Courtesy

What was that courtesy code of the knights? Strong guys, strongly armed going here and there wearing armors… they are supposed to be good makers, but why doing the right thing required swords? A bunch of armed guys with volatile tempers are controlled by this alleged code. They were not like the modern police, they did not answer to a superior except for a lord or a king who was too busy doing his own violence against the villain of the moment.

The code looks abstract and vague from this point of history. It is almost a good manner manual, but did it have actual ethic content? Being brave and doing the good thing seems not to be enough specific rules, and the respect of the honor sometimes seems more like an infantile excuse for bullying… except that we are talking about big guys with swords.

May be is because of my Hispanic heritage that when I think about a knight I cannot avoid thinking about “Don Quijote de la Mancha”, trying to force someone to confess that his “Dulcinea” was the most beautiful girl ever… “Don Quijote” was a lousy warrior and most of the times he got beaten, but he could take the “Helmet of Mambrino” –which was actually a barber’s bowl –using violence. His courtesy code was absurd even in the sixteen century.

Was the Chivalry Code more logical during the middle ages and its application restricted toe when it was possible, as the modern Humanitarian Law? Were these knights actually models of virtue or just a bunch of belligerent guys doing almost what they wanted?

Ugliness and Beauty

One topic I didn't have time to discuss in my presentation was the relationship between ugliness and beauty. In all the texts we have read so far, the narrators give us plenty of details regarding the hideous features of the monsters/others. Indeed, the narrator of "Dame Ragnelle" leaves little to imagination when describing the loathly lady.

However these same narrators are almost silent when it comes to beauty. Other than using vague sup relatives like "the most beautiful woman ever", the narrators never give us a sense of what they look like. What color of hair does Dame Ragnelle have post transformation? What facial features does the fairy queen in Lanval have? What does the narrators lack of description mean? I would propose that the reason has to do with the nature of beauty. It has been said, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Beauty is relative because there is no universal standard of what beauty is or is not. Indeed, movies stars, models, and the like possess a marketable beauty because many other people consider them beautiful. But even celebrities are not considered beautiful by everyone. Everyone has his/her own definition of beauty, so no person can be universally acclaimed as "the most beautiful".

By contrast, ugliness/monstrous is easier to pinpoint. The narrators can expound on the grotesque details of the ugliness/monstrous because these details are more universally identifiable. It is doubtful that anyone in any time or culture would consider a woman with boar's tusks to be attractive! Beauty then is subjective, whereas ugliness/monstrous is objective (at least more so than beauty). While we can debate who is the most beautiful man or woman on earth, we will all probably agree that Grendel, his mother, the Carl, and the loathly Dame Ragnelle are not.

Dame Ragnelle and Queen Bramimonde

I found The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle the most interesting of the three Sir Gawain poems we had to read for Monday's class. The character of Dame Ragnelle is truly fascinating: she is monstrous, "she was as ungoodly a creature / As evere man sawe, withoute mesure" (228-9), she exhibits agency and a desire for "sovereynte" and, after her marriage to a knight and magical transformation into the most beautiful woman at court, is also magically transformed into an obedient wife. Her trajectory in the poem reminded me of the Saracen princess or queen who displays all the qualities that are disdained in a good Christian woman but is still considered a herione and, upon marriage to a knight and conversion from paganism, becomes the perfect wife.

In many ways we can think of Dame Ragnelle as a proto-feminist: she wishes, above all, for autonomy. She is shrewd and she is bold and she is willing to risk disloyalty to the only family member we know of, her mischief making brother Sir Gromer Somer. She is similar to Queen Bramimonde who also exhibits her own agency and has no problem hurling curses at her own gods thus demonstrating that she, too, is willing to exhibit disloyalty to religion and family which is only further confirmed by her later conversion. Both are willful women who are tamed by marriage and absorption into a new society. Dame Ragnelle, despite her insistence that all women really want sovereignty, is all too happy to give this up, voluntarily, upon her marriage to Sir Gawain and Bramimonde-Juliana becomes fully absorbed into Christian society as a mild mannered lady.

For all the parallels, however, it is the difference between Dame Ragnelle and the typical Saracen princess/queen that struck me. Dame Ragnelle is ugly, is monstrous, is so completely other, whereas medieval poems typically portray the Saracen princess as beautiful, alluring and, most importantly, white. (I know there are cases when she is black but, as far as I know, when she converts to Christianity her blackness melts away into whiteness.) The Saracen princess is exactly like a Christian heroine except she is willful and disobedient to her family and faith. These kinks, as it were, are remedied upon her conversion and marriage whereupon she is transformed into the good Christian woman. In the Saracen princess case, her monstrosity is her paganism and sense of agency which can be changed by conversion. In Dame Ragnelle's case, however, she may already be Christian but she is willful and disobedient and, most importantly, really really ugly. The Saracen princess is admired for her beauty, already in a sense belonging to the society that she will join at the end of the poem, but there is no place for Dame Ragnelle and she has to force her way into society where she is barely tolerated. It begs the question: what is the function of Dame Ragnelle's monstrosity? Is it caused, in part, by her agency and willfulness or is that just a symptom of it?

In both cases, however different on the surface, there are two women who are figured as monstrous - one for her geographic location and one for her appearance - and a marriage to a knight is central to her transformation, not only into an acceptable Christian lady who must look the part, but also one who must act the part.