The interplay of matriarchal and patriarchal power in four thirteenth-century father-daughter incest narratives from the French, Spanish, and Latin traditions

James Frazer suggests that traces of matriarchal social organization are evident in tales of father-daughter incest. Margaret Schlauch develops Frazer's suggestion even further, proposing that medieval stories incorporating such reminiscences play out the conflict between the old matriarchal and the new patriarchal ideologies. According to this theory, when kinship and royalty were calculated through the female, a male who wanted to attain power would marry the empowered female of a clan and would become king through his association with her. However, traces of matriarchy have not been studied sufficiently in medieval narratives of father-daughter incest---both consummated and unconsummated---nor has the conflict Schlauch describes received sufficient attention. After presenting the tenets of Frazer's and Schlauch's theories, my dissertation studies the major female figures of four father-daughter incest stories---the Libro de Apolonio, the Vita Sancti Albani, the Roman de la Manekine, and the Vita Offae Primi---by placing them within the frame of the history of the High Middle Ages, of the Hellenistic myths with which they might be related, and within recent psychoanalytic approaches to incest. My study points out that in these thirteenth-century father-daughter incest narratives women possess residual matriarchal powers and that male characters seek out an association with them for their own gain. However, by the end of these narratives the men become the possessors of their wives' realms and transfer land from father to son. Women's role, as depicted in these works, is to bring political and economic gain to their husbands and to provide them with a male heir to inherit the land they have appropriated from their wives. Patriarchy, in the end, becomes the dominant order in these works.