Enforcing Desire and Interrogating Masculinity: Ipomadon and Blanchardyn and Eglantine

Both romances overtly identify their heroines as proud ladies. While Eglantine’s byname is ‘the proude lady in loue’, the Fere (La Fière in Anglo-­Norman) means ‘the Proud One’. Although ‘fere’ may also be glossed as ‘companion’ in Middle English, the redactor of Ipomadon puns on the meaning of pride, noting that ‘she was namyd prowde / But of love to lere’ (107–8), which suggests that the connotation of pride was still recognised.3 On the alternative meaning of ‘fere’ in Middle English, see Helen Cooper, ‘Passionate, eloquent and determined: Heroines’ tales and feminine poetics’, Journal of the British Academy, 4 (2016), 221–44 (p. 232). As I have already mentioned, the focus on pride preconditions responses to these women through pride’s negative cultural valences, which Blanchardyn and Eglantine augments by associating pride with military enemies (p. 104) and with the knight Subyon’s attempt to force Eglantine to marry him and usurp her rule (p. 176). Both Ipomadon and Blanchardyn and Eglantine present the heroine’s pride as transgressive and establish tension between her celebrated characteristics and her resistance to love. These romances use the motif of the proud lady to explore disruptions to normative desires and gender roles, ultimately reinforcing the importance of marriage. However, while desire is reimposed upon the proud lady, these works also question romance constructions of masculinity, moving away from the affirmative role the proud lady plays in Guy of Warwick. Ipomadon and Blanchardyn and Eglantine thus exemplify romance’s ability to both reinforce and question socio-cultural expectations, playing with some gendered expectations while at times punitively enforcing others. To this extent, their portrayal of resistance to love overlaps with Angela Chen’s theorisation of asexuality as able to ‘draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts […] and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller’.4 Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon, 2020), pp. 6–7. Neither heroine entirely fits into modern thinking on asexuality or aromanticism, as they seem to voice resistance to love at least partly as a political strategy for autonomy, and both later desire the hero. However, their initial resistance does challenge normative sexual scripts and reveals the restrictive stakes of these scripts, though these subversive effects are disavowed by the negative perspective from which each work presents its heroine.

Blanchardyn and Eglantine expresses a negative attitude towards Eglantine’s romantic a(nti)pathy early on – almost as soon as she is introduced. The Knight of the Ferry’s early speech to Blanchardyn, wishing that Eglantine will fall in love ‘som daye / yf god be plesed’, aligns God’s grace with the expectation of love in romance, while Eglantine’s ‘prowde corage’ and ‘obstynate wylle’ are criticised (p. 37). As Rosalind Brown-Grant notes, these criticisms of l’Orgueilleuse d’amours are much more prominent in the fifteenth-century French prose Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amours than the thirteenth-century verse Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amour; this perhaps suggests the increasingly negative or threatening perception of the proud lady in love towards the later medieval period, a trajectory borne out in this chapter.5 Rosalind Brown-Grant, French Romance of the Later Middle Ages: Gender, Morality, and Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 42. This shift in perception may have been influenced by increased anxieties about the efficacy of chivalric masculinity following crusading failures.6 See Katherine J. Lewis, ‘“…doo as this noble prynce Godeffroy of boloyne dyde”: Chivalry, masculinity, and crusading in late medieval England’, in Crusading and Masculinities, ed. by Natasha R. Hodgson, Katherine J. Lewis, and Matthew M. Mesley (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), pp. 311–28. While key moments such as the loss of Acre occurred in the late thirteenth century, significantly predating the French prose Blancandin and Caxton’s translation, Katherine Lewis suggests that anxieties about crusading and masculinity continued to affect writers in later medieval England and directly shaped Caxton’s literary output.7 Ibid., pp. 311–13, 317, 319. Blanchardyn and Eglantine does seem to engage with crusading discourses: it depicts Alymodes’s men as ‘sarrasyns’ (p. 87) but also indicates concern with distinguishing Christians and Muslims, in the episodes where Blanchardyn serves the Muslim King of Marienburg and Eglantine’s provost fails to recognise him, perceiving him as a Muslim knight. Leon Kellner also speculates that the author of the prose Blancandin altered the location of these scenes from Athens to Marienburg because of an interest in the Teutonic orders’ battles with their non-Christian neighbours in central Europe at this time.8 Leon Kellner, ‘Introduction’, in Blanchardyn and Eglantine, ed. by Kellner, pp. v–cxxvi (p. cxxv). For Caxton, a backdrop of concerns about masculinity and crusading failures may have influenced his interest in this romance, which he claims to have sold to Lady Margaret Beaufort in French and to translate at her request.9 William Caxton, ‘Dedication’, in Blanchardyn and Eglantine, pp. 1–2. Yu-Chiao Wang has drawn attention to the fact that the relationships Caxton describes in his prologues may be part of an advertising technique rather than reflecting real transactions, noting that his works seem primarily to have been read by people who probably considered themselves to be gentry rather than aristocracy or royalty: Yu-Chiao Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and Their Early Tudor Readers’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.2 (2004), 173–88. The French prose version already offered a means to consider the construction and disruption of chivalric masculinity, as well as a way of resolving these concerns by disavowing the problems posed by the proud lady in love through repeated criticisms of her.

