Outsiders

Sylvia Huot

Description

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern perspective.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Lanzarote del Lago
• Tristán
• Edad Media
• Lancelot
• Round Table
• Middle Ages
• Lancelot du Lac
• Perceforest
• European
• French
• Tristan

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268081836
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

OUTSIDERS
The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies 2012
The Medieval Institute gratefully acknowledges the generosity of Robert M. Conway and his support for the lecture series and publications resulting from it .
PREVIOUS TITLES PUBLISHED IN THIS SERIES:
Paul Strohm
Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (2005)
Ulrich Horst, O.P.
The Dominicans and the Pope: Papal Teaching Authority in the Medieval and Early Modern Thomist Tradition (2006)
Rosamond McKitterick
Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (2006)
Jonathan Riley-Smith
Templars and Hospitallers as Professed Religious in the Holy Land (2009)
A. C. Spearing
Medieval Autographies: The I of the Text (2012)
Barbara Newman
Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular against the Sacred (2013)
John Marenbon
Abelard in Four Dimensions: A Twelfth-Century Philosopher in His Context and Ours (2013)
OUTSIDERS
The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance
SYLVIA HUOT
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2016 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Huot, Sylvia, author.
Title: Outsiders : the humanity and inhumanity of giants in medieval French prose / Sylvia Huot.
Other titles: Giants in medieval French prose
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Series: The Conway Lectures in Medieval Studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007506 (print) | LCCN 2016016930 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268031121 (paperback) | ISBN 0268031126 (paper) | ISBN 9780268081812 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268081836 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Romances-History and criticism. | French literature-To 1500-History and criticism. | Giants in literature. | Outsiders in literature. | Civilization, Medieval, in literature. | Arthurian romances-History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval.
Classification: LCC PQ221 . H86 2016 (print) | LCC PQ221 (ebook) | DDC 840.9/375-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007506
ISBN 9780268081836
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter 1 Inhuman Men and Knightly Fiends: The Vexed Humanity of Giants
Chapter 2 An Alien Presence: Giants as Markers of Race, Class, and Culture
Chapter 3 Touching the Absolute: Violence, Death, and Love
Chapter 4 Giants and Saracens in the Prose Tristan : Rival Narratives, Hostile Desires, and the Struggle to (Re)write History
Chapter 5 Outsiders in the Story: Galehot, Palamedes, and Saladin
Chapter 6 Desire, Subjectivity, and the Humanity of Giants
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book contains material, in revised form, that was originally published in the following locations: Unspeakable Horror, Ineffable Bliss: Riddles and Marvels in the Prose Tristan , Medium Aevum 71 (2002): 47-65; and Love, Race, and Gender in Medieval Romance: Lancelot and the Son of the Giantess, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (2007): 373-91.
I am grateful to the editors of Medium Aevum and the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature and to the editors of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Duke University Press, respectively, for permission to reprint this material. I would also like to thank the Biblioth que de G n ve, the Biblioth que Nationale de France, and Firestone Library at Princeton University for permission to publish photographs of medieval manuscripts in their collections. Finally, my thanks go to Pembroke College, Cambridge, for grants from the Fellows Research Fund in support of this study.
Many thanks to the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame for inviting me to deliver the 2012 Conway Lectures. The impetus this gave me to shape my thoughts about giants into something more cohesive, and the useful feedback from students and faculty members who attended the lectures, were invaluable in the evolution of this project. I am also grateful to the colleagues and students who contributed so much to my thinking on this subject; particular thanks go to Bill Burgwinkle, Miranda Griffin, and Tim Atkin, as well as others too numerous to mention. And as always, deep thanks to my husband and to my entire family for their loving support throughout my long interaction with the giants.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 . Guiron fights two giants. Paris, Biblioth que de l Arsenal, MS 3477, fol. 327v .
Figure 2 . Bohort fights Maudit. Paris, Biblioth que Nationale de France, fr. 119, fol. 424v .
Figure 3 . The giant rescues Luce from the royal guards. Geneva, Biblioth que de Gen ve, fr. 189, fol. 9r .
Figure 4 . Yvain fights Harpin de la Montagne. Garrett MS 125, fol. 56v, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library .
Figure 5 . Yvain fights Harpin de la Montagne (upper register); Yvain defends Lunete against the wicked seneschal and his supporters (lower register). Paris, Biblioth que Nationale de France, fr. 1433, fol. 90r .
Introduction
The study that follows is an examination of giants and their complex role in medieval French literature: principally prose romance set in the Arthurian or pre-Arthurian world, but sometimes also touching on other genres in both verse and prose. At the outset, I wish to clarify a point of terminology. My discussion of giants in these texts is sometimes cast in terms of relations and oppositions between giants and humans. I make this distinction not to deny the humanity of giants but to distinguish them from ordinary people. Medieval texts typically refer to giants as homme and giantesses as dame or pucelle, and there is no question that they are fundamentally human beings-however degraded or marginalized this humanity may at times be. In some ways, the category of giant is comparable to other racial or ethnic categories found in medieval literature, such as Saxon, Norman, Welsh, or Saracen; and it will be an important aspect of this study to examine the ways in which giants are a fantasy race, yet another of the diverse ethnic groups inhabiting Arthurian Britain, and a vehicle for reflection on the nature of both racial and cultural differences. Still, the common use of geant and geante clearly marks these men, women, and girls as set apart from the other human subjects of the Arthurian world. Even when giants form alliances with pagan lords, they are likely to assume a high-handed attitude, exacting tribute and brooking no interference with their affairs, or any challenge to their supremacy. It thus seems important to distinguish between giants of all kinds, wherever they may live, and the other characters with whom they interact. Since ordinary human knight, nongiant , or regular-sized person is too cumbersome to use on a regular basis, I will also use the terms giant and human to clarify this distinction.
It is further worth noting that medieval literature as a whole presents two very different kinds of giants: those who are descended from a fully giant lineage and those who are giants only through some accident of birth or exotic upbringing. Most giants in Arthurian romance are of the former type, with varying combinations and degrees of human potential for cultural refinement and ethical behavior on the one hand, or bestial savagery on the other. Giants of the other kind are most commonly found among the Saracens that populate the chanson de geste , a genre whose giants tend to inhabit the two extremes of assimilable humanity and monstrous or demonic inhumanity. 1 A third category that we will encounter is that of half-blood giants, whose identity may be somewhat ambiguous: they are likely to be assimilable into chivalric life, but generally not entirely, and not without conflict. In all cases, however, giants are a focal point for racial, social, cultural, and ideological clashes; and there are three principal contexts in which these issues will be examined.
Species, Race, and Culture: Defining Human Identity
Le discours sur le monstre est, en r alit , un discours sur l homme .
[Discourse about monsters is, in reality, a discourse about man.]
-Annie Cazenave, Monstres et merveilles
In speaking of racist and sexist stereotypes, Kobena Mercer states that we are dealing not with persons, but with the imaginary and symbolic positions through which the contingent, historical and psychic construction of personhood is spoken. 2 Mercer s comment pertains to the discourse of modern colonial and postcolonial societies, but the same can certainly be said of both the giants and the other characters populating medieval art and literature. Giants, no more a cultural fantasy than the shifting stereotypes of race, class, and gender embodied by Arthurian knights and ladies, are one of the means by which medieval Europeans imagined the limits of personhood.
Robert Bartlett s influential work on medieval concepts of race and ethnicity draws on the much-quoted formulation by the early medieval writer Regino de Pr m (d. 915): Diversae nationes populorum inter se discrepant genere, moribus, lin