Murderous Sows in Chaucer’s <i>Knight’s Tale</i> and Late Fourteenth-Century France

Abstract

In the Knight's Tale Chaucer's narrator describes at length the decorations on the walls of the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana, which Theseus orders to be built as part of the lists in which Palamon and Arcite are to fight for the hand of Emelye. At eighty-three lines, the description of the temple of Mars is nearly twice as long as either of the other two, providing a detailed catalogue of scenes of violence and bloodshed. Among the images is one that calls attention to itself because it takes place within the medieval domestic sphere but is fully as horrifying as the violence caused by wars and tyrants. The Knight, describing the temple almost as if he had visited it, says that among the decorations on the temple wall he saw a representation of a sow gnawing a child in a cradle: Yet saugh II. . ./The sowe freten the child right in the cradel (I 2017, 2019).1 This is an unexpected image in the long series of descriptions that focus on adults both as victims and victimizers: here the victim is an innocent child and the victimizer is merely following its natural animal instincts, horrible though they may be. The scene of natural rather than martial aggression seems a strange image to depict on Mars's temple wall.2