Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature by Charlie Samuelson Hilary Rhodes Charlie Samuelson, Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2022), 229 pp. Even as the history of the queer Middle Ages continues to flourish, with a rapidly expanding scholarly focus on premodern gender and sexuality, it remains something of a staple disclaimer that these discourses took place relatively unnoticed, in the margins of medieval society, or that they were not understandable, interpretable, or otherwise applicable to the contextual and critical tools of modern queer theory. Charlie Samuelson’s ambitious monograph challenges both of these ideas by drawing primarily on twelfth- and thirteenth-century narrative romances and fourteenth-century dits, especially those of Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut. By placing these two famous figures of the Old French [End Page 262] literary tradition in a complex and multivariate analytical framework, wherein he reads them and several of their counterparts in conversation with modern queer theorists and queer literary topoi, Samuelson centrally contends that the high medieval genre of courtly love “self-consciously interrogates the indeterminacy of language and poetics and of gender and sexuality” (2). The implications of this thesis are twofold. First, an oeuvre often prone to conservative and patriarchal interpretations, which are then used to reinforce stereotypical depictions of medieval gender and sexuality, is in fact open to a number of subversive and ambiguous readings—in other words, critics should refrain from simply accepting these texts at face value, and instead lean in to the varied, nuanced, and often-times-audacious interrogations of medieval sexuality, gender, and society that exist within them. Second, the literary “sophistication” of these texts, a term often used to designate perceived intellectual merit and proximity to power, does not definitively exclude or foreclose queerness in any way—in fact, sometimes quite the opposite. As such, we are forced to substantially rethink our automatic and reductive assumptions that any “queerness” in the Middle Ages existed unnoticed on the margins of society, rather than in its very literary, cultural, and political center. Samuelson deploys a number of examples and arguments to make his point, some more successfully than others. His command of both the medieval French texts and the modern scholarship on gender and queer theory, particularly that of Judith Butler and Lee Edelman, is undoubted, and he often pinpoints dynamic intersections between past and present, particularly in chapter 2, “Medieval Metalepsis: Queering Narrative Poetics.” By explicitly inviting us to read a variety of medieval romances in a deliberately destabilized framework, where the “interpenetration of ostensibly discrete narrative levels or textual elements” (72) invites productive disruptions both textually and chronologically, Samuelson highlights some of the most explicitly queer material under consideration here, including the Roman de Silence. In this narrative from the late thirteenth century, featuring as its hero(ine) a “lad who is a maiden” (87)—or an individual assigned female at birth who is raised (very successfully) as a boy—Samuelson explores the provocative and queer-coded interplay of medieval gender politics and poetic structure, and the ways in which the seemingly conservative, heteronormative authorial voice nonetheless should not be taken as the final verdict on the poem’s presentation of its Butlerian “gender trouble.” As he consistently draws attention to the uncertainty, subjectivity, and inherent unreliability of the Old French je, or “I,” the in-text narrator who is usually (but incorrectly) presumed to precisely correlate with the real-world author, he invites us to rethink any simplistic assumptions about who is really speaking, and what they are saying (12, 27, 29). Samuelson compellingly demonstrates that instead of adhering to one conservative interpretation that conveniently upholds stale and repressive clichés, the medieval French literary tradition has a complex and deliberate ability to question any predetermined idea of the “normative” or “heterosexual” Middle Ages, and to generate considerably subversive discourses around parallel questions of gender/queer and poetic/narrative indeterminacy. Other formulations of queerness in narrative structure and authorial voice are explored in chapter 1, “Reflexive, Ambivalent, Queer Subjects,” and chapter 3, “On Sameness, Difference, and Textualizing Desire: Queering Lyric Insertion.” [End Page 263] By highlighting...