In France and England of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the feudal obligations imposed on two parties by the mutual contract of vassalage tended to be derived more from the oath of fealty than from the act of homage, and to be expressed in terms of abstention from action which might endanger the other party or harm his or her property. But as Bishop Fulbert of Chartres stated in his letter to William V, duke of Aquitaine, in 1020, it was also necessary for the vassal to do right, and for the lord also to do right to the vassal who had sworn fealty to him, or risk being accused of bad faith. Oaths recorded in charters from the eleventh century onwards attest to this seeming bar on felony. Felony applied to conduct which disrupted the feudal bond between dependent and lord; it was a breach of the oath of fidelity, incurring the rupture of friendly relations, the forfeiture of the lands and goods of the offender and, in some cases, the death penalty. It consisted of serious offences such as, on the part of the vassal, refusal to do military service, contravention of the rules of the lord's court, and giving bad advice to the lord. But the lord also had to avoid injuring the honour, property or life of his dependant and offering him bad advice. Over several centuries, felony came to mean a category of crimes which had little to do with feudalism proper, but which were considered more serious than misdemeanours and less serious than treason. But in the texts of the period studied here, the breach of fealty that felony represents supposes strong feelings of anger and hatred and acts of rebellion, aggression and violence. It is associated with treason.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion and expression of felony principally in the poetry of troubadours, but with reference also to narrative texts in French and Occitan. I shall consider the group of terms, their origin and meaning, and their occurrence in certain verbal structures and in certain contexts representing the relationship between poet-lover and lady.

Que les Lais de Marie de France continuent à opérer leur charme sur celui qui les lit, semble être un fait indéniable. Tout aussi indéniable paraît le fait que les douze lais n’ont pas toujours exercé un même pouvoir de séduction, témoins les lais d’Equitan et de Chaitivel auxquels on a même refusé le titre de lai et qui se sont vus relégués dans le champ du fabliau (Harf 106–07). Des deux lais, celui du Chaitivel a été le moins prisé. On lui a reproché entre autres son manque de valeur littéraire, son style « embarrassé » (Tuffrau viii), ses faiblesses au niveau de la composition (Burgess 15). Nul ne conteste cependant la présence de traits, si superficiels soient-ils, le rattachant à l’esprit courtois (Ménard 133; Wind 741–42). Certains critiques ont vu le lai comme un débat posant un problème de casuistique courtoise (Hoepffner 161; Lazar 197); d’autres ont trouvé dans le De Amore d’André Le Chapelain un cas à débattre analogue à celui présenté dans le lai (Mickel 58; Baum 186). D’aucuns ont considéré le lai comme un « parfait exemple d’une authentique nouvelle courtoise » (Ménard 58) annonçant un genre fort en vogue au XIIIe siècle, notamment le lai courtois, ou comme « une nouvelle dépouillée … [dont] le message se réduit ici à un simple qualificatif revendiqué par l’amoureux, un blason » (Poirion 113). Le lai a également été rattaché à la lyrique occitane: le dialogue final serait une réminiscence sous forme narrative de la tenson des troubadours (Mora-Lebrun).

Dans un premier temps, la plupart des critiques ont vu la dame comme « la Belle Dame sans merci » et ont interprété son comportement, qu’ils qualifiaient d’altier, d’insensible, et de vaniteux, comme signe de la désapprobation de Marie de France sinon pour la doctrine de la fin’amors (Hoepffner 165; Green 266, 270), du moins pour quelques-uns de ses principes (Wind 743; Lazar 197). Aujourd’hui, la critique se montre plus clémente envers la dame et lui porte un jugement moins sévère, moins dur. Elle n’est plus traitée de « coquette orgueilleuse » ou de « belle inhumaine se refusant à l’amour » (Ménard 67; Sienaert 148–149; Harper et Verhuyck 188).

