Cahiers de recherches médiévales et

humanistes
Journal of medieval and humanistic studies 
36 | 2018
Une forme médiévale à succès : la strophe d'Hélinand

Eating your lover’s otherness

The narrative theme of the Eaten Heart in the Lai d’Ignaure

Amy Heneveld

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/crmh/16267
DOI: 10.4000/crm.16267
ISSN: 2273-0893

Publisher
Classiques Garnier

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 December 2018
Number of pages: 393-412
ISBN: 9782406089520
ISSN: 2115-6360
 

Electronic reference
Amy Heneveld, “Eating your lover’s otherness”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes [Online],
36 | 2018, Online since 01 December 2021, connection on 15 December 2022. URL: http://
journals.openedition.org/crmh/16267 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/crm.16267

All rights reserved

 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS
The narrative theme of the Eaten Heart
in the Lai d’Ignaure

The Eaten Heart is a narrative motif that appears repeatedly in the

written record of medieval French literature: first sung by Yseut in
Thomas’ Tristan, it appears in the vida of troubadour named Guillem
de Cabestaing, in a short lai, and in several longer romances1. It was
persistently rewritten in a range of genres up until at least the nine-
teenth century2. As its name suggests, it describes a love story with a
morbid end. A jealous husband takes revenge on his adulterous wife
by killing her lover, having his heart and occasionally other body parts
cooked and feeding it to her. In its medieval context, female desire thus
explicitly frames the story and its proscriptive lesson initially appears
to be straightforward, especially as female readers or listeners may have
understood it: be true to your matrimonial vows and accept constraints
on your desire or suffer the consequences. Yet the tale also glorifies erotic
love, through the sacrifice of the lovers, and thus the message of the tale
seems ambiguous. In this article I would like to suggest that medieval
readers and writers might have repeatedly returned to this motif not
because of how it expresses taboo desires in order to proscribe them
but because it articulates, through love, the possibility of an egalitarian
relationship between self and other. From sexual communion to alimen-
tary ingestion, might cannibalism in the context of erotic love teach us
something about how to relate to the other as no different from the self?
1 For two in depth repertories, along with excellent readings of the myth in its different
incarnations, see L. Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique et réalité historique dans la légende
du Cœur mangé”, Micrologus, 11, 2003, p. 469-500 and M. Di Febo, “Ignauré: La parodie
‘dialectique’ ou le détournement du symbolisme courtois”, Cahiers de recherches médiévales
et humanistes, 5, 1998, p. 167-201.
2 J. Bohnengel, Das gegessene Herz: eine europäische Kulturgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zum 19.
Jahrhunderg: Herzmäre – Le cœur mangé – il cuore mangiato – The eaten heart, Würzburg,
Königshausen & Neumann, 2016.
394 AMY HENEVELD

In the past twenty years, two critics have proposed to read the motif
as it allows for the expression of repressed desire, broadly defined3. In
an article that considers the motif from an anthropological perspective,
published in 1991, Jean-Jacques Vincensini summarizes how its ele-
ments speak to broader human concerns, since similar tales have been
traced outside of the Indo-European tradition, in an Eskimo story, for
example, and in two tales from the Pacific Islands. The author turns
to the Motif-Index of Folk Literature, where S. Thompson categorized it
in the following way: “Q478.1. The Eaten Heart. Adulteress is caused
unwittingly to eat her lover’s heart (Sometimes other parts of the
body4)”. He identifies three taboos around which the tale turns: the
breaking of matrimonial vows, the killing of another human, and the
involuntary ingestion of a cooked part of an eroticized human object,
the lover. This last transgression mirrors the first, since it stands in as
a trope for the sexual act itself, the adultery that begins the story and
that leads to a jealous and violent act of revenge. The cannibalistic
act thus mirrors the sexual union of the lovers, with a disjunction in
between, the murder of the lover.
Simon Gaunt’s psychoanalytic reading of the tale, especially the trou-
badour versions, underlines the latter thematic, stressing how the lover
“wants to be devoured since incorporation is the ultimate sign of love,
while she proves that she loves him enough to eat him5”. In this reading
the lovers are diametrically opposed and fixed, passive and active: it is
the man’s ultimate desire to be eaten and the woman’s ultimate desire
to consume her lover. He sees this as one of the structural elements of
courtly love, the shadow side to the amor de loin trope. Poetic discourse
is the void around which this exchange is built, and the text is the
3 J.-J. Vincensini, “Figure de l’imaginaire et figure du discours. Le motif du ‘Cœur
Mangé’ dans la narration médiévale”, Le “cuer” au Moyen Âge: Réalité et Senefiance, Aix-
en-Provence, Presses universitaires de Provence, 1991, p. 439-459; S. Gaunt, “‘Le cœur
a ses raisons…’: Guillem de Cabestanh et l’évolution du thème du cœur mangé”, Scène,
évolution, sort de la langue et de la littérature d’oc: Actes du Septième Congrès International de
l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes, Regio Calabria-Messina, 7-3 juillet 2002, ed.
R. Castano, S. Guida and F. Latella, Rome, Viella, t. 1, p. 363-373. A version of this article
was also published in English, and for ease of citation this is the one I will be referring
to: S. Gaunt, “Exposing the Secrets of the Heart in Medieval Narrative”, Exposure, ed.
K. Banks and J. Harris, Bern, Peter Lang, 2004, p. 109-123.
4 S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Bloomington, Indiana University Press,
1956, p. 238.
5 Gaunt, “Exposing the Secrets of the Heart”, p. 110.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 395

