Wod et wude dans la littérature médiévale anglaise ou l'espace de la folie

International audienceLunatics are not familiar figures in English medieval works. Indeed, they hardly play any role in Old English literature. Before the introduction of romance in the twelfth century, the few examples of lunatics are biblical heroes or those considered to be possessed by the devil (sick people, sinners, or pagans). On the other hand, the lives of saints present men and women madly in love with God, hermits withdrawn into deserts and fascinating mystics; in epics, madness is associated with anger: enraged warriors fighting on the battlefield. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with romance now a well-established genre, knights were often shown as temporarily unsound. Mental disorder was then a (necessary?) stage in their inner development: deeply bewildered, they separated themselves from society and found refuge in the forest; in romances, the madman was a wild man. The urban fool and the court jester, whose (pretended) madness revealed concealed wisdom, were quite different. The king's fool appeared in medieval works but had his hour of glory later on, in Elizabethan drama. Lunatics, fools, all such characters, though not totally absent from English medieval texts, remained in the background throughout the period