Banging Shield and Shield Together: Lesbians in Medieval French Literature

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Instead of writing up my Gawain paper, and instead of doing any real blogging; and in between learning how to be an efficient receptionist, and giving my patent Twitface Look to first the incoming Principal of Women’s College and then to our soon-to-be Head of State, The Governor-General Designate, I’ve been perusing one of the gems of Awesome’s bookshelf, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Bullough and Brundage. I particularly enjoyed Jaqueline Murray’s article ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’. I give her the highest praise I can give to a theory-dense article: she works through the historiography and the Theory background systematically, making it clear at every step just how the Theory relates to historical study, and she gives you big clear pointers for further reading. And, as if that wasn’t enough, as the article goes on, she demonstrates a good range of primary source work (although I guess I’d have to go and look at the primary sources in question and particular scholarship on them in order to evaluate her use of them properly).

I could give you a run-down of Murray’s theoretical approach, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to give you a titilating segment from Etienne de Fougères’ Livre des manières, translated by Robert L.A. Clark and appended to Murray’s article.

These ladies have made up a game:
With “trutennes” they make an “eu”,
they bang coffin against coffin,
without a poker to stir up their fire.

They don’t play at jousting,
but join shield to shield without a lance.
They don’t need a pointer in their scales,
nor a handle in their mould.

Out of water they fish for turbot
and they have no need for a rod.
They don’t bother with a pestle in their mortar
nor a fulcrum in their see-saw.

They do their jousting act in couples
and go at it full tilt;
at the game of thigh-fencing
they lewdly share their expenses.

They’re not all from the same mould:
one lies still and the other makes busy,
one plays the cock and the other the hen
and each one plays her role.

*p. 210 in Bullough & Brundage. Words in italics have not been successfully translated.

This passage follows a comparison of the ‘beautiful sin’ of heterosexual fornication with the ‘vile sin’ of homosexuality and instructions to kill homosexual men ‘like any cur’, so I doubt we’re meant to look favourably upon ‘these ladies’ either. However, some features Murray notes:

* de Fougères shares with canon and secular law a phallo-centric approach to sex: lesbian sex is defined by the absence of a penis.
* HOWEVER, unlike the canon and secular law, he doesn’t presume that lesbians must grow or manufacture penises as substitutes for manly apparatus. If you look at the stanzas above, he’s obviously pointing and laughing at the futility of ‘banging coffin upon coffin’, but he presents his Ladies as perfectly happy without a pestle in their mortar. He think’s they silly and unnatural for not desiring a penis in their sex act, but he does grasp the fact that they don’t want one.

and something I noticed myself, from the last stanza:

* de Fougères also shares with the legal examples Murray gives the assumption that sex involves an active and a passive partner. This meshes nicely with David L. Boyd’s side note, in ‘Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement’, that medieval sexuality is defined by an active/passive binary, which, for men, meant that the recieving partner in homosexual penetrative sex was debased and shamed, for being made passive and therefore feminised. I wonder how this binary transfers over to lesbian sex? Murray may have addressed it, I’ll have to have a closer look at the article sometime…

In the meantime, happy innuendo, everyone!

Roland and Gawain- further expoundings

I foolishly drank red wine at Formal Dinner, and got all teary over a UNICEF presentation, and now I don’t feel like doing any work. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to trick myself into writing my commentary for my Gawain class tomorrow by putting it online. Sound fair?

First up, if you’re wondering what’s going on, read this morning’s post about the parrallels between the Charlemange/Roland and Arthur/Gawain relationships. (note- thanks for the tip-off about Ralph the Collier, Jeff. I’m going to see if Middle English Reading Group will help me out with it.)

This morning, I looked at the structural relationships between Roland and Gawain in the courts to which they respectively belong. (Now, I must note that it’s over a year since I read Roland, in translation, and my copy thereof is now in the hands of the Goblin. So I’m really pulling things out of my backside here.) There are two further aspects of the two heroes which I feel worth investigating: one, their personal natures, and two, their wider settings.

The Character of the Hero

No one ever accused Roland of being the sharpest sword in the armoury, did they? If I had my copy (I think it’s the Penguin?) here, I would quote to you from the introduction, but as is, you’ll have to trust me when I say that the editor, whose name I’ve forgotten, talks about just this fact. Roland isn’t the quickest of wit, or the wisest. Not much of a tactician, nor, one suspects, was he really one for courtly poncing around. Rather, he is young, and beautiful, and brave, and that is all that is required of him. See enemy, hoist banner, charge. Instant hero.

