Postcolonial Fictions in the 'Roman de Perceforest': Cultural Identities and Hybridities (Gallica)

Gallica Volume 1

POSTCOLONIAL FICTIONS IN THE ROMAN DE PERCEFOREST CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND HYBRIDITIES The Roman de Perceforest was composed about 1340 for William I, Count of Hainaut. This vast romance, building on the prose romance cycles of the thirteenth century, chronicles an imaginary era of pre-Arthurian British history when Britain was ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander the Great. Its story of cultural rise, decline, and regeneration offers a fascinating exploration of medieval ideas about ethnic and cultural conflict and fusion, identity and hybridity. Drawing on the insights of contemporary postcolonial theory, Sylvia Huot examines the author’s treatment of basic concepts such as ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘savagery’ and ‘civilisation’. Particular attention is given to the text’s treatment of gender and sexuality as focal points of cultural identity, to its construction of the ethnic categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘Trojan’, and to its exposition of the ideological biases inherent in any historical narrative. Written in the fourteenth century, revived at the fifteenth-century Burgundian court, and twice printed in sixteenth-century Paris, Perceforest is both a masterpiece of medieval literature, and a vehicle for the transmission of medieval thought into the early modern era of global exploration and colonisation. Sylvia Huot  is Reader in Medieval French Literature and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge University.

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X

General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, U S A The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, U K

POSTCOLONIAL FICTIONS IN THE ROMAN DE PERCEFOREST CULTURAL IDENTITIES AND HYBRIDITIES

Sylvia Huot

D. S. BREWER

©  Sylvia Huot 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Sylvia Huot to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2007 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN  1 84384 104 5 ISBN  978 1 84384 104 3

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction

vii 1

Part I: Founding Myths: Nature, Culture, and the Production of a British Kingdom 1. First Encounters: Gadifer in the Deserts d’Escoce

25

2. Testing Boundaries: Colonial Culture and Indigenous Nature

44

3. The King, His Law, and His Kingdom

73

Part II: Heteronormative Sexuality and the Mission Civilisatrice 4. Compulsory Love

99

5. Marriage and the Management of Difference: Between Incest and Miscegenation

119

6. Sexual Violence, Imperial Conquest and the Bonds between Men

140

Part III: Greeks, Trojans, and the Construction of British History 7. Lest We Forget: The Trojan War as a Cultural Matrix

161

8. Lest We Remember: The Artifice of History

183

Conclusion

207

Glossary of Proper Names in Perceforest

217

Bibliography

221

Index

231

Acknowledgements My first thanks go to Jane Taylor – then of Manchester University, now of Durham – for having drawn my attention, nearly twenty-five years ago, to the very existence of Perceforest. Her enthusiasm for this strange, vast work, and the detailed studies through which she helped make it accessible to the uninitiated, led to my first forays into what was then a largely unedited text. In the aventure thus begun, I have benefited from useful and stimulating conversations and correspondence not only with her, but also with many other colleagues both near and far; particular thanks go to Helen Nicholson, Christine Ferlampin-Acher, Elspeth Kennedy, Miranda Griffin, Jane Gilbert, and Simon Gaunt. Sarah Kay, Denyse Delcourt, Bill Burgwinkle, Ato Quayson, Andy Martin, and Finn Sinclair all read portions of the work in progress, providing much useful feedback. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, as reader for Boydell & Brewer, made invaluable suggestions for the overall improvement of the book. Thanks also go to my family, whether close at hand in Hundon or farther afield in California, for their many expressions of interest and support. This book could not have been written without the helpful assistance of the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford University; the Cambridge University Library; the British Library, London; and the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. My thanks also go to Cambridge University and to Pembroke College for their support, including funds for travel and research materials, as well as two sabbatical terms that allowed for sustained writing. I am grateful to the editors of Romance Studies for permission to reprint ­material from my article, ‘Cultural Conflict as Anamorphosis: Conceptual Spaces and Visual Fields in the Roman de Perceforest’, Romance Studies 22 (2004), 185–95.

Introduction The vast prose composition known as Perceforest, at this time only partially edited, is the work of an anonymous monastic or clerical author, and was apparently begun under the patronage of William I, Count of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland, and father of Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III. The principal modern editor of the work, Gilles Roussineau, has dated its completion, on the basis of internal evidence, to c. 1340–44. The text was reworked in the mid fifteenth century by David Aubert for Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Perceforest draws on the Old French romance tradition – in particular the prose Tristan, the prose Lancelot-Grail, and the Alexander romances – as well as medieval historiography as developed by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and others, and travel writing by such authors as Gerald of Wales and Marco Polo. Far from merely reworking the material of its sources, however, it presents an original story line: the ‘chronicle’ of a hitherto unknown period of history when Great Britain was ruled by Greek kings established by Alexander the Great, who was blown off course on his way to Babylon and washed up on English shores. Alexander established two of his followers – characters from the early fourteenth-century Voeux du paon – as kings: Gadifer is king of Scotland, while the new king of England is his brother Betis, soon to be renamed Perceforest. After a difficult start, Perceforest establishes a glittering chivalric society in England, centred on the Franc Palais, a forerunner of the Round Table. A Roman invasion in the next generation devastates the realm, but it is eventually rebuilt and, under the joint rule of Gadifer’s grandson and Perceforest’s granddaughter, the society flourishes once more. A second invasion from the Continent finally brings the dynasty to an end, but by then chivalric institutions are well established. The Grail arrives in Britain soon thereafter, and the spread of Christianity has begun. This long historical 

I cite the first half of Book I (I.i) in the edition by Taylor; Books II (II.i and II.ii), III (III.i, III.ii, and III.iii) and IV (IV.i and IV.ii) in the editions by Roussineau; and the second half of Book I (I.ii) and Books V and VI from the edition of 1528, noting significant variants in the manuscripts. For a summary of the narrative and discussion of its central themes and characters, see Lods, Roman de Perceforest, and the series of articles by Flûtre.  The only surviving manuscripts date from the mid- or late fifteenth century. The manuscript tradition presents a long and a short redaction; the latter was also printed in 1528 and again in 1531–32. Roussineau has argued that neither one is based on the other, but that one is an amplification of a lost version, of which the other is an abridgment. See his Introduction in IV.i, pp. IX–XXXIV. Van Hemelryck speculated recently that the text might have originated in the fifteenth century; see ‘Soumettre le Perceforest’.



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fantasy is inserted into a summary of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae and is presented as laying the groundwork for the Arthurian era. Perceforest shares with romance the pervasive presence of magic, the importance of love, and the focus on the personal development, exploits, and marriages of numerous individual knights and ladies. It frames these stories in a long-range vision of history, exploring such issues as the formation of ethnic and cultural identities and the cyclical rise and fall of civilisation. Alexander’s expansionist policies and his reluctance to respect even the gates of Paradise were portrayed in many medieval texts as excessive, and his untimely death was often seen as just deserts. The corpus of Alexander texts that existed by the time Perceforest was written told of his conquest of Asia, his quest for the most remote lands on earth, his journeys under the sea and into the sky. The Paon cycle that provides the immediate background to Perceforest, however, highlights his responsibilities as emperor rather than the sheer pleasure of conquest and adventuring. In keeping with this image of an emperor who protects the rights of his subjects and regulates matters of inheritance and marriage, Alexander’s imperial project takes on a decidedly ethical colour in Perceforest. It is explained that the gods use him as ‘leur sergent et leur verge pour chastier les felons princes’ [their sergeant and their rod for punishing wicked princes] (I.i, p. 147); to the extent that Alexander imposes his will on conquered lands, he does so in a benevolent manner. Endowed with ‘sens, largesse, et proesse’ [wisdom, generosity, and prowess] (I.i, p. 125), he is a medieval version of the enlightened despot, using his power to foster a society in which love, honour, and chivalry flourish. William I of Hainaut seems to have had a particular interest in the Alexander legend. Watriquet de Couvin, in his Dit des .iiii. sieges (1319) identifies the Count as the living embodiment of Alexander, and this may well reflect an image cultivated by William. The three Paon poems, in which the characters of Gadifer and Betis first appear as associates of Alexander, are products of the region; the Parfait du paon, in particular, was written by Jean de le Mote two years after he composed the elegant Regret Guillaume comte de Hainaut, apparently at the request of Queen Philippa, when her father died in 1338. In the Regret, William is compared to a series of illustrious figures, including Alexander, with particular reference to the Voeux du paon. In all, the evidence points to a strong local interest in the Alexander legend during the first half of the fourteenth century, particularly in its increasingly courtly manifestations, and to an attribution of Alexandran qualities to Count William. In that case the story of Alexander as 

Watriquet de Couvin, Dits, ed. Scheler, pp. 163–85. Watriquet asserts that ‘Tant con li contes vivera, / Alixandres fin ne fera’ (vv. 293–4).  Jehan de le Mote, Regret, ed. Scheler, vv. 3104–56.  Further evidence of interest in the Alexander legend at the time of Perceforest’s composition lies in the flurry of Alexander manuscripts produced in the decades just prior to the appearance of our romance. As Busby notes, ‘the manuscript evidence points, roughly speaking, to two more waves of dissemination, namely the last quarter of the thirteenth century, and the



INTRODUCTION



saviour of an England suffering from incompetent royal rule might well have been understood by its original audience as a flattering commentary on William’s role in the removal of Edward II. Hainaut, after all, was instrumental in the events of 1326 that led to the downfall of Edward and his favourite, Hugh Despenser. It was William who funded the expedition to remove Edward from the throne, and his brother Jean d’Avesnes who led it; and this assistance was certainly a factor in his daughter Philippa’s betrothal to the future Edward III. Perceforest, like other medieval chronicles and romances treating the ancient world, produces a historical vision grounded in the notion of translatio studii et imperii. This concept of political and cultural ‘translation’ implies a long-term global movement from an Asia-centred world to one that is Euro-centred. The historical model generally used by medieval writers posited an ancient world in which powerful cultural centres were located near or in Asia – Troy, Greece, Babylon, Persia, and the marvellous East. The fall of Troy caused a westward movement that brought Trojan refugees to Europe and led to the foundation of new cultural centres: Rome, France, Britain. The Trojans are portrayed in the twelfth-century Partonopeu de Blois, for example, as the bringers of civilisation to France, where they taught the indigenous Gauls to construct fortified cities. The kings of France considered themselves to be the direct descendants of the Trojan king Priam. Another legend, less widely circulated, held that other descendants of Priam settled in Macedonia, where they regrouped to provide the armies of Philip and Alexander the Great; it was supposedly from this group of Trojan refugees that the Saxons were descended. Trojans also settled in Britain, so that this island at the edge of the world’s inhabitable land mass, once a wilderness populated only by giants, became civilised. The account of Brutus’ arrival and the alacrity with which he and his men dispatched the giants to mountainous exile or death, adapted from Geoffrey of Monmouth, appears in the opening pages of Perceforest. But partly because of the ineptitude of its latest king, and perhaps partly just because of its status as a third and fourth decades of the fourteenth’ (Codex and Context, vol. 1, p. 315). As Busby further notes, the surviving manuscripts of the various Alexander romances derive from a wide geographical area, but one that does include both Tournai and England (ibid., pp. 321–2).  On the uses of ancient history in medieval French historiography, see Spiegel, Romancing the Past. For a discussion of the integration of medieval Europe into the trade networks stretching from the Levant to China, and speculation about the economic and political factors that might have contributed to the subsequent rise of European hegemony, see Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony. Szkilnik notes that in Perceforest, ‘the center of gravity of the Macedonian Empire has shifted’ from East to West, and that in this way ‘Alexander redeems his earlier flawed preference for Asia over Europe’, in ‘Conquering Alexander’, pp. 213, 214. Akbari addresses the concepts of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, and Alexander’s movement between these poles, in ‘Alexander’; while I differ from Akbari in the interpretation of certain passages in the Roman de toute chevalerie, her study is a useful survey of that text.  See Simons and Eley, ‘Prologue’. Beaune notes that the Trojans were traditionally credited with ‘the founding and fortifying of towns, the superiority of legislation, and the language they brought with them’, in Birth, pp. 241–2.  See Southern, ‘Aspects’, pp. 190–1.



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recently settled wilderness far from centres of civilisation, Britain is portrayed as poor and backward, a kind of Third World of antiquity. We learn that after a promising start under Brutus, ‘le pays vint . . . a si grant neanté que les princes voisins n’avoient convoitise du pays acquerre, ains estoit adoncques ainsi que mis en oubly’ [the land sank to such utter nothingness that neighbouring princes had no desire to acquire it, and thus it was forgotten] (I.i, p. 120). Hence the need for Alexander, with his Aristotelian education, his cosmopolitan sophistication, his foreign blood. In the Voeux du paon, the father of Betis and Gadifer is identified as a descendant of Priam, part of the post-war Trojan diaspora, while their mother is the sister of the ‘seignor de Turquie’ [lord of Turkey] (ed. Ritchie, vv. 471–84). They are also repeatedly termed ‘Chaldean’ (Caldain, Caldÿen); their city, ‘Ephezon’, is of indeterminate Near Eastern location. In Perceforest, however, their association with Alexander takes precedence over all else and they are consistently identified as Greek – whether politically or ethnically is unspecified. In any case, they bring with them the refined chivalric culture of an empire stretching from the Mediterranean to India. This era, in which Greek and Trojan blood is mingled in the royal and noble lineages of pre-Christian Britain, lays the foundations, however distant and however lost to living memory, for the greatness of the Arthurian world and, by extension, that of medieval Britain. This model, despite casting Britain in the role of a ‘developing country’ in need of foreign imperial guidance, rests upon fundamental assumptions that were already operative in English colonial activity in Wales and Ireland, and that would subsequently help shape British and European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. As he arrives in Britain, Alexander ponders its past greatness, its current torpor, and the need for intervention: Lors prist a considerer la renommee en chevalerie dont le pays avoit jadis esté, dont eut il grant merveille comment le pays pouoit sy estre desnué de gentilz hommes en prouesse. . . . Sy dist a soy mesmes que le bon sang en gentillesse et en prouesse estoit tout corrompu et aliené, et de necessité seroit qu’ilz eussent prince souverain estrange et de gentil sang qui les gentilz hommes du pays renouvellast en toute gentillesse par bons exemples et par chevalereuse vie.  (I.i, p. 144) [Then he began to consider the renown the land had had long ago for its chivalry, and he marvelled greatly that it could have become so bereft of noble men of prowess. . . . And he said to himself that the good blood, once noble and valiant, had been completely corrupted and alienated, and that they needed a sovereign ruler who was foreign and of noble blood, who would renew the noblemen of the land in all nobility, through good examples and a chivalric life.]

The attitude here attributed to Alexander is reminiscent of that expressed by Gerald of Wales with regard to the Irish, whom he scorned as ‘solum . . . otio dediti’ [given only to leisure] and ‘gens barbara, et vere barbara’ [a barbarous people, literally barbarous] because of the ‘laziness’ that prevented them from



INTRODUCTION



mining or cultivating what would otherwise have been a rich and fertile land. Edward Said’s comment about Zionism and European colonialism would be readily applicable to Gerald’s comments or to Alexander’s musings: Imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of the European metropolitain society’.10

Perceforest plays most immediately to medieval English dreams of presiding over a pan-British kingdom.11 It is an unexplained feature of the text that while Gadifer is king of ‘Albany’ or ‘Escosse’, Perceforest is both the ‘roy d’Angleterre’ and the ‘roy de Bretaigne’. Aside from the obvious anachronism of an ‘England’ many hundreds of years before the arrival of the Angles and Saxons, this slippage promotes an identification of the English king as overlord to all other British monarchs – be they Scottish, Cornish, Welsh, or other – that no doubt sat comfortably with the text’s Anglo-Norman audience. The projection of ‘Angleterre’ into the age of Alexander implies the antiquity and inviolable sovereignty of the English kingdom, which somehow pre-exists the people who would later give it its name. And it further suggests that whatever the ethnicity of the monarch occupying this southern throne, his rule extends to the whole of Great Britain. If Perceforest supported the imperial ambitions of the Plantagenets, its message evidently struck a chord with later readers as well, for it remained popular throughout the sixteenth century.12 Not only was it printed twice, but also an Italian translation was printed in 1558; a Spanish translation of Books I and II survives in a manuscript of the 1570s; and Perceforest is the undisputed source for the Elizabethan play Clyomon and Clamydes, composed about 1576–77 and printed in 1599.13 The text had a cultural currency as the great Western European powers entered the era of global exploration and exploitation, though to what extent it would have been read as relevant to these activities is difficult to say. Still it is evidence of continuity between medieval and early modern discourses of cultural difference, conquest, and empire. Renaissance culture, with its fascination for the exotic lands and peoples of the New World and its rapid move towards commercial exploitation of these newly discovered lands, is indebted to the formative models of medieval romance and historiography. Whether or not sixteenth-century readers of Perceforest explicitly  Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia, III.10, p. 152; History and Topography, tr. O’Meara, p. 102. On the negative stereotyping of the Irish in Anglo-Norman Britain, see also Bloch, Anonymous Marie, pp. 271–2; Gillingham, English, pp. 145–50. 10 Said, Question, p. 78. 11 See Davies, First English Empire, especially pp. 31–53, 202; Gillingham, English, pp. 43, 118. 12 See Lods, Roman, pp. 9–11. 13 See Taylor’s Introduction in I.i, p. 31; Roussineau’s Introduction in IV.i, pp. XXXIII– XXXVIII; Barchilon and Zago, ‘Renaissance’; Littleton’s Introduction to Clyomon and Clamydes, pp. 30–3, 38–49.



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associated its vision of history with the events unfolding around them, it was an integral, if minor, part of the cultural fabric that fostered what would ultimately become an imperial enterprise of unprecedented scale. As Said has noted, imperialism and colonialism can only exist within an ideological framework including ‘notions that certain territories and peoples require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination’.14 In Said’s words, ‘the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire . . . and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture’ (ibid., p. 10, emphasis his). Nor were these ‘preparations’ a new development of the post-Columbian era. Joshua Prawer, for example, has described medieval Crusader kingdoms as a ‘colonial situation’ in which one can see many of the practices and ideological constructs that would characterise later European colonial enterprises.15 Andrea RossiReder, with reference to an even earlier period, has stressed that such texts as the Anglo-Saxon Wonders of the East ‘employ what might be termed an incipient colonial or even a proto-colonial discourse to assert Western superiority’.16 In tracing the early history of European colonialism and imperialism, Perceforest too has its part to play. It could be argued that Alexander’s visit to Britain is not precisely a ‘colonial’ adventure since he does not set up traffic of people or goods between it and a Macedonian metropole. The text readily acknowledges his practice of demanding tribute from other conquered lands, however, and the lofty claims made by his representative in negotiations with the British are classic in their portrayal of colonial subjugation as a veritable privilege: car ne tenés pas que ce soit servaige se ceulx qu’il a conquis tiennent leurs terres de luy, et s’ilz lui rendent chacun an aucune subvention courtoise et non grevant ou pays, car ce leur est honneur et franchise. (I.i, p. 139) [Do not consider it serfdom if those whom he has conquered hold their lands from him, and if every year they pay him a tribute that is courtly and not grievous for the land, for this is an honour to them, and a freedom.]

If Alexander does not demand tribute from the new British kingdoms, they are not for all that free of his authority. In the coronation ceremony, he stipulates that Perceforest holds the land from him, and no sooner is the crown on his head than the new king kneels before his emperor to do fealty for his kingdom. Subsequently, in official proclamations Perceforest identifies himself as ‘roy d’Angleterre, par la grace du Dieu Souverain, et du Roy Alexandre, roy des roys 14 15 16

Said, Culture, p. 8, emphasis his. Prawer, ‘Roots’. Rossi-Reder, ‘Wonders’, p. 66. For a slightly different view, arguing that the Wonders of the East attributes humanity to monstrous races, see Austin, ‘Marvelous People’. For a discussion of medieval books known to Columbus, and their influence on his concepts of geography and cultural diversity, see Flint, Imaginative Landscape.



INTRODUCTION



terriens’ [king of England, by the grace of the Sovereign God, and of King Alexander, king of earthly kings] (I.ii, ch. 108, fol. 97r). And, aside from his period of mental collapse in the wake of Alexander’s death, Perceforest takes seriously his mission to ‘civilise’ the kingdom. The British kingdoms established by Alexander correspond to the model of medieval colonialism identified by Robert Bartlett: ‘not the creation of “colonies”, in the sense of dependencies, but the spread, by a kind of cellular multiplication, of the cultural and social forms found in the Latin Christian core’.17 It is also in keeping with an imperial agenda of global proportions that Britain is now ruled by Greek kings who maintain a strong sense of personal loyalty to Alexander. Alexander insists that the only benefit accruing to himself is the satisfaction of bestowing newly conquered lands on his deserving vassals, claiming that with every conquest, ‘je ne puis dormir ne faire somme si l’auray donné et enrichi ung gentil homme preux et hardy’ [I cannot sleep or even nap until I have given it away and enriched a bold and valiant nobleman] (I.i, p. 145). One could, however, question just how unselfish such imperial pleasures might really be. His diversion to Britain allows Alexander to reward two of his followers with lucrative land grants at no cost to himself. And because of the marriages arranged by Alexander at the beginning of the story (borrowed from the Voeux du paon), the installation of these particular kings results in a close-knit web of pro-Greek, anti-Roman alliances reaching from one end of the empire to the other. Fezonas, sister of Gadifer and Perceforest, is queen of India; the sister of Perceforest’s wife Ydorus is married to the sultan of Badres, while her cousin is the queen of Persia. When the villainous Roman Antipater later assassinates Alexander and his Asian allies and attempts to take over the eastern empire, Perceforest is able to shelter the two queens and their infant sons until they can return to their kingdoms. The British knighthood, revived under Alexander’s tutelage, ultimately defeat Antipater’s army, thereby not only blocking the westward expansion of the Roman Empire, but also avenging Alexander’s death. Alexander’s sojourn in Britain is colonialism in a sanitised form. It is nonviolent – at least in its inception – because the grateful British knights make no resistance; non-exploitative because the Greek emperor is the very soul of generosity. Perceforest inscribes itself as the link joining up the great locations of European culture, allowing for a grand historical narrative that takes in Priam, Brutus, Alexander, Joseph of Arimathea, and Arthur. In so doing, its author creates a picture of ethnic and cultural conflict, fusion, and exchange that is remarkably sensitive and detailed. Thomas Hahn has noted that Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia is paraphrased in the opening section of Perceforest, ‘renders racial antagonism a crucial component of any larger vision of national history’.18 Both ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are slippery and highly charged terms, whose meaning 17

Bartlett, Making of Europe, p. 306. On the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ in a medieval context, see also West, ‘Colonial History’. 18 Hahn, ‘Difference’, p. 8.



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in a medieval context is still being debated. For purposes of this study, I have chosen to follow Bartlett’s emphasis on the importance in medieval writings of ‘the cultural component of ethnic identity’, itself constructed out of the four basic categories of ‘descent, language, law, and custom’.19 Eley, in a survey of twelfth-century romans antiques, similarly concludes that in these texts, the Trojans – and to some extent Greeks, Carthaginians, and Italians as well – are depicted as ‘a distinct people, united by a common history, descent, and culture, and linked to a specific territory’.20 Medieval notions of what we call ethnic identity include a component of genealogy, and of geographic localisation, that brings them into contact with modern concepts of race. But the ethical dimension is also of great importance – sexual norms, religious values, modes of government, uses of violence – as is, for that matter, the aesthetic: personal beauty, fine clothing, the arts, landscaping.21 These categories are explicitly invoked in the vision of history elaborated in Perceforest, with its complex narrative of competing cultures and peoples, of civilisation and that which resists or lies outside it. It is in this spirit that I apply the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ to Perceforest.22 Ato Quayson, in a discussion of postcolonial theory and its relevance for medieval studies, has characterised postcolonialism as being ‘inherently about relations of hegemony and resistance in the encounter between different cultures and peoples’.23 As he notes, postcolonialism concerns ‘the quest for models of cultural practice that have been produced by the conjuncture between the imperial and the colonized, and the native and the foreign’ (p. 256). It would not be overstating the case to assert that ‘the encounter between different cultures and people’, as well as the ever-shifting relations ‘between the imperial and the colonized, and the native and the foreign’ are the very substance of Perceforest. A peculiarity of the unique historical context that it imagines – a kingdom established in Britain by Alexander the Great – is that Alexander and his Greek vassals are at once a foreign presence in Britain, and also fundamental to the history that produced the matière de Bretagne. By the text’s account of its own origins (I.i, pp. 120–4), the source of Perceforest is a recently discovered chronicle maintained at court by Perceforest and his successors, and the exotic foreignness of this text can hardly be overstated.24 It is in a language (Greek) that its discoverers cannot even recognise, and languishes unread for a further ten years before a translator 19 Bartlett, ‘Medieval and Modern’, p. 47. Bartlett considers the terms ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ as synonyms in medieval writing (p. 42). See also Lomperis, ‘Medieval Travel Writing’. 20 Eley, ‘Myth’, p. 40. 21 Ingham stresses the discourse of virtue and vice in medieval categories of race and ethnicity, in Sovereign Fantasies, pp. 110–14. Eley identifies a concern in the romans antiques to ‘emphasise the achievements in art, architecture and entertainment which set the Trojans apart from other groupings’ (‘Myth’, pp. 36–8). 22 For a survey of the complex relationships that have obtained between medieval and postcolonial studies, and some of the attendant critical controversies, see Holsinger, ‘Medieval Studies’. 23 Quayson, ‘Translations’, p. 253. 24 See Taylor, ‘Fourteenth Century’, and my ‘Chronicle’.



INTRODUCTION



is found. It tells of a period of history utterly unknown. The twelfth-century Alexander romances by Thomas de Kent and Alexandre de Paris do mention, in passing, that Alexander had extended his rule over parts of western Europe. Thomas de Kent, for example, alludes to Alexander’s exaction of tribute from such places as Lombardy, France, Burgundy, Germany, Flanders, and Normandy (Roman de toute chevalerie, ed. Gaullier-Bougassas and Harf-Lancner, vv. 2368–71). Still, nowhere outside of Perceforest do we read of an extended stay in Britain or other Western locations.25 The person who translates this mysterious book into a Western language (Latin) is himself exotic. A Greek scholar who has been studying in France, he is doubly foreign. And as a fugitive who left France for England because ‘plus demourer n’y pouoit pour ung homicide’ [he couldn’t stay any longer because of a murder] (p. 122), he is even more thoroughly marginalised. Even his Latin translation is still inaccessible to the lay audience for whom such a book is really intended, so that the Count of Hainaut has to commission a French translation by a monk at the abbey of St Landelain in Crespin (Petit-Crépin). This translator – the persona adopted by the Perceforest narrator – claims to have introduced stylistic improvements in order to make the story more entertaining. The Roman de Perceforest, in other words, is presented as an embellished French translation of a Latin translation of a Greek chronicle that had been hidden away for over a thousand years. On the one hand, then, the story told in Perceforest emerges from beneath layers of exotic otherness and obscurity; but it also sits at the very heart of Britishness, purporting to explain how the most famous era in medieval vernacular romance came to be. The text is populated by the ancestors of the Arthurian world, as is made abundantly clear every time a marriage takes place and the narrator announces the illustrious progeny that will result. This improbable Greek kingdom of Great Britain is responsible for both cultural institutions and material props that are essential to the Arthurian world. It is thanks to Alexander and the kings he appoints that the tournament is invented and becomes a favourite British pastime; thanks to them that Britain becomes a place in which ladies are honoured, and love is a cultural ideal; thanks to them that two dragons – one red, one white – are buried where Vortigern will later build a tower, that a sword is 25

See Gaullier-Bougassas, ‘Alexandre le Grand’. The Saxon chronicler Widukind, writing c. 970, cited the legendary descent of the Saxons from Alexander’s army; contrary to other sources, which identified this army as being of Trojan descent, Widukind portrayed them as Greek. However, the identification of the Saxons as Greek was not widely disseminated and there is no evidence that the Perceforest author would have been aware of it. See Southern, ‘Aspects’, pp. 190–1, n. 3. Writing c. 1370–72, Guillaume de Machaut cites ‘li bons rois Alixandres / qui conquist angleterre et flandres / et tant quist terre et mer parfonde / qu’il fu seigneur de tout le monde’ [the good king Alexander who conquered England and Flanders and explored the earth and the deep sea so much that he was the lord of the entire world] (Prise d’Alexandrie, ed. Palmer, vv. 47–50). The prominence here given to England and Flanders in Alexander’s career is unusual and may reflect a knowledge of Perceforest.

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embedded in a stone for Arthur to withdraw, that the ground is prepared for the advent of Christianity and the arrival of the Grail. It is this infusion of a foreign element that enabled the most famous of British kings to be what he was. Among Arthur’s ancestors, we now learn, are the brothers-in-law of the king of India and the sultan of Badres – that is, Perceforest and Gadifer – as well as Alexander himself. It is because of an eventual reconquest of Britain by the descendants of those whom Alexander displaced, that this Greek heritage is suppressed, abolished by royal decree from all public discourse. Only the chronicle, walled up in an abbey, survives to be discovered centuries later. The Byzantine and Asian East, seemingly far removed from British cultural history, are nonetheless at its heart. British culture is grounded in a hybridity that is hidden and disavowed, yet utterly essential. As Elleke Boehmer has pointed out, ‘imperialism was a thing of mind and representation, as well as a matter of military and political power and the extraction of profit’.26 In her study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Commonwealth literatures, Boehmer identifies an intertextual network that played a unifying role in the vast and diverse British Empire, providing ‘conventions of seeing and reading’ that migrated not only between works of literary and visual art, but also between regions (p. 52). In her words: Itinerant and adaptive, focusing colonial myths, activating imperialist energies, what we shall call the travelling metaphor formed an essential constitutive element of an intensely imagined colonial system. (ibid., emphasis hers)

These colonial imaginings, though obviously diverse and shaped in large part by contemporary circumstances, also have their roots in the imaginings and cultural mythologies of the past. The present study does not pretend to offer a comprehensive survey of these ‘mythologies’, nor to establish a definitive relationship between specific literary and ideological expressions of the modern era and those of the medieval period. Still less would I wish to argue for an essentialist levelling of all forms of imperialism and colonialism throughout European history. Nonetheless it is useful to consider the literary and theoretical works of postmedieval colonialism as a kind of backdrop or counterpoint to Perceforest. As a prelude to my detailed reading of this very rich text, I wish briefly to identify certain concepts that link Perceforest with the (post)colonial literature of later centuries.

26

Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial, p. 23.



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Godlike Conquerors It is a cherished fantasy of European colonialism that the conquering rulers seem to their new subjects superhuman, supernatural beings, and this notion appears in Perceforest. In Scotland Gadifer and his men are perceived first as demons, and then as vastly superior humans. In England, the women who establish beautiful manors in response to Perceforest’s rule are thought to be fairies: ‘Et d’elles vindrent les damoiselles que le commun peuple clamoit faees. Car il cuydoit qu’elles fussent faees et qu’elles ne morussent pas’ [And from them came the damsels whom the common folk called fairies. For they believed that they were fairies and that they did not die] (I.ii, fol. 97r). Gadifer’s wife Lydoire, the Greek queen of Scotland, is known far and wide as ‘The Fairy Queen’ [La Royne Fee].27 It is true that this title reflects her very real skill in the magic arts, but nonetheless she is neither immortal nor a fairy – just an aristocratic lady in the entourage of Alexander the Great. Lydoire is able to develop such a high level of expertise in magic and astrology because, as a girl, she received a thorough philosophical training from none other than Aristotle. What the terrified Scottish ‘savages’ think are demons are actually a band of knights outfitted by the newly crowned Greek king; and what the impressionable Britons later perceive as a fairy is really a Greek aristocrat with an Aristotelian education. The idea of Europeans being perceived as gods has a long history, and is already active at the very beginnings of New World exploration. Columbus reported that the Caribbean people he encountered thought the Spaniards were heavenly beings; and the legends are still alive today of Moctezuma taking Cortés for Quetzalcóatl, the Miwok Indians of what is now California perceiving Sir Francis Drake and his crew as gods, and the Hawa’iian Islanders taking Captain Cook for the god Lono. As Gananath Obeyesekere notes, ‘the very beginnings of the voyages of discovery carried with them the tradition of the apotheosis of the redoubtable European navigators who were also the harbingers of civilization’.28 We will probably never know exactly what the Caribbean islanders, the Hawa’iians, the Aztecs, or the Miwok really thought of their strange visitors. But one thing is certain: westerners venturing into hitherto uncharted territory have long harboured expectations of being perceived as gods, and Perceforest is one more piece of evidence that these beliefs predated European contact with New World peoples. The Civilising Mission Even when they did not see themselves worshipped as gods, European explorers and colonisers have tended to view themselves as a benevolent force, graciously accepting the task of bestowing civilisation on those who either never had it or 27 28

See Taylor, ‘Reine Fée’. Obeyesekere, Apotheosis, p. 124. See also Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 77 and 173–4, n. 64; Wilson, World Encompassed.

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unfortunately lost it. This too is a controlling idea in Perceforest, where Alexander magnanimously delays his expedition to Babylon in order to assist in the cultural regeneration of Britain. Perhaps the starkest articulation of this notion in modern history is that of Jules Ferry, who stated in his ‘Discours’ of 28 July 1885: ‘Les races supérieures . . . ont le devoir de civiliser les races inférieures’ [The superior races have the duty of civilising the inferior races].29 Ferry’s idea was hardly original, however. Of countless analogous examples, we might consider the account of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign in the twenty-three-volume Description de l’Egypte (1809–28). Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier’s Introduction is a classic enunciation of the colonial mission civilisatrice or ‘white man’s burden’.30 Stressing Egypt’s tragic fall from ancient greatness to modern barbarity, and the benefits for the Egyptians and indeed the world that will flow from a restoration of their civilisation, Fourier portrays Napoleon’s army more as a missionary expedition than a military one. Said has characterised this view of Napoleon’s mission as follows: To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct (for its own benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West; to subordinate or underplay military power in order to aggrandize the project of glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination of the Orient; to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its ‘natural’ role as an appendage to Europe . . .31

If we but substitute ‘Britain’ for ‘the Orient’, and ‘Macedonian empire’ for ‘the West’ and ‘Europe’, we have a remarkably accurate description of the portrayal of Alexander’s British campaigns in Perceforest. With its account of Britain’s recovery of past greatness, coupled with that of the ongoing resistance to Greek rule that is maintained by those whom Perceforest drives from power, the text sets forth both the glorified view of colonialism as cultural development, and the discourses of opposition that we now term ‘postcolonial’.

Women’s Liberation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her famous discussion of the silenced subaltern woman, considers at length the many overt and covert implications of the sentence: ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men.’32 Spivak’s analysis addresses nineteenth-century British legislation banning the Hindu tradition 29 30 31 32

Quoted by Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 349. See Said, Orientalism, pp. 80–8. Ibid., p. 86. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, pp. 296–308.



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of suttee, but many other examples of this self-styled colonial gallantry could be found. Perhaps the most recent example, while not strictly speaking colonial, is the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001: though clearly and explicitly launched in response to the al-Quaeda attacks of 11 September 2001, it has often been portrayed in the popular media as a mission on behalf of Afghan women. An uninformed observer of the American news coverage during that period might almost be forgiven for thinking that Washington was more concerned with the abolition of the burka than with the capture of Osama bin Laden.33 I do not of course mean to deny the very real oppression of women under the Taliban, any more than Spivak intended to advocate ‘some violent Hindu sisterhood of selfdestruction’ (p. 307). But in both instances, the military, political, and economic interests of an expansionist power are obscured beneath the rhetoric of a civilising mission that appropriates woman as an object to be saved. The salvation of women is equally a theme of Perceforest’s rule. The trope of saving women from their own kind is most obvious in episodes in which girls are rescued from the incestuous designs of their fathers – the princess Flamine of the Roide Montaigne, and the young giantess Galotine – but its importance goes well beyond these stories of domestic sexual violence. As will be discussed in Chapter Three, Perceforest’s first task is the suppression of the wicked lignaige Darnant, whose salient feature is their practice of indiscriminate rape; and his founding act is a law making rape a capital offence. Though Perceforest initially embarked on his war against the lignaige Darnant in an effort to break their monopoly on the natural resources of the forests, these economic and material concerns fade rapidly under a narrative emphasis on Perceforest as the saviour of British women. Robert Young has noted that Spivak’s formulation ‘prompts the question who the brown women are being saved for in this act of delicious gallantry by the white men’.34 Whatever the complex realities of Western colonialism, the fictional scenario of Perceforest corresponds to Young’s contention that the answer is ‘for the white men themselves’ (ibid.). Flamine and Galotine are saved from incestuous rape in order to marry their rescuers; Sebille, a lady of the forest who is rescued from would-be rapists, has a love affair with Alexander and bears his son. The British girl Lyriope, who is saved from being raped by her cousin when Gadifer and Le Tor kill her brother and capture the family castle, becomes a royal ward and is given in marriage to Le Tor. And beyond this literal appropriation of native women by the incomers, the text overall implies an identification of the grateful female beneficiaries of Perceforest’s rule with the land itself, or perhaps with the goodness that it contains; while those women uninterested in being saved are clearly beneath contempt. Commenting on nineteenth-century accounts of colonial encounters in both North America and Australia, Terry Goldie notes the recurring juxtaposition of 33 34

See Davis, ‘Time’. Young, Colonial Desire, p. 152, emphasis his.

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‘temptation by the dusky maiden and fear of the demonic violence of the fiendish warrior’.35 Goldie focuses on the gendered language used to express the ambivalence of European incomers towards these strange new worlds: the enticing aspects of the land eroticised as feminine, the forbidding aspects coded as hypermasculine. This formulation could equally be applied to the scenarios imagined in Perceforest. The split between the beautiful ladies of the forest, hospitable and at times openly erotic, and the frightening knights of the lignaige Darnant, with their magic spells and their brutal violence, is mirrored in Goldie’s evocation of ‘the alien’s fear of the “redskin” as hostile wilderness, the new, threatening land, and the arrivant’s attraction to the maiden as restorative pastoral, this new, available land’ (ibid., p. 236). The recasting of class violence or military conquest in the form of erotic or amorous intrigue is a well established feature of medieval vernacular literature, familiar in the pastourelle encounters between a shepherdess and a knight as well as in the tales of amorous Saracen princesses in Crusade epic. This common ground between otherwise disparate genres points to a more pervasive discursive strategy within medieval culture. Sharon Kinoshita has noted that just as sexual violence in the pastourelle ‘is deployed especially to do the symbolic work of internal colonization’, similarly the violent conquest of ‘the religious and cultural Other’ is effaced in ‘the Saracen woman’s willing embrace of the conqueror and all he represents’.36 The motif of the Saracen woman who converts to Christianity to marry the Crusader knight, as in the Prise d’Orange, allows the tropes of ‘courtly love’ to be ‘mobilized in the service of an ideology of expansion and conquest’ (ibid.).

Colonial Insecurities The image of the powerful Saracen princess is, however, one that can cut in different directions; as Sarah Kay states, she ‘does not merely ventriloquize a controlling masculine fantasy: she helps to shape it, and thereby disrupts assumed hierarchies’.37 The male fantasy that produces these narratives of sexually aggressive, self-possessed Saracen women is, in Kay’s words, ‘as much one of anxiety as of wish fulfillment’ (ibid., p. 47). One could say much the same thing about certain ladies in Perceforest, some of whom display an aggressive sexuality that threatens to rob men of their autonomy. Sebille, for example, initiates her liaison with Alexander by enchanting him so that he stays at her castle for two weeks, despite his intention to depart after just one night. The sexual potency of foreign women can figure not just the ‘restorative’ aspects of the land, but also

35 36 37

Goldie, ‘Representation’, p. 235. Kinoshita, ‘Politics’, p. 286; see also Kinoshita, ‘ “Pagans are wrong” ’. Kay, Chanson de geste, p. 46.



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its ­disorienting capabilities.38 The same is true in modern colonial literature; one might think, for example, of Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, with its amusing portrayal of the French chaplain in Tahiti, distractedly invoking his religion, his état, his bonnes moeurs while his host’s naked daughters present themselves for his delectation. Bougainville’s own comments on the sexual enticements of Tahiti are revealing in this regard. In some respects, his account portrays Tahiti as a utopia of erotic delights. As he tells it, the inhabitants freely invited the Frenchmen into their homes, ‘ils leur offraient des jeunes filles’ [they offered them young girls] in a sensuous idyll in which ‘la terre se jonchait de feuillage et de fleurs, et des musiciens chantaient aux accords de la flûte un hymne de jouissance’ [the earth was strewn with leaves and flowers, and musicians sang a hymn to orgasm, accompanied by flutes].39 But the public nature of these exchanges, in which ‘la case se remplissait à l’instant d’une foule curieuse d’hommes et de femmes’ [the hut would fill instantly with a curious crowd of men and women] disconcerts the French, since, as Bougainville says, ‘nos moeurs ont proscrit cette publicité’ [our customs forbid this public display] (ibid.). In conclusion he notes simply that ‘je ne garantirais pas qu’aucun n’ait vaincu sa répugnance et ne se soit conformé aux usages du pays’ [I can’t guarantee that certain ones didn’t overcome their repugnance and conform to the customs of the country] (ibid.). This clash of desire and revulsion marks a moment of double hybridisation. French seed is sown in a Tahitian body, to produce bodies that are still Tahitian but with a French difference; while a French body is overwritten with Tahitian customs. In both cases a subject is produced who is not quite fully French or Tahitian, but something partaking of both. In Perceforest, Alexander’s Greek body is similarly appropriated and transformed into an object of British desire. And the result is a new British Alexander: the knight Alexandre Remanant de Joie, a Briton on whose body is written the semblance of his illustrious Greek father. Despite the sense of mission that characterises much colonial literature, then, such works can also betray an underlying current of insecurity and disorientation, as the coloniser struggles to preserve a sense of self in an alien surrounding. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe expresses both sides of this divide. Crusoe sets out to build himself an estate where he can live as lord of his own domain, replicating insofar as possible the conditions of his homeland. Nonetheless, as Boehmer stresses, ‘[n]o matter how much Crusoe, like the archetypal colonist he is, strives to assert his own reality and establish his right to the island “kingdom”, the unknown remains a constant anxiety, represented by his horror of cannibalism’.40 An even greater sense of malaise infects the portrayal of colonial rule in the works of Joseph Conrad nearly two hundred years later. The eponymous hero of Lord Jim, for example, finds himself strangely unsettled in his efforts to 38 39 40

See Taylor, ‘Alexander Amoroso’. Bougainville, Voyage, ed. Proust, II.2, p. 235. Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial, p. 18.

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rule over an island ‘kingdom’. Again in Boehmer’s words, ‘his personal ideals remain centred in Europe but his experience is set on the colonial periphery’ (p. 63). Thus his authority exists ‘in relation to the native population’, yet he remains ‘in search of European approval, believing himself disconnected from native life’ (pp. 63–4). The precarious position of the colonial ruler, whose ‘life-narrative is split’ (Boehmer, p. 63), is fully acknowledged in the troubling isolation into which both Perceforest and Gadifer fall – the former temporarily, the latter permanently. News of Alexander’s death plunges Perceforest into a debilitating melancholy that makes him unable to govern for some twenty years. It is only when he learns to detach himself from his idealised image of Alexander and to accept the heroic and courtly potential of his British subjects that Perceforest is finally able to become a true, and effective, British king. As for Gadifer, he is severely injured in a hunting accident in the Scottish forest, and becomes permanently disabled when a local woman, in league with the indigenous resistance, poisons his wounds. His wife Lydoire reacts by hiding the entire royal family in an invisible castle. The disappearance of both the king and his young heirs causes considerable consternation among the Scottish knights, who are henceforth allowed only rare and fleeting encounters with their king, at Lydoire’s discretion. The English court, in other words, is blighted by the king’s inability to perceive himself as anything other than a vassal to Alexander, or to appreciate his British kingdom as a sovereign entity in its own right. And the Scottish court is crippled by a pathological aversion to contact with its own subjects. Invisible in her castle but spying on all around her, as if in a medieval panopticon, Lydoire metes out severe punishments to anyone deemed disobedient or negligent, while even the most faithful knights are largely kept at bay. Both courts also reflect a pervasive fear of a resurgence of the indigenous lignaige Darnant, a once-powerful clan whose warrior ethos might be described in modern terms as terrorist. The brutal sexual predations of the clansmen, their abduction and assassination of the knights of the Franc Palais, and their aggressive use of sorcery – which transforms the forests, at the height of their power, into a frightening realm of disorienting hallucinations – haunt the collective memory of Perceforest’s Britain. ‘In those times’, people remind one another, there was no security, the weak were oppressed, women abused, those in power like rapacious beasts. If they should ever once again gain the upper hand . . . The Perceforest author thus pits the chivalric culture of Greek imperial rule – the idealised image of his own culture – against an imagined era of barbarity, located in a distant and lawless past. As it happens, this construction of ancient Britain as an uncivilised wilderness corresponds to the vision outlined in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by the character Marlow who, in a now famous passage, conjures up a vivid image of the colonising Romans who struggled to establish civilisation in the hostile and forbidding ‘darkness’ that was Britain.41 41

See Achebe, ‘Image’; Ingham, ‘Contrapuntal’, pp. 55–58.



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Ingham notes that the past here is deployed as ‘an object lesson in the colonial “ordering” of “savagery”. . . . Having suffered under the Roman lash, Britain is now well able to wield it.’42 If for Conrad – as indeed for numerous other nineteenth-century British writers and statesmen – the Roman colonisation of Britain was a figure for the nineteenth-century British colonisation of Africa, for our fourteenth-century author the imagined Greek encounter with a British wilderness likewise figured the conquest of savagery by civilisation, no doubt with similar resonances for English colonial activity in such places as Wales and Ireland. And just as resistant pockets of the lignaige Darnant are regarded by Perceforest and his followers as the terrorist enemies of civilisation, so Conrad’s characters refuse, in Said’s words, to recognize that what they saw, disablingly and disparagingly, as a nonEuropean ‘darkness’ was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness.43

Colonial Desire Colonisers, then, are disoriented by the experience of seeing themselves as ‘other’. Far from ‘civilisation’, in a place where their normal expectations are constantly defied, they may attempt to live in an artificial metropolitan bubble. But the discourse of colonialism also appropriates that very sense of estrangement, that alienation from the self, and rewrites it as self-aggrandisement. The gaze of the colonised fixes the colonial foreigner as an object of difference, an intruder to be expelled, a curiosity to be examined. And it must therefore be contained by the more powerful gaze of the colonisers, certain of their superiority, and thus able to transform fear, hostility, even indifference into adoration, wonder, desire. The violence of the colonial encounter is realised, in part, through the imposition of this perspective onto the conquered people, who are made to internalise an image of themselves as awestruck by the conquerors and grateful for their attentions.44 Precisely this view is attributed to the English knights in the opening section of Perceforest, as they realise that Alexander has come to their shores. Though initially worried that he has come to conquer them, the English soon decide that the Greeks should be welcomed as saviours: Ainsi sommes nous menez a grant deneanté, dont je ne puis veoir que ja puissons valoir se n’est par estrange sang. Et quant a l’estrange vient, de meilleur ne pouons estre regenerez que du sang des Gregois. (I.i, p. 136) 42 43 44

Ingham, ‘Contrapuntal’, p. 57. See also Kabir, ‘Analogy’. Said, Culture, p. 33, emphasis his. Bhabha discusses this subjugating or alienating gaze in Location, pp. 85–92.

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[For we have sunk to utter nothingness, and I don’t see how we can ever be worth anything if not by means of foreign blood. And when it comes to foreign blood, we cannot be regenerated by anything better than the blood of the Greeks.]

In this Western European antiquity, populated by Trojans on the one hand, giants and marauding Scandinavians on the other, Greek blood is a marker of difference. This infusion of blood from an unconquered imperial power, slightly exotic but still European, will produce a new lineage, a new culture that will make Britain unique in the world. The eagerness of the colonised for new blood is another cherished colonial fantasy; for a modern example we can turn again to Diderot’s imaginative portrayal of the Franco-Tahitian encounter in his Supplément. Here Orou, a Tahitian, explains to a member of Bougainville’s party why Tahitian women have sought sexual relations with the Frenchmen, and why the men have been so approving: Plus robustes, plus sains que vous, nous nous sommes aperçus au premier coup d’oeil que vous nous surpassiez en intelligence; et, sur-le-champ, nous avons destiné quelques-unes de nos femmes et de nos filles les plus belles à recueillir la semence d’une race meilleure que la nôtre. (p. 175) [Stronger and healthier than you, we noticed at first glance that you surpass us in intelligence; and at once, we selected some of our most beautiful wives and daughters to receive the seed of a race superior to us.]

Diderot’s portrayal, like that in Perceforest, rests on the notion that the superiority of the imperial power is so self-evident that an enterprising people will seek upward mobility through selective cross-breeding with these foreign emissaries. Blood, or semence, is not the only object of colonial desire. The mission civilisatrice also assumes, and aggressively imposes, a desire for assimilation to the colonising culture. For a historical example, again from the eighteenth century, we can turn to the famous verses of the African-American poet Phillis Wheatley. Captured by slave traders in Africa and sold at auction in Boston at the age of about seven, purchased by a Quaker family who kept her as a servant but gave her a classical education, Wheatley came to see her traumatic abduction as an enabling, indeed salvific, opportunity. The poem ‘On being brought from AFRICA to AMERICA’, published in 1773, expresses this succinctly: ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, ‘Their color is a diabolic die.’



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Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.45

Speaking from within the cultural framework that has been imposed upon her, Wheatley looks back at her own native condition and sees it as a state of deprivation and potential, in need of – but also, crucially, worthy of – civilisation and salvation by a more enlightened race. The hybridity of her voice, both African and Christian, allows for an assertion of African self-worth that challenges colonial racist assumptions. The intricate world of Perceforest also includes numerous characters whose assimilation to a new cultural order severs them completely from the life into which they were born. Exemplary in this regard is Priande, a twelve-year-old girl living in the ‘savage’ Deserts d’Escoce when she is picked up by Estonné, one of Gadifer’s knights, and sent to be raised at the royal court. Though initially terrified, Priande is won over when Estonné kisses her naked breast. She subsequently records this incident in a poem expressing her love for Estonné and her hopes for his return to court. Representing Estonné as a lion, she describes their meeting in these terms: Quant le lÿon l’eut embracie, Sa destre mammelle a baisie. A ce lez lui fut esrachie Sa sauvaigine, la boscage.  (III.i, p. 277, str. IV) [When the lion had embraced her, he kissed her right breast. At that the woodland lass lost her uncouth ways.]

In her original state, Priande lacks all amenities: her sun-bleached hair has never been cut, her only clothing is a sheepskin, she does not know her ancestry or even her own name, and she bites, struggles, and screeches like a wild thing. But this condition of lack, the blankness of uncultured, uncivilised barbarity, is also one of potentiality: she is sent to court because of the perception that she could achieve the perfection of aristocratic femininity, ‘se elle estoit nourrie ainsi qu’elle deust’ [if she was cared for as she should be] (II.i, p. 6). Priande echoes and even intensifies this perspective, rewriting the trauma and violence of that first encounter as a moment of enlightenment, a sexual and cultural awakening that did not so much replace a former identity, as it bestowed an identity where formerly there had been none. Priande is a fictional character, her eager conversion imagined by the (male) author who has created her. Yet she is also a forerunner of the persona created by Wheatley. In both cases, the young female persona refuses to acknowledge her objectification as commodity or spoil of conquest, claiming instead a subject position that redefines her encounter with an alien culture. And 45 Wheatley, Collected Works, p. 18. Emphasis hers. On this poem and its critical reception, see Birkle, ‘Border Crossings’.

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in both cases it is the potential for conversion and assimilation that is the measure of worth in a subjugated people. But Perceforest does also show another side, the resistance of certain Britons to the new Greco-British culture and their persistence in seeing themselves as the rightful heirs to the land. Since this is a fictional history, it is impossible to probe the experiences and subjectivities of the outlawed clan members, either male or female, beyond what we are given in the text. Complicitous with his heroic Greek king, the narrator constructs all resistant members of the lignaige Darnant as malicious and unprincipled characters. Still, we are given occasional glimpses of these clan members as people in their own right. Their grief at the death of their kinsmen, for example, seems very genuine, and their desire for vengeance cannot completely be discounted. In a meeting of clan elders, the virtuous Gelinant du Gat informs his kinsmen that they are reaping the fruits of their own sinful ways. His views are angrily refuted by his brother Griant, who argues for the preservation of the ‘droit qui nous vient de noz ancestres’ [our ancestral rights] (I.i, p. 401). Griant calls for vengeance and defence of the traditional way of life, proclaiming: ‘je tout seul ay coeur et voulenté de mes freres vengier et de noz franchises garder que les dieux nous ont donnees’ [I have the heart and the will to stand alone and avenge my brothers and to protect the freedoms that the gods have given us] (p. 402). While the narrator clearly supports Gelinant’s views, still we are reminded that members of the lignaige Darnant have their own perspective, from which their customs are perfectly legitimate, and their resistance is an act of courage and devotion. We are even allowed a momentary insight into the private thoughts of a clanswoman who is part of a conspiracy to abduct several knights of the Franc Palais. Having discovered that the knight she is leading into the trap is Lyonnel du Glat, grandson of Gelinant, this clanswoman gives silent voice, ‘dedens son cuer’ [in her heart], to the sense of betrayal that she and the rest of the lineage feel towards this defector: ‘A ce coup amenderez vous les excez que vous avez fait sur ceulx qui sont yssuz du sang Darnant et que vous deussiez avoir aidiez par lignaige’ [Thus you will pay for the excesses you have committed against those who are descended from the blood of Darnant, whom you should have aided through kinship] (II.ii, p. 348). For an instant – if only for an instant – we may imagine that we see not a band of barbaric outlaws, but a community fighting for its life, committed to relations of kinship and to the traditions of their ancestors, and to recovering the independence they have lost. Their castle, hidden in the depths of the forest and rendered invisible through enchantment, allows them to operate their war of attrition without fear of counter-attack. This invisibility is itself a powerful form of resistance. Literally removing themselves from the hostile gaze of the foreign king and his henchmen, placing themselves outside the reach of his desire, the indigenous people fix the king in a gaze that seems to emanate from the very land itself to isolate and incapacitate him as an alien presence, a powerless stranger in a strange land.



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In his Introduction to The Postcolonial Middle Ages, Cohen lists five ways that medieval studies might help to further the field of postcolonial studies.46 Of most immediate relevance to the present study is his call to ‘[r]ethink history as effective history’ and to ‘[d]estabilize hegemonic identities . . . by detailing their historical contingency’ (pp. 6, 7). Perceforest is a text well suited to either task. True, it posits a historical movement leading inexorably to the triumphant emergence of Christendom and British, or perhaps more precisely English, hegemony. But Perceforest is a patently fictional history, deliberately crafted to portray this happy outcome as the overdetermined product of human, natural, and supernatural forces. Paradoxically, the text’s very insistence on the naturalisation of such categories as gender, lineage, and humanity, and its elaborate justifications of conquest and cultural repression, are a salutary reminder that these are, in fact, constructions. I do not mean, however, to imply that Perceforest was a radical or subversive text, or that contemporary readers would necessarily have understood it as implying the contingency of cultural values. Where we see the creation and imposition of gender norms, for example, a medieval reader might see the affirmation and restoration of a natural order. Greenblatt has rightfully stressed the extent to which ‘subversive insights are generated in the midst of apparently orthodox texts and simultaneously contained by those texts’ so effectively that ‘society’s licensing and policing apparatus’ need not even be aroused.47 As he notes, ‘power defines itself in relation to. . . that which is not identical with it’, and the representation of alien voices and perspectives can be a device for the silencing of those very voices (p. 50). But the deconstruction and analysis of these textual strategies is illuminating. To the extent that we can identify the ideological stakes and blind spots of Perceforest’s constructed history, we can better understand the processes by which the artificiality of culture is contained and naturalised. In its tacit acknowledgment that any historical narrative is shaped by the needs and desires of the present, it reflects – even if per speculum in aenigmate – Cohen’s assertion that ‘the seeming naturalness of “truth” can be an effect of accumulating acts of power, especially colonialist power’ (p. 6). The following study will examine Perceforest’s portrayal of the shifting constructions of gender and ethnicity, of purity and hybridisation, that emerge in the colonial encounter and in the competing discourses of the postcolonial world. I will begin in Part I with the figures of Gadifer and Perceforest, Greek kings of Trojan Britain, and the way that their mission civilisatrice is carried out through specific acts of legislation and through the construction of courts and cities. Their rule rewrites British identity, as categories of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, even humanity are reconstrued, and the nature of culture itself is explored. Part II will treat the role of love and sexuality in more detail, looking at the importance of heterosexual love in the chivalric culture of Perceforest’s Britain, at the sexual 46 47

Cohen, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–8. Greenblatt, ‘Invisible Bullets’, p. 41.

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taboos – rape, incest, miscegenation, homoeroticism – by which it is haunted, and at the ways in which the sexual is used to mirror the political. Part III will examine the categories of blood and ethnicity that emerge from the text – Greeks, Trojans, the lignaige Darnant – and their role in the construction of history as a matrix for both individual and cultural identity.

Part I Founding Myths: Nature, Culture, and the Production of a British Kingdom

Landscapes of place reflect upon landscapes of the mind. The world’s landscapes are but the screen on which the past, present, and anticipated cosmic vanity of mankind is written. James M. Houston, ‘Concepts of “Place” ’, p. 225

1

First Encounters: Gadifer in the Deserts d’Escoce Book II of Perceforest opens with a cross-cultural encounter that encapsulates many of the anthropological and historiographic themes of the text as a whole. Gadifer, now king of Scotland, decides to explore his kingdom. And although his entourage does include some very capable Scottish knights, he finds that much of Scotland is a sparsely inhabited wilderness. In the Deserts d’Escoce – the Scottish Wilds, probably corresponding to the Highlands – there are no towns at all, just simple cowherds living in makeshift huts. Gadifer’s encounter with these Scottish ‘savages’ is a classic mise en scène of Western notions of colonialism as a mission civilisatrice. This fictional account of a ‘first contact’ – or at least, the first contact that the inhabitants of the Scottish Wilds have had with civilisation since their ancestors, fleeing the fall of Troy, washed ashore a few generations earlier – describes an uncivilised yet highly malleable, indeed grateful, people. Initially terrified, they mistake the new arrivals for devils; the men cower in the bushes while the women rush forward in a savage attack. But once they realise that these strange, armourclad creatures are people, they quickly accept the sovereignty of the king, eager for the blessings of civilisation. The reader, presumed to be a member of medieval court culture, thus sees the knights from the outside while simultaneously identifying with them: ‘we’ become ‘other’, but a glorious other. And Gadifer’s subjugation of the people is an act of beneficence, less an imposition than a restoration of their lost Trojan heritage.

Colonial Fantasies: Grateful Subjects and Godlike Rulers This scenario, then, allows for a pleasant fantasy of oneself as exotic Other. The terror manifested by the people in this first encounter would be an understandable reaction to an invading army of heavily armed warriors, but it turns out that their fear goes well beyond such relatively down-to-earth concerns. Their perception of the knights is revealed in the cries of the little girl picked up by the knight Estonné: ‘Tuez le dyable qui me veult mengier!’ [kill the devil who wants to eat me] (II.i, p. 10). It was not simply fear of human marauders that inspired the violent, riotous reception, but a fear much darker and more primal: that of being devoured by something monstrous, something evil. Slightly later, it is further clarified that it was the armour that confused the

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people, creating the appearance of something inhuman, indeed inorganic. When Gadifer, having removed his helmet, speaks to a man old enough to remember the uncorrupted language spoken by his own father – and thus capable of communicating with the new arrivals – he asks why the people reacted as they did. The old man explains that they were terrified at the sight of men mounted on unknown beasts, and adds a further note: ‘sy aviez aultres testes que vous n’avez maintenant’ [you had different heads from what you have now] (p. 12). When the old man is asked how the king might reassure the people, his reply suggests that he still has not fully grasped that the armour is a form of clothing, and continues to see its donning or removal as a kind of metamorphosis: ‘Sire, dist le preudomme, faictes estre voz gens de nostre semblance’ [‘Sire,’ said the worthy man, ‘make your men look like us’] (p. 13). Once the king and his knights have removed their armour and dressed in their finery, the people are completely won over and indeed press forward for a closer look. Needless to say, the women in particular are captivated by this spectacle of manly beauty: ‘Et sachiez qu’il n’y avoit celle qui ne les regardast voulentiers et ne les alassent veoir de plus prez’ [and indeed there was not one woman who didn’t look at them eagerly, and go up to see them more closely] (p. 14). Having changed their garb from that of war to that of the court, the knights still have a powerful allure, but already their impact is changing from one of terror to one of fascination and desire. This fantasy of the knight’s superhuman appearance and his power to inspire fear, awe, and fascination has a long and well-established presence in European thought. An early French example is Chrétien’s Conte du graal, a text undoubtedly familiar to the Perceforest author. The fateful encounter in the Welsh forest between the young Perceval and a band of knights is well known: his initial fear that these thunderous creatures must be devils, followed by his revised belief, upon seeing them more clearly, that ‘Ce sont ange que je voi ci’ [those are angels that I see here] (ed. Lecoy, v. 136). Having learned from his mother that the only being more beautiful than the angels is God himself, Perceval decides that the most handsome of the knights must be God, and adopts a worshipful posture. Unshakeable in his reverential devotion to these resplendent figures, Perceval’s reaction upon learning that they are in fact knights is to reflect that his mother must have overestimated angelic beauty. As he informs the knight who tries to question him, ‘vos estes plus biax que Dex’ [you are more beautiful than God] (v. 176). In the eyes of this uncultured Welsh lad, in other words, British knights are an absolute limit of beauty and splendour that simply cannot be surpassed in this world or in any other. A similar expectation that those endowed with intellectual, artistic, or technical skills would be regarded as gods underlies a medieval tradition of euhemeristic readings of classical mythology. Pagan deities could be interpreted as the 

Paraphrasing Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Perceforest author explains that the original Britons spoke a dialect of Greek: ‘Troyens ou Curves Gregoiz’ (I.i, p. 85). In the Deserts d’Escoce, however, this language has deteriorated beyond recognition.



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glorified images of human beings who had invented such fundamental practices as agriculture, metallurgy, or the rule of law. The innovations that might lead to deification – gathering people into communities, teaching them to build towns and to cultivate the land – are very similar to those that Gadifer brings to the inhabitants of the Scottish Wilds, and recur in other founding legends as well. Most relevant for the present purposes are the tales of Trojan settlement in both Gaul and Britain, where the emphasis is again on agriculture, legislation, and the construction of fortified cities. The formation of social communities and the manipulation of nature to serve human needs mark the origins of civilisation, establishing a divide between the bestial and the human. Far from being a royal imposition, these are gifts so vital as to ensure the reverence and awestruck gratitude of the recipients and their descendants forever after. Gadifer does have an almost supernatural effect upon the land as he passes through it, as though it responds to the power of his gaze and the force of his desire. Paul Zumthor has commented on the distinction between natural wilderness and an aestheticised landscape serving as a backdrop to human cultural activity: Invention moderne, le paysage n’existe pas en lui-même . . . et l’exaltation qui nous saisit alors provient du sentiment puissant et confus que nous avons de le faire être. Le paysage est pour nous un objet construit. . . . De ce paysage que j’admire je suis le prédateur. [A modern invention, the landscape does not exist in itself . . . and the exaltation that grips us then derives from the powerful and confused feeling that we have of bringing it into existence. For us the landscape is a constructed object . . . Of this landscape that I admire, I am the predator.]

It is this principle that is illustrated in Gadifer’s exuberant ride through Scotland. Wild land becomes a kingdom populated by loyal subjects, it would seem, simply because he is its king and he wishes it to be so: Et la chevauchierent bien deux journees qu’ilz ne trouverent ne ville ne chastel ne personne, tant qu’ilz s’embatirent sur une moult belle praerie, sy couroit une moult belle riviere parmy. Lors regarda le roy et dist que le lieu estoit moult delectable et que dommaige estoit qu’il n’estoit habité . . . Ainsi qu’ilz se devisoient du delictable lieu, ilz regardent avant ou parfont de la praerie et voient qu’il y avoit vaches domestez et couroient  

See Waswo, ‘Our Ancestors’; Beaune, Birth, pp. 241–2. Warren argues for a similar imperial gaze in the Old French prose Alexander, in which ‘Alexander himself acquires land through battle and the almost magical force of his own penetrating gaze’, in ‘Take the World’, p. 145. On the landscape as an object of imperial gaze, see also Siewers, ‘Landscapes’.  Zumthor, Mesure, p. 86.

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entre elles enfans de .X. ans et de .XII. tous nudz, fors qu’ilz estoient envelopez de peaulx de moutons. (p. 5) [And they rode two full days without finding any town, castle, or people, until they came to a very beautiful meadow, and a very beautiful river flowed through it. Then the king looked and said that the place was most delightful and it was a shame that it wasn’t inhabited. . . . As they were talking about the delightful place, they look ahead in the depths of the meadow and see that there were domestic cows and that children ten or twelve years old were running among them, naked except that they were wrapped in sheepskins.]

At first sight, the land seems very beautiful, but uninhabited: its ‘uncivilised’ inhabitants have not made their mark on it. Gadifer articulates the desire to populate the land and, as if in response, he discerns signs of human presence. As the inhabitants appear, it is always as the object of the knights’ collective gaze. First, in the passage quoted above, ‘ilz regardent . . . et voient’ [they look and see] domestic animals, then children; subsequently ‘ilz veirent yssir des forestz’ [they see coming from the forest] children followed by men (p. 6); in a third phase, ‘ilz regardent et voient yssir hors de la forest sy grant plenté de femmes que bien leur fut advis qu’il en y eut jusques a .III.c et plus’ [they look and see coming from the forest so many women that it seemed to them that there were as many as 300 or more] (p. 7). When Gadifer at last manages to speak with one of his new subjects, his questioning awakens a memory of the people’s distant Trojan past, their royal lineage, the Hellenic language they once spoke: Sire, dist le preudomme, j’ay oÿ dire et recorder a mon pere en ma josnesse que une nef des fuitifz de Troyes arriva en ceste terre . . . il me souvient bien que mon pere parloit ainsy que vous faictes. (p. 12) [‘Sire’, said the worthy man, ‘I have heard my father tell, in my youth, that a ship of Trojan refugees arrived in this land. . . I remember that my father spoke the way you do.’]

Through their ‘discovery’ by Gadifer, these violent, unkempt savages turn out to be good people of Trojan and indeed royal lineage, descended from Priam’s sister. Those who initially seemed to stand on the far side of an unbridgeable abyss of difference – jabbering incomprehensibly, the men timid and fearful, the women attacking in savage frenzy – now seem hardly ‘other’ at all. And by the time Gadifer moves on, after a stay of only two months, the people have become his loyal subjects, the forest has been cleared and a road constructed, and the once wild land has become a city. The ‘savages’, in other words, have ceased to be anonymous figures and have been situated in both time and space as inhabitants of a town whose location is expressed in relation to other towns. Under Gadifer’s rule, they are endowed with an ethnic and genealogical identity



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that defines their relationship to other peoples both present and past, and given a feudal allegiance that locates them within the political map of Greco-Trojan Britain and the wider European world. Thanks to the intervention of a Greek king acting through the agency of the global emperor Alexander, this once lost people have literally been rescued from oblivion and re-formed as Britons.

