An Iconography of Trauma: The Fraught Identity of King Charles VI in Its Literary and Cultural Context

Abstract

a possible diagnosis of the king and as medieval depictions of mental disorder and madness. In this article, I propose that Charles's delusional thinking can be linked, iconographically and thematically, to literary texts with which he was familiar. At times I will make reference to modern studies of schizophrenia in an effort to understand his behavior. In doing so, I do not mean to imply a definitive diagnosis of his condition: no diagnosis could be complete if based solely on secondhand reports at a distance of six hundred years. Nonetheless, as noted by R. C. Famiglietti in his study of Charles's tumultuous reign, contemporary descriptions of the king's words and actions do accord with patterns of cognition and behavior typical of schizophrenia as we now attempt to understand it. 1 As I will show, examining the king's delusions, identity crises, and manipulation of emblems in light of certain manners of thinking associated with schizophrenia (the concretism, intermingling, reverse inference, and delusional identity constructs that Silvano Arieti, in his groundbreaking study of schizophrenia, has termed paleologic) does shed an interesting light on his behavior. 2 It is known that, in constructing his personal iconography, Charles drew inspiration from literary sources. Colette Beaune has argued persuasively that his personal emblems included at least one, a white hart with wings and a golden collar, taken from the Queste del saint Graal. 3 In a vision beheld by Galahad, Perceval, and Boors, a white hart accompanied by four lions turns into a king with the four winged evangelist symbols-man, lion, ox, eagle-and then flies away; this is explained by a hermit as a vision of the resurrected Christ, given as a unique sign of favor to the three grail knights. In Beaune's view, Charles took the winged white hart from that tale, along with his motto "Jamais" ((n) ever), a word recurring, albeit in the form of synonyms, in the passage in question. 4 She notes that at this time Charles also adopted the colors red, white, and green, which figure prominently in the Queste as the colors of the trees that grew after Eve planted a twig from the Tree of Knowledge, now renamed the Tree of Life, outside the Garden of Eden. 5 Beaune's interpretation is supported by a record indicating that Charles had taken the Queste from the royal library on a longterm loan and had it in his possession at the time he adopted the hart. However, as Beaune points out, the emblem is also linked to a hunt in 1382, recounted by both the Monk of Saint Denis and Jean Juvénal des Ursins, in which Charles captured a hart wearing a golden collar with the inscription "Caesar hoc mihi donavit" (Caesar gave me this). 6 Charles later released the animal, delighted at following in the footsteps of the great Julius Cesar. This alternative explanation reflects