“Doel” In Situ: The Contextual and Corporeal Landscape of Grief in La Chanson de Roland

Abstract

This chapter examines the corporeal and lexical manifestations of grief in the medieval French epic, La Chanson de Roland. Beginning by exploring the corporeal aspects of the more typical expressions of grief: the planctus, weeping, fainting, beard-rending and dying, Warner centers her thesis on demonstrating that the twelfth-century poet possessed a comprehensive understanding of grief’s emotional and somatic nuances by focusing on the poet’s well-chosen, inflected lexicon of paired grief words that serves to enhance the understanding of grief within the epic. Woven through her lexical research, Warner proposes an expanded perspective of William Reddy’s emotives.