ABSTRACT
Medieval orchards were specific types of garden that were designed with two purposes in mind: functionality and pleasure. Drawing on the work of Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Carolyn Dinshaw, this chapter examines two literary examples of the medieval orchard and shows that within the lay genre, these gardens also took on a third purpose as enclosures of queer space. Through an analysis of Marie de France’s twelfth-century lai Lanval and the fourteenth-century Breton lay Sir Orfeo, this chapter argues that the enclosed orchard is a dangerous space that displays conventional courtly images of mirth, love, and beauty but is also filled with queer potential. Moreover, this queerness takes on many forms within the two texts. For example, in Lanval, the setting of the orchard allows Marie de France to invert common conventions of medieval literature and gender politics to present an alternative gender dynamic between knight and lady. It is also the physical space in which the hero of the poem Lanval is directly accused of sodomy. In Sir Orfeo, the orchard functions as a limen to the Otherworld and thus represents the boundary between heteronormativity and the supernatural Other. The enclosed orchard of the medieval lays is thus both pleasure garden and queer space.
