[2] The single manuscript holding the text was found in 1911 in Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, in a crate marked "unimportant documents".

[5] The narrative concerns the adventures of Cador, the heir of the Earl of Cornwall, and then of his daughter Silence, who is raised as a boy in order to be eligible to inherit, as the king of England has outlawed the succession of females.

Cador, a knight who is in love with a woman named Eufemie who serves the Queen, successfully faces the dragon.

The King gives his consent, along with 1,000 pounds a year and the territory of Cornwall once Eufemie's father, Count Renald, passes away.

In order to further conceal his identity, Silence changes his name to Malduit, meaning badly raised child.

Eufeme then realizes Silence is still alive, and although she is still angry, hearing about his popularity in France makes her fall in love with him again.

Silence and thirty of his companions travel to England; the king orders his men to attack the count who is holding Chester, and is able to seize it.

The Queen tells Evan to order Silence to capture Merlin, who cannot be caught other than by "the trick of a woman," which the king does.

Evan strips Silence of her male clothing, alters her name to the female form Silentia, and makes her his new Queen.

Nature plays the underlying role of opposition to Silence's lifestyle because she is trying to become entirely male but we see in the story that gender is tied very closely to biological sex.

Nurture, however, is what the entire story is based on: a medieval woman attempting to recreate her image in order to pose as a knight and save her family from harsh inheritance laws.

In the end, despite the story's interesting exploration of gender, Nature emerges victorious, as Silence assumes the female version of her name- Silencia- and becomes the new Queen.

After Nurture arrived, she successfully undid Nature's arguments and, using reason, managed to return Silence to her former way of thinking.

The theme is common in Old French literature, famously in Chretien de Troyes' Perceval, where the hero's effort to suppress his natural impulse of compassion in favour of what he considers proper courtly behaviour leads to catastrophe.

[9] Silence embodies absolute physical perfection and engages in outstanding knightly activities that seem impossible for an ordinary human being.

[citation needed] Especially in the case of Silence, her aspiration to inherit lawfully and maintain family duty to her parents left her no choice but to cross-dress as a male for she cannot alter her biological sex.

Consequently, she was brought up as a knight in order to have a brighter opportunity and achieve greater accomplishment in life, while demonstrating others that she is indeed a man.

However, Silence has to be subdued in the end as her mixed identity creates considerable hierarchical turmoil to the fixed social order.

[citation needed] She broke gender role boundaries temporarily and showed that woman can learn, hunt, and be skillful at knightly activities.

A loud, belly laugh assumes the masculine role as it removes all other voices, and a soft giggle proves feminine as it is quiet and docile.

After several advances by Queen Eufeme the narrator describes Silence as, "li vallés qui est mescine" (l. 3785), "the boy who is a girl".

The 'boy who is a girl' implies that her behavior, garb, appearance reveals her gender, while her biological sex falls secondary.

A personal statement of preferred gender identity of Silence is never mentioned beyond the discussions with the allegorical characters of Nature and Nurture.

On the other hand, Nurture argues that Silence's brave and manly activities have made him a formidable and respectable knight, thus determining his gender.

This act complicates the ending of the tale as it presents a possibility that gender is not a binary after all and maybe Silence is less content with his final transformation to be female than one may at first think.

These variances in the dynamic of the rhetoric indicate the complexities that even the Narrator faces when discussing Silence's cross-dressing in terms of her gender identity.

Critics discuss the motives and interpretation of the poem with the central question "Is this romance ultimately misogynist or philogynous?

The significance of the name and usage of speech by men and women reflected how integral language was to identity and gender.

[citation needed] At the same time, the author altered the structure of medieval society[22] with a character who was woman by nature but through nurture was able to achieve anything that an exceptional man could do.

Alex Myers’s Story of Silence (Glasgow: HarperVoyager, 2020) is a novel that reimagines the romance and gives voice to the eponymous protagonist.