Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad 2020931795, 9780198832454

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Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

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OX F O R D S T U D I E S I N M E D I EVA L L I T E R AT U R E A N D C U LT U R E General Editors Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism.

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Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad JA N E G I L B E RT, SI M O N G AU N T, AND W I L L IA M BU R G W I N K L E

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931795 ISBN 978–0–19–883245–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements We are first and foremost grateful to the AHRC for funding the collaborative project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, which ran from 2011 to 2015 at the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and University College London. This book is one of the main outcomes of this project, and we would like to thank other members of the project team: Huw Grange, Neil Jakeman, Nicola Morato, David Murray, Dirk Schoenaers, and Paul Vetch. MFLCOF was throughout a collective endeavour: Huw, David, Nicola, and Dirk collected a substantial amount of the data on manuscripts that we use as the basis for the argument of this book, while Paul and Neil designed the database and website that was another of the major outputs of the project (http://www. medievalfrancophone.ac.uk/). Paul and Neil were ably assisted at various stages by Ginestra Ferraro and Charlotte Tupman in the then Digital Humanities Department at King’s College London (now the King’s Digital Lab), and we would also like to thank the graduate students from Cambridge, King’s, and UCL, who volunteered their time to gather data on manuscripts (under the able supervision of Dirk and Nicola): Merryn Everitt, Blake Gutt, Hannah Morcos, Jessica Stoll, Alex Stuart, and Ella Williams. Kathleen Doyle, Lead Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library, was an excellent collaborator who also gave us invaluable assistance in our work on manuscripts. Yet another output of the project was an exhibition at Cambridge University Library in 2014 (https://ex­hib­itions. lib.cam.ac.uk/moving-word/case/introduction/), which was largely curated by students: Tim Atkin, Sara Harris, Edward Mills, Natalia Petrovskaia, Helena Philips-Robins, Maria Teresa Rachetta, Alex Stuart, and Shaun Thompson did a great job, as well as being fun to work with. John Wells from the University Library made the exhibition possible in the first place, and we should also like to thank his colleagues from the Library and from the Fitzwilliam Museum who collaborated on the exhibition: James Bloxam, Suzanne Paul, and Kristine RoseBeers. We can’t possibly thank all the scholars whose publications, input, interest in our work, feedback, and general support have informed and improved this book, but many of them are included in the final major output of the project, a volume of essays drawing on papers from the project’s two international conferences (UCL, 2013; King’s College, Cambridge, 2014): Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France: Studies in the Moving Word, edited by Nicola Morato and Dirk Schoenaers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). We would like to thank all the contributors to our conferences and this volume, since dialogue with them as well as the range and depth of their scholarship shaped the thinking of this book in

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vi Acknowledgements decisive ways. We got valuable feedback and support from our series editors, Ardis Butterfield and Christopher Cannon, and extremely helpful suggestions from the Press’s two anonymous readers, for which we are very grateful. Finally, Ruth Harvey, Sophie Marnette, and the late, deeply missed David Trotter were our MFLCOF Advisory Board and gave us judicious, generous advice at every stage. Chapter  1 is drawn from Simon Gaunt, ‘French literature abroad: towards an alternative history of French literature’, Interfaces, 1 (2015), 25–61 (with revisions), and the second part of Chapter  5 draws from Simon Gaunt, ‘Philology and the Global Middle Ages: British Library Royal 20 D 1’, Medioevo Romanzo, 40 (2016), 27–47 (again, with revisions). We are grateful to the editors and pub­lishers of these journals for permission to reproduce this material in a revised form. JG, SG, WB

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Contents Maps and Figures

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Introduction

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1. Local French outside France: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and the Second Mise en Prose of the Roman de Troie

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2. Francophone Literary Culture on the Move: Northern Italy

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3. Living History: Pierre de Langtoft and London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II

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4. History, Time, and Empire: The Histoire ancienne in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

122

5. The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies

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6. Dark Networks: Prehistories, Post-histories, and Imagined Geographies

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Conclusion: Networks, Communities, Language, and the Writing of History: Medieval French Literary Culture Outside France Bibliography Index

243 249 275

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Maps and Figures Maps 0.1. Linguistic map of France. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:France_language_map_1550.jpg, accessed 26 February 2019

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0.2–0.5.  France 1086, 1174, 1260, and 1360. ‘France in the Middle Ages’, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/utk/maps/popup/france.htm, accessed 7 August 2018

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6.1. Late medieval boundaries in the Low Countries (Stapel 2018)

216

Figures 1.1. Grenoble 861, f. 1. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

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1.2. Grenoble 861, f. 19r, detail. Note instructions to the artist in Italian. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

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1.3. Grenoble 861, f. 17r, detail. Note the manicula. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

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1.4. Grenoble 861, f. 7v, detail. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

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3.1. BL, Royal MS 20 A II, f. 145r, the Wallace lyrics. © The British Library Board, London

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4.1. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 9r, detail

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4.2. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 23r

149

4.3. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 130v

150

4.4. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 181v

152

4.5. Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 114r

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4.6. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 13r (cliché CNRS-IHRT, © Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condée)

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4.7. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 9v (cliché CNRS-IHRT, © Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condée)

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4.8. Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 11v (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 9v)

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5.1. Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f.1r. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

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x  Maps and Figures 5.2. Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f. 89r. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

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5.3. Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f. 499v, detail (Marc’s features effaced). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

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5.4. BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 363r, detail. © The British Library Board, London

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5.5. BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 28v, detail. © The British Library Board, London

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5.6. BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 27v detail, summary of the Flood. © The British Library Board, London

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5.7. BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 193v, detail. © The British Library Board, London

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5.8. BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, ff. 193v–194r. © The British Library Board, London

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Introduction The Problem and Its Scale That the various disciplines and approaches that make up modern literary studies—whether these be defined by the language of the texts in question (English, French, and so on) or by method (philology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, for ex­ample)—emerge from the institutional structures and intellectual frameworks of modern nation states is well established and uncontroversial. If these param­ eters have been challenged by postcolonial studies for the modern period, it has also become axiomatic in our now almost post-postcolonial academy that what we think we know about pre-modern literary traditions needs to be reconsidered. A necessary first step consists in casting aside the retrospective lens of the national literary histories associated with modern nation states, since a major aim of that literary historical enterprise was the tracing of a continuous national history from early medieval texts through to the modern period. Yet the resulting institutional and disciplinary structures and intellectual frameworks, though decried by many, are not easily shaken off; most literary scholars remain deeply embedded in them institutionally and intellectually. Thus, most students of medieval literature still encounter their object of study for the first time within the framework of school and university courses that are defined by the old categories of national literatures associated with ‘national’ lan­ guages (‘English’, ‘French’, ‘German’, ‘Italian’, ‘Spanish’, and so on), and a glance at those most institutional of institutional educational structures—public exam­in­ ation systems—is illuminating. Thus, if the Cambridge International A-level syl­ labus in English Literature has undergone the apparently radical change of title to ‘Literature in English’, recent syllabuses remain dominated by canonical British writers. While several US and Irish writers generally feature, and significant efforts have been made to include more women and non-white writers, over 50 per cent of ‘literature in English’ according to these school curricula is in fact British (even though the UK represents nothing like 50 per cent of the population of the Anglophone world).1 Moreover, the canon these syllabuses implicitly define

1  For recent syllabuses, see ‘Cambridge International AS and A Level English—Literature (9695)’, http://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-internationalas-and-a-level-english-literature-9695/, accessed 6 August 2018. The course also uses two anthologies of poetry and short stories, which bring in more varied writers. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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2  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad is dominated by writers who would not have been out of place twenty-five years ago, even if some of these writers only became canonical in the 1970s and 1980s: Austen, the Brontës, Chaucer, Dickens, Jennings, Marvell, Miller, Rossetti, Shakespeare (figuring multiple times), Wharton, Yeats. This template for ‘English literature’, without being atemporal, nonetheless transcends time and is de facto, given the predominance of British writers, grounded largely (though by no means exclusively) in place (England and the ‘British Isles’) as well as in nation (the UK) and language (English). Thus, one of the main characteristics that unites these  authors and makes their texts a legitimate corpus of material for study together (one that in turn instantiates a discipline) is implicitly their Englishness, characterized primarily by language, (literary) tradition, and place; the texts from elsewhere that figure are implicitly, therefore, in part at least considered in rela­ tion to this Englishness. If we move across the Channel and look at the syllabus for the 2019 agrégation de lettres modernes, we find an even more restrictive list of six authors represent­ ing la littérature française: Marie de France (whose Frenchness is affirmed in her very name, even though it is a modern confection), Marot, Scarron, Marivaux, Balzac, and de Beauvoir. Including as it does two women writers, this line-up is notably more diverse than that of 2018, which featured six male writers, but gen­ erally we find in recent years a familiar roster of Chrétien de Troyes, Jean Renart, Christine de Pizan, Ronsard, Montaigne, Rabelais, Pascal, Molière, Racine, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Chénier, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Giono, Yourcenar, and Bonnefoy.2 While it would be reductive to see all thinking about the canon in France as determined by the notoriously rigid and selective programme of the agrégation (one author per century after 1500 has to be selected each year, and only one from the long medieval period), the fact that all scholars and university teachers of French literature in France have to engage with its syllabus—and most of them have to pass it—along with the impact it has on academic publishing mean that its traction remains enormous. National examination systems are notoriously conservative sites of cultural memory and more open approaches are ubiquitous, but these syllabuses are nonetheless eloquent as to the tenacity of the model of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury national literary traditions in the twenty-first century, even as efforts are made to accommodate more diversity within the curriculum. Since these sylla­ buses determine the education of a generation of students, they shape the future while determining how the past is to be perceived. Even while many teachers in the Anglophone world at least are undermining the category of ‘nation’ in their pedagogy, nation lives on in the structures in which their teaching takes place and 2  Prescribed texts going back several decades may be found at the Wikipedia entry for ‘Agrégation de lettres modernes’, https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrégation_de_lettres_modernes, accessed 6 August 2018.

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Introduction  3 in which it is assessed. Even the more open discipline of Comparative Literature tends to define itself in relation to discrete cultures and national boundaries. Thus the largest association in the world for the study of Comparative Literature describes itself as ‘the principal learned society in the United States for scholars whose work involves several literatures and cultures as well as the premises of cross-cultural literary study itself ’ and declares that ‘comparative literature pro­ motes the study of intercultural relations that cross national boundaries’.3 National boundaries are crossed here, but their existence as a heuristic tool is not funda­ mentally questioned. If the literatures of medieval Europe have often been studied within the frame­ works of national literatures associated with modern nation states—with particu­ lar attention paid to founding fathers like Chrétien de Troyes, Chaucer, and Dante—medievalists are well aware that in the period they study the ‘national boundaries’ evoked by the ACLA did not exist in their modern form. Yet a grow­ ing body of scholarship shows that medieval literary studies have nonetheless been more often than not hidebound by categories emerging from modern nation-statehood. Much of the earlier scholarship that laid the foundations for our knowledge of medieval literature was undertaken in an age when nationhood was a given and when it was taken for granted that part of the interest of Beowulf and the Chanson de Roland, to take but two celebrated examples, was their sup­ posed foundational status within English and French literary culture respectively. Furthermore, it was assumed that a language embodied the spirit and culture of a nation, therefore the great writers of the languages associated with modern European nation states inscribed something quintessential about those institu­ tions’ cultures and histories. As Giulio Bertoni pithily put it in the fraught atmos­ phere of 1941 Rome, ‘La storia di un popolo o della sua civiltà è in realtà la storia della sua lingua’ (7, ‘The history of a people or of its civilization is in reality the history of its language’).4 Chaucer and Shakespeare adumbrated a precocious Englishness; the Chanson de Roland was the work of a great French patriot avant la lettre and anticipated some of the quintessential features of French poetry; Dante invented Italian culture practically single-handed. This book looks at a number of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts composed in a language we now call ancien français or Old French and questions the trad­ ition­al literary history that positions this literary culture largely in relation to France. Our purpose is to offer a new perspective on medieval French literary history and to suggest new approaches to the literary history of texts written or read in French during the Middle Ages. Scholars of European languages throughout 3 ‘About the American Comparative Literature Association’,  http://www.acla.org/about, accessed 6 August 2018. Emphases added. 4  Bertoni’s essay is the foreword to the first number of the journal Cultura Neolatina. Unexpectedly for some modern readers, his articulation of nationalist sentiments has an implicit anti-fascist agenda (Bertoni 1941).

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4  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the world are dealing with the legacy of national literary historical frameworks, and the issues raised by traditional notions of ‘French literature’ are as complex and enduring in the UK and other Anglophone countries as they are in France. We believe that the perspective of this book will cast new light, coming as it does from outside France and the Francophone world, and from scholars based in long-established university departments of French with strong literary and literaryhistorical specializations. It is often acknowledged, particularly among Anglophone scholars, that many of the earliest manifestations of ‘French literature’ came from elsewhere and were widely disseminated outside France (whether ‘France’ be defined in medieval or modern terms). However, the implications of this are rarely fully examined, and in the Francophone world a more traditional literary history still prevails, which focuses on Paris and/or regions adjacent to Paris such as the Champenois (an area that, in the period this book covers, needs to be considered also in close rela­ tion to the kingdom’s eastern border and to the Empire). This more traditional account adopts often implicitly, sometimes explicitly, a Franco-centric perspec­ tive whereby ‘French culture’ has its origin in ‘France’—particularly Paris as the Middle Ages advance—and emanates outward to other parts of Europe and beyond. Textual production and dissemination elsewhere are adduced as evi­ dence of the pre-eminent influence of French courtly culture during the medieval period. The collaborative AHRC-funded project that gave rise to this book— Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France (MFLCOF)—combined the use of empirical data, critical theory, and digital humanities to challenge these assumptions and start to pull together the threads of a new literary history of medieval French, often drawing on work taking place in a number of disparate disciplines: Anglo-Norman studies, medieval Dutch and Italian studies, phil­ ology, codicology, postcolonial studies, translation studies.5 A distinctive feature of the research that underpins this book is that it focuses on manuscripts as much as on texts and textual production, with, in both cases, an emphasis on transmis­ sion through time and space. Whereas mainstream scholarship in medieval French studies has often implicitly regarded manuscripts from outside France with texts in French as inferior (whether linguistically or as copies), we place them centre stage and seek to look at their cultural resonances in relation to their specific contexts, rather than as peripheral reflections of a hegemonic centre. We are particularly concerned to set aside the assumptions about core and periphery that often implicitly underpin evaluations of medieval texts in French. With a view to making this concern as explicit as possible, the remainder of this first section of our introduction briefly outlines some deceptively straightforward terms that we will use throughout this book: ‘French’, ‘France’, and ‘literature’. 5  Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, http://www.medievalfrancophone. ac.uk/, accessed 14 August 2019.

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Introduction  5 A simple traditional definition of French would run something like this. French is a Romance language, which is to say a language that evolves from Latin after the fall of the Roman empire in the fourth century. Scholars disagree as to how many Romance languages there are (the debating point is when the linguistic practices of a speech community constitute a ‘language’, when a ‘dialect’), but, using a number of criteria such as lexis, phonology, morphology, and syntax, it is relatively uncontroversial to see the following at least as discrete languages: Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian. A number of factors determined why and how Romance languages evolved from Latin into different languages, but two elements sometimes referred to as sub­ strata and superstrata are widely (though not universally, and often in different ways) believed to be key. The substrata consist of the languages spoken in differ­ ent regions before the introduction of Latin; the superstrata, of the languages spoken by the various Germanic, Gothic, and Scandinavian peoples whose suc­ cessive migrations or invasions led to and followed the disintegration of the Roman empire. Thus, it is supposed that, prior to the introduction of Latin, the population of much of the area that is now modern France spoke some version of Gaulish, a Celtic language (though concrete evidence of this is patchy). From the fifth century onward, the same territory fragments into at least three distinct lin­ guistic regions: Brittany, where the main language continued to be Celtic; Occitania, or broadly speaking southern France, which remained largely free from invasions and where the language evolved from Latin relatively untouched by Gothic or Germanic languages; and finally, northern France, where Frankish (a Germanic language) had a strong influence on how the phonology, stress, morph­ology, lexis, and to some extent the syntax of Latin evolved into the Romance language we call French.6 Although it is unclear when varieties of ­spoken Romance languages became so distinct from Latin and from each other as to become mutually unintelligible, or at least perceptibly discrete, it is likely that already in the Roman period the difference between spoken and written Latin was considerable. Written Latin was also subject to modification over time as the complexity of classical written grammar became harder for speakers of Romance vernaculars to grasp and reproduce intuitively. The consensus today is that the Roman world morphed into a more fragmented Romance world in stages and at different paces from place to place, as local idioms became more clearly defined and less intelligible to non-locals; moreover, in this Romance world Latin con­ tinued to be used by elites as a supralocal mode of communication. Thus, Michel Banniard suggests on the basis of extensive research the following sequence for the growing awareness of the clear demarcation of spoken Romance from Latin: 750–800 Old French; 800–850 Occitan; 850–900 Hispanic languages; 900–950 Italian dialects (1992, 487–92). 6  For a succinct articulation of this history of French, see Ayres-Bennett 1995.

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6  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Surviving instances of written Romance, as distinct from Latin, before the twelfth century are few and far between. The earliest example of written French is usually taken to be the two short passages recorded as part of the so-called Strasbourg Oaths of 842, to which we shall return shortly: Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d’ist di in avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradre salvar dift, in o quid il mi altresi fazet et ab Ludher nul plaid nunquam prindrai, qui meon vol, cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit. For the love of God and for Christendom and our common salvation, from this day onward, as God will give me the wisdom and power, I shall protect this brother of mine Charles, with aid or anything else, as one ought to protect one’s brother, so that he may do the same for me, and I shall never knowingly make any covenant with Lothair that might harm this brother of mine Charles. Si Lodhuuigs sagrament que son fradre Karlo iurat conservat, et Karlus, meos sendra, de suo part, non l’ostanit, si io returnar non l’int pois, ne io ne neuls cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla aiudha contra Lodhuuuig nun li iu er. If Louis keeps the oath that he has sworn to his brother Charles, and Charles, my lord, on the other hand breaks it, and if I cannot dissuade him from it—­neither I nor anyone that I can dissuade from it—then I shall not help him in any way against Louis. (Ducos, Soutet, and Valette 2016, 112)

As is well known, these short passages are embedded in a Latin chronicle. Latin remained the main language for written records and for the composition of texts of all kinds, including those we might think of as literary, throughout much of the former Roman empire and during most of the rest of the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, a more sustained use of what we now call French and Occitan as written languages from the early twelfth century onward is clear. From roughly 1150 this accelerates, and there is a marked increase in the number of texts recorded. This vernacular written culture is undoubtedly a secondary effect of a more general increase in literacy and the use of writing in the twelfth century; still, the number of texts produced and copied in Latin continues to outweigh mas­ sively those produced and copied in any vernacular.7 Other Romance languages, 7  On early Romance texts, see Asperti 2006. A more sustained literary culture in the vernacular begins around 1100 with Guilhem IX’s lyrics (1071–1126) in Occitan and with the Chanson de Roland in French (c. 1100), but the role of writing in the production of these texts is unclear. The date of the earliest manuscript of the Roland (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 23) is, however, thought not to postdate the text’s composition by much (c. 1125–50). On the increase in the use of the written record generally after 1150, see Clanchy 2009. Henry II of England seems to have embarked upon a deliber­ ate strategy of increasing the use of written record because of the extensive nature of his territories; this is then imitated by Philip Augustus in France as he also seeks to establish a more sophisticated administration. The increase in the production (and survival) of vernacular texts no doubt depends

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Introduction  7 like Catalan and Italian, are a little behind French and Occitan in terms of ­surviving texts, with sporadic surviving witnesses to written texts in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then the emergence of a more sustained written culture in the thirteenth. The relatively linear and traditional linguistic history we have just traced, though valid in its broad outline, masks a number of problems. For one thing, we are using anachronistic and retroactive modern labels like ‘French’, ‘Catalan’, and ‘Italian’ to designate medieval languages. The reason for citing the Strasbourg Oaths in this context, even if they have little bearing on the period under exam­ in­ation in this book, is that they routinely open histories of the French language and are therefore cast explicitly as the preface or prehistory to later material in French. However, the passage in ‘French’ in the Strasbourg Oaths is designated in the text as ‘romana lingua’, which, along with ‘lingua gallica’, is the standard Latin designation for French into the late Middle Ages. ‘Romana lingua’ also antici­ pates the standard way in which Romance languages, including French and Occitan, refer to themselves during the twelfth century, which is as roman. Although the term fransois is used in the twelfth century to speak of language as opposed to ethnicity, it becomes the standard term for the language only in the thirteenth century, when, as Serge Lusignan has recently shown (2012, particu­ larly 84–95), it begins to be used more systematically. Fransois—whether as a noun or an adjective—is ambivalent in the twelfth century: occasionally it is used as synonym of roman; sometimes it identifies the form of roman spoken in the region around Paris; and sometimes it identifies an ethnic group, in which case it may be restrictive (those who live in the Ile de France, which is to say the region around Paris) or inclusive (people from any region where the population may be of Frankish descent). The more systematic use of fransois to designate the lan­ guage and people from the region around Paris seems to have originated in the thirteenth-century University of Paris, where students were divided into colleges known as nationes depending on their origin (English/German, Norman, French, and Picard, with other students having to join one of these groups): fransois is used in this context by those writing and speaking Picard French to designate Parisian French and distinguish it from their own. It is worth making two points about this: first, the systematic designation as fransois of what we call ‘French’ derives from seeking to differentiate one form of the same language from another, which means that it derives from a process that requires an external as well as an internal viewpoint and also that it has its origin in internal difference as much as to some extent on the greater availability of the infrastructure that makes writing possible, an infra­ structure primarily found in religious institutions, towns, and courts, primarily supporting the pro­ duction and reproduction of Latin texts. English (multilingual) monasteries seem to have led the way in the twelfth-century increase in written Romance culture, perhaps responding to the important earlier (and to some extent continuing) Old English written tradition, on which see Treharne  2012. On twelfth-century manuscripts with texts in French, see Careri, Ruby, and Short 2001. If textual produc­ tion increases after c. 1150, most twelfth-century texts survive primarily in later manuscripts.

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8  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad perceived coherence;8 secondly, the most common form of written French at this stage—as is well-known—is Picard, followed by Norman, then Champenois, not the French of Paris or the Ile de France, still sometimes known by the modern neologism francien. The term francien was coined by Gaston Paris (1889), a towering figure in the foundation of the modern discipline of medieval French. His agenda was to recon­ struct and document an illustrious predecessor for standard French already in the twelfth century, a neutral and ‘pure’ form from the area around Paris, supposedly unmarked by regional variation. While the term has often been decried by dia­ lect­olo­gists—since the notion of a neutral form of language without regional vari­ ation or dialect is absurd—francien still has considerable currency among literary scholars and textual editors.9 Yet, as Martin Glessgen has recently reaffirmed with aplomb, ‘l’écrit vernaculaire ne fait son apparition à Paris qu’au milieu du 13e siè­ cle et . . . il ne devient dominant qu’au début du 14e siècle. Paris ne peut donc pas avoir servi de modèle pour l’époque antérieure’ (2017, 316, ‘vernacular writing does not make an appearance in Paris until the middle of the thirteenth century, and it does not become dominant until the beginning of the fourteenth. Paris cannot therefore have been the model for the earlier period’). In other words, the reason why Gaston Paris had to reconstruct twelfth-century written francien was not just because no examples happened to survive; rather, it never existed in the first place. On the other hand, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at least, Picard traits are found in texts and manuscripts from pretty much every part of the Francophone world, which suggests that Picard or­thog­raphy (which is to say, spellings that presumably reflect Picard pronunciation and morphology) was a supralocal scripta or koine for French far beyond Picardy.10 Gaston Paris’s very notion of francien is, as Glessgen puts it, ‘trompeuse à plusieurs égards’ (2017, 355, ‘misleading on several levels’): first, because of its ideological underpinning; second, because it presupposes an erroneous chronology (Parisian French only becomes central to the development of written French after 1300); third, because it fails to distinguish dialect from scripta. It is worth pausing a moment to clarify our use of the terms koine and scripta. Koine (from the Greek adjective meaning ‘common’ or ‘shared’) is a form of a lan­ guage that develops as a supralocal norm; entailing the levelling (or gen­er­al­iza­ tion) of a range of forms from a variety of dialects, koines may develop in 8  Roger Bacon famously distinguishes four specific varieties in what he calls lingua gallicana: the idioms of the Picards, Normans, and Burgundians are said to sound strange to the Gallicos (French). Although he refers to ‘many other varieties’, he is not specific about what these are (Lodge 2004, 54). 9  See Lodge (2004, 54–6) on the meaning of francois and the term francien. Ayres-Bennett, among many others, retains the term francien (1995, 385). 10 Lodge  1993, 132. See also, for example, Minervini  2010a on Picardisms in the French of Outremer (the eastern Mediterranean) and Butterfield  2009, 60–1 on the geographic mobility of Picard.

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Introduction  9 tandem with specific literary forms. A celebrated medieval example is the form that Occitan takes in the majority of the troubadour lyric tradition, since the pres­ tige and popularity of the canso (or courtly love lyric) both within and outside Occitania impact upon the stability of the koine in which texts were composed by a range of native and non-native speakers. Whereas a koine may entail linguistic phenomena that are generally taken to derive from the spoken practices of differ­ ent dialects coming into contact with each other, the term scripta designates spe­ cifically written practices, which may develop independently of spoken forms. As Johannes Kabatek puts it in the best recent synthesis of research on koine and scripta, ‘the field of scripta research is critical of an approach which naively equates regional written language with regional dialect’ (2010, 151). Picard scripta is a case in point, since its features are found in manuscripts produced in a wide variety of places. Why should this be so? Most obviously, the economic importance of towns in Picardy (such as Amiens, Beauvais, Laon, Saint-Quentin, and Senlis) led to their becoming cultural and educational centres, key for the production of texts and manuscripts, with numerous urban schools that sent students to the main nascent universities in Paris, Bologna, Oxford. Crucially, the areas of northern France and the Low Countries where Picard predominated were also key contributors to the Crusades, as well as providing staging posts on trade routes that ran from England and further west or north, to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean (down the Rhine or the Rhône). There are thus many good reasons why Picard scripta should have been exported and legible elsewhere. To return to the Strasbourg Oaths, what exactly does romana lingua mean at this stage, and what are we to make of the fact that the individual taking the oath ‘in French’ is in fact the ‘German’, not the ‘Frenchman’? As others have pointed out, the Strasbourg Oaths seek to offer a written record of an oral performance. The history of the Carolingian empire of which they are part (Nithard’s De dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici pii) is (naturally) in Latin and concerns the quarrel­ some relations of the three sons of Louis the Pious. The oaths themselves are thought to concern the pact made by Louis, king of the East Franks (Germans), with Charles, king of the West Franks (French), against their brother Lothair. According to the text, Louis takes his oath in romana lingua while Charles takes his in teudisca lingua. This gives the impression of Nithard—in fact a member of the imperial family—having recorded what they actually said (as opposed to a Latin transposition), and it has been inferred from this (a) that romana lingua was considered distinct from Latin as well as from German, and (b) that neither Louis nor Charles spoke or understood enough Latin to take an oath in it. The short oath ‘in French’ is indeed linguistically distinct from the framing narrative, but all this actually tells us about Louis’s oath is that this is how Nithard sought to represent how ‘Roman language’ was spoken as distinct from his written account of events. Although Romance and German are distinguished from each other here, there is no clear indication that Latin and Romance are conceived of as

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10  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad separate languages (as opposed, for instance, to different registers of discourse, written and oral), nor is there clear evidence that the oaths were taken in the ver­ nacular because Louis and Charles had insufficient Latin. Indeed, the high degree of Latinity of the upper echelons of Carolingian society, the ubiquitous pragmatic use of Latin for record-keeping, legal transactions, and property deals, quite apart from the use of Latin in any religious context, make it unlikely that Louis and Charles knew no Latin; in fact, their command of Latin was probably fairly good. Furthermore, as others have noted, the situation in which the oaths are set is essentially multilingual. Thus, the main reason why Louis and Charles take their oaths in each other’s languages is so that the other’s troops can understand them. Perhaps even to say ‘each other’s languages’ is misleading. Louis and Charles are brothers as well as princes, and it is likely that both spoke and had considerable facility in several vernaculars (including romana lingua and teudisca lingua) as well as Latin.11 Three key points emerge from this. First: if, by the twelfth century, the repeated assertion that texts in Latin have been mis en roman (‘put into Romance’, that is, translated) suggests a clear-cut distinction between Latin and vernacular, we do not really know when this distinction became evident and what its implications were for speakers, writers, and readers of Romance languages. Indeed, the con­ tinued use of the term roman until at least the thirteenth century might suggest a conceptual continuum between Latin and vernacular (both being implicitly the language of Romans) rather than a clear-cut distinction between separate lan­ guages. Furthermore, the word latin in French or lati in Occitan was frequently used to designate language generally, rather than Latin specifically, and a latinier was a translator or interpreter, someone who moved between different languages: cognates of the words we use today to designate specific languages were thus used more fluidly in the Middle Ages. Fluidity almost certainly characterized the way some languages were used too, inasmuch as it was almost certainly possible to read Latin aloud (or to transpose and inflect it as it was read aloud) so as to make it broadly intelligible to Romance vernacular speakers who ostensibly knew no Latin; this probably continued to be the case for a considerable period after the process of Romance languages becoming distinct from Latin had begun.12 To put this slightly differently and to draw on a distinction Anthony Lodge makes in his 11  On the Strasbourg Oaths, see Banniard (1992, 499–501) and McKitterick (1991, 138 and 142). Banniard argues that, rather than stress the differences between late Latin and early French, we might rather consider their similarity (‘la langue populaire paraissait vers 850 en France aux locuteurs lettrés uicina latinatati’ (499, ‘popular speech in France around 850 seemed to educated speakers close to Latin’). McKitterick maintains that none of the hypotheses about linguistic differentiation or the decline of Latinity for which the Strasbourg Oaths are often taken as evidence is sustainable; Latin remains a primary means of communication. Butterfield (2009, 44–9) similarly suggests the oaths implicitly foreground vernacular multilingualism. 12  See Banniard (1992, 38–9) on what he calls la communication verticale (‘vertical communica­ tion’), which was facilitated by the relative stability of texts and linguistic forms in Latin.

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Introduction  11 work on Parisian French (2004, 12–13), it is conventional to approach the study of Romance vernaculars and their gradual differentiation from Latin in the Middle Ages in terms of language and dialect, but it may be more useful to see the process in terms of register (that is, the pragmatic selection of an appropriate level of language according to circumstances). In some contexts, register may in fact have been the key factor in language choice, not linguistic competence. Thus, as in the Strasbourg Oaths, the use of Latin or a Romance vernacular may mark primarily a distinction between written and spoken registers. Second, ‘French’ or romana lingua emerges from the outset in a multilingual context, one in which some speakers (including, but not only, elite ones) are multi­ lin­gual and move between different languages but in which all members of the speech community are aware that languages share political and cultural spaces. Third, the ability to speak different languages and then levels of competence in different languages are determined by social and pragmatic factors. High-ranking nobles, clerks or those in religious orders, and anyone trading over medium or long distances were perhaps likely to be more multilingual. But multilingualism (as distinct from bilingualism) no doubt took a variety of forms, as it still does in most parts of the world today. One may speak several languages without being able to write them (or without being able to read at all, let alone write); conversely, one may have a high level of reading competence in a language—and even be able to write it passably—without being able to speak it effectively; one may be able to make oneself understood in a language for practical purposes yet nonetheless be clearly marked as a non-native speaker (faulty grammar, uneven lexis, hesitant or simple syntax, elements imported from other languages, poor grasp of register); one may understand a language well but have difficulty expressing oneself in it— yet, faced with an interlocutor (even one in a similar position), one may be able to have an effective conversation that moves backwards and forwards between two or more languages—rather like the Strasbourg Oaths. A small minority of multi­ lin­gual individuals may indeed be perfectly bilingual or trilingual in speech and on paper, with a command of different registers in a range of languages, but they will be the exceptions. There are many degrees of multilingualism below this highest level of competence that tend not to attract much scholarly attention and may often go under the radar, becoming invisible, particularly if the main schol­ arly focus is the high culture of a single language. But these lower levels of multi­ lin­gualism are part of the fabric of everyday life in multilingual spaces around the world now and must also have been so in the past.13 Furthermore, as we have seen, the use of French in the Middle Ages was not coterminous with the borders of modern France. For one thing, less than half of

13  The difficulty of assessing multilingualism in the Middle Ages, with only fragmentary evidence, is examined intelligently by Crick 2011 and Busby 2017, 9–75.

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12  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad ANGLETERRE Anglais

Bas-Saxon

Bas-Francique

Lille

llo

Francique moyen

n

CHARLES QUINT

d

Sa in to ng ea

is

as

n

Dijon

Besançon

SUISSE

FRANCE

Li

mo

u

n si

A

u

ve

LANGUES OCCITANES

Rom

rg

Lyon

and

SAVOIE n

a

t

LANGUES ITALIQUES

Vivaro-alpin

Occitan central co

Basque

n

Toulouse

Montpellier

Provençal

ES

N GÊ

Marseille

Castillan

Mer Méditerranée

EMPIRE DE CHARLES QUINT LANGUES IBÉRIQUES

is ig gu

n icho Berr

Limoges Clermont

Bordeaux

FrancComtois

ue

ur

n

niq

D'OIL

Poitiers

G

no

Orléans

vi

ma

ge

Strasbourg

Lorrain

Alé

Gallo

An

Francique supérieur

Metz

Châlons

LANGUES

in Poitev

Golfe de Gascogne

no

Francien

Rennes

Nantes Québecois Acadien

Paris

am

an

Bo

Breton

rm

GERMANIQUES

Ch

No

pe

Rouen

Caen

Pi

ca

Amiens

Wa

rd

Manche

LANGUES EMPIRE DE

Catalan

Frontières de 1550

100 km

Figure 0.1.  Linguistic map of France. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:France_language_map_1550.jpg, accessed 26 February 2019

the modern Hexagon was French-speaking (langues d’oïl), as illustrated by this linguistic map of France (see Figure 0.1). Maps are always inadequate in their representation of where a language begins and ends, precisely because dialects leak into each other and distinctions between languages are difficult to pin down (as signalled in Figure 0.1 by the hatched area sometimes known as the ‘Crescent’, here conveniently covered by the word ‘FRANCE’). Linguistic borders were also fuzzier than they would become once modern nation states began to impose the use of national languages and to insti­ tutionalize monolingualism. Indeed, prior to modern nation states, border zones were routinely multilingual and linguistic borders themselves—untidy and fuzzy with (for example) French- or German-speaking communities on the ‘wrong’

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Introduction  13 side of the Rhine, French-speaking enclaves in areas that were otherwise Flemish- or Occitan-speaking (and vice versa), and also some fairly significant intermediary regions in which ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ forms of French and Occitan seem to have prevailed, suggesting continua of linguistic practices rather than clear-cut distinctions. Linguistic borders in the Middle Ages did not coincide with either modern or medieval political borders. Indeed, if we identify France primarily with the lands controlled by the French king, its borders in the Middle Ages were more unstable than they became after 1500. While the historical borders of France and indeed the definition of ‘France’ are contentious, the following maps graphically illustrate that any straightforward equation between language and nation state is simplistic (see Figures 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5).

1086

1174

Rouen

Tosny Château Gaillard Paris

Vexin

Normandy French Royal Domain

France

English Control

Place name Battle

Place name Battle

Sluya 1340

1260

1360

Crécy 1346

French Control

French Control Place name Battle

English Control

Place name Battle

Poitiers 1356

English Control

Figures 0.2–0.5.  France 1086, 1174, 1260, and 1360. ‘France in the Middle Ages’, http:// www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/utk/maps/popup/france.htm, accessed 7 August 2018

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14  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad But if the linguistic situation ‘in France’ is far from straightforward, even more significant for our purposes is that French was deeply, though differently, embed­ ded in parts of Europe where it was not an indigenous language. The reasons for this will be explored in more detail as specific cases arise throughout this book, but the most important regions in which texts written in French circulated, were copied, and indeed were composed were as follows: • England and other areas of the British Isles more selectively (certain towns in Ireland, Scotland, the Welsh Marches, and Wales). It is tempting to see 1066 as the watershed here, since the Norman Conquest embedded a Francophone (though not always ‘French’) aristocracy and clergy in the British Isles with lasting impact. However, there was already a Francophone pres­ ence in England and sustained cross-channel exchange and traffic before the Conquest.14 This may help explain why England quickly became the main driver of written Francophone culture in the twelfth century, before vernacular material was produced in significant quantity on the continent. Yet after the Conquest, matters are complex, since the first language of the Insular Norman aristocracy became English within a few generations, cross-channel ties meant French continued to be ubiquitous in aristocratic circles, and, while the use of French in England was tenacious in some spheres through to the sixteenth century (the law, for example), the number of French speakers, their competence, and their reasons for speaking or writing French varied considerably between 1066 and the later Middle Ages. While some major English writers of the later Middle Ages (Gower, for example) also wrote in French and Latin, by the late fourteenth century English is a signifi­ cant literary language, albeit one with limited reach and whose texts are often in dialogue with French ones, as Ardis Butterfield has shown so cogently in her magisterial The Familiar Enemy (2009). Her contention that ‘England was a trilingual country [English, French, Latin] right through the period’ (2009, 11) is undoubtedly correct, but French was nonetheless always a minority language, restricted to specific registers and perhaps more importantly to high-prestige speech communities, which meant its influence in some circles was disproportionate to the population that actually spoke French.15

14  See Lewis 1995; also Tyler 2011c, who stresses the importance of aristocratic women from the Continent being married to English nobles before 1066 to the introduction of French into some insu­ lar circles. Emma of Normandy, wife of kings Ethelred then Cnut and mother of Edward the Confessor, is a particularly significant example (c. 985–1052). 15  For other recent work, see Cannon 2013 and O’Donnell 2017. Cannon shows the extent to which knowledge of French may have been determined by class, and O’Donnell shows that for some readers of French, Latin may have been a support, rather than vice versa, which together suggest that for some readers Latin was regarded as more accessible than French.

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Introduction  15 • The Low Countries. The political frontiers between the kingdom of France and the Empire were unstable and contested. Part of the lands of the powerful counts of Flanders lay within the Empire, although the county proper fell— often ­disputably—under the aegis of the French king; among other influential imperial territories to the north and north-east of French territory were the county of Hainault, where French dominated, and the Flemish-dominated duchy of Brabant, where the court is considered to have been Flemishspeaking (but where Wenceslas, duke of Luxembourg and Bohemia, com­ posed lyrics in French, woven into his Scottish-, Irish- and English-set Arthurian romance, Méliador, by Jean Froissart, whose career was spent in the patronage of the Hainault comital extended family). Nobility, churchmen, and merchants in several of these areas used French for cultural and pragmatic purposes, while some religious communities, though located in Flemish-speaking territories, seem routinely to have used French alongside Flemish and Latin.16 Yet to speak of ‘Francophone communities’ in Flanders and the Low Countries may be misleading; it would be more ac­cur­ate to say that communities even some distance from the apparent linguistic frontier were for some purposes multilingual. • The Italian peninsula. There is indirect evidence for the circulation of texts in French in the twelfth century, but there is unequivocal evidence for ­centres of Francophone literary activity and manuscript production from the mid-thirteenth onward, initially in Genoa, Pisa, and the Veneto, subse­ quently northern Italy more generally, and finally in Naples and the south, where a new Francophone literary culture, drawing on sources from northwestern Europe, northern Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean emerged under the Capetian Angevins in the thirteenth century.17 Italy seems to have been particularly crucial to the manuscript traditions of some key texts written in French, some of which are included in the corpus studied in this book: the Roman de Troie, the Histoire ancienne, the Tristan en prose, and Guiron le Courtois, as well as many chansons de geste.18 Traditional histories of Italian literature assert a decline in interest in texts in French or code this socially as increasingly restricted to the bourgeoisie once Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch are available to Italian readers. Nevertheless, manuscript pro­ duction indicates a continued appetite for texts in French on the part of a broad spectrum of Italian readers through to the fifteenth century. Furthermore, several extremely successful texts written in French are the work of Italians: Brunetto Latini, Marco Polo, Martin da Canale, and 16  For a recent case study, see Peersman 2012 on the abbey at Ninove. 17  Meyer 1904 remains indispensable here, but see also Holtus and Wunderli 2005. 18  According to Keith Busby, if more than 50 per cent of surviving Old French manuscripts were composed in the region around Arras, many Arthurian manuscripts in particular were produced in the north of Italy (Venice, Pisa, Genoa, Tuscany). See Busby 2002, 523.

