Peggy McCracken

The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender, and Medieval Literature

In The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero, Peggy McCracken explores the role of blood symbolism in establishing and maintaining the sex-gender systems of medieval culture. Reading a variety of literary texts in relation to historical, medical, and religious discourses about blood, and in the context of anthropological and religious studies, McCracken offers a provocative examination of the ways gendered cultural values were mapped onto blood in the Middle Ages. As McCracken demonstrates, blood is gendered when that of men is prized in stories about battle and that of women is excluded from the public arena in which social and political hierarchies are contested and defined through chivalric contest. In her examination of the conceptualization of familial relationships, she uncovers the privileges that are grounded in gendered definitions of blood relationships. She shows that in narratives about sacrifice a fathers relationship to his son is described as a shared blood, whereas texts about women accused of giving birth to monstrous children define the mothers contribution to conception in terms of corrupted, often menstrual blood. Turning to fictional representations of bloody martyrdom and of eucharistic ritual, McCracken juxtaposes the blood of the wounded guardian of the grail with that of Christ and suggests that the blood from the grail kings wound is characterized in opposition to that of women and Jewish men. Drawing on a range of French and other literary texts, McCracken shows how the dominant ideas about blood in medieval culture point to ways of seeing modern values associated with blood in a new light, and how modern representations in turn suggest new perspectives on medieval perceptions.

The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual Transgression in Old French Literature

SubStance # 98/99 Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002 and performativity, “civic responsibility” (211) and “poetic license” (188). Writing History, Writing Trauma will thus be important reading not only to trauma theorists and their critics, but to historians and literary critics of all persuasions invested in rethinking the relationship between trauma, history and ethics. Debarati Sanyal University of California, Berkeley

The amenorrhea of war

B lood and war would seem to be a natural pair—it is hard to imagine a battlefield without blood, as a whole spate of recent movies about World War II has graphically reminded us. Military heroism seems to demand bloodshed, or at least the possibility of bloodshed. But only one kind of blood is conventionally shed in war: men’s blood. To be sure, women are hurt, killed, raped, and wounded in war, but women’s wounds and women’s deaths are usually classed under the heading of atrocities; they are the result of illegitimate violence that takes place outside the battlefield. Legitimate violence, authorized by a higher good that requires heroic struggle and sacrifice, is traditionally the domain of men in most cultures: only men should die in combat; the blood of war is men’s bloodshed. The gendering of the blood of war has a long history. That history, I will argue, is to be found in both legends and in historical narratives, and it is most intensely constructed through representations of women’s blood on the battlefield. Like some modern representations of war (I will ex-

Scandalizing Desire: Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Chroniclers

Most historical accounts characterize Eleanor of Aquitaine as a strong-willed woman who knew what she wanted, and many stories about her—both medieval and modern—portray her desire as a dangerous threat to the powerful men in her life. She is represented this way in some of the earliest accounts of her life as queen of France, most prominently in chronicles that record her voyage to the East with Louis VII. In 1148, Eleanor accompanied the king to Antioch, and her affection for her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, was regarded with suspicion by some in her entourage; several chroniclers recorded rumors of an adulterous passion between the queen and her uncle. Over the course of the Middle Ages, chroniclers transformed Eleanor’s close relationship with her uncle into a scandalous, adulterous passion for a Muslim sultan. While the fictitious elaborations of Eleanor’s story do not offer historically reliable information about the queen herself, their representation of her scandalous desire for adultery might say something about the institution of queenship in the medieval West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The ways in which the story of Eleanor’s adultery is recounted, revised, and elaborated may speak some of the anxieties about gender, sexuality, and sovereignty that continually surfaced in medieval definitions of queenship. In particular, these narratives articulate the imperative of legitimate childbirth within the royal family, the complex and contested question of the queen’s sovereign authority, and above all, an uneasy recognition of the queen’s access to influence and power as the king’s sexual partner.

The Curse of Eve: Female Bodies and Christian Bodies in Heloise’s Third Letter

Heloise’s third letter to Abelard has long been considered a sort of end point for the correspondence, even though it is not the last letter in the exchange.1 Here Heloise abandons the passionate speech of desire that characterizes her first two letters and makes two requests of Abelard: that he explain the origin and authority of monastic foundations for women and that he write a monastic rule appropriate for nuns.

Mothers in the Grail Quest: Desire, Pleasure, and Conception

This essay explores the ambivalent representation of second-generation mothers in the Grail Quest and proposes that representations of sexually active widows, chaste mothers, and desiring virgins in the Prose Lancelot suggest the difficult combination of chivalric quest and Christian values in courtly romance.

Love and adultery: Arthur’s affairs

The subject of love and adultery in Arthurian romances usually calls to mind the love triangle that unites King Arthur, his wife Queen Guinevere, and the knight Sir Lancelot. The great love affair of Guinevere and Lancelot is often celebrated as an enduring passion that overcomes all obstacles, including the queens marriage. Lancelot is inspired to accomplish extraordinary feats of prowess because of his love for the queen, and his successes in adventures, tournaments and contests contribute to the chivalric brilliance that establishes the reputation of Arthurs court and the Round Table. Yet even though the knight does great acts of chivalry for his beloved queen, his love for her must remain secret because it betrays the king. And although the queen rewards her knight with public displays of favour, her passionate love for him must remain hidden. Secrecy never adequately hides the queens love affair from her husband, however, and the lovers are inevitably discovered. Indeed, medieval versions of the story recount a series of repeated episodes in which the love affair is revealed and then covered up again. That is, Arthur sees evidence of his queens adultery, but he finds a way not to believe what he sees. In the thirteenth-century Old French Vulgate Cycle (also called the Lancelot-Grail Cycle by modern scholars), which combines the story of Lancelot with that of the Holy Grail, the final section, the Mort Artu ( Death of King Arthur ), recounts that the king repeatedly refuses to believe that Lancelot and Guinevere could betray him.

Skin and sovereignty in Guillaume de Palerne

Guillaume de Palerne uses skin to interrogate animal-human difference and to demonstrate the affinity between the animal and the sovereign. The romance links human hand and animal foot, sovereign protection and exile, and animal gestures and sovereign speech, in order to uncover not just the sovereign in the skin of an animal, but also the sovereign in the beast.

Maternity and Chivalry after Chrétien. The Case of King Lot’s Wife

In Le Conte du graal Chretien de Troyes famously introduces a tension between a mother’s desire to keep her son from chivalry and the son’s desire to be a knight. Perceval’s mother’s effort to hide all knowledge of knights and their pursuits from her son is an attempt to keep him from a chivalric destiny scripted by his father’s lineage and her own. This mother’s effort to protect her son from the fate of his father and brothers is thwarted when Perceval encounters knights passing through his...