SOURCE: Jones, Catherine M. “Identity and Disguise in a Late French Epic: Hervis de Mes.” Essays in Medieval Studies 4 (1987): 107-17.

In the following essay, Jones analyzes the function of disguise and dissimulation as weapons used to exclude the rising bourgeoisie from the world of the aristocracy in Hervis de Mes, a thirteenth-century epic of the Loherain cycle.

Hervis de Mes is a branch of the provincial epic cycle known as the geste des Loherains. The oldest and most prominent poem in the cycle, Garin le Loherain, depicts the bitter rivalry between two feudal houses during the reign of Pépin le Bref; succeeding branches relate the continuation of this conflict by the descendants of Garin and his enemies. Hervis de Mes was composed in the mid-thirteenth century, after most of the other works in the geste; fictionally, however, it extends the cycle by reverse chronology, recounting the adventures...