The “epic” Entrée d’Espagne, composed in Italy probably in the first half of the fourteenth century, purports to set forth in the vernacular the account of Charlemagne's Spanish conquest as recorded in Latin by the (pseudo) Turpin. Notable as innovation is the portrayal of its hero Roland, whose familiar epic profile is significantly nuanced in this text, making of him, in the words of one reader, “l’éclatante illustration d’une conception originale de l’héroisme épique.” Henning Krauss and others have explored the socio-economic context of such a transformation, determinant not only for the Entrée but for other poems in the franco-italian tradition that reflect the search for a new ethic appropriate to a new communal culture. And among the prominent elements of this conception figure “courtliness” and, more broadly, “courtoisie.” In the Chanson de Roland, the epithet curtois is reserved uniquely for Roland's companion Olivier, a denomination that, like his “sagesse” – in the famous formula “Roland est preux et Olivier est sage” – underlines the contrast between him and the principal hero of the poem; the adjective “cortois” to characterize the actions of individuals did not appear, Ulrich Mölk observes, in the earliest chansons de geste, and the abstract term “cortoisie” derives in all probability from the usage of the troubadours (43). Now, in the Entrée, we find a new portrait of a Roland who is not only personally “courtois” but responsible, in the long interpolated segment that recounts his sojourn in the Orient, for a civilizing mission defined as the introduction of the practices of “courtoisie” into a pagan (Saracen) world.

The importance of this thematic element is underlined by the narrator as he prepares his hero's transition to the Orient from the battleground of Spain, which Roland leaves behind after being struck by Charlemagne. Roland's subsequent adoption of a pagan disguise and his service to the Persian Sultan is not without precedent in certain late French epics, in which Christian knights evince little reluctance to participate in wars between pagans or to adopt their ways, at least in appearance.

The most perceptive student of the Lancelot tradition in Italy may well be Francesca da Rimini. The well-read adulteress provides important evidence that, although no medieval Italian text of the prose Lancelot exists, the story was familiar, at least to the noble and educated, in fourteenth-century Italy. Almost too well known to merit repetition, her discussion of the Lancelot nevertheless raises too many relevant issues not to require yet another look.

This abbreviatio of a crucial moment in the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere (itself a ‘cover’ for a crucial moment in the adultery of Paolo and Francesca) indicates Dante's (and Francesca’s) knowledge of the story but, as many have noted, it provides no clue as to what version of the Lancelot-Grail might have been available to either the poet of Florence or the lady of Rimini.

Chaucer is a major poet and women are a major subject of his poetry. In consequence, this book has turned out to be much longer than it should have been, and even so the reader will notice some obvious omissions. Among the more important casualties are the Prioress and her tale, St Cecilia, the Wife of Bath's fourth husband, the Book of The Duchess and the Parliament of Fowls. I can only plead in excuse that it seemed less important to give exactly equal coverage to all things female in Chaucer's work than to develop a coherent argument which would enable the reader to place individual works or passages in relation to a structure of poetic thought and practice.

The restrictions of space have had other consequences: I have had to omit any systematic survey of previous feminist writings on Chaucer, although I have dealt with numerous examples of them at appropriate points of my own discussion. I have also had to renounce any attempt to define the relationship between the fictional world of Chaucer's poetry and the social realities of fourteenthcentury England. I hope that in doing so I shall not be thought to believe that when all is well in literature, all is well in life, but I do believe that literature is not only produced but also produces – that it is precisely in its imaginative engagement with the ideologies and myths of contemporary society that it can make a contribution to the formation of new social conditions. To concentrate on the text is therefore not an isolationist exercise, but a recognition that this imaginative engagement is itself a critique of prevailing ideologies and a visionary outline of the future, which must be grasped in its full subtlety if it is to be of any use.

As for the kind of ‘feminist reading’ that this book represents, I should make it clear that it is not tied to any particular school of feminist criticism, though I have formed many of my arguments in mental dialogue with their imagined representatives.

INTRODUCTION

Imagine the scene. A gentry girl of, shall we say, fifteen, is sitting with her family in their parish church, in a private pew near the chancel. It is during Lent, some time in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the priest has chosen for his sermon the well-worn theme of the seven deadly sins. He begins with the first mortal sin, pride, and among the admonitions our maiden hears this cautionary tale:

The dangers posed not only to a woman’s own soul but also to those of the men who might behold her fashionably dressed and adorned body are hammered home some minutes later when the priest, having been diverted onto other themes through discourses on wrath, envy, sloth, avarice, and gluttony, reaches his crescendo with lechery, which some called the sin ‘fyrþest … fro heuene’, because it damns two souls in one act. Again, our maiden and other female parishioners are urged to think on their carefully tended hair, their fine dresses, their eye-catching headdresses, and the desperate state of damnation which these could lead them, and others, into:

Discussion of father-daughter incest in the Deus Amanz is not new. It was a subject of some dispute in the early days of editing manuscripts, and contemporary critics continue to comment on the incestuous nature of the father-daughter relationship in Marie's lai.

