Medieval Nature Class 4 – Roman de Silence
Silence with Parents
One of the chapters of Giovanni Baptista Gelli’s Circe features a conversation between Ulysses and a deer. Gelli’s sixteenth-century work, a series of debates between Circe’s Greek prisoner and a series of people, now transformed into animals, sees him lose nearly every argument about the supposed superiority of human beings. The deer’s argument is that she had been a human woman. That she’s female, or had once been female, isn’t apparent to Ulysses until she identifies herself: at first he addresses her as a “he,” and he shouts with dismay when she identifies herself as a former Greek and woman. Certainly the gender of cervids mattered then as it matters now to hunters: fully antlered deer were the ideal trophy. But freed from the legal machinery of human gender, the deer is every bit as formerly woman as she is formerly Greek and formerly human. Having escaped the hierarchies that would make her a “slave and servant” to men, she is now, simply, a deer.
I was put in mind of this by the legal insistence on gendering infants to preserve existing social hierarchies, which Leah DeVun describes in her The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. DeVun cites the twelfth-century Italian jurist Azo, who writes that “Women are different from men in many things because the legal status of women in lower than men” (qtd 126). The Secrets of Women, pseudonymously ascribed to Albert the Great, therefore proposes that anyone with “two natures” should be done the favor of being legally identified as male (129), as does the Summa ‘Omnes Homines,’ advising that such infants “should be baptized as male because the male is the ‘more worthy of the sexes, and the active [is] better than its passive’” (130). The deer refuses to become human again because that would mean returning to a diminished legal standpoint; given the option of being gendered female or male, jurists justly feel that there’s likewise no good reason to prefer being a woman to a man, should the opportunity present itself to choose.
So what happens in the Roman de Silence is a similar choice. Given the text’s insistence on secrets, and on the parents negotiating an identity for their child under prevailing legal conditions, I’m struck by how Silence decides to live as a man, and struck by the allegorical figure who advises Silence being neither Nature nor Nurture, but Reason (2640-47). Silence makes this decision in a work in which we have already met their mother, the best physician of the realm, whose love sickness is every bit as severe as her patient’s, and who suffers from no lack of political agency in choosing her mate: only sexual desire itself makes things difficult for her. Even so, despite her evident social power and recognized expertise, Silence’s mother lacks narrative stickiness: there’s no story to tell about her in a long romance. In a lai, certainly, but this is no lai. What’s being chosen, by Silence, might therefore arguably be agency and narratability, where being a man, even a lower-class man like a jongleur, is a choice that makes sense, and has the force of inevitability, primarily because of the genre’s diminishment of possibilities for women. It’s no wonder, then, that Silence’s story essentially ends when he’s compelled to be a she.[1]
On this rereading, I’m struck by the common observation that Silence is a figure without sexual desire. In passages you likely haven’t read, since we haven’t read the whole romance, Silence is the object of Eufeme’s desire, who, failing in her attempted seduction, accuses Silence of being an “erite” (3935, a “heretic”), since Silence “a feme ne se delite” (does not delight in women); when Silence succeeds in a task, that of luring Merlin from the woods and back to civilization, that only a woman can do, Silence is thereupon the object of King Eban’s desire – a desire whose supposed ‘return to normality’ runs aground on Ebain being, perhaps, her uncle, since he had “fist norir” (515) her father, Cador.
Silence is troubled by desire, but only as desire’s object.
Except that the question of desire, or at least sexual congress, is part of the pragmatism of Silence’s decision to refuse Nature and follow Nurture.
Donques li prent a souvenir
Des jus c’on siolt es cambres faire
Dont a oï sovent retraire (2632-34)Then he began to consider / the past times of a woman’s chamber — / which he had often heard about.
That’s Roche-Mardi’s translation. Regina Psaki does that crucial line 2633 as “the games people play in private,” which Loren Lee clearly prefers, with her “the games people play alone in chambers.” Though I’m not sure how Roche-Mardi produced “women’s chamber” from cambres – chambre, in Modern French, it’s clear to me that Silence is weighing not just inside versus outside, that is, Silence’s decision here that life in the outdoor sporting entertainments of an aristocratic boy will make Silence a rotten kisser (2645), but also deciding that being alone indoors, in private, means having to do indoor jus, in modern French jeux, games: sex, in a word.
And the consideration here, at this point, is not that of having a secret revealed. We have encountered that fear earlier, when Silence was on the edge of agreeing with Nature (2570-2571): what if I’m naked, Silence wonders, what will people find out about me? But the issue later, when Silence meets Reason, is otherwise: that of being too rough for indoor games.
We can come at this at least two ways. First, as I observed last week, I find that Peter Damien especially, but also Alan of Lille, seem to be unable to conceive of sex non-hierarchically. Alan of Lille cannot conceive of sex between equals because his metaphor, he believes, demands a relation between active and passive. Peter Damian cannot conceive of equal sex because he thinks that the sodomite is really seeking a woman, perhaps because the chief target of his ire is the sexual use made by senior clerics of the people in their charge, which means that the Sodomite is not just addled in their choice of sexual partner, they’re also abusing people who by rights should also be on top. So too here, in a way. Sex for Silence, so long as Silence has settled on being a man, threatens not to reveal Silence’s truth, but rather to strip Silence of the social superiority they enjoy. With all that in mind, I’m now inclined to support Lauren Lee’s bold decision to translate lines 2639-41 as “Look,” he said, “in a malign hour / will I bottom, when I’m a top / I’m on top, am I going to bottom out?.” This isn’t a matter of truth or not: it’s a matter of living a better life.
Secondly, as others have observed, the Nature / Nurture division all takes place within gendered social hierarchies (the class hierarchies we might consider in class discussion). It’s all politics, but politics of a peculiar sort, where the options are not universal equality, but who gets to lead a freer life. Unlike fables, which so often love to tell stories of animals ultimately frustrated by refusing to live out their true nature, like the donkey beaten for wanting to be caressed like a dog. The donkey is disappointed because of course it would be. It’s not built like a dog. It doesn’t feel like a dog. It only wants what a dog has. But the Roman de Silence can put Nature on top, and Silence on bottom, only through great effort, through a wonder in fact, that of fetching Merlin back to civilization, and along with it, his uncanny ability to spy out a truth (6534-36). Nature is not inevitable here. To a degree, Nature can be managed; it can be a choice; and Free Will, granted as full a reign as it merits, might never choose, in this world, to be a woman.
- Here’s what I read this time: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Nature’s Forge Recast in the Roman de Silence,” in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, 39-46, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (D. S. Brewer, 1994); Barbara Newman, “Did Goddesses Empower Women? The Case of Dame Nature,” In Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Carpenter Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, pp. 135-155 (Cornell University Press, 2003); Jessica Barr, “The idea of the wilderness: Gender and Resistance in le Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 30, no. 1 (2020): 3-25; and Masha Raskolnikov “Without Magic or Miracle: The Romance of Silence and the Prehistory of Genderqueerness.” Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, ed. Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska, 178-206 (Cornell University Press, 2021). In 2001, I did a seminar paper for Joan Ferrante on how gender moves in the Roman de Silence, but not class, and that where we expect it to move perhaps – her time among the jongleurs – is where the Roman most noisily and desperately asserts a core identity for Silence, which is that of being an aristocrat. I should probably find time to publish it some day. ↑