Mapping Space and Time Gadifer’s first concern, once he has established contact, is to gather his subjects together into a structured community: the city that will be called Royauville. Having determined who these people are, his next enquiry concerns their living arrangements. The old man explains that they live in the forest and take shelter during the winter under piles of dried grasses. But Gadifer’s concerns are less material than structural: are their homes located close to one another, or far apart? – Sire, dist le preudomme, mais moult loing, ainsi qu’il plaist a chacun. – Ha! dist le roy, par ce estes vous sy bestialz et vostre langue sy empiree. Sy vous rassembleray, se je puis, et mectray en meilleur estat. (p. 13) [‘Sire,’ said the worthy man, ‘they are very far apart, as each one wishes.’ ‘Ha!’ said the king, ‘that’s why you’re so bestial and your language so degenerate. I will gather you together, if I can, and improve your condition.’]

The importance of community could not be more clearly expressed: it is because the Trojan refugees have scattered themselves throughout the land that their language has deteriorated and they have lost the ability to communicate with the outside world or to conceptualise their place in it. Indeed it is questionable whether they occupy a place at all, if we take that term in Jonathan Smith’s definition of place – as opposed to undifferentiated space – as ‘a locus of meaning’. As Smith notes, ‘Human beings are not placed, they bring place into being.’ The Perceforest author implies a similar concept of place as a reflection and production of human subjectivity. Savage, barely human, the inhabitants of the Scottish wilderness are depicted as having failed to bring any sort of ‘place’ into being: bereft of a ‘locus of meaning’ they live like beasts, with no sense either of spatial boundaries or of historical moment.  

Smith, To Take Place, p. 28. On the demarcation and naming of places in Perceforest, see Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Géographie’. The description of the Scottish Wilds echoes stock criticisms made by medieval English writers about the Welsh, the Irish, and the Scottish Highlanders and Islanders: that they lived by livestock rather than farming, in dispersed huts rather than solidly built towns, with no rule of law until one was brought by the English. See Davies, First English Empire, pp. 122–6, 133–4.

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Gadifer at once sets about crafting a society out of the wilderness, moving in two stages which could be seen as corresponding to the Latin terms urbs and civitas respectively. As Isidore of Seville explains: Nam urbs ipsa moenia sunt, civitas autem non saxa, sed habitatores vocantur. (Etymologiae, ed. Lindsay, XV.ii.1) [For the ‘urbs’ is the walls themselves, whereas ‘civitas’ is what we call not the stones, but the inhabitants.]

First there must be the material support, the urbs: buildings that can be identified as individual properties. Gadifer accordingly sends for workmen and sets them to building houses. From this construction of an urbs will flow, in turn, the civitas: the society of people bound by a common law, interests, and values. Significantly, it is the new king’s imposition of urban living arrangements that literally re-forms the people, transforming ungovernable ‘savages’ into subjects of the realm. It is also only with the advent of towns and an organised human society that a visible tale of historical progress is inscribed upon the land. It is not that these people had previously been suspended in an unchanging state: in fact, as has been seen, they had changed drastically over the generations, losing all memory of their origins, all knowledge of artisanal skills and civic institutions, even their very language. But this process left no mark on the land, which gave no visible sign that people were there at all, much less of their ongoing activities. Nor is there any evidence that the people themselves harboured any sense of occupying a place in history, framed by their own particular past and future. James M. Houston has commented on the intimate relationship between the concept of place and that of history, as both past and future endow the present moment with meaning: Place . . . has human context: space with historical associations . . . Place implies belonging. It establishes identity. It defines vocation. It envisions destiny. Place is filled with memories of life that provide roots and give direction.

Not only geographical place, but also the historical moment, are the product of human subjectivity and cultural ideology. Indeed Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the twelfth century, identified a sense of history as quintessentially human: Habet quidem praeter haec illustres transactorum notitia dotes, quod ipsa maxima distinguat a brutis rationabiles: bruti namque homines et animalia unde sint nesciunt, genus suum nesciunt, patriae suae casus et gesta nesciunt, immo nec scire volunt. (Historia Anglorum, ed. Arnold, p. 2) 

Houston, ‘Concepts’, p. 225, emphasis his.



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[thus the educated have kept a record of events, and this is what most distinguishes rational beings from brutes: for brutish people and animals don’t know where they come from, they don’t know their lineage, the deeds and fortunes of their homeland, nor do they want to know.]

Henry, like the Perceforest author, equates ‘primitive’ people with beasts, lacking any sense of a collective identity that has evolved through time. The inhabitants of the Scottish wilderness are on the brink of losing their place in history altogether, and hence their power, as rational subjects, to define a collective identity through a shared series of meaningful events. Their story could only be retrieved because of the presence of a man old enough to remember hearing it from his father; once he was dead, we must assume, the people’s Trojan origins would have been lost forever. In contrast, when Estonné returns to Royauville after an absence of some twenty years, he is struck by the signs of human progress that are everywhere visible. A well-travelled road fills him with amazement, ‘car il n’avoit pas veu que en Escoce eust chemins sy froyez de chariots ne de chevaulx’ [for he hadn’t seen that Scotland had roads so well-travelled by carts and horses] (II.i, p. 329). He also fails to recognise Royauville itself, ‘car elle estoit tant amendee’ [it was so much improved] (p. 331), and is quick to enquire into the events that fostered this change. Not only a feudal stronghold, Royauville is a centre of commerce and trade. It is also the site of an important victory over Roman invaders, and the story of this battle is one that its inhabitants are eager to tell. Royauville is a place with a history, and its history is in turn a part of world history: a focal point in the vast ongoing saga of relations between Greeks and Trojans as the descendants of both peoples spread themselves across the face of Europe. Naming is part of this process of mapping and networking, applicable to both people and places. These names reflect their status as seen by the Greek rulers; as Zumthor has commented, ‘Nommer un lieu, c’est en prendre possession’ [To name a place is to take possession of it]. The little girl picked up by Estonné, for example, is sent to live at the royal court. When Gadifer next sees her there it is clear that she still feels the power of the queen in defining her identity, for when he asks what her name is, she replies that ‘madame la royne veult que je soye appellee Priande’ [Madame the queen wants me to be called Priande] (p. 21). The queen then intervenes to explain, reminding Gadifer that he had sent the girl with a message stating that she was of the lineage of King Priam: Et pour ce qu’elle ne me sceut a dire comment elle estoit appellee, je l’ay appellee depuis Priande a la recommendacion de sa lignie, qui ne fait pas a oublier. (p. 21) [Since she couldn’t tell me her name, I’ve called her Priande in honour of her lineage, which shouldn’t be forgotten.] 

Zumthor, Mesure, p. 54.

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It is not entirely clear why Priande could not give her name; perhaps she did not have one. But now that she is officially recognised as part of the Trojan diaspora, and of royal descent, that dynastic and ethnic past becomes the determining factor of her identity. Enshrined in her very name, it cannot now be forgotten. Again, one can make an analogy with Chrétien’s Perceval. Asked by the knight who accosts him in the forest what his name is, Perceval replies that his name is ‘Biax Filz’ [Fair Son]; upon further questioning, that his ‘autre non’ [other name] is ‘Biau Frere’ [Fair Brother]; and finally that his ‘droit non’ [true name] is ‘Biau Sire’ [Fair Lord] (ed. Lecoy, vv. 345–52). The first two names that he comes up with are, of course, applicable only within a family group: they are relationship-specific and could not be used by any of his new acquaintances. As if dimly aware of this, Perceval designates as his ‘droit non’ the title with which he is addressed by those who work on his mother’s lands. As a marker of social status rather than blood relationship, ‘sire’ is indeed a form of address that can follow Perceval wherever he goes. But it is still generic and will not serve to identify him as an individual once he has entered the world at large, where there are many who can claim that title. It is as though, at this stage of his life, Perceval cannot conceive of any name other than one that expresses the feudal or familial relationship between him and his interlocutor. It is only much later, after having become a knight, received his education in chivalry, proved himself in the defence of Blanchefleur, and had his disastrous visit to the Grail Castle, that he will produce, as if from some subconscious inkling, the name that will serve to identify him in his public career: Et cil qui son non ne savoit

devine et dit que il avoit Percevax li Galois a non.  (vv. 3559–61) [And not knowing his name, he took a guess and said that his name was Perceval the Welshman.]

Only at this point does Perceval acknowledge a name that can designate his identity in a more absolute fashion, holding true in the eyes of everyone. His identity, a complex mix of ethnicity, genealogy, class, feudal allegiance, and personal achievement (or failure), resides within himself rather than simply mirroring his relationship with each individual interlocutor. In the same way Priande will no longer be simply ‘la pucellote’ [the little girl], or ‘la fille de ma fille’ [my daughter’s daughter] as the old man identifies her, but a courtly lady in her own right. Not only have people begun to emerge as individuals in need of names, but also the undifferentiated space of the Scottish wilderness has begun to coalesce into recognisable and individualised places that are equally in need of names. Gadifer first designates the new town he is building as ‘Sauvage’. Its salient feature at this stage is that it is located in the wilds of the forest. But after a fire 

See Johnson, ‘Parzival’; Dennis Green, ‘Art’.



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burns down the forest, clearing the way for a road to the next town, the city is no longer isolated from the rest of the world. And so Gadifer changes its name to Royauville. Paul Carter, commenting on the process of naming in the European voyages of the colonial era, stresses the importance of the cultural place where spatial history begins: not in a particular year, nor in a particular place, but in the act of naming. For by the act of placenaming, space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a space with a history.10

From an undifferentiated, unmarked wilderness area this location has moved to being first a forest outpost and now a proper city. Moreover, now that Royauville is a named and recognisable place it can enter into a system of feudal exchange, and Gadifer immediately uses it in this way. He gives it to Estonné, who promptly sees to the construction of a castle and selects one of his men to remain there as governor. Though a cultural place needs to be distinct from its surroundings, it must not be isolated either. Thus the fire that breaks out shortly after Gadifer’s arrival, a potential disaster resulting from the people’s ignorance – they have never before seen fire and have no concept of how to manage it – turns out to be a blessing. With the undergrowth burnt off, Gadifer easily constructs a road, calling it ‘Brulé Chemin’. He then attends to the installation of signposts: Et puis commanda a ung ouvrier qu’il ne cessast, sy eust fait et atachié signes d’une main de bois d’arbre en arbre pour avoir droicte voie et certaine jusques au Chastel du Chief, car il vouloit que ceulx de la Ville Royalle aprinssent a aler hors de leurs lieux. (p. 18) [And then he ordered a workman not to stop until he had made and attached wooden signs from tree to tree, clearly marking the path to Chastel du Chief, for he wanted the people of Royauville to learn how to leave their own area.]

The laying out of roads and signposts creates an idea of the kingdom as organised geography, within which a complex and multifaceted narrative can unfold. The association of road-building with colonial rule is highlighted through its importance as one of Gadifer’s foundational gestures. His status as the founder of towns and the builder of roads helps to identify him as a rival to rulers of Trojan descent – most notably the Romans – to whom such works are normally attributed. He founds no fewer than eighteen towns on his initial visit, all inhabited by people who had previously been living ‘ainsi que bestes’ [like beasts], and 10 Carter, ‘Spatial History’, p. 377, emphasis his. See also Warren, who notes the ‘intensive colonial pedagogy of naming and narration’ in the prose Alexander (‘Take the World’, p. 145). Warren also comments on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s description of British topography in History, pp. 3–9, 30–43.

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these in turn allow for distinctions between insiders and outsiders, residents and strangers, as well as providing points of reference in the landscape. The Scottish wilderness is now demarcated by a distinction between town and countryside; it is now possible to move through the land with direction, from one known place to another. It is possible, indeed necessary, to make choices about which route one will take, which road one will follow. These diverging roads figure in the subsequent narrative, providing opportunities for knights to separate and enter into different adventures. At one point – to take but a single example – Lyonnel and Troïlus, riding through the Scottish forest, decide that it is necessary to separate so that each can go in search of his beloved. Troïlus thus resolves that ‘au premier chemin que nous trouverons, que la departie en soit faitte’ [we should separate at the first road we find] (III. i, p. 293). The companions duly part as soon as they come upon ‘ung chemin qui se partoit en deux’ [a road that split into two ways] (p. 297), riding off each into his own adventure. The roads are the visible mapping of the many narrative threads that make up the romance, and thus the history of Greco-Trojan Britain: intersecting, converging and diverging as the knights meet up or go their separate ways.11 This model of locating culture within spatial and temporal networks, and inscribing civilisation onto the land itself, is repeated elsewhere in the romance. As Szkilnik points out, the evil king Aroès, whose story is told in Book Three, tries to exist outside of history.12 An unscrupulous practitioner of magic, Aroès dazzles his people with regular displays of what they take to be the souls of their friends, relatives, and ancestors in either paradise or hell. These hallucinatory spectacles attempt to nullify the passage of time, so that everyone who ever lived on the island is portrayed as eternally present and eternally the king’s subject, whether in life or in death. With his claims of immortality and divinity, Aroès himself proposes to transcend time and history. His incestuous intention of marrying his own daughter further reflects his fantasy of transcending generations, of being the eternal and unchanging father and bridegroom to a potentially endless series of virginal daughter-wives. After the cataclysmic destruction of Aroès and his once mountainous island, there remains a flat and featureless stretch of land, ‘toute onnye . . . et de couleur de sablon sans quelque couleur d’arbres ne d’herbes’ [entirely smooth . . . and the colour of sand, with no sign of trees or plants] (III.ii, p. 121). This land is an empty, undifferentiated space ready to be named, repopulated, and incorpo11 For comments on the significance of ‘la route’, see Zumthor, Mesure, pp. 167-83. As Zumthor notes, ‘Le chemin médiéval . . . profondément inscrit dans la mémoire de chacun, dans les traditions locales, est hommage à l’espace: chaque tronçon en invite à la halte et porte une signification originale – originaire. Chaque carrefour s’ouvre sur un horizon mythique’ [The medieval road . . . profoundly inscribed in each person’s memory, in local traditions, is an homage to space: each section is an invitation to stop and carries an original – or originary – meaning. Each crossroads opens out on a mythical horizon] (p. 173). 12 Szkilnik, ‘Aroès’.



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rated into the British world; it is in fact the as yet uninhabited Ireland.13 Aroès’s daughter Flamine, who has been rescued by the young prince Gadifer, watches the destruction of her homeland from a ship at sea and is overjoyed to see the new land appear as the waters recede. At once she names the land ‘Islangue’ and declares her intention to repopulate it. Again it is a royal gaze that looks out on to a barren landscape and sees a potential society, a kingdom governed by law. The narrative of taming the wilderness, establishing legal and political structures, and entering history is also developed in the account of Gadifer’s brother, Perceforest, king of England. In both cases, the Greek sovereign imposes his view of history – the history that defines him as ruler – on to the land through, in part, the delineation of places.14 The Perceforest author’s attention to this process reflects what Johannes Fabian has termed the ‘spatialization of consciousness’, itself linked to ancient and medieval arts of memory based on locational mnemonics: topoi, places, in the mind that serve to organize information and store it for ready retrieval.15 This practice has been linked by Mary Carruthers to the structure of medieval narrative: Locational mnemonics help to account for the ‘episodic’ quality of romance narrative, for like beads on a string or like rooms in a house plan, the story moves from one ‘place’ to the next, each location ‘gathering in’ images charged with emotional content which serve to focus the matter.16

Carruthers’ remarks would apply not only to the structure of Perceforest as a romance, but also to the spatial and temporal mapping that, in its guise as a supposed chronicle, it charts. As Alexander’s anointed kings take possession of Britain, we witness the construction, as Fabian put it, of ‘ordered Space and Time – a cosmos – for Western society to inhabit’ (pp. 111–12). The island of Great Britain, once of so little importance that it was not even worth invading, will thus become the resplendent setting for a history encompassing not only Gadifer and Perceforest, but also Arthur and the Round Table, the Grail Quest, and ultimately the Plantagenets themselves, for whose ally and in-law Perceforest was written.

Living under the Law Gadifer’s acts as he takes possession of Scotland reflect another important theme of Perceforest overall: like Perceforest, he inaugurates his rule with a founding law. Perceforest declares rape a capital offence, and Gadifer has people publicly 13 14

Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Géographie’, p. 282. On medieval geography and cartography, see Tomasch and Gilles, eds, Text and ­Territory. 15 Fabian, Time, p. 111. 16 Carruthers, ‘Seeing’, p. 102.

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whipped for failure to respect private property. This public punishment, described as a carefully orchestrated performance of royal power, is a key moment in the consolidation of Gadifer’s kingdom. The need for punishment arises as the town of Royauville is being built and those who are still homeless begin to invade the existing houses, ousting the rightful inhabitants. Gadifer reacts by setting up a whipping post in the town centre and flogging the offenders until the blood runs down their bodies, after which he issues a proclamation: Et puis fist crier devant tout le peuple qui la estoit assemblé que quiconques tolroit a son voisin maison ne quelque chose que ce fust, il seroit batu en l’estache jusques au sang. (II.i, p. 16) [And then he had it cried before all the people who were gathered there that if anyone took a house or anything else from his neighbour, he would be beaten until the blood flowed.]

Gadifer’s use of punishment as a spectacle is designed to instill fear not only in the perpetrators but also in those who merely watch. It is a visible staging of the law, inflicted onto the bodies of the guilty, imprinted in the memory of the observers through the blood that they see flowing, and emblematically on view at all times through the permanent presence of the whipping post itself. As such it is completely successful: Quant le peuple eut veu celle justice et le cry que le roy fist faire, il n’y eut cellui qui ne tremblast tout de paour, dont il n’y eut celluy qui osast puis meffaire a son voisin. Et quant il avenoit que l’un tençoit a l’autre, ceulx qui les oyoient venoient a eulx et leur disoient: ‘Soyez en paix que vous ne soyez batuz a l’estache!’ Et ceulx se taisoient quant ilz oyoient parler de l’estache, car trop le doubtoient. (p. 17) [When the people saw the justice and the cry that the king had done, there was no one who didn’t tremble with fear, and thus there was no one who would dare to wrong his neighbour. And if there was a quarrel, those who overheard it would go and say to them: ‘Be quiet or you’ll be beaten at the whipping post!’ And they would fall silent when they heard talk of the whipping post, for they feared it greatly.]

The fear of punishment inscribes itself in the very language of the Scottish subjects, the estache becoming a cultural icon for the horror of transgression. Fully internalised, this spectre of corporal punishment becomes a means of policing both oneself and others. Though civilisation is clearly presented as a good thing, still its imposition is not without ambivalence. The rule of law instills fear and constraint, even as the advent of civilisation bestows luxuries and pleasures. This ambivalence is signalled in Gadifer’s promise – or is it a threat? – as he reveals his sovereignty to those who have just become his subjects:



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Sy vous prie que vous soyez quoys et paisibles et sy creez conseil, par quoy on vous puist aprendre quelle chose est bien et mal et que vous soyez de plus honneste vie, car vous estes en si bon paÿs que, s’il est qui vous aprenne a gaigner et a ouvrer, vous serez tantost en bel estat et honneste. (p. 15) [I beg you to be quiet and peaceful and take my advice, whereby you can learn the meaning of good and evil and you can lead a more respectable life, for you are in such a good land that if someone teaches you how to work and earn a living, you will soon be in a better and more respectable state.]

The people’s reaction – have they any choice? – is unequivocal: ‘Nous le ferons voulentiers’ [we will gladly do that] (ibid.). Or at least so we are told. In fact, the situation is perhaps not quite as clear as it at first seems, for only a few lines later the old man is being asked to explain the king’s words to ‘ceulx qui n’avoient mie entendu le roy’ [those who hadn’t understood the king at all] (ibid.). In this authorial assurance of the people’s joyous acceptance of Gadifer’s rule of law, interwoven with an equally clear acknowledgment that direct communication was impossible, we can already glimpse the ambiguity of the transition they are making. The ‘savages’ learn the difference between good and evil: that is, they lose a certain innocence, and acquire a rule of law. The allusion to Original Sin is unmistakable and links this founding moment to others. Not only expulsion from Eden, with the agricultural and domestic labour that ensued and the advent of crime and punishment. But also the fall from the classical Golden Age, characterised by human exploitation of nature and the growth of cities and commerce. Elsewhere the text hints at a nostalgic identification of primitivism, simplicity, and purity of heart. We learn, for example, that the knights were of stronger constitutions ‘then’ than ‘now’, capable of going for days at a time without food. Despite their paganism, many ‘at that time’ refrained from ornamenting their temples with costly and distracting images, contenting themselves with a simple representation of the deity to whom the temple was dedicated, and creating an atmosphere of meditation and prayer. And when a tournament is held to mark the restoration of the kingdom after the Roman invasion, the young men and women who gather at the Perron Merveilleux indulge in a virtual orgy, justified by the narrator under the guise of ‘nature’: La fut faitte mainte acointise sans convoitise ne trahison, ains par plaisance et amour naturelle, dont maint preudhommes et vaillans dames furent puis engendrés qui raemplirent le païs. (IV.ii, p. 1129) [Then many an acquaintance was made with no selfish desire or treachery, through attraction and natural love, whereby many worthy men and valiant ladies were engendered, who populated the land.]

This ecstatic night, carried out in a lush flowery meadow that is ‘doulce et moiste

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et souefve, clere et delictant pour la lueur de la lune’ [sweet and moist and soft, bright and lovely in the moonlight] (p. 1135), is highly evocative of standard descriptions of the Golden Age as a time of untrammelled sexual pleasure, pursued in an idyllic pastoral setting. This last detail is particularly striking in view of the importance attributed elsewhere in the text to the institution of marriage, and to the need for a protracted courtship in which a knight proves his worth before daring to expect any sexual favours from his beloved. The text overall maintains a double focus, whereby the moral prescriptions, legal constraints, and material luxuries of aristocratic society can be a sign both of an advanced civilisation, and of cultural decadence. This ambivalence is reminiscent of the antithesis between ‘high culture’ and ‘folk culture’ traced throughout the modern period by Robert Young, who comments that ‘the notion of culture developed so that it was . . . both civilization and the critique of civilization, and this characteristic form of self-alienation has marked culture from the very start’.17 Clearly, well before the advent of Enlightenment and Romantic debates about culture and civilisation, European thought already followed this double track, and the ‘self-alienation’ of culture leaves its trace in Perceforest. For the most part, nonetheless, the historical vision expressed in Perceforest diverges from the idealisation of the primitive past outlined in such texts as the Roman de la Rose. Instead it resembles that elaborated in the Cité des dames, which also ascribes a positive value to ‘civilisation’ with its blessings of education, material comfort, and social organisation.18 As in other medieval and early modern depictions of the ‘noble savage’, whether set in the distant past or in the exotic lands of the New World, the people of the Scottish Wilds are characterised in terms of lack.19 And in the Scottish Wilds, as in early descriptions of the New World Indians by such explorers as Jacques Cartier, this lack is not a blessing but a deprivation. Rather than living in idyllic bliss, the people of Scotland, in their extreme ignorance and need, are fertile ground for the transplantation of Greek social, cultural, and economic institutions. The Perceforest author’s imaginative representation is the antecedent to claims by Columbus, Cartier, and others that the ‘savages’ they encountered would be easy targets for conversion to Christianity because they lacked any religious beliefs of their own: a tabula rasa on which the coloniser can inscribe his laws and customs.20 17 18

Young, Colonial Desire, p. 53. The myth of the Golden Age, with its associations of sexual freedom outside the bonds of marriage, is mocked in the ‘Conte de la Rose’ episode (IV.i, pp. 331-86), where a knight who wrongly suspects his wife of infidelity characterises the bachelor life as a state of natural freedom, innocence, and plenitude, only to be chastised for his folly by a group of happily married knights; see my ‘Visualizing the Feminine’. On the Cité, see Brown-Grant, ‘Décadence ou progrès?’ 19 For an overview of such depictions, see Todorov, Nous et les autres, pp. 355–76. 20 See Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, pp. 103–4; Gagnon and Petel, Hommes effarables, pp. 98–102.



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Perhaps most importantly of all, however, the state that characterises the people of Scotland is not actually one of lack in the sense of primal innocence, but one of loss and degeneration. As if in answer to the conflicted sense of civilisation as both progress and decline, Perceforest thus offers a second duality whereby the culture brought by Gadifer is both an imposition and a restoration. Gadifer’s phrase reminds us that in a fallen world, a knowledge of good and evil is necessary, for it is only through a knowledge of moral law, enforced by threat of punishment, that humankind can protect itself from an otherwise inevitable slide into sin and savagery. If civilisation is a fall from innocence, the wild state of the Scottish Trojans is no less a precipitous fall from culture. Their ancestors had lived in a glorious city famed for its wealth, learning, artistry, and military might. And yet of course these people are not Greeks but Trojans, survivors of a culture twice destroyed by the Greeks. How then should we interpret this story of a Greek king bringing civilisation to a race of Trojans who have reverted to savagery?

Colonial Subjecthood: Imposition or Restoration? It is impossible to read Perceforest without bearing in mind the backdrop of the Trojan War. As the Scottish subjects recover their Trojan identity and their past, they emerge as people who were conquered and exiled by the Greeks; and now they are once again being ruled by a Greek king. In fleeing the destruction of Troy, their ancestors attempted to resist Greek hegemony, to preserve some measure of Trojan identity and autonomy. We see that this Trojan-ness does indeed shape their identity, but the very fact of being Trojan now includes the condition of having been conquered by Greeks. Though the names of the Scottish aristocracy may reflect a glorious Trojan heritage – Priande, for example, or her brother Troïlus – still that Trojan identity was recovered only at the price of becoming the subjects of a Greek king. This dual context for defining the people of Britain – the grandeur and the failure that was Troy – will be a recurring theme as the romance unfolds its tale of British history. In this tension between the imposition and the restoration of identity, we are reminded once again of Chrétien’s Perceval, a simple Welshman unable to comprehend chivalry but also of noble lineage. The process by which he becomes a knight entails the erasure of his Welsh ethnicity and the suppression of his mother’s teachings, yet it is also a restoration of his true identity.21 The knights who meet him in the forest scornfully dismiss him as typical of his race, telling their companion: Sire, sachiez bien antreset que Galois sont tuit par nature 21 See Cohen, ‘Hybrids’. On Chrétien’s Conte du Graal as a source for Gadifer’s encounter with Priande and her people, see Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et Chrétien’.

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plus fol que bestes an pasture. Cist est ausi com une beste.  (ed. Lecoy, vv. 240–3) [Sire, you should know that the Welsh are more senseless than grazing cattle. This lad is no different from an animal.]

Chrétien also notes that Perceval’s clothing is entirely ‘a la guise / de Gales’ [in Welsh style] (vv. 498–9). Only gradually, and not always gracefully, will he give up these signs of Welshness to replace them with the signs of knighthood. Yet if Perceval’s abandonment of his mother is a sin that will haunt him forever after, it nonetheless leads to a reconnection with his extended family and a recovery of his aristocratic inheritance. The fissures in his identity mean that he will always be alienated from some part of his familial origins, always seeking to integrate the conflicting, indeed mutually exclusive, elements that have shaped his persona. Perceval’s story is a long, painful struggle to master a foreign and incomprehensible culture that is also his birthright and his destiny. This complex tale of alienation that is also recovery is a literary precedent for the depiction in Perceforest of the young British knights, such as Lyonnel or Troïlus, who struggle to craft an identity as colonial subjects, poised precariously between chivalric greatness and ethnic inferiority. If the story of Gadifer’s ‘first encounter’ with the Trojano-Scots entails a double focus on colonial rule as both an imposition and a restoration of culture, a fall from innocence that is also an emergence from lawless savagery, we can discern a similar double focus in the portrayal of the people themselves. It is useful here to invoke Homi Bhabha’s distinction of colonial attitudes as grounded in either menace or mimicry.22 In Bhabha’s formulation: The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is almost total but not quite. (p. 91, emphasis his)

What I have described as a tension between imposition and restoration can also be viewed in terms of this tension or vacillation between mimicry and menace, or between a nearly invisible and a nearly total sense of difference. At first encounter, the Scottish people seem to be almost wholly different from Gadifer and his knights, and menacing in the extreme. They wear skins rather than clothes, their hair is long and unkempt, they speak an incomprehensible language and manifest only utter terror or aggressive ferocity. Moreover, in this uncivilised realm, it is not the men but the women who fight. This turn of events violates the normal rules of chivalric warfare and creates a situation that Gadifer and his knights cannot easily cope with: their lives are in danger, but they cannot fight women with honour. They must make do by defending themselves with

22

Bhabha, Location, pp. 85–92.



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their shields, using only the flat sides of their swords and even that only as a last resort. Subduing these creatures is of the utmost importance, as Gadifer states: Il nous convient faire que ceste ignorante gent et sauvaige soit ramenee a nostre congnoissance affin qu’il recongnoissent a avoir seigneur. Autrement en porroit yssir en pou de temps ung peril qui porroit grever et nous et aultruy. (II.i, p. 7) [We must see to it that this savage and ignorant people are brought to know us so that they recognize their lord. Otherwise, there could soon be a danger that would hurt us and others.]

The savagery of the people and their ignorance of Gadifer’s sovereignty pose not only an immediate threat to his entourage, but also a larger and more ominous threat to the kingdom at large. Yet these are still people, and however ferocious the women may be they are still women, protected by the chivalric code that says that a knight can fight only against one who is equally armed, and that ladies are to be honoured. Gadifer’s orders reflect the ambiguous status of these colonial subjects, uncourtly and unashamed in their nakedness. While he considers them ‘toutes dervees’ [completely mad], he also insists that killing them would be ‘trop grant honte pour nous’ [terribly shameful for us] (p. 8). His instructions are telling: Et se neccessité est de vous deffendre, sy les ferez du plat de voz espees, car mauvaise foulure est que de truye! (ibid.) [And if you must defend yourself, hit them with the flat side of your sword, for it is bad to harm a sow.]

Shameful it may be for a knight to use the cutting edge of a sword against a woman – but the term ‘truye’ reminds us that in this case, it may be more because their bestial lowliness would defile his noble weapon, than because of any protected status as honoured ladies. Still, it is recognition of their common humanity that forces Gadifer to limit the force with which his men can react. This sense of menace, this perception of ‘a difference that is almost total but not quite’, is, as we have seen, followed in short order by a recognition of these people as almost wholly familiar, though still not quite. Despite their ­illustrious origins, their cultural and linguistic decline has brought them to a point of no return: they cannot civilise themselves, and are dependent on their Greek king. Like Perceval, whose sole desire once he saw a knight was to become one himself, the Scots now adopt a posture of mimicry that is almost comical in its enthusiasm. At this point Gadifer has stated only that he wishes to assemble the people into a communal living arrangement and to bring them ‘en meilleur estat’ (p. 13). What the old man relays to the populace, however, goes a bit further:

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Adont leur dist le preudomme qu’ilz n’eussent pas paour de celle gent . . . mais ilz voulsissent venir parler a leur seigneur bellement, et il les aprendroit comment ilz seroient telz qu’ilz sont. (ibid.) [Then the worthy man told them that they shouldn’t be afraid of these people . . . but that they should come and speak nicely to their lord, and he would teach them to be just like his people.]

Already the good will of the new ruler has been restated as the intention of teaching his subjects how to be like himself. Despite having thought up until that moment that the new arrivals were anthropophagic demons, the people welcome this prospect of being re-formed in the image of their king with extravagant displays of joy: ‘Adont commencerent a danser pardevant luy et dirent qu’ilz n’avroient plus paour d’eulx’ [then they began dancing before him, and said they were no longer afraid] (ibid.). The scene imagined here is strikingly similar to those described by early explorers of the New World. Gadifer and his knights encounter an initially hostile reception, marked by a crazed frenzy of violence and fear, but followed in short order by awe at the superhuman splendour of the newcomers, an eagerness to submit to their rule, and a joyous reception of the new king. The first items of admiration and exchange are articles of clothing, a foreign concept to the benighted natives. The king’s principal concern is to lead his new subjects from lawless ignorance into civilised propriety. And despite the lack of a common language, initial bewilderment soon gives way to harmonious accord. By way of comparison one might consider the account given by Sir Francis Drake’s chaplain, Francis Fletcher, of their party’s encounter with the Miwok on the Pacific coast of North America in 1579. The latter launch an abortive attack, soon abandoning their weapons to stare with amazement at their unusual visitors. The English offer gifts of clothing ‘to cover [their] shame’ along with food and drink. Not long afterwards, the Miwok men return with gifts while the women stage a frenzied ‘sacrifice’, ‘crying and shrieking piteously, tearing their flesh with their nails from their cheeks in a monstrous manner’: proof positive, in Fletcher’s view, that the Miwok considered these Europeans to be gods.23 The culmination of Drake’s apotheosis came in another ceremony initiated by the Miwok ‘king’ and a large group of men. And although the Englishmen clearly had no means of understanding a word that was said, nor any access to cultural traditions that might have helped to explain the Miwok’s behaviour, the import of the event seems perfectly straightforward in Fletcher’s interpretation: the king and divers others made several orations, or rather, indeed, if we had understood them, supplications, that he would take the Province and kingdom into his hand, and become their king and patron: making signs that they would resign unto him their right and title in the whole land. 23

Wilson, World, p. 158.



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. . . Adding thereunto (as it might seem) a song and dance of triumph: because they were not only visited of the gods (for so they still judged us to be), but the great and chief God was now become their God, their king and patron, and themselves were become the only happy and blessed people in the world. (pp. 159–60)

The parallels between the fictional Perceforest and Fletcher’s scarcely less imaginative account are not evidence that the one was modelled on the other, but rather that European expectations about ‘first encounters’ with ‘savages’ were shaped by a long tradition of literary depictions, of which Perceforest is a particularly detailed instance. The foreign king, then, emissary of a global empire, comes upon a primitive population who, after some initial confusion, dance with joy at the mere prospect of becoming his subjects. But of course even in the idealised fictions of Perceforest, it is not quite that simple. As we have seen, the euphoric fantasy of fearless solidarity with the king is quickly dispelled when he shows his readiness to punish wrongdoers, thereby instilling a fear that can never be eradicated. From this initial difference that was so unmanageable, then, comes the more manageable, but still absolute, difference of class and ethnicity. Although they will be governed with justice and wisdom by Gadifer, and some of their number will even come to be on intimate terms with the royal family, still these descendants of Trojans will never be able to bridge the divide between sovereign and subject. I have as yet barely touched upon the little girl Priande, seized by Estonné because of her beauty, which he displays to his fellow knights as she struggles, nearly naked, in his grip; who then warms to his attentions; and who is ultimately sent to live at court as a companion to the princess Blanchete. Priande’s ready acceptance of court life continues the pattern of mimicry, as the colonised people move towards greater assimilation with their rulers. Even more striking is the identification of the mission civilisatrice with the establishment of heteronormative sexuality, aided by the sexual curiosity of indigenous women and their instant attraction to foreign men. This theme, of central importance in Perceforest as in later colonial writings, will be examined in detail in Part II. First, however, I wish to examine more fully the text’s portrayal of the complex, and varied, relations between the foreign rulers and the indigenous people, and the means by which a chivalric culture and a rule of law are established in a lawless and degenerate Britain.

2

Testing Boundaries: Colonial Culture and Indigenous Nature Shortly after the two young princes have been knighted, in Perceforest Book Two, Gadifer’s son Nestor and Perceforest’s son Bethidés engage in a ferocious nocturnal battle deep in the forest. Nestor, travelling incognito as the Chevalier Doré, has vowed never to tell another knight his name unless he is conquered in battle; Bethidés, similarly incognito as the Chevalier Blanc, has vowed to determine the name of the Chevalier Doré. Their struggle makes so much noise that it disturbs another knight attempting to sleep in the forest, who is later revealed to be young Gadifer, Nestor’s twin brother. Gadifer, also incognito, attempts to settle the combatants with an appeal to nature: Les arbres et les herbes qui sont croissans sur la terre, que vous gastez et deffoulez en heure qu’elles doivent croistre et alongier et prendre repos et leur nourreçon pour donner aprés en temps avenir au jour aux hommes et aux bestes et aux oiseaulx soustenance et nourreçon par l’ordonnance du Createur, se plaignent de vous, car toute creature doit avoir respit de nuyt. (II.ii, p. 416) [The trees and plants that grow in the ground, which you’re crushing and destroying at a time when they need to grow and take respite and nourishment so that in the future, they can give sustenance and nourishment to men, beasts, and birds as ordained by the Creator – these are complaining of you, for all creatures should rest at night.]

In this vision of the world, humans are included along with ‘toute creature’ as part of a natural order that follows a regular cycle of active days and restful nights. Even plant life is disturbed by the young knights’ unnatural behaviour. But this argument carries little weight in the mind of a young prince fired up with the excitement of his first chivalric oath: Sire chevalier, dist le Chevalier Doré, toute creature est faicte pour servir a l’omme. Et se nous faisons grief aux herbes et aux arbres, souffrir le doivent que de leur seigneur. (ibid.) [‘Sir knight,’ said the Golden Knight, ‘every creature is made to serve man. And if we’re hurting plants and trees, they have to put up with it, as coming from their overlord.’]



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All of creation may indeed form a single system governed by a single ‘law of nature’, but this law is one that privileges humans as overlords to all other species. And accordingly Gadifer replies with a new argument, one grounded entirely in the ethics of chivalric culture: Sire . . . en nulle court il n’est de coustume que bataille se face de chevalier qu’elle ne soit entre .II. soleilz ne il n’est bataille entre preudommes qui se face de nuit, ainçois sont tenuz pour murdriers. (pp. 416–17) [Sir, in no court is it the custom for knights to fight other than between sunup and sundown, nor do worthy men fight at night, or they will be considered murderers.]

The appeal to chivalric ethics has a completely different effect: at once Bethidés acknowledges that ‘vostre querelle a semblance de verité’ [your argument seems truthful] (p. 417). Conforming to chivalric custom – ‘non pour paour, mais pour ce que ne vouldroie estre reprins de vilonnie’ [not through fear, but because I don’t want to be accused of villainy] (p. 418) – the adversaries agree on a time and a place where they might lawfully pursue their battle. This brief exchange illustrates the extent to which the chivalric culture of Perceforest’s Britain perpetuates itself through conformance to an imagined model of excellence, itself transmitted through a combination of peer pressure, instruction from elders, and the public glorification of those deemed successful. Beyond that, it also shows the extent to which this cultural ideology is naturalised: if people have their place in social and feudal hierarchies, so too do animals and even plants, who are bound to serve their human ‘lords’. Though Gadifer and Nestor seem at first glance to be in opposition, in reality both princes agree that nature and culture are subsumed within a single continuum. Elements of nature may, of course, resist human domination, just as humans may be guilty of unnatural and ‘perverse’ behaviour, but in a well-governed kingdom neither situation will be allowed to continue. This chapter will examine Perceforest’s representation of the permeable boundary between wild nature and human culture, asking whether culture is indeed shown to be as all-encompassing as the young knights assert, or whether it might in fact have an ‘outside’, a natural ‘beyond’ from which not just variations between cultures, but culture itself, can be seen as a contingent and mutable construction.

The King and His Kingdom: Nature as a Cultural Space We have seen in Chapter 1 that, as Gadifer processes through Scotland, his royal gaze onto the natural landscape initiates its transformation into a kingdom, and 

On the medieval ideal, derived from Genesis, of human dominance over nature, see Salter, Holy and Noble. For a survey of the nature–culture dichotomy in Western thought, see MacCormack, ‘Nature’.

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this process is completed through his forceful imposition of place names, laws, and land management. Gadifer’s effect on the land is both aesthetic and ethical, as a wild, natural space becomes a beautiful landscape, a setting for the pleasures and the labours of civilisation, and a reflection, in its ordered management, of honest work and good government. Perceforest’s exploration of his own kingdom is imbued with a similar sense of pleasure taken in a landscape whose aesthetic impact lies in its efficacy as an environment for human exploitation. When Perceforest first ventures into the English forest, he is struck by its beauty: Lors regarde et voit la plus belle forest qu’il eust onques veue, car elle estoit aussi onnye que une belle playne ne n’y avoit ne herbe ne buisson, et les arbres qui y estoient estoient si haulx que la flesche du moindre avoit bien soixante piez de long, et estoient sy ordonneement plantez qu’a droite ligne et avoit entre chacun arbre bien l’espace de dix destres. (I.i, 191–92) [Then he looks and sees the most beautiful forest he had ever seen, for it was as flat as a beautiful plain, nor was there grass or underbrush, and the trees were so tall that the trunk of the smallest was a good sixty feet high, and they were so neatly planted that they were in straight rows, and widely spaced.]

Like Gadifer admiring the Scottish Wilds and longing to populate them with towns and fortified cities, Perceforest’s pleasure in the English forests is a delight not in unfettered wilderness, but in a well-managed environment for human habitation, rich in valuable resources. Perceforest’s journey into the forest was motivated in part by a search for timbers for the construction of his castle, and in part by a need to consolidate his power as king by subjugating the forests – then ruled by the lignaige Darnant – to his rule. And what takes shape under his gaze, inspiring feelings of ‘droit deduit’, is a forest that answers to human needs: clear and easy to traverse, neatly planted and well-ordered, a plentiful and readily accessible source of timber and wood. The only drawback to this sylvan bliss is that the forest is in the grip of the wicked clan. Perceforest has already been told that his castle cannot be constructed unless he opens up the forests, since otherwise no workmen will dare to go in search of appropriate timber. And his fateful encounter with Darnant is sparked by an altercation at a spring, which the clan has demarcated as private property from which no one can drink without permission. Protesting that ‘eaue doit estre de commun’ [water should be common to all] (I.i, p. 193), Perceforest rises to the challenge that will lead to the death of Darnant and the demise of the entire clan. Interestingly, then, the management and commercial exploitation of natural resources such as water and wood are the initial focus of Perceforest’s struggle with the clan, to be translated only somewhat later into one of sexual ethics and feminine honour. I will return in Chapter 3 to this conflation of male sexual predation against women, and the predatory exploitation and appropriation of the natural environment.



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This well-kept forest contrasts with the forest that Perceforest sees in an admonitory dream sent by God some twenty years later. The king’s melancholic lethargy has allowed the kingdom to decline into lawlessness and corruption, the worthy knights and able counsellors driven away from court by sycophantic flatterers. This condition of cultural decay is represented in the king’s dream by a vision of an ill-managed forest. Perceforest describes his dream to the hermit Dardanon, whose advice he has sought: Mais quant j’euz bien consideré les estocz, je vey apertement que puis ung pou de temps et par deffaulte de forestier les estocz avoient jecté grans jectons qui commençoient a fourmener les bons arbres, sy que les branches en commençoient a sechier. . . . Et encores croissoit entour les bons arbres ung mauvais arbre qui estoit appellé yerre, qui s’envelopoit entour les bonnes branches qui estoient demourees et leur tolloit le soleil, sy ne pouoient fructifier. (II.i, p. 234) [But when I had looked at the stumps, I saw clearly that in a short time, for lack of a forester, they had sent out long shoots which were damaging the good trees, and their branches were drying out. . . . And also a bad plant called ivy was growing all around the good trees, wrapping around the good branches that remained and blocking the sun, so they couldn’t grow.]

Like an ethical mirror of political and economic management, the landscape reflects the society that it supports; and the most nightmarish image that a king can have, it would seem, is that of his forests run wild. Accompanying the effects of resource management are those of beautification through artifice. As Perceforest’s kingdom begins to thrive, we are told, stately manors come into being, with gardens and landscaped terrains: ‘Et dames et damoiselles de honneur . . . entreprindrent a enrichir et a ediffier beaulx manoirs sur lieux delectables de boys, de rivieres et de fontaines’ [and ladies and damsels at court. . . undertook to enhance and construct beautiful manors in delightful places with woods, rivers, and fountains] (I.ii., ch. 108, fol. 97r). Courts in turn become showcases for crafted treasures of all sorts: ‘Et commencerent a entreprendre de subtiliser a faire nobles vestures et paremens pour donner aux preux chevaliers’ [and they began to work subtly to make noble garments and jewellery to give the worthy knights] (ibid.). We read of metallic birds constructed so that the breeze causes them to sing in perfect imitation of the species that each represents, richly patterned silks worked with images of birds and flowers. Ornamental objects of crystal, gold, and jewels reflect the power of artistry to create a more lovely copy of nature, mimicking its shapes and sounds but arranging them according to aesthetically determined patterns. Such items contribute to the splendour of the court, marking it out as a space of artifice in which human fantasies and desires are the controlling factor. Increasingly, the natural world is but the backdrop, the material support and setting that enables this opulent culture to flourish.

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The aestheticising power of culture is nowhere more evident than in the enchantments wrought by Queen Lydoire. In reaction to the violent, untamed wilderness that surrounds them, the Scottish royal family live in a magically constructed space, barely touching nature at all. Wherever Lydoire goes, there is radiance, perfume, flowers, birdsong. When she and Gadifer arrive at Perceforest’s court for the festival of the Dieu Souverain, for example, they are preceded by an entourage dressed in sparkling, jewelled garments, and the road literally becomes a garden as they approach and pass through it: et tous les chemins, ainsi qu’ilz venoient, estoyent a l’advis des regardans encloz de rosiers a ung lez et a l’autre. Et sachiés que les roses de dessus les rosiers estoient de si haulte couleur en vermeil qu’il sambloit qu’elles fussent de fins rubis. Et les foeilles estoient d’une verte couleur si estincellans qu’elles sambloient de fines esmeraudes. (IV.i, p. 11) [and all the roads, as they came, seemed to the beholders to be lined with rosebushes on both sides. And the roses on the bushes were of such bright red that they seemed like fine rubies. And the leaves were of a green so bright that they seemed like fine emeralds.]

The procession is accompanied not only by visual but also by aural beauty, for the bells on the horses sound so sweetly that ‘nulles melodies a celles n’estoient aucunement a comparer’ [no melodies were at all comparable to these] (p. 12), while the litter in which the royal family itself is sitting gives off ‘telle melodie que les oyans en estoient comme tous ravis’ [such a melody that those hearing it were spellbound] (p. 14). The very presence of Lydoire and her court beautifies the land, in an even more immediate fashion than that whereby Gadifer first transformed a wilderness into a prosperous city. Like the objects produced through the work of artisans, the visual effects of Lydoire’s magic are all the more precious for their insistent artificiality: recognisable as roses, yet somehow more closely resembling rubies and emeralds than actual leaves and flowers.

Colonial Culture, Indigenous Nature: Rulers and Their Subjects The Greek rulers of Britain, then, perceive the landscape as something to be managed, shaped, and ultimately recreated in artificial form for their own pleasure and profit. How, in turn, do they view the indigenous inhabitants of this land, their subjects? We have already seen that the people of the Scottish Wilds are portrayed as barely human. They are ‘bestialz’, ‘gens qui se maintenoient ainsi que bestes’ [bestial, people who behave like beasts] (II.i, pp. 13, 18), and they are initially unable to recognise Gadifer and his knights as members of the same species as themselves. Gadifer graciously addresses them as ‘bonnes gens’ [good people], but the implication is that their human potential will be realised only because of his guiding presence and firm hand. And the bestial aura that



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clings to the indigenous people is reiterated in the punishment of animal metamorphosis that Lydoire metes out not only to Le Tor, whom she holds responsible for the hunting accident that cripples her husband, but also to Estonné, Le Tor’s companion. Le Tor and Estonné are embarking on a military mission on the Continent when Le Tor draws Gadifer’s attention to the boar that later maims him. Neither is present, however, when the tragedy occurs. Their campaign is successful, but they are stranded on the Continent after their ships are burned by enemy forces. Estonné, unaware of Lydoire’s grievance, turns to the lutin Zephir. Zephir, a forerunner to Merlin, is both an incorrigible trickster and a kind of guardian angel to Britain: he actively manipulates lineage through the many marriages and seductions that he arranges, repeatedly rescues knights from evil spirits, enemy kings, and erotic enchantments, dispels a Roman invasion by creating a storm at sea, and generally ensures that the glorious Arthurian future will come to pass. Estonné asks to be taken to Scotland so that he can outfit a ship; Zephir obligingly, if somewhat maliciously, deposits him in the otherwise inaccessible courtyard of the enchanted royal palace. When Lydoire sees him she resolves that he must never be able to fetch Le Tor, and casts a spell: et fist en telle maniere que Estonné, qui estoit au praiel, fut mué en semblance d’un ours a la veue de tous ceulx qui le regardoient, et luy mesme le cuida estre vrayement et eut en luy grant partie de la nature d’un ours. (II.i, p. 322) [and she acted in such a way that Estonné, who was in the yard, was changed into the appearance of a bear in the eyes of everyone who saw him, and he really thought he was one, and to a large extent he acquired the nature of a bear.]

Though Estonné has not literally become a bear, his humanity is hidden by Lydoire’s magical illusion. He spends at least a couple of years in this state, during which he lives as a household pet. He is particularly devoted to Priande, following her closely and eating from her hand; as a result of this devotion, he is given the name Priant. His life as a bear reaches its culmination when two members of the lignaige Darnant attempt to rape Priande and Lyriope, and Estonné/Priant attacks them savagely. Up to this point he has behaved like a bear, albeit a domesticated one, but now, in his rage, he siezes a sword and shield and puts them to good use in the ensuing battle. The sight of the armed bear strikes terror into the hearts of his opponents and fills the royal family with wonder: Sy en avoit le roy et la royne tresgrant merveille comment telle beste, qui est rude et pesant de sa nature, se puet ne scet si bien deffendre ne soy sçavoir si bien couvrir de l’escu ne ferir de l’espee. (p. 327) 

See Bertholot, ‘Zéphyr’; Taylor, ‘Reine Fée’, pp. 84–5. Taylor downplays Zephir’s importance, stressing his role as a shape-shifting trickster.  See Delcourt, ‘Laboratory’ and ‘Magie’.

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[Thus the king and queen marvelled greatly how such a beast, cumbersome and rude in nature, had the knowledge and ability to defend itself, and knew how to cover itself with the shield and strike with the sword.]

It is this gallant behaviour that finally persuades Lydoire to release Estonné from enchantment. Awakening in bewilderment to find himself deep in the woods, he believes his ursine adventure to have been a dream and discovers only much later, to his chagrin, that it did really take place. In this episode Estonné’s character is reduced to its bare essentials: an attachment to Priande, a hatred of the lignaige Darnant, an instinct to defend maidens from rape and the martial skills needed to do so. Heterosexual love, a capacity for both loyalty and homosocial violence, and a mercurial temperment define his nature, one that might characterise an affectionate and rambunctious watchdog. Though Lydoire eventually decides that his humanity should be restored, it is telling that she chooses this means of removing Estonné from his social network. Despite his status as an aristocrat – Comte des Deserts d’Escoce – and a loyal vassal of the king, it is clear that the Greek-born queen views this British lord as little more than an animal, to be trained, confined, or set free according to her whims. In his life as a court pet, Estonné/Priant is comparable to the tame lion cub that Lyonnel brings back from his adventures. Son of the ferocious lions that had virtually depopulated the kingdom of the Estrange Marche, and whom Lyonnel alone is able to kill, the cub attaches itself to Lyonnel in an apparent effort to atone for the ‘crimes’ of its parents. Later it too lives at the Scottish royal court, guarding the Temple de la Franche Garde where Lyonnel’s other trophies are housed and displaying a particular affection for Lyonnel’s beloved, the young princess Blanchete. Though born wild, Lyonnel’s lion has internalised the values of the court and, like Estonné/Priant, is selective in its violence, attacking only those who violate the orders of the queen by entering the temple precinct without permission. Domesticated beast and bestialised man: the lion and the bear, exotic pets at court, are living reminders of the colonial mission civilisatrice and its tendency to blur the distinction between ‘natives’ and beasts in its drive to regulate, refine and re-make what it perceives as a vast, unformed wilderness. The most extreme animal metamorphosis is reserved for Le Tor, whom Lydoire holds directly responsible for Gadifer’s demise. To atone for his carelessness, Le Tor is condemned to a seven-year penance during which he will spend every day as a nine-headed bull, returning to human form at night. His ordeal, while clearly reminiscent of Nebuchadnezzar’s seven-year penitential delusion of being an ox, is even more extreme. Not only must he take on a horrific form – combining the oxlike behaviour of Nebuchadnezzar with the monstrosity of an Apocalyptic beast – but also he must pass back and forth every day across the  The penitential period is reduced to one year when Lyriope agrees to join her future husband in the maison penancière, spending every night in the form of a greyhound.



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divide between the human and the non-human. This ‘penance’ is rationalised as the result of his failure to protect the king, and Lydoire explains that it is intended to make a lasting impression in the collective memory: Et pour ce luy ai je fait porter celle penitence, afin que ceulx qui en orront parler regardent bien devant eulx en conduisant leur prince. (III.iii, p. 185) [And I’ve imposed this penance on him so that those who hear tell of it will pay close attention when escorting their king.]

As a cultural icon, then, the dehumanised Tor represents the ambiguous and precarious position of the indigenous lord. Caught between his urbane foreign monarchs and the wildness of his native land, he is reminded that it is only the pleasure of the sovereign that permits him to stand this side of the line between humans and beasts. If Le Tor’s monstrous metamorphosis itself is more extreme than that of Estonné, the manner of its imposition is also more explicitly disempowering. Le Tor’s ‘penance’ is presented by Lydoire in simple terms: he must don his ‘penitential coat’ whenever he feels the desire to do so. Seemingly, the entire affair is dependent on his voluntary submission. The spell she has cast, however, ensures that he will be gripped with the desire to wear the cotte every morning. Thus not only is Le Tor dehumanised by the ordeal, but also even in human form his desire is subjugated to that of his queen, becoming a desire for his own relegation to monstrous bestiality. Ever the perfect subject, Le Tor finds himself actively seeking his own dehumanisation. This use of the motif of animal metamorphosis to explore the boundaries that define humanity finds many parallels in medieval literary tradition. Paul Freedman has stressed the animalistic depictions of peasants, who occupy ‘an unstable border between human and nonhuman’ in medieval class discourses. J.R. Simpson has shown that medieval writers often portray the state of sin as an internal metamorphosis, whereby the human body becomes the vehicle for a soul that has become a bestial, rather than a divine, likeness. What more appropriate, then, than a penance that writes this sinful bestiality in the body itself, to be erased once the soul has given proof of its humanity? The implication that it is the internalisation of legal and feudal structures that defines the human subject is expressed in a well-known twelfth-century text, Marie de France’s Bisclavret. Like Marie’s knightly werewolf, the bear Priant and the monstrous bull embody



Freedman, Images, p. 250; see also pp. 133–56. On the identification of madmen with animals, see my Madness, pp. 81–8. The association in late medieval thought of culturally unassimilated or alien peoples with the bestial and inhuman is also discussed by Leshock, ‘Religious Geography’, and Salisbury, Beast Within.  Simpson, Animal Body, pp. 11–14, 128–9.

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an adherence to the courtly, chivalric, and legal standards of the realm, and it is this that allows them to be categorised, ultimately, as human subjects. Whether or not he was familiar with Bisclavret, the Perceforest author would certainly have known another twelfth-century werewolf story: the now famous tale in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hiberniae of a man in wolf form who requested a priest to administer last rites to his dying wife, also in wolf form. The two belong to a community that is being punished by St Natal. A couple from the community must spend seven years in wolf form on a certain island; if they survive their ordeal they revert to their human form and return home, to be replaced by another couple similarly transformed. This story has been interpreted by Catherine Karkov as a metaphor for the English conquest of Ireland. The tale is set in an area under English rule. As Karkov shows, the story implies that the Irish are barely distinguishable from beasts, while at the same time stressing that beneath their beastly exterior there lies a human presence, one that can be redeemed and incorporated into the Roman Church – and, of course, into English rule as well. Like the Perceforest episodes, which may have been inspired to some degree by Gerald’s account, the tale of the werewolves offers the comforting message that the indigenous people, though potentially bestial and rebellious, ultimately desire nothing more than to submit to colonial rule and to undergo whatever penance is necessary in order to achieve acceptance into the new order. The boundary between human and beast is further blurred in Ireland, according to Gerald, as a result of the people’s proclivity for sexual relations with animals. He claims, for example, that Lough Neagh was created as the result of a flood sent to annihilate a village whose inhabitants were so thoroughly given over to bestial fornications that the land was polluted forever afterwards, fit only to serve as the bottom of a lake (2.42). As a result of these transgressive unions, furthermore, Gerald asserts that Ireland is populated here and there with hybrid monsters. He cites a bovine man [semibovus vir], offspring of a human man’s sexual union with a cow, as well as a woman who engaged in sexual relations with a goat (2.54, 56). This is an even more lurid means of portraying a similar idea to that suggested in Perceforest: that the indigenous people are somehow closer to nature than their rulers, that for them the boundary between human and animal is permeable, and thus that these people are a threat to cultural stability and must be brought to order. The subtle but all-important boundary between beast and human, then, is  This comparison is noted by Delcourt, ‘Magie’, p. 168. See also my Madness, pp. 192– 9. The strong similarities between the episode of Dorine and Passelion and Marie de France’s Yonec (see below, Chapter 8) suggest that the Perceforest author had at least some knowledge of the Lais.  Karkov, ‘Tales’.  See Knight, ‘Werewolves’. Knight reproduces manuscript illuminations depicting the bovine man, a woman embracing a goat, and another woman embracing a lion (pp. 61–2, figs 2–4). On Gerald’s hybrids, see also Mittman, ‘Other’.



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presented by Gerald as parallel to that between the colonised Irish and their English colonisers; and Perceforest, in a similar vein, associates that boundary with the one dividing Briton (Trojan) nature from colonial Greek culture. The human status of the British populace is defined through their subjection to the Greek monarchs and their incorporation into the legal and cultural structures established by the kings, just as the human status of the Celts is portrayed by Gerald as dependent on their conformance to Roman Catholicism and English rule. The bestial metamorphoses inflicted by Lydoire continue the pattern of Gadifer’s whipping post. In both cases the punishment is one that targets the bodies of the perpetrators, forcing them literally to embody and live out their deviance. The punishment serves the purpose both of individual penance, binding the chastened culprit more tightly to the law of the realm, and of public spectacle, providing a graphic warning to be internalised by all present and future subjects. The contrast between a law that binds and one that excludes is highlighted in that between the dramatic punishments inflicted on such figures as Le Tor and Estonné, and the even more definitive disappearance of the villainous Harban, or the lifelong agony that is the lot of the old woman responsible for Gadifer’s affliction.10 And it is also, as we will see, illustrated in the contrast between Gadifer’s governance and that of Perceforest, who hunts down an enemy that is not and never can be incorporated into his kingdom, and must be exterminated or driven into continental exile. The distinction between these two complementary impositions of law rests ultimately on a distinction between subjects, or potential subjects, and those definitively excluded from that status. A manipulation of the categories of human and nonhuman is one way that this distinction can be expressed. Conformance to the law offers the only possibility of human status as subjects of the king. Yet paradoxically, through the analogy of human beings as lords of the natural world, this very condition aligns the Britons with the flora and fauna of their homeland, in subjugation to their foreign rulers. ‘Good’ subjects, in effect, are like domesticatable animals that can serve their human masters, live at court or in town, and contribute their labour to farming, commerce, warfare, or entertainment. ‘Bad’ subjects, like vermin or dangerous predators, must be eliminated.11 But for all the confidence with which the Greek sovereigns impose their laws 10 Harban, a Scottish knight, steals the trophies of Lyonnel’s love service to Blanchete, and uses them in an attempt to win the princess’s hand himself. He is ultimately carried off by demons. The old woman poisons Gadifer’s hunting wound, maiming him for life; as a result, she spends the rest of her life in a pit of stinging vipers and other vermin. 11 Salter, in his discussion of St Francis and the wolf, notes that far from expressing a respect for the wolf as ‘an autonomous being in his own right’, the saint offered the creature a choice between being put to death, or living a domesticated life in conformance with society’s rules (Holy and Noble, pp. 25–32). Salter concludes that the legends of St Francis support the pervasive medieval view that ‘the original condition of the animal kingdom was one of natural servility and obedience to humanity’ (p. 37).

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and exploit the resources of their newly acquired lands, there are many indications within Perceforest that the totalising myth of culture is not as simple as it may seem. The forests and fens of Britain contain surprises for which the urbane Greeks are ill prepared; and in more distant islands, not yet subject to human colonisation in any form, adventuring knights encounter an existence so alien that flight is the only viable response.

An Irreducible Nature? When Gadifer learns that his forests are home to a particularly fierce boar, his instant reaction is to hunt it down. He wants not to kill the dangerous beast in its sleep – as recommended by his huntsman – but to enjoy its demise through the cultural ritual of the hunt: Comment! maistre . . . se vous estes murdrier de bestes, pour ce ne le voulons pas estre. J’en vueil avoir le deduit de le chassier et de l’occire quant il sera bersé. (II.i, p. 46) [What! Master . . . if you are the murderer of animals, still I don’t want to be. I want to have the pleasure of hunting him and killing him when he’s cornered.]

When warned of the possible danger, Gadifer is unconcerned: Sire, dist le veneur, vous ferez vostre vouloir, mais l’en dit par la forest qu’il est destiné que celluy qui l’occira en demourra mehaignié. – Taiz toy, dist le roy. Je ne croy en leurs sors ne en leurs devinemens. (ibid.) [‘Sire,’ said the huntsman, ‘you will do as you wish, but it is said in the forest that whoever kills him is destined to be maimed for life.’ ‘Be quiet,’ said the king. ‘I don’t believe in their superstitions and their prophecies.’]

Both England and Scotland face an internal danger that must be countered by a foreign king. But whereas Perceforest is menaced by the ‘perversity’ of a rival culture, Gadifer faces a natural danger; and, with colonial contempt for indigenous folkloric traditions, he makes the fatal error of judgment that will lead to his lifelong infirmity. The boar that wounds Gadifer becomes an emblem for the violent potential of the Scottish landscape. Seemingly immortal, it is hunted by successive generations of the royal family, recognisable by the chunk of Gadifer’s sword that remains embedded in its back. This danger lurking in the wilderness does not succumb until it is finally slain by Gadifer’s great-grandson Olofer, towards the end of the romance. Together with the mysterious and frightening beste glatis-



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sant, the boar haunts the Scottish forest.12 This bestial presence complements the alien culture that haunts the forests of England. The ferocious boar embodies the power of the natural world to elude containment and suppression within the structures of culture. Clearly, Gadifer erred in his lack of respect for local traditions. And his Scottish companions might have taken more care to assist and protect their king in this wild environment; such, at any rate, is Lydoire’s belief. But was Gadifer fundamentally wrong in wishing to kill the boar through the ceremony of the hunt rather than simply to exterminate it? The narrator does not offer a clear judgment in this regard, but there are indications that preserving the rules of the aristocratic hunt could be seen as part of Gadifer’s overall civilising mission. In his initial progression through the kingdom, he and his men visit every town, enquiring ‘de leurs loix et de leurs coustumes. Et se elles luy sembloient bonnes, il les confermoit; et se malles luy sembloient, il les condempnoit et establissoit bonnes’ [about their laws and customs. And if they seemed to him good, he confirmed them, and if they seemed to him bad, he condemned them and established good ones] (II.i, p. 5). Jacques Le Goff, commenting on medieval legends of confrontations between saints and dragons, notes that those beasts are a ‘symbol of hostile nature’ that is to be ‘contained and tamed rather than annihilated’.13 In a similar vein, Gadifer’s reign, with its attention to the standardisation of laws, the clearing of lands, the building of roads, and the establishment of cities as centres of trade and commerce, requires an orderly domestication of the wilderness that rises above the brute struggle for survival. In this sense Gadifer’s accident has a tragic dimension as a casualty of the clash between civilisation and raw nature, a noble battle that can only be won, if at all, in the long course of history. The deadly face of nature takes on an even more interesting aspect with the other beast unique to the British forests, the ‘baying beast’ or beste glatissant. This creature is described as a hybrid mixture of different animals, having the body of a leopard, the feet of a stag, the hindquarters of a lion, and the head of serpent, together with a fantastic neck whose iridescent colours, shimmering in the sunlight, entrance all who behold it, humans and animals alike.14 It is precisely the compelling, irresistible beauty of the beast’s neck that poses such a lethal danger: Aincores avecq ce il leur sambloit parfois dedens ce flamboiement de couleurs qu’ilz veissent pucelles, dames et damoiselles ou chevaliers, selon ce que les courages de ceulx qui la regardoient estoient affectez. Et 12

On the beste glatissant, already present in various thirteenth-century romances, see Roussineau, III.ii, pp. xx–xxiii. 13 Le Goff, ‘Ecclesiastical Culture’, p. 173. See also Riches, ‘Encountering the Monstrous’. 14 See Roussel, ‘Jeu des formes’; Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest’ and ‘Deceptions’, pp. 422–3. Ferlampin-Acher reproduces illuminations of the beste glatissant from two Perceforest manuscripts in ‘Peur du monstre’, pp. 133–4.

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lors ilz estoient tellement ravis en ce tant plaisant regard qu’il n’y avoit en eulx sens ne advis . . . Et quant celle beste veoit ces oiseaulx ou autres bestes, hommes ou femmes, et qu’ilz estoient du tout applicquié a la regarder, de sa nature elle leur couroit seure et les estrangloit, et n’avoit autre praticque en elle de pourchassier sa pasture. (III.ii, pp. 215–16) [And so it might seem to them that in this blaze of colours they saw maidens, ladies or damsels, or knights, depending on what was in the hearts of the beholders. And then they were so entranced by this delightful vision that they lost their senses... And when this beast saw these birds or other animals, men, or women, and that they were completely absorbed in gazing upon it, by its nature it would pounce on them and kill them, and it had no other way of catching its prey.]

The beste glatissant erases all distinctions not only between species of wildlife, but even between the human and the animal kingdoms, reducing all to the status of prey. When Nestor comes upon the beast in the forest, he is amazed to find it surrounded by an admiring crowd of ‘plusieurs bestes contraires les unes aux autres . . . et pareillement tout autre volille contraire l’une a l’autre’ [many beasts of contrary dispositions... and likewise all sorts of birds, incompatible with one another] (p. 216), none of whom seem even to notice his arrival. He quickly melts into this crowd himself: Et quant le chevalier et son cheval eurent approuchié celle beste, ilz applicquerent tellement leur veue a son col qu’ilz oublierent toutes autres choses et demourerent comme statues sans mouvoir pié ne main. (p. 217) [and when the knight and his horse approached this beast, they gazed upon its neck so intently that they forgot everything else and stood like statues without moving hand or foot.]

The effacement of human difference is expressed in the way that Nestor and his horse are equally affected by the beast’s intoxicating colours. The danger of losing oneself in the pursuit of an illusory beauty that can lead only to death is fully revealed in the beast’s encounters with various knights. Dazzled by visions of pucelles, most notably his beloved Neronés, Nestor is nearly eaten, surviving only because he awakens from his trance in the nick of time. Towards the end of the romance, the knight Maronés also manages to escape after a mesmerising encounter with the beast. Gadifer’s great-grandson Olofer, unable to temper his fascination for visual pleasure, is devoured by it.15 Perceforest too has a brush with death when he comes upon the creature and 15 As Ferlampin-Acher points out, Olofer is the only descendent of Perceforest and Gadifer who resists conversion to Christianity. His inability to handle the encounter with the beste reflects his unredeemed sensuality; as the narrator comments, he is killed by his fondness for ‘plaisant regart’. See Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et ses miroirs’, p. 337.