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16  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Rusticiaus de Pise (also known today as Rustichello da Pisa; we retain both names). • The eastern Mediterranean. The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was established in 1099 after the First Crusade and survived (in reduced form) until the fall of Acre in 1291. The majority of the western Europeans who founded and subse­ quently settled in the Kingdom of Jerusalem were either of Norman extrac­ tion, and therefore Francophone, or from Flanders, and therefore also French-speaking at least to some extent. Occitan speakers were present in large numbers in the contiguous county of Tripoli, the principality of Antioch, and the county of Edessa, but the Norman and northern French/Flemish presence was nonetheless also strong in Tripoli and Antioch. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, both the principalities of Cyprus and the Morea (in the Peloponnese) had Francophone rulers, and both also took in Francophone refugees from the crusader states after the fall of Acre. There were important scriptoria producing manuscripts with texts in French in the Latin Kingdom, particularly Acre, and some significant texts in French are known to have been composed in Cyprus and the Morea.19 However, as with the British Isles, the Low Countries, and Italy, the eastern Mediterranean was profoundly and intrinsically multilingual, with French (in a range of varieties) existing along­ side multiple forms of (at least) Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Occitan, and Persian, often in communities that were also multi-ethnic and multi-faith and where only a relatively small minority had French as a mother tongue.20 Although we also have evidence for the presence of French texts in the Iberian peninsular, Germany, Scandinavia, and various parts of central and eastern Europe (primarily through the documented presence of manuscripts and transla­ tions of French texts), it is less clear that there was sustained manuscript produc­ tion or circulation. Our focus in this book will be on parts of Europe where French texts were reproduced and then read in French, rather than in translation. Does the presence of texts in French in so many places where it was not an indigenous language mean that French was spoken widely outside France? The evidence is equivocal, and much depends on what one means by ‘spoken’. While 19  The best and most thorough study of the French of Outremer is Minervini 2010a. On the scrip­ toria of Acre, see Folda  2005, who argues that for a while they were the most important in Christendom. 20  The situation therefore has similarities with the phenemonon studied in Trudgill’s seminal work on contact linguistics (see in the first instance Trudgill 1986): contact between different English dia­ lects and other languages, as spoken (in both cases) by native and non-native speakers, inflects how English developed in colonial and postcolonial contexts, for instance in Australia. Fundamental to groundbreaking recent scholarship such as Minervini 2010a and Zinelli 2013 and 2016 is the idea that language contact of this largely oral sort inflects scripta in the Middle Ages, though not necessarily in straightforward ways.

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Introduction  17 current estimates of the numbers of English people in the thirteenth century with a native command of French, for example, suggest they represent a tiny propor­ tion of the population (Cannon  2013), the number of people with some prag­ matic knowledge of French—and this in a range of different contexts—was certainly far greater. In any case the number of speakers may be less important for some purposes than who they were and the purposes for which they used French. High-ranking nobles, clergymen, and merchants would all almost cer­ tainly have known some French. As far as textual culture is concerned, whereas modern scholarship has tended to focus on the fact that courtly narrative was mediated first and foremost in French, the circulation of texts about the past (classical antiquity, the Arthurian past, the Carolingian age) in France was if any­ thing a more important cultural glue for middle and upper echelons of European medi­eval society, and of course there was significant overlap between courtly and historical texts.21 In England, the Low Countries, Italy, and the eastern Mediterranean, if you could not read about the past in Latin—and sometimes even if you could—you did so in French. However, although the sociolinguistic reasons for the use of French in each of these regions differed, they have elements in common which make it valuable to treat them together. French was not used in these different places because of a centrifugal relation to a clearly defined cultural or political centre but rather because of their being part of one or more networks. What is the nature of these networks? In his study of Parisian French, Anthony Lodge (2004, 39–49) explores the sociolinguistic implications of the two models of urbanization elaborated by Hohenberg and Lees (1995): the ‘network system’ and the ‘central place system’. Some major cities come into being because they are part of a ‘network place sys­ tem’, which is to say that their main raison d’être is as part of a network and their position on, or as the hub of, a system of major long-distance transport arteries: examples include medieval Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and mod­ ern Hong Kong. Some other major cities, however, derive their importance from being the focal point of a ‘central place system’, which is to say they are the hub of an economically prosperous region: examples here include Berlin, Madrid, and Moscow. With cities of the ‘network place’ sort, the importance of the region around is created by the city itself; with ‘central place’ cities, the urban area is rather a product of the region. The Veneto would be a good example of the for­ mer; the Ile de France, of the latter. Yet Hohenberg and Lees’ useful models should be understood for what they are, which is to say models: cities are unlikely to be purely one type or the other, while their nature may change over time. Thus, in terms of trade and political importance, Paris seems to be predominantly a ‘central place’ city in the twelfth century: a town which grows in importance 21  The formulation ‘cultural glue’ is calqued on Jacqueline Rose’s description of fantasy as ‘psychic glue’ (1996, 3).

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18  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad because of the agricultural prosperity and contingent political importance of the regions around it. However, the establishment and rapid growth of the University of Paris in the early thirteenth century, together with the growing power of the crown, meant that in the spheres of education, religion, and political power Paris quickly started to function more like a networked city, drawing students and clerks from all over Europe; furthermore, from the late thirteenth century onward, Paris also started to become more networked in other spheres, such as trade. London, the towns of northern France and the Low Countries, the towns of northern Italy, and those of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, were all, however, networked urban conglomerates in the twelfth century, and they remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Paris was not initially vital to these networks (even though it of course had a relation to them). As Lodge puts it, ‘Paris was essentially a North European city and its place in the European network system is probably a less important factor in its growth than the development of the city as a Central Place, firmly grounded in its hinterland’ (2004, 43). The pivotal place on French territory in relation to broader European networks in the twelfth century was, rather, Champagne, because of its trade fairs (with Normandy, Bordeaux, and Flanders being important connectors with Britain and, beyond that, with Scandinavia), while the main conduits were the river trade routes that ran down the Escaut/Scheldt/Schelde, the Rhine, or the Rhone, through northern Italy and the Mediterranean more widely.22 Such networks require common languages: in Western Europe, Latin was one, French another; in the eastern Mediterranean, Greek, Arabic, and to some extent Hebrew (which created networks with and within the West too) were also used by non-native speakers alongside Latin and French. Understanding these networks, their languages, and the changing nature and various roles of Paris is vital to understanding the use of French outside France in the Middle Ages. Recent research presents a more nuanced picture than earlier work concerned either to trace the prehistory of standard French or to examine a specific regional form. Indeed, although it is possible to detect regional features in many texts and manuscripts, a striking feature of many medieval French texts and manuscripts is the mixture of different regional forms and, in some texts and manuscripts, even a high degree of koineization, which is to say a levelling of regional variation so as to produce a linguistic practice with multiple cultural and geographic affiliations drawing elements from several different regional varieties. The effect of koineiza­ tion, it is generally agreed, is openness to a broader readership. Thus, as already noted, features of Picard French found in texts and manuscripts known to come from many other, geographically disparate, places may suggest that, both in Picardy and elsewhere, what this form of French signals above all is affiliation to

22  See Abu-Lughod 1989, 51–101, though she focuses on a slightly later period.

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Introduction  19 networks rather than to a specific region.23 Furthermore, recent research on the French of Outremer suggests it may in fact also be a form of this supralocal koine.24 This is not to say that manuscripts do not often betray the English, Italian, or other non-French origin of their scribes (and sometimes authors), but so-called ‘hybrid’ linguistic forms or ‘errors’ need to be seen within a broader context. French in the Middle Ages was not a language owned by ‘the French’ (however we understand this term) but a mobile and labile idiom used by different people in different places and for different purposes. What kind of literary texts in French were circulating in these disparate places? Whereas the modern canon of medieval French literature has often been dom­in­ ated by a narrow range of twelfth-century texts (for example the Oxford version of the Chanson de Roland, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, verse Tristan romances), surviving manuscripts suggest that the canon of texts in French that circulated outside France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was dom­in­ ated on the one hand by the great prose romance cycles that grew out of the verse romance tradition and on the other by texts that broadly speaking were con­ cerned with the narration of history and an understanding of the relation of the present to the past, whether these be the numerous chansons de geste that circu­ lated in Italy or the accounts of ancient history either in French or from French sources that were found in most parts of Europe.25 Some of these texts originated in France, some did not, but there are two key points for our purposes as far as the presence of texts in French in many parts of Europe is concerned. First, this presence cannot necessarily be attributed primarily to the influence of ‘French’ culture and ‘French’ political influence, if ‘French’ culture and ‘French’ political influence are understood in a limited sense as emanating from the territory con­ trolled by the king of France, still less as reflecting strictly royal power. The key agents of the vectors of transmission were rather, on the one hand, the Frenchspeaking Normans, whose sphere of influence and domains included England, Sicily, and, until the end of the twelfth century, southern Italy, then further enclaves around the Mediterranean (Henry II’s daughters were particularly important in disseminating Arthurian materials, for example);26 and, on the other hand, the trade routes that crossed the Low Countries and stretched at least to

23  Typical features of Picard French include retention of /k/ before tonic /a/ and /o/, no palatization of /g/, and less palatization of /k/. 24  Minervini 2010a finds many orthographical and phonological features of Outremer French that have parallels in Picard. She also finds forms that recall Normandy and other regions, but Picard traits are more frequent. 25  A major text that fits into neither of these categories is the Roman de la Rose, which circulates widely from the late thirteenth century onward and has the most extensive manuscript dissemination surviving for any medieval text in French. However, in contrast to the texts we discuss in this book, manuscript production of the Rose seems to have been very predominantly French. 26  See Bates 2013, 128–59 for an excellent recent account of how Norman expansion engendered networks.

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20  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad England in the west and in the east through the Rhineland to both north and south, across the Alps into Italy and thence into the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and more distant seas. Through much of the Middle Ages these trade routes were also followed by pilgrims and crusaders. Of course, the political situation changed during the period, and by the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the French crown—and a stronger idea of France—had become more important fac­ tors. But throughout much of the thirteenth century, vectors of transmission for many texts in French did not necessarily emanate from France; rather, they passed through it or skirted around it. The second key point is that much of this textual material is broadly speaking concerned with a genealogy of a common culture that we might identify as European and which was indeed already identified as such in some texts. This common culture has its origins in ancient history and (according to the ubiquitous Troy narrative) comes to Europe from Asia, thus from the East. Different groups claim precedence in relation to this common cul­ ture, and thus, as we will see, a contentious point in much of this material is whether the true heirs to Alexander and the Trojans are the British, the French, the Germans, or other groups, not all ‘national’ (cities, regions, domains may also claim ancient authority). The concern of much of this material with the past means it sits uneasily within modern categories like ‘fiction’, ‘history’, or ‘literature’. Questioning such distinc­ tions will thus be an underlying preoccupation of this book. If a history of ‘medi­ eval French literature’ that centres on France and the emergence of French culture is belied by the manuscripts and textual production on which we shall focus—in contrast to the texts and authors that are the primary object of studies of most literary histories—so too is one that takes as given some of the generic categories that have conventionally been treated as organizing principles.

This Book This book is one outcome of the collaborative, AHRC-funded project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, the other major outcomes being a collection of essays (Morato and Schoenaers 2018) and a database on which this book draws (www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk). We should be clear, however, that this book does not seek to give a comprehensive account of the data we gathered: it seeks rather to offer a more speculative argument, using that empirical research as a starting point but seeking also to go beyond some of the limitations imposed by a database’s technological requirements and to exploit the possibilities for nuanced, ‘analogue’ development permitted by a monograph. Our database maps the dissemination of six important textual traditions in French originally dating from the second half of the twelfth and the first half of the thirteenth centuries, in manuscripts produced during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries:

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Introduction  21 the classicizing Roman de Troie, Roman d’Alexandre, and Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, and the Arthurian prose romances of Lancelot, Tristan, and Guiron le Courtois. At various points in this book we shall go into detail about aspects of the manuscript and textual transmission of this material, touching on individual manuscripts; fuller and more comprehensive information is in many cases avail­ able from the website. For the moment, we briefly introduce each of these textual traditions: • Alexandre (see Chapter  6). Medieval accounts of Alexander the Great are varied and widespread in languages and traditions throughout and well beyond western Europe. Verse narratives recounting stories about the life of Alexander were composed in French from at least the early twelfth century onward.27 We focus on the Roman d’Alexandre as brought together by one Alexandre de Paris (or de Bernay, in Normandy) at some point in the 1180s. Alexandre incorporated earlier material in French, refashioning some of it metrically from decasyllabic verse laisses, commonly associated with the chanson de geste, into dodecasyllabic verse (hence alexandrines), and adding material from other sources. There are over thirty surviving manuscripts of the Roman d’Alexandre dating from the early thirteenth through to the fifteenth centuries. Transmitters and copyists continue Alexandre de Paris’s practice of adding and interpolating new narrative episodes. This Roman d’Alexandre seems to have been particularly popular in northern France and the Low Countries, but it also circulated in Britain and was copied in Italy. • Guiron le Courtois (see Chapter 2). This is the third of three great Arthurian prose cycles to be composed in French in the first half of the thirteenth century (after the Lancelot and Tristan, a knowledge of both of which Guiron assumes on the part of its readers). It consists of three main narrative arcs known today as the Roman de Méliadus, the Roman de Guiron, and the Suite Guiron; these narrate respectively the adventures of the two eponymous heroes and of a clan known as the Bruns in the period preceding Arthur’s coronation.28 The earliest parts were probably composed in the 1230s, prob­ ably in northern France, but Guiron was circulating in Italy by 1240, where episodes were added later in the century, perhaps by Rusticiaus de Pise. There are over forty extant manuscripts: production seems to have been par­ ticularly intense in northern France, Flanders, and Italy. Manuscripts went on being produced through the later Middle Ages, and adaptations of the text also went into print. • Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Chapters  4 and  5). Generally believed to have been composed in Flanders between 1208 and 1219 for Roger, castellan

27  For a good overview, see Gosman 1997.

28  For a good overview, see Morato 2010.

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22  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad of Lille, the unfinished and rambling prose Histoire ancienne is an embryonic so-called ‘universal history’: that is to say, it draws on a range of Latin and Old French sources to tell a single historical narrative that puts biblical history alongside, and in sequence with, classical antique history (legendary and factual).29 Thus various stories drawn from the Old Testament give way to accounts of Thebes, Troy, Aeneas, Alexander the Great, and Rome. There are at least ninety surviving manuscripts of different redactions of the Histoire ancienne, dating from the mid-thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The earliest manuscripts are either from northern France/Flanders or from Acre in the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Both the northern French and eastern Mediterranean traditions fed into manuscript production in Italy, which in turn led to a fairly fundamental reworking of the material in Naples around 1340 in a highly significant manuscript (London, BL, Royal MS 20 D 1), which was taken (possibly via Spain) to France as a gift for Charles V before 1380. This manuscript in turn became the source for a subsequent wave of manuscript production of the so-called ‘second redaction’ in France. • Lancelot (see Chapter 3). The core of the best known of Old French prose Arthurian cycles, the Lancelot en prose was completed between 1215 and 1220 and drew loosely on earlier verse texts to tell the story of the eponym­ ous hero, the most famous of the knights of the Round Table. Most probably in the following decade, other texts were added to create a cyclical narrative that included the Grail quest and the final years of Arthur’s kingdom (the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort le roi Artu), with the addition of these sequels probably leading to revisions to the original ‘non-cyclic’ version of the Lancelot to make the ‘cyclic’ version cohere with what follows.30 By 1250 other texts had been added to create a vast textual mass (usually known as the Vulgate Cycle), this time in the form of ‘prequels’: the Estoire del Saint Graal, the Estoire Merlin, and the Suite-Vulgate du Merlin. Almost all parts of the cycle are subject in transmission to contractions (and/or in some cases expansions) that are not always predictable, indicating that scribes of this very popular text often used more than one source. Earliest manuscript production (with surviving examples dating from as early as 1220) seems focused in the Champagne region and the Ile de France, but copies of the text were also quickly produced in the Low Countries, northern France, and Paris. The text was also copied (and clearly very popular) in Italy and in England throughout the fourteenth century. There are over a hundred sur­ viving manuscripts. 29 The Histoire ancienne is the object of a good deal of current research, so our understanding of its manuscript tradition is still a work in progress. Meyer 1885, Oltrogge 1989, and Jung 1996 remain fundamental research tools. 30  There is some controversy over the evolution of the Lancelot en prose, but we accept the account offered by Kennedy 1986; see also Micha 1987.

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Introduction  23 • Tristan (see Chapters 2, 5, and 6). Composed between 1215 and 1235, the Tristan en prose clearly took its inspiration in part at least from the prose Lancelot and in turn inspired the author or authors of the Guiron. A signifi­ cant portion of the more than eighty surviving manuscripts transmits only part of the text (without being fragments), which suggests that episodes of the longer cycle also circulated independently.31 As with other traditions under consideration here, the Low Countries and northern France were major early centres of production of manuscripts (mid thirteenth-century), but again a significant body of manuscripts was produced in Italy and the material was also present in the eastern Mediterranean. Much more popular with medieval readers than it has been with modern critics, the Tristan en prose went on being copied well into the fifteenth century. Whereas earlier sections of the vast narrative, which draws on twelfth-century verse texts while greatly supplementing them, chart the origins and exploits of Tristan’s parents in exotic lands, creating clear links with the Mediterranean basin, later sections align the Tristan story with the Lancelot en prose and in­corp­ or­ate long sections of the Queste. • Roman de Troie (see Chapters  1 and  5). This long (30,000 lines) narrative poem in octosyllabic rhyming couplets was composed c. 1165 by the Norman cleric Benoît de Sainte-Maure, working in the orbit of Henry II of England and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry commissioned the other major text attributed to Benoît, the Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Drawing mainly on two Latin texts (Dares and Dictys), the Roman de Troie is the main and most influential means by which the story of Troy was disseminated in the vernacular from the twelfth century through to the fifteenth. Relatively un­usual­ly for a vernacular text, it was translated into Latin; it was also reworked into prose several times (in France, Italy, and the Morea); one of these mises en prose was incorporated into the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne and enjoyed popularity in France after its verse source had fallen out of favour. The sixty or so surviving manuscripts and five prosifications indicate the text was popular in France but also that it was widely read (and copied) in Italy. Its presence in England and also the eastern Mediterranean is attested.32 We prefer to refer to these materials as ‘textual traditions’ and do not consider them to be discrete ‘texts’ in the accepted sense. In each case, transmission through time and space was transformative, often resulting in the addition, trans­ position, or taking away of textual material; on occasion in the transposition of

31  For a magisterial account of the manuscript tradition, see Baumgartner 1975; for an important recent contribution, Cigni 2012. On Italian manuscripts, see Delcorno Branca 1998a. 32  Although much about the manuscript tradition of the Roman de Troie remains unexplored, the manuscripts themselves are described in detail in Jung 1996.

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24  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the form and/or style of the text transmitted; frequently in the modification of the language; and invariably in the transformation of the text’s physical presentation in manuscript form. Traditional literary histories’ concentration on the moment and circumstances of textual production means that consideration of manuscript reception or transmission is often viewed simply as an index of a text’s popularity (or lack of it) and, in the case of texts in French having significant transmission outside France, as an index of the pre-eminence of ‘French’ (usually Parisian and/ or royal) culture. But as literary works move through time and space, these ‘text­ ual traditions’ need to be resituated in new sociohistoric and cultural contexts, understood as part of new literary and cultural milieus. A work like the Histoire ancienne, for example, needs to be read not just as an early thirteenth-century Flemish text but also, in its revised incarnations, as a mid-thirteenth-century eastern Mediterranean or northern Italian production, with the second redaction then read first as a southern Italian, Angevin creation and then (once it has had a linguistic make-over) as a fourteenth-century French one. This re-situation of texts requires consideration of the new forms they take in new cultural and historical contexts but also some consideration of the value accorded to the language(s) used in different places and at different times. This insistence on a composite, historically specific object requires us to inter­ rogate manuscripts as much as texts. Our database offers basic codicological data for many manuscripts of our corpus and as full a physical description as possible of as many manuscripts as we were able to consult that were produced or circu­ lated outside France or on its fluid borders or frontiers. Rather than dismiss manuscript material because of its distance in time and space from a notional centre of French culture, we want to ask what this material meant—and to under­ stand the forms in which it was transmitted—in different places and times. Our approach therefore requires a solid empirical dataset, but it also deploys two key theoretical approaches: Actor-Network Theory and modern theoretical approaches to community. We will introduce the first of these briefly here, but it will also be addressed explicitly at a number of points in the book. The second will be more implicit in our analyses of manuscripts and texts but will be addressed overtly in our Conclusion. From the seventeenth century onward, French historiography in particular has tended to cast French history and culture within a framework that focuses on an all-important political and cultural centre and that situates the rest of France (let alone the rest of the world) as peripheral to Paris. Successive centralizing regimes in France over the last 400 years (Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Second Empire, the Third Republic, the Fifth Republic) have lent a certain inevitability to the focus in scholarship on Parisian intellectual and cul­ tural life, so that France is almost always implicitly reduced to that which is seen ‘par les Parisiens’. This corresponds to a particular model of empire that sees the periphery primarily in relation to an imperial centre or capital—Rome, London, Berlin, Beijing—with power, wealth, and culture emanating outwards towards the

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Introduction  25 periphery. Actor-Network Theory, however, encourages us to think differently and to focus rather on complex vectors that move in multiple directions and along multiple axes.33 We have already alluded to the importance of understanding the networks in which the medieval Francophone world participated and was embedded for understanding both why Paris was not always the pre-eminent centre it was to become in the later Middle Ages and modern period and also what the vectors that linked different parts of the Francophone world together were. We have drawn attention to the crucial role played by the Norman diaspora and the Plantagenet empire in the dissemination of Francophone literary culture and also to the importance of the trade routes that ran north and south, east and west using the major overland ways but more importantly the rivers and sea routes of Europe and the Mediterranean.34 Work on the Ancient Greek world and on the medieval Mediterranean proves a useful model here (Malkin 2011 and Abulafia  2011): disparate communities are united by a shared language (even when this sits alongside other languages) and by shared or complementary ­cultural preoccupations and economic or political aims. Furthermore, according to ANT, networks are not simply the products of human agency but are also an effect of non-human actors, such as manufactured commodities, goods, cul­ tural artefacts, roads, harbours, schools, geography, climate, and so on (Latour  2005, particularly 63–86). Manuscripts and the texts they transmit may be viewed from this perspective as agents or conduits of relations between other disparate and geographically distant agents, thus as lymph nodes or other components of a kind of ‘lymphatic system’ serving to sustain networks or even diasporic communities. Intrinsic to our approach to French as a shared language outside France in the Middle Ages as a kind of ‘lymphatic system’ of networks is Jacques Derrida’s notion of monolingualism.35 Derrida’s starting point is a reflection on the linguis­ tic situation in which he grew up. An Algerian Jew, Derrida spoke only French, but in a fundamentally multilingual society where French was the hegemonic language of an absent master that was, during the war years, to repudiate citizens such as Derrida and his family. The young Derrida was thus dispossessed of the only language he speaks: ‘Je n’ai qu’une langue, or ce n’est pas la mienne’ (Derrida 1996, 15, translated in Derrida 1998 as ‘I only have one language, yet it is not mine’). Derrida regards this situation as a specific, exemplary historical ar­ticu­ la­tion of a paradigm that is generally true of language, regardless of how many languages one speaks: ‘Ma langue, la seule que je m’entende à parler, c’est la langue de l’autre’ (47, ‘My language, the only one I know how to speak, is the language of 33  The Parisian outlook is graphically but amusingly illustrated by the many versions of the map of ‘France vue par les Parisiens’ (2018). For a good introduction to ANT, see Latour 2005. 34  For an approach to the Normans informed by ANT, see Bates 2013. Oksanen (2012, 133) under­ scores the importance of French as a common language to Norman cultural cohesion. 35  See Butterfield 2009, particularly chapter 3 (66–101), Gaunt 2013, and Gilbert 2006.

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26  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the other’). Paradoxically, if one only ever speaks one language—the language of the other—this is never just one language, since language is never pure, never without internal fracture (23). This does not mean that all speakers at all times are equally alienated; on the contrary, Derrida invites political analyses of particular degrees and kinds of alienation. His book on Le Monolinguisme is thus only superficially about monolingualism per se: it is rather a meditation on how sub­ jects relate to language as a (necessarily but variably) hegemonic regime. It is, however, also about a specific language—French—a language that Derrida clearly loved and identified with closely, even though he realizes how problematic this identification is. Indeed, the vision of French as a universal, hegemonic language is on the one hand specifically presented by Derrida as a colonial phenomenon (language colonizes and controls us—some more than others) but on the other clearly has utopian overtones (we desire a universal and single mode of expres­ sion, however unattainable). Whether we regard the other’s language as oppres­ sive (and therefore seek to undermine its hegemony) or as liberating, speaking in it always entails an element of translation into that language which does not belong to me, as into a foreign language (even for monolingual speakers) because—axiomatically, for Derrida—no one owns it, no one inhabits it naturally. The monolanguage, as theorized by Derrida, is thus an idealized lost idiom that is only ever partially accessible and partially realized in any given utterance; it is as much an objective as it is a point of origin. Like many other fantasies, it is ripe for appropriation by particular political interests, whether totalitarian or resisting. The French of which Derrida writes in Le Monolinguisme is very different from the medieval French that is our object of study, but his work nonetheless provokes questions that are pertinent to our material. We assume that a language like Old French belongs to no one and that the perception that it does belong to someone or to a specific group is a historically contingent illusion (though a widespread one today, if not always in the Middle Ages). What, then, can we detect to be at stake when variants of Old French are used widely outside areas where the lan­ guage is indigenous and used not only by native speakers? How are individuals (speakers, readers, interlocutors) ‘colonized’ by this language? What kinds of net­ work and community does it engender? Who is included and who is excluded from these networks and communities, and on what grounds? How do these situ­ ations change from place to place and from time to time, and what other factors are entangled in such variations? Our book has six chapters. Chapter 1 (‘Local French outside France: England and Italy’) juxtaposes two case studies of texts in French that had an exclusively local dissemination outside France: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, the earliest sur­ viving historiography in French, composed in England c. 1137 and surviving in just four manuscripts, all Insular; and the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie, adapted from Benoît de Sainte-Maure c. 1270 in northern Italy and surviv­ ing in just three manuscripts, all made in northern Italy and within a space of fifty

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Introduction  27 years. In each of these cases, French is used as a cosmopolitan language that addresses a multilingual readership, but the particular form it takes and the aes­ thetic developed in these instances have a distinct local flavour. These texts are not in a two-way dialogue with literary culture in France but rather are witnesses to the existence of autonomous Francophone literary cultures in places outside the kingdom of France. In the case of Gaimar, ‘French literary culture’ had barely emerged in France at this early stage, and the text itself is an example of the extraordinary role England played in the early years of written culture in French. In the case of the mise en prose of the Roman de Troie, the manuscripts as much as the text are the focus of our study, for the local visual style of the manuscripts is as striking as the text’s formal and linguistic make-over. Chapter 2 (‘Networked French, Compilation and Expansion in Italy’) proposes a contrast to the local dissemination of the texts discussed in Chapter 1. The texts on which we focus here connect northern Italy with networked vectors of trans­ mission encompassing the Low Countries, Britain, France, and the eastern Mediterranean: Arthurian prose romance is a vehicle for, and instrument of, a pan-European chivalric vision of the past, present, and future. This Christianizing interest in figures like Tristan and Guiron connects Italy with the Low Countries and the eastern Mediterranean in particular. A key feature of the transmission of this material, and one that grows in importance by the fourteenth century, is compilation. The famous Arthurian compilation (c. 1270) of Rusticiaus de Pise gathers episodes from different romance traditions and, in doing so, both expands and fragments the narrative frame. Although the prose Tristan and Guiron cycles have their origin in central and northern France, key stages in their evolution nonetheless took place in northern Italy, from where new forms of the texts moved back not only to France but—in the case of Guiron—also to the Low Countries. The interest of Rusticiaus’s Arthurian compilation is twofold. First, because Rusticiaus put together episodes from a number of different Arthurian sources with a diverse geographical dissemination, his compilation illustrates the tendencies for both fragmentation and compilation across a wide, networked space. Secondly, according to his prologue, the compilation was made for an English prince, the future Edward I, as he passed through Italy on his way to the Holy Land. Rusticiaus’s compilation—marginal to the modern canon—provides an excellent example of the mobile, deterritorialized nature of much literary pro­ duction in French at this period. Compilation does not, however, take place only within textual cycles. Chapter 3 (‘Living History: Pierre de Langtoft and London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II’) discusses a manuscript of Peter Langtoft’s French-language epic chronicle of British history (finished c. 1307 and disseminated mainly in northern England). When produced in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, this manuscript also contained other historical, lyric, and prophetic material in French and English; in the second half of the same century, abridged segments of the Lancelot en prose and Queste del

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28  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Saint Graal were appended, along with a letter purporting to be from Joanna of Naples, about recent events in the eastern Mediterranean. The main questions that we ask of this manuscript are: how does a historical text produce itself, how does it authorize itself, and what are the roles of language and of discourse in these pro­ cesses? We begin by focusing on Langtoft’s writing about the past. His text, we argue, displays a characteristically medieval form of what Derrida calls monolingualism: one which highlights instead of suppresses internal conflict. The short, codeswitching ‘political songs’ that are today the most famous feature of Langtoft’s chronicle are an extreme expression of this tension. Fourteenth-century French and English, famously in the process of becoming ‘national languages’, in fact cohere by swallowing large doses of foreign idioms. Modern understandings of what are now called multilingualism and monolingualism therefore need to be adapted for such medieval phenomena, and these, in turn, complicate modern notions of linguistic identity. In the second part of the chapter, we turn to the texts that accompany Langtoft’s text in its most luxurious surviving manuscript, Royal 20 A II, to show how, in the different production stages of this codex, French functions as a high-register language offering discourses adapted to ana­ lyse and represent insular history in ways that change over the course of the four­ teenth century. Langtoft’s vision is extended, rather than revised, by the accompanying works in the early state of the codex, but the later additions tell a different story. We show how the Arthurian prose romance extracts in French that were introduced late in the codex’s development, though of little interest to literary or textual scholars, adapt the manuscript’s earlier contents to England’s changing political and cultural concerns and have both international and locally northern resonance. The use of a single language—French—actually enhances and directs the potential for meaningful conflict within the language community, but this community and its relation to and understanding of that language have noticeably altered in the generations since the early compilation was produced and read. Chapter 4 (‘History, Romance, and Empire: the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César in the Latin Kingdoms’) focuses on the remarkable manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne made in Acre in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem between roughly 1260 and Acre’s fall in 1291. Chapter 4 builds on Chapter 3 by offering another example of the complex temporality and spatiality of medieval history-writing. Composed in a politically disputed, linguistically complicated frontier region of the Francophone world (Flanders and more broadly, the Low Countries), the Histoire ancienne seems to owe much of its success in France to its having been trans­ ported to and copied in much more distant zones such as the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Italy. The four Acre manuscripts of the Histoire are not just highly sophisticated, visually exquisite artefacts: they are cultural productions of a spe­ cific place and time—we situate them in the beleaguered frontier-land that is the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and argue for a particular reading of the text

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Introduction  29 they transmit in this context. That this text written in French had currency in the Latin Kingdom is significant in that French was the common vernacular in the crusader states for individuals from a wide variety of northern, western, and southern European backgrounds; and the French they used was particularly mobile and translatable, thus adapted to wide comprehension and to further diffusion to audiences in Europe. The elaborately decorated Acre manuscripts insist visually upon a local as well as a universal referent and provide evidence of how, here as elsewhere in our study, place matters. Yet this particular place— the Holy Land in the thirteenth century—was nothing if not a melting pot, drawing people from all over Europe and the Middle East. The social, political, commercial, and dynastic structures of the Latin Kingdom and other crusader states were imbricated with those of many other parts of Europe. Language and texts—and the vision of past, present, and future they purveyed—were one of the main instruments of the network on which the Latin Kingdom depended for its fragile survival. Much of the book to this point has been concerned with situating texts and the manuscripts that transmit them in the cultural contexts in which the manu­ scripts were produced. These contexts were themselves networked, but these networks become both more complex and more detectable when it is considered that books are themselves highly portable. Indeed, many codices in our corpus moved between different Francophone zones during the course of the Middle Ages and were therefore primary material vehicles for cultural traffic and trans­ lation. Sometimes this involved material changes to texts and manuscripts, as with Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5667, one of the manuscripts studied in Chapter  5 (‘The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies’); in other instances, the movement of a single manuscript may have had a demon­ strable impact on the subsequent transmission of a text in a place remote from its place of production. This is the case with London, BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, the earliest manuscript of the so-called second redaction of the Histoire ancienne: made in Naples in the early fourteenth century, the manuscript was taken to France in the 1340s (perhaps via Spain) and subsequently became the source for all second-redaction manuscripts of the Histoire in France itself. This chapter therefore offers case studies of NLW 5667 and Royal 20 D 1: one manuscript that moves from France to Italy and one that moves from Italy to France. The interest of the former is that an Italian scribe and an Italian artist added to the earlier work of a French scriptorium; but, seeking to make the whole visually coherent, they chose episodes to complement the book they inherited and attempted to remake that composite book into a seamless Italian production, in French. Royal 20 D 1, on the other hand, represents a more thoroughgoing revision of the text it trans­ mits, one grounded in Italian cultural traditions deriving from a variety of sources: (a) the Histoire ancienne’s earlier Italian transmission but without the biblical elem­ents; (b) a lengthy prosification of the Roman de Troie that draws on previous

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30  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad prosifications; and (c) an Italian translation into French of Ovid’s Heroides integrated into the Troy section. Tracing the movement of books in this detailed manner gives us insight into one way in which texts may record and also instantiate ­networks; but looking at where the texts that make up a manuscript may have come from is also illuminating. Both the manuscripts discussed in this chapter transmit what might in traditional scholarship be considered mixed, composite, or corrupt texts: they are of no interest to a scholar interested in what the ‘author’ wrote ‘originally’ nor in the Ur-text or archetype at the top of a stemma. Yet it is precisely this textual bricolage—and the new texts the process produces, which take on a life of their own—that makes these artefacts of interest to us. This rep­ resents, moreover and crucially, the condition of a large number of surviving medieval texts. Chapter  6 (‘Dark Networks: Prehistories, Post-histories, and Imagined Geographies’) pursues the theme of travel, focusing on how both the represen­ tation and, crucially, the non-representation of movements, travels, and net­ works become key to the retooling of some texts in transmission. The term ‘dark networks’ in our title refers, in the first instance, to the virtual travel and ­re-identifications that are realized by means of literary fictions and sometimes of narrative innovations in our textual traditions. Thus, as we show in the first section of this chapter, the Tristan is made to travel, indeed is relocated to the Mediterranean, through a prologue and a lengthy prequel; the whole of British culture is thereby glossed as a dislocation of, and exile from, the holy East. The oriental origins of Tristan’s parent, also by an incestuous marriage, flatten both space and time by merging cultural identities and disturbing generational dif­ ferences. The ‘other’, from ‘elsewhere’, is in fact also from here; the present is inhabited by a past that it would prefer to forget. This suggests a way of thinking about translatio that is implicitly at odds with, while supplementing and com­ plementing, the genealogies and chronicles with which medieval culture is pre­ occupied (see Chapters  1 and  3) and to which translatio is usually linked. Outrageous fictions like the Tristan prequel are as much, though differently, about history; and they are better at registering some of the ways in which his­ tory is perceived and lived, below or outside the level of acknowledged accounts. Our second understanding of ‘dark networks’ concerns what may be missing, rejected, or cut off from the visible networks instantiated by a codex. The second section of our chapter therefore takes a well-known and much-studied manu­ script, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264, and follows a textual (non-) thread via the Paon (Peacock) cycle of Alexander texts to trace the career of a poet, Jean de le Mote. He is a figure whose work is neither included in the ­manuscript nor deliberately omitted but whose parallel career brings into focus for us specifically Low Countries identities, contexts, and tensions that, we argue, lie also behind the sumptuous codex that is Bodley 264. The more com­ plex world view thus revealed would likely be overlooked by anyone who

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Introduction  31 studied only the networks that are evident in the manuscript. Such counter-intuitive investigative procedures are especially important at a time when visual represen­ tations of digitally captured, empirically restricted data increasingly determine, and also limit, scholarly debate. Our conclusion will move from networks to questions of community. We shall ask whether the use of French outside France created a collective identity among users and explore the ambivalence of ‘community’, which excludes as it includes. We shall tie these questions together with the themes of historiography and of language that have run throughout the earlier chapters.

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1

Local French outside France Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and the Second Mise en Prose of the Roman de Troie

French was a networked language in the Middle Ages, engendering textual traditions that spread throughout much of Europe. It also engendered some highly localized texts that were composed in places where French was not a native idiom and which seem to have had a purely local dissemination. This chapter examines two such texts as case studies: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis from England c. 1136 and the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie from northern Italy c. 1270. While the use of French in England and northern Italy necessarily signals participation in broader European cultural networks, our purpose here is nonetheless to bring out the local features of these texts, with a view to showing that the use of French in disparate places and times may vary considerably. We use different methodologies in the two halves of this chapter: for Gaimar, we will focus on the text; for the prose Troie we will focus on one manuscript.

England c. 1136 Modern medieval French literary studies for many years privileged the twelfth century as the high point of the tradition. The glories of the so-called ‘twelfthcentury Renaissance’ were thought to preface a slow decline through the ‘waning of the Middle Ages’, before the real Renaissance rebooted high culture. Few ­scholars would now accept this caricature of literary history, but twelfth-century texts and authors still dominate many university syllabuses. They are also the object of a disproportionate amount of attention from medievalists working in other languages looking to chart the influence of French literature on other literary ­traditions, as well as of a disproportionate share of research in the field. It is well known, of course, that some of our most canonical twelfth-century texts written in French come from England in one way or another: the Chanson de Roland (at least in its canonical Oxford version), Marie de France’s Lais, and Thomas’s Tristan. Yet the number and spread of surviving manuscripts suggest that the dissemination of these specific texts was relatively narrow compared with many other works in French; and that fact prompts questions about a possible disjuncture Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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Local French outside France  33 between modern and medieval aesthetic judgements and values. Whereas England in the twelfth century seems to have had precocious tastes in vernacular literature compared to France, medieval readers on the continent from the early thirteenth century onward seem to have preferred later versions of the verse texts that first circulated in England (and, in the case of the Tristan, prose versions). When the role of England in the emergence of French literature is ac­know­ledged (which is not always the case), scholars turn to history for an explanation. Three key historical factors are invoked: first, the prior existence of an established and written vernacular literary tradition going back some centuries (Old English/Anglo-Saxon/ Standard West Saxon); second, the Norman Conquest of 1066; third, the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry of Anjou in 1152 followed by Henry’s succession to the throne of England in 1154. It is superfluous to rehearse the impact of 1066 and 1154 in detail. William of Normandy’s victory at Hastings in 1066 allowed him to implant in England a Norman—French-speaking—aristocratic elite, which meant that French was a language widely used by England’s aristocratic and clerical elites throughout the rest of the Middle Ages (even if they became also English-speaking within a few generations). As already noted in our Introduction, this wave of Francophone incomers joined small but already well-established Francophone networks in England, notably from Normandy, Flanders, and the lands joining eastern France to the Empire. This Gallicization of the culture of the English aristocracy and high clergy was no doubt accelerated, however, by the accession of Henry of Anjou to the English throne and the creation thereby of the Plantagenet Angevin ‘empire’, since French-speaking Henry, his Occitan- and French-speaking wife Eleanor (previously queen of France 1137–52), and then their four French- and Occitan-speaking sons effectively ruled lands from England’s Scottish border to the Pyrenees. The extent of the Francophone literary culture generated by and for the elite social strata of England is considerable: Ruth Dean and Maureen Bolton’s catalogue of Anglo-Norman texts includes 986 items (Dean and Boulton 1999). But institutional and national biases have shaped modern apprehension of this ma­ter­ ial. Whereas ‘Anglo-Norman Studies’ was a thriving sub-discipline in many UK universities (in English as well as in French departments) throughout the twentieth century, Francophone publications on Anglo-Norman texts other than the Roland, Marie de France, and Thomas’s Tristan were and are limited. AngloNorman literature was thus often implicitly regarded as an English affair. The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen the transformation and revitalization of this field, thanks to the work of scholars such as Marianne Ailes, Ardis Butterfield, Susan Crane, Rosalind Field, Jonathan Hsy, Richard Ingham, Serge Lusignan, Ad Putter, William Rothwell, Ian Short, David Trotter, Elizabeth Tyler, Judith Weiss, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne.1 Thus, the much-expanded online 1  The bibliography is too wide to be cited in full, but the following collections also deserve special mention: Fenster and Collette 2017, Ingham 2010, Jefferson and Putter, with Hopkins 2012, Kleinhenz

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34  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Anglo-Norman Dictionary (a project formerly led by the late David Trotter and still based at Aberystwyth University) now provides an unrivalled research resource that greatly improves our knowledge of the lexis of texts in French produced in the British Isles.2 In the Introduction to the important collection Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (Wogan-Browne et al. 2013), Jocelyn Wogan-Browne redefined and rebaptized ‘Anglo-Norman’ as the ‘French of England’, drawing attention in particular to the variety, ubiquity, and longevity of French in England.3 Ardis Butterfield (2009) has influentially shown in her The Familiar Enemy the extent to which later medieval English identity is bound up not only with England’s relation to France but even more significantly with a pervasive and deeply embedded dialogue with French literary texts.4 It is striking, however, that much of this important work remains largely (though not exclusively) focused on the multilingualism of Insular culture, and on Insular cultural history; it is also noteworthy that this vibrant new field is dominated by Englishspeaking scholars and by scholars working in departments of English language and literature.5 What then often takes centre stage is England’s relation to France, with ‘French culture’ identified primarily with Normandy for the period immediately following 1066, then from the 1160s onward with a rarely defined ‘France’, but seen primarily within the context of relations between the English and French monarchies.6 Wogan-Browne quite rightly points out that ‘we need a new postnational vocabulary—and that is not easy to find’ (2013, 9). Even more crucially for our purposes, as Ardis Butterfield suggests (2009, 57), we need to be wary of ‘an insular approach’ that would stress mainly ‘the importance of Anglo-French to the story of English’. When we instead adopt ‘a continental approach’, it is immediately clear, as Butterfield points out, that French is not a ‘single language’, whether considered at home or abroad. The common implicit assumption that uses of what is now called the French language necessarily connote primarily a relation to France, or specifically to Paris, is, as we outlined in our Introduction, erroneous. As we have already seen, variants of French were used widely throughout Europe—in the Low Countries, northern and southern Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, and elsewhere—as a language of trade, culture, diplomacy, and fashion. Recent and ongoing research is showing with increasing clarity that the and Busby 2010, Baswell et al. 2015, Trotter 2000, Tyler 2011a, Wogan-Browne et al. 1999, WoganBrowne et al. 2013, Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell 2016. 2  Anglo-Norman Dictionary, http://www.anglo-norman.net/, accessed 14 August 2018. 3  See also French of England, https://frenchofengland.ace.fordham.edu/, accessed 14 August 2018. 4  Building on, but greatly expanding, the insights of Muscatine 1957 and Calin 1994. 5  The overwhelming majority of contributors to Wogan-Browne et al. 2013 are working in English Studies. Other collected volumes on related topics are similarly dominated by Anglophone scholars, and not only when English is the main language of publication; see for example the special number of Médiévales (2015) devoted to medieval England. 6  See in particular the essays in Wogan-Browne et al. 2013, but for some different perspectives see also the essays in Tyler 2011a.

