdon, “The Nose Knows.” 75. I discuss animal gestures more fully in chapter 3. 76. See How to Make a Human. 77. Bartlett notes the facination that medieval people felt for animal behavior that mimics rationality and he points to dogs as prime examples of animals whose apparently rational behavior provoked affection and admiration from humans (The Natural and the Supernatural, 91–­94). 78. Pickens sees the wolf as domesticated by the king, “Courtly Acculturation,” 35. 79. Crane, Animal Encounters, 64. 80. Labbie notes that the wife is the animal that can speak, while Bisclavret is the human that cannot (Lacan’s Medievalism, 83). On the human/animal relationship of the wife and werewolf, see also Noacco, La métamorphose, 112. Campbell discusses the dehu­ manization of wife through torture in “Political Animals,” 100–­101. 81. Griffin, Transforming Tales, 118; full discussion on 102–­36. 82. For studies that focus on animals’ perception or experience of their own world, see Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds; Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” On critical anthropomorphism, see de Waal, “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial”; Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles, “Taking Anthropomorphism and Anedcotes Seriously.” For a critique of critical anthropomorphism, see Tyler, “If Horses Had Hands. . . .” 83. Baratay, Le point de vue animal; Despret, “The Becomings of Subjectivity”; Porcher and Schmitt, “Les vaches collaborent-­elles au travail?”; Vicart, “Où est le chien?” See also, for a broader perspective, Descola, Par-­delà nature et culture. 84. Baratay, Le point de vue animal, 30.

notes to pages 68–75

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chapter three 1. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity. 2. Cited and translated by Price, “The Viking Way,” 366. See discussion in Grundy, “Shapeshifting and Berserkergang,” 115. 3. The berserker was often associated with bearskins, but there was also a kind of warrior known as a wolf-­skin wearer (ulfheðnar). On the two kinds of warriors, see Price, “The Viking Way,” 374. See also Grundy, “Shapeshifting and Berserkergang,” 104–­5, 115; Davidson, “Shape-­Shifting in the Old Norse Sagas,” 132–­33; Pastoureau, The Bear, 42–­45. 4. Davidson, “Shape-­Shifting,” 126. 5. The Saga of the Volsungs, 44. 6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238. But for a critique of the concept’s exclusion of actual animals, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 27–­30. 7. I discuss werewolves in chapter 2 and below; for the man-­horse assemblage that is the knight, see Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines, 35–­77. 8. Schiff argues for the relationship between noble becomings-­animal and hegemonic aristocratic identity in “Cross-­Channel Becomings-­Animal.” 9. “Tout autresi entr’eus se fiert / Com li lions entre les dains / Quant l’angousse et cache li fains” (Le chevalier au lion, lines 3202–­4). 10. Bruckner describes the many animal metaphors used in the romance (“The Lady and the Dragon,” 68–­72); Vance describes “a tapestry of animals” in the romance (From Topic to Tale, 91). 11. On the alignment of wildness and animality, see Vance, From Topic to Tale, 65–­71. 12. For a discussion of the manuscripts, see Stones, “The Illustrated Chrétien Manuscripts.” 13. In fact, according to Yamamoto, heraldic animals are represented as “armed . . . with the bodily weaponry of teeth, talons, horns, or claws” (The Boundaries of the Human, 82). 14. On the romance hero as litteratus, see Vance, From Topic to Tale, 7–­13. 15. The text does not indicate such a temporality, but I find it suggested in the knight’s later confrontation with the two sons of a demon (fils de netun) who bear weapons of worked metal: “Si n’i a celui qui n’ait un / Baston cornu de cornillier / Qu’il avoit fait aparellier / De coivre et puis lïer d’arcal” (Le chevalier au lion, lines 5510–­13). 16. Pastoureau, The Bear, 152. 17. The figure of the royal lion comes from biblical sources as well as from Latin bestiaries derived from the Greek Physiologus where the lion is almost always presented as the king of wild beasts, and through the bestiaries, the lion was incorporated into Chris­ tian symbolism. See Pastoureau, The Bear, 138–­39. On the displacement of the bear by the lion, see 135–­55. 18. Yvain’s syllogistic reasoning, perhaps based on the Christian exegesis of bestiaries, demonstrates his bookishness, in Greene’s reading (Logical Fictions, 28). Vance sees Yvain’s dilemma as a moral choice (From Topic to Tale, 85). 19. On the grateful lion motif, as well as other medieval associations with the lion, see Stanesco, “Le lion du chevalier.”

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notes to pages 75–83

20. Brault, Early Blazon, 48–­50. 21. Pastoureau, Armorial des chevaliers, 105–­6. 22. Pastoureau, L’hermine et le sinople, 57. Such insignia were not promoted only by the needs of warfare. They were also motivated by transformations in feudal society after the year 1000, including the use of patronyms and stricter definitions of kinship and line­ age. Heraldic design quickly moved from designating an individual to a family identity. Pastoureau, The Bear, 141–­42, and Traité d’heraldique, 37–­65. 23. Greene, Logical Fictions, 24–­30. See also Greene, “Imagination.” 24. Vance, From Topic to Tale, 106. 25. Pastoureau, L’hermine et le sinople, 107. On Patristic uses of lion and serpent symbolism, see Quarcquarelli, Il leone e il drago. 26. Pastoureau, L’hermine et le sinople, 108. On the use of lion heraldry in the twelfth century, see also Dennys, The Heraldic Imagination, 133–­44. With reference to the semiotic system of heraldry, Vance calls the lion “the emblem of the emblematic” (From Topic to Tale, 106). 27. Pastoureau, The Bear, 143. 28. Vance, From Topic to Tale, 104. Vance describes romance and heraldry as belonging to the same “textual community,” the high aristocracy of twelfth-­century France (From Topic to Tale, 105). 29. On chivalric disguise and renown, and on animals, totemism, and coats of arms, see Crane’s important discussion in The Performance of Self, 107–­39. Crane considers the Swan Knight, a figure I turn to in chapter 5. 30. On the mobility and contingency of skins and second skins, see Kay, “Legible Skins.” 31. The werewolf story in Guillaume de Palerne may be modeled on stories like Marie de France’s Bisclavret or the anonymous Melion. See Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity, 97–­111; Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf, 90–­126; and Lampert-­Weissig, Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies, 41–­56. See also Shyovitz’s important discussion of lycanthropy as a theological problem in the intellectual tradition shared by Jewish and Christian writers in “Christians and Jews.” 32. Palma, “Banquets and Power”; Pastoureau, The Bear, 93–­94. 33. Later in the story, Queen Felise’s dream of being saved by “uns blans leus et dui blanc ors” (1ine 4731) refers to the white bearskins but also suggests a marvelous quality for the white wolf. 34. On white bears in Icelandic literature, see Miller, Audun and the Polar Bear, especially “Coda: The Whiteness of the Bear,” 142–­46. 35. See Behrmann, “ ‘Quel beste ceste piax acuevre.’ ” 36. In “Ancien français beste mue,” Lecoy shows the derivation of the French ex­ pression beste mue from the Latin animalia muta, and argues that it means primarily an animal without reason. Given the emphasis on gesture and speech in the romance’s conclusion (see my discussion below), it surely also here has the meaning of an animal that cannot speak. Sconduto’s translation of beste mue as “transformed beast” is wrong; see her discussion in Metamorphoses of the Werewolf, 98, 104. 37. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, IV.x, 375. 38. “Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings,” 43.

