Female Intercession and the Shaping of Male Heroism in the Roman d’Enéas and Le chevalier au lion

Abstract

or some time now, feminist literary scholarship has demonstrated how the leading female figures of medieval French romance are often constructed to emphasize the heroism of the male protagonist. 1 While romance challenges the model of male homosociality of the chanson de geste by expanding the discourses of heterosexual desire and by recognizing female desire, in particular, women gain prominence in this narrative form because femininity becomes the “metaphor” which male authors newly use to develop male subjectivity. 2 As Simon Gaunt writes, “romance does not ‘discover’ women, or femininity, or the individual, it constructs models of them.” 3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.