Romancing Death: The Erotics of Grief in the Old French Philomena

Abstract

AbstractWhereas much medieval literature seems to align courtly love with a joyous celebration of noble life, there is a darker affective narrative of death undergirding medieval texts, one that paradoxically entwines the emotions of love with those surrounding death. The Old French Philomena is an excellent space to explore what I develop here as the medieval erotics of grief: it is a text full of incest, cannibalism, infanticide, and rape and one whose sorrow‐filled pages invite us to reconsider our assumption that love is linked to a desire for life. I instead consider why death is so sexually charged in medieval French literature. In this article, I use a wide range of theories of emotions – from Augustine to Sade to Bataille – to theorize a medieval “erotics of grief” as stemming from the locus of courtly love. Using the doleful rape and mutilation of Philomena, and her subsequent revenge in infanticide and cannibalism as a backdrop to consider taboo, transgression, and death as all constitutive of medieval desire, I propose that we should reconsider our received narratives about courtly love as a romantic pining and instead consider them as intimately entwined with grief and the death that it enshrouds. I propose that this text – and many others like it – suggests that for medieval nobles, there was an association between eroticism and grief, a valence of violent sexuality underpinning much of the dynamics of the medieval court.