Harmonious Hair: Flamenca, the Benda, and Tonsured Love

This essay argues that the Occitan romance Flamenca demonstrates how religious headgear and hairstyles are used to exemplify the courtly ideal of mezura. Flamenca reiterates the perils of jealousy and lack of restraint that result from falling out of sync with the Church and society and off the path of courtly love. Through veiled and tonsured hair, more usually redolent of piety, romantic, adulterous love flourishes and the narrative's eponymous heroine gains social agency and sexual fulfillment lacking in her marriage to a restrictive, jealous and immoderate boor. A close reading of male and female hair in this romance also demonstrates how seemingly pious hair practices subvert gender norms and further indicates the importance of hair as a signifier in medieval literature.