These critiques of Eglantine often come from characters who owe loyalty to her, as the Knight of the Ferry does (he is her vassal), priming the reader to view Eglantine’s pride as a negative characteristic because these opinions stem from within her realm rather than from enemies to her country. Her provost tells Blanchardyn ‘we sholde wel desyre’ Eglantine to fall in love (p. 75), while her foster-mother warns her ‘youre pryde shalbe cause / but yf ye take hede, of the totall distruction of your royalme’ (p. 65). The foster-mother projects larger socio-political concerns onto Eglantine’s resistance to love, indicating the way that women’s sexuality becomes a public issue when the woman in question holds political power. The foster-mother’s fear of the realm’s ‘distruction’ also points to a specific anxiety about female rulers’ inability to defend their lands in military action, a particular concern in Blanchardyn and Eglantine in the context of Alymodes’s attack.10 This fear was not necessarily well grounded: Margaret Paston’s letter to her husband requesting arms with which to defend their manor at Gresham indicates that women could organise military action. See Paston Letters and Papers, ed. by Davis, I, 226–7 (letter 130). I am indebted to Diane Watt’s work on this letter. For a broader investigation of women’s roles in war, see Sophie Harwood, Medieval Women and War: Female Roles in the Old French Tradition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). Eglantine’s pride is further criticised by the narrator, who disavows her ‘haulte corage insaucyble’ (p. 52) and ‘dismesurable herte’ (p. 68), lending narratorial authority to this condemnation. While Eglantine is initially praised for her beauty and virtue, presenting her as a desirable partner for Blanchardyn, her positive features exist in tension with her proud repudiation of love. This perhaps develops a feature of troubadour and trouvère poetry, where, as Helen Dell writes,

The same tension is evident in Ipomadon, where the celebration of the Fere as ‘the beste in all degre / That euer on erthe myghte trede’ (92–3) is soon qualified, as

