This paper examines evidence for the intended audience of the anonymous fifteenth-century anthology, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, MS XIII.B.29. All evidence is internal, but the selection of texts, their arrangement, their adjustments to the manuscript matrix, and their focus on female agency strongly suggest that this manuscript was intended for a female audience. The contents of the manuscript comprise medical recipes, three romances, a saint’s life, and a “legend”—a version of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale. The relevance of each of these items to a female audience, together with an explanation of their contextual significance to the overall manuscript, is discussed. The secular nature of the contents suggests also that the intended audience consisted of secular women, and as such, the Naples Manuscript is an important document in the history of women’s culture in the Middle Ages.

The Naples Manuscript and the Case for a Female Readership

This three-part essay addresses the monstrous-feminine in Lybeaus Desconus, a Middle English romance extant in six manuscript versions. Part 1 foregrounds variations on the fierce kiss (fier basier) that signals a change in narratives of the 'Fair Unknown.' Part 2 addresses Lybeaus' status as an illegitimate son of Gawain and his reintegration into courtly society. Part 3 examines the means by which the monstrous-feminine plays a role in the transformation of a source text into two English versions in a complex process of adaptation. (ES)Lybeaus Desconus is a tale about a mysterious outsider-the Fair Unknown-who comes to King Arthur's court to prove himself worthy of inclusion.1 Like Perceval, this would-be knight is raised in the wilderness by his mother; his status as Sir Gawain's illegitimate son is unknown even to himself. When Arthur asks him to state his name publicly, the youth announces the only name he knows-Bewfiz (Beautiful Son)-a term of endearment identifying him exclusively as his mother's child. Such a name proves troublesome in a realm predicated upon androcentric codes of conduct and 'proper' names. Thus in a gesture that overrides the mother's dominion over her son, the youth is dubbed 'Lybeaus Desconus' and provisionally enfolded into a signifying system until he gains full recognition by the chivalric community. This name is akin to 'Bewfiz' in its recognition of the boy's good looks, and the renamed young knight-called 'child' for much of the narrative-is provisionally enfolded into a signifying system until he gains full recognition by the chivalric community. In the legitimizing world of the Arthurian court to which Lybeaus Desconus is only tangentially related, the illegitimate son of Gawain stands in a precarious position between kinship and disenfranchisement.Once provided with a legitimate name by the king, Lybeaus is offered an opportunity to forge a reputation for himself when he is assigned a mission to rescue the lady of Synadoun who has been transformed into a dragon by two malevolent necromancers. When Lybeaus arrives at the lady's castle in the macabre city of Synadoun, believed to be located somewhere in North Wales, he enters the enchanted hall and is immediately overtaken by such apprehension and fear that he 'swelt for swete' (sweltered for sweat [Lambeth, line 2076]). Such a physiological response, rarely acknowledged in medieval romance even in a knight's preparation for battle, presages events to come when suddenly, a 'worme...with a womanes face,' (Lambeth, lines 2067-68) emerges from a window of the illumined hall to confront the fearful knight. Literally stopped in his tracks by the sight of the hybrid dragon-lady looming before him, Lybeaus feels his heart begin to pound so forcefully that he thinks it will burst ('So sore he was agaste/Hym thought his herte tobraste' [Lambeth, lines 2079-80]). Then, without warning, he becomes the target of a stunning act of intimacy as the creature grabs him around the neck and delivers a fearsome kiss: 'The worme with mouth him kyste/And clypped aboute the swyre' (Lambeth, lines 2077-84).The aggressive and shocking dragon-woman who attacks the novitiate knight and produces this visceral response in him enacts what film critic Barbara Creed calls the 'monstrous-feminine,' a concept she defines as any representation of a daunting mode of female sexuality eliciting fear in the men who encounter it.2 For Creed, female monsters take many forms and assume many guises; some have more to do with reproduction and motherhood- the archaic mother, woman as monstrous womb, woman as witch, for instance- while others address matters of sexual desire-the femme castratrice and the vagina dentata. In its ability to destabilize normative ontological categories, the monstrous-feminine is a paradoxical figure of resistance and attraction, desire and revulsion, aggression and submission, the beautiful and the hideous, the familiar and the unfamiliar. …

