KEYWORD: GALEOTTO -- "amante" -- GEORGES DUBY -- "juvenes" &c.

Speranza




Between Guinevere and Galehot, there's Homo/eroticism in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.

A homoerotic reading of the thirteenth-century Prose Lancelot, arguably the
best and most sophisticated of all medieval romances ever written, lays bare a
hitherto-disregarded ideological stance of courtly love.

Through the first half of
the Prose Lancelot, which is known as “Lancelot without the Grail,” Lancelot’s
love for Guinevere is counterbalanced by Galehot’s equally passionate
infatuation with Lancelot.

While exploiting the well-established romantic rivalry
between love and friendship to the fullest extent, this juxtaposition of seemingly
incompatible erotic orientations, at the same time, points towards ideological
proximity between the quasi-religious cult of erotic love and the celebration of
male-male bonding in chivalric society.

 Although both love and friendship
appear to be sensationally erotic and disturbingly antisocial in the Prose
Lancelot, they eventually prove to be conducive to the patriarchal and feudal
status quo since they urge the involved to sacrifice all worldly desires and
ambitions for the sake of purely psychological reward, thus endorsing a curious
lifestyle that might be dubbed as “erotic asceticism.”

This eroticized ideal of
asceticism objectifies and marginalizes not only the object of erotic desire (i.e.
the lady) but also its seeming subject (i.e. the knight-lover), who, in turn,
becomes the object of his friend’s erotic desire.

What is “subverted and
mystified,” therefore, is not female desire alone; male desire is also subverted
and mystified.

As “the female subject vanishes,” so does the male subject of
romantic adventure, which Georges Duby has identified with the juvenes, the
group of landless bachelor knights in feudal society who were “condemned to
a prolonged ‘youth’” by the law of primogeniture. It is arguable, therefore, that
a “well-wrought urn” of courtly romance creates a safely contained world of
fantasy for both aristocratic women and “young” bachelors, who are
institutionally excluded from patriarchal and feudal resources and privileges.


Keywords: LANCILLOTTO, GINEVRA, GALEOTTO, AMOR CORTESE, medieval romance, courtly love, eroticism, homoeroticism, asceticism, patriarchy, feudalism

As Elspeth Kennedy has pointed out, the first half of Lancelot Proper, the
long central branch of the Old French Lancelot-Grail cycle, has

“a firm thematic
structure in which the love of Lancillotto and Ginevra and the making of a
name intertwine”.

This twin theme, however, is complicated by the
potential uncertainty and plurality of the hero’s love and identity, which, though
manifest in the text itself, have somehow eluded scholarly attention so far.

What
Lancillotto does early on in his career is not only to earn the identity he is entitled
to through the service of love, but also to explore which love to settle on and
what identity to pursue―or, more specifically, to choose between his lady
Ginevra and his friend Galeotto and thus between heteronormativity and the
male bonding verging on homoeroticism.

We aim to demonstrate
that a homoerotic reading of Lancillotto-Galeotto relationship is instrumental to the
understanding of the ideological process by which love and sexuality are
constructed, channeled, and circumscribed in the Old French Arthurian prose
cycles, including the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.

Galeotto is Her Majesty’s Secret Rival.

Even a casual description of Lancelot’s friendship with Galehot will be
enough to show the presence of homo-erotic motif in Lancelot Proper.

Galehot,
young lord of the Lointaines Iles, is waging war against King Arthur in an
attempt to seal his great career as a conqueror when he is fascinated by the
prowess of a knight fighting for Arthur, who turns out to be Lancelot incognito.


Eager to secure Lancelot’s friendship, he ends up surrendering himself to Arthur
according to the request of the former even though he is on the brink of
winning the war.

Owing to this unheard-of act of soliciting friendship, he
succeeds in keeping Lancelot as his companion.

His affection for Lancelot,
nonetheless, is far from typical by the standard of common male-male friendship
portrayed in the medieval romance.

One night, Galehot sneaked into the room
where Lancelot was sleeping and “lay down beside him as quietly as he could”
(Lancelot-Grail 2: 136-37).