The threat of father-daughter incest was noted by the early scholars as a not uncommon motif. Today readers of the Deus Amanz mention it simply as a comment in passing, for although the father's overweening love for his daughter is clearly pertinent to the development of the story as a whole, we also recognize that this lai seems to be “thematically challenged.” It is this aspect of the lai that I wish to discuss.

There is, of course, no evidence of incest in Marie's poem. There is, moreover, no incest in the later thirteenth- and fourteenth-century romances, which are explicit concerning the father's sexual obsession with his daughter. There are other medieval texts in which father-daughter incest does take place, but they are of an altogether different nature. In the Vie de Saint Albain, father-daughter incest is followed by unwitting mother-son incest. The story of Pope Gregory is another story of unwitting incest followed by sincere penitence and forgiveness. In the exempla, incest is associated with infanticide. In a similar vein, the Dux Moraud is a morality play in which the father seduces the daughter. The girl bears two children whom she kills at birth (Roussel 47). Morality tales of this type implicate the woman in the wrong-doing whereas the child importuned by her father in the romances becomes the courageous heroine of her story.

Regarding non-literary incest in the Middle Ages, we can only assume that it was at least as prevalent as it is now. In 1982, James Brundage published a statistical survey of various aspects of medieval life and the Church, for which eight hundred randomly selected volumes, four hundred each of civil and canon law, were culled for a variety of references, among them incest, in the more general category of sexual misdemeanors. Civil law (the corpus juris civilis) deals with decisions under Roman Law, begun under the rule of Justinian around the year A.D. 500 and added to by subsequent civilizations. Canon law (the corpus juris canonici) refers to the decisions of the Church fathers, codified in the twelfth century by Gratian.

The preceding chapters have stressed Chaucer's originality in creating models of both female and male behaviour that erase traditional gender boundaries and dissolve the power-structures on which they rest. But the Canterbury Tales is not entirely lacking in examples of traditional gender roles. We see them above all in the fabliau-tales – in, for example, the miller of the Reeve's Tale, who goes armed to the teeth to impress his ladylike wife with his manly courage.

We see these traditional roles likewise in January's pathetic belief that sexual desire is by definition masculine, even when he has to arouse it by laborious artificial means, and that it is the sexual act itself, rather than his own person, that will ‘greetly offende’ his innocent young wife (Merchant's Tale 1829). And again in the marital relationship of the Shipman's Tale, where the merchant buttresses his husbandly authority with the imposing mysteries of the business world, and his wife ripostes with the claims of the kitchen and the dinner-table, where female rule is undisputed (214–38). The comedy in examples such as these is generated precisely from the shrewd observation that identifies the conventionalized nature of these male-female roles – that recognizes roleplay as a constant feature of human behaviour. So that to acknowledge the presence of traditional male-female relationships in these instances is at the same time to acknowledge that they are not represented as ‘natural’ but as a series of learned rituals through which male and female roles are constructed.

The wittiest and most original dramatisation of these traditional relationships is however acted out, not between human beings, but between a couple of chickens. Of all the married couples in the Canterbury Tales, it is Chauntecleer and Pertelote who give us a classic illustration of the distribution of roles in a conventional marriage.

I propose to examine four Old French poems by different authors, considering if these poems, all in the woman's voice, have any features that allow the listener and the modern critic to determine the sex of the author.

Carolyn Larrington has summarized the arguments about women's writing, noting that “whether women can, do and should use language in distinctively different ways from men has been a preoccupation of modern French feminist theory” (Larrington 229, referring to Moi 102–62). Larrington continues that the writing of “medieval women does show common features, stylistic traits which are not exclusive of women, but typical of them” (230). And Peter Dronke has observed that medieval women seek to solve problems which cause them “to look at themselves more concretely and more searchingly than many of the highly accomplished men writers who were their contemporaries” (Intro., x). To pursue the woman's voice a bit further, Toril Moi describes, for example, Luce Irigaray's argument that “power is something women are against” (italics in Moi 148).

Meanwhile, to return to the Middle Ages, we have extant songs that express the feelings of the man, generally called chansons, and songs that express the feelings of the woman, called chansons de femme. Interestingly, a number of chansons de femme are attributed to male authors. Why would a man adopt the female voice for a poem? What benefit is gained by the author from such a tactic? Is it simply a rhetorical ploy, a “let's try something new and different”? Even if we accept that rationale, it seems to me that there is no point in composing something for the woman's voice if there is no environment in which to present it. We think there were women performers in the Middle Ages; is a male author simply giving them material? Is a male author writing for a performer in drag? I do not know what evidence exists to answer this question. But the real issue is, what is the benefit for the male to write such a piece? I can see real benefit for a female author to compose something under a male pseudonym, for male authors are the norm, the expectation, the voice of power in the Middle Ages. And yet, there appear to be a number of works in the woman's voice composed by men.

