This thesis applies the tools of kinesic analysis of gesture and its cultural encoding in works from the medieval and early modern English and French literary and iconographic tradition. It proposes a twofold approach to gesture as both non-verbal and linguistic phenomenon, appearing in the discursive structuring of embodiment.

The rhetorical figure and philosophical concept of the example (or paradigm) is employed as analytical tool focusing the aspects of gesture, narrative and visual images activating the cognitive potential of fiction.

The corpus includes Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from a comparatist perspective with its French sources, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales read in the light of predominant medieval paradigms of embodiment, his contemporary John Gower’s Anglo-Norman and English narrative poems from the viewpoints of the literary convention of fin amor and the phenomenology of fiction and the creative imagination, highlighting intertextual resonances with Shakespeare’s play Pericles.

The analytical framework draws on medieval and contemporary philosophy (Origen, Bernard de Clairvaux, Wittgenstein, Deleuze, Agamben) ; cultural anthropology (Iser,Macé, Bolens) ; literary and visual arts theory and criticism.