Introduction

As perceived in the wife’s responded anxiety, clothing in Bisclavret functions as a transformative and revelatory actor that categorizes the monstrous figure in opposition to the chivalrous human (Marie de France n.d., l. 82). The binaried clothed and unclothed body, with all that this material barrier can conceal or reveal — monstrous or otherwise — would have elicited fear and suspicion from the mid 12th Century audience of Marie de France’s lais, that being the court of Henry II. Such an affective response finds its basis in depictions of unclothed ‘monstrous’ or Plinian races in quasi-religious manuscripts like the Getty Ludwig XV 4 Bestiary ca. 1226, where they operate as sinister forces that stood external to the sound, pious existence (fig. 1). Through this ethos of the Christianized-monster, the wife’s mistrust of the body concealed precipitates her theft, thereby condemning Bisclavret to his lycanthropic inverse (Marie de France n.d., l. 82).  Her actions act as a literary substitute to contemporary animosity towards the Jewish ‘other’ as a clothed monster and thus deceitful masquerader in Christo-English society. Markedly palpable in England of the 12th and 13th centuries — the time in which Marie wrote the lais and their subsequent dissemination — the representation of Jews in Christian devotional manuscripts, exemplified by the Oscott Psalter ca. 1265 and MS. Bodl. 764 ca. 1250, is likewise contingent upon the transformative and definitive properties of clothing, used to conflate the Jew with the malevolent monster in Christian imagination (fig. 2,3). Yet Bisclavret, even when unclothed, suspends this transgressive (and aggressive) typology of the medieval monster through civility and the restoration of order in his final transformation, thus permitting his moralizing literary role as narrativized by the mobilization of clothing.