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3. Replaying Rape: Feudal Law on Trial in Le Roman de Renart The archeology of feudal rape law discloses itself in a group of twelfth­ and thirteenth­century Old French texts entitled Le Roman deRenart, a cycle of narratives in which the characters are humanized animals.1 The genre draws its sources from universal folklore. In the French medieval avatar, the hero is the trickster fox Renart. Composed between approximately 1171 and 1250, the collection is made up of elements, of varying length and ho­ mogeneity, called "branches." A great number of poets participated in the cycle, but we know nothing of them and most of the branches are anony­ mous. It is assumed the different authors were literate clerics. The genre enjoyed immediate success, a fact attested to by the considerable number of manuscripts, translations into other medieval vernaculars, and also the abundance of iconographic references to Renart in medieval art. The ma­ terial was initially addressed to a chivalric audience, but was soon aimed at and heard by a broader, general public. Some branches are epic, staged in feudal courts, some parody romance and other popular literary genres, some are situated in the animal world. All are marked by the one perma­ nent feature of the genre—its constant irony. One group of the Renart texts is about the formulation, the authority, and the application of rape law in society. The authors of Branches Vila, Vllb, I, and VIII display a detailed knowledge of French feudal law, ap­ parent in their construction of legal discourse, their elaborate representa­ tion of the feudal judiciary in trial scenes, and their insistenceupon posing sexual conflicts in judicial terms. Far from condensing their legal erudition to spare their audience, these poets foreground and highlight the legal pro­ cedure of the day, confident that their listenerstake great interest in feudal law and are perfectly capable of assimilating its technical points. Indeed, law and legal learning held an important place in the value system of the noble elite in feudal society.2 Replaying Rape 73 Practitioners of the comparative study of law and literature today have discussed various ways in which the literary text relates itself to law, none of which can begin to account for the complex interweaving of literary and legal models in Le Roman de Renart. Legal discourse in the Rmart is not a metaphor of something else, of another preoccupation or theme.3 Nor can these recits be scrutinized for impassioned human voices, protesting the harsh impartial reason of medieval law.* These branches of Le Roman de Renart can be read as a set of social texts, to be juxtaposed to another, closely related set of social texts, the legal documents of the same period.' The Kenan's depiction of trial procedures, oaths, ordeals, trial by combat, and royal pardon, reveals that the preoccupations of the legal and social communities overlap. A dialectical reading of literature, history, and law is certainly not with­ out precedent among medievalists. There is a methodological tautology inherent in medieval studies, whether we read poetic works in light of sec­ ondary sources or study feudalhistory in light of contemporaneous literary texts. Textual interpretations have for centuries been conceived dialecti­ cally, based on historical accounts themselves based on the objects of in­ quiry. The hermeneutic power of this paradoxis double. It plunges us into the medievalwayof conceptualizing, which established no epistemological distinction between factual and fictional texts. Second, it teaches us there is no "source," there is no original object or fact that can be retrieved and that is the Middle Ages. There is only the study of the ways in which dis­ course is constituted and comes to construct relations of power in society. We cannot produce records of historical fact, but only analyze texts, whether legal, literary, religious, or scientific, asthey work to produce rep­ resentations of "reality." R. Howard Bloch's Medieval French Literatureand Law illuminates the singular exchange between literary and legal texts in the French Middle Ages:6 "Based upon formula, gesture, and ritual, the procedures of the feu­ dal court resembled more than superficially the literaryperformance. Both fulfilled in different ways a common purpose—the affirmation of an ac­ knowledged set of shared beliefs and aspirations through the articulation of a collective history."7 As Bloch demonstrates, the languages of poems and of legal documentary material are strikingly similar. Their narrative structures draw on shared paradigms. Legal documents are written with conventional literary forms; and literarytexts like the Renart that...

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