The specific focus of these criticisms in Ipomadon and Blanchardyn and Eglantine – the need for the women to take a lord – suggests that the Fere and Eglantine not only threaten normative expectations of desire but arguably inspire greater anxiety and critique by disrupting patriarchal rule. Eglantine and the Fere are both sole female rulers, having already come into their inheritance. This places them, together with Ettarde, the final proud lady I will discuss in this chapter, in an unusual position for women in late medieval literature and society. Corinne Saunders notes that ‘the system of male primogeniture did not allow women to inherit land except in the absence of a male heir and then only with circumscribed rights; heiresses were therefore married at the earliest opportunity’.12 Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 51. While the ‘actively desiring heiress’ is a prominent romance motif, female rulers appear most often as fairies or enchantresses (in the Lanval narratives and Partonope of Blois, for example), or as women whose lands are under threat and who are happy to accept the love of a knight who rescues them, with no resistance (such as Blancheflor in Chrétien’s Perceval, the Lady of Synadowne in Lybeaus Desconus, and the lady Degaré marries in Sir Degaré).13 Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 223. Eglantine, the Fere, and Ettarde are unusual as human women who are rulers with significant power, and the threat this unusual position poses is suggested by the focus upon the political need for them to marry.14 Dido in the Roman d’Enéas and Caxton’s Eneydos (as well as, in the context of epic, Virgil’s Aeneid) is another human ruler with significant power, although she is disempowered and commits suicide because of her love for Eneas. In Blanchardyn and Eglantine, the provost argues Eglantine’s vassals should hope she does love Blanchardyn, ‘to thende she myght take a goode lord for to deffende vs and her lande’ (p. 75), suggesting that Eglantine is inadequate as a military leader and requires a husband to fulfil this role for her. Similar concerns are voiced in Ipomadon, where a male ruler is perceived as so essential to ‘maynteyme vs and hyr lond, / Our stryffe to stabull and stille’ (2089–90) that the Fere’s barons threaten ‘but she a lord take’, ‘they shuld þer omage make / To kyngys of other kynne’ (1787–9). This criticism of the Fere’s rule conflicts with the earlier description of her as ‘ware and wyce’, a ruler who would ‘abowtte hur suffyr no debatte’, and whom ‘her meyny lovyd […] euer ilke one’ (348–52). This inconsistency may imply that even an initially effective female ruler eventually requires a husband to keep her followers in check, or it may indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the Fere as her resistance to love persists. These anxieties often focus on the perceived vulnerability of a country ruled by a woman, implying that she is incapable of directing military strength.15 On the similar way in which the Old Norse maiden-kings’ realms are perceived as vulnerable, see Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words, and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 112–13. But they also seem to express discomfort with women’s rule and the effects it may have on the prerogative of male rule.

In this respect, the proud lady in love shares some perhaps surprising similarities with a figure in Old Norse literature: the maiden-king. Francophone influence upon the literary culture of both Iceland and England offers an explanation for this connection, but the maiden-king is usually considered unique to Old Norse literature.16 See Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, ‘From Heroic Legend to “Medieval Screwball Comedy”? The Origins, Development and Interpretation of the Maiden-King Narrative’, in The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. by Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney, and Ármann Jakobsson (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2012), pp. 229–49; Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012). The Old Norse narratives are ‘unique in the large international corpus of narratives devoted to the taming of a haughty princess in that their plot is dominated by a misogamous female ruler who insists on being called kongr (“king”) rather than dróttning (“queen”)’.17 Marianne E. Kalinke, Bridal-Quest Romance in Medieval Iceland (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p. 66. This title offers a decisive difference from the proud ladies, as it foregrounds the maiden-king’s transgression of a powerful role usually associated with men. Yet Icelandic maiden-kings are still recognised as maiden-kings without this title,18 For example, in Clári saga and Dínus saga drambláta. and Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir suggests that ‘the crucial element is that the maiden-king is empowered to achieve her own aims and rule in practice if not in name’.19 Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature, p. 109. Elaborating on the characteristics of the maiden-king, Friðriksdóttir writes that she is