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Local French outside France  35 networks for which French was a conduit in the British Isles extended beyond the English–French axis that has hitherto often been the focus. If quantities of surviving manuscripts and texts are anything to go by, England played a significant role in the development of Francophone literary culture. Indeed, a sustained Francophone textual culture in England precedes the emergence of a sustained vernacular written culture in France itself. For instance, the statistical surveys based on the vast Translations médiévales collaborative project that reviews medieval translations into French indicate that a high proportion of both translations and surviving manuscripts of translations into French (which at this stage means translations from Latin) from the twelfth and thirteenth cen­tur­ies comes from England (see Galderisi 2011, I, 560–2; also Careri, Ruby, and Short 2001, xxxiii–xxxv). Furthermore, many of these translations are broadly speaking devotional or learned, and they may emanate from religious communities rather than secular courtly settings. It is instructive to consider this data alongside insights from palaeography, codicology, and philology, according to which the emerging script for writing French in twelfth-century England (for which there is no sustained continental precedent) was influenced and shaped by the scripts used to write Old English and Insular Latin.7 In his groundbreaking study French: From Dialect to Standard, Anthony Lodge writes: ‘In the langue d’oïl, if we disregard the French used in England after the Norman conquest . . . the vernacular begins to be used extensively in literary manu­scripts from the middle of the twelfth century’ (2004, 113). Lodge is opposing the langue d’oïl here to the langue d’oc, while seeking to explain the co-existence of  a range of scriptae for continental French before the rise of Parisian French in the late thirteenth century. To what extent, however, is it helpful ‘to disregard the French used in England’? And, given the scattered nature of the manuscript evidence for continental French in the twelfth century, can we really be sure that ‘the vernacular begins to be used extensively in literary manuscripts from the middle of the twelfth century’? We may know of a lot of texts composed from roughly 1150 onward, but, as Careri, Ruby, and Short demonstrate in their Livres et écritures (2001), surviving manuscripts originating in the kingdom of France are especially thin on the ground. This means we have to be cautious, without further research, about drawing any conclusions regarding the emergence, relation, and chronological sequence of different scriptae for writing French in the twelfth century. All the same, Serge Lusignan (2010) has demonstrated for a slightly later period (the early and mid thirteenth century) that what he calls an Anglo-Norman scripta was at times consciously adopted in Picardy and the Low Countries. Lusignan points to the fact that the territories on either side of 7  Consider the Insular manuscripts in Careri, Ruby, and Short 2001 with texts in French, particularly numbers 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 25, 26, and so on; see also their comments (xlvii–lv). See also Hasenohr 1998 on the survival and influence of Carolingian script in the British Isles.

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36  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the English Channel may have been politically diffuse but were tightly bound together economically and used two langues véhiculaires (languages for pragmatic purposes): Latin and French. French, he writes, ‘s’y manifestait sous trois formes régionales ou scriptae: l’anglo-normand, le picard et accessoirement le français central’ (2010, 119, ‘has three regional forms or scriptae: Anglo-Norman, Picard, and, peripherally, central French’). As Lusignan’s equation here of ‘regional form’ and scripta suggests, a scripta may derive from a local dialect; however, inasmuch as it is a written convention and thereby mobile, it is also supralocal, at least potentially, and we have already suggested in our Introduction that too strong an equation between scripta and local dialect is problematic. Lusignan is no doubt deliberately provocative here in relation to the precedence that some scholarship has traditionally accorded central French from the outset when he suggests it is manifest only accessoirement (‘peripherally’), but he thereby usefully challenges received wisdom about centre or core and periphery. In the zone in which he is interested, ‘Central French’ is indeed peripheral. Thus when the cross-channel links between religious institutions in England, the Low Countries, northern France, and Normandy, on the one hand, and the bidirectional cross-channel movement of scriptae and texts, on the other, are set alongside the proportion of surviving early manuscripts in French which come from England, a picture emerges of a written textual culture in French beginning in what has traditionally been considered a ‘peripheral’ zone, one where it is not the mother tongue of the overwhelming majority of the population (England), and then moving towards the area usually taken to be its centre (France) but in a form strongly marked by the graphic systems of other languages (Latin and English). The text on which we focus here, Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (composed in Lincolnshire c. 1136–7, cited from Short 2009), is every bit as foundational for Francophone textual culture as the Oxford Roland, Marie de France’s Lais, or Thomas’s Tristan, yet it has received only a fraction of the scholarly attention. The Estoire is the earliest surviving example of French vernacular historiography. Although Gaimar uses a variety of different sources (of which more shortly), his 6,532-line poem of octosyllabic rhyming couplets is a loose adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which makes him also the earliest known translator of English into French. His account runs from the earliest Saxon and Danish invasions in the late fifth century through to the death of William II Rufus (r. 1087–1100). We shall return to the text’s epilogues, but there is more than a hint there (6,528–6,532) and in the Estoire’s opening lines (1–16) that the surviving text was originally the second half of a diptych, the first of which almost certainly had Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (c. 1136) as its source. In all four surviving manuscripts—all of Insular provenance—the Estoire is preceded by Wace’s Brut, also drawn from the Historia, and the reason why the first part of Gaimar’s history did not survive may well be that it was routinely displaced by Wace’s better-known account of the same historical sweep, from the Trojan Brutus to Cadwallader, last of the British kings.

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Local French outside France  37 There is not a great deal of critical literature on Gaimar’s Estoire and virtually none in French. Francophone opinion seems to have been content with Gaston Paris’s judgement of Gaimar as ‘à peu près dénué de valeur littéraire’ (quoted by Short 2009, iii, ‘more or less devoid of literary value’). Yet Gaimar’s racy account of English history exploits pace and dramatic poise to considerable effect; it is linguistically inventive, and it strikingly breaks new ground in terms of using a Romance vernacular to write history. Furthermore, Gaimar may have been influential in shaping how subsequent writers would use the octosyllabic rhyming couplet for secular narrative (Wace, for example), and his work has erotic and chivalric elements that anticipate those of subsequent verse romance. Ian Short has done much to set out the merits and interest of Gaimar’s Estoire, but, as he points out (2009, liii), if historians have recognized the text’s merits as a source, all too often it is referred to by literary scholars only in passing and usually in negative terms. That such an important early text lacked a reliable modern edition until very recently is telling in itself. Literary scholars have tended (in our view) to pigeonhole Gaimar as something of a spokesman for the Norman regime. Thus Laura Ashe, in her study Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (2007), mentions Gaimar only in passing and sticks with examples from the modern canon of medieval literature in English, French, and Latin. Her main evaluation of Gaimar is that his ‘Estoire des Engleis (1130s) and the Lai d’Haveloc (c. 1200 derived from Gaimar) are monuments to the Normans’ appropriation of England, and the characteristics of insular narrative’ (2007, 20). To read the Estoire exclusively in relation to the Conquest, when England in 1066 was already so deeply embedded in cross-channel networks, and exclusively within the framework of Insular narrative is not, however, entirely satisfactory. True, Gaimar’s narrative climaxes with the Conquest, and true, his view of the first two Norman kings is unequivocally positive: William I (r. 1066–87) is ‘le meildre rei e le meillur / ke Engleis eüssent a seignur’ (5,139–5,140, ‘the best king and the best overlord that the English ever had’),8 while William Rufus is represented as a powerful, larger-than-life figure acclaimed by English and Normans alike (5,778) and also a proto-courtly lord, renowned for his hospitality and prowess. Furthermore, Gaimar’s sense of right and wrong in relation to the Conquest is terse and schematic: ‘Engleis cump[r]erent lur ultrages’ (5,342, ‘the English paid dearly for their outrageous behaviour’). Yet when the Conquest is set in the broader context of Gaimar’s account of English history, it is clear the Normans are but the latest in a long line of ‘gent de ultramarine’ (5,266, ‘people from overseas’) to have invaded England and then become assimilated. The fact that so many waves of invading Saxons and Danes become assimilated into the English aristocratic elite renders any sense of purely English identity, as

8  Translations of quotations are from Short 2009.

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38  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad opposed to Saxon, Danish, or Norman identity, difficult to discern. Thus, if the Danes are initially represented as a ‘päene gente’ (2,160, ‘pagan people’) and frequently cast in an antagonistic relation to the English, an antagonism that is often reinforced formally through prosody and rhyme, and if it is remarked that the English dislike the Danes for their rapacious cruelty (e.g. 2,968–2,969, 4,523–4,536, 4,766–4,768, 4,777–4,778), this antagonism is just as frequently swept aside and troubled. Consider the case of Rægnald Everwic, ‘un rei demi daneis’ (3,507, ‘a half-Danish king’) with an English mother (3,508). As this altogether typical case indicates, marriage practices among the social elite of medieval Europe sought to unite warring factions, or potential allies, often across long distances. Rægnald’s ethnic hybridity was thus the rule rather than the exception, and this naturally means that the cultural (or indeed linguistic) identity of high-ranking men is invariably complex. The most striking case of the Estoire’s representation of a Dane complicating any straightforward opposition between the Engleis and the Daneis is Cnut. The English, the Estoire tells us, flocked to Cnut’s support when he invaded (4,188–4,189). Cnut, king of England from 1016 to 1035 as well as king at different times of Denmark, Norway, and parts of Sweden, gets a wholly good press from Gaimar as a ‘good king’ (4,683–4,684). The portrayal of Cnut’s attempted reconciliation with Edmond Ironside, following his capture of half the kingdom, is particularly positive. He addresses Edmund thus: Eadmund, un poi atent! Jo sui Daneis, e tu Engleis, E nos peres furent dous reis: L’un tint la terre, e l’autre l’out, Chescon en fist ço ke li plout. Tant com l’urent en poüsté, Chescons en fist sa volunté E bien sachez loi[n]gtenement L’urent Deneis nostre parent: Prés de mil anz l’out Dane aince[i]s Ke unc i entrast Certiz li reis. Certiz, ço fu vostre ancïen, E li reis Danes fu le mien. Daneis le tint en chef de Deu, Mordret donat Certiz son feu: Il ne tient unkes chevalment, De lui vindrent vostre parent. Pur ço vus di, si nel savez: Si vus od mai [vus] combatez, L[i] un de nus ad greignur tort,

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Local French outside France  39 Ne savom liquels en ert mort. Pur ço vus vol un offre fere E ne m’en voil de rien retrere: Partum la terre dreit en dous, L’une partie en aiez vus, L’altre partie me remaigne! Ne jo ne vus ne se complaigne! Puis conquerom cele partie Dunt jo ne vus n[en] avom mie! [E] sicom nus la conqueroms, Entre nus dous la departoms, E saium dous freres en lai! Jo jurrai vus, vus jurez moi, De tenir tel fraternité Com de une mere fussum né, Cum si fussum ambedui frere E d’un pere e d’une mere; Si eit ostages entre nus, E crëez mei, jo crerai vus!  (4,308–4,346) Edmund, wait a moment. I am a Dane and you are English; both of our fathers were kings, both ruled over the country, and each was master in the land. As long as it was in their power to do so, each did exactly as he saw fit. Our Danish ancestors, I’ll have you know, have been ruling here for a very long time. Almost a thousand years before king Cerdic came to the throne, Danr was king. Cerdic was your ancestor, and King Danr was mine. A Dane held the land in chief from God. It was Mordred who granted Cerdic his fief; he never held in chief, and your family descended from him. In case you don’t already know, I’ll tell you that if you fight me, one of us is going to be in the wrong more than the other, though we don’t know which one of us will die as a result. This is why I am willing to make you an offer [of peace]—one that I will not seek to back down from: let us divide the kingdom exactly in two, with one part going to you and the other remaining with me, in such a way that neither I nor you will have any cause for complaint. Thereafter let us conquer that part of the kingdom that neither you nor I have possession of. As we conquer it, so let us divide it between us. Let you and me be brothers by adoption! I shall swear a solemn oath to you, and you to me, that we will have the same sort of fraternal relations as if we had been born of the same mother, and as if we were two brothers with the same father and the same mother. Let there be exchange of sureties between us: trust me and I shall trust you!

The terms of this pact were not subsequently honoured because of underhand machinations in Edmund’s camp—then his death—but the pact is sealed with a

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40  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad kiss, and Edmund implicitly accepts Cnut’s argument that the two men have more in common than divides them as descendants from the same Royal Danish stock (‘nostre parent’ in line 4,316 implicitly refers to both men), with a shared history of inter-relations going back centuries. Cnut’s contention that, whereas English royalty owes its sovereignty to a man (Mordred), Danish royalty received its authority from God belies the text’s earlier labelling of the Danes as pagans but implicitly gives Cnut the greater right to rule. The realpolitik of the two men agreeing to join together to share the parts of the kingdom neither controls is also instructive as to the solidarity of the ‘English’ (4,309) in the face of Danish in­vaders, and, as in near-contemporary chansons de geste, ideas of right and wrong (tort, 4,327) are subsumed to questions of power and domination: if you are right, you win; you lose if you are wrong. Ian Short remarks that ‘one of the most unexpected aspects of Gaimar’s attitude to English history is in his treatment of the Danes’ (2009, xliii). His positive portrayal of the Danes has implications for how the text represents ‘English’ identity. Even more significantly, the same process of the blurring of boundaries between the English and their antagonists occurs with the Normans. Not coincidentally, the beginning of this process (both in the Estoire and in reality) involves Cnut in that he marries Emma of Normandy: daughter and sister of the Duke of Normandy, Emma had previously been married to Ethelred the Unready and was mother of  Edward the Confessor, king of England 1042–66, who grew up in exile in Normandy and Flanders during the reigns of his stepfather and half-brothers (including Harthacnut, Cnut and Emma’s son). Though the Norman involvement in England starts earlier (see for example line 5,037), it was through Emma that it intensified.9 If the Normans prior to the Conquest, like the Danes before them, are la gent de ultramarine, the frequency with which William the Conqueror crosses the Channel subsequently is dizzying (5,353–5,358), and his ability (at least in Gaimar’s account) to unite franceis and engleis striking (5,484). William, in other words, is above all a cross-channel, cosmopolitan leader and a notably more successful one than the no-less-mobile Edward the Confessor. It is equally noteworthy that Gaimar oscillates between referring to the new ruling class as Normans and referring to them as French. Since their being ‘French’ clearly gives no sense of their being associated with, or subject to, the French crown, ‘French’ here simply means ‘from the other side of the Channel’. If this is then put together with the frequent references to the presence of Flemings (usually mercenaries) in England (5,160, 5,185, 5,423, 5,428, 6,283), the political map of late eleventh- and early twelfth-century England that Gaimar is drawing is not reducible simply to an English–Norman axis in the immediate post-conquest era. The position of 9 Elizabeth Tyler has recently highlighted the importance of royal and aristocratic women in the fostering of polyglot literary culture in medieval England before the Conquest (Tyler 2011c, Tyler 2017).

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Local French outside France  41 England, rather, is determined by a longer history of networks established by c­ ontact across the Channel and the North Sea, with a good portion of the coast on the other side of the Channel being French-speaking, though not politically French. For Gaimar, allegiance to a good king transcends ethnic or linguistic divisions. He most admires kings—Cnut, William I, William Rufus—with a substantial power base on either side of the Channel. William Rufus is exemplary in this respect. In Gaimar’s account, England has at this stage a cosmopolitan court at its symbolic centre, where magnates from many different places gather. These include France (as opposed to Normandy), where Rufus is extending his power base with the enthusiastic help of English lords (5,909–5,910), and Flanders.10 Gaimar’s playful attention to the squabbling of courtiers at Rufus’s coronation notes the origins of the different factions, but their specific identity seems less important than the courtly scenario that underlines William’s pre-eminence: Welsh kings vie for favour at his court and for the privilege of taking up the subservient position of sword-bearer. One lord, Hugh of Chester, balks at this, however, and after some bantering is asked to bear the golden royal staff instead (6,015–6,020). This courtly feinting leads to Hugh swearing fealty (6,033), which in turn leads to the granting of North Wales (6,043); but the dominant image of this passage is the spectacle of William’s court as a place in which powerful men from Normandy and the British Isles vie with each other for positions in the king’s entourage. This scene would not be out of place in an Arthurian romance. Tellingly, within a hundred lines we are told of another of William’s courtiers, Malcolm III, king of Scotland (6,119) (r. 1058–93), said to be involved in William’s affairs on both sides of the Channel, while Gaimar also underlines the connectedness of William to the Kingdom of Jerusalem (6,207) through his fractious brother Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy (r. 1087–1106). If Gaimar glosses over the unpleasantness of their family squabble, a picture nonetheless emerges of an England embedded in a complex set of networks stretching in all directions, even to the distant eastern Mediterranean. The ‘Anglo-Norman’ axis of relations between England and Normandy, or even England and France, is but part of this more complex set of networks. What role does language play in this? In his lengthy epilogue, Gaimar stresses the multilingual nature of his sources:11 Ceste estorie fist translater Dame Custance la gentil. Gaimar i mist marz e avril E [aprés] tuz les dusze mais 10  On the importance of relations between Norman England and Flanders, see Oksanen 2012. 11  On this epilogue, see Short 1994. There is a second, shorter and more conventional epilogue that only occurs in one of the four manuscripts; see Short 2009, 354–5.

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42  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Ainz k’il oust translaté des reis. Il purchaça maint esamplaire, Livres engleis e par gramaire E en romanz e en latin, Ainz k’en p[e]üst traire a la fin. Si sa dame ne li aidast, Ja a nul jor ne l’achevast. Ele enveiad a Helmeslac Pur le livre Walter Espac. Robert li quens de Gloücestre Fist translater icele geste Solum les livres as Waleis K’il aveient des bretons reis. Walter Espec la demandat, Li quens Robert li enveiat, Puis la prestat Walter Espec A Raül le fiz Gilebert. Dame Custance l’enpruntat De son seignur k’el mult amat. Geffrai Geimar cel livre escri[s]t [E] les transsa[n]dances i mist ke li Waleis ourent leissé, K[ë] il aveit ainz purchacé— U fust a dreit u fust a tort— Le bon livre dë Oxeford Ki fust Walter l’arcedaien, Sin amendat son livre bien; E de l’estorie di Wincestre Fust amende[e] ceste geste, De Wassingburc un livre engleis U il trovad escrit des reis E de tuz les emper[e]ürs Ki de Rome furent seignurs. E de Englettere ourent treü, Des reis ki d’els ourent tenu, De lur vies e de lur plaiz, Des aventures e des faiz, Coment chescons maintint la terre, Quel amat pes e liquel guere. De tut le plus pout ci trover Ki en cest livre volt esgarder.  (6,436–6,480)

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Local French outside France  43 The noble lady Constance had this history adapted into French. Gaimar took March and April and a whole twelve months before finishing this adaptation of [the history of] the kings [of Britain]. He obtained a large number of copies of books—English books, by dint of learned reading, and books both in the French vernacular and Latin—before finally managing to bring his work to a conclusion. If his lady had not helped him, he would never have completed it. She sent to Helmsley for Walter Espec’s book. Robert earl of Gloucester had had this historical narrative translated in accordance with the books belonging to the Welsh that they had in their possession on the subject of the kings of Britain. Walter Espec requested this historical narrative, earl Robert sent it to him, and then Walter Espec lent it to Ralf  fitz Gilbert; lady Constance borrowed it from her husband, whom she loved dearly. Geoffrey Gaimar made a written copy of the book and added it to the supplementary material that the Welsh had omitted, for he had previously obtained, be it rightfully or wrongfully, the good book of Oxford that belonged to archdeacon Walter, and with this he made considerable improvements to his own book. And this historical narrative was improved also by reference to the Winchester History, [that is,] a certain English book at Washingborough, in which he found a written account of the kings [of Britain] and of all the Emperors who had dominion over Rome and tribute from England, and of the kings who had held lands of these emperors, of their lives and their affairs, what happened to them and what deeds they performed, how each one governed the land, which ones loved peace and which ones war. Anyone willing to look in this [Washingborough] book will be able to find there all this and more.

The context in which Gaimar writes is portrayed as one in which books written in English, French, Latin, and Welsh are circulating among cultivated patrons eager to learn about English history, and a writer such as Gaimar is clearly expected to use sources in all four languages. But these languages differ in nature: whereas English and Welsh are local, indigenous languages, tied to specific regions and delimited communities (albeit of possible Trojan descent), French and Latin are neither indigenous nor specific to the British Isles. Indeed, these languages enable textual mobility and translatio in the physical sense of the term. It is interesting, then, that, although the Welsh and English sources Gaimar uses are key to his endeavour, particularly the estorie de Wincestre (6,467; almost certainly the Winchester Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), these sources are also represented as in need of supplementation (6,459–6,461). We have retained Short’s translation, but this may mask a number of problems. First, in his translation of lines 6,442–6,443, he introduces the term ‘French vernacular’ for clarity in order to translate romanz, which is indeed the standard word for ‘French’ of the period. But the syntax actually subordinates both romanz and latin in line 6,433 to par gramaire in line 6,432. An alternative reading would take both romanz and latin to be types of gramaire,

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44  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad which is usually a synonym for Latin. This seems to imply that French should be regarded as equivalent to, or at least in the same class of languages as, Latin.12 Secondly, Short’s translation specifies that cest livre in line 6,480 is to be understood as ‘this [Washingborough] book’. Yet syntactically it is equally possible that Gaimar refers here to his own book, particularly given the presence of the spatial marker ci in line 6,479, which Short translates as ‘there’ but more obviously means ‘here’. Thus, despite all the local and authoritative Latin sources, if you want to know de tut le plus (‘all this and more’) in this instance you need a book in French: specifically, you need to read Gaimar’s Estoire. It is interesting, then, given the Estoire’s status as the earliest surviving French history book, that Gaimar suggests that historical writing in French is already in circulation (6,473, quoted above); he also goes on to spar with a figure called Davit, whose work is in a non-specified language (French? Latin? English? Welsh?) but whose account of history Gaimar finds wanting, though he ‘sings well of courtly intrigue’ (6,483–6,532). Given the status Gaimar assumes for French here, the purely Insular circulation of the Estoire implied by the manuscript tradition is striking. This cannot, however, be attributed to a lack of interest in his subject matter. Indeed, the success of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia (almost certainly Gaimar’s livre dë Oxeford, l. 6,464, quoted above) and of Wace’s Brut (with which the Estoire is systematically associated in transmission) shows the popularity of this material outside England. Thus, despite the eminent geographical translatability of French (in Lusignan’s terms, its high status as a langue véhiculaire),13 perhaps there is something eminently untranslatable about Gaimar’s particular use of it. This is not simply a result of the unmistakable ‘Anglo-Norman’ phonological features found throughout the text (see Short 2009, xxxii–xxxvii), which do not necessarily render the text incomprehensible to continental readers; nor would they preclude the transposition of the text into a continental form of French, which happens with other Anglo-Norman texts. Interestingly, many passages of the Estoire seem clearly addressed to readers who also know at least some English. Thus, in the portion of the epilogue quoted above there are several instances of English proper nouns rhyming with French words in such a way that the phonology of either the English or the French word must be distorted in order to make a pure rhyme (Gloücestre and Wincestre with geste; Oxeford/tort). This is a technique also used by Wace, so it is hardly un­pre­ce­ dent­ed in Anglo-Norman texts. It is not clear that rhymes such as these tell us anything about how the words were actually pronounced in a reading of the text,

12  O’Donnell 2011 makes a very similar point. 13  Lusignan  2010 concludes with the observation that the forme lettrée or scolarisée (literary or scholastic form) of much Anglo-Norman and Picard French makes it functionally more akin to Latin than to spoken French, a point which will be stressed at various points in the present book.

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Local French outside France  45 since rhyming with a French word may have changed the stress in an English word, the spelling of the words may be modified in transmission, and all our ­surviving manuscripts postdate the composition of the text considerably. On the other hand, the high frequency of English proper nouns and the accuracy with which they are recorded in the Estoire suggests that it is the phonology of the French word that is implicitly modified by rhyming with an English word. In many instances of multilingual rhyming, a variety of parts of speech, not just proper nouns, do not make sense without the voicing or modification of con­son­ants that in some instances would destroy the phonic purity and alignment of the rhyme and in others would seem potentially to introduce an English word into French: Edefrid/saisi (1,147–1,148); retint/edeling (1,727–1,728); suth/vertu (2,115–2,116); Everwices/païs (2,859–2,860). Elsewhere Gaimar uses unambiguously English words, and if, again as in Wace, some of these might have had some continental currency thanks precisely to Arthurian literature or indeed to the circulation of Wace’s texts (for example uthlages 2,612 and elsewhere; then particularly the iconic and quintessentially English (not to say Anglo-Saxon) wesheil and drincheil 3,809), others either have a quaintly ‘franglais’ flavour (e.g. welcumé 3,679 and 3,689) or are arcane and/or technical, therefore probably not in­tel­li­gible to general readers from the continent with no knowledge of some quite specific English nautical vocabulary that seems to have had some international currency (e.g. buzecharles, ‘shipman’ in 5,486; esterman, ‘steersman’ in 5,832). It is not clear from this that Gaimar’s Estoire is necessarily written for native speakers of English who are also readers and speakers of French, since the range of English vocabulary used is very restricted. It is clear, however, that parts of the text would be hard to follow with no knowledge of English and no direct knowledge of England. Gaimar’s use of French is therefore local and particularized, and yet at the same time it plays on the status of French as a mobile, supralocal, European language. As a writer, Gaimar is not in any way dependent on French models (since apart from anything else there are virtually no surviving textual precedents), nor is he apparently concerned to reproduce the language of native French speakers from France. One important corollary, however, of Gaimar’s French being directed at a Francophone readership with a knowledge of English is the sharper focus this gives, less on the mobility of texts in French per se (since this text does not appear to have been particularly mobile) than on the importance for his readers of knowing French in order to partake in certain types of supralocal, pan-European cultural and political networks, networks from which monolingual English or Welsh speakers would by definition have been excluded, or even English or Welsh ­readers of Latin who knew no French. The local ‘English’ reader of French is thus situated in a broader and cosmopolitan cultural and political context simply by virtue of his or her knowledge of French, even if the text s/he is reading is primarily of local interest.

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46  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Italy c. 1270 ‘Lengue franceise cort parmi le monde’ (‘the French language runs throughout the world’)—so writes Martin da Canale, author of the Estoire de Venise (Limentani 1972, 1), and perhaps the most salient feature of French in the Middle Ages is precisely that, being the vernacular language that transcends borders, linguistic and otherwise, it belongs exclusively to no particular community. After the twelfth century, one of the most important regions for the production and transmission of texts in French is Italy, initially northern Italy, particularly the Veneto, Genoa, and Pisa, the most celebrated and successful example being Marco Polo and Rusticiaus de Pise’s Le Devisement du Monde, composed in Genoa by a Pisan and a Venetian in 1298, better known in the Anglophone world as Marco Polo’s Travels (see Chapter 2). Italian readers of French seem to have had a particular taste for Arthurian romance—especially the prose Tristan—but also for texts with a ­historical bent: chansons de geste (of which there is a significant northern Italian tradition), the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César (Biblical, Greek, and Roman ­history), and the matter of Troy (Rome’s prehistory). Thus, Italy plays a significant role in the manuscript tradition of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie; moreover, three of the five mises en prose of this text—seminal for later medieval culture—were produced in Italy, almost certainly by writers of French who were native speakers of Italian.14 A good deal of this so-called ‘Franco-Italian’ material is under-researched; some is as yet unedited.15 This is true of our second case study in this chapter, the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie. This text was produced in Italy around 1270 and survives in only three manuscripts, close to each other (and to the supposed date of com­pos­ ition) in terms of provenance and date: Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 861: copied in Padua, 1298. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 196: copied in Verona, 1323. Paris, BnF, MS NAF 9603: copied in Genoa, c. 1300. That two of these manuscripts come from the Veneto, with the third closely ­associated with it, is significant. While there is a rich Latin historiographical tradition in the Veneto in the thirteenth century, Venetan vernacular textual culture, 14  The best source of information for the five known mises en prose of the Roman de Troie is Luca Barbieri’s entries on them on the website La Vie en Proses: riscrivere in prosa nella Francia dei secoli XIV–XVI. For an index of his entries, see: http://users2.unimi.it/lavieenproses/index.php/ component/search/?searchword=Roman%20de%20Troie&searchphrase=all&Itemid=468, accessed 17 August 2018. 15  On the use of French by Marco Polo and Rusticiaus de Pise, see Gaunt 2013. For an overview of Franco-Italian literature, see Holtus and Wunderli  2005. Other important studies include Busby 2002, II, 596–635, and Delcorno Branca 1998a. On the transmission of the Roman de Troie in Italy, see Jung 1996.

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Local French outside France  47 including historiography, is at this point, and as far as we know, in Occitan or French. The choice of French as a vehicle for historical narrative in the Veneto, as Laura Morreale and others have argued in relation to Martin da Canale’s Estoire de Venise (1267), almost certainly signals an affiliation with the crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean as much as it does an affiliation to the French aristocracy.16 There is little scholarship on the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie, which has mainly elicited comment as part of the broader tradition of transmission of the Roman de Troie or as an example of Italian adaptations and volgarizzamento of French texts.17 What exactly is it? How are we to evaluate its language and style? Finally, for whom was this new version of the Troy story intended? We will first discuss the relation of this text to its source, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie; secondly, we will discuss what can be inferred from its use of French; finally, we will look at how its style in one manuscript—not just textually, but also visually—localizes its production and reception. The first thing to note with regard to the author’s treatment of Benoît de SainteMaure is that, although he was selective and cut quite long sections (detailed by Jung 1996, 485–90), he works closely with his source, following its plotlines and borrowing large chunks of text verbatim, but rewriting often profoundly on a stylistic level, which is probably why Jung says this text ‘contient moins de re­min­ is­cences directes du poème de Benoît (mots, expressions, bouts de phrase) que les autres’ (1996, 485, ‘has fewer direct borrowings from Benoît’s poem (words, expressions, clauses) than the others’). We reproduce here the opening page from Grenoble 861 (see Figure 1.1), the manuscript on which our discussion focuses, together with a translation of material from its opening paragraphs equivalent to roughly the first hundred lines of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s poem. We print the  rubrics in bold and in italics textual material that has a direct verbatim cor­res­pond­ence in the verse romance to give a sense of the scale of the direct transposition. This book speaks of the siege and the destruction of Troy. And of why Troy was destroyed and confounded. Rubrica, Rubrica. Solomon, the most wise, teaches us and exhorts us in his book that one should not hide one’s wisdom. Rather one should teach and convey it to others honourably and in order to obtain and have a fine reputation. Thus did our ancestors behave. And if those who invented the seven arts had been silent, men would live now like beasts. Indeed, they would not know wisdom from folly, and they would not care for each other, for they would neither have nor observe reason. But because they did teach and convey their knowledge to others, their names are recorded and remembered over the ages. And 16  Morreale 2009, xii. On literary culture in the Veneto more generally, see Folena 1990. 17  See Carlesso 1966 and Chesney 1942; Jung 1996, 485–98. The second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie is translated into Italian by Binduccio dello Scelto, possibly in Florence, around 1300.

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48  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 1.1.  Grenoble 861, f. 1. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

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Local French outside France  49 if they had not done so, their wisdom and knowledge would now be lost, without profit. And because one must always learn and teach, I want to work on putting a story/history into Romance so that those who do not know Latin might understand and enjoy it. For the story/history is noble and concerns great deeds. It is about how Troy was destroyed and confounded, concerning which the truth is little known. Here [the book] speaks of how Homer, the clerk, dealt with the siege and destruction of Troy. Homer was a very wise clerk, as the story/history tells us. This Homer wrote about the origins of the war up to the destruction of Troy. And why Troy was destroyed and her people disinherited. But because Homer was not born until 100 years after Troy was destroyed and her people disinherited, his book was not always considered truthful. Indeed, he had not seen any of this. And when Homer had written his book and it was taken to the city of Athens, and read by the wise clerks, they rightfully condemned it, for he had the gods doing battle with the Trojans. Likewise, he had goddesses fighting with mortal men, which was con­sidered great folly. But because Homer was a wise clerk, his book was considered authoritative and circulated. How Cornelius, found the true story/history of Troy, which a Trojan wrote in Greek in Troy itself. And how Cornelius translated it into Latin. Sallust lived at that time, shortly after Rome’s foundation. Sallust was from a very noble family, and he was bold, most worthy and a very wise clerk. Sallust had a nephew called Cornelius, who was very wise and knowledgeable, and learned. Cornelius was at school in Athens. One day Cornelius was searching around in his cupboard for one of his books. And in so doing, the history/story that Darius wrote in Greek during the siege of Troy came into his hands. Darius was a Trojan. He was in the city and saw and observed everything that happened.

It is immediately apparent from this opening that either Grenoble 861’s source was sloppy or it is a sloppy copy of its source. Banal scribal errors are not infrequent, and on the first page alone there are two glaring misunderstandings or bowdlerizations of words: ‘en na hotrices’ for ‘en l’autorité (as in Douce 196) and ‘demonois les diez’ for ‘les damedeus’ (both at the end of the second paragraph). Yet the prosifier works attentively with the detail of Benoît’s text. In the passage translated here, he retains around 70 per cent of his source fairly literally; this means that around 70 per cent of his own text consists of approximate quotation in that it is adapted directly from Benoît, keeping many of the latter’s formulations. The prosifier loses some of the nuances of Benoît’s text, but he cuts far less here than the prosifier of the first mise en prose (made in the Morea), whose text is shorter, more moralizing, and less interested in the figure of Benoît and his supposed sources. Furthermore, whether consciously or not, our prosifier dismantles Benoît’s octosyllabic rhyming couplets thoroughly; for example:18 18  Benoît quoted from Constans 1904–12.

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50  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Qu’ensi firent li ancessor (l. 6) Car ensi firent les nos ansesors (+ 2 syllables) The ancestors behaved thus . . . > our ancestors behaved thus . . . Mais la verté est poi oïe (l. 44) > de qoi la verite est poi seüe (+ 1 syllable) But the truth is not often heard > which is why the truth is not often known

This formal makeover goes hand in hand with a more thoroughgoing stylistic and ideological reworking. For example, as Jung (1996, 486) also notes, the second mise en prose makes frequent use of formulae that evoke li conte, ‘the tale’, and l’estoire, the ‘story’ or ‘history’, both as source of the narrative material and as guarantor of its authority: Mes a tant laisse hore li conte a parler de Medea qe plus ne dit hore por sivre la droite matire (Grenoble 861, 7r) But now the tale leaves off speaking about Medea to say no more and return to the main subject . . . Or dit li contes qe Hercules s’aparoilla molt . . . (Grenoble 861, 7v) Now the tale says that Hercules prepared himself well . . .

This flagging of narrative interlace makes the style far more characteristic of  thirteenth-century prose romance than of twelfth-century verse romance. Furthermore, whereas Benoît evokes l’estoire and the authority of his supposed sources Dares and Dictys, here Benoît himself becomes another author/authority figure, cited as part of a chain of transmission that begins with Dares and cul­min­ ates in the text we are reading (emphasis added): Si vos laisse hore nostre conte a parler de Jason si outreement q’il ne parole plus en nulle part, por ce que Daire ne s’escrist plus. Meismement Beneoit, qi le livre trelaica le nos tesmoigne ausi. Mes nos vos conterons de la plus grant houre [Douce 196: histoire] qi james fust ni doie estre secuit [Douce 196: escrite]. (Grenoble 861, 7r) Now our tale leaves off speaking about Jason so completely that it does not speak of him anywhere else, for Dares wrote no more about him. Likewise, Benoît, who translated the book, certifies this for us too. But we will tell you the greatest story that was ever and may ever be written. Benoic qe cestui livre escrist, et trelaita de latin & le mist en romans, ne vost laissier a retraire nulle rienz de ce qe Daire dist, car Daire savoit tot ce q’il dist por fine verite por ce q’il l’avoit tot ce veu a ces els, ou par verité hoi conter. Mes por ce Daire volt faire sa hovre conplie & pleniere vost il escrire la forme e la contenance de ciascun de princes qi vindrent au siege de Troie. (Grenoble 861, 19r)

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Local French outside France  51 Benoît, who wrote this book and translated it from Latin and put it into Romance, does not wish to leave out anything that Dares said, for Dares knew everything he said to be entirely true because he had seen everything with his own eyes, or he heard it told truthfully. Because Dares wanted to make his work complete and full, he wanted to write about the form and conduct of each of the princes who came to the siege of Troy. En ceste partie dit li contes, et Beneoite qi l’estoire treslaita nos le tesmoigne, qe cele nuit passa en tel mainiere come je vos ai dit. (Grenoble 861, 82v–83r) In this part of the tale, Benoît, who translated the story, tells us this, that the night passed just as I told you.

If the first paragraph of the text retains the first person of its source (‘me voill ge travaillier d’une estoire metre en romanz’, ‘I want to work at transposing a story into Romance’), as Jung points out (1996, 486), elsewhere Benoît’s first person is systematically transposed to the third person, then linked to Dares’ name; for example: Ne puis tot dire n’aconter, Qu’enuiz sereit de l’escouter Co que chascuns fist endreit sei  (Benoît, 12,337–12,339) I cannot say or tell, for it would be tedious to listen to this, what each one of them did. Daire qe ceste estoire escrist, ne vost pas metre en escrit ce qu ciascun fist d’armes endroit soi, por ce que l’estoire seroit trop desmesuree. (Grenoble 861, 51v) Dares, who wrote this story, did not want to write down what each one of them did at arms, for this would make the story too long.

It is telling here that in one at least of the two author portraits in Grenoble 861, the identity of the author depicted—Dares or Benoît—is unclear, reinforcing the idea that Benoît is now an ancient author and authority, like Dares and Dictys. Thus on f. 19r, the rubric identifies the author as Dares, but the text beside the author portrait identifies him as Benoît (see Figure 1.2). An example of the ideological reworking the text undergoes is the misogynistic rewriting of the Troilus and Briseïda episode, which, as Jung points out (1996, 487), is grounded in a misreading or a possibly telling misunderstanding of the first-person verb form criem ‘I fear’ as the noun crime. Benoît’s declaration, sometimes taken as an apology to Eleanor of Aquitaine for telling a story that might cause offence to women, that ‘De cest veir criem g’estre blasmez’ (13457, ‘I fear that I will be blamed for speaking the truth’) is transformed into the remark that ‘De cestui crime estoit la damoisele Blesida durement blasmee’ (Genoble 861, 17r, ‘Briseïda was harshly blamed for this crime’). Interestingly, maniculae against this

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52  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 1.2.  Grenoble 861, f. 19r, detail. Note instructions to the artist in Italian. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

passage in both Grenoble 861 and Douce 196 indicate that contemporary readers found this passage particularly significant, and, though it is common to indicate antifeminist tirades with maniculae, their being positioned against identical portions of the text here may support the view that the two manuscripts are related (see Figure 1.3). What are we to make of the language of this text? A common term used to describe the French of Italy is ‘hybrid’, which is to say that French and Italian forms are mingled, sometimes to the extent that the form of an individual word is neither clearly French nor clearly Italian but mixed. However, the notion of ‘hybridity’ as applied to texts of this kind is problematic, one key point being that it imposes an imperative to analyse the language of a text deemed to be lin­guis­tic­ al­ly ‘hybrid’ against a ‘pure’ or ‘non-hybrid’ model (Gaunt 2013, 86–94). This is not always clearly stated, but, even in a textbook as fine as Frédéric Duval’s ­outstanding Le Français médiéval, the implication is that le franco-italien needs to be evaluated against an ‘original’ form of French from France: ‘L’apparition du franco-italien s’explique peut-être par un compromis, qui consisterait à contenter

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Local French outside France  53

Figure 1.3.  Grenoble 861, f. 17r, detail. Note the manicula. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

le public pour la compréhension du texte tout en conservant le prestige de l’original français. La forme hybride franco-italienne ne résulterait pas de l’incapacité des  rédacteurs à s’exprimer en français, mais du désir de concilier la langue étrangère . . . et la compréhension du public’ (Duval 2009, 52, emphasis added, ‘the emergence of Franco-Italian may perhaps be explained by a compromise which consists of catering to the readership’s need to understand the text while conserving the prestige of the original French. The Franco-Italian hybrid form would not then be the product of the redactors’ inability to express themselves in French, but of their desire to mediate between a foreign language . . . and the public’s ­capacity to understand.’). If writers of Franco-Italian texts are not deemed incompetent here, as has often been the case, their readers’ limited knowledge of French implicitly becomes the reason for deviation from standard French, which in turn supports the notion of le prestige de l’original français (whether the prestige be the originary nature of the original text or its superior French). But is this notion borne out by the Grenoble manuscript of the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie?

