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  • Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature by Carolyne Larrington
  • Jonathan Sapp
Carolyne Larrington, Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (Suffolk, UK: The University of York, York Medieval Press 2015) 285 pp.

Carolyne Larrington’s Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature is a thought-provoking work that signals a recent resurgence in interest concerning the medieval family. The chronological and geographic span of the book is understandably quite large, from the medieval and early modern epics and romances of continental Europe to the sagas of the Scandinavian lands. The monograph complements the work of historians such as Didier Lett, Martin Aurell, and Jonathan Lyon. These authors have examined the trajectories of sibling relationships and their influence on political processes through documentary evidence. Larrington’s work is an attempt to access the interiority and emotional dynamics of sibling bonds with an analysis of the bond as represented in the canon of medieval literature, supplemented by the work conducted by sibling psychologists during the late twentieth century.

Larrington’s central argument is that that the canon of medieval literary texts demonstrates that the foremost anxiety produced by sibling relationships is the fear of displacement and the erasure of the self in the face of one’s brother or sister. She draws on René Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire,” and sees the sibling relationship as a prime site for the intense rivalries that can arise between brothers and sisters as a result of ever-present worries about the underlying threat of social oblivion produced by the existence of a sibling acting as a “monstrous double.” Chapter 1 lays out the changes in family structure during [End Page 297] the high Middle Ages that privileged primogeniture and catalyzed the dissolving of sibling accord. For Larrington, the looming possibility of sibling conflict can only be mitigated through the maintenance of different identities and life courses on the part of each sibling.

This argument plays out across eight chapters that examine the subtle differences in bond dynamics between brothers, sisters and their brothers, incestuous couples, and affinal or affective siblings. In chapter 2 Larrington places the ideal of fraternal loyalty and affection at the center of fraternal relations, even as this harmony could only be reinforced through the beneficent work done through the maintenance of separate identities. The dangers of eschewing complimentary difference manifest in the socially damning practice of sibling groups unifying in support of feuding kindreds, as seen most clearly in Njal’s saga and the Authurian cycles of romance. For Larrington, the powerful similarity of twins presents unbearable tension in medieval narratives, since their powerful similarity collides with the practice of primogeniture.

Chapter 3 addresses relationships between sisters and their brothers, arguing that the practice of arranged marriage in the medieval period allowed sisters to build complementarity and identity separation easier than brothers. Similarly, Larrington argues that this kind of identity maintenance gave sisters an advantage over their brothers. Brothers and sisters shared bonds of special force in medieval literature, and as sibling groups aged, the omnipresent potential for violence dissipated into a utopian ideal of a sibling bond. As was the case between brothers, Larrington reads sisterly solidarity as an imposing threat that caused great concern for the authors of the texts she analyzes. Significantly, she argues that the practice of a sister calling out for vengeance on the part of a dead brother is in fact a recycled motif from older stories meant to reinforce the restoration of the honor of the deceased sibling.

Chapter 4 analyses the formidable topoi of fraternal hatred, and as such is the chapter most indebted to René Girard. Cain and Abel form the prototypical relationship for Larrington in this regard, and stories of sibling rivalries exemplified in the wars of Oedipus’s sons served as an analytic for medieval authors to discuss concerns about the shifting of lordship relationships. For Larrington, fraternal strife echoes the threat of oblivion initiated by the birth of a sibling, and hatreds generated by mutual love of a woman or some other mimetic desire create the kind of mimetic violence exemplified by sibling conflict. Chapter 5 examines sisters in this same context, yet here the...

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