Vows and Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern Chivalric Romances of France, Italy, and Spain

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Abstract

In Vows and Violence in the Medieval and Early Modern Chivalric Romances of France, Italy, and Spain I offer a comparative humanistic analysis of seminal works from the medieval and early modern periods, focusing on the relationship between vows and violence in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish literatures. By analyzing the complexity of vows and their susceptibility to failure, I situate broken vows as a textual screen through which any discussion of authority, gender, and religious and racial difference must be read. My focus is threefold: on vows as a speech act intensely revelatory of an individual's understanding of the self and other and the gendered and racialized dynamics implicated therein; on the violence, be it literal or metaphorical, physical or epistemological, which explodes when vows are mismanaged and broken; and finally, on authorial confessions of a pessimistic understanding of vows that further undermines the relationship between self and other, the propensity of actants to violence, and the relationship between text and reader. Studying medieval literature, in chapter 1, I discuss how the complexity of vows and their susceptibility to failure is dramatized in Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose (≈1225/30-1270). The question of faithful representation and narratological promises that each of the Rose's authors negotiate through the mechanism of an oneiric framework calls attention to the frequent indecipherability of reality and fiction, truth and lies. These themes are further exemplified by the Rose's recurrence to Classical Latin intertexts. The use of two exemplary myths—the story of Narcissus and the story of Pygmalion—are strategically presented by each of the Rose's two authors as self-reflexive commentaries on the fidelity of representation, the mutability and moldability of language, and the actantial capacities of authorial and creational roles. Responding to the medieval tradition prepared by the Rose while recodifying said inheritance, my argument in chapters 2 through 4 focuses on the moral and gendered implications of vow-making and -breaking in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516), Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1581), and Miguel de Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615), respectively. Often displaced upon or metaphorized by an incursive female presence, the broken vows featured in the aforementioned texts all spark highly nuanced discussions of the paradoxically threatening and alluring, volatile and vulnerable position of those who articulate promises, as well as those who believe in promises, and who are thus bound by them. Since promises are so often broken, they foment an epistemologically unstable environment, and a dubious sense of selfhood. Not only do they pose a specific threat to familial, political, 'national,' and religious identity, they destabilize the promises articulated by authors. Consequently, failed narratological promises disabuse readers of their faith in authorial integrity and present a bleak understanding of the individual as isolated and vulnerable in a world where faith and trust have failed. Indeed, the faltering faith caused by defective vows catalyzes psychic fragmentation and vulnerability that can only end in extreme violence or a latent pessimism that is not easily lifted, as the genre of early modern chivalric romance so vividly portrays.