The queen's secret: adultery and political structure in the feudal courts of Old French romance.

Adultery is a prominent subject of romances, and royal adultery seems to have exercised a particular fascination for medieval French poets. Some of the best known examples of the romance genre recount the story of an adulterous liaison between a queen and a knight. In these stories marriage is a political arrangement that may have sentimental attachments, but it is not motivated by love; love characterizes the queen's adulterous liaison with her knight. Many critics have interrogated the prominent connection of love and adultery in these stories, and the political significance of the queen's adultery is usually acknowledged in studies of the romance love ethic: it is treason against the king to have an affair with his wife. Yet while the effect of adultery on the king's position in his court has been the subject of critical study, the function of adultery within the political structure of medieval romances remains unexamined.

The queen's adultery takes place in a royal feudal court and it is constantly scrutinized, often discovered, and repeatedly rehidden. Love has a dual character in these stories: it provokes exemplary loyalty and passion and it is transgressive. The ambiguous status of adulterous love is seen in the ambivalent attitude toward the lovers taken by the narrator and the characters in the romance. They sympathize with the lovers, but they do not condone the adulterous liaison without reserve. The queen and her lover sometimes display a similarly undecided view of how well their liaison must be kept secret. Although they try to hide their relationship from the one party who threatens it the most, the king, they often seem indiscreet, even reckless, and little concerned with maintaining the secret of their adultery. The narrative development and drama of the story create and depend on this ambivalence: the queen and her lover repeatedly try to hide their liaison, their enemies constantly try to discover it, and the king wavers between belief in the lovers' innocence and certainty that they have betrayed him.

Some of the best known Old French romances recount the successive discoveries and cover-ups of a queen's sexual transgression, but adultery is not only a narrative structure in these stories. As an integral part of the social and hierarchical organization of the court it is also part of a political structure within which its status is also ambiguous, both necessary and prohibited. This essay explores how the queen's adultery mediates relationships between the king and his vassals and establishes a necessary equilibrium between powerful factions whose contests for power are played out in the feudal court through accusations of adultery against the queen.

The Knight's Secret

The limitation of women's power in medieval romances is cloaked by the representation of an apparent agency: the courtly lady commands her lover's service and obedience. According to the tenets of love established first in lyric love poetry and adopted in romances that recount courtly love liaisons, the first requirement that the lady makes of her lover is that he keep their affair secret. He must never speak of his lady and above all, he must never reveal her identity. Discretion is required of the male lover as a demonstration of his worthiness to love. A narrative representation of the importance of secrecy in love is found in the thirteenth-century Chatelaine de Vergi, a short romance that recounts the story of the courtly love relationship of the lady of Vergi and her unnamed knight.(1) The story closely follows lyric love poems in its description of the secret liaison between a married lady and a knight, but the narrative's setting in a feudal court provokes a conflict between feudal values and the values of courtly love that leads to a tragic ending for the lovers.(2)

In La Chatelaine de Vergi the chatelaine and the knight meet in a secluded garden whenever they can avoid discovery. The chatelaine forbids the knight to speak of their love, vowing that he will keep her love only as long as he keeps it secret. Initially, the knight obeys only too well. The wife of his lord, a duchess, does not know of the knight's relationship with the chatelaine and tries to seduce him. When the knight rejects her, the duchess seeks vengeance on the knight and claims to the duke that his vassal tried to seduce her. The duke confronts the knight and threatens him with exile from the duchy unless he can disprove the accusation. The knight is faced with the choice of keeping his secret and being banished from his lord's domain, or revealing the secret and losing his lady. The knight invents a third alternative: he tells the secret to the duke and hopes that the chatelaine will never learn that he has spoken. The duke does not keep silent, however. He tells the secret to the duchess, the duchess reveals to the chatelaine that she knows her secret, the chatelaine dies of heartbreak at her knight's betrayal, and the knight kills himself when he finds his lady's body and understands that she died because he spoke of their secret love.

La Chatelaine de Vergi belongs to a thirteenth-century subgenre of romance that Jean Frappier has called the roman tragique.(3) The romance not only ends tragically for the lovers, it also ends in political tragedy since the lovers' deaths indirectly cause the destruction of the feudal court. When the duke learns of the duchess's betrayal of the secret he executes her, abandons his lands to join a crusade, becomes a Templar, and never returns to France. The fate of the duchy is left in suspension; the romance does not recount that the duke and duchess had any children who might have inherited it.