Bisclavret’s clothes are fetched. After a knight explains
to the king that the beast has “great shame” (l. 288), he
is left alone in a bedchamber to put on his clothes and
be transformed back into a man. Upon re-entering the
chamber, the king fi nds his beloved knight Bisclavret
asleep on the bed; they embrace and kiss, rejoicing at
being reunited. The wife and her knight are banished;
many of the women of their lineage are born noseless
(esnasees).
Tales of lycanthropy—the phenomenon of humans
being transformed into werewolves—were popular in
Europe from classical antiquity forward. Both the Nat-
ural History of Pliny the Elder (23–79 C.E.) and the
Satyricon of Petronius (27–66 C.E.) contain accounts of
lycanthropy, and there are numerous examples from
the Middle Ages. In Marie de France’s “Bisclavret,” the
emphasis on the beast’s rational behavior, his fealty to
the king, and the love the king bears him in both his
human and werewolf form is particularly signifi cant.
The poem is an interesting and early example of an
examination of the nature and origin of nobility and
the tension that exists between nobility of blood and
nobility of character. Both the wife and her lover are of
a social standing that demands comportment accord-
ing to established chivalric norms, yet their actions
betray those norms—she willingly enters into an adul-
terous relationship with a knight for whom she feels no
love; he betrays a lord and, by extension, his king.
The poem also invites a demande d’amours, or “ques-
tion of love” of the sort popular in 12th-century litera-
ture of the court: Can the wife be blamed for not
wanting to stay with a man who becomes a werewolf
three days of the week? Here Marie leaves no doubt as
to the answer to which readers should come. In
Bisclavret’s reasonable behavior, the court sees a star-
tling nobility of character that leads them to defend the
beast when it attacks the knight and to torture the wife
when the beast has torn off her nose. In the end, the
only love consistent and laudable in the poem is that
between the king and Bisclavret, his loyal knight, and
the wife and knight’s fate is to have some of their off-
spring born noseless, leaving them marked with a
physical deformity that signifi es the unchivalrous
nature of their ancestors and the base and fl awed sex-
ual love through which they were conceived.
Recent criticism of “Bisclavret” has focused on a
number of tensions evident in the poem. We are told at
the opening that werewolves are savages that kill men,
yet the only violence the beast in the poem demon-
strates are his (apparently justifi ed) attacks on his wife
and her lover. Other critical works examine the rela-
tionship between the king and Bisclavret in his were-
wolf and human form, positing analogous chivalric
relationships in other of the lais, while queer readings
suggest that homosocial (and perhaps homosexual)
relationships are privileged. Feminist critics have
examined the violence done to the wife, including her
abandonment, torture, and nose-slicing.
FURTHER READING
Holten, Kathryn I. “Metamorphosis and Language in the
Lay of Bisclavret.” In Quest of Marie de France, a Twelfth-
Century Poet, edited by Chantal A. Maréchal, 193–211.
Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1992.
Marie de France. Lais. Edited by Alfred Ewert. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1960.
———. The Lais of Marie de France. Edited and translated
by Robert Hanning and Joan Ferrante. Durham: Laby-
rinth Press, 1978.
Pappa, Joseph. “The Bewildering Bounded/Bounding
Bisclavret, or Lycanthropy, Lieges, and Lotta Leeway in
Marie de France.” Crossings: A Counter Disciplinary Journal
4 (2000): 117–143.
Andrew BethuneBLACK DEATH (1347–1351) This pestilence
of massive proportions ravaged Europe in the late 1340s,
reaching England in 1348 or 1349. A similar plague was
reported in the Middle East, suggesting that both may
have been part of a pandemic attack. It lasted two years,
and by the time it was over, between one-third and one-
half of Europe’s population had died. Subsequent out-
breaks of the plague occurred in nearly every generation
for more than 300 years (the 1665 Great Plague of Lon-
don is generally considered to have been the last major
occurrence in England). The population level of Eng-
land, which later suffered further reductions from new
visitations of pestilence, did not return to its pre-1348
height for two centuries or more.
The plague took three forms: bubonic, septicemic,
and pneumonic. The bubonic (from the buboes, orBLACK DEATH 83