realization of the desire of the courtly lover, the troubadour writer whose
work becomes a monument to his life and love. Indeed, at the end of
the vida a monument is built to the lovers so that all true lovers can
remember them. Like Vincensini’s narratological and anthropological
understanding of the story, this reading also monumentalizes its mean-
ing: both literary lovers get what they have longed for, to be eaten and
to eat, while the text celebrates their mutual sacrifice for love. Desire
thus finds an ethical solution and resolution in the tale, one that is only
possible, however, in the world of the fictionalized life of the male poet.
Yet once the story told and this literary monument constructed, why
does the tale continue to fascinate both writers and readers? The earliest
mention of the narrative in Old French comes from Thomas’s version
of the Tristan and Yseut myth. It is Yseut who, alone in her room and
longing for Tristan while he is off fighting a giant, sings a lai, the Lai
de Guirun6. Tristan, who has married the other Yseut, “aux blanches
mains”, is unable to satisfy Yseut’s desire and cannot come to her. Her
longing is explicit, she desires only him:
Ysolt en sa chambre suspire
Pur Tristran qu’ele tant desire;
Ne puet en sun cue[r] el penser
Fors ço sulment: Tristran amer.
Ele nen ad altre voleir
Në altre amur në altre espier.
En lui est trestuit sun desir
E ne puet rien de lui oïr7. (v. 703-709)
Yseut, in her chamber, sighed
for Tristran, the object of her deep longing;
all her heart could think of was
loving Tristran.
She had no other desire,
no other love or fancy.
All her longing was for him alone,
and yet she could learn no news of him8.

6 For a fascinating reading of this example of the theme in this context, which seeks to
identify the classical metaphor at the heart of it, see Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique”,
p. 477-483.
7 Thomas’ Tristan, ed. S. Gregory, Early French Tristan Poems, ed. N. J. Lacy, vol. 2, Cambridge,
D.S. Brewer, 1998, p. 3-174, at p. 42.
8 If not stated otherwise, all translations into English are mine.
396 AMY HENEVELD

After this passage, the reader learns of Tristan’s adventures, which involve
fighting a giant who wants King Arthur’s beard9. Over a hundred lines
later, we return to Yseut, who is singing a “lai pitus d’amour10”. Here
the reader finds an eight-line resume of the Eaten Heart narrative,
which Yseut sings with an instrument, her voice low and her hands
beautiful11. It is interesting that, in order to express her longing and
unfulfilled desire, Yseut sings the tale of a male protagonist, Guirun,
who is betrayed and whose heart is fed to his lover. As we shall see, in
the Lai d’Ignaure, a male narrator sings of female desire to reflect his own.
The Lai d’Ignaure, the second Old French incarnation of the tale,
has been read as an expression of medieval misogyny and a mockery of
renewed female religious piety12. Both these readings, however, refuse
to consider the cannibalistic act as anything other than an obscene
gesture towards the people who are tricked into it: the twelve ladies
who love Ignaure adulterously. In order to do so, they minimize the
importance of the female agency that runs throughout the work, from
the vocal, active female lovers at the beginning of the text to the
twelve verses these twelve female bodies compose at the end of the
tale to commemorate their despair. When taken into consideration,
these meaningful representations of female desire allow for a positive
reading of the cannibalistic act that ends the story. The tale becomes
an important lesson on an important principle of love: unity.
One hint that the cannibalism in medieval versions of the Eaten
Heart theme must be read as more than an atrocious punishment or
ironic mockery comes from earlier uses of the theme in classical liter-
ature13. In the classical narratives that include acts of anthropophagy,
most notably the story of Thyestes who is punished for his adultery, or

9 Rossi interprets the passage as symbolic of castration (“Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 478).

This interpretation is meaningful in relation to Tristan, who cannot and will not make
love to his new wife, the new Yseut, and of course to Yseut’s choice of lai.
10 Thomas’ Tristan, v. 834-843.
11 “Ysolt chante molt dulcement, / La voiz acorde a l’estrument. / Les mains sunt bel[e]s,
li lais buens, / Dulce la voiz [e] bas li tons.” Thomas’ Tristan, v. 844-847.
12 R. H. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 126-128; B. Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the
Secular against the Sacred, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, p. 174-181.
13 See Rossi for a discussion of the relationship between the theme and the classical tra-
dition (“Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 469). He sees the story as the expression of the
metaphysical difficulty of describing the highest forms of love: “la tentative vaine de
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 397

Tereus, who is punished for the rape of his sister-in-law Philomela, both
characters pay for their crime by unwittingly eating something that
belongs to them or is the same as them, their progeny. In these examples,
a man is punished for his sexual misconduct by being fed his children;
in essence, he eats himself, ending the patrilineal line. With the Eaten
Heart theme, the female lover is punished for acting on her adultery but
she is forced to eat her beloved other, something that is different from
her but which she wants to bring closer. The reader begins to think,
just as with the death of Tristan and Yseut, that this is no punishment
after all. The story of Philomela, however, does appear as a subtext in
the Lai d’Ignaure. When introducing the hero, the narrator states that
ladies call him Lousignol, or rossignol in French (v. 37). Here the highly
charged symbol of the nightingale orients the reader, signalling to him
or her that the tale is one in which various tropes may be expected and
enjoyed: the pleasures of May, the exchange of words, and the erotic
silence of imagined lovers’ meetings. The symbol of the nightingale is
an ambivalent one, as it stands at once for the lyrical masculine iden-
tity of the poet as well as for female desire, which can still sing despite
its brutal loss of voice14. This early identification of Ignaure, the lover
and poet, with this bird, who represents an earlier metamorphosis of a
silenced yet still vocal woman, places the text at a pivotal conjunction
where female desire and male poetic voice meet.
In order to understand in what context medieval readers might have
come across the tale, I will start with a brief consideration of the lai in
its material literary context. I first came across the Lai d’Ignaure when,
at the beginning of my dissertation, I was transcribing the BnF fr. 1553
for an electronic edition for the digital humanities project Hypercodex,
based at the University of Geneva. This homogeneous compilation
manuscript had been selected from a range of thirteenth century col-
lections as promisingly representative of a manuscript tradition that
favored diversity. Sometime in the late thirteenth century, somewhere
s’approprier la divinité d’Amour au plus haut degré d’union par le biais paradoxal de la
sauvagerie et du cannibalisme.”
14 Philomela, whose tongue was removed so she could not tell her tale, narrates to her
rape to her sister on a tapestry and they then plan their revenge: W. Pfeffer, The Change
of Philomel: The Nightingale in Medieval Literature, New York, Peter Lang, 1985, p. 158.
For a different reading of this symbol, see Di Febo (“Ignauré”, p. 174); Rossi reads it as
a “symbol of the mystery of lyric poetry” (“Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 485).
398 AMY HENEVELD

