The Final Frontier: Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature

Although life and death may be considered as the ultimate binary opposition, in medieval literature the boundary between them is permeable and surrounded by a kind of frontier zone within which figures belonging properly to one side may encroach on the other. The dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize and sometimes even desire their own deaths. Integrating death, dying and the dead in such a way as to allow life to continue poses a major challenge to the individual and to the social order. Although at times the old order is reasserted, at others change may be initiated or a new order founded. Thus death has the potential to regenerate as well as to destroy.

AHRC leave will allow me to complete a monograph entitled The Final Frontier: Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature, in which I investigate what special significance these themes held for the medieval writers and audiences who returned to them so frequently. I explore this question in important French and English literary works dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, namely the Chanson de Roland, the non-cyclic Prose Lancelot, Villon's Testament, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, and Pearl. In discussing English texts with the French I replace them in their proper context; the cultural continuum between medieval England and France is inadequately appreciated.

Medieval attitudes to death have long interested historians, and literary critics have done fine detailed work on individual texts, including some recent monographs focusing on sacrifice or on what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls 'the between-two-deaths'. My project builds on this work while carrying it in new thematic and methodological directions. The centre of my project lies in Lacan's development of the distinction between bodily and social or symbolic death. Symbolic death may follow bodily death (as, in modern British society, in the funeral or memorial ceremony). But it may also precede it, as when madness or obsession makes a person 'dead to the world'. Lacan sees the separation of these two deaths as opening up a space ('the between-two-deaths') in which ethical and political issues can be re-negotiated, leading to restoration and renewal for both individuals and societies. I explore this and related ideas in relation to the medieval material, selected for its thematic focus and literary importance. My approach is not limited to psychoanalysis, which is one of a wide range of critical tools available to contemporary medievalists. I draw also on anthropological discussions of the two deaths, of burial and memorialization in different cultures; on Freudian psychoanalysis for its accounts of the death drive, memory, mourning and repetition; on phenomenology for its insights into the human subject; and on gender studies and queer theory for their critiques of the famously contentious psychoanalytical accounts of gender and sexuality.

My work acts as a bridge both between English and French medieval studies and between US and UK practice. Theoretical approaches such as mine are widely accepted in medieval French studies but in medieval English have to date been more developed in the US than here. My aim is to combine the best of these various traditions.