Reading the cors saint: Relics and the allegorical body in medieval French romance

This project excavates a discursive history of the relic in order to contextualize its deployment as a poetic construct in medieval romance narrative. Although historians have devoted much attention to this artifact of medieval Christianity, the relic has surprisingly remained on the margins of literary criticism despite its frequent appearance in French romance. Discussions of the literary implications of the relic in this field are both rare and cursory, evincing little interest in the complex web of figurative relationships subtending the cors saint. Such analyses instead privilege the cultural significance of the relic as a religious devotional object over its semiotic potential as a poetic figure, thereby overlooking the hermeneutic value of the relic in its own right. I examine how romance appropriates the relic as a literary symbol through a careful exploitation of certain key properties of its material life: the probative dimension of oaths and ordeals in Beroul's Tristan and Chretien de Troyes' Le chevalier de la Charrette; the healing power of song in the anonymous prosimetric Aucassin et Nicolette; and, finally, the representational poetics of the relic itself in Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. While epic and hagiographic literature posit the relic as a site of political sovereignty or saintly power, romance instead explicitly links this sacred icon to the erotic body of the amie, transforming the beloved into a feminized relic, a true cors sainte. This strategic reframing in turn allows for a series of transformative linguistic disruptions in romance narrative, whereby the relic advances and legitimizes the idiosyncratic concerns of courtly desire at play in these texts. In this sense, the relic becomes an ideal candidate for literary appropriation precisely because it already mediates between, indeed embodies, different allegorical registers of somatic expressivity in medieval religious culture. In representing its own narrative of past fragmentation and future reconstitution, the relic proposes a hermeneutic model which bridges the gap between writing and reading, between allegory and allegoresis.