The editor of my Roland (damn, I wish I could remember her name…) had some very eloquent phrases to the effect that ‘The phrase ‘Middle Ages’ are a misnomer… these are the young ages’- young, good-looking, brash and overconfident. We’re talking about eleventh century Francophonia¹ here, the height of the Feudal era, but before the chivalric code and courtly literature had really taken off. Roland and his cohort are defined as knights by two things: their relationship with one another, and their courage. Intelligence and refinement are not held at a high premium.

Now, turning to Gawain. He’s a knight cut from the same mould as Roland. He is young, and beautiful. He is known for his valiant courage, and demonstrates this against tangible enemies in the wilderness of the Wirral. He loves his uncle the king steadfastly. Intelligence is not his strong point. (I have a complicated anaylsis of this, but a) i’m not that generous with the internet, and b), it’s really kind of boring to sit through.) Suffice it to say, Gawain is perfectly equipped to deal with the dangers right in front of him, but he is completely flummoxed by the otherworldly machinations of The Green Knight, Morgan and the Lady. He just plain doesn’t know what’s going on, or how to deal with it, and in the face of these mind-games he is lead into a spiral of deceit, cowardice and sin.

Which brings us to…

The Hero’s world

It doesn’t matter that Roland isn’t the pointiest pike in the rack. His world- or his poet, if you like- doesn’t ask it of him. It asks only beauty and courage and loyalty, and these he has aplenty. Gawain, likewise not the bendiest bow in the rank, would be quite at home in Roland’s world.

* Roland’s life is defined by deep homosocial relationships.² Roland is off with his troops, under the command of his uncle, supported by his foster-brother Olivier. Gawain, meanwhile, is off on his journey alone, into a world where the homosocial is undermined by the homosexual. Does Gawain even know what he would have to give to the Lord if he had his way with the Lady?

Gawain’s masculinity is at stake. Before I go on talking about hetero/homosexual, it’s worth making the disclaimer that I know these categories don’t cookie-cutter fit the Middle Ages. I prefer a disctinction which David L Boyd makes and then passes over, which is that (high) medieval (western european) sexuality is a binary not of hetero/homosexual but top/bottom, the former being appropriate to a man and the latter to a woman. M/M sex is dangerous because it feminises one or both of the participants. Boyd argues that Gawain would be feminised, in that he would have to offer what the Lady gave him, a ‘receptacle’. He doesn’t go that far, happily (for him, if not for future slash fans), but there’s a whole lot of complicated scholarship (see Boyd and Shiela Fisher, for starters), explaining how the girdle is feminising and the axe-wound is a vaginal symbol and so on. Point is, the whole setup runs Gawain in circles, and is a far cry from the straightforward manly bonding of Roland.

As someone known as Nathaniel (sorry, I don’t remember where you blog…) pointed out to me the other day, fourteenth century England had good reason to be concerned about the erosion of boundaries between the homosocial bonds of the feudal order and potential homosexual bonds, in the form of Edward II and his ‘favourites’. Gawain, and the straightforward heroic order he represents, are threatened.

* Roland’s world is utterly devoid of female sexuality. It’s not devoid of women: Bramimunde, in the Saracen court, is an active character. But on Roland’s side, there is only the distant Aude, a token passed between Olivier and Roland to cement their brotherly affection. This looks like a perfect example of Boyd’s heterosex-as-vehicle-for-homosexual-desire trope, but I don’t buy it, in this case. Marrying sisters is a good way to tie two men and their families together in a political as well as affectionate alliance. (And if you like your sister, you’d probably rather her married to someone you know and trust…) IMHO, it’s significant that Roland never makes it home to Aude and the marriage (and the sex) never takes place.

At Hautdesert, however, heterosex does imply some kind of homosexual exchange, as I noted above. Gawain can’t be quite certain of that, though. What he can be certain of is that he’s faced with transgressive and aggressive female sexuality. I’m digging in my heels and maintaining that the Lady is dominant, at least in the first temptation scene. At the very least, the boundary between masculine/top and feminine/bottom is blurred.

