This week, as threatened, I want to get back into some medieval literature with two more lesser-known 13th century French chanson prose poems, the Arthurian-adjacent Roman de Silence and the tongue-in-cheek romance parody Aucassin et Nicolette. While not perhaps immediately similar, both of these works have what a modern audience would likely find surprisingly sophisticated observations on the nature of gender and identity as social constructs for stories written more than six hundred years ago.

Despite being written, we believe, in the 13th century in Old French, a manuscript for Le Roman de Silence wasn’t discovered until 1911 in Nottinghamshire, England. Silence was one of several stories in a “well-worn” anthology of a type used by professional medieval entertainers that was found in a discarded box labeled “old papers—no value” among the Willoughby family library of Wollaton Hall, then in the possession of Lord Digby Wentworth Bayard Willoughby, the 9th Baron Middleton (Roche-Mahdi xi, quoting Cowper, 17).

Despite the novelty of the manuscript, academic scholarship on Silence wasn’t seriously begun until the 1960s, and even now, the story is largely unknown outside of specialist circles. Which is a shame, because it’s a really interesting artifact of medieval thought. Like many authors of the time, Silence’s, Heldris of Cornwall, is otherwise a cipher, and even this name is likely a pseudonym meant to tie the French poet to the story’s setting in English Cornwall. The poem’s language is, as I said, Old French, with linguistic features of Picard, a French dialect native to Northern France and Belgium. Picard is still spoken in Hauts-de-France and is an officially recognized dialect in Belgium alongside other regional dialects like Walloon, with somewhere under 700,000 speakers in both countries (per a 1998 study; the UNESCO world atlas of languages claims there could be as many as a million in 2024, but given the general world trend toward linguistic homogenization, it seems unlikely that Picard is gaining native speakers).

Silence is a relatively late edition to a large and colorful continuation of Arthurian lore that spans much of the Middle Ages. The protagonist Silence is a new character, but their father, Cador, is not. Cador (also Cado or Cadwr in Welsh) is a legendary duke of Cornwall, who is usually depicted as a kinsman of King Arthur and one of his mythical knights. The main source of his legends come from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s pseudo-history, Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1135), where Cador is the son of the king of Dumnonia and the legal guardian of a young Guinevere. In Monmouth, Cador has a different duchess and family, but Arthurian mythology is fluid enough that most of the figures have multiple versions of themselves.

Rather than Arthur, Silence’s Cador serves King Evan of Britain, his cousin, and he is the heir of the earl of Cornwall through marriage, rather than being the duchy’s hereditary duke. This might seem like a small narrative tweak, but gendered inheritance law and customs are the backbone of Silence’s story, so it’s worth pointing it out. Cador slays a dragon to win the hand of the earl of Cornwall’s daughter, Eufemie, and inherits Cornwall’s title when he dies through her. Indeed, when the poem begins, English inheritance law permits women to inherit and transmit titles. This was true of historical England as well, though often the practice was most commonly maintained by certain estates on the fringes of English territory, such as those on the Scottish border or in Wales.

But the catalyst for the plot of Silence is the inheritance of a title and estates split between two twin sisters. Their husbands end up killing each other in a duel over the issue, and furious at the senseless deaths of two otherwise valiant men, Evan decrees that daughters are hereby unable to inherit their father’s estates. Initially this is of no concern to newlyweds Cador and Eufemie, but as the years pass, the threat of losing Cornwall begins to loom over them. Eufemie finally becomes pregnant, but Cador, unwilling to leave things to chance, convinces her to conceal the true sex of the baby if it’s born a girl, and they will raise her as a boy to circumvent Evan’s decree and preserve her inheritance.