Later, as he headed for Arthur’s camp, leaving
Lancelot behind, “he embraced him and kissed him, commended him to God”
(2: 139).

Still later, when he was reunited with Lancelot after a brief separation,
“they lay down together in one bed, and spoke all night about what brought joy
to their hearts” (2: 147).1)

According to Gawain, “he is more jealous of
Lancillotto than any knight is of a young lady” (2: 237), and the narrator makes
1) “se couka dalés li al plus coiement que il pot” (Lancelot 8: 80).

"L’acole et baise
en la face et le commande a Dieu” (8: 88).

“Se couchant ambedoi en .I. lit et
parolent toute nuit de ce don lor cuer sont moult a aise” (8: 118).


it explicit that “he had put into his love for Lancelot everything a man could
put: heart and body and, most precious of all, his honor” (2: 241).2)

While he helps Lancelot win Queen Guinevere’s love and assumes the role
of a confidant between the two lovers thereafter―it is he who offers a shelter
to her when she is repudiated by Arthur in the False Guinevere episode―

Galehot is always afraid that he might lose Lancelot, on the one hand, due to
Guinevere’s possessive desire, and, on the other, because of Arthur’s growing
dependence on him.

As the narrative goes on, therefore, he gets increasingly
fatalistic about the future of their relationship―especially after Lancelot is
inducted to the Round Table (Lancelot-Grail 2: 241; Lancelot 1: 1).

All
portents, including his two dreams and the crumbling fortresses in Sorelois,
point towards his eventual loss of Lancelot.

Yet he faces his imminent downfall
most stoically, disappearing with grace into the background of endless
adventures, until he is led to believe that Lancelot is dead, at which he finally
dies of grief, despair, and a subsequent illness.

Later, when Lancelot discovers
Galehot’s tomb and learns that the latter is dead, he wishes to kill himself for
the unbearable dolor and damage he feels for the “loss of the most valiant
knight in the world, who died of love for the basest and most wicked knight
there ever was” (Lancelot-Grail 3: 59).3)

Upon the intercession of the Lady of
the Lake’s messenger, though, he has Galehot’s body carried to the Joieuse
Garde―the castle he captured early in his career―where he buries him in an
ancient tomb made of precious stones.

“As he had laid [Galehot] down, he
kissed him three times on the mouth in such agony that his heart leapt out of
“il est plus jalous de lui que nuls chevaliers de jouene dame” (8: 482); “il avoit mis
en l’amor Lancelot tot ce que hom i pooit metre, cuer et cors, et tote honor, que
miels valt” (1: 3).
“perte del plus preudome del monde qui mors est por le plus vil chevalier et por
le plus malvés qui onques fust” (2: 213).

his chest” (3: 69-70).4)

As far as Lancelot and Galehot are concerned, however, the most erotic
moment comes posthumously at the end of La Mort le roi Artu, the final branch
of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.

When Lancelot dies a hermit after the collapse of
the Round Table and the demises of Arthur and Guinevere, his surviving
companions bear his body upon his request to the Joieuse Garde.

He is buried
there in the tomb containing Galehot’s body.


That day there was a great deal of grief expressed in the castle, and that
night they ordered that the rich and sumptuous tomb of [Galehot] be opened.

The following day they placed the body of Lancelot in the tomb, which they
then had inscribed as follows:

Here lies the body of [Galehot], the Lord of
the Distant Isles, and with him rests Lancelot of the Lake, who, with the
exception of his son Galahad, was the best knight who ever entered the
kingdom of Logres. (Lancelot-Grail 4: 159)5)

Thus the two friends are bound to lie side by side, liberated from “the touch
of earthly years” and rolling round in saecula saeculorum “in earth’s diurnal
course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

Considering his lifelong service to
son amie Guinevere, it is sadly ironic that the body Lancelot is ultimately united
with is not hers, but that of the long-deceased ami Galehot.

The subtle rivalry between Guinevere and Galehot is tuned carefully

“quant il ot couchié, si le baisato fois en la boche a si grant anguoisse que par pou
que li cuers ne li partoit el ventre” (2: 254).