The anonymous Lancelot, probably composed between 1215 and 1220, is acknowledged as the oldest member of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. We may never know the identity of its author(s) beyond Lot's suggestion that he was a cleric of aristocratic background in service at court, whose work combined a Grail story with a courtly story, apparently to make good on what Chrétien had attempted in his Grail story. Although each of the members of the Cycle has its particular perspective and texture, Jean Frappier's concept of the entire Cycle being planned and directed by a single mind that he calls the ‘architect,’ is still convincing. We may never know more about the actual production of the Lancelot than the text itself can actually reveal: did it exist first as a ‘non-cyclic’ work, or was it planned from the start as a cyclic work? On the one hand Elspeth Kennedy argues that the Lancelot existed initially as a small prose romance, courtly in tone and independent of the cyclic intent, before being appropriated as the basis of a large cyclic composition and elaborated to three times its original size to form the cyclic Lancelot. Alexandre Micha, on the other hand, believes that the end of the non-cyclic Lancelot is a truncation of the cyclic version and that the cyclic intent was present from the beginning of the work. The debate has been recently re-opened on Micha's side by Annie Combes, who presents the non-cyclic textual evidence as the effect of important narrative strategies devised to create mystery and to introduce a revised Grail tradition.

Whether we accept the theory of an initially independent narrative or not, the Lancelot exists today in a cyclic environment that is really a dual one: in the Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu trilogy (or Prose Lancelot) which is by far the commonest grouping in the extant cyclic manuscripts and probably its earliest cyclic environment, and in the five-part Cycle formed with the addition of the Estoire and Merlin-Suite. In the trilogy, the Lancelot is the foundation of the edifice: a romance chronicle of the state of Arthurian chivalry and the realm. In the Cycle, the Lancelot is at the center of the new edifice, flanked symmetrically on either side by a Grail narrative and an Arthurian narrative.

The tale that the Wife of Bath goes on to tell repeats on a larger scale the pattern of surrender and reconciliation which is traced in miniature form at the end of her Prologue. It begins with a manifestation of masculine ‘maistrye’ in its ugliest form: the knight's casual rape of a young girl. It ends with the rapist's humble surrender of ‘maistrye’ to the old wife who has been inflicted on him as punishment:

This time, male surrender leads not only to marital peace and harmony, but also to the magical transformation of the ugly old hag into a beautiful young wife. Miraculous as it is, this transformation is no whit more miraculous than the transformation of a rapist into a meekly submissive husband; the magical change in the woman is merely the external projection of this even more magical change in the man.

The transformation of the rapist into an obedient husband is something that can only be told as fairy-tale (unless, as with Pluto and Proserpina, it is told with a comedy that likewise places it beyond the reach of serious representationalism). That is to say, the tale is not to be interpreted in realistic terms as a serious proposal for the rehabilitation of sexual offenders; rather it is (like all good fairy-tales) the imaginative embodiment of aspirations towards a transfigured reality, a vision of the way things might be. It addresses itself not to the pathology of rape, but to the imaginative representation of the processes which male psychology (in its social rather than individual form) would have to undergo to purge itself of the drive towards ‘oppressioun’ (889). It moves beyond the stories of rape in the Legend of Good Women by widening its vision beyond the horror of the crime to ask in what way men would have to change for rape to cease to exist.

The late Quattrocento Italian humanist Bartolommeo Goggio presented his treatise De laudibus mulierum to Eleonora d’Este (Duchess of Ferrara, 1473–94) in 1487. The treatise recounted the actions and lives of worthy women who were, according to Goggio, superior to men in every respect. A treatise written to illustrate the equality of women to men would have been remarkable enough in the Quattrocento, but Goggio asserts the superiority of women. The one aspect of the work that is not surprising is that it came out of the Este court in Ferrara whose duchess Eleonora was daughter of Isabella di Chiaramonte and the Aragonese Ferdinand of Naples, wife of Duke Ercole I and mother to a number of offspring who would be essential in the shaping of the Cinquecento. Eleonora, however, went beyond the traditionally expected female role of subservient daughter, supportive wife and doting mother. It is my contention that Eleonora's very presence at the Este court helped redefine the role of the woman – not only in history (one need look no farther than her influential daughter, Isabella), but in literature as well. This article examines, first, a few significant facets of Eleonora's courtly life that helped shape the image of the woman in fifteenth-century Ferrara, and, second, parallels between the historical Eleonora and one of the fictional heroines in Matteo Maria Boiardo's Ferrarese epic, the Orlando innamorato.

