Knight Fever: Sickness, masculinity and narrative absence in the Mort Artu, Béroul’s Tristan and Thomas of Britain’s Tristan

The ideal knight protagonist of high medieval romance should be capable of engaging actively in chivalric activities, whether martial or amatory. What happens, then, when knight protagonists fall ill? Illness presents a problem: the knight loses his ability to act and is no longer in control of his own body. This article examines the fates of knights who fall ill in three Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the Mort Artu, Thomas of Britain’s Tristan and Béroul’s Tristan. Illness has a marked effect on the presence of knights, both narratologically and to other characters in the text. When knights fall ill, they are temporarily excised from the narrative until their ability to be active is restored. An exception to this illness-absence paradigm occurs when the heroes of romance feign illness: at such junctures, these men are still exemplifying the agency and resourcefulness required of an effective hero, and the narrative maintains its focus on them at these moments regardless of how other characters might be treating them.