Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
12 - Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Castration is a motif running through the Rose’ asserts Sylvia Huot in The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers. The thirteenth-century Old French Romans de la rose that Huot examines, one of the most popular works of the European Middle Ages, occurs in two parts. The original text, an approximately 4,000-line first-person verse allegory composed by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230, recounts the dream vision quest of the young narrator for the rose he seeks. The continuation, written a generation later by Jean de Meun (c. 1270), amounts to an encyclopedic 17,000-line, often satiric gloss on Guillaume's Rose that retells, amplifies, and at times diverges from the young lover's story. The four primary examples that Huot presents of the mutilation motif in the Rose all appear in Jean's poem. David F. Hult, in ‘Language and Dismemberment: Abelard, Origen, and the Romance of the Rose’, arrives at a rather extreme assessment of Jean's work, finding that the author exhibits an ‘unrelenting fascination with castration’. Jean presents the four castration commentaries – on Saturn's dismemberment by his son Jupiter, on Abelard's by the henchmen of his wife's uncle, on Genius's exhortation against it, and on Origen's self castration – as generally negative, even if Jean, as author, identifies some positive results from such violent actions.
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- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 255 - 279Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013