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falls under its spell. Unable to bear the loss of the ecstatic visions produced by its shimmering neck, he pursues the beast through the forest. He is saved by the intervention of a hermit, who suddenly cries out: ‘Chasse folie, arreste toy et parle a moy’ [Folly-seeker, stop and speak to me] (III.iii, p. 167). The hermit warns him that this hunt can lead only to misfortune. Fortunately, unlike his brother in pursuit of the boar, Perceforest heeds the warning and abandons the chase. Perceforest’s visions, when gazing upon the beast, were of the festival and tournaments that he intended to host at the Franc Palais. But it is not in the forest, in the company of wild beasts, that such fantasies can be realised: they are viable only within the confines of civilisation. Nadia Lovell, commenting on the objectification of nature in different cultures, states: Nature needs to be socialised in order for it to be understood, and only through this appropriation can it be of any use in ‘re-presenting’ human sociality. In this view, the externalising process is also essential in creating a human identity distinctive from nature. . . . Nature becomes socially meaningful because it provides the means through which humans can recognise identities and places.16 Nature, as portrayed in Perceforest, must be managed and conceptually controlled if it is to provide a proper ‘place’ for human activities. Perceforest’s dream of presiding at a great feast will be realised within his castle, whose timbers are concrete evidence of his supremacy in the British forests. It is this mapping of the world, this creation of architectural and urban structures, that produces a concept of ‘nature’ as the foundational stratum of ‘culture’, subservient to the people for which it provides space, resources, and recreational pleasure. And the text implies that it is only through the foundation of these centres of political power and cultural influence that the British wilderness can eventually be colonised. Neither a headlong rush into the uncharted depths of the forest, nor a descent into brute force, will transform this barely civilised island into a western extension of Alexander’s empire. The motif of the beste glatissant can be analysed further by analogy with the concept of anamorphosis, a technique in the visual arts that involves a play on perspective. The term may refer to a painting that cannot be deciphered until it is viewed in a distorting mirror, such as a cylinder. It may also, as in Hans Holbein’s famous painting ‘The Ambassadors’, be applied to an otherwise normal painting that includes some detail that appears incomprehensible, but which assumes a recognisable form when viewed from an extremely oblique angle – one that simultaneously renders the rest of the painting unrecognisable. In either case, the juxtaposition of radically discontinuous perspectives means that in any view, something is always suppressed. In Holbein’s painting, for example, one can 16

Lovell, ‘Wild Gods’, pp. 72–3.

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never simultaneously see the political world of the court – represented by the figures that one sees when viewing the painting head on – and the fact of death that haunts it, represented by the amorphous blob lurking at the bottom of the scene, which comes into focus as a skull when viewed on edge.17 The neck of the beste glatissant in Perceforest is comparable to the cylindrical mirror of anamorphosis. Placed in the midst of nature in its purest form, with all animal species aranged around it iconically as if in a poster image of the wildlife of pre-Arthurian Britain, the shimmering neck of the beast reflects back the image of male sexual and colonial desire. What is suppressed in this vision is the beste itself, rapacious and lethal. The ‘reverberacion des couleurs’ emanating from its neck, source of spellbinding hallucinations, ‘estoit aucunes fois sy grande que la beste en estoit comme mucee et ne la veoit on point’ [was sometimes so great that the beast was completely hidden and could not be seen] (III.ii, 215). Layers of illusory beauty, tranquillity, and delight – animals peacefully assembled as if in a depiction of the Earthly Paradise, obscured in turn by a hypnotic vision of the heart’s desire – mask the very embodiment of absolute bestiality: incomprehensible in its mix of incompatible body parts, too swift to be caught and too dangerous to be hunted. Ever predatory yet ever fleeing, the elusive beste glatissant embodies the two faces of the colonised land: enticing, mesmerising, and potentially deadly in its devious mimicry and its infinite promise. The local people, as usual well aware of the dangers, have marked out a path through the forest that gives a wide berth to the beast’s lair, and the chastened Perceforest duly returns to this route. In so doing, he repositions himself within the mapped, socialised space of his kingdom, moving along a defined path with a known destination rather than pursuing illusory pleasures in a headlong flight through the wilderness. The long series of markers affixed to the trees establishes a boundary between a cultured domain, where humans occupy a position apart from all other creatures, and the dangerous, undifferentiated realm of bestiality, pure desire, and death, where humans are merely another pair of eyes to dazzle, another source of food. If the beste glatissant is a barely acknowledged sign of the limitations of human culture to impose itself upon the world at large – and thus, by analogy, of the limitations of colonial rule to shape a conquered people – these limits, this ‘outside’ of culture is more apparent still in episodes taking place beyond the confines of the British kingdom. The boar, and to an even greater extent the beste, highlight both the powers and the dangers of the narcissistic colonial gaze that sees only its own desires and its own success reflected in each new land. But on distant islands out to sea, what remained hidden from view under the hallucinatory ‘reverberations’ of the beste is more openly revealed: the existence of 17

On the extension of anamorphosis to literary and cultural constructs, see Lacan, Ethics, pp. 139–54, 272–3. Lacan links anamorphosis to the medieval concept of ‘courtly love’, an idea further explored by Gaunt, ‘Look of Love’. On anamorphosis in medieval romance, see Kay, Courtly Contradictions. I have discussed anamorphosis with regard to Perceforest in ‘Cultural Conflict’.



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an inhuman world, so alien that the encounter produces a terrifying realisation not just of the difference between two peoples or two cultures, but of the more fundamental difference that defines culture, and humanity, itself.

The Chevaliers de Mer and the Limits of Culture The chevaliers de mer figure in two episodes of Perceforest. Their first appearance is only as a memory: Alexander, concerned about the incompetence of British knights, recalls the remarkable fish that he saw during his undersea descent: En ce penser luy souvint de ce qu’il avoit veu une maniere de poissons que on appelloit chevaliers de mer, qui ont les testes façonnees a maniere de heaulme et au dessus tenant une espee par le pumel et par dessus le dos ung escu. La veyt le gentil roy ces poissons tournoier et bataillier les ungs aux autres tant fort que merveilles estoit a veoir, en donnant l’un a l’autre grans coups d’espees, et occioient aucunesfoiz l’un l’autre. (I.i, p. 167) [While thinking he recalled having seen a type of fish called sea knights, who have heads shaped like a helmet, with a sword on top at the hilt, and on their back a shield. The noble king saw these fish manoeuvre and battle one another so powerfully that it was a marvel to behold, giving one another great blows with their swords, and sometimes killing each other.]

Inspired by these martial fish, Alexander conceives the idea of the tournament as a chivalric sport that will serve both to entertain the ladies and to train the young warriors. Needless to say, it is a huge success and becomes a hallmark of the new British culture. The second appearance of chevaliers de mer is more developed. Bethidés is taken by evil spirits to a distant uninhabited island, which turns out to belong to the chivalric fish: more amphibious than strictly piscine, they emerge from the water for a few hours each day to graze. Since there is nothing else to eat on the island, Bethidés kills several of the fish and eats them, finding the meat delicious. But these are no ordinary fish, and they immediately launch a well-organised battle to eliminate the murderous intruder from their midst. Given their martial proclivities, it is no surprise that they are skilled fighters: Et sachiez qu’ilz venoient en bonne ordonnance et bien rengiez, tellement que ce sambloit une bataille de gens d’armes. . . . Celle bataille aproucha le chevalier, puis lui coururent sus en eulx lanchant a l’encontre de lui, et frapperent de leurs espees sus son escu de grant randon. (III.ii, p. 276) [And indeed, they came in good order and well arrayed, so that it seemed like a battalion of soldiers. . . . That battalion approached the knight, then

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charged, throwing themselves at him, and striking their swords against his shield with great force.]

In this manner the battle rages for several days, with fresh battalions of the fish emerging every two hours to relieve their companions. These sea creatures seem alarmingly human in their ability to conceive and execute a battle plan. And as time goes on, it turns out that they also have a social hierarchy and indeed a king: Le Blancq Chevalier [Bethidés] regarda a merveilles ce poisson, car il estoit grant et gros plus que nulz des autres, et sy avoit sus son heaume une couronne moult bien faitte, dont s’apensa tantost que c’estoit le roy de ces poissons et, par les crys et manieres qu’il avoit faittes, il considera qu’il demandoit la bataille de corps contre corps. (p. 279) [The White Knight (Bethidés) gazed wonderingly on this fish, for he was larger and stockier than the others, and he had a well-made crown on his helm, so the knight at once realised that he was the king of the fish, and from his cries and gestures he gathered that he was asking for single combat.]

The outcome of this single combat is victory for Bethidés, with the king acknowledging defeat and showing ‘moult de admiracions en signe de humilité et de paix’ [great admiration with signs of humility and peace] (p. 282). When it is time for the king to return to the sea, Bethidés escorts him to the shore, and ‘ce roy aloit autant discretement avecq lui comme s’il eust eu sens et conduite d’homme humain’ [this king went with him as discreetly as if he had human sense and comportment] (p. 282). But if Bethidés has established his right to remain on the island, his nightmare is not yet over. The problem still remains of how to escape, what to eat, and, most fundamentally, how to manage his relationship with the now nearly human fish. As far as the latter are concerned, Bethidés occupies the position of a monstrous creature haunting a community and demanding human tribute, and accordingly they bring him an offering the following morning: Et quant le roy fut sus la terre, il alla devers le Blancq Chevalier et lui fist la reverence, et puis fist coupper la teste a ung de ses chevaliers poissons. Et lors il s’approucha du chevalier et lui fist signe qu’il mengast du poisson. (p. 283) [and when the king was on land, he came up to the White Knight and bowed to him, and then beheaded one of his knight fish. And then he approached the knight and made signs that he should eat the fish.]

By now, of course, Bethidés has established a relationship with the fish such that eating them seems almost cannibalistic. Small wonder if ‘le gentil chevalier n’en voult riens faire’ [the noble knight didn’t want to] (ibid.). But what else is there



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to do? The narrator remains discreetly silent on this question, but the expanded version in MS C does note that the fish ‘l’avoient tellement en grace que merveilles ne ilz ne souffroient point qu’il eust quelque disette de mengier’ [were marvellously favourable to him and made sure he didn’t go hungry] (p. 413). If not their fellows, what then might they have been feeding him? This disturbing question hangs over Bethidés’ sojourn on the island, during which he is forced to participate in daily tournaments. On the first day of their truce, the king of the fish takes hold of Bethidés with his teeth and drags him into the combat, which, again, has an uncannily human quality to it. The hapless knight ‘avoit aussi bien a faire de monstrer sa prouesse sus eulx comme il fist au tournoy du noble roy de Cornuaille’ [had to work as hard to show his prowess against them as he did at the tournament of the noble king of Cornwall] (p. 284). He has in fact become the means by which the fish can determine their own prowess: Et ces chevaliers marins amoient mieulx a tournoier a lui que a leurs compaignons, et leur sambloit bien que nul de eulx ne devoit estre tenu pour preu s’il n’avoit tournoyet a lui. (ibid.) [And these sea knights would rather joust with him than with their companions, and it seemed to them that none of them should be considered worthy if he had not jousted with him.]

Thus Bethidés lives for six months of daily jousting, until finally he is rescued by a passing ship. Are these creatures human? Do they inhabit nature or culture? They certainly do not have human bodies. The narrator is unequivocal in referring to them as ‘poissons’, and overall they present a bewildering, phantasmagoric menagerie of animal shapes: entre les autres il y en sailly ung qui avoit la teste comme ung boef et grant corne, et estoit tout velu. Il avoit quatre piez et quatres gambes, mais elles n’avoient de haulteur que deux piez de homme. . . . Et y avoit plusieurs poissons samblables a moutons cornus et estoient tous velus, reservé la queue qu’ilz avoient comme ung poisson. (pp. 273–74) [among others there leapt forth one that had the head of an ox and a great horn, and was all shaggy. It had four feet and four legs, but they were only two feet long. . . . And there were many fish resembling sheep and they were all shaggy except for their tail, which was like a fish.]

Others still resemble stags or bears, though again with short legs. But these creatures are not without human traits. Not only do the fish have a king, but they also have a stratified society that includes a warrior class as well as other, noncombative groups. Despite their bestial appearance, their behaviour is decidedly human-like, indeed increasingly so as the narrative progresses. Their king, we

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are told, is of ‘franc couraige’, and his performance in single combat compares favourably with that of British knights (pp. 279–80). By the end, we find that the fish have not only a keen sense of military strategy and chivalric honour, but also a concept of prowess that contributes to a well-defined self-image and social rank.18 A hint of human identity for the chevaliers de mer also emerges from the larger corpus of Alexander texts. Surviving accounts of Alexander’s descent under the sea do not actually mention any such creatures.19 During his conquest of India, however, Alexander does learn of a race of people who take their ships below the surface of the water, and who inhabit an island – the most remote outpost, Alexander is told, of human habitation – subject to such violent storms that they can remain there only four months out of the year, and must take to their ships the rest of the time.20 The Perceforest author may have imagined a global geography, such that the distant isle approached by Alexander from the East is the same one that Bethidés reaches from the West. These people, in any case, figure among the many marvellous and monstrous races that are described as populating the far eastern lands, a realm in which the distinction between human and animal is increasingly, and often disturbingly, blurred. The episode of the chevaliers de mer was probably inspired by the references, tantalisingly brief, to these and other ‘monstrous races’ in the Alexander romances and elsewhere, and represents the Perceforest author’s imaginative attempt to portray a life form that is somewhere between the human and the bestial. As such these chivalric fish can be compared to other creatures that populate medieval writings about distant lands, such as the cynocephali, who are also portrayed as living in social groups and manifesting at least some signs of rational intelligence.21 Still, the chevaliers de mer are fish, and their appearance is thoroughly inhuman. And although they may exhibit striking similarities to human behaviour, there are nonetheless important differences between their tournaments and those of the court. The fish seem to know no other mode of being: they joust continuously, both in and out of the water. They cannot disarm themselves, for their armour and weaponry are an integral part of their bodies. This is a crucial point that distinguishes the chevaliers de mer from their human counterparts, for whom the tournament is a special occasion, demarcated as such, representing only one aspect of their interactions with their fellow knights. And the fishly tournaments apparently have no female spectators. Unlike the mock-battles at court, which enable knights to attract the favourable attention of ladies and pucelles, those 18 Ferlampin-Acher comments on the progressive humanisation of the chevaliers marins, in ‘Aux frontières’, pp. 96–97. Of the fish king, she states that ‘on est passé d’une créature dont l’essence est monstrueuse et qui a un attribut accidental humain à une figure humaine ayant un attribut accidentellement monstrueux’ (p. 97). 19 Gaullier-Bougasses, ‘Alexandre le Grand’, pp. 403–5. 20 See, for example, Thomas de Kent, Roman d’Alexandre, laisses 378, 395–400. 21 On the cynocephali, see Salih, ‘Idols and Simulacra’, pp. 126–7; Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 186–90.



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waged by the fish are a purely masculine affair, in which the sole objective is to test one’s mettle. The identity of the chevaliers de mer, in other words, is profoundly essentialist. Just as their armour is inseparable from their bodies, so their prowess is inseparable from their being. Their tournaments only seem to resemble those of the court, and are in fact a dark parody of human chivalry, both comical and horrific; as Bethidés tells the sailors who eventually rescue him, ‘je ne desire tant chose au monde que moy trouver hors de ceste isle’ [I want nothing on earth so much as to get off this island] (p. 285). Forced to participate in their incessant jousts, Bethidés is trapped in an endlessly repetitive cycle of ritual violence that leads nowhere and serves no purpose beyond itself. It allows the fish to define themselves as preux and it enables him to maintain his position of dominance within their world, receiving their daily sacrifice; but it is a closed, self-contained system. The episode of the chevaliers de mer also continues, in parodic form, the motif of the invading imperial power and the resisting indigenous culture. As we have seen, the Scots initially perceived their new rulers as demons, while in England it is the local resistance that takes on demonic form in the eyes of the Greeks and their supporters. In the case of Bethidés among the fish, who is monstrous? Bethidés, like some fairy-tale ogre who demands human sacrifice and against whom a people can test its would-be heroes, becomes that absolute limit that Gadifer’s men also seemed to the Scots, and that the ghosts of Darnant and his cohorts are to Perceforest’s knights. At the same time the fish – grotesque, relentlessly violent, static and inflexible in their unchanging ritualistic acts – remain alien in the extreme, providing only the outward semblance of chivalric life. Their penchant for battle pushes Bethidés to the limits of his knightly abilities, yet offers no opportunity for social, political, financial, or amorous advancement. Since Bethidés is unable to converse with the fish, and can neither integrate himself into their society nor impose his own culture on them, he remains a singularity in their world: again, a parodic, distorted image of his father’s role as foreign king. His (understandable) failure to humanise the inhabitants or to establish cultural hegemony in the alien realm that he discovers forshadows his later, and far more serious, failure to govern wisely the kingdom that he inherits, or to protect it from foreign invasion.

Le Bossu on the Isle aux Singesses Le Bossu de Suave, a hunchbacked but very able knight at Perceforest’s court, is another character in whose career the twin issues of humanity and capacity for cultural refinement are focused. His deformed appearance is an obstacle that must be overcome in determining the legitimacy of both his birth, and his aspirations to love and courtliness. Moreover, in his enforced sojourn on the Isle aux Singesses, he becomes a parody of the adventuring knight of the classical

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tradition, such as Jason or Aeneas. These characters provide the basic model of a knight who penetrates an alien culture and is taken in by a woman who forms or re-forms him into a heroic figure; but who then moves on, leaving the woman to kill herself or their sons. In the case of Le Bossu among the apes, however, the identity that the ‘woman’ bestows on him is a descent into bestiality rather than an ascent into royal or heroic stature. Le Bossu’s first crisis occurs at his birth, when his father, horrified at the misshapen baby his wife has produced, declares that she must have committed adultery with the court dwarf and orders her to be put to death. Fortunately cooler heads prevail and a wise philosopher is called in to assess the situation. Having learned that the the lady of Suave had a deep-seated fear of the dwarf, and that on the occasion of the baby’s conception she had been terrified that he might burst in on the couple because the bedroom door was ajar, the philosopher concludes that it was the power of the maternal imagination that affected the bodily shape of the child, and nothing more. To convince the still sceptical father, he sets up two experiments. In one, a brooding hen is forced to hatch her chicks under the constant gaze of a hawk; in the other, two grey rabbits are surrounded by paintings of black-and-white spotted rabbits. The outcome is exactly as predicted: the hen hatches chicks the colour of the hawk, while the rabbits produce blackand-white babies. Fully persuaded, Le Bossu’s father acknowledges the child’s legitimacy.22 To ensure that no such unfortunate incidents occur in the future, moreover, he issues an immediate order banning all ‘misshapen’ people from court: ne nain ne naine ne homme contrefait ne femme ne personne qui ayt deffaulte de membres: ainçois veulx qu’ilz soient tous chassez d’entour tous gentilz hommes et gentilz femmes. (I.ii, ch. 80, fol. 78r) [neither male nor female dwarf, nor a misshapen man or woman or any person missing limbs: I want them all to be driven away from noble men and women.]

As a result, Le Bossu, though accepted as eldest son and heir to the realm, continues to occupy a precarious position. Himself a central member of the court, he has nonetheless been the reason for banning all other people who look like him, lest the local nobility be contaminated by any further deformities. As a young knight, then, small wonder if Le Bossu’s behaviour at court, and particularly his interactions with ladies, are tinged with anxiety. His selfdoubts, touchingly portrayed, should be read in the context of medieval discussions of ‘monstrous births’, in which the general consensus is that human status is determined not by bodily appearance but by signs of rational intelligence.23 22 23

This passage is unedited, but portions of it appear in Flûtre (1953). See Friedman, Monstrous Races, pp. 178–96, for a survey of medieval ideas about the distinction between the human and the animal.



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The ­fourteenth-century philosopher and translator Nicole Oresme, for example, argues that bodily shape should not be used as an index of human or animal nature. If there is any doubt, he says, one need only wait until ‘videatur si possit uti ratione’ [it can be determined whether or not it is capable of reason], for ‘in natura humana est maior monstruositas defectus in membris sensuum et sedibus seu organis anime quam in aliis membris’ [in human nature it is a greater monstrosity to be defective in sense organs and in those of the mind than in other bodily members] (De causis mirabilium, ed. and tr. Hansen, p. 234 ). Seen in this light, Le Bossu’s very anxiety, and the eloquence with which he voices it, are proof of his noble nature. Indeed he expresses his hopes and fears in the highest cultural form available within the courtly framework, the chanson courtoise: Quant me senty ainsy enamouré, De gaieté me prins a quointoyer, Mais quant me vey et boçus et huré Et contrefait, moult m’en poeult anoyer Car quant par moy m’en prins a aviser Que devant luy mal est de moy monstrer, Je me tapy Et ma laideur haÿ.  (Lods ed., Pièces lyriques, IV, vv. 12–19) [When I feel myself thus enamoured, I begin to preen myself in gaiety, but when I see myself hunchbacked and shaggy and misshapen, it upsets me, for when I consider that it is wrong to show myself in her presence, I hide, and hate my ugliness.]

So heartfelt and moving is this song that one of the ladies is drawn to sit with him, declaring that ‘j’ayme mieulx plaisance que beaulté’ [I value pleasant company more than beauty] (I.ii, ch. 80, fol. 78r). True to her word, she falls in love with the chivalric hunchback and marries him. But this is not the end of Le Bossu’s troubles. At the tomb of Darnant, Le Bossu is overwhelmed by demonic spirits and, like Bethidés, whisked away to an island far out to sea. This island is inhabited only by apes, who attack him mercilessly. Unlike the chevaliers de mer, the apes have no battle plan nor any vestige of chivalry. They simply run at him, ‘comme tous foursenés’ [as if completely crazed] (IV.i, p. 64), jabbering wildly and using teeth and claws to attack him. After Le Bossu has killed several of them, they pull back, but continue to manifest crude and aggressive behaviour: Et eulx ainsi retrais, me prindrent a regarder faisant maintes fieres contenances, car en plus de cent lieux ilz me firent la moue et tant d’autres grimaces que je ne le sçavroie dire, en barbetans des dentz; et aucuns en y avoit qui me monstroient leurs bulles. (ibid.) [and having retreated, they began to look at me making many fierce faces, for in more than a hundred places they mocked me and grimaced

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more than I can say, jabbering with their teeth; and there were some who showed their testicles.]

Pinned against a rocky cliff, Le Bossu is rescued at last by ‘une merveilleuse singesse, grande et laide sans comparoison’ [a marvellous female ape, large and incomparably ugly] (p. 65). Chasing away the other apes, she shows him ‘signe d’amour’ [signs of love] (p. 66) and takes him to her cave, where she protects him from attack and feeds him with nuts and fruits. Le Bossu has thus entered an alien society that offers a farcical parody of chivalric society: the male apes manifest the most extreme violence and aggression, while the female ape is consumed with lustful desire for the foreign knight. Nor is her desire without fruit: car tant repairay autour de celle singesse que, par la convoitise charnelle qu’elle avoit en ma personne tant seullement, elle engendra ne sçay par quel moien quatre petitz singos dont les deux, aprés ce qu’elle les eut mis sus terre, me ressambloyent assés bien; et amoit trop mieulx ces deux que les autres deux. (p. 66) [for I spent so much time with that female ape that, solely through the carnal lust that she had for my body, she gave birth, I know not how, to four little apes, two of whom, after they were born, resembled me fairly closely; and she liked those two better than the other two.]

As the dwarf at court, it would seem, so the hunchback among the apes: his presence, and the intensity with which he exercises the female imagination, affect the bodily appearance of the young. If dwarves might be responsible for producing a race of deformed humans, Le Bossu is now responsible for producing a race of humanoid apes. The sight of creatures who resemble him while yet remaining firmly within the animal kingdom is a realisation of Le Bossu’s deepest fears. Like the implied pairing of Lyonnel’s lion cub and the bear Estonné/Priant at the Scottish court, this face-to-face encounter of hunchback and ape highlights a boundary that is both crucial and elusive. The hunchback’s involuntary liaison with the singesse, indeed, recalls the eighteenth-century writer Edward Long’s assertion in his History of Jamaica: ‘Ludicrous as the opinion may seem I do not think that an orangutang husband would be any dishonour to a Hottentot female.’24 Could this racist judgment of a foreign people be applicable to the hunchback who seemed an alien intruder within his own family? If his aristocratic wife was a fulfillment of Le Bossu’s longing for acceptance at court, his life among the apes places his very humanity in question. Small wonder that he is so desperate to escape from this downward spiral. Le Bossu is finally rescued by a passing ship, to whom he cries for help. At this decisive moment, determining once and for all whether he will spend 24

Quoted by Bhabha, Location, p. 91.



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his life as man or beast, he is nearly lost forever. The sailors pass him by, with the comment: ‘ce n’est point ung homme, ains est ung singe; car vous voyés comment il est contrefait’ [that’s not a man, it’s an ape; you see how misshapen he is] (p. 67). The frantic hunchback, pleading at once for his humanity and for his life, cries out: Ha! mes seigneurs, pour Dieu aiez mercy de moy, car je suis homme come vous et du royaume d’Angleterre, combien que nature me ait fait lait. (ibid.) [Oh! my lords, for God’s sake have mercy on me, for I am a man like you, of the realm of England, however ugly nature may have made me.]

At this the sailors are persuaded; but as Le Bossu is being rowed out to the ship, the singesse sees what is happening and runs to the shore, ‘mieulx dervee que autrement’ [more crazed than usual] (ibid.). She stages a remarkable protest, worth citing at length: Car quant elle me vey en la nef, elle prinst l’un des quatre singos entre ses bras et en l’eslevant le me monstroit, et sambloit qu’elle vouloit dire: ‘Haa! faulz homme, comment puez tu laissier celle quy t’a fais tant de biens comme de toy avoir preservé de mort?’ Tandis que menoit celle vye, les mariniers desancrerent et se mirent en la mer. Et voyant ce la singesse, elle tua le singot qu’elle tenoit et le jecta en la mer aprés moy. Ce fait, elle s’en fui criant et breant en la forest. (pp. 67–8) [For when she saw me in the boat, she took one of the four little apes in her arms and holding it up, showed it to me, and it seemed that she wanted to say: ‘Oh! false man, how can you leave the one who did you such a favour that she saved you from death?’ While she was acting like that, the sailors pulled anchor and set to sea. And seeing that, the ape killed the baby ape that she was holding and threw him after me into the sea. Having done that, she ran off crying and yowling into the forest.]

The ape’s behaviour here is an unmistakable parody of Dido, well known to medieval readers for her passionate love for Aeneas; her frenzied grief at his departure and her outrage at being abandoned by the man whom she had saved from shipwreck and impoverished exile; and her suicide, which in some traditions included the death of Aeneas’ unborn child as well. The dramatic murder of the ape child also, of course, recalls Medea, similarly driven mad at the treachery of Jason, a man whom she too had saved from certain death. The identification of the singesse with these figures strengthens the association of her bestial lust and rage with the dark side of (foreign) femininity, enemy to rational masculine control of culture. Le Bossu, in turn, emerges as an image of Jason or, especially, Aeneas: identified with cultural continuity, with the preservation of the Trojan heritage.

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Two ‘women’ fall in love with Le Bossu and produce offspring in his image, and these two genealogical lines represent his precarious identity: human to be sure, yet always in danger of being relegated to the lesser status of court freak. His wife loves him for his cultural attributes, his speech, manners, and comportment: ‘tant avoit plaisance es parolles du chevalier et en son bel estre que sa laide faicture luy sembla belle’ [she so enjoyed the knight’s speech and his handsome comportment that his ugly shape seemed to her beautiful] (II.ii, p. 179). Their two sons resemble their father not in body – neither is hunchbacked – but in chivalry and courtly bearing. The singesse, in contrast, has no concept of cultural refinement and ‘loves’ Le Bossu precisely for his body and for the brute violence with which he meets the assault of the apes: Mais quant elle vey la tuison que j’avoie illecques fait, elle se refraindy et me print a regarder forment. (IV.i, p. 65) [But when she saw the slaughter I had done there, she stopped and began to eye me intently.]

And accordingly the children that she produces are not of his lineage and share none of his cultural identity: animals themselves, with no possibility of inheriting his lordship or joining him as a knight of the Franc Palais, they resemble him physically, and nothing more. Beneath the dark humour of this story is an exploration of the elements that make up humanity. These traits – language, manners, plaisance – belong to culture rather than nature. As was made clear in the crisis surrounding Le Bossu’s birth, it is not bodily appearance that determines identity, but rather the capacity for rational thought, ethical behaviour, and cultural refinement. Similarly, Estonné is ultimately judged on the basis of his ineradicable internalisation of royal law and chivalric culture: having seen proof of an inner humanity even in bestial guise, Lydoire is compelled to restore Estonné to human form. This location of humanity in a capacity to adapt to the dominant culture, however, also authorises the dismissal of those who adhere to an alien culture as mere beasts. A similar disregard for body shape, after all, informs the opinion of the afore-mentioned Edward Long, who categorises Afro-Caribbeans as ‘the vilest of human kind, to which they have little more pretension of resemblance than that which arises from their exterior forms’.25 Several hundred years earlier, Gerald of Wales similarly acknowledged that the Irish had handsome and well-formed bodies, but claimed that they were utterly lacking in the attributes of culture – ’gens silvestris, gens inhospita . . . bestialiter vivens’ [they are a wild and inhospitable people... and live like beasts] – and concluded with the scornful comment: ‘Quod igitur in his naturae, illud optimum; quicquid fere industriae, illud pessimum’ [Their natural qualities are excellent. But almost everything acquired is deplorable].26 25 26

Quoted by Bhabha, Location, p. 90, emphasis Bhabha’s. Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia, III.10, pp. 151, 153; History and Topography, trans.



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Both the chevaliers de mer and the singesse offer extreme cases of other ‘peoples’, other ‘cultures’ whose difference is too great to be bridged in a meaningful way. If for Lydoire the native Britons are precariously close to bestial status, the beings encountered by Le Bossu and Bethidés are clearly beyond the pale, grotesque caricatures of human skills or foibles and nothing more. ‘Misshapen’ though Le Bossu’s body may be, his humanity is reaffirmed through this close encounter with animal bodies. The identification of the singesse with Dido and Medea further suggests a bestialisation of the foreign woman with whom cultural assimilation is impossible. Le Bossu’s adventure might be seen as a literal depiction of impressions like those recorded by modern writers such as Pierre Loti (Julien Viaud). His novel Le Roman d’un spahi (1881) presents the military and erotic adventures of a French soldier stationed in Senegal, in whose eyes the local people – including his young mistress – resemble nothing more than apes; in Todorov’s words, they have ‘des faces de gorille, des voix de singe, [. . .] des grimaces de ouistiti et des gesticulations de chimpanzé’ [the faces of gorillas, the voices of apes . . . the grimaces of a marmoset and the gesticulations of chimps].27 I will return in a later chapter to the Perceforest author’s conflation of xenophobia with misogyny in the figure of the corrupting foreign woman. For now I will note only that in this distorted, grotesque revision of Dido and Aeneas, the confrontation with an impossibly different lineage, a different people, a different destiny is expressed through the opposition of human culture and animal nature.

Nature and Culture The foregoing has touched on some of the tensions and divisions that underlie the constructed coherence of culture. The portrayal of cultural conflict, progress, and decline in Perceforest rests on the realisation that no culture can ever be more than partial, arbitrary, and illusory even as it also claims to be totalising and absolute. Robert Young’s statement of cultural contingency is strikingly similar to the view that emerges from Perceforest: ‘like gender, class, and race, its willing accomplices, culture’s categories are never essentialist, even when they aspire to be so’.28 Despite the pervasive illusion of a perfect coincidence of natural law and cultural practices, the gap between nature and culture, the element of visible, self-evident artifice, is all-important. This gap, as we have seen, is what distinguishes a human knight from the chevaliers de mer. Embedded in Perceforest’s glamorous chivalric culture, indeed at its very foundation, is the knowledge that things need not necessarily be this way. Impoverishment and decline, decadence O’Meara, pp. 101, 103. Gillingham notes the twelfth-century English view of the Irish as primitive barbarians, in English, pp. 145–50. 27 Todorov, Nous et les autres, p. 424; on the foreign woman in Loti’s novels, see pp. 409–26. 28 Colonial Desire, p. 30.

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and corruption, a perverse adherence to lawlessness, or indeed advancement through the advent of a new and superior ideology: these and other possibilities lurk always at the edges, threatening, promising, tempting. The very arbitrariness, mutability, and fragility of culture is both its weakness and its strength, inspiring great deeds in the defence and preservation of cultural ideals, and allowing for positive as well as negative change. A human, inhabiting culture will have an identity that cannot be bestowed by nature alone: knight, lady, monarch. And unlike the chevaliers de mer, the cultural signs of knighthood are separable from the natural features of personal identity manifested in the body. This point is brought out in various humorous and fantastic representations of cultural misunderstanding. On the one hand, we have seen that the savage Scots thought that the knights’ armour was a monstrous sort of skin: unfamiliar with the concept of clothing, they could not distinguish the cultural trappings from the body underneath. The opposite happens with Ourseau, whose father – the son of King Gadifer and Queen Lydoire, also called Ourseau – is taken by Roman spies as a young boy and raised in Rome. The original Ourseau, having been conceived on the night that Lydoire changed Estonné into a bear, is born with thick fur, and this trait is inherited by his son. Though he considers himself Roman, the young Ourseau knows that his father was British and decides to visit Britain after the devastating Roman invasion, hoping to learn more about his ancestry. Since all British knights were killed in the war some fifteen or twenty years earlier, most Britons now have never seen one. Hearing that there is a knight in town, people flock to see him, ‘dont il advint que tous les ignorans cuidoient que tous chevaliers fussent pelus comme Ourseau l’estoit’ [whereby all the ignorant people thought that all knights were furry like Ourseau was] (IV.ii, p. 809). Again, a people in a state of severe cultural decline cannot distinguish between a natural feature of the body and the cultural identity of chevalier. In their benighted view, it is as though knights were a distinct race or indeed a different species. Culture, in this representation, must be always overlaid on to nature, not totally cut off from it or absorbed into it. Culture must respect what Gelinant du Glat calls ‘le Dieu de Nature’ (I.i, pp. 399–401), while at the same time moving beyond mere instinct and basic survival. It is a foundational myth of Perceforest’s kingdom that its values are those of natural law, while at the same time its refinements guard against any lapse into the ‘bestial’ practices of the clan. This point is reiterated at the restoration of the kingdom under Gadifer’s grandson Gallafur. At Gallafur’s coronation, portions of the court chronicles are read out – that is, the text that supposedly served as source for Perceforest itself – and the old lais are sung. Listening to the deeds of their ancestors, seeing the benefits that accrue from having a strong leader, the knights and ladies enthusiastically reflect on their new-found sense of ethics: En la venue de nostre roy est joye nee en cest pays, sens, honneur, courtoysie et chevalerie. Devant ne sçavions que c’estoit de bien ne d’honneur,



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fors ce que nature simplement nous enseignoit; mais or voyons de fait que c’est une grande chose de bien faire. . . . Car les mauvais seront pugniz, et les bons exaulcez et eslevez. (VI, ch. 22, fol. 64r) [With the advent of our king joy is born in this land, and sense, honour, courtesy and chivalry. Formerly we didn’t know what goodness and honour were, other than simply what nature taught us; but now we see indeed that it is a great thing to do good. . . . For the bad will be punished, and the good raised up and exalted.]

Like the inhabitants of the Scottish Wilds, the generation of Britons who grew up in the aftermath of the devastating Roman invasion have been without any form of government and have been in danger of declining into a savage state. But with the restoration of government and the recovery of their history, culture is reborn and with it a sense of ethics: like the people of Scotland under Gadifer, ‘ilz commencerent a discerner le bien du mal, les vertus des vices’ [they began to distinguish between good and evil, virtue and vice] (ibid.). Like the goldwork birds whose cries mimic those of actual birds, so culture is a work of art, an imaging and an enhancement of nature whose very artifice and separation from the natural give it added value. At its core culture is a fundamentally hybrid construct. It subsumes nature within its confines, imprints the natural world with concepts of order, re-forms it in the image of human needs and desires. And no less does it receive the imprint of nature. Men devise ways of equipping themselves with the armour-plated hides and piercing tusks of fish so as to imitate their aquatic battles, while women develop techniques of needlework to clothe themselves and their amis in garments bedecked with artificial flowers. Ultimately, in Perceforest as in so much of Western thought, neither ‘nature’ nor ‘culture’ is a stable concept. What emerges as a constant is a pervasive sense of difference, an endless series of oppositions and imitations across the elusive ‘nature–culture’ divide: nature is both excluded from and contained within culture, while culture both corrupts or falls short of nature, and rises above it. The fundamental hybridity of culture – at once ‘natural’ and constructed – is most acutely visible in the subjected peoples who are positioned at the boundary between culture and nature, and whose varied character reflects a fundamental ambivalence inherent in medieval views of nature. As Hugh White notes, ‘an association between nature and reason is widespread’ in medieval philosophy and theology, even as a parallel ‘strain in medieval thought associates the natural with the animal and the irrational’.29 This double focus can be seen in the contrast between the chevaliers de mer and the apes. The former are a species governed by reason and a kind of ‘natural law’, while the apes are the very image of an irrational animal nature driven by aggression and lust. This ambivalence is replicated in the persistent splitting of the indigenous 29

White, Nature, p. 44.

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Britons into those who can be assimilated and those who cannot, allowing all of them to be characterised with recourse to ‘nature’. If the inhabitants of the Scottish Wilds are ‘bestial’, still they appear to be living in accordance with natural law, and like animals, they are subject to domestication. If certain Scottish knights must be relegated to bestial status for a time, in the end it is their loyalty and obedience to their rulers that is expressed through their embodiment of an animalistic condition of ‘natural servility and obedience to humanity’.30 The evil lignaige Darnant, in turn, are repeatedly compared to ‘bestes sauvages’ in the negative sense of the term: irrational, violent predators that can only be hunted down and exterminated. This ambivalence extends even to the race of giants. As we will see in Chapter 5, the Golden-Haired Giant, murderous and incestuous, must be killed, while his daughter Galotine, no less a giant than her father, marries a British knight and adapts perfectly to the culture of the court. So far my analysis has focused mainly on characters who are eager for acceptance and assimilation into the new dominant culture. But not all Britons take this attitude. If Gadifer found that his new subjects were unformed rustics, Perceforest finds that a goodly portion of his – the lignaige Darnant – are organised into their own decidedly hostile society. His efforts to reshape this people, then, are different from the more primal struggle in Scotland, and entail different, though equally fraught, boundaries: not only those between humans and other living things, but also those establishing the categories of difference that define human society: gender, sexuality, and the legal differentiation of subjects and outlaws. It is to these issues, as brought to the fore in Perceforest’s conquest of the English forests, that I now turn.

30

Thus Salter characterises the medieval view of animals, in Holy and Noble, p. 37.

3

The King, His Law, and His Kingdom We have seen that Gadifer inaugurates his reign with a law establishing property rights. As befits his mission of transforming the wilderness into a cultured space, Gadifer’s legislation targets the demarcation of land into individual holdings and the attendant issues of ownership, usage, and tenancy. Perceforest, king of England, likewise establishes a foundational law at the onset of his reign. Hoping to reform a decadent society, he regulates access not to land but to women, with a prohibition of rape. Property rights and sexual norms alike are central to the larger process of establishing cultural hegemony. Matters once considered private – the choice of where to live, the selection of a sexual partner – are redefined as public, subject to strict regulation. And while the people of Scotland submit with relative ease to Gadifer’s rule – true to the colonial fantasy of a primitive race eager to receive civilisation ready-made from their conquerors – the situation in England is decidedly different. As we shall see, the prohibition of rape sparks a clash of cultures in which the stakes include not only the norms of gender and sexuality, but also the identity of a people, their relationship to the land, and their position in history. Perceforest’s proclamation lays down the law in no uncertain terms: que s’il est homme gentil ou vilain, noble ou non noble, de quelq’etat qu’il soit, que s’il fait force a femme de quelque condition qu’elle soit, c’est assavoir qu’il ait charnelle compaignie a elle oultre son gré et sa voulenté, il a mort desservie telle que d’estre detrait a quatre chevaulx tant que les membres luy soient departiz du corps, et commandons a tous ceulx qui tiennent justice dessoubs nous ou pour nous . . . qu’il face justice telle que dessus est dicte. (I.ii, ch. 108, fol. 97r) [if any gentleman or peasant, noble or non-noble, of any social station, forces a woman of no matter what social condition, that is, if he has carnal knowledge of her against her will, he should be put to death by being drawn between four horses until his body is dismembered, and we command all those who administer justice below us or on our behalf . . . that they mete out justice as aforesaid.]

In addition, anyone who ‘reproaches’ a woman for being raped is to have his  The second half of Book I, where the law is proclaimed, has not yet been edited. For passages detailing the law, see Lods, Roman de Perceforest, pp. 193–5.

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tongue cut out. And finally, as if echoing Gadifer’s law, Perceforest’s founding law prohibits the general abuse of the weak by the powerful: ‘Et encores commandons nous . . . que le fort laisse joir au foible de ce qui est sien’ [and we also command . . . that the strong allow the weak to benefit from what is his] (ibid.). Throughout Britain, the law of ‘might makes right’ is replaced by one of due process. Perceforest’s law targets the lignaige Darnant – the sorcerer Darnant, his four brothers, and their many descendants – who control the English forests at the time of Perceforest’s arrival. One of the brothers, Gelinant du Glat, recommends submitting to the authority of the new king, and his descendents for the most part join forces with Perceforest. The rest of the clan, however, resist. Their reign in the forests is one of brute force and terror. They are particularly given to rape, which they practise at will. Perceforest’s prohibition of rape results in a redefinition of gender roles, producing the structures of masculinity and femininity on which chivalric culture rests. And it is also of vital importance in defining the realm itself: whereas the lignaige Darnant identified themselves through shared bloodlines and ancestral customs – the ‘droit qui nous vient de noz ancestres et que nous avons usé toutes noz vies’ [rights that come to us from our ancestors, that we have enjoyed all our lives] (I.i, 401) – membership in Perceforest’s kingdom is determined ideologically, through loyalty to the king and conformance to his law.

Cultural Foundations: Rewriting Gender Greeted with wrath and resentment by the knights of the lignaige Darnant, who are loath to abandon their easy existence of rape and pillage, Perceforest’s edict is hailed by commoners, by women of all classes, and by those knights who have allied themselves with him, as a major innovation freeing them from lives of fear and misery. Women in particular view Perceforest as their saviour and actively support his rise to power, acting as spies and messengers, supplying his men with food, and tending their wounds. From Perceforest’s abolition of rape, we are told, flow all the benefits of culture: Et par ceste voye comença premier a regnier en Angleterre le dieu d’amours. Et la chevalerie commença aussi premier a faire les prouesses grandes . . . et a eulx maintenir en tout honneur affin qu’ilz peussent avoir los et pris entre les dames et damoiselles. . . . Et dames et damoiselles de honneur se prindrent a cher tenir et a elles maintenir nettement et honnestement, a aymer les preux et les courtoys et les nobles et a hayr les villains. . . . Aprés ce elles entreprindrent a enrichir et a ediffier beaulx manoirs sur lieux delictables de boys, de rivieres et de fontaines, et commencerent a entreprendre de subtiliser a faire nobles vestures et paremens pour donner aux preux chevaliers. (I.ii, ch. 108, fol. 97r) [And in this way the God of Love first came to reign in England. And knights first began to do great deeds . . . and to maintain themselves



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honourably so as to win favour and fame with ladies and damsels... And ladies and damsels began to value themselves, and maintain themselves in purity and decency, to love the worthy, courteous, and noble men and to hate the lowly ones. . . . And then the women undertook the improvement and construction of beautiful manors in delightful places with woods, rivers, and fountains, and began the subtle work of making noble garments and jewellery to give the worthy knights.]

This fantasy of an ancient English king who ushers in an era of chivalric and courtly grandeur by banning rape corresponds to a nostalgic belief, current in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in early English kings who took stern measures against rape. The law has dramatic effects in shaping the new British culture, one grounded in courtly models of masculinity and femininity. The key concept in this new model of gendered behaviour is ‘honneur’, applicable to men and women alike. This concept of honour, with its consequences of self-respect on the one hand, and mutual respect between the sexes on the other, then gives rise to a new sense of partnership between knights and ladies and to a flowering of heroic behaviour, courtly manners, and general beautification of the land. The effects of this law can be better assessed through an examination of the society that is portrayed as existing before the law came into effect, as well as the conditions that prevail during Perceforest’s long mental illness, when the law is not being enforced, and in the anarchic aftermath of the Roman invasion. During these periods, we find a society with a marked division into separatist male and female domains. The ladies of the forest are often portrayed as presiding over their own estates, sometimes with children or siblings but usually without husbands. In constant danger of rape and abduction, and lacking male protectors, these women take extreme measures. At least one, Sebille, lives with her female attendants in an invisible castle hidden under an illusory lake. And during the period of Perceforest’s illness, the ladies of the forest construct bronze images of knights who magically sound the alarm whenever knights of the lignaige Darnant draw near, thus enabling the women to take cover. The men, for their part, proliferate freely with little concern for marriage. As Gloriande explains to Perceforest, with reference to Darnant: Car entre ses malfais, il ne pouoit demourer ne belle dame ne damoiselle . . . qu’il ne voulsist avoir ou par force ou par amour ou par enchantemens, de quoy il a bien en ceste forest habitans soixante bastars tous chevaliers. . . . Et sachiez qu’il y an a bien cincquante qui devoient estre chevaliers au printemps. Et n’a pas huit jours qu’il voult viser quantz enfans ses filz avoient, mais il ne peult sçavoir le nombre, sy en compta il cent tous chevaliers. (I, i, 203) [For along with his other crimes, there can be no beautiful lady or damsel . . . that he doesn’t want to take by force or by love or by magic, whereby 

Saunders, Rape.

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he has a good sixty bastard sons living in this forest, all knights . . . and there are about fifty more who are supposed to become knights this spring. And just a week ago he wanted to work out how many children his sons had, but he couldn’t calculate it, though he counted up to a hundred, all knights.]

Admittedly marriage is not unheard of. Darnant was once married to a woman who bore him ten sons, and at the time of his death was preparing to marry Gloriande. This marriage, however, was inpsired by neither love nor political alliance, but was simply an expedient measure taken to prevent Gloriande, whom Darnant had abducted, from starving herself to death in protest. As she explains when Perceforest asks if she is the wife of Darnant: ‘Par ma foy, sire, je le devoie estre malgré moy et a force’ [By my faith, sire, I was supposed to be, against my will and by force] (I.i, 204). Sarra, another lady of the forest, is also the victim of a forced marriage with a clansman; and when her husband is killed by Gadifer and Le Tors, she is overjoyed. The nature of family and household units among the lignaige Darnant can be illustrated with the example of Chastel Malebranche, where Le Tor achieves a decisive victory and rescues the wounded Gadifer, who was being held prisoner after killing Malebranche, lord of the manor. Malebranche is one of the many sons of Darnant, and the other inhabitants of the castle are his mother, his young sister Lyriope, and Lysenne, ‘une josne damoiselle que Malebranche avoit ravye a force pour sa beaulté et l’avoit tenue malgré elle’ [a young girl that Malebranche had ravished by force because of her beauty, and he had held her against her will] (I.i, 311). The castle does house a family, in other words, but one from which marriage is notably lacking. There is no resident father, since Darnant has never been married to the mother of Lyriope and Malebranche, and this is but one of many castles housing his former concubines and their offspring. Lyriope’s companion is not her brother’s wife or intended wife, but a girl he has raped and kidnapped. The twelve-year-old Lyriope reveals that she has been living in constant fear of rape herself, and that another knight killed by Le Tor at the castle, Darnant’s nephew Dagin, had come for that very purpose: je n’attendoye l’eure que je fusse desonnouree a force, combien que je soye josne. Et sachiez que ce chevalier qui m’est germain ne venait cy pour autre chose, mais vous m’en avez delivree. (I.i, 337) [At any moment I would have been forcibly dishonoured, despite being young. And certainly this knight, who is my cousin, came for no other reason, but you have saved me.]

That she would be raped by her first cousin – not even a possible marriage partner under medieval law, and someone who should have protected her – highlights the depravity of the lignaige Darnant and their disregard for the politics of feudal marriage.



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These sexual predations are the single most striking feature of the lignaige Darnant. While riding through the forest, Perceforest and his knights come upon numerous scenes of rape, and their interventions are greeted with both outrage and astonishment by the perpetrators, who are clearly not accustomed to having such behaviour questioned. Some of the women associated with the clan are loyal to their men, but many are eager for liberation and risk brutal punishment by assisting Perceforest, Alexander, and the other knights in their retinue. Men, however, are not the only sexual predators in this world. Women can be remarkably aggressive, using magic to sequester men in love nests of sexual oblivion. Sebille, for example, enamoured of Alexander, is unimpressed when he tells her of his vow not to sleep two nights in the same place until he has found Perceforest. Casting a spell, she keeps him in her invisible castle for two weeks, which he experiences as a single night. She does not allow him to leave until she has conceived a son, whose role as a source of consolation after Alexander’s departure and premature death is expressed in his name, Remanant de Joie. Alexander forgives Sebille when he learns the truth, and returns her love. Nonetheless, this exercise of feminine power does threaten to undermine chivalric life by isolating the knights from their fellows and interfering with their duties. Despite his affection for her, Alexander extracts from Sebille a promise never again to hold him against his will. And at the end of a year, when he decides to return to Babylon, he lets her know that he is not going to sacrifice his imperial ambitions in order to remain at her side. These female predations are particularly pronounced during the lawless period following the Roman invasion, in which the entire knighthood of Britain is killed, leaving only women and children. The dearth of eligible bachelors creates fierce competition among women as the boys of the kingdom begin to come of age. Many a young knight falls into the hands of an eager damsel, enchanted into forgetting that he might have a life to lead away from his mistress. In part these women are motivated by the desire for sexual companionship, but there is also a strong desire for procreation, particularly after the devastating ravages of the war. As Zephir reminds the angry victim of one such damsel, ‘il est necessité que ainsi soit pour le païs aucunement repoeupler de noble generation’ [it must be so, in order to repopulate the land with noble lineage] (IV.ii, 931). Darnant and his fellows make use of women for sexual pleasure and to propagate their lineage, thereby increasing their power; women in turn, under these lawless conditions, make use of men for sexual companionship and to produce offspring who will provide a measure of solace and protection. Perceforest’s law responds to a state of affairs in which men and women operate in separate spheres, pursuing independent agendas that only some See Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Sebille’; Taylor, ‘Alexander Amoroso’. The newly crowned Perceforest secretly enters the forest to wage war against the lignaige Darnant; Alexander, Gadifer, and several other knights depart on a quest to find him.  Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Rôle des mères’.

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times intersect. His law reorients the balance of power, such that the honour and empowerment of men and that of women, rather than being mutually exclusive, are mutually defining. When Griant de la Haulte Forest, Darnant’s brother, rallies the clansmen to a war of resistance against Perceforest, he paints a stark picture of gender difference, in which men must either enslave women or be enslaved by them. Submitting to the new king, he claims, will mean becoming ‘serfz aux femmes qui ne sont faittes fors pour nos voulentez acomplir’ [the slaves of women, who exist only to do our bidding] (I.i, 401). But the chivalric society that Perceforest produces is one in which the status of both men and women is redefined. The elevation of women to a position of honour becomes the occasion for male joy at having a female audience for whom they can perform: Dont il advint depuis que d’autant que femmes avoient esté villes et peu prisees elles furent honnorees et cheres tenues: car ceulx qui devant ne les daignoient bellement appeller furent après tous joyeulx se les damoiselles les daignoient regarder. (I.ii, ch. 108, fol. 97r) [Thus it happened that as much as women had been considered vile and of little worth, now they were honoured and valued: for the men who formerly didn’t deign to speak nicely to them were now delighted if the damsels deigned to look at them.]

Rather than a simple pleasure that is there for the taking, young puceles are now seen as a valuable resource. The preservation of their virginity during a period in which their would-be lovers are forced to prove their worth becomes a means of producing a more valiant knighthood, while the eventual reward of marriage, with its attendant promise of mutual love and fidelity, ensures that the knights will forever be motivated to augment their valour. Perceforest’s law produces a society in which masculinity and femininity are redefined around a pole of mutual desire rather than one of mutual antagonism, and in which the by-products of this desire are the refinements of culture: displays of prowess, courtly manners and genteel flirtation, gardens and elegant manor homes, embroidered garments, objets de luxe. The fundamental importance of this interdependence between the sexes is reiterated on the occasion of the festivities at the Perron Merveilleux, when the kingdom is restored after the Roman invasion. Following the tournament – the first in a generation – the young men are eager to join the assembled damsels, for ‘feste de femmes sans hommes et d’hommes sans femmes est de nulle plaisance’ [festivities of women without men or of men without women give no pleasure] (IV.ii, p. 1134). This chivalric culture, and the gender norms that underwrite it, are the legacy of Alexander’s sojourn in Britain: a refinement from the East transplanted to the Far West. I will expand on this preliminary examination of compulsory love and sexual taboos in Part II. First, however, I wish to dwell a little longer on Perceforest’s struggles with the lignaige Darnant, examining the concepts of political sovereignty and cultural supremacy that emerge from this account.



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Irreconcilable Differences: Chivalric Culture and its Parodic Double Although sexual violence is the salient feature of the lignaige Darnant, it is not the only attribute that sets clan members apart from the knights of the Franc Palais. They are also portrayed as generally troublesome presences, a disruptive force whether from the outside – as in the case of Bruyant sans Foy, a leader of the ongoing resistance to Perceforest – or from the inside, as with Melean and Nabon, two clansmen who join Perceforest’s court and soon infect its atmosphere with their spirit of envy, spite, and misogyny. Overtly and covertly, through armed struggle and concerted ruse, and by the sheer fact of their presence, the lignaige Darnant resist assimilation into the dominant culture that has taken over their homeland, and frustrate Perceforest’s desire for cultural hegemony and centralised rule. Though they may at first glance have seemed a chivalric society almost the same as that of Perceforest they turn out, on closer scrutiny, to be the opposite: profoundly, if perhaps not quite wholly, different. Bruyant sans Foy, nephew of Darnant, conducts guerilla warfare against Perceforest for several years until he is finally killed by Passelion, son of Estonné and Priande. As his epithet would suggest, Bruyant has a particular knack for sowing discord, warping the chivalric oath, and turning good faith into virtual treason. At one point, for example, when fleeing a group of knights of the Franc Palais, he comes upon Perceforest and asks for royal protection from his enemies, who are trying to kill him. Perceforest grants this protection without knowing who the knight in question is, and is then forced to defend his mortal enemy against two of his own closest allies. There results an angry and violent conflict in which the latter, not realising to whom they are speaking, accuse Bruyant’s protector of treason for saving the life of the realm’s most wanted criminal. A fight breaks out between the king and his loyal companions, during which Bruyant makes his escape. Bruyant’s presence thus acts as a distorting lens that causes members of the Franc Palais to perceive their own king as a traitor. The misunderstanding is eventually resolved back at court, notably in a context from which Bruyant himself is absent. The episode is symptomatic of his tendency to draw Perceforest’s knights into conflict with one another. On another occasion he incites a nearly lethal battle between the Chevalier a la Blanche Mule and his close friend, the Chevalier au Delphin. The latter has sworn to kill Bruyant and is on the point of doing so. But the former, who is travelling with the Chevalier au Delphin, was once tricked into swearing to save Bruyant’s life, and the villainous knight now calls in the favour. Again Bruyant makes his escape while two knights of the Franc Palais fight a battle that they abhor, but which their oaths force them to undertake. As the Chevalier a la Blanche Mule says: Il fault dont que malgré moy je soye vostre ennemy, car vous ne lui donnerez meshui coup de lance ne d’espee sy me avrez premierement occis. (III.iii, p. 128)

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[I am forced against my will to be your enemy, for you will not strike him with lance or sword unless you have killed me first.]

To which the Chevalier au Delphin makes the only reply possible: Sire . . . ce seroit grant domage et la chose du monde que je feroye le plus envis, saulf toutesfois de moy parjurer. (ibid.) [Sir . . . that would be a great shame and the thing I would least want to do in all the world, other than to perjure myself.]

Again, Bruyant’s very presence warps the chivalric oath, turning what should be the basis of social cohesion into a source of social division. Even more dangerous than the terrorist strikes in which he kidnaps or kills lone knights, his malign influence infects the knighthood and subverts their most cherished institutions. Clearly this knight of the lignaige Darnant is an alien presence, in no way subject to assimilation into the culture of the Franc Palais. Melean and Nabon in turn, the villains of the ‘Conte de la Rose’ episode, illustrate the dangers of allowing knights of the clan into court, even when they seem to be seeking the king’s favour. In this instance, the presence of the misogynistic and sexually rapacious lignaige Darnant turns a sign of feminine honour into an invitation to adultery. Through their machinations, feminine self-possession is redefined from the power to preserve marital fidelity by rejecting unwanted suitors, into the power to shame a husband through wanton behaviour. Targeting the knight Margon, whose intimacy with the king arouses their envy, and having learnt that he carries a magical rose whose eternal freshness is a sign of his wife’s fidelity, the two wicked knights plan to seduce the lady and thereby shame their rival: se la vertu de la rose n’est esprouvee par l’un de nous deux . . . nous ne sommes pas dignes d’estre du lignaige Darnant, le vaillant prince auquel femme ne peut oncques resister qu’il n’en feist son voloir. (IV.i, pp. 343–4) [if the power of the rose is not tested by one of us . . . we are not worthy of being of the lineage of Darnant, the valiant prince whom no woman could ever resist but that he had his will with her.]

The two force Margon into a wager: if they fail, they will forfeit their lands to him, but if they succeed, he must carry a shield for one year with the image of a woman astride a man on all fours. When Perceforest learns of this wager, he is angered at the affront to his favourite and offended by its misogynistic tenor, and sharply chastises the two plotters:



See my ‘Visualizing’.



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Par ma foy, beaulx seigneurs, vous estes trop oultrageux. . . . Et en verité le fait demoustre bien que vous estes du lignaige de Darnant l’enchanteur qui oncques ne fist honneur a femme. (p. 347) [By my faith, fair lords, you are totally outrageous. . . . And truly this shows that you are of the lineage of Darnant the enchanter, who never showed honour to women.]

In this way the entire episode, though overtly focused on the issues of feminine virtue and sexual autonomy, is simultaneously defined as a clash between the courtly culture imposed by Perceforest and that of the clan, for whom women are tools for pleasure and personal advancement. The stakes of the wager are not merely the chastity of a single woman and the public reputation of her husband, but the rank at court of the men who represent these opposing cultures. Perceforest, in fact, ups the stakes by declaring that if Nabon and Melean are defeated they will not only forfeit their lands and revenues, but also be banished from his kingdom forever. When in the end the wife, Lisane, does prove virtuous, her actions not only bring honour to herself and her husband but also contribute to the ongoing elimination of the enemy clan. Foiling the would-be seducers, she locks them in a room and forces them to spin and wind wool to earn their keep. When this ­spectacle is revealed to Margon and eight other knights of the Franc Palais, Nabon and Melean are so deeply shamed that their only recourse is flight. The imposition of the quintessential ‘women’s work’ effectively emasculates them – indeed unmasks them as imposters at court. Though they may have spent time posing as knights and retainers of the king, these members of the enemy clan remained outsiders who never attained the status of ‘real’ knights of the realm. Perhaps the most sinister tactic adopted by the lignaige Darnant is that of staging false rapes, then abducting the knights who ride to the rescue and ­imprisoning them in an invisible castle, the Chastel Desvoyé. This strategem exploits the readiness with which knights of the Franc Palais believe any damsel calling for help, and drop everything to pursue a suspected rapist. It was ­Bruyant’s insight that their readiness to engage in battle at a woman’s request was in fact a potential weak point of the system, a means of drawing otherwise invincible knights into a situation of vulnerability. The prospect of a false claim of rape is devastating for a culture in which a knight’s honour is defined in no small part by his defence of women. Young Gadifer, son of King Gadifer, is waylaid by one such woman while travelling with the damsel Pierote, who has sought his aid for Flamine, daughter of the wicked King Aroès. But when the clearsighted Pierote attempts to warn him, Gadifer attributes her resistance to a fear that assisting the supposed rape victim will prevent him from rescuing Flamine. Pierote attempts to explain that he is walking into an ambush set by the lignaige Darnant:

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car de beau fait ne les osent assaillir, mais par telles dames font desvoier les preudhommes tant qu’ilz les tiennent en leurs destroiz et puis les murdrissent. (II.ii, p. 341) [for they don’t dare attack [valiant knights] openly, but with such ladies they sidetrack the worthy men until they catch them in their traps and then they murder them.]

Gadifer’s reply shows just how threatening such tactics are: Ha! Pierote . . . ne dictes pas cela, car je ne porroie croire que de femmes yssist telle trahison. (ibid.) [Ha! Pierote . . . don’t say that, for I can’t believe that a woman could commit such treachery].

The outlaw culture, growing ever more cunning, presents itself as a parody or subversive doubling of the dominant culture, able to undo it by aggressively mimicking its most important structures and ideals. Gadifer here is caught between two cultures, each of which assumes the face of a damsel in distress; and to assist one of the damsels unavoidably entails the abandonment or betrayal of the other. Too late, he realises that he has made the wrong choice. These theatrical tactics, like the hostile rereading of the rose proposed by Nabon and Melean or the abuse of the oath as practiced by Bruyant, distort the very fabric of Perceforest’s chivalric culture. In confrontation with this unassimilated and irreducible kernel of resistance, his knights lose their bearings, finding that the normal rules of behaviour somehow no longer apply. In fact, it is not enough merely to banish or even to kill the lignaige Darnant. From beyond the grave, their ghosts exploit the chivalric commitment to battle as a means of drawing British knights into hellish and impossible jousts. At the tomb of Darnant, for example, they set up a stone bearing the inscription: Bien est la chevallerie perdue quant il n’est tant preu chevallier qui viengne jouster a Malaquin qui garde sa tombe de nuit. (III.i, p. 79) [Chivalry is indeed lost when there is no knight bold enough to come joust with Malaquin, who guards his tomb at night.]

Needless to say, no knight can pass the tomb without feeling honour-bound to delay even the most urgent journey so as to try his hand against its demonic guardian, inevitably with disastrous results. At another site, where the mutilated bodies of four knights of the clan are magically preserved to commemorate their demise at the hands of Gadifer and Le Tor, a disembodied voice calls out: Ne doit estre nommé pour chevallier qui en celle place n’a veillé une nuit pour veoir les merveilles qui y adviennent. (III.i, pp. 9–10)



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[He who has not kept a night’s vigil in this spot to see the marvels that take place, should not be called a knight.]

If a knight rises to the challenge, he is attacked by an army of phantom knights exuding fire and brimstone. Such encounters make a mockery of combat, for weapons are of no use against incorporeal beings. By luring the knights into a joust that is not a joust at all, daring them to prove their honour in a situation where no honour is to be found, these demonic spirits, like a distorting mirror, transform the most cherished institutions of chivalry into a horrific nightmare. This warping of the cultural parameters, and the fissures thereby created, reach a climax in the optical illusions created by the clan’s magical arts. Annoyed by Pierote’s protestations and fearing that Gadifer might believe her, the false rape plaintiff casts a spell to split the visual field, causing Pierote and Gadifer to perceive different things. The first conjures up a phantom image of Gadifer and herself, which Pierote follows off into the depths of the forest, car bien luy fut adviz qu’elle eust veu chevauchier pardevant luy Gadifer et la mauvaise damoiselle, et non avoit, ainçois estoit une fantasie qui luy estoit entree en la teste par les enchantemens de la dame. (II.ii, p. 342) [for it seemed to her that she saw Gadifer and the wicked damsel riding before her, but she didn’t, it was just a phantasm put into her head by the lady’s spells.]

The second spell conjures up a phantom Pierote who will appear to be riding alongside Gadifer: Car elle ala faire ung enchantement tel que se vous fussiez la endroit, vous cuidissiez vrayement que Pierote fust en la place sur son cheval et dist: ‘Gadifer et vous, damoiselle, chevauchons, il est temps.’ (p. 343) [For she cast a spell such that if you were there, you would really think that Pierote was there on her horse, saying: ‘Gadifer and you, damsel, let’s ride on, it’s high time.’]

It is only because Gadifer’s magic ring protects him from being deceived by enchantments that this ploy fails, though not before Pierote has been lost. Had it succeeded, it would have meant the generation of two irreconcilable visions, neither of which corresponded to the controling ‘master vision’ of the mendacious enchantress. The Chastel Desvoyé, Bruyant’s stronghold, is also a site of optical warping. Though visible to knights of the lignaige Darnant and their female accomplices, it is invisible to all others, who see not a castle but a raging river. The castle both is and is not contained within Perceforest’s kingdom: though physically present, it is absent from the official culture’s perceptual field. Thus the lignaige

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Darnant and the Franc Palais inhabit the same land, but not, we might say, the same idea of the land. The outlaws attempt to recolonise the English forests by defining a space apart and using it as a kind of black hole that cannot be seen, but into which Perceforest’s power structure will be drawn and consigned to death. Slowly but surely, if their plan succeeds, his knighthood will be contained within their castles, dungeons, and execution chambers, and theirs will be the dominant space. In a very real sense, Bruyant’s plan is to turn the kingdom inside out, and he sets this plan in motion through the creation of a visual perspective that is inaccessible to the rival culture. The invisibility of Bruyant’s fortress is a force that drives the endless violence, the searching, the circulation of Perceforest’s knights around this site that they can never find, whose effects are everywhere and whose presence seems to be nowhere. Seeking the supposed assailants of damsels claiming to be in distress, or indeed seeking their own disappeared companions, the knights of the Franc Palais will be drawn inexorably to their death. Instead of the castle that they search for so desparately, Perceforest and his men see a river, impassable and wild: a natural threat, intrinsic to the land. Only Gadifer, with his magic ring, sees that the river is an illusion, and that behind this illusion stands the castle. There ensues an amusing conversation in which Perceforest and his nephew debate their respective perceptions: Le roy, la damoiselle et les deux escuiers certiffierent lors a Gadiffer qu’il y avoit pardevant eulx une tres grosse riviere moult radement courant. ‘Comment, dist Gadiffer, me tenez vous pour yvre, quant huy ne mengay ne beu? – Beaulx nieps, dist le roy, ne sçay comment il vous en prent, mais nous voyons bien que c’est, et pour ce soiez content, car il est ainsi.’ (III.i, pp. 208–9) [The king, the damsel, and the two squires insisted then to Gadifer that before them was a very large river running very swiftly. ‘What,’ said Gadifer, ‘do you think I’m drunk, when I have neither eaten nor drunk anything today?’ ‘Fair nephew’, said the king, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but we clearly see what’s there, and rest assured, that’s how it is.’]