in northern France, a compiler had included this short tragi-comedic

tale on love and cannibalism in an illuminated manuscript that contains
53 works, including the Roman de Troie by Benoit de Saint Maur, Barlaam
et Josaphat by Gui de Cambrai, and the Roman de la violette by Gerbert
de Montreuil. Its compiler brought together courtly romance, epic,
history, hagiography and fabliau in a complex composition that favors
the weaving together of meaning through productive juxtaposition15.
The Lai d’Ignaure exists only in this collection, where it is situated
towards the end of the manuscript, number 35, on folios 485r-488v out
of a total of 524. It is at the beginning of what can be qualified as the
third section of the manuscript, which, as opposed to the previous two
that are more didactic in nature, is devoted to lighter, bawdy and more
entertaining works on the topic of love16.
The Lai d’Ignaure is the third work in this section, after two texts on
love, Li lais de l’espine17 and Li flours d’amour18. The first is a Breton lai
that describes an idyllic love story of loss and reunion while the second
is a debate between a lover’s body and heart that ends with the death
of the lover who despairs that his lady loves others as well as him. Our
cannibalistic narrative takes up where the debate ends, rendering the
body, the heart and the theme of infidelity all the more material. It
also shifts the tone of the discussion: the text it precedes is the fabliau

15 For some readings on this manuscript and its structure, see M. Uhlig, “Un Voyage en
Orient: Le Barlaam et Josaphat de Gui de Cambrai et le manuscrit de Paris BnF, MS Fr.
1553”, D’Orient en Occident: les recueils de fables enchassées avant les Mille et une nuits de
Galland (Barlaam et Josaphat, Calila et Dimna, Disciplina clericalis, Roman des Sept Sages),
ed. M. Uhlig et Y. Foehr-Janssens, Turnhout, Brepols, 2014, p. 351-371; O. Collet, “Du
‘manuscrit de jongleur’ au ‘recueil aristocratique’: réflexions sur les premières anthologies
françaises”, Le Moyen Âge, 113, 2007, p. 481-499. For further thoughts on compilation
manuscripts during this period, some of which inspired or came out of the Hypercodex
project, see W. Azzam, O. Collet and Y. Foehr-Janssens, “Les manuscrits littéraires français:
Pour une sémiotique du recueil medieval”, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 83, 2005,
p. 639-669; O. Collet et Y. Foehr-Janssens, “Cohérence et éclatement: réflexion sur les
recueils littéraires du Moyen Âge”, La mise en recueil des textes médiévaux, ed. X. Leroux,
Babel, 16, 2007, p. 31-59.
16 On the role of love more broadly in this manuscript and others, see my article on the
topic: A. Heneveld, “‘Chi commence d’amours’, ou commencer pour finir: la place des
arts d’aimer dans les manuscrits-recueils du xiiie siècle”, Le recueil au Moyen Âge: Le Moyen
Âge central, ed. Y. Foehr-Janssen et O. Collet, Turnhout, Brepols, 2010, p. 139-156.
17 A. Hopkins, “Espine”, French Arthurian Literature IV: Eleven Old French Narrative Lays,
ed. G. S. Burgess and L. C. Brook, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2007, p. 197-242.
18 J. Morawski, “La Flours d’amour”, Romania, 53, 1927, p. 187-197.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 399

De dant Constant de Hamiel, which mocks adulterers and validates the

constancy of the eponymous character, a lady who takes revenge on
her would-be seducers by having her husband violate their wives while
they watch. The Lai d’Ignaure thus seems to mark the passage from
a discourse of courtly romantic love to more lurid descriptions of its
associated acts in the fabliau19. As a doctoral transcriber, my own gaze
was certainly surprised and shifted. I was fascinated by the passage
between the metaphorical heart of the lover in the debate to the liter-
ally consumed heart of Ignaure and then to the very incarnated love
of the peasant couple in the fabliau. But before we consider in more
detail what insights reading these three tales together might allow, let
us consider this singular version of the Eaten Heart theme, and how its
cannibalism might offer us a key to understanding the broader message
about love in the collection.
The Lai d’Ignaure, which was written by a certain Renaut20, tells the
story of a valiant knight who wins the love of not one but 12 ladies,
who are married to the 12 pairs that live in the castle near him21.
He manages to love all of them simultaneously for a time, until one
fateful feast of Saint John when, gathered together in an orchard, one
lady, who loves to speak her mind, explains that, because they are all
beautiful, joyful and in love, wants to name one woman priest and
enact a group confession in order to see who loves the most noble
man. The others respond by telling her that she may be priest and
she is consistently referred to in this scene as “li prestres”, both by
the narrator and the women who confess to her (v. 106, 138, 184,
196, 201). She listens to five confessions one by one, at first blushing
then becoming angry and incredulous when she realizes that they all
name the same man, while they each think that they are his only one.
This confessional scene is primarily in direct discourse, as we hear
19 On the Lai d’Ignaure’s relationship to the fabliau, see N. Zufferey, “Renaut de Bâgé ou
les infortunes du gai savoir”, Romania, 124, 2006, p. 273-300, at p. 291.
20 R. Lejeune, in her 1938 edition, identified the author with Renaut de Beajeu/Bâgé,
author of the Bel Inconnu, but this attribution no longer stands (Renaut [de Beaujeu],
Le Lai d’Ignaure ou Lai du Prisonnier, Bruxelles-Liège, Palais des académies, 1938). See
Zufferey (“Renaut de Bâgé”, p. 288-292) for a detailed description of the text’s linguistic
traits, which are Picard, and its probable composition date, during the first third of the
thirteenth century.
21 “Ignaure”, The Old French Lays of ‘Ignaure’, ‘Oiselet’ and ‘Amours’, ed. G. S. Burgess and
L. C. Brook, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2010, p. 5-114.
400 AMY HENEVELD

