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Abstract
The purpose of this dissertation is to distinguish the beast from the animal in manuscript copies of the Old French Roman de Renart and of the Ysopet attributed to Marie de France. First and most obviously, these traditions are populated by “beasts”: characters that have been marked as nonhuman by their species names and/or certain narrative cues like an emphasis on the role of instinct, but which are able at the same time to speak in a language that human readers can understand. Because this ability to speak is its defining trait, there is nothing substantively nonhuman about the speaking beast. The comprehensibility of this literary invention therefore depends on our forfeiting any acknowledgement of the void of negativity over which it hovers in favor of that which is recognizably human about it: its words that resemble our own, for example, or its desires that echo those that we imagine as bestial within ourselves.
Just as Jacques Lacan’s account of the split subject holds that the conscious mind sometimes fades under the pressure of the unconscious meanings that it has been forced to abandon, however, the beastly subject thus recognized by the reader as somehow “human” in nature can be found momentarily to fade and to disclose its forfeited negativity when read as a manuscript text. Conventions of medieval vernacular handwriting privileged ambiguity over clarity: no consistent system of punctuation was employed, the shapes taken by individual letters were subject to vicissitudes of scribal attention, and the final product of the text often retains a variety of errors. Because these fault-lines in the handwritten text connect with cracks covered up in the fragile identification of the speaking beast as human, it is not only the beast who speaks in manuscripts of the Ysopet and the Renart, but an animal order of abyssal negations as well.