In the end, having had enough of this fruitless argument, Gadifer simply rides into the castle, giving his uncle the impression that he has drowned in the river. All is resolved, however, when Gadifer locates and smashes ‘la gaiolle plaine de ampoulles de voire et de plusieurs malefices qui destournoient a veoir le chastel pour les enchantemens dont plaines estoient’ [the rack of glass jars and evil things which made the castle invisible because of the magic spells they were full of] (pp. 211–12). With the castle no longer invisible, Perceforest rides in at once to assist Gadifer in rescuing their companions. Renamed Chastel Trouvé, the site becomes a stronghold of royal power. This juxtaposition of irreconcilable perspectives, like the hallucinatory effects



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of the beste glatissant, recalls the visual play of anamorphosis. In the case of the beste, each viewer has a unique visual perspective, defined by his fantasies and desires, which isolates him in a hallucinatory bubble; but all are united in their inability to see the beast itself, which disappears under its iridescent ‘reverberacions’. Bruyant’s castle is at a confluence of only two perspectives, serving to categorise the viewers into those who share in the lineage and the customs of the clan, and those who do not. For this latter group, the lignaige Darnant are not a legitimate aristocracy but a barbaric tribe behaving like ‘bestes sauvages’, and appropriately their castle blends into the inhospitable landscape that shelters them. Even when they are standing in front of it, Perceforest and his knights see not a stronghold of aristocratic power but a ‘riviere . . . trop perilleuse’ [exceedingly perilous river] flowing through ‘une forest moult espesse . . . tellement que pour la force des branches a paine pouoient ilz aller avant’ [a forest so dense that they could scarcely move forward because of obstruction from the branches] (III.i, pp. 209, 194). Once again, armed struggle between rival cultures is overwritten with the march of civilisation against the wilderness. At the same time, this perception of the lignaige Darnant as embedded in the landscape is not inappropriate to the clan’s own self-image as the rightful owners and rulers of a land that is theirs not by feudal grant but by birthright. The optical trick that turns a castle into a river and back again expresses the indigenous people’s sense of their own natural claim to the forest, while also exploiting the foreign king’s unacknowledged fear of the wild, uncharted territories that lie beyond his palace precinct. What is even more deeply hidden from view is the source of this illusion: magic potions contained in glass bottles. Far from being a natural component of the English landscape, the danger here is entirely cultural: a stronghold of resistance to colonial rule. The power on which that resistant culture rests is contrary to the proto-Christian cult of the Dieu Souverain promulgated by Perceforest. Its magical basis is both Trojan and also quintessentially British, having been brought by Cassandra in the very first contingent of Trojan refugees to reach those islands. As the hermit Dardanon explains, ‘d’elle vindrent tous les enchantemens de cest pays’ [all the enchantments of this land came from her] (I.i, pp. 424–5). Cassandra and her people used ‘conjuracions et enchantemens’ to combat the giants, making magic literally the means by which a Trojan foothold was established in Britain. By this point, magic is a defining feature of the realm: as explained by a damsel who has escaped from the Chastel Desvoyé, ‘n’est contree au monde en qui l’en use tant de ces maledictions comme l’en fait en cestui royaume’ [there is no country in the world where these evil spells are  

See my ‘Cultural Conflict’. Taylor notes that ‘the unmasking of the technical paraphernalia involved in the creating of the illusion in not only in itself a subject of interest and curiosity, but also an additional proof of the diabolical wiles of the enchanter’, in ‘Aroès’, p. 33. See also Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et ses déceptions’, pp. 423–4.

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used as much as in this kingdom] (III.i, p. 207). It is the mainstay of the lignaige Darnant, ‘la chose qui plus les tient en vertus’ [the thing that most maintains their power] (ibid.). The Greek queen Lydoire also takes up the magical arts; but, significantly, she eventually renounces them. Although she insists that her use of magic was always ‘a bonne intencion’ [well intentioned] (IV.i, p. 558), upon her conversion to the cult of the Dieu Souverain she recognises ‘conjurations et enchantemens’ of all sorts as a forbidden science. Reaffirming her faith in the ‘sentences des philozophes’ [teachings of the philosophers] (p. 555), which she studied as a girl under the tutelage of Aristotle himself, and which enabled her to become ‘tres bonne astronomienne’ [a skilled astronomer] and ‘maistresse d’arquemie’ [a master alchemist] (p. 518), Lydoire is granted a vision foretelling the Incarnation and Virgin Birth. Magic, clearly, is part of the old Trojano-British culture that must be supplanted by a new order grounded in Hellenic philosophy and Christian theology. It is this forbidden science, the intellectual heritage and power base of an alien culture, that Gadifer exposes at the heart of clan resistance, and which he shows in a single blow to be not impregnable but remarkably ephemeral, built out of glass.

Outlaw Knights and Whorish Women How then are we to assess the status of the lignaige Darnant in Perceforest’s Britain? In their resistance to the new king and his laws, the men could be seen as comparable to the outlaws, often similarly powerful and well organised, which figure in medieval legal and literary documents. For a historical example contemporary with Perceforest, one might think of the Folville brothers, active in the first half of fourteenth century, who preyed on the king’s officers while receiving considerable support from local people.10 In the folkloric and literary traditions that idealised them, such figures were often identified with a counter-culture based on local customs and traditions, resisting the increasingly codified laws of the realm and its ever more complex bureaucracy of courts and legal officers. The story of Darnant and his brothers, as explained by a British knight on the occasion of Perceforest’s coronation, could indeed be the basis for stirring tales of dashing knights living free in the greenwood: il y eut un chevalier en cest pays . . . qui occist ung chevalier qui cousin estoit au roy. . . . Le chevalier se traist en ceste forest luy cinquiesme de freres. Et sachiez que onques ne peurent estre tenus, ainçois sont depuis 

Gerald of Wales associates a Welsh tradition of soothsayers such as Merlin with the Trojan legacy as exemplified in Calchas and Cassandra, in Descriptio Kambriae, I.16, pp. 194–200 (Description, tr. Thorpe, pp. 246–51). See also Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, p. 679.  On the ambivalence surrounding Lydoire’s use of magic, see Taylor, ‘Reine Fée’. 10 See Stones, ‘Folvilles’; R. F. Green, ‘Medieval Literature’.



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tant multipliez qu’ils tiennent les forestz tant franches qu’il n’est chevalier de dehors, s’ilz le peuent tenir dedens, que jamais en reviengne. (I.i, p. 164) [There was a knight of this land . . . who killed a knight who was the king’s cousin. . . . The knight took refuge in this forest with his four brothers. And you should know that they have never been caught, and since then they have so multiplied that they they rule the forests completely, such that no knight from the outside, if they catch him in the forest, can ever get out.]

Unlike the various romances and legends that treat such characters sympathetically, however, Perceforest supports a royalist ideology of strong central government, emanating from the personal power and integrity of the sovereign and enforced by royal knights and local lords. The practices of the lignaige Darnant might also be compared to the common romance motif of the mauvaises coustumes entrenched in a given location. These customs obstruct travel and distract knights from important missions by bogging them down in enforced battles that often serve no purpose other than that of perpetuating the custom itself. Worst of all, the victor may find that he has escaped death only to be given the role of defender, and that he is now required to remain in place, an effective prisoner, and fight all new arrivals. The suppression of these ‘evil customs’, which often derive from a local blood feud or a personal grievance against the king, is an important part of the work accomplished by Arthur’s knights. And their persistence is the sign of a weak monarch. As ­Tristan’s brotherin-law Kahedin exclaims when, on a visit to the realm of Logres, he is forced to fight his way across the Pont de la Tour Vermeille: ‘Maleois soit le rois Artus, ki si males coustumes et si vilaines suefre u roiaume de Logres’ [cursed be King Arthur, who permits such evil and dastardly customs in the realm of Logres].11 The abolition of mauvaises coustumes based on private vendettas or bids for power can be seen as part of a larger process of breaking down the categories of ‘local’ and ‘private’ in the expansion of a public realm governed by a centralised law. Perceforest’s ban on rape has a similar effect, targeting what had previously been viewed as a private act with no public consequences – a knight’s right to the sexual enjoyment of any woman that catches his attention – and redefining it as a public act, a crime against royal authority and public decency. As such it makes an interesting comparison with legislation enacted in the modern history of European colonialism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s comments about the Indian custom of suttee are illuminating in this regard. Spivak notes that with the abolition of suttee, ‘the protection of woman . . . becomes a signifier for the establishment of a good society’.12 With ‘the redefinition as a crime of what had been tolerated, known, or adulated as ritual’, the practice of suttee ‘jumped the 11 12

Tristan, ed. Ménard, vol. 1. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, p. 298, emphasis hers.

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frontier between the private and the public domain’ (ibid.). Competing cultural discourses in colonial and postcolonial India have used suttee as a battleground for defining the ‘good woman’: one who immolates herself out of love for her husband, one eager to sacrifice her body as a means of escaping from feminine reincarnations, or one willing to let herself be protected by white men. From the perspective of the colonial power, the definition of the native woman as a victim of her own culture, and her complicity with this move, is crucial in the legitimation of colonial rule. As Kinoshita has said of the Saracen princess who converts to Christianity, a stock figure in medieval Crusade epics, the woman becomes ‘the site where pagan society turns against itself ’ and acknowledges its desire for the foreign – in this case Christian European – presence.13 As Spivak states, the image of imperialism as ‘the establisher of the good society’ is staked on ‘the espousal of woman as object of protection from her own kind’ (p. 299, emphasis hers). Similarly, in the fictional history imagined in Perceforest, the foundation of a ‘good society’ is inseparable from the location of sexuality as a public concern, the identification of British women as an object to be protected by royal decree from British (and other) men, and the definition of a good woman as one who avails herself of that protection. This last point is crucial, for the outlawing of the lignaige Darnant as insurgent rapists affects not only the men, but also the women who choose to retain their clan allegiances. Such women, having ostensibly opted for a life of sexual abuse rather than one of chastity and marriage, are reviled by the knights and ladies of the Franc Palais. Pierote, sizing up the damsel who misleads Gadifer with her false rape claim, perceives her as one who ‘comptast pou a une telle aventure dont elle se plaignoit’ [would care little about an occurrence such as the one she was complaining of] (II.ii, p. 339). Not content merely to expose the woman’s claim as false, Pierote takes the further step of asserting that she would have no objection to rape if it did happen. In effect, Pierote’s view is that women of the lignaige Darnant could never be victims of rape: always open to another sexual adventure, they have no vulnerability, and thus can neither be threatened nor saved. A woman of the lignaige Darnant embodies the misogynist fantasy of the woman who longs to be raped because it allows her to keep up the pretence of modesty while indulging her lascivious desires. The indignant Pierote does not hesitate to denounce her new adversary in precisely these terms: Sy m’est advis . . . que vous soyez de celles qui habandonnent a tollir ce qu’elles faignent a garder jusques a la mort . . . car je cuide qu’il y ait passé .XXX. ans que vous l’avez perdu de vostre bon gré. (p. 340) [It seems to me . . . that you’re one of those women who allow that to be taken which they pretend to guard with their life . . . for I’d say that it’s been thirty years since you lost it, and willingly.]

13

Kinoshita, ‘ “Pagans” ’, p. 96.



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And as the knights taken prisoner through this ruse lament their fate, they agree that a woman capable of such perfidy is ‘pire beste que le dyable’ [a worse beast than the devil] (p. 353). Just as Perceforest’s law creates the categories of courtly femininity and chivalric masculinity, so also it creates the corresponding categories of brutal rapist and deceiving whore as gender constructions that are outlawed, excluded from consideration as acceptable subject positions. The status of the lignaige Darnant as an obstacle to Perceforest’s hegemonic rule is more complex, however, than the existence of an aberrant custom, a hostile outpost, or a band of outlaws. I have just noted that they cannot be overcome by military force alone, for their power is also magic, their presence demonic. The long process of their elimination, though upheld by force of arms, is contained within an ideological battle that begins with Perceforest’s proclamation, and culminates in his great-nephew Gallafur’s exorcism of the clan ghosts by invoking the – to him incomprehensible – ‘son of the virgin’. In its creation of the category of outlaws who can never be assimilated but only put to death and banished to the depths of hell, this new regime is portrayed as establishing not just a new culture in competition with an indigenous one, but culture itself, where formerly there had been only barbarity.

Absolute Culture and Cultural Hybridity When the leaders of the lignaige Darnant gather to plot their strategy in the face of Perceforest’s incursion, the one virtuous brother, Gelinant du Glat, accuses his fellows of having violated political, natural, and religious laws. As an indictment of the clan’s behaviour, his speech merits close examination. Firstly and most obviously, they have defied the authority of the king: as supreme rulers of the forests, ‘n’avons voulu recongnoistre de nul seigneur’ [we have been unwilling to recognise any overlord] (I.i, 399). Secondly, in their abusive treatment of women, they have gone against the law of nature. The ‘Dieu de Nature’, he acknowledges, created the male of every species as stronger, nobler, and naturally dominant over the female. But in order to ensure that the female is regarded by the male as his sexual equal – ‘sa pareille’ – nature established the female of every species as ‘dame de son corps’ [mistress of her body] (I.i, p. 400): Et pour la franchise aux fumelles garder, le Dieu de Nature y mist une garde qui a nom plaisance, par quoy le masle n’osast adeser la fumelle se plaisance ne luy donnoit congié, de quoy nous veons que tout masle de bestes et d’oiseaulx sont ou dangier des femelles en ce cas. (pp. 400–401) [and to protect the freedom of the females, the God of Nature placed a safeguard called ‘attraction’, whereby the male wouldn’t dare to mate with the female unless she found him attractive and thus permitted it, and so we see that the male of every species of beast and bird is at the mercy of the females in this respect.]

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Even animals, we are asked to believe, operate on the basis of mutual, consensual attraction; in their perverse flouting of this natural principle, the lignaige Darnant have merited their punishment. And finally, they have turned against their own gods, failing to give thanks or to offer sacrifices, ‘ainsy que se nous n’eussions besoing de luy ne qu’il ne nous peust grever’ [as though we had no need of him, and he had no power to hurt us] (p. 400). Threefold, then, are the failings of the lignaige Darnant. Outlaws of the realm, guilty of unnatural sexual practices, and blasphemous in their disrespect of the gods, they are a pre-Christian version of heretics, who were also often accused of sexual deviance and other criminal activities. Lacking a grounding in either religious piety or natural law, and holding themselves apart from the network of feudal relations, they are the very picture of cultural degeneracy. Perceforest, in contrast, will unite these cultural matrices. With his proto-Christian cult of the Dieu Souverain, his regulation of sexuality, and his organisation of the British knighthood in the fellowship of the Franc Palais, his reign offers the idealised model of a realm in which sacred, natural, and feudal laws coincide. Perceforest’s imposition of law and order, like that of Gadifer, involves public display of punishment, but in his case this punishment is meted out as death and must be staged again and again. Moreover, the mutilated bodies, magically preserved and in some cases consumed by eternal flames, are often left on display; at the very least, tombs or other monuments commemorate the killings.14 Thus the wild forests of Perceforest’s England are demarcated into places and mapped out around a history of violent conquest and ruthless enforcement. Perceforest’s England is explicitly, visibly defined over and against a category of ‘outsiders’ who continue to occupy zones of exclusion and exile, whether as ‘undead’ bodies, as spirits haunting the site of their demise, as outlaws hiding in the forest, or as exiles in Brittany, patiently plotting their revenge. As exiles and rebels against a culture of absolute value, the lignaige Darnant are assimilated to the fallen angels, who continue to resist the sovereign deity from their refuge in hell, and who persecute Perceforest’s knights through such points of entry as Darnant’s tomb. Darnant himself, when not haunting his tomb by night, occupies a place in hell second only to that of Lucifer, who of course lies at the furthest possible extreme. Darnant’s fate is explained when Passelion, son of Estonné and Priande, visits the underworld in order to consult the ghost of his father, and views the tormented souls in the pit of hell: Adont lui demanda Passelyon tellement: ‘Dy moy, esprit, qui est celle ame assez prez de la santine qui tant est tourmentee par l’ardeur de Luciffer? – Je la congnois aucunement, dist l’esprit, car c’est l’ame du 14

On verbal and visual commemoration in Arthurian romance, see Bozóky, ‘De la parole’. Siewers notes a similar politicisation of the haunted landscape in Old English literature, where ‘the devilish spirits of the landscape are the spirits of the native population that demographically was still present in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms’, and concludes that ‘landscape becomes . . . a palimpsest for human moral and political concerns’, in ‘Landscapes’, pp. 25, 39.



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mauvais homme Dernant l’enchanteur… Et ceux d’entour lui sont de son lignaige qui se consentirent a son malice’. (IV.ii, p. 748) [Then Passelion asked him: ‘Tell me, spirit, who is that soul close to the pit, who is so tormented by the heat of Lucifer?’ ‘I used to know him,’ said the spirit, ‘for that’s the soul of the evil man Darnant the Enchanter . . . and all around him are those of his lineage who went along with his wickedness.’]

Darnant, surrounded by his followers, mimics Lucifer, surrounded by those who consented to his evil will. And the ‘mauvais esprits’ that swarm over Britain are identified on at least some occasions as devils from hell: fallen angels who, less absolutely damned than Lucifer, are allowed to wander the earth within strict limitations. That is the explanation given to Estonné by Zephir, a fallen angel himself (II.i, pp. 73–7). Yet on other occasions these spirits identify themselves as the followers of Darnant, ‘prince et souverain de tout son lignage trespassez et de tous les mauvais esperis de celle forest’ [prince and sovereign of his deceased lineage, and of all the evil spirits of this forest] (III.i, p. 152). The distinction between the fallen angels and the ghosts of the lignaige Darnant is increasingly blurred as the narrative progresses, strengthening the latter’s identification with sin, abjection, and exile. But there is also a more particular consequence of this identification. Lucifer’s great sin, after all, was to set himself up as a rival to God; or, as it is explained to Passelion, ‘il voult estre samblable a son Createur Souverain, ce que aucunement ne pouoit’ [he wanted to be like his Sovereign Creator, which was impossible] (IV.ii, p. 747). At the core of Hell, defining the absolute limit of evil, is a figure of perverse mimicry, an exceedingly dangerous gesture of resemblance that spells damnation for anyone deceived into believing it. And this tactic of perverse and hostile mimicry, grounded in deception, is precisely the most powerful weapon available to the lignaige Darnant, which seeks to subvert the chivalric culture of Perceforest’s England by aggressively imitating its outward forms. Lucifer is never able to deceive God and still inhabits God’s universe, in which distance from God is experienced as torment. He cannot stop desiring God, because that is a condition of existence in any form; as Estonné concludes from Zephir’s explanations, ‘il n’est enfer ne tourment fors de perdre la veue et la congnoissance de Dieu’ [there is no hell or torment other than to lose the sight and the knowledge of God] (II.i, p. 74). Zephir concurs, adding that ‘se Lucifer pouoit oublier la perte qu’il a faicte en la veue de Dieu, tout aultre tourment qui porroit estre a creature luy tourneroit a deduit’ [if Lucifer could forget having lost the sight of God, all other torment that a creature can suffer would seem to him like pleasure] (pp. 74–5). God does not inhabit a culture that has an outside. Nor, according to medieval theology, is he a finite being vying for dominance with another finite being; God is being, while sinners, insofar as they estrange themselves from God, dissolve into nonbeing and formlessness. In contrast even the great king Perceforest does inhabit a culture with clear

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boundaries, and is very much a finite and fallible being. His enemies create alternative spaces and visions that deceive and confuse him, and threaten constantly to recolonise the territory that he has won with such effort. In that sense his culture, like all things in this world below, is contingent and precarious. But insofar as his law is aligned with that of God and his enemies with God’s enemies, the culture established by Perceforest also attains an absolute quality: not just a culture, but Culture, the perfect confluence of human, natural, and sacred laws. Though individual dynasties will rise and fall, and different peoples will rule Britain, the cultural institutions and laws that Perceforest has established will live on: eclipsed during periods of cultural decline, but ever resurgent in periods of stability and prosperity. His kingdom prepares Britain for the advent of Christianity, for the rise of the Arthurian era and the adventures of the Grail, and ultimately for the cultural flowering of Plantagenet England. The analogy between the kingdom of God and that of Perceforest is strengthened in the realisation that in both cases the effect of power and cultural hegemony is, as Bhabha says of colonialism, the production of hybridity.15 We find the hostile mimicry of the clan, and the eager – at times almost worshipful – mimicry of indigenes seeking assimilation. We encounter the humanoid singots that result from Le Bossu’s presence among the apes, the lineage of half-breed giants that issue from the marriage of Lyonnel’s squire Clamidés to the young giantess Galotine, and the mixing of Greek and Trojan that results from the intermarriage of the incomers with indigenous people. And what of the lignaige Darnant? I will discuss their treatment at greater length in Chapter 8; but here, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn. We have seen that the anamorphic illusions described in Perceforest entail a kind of triangulation. Behind the optical play of opposing perspectives is something traumatic, something dangerous and incomprehensible, which must nonetheless be seen and confronted if the illusions are to be dispelled and the danger averted. In the scene at the Chastel Desvoyé, the lignaige Darnant are unmasked as practitioners of magic, their demonic arts exposed and shattered. The vision of Darnant in the pit of hell – the traumatic reality that is both indicated and hidden from view by his earthly tomb – even more explicitly locates their war of resistance in a cosmic framework of good versus evil. And finally, what is hidden away in the very bottom of hell is a desperate, truly unbearable yearning for God, against whom Lucifer nonetheless continues to rebel. By analogy, then, is there a hint that beneath the barbaric semblance of the lignaige Darnant, there might lurk an equally desperate, equally unspoken longing for all that Alexander or Perceforest represent? If so, they would not be alone. The people of the Scottish Wilds, as we have seen, are consumed with a desire to ‘be like’ their new king, to be his subjects formed in his image, as soon as they understand that this might be possible. The giantess Galotine’s desire for Clamidés, despite her young age, is so strong that 15

Bhabha, Location, p. 112.



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she insists on marrying no one but him; and their descendant Galeholt, the halfbreed giant from the Distant Isles, will famously and fatally desire Lancelot so keenly that, in order to have his company, he will abandon all earthly honour. Mimetic desire, in fact, pervades the world of Arthurian romance and is a powerful force in the shaping of masculine subjects. As Burgwinkle has stated: ‘These men all want the same things . . . Violent mimetism is the rule of chivalry.’16 According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the ability to inspire – or perhaps to enforce – imitation was a powerful tool of Arthurian hegemony: Tunc inuitatis probissimis quibusque ex longe positis regnis. cepit familiam suam augmentare. tantamque facetiam in domo sua habere. ita ut emulationem longe manentibus populis ingereret. Unde nobilissimus quisque incitatus nichili pendebat se. nisi sese siue in induendo. siue in arma ferendo. ad modum militum arturi haberet. (Historia, IX.xi, p. 446) [Arthur then began to increase his personal entourage by inviting very distinguished men from far-distant kingdoms to join it. In this way he developed such a code of courtliness in his household that he inspired people living far away to imitate him. The result was that even the man of noblest birth, once he was roused to rivalry, thought nothing at all of himself unless he wore his arms and dressed in the same way as Arthur’s knights.] (History, tr. Thorpe, p. 222)

As Bhabha notes, even the most enthusiastic mimicry to which the colonial situation gives rise can have disturbing consequences, as it both blurs and yet enhances the distinction between rulers and subjects, coloniser and colonised. For the resistant clansmen, mimicry becomes a powerful weapon even as it also corrodes identity, forcing them increasingly into postures and modes of behaviour determined by the norms of the dominant culture. The lignaige Darnant are envious of Perceforest’s political power and his possession of what they regard as their lands. They chafe under his redefinition of honour, from which they are excluded, and his ability to promulgate an official view of British history in which their demise is something to be celebrated. In their hostile mimicry, hybridity in action, they grow ever more skilful at posing as the object of his knights’ desire. In the initial battle for control of the forests, Darnant himself most strikingly assumes the form of Ydorus, Perceforest’s queen. When the bewildered Perceforest lays down his arms, attempting to embrace what he thinks is his wife, he is nearly killed by the wily sorcerer. On subsequent occasions, the clan dazzle the knights with the spectacle of damsels in distress, and of illusory opportunities for heroic action and public honour. Towards the end of the romance, when Gallafur is attempting to free the forest of its demonic legacy, the spirits have switched tactics yet again and now portray themselves as the guardians of aristocratic opulence, able to admit their followers 16

Burgwinkle, Sodomy, pp. 98, 100.

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to a paradise of sensual bliss in which trees are perpetually in both flower and fruit, the weather is eternally warm and sunny, tempting foods are ever available, and there is an endless supply of beautiful maidens.17 If they are so skilled at articulating and staging the knights’ deepest desires, it is ultimately because these desires are their own as well. This endlessly mimicking, endlessly mocking, always illusory presence, formulating the fundamental values of Perceforest’s culture while simultaneously undermining them, is a satanic one. We encounter here the tempter who interposes himself between the individual and the one true object of desire, attempting to attract desire onto himself while at the same time unable to suppress his own longing for that same object of universal desire. Again, the text implies an analogy between the rebellion of Darnant and his lineage against Perceforest, and that of Lucifer and his minions against God. The tactic is reminiscent of that identified by Bloch in Anglo-Norman accounts of St Patrick’s mission to Ireland. Commenting on the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz attributed to Marie de France, in which Irish demons anxiously ask one another how they can defend themselves against Patrick’s onslaught, Bloch states: The demon’s question and fear of the displacement of one set of laws by another are to be understood in the context of Anglo-Norman ambitions in Ireland and of their ideological consequences in what is figured as the civilizing mission of the English.18 Similarly, in Perceforest the resistant members of the lignaige Darnant are portrayed as outlaws of the realm and as sinners damned beyond redemption. Not only must they be killed and their customs abolished, but even their ghosts, indistinguishable from infernal demons, must be exorcised and banished from the land. The lignaige Darnant are a cultural failure, a people unable to benefit from the redemptive gift of an imperial power’s mission civilisatrice. They are indelibly marked by the advent of Greek rule, but the result is not a fruitful merging of cultural traditions or an innovative recreation of eastern splendour in a western setting. Though at times ingenious, the hybrid forms assumed by these resistant knights and ladies remain sterile and self-defeating. At the same time, interestingly, it is a great-nephew of Darnant, Lyonnel du Glat, who assimilates into the new Greek regime so completely that he marries Gadifer’s daughter, and is regarded by all as the greatest knight of the realm. Itself riven by a fundamental hybridity at its core, the lignaige Darnant becomes the staging ground for a complex exploration of conquest, resistance, and assimilation. In an illuminating discussion of the theory of colonial hybridity, Robert Young has stressed the close relationship between a hybridity of cultural expression and that of miscegenation, noting that ‘hybridity as a cultural description will always carry with it an implicit politics of heterosexuality’.19 A politics of heterosexu17 18 19

The episode is in Book VI. See Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Aux frontières’, pp. 89–90. Bloch, Anonymous Marie, pp. 269–70. Young, Colonial Desire, p. 25.



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ality is indeed fundamental to Perceforest, whose tale of the relations between different peoples and cultures is also one of heteronormative sexuality, its risks and rewards, its ideals and its perversions. Not only rape, but also incest and miscegenation are recurring sources of anxiety throughout the romance, while the prospect of homoeroticism, though never named as such, lurks just beneath the surface. The treatment of love, gender and sexuality in Perceforest will be the focus of Part II; in Part III, I will return to the text’s portrayal of ethnic and cultural difference, with a closer examination of the Trojan legacy on the one hand and that of the lignaige Darnant on the other.

Part II Heteronormative Sexuality and the Mission Civilisatrice

Et ob affluentiam diuiciarum superbi, ceperunt tali et tante fornicationi indulgere, qualis nec inter gentes audita est. . . . Uolebat enim deus uindictam ex ipsis sumere, dum externum populum superuenire passus est qui eos patriis agris exterminarent. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, XII.vi, pp. 520–1 [They were made proud by the very vastness of their wealth. They began to indulge in sexual excesses such as had never been heard of among other peoples. . . . God decided to take vengeance on them by suffering a foreign people to come and drive them away from the lands of their forefathers. (trans. Thorpe, History, pp. 273–4)]

4

Compulsory Love We have seen in Chapter 3 that Perceforest’s law against rape had the effect of establishing love in England, and that from the advent of love flowed all the blessings of civilisation. Love inspires heroic exploits and courtly refinements and, in Perceforest, nearly always leads to marriage and the continuation of noble lineage. Ostensibly enacted for the protection and empowerment of women – virtually by popular demand – Perceforest’s law is a mainstay of his own royal power. The prohibition of rape creates a knighthood, bound to the king in part through his power to approve marriages, and eager to win their brides by performing valiant deeds in battle or, failing that, in the court festivities through which Perceforest’s kingship is staged and reconfirmed. And it creates ladyhood, a class of aristocratic women devoted to the improvement of the kingdom through a cultivation of domestic arts, landscaping, and the production of an opulent courtly splendour that, once again, publicly stages the cultural pre-eminence of the kingdom and its rulers. Perceforest’s law also defines the resistant clan members as outlaws. By condemning the lignaige Darnant as rapists whose access to women is fundamentally illegitimate, Perceforest emasculates his indigenous rivals, curbs their prolific reproduction – when he was killed by Perceforest, Darnant alone had well over a hundred sons and nearly as many grandsons – and establishes a legal basis for the systematic extermination of the clansmen. Imperial conquest – a process all too easily represented through the metaphor of rape – is thus recast as sexual salvation, with sexual violence and ‘perversity’ projected onto the native male rulers about to be supplanted. Such a move is not original to Perceforest. Giants, those archetypal indigenes and enemies of civilisation, are typically portrayed as rapists. Gerald of Wales also cites the value of conquest by a foreign people as a means of eliminating sexual vices from a depraved populace, with his claim that the Welsh now refrained from sodomy only as a result of their poverty and subjugation by the English. Ingham’s comment that in Gerald’s eyes, ‘[o]nly loss at the hands of the apparently righteous English can save these wild Britons from themselves’, would be equally applicable to the relationship between the conquering Greeks and the British clan that they drive into exile.   

See Cohen, Of Giants, on the sexually rapacious giant in myths of cultural conquest. Description, II.7. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, p. 112.

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Heterosexual love, then, is presented as an essential feature of chivalric culture, an element at once anchoring it in nature and elevating it to superior heights. It is clear that the chivalric society depicted in Perceforest could not function, indeed would not exist, without love, that is, without a heterosexual passion that is both erotic and emotional, and both overpowering yet subject to strict regulation. How then does ‘love’ operate in the world of Perceforest, and why is it so vital?

Love and the Escape from the Same Heterosexual love is depicted in Perceforest, as in medieval French romance generally, as a necessary supplement to the knight’s identity within the feudal network. King Gadifer explains to Lyonnel, who aspires to the hand of the princess Blanchete, that acquiring a maiden’s love is no easy matter: Lyonnel, dist le roy, combien que valeur et proesse, lignaige et beaulté vaille a amour de pucelle, sy convient il avoir eur et grace, car vous sçavez que dames et damoiselles sont dangereuses. (II.ii, p. 123) [Lyonnel, said the king, however important valour and prowess, lineage and beauty are in winning a maiden’s love, still one needs favour and grace, for you know that ladies and damsels are haughty.]

The fundamental chivalric attributes that ensure a knight’s standing among his peers are not sufficient to ensure his success in love: something else is required, something mysterious and intangible. This ‘something else’ that determines the mutual attraction of lovers, this supplement to the feudal values of prowess and noble birth, is at the heart of courtly culture. The winning of brides, dependent on the lady’s ‘grace’ and not simply the man’s military record and illustrious ancestry, allows each knight to be the very best. The hierarchy of chivalric prowess and aristocratic rank that obtains within the male world is annihilated in the world defined by love, where every knight is supreme in the eyes of his lady. At one tournament, the knight Peleon, ignominiously defeated before the eyes of his beloved Dache, is so humiliated that he flees the court and goes mad, wandering aimlessly in the forest. But Dache, unflinching in her love, kidnaps all twelve of the tournament victors and keeps them under a spell, forcing them to fight every knight who comes along until the day that all twelve are defeated by a single combatant. Of course it is Peleon who, despite his sorry state, achieves this feat. And now, having redeemed himself as ‘very best’ in the eyes of his beloved, he recovers his senses; the two marry shortly thereafter. 

For a discussion of the early rise of courtly romance in terms of its marginalisation of ‘monologic masculinity’ and its grounding in compulsory heterosexuality, see Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 73–91.



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Love also creates a framework in which each knight can experience privacy and isolation from his fellow knights. Though love is vital to a knight’s identity, and common to all of them, it is not something that can be shared. The privacy of love is humorously noted when Le Tor and Troïlus manage, in the midst of a protracted siege, to spend a night with their wives. As they retire for the night in adjoining rooms, Le Tor calls out to Troïlus with comments about their good fortune. In no mood for conversation, Troïlus begs for a bit of privacy: ‘je vous requiers de faire scillence jusquez au matin qu’il sera heure de parler’ [I beg you to keep quiet until the morning, when it will be time to talk] (IV.i, p. 251). Severed from his companion-at-arms by this protective silence, each then enjoys the fruits of love: Pour entendre aux choses plus agreables, les deux chevaliers et leurs compaignes firent sillence et besongnerent tellement a leurs plaisances que, ains qu’ilz se descouchassent le matin, ilz laisserent chascun leurs femmes enchaintes d’un beau fils. (ibid.) [To attend to more agreeable things, the two knights and their wives kept quiet and worked so hard on their pleasure that, by the time they got up in the morning, each one left his wife pregnant with a handsome son.]

Knightly companionship, clearly, has its limits, and the marker of those limits is the heterosexual relationship. The role of heterosexual love as both a bond and a wedge between knights is interestingly illustrated in the relationship of Lyonnel and the young Troïlus, before the latter has met and married Zellandine. Troïlus is the brother of Priande and thus one of the recently civilised inhabitants of Royauville. On the way to his first tournament, Troïlus is delighted to encounter the famous Lyonnel, but his joy turns to dismay when Lyonnel informs him that he cannot possibly keep company with a knight who is not in love: – Comment, sire, dist Troÿlus, renoncez vous a ma compaignie pour ce que je n’aime pas par amours? – Certes, sire, dist Lyonnel, oÿl, car je ne porroie mie croire que bien me deust venir de chose que j’emprenisse pour honneur acquerre tant que je fusse en vostre compaignie. (II.ii, p. 187) [‘What, sir,’ said Troylus, ‘are you renouncing my company just because I’m not in love?’ ‘Indeed, sir,’ said Lyonnel, ‘yes, because I can’t believe that I could benefit from anything I undertook in search of honour, as long as I’m in your company.’]

Only after Troïlus somewhat desperately promises to fall in love as soon as he meets an appropriate damsel can the two continue together. Now that Troïlus is committed to falling in love, Lyonnel takes pleasure in watching him joust with other knights encountered along the way; and his pleasure redoubles at the tour-

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nament itself, where it becomes apparent that Troïlus has indeed fallen in love, and his prowess accordingly grown to the point that he is able to unhorse Lyonnel himself. Male–male intimacy, comprising both physical violence and emotional friendship, is literally predicated on the need for each man to have a heterosexual love interest. Once the tournament is over, Lyonnel once again requests that Troïlus go his separate way. This time, however, he gives a different reason: they are approaching the home of Blanchete, and Lyonnel wants to be unaccompanied when he sees her. It is worth looking in some detail at Lyonnel’s elaborate explanation of why the two friends must part. He begins rather obliquely, with a statement of conformance to a paradigm that Troïlus instantly feels compelled to imitate himself, despite not yet knowing what it entails. Troïlus has just asked Lyonnel what he is thinking about: ‘Sire, dist Lyonnel . . . Il est bien vray que je pensoye, et bien me sambloit que je ressambloye aux leaux amoureux.’ Quant Troÿlus oÿ ce, la face lui commença a rougir, car il eust esté trop doulant s’il n’eust ressamblé leal amoureux sus tous les autres. (III.i, p. 292) [‘Sir,’ said Lyonnel . . . ‘it is very true that I was thinking, and it seemed to me that I resembled the loyal lovers’. When Troilus heard that, he began to blush, for he would have been devastated if he had not resembled a loyal lover more than anyone.]

Troïlus accordingly asks Lyonnel for clarification, upon which Lyonnel explains that a ‘vray amant’ needs to be alone when he approaches his beloved. Having thus justified himself, Lyonnel further explains that although Troïlus is ‘l’un des chevaliers au monde que j’aime le mieulx’ [one of the knights that I like best in all the world], he now wants his companion to go away (ibid.). Eager to show his conformance to this all-important norm, Troïlus happily agrees, pointing out that the further he goes with Lyonnel, the further he gets from his beloved Zellandine, whom he now wishes to seek – on his own, of course. Love, then, is a paradoxical force in the chivalric world: both a condition of knightly companionship and a source of division. Every knight must conform to the model of true love, desiring to fit himself to this image even before he knows what it is, thus making himself rigorously identical to his companions. And yet this very model is one that demands a privileged, private space, one that no other knight can occupy. Unlike chivalric exploits, typically performed for the admiring gaze of men and ladies alike, the workings of love permit no observers. Thus love creates an alternate context, a safety valve to relieve the potential 

On the way that same-sex and heterosexual desires are negotiated both through and against one another in fourteenth-century English texts, see Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism, pp. 45–66.



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claustrophobia of knighthood. This is what was missing with the chevaliers de mer: the only frame of reference there was that of chivalric violence and male bonding through competition. The lignaige Darnant, on the other hand, are openly and rapaciously sexual, but not in a manner that separates the knights from one another. The offhand manner in which clan members plan their fleeting and brutal sexual encounters hardly suggests any need for privacy, as shown in the agreement between the two knights who attack Priande and Lyriope: ‘je en iray prendre une et vous l’autre, se vous me creez, sy en ferons noz voulentez en ceste forest’ [I will take one and you the other, if you heed me, and we can have our will with them in this forest] (II.i, p. 326). And if there are not enough women to go around, the men are happy to share, as in an attempted gang rape forestalled by Troïlus in which four clan members attack a single lady (II.i, p. 375). The danger lurking within the courtly construct is that heterosexual love can become a barrier between men or indeed a cause of war. This happens when two men are rivals for the same woman, an infrequent occurrence in Perceforest but one that can lead to disaster. Love, and indeed marriage, may also remove a knight from his companions to a greater extent than seems proper, particularly when ladies enchant their lovers to keep them permanently at their side. Despite its importance as an alternative network to relieve the pressures and intimacy of knighthood, then, heterosexual love is also a potential threat to the stability and the harmony of the chivalric world.

The Dangers of Love: Consorting with the Other The dangers of heterosexual love, on close examination, are many. On the one hand, the very otherness of the woman poses its own threat to a knight and to his society in general. Gender difference can merge with other, more sinister forms of difference: lineage, class, race, culture, species. Through exogamy, women introduce an outside element into lineage that can easily slip into pollution and contamination. Equally problematic is the woman’s considerable power over her lover or husband, a necessary corollary of the prohibition against non-consensual sexual relations. Since, as we have seen, a woman is ‘dame de son corps’ and ‘dangereuse’, much male behaviour will inevitably be geared towards winning her approval. The woman’s power to improve her lover can just as easily be a power to corrupt him. The privacy of the love relationship, in turn, can estrange a knight from his fellows. Nestor, for example, suffers from the classic conflict of Amours and Raison as he agonises over his course of action: to remain in Britain seeking the 

See Taylor, ‘Alexander Amoroso’. I would dispute Taylor’s assertion that the Perceforest author ‘has imagined . . . a universe in which erotic love is found to be incompatible with “brotherliness” ’ and that the warrior society portrayed therein is one which must necessarily be ‘exclusive of women’ (p. 229); but I would agree that the text acknowledges – even highlights – these tensions while exploring possible means of resolution.

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Chevalier Blanc (the incognito Bethidés), whom he is sworn to meet in battle, or to travel to the kingdom of the Estrange Marche to rescue his beloved Neronés from a forced marriage with the king of Norway. If he is seen to abandon his battle, he will lose his honour as a knight, and in that case ‘je ne me oseray jamais veoir entre les vaillans hommes’ [I will never dare be seen among valiant men] (III.ii, p. 17). Yet if he loses Neronés, ‘je perderay ma joye, ma vie et mon honneur, ce qui me soustient en valeur et proesse et en tous biens’ [I will lose my joy, my life and my honour, that which sustains my valour and prowess and all that is good in me] (ibid.). Fortunately Nestor’s dilemma is resolved when he learns that Bethidés is marooned on a distant island, giving him a window of opportunity to seek his bride. Other knights, however, find themselves faced with more sinister choices. Four knights of the Franc Palais are en route to a tournament that will determine the husband of one of the twelve nieces of the hermit Pergamon, and each suspects that the damsel in question may be his beloved. Hence their sense of urgency in reaching the tournament on time and properly armed, and their despair when the villainous Bruyant sans Foy manages to steal their horses, shields, and swords. It is to recover their gear that the knights agree to a humiliating oath: each will save Bruyant’s life once when asked to do so. It is this oath that, as we have seen, creates so much discord between knights sworn to kill Bruyant and those sworn to defend him; as Zellandin comments, ‘vous avez icy fait ung marché parquoy maints vaillans hommes avront a souffrir’ [you have struck a deal here that will cause suffering for many valiant men] (III.ii, p. 324). But as the Chevalier au Griffon replies in self-defence, ‘ainsi advient des amoureux’ [that’s the way it is with lovers] (ibid.). And even if love serves for the most part to produce chivalric excellence, marriage can threaten the male homosocial community. This paradox is most clearly expressed when Perceforest laments the disappearance from court of his recently married knights, all of whom have gone off to set up their households. The king has nothing against love itself, noting that it was ‘pour acquerre honneur et louenge et l’amour des pucelles’ [to acquire honour and praise and the maidens’ love] that the knights undertook their glorious feats of prowess (IV. i, p. 145). His complaint is that the pucelles should not have agreed to marriage so easily: Mais s’elles se fussent tenues plus fieres et eussent tenus enclos et enserrés leurs merites et leurs guerredons dedens les secretes fermetez de leurs cuers . . . jamais la chevallerie ne fust si tost departie de moy… ains eussent establis et ordonnés joustez et tournois tous jours plus fortes et plus redoutables pour concquerre le guerredon des dames dont ilz jouyssent maintenant comme vous sçavez. (p. 146) [But if the damsels had been more aloof and had kept their merits and rewards strictly enclosed and locked up within the secret confines of their hearts... the knights wouldn’t have left me so quickly . . . but they would have arranged jousts and tournaments, ever more fierce and bold,



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in order to win the favours of the ladies, which they are now enjoying, as you know.]

And at a later tournament, held to celebrate Bethidés’ ill-fated marriage to the Roman princess Cerse, the narrator acknowledges that many knights did not perform as well as they could have, ‘car d’Amours, qui les cuers enflambe a grans fais emprendre et mettre a fin, n’attendoient plus hault loyer, c’est a dire qu’ilz estoyent mariés’ [for they no longer awaited the highest recompense of love, which enflames hearts to undertake and complete great deeds, that is to say, they were married] (IV.i, p. 388). The specialness of the heterosexual union, in short, is that it is always both essential to chivalric culture and yet somehow in conflict with it. Would it then be better if, as wished by Perceforest, maidens withheld their favours indefinitely – if love was a driving force that could never be consummated? That vision of love exists in the courtly tradition, being central to the chanson courtoise. A succinct formulation of the ideal expressed here by Perceforest occurs in a song by the twelfth-century trouvère Gace Brulé: Amer m’estuet, ne m’en puis plus sosfrir, Celi cui ja ne vanra a plaisir; ... Amer me fait ce qui ne m’ainme mie. (‘De bone amour’, vv. 13–14, 19) [I must love, I can’t help myself, the one from whom I will never get any pleasure . . . I am forced to love that which will never love me.]

If an impossible love for an indifferent or indeed hostile object of desire is a fruitful engine for the production of lyric poetry, however, the Perceforest author makes it clear that it is not actually a viable basis for a chivalric society. The culture of heterosexual love portrayed in Perceforest is one that requires a mutual understanding between men and women such that neither can aspire to absolute power over the other. Freedom of choice carries with it the requirement that a choice must be made: while neither man nor woman can force the other’s will, neither can entirely resist the other either. We have seen that male desire is regulated and kept in check by Perceforest’s rape legislation. Female desire, in turn, is managed in a somewhat more mysterious manner, through the combined efforts of Zephir the lutin – who repeatedly rescues knights under the spells of overly amorous damsels – and a British knight known as the Dieu des Desirriers. This chivalric ‘God of Desire’ merits a closer examination.



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The Dieu des Desirriers and the Desire of Maidens The Chevalier au Delphin acquires his reputation as one who grants the wishes of maidens in the tournament held on the English–Scottish border – ‘entre Tantalon et Sydracq’ – in honour of the new kings installed by Alexander. The tournament takes place at the Chastel des Pucelles, so named because it is inhabited by the twelve young nieces of the hermit Pergamon. Here, each of the twelve knights in love with these maidens makes a vow. Eleven of these vows entail a performance of military prowess: a certain rival knight will be unhorsed three times, or prevented from advancing across the field, or perhaps a specified series of knights will each be unhorsed once. The twelfth vow is that of the Chevalier au Delphin, who ensures his lasting fame by asking each maiden to specify some beautiful object belonging to one of the other knights, which he then wins for her. In this way he presents one maiden with Perceforest’s beautifully decorated shield, another with the richly ornamented helmet of the knight Thelamon, yet another with the golden tiara of metallic birds given by Lydoire to Gadifer, and so on. At this stage, the Chevalier au Delphin’s approach to satisfying the desire of maidens has a decided component of what we might call sublimation. These are the same twelve maidens whose husbands – the star participants in this first tournament – will be selected in the series of twelve tournaments that unfold in the course of Book III. It is in getting to marry her beloved that the desire of a pucelle is truly gratified, and these ornamental objects are clearly a kind of place-holder, a symbolic fulfilment until the longed-for sexual fulfilment can finally be articulated and granted. This point is highlighted by the fact that in the marriage tournaments, the maidens are seated prominently overlooking the field, with their prizes from the first tournament displayed over their heads. Though originally portrayed as the fulfilment of desire, these objects now take on a role of symbolically representing the as yet unfulfilled desire of each maiden for marriage with the knight she loves. At this stage, then, the Chevalier au Delphin regulates female desire by providing it with objects that defer sexual consummation. It is somewhat later, after his marriage and coronation, that the Chevalier au Delphin is explicitly identified as a hero to all pucelles, who in this pre-Christian world regard him as their god, the Dieu des Desirriers. In this context, his role is portrayed as spectacular in that the desires of maidens are a powerful, potentially dangerous force. The maiden Marse, who has sent for him in her distress over the imprisonment of her lover Hollandin, acknowledges that a pucelle’s desires can be ‘aucunesfois trop pesans et comme impossibles’ [sometimes too weighty and virtually impossible], and adds that ‘ce proucede pour ce qu’elles n’ont point de regard a raison, ains sont souvent tant asprez et hastives que le sang vif leur sault par les levres de la bouche’ [this is because they have no regard for reason, but are often so urgent and impulsive that their impassioned temper leaps forth from their lips] (IV.i, p. 106). The powerful desire of a maiden is of the same



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sexual potency as that of knights, who are thereby motivated to perform the most extreme feats of valour. But since maidens are unable to undertake adventures, or indeed even fully to articulate their desire, they must resort either to asking for emblematic objects or to appealing to their ‘god’ for unspecified relief of his own devising. It is the latter tactic that is employed by Marse. While admitting that ‘mon desirier me tourmente incessamment’ [my desire torments me incessantly] (p. 102), she nonetheless avoids stating it directly and instead simply narrates the account of her love for Hollandin and his imprisonment by the cruel giant. It is up to the knight himself, as if playing the role of therapist, to formulate the desire: Damoiselle, dist le roy, il me samble que se Hollandin vostre amy estoit hors de prison, tant qu’il peust venir sus la rive de la mer comme il souloit et que aucunement veoir le peussiés, vostre desir seroit acompli. – Certes, sire, dist Marse la pucelle, vous dites vray. (p. 107) [‘Damsel,’ said the king, ‘it seems to me that if Hollandin your beloved was out of prison, so that he could go along the shore like he used to do and you could see him sometimes, then your desire would be fulfilled.’ ‘Indeed, sire,’ said the maiden Marse, ‘you speak the truth.’]

As his mission moves beyond the granting of ‘substitute’ wishes and edges closer to actual sexual fulfilment, then, the Chevalier au Delphin takes on the role of articulating the maiden’s wish on her behalf, channelling her unspecified yearning into a specific sexual desire aimed at a particular man. Even still, his initial formulation falls short of sexual union, aiming only at renewing the lovers’ practice of signalling to one another from their respective islands. Only after accomplishing this does the Chevalier bring Hollandin to Marse’s island and arrange their marriage. Thus he does finally give Marse ‘ce que son cuer au monde plus desiroit’ [that which her heart most desired in all the world] (p. 128), but which she herself was unable to ask for directly. Having moved from symbolic objects that both gratify desire and also prolong it by not being the ‘real thing’, to assisting in the direct fulfilment of a maiden’s sexual desires, the Chevalier’s logical next move is to fulfil such desires himself rather than through a third party. And this is precisely what happens during his visit to Nerves (Tournai), when he is summoned to grant the desire of yet another maiden. This new request is as urgent as it is mysterious: the maiden’s messenger informs the knight ‘qu’il convient en ceste nuit, ou elle mourra, qu’elle ait de vous ce que oncques n’eustes ne avoir ne poués’ (IV.i, p. 464) [that tonight she must have from you that which you never had nor ever could have, or she will die]. Again it falls to the Chevalier himself to interpret this enigmatic request, and at first he professes bewilderment, lamenting that he has no idea how to give her what she wants ‘quant n’ay ne puis avoir ce dont elle puet estre confortee’ (ibid.) [when I don’t have, nor could have, the thing by which she would be comforted]. The solution hinges on the cultural understanding of gender differ-

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ence, underwritten by a militant heterosexuality. Escorted to the girl’s bedside, where he finds a note reiterating her request, the knight is overwhelmed by her beauty and promptly climbs into bed beside her. As the narrator coyly reports: Ne sçay du surplus, fors que le baceler fit tant que la damoyselle eut de lui puis ce qu’il n’eut oncques ne avoir ne pouoit, dont la damoiselle fut guerie. (IV.i, p. 468) [I don’t know about the rest, except that the young man did so much that the damsel had from him that which he never had nor could have, whereby she was healed.]

The gratified young lady, maiden no longer, subsequently gives birth to a son. Having progressed to this stage, one might well wonder if the God of Desire will now spend the rest of his life initiating maidens into active sexuality, but if he does so, the text is discreetly silent on the subject. He does, however, retain his special status in the eyes of maidens, who carry away the body of their ‘god’ after the battle with the Romans as ‘un precieux reliquaire’ [a precious relic] to be placed in their temple (IV.ii, p. 821). Magically preserved in the crystal sphere in which they have placed it, the body presides over the altar where maidens from all over Britain come to pray for their wishes to be granted, wishes that invariably, and inevitably, pertain to the acquisition of a husband. As the maidens vow when they lay claim to his body: Le Dieu aux Desirriers nous demourera, car de maris nous pourverra et nous le servirons. (pp. 821–2) [The God of Desires will stay with us, for he will provide us with husbands, and we will serve him.]

To honour their god, the maidens sing a lai that details the Chevalier au Delphin’s many feats of wish-granting, including not only the twelve maidens of the tournament but also Marse, la Nervoise, and even Dache, daughter of Dache and Peleon, who comes to his temple in search of advice (IV.ii, pp. 1100–5). Embracing the accomplishments of the Dieu des Desirriers both in life and in death, the lai in effect erases the distinction made by his death to posit him as a sublime, transcendant figure, the very principle by which maidenly sexual desires can be articulated in a form that allows them to be both regulated and fulfilled. In this war-ravaged land, the dominant mood is that of frustrated female sexuality. The men of fighting age all having been killed in the war, the kingdom is populated by women and children, and the women positively yearn for husbands. To judge from the advice he gives the princess Dache, the deified knight takes a rather direct approach to the problem. Dache, who has inherited the kingdom of Cornwall but who worries that her realm cannot flourish without a male sovereign, travels to the temple and prays for assistance. She is told to marry the first knight who appears and asks for her hand. The urgency of marriage that will



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advance a young woman from virginity to procreative sexual activity and provide the kingdom with a male ruler could not be more clearly expressed. Such episodes show that the movement from near-savagery back to civilisation is achieved to no small measure through the institution of marriage. We are told that people have reverted to a primitive existence, living hidden away in the woods, and lacking most amenities. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the ladies of the forest convene to consider their plight, worried that this might spell a return to the reign of sexual terror perpetrated by the lignaige Darnant. Sarra, who assisted in Perceforest’s initial rise to power, even contemplates killing her two young daughters in order to keep them from the horrific fate that would await them if the clan returned to power. Luckily, her skill in divination tells her that a new king will soon be on the throne, and the daughters are spared. The fear of rape and the desire for husbands are two sides of the same coin, and that ‘coin’, as it were, is at the heart of the chivalric civilisation brought to Britain by Alexander and his followers. The restoration of heteronormative sexuality is the mask for the preservation of Greco-British cultural hegemony – indeed it is virtually the means by which this is brought about. These episodes are a logical outgrowth of patterns seen earlier in the romance. Estonné’s encounter with Priande was the paradigmatic case of a ‘primitive’ people taking on the face of a young girl, whose sexual awakening is also her first step towards assimilation into the new culture that is about to engulf her people. Priande’s love for Estonné inspires her two poetic compositions: the strophe that she contributes to the Lai secret that is jointly composed by Priande, Blanchete, and Lyriope, and Priande’s own Lai de l’ours. In these lais the women are given a voice to articulate their own perspective on the upheavals within their homeland – a perspective that is, of course, imagined by the Perceforest author and shaped in accordance with the political agenda of the text. A reading of these lais sheds further light on the importance of heterosexual love in the cultural dynamics of Perceforest.

The Erotics of Conquest When Gadifer and his knights have their dramatic encounter with the people of the Deserts d’Escoce in Book II, Priande’s burst of ‘pitié’ towards Estonné is attributed to ‘nature’, inspired by her delight at the cloak that he wrapped her in to cover her nakedness. At this point, we are told only that ‘elle… se print a quointoier du mantel selon son sens quant elle se senty eschappee’ [she . . . took pride in the prettiness of the cloak, as best she could, when she saw that she had escaped] (II.i, p. 9). Priande herself, however, presents a more eroticised version of events when she later tells the story to Lyriope and Blanchete. Explaining her terror as the knight swept her up onto his horse, her sheepskin garment lost, Priande focuses on a detail previously unmentioned:

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Et lors qu’il me vey ainsi nue, il me baisa sus la destre mammelle. . . . Sy vous prommés que la vertu de ce baisier me tira hors du cuer l’ignorance et povreté ou je avoie esté nourrie jusques adont, et oncques puis je ne le peues haïr. (III.i, p. 227) [And when he saw me naked like that, he kissed me on the right breast. . . . I promise you, the power of that kiss drew from my heart the ignorance and poverty in which I had been raised up to then, and I could never hate him since then.]

Ultimately, then – at least from the perspective of Priande herself – it was not so much a burgeoning sense of fashion that caused her change of heart, but the sexual attentions of a dashing young warrior. If the narrator coyly delays the revelation of this stolen kiss, he does nonetheless stress Priande’s change of heart as a crucial turning point, terming it ‘une grande merveille et qui depuis fut moult recordee entre gentilz et vilains’ [a great marvel that was much remembered afterwards by both nobility and commoners] (II.i, p. 8). It is her newfound tenderness towards this frightening but sexually alluring masculine creature that leads to her decisive intervention, dissuading the frenzied women from their attack with the cry: ‘Mere, laissiez le quoy ou je me occiray!’ [Mother, leave him alone or I will kill myself] (p. 9). Identifying with what she still thinks is a devil, appropriating the violence against him to redirect it onto herself, Priande makes a fateful step that takes her forever out of her native context and binds her to the Scottish court and to Estonné himself. It is this moment, in turn, that is memorialised in her contribution to the Lai secret, jointly composed by the three young women in hopes of enticing their lovers back to court. Representing herself as a wild goat and Estonné as a lion, Priande focuses again on the kiss: Le lÿon jadis mist en cage La jeune chievrette sauvage, Dont fut ainsi comme esragie. Sa peau perdy sans mettre en gage, Nud eut le corps et le visage. Quant le lÿon l’eut embracie, Sa destre mammelle a baisie. A ce lez lui fut esrachie Sa sauvaigine, la boscage. Lors a sa grant peau desvestie, La chievrette en a revestie, Revenir puet a son courage.  Lai secret, IV (III.i, p. 277) [Long ago the lion caged the young wild goat, who became crazed. She lost her skin without noticing, her body and face were naked. When the lion had embraced her, he kissed her right breast. At that, the woodland lass’s savagery was taken from her. Then he removed



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his great skin and wrapped the little goat in it, so she could recover her wits.]

Priande here invokes the violence of the encounter – her terror, her naked vulnerability, the overpowering force of the man who captured her – while yet depicting it as a moment of liberation. I noted in the Introduction that the crises suffered by Perceforest and Gadifer respectively reflect what Elleke Boehmer called the ‘split experience’ of the colonising ruler. Priande embodies the equally split experience of the colonised subject. The kiss bestowed by Estonné is the moment of her quantum leap from one subjectivity to another. What had seemed a horrific abduction by a monster is suddenly perceived as a loving embrace. The life that had seemed normal, the identity that had been so unproblematic, are now denigrated as ‘sauvagine’, as Priande is relocated forever in a different position, made to see herself and her native culture through entirely different eyes. Priande’s self-portrait in the Lai secret is supplemented by her more extended treatment of Estonné in the Lai de l’ours. Recounting the episode of his metamorphosis into a bear, Priande suppresses the reason for Lydoire’s anger, referring only obliquely to the ‘haïne’ [hatred] (II.ii, p. 161, str. XXVIII) that caused his ordeal. Instead the transformation is framed by her complaints at his long absence and his distracting affair with Sorence. This love triangle is worthy of closer examination. Sorence was the amie of Branius, lord of the castle of Brane (Braine-le-Comte in Hainaut), which Estonné and Le Tor capture during their campaign in the Selve Carbonnière. Sneaking into the castle precincts one night, Estonné penetrates to the bedchamber, where he finds Sorence sleeping. Overcome with desire, he takes full advantage of her defenceless state: Et sachiez que Estonné eut ses deduitz de la damoiselle ainçois qu’il fust jour. Mais la damoiselle se perceut en la fin que ce n’estoit pas son amy par le maintien d’Estonné, qui estoit trop rade. Sy commença a plourer moult tendrement. (II.i, p. 79) [And you should know that Estonné took his pleasure with the damsel before daybreak. But the damsel eventually realised that this wasn’t her lover, because of Estonné’s comportment, which was very rough. So she began to weep very piteously.]

Well might she weep under the circumstances – but to no avail, for Estonné has already killed Branius on his way into the castle. Left with little choice, Sorence shows him the secret passageways, helps him to secure control, and accepts her role as his mistress. She even bears him a son during his long sojourn in the Low  

Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial, p. 63. From a reading of the Lai de l’ours, Lods was led to assert that ‘Estonné a été infidèle à Priande son amie . . . pour le punir, la Reine-Fée le transforme en ours’ (Pièces lyriques, p. 39).

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Countries, before her untimely but convenient death leaves him free to return his thoughts to Priande. Sorence is thus quite literally a spoil of war, captured along with the castle in which she lived, and easily jettisoned from the narrative when it is time to move on. Potentially, she is no different from Priande, also a spoil of conquest, picked out by Estonné and sent to court for his future delectation – should he even remember her. Priande, however, portrays herself in the Lai de l’ours as an aristocratic maiden and highlights the important moment when Estonné, despite his ursine condition, rescued her and Lyriope from the sexual predations of two marauding knights: Les .II. en vont saisir Deux chevaliers errans. Mais le bon ours errans En va l’un si ferir Qu’il l’affola.  (II.ii, p. 160, str. XXI) [Two knights errant go to seize the two (girls). But the good wandering bear goes and strikes one so hard that he cripples him.]

Unlike Sorence, who succumbs to the violent sexuality of the conqueror, Priande escapes with her virtue intact, and her special relationship with the knight in question is thus of a higher order: if Sorence has attracted his desires, Priande has benefited from his gallantry. Complaining that ‘Priande est oubliee’ [Priande is forgotten] and that ‘Se Sorence ne fust, / D’aultruy plus vous chalust’ [if it wasn’t for Sorence, you’d care more about the other (girl)] ( II.ii, p. 162, str. XXXIII, XXXIV), Priande appeals to Love: Amours, doresnavant Soyez pour les pucelles Par quoy les damoiselles Ne leur voisent tollant Leurs bons amis.  (p. 162, str. XXXV) [Love, hereafter be on the side of maidens, so that damsels don’t go stealing their boyfriends.]

In this contrast between the ‘pucelles’ and the ‘damoiselles’ who steal their lovers, Priande effects – and masks – another split within her own person. Disavowing the violence of her own original encounter with Estonné, she flaunts her courtly virginity and projects onto Sorence the role of the dishonoured woman, complicitous in her own victimisation. Priande’s manoeuvre here underscores the privileged position of the maiden who has been saved by one man from being raped by another. In this model, a potential heterosexual violence is deflected through male–male homosocial violence, and the result is heterosexual love. Sorence, in contrast, is a prize – a



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site of heterosexual pleasure – claimed by Estonné as a reward for his murder of Branius. Estonné’s appropriation of Sorence reflects the dynamics of military conquest, whereby the Selve Carbonnière itself is being used by Alexander as a means of rewarding Lyriope for her service: in this model, both the land and the woman are simply there for the taking. His encounter with Priande, carefully distinguished from this harsh reality, offers a different model, that of conquest – both sexual and colonial – as benign, amorous, salvific. A similar move is effected in Lyriope’s contribution to the Lai secret, which describes Le Tor’s capture of her castle. Lyriope recalls how Le Tor ‘Print ung chastel et puis l’oeille’ [took a castle, and the sheep] (III.i, p. 277, str. V): a formulation seemingly implying that she, like the castle – like Sorence – was little more than the booty of war. Crucially, however, Lyriope was wounded when the clansmen attempted to retake the castle: ‘De la sayette fut blecie’ [she was wounded with the arrow] (ibid.). Again, Lyriope is the victim not of Le Tor but of the lignaige Darnant, from whom Le Tor protects her. It is within this framework of violence and counter-violence that he gives her the ‘tresgracïeulx nom d’amie’ [most gracious name of beloved] (ibid.).10 The crucial factor in these constructions of both gender and cultural allegiance is one’s location within the dynamic of violence. Patricia Ingham has noted the portrayal of ‘female desire as enabling for male aggressivity’ in both romance and chronicles of the fourteenth century.11 ‘This constellation of love with war’, as Ingham states, ‘asks women to perform . . . an eroticization of heroic violence’.12 Further: it requires women to position themselves as vulnerable and potential victims in order to enable the confrontation that will produce the heterosexual construct on which chivalric culture is based.13 And insofar as the colonial encounter is presented in gendered terms, it is the colonised people who assume the role of feminised victims, to be rescued – civilised – by the gallant colonisers and their indigenous allies. The submission of the courtly lady to the will of her husband, and the transmission of his cultural heritage to their children, reflects the submission of ‘primitive’ or ‘decadent’ peoples to the superior culture of the colonial power and its agents.14 If British women can readily avail themselves of the opportunity to be rescued 10

This point is equally clear in the original narration of the event in Book I, where the narrator chooses the moment when Lyriope is wounded to insert a description of her beauty, its seductive effect on Le Tor, and his growing love for her (I.ii, ch. 85, fol. 73r). 11 Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, p. 148; and more generally, pp. 144–55. 12 Ibid., p. 154. 13 Gravdal has stressed the importance of rape as a motif in Arthurian romance in Ravishing Maidens: ‘Sexual violence is built into the very premise of Arthurian romance. It is a genre that by its definition must create the threat of rape . . . rape is both proscribed and moralized, banished and aestheticized, so that it can be contemplated again and again’ (p. 43, emphasis hers). 14 Interestingly, as Warren points out, the monstrous races encountered by Alexander in the prose Alexander also tend to be described as though they were exclusively female, so that here too ‘cultural difference translates into gendered difference’ (‘Take the World’, p. 151).

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from lives of abuse, gaining honour in the process, assimilation into the new dominant culture is a rather different matter for men. We have seen that both Estonné and Le Tor are subjected to periods of ‘penance’ that call into question their very humanity. Somewhat different problems are faced by Lyonnel and Troïlus, both of whom wage a protracted struggle to win their brides. Lyonnel carries the stigma of belonging to the lignaige Darnant, albeit that his grandfather, of the five original brothers, was the sole ‘good’ one. Troïlus in turn, Priande’s brother, was born and raised as a ‘savage’. Though eager to embrace chivalric culture as soon as it presents itself, he soon finds that the path to knighthood and marriage is not an easy one. I will return to this problem of the indigenous knight as lover in Chapter Seven, after examining the text’s treatment of the deviant sexualities that must be eradicated in the expansion of cultural hegemony.

The Mission Civilisatrice and Heterosexual Love The heterosexual relationship, in sum, functions as a mirror of the colonial relationship and a means of enacting it. It is by no means unique to Perceforest that sexual relationships are a coded means of exploring difference and boundaries of other kinds. Rhonda Knight has compared the depiction of monstrous or hybrid Irish bodies in Gerald of Wales’ Topographia hibernica to the fetishisation of the female body, noting that in both cases, ‘the description of the Othered body titillates and fascinates . . . exposing the fine line between sexual and colonial economies of looking, possessing, and transforming’.15 And within the corpus of vernacular literature, the Old French pastourelle is probably the best known example of a genre in which sexual difference, and the complex power imbalances that it generates, are conflated with other oppositions such as social class, or high and low forms of discourse.16 As Ardis Butterfield has noted, in the pastourelle ‘[o]ne sort of difference (social) is articulated by another (sexual) in such a way as to show the two kinds of confrontation to be mutually symptomatic’.17 The story of Priande and Estonné, modelled on the pastourelle, deepens the cultural divide between the young cowherd and her aristocratic admirer while preserving the role of heterosexual love as the solution to an otherwise explosive clash of cultures and peoples. The eroticisation of the cross-cultural encounter is thus a potent motif, appropriated by the Perceforest author in his portrayal of pre-Arthurian Britain. And its potentially disturbing underside – male sexual aggression, female usurpation of power – is periodically glimpsed, cloaked by the myth of mutual love. Even when brides are won by force of arms, it is always and necessarily the case that 15 16

Knight, ‘Werewolves’, p. 64. On critical reception of the pastourelle as a discourse about different forms of difference, see Butterfield, Poetry and Music, pp. 160–8. 17 Ibid., p. 167.