“Celui jor fu li duelz trop granz el chastel; et la nuit firent ouvrir la tombe Galeholt
qui tant estoit riche com nule plus. L’endemain firent metre enz le cors Lancelot;
après firent metre desus letres qui disoient: Ci gist li cors Galeholt, le segnor des
Lointaignes Illes, et avec lui repose Lancelos del Lac qui fu li mieudres chevaliers
qui onques entrast el roiaume de Locres, fors seulement Galaad son fill” (Mort
262-63).


throughout the first half of Lancelot Proper, which Kennedy aptly calls
“Lancelot without the Grail.”

A telling example is the confusion caused by the
term biax dols amis.

In Lancelot Proper, as in other Old French courtly
literature, the word ami/e is given an erotic value, which is unequivocally
articulated in the famous scene of Lancelot’s first tryst with Guinevere, which
culminates, as remembered by Dante’s Francesca, in the moment when

“the
longed-for smile / was kissed by so renowned a lover [amante]” (Inferno 5.133-34).6)

The
dialogue between the gracefully assertive Guinevere and the bashful Lancelot
goes as follows:

[S]he said to him, “Tell me, where does this love come from that I am
asking you about?”

“My lady, you yourself made it happen, by making me your friend
[vostre ami], if your words did not lie to me.”

“My friend [Mon ami]?” she asked, “How was that?”

“My lady,” he said, “I came before you, when I took my leave of the
king, fully armed but for my head and my hands, and I commended you to
God and said that I was your knight in whatever place I might be.

And you
said that you wanted me to be your knight and your friend [vostres
chevaliers et vos amis].

Then I said, ‘Farewell, my lady,’ and you said,

‘Farewell, dear friend [biax DOLS AMIS].’

Since then those words could never
leave my heart; those were the words that made me a worthy knight, if I am
one.” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 145; my Italics)7)

il disïato riso / esser basciato da contanto amante.

«Dites moi, fait ele, dont cele amor vient que je vous demant.». . . ―Dame, fait
il, vous le feistes faire, qui de moi feistes vostre ami, se vostre bouce ne me meti.
―Mon ami? fait ele.
Et comment? ―Dame, fait il, je m’en ving devant vous, quant
je prins congié de mon seignor le roi tous armés fors de mon chief et de mes mains,
si vous comandai a Dieu et dis que j’estoie vostre chevaliers en quelconques lieu
que je fuisse; et vous me desistes que vostres chevaliers et vos amis voliés vous
que je fuisse; et puis dis «a Dieu, dame» et vous desistes «a Dieu, biax dols amis»,


Lancelot is talking about the incident that happened on the day he was knighted.

Young squire as he was then, he was well‐informed enough to interpret "biax
dols amis" as an erotically-charged term, which it was, not only in the context
of the courtly romance at large but also in the context where the queen actually
used it, for by that time she had already begun to feel for him, suspecting he
was helplessly in love with her (Lancelot 7: 274-75, 285).

Even if it was not,
his interpretation is eventually justified by Guinevere’s subsequent use of the
term.

With a first kiss following this dialogue, Lancelot attains Guinevere’s
amor vraie (Lancelot 8: 115), and biax dols amis becomes her favorite term of
endearment for him.8)

It is exactly by this term, and by it only, which Lancelot
was thrilled to hear from Guinevere, that Galehot prefers to designate him―of
course, with no less affection.9)

Thus as Lancelot is Guinevere’s biax dols amis,
so is he to Galehot.

As Guinevere “was so overwhelmed by him and by his love
that she did not see how she could ever do without him” (Lancelot-Grail 2:
228), Galehot “had so given him his heart that he could have no joy without
him” (2: 241).10)

This theme of one friend versus another, or of one love versus another,
permeates the entire first half of Lancelot Proper.

For Lancelot, “la riens el
monde que il plus aime” is, of course, Guinevere (Lancelot 8: 463), and no one
else―not even Galehot, for whom he has utmost respect and affection―can
replace her.

