Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (The New Middle Ages)

T he motivating crisis of the mid-fourteenth-century tail-rhyme romance Octavian is caused by the violent intrusion of the eponymous emperor into his wife's birth-chamber, or lying-in room. 1 He intrudes at the instigation of his conniving mother, who has bribed a kitchen servant to join the delirious and exhausted new mother in her bed-nude. Upon his entrance, Octavian jumps to the obvious though erroneous conclusion that his wife is an adulteress. He deals with the situation with considerable dispatch, immediately beheading the terrified servant and tossing the severed head at his awakening wife. The slandered empress thus emerges from a premonitory nightmare only to enter a far more horrifying reality of violence, blood, and disgrace. This intrusion precipitates the central crisis of the plot, the scattering of the royal family and consequent endangering of the patrilineal line due to the violation and misrepresentation of the empress' lying-in room. Octavian's entrance into his wife's lying-in room breaks the codes through which births, particularly aristocratic births, were culturally constructed and represented in late medieval culture. Aristocratic births were configured within a matrix of gendered and political beliefs concerning the significance of the work performed within the lying-in room, work that could not be authorized or recognized if the crucial integrity of the space allotted for childbearing was broken. The poem does not allow this primal crisis to disappear; violent male intruders repeatedly disrupt this traditionally female zone at key moments throughout the romance. These repetitions reconstruct the violated area of the lying-in room and the ambivalent interpretations of the place of women in both religion and the state played Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, "Marking Maternity" offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy, and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England. This book examines how Middle English romances have come to reflect the impact of dominant contemporary discourses of maternal influence and contamination upon individuals, communities, and families. Angela Florschuetz goes onto argue while these romances often reference and participate in contemporary discourses that identify the maternal with contamination, they also reframe the problem of maternal influence by focusing on the corrosive effects of these anxieties upon all levels of society Cover 1 Title 10 Copyright 11 Contents 12 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction: The Mother’s Mark and the Maternal Monster 16 1. Women’s Secrets and Men’s Interests: Rituals of Childbirth and Northern Octavian 25 2. “That Moder Ever Hym Fed”: Nursing and Other Anthropophagies in Sir Gowther 56 3. “Youre Owene Thyng”: The Clerk’s Tale and Fantasies of Autonomous Male Reproduction 89 4. “A Mooder He Hath, But Fader Hath He Noon”: Maternal Transmission and Fatherless Sons: The Man of Law’s Tale 116 5. Forgetting Eleanor: Richard Coer de Lyon and England’s Maternal Aporia 142 6. Monstrous Maternity and the Mother-Mark: Melusine as Genealogical Phantom 176 Afterword: Abjection and the Mother at the End of this Book 207 Notes 214 Bibliography 238 Index 248 Front Matter....Pages i-xxiii Women’s Secrets and Men’s Interests: Rituals of Childbirth and Northern Octavian ....Pages 1-31 “That Moder Ever Hym Fed”: Nursing and Other Anthropophagies in Sir Gowther ....Pages 33-65 “Youre Owene Thyng”: The Clerk’s Tale and Fantasies of Autonomous Male Reproduction....Pages 67-93 “A Mooder He Hath, but Fader Hath He Noon”: Maternal Transmission and Fatherless Sons: The Man of Law’s Tale ....Pages 95-120 Forgetting Eleanor: Richard Coer de Lyon and England’s Maternal Aporia....Pages 121-154 Monstrous Maternity and the Mother-Mark: Melusine as Genealogical Phantom....Pages 155-185 Afterword: Abjection and the Mother at the End of this Book....Pages 187-193 Back Matter....Pages 195-232 Working at the intersection of medical, theological, cultural, and literary studies, this book offers an innovative approach to understanding maternity, genealogy and social identity as they are represented in popular literature in late-medieval England.