Abstract
AbstractThis article examines the thirteenth‐century romance Perlesvaus as a biopolitical fantasy and specifically examines one episode in which the Crucifixion is staged with animal actors coded as Christ and Jews. This episode frames the forest surrounding the event as a liminal space, as a biopolitical space of exception that surrounds the clearing or heath where miracles happen and produce biblical truth in Arthurian Britain. The anonymous author places Jews at this frontier, both constitutive of the New Law/civilization and its greatest menace. From this episode emerges a biopolitical narrative that responds to geopolitical crisis in the medieval Francophone world while affirming the violence of the Crusades and anti‐Semitic logic. As this romance is often dismissed for its messy, violent, and confusing narrative and theology, this article contests that its racialized fantasy of the Crucifixion performance shows Perlesvaus to be in line with contemporary values of the Church rather than at the margins. Instead of reading this romance as abhorrent, we explore how romance uses marvels and miracles to assert a certain biopolitical ideology. Biopolitics thus emerges as having a medieval past in fantasy writing, rooted in pre‐modern categories of race, religion, and the human.
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