Lancelot without the Grail hence might be read as the eponymous
ne onques puis del cuer ne me pot issir; et ce fu li most qui me fera preudome,
se jel sui ja (Lancelot 8: 111).
E.g. see Lancelot 8: 116, 456; 7: 155; 1: 144, 151, 173.
E.g. see Lancelot 8: 81, 84, 91, 97; 1: 9, 12, 33, 35, 73, 75, 126.
 “ele est si sosprise de lui et de amor, que ele ne voit mie comment ele s’en puisse
consievrer” (Lancelot 8: 445); “il li avoit si doné son cuer, la ou il ne pooit avoir
joie sans lui” (1: 3).
hero’s quest for love and identity, in which his amie Guinevere eventually
prevails over his ami Galehot, or heteronormativity over homoeroticim.

Only
with Galehot’s death does Lancelot’s vacillation between the two “friends”
come to an end.

Puzzlingly, however, at the very moment when Lancelot’s love
and sexual identity are fixed and resolved once and for all―par aventure, if not
by his own choice―begins his long, slow downslide, in which he is destined
to lose not only his love but also his name as the best knight in the world, as
well, superseded by his son Galahad.

What is even more puzzling is that it is
not Guinevere but Galehot who is set up to await him at the far end of the
journey, so the reader is left to suspect Lancelot might have known who it was
going to be, after all.

Courtly Love is Erotic Asceticism.

To properly locate the implications of this homoeroticism in Lancelot
Proper, a reexamination of normative heterosexual relationship is indispensable,
for the text is apparently one of the most powerful and memorable endorsements
of courtly love ever rendered in fictional narrative.

The structure of Lancelot Proper, elaborate and complex as it may be, is
typically romantic in two ways.

First, the entire work is framed by the
exile-and-return motif characterizing many medieval romances.

It begins with
the dispossession of the infant Lancelot and his two first cousins and ends with
them re-conquering their patrimonies from their nemesis King Claudas.

The
world in which Lancelot and his cousins are orphaned and disinherited is
governed by feudal -- and thus essentially homosocial -- values such as dynastic
obligation, princely virtues, and vassalic loyalty.

The world itself is distinctively
homosocial, too.

Women are virtually invisible there, and, when they are, they
are found to be either isolated in a convent (Lancelot’s mother and her sister)
or incarcerated by their husbands (Pharian’s wife).

It is only with the emergence
of the Lady of the Lake and her magical lake community that homosocial
agenda begins to submerge, at least from the surface.

The Fair Unknown motif,
another popular theme of the romance, is also present in Lancelot Proper.


Lancelot arrives at King Arthur’s court as a handsome nobody and has to win
a name -- and love, too -- befitting his exceptional physical beauty by his own
effort.

Compared with Claudas’ Gaul, which is justly named la Terre Deserte,
Arthur’s Kingdom of Logres is noticeably heterosocial in atmosphere.

Lancelot
enters Camelot escorted by the Lady of the Lake -- his patron and surrogate
mother -- and her splendid retinue.

Upon his arrival, he instantly falls in love
with Queen Guinevere, “la dame des dames et la fontaine de biauté” (Lancelot
7: 274), and one of the two adventures he subsequently undertakes as le novel
chevalier is defending the Lady of Nohaut and her land from the invasion of
the king of Northumberland.

Both these motifs, however, are eventually undermined and left
uncompleted.

When the long-delayed revenge is finally fulfilled at the end of
Lancelot Proper, Lancelot yields his claim for Gaul to his half-brother ETTORE
and his cousin Lionel, denouncing landed comfort as detrimental to the pursuit
of chivalry.

Unlike typical heroes of the exile-and-return romance, he and Bors,
another cousin of his, prefer to remain a “povres hom et bons chevaliers” than
to be a “riches rois recreanz” (6: 170).

Lancelot’s story departs from the typical
Fair Unknown plotline, as well: his quest does not result in the foundation of
a new dynasty away from home through a marriage to a rich, beautiful heiress.

LANCILLOTTO, instead, loves Guinevere, who is his sovereign’s wife and thus neither
available for a legal union or able to re-enfranchise him.

