Abstract
The episode of the Fisher King is one of the defining moments of Perceval, leading the hero to finally say his own name (ll.3575–77).1 In that episode, Perceval encounters men in a fishing boat, who direct him to a mysterious Grail Castle. His host is an exquisitely dressed, invalid man. Seated by his side, Perceval witnesses a candle-lit procession with a bleed¬ing lance, a magnificent grail or cup, and a tailleoir (platter):
Uns vaslez d’une chanbre vint,
Qui une blanche lance tint
Anpoigniee par le mileu…
Un graal antre ses deus mains
Une dameisele tenoit…
Aprés celi an revint une
Qui tint un tailleor d’argent…
Tot autresi com de la lance
Par de devant lui trespasserent
Et d’une chanbre en autre alerent. (ll.3,191–243)
[From a room came a young man holding a white lance by the middle…a young woman was holding a cup in both hands…after her came another holding a silver platter…just as with the lance, they walked in front of him, and went from one room to another.]
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Notes
Maarten Jozef Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult. Trans. A.M.H. Lemmers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977).
Quoted in: Joan Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 49–50.
Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval le Gallois: ou, Le conte du Graal. Chrétien de Troyes. Publié d’après les manuscrits originaux, ed. Ch. Potvin (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977) (includes continuations by Gauthier de Denet and Manessier).
Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Arthur Groos, Romancing the Grail: Genre, Science, and Quest in Wolfram’s Parzi-val (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 148.
Quoted in epigraph by Richard D. Mohr, Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 134.
Iacopone da Todi, Laude, ed. Franco Mancini (Rome: Giuseppe Laterza, 1974), pp. 339–41. For a treatment of the Virgin Mary in a medieval context, see Peggy McCracken, “Mothers in the Grail Quest: Desire, Pleasure, and Conception,” Arthuriana 8:1 (1998): 35–48. McCracken refers to work by Atkinson, Pelican, Warner, Levi D’Ancona, and, more recently, Ashely and Sheingorn.
For instance, in L.T. Topsfield, Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Arthurian Romances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See the discussion of Percevalian scholarship later in this chapter.
On the question of queer audience, see Robert Mills, “‘Whatever you do is a delight to me!’ Masculinity, masochism, and queer play in representations of male martyrdom,” Exemplaria 13:1 (2001). p. 1–37. Mills cites Gaunt’s “queer wishes,” and himself contributes “perverse optic” and “queer eye,” among others, as labels of that position from which a queer reader speaks (p. 3). Mills also contributes to other issues raised in this chapter, castration, feminization, and “interpassivity.”
The functioning of the Grail legend as a national legend is the focus of Sandra Hindman’s examination of the manuscript tradition of Perceval. Sandra Hindman, Sealed in Parchment: Rereadings of Knighthood in the Illuminated Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Howard R. Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
Julia Kristeva, Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974). Révolution appeared two years before the initial publication of “Stabat Mater.”
Elizabeth Badinter, XY: De l’identité masculine (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1992). Translated as XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press: 1995).
Robert Mills’s essay, mentioned above, gives an excellent account of some of the aspects of castration also mentioned here, and also touches on important issues which I do not develop, e.g., Žižek’s “interpassivity,” “the radically decentering process of identification by which one sustains a relationship with that which suffers” (Mills): “if the signifier is the form of ‘being active through another,’ the object is primordially that which suffers, endures it, for me, in my place: in short, that enjoys for me.” Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 112, 116; Mills, “Whatever you do…,” n. 87 p. 36.
Robert S. Sturges, Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 (Carbondale: Southern Indiana University Press, 1991), provides a review of reader-oriented criticism, in Sturges’s discussion of Chrétien de Troyes.
Michèle Vauthier, “The ‘Roi Pescheor’ and Iconographic Implications in the Conte del Graal,” in Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. Keith Busby (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 320–21
Brigitte Cazelles, The Unholy Grail: A Social Reading of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 151–55.
Maurice Delbouille, “Les hanches du Roi-Pêcheur et la génèse du Conte del Graal”,” in Festschrift Walther von Wartburg zum 80. Geburstag. 18 Mai 1968 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 359–79.
Maurice Delbouille, “Réalité du château du Roi-Pêcheur dans le Conte del Graal”, in Mélanges offerts à René Crozet…à l’occasion de son 70 anniversaire, par ses amis, ses collègues, ses élèves…(Poitiers: Société d’Etudes Médiévales, 1966), pp. 903–913.
Jean Marx, La Légende arthurienne et le Graal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952). Delbouille, “Les hanches,” pp. 360–61, n.6.
Frappier, “Féerie du château du Roi-Pêcheur dans le conte du Graal,” Mélanges pour Jean Fourquet. 37 Essais de linguistique germanique et de littérature du moyen âge français et allemand, ed. P. Valentin and G. Zink (Paris: Klincksieck, Munich: Hueber, 1969), p. 105.
Frappier, “La blessure du Roi Pêcheur dans le conte du Graal,” in Jean Mis-rahi Memorial Volume: Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Hans R. Runte, Henri Niedzielski, William L. Hendrickson, and Reinhard Kühn (Columbia, S.C.: French Literature Publications, 1977), p. 190.
