International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2006 Abstracts

“Reeling in the Strange Knight: Endogamous Paternal Regimes in French and German Arthurian Literature”
Jessica Quinlan, University of Würzburg

Many a father in Arthurian romance is plagued by the problem of marrying off the sole heiress. In this paper, I propose to examine not the behaviour of those fathers who steadfastly refuse to give their daughters in marriage, but rather the tactics employed by fathers who take it upon themselves to seek out the ideal son-in-law. In the quest to identify and secure the perfect match for the sole heiress, fathers will often resort to strategies which involve nabbing errand knights at will. Finding a possible candidate is only half the battle, however, for the successfully “caught” knight must be subjected to a gruelling test in order to check his suitability as successor to the castellan, before the daughter and patrimony can be handed over lock, stock and barrel. Such policies can be shown for this reason to be fundamentally endogamous in that they ultimately delay the marriage of the heiress due to the almost insurmountable difficulty of the test. They are also endogamous, however, inasmuch as they seek not to give the daughter to a member of an outside group, but to take a knight from the outside and incorporate him into the family by force, thereby stripping him of his status as outsider: the “strange” or “foreign” knight is to be subsumed into the endogamous regime of the castellan. These proposed relationships, which I examine here in the Pesme Aventure in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain and its German adaptation by Hartmann von Aue, in the Estroite Marche episode of the Prose Lancelot, in the castellan episode of the Chevalier à l’Épée and in the Gurnemanz episode of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, all oppose the essentially exogamous programme of courtly literature. The author always prevents the hero from becoming permanently entangled in such a relationship, and the hero’s task is most often to disable the endogamous strategy of the father.