The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390

Description

In medieval French literature, faces feature heavily as markers of identity, mood, class, status, and even humanity. The information that they convey can be strategically concealed and revealed, but they are always understood to be legible. This book explores the face as a medieval literary motif and as a modern phenomenon, charting its limits and interrogating the idea of face as a universal signifier. It examines what happens when faces are not legible, when they are found on non-human surfaces, and when they migrate across the human body. It looks at faciality in a series of texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moving from Arthurian tales, through the 'Roman de la Rose' to the fabliaux, as well as examining fourteenth-century manuscripts in which faces appear as disembodied doodles. Reading these texts in conjunction with twentieth-century theories of face and faciality, and considering the ideas behind twenty-first-century face recognition technology, this book argues that faces in the popular imagination tell us less about identity than they do about how we understand and interact with the world around us. List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix Author’s Note xi Introduction 1 1. Levinasian Faces in Arthurian Verse 28 Emmanuel Levinas and the Middle Ages 36 'Le Chevalier au lion 43 'Le Chevalier as deus espees' 57 'La Vengeance Raguidel' 67 2. Marginal Faces 80 Sources 83 The Picture-face and the 'sainte face' 91 Letter-faces 96 Affect and the Real: Tomkins and Lacan 98 3. The 'visagéité' of the 'Roman de la rose' 116 The Vice Portraits 121 The Garden Wall 141 4. Faces and Genitals in the 'fabliaux' 160 'Trubert' 164 'Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons' 179 Conclusion 203 Bibliography 211 Index 225