SCRIPTA: Doriane Zerka: The Queen and The Hound: Gender, Language and Agency in Königin Sibille

The Queen and The Hound: Gender, Language and Agency in Königin Sibille

Dr Doriane Zerka (University of Cambridge)

Composed in the 15th century by Elisabeth of Nassau-Saarbrücken, the prose epic Königin Sibille centres around a crisis of dynastic authority that threatens imperial succession at the court of Charlemagne. Following an intrigue by the dwarf Syweron, who falsely accuses Queen Sibille of adultery, she is banished by the emperor and attempts to return to her homeland of Constantinople. While the narrative initially contrasts male power at the Frankish court in Paris with a female authority that Sibille must reclaim during her journey, the paper argues that the core of this crisis lies in the failure of language and patriarchal authority. The crisis, rooted in human discourse, is only solved with the intervention of a dog. Operating outside human language and social norms, the dog exposes the betrayal, redistributing agency within a gendered field of violence. Granting decisive authority to an animal that is intimately tied with the queen, the text questions the limits of human authority and stages a form of posthuman intervention that enables the restoration of justice and dynastic order. In turn, this posthuman intervention brings into question the manuscript transmission of the text and its role in restoring a sense of authorial authority to Elisabeth herself.

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