During the Middle Ages and early modern times, wild men (silvani) lived in forests and may well have been prey to unrestrained impulses of lust and violence. These men were the opposite of courtly knights, whose ladies they desired and seized when they could. Their frequent appearance in medieval art and literature testifies not only to their hold on medieval minds, but also to the persistence of a belief in animalistic human types that can be traced back through antiquity to prehistory. The horned dancing god, part human, part animal, in neolithic cave painting, for example, becomes Pan in classical mythology, and a demon with the advent of Christianity. These are the “cousins” of the wild man of the woods, whose bestial strength and passions frightened “civilized” people and kept before them questions that have troubled humans for centuries: what makes us human and separates us from the animals? Are we truly different from the beasts?

In this essay I present some general concepts of the wild man phenomenon, in order to place the 1489 tale in its tradition. Literary representations of the wild man exist at least as far back as the hairy Enkidu in the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh and occur in medieval texts with some regularity. Visual representations of wild men were known in the Middle Ages in media as varied as manuscript illuminations, ivory caskets, candlesticks, stove tiles, mosaics, and tapestries. However, the wild man who inhabits the romance epic Valentin et Orson is nowhere to be found in the woodcut illustrations of the 1489 incunable, most likely because the generic reusable images called for by the economies of early book production often precluded using individualized depictions specific to a story's characters and events. Nevertheless, the forms wild men took in visual media and literary representations shaped the textual image of the wild Orson. Therefore, in this study, I propose to analyze the conception of the violent “uncivilized” Orson of the story in terms of its analogues in medieval pictorial and other textual renderings of the wild man.

The eponymous heroes of Valentin et Orson are twins, born to King Pepin's sister and the emperor of Greece. Due to a false accusation of adultery, their banished mother gives birth in the forest. Accident separates the three, leaving Orson to grow up wild with bears while Valentin is raised as a foundling by his own uncle, King Pepin.