A hind as a mother, a bear as a brother. Animal knights in medieval French literature
(2013) Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society Seminar (30.September.2013)
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- Authors
- Abstract
- This paper stemmed out of my PhD research, for which I have tackled the character of the knight in French medieval literature, in order to shed light on his relationship with the anthropologically attested model of the animal-warrior. In French literary tradition, the knight is rarely presented as a metamorpic warrior, but his connection with animals is fragmented in several motifs. In this paper, I singled out one very important motif out of the range of animal-like features that involve the knight in French chivalric texts: that of the knight with a past as a “wild child”. As a matter of fact, in a good number of texts we find knights who are raised by wild animals and have animals as friends and foster parents during in first years of life. The main aim of this paper was to demonstrate that the knight in medieval literature was indeed a multicultural tangle of folkloric elements revolving around the animal-warrior, translated and re-elaborated in literature throughout time and cultural borders and endowed with new functions inside the courtly context.
- Affiliations
University of Edinburgh
Citations
Sciancalepore, A. (2013). A hind as a mother, a bear as a brother. Animal knights in medieval French literature. Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society Seminar. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126748