Of course, the child is born a girl, but the Cornwalls give out that Eufemie has given birth to a boy named Silence (Silentius in the Picard text). Silence is raised apart in the forest by a couple of loyal retainers sworn to secrecy, in order to make sure that Silence becomes inured to her false gender and accustomed to it in a way that will hopefully prevent the deception from being accidentally exposed by a young child. But it’s this detail that is the first noteworthy observation on the realities of gender in the poem. It’s not just that Silence needs to be raised to perform medieval masculinity—military training, etc—but there is a seeming acknowledgment that her being raised like a boy doesn’t necessarily make her one. Silence, once she is old enough to understand the deception, is uncomfortable with the role her parents have forced her into, but by then, she is a young adult, and is equally unsure if she could successfully perform traditional medieval femininity, understanding that her body, not entirely able to shed her exceptional beauty, has been molded to ride a horse and carry a sword, not to sew. The poem contains an extended allegorical fight between the figures of Nature and Nurture as to which controls Silence’s true destiny.

Most of the rest of the story involves misunderstandings generated by Silence’s secret, including a “Potiphar’s Wife” plot where Evan’s evil queen, confusingly named Eufeme, falls in love with Silentius and then tries to destroy him when Silence rebuffs her adulterous advances. Eventually, Silence is exposed when, to save herself from execution because of rape accusations by Eufeme, she successfully brings the wizard Merlin back to court (who for reasons that unfortunately not particularly cogent to the plot has been living a semi-feral existence in the woods), who was prophesied to be only capable of capture “by a woman’s trick.” Silence is revealed to be a woman, and Eufeme is unmasked as a traitor to her husband. Eufeme is drawn and quartered, and Silence, back in the fold of womanhood as Silentia, takes her place as Evan’s queen. By marrying the king, the inheritance impediment just falls by the wayside, as even if Silence inherits Cornwall, it’ll just become a crown estate same as it would have been if Cador had died sonless in the first place. But to show his gratitude for Silence’s loyalty, Evan does reverse the inheritance law back to the way it was before the duel. Either way, Heldris isn’t really worried about it once Silence is “back where she belongs” and the evil Eufeme is punished.

On the surface, Silence’s conclusions might seem to serve a sort of gender critical position of “shorter hair and sword didn’t make a girl a boy”; but I think it’s more nuanced than that. I think it’s just as valid a reading to look at Silence in the more gender positive lens of “Silence knew she was a girl no matter how much her parents and others tried to make her a boy by giving her a masculine-coded upbringing.” Her anxieties about her abilities to later perform feminine-coded tasks aren’t necessarily evidence of the supremacy of Nature, but more importantly point to the artificiality of performative gender as a social construct rather than a biological imperative. Like many later code-switching Shakespearean women, Silence’s traditionally feminine “happy ending” of marrying Evan leaves the reader somewhat ambivalent. Silence, unlike, say, Viola from Twelfth Night, never expresses romantic or sexual interest in Evan, so her just ending up with him to tie the story together has far more in common with the almost distasteful resolution of Shakespearean “problem play” Measure For Measure, where the Duke Vicentio simply swoops in at the end to tell Isabella that she’s going to marry him, than with the comedies.

I would argue, if we permit ourselves to project contemporary gender identity back on a medieval protagonist, that rather than Silence being a cis woman cruelly suppressed into trans masculinity, or trans man forced back into the feminine closet, that (s)he probably best embodies either a nonbinary identity, or she is simply an asexual cis woman. As unnatural as Silence’s parents forcing her into a different gender identity feels in the poem, as I said before, her return to her “correct” gender at the end feels almost equally wrong. A more interesting question than which is her “right” gender might be whether the circumstances of her nurture simply revealed the nonbinary person Silence was all along. As medieval thought doesn’t really possess a paradigm for nonbinary identity, nor for asexuality outside of religious devotional celibacy, there is no definitive answer to this. But I found the idea of Silence’s lack of joy or investment in being a woman or man far more engaging than the typical folklore tropes that served as window dressing to her/his/their story.