the leading lady propose the idea, get agreement from the others, and
begin to take confession (v. 76-222).
Ignaure, as described by his lovers, is of course exceedingly noble,
well learned and courteous, the flower of Brittany, the flower of chivalry,
and, most strikingly, the thunderbolt of the land, heartily welcomed
by the last lady to speak. These comedic exchanges seem to poke fun
at the rite of confession itself: what language might one use to describe
love in the context of confession? The 4th Lateran Council decreed in
1215 that priests needed to hear confession once a year, so it is not
surprising to find concern about the modality of confession expressed
here. The tale seems to ask, what will happen once we all must speak
our deepest desires? The lady playing the priest tells the second woman
to confess, who comes to her beating her breast, to “beat her bum”,
rhyming croupe with coupe22. The third lady to confess kisses a ring on
her finger when she hears a nightingale sing in the flowering tree under
which the “priest” has taken up court (v. 164-166). The tension between
courtly love and priestly injunction can indeed be comical. When the
last woman to confess weaves an extended metaphor on how Ignaure is
like a thunderbolt upon the land, stating that she welcomes his “thun-
derclaps” and doesn’t mind their “bonne fusion” (their multiplication),
the “priest” tells her to please stop, to cut to the chase and name her
lover: “‘Dame, or laissiés ceste raison, / Si nommés le non, douche suer23”.
The satire here seems to fall not on the women, however, since they are
simply following their hearts and bodies, but rather on the figure of the
priest who the noble lady impersonates and who must bide his tongue
while he listens to such diverse expressions of “sin”.
After hearing everyone, the “priest” declares to her friends, much to
their dismay, that they all love the same man. They decide to arrange a
meeting with Ignaure in order to confront him and kill him, arranging to
meet in lady Clemence’s garden. The priest here is “la prestresse” (v. 285)
and once again she speaks first, inviting all the other women to speak
as well. This second scene in direct discourse (v. 286-358) is notable for
the wide range of emotions exhibited by the women who express their
displeasure to him; they show contempt and pride (“desdaigneuse…
22 “Ignaure”, v. 123-126: “A la destre main batoit sa coupe. / ‘Douche suer, mais batés la
crupe, / Ki vous fait faire les pechiés / Dont vostre cors est entechiés.’”
23 “Ignaure”, v. 192-193.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 401

orgilleuse”, v. 295-294), jealousy and cruelty (“envie… a cruel chiere”,

v. 302-303). He naively replies that he loves them all, completely and
faithfully, which prompts all the women to begin to scream at him as
they draw their knives, preparing to kill him. The name of the garden’s
proprietor foreshadows what ensues, however. He eloquently declares
he loves them all truly and pleads for mercy. Describing himself as a
knight on the battlefield, he eloquently begs them to spare his life as
he would from a worthy adversary. He concludes by saying he would
be a saint in heaven if he were to die by such beautiful hands: “Se je
muir a si bieles mains, / G’iere martyrs avoec les sains; / Bien sai que
fui nés en bonne eure24”. These lines foreshadow his demise, as well
as suggest the sacramental reading of the tale, in which Ignaure is a
figure for Christ25.
His speech causes them to cry and softens them (amolliier, v. 335)
and so they decide to let him live, on one condition. He must choose
the one he loves best and be faithful to her, for every women wants to
have their own lover: “Chascune velt son dru avoir26”. After insisting
that he does not want to abandon any of his loves, he finally complies,
but only because the priestess says she will kill him if he does not. Here,
once again, she is the priest: “‘Fai mon commant’, che dis li prestre…”
(v. 351). The switch back to a masculine nominative form here strikes
the reader who is not surprised to learn that he chooses the very woman
who threatens him last, the one who first learned of his multiple loves
and here holds discursive power. He says that he is sad to lose the others,
but that she is the one that fills him with the most desire.
‘Dame’, dist il, ‘chou estes vous.
De ma perte sui molt dolans
Qu’eles sont toutes molt vaillans,
Mais li vostre amors m’atalente.’ (v. 354-357)
‘My lady’, he said, ‘you are the one.
I am very upset over the loss of the others,
Because they are mostly all worthy,
But your love fills me with desire.’

