“My most recent reading for fun was the first twenty pages of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, after which I gave up.” - Me, on the first day of class.
This class is taking on a strange cyclical nature for me - upon reading “The Knight of the Cart” I was instantly reminded of what little Foucault I had read. What served as a point of interest to me in particular was the punishment itself - the titular cart - which serves a peculiar analytical position when studied through the lens of Foucault’s explanation of history.
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| Strap yourselves in, this is gonna be dense. |
Discipline and Punish studies the historical shift between feudal penal structures (which it argues to be public and focused on the body) and later capitalistic ones (which it argues to be more private and focused on the “soul”). The punishment of the cart was perplexing to me because it seemed to contradict Foucault’s thesis - while, like Foucault predicts, it was very public, its description in the text seems to indicate a greater focus on the soul, saying “Thus he [the condemned] had lost all honor.” With further thought, I realized something crucial about feudal society, which I believe is key to understanding several of the texts we’ve read thus far: the body and soul were not considered separate ontological entities, as we know them today, at the time. This punishment of the “soul” (through the emotion of shame) here has direct consequences, not just spiritually, but materially, through the system of honor in place at the time. Chrétien alludes to this: “From then on all courts refused him hearing”. The significance is difficult to understand through our modern capitalist lens, but at the time, this was a very severe material penalty, that had intense physical consequences to the body of the condemned - he would likely be doomed to a life of poverty and solitude, potentially ending in starvation or similar death. For the knight, labor in service of a court was the only option - its denial would lead to death. The punishment of the “soul” here is not coherently differentiable from the material punishment of the body.
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| Phew! |
So ultimately, this long-winded mess has led to the conclusion that medieval ontologies lacked the distinction between body and soul as separate entities that modern constructions have. I am positive that this can be applied to other texts that we’ve read as an interesting perspective and mode of analysis. I, however, will draw upon my roots as a math major: “This is left as an exercise to the reader.”
