Ebook: Redefining gender through the arena of the male body: The reception of Thomas’s Tristan in the Old French “Le Chevalier de la Charette” and the Old Icelandic “Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd”

This dissertation concentrates on two medieval romances which occupy different places in the medieval canon, Chrétien de Troyes' Le Chevalier de la Charette and the Old Icelandic Saga af Tristram ok Ísodd. Both of these texts are responses to the Old French Tristan romance and both deny the sexual ambiguity of the Tristan figure by reconfiguring the equation of male body and masculinity that is typical of courtly romance. Chrétien is motivated by the disjunction between clerical and chivalric paradigms of masculinity and he uses the experiences of Lancelot to define gender as purely performative. Tristram ok Ísodd, on the other hand, models the masculinity of its hero on the gender system in the literary-historic sagas of Icelanders. While maleness in this genre is largely based on performance, it rests on a biological basis. Thus, the ability of the Old Icelandic hero to father a son marks his immunity to the ambivalence which plagues the continental Tristan figure.