This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series Managing Monsters, given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994.

In the medieval romance, Valentine and Orson, the Empress of Constantinople finds herself alone in a wild forest, giving birth to twins.

Her husband, the emperor, has cruelly cast her out under full suspicion of adultery. A passing she-bear steals one of the children

for herself. The other baby, Valentine, is rescued with his mother when a nobleman comes

riding by at the right moment and takes them both home with him. This twin, Valentine, grows up at court to become a valiant prince, while the lost boy,

Orson or Bear Cub, grows up a wild, hairy man doing great mischief to all that pass through the forest.

The separated twins' tumultuous legend tells how the brothers later meet and fight and how Valentine

captures the wildman Orson. At the first dawn of morning, Valentine arose, and putting on his armour,

took a shield polished like a mirror, and having arrived at the forest, he climbed a high tree near

the bear's cave. Presently he heard Orson, who had a buck with him which he had just killed, come roaring by. And he could not help admiring the beauty of his make and his agility, wishing it were possible to tame him. He then tore off a branch of a tree and threw it at Orson, who, looking up, uttered a furious howl,

and darted up the tree like lightning. Valentine descended, and Orson, seeing him on the ground,

rushed down. Valentine held up his shield, and Or Orson evidently surprised and delighted

Beheld his own image

Just as Perseus used Medusa's mask to free Andromeda from the monster

So Valentine's spellbines the wild man

The scene of Orson's capture borrows the advice of medieval besturies on hunting a tigress.

To catch that wildest of wild beasts, a hunter should throw down a glass globe in the animal's path.

She'll see herself reflected in it in miniature and mistake her image for her cub.

This will stop her in her tracks and she'll try to pick it up, giving the huntsman time

to drop a net over her. The romance, Valentine and Orson, was translated from a lost French

original and printed by Caxton's successor Winkin de Word at the beginning of the 16th century.

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