Volume 37, Issue 1, March 2011, Pages 62–74
Feasts and Gifts of Food in Medieval Europe: Ritualised Constructions of Hierarchy, Identity and Community
Arthur's refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast
Abstract
Arthur's
refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale
of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment
on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating
may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper
argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in
pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to
reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world.
Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and
controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and
is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This
study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals
and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in
order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat
have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as
mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.
Keywords
- Feasting;
- Romance;
- Arthur;
- Ritual;
- Courtesy;
- Chivalry
Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Aisling Byrne
is a doctoral student in the Faculty of English at the University of
Cambridge. Her dissertation is on the topic of ‘otherworlds’ in
literatures from medieval Britain and Ireland and she is supervised by
Professor Helen Cooper. She has a BA in English from University College
Dublin and an MPhil in Medieval Literature from the University of
Cambridge.
