2 Forms against war

Abstract

In one of Eustache Deschamps's ballades, En une grant fourest et lée (c.1380), the speaker, riding on horseback through the forest, comes across a group of frightened barnyard animals huddled in an enclosed space as wolves, foxes and other carnivorous forest animals prowl around them. The predators demand money as they encircle the livestock, and the barnyard animals beg for mercy. The ewe says she has been shorn four times that year (10-12), implying she has no more wool to offer at this time. 2 The sow says that she will be forced to beg in the streets along with her piglets, as she has no merchandise left to sell, to which the wolf responds that she can sell her hide (25-9). Deploying the tropes of animal husbandry, this beast allegory critiques exploitation of the rural poor by wealthy administrative elites. 3 Cornered by menacing predators, the terrified animals lend pathos to Deschamps's critique of class warfare. The gendered quality of this beast allegory, however, and its intimations of sexual violence, raise questions regarding the spectacularity of pain, both female and animal.Deschamps's lexical choice of brebis [ewe] and truie [sow] underline that the animals foregrounded in this poem are female. They are also represented in gendered attitudes of subjection: the ewe 's'est agenoillée' [knelt down] (9) and speaks 'comme coye' [peaceably] (10), while the sow is 'desesperée' [in despair] (25), in a characterisation that recalls the Argive widows weeping on their knees in the road before Theseus at the opening of Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight 's Tale (c.1380). Their gendering introduces an extra dimension to Deschamps's critique. The overshearing of this female sheep now intimates sexual assault of her body. That sense is heightened in the