Furthermore, the machinations of female sexuality are behind all this confusion. As Boyd points out, the blame for transgressive homosexual desires is shifted onto women; his women-as-objects-between-men thesis can be inverted, and the men become ‘taken men’ in women’s power, as Shiela Fisher argues. Sadly neither of them consider the sexual implications of this- what does it mean for the Lady to instigate a homosexual exchange? If Gawain knows he may have to ‘pay back’ Bertilak, does he think Bertilak has orchestrated it, or the Lady? And then, at the end of the poem, we find out that Morgan is behind the whole operation. As a result of his ‘trafficking’ with women, as Sheila Fisher puts it, Gawain dons the girdle and loses his heroic standing. Women, to put it bluntly, are dangerous and they’re undermining the masculine warrior code by which Roland lived and Gawain ought to live.

* Roland’s enemies are this-worldly and they stay that way. He’s facing a whole pile of Saracens, all he has to do is charge them down and die heroically. His conflict is that between sensible tactics and his stubborn pride- pride wins, and he gets to be a hero. Bonus points.

Gawain’s enemies, on the other hand, can’t make up their mind if they’re otherwordly or thisworldly. First off, he has the otherworldly Green Knight, who is scary as hell. Next, he has the Lady, who ought to be thisworldly but is behaving very transgressively. Then there’s the fact that his host, apparently thisworldly, is also the otherworldly Green Knight. And finally we find out that the whole apparently thisworldly castle of Hautdesert is ruled by Morgan ‘the goddess’, and she orchestrated the entire sequence of events. Poor ole Gawain just can’t keep up. He doesn’t have the information he needs to understand what’s going on around him, but what’s more he just doesn’t seem to try. He just bumbles along trying to keep his head on and his masculinity invoilate from moment to moment.

* Finally, and this is a point I haven’t investigated properly in relation to either poem, there’s the question of economic anxiety. I have a book waiting to be read called ‘The Poem as Green Girdle’, which is all about commercial imagery in SGGK. For now, suffice it to say that in Roland, everything is shiny and beautiful, while in Gawain, everything is shiny and beautiful and has a definite price, even Gawain himself. Roland associates display with nobility and worth; Gawain associates display with wealth and commercial value. Roland’s worth as a hero is displayed in his rich ornamentation; Gawain’s worth as a hero is measured and curtailed by pricing. I need to poke into this a bit more, and have another look at Roland (in the French… blerg…), but I venture the suggestion that the later poem is evidencing an anxiety about the burgeoning market economy, the nature of wealth and the possibility of it amassing in non-noble hands, a concern which simply isn’t relevant in Roland.

What I’m trying to say here…

is that Gawain is an old-skool knight, a big, pretty, kinda dumb warrior of the Roland type, completely at sea in the confusing and threatening world of the fourteenth century. A good three centuries separate the two poems, and in that time a whole courtly culture has had time to develop, on the foundations of the feudal society in which Roland is located, and is now threatened by all kinds of things. The poet emphasises this disparity between the heroic past and the unstable present through the character of Gawain- not through a great courtly knight like Lancelot, or even the later French incarnation of Gawain, but through a Gawain who bears more resemblance to Roland, and who simply cannot cope with the confusion of his new situation. Perhaps this is why the poem shows such leniency toward Gawain’s cowardice in saving his own life- a hero used to facing down his enemies in combat shouldn’t be expected to unravel the twistings of monsters and Morgan.

~

1. As Keith Busby pointed out to the CMS the other night, a good deal of medieval ‘french’ literature is preserved in English manuscripts. Nobody mention this to the French department, ok?
2. If you try to tell me Roland and Olivier were having slashy gay buttsex, I will cry.

Gawain and Roland: Matching Pair

Let me test this theory out on you, O Blogosphere.

France’s great hero-king, Charlemagne, had a nephew. Roland. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them are commemorated in the Chanson de Roland (11thc), where Charlemagne embodies France, and French Kingship. Roland, meanwhile, embodies France and French knighthood. Everybody with me so far?

England’s great hero-king, Arthur (sorry, no humourous videos), had a nephew. Gawain. Or at least, so the cycle of hero-myths tells us. The pair of them turn up all over the place in medieval English literature. Before someone imports Lancelot from the Continent, Gawain is the premier knight of Arthur’s court- take, for example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (14thc). Arthur embodies England and English kingship. Meanwhile, Gawain embodies England and English knighthood. We have a parrallel, yes?