24 “Ignaure”, v. 331-333.
25 M. L. Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 42-44.
26 “Ignaure”, v. 347.
402 AMY HENEVELD

At this point, about half way through the text, the narrator turns away
from the ladies to focus on the discovery of the adultery. This doesn’t
take very long, because, as the text explains, now that he only has one
lover, he must go quite frequently to her. This transition is marked by
a proverb, “soris ki n’a c’un trau poi dure”, the mouse that only has one
hole doesn’t last long and with this the narration seems to shift from an
implied female reader to an implied male reader. Up until this point,
the narrator had sided with the women who loved Ignaure, focusing
on their feelings and actions, the confessional scene in the garden and
their desire for revenge. The proverb, which causes the reader to identify
Ignaure with the unlucky mouse, identifies the women by metonymy
with a simplified version of their sexual anatomy, reducing them from
their previous active, embodied state. The narrator also refers to the
women as “foles” for the first time (v. 376). A few lines later the priestess
herself fails to hide what she is doing, “folement se cuevre” (v. 381), and
the cruel “losengier” in the castle (v. 378), also referred to as a “lechier”, a
rogue (v. 384, 392), soon discovers that the Ignaure is coming to her and
he tells the lords. He presents the events of the first part of the tale at a
dinner of all twelve lords, as a story that will cause anger, but one that is
causing him great laughter: a single man is cuckolding them all, but one
lady is “sire et mestre”, lord and master (v. 412-414). The gathering of the
twelve lords echoes the women’s gathering in the garden, their game and
desire for revenge, yet here the men are listening and reacting, prisoners
of their own desire for control. The rogue, by referring to the lady as a
master, further stresses her active, desiring role, but according to this
masculine company, she has overstepped her bounds. The evil losengier
is the one speaking these words, however, and he is the most despicable
figure in the tale. The reader is aware of the change in focalization, yet
cannot fully identify with these new narrative masters.
The losengier speaks Ignaure’s name and tells them the whole story,
in a moment of mise-en-abime, from the scene in the garden when the
ladies confess, to their subsequent confrontation of Ignaure and their
desire to kill him with their knives.
Toute leor conte l’aventure
Et del vregié et des confiesses,
Et ensi comme les engresses
Le vaurent mordrir as coutiaus. (v. 422-425)
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 403

He told them the whole story,

All about the garden and the confessions,
And how the angry ladies
Had intended to kill him with their knives.

It’s as if the losengier had been watching them the whole time, and the
reader again feels the discomfort of standing in the shoes of this spy.
The traitor then reveals the lord whose wife has been chosen, using the
same words as Ignaure used to designate his preferred one, “‘Chou estes
vous’” (v. 437). The chosen lord replies in a fury that he must then be
worth much more than all his peers! He promises the others that he will
follow Ignaure until they can capture him and punish him. They want to
catch the one who didn’t take care to hide what he was doing: “Desirent
de chelui confondre / Qui n’avoit cure de respondre” (v. 469-470).
This last word, respondre, echos the first line of the tale, in which the
narrator says that a body that loves must not hide it, just as someone
who has knowledge must share it:
Cors ki aimme ne doit reponre,
Ains doit auchun biel mot despondre
U li autre puissant aprendre
Et auchun biel example prendre. (v. 1-4)
Anyone who is in love should not conceal the fact,
Rather should he express it in fine words,
From which others can learn
And extract some fine lesson.

The sentiment expressed here is relatively common in medieval French

prologues, most memorably in the prologue to Marie de France’s Lais:
“Qui Deus a duné esciënce / e de parler bone eloquence, / ne s’en deit vol-
untiers mustrer27”. The narrator of the Lai d’Ignaure eloquently transposes
Marie’s injunction to share knowledge to the realm of love, to this cors ki
aimme, the body that loves. Here the poet-narrator himself declares one
must not hide one’s love, specifically in order that others may learn from
one’s example. The meaning which is covered cannot be sown, and thus
cannot give rise to further knowledge: “Sens est perdu ki est couvers; /
Cis k’est moustrés et descouvers / Puet en auchun liu semenchier28”.
27 Marie de France, Lais, ed. K. Warnke, trad. L. Harf-Lancner, Paris, LGF, 1990, v 1-4.
28 “Ignaure”, v. 11-13.
404 AMY HENEVELD

This last reference to sowing recalls Chrétien de Troyes’ rhetorical

metaphor for the writer as one who sows words in the prologue to the
Roman de Perceval.
Ki petit semme petit quelt,
Et qui auques requeillir velt,
En tel liu sa semence espande
Que fruit a.c. doubles li rande;
Car en terre qui riens ne valt
Bone semence seche et faut.
Crestïens semme et fait semence
D’un romans que il encomence
Et si le seime en si bon leu
Qu’il ne puet [ester] sanz grant preu29.
He who sows sparingly, reaps sparingly, but he who wishes to reap plentifully
casts his seed on ground that will bear him fruit a hundredfold; for good
seed withers and dies in worthless soil. Chrétien sows and casts the seed of a
romance that he is beginning, and sows it in such a good place that it cannot
fail to be bountiful30.

Chrétien’s message here is that his dedicatee, Count Philippe of Flanders,

is a worthy reader of his tale. This is a clear reference to Matthew 13, the
Parable of the sower, an injunction to the reader, the believer, to hear
and seek to understand Christ’s revelation, which is spoken in riddles.
Yet, in both prologues, these words also bring the reader back to the
body, to the sexual metaphor of sowing and to the matière of the story
that will be told: “Pour chou voel romans coumenchier31”.
The word couvers, “Sens est perdu ki est couvers”, and the play
around the topic of hiding and showing in the prologue, also suggests
another literary and poetical connection. The name Ignaure appears
in Chrétien de Troyes’ Chevalier de la Charette during a tournament
scene where he is introduced as Ignaure “li covoitiez / li amoreus et li
pleisanz32”. L. Rossi has traced the associated coat of arms described
in this scene to the troubadour Raimbaut d’Aurenga, who was also
29 Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, ed. K. Busby, Tübingen,
Niemeyer, 1993, v. 1-10.
30 Translation by W. W. Kibler, from Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, transl.
W. W. Kibler and C. W. Carroll, London, Penguin, 1991, p. 381.
31 “Ignaure”, v. 14.
32 “The coveted, the lover and the pleaser”. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la Charette,
ed. A. Foulet and K. D. Uitti, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2010, v. 5808-5809, p. 326.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 405

