Emily C. Francomano. "The Hands of Phillipe de Rémi’s Manekine." Mediterranean Studies 15 (2006): 1-20.
Philippe de Remi’s thirteenth-century Le roman de la Manekine never lets its audience forget that hands are at the center of the romance’s negotiation of incest, exogamy, identity, language, and memory. Philippe intensifies the tale’s fundamental focus on the body, dwelling upon the hand, the part of the body upon which human relationships and activities depend. This study of the hands of the Manekine is a modified psychoanalytic and structural reading of the romance, one which does not see the handless victim/heroine as a character enacting a punishment for her forbidden Oedipal desires, but rather as an exemplary figure whose hands have a lesson to teach about marriage and the proper circulation of women in Christian, patriarchal society. In the Manekine, textual hands—mains—and members—membres— function like the pointing hands in the margins of many a medieval manuscript, signaling key junctures in Philippe’s conjointure.
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