Lybeaus Desconus: Transformation, Adaptation, and the Monstrous-Feminine

This article positions Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal alongside chivalric manuals and histories of nobility in order to highlight the ways in which a knight's attendants and companions support his heroism and social status. ( JTS)The knight in medieval England rarely worked alone. Whether he served under a magnate or at the head of a regiment, a knight was almost always a part of a much larger company of men. This is especially true of English knights of the later Middle Ages, whose social roles on and off the battlefield proliferated as time went on. Since at least the thirteenth century, responsibilities in town government kept knights occupied. As literacy spread among the members of England's landed class, so too did knowledge of legal and administrative matters, which allowed knights to serve their king as counselors and functionaries at court; by the middle of the fourteenth century, knights had begun to occupy government posts previously reserved for clerics.1 At home, knights also managed large households and directed many servants who helped maintain the impressive estates of the nobility. With the support of their stewards, many knights cultivated reputations for largess and even drew censure from Thomas Walsingham, who claimed that these nobles were forsaking their swords while training their tongues.2 But, although they took on responsibilities of management removed from battle, medieval knights were, and still are, largely defined through their most visible and spectacular role as bellatores-the armored, mounted warriors who fought for the king. Historians of chivalry have shown that knighthood was indelibly linked with armed combat through at least the end of the fourteenth century.3 And just as the knight's duties at court and at home required that he work as part of a governing body, so too was the knight on the battlefield one man among a company of men. The expansion of the knight's weaponry and armor in the later Middle Ages led to a parallel expansion in the knight's retinue, on whom he depended for support in battle. Even while a knight fought an opponent in single combat on the tournament grounds, a company of squires and attendants helped their employer to victory by looking after his horses, armor, and weapons.4The cooperation between knights, squires, and magnates appears in medieval chivalric manuals as a sign of proper noble behavior. Didactic texts by Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century and Geoffroi de Charny in the fourteenth emphasize knights' responsibility to uphold their own honor even while they also insist that the knights' duties often require working together with other members of the higher and lower nobility.5 These writers approach their pedagogical projects from different angles-Llull focuses heavily on symbolism and interpretation, Charny on more pragmatic concerns- but their texts concur when the writers tell their audiences how to avoid dishonorable behavior in ways that promote reciprocal support. Moreover, cooperation between nobles appears prominently in modern studies of chivalry and nobility.6 In light of the knight's cooperation with other nobles in late medieval England at war, in the household, and on the tournament grounds, it is surprising that a hero's companions should appear so seldom in discussions of the idealized chivalric romances of the time. Members of the English aristocracy had many opportunities to see large companies ride against each other in tournaments during the reign of Richard II, whose love of pageantry and extravagance led him to drain England's coffers in order to fund increasingly elaborate public displays of nobility.7 Nonetheless, Maldwyn Mills insists that chivalric romances center on 'the prowess and fortunes of individual knights, even when they also relate the activities of a large company of such knights at court.'8 Although knights under Richard II fought in immense groups, the romances of the late fourteenth century appear to focus instead on single combat and individual success. …

Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal and the Knight in Need

A Sheela Na Gig is a carving of a woman with exposed and/or exaggerated genitalia, usually found on religious buildings in the Middle Ages and considered to be sacred. This article seeks to examine the complexity of the naked female body in the Middle ages embodying a sheela na gig model. The naked female body is usually regarded as a sinful object as most of the medieval clerical antifeministic writings deal with in relation to the Fall of Eve. However, some anonymous Middle English romances – particularly the fifteenth century Lybeaus Desconus and The Squire of Low Degree seem to resist the medieval representations of the naked female body as sinful. This article argues about naked female body which does not seem to be a subject matter of evil in the Middle English Lybeaus Desconus and The Squire of Low Degree.

A Model of Sheela Na Gig in Lybeaus Desconus and the Squire of Low Degree

The purpose of this study is to relate Sir Launfal to fourteenth century England and to explore the contemporary re-conceptualization of a knight presented in the poem. My argument is that Sir Launfal is a portrait of a knight, not ensconced in the idealized setting as in Marie de France’s poem, but frequently found among fourteenth century English nobility. Appropriating inherited literary materials and stock motifs of the genre, Chestre demystifies the ideal of knighthood, de-idealizes romantic love and discloses the cohesiveness of wealth and knighthood, mainly through his own insertions of episodes that serve to widen the prospect of the poem from an individual knight to the society in which he is entwined in the social networks and the value system shared by its members. “Materialistic” or “bourgeois” features found in the poem and criticized so far are symptomatic or reflective of the state of affairs in Chestre’s age, such as the sumptuary laws, visual display culture of the nobility, inheritance of lands through heiresses, and a series of redistribution of estates from 1327 to 1337. In conclusion, Sir Launfal is not a deplorable degradation of Lanval, nor should it be evaluated by the standard which sets the twelfth century French romances as a model. Rather, it should be viewed as a poem born in fourteenth-century England?brimming with social, political and social changes within and without the court?intended to depict a knight of this age.

Sir Launfal : A Portrait of a Knight in Fourteenth Century England

The central disenchantment scene in Lybeaus Desconus raises two significant medieval concerns, the nature of women and marital consent. The enchantment casts the Lady of Sinadoun into the form of a serpent/dragon-woman with its implications of original sin and female blame. Her disenchantment removes this symbolic covering, and in her naked innocence the Lady offers herself in marriage to Lybeaus in language reminiscent of medieval legal terminology for female marital consent. Other marriages depicted in the text, including the Lady's own marriage to Lybeaus, evoke the constraints medieval marriages placed on women – paternal authority, male coercion, and the loss of legal status for women. The disenchantment scene, however momentarily, inscribes female freedom within this marital context.

'Naked as she was bore': Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus

Jousting for Identity: Tournaments in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal

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'Naked as she was bore': Naked Disenchantment in Lybeaus Desconus

Jousting for Identity: Tournaments in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal