'As in heart, so in mouth': Translating the Scandal of Wolfish Desire from Fables to Peire Vidal

Abstract

The motif of the ‘wolf at school’, in which a wolf is made to learn elementary Latin, typically the alphabet, occurs in medieval tales, church sculptures, and manuscript illuminations. Whatever the wolf ’s instructors try to teach him, he can only say ‘lamb’. The story’s usual moral is ‘quod in corde, hoc in ore’ [as in heart, so in mouth]. I probe the meaning of this moral through the medieval Latin fables of Romulus and Odo of Cheriton, the well-known vernacular fable of Marie de France, and a hitherto unknown version attributed to the troubadour Peire Vidal, which in turn leads me to assess clerical and vernacular teaching of the alphabet. In Latin, the wolf ’s speech is invariably censured, even if readers may sneakingly have sided with him; but the vernacular texts accord him more sympathy, self-deprecatingly in Berenguer d’Anoia, equivocally in Marie, and flamboyantly in Peire Vidal, who elsewhere adopts a wolf as his emblem. The wolf ’s cry of ‘lamb’ gives voice, albeit impossibly, to the ‘insistence of the letter in the unconscious’ (Lacan): a beast that can thus openly speak his desire challenges human readers to reconsider the relationship of language to appetite and to question the human monopoly of language.