The Weavers’ Lament: Gender, Labor, Collective, and Custom in Chrétien and Malory

Abstract: Chivalric romance has an underrated capacity to interrogate gendered labor. Similar episodes in Chrétien’s Yvain and Malory’s Morte depict groups of female weavers who act as worker-collectives rather than as individual marriageable women. These instances of non-sexual exploitation act as signifiers of societal collapse in the medieval literary imagination. (DO)