Women’s romantic a(nti)pathy therefore has significantly different implications from men’s resistance to love. Although men’s acceptance of love and marriage allows them to fulfil generic expectations and continue their lineage, its resolution rarely has political or economic implications. In Guigemar, we do not know if Guigemar and the lady marry (indeed, it would seem they cannot as she is presumably still married to her first husband), have children, or if the lady brings Guigemar any wealth or property; the emphasis is upon Guigemar’s acceptance of love – although this partly reflects the different literary and historical context of Marie’s courtly twelfth-century Lais. Troilus and Criseyde likewise focuses upon the experience of love itself, not wealth, property, or even dynasty. In Amadas et Ydoine and Sir Degrevant, the female love-object possesses significant wealth and property, but no explicit concerns are expressed about the impact the men’s initial resistance might have on their economic and familial responsibilities. And there appears to be no question of how Dynadan, who never marries or falls in love, may compromise his familial, political, or economic interests. In contrast, anxieties about women’s power in Blanchardyn and Eglantine and Ipomadon reveal a concern with preserving men’s access to political and economic power through heiresses who accept marriage, highlighting what is really at stake in these romances – and, indeed, what is at stake in romances that emphasise ‘desirable desire’.22 See further Cooper, The English Romance in Time, pp. 221–3. While Moss argues that an heiress’s ‘marriage making must be controlled’ as it ‘could potentially threaten patriarchal authority’, this risk was even greater if an heiress threatened not to marry at all.23 Moss, Fatherhood and its Representations, p. 137. The concerns about resistance to love with which romances engage vary in accordance with gendered perceptions: while men’s acceptance of love and marriage aligns them with dominant models of chivalric masculinity, women’s acceptance of love is more specifically an issue of economic and political power.

The resolution of the proud lady’s resistance also has a dynastic function, as in each of the romances discussed in this chapter (except for Malory’s Pelleas and Ettarde episode), the proud lady’s acceptance of love leads to the birth of at least one son, ensuring that the political and economic power she initially wields is handed down to a male successor rather than repeating the cycle of female inheritance. The proud lady’s romantic a(nti)pathy is taken seriously, then, and her pride viewed negatively, because of her political and economic power, which requires her desire for autonomy to be disavowed. Brown-Grant similarly argues that the prose Blancandin,

To reimpose normative attitudes to love and marriage in these romances, Blanchardyn and Eglantine and Ipomadon use episodes of physical and psychological coercion. These coercive actions fall outside of the medieval legal concept of raptus but seem to be recognised as coercive within each romance, suggesting an acknowledgement of extra-legal forms of coercion in the literary sphere. In Blanchardyn and Eglantine, a forced kiss marks Eglantine’s first encounter with Blanchardyn, as he rides up behind her and seizes the opportunity to kiss her when she turns to see who approaches (an illustration of this episode from the French prose Blancandin is included on the cover of this book).25 The image is taken, with kind permission from the ÖNB, from Blancandin ou l’Orgueilleuse d’Amour, 1450–74, Wien, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 3438, fol. 16v. Blanchardyn does this at the Knight of the Ferry’s suggestion, associating the kiss with collusion between men in a manner reminiscent of Carissa Harris’s concept of ‘felawe masculinity’ as teaching men to perpetuate rape culture (though, again, the class context is rather different here).26 Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), pp. 29–30. The knight explicitly frames this kiss as the beginning of Blanchardyn and Eglantine’s love, telling him ‘yf ye may haue that onely cusse […] hit shal be occasyon of a loue inseparable betwyx her and you’ (p. 39). But the kiss is entirely undesired and non-consensual on Eglantine’s part: she describes it at first as ‘this Iniurye’ (p. 43) and ‘this vyolence’ (p. 45), and desires restitution for Blanchardyn’s behaviour, threatening to have him killed. Unwanted kissing was not a crime in medieval English law – and indeed attempts to prosecute it as sexual assault in modern legal cases have had mixed results – so there would have been no legal recompense available to Eglantine. However, other literary works do depict kissing as comparable to sexual violation. For example, Chrétien’s Perceval forcibly kissing the maiden in the pavilion is described in terms akin to rape, as he ‘mist le soz lui tote estendue […] desfense mestier n’i ot’ [‘stretched her out beneath himself […] her resistance was in vain’], while the lady’s abusive partner later claims