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the resulting marriage is informed by genuine, unforced love and loyalty. This is perhaps nowhere more clearly stated than in the rivalry that develops for the hand of the princess Blanche, daughter of Lyonnel and Blanchete. In the aftermath of the Roman invasion, the widowed Blanchete hosts a series of fencing matches and tournaments in which armour and swords are awarded as prizes, and the grand prize is her daughter Blanche: ‘la plus belle pucelle que jamais chevalier verra’ [the most beautiful girl that ever a knight will see], in the words of the minstrel Ponchonnet, who is charged with publicising the event (IV.ii, p. 1083). The young Blanche, in other words, is literally offered along with suits of armour and weaponry as a prize to be fought for. As Blanchete asks the bedazzled Ponchonnet when she shows him her daughter, ‘le pris de nostre feste est il bel?’ [the prize of our festival, is it handsome?] (ibid.). The kingdom is reconstructed through the training and arming of knights and through the emergence of the young princess as an object of desire, whose radiant beauty and erotic vulnerability emblematically represent the endpoint towards which every young knight strives, whether or not he is a serious contender for her hand. On the one hand, then, the young princess is fully objectified, to the point that, as ‘pris’, she loses her feminine gender to become ‘bel’. But on the other hand, of course, as with the series of twelve tournaments in Book III in which each of twelve knights fought to win the bride that he already loved, the winner must be not only the most valiant knight but also the one who most truly loves Blanche, and whom she loves in return. As if to stress this point, the narrative focuses on two principal contenders, Exillié and Norgal, each of whom is in love with Blanche. As the rivalry threatens to explode into a private vendetta, Blanche’s attendants remind the young hotheads that the princess has no interest in a suitor who goes around attacking knights of the realm. She will be won, say the ladies, ‘non point par hayne mortelle, ne par jalousie mauvaise, ains par bonne renommee d’acquerir loz et pris en chevalerie qui soit courtoise messagiere envers elle’ [not by mortal hatred, nor by evil jealousy, but by a good reputation in winning praise and fame in knighthood, which will be a courtly messanger to her] (V, ch. 5, fol. 18r). In the end, Exillié marries Blanche and Norgal, graciously acknowledging defeat, turns his attentions elsewhere. Although Blanche’s marriage is indeed determined by a series of tournaments, the implication is that she marries the victor not because having defeated his rivals, he was free to take her, but because she herself chose to accept him once he had proved his worth. It is certainly true, as noted above, that the positive and negative qualities of the new land are gender-coded, the wicked clansmen and the rapacious male giants contrasting with the beautiful, grateful, and nurturing ladies of the forest or the amorous and malleable young giantess. But the relationship between gender structures and those of conquest and rule runs deeper than that, reflecting not only a varied spectrum of emotions towards the conquered land, but also a submerged ambivalence about the colonial enterprise itself. The obsessive concern with sexual violence that pervades Perceforest’s Britain is the symptom of an unspoken anxiety about the violence of conquest. The equally powerful

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theme of the sexually aggressive damsel, in turn, is symptomatic of the complementary anxiety: that of ‘going native’, submitting to the demands and desires of the alien culture that one had originally intended to conquer, to exploit, to reshape.18 And the tension that surrounds the tournament competition for brides – the suspenseful waiting to find out if the winner is the one to whom the damsel has already given her heart – reflects a pervasive unease with the interdependence of marriage and conquest. The need for female consent is, as we have seen, enshrined in natural and civil law alike and indeed stands as an important site of linkage between the two, a kind of litmus test by which a culture can be judged. At the same time female desire – and its mirror, the political desire of a people – is a potential site of resistance or disruption of an imperial agenda of military conquest and feudal power-brokering. At the beginning of the romance proper, following the brief summary of British kings taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth, Alexander has a dream in which he sees a land bereft of a king, in need of cultural regeneration. This is Britain, whose incompetent king Pir has just died and left the realm at the mercy of Darnant and his ruthless cohorts. The British, in turn, have been advised by the goddess Venus that she will send a new king; and when Alexander and his men arrive, they are accepted as the goddess’s promised emissaries. Aware of their need for revitalisation, the British knights agree that an infusion of foreign blood can only be a good thing, and that ‘quant a l’estrange vient, de meilleur ne pouons estre regenerez que du sang des Gregois’ [when it comes to foreign blood, we cannot be regenerated by anything better than the blood of the Greeks] (I.i, p. 136). When Alexander obligingly designates Gadifer and Betis (soon renamed Perceforest) as the new kings, his act is met with enthusiastic acceptance: ‘Vive le roy Alexandre qui nous a pourveuz de si noble roy!’ [Long live King Alexander who has given us such a noble king!] (p. 149). The installation of Greek kings is one way that Greek blood enters the British kingdom to effect a cultural regeneration. But the driving force behind this mission is after all Venus, and it is ultimately through Greco-Briton sexual relations that a true mixing of blood will occur.19 This does not take long: Perceforest has barely been crowned when Sebille, one of the ladies of the forest, falls in love with Alexander and seduces him. From this liaison there results a son, Alexandre Remanant de Joie, in whom Greek and British blood are literally mingled. Alexander, emperor of the world, is famously known to have conquered all lands that he visits ‘par force or par amour’ [by force or by love] (p. 139). His conquest of 18 On late medieval English fears of ‘going native’ in Ireland, and legislation aimed at preventing the ‘Irishisation’ of English rulers and settlers, see Davies, First English Empire, pp. 196–8; Biddick, ‘Cut of Genealogy’, pp. 452–6. 19 On Venus’s role in Alexander’s mission, see Gaullier-Bougassas, ‘Alexandre le Grand’, pp. 397–9; Szkilnik, ‘Conquering Alexander’, p. 206. For an analogous example of the erotisation of war and power politics, the love affair of Caesar and Cleopatra, see Spiegel, Romancing the Past, pp. 202–10. On the problematic status of colonial cross-cultural desire in the prose Alexander, see Warren, ‘Take the World’.



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Britain, quite clearly, is ‘par amour’: the feudal love of the vassal for his lord, the cultural love of the colonised for the colonial rulers who come to improve the land, the sexual love of the indigenous woman for the handsome foreign king. In contrast, the marriage between Perceforest’s son Bethidès and the Roman girl Cerse results not in a fruitful mixing of blood but in a hostile takeover, as Cerse enters into an adulterous liaison with the Roman knight Luces, produces a fullblooded Roman bastard son as heir to the throne, and paves the way for the Roman invasion. The violence of expansionist or despotic rule is made manifest as rape and bastardisation when practised by ‘them’: Scandinavian giants, the lignaige Darnant, the Romans. 20 But when practised by ‘us’ – the Greeks and their British allies – conquest is rewritten as love.

Love and the Management of Difference Perceforest’s wish for what we might think of as a lyric ideology of love – one grounded in the endless prolongation and deferral of desire, rather than in the goal-oriented ethos of conquest and marriage – is refuted by Queen Ydorus. According to the queen, the system of love-service, and with it chivalric culture as a whole, would break down if the knights did not receive constant encouragement from their ladies, and if they did not have reason to believe that their desire for sexual union would ultimately be fulfilled: Car s’en tamps et en lieu les chassans n’avoient le guerredon de prise, les chassans se deporteroyent de chassier . . . Et quant ce seroit sceu, jamais ne seroit aucune emprinse, ains se maintendroyent a guise de bestes. (IV.i, p. 149) [For if the hunters didn’t eventually get their reward, they would abandon the hunt. . . . And when that became known, no hunt would ever be undertaken, but everyone would just behave like beasts.]

Just as men cannot force themselves on women, so women cannot resist indefinitely either. And just as men are honour-bound to serve women and to defend their interests, so women too must respect their lovers’ responsibilities to the world at large. The power to attract a member of the opposite sex and to form him/her in the image of one’s own desire must be carefully regulated, informed by a mutual understanding of give and take. Perceforest’s civilisation rests on the careful management of gender difference and the mutual curtailing of power and autonomy. This vision of culture avoids the either/or formulation implied in the words of Griant de la Haulte Forest, when he rallies the members of the lignaige Darnant to resist Perceforest’s rule 20 Caesar’s conquest of the world, for example, was supposedly prefigured by a dream of raping his mother. See Spiegel, Romancing the Past, pp. 163–4.

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and characterises acceptance of the new king as an unacceptable infringement of personal freedom, whereby men will be ‘serfz aux femmes qui ne sont faittes fors pour noz voulentez acomplir’ [slaves to women, who exist only to do our bidding] (I.i, p. 401). In the uncompromising world view of the lignaige Darnant, there are only two possibilities: men will be either the absolute masters of women, or their slaves. The culture of the dieu d’amours attempts to map out a third path, in which men and women alike are free to fall in love, but also required to do so, with all the responsibilities and mutual obligations that love entails. The tensions inherent in this strictly regulated heterosexuality, largely banished from the courtly celebration of love as inspiration for chivalric prowess, re-emerge in episodes that present specific problems in emblematic or caricatured form. In keeping with the symmetrical structure of the romance, in which England and Scotland are used as settings for complementary aspects of the rise, decline, and renewal of civilisation, the theme of incest is explored through characters associated with the Scottish royal family, while the transgression at the heart of the English royal family is that of miscegenation, linked to adultery. Bethides’ perfidious Roman queen, Cerse, crystallises the identification of the woman with the dangerous or polluting outsider. And the danger of avoiding all difference through extreme xenophobic isolation or incestuous marriage emerges, respectively, in the episode of the ferociously reclusive Holland and in those of the incestuous fathers, Aroès and the Golden-Haired Giant. Finally, the lignaige Darnant embody the dark side of male sexuality as violent predation, aimed more at consolidating bonds between the men themselves than at establishing each man individually in relation to a female partner. After examining these treatments of deviant and transgressive sexuality, we will be in a position to return to the text’s representation of the mission civilisatrice and to the overlay of compulsory heterosexuality and colonial conquest.

5

Marriage and the Management of Difference: Between Incest and Miscegenation We have seen that the cultural revival effected by the Greek rulers of Britain is indissociable from the institution of heterosexual love and marriage, and that Perceforest’s reign is founded on the prohibition of rape. Equally important in the adventures of the first generation of the Greco-British knighthood is the balance that must be struck between endogamy, with its dangers of stagnation and isolation, and exogamy, with its dangers of corruption and pollution. The eradication of incest occupies two of the most important characters: the sublimely heroic Lyonnel, who marries the Scottish princess Blanchete, and young Gadifer, Blanchete’s brother and the heir to the Scottish throne. The dire consequences of miscegenation, in turn, are illustrated in the disastrous marriage of Perceforest’s son and heir Bethidés to Cerse, daughter of a Roman senator. This chapter will look at these complementary threats to Greco-British civilisation. Cerse, the foreign queen whose devious Roman nature and loyalty to her native land spell the destruction of Britain, is probably modelled in part on the wicked queens of foreign birth described by Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Guenevere was a Roman princess, and although he does not mention her adultery with Lancelot, he does state that she colluded with Mordred against her husband. Geoffrey also cites the queen Renwein, Saxon wife of Vortigern, and comments darkly on that inter-ethnic, inter-faith marriage: intrante sathana in corde suo. amauit puellam. & postulauit eam a patre suo. Intrauerat inquam sathanas in corde suo. quia christianus cum esset. cum pagana coire desiderabat. (VI.xii, p. 371) [Satan entered his heart, so that he fell in love with Renwein and asked her father to give her to him. I say that Satan entered his heart because, despite the fact that he was a Christian, he was determined to make love with this pagan woman. (tr. Thorpe, p. 160)]

Like Cerse, Renwein alienates her husband from his people and conspires with her kinsmen in their invasion of Britain. Geoffrey’s much-noted concern with the ethnicity of British history is echoed in the contaminating presence of Bethides’ Roman queen. 

On the dangers of exogamy in Geoffrey’s Historia, see Warren, History, pp. 44–8.

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The preoccupation with incest, in turn, may derive in part from Gerald of Wales, who flatly asserts that ‘Crimen autem incestus adeo apud omnes, tam minores in populo quam etiam majores, enormiter invaluit’ [incest is extremely common among the Welsh, both in the lower classes and the better educated people]. Gerald was referring to marriages between cousins related within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity, however, and not to the father–daughter incest that figures in Perceforest. Equally important as background to the Perceforest author’s preoccupations, are the cannibalistic, incestuous giants traditionally imagined as the first inhabitants of Britain. The motif of the pagan king who establishes himself as a god or pursues marriage with his daughter is also well known in medieval literary tradition, figuring in such texts as Eracle, Belle Helene de Constantinople, Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde, and the Golden Legend, though these kings do not invariably combine the two traits of incest and self-deification. The Perceforest author’s creative use of these familiar motifs enables him to explore the theme of incest both as the effect of a deviant and idolatrous law, resulting from a perverse mimicry of the divine, and as the manifestation of lawless savagery. Lurking behind both representations of incest, finally, is its unspoken but perhaps most truly important aspect: its capacity to figure the resistance of foreign peoples – in this case island kingdoms at the edge of the British horizon – to an expanding imperial power.

Aroès and Incest as Idolatry Aroès, king of the Roide Montaigne, is an irredeemably evil character. A master sorceror, he uses his powers to produce visions of an illusory ‘paradise’, which he displays to his subjects as proof of his divinity and his power over their immortal souls. In these visions, the credulous people of the Roide Montaigne recognise the souls of their departed friends and relatives, now rejoicing in a paradise presided over by a transfigured Aroès. His queen, Flora, is the only islander not to be deceived by her husband’s optical illusions and preposterous claims, and she raises their daughter, the princess Flamine, in the monotheistic, proto-Christian cult of the Dieu Souverain. It is Flora who foresees that Aroès will murder her one day and marry their daughter. As a god, he considers himself above the law, and thus free to follow his own desires. Just before her death, Flora manages

  

Geraldis Cambrensis, Descriptio, II.6, p. 213; Description, tr. Thorpe, p. 262. See Cohen, Of Giants. Cohen discusses incest on pp. 56–7. See Roussel, ‘Paradis’; Taylor, ‘Aroès the Enchanter’. On incest as an exotic custom in Mandeville’s Travels, see Heng, Empire, pp. 244–5. On the motif of father–daughter incest in medieval literature, see Archibald, Incest, pp. 145–91. Archibald also provides an Appendix, ‘Synopses of Flight from Incestuous Father Stories’, pp. 245–56. Perceforest is not included among her examples.  On this cult, see Taylor, ‘Faith and Austerity’.



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to send a messenger to Perceforest’s court, and it is thus that young Gadifer ends up coming to the rescue. Since Perceforest is set in the pre-Christian era, Aroès cannot be depicted as consciously imitating the Christian Trinity, as is the case with some of his literary antecedents. The king Chosroès, for example, portrayed in Eracle and the Golden Legend, sets up a starry sphere in which he sits in majesty, a fragment of the true cross on his right and a cockerel representing the Holy Spirit on his left. But if Aroès lacks the trappings of Christian iconography, he is nonetheless clearly portrayed as aggressively mimicking the supreme god. As Flamine explains to Gadifer, her father claims ‘qu’il vivera tousjours et qu’en brief temps il sera aouré par tout le monde comme dieu souverain’ [that he will live forever and that soon he will be worshipped by the whole world as sovereign god] (III. ii, p. 98). In reality, this urge to challenge God makes him the mimic of Lucifer, who himself aspired to godhead, and whose demons carry off Aroès and his deluded subjects in the cataclysmic explosion that follows Gadifer’s rescue of Flamine. Like Darnant, Aroès is thus assimilated to Lucifer as yet another figure of perverse, failed mimicry and of transgressive sexuality. For medieval readers it would be clear that this king is a parody of the Christian god and of the ‘incestuous’ relationships that permeate the mystery of the Incarnation. These paradoxical kinship structures, impossible and incomprehensible in human terms, are playfully evoked by countless medieval poets, both Latin and vernacular. Mary’s mystical marriage, as Queen of Heaven, makes her the bride of both her father and her son. A sexually charged parody of the construct at the heart of Christian doctrine may have seemed too blasphemous for explicit articulation, but it informs the depiction of Aroès, who inverts the tenets of Christianity at every turn. Instead of saving his people, Aroès leads them into damnation. Instead of begetting a son, he presumably means to beget more daughters, taking each in turn as his bride in order to replace her halfsister/mother, who will inevitably age while he lives forever. Instead of a miraculous fusion of god and man, Aroès will produce only endless replications of the beautiful, virginal object of his desire, coming as close as is humanly possible to the immaculate bride of God: one that is ever young, ever beautiful, ever a virgin. The perception of incest as permissible, like the optical illusions that produce a vision of musicians, birds, and carolling souls in a resplendent heaven, is in anamorphic relation to orthodox culture. To the extent that Aroès does have a godlike power over his people, it lies in his ability to force them into a perspective mutually exclusive to that from which Gadifer – as usual protected by his ring from magic spells and illusions – gazes out at the island kingdom. Where the deluded subjects see an omnipotent god in majesty, surrounded by those subjects who have passed into eternity, Gadifer sees only the king in a stone tower, surrounded by glass bottles of ‘merveilleuses eaues faittes par art 

See Kay, Courtly Contradictions, pp. 193–8.

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mauvais’ [marvellous liquids made through evil arts] which, when spun round and subjected to a play of light, produce the hallucinatory visions seen by the people below (p. 109). Just as in the earlier episode outside the Chastel Desvoyé, the narrative perspective now splits in two: Tout le poeuple . . . disoit l’un a l’autre: ‘Veez la maintenant la royne, nostre souveraine deesse’ . . . Et quant Gadifer entendy ce, il eut grand merveille pour ce qu’il ne veoit riens de ce que le poeuple disoit et ne veoit sy non grant lumiere de torseis qui estoient alumez au plus hault d’une tour. (p. 107) [All the people . . . said to one another: ‘There’s the queen now, our sovereign goddess’. . . . And when Gadifer heard that, he marvelled greatly because he didn’t see any of what the people were talking about, he saw only a great light from torches which were lit at the top of a tower.]

And where the people look forward to a holy marriage between their god and his deified daughter, Gadifer sees only sacrilege and abomination. Continuing the analogy of anamorphic illusion, we might say that Aroès himself aspires to being the mechanism that defines the vision – both optical and ethical – imposed on his subjects. It is useful here to recall Lacan’s description of an anamorphosis in which an indecipherable pattern is arranged around a cylindrical mirror, in whose reflective surface the lines and shapes resolve themselves into an image of the Passion. In Lacan’s words: a marvelous illusion in the form of a beautiful image of the passion appears beyond the mirror, whereas something decomposed and disgusting spreads out around it. (Ethics, p. 273)

It is the ‘beautiful image’ that Aroès’ subjects see in the imaginary space beyond the tower; Gadifer sees ‘something decomposed and disgusting’. It is this deluding, demonic optics that defines Aroès’ people and produces them as his subjects, and as a result they are swallowed up by the infernal abyss that is his true ‘paradise’. Only Flamine and her companion Sorette escape with Gadifer to Scotland.

The Golden-Haired Giant and Incest as Sexual Violence The other incestuous father targeted by the Scottish court is the Gayant aux Crins Dorez, whom Lyonnel must behead in order to see Blanchete for a second time. Like Aroès, the giant plans to murder his wife and marry his daughter, Galotine, as soon as she reaches the appropriate age. Unlike Aroès, however, he  On Aroès’ use of glass bottles and light, see Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et ses déceptions’, pp. 423–4; Taylor, ‘Aroès’.



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seeks no ideological justification for his behaviour, but acts purely on the basis of his lustful impulses. In this respect he is typical of the primeval giants that populate medieval literature. While waiting for Galotine to mature – she is nine years old when Lyonnel arrives – the giant satisfies his lust in sexual assaults that outdo even Darnant himself in horrific violence. As his distraught giantess wife explains to Lyonnel: il m’est autant des meschiefz des bonnes damoiselles de ceste ylle que il par sa vile luxure ravist et emmaine pour faire sa voulentez, dont il les atourne tant que elles meurent, car elles ne sont pas de grandeur pour le recepvoir. (II.i, p. 348) [I worry just as much about the sufferings of the good damsels of this island, whom he rapes in his vile lechery and abducts to do his will, and he so abuses them that they die, for they are not big enough to receive him.]

The giant, lawless and rapacious, is the very embodiment of masculinity run amok, an absolute limit of lethal sexual violence. It is his incestuous designs on his daughter, however, that most clearly distinguish the giant from ‘ordinary’ rapists like the lignaige Darnant. And it is telling that Lyonnel initiates his courtship of Blanchete with an adventure that entails both the death of an incestuous father, and the sexual awakening of a young girl whose desires must be deflected away from her father towards someone more suitable. Lyonnel dispatches the giant with little ceremony, and packs up the head as a grisly love token. The twist to this episode involves Lyonnel’s squire, Clamidés. While Lyonnel and the giant’s wife are making their plans, Clamidés sneaks into Galotine’s bedroom. Being a giantess, Galotine already has the size of a normal adult woman; but her childish innocence leads her to expose her naked body to the male guests without shame. As a result, Clamidés ‘fut a ce meu qu’il jeut avecques elle’ [was so aroused that he lay with her] (II.i, p. 350). His action, though condemned by Galotine’s mother, has a striking effect on the girl herself, as shown in the conversation with her father later that day: Quant le gueant veyt sa fille, il luy prist a faire tresgrant feste et dist: ‘Galotine, belle fille, vous serez m’amie quant vous serez grande.’ L’enfant . . . respondy et dist: ‘Sire, je ne vueil plus estre vostre amie, car j’en ay trouvé ung plus bel et plus petit que vous.’ (p. 352) [When the giant saw his daughter, he made a fuss over her and said: ‘Galotine, fair daughter, you will be my beloved when you’re grown up.’ The child . . . replied and said: ‘Sir, I don’t want to be your beloved, for I have met someone else more handsome and smaller than you.’]

Needless to say, the episode is resolved, after the giant’s death, with a marriage between Clamidés and Galotine.

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The relationship that is established between Clamidés and Galotine reminds us that it is not enough to vanquish the incestuous father: the daughter herself must also conform to the norms of heterosexual love and feudal marriage. In the interests of bringing this about the seduction/rape of a nine-year-old child turns out to be a relatively minor transgression, a small price to pay for the eradication of incest. The fact that she prefers the human size and appearance of a British squire over that of a Danish giant supports the text’s colonial agenda: if the Greek incomers are culturally superior to the indigenous Trojan inhabitants of the British Isles, still the latter are far more handsome and more desirable than the giants. Clamidés, moreover, takes his young wife in hand and instructs her in courtly manners. As an adult, despite being two feet taller than her husband, Galotine is considered by all to be la meilleure, la plus doulce et debonnaire, la plus charitable et de meilleure vie et la plus belle et la plus plaisant et la plus feminine selon sa grandeur que l’on sceust, et si ama et cremy son seigneur sur toute riens aprés le Dieu Souverain tant qu’elle vequist. (p. 363) [the best woman, the sweetest and noblest, the most charitable and the best behaved and the most beautiful and most pleasant and the most feminine, allowing for her size, that anyone knew, and she loved and feared her husband above all else except for the Sovereign God, as long as she lived.]

‘La plus feminine selon sa grandeur’: Galotine’s gigantism remains as a marker of her alien origins, an otherness that cannot quite be assimilated. But her willing subjection to her husband, her conformance to his ethical, spiritual, and social values, ensures her admittance to courtly society. The imperial mission civilisatrice, as we have already seen, is portrayed to a great extent as a matter of establishing heteronormative gender and sexuality. In this particular instance Lyonnel and Clamidés work as a team. Lyonnel, in killing the giant, annihilates the violent and lawless sexuality of uncivilised masculinity, while Clamidès transforms the young giantess into a model of courtly femininity. The sexual agenda, as elsewhere in the text, is intertwined with a drive towards the domestication of nature: it is while seeking the giant that Lyonnel kills both the lions who had depopulated the realm of the Estrange Marche, and a dragon whose predations had hampered inter-island commerce. But the eradication of incest is the central theme to Lyonnel’s formative exploit; and in a later episode, Lyonnel’s courtship of Blanchete will serve to illustrate the incest taboo once again, this time in comical guise.



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Lyonnel as an Icon of Sexual Propriety Having slain the giant as requested, Lyonnel is accepted as the ami of Blanchete and treated to a cordial reception in the magical Scottish palace. Happy to treat the young hero as a potential son-in-law, King Gadifer looks for a way of staging their newly intimate relationship. And since the disabled Gadifer cannot participate in tournaments, he gives Lyonnel his shield and lance, asking him to bear them on Gadifer’s behalf in the next tournament and to return the shield afterwards, so that he can see ‘les coupz qu’il avra receuz’ [the blows it will have received] (II.ii, p. 132). Lyonnel, in other words, will be Gadifer’s proxy, bearing his arms and in that sense assuming his identity. The shield, moreover, is not just any shield; it represents the amorous relationship between Gadifer and Lydoire. As he explains: Sy est d’azur a ung chastel d’argent et sy y a entre deux tours pourtraitz deux amans par amours, qui representent moy et ceste dame qui delez moy siet. . . . Et sachiez qu’elle le m’envoia ou commencement de noz premieres amours. (p. 131) [It is blue with a silver castle and between two towers are portrayed two lovers, which represent myself and this lady sitting beside me. . . . and indeed she gave it to me at the beginning of our first love.]

At the onset of his ‘premieres amours’ with Blanchete, then, Lyonnel finds himself acting as the double of her father, bearing a shield that records the first love between her parents. The incestuous implications, while never articulated, are both amusing and intriguing. Will Lyonnel also be acting as Gadifer’s proxy in his marriage to Blanchete, realising sexual fantasies that the king would not dare to utter? The plot thickens the following morning, when Lyonnel, en route to England, is stopped by a damsel who presents him with another shield and lance. These come from Blanchete, whose portrait decorates the shield; and they too are to be used in the upcoming tournament. As a result, Lyonnel enters the field in a guise never before seen, as the Chevalier aux .II. Escus, wearing both shields on his left side – one more to the front and one turned a bit towards the back – and holding both lances in his right hand. His appearance creates quite a stir, but he lives up to both of his promises, shattering both lances simultaneously in his first joust and reducing first one shield to tatters, then the other. In this bravado performance, Lyonnel literally stages both his bond with Gadifer – as the man to whom the king will entrust his daughter – and his difference, as one whose bond with that daughter excludes the king in a crucial way. Blanchete may indeed be a medium for intimacy between Gadifer and Lyonnel, but she is no object passed between them either: she forms her own relationship with Lyonnel, taking considerable initiative. And while Lyonnel may indeed, as Gadifer’s son-in-law, be viewed as his proxy in a certain sense, it is amply clear that his relationship with Blanchete lies outside any actions he may undertake on Gadifer’s behalf. The amorous rela-

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tionship with the daughter, one of mutual fascination and erotic attraction, is supplementary to any initiative taken by her father and cannot be assimilated to his name. Thus while incest may pose a threat on the outer margins of civilisation, within the kingdoms established by Alexander it is not a possibility. The structures of chivalric culture, to which all members of the court adhere, foreclose the very thought of incest before it can even be articulated. It is Lydoire who, in demanding the giant’s head as the price of contact with Blanchete, determined that her daughter’s husband must be a man who stands as a bulwark against father–daughter incest. And so important is the heroic stature of her future son-in-law that Lydoire goes even further, constructing a temple in which to house all of Lyonnel’s trophies. As befits a shrine to passionate, allinspiring love, the temple is dedicated to Venus, and in it Lydoire arranges the relics of Lyonnel’s exploits. The head of the giant, its ferocity enhanced with artfully applied make-up, is displayed on a pillar. The shield that Lyonnel used in his battles with the lions and the dragon – in which the dragon’s talons and the lion’s claws are still embedded – hangs on the wall, as do the two shields that he bore in the tournament at the Franc Palais. The lion cub that he brought back from the Estrange Marche guards the temple precincts, killing any knight who approaches the temple without Lydoire’s approval but fawning on anyone she admits, and serving as a cuddly pet for Blanchete. And on the walls, exquisitely lifelike murals tell the story of Lyonnel’s exploits, beginning with his first glimpse of Blanchete bathing in the forest and outlining every detail of his adventures from that point on. In this cross between a museum and a holy shrine, known as the ‘Temple de la Franche Garde’, Lyonnel is recreated as a cultural icon, the embodiment of Alexander’s colonial agenda. The prohibition against incest, which pervades the entire installation, is identified with the conquest of nature and with the power of erotic love. Moreover, as the central figure in a pagan temple, Lyonnel emerges as a corrective counterpart to Aroès, reinforcing the identification of incest with a destructive idolatry. Aroès set himself up as the object of a cult, proposing himself as an absolute reality: not merely a sign or conduit for divine power, but the very god himself. Lyonnel, in contrast, is not to be worshipped, but is defined as the iconic embodiment of abstract ethical and cultural principles. The cult of Aroès, constructed around his own personal desire, is thus implicitly opposed to a system of ethical law that transcends the individual. Incest, which Flamine names only as ‘ce qui est deffendu en toutes loix’ [that which is forbidden under all forms of law/religion] (III.ii, p. 84), is by definition only possible under a godless perversion of law or an anarchic reign of terror. And the prohibition of incest, like the banning of rape, inaugurates a rule of law, portrayed as transcending any individual monarch because it derives ultimately from the sovereign ‘Dieu de Nature’.



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Exogamy, Exchange, and the Entrance into History The internal and external enemies targeted by Alexander’s vassals in their rule of Britain – Darnant, Aroès, the Golden-Haired Giant – have in common their creation of a self-contained, isolationist society. The lignaige Darnant seal off the forests of Britain, holding them ‘sy franches que nul n’y a osé entrer n’yssir’ [with such autonomy that no one dared enter or leave] (I.i, p. 399). The invisible Chastel Desvoyé is only the most extreme manifestation of their desire for a space apart. And although they are not explicitly associated with incest, it is clear that they are unconcerned with prohibitions of consanguinity. Lyriope, as we have seen, expected to be raped by her first cousin. In the Forest of Darnant, some 120 half-brothers freely and indiscriminately rape the local women and their young daughters – as do, presumably, their father and their many sons, not to mention their uncles and equally vast numbers of cousins – and it does not require any great imagination to realise that this situation, if practised for a number of years, would inevitably lead to incestuous unions. Marriage, as we have seen, is of very little importance to the lignaige Darnant. Perceforest’s prohibition of rape may indeed have the effect of enshrining a principle of female consent, but it equally inaugurates a system of alliance and exchange as marriages are contracted between the families of the British aristocracy. This network of families linked through marriage is crucial in the systematic structuring and unification of the feudal society that takes shape under Greek rule, as well as in the establishment of ties with outlying islands and with the Continent. Just as the lignaige Darnant had complete control over logging and other resources within the forests, so also they maintained sexual dominance over the women, ensuring that all children born within the forests would be of their lineage, part of a single extended family. The ‘liberation’ of the ladies of the forest coincides with the new monarch’s appropriation of resources as he consolidates his power. The chivalrous concern with feminine honour is thus a screen for a far more self-serving interest in controlling the means of both commercial production and sexual reproduction. The Golden-Haired Giant maintains an equally isolated island kingdom. When Lyonnel asks the sailor Nabin to take him to the Isle du Geant, Nabin at first refuses, saying that the giant’s favourite food is human flesh and that visiting his island can only mean certain death. Reaching the Isle du Geant, moreover, means passing perilously close to the Isle du Serpent. As a result of Lyonnel’s double victory over the dragon and the giant, both islands are opened up. The joyful sailors hang the dragon’s body on a high mast as a sign to mariners that they need no longer fear the passage, and eventually the Isle du Serpent is taken over by Nestor’s son Nero and his wife Clamidette, daughter of Clamidés and Galotine. With the help of the indispensable Zephir, they bring a thousand settlers to the hitherto uninhabited isle, founding the kingdom of Orkney; they are the ancestors of Gauvain. As for the Isle du Geant, it will someday be the birthplace of Lancelot’s companion Galeholt, descendant of Galotine and Clamidés. Thus while Lyonnel’s actions are explicitly directed to the suppression of rape

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and incest, and performed as personal love service, they have consequences that reach far beyond this limited context. Thanks to him, lands that were formerly off limits are brought within the British sphere of influence. Aroès too reigns over a kingdom that is a parody of cultural purity and selfsufficiency. In his desire to incarnate the sublime body of kingship, and to merge his identity with that of the Sovereign God that sustains all earthly power, Aroès endeavours to literalise the unity of sacred, natural, and feudal law by collapsing all of these categories into his own person. As we have seen, Perceforest acknowledges this as the ideal towards which any culture strives, indeed the claim on which it is founded; but it also shows that such an ideal can never be realised. With his magic spells, Aroès creates the illusion of a timeless, ahistorical realm in which all subjects, whether dead or alive, are eternally present and subject to his sovereign power. As Michelle Szkilnik has pointed out, the Roide Montaigne bears no monuments to past people or events; those who die are simply thrown into the sea. It is after the demise of Aroès that the island receives its first tomb, that of Flora, created and placed there by God himself. Its inscription narrates her marriage to Aroès, her resistance to his megalomaniacal delusions, and his demise along with that of the kingdom. Flora’s tomb is the island’s first historical marker, its first visible distinction between ‘then’ and ‘now’. As a monument to the succession of human generations, the tomb is also a correction of Aroès’s attempt to refuse historical progression through a refusal of lineage. The incestuous impulse runs counter not only to spatial integration – the establishment of alliances through the exchange of women with other kingdoms – but also to temporal integration, as Aroès seeks to create a realm in which the passage of time has little meaning. This, then, is a key to the secret hidden under his dazzling displays, the traumatic, unseen point of the anamorphic illusion: the very fact of difference – temporal, spatial, cultural – and of an ‘outside’ to the power of the king. Aroès attempts to deny the possibility of escaping his sovereignty: the only form of difference that he acknowledges is between those subjects admitted to his paradise and those relegated to his hell. Both this paradise and this hell are somehow present within the kingdom, to be revealed on a regular basis to the credulous subjects. The real paradise to which people might someday have access, and the real hell to which he ultimately does consign his kingdom, are both hidden from view, as is the real god whose judgment determines both salvation and damnation. The choice that Aroès seems to offer his people is in fact no choice at all. Moreover, the very substances necessary for Aroès’ magic spells – substances which themselves are a secret suppressed from the visual field of his subjects – are procured through trade with the outside world. Though the Roide Montaigne is ‘tant marveilleusement haulte qu’il n’est homme vivant qui y eust peu entrer’ [so marvellously high that there is no man alive who can get in] (III.ii, p. 82),  

See Delcourt, ‘Ironie, Magie’. Szkilnik, ‘Aroès l’illusioniste’.



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it does have to be supplied by regular visits from a merchant ship. A system of winches allows packages to be hoisted up to the castle, and these include not only domestic goods for the queen but also bundles ‘d’herbes, de pouldres et de aucune merveilleuses choses dont le dieu Aroès decevoit tout le peuple de son royaume’ [of herbs, of powders, and of various marvellous things with which the god Aroès deceived the people of his realm] (p. 83). This need for commerce with the outside world allows Flora to send for help by lowering her messenger Pierote into the ship. Gadifer subsequently reaches the island on board a merchant’s ship, and gains entrance to the otherwise impregnable kingdom by hiding himself inside the bundle of silks and linens being raised to the window of the women’s quarters; the other delivery being made that day consists of ingredients for the king’s potions. The very means by which the king produces his godlike image and maintains his power, in other words, is possible only through reliance on external contact, and is thus his point of vulnerability. Incest, then, is associated with an impossible law that prescribes that which any real law, by definition, prohibits: again, in Flamine’s words, ‘ce qui est deffendu en toutes loix’. This impossible law, in turn, defines an impossible kingdom, suspended outside of time. Flora’s tomb marks the beginning of recorded history in the land now renamed ‘Islangue’. And the queen’s epitaph also grounds this sense of history in an ethical framework, distinguishing the queen’s ‘creance pure’ [pure faith] from the king’s ‘subtillesse, qui n’ot sens ne mesure’ [subtle craftiness, which had neither sense nor moderation] and situating them in Heaven and Hell respectively (p. 125). In the Forest of Darnant, a similar ‘beginning of history’ is marked by the marble pillar that appears, seemingly overnight, on the spot where Perceforest killed Darnant, bearing the inscription: ‘Cy endroit fut feru le premier coup de lance par chevalier estrange es forestz d’Angleterre, et fut de la main Percheforest le bon roy d’Angleterre sur Darnant l’enchanteur’. (I.i, p. 228) [Here was the first lance blow struck by a foreign knight in the English forests, and it was by the hand of Perceforest, the good king of England, against Darnant the Enchanter.]

It is not just the death of Darnant that is commemorated here but also the incursion into the English forests of an outsider, a ‘chevalier estrange’ who creates a mark of difference, striking the ‘premier coup’ of a new era.10 Like the sexual privileges claimed by the lignaige Darnant, and even more explicitly, incest is a trope for an all-encompassing social and cultural isolationism, one that can only be regarded with hostility by the expansionist British 10 On the comparison of Aroès and Darnant and their shared resistance to historical markers, see Szkilnik, ‘Aroès l’illusioniste’, pp. 461–4. Szkilnik notes that the monuments commemorating the deaths of Darnant and his clansmen even survive the Roman invasion, creating a sense of continuity across historical eras.

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monarchs. Trade, military alliances, strategic marriages: all these become possible as the closed borders of the Isle du Serpent, the Isle du Geant, and the Roide Montaigne – that is, the Orkney and Shetland Islands and Ireland – are opened up, along with the forests of England. Both rape and incest are closely associated with forms of local intransigence and resistance to the encroaching power of the king, himself an agent of Alexander’s imperial reign. And both also can be seen as projections, in grotesquely caricatured form, of that very expansionism. I have already noted that rape is a ready metaphor for colonial domination. And incest, with its associations of xenophobia and resistance to external alliances, reflects the hegemonic pretentions of Perceforest’s kingdom as a holdout against Roman imperial expansion. Important though the prohibition of incest is in allowing for both the exercise of feminine desire and the formation of alliances between men, the resulting practice of exogamy is not without its own hazards. Not every foreign bride is as malleable as Galotine or as virtuous as Flamine. And while exogamy may be a means of extending cultural dominance, it can also backfire and become a step towards cultural submission. In the half-breed heirs and syncretic cultural forms that result, enrichment and cross-fertilisation are but the inverse of corruption and deterioration. In his analysis of the racial philosophy of Gobineau, Tzvetan Todorov sums up the negative view of this ‘paradoxe tragique qui pèse sur le genre humain’: ‘Dès qu’une société est suffisamment forte, elle tend à se soumettre les autres; mais dès qu’elle le fait, elle est menacée dans son identité et elle n’est plus forte . . . les faibles périssent soumis par les forts, les forts corrompus par les faibles’.11 [Once a society is strong enough, it tends to subjugate others; but once it does that, it is threatened in its identity and is no longer strong . . . the weak perish subjugated by the strong, the strong corrupted by the weak.]

The foreign woman poses the threat of both cultural and genealogical pollution. Especially worrisome is the possibility that the currently dominant culture may itself by invaded and eclipsed by some other power that is stronger still. This sinister possibility is explored by the Perceforest author in the story of Perceforest’s son Bethidés and his Roman bride Cerse.

Cerse and the Danger of Miscegenation Bethidés meets Cerse during his period of adventuring in the Low Countries after his escape from the chevaliers de mer. The ancient forerunner of Tournai, here called Ostille and later Nerves, is portrayed as a Roman foundation whose 11

Todorov, Nous et les autres, pp. 191–2.



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citizens consider themselves to be independent of the empire.12 The Romans periodically attempt to subjugate the city but, until the disastrous campaigns of Julius Caesar, which destroy both Britain and the Low Countries, the city successfully defends itself. It is one such Roman siege, led by the officer Luces, that Bethidés joins for a time – a sign of poor judgment, since the Romans are the archenemies of his own kingdom, and Nerves later emerges as an important British ally. Here Bethidés meets Cerse, Luces’s amie, who has disguised herself as a young knight in order to join her lover. But she soon transfers her affections to the young English prince, who takes her back to England. After a period of resistance from Perceforest and Ydorus, Bethidés succeeds in marrying Cerse, but her perfidious Roman character becomes ever more obvious as she corrupts her husband and presides over a frivolous and decadent court. When her former lover Luces reappears, scouting the land for a potential Roman invasion, Cerse takes him on as a knight at court and plots with him to overthrow Bethidés and establish Roman rule. Their adulterous liaison results in the birth of a son, the putative heir to the throne, since the only child of Cerse and Bethidés was stillborn. By this time, given the child’s resemblance to Luces and the pair’s indiscreet behaviour, the love affair is an open secret. Bethidés turns a wilfully blind eye, but the aged Perceforest is in despair. When Luces summons the Romans under Julius Caesar, Cerse contrives to deceive her husband, claiming he has been called to repel an invasion in Scotland. In his absence the Romans easily make their landing, but Bethidés and young Gadifer, now king of Scotland, discover the treachery and return sooner than expected. In her rage at the sight of the advancing British armies, who manage to reach the Franc Palais before the Romans do, Cerse grabs her young son and kills him, dying soon afterwards herself as she is hit by a divine thunderbolt. All of the British knights are killed in the ensuing battle, which leaves Britain in ruins, not to be rebuilt until the next generation of boys has grown up to assume their role as rulers and defenders of the land. The immediate shock with which Bethidés’s family greet his request to marry Cerse might seem slightly surprising. After all, his cousins in Scotland, Gadifer and Nestor, both marry princesses whom they meet in the course of their adventures. Neither Flamine nor Neronés, however, hail from lands as far distant as Rome. This point is raised by the Chevalier au Delphin when Bethidés complains of his father’s displeasure: ‘Sy regarde vostre chier sire que merveilleuse chose seroit a vous de prendre femme de tant longtaine contree’ [your dear father thinks it would be strange for you to take a wife from such a distant land] (IV.i, p. 98). Lydoire also argues against a truly foreign marriage, telling her disgruntled nephew that ‘il ne fait pas bon estraindre estrange boiel au sien, car on se doit alier selon soy et a ce que l’en congnoit’ [it’s not a good thing to embrace a foreigner, 12

The names are those used by the chronicler Jacques de Guise: ‘Hostilione, Nervis, seu Tornaco’. ‘Nerves-la-Cité’ ultimately derives from Caesar’s ‘Nerviorum civitas’. See Lods, Roman de Perceforest, p. 135; Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Géographie’, pp. 282–3.

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for one should make an alliance with one’s own kind, and with the familiar] (p. 70). Perceforest himself, in his first comments on the subject, dismisses Cerse as ‘je ne sçay quelle femme rommaine qu’il a amenee d’estrange terre’ [some Roman woman that he brought back from abroad] (p. 147), as though her alien origins in and of themselves placed her beyond consideration. As the discussion continues, it becomes clear that the real problem with Cerse is not simply that she was born abroad, but that she is Roman. After his initial restraint, Perceforest’s anger explodes in a burst of racist invective: il veult avoir a femme la fille d’un Rommain, qui sont de leur propre nature tant haultains et tant oultrecuidiez qu’ilz ne prisent nations du monde fors la leur. Et avecquez ce ilz sont tant convoiteux que se tout l’avoir qui est dessoubz le firmament leur estoit dedens leurs huges, si n’en avroyent ilz point a souffisance. Pourquoy il se feroit a grant paine que la lignie qui d’elle descendroit aucunement ne fust convoiteuse et raemplie de despit, ce qui n’a mestier en sale de preudhomme. (p. 152) [he wants to marry the daughter of a Roman, whose nature is such that they are haughty and so arrogant that they admire no peoples of the world except themselves. And moreover, they are so greedy that if all the wealth beneath the heavens was theirs, it wouldn’t satisfy them. So it could hardly be that the lineage descended from her wouldn’t be greedy and spiteful, which has no place in the hall of a nobleman.]

The Romans are not just any foreign people; they are the rival imperial power whose empire is built, in part, from the remnants of Alexander’s. It was the Romans who killed Porrus and Cassiel, brothers-in-law to Perceforest and Gadifer, in their attempted conquest of Alexander’s Asian territories. They are a constant menace to Greco-British hegemony. Cerse thus embodies both the literal and the figurative threat of foreign invasion. It is her treacherous conspiracy with Luces that enables the Roman army to devastate Britain; it is her nefarious influence on her husband that alienates him from his subjects and initiates the English cultural decline even before the invasion has been planned; and it is her illicit love affair with Luces that introduces a bastard son, of purely Roman blood, into the royal line of descent. At birth, the child’s body bears unmistakable signs of his racial heritage, described in grotesque terms: il avoit le visaige rommain long et soustret, le chief gros et coqu a bouche derriere, et assez ressamblant a Luces le Rommain. (p. 492) [he had a long, receding Roman face, a large rectangular head with a crooked mouth, quite similar to Luces the Roman.]

So strikingly alien, so unmistakably Roman is this child that when Perceforest is presented with the infant, he can only cry out, ‘Tenés, tenés, ostés moy cest



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enffant, laissiés moy aller!’ [Here, here, take this child from me, get me out of here] (p. 493). Cerse, in defence, points out that she is Roman herself, that her heritage will inevitably manifest itself in her son, and that ‘ne pouoit le sang et la nature de Bretaigne estre fourmé en celle du prumier enfant masle’ [the blood and the nature of Britain couldn’t be formed in the first male child] (p. 494). This very argument, however, would only serve to discredit the foreign marriage in the first place, in acknowledging that even without adulterous contamination, the mother’s Roman ancestry would be enough to stamp a foreign identity on to the child. The implication is that even if the boy was the son of Bethidés, at the same time he would not be. His problematic identity, indeed, is reflected in the confusion over his name, variously recorded in the text as ‘Cersidorus’ or ‘Acersidorus’ and ‘Bethiluc’: it is unclear whether his maternal (Roman) side or his paternal (Greco-British) side is dominant. In the account of Cerse’s relationship with Queen Ydorus, whose favour she must win in order for the marriage to take place, the narrator mingles xenophobic and antifeminist commentary: La belle damoiselle respondi tant saigement a la noble rouyne et tant honnourablement s’i maintint et tant subtivement couvry ses meurs femenins que oncques la royne ne peut percevoir en elle chose qui fust a blasmer . . . mais sans faulte fort est a concepvoir que les Rommains pensent, car ilz sont en leur nature couvers et malicieux. Et la damoiselle, qui avoit grant entendement, sceut bien ensieuvir la nature de son païs et tellement s’y conduisi qu’en dedens une espace de tamps elle acquist du tout l’amour de la rouyne. (pp. 330–1) [The fair damsel replied so prudently to the noble queen and behaved so honourably and so subtly concealed her feminine ways that the queen never saw anything blameworthy in her . . . but truly it is hard to imagine what the Romans are thinking, for by their nature they are covert and malicious. And the damsel, who was very intelligent, knew how to conform to the nature of her homeland and conducted herself in such a way that she had soon won the queen’s love.]

Is Cerse’s devious behaviour a manifestation of ‘la nature de son païs’ or of ‘meurs femenins’? The Perceforest author evidently wants to have it both ways. Cerse is also the occasion for a rare antifeminist intervention in the narrator’s own voice. When she assures Bethidés that she has been living chastely with Luces ‘comme sa soeur’ [as his sister] the narrator wryly comments: ‘Le chevalier l’en creut tresbien et, au regard de moy, je l’en croy ainsi comme l’en peut croire femmes en tel cas!’ [The knight fully believed her, and as for myself, I believe her just as much as one can ever believe women in these matters] (III. ii, p. 291). In this romance, so concerned with the honour of women and their positive contributions to chivalric culture, misogyny is projected onto women of foreign or otherwise tainted blood: the female collaborators of the lignaige

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Darnant, the scheming Roman, and the grotesque singesse who attempted to ‘marry’ Le Bossu. As we have seen, the knights of Perceforest’s Britain are ill equipped to handle a female adversary, be it the physically aggressive ‘savages’ of Scotland, the mendacious clanswomen with their false claims of rape, or the power-hungry and faithless Cerse. The assumption underwriting this portrayal of a chivalric Golden Age is that stereotypical feminine vices – gossip, mendacity, promiscuity, manipulation of men for private gain – are located in women who do not subscribe to the courtly ethos and who, for the most part, are of alien descent. When such behaviour rears its head at the English court, it is entirely owing to the Romanising influence of Cerse, now queen, who has fostered a culture of self-serving duplicity. The uncourtly and wicked behaviour of such women excludes them from membership in courtly society, but conversely – if implicitly – the very genealogical or ethnic identity that defines their outsider status also excludes them from the courtly virtues. In this stereotyped view, ethical and racial matrices coincide. Though her behaviour has long since brought her under widespread suspicion, it is when she kills her son that Cerse shows her true colours. Emerging as a full-blown Medea or Dido figure, she strangles the child in a paroxysm of rage at Luce’s failure to assemble his army before the British forces arrived: ‘Questron bastard, je te occiray ou despit de ton pere Luces qui tant a demouré’ [Bastard brat, I’ll kill you to spite your father Luces, who delayed too long] (IV.i, p. 608). Having revealed the open secret of the child’s parentage and her own act of betrayal, she is struck by lightning: so urgent is her elimination that it cannot wait for human justice to take its course. Cerse’s replay of Medea’s crime echoes the earlier parodic actions of the singesse abandoned by Le Bossu. In the Roman queen and her bestial double we see the foreign woman with whom the foundation of lineage is simply impossible. The disastrous consequences of Cerse’s queenship, tainted with both foreignness and adultery, are overdetermined. Bethidés is unable to father a son with her: their only child ‘morut incontinent qu’i fut venu au monde’ [died as soon as it was born] (p. 487). But as Ourseau comments at the restoration of the realm some twenty years later, it is just as well that Bethidés did not have a son, for if he had, ‘sy seroit il de tant mauvais sang de par la mere que aucunement ne me pourroye accorder qu’il regnast’ [he would be of such bad blood from his mother’s side that I could never consent to his reign] (IV.ii, p. 1133). The urgent need to purify the bloodlines is resolved in the marriage of Gallafur, son of Gadifer and Flamine, to Alexandre Fin de Liesse, daughter of Perceforest’s daughter Bethoine and Alexandre Remanant de Joie, son of Alexander the Great and Sebille. Gallafur and his bride are second cousins and thus related within the prohibited degrees for medieval marriage. The incestuous quality of this marriage is justified through the need for ethnic purity: ‘Ainsi estoient les deux branches reioinctes affin que estrange sang ne s’i meslast’ [thus the two branches were joined up so that foreign blood wouldn’t get mixed in] (VI, ch. 47). The royal cousins



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preside over a successfully restored British kingdom, home once again to chivalry and love. The lineage thus founded, which will culminate in Arthur, is truly the embodiment of a Greco-British hegemony that stands in proud opposition to the Romano-Trojan culture of the European continent.

Ourseau and the De-Romanisation of the Mixed Race Son The temporary collapse of Greco-British civilisation, then, is the result of a mixed marriage that introduces a Roman contamination into the bloodlines and further Romanises the culture of the royal court. The counterpart to this corrupted, Romanised Greco-British prince is Bethidés’ first cousin, Ourseau, the mysterious fourth child of Gadifer and Lydoire. Covered with fur from birth – the result of Lydoire’s obsession with bears on the night of his conception, the same night in which she changed Estonné into a bear – this child cannot be kept in Scotland. As Lydoire explains, her reading of the stars told her that he would bring shame on to his lineage if he remained in his homeland, but that he would find honour and glory if he went abroad before the age of thirty. She therefore entrusted him to foster parents, knowing that he would be found by Roman scouts. Adopted by a Roman senator and ignorant of his family origins – he knows only that he was found in the Scottish forest as a child, and that his parents were said to be royal – Ourseau marries the senator’s daughter, a cousin of Julius Caesar, and has twelve sons. The first born, also called Ourseau and also covered with fur, travels to Britain after the invasion in order to seek his roots. Though initially he considers himself a Roman knight with British ancestry, he is increasingly won over by the vestiges of the once proud culture, and horrified at the devastation wrought on his paternal kin by his maternal relatives. The very fact of finding himself within his father’s homeland, so near to his ancestral origins, has a profound effect that is both emotional and bodily. Describing his desire to track down his grandparents, no matter how old or infirm they may be, he explains: ains m’est commencé a fremir tout le corps puis que j’entray ceans par naturelle inclination et par sentement sans congnoissance de veue . . . car de leur achierissement ne me doute je pas. (IV.ii, p. 995) [my whole body began to tremble since I came here, through natural inclination and sentiment, without any first-hand knowledge . . . for I have no doubt of their love.]

Overwhelmed by the discovery of his own Britishness, Ourseau marries a British princess, Camille of Hurtemer, and is converted by Lydoire to the monotheistic religion of the Souverain Dieu. By the time he returns to Rome he has, in effect, become a British knight. The real turning point in Ourseau’s passage from Roman to Greco-Briton

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comes when he meets Lydoire, who explains the details of his father’s birth. She welcomes him as her grandson and sends him to the enchanted isle where he can view the horribly mutilated bodies of his three uncles, Lyonnel, Gadifer, and Nestor; his cousin Bethidés; and eleven of the twelve knights who made the vows at Gadifer’s coronation tournament.13 Flamine has already told him how the three queens – Blanchete, Neronés, and Flamine herself – faced the grim task of stitching their husbands’ bodies back together into some recognisable form as the men lay dying. The heroes’ bodies were so badly mutilated as to be almost unrecognisable. As Flamine says of her husband Gadifer, qui eust voulu dire que ce fust un corps d’homme qui la couchoit, bien l’eust l’en convenu regarder prumier, car mieulx sambloient pieces de char rassamblees que ce que nature l’eust fait. (IV.ii, p. 824) [if someone had wanted to say that it was the body of a man lying there, he would have had to look closely, for it seemed more like chunks of flesh set side by side, rather than something made by nature.]

Lyonnel, once ‘le mirouer et le tresor de toute prouesse et de toute chevallerie’ [the mirror and the treasure-trove of all prowess and chivalry], had so utterly spent himself on the battlefield that ‘il ne lui en estoit demouré que la bourse platte et esvuydee’ [there was nothing left of him but the flat, empty purse] (p. 821). Disembowelled, dismembered, drained of prouesse and chevallerie, these gruesome bodies are the very emblem of the devastated British kingdom. This personal tragedy – the effects of the Roman war so visibly etched into the bodies of his close paternal kin, the nearly unbearable grief experienced by his grandmother and his aunts – shakes Ourseau to the core, converting him from Roman to British identity. Though he knows that his fellow countrymen are responsible, led by his own cousin, Ourseau nonetheless sees these bodies as ‘la plus piteuse chose du monde et qui plus requiert vengance’ [the most pitiful thing in the world and the thing most requiring vengeance] (IV.ii, p. 1011). Ourseau’s Britishness can only be purchased, however, at the price of excising his Romanness, and Lydoire presents him with a simple but breathtaking means of achieving this: he must avenge his British uncles by assassinating his Roman cousin, Julius Caesar. The murder weapon, in turn, is the spearhead taken from the body of Nestor, who died fighting Caesar in single combat. In effect, Ourseau must symbolically destroy the Roman side of his ancestry. Ironically this means leaving his British wife, much to her displeasure; she makes a concerted but futile effort to thwart his plans, even stealing the spearhead at one point and having it melted down to produce twelve styluses intended for silkworking. Advised by

13

This tournament is described in the second half of Book I, currently unedited. The twelfth of the star performers, the Chevalier au Delphin, was kept after his death by the damsels of the Forest of Darnant and worshipped as the Dieu des Desirriers.



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Zephir, Ourseau recovers the styluses, which are eventually used for the famous murder in the Roman senate.14 Despite the importance of love and marriage in Perceforest, the need for vengeance against the Romans takes precedence. Although Camille has borne him a child, Ourseau abandons her, sending only a message to tell her that she will pay dearly for her crime. In a sense, it is inappropriate for Ourseau to attempt permanent settlement in Britain as long as he has not yet fully enacted his rejection of Roman – Caesarean – hegemony. His status as a knight of mixed race remains problematic, keeping him, like his father, a liminal figure, neither fully Roman nor fully British. The furry appearance of the first Ourseau and his sons marks them as inescapably Other no matter where they may go. It was the furriness of the new-born Ourseau that first aroused Lydoire’s suspicions towards him: as she admits, ‘Quant je vey l’enffant tel, il m’en anuia’ [when I saw the child like that, it bothered me] (IV.ii, p. 1002). Destined to bring only shame onto himself and his lineage if he remains in his homeland, Ourseau must be sent abroad. But no sooner has he established his Roman family than the eldest son, now British in orientation, draws his brothers into a deadly plot targeting their Roman leader and kinsman. Neither Ourseau – father or son – can live unproblematically in either Rome or Britain. Be that as it may, Ourseau does at least succeed in fulfilling the promise that he made to his grandmother, Lydoire. The family’s Roman ties, so intimate and yet so easily broken, are sacrificed in an act that at once exacts vengeance and redeems this expatriate branch of the Scottish royal family. In this way the fatal Romano-British marriage that destroyed Perceforest’s Britain is answered by another Romano-British marriage; and the corrupting Romanisation of Perceforest’s lineage is met by the triumphant de-Romanisation of the lineage of Gadifer.

Pathological Fear of the Other: Holland the Giant The theme of xenophobia, finally, also receives more exotic and comic treatment in Perceforest. We have already noted the xenophobic overtones of Le Bossu’s adventure with the singesse. A paranoid aversion to marriage, in turn, is parodied in the story of Holland, the monstrous giant killed by the Chevalier au Delphin – the Dieu des Desirriers – in order to fulfil the desire of the damsel Marse, whose beloved has been imprisoned by Holland. Holland is not just a giant, but a particularly lethal one, for when angry he exudes toxic fumes. The Chevalier au Delphin’s horse succumbs to this ‘venimeuse fumee’, as do island inhabitants who stray too close to the giant’s corpse; the hero himself survives only thanks to a magic ring. The place where the giant died retains its deadly contamination 14 The account of Caesar’s assassination is published by Flûtre, ‘Etudes’ (1969), pp. 365– 70. It appears in Book V, as yet unedited.

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for more than a hundred years and is known ironically as ‘le Paradis du terrible Holland’ [the paradise of the terrible Holland] (p. 125). As if that was not enough, Holland also has a strangely doubled body. As Marse coyly explains: Sy vous dis que c’est ung homme qui a deux testes sus ses espaules, grandes et espoantables a veoir, mais l’une n’a ne veue ne parole et ne mengüe point. Et a quatre bras, mais les deux n’ont aucune vertu, ains pendent aval comme mors. Il a avecq ce quatre piez, mais les deux ne lui font que empescement. Et pour abregier, de tous membres appartenans a homme parfait il en a deux, et passe sa grandeur la forme commune de deux piés. (IV.i, p. 102) [I tell you, this is a man who has two heads on his shoulders, huge and horrible to see, but one of them has neither sight nor speech and doesn’t eat. And he has four arms, but two of them are without strength, and hang as if dead. He also has four feet, but two of them are just an impediment. And in short, he has two of each member pertaining to a well-formed man, and he is two feet taller than the average man.]

Quite literally a figure of male bodily excess, Holland lives a reclusive existence on his little island, known as Hollande. Wanting an heir, he kidnapped the pregnant wife of his brother, planning to make her his wife after the birth of her son. But the poor woman ‘en print telle paour qu’elle en morut a grant meschief ’ [was so afraid of him that she died in great distress] (p. 122). Holland raised the boy as his own, naming him Hollandin and apparently treating him well up to the age of twenty. But then, as the inhabitants of Hollande explain after the battle, ‘comme cruel qu’il estoit, l’avoit fait emprisonner, pour ce qu’il amoit par amours une jenne pucelle qui demeure en une isle auprez d’icy’ [like the cruel man that he was, he imprisoned him, because he fell in love with a young maiden on an adjacent island] (p. 123). That girl, of course, is Marse, and Holland’s death allows Hollandin to marry her. Like other episodes involving monsters or bizarre creatures, this one comments on the larger themes of the romance. As the Chevalier au Delphin is heading off to fight Holland, he encounters Bethidés, who has left his father’s court in a rage and complains bitterly of Perceforest’s aversion to Cerse. Thus we are invited to consider the story of Holland as a gloss on the foreign marriage that is creating so much concern at the English court. The refusal of a ‘foreign’ bride – Marse does not live in Hollande, but on the neighbouring island – is presented in monstrous guise. The obstructionist father is not only cruel but literally toxic, profoundly isolationist, and so abhorrent to women that Hollandin’s mother died at the mere thought of becoming his wife. Juxtaposed with the family quarrel over Cerse, Holland looms as a caricatured image of Bethidés’ resentful vision of his own father. But if Holland corresponds to Bethidés’ adolescent fantasy, he is actually everything that Perceforest is not, and his very monstrosity makes a



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striking contrast with the English king’s sensible and well-meaning opposition to his son’s proposed marriage. Holland does, however, conjure up a further transgressive vision that reflects troublingly on Bethidés’ situation. Why, we might ask, is he so distressed at the thought of his nephew and adopted son finding a wife? By analogy with the isolationist fathers who regard with murderous hatred any pretender to the hand of their daughter, one might wonder if Holland, having failed in his one heterosexual venture, intends to keep the boy for his own sexual enjoyment. He is, after all, a man haunted and overwritten with a monstrous image of male–male bonding. And the designation of ‘le Paradis du terrible Holland’ echoes the equally hellish ‘paradis’ of the incestuous father Aroès, whose story was told earlier. This submerged hint at a doubly transgressive homosexual incest, literally unspeakable within the framework of Perceforest, would be appropriate to this figure of masculine excess, death, and isolation. If Holland does point to the spectre of homosexual desire, then how does this relate to the larger narrative of the Perceforest? The implicit evocation of homosexuality brings us back to Bethidés and Cerse, the cross-dressed Roman princess. That possibility, as well as the implicit condemnation of homosexuality woven into the fabric of Perceforest, will be explored in the next chapter.

6

Sexual Violence, Imperial Conquest, and the Bonds between Men The Trojan identity of the wicked lignaige Darnant is explicit and formative. Of the evil customs that characterise the clan, sorcery is most directly linked to the Trojan heritage: Dardanon explains to Perceforest that ‘tous les enchantemens de cest pays’ [all the enchantments of this land] were brought there by Cassandra, who in turn imparted her knowledge to ‘ceulx qui puis en ont usé mauvaisement’ [people who subsequently put them to ill use] (I.i, pp. 424–5). The treacherous and anarchic proclivities of clan members also correspond to the Trojan reputation, well developed in medieval tradition, as traitors and murderers. Yet the Perceforest is silent on another vice sometimes attributed to Trojans in classical and medieval texts, their supposed homoerotic tendencies. The deviant Trojan sexuality, famously enunciated by Lavine’s mother in the twelfth-century Roman d’Eneas, is also cited by Latin authors whose works were important sources for Perceforest, both with regard to Troy itself and with regard to the ethnically Trojan Britons. In his commentary on Virgil, Servius credits Trojans with the invention of pederasty, while references to Ganymede as Jove’s lover often stress his Trojan origins. Geoffrey of Monmouth mentions two ‘sodomite’ British kings, Mempricius (II.vi) and Malgo (XI.vii), and notes further that the Britons were guilty of unspecified and apparently unspeakable sexual crimes: ‘ceperunt tali & tanti fornicationi indulgere. Qualis nec inter gentes audita est’ (XII.vi) [They began to indulge in sexual excesses such as had never been heard of among other peoples]. Gerald of Wales, citing Geoffrey’s examples, is even more categorical: ‘Praeterea, peccatis urgentibus, et praecipua detestabili illo et nefando Sodomitico, divina ultione tam olim Trojam quam postea Britanniam amiserunt’ [It was because of their sins, and more particularly the wicked and detestable vice of homosexuality, that the Welsh were punished by God and so lost first Troy and then Britain]. Accusations of sexual deviance, including homoerotic 

On Eneas, see Burgwinkle, ‘Knighting the Classical Hero’; Gaunt, Gender and Genre, pp. 75–85.  On Servius, see Knight, ‘Procreative Sodomy’, p. 69. On Ganymede, see Boswell, Christianity, pp. 251–64, 392–8; Burgwinkle, Sodomy, p. 66.  Historia, ed. Griscom, p. 520; History, tr. Thorpe, p. 273. See Heng, Empire, p. 55.  Giraldus Cambrensis, Descriptio, II.7, p. 215; Description, tr. Thorpe, p. 264. See Knight, ‘Procreative Sodomy’, pp. 65–73.



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liaisons, had also been made against Norman (and thus, in some sense, Trojan) kings of England: William Rufus, Richard I, and – of most immediate relevance – Edward II. Given his detailed knowledge of both Latin and vernacular traditions concerning the Trojan legacy and the matter of Britain, it is inconceivable that the Perceforest author could have been unaware of this persistent attribution of homoeroticism to the Trojan ‘race’, or to its recurrence in the polemics of English royal politics. And in fact the possibility of sexual relations between men, though never openly articulated, haunts the romance with its powerfully expressed ideology of love, marriage, and chivalric friendship. If he suppresses explicit references to homosexuality, the Perceforest author is insistent in his emphasis on both the deviant heterosexuality of the lignaige Darnant, and the all-important role of love in the chivalric ethos promoted by Perceforest. So crucial is this cult of heterosexual love, as we have seen, that knights who have fallen in love may actually refuse the company of those who have not yet done so, even when the latter are among their most devoted companions or feudal retainers. Given the importance of heterosexual politics in the text’s account of cultural conflict and imperial expansion, it is worth looking more closely not only at the relationship between ‘perverse’ and ‘proper’ heterosexuality, but also at the relationship between these and the third, unspoken option of sexual bonds between men.

Imagining Homosexuality: Homoeroticism and Heterosexual Violence It is rare to find a depiction in medieval French literature of male homosexuality as a lifestyle that excludes sexual relations with women. Perhaps the only developed representation of such a choice occurs in the thirteenth-century romance Bérinus, where the king Agriano exiles women and establishes a purely male kingdom. Agriano’s fear and loathing of women is expressed in his assertion that sexual contact with women is unhealthy and debilitating; he instructs his men in the ‘fol usage’ of pederasty. More common, however, is a view of male homosexuality as a supplement to heterosexual liaisons. According to this view, there is a type of man who does engage in marital or even non-marital sexual relations with women, but who treats these women with brutality, showing them neither love nor respect because his preference is for boys or other men. Self-serving and violent use and abuse of women contribute to the construction of Trojan effeminacy and homosexuality in both the Eneas and, if less flam-

 See Heng, Empire, pp. 91–8; Burgwinkle, Sodomy, pp. 49–52, 73–85; Sponsler, ‘King’s Boyfriend’; Delcourt, ‘Ironie, magie’, pp. 38–40.  See Burgwinkle, Sodomy; Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism.  See my Madness, pp. 129–35, 138–41.  Burgwinkle notes that contemporary diatribes against Richard I include insinuations of homoerotic liaisons as well as explicit accusations of heterosexual rape; see Sodomy, p. 79.

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boyantly, the Aeneid. Lavine’s mother, in her famous tirade against the Trojan intruder, cites Eneas’s affair with Dido as proof of his disregard for women: il priseroit mialz un garçon que toi ne altre acoler; ... en ce sont Troïen norri. Molt par as foiblement choisi. N’as tu oï comfaitement il mena Dido malement?  (ed. Salverda de Grave, vv. 8567–8, 8572–3, 8577–80) [He would rather have a boy than to embrace you or any other woman; [. . .] that’s how Trojans are raised. You’ve made a very poor choice. Haven’t you heard how badly he treated Dido?]

