Sharing Flesh. Carnivorism and Commensality in Medieval French Literature

My dissertation investigates the ways in which medieval fiction imagines the boundaries of the self in relation to the bodies of others, with a focus on representations of eating flesh. Reading Old French narratives from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, I highlight the ways in which the consumption of meat both defines and disrupts human-nonhuman difference as well as social divisions among humans, conceived in terms of gender, class, or race. As other critics have noted, many literary texts point to the porosity of human/nonhuman boundaries, demonstrating that hierarchies defined by such boundaries must be repeatedly reinstated through violence. My research shows that the shared consumption of flesh both conforms to and challenges such violent enactments of hierarchical distinction. Literary representations of carnivorism offer new perspectives on bodily difference; they endorse the hierarchy of eater and eaten even as they question and resist ontological distinction based on who or what may be consumed. I demonstrate that medieval narratives represent the carnivorous relation to flesh paradoxically as both a recognition of shared corporeality and the production of bodily difference through butchering. In medieval romances carnivorism is simultaneously a habit, a violent act, and a privilege enacting social distinctions. These texts associate meat with virility, and the vocabulary of consumption and flesh links meat eating and heterosexual practices, but gendered divisions also cut across other modes of distinction, such as class and race, as seen in the animalization of peasants and racialized others in chivalric romances, and in representations of “noble” animals who are granted more value than some human beings. Romance narratives also draw on religious imagery to describe the shared consumption of meat, but my research contributes to a secular rethinking of flesh as a notion capacious enough to encompass distinctions and experiences that do not fit neatly into our modern human/nonhuman divide. I demonstrate that flesh grounds a variety of distinctions and hierarchies, and that a critical interrogation of flesh offers new understandings of social identity in medieval texts. After a first chapter in which I both define my phenomenological understanding of flesh and contextualize it in the medieval cultural landscape, I read the thirteenth-century Lai d’Ignaure: in this story of twelve noble ladies who unwittingly share a cannibalistic meal, the women form a community organized in relation to the flesh of the man they all loved and whose heart and genitals they consume in a meal. I argue that because it stresses physical contact and co-belonging instead of boundaries, flesh seams what bodies divide in this story about patriarchal authority, allowing the women access to a sexual agency that conflicts with noble social structures. In a third chapter about Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion, I show that butchering produces corporeal difference, tearing beings and bodies apart to assert who can eat whom and with whom, with a focus on separating species, class, and race. My fourth chapter investigates the possibility of an embodied animal perspective in the thirteenth century Guillaume de Palerne and Roman de Renart, as well as several werewolf tales in which I interrogate how different embodiments shape different ways to inhabit the world “in the flesh,” beyond one’s given body, unveiling ontologies that are neither dualistic or essentialist.PhDRomance Languages & Literatures: FrenchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/178161/1/tonyrev_1.pd