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54  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad According to Jung, one of the few scholars to have passed any comment on this text, ‘la langue est truffée d’italianismes’ (1996, 485, ‘the language is full of Italianisms’). Some of these Italianisms are clear and are common in Italian manu­scripts of French texts: • Reduction of [ou] > [o] systematically in some words: trover < trouver; soveraine < souveraine; tornera < tournera; novelle < nouvelle • Parledor (for parleur) • Ciascune (for chacune) • Chouse (for chose) Furthermore, there are ‘errors’ with agreements of gender and number and with verb morphology that are typical of Italian scribes of French texts, ‘errors’ that indicate imperfect knowledge of French as written and spoken in France or, at the very least, a casual attitude towards its written grammatical norms, in that a scribe of (at least some kinds of) French origin is unlikely to have written in this way: • tos le doulor (fem. noun with a masc. adj.) • Elle ne vuelent (sg. subject + pl. verb) • Fairons (wrong stem for verb form) This kind of ‘agrammatical’ behaviour is altogether typical of some Franco-Italian texts and manuscripts (Gaunt 2013, 84–5) and some syntactic structures sometimes mimic those of Italian, for example the possessive in ‘les nos ancessors’ on the first folio. But are these necessarily ‘errors’? It is instructive to consider these ‘errors’ within the broader framework of the manuscript’s orthographic system, which is idiosyncratic but nonetheless fairly systematic by medieval standards: • The frequent, almost systematic use of inorganic ‘h’ in words beginning with a vowel, particularly ‘e’ and ‘o’: hoc, hoisi < issi, horent < eurent; hosast < osast; hole < o le; hestoit < estoit; hosels < osels • The almost systematic use of ‘i’ as a graphy for intervocalic [ʤ] in some words, most notably saie, ‘wise’ • The almost systematic use of ‘s’ as a graphy for [ʧ] in some words, e.g. cersoit, where there is also possible metathesis of [ts] and [ʧ] • ‘l’ for ‘r’, known as ‘lamdacism’: Blesida The initial inorganic ‘h’ could be a Burgundian trait, but this seems unlikely here; it seems more probable we are dealing with a scribal tic, perhaps intended to

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Local French outside France  55 give the script a more learned, Latinate flavour. The graphy saie is common in Franco-Italian manuscripts, but it is not to our knowledge used in France, where either sage or saige prevails. Saie would seem therefore to be a specifically Italian form of a French word. We have not found any analogies for the metathesis in cersoit or for this form of Briseïda’s name.19 Fabio Zinelli, in his discussion of a corpus of texts and manuscripts produced or reproduced in Genoa (including therefore the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie, writes that ‘la pressione dell’italiano può farsi sentire’ (2015, 95, ‘the pressure of Italian can make itself felt’), and this is perhaps a more value-neutral and therefore interesting formulation than ‘hybridity’.20 This overall complex of linguistic features and orthographical traits makes it imprudent, in our view, to judge a text such as this against a notional French original either in terms of the text itself or the language in which it is copied. In any case, what would the ‘original’ be here, textually or linguistically? Clearly not Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s text, since, although it is a source, it has had such a thorough makeover. And then what constitutes ‘correct French’ for the Italian prosifier, a copy of whose work we are reading? We would like to take seriously Alberto Varvaro’s suggestion that linguistic features of the kind that philologists often use to localize a text or scribe by identifying dialectic traits, or sometimes ‘errors’ characteristic of foreign or non-local scribes, may in fact also be stylistic choices (Varvaro 1996, 532). But we would like to suggest further that, if this linguistic veneer of a text is seen as a stylistic choice, it needs also to be looked at in conjunction with other stylistic choices, such as those pertaining to narrative voice, prosody, and the representation of authorship we discussed earlier. Furthermore, we can push further this stylistic approach to the medieval text in its manuscript context if we also look at how it is presented visually. We can locate and date Grenoble 861 precisely through a colophon informing us that one Johannes de Stennis copied the manuscript while imprisoned in Padua in 1298. But even without this information, the manuscript has visual traits that localize it and tie it to the late thirteenth century: • the characteristic display script of the opening initial (1r) • the style of the miniatures (e.g. 19r) • the decorative medallions (e.g. 19r) • the scribe’s hand • instructions to the artist in Italian (e.g. 19r)

19  We are grateful to Ian Short for advice on some of these points. 20  Zinelli uses the three manuscripts of the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie mainly to isolate the Genoese traits of Paris, BnF, NAF 9603 (2015, 108–9). His purpose is therefore rather different from ours.

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56  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 1.4.  Grenoble 861, f. 7v, detail. (Roman de Troie, en prose, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, cote MS.263 Rés. Cliché BMG.)

The first two of these points are particularly telling. Although this style of d ­ isplay script is found in manuscripts of other vernacular texts from the Veneto (e.g. Brunetto Latini’s Tresor), the majority of other examples we have been able to locate are Italian manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César.21 As for the style of the miniatures, there may well be stylistic analogies here with troubadour chansonniers produced in the Veneto (see Figure 1.4). The historiated initial here shows stylistic parallels with portraits of troubadours in two chansonniers (Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 854 and fr. 12473), the Venetian descorative features of which have been studied by Fabio Zinelli (2007), and it does not therefore seem a coincidence that the figure stands beside a passage clearly evocative of the lyric spring opening. So who and what was this new version of the Roman de Troie for? At the time it was produced and reproduced, Benoît’s text was still in circulation in Italy, but in 21  See Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 1260, f. 1r (Histoire); Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 1113, f. 5 and f. 100 (Tresor), fr. 1386, f. 1 (Histoire), fr. 9865, f. 2 (Histoire), NAF 9603 (second mise en prose of the Troie); Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2576, f. 3r (Histoire). We are grateful to Keith Busby for his help on this point.

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Local French outside France  57 the late thirteenth century it must have seemed stylistically archaic to an Italian Francophone reading public that seems never to have had a taste for French verse romance, except for the Troie, and yet seems to have had a strong appetite for prose romance, particularly the Tristan en prose and material derived from or related to it (Delcorna Branca 1998a, 49–76). The stylistic modernization effected by the prosifier of the second mise en prose goes hand in hand with a visual packaging in Grenoble 861 that seems to create a link with other vernacular French texts, notably the Histoire ancienne, with its central Trojan theme, but also troubadour lyric. This begins to give us a sense of what a vernacular literary canon in the late thirteenth-century Veneto might have looked like, to which one should add of course the numerous chansons de geste copied in the region at this time. But the Italian reading public who commissioned and used manuscripts of works in French did not require them to be written in ‘correct’ or ‘pure’ French. Thus, as with Gaimar’s Estoire, the French of the second mise en prose of the Roman de Troie localizes it on one level and yet probably also means that the text is not translatable to France, or at least not in this linguistic form; and again, as with Gaimar’s Estoire, the dissemination of this text seems to have been confined to a single region. But crucially, the language of a manuscript like Grenoble 861 has its own distinctive style, which is sustained and clearly has its own aesthetic rather than simply reproducing debased forms of imported ‘French’ literary culture. That this should then go hand in hand with a distinct visual style that is also local points towards an independent local literary culture in French.

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2

Francophone Literary Culture on the Move Northern Italy

This chapter takes up the topic of medieval Francophone literary centres in ­northern Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by addressing how the traffic in texts between northern France, Picardy, and the Low Countries, on the one hand, and Lombardy, the Veneto, Piedmont, and Liguria, on the other, shaped textual traditions as they moved along trade routes, from court to court, in Europe and beyond.1 As such, it addresses a different sense of supralocality and temporality than did our first chapter: one that is more mobile, keeping one eye firmly on the future and the other on the past. If Pierre Nora characterizes a lieu de mémoire as a site of remembrance at the crossroads between memory and ­history, then the thirteenth-century prose romances we will discuss in this chapter come very close to serving such a function. They are neither history nor artefacts of memory but objects—manuscripts—left behind for interpretation, rather than vestiges of truth. As Nora put it, such lieux are ‘moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned, no longer quite life, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded’ (Nora 1989, 12). Once such physical ‘moments’ have been collected, re-sorted, and repurposed— be it by artists, authors, historians, or political leaders—they can fulfil all sorts of  narratological purposes across wide geographical and cultural ranges. As thirteenth-­century French prose romances mixed and merged through transmission and rewriting, they came to reflect the concerns of their audiences and patrons, providing heroic models for imitation and instituting a vogue for compilation. This generic innovation involved collections of branches and fragments of textual traditions that could then be conjoined to appeal to particular tastes. Such an understanding of the processes of compilation undermines some of the nationalistic principles that underpinned nineteenth-century philological work regarding textual integrity, authors, and authorial distinction; but it has enriched our 1  Many thanks are due to Nicola Morato and Huw Grange for their considerable contributions to this chapter. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  59 understanding of how textual traditions gathered material through travel and collective manipulation as they moved southward from England, the Low Countries, and what is now the north of France, then returned northward from Italy, in new, modified, and sometimes unexpected forms. Although there is nothing particularly new about this idea—that French literary material travelled widely during the period or that the ‘original’ and the ‘author’ are at best heuristic assumptions and not markers of authenticity—the ‘resettlement’ question of material returning to its assumed place of origin has received much less attention. Northern Italian courts, and mercantile centres in northern Europe, played a large role in the processes of transition and in the production and consumption of manuscripts and are thereby arguably just as significant as, if not more significant than, places of origin, at least when discussing questions of reception. Sociological readings of literary texts that pay attention to these milieus will therefore be part of this chapter’s agenda. The languages, dialects, and scriptae in which these modifications were made— French, Genoese, Venetian, Franco-Italian—also offer evidence of the viability of  this mix of Picard French and northern Italian languages and culture. Once thought (see discussion in Chapter  1) to record simply a range of debased and error-ridden forms of French—a language that was itself in a process of mutation and development across the many regions in which it was used during this period—French-language manuscripts produced in northern Italy are now recognized as valuable evidence of language contact and development at a moment when manuscript production was on the rise and language theory was just developing.2 The significant amount of literary production undertaken in the eastern (Veneto and North-East generally), central (Lombardy), and western regions (Piedmont, Liguria) of northern Italy, and the contribution that this material made to the literary history of western Europe, is assurance enough that what we are facing here is a significant and widespread phenomenon of linguistic and ­cultural mixing that echoes similar phenomena in other such border and commercial regions.3 A similar phenomenon can be observed in the Low Countries, including medieval Flanders: the southern regions were primarily French speaking; the middle regions between the Canche and Aa rivers were multilingual, speaking some forms of French and Germanic dialects; and in the north, merchants, many aristocrats, and clerics seem to have been functionally bilingual, even if their first 2 Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia provides one of the best examples of comparative language study between French, Occitan, and the various northern Italian and Mediterranean dialects, though in its time it was ‘del tutto eccezionale’ (Varvaro 1996, 532, ‘exceptional in everything’). Much of it was likely theorized during his travels in these regions during his exile from Florence. 3  Varvaro 1996 rightly reminds us that literary languages offer an exception in that they can hold to a form that is much less malleable and much more conservative in relation to the spoken languages of the communities from which they emerge.

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60  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad language was a variety of Flemish or Dutch.4 The influx of francophone texts into northern Italy was probably driven as much by networks operating within the imperial territories of the Low Countries and the northern regions of what is now France as it was by exchanges with Paris or the kingdom of France. And, as in Italy, the use of French in the Low Countries was not driven simply by the cultural prestige of French literary and chivalric models: it also reflected trade patterns, political tensions along regional borders, and what for lack of a better term we may call crusading propaganda (Oksanen  2012, 5). The great seasonal fairs held throughout the Low Countries proved a training ground not only for commercial exchange but for cultural and linguistic exchange as well. As Margriet Hoogvliet notes in a study on language mixing, a late medieval visitor to north-western Europe in 1517, the Italian Antonio de Beatis, observed that ‘[t]hough the people, men and women, [of Montreuil and Boulogne-­surMer] speak French, they are like Flemings in dress and all other ways’.5 This observation supports her argument that during this period cultural continuity flowed across languages and that the area between Paris and Antwerp was split less by language than has been imagined (see Lusignan 2004, 225–31 and 2012, 82 and Busby 2002, 513–35). Middle Dutch (or Vlaams, or flamand) may have been predominant in the north of the Low Countries (Ryckeboer  2002), and French more dominant in the south, but the two cultures were nonetheless intermixing freely.6 The Francophone material copied and composed in the north of Italy reflects a similar pattern. Local pronunciation and usage were grafted onto texts and copies written in French, largely of the supralocal, Picard-inflected variety discussed in our Introduction. Franco-Italian in particular (or Franco-Venetan, when discussing the eastern variety) has been recognized since the nineteenth century as a specific linguistic medium (again, see the Introduction). Though in some exceptional cases local forms predominate to such an extent that texts were limited to local circulation7 or alternatively required translation into a more standard form of French for circulation outside Italy, generally speaking Franco-Italian texts partook of international networks of transmission and were at least in some cases produced precisely for that purpose.

4  Oksanen 2012, 5, citing Milis 2005b and 2005c, both of which are to be found in Milis 2005a. 5  De Beatis 1979, 106; quoted in Hoogvliet 2018, 323. 6  Hoogvliet notes that, although de Beatis refers here to ‘French’, the language he heard would most likely have been a variety of Picard or Walloon. For more on that topic, see Lusignan 2012, Lusignan, Martineau, Morin, and Cohen 2011, 45–65, and Trotter 2006. 7 The Geste Francor provides an example. This is a collection of epic texts in Franco-Italian copied in the first half of the fourteenth century, which contains nine epic texts within its ninety-five folios. See note 23.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  61 The modern concepts of ‘contact zones’8 and ‘translation zones’9 are pertinent to understanding how French worked in the north of Italy and to what degree it was recognized as a different and competing language or stitched into the local vernacular such that in some contexts it could work as a form of pidgin: a sup­ plemental and simplified form of two or more languages which serves as a reference for speakers of different languages that are spoken within a community (see Sebba 1997). It seems quite clear that the courts and literary centres of northern Italy constituted a contact zone, an arena within which languages mixed freely, in speech and in textual transmission (Apter 2005, 6). Most of the French material that was being copied in northern Italy was not composed originally in those ­centres, though much of it was present in the area for a longer period than acknowledged; and, as we have seen, most of the settings of the tales that proved most popular were far removed temporally and spatially from the communes and regions in which the manuscripts were being copied and assembled.10 Many of the characters who populate these romance manuscript folios—Arthur, Guiron, Tristan, and the biblical and classical figures from the Histoire ancienne—are performing diegetically in places and time zones quite different from those of the sites where the texts were thought to have been compiled and consumed. Celtic Britain, northern France/Picardy, and the Low Countries figure most prom­in­ ent­ly in this material, and if there is no attempt to ‘localize’ the action as described in the text to the Veneto, the Lombard plains, or the north of Italy, the fact that the characters resemble local knights fighting over the same sorts of issues that plagued the Arthurian court, combined with the fact that the illuminations often feature identifiable landscape, fashion, or architecture, suggest the narratives are presented as directly pertinent to the northern Italian context. This may simply be true of adventure fiction in general, in which action supersedes local and political differences, though there will usually be subtle parallels drawn between the diegesis and host culture. The use of such tales, composed in French, seems to indicate that their audiences were both responding to and serving as reflections of larger cultural identities and issues. French seems to have served as a guarantor at once of authority, comparative antiquity, and widespread comprehensibility. It is implicit in the material being transmitted that the issues facing the prose romance heroes were similar to problems faced by their contemporary readers/listeners: loss of land to invaders, political tensions over sovereignty and legitimacy, family disruption leading to civil war, religious dogma conflicting

8  Contact zones are ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today’ (Pratt 1991, 34). The first use of the term was by Pratt 1991, 34, but she develops the idea more fully in Pratt 1992. 9  See Apter 2005. 10  On this point, Morato 2017 draws attention to an even earlier circulation of Arthurian materials in both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, for which there is so far no explanation.

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62  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad with political aims. What the audience of such texts was looking for were models of governance, heroism, love, and ethics. Their eyes were fixed throughout, however, on notions of the future as well as the past. The texts were not read as quaintly antiquarian but as practically historical. The past was evoked so as to be folded into the future, and the present served simply as the fulcrum through which the divine plan could be made evident and effective, a bit like one’s personal experience of time, or dream time, in which all past, present, and future seem continually to merge.11 Supralocal languages must not be seen as interesting oddities or footnotes to literary history but were a means by which to transmit necessary cultural knowledge at a time when the political tensions between the Holy Roman Empire and papal interests had risen to the point of no return and the fate of Christian empire hung in the balance. The loss of Acre in 1291 meant the end of the Latin Kingdom (though it hung on for some time on the island of Cyprus). The prose romances that we are considering were all composed and circulated not long before and after this event (from the first decade of the thirteenth century through the fourteenth century) and inevitably reflect another whole series of tensions and references that subtend the tales of Arthurian empire-building. The present chapter will set out the extent to which Italian interest in prose romance proved decisive in its permeation of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century western Christian mentalities, through the copying, circulation, translation, and composition of such material right through to the sixteenth century. This process of borrowing, adapting, and transmitting had probably begun much earlier with epic material, some of which was explicitly set in the Italian peninsula. The mix of languages and cultures (French, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew) was a constant throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and some historical memory of Islamic, Byzantine, and Norman invasions remained current and painful (Vitullo 2000, Palumbo 2013). Especially in the south, but also in Lombardy and the Veneto, the multiple temporal, spatial, and linguistic layers between tales of the past and the world in which they were being recounted remained tangible and retained ideological punch. The Arthurian past seems to have been enrolled in a move to address how the past informs the present, how Christian empire-building fills the breach left by the fall of Rome and pagan invasions. References to Arthur in visual and iconographic terms were already common in southern Italy—the mosaics of Otranto cathedral being a notable example—and on the Iberian peninsula, and it was even widely believed that King Arthur had been entombed in Mount Etna in Sicily, thus ensuring a presumed ‘Italian’ and Mediterranean connection.12 While it might appear that such a geographical and temporal remove from Arthurian Britain might dampen the 11  Much of this material would, in fact, lend itself to Lacanian theorization as regards the notions of time, memory, and history. 12  See Allaire and Psaki, 2014, 205–32 and Busby 2014, 11–20.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  63 immediate political connection for contemporary twelfth- and thirteenth-century audiences, the proliferation of manuscripts of Arthurian material in French from south of the Alps seems to point in another direction. Audiences seem to have seen themselves in these texts, not because of their language or the proximity of their setting but because they saw themselves as the direct heirs of the classical and Arthurian worlds about which they were hearing, especially following the rise and fall of Frederick II, king of Sicily, of Italy, and of Jerusalem (with varying regnal dates) and Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1220–50): part of a larger and more comprehensive Christian community in the wake of the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. This distant but parallel past acted as an effective mirror within which ­audiences could see their own victories over adversity and their own future glory; and it provides a particularly effective case study for translatio studii. The movement of glory and knowledge from the East to the West in the years following the fall of Greece and Rome provided a clear, compensatory fantasy narrative that could be bent and shaped to fit different purposes. At the same time, a similar dynamic seems to have been operating further north, in Flanders and the Artois, where the Histoire ancienne was among a number of historiographical works being composed for a public who saw themselves as the modern equivalents of the pro­tag­on­ists of biblical narrative and classical conquest, the heroic kings and conquerors of Jerusalem (Spiegel 1993, 11–54). Aristocratic northern Italian readers were consuming the Histoire ancienne in the late thirteenth ­century and clearly saw in figures such as Tristan and Guiron le Courtois models of courtly and knightly excellence that they could emulate, not as attributes of a particularly English or northern European orientation but as part of a larger, universal brotherhood of Christian heroes such as those which appear in Jacques de Longuyon’s early fourteenth-century Vœux du Paon as the Nine Worthies, ­biblical, secular, and legendary heroes who define what was already being claimed as the foundation of European Christian culture (see further discussion in Chapter 6).13 The maritime centres of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, and to a lesser degree the intellectual and commercial centres of Bologna and Milan, were instrumental in this process of transmission and dissemination. Burgeoning population growth and economic prosperity had fostered a multilingual environment where merchants, women displaced from their homelands by marriage alliances, peripatetic clerics, and ecclesiastics from elsewhere carried their languages with them. Such centres operated as translation zones: areas where textual materials were admitted, absorbed, reformulated, and retransmitted. Language choice for manuscript

13 The Nine Worthies comprise three sets of heroes from classical pagan, Old Testament, and  Christian sources (Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon); the characters in the romances are models of earthly, Christian chivalry.

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64  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad production seems to have been pragmatic and functional, with French the c­ ommon vernacular language of choice when the frame of reference was literary, secu­lar, historical, or all three, as in the case of the major prose romance cycles and the Histoire ancienne. Italian readers and at least some Italian scribes seem not to have been too worried about the forms that French assumed or about how, or if, the texts they worked on would be received by first-language French speakers.14 The cultural centres in which these texts were produced (largely monastic, commercial, and aristocratic scriptoria) operated as clearing houses, producing material for specific audiences and for export as well as for local courts and dignitaries. The scribes and compilers working on this French-language material were providing for their readers the justification and celebration of a shared Christian, aristocratic genealogy that celebrated not only the local nobility and their place in a Christian power structure but also their role amongst warriors, kings, and knights from across Europe who shared a similar set of goals and values and worked within the norms of a common ethical system. This was further supported by the crusades, religious propaganda, and prophecies that circu­lated regarding the place of the Holy Land in European destiny.15 The northern Italian centres operated as points within networks, extending from the Low Countries to northern Italy, to Acre, and back again to the port cities of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. Along these networks there moved manuscripts, textual traditions, compilers, and scribes, as they stopped at one centre before moving into more local networks or towards private collections. Ships, codices, manuscripts, spices, luxury items, language, and stories: all acted as agents and mediators, making, as Bruno Latour would have it, things happen (Latour 2005). The political fictions pedalled by the narratives we examine in this book, and the move from verse to prose that may have facilitated the wide dispersal of vernacular romance and history in the thirteenth century (Spiegel 1993, 55–98), were part of this larger Christian effort to recast the past as an alliance of might with right, figured in the form of Arthurian and biblical figures, all in the aim of portraying northern and southern Europe as constitutive parts of a Christian empire whose centres would be twinned in the East and West, the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem acting as Rome’s eastern arm. A supralocal form of French served as a convenient vehicle in this effort. Just as we saw in Chapter 1 with the re-valorization of the ‘French of England’ (Wogan-Browne  2013), the re-valorization of the ‘French of Italy’—a term that encompasses all of the varieties of French used in transmitting literary and 14  Following Derrida 1996, we maintain that no native speaker possesses even their ‘own’ language: it is always borrowed and shared. ‘Native speaker’ might sometimes be misinterpreted in our heavily ‘monolingual’ cultures, especially in the Anglophone world, thus this caveat. 15  Robert E. Lerner (1976, 7) asserts that ‘much of the content of medieval religious prophecy can be read as the expression of dissatisfaction with the present and hope for the future’.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  65 historical material—has been a gradual process. Thanks to the foundational research of Gianfranco Folena (1990) and Alberto Limentani on the Veneto (Limentani, Infurna, and Zambon 1992), Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso (1989) on Pisa, and Daniela Delcorno Branca (1998a) on Pisa and Tuscany, much more is now known about the dissemination of the most popular texts in French copied in northern Italy. More recently, a new generation of scholars has taken up their work and essentially redrawn the map of this Franco-Italian production by turning their attention to Genoa, Naples, the south of France, and, in some cases, the workshops of Cyprus and Acre, in addition to the Veneto.16 This work has confirmed that French-language literary and historical material permeated Italian cultural circles to a previously unimagined degree from the mid to late thirteenth century, especially at aristocratic courts and amongst well-to-do civic and economic leaders across northern Italy and down to Naples.17 By the second half of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, under the Este family in Ferrara, the Visconti/ Sforza in Milan/Pavia, and Gonzaga rule in Mantua, French manuscripts became prized objects that were collected and stored in magnificent library collections whose records of ownership and storage were left for posterity.18 Some of these records also chart patterns of borrowing, trading, and sales; and, when supplemented by civic records of taxes and inheritance, we can see that many manuscripts moved from one hand to the next, for pleasure, copying, and display. Such records have since proven invaluable in reconstructing the history of French-language manuscripts in the later Middle Ages, telling stories of their usage, composition, and travels (Allaire 2014). The first vernacular texts from north and west of the Alps to circulate in Italy seem to have been translations of religious texts and Occitan lyrics, perhaps as a result of the incursion into northern Italy of an Occitan-speaking population in the wake of the Albigensian crusade in the early years of the thirteenth century and the ambitions of the lords in the Piemonte and Lunigiana (Caïti-Russo 2005). Amongst the longer narrative forms, the chansons de geste may have had an audience in northern Italy well before the arrival of prose romance. We find echoes of chansons de geste in both the north and the south of the Italian peninsula, first appearing in Latin chronicles and in the references made in other twelfth-century Latin texts to the fabled heroism of Charlemagne and his army.19 By the year 1200, 16  A key publication was Zinelli  2007, which argued that an early manuscript of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor (Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, MS DVIII) had probably been produced in the same workshop that produced two of the major troubadour chansonniers, manuscripts IK, before then connecting that workshop with Outremer productions from Acre and Cyprus on the basis of linguistic analysis, mise en page, and marginal decoration. See also the discussion in Chapter 1 on the visual style of Grenoble 861. 17  For the case of Naples, following the crowning of Charles of Anjou as king of Sicily in 1266, see Formisano and Lee 1993, ch. 5. 18 On the Este, see Antonelli  2012 and 2013; on the Visconti, see Chapter  5. On Venice, see Bisson 2008. 19  These would include artistic references as well, such as the carved figures of Roland and Oliver on the Duomo of Verona (1139) and the mosaics in Otranto Cathedral, as well as Latin chronicles: the

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66  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad there are indications that both a rhymed and assonanced Roland were ­circulating in the Veneto, along with a copy of the Prise de Narbonne, suggesting either that the Roland might be one of the earliest texts in French to have been absorbed into an Italian network of reception and reproduction or, indeed, that it should more properly be seen as a Mediterranean as well as a northern European text (Palumbo 2013, Duggan 2005). The author of the Entrée d’Espagne, composed c. 1320, probably in Padua,20 certainly knew both the assonanced and rhymed versions of the Roland, and both forms were used in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian remaniements (re-workings) of the Roland, preserved in manuscripts such as Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS fr. Z. 4 (end of the thirteenth century), Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS fr. Z. 7 (1320–45), and Chateauroux, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1, another Italian production possibly composed in the same workshop.21 The Entrée d’Espagne (whose French was characterized as déplorable by its 1913 French editor, Antoine Thomas) was also later reworked in prose and gave rise to spinoffs, such as the mid-fourteenth-century Fatti di Spagna, and to continuations and inter-weavings with Pseudo-Turpin material that were eventually melded into a loose cycle.22 Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS fr. Z. 13 offers additional evidence of the importance of French epic in the northern Italian republics and mercantile centres.23 In it are preserved a cycle of epic texts composed between 1320 and 1345 whose antigraph was probably composed somewhere between 1265 and 1300.24 This would imply that production of manuscripts in French was already under way in the mid thirteenth century and that a sort of ‘koine franco-italien’ (Palumbo’s term) was already in use at that date in the Veneto. Although this suggests that the chanson de geste rivalled romance (or history as romance) in popularity in the Veneto at the end of the thirteenth century and into the early decades of the fourteenth, prose romance eventually seems to have surpassed it as the choice of collectors and perhaps also of contemporary taste. Cronaca Faentina (1226), the Annales Ceccanenses (early thirteenth century), and the Cronaca di Saba Malaspina (c. 1285). See Palumbo 2013, for a fuller discussion, and Vitullo 2000. 20  For the Entrée d’Espagne, see Thomas 1913 and the more recent anthology (using Thomas’s text) by Infurna 2011. On the Roland tradition more generally, see the excellent introductions to each of the texts in Duggan 2005. 21  Palumbo 2013, 92–3 n. 11. The fundamental scholarship on this tradition is Segre 1974. 22  On which, see Palumbo 2013, 214–344. Thomas was an exemplary scholar in his time, and his derogatory comment was not in any way unusual for the period. The French probably did appear deplorable if you were simply expecting that all users would reference the same standard dialect. To his credit, Thomas did go on to publish the text, which he considered of primary interest, despite his misgivings about the language. See Sunderland 2017 for more on this Franco-Italian material. 23  On Marciana fr. Z. 13 see the edition by Leslie Zarker Morgan (2009) and the discussion in Vitullo 2000. It includes Bovo d’Antona, the Enfances Ogier, the Chevalerie Ogier, Karleto, Berta da li pe grandi, Berta e Milon, Rolandino, Macaire. 24  See Palumbo 2013, 77–78 for more particulars on this dating.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  67 Genoa and Pisa played an important role in the dissemination of romance and historiographical material, a fact that makes perfect sense when we consider the status of these ports in the thirteenth century.25 Though both were already prosperous prior to 1000, it was in the wake of the First Crusade that their ­dominance at sea was firmly established. This dominance was manifested, on the one hand, in their successful trade with the East and particularly with Islamic commercial centres; and, on the other, in their provision of transportation to pilgrims and crusaders travelling to the Latin Kingdom (Abulafia 2011, 287–369). When Acre began operating as the capital of that kingdom, following the recapture of the city by Richard I (the Lionheart) of England in 1191, the urban space was carved into a series of independent enclaves: two for the Genoese and one each, of varying size and importance, for the Pisans, Venetians, Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights (see further discussion in Chapter  4).26 Much of the economic activity of the city for the next century depended upon the financial and mercantile strength of the first three of those communities and their dealings with both local Muslim traders and the Christian powers in the West. The city survived the thirteenth century on the basis of a difficult balance between these commercial interests, centred in the three powerful Italian communities, the religious and military orders, and the frequent interventions from the western powers, including the Papacy, all of whom held moral and financial investments in the good standing of the Kingdom. This balance was perennially fragile, however, and often interrupted by outbreaks of violence amongst the major players; such violence finally escalated into what can only be called civil war (Jacoby  2005). Though within the kingdom the conflict was largely played out behind the city walls of Acre, closer to home it extended to the sea and climaxed in the naval battle of Meloria, off the Ligurian coast, in 1284, just seven years before the fall of the Latin Kingdom. That battle firmly established the supremacy of the Genoese at sea but in a sense sealed the fate of Acre, besieged from within. Close to 8,000 Pisans lost their lives in the battle of Meloria, but there was a curious benefit to the defeat, at least in terms of literary history: Pisan prisoners held in Genoese prisons were essentially conscripted into a textual offensive. Over a period of decades—a very small window in cultural terms—they produced a large number of important manuscripts, many of them in the vernacular and most of them in French, including multiple copies of the prose Tristan and Guiron. Today they can still be identified by a distinctive visual aesthetic.27

25 Crucial early studies that established the importance of Genoa include Avril, Gousset, and Rabel 1984, Avril and Gousset 1988, and Benedetti 1990. 26  On the medieval Genoese quarter, see Kool 1997, Jacoby 1979, and Prawer 1980. 27  See particularly Cigni 2007 and also Benedetti 1990, 31–47.

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68  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Fabrizio Cigni’s count in 2010 of twenty-seven French-language manuscripts that had been positively identified as having been produced in Genoa between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has since risen to close to fifty.28 Cigni refers to these Genoan-Pisan manuscripts as the groupe chevaleresque, and they include, in addition to the Compilation by Rusticiaus de Pise (Rustichello da Pisa),  copies of the Libro de marescalcie by Giordano Ruffo, two bestiaries (including that of Richard de Fournival), Apollonius de Tyr, the Distiques de Caton, the Jugement d’amour, Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, the Amonestement del pere a son fils, the Faits des Romains, two manuscripts of the Roman de Troie, and the Queste del Saint Graal. The four most numerous remain, nonetheless, the Histoire ancienne (four manuscripts), the prose Lancelot (four manuscripts), the prose Tristan (five manuscripts), and Guiron le courtois (five manuscripts). The Tristan and Guiron, in particular, proved popular in northern Italy, where they developed whole new additions and reformulations of the texts, including additional ­prequels and distinctive Franco-Italian variations of romance material. If Italian readers were demanding texts in French, volgarizzamenti—rewritings in Italian dialects—were also flourishing by the fourteenth century (see Cornish 2011). It would appear that audiences and patrons were able to appreciate the French prose versions of the classic historical/romance material (again,  particularly the Arthurian material featuring Lancelot, Tristan, and Guiron) as well as the Italian-language adaptations of the same material29 and, in some cases, even Latin adaptations (for example, in the case of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, for which see Griffin 1936). Such a gamut of choices is probably to be explained by the sociocultural differences among aristocratic households, mercantile families, and patrons and the extra layer of prestige that Latin continued to carry. Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS EST.39 (ALFA.L.9.30) is one of the earliest known manuscripts of Arthurian material (c. 1210–20, see Stones 1977) and has much to tell us about networks of transmission outside France. Thought to have been copied in northern France, this manuscript transmits the trilogy attributed to Robert de Boron plus the Mort le roi Artu section from the Didot-Perceval 28  Cigni  2010, 192–3, 211–12, supplemented by a thorough 2015 publication by Fabbio Zinelli which identified 47 such manuscripts. Thirty of the forty-seven carry at least one of the six textual traditions under study in this book (plus Rusticiaus’s Compilation). This work has since been added to by Fabbri 2016. Though these manuscripts had traditionally been identified as having been made for the Angevin court in Naples, or the Carafa (or Caracciolo) family from that same milieu, Avril and Gousset (1988) reassigned them to Genoa, probably to the Genoese prison workshops, based on marginal writings and the style of bas-de-page decoration. Elsewhere they specify details of the painted initials and filigreed extenders to the letters which end in hooks, imaginary creatures, white points on letters and faces; Avril, Gousset, and Rabel 1984, 25–7, and Gousset 1988. See also Cigni 2012, 227–30 and Benedetti 1990, 31–47. 29  The prose Tristan received by far the greatest number of volgarizzamenti. Until recently it was thought that the Lancelot was the only one of these texts to be read exclusively in French and not to receive a volgarizzamento into Italian. However, a recently discovered substantial fragment of a translation into Italian has excited a great deal of interest, as it overturns some of the earlier explanations for the Lancelot’s absence. See Cadioli 2016.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  69 and a lapidary.30 Heretofore, the conventional view had been that the prose Joseph portion of Modena EST.39 was a later addition, an adaptation of the verse Joseph d’Arimathie, also known as the Roman de l’Estoire dou Graal, again by Robert de Boron. A scribe or reader at the end of the verse text (lines 3,489–3,491), however, appears to invoke as his patron a certain Gautier de Montbéliard, who has been identified as regent of Cyprus from 1205 to 1210 and who probably died fighting in Palestine in 1212. One plausible interpretation of this difficult passage would be that Robert de Boron might have produced this rhymed version in the East, perhaps in Cyprus, after 1212, having accompanied the man he speaks of as Gautier of ‘Mont Belyal’ to Outremer.31 This Gautier has since been identified as the lord of Montfaucon, who died in the Latin Kingdom in 1212, after having set off to participate in the Fourth Crusade in 1202.32 Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 255 rivals Modena EST.39 for the title of earliest known Arthurian prose manuscript. In Roger Middleton’s estimation, if this manuscript were of Parisian fabrication, as the appearance of its illustrative programme would seem to indicate, one could speculate that the business of manuscript making was already operating in the first decades of the thirteenth century, orchestrated by a well-organized Parisian libraire—what Middleton calls ‘an exercise in marketing as much as a literary or artistic creation’ (Middleton 2006, 49 and 51). Both ideas—that of a profiteering libraire in Paris and that of Robert de Boron writing in Cyprus—are worth entertaining. They establish that the idea of providing manuscripts for wealthy patrons, the sort who bought prose romances, was already firmly in place quite early in the thirteenth century; but they also suggest that the material being copied in Paris, one of the earliest established centres of manuscript production, could well have been coming from far further afield. Fabio Zinelli (2007, 51 n. 180) raises the possibility of a scriptorium operating in Cyprus later in the thirteenth or in the early fourteenth century. If he is right, then it would make sense that it could have been associated with the Lusignan court or at least have been set up to serve their interests. His basis for this hypothesis is a set of scriptural similarities and lexical parallels that he observed between one family of Tresor manuscripts and two manuscripts of John of Ibelin’s Assises de Jerusalem.33 He suggests a possible connection between this 30  Folios 1r–13v transmit the Joseph d’Arimathie en prose; 13v–46r the Merlin en prose; 46r–66r the Didot-Perceval; 66r–74v the Mort le roi Artu, and 75r–80v the Modena lapidary. 31  Gowans (2004) has also argued that these verse renditions are later adaptations of the earlier prose rendering. See Zufferey 2006 for another view on Robert de Boron. 32  In addition to Gallais 1970, see also Arthurian Fiction in Narratives and Manuscripts, ­http:// www.arthurianfiction.org, accessed 29 August 2018, and The Lancelot-Graal Project, http://www. lancelot-project.pitt.edu/lancelot-project.html, accessed 29 August 2018. The crusading Montfaucon/ Montbéliard were linked by marriage to the family of the castellans of Saint-Omer, another clan of famous crusaders (see Chapter 3, p. 115). 33  Zinelli 2007, 51–53. For the Assises, see Edbury 2003. The Tresor manuscripts are London, BL, Additional MSS 30024 and 30025, and Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 269; the Assises manuscripts are Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden 3457 and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19026. Furthermore, one manuscript of this text, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Str. App. 20, is made up of two

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70  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad same family of Tresor manuscripts and the Chronique du Templier de Tyr, which is clearly a Cypriot production, and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 4789 and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19026, which make up branch z1 of the Assises de Jerusalem.34 Each of these contains an interpolation from chapters 3.75 and 3.74 of Brunetto’s Tresor. Interestingly, the compiler here has adapted Brunetto’s language to fit a more feudal context, changing, for example, the phrase ‘chief des citiens’, appropriate for an Italian city state, to ‘le chief des homes liges’ in Vat. Lat. 4789.35 Zinelli speculates that the composition of the second version of Brunetto’s text may be explained by the success that the text enjoyed in Outremer and that this second version might have had a Neapolitan origin or one associated with the Angevin possessions in the eastern Mediterranean.36 This would establish that even from a relatively early date (mid thirteenth century) manuscripts were an important export of the Latin Kingdom. Thus, at the same time that the Parisian trade in secular manuscript production was being set up, another such centre was already operating far to the east in the Latin Kingdom, and the manuscripts being produced were moving between the major maritime ports on a regular basis. The early date at which French language manuscripts of Arthurian material were circulating in Italy is further established by the well-known letter of 1240 from Frederick II, in which he affirms receipt of the fifty-four quaterni (quires) of the libro Palamidis, which we now call the Meliadus or Guiron le Courtois. In Morato’s words, this is ‘la plus ancienne attestation de la circulation d’un roman arthurien en prose en Italie’ (2018, 188, ‘the oldest attestation of the cir­ culation of an Arthurian romance in prose in Italy’). The nature of this copy is not entirely clear: either it contained the Meliadus amongst other texts or a longer version of the text than we know today. In any case, the success of Arthurian prose romance in Italy was rapid. Fifty years later, in 1290, a speziale, or spice merchant, in Bologna mentions in his will that he possessed two French-language volumes, one a Chanson de Roland and the other a ‘librum de romano scilicet domini Lançalocti’ (Delcorno Branca 2011, 157, ‘a book in French about lord Lancelot’). This is not all that surprising: merchants and ‘bourgeois’ probably possessed sections, one from Acre, the other from Cyprus. Other Assises manuscripts from Cyprus are Munich, Bayerische StaatsBibliothek, MS Cod.gall. 51; Paris, BnF, MS fr. 19025; Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. Lat. 4789; Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS Fr. App. 6. For details of other French-language Cypriot manuscripts, see Zinelli 2007, 51 n. 180. 34 The Assises are actually made up of many different collections of writings on the laws that governed the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The best known of these writers is John of Ibelin, and z1 is another of these recensions that make up a very complicated manuscript tradition. See Edbury 2003, 694–720. 35  Zinelli 2007, 64. On feudalism in the Latin Kingdom, see Prawer 1980, 3–45. 36  Zinelli, 2007, 65. Here he suggests that at least one very early manuscript of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor made its way to Acre or Cyprus before returning in the form of multiple copies to the city of Venice. This one example could perhaps suggest the Mediterranean movement of other manuscripts which travelled from western Christian centres to the Latin Kingdom and then back again, often in a slightly altered form.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  71 ‘French’ manuscripts from the early years of their appearance, given the appeal of their narratives, but it has always been assumed that the prestigious aristocratic and monastic collections would have been predominantly in Latin. This is contradicted by the evidence that the Genoese manuscripts described earlier moved rather quickly into the princely collections of the period, the Gonzaga at Mantua, the Este at Ferrara, and the Visconti-Sforza family at Milan-Pavia.37 But instead of  remaining displayed on benches as proof of family status, these volumes were also lent out, copied, and recopied over the course of the following century, and occasionally used as collateral.38 Ubaldo Meroni notes that, in 1325, the Bonacolsi family, the predecessors of the Gonzaga in Mantua, had pawned six volumes to a Florentine banker, including one copy of the Tristan; and possession lists culled from the wills of mercantile and bourgeois families in Padua, Pavia, Ferrara, Bologna, Florence, Perugia, and Palermo also include French-language materials.39 In the Visconti library, there were French manuscripts produced in the north of France as well, such as the important Robert de Boron manuscript, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 95 (c. 1280), whose mise en page, treatment of initials, and style of illumination influenced the appearance of later Italian-made romance manuscripts.40 By the mid fourteenth century there was a general move away from the typical Genoese and Bologna ‘local’ styles that had pre­dom­in­ated in the thirteenth and early parts of the fourteenth century and towards what has been called a more ‘international’ style of luxury manuscript production.41 Not all of these French-language texts were copied by native (i.e. first-language French) speakers, of course, or necessarily imported from northern or eastern centres. Italian speakers also composed, or translated and adapted, works directly into various forms of French, or Franco-Italian, as we have seen, most strikingly in the case of Rusticiaus’s Compilation and the Prophéties de Merlin or the huge compilation of French materials that was composed by an Italian scribe, now Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12599. In this latter manuscript (c. 1275–1300), made in

37  As Cigni 2014, 37 points out, the prologues to both Rusticiaus’s Compilation and his and Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde are addressed to everyone from kings and lords to ‘civalier et vauvasor et borgiois, et tous les preudome de ce monde qui avés talent de delitier vos en romainz’ (‘knights and vavasors and bourgeois, and all worthy men of the world who delight in romance’). This suggests a significant expansion of the listening audience for romance texts. 38  See Benedetti 1990, 31–47 and Delcorno Branca 1998b, 385–6. For more on this topic, though from a slightly later period, see Um and Clark 2016, 3–18. 39  The list is not exhaustive. See Meroni 1966, 43, cited in Delcorno Branca 2011, 158–9. It is indicated, for example, in a ‘faux’ colophon to MS Y of the Brunetto Tresor (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, MS 10124) that the manuscript belonged to a member of the Scannasurice family, an important Neapolitan family which was associated, already in the time of Charles of Anjou (i.e. after 1266), with ‘mutuatori’ or money lenders. See Zinelli 2007, 44 n. 158. 40  This manuscript includes L’Estoire del Saint Graal (ff. 1–113), L’Estoire de Merlin (ff. 113–355), Le Roman des Sept Sages de Rome (ff. 355–80), and La Penitence Adam (ff. 380–94). 41  Delcorno Branca 2011, 179. The Bolognese style, present in other of the Visconti manuscripts, e.g. the early fourteenth-century Paris, BnF, MS fr. 755, is characterized by the use of brilliant colours and distinctive ornamentation.

