The Werewolf in the Ancient World

The ancient world already cherished a rich folklore of werewolfism that broadly resembled the one copiously attested for the central medieval period in Europe. Our best access to the sort of narrative that underpinned such folklore comes in the well-known werewolf tale of the Neronian Petronius’ Satyricon, which shares some striking motifs with the equally famous AD 1160-78 Anglo-Norman tale of Bisclavret by Marie de France. It was, accordingly, folklore that determined the ancients’ conception of what a werewolf actually was. Almost all the evidence for werewolfism in antiquity should be regarded either as folkloric in nature or as secondary to and refractive of a folkloric core. The ancients re-deployed, finessed and parlayed this focal conception in distinct ways in diverse cultural contexts. Notions, themes and images were borrowed from this folkloric home and transferred, in as it were a metaphorical fashion, to other realms of human experience and endeavour, be this: aetiological myth, in the case of the material bearing upon Lykaon; rites of passage or of maturation, in the case of the material bearing upon the Lykaia rite; or medicine, in the case of the medical writers’ identification of the disease of ‘lycanthropy.’ It is this that accounts for what initially appears to be the incoherent, chaotic and centrifugal nature of the evidence-field for werewolves that the ancients have bequeathed to us.

Jug Songs: Acoustic Enclosure from Ovid to Eliot

Philomela holds a privileged place in Euro-American poetry. Tracking the nightingales in Ovid, Marie de France, Gascoigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning reveals a new dimension of an old trope. Frequently paired with images of architectural and bodily containment, the nightingale’s song mediates between sound and space. This article builds on Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, who use the bird to think about enclosure (sonic, spatial) and territorial possession. Nesting T. S. Eliot’s nightingales within a wider context clarifies other kinds of containment in “A Game of Chess” from The Waste Land, resolving some of the section’s enduring ambiguity concerning images of vacuity and the disembodied voice. Ultimately, this article contributes to debates in lyric studies, arguing for a reappraisal of the nightingale in comparative verse history.

Tristan en reverdie: l’arborescence mythique d’un corpus

In most of its European versions of the central Middle Ages, Tristan nurtures an arborescent dynamics in which human agents reveal a spectacular potential for vegetalization, from the living couple to its tombal avatars, from the French poems to the Norse and German adaptations of a greening narrative matter (Pastré 1999, Victorin 2009). While exploring the affinities between the romance’s modeling of human ethos and its stylization of sylvan, vegetal figures under the sign of the philter, the present article focuses on the metamorphosis of the love tree in Béroul’s, Marie de France’s, Eilhart von Oberg’s and Robert’s realms of Tristania. In Béroul’s version, the couple fuses into an Edenic matrix where sleeping becomes an ensavaging, liberating process excluding the possibility of corporeal fecundity. (Marchello-Nizia 1981). Marie de France takes the idea of a refuted genealogy one step further, via the symbiosis of the honeysuckle and the hazel tree; this vegetal self-sufficiency excludes God’s commandments by suppressing the mere possibility of achieving a living descendance. In Eilhart’s romance, death is the catalyzer of a revegetation of the consubstantial souls of the lovers, as they are transcendentally reunited by the philter. Robert’s Saga crowns the textual regeneration of the Tristanian matter by resignifying its distinctive sign of mythical arborescence.

Comparing the Role of the Outsider in Beowulf and Marie de France’s Lanval

The character of the outsider can be identified in a diverse range of medieval works, including the Old English heroic epic and the Middle English lai. Indeed, both Beowulf and Marie de France’s Lanval prominently feature characters who are outsiders, although these characters are presented quite differently within each work. In Beowulf, the characters of Grendel and his mother are outsiders with respect to the heroic society of Beowulf and his kingdom, and in Lanval, Marie de France’s titular character begins his lai in a melancholic state as he struggles to understand why his king neglects him and favours the other retainers. While both of these works feature outsiders, though, the reasons why they are outcast from their respective societies are quite different. Grendel and his mother are outcast because they are descendants of Cain, whose bloodline God condemned after Cain killed his brother Abel. As a method of taking vengeance for his exclusion, Grendel attacks the court of King Hrothgar every night for many years, killing as many of Hrothgar’s loyal retainers as he possibly can. Conversely, Marie de France does not suggest that Lanval bears any similar condemnation; instead, she indicates that he is unjustly cut from society because his king forgets him and the other retainers are jealous of him. Despite these differences between Grendel and Lanval, both characters function to comment upon the nature of their respective civilizations; however, where Grendel effectively reaffirms the importance of the hall and the king’s relationship with his retainers, Lanval does the opposite, and instead serves to question whether life in King Arthur’s court actually benefits those who live within it.

Breves reflexões sobre o percurso de vida e a identidade de uma escritora francesa da Idade Média: estudo de caso

Resumo: Neste artigo, propomos uma reflexão sobre o conceito de identidade, tomando por base uma narrativa lírica de Marie de France. Esta mulher viveu/escreveu, possivelmente, na segunda metade do século XII, na corte de Henrique II, na Inglaterra: iremos propor alguns comentários sobre sua vida e sobre essa corte. Servindo-nos de uma tradução para o português do Lai du Chèvrefeuille, abordaremos alguns dos imaginários sociais e culturais que circulavam na época da escritora e que condicionam seus escritos, que consideramos como narrativas líricas. Ocupar-nos-emos sobretudo do conceito de identidade, aplicando-o tanto ao indivíduo Marie France, como também aos personagens ou sujeitos de papelpor ela criados no supracitado lai. Nosso objetivo principal é o mostrar que a importância do estudo da identidade e como ele se adequa à interpretação de textos literários.