Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Darren Gray

‘In this court ful selde trouthe avayleth’. The Vulnerable Reader at the Medieval Court of Cupid

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ABSTRACT

Cupid, the minor Roman deity, was rarely represented as blind in classical literature and never depicted as visually impaired in classical art.  The ‘blindfold motif’ was alien to both Greek and Roman iconography and ‘love’ could never have been designated as such as, ‘the noblest of emotions enters the human soul by the noblest of the senses.’(Panofsky)  Yet, during the fourteenth century the ‘love god’ underwent a dramatic transformation, in which he was struck blind, most notably by Bersuire and Boccaccio, in what Theresa Tinkle has suggested was an attempt to stabilise meaning.  

The blinding of Cupid betrayed the social anxieties embodied in this acquired defect - the indiscriminate and undiscerning violation of all regulations and boundaries -  personifying the ‘loss of social order evidenced by the disappearance of the rules and “differences” that define cultural divisions.’(Girard)  

In this paper I propose to explore what I would term the various ‘bodies’ of the medieval Cupid:

• The body of the Cupid-centred text itself as a ‘realm’ of mimetic seduction.
• Representations of the lack of differentiation in the ‘communal body’ of Cupid and the body’s self-perpetuating, cyclical mimeticism.
• The vulnerability of the reader as individual ‘body’ exposed to seduction/seductive narrative models.

Finally, I intend to look at the possibility of reading beyond mimetic desire and comprehending the redemptive duality of the Cupid figure as a symbol of charitable exposition; a cautionary figure pointing to the ‘otherness’ of caritas, thus establishing him, ultimately, as a pharmakon.

I intend to demonstrate this by concentrating mainly on English vernacular texts of the fourteenth century.

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Darren Gray.  Doctoral Postgraduate, Department of English (Medieval), University of Birmingham, England.