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72  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad north-western Italy, French and Italian texts sit one beside the another. Midway through the episode of Bréhus sans pitié, when Bréhus is visiting the cave of the Bruns, for example, the language switches at f. 17r, from French to a West-Tuscan dialect (probably Pisan) (Cigni 1999, 38): ‘Mes atant lasse il conte a parler de Guron et de Serses et de l’autre chevalier, et retorne a parler des aventures de la damoisele malverse’ [clearly French]. The same hand continues: ‘Or dice lo conto che quando la donzella si fu partita da Gurone in la guissa com’io ò contato’ [clearly Tuscan/Italian] (see Lathuillère 1966, 307–14; Limentani 1962, 3); and even this is full of Gallicisms, such as vizagio, roiaume, oraindiritto, tam tosto, dilongo, or even parler, reaume, roiaume, lo quele, ensi, and ou (meaning ‘where’) (Cigni 1999, 39). Cigni speculates that this could be deliberate, a way of imparting to the French text a more exotic, hybrid flavour, but it could also be a slip, in which the scribe moves from one form of Franco-Italian that is more French to another form that favours the Pisan. To give some sense of the scale of Italian transmission of these prose Arthurian texts, the prose Lancelot is extant in some sixteen thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Franco-Italian manuscripts (Delcorno Branca 1998a, 14–48), and there are some nineteen Italian manuscripts of the Guiron le Courtois from the same period, out of a total of forty witnesses (Morato 2010 and 2018). Clearly the Tristan, in particular, struck a chord with northern Italian audiences, as we have seen, with at least twenty-six Italian manuscripts in French extant and numerous translations and adaptations (Delcorno Branca 1998a, 49–76). What is particularly noteworthy about the majority of these Italian manuscripts is the innovative way in which those who were compiling them chose to reorganize the material, shorten or elaborate on various episodes, and reshuffle or cut others. Again, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12599 offers, in addition to its notable fusion of Italian and French forms, a whole range of episodes that are recognized as being part of the Guiron le courtois, the Suite Merlin, and others. Delcorno Branca insists on the positive aspects of this initiative in her early work, as well as in a later synthesis (2003, 2008a, 2011). While this tendency to splinter texts or circulate modular events, rather than to provide a full narrative, initially attracted little admiration, many recent scholars have highlighted this tendency as a unique development in the romance tradition, citing its presence in both Flanders and Italy.42 In some cases, the results resemble more a compilation than a simple copy of a model romance, occasionally veering towards what we might call a process of ‘cyclification’ in that it reaches for broader coverage of the full range of material associated with the tradition (Bogdanow and Trachsler 2006, 365). But, in reaching for wider coverage, they are also, paradoxically, often more streamlined, moving quickly from one episode to the other. This innovation is perhaps most evident in the earliest of these compilations, the 1272–4 Compilation

42  See, for example, Cigni 2006, Heijkant 1994, Morato 2007a, Paradisi and Punzi 1993.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  73 by Rusticiaus de Pise. But to return again to BnF fr. 12599, the compiler has there chosen to insert the more moving of the lyrical sections of the Tristan, including the death wish exhortations by the famous lovers, in the middle of his com­pil­ ation of various episodes from a variety of other romance traditions (the Guiron, the Post-Vulgate cycle, and other episodes from the Tristan (Cigni 1999, 39 and Delcorno Branca 2011, 175). We can hypothesize that this might have been because the episodes were favourites of the audiences, or the scribe, or were included at the request of the patron. In any case, it would appear that the scribe felt free to reorganize his material as he saw fit. All of these peculiarities are perhaps most striking in one of the most original composite compositions of the period, and probably the earliest Franco-Italian text to have been composed in northern Italy or the Latin Kingdom. Rusticiaus’s Compilation relies on three strategies: the re-elaboration of episodes from the Tristan en prose; the insertion of minor episodes from the Grail cycle; and the rewriting of the Livre Galehaut, i.e. portions of the prose Lancelot, to explain how the half-giant chevalier ends up a vassal of Arthur and his court (Cigni 2014, 30). Braiding his material from different sources into a narrative with a satisfying conclusion, Rusticiaus works to his own particular logic, according to Cigni, and in doing so should be seen as an innovator rather than simply a compiler. Almost nothing is known about him: he could have been a trained notary and, if so, was probably familiar as well with Dominican scholastic convent culture. Imprisoned in Genoa after 1284 (Bogdanow and Trachsler 2016, Cigni 2014, Trachsler  2006), he is mentioned as the co-author/scribe/amanuensis of Marco Polo in the writing of the Devisement du monde. While most scholars have accepted his name as given, Trachsler suggests that the name and the act of naming is simply part of a literary convention (Trachsler 2006, 123).43 We will continue nonetheless to discuss the text as written by someone known as Rusticiaus, an important link between the Arthurian material he inherited, the material that gets picked up for later anthologies of Italian language romances, and the compilations, including his own, which would eventually travel north across the Alps.44 In a sense, his Compilation is the beginning and end of a line: its comparatively 43  Trachsler questions whether the attribution of the Compilation to a Rusticiaus is to be taken seriously. His hypothesis is that the prologue is simply a rewriting of the prologue of the Marco Polo text, with an attribution to Rusticiaus as a figure of auctoritas. See also Bertolucci Pizzorusso 2002. 44 Once the Compilation had been absorbed into northern French/Picard/Arras traditions, it quickly lost its distinctive linguistic traits (Cigni calls them ‘hybrid’) and was copied in a standard form of literary French, Picard for the most part. One French manuscript which relies on episodes from the Compilation is Paris, BnF, MS fr. 99, made for Jacques d’Armagnac, duke of Nemours, who was beheaded in 1477 on charges of treason. It was signed by the scribe, Michel Gonnot, in 1463. Emmanuèle Baumgartner used this manuscript as the prototype of what she called Version IV of the Prose Tristan. See also Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 358–63, a collection of codices dealing with Guiron le Courtois, and Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, MSS Cod. Bodmer 96–1 and 96–2, which also contain portions of the Compilation. See Pickford 1959, Baumgartner 1975, and Grange 2015 for an update on ‘versions’.

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74  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad early date of composition45 associates it with the rise of French prose romance in Italy, but it also announces a new aesthetic, both faithful to its models and innovative in its conception, representing a move into the summa tradition, in which vast amounts of material are compressed into more reasonably sized codices. Rusticiaus opts at this early date for a sort of prose florilegium, collecting his favourite bits (often lengthy) from a variety of sources, and it was this model that would triumph in the numerous Italian translations, reworkings, and volgarizzamenti to follow (Delcorno Branca 2003). Rusticiaus’s compilation is nonetheless no mere mechanical exercise: he provides original touches along the way to help the material coalesce, and his occasional first-person interventions provide a unifying narrative voice. In the Galehaut ­episode, for example, the giant knight’s obsessive love for Lancelot, so important in the prose Lancelot, is left largely unspoken and essentially underwritten; and Galehaut must pledge fealty to Arthur as the result of a ‘rash boon’ promise that he has made to Lancelot, an original touch with no antecedent in the known earlier manuscripts. Little is made of the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere either, and the same could be said for the love of Tristan and Iseut. The prologue and interventions of the author also mark the Compilation as distinctive within the Arthurian tradition in Italy. At least three versions of the Compilation exist: the first, from the oldest known manuscript, is the late thirteenth-century Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1463, which concentrates largely on episodes from the Tristan, with some interpolated episodes from the Queste and the Lancelot and a section on the death of Tristan and Iseut. A second group, all of whose manuscripts date from the fifteenth century, includes episodes from what we now call the Guiron le courtois tradition, including the Meliadus, but also material from the Mort le roi Artu, or several of the above (see Cigni 2014, 38, n. 36). A final group, again all from the fifteenth century, consists of isolated passages from the Compilation trad­ition, largely dedicated to episodes from the Guiron and prose Tristan (see Cigni 2014, 27). Though these later manuscripts are often incomplete in their treatment of Rusticiaus’s work, they are also sumptuously decorated and demonstrate how important and prestigious Arthurian manuscripts continued to be in the aristocratic libraries of the late Middle Ages. Rusticiaus’s prologue to the Compilation, present in the earliest known manuscript (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1463), provides interesting information about the circumstances in which the text was composed—or at least the way that he wished his work to be framed.46 The author addresses first lords, emperors, kings, princes and dukes, counts and barons, knights, vassals, and borgois (presumably wealthy 45  This date, c. 1272–4, is late compared to the French romances we have been discussing (1215–40) but comparatively early in relation to a second wave of Arthurian prose romances, which include the almost contemporary Ysaïe le Triste, and the later Arthur le Petit and Perceforest. 46  On the relation of this prologue to that of the Devisement du Monde, see Bertolucci Pizzorusso 2002.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  75 city-dwelling merchants) and then adds all preudome who take great pleasure in romainz and urges them all to read the text from beginning to end (§ 1, ‘de chief en chief ’; all quotations from Cigni 1994). There they will find the grand adventures experienced by the errant knights from the times of Uterpendragon to those of his son King Arthur and his companions at the Round Table. No mention is made of the fact that such material would be emanating from an English or French source or that such kings would be ruling over parts of England and perhaps a larger empire that would extend even to the Italian peninsula. The author seems to assume that his readers will know that much and that very minimal cultural or geographic adaptation is required. What is needed, on the other hand, is textual reproduction, or at least copying (another sense of the word ‘translation’), since Rusticiaus says that he has acquired the book from Odoard ‘(Edward I), the soon-to-be king’ of England. It was copied during Edward’s travels, perhaps in Sicily (1270–1), at the court of Charles of Anjou, or, given the terminology (‘houtre la mer’ may be read as Outremer), in the Latin Kingdom, where Edward is said to have travelled to render service to God (Prestwich 1997, 118). Maistre de Pise, whom some have imagined portrayed in the illumination that appears at the top of the folio (a now badly damaged image of a man on a seat or throne, pointing at the opening initial of the text), is identified as he who has compiled (conpilé) the text on the basis of the magnificent stories (tresmervillieuse novelles) that he found in Edward’s book and its excellent choice of adventures. The author warns us that the stories he has chosen will deal with Lancelot and Tristan more than with the other knights, simply because they are known to be the very best knights of their time. And he reaffirms that the master (presumably Rusticiaus himself) will provide the best details and recount the best battles simply because his source is the book of the king of England: and where could one find a better source? He offers his own testimony as proof and claims to have copied (and perhaps translated) the text from that very source. Then, rather abruptly, we are told that, in spite of the previous statement, we shall begin with a great adventure that once took place at Kamaaloth (Camelot), at the court of King Arthur, lord of Logres (England, roughly) and of Bretagne (the insular and French Brittany). This first story deals with the appearance of the almost-giant mystery knight identified only as Li Viel Chevalier. Cigni speculates that this episode, placed in the strategic opening section—at least in the earliest known witness—is the work of Rusticiaus himself (1994, 11) and might be the first version in any language of this particular tale.47 And it sets the tone for the larger collection to come: part nostalgia, part super-hero narrative, 47  This episode will go on to appear in several other traditions, including the Italian language Tavola ritonda, cantari, and indirectly the Novellino. See Cigni 2014, 23–5.

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76  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad part put-down to the recent trove of Arthurian mythology that had invaded Italian courts in the previous half-century and which had grown in stature in the years before the Compilation appeared. Branor li Brun is our larger-than-normal hero—Li Viel Chevalier, as he is known to his opponents and to the readers of the text—an aged figure who goes out for one last binge of honourable combat and ends up astounding everyone he meets. In this case, however, his age and nobility mark him as a nostalgic figure, a hero who harks back to nobler times. The conceit is that no one in his right mind would fear an ancient and seemingly deluded knight who goes around challenging the young, ambitious, and able-bodied best from the Arthurian menagerie. Yet one by one they fall before his might: first the overweening Palamedes, then Gauvain, then Lamorat, and finally even the invincible Tristan falls in his wake. In addition, Gariet de Gaunes, Beord de Gaunes, Yvain, Sagremor le Desereés, Blioberis de Gaune, Siguradés, Separ, the brother of Palamedes, Hestor li Marés, brother of Lancelot, and Givret de Lanbelle all line up to challenge the Old Knight, and all are defeated, with nine of them embarrassingly unseated in the onslaught. Finally, even Lancelot is defeated, though that follows an obligatory exchange of courtesies once his name has been recognized. The Old Knight alone keeps his name—Branor li Brun—carefully hidden until he has accomplished all he set out to do. In the end, Arthur marches out to make a final appeal, asking himself and his opponent if he and his court have been dealing with a phantom or a diabolical enchantment. What he learns is that the Knight was once one of the friends and accomplices of his father, Uterpendragon. Arthur persists in his challenge, nonetheless, and is unseated at the first blow. As he lies bleeding on the ground, and the other knights who have been similarly wounded rush to his aid, Arthur says only that he has never been hit with such force and that he is indeed in great distress: Et li roi ovri les iaux et getent un grant souspir de cuer parfont, et puis dit: ‘Ha, Sire Dieu, aïde moi! . . . Et voirement ce cestui est chevalier terreine, dir poés seüremant qu’il est li meillor chevalier et li plus puissant qe fust jamés veüe. Mais san faille je ne croi qu’il soit chevalier, mais foudre et tenpestes, car nos peon dir tot seürement que voiremant avon noz trevés a cestui point tiel chev­ alier qui passé de joste tuit li chevalier que jamés portassent armes ansienement ne novellemant.’  (§ 13) And the king opened his eyes and breathed a deep sigh from the depths of his heart and said: ‘O, Lord God, come to my aid. . . . And truly, if this knight is earthly, you can say with certainty that he is the best knight and the strongest that has ever been seen. But there is no way that that could be: he is not a knight but rather lightning and tempest, for we may say with certainty that truly have we found here a knight who could surpass in jousting to such a degree all the knights who ever carried arms, in the days of the ancients or in the present generation.’

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  77 This plethora of superlatives is typical of the tone of Rusticiaus’s text and of Arthurian prose texts in general, but they are especially prevalent in the Viel Chevalier episode. The ‘foudre et tenpestes’ metaphor had already been used when talking about the first joust of the Chevalier and Palamedes: ‘Que vos en diroie? M.  Palamidés vient si grant alleüre qu’il ne sembloit pas chevalier, mes foudre et tenpestes’ (§ 5: ‘What can I tell you? Sir Palamedes comes up so quickly that he didn’t seem like a knight, but rather lightning and tempest’); and the story­tell­ing is laced with such metaphors, as well as with rhetorical interpellations of the audience/reader. The formulaic question ‘Que vos en diroie?’—common in prose romance—is repeated dozens of times and with such insistence that it is almost as if the author were anxious to keep the conversation, or the story-telling, as intimate as possible, suggesting a close relationship between teller and listener. As we have seen, nothing stops that force of nature, Branor. His attack is superhuman, and he never tires; yet both he and his opponents are described as the equivalent of natural phenomena—thunder and lightning, earthquakes, and the like—and the present day can only pale when compared with this sudden resurrection of the past. Elizabeth Florea (2017) thinks that this is because Rusticiaus intended this unearthed relic, this atavistic and uncanny reminder of ancestry, to speak directly to Edward I of England. The king, she suggests, should recognize himself in such a figure, arisen from nowhere to remind his prideful con­tem­por­ ar­ies of their paltry accomplishments in the face of the glory of his own name.48 According to this thinking, Edward, the crusader and newly crowned king, representative of an ancient family line, would, like an atavistic Branor, rise from the ashes of the pre-1187, once-powerful Kingdom of Jerusalem, to avenge the shameful loss of the city and re-establish his powerful Christian presence in Outremer. This is, of course, impossible to substantiate. It is not even certain that Edward directly commissioned the work or ever owned a copy; but it is altogether plaus­ ible that Rusticiaus was trying to establish or reinforce an Italian Arthurian connection by advertising a connection with his English royal benefactor—a way of currying favour by alluding indirectly to his royal ancestry. Edward I does share a few characteristics with the Old Knight: he too was a sort of giant in his time— 6ʹ2ʹʹ or 1.88m (‘Longshanks’)—the self-sure warrior of Louis IX’s Ninth Crusade and the terror of the Welsh and Scots, against whom he waged a relentless campaign to consolidate his power after the traumatic Second Barons’ War and against the lingering threat of baronial revolt. He was also apparently greatly attached to his much-vaunted Arthurian heritage, however spurious, and that connection survived him: it was Edward, after all, who in 1278 opened officially the tomb at Glastonbury Abbey, thought to be the final resting-place of Arthur and Guinevere, and he who rescued what he claimed was Arthur’s crown after the

48 https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/62075?show=full.

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78  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad conquest of North Wales.49 While in one sense accepting that Arthur might well have been Welsh in doing so, he was also establishing that the Arthurian kingdom was inclusive of far-flung lands, much like his own domain, which stretched from Wales to Gascony. Implied in all of this is the fact that, although the King Arthur of fables might eventually be returning to rescue the Welsh, in particular, he would do so not as an exclusively local hero but in his capacity as king of an extended empire, a king like Edward himself, who could see beyond his provincial borders to the distant corners of his political holdings and envision his place in history. Here is a king of such stature and humility that he can admit that his true greatness lies in his pedigree, in his connections with the previous generation and the heroes of the past. Like Arthur, Edward could rule over an extended Christian empire but still be humbled by those who came before him. In Rusticiaus’s telling, this plays out in the encounter of Arthur with an aged warrior from his father’s generation, a vestige of a nobler and more valiant race; while in the case of Edward, the parallel would be his encounter with the legendary King Arthur, including his proc­lam­ ation of their connection and his very public identification of Arthurian graves and artefacts. Rusticiaus’s conventional but nonetheless surprising statement that Li Viel Chevalier had the ‘plus merevillieuses aventures que avenist jamés en écrit entres les aventures de la Table Reonde’ (§ 16: ‘the most marvellous adventures that ever took place and were written amongst [or until the time of] the adventures of the Round Table’) might then be explained by the fact that it was meant to enhance the status of Edward—a regent who appreciates his history. As Simon Lloyd and Tony Hunt put it: ‘Precisely because he alone of the major leaders of Louis IX’s second crusade completed his passage to the East, Edward [I] won an enviable international reputation and thereafter was regarded widely as the potential leader of a new passagium generale, for the time being supplanting the Capetians as the expected saviour of the Holy Land’ (1988, 232). In case we had yet to realize the full importance of these tales of Arthur and the Old Knight, the affair is further highlighted by the king’s determination to record the event: Arthur ‘fist venir un clerges, et fist mettre en ecrit tot l’affer de ceste aventure de chief en chef ’ (§ 16: ‘had a clerk come and had him write down every­ thing about this adventure’); and when the Old Knight is close to his end, he is treated with the sort of veneration that is usually reserved for saints: ‘Et la dame et tuit li chevalier dou chastel font si grant henor au Viel Chevalier con c’il fust un cors saint’ (§ 23: ‘And the lady and all the knights of the castle honour the Old Knight to such an extent that you might think he was a saintly relic’). This earlier tribe of ‘Brun’ descends, we are told, from a line of the very best knights ever known, beginning with Clovis (the first Christian king of France) and Febus

49  Prestwich 1997, 120–2 and Morris 2008a, 165–6, 191–2. Edward I is discussed further in Chapter 3.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  79 (grandfather of Guiron le Courtois), about whom one can supposedly read stories in many books (§ 38: ‘par maintes livre’). When Branor dies later in the same year as his triumph over the collective Round Table, he is buried in Normandy, in the most magnificent tomb in the world (§ 39). While the compilation is certainly not to be read as straight-on propaganda or a lightly disguised roman à clef, it does show signs of having been composed with a named patron in mind, and it takes pains to establish that connections between the Plantagenet kings and their ­predecessors are there for the finding. Once found, they can only really redound to that patron’s greater royal and Christian glory. Other notable features of the Compilation include the very courtly way in which knights deal with one another—Tristan and Lancelot bowing and deferring to each other (e.g. § 139), Galeat (presumably an alternative spelling of Galahad/ Galehaut), not wishing to fight a foe (Dalidés) whose family has extended their hospitality (§ 61), laddish kidding of the other knights as a sign of an emotional bond (Palamedes and Tristan in § 92), or Tristan’s extravagant mourning over what looks like a dead Palamedes (§ 100, ‘Chivalerie est morte, se cist est mors!’, ‘chivalry has truly died if this one is dead’). The narrative technique generally ­follows the models of the prose romances that were circulating in Italy in the ­thirteenth century, but Rusticiaus adds his own special touches as well. When he wishes to move the topic from the adventures of Perceval and Sacremor to those of Galeout (an alternative spelling of Galehaut), he does so by saying: Mes atant laisse li contes a paller de cestui affere, ce est de m. Percevaus et de Sacreor, et pallera li maistre d’une autre aventure que ne se afiert a ceste mes li maistre la veaut metre au derrain de son livre por ce qu’elle est la greingnor aventures que avenist jamés en terre jusque a cestui tens.  (§ 162) But here the story will move on from this affair, the one dealing with Sir Perceval and Sacremor, and the master will speak of another adventure that has nothing to do with this one but the master wants to place it at the end of his book because it is the greatest adventure which ever took place on this earth until the present time.

Shortly thereafter, he reiterates this resolve to tell this greatest-story-ever-told when he says that he will not tell us why Lady Manoaut held Lancelot in her prison at this particular moment because ‘the master wants to get back to our material’: ‘veaut torner li maistre a nostre matire’ (§ 180). Rusticiaus’s chronicle points, as we have said, toward the future: a time when the ultimate ideal of Christian knighthood overrides every other difference. This emerges even more strikingly in Guiron le courtois, which includes material which almost certainly had its origin in Rusticiaus’s work. The romance as we know it today has been referred to collectively in the past as Guiron le courtois, Meliadus, or Palamedes, now considered sub-subjects of a more global cycle, and shared a

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80  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad degree of popularity amongst the Italian courts and patrons who supported it; and it, too, owes its life to a process of compilation.50 There is plenty of evidence as to its popularity. Inventories from the fifteenth century reveal that the text was still in high demand amongst the aristocracy and the wealthy merchants of northern Italy: Francesco Accolti of Arezzo, a noted legal scholar at the studium of Ferrara, borrowed a Meliadux on 17 June 1458; Giacomo (di Folco) Ariosto, great-uncle of the famous poet, borrowed a Meliadux on 1 February 1455 and then again in 1457; in 1461 he borrowed a Tristan. Sigismondo d’Este borrowed a Tristan and Borso obtained a copy of Guirone from Ludovico Gonzaga in 1464. At least one copy of the Guiron was present in the Gonzaga library in Mantua.51 As we have already seen, the earliest explicit mention of Arthurian romance in Italy was a reference to Guiron material in a letter issued by the chancellery of Emperor Frederick II at Foligno on 5 February 1240, which mentions a copy of the Meliadus (which may also have included a cyclic Guiron) belonging to a certain ‘Johannes Romanzor’.52 Though we cannot be sure of exactly what this meant, it would certainly be the earliest evidence of an Arthurian prose romance circula­ t­ing in Italy.53 Although the earliest form of the romance is thought to have been a northern French/Picard production, little is known of it other than it likely contained a long version of the Meliadus and was not yet cyclic. It was based on the conflation of two originally distinct narratives: a Roman de Meliadus and a Roman de Guiron and it was probably this version which circulated in the fourteenth century across northern Italy, the only vestiges of which are now found in manuscripts made in Italy.54 Nicola Morato speculates that there is at least a fifty per cent chance that the archetype of the French Meliadus was itself Italian.55 The earliest known witnesses, Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 3325 (c. 1250–75) and Marseille, Bibliothèque municipale L’Alcazar, MS 1106 (c. 1270–90) come respectively from northern Italy (very possibly Genoa) and north-eastern France (probably Picardy), and both offer incomplete accounts of the romance’s three sections.

50  The following is essential reading on Guiron le courtois and compilations of Rusticiaus and those derived from Guiron le courtois: Lagomarsini 2012a and 2012b, Lecomte 2018, Morato 2007a, 2007b, 2010, 2018, Trachsler  2014, Materni  2015, and Morato and Leonardi 2018. There is no complete ­edition, though the ‘Gruppo Guiron’, a scholarly collective working through the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, is producing an edition of the cycle. Partial editions include: Bubenicek 2016, Lagomarsini 2014 and 2015, Limentani  1962, Trachsler, Albert, Plaut, and Plumet  2004. See also Cadioli and Lecomte 2018. 51  Allaire 2014, 191–2. See also the examples in Delcorno Branca 1998a, 35–8 and Morato 2018b 212–5. 52  Morato 2018, 186; Lathuillère 1966, 31–2. 53  Morato notes that the long version of the Meliadus occupies between eighteen and twenty-five quires, while this letter refers to there being fifty-four. This could mean that the Libro Palamides included more than just this first section (then known as the Palamides), or it could also be a scribal error. 54  These earliest witnesses include, in addition to the manuscripts already mentioned, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 350 (part from Arras and part from northern Italy). 55  Nicola Morato, personal communication.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  81 The founding sequence of this cyclic romance was a grouping of three texts: Meliadus, also sometimes known as the Palamedes, as we have just seen, which appears as well in Rusticiaus’s Compilation (extending in Lathuillère’s Analyse from §§ 1–49), and which leads us to the second main component, the Roman de Guiron, which is seen by some as the Guiron proper (§§ 58–132). This connecting section is itself based on a third romance, the Suite Guiron, which is a prequel to the Roman de Guiron.56 A series of cyclical forms then evolved from the primitive one. One of them, which can be regarded as the vulgate version of Guiron le Courtois, was particularly malleable, incorporating within its sphere the second part of the long redaction of the Meliadus (dealing with the ancestors of Tristan), the Aventures des Bruns (which is often the opening segment of the text), dealing with the ancestry of Guiron, and perhaps composed by Rusticiaus, though whether before or after the Compilation is impossible to say.57 According to Morato: ‘A structured system of prolepses, prophecies, and presentiments anchors the tales of the cycle to the Arthurian future, that is, to the eschatological events of Tristan’s death, Arthur’s death, and even the mythical conquest of England by Charlemagne.’58 Morato sees temporality as being key to the endeavour, as the Meliadus proceeds directly from the Tristan and the Lancelot while the Guiron introduces new characters, about whom the roman relates only discrete incidents from their story. Trachsler sums up Sophie Albert’s study on the Guiron with the observation that she sees the Meliadus as being oriented towards the future, while the Guiron is turned squarely to the past, filling in the blanks of what happened—as if the fictional past were as malleable as its historical cousin.59 In many ways, the Guiron tradition represents a sort of apotheosis of the trad­ition of compilation. Morato has determined convincingly that there never was a hypothetical original unitary romance that was subsequently mishandled by marauding compilers, as was once imagined. On the contrary, the cycle developed from a limited group of narratives probably composed between northern France (Méliadus, Guiron) and Italy (Rusticiaus’ compilations). That Italy played a large part in that process is clearly no longer in doubt: Italian is the only language in which some parts of the Guiron were translated, other than French/Franco-Italian. None of the extant manuscripts include all of the episodes of the cycle, and, as we have seen, the movement from northern France to northern Italy and back to northern France seems to have been rapid, clearly a response to an active interest 56  Trachsler 2014, 2–5. Albert 2010 sees §§ 52–57 as part of the Meliadus while Morato sees it as part of a bridge connecting the two sections. 57  See the works cited in the previous note, plus Cigni 2004, 28 and Bogdanow and Trachsler 2006, 368–9. 58  See ‘Guiron le Courtois: Introduction’, at Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk/textual-traditions-and-segments/guiron/, accessed 14 August 2018. 59  Trachsler 2014, 236, referring to Albert 2010, 190.

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82  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad on both sides of the Alps. Though it appears clear that the earliest prototype came to Italy from Picardy, it appears to have been particularly appreciated in the regions of Pavia, Mantua, and Ferrara, if we are to judge by its presence in library collections. This is not surprising, of course, and it reminds us of the Visconti interest in the Tristan, in tales that establish bloodlines and structures of legitimacy (see Chapter 5). The exalted models of heroism, linked with familial pride, were custom-made for the aristocratic families and upwardly mobile merchants who sought to establish elite credentials.60 We will close with a glance at Paris, BnF, MS fr. 350, which offers an interesting demonstration of how the Guiron tradition and its manuscripts travelled in the late thirteenth century.61 This manuscript transmits a later, though non-cyclic, form of the tradition, followed by the Prophéties de Merlin, all in five distinct sections.62 The initial section (ff. 1r*–1v*) was composed in northern Italy at the turn of the fourteenth century; the second, much longer section (ff. 1r–101v), was produced in Arras at approximately the same time; the third (ff. 102r–117v) was also probably done somewhere in France in the first quarter of the fourteenth century; the fourth (ff. 118r–141) is from that same period but from northern Italy. A fifth section (ff. 142r–366v) transmits a portion of the Roman de Guiron, that was almost certainly done in the same scriptorium (in Arras) as the second section, and this is followed by a partial version of the Prophéties de Merlin, also from the same scriptorium in Arras but in a different hand (ff. 367ra–438vb) (Morato 2018, 198). It is interesting to note that if the Prophéties can be attributed to an Arras workshop towards the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries (Trachsler 2004), but the fourth part of the Meliadus was done in Italy at approximately the same date (1275–1300), it could suggest either that there was almost immediate transmission and circulation of materials at this time between the north of France and northern Italy or that the workshop originally in Arras had travelled to the court in Naples, perhaps following the Angevin move to that city under Charles of Anjou and the subsequent rule of his progeny, including Robert the Wise (r. 1309–43; see Chapter 5). While in the first half of the thirteenth century, French language manuscripts were moving into Italy via trade routes and gift exchange from Arras, Lorraine, and the Latin Kingdom, by the end of the century Italian productions of French romance (including the Troie, Histoire ancienne, Tristan, and Guiron) were already being copied in northern French scriptoria, and the textual traditions were essentially being merged in collective volumes, though each continued to carry traces of their dual source of inspiration.

60  Cigni 2004, 2006, 2010. See also the first section of Chapter 5. 61  Morato 2007a, 241–85. 62  ‘Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 350’, at http://www.medievalfrancophone. ac.uk/browse/mss/114/manuscript.html, accessed 31 August 2019.

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Francophone Literary Culture on the Move  83 All this suggests that the idea of reconstructing the single, original, authorial text would be to misunderstand the nature of Guiron’s medieval existence and development. The philological efforts to reconstruct the original text of the main narrative, which the Gruppo Guiron have been pursuing in dialogue with MFLCOF, becomes fully significant only when it is complemented by the study of the branches and fragments, among which scribes could have chosen from the outset. While this notion might have seemed alien to many nineteenth-century scholars, it is a welcome and apposite model of textuality for the twenty-first century. The original was, we might say, plural from the start rather than singular, never anchored in any one site but already composite, mobile, and malleable. Where does this leave us in our attempt to theorize the appeal, transformation, and transmission of French-language materials in northern Italy? The com­pil­ ation model serves as an ingenious solution to the problems regularly associated with multilingual and multicultural zones. Instead of taking one tradition and parking it ingloriously in a spot claimed by another language tradition, or competing with that and other traditions for dominance, the compilation in­corp­or­ates material more dextrously. It can pick and choose its episodes, utilizing a language that was already present as a known commercial and cultural commodity, then modifying it slightly to make it more comprehensible to a larger swathe of the educated public. Similarly, the scribe makes modifications freely to the language and the textual tradition he transmits. This model had the benefit of contributing to the collective textual tradition and of circulating that new model to an eager audience, both within the Italian courts and communes and to the place of origin of the models that were first used in the scriptoria, in most cases the north of France, the Low Countries, Acre, and Cyprus. A potentially sticky cultural clash was thus averted, and the texts were subsequently reabsorbed into French collections, with no further mention of their Italian sources, artisans, or additions.63 It has taken 600 years, more or less, to recognize and acknowledge the fact that the ‘shells’ that have washed upon the shores of the twenty-first century now that ‘the sea of living memory has receded’—to return to Nora’s characterization of ­material vestiges of the past—are themselves mediators, bringing the past into the future and confounding dogma that had settled in the intervening centuries. It is high time to recognize that the French romance traditions that we know today, are, at least in part, artefacts of French–Low Countries–English, French–Low Countries–Italian, and French–Low Countries–Outremer cooperation, no matter how thoroughly those connections were once occluded or obscured by the ­detritus of history. 63  Though there is no clear evidence, there is every possibility that these manuscripts could have served as diplomatic gifts, either at the moment of production or during subsequent exchanges. For an interesting example of manuscripts as gifts, see Alberni 2018; and for a broader statement on the use and agency of objects and images in diplomatic exchange, see the Introduction by Um and Clark 2016, 3–18.

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3

Living History Pierre de Langtoft and London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II

Pierre de Langtoft (Peter Langtoft, Piers Langtoft, d. 1307?) seems originally to have ended his history at the year 1296 but to have later added to and revised it more than once; we shall here discuss the fullest version, which ends with the death of Edward I of England and the accession of Edward II in 1307.1 Modern scholars usually divide Langtoft’s work into three parts (although the status of the division is not universally accepted: Summerfield  1998, 26). The first two—a ­history of the British and a history of the English—derive from standard medieval narrative sources, and historians today consider that they add little to the record. Langtoft’s history of the British, a condensed adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, runs from a brief evocation of the Creation, through the arrival of the Trojans, to the extinction of the British line with Cadwalader; his English section draws on several Latin prose histories to continue the narrative up to the death of Henry III (r. 1216–72) (Young 2011). However, Langtoft’s tone and his historical methods change substantially in his third section, an account of the reign of Edward I (r. 1272–1307). To relate events that occurred during his own maturity and in which he was closely interested, Langtoft draws on contemporary sources and on the kind of experiences, contacts, and legal expertise available to an Augustinian canon of wealthy Bridlington Priory in the archdiocese of York, who was involved both regionally and in London

1  The standard edition of Langtoft remains Wright 1866–8. Since Wright does not supply line numbers, we cite in the format ‘volume number, page, line number on page’, this last representing our own count. Wright presents what Jean-Claude Thiolier refers to as the text’s second redaction; the much less well-attested first redaction is edited in Thiolier 1989, which also includes an in-depth exploration of the textual tradition (155–208) and detailed descriptions of the surviving manuscripts of both redactions (31–153). Thiolier argues that following the account of 1296 both redactions are the work of continuators (see Thiolier 2004 for an overview). Thea Summerfield rejects Thiolier’s arguments, proposing that Langtoft’s work was written between 1305/6 and 1307 (81–84) and that Thiolier’s ‘second redaction’ is the original one (22–7); she considers Thiolier’s descriptions of the manuscripts to be excessively influenced by his theories about the textual tradition (24). T.  M.  Smallwood (1977) has also contributed to the debate. We use ‘Langtoft’ here as a shorthand for the implied author/narrator of the geste as extant in the text in its fullest version ending in 1307, without committing ourselves on the question of whether or not the writer was the historical Pierre de/Peter/Piers Langtoft. We are indebted throughout to the writings of Thiolier and Summerfield as the major scholars on Langtoft’s work, and especially to Jean-Claude Thiolier for his generosity and interest in our project. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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Living History  85 in advancing the affairs of his house (Thiolier 1998 and 2004, Summerfield 1998, 15–18).2 A notable feature of this section of the text is the embedding of various pieces of apparently external, documentary evidence, such as the homage to Edward I of John Balliol, whose prose momentarily breaks up the verse narrative (II, 192.20–194.10).3 Modern historians generally endorse Antonia Gransden’s judgement that this third section ‘managed to give a fairly accurate record of contemporary affairs’ (1974–82, I, 482). The present chapter argues that Langtoft’s account of Edward I’s reign carries conviction not only through its historical methods and citing of sources but also thanks to the literary and linguistic strategies that it develops for contemporary historiography—strategies intimately and intricately connected with the use of French in England and on the continent. We shall analyse how these strategies contribute a variety, uncertainty, and vitality that convey what it means to live in and through Langtoft’s own, difficult times. ‘Medieval England’ was not a single, homogenous culture but an agglomeration of different cultures: regional, social, religious, political, dynastic, economic, linguistic, professional, and gendered, to name only some of the most obvious. The first section of this chapter will outline the political situation between the late thirteenth and mid fourteenth centuries—the period when Langtoft was writing and when the majority of the surviving manuscripts were produced. The most intensely invested events related in Langtoft’s Edward I section took place in the same area where most of the manuscripts originate and where Langtoft was probably based for much of his life:4 the north-east of England, corresponding roughly to today’s Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, Northumberland, and the Scottish Borders (more or less the ancient kingdom of Northumbria), plus northern Lincolnshire.5 We shall detail especially how the Anglo-Scottish conflicts that Langtoft highlights affected this region, whose inhabitants were not only on the front line, engaging in and subject to extensive ravages, but were also closely bound to their counterparts on the Scottish side of the border by multiple, often long-standing ties. 2  On Augustinian books in England, see especially Legge 1950 and Pouzet 2013. 3  Archival documents and eyewitness accounts are standardly quoted to authorize medieval historical accounts; Given-Wilson (2004, especially 1–20 and 57–78) outlines the traditional practices and how these changed in the later Middle Ages. 4  Legge speculated that Langtoft’s chronicle ‘may never have been circulated in the South’ (1950, 72), but Thiolier places the production of six of the twenty medieval manuscripts or fragments that he lists south of the Humber river, dating some to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (Thiolier 1989, 147–8, and see Thiolier 2009). Most of these southern manuscripts preserve only the Edward I section, whereas all those that originally contained all three sections of the geste are considered to be north-eastern. 5  The modern designation of ‘The North-East’, covering only the counties of Northumberland, Durham, and Tyne and Wear, goes much less far south than the area that concerns us here; for discussion of whether it had a regional identity in the later Middle Ages, see Pollard 2005. On the successor states to the kingdom of Northumbria, including the establishment of the border between England and Scotland, see Rollason 2003, 256–90.

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86  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad The second part of this chapter will consider how the language, discourse, and literary form that Langtoft chose for the majority of his narrative convey a particular political analysis of the English past and present. His use of alexandrine laisses, a discourse and form associated with chansons de geste and with narratives about Alexander the Great, asserts the value of strong regal authority and of spiritual leadership, and censures noble infighting. Moreover, the particular situation of Insular French in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries allows Langtoft to promote the unity of the realm and of the island through his use of the language. Nor does it restrict his audience only to lay elites. His emphasis on French as the language of law, which intensifies in the Edward I section, also licenses certain non-noble professionals, including Langtoft and those like him, to intervene in the national story. In the third part of this chapter, we continue this discussion of the politics of language, discourse, and form by turning to the short sections in French and English stanzaic verse, commonly known as the ‘political songs’, found in Langtoft’s Edward I section. We shall analyse how these songs contribute to the adapted historiographical practice with which Langtoft meets the challenge of recounting the events through which he and many of his early audiences lived. The ‘living historiography’ that he devises includes other discourses and other voices, expanding the political body and its expression beyond the limitations that his earlier sections imposed on the past. This living history at once expresses a perceived centrifugal tendency in then-contemporary history and seeks a response in favour of unity. Our analysis of literary strategies will show that Langtoft presents this political tendency and response as a development of the dynamics established in his British and English sections. His historiographical discourse presents continuities as well as ruptures between past and present, although the intensifying tensions under Edward I lead to a change that is, arguably, qualitative as well as quantitative. The last two sections of this chapter turn to the manuscript tradition. Its twenty surviving manuscripts or fragments make Langtoft’s the best attested Frenchlanguage Insular history after Wace’s Roman de Brut and the prose Brut (for whose Edward I section Langtoft’s first redaction was a source: Thiolier  1989, 23–4). Nine manuscripts or fragments of Langtoft’s text have been localized to the north-east of England in the first half of the fourteenth century—that is, to the two generations after Langtoft wrote and to the same geographical, political, and cultural area, which (as we shall relate) remained troubled by Anglo-Scottish and insular-continental conflicts throughout the time when the manuscripts were being produced.6 We shall explore the insights that one of these—London, BL,

6  Thiolier (1989, 35–153): London, BL, Cotton MS Julius A V; London, BL, Royal MS 20 A XI; London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II; London, BL, Harley MS 114; Aylsham, Blickling Hall, MS 6892; Oxford, All Souls College, MS 39; Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 43; London, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius A X; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 930.

