Out In the Wild: Imagining Public and Secret Identity Through Animals and Nature In Old French Literature

Sciancalepore, Antonella [UCL]

The forest is the ubiquitous frontier of medieval Europe. As such, the alternation between human and untamed space had a key role in medieval imagined landscape: the forest would overthrow social and ethical norms, and thus be the most effective setting for stories of identity transformation. In chivalric texts, in particular, the movement of the knight between the court and the wild designated a movement from the public sphere of courtly ideology into an alternative space, where human rules were partially suspended and the character could grow a new identity by incorporating natural and animal features. For this reason, French epic and romance texts (12th-13th century) portray the life in the wild as a formative experience: here, the contact with wild nature actively transforms the knight’s habits and body towards animalisation, before he eventually sheds out the animality and returns, improved, within the court to embrace his social role. In some texts, however, the alternation between court and forest does not end with a full dismissal of the animal: the knight has simultaneously both identities, one within society and one outside it, keeping one of them secret. The role of the animal in these episodes is also different: while chivalric culture normally uses animal symbolism as a public display of knightly virtues (e.g. in genealogical legends and heraldry), here the animal identity is kept hidden, detached from the social sphere, and designates a more problematic avatar of the character. In this paper, I will focus on the textual occurrences in which the knight negotiates his ambiguous social identity through a secret human/animal alternation, as portrayed in lai de Bisclavret and Beroul’s Tristan. The aim will be to investigate how medieval texts use nature and animals as a way to represent social role transgression and the tension between public and secret identities.