The Pain of Reading Female Bodies in Marie de France's "Guigemar"1

Abstract

Œhe Systems which engendered the acts of violent aggression by men against men in late-medieval Western aristocratic culture have been welldocumented. What seems to be less foregrounded are noblewomen's cultural and especially literary relations to male violence, their positions within the violent discursive practises of the period.2 The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman writer Marie de France gives us the rare opportunity to explore female representation as a site of male violence from an alternative perspective.3 In her lay Guigemar Marie exposes the antifemale violence of two dominant discourses, the hermeneutic and the courtly, when she critiques the ways in which both systems naturalize or even romanticize rape. Before turning to Marie's decoding of the violence endemic to these discourses, the connection between reading and rape in medieval poetics will first be briefly outlined.

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