Sacred Woods, Spoiled City: Bourgeois Appropriation of Noble Capital in Chestre’s Launfal
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Joining a number of recent class-based readings of Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, the article links the tale’s populism with the poet’s use of aristocratic exceptionalist narrative to critique anti-capitalist elitism. Working from his source, the anonymous Sir Landevale, Chestre accentuates his protagonist’s accrual of massive debt and links his courtly success directly with a credit economy. Chestre then highlights tensions between an older aristocracy and capitalist culture by introducing Launfal’s long, humiliating stay in a city where he is scorned for his poverty in a world led by the calculating, bourgeois Mayor, who was Launfal’s former servant. Chestre symbolically opposes this urban space with an idealized sylvan world, though Chestre ensures that Launfal incurs a final debt linked to chivalric culture before entering the forest where he meets his fairy benefactress. Tryamour’s gifts—limitless wealth to sustain his largess, and a horse and squire to allow Launfal to be respectable as warrior and mobile courtier—reveal Chestre’s clear understanding of chivalric symbolic capital. Chestre inserts another scene that sets bourgeois interests against aristocratic elitism when he has Launfal win an overdetermined duel in Lombardy, a region intimately associated with urbanized capitalism. Launfal’s unfair advantage in his victory against Valentyne underscores his status as a symbolic icon of a nostalgic chivalric world.
Abstract
Joining a number of recent class-based readings of Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, the article links the tale’s populism with the poet’s use of aristocratic exceptionalist narrative to critique anti-capitalist elitism. Working from his source, the anonymous Sir Landevale, Chestre accentuates his protagonist’s accrual of massive debt and links his courtly success directly with a credit economy. Chestre then highlights tensions between an older aristocracy and capitalist culture by introducing Launfal’s long, humiliating stay in a city where he is scorned for his poverty in a world led by the calculating, bourgeois Mayor, who was Launfal’s former servant. Chestre symbolically opposes this urban space with an idealized sylvan world, though Chestre ensures that Launfal incurs a final debt linked to chivalric culture before entering the forest where he meets his fairy benefactress. Tryamour’s gifts—limitless wealth to sustain his largess, and a horse and squire to allow Launfal to be respectable as warrior and mobile courtier—reveal Chestre’s clear understanding of chivalric symbolic capital. Chestre inserts another scene that sets bourgeois interests against aristocratic elitism when he has Launfal win an overdetermined duel in Lombardy, a region intimately associated with urbanized capitalism. Launfal’s unfair advantage in his victory against Valentyne underscores his status as a symbolic icon of a nostalgic chivalric world. Key Words: Chestre, Launfal, Arthurian, capitalism, fairy Notes on Contributor: Randy P. Schiff is Associate Professor of English at the Un
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