Disputed gender categories in the Yvain stories: Manuscripts, authors, editors.

摘要

“Disputed Gender Categories in the Yvain Stories: Manuscripts, Authors, Editors” focuses in part on problems generated by the editing of medieval text and specifically on gender as an unstable category in this romance. Most medieval literature was edited for the first time during the nineteenth century. Editors reconstructed the lost original text, language, meaning, and their national cultural heritage by means of a scientific technique which cleansed the textual rubble left behind in the manuscripts. Scholars made many assumptions about the status of medieval text, manuscripts and authors, and in the process of reconstructing the lost original version suppressed and/or erased textual, linguistic, historical and cultural evidence. While making the cultural heritage available to the nation, they simultaneously competed with other nations for cultural and scientific superiority. Nineteenth-century philology was permeated by contemporary nationalistic and scientific thought, which left its mark on medieval literature. It is no longer tenable to attribute every variant to scribal error or textual corruption. Instead, medieval text and its variants need to be understood from within their own cultural context, namely that of an oral and performance-oriented culture which generated variant versions of the “same” tale in its own “national” and foreign traditions. Thus I develop a new interdisciplinary model for working with medieval text that is based on manuscript evidence and does not rely on the suppression of evidence.; My study of gender ambiguity and ambivalence arises from the textual versions which these variant stories contain, variant stories which were erased in the editing process and thus have not been studied. In my analysis of the Yvain stories I show that gender is not a stable category as constructed by medieval culture through its literature. Hartmann's ambivalent concept of the “knightly maiden” aptly demonstrates the possibilities and limitations for female agency in a male-dominated political system. While each “national” version contains its own gender ambiguity and ambivalence, the extent of both becomes more apparent when comparing it to those expressed in the other “national” versions. It is in the interdisciplinary comparison that the complexity of medieval notions of gender becomes fully visible.