Philomena and the Erotics of Privilege in the Middle Ages

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a tapestry of grief produced in Philomena, a medieval retelling of an Ovidian tale of rape and infanticide recounted in the Metamorphoses. It explores how communal constraints on emotions mediate the construction of agency in tension between the powerful king and the vulnerable virgin. The chapter also looks at the nightingale's polyvalency as a fruitful way to approach the thematization of desire through suffering, as the nightingale highlights the interconnectivity of two seemingly dichotomous emotions — love and grief — as a way of exploring how emotional exceptionalism constructs stories of noble power. Philomena, as the chapter argues, offers an early test case for an erotics of grief developed more extensively in later romances, and it investigates the relation between the performance of elite emotions and the construction of noble power. The chapter analyses the valences of love and desire, grief and death that enshroud the nightingale as synecdochal of the complex emotional community of privilege within romance.