Fabricating Monstrosity: Secrets and Violence in the Lay of Graelent and Several Old French Fabliaux

abstract:Hidden knowledge in the Old French lays and fabliaux predominantly concerns the bodies, behaviors, and desires of women, who are portrayed as jealously guarding their secrets while men seek to discover them. In the twelfth-century Lai de Graelent and various Old French fabliaux from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, women are marked with the trait of monstrosity, indicating the bodily site of hidden knowledge. The body itself thus becomes the secret, representing the material difference that supposedly produces epistemological difference, and these two registers are conflated as knowledge is sought by violating the body. This article connects the lays and fabliaux, which are rarely studied together, and argues that women in these tales can exploit perceptions of monstrosity to short-circuit the violence inherent to conventions that pose them as the ultimate object of knowledge.