Elizabeth Archibald on Incest and the Medieval Imagination
Elizabeth Archibald explores the theme of incest in medieval literature, which has ‘come out of the closet’ in our own society as a major social problem
I first became interested in the incest theme in medieval literature while working on my Ph D thesis on the Apollonius of Tyre story, the source of Shakespeare’s play Pericles. This plot, which was extremely popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, begins with a widowed father falling in love with his only daughter, raping her, and living with her in secret until both are killed by a thunderbolt from heaven. The protagonist too has an only daughter, as do all the powerful men in the story; there is a clear correlation between being a good ruler and being a good father. I wondered whether the incest theme appeared in many other medieval stories; fifteen years later, I have far more examples than can be discussed in any detail in a single volume.
During the time that I have been working on this book, incest has ‘come out of the closet’ in our own society as a major social problem. I am sure the incidence of incest has not changed over the last few centuries, yet it is only quite recently that it is become an acceptable subject for novels, plays and films. I have been startled by the openness with which medieval writers discussed incest. They did not condone it, but they certainly accepted that it happens, and even that incestuous partners may love each other deeply. They also accepted that woman may initiate or encourage incest; our own society has been reluctant to face up to the notion of women as sexual aggressors, especially in relation to their own children.
I decided that in order to understand medieval atttitudes to the incest theme, it was necessary to consider the treatment of the theme in classical myth and literature, and the ways in which medieval writers used the classical stories they inherited, as opposed to the new plots they invented themselves. I had hoped to extend my study to the Renaissance, but this would have involved a great many more primary texts and a great deal of research on the cultural, historical and theological context; the book would have had to be twice as long. Instead I decided to devote a chapter to the development of the medieval incest laws and the extent to which they seem to have been observed. I was surprised to find that there is little trace in the historical and legal documents of the shocking nuclear family incest which is so frequently found in the imaginative literature of the period. At a late stage in my research, however, I discovered that the trope of the Virgin Mary as the Bride of her own Father and Son was commonly used throughout medieval literature, from the earliest centuries of Christianity. This struck me as the exception that proved the rule, and highlighted the way in which medieval Christian writers used incest as a metaphor for original sin.
Many recent critics have commented on the incest theme in particular medieval texts. My aim in this book was to provide an overview of the ways in which it was used during the Middle Ages, and especially from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, when the vernacular languages we use today were first being used for imaginative literature that was preserved in written form. The subject of incest invites readings informed by modern approaches such as anthropology and psychiatry. I have preferred to study the mentalité of medieval writers and readers, and to trace some of the ways in which particular incest plots were used and adapted by religious and secular writers in saints’ lives, cautionary tales, romances, and chronicles. My original title for the book was Dangerous Propinquity, a quotation from Elizabeth Smart; this was thought to be too oblique for on-line catalogue listing, but it seems to me a succinct encapsulation of the problem of incest.
Elizabeth Archibald
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