known by the senhal Linhaure33. The name Linaura appears in a late

twelfth century text, the Ensenhamen d’Arnaut Guillem de Marsan,
which describes a similar story of revenge34. Furthermore, Raimbaut
d’Aurenga wrote a poem, Lonc temps ai estat cubertz in which he describes
himself as castrated and therefore only able to long for his lady; he
poses no threat to any husbands35. Though there is no explicit mention
of heart, penis or cannibalism here, the first stanza plays on the same
topic of uncovering what has been covered, of making known what
has been hidden, and of sharing in order to teach others, however
painful it may be36. An injunction to knights to listen in the last line
is echoed in the envoi at the end of the poem when he entreats his lady
to hear his joy. It is impossible to know whether Raimbaut’s poem or
its inspiration may have influenced the author of the Lai d’Ignaure, but
the similarities do confirm the rich exchanges that existed between
literary communities during this period. They have a shared associ-
ated literary theme: the ambiguous value of uncovering experience
and transmitting its meaning. The noble lady in Ignaure who doesn’t
hide her love thus acts in the same way as the poet and lover who
must sing what he knows, what he loves, or what he is missing, even
though this will lead to his downfall.
To return to Ignaure, his fate is sealed. In order to introduce the
scene of the discovery of his adultery, the narrator rewords the proverb
he had mentioned earlier: “La soris ki n’a c’un pertruis / Est molt tost
prise et enganee37”. The chosen lady’s husband, armed and wearing
his helmet, enters her room by an underground passage and finds him
making love (“dosnoiant”, v. 491) to his wife. Ignaure’s words of excuse
are courtly and inclusive:
‘Sire’, fait il, ‘por Diu, merchi.
Vous veés bien ques est nos fais.
Durement sui vers vous mesfais;
N’i vaut escondis ne celers.’ (v. 494-497)

33 Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 491. For a summary in English of this connection,

see “Ignaure”, p. 15.
34 Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 496.
35 Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 492-495.
36 Ibid.: “Lonc temps ai estat cubertz, / mas Dieus no vole qu’ieu oimais / puesca cobrir ma besoigna, /
don’t mi ven ira et esglais. / Ez escoutatz, cavallier, / s’ar en ai obs ni mestier!”
37 “Ignaure”, v. 480-481.
406 AMY HENEVELD

‘My lord’, he said, ‘in God’s name, have mercy on me.

You can see what a grim situation this is for us.
I have sorely wronged you;
It’s no use my denying or concealing this.’

Here Ignaure declares that he does not want to hide what he has done,
and pleads for mercy. He insists on the husband’s perception of the
facts, contrasting an inclusive nos with a respectful vous, and says that
there is no longer any worth in hiding whe he has done. His words fall,
however, on the husband’s deaf ears. The lady begs for his mercy in
direct discourse but her husband only replies with mockery: “‘Dame, il
couvient vo dru baignier, / Et apriés le ferai saignier; / Gardés que blans
dras ait vos sire38‘”. As cruelly and ironically as the husband intends
them, these lines can also be read as another reference to Ignaure as a
Christ figure39. He takes Ignaure prisoner while he decides with the
others how to take revenge – the narrator explains that his meals will be
very meager (v. 515). She tells all her friends who also love him to share
in her grief and fast with her. “‘…Or m’aidiés a faire mon doel. / Ensi
con joie en ot chascune, / Si nous soit la dolors commune40‘”. She calls
on the shared, communal aspect of their love, and they all begin to fast
together, until the day they will know what is to become of Ignaure.
The men decide to serve and cook Ignaure’s “lower parts” to which
they will add the heart, in order to feed to the women that which
brought them the most pleasure:
Au quart jor prendons le vassal
Tout le daerrain membre aval,
Dont li delis lor soloit plaire,
Si en fache on.I. mangier faire;
Le cuer avoec nous meterons.
.XII. escuieles en ferons;
Par engien lor faisons mangier,
Car nous n’en poons mieus vengier.’ (v. 542-548)
In four days time let us remove from the vassal
His lowest member down below,
The delights of which used to please them,
And have it made into a meal;

38 “Ignaure”, v. 505-507.
39 Price, Consuming Passions, p. 43.
40 “Ignaure”, v. 524-526.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 407

We’ll put the heart in as well.

We’ll make twelve bows out of all this
And trick them into eating it,
For we couldn’t take any better revenge on them.’

These jealous husbands, far from deserving the reader’s compassion,

incarnate an evil collective body that hates female pleasure. The lord
who thinks of this plan refers to the women as “filthy sluts” (“Ces ordes
gloutes…”, v. 537), in stark contrast to the fact that they are now all
fasting and thus controlling their desire. As other critics have noted,
it is hard not to hear in this passage an echo of the Last Supper, the
sacrificial lamb of Passover that will be prepared and eaten by the 12
apostles41. For this reason Barbara Newman reads the tale as an “obscene
parody” directed at medieval religious women, reading the cannibalistic
turn to the plot as “obscene and macabre42”. Yet one can easily judge on
which side of things the men in the narrative stand, and it isn’t with
Christ. The women, who show mercy to Ignaure in the first part of the
tale and choose to fast for him when his life is in danger offer a more
productive, sympathetic group for the reader to identify with. This, in
a sense, redeems their cannibalism, suggesting, on the contrary, that
the narrative hides a story of satisfied female desire.
Indeed, the women are all already so satisfied that at first they do
not want to eat, but their husbands praise the dish so much that they
finally try it.
Chascune ot le cuer asasé,
Tant qu’eles en ont mise arriere
Douch saveur et bonne et biele.
Lor signor tant le losengierent
K’eles burent et si mangierent;
Ne l’ont pas en despit tenu. (v. 554-559)
Each one already had what her heart desired,
So much so that they rejected
The sweet aroma, good and fine.
But their lords praised the dish so much that
They drank and also ate,
And they did not despise the dish.