Back when I wanted to be an Arthurianist, and read all kinds of crappy Arthurian pop-history, quite a few books I read talked about the creation of the Arthur myth as a response to the French foundation legends centred around Charlemagne. Now, being old and wise, I’m willing to bet that there’s more to it than that. However, I do note that, in all my (fairly haphazard) research into the Gawain tales, lots and lots of people make comparisions between the ‘English’ Gawain and the ‘French’ Gawain- and squabble over which the Gawain of SGGK better embodies- but no one seems to step outside the Arthurian canon, which is odd. I’m not so sure that the fourteenth century would’ve drawn such a big distinction.

I have more Gawain-Roland relationships I can draw out, but I have to go and get ready for work now. So I’ll leave you to sit on this one- tell me what you think!

In Parentheses: Resources for Literature and Language studies

Courtesy of Dr Nokes, I just discovered In Parentheses, a collection of resources hosted by the University of York, Canada. There, you can find collections of (mostly translated) works in Old and Middle English, Chinese Drama, Ethiopian, Old French, Peruvian, Malayan, Old Norse, Medieval Italian, Medieval Russion, Restoration Drama, and a whole host of other languages.

Furthermore, they offer a volume of Papers In Medieval Studies, in PDF form, and a Linguistics Series, which it seems to me would be better titled ‘Language Learning Series’. They have three sets of wordlists (Irish- German, English to Old Norse, and Romanian-English), plus flash cards for such languages as diverse as Classical Armenian, Old Norse, Old Occitan, Esperanto and Norwegian.
Their Old English flashcards come in two versions: basic, and ‘tenth century script’. The tenth century script one looks simply like this font¹, but for those who (like me) have both poor word retention AND a distaste for paelography, it could be a good way to memorise both words and letter-forms.

Happy language-learning, everyone

~

1. The font is actually quite good, and the creator is a very nice man if you email him and ask for it.

The Naked Philologist Brings You (Medieval) Bedroom Satisfaction

Let’s talk about… Medieval Sex. Which is, as anyone will tell you, one of my very favourite topics, right after megalomaniac bishops.¹

Last night, while reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, a collection of texts largely in translation, by Elisabeth Brewer, ² I discovered Le Chevalier a L’Epée. A section- in informally styled English prose translation- appears at the end of her chapter on Temptation episodes associated with Gawain.³

In this section, Gawain meets a knight in the forest, who invites him home for tea and scones. Along the way, some shepherds warn Gawain that no one invited to the castle for tea and scones ever returns. Gawain is rather put off by this, but cannot honourably back out. So he heads on up to the castle, where his host goes to every effort to set him up with his lovely daughter. Come evening, the host shuts Gawain and the girly into his own bedroom, ordering her to “shut the doors, my girl, and do what he tells you, for I know such knights have no need of a crowd.”⁴ The girl strips down and cuddles up with Gawain, whereupon she informs him that- unlike all the other men her father has brought home- she cares very much for him, and doesn’t want him to die. Accordingly, he mustn’t make any amorous moves upon her, or the big sword which hangs over her father’s bed will come down and cut him to pieces.
Gawain is perplexed, and “he suspected that she told him all this to protect herself, so that he could not satisfy his desire. On the other hand, it could not be concealed… that he had lain all night with her alone, both of them naked, in her bed, and that he had, on account of a single word, desisted from making love to her”.⁵ So he snuggles up closer, and lo and behold the sword drops down and clonks him one on the shoulder, whereupon Gawain ‘lost all desire’ and retreats to the far side of the bed.⁶ After a while, though, his pride- or possibly his libido- prods him into trying again.

He drew close to her very gently because he was not a peasant. He was playing a certain game when the sword jumped from its scabbard and made another attack on him… But the sword was deflected a little and turned to his right shoulder so that it cut three fingers’ breadths into the skin…⁷

He begs a ‘truce’ from the lady, who snarks back that if he’d given the truce when she asked it, he’d be a lot better off now. The pair of them lie awake all night until her father raps on the door. She opens it, and he is astounded to find Gawain still alive. Noticing the blood on the sheets, he demands to know what went on. On hearing that the sword deflected from Sir Gawain, he tells Gawain that the sword was to choose his daughter’s husband, because it would deflect from the best knight who came to her. There’s a big wedding feast, and then the host escorts them to bed, where he “married them with goodwill”⁸.

