Wounds and Healing: A Moral Guide to the Prose Lancelot

The thirteenth-century French Prose Lancelot presents readers with an interpretative challenge. The romance seems to celebrate the eponymous hero's adulterous liaison with Guenevere, yet several of its adventures anticipate those in the next romance of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, La Queste del Saint Graal. Because the pious sequel denigrates Lancelot's love for the queen, the dichotomy leaves readers of the Prose Lancelot wondering how to reconcile prophecy with celebration. Early twentieth-century scholars Ferdinand Lot and Jean Frappier cast the final third of the narrative, where prophecy becomes more frequent, as a preparation for the ethereal values of the Queste.¹ More recently, Elspeth Kennedy and Annie Combes have identified the romance's midsection as its moral turning point.² Carol Dover and David F. Hult, on the other hand, see no transitional moment at all. They dismiss the romance's prophecies relating to the Queste as interpolations with no meaningful connection to the substance of the Prose Lancelot.³ Identifying moral kinship between the two romances, therefore, requires evidence of some figurative connection apart from the prophetic adventures themselves.⁴

Wounds and, more importantly, healing in the Prose Lancelot provide just such a connection. Virtue heals and, as the narrative progresses, the virtues with this power change. In the first half of the romance, the knights of the Round Table, no matter how gravely they are wounded, mend fully through convalescence or through the intervention of their more esteemed peers. Miscreants, if they survive their wounds, remain damaged. Whereas Lancelot surpasses all others as convalescent and as healer, the narrative avoids attributing that supremacy directly to his love for the queen. The narrative instead invites the reader to understand Lancelot's adulterous desire as a catalyst. He excels because his love requires demonstrations of virtue. But following Meleagant's death, near the point Kennedy and Combes indicate as marking a transition in values, the healing power of the chivalrous begins to ebb. Knights, who appear to be among the virtuous, sustain mutilations that previously befell only the wicked. Lancelot can no longer protect others from harm as he did formerly or recover from his own wounds with the aid of a simple mire [doctor]. The diminution of his restorative powers and the errancy of his prowess identify his carnal attachment to the queen as a handicap rather than as a source of inspiration. In the latter stages of the romance, the power to heal comes from piety, chastity, and continence, the virtues promoted in the Queste.

François Suard represents an exception among critics in that, to his eyes, "la mise en cause apparente" [the obvious questioning] of Lancelot's prowess and his love for Guenevere begins with the hero's first adventures in the kingdom of Logres.⁵ After liberating the Dolorous Guard, Lancelot becomes lost in thought on hearing a love song. The knight and his horse then wander into a ditch. Suard characterizes the resulting wound to Lancelot's leg as a "stigmate douloureux qui s'inscrit dans sa chair" [painful stigma that inscribes itself in his flesh].⁶ One can understand why Suard could read a wound as stigma. The association commonly occurs, for example, in the chansons de geste where the heroes sever limbs from their adversaries before killing them. In that genre, the permanent corruption of the body underscores the mutilated warriors' inner corruption, be they pagan or Christian.⁷ The first half of the Prose Lancelot features the same wounding pattern. The heroes, Gauvain, Bors, Galescalain, Lionel, and Lancelot remove numerous body parts from their opponents, including at least one nose, two ears, three legs or feet, four heads, seven arms or hands, and in five instances a combination of limbs or limbs and heads.⁸ The victims interfere with the good works of the Round Table knights or their perfidy is somehow suggested, if not made explicit.

However, the romance's heroes also sustain many wounds. As a result, we cannot assume that every insult to the body represents a moral stain on the victim. Indeed, the author of...