8 - Gamelyn

Summary

Gamelyn finds a place among this volume's potential anti-heroes because his behaviour has so often struck readers as gratuitously violent. In his influential study Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe, Richard W. Kaeuper cites The Tale of Gamelyn to illustrate the propensity of lay elites to claim the right to violence as a ‘defining privilege… in any matter touching their prickly sense of honour’. He writes that Gamelyn recovers ‘right and honour by violently overwhelming the meeting of a corrupt royal court, has hanged the sheriff and jurors, and will shortly hang the king's justice, after cleaving his cheekbone and breaking his arm’. Jean E. Jost's characterization in Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature marks the extreme pole of negative response to Gamelyn as hero: the tale asks us to accept, and even admire, his ‘brutality’ and ‘hard-hearted vengeance’; he partakes of his villainous brother's ‘crassness and cruelty’; ‘he becomes inured to violence; his anger and aggression become more gratuitous, part of his ordinary behavior’; his response to mistreatment is ‘brutally unchivalric’; he seems ‘to know no other path of resolution but violence’. Enough has doubtless been said to justify an inquiry into Gamelyn's heroism in a volume meant to step back from authorial praise of romance heroes to re-examine their often morally ambiguous deeds.

Gamelyn is indeed a knight, and he does indeed break spines, limbs, and cheekbones throughout the tale. But, despite the words Chivalry in Kaeuper's title and Courtly Literature in the title of the volume that contains Jost's essay, I question whether Gamelyn's exuberant sprees of bone-cracking are best understood under the rubric of chivalry, medieval romance's key justification for knightly violence.