That night he had his desire, and no sword was unsheathed there. If he returned again to the attack upon the courteous damsel, it does not distress me, and she was not upset.⁹

Everything is fine and dandy for a month or so, before Gawain decides he ought to take his new wife back to Arthur’s court. Off they set, but at the bend she suddenly refuses to move unless he goes back to the castle and brings her beloved greyhounds. Gawain, being a nice enough bloke, does so, and when he returns to her, a knight bristling with arms careers up and plants himself between Gawain and the lady. Said knight takes her bridle and leads her away, and she goes with him, as quiet as you please. Gawain, who is only lightly armed, calls out and reproves the other knight for taking away his beloved. As Gawain is at a disadvantage, and his opponent will not allow him to return to the castle for more arms, Gawain proposes a fair contest: they set the lady between them, and her consent will decide which of them shall keep her. Gawain is convinced he will win this contest, but

the girl, who knew very well how Gawain could aquit himself in love, wanted next to know about the knight, and how bold and valiant he was. You all, both great and small, and those who laugh as well as those who groan, know that there is scarcely a woman in the world, if she is a sweetheart and a wife, with the best knight there can be from here to Greater India, who would ever love him enough to value him as much as a pinch of salt if he was not valiant in the castle- you all know to what prowess I refer.¹⁰

The lady then gets cold feet, and tells her new paramour that she will not go anywhere without her greyhounds. The knight returns to Gawain, and the same scene is played out, save that the dogs return straight to Gawain, who taunts his rival:

… if you hope to satisfy this girl, you will have little joy of her- I hope she can hear what I am saying- for I can assure you that when she was mine she got what she wanted, and now see how she has served me! It doesn’t happen like that with this does as it does with the woman, as you can see: he will never change his master who has reared him for a stranger. A woman completely throws over her master if he does not give her all she wants, and it is an astonishing thing about such an exchange that she will leave her own for a stranger.¹¹

They have a nice manly joust over it; Gawain kills the stranger and keeps the dogs. The lady begs him to take her back, saying that she only feared for his life, as he was so lightly armed, and accordingly she had gone with the stranger to save Gawain. Gawain doesn’t believe a word of this, and leaves her in the dust, taking the greyhouds with him as his prize.

Now, needless to say, there are many objectionable gender stereotypes here. I’m jolly glad my father refrains from shutting me naked in a room with random young men, and also refrains from chopping up my suitors. Gawain isn’t really that nice a bloke- his reputation being more important than the lady’s wish to ‘protect’ herself from his desire.

But do you notice that all the way through this episode, a knight’s big tough manliness depends on his bedroom performance… and that depends on his ability to satisfy his lady friend’s desires? That a *nobleman* is distinguished in the bedroom by gentility and playing ‘games’ before intercourse? That lack of sexual satisfaction on the woman’s part is acknowledged- though not approved- as a common cause of relationship breakdown?

I found this quite interesting. I haven’t read far and wide in high medieval literature, either French or Middle English, and this was the first time I’d encountered such a strong focus on female pleasure in a sexual context. Is this more common than I’d thought? Is it a special for Le Chevalier a L’Epée?
These things I wonder.
Plus, it’s a rollicking good story.

~

1. I blame Awesome, who, in second year, noted that class attendance was dropping off halfway through semester, and rocked up to class with the announcement that “I can see we’re boring you a little. So I decided to scrap what’s in the program this week. Let’s talk about sex in Anglo-Saxon England”, and read us dirty riddles for an hour or so. This was a highly effective teaching strategy, because dirty riddles aren’t something you forget easily.^1.1
2. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992). Previous edition From Cuchulainn to Gawain, 1973. I have grave reserves about this book as a scholarly text. Brewer includes no introductions to the sources- we don’t knowtheir origins, dates, or even their original languages. Her citations are minimal and the bibliography non-existant.

Having said that, her introduction and nine chapters of ’sources and analogues’ do provide a quick grounding in the genre of Arthurian romances in the time of the Gawain poet. Plus, some of them are fun to read. I’d recommend the book as a source for high school students or perhaps first years, or as light background reading for anyone else. If you’re wanting serious research into the sources and contemporaries of SGGK, don’t go here.
3. pp. 109-126.
4. pp. 115-116.
5. p. 117.
6. p. 117.
7. p. 118.
8. p. 120. I’m curious about this wedding, incidentally. Anyone know much about medieval French marriage law and customs?
9. p. 120.
10. p. 122-123.
11. p. 124.

1.1 Also, Sydney Uni is the place to be in 2009 for medieval sex. Awesome and a colleague are offering a course entitled ‘Sex and Sin’, or possibly ‘Sex and Sinners’. A whole semester of medieval sex! I almost wish I wasn’t graduating…