Performing the Self, Performing the Other

This article focuses on the Old French Nanteuil Cycle of chansons de geste, investigating the nature of medieval identity and its connection to gender, race and religion. The Nanteuil Cycle repeatedly uses disguise as a means of crossing gender boundaries, which allows the repositioning of identity and simultaneously reveals the arbitrariness of cultural categorisation. Although cross-dressing heroines abound in medieval literature, the fourteenth-century Tristan de Nanteuil contains instances where cross-dressing is both gendered and racialised, stretching the malleability of identity to the point that it seems physical form can be altered at will. The article discusses the distortion of genealogies in the Cycle effected by the challenges to the social matrix produced by disguise, with a new relational framework where wives may become fathers and mothers become husbands

Aesthetics · Arbitrariness · Art · Epistemology · Malleability · Sociology · Computer Science · French Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Medieval European Literature and History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology

• Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity

  Robert Bartlett•Journal of Medieval and Early…•2001

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