Plant-Being, Family Trees, and Grafted Fictions: "Le Roman de saint Fanuel"

Authors

• Blake Gutt, University of UtahFollow

Abstract

This essay addresses the vegetal metaphors that humans use to think with and through, as well as conceptions of plants as agential, thinking beings. Examination of Le Roman de saint Fanuel, a thirteenth-century French hagiographic romance whose titular saint is a hybrid of human and plant, reveals how vegetable thought facilitates analysis of the relationship between the human and the divine. Fanuel displays the literary grafting techniques that allow new narratives to spring from familiar, canonical works as it presents an alternative genealogy for the Virgin Mary and recounts the interweaving of a literal tree into the holy family tree. Simultaneously, the mise en page of the manuscript folio displays the importance of plant-thinking in structuring and framing literary production. The essay explores how vegetal life is mobilized both as a source of stable and familiar patterns that thought can follow (for example, the organizational tree), and as an agential presence through which to imagine other ways of being, and to chart the limits of the human.

Recommended Citation

Gutt, Blake (2026) "Plant-Being, Family Trees, and Grafted Fictions: "Le Roman de saint Fanuel"," Medieval Ecocriticisms: Vol. 6, Article 2.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/med_ecocriticisms/vol6/iss1/2