notes to pages 83–92

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39. “All the beasts have feet where men have hands. Although nature has given man hands for many life functions in war and in peace, yet above all it is for this: if man had no hands, his mouth would have to be fashioned like those of quadrupeds so he could take food from the ground. The length of his neck would have to be increased, his nose shaped like that of a brute animal. He would have to have heavy lips, thick, coarse and projecting, suited to cutting fodder. The fleshy part around the teeth would have to be solid and rough, as in dogs and other animals that eat meat. Thus if hands had not been provided for the body, an articulated and modulated voice could not exist. Man would have to bleat or low or bark or make some other kinds of animal noise. But now, with the hand serving the mouth, the mouth serves reason and through it the intellectual soul which is spiritual and incorporeal. This is something not shared with irrational animals.” William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis, II.2, 131. Latin text in William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis et animae, 148–­51. Thanks to Scott Hiley and Karl Steel for the reference. See discussion in Steel, How to Make a Human, 48–­49. 40. William of St. Thierry, De natura corporis, 132. 41. Thanks to Sarah Kay for this insight. 42. Kay, “Legible Skins,” 15, 17. See also Kay’s “Original Skin.” 43. For a short description of the manuscript, see the editor’s introduction to Guillaume de Palerne, 7–­8. 44. We do find descriptions of the characters wearing furs elsewhere in the romance. For example, when Alfonso is transformed into a man, he sheds his wolf skin and puts on “un blanc hermine tot forré” (Guillaume de Palerne, line 7836). 45. See Griffin’s discussion of clothes here as a boundary between skin and skin (Transforming Tales, 121–­22). 46. Pairet notes that this description inverts the conventional representation of the werewolf that puts on clothes to assume human form (Les mutacions des fables, 66). 47. The relationship between protection and obedience is constitutive of sovereignty, according to Derrida’s reading of Carl Schmidt (The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:42–­43). 48. In her reading of the romance in the context of Norman Sicily, Lampert-­Weissig has suggested that Moysans may be a converted Jew, perhaps a reference to the Jewish community in Sicily (Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies, 51). 49. A lacuna in the manuscript has eliminated any explanation of the queen’s decision to put on a deerskin. 50. On recognition in relation to interpellation, see Miller, “ ‘Hey, you look like a prince!’ ” In chapter 4, I turn to the subject of recognition and self-­sovereignty. 51. Guillaume’s words echo the king’s judgment of the werewolf in Marie de France’s Bisclavret, discussed in chapter 2. The lines following the Guillaume de Palerne citation above may indicate that Guillaume recognizes that the wolf is something other than it appears (“Je ne sai que ce est de vous, / Quë en nule riens ne fus lous . . . ,” 1ines 4379–­80), but a lacuna in the text suggests that Guillaume’s sentence is incomplete and that his claim that “if you were not a wolf . . .” would have been qualified. 52. See discussion in Gollut, “Songes de la littérature épique,” 45–­48. 53. On animal submission, see Steel, How to Make a Human, and my chapter 2. 54. Shukin points out that “the power to reduce humans to the bare life of their species body arguably presupposes the prior power to suspend other species in a state of

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notes to pages 92–98

exception within which they can be noncriminally put to death” (Animal Capital, 10). 55. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 107. For another reading of the romance that uses Agamben to argue for the persistence of aristocratic privilege and the violence on which it is based, see Schiff, “Cross-­channel Becomings-­Animal.” And for a probing reading of Agamben in relation to medieval literature, see Campbell, “Homo sacer.” 56. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 110–­11. 57. Wolfe discusses the “overly formalized symmetry” of Agamben’s alignment of the sovereign and the homo sacer which “leads Agamben to engage in a fundamental form of dismissal and disavowal of the embodied existence that we share with nonhuman animals” (Before the Law, 24). 58. Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 135. On Lévi-­Strauss’s formulation that “animals are good to think,” see my Introduction. 59. Guibert de Nogent, Moralium in Genesim, I, 31, PL 156, col. 59D (secundum suum modum gestu ac vocibus). Cited by Schmitt, La raison des gestes, 139. 60. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:56. 61. Ibid., 1:140–­41. 62. “My reservation bears only on the purity, rigor, and indivisibility of the frontier that separates, already among ‘us humans,’ reaction from response: and consequently the purity, rigor, and especially the indivisibility of the concept of responsibility—­and consequently of the concept of sovereignty, which depends on it” (Ibid., 1:168–­69). 63. The use of the stone to reverse the spell recalls the anonymous Melion. 64. See discussion in Miller, “ ‘Hey, you look like a prince!’ ” 65. Behrmann, “‘Quel beste ceste piax acuevre,’” explores the characterization more broadly. 66. Derrida describes his own demonstration as “performative avant la lettre, as it were, and pragmatic before being juridical and rational and philosophical” (The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:79). 67. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:32.

chapter four 1. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 11. Markell casts recognition as a problem rather than an ideal and offers an alternative ideal of justice rooted not in recognition but in the acknowledgement of human finitude. 2. Ibid., 12. 3. Ibid., 11–­12 (Markell’s emphasis). 4. Ibid., 40. 5. I leave aside other examples of snake women—­as in Antoine de la Sale’s Paradis de la reine Sybille or La mort Aymeri de Narbonne—­to focus on scenes of recognition. For a discussion of the guivre in La mort Aymeri, see Morgan, “Flohart, Guinehart, Serpents, and Feminie.” 6. For studies that read the romances alongside the temptation episode, see Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman”; Wolf-­Bonvin, Textus; Griffin, Transforming Tales. I return to these studies below.

notes to pages 98–103

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7. For a wide-­ranging account of ancient and biblical serpent symbolism, see Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent. 8. Genesis 3:6: “Vidit igitur mulier quod bonum esset lignum ad vescendum et pulchrum oculis aspectuque delectabile, et tulit de fructu illius et comedit deditque viro suo, qui comedit.” 9. The play is found in a single manuscript from the thirteenth century, Tours, Bibliothèque municipale ms. 927, fol. 20–­40. On the language of the play, see Bougy, “Etude de la langue.” 10. The play is technically trilingual, according to Nisse, who notes the use of a Hebrew word in the play (“Serpent’s Head/Jew’s Hand”). 11. There is disagreement on this issue. See Noomen, “Le jeu d’Adam,” 190–­93; Justice, “The Authority of Ritual.” 12. Auerbach, Mimesis, 156–­57. See also Auerbach’s “Figura”; Kaske, “The Character ‘Figura.’ ” 13. On conflicting ideologies about gender and marriage in the play, see Clark, “Eve and Her Audience,” 38. 14. Satan’s approach to Adam is also in the Anglo-­Saxon Genesis B; the question of whether Genesis B could have been a source of Le jeu d’Adam is unresolved. See Noo­ men, “Le jeu d’Adam,” 171–­75; Muir, Liturgy and Drama, 18–­21; Chaguinian, Le jeu d’Adam, 23. 15. The stage directions do not indicate any specific costume for the character. 16. On the play’s description of transgression in the language of feudal relations, see Blumreich-­Moore, “Original Sin as Treason”; Wendy Morgan, “ ‘Who Was Then the Gentleman?’ ” 17. On the devil’s recognition of Eve’s desire for power, see Grimbert, “Eve as Adam’s Pareil,” 36. 18. Genesis 3:1: “Sed et serpens erat callidior cunctis animantibus terrae quae fecerat Dominus Deus. Qui dixit ad mulierem, ‘Cur praecepit vobis Deus ut non comederetis de omni ligno paradisi?’ ” 19. Burns has insisted on the way that Eve’s responses to the devil’s seductions dis­rupt the hierarchical opposition of body and mind that defines woman as body and subordinate to the thinking man (Bodytalk, 82). 20. Markell, Bound by Recognition, 11. On Eve’s desire for parity with God, see Grimbert, “Eve as God’s Pareil.” 21. I discussed another literary representation of Eve’s over-­reaching in chapter 2. In Le roman de Renart’s creation story, Eve’s desire to have a second ewe causes her to lose the one she had. 22. Studies of this figure include Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman”; Flores, “‘Effigies amicitiae’ ”; Kelly, “The Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent.” For earlier studies, see Bonnell, “The Serpent with a Human Head”; Schmerber, Die Schlange des Paradieses; Kemp-­Welch, “The Woman-­Headed Serpent.” 23. “Timens uero deprehendi a uiro mulierem, minus prouidam et ceream in uicium flecti, aggressus est, et hoc per serpentem, quia tunc serpens erectus erat ut homo, quia in maledictione prostratus est. Et adhuc, ut tradunt, phareas erectus incedit. Elegit etiam

