Refiguring Disability: Deviance, Punishment, and the Supernatural in Bisclavret, Sir Launfal, and the Testament of Cresseid

Abstract

To continue our discussion of medieval texts in which violence against women results in physical impairment, this chapter will examine texts that portray women punished by both divine agents and humans (both male and female) under supernatural enchantment. In Marie de France’s Bisclavret, Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, and Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, a woman behaving subversively soon suffers a violent punishment that causes her to incur a physical impairment at the hands of a supernatural agent. The effect of incorporating a supernatural agent into the narrative is twofold. First, supernatural agents of punishment create an opening in the narrative that allows for a critical assessment of discourses that present women as inherently defective in both body and character. Second, the supernatural punishments represent an intrinsic narrative drive to control the deviancy that the unruly female character creates. However, instead of neatly concluding the narrative, the bodily impairments caused by the punishment of the character end up producing alternative narratives that challenge common medieval notions of femaleness, femininity, and disability. As a result, these alternative narratives work against the fundamental narrative drive to control textual deviancy—represented by unruly women—by critiquing the very notions of femininity and disability upon which the text’s deviancy is based.