What Lancelot has to
learn amid the plethora of adventures and marvels, therefore, is to suppress and
overcome territorial ambition and dynastic motivation, which characterize both
types of romance heroes described above.

Such unmarried, seemingly anti-feudal lifestyle is odd because most
adventures are either erotic or feudal or both by nature.

Love and property are
everywhere to take up for a preudome noble and valiant enough, and often
handily combined in a single person.

Thus the Lady of Nohaut, upon the king
of Northumberland’s withdrawal, “offered [Lancelot] herself and her land [li et
sa terre], as he might wish” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 73), and the Lady of Malehaut,
another femme sole with a power to enfranchise, “greatly desired to find out
who [Lancelot] was and where he had placed his heart, and would have liked
it to be in hers” (2: 125).11)

Again, it is in the same context that the Lady of
Roestoc lamented her failure to detain Gawain, confessing that he was “the
person she had most loved in all the world” (2: 169).12)

So is it that the Lord
of the Estroite Marche offered Hector both his land and only daughter after the
latter successfully championed his cause against Marganor (Lancelot-Grail 2:
193; Lancelot 8: 306–307). He is looking for the “chevaliers de si grant
riqueche ou de si grant proeche” who can protect his patrimony and perpetuate
his lineage:

I have been in such anguish all my life; now I’m very old, and nothing else
in all the world gives me such sorrow as the fact that there will be no one
after me to maintain this castle as well as I have maintained it, for my only
child is a beautiful and sensible daughter, who could already have three
“moult se poroffri, li et sa terre, a son voloi” (Lancelot 7: 304); “si volsist moult
volentiers savoir qui il estoit et en quel lieu il avoit mis son cuer et bien volsist
que che fust en li” (8: 35).
“la riens en cest mont que ele avoit plus aimee” (Lancelot 8: 209).

children, given her age, but I don’t want to marry her off until a knight of
great worth or great power comes along, upon whom she would be well
bestowed and who could honorably maintain this castle after me.
(Lancelot-Grail 2: 186; my Italics)13)

The Lord of the Estroite Marche is thus beleaguered by a problem common to
heirless chatelains and unattached chatelaines abounding in Arthurian landscape.
The world of adventures Lancelot and his likes roam about, therefore, is
basically the same as the one inhabited by the Fair Unknowns, or rather male
Cinderellas: what unfolds before the eyes of a young knight-errant is a terrain
of unlimited opportunities, where li et sa terre await his magic kiss, dormant
in the keep of a forlorn castle, besieged by the irksome and noxious briers of
suitors, pretenders, and usurpers.

A hallmark of a better knight, however, is an ability to remain aloof from
propertied women, or property personified as women.

Lancelot’s entire career
is, in fact, a never-ending series of heroic efforts to ward off all other women --
most of whom are coupled with properties -- to stay loyal to one and only
Guinevere.

The same is true for Hector, who, as Kennedy observes, “takes
Lancelot’s place in the main narrative as a young knight and lover in the
process of establishing his reputation” during his half-brother’s absence (232).
Even Gawain, who is not committed to any single woman and obviously less
rigorous in sexual discipline than Lancelot and Hector, manages to evade the
13) “En tel angoisse ai esté des que je ving en terre tant que sui mais tous viex ne
je n’ai el monde si grant duel comme j’ae de ce qu’il n’ert après moi qui cest
castel maintiegne si bien comme je l’ai maintenu, car je n’ai de tous enfans que
une fille moult bele et moult sage qui peust ja avoir .III. enfans par eage ne je
ne la voeil marier dusqu’a tant que uns chevaliers de si grant riqueche ou de si
grant proeche viegne ou ele fust bien emploïe et qui après moi maintenist chest
chastel a honor” (Lancelot 8: 279).

Then we have the Lady of Roestoc’s desperate courtship.