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quoddam genus serpentis, ut ait Beda, uirgineum uultum habens, quia similia similibus applaudunt. Et mouit ad loquendum linguam eius tamen nescientis sicut et per fanaticos et inerguminos loquitur” (Comester, Liber genesis, 39–­40); translation from Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 308. “Comester” means “Eater,” and the name is often taken as a reference to the scholar’s voracious appetite for books, but Daly points out that “Comester” is a family name in thirteenth-­century Champagne (Daly, “Peter Comesteor”). 24. Bonnell plausibly suggests that it may come from a misreading of Bede (“The Ser­ pent with a Human Head,” 257n3); discussion in Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 309. 25. On the reception of the Historia scholastica in France and Anglo-­Norman England, see Morey, “Peter Comester.” On German and Dutch reception, see Sherwood-­ Smith, Studies in the Reception. 26. La bible historiale records that Satan “entered a kind of serpent that had a virgin’s face in order better and more quickly to deceive the woman” (“entra en vne maniere de serpent qui auoit visage de vierge, pour mieulx et plus tost la femme deceuoir,” 30). 27. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, 86–­87; Bonaventure, Sententiarum, cited by Flores, “ ‘Effigies amicitiae,’ ” 170; Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, cited by Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 320; Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, 94. Kelly, Flores, and Burns (“A Snake-­Tailed Woman”) reproduce images of the woman-­ headed snake. 28. But for cautions about discussions of the woman-­headed serpent on the west façade of Notre Dame de Paris, sometimes taken as an example of the medieval figure but actually a nineteenth-­century work of restoration, see Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman,” 217n24. 29. The Physiologus was in circulation in Greek by at least the fourth century CE and was translated into Latin by the early sixth century and possibly as early as the mid-­ fourth century. See Curley’s discussion in Physiologus, ix–­xxxiii. 30. Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” esp. 326. More abstractly, Lilith, Adam’s first wife, has been identified as the basis for the woman-­headed Eden serpent, but there is no evidence to support this assertion. See Hoffeld, “Adam’s Two Wives”; discussion in Bonnell, “The Serpent,” 290n2; Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 302. 31. Physiologus, 15–­16. On the various forms of the figure, see Jaritz, “Draconcopedes.” 32. Coletta, “Influence of the Visual Arts”; Bonnell, “A Woman-­Headed Serpent.” The woman-­headed serpent appears on stage in the fourteenth-­century Mistére du Viel Testament, 1:44. 33. The snake’s erect stature is particularly prominent in images from manuscripts of the Speculum humanae salvationis. 34. Nicholas de Lira, Postilla, cited by Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 326. 35. Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 326. 36. On male-­headed serpent iconography, see Labriola, “The Aesthetics of Self Diminution,” 299–­300. 37. For a thorough discussion of this manuscript, see Hedeman, Translating the Past; on this illumination in particular, see 184–­91. 38. The Boucicaut Master is also responsible for the presentation image in Pierre Salmon’s Réponses that I discussed in chapter 1.

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39. As far as I know, only Camille has mentioned the same-­sex attraction implicit in the notion that “like favors like.” He discusses in particular a representation of the woman-­headed serpent in a Bible moralisée (Vienna cod. 2554), which is accompanied by a representation of two same-­sex couples in bed, urged on by demons (The Gothic Idol, 90–­91). The Midrash Rabbah explains that the snake lusted after Eve, an idea repeated in the twelfth century by Rashi (Rabbi Yitzhak ben Solomon), whose rabinnical school was located in Troyes (Midrash Rabbah, 1:47; Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, 1:12). For discussion, see Signer, “Coming to Consciousness.” Although Peter Comester could have known Jewish scholars in Troyes, where he began his career, it is not clear that Jewish commentaries on Genesis had any direct influence on his description of the women-­ headed serpent, and in any case, sources for Hebrew references in the Historia scholastica remain disputed; for an overview see Sherwood-­Smith, Studies in the Reception, 4–­8. For a study focusing on Comester’s Hebrew sources in Genesis more generally, see Shereshevsky, “Hebrew Traditions”; Kelly, “The Metamorphoses,” 301–­3. As far as the woman-­ headed serpent is concerned, it is likely that the influence went the other way, at least for visual representations, since the image found its way into two Hebrew manuscripts made in northern France at the end of the thirteenth century (Sed-­Rajna, “The Illustrations,” and “The Paintings”) 40. With reference to other images, Minnis has noted that Adam is often portrayed with a beard to connote wisdom and virility (From Eden to Eternity, 26–­27). 41. Only the snake’s head favors Eve, however. In representations of Eve and the serpent, the woman and the animal often have similar heads, but their bodies are different, and E. Jane Burns emphasizes that the serpent woman with a female head does not have the seducing and reproducing female body that so troubles medieval clerics and theologians (Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman,” 196–­97). For Dittmar, images of the woman-­ headed serpent insist on the bestiality of the body not mastered by reason (“Naissance de la bestialité,” 2:468–­79). 42. Rudolf’s version of Barlaam and Josaphat has not been translated into English; for a close thirteenth-­century analogue, see my translation of Gui de Cambrai, Barlaam and Josaphat. The story is thought to be based on some version of the life of the Buddha; see Lopez and McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha. 43. Representations of the crowned Eden serpent seem to have been produced only in Germany or Eastern Europe; I have not found any examples of crowned serpents in French or British manuscripts. Many thanks to Daniel Spaulding and to the Getty Research Institute for providing assistance and resources for this research. 44. Flores, “‘Effigies amicitiae,’” 179. Jaritz discusses a wall painting that represents Mary, the queen of heaven, and her followers alongside Eve and her followers being seduced by a woman-­headed serpent that Jaritz interprets as the queen of hell (“Draconcopedes,” 89–­90). The specific juxtaposition of Mary, Eve, and the serpent is rare, however, and the serpent as queen of hell does not seem to be a widespread notion. 45. Le Goff emphasizes the particular importance of the crown in medieval politico-­ religious symbolism: “The whole panorama of medieval politics, linked on one side with the hereditary kingships of antiquity and on the other with the relics of monarchy which have survived into modern times, radiated out from the crown. The symbolic field ranged from the material object itself through the coronation rites to the actual kingdom on

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one hand and the abstract idea of monarchy on the other” (Le Goff, “Is Politics Still the Backbone of History?” 5). See also Hellmann, ed., Corona Regni; “The Crown as Fiction,” in Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 336–­83; Guenée, States and Rulers, 74–­80. 46. In chapter 1, I mentioned Pierre Salmon’s example of this genre, though Salmon’s advice book is not titled as a mirror. 47. For a typology of mirror-­titled works, see Grabes, The Mutable Glass, 38–­63. For a study of the development of the genre that insists on the mirror as metaphor, see Jónsson, Le Miroir. One of the genres in which the woman-­headed serpent features most prominently is a mirror, the Speculum humanae salvationis. 48. Senellart, Les arts de gouverner, 47–­51. For the generic category of the mirror of princes, see Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel. According to Senellart, political books of instruction make little use of the mirror symbolism developed in theological and mystical dis­ courses (Les arts de gouverner, 51–­52). 49. Luscombe and Evans, “The Twelfth-­Century Renaissance,” 327. See the discussion of the “ideal ruler” in Guenée, States and Rulers, 69–­74. For mirrors and French kings, see Krynen, L’empire du roi, 170–­204. 50. Boutet, “Le prince au miroir.” 51. The Latin text is found in more than fifty manuscripts; there are four medieval French translations, the oldest and most extensive among them made by a monk called Andrius around 1280. The French versions include Andrius, The Penitence of Adam; Robert de Blois, “La création du monde”; Jean d’Outremeuse, Ly myreur des histors, 1:309–­24; an unpublished translation by Collard Mansion is found in BnF. fr. 1837 and Arsenal ms. 5092. On the Latin and vernacular dissemination of the text, see Murdoch, “Textual Fluidity,” 296–­98. The long-­held notion that the story is based on a Hebrew legend has now been disputed. See Murdoch, Adam’s Grace, 26, and The Apocryphal Adam and Eve, 16; Levison, Portraits of Adam. For a discussion of textual relations in the tradition, see Stone, A History of the Literature. 52. On Lutwin and the manuscript tradition of the vita, see Halford, “The Apocryphal ‘Vita Adae et Evae.’ ” 53. I have standardized punctuation and capitalization in this citation. In Lutwin, Seth makes a similar rebuke: “ ‘Flee from the image of God here, this I command of you on behalf of God, who created us in his likeness, as his goodness required and demanded it of him.’ The Devil replied: ‘I will leave you as you have commanded me’ ” (Eva und Adam, 279). (“‘Flüch die gottes balde hie, / Das gebüt ich dir an gottes stat, / Der uns nach yme gebildet hat, / Als in sine güte twang und bat.’ / Der tufel sprach: ‘ich vare von dir, / Als du hast gebotten mir.’” Eva und Adam, lines 2572–­77). 54. With reference to Le jeu d’Adam, Burns argues that the insistence on the order of creation masks the originary reproductive role of women’s bodies in creation (Bodytalk, 71–­106). On the figure of Seth, see Baert, “Adam, Seth and Jerusalem.” 55. In an addition to the source texts, Lutwin identifies the snake as the devil in disguise, but—­as in the account of Eve’s temptation—­he does not say that it has a woman’s head: “The Devil . . . rose up in their path, a frightening object, for he was disguised as a serpent” (278); “Der tüfel . . . hüp sich an ir strosse, / Jn engestlicher mosse, / Als en slange getan” (lines 2527–­30).