The kissing scene ‘resonates with sexual violence’, as Jennifer Summit argues.31 Jennifer Summit, ‘William Caxton, Margaret Beaufort and the Romance of Female Patronage’, in Women, the Book, and the Worldly, ed. by Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 151–65 (p. 162). When Blanchardyn approaches Eglantine, he ‘gaf the spore to þe hors & forced hym as moche as he coude’, until ‘bothe theyre mouthes recountred’ (p. 41). Not only is the spectre of force raised in the description of Blanchardyn forcing his horse onwards, but ‘recountred’ identifies the kiss as a form of violence. This term is unique to Caxton’s translation: the prose Blancandin says that their mouths ‘s’entrebaisierent’ [kissed each other], and the verse Blancandin that Blancandin ‘baisie’ [kissed] her.32 Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amours: Versioni in prosa del XV secolo, ed. by Rosa Anna Greco, Bibliotheca Romanica: Studi e Testi, 3 (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2002), p. 95 (10. 8); Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amour: Roman d’aventures, ed. by H. Michelant (Paris: Librairie Tross, 1867), line 702. To ‘recountre’ usually refers to ‘encounter[ing] (an enemy or his force) in battle’, meeting ‘in a hostile encounter, fight’.33 ‘Recǒuntren v.’, Middle English Dictionary <https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED36231> [accessed 27 May 2023]. This casts the kiss as a military encounter or, more specifically, a joust.34 Summit notes that the scene uses the ‘language of masculine enterprise’ but does not draw a specific parallel with a joust: ‘The Romance of Female Patronage’, p. 161. The scene shares several parallels with jousting, as Blanchardyn charges his horse towards Eglantine to ‘recountre’ with her, with the result that she ‘fell doune from her amblere’ in shock (p. 43), while he rides on. These parallels are latent in the French Blancandin, but Caxton’s use of ‘recountre’ augments them, emphasising the violence of the forced kiss.35 The imagery of jousting offers an unusual variation on the metaphor of love as warfare or as a siege, found in the works of Ovid as well as Le Roman de la Rose.

Yet the military language describing the kiss also opens up possibilities for questioning this violence and its place in chivalric practices, as at times it seems humorously incongruous. The high register in which Blanchardyn considers his task, being ‘affrayed and replenysshed wyth grete fere lest he shold faylle of his entrepryse’ (p. 40), the description of it as a ‘fayre aduenture’ (p. 42), as well as the framing of the kiss as a joust, have an absurd, self-­aggrandising quality. This is coupled with the comically fortuitous meeting of the couple’s lips (with no injury to either party, despite Blanchardyn apparently riding at full speed) and the performance of Blanchardyn’s subsequent ride through Eglantine’s company ‘gyuyng a gracyouse and honourable salutacion to them all’ (p. 42). The exaggerated, comic, and performed qualities of these moments become more prominent in the later texts: in the verse Blancandin, the hero does think that he ‘vivrai petit’ [will live but a short time] after kissing l’Orgueilleuse, and ‘fu angoissous’ [was anxious] to kiss her, but the later texts inflate this sense of fear and corresponding gravitas more, perhaps responding to increased anxieties about chivalric masculinity in the later medieval period.36 Blancandin et l’Orgueilleuse d’amour, ed. by Michelant, lines 607, 690. While the forced kiss is certainly a coercive attempt to enforce the role of beloved upon Eglantine, there may also be scope to read it in a more critical and questioning light.

While Blanchardyn and Eglantine uses physical force to initiate Eglantine’s acceptance of love, Ipomadon turns to psychological coercion to reinforce the importance of normative desires. Ipomadon is both a master manipulator and a master of disguise: the two go together in his performance at the three-day tournament held to determine whom the Fere ought to marry, as well as in his concluding battle with Lyolyne. At the tournament, Ipomadon appears in a different guise each day, apparently to ensure he can earn his reputation anew each time. However, his disguises also make the Fere despair as she thinks that a new knight has won the field each day. Similarly, when Ipomadon defeats the Fere’s enemy Lyolyne in a concluding battle, he then takes up Lyolyne’s standard to pretend that it was he who won; once again, Ipomadon’s overt motive is to earn more prowess before he can ask the Fere to be his bride, but this causes the Fere to further despair and attempt to leave Calabria. While Ipomadon is not on either occasion trying to manipulate the Fere’s emotional responses, the narrative nonetheless makes the emotional impact of his actions clear. This is not what inspires the Fere’s love for Ipomadon as she began to desire him long before this point, but her increasing dependence and desperation do suggest that these episodes partly rebuke her initial transgression of normative gender and sexual roles. In this respect, they operate in a similar though much less extreme way to the humiliations inflicted upon the maiden-kings in Old Norse literature, which encompass loss of status, physical abuse, and rape.37 See Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature, pp. 120–5; Kalinke, Bridal-Quest Romance, pp. 66–8, 78–9, 101–2; Erik Wahlgren, ‘The Maiden King in Iceland’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1938), pp. 36–8.