This ideal of knighthood, of which
Lancelot is the epitome, sustains Lancelot Proper, and, in successively loosened
forms, the later Arthurian prose cycles􀉆especially their central, more secular
branches such as the Prose Tristan and Palamedes. A bizarre example of this
impoverishing practice of knighthood is le Chevalier a la Cote Mautailliee in
the Prose Tristan. While Malory’s La Cote Male Tayle is happily invested with
a bride and a castle (Malory 476), his French namesake is not so lucky, at least
to the eyes of a worldly􍾟wise reader. The Chevalier neither marries la Demoisele
Mesdisant nor secures any landed franchise. His adventure ends abruptly with
an ascetic overtone symptomatic of the Old French courtly romance. Lancelot
is offered the Chastel Nestor but once again satisfied to be a “povres hom et
bons chevaliers”: “‘Lords,’ said he, ‘know well that in this country there is no
land that I want to keep for myself. I am a knight-errant; for no adventure in
the world will I stay here or elsewhere’” (Roman de Tristan 3: 88; my
translation).14) Instead, he encourages the inhabitants of the castle to choose
their lord among his four companions, one of whom is le Chevalier a la Cote
Mautailliee. They elect a knight better proven than the youthful Chevalier, as
Lancelot heads back towards King Arthur’s court. The severely wounded
Chevalier a la Cote Mautailliee, however, is left behind, nursing his battered
body, still landless and wifeless à la mode Française, after his share of
adventure is completed.
Compared with the Chevalier’s seemingly purposeless life, Lancelot’s
appears to be far more unified and meaningful. It is for the love of Guinevere
that he renounces everything valuable in this world and next. His life is no less
14) “‘Seignor,’ fait il, ‘or sachiez bien qu’en cest païs n’a nule terre que je por moi
vousisse retenir. Je sui chevaliers erranz; por nule aventure del monde je ne
remendroie ne ci ne aillors.’”
arduous and painful, though. He abandons his patrimony and duty to revenge,
passes over the hopes of conjugal stability, and denies the comfort of a “riches
rois recreanz.” He is even deprived of a celestial privilege to achieve the Grail
on account of his love, let alone a chance to be le meilleur chevalier du monde.
He can accept no woman’s offer of “friendship” since he has only one lady in
his mind, but, unfortunately, he is isolated from her, too, not only because he
has to quest as a knight􍾟errant away from the court where she resides, but also
because she and her body permanently belong elsewhere. Though he is a jouster
par excellence, life on the road is not always easy and pleasant to him, either,
for he pines away most of the time in a remote dungeon, captured in turn by
all kinds of villains and sorceresses􀉆including Morgan le Fay, who is
resourceful enough to trap him twice.

The Lady of the Lake’s shield that
Lancelot takes up during his first spell of madness, in this sense, becomes an
effective symbol of his dilemma. While he is wearing it around his neck on a
sling, he is perfectly sane but it torments him; as soon as he takes it off,
however, he gets insane again (Lancelot-Grail 2: 231; Lancelot 8: 455-57). Love
is like carrying such magic shield for Lancelot: the weight of it is too
tormenting to bear, but he cannot be himself without it. Few other medieval
romances are more erotic than those of Lancelot, which is true. But what other
stories of erotic love could be more ascetic than his? In sacrificing all else in
self-imposed penance and poverty for the sake of one love that means
everything, erotic love pursued by Lancelot approaches the gist of religious
monasticism, paradoxical as it may sound. It is exactly in this context that the
oxymoron of “erotic asceticism” becomes a term apropos to define the form of
heterosexual relationship prized in the Old French courtly romance.
Guinevere’s barren body further elucidates the problematic nature of courtly
love as erotic asceticism. Barrenness of adulterous relationship in courtly
Between Guinevere and Galehot: Homo/eroticism in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle 319
literature, as Georges Duby points out, might have been caused by the concern
that “bastardy was too serious a matter to be treated lightly in literature,” or that
“people were too afraid of it to use it as a subject for a tale” (Knight 222). More
important to our purpose, however, is the awareness that Guinevere’s barrenness
places her once again vis􍾟à􍾟vis with Galehot, another barren body in love with
Lancelot. This, in turn, reminds us of the barrenness of Lancelot’s life. The
object of his lifelong quest proves to be hardly differentiated from the subject
by whom he has been objectified as “la rien que je plus aim” (Lancelot 8: 93)
and from whom he has longed to escape unconsciously􀉆at least by the feudal
standard of the medieval romance, in which femininity is equated with double
fertility in procreation and enfranchisement. Guinevere’s twofold sterility, then,
threatens her feminine identity, as well as her value as an object of feudalized
masculine desire. The boundary between heteronormativity and homoeroticism is
again being blurred; so is the one between masculinity and femininity.