notes to pages 112–115

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56. On the substitution of the snake for the wild beast, see Life of Adam and Eve, 2:273–­75, and Anderson, “The Penitence Narrative,” 34–­36. Jobling notes that in the Adam books, the nature of Adam’s rule before the Fall remains somewhat unclear (“ ‘And Have Dominion . . ,’ ” 236). 57. “The man is also to be raised and honoured above you. You will often suffer because of man’s (physical) strength by means of which he will rule you and have you in his keeping.” (Eva und Adam, 248). “Ouch sol der man uber dich / Gehöhet sin und geheret. / So wursten dicke verseret / Von mannes gewalte, / So das er din walte / Und dich habe in siner pflege” (Eva und Adam, lines 606–­11). 58. Shyovitz notes that the white band may suggest the “underlying ontological contiguity” of the snake women; the absolute transformation is more graduated than it might appear. Shyovitz also notes Gervase’s possible contact with learned Jews (“Christians and Jews,” 541). 59. “Nec erit omittendum quod ait Beda, loquens de serpente qui Euam seduxit. Elegit enim diabolus quoddam genus serpentis femineum uultum habentis, quia similia similibus applaudunt, et mouit ad loquendum linguam eius. De serpentibus tradunt uulgares quod sunt quedam femine que mutantur in serpentes, que ita dinoscuntur: habent enim ligaturam albam quasi uittam in capite” (Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, 86). The compatibility of romance narratives and the Eden story is also suggested by the context of the Andrius text, found in BnF fr. 95, a richly illuminated manuscript otherwise devoted to Arthurian romances. La pénitence includes only one miniature, of Andrius the monk writing the text; below are Adam with spade and Eve with spindle. See Stones, “The Illustrations of BN, fr. 95 and Yale 229”; Hunt, Illuminating the Borders, 79–­110. 60. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia, 86–­91. 61. On the broad range of Latin and vernacular stories related to Le roman de Mélusine, see Jean d’Arras, Le roman de Mélusine, 8–­17; Harf-­Lancner, Les fées au moyen âge, 119–­54. On folklore sources for the story, see Walter, La fée Mélusine; Lecouteux, Mélusine et le Chevalier au cygne. 62. Jean d’Arras, Le roman de Mélusine, 116. Jean d’Arras’s prose Mélusine was completed in 1393 for Jean de Berry and his sister Marie, duchess of Bar, both descendants of the Lusignan family. Shortly thereafter, between 1401 and 1405, a verse version of the story was composed for the Parthenay family, which also had ties to the Lusignan dynasty. For the relationship between the two versions, see Coudrette, Le roman de Mélusine, ed. and trans. Harf-­Lancner, 19–­36; Coudrette, Le roman de Mélusine, ed. Roach, 13–­21. 63. Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman,” 210. See especially Burns’s discussion of the resemblance between the woman-­headed serpent and Mélusine in illuminations, 204–­5; on the Otia imperialia, 209–­11. See also Griffin’s study of Eve, Mélusine, and Medusa in Transforming Tales, 137–­75. 64. Burns, “A Snake-­Tailed Woman,” 209–­10. 65. The description of a snake from below the waist may also recall the description of the viper from Physiologus cited above (see note 31). On the iconography of Mélusine romances, see Cleir-­Colombani, “Mélusine.” 66. Critics have insisted on the phallic nature of Mélusine’s snake tail; see, for exam­ ple, Nichols, “Mélusine between Myth and History,” 143. Delcourt has discussed the

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animal imagery in this episode as revealing the phallic attributes of the snake woman perceived by the voyeur Raymondin (“Métamorphose, mystère et féminité,” 96–­100), and Labbie sees the snake’s form as that of a phallic mother (Lacan’s Medievalism, 89). But Griffin offers an important corrective, noting that “the snake’s tail may well be cylindrical and longer than it is wide, but this does not necessarily associate it with the authority psychoanalysis inscribes in the form of fantasized male genitals.” Griffin reads the snake woman’s body as abject, defined by “horror and longing for that which has been forbidden” (Transforming Tales, 155). 67. Pastoureau and Delahaye, Les secrets de la licorne, 21–­22, 35. Bruckner emphasizes the bestiary account of the unicorn in her reading and also notes the asp’s habit of sealing its ears, suggesting that it may recall Mélusine’s siren-­like appearance (“Natural and Unnatural Woman,” 26). 68. Mélusine herself is an inexistent species, as Greene has argued (Logical Fictions, 84). She is here doubled by the unicorn, another inexistent species. 69. “Fertur autem cum coeperit pati incantatorem, qui eam in quibusdam carminibus propriis evocat, ut eam de caverna producat, illa, cum exire noluerit, unam aurem in terram premit, alteram cauda obturat et operit, atque voces illas magicas non audiens, non exit ad incantantem” (A Medieval Book of Beasts, 197). The bestiary account is probably influenced by Psalm 57:5-­6. 70. The two romances represent two kinds of stories derived from folklore. The so-­ called conte mélusinien recounts the union of a supernatural being, usually a fairy, with a human man; the couple lives happily together until some event, usually the transgression of an interdiction, disrupts their union (Kohler, Der Ursprung der Melusinensage, 1). Le bel inconnu belongs to an alternative story type, classified by Harf-­Lancner as “morganien,” after Morgan Le Fay; in this story type, the fairy draws her lover into an isolated Otherworld instead of following him into the human world (Les fées au moyen âge, 84). 71. Walters, “The Formation of a Gauvain Cycle.” 72. On sources and analogs see: Tyssens, “Les sources de Renaut de Beaujeu”; Jewers, “Slippery Custom(er)s”; the editors’ introductions in Le bel inconnu, ed. Perret, vii–­xi, and Le bel inconnu, ed. G. Perrie Williams, iii–­xi. All citations are taken from the Perret edition. 73. Wolf-­Bonvin, Textus, 180–­81. Wolf-­Bonvin points to the textual merging of the two female protagonists, noting here that the Dame aux Blanches Mains, “a new Eve,” possesses the knowledge of good and evil that the serpent offered to the first Eve (“et bien et mal, tot ço savoit,” line 1935). The snake woman enigmatically figures the knowledge to be acquired at the Ile d’Or, the domain of Blanches Mains (Textus, 180). On the ro­ mance’s relationship to Genesis more generally, see 216, and Wolf-­Bonvin, “Le bel inconnu ou l’hexaemeron amoureux.” 74. Jewers, “Slippery Custom(er)s,” 24–­25; Chestre, Libeaus Desconus, 197. 75. Jewers, “Slippery Custom(er)s,” 25. See also Wolf-­Bonvin, Textus, 180–­82. 76. Wolf-­Bonvin, “Le bel inconnu ou l’hexamaeron amoureux,” 133–­34. 77. Paupert sees the snake’s submission as directly inspired by the lion in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion (“Le fier baiser,” 33). By contrast, Noacco sees the gesture as a revelation of the snake’s humanity, even as the comparisons she cites are to animal behavior (La métamorphose, 98–­100).