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Living History  87 Royal MS 20 A II, the most luxurious surviving Langtoft manuscript—provides into how elite northern English culture, and that culture’s investment in French, changed during the fourteenth century. A large, beautifully produced codex with nineteen full-page opening miniatures, Royal 20 A II represents a significant investment of time and money and was probably produced to commission.7 Although we do not know who ordered, designed, or executed it, like most Langtoft manuscripts its contents manifest a strong interest in events centred in or matters affecting the north-east of England and the south-east of Scotland. The fourth section of this chapter will analyse the texts compiled in Royal 20 A II in the first third of the fourteenth century and will argue that they build on and further develop the discourse that Langtoft had established for relating the historical events of his own lifetime. The collection of shorter works that follow Langtoft’s history in this first production phase imitates and extends the discursive variety and the documentary model introduced into his Edward I section: religious lyric, prophecy, legalistic record, chanson de geste, and also both French and English. However, because it dispenses with the overarching historical narrative and with a single ‘frame’ text, this collection of ‘documents’ gives fuller expression to the centrifugal tendencies that Langtoft attempted to control, subjecting his model to new strains. The first production phase of Royal 20 A II, in fact, anxiously suggests that the ideological centre may be failing to hold things together—an idea that may be detected in Langtoft’s work also, but more faintly. Our fifth and final section concentrates on the second production phase of Royal 20 A II in the second half of the fourteenth century. Here the centrifugal forces just about contained in the manuscript’s first phase spiral off in new directions and now manifest confidence, optimism, and extroversion. Genres, literary forms, and textual traditions new to the manuscript are introduced: extracts from the French prose romances of Lancelot and the Queste del Saint Graal, and a royal letter relating a miraculous Christian victory at the city of Thebes in Boeotia (central Greece) in 1345. The inclusion of these pieces continues the inclusive, documentary method of the manuscript’s earlier phase but significantly reorients the geopolitical, geocultural spaces within which readers are called upon to locate the manuscript and its contents; it frames their interests relative to a different, wider imaginative world. We shall show also how the Lancelot and Queste texts in Royal 20 A II have been edited so as to contrast royal failings with noble merits and to invite noble readers to take up the mantle of English destiny in a continental, indeed global theatre. French in the manuscript’s later phase therefore supports a 7  A full digitization of Royal 20 A II is available through the ‘British Library Manuscript Viewer: Royal MS 20 A II’, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_20_a_ii_fs001r, accessed 19 February 2019. Nineteen leaves of the Royal manuscript, extracted from between the present f. 146 and f. 147, have been since at least the seventeenth century in London, BL, Cotton MS Julius A V as ff. 169r–187v, completing that manuscript’s copy of Langtoft. We treat these leaves here as part of the Royal manuscript, since our interest is in its medieval condition.

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88  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad discourse that calls for a new kind of monarch, upwardly mobile and sufficiently religiously and politically alert and bold to respond to signals that the time is ripe to intervene on both the national and the world stages.

Scotland, England, and the North-East It is impossible to give a full account here of the long entanglement of English and Scottish affairs not only with each other but also with continental Europe and with Scandinavia, or of the impact of those entanglements on people living in the north-east of England and south-east of Scotland during the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.8 The Scottish succession crisis of 1290–2 represented a watershed in Anglo-Scottish relations after a period of relative rapprochement (Prestwich 1997, 357–75). With no clear heir to Alexander III of Scotland (r. 1249–86), Edward I of England was invited to arbitrate in what became known as the Great Cause, concerning thirteen claimants to the Scottish throne—among them John Balliol, Robert de Brus (grandfather of the later Scottish king), the count of Holland, and the king of Norway (Stones and Simpson 1978, I, 5–24). Edward renounced his own claim to the throne in return for the status of arbiter, which, he insisted, established him as Scotland’s feudal overlord.9 He adjudicated in favour of Balliol, who did homage to him for Scotland. But neither Edward’s nor Balliol’s position was at all secure. Edward alienated Balliol immediately by taking over key Scottish affairs, thereby weakening his protégé’s position in the ongoing struggle for the throne among several of the claimants of 1291–2. In 1294, Edward further exercised his suzerainty by requiring the Scottish king and nobles to do military service in his recently begun war against France, which proved a step too far; in 1296, the Scots and French made a treaty (the famous ‘Auld Alliance’, renewed in 1371, 1383, and 1391; Macdougall 2001, Pollock 2015), to which Edward responded with armed invasion of Scotland. The ‘First Scottish

8  Summerfield (1998, 99–128) recounts the special miseries inflicted on non-nobles by the high political events of 1300–40; her historical account (which is framed by a consideration of the differing language politics of Langtoft and his English translator, Robert Mannyng) complements ours. 9  In 1291 Edward initiated nationwide searches of archives for material that might support his claim. Bridlington Priory, Langtoft’s base, is one of the few houses recorded as having contributed significantly, and its return was used in the compendium for the years 901–1066 and 1066–1200; Langtoft uses some of the same sources. The call was repeated in 1301 in order to provide Edward with material to respond to an accusatory letter from Pope Boniface VIII; whereas the earlier search reached back no further than 901 ce, Edward’s response to Boniface drew on earlier periods, on Brut legend, and on Geoffrey of Monmouth. Langtoft’s only other attributed work is a translation of this letter exchange, which is included in some manuscripts of his geste and which is edited and discussed in Thiolier 1989, 445–83. On Edward’s searches and their products, see Stones and Simpson 1978, I, 136–62, and on Langtoft’s role especially, see Summerfield 2005. On Bridlington’s historiographical tradition, see John Taylor 1987, 149–52.

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Living History  89 War of Independence’ continued up to and beyond Edward’s death in 1307.10 According to Andy King and Michael Penman, ‘a state of officially declared and sustained war’ pertained for ‘only’ ‘roughly 55 years out of the 110-year period, from 1296 to 1406’ in the region where Langtoft wrote and where his geste was copied and read, but ‘a barely contained hostility underlay many of the intervening truces’ (2007, 6), and raiding by both sides was widespread for much of the period. At moments during Langtoft’s lifetime and in his narrative, Edward I seemed to have won his war. Thus in 1296, a ‘triumphant English campaign saw all of Scotland conquered . . . in twenty-one weeks’ (Prestwich 1997, 473), with major victories at Berwick and Dunbar, the capture and humiliation of Balliol, and the removal of the Scottish coronation regalia (including the Stone of Destiny) to Westminster. Langtoft’s ‘political songs’ cluster around this campaign, and in some manuscripts his narrative ends at this point (Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.1, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12154 (1), and Oxford, All Souls College, MS 39). But fortunes were reversed in 1297 with important Scottish successes, notably at Stirling Bridge under the leadership of William Wallace. A truce between England and France at the turn of the fourteenth century allowed Edward to concentrate once more on Scotland. In 1304 the country again seemed to have been definitively subdued, with Wallace’s successors as leaders, Robert Bruce and John Comyn (Balliol’s nephew) having made treaties with Edward; the last of Langtoft’s songs celebrates the execution of Wallace in 1305. The year 1306, however, saw Scottish resistance rise again under Robert Bruce, who was enthroned in March (r. 1306–29). Edward died near Carlisle on his way to meet Bruce’s challenge in 1307, when Langtoft’s narrative also ends. Although Langtoft’s text knows nothing of what happened after Edward I’s death, his readers did; most of the surviving copies are thought to have been ­produced in the first or second quarters of the fourteenth century, therefore during the reign of Edward II (r. 1307–27) or in the first half of that of Edward III (r. 1327–77). Even readers who remembered events related by Langtoft would be obliged to view his narrative through the lens of quite different later events. In spite of recent attempts to mitigate the severe judgements on Edward II held by his contemporaries as well as by later historians, the reign was in several respects disastrous.11 Civil wars grew between Edward and several magnates—not only with Roger Mortimer, who would eventually depose the king in alliance with the  queen, but also notably with Edward’s first cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, who  dominated northern England as earl of Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, and Lincoln, as well as of Salisbury, and who allied with the Scots against Edward 10  We follow the dating of Brown 2004, for whom the First War runs 1297–1314. For reasons that will be clear from the discussion, these dates are not universally accepted. 11  On Edward II’s contemporary reputation, see Seymour Phillips 2010, 5–25; for a recent revisionist account, Dodd and Musson 2006. On the situation that Edward II inherited and on events during his reign, see Haines 2003: on England and Scotland, 241–82, and on Gascony and France, 303–32.

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90  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad (Maddicott  1970). On the Scottish side, Bruce achieved resounding victories against the English (notably at Bannockburn in 1314) and repeatedly ravaged the north-east. Significant English defeats occurred at Myton in 1319 and Byford in 1322, both in today’s North Yorkshire; in 1319 the raids went as far south as Pontefract Castle, in 1322 as far as York itself (Penman  2014, 148). Bruce succeeded in uniting the Scottish lords (attested in the famous 1320 Declaration of Arbroath) and distributed to them lands recently held by the English (both sides redistributed lands when in the ascendancy); he also won papal support and a renewed treaty with France. Nor did the accession of Edward III appear promising for the English: the year 1328 saw the ‘Shameful Peace’, whereby the new king acknowledged Scotland as an independent kingdom, renounced his grandfather’s claim to suzerainty, and recognized the rights of Bruce and his heirs to the Scottish crown (Ormrod 2011, 71–4). These high political manoeuvres correlated with disturbances that were local for the producers and consumers of many Langtoft manuscripts. In the decades after Edward I’s death, northern English chronicles complain of southern neglect in the face of Scottish raids and express a ‘desire for inclusion’ and a sense of their region’s importance to the ‘territorial integrity of England’ (Ruddick 2013, 96), which suggests that they felt alienated from the political centre. As we shall see, the materials included with Langtoft’s history in the first phase of Royal 20 A II imply similar anxieties, asserting their region’s national significance and resisting its marginalization. For those encountering manuscripts of Langtoft’s history before the mid 1330s, then, the contrast of their present with his recent past of glorious English victories over Scotland must have been stark. However, Edward III’s early concessions to the Scots did not last long. Having come to the throne at the age of fourteen, he ruled initially under the dominance of his mother, Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, who had deposed her husband with the aid of Roger Mortimer, earl of March. But in 1330 Edward asserted personal rule, committing himself to restoring public order and initiating an aggressively expansionist politics (Ormrod 2011, 90–119 and 147–211). The death of Robert Bruce and the accession of his fiveyear-old son, David II (r. 1329–71), offered an opportunity for Edward Balliol (John’s eldest son) and other ‘Disinherited’ nobles to invade Scotland, possibly with English backing (Ormrod  2011, 149–53). Balliol’s ‘restoration’ of Scottish inheritances to his followers and to Edward sparked the Second Scottish War of Independence (1332–57). These Anglo-Scottish conflicts were also integral to English rivalry with and claims upon France, and the French king supported the Scots. Over the next century, the northern-English–southern-Scottish region would form another front in the Hundred Years War; or, differently put, the continent was a secondary theatre in the Anglo-Scottish conflicts. As Anglo-French hostilities intensified during the 1330s—Edward assumed the title of King of France in 1340—the decade also saw victories for both sides in the conflict between English and Scots. After 1341, with

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Living History  91 David II newly returned from his youthful exile in France, the Scottish cause was again strong; but David was captured in 1346 when attacking England in support of France. Edward kept him in captivity until 1357, after which David seems to have worked to keep England and Scotland out of open war. The second half of the fourteenth century nevertheless saw ‘a sustained and arguably intensifying pattern of Anglo-Scottish rivalry, and often open conflict, in military, economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural terms’ (King and Penman 2007, 3; see also Goodman 2007) even before the accession of the more warlike Robert II of Scotland in 1371. Although Mark Ormrod offers a useful corrective to the widespread idea that Edward III neglected the north in favour of the continent (Ormrod 2011, 147–78), many fourteenth-century northerners were evidently frustrated by what they considered royal failure to prioritize their interests. It is important to stress, however, that we cannot view the experience of people living in the area in terms of a simple division along national lines. The border between Scotland and England neither reflected nor produced clear, stable political distinctions or affiliations; instead it blurred them. Many nobles of Norman or French descent, including the Balliols and the Bruces, held lands from both the Scottish and English kings. Many ‘changed sides’ as local interests and national and international politics varied. None behaved like the nationalist or regionalist heroes that modern representations sometimes portray, but, equally, none was indifferent to political units, boundaries, and titles. Networks of alliances, marriages, kinship, and influence worked across the border of the kingdoms; having a foot in both camps gave strategic advantages. According to Michael Prestwich, ‘these cross-border links . . . tended to promote harmony between the realms’ (1997, 357–8), but if some such connections worked to discourage high-level political animosity, others evidently intensified it. Domestic politics on both sides were also constantly troubled, not least under such great northern lords as Thomas of Lancaster (c. 1278–1322) and John of Gaunt (1340–99), respectively royal cousin and brother then uncle, whose vast power bases distant from London encouraged them to rebel (in Lancaster’s case) or to be suspected of rebellion (in Gaunt’s; Ormrod 2011, 562–9). Both engaged diplomatically and militarily with Scotland in either their own or their kings’ interests. For an area so riven and so interconnected, shared between two kingdoms with a long history of fraught relations and caught up in multiple internal rivalries (and with other alliances or hostilities), it is probably not possible to establish an impartial account of this period. Many modern as well as medieval histories do not seem even to want to be impartial. In part due to its complex political situation, the north-east had a sense of exceptionalism relative to southern England, which it exercised in a proud tradition of historiography and legendary history (Meneghetti  1979; John ­ Taylor 1961). The lands north of the Humber river had long been a point of entry for invasions from Scandinavia and mainland Europe as well as from Scotland (e.g. Langtoft I, 236.7 and II, 254.4), so northerners considered themselves to be

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92  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad frontier-folk of long experience and key defenders of the realm. Northern monasteries, saints, and writers had played a foundational role in the establishment of Roman Christianity in Britain and in English contributions to European traditions of Christian learning (Rowley 2013). The city of York claimed an important place in the English imaginary and promoted two foundation legends—one deriving from Geoffrey of Monmouth, the other from Bede—which together fed ‘the national ambitions of England’s kings’ with precedents for imperial, royal, and ecclesiastical hegemony over both Scotland and parts of the continent, notably France (Rees Jones 2013, 4). York ‘had long cultivated its distinctions as part of a public collective identity that located it not so much within the kingdom of England as within a Christian history of both the north on the one hand, and of Latin Christian Europe on the other’ (Rees Jones 2013, 317). The intensified conflicts with Scotland in the late thirteenth century enhanced the region’s sense of its significance: between 1298 and 1304, Edward I moved both the Chancery and the Exchequer to York, which became a quasi-capital as well as a large military base and a centre for continental trade, second only to London and closely connected to it (Rees Jones 2013, 1–22, Pelham 1951, 230–65). When Langtoft was collecting material in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, therefore, the north-east enjoyed what in local eyes was due recognition of its national and international importance, thanks especially to the wars with Scotland and to Edward I, respectively Langtoft’s main subject and preferred hero. Other domestic and international crises sporadically restored this prominence in later years, but overall the balance shifted south. Langtoft’s north-eastern readers evidently regretted its passing; Royal 20 A II is one of several Langtoft manuscripts that reassert the area’s importance through its contents (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS Julius A V; Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 43; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS 930), to which its unique visual programme and its production quality add further prestige. The importance of Durham, another powerful holy and historic place and the other major regional centre, is reflected especially in Langtoft’s interest in its charismatic prince-bishop, Antony Bek (r. 1283–1311). Originally a Lincolnshire man (possibly like Langtoft himself), Bek was for many years a trusted member of Edward I’s inner circle and a very significant figure in English domestic and foreign politics. Although his unyielding prosecution of an ecclesiastical dispute with Durham Priory eventually estranged him from the old king, he was close also to Edward II before and after his accession (Fraser  2008, Prestwich 1997, 541–6, Summerfield 1998, 69–98). Bek successfully defended the unique regalian privileges of his palatinate even from the king and the independence of his see from the archbishopric of York; he extended his landholdings in Durham, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire, as well as acquiring Scottish lands to the north (Fraser 1957, 79–122). Bek repeatedly draws admiring comments from Langtoft, who addresses him in the second person (e.g. ‘Ore aidez, Auntoyne, e overez

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Living History  93 sagement; / En ço cas sanz tay ne gist amendement’, Wright II, 200.16–200.17, ‘Now help, Anthony, and work wisely; without you there is no solution in this case’), suggesting a possible dedication to (if not active patronage by) the great man.12 Like London, York, and Bridlington Priory—and also like south-eastern Scotland and the Scottish Borders—Durham and Northumbria were woven into a range of networks that fashioned alliances and rivalries on the regional, national, and international scenes. Langtoft’s research, writing, and reception took shape within these networks.

Langtoft’s Geste: The Politics of Language, Form, and Discourse Whereas when Gaimar wrote in the 1130s, French in Britain was the principal tongue of a still relatively new ruling class, with close contacts across the Channel and a strong sense of continental as well as Insular affiliations (see Chapter 1), by Langtoft’s time it was a taught language, access to which distinguished both an established nobility and the professions and institutions of religion, learning, administration, and law (among others), within which Langtoft himself lived and worked.13 Far from being the deficient and moribund dialect that scholars still occasionally claim, Insular French as Langtoft uses it fulfils many of the functions that mark a high-status language in a diglossia (or polyglossia, where more than two languages are in play).14 Moreover, although Insular written French at the 12  On the importance of Bek and Durham in Langtoft, see especially Summerfield  1998, 69–98. Summerfield argues that the geste was written at the behest of John Scafeld (Sheffield), sheriff of Durham from 1305, in order to reconcile Bek with Edward I in 1305–7. She cogently links Langtoft’s literary devices to his work’s political messages of unity, harmony, and cooperation throughout the realm so as to further the English king’s territorial claims—whatever those might be (arguments summarized, 211–216). (Compare Stepsis 1972, who considers that Langtoft’s interest is in preserving the unity of the land and in condemning or avoiding the periodic fracturing recorded in past and present history.) Contrastingly, Thiolier (1998) considers that the first two parts were written earlier and the third after Langtoft entered Bek’s service in 1293 and in consequence of Bek’s falling out with John le Romeyn, archbishop of York. 13  Scholars disagree over the currency of Insular French in the later Middle Ages, but it is clear that it varies widely depending on context, milieu, place, and so on. Legge’s opinion remains worth quoting: ‘The fourteenth century, the period of the decline of Anglo-Norman, is also the period of its widest diffusion, both socially and geographically’ (1950, 131). On social variations, see Ingham  2012, Crane 1999. Langtoft’s work addresses largely the same audience as that of the oldest French prose Brut (originally late thirteenth century, also northern), namely ‘the households of the middling to upper baronage, those with an interest in continued social stability and a strong, but advisable, king’ (Marvin 2005, 87). 14  Lodge (1993, 13–15) summarizes and updates the classic account in Ferguson 1959. Language varieties in diglossic or polyglossic situations differ in function (High varieties are used for religion, education/learning, administration/law, and ‘real’ literature, Low for conversation, instructions to servants, and folk literature); prestige (‘H is felt to be more beautiful, more logical, better able to express important thoughts than L’); literary heritage (‘H possesses one, L does not’); acquisition (‘H has to be explicitly taught’); and standardization (H is codified and uniform, L varied or dialectally fragmented). Moreover, ‘speakers of the standard tend to be credited with greater intelligence, trustworthiness, etc.’ (Lodge 1993, 12).

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94  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad turn of the fourteenth century is far from being standardized in a modern sense, its use by Langtoft invokes some of the value that today is often considered to accompany standardization: it implies the existence of centres of secular or ­religious power and extends their authority by asserting their ‘uniformity and permanence’ (Lodge 1993, 116). The status and functions associated with Insular French in the rhetorical, performative use that Langtoft made of it are in several respects closer to Latin than to a vernacular such as Middle English, Scots, or Gaelic. No variety of continental northern French at this period could have claimed similar prestige (Lodge 1993, 85–117). Had Langtoft written in Latin, he would have risked limiting his discourse’s import to a narrow range of professions and vocations. French allows him to address a noble lay audience and to draw its attention to the interests that it shares with lawyers, administrators, and clergy, as well as with other nobles and with kings. Thus French recruits for the dignity and credibility of his narrative both noble heritage and tradition and also specialist knowledge of institutions and proceedings close to the centres of secular and spiritual power. The exclusive status of French in Britain allows Langtoft to limit the political community—those who matter politically—to the French-speaking classes; its diffusion allows him to include professionals like himself therein. The particular circumstances of Insular French authorize Langtoft, lawyer and Augustinian canon, to speak appropriately to and about Edward, Bek, and other great lords and to assert the commonality of their points of view. English was also an option: Laȝamon and Robert of Gloucester had written English verse chronicles, the former in the early thirteenth century, the latter between 1270 and 1300, roughly when Langtoft was working.15 Choosing English would have altered the politics as well as the status of Langtoft’s work. Mark N. Taylor (2010) argues that, during the thirteenth century, British-born barons sponsored the use of English in order to distinguish themselves from continental-born Franceis holding lands and title in England, thus affirming the greater prestige and influence of those nobles who spoke both languages but had English as a mother tongue.16 By writing in French, Langtoft ignores this potential division between members of the Insular nobility, effectively invalidating it. Insular French further supports his promotion of unity because it is not regionally variable (Short  2013, 31 summarizes the consensus, though see Pouzet 2010 for a dissenting view)—unlike Middle English, which is highly

15  A few decades after Langtoft, we find English verse chronicles produced in the north-east of England by Thomas of Castleford (c. 1327) and by Robert Mannyng of Brunne (1338; in part a translation of Langtoft). 16  Henry III’s promotion of ‘foreigners’ was a grievance in the wars between crown and barony that marked his reign. The classic though much contested exploration of the connections between the use of English and the developing idea of an English ‘nation’ in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is Turville-Petre 1996.

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Living History  95 localized (Blake 1992b, Milroy 1992)—and therefore easily represents the kingdom and its interests as a homogeneous whole. Indeed, since French was used by ­ruling elites in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland as well as in England, Langtoft’s choice of language represents and asserts the high-level political unity not only of England but also of the archipelago, even for those areas where English was not much used.17 When Langtoft invokes Merlin’s prophecy of the union of England and Scotland and declares that ‘Arthur ne avayt unkes si plainement les fez’ (II, 266.3, ‘Arthur never held the fiefs so completely’) as does Edward I in 1296, Edward’s dominance over ‘Albanye’ (II, 264.23), Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland is embodied and enabled by the use of Insular French, shared with and performed by Langtoft’s historiographical narrative. French therefore empowers a centralizing politics which supports English monarchism and imperialism while also encouraging the English kings to allow a role in government for certain professional and religious classes as well as for the nobility. Langtoft’s choice of literary form and discourse also contribute to his centralizing project.18 Instead of Gaimar’s running octosyllabic couplets, Langtoft worked with alexandrine (i.e. twelve-syllable or four-stress) lines arranged in laisses: groupings of a variable number of lines linked by monorhyme. This form was associated by the late thirteenth century principally with chansons de geste (the medieval French ‘epic’), with Alexander narratives, with histories, and, in Britain, with ‘ancestral romances’.19 It is commonplace to observe that Langtoft’s geste (as he terms it)20 has an ‘epic’ quality, to which his use of alexandrine laisses and some 17  In Scotland at this time, Gaelic was the main language of the central and northern Highlands, while Scots—a Germanic language related to Northumbrian Old English—was spoken in the Lowlands (J. Derrick McClure, 2008). 18 An excellent discussion of the relations between literary form, language use, and politics is Coleman  2003. Coleman discusses how Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Langtoft’s (partial) translator into English, renders both the main narrative and the ‘political songs’. 19  Insular histories in alexandrine laisses include Jordan Fantosme’s chronicle of the Anglo-Scottish wars and a section of Wace’s Roman de Rou, both 1170s; see Bennett 1995; Bennett 1997; Ashe 2007, 81–120. Fourteenth-century history-writing in French verse was seemingly more widespread on the continent than in England (Tyson  1975, 20–30); Cuvelier’s Vie de Bertrand du Guesclin and Jean d’Outremeuse’s Geste de Liège, both late fourteenth century, are in alexandrine laisses. On chanson de geste literary form, style, and poetics, see Suard 2011, especially 69–97; on Anglo-Norman developments, Hardman and Ailes 2017, 32–109. On Alexander narratives, see Chapter 6. On the similarities of Insular ‘ancestral romances’ to chansons de geste, see Field 2011, Ailes 2011. Crane, Field, and Ailes have all worked intensively in these areas. 20  Andrea Ruddick’s discussion of medieval English historiographical genres usefully takes into account not only textual evidence but also that of the often heterogeneous manuscript compilations (2013, 36–48); the contents of Royal 20 A II are fairly typical. Modern scholars generally call Langtoft’s work a ‘chronicle’—a notoriously heterogeneous term, and one that Langtoft does not use. Langtoft’s work is sometimes also considered by modern historians to represent ‘chivalrous history’, influenced by romance writing; on the practice of this in fourteenth-century England by continental and Insular writers (including Langtoft), see John Taylor 1987, 154–174. Langtoft generally refers to his sources as ‘estory’, e.g. ‘Gildas, en ses estoryes’ (I, 232, 11, ‘Gildas, in his histories’) and in frequent references of the type, ‘L’estory ne dit mye’ (I, 216.1, ‘The history does not say’) or ‘si com l’estory crye’ (I, 158.7, ‘As the history announces’). Summerfield (1998, 1–12) gives an excellent short introduction to Insular verse historiography. Laura Slater shows how history-writing relates to other cultural productions and

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96  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad of his lexical and stylistic choices contribute, but the political freight that his intertexts bear deserves further exploration. His preoccupations are those of many Alexander narratives and chansons de geste: prowess and heroism on the battlefield, loyalty and betrayal, the proper and improper exercise of feudal roles, legal processes and their testing, and kingship. Langtoft approves of kings who learn from Alexander’s strengths and weaknesses and who accordingly heed good counsel, exercise justice, temper generosity and magnanimity with prudence, and show military enterprise, skill, determination, and energy. His preferred examples are Arthur, Richard I, Henry II, and especially Edward I, whose reign occupies a third of the whole geste. The same royal qualities are idealized in chansons de geste, though often in wistful contrast to the imperfect specimens who inhabit the narratives. Correspondingly, Langtoft portrays the English barons as endlessly, inventively unmanageable in ways again reminiscent of chansons de geste. Langtoft urges Edward to extend the full penalty of the law against them and is unhappy when the king displays mercy (e.g. II, 256.6–258.6). He nevertheless supports noble rights where these are not detrimental to the realm and protests where those rights suffer through royal abuse or neglect. He is prepared to castigate anyone who, he considers, destabilizes the realm through illegitimate violence or excessive self-interest. Profiting from the perspectival shifts characteristic of chansons de geste (Kay 1995), he repeatedly censures Edward for endangering his realm’s unity, for instance by neglecting his duty of largesse and by deferring the puraler (perambulation to confirm boundaries) for which his barons frequently petition. Though sometimes vaunting his hero as Arthur’s equal or even superior, at others he uses Arthur to measure Edward’s inadequacy (e.g. II, 296.12–298.9 or II, 326.9–328.5; contrast II, 380.7).21 As in a chanson de geste so in Langtoft’s geste, the same mechanisms both constitute and threaten the polity; dangers come from law’s enforcement as well as from its transgression and as much from full participants as from traitors and outsiders. For medieval readers, this is not a paradox but a familiar analysis of history and politics, and one that, in French, is articulated especially clearly by chansons de geste and implied by the use of a form strongly associated with them. Langtoft’s geste is constructed around the same tension between centrifugal and centripetal forces that typifies chansons de geste. On the one hand, chansons de geste notoriously homogenize and demonize communal enemies and urge Christians to unite aggressively against them. Similarly, Langtoft’s narrator and characters use rhetoric familiar to chanson de geste audiences in order to present to political conflicts; this context is useful to situate Langtoft regionally and nationally (2018, especially 115–62 and 163–236). 21  As in the earliest prose Brut, so in Langtoft, ‘Arthur is an idealised version of Edward I’, and a continuous narrative of English history is forged by including the two in the same book (Marvin 2005, 89).

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Living History  97 England’s enemies as immoral and inhuman. Thus the Saracens fighting Richard I in the Holy Land are ‘feloun’ (II, 26.23, ‘villains’), ‘chens’ (II, 90.25, ‘dogs’), and ‘[le] pople canyn’ (II, 100.4, ‘the canine people’, with also the idea of ‘the people of Cain’, who is referenced later in the laisse); their religion is ‘la lay mastyne’ (II, 106.25, ‘the mastiff law’).22 The same crusading rhetoric ‘others’ the Scots and Welsh who challenge Edward I: they are not only ‘fols mastyns’ (II, 232.1, ‘mad mastiffs’) and ‘felun’ (II, 220.4, ‘villains’) but also enemies of Christianity and of truth:23 Escoce sait maudite de la mere Dé, Et parfound ad deable Gales enfoundré! En l’un ne l’autre fu unkes verité.  (II, 220.12–14) May Scotland be cursed by the mother of God, and Wales sunk deep to the devil! In neither one was there ever any truth.

This othering process portrays Edward’s Insular enemies as external to the ­polity and authorizes their violent correction and integration. Multiplying the dissenting forces helps to define a ‘centre’ that is called upon—or called into being—to contain them. On the other hand, chansons de geste have a less well-known but very pronounced taste for internal, indeed intestinal, conflict. The constant civil wars, feuds, and rebellions that wrack their communities prove that people have no need of linguistic, social, or ideological differences to enter into bloody conflict. Because they acknowledge only one ideological voice and one kind of person, and because their engagement with the world is limited by a feudal and (up to a point) Christian baronial ideology, chansons de geste are sometimes said to be ‘monologic’ (e.g. Gaunt 1995, 22–70) and are contrasted with the supposedly greater openness to other voices of romance ‘dialogism’. This monologism means that friend and foe speak the same ideological language; one effect is to create an intrinsic instability between those crucial political categories. Chanson de geste barons kill their friends, kin, fellows, and lords, and the same forces that make two men close companions may—and usually do—make them also bitter antagonists. Moreover, it is typical of chansons de geste that distinctions between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ enemies, between ‘traitors’, ‘heretics’, and even ‘heroes’, blur. Langtoft similarly 22  The use of such rhetoric in chansons de geste is widespread and much discussed, e.g. Kay 1995, Kinoshita 2006. 23  Helen Phillips (2005) analyses Langtoft’s rhetoric and feudal themes but does not connect them with chansons de geste. In England as elsewhere, it was common to accuse those fighting against a lord of preventing him from leaving on crusade, therefore acting as enemies of Christ, therefore themselves legitimate objects of crusade. One example of many: ‘In January 1216, Innocent III offered remission of sins to those who fought for King John; his [secular, domestic] opponents were branded as renegades hindering the crusade to the Holy Land’ (Tyerman 2006, 896).

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98  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad presents the Scots, Welsh, and French lords at different times as outraging common humanity in ways that virtually oblige any Christian monarch to subdue them, as allies, and as rebels against legitimate English overlordship. This monologic instability, which drives many geste narratives, prompts a particular interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s famous, enigmatic double proposition problematizing the relationship between linguistic competence and power: On ne parle jamais qu’une seule langue—ou plutôt un seul idiome. On ne parle jamais une seule langue—ou plutôt il n’y a pas d’idiome pur. (Derrida 1996, 23) We only ever speak one language—or rather one idiom only. We never speak only one language—or rather there is no pure idiom. (Derrida 1998, 7–8)

Derrida’s provocative formulation insists that monolingualism is in a relation of antinomy with multilingualism. A consequence for polyglossic situations is that standardized, hegemonic, ‘High’ languages (registers, discourses) are not simply distinct from and contrasted with variable, marginalized ‘Low’. The human linguistic condition is fundamentally alienated; nevertheless, degrees of alienation vary. Any communicative code incorporates multiple markers of authority, which different users may or may not be able to access, may or may not be encouraged or required to manifest. Derrida’s proposition encourages us to seek for the ways in which each term inhabits the other in every language situation, both in order to gain a more graded, nuanced insight into that situation’s specific political, social, and ethical engagements and—more radically—to discover the potential for change. For example, some medieval texts and manuscripts seem to aspire to a cultural ‘monolingualism’ in which participants speak ‘one idiom only’, however many languages they deploy; chansons de geste are a case in point. However, even if everyone who matters does ‘speak only one [ideological] language’, this does not guarantee concord or stability. On the contrary: their common tongue and shared values enhance the potential for conflict and intensify it when it occurs. The internal antagonisms that chansons de geste expose infect audiences also: the narration makes it often difficult to distinguish ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ characters, behaviour, and policies, and its characteristic focal shifts oblige us to consider ­different viewpoints without settling definitively for any, thus fostering contradictions and disagreements between and even within listeners. In these ways, the intensely monologic or monolingual geste environment compresses powerful ambiguities into a single, confined space, breeding a multitude of violently dissenting voices that encourage political reflection (Kay 1995). Chansons de geste force us to recognize that the social fabric of the geste actually is the antagonisms that set Christians, domestic lords and vassals, kings and nobles, comrades, friends, kin, husbands and wives, men and women, generations, centre and centrifuge,

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Living History  99 against each other. These antagonisms produce and energize each other in a swirl of creation and destruction that constitutes a specific, highly dynamic vision of historical and political process. Geste, therefore, is not only a genre or a discourse but also a dynamic in which various centripetal and centrifugal forces interact in complicated, often chaotic tension. Chansons de geste not only represent conflict as endogeneous and chronic but foment it in the same terms: internally sourced and directed, systemic, and interminable. Their repeated calls for crusade appeal to an extraneous, spiritual authority and to the higher level of political organization that an idealized Christian empire might provide as hoped-for solutions to the problem of intestinal antagonism. If barons and/or royals can be exported to a (preferably distant) ­theatre of religious war, then their innate quarrelsomeness may actually serve and strengthen the domestic community. This fantasy of the body politic uniting against an external enemy, however, remains on the fringes of most chanson de geste narratives. It should not distract from the genre’s major investment in conflicts between friends, allies, close kin, and lords and vassals, nor from the dynamic which keeps those conflicts raging across generations of people and of songs, occasioning thousands of deaths and of lines. The geste colouring of Langtoft’s verse chronicle therefore supports a specific presentation of British history, envisaging it in the above terms. It allows him to criticize those responsible for defending the polity—nobles and kings—for the endless dissension which prevents them from working together to defeat common enemies. For a professional religious like Langtoft, geste paradigms have the further merit of absolving religious authorities of blame for internal dissension: Bishop Bek presides as a Turpin-like adviser, mediating tensions between secular and religious principles and urging internal peace so that higher priorities can be attended to.24 Langtoft even briefly indulges in the chanson de geste fantasy of uniting the warring sides in a combined assault on distant pagans when, after comparing Edward’s holdings favourably with Arthur’s, he evokes the Last World Emperor prophecy, according to which a mighty king will unify Christendom by conquest before recovering Jerusalem and ushering in the age of Antichrist: Desore n’y ad ke fere for purver ses alez Sur li ray de Fraunce, conquere ses heritez, Et pus porter la croyce où Jhesu Cryst fu nez. (II, 266.4–266.6) Now all he has to do is prepare his expeditions against the king of France, to conquer his inheritance, and then bear the cross to where Jesus Christ was born.

24 ‘Ly eveske de Dureme touz jours travayllait / De enentir la guerre saunz contek et playt’ (II, 296.5–295.6, ‘The bishop of Durham worked continually to end the war without brawling or ­lawsuit’—though both contek and playt could indicate either litigation or battle).

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100  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad In Langtoft’s hands, geste ideologies, themes, and literary strategies are not, as Legge alleged (1950, 71–2), provincial hangovers of an earlier age but point to a dynamic which accounts for the British past and present and warns about the future. Nuanced by the particularities of Insular political culture and language politics at the turn of the fourteenth century, they not only allow him to sketch an ideal of strong kings and heroic, public-spirited nobles collaborating in good, Christian government (expressed in English military greatness) but also furnish him with aesthetically powerful means of depicting how and why reality falls short. And although on the continent chansons de geste may often have carried associations of orality and ‘popular’ status, the way in which Langtoft uses Insular French allows them instead to confer high social and ethical status on his text, its producer and consumers, and its destinatee.

The ‘Political Songs’ and a Living Historiography Given these advantages of using geste discourse, it must be significant when Langtoft on rare occasions deviates from French alexandrine laisses. We turn now to ask whether the most striking of these deviations—the nine ‘political songs’ included in the Edward I section—break with the geste or somehow continue its paradigms.25 Metrically and sometimes linguistically distinct from the thousands of lines that surround them, these short passages in French and English stanzaic verse appear as novel and challenging developments. They introduce voices previously unheard in the geste; most notably to modern eyes and ears, seven songs use some English. So vivid are their lines that some modern commentators consider them to preserve authentic snatches of popular rhymes (Wilson 1970, 200–8), but recent scholarship has also emphasized the lyric pieces’ complex voicing, framing, and effects as part of Langtoft’s text (Matthews 2010, 54–72, Galloway 2012). These songs’ impact derives not only from their use of a vernacular, whose diffusion and connotations carry lower status than do those of Insular French, but also from the regional character of their English. Regionalism can authorize, but in ways very different from the Insular French of Langtoft’s main narrative. We shall show how the songs’ linguistic, literary, and material presentation revises the centralist foregrounding of realm and island(s) that is elsewhere implied by Langtoft’s geste; however, we 25  On the songs in the different manuscripts, see Matthews  2010, 161–6. Langtoft occasionally changes metre or language elsewhere. Diana’s prophecies are recorded in Latin elegiac verse attributed to Ovid and borrowed from the Historia regum Britanniae (I, 12.1–12.6 and 12.12–12.19); Henry II’s will is given in French alexandrine rhyming couplets (II, 14.14–18.2); and John Balliol’s homage to Edward in French prose (II, 192.20–194.10). A mocking use of interlanguage occurs at II, 352.7–352.10, where Langtoft grafts Latin into French when satirizing papal greed.

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Living History  101 shall argue that they complement and extend the geste point of view instead of undermining it. The textual disturbance created by these novel strategies represents and reproduces the upheavals characterizing the difficult times through which Langtoft and others had lived and were living, as well as the challenge of recording those historiographically—a challenge that Langtoft met by adapting his historiographical practice. The songs are, nevertheless, not simply exogenous alternatives to the idiom established in Langtoft’s geste; true to geste dynamics, their dissent is also internally sourced and presented as a series of variations that stretch the geste’s discursive seams while—arguably—leaving it intact. Their inclusion therefore gives fuller expression to the centrifugal tendencies that animate earlier sections of the geste, thereby rendering recent history more accurately and perhaps prompting (or hoping to prompt) a centripetal response which will contain those tendencies. The songs range from six to fifty-four lines in length. All may be read as groups of three verses with the rhyme scheme aab, ccb, dde, ffe. Although they are usually said to be written in tail-rhyme or rime couée, a fairly common metre in Insular French and Middle English lyric and narrative, the third line is not always shorter, as it would be in classic tail-rhyme; in fact, the songs show considerable metrical and rhythmical variation (Thiolier 2014, Summerfield 1997, Summerfield 2012—this last refers to the songs’ ‘demotic metre’ rather than to ‘tail-rhyme’). Two songs—one six, the other thirty-six lines in length— are entirely in French; three songs are entirely in English, none more than twelve lines long; four begin in French and end with six or twelve lines of English.26 All are associated with the English victories over the Scots; all but two relate to the campaign of 1296 (see above, 88–89). The last, which applauds the capture and execution of William Wallace in 1305 (Fisher 2013 discusses Langtoft’s and other treatments), is typical of form and layout, here in Royal 20 A II (see Figure 3.1).

26  Song 1: six lines, French, ‘Dount li rays Eduuard’ (II, 222.16–222.21). Song 2: English, twelve lines, ‘Pykit him’ (II, 234.23–236.14). Song 3: French, twelve lines, then English, six lines, ‘De nos enemys’ (II, 244.3–244.20). Song 4: English, twelve lines, ‘The fote folk’ (II, 248.5–248.16). Song 5: English, six lines, ‘For Scottes’ (II, 252.5–252.10). Song 6: French, forty-eight lines, then English, six lines, ‘Calays, Yrays’ (II, 254.16–258.15). Song 7: French, thirty lines, then English, twelve lines, ‘Les .xii. peres’ (II, 260.21–264.15). Song 8: French, thirty-six lines, ‘Ses enemys’ (II, 266.7–268.9). Song 9: French, six lines, then English, six lines, ‘Pur finir sa geste’ (II, 364.1–364.12). A further song survives only in the first redaction edited by Thiolier and is not printed by Wright: ‘Tprut! Scot riveling, / Wiþ mikel mistiming, / Crop þu ut of kage’ (redaction I, Thiolier  1989, ll. 846–848; ‘[Raspberry noise] Roughshod Scot, it was a really bad moment when you crawled out of your cage’). The equivalent lines in the second redaction (Thiolier 1989, 300–1, lines 769–772; Wright II, 232.2–5) are in French and in the alexandrine laisse metre but share some of the vocabulary and the tone of the English of the first redaction. Summerfield (2012, 23–4, n. 15) argues that closer attention to the manuscripts may reveal further songs or stanzas in future; see, for instance, the extra six lines at the end of song 6 in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.1 (Thiolier 1989, 368).