41 Rossi, “Suggestion métaphorique”, p. 477.

42 See Chapter 4, “Parody”, of Newman, Medieval Crossover. On the Lai d’Ignaure as a “dia-
lectic parody”, see Di Febo, “Ignauré”, p. 4-5.
408 AMY HENEVELD

Here the women have no need to be satisfied by Ignaure as food because

they have all known him sexually. Their satisfaction only further
encourages their husbands to convince them to eat the succulent dish
made of his penis and heart. The adjectives douche, bonne, and biele, here
used to describe the dish, appear frequently in medieval French courtly
love lyric, often in reference to the desired lady or related objects43. In
particular, to cite one well-known example, Machaut’s virelai “Tres bonne
et belle” refers in the last line to how the lover’s heart finds sweet food
in his lover’s welcome44. This contrast softens the descriptive passage of
the cannibalistic act itself, again placing the reader on the side of the
women who love. The men once more represent falsity as they praise
the food (“losengierent”, v. 557), in order to convince the women to eat.
When, after eating, each woman asks her husband what has hap-
pened to Ignaure, the priestess’ husband tells her what she has just
eaten, asking her if they have not all now shared in the pleasure of that
which women desire the most:
Cil qui le prist en sa maison
A respondu: ‘Dame prestresse,
Ja fustes vous sa maistresse.
Mangié avés le grant desir
Ki si vous estoit em plaisir,
Car d’autre n’aviés vous envie;
En la fin en estes servie.
Vostre drut ai mort et destruit;
Toutes partirés au deduit
De chou que femme plus goulouse.
End avés assés en vous douse?
Bien nous sommes vengié del blasme.’ (v. 564-575)
The one who had caught him in his house
Replied: ‘My lady priestess,
You used to be his mistress.
You have eaten the object of your great desire,
Which gave you so much pleasure,

43 Marion’s song “Robin m’aime” which begins Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de Robin et Marion
came immediately to mind, where she sings “d’escarlate, bonne et belle” in reference to
the belt Robin has given her. Adam de la Halle, Œuvres complètes, ed. P.-Y. Badel, Paris,
LGF, 1995, p. 206-285, v. 1-8.
44 “Tres bonne et bele, mi oueil / Joieuse pasture / Prennent en vostre figure, / Simple et
sans orgueil, / Et mes cuers en vostre acueil / Vie et douce norriture.” Guillaume de
Machaut, Poésies lyriques, ed. V. Chichmaref, Paris, 1909, t. 1, p. 185, v. 1-6.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 409

For you had no wish for anything else;

In the end it has been served up to you.
I have killed and destroyed your lover;
You can all share in the pleasure
That comes from what women crave for.
Is there enough of it for the twelve of you?
We are now well avenged for your misdeed.’

His admonition is redundant; the ladies have all had what they were
longing for. They have indeed eaten their desire, and because of this, they
all swear to never eat again. They compose a complainte, a lament for him,
which takes up twenty lines of the text and describes Ignaure’s physical
beauty, his body, his eyes, his flanks, as well as his valor and largesse,
which will be so greatly missed. The 12 ladies all waste away, and the
narrator describes the lai of twelve stanzas that was written to remember
them. The narrator ends his own telling with a tribute to the lady that had
this lai written, and a description of his attachment to her. Her physical
beauty, also described over twenty lines, is like a chain that binds him to
her. She is the perfect parallel to Ignaure’s physical beauty. The story has
another name, “le lay del Prison”, which describes the sweet prison the poet
is also in. It was written to remember Ignaure, “who was dismembered
for love”. These last lines intermingle the identity of the poet, who names
himself at line 620, and Ignaure, who dies again in the following line:
“Ensi con tiesmoigne Renaus, / Morut Ignaures, li bons vassaus.” One is
dismembered, one remembers. Yet it also confuses the body of Ignaure
with the body of the his lady love, crossing his own desire with the desire
of the women in the tale he just told, and replacing the sanctified body
of the male lover with his own object of desire, the lady he is writing for.
The formal symmetry of the tale mirrors this game of reflection to
hold the reader’s attention, as though the poet wanted to create a perfect
parallel between feminine and masculine desire. The text can be divided
into two almost equal parts, the first telling of Ignaure’s multiple loves and
the ways all his lovers adore him, while the second part, after his choice
of one woman, details his demise. The poem ends with two passages of
exactly equal length, one describing Ignaure’s beauty and the other the
beauty of the poet’s patron. This chain of words, or prison of love, monu-
mentalizes the devotion of the poet, while the reader, who takes the place
of his lady dedicatee feels enchained by his words, as she consumes them.
410 AMY HENEVELD