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78. Simons, “The ‘Bel Samblant,’ ” 267. 79. Griffin, Transforming Tales, 150. On red lips as a human characteristic, see Steeves, The Things Themselves, 22–­26. 80. See the description of the demon-­knight’s fire-­breathing horse: “Par la gole rent feu ardant” (Le bel inconnu, line 2996). 81. Noacco, La métamorphose, 97. 82. Colby-­Hall, “The Lips of the Serpent,” 113–­14. 83. Alain Guerreau sees the kiss as a gesture of feudal hommage (“Renaud de Bâgé,” 61). On the importance of reciprocity of the ritual kiss, see Carré, Le baiser sur la bouche, 29–­30. 84. Dubost, “ ‘Tel cuide bien faire qui faut’ ” notes the passivity of the knight who says he kissed against his will (“j’ai baissié otre mon gré,” line 3210). 85. Owen, The Evolution of the Grail Legend, 5–­6. 86. Loomis, “The Fier Baiser.” Loomis’s identification of a source text follows Frank, Der Schlangenkuss, 23–­29. On the relation of Lanzelet to the Irish motif, see Loomis’s commentary in Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, Lanzelet, 224–­26n228. On the tradition of the fier baiser, analogues and folklore, see Schofield, Studies on the Libeaus Desconus, 199–­ 208. For the possible evolution of the story to include the snake woman, see Owen, The Evolution, 95–­96. For the relationship between the fier baiser adventure and the figure of sovereignty in Le bel inconnu, see Walter, “Le bel inconnu” de Renaut de Beaujeu, 267–­ 94; Paupert, “Le fier baiser,” 29–­35, esp. 31. 87. “Omnis mundi creatura / quasi liber et pictura / Nobis est in speculum, / Nostrae vitae, nostrae sortis, / Nostre status, nostrae mortis / Fidele signaculum.” Cited from Alain de Lille’s Rhythus de natura hominis fluxa et caduca by Ziolkowski, “Literary Genre and Animal Symbolism,” 7. Translation from Evans, Alain de Lille, 151.

chapter five 1. For an incisive reading of Mélusine’s part-­snake body as abject, see Griffin, Transforming Tales, 137–­75. 2. Most medieval representations of human wildness feature men; however, some rare examples of wild women are found in the German Wigalois and Diu Crône by Heinrich von dem Türlin. A few female saints, like Saint Mary the Egyptian, live in the wilderness and become wild-­like in the sense that their hair grows long and covers their naked bodies. The descriptions of wild women are brief; I focus here on two extended fictional accounts of wild boys raised by animals in the forest. 3. Steeves notes that difference between hair and fur is a distinction based on a prior judgment of human or animal identity (The Things Themselves, 24–­25). 4. “La ballade d’uns hom sauvage,” lines 1–­2. The entire text is reproduced on page 314 of Walter’s edition and I have added line numbers. Stock discusses the poem’s resemblance to Chaucer’s ballads and moralistic lyrics in “Past and Present,” 12. 5. Walter describes this attitude in “Une ballade inédite,” 321. 6. This drawing is figure 1 in Husband’s exhibit catalog, The Wild Man, xii; Husband describes the figure in terms of “social disillusionment,” 130. Pouvreau critiques Husband’s “functionalist” view of the wild man myth (Du poil et de la bête, 121).

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7. I owe this observation to an audience member at Northwestern University—­thank you. For a description of pollarding in relation to other kinds of woodland management, see Rackham, The History of the Countryside, 65–­67. 8. Walter sees the wild man as a model of an evangelical idea of poverty compensated by true wisdom (“Une ballade inédite,” 322). 9. This wild man may also recall representations of the so-­called “hairy anchorites,” hermits who live in the wilderness to practice severe repentance and devotion to God. See Williams, The German Legends of the Hairy Anchorite. 10. White, “The Forms of Wildness,” 28. White depends heavily on Bernheimer’s influential Wild Men in the Middle Ages to describe the evolution of wild man representations. According to Friedman, idealizations of monstrous men were kept at the margins of the European imaginary (The Monstrous Races, 163–­77). 11. It would, however, be possible to question how thoroughly human the animal-­ like wild man can become, and even how human he wants to become. Steel has offered this kind of analysis for the account of the boy raised by wolves in the Erfurt Chronicle (“With the World”). 12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 238–­39. 13. La naissance du chevalier au cygne is also known under the title Enfants-­Cygnes. There are four versions of the narrative. Three are known by the names given to the mo­ther in each: Elioxe, Beatrix, and Isomberte. The fourth is a composite of Elioxe and Beatrix. All the narratives are probably from the early thirteenth century. I focus on Beatrix, which is the longest and gives the most detailed account of the Swan Knight’s birth and childhood. Subsequent citations of La naissance du chevalier au cygne refer to the Beatrix version of the text. 14. La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 338–­50. The first written record of the swan children story is in Johannes de Alta Silva’s Dolopathos, composed around 1190, but it circulated widely in popular literature. The Crusade Cycle borrows this story, either from a popular source or from the Dolopathos, to explain the origins of the Swan Knight who is Godefroy’s ancestor. See discussion in La naissance, lxxxxi–­lxxxxix. 15. For other accounts of monstrous progeny associated with mother’s blood, see my The Curse of Eve, 61–­76. 16. This motif is also found in Marie de France’s Le fraisne. 17. In this version of the story, the daughter is one of the six children changed into swans, whereas in the Elioxe version, as in Grimm’s fairy tale, the sister retains her human form and ultimately rescues her swan brothers. 18. The Beatrix version Christianizes the story significantly. Even the faeric transformation of the children is described as coming from God: “Or sunt cil .vi. oisiel si con dire m’oés / Qar ensi les avoit nostre Sire faés” (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, lines 493–­94). 19. Basing her analysis closely on Bernheimer’s Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Wil­ liamson insists on the perceived folly or insanity of the wild boy (“Elias as a ‘Wild-­ Man’ ”). For a wide-­ranging view of the persistent motif of the wild man’s hairy body, see Pouvreau, Du poil et de la bête; for a critique of Bernheimer, 18n25. 20. He is very much like the young Perceval in Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du graal. Like Perceval, when he arrives at court and the king asks his name, he replies that he is

notes to pages 136–145

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called “Biaus Fius” (La naissance du chevalier au cygne, line 910). 21. Elsewhere I argue that the episode of cross-­species nursing lingers in the text, re­ called in an insistance on materal nursing in the story of the Swan Knight’s descendants (McCracken, “Nursing Animals,” 47–­51). See also Sinclair, Blood and Milk, 66, 90–­95. 22. On the swan as an emblem of lineage, see Crane, The Performance of Self, 107–­39. 23. Tristan de Nanteuil is found in a single fifteenth-­century manuscript and is not illuminated. The Nanteuil cycle includes Doon de Mayence, Doon de Nanteuil, Aye d’Avignon, Gui de Nanteuil, and Parise la Duchesse. Sinclair’s introduction in Tristan de Nanteuil reviews the cycle and evidence for the manuscript’s date and the regional identity of its author. 24. Examples include Lion de Bourges, Valentin et Orson, La naissance du chevalier au cygne, as well as the romance narrative Guillaume d’Angleterre. 25. This characterization may explain why the text consistently calls the hind a cerve, and not a biche. The text uses biche to describe the doe that comes each day to sprinkle its milk on the wild herbs and grasses that nurture St. Gilles in the wilderness (lines 20223–­29). 26. I thank Gillian Feeley-­Harnik for suggesting milk kinship as a way to understand this relationship. 27. On the structure of the narrative, see Georges, Tristan de Nanteuil; Sinclair, Tristan de Nanteuil: Thematic Infrastructure and Literary Creation. 28. Taylor, “The Lure of the Hybrid, 78. 29. Here I am following Sautman, who has advocated for “importance of motif clus­ tering and migrations in the task of situating and interpreting medieval texts” (“What Can They Possibly Do Together?” 204). 30. Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies. 31. Tristan de Nanteui1, lines 808–­9. For this and other parallels with Guillaume de Palerne, see Sinclair, “Guillaume de Palerne.” 32. Such an understanding may explain why the non-­noble fisherman’s wife nurses the noble Tristan for only one day and it may also explain why later in the story, Clarinde will insist on suckling her own infant. See below note 39. For an important study of mothers in Old French chansons de geste, and particularly on the tensions between the physical functions of the maternal body and their appropriations into symbolic meaning, see Sinclair, Blood and Milk. 33. The verb gouverner has a range of meanings in late medieval French that include to care for someone, to govern (in a political sense), to steer a boat or ship, to tame an animal, to rule over others (Martin, “Gouverner et gouvernement”). 34. Massumi insists on instinct as shared by animal and human: “To think the human is to think the animal, and to think the animal is to think instinct” (What Animals Teach Us about Politics, 54). 35. The debate between the allegorical figures Nature and Nurture in Heldris de Cor­ nüalle’s Roman de Silence offers another example of the difficulty of separating the two. 36. Altorki, “Milk-­Kinship in Arab Society”; Héritier-­Augé, “Identité de substance et parenté de lait dans le monde arabe”; Parkes, “Milk Kinship in Islam.” For a study of milk kinship between animals and humans, see Dittmar, Maillet, and Questiaux, “La Chèvre ou la femme.”