We need A Reality Check.

This valorization of barren sexuality espoused by a categorical
denouncement of all other socio-cultural currencies might be an ideological
discourse addressed to the group of landless bachelors whom Georges Duby
identifies as the youths, or juvenes.

According to Duby, the ordo of youths
included both unmarried eldest sons and the younger sons who were,
necessitated by primogeniture, “condemned to a prolonged ‘youth’” (“Youth”
118) and thus led a life of vagabondage prone to violence and promiscuity􀉆
including sodomy, of course (115n).

They were the primary audience of the
twelfth-century chanson and romance, so goes his argument, which were intended
to beautify their nomadic lifestyle and discipline their excessive virility.

Duby
suggests, however, that their status began to change near the end of the twelfth
century, when more younger sons were allowed to marry thanks to the increased
revenues of aristocratic families (Knight 274-78).

How well-versed Duby was in
the courtly romances of the following century is uncertain, but it is certain that
in no place else is the presence of the “youths” felt more strongly than in the
thirteenth-century prose cycles.

The earlier episodes of Lancelot Proper are, in
fact, inscribed with concerns about poor bachelers, a term that indicates the
aristocratic males who are “not only young and unmarried but, more particularly,
landless” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 118n) and, therefore, corresponds exactly to Duby’s
description of juvenes.

Thus “li legier bachelier et li povre homme” populate the
tournaments (Lancelot 7: 424), and “moult li povre homme” are eager to break
lances on both sides during Galehot’s war against Arthur,15) while Arthur is
advised by a wise man to take care of any “poor landless knight [le povre
bachelor] whom Poverty has in bondage and who has not forgotten knightly
prowess” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 122). 16)

What is most interesting, however, is the
fact that Lancelot fashions himself as “uns povres bachelers” (Lancelot 8: 8) and
is recognized, in turn, as a “povre hom” (8: 117) who “had not a penny’s worth
of land” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 230).17)

Lancelot thus emerges as a paragon of young bachelors, and what his
example does ideologically is obvious.

No other social group is, of course,

Samuel N. Rosenber’s translation goes respectively as follows: “lively young
knights and landless men” (Lancelot-Grail 2: 105); “the landless knight” (2: 129).
Considering social contexts, these might be accurate, if not literal, renderings of the
terms.
“le povre bacheler que poverté avra en son lien et qui proece de cors n’avra mie
oublié” (Lancelot 8: 19).
“li n’a denree de terre” (Lancelot 8: 453).
farther away from the “profane” asceticism he practices than the juvenes, but
no other is in a direr need of disciplinary measures than them, either.

The
romances of Lancelot, arguably the purest brand of courtly narratives known to
the French Middle Ages, of which Lancelot Proper is an exemplar, glorify the
state of bachelorhood in which an exclusion from feudal customs and resources
is prized and perpetuated in anticipation of an erotic conquest.

The conquest
itself is heavily prescribed, too, as it is imagined on the remote, sterile female
body in the network of disenfranchising asceticism.

What is “subverted and
mystified,” therefore, is not female desire alone; male desire is also subverted
and mystified. As “the female subject vanishes,” so does the male subject
(Krueger 65).18)

Then, it is not entirely an unimaginable scenario that Lancelot
is indeed a nobody, “uns povres bachelers” without any splendid ancestry to
boast: it should be noted that the watery element of the lake where he is
educated and where his identity is shaped is an illusion created by the Lady of
the Lake’s enchantment (Lancelot 7: 44).


