Eating your lover’s otherness The narrative theme of the Eaten Heart in the Lai d’Ignaure

The Eaten Heart is a cannibalistic narrative theme that appears regularly in a range of medieval writings. As a love story, it’s a gruesome reminder of both the pleasures and the pains of love. In the Lai d’Ignaure, the author infuses the tragic with the comedic, creating a tension for the reader around how to interpret the tale. Through the representation of female desire, cannibalism becomes a metaphor for love and reading, teaching how to erase the distance between self and other.