188

notes to pages 146–157

37. On Christian notions of spiritual kinship based on baptismal sponsorship, see Lynch, Godparents and Kinship. 38. The most famous literary milk-­brothers are probably King Arthur and Sir Kay, but their relationship provokes rivalry rather than intimacy. 39. Clarinde has earlier refused to allow a nursemaid to care for Gilles and nurses him herself (lines 17706–­10). For a discussion of a similar refusal in Le chevalier au cygne and Les enfances de Godefoi, see McCracken, “Nursing Animals.” 40. The Old French Crusade Cycle also insists on nobility transmitted through maternal suckling, see McCracken, “Nursing Animals.” 41. Campbell has shown the several ways that maleness is divorced from the cultural performance of masculinity in this narrative (“Acting like a Man”). 42. Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens. 43. The narrator does not fail to mention that Blanchandine nurses her own child (line 6030). 44. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 141–­64. 45. See Sautman’s discussion of the episode in “What Can They Possibly Do Together?” 46. In “Acting like a Man,” Campbell emphasizes the belatedness of Tristan’s arrival at masculine chivalric identity as well. 47. Derrida, On Grammatology, 157 (translation modified). 48. Tristan’s bond with his deer may be recalled in the deer that comes to nourish Blanchandin’s son, St. Gilles, as recounted later in the narrative. 49. Steel, How to Make a Human. 50. On parallels between the two stories, see Krappe, “Tristan de Nanteuil.” 51. What exactly a forest is in this text is open to dispute. Rackham cautions against the use of “forest” to mean woodlands in medieval England and insists on the use of “forest” to indicate an unfenced area where deer are kept (The History of the Countryside, 129–­39). Steel insists on legal definitions of the forest and on forest law in “Biopolitics in the Forest,” and Saunders offers a study of literary forests in The Forest of Medieval Romance, whereas Yamamoto notes the instability of the category of forest life in her exploration of wild man narratives in The Boundaries of the Human, 150–­53. 52. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, 70. 53. Ibid., 29, 93. 54. Kay, The “Chansons de geste” in the Age of Romance, 17; for another feminist critique of Bloch, see Sinclair, Milk and Blood, 96–­97.

epilogue 1. The disguises are usually understood as part of a charivari, though only the Monk of Saint Denis explicitly identifies the entertainment as such (Chronique du Religieux de Saint-­Denys, 66–­67). For context, see Grinberg, “Charivaris au moyen âge,” 141–­47. On charivari and noble courts, with particular reference to the Bal des Ardents, see Crane, The Performance of Self, 140–­74. 2. Froissart, Chroniques, Book 4, 85–­92. The other accounts include Michel Pintoin, also known as the Monk of Saint Denis, Chronique du Religieux de Saint Denis; an ac-

notes to pages 157–160

189

count by an anonymous cleric from Rouen, Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, 327–­ 29; and another anonymous account by a Burgundian chronicler reproduced in Froissart, Chroniques, 367–­68. 3. Pouvreau, Du poil et de la bête, 84–­95; Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and its Illustrators,” 123; Harf-­Lancner and Le Guay, “L’illustration du livre IV des Chroniques,” 93–­112. 4. The Chronique des quatre premiers Valois reports: “Et avoient vestement de toille cyree et empesee de noire pois, raisine. Et y avoit estouppez atachees a la dicte poix, tant que les diz vestemens en estoient couvers, et tous les membres et le corps du roy et des autres semblablement” (328). 5. Stock, “Froissart’s Chroniques and Its Illustrators,” 137. 6. Pouvreau, Du poil et de la bête, 87–­88. 7. Ibid., 88. 8. A description of the manuscript is in McKendrick, Lowden, and Doyle, Royal Manuscripts, no. 49. 9. Pouvreau, De la poil et de la bête, 90. 10. Harf-­Lancner, “Le masque de l’homme sauvage,” 388. 11. Ibid., 385. The Monk of Saint Denis says that the men wore disguises on their faces. 12. Pouvreau, Du poil et de la bête, 63–­69. 13. Ibid., 93.

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index

Adam, 10, 14, 15–­19, 40–­44, 55, 98–­112 adstraction, 76, 90–­91 affect, 2–­3, 42–­51, 57, 60–­61, 66–­67, 75, 151; and politics, 5, 8, 48, 51, 89, 161; and subjection, 10, 33, 37–­38, 50 Agamben, Giorgio, 7, 85, 91–­92, 95 Aiglentine, 139–­40, 151 Alexander the Great, 23–­25, 27 Alexandrine, 79–­81, 83, 158 Alfonso of Spain, 78, 81, 85–­86, 93–­94 angel, 18, 105, 134–­36, 144, 148, 152 animality, 21, 91, 95, 110, 127, 132, 137; and exile, 85; and gender, 14, 113, 115–­18, 125, 126; and kinship, 131, 138, 154; and skin, 16–­18, 20, 71–­73; and sovereignty, 2, 7–­9, 70, 78, 85, 160–­61; and subjection, 121; symbolic, 78; of wild man, 127, 157–­58 anthropomorphism, 1, 2, 50, 65, 91 Aristotle, 82–­83 armor, 10, 20–­21, 27, 68, 70–­73, 75, 77, 147 Arthur, King, 20–­22, 25–­27, 75, 118 artifice, 11, 101, 160–­61 asp, 115–­17, 123–­24 ass, 2, 59, 114 Auerbach, Erich, 99 Augustine, 45 Aye d’Avignon, 144–­49 Bal des Ardents, 11, 157–­61 “Ballade d’uns home sauvage,” 127–­30 ban, 85, 91–­93 Baratay, Eric, 66 Barlaam and Josaphat, 106–­7, 110

Batany, Jean, 59–­60 bear, 18, 39, 68, 69, 70–­74, 79, 80–­81, 83–­84, 91, 134, 145, 155, 158 bearskin, 68, 71–­74, 80–­84, 91, 158 Beatrix, Queen, 132, 134, 136 beetle, 52 Bel inconnu, 10, 98, 113, 117–­24, 126 Berechiah ha-­Nakdan, 59–­60 berserker, 68–­69 Berthidés, 24 bestiary, 1, 7, 45–­48, 52, 62, 77, 116, 121, 124 bible, 7–­8, 9–­10, 13–­20, 29, 38, 39–­45, 47, 49, 57, 61, 99–­104, 107, 108, 111 Bible anonyme, 15, 39–­41, 43, 49 Bible française du XIIIe siècle, 15, 18–­19 Bible historiale, 15–­16, 18, 41, 45, 99, 103, 107 Biddick, Kathleen, 6 birds, 39, 46, 106 Bisclavret. See under Marie de France Blanchandin(e), 107, 141, 144, 149–­55 Bloch, R. Howard, 156 Blonde Esmerée, 118, 123 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 26, 105–­6 Bonaventure, 103 Bonnell, J. K., 104 Boucicaut Master, 28–­29, 105–­6 Boureau, Alain, 6, 51 Boutet, Dominique, 108 breast, 18, 139, 144–­48, 154 Buc, Philippe, 13–­14 Burns, E. Jane, 114 butchery, 17, 79–­80

