Outsiders: The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose Romance by Sylvia Huot (review)

Sylvia Huot's Outsiders examines the multi-faceted roles played by giants in medieval French literature. As exceptional human beings situated at the intersection of humanity, bestiality, and demonry, giants 'elaborate fantasies of racial and cultural alterity and […] explore the traumas and desires that shape Christian chivalric subjectivity' (p. 25). Outsiders persuasively develops this thesis by drawing on a wide body of evidence, primarily consisting of prose Arthurian material, but ranging across epic, chansons de geste, ancestral romance, and lyric poetry, with a brief nod to manuscript iconography. The author's judicious use of critical theoretical frameworks, including postcolonial, anthropological, and psychoanalytical approaches to subjectivity and race—a term which Huot acknowledges lacked sustained theorization in medieval (European) culture—also draws out pertinent analogies between medieval, early modern, and modern concerns with identity, alterity, and security.

Outsiders begins, logically, by exploring the origins of giants to reveal how their liminal ontological status is figured by their location on the borders of courtly civilization and by their identification as peoples indigenous to hitherto unexplored realms. These marginal giantesque societies are characterized by a distortion of Christian, political, structural, and moral values that become conflated with a racial and cultural alterity shared with 'Saracens'. This alterity informs giants' resistance to, and rejection of, the master civilization embodied by Arthur's chivalric court.

In their effort to overcome this threat to courtly society, knightly encounters with giants reflect an intersection between 'the physical and ideological violence of military adventuring, imperial expansionism, and the consolidation of cultural hegemony' (p. 107). Detailed analysis of the prose Tristan and Lancelot romances uncovers how giants (and Saracens) contest, and yet ultimately fail to subvert, courtly historical narratives: attempts to disrupt the Arthurian polity with violence are overturned by heroic archetypes of chivalric and devotional virtue.

Outsiders elucidates the evolution of knightly subjectivity as a consequence of violent encounter with giants in light of giants' allegorical potential as 'vivid fantasies of racial and ethnic difference' (pp. 237–38). Ultimately, Outsiders affirms the importance of violence in the formation of knightly identity and in chivalric culture's quest to protect and extend Christian society: it is a knight's civilized control of his violence that justifies its exertion over giantesque barbarism and savagery.

Huot's discussion is dense with critical observations and evidence, yet the prose remains clear throughout and helpful subheadings enable readers to absorb her insights in digestible sections. Iconographic analysis suggests how giants could be invested with various meanings contemporaneously, although some reflection on how representations of literary giants changed across the Middle Ages would have been interesting. This contribution to an ever-growing literature on non- and barely human figures in medieval literature offers many new insights into the role of alterity in medieval literature. Outsiders also illustrates how modern anxieties about self and identity, encounters with Others, and the control of historical and cultural narratives were embedded within the medieval European world.