The Touch of Man on Woman: Dramatizing Identity in The Return of Martin Guerre

Abstract

How do bodies stand before the law? How does the law deal with their subjectivity, materiality and opacity? In particular, what gender and subject differentiation is applied to bodily distinctions? These are some of the urgent questions raised by one of the most famous - indeed notorious - of Renaissance lawsuits, the Martin Guerre case. In 1548, Martin Guerre, a peasant from Artigat, a village in the south-west of France near the Pyrenees, left his wife and son and disappeared. Eight years later, a man claiming to be Martin turned up in Artigat and was accepted as such by Bertrande de Rols, Martin’s wife. The stranger was an imposter, Arnaud du Tilh, and after three years he was put on trial for imposture (among other charges) and executed in September 1560.1 This historical incident attracted wide and long-lived attention throughout the early modern period and is an exemplary instance of the ways in which the selfhood and identity of particular groups and individuals emerge into representational visibility.