'Wommen, of kynde': The construction of the 'natural' and the natural world in medieval courtly narrative

The intersections of conceptions of the natural, unnatural, and supernatural in medieval romance literature provide a rich inquiry into the relationship between gender role expectations and the natural world. However, few critics have explored the intricate relationships between the various forms of 'nature' and the natural world, particularly how those intricacies inform or reflect gender ideologies. This dissertation fills this void by examining how a number of medieval authors incorporate these variant forms of 'nature' with their depictions of the natural world as a means to explore gender ideologies. These explorations indicate the necessity of examining the two factors simultaneously in order to understand fully how the arbitrary designations of 'natural,' 'unnatural,' and 'supernatural' represent anxiety, domination, subversion, and transformation in courtly culture.; Authors of medieval courtly narratives suggest masculine identity is contingent upon the social and linguistic control of what is 'natural,' both in terms of the natural world and in terms of gender ideologies. By depicting a court that naturalizes the strict control of women and that inscribes that idea about the control of women onto the natural world by contrasting an 'unnatural' wilderness with a 'naturally' tamed courtly garden, these narratives call into question the fixity of gender ideals and courtly identity. Despite patriarchal attempts to maintain strict control over property (including women) in medieval literature, a number of hybrid forms associated with the natural world---giants, wild men, women with magic powers---continually disrupt the control of the patriarchal courtly system, undermining the system by revealing the constructedness of it. The hypermasculinity of the giants and wild men and the hyperfeminity of magic women parody courtly culture's conceptions of what is 'natural' and 'unnatural,' and in doing so, they suggest the patriarchal system and all it seeks to control is subject to constant revision, deconstruction, and reconstruction.