The cannibalistic act, as a metaphor for reading, encourages the reader to

imagine her desire fulfilled, while the poet, who offers himself to her, also
reads her, reads her desire, amplified by the twelve female protagonists of
the tale who all lament, writing their own lai of satisfied desire and loss.
Female desire here becomes hyperbolic, the subject, the cause and the
result of the tale, and Ignaure, for a time, is able to satisfy it all. Just as
the twelve women and twelve men amplify the representation of human
desire in the tale, Ignaure’s desirable essence is also hyperbolized as the
object of female desire: his heart is consumed along with his penis, which
becomes the prime mover in the tale, the object of all female desire, while
also reflecting the desire of the masculine poet, the prime mover of the
word. This establishes different levels of possible symmetry between the
reader and the text – as object of desire, as desiring subject, as both at once.
The poet plays one last time on the trope of covering and uncovering
when, in the middle of his portrait of his beloved, he writes that he can-
not say any more about her beauty (v. 635-636): “Plus n’end arés parole
aperte; / L’autre partie en est couverte.” Here the words, like clothes, both
cover and reveal the female body, which, in a clever conjoining of the two
meanings, describe how her breasts look in her dress. This echoes again
the lines in the prologue to Ignaure, on the importance of uncovering
that which needs to be told. This message, when coupled with such a
tragic story of betrayal, develops a tension between the need to keep love,
and knowledge, secret and the importance of sharing or speaking it. In
view of these lines, we sense that the narrator sides with the lover, and
so we are also called to support Ignaure the man, the one who loves and
shows it, as well as the poet, the one who tells his tale, even as the tale
itself reveals the dangers of being found out. This tension, built around
the body as a locus of desire, finds resolution in the cannibalistic act, as
the ladies enact their desire and ultimately die for it, sowing the seeds
of love’s teachings45. The ladies’ desire, which was fulfilled by loving
and being loved by Ignaure, becomes literally embodied when they
consume him; all is covered and uncovered, secret and found out. The
jealous husbands don’t realize with their atrocious punishment that they
are only playing into this dynamic, giving their wives what they truly
want, and revealing what must be revealed in order for their love to be
45 For another reading of this prologue along similar lines but with the opposite conclusion,
see Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, p. 126-128.
 EATING YOUR LOVER’S OTHERNESS 411

redeemed and the narrative to exist46. The 12 husbands are the opposite
of their wives, their vilified other halves that seek to deny their pleasure
and passion, while Ignaure is the pivot between the two, the figure that
says, you can have all you desire. The husbands, who stand against the
lover, frame the tale and in some sense allow for the multiplication of
narrative instances, of moments of hidden yet imagined erotic exchange.
Thanks to them there is desire, and a story to tell.
Coming back to the manuscript collection in which the Lai d’Ignaure
can be found, I’ll return to my initial reading of the tale in that context.
When I first came across it, I was held between a feeling of disgust
at the murder and subsequent cannibalistic act and a fascination with
the creative sacrifice of the lovers who dare embody such forbidden
and destructive desire. I was also puzzled because, although everything
points to the fault of the lovers, much like when faced with the Tristan
and Yseut story, the reader has no choice but to side with those standing
outside of matrimonial law. The jealous husband is the true culprit. The
reader experiences a certain amount of ambivalence, as though balancing
between pleasure and pain, similar to that which the author expresses
in the debate between the heart and the body which precedes it in the
BnF fr. 1553 manuscript. The text which follows the Lai d’Ignaure in the
collection brings a lighter tone to this balancing act, as if the heart, once
outside the body and consumed, can be re-embodied by the clever peasant
wife and her simple husband in the fabliau De dant Constant de Hamiel.
As an example of female revenge, this woman does not kill anyone, but
simply makes the men see, with the example of their own wives, what they
wanted to do to her. She demands empathy of them. Is this a less cruel
form of revenge? The reader can decide. Balancing between the heart and
body, between male and female characters, he or she learns something of
the truth of love, of its impossibility and its immediacy, of its rules and
chaos, but also how these become one when you experience it.

In conclusion, does cannibalism in the Eaten Heart narrative have

the symbolic potential to erase the difference between self and other?
46 “In their violent and gruesome attempt to punish transgression by transgressing, they
achieve not a reversal or a mitigation of the original transgression, but an invocation of
a shared sense of the sacred… The women regain, then, a final dignity, which includes
the power to punish their husbands doubly by choosing to die rather than to dishonor
Ignaure’s memory by eating profane food.” Price, Consuming Passions, p. 43.
412 AMY HENEVELD

The weight of understanding the story’s message falls on the shoulders

of the reader, who must discern the wisdom behind it, holding the
meaning of what has become a Eucharistic symbol up to the light of
erotic love. As a metaphor for love, the act of cannibalism gives voice
to the wordless acts of physical love and intimate exchange that are
difficult if not impossible to describe, and thus articulates the possibility
of unity between two desiring subjects. In the Lai d’Ignaure, the lady
lovers are active, bringing balance to a typically one-sided paradigm of
expressive male lover and passive, admired female, making coincide the
oppositional roles of the love relationship. Ambiguity also surrounds
each protagonist, allowing the reader to rethink his or her relationship
to the other. Otherness here is thus not seen as fixed opposition, but
rather as something one can incorporate and bring closer, as the reader
or listener does the text through interpretation. In a sense, each lover
becomes the other, through desire, and through the written word.
The literary weaving in the lai allows for pleasurable interpretation, and
the reader observes another kind of interpenetration: the lyric combines
with the narrative, the Ovidian with the Occitan and with the Breton, the
comedic with the tragic. The teller does this with a wink of awareness,
the recognizable self-referentiality of someone who is also a reader and
conscious of his own re-telling. Thus, the lai insists on the importance
of teaching by example, through parable, of covering and uncovering.
While it is being read, the story does satisfy, as its multiple retellings
prove. This literary satisfaction does several things: it presents longing for
the other as positive in that the love in the tale satisfies as the tale does
in its telling. Placing satisfied female desire at the center of the tale also
reclaims female literary influence, putting women in charge of heart and
penis, in charge of desire and its related lyric outpouring. Love’s greatest
lesson here then is perhaps how to eat what is different to make it the
same, and this offers us another way to think about cannibalism, which,
as we know, when it isn’t literal, can be sacred.

Amy Heneveld
University of Geneva