Huot, Sylvia. Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 224 (Gerulaitis).

Summary

Professor Huot is a distinguished scholar of French medieval literature who teaches at Pembroke College, Cambridge University. In her latest book, Madness in Medieval French Literature, she examines literary representations of insanity during the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, from the perspective of individual and collective identity. Her approach is mainly influenced by three well-known scholars: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Julia Kristeva (1941–). She also consults some feminist critics.

The fol (fou, madman) transcends rational thought and is characterized by inaccessible otherness. Madness becomes a means for the construction of his identity, as well as for exclusion from the social group, and determines his/her homosocial status. The real person still exists, but his/her socially constructed identity is masked or damaged by the mental condition. Caused by humoral dyscrasia, magic potions, or enchantments (according to the texts consulted), madness blurs the distinctions between civilization and savagery. Huot assumes that the concepts of sanity and madness are formed and reinforced “through repetitive performances of exclusion, identification, and imitation” (p. 6).

In her first chapter the author examines madness as having bipolar consequences, i.e., abjection or sublimity: the fol is associated with sin, deviance, and illness, but also (in other cases) with sanctity, heroism, and genius. For example, the famous “Juggler of Notre Dame,” in one of the Miracles de Nostre Dame (twelfth century), is an individual whom the dominant culture cannot assimilate or explain rationally. Huot then looks at Daguenet in Arthur's court, at the mad Lancelot, and Tristan at Tintagel among other characters, and she tries to establish the role these protagonists play in the construction of communal identity, for example, in the legendary king's environment or the court at Tintagel.

The third chapter explores the role of violence in demarcating the line of distinction between sanity and madness and also compares the insane, subjected to exclusion and violence, to other living beings treated similarly: holy martyrs, peasants, and animals. Further chapters deal with the relation between madness and love/sexuality: literary and historical sources explain that the homosocial knightly class must remain heterosexual, and that any behavior of transgression may engender a rather pathological affliction.