InThe 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 father's relationship to his son is described as a shared blood, whereas texts about women accused of giving birth to monstrous children define the mother's 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 king's 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.
Peggy McCracken offers a feminist historicist reading of Guenevere, Iseut, and other adulterous queens of Old French literature, and situates romance narratives about queens and their lovers within ...the broader cultural debate about the institution of queenship in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France. Moving among a wide selection of narratives that recount the stories of queens and their lovers, McCracken explores the ways adultery is appropriated into the political structure of romance. McCracken examines the symbolic meanings and uses of the queen's body in both romance and the historical institutions of monarchy and points toward the ways medieval romance contributed to the evolving definition of royal sovereignty as exclusively male.
Among the many representations of cross-species suckling in medieval French literature, two fourteenthcentury examples are remarkable for their portrayals of fantastic creatures that nurse human ...infants. In Le conte du papegau (The Tale of the Parrot), a unicorn suckles a motherless child, and in Tristan de Nanteuil (Tristan of Nanteuil), a siren nurses a child abandoned at sea. The substitution of a fantastic creature for the wild animal that more commonly suckles an abandoned child emphasizes the fictionality of the episode. This emphasis on the fictional and the fantastic opens a moment of reflection in which the relationships defined through suckling come under consideration. Fantasy disrupts the conventional representation of kinship bonds based on blood and introduces symbolic relationships based on shared milk; cross-species nursing defines cross-species kinships.
"A provocative study of an intriguing subject. . . . The Romance of Adultery establishes perceptive and tantalizing connections between literature and history while sensibly resisting the teptation ...to see the former as a reflection of the latter."--Romance Philology.
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.
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