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102  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 3.1.  BL, Royal MS 20 A II, f. 145r, the Wallace lyrics. © The British Library Board, London

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Living History  103 Transcription (compare Wright 1866–8, II, 246.1–246.12): Cope ly fu le corps en quatr[e] porciouns Chescon pend p[ar] say en memore de ces nouns En leu de sa banere cels sont les gounfaignouns              Pur finer la geste                                                                    \     de corps est fet partye        A Loundres est sa teste / \ En .iiii. bones viles                                                                \     / Qe sont en albanye               Dont honurer les ylles                                                          /             And thus may you here                                                       \    to biggen in pays                    A ladde to leere                                                                      /              \   It falles in his eghe                                                                 \    / Wit at Walais                           Þat hagges ouer heghe                                                         /                    Pur la mort Walus puet homme remembrer Quele gwerdoun apent a traytour et a leer Et por deuers trespas quele deuers lower [French] His body was cut into four pieces, / each of which hangs alone in memory of those names. / In place of his banner, these are his standards. / To conclude the geste / His head is in London, / his body is shared out / In four good towns / That are in Albany / Thereby to honour the islands. [English] And so you may hear / How a churl learns / to dwell in peace. / Something falls into his eye, / whoever builds his hedges too high; / Know this by Wallace. / [French] By Wallace’s death people can remember / what reward belongs to traitors and thieves, / and that different crimes earn ­different wages. We today cannot help hearing in these songs a voice or voices different from the  epic monolanguage established over the preceding laisses, centuries, and ­generations of Langtoft’s geste. The historiographical and political consequences are significant: by breaking with the dominant idiom, the songs suggest that there may be other narrators, actors, and audiences—other ways of presenting English history and of furthering English political projects. The nature and meaning of the songs’ difference, however, requires further discussion. We shall ask first to what extent the songs’ use of English marks a new departure for Langtoft, then consider two further ideas: the significance of code-switching between French and English; and how continuities with the rest of the text present the songs’ innovations as developments of, rather than radical breaks with, the established geste discourse. The short passages in English pack a stylistic and phonaesthetic punch. They either stand alone as interruptions to the main narrative or terminate longer lyric sections in French. All exploit rhetorically the qualities of Low languages

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104  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad in diglossic situations: informal or even vulgar, oralistic, seeming to address inferiors, expressing base sentiments, and dialectally marked, they appear fully ‘vernacular’: For Scottes Telle i for sottes, And wrecches unwar; Unsele Dintes to dele Tham drohu to Dumbar.  (II, 252.5–252.10) For the Scots I account fools and unwary wretches. Unluckily they drew to Dunbar to deal blows.

The rhetoric that here gains force from English phonemes, alliteration, and pace is nevertheless not new in the geste. Other of Langtoft’s figures also engage, in French, in insult and triumphalism; as Stephen D. White (1998) points out, these rank as legitimate, indeed indispensable elements of medieval political rhetoric.27 The songs in English therefore contest the implicit assertion of Langtoft’s earlier sections that Insular French is the only language of effective political discourse. English speakers suddenly appear as noteworthy political actors in and commentators on the troubles of the very recent past and present—and also of the future. The primary intention may be to exclude non-English-speaking (i.e. continentalbred) nobles from effective political action, to the benefit of bilingual, Insularraised lords (Mark N. Taylor 2010). Nevertheless, the use of English also widens the remit of Langtoft’s history beyond the circle of French-speaking, Frenchliterate privilege represented by the geste proper. The songs, therefore, connect Langtoft’s text to a different, and differently potentially diverse, social world from that defined by the main geste narrative. It appears that the recent political situation required Langtoft to revise his language politics and his historiographic practice. Modern historians welcome the songs as one instance of Langtoft’s turn to contemporary sources in his Edward I section. Enshrined within the matrix text, they perform the 27  Michael Penman argues that, between 1300 and 1350, Englishmen (mainly churchmen) wrote with ‘a belligerent nationalist and racial flavour’ that ‘by far exceeded any outbursts against the Scots as a proud and destructive people expressed in earlier English sources commenting upon periodic tensions before 1296’ (2007, 217), adding that contemporary Scottish writers never embraced invective to such an extent. Another north-eastern history, Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica (late 1350s), records Edward I appointing Earl Warenne guardian of Scotland and giving him a governmental seal: ‘si ly disoit en bourdaunt, Bon besoigne fait, qy de merde se deliuer’ (saying to him jokingly ‘He does good business, who rids himself of shit’; text and translation, King 2005, 38–39).

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Living History  105 authenticating function of documentary evidence gathered in the field from ­participants and first-hand witnesses—and this seems to be true for Langtoft also. Demotic speakers not only make history but also guarantee historical accounts: the songs support the narrative’s truth-claims by adding a new liveliness and authenticity. Spreading the social net wider by using English as well as French allows Langtoft’s text to forge a larger ‘English’ community that will prove resistant to potential divisions along that particular set of linguistic-political lines, thus enhancing its ability to further Langtoft’s project of expansive English sovereignty. In order to call this larger community into being, Langtoft invokes the chanson de geste fantasy of ending intestinal strife by uniting against a common enemy. That unenviable role is allotted principally to the Scots. It was the songs in English that earned Langtoft his reputation as ‘one of the most violent Scotophobe historians of all time’ (Legge 1950, 71); however, the French verses and laisses can be equally scornful and vituperative, celebrating Scottish defeats with partisan glee. At the battle of Dunbar, for instance, the Scots flee the English like sheep before a wolf, and ‘Des taunz de gens armez mult ayt grant mervaylle / Ke nes un de tuz al fet valt une maylle’ (II, 246.14–15, ‘It was a great marvel that, of so many armed men, not one of the whole lot was worth a ha’penny when it came down to business’). The English songs are very much on message ideologically, even if they also point us socially outside the dominant geste discourse. Langtoft adds English voices to the Insular French ones not to contest them but to sing the same song—literally, in four cases (songs 3, 6, 7, 9). In fact, the songs’ rhetorical impact is created as much by code-switching as by the use of English per se. Here is the ending of song 6, ‘Calays, Yrays’: Pur amy ne pur dener, Ray ne dait esparnier, K’il ne juge owelement. Si li rays volt Deu servir, La lay ly covent mayntenir; Si noun, il pecche et molt mesprent. Pur veir quant Jon de Balliol Lessa sun liver à l’escol, Desceu fu tremalement. For boule bred in his bok, Wen he tint that he tok Wiht ye kingedome. For he haves overhipped, His tippet is tipped, His tabard is tom.  (II, 258.1–258.15)

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106  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad [French] For friend nor for money, a king must not refrain from judging equally. If the king wants to serve God, he must uphold the law; otherwise he sins and does very wrong. In truth, when John Balliol left his book in school, he was very badly deceived. [English] For falsehood grew in his book, when he lost what he had seized with the kingdom. For he has missed his mark, his tippet has fallen, his tabard is empty.28

Such code-switching was a not uncommon rhetorical device in fourteenth-century England: Legge notes, ‘The judges of Edward I’s reign were in the habit of disconcerting Counsel with salty English sayings delivered with pungent force from the Bench’ (1950, 89). In the law-courts with which Langtoft was familiar, ‘the passage from one language to another became a sort of game’ (ibid.). This suggests that Langtoft’s code-switching songs continue to address the same powerful audiences as does his main narrative, although they differ by warily acknowledging, and working to neutralize, language difference as a marker or cause of political division. While earlier sections of Langtoft’s work grandly ignored or overrode domestic distinctions along French-/English-language lines, the songs proactively weave those languages together, even down to carefully executed textual detail: as is often noted, in most cases the verses’ syntax continues that of the preceding lines, and the first tail-rhyme (the b of aab, ccb) continues the monorhyme of the ­preceding laisse even where the song begins in English. The mise en page too ­contributes to balancing change and continuity. Almost all the surviving Langtoft manuscripts present the main geste as a single column, and most adopt variants of the distinctive layout reproduced above (p. 102) for the songs. This layout, which Rhiannon Purdie terms ‘graphic tail-rhyme’, was familiar from tail-rhyme lyrics and narratives in English, French, and Latin in Insular manuscripts (Purdie 2008, 7 and 66–92). Whereas every surviving Langtoft manuscript marks the songs as formally different and allows that difference to disturb the layout of the page, none highlights graphically the switch to or from English, which therefore appears less disruptive than it may to modern readers. The potential for the ‘English’ ­political community to divide or even disintegrate along lines of language use is displaced onto less (or differently) politically charged differences, thus producing an impression of productive variety instead of one of antagonism. Read in the context of Legge’s remark about judges’ English salt, moreover, Langtoft’s songs may be taken to reinforce the legal atmosphere of the geste’s third section, manifested also in its precise, professional legal vocabulary and attention to judicial detail. The foregrounding of the legal framework urges Edward I to rule with the careful attention to legal procedure that characterizes a good king and exhorts the Insular nobility (including the kings of Scotland, treated as 28  On ‘toom tabard’, see Simpson 1968.

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Living History  107 Edward’s vassals) to show the law an equal respect. Among the many examples is the following passage, which aims to establish the impartiality and validity of Edward’s judgement in 1292 in favour of John Balliol as heir to the Scottish throne, as well as Langtoft’s competence to render that judgement in due form. Any impropriety in either the process or the reporting could invalidate the ­suzerainty over Scotland that Edward’s role as arbitrator allowed him to claim. Legal terms are underlined: Sir Edward est saisy du terre e tenement Du realme de Escoce, cum à seygnur apent. Les .iij. ke claym i mettent par resun de parent Sunt venuz en courte demaunder jugement. Le rays ne volt fors drayt à son ascient; Des Englays, des Escoce, fet venir la gent, Et saver volt de cyl ke melz la lay entent, Ki ad drait, ki noun, à cel governement, Par quel accioun e par quel descent. Li tryours ount fet examinement, Et moustrez au ray par lur entendement, Ke Jon Bayllof, saunz desturbement, Dait aver de drait le regne playnement, A tenir e aver pardurablement Du ray de Engleterre, par homage e serement.  (II, 192.1–192.15) Lord Edward is seized of the land and the holdings, of the realm of Scotland, as befits a lord. The three who lay claim to it by right of kin have come to court to demand a judgement. The king wants only what is lawful to the best of his knowledge. He summons the people of the English and the Scots and wants to know from those who best understand the law, who has a legitimate right to that office and whose claim is illegitimate, by what legal cause and by what line of descent. The triers have conducted their investigation and notified the king that, according to their understanding of the law, John Balliol, without hindrance, should by law have the kingdom without restrictions, to have and to hold in perpetuity from the king of England, by homage and oath.

The dignified, expert, Francophone legalisms complement the songs’ ‘salty English’ in establishing Langtoft’s legal credentials, his competence as a narrator of history, and the claim of his professional class to advise and comment on the affairs of the great. Langtoft establishes in his Edward I section a hybrid historiographical discourse that meets the challenge of relating (to) modern times by weaving together different idioms of a single ideological ‘language’, whose authority is strengthened by the demonstration that it can express itself in both English and French, ‘Low’

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108  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad and ‘High’ discourses and registers. Langtoft deploys a ‘monolingualism’ which, to fulfil its vocation of registering a community’s internal dissent, expresses itself in different national languages, in abruptly shifting literary forms and in a variety of group parlances. By sidestepping any attempt at what Derrida calls a ‘pure idiom’, the Edward I section brings home what it means to live in the critical times that it chronicles, and both conveys and counters the confusion and contradictions that plague decisions in the present and that obscure the future. As we shall argue in the next section, this model for history-writing was adopted and developed by being subjected to further ambiguity in a luxury manuscript of his geste produced in the generation after Langtoft wrote.

Royal 20 A II: History in Time We turn now to examine what one high-quality, north-eastern manuscript of Langtoft’s geste tells us about how his account of English history and the historiographical practice with which he rendered recent events were received over the following century by an elite audience living in the areas about which he wrote. The surviving manuscript evidence is densest for the generations living in the first third or half of the fourteenth century, thus under Edward II or during the first half of Edward III’s reign. London, BL, Royal MS 20 A II is among the manuscripts that testify to Langtoft’s reception by the variety of textual and visual materials with which they frame and interpret his geste. As in several other manuscripts, these materials reveal here an audience deeply invested in the struggles of the northern region and especially in the Anglo-Scottish conflict. Their engagement with the politics of language, genre, and discourse shows an ambiguous response to the historiographical techniques that Langtoft developed to deal with the present. The manuscript’s contents increase the centrifugal tendencies brought to the ­ resent as a fore by Langtoft’s Edward I section but seem to aim to revive what they p failing centre; demonstrating each’s importance for the other, they seek to reinforce the links that bind centre and region together. Some of the materials that were originally in Royal 20 A II are today in London, BL Cotton MS Julius A V; the latter’s incomplete copy of Langtoft’s geste was ­supplemented by incorporating a quire of the former, probably in the early ­modern period. A reconstructed table of contents for Royal 20 A II as it grew over the fourteenth century would look like this: 1. Nineteen full-page miniatures, incorporating a short genealogical chronicle of the post-Conquest kings England up to Edward II, in Latin verse (Royal, ff. 1r–10r).29 29  The same genealogical verses are found in two other Langtoft manuscripts: Aylsham, Blickling Hall, MS 6892, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Miscellany 637.

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Living History  109 2. Langtoft’s chronicle (Royal, ff. 11r–146v—up to Wright 1866–8, II, 374.29; thereafter Julius, ff. 169r–172r—though see next item). 3. ‘Tretys de la Passion’ (‘Un Rois iadis estait qe auait un amye’, Julius, ff. 172r–174v; Dean and Boulton  1999, no. 688): Christ, king and knight, jousts with the enemy tyrant to rescue his unfaithful beloved who, thanks to her penitence and his forgiveness, becomes his spouse. ‘Lament of the Virgin’ (‘Dame coroune flour de parays’, Julius, ff. 174v–177r; Dean and Boulton 1999, no. 956): the Virgin relates her own and her son’s suffering during the Passion, with a final brief celebration of the resurrection. French religious lyrics in quatrains, now attributed to the Franciscan poet Nicolas Bozon (fl. late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; Legge 1950, 85–9). The lyrics appear here as organic parts of Langtoft’s work (Wright prints and translates them: II, 426–47): the first quatrain of the ‘Tretys’ continues the monorhyme of the preceding laisse, and both lyrics precede the colophon in Latin verse that closes the geste: ‘Artus scriptoris careant grauitate doloris / Sermo de Bruto fit sub dictamine tuto. / Culpa datur Petro deficiente metro’.30 4. A Galfridian prophecy in French prose, introduced as ‘aqunes de propheiis et merueilles ke merlyn dist en son temps dengletere’ (Julius, ff. 177v–179r); also known as ‘The Six Kings after John’ or ‘The Six Last Kings’ (Dean and Boulton 1999, no. 18).31 This too may be considered part of the geste, for Langtoft’s text assures us that ‘Le Latin est escriz de sa prophecye / En la fyn del livre’ (‘The Latin of his [Merlin’s] prophecy is written at the end of the book’; I, 114.18–19).32 5. A proclamation in French prose (Julius, ff. 179r–180r), known as the Award of Norham, recording the formal acknowledgement in June 1291 of Edward I’s suzerainty over Scotland by the contestants in the Great Cause (edited in Stones and Simpson 1978, II, 68). 6. ‘Als y yod’ (Julius, ff. 180r–181v; Boffey and Edwards 2005, no. 379): a ballad about the Anglo-Scottish wars that is also one of the earliest surviving prophecies written in English (edited and translated in Wright II, 453–67). Like ‘The Six Kings’, ‘Als y yod’ uses animals to figure kings and great lords 30  The second and third lines are found in some other manuscripts at the geste’s opening. Various translations have been proposed, e.g. Thiolier’s: ‘Si les tournures de l’écrivain manquent de la gravité de la douleur, c’est que le style du Brut est soumis à tous les procédés de l’art d’écrire. La faute en revient à Pierre si son vers est déficient’ (‘If the writer’s turns of phrase lack the gravity of sorrow/pain, it is because the Brut’s style undergoes all the procedures of the writerly art. It is Peter’s fault if his verse is deficient’) (1989, 53–4). Summerfield gives, ‘The story of Brutus was written wholly according to the rules of the ars dictaminis; Peter is to blame for the less than perfect metre. . . . May the scribe’s extremities lack the heaviness of pain’ (1998, 224, n. 20). The word Artus also confirms Arthur’s prominence in Langtoft’s text and in the manuscript as a whole. 31  On this widespread prophecy, see Smallwood 1985, Coote 2000, 101–11, Flood 2016, 87–109, Marvin 2005, 90–9. 32  The Latin prophecies appear today only in Cotton Julius A V, ff. 54r–57v, at the end of the Brut section (before the section grafted in from Royal 20 A II), although some other Langtoft manuscripts contain French versions of the Six Kings prophecy.

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110  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad in the Galfridian manner, but also has popular features: an ‘air of “folk ­wisdom” . . . imparted by the linguistic arrangement, the predictive, proverbial content, and the opaque language’ (Coote  2000, 18; see also Flood  2016, 102–9). 7. The Chanson du bon William Longespee (Julius, ff. 181v–187r; Dean and Boulton 1999, no. 69 (1)). An account in French alexandrine (short) laisses of the death of William II Longespee, earl of Salisbury, and of the massacre of a Christian army in 1250 at Al-Mansurah in Egypt, an episode omitted from Langtoft’s narrative. On the ‘peculiarly English cult’ of Longespee, see Lloyd 1991 (42), and on the chanson, Lloyd and Hunt 1992 (edition by Tony Hunt, 103–25). 8. An extract from the Lancelot en prose: an abridged version of the False Guinevere episode from the long version of the French prose Vulgate romance (Julius, f. 187v, Dean and Boulton  1999, no. 168; continued in Royal 20 A II, ff. 147r–152v). Corresponds to Micha  1978–83, I, 119–68 (VII.22–IX.37). 9. A short letter in French prose reporting how a small Christian army ­vanquished a large Turkish one at Thebes in Boeotia in 1345, thanks to a miraculous appearance by John the Baptist (Royal, ff. 152v–154r, Dean and Boulton 1999, no. 69 (2)). The letter purports to be from Joanna I, queen of Naples (r. 1343–82), to Hugh IV, king of Cyprus (r. 1324–58). Joanna, whose letter announces her also as ‘roygne de Jerusalem’ (f. 152v) and who was also princess of Achaea from 1373 to 1381, continued the Angevin Neapolitans’ long-standing interests in the eastern Mediterranean. Hugh (dynastically a Lusignan, nephew and successor of Henry II, on whom see Chapter 4), was also titular king of Jerusalem (as Hugh II, r. 1324–59). It was at the court of Joanna’s grandfather, Robert I (the Wise, r. 1309–43), that Hugh invited Boccaccio to compose the De Genealogia deorum (Kelly 2003).33 10. A severely abridged version of the French prose Vulgate romance, La Queste del Saint Graal: a leaf is missing at the beginning and at the end (Royal, ff. 155r–169v). Items 8, 9, and 10, which are all in later fourteenth-century hands, were evidently added to the manuscript at that period and will be discussed in the last section of this chapter.34 We concentrate for the moment on the collection as it (may have) appeared in the first third (or even the first quarter) of the fourteenth century. 33  Casteen (2015) portrays Boccaccio as both influential architect and mediator of Joanna’s public persona first as ‘she-wolf ’ then as ‘radiant queen’, in the title of Casteen’s chapter  2 (67–117). On Boccaccio and Naples, see pp. 177–8). 34  The pages of the Queste are smaller than those in the rest of Royal 20 A II; however, the text was evidently added to the manuscript in the fourteenth century, since the Queste hand also made a note on f. 40v. We thank Julia Crick for this observation.

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Living History  111 Items 3 to 7 continue Langtoft’s strategy of assembling historical documents as materials for writing up-to-date history. Each isolates and highlights a particular discursive variety that is found in Langtoft’s own work. Thus, the two Insular French lyrics that conclude the geste in Royal 20 A II combine piety with chivalry and warfare, spiritual with secular kingship, knighthood, justice, and love, in a manner similar to but more extended than Langtoft’s longer French-language lyrics (songs 6, 7, and 8). The closing (Bozon) lyrics’ tone is consistently elevated and their piety much more developed, and their eschatological allegories appropriately close the long account of terrestrial history. Another discourse that Langtoft weaves into his work is prophecy. ‘[P]rovid[ing] a platform for political imaginings with high stakes, nothing less than the fate of the nation, structuring diplomatic strategy and elite self-identifications’ (Flood 2016, 86), prophetic discourse is adopted and extended in items 4 and 6, both of which share interests and styles with Langtoft’s geste.35 ‘Als y yod’ further adopts the passionate, popular tone and regionally marked English of some of Langtoft’s ‘political songs’. Item 5, the Award of Norham, picks up the legalistic discourse of Langtoft’s Edward I section and echoes his inclusion of a short ­section in French prose recording Balliol’s homage. Last in this phase of the manuscript’s production, William Longespee resembles Langtoft’s matrix text in miniature, being a verse chronicle with strong chanson de geste tendencies (Lloyd and Hunt 1992, 108–9). The episode it relates is presented as a high-point of heroic English, Christian sacrifice, missing from, but in tune with, Langtoft’s narrative. Like the other items that accompany Langtoft’s geste in Royal 20 A II, William Longespee is presented like an appendix or supplement to the main text: a documentary source that Langtoft for some reason omitted and which supplies further relevant information. Thus the materials collected in the first half of the fourteenth century prolong the historiographical language developed in Langtoft’s Edward I section. The documentary evidence continues to be assembled, and the geste dynamics of internal conflict, of variety and contrast without dialogue, is maintained. However, the ‘documents’ are no longer contained by a matrix text or narrative. Instead the manuscript takes over as the matrix—the object and the idea—performing the same framing, contextualizing, and juxtaposing work that Langtoft’s geste did for the various resources it contained. Abandoning an overarching narrative voice

35  Coote (2000) discusses in detail prophecies circulating in Britain from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and how their political meanings changed over time. Flood (2016, 66–109) analyses the dialogue conducted via prophetic material between English and Scottish factions in the first three decades of the fourteenth century and looks at how Arthurian prophetic themes were transferred from the Anglo-Welsh to the Anglo-Scottish conflict. Flood argues that the Galfridian theme of British unification was interpreted in English-sponsored material as meaning English conquest of Scotland (2016, 72–3). On the importance in medieval historiography of prophecies, dreams, miracles, and portents, see Southern  1972, Given-Wilson  2004, 21–56, and on prophecies’ inclusion with histories in manuscripts, see Ruddick 2013, 41–2.

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112  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad and narrative closure means that the new, codex-based collection is more obviously open to further supplementation and revision and less dependent on or tending towards ‘completion’. Thus the centrifugal tendency that Langtoft built into his final, living section here takes a significant further step, emphasizing how open-ended and revisable any historical account must be and demonstrating that historical documents can and will be re-interpreted. In the early fourteenthcentury phase of Royal 20 A II, the possibility that the centre might actually fail to hold reaches the brink of realization, though held in check by the pro-English, imperialist, and anti-Scottish, -Welsh and -French strand that runs through the assembled documents (except the pious lyrics, but these are incorporated into Langtoft’s text). The texts collected with Langtoft’s geste in Royal 20 A II in the first third or even quarter of the fourteenth century cast a somewhat apocalyptic, crepuscular light over England’s future. Their tone and genre move away from detailed historical narrative into invocations of the grand arc of salvation history and the small arcs of individual lives. Laments and endings predominate. The pious lyrics that close Langtoft’s work elevate his military and genealogical discourses into sacred allegory, providing a final flourish that sacralizes English history and especially the English monarchy by association with the Virgin and with Christ. The Six Kings prophecy illustrates how Edward II’s reign will fall (or is falling, or has fallen, depending on the implied date) far short of his father’s, but it also envisages that Edward III (born in 1312) ‘regaignera quanqe ses auncestre ount perdu’ (Cotton Julius A V, f. 178v, ‘will regain whatever his ancestors have lost’) and will surpass them by triumphing ‘jesques a Burgh de Jerusalem’ (‘as far as the city of Jerusalem’), a prediction that evokes the Last Emperor prophecy briefly referenced by Langtoft. Just two reigns later, England will nevertheless find its destiny reprising that of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Britain: divided and conquered, its kings exiled. The other prophecy, ‘Als y yod’, is equally apocalyptic, predicting terrible slaughter and suffering around the Humber, Tweed, Tyne, and Clyde rivers, but it ends with a utopian vision of an ideal age of justice and order that represents the end of history: And than sal reson raike and ride . and wisdome be ware es best. And leauté sal gare leal habide . and sithen sal hosbondmen af reste. (Cotton Julius A V, f. 181v) And then shall reason go about and ride, and wisdom be where is best, and  ­loyalty shall cause the loyal to abide, and afterwards shall husbandmen have rest.  (Translation from Wright, II, 467.29–467.32)

Finally, the Chanson du bon William Longespee relates an epic disaster that provides an impulse both to crusade and to revenge against the French—since, true

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Living History  113 to geste form, the Christians are shown here failing to unite against their common religious enemy. Robert of Artois (brother of Louis IX of France, St.  Louis) goads the heroic Englishman into a rash attack and then turns tail, leaving William doomed but staunchly championing English chivalry: ‘Ja a chivaler engleis ne serra reproue. Que pur poour me fui de sarazin malure’ (‘No English knight shall ever be reproached with my fearful flight from a cursed Saracen’; Cotton Julius A V, f. 185r; Lloyd and Hunt  1992, lines 295–296). Simon Lloyd (1988, 198–207) argues that the Longespee cult aimed to appropriate for England the idea of crusading, perceived internationally to be a particularly French activity. In the company of these works, Langtoft’s geste as a whole may come retrospectively to represent a golden age of English unity and hegemony with north-eastern ascendancy, a better life guaranteed by law and order (as implied by the inclusion of the Award of Norham)—an object of ­melancholy nostalgia. His Edward I section would therefore no longer look recent, turbulent, living, and conflicted but would become an idealized and mythified past, whose passing fits humanity’s teleological progression through cycles of prosperity and disaster to its imminent promised end. Although the texts collected in the first phase of Royal 20 A II adopt and extend Langtoft’s aesthetically and politically energizing model of how to write historiography, therefore, they both enhance its instability and insert it into a different vision of English history. On the one hand, his geste is reified nostalgically as a monument to a great past; on the other, it prefigures a future of short-lived, even greater eminence before ultimate catastrophe. The manuscript itself replaces the geste as interpretive matrix, permitting the book as a whole to have an ideological orientation somewhat different from that of Langtoft’s geste, even though that is by far the longest text in the anthology. For instance, Langtoft’s interest in recovering Gascony is omitted from the additional texts, so that an effect of the compilation is that his expansionist vision of English destiny shrinks and that regional and Insular concerns are foregrounded. Although it is true that Longespee widens the focus to include the Holy Land, it does so in order to castigate the French, a development probably motivated by their involvement in the Scottish wars. ‘Als y yod’ introduces a distinctive, highly regionalizing discourse that ­promotes and intensifies the focus on northern England and its concerns. Insular French no longer carries the unifying function it had in the geste, though it remains much the most represented vernacular. If the manuscript here still presents itself as speaking different idioms but ‘only one language’, this is no longer entirely that of Langtoft’s geste. Further materials were added to Royal 20 A II in the second half of the fourteenth century. We now conclude this chapter by turning our attention to how those additions to the manuscript build on the earlier developments to offer a signally different view of events.

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114  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Royal 20 A II: The Turn to French Prose Romance We have seen how the items compiled in the manuscript’s first phase were rather more narrowly absorbed in Anglo-Scottish relations and in regional concerns than was Langtoft’s geste. This orientation changes with the materials added in the later fourteenth century: the extracts from the Vulgate prose Lancelot, the letter supposedly from Joanna of Naples to Hugh of Cyprus, and the abridged version of the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal (the French of all three shows some standard Insular variations, e.g. ‘jeo’ for ‘je’, but is not markedly different from continental norms, especially Picard). These materials sketch a new picture of English history and a new historiographical language, whose paradigm is romance rather than geste, and prose rather than alexandrines laisses. In fact, the final materials constitute a miniature Lancelot-Grail cycle, at the heart of which lies Joanna’s letter encouraging crusade; they also retrospectively construct the codex as a larger cycle, running from the fall of Troy to the achievement of the Grail. They show no interest in Scotland but instead place the northern English region in the context of a large Francophone area that, as we shall see, touches mainly on nearby Flanders and on the eastern Mediterranean. In the later fourteenth-century production phase of Royal 20 A II, the use of French connects the north to a continental Europe envisaged as a stepping stone to greater things. Civil war remains a central theme, but it is now framed by, on the one hand, the ambitions of upwardly mobile magnates and, on the other, by the late medieval iteration of the ideology of international crusade. The final texts in Royal 20 A II invite noble readers to aspire both to lead their country and to pursue interests in these wider Christian and Francophone contexts. In the remainder of this chapter we analyse how this invitation is produced and how its international ambitions remain rooted in regional and national politics. According to G. Unwin, ‘the contrast between the England of 1377 and that of 1327, whether in regard to its external relations, its constitutional development or its social and economic conditions, must have been scarcely less striking than the more familiar contrast between the beginning and the end of the Victorian era’ (quoted in Pelham 1951, 230 n. 2; see also Campbell 1991). The manuscript’s later phase may be considered an attempt to update the codex, and the historiographical practices that its first phase and Langtoft developed for recent history, to suit the events and tenor of the late fourteenth century. Including new kinds of text— formal letter (item 9) and Arthurian prose romance (items 8 and 10)—suggests a continuation of the imperative to collect different kinds of ‘document’, established in Langtoft’s final section and continued in the manuscript’s earlier fourteenthcentury contents. The fact that only sections of the prose Lancelot and Queste romances are included encourages the impression that these extracts have been selected for their relevance to contemporary English and northern history, while the Joanna letter parallels Longespee by relating an episode of Christian heroism

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Living History  115 omitted from the earlier contents. Finishing with the Queste del Saint Graal also brings the arc of British history begun by Langtoft to its close.36 Its Arthurian eschatology points us not only towards Langtoft’s Galfridian origins but also towards Egypt, Sarras, and Jerusalem—recalling and updating the exploits of Langtoft’s Richard I by connecting them to late medieval, internationalist movements of chivalry and crusade. England’s fate is knitted into universal salvation history via the prowess of its expansionist, aggressively pious heroes. The later fourteenth-century phase of Royal 20 A II also significantly reorients the manuscript in several ways. One major difference is chronological: whereas none of the earlier items admits to originating after the closure of Langtoft’s geste in 1307, Joanna’s letter dates the miraculous Christian victory it relates to 1345.37 And the excitement of her letter suggests that this victory heralds a new era, reversing the disaster of Al-Mansurah recorded in Longespee and suggesting that the time is ripe for new efforts in the eastern Mediterranean. Hugh, the letter’s addressee, had in fact achieved military victories against the Turks in the 1340s, and the letter shows an excitement and an optimism about the possibilities for religiously inspired warfare that are evidently intended to be transmitted to other readers and which characterized the later fourteenth century (crusading fervour rose while the number of active crusaders fell, according to Tyerman 2006, 875–915). Whereas some of the manuscript’s earlier contents warned in apocalyptic tones of dire futures soon to obliterate the region or nation, Joanna’s letter invites Frenchspeaking English readers to assist in providential conquests that foreshadow those of the Last World Emperor.38 A related change is geopolitical. Both crusading and the patronage and consumption of Arthurian romance were family matters in the Middle Ages, and it is significant that, unlike any of the preceding items in Royal 20 A II, the prose Lancelot and Queste had large continental diffusion. We shall quickly sketch some connections which, though they could have provided actual conduits resulting in Royal 20 A II, are better taken as indicative of the kinds of network that contributed to its production. Several Queste manuscripts which share some unusual textual variations with Royal 20 A II’s version have been traced (on the basis of their decoration) to an area connecting Saint-Omer, Thérouanne, Tournai, Cambrai, and Ghent.39 The castellans of Saint-Omer, famous crusaders, in the thirteenth 36  The trajectory of British history from Brutus to Grail is found in another Langtoft manuscript: London, College of Arms, MS Arundel XIV contains Wace’s Brut, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Langtoft’s Edward I section, and Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du graal. 37  In dating the text, it may be relevant that Joanna’s reputation was apparently poor before the 1360s and 1370s, when she established herself as a key supporter of the papacy, revived the traditional Angevin Neapolitan claims to a beata stirps, and befriended important living saints; Casteen  2015, 118–95. Her reputation declined again after the Great Schism of 1378, where she supported Clement VII. 38  On crusading letters, see also Paul and Yeager 2012, discussed below, 128. 39  For instance, in Royal 20 A II, f. 164r, lines 17–18, we find the reading ‘Lors perdi le non de Lancelot quele auoit et fu apele la fontaine Galaad’ (Then it lost the name of ‘Lancelot’ that it had, and was called the spring of Galahad), where Pauphilet’s edition has ‘Lors perdi le nom que ele avoit

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116  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad and first quarter of the fourteenth century held the city of Thebes (Longnon 1969), whose (re)capture by Christians is the occasion of Joanna’s letter. That the Thebes branch of the Saint-Omer was distinguished is evident from the fact that its founder, Nicholas I of Saint-Omer, in 1210/12 married Margaret Árpád, widow both of Isaac II, emperor of Constantinople, and of Boniface I of Montferrat, king of Salonika; Margaret was also the daughter of Bela III, king of Hungary, and of Agnes of Châtillon, Renaud de Châtillon’s daughter (Delvaux  2007, 165–75).40 While Nicholas and Margaret’s elder son remained in Greece, the younger— William—married Petronilla de Lacy (whose family were influential especially in Angevin Ireland and Wales); other Saint-Omer branches had been established in England since 1066. A later William de Saint-Omer (perhaps a grandson?) became steward to Edward III and seneschal to the household of his eldest son, Edward of Woodstock (1330–76), the future Black Prince (Devaux  2000, 7); William’s wife Elizabeth was not only a lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa (of Hainault) but ‘one of the people closest to the young prince’ (Green 2007, 10) as his mistress and custodian. She exemplifies ‘that group of high-status, northern French and Netherlandish aristocratic women’ employed in the English royal family’s household service ‘who had moved freely between the courts of England and the Continent in the years before 1337 and continued to maintain their crossChannel connections even after the outbreak of the Hundred Years War’ (Ormrod 2005, 410). These Saint-Omer and their descendants were based in Norfolk, but the connection between Joanna’s letter and the north is evident not only from Royal 20 A II but also from its only other known manuscript. London, BL, Harley MS 1808 (second quarter of the fifteenth century) contains many texts and records relating to northern matters, including genealogies of the earls of Lancaster and of Derby (Ferrers), a genealogy of the Picts and Scots, and letters relating to devant et fu des lors en avant apelee la Fontainne Galaad’ (1984, 264.1–2; then it lost the name that it had before, and was called the spring of Galahad). According to Pauphilet (1984, 290), the reading ‘Lancelot’ is found in only two other manuscripts: London, BL, Royal MS 14 E III, and London, BL, Additional MS 10294 (the bases respectively for F. J. Furnivall’s and H. O. Sommer’s editions of the Queste). These manuscripts belong to what Pauphilet (1921, xxii) identifies as group Σ of family α, along with Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 110, fr. 116, and fr. 1423–1424. The ‘Lancelot’ reading is also in fact found in New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 229 (formerly Cheltenham, Phillipps Collection, MS 130) (Willingham  2012, 194–5). Apart from one outlier, all these manuscripts are thought to have been produced in the southern Low Countries. Royal 14 E III is ascribed to ‘Saint-Omer or Tournai?’, first quarter of the fourteenth century (‘Detailed Record for Royal 14 E III’); Additional 10294 to ‘Saint-Omer or Tournai, c. 1316’ (‘Detailed Record for Additional 10294); and Yale/Beineke 229 to Thérouanne (close to Saint-Omer), 1290–1300 (Morrison and Hedeman 2010, 111). The Lancelot-Graal Project gives for the other manuscripts in the group: fr. 110, Thérouanne or Cambrai, c. 1295; fr. 1423–4, Tournai, c. 1320–45; and fr. 116—the outlier—c. 1475, made for Jacques d’Armagnac, Central France. All the manuscripts except Royal 20 A II are richly decorated; Stones argues that Royal 14 E III, Additional 10294, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 215 were made by ‘the same team of craftsmen’ (Lancelot-Graal Project: ‘Why these Project Manuscripts?’). Stones 2012 compares the Yale/Beinecke 229 illustrations with those of this group. 40  On marriage links between the crusading branch of the Saint-Omer family and the Montfaucon/ Montbéliard associated with Robert de Boron’s Merlin (see 69, above), see Delvaux 2007, 100–1.

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Living History  117 the disputed claim of the archbishops of York to jurisdiction over Scotland.41 Its spiritual home is York Minster, to whose foundation it dedicates a poem and appealing image (f. 45v). Harley 1808 shares the north-east-English–southeast-Scottish interests of Royal 20 A II (though their affiliations and contexts are different) and similarly links those interests to the global East and to larger ideological matters: both manuscripts trace networks that stretch from the local region across northern and southern mainland Europe (but that largely bypass the kingdom of France) to the Mediterranean islands, Latin Greece, and the holy cities of Constantinople and Jerusalem.42 These places had been mentioned before in Royal 20 A II but become much more prominent with the reorientation operated by the later fourteenth-century additions, which alter the imaginary and real-life spaces towards which the manuscript encourages its readers. The north-eastern English elite is now summoned to intervene in a field of actions that runs continuously from England to continental Europe to the distant East; the transition, like the proposed intervention, is eased by the elite use of French in different cultural, political, social, and literary contexts. Including (parts of) two Arthurian prose romances points to a third significant shift in the later phase Royal 20 A II. Not only does the manuscript contain no prior mention of Lancelot or of the Grail or instance of prose romance, but the ‘romance’ version of Arthurian history represented in the Lancelot and Queste contradicts Langtoft’s Galfridian, ‘chronicle’ account.43 Thus the last part of the manuscript signals both a new direction for historiography and a new kind of historicity. Although in the manuscript’s later contents, civil war remains as much the bedrock of English history as it is in Langtoft, its presentation as romance rather than as geste encourages a quite different understanding. Writers of romance do not generally base their accounts on documentation (other than long-lost books, serendipitously found and often conveniently lost again), and romances rarely have much documentary value for modern historians. Romance invests in other kinds of truth, in the added value for the reader of certain skills, disciplines, and ethical elements, of particular social ideologies, and in the imagination of alternative realities or histories. In Royal 20 A II, the Arthurian prose romances draw on some of these generic affordances to initiate a programme of political and personal renewal elevating a new concept of kingship—one that allows the

41  See the ‘Detailed Record for Harley 1808’, http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ record.asp?MSID=6645&CollID=8&NStart=1808, accessed 19 February 2019. A more detailed table of contents is available from A Catalogue of Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 4 vols (London: Eyre and Strahan, 1808–12), vol. II (1808), item 1808; our text is item 50, and is followed by two similar letters encouraging Christian warfare, in a series relating to the 1340s. 42  A further Langtoft manuscript, London, BL, Royal MS 20 A XI, adumbrates a similar trajectory by including a letter supposedly from Prester John to the emperor of Constantinople. 43  ‘The distinctive Arthurian tradition in English is rooted, not in the folk-tale of Welsh tradition nor in the romance which dominates the French corpus, but in chronicle format embodying a dynastic theme with every appearance of historical conviction’ (Barron, Le Saux, and Johnson 2001, 11).

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118  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad marginalization and even the replacement of the existing king in favour of an improved ideal. Arthurian romance is highly intertextual, assuming in its reader a knowledge of Arthurian textual traditions that allows them to appreciate how individual tellings have been modified. Both the Royal 20 A II texts show heavy editorial intervention, effective even if it does not originate with the manuscript. The editing of the prose Lancelot would have been obvious to many readers, since the text represents the long version of the cyclic redaction, which is attested in many manuscripts over a widespread area and long timespan. Royal 20 A II contains only the False Guinevere episode.44 The absence of preamble or epilogue increases the ‘documentary’ effect, but the episode is self-contained and the text generally coherent in spite of severe cutting. Compared with Micha’s edition of the Vulgate prose Lancelot, the Royal 20 A II text lacks many phrases and sentences, and some chapters are reduced to a single line or disappear altogether. Much that is cut is ‘courtly’: court scenes, character development through dialogue, ethical debate, religious elements, and stylistic flourishes carrying information redundant in plot terms.45 The extant text presents a cautionary tale about a weak king unable to resist the twin pressures of illicit sexual temptation and of lobbying by unreliable counsellors. The kingdom and its persecuted queen are rescued by two loyal ­barons: Lancelot, whose courage and prowess defy absurd odds in battle, and Galehaut, whose extensive lands and exemplary generosity prompt him to offer Guinevere sanctuary and even his own realm in compensation for the one she has lost. Thus cut and re-formed, the Lancelot testifies that a kingdom needs barons possessed of the independent means and minds that equip them to challenge a rex inutilis. This portrayal of Arthur is a new element in Royal 20 A II. Langtoft’s Arthur is the conqueror of the chronicle tradition, prototype of his Richard I and Edward I (compare the famous miniature on f. 4r). His warrior kings dominate 44  Beginning with the line ‘[Q]uant vint al iour del ascension qe tut le baru[nage]s fu assemble’ (‘When it came to Ascension Day, and all the barons were assembled’) and ending with ‘Et quant li Rois les encontra si fu grant la ioye qil fist de Galahut et de la Royne E my sire .G. fet ioye sur toz’ (‘And when the King met them he rejoiced greatly over Galehaut and the Queen And my lord Gawain rejoices more than anyone’). The opening page is now Julius A V, f. 187v; William Longespee finishes halfway down the recto. The page has been trimmed in such a way that a few letters are missing from the beginning of the lines in column a. The text on the Julius page is Micha  1978–83, I, 119–21 (VII.22–VII.25); it continues in Royal 20 A II, ff. 147r–152v, with Micha  1978–83, I, 121–69 (VII.25–IX.37). 45  For example, this short passage in Royal 20 A II, ff. 147v–148r, corresponds to sixteen lines in Micha 1978–83, I, 128–29 (extracts from chapter VIII.12, which disappears almost in its entirety); the major item omitted is a detailed description of Lancelot’s beauty: Quant Launcelot vint deuant le Roy si fu mult grande la presse por escotir ceo que i volast dire si fust mult esgarde por ceo que il fu en cote. Et il fu de mult tresgrant bealte. Si out la chere clere con len parroit chivalere meuz deviser de son grant et si ne fu pas petiz car il fu plus haut de mon sire G. When Lancelot came before the King, the press was very great to hear what he wanted to say, and he was much looked at because he was wearing [only] a tunic. And he was of very great beauty. And he had as clear a face as one could imagine for a knight of his size, and also he was not short, for he was taller than Sir G[awain].

