Kisses on Stitches: Words of Active Fetishisation of Cloth Bodies in Old French Romance

Abstract

The chapter discusses the words used to describe active participation in love in two Old French romances, Galeran de Bretagne, and Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès. Focusing particularly on actions involving cloth bodies – cloth that acts as a symbolic body for the female characters of two Old French romances – reveals attitudes towards the private fetishisation of objects by male protagonists and the potential non-participation in acceptable courtly love relationships that results from such behaviour. When directed towards these cloth bodies, words of erotic action become, in themselves, symbols of the problematic type of love involved, undermining as they do, female agency and consent. The authors’ ensuing commentary on such love is readable through comparison with chivalric norms and Christian ideas regarding procreative relationships in this period. In the narratives of these romances, fragmented pieces of the female body that cannot be separated from the whole become the focus of the knight’s desires in a form of non-reciprocal love. Such non-reciprocal, non-consensual actions trouble the boundaries between public and private behaviour and suggest that the treatment of cloth bodies can be read as a form of sodomitic behaviour. As a result, analysing the use of active words of fetishisation in relation to clothbodies shows how this behaviour must be rejected in the course of the narrative to impart and reinforce broader moral messages about appropriate expressions of love.