Love is (species-)blind: parenting across the human/animal boundary in French medieval romance
(2018) 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies — Location: Kalamazoo (Michigan) (10.May.2018)
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- Abstract
- The narrative motif of the baby hero being rescued, looked after and sometimes breast-fed by a wild animal is widespread in mythic narratives and is persistently used in medieval chansons de geste and romans. In the early appearances of the motif, the animal surrogate parenting of the hero works mostly as a sign of the hierarchical respect the character naturally inspires across species as well as a demonstration of his being elected by God. However, it is only in the later development of the motif, with the passage to the 14th and 15th-century prose romance, that the affective and biological implications of such cross-species intimacy start being explored. Prose romans such as Valentin et Orson, Le conte au papegau, Wauquelin’s La Belle Hélène, exploit these episodes as a place where to express alternative views on the relationship between humans and animals. Therefore, while coeval scientific literature insisted on the difference opposing human and animal, literary narratives of wild animals miraculously parenting human characters triggered reflections on love, nurturing, and bodily identity as performances across species. In the course of this paper, I investigate how this reflection is elaborated in episodes of cross-species parenting in some French prose romances, and whether these episodes influence the definition of the human/animal divide in the rest of the text. By doing so, I demonstrate that these episodes foreground a shift, in late medieval literature, towards a species-fluid concept of heroism and identity.
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Sciancalepore, A. (2018). Love is (species-)blind: parenting across the human/animal boundary in French medieval romance. 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo (Michigan). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/127165