2007 Congress<\/a><\/p>\nIn the twelfth century there emerged the figure of the “sympathetic werewolf,” an almost tragic figure of a man’s mind trapped in a wolf’s body. \u00a0Modern lycanthropes, in films ranging from The Wolf Man<\/em> and An American Werewolf in London<\/em> to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban<\/em> and Underworld<\/em>, continue to evidence the simultaneously horrifying and sympathetic nature of this hybrid monstrosity.<\/p>\nBut beyond sympathy, werewolves in medieval romances elicited both humorous and deconstructive responses. \u00a0That is, in Arthur and Gorlagon<\/em> and William of Palerne<\/em>, the unconventional appearance of the werewolf raises questions of appearance and convention in\/of the very work it inhabits. \u00a0In short, the comic werewolf in these tales serves as a tool for parodic self-deconstruction.<\/p>\nIn medieval romances the werewolves by all outward appearances are wolves. \u00a0That is, they are quadrupeds, unlike their contemporaries the bipedal cynocephaloi<\/em> and modern filmic werewolves. \u00a0They display a human intelligence far beyond that of their human romance counterparts. \u00a0Put another way, the animal who exhibits a normal human intelligence underscores the lack of realistic intelligence in the traditional human romance characters around him. \u00a0As a result, the audience of the romance, already primed to see beyond the surface appearances by the existence of the werewolf in the narrative, is alerted to the awkward conventions of the romance itself and the self-imposed limits of the genre.<\/p>\nIn the Latin romance Arthur and Gorlagon<\/em>, the normally heroic King Arthur is reduced to a simpleton who never gets the joke or the message. \u00a0He fails to recognize that his host is a werewolf just as he fails to recognize that his wife Geinevere is an adultress. \u00a0In the English romance William of Parerne<\/em>, Alphouns the werewolf repeatedly aids the naive couple William and Meliors, who, as Norman Hinton has rightly pointed out, are “stiff figures, almost frozen into conventional attitudes, sometimes devoid of narrative subtlety.” \u00a0Alphouns, the monstrous werewolf, is the most realistic character in the tale, an incongruity which signals the artificial form of the romance he inhabits. \u00a0Marie, in her Lai de Bisclavret<\/em>, allows the werewolf Bisclavet to run free while pigeon-holing her other characters into static and predictable (that is, hyper-conventional) stances. \u00a0Again, the unexpected appearance of a sympathetic and self-conscious werewolf turns the romance conventions on end.<\/p>\nIf, as Caroline Jewers has recently suggested, parody has always been inherent in medieval romance, perhaps one of the most unlikely but effective means of establishing that parody was a sympathetic monster. \u00a0In the romance world of blacks and whites, the werewolf stands out a hoary grey \/ it doesn’t fit convention, and its incongruity helps to destabilize and invigorate the very romance it inhabits. \u00a0Far more than simply a stock “scaqry monster,” the medieval werewolf broke narrative convention; understanding this complex figure may help us breadk the conventional modern image of medieval literature as a humorless landscape stocked with predictably dreary castles, dire wolves, and morbid monsters.<\/p>\n
*****<\/p>\n
Website Editor’s Note<\/em>:<\/p>\nThe Abstract of Prof. Massey’s Paper for one of our Sessions at the next Congress appears here<\/a><\/p>\nWe thank him for his continuing contributions.<\/p>\n
*****<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeff Massey (Molloy College, Rockville Center, New York) “‘There, Wolf . . . There, Castle’: \u00a0Comedy, Romance, and the Self-Deconstructing Medieval Monster” Abstract of Paper Presented at the 42nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 2007) Session on “Getting Medieval: \u00a0Medieval Monstrosities and Their Ill Repute” Sponsored by the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence Organized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":1023,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3900"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4395,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3900\/revisions\/4395"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscriptevidence.org\/wpme\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}