Earthbound with Béroul’s Tristan

Abstract This article stages an encounter between the late-twelfth-century Tristan narrative attributed to ‘Béroul’ and Bruno Latour’s work on the Earthbound. Through a series of new close readings of two key narrative episodes—the lovers’ exile in the forest of Morrois and the scenes at the ford of Mal Pas—I read Béroul as not just prefiguring, but (p)reconfiguring the notion of the Earthbound, drawing out its relationship with both love and abjection, both care and violence. Ultimately, I argue that Morrois and Mal Pas formulate different paradigms of becoming Earthbound in ways instructive for Latour’s Moderns in the face of the current climate crisis, as the medieval imagines new post-Modern futures. I conclude by considering the Earthbound dimensions of the reading encounter with the text’s principal manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fr. 2171, both as a physical and as a digital entity.