In this caricatured depiction, the Trojan preference for pederasty results not in the refusal of women, but in their mistreatment, as Eneas unhesitatingly uses sex as a means of exploiting first one woman, then another for material gain. The Eneas author builds here on Virgil’s more fleeting portrayal of a prejudice against Trojan men linking effeminacy and rape, that is, the appropriation of another man’s (intended) wife for personal gain. Paris, of course, is the quintessential Trojan abductor of a married woman. In Book 4 of the Aeneid, the Libian King Iarbas, spurned by Dido, transfers the reputation to Aeneas when he learns of Dido’s liaison with the Trojan: ‘et nunc ille Paris cum semiviro comitatu / . . . rapto potitur’ [and now this Paris with his effeminate cohort . . . siezes the plunder] (IV, vv. 215–17). And at the conclusion of Virgil’s epic, when Aeneas ignores Turnus’s pleas for mercy, he is motivated by his love not for Lavinia, but for the young soldier Pallas, whom Turnus had killed. An exploitative, abusive attitude towards women, an effeminate and vindictive character, a devotion to male companions that verges on the erotic: these attributes traditionally form the dark side of Trojan masculinity. The lignaige Darnant are the heirs to the stereotypical Trojan practices of treachery and sexual violence; they practise sorcery, often linked in the medieval cultural imagination with homoeroticism through the assumption that those guilty of the one crime would likely be guilty of the other as well. Given this accumulation of deviant practices, the clan could easily come under suspicion for that other Trojan vice as well. As we have seen, their free exploitation of women as sexual slaves goes along with a form of male bonding that is unmediated in its intimate intensity. Clan members are not linked at one remove through the exchange of female relatives in marriage, nor do their relations with women  On the association of sodomy with both treachery and heresy, see Sponsler, ‘King’s Boyfriend’; Delcourt, ‘Ironie’; Heng, Empire, p. 93. Burgwinkle notes that in medieval discourses, sodomy ‘ranges from being a simple description of homoerotic relations or attractions to a theological category synonymous with the sinful’, in Sodomy, p. 3.



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define a space of privacy from their fellow knights. Their sexual liaisons with women are often quasi-public events, shared adventures involving as many as three or four companions. The problem of sexual violence against women is solved in Perceforest with the imposition of heterosexual love, which targets both sides of the clan’s ‘perverse’ sexuality: the lack of respect for women and the unmediated relationships between men. Only the former is explicit, but the latter view is unmistakably implied in the knights’ obsessive concern with love, which goes well beyond the mere prevention of rape. It is not because he suspects Troïlus of being a rapist that Lyonnel refuses his company. A knight who is not in love is somehow less manly; as Zellandin proclaims upon meeting up with Lyonnel and Troïlus, ‘chevalier sans amie . . . sera plus mat et plus nice en tous ses fais’ [a knight without a girlfriend . . . will be lacklustre and foolish in all his deeds] (II.ii, p. 195). And upon realising that his five companions have no interest in love, Zellandin summarily dismisses them, despite their protestations that they are bound to serve him as the son of their liege lord: Seigneurs, dist Zellandin . . . vous ne me ferez jamais compaignie tant que vous amerez par amours, car du gentil au villain est trop mauvaise la meslee. (p. 196) [‘Lords,’ said Zellandin . . . ‘you won’t be keeping me company unless you fall in love, for it is an ill mix to put the noble with the lowly.’]

Not only less manly, then, but also less worthy in general: a knight without a female love object hardly even merits admittance to noble company, being little better than a peasant. As Lyonnel himself had stated, knights who are not in love are likely to have a corrupting influence on those who are, robbing them of honour. So pronounced is Lyonnel’s and Zellandin’s abhorrence of a chevalier sans amie that one cannot help wondering just what it is that they find so threatening, so repellant in their non-amorous fellows. The cult of love, it would seem, governs not only relations between the sexes, but also those among the men themselves.10 Love, in short, is a solution not only to the problem of heterosexual rape, but also to another problem, that of improper and excessively intimate relations between men. And while the possibility of homosexual attractions is never explicitly raised, it remains an unspoken threat that haunts the text: too taboo even to be named, yet always there, just beneath the surface. It lurks behind the brutal and unfeeling heterosexual violence of the lignaige Darnant; it silently informs the amorous knights’ repugnance at contact with those who are not in love; and it is 10

As Gaunt notes, the ‘obligatory heterosexuality’ of romance as a genre is ‘nearly always inscribed with a structure of homosocial desire’ (Gender and Genre, p. 85). This comment is certainly applicable to Troïlus’ friendship with Lyonnel and Zellandin, who accept his company only on condition that he is looking for heterosexual love, and who delight in watching his prowess increase as a result of that love.

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implicitly raised – only to be defused through humour or discredited as unworkable – in a series of episodes that treat relationships between men.

Courtly Parody: The Homosexual Liaison as Impossible Farce Book I of Perceforest describes the protracted battle waged by Perceforest, aided by Alexander, Gadifer, and an assortment of Greek, English, and Scottish knights, against the lignaige Darnant. The story of the suppression of a violently misogynist culture allows the author to develop his central characters. The narrative divides into numerous interlaced strands, following the adventures of the knights as they meet up, separate, and meet again in various combinations. It is here that certain knights in particular emerge as distinctive characters who will be central to the narrative until their demise in Book IV. Their actions in fighting the lignaige Darnant define their chivalric heroism against the abusive exploitation of women: at every turn they are hailed by the ladies of the forest as saviours. But if the text most explicitly contrasts the Greco-British knighthood with the rapist clan members, there is another, more subtle agenda as well. The homosocial bonds between the knights themselves are also developed in this section of the romance, as friendships and feudal relations are established that will inform subsequent adventures. And a network of allusions to famous lovers of romance tradition distinguishes these chivalric friendships not only from the ‘perverse’ bonds between clan members, but also from the passionate relationships of erotic love. An example of male companionship modelled on a famous Arthurian love story occurs when Estonné is separated from his friend Claudius during an altercation with some knights of the lignaige Darnant. Having lost his horse, Estonné is unable to accompany Claudius in pursuit of the villains, and fears that his friend, outnumbered, may have the worst of it. Searching frantically for a replacement horse, Estonné finds only a mare; mounting her, he races off in search of Claudius. The narrator explains that at that time, riding a mare was a sign of great shame for a knight, ne on ne pouoit ung chevalier plus deshonnourer que de monter sur jumens. . . . Et tenoit on depuis que c’estoient chevaliers recreans et de nulle valeur ne ja puis chevalier qui amast son honneur ne joustoit a luy ne feroit d’espee, neant plus que sur ung sot tondu. (I.i, p. 374) [nor could a knight be more dishonoured than by mounting a mare. . . . And afterwards he would be considered a cowardly and worthless knight, nor would any knight who valued his own honour engage in jousting or sword fighting with him, no more than he would with a shaved madman.]

Estonné, however, ‘ne regarda pas au blasme, mais regarda au desir qu’il avoit de



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aidier son amy’ [didn’t worry about the stigma, but only about his desire to aid his friend] (ibid.). In this shameful ride, undertaken as a desperate means of saving someone near and dear, we cannot miss the allusion to Lancelot’s famous ride in the cart during his quest to rescue Guenevere. And just as Lancelot is taunted by all who see him in the cart, so Estonné must endure the jeers of those who see him astride the mare. In keeping with Estonné’s character, however, he cuts a far more rakish figure than Lancelot. Whereas the Arthurian hero stood silent and morose in the cart, pained by the shame it brought him but steadfast in his love, Estonné rides wildly through town and countryside, ‘tout foursené’ [utterly crazed], striking dead several knights of Darnant who stray into his path. By the end of his ride he is completely covered with mud, has been pelted with manure, and is understandably taken for a madman by all who see him.11 Estonné’s reception, when he is finally reunited with Claudius, cannot equal the ecstatic night spent by Lancelot with Guenevere. But the episode does seal a bond of friendship between the two knights, with Claudius acknowledging the ‘peine et travail et peril’ [pain, travail, and danger] that Estonné has suffered for his sake, and vowing that ‘veuil estre vostre amy a tousjours’ [I wish to be your friend forever] (I.i, p. 394). Ultimately, then, Estonné’s behaviour is valued in the context of chivalric homosocial desire. The farcical overlay does not compromise the valiance of his deeds, but it does colour the imitation of Lancelot, turning a noble act of transcendent love into a slapstick parody; and thus defusing any possible homoerotic overtones that the episode might have had. Brief allusions to Lancelot are intertwined with allusions to Yvain in another, longer episode, that of Gadifer and Le Tor at the castle of Malebranche.12 In mortal combat with the evil knight Malebranche, Gadifer seriously wounds his adversary and pursues him as he flees to his nearby castle. Penetrating the castle on the heels of his opponent, Gadifer kills Malebranche in the courtyard, but then finds himself locked in; the lady of the castle, Malebranche’s wicked mother, decides to have the intruder murdered under cover of darkness. It is Malebranche’s twelve-year-old sister Lyriope who persuades her mother that Gadifer should be allowed to stand trial, and who accordingly takes him in and tends his wounds. Her real intention is to preserve Gadifer’s life in the hopes that he will rescue her from sexual exploitation; as she explains to him at a later point, ‘je n’attendoye l’eure que je fusse deshonnouree a force, combien que je soye josne’ [I expected any minute to be forcibly dishonoured, no matter how young I was] (I.i, p. 337). At this point, then, Gadifer can be seen as replaying the movements of Yvain in his first trip to the magic fountain: mortal combat and pursuit into the castle precinct where the enemy dies but our hero is trapped, saved from certain death 11 12

On Estonné’s ride, see Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Cheval’, pp. 229–30. The fact that these two Arthurian heroes would be conjoined as the backdrop for a single, important episode suggests that the author knew not only the prose Lancelot-Graal, but also verse romances, since it was Chrétien who linked these two heroes through the references to the Chevalier de la charrete in the Chevalier au lion.

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only through the intervention of an enterprising young damsel pursuing her own agenda. Gadifer’s situation is more precarious than that of Yvain, however, since there is no possibility that the lady of the manor may fall in love and decide to spare his life. Nor has he any hope of seizing control through a fortuitous marriage, since he is already married to Queen Lydoire. And in any case, he is too severely injured to be capable of anything other than lying in bed. Gadifer is thus reduced to waiting until he can be rescued by his companion and vassal, the Scottish knight Le Tor. And as Le Tor camps outside the castle gate, killing several knights of the clan and eventually working his way inside through a clever ruse, the Arthurian allusions shift, pointing now at Lancelot and his valiant efforts to rescue Guenevere in the land of Gorre. Once inside the castle courtyard, Le Tor engages in mortal combat with Malebranche’s cousin Dagin, nephew of Darnant. Delighted that help is at hand, Gadifer asks Lyriope to open the window so that he can watch the battle from his sickbed; and thus Le Tor looks up and sees his king. His reaction is one of overwhelming desire to go to Gadifer: il en eut si grant pitié qu’il en larmoya des yeulx et eut si grant desir d’aler a luy que a paine qu’il ne laissa sa bataille. (I.i, p. 336) [he felt such great pity that tears streamed from his eyes, and he had such great desire to go to him that he almost abandoned his fight.]

Fortunately, instead of this he summons up his last reserves of energy to deal the death blow to Dagin, after which he goes inside for an emotional reunion with his king. Lyriope makes up another bed so that the two of them can lie side by side. In this crucial moment of recognition there is an echo of Lancelot’s even more extreme reaction when he looks up to see Guenevere observing his combat with Meleagant. In Chrétien’s rendition, Lancelot turns his back on Meleagant in order to gaze upon the queen, while in the prose Lancelot, he is so transfixed that he simply stands there, allowing his adversary to attack him without resistance. From Gadifer as Yvain taken in by Lyriope as Lunete, then, we have moved to a new configuration: Gadifer as Guenevere rescued by Le Tor as Lancelot. But if Gadifer could not continue in the role of Yvain because marriage with the lady of the castle was out of the question, even less can he continue in the role of Guenevere. Though he and Le Tor do end up sharing a bed, after a fashion, this allusion to the most famous couple of Arthurian romance can only be taken as slapstick humour, a wink from the narrator that sets us up for the even more comical scene a bit later when the mud-caked, wild-eyed Estonné presents a frenzied parody of Lancelot.13 In fact the various Arthurian allusions that have been put into play are resolved with yet another shift, through the emergence of the couple Lyriope–Le Tor. Gadifer, we learn, was not the only intended victim of Dagin. 13 On the tendency in medieval texts to raise the possibility of homoerotic liaisons only so as to preclude them, see Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism, pp. 1–6.



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Lyriope accuses Dagin of intended rape, claiming that ‘ce chevalier… ne venoit cy pour autre chose’ [this knight... came for no other reason] (p. 337). Lyriope thus emerges as a sexually vulnerable young woman in need of a male protector: Laudine, perhaps, to Le Tor’s Yvain, or Guenevere to his Lancelot. This latter model, in fact, conveniently allows Gadifer a male role, that of Keu, who sits, a wounded prisoner, at Guenevere’s side as the two of them watch Lancelot battle with their captor. And in a final flourish back at court, it is Lyriope who becomes so attached to Lydoire that she insists on sharing her bed, so that Gadifer cannot make love to his wife until Lyriope falls asleep. The humorous dénouement, centred on the triangle of Gadifer, Lyriope, and Lydoire, situates each character in their proper place and banishes any latent possibility of transgressive relationships, both sexual and feudal. The possibility of adultery, conjured up in the allusions to Lancelot, dissolves into farce when it is a little girl, and not the star knight, who displaces the king from his wife’s bed. Yvain’s self-serving marriage to the heiress whose husband he has just killed is a thinly veiled act of rape, murder, and plunder; but as we have seen, Le Tor’s role as Lyriope’s saviour absolves him of any such associations. The momentary identification of Gadifer and Le Tor with Guenevere and Lancelot respectively hinted at an even deeper taboo. But if Gadifer does reward Le Tor with sexual gratification, it is by giving him Lyriope in marriage. Sexual violence, male bonding that excludes the mediation of women, and the violation of marriage are all projected on to the enemy clansmen. It is the indigenes who rape local women, while the new colonial ruler wants only to give them husbands; it is the indigenes who delight in shared male violence, while the new ruler seeks to defend the honour of ladies. Nonetheless, the spectre of homoerotic attraction has been raised, even if only comedically, its very impossibility reducing it to farce. And it will be raised again, more troublingly, in a later narrative development, that of the love between Bethidés and Cerse.

Cerse and the Spectre of Homosexual Love We have already seen that Cerse, Bethidés’s wicked Roman queen, exemplifies the danger of woman as a foreign polluting element. But there is another side to the corrupting love between Bethidés and his bride: if her influence is so nefarious, it is not only because she is a woman or because she is foreign, but also because the entire relationship is tainted with an aura of homosexuality. Cerse is disguised as a man throughout the early stages of her love affair with Bethidés, acting first as a young Roman soldier and then as Bethidés’ squire; and the very nature of their relationship is markedly unlike any of the other love stories in Perceforest. It is after joining the Roman army under the command of Luces that Bethidés encounters the young knight Malaquin, who delights in jousting with the other

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knights to improve his military skills. When Malaquin challenges Bethidés, who is using the pseudonym Nabel, the young knight is knocked to the ground, stunned, his clothing torn and his body exposed. Here is what happens as Bethidés/Nabel approaches his opponent: Et a l’approuchier, il voit qu’il estoit descouvert jusques a la chainture et avoit la char plus blanche que une fleur de lys, la ou le soleil jectoit ses rais par dessus. Adont dist il a soy qu’il n’avoit oncques veu plus blanche char porter a chevalier. Et lors, ainsi que Nabel regardoit la blancheur du chevalier, il perceut que Nature n’avoit point failly en sa personne qu’elle n’y eut fait et forme et cognoissance naturelle pour jugier s’il estoit homme ou femme. Mais Nabel eut vergongne de le veoir . . . et le couvry pour ce principalement que c’estoit une femme. (III.ii, p. 289) [And approaching him, he saw that he was uncovered up to his belt, and he had flesh whiter than a lily, where the sun’s rays were falling. Then he said to himself that he had never seen a knight with fairer flesh. And then, as Nabel stared at the knight’s whiteness, he noticed that Nature hadn’t failed in forming his body to provide a means of telling whether he was a man or a woman. But Nabel felt ashamed to see it . . . and covered him, primarily because he was a woman.]

Malaquin then recovers his or her senses and rides away. But a powerful attraction springs up between the two, such that soon they declare their love and elope, heading back to England. Since the reader does not know that the young Malaquin is a woman, this scene carries a powerful homoerotic charge. Bethidés’ attraction to the white flesh of the jenne bacheler, his fascination with what he thinks is a male body, is designed to shock and to titillate the audience. The coy reference to Malaquin’s exposed genitals only heightens the tension, conjuring up an image of Bethidés as a pederast, ogling the naked body of a younger man. The narrator allows the suspense to build up before letting the reader – and Bethidés – off the hook with the revelation that this enticing body is female. Yet somehow this fact, while reassuring for readers concerned about the sexuality of the British crown prince, does not entirely dispel the transgressive aura of the scene. After all, it is hardly orthodox for a knight to meet his future beloved by knocking her to the ground in a joust, and then taking advantage of her disarray to admire her naked body. Moreover, the narrative build-up, with its delayed resolution to the question of Malaquin’s gender, allows the spectre of homoeroticism to take root, colouring the couple’s subsequent adventures. It is almost as though it is the fascinated gaze of the somewhat older knight that feminises the younger knight’s body, transforming the jousting partner into a barely acceptable object of sexual desire. Back in England, Cerse continues to pass as a young man, acting as Bethidés’ squire. It is at this point that Bethidés, having agreed to champion a young prince in a dispute over inheritance, finds that his adversary is the Chevalier Doré, that is, Nestor, son of Gadifer. The two knights are delighted, since they have been



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seeking one another to pursue their quarrel ever since their appointed battle was foiled by evil spirits. What they do not know is that they are cousins, since both are incognito: the battle derives from Nestor’s vow not to reveal his identity unless defeated in battle, and Bethidés’s vow to discover his name. Additionally, of course, neither Nestor nor any of the spectators knows that the squire Malaquin is a woman and the lover of her knight. And what no one knows, not even Nestor himself, is that his squire, Cuer d’Acier, is also a woman and also his beloved lady, the damsel Neronés. Having disguised herself as a man in order to travel more safely in search of her beloved, Neronés has been hesitant to reveal her identity to Nestor, given that the two of them are travelling in such intimate circumstances. The battle between Bethidés and Nestor illustrates, in a darkly comic way, what would happen if knights and their squires were lovers. Both squires, in this case, are in love with their knights, though only one of the knights is knowingly in love with his squire. As a result, the battle is even more fraught with emotion than usual. Bethidés draws an unfair advantage from the inspiring presence of his beloved, enabling him to recover more quickly when he is wounded by Nestor: Mais il estoit fort et jenne et veoit sa dame en sa presence, dont il reprint couraige et se repoly en ses armes. (III.ii, p. 304) [But he was strong and young and saw his lady present, whereby he recovered his courage and redeployed his arms.]

The squires, for their part, experience a heightened anxiety watching their lovers fight. Cuer d’Acier/Neronés ‘plouroit tant tendrement que plus ne pouoit pour l’amour de son seigneur qu’il veoit au champ mortel’ [was weeping so piteously that he could do no more, out of love for his lord whom he saw on the battlefield] (p. 301); while Malaquin/Cerse, seeing that Bethidés is having the worst of the affair, ‘estoit sy doulante que plus ne pouoit’ [could not have been any more sorrowful] (p. 305). In the end, Cuer d’Acier is unable to bear the tension and persuades the onlookers to separate the combatants and forcibly end their ferocious battle. As it happens, this is the right thing to do. The original dispute has already been settled by the participants, and the two knights are now fighting only because of their private quarrel, itself the result of misguided vows. It is in separating the combatants that the other knights realise their identities and put a stop to the entire business. Without this intervention, it is likely that Nestor would have killed Bethidés: an unthinkable tragedy with dire consequences, had it occurred. Like the battle between Yvain and Gauvain in the Chevalier au lion, a likely source, this episode hints at the dangers of trial by combat and of the knights’ capacity for implacable and pointless violence. With its overlay of cross-dressed squires, however, the Perceforest episode further shows how erotic intrigue between a knight and his squire might interfere with chivalric duty, upsetting a finely tuned balance.

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The contrast between Cuer d’Acier/Neronés and Malaquin/Cerse is itself revealing. Neronés adopted her male disguise out of desperation when she found herself stranded in the forest and far from home. Travelling as a man was the only safe way for her to seek her beloved, and once she became his squire, riding with him along solitary forest paths and sleeping at his side, her innate modesty prevented her from revealing the truth. For Neronés, that is, the masculine identity is a de-sexualisation of her person, a defence against improper erotic intrigue. Her feminine self is displaced into the realm of fantasy and poetry, as ‘Cuer d’Acier’ endeavours to enlighten Nestor by claiming to see Neronés in dreams and by singing her story in the form of a lai.14 She finds the male disguise increasingly distressing, and is enormously relieved to reveal the truth, in a flood of tears, to Nestor’s mother, Lydoire. Cerse, in contrast, uses a masculine identity specifically as a means of carrying on her amorous liaisons under cover of secrecy, first with her Roman lover Luces and then with Bethidés. The innocence and virtue of Neronés, and her scrupulous separation of masculine and feminine personae, serve to highlight the troubling androgyny of Cerse, who seems quite comfortable with serving her knight as squire and lover. Perhaps most crucial of all is the fact that Bethidés never performs any exploits to win Cerse, beyond the original joust in which he uncovered her sexual identity. The only obstacle to their marriage was Perceforest himself, and even during this period Bethidés was free to visit Cerse: she was never inaccessible to him in the way that other maidens were placed off limits to their lovers, available only for fleeting and closely guarded contact. Bethidés’ ‘heroic’ exploits are limited to his purposeless jousts with the chevaliers de mer, his ill-advised assistance to the Romans beseiging Nerves, and his foolish, nearly suicidal battle with Nestor. Perceforest laments that his son has never shown any real inclination for chivalric prowess, commenting darkly that: il s’enamoura d’une jenne damoyselle rommaine dont oncques puis bien ne lui advint ne ne pretendy a honneur acquerre, fors a traveillier qu’il parvenist a avoir celle Rommaine a femme. (IV.ii, p. 502) [He fell in love with a young Roman girl from whom no good ever came to him, nor did he ever seek to acquire honour, but just persisted in trying to marry this Roman.]

The other male characters all have to win their brides, often – like Lyonnel and Gadifer – through missions that entail extreme hardship and personal danger while serving the interests of the royal court, and at the very least by achieving a clear victory on the tournament circuit. Bethidés, however, wins his bride simply by talking his parents into letting him marry her. And far from being motivated to reach new heights of prowess and courtliness in order to merit her love, he

14

See Szkilnik, ‘Des femmes écrivains’.



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is subjugated and dishonoured, ‘empirié des meurs de celle mauvaise femme’ [corrupted by the habits of that evil woman] (IV.i, p. 483). Bethidés’ relationship with Cerse, in sum, does not actually conform to the norms of what the knights call amer par amours. If heterosexual love is defined as a relationship in which long deferral heightens desire and inspires ever more glorious feats of prowess, and if a knight in love is reduced to bashful silence and courtly discretion in the presence of his beloved, then Bethidés can hardly be considered a chevalier amant par amours. As we have seen, his relationship with Cerse, though certainly erotic, is also one of easy companionship, forged through jousting and the camaraderie of the battlefield, and continued through a period of joint adventuring. It could be said that Bethidés has a homosexual relationship with his wife, and this spectre of sexual deviance fuses with the overt transgression of miscegenation to spell the utter destruction of the kingdom. As Perceforest despairingly foresees, ‘toute chevallerie deffauldra a son tamps, avec ce toute honneur et prouesse’ [all chivalry will fail during his reign, along with all honour and prowess] (IV.ii, p. 502). As we have seen, Cerse’s impersonation of a virtuous princess is as much an act of drag as was her male disguise. Bethidés, blinded by her performance, relates only to that outward construction, with its camp mimicry of knighthood or ladyhood as the case may be. Luces alone, as a fellow Roman, is granted access to the real Cerse, with her labyrinthine plotting, her feminine guile, her Roman treachery. And Luce, unlike Bethidés, succeeds in begetting a viable son – a further sign that Cerse’s marriage to Bethidés falls short of the heterosexual ideal, for it lacks progeny. In this context we should recall the monstrous giant Holland. If Holland’s perverse xenophobia provides a contrast with Perceforest’s healthy resistance to foreign contamination, then the character that the monster secretly mirrors may actually be Bethidés himself. Like Holland, Bethidés is a figure of failed lordship: alienated from his people, raising someone else’s son because he is unable to produce one himself. The basis of his failing, however, is complementary to Holland. The giant shunned all forms of difference, indulging in an incestuous passion for his brother’s wife and an excessively jealous possessiveness of his nephew, growing furious at the boy’s communication with someone of a different gender, on a different island. The association of xenophobia, incest, and implied homoeroticism associates the giant with what Jane Gilbert has termed ‘extreme endogamy’.15 Bethidés in turn collapses difference, treating a foreigner of alien customs like a compatriot, and relating to his wife as though she was somehow both a man and a woman. The association of homoeroticism with miscegenation rather than incest might at first seem illogical in a cultural construct founded on gender difference and on ‘love’ as a relationship operating across that divide. But as Gilbert notes, ‘extreme endogamy’ and ‘extreme exogamy’ are sometimes linked in medieval texts. Moreover, the most striking instance of homoerotic desire in the Arthurian 15

Gilbert, ‘Gender’, pp. 54–5.

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tradition, that of Galeholt for Lancelot, also entails an element of miscegenation in that Galeholt himself is a half-breed giant, ‘le fils de la belle geande’. In Gilbert’s words, ‘the sexual category called “sodomy”. . . merges inextricably ideas of homosexuality and of foreignness’ (p. 56). In fact Bethidés’ confused projection of sameness on to difference – consorting with a woman as though she were a man, accepting foreign customs at his court and an alien child as his heir – is already prefigured in his misadventure with the chevaliers de mer. On that distant island, as we saw in Chapter 2, the young prince finds himself entangled with creatures who are at once his food and his companions at arms: a troubling relationship that blurs the distinction between human and beast. In Perceforest’s Britain, then, homosexuality is the ultimate taboo, foreclosed by the very structures of culture without ever being named as such. Certainly homosexuality could be and often was actively discussed in medieval cultural discourses, but within the framework of Perceforest, it is the prohibition that dares not speak its name.16 The unspoken threat of a homoerotic knighthood is hinted at in a host of other ‘unnatural’ and subversive practices that figure the effects associated with a pervasive homoeroticism in the medieval cultural imagination: sorcery, sacrilegious disrespect for the gods – a sort of pre-­Christian heresy – and the abusive sexual exploitation of women. Miscegenation and adultery – the pollution of bloodlines, the obstruction of lineage – bring about the corruption of the royal court and a general cultural decline, making the land vulnerable to foreign invasion. Behind these screen-vices, at the anamorphic blind spot of culture, lurks a prospect that would spell an even more extreme corruption of chivalric and feudal bonds and an even more decisive end to the gender constructs of Perceforest’s Britain. The four royal marriages that receive detailed development – those of Gadifer, Nestor, Blanchete, and Bethidés – all, as we have seen, target sexual and cultural deviance. The spectre of incest, identified with heresy, criminal violence, and tyranny, allows the conquest of island kingdoms to be cast as love service and gallant rescue. When Neronés is abducted by the arrogant but cowardly king of Norway, Nestor kills him, and eventually comes to reign over that troublesome land: a narrative of feminine honour and foiled rape masks the expansionist fantasy of a Scottish kingdom of Norway. The marriage of Bethidés and Cerse, in turn, represents the failure of heteronormative gender and sexuality. In closing, I want to examine the political implications of this other menace – improper male bonding and the corruption of gender – both for the immediate context of Perceforest’s composition, and for its portrayal of a colonial civilising mission.

16 The only exception to this silence is the insult hurled at Gallafur when he refuses a sexual liaison with the devious damsel Capraise: ‘recreant chevalier et desnaturé’ [cowardly and unnatural knight] (V, ch. 18, fol. 54v). Though this term might imply only sexual impotence, an association with homoeroticism is likely. But since the reader knows that Gallafur is acting out of loyalty to his beloved, the accusation carries little force. See my ‘Amorous Performances’.



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Sexual Politics I noted in the Introduction that the campaign in the English forests against Darnant and his clan could be seen as a fictionalised and idealised echo of the military campaign of 1326, mounted by William of Hainaut and his brother on behalf of Isabella and the future Edward III. From this perspective, the rapacious behaviour of the clan stands out as an implicit reminder of the corrupt and tyrannical practices attributed to Edward II and his circle of intimates; while their ‘perverse’ sexual practices recall the deviant sexuality of which Edward and his favourites – first Piers Gaveston, then Hugh Despenser – were accused. It goes without saying that Perceforest is not a retelling of Edward’s downfall, and that no episode in the romance actually corresponds to those events. But their memory, and the issues that they raised, are evoked both in the opening battle with the clan, and in the disastrous reign of the English king Bethidés. Though no fourteenth-century chronicler dwells on the intimate details of the king’s liaison with Despenser, the sexual nature of their relationship is clearly stated. Froissart, following Jean le Bel, reports that Despenser ‘estoit et avoit esté herites et sodomites, ensi que renonmee puble couroit par toute Engleterre, et dou roi meismes’ [had been and still was a heretic and sodomite, according to the rumours all over England, and the same was said of the king].17 Despenser is portrayed as a rival to the queen, unsettling the royal marriage: ‘il mist, li dis messires Hues, si tres grant discort entre le roi et la roine que li rois ne voloit point veoir sa fenme’ [the aforementioned Hugh caused such great enmity between the king and the queen that the king would not see his wife] (p. 48). So virulent was Despenser’s hatred of Isabella, according to Froissart, that she was forced to flee the realm with her young son under fear of imprisonment or death. Froissart highlights the sexual dynamics of this royal triangle, noting that the queen was ‘tres belle dame et feminine et doucement enlangagie’ [a very beautiful lady, feminine and of sweet speech] (p. 49) – precisely the sort of woman any ‘normal’ man would want. But the king was blinded by his homoerotic liaison: having noted the accusation of sodomy, Froissart reminds the reader that ‘pour ce vilain et ort pechiet, li rois avoit escaciet la roine sa fenme en sus de lui’ [because of this base and filthy sin, the king had driven the queen his wife away] (p. 92). The image conjured up here – the sodomitical king and his evil counsellors, full of contempt and hostility for wife, marriage, and lineage – plays on the medieval association of homoeroticism with the abusive treatment of women. Against such a background the lignaige Darnant, with their sneering dismissal of women as ‘doublieres’ [cheaters] and ‘foles garces’ [crazy broads], their indifference to marriage, and their almost obsessive indulgence in rape, recreate in caricature the ills infecting the royal household at the time of William of Hainaut’s intervention. The spectre of bad government, factionalism and favouritism, and homoerotic 17 Froissart, Chroniques, ed. Diller, p. 92. On contemporary criticism of Edward’s relationship with his other favourite, Piers Gaveston, see Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism, pp. 113–18.

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intrigue also haunts England under the troubled rule of Bethidés. Just as the public scapegoat in 1326 was Despenser, with Edward hidden away in prison to be murdered in secret, so now the deviant element in the royal debacle is Cerse. The adulterous and treasonous queen embodies the crimes associated with Despenser: disruption of lineage, corruption of the king, abusive usurpation of power, and even, through her androgyny, a homoerotic liaison. Although in this case the king is overthrown by a hostile invasion rather than one acting under the cloak of chivalrous intervention, his demise is still the result of deep-seated corruption: social, political, and sexual. Moreover, in the public punishment of both Cerse and the rapist clansmen, we might see an echo of the execution of Hugh Despenser, as orchestrated by the triumphant Isabella. Hoisted high on a ladder for all to see, with a fire lit below, Despenser was mutilated in accordance with the crimes, both sexual and feudal, of which he stood accused. First his sinful genitals, then his traitorous heart were cut out and cast into the flames, before he was finally hanged, drawn, beheaded and quartered, each portion of his body being sent to a different part of the kingdom for public display. Sponsler has characterised this spectacle as a targeting of deviant masculinity: What discoheres in this instance is masculinity (and power and authority), once resident in Despenser’s arrogantly powerful, and hence hypermasculine, person, but now drained from him by the queen who has rendered him weak, helpless, effeminate, and a victim of his own desires . . . neither completely feminized and passive nor totally masculine and active.18 One could make very much the same point about the powerful, ‘hypermasculine’ rapist warriors slain by Alexander and his allies, and reduced to public spectacles of shame, pain, and mutilation by the ladies of the forest. It is the ladies, with their magical arts, who cause the bodies of these villainous knights to be consumed by eternal flames (I.i, pp. 356–7) or permanently skewered by spears on which their severed heads are displayed (I.i, pp. 288–9). The defeat of the lignaige Darnant, in other words, shares with contemporary accounts of the demise of Edward and Despenser an emphasis on tyrannical rule and sexual deviance and rapacity, punished through lurid public displays orchestrated by wronged women. In both cases, ritualistic executions mark the inauguration of a new regime and its restoration of heteronormative sexuality and chivalric masculinity.19 I have argued that the brutalities of colonial conquest are projected on to the lignaige Darnant: they, not Alexander and his knights, are literally and figu18 19

Sponsler, ‘King’s Boyfriend’, pp. 156–7. The contemporary relevance of allusions to sexual deviance in a distant British past would be another parallel between Perceforest and Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose accounts of sodomitical kings in the British past have been linked to the rumours of sodomy within the Plantagenet dynasty; see Tatlock, Legendary Histories, pp. 353–5.



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ratively the rapists of the British forests. Their role as a reflection of imperial rapacity is disavowed through the attribution of hostile mimicry to the clansmen themselves, as though any perceived similarity was due entirely to their subversive strategems. Heterosexual violence, in fact, is probably the single most important trait that distinguishes giants, despots, and outlaws from the Greek rulers of Britain and their loyal subjects. Beyond the immediate context of Plantagenet politics, how does Perceforest’s furtive play around an unstated homoerotic menace contribute to its construction of ethnic and cultural conflict, and the identities and hybridities thereby produced? In her study of Geoffrey of Monmouth and related medieval British and Anglo-Norman writers, Michelle Warren has noted the exuberant joy expressed by such figures as Arthur and Corineus, Brutus’ companion, in their altercations with giants. Corineus, requesting lordship of Cornwall because of its great abundance of giants, took particular pleasure in wrestling these large, hypermasculine indigenes. His encounter with Gogmagog expresses what Warren terms ‘the violent antagonism of this desire for the almost same’.20 The Perceforest author maintains Corineus’ proclivity for giant-wrestling in his summary of Geoffrey’s Historia, noting that ‘il luy plaisoit moult combatre contre les geans’ [he greatly enjoyed fighting the giants], and that at the opportunity to wrestle with Gogmagog, ‘Corineus esprins de tresgrande joye soubzrist’ [Corineus smiled, fired up with joy] (I.i, p. 85). Removing his armour (‘ostees ses armeures’), Corineus renounces chivalric combat for something far more intimate: ‘l’un l’autre enlaçans de leurs bras travaillent l’air de leurs grans soufflemens’ [wrapping their arms around each other, they stirred the air with their panting] (ibid.).21 Brutus’s decision to use Gogmagog in this way, ‘veuillans veoir la luite de luy et de Corinei’ [wanting to see his struggle with Corineus], reminds us that this meeting of male bodies was a public event, affording a voyeuristic pleasure to the colonial ruler (ibid.) Gogmagog’s crime was to lead an insurgent attack on the Trojan incomers. The next Galfridian monster, the Giant of Mont-St-Michel, also kills numerous knights, but the crime that most incites Arthurian vengeance is his rape of a Breton princess and her nurse. And Arthur’s victory over this giant, in Warren’s words, ‘enacts a metaphoric passage from conquest as heterosexual rape to a homoerotics of colonial desire’ (p. 46). If the violent appropriation of women is what ‘they’ do, then the possibility does exist for a reading of the coloniser as motivated by a desire for intimate contact with other men: a violent intimacy in the battles with those who resist, and an affectionate intimacy in the newly formed alliances with those who accept the new rulers. Alexander’s Greek knights seem particularly struck by the physical beauty of young men who voluntarily abandon their clan allegiances to ally themselves with Perceforest. Perdicas, for 20 21

Warren, History, p. 34. Wace gives an even more detailed account of the combat, devoting some thirty-five lines to intertwined limbs, bodily contact and physical exertion (Brut, vv. 1117–52).

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example, sizes up two young British squires in terms very similar to those with which Estonné first eyed the young Priande, finding them ‘sy beaulx, si droiz et sy bien tailliez et si furniz de membres selon leur aaige que c’estoit ung deduit a regarder’ [so handsome, so upright and so well formed, their limbs so well endowed for someone their age, that it was a pleasure to behold them] (I.i, p. 362). And when the young Lyonnel du Glat first appears, Perceforest considers him ‘ung des beaux enfans qu’il avoit onques veu’ [one of the most handsome boys he had ever seen] (I.i, p. 406). If the homoerotic reading of colonial desire remains latent, however, its disavowal is overt and insistent. As we have seen, any possibility of erotic bonds between Gadifer, Perceforest, and their knights is dismissed as farce or simply annulled in the knights’ devotion to heterosexual love. When they are attacked by a group of clansmen, Gadifer turns to Le Tor and says, as if out of nowhere: ‘se onques pour amour et pour dame vaulsistes mieulx, je vous prie que le monstrez’ [if ever you became more valiant for love and for a lady, I pray you to show it] (I.i, p. 308). And whatever the mix of desires causing British youths to attach themselves to the new kings, it will, as we know, be heterosexual love and marriage that truly binds them to the regime and makes them part of its history. If colonial conquest can take the form of erotic attraction to a land personified in its women, it is equally figured in the power to bestow heterosexual love objects on to a land personified in its men. In a sense Perceforest’s law, with its creation of love service, ensures the ‘heterosexualisation’ of British men by establishing a woman’s love as the ultimate goal to which they strive. The anxiety of conquest, both sexual and colonial, is played out in the contrast between Alexander and Caesar as imperial figures. The latter, enraged by British resistance, wreaks total destruction, while the former is motivated solely by a desire to restore the chivalric greatness and courtly refinement of the realm – a desire that actually emanates from the British themselves. Given the implicit personification of the conquered lands in their female inhabitants, to be violently raped or amorously won, Caesar here lives up to the Trojan reputation for sexual violence and abuse; while Alexander, as we have seen, becomes Sebille’s lover virtually upon arrival. The precarious balance of heterosexual and homosocial desire, with its thinly veiled homoerotic potential, informs the Roman conquest of Britain at every step. Roman colonial desire is first aroused by reports that survivors of the first, unsuccessful invasion bring back to their compatriots camped outside Nerve: ilz recorderent la prouesse des chevalliers bretons qu’ilz avoient en ce paÿs trouvés. Et tant en dirent de bien et de vaillance que le souverain de l’ost dist qu’il ne seroit jamais joyeulx tant qu’il avroit tout le paÿs conquis. (IV.i, p. 59) [they described the prowess of the British knights that they had found in this land. And they spoke so highly of their merit and valiance that



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the military commander said he would never be happy until he had conquered the land.]

A Roman knight is accordingly sent to scout the territory; since his Roman accent would give away his identity he poses as mute, and is thus known as the ‘Chevalier Muel’. But after a year of living incognito at Perceforest’s court, he is so impressed that he throws himself on the king’s mercy. He declares his once antagonistic desire to have changed into one of intimate affection: having found ‘les gens sy courtois et les chevaliers sy chevallereux . . . j’enamouray toute l’isle et la chevalerie’ [the people so courtly and the knights so chivalrous . . . I fell in love with the entire island and the knighthood] (p. 60). The would-be conqueror is now consumed with the mimetic impulse to be as much like the British knights as possible, ‘moult ententif de mettre en sa memoire les ordonnances du Francq Palais . . . et comme desireux d’en estre chevalier’ [eager to commit the rules of the Franc Palais to memory . . . and desirous of becoming one of its knights] (p. 57). His desire is not exclusively for male companions, however, for part of his acculturation is his love for Florette, a maiden at the English court. His assimilation is effected both through his membership in the Franc Palais, and by the eventual marriage uniting Roman and Briton, ‘qui long tamps s’estoient entramés’ [who had loved each other for a long time] (p. 387). In this particular case, the Roman danger is averted as homosocial attraction is translated into imitation and assimilation, and rewarded with heterosexual love. Bethidés expected his own marriage with Cerse to effect a similar alliance, arguing that it would deter the much-feared Roman invasion (IV.i, p. 98). His father’s generation had established their hegemony by saving British women from British men – as Spivak might have put it – and by resolving a potentially intractable ethnic difference into gender difference, to be bridged by love and marriage.22 But as we have seen, Cerse was not the malleable indigenous maiden, eager to submit to the sexual and cultural supremacy of her conqueror. Instead, her relationship with Bethidés assumed the form of the homosocial, indeed homoerotic, desire of imperial Rome for British knights: a desire to be consummated in the joy not of assimilation, but of subjugation. Though the homoerotic component is masked by the euphemism of cross-dressing, it nonetheless colours this negative portrayal of Roman colonial expansion. Situated in opposition to monstrous island despots, the lignaige Darnant, and the perfidious Romans, Alexander’s own global empire thus emerges as the very model of enlightened rule. Grounded in neither heterosexual rape nor homoerotic bonding and rivalry, it translates the colonial enterprise into the gender models of chivalric friendship and courtly love. This idealised Greek imperialism, ­differentiated from that of the Trojan ‘race’, is offered as the origins of the ­ similarly benevolent Arthurian hegemony. And by extension, it is also 22 I refer to Spivak’s famous assertion, ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’, in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, pp. 296–308.

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a flattering model for the self-styled heirs to both Arthur and Perceforest: the Norman kings of England, whose expansionist policies could now be pleasingly imagined as the restoration of a pan-British kingdom once founded by Alexander himself.

Part III

Greeks, Trojans, and the Construction of British History

Only his own best deeds, only the worst deeds of the Indians, has the white man told.  Yellow Wolf, Yellow Wolf: His Own Story, p. 192 L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation. . . . Aucun citoyen français ne sait s’il est Burgonde, Alain, Taïfale, Visigoth; tout citoyen français doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au XIIIe siècle. Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, pp. 891, 892 [Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation. . . . No French citizen knows if he is Burgundian, Alanic, Taifale, Visigothic; every French citizen has to have forgotten the night of Saint Bartholomew, the massacres in the Midi in the thirteenth century.]

7

Lest We Forget: The Trojan War as Cultural Matrix

Perceforest portrays British history as a cyclical process of cultural rise and decline, in which different groups vie for dominance: the lignaige Darnant, the lineage of Brutus as embodied in Britus and his continental descendants, the Greek dynasties established by Alexander, the Romans, and various continental peoples such as the Sicambrians and the Norwegians. Overall, most of these ethnic and cultural bids for power are subsumed within the archetypal conflict that, according to legend, determined the shape of the ancient world: that between Greeks and Trojans. And the Trojan heritage of the British knights, with its elements both of glory and of shame, is a potent but unstable matrix for the production of identity. What it means to be British is inextricably bound up with the question of what it means to be Trojan. To a large extent, stereotypical Trojan vices are identified with the lignaige Darnant, while the positive qualities of heroism and courtly refinement are revived through the conformance of the British aristocracy to their Greek rulers. However, the situation is not really this simple. Evil though the clan may have been, the virtuous Gelinant and his luminous grandson Lyonnel stand as reminders that the lignaige Darnant did harbour potential greatness, and this potential is salvaged in both the culture and the bloodlines of the new regime. And heroic though the knights of the Franc Palais may be, numerous episodes suggest, somewhat troublingly, that stereotypical Trojan shortcomings are resurfacing along with their recovered glory. Robert Young, in his study of cultural hybridity, asks rhetorically if culture has ‘always been a way of giving meaning and value to sameness and difference’. As he notes, ‘this division into same and other is less a site of contradiction and conflict than culture’s founding possibility. . . . This is because culture is always a dialectical process, inscribing and expelling its own alterity’ (ibid., p. 30). The precise nature of that alterity, however – the categories of difference through which a given culture defines itself and endows itself with a sense of history – is constantly changing. The synchronic and diachronic continuities and discontinuities that determine individual and collective identities are themselves unstable, ever susceptible to reinvention. This insight is central to the grand historical 

Colonial Desire, p. 29.

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vision that underwrites Perceforest. In the different cultural milieux imagined within this text, political allegiances, ethnic identifications, and the writing of history itself are formed and re-formed. The competing versions of history depicted in Perceforest call to mind Certeau’s characterisation of historiography as ‘a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten in order to obtain the representation of a present intelligibility’. The shifting matrices of British identity undercut any notion of absolute historical truth or ethnic identity. The selective vision that determines a given culture is inevitably revealed to have forgotten or overlooked some crucial factor whose resurgence will necessitate a reorientation of cultural institutions, a rewriting of history. And in the survival of the lignaige Darnant and the re-emergence of Trojan cultural traits, Perceforest incorporates a further development postulated by Certeau: ‘a return of the repressed, that is, a return of what, at a given moment has become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable’ (ibid., emphasis his). In Part I, we saw that Perceforest depicts a process of hybridisation across the elusive divide between nature and culture. The natural world both is and is not subsumed within the domain of culture, which itself both is and is not grounded in nature. Perceforest’s redefinition of gender resulted in a hybridity of a different sort, in that neither masculinity nor femininity could now be imagined except in relation to one another. And the centrality of monogamous love and marriage, with its accompanying anxieties about both incest and miscegenation, identified a third sort of hybridisation common to sexual and imperial politics: the crossfertilisation, or alternatively the contamination, of one lineage or one people with another. Certeau’s ‘return of the repressed’, in turn, is formulated with respect to the difference of past and present: each new era defines itself with respect to a past, constructed through ‘a selection between what can be understood and what must be forgotten’ (ibid., emphasis his). But, as he states, neither remembrance nor forgetting can ever be absolute: But whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant – shards created by the selection of materials, remainders left aside by an explication – comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies: ‘resistances’, ‘survivals’, or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of ‘progress’ or a system of interpretation. (ibid.)

This concept of ‘repressed’ or ‘forgotten’ elements of the past that nonetheless remain to disrupt and re-form the present parallels Bhabha’s notion of crosscultural hybridity, whereby a colonial culture fails either to eradicate or to assimilate the indigenous culture. The resulting new forms – ‘the anglicised’ as  Certeau, Writing of History, p. 4, emphasis his. See Warren, ‘Making Contact’, for a discussion of memory and amnesia in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s vision of history.



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opposed to ‘the English’, in Bhabha’s examples – serve to distort and disrupt colonial cultural hegemony by inscribing an irreducible otherness within it. This and the following chapter will consider the ‘return of the repressed’ with reference to two important characters, Lyonnel and Troïlus, and the lineage from which each emerges: the lignaige Darnant and the Trojan king Priam respectively. Lyonnel’s struggle to free himself from the stigma of his ancestry and to win a place in the Greek royal family of Scotland is a striking portrayal of the indigenous knight’s uphill battle for acceptance by his foreign rulers. But it is also, if implicitly, a preparation for the more dramatic reappearance of the lignaige Darnant in Book VI, when the clan descendants will return to reclaim what they regard as their rightful heritage. Lyonnel’s arduous pursuit of assimilation stands in contrast to an equally determined drive to resist assimilation at all costs, through the twin paths of exile and reconquest. Troïlus, a recently civilised inhabitant of the Scottish Wilds, similarly seeks acceptance in the new chivalric culture, almost literally ‘breaking in’ to claim his rightful place. But if Lyonnel embodied the Alexandran chivalric values to perfection, Troïlus displays a disconcerting tendency towards Trojan habits of ruse, deception, and the abduction of another man’s bride. This too lays the groundwork for events in the second half of the romance, where these stereotypical Trojan traits will become a serious issue. The infusion of Greek blood and Greek cultural institutions has made its mark in Trojan Britain. Nonetheless, in the absence of a Greek king after the Roman invasion, old Trojan traits surge to the fore. It is with the persistence of Troy – the recovery of Trojan heritage by the inhabitants of Britain and the reassertion of Trojan dominance – that this chapter will be concerned.

Stolen Kisses: Troïlus in Love Troïlus, Priande’s brother, is knighted at a young age after the repulsion of the Roman invasion at Royauville. Not wishing to be ‘oyseux ainsi que ung marchant’ [as idle as a merchant] (II.i, p. 366), he seeks to embody the values of the knightly class: Sy se mist au chemin tout seul, car bien luy estoit advis que digne n’estoit d’avoir escuier quant encores n’avoit riens fait de son corps. (ibid.) [So he set out all alone, for it seemed to him that he was not worthy of having a squire when he hadn’t yet done anything with his body.]

Eager to prove his bodily prowess, Troïlus soon learns that his real deficit is that he is not amorous. In order to ‘do things with his body’ he has to place that body in the service of erotic love. Or to put it another way, in order to enter into competition and fellowship with the other knights, he has to have a relationship that excludes all other knights. And so Troïlus dutifully falls in love with the first available maiden that he meets, Zellandine, daughter of the king of Zellande

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(Zeeland, in what is now the Netherlands). Their eldest son, we later learn, is the ancestor of Lancelot. Yet however necessary it is for Troïlus to fall in love, it is no easy path. All knights are expected to prove their love and their worth through feats of valour and endurance, but the humiliation that Troïlus undergoes, as well as the degree of subterfuge required to ensure his marriage, are not matched in more securely aristocratic figures like Gadifer, Nestor, or other sons of lords and kings. The shield from Zellandine that he carries in his first tournament encapsulates two views of love in the cryptic acronym with which it is decorated: SCMASBLTF. As Troïlus is musing on its possible significance, he is accosted by an elderly hermit who proposes a scornful solution: ‘Sot, chetif, meschant, a sotie bees, laisse ta folie’ [Fool, pathetic, good-for-nothing, your hopes are silly, abandon your folly] (II.ii, p. 204). At this Troïlus is deeply upset, feeling that such an interpretation reflects very badly on the damsel who gave him the shield. After some thought he takes the blame on to himself, concluding that he is unworthy of bearing the shield at all. He is thus greatly relieved when, after proving his mettle in a series of jousts, he meets a young man who proposes a different solution: ‘Sire chevalier, m’amour avrez se bien l’escu tournoier faictes’ [Sir knight, you will have my love if you use the shield well in the tournament] (II.ii, p. 213). Needless to say, this alternative reading fills Troïlus with joy, and Zellandine later confirms discreetly that ‘les parolles ont double entente’ [the words have a double meaning] (p. 218). Thus the shield with which Troïlus performs his first love service literally carries a double message: it invites him to win a noble maiden’s love, yet also taunts him for imagining that such a thing might be possible. Moreover, having won Zellandine’s love, Troïlus is unable to claim his bride in the orthodox manner, and is reduced to tactics that come perilously close to the old Trojan vices of rape and abduction. Zellandine’s father has already betrothed her to a local knight, but before the wedding can take place she mysteriously falls into a deep slumber. As it happens this is caused by a splinter of wood in her thumb – and ultimately by the curse of a malevolent fairy, as in other versions of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ legend – and until that splinter is removed she cannot wake up. Her distraught father places her in a high tower for protection; Troïlus, having heard the worrisome news, makes his way there. While he is wondering what to do, the ever-helpful Zephir, in the form of a giant bird, appears and carries him into Zellandine’s room. There, confronted with the sight of his naked, sleeping beloved, Troïlus is moved first to kisses, then to a full consummation of his love, after which Zephir reappears to carry him away. The child that is born nine months later sucks on his mother’s thumb and so removes the splinter, allowing her to wake up. As is hardly surprising, Zellandine is horrified to discover that she has somehow given birth to a child during her sleep. She grieves for her lost virginity  See Roussineau, ‘Tradition littéraire’, for a discussion of this episode and its analogues with other versions of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ tale.



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and hopes that her beloved Troïlus will never learn the truth. She is even more bewildered when she notices that her ring has disappeared and that she is now wearing the ring that she had given Troïlus at the time of their last encounter – a sign, though she resists seeing the truth of it, that it was he who fathered the child. Troïlus does eventually reappear, all is clarified between the two of them, and since Zellandine’s father still intends to go through with the original marriage, the lovers flee to England. There they are married with the consent of Zellandine’s brother, Zellandin. Though their love eventually reaches its ‘happy ending’, leading to marriage and the foundation of an illustrious lineage, the manner in which this is achieved is problematic. Of all the heroines in the first half of the romance, Zellandine is the only one to lose her virginity before marriage (in the post-invasion world of the second half, the anarchic state of the kingdom makes for somewhat different patterns of behaviour). Even Priande, who as a ‘savage’ is more freely accessible to male attentions, endures no more than a kiss. Troïlus himself suffers considerable anxiety during the ‘rape’ scene, and his inner turmoil is expressed through the intervention of such allegorical figures as Desir, Loyauté, Raison, and Discrecion. The latter two, for example, chastise him as he starts to kiss the sleeping Zellandine: Sire chevalier, il n’affiert a homme d’entrer en lieu ou pucelle soit seulle en son secret, se par avant il n’en a eu congé, et ne la doit atouchier tant qu’elle dorme. (III.iii, p. 88) [Sir knight, it’s not right for a man to go into a place where a maiden is alone and private, if he doesn’t first get permission, nor should he touch her while she’s asleep.]

Venus eggs him on, arguing that it would be cowardice indeed to hold back at such a point; but he hesitates again upon being reminded by Loyauté that ‘celui qui empire son amy ne doit point estre tenu pour amy’ [he who damages his friend is no friend] (p. 89). It is only upon being fully inflamed by Venus’s torch that Troïlus finally gives way to his desires. Is Troïlus here undergoing a necessary rite of passage, whereby a young bachelor accedes to marriage and the foundation of a new lineage? Or is he succumbing to something rather more ominous, a deeply ingrained Trojan proclivity for self-serving sexual adventuring? The affair is further problematised by Zellandine’s own distress. Upon waking up and discovering her situation, her only feeling is one of shameful violation:

 A possible exception would be Sebille, who seduces Alexander with no thought of marriage. Her status as one of the mysterious and decidedly independent ladies of the forest, however, distinguishes her from more conventional courtly maidens such as Zellandine, Lyriope, Flamine, or Neronés, as do her skills as an enchantress. Sebille is also the one who initiates her relationship with Alexander; she does not suffer the ignominy of being raped (however amorously) in her sleep.

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Adont elle commença a plourer comme celle quy ne sçavoit que homme eust eu afaire a son corps. (III.iii, p. 210) [Then she began to weep, not knowing what man may have taken advantage of her body.]

When told that it was probably the god Mars who fathered the child, Zellandine is hardly consoled: ‘elle se print tant a larmoier que parler ne pouoit’ [she began to cry so much that she couldn’t speak] (p. 211). And when Troïlus finally explains to her what happened, she is initially horrified: Toutesvoies la damoyselle devint moult honteuse et commença moult fort a plourer pour ce que son amy par son record avoit eu sa virginité. (p. 234) [Still the damsel was very ashamed and began to cry with all her might because her beloved, by his own admission, had taken her virginity.]

It is only when Troïlus reminds her that this was the only way to break the spell, and makes it clear that he still wishes to marry her, that she begins to accept the situation. Troïlus’ condition, in part, reflects his status as a colonial subject struggling to adapt to the dominant courtly culture. He must fall in love with Zellandine in order to prove himself worthy of chivalric standing, and he must marry her in order to legitimise both his love and his aspirations to feudal lordship; and yet the entire courtship is fraught with humiliation and tainted with an aura of transgression. In his efforts at cultural assimilation, Troïlus constantly finds himself on the outside, furtive, as if sneaking or indeed breaking in. As we have seen, he is nearly banned from the company of Lyonnel because of his ignorance of love, and the shield with which he proves his worth, with its double message, threatens failure at the very task to which it summons him. In his effort to legitimise himself in the linked domains of chivalry and love, Troïlus can be compared to Perceval. As noted in Chapter 1, Perceval provides the model of a young man destined for greatness, but hampered by his rustic upbringing. In Cohen’s words, Perceval must lose the ‘signifiers of his ethnicity, striving towards the unmarked body of contemporary French chivalry’. Like Troïlus, Perceval has difficulty in negotiating heterosexual relations: he rudely takes advantage of the first damsel that he meets, unwittingly exposing her to the abusive fury of her lover, and then enters into a nebulous relationship with Blanchefleur that is differently resolved by different continuators. The unformed Celtic lad striving for acceptance as an Arthurian knight must learn not only the skills of combat, but also those of love. Troïlus is never shown to be as inept at chivalric culture as Perceval initially is, though one can assume that he was once every bit as ‘savage’ as his sister Priande. 

Cohen, ‘Hybrids’, p. 99 n. 8.



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Nonetheless, Troïlus is a figure of comedy during his first visit to Zellande. Upon arrival he is driven up a tree by the incoming tide and loses his horse, which drowns. That night he is bewitched by the mother of Nervin, Zellandine’s local suitor, who steals his arms. Soaked by rain, bewildered and amnesiac, Troïlus wanders the island. Taken in by Zellandine’s father, he spends a week as a court fool before being cured by Venus. Only then does he defeat Nervin and expose his treachery. When Zelland nonetheless persists in marrying Zellandine to Nervin, Troïlus is reduced, as we have seen, to a secret elopement. Unlike the knights of the British aristocracy, who win their brides through glorious feats of prowess, Troïlus’ path to marriage and seigneurie is a struggle against mockery and social exclusion, and edges perilously close to the stereotypical Trojan habit of raptus.

Troy Resurgent I repeat the question raised earlier in this chapter: What does it mean to be Trojan? The Trojan legacy is complex and ambivalent. In different texts, and indeed at different points within the same text, aspects of Trojan identity may be selectively remembered or forgotten, in an effort to reconcile a historical narrative with a particular ideological agenda. At the beginning of Perceforest, as noted above, the negative characteristics of the Trojans are displaced on to the lignaige Darnant, while the rest of Trojan Britain, thanks to Alexander’s intervention, flowers into a glittering chivalric culture. And yet inexorably, the Trojan legacy survives and reasserts itself, as if seeping through the Greek cultural veneer. In the second half of the romance, the young British knights engage in an almost compulsive re-enactment of the behaviour of those famous or infamous Trojan princes, Paris and Aeneas. Like Aeneas with Dido or Paris with Oenone, the British heroes of Gallafur’s generation may become sexually involved with a woman who, though temporarily useful, is later abandoned as a distraction or outright obstacle to the knight’s destiny. And like Aeneas with Lavinia or Paris with Helen, they may find that the woman in whom their destiny is to be realised is inconveniently betrothed or married to some other man. In this way the Perceforest author echoes in slightly altered form Gerald of Wales’ claim that the sexual crimes of the Trojano-Britons were responsible for their loss first of Troy, then of Britain; and that this proclivity for sexual excess is an immutable feature of Briton ethnicity. Estonné’s son Passelion, a valiant but comical character given to excesses of all sorts, is the most promiscuous of these young knights, working his way through a series of mostly brief erotic liaisons. Some of these do have a tragic dimen See Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, pp. 109–14. A similar compulsion to re-enact the events surrounding the Trojan War is explored in Athis et Prophilias, in which Roman (and thus Trojan) knights provoke conflict with the Greeks through their amorous liaisons with the intended brides of two Greek knights; see Ehrhart, Judgment, p. 179.

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sion, although the narrative does not really dwell on it. Gaudine, for example, a young woman with whom he fathers a child, dies of chagrin when she realises that he has abandoned her; but the reader learns this only long after the fact. Of all Passelion’s lovers, the one who most recalls the Trojan past is Marmona, who, like Dido, represents a potentially sinister threat to Passelion’s public and familial duties. Her enchantments cause him to forget entirely the important gathering at the Perron Merveilleux, at which the heir to the throne will be identified and the future of the kingdom foretold. As usual, it is Zephir who rescues Passelion from Marmona’s spell, with the forceful reminder: ‘malheureux fusses o ta leuve et perdisses honneur en chevallerie, se ne fusse’ [you would languish with your wolf bitch and would lose all knightly honour, if not for me] (IV.ii, p.930). The sense of crisis here, and the striking denunciation of Marmona herself, recall ­Mercury’s words to Aeneas:          tu nunc Karthaginis altae fundamenta locas pulchramque uxorius urbem exstruis? heu! regni rerumque oblite tuarum!  (Aen. IV: 265–7) [Art thou now laying the foundations of lofty Carthage, and building up a fair city, a wife’s minion? Alas! of thine own kingdom and fortunes forgetful!] (tr. Fairclough)

The troubled relationship between Passelion and Marmona recalls that of Aeneas and Dido in its capacity to obstruct chivalric duty and the destiny of a people, as well as in the intensity of Marmona’s passion. Her distraught words to Passelion at one point lead her own brother to dismiss her as ‘folle’, while her attempt to seek the aid of the Dieu des Desirriers results in her punitive transformation into a deer. And just as the ill-fated liaison of Aeneas and Dido produced a legacy of bitter warfare between their respective peoples, so also the descendant of Passelion and Marmona is King Claudas, implacable enemy of the worthy kings Ban of Benoic and Boors of Gaunes. The ruthless expansionism of Marmona’s descendant will have tragic consequences for the descendants of Passelion’s cousin Benuicq, son of Troïlus and ancestor of Ban and Boors, and for the kingdom that Passelion’s principal descendant, Merlin, will foster. Equally troubling are the relationship of Benuicq and Sarra, and that of Ourseau and Camille. Sarra’s mother was one of the ladies of the forest who aided in the defeat of the lignaige Darnant, and a lifelong friend of Perceforest; presumably, the young Sarra would be a worthy match for any knight. But Benuicq is summoned by Zephir to abandon the pregnant Sarra when he is on the brink of marrying her, since his destiny as the ancestor of Lancelot can only be fulfilled in a different woman, the daughter of Lyonnel and Blanchete. Though she does not react with Dido’s mad fury, Sarra does harbour a deep resentment  Passelion’s encounter with Gaudine takes place in Book IV, but its tragic outcome is revealed in Book VI. See Flûtre, ‘Etudes’ (1970), p. 210.



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that surfaces when she is assisting Ourseau’s wife Camille in childbirth. Learning that Camille’s husband is about to depart for Rome to plot the assassination of Caesar, Sarra advises Camille that men are ‘faulx . . . car quant ilz ont fait des dames, jamais n’en vuellent ouyr parler’ [false . . . for once they’ve made it with a lady, they want to hear no more about it] (IV.ii, p. 1096). It is on Sarra’s advice that Camille steals the weapon destined for the assassination plot, and sells it to the silk merchant from whom Ourseau eventually recovers the twelve styluses into which it is made. Thus Camille is the next woman to be abandoned. Ourseau is warned of his wife’s treachery in a dream, after which Zephir arrives to explain the affair more fully. Again a knight is chastised for his excessive attachment to a woman: ‘Car comme fol tu as dit as ta femme ce que du fer as a faire’ [like a fool you told your wife what you were going to do with the spearhead], says Zephir accusingly (IV. ii, p. 1097). Presumably Ourseau ought to have known better, having already seen the dangerous effects of a woman’s seductive powers. For it was he who, again under the guidance of Zephir, rescued yet another knight, Blanor, from the enchantments of a damsel who had sequestered him in a magical retreat (IV.ii, pp. 944–6). Even the seemingly faultless Gallafur, whose destiny requires him to marry Perceforest’s granddaughter Alexandre Fin de Liesse, works tirelessly to win the favour of his intended bride but is temporarily waylaid and very nearly seduced by Capraise, a niece of Morgan la Fee, whose enchantments cause him to believe for a moment that she is Alexandre. Overall, the ominous power that women take on in the second half of the romance suggests that Britain is populated by a race of Didos, aggressively seducing knights and keeping them as sexual playthings, derailed from the grand historical narrative they are supposed to be furthering. If not for the tireless efforts of Zephir, it would seem, Britain would have known neither the Arthurian era nor its medieval aftermath, thwarted by scheming women. And at the same time the men, though supposedly devoted to a cult of love and feminine honour, are remarkably willing to abandon women to whom they have pledged their love for the sake of glory, adventure, or a more advantageous marriage. Another Trojan vice, adultery, also manifests itself increasingly in the second half of the romance. Policés, king of Sicambria, swears vengeance on Gallafur’s kingdom because two brides are snatched from his arms by British knights. Nero, son of Nestor and Neronés, seduces Clamidette, daughter of Clamidés and La Belle Géande, to whom Policés is betrothed. With Zephir’s aid, Clamidette escapes from the boat that is taking her to Sicambria for the wedding. And when the disgruntled king finally manages to wed a different young lady, Dorine, she enters into a secret liaison with Passelion and eventually escapes with him to Britain. I will discuss both of these episodes in more detail in Chapter 8. For now, it suffices to note that just as Paris ignited the war that would lead to the 

See my ‘Amorous Performances’.

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destruction of his city and to the Trojan diaspora, and just as Aeneas founded the illustrious lineage of Rome at the expense of a bloody war with Turnus, so these British knights incite the wrath of a foreign (albeit equally Trojan) king who responds with devastating war. Just as Troy was extinguished by the Greeks, so now the Greek kingdom of Britain is extinguished by Trojans, who are determined to efface all traces of the ‘secte du roy Alexandre’ [followers of King Alexander]. On his deathbed, Policés extracts a promise from his successor Thorax to destroy ‘le lignage du roy Perceforest, et tous ceulx qui seront extraictz de ceulx de Grece, qui destruirent jadis les Troyens dont nous sommes descendus’ [the lineage of King Perceforest, and all those descended from the Greeks, who long ago destroyed the Trojans from whom we are descended] (VI, ch. 47, fol. 91r). Having fulfilled this vow, the Sicambrian king of Britain, Thorax’s son Scapiol, pursues his policy without mercy: Il commanda par tout le pays sur peine de mort que toutes hystoires, tous lays et fables parlans de Perceforest et de son lignage fussent arses et mises a néant, si que de ceste secte ne fussent jamais nouvelles. (VI, ch. 57, fol. 106r–v) [He ordered throughout the land, on pain of death, that all stories, all lais and fables pertaining to Perceforest and his lineage should be burnt and annihilated, so that nothing would ever be heard of that people.]

So successful is this Trojan suppression of the Greeks that ‘en peu de temps aprés ne fut memoire de tout le temps passé ne de ceulx qui resgné y avoient’ [soon after there was no memory of all that past time nor of those who had reigned then] (VI, ch. 57, fol. 106v). Yet in his zeal to eradicate the Greek race from his island, Scapiol has one spectacular failing, and that is his decision to marry the princess Ygerne, daughter of Gallafur and Alexandre, and the descendent of Perceforest, Gadifer, Lydoire – pupil of Aristotle – and Alexander himself. Thus although the Greco-British culture may have been lost from memory, it persists in the lineage of British kings. The cycle of repression and return, then, comes full circle by the end of Perceforest; and Greek and Trojan identities are layered in a seemingly endless series of exchanges, suppressions, and fusions. Through a series of subtle shifts in the course of the romance, Perceforest’s status changes from foreign knight to glorious British king, then to an intruder unworthy of memory, all the while remaining the illustrious ancestor of Arthur. Along the way, the text explores and problematises the very bases of legitimate kingship. To trace this path, we must return to the beginning of the story.

 Sicambria was supposed to have been founded by the legendary Trojan hero Francio, ancestor of the Franks. See Spiegel, Romancing the Past, pp. 236–7.



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The Foreign King In the immediate aftermath of Darnant’s death, Gadifer and his companions are riding through the forest and come upon a beautiful marble pillar with the sculpted figure of a knight bearing the arms of England. The inscription reads: Cy endroit fu feru le premier coup de lance par chevalier estrange es forestz d’Angleterre, et fu de la main Perceforest le bon roy d’Angleterre sur Darnant l’enchanteur. (I.i, p. 228) [Here was the first lance blow struck by a foreign knight in the forests of England, and it was by the hand of Perceforest the good king of England, against Darnant the Enchanter.]