The three-day tournament and Ipomadon’s fight with Lyolyne follow the same narrative trajectory as in Hue’s Ipomedon, which, as Roberta Krueger argues, thwarts romance expectations and deprives La Fière of her agency.38 Roberta Krueger, ‘Misogyny, Manipulation, and the Female Reader in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. by Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), pp. 395–409 (p. 400). However, the Middle English Ipomadon offers potentially differing views of these episodes because of this redaction’s reduced misogyny.39 See Cooper, The English Romance in Time, pp. 235–7; Brenda Hosington, ‘The Englishing of the Comic Technique in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. by Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), pp. 247–63. Ipomadon portrays the Fere more positively during the three-day tournament, removing the Anglo-Norman Ipomedon’s description of her desire for the hero in each of his disguises (which, because she does not realise it is Ipomedon, is used to suggest indiscriminate lust) to instead emphasise her fidelity.40 See further Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-­Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 205. Given the significance of fidelity for female virtue in the Middle Ages, this may have encouraged greater sympathy with the Fere’s distress. Ipomadon does not disguise but rather emphasises this distress: on the first day, the Fere ‘þought for pur tene / Her hert wold breke in thre’ (3406–7) when she hears Ipomadon has left, cursing her pride and proclaiming ‘dothe he þus, he dothe grette synne!’ (3417). In Hue’s Ipomedon, this line is given to Jason rather than the Fere, ensuring that the heroine herself does not question Ipomedon’s behaviour.41 See Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon: poème de Hue de Rotelande (fin du XIIe siècle), ed. by A. J. Holden, Bibliothèque française et romane, série B, éditions critiques de textes, 17 (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1979), lines 5192, 6316. Jason continues to warn Ipomadon against leaving the Fere in both versions,42 Ibid., lines 6313–18. even issuing the stark caution that

The distress Ipomadon causes the Fere becomes even more evident in the Lyolyne episodes, where the Fere’s behaviour suggestively indicates the traumatic effects Ipomadon’s abandonment has on her sense of autonomy.43 While trauma is culturally specific and symptoms and understandings shift over time, I perceive it to be a useful term for the Fere’s experiences of ‘shock or stress beyond the limits of [her] psychic ability to cope’. See Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee, ‘Conceptualizing Trauma for the Middle Ages’, in Trauma in Medieval Society, ed. by Turner and Lee (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 3–12 (p. 8). When she sees her cousin Cabanus approach after Lyolyne’s apparent victory, she introduces herself as

The reduction of the Fere’s pride also takes on didactic meaning, however. She repeatedly blames herself for her misfortune, saying ‘aftur pryde comythe grette reprove’ (942), and declaring

