De la traîtresse à la sorcière: imaginaire et représentations de l’héroïne rusée condamnée au bûcher dans la littérature courtoise médiévale. (original) (raw)

2018, The Lincoln Humanities Journal, 6 ("Alternative Realities: Myths, Lies, Truths, and Half-Truths")

This article studies the structures of domination put in place by the courtly society of the 12th and 13th centuries, as they appear throughout its literature, by questioning the motif of female characters condemned to be burnt at the stake. That punishment, at a time pre-dating condemnations for witchcraft, is depicted as a mean of oppression against women who are outside of patriarchal social control, and who show their independent way of acting, often through the use of deception and the display of a free sexual live, or – to put it in terms of literary archetype – by behaving as "female heroes" rather than "heroines". But these texts do not only denounce burnings at the stake as unjust punishments inflicted upon women, who are often shown to be the collateral victims of a male fight for domination. Literature from around 1200 also sheds light on how the punishment by fire, while having little to do yet with heresy and witchcraft, testifies to the strong anxiety towards uncontrolled female otherness, which, by seeking to escape from masculine domination, ends being assimilated with a monstrosity, a manifestation of evil to be destroyed. Thus, while medieval courtly literature showed patriarchal domination at work against an oppressed female figure, it also anticipated by nearly two centuries how the early modern imaginary (if not also our contemporary one) represented women and their sexuality as oppressive, and the consequences thereof. Moreover, it appears that the condemnation of witchcraft or female deception as inspired by the devil was not so much the reason for condemning them to death, as an expression of the need for a valid reason to invalidate their behaviour outside of sanctioned norms.