Alumni College Fellow

Lucas Wood

Fake News in Medieval Camelot: Revealing and Repressing Courtly Adultery

The use of the concept of "fake news" as a response to crises of gender politics in contemporary media discourses may seem like a recent phenomenon, but an analogous configuration of ideas can be observed in thirteenth-century French and Anglo-Norman Arthurian literature. The recurring motif of the magical chastity test, in which an enchanted drinking horn or mantle promises to expose the ubiquity of marital and sexual infidelity at King Arthur's court, destabilizes the ideological premises and social practices on which the courtly community is based. Labeling the magical test's results as "fake news"—that is, attacking its legitimacy as an epistemological tool rather than actually disproving its (accurate) findings—offers a way of letting courtly discourses and social structures, if not individual love relationships, survive the test's explosive revelation. But the strategic construct of "fake news" not only defuses, but also productively diffuses the truth of courtly infidelity. Publicizing this uncomfortable knowledge under the sign of the "lie" allows the group to assimilate the fact of habitual adultery into its collective consciousness and rethink the nature of relationships between real men and women as they are idealized and practiced in and beyond the world of Arthurian fiction.

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