'Homs Sui Je, Dame, Vraiement': Sex, Chivalry and Identity in Jehan d'Avennes

D'ou sont venues les grans vaillances, les grans emprinses et les chevalereux faiz de Lancelot, de Gauvain, de Tristan, de Guron le courtois, et des aultres preux de la Table Ronde . . ., sinon par le service d'amours acquerir et eulz entretenir en la grace de leurs tresdesirees dames?¹

With these words, uttered with considerable irony, the knowing Madame des Belles Cousines needles the timid young hero of Antoine de la Sale's Petit Jehan de Saintré. Her teasing, designed to impel Jehan to noble acts of chivalry as well as to discomfit the unformed boy before Belles Cousines and her ladies, is also suggestive in another way, for her speech draws attention to certain themes that are of great importance for an interpretation of a related work. The Istoire de tres vaillans Jehan d'Avennes poses, and to some extent answers, similar questions to those raised by Belles Cousines's words about chivalry, the relationship between men and women and (by implication) of both sexes to chivalry, and the formation of gender identities. The means by which these answers are arrived at is central to the development and reconfiguration of the concept of 'otherness' pervading Jehan d'Avennes and other late fifteenth-century Burgundian texts.²

Madame's disingenuous evocation of Lancelot among other celebrated chevaliers here is on one level hardly surprising: it is after all traditional to invoke these as models of a perfect — if by the fifteenth century dated — brand of chivalric endeavour.³ However, what does unsettle is her alliance of 'les grans vaillances, les grans emprinses et les chevalereux faiz' with 'le service d'amours': surely a wilful realignment, if not misrepresentation, of the motivation for such noble deeds? This could simply look like an example of Belles Cousines's manipulation of Saintré for her own devious amatory ends, were it not for the fact that the realignment matches the focus, or refocusing, of other fifteenth-century narratives. While in some texts, it is true, we see the assertion of an outwardly directed, public-oriented, chivalric identity on the older Arthurian model, there is another group of mises en prose in which chivalry becomes a more inwardly channelled enterprise, geared not towards the [End Page 141-] greater good of the court but rather towards the personal honour and renown of the hero, becoming a more blatant means to 'eulz entretenir en la grace de leurs tresdesirees dames'.⁴

These works turn attention away from the male and on to the woman he loves, so highlighting for the reader distinctions between masculine and feminine identities, and subordinate and dominant characters and characteristics. The clash of sexual and gender identities creates an interpretative 'trouble' that can generate theorizations of physical and intellectualized otherness.⁵ From the realignment of the relative power and authority of male and female there emerges, for the present-day reader if not the original Burgundian one, an interesting and disturbing picture of deviant behaviour. In Jehan d'Avennes such deviance gives rise, and gradually yields, to another kind of difference. The developing relationship between Jehan d'Avennes and the comtesse d'Artois illustrates the subtle recasting of opposites — masculine/feminine, reality/illusion and speech/silence — and hence alteration in the balance of power that characterizes the mises en prose in general and Jehan d'Avennes in particular.

The scene is the court of Artois, run by the countess while her husband is away at war. She is helped by monseigneur Gaultier, whose son, Jehan d'Avennes, is a constant source of worry to him: Jehan refuses to behave in a way befitting his noble birth, preferring the company of common country-folk. The countess offers to undertake his chivalric and amorous formation. Unfortunately, Jehan falls in love with her and wrongly believes himself to be loved in return, though the countess is simply acting a part in order to 'educate' him. Jehan duly embarks on a chivalric career filled with battles and tournaments, and punctuated by three return visits to court. At his third visit, the countess tells him she has a husband. In despair, Jehan...