Without this illusion, in which is
programmed his future as “Lancelos del Lac, li fiex au rois Ban de Benoÿc,”
life would have been much more painful and much less rewarding to him, and
also to any bachelors who would like to pattern their careers after him.
What greets a “young” knight-errant after the dreaded moment of
disenchantment, however, is nothing but hard reality􀉆the deep, throbbing
wounds of a Chevalier a la Cote Mautailliee sans guerdon, or the
fifty-five-year-old body of a Lancelot laboring to out-joust the
seventy-six-year-old Gawain in a combat of life and honor, still wifeless and
landless (Mort 204), or the “friendly” kiss and embrace of a Galehot, who is

Krueger is commenting on Chétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier de la charette. Her
observation, however, can be applied with little reservation to Lancelot Proper,
which is an encyclopedic expansion of Chétien’s romance.

in his turn ready to sacrifice anything for the sake of a friend and lover in his
wildest fantasy. After all, what else can be more erotic in the life of a fictional
knight-errant than a friendly but fierce struggle of sweat and sinew against a
worthy foe, in which one body is unavoidably intertwined with another? Then,
it might be a poignantly realistic ending, I would argue, for Lancelot to be
reunited body to body with Galehot after all those years.

When the medieval West invented a way to eroticize its cultural front in the
late eleventh century, compared to which “the Renaissance is a mere ripple on
the surface of literature”􀉆so goes C. S. Lewis’ unforgettable dictum (4)􀉆what
was eroticized in consequence was not only heterosexual desire thitherto
disregarded in literature, but also the homosocial bond between male warriors,
which had been at the very heart of Germanic ideology and imagination from
the pre-literary past to the age of Beowulf and of La Chanson de Roland.

When
Wealhtheow and Aude were eroticized, so were Wiglaf and Olivier.

Even in the
eroticized versions of heroic narratives, however, it is the homosocial􀉆now
homoerotic􀉆relationship between man and man that is accepted without
question and stays intact up to the very last moment.

Wealhtheows and Audes,
for all the rhetorical camouflage, remain curiously objectified and marginalized
in this process of transformation.

The same is true for an imaginary
warrior-knight excluded by destiny from homosocial gift-giving culture, lacking
Hyelacs and Charlemagnes􀉆both are father-figures, anyway􀉆to enfranchise him.


He does not have many options available, one of which is a typically poetic and
romantic one we are already well acquainted with: he “must again and again
send his weary heart out over the woven waves,” caught in a dream of
“embracing and kissing his liege [lady] and laying his hands and his heads on
[her] knee,” even though she is not able to “protect” him as his non-existent
male patron would be.19)


REFERENCES:


Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New
York: Doubleday, 2000.

Duby, Georges. The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern
Marriage in Medieval France. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

---  “Youth in Aristocratic Society: Northwestern France in the Twelfth
Century.” The Chivalrous Society. Trans. Cynthia Postan. London: Edward
Arnold, 1977. 112-22.

Kennedy, Elspeth. Lancelot and the Grail: A Study of the Prose Lancelot.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.

Krueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French
Verse Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Lancelot: Roman en prose du XIIIe siècle. Ed. Alexandre Micha. 9 vols.
Genève: Droz S. A., 1978–83.

Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in
Translation. Norris J. Lacy, gen. ed. 5 vols. New York: Garland, 1993-96.

Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1936.


  “sendan sceal swþe geneahhe / ofer waþema gebind werigne sefa” (Wanderer 557);
“he his mondryhten / clyppe on cysse ond on cneo lecge /hond ond heafod”
(41-43a). E. Talbot Donaldson’s translations are quoted from The Norton Anthology
of English Literature; emendations are, of course, mine.


Malory, Sir Thomas. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. Ed. Eugène Vinaver.
Rev. P. J. C. Field. 3rd ed. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.
La mort le roi Artu: Roman du XIIIe siècle. Ed. Jean Frappier. Genève: Droz
S. A., 1964.
Le roman de Tristan en prose. Ed. Renée L. Curtis. 3 vols. Vol. 1, Munich:
Max Hueber, 1963. Vol. 2, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976. Vol. 3, Cambridge:
D. S. Brewer, 1985.