In contrast to Silence, the gender politics dredged up by the much more lighthearted Aucassin et Nicolette aren’t nearly as serious, but they are there, and they’re joined by more mediations on medieval Europe’s favorite fixation—the Muslim world and the fluidity between it and traditional Christendom. The story, like Silence, exists in a single medieval manuscript that ironically is also from 13th century northern France in the Picard dialect (Struges, xi). While A&N sports many of the traditional French chanson tropes, including the clever and beautiful converted Saracen maiden at its center, where the poem arguably falls into parody is through its hapless himbo knight-protagonist. Aucassin is the son of the count of Beaucaire (a southern Occitan town) who falls so hopelessly in love with Nicolette, the Saracen girl who was bought, then adopted by a vassal viscount of his father’s, that he refuses to perform any of his chivalric duties, even when Beaucaire is literally being besieged by enemies. The count and viscount mutually try to keep the lovers apart, and Aucassin can literally muster no plan beyond moaning in his room, but fortunately Nicolette—honestly the brawn and the brains of the operation—engineers both her own escape from her guardian and a careful breadcrumb trail for the hapless Aucassin to follow so they can be reunited.

Once they’re together again, Aucassin and Nicolette escape by ship and arrive in the fictional kingdom of Torelore, a realm largely defined by, as my God’s Wife readers know that Herodotus used to say of the Egyptians, doing everything backwards. The lovers are invited to the palace, where the king is currently giving birth while the queen leads the kingdom’s armies against their enemies, whom they pelt with rotten fruit, eggs, and cheese instead of weapons. Aucassin immediately goes Full Bad American Frenchman—beating the king for “degrading” himself by giving birth and slaying the kingdom’s enemies with his sword. This all horrifies the Torelorians, who want to throw this crazy asshole out of the kingdom, while keeping Nicolette because of her beauty and obvious nobility. Nicolette saves the situation (again) by refusing to be parted from Aucassin, and the couple instead remain honored guests for three years, after which they set sail for home, but are separated by a storm and attacked by Saracen pirates.

Aucassin safely arrives in Beaucaire, but Nicolette is taken to Cartage (likely meant to be Carthage, North Africa, or Cartagena, Spain—both Muslim strongholds during this period). Nicolette conveniently remembers that she’s the lost daughter of the sultan, and is given a hero(ine)’s welcome. But when her father begins to arrange a Muslim marriage for her, our good Christian girl only (inexplicably) wants to return to France and Aucassin. Nicolette disguises herself as a minstrel and escapes back to Beaucaire, where, to his credit, Aucassin is still pining for her… though of course he’s too dense to recognize her. She sings of their love, and he offers her anything in his power to give her if she can bring his beloved Nicolette back to him. Nicolette eventually reveals herself to Aucassin, and they live happily ever after.

As you can see, the plot of A&N is much sillier than that of Silence, but like the latter titular heroine, it is the resourceful Nicolette who moves the plot of her story, rather than the rather ridiculous Aucassin. Although she, like Silence, engages in strategic cross-dressing (both even spend time disguised as minstrels), I would argue Nicolette’s gender fluidity derives more from her status as the Muslim Other, and that makes her cross-dressing less transgressive than Silence’s. Although, like all Muslim heroines in medieval European literature, Nicolette is beautiful (fair-skinned) and a devout converted Christian, she is still either a Berber or a Moor by blood—hence why Aucassin’s father initially opposes the match. But it’s this otherness that perhaps facilitates her ability to move between Occitan Beaucaire, the strange upside down world of Torelore, and then seamlessly reintegrate herself back into her native Cartage. Maybe that is why she chooses the helpless himbo with the inexplicably Saracen-sounding name (Aucassin is thought to be an Occitan corruption of al-Kassim, or possibly al-Ghassan)—our Muslim heroine with the perfectly French name and the unpredictable edge that makes her so much more than most chanson damsels in distress. Not to mention more than a match for her stoic sister from Cornwall, Silence. Personally, I think that they should ditch the guys and write their own chanson. Silence et Nicolette has a nice ring to it…