The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred [Hardcover]

The process of identity formation during the central Middle Ages (10th-12th centuries) among the warrior aristocracy was fundamentally centered on the paired practices of gift giving and violent taking, inextricably linked elements of the same basic symbolic economy. These performative practices cannot be understood without reference to a concept of the sacred, which anchored and governed the performances, providing the goal and rationale of social and military action. After focussing on anthropological theory, social history, and chronicles, the author turns to the literary persona of the hero as seen in the epic. He argues that the hero was specifically a narrative touchstone used for reflection on the nature and limits of aggressive identity formation among the medieval warrior elite; the hero can be seen, from a theoretical perspective, as a supplement to his own society, who both perfectly incarnated its values but also, in attaining full integrity, short-circuited the very mechanisms of identity formation and reciprocity which undergirded the society. The book shows that the relationship between warriors, heroes, and their opponents (especially Saracens) must be understood as a complex, tri-partite structure - not a simple binary opposition - in which the identity of each constituent depends on the other two. ANDREW COWELL is Associate Professor of the Department of French and Italian, and the Department of Linguistics, at the University of Colorado.A major reconsideration of the relationship between warrior aristocrats, epics, and heroes in medieval culture.IntroductionThe Power of GivingThe Symbolic Constitution of the Giving Subject: William the Conqueror and Robert GuiscardViolence and Taking : Towards a Generalized Symbolic EconomyTaking an Identity: The Poem of the CidThe Sacred KeptThe Hero, Gratuity and Alterity: The Song of RolandThe Supplemental Hero: Raoul of CambraiFemale Integrity and Masculine Desires in The NibelungenliedFractured Identitieló+