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Living History  119 their barons (sometimes to a fault) and show no trace of sexual desire’s enfeebling effects. The character and history of Arthur in Royal 20 A II’s brief prose Lancelot instead resemble those that contemporary historians attributed to Edward II; its text instead promotes the worthiness of lords of royal blood for the very highest offices. The Queste del Saint Graal as the manuscript presents it manifests similar ­ideological concerns. The cutting of the Vulgate is here done differently. Only the narrative’s beginning and end are present: we follow the Vulgate version unabridged until the knights leave Camelot to begin the Grail quest but then move directly to Galahad’s encounter with King Mordrain, his attainment of the Grail, coronation, and death.46 Omitting all the intervening adventures and large cast—which in the Vulgate form the body of the narrative—has the effect of downplaying the Bernardine ‘new knighthood’ which the Vulgate text urges. Royal 20 A II’s narrative instead highlights how Galahad institutes a new kind of kingship, sacral and purist, to supersede Arthur’s declining regime. Galahad, the new, improved king, is not Arthur’s son or expected heir, although a man of the highest lineage as well as of outstanding moral, spiritual, and chivalric desert. Royal 20 A II’s Queste adds to its Lancelot by crowning and consecrating the ambitious, deserving magnate of royal blood, for whom it sketches a national duty and a royal, sacral destiny. It is hard not to consider these romances as they appear in Royal 20 A II to be engaged in a debate concerning later fourteenth-century English politics. In the second half of the century, northern England was dominated by the energetic John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster (1340–99; Edward III’s third son). Gaunt, one of the greatest of fourteenth-century English magnates with strong regional and international interests, more than once contemplated the difficult transition to kingship. There were negotiations with David II to recognize Gaunt as his heir in Scotland in both 1350–1 and 1363–4 (Goodman  1992, 177); in 1371 Gaunt assumed the title of king of Castile and León, having married Constance, heir of Peter I (Goodman  1992, 49 and, on Gaunt’s continuing involvement in Iberian affairs, 111–43). However, it fell to his son Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby— and a crusader in Prussia—to achieve a crown, when he deposed his cousin Richard II (1377–99) to rule as Henry IV (1399–1413). In defiance of conventional ideas about romance’s ahistoricity, it is through Arthurian romance that

46  There are material lacunae at the beginning and end of the Royal 20 A II Queste. The text now begins on f. 155r: ‘Sire feat ele il nira pas ore mes si tost con nous querderoms qil ensoit lieus et tens nous ly voiroms’ (corresponding to Pauphilet 1999, 3.18, ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘he will not go now, but as soon as we think that it is the right time and place, we shall see him’). The early part of the narrative continues until f. 163v, l. 13 (Pauphilet 1999, 26. 22) and, without indicating a break, continues with ‘Ore dit li contes que quant Galaad sen fu partis de Lancelot quil cheuacha mainte iornee sicom auenture len menoit leune [the first e has a dot under it, marking a mistake] heure auant et lautre ariere tant quil vint a vn abbeye ou li rois mordrans estoit’ (Pauphilet 1999, 262.20, ‘Now the tale says that when Galahad had parted from Lancelot he rode for many days as adventure led him, hither and yon, until he came to an abbey where King Mordrain was’). The text breaks off on f. 169v, ‘et li plusurs del pais en fissent . . . ’, Pauphilet 1999, 279.12 (‘and most people in the area did . . . ’).

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120  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad contemporary late fourteenth-century history is injected into Royal 20 A II, reflecting on recent political developments in regional, political, and international developments, and encouraging particular responses. These final texts embrace the chanson de geste fantasy of forging internal unity to conquer terrain from a religious enemy. They also, however, quietly reject the epic flavour and the geste dynamic that has so far dominated the manuscript. The ideological reorientation and political incentive that we have been describing are due in large measure to the manuscript’s foregrounding of Arthurian romance. We stress: it is the romance characterization of the royal figure of Arthur, romance narratives, and the romance heroism of Lancelot, Galehaut, and Galahad that allow these final texts to dramatize the king’s replacement, reconceiving the manuscript’s version of Insular history and reinvigorating its connection with the late medieval contemporary world. The politics and dynamics of geste are updated so as to enhance the texts’ and codex’s political actuality and effectiveness. Read back through the other contents as far as the last-added opening miniatures—the Creator (armed with the banner of St George) and the Trojan War—the manuscript’s Arthurian cycle describes a single impetus whose results will be, on the one hand, a new king and a new form of kingship and, on the other, personal conversion and crusade in the East. Accessorily, it urges the reader to enact that renewal in the real world: Grail texts insist that, to respond properly to the work of art, you must change your life. Arthurian romance becomes a vehicle of sacred truth that translates between English, British, and universal history. This could have been achieved with Arthurian romance in English, which by the late fourteenth century boasted numerous works; pursuing it in French defines differently the political allegiances and image advanced. Despite the potential of Langtoft’s political songs in English and of ‘Als y yod’, the last word in Royal 20 A II goes to French, now positioned as the idiom not of a professional class of government advisers but of a high English nobility, courtly and chivalric players of international excellence, whose ‘local’ stamping ground stretches from northern England to European, Mediterranean, and (in medieval western European terms) global stages and audiences.

Conclusion Langtoft’s Edward I section, we have argued, represents a ‘living history’ of his times in its inclusion of different kinds of text and its presentation of intracommunal conflict, which develop the discursive and generic model of the geste established in his earlier sections. This geste dynamics is continued in the early fourteenth-century contents of Royal 20 A II, which conform to Langtoft’s chronological limits and to his thematic and formal models. The second phase of

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Living History  121 this manuscript, dating to the later fourteenth century, changes the matrix from geste or epic verse chronicle to Arthurian prose romance, in fact to a mini-Vulgate cycle with a strongly crusade-oriented centre. This is not at all a turn away from the historical but a living history of its own, later time, one which is also forward-looking. Though often associated with dialogism, romance in many respects imposes an ideological monolanguage: chivalric victory conventionally leads the defeated party to acknowledge the superiority of the Arthurian ethos and to reconcile with his vanquisher, thus demonstrating that romance participants ‘only ever speak one language’. And arguably, it is in its final phase that Royal 20 A II most strenuously aspires to ‘only one language’, piling up texts in support of a single, coherent message. Contrast the manuscript’s first phase, wherein Langtoft’s geste and its accompaniments—which constitute a geste ‘deconstructed’ in the same sense as a cheesecake may be, in restaurant menu parlance—highlight that ‘we never speak only one language’ by foregrounding conflicting intra-communal viewpoints and factions. Thus the shifting roles of French-language texts, genres, and discourses in Royal 20 A II demonstrate how, in the constant renegotiation of power relations, language is simultaneously a critical battlefield, a subtle weapon, and an ideological prize. Analysing how these play out even in a single manuscript may require us to trace networks across recent and deep time and across locales, regions, domains, and continents—and this is more commonly true of works in French than in many other vernacular languages.

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4

History, Time, and Empire The Histoire ancienne in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem

The previous chapter champions a decentring impulse, both geographically, in  terms of moving the focus to the north-east of England and south-east of Scotland, and materially, in tracing how a single manuscript, whose major contents is a historiographical geste, shows a similar tendency towards compilation and multilingualism as we find in the geste itself. This chapter follows a similar vein in focusing on the symbiosis between a single narrative tradition, that of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, and one of the places of its compilation and dec­or­ation, the city of Acre, capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Like Chapter 3, this one will concentrate primarily on history, but toward different ends. Here we shall show how history was conceived in this particular case as an intricate interweaving of place, movement, prophecy, and universalism, making of the text itself a memento mori pointing as surely to the future as it does to the past. Building on and extending the discussion in Chapter 3, one of the guiding questions of our inquiry here is this: how can one conceive of a history of the present when that present itself—the present of Acre—shows so little chance of acceding to a future? The Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, known at the time by titles such as Les Ansiennes hystoires romaines or Bible en fransois, was written as a chronicle of world events and therefore at least putatively from a perspective that emphasizes what transpired before ‘we’ arrived to evaluate the world and how the sequence of those events can be arranged so as to explain the world that we live in. But the tradition is not limited to a written text; it is also coloured by the events that surrounded its compilation: the founding of the Latin Kingdom a century before its composition, the political and military mayhem of the eastern Mediterranean, the travel, trade, and apocalyptic rhetoric that brought the past-being-conjured into contact with other versions of that very past and present. One result of this clash of stories, genealogies, people, and places was a unique artistic moment in which an international group of artists and scribes, assembled in Acre but coming from elsewhere, produced multiple copies of a tradition that reflects not only its presumed source text but also the contingent network of objects, colours, artistic and narratological conventions, patrons, artisans, and workplaces that allowed for its making. It was not long before the manuscript witnesses produced in that Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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History, Time, and Empire  123 centre were moving on to contribute to other networks in which political ambitions, artistic templates, new wealth, extravagant gift-giving, and self-serving prophecy were producing different versions of a fantastical and universal Christian order, one tinged with apocalyptic fantasies of earthly justice and salvation. While the Histoire ancienne is certainly not a romance, neither is it strictly a chronicle: perhaps history/romance is a more appropriate term. Its narration is  differentiated from the prose romances of the same period in being less entrenched in the interlacing that marks those texts, yet, like them, it is eminently modular. It consists essentially of material spliced together from Latin histories (including most notably a Latin translation of Josephus, Orosius, Eusebius, Petrus Comestor, Dares’ account of the fall of Troy, the Lancelot-Grail cycle, and some version of the Old French Roman d’Alexandre material), some episodes being dropped or recombined in creative ways in order better to relate to new audiences. Its manuscript presentations are a reflection of those new audiences, those new locations, and the new artistic synergies which inform its artistic style; and this is nowhere better illustrated than in the example of those manuscripts compiled in Acre.1 Their form and presentation speak as loudly as their contents; or, to put it another way, those contents—gathered and shaped from this wide variety of different sites and sources—can only really be understood in terms of the way that they appear on the manuscript folio. This chapter will therefore examine how historical writing in the thirteenth century works alongside prose romance, both interested in bringing the past to life but also focusing very much on the march of time and the implications of the past for the present. Admittedly, this overlapping most often takes the form of historical writing informing romance, casting upon its surface the sheen of veracity, without ever necessarily absorbing romance’s tendency to metastasize and reinvent itself through creative, recombinational use of narrative sequences and rhetorical flourish. The Histoire ancienne lands somewhere in between these distinctions—claiming veracity, ancient provenance, and wisdom in the form of historical preservation, but also metastasizing, building upon narrative echoing, offering visual and verbal accounts of past events that are meant to be savoured and, more importantly, learned from.

Acre as Political and Textual Node If truth is said to be found in the encounter between past and present, and the function of the literary/historical text is to create the conditions for such an encounter, then anachronism and temporal disequilibrium—one era layered upon the other as the two are juxtaposed and interwoven—are essential ingredients. 1  See, on this topic, Ruhland 2019.

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124  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad While anachronism allows for the illusion of the abolition of time, temporal ­ isequilibrium readjusts that illusion, providing an extra-temporal, authorial seat d from which to observe, as well as feel the uncanny and fleeting present moment. The process of narrativizing the past and the juxtaposition of the different strands that have gone into its making represent one effective way of reproducing the uncanny sensation of living the present and past in a single moment. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith (2010b, 17) have called this reproduction an experience of ‘being in time’: simultaneously remembering, contemplating, and anticipating on three distinct temporal levels (past, present, and future) and two different experiential planes—the textual narrative and the lived moment. If it is true that the reader/listener of the medieval text was able to experience such a richness of sensation, it might help explain why the production of manuscripts exploded in the thirteenth century, particularly in Acre, the capital of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem post-1187, and shed some light as well on why the Church hierarchy and monastic institutions so distrusted secular narrative.2 The idea of a reader in the driver’s seat is not a comfortable thought for those invested in maintaining their hold on narrative; and it was this sense of being in time, more than the portrait they provided of historical figures, that made history/romance texts so power­ful, so secular, and, yet, so challengingly religious as well.3 It is the encounter with history, in other words, that empowers our sense of control over the present and provides us with a sense of temporality. The future, rather than representing the innocent party, the blank slate juxtaposed with the sullied past, arrives already coloured by that past. In the words of Paul Zumthor: L’histoire n’est qu’un approfondissement de la mémoire, épaississant le présent et le projetant dans l’avenir comme un accroissement d’être. Elle est conçue à la fois comme le milieu où se situe le groupe social, et comme l’un des modes dont celui-ci s’appréhende et se connaît. Fermée, finie, elle est pourtant progrès vers un terme et espoir d’une perfection. (Zumthor 1992, 35, quoted in Cole and Smith 2010b, 19) History is simply a deepening of memory, thickening the present and projecting it into the future like a steadily growing sense of being. It is conceived of as the milieu in which the social group is formed and as one of the ways in which the group apprehends and comes to know itself. Closed and finite, history nonetheless represents progress toward an eventual end and an expression of hope in perfection. 2  Jaroslav Folda’s work has reiterated the importance of Acre in the thirteenth century, a fact that had been underplayed by scholars interested principally in charting the growth of the fourteenthcentury book and manuscript trade in Paris. 3  See Akbari 2012 and 2014 for an apposite take on the secular/religious divide and ‘the shape of time’ in the Histoire ancienne and Ruhland 2019 on reader reception of political manuscripts.

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History, Time, and Empire  125 We might then describe history as a tangle of networks and narratives within which the social group is hatched, or at least imagines itself as having been hatched. It is not just discourse patched on to events, in other words: it is the (textual) milieu that allows those events to cohere into something resembling destiny, a useful prerequisite for every social group. Part imaginary, part documentary, part ritual—history is the arena within which the group learns to recognize itself as a structure replete with a particular form. It allows the group to incorporate its members as necessary parts of that structure and to reject whatever does not belong or anything whose presence challenges that sense of ­cohesion. We can recuperate this sense of medieval history from the actual narratives produced during the medieval centuries or simply from the material history of the period, and by that we mean the material vestiges, the manuscripts themselves, with their not always evident or coherent (at least from a modern perspective) grouping of texts. These material signs betray not only the routes of their travel, the demands of their previous owners, and their affiliation with other manuscripts pertaining to the same textual traditions; they also speak to a future audience through their décor and their presentation and the logic governing their organization. Whether we moderns can ever really understand the wealth of data to which we are privy, or whether we can overcome our own ­suppositions about their making and transmission long enough to evaluate them as material witnesses of the past, is questionable; but it is essential that we expand our viewpoint, evaluate data based on that material evidence, and see these manuscripts in their geographic, cultural, and thematic complexity, as real, material objects rather than idealized artefacts that sing of a mythical and burnished past.4 In 1287 Henry II, the new king of Jerusalem, visited the city of Acre, then ­cap­ital of the Latin Kingdom, to celebrate his coronation.5 The contemporary Chronique du templier de Tyr describes the festivities as follows: . . . il tint feste .xv. jours dedens .i. leuc a Acre quy se dit a la Herberge de l’Ospitau de Saint Johan, la ou il y avoit .i. moult grant palais. E fu la feste la plus belle que l’on sache, .c. ans a, d’envissures et de behors, et contrefirent la table reonde et la raine de Femenie, c’est a saver chevaliers vestus come dames, et josteent ensembles, puis firent nounains quy estoient avé moines et bendoient les una as autres, et confrefirent Lancelot et Tristan et Pilamedes et moult d’autres jeus biaus et delitables et plaissans.  (Minervini, 2000, 170, § 203) 4 Sympathetic views on medieval history can be found in Arnold  2008, Guenée  1980, and Spiegel 1997. For more on historiography and the Histoire ancienne, see Croizy-Naquet 1999. 5 Henry, a Lusignan, reigned in Jerusalem 1285–1306 and again 1310–24. He was also king of  Cyprus (r. 1285–1324), uncle and predecessor of Hugh IV of Cyprus (see Chapter  3, p. 110, pp. 114–15).

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126  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad . . . he held fifteen days of feasting in the grounds of the Hospital of Saint Jean, which included a huge palace. This was the greatest feast that anyone had ever seen in over a hundred years, full of marvellous sights and jousting. Some dressed up as members of the Round Table and the realm of Femenie, for which knights dressed like ladies and jousted with each other; then they dressed as nuns who were cavorting with monks, and bound together with them; and then they dressed up like Tristan and Palamedes and put on many other beautiful games, pleasing and delectable.

This was not an isolated incident, even if more lavish than usual. In the Gestes des Chiprois it is also noted that in 1223, during the celebrations of the dubbing of the sons of John I of Ibelin,6 there were theatrical presentations in which the knights played out popular scenes from Arthurian romance (Jacoby 1982, 627 n. 44). Why were the knights of Acre dressing like the women of Femenie, a land of exclusively female inhabitants usually depicted as Amazons and known principally through the romances of Troie, Alexandre, and the Histoire ancienne; and why were they impersonating Tristan and Palamedes, the latter a character known principally through the prose Tristan, in which he plays the rival for Iseut’s love?7 The Tristan, though the textual history would indicate that its roots were in northern Europe (Brittany, Cornwall, England, and Normandy), was a great favourite amongst aristocratic collectors and was appreciated widely down the Italian peninsula (see Chapter  2). Paris, BnF, MS fr. 750, the earliest known manu­script of the (prose) text, was produced either in southern Italy (the area known as Magna Graecia; see Desmond 2018) or in Acre or Antioch by a French scribe in 1278, and there may have been more witnesses from the Latin Kingdom which did not survive.8 The Tristan, Troie, and Alexandre served as models for heroic behaviour in the period, in French- and Italian-speaking courts and cities, and it was the French-language texts that seem to have carried the panache of authenticity. How this fitted in with the unique cultural ambience of Acre is a question difficult to assess, given the destruction that followed the Mamluk conquest of the city in 1291, but if we look at other texts that are known to have been popular there we can attempt to reconstruct the audience and appeal of Frenchlanguage romance.9 Conflicting family ties and erotic turmoil, though not limited to Acre politics, were one of the mainstays of civic disruption in the city. Add to 6  John I of Ibelin (1179–1236) was lord of Beirut. He and his family exerted enormous influence over the Latin Kingdom throughout the thirteenth century. His nephew, also John of Ibelin (1215–66), was the author of the legal treatise, the Livre des Assises. 7  The same name occurs in the Troy section of the Histoire ancienne and in the Roman de Troie, but the context here would indicate that we are dealing with the rival lover of the prose Tristan. See Huot 2003 for a more extended discussion of Palamedes and his madness. 8  Avril, Gousset, and Rabel 1984, 163–4; Cigni 1999, 41 n. 26. 9  Minervini 2010b provides a listing of some of the texts known to have circulated in Outremer, and Jacoby provided a magisterial account in his 1982 article on the topic.

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History, Time, and Empire  127 that the ethnic tensions among the Christian inhabitants and the economic rivalry that spilled over into civil war, and you have the key ingredients for the political disorder that was eating away at the kingdom from within long before the fateful conquest of 1291.10 Philippe de Novare, writing of this troubled period in his Estoire et le droit conte de la guerre qui fu entre l’empereur Frederic et messire Johan de Ibelin, refers repeatedly to vernacular literary texts in his account of the tensions between the Ibelin family, rulers of Beirut and powerbrokers in Cyprus, and the embattled Emperor Frederick II, as he struggled to maintain control of Acre while negotiating a shared governance of Jerusalem.11 Philippe spent most of his life in Cyprus after having participated in the Fifth Crusade’s attempt to take Damietta (in the Nile delta) in 1218. He tells us in his memoirs that one evening during that siege, when the lord he was serving, Pierre Chappe, and his guest, Raoul de Tabarie, had finished dining, they asked him to read them a roman. Philippe acquiesced and continued those nightly readings for more than three months, offering as an explanation that Raoul was a bad sleeper. From this anecdote, we learn that texts considered romans (romances), presumably in French, were available; that public reading was common; that a speaker from Piedmont in northern Italy could read to, and be understood by, a French knight; and that the chivalric class held such materials in their own private collections (Jacoby 1982, 617–18). Eudes of Nevers provides another illustration of vernacular literary and historical material at the disposition of the knightly class. Eudes landed in Acre in 1265 and died just a year later, but he had in his possession at his death three French texts: the romanz des Loheranz (perhaps Garin le Loherain), the romanz de la terre d’outre mer, and an unspecified chansonnier (Jacoby 1982, 620–1). Philippe de Novare himself wrote a number of works in French, most of which have been lost, but his chronicle, which covers the years 1218–43 and the events leading to the war between the Ibelin family and Frederick II, who was king of Jerusalem as well as Holy Roman Emperor, is rich with detail. In a poem that is 10  What is now known as the war of Saint Sabas involved rival claimants to the throne (the dom­in­ ant Ibelin family of Beirut and their rivals), each with its mercantile supporters, principally representing Venice and Genoa. This conflict stretched from 1256 to 1270, seriously weakening the city of Acre when it most needed stability. A further war followed, this one between Pisa and Genoa, precisely at the moment when the Mamluk forces were picking off Latin Kingdom centres around Acre. The Pisans joined forces for this expedition with Genoa’s arch-rivals, the Venetians, instead of pooling their conjoined efforts to combat the threat at the city’s gate. 11 The Estoire, often also known as the Mémoires, is largely (auto)biographical. See the two published editions: Kohler  1913 and Melani  1994. There is also an English translation of the text: La Monte 1936. Some of those literary texts in circulation in the Latin Kingdom would include, according to Jacoby 1982: a copy of Garin le Loherain, the chronicle of William of Tyre, the Tristan en prose, a copy of the Palamedes (which later becomes Guiron le courtois), the Histoire universelle (which is only later called the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à Cesar), and lyric poetry that had been composed there or imported in the form of chansonniers. Knowledge of the Chanson de Roland is also attested, as is cit­ ation from the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Renart, the Lancelot en prose, Barlaam et Josephat, and some form of the Roman d’Alexandre.

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128  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad included in that chronicle, Philippe represents the enemies of his patrons, the Ibelins, as Renart, Grimbert, and Cointereau the monkey, all characters from the Roman de Renart. With reference to the well-known episode in the Renart of the sick Lion King and the attempt to eat the heart of a healthy stag, Philippe added his own allegorical gloss, in which Frederick is the sick king and he himself the victimized stag who learns almost too late that his king is not to be trusted. He also interrupts his narrative of historical events to insert an original branch of the Renart cycle, comprising over 220 lines of octosyllabic verse, in order to pursue the political commentary in the guise of anthropomorphic beasts (Melani 1994, 206–8 and 134–44). The fox this time is Aimery Barlias, one of the leading baillis representing Frederick’s interests, while the lord of Beirut, John of Ibelin, is represented by Isengrin the wolf, and his children by the wolf ’s cubs. Philippe takes on the role of Chanticleer the Cock, the narrator, who recounts how Renart, despite his oath of loyalty, betrays the peace with Isengrin by urinating on the wolf ’s cubs, the Ibelin sons. The search for justice is impossible as the royal lion, Frederick II, is, then and always, absent and unavailable (Rose 2011). In the same text, Philippe references Guillaume d’Orange (William of Orange), hero of a whole series of epic texts, as the literary equivalent to John of Ibelin who, like Guillaume, has to rise up against his own lord in the defence of his property and rights.12 Guillaume, a feudal vassal dissatisfied with his ungrateful overlord and the many attempts to wrest power back from his hands, provides an apt comparison for John’s own dilemma (Rose 2011). We can imagine the entertainment of the 1287 royal festivities as animated by a similar principle of political and literary satire. For one brief hiatus, the inhabitants, or at least their rulers, could put aside their woes and at least pretend to have found a solution to those problems. Clinging to the fiction that their importance to Islamic trade links made them untouchable and that a new and legitimate king of Jerusalem would bring back stability, they seemed unable to appreciate the gravity of their situation, an internal and external crisis going back to 1220 at the very least. Yet this was also one of the most creative periods in the history of the Kingdom, at least artistically, with the production of a number of sumptuous manuscripts that continue to attract attention from scholars from a range of dis­ cip­lines. A glance at the texts chosen and the role that they might have played in fostering a sense of community and belonging is instructive. As Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager explain in their book, Remembering the Crusades, oral reports from and about the crusades were crucial in the development of vernacular writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the European

12  ‘Lord, I have never reminded you or your father of my services or of the service of my entire lineage, but now I have to do so, just as Guillaume d’Orange, to whom I am not equal, did when he had to help his nephews in Candie: he reminded his lord King Louis of all the service that he had provided’ (Melani 1994, 150).

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History, Time, and Empire  129 centres of learning, and the same was likely to have been true for those living in the increasingly isolated Latin Kingdom. French materials from the European continent which were then circulating in the Mediterranean might have kept the western Christians’ hopes alive: historical texts such as the famous account by William of Tyre, or legendary and prophetic texts such as the prose romance cycles, would have provided a reminder of where they had come from and what they had been led to believe was theirs to reclaim. Paul and Yeager use as an example a letter sent back from the early crusades, one dictated by Anselm of Ribemont. It made its way into a manuscript that was read aloud to a community eager for information about the progress of the combat, the sights that the pilgrims were seeing, the places and objects they had touched. Such written records and ­performances became ‘part of the architecture around which the collective memory of crusade was constructed’ (Paul and Yeager  2012, 2). The absorption of such memorial material into local histories and local identities is mediated by what Paul and Yeager refer to as the ‘shared sacred, historical, and mythic pasts’ that fed into the composition and dissemination of manuscripts around the Mediterranean and thereafter to eager patrons and library collections (Paul and Yeager 2012, 3; compare the Joanna letter discussed in Chapter 3 above, p. 110 and pp. 114–17). This shared past of course included the presumption that the Christian population of what is now considered western Europe descended from ‘Middle Eastern’ or western Asian ancestors: from Brutus, a prince of Troy, and from Bron, brother-in-law of Joseph of Arimathea, in the case of contemporary England/ Britain;13 or Francus, another Trojan prince, in the case of the kingdom of France. That Christians would return to the land of their forebears and the site of the passion of Christ was not therefore surprising, especially in the wake of calls from Constantinople to defend Christian interests. The correspondence between the dates of the first nine crusades (to count only those today considered important enough to be numbered) and the outpouring of vernacular textual production in French is hard to ignore (1099–1291), and echoes of travel and crusading (or pilgrimage, long considered in the same terms) within the ample vernacular corpus are ubiquitous. Other sites could be singled out for their importance as sources or agents in the transmission of vernacular literary/historical texts, but the city of Acre, or Akko, at the northern extremity of Haifa Bay, has a unique story to tell. For many years, scholars considered it a backwater, of meagre commercial importance, but the past forty years have seen a wholesale revision of that earlier judgement, and the current view is that the city, as capital of the kingdom, played a major role in cultural transmission.14 As an urban centre, it resembled other such centres both in the West and in the Middle East, slightly smaller than Jerusalem in size, and split 13  Though Anglo-Saxon rulers had been unusual in rejecting Trojan descent; see Tyler 2013. 14  Buchthal 1957 spearheaded that change, followed by Folda 1976, 1995, and 2005.

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130  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad into walled enclaves that competed with one another for land, prestige, and wealth. Along the harbour, commercial enterprises, churches, and civic buildings were grouped. To the north were the walled quarters of the wealthy and influential Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese, and further north and north-east still were the quarters of the important religious and military orders: the Templars, the Hospitallers of Saint John, and the Teutonic Knights.15 A 1987 sale of financial documents on parchment, detailing loans and repayment arrangements in the Latin Kingdom at the time of the Third Crusade (1191), gives some indication of the financial power that the Genoese (and Pisans, to a lesser extent) wielded over even the major crusading powers and political elite of Christendom at the time Acre became the capital as a result of the fall of Jerusalem. The conditions of loans made to prominent French-speaking figures such as the bishop of Beauvais, the lord of Coucy, the count of Ponthieu, Philip Augustus, king of France (standing in surety for Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders, who had died in the 1191 siege of Acre), and Richard I, the Lionheart, king of England, were preserved in these documents. Their lenders included Waleran da Casanova (Pisan), Giovanni da Rosio (Genoese), Selvagius Testa (Genoese), Lodisius Brezano (Genoese), and Jacobo de Ihota (Genoese) (Folda 2005, 45). Fifteen Genoese lenders in total are mentioned in these documents and five Pisans, with Jacobo de Ihota alone mentioned as a lender in five different transactions. All these loans were initially contracted in the temporary city that had grown up around the walls of Acre, from which the crusaders were coordinating their siege. English, Flemish, German, French, and Italian knights signed pledges to a group of remarkably wealthy and important figures from the Genoese and Pisan merchant communities, men who were travelling frequently between the Latin Kingdom and Tuscany (on which see Kool 1997, 200 n. 2) and were said to have ‘had personal possessions that included works of art, not only metalwork, but also manuscripts and devotional images’.16 It goes without saying that many manuscripts produced in Acre and Cyprus show signs of multilingual production and/or a multilingual readership. Influential residents in the city travelled with surprising frequency between the Latin Kingdom and their home centres of Genoa, Pisa, Venice, the south of France (Occitania), the Neapolitan Angevin empire, and England (see Minervini 1999, 79–96). As Robert Kool noted in a study on the Genoese quarter in Acre, travel amongst the Genoese consuls—each of whom held office for one year—between the eastern and western Mediterranean was frequent and likely to involve transactions requiring multiple languages. Simon Malocellus, for ex­ample, resided in Aigues-Mortes and Montpellier (both in Occitania) in the autumn of 1248 and remained in the Levant in the spring of 1250, after the completion of his term; by 15  See Jacoby 1979 and 2005a and Kedar 1993. 16  Folda 2005, 46. See also Byrne 1928, 139–83.

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History, Time, and Empire  131 1251 he was back in Genoa (Kool 1997, 200 n. 2). Another consul, Ogerius Ricius, was exporting spices and textiles from Acre to Genoa in 1250 but was back in Genoa in 1251; and de Burgaro was in Acre in March 1251 but by June was residing in Genoa.17 French was one of the languages in use in these documents, and it frequently served as a common denominator, but it was often French with an Italianate flavour, and the admixture is telling. Laura Minervini (2010a) has examined many of the extant documents with French that can be shown to have been produced in the Latin Kingdom and has concluded that a largely supralocal koine, with Picard markings, was used, a language variety on which all could draw but which was often marked as well by the other languages used by its speakers. Some of the recognizable markers of Picard that occur frequently include the /k/ before tonic /a/ and /o/, no palatization of /g/ and less frequent palatization of /k/; but there are also signs of Occitan usage, including in final consonants (e.g. leuc, feuc, jeuc for lieu, feu, jeu); vocalic in­stabil­ity between ‘ie’ and ‘e’, or ‘e’ and ‘oi’; and use of the word ziaus (eyes). Though such features are typical in Outremer texts, they can also be found in the texts of Martin da Canale and in Venetian merchant records, thus blurring any assumed particularity for the French used in Acre. Velarization of final l (biau for bel) is also common, as it is in Norman and Picard, and there is widespread use of Italianate lexis, especially terms used for shipping and trade, with a sprinkling of terms derived from Arabic dealing especially with local places, foods, spices, and tariffs.18 It is not clear to what degree this language would have coloured the production of manuscripts back in Genoa, but it is clear that there was constant exchange between the Genoan settlements in Liguria and Acre, and this makes definitive identification of place of composition difficult. The literary languages of northern Italy might bear more markers of the French of Acre than has been acknowledged (Zinelli 2007). As Folda has argued, the Dominican house in Acre was probably the home of a scriptorium or workshop that was producing some of the region’s extant manu­ scripts. He speculates that this was probably just one of three such ateliers that operated in the city in the thirteenth century. Louis IX’s four-year stay, from 1250 to 1254, seems to have fuelled a surge in artistic production during the final forty years of the kingdom, and, given his close connection with the Dominicans in Paris, that order no doubt benefitted as well from his patronage at Acre.19 Louis’s own confessor was a Dominican, who could well have helped to source material and artists for the production of the Arsenal Bible, a royal commission during

17  Kool 1997, 200 n. 2; see also Byrne 1928, 139–82, and Lock 2013, 382–90. 18  Minervini 1999, 2010a, 2010b, and 2010c. See also Zinelli 2007, 22–43. 19  Buchthal 1957 and Weiss 1998 concur that Louis’s stay revitalized the artistic scene and brought with it a new emphasis on works either composed in French or flavoured with French artistic tastes and practices. For a broader discussion of the topic, see the essays collected in Weiss and Mahoney 2004.

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132  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad these years; its scribe was probably another Dominican.20 Folda estimates that, between the cathedral workshop (usually known as the scriptorium of Acre), the Dominican workshop, and the house of St Catherine of Acre, which likely ­harboured a mix of religious artists and icon painters, there were eight artistic masters in the city in that period, plus four or five highly skilled assistants. The ‘scriptorium of Acre’, a transplanted scriptorium which had served the patri­arch­ ate of Jerusalem before that city’s fall, was, according to learned speculation, attached to the cathedral of the Holy Cross, an institution that was shared between the patriarch and the archbishop of Acre. This workshop produced largely li­tur­ gic­al books, mostly in Latin. The two patriarchs following Louis’s arrival were both French speakers, one from Troyes and the other from Nantes, thus perpetuating the close ties between French speakers and official artistic production. Folda imagines a street in Acre similar to the Parisian model sketched by the Rouses, in which parchmenters, painters, and codex makers worked side by side (though no evidence thus far has been found to support that hypothesis).21 These scriptoria, associated with the religious orders and with the cathedral, were producing lavish and important manuscripts, mostly in French and mostly on historical, legal, and philosophical material.22 The most commonly produced was, unsurprisingly, William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer, an account of the First Crusade and the first eighty years of the Latin Kingdom from the perspective of its author, chancellor and archbishop of Tyre: the only account of the kingdom written by a native-born, long-term resident. Second in popularity, to judge from the extant manuscripts, was the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, followed by legal treatises (Assises) and rhetorical treatises (Brunetto Latini and translations of Cicero).23

The Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César According to a verse prologue found in only two of the almost one hundred extant manuscripts, the Histoire ancienne was composed for, or dedicated to, Roger, castellan of Lille (hence its alternate title, the Estoires Rogier). By extension, 20  Folda 2005, 305 and Buchthal 1957, 588. 21  This is not surprising, however, given that Acre was destroyed upon its conquest in 1291 and serious archaeological research has only been undertaken in the past fifty years. See Rouse and Rouse 2000 and Folda 2005, 307–8. 22  Folda 2005. To put this in context, an important city such as Milan had forty scriptoria in the late thirteenth century. 23 The Assises are books of juridical codes, said to represent the most advanced legal thinking of their day. See Edbury and Folda 1994. The earliest example of a translation of Cicero into the vernacular can be found in Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433 (590), another Acre production discussed later in this chapter. A certain Master Richard also prepared in Acre an Anglo-Norman translation of Vegetius’s De re militari for Eleanor of Castile during her stay in the city with her husband, the soon-to-be Edward I of England.

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History, Time, and Empire  133 therefore, this earliest known vernacular prose account of universal history in French is usually thought to have been written for the Flemish aristocracy before 1219.24 In the late twelfth century, the count of Flanders, Philip of Alsace, patron of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du graal (see Chrétien de Troyes 1994), had acquired the Vermandois (now located in northern France). With that addition to his territorial holdings, he ruled over a larger area than did his overlord, Philip Augustus, king of France. Not only did this worry the French, particularly given Flanders’ close economic ties with England, but it directly countered the king’s plans for consolidating jurisdiction over his territories and nobles. When, in 1213, Ferrand, the new count of Flanders, refused to join the French army then opposing the coalition represented by the English under their king John and his assorted northern allies—who included Otto IV, the Holy Roman emperor and nephew of the English king, along with various lords from imperial lands now in Belgium and the southern Low Countries—the French attacked and pillaged Lille. What was meant to be a warning to the Flemish to clip their wings and defer to their southern neighbours turned out to be a further incentive for them to cement their strong alliance with the English. Flanders in alliance with the English and the emperor constituted a formidable opposition, and Philip Augustus knew that he had to act. The county of Flanders was at this time at its apogee, both prosperous and influential.25 Its star had been rising for the past century, since the Frankish victory in the First Crusade; the Flemish played a major role both in the crusades and in the running of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Their claim to the throne of Jerusalem hung on the accomplishments of one of the four leaders of the First Crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon. Godfrey was from the region now known as Wallonia, a French-speaking region in eastern Belgium, and he and his army first distinguished themselves during the conquest of the citadel of Antioch, a turning point in the crusader effort. It was he and his men who then took the city of Jerusalem, for the first time, on 15 July 1099, for which action he was acclaimed the ruler. Godfrey refused the title of king, claiming that no man could use that title in the city of the King of Kings, and instead took the title of advocatus sancti sepulchri, though he was referred to most commonly by his previous titles, Duke and Lord. He never married, and, following his death, his brother Baldwin was crowned king of Jerusalem on Christmas Day, 1100. The royal line, at least nom­in­­ al­ly, sprung from those Flemish and Low Countries roots for the next 192 years until the fall of Acre in 1291; and the deeds of those early military heroes were commemorated in a series of epic tales (using the form of the chanson de geste), known as the Crusader Cycle, successful across the European continent from the late thirteenth century. The chansons of the cycle use the twelfth-century Chanson 24  See Spiegel 1997 and de Visser-van Terwisga 1995, 241; and, for more recent work, Rochebouet 2016 and Montorsi 2016, 165. 25  Akbari 2014, 630–1 makes the case that, while the Histoire ancienne is a tribute to the French natio in genealogical terms, it is for the imperium of Flanders that it reserves its highest praise.

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134  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad d’Antioche, Chanson de Jérusalem, and Chanson des Chétifs as their historical basis and then move swiftly into a sort of legendary epic/romance. Godfrey and his brothers were said in these texts to have been the descendants of a race of Swan Knights, known today principally through Wagner’s opera Lohengrin (see below, pp. 224–5). The fall of Jerusalem in 1187 to Saladin’s forces damaged the reputation of the ruling family of Jerusalem, but this was more than compensated for by the crusader victory over the capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople, in 1204, following the diversion of the Fourth Crusade. When Baldwin IX of Flanders (who was also Baldwin VI of Hainault, another powerful, French-speaking county but wholly in the German Roman Empire; see Chapter 6, below) was crowned as the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, and by extension of the Byzantine Roman empire, the glory of Flanders was at its zenith. He held that post until his death in 1206 and was succeeded by his brother, Henry, after which a series of weak rulers took charge and the empire went into rapid decline. In 1261, it fell to Nicaean forces and the Western Christians were expelled. To put this in perspective: Baldwin’s crowning took place more or less at the time of the composition of the Histoire ancienne, and the fall of the Latin Empire in Constantinople preceded that of the Latin Kingdom in Acre by just thirty years (de Visser-van Terwisga 1995, 264, n. 35). Though Flanders was aiming at a Western empire (based principally within the Holy Roman Empire) to match its Eastern equivalents, Philip Augustus’s decisive defeat of the coalition of the English crown, the Holy Roman Empire, and Flemish feudal powers at Bouvines in 1214, effectively crushed those hopes (Duby 1985). Given the prologue and the information about Roger of Lille as the dedicatee, it has thus far been assumed that the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César was ul­tim­ ate­ly intended to glorify the Flemish as the saviours of Christendom.26 The prologue tells us what we will learn in this text: Des quels gens Flandres fu puplee vos iert l’estoire bien contee, Com se proverent, quell il furent, Com il firent que fere durent.     (Joslin 1986, lines 22–25) 26  Parts of the text are available in individual editions, though it has yet to be edited in full: de Visser-van Terwisga 1995 provides an edition of the Assyria to Thebes sections as well as all the verse moralisations; Jung 1996, 359–430 gives us the Troy section; Joslin 1986 offers the Genesis section, including the all-important prologue; Gaullier-Bougassas 2012 provides an edition of the Alexander section; Lynde-Recchia  2000 offers an edition of the Thebes section; and Rochebouet  2017 the socalled Orient II section. Otaka 2016 has provided an edition of part of the second redaction of the text, though using a rather idiosyncratic manuscript. The ERC-funded project The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages has published interpretive editions of two versions of the Eneas section (from Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20125 and London, BL, Royal 20 D I, the earliest manuscript of the so-called second redaction, made in Naples in the early fourteenth century) and of one version of the Rome 2 section. Their website also makes available a semi-diplomatic transcription of the entire text from both manuscripts, and will eventually include interpretive editions of both manuscripts.

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History, Time, and Empire  135 The story will be told here of the people who inhabited Flanders, how they strove and who they were, how they did what they had to do.

It was written in prose (rather than verse)—quite an innovation at the time—­ certainly after 1208 and most probably after 1214, perhaps by Wauchier de Denain, though that identification remains hypothetical.27 The most extensive version (found in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20125) has a series of verse moralizations that survive as verse only in two other manuscripts:28 they are either omitted or prosified in other manuscripts, which suggests they may have been regarded as archaic. It was never completed: perhaps because the French sack of Lille in 1213 put an end to the dreams behind its composition; perhaps because the defeat at Bouvines was so conclusive;29 perhaps because the money ran out; or perhaps because by that time another work, the Faits des Romains, was already circulating, and its coverage of the period from Caesar onward obviated going any further with Roman history.30 In any case, the Histoire ancienne ends abruptly with the arrival of Julius Caesar on the scene. Before that date of 57 bce, the text lurches from one period to the next, occasionally drawing awkward parallels between his­tor­ic­al epochs, though aiming at a coherent chronology that links Christian teleology with antique lore. Like earlier Latin-language models (notably Orosius), it begins with the four great pre-Christian civilizations (Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Hebrews) and then turns to