Like the forced kiss in Blanchardyn and Eglantine, these episodes of psychological coercion in Ipomadon are portrayed ambivalently: while they impose a normative role upon the Fere, they also highlight the coercive effects of Ipomadon’s behaviour and raise questions about the performative nature of masculinity in Ipomadon and romance more widely. As with the kiss in Blanchardyn and Eglantine, but this time on a broader basis across the narrative, masculinity is repeatedly highlighted as something that is constructed in Ipomadon because of Ipomadon’s propensity for disguise. His disguises are particularly subversive because they often take the form of figures antithetical to the role of the chivalric Christian knight: the fool, the coward, and finally the threatening knight who besieges the Fere, Lyolyne. This final disguise is the most disruptive, not only because it ruptures the Fere’s and the reader’s expectations of a climactic (re)union but also because this disguise is both closer to the Christian chivalric knight than the fool or the coward and furthest from this identity. While Lyolyne is a knight, he is also a black man from ‘Ynde Mayore’ (6138) who embodies the trope of the ‘hostile pagan outsider’s desire to possess the woman’.48 Saunders, ‘A Matter of Consent’, p. 115. I follow Jonathan Hsy’s distinction between Black as ‘signal[ling] contemporary sociopolitical identities shaped by African diaspora experiences’, while black ‘is not always capitalized in earlier historical instances’: Hsy, Antiracist Medievalisms: From ‘Yellow Peril’ to Black Lives Matter (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), p. 16 n. 98. Somewhat surprisingly, Lyolyne is not explicitly described as pagan or Muslim, unlike Alymodes in Blanchardyn and Eglantine, whom Eglantine refuses to marry because ‘neuer the dayes of her lyff she sholde wedde paynem nor noo man infydele’.49 Blanchardyn and Eglantine, p. 65. On the importance of using the term ‘Muslim’ instead of ‘Saracen’ to call attention to Islamophobia in medieval literature, see Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, ‘The depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’, Literature Compass, 16.9–10 (2019) <https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12548>. However, Lyolyne’s association with ‘Ynde Mayore’ may link him to the trope of what Geraldine Heng refers to as ‘black Saracens’, who ‘abound from the twelfth century on – in the shape of […] enemies whose bodies may also bear nonhuman characteristics’, recalling the description of Lyolyne.50 Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 187–8. Heng notes that people from India are imagined as black in Parzival, p. 209. See Ipomadon, lines 6145–64. Ipomadon’s disguise as Lyolyne could be seen as a kind of blackface here: while he masquerades as a black person successfully, Lyolyne cannot cross racial borders so easily.51 For scholarship on blackface and medieval performance, see Erik Wade, ‘Ower Felaws Blake: Blackface, Race, and Muslim Conversion in the Digby Mary Magdalene’, Exemplaria, 31.1 (2019), 22–45; Wade’s insights into the way blackface is used as a contrast to a sense of white Christian identity as stable and God-given align with my reading of Ipomadon here. I am indebted to Dorothy Kim for suggesting the focus on blackface to me at the 2018 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference. Ipomadon’s masquerade as a black, presumably non-Christian character, against whom Christian knights are often purposefully contrasted in medieval romance, may raise questions about constructions of race alongside the broader exploration of chivalric masculinity in these episodes of disguise.52 I elaborate on race and medieval race-making in Chapter 4. The centrality of disguise and deception in Ipomadon may even suggest that masculinity itself is a form of disguise or deception, aligning with modern views of gender as performative.53 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2002; first publ. 1990). Several scholars have commented on the way other romances, particularly Malory’s Morte, align with this model, but Ipomadon perhaps takes this further to suggest that masculinity is also a perpetual work of deception, of pretending to be (or performing as) something you are not.54 See, for example, Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 12–13; Dorsey Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), pp. 38, 68–9, 129. Armstrong discusses Malorian masculinity as masquerade, pp. 86–9, but this is not quite the same as masculinity as disguise or even pretence in Ipomadon. This may stem from Hue de Rotelande’s ironic and satirical approach to romance and gender, but the Middle English text opens up other possibilities for exploring and questioning chivalric masculinity through its subtle critiques of Ipomadon.

Blanchardyn and Eglantine and Ipomadon both reassert normative models of desire and gender, at times forcefully emphasising the necessity of marriage to maintain male rule. These romances expose the political significance of the proud lady’s marriage, which ensures that her lands return to patriarchal control. However, both narratives also explore possibilities outside the norm by interrogating romance constructions of masculinity, moving beyond the affirmative role of the proud lady in the first half of Guy of Warwick and starting to denaturalise gendered roles and sexual scripts, opening up possibilities for comparing women’s romantic a(nti)pathy with Chen’s sense of how asexuality can help us to interrogate sexual norms. This interrogation of masculinity is developed further in Eger and Grime and Malory’s episode of Pelleas and Ettarde.