Cross-Channel Becomings-Animal: Primal Courtliness in Guillame de Palerne and William of Palerne

Abstract

This essay argues that William of Palerne, a fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the twelfth-century Old French romance Guillaume de Palerne, outdoes its French predecessor in sustaining Western aristocratic hegemony. William's translation is motivated not by patriotism, but by a desire to disseminate elitist class values. Both versions feature what Bourdieu calls “rites of passage,” in which nobles cement their exceptional status through privileged crossings into the animal world. The romances' werewolf narratives reveal the predatory nature of aristocratic power, with a future prince's animal life figuring the sovereign's incorporation of violent nature. In donning animal skins, the fugitive lovers become what Agamben calls bare life, with the elite idioms of courtly love and venery marking their ritual passage into full aristocratic identity and imperial power. By magnifying Alexandrine's role, William highlights the ritual nature of the lovers' becoming-animal. By intensifying his source's feudal elitism, and by underscoring the link between violence against peasants and aristocratic exceptionalism, William registers his aristocratic patron's anxiety concerning increasing socio-economic diversity. Each of the romances participates in Western consolidation by excluding the Eastern other from the closing marriage alliances, revealing that class is the driving force of its animalized allegory.