Eleonora was neither a virgin temptress like Boiardo's Angelica nor a warrior queen like his Marfisa, but she represents all that is wise and powerful in the Boiardo heroines on a decidedly human and everyday level. Characterization of the woman in the Orlando innamorato, the epic written by an Este courtier specifically for the Este court, benefited from the strong-willed duchess at the court's center. She was not considered to be a witch, like so many strong, literary women of the time, nor did she disguise her feminine characteristics and don armor in order to duel against Ercole's enemies, another common literary device. However, she took Ercole's place during his frequent absences from Ferrara, and she did single-handedly govern the city while it was under siege and in danger of falling during the Ferrara-Venice war.

It is a commonplace that, with age, comes wisdom, based on our knowledge and experience of the world. It is also said, on the other hand, that there is no fool like an old fool. Certainly, in this paper, I shall be addressing remarks in relation to my two chosen works which will have bearing on both statements. Not that it will be the whole story for, as I intend to show, they both aspire to demonstrate the rich panoply of summas in which the Middle Ages abound, even if their central themes contain much which is part of the lore of love and reserve a few surprises for the dedicated reader.

Whether, at the end of my exposition, you, the readers, will also wish to apply the second statement to the writer but not the first, remains a matter of conjecture. Certainly, that someone who has devoted much of a career to the diffusion and celebration of mainly Medieval Occitan texts should launch into a comparison of the Breviari d’amor with a Middle English text may seem surprising to many and to some even injudicious. Indeed, I, too, am uncertain why I ever took on this topic. But no one twisted my arm. My sole concern was to deliver a plenary on a subject which would be of interest to the broad sweep of colleagues in attendance at the conference, as was the case for the subjects chosen by the four other plenary speakers.

I console myself in part with the fact that I do know one of the two texts well – the fourth and last volume of text of the Breviari has been deciphered in the base manuscript and, with the help of my collaborator, Cyril Hershon, we should see the publication of volume 4 in the year 2004, when the other eleven manuscripts have been transcribed for the 11,000 lines it will contain.

But, how does it come about that the other text I am talking about is John Gower's Confessio Amantis? Well, you have to thank Derek Pearsall for that. Knowing that I was to be in Boston in 1990, Derek was kind enough to invite me to speak to the English Department staff/postgraduate medieval seminar at Harvard.

When Thomas's Tristran considers marriage, adequate terms escape his deliberation. He neither loves nor hates Ysolt of the White Hands; he loves her beauty and name (250–51). He does not hate Queen Ysolt, but he is unable to have her (208–09; 232–35). He wants Ysolt of the White Hands because of his want for the Queen. Systematically, love and hate fail as antithesis. To want (voleir) and to be able (poeir), repeated throughout his deliberation, refuse alignment.

As Per Nykrog argues, self-conflict organizes the narratives of the first generation of Old French romancers. It distinguishes the literary from the oral, the roman from the chanson de geste (609). In romance, a hero confronts his own values. Although mirroring aspects of the modern novel for which Nykrog argues, self-conflict specifically evokes a medieval academic framework. In that the hero's reaction to conflict frequently entails deliberation leading to action, the early romancers fictionalize practical reasoning.

Although the term ratio practica comes into usage in the thirteenth century, learned attempts to systematize practical philosophy and to incorporate ethics into curriculum historically coincide with the first works of the romancers. Likewise, whether before or after the translation and dissemination of Aristotle's Ethics, the speaker wrestles with antithetical and equal claims under circumstances that necessitate action. The representation of deliberation formulates personal decisions as accountable to reasons, if not to principles, for actions. They are accessible to the understanding of others.

Natural law, the category under which medievals treat practical reasoning, also influences the tenor and content of its twelfth-century fictionalization. Academics attempt to delineate its terms and precepts. According to Anselm of Laon, for example, it precedes Mosaic law and issues from ratio naturalis (Lottin 2: 71). It depends on doing to others as you would want done to you; it teaches what to do and what to avoid. In 1140, Gratian adopts these precepts taken from the school of Anselm and repeated by Hugh of St. Victor and adds the political distinction between ius civile, which applies to an individual people, and ius naturale, which applies to all nations (“commune omnium nationum”; 2: 73). In so doing, he explicitly connects moral and legal action by means of a distinction the romances explore.