213

214

index

calf, 48–­50. See also cattle cattle, 13, 45, 49–­50, 52 centaur, 21 chain, 56, 58–­60, 132, 134, 136–­38, 158 chanson de geste. See epic Charles VI, of France, 11, 28–­29, 157–­61 Chevalier au lion. See under Chrétien de Troyes Chevalier au lion (protagonist). See Yvain Chevalier du Papegau, 20–­22. See also Arthur, King choice, 10, 48, 50, 57–­60, 66, 77, 97–­99, 106–­ 8, 117, 124, 127, 161. See also consent Chrétien de Troyes, 10, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 121, 130; Le chevalier au lion, 10, 70–­78, 87, 89, 91, 95, 105, 121, 130 Clarinde, 146–­47, 152–­53 clothing, 62, 84–­85, 106, 110, 128, 130, 152; as disguise, 47, 57, 157–­61; and display, 28–­29, 158; and humanity, 64–­65, 129; use of animals for, 12, 15–­19, 27, 30–­35, 36, 38, 71–­73, 82–­84, 128; and wild man, 134, 148, 150–­51, 158, 160 Cohen, Jeremy, 13 Colby-­Hall, Alice, 121 Coletta, John Philip, 104 Comester, Peter, 15, 41, 103–­4, 107 consent, 6, 51, 66, 97. See also choice Conte du papegau, 9, 12, 20–­29 cow, 48–­50, 60. See also cattle cowherd, 79 crane, 39 Crane, Susan, 3, 49, 53, 63 crown, 2, 106–­7, 110–­13, 125 Dame aux Cheveux Blonds, 20, 22, 24–­25 Davies, Rees, 4–­5, 37 Davis, Kathleen, 6 deer, 2, 26, 39, 70, 79–­80, 86, 91, 132–­34, 136–­ 46, 149–­52, 154–­55 deerskin, 84–­87, 95 Deleuze, Gilles, 7, 69, 131, 154 Delort, Robert, 28 Demoiselle aux Blanches Mains, 118, 121–­22 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 33, 55, 93–­95, 153–­54 devil. See Satan Diabolus, 100–­102 Dialogus creaturarum, 60 Dido, 25–­26 disguise, 101; and animal skin, 8, 9–­10, 70, 78–­81, 83–­86, 89, 91, 95; and cross-­

dressing, 144, 147, 152, 155–­56; and heraldry, 77–­78, 83–­86, 89; as wild man, 157–­61 doe. See deer dog, 43–­48, 52, 56–­64, 68, 121, 132 Dog of Antioch, 63 domestication, 8, 10, 37–­38, 41, 44–­52, 56–­67, 91, 109, 134, 150–­51 domesticity, 41, 44, 50, 52, 61–­62, 66–­67, 151 dragon. See serpent eagle, 39, 52 Eden, 15, 79, 101, 104–­5, 112–­14, 119, 124–­25, 126. See also Paradise elephant, 20 Elias, 135–­37 encyclopedia, 23, 114 Enfances de Godefroi, 131 Enfances Renart, 42–­45 epic, 1, 10, 108, 127, 131, 138–­40, 146, 150, 155–­56 ermine, 9, 28, 30, 34, 68 Escoufle, 83 ethics, 9–­10, 12, 32–­36 Eva und Adam. See Lutwin Eve, 10, 14, 15–­19, 40–­44, 55, 98–­113, 124–­25, 126, 161 ewe, 39–­41, 42–­46 exile, 10, 70, 78, 85–­86, 91–­93, 127, 155 fables, 1, 2, 7, 10, 38, 45, 48, 51, 52–­61, 65–­67, 91, 94, 123 face, 74, 75, 87–­88, 100–­102, 103–­7, 110, 113, 119, 125, 129, 140, 142, 144, 148, 152, 159–­60 fairy, 114–­15, 117, 132 falcon, 39 Felise, Queen, 84–­89, 94–­95 Fier Baiser, 118, 122 Figura, 99–­102 fish, 13–­14, 27, 39, 106, 144 Fish Knight, 23–­24, 26–­27, 36, 161 flaying, 9, 12, 16, 18–­20, 22, 24–­27 Flores, Nona C., 107 folklore, 113, 119, 123 foot, 62–­64, 76, 89, 90, 107, 142 Foucault, Michel, 12, 29–­30 fox, 2, 42 Francis, Saint, 50–­51 freedom, 30, 58–­60, 84, 93

index Froissart, Jean, 11, 157–­61 fur, 9, 12, 15, 18, 27–­35, 68, 84, 126, 128, 158–­ 60. See also skin Gauvain, 71, 75, 77, 118, 123 gender, 9–­10, 14, 44, 46–­47, 98–­100, 104–­5, 108–­9, 110–­13, 117, 124, 126–­27, 139–­40, 144, 147–­48, 153–­54, 156, 161 genealogy, 5, 10, 126, 131, 138, 140, 146, 153, 154, 156. See also kinship; lineage Genesis, 1, 7, 12–­16, 19–­20, 27, 39–­45, 98–­ 109, 111–­13, 114, 117 Genêt, Jean-­Philippe, 4 Gervase of Tilbury, 103, 113–­14 gesture, 18, 26, 28, 51, 62–­63, 66, 75–­76, 86–­ 91, 93–­94, 95, 109–­10, 119–­22 Gilles, 146–­47 Glossa ordinaria, 13, 15 goat, 2, 79 Godefroy de Bouillon, 10, 131, 137–­38 Gravdal, Kathryn, 150 Greene, Virginie, 21, 76, 90–­91 Griffin, Miranda, 65, 121 griffon, 39 Guattari, Félix, 7, 69, 131, 154 Gubbio, 50–­51, 61 Guenée, Bernard, 4 Gui de Nanteuil, 139–­40 Guido delle Colonne, 103 Guillaume de Palerne, 10, 70, 78–­95, 158 Guillaume de Palerne (protagonist), 76, 78–­82, 84–­95, 158 Guinglain, 118, 123–­24 guivre, 101–­2, 104, 118–­21. See also snake hair, 20, 24, 105–­7, 110, 115, 126, 129, 134–­35, 142, 144, 148, 157–­58, 160. See also fur hand, 2, 21, 28, 42, 50, 78, 81–­83, 90, 105, 106, 112, 129, 159 hawk, 39, 68 Hedeman, Anne D., 29 heraldry, 8, 10, 68, 70, 73, 74–­78, 87, 91, 94, 137 herdsman, 70 hermit, 71, 127, 132–­36, 138 hide, 21–­22, 24–­27, 68, 70, 78, 83. See also skin hind. See deer Historia scholastica, 41, 103 homo sacer, 85, 91–­92, 95 hoopoe, 60

215

horse, 20–­24, 27, 69, 73, 76, 89, 91, 94 hound, 39, 82. See also dog humanity, 11, 16, 70, 80, 99; and animality, 9, 20–­21, 27, 65, 68, 70, 81–­82, 85, 121, 126, 132; and sovereignty, 9, 95, 161; and werewolf, 90–­91; and wild man, 126, 130–­31, 144, 147–­48, 160 husbandry, 30, 44, 49 instinct, 27, 63, 93, 133, 144, 155 intimacy, 5, 8, 11, 38, 39–­43, 49, 56, 63, 66–­ 67, 106, 136, 155–­56 Isengrin, 42 Isidore of Seville, 47, 83 Jean d’Arras, 10, 114 Jeu d’Adam, 10, 99–­102, 104, 107, 108 John, duke of Burgundy, 28 Kay, Sarah, 26, 53–­54, 83, 156 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 103 kinship, 8, 10, 127, 131, 136, 139, 140–­47, 154–­56 knowledge, 7, 10, 25, 29, 64, 76–­77, 97–­100, 102–­3, 107, 113, 117, 123–­25, 126, 129, 161 Lacan, Jacques, 33 lai, 38, 48, 62–­67 lamb, 47, 50, 52, 53–­55 Landuc, lady of, 78, 95 language, 4, 7, 35, 49, 51, 53–­54, 69, 85, 88, 93, 110, 121, 126, 148 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 1, 8, 93 Libeaus Desconus, 118–­19 Life of Adam and Eve, 10, 17, 109, 112 lineage, 2, 5, 9, 11, 86, 127, 131–­32, 137–­39, 145–­48, 151–­56. See also genealogy: kinship lion, 2, 10, 39, 41, 59, 70–­78, 87, 89, 91, 95, 105, 121, 145 Little Red Riding Hood, 47 Loomis, Roger Sherman, 123 lordship, 5, 41, 53, 78, 108, 124, 135 Lucion, king of Ivoirie, 141–­43, 149 Lutwin, 17–­18, 109–­11 Mann, Jill, 52 Mansion, Colart, 60 map, 12, 20, 23, 25–­27; mappemundi, 23, 26–­27