K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London: Duckworth, 1978), mostly referring to poetry: charioteering and riding pp. 58–59, hunting pp. 58–59, and pp. 87–88.
Joan Cadden, Meaning of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 230–31, and pp. 378–86, nn. 20–32.
Donald Maddox discusses this aspect in The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 98–100.
Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), fig. 8.6, p. 164, discussion pp. 163–66.
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 75–76.
Arthur Groos gives a thorough discussion of the cure: “Treating the Fisher King (Parzival, Book IX),” in German Narrative Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Volker Honemann, Martin H. Jones, Adrian Stevens, and David Wells (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994), pp. 275–304; expanded in Romancing the Grail, pp. 144–69.
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Yves Ferroul, “Abelard’s Blissful Castration,” pp. 129–49. See also Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees, Medieval Cultures 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 3–29, esp. p. 16. On the meanings of castration and eunuchism
Mathew S. Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 279–306
Julia Haig Gaisser, Catullus and His Renaissance Readers (Oxford: Clarendon Press. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 16–23 and pp. 281–88, nn. 60–101.
Gaisser comments on B. L. Ullman, “The Transmission of the Text of Catullus,” in Studi in onore di Luigi Castiglioni 2 (Florence, 1960), pp. 1,027–1,057. Links to France include: in the ninth century,? (BN Lat. 8,071; called T from Jacques-Auguste de Thou, its sixteenth-century owner), a florilegium, the only extant early manuscript containing one poem by Catullus, and its sister manuscript, Vienna 277 (now incomplete and lacking Catullus), both “French in script” (p. 16). Vienna 277 has been linked with Tours. Ullman proposed that the exemplar of? and Vienna might have been from Tours, and was perhaps known to Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus. However, as Gaisser points out, if Fortunatus knew Catullus, he knew more than that one poem; the same is true of Heiricus of Auxerre, who uses rare Catulline expressions; and monk Hildmar, a Frenchman, perhaps from Corbie; Gaisser suggests he may have visited Verona from Brescia, where he resided in 841–45, and seen Catullus there. In the tenth century, Bishop Rather of Verona, who refers to Catullus in a sermon of 966 (he takes Catullus as an example of an obscure poet), later lived in Lobbes, Aulne, and Haumont, and may have brought a copy of Catullus with him. This is the more likely because there may have been a copy of Catullus on hand in that area at that time: a copy of Priscian produced in the nearby Cologne, dated between the tenth and twelfth centuries, contains a correct quote from Catullus, corrupt in other Priscian manuscripts. The epigram celebrating the rediscovery of Catullus at the dawn of the fourteenth century mentions France in an obscure reference, although probably not in connection with the manuscript, but with the finder’s patron
Frank Tenney, “Can Grande and Catullus,” American Journal of Philology 48 (1927): 273–75
Harry L. Levy, “Catullus and Cangrande della Scala,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Association 99 (1968): 249–54.
Sharon Off Dunlap Smith, Illustrations of Raoul de Praelles’ Translation of St. Augustine’s City of God Between 1375 and 1420 (Ph. D. Thesis, New York University, 1974), p. 19, n. 29.
Augustine uses lex Voconia, a law that prohibited naming women as successors, “even the only daughters,” as an example of Roman iniquity and decadence. Of course, the laws of the Salian Franks, on which the French dynasty based their claim against England, had to be exempted from Augustine’s condemnation of lex Voconia. Raoul de Presles does so explicitly, saying that lex Voconia and Augustine’s remarks applied to private inheritance, as opposed to the dynastic (and therefore public) policy, and he quotes Waleys as the source of this interpretation, and Meyronnes as being in agreement with Waleys, in his exposicion [commentary] to Augustine 3:1; quoted in Jeanette Beer, “Patronage and the Translator: Raoul de Presles’s La cité de Dieu and Calvin’s Institutio religionis Christianae,” in Translation and the Transmission of Culture Between 1300 and 1600, ed. Jeanette Beer and Kenneth Lloyd-Jones, Studies in Medieval Culture 35 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), pp. 105–106.
Frédéric Lyna, Les manuscrits à peintures de la Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, vol. 3, part 1 (Brussels: Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, 1984), p. 26.
Charity Cannon Willard, “Raoul de Presles s Translation of Saint Augustine’s De Civitate Dei”, in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. Jeanette Beer, Studies in Medieval Culture 25 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), pp. 329–46, esp. pp. 341–42. Willard mentions the old manuscript number, as in Bossuat—at that time, either the two volumes were one, numbered 1155; or Bossuat’s list counts books 1–10 as one copy of the whole, books 11–22 as another copy. On the copies owned by Jean de Berry, see Smith, Illustrations, p. 45, based on Delisle, Recherches 2, pp. 242–43, numbers 114–119. Willard is more cautious, stating that the duke had “at least three” copies, but she provides no further clarifications or references; Willard, “Raoul de Presles’s Translation,” p. 341.
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© 2005 Anna Kłosowska
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Kłosowska, A. (2005). Grail Narratives: Castration as a Thematic Site. In: Queer Love in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08810-9_2
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