Second Annual Jeffrey T. Chamberlain Memorial Lecture

“Giants, Snakes and Seductresses: Unexpected, Unexplained, and Ugly Females in the Guillaume d’Orange Epic”
Leslie Zarker Morgan, Loyola University Maryland
George Mason University
12 April 2012
Aude, Roland’s fiancée, who faints and dies after hearing of her betrothed’s death, does not by any means represent all the females in the chanson de geste (Old French epic). The best-known Song of Roland where she thus appears is but one version of one poem in one of three major cycles. Almost equally as old, the Guillaume d’Orange (William of Orange) cycle depicts a more varied world, with a couple—Guibourc, a beautiful converted Saracen princess, and Guillaume—at the center. William and his six brothers, their father Aymeri and their Lombard mother, and many nephews, hold southern France and parts of Spain, on the (imagined) edge of Christian Europe. Guibourc herself has drawn much attention, but not the monsters—including many-headed snakes, smelly hags, and Amazons. Critics have largely avoided these unpleasant characters and the texts themselves are not consistent in depicting them, creating a double silence for modern readers. Yet these female figures offer examples of confronting and ultimately assimilating difference both then (in a post-Crusades time of growing Mediterranean commerce of humans and wealth) and now (with various critical approaches, such as feminist and frontier criticism): misogynous jibes, death, marriage, and silence.