216

index

Marie de France, 10, 38, 53, 54–­55, 56–­60, 62, 66, 89, 91; Bisclavret, 10, 38, 62–­66, 89, 91; Guigemar, 91; The Priest and the Wolf, 53–­54, 56–­57; The Two Wolves, 60–­61; The Wolf and the Dog, 57–­60; The Wolves, 56–­57. See also fables Matabrune, Queen, 132, 134, 136, 138 Mélior, 79–­82, 84–­87, 91, 94–­95, 158 Mélusine, 26, 114–­17, 123, 124, 126, 132 miracle, 48, 119, 144 miracle story, 38, 45, 48–­52, 57, 60, 61. See also saints’ lives mirroring, 8, 98, 101, 104–­7, 112–­13, 115–­17, 122–­24, 126, 142–­43 mirror of princes, 28, 107–­8, 113, 114, 158 Modwenna, Saint, 48–­51, 60 monstrous, 20–­24, 27, 71, 104, 122, 123, 126, 132, 139 mouth, 53, 76, 82–­83, 106, 110–­11, 118–­22, 124 nature, 2, 7, 9, 40, 41, 44–­47, 49–­50, 51, 52–­53, 56–­57, 62, 74, 76–­77, 86–­87, 124, 127–­30, 138, 144–­45, 147–­52 Nicolas of Lyre, 104 Noacco, Cristina, 121 nobility, 2–­3, 5, 8–­11, 51, 79, 86, 123, 127, 131, 135–­39, 145–­48, 151–­56, 161 Noble, King, 2 Olivi, Pierre de Jean, 51 Oriant, King, 132, 134 Otia imperialia, 113–­14 Owen, D. D. R., 123 Paradise, 13–­19, 39–­40, 42–­43, 98–­101, 105, 108–­12 parchment, 26, 28–­29, 83 parrot, 9, 12, 20–­22, 60 Pastoureau, Michel, 73, 77 pelt, 9, 12, 18–­19, 24–­36, 68–­73, 78, 82, 84–­85, 95, 126, 128. See also fur; skin penis, 106, 148–­51, 153–­54 Pépin, Jean, 17 Perceforest, 23–­24 Philippe de Beaumanoir, 5 Physiologus, 103 Pierre de Beauvais, 46–­47, 62, 121 Pouchelle, Marie-­Christine, 28 Premierfait, Laurent de, 105 Priest and the Wolf. See under Marie de France Prose Edda, 68

protection, 86, 89, 144, 161; and exile, 10, 70, 78, 85, 91–­93; of skin, 9, 74; and sovereignty, 2, 4, 8, 10, 62, 78, 85–­86, 92–­93, 95–­96, 97 psalter, 73 rabbit, 2, 39 Raymondin, 26, 114–­17, 122–­23, 124 reason, 51, 55, 63–­64, 66, 71, 81, 83, 86–­87, 89, 91, 93, 144, 145, 160–­61 recognition, 4, 38, 49, 63; and animality, 70, 85; and armor, 75–­76; of authority, 62–­63, 85, 91, 95; and desire for, 61, 94; of gendered bodies, 127, 145, 147, 154; of lineage, 127, 145, 147; and mirroring, 103, 106–­7, 112–­13, 124–­25, 126; and self-­sovereignty, 97–­98, 113, 117, 124–­25, 126, 161; and sovereignty, 10, 85, 94–­96, 102, 104 Renart, Jean, 83 Renart the fox, 2 Renaud de Beaujeu, 118, 119, 121 Réponses à Charles VI, 28–­29 resistance, 30, 35–­36, 66 response, 33–­36, 37, 38, 51, 54, 62, 75, 88–­89, 93–­96 Reynolds, Susan, 4 Robert, Count of Artois, 47 romance, 2, 10, 12, 19–­20, 23, 26, 38, 69–­70, 73, 76, 78, 83, 95–­96, 97–­98, 108, 113, 114, 118, 123–­24, 125, 126, 131, 138 Roman d’Alexandre, 23–­25, 29 Roman de Mélusine, 10, 98, 113, 114–­17 Roman d’Eneas, 25–­26 Roman de Renart, 2 Roman des romans, 10, 12, 30–­34, 128 sable, 28, 30, 24 saga, 68–­70 saints’ lives, 2, 10, 38, 48–­50, 60 Salisbury, Joyce, 3 Salmon, Pierre, 28–­29 Salter, David, 50 Satan, 77, 99, 100–­105, 107, 109–­10, 113, 116, 119, 122. See also Diabolus Schmitt, Jean-­Claude, 93 self-­sovereignty, 8, 10, 97, 102, 107–­8, 113, 124–­25, 126, 129, 161 sermon, 52, 59 serpent, 10, 21, 74–­77, 80, 98, 101, 103–­7, 109–­17, 119, 121, 123, 124, 142, 143. See also snake

index Seth, 110–­12 shame, 18, 64–­66, 111 sheep, 43, 45, 46–­47, 57, 59, 105. See also ewe; lamb shepherd, 47, 48–­49 Shyovitz, David I., 16 siren, 103, 139, 141, 145–­48, 154 skin: and animality, 9, 16–­17, 18, 20, 69, 157–­58; as armor, 10; as clothing, 9, 12, 15–­19, 30–­35; as disguise, 8, 9, 10, 79–­86, 158–­60; garments of, 15–­19; human, 16, 128–­29; and hybridity, 9, 10, 20–­23, 126; as manuscript page, 9, 26–­27, 28; as map, 24–­27, 114; as symbol, 8, 12, 19, 20, 24–­ 29, 70–­71; use of, 3, 9, 12, 36, 54–­55. See also bearskin; deerskin; snakeskin; wolf skin Skinner, Quentin, 4 slaughter, 12, 17–­20, 24, 27, 37, 79, 151, 155 snake, 8, 9, 10, 21–­22, 97–­125, 126, 132, 161 snakeskin, 110, 121 sovereignty: biopolitical, 10, 12–­13, 29–­30; contractual, 3, 6, 10; female, 117–­18; human, 2–­3, 7–­8, 9, 12, 13–­15, 19–­20, 27, 30, 35–­36, 40–­42, 44, 45, 61, 128; medieval, 3–­7; symbol of, 8, 9, 25, 27, 28–­30, 35; technology of, 9, 12, 19, 27, 29–­30, 35, 37–­38, 97; vocabulary of, 2, 3–­7, 14. See also self-­sovereignty species, 17, 29, 44, 47, 49, 52–­53, 55–­57, 61, 83, 133, 136, 147, 156, 161 Speculum humanae salvationis, 103 speech. See language squirrel, 34 stag. See deer Steel, Karl, 3, 19, 37, 63, 154 survival, 9, 12, 19–­20, 27, 31, 35, 44 swan, 132–­34, 136–­38, 161 Swan Knight, 10, 127, 131, 137–­38 Taylor, Jane, 140 Thomas of Cantimpré, 103

217

Tierney, Brian, 5 Tristan de Nanteuil, 10, 127, 131, 138–­56 Tristan de Nanteuil (protagonist), 127, 139–­ 52, 154–­55 tunicas pellicias, 15–­19 Two Wolves. See under Marie de France unicorn, 115–­16 Valentin et Orson, 155 Vance, Eugene, 77 vellum. See parchment Vie de seinte Modwenne, 48–­50 Vincent of Beauvais, 103 vitae. See saints’ lives Volsunga Saga, 69 Wales, queen of. See Blonde Esmerée Warren, Michelle, 28 Watts, John, 4–­5 werewolf, 9, 62–­65, 66, 68–­69, 78–­79, 81–­85, 86–­95. See also wolf White, Hayden, 130–­31 wild man, 8, 10, 126–­56, 157–­61 wildness, 10, 38–­45, 47–­67, 68, 70–­71, 74, 80, 97, 109, 112, 127–­28, 130–­31, 134, 144, 161 William of St. Thierry, 83 Wogan-­Brown [Price], Jocelyn, 49 wolf, 8, 9–­10, 37–­67, 68–­69, 78, 81–­82, 84–­95, 97, 114, 161; of Gubbio, 50–­51, 61 Wolf and the Dog. See under Marie de France Wolf-­Bonvin, Romaine, 119–­20 wolf skin, 56–­57, 65, 68–­69, 78, 94 Wolfe, Cary, 30, 35 Wolves. See under Marie de France worm, 119, 34 Ynglinga saga, 68 Yvain, 70–­78, 89, 91, 95, 121, 131 zitiron, 23–­24