The Medieval Body is not a Passive Entity: The Body as an Imaginative Landscape in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and ‘The Tale of Iphis and Ianthe’

Author Bio:

Daisy Hunter is a third-year English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh. Her literary interests include medieval literature, folktales, and stories of the supernatural across various genres. She has a particular love for creative writing, and enjoys writing flash fiction that explores nature and interpersonal relationships.

Essay Abstract:

‘The Medieval Body is not a Passive Entity’ deconstructs the systematic relation between the medieval body and the designation of social existences. As the classification of the body acts as a means of maintaining the desired social order, to possess a body demands the self become synonymous with the characteristics it demands. Yet as both The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and ‘The Tale of Iphis and Ianthe’, grapple with this concept, their narratives of bodily transformation ask how medieval society grapples with existences that rest on the bounds of social categories, or refute categorisation entirely. Though critics have often regarded their respective bodily transformations as a refutation of liminality, acting to reinforce socially accepted ways of being, the texts’ consideration of alternate identities, and suggestion that uncertainty is intrinsic to identity, to the medieval body, and the ideas of social classification that govern it, re-envision the medieval body as an imaginative landscape. Beyond reproducing social existences, the body exists as a canvas for the contemplation of contradictory and undefined identities, by which people can seek to understand the desire for an existence that may as of yet lack a name.

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The Medieval Body is not a Passive Entity- The Body as an Imaginative Landscape in The Wed.

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