Visible Nobility and Aristocratic Power in Sir Orfeo

As the titular hero of the anonymous Middle English poem Sir Orfeo (1330) passes into the Otherworld to retrieve his wife Heurodis, he encounters a string of wonders that culminates in a tableau featuring none other than his:

    owhen wiif,Dam Heurodis, his lef liif,Slepe vnder an ympe-tre:Bi her cloþes he knewe þat it was he.

(405-08)

While we are naturally meant to be touched by Orfeo's rediscovery of his "beloved life" after so long a separation, the final line of this description is a curious one: "by her clothes he knew that it was she." We know, of course, that the cut and style of clothes would tell the viewer how well-off Heurodis was, how much power she possessed, how many servants she required to dress her, and so on. But it would seem that to a contemporary audience of romances, clothing is a kind of ID badge that marks Heurodis as a queen and, more importantly, as Heurodis, in a way that her face and body apparently do not.

This description is part of a larger theme running through Sir Orfeo, namely its fascination with visible nobility. By visible nobility, I mean the signifiers that elite characters in romance use to establish the nobility's ideas about appropriate behavior in love, power, gender, and class. Now, medieval romances exist in part to demonstrate to their audience—who may be elite but don't have to be—how the aristocracy is supposed to behave, and how to spot (and be attracted to) the aristocracy even in disguise. However, Sir Orfeo seems more obsessed with the metaphorical depictions of nobility than other Middle English romances and, in turn, also more obsessed with the power those depictions hold. Through its descriptions of both Heurodis and Orfeo, Sir Orfeo asks the audience to question the conventional depictions of royal authority in romance and ultimately suggests that an over-reliance on traditional performances of aristocracy leads to stagnation.

Let us first look at Heurodis, whose signifiers of nobility are routinely hidden from the audience. When she is introduced by the poet, for example, Heurodis's beauty is grounded in her body, but its corporality is immediately dismissed. She is

Þe Fairest leuedi, for þe nones,Þat miȝt gon on bodi & bones,Ful of lue & of godenisse;Ac no man may telle hir fairnise.

(53-56)

Romances typically engage in blazoning—that is, listing the characteristics by which we know a female character is desirable, and desirably noble, such as fair skin, fair hair, long necks, black eyebrows, nice ankles, and so on.¹ Yet in Sir Orfeo, the poet all but ignores Heurodis's body to focus on her noble virtues. He speaks mainly of her "love and goodness," both words that have a greater and more upper-class resonance in Middle English than in modern. Heurodis's physical beauty is hidden in part because beauty, defined by elite standards of color, fairness, and dress, is a direct cause of love. When we as viewers are prohibited from seeing Heurodis directly, we cannot be affected by those "attributes of the beloved" and are thus spared the effects of eros. That vision is reserved for the characters alone, especially the royal figures of the Faerie King and Orfeo, who are so profoundly affected by Heurodis's attributes that they will go to fantastic lengths to attain them.

The initial description of Heurodis typifies the way that the poet represents her throughout the rest of the poem. After the Faerie King visits her in a dream, Heurodis awakens and immediately begins to destroy those features that cause desire in others (that is, both her body and her clothes):

Sche froted hir honden & hir fet,& crached hir visage—it bled wete;Hir riche robe hye al to-rett,& was reueyd out of witt.

(79-82)

In response, her maidens run to the castle and gather everyone they can—knights, squires, damsels, and ladies—who all, along with the readers, are invited to stare at the queen in her madness. What we all are watching is...