Venus sans furs: wolves and women in three medieval poems

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the futures and homes which women fashion—the placental spaces they create and occupy—by exploring how women manage fur in three medieval poems. Unlike skin, fur can be both soft and savage, a sign of wealth or evidence of ferocity; in female hands, fur not only marks what is other but also suggests how such a threat might be absorbed or rejected, carefully hidden or extravagantly displayed. Love and hate work themselves out through such handlings of fur, in the process shaping an alternate universe over which medieval women have some control, an order of things they can choose or refuse. The 10th century poem ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’ uncovers this technology for letting go, using fur to describe what must be sacrificed to safeguard the future and rescue the world from teeth and claws. Marie de France’s 12th century lais ‘Lanval’ and ‘Bisclavret’ reimagine this technology, describing women who think with fur strategically, deploying it to divide what gets to live and to reproduce from what must be banished or torn apart.