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Knight Fever II

by Mary Bateman

When Knights "Pull A Sickie"*

In the first part of this blog series, I discussed the absenting effect that illness can have on the knights of medieval romance. Sometimes, the impression of absence may actually be useful to a knight: we know this because, frequently, the knights of romance choose to adopt the semblance of absence in order to achieve a goal. By choosing to remain absent from a tournament, a knight may attend in disguise and thus win glory without relying on the glamour of his name and reputation. Frequently, illness is used as an excuse to permit this to happen, as in the case of Lancelot in the Mort Artu and in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Alternatively, a knight might dress himself as a leper in order to visit his illicit lover: we see this across the Tristan narratives of Béroul, Thomas of Britain, and in the Prose Tristan, where the hero’s leper disguise is symbolic, an outer display of the protagonist’s inner moral failings. Knights of romance will sometimes intentionally seek out the invisibility cloak of illness in order to split the fabric of the narrative, and to successfully achieve their furtive goals. When knights do this, they are not silenced or kicked out of the narrative, as they are when they really fall ill; rather, they remain at the narrative centre because they maintain presence of mind and body in pursuing whatever their goal might be.

These periods of illness and absence, of healing and reanimation, and of feigned illness and hidden activity may simply be conscious plot devices on the part of these romances’ medieval authors – we want to keep reading when Gawain or Lancelot is mortally ill to see if they recover, just as we want to keep watching when a beloved character on screen is desperately ill in the hopes that they recover. An alternative possibility might be glimpsed in the knights “pulling a sickie”, who take advantage of the absenting effects of illness: that these feigning knights and their authors are cognizant of the impact illness can have on knightly presence, and of the discomfort surrounding an inactive knight. When a knight lies about being ill, a narrative is split, creating a polysemous space in which author, protagonists, and reader might, figuratively speaking, wink at each other through the gap. Read in this way, instances of feigned illness might be interpreted as conscious, perhaps even tongue-in-cheek observations on the part of an author about the expectations and anxieties surrounding fictive knighthood in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the unrealistic models of chivalric presence – bodily, vocally, literally, mentally – often presented to the male readers of romance texts.

 

* UK colloquialism meaning to feign illness. Example: ‘oh no, we have to do long distance running today at school! Shall we pull a sickie?”

 

(This blog post and part I is based on a recently published article by Mary in the Journal of the International Arthurian Society.)

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