This inscription encapsulates the riddle of both Gadifer’s and Perceforest’s identity as simultaneously foreigner and king. Their ‘strangeness’, indeed, is evident to all who encounter them. When Perceforest is riding incognito through the forest after his long period of sottise and misrule, a woman to whom he speaks replies: ‘Il m’est advis, a ta langue fozonoise, que tu es des gens du maleureux roy Percheforest’ [It seems to me, from your Efesonian language, that you’re a follower of the pathetic King Perceforest] (II.i, p. 227). And when he is seen by two knights of the lignaige Darnant, one of them remarks: ‘Ce varlet qui cy vient chevauche ung bon cheval et sy ne semble pas de nostre paÿs’ [that boy there is riding a good horse, but he doesn’t seem like he’s from around here] (ibid.). Perceforest stands out as an alien presence, un-English; he is a foreign intruder into the hitherto sealed-off English forest, and a violent one at that, who might well be seen as a disruptive and polluting presence. And yet he is the English king. Perceforest’s status as foreign knight and king remains problematic throughout the first twenty years of his reign. His despair at Alexander’s untimely death plunges him into a profound melancholy that renders him mentally incompetent: desvoyé, ydeote, assoty. Unable to rule, he allows the kingdom to be dominated by ‘les mauvais’. The lignaige Darnant enjoy a period of ascendancy, while worthy knights are alienated from the court. In effect, Perceforest’s allegiance to Alexander and strong sense of identification with the Macedonian empire alienate him from his own kingdom. The hermit Dardanon chastises Perceforest for this undue fixation on Alexander: Cuidoies tu que les biens et les graces qui en luy estoient fussent tiens aussi que tu voeuillez dire qu’il par sa mort te les ait tolluz ou emblez? Cuides tu que tous biens, toutes vertus, toutes honneurs, toutes gentillesses morussent avcques luy? (II.i, p. 237) [Did you think that the good traits and the graces that were in him were yours, so that you can say that in dying, he robbed you of them? Do you think that all good, all virtue, all honour, all nobility died along with him?]

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Perceforest has acted as though Alexander uniquely embodied chivalric perfection – indeed, as though his own chivalric glory was bound up in that of the emperor. The unspoken implication is that Perceforest has never acknowledged the value of the British knighthood that stands ready to serve him, has never entirely believed that they, too, might embody grace, vertu, honneur, gentillesse. In order to fulfil his role as king of England, Perceforest has to become truly British, relinquishing his identity as vassal to Alexander and revising his perception of prowess and cultural refinement as essentially Greek.10 Though his kingdom has been damaged by this negligence, it will flower in chivalric glory and courtly splendour once he reorients himself as a British king. The lignaige Darnant – as their designation implies – ground their identity in genealogical descent and in a concept of birthright. Arguing for a robust resistance to Perceforest’s incursions, Griant de la Haute Forest cites the ‘droit qui nous vient de noz ancestres et que nous avons usé toutes nos vies’ [the rights that come from our ancestors and which we have enjoyed all our lives] (I.i, p. 401): the authority of tradition, the sanctity of blood. As the clan members take counsel and make their plans it is clear that, from their perspective, the land has been invaded and taken over by a foreign king who has no understanding of local customs, and whose rule is despotic. As a result of Perceforest’s initial successes in killing key members of the clan, with the help of Alexander and Gadifer, they are forced to retreat deeper into the forests. From there they will wage their struggle, one of attrition, ambush, and sedition. A more open challenge to Perceforest’s authority is mounted by the knight Britus, a cousin to Darnant who traces his ancestry back to the ‘lignage Brutus, qui premier poeupla et inhabita la Grant Bretaigne’ [lineage of Brutus, who first populated and inhabited Great Britain] (II.i., p. 272). Britus inherits his English lands just at the point when Perceforest is recovering from his long mental illness, and decides that he has had enough of this foreign king. He sends envoys to Perceforest’s principal seat, Neuf Chastel, where they present their case to Queen Ydorus. The arguments are worth citing at some length: Sans faulte, se Betis de Fezon vostre mary fust en bon sens, nous monstrissions ainçois nostre besongne a luy que a vous. Mais chacun scet qu’il n’est pas homme pour tenir terre ne a qui besongne de prince doive estre monstree et grant meschief est quant il a tant tenu le royaulme. Mais le roy Alexandre par sa force le couronna a roy et en desherita ceulx qui avoient droit au royaulme.   Britus nostre sire a mesme grant merveille ou il a pris le hardement, comme estrangier qu’il estoit, de tenir le royaulme aprés la mort du roy Alexandre. . . . Sy vous loons . . . que vous en retournez en Efezon tandiz que vous avez espace, car cy n’avez loy de demourer puis qu’il ne plaist 10

Szkilnik argues that Alexander himself is reinvented as a British hero, asking rhetorically: ‘But who has conquered whom? Is it not Alexander who, upon landing in Great Britain, has changed completely?’, in ‘Conquering Alexander’, p. 203.



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a Britus, a qui le royaulme estoit d’extraction des la grant espace de Brutus. (II.i, p. 273) [Without a doubt, if Betis of Efeson your husband was in his right mind, we’d make our case to him rather than to you. But everyone knows that he’s not a man fit to hold land, nor to deserve being treated like a prince, and it’s a great misfortune that he’s held the land for so long. But King Alexander forcibly crowned him and disinherited those to whom the land rightfully belonged. Britus our lord marvels greatly that he, a foreigner, dares to go on holding the kingdom after Alexander’s death. . . . I advise you . . . to go back to Efeson while you can, for you have no right to stay here since it displeases Britus, who has inherited the realm through his descent from Brutus.]

Unlike the guerilla tactics of Bruyant sans Foy and other members of the lignaige Darnant, Britus’ challenge is open, from within the system. Refusing to use the name Perceforest – the name that figured in native English prophecies about the king who would liberate the realm from Darnant – he reverts to ‘Betis de Fezon’, stressing Perceforest’s foreign identity and the illegitimacy of his kingship. In contrast, Britus’ own claim is grounded in blood descent from the first British king, Brutus himself, whose followers transformed a giant-infested wilderness into a civilised kingdom: a founding act far more primal than that of Gadifer or Perceforest. Perceforest is thus branded as a foreign usurper, and an incompetent one at that. The latter charge is inarguably true given Perceforest’s long period of melancholic lethargy, but fortunately the challenge does not come until he is being cured, so that it loses its validity. Nonetheless he is still a foreigner, put in power by a foreign prince. And as noted above, his mental incompetence is really a pathological manifestation of that very foreignness. One sympathises with Britus’s amazement that Perceforest dared to hold the throne after Alexander’s death, for it does seem that only Alexander’s personal presence as Perceforest’s overlord served to sustain him as a proper king. In a world without Alexander, Perceforest was king in name only. But removing the foreign king turns out not to be so easy, for he too has founded a lineage in the form of his son, Bethidés. When the English knights swear allegiance to Bethidés, he can claim a legitimacy that is grounded in very much the same ideology as that of Britus. Bethidés was born in England, he is the son of the king, and he commands the loyalty of indigenous knights. The battle against Britus can thus be seen as the suppression of a treacherous rebellion, rather than a land-grab by a foreign power; and it parallels the battle in Scotland, led by Lyonnel du Glat, to repulse the Roman invasion. Both Gadifer and Perceforest in this sense cease to be foreign kings installed and kept in place by Alexander: they have local support and have fended off both foreign and internal challenges. By portraying the Greek dynasty as victorious in both situations, the Perceforest author suggests that they are successfully negotiating the long and complex transition from colonial to indigenous rulers.

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The question of who is foreign and who is not returns near the end of the romance, when the king Scapiol has abolished the memory of the Greek dynasty. Olofer, son of Gallafur and Alexandre and the true heir to the British throne, is reunited with his sister Ygerne, Scapiol’s queen. Ygerne does not dare reveal Olofer’s identity ‘pource que le peuple et les gentilz hommes estoient pervertiz de l’amour qu’ilz avoient eu au paravant aux Grecz’ [because the people and the nobility were perverted away from the love they had once had for the Greeks] (VI, ch. 60, fol. 111r); he is forced to pose as a knight from a distant land. But she does see that he is taken on as a royal squire. Later, on the occasion of his knighting, Olofer sparks a fierce battle with the descendants of the lignaige Darnant, whom Scapiol has restored to their ancestral lands, and whose behaviour has earned them the hatred of other British knights. The knights of the clan are outraged when Olofer kills several of their fellows, finding it particularly galling to be ‘deshonnoré par ung chevalier estrangier’ [dishonoured by a foreign knight] (ibid.). Their leader Nagor, in fact, challenges Olofer with the cry, ‘Auollé d’estrange terre, garde toy de moy’ [foundling from a foreign land, on your guard] (ibid.). In reality, of course, Olofer is British-born, while Nagor was born in Brittany where his people were living in exile; but Olofer’s British roots go back only three generations, while Nagor is descended from Brutus. Who, indeed, is British, who is foreign? The answer comes as Scapiol rallies his men in defence of Olofer against ‘le mauldicte secte de Darnant qui oncques bien ne fist’ [the cursed clan of Darnant who never did any good] (ibid.), exterminating the unfortunate clansmen and dumping their bodies into the Thames. At least for this moment, legitimacy in the British kingdom will be defined not by ethnicity and the ties of blood, but by adherence to a chivalric ethos. The problem of legitimacy is one that faces any colonial or expansionist power. For a historical example, we need look no further than the English domination of Wales. The legitimacy of English rule is addressed by Gerald of Wales in his Itinerarium Kambriae with the tale of a Welsh lake whose birds are known to sing only when commanded to do so by the ‘natural’ ruler of the land (‘naturalis Walliae princeps’, ed. Dimock, p. 34).11 In a contest between Prince Gruffydd and an English Earl, it is Gruffydd alone who succeeds in getting the birds to sing. Hearing of this, Henry II acknowledges the legitimacy of Gruffydd’s claim: Quia licet gentibus illis per vires nostras magnas injuriam et violentiam irrogemus, nihilominus tamen in terris eisdem jus hereditarium habere noscuntur. (ibid., p. 35) [It is we who hold the power, and so we are free to commit acts of violence and injustice against these people, and yet we know full well that it is they who are the rightful heirs to the land.] (tr. Thorpe, p. 95)

11 For comments on this passage and on other medieval texts treating the problem of legitimate rule, see Nichols, ‘Fission and Fusion’.



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But of course this does not mean that Henry will relinquish his hold on Wales. He is simply making a distinction between two different kinds of legitimacy: that of sovereignty upheld through brute force, and that of lineage. Gruffydd’s descent from Welsh princes was never in dispute, and that is all that his success with the birds actually showed, as indicated in his prayer: ‘Deus omnipotens et omnia sciens . . . si ex naturalibus Walliae principibus me linealiter descendere fecisti, avibus istis ut hoc denuncient in nomine tuo praecipio’ [Almighty and omnipotent God. . . . If You have ordained that I should descend in direct line from the five princes of Wales, make these birds declare it in your name] (ibid.). In the face of English military power, however, the mere fact of blood descent is of little value: it is still Henry who rules. The anecdote highlights the problem of legitimacy and of defining such slippery terms as foreigner, ruler, heir. The fact that Gerald chose to record such an incident reflects an uneasiness, largely left unspoken, with the status of the foreign king. The Perceforest author, though probably not intending to comment specifically on English rule over Celtic peoples, clearly knew Gerald’s writings on both Wales and Ireland. He would thus have been familiar with this anecdote and with the political issues that it raises. His portrayal of ethnic and cultural conflict in Perceforest’s Britain reflects a similar unease, as the legitimacy of the foreign king is questioned and reaffirmed time and again, in the end almost overdetermined, yet never definitively placed beyond dispute.12

Britain: A Greco-Trojan Fusion British history, as portrayed in Perceforest, thus passes through cycles of suppression, cooption, and reassertion; through recurring patterns of ascendancy and decline. The Greek monarchs exert sovereignty over their Trojan subjects, but at the same time they adapt to the local culture in such a way that its history becomes their history. Betis is renamed Perceforest, Gadifer is crippled by a boar: thus each Greek king, for better or for worse, assumes his place as the fulfilment of an indigenous Trojano-British prophecy. In these respects the Perceforest author shows himself a careful reader of medieval historical writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia he clearly knew intimately, and of the uses to which Geoffrey’s work was put by the Anglo-Norman rulers of England. As Ingham has shown, Geoffrey’s account appealed to Norman rulers who, having conquered the Welsh, appropriated the Arthurian and Trojan glory of the Welsh past, making it their own.13 The portrayal in Perceforest of recurring waves of emigration, conquest, and devastation, alternating with periods of cultural glory, parallels the Historia, where, as Ingham states, one finds ‘repetition and loss as ­Britain’s 12

On medieval ideas of racial descent and political unity, see Reynolds, ‘Medieval Origines Gentium’. 13 Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies. See especially pp. 43, 61–3.

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fundamental story’ (ibid., p. 47). Other English chronicles, as well as works based on the Prophecies of Merlin, also reflect this pervasive sense of mourning for past losses, combined with optimism for future recovery.14 Other identity shifts described in Perceforest are more symbolic, but work towards a Greco-Trojan hybridity that blurs the ethnic distinctions between sovereign and subject. Remanant de Joie, son of Alexander and Sebille, is so perfect a reproduction of his Greek father that when Perceforest jousts with him, despite having no idea who the young knight is, he exclaims, ‘c’est des coupz Alexandre!’ [that’s one of Alexander’s blows] (II.ii, p. 176). But this remnant of Alexander is nonetheless British. He follows the monotheistic cult of the Dieu Souverain rather than the pagan gods worshipped by his father, and his destiny lies in Britain – as a member of the Franc Palais and an ancestor of Arthur – and not in the Mediterranean or Asian lands of his father’s empire. Lyonnel, though he marries a Greek princess, emerges as an overtly Trojan figure when he is awarded the hauberc of Hector, hitherto in the keeping of the king of the Estrange Marche (II.i, p. 353). His identification with Hector reaches its apogee in his heroic, though ultimately tragic, stand against a foreign invasion. As the narrator comments, Lyonnel’s valour against the Romans ‘monstroit que la vaillance de lui et du preu Hector de Troies fussent entrees en ung corps’ [showed that his valiance and that of the worthy Hector of Troy were both in a single body] (IV. i, p. 618). And when Perceforest is given the armour and sword of Priam, he takes a step towards merging his identity with that of the ancient Trojan king, thus furthering the submersion of his lineage in that of the Trojan Britons (II.i, p. 249).15 Lydoire, for her part, becomes a new Cassandra, taking her place as the leading sorceress of Britain, one who foresees the disastrous destruction of the kingdom but can do nothing to prevent it. As the Greek monarchs consolidate their power, they define themselves in terms of the Trojan culture that they have taken over. The tournament between English and Scottish knights held on the occasion of Gadifer’s coronation, in fact, is heralded as ‘une des nobles journees qui fust puis la destruction de Troyes’ [one of the most noble days there has been since the destruction of Troy] (I.ii, ch. 143, fol. 124v). The new monarchs are not supplanting but restoring the greatness of Trojan Britain, indeed of Troy itself.16 Fulfilling its prophecies, they are precisely what it has been waiting for, what it has desired, what its history has been leading up to. But of course that very act of defining themselves in terms of British culture, as its fulfilment and culmination, is also a rewriting of that culture so as to make it desire them, a selective highlighting of elements that can be seen as pointing 14

See ibid., pp. 51–74. On the cyclic view of history in Perceforest, see Taylor, ‘Sense of a Beginning’, and ‘Fourteenth Century’, pp. 312–17. 15 As noted above in the Introduction, Gadifer and Perceforest are identified as descendants of Priam in the Voeux du paon, but their Trojan ancestry is never mentioned in Perceforest, where they are instead identified as Greek through their association with Alexander. 16 See Nissé, ‘ “Coroune Ful Riche” ’, for an interesting parallel example of the glorification of Britain’s Trojan legacy in the alliterative St Erkenwald.



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to their rule. The slippage is apparent from the very start in the crucial combat between Perceforest, still called Betis, and Darnant. Knowing that the king destined to kill him will be named Perceforest, Darnant is relieved to learn that the new king crowned by Alexander is named Betis: clearly this is not the man he needs to fear. When Betis does kill Darnant, one interpretation might be to doubt the veracity of the ancient prophecies, thereby severing the indigenous past completely from the colonial present, and discrediting any possible sense of continuity between the two cultural regimes. Another interpretative move might be to perceive Betis as an impostor, performing a deed of which he was not in fact worthy, and thus to reject him as king: surely the true saviour of Britain, the Perceforest promised by tradition, is yet to come. This latter strategy is employed by the rebellious Britus, who, as we have seen, persists in referring to Perceforest as Betis. The ladies of the forest and their allies, however, preserve the legitimacy of both Betis and the prophecies by simply renaming Betis as Perceforest.17 In this way, although a new era is certainly inaugurated, it is not one that makes a clean break with the past, but rather one that is produced from the traditions and beliefs of indigenous Trojano-British culture. As the ‘Trojan’ traits come to the fore in the generation following the Roman invasion, some of the knights exhibiting these characteristics have at least as much Greek blood as they do Trojan. None, however, is purely Greek, for already the ruling families established by Alexander have married into the surrounding population. As the adventures of this generation of knights are narrated, there is an unstated implication that the Greek chivalric culture brought by Alexander is being ‘Trojanised’, and thus becoming vulnerable to the fate that befell Troy itself. The Greco-Trojan Britons invite their own downfall through their high-handed appropriation of women, just as the original Trojans did. Though the power dynamics governing relations between Alexander, the Greek kings of Britain, and the Trojan subjects were never the same as those obtaining in modern European colonialism, the trajectory here is analogous to that of colonial hybridity as described by Bhabha. As he notes, once ‘the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization’ there then results ‘a form of subversion . . . that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention’, as the colonised culture reinscribes itself in the discourse of its colonial rulers.18 Having first used an outpost of the Trojan diaspora as a means of establishing its own royal power, the Greek dynasty of Britain then becomes itself the means by which the Trojan heritage is revived; and having inextricably fused with a Trojan people, the Greek dynasty will ultimately share its fate, one determined by Trojan history and Trojan stereotypical traits. In this sense the spectacular events at the Perron Merveilleux, where the 17

See Taylor, ‘Perceval/Perceforest’. Taylor argues that Betis’s name-change marks ‘the loss of individual identity, the acquisition of a public and collective mission’ (p. 211). Since this mission pre-existed Betis’s arrival, the new name also marks his insertion into – or appropriation of – British history. 18 Bhabha, Location, p. 112.

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kingdom is restored after the Roman invasion, are invested with a complex meaning, promising both a glorious future and one fraught with war and conflict. When Gallafur cuts through the chain binding the red and the white dragons to the stone, he not only embeds his sword in the stone for the future Arthur to withdraw – thereby preparing the way for that greatest of British kings – but also unleashes into British history two of its most potent symbols of ethnic power struggle. The red dragon of the Trojano-Britons and the white dragon of their conquerors will persist in the fabric of British culture and in the land itself, bringing down Vortigern’s tower, figuring in the Prophecies of Merlin, and, as Lee Patterson has stated, serving as ‘symbols of the perpetual strife upon which history is founded and which it continually reenacts’.19 In the ongoing rivalry of Greek and Trojan hegemony, and the repeated resurgence of the ultimately selfdestructive Trojan excesses, Perceforest puts forward a view of history not unlike that which Patterson attributes to the alliterative Morte Arthure, written some sixty years later, with its ‘rhythm of striving and disappointment, of aspiration towards transcendence followed by submission to the iron law of historical recurrence’.20 Still, through all the cycles of conquest, glory, and decline, the increasingly intertwined Greek and Trojan bloodlines will persist. This underlying continuity through the upheaval of the centuries accords with what Heng has termed the ‘view of continuity-through-disruption’ put forth by Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia ‘resolutely pronounces heterogeneity to be the stable, enduring condition of Britain’s population’.21 Lydoire foresees that the Greek lineage ‘ne sera sauvé synon par le femmenin gendre’ [will be saved only by the feminine line] (IV.ii, 998), and this is indeed what happens when Scapiol marries Gallafur’s daughter Ygerne. Their son in turn marries the daughter of Olofer, Ygerne’s brother and the true heir to the Greco-British throne. Thanks to this silent, suppressed, maternal genealogy, Arthur is heir not only to the legacy of Troy but also to the Greek kings of Britain and to Alexander himself. Greek blood also filters through to Guenevere, one of whose ancestors is the princess Blanchete, daughter of Gadifer and Lydoire; to Iseut, descendent of the Greek Sanguin – son of Gadifer and Flamine – and of the Trojan Torette, daughter of Le Tor and Lyriope; to Tristan, another descendant of Lyonnel and Blanchete; and of course to other heroes of the Arthurian world. We have seen that Gauvain is descended from Nestor, while Lancelot is descended from the Trojan Benuicq and the Greco-Trojan Lionnelle. In a very real sense, Perceforest depicts Britain as the ultimate resolution to that primal conflict between the two great cultural centres of the ancient world, Troy and the vaguely defined entity known as ‘Greece’. This fantasy of a secret Greek lineage reflects, and embellishes, the ethnically 19 20 21

Patterson, Negotiating the Past, p. 202. Ibid., p. 217. Heng, Empire, pp. 66, 65.



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diverse character of Britain as portrayed in medieval chronicles. The Venerable Bede, for example, identifies Britain as home to four peoples – Britons, Scots, Picts, and English – each with their own language, united through the medium of the Church and its lingua franca, Latin. Geoffrey of Monmouth, of course, adds the Normans to this list, so that in his account that ‘best of islands’ is home to five races. The multi-ethnic heritage of the Anglo-Norman monarchs, in turn, was an explicit part of their dynastic self-image. Henry I, seizing the throne in 1100 in defiance of his elder brother Robert Courthose, consolidated his position in part by marrying Matilda, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, herself a descendant of Aethelred the Unready and Edmund Ironside and a great-niece of Edward the Confessor. Royal propaganda of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries exploited this dual heritage: a paternal descent through Angevin and Norman lines, coupled with a maternal line leading back to the Anglo-Saxon kings of old.22 As Ralph Davis has stated, by the thirteenth century ‘all notion of a real distinction between Normans and English had vanished, because the Normans had projected themselves into the past and identified themselves with the preNorman history of England’.23 It has become commonplace to note that the twelfth-century romans antiques served the Plantagenets by offering, in Christopher Baswell’s words, ‘a racial background and historical precedent for Angevin imperialism’.24 Nearly two hundred years later, Perceforest too draws on the antique past to comment obliquely on the English monarchy and its expansionist agendas. In Scapiol, the invading continental king who marries an indigenous princess, we can catch an echo of Henry I’s marriage to the princess Matilda. The fabrication of Trojan ancestry for the Anglo-Norman dynasty under Henry II allowed for an illusion of continuity with an even deeper British past, that of the Trojano-Britons. The Plantagenet monarchs descended from this union of Norman–Trojan and Saxon are thus genealogically analogous to the great King Arthur, descended from the union of Sicambrian–Trojan and Greek. Edward I, with his interest in Glastonbury and in the ‘discovery’ of Arthur’s tomb, positioned himself explicitly as successor to the legendary king and thus as heir to a legacy at once Trojan/Celtic, Saxon, Norman, and Angevin. This idea was embraced enthusiastically by Edward III, who on occasion carried the dragon ensign of Utherpendragon in battle and who established first a Round Table, then the Order of the Garter at the Arthurian castle of 22 For comments on the ‘dual’ history of England and its royal lineage, as both Saxon (through the female line) and Norman (through the male line), see Heng, Empire, pp. 99–107. The emphasis placed by Aelred of Riveaulx on a matrilineal Anglo-Saxon lineage for Henry II is noted by Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, pp. 693–4. The Norman use of a mythical Trojan and Arthurian past to legitimate a royal line fraught with power struggles and repeated waves of foreign conquest is also discussed by Patterson, Negotiating the Past, pp. 199–229, and by Rollo, Historical Fabrication. On medieval views of maternal lineage, see McCracken, Curse of Eve. 23 Davis, Normans, p. 131. See also Gillingham, English, pp. 123–44. 24 Baswell, ‘Men’, p. 149. See also Simons and Eley, ‘Prologue’.

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Windsor.25 Edward III also, of course, placed great importance on his maternal descent from the French King Phillip IV, himself supposedly a descendant of King Priam. The problem of succession to the French throne, turning as it did on the question of maternal inheritance, meant that the question of mixed blood, and of royal genealogy as comprising both maternal and paternal lines, was central to the political discourse of the day. Edward’s claim to be the last surviving heir to the Capetian dynasty, saved from extinction through its passage to him by way of Philip IV’s daughter Isabella, gives a decidedly topical significance to Lydoire’s prophecy that the Greek dynasty of Britain will be saved by a feminine line of descent. Since Perceforest was written for his father-in-law, it is very likely that Edward would have had access to the text. I have already noted that Alexander’s role in establishing Perceforest as King of Britain offers a parallel with the role played by William of Hainaut and his brother, Jean d’Avesnes, in securing the English throne for the young Edward. Lyonnel du Glat might also be seen as a flattering reflection of the English royal family, given that Edward III cultivated an identification with Lancelot’s cousin Lionel, who of course, like Lancelot, is Lyonnel du Glat’s descendant. Edward assumed the identity of ‘Sir Lyonnel’ in a tournament in 1334, named his second son Lionel in 1338, and assigned his son the arms and colours of Lancelot’s cousin.26 Edward’s desire to identify himself with a mythic British past seems to have extended beyond the Arthurian world to that of Perceforest as well, for it has been argued that the Order of the Garter was modelled in certain respects on Perceforest’s Franc Palais.27 And certain aspects of Edward’s early reign – his efforts to outlaw and suppress notorious bandits who were resisting royal authority, his attention to the establishment of a written code of justice, his military expeditions against the Scots, a people seen as terrorising his northern subjects – are reflected in the account of Perceforest’s struggles with the outlawed lignaige Darnant, and the efforts by both Perceforest and Gadifer to standardise law and customs throughout the kingdom. Again like the romans antiques, Perceforest addresses contemporary conflicts between local custom and centralised monarchical power, and between folk traditions and a codified law, by projecting them back into a heroic, slightly exotic, and profoundly authoritative antiquity. The next English king who adopted the standard of Utherpendragon was Edward IV; and interestingly, he is known to have owned a copy of Perceforest.28 With his interest in uncovering genealogical lines linking himself to the Arthurian past, and in appropriating the legends of English and Celtic Britain for the legitimisation of the Yorkist monarchy, Edward would surely have taken a lively 25

Leshock, ‘Religious Geography’, p. 204. On chivalric pageantry and its Arthurian emphasis at the courts of Edward I and Edward III, see Vale, Edward III. 26 Vale, Edward III, pp. 63, 68–9. 27 Boulton, Knights, pp. 107–8, 126; Roussineau, ‘Ethique chevaleresque’. 28 See Roussineau’s Introduction to Perceforest IV.i, pp. xxxi–xxxii.



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interest in Perceforest.29 Edward IV, after all, in addition to being descended from Edward III, traced his ancestry through maternal lines back to the British king Cadwaladr and thus, in mythic terms, to Brutus. With a bit of imagination, Perceforest could be seen as another distant ancestor of Edward IV, and the prophecy of a noble lineage saved ‘par le femmenin gendre’ could be seen as culminating in Edward himself. Edward could have enjoyed the literary fantasy of restoring Perceforest’s monarchy, as a supplement to his scarcely less literary claim to be restoring the British dynasty of Brutus, Arthur, and Cadwaladr. Claiming a Greek dynasty to which both he and Arthur were heirs would have been an attractive notion for either Edward III or Edward IV, even if (as was surely the case) neither entertained it as anything more than a flattering literary fiction. Positing an infusion of Greek blood into the Trojan lineage of Britain, the Perceforest author implicitly argues for a superior strain of Britons, standing slightly apart from those of entirely Trojan descent and forming the heroic kernel of the Arthurian world. Such a view of British royal and aristocratic lineage would enable either Edward to stage himself as a modern Arthur, without having to admit thereby too close an affinity with the conquered Welsh people. As Said has noted, ‘More important than the past itself . . . is its bearing upon 30 cultural attitudes in the present.’ The past is revealed in Perceforest to be a ­malleable construct, virtually a fiction or indeed an optical illusion. The vision of the past adopted in a given present, the way in which a particular community defines its relation to a particular past, will determine its position within the dynamics of regional and international power politics as well as its movement into the future. The book does not give us a reconceptualisation of the sort desired by Said in the postcolonial world, one that would ‘transform our understanding of both the past and the present and our attitudes towards the future’ (ibid.). The British rise to cultural pre-eminence is thanks to Alexander, and the story of Britain’s Greek heritage provides a means of celebrating the greatness and glory of the Arthurian world while still maintaining a view of the Celts as an inferior race, incapable of self-government or self-improvement without an infusion of foreign blood. Still less does Perceforest question the basic structures of feudal society and aristocratic lineage, nor the cultural values of imperial expansion, underwritten by a noble mission civilisatrice joyfully accepted as salvific by those on whom it is visited. Nonetheless it does demonstrate that at any given historical moment, the dominant culture is likely to be one with a varied and complex legacy, including customs, cultural institutions, laws, and bloodlines deriving from a range of peoples both victorious and defeated, both famous and forgotten. The text frequently juxtaposes different points of view, sometimes even narrating the same event two or three times over from the perspective of different characters,

29 30

Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda’. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 18.

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and showing that there can be no single version of history accepted by all.31 In these ways, if perhaps despite itself, the text does open up a possibility for questioning the absolutism of cultural hegemony and for examining the artifices and ruses by which the narrative of history, and the cultures it describes and upholds, are produced.

31 Ferlampin-Acher comments briefly on ‘le jeu sur la pluralité des points de vue’ in Perceforest, in ‘Perceforest et ses deceptions’, pp. 464–5.

8

Lest We Remember: The Artifice of History ‘Historical reality . . . is only available through textual sources and cannot be recovered independently of the processes of construction and manipulation which those involve.’ Thus Bart Moore-Gilbert sums up one side of Spivak’s theoretical position and of Subaltern Studies in general. At the same time, Moore-Gilbert also acknowledges a counter strain in the work of Spivak and other postcolonial theorists, one that posits an absolute ‘real’ independent of such mediation: what is sometimes called ‘the “real history” of colonialism’ (ibid.). The problem of historical truth – of authentic, lived experience and its distortion or concealment beneath competing discursive layers of oral, textual, and visual commemoration – is central to Perceforest. And it is in the second half of the romance, with the restoration of the kingdom and its subsequent, definitive defeat, that these issues are most explicitly brought to the fore. In the aftermath of the Roman invasion, the restored Greco-British kingdom stands at a point in history notably different from that of its original foundation under Alexander. Rather than positioning themselves as an originary moment that will become a glorious past for future generations to marvel at, as did Perceforest and his contemporaries, the knights of the restoration are positioned in a middle ground. And as such they seek to subdue the past, preserving it as history in the lais sung by the old minstrel Ponchonnet and in the chronicle discovered amid the ruins of the Franc Palais, but banishing it from active intrusion into the present. Unlike Perceforest and Gadifer, Gallafur and his companions have a British past, and they have to negotiate their position as a bridge between that past and the future that must be produced. As the generations proceed from Perceforest and Gadifer to their sons and grandsons, the ever more complex and interwoven bloodlines – Greek, TrojanoBritish, continental European – create a multi-cultural, multi-faceted history that can be viewed differently depending on the perspective one adopts. We saw that as Greek rule slowly takes shape in Britain, competing cultures are defined in part by an optics that defines a spatial mapping and a visual field unique to each. The same is true of temporal mapping, and this optics of history is explored in Books V and VI. The immediate past is laid to rest, but the even deeper past returns in new guise to rule again, as competing versions of history sponsored by 

8–10.

Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, p. 100. See also Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism, pp.

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rival social and ethnic groups vie for dominance in the formation and reformation of British identity. From the imperial perspective of Alexander and his men, the Britain that they find – lawless, its knights poorly trained, its common people virtual savages – corresponds to what Bhabha, drawing on Certeau’s concept of the ‘non-place’, has termed the ‘caesura’ or ‘colonial space’: ‘the empty or wasted land whose history has to be begun, whose archives must be filled out; whose future progress must be secured in modernity’ (Location, p. 246). The Breton–Sicambrian invasion, in turn, with its virtual extermination of Greco-British knighthood and obliteration of their culture, represents an attempt to recreate this ‘caesura’ so that history can be rewritten, restarted in a different trajectory. The Trojan remnants of the lignaige Darnant rebel against their relegation to the margins of British identity: the temporally distant, pre-Alexandran past and the geographically distant space of continental exile. To paraphrase Bhabha, the Trojan Briton resists occupying a past of which the Greek Briton is the future. Central questions of Perceforest Books V and VI are: whose past will be the one that defines the future? Whose present will be the one that defines the past? Or, to collapse these questions into one: to whom does the future – and therefore also the past – belong?

Lasting Records and Ephemeral Memories During the reign of Perceforest, in keeping with the pervasive anxiety over historical rupture and continuity, the defeated culture of the lignaige Darnant is kept on show, conspicuous in its exclusion and suppression. The history of the Greek conquest of Britain is literally written across the landscape in the form of monuments and inscriptions, and travelling knights contemplate the history lessons they provide, often cryptic but nonetheless compelling. The pillier Estonné, for example, is encountered by numerous characters. It commemorates an event discussed above in Chapter 2: Estonné, kept at the Scottish court in the form of a bear, killed two knights of the clan who were attempting to rape Lyriope and Priande. The pillar is sculpted with the image of a bear wielding a sword and shield and fighting two knights, while two maidens cower in terror. Nearby is the tomb of the would-be rapists, marked with the inscription: Cy gist deux chevaliers du lignaige Darnant l’enchanteur que Estonné mist a mort luy estant en figure d’ours pour ce qu’ilz vouloient emmener .II. pucelles par force. (II.ii, p. 97) 

For Certeau’s concept of the ‘non-place’ from which historiography originates, see Writing of History, tr. Conley, 91.  Bhabha, in reference to Frantz Fanon’s discussion of ‘the belatedness of the black man’, comments that in Fanon’s writing ‘the black man refuses to occupy the past of which the white man is the future’ (Location, p. 238).



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[Here lie two knights of the lineage of Darnant the Enchanter, whom Estonné killed when he was in the form of a bear, because they wanted to abduct two girls.]

Lyonnel comes upon this site when he is searching for Blanchete, and is so puzzled by the notion of Estonné in the form of a bear that he stays there, pondering the inscription, until nightfall. The twelve knights who made the vows at Gadifer’s coronation tournament also pass that way and are equally mystified, asking a local man for explanation. His answer, introduced as ‘ce que l’on en scet par cest forest’ [what is known around the forest] and qualified further with the disclaimer ‘a ce que l’on dist’ [so it is said], shows that the event has already passed into local legend, the stuff of gossip, rumour, and story-telling (II.ii, pp. 70–1). Estonné himself, in the company of Le Tor, sees the monument and the tomb but considers them a hallucination, because he is so sure that the events themselves were only a dream. As Estonné insists when he later describes the monument to Queen Ydorus: ‘Songe fut et a songe est tourné’ [it was a dream and nothing but a dream] (II.ii, p. 151). When he hears a minstrel narrate his supposed dream in the Lai de l’ours, however, Estonné finally realises that these events did indeed take place. Commemorated in the minstrel repertoire, in local gossip, and in a monument that comprises both visual narrative and written text, Estonné’s adventure lives on in oral history and eventually in the written chronicle that is the fictive source of Perceforest. This important monument combines a story of thwarted rape – the ongoing suppression of the clan and the royal regulation of sexuality – and one of animal metamorphosis: the precarious position of the indigenous lord, at the mercy of the sovereign who alone has the power to bestow or to withhold subjecthood. It is fitting, therefore, that its site should be marked in the otherwise wild forest, and that its lessons should be offered for the edification of British subjects. Even after the invasion, the pillier Estonné makes a final appearance when Ourseau comes upon it during his exploration of Britain. But since there is no one left to explain the story, the monument is now difficult to evaluate: ‘il ne sceut que c’estoit a dire, dont moult lui pesa’ [he didn’t know what it meant, which bothered him] (IV.i, p. 662). He also encounters the maimed bodies of clan members on display in the Forest of Darnant, and wonders about them as well. For Ourseau, ignorant of the ethnic and cultural conflicts that shaped his father’s homeland, it is clear that the land has been the site of many marvellous adventures and many a struggle for power, but already it is impossible to reconstruct exactly what may have happened. These signs, so manifestly clear to those who created them, are culture-bound; as the saying goes, you had to be there. Ourseau is impressed at what he sees, but he is truly moved only by the bodies of his kinsmen, because he knows their story and their link to himself. As a result, he sees their history as 

On the use of lais in Perceforest, see my ‘Chronicle, Lai’.

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his own, and it is this experience of gazing into the past, touching it in the form of ancestral bodies, that catapults him into his sense of Britishness, with a place in British history. It is one effect of the Roman devastation that these potent sites are in danger of losing their meaning, and becoming mere marvels: images of exotic and romantic adventure, sites of demonic temptation and defiance. What was once a triumphant gesture of appropriation is rapidly becoming little more than a museum piece. What is worse, such sites are a means by which the ghosts of the clan can continue their predations, for their activity rages on unabated. As Perceforest’s world is threatened by oblivion, its descendants react with an effort to protect their cultural heritage. And interestingly, this task entails two complementary approaches. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on the recovery of a recorded history, both oral – the lais of the minstrel repertoire – and written – the chronicles kept at Perceforest’s court. But at the same time, it is also necessary to separate from that recent past, to lay it to rest in a definitive manner: to establish what Bhabha has called a ‘syntax of forgetting’. One aspect of Books V and VI is their narrative of what we might call a managed oblivion, a careful relegation of the past into a form that allows it to be safely accessed but also safely removed from the present. In this sense Perceforest illustrates Certeau’s assertion that the construction of history ‘aims at calming the dead who still haunt the present, and at offering them scriptural tombs’.

The Art of Forgetting In the aftermath of the Roman invasion, Britain is indeed a realm haunted by the dead. And the experience of Passelion, son of Estonné and Priande, illustrates the hazards of being poised uncomfortably between two times: the past of Perceforest’s kingdom and the Arthurian future. Unable to resist the inscriptions that invite passing knights to joust with the ghosts of the clansmen, Passelion finds himself more than once embroiled in perilous and fruitless battles with the past. Rising to the challenge of a joust with Malaquin at the tomb of Darnant – the same joust that once caused Le Bossu to be carried by evil spirits to the Isle of Apes – he is soon overwhelmed by the tempestuous ghosts of the lignaige Darnant, who bear him away with the cry: ‘Nous avons occis le pere, pareillement ferons nous du filz!’ [we killed the father, we’ll do likewise with the son] (IV.ii, p. 1026). On another occasion, he and Ourseau keep vigil to confront the spirits of the two chevaliers enferrés: clansmen who were killed in the act of attempted rape, and whose bodies, pierced by lances, remain on display in the forest. Despite the fact that the rapists are already dead, Passelion succumbs to the temptation to add to the punishment for this crime, as articulated by a voice speaking for the defeated clan:  

Location, p. 160. Certeau, Writing of History, p. 2.



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Seigneurs chevaliers, se l’amende vous samble petite et cuer avés de l’amender, soyés cy a l’eure de minuit. Vous les avrés presens, sy les tuez la seconde fois. (p. 1110) [Sir knights, if the penalty seems small to you and you have the courage to increase it, be here at midnight. You will find them present: kill them a second time.]

But of course, the desire to reach back into the past and kill a criminal who is already dead – in effect, to project himself back into the time of his father’s youth and fight his father’s battles all over again – is futile and indeed dangerous. As he and Ourseau are warned at yet another such site: Alez vous ent d’icy, car se trouvés y estes a minuit, mauvais espris vous emporteront en tel lieu que jamais n’en retournerés. (p. 1109) [Get away from here, for if you’re here at midnight, evil spirits will carry you away to a place you’ll never get out of.]

Engagement with the ghostly remnants of the past can bring no honour, and serves only to remove the victim from the present altogether. Such battles must be shunned as the knights make their way to the Perron Merveilleux, where in a dramatic ceremony the heir to the British throne will be identified and the sword that once belonged to Perceforest will be embedded in the stone from which a young Arthur will someday draw it. It is in the production of the future, and not in the obsessive reliving of the past, that the young knights’ honour lies: ‘partés vous d’icy . . . car a honneur fauldrez se vous n’estes au Perron Merveilleux’ [get out of here . . . for you will lose honour if you’re not at the Perron Merveilleux] (p. 1111). These spirits will eventually be driven out definitively through the work of Gadifer’s grandson Gallafur, son of young Gadifer and Flamine. He will visit the sites one by one and conjure the ghosts away in the name of the ‘Son of the Virgin’, a phrase discovered by Blanchete – who continues the magical and prophetic practices of her mother Lydoire – and which proves remarkably effective despite Gallafur’s incomprehension of its meaning. It is noteworthy that in this second half of the romance, the exotic enemies to be vanquished are no longer giants, sorcerers, or humanoid animals inhabiting distant islands; they are figures from the past. Certeau has pointed out the ‘intimate rapport’ between historiography and ethnology, noting that ‘the past is first of all the means of representing a difference’. If conflict and difference were primarily expressed in geographic and racial terms in the original Greek conquest of Britain, the conflict that engages the post-invasion generation is largely defined in temporal terms as a struggle for the control of history. To be sure, Gallafur’s Britain faces attack from the outside, in the form of Danes, Sicambrians, and Bretons. 

Ibid., p. 85.

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But still the difference that defines the enemy is expressed to a large extent in terms of opposing views of history. The Breton descendants of Darnant refuse to relinquish that originary struggle between their clan and the Greek regime. The Sicambrians seek vengeance for the theft of their queen, but are also still locked in the even older conflict of Trojan against Greek. As if aware of the urgent need to consolidate their place in history, determining the future by settling the past, Gallafur and his contemporaries turn their attention to the past generations still haunting the landscape. It is not only the ancient enemy whose ghostly presence must be banished. Britain is also haunted by the ghosts of Perceforest’s knights, who hold a phantom tournament every night in the ruins of the Franc Palais, and will continue to do so until the palace is rebuilt and a new generation of knights produce their own tournaments. And although these ghosts are benign, they are nonetheless an awesome force to encounter, as Passelion discovers when he and his companions are attacked amid the ruins by an unseen enemy, against whom no defence is possible. When the bewildered Passelion demands an explanation, he learns that the assailants were the father and uncles of Marmona, his former lover whose spells nearly prevented him from reaching this fateful site at all. As her father’s ghost explains, ‘tu as engendré en ma fille ung hoir masle dont il ystera ung lignaige terrible et de mauvaise foy’ [you have begotten on my daughter a male heir from whom will descend a terrible and faithless lineage] (p. 938). This faithless descendant will be none other than Claudas, enemy of Ban and Boors. At every turn, Passelion is attacked and accosted by the past, punished for his role in the future or simply deflected from having any such role at all. This past must be put to rest so that it will no longer continue as an angry presence; it must remain in the past, sealed off, preserved as a memory but nothing more. Of that original generation of heroes, only Perceforest, Gadifer, Lydoire, and Dardanon continue to live on in the Isle de Vie, awaiting the advent of Christianity. And even they are removed from view, outside the mainstream of events, simply waiting for history to fulfil its promise. In Gallafur’s Britain, it is no longer appropriate to keep the defeated lignaige Darnant on display, or for British knighthood to define itself through that past struggle. The tombs themselves, as sites of memory, keep this past from disappearing and as such pose a threat to the dominant culture; as Zumthor has said, ‘La tombe est Mémoire, fixée en un lieu. Par là, elle tient encore de la vie’ [The

 Faletra has commented on the ‘linear, future-oriented’ view of history in narratives concerned with ‘the foundation of nations’, noting that for both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Virgil ‘the past is something that must be cast aside and superseded’ because it ‘holds too many ghosts’ (‘Narrating’, p. 65). Warren, however, argues that in Geoffrey’s Historia ‘conflicting memories and forgettings undermine the linear progress of the history’ (‘Making contact’, p. 123). The Perceforest author’s view of history owes much to his study of Geoffrey’s complex narration, characterised by Warren as occupying ‘a double-time between memory and amnesia’ (ibid.).



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tomb is Memory, fixed in one place. Thereby, it holds onto life]. As long as the past remains undead, ever resurgent in its mocking challenge to be subjected to a ‘second death’, it continues to pose a danger, becoming a powerful vortex of death and exile. Gallafur’s proto-Christian conjuration attempts to place a seal on this historical past, inflicting a true ‘second death’ in the sense that would be postulated by the Marquis de Sade and taken up by Lacan: a revolutionary act that closes an old order and makes way for a new one, or in Lacan’s words, ‘the point at which the very cycles of the transformations of nature are annihilated’.10 Gallafur’s cleansing of the land makes way for the advent of Christianity – the single most important historical turning point that medieval culture could imagine – and for the special role that Britain would play as the land of the Grail. The importance of these tombs and corpses in the historical trajectory of Perceforest illustrates Donald Maddox’s characterisation of tombs in Arthurian romance as ‘objects of intense fascination’ and ‘material signifiers of an invisible alterity’.11 In his analysis of tombs and cemeteries in the prose Lancelot, Maddox notes that tombs mark ‘the crossroads of time and space’ (p. 116) and that they are frequently the site of a specular encounter in which a knight acquires selfknowledge, often pertaining to his lineage. Perceforest likewise uses tombs and corpses as markers of an alterity that is simultaneously uncomfortably close to home. Once ethnically defined – and thus ultimately geographically, in that these dead descended from Troy rather than the Greece of the conquerors – the otherness of these deaths is now equally defined through their removal in time. In his speech ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, delivered at the Sorbonne in March 1882, Ernest Renan argued for the importance of a kind of collective amnesia as a safeguard of national unity and stability: L’oubli, et je dirai même l’erreur historique, sont un facteur essentiel de la création d’une nation, et c’est ainsi que le progrès des études historiques est souvent pour la nationalité un danger. L’investigation historique, en effet, remet en lumière les faits de violence qui se sont passés à l’origine de toutes les formations politiques. (p. 891) [Forgetting, and I will even say historical error, are an essential factor in the creation of a nation, and that is why the development of historical study is often dangerous for the nationality. Historical investigation, in effect, brings to light the acts of violence that take place at the origin of all political institutions.]

Though formulated with regard to the modern nation state, this idea is similar to that implied in Perceforest. In a final effort to secure its long-term survival, Greco-British culture must suppress living memory of its violent origins and of the culture that it has eradicated, this ‘perverse’ culture that is a negative,  10 11

Zumthor, Mesure, p. 291. Lacan, Ethics, p. 248; see also pp. 210–12, 294–5. Maddox, Fictions, p. 115.

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mocking mimicry of itself: rapacious, expansionist, territorially protective. The truly dominant culture is one that moves on, relegating past conflicts to a written record that will preserve them, to be sure, but in a form safely severed from the present. Thus Gallafur constructs a new palace and renews the tradition of tournaments in order to rid the land of the ceaseless tourneys of ancestral ghosts. When the new generation of knights and damsels gather in the ruins of the Franc Palais and listen to readings from Perceforest’s great chronicle, the exploits of that first generation of Greek kings are explicitly relegated to the space of writing, with its dual function as outlined by Certeau: On the one hand, writing plays the role of a burial rite, in the ethnological and religious meaning of the term; it exorcises death by inserting it into discourse. On the other hand, it possesses a symbolizing function; it allows a society to situate itself by giving itself a past through language, and it thus opens to the present a space of its own. (Writing of History, p. 100)

This separation from the past serves – as we have seen, quite literally – to clear a space for the present. But also, as Certeau notes, ‘the locus that it carves for the past is equally a fashion of making a place for the future’ (ibid., p. 85, emphasis his). Rather than the Temple de la Franche Garde, which commemorates past deeds and the spread of civilisation against wilderness as an act still alive in its significance, Gallafur’s Britain is centred on the temples of the Dieu des Desirriers and the Deesse des Songes. Both of these deities promote movement into the future, the former by fostering marriage and the continuation of lineage and the latter by offering guidance, in the form of revelatory dreams, to the political and military future of the realm. The central point in the landscape is no longer the tomb of Darnant or the pillier Estonné, with their commemoration of past events, but the Perron Merveilleux, which looks to the future and holds the sword in readiness for the king who will some day draw it forth. The significance of the sword itself, in fact, is now less to whom it once belonged – Perceforest – than to whom it someday will belong: Arthur. Though the Arthurian era has not yet arrived, still the Alexandran era has come to an end. Alexander’s son – Perceforest’s son-inlaw – had been named Alexandre Remanant de Joie [Alexander, Remnant of Joy]: at this stage, despite the death of Alexander himself, it was still possible to salvage something of his aura, to feel a living connection to his world. But the daughter of Remanant de Joie, who marries Gallafur, is called Alexandre Fin de Liesse [Alexandra, End of Happiness]. The Age of Alexander, the particular form of joyous (Greek) imperial expansionism that it entailed, is truly over. The future to which Gallafur’s Britain now looks is both political and spiritual. On the one hand, it is Gallafur and his contemporaries who put in place that which will allow for the Arthurian world: they establish many of the prophecies it will fulfil, the tasks that its heroes will perform, the dynastic bloodlines that



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will culminate in its protagonists.12 And on the other hand, Gallafur’s Britain is marked by a growing expectation of divine events in the immanent future: a virgin birth that will confound Nature, a visitation from the Dieu Souverain, a new spiritual era. These two visions of the future intersect in the Grail quest, the ultimate future adventure that is already being prepared. Yet even as the GrecoBritish dynasty is apparently consolidating its power, settling on the old lais and the Greek court chronicle as its sole links with the past, and looking to its glorious future, other forces, other peoples, are at work. Neither the lignaige Darnant specifically, nor the descendants of Troy more generally, are prepared to disappear gracefully, and the ‘oubli’ prescribed by Renan turns out to be less easily achieved than was first imagined.

The Survival of the Lignaige Darnant: Return of the Repressed The reconstruction of Britain under Gallafur entails a recognition of the Roman invasion – ‘la tempeste’ – as a definitive rupture demarcating the age of Perceforest and Alexander as an irretrievable past, itself defined in its establishment of a definitive break with the age of Darnant. And yet ironically, this process of sealing off the past is itself but the prelude to what I have termed, after Certeau, a ‘return of the repressed’. The ‘repressed’, the ‘unthinkable’, which returns towards the end of Perceforest is precisely that which had been suppressed in the creation of Greco-British cultural identity: the lignaige Darnant. And as stated in the previous chapter, this resurgence of the clan is subtly foreshadowed by their vestigial survival at the very heart of the Greco-British royal family, in the persons of Lyriope du Chastel Malebranche and Lyonnel du Glat. Lyriope, daughter of Darnant himself, is a supporter of the new Greek monarchs from the start.13 Because she saves the life of Gadifer when he finds himself a prisoner at the castle of Malebranche, she is brought to the royal court and lives as a companion to the princess Blanchete. Lyriope also uses her medical expertise to treat Gadifer’s crippling wound, soothing his pain as much as possible. Fully assimilated into the royal family unit, sharing a bed first with the queen and later with the young princess, Lyriope acquires a new identity that effaces her old clan ties. Yet the fact remains that she is a direct descendant of the evil clan leader, and through her the blood of the lignaige Darnant enters the lineage of the Greco-British royal family. One of Lyriope’s daughters marries Gadifer’s grandson Utran to become queen of Scotland. The other, wife of Utran’s brother Sanguin, is queen of Ireland and the ancestor of Iseut. A similar mingling of Greek and Darnantine bloodlines occurs in the marriage 12

For comments on this (re-)construction of British history in Perceforest, with particular attention to Lydoire’s role in foreseeing and preparing for the future, see Taylor, ‘Reine Fée’. 13 Roussineau’s glossary identifies Lyriope as the granddaughter of Darnant and the daughter of Malebranche, Darnant’s son. The text, however, makes very clear that Lyriope is Malebranche’s sister.

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of Lyonnel and Blanchete. One of their daughters marries Benuicq and becomes the ancestor of Lancelot, while another marries Exillié to become the ancestor of Guenevere. The famous Tristan is also descended from Lyonnel and Blanche. The blood of the clan thus filters through to some of the most illustrious Arthurian figures. And while the narrator passes over this particular point in silence, the potential trauma of Lyonnel’s ancestry and his origins in the infamous clan are explicitly at issue, and are an essential backdrop to his fraught, if glorious, rise to eventual kingship. Grandson of Gelinant du Glat and great-nephew of the infamous Darnant, Lyonnel is a young squire at the time of Alexander’s arrival in Britain. And like the other descendants of Gelinant, Lyonnel devotes himself from the very start to assimilation into the new dominant culture. At every turn, however, his encounters with the Greek monarchs remind him of his tainted heritage. Fleeing from his wicked relatives, the young Lyonnel meets Perceforest in the forest, but his eager request for news of the king’s progress is met with a discouraging response: Dittes moy que vous voulez a Percheforest et je vous en diray ce que j’en sçay, sauf a ce que vous ne soyez du lignaige de Darnant. (I.i, p. 407) [Tell me what you want from Perceforest and I will tell you what I know, provided you’re not of the lineage of Darnant.]

Having explained himself and been accepted into Queen Ydorus’s Knights of the White Rose, Lyonnel remains defensive about his ancestry. At his first meeting with Lydoire, having killed the Golden-Haired Giant, he explains himself with these words: Or sachiez que je suys filz a l’aisné filz de Gelinant du Glat, qui fut frere a Darnant l’enchanteur, nonpas frere en ses vices, mais frere d’une mere et nompas d’un pere, et sy suys appellé Lyonnel. (II.ii, p. 117) [Now know that I am the son of the eldest son of Gelinant du Glat, who was the brother of Darnant the Enchanter, not in the brotherhood of his vices, but a half-brother sharing a mother and not a father, and I am called Lyonnel.]

Though he cannot deny his ancestral ties to the clan, Lyonnel here does everything he can to distance himself from his notorious great-uncle. Subjected to stringent tests and continuous scrutiny by the queen, and constantly made to feel unworthy of the maiden that he longs to marry, Lyonnel nonetheless has no choice but to strive for acceptance, for there is no turning back. His kinsmen, furious at his betrayal and subsequent rise to fame as Marshall of Scotland, now want only to kill him: he is, we subsequently learn, ‘le chevalier ou monde que ceulx du sang Darnant l’enchanteur heoient le plus’ [the knight whom the lineage of Darnant the Enchanter hated most in all the world] (II. ii, p. 348). Having severed himself forever from his original clan affiliations,



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Lyonnel must now prove himself worthy of acceptance in the new regime. And although his chivalric exploits bring him universal acclaim, he is tormented by conflicting guilt and desire in the realm of love. It is bad enough that he is never able to present his trophies to Blanchete in person. The lion, the shield with the paws and talons embedded in it, and the head of the giant are stolen from him by a rival knight, plunging him into despair. Lydoire easily sees through the imposter and installs the trophies in the Temple de la Franche Garde, and when Lyonnel finally locates the temple she knows very well that he is the true hero, since none but him can open the enchanted door. Nonetheless, she toys with him by accusing him of attempting to steal the trophies and feigns anger before finally allowing him to enter the palace and meet Blanchete face to face. Later, as Lyonnel is fulfilling the requests of Blanchete and Gadifer respectively to bring them the battered shields that he, at their request, used in Perceforest’s tournament, even these lesser trophies are stolen by Lydoire’s invisible agents. When Lyonnel finally arrives at the Temple de la Franche Garde, his shields have already joined the display. Moreover, Lyonnel’s contact with Blanchete is strictly regulated: he is not to speak to her or touch her in any way without Lydoire’s permission. When the two lovers accidentally brush fingers during dinner, Lyonnel is initially overjoyed and ecstatically kisses his finger, only to find that both it and his mouth have turned black. Once again Lydoire flies into a rage and threatens dire punishments, including the permanent loss of Blanchete, if he ever dares to touch her again. So great is Lyonnel’s shame and horror at his misdeed that he sheds tears ‘si grosses que poix’ [as large as peas] (II.ii, p. 137). His remorse effaces the black stain and he is forgiven, but that night his desire and guilt resurface in a dream in which he hugs Blanchete and fondles her. Lyonnel’s pleasure does not last long even in the realm of dreams, for as he takes Blanchete’s hand he sees that his own hands are now coal black.14 At this, in ‘si . . . grant meschief que a pou qu’il ne mouroit de dueil’ [so wretched that he nearly died of grief], Lyonnel lets out ‘ung cry sy grant d’angoisse’ [such a great cry of anguish] that both he and his squire are rudely awakened; they find themselves, as always with guests at the Scottish royal palace, lying fully armed in the forest with their horses nearby (p. 140). And even though he is reassured, upon waking, to see that the black stains have disappeared, Lyonnel nonetheless takes advantage of the first spring he comes to in order to wash his hands. More so than any of the other knights, then, Lyonnel is portrayed as struggling with an overwhelming love that simultaneously propels him onward to ever more glorious feats of arms, and also fills him with feelings of terror, guilt, and unworthiness. Lydoire’s capricious testing and toying with Lyonnel continue unabated throughout the long courtship. Even after all of his expoits, when Gadifer is fully 14

Roussineau interprets the passage as saying that Blanchete’s hands are black (II.ii, p. LXXV). To my mind, however, the context makes clear that Lyonnel’s own hands are blackened. This reading is supported by Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et ses deceptions’, p. 459.

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prepared to give Lyonnel his daughter in marriage, Lydoire holds out, announcing that their daughter can only marry a king. In order to make this possible, she then offers a royal crown as first prize in Perceforest’s annual tournament, and she gives Lyonnel further reason to hope by presenting him with a tiny ring, telling him that when the ring is able to fit over his finger, it will be a sign that he can ask her for a boon. Lyonnel wins the crown and, during a momentary lull, discovers that the ring now fits on to his finger; but when he goes to claim his prize, the ring seems to have disappeared. Once again overcome with shame and remorse, Lyonnel abruptly leaves the field and gives way to a flood of self-recrimination: Si dist qu’il n’estoit digne de advenir a aucune perfection, ains se tenoit pour le plus malheureux chevalier du monde. . . . Atant il osta son heaume et le jecta par terre comme homme foursené. (IV.i, pp. 34–5) [He said that he was not worthy of achieving any perfection, but he considered himself the most pathetic knight on earth. . . . He took off his helmet and threw it on the ground like a maniac.]

Sadistically, Lydoire confronts Lyonnel, forces him to confess to the apparent loss of his ring, and informs him that the enchantment would allow it to be lost only if its bearer were guilty of extreme lacheté; if he has indeed lost it, she proclaims, then he is ‘du tout ahonti sans quelque respit ou remede’ [utterly shamed, with no hope of recovery] (p. 41). Only when she has reduced him to a state of utter abjection, as if ‘feru au travers du cuer d’une espee’ [pierced through the heart by a sword] (ibid.), does Lydoire draw Lyonnel’s attention to the fact that the ring is in fact still on his finger. The reader can only assume that it was there all along, and that Lydoire’s magical powers have been causing it to vanish and reappear as suits her purposes. Lyonnel’s experience of love, then, is always tinged with violence and a potential for ruinous humiliation, from the the moment that he first lays eyes on Blanchete in the forest – when he has to fight first the two knights in the queen’s guard and then the monstrous bull produced by her enchantments – up to the final moment before the marriage is at last granted. This love inspires legendary feats of prowess, yet his trophies are always taken from him to reappear mysteriously in the queen’s temple museum, in which Lyonnel himself is reduced to an icon of Greek royal power. The strangely taboo nature of his love for Blanchete and the way that it simultaneously exalts and dehumanises him is emblematic of his status as an indigenous clansman striving to live down his shameful, sexually ‘perverse’ ancestry, and to achieve membership in the dominant power structure of Greek Britain. The authenticity of Lyonnel’s assimilation, his genuine internalisation of the monarchy’s world view, is highlighted in the episode of the impostor Harban, who helps to shape our perception of Lyonnel by providing a foil. The wicked Harban steals Lyonnel’s trophies and attempts to pass himself off as the one who killed the lions, the dragon, and the giant, hoping thereby to win the hand of the



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princess. Lyonnel, as we have seen, imitates a model that he somehow intuits, that of the ‘true lover’, and which he embodies to perfection. Troïlus mimics that same paradigm, not without certain slapstick side-effects, but ultimately successfully. But if these two heroes strive for an inner conformance to their model, Harban indulges in a self-consciously deceptive masquerade, a hostile mimicry that presents only the outward feint of heroism. For Harban, the ideals of heroism inspired by love are purely a disguise donned for self-serving ends, and as a devious pretender to Blanchete’s hand he poses a sinister threat to the royal family. He and his accomplices must therefore be subjected to dreadful punishments, their tortured bodies displayed upon the landscape as signs of royal power. However fraught, Lyonnel’s own exploits are accepted as ‘the real thing’. And his success is an implicit acknowledgment that the lignaige Darnant are not a monolithic entity, and that despite their suppression and exile, the clan did contribute in some part to the greatness and the glory of Perceforest’s Britain. Implicitly, then, Lyonnel’s successful assimilation into the Greek dynasty, like that of Lyriope, foreshadows the full-fledged return of the lignaige Darnant in Book VI, when they will suddenly emerge from their continental exile and reassert their claims to the English forests.

Recovered Memories As early as Book I, there were allusions to a flight of clan members from Britain to Brittany, but little emphasis was placed on this fact. The reader has been allowed to forget, or nearly to forget, the very existence of this rival culture, this reconstitution of the clan across the Channel. In Book VI, however, we discover that the followers of Darnant have not been consigned to oblivion after all. They are alive and well in Brittany, where they have constructed a culture based on the worship of Darnant as a god, and focused entirely on the desire to reclaim their British heritage. While the dominant culture in Britain has staked its credibility, its very identity, on the elimination of the lignaige Darnant, it turns out that the clan descendants themselves have been pursuing what Said terms ‘an act of resistance by recollection’, refusing to succumb to a ‘hegemony [that] effectively erases memory and says it’s all bunk’.15 The narrative overall grants the clan no redemption: they are as evil now as they were before. Still, the emergence of this heretofore invisible people as a serious threat to the Greek dynasty reveals how partial, how inadequate the historical narrative of Perceforest’s chronicler really was. As Warren has noted, conquerors generally ‘remember to remember, imagining the incorporation of past differences into a new whole’.16 The existence of Gelinant 15 16

‘Interview’, in Said Reader, p. 441. Warren, History, p. 15.

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du Glat, the ‘good’ clan leader, and the assimilation of his lineage into the Britain of Perceforest and Gadifer, together with the flaunted defeat of Darnant and his followers, illustrate this colonial myth of past differences overcome. As we have seen, the violence of the conflict was ultimately suppressed from the lived experience of the realm, consigned to the pages of the ancient chronicle and subsumed by the comforting vision of a glorious heroic past. The conquered, however, in Warren’s words, ‘forget to forget, commemorating original violence as a resistance to post-colonial hegemony’ (ibid.); and this is precisely what the exiled members of the lignaige Darnant have done. The significance of having Darnant as an ancestor, or being of his lineage, was disputed throughout the reign of Perceforest. Lyonnel, as we have seen, suffered it as an embarrassment. Late in Perceforest’s reign the episode known as the ‘Conte de la Rose’ once again raises the question of clan membership and its cultural implications. As discussed in Chapter 3, this episode pits the courtly construction of gender promulgated by Perceforest against that favoured by the lignaige Darnant, and results ultimately in the degradation of the two clansmen and their expulsion from court. The episode of the ‘Conte de la Rose’, as well as the various raids and terrorist acts committed by Bruyant sans Foy and his followers, remind the reader periodically that vestiges of the clan remain, resistant to the Greek monarchy and its cultural values even as they are slowly assimilated into its feudal structures. Still, the eventual defeat of all of these figures, along with the spectacle of Darnant deep in the pit of hell, condition the reader to see him as the quintessential Other, a figure of evil and exile. Thus it comes as a bit of a shock to discover a culture of displaced Britons on the Continent who explicitly ground their sense of identity and their claim to legitimacy in their descent from Darnant. As Gallafur is engaged in driving the evil spirits and clan ghosts out of the Forest, he and his companion Blanor are captured by a group of spirits and delivered to King Nagor of Brittany. Nagor is the grandson of Britus, who led the failed rebellion against Perceforest, and a distant cousin to Darnant. And he has in no way ceased to regard the British forests as rightfully belonging to himself and his people. To have captured the son of Gadifer, leader of the army that defeated Britus, is an opportunity he could scarcely have hoped for. Nagor thus summons his men to decide how the two enemy knights will be executed, and the terms of his speech are striking: Et quant ilz furent tous assemblez le roy Nagor leur print a racompter comment Darnant, qui est devenu dieu depuis sa mort et regne de nuyt en sa forest en la Grant Bretaigne, si a envoyé deux chevaliers qui le guerroyent en sa forest, et le veullent mettre a destruction, luy et son lignage qui le servent en son paradis. (V, ch. 8, fol. 23r) [And when they were all assembled King Nagor began to tell them how Darnant, who has become a god since his death and reigns by night in his forest in Great Britain, has sent two knights who were attacking him



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in his forest, wanting to destroy him, along with his kinsmen who serve him in his paradise.]

It is not just the ghosts of the clan that Gallafur has been fighting; it now emerges that these are in contact with the clan descendants, who stand ready to assist in this epic battle for the British forests. The Breton knights decide to burn Gallafur and Blanor in a huge fire on a mountaintop, where the act can be seen as an example to the entire kingdom. But the inhabitants of Brittany will not be the only spectators: Et la pourra veoir le dieu Darnant de son paradis, qui luy sera moult aggreable. (fol. 23v) [And the god Darnant will be able to see it from his paradise, and it will be very pleasing to him.]

In their continental exile the depravity of the lignaige Darnant has only grown more intense, leading them to worship a damned soul in the pit of hell, to make of him their god, and to offer up human sacrifice. Fortunately, the tireless Zephir is on hand to rescue the heroes and speed them back to Britain, along with Nagor’s daughter who has fallen in love with Blanor. But the damage has been done: infuriated at this evasion of justice and at the loss of his daughter, Nagor plots his revenge. It will be an alliance of Bretons, Danes, and Sicambrians who subsequently invade Britain and destroy all memory of Perceforest and his lineage. And once the Sicambrian Scapiol has established himself as king of Great Britain, he rewards his allies by giving Wales to the Danes, and by restoring the forests to the descendants of the lignaige Darnant. The wicked clan, then, returns from the realm of memory to reassert its rule in the forests; Perceforest’s legacy is suppressed and forgotten. Or is it? With the collapse of Perceforest’s dynasty comes a return of the bad old days, with the lignaige Darnant terrorising the women of the forests. The memories that are recovered here are nightmarish ones, and they threaten to destroy the very fabric of the kingdom. Scapiol discovers with a shock that the ladies of the forest, in constant fear of the predatory clansmen, no longer offer hospitality to knights errant. To save the kingdom it is necessary for further memories to be recovered, and this occurs in a conversation between Scapiol and one of the ladies of the forest: Et elle qui bien le sceut racompter racompta comment Darnant l’enchanteur et son lignage faisoient excés sur les dames et damoiselles des forestz, et comment le noble roy Perceforest, dont pour lors on n’osoit parler ne faire mention, les mist en franchise et destruysit ce pervers lignage. (VI, ch. 59, fol. 110r) [And she, who knew well how to tell it, told how Darnant the Enchanter and his lineage committed excesses against the ladies and damsels of

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the forests, and how the noble king Perceforest, of whom now no one dared speak or make mention, liberated them and destroyed that perverse lineage.]

The female experience of sexual terror, so vividly described by the various ladies of the forest in their earlier encounters with Perceforest and Alexander, re-emerges in this later revelation to Scapiol. As at the beginning of Perceforest’s reign, the public discourse of land rights, sovereignty, and succession is replaced by, or redefined as, one of gender norms and sexual practices. The return of the lignaige Darnant, originally linked to the suppression of Perceforest and his lineage, in the end provides the occasion not only for the revival of Perceforest’s memory, but also for the recovery of his male heir: for the ultimate demise of Nagor and his clan is directly linked to the ascendancy of Olofer, Gallafur’s eldest son. Alerted to the wickedness of the clan, Scapiol later joins Olofer in their extermination. It is only then that Scapiol learns that Olofer is actually Ygerne’s brother, and thus the descendant of Perceforest and Gadifer. Ygerne promises to keep this a secret, recognising that the British knights have now all turned against the ‘lignage de Grece qui destruysirent les Troyens’ [lineage of Greece, who destroyed the Trojans] (VI, ch. 60, fol. 111r). But Scapiol nonetheless honours his brother-in-law by marrying him to the Duchess of Cornwall, and later by marrying his own children to those of Olofer. Gallafur’s three children thus achieve what is needed to ensure that, however anonymously, Perceforest’s legacy will be transmitted to future generations. Olofer eradicates the lignaige Darnant; young Gallafur converts to Christianity and lays the foundations of the Grail quest. Ygerne marries Scapiol, enables her brother’s rise to aristocratic power, and approves the (somewhat unorthodox) marriage of her own children to his, thus ensuring once again the concentration of Greek bloodlines in the lineage of Arthur. Under the reign of Scapiol, the revived Trojan culture defines itself in seamless continuity with the original Trojan regime established by Brutus and other refugees, effacing all trace of the Greek era. The Trojans establish their cultural dominance and hegemony, yet they will, inevitably, become the fulfilment of the prophecies originating with Perceforest’s Britain: Arthur will be descended from Gadifer, Perceforest, and Alexander, and will draw Perceforest’s sword from the stone where Gallafur embedded it while acting on the instructions from the Dieu des Desirriers and the Deesse des Songes. Arthur will marry a descendant of the Dieu des Desirriers, and his reign will be prepared by Merlin, descendant of Estonné and Priande. Just as Perceforest’s culture was an imposition from the outside posing as a fulfillment of indigenous prophecies and a doubling of Trojan models, so now the new regime, in restoring a Trojan heritage that will give rise to the Arthurian kingdom and the adventures of the Grail, is at once an outside imposition of foreign rule on to Greek Britain, and a fulfilment of Greco-British futurism. Perceforest’s Greek Britain emerges here as victorious in the sense that it



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succeeded in shaping a vision of the past that made it the fulfilment of prophecies, while also staging itself as the past that would be fulfilled in the glorious future still to come. In due course, as the medieval audience knows, the restored Trojan kingdom will once more give way to invasion and rule, first by Saxons, then by Normans, heirs to a different line of Trojan descent. And just as the Britain of Perceforest and his descendants was both a culmination and the originary matrix for a greatness yet to come, so Arthurian Britain will be viewed in a similar light, as a culmination of native British glory, and as a legacy claimed by the Norman rulers of England.

Parallel Histories The return of Trojan hegemony is an example of the rewriting of history, the creation of a competing optics that transforms history by selecting for different details. But this phenomenon of alternative histories has already emerged during the episode of the Sicambrian king Policés’ attempted marriage to Clamidette, daughter of the giantess Galotine and Clamidés. When the Sicambrian party that has come to fetch Clamidette is blown off course and lands in Britain, they encounter the young Nero, son of Nestor and Neronés, and welcome him aboard their ship for the night. Explaining their mission, Policés’s nephew Thorax gives an account of Clamidette’s ancestry that omits any reference to her grandfather’s brutality. In fact, the giant is described in positive terms as ‘si puissant, si hardy et si chevalereux que son pareil n’avoit au pays’ [so powerful, so bold and chivalrous that he had no equal in the land] (V, ch. 6, fol. 29r). Thorax’s tale does replicate in part the one told to Lyonnel by the giant’s wife: having fallen in love, the couple eloped from their home in Denmark because he was not of high enough rank to marry her, and they settled on the little island where Lyonnel later found them. But Thorax makes no mention of sexual violence or incest arising after the birth of their daughter, nor of Lyonnel as a saviour: il se fist seigneur de la terre qu’il conquist, et en jouyt paisiblement grant temps avec sa dame, qui moult estoit belle femme, sage et discrette. . . . Et comme l’on recorde en nostre pays, ce geant fut mis a mort par ung vaillant chevalier de ce pays, qui en sa compaignie avoit ung gentil homme qu’il fist chevalier aprés sa victoire, et luy donna a femme la jeune Gallatyne, pourquoi il demoura seigneur de la terre. (ibid.) [(the giant) made himself lord of the land that he conquered, and ruled peacefully for a long time with his lady, who was a very beautiful woman, wise and discreet. . . . And as is recorded in our land, that giant was killed by a valiant knight of this country, who had a nobleman with him that he knighted after his victory, and gave him the young Galotine as wife, so that he became lord of the land.]

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In this version of events, Lyonnel’s invasion is unmotivated; he simply conquers the island and installs his follower as lord, just as the giant himself had earlier killed its original lord in his own act of conquest. This recasting of the rapacious Golden-Haired Giant as an ordinary (if gigantic) island lord might be seen as similar to the shifting identities of the monstrous Green Knight who is also the hospitable and courtly Bertilac, in the late fourteenth-century Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. It is the perspective from Arthur’s court that sees a regional lord, potentially threatening in his resistance to centralised royal power, as inhuman and menacingly invulnerable to the power wielded by the Round Table. In his own castle Bertilac is neither green nor gigantic, and the people that he rules, baffled by Gawain’s 17 enquiries about a Green Knight, have evidently never seen him as inhuman. The new perspective opened up by Thorax might cause us to wonder if the GoldenHaired Giant was similarly cast as a threat primarily because he represented a power base outside the reach of Greco-British royalty. We have, after all, been told that the chronicle on which Perceforest is supposedly based was compiled from the knights’ own accounts of their adventures. In other words, the description of the giant as incestuous, murderous, and hated by his people derives from a record kept at Perceforest’s court, and ultimately comes down to the word of Lyonnel himself, hardly an objective party. If we return to the narrator’s account of Lyonnel’s exploit, it is clear that there is indeed the possibility of an alternative reading. It is true (perhaps) that when Lyonnel finally locates the Golden-Haired Giant, he finds that the giant is an evil creature, and that both his wife and his subjects want nothing more than to be freed from his reign of terror. But of course this was not actually the reason for Lyonnel’s quest. He sets out to kill the giant not out of concern for the life and liberty of some distant islanders, but because the giant’s head is the price of an audience with Blanchete. Lyonnel’s drive to kill the giant, in other words, is a translation of heterosexual desire into homosocial violence against a foreign man, a displacement of the potential violence of rape – had he lived up to the reputation of his fellow clansmen – into an arena deemed socially acceptable. Lyonnel does take advantage of the giant’s evil intentions as a means of justifying his actions, telling the giant’s wife: ‘Madame . . . se ce n’estoit fors par sa mauvaise vie que vous me dictes qu’il maine, sy ay je fiance que je l’occiray’ [Madame . . . if for no other reason than the wicked life that you tell me he leads, I am determined to kill him] (II.i, p. 350). The combat itself, however, is entirely defined as a fight for the giant’s head. Lyonnel tells the giant forthrightly that he has come to carry off his head as a love token. And when the giant later taunts Lyonnel, the knight explains that he is waiting to get a clear strike at the neck without damaging the hair, since ‘la belle a qui les ay promis a plus chier les cheveulx que la teste et pour ceste pitié en joïssez vous encores’ [the fair one to

17

On this reading of Sir Gawain, see Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, pp. 114–36.



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whom I have promised it cares more for the hair than for the head, and because of that concern, you still have use of it] (p. 358). Clearly, any benefits devolving to the giant’s family or to his subjects are quite incidental to Lyonnel’s real mission, one of sexual desire and upward mobility, informed by the perspective of the royal court into which he hopes to marry. And in the eyes of Scotland’s Greek rulers, the lord of a distant island is nothing more than an exotic curiosity whose interestingly coloured hair makes his head an attractive museum piece. As for Clamidés, we might do well to remember that he never shared Lyonnel’s commitment to love; indeed, he had nothing but scorn for the very idea. He was a faithful squire who strove courageously to serve his knight, but his opinion of love is summed up in his sardonic comment, ‘j’ay plus veu de saiges devenir folz en regardant bealté de femme que de folz devenir saiges’ [I have seen more wise men made foolish by gazing upon feminine beauty than fools made wise] (II.i, p. 192). His seduction of Galotine might charitably be taken as the sign of a sudden conversion, but it might equally be seen as a simple diversion on his part, an instance of that very folly inspired by ‘bealté de femme’. Contained within the stirring tale of noble love, heroic prowess, and the sexual liberation of an island, in other words, there lurks another story in which the giant is simply a foreign lord whose realm was invaded by an adventuring knight. Having killed the lord in order to impress the princess he is courting and to entertain her with an unusual trophy, the knight then gives the realm to his squire, who has already raped the lord’s nine-year-old daughter. If the people do not resist, it could well be because, having seen the ease with which the intruders dispatched their lord, they consider it wiser to seek the new lord’s favour. Thus is yet another island brought within the orbit of the British courts. The Golden-Haired Giant, originally from Denmark, is the Scandinavian ruler of an island associated with the Shetland or Orkney Isles: lands whose medieval lords maintained a considerable degree of autonomy while manoeuvring between the kings of Scotland and Norway, and which did not come under Scottish rule until the marriage of James III to Princess Margaret of Denmark in 1468.18 Within the framework of late medieval international politics, it is perhaps not surprising if the powerful Scottish queen Lydoire perceives this island lord as a barely human Viking marauder, occupying land that should rightfully belong to Scotland. Elsewhere in Perceforest the Norwegians are also vilified for their predatory designs on the princess Neronés and her kingdom of the Estrange Marche, apparently situated along the northern edges of Scotland. Defeated by Neronés’ brother in an alliance with Gadifer and Nestor, the Norwegians are forced to accept Nestor as their king. It is Nestor’s son who now marries Clamidette, settles with her on the nearby Isle du Serpent, and founds the lineage that will lead to King Lot and the kingdom of Orkney. When looked at from one perspective, we have a triple 18

Barrell, Medieval Scotland, pp. 76–7, 171–2. The precise location of the Isle du Geant is impossible to determine, but the text specifies that it could be reached only by sailing past the Isle du Serpent, which eventually becomes the seat of the kingdom of Orkney.

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love story: a valiant knight on a mission to win the hand of a beautiful princess, a monstrous giant whose innocent daughter falls in love with her rescuer, another young maiden who is saved from a forced marriage by the young knight who loves her. But we are also shown another perspective, from which this tale of love and chivalry dissolves into one of military expansionism, a chapter in the ongoing British and Scandinavian rivalry for control of northern lands. An even more extreme bifurcation of histories occurs with the tale of Dorine, whom Policés marries after the loss of Clamidette, and Passelion, who penetrates the castle where she is kept under the guard of Policés’ elderly sister. When the lovers are discovered Policés leads a party of armed men to capture Passelion, but the young knight escapes with the aid of Zephir. Desperate for vengeance, the furious Policés condemns Dorine to be burnt at the stake. Intent on reducing her body to ash, he keeps the fire burning for days, but to no avail: the body is seemingly indestructible, glowing amid the flames ‘en la maniere de ung charbon, vermeil comme rose’ [like a hot coal, red as a rose] (V, ch. 39, fol. 102r). When the flames finally die down, the astonished people find ‘une ymage faicte en maniere de femme tres bien ouvree’ [an image in the likeness of a woman, very skilfully made], with gilded hair, a royal crown, and richly coloured garments (ibid.). Their reaction is decisive: Et moult fut le peuple esmerveillé de ceste ymage, et disoyent que la deesse Venus y avoit monstré ses myracles et qu’elle [Dorine] n’avoit coulpe en ce que le roy luy avoit mis sus. (ibid.) [And the people were amazed by this image, and said that the goddess Venus had performed a miracle and that Dorine was not guilty of what the king had alleged.]

Worshipping their martyred queen as a goddess, the people construct a temple around the image. The king, ‘tout confus’ [utterly bewildered] (ibid.), makes no effort to stop them. Filled with despair, he retires to his bed to reflect on the judgment of which he had been so certain, and its cryptic outcome. So intense is his anguish at this turn of events that he becomes paralysed, and dies soon thereafter. Having described this marvel, the narrator then promises to reveal ‘la verité de ceste adventure’ [the truth of the matter] (ibid.). The real Dorine, we learn, is spirited away to join Passelion; the two are given a kingdom where they will enjoy a prosperous reign, subduing the neighbouring lands and founding a lineage characterised by military might and ruthless power. Their final descendant – somewhat ominously – will be a king who makes a fur cloak out of the beards of conquered kings. This is Retho or Rion, here unnamed, but known from citations in Geoffrey of Monmouth and other texts.19 And what of the mysterious image? The narrator offers an explanation that is comical for its very simplicity. It is, 19

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, X.3. Retho is eventually killed by Arthur.



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of course, the work of Zephir: ‘Ce fut une ymage de terre de pottier qu’il avoit faicte qui depuis fut tant au feu qu’elle fut cuytte et convertie en pierre par force de feu’ [it was an image of potter’s clay that he had made, which was then in the fire for so long that it was fired and turned to stone by the strength of the flames] (fol. 102v). The miraculous image, object of a pagan cult, is an ordinary ceramic statue. What, then, are we to make of this complicated string of events? In many ways the episode is classic matière de Bretagne. The knight who comes upon a lonely mal mariée locked in a tower, the lovers’ discovery and narrow escape, aided and abetted by a magical being: the Perceforest author draws here on conventional and deeply familiar motifs, reminiscent of such texts as Marie de France’s Guigemar or Yonec. Dorine’s passionate lament over her unhappy marriage to a cold, jealous old man for whom she feels only revulsion sets the stage for Passelion’s intervention and the ensuing love affair. Moreover, although he has impregnated and abandoned numerous other damsels with scarcely a second thought, Passelion does genuinely care for Dorine. When Zephir rescues him from the clutches of Policés, Passelion laments that he cannot possibly be happy without the maiden that he loves and for whose safety he is now deeply concerned; and he is overjoyed when the two are reunited. One would be inclined to sympathise with the lovers, yet there is another side to this story: that of Policés who, upon learning of his wife’s infidelity, ‘fut moult dolent, car il aymoit a merveilles la belle Dorine’ [was devastated, for he deeply loved the fair Dorine] (fol. 99v). Lying in bed, where he will die of a broken heart, the old king indulges in a lament of his own, reflecting on the pain of his loss and the cruelty of the interloper who (as the king believes) caused Dorine’s death: ‘Haa! dist il, comme ores suis malheureux quant pour ung enchanteur j’ay perdu mon deduyt et mon soulas. Haa! le faulx meurtrier . . . comme il a cueilly ce fruyt a plain auquel tu as mainteffoys failly.’ (VI, ch. 47, fol. 90v) [‘Ha!’ he said, ‘how miserable I am when I have lost my pleasure and my solace because of a magician. Oh! the false murderer . . . how fulsomely he gathered that fruit which I often failed to get.’]

The ultimate shame, as the old king now admits, is that he was too old and infirm to enjoy his young wife properly even when he had the chance. The portrayal of the husband as a wronged character, remorseful and tormented, imparts a note of ambiguity to the tale. In the old king’s tears, we are reminded that this blissful love, this fierce lineage, is purchased at a price, that it has come into being only through the ruthless exclusion of other trajectories, other desires. Small wonder, perhaps, that this lineage will culminate in a king who is the very embodiment of violence, flaunting a cloak constructed from his victims’ bodies. And as the Sicambrians regroup around their ceramic image, the culture that was robbed of its queen and its hopes for an heir to the throne is further undermined

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by the flagrant fraudulence of its idol. History, as a narrative that gives shape to the past, splits before our eyes into different versions, one of which casts Dorine as a guilty adultress, while the other two portray her as an innocent victim; and of these, one gives her an active role as queen, wife, and mother, while the other views her as standing outside history, fixed for all time as an iconic object of worship. From the account of the Sicambrian king’s marital misfortunes, there emerges the implication that in historical narrative something will always be suppressed, and that as a result there can be no absolute historical truth, but only competing versions. A history of imperial conquest, expansionism, and ethnic rivalry will be one in which an originary transgression, an act of violence, is glossed over, its illegitimacy suppressed. The story of military or sexual adventuring will tell of a ruler so unworthy, so fiendishly wicked, that his head is preserved as an icon of savagery conquered by civilisation. It will tell of a king selfishly pursuing his lust well past the age of marriage, one hundred years old when he takes the young wife whom he cannot possibly satisfy, and with whom he will certainly not produce an heir. It will tell of a rescue, heroic and amorous, whereby the land/wife held in thrall to an unworthy lord is freed and can become fertile and productive, re-entering history. Yet lurking behind these tales, with their triumphalism, their courtly refinements, their focus on mutual love, is another tale, one of violence and loss, of murder, betrayal, and remorse. As with the visual and spatial examples that we saw in Part I, the historical narrative of Queen Dorine in particular forms an anamorphic discontinuity, triangulated into public and private versions. In both public versions – that accounting for the lineage that she founds with Passelion, and that embraced in the Sicambrian cult of ‘la deesse Dorine’ – she is innocent, though for different reasons. What we might call the ‘British’ or ‘courtly’ version of the story imposes the model of the Breton lai, valorising the love shared between two young people and discrediting a marriage that was contracted for purely dynastic reasons; the ‘Sicambrian’ or ‘hagiographic’ version denies the adultery altogether, making Dorine the victim of a deluded jaloux, a tyrannical king. The trauma suppressed from both of these accounts is visible only from the perspective of the husband and king himself: his sense of violation, his unbearable grief. The subject-position of the wronged husband is, of course, generally excluded from consideration in courtly tales of illicit love, as is that of the persecuting king in hagiographic tales of female martyrs. In an interesting twist, the Perceforest author here aligns these much-maligned positions with that of the king of a conquered people. For that, ultimately, is the position taken by the twice-cuckolded Policés in his dying request for vengeance against ‘ceulx de Grece qui destruirent jadis les Troyens dont nous sommes descendus’ [those Greeks, who long ago destroyed the Trojans from whom we are descended] (VI, ch. 47, fol. 91r). Policés’ perception of Clamidette’s and Dorine’s seduction as part of a long series of Greek crimes against Trojans, effects yet another inversion in the endless interplay between Greek and Trojan perspectives that operates throughout the



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romance. Not only is the adulterous crime itself cast as a typically Greek atrocity, but so is the guilty knight’s miraculous escape. Policés rightly suspects that his rival has benefited from the magic arts long associated with Great Britain. But rather than identifying these as a Trojan characteristic, as elsewhere in the text, this king of Trojan descent perceives the magical ploys of his adversary as quintessentially Greek, exclaiming that ‘luy et le roy Perceforest yssirent du pays du filz a l’enchanteur le roy Alexandre, qui tout le monde mist en sa subgection par son art magicque’ [he and King Perceforest came from the land of the son of the magician, King Alexander, who conquered the whole world through his magic arts] (V, ch. 39, fol. 101v). In reality, as the reader knows, Passelion is not Greek at all. His mother, Priande, is descended from King Priam’s sister, making Passelion a distant cousin of that Trojan adulterer Paris – and of Policés himself. But Policés turns the tables here, suddenly – for the first time in the text – invoking Alexander’s own origins in a royal act of adultery aided and abetted by magic. This perspective calls into question the legitimacy both of Alexander’s crown and of his global empire, setting the stage for the Trojan reconquest of Britain and the suppression of the Greek legacy. The king’s indignation against what he sees as typically Greek behaviour, and his desire for vengeance, recall the explanation of events leading up to the Trojan War that is given by the supposedly Trojan poet known to medieval Europe as Dares the Phrygian. In Dares’s account, repeated by Benoit de Ste-Maure and other medieval authors, it was the destruction of Troy by Hercules – itself a response to the Trojan king Laomedon’s abusive treatment of Greek guests – and the abduction of Priam’s sister Hesione by Hercules’ follower Telemon, that aroused the Trojan desire for vengeance and ultimately led to Paris’s abduction of Helen.20 A close look at the fraught history of Greco-Trojan relations, from the events of Perceforest back into distant antiquity, thus reveals an infinite regression of vengeance and counter-vengeance, abduction and counter-abduction of women, in which neither side is wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. The very notion of a history of absolute ethical clarity, made manifest in the relics and signs that it produces, is mocked by the episode of Passelion and Dorine. In this light, in fact, the reader might well rethink the significance of the various tombs and mutilated corpses on display throughout Perceforest’s Britain. Once seemingly absolute in their meaning, these monuments in fact depend entirely on the perspective of the beholder if they are to mean anything whatsoever. For Perceforest and his kingdom, Darnant is the most dreadful of evil spirits, one whose very grave must be shunned; for his exiled descendants, he is a god. The ‘real’ of history is written on the bodies of its victims, witnesses, and participants as sexual violation, insemination and birth, torture, sacrifice, and death. But the ‘signifiance’ of these lived experiences – that elusive clarity eternally sought by the inhabitants of medieval romance – can only be approached through the mediation of ideologically charged discursive models. One set of mutilated 20

See Ehrhart, Judgment, pp. 31–4.

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corpses kindles a profound reverence for the fallen heroes and a burning desire for vengeance, while the other set inspires self-righteous joy. But which meaning adheres in the dead bodies of Lyonnel, Gadifer, Nestor, and Bethidés, and which in those of the lignaige Darnant, the Golden-Haired Giant, or Dorine herself, depends on the political sympathies and the ethnic or genealogical identity of the viewer. In the fabrication of the clay statue, as in the stitching together of the dead bodies of British knighthood, in the proudly exhibited head of the giant, and in the theatrical displays of the bodies of clan members, we see, literally, the construction of history, the forging of cultural icons. In the various reactions to these objects we come to see that all such historical icons are ultimately works of artifice, shaped by the beliefs of their creators and subject to the interpretative powers and agendas of their viewers. In the end, the demise of Greco-British civilisation, like that of the Round Table, is over-determined. The Sicambrians are motivated by male rivalry over women, and by the distant memory of their ancestors’ defeat at Troy; the Bretons, also ethnically Trojan, are intent on reclaiming their lands. The Danish participation may simply allude to the Viking raids that would leave their indelible mark on British history, although the reader may be expected to remember that Norman historiographical traditions identified them, too, as Trojan, the descendants of Antenor.21 In any case, the victors with their diverse agendas do agree on one thing: that Trojan people must not be ruled by Greeks. This is explicit in Scapiol’s proclamation that ‘le lignaige du roy Perceforest’ must be consigned to absolute oblivion. The precise reasons for the invasion remain blurred. Is it an act of vengeance for the abduction of two Sicambrian brides? Yet Policés himself admits that ‘se j’eusse esté bien advisé je n’avoye mestier d’elle [Clamidette] ne de la belle Doryne’ [if I had been properly advised, I had no need of Clamidette nor of the fair Dorine] (VI, ch. 47, fol. 91r). The ultimate reason given for the proposed invasion is simply that the rulers of Britain are descended from those who vanquished Troy, and are thus the ancestral enemies of European Trojans. Though it may have been stereotypically Trojan transgressions that drew the British knights into conflict with their neighbours on the Continent, in the end it is Perceforest’s Greekness, antithetical to Trojan ascendancy, that causes him and his legacy to be excised from British history.

21

The Trojan identity of the Normans depends on the identification of Antenor as the ancestor of the Danes, an idea apparently invented around the turn of the tenth century by Dudo of Saint-Quentin; see Ingledew, ‘Book of Troy’, pp. 682–5.

Conclusion This study has examined the construction of culture and history through the careful management of difference. We have seen complementary, or at times contradictory, impulses: strategies of hybridisation, assimilation, and fusion on the one hand, and of separation, isolationism, and purification on the other. In closing I wish to examine a pair of images through which this insoluble problem of difference is emblematically expressed: the two dragons unleashed at the Perron Merveilleux to be interred in a subterranean pool, and their comical double, a pair of serpents in a fountain. The two dragons, red and white, are identified as the very ones later figuring in the prophecies of Merlin. Whether they are understood in their original sense of representing the Britons and the Saxons, or whether they are additionally seen as representing Trojans and Greeks, one thing at least is clear: any dream of ethnic purity, of a British identity existing in isolation from ethnic and cultural difference, is impossible. The dragons, hidden in a pool beneath Mount Snowdon like a time bomb waiting to go off, figure inter-ethnic strife as the fundamental violence of history, the crucible in which ‘Britishness’ is forged. And in the context of Perceforest itself, the furtive burial of these highly charged symbolic beasts can be seen, along with the concealment of the ‘ancient chronicle’ narrating the secret of Britain’s Greek heritage, as a virtual staging, mutatis mutandis, of Said’s comment that ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and underground self ’. The two dragons appear only briefly at the end of Book IV and the beginning of Book V, and their exact role is puzzling. They are attached with chains to the Perron Merveilleux, apparently for the sole purpose of being released by whichever knight is capable of braving their violent attacks long enough to cut through the chains. This knight, of course, is Gallafur, using the sword that once belonged to Perceforest, which remains embedded in the stone for the future Arthur to withdraw. As soon as the chains are cut, Alexandre Fin de Liesse catches hold of them and rides at top speed into the forest, taking the dragons with her; it is for this reason that she is known only as the ‘Pucelle aux Deux Dragons’ throughout Book V and into Book VI. Gallafur at once follows, guided by the brilliant flames breathed by the dragons, which can be seen from afar. Eventually, he arrives at a spot from which he (and he alone) is able to observe the dragons’ interment. 

Said, Orientalism, p. 3.

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The dragons are a dramatic spectacle, yet at the same time curiously gratuitous. Even given the need for a test that would identify the man destined to rid the realm of ghosts and demons, marry Alexandre, and inherit the throne, still the importance of the dragons is far from clear. Not only were they chained to the Perron solely so that they could be cut loose, but they seem to have been produced at all only to be hidden away and buried at a secret location. Gallafur voices the bewilderment that the reader too might well be feeling, asking the hermit who presides over the burial for ‘la signifiance des deux dragons’ [the meaning of the two dragons] (V, ch. 1, fol. 2v). He is told only that they will serve as a sign in the future, so that a descendant of Estonné can prove his talents. Gallafur does not know what to make of this, but the reader recognises that the wise man will be Merlin, that he will demonstrate his occult knowledge by revealing the dragons and their pool as the reason why Vortigern’s tower always founders, and that the dragons’ significance will be revealed in his famous prophecies. In one sense, then, the dragons are simply a device for the unleashing of historical prophecy and reflection itself. They appear only in order to be hidden, and are hidden only so that they can later be revealed, as if in a cartoon-like enactment of the processes of remembrance and forgetfulness that characterise the production of competing historical records. They seem almost devoid of reality in and of themselves, but as signs they are immensely potent. They appear at crucial moments, when the survival of the British kingdom is most in question, and in their unceasing combat they represent the very principle of ethnic difference as a source of violent conflict. Little is of straightforward meaning in Merlin’s hermetic utterances, but the dragons themselves are the one thing that he does gloss explicitly: Ue rubeo draconi, nam exterminatio ejus festinat. Cauernas ipsius occupabit albus draco, qui saxones quos inuitasti significat. Rubeus uero gentem designat britannie, que ab albo opprimetur. (Historia VII.3, p. 385) [Alas for the Red Dragon, for its end is near. Its cavernous dens shall be occupied by the White Dragon, which stands for the Saxons whom you have invited over. The Red Dragon represents the people of Britain, who will be overrun by the White One. (tr. Thorpe, p. 171)]

The battle of the dragons represents the destruction of the kingdom through the introduction of foreign blood. The crumbling of Vortigern’s tower, caused by the buried dragons in their watery prison, foreshadows the conquest of Britain by Saxon invaders. In Perceforest the dragons also take on a more immediate significance, that of the grand conflict between Greek and Trojan that defines British history as depicted here. Gallafur will drive out the remnants of the Trojan resistance, his marriage with Alexandre will concentrate Greek blood in a single line of descent, and the two of them will restore the kingdom in all its glory: a Greek monarchy



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ruling over Trojan subjects. Yet even before the end of their reign, the kingdom will be invaded by Europeans of Trojan descent, and in the following generation Greek blood will be absorbed, silently and invisibly, into an overtly Trojan lineage. Whatever their future importance for Merlin and Vortigern, this bestial struggle hidden beneath the rocks is also a figure for the buried secret of the Britons themselves, that of their ethnic impurity. The red dragon of the Britons stands for a Trojan kingdom marked by Greek cultural institutions, ruled by a mixture of Greek and Trojan blood, and framed within a long history of recurrent Greco-Trojan conflict. The two warring dragons in their intimate prison thus represent not only the future battles between indigenous Britons and foreign invaders, but also the fundamental difference that is subsumed within Britishness itself. The first adventure that Gallafur undertakes after witnessing the dragons’ burial is that of ‘l’espee vermeille’: a red sword that will turn black if its bearer succumbs to the sexual wiles of Capraise and her sisters. When Gallafur is bewitched and nearly seduced by Capraise he comes close to failing this test, but manages to escape with his virtue intact, and his sword still rosy in colour. Hearing rumours of his liaison with Capraise, however, Alexandre is furious. It is only after he sends her the sword and she sees its colour that she accepts his innocence; at this stage she affirms that she will grant him her love, but only after he has rid the land of the ghosts of the lignaige Darnant. The scene where Alexandre examines the sword is of complex construction. The reader does not actually witness her actions directly; rather we see them through the eyes of Gallafur, who in turn watches the action in the mysterious reflections that appear in a fountain where he is waiting in the forest. He sees first a host of beautiful female faces; as they come more clearly into focus he realises that they are visible at the windows of a grand tower, and that the most beautiful among them is Alexandre, identified here only as the Pucelle aux Deux Dragons. As he watches, he sees Alexandre take the sword from the damsel to whom he has entrusted it. Gallafur’s delight at this sight is almost unbearable: ‘il n’y eust peu estre sans perdre toute contenance, par quoy il estoit a ce point comme en paradis’ [he nearly lost all control, for at that he felt like he was in paradise] (V, ch. 33, fol. 83bis r). But his bliss is shattered as the images are dispelled by ‘ung serpent . . . qui encommenca a nager au travers de la fontaine et a esmouvoir l’eaue tellement que les viaires illecques apparans se prindrent a diversifier et a perdre leurs façons’ [a serpent . . . which began to swim across the fountain and to disturb the water so much that the faces appearing there began to distort and to lose their features] (ibid.). Gallafur chases the creature away with a stick, and the images return in time for him to see Alexandre unsheath the sword, acknowledge his innocence, and reflect on the dangers of malicious rumours. But as he is once more in ecstasy, the waters are again disturbed and the images  

See my ‘Amorous Performances’. See Ferlampin-Acher, ‘Perceforest et ses miroirs’, pp. 330–2.

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destroyed by the serpent, who displays an extraordinary gaiety as he frolics with his mate: le serpent . . . qui desirant estoit de s’esjouyr pour la saison delectable, resaillit de son creux, puis se print a nager tout chantant selon sa voix, parmy l’eaue . . . et en nageant endroit soy faisoit undes nouvelles qui faisoient changer les figures des visages ou le chevalier avoit prins son deduyt . . . Si abaissa la veue sur la fontaine et voit que le serpent estoit au meillieu de l’eaue en festoyant sa femelle et son pareil. (V, ch. 33, fols 83bis r–v) [the serpent . . . desirous of enjoying itself in the delightful season, sprang from its crevice, and began to swim through the water, all the while singing in its own way . . . and in swimming it stirred up new ripples which changed the shapes of the faces that the knight had been delighting in . . . So he lowered his gaze to the fountain and saw that the serpent was in the midst of the water cavorting with its mate.]

Going for his stick, Gallafur clears the waters once again, just in time to see Alexandre confirm that he has accomplished ‘l’adventure des vrays amans’ and that ‘nul autre ne scaura tant de mon estat comme celluy fera’ [no other man will know as much about me as he will] (fol. 83bis v). But then the rambunctious serpents reappear, ‘car nature les en semmonoit’ [for nature spurred them on] (ibid.); and when Gallafur attempts to chase them away for a third time, he falls into the water. By then the scene is fully dispelled and he finds the damsel standing behind him, sword in hand. Teasing the drenched and discomfited knight, she reveals that Alexandre has witnessed his entire altercation with the serpents, and that she was much amused. On one level the creatures that obstruct Gallafur’s view of his beloved are a sign of the erotic desire that he must, at this stage, suppress. As he watches Alexandre handle and examine his sword, sign of his sexual fidelity, Gallafur’s intense feelings are, as it were, personified in these amorous serpents, reminders of the primal scene of temptation and sin. And their carefree mating is a stark reminder of what he must renounce if he is to accomplish the exorcism of evil spirits. This latter task, after all, is not only a political but a religious one, accomplished by invoking the ‘Son of the Virgin’ and brandishing the sign of the Cross. Gallafur is clearly a kind of proto-Galahad, and in his quest as in the Grail quest, sexual purity is paramount. To stop here, however, would be misleading. Gallafur is legitimately in love with Alexandre and their relationship is not destined to remain chaste forever; they will, indeed must, marry. And his mission, despite its spiritual overtones, is defined as love service, not only by Alexandre herself but also in the mysterious inscriptions that mark his progress. The verse inscription that appears promptly  The sixteenth-century edition reads ‘en festoyant son pareil’; I have emended the text based on the MS Bibl. Nat. fr. 348, fol. 247v.



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on the spot to commemorate his victory at Darnant’s tomb, for example, refers to his exploit as ‘l’espreuve des vrays amans’ [the test of true lovers] (VI, ch. 3, fol. 7v). The sexual temptation that threatened to alienate Gallafur from his beloved and to sabotage his mission was posed not by Alexandre herself, but by Capraise. And it is his resistance of Capraise’s sexual enticements – not those of Alexandre – that he must now prove by displaying the colour of his sword. Unlike Galahad, Gallafur has no commitment to a life of virginity. His only obligation is to direct his desire to a maiden of his own lineage, and to win her by performing particular deeds. It was thus the purity of Gallafur’s bloodlines that was at stake in his encounter with Capraise, and not that of his soul. Having discovered through their divinations that ‘du lignage au bon roy Gadiffer d’Escosse descendra ung hoir de si hault renon que en sera parlé loing et pres’ [from the lineage of good King Gadifer of Scotland there will descend an heir of such high renown that he will be spoken of near and far] (V, ch. 18, fol. 55r), Capraise and her sisters set out methodically to entrap knights of that lineage with the sole aim of becoming pregnant. Capraise sought to seduce Gallafur ‘non pas tant por le plaisir du deduit come pour estre mere du fruit qui devoit issir du chevalier come prophetisé estoit’ [not so much for the enjoyment of sexual pleasure, but to become the mother of the progeny that was supposed to descend from the knight as had been prophesied] (V, ch. 17, fol. 51r). The threat that she poses – and that Gallafur’s rosy sword shows him to have overcome – is not that of sexuality as such, but that of miscegenation and bastardy. And it is this threat of miscegenation that is emblematically represented in the sexually active serpents that continually obstruct Gallafur’s vision of his second cousin and future wife. The two serpents, in sum, are an eroticised and miniaturised version of the dragons. The dragons are imprisoned in stone enclosures beneath a wild subterranean pool, from which they will emerge to engage in deadly battle; the serpents emerge from cracks in the rocks to cavort in a gentle fountain. Both pairs represent an absolute difference, that of race or ethnicity and that of gender respectively. And just as the dragons will some day undermine the king’s defensive tower and signify the immanent destruction of his kingdom, so the sexual antics of the serpents dispel the hallucinatory image of an erotic tower of maidens. Gallafur’s vision tells him that the Pucelle aux Deux Dragons has inspected his sword and seen that he did not father a child with Capraise; the damsel tells him that she has in fact been watching him at the fountain, as he struggled to drive the two serpents back into their rocky dens. But through the complex chains of association and symbolism set up within the text, both visual spectacles – the rosy sword of sexual purity, the serpents prevented from mating – come down to a single underlying message of carefully managed, endogamous sexuality. As Gallafur rebuilds his kingdom after the Roman devastation and drives out the remnants of an ancient enemy race, he suppresses a violent past of foreign invasion and ethnic strife. The two dragons, locked together and immobilised, buried in the wilderness, are a striking image for that attempt to foster a myth of

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cultural unity. The eroticisation of this image in the two serpents, in turn, foreshadows the solution embraced by the next generation. From a quasi-incestuous marriage aimed at achieving ethnic purity, we move to an inter-ethnic marriage that ensures the absorption of Greek lineage into Trojan, though the fact of this Greco-Trojan fusion is nonetheless scrupulously concealed by Scapiol and his descendants. More quasi-incestuous marriages occur in the generation after that, as a double marriage of first cousins – the son and daughter of Olofer, and the daughter and son of Ygerne and Scapiol – again concentrates Greek blood in the British royal lineage. The spectre buried beneath Mount Snowdon – the ‘signifiance’ of the two dragons – is that of an indissoluble reality that is both the salvation of the kingdom and its destruction. Ethnic difference is the secret of British success, for the infusion of foreign (Greek) blood into a degenerate (Trojan) knighthood lies at the origin of the kingdom that Gallafur inherits, and is the reason for its greatness. The revelation of hitherto unsuspected Greek blood in the royal lineage of the Britons gives a new meaning to Cassibelaunus’s indignant reply to Julius Caesar’s demand for tribute, as reported by Geoffrey of Monmouth: Opprobrium itaque tibi petiuisti cesar, cum communis nobilitatis uena britonibus et romanis ab enea defluat, et eiusdem cognationis una et eadem catena prefulgeat, qua in firma amicitia coniungi deberent. (Historia, IV.3, p. 307) [What you have sought from us, Caesar, is an insult to yourself, for a common inheritance of noble blood comes down from Aeneas to Briton and Roman alike, and our two races should be joined in close amity by this link of glorious kinship. (tr. Thorpe, p. 108)]

Thanks to the ‘ystoire celee’ brought to light in Perceforest, we now know that the Britons can boast not only the same illustrious Trojan lineage as the Romans, but also that of the Greeks who defeated the Trojans and sent Aeneas into exile in the first place. Arthur issues a similarly defiant response to a subsequent request for tribute, based on the Roman conquest of Britain some generations earlier: Nam si ideo quia iulius cesar ceterique romani reges britanniam olim subiugauerunt, uectigal nunc debere sibi ex illa reddi decernit similiter ego censeo quod roma tibi tributum dare debet, quia antecessores mei eam antiquitus optinuerunt. (Historia, IX.16, p. 462–3) [If the Roman decrees that tribute ought to be paid him by Britain simply because Julius Caesar and other Roman leaders conquered this country years ago, then I decree in the same way that Rome ought to give me tribute, in that my ancestors once captured that city. (tr. Thorpe, p. 233)]

Seeing Arthur as descended from the conquerors of Troy, and indeed from



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­ lexander, self-styled emperor of the entire world, only enhances this claim of A British, or at least Arthurian, supremacy. But the genealogies imagined in Perceforest provide more than an intricate layering of Greek and Trojan strains in the ethnic background of Arthurian Britain. The remnants of other races and other cultures, overrun and destroyed or absorbed by those of Greek and Trojan descent, also enter the bloodlines. Arthur, for example, is descended not only from King Priam (via Scapiol) and Alexander the Great (via Ygerne and her mother Alexandre Fin de Liesse), but also – through Gallafur and his mother Flamine – from Aroès, the very epitome of pagan depravity. Close ties between the Isle du Geant and Sicambria resulted in several marriages linking those realms; Scapiol himself – and therefore also Arthur – are descended not only from King Priam but also from the GoldenHaired Giant. Nero’s marriage with Clamidette transmits a similar ethnic mix to Sir Gawain. This rich and complex mingling of Aegean and Nordic strains is a reflection of the cultural hybridity inherent in the medieval tradition of translatio studii et imperii itself. As R.W. Southern has noted: In the tenth century several new peoples . . . were beginning to achieve political importance and respectability. With this there came the conviction, or perhaps only the hope, that they were no longer barbarians but belonged to the civilized peoples of Europe. . . . But [they] were largely cut off from their mythological origins by their conversion to Christianity and by the Latin learning which stood between the literate part of society and its native past. Hence it was in Roman history that they found the broken pieces which they could build into a picture of their own origins and destiny.

Northern European claims of Trojan descent, in other words, are themselves the fabrication of a people dislocated from their native traditions, seeking to reinscribe themselves within the cultural and historical narratives of Imperial Rome. Derek Walcott states that ‘the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters’. Yet, Walcott notes, the New World was forged out of loss, migration, and exile on both sides of the cultural divide, that of ‘Crusoe and Prospero’ as much as that of ‘Friday and Caliban’ (p. 372). From this loss of innocence, this melancholic sense of exile and displacement, something new emerges: ‘the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning assimilation. . . . What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal’ (p. 373). Addressing ‘the ancestor who sold me’ and ‘the ancestor who bought me’ along with the ‘father in the filth-ridden gut of the slave ship’, Walcott celebrates ‘the monumental groaning and soldering  

Southern, ‘Aspects’, p. 189. Walcott, ‘Muse’, p. 371.

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of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice’ (pp. 373, 374). A similar reading might be applied to medieval depictions of the problematic hybridity that is Britishness. If the indigenous British giants were massacred and exiled into mountainous caves by the Trojans, no less were the Trojans themselves exiles, fleeing the destruction of their homeland and enslavement by their conquerors. The Saxons in turn, not unlike many New World immigrants, present themselves as ‘expulsi a patria nostra’ (Historia, VI.10) [banished from our own country] (tr. Thorpe, p. 156), because of overpopulation back home. Perceforest, Gadifer and their lineage are also uprooted from their homeland, and – much to Perceforest’s distress – bereft of their Greek overlord and the empire that had once defined Britain as a Greek protectorate. Walcott’s moving characterisation of the New World’s ancestors – indigenous, African, European – as all equally ‘exiled from your own Edens’ (p. 374) might be applied to the diverse races that are portrayed as combining, often violently, to form Britain. In Szkilnik’s words, Perceforest is constructed to produce an Arthurian kingdom in which ‘yesterday’s enemies are reconciled’. As we have seen, history itself is highly malleable in Perceforest, and it is often in association with the motif of marriage and the separation or fusion of bloodlines that these shifts in perspective are revealed. The Golden-Haired Giant may in fact have been a rapacious monster; but once he has become the ancestor of British and European nobility, he is remembered as an able ruler and valiant knight who accepted exile from his homeland in the name of love. The terrifying Aroés, in turn, is abducted right out of history by the demons who carry him off to Hell, leaving the tomb of his virtuous, proto-Christian queen to mark the origin of the Irish kingdom and of the bloodlines that would lead, through Flamine, to royal houses of Ireland, Britain, and Scotland. The need to adapt, to follow the new trajectories of history and to preserve something of the old by creating something new is expressed poignantly in Zephir’s words to Ygerne as she is being courted by Scapiol: Damoiselle, festoyez ce chevalier et l’honnorez ainsi que pucelle doit faire. . . . Et ja soit il de ceulx qui vostre lignage ont destruit, ce ne peult estre recouvré. L’ancienne lignee est passee. Il en fault faire de nouvelle. Il n’y a autre restor en ce present siecle. (VI, ch. 57, fol. 107v) [Damsel, greet this knight and honour him as a maiden should. . . . Even though he is one of those who destroyed your lineage, that cannot be recovered. The old bloodlines are gone. New ones must be created. There is no other means of restoration at this point.]

What was wrong for Bethidés – marriage with someone of an enemy race – turns out to be right for Ygerne. Miscegenation spells first the destruction of the kingdom, then its only hope for salvation. 

Szkilnik, ‘Conquering Alexander’, p. 214.



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Geoffrey of Monmouth tells us that Vortigern thought to bolster his kingdom through alliances with the Saxons, and took a Saxon bride, the princess Renwein. But this ill-fated marriage with a woman of foreign blood and alien (non-Christian) culture proved to be but the harbinger of the bloody battles that would, in the end, result in the conquest and oppression of his people by hers. In Geoffrey’s text the two dragons, Briton and Saxon, already represented both the threat of miscegenation and that of military conquest and rule by a foreign people. The former, indeed, is a potent tool in achieving the latter; as Geoffrey notes, with regard to Briton restiveness about the growing Saxon presence: Iam nesciebatur quis paganus esset quis christianus. quia pagani filias. & consanguineas eorum sibi associauerant. (Historia, VI.13) [Already no one could tell who was a pagan and who was a Christian, for the pagans were associating with their daughters and their female relations.] (tr. Thorpe, p. 161)

The Perceforest author has elaborated upon the famous dragons by superimposing the frisky serpents on to the image of the Pucelle aux Deux Dragons, in the context of Gallafur’s determination to marry a maiden of his own lineage. In this double image of duality – the dragons in a forced togetherness, always ready to burst into deadly struggle; the serpents forced apart as they strive to conjoin and mate – we see the twin impulses that have operated throughout the long historical narrative of Perceforest: hybridity and purity, fusion and isolation, the spectre of incest and that of miscegenation. And in this overlay of ethnic warfare and intermarriage, we see the intimate relationship of the military or imperial and the sexual as forms of conquest and conjoining – for better and for worse – across the boundaries of culture, race, and lineage.

Glossary of Proper Names in Perceforest This is not a comprehensive list of persons and places in Perceforest, but only of those that figure in this study Alexander, Alexander the Great Alexandre Fin de Liesse, daughter of Bethoine and Alexandre Remanant de Joie; wife of Gallafur; queen of Great Britain. Also called the ‘Pucelle aux Deux Dragons’ Alexandre Remanant de Joie, son of Alexander and Sebille; husband of Bethoine Aroès, wicked magician and king of the Roide Montaigne; father of Flamine Benuicq, son of Troïlus and Zellandine; husband of Lionelle Bethidés, son of Perceforest and Ydorus; king of England or Great Britain; husband of Cerse. Also known as the ‘Chevalier Blanc’ Bethoine, daughter of Perceforest and Ydorus; wife of Alexandre Remanant de Joie Betis, a character from the Voeux du paon; crowned by Alexander as king of England or Great Britain; name changed to Perceforest Blanche, daughter of Lyonnel and Blanchete; wife of Exillié Blanchete, daughter of Gadifer the Elder and Lydoire; sometimes called Blanche; wife of Lyonnel du Glat Blanor, British knight of Gallafur’s generation Britus, English knight; leader of an uprising against Perceforest Bruyant sans Foy, nephew of Darnant; leader of resistance against Perceforest Camille of Hurtemer, British princess; wife of Ourseau the Younger Capraise, niece of Morgan la Fee; tries to seduce Gallafur Cerse, Roman damsel; wife of Bethidés; queen of England or Great Britain Chastel Desvoyé, invisible stronghold of Bruyant sans Foy Chevalier a la Belle Geante, name given to Clamidés after his marriage to the giantess Galotine Chevalier a la Blanche Mule, identity adopted by Maronés Chevalier au Delphin, one of twelve British knights who made vows at the coronation tournament ‘entre Sidrac et Tantalon’; also known as the ‘Dieu des Desirriers’ Chevalier au Griffon, one of twelve British knights who made vows at the coronation tournament ‘entre Sidrac et Tantalon’ Chevalier Blanc, identity adopted by Bethidés Chevalier Doré, identity adopted by Nestor Chevalier Muel, a Roman knight who joins Perceforest’s court Clamidés, squire of Lyonnel du Glat; husband of Galotine; also known as the ‘Chevalier a la Belle Geante’ Clamidette, daughter of Clamidés and Galotine; betrothed to King Policés of Sicambria; elopes with Nero

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Claudius, English knight who assists in Perceforest’s battles against the lignaige Darnant Cuer d’Acier, pseudonym adopted by Neronés when dressed as a squire Dache (1), wife of Peleon; queen of Cornwall Dache (2), daughter of Dache and Peleon; heiress to Cornwall Dagin, nephew of Darnant; cousin of Lyriope Dardanon, Trojan priest who came to Britain in the entourage of Cassandra; hermit devoted to the cult of the ‘Dieu Souverain’; spiritual adviser to Perceforest Darnant, wicked sorcerer and English knight; leader of the lignaige Darnant Deesse des Songes, posthumous identity of Sarra, at whose temple the knights experience admonitory and prophetic dreams Dieu des Desirriers, name given to the Chevalier au Delphin because of his reputation for fulfilling the desires of maidens Dorine, wife of King Policés of Sicambria; elopes with Passelion Estonné, Scottish knight; Comte des Deserts d’Escoce; husband of Priande Exillié, British knight; son of the Chevalier au Delphin; husband of Blanche Fezonas, character from the Voeux du paon; sister of Gadifer and Perceforest; wife of King Porrus of India Flamine, daughter of Aroés, king of the Roide Montaigne; wife of Gadifer the Younger Flora, wife of Aroés; mother of Flamine Franc Palais, Perceforest’s palace, and the name given to a chivalric order founded by Perceforest Gadifer (the Elder), character from the Voeux du paon; brother of Perceforest and husband of Lydoire; crowned by Alexander as king of Scotland Gadifer (the Younger), eldest son of Gadifer the Elder; heir to the Scottish throne; husband of Flamine Gallafur, eldest son of Gadifer the Younger and Flamine; husband of Alexandre Fin de Liesse; king of Great Britain Galotine, daughter of the Golden-Haired Giant; wife of Clamidés; also known as ‘La Belle Geante’ Gayant aux Crins Dorez, see Golden-Haired Giant Gelinant du Glat, brother of Darnant; grandfather of Lyonnel du Glat; the only ‘good’ leader of the lignaige Darnant Gloriande, lady of the forest, betrothed against her will to Darnant; assists Perceforest in his battle against the lignaige Darnant Golden-Haired Giant, ferocious and incestuous giant whom Lyonnel du Glat must behead as love-service for Blanchete; father of Galotine Griant de la Haulte Forest, brother of Darnant; leads resistance against Perceforest Harban, Scottish knight who steals Lyonnel’s trophies and attempts to woo Blanchete Holland, evil giant killed by the Chevalier au Delphin Hollandin, nephew and adopted son of Holland; rescued by the Chevalier au Delphin; husband of Marse Le Bossu de Suave, knight in the service of Perceforest Le Tor, Scottish knight; Comte de Pedrac; husband of Lyriope lignaige Darnant, the descendants of Darnant and his brothers; powerful clan controlling the English forests at the time of Perceforest’s coronation, and largely resistant to his rule



GLOSSARY OF PROPER NAMES

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Lionnelle, daughter of Lyonnel and Blanchete; wife of Benuicq Luces, Roman knight; lover of Cerse both before and after her marriage to Bethidés; assists in Caesar’s invasion of Britain Lydoire, character from the Voeux du paon; wife of Gadifer the Elder; queen of Scotland; known as ‘La Royne Fee’ because of her knowledge of magic Lyonnel du Glat, English knight; grandson of Gelinant du Glat and great-nephew of Darnant; husband of Blanchete Lyriope, English maiden; saves the life of Gadifer the Elder at the castle of Malebranche; companion of Priande and Blanchete; wife of Le Tor Malaquin (1), pseudonym used by Cerse when dressed as a man Malaquin (2), son of Darnant whose demonic spirit guards Darnant’s tomb Malebranche, son of Darnant; brother of Lyriope; killed by Gadifer the Elder Margon, knight at Perceforest’s court; hero of the ‘conte de la rose’ episode Marmona, daughter of Maronés, king of the Estrange Marche; lover of Passelion Maronés, British knight and king of the Estrange Marche, also known as the ‘Chevalier a la Blanche Mule’; brother of Neronés and father of Marmona; also the name given to his son Marse, British damsel; wife of Holland Melean, knight of the lignaige Darnant temporarily at Perceforest’s court; one of the villains of the ‘conte de la rose’ episode Nabel, pseudonym adopted by Bethidés during his continental adventuring Nabon, knight of the lignaige Darnant temporarily at Perceforest’s court; one of the villains of the ‘conte de la rose’ episode Nagor, king of Brittany; grandson of Britus Nero, son of Nestor and Neronés; husband of Clamidette Neronés, daughter of the king of the Estrange Marche; wife of Nestor Nervin, knight of Zelland; betrothed to Zellandine before her marriage to Troïlus Nestor, second son of Gadifer the Elder and Lydoire, also known as the ‘Chevalier Doré’; husband of Neronés; eventually becomes King of Norway Norgal, British knight of Gallafur’s generation Olofer, eldest son of Gallafur and Alexandre Fin de Liesse Ourseau (the Elder), third son of Gadifer the Elder and Lydoire; born covered with fur, and taken to be raised in Rome Ourseau (the Younger), eldest son of Ourseau the Elder; Roman knight Passelion, son of Estonné and Priande; husband of Dorine after her marriage to Policés; lover of numerous damsels Peleon, king of Cornwall; husband of Dache Perceforest, the name given to Betis, a character from the Voeux du paon; brother of Gadifer the Elder; husband of Ydorus; crowned by Alexander as king of England or Great Britain Pergamon, a hermit whose twelve nieces are provided with husbands by means of a series of twelve tournaments Perron Merveilleux, a stone located near Perceforest’s castle, in which Perceforest’s sword is embedded for the future Arthur to withdraw; site of prophecies concerning British history Pierote, damsel from the Roide Montaigne who seeks help for Flamine Policés, king of Sicambria; betrothed to Clamidette before her elopement with Nero; husband of Dorine before she escapes with Passelion

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Ponchonnet, British minstrel who performs the lais that preserve the tales of Perceforest’s reign Priande, Scottish maiden; sister of Troïlus; companion of Lyriope and Blanchete; wife of Estonné Pucelle aux Deux Dragons, name given to Alexandre Fin de Liesse before her marriage to Gallafur, owing to her role in capturing the red and white dragons at the Perron Merveilleux and taking them to be buried under Mount Snowdon Royauville, the first city established in the ‘Deserts d’Escoce’ by Gadifer the Elder; birthplace of Priande and Troïlus Sanguin, youngest son of Gadifer the Younger and Flamine; king of Ireland Sarra (1), a lady of the Forest; assists in Perceforest’s battle against the lignaige Darnant Sarra (2), daughter of the above; lover of Benuicq, who abandons her and their child in order to marry Lionelle Scapiol, son of Thorax; Sicambrian conqueror and king of Great Britain; husband of Ygerne Sebille, a lady of the Forest; lover of Alexander; mother of Alexandre Remanant de Joie Sorence, damsel in the Selve Carbonniere (Hainaut); the mistress of Branius, a knight killed by Estonné; later Estonné’s mistress Thorax, nephew of Policés, whom he succeeds as king of the Sicambrians; father of Scapiol Torette, daughter of Le Tor and Lyriope Troïlus, brother of Priande; companion of Lyonnel du Glat; husband of Zellandine Utran, younger son of Gadifer the Younger and Flamine; king of Scotland Ydorus, a character from the Voeux du paon; wife of Perceforest and sister-in-law to the Sultan of Badres. Ygerne, daughter of Gallafur and Alexandre Fin de Liesse; wife of Scapiol; queen of Great Britain Zelland, the Lord of Zellande (Zeeland); father of Zellandin and Zellandine Zellandin, the heir to Zellande; brother of Zellandine Zellandine, sister of Zellandin; wife of Troïlus. Zephir, a fallen angel and a trickster, but also devoted to the cause of British ascendancy; modelled on the character of Merlin

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Index Modern critics are included only when their names appear in the main body of the text. Entries for fictional characters do not include mere passing references. Aeneas 142, 167–8, 170 Alexander the Great 1, 4, 6–7, 10, 16, 62, 116–7, 156–8, 171–3, 181, 205; as lover 14–5, 77, 156; medieval reputation 2, 9 Alexandre Fin de Liesse 134, 190, 207–11 anamorphosis 57–8, 83–6, 92, 121–2, 128, 152 apes 65–9, 71, 134 Aristotle 11, 86 Aroès 34–5, 120–2, 126, 128–9, 213, 214 Arthur 7, 10, 87, 155, 170, 178, 187, 190, 198, 212–3 Bartlett, Robert 7, 8 Baswell, Christopher 179 beste glatissant 54–9 Bethidés 173, 214; and Cerse 117, 131–4, 138–9, 147–52, 157; battles with Nestor 44–5, 148–9; chevaliers de mer 59–63 Betis 1, 4, 172–3, 175, 177; see also Perceforest Bhabha, Homi 40, 93, 162–3, 177, 184, 186 Blanche 115 Blanchete 115, 187; see also Lyonnel du Glat Bloch, R. Howard 94 Boehmer, Elleke 10, 15–6, 111 Bossu de Suave, Le 63–9, 92, 134, 137, 186 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de 15 Britus 161, 172–3, 196 Brutus 3, 7, 155, 161, 181 Bruyant sans Foy 79–80, 81, 104, 173, 196; see also Chastel Desvoyé Burgwinkle, William 93 Butterfield, Ardis 114 Caesar, Julius 131, 135, 136–7, 156 Capraise 152n.16, 209, 211

Carruthers, Mary 35 Carter, Paul 33 Cerse 117, 119, 130–4, 147–51; see also Bethidés Certeau, Michel de 162, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191 Chastel Desvoyé 81, 83–6 Chevalier au Delphin 79–80, 131; as Dieu des Desirriers, 105–9, 137–8, 168, 190, 198 Chevalier Blanc, see Bethidés Chevalier Doré, see Nestor Chevalier Muel 157 chevaliers de mer 59–63, 69, 71 Chrétien de Troyes, Conte du graal 26, 32, 39–40, 41, 166; Chevalier de la charrete 145–7; Chevalier au lion 145–7, 149 Cité des dames 38 civilising mission 4–5, 11–2, 25–43, 50, 94, 113–4, 116–7, 124, 181 Clamidés 123–4, 127, 201 Clyomon and Clamides 5 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 21, 166 colonialism, medieval 4, 7, 52–3, 174–5; see also Ireland; Wales Columbus, Christopher 11 Conrad, Joseph 15–7 ‘Conte de la Rose’ 80–1, 196 cross-dressing 147–50 culture, and nature 61–3, 69–72, 85, 162; see also hybridity; landscape; metamorphosis Dardanon 171, 188 Darnant 46, 63, 90–1, 93, 129, 177, 196–7, 205; see also lignaige Darnant Davis, Ralph 179 Despenser, Hugh 3, 153–4

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Diderot 15, 18 Dido 67, 69, 134, 142, 167–9 Dieu des Desirriers; see Chevalier au Delphin Dorine 169, 202–5 dragons 207–9, 211–2, 215 Drake, Sir Francis 11, 42–3 Edward I, King of England 179 Edward II, King of England 3, 141, 153–4 Edward III, King of England 1, 153, 179–81 Edward IV, King of England 180–1 Eeley, Penny 8 Eneas 141–2 Estonné 19, 33, 111–3, 144–5, 208; as a bear 49–50, 53, 111, 184–5 ethnicity 7–8, 132–3, 135–7, 167, 178–9, 187, 189, 207–9, 211–5; see also giants; Greeks; lignaige Darnant; miscegenation; Normans; Romans; Saracens; Trojans Fabian, Johannes 35 Ferry, Jules 12 Flamine 13, 35, 136; see also Aroès Freedman, Paul 51 Froissart, Jean 153 Gadifer (elder) 1, 4, 10, 125–6, 145–7, 171, 188; civilises Scotland 11, 25–43; hunting accident 16, 49, 54–5, 175 Gadifer (younger) 81–4, 121–2 Galeholt 93, 127, 152 Gallafur 70–1, 93, 134, 169, 178, 183, 187–91, 196–7, 207–12, 215 Galotine 13, 72, 92–3, 123–4, 127, 201 Gawain 127, 149, 200, 213 Gelinant du Glat 20, 70, 74, 89–90, 161 Geoffrey of Monmouth 1, 2, 7, 93, 119, 140, 155, 175–6, 178, 179, 202, 212, 215 Gerald of Wales 1, 4–5, 52–3, 68, 99, 114, 120, 140, 167, 174–5 giants 115, 155; Green Knight 200; GoldenHaired Giant 72, 122–4, 127, 199–202, 213, 214; Holland 118, 137–9, 151; indigenous inhabitants of Britain 3, 99, 120, 214; see also Galeholt; Galotine Gilbert, Jane 151–2 Gloriande 75–6 Goldie, Terry 13–4 Greeks 17–8, 157, 170–3, 175–9, 181, 198–9, 204–6, 212–4 Greenblatt, Stephen 21

Griant de la Haulte Forest 78, 117–8, 172 Guenevere 119, 178, 192 Hahn, Thomas 7 Harban 53, 194–5 Heng, Geraldine 178 Henry of Huntingdon 30–1 homoeroticism 99, 139, 144–7; and heterosexual violence 141–4; Bethidés 147–52; Edward II 141, 153–4; Trojan 140–2 Houston, James A. 30 hybridity 71–2, 92–5, 161–3, 175–9, 207, 213–5 incest 118, 120, 125–30, 134, 151–2, 212, 215; Aroès and Flamine 13, 34, 120–2; Golden- Haired Giant 122–4; homosexual 139 Ingham, Patricia 99, 113, 175–6 Ireland 4–5, 35, 52–3, 68, 94, 130, 214 Iseut 178, 191 Isidore of Seville 30 Karkov, Catherine 52 Kay, Sarah 14 Kinoshita, Sharon 14, 88 Knight, Rhonda 114 Lancelot 145–7, 164, 168, 178, 192 landscape 27–8, 30–5, 45–8, 85 law, foundational 13, 35–7, 73–8, 99; natural 89–90 Le Tor 13, 101, 145–7; as a bull 50–1, 53 lignaige Darnant 16, 72, 89–90, 161, 174, 184–5, 191–2; fallen angels 90–4; resistance to Perceforest 20, 74, 81–94, 172, 195–8; sexual violence 13, 75–8, 99, 103, 118, 127, 142–3, 153, 197–8; see also Bruyant sans Foy; ‘Conte de la Rose’; Darnant; Griant de la Haulte Forest Long, Edward 66, 68 love, and chivalric culture 100–5, 117–8, 141, 143, 156, 163–7; and prohibition of rape 74–5, 99, 143 Loti, Pierre 69 Lovell, Nadia 57 Lucifer 90–2, 121 Lydoire 11, 16, 48, 86, 131, 135–7, 176, 178, 188; and Estonné 49–50, 135; and Lyonnel 126, 193–4 Lyonnel du Glat, 101–2, 136, 143, 156,



INDEX

173, 176, 180; and Blanchete 100, 102, 125–6, 193–5; and Golden-Haired Giant 122–4, 127–8, 199–202; lignaige Darnant 20, 94, 114, 161, 163, 191–5; kills lions 50, 124 Lyriope 13; as a greyhound 50n.4; assists Gadifer 76, 113, 145–7, 191 Machaut, Guillaume de 9n.25 Maddox, Donald 189 magic 205; Aroès 121–2, 128–9; lignaige Darnant 83–6, 93; Lydoire 11, 48–51, 86, 176; see also Zephir Marie de France 51–2, 94, 203 Marmona 168, 188 Marse 106–7, 108, 137–8 Medea 67, 69, 134 Merlin 198, 208 metamorphosis 49–53, 111, 168, 184–5 mimicry 40–3, 91–4, 121, 190, 195 miscegenation 118, 119, 130–5, 151–2, 211, 214–5 Moore-Gilbert, Bart 183 Nagor 196–7 Nero 127, 169, 199, 213 Neronés 150–1, 201; see also Nestor Nerves 107, 130–1, 150 Nestor 136, 201; and Neronés 104, 149–50, 152; battles with Bethidés 44–5, 103–4, 148–9; beste glatissant 56; Normans 141, 158, 175, 179, 199 Norway 152, 201–2 Obeyesekere, Gananath 11 Olofer 54, 56, 174, 198, 212 Orkney 127, 130, 201 Ourseau (elder) 70, 135, 137 Ourseau (younger) 70, 134, 135–7, 168–9, 185–7 Partonopeu de Blois 3 Passelion 79, 90–1, 167–8, 169, 186–8, 202–5 Patterson, Lee 178 Peleon 100 Perceforest 1, 10, 93, 104–5, 132–3, 138–9, 170, 176, 188; and beste glatissant 56–7; and the forest, 46–7, 84–5; melancholic illness 16, 75, 171–3; saviour of women 13, 74–5, 88, 144; see also Betis; law; rape; civilising mission Perceval 26, 32, 39–40, 41, 166

233

Perron Merveilleux 37–8, 78, 168, 177–8, 187, 190, 207 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 1 Policés 169–70, 199, 202–6 Polo, Marco 1, 120 Prawer, Joshua 6 Priam 3, 4, 7, 176, 205, 213 Priande, 43, 49; as ‘savage’ 19, 25, 31–2, 109–11, 114, 165; composer of lais 19–20, 109–13 property rights 36, 46, 73 Pucelle aux Deux Dragons, see Alexandre Fin de Liesse Quayson, Ato 8 race 7–8; see also ethnicity rape 13, 49–50, 73–7, 109, 111–3, 123–4, 165–6, 200; and anxiety of conquest 115–6, 130, 154–6; falsely claimed 81–2, 88–9; see also lignaige Darnant Remanant de Joie 15, 116, 190 Renan, Ernst 189 Robinson Crusoe 15 Romans 33, 131–7, 156–7, 212 Rossi-Reder, Andrea 6 Said, Edward 5, 6, 17, 181, 195, 207 Saracens 14, 88 Sarra (elder) 109, 168; as Deesse des Songes 190, 198 Sarra (younger) 168–9 Scapiol 170, 174, 178, 179, 197–8, 212, 213 Sebille 13, 14, 75, 77, 116 Shetland Isles 201 Simpson, J.R. 51 ‘Sleeping Beauty’ 164 Smith, Jonathan 29 sodomy 99, 140, 152; see also homoeroticism Sorence 111–3 Southern, R.W. 213 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 12–3, 87–8, 157, 183 Sponsler, Claire 154 Szkilnik, Michèle 34, 128, 214 Temple de la Franche Garde 50, 126, 190, 193 Thorax 170, 199 Todorov, Tzvetan 130 tombs 82–3, 184–9, 211

234

INDEX

Tournai, see Nerves Tristan 178, 192 Troïlus 101–2, 163–7, 195 Trojans 8, 32, 184, 198–9, 204–6, 212–4; bringers of civilisation 3, 33, 85; identity 39, 140, 161, 163, 167–70, 175–8, 181; sexuality 140–2, 156, 165, 167–9

werewolves 51–2 Wheatley, Phillis 18–20 White, Hugh 71 wilderness 27–8, 55, 57–8; see also landscape William I, Count of Hainaut 1, 2–3, 9, 153

Venus 116, 126, 165 Voeux du paon 1, 2, 4, 7 Vortigern 9, 119, 178, 208, 215

Ydorus 7, 117, 133 Ygerne 170, 174, 178, 198, 214 Young, Robert 38, 69, 94, 161 Yvain 145–7, 149

Wace 1, 155n.21 Walcott, Derek 213–4 Wales 39–40, 99, 120, 140, 174–5, 197 Warren, Michelle 155, 195–6 Watriquet de Couvin 2

Zellandin 104, 143 Zellandine 163–7 Zephir 49, 77, 91, 105, 127, 137, 164, 168–9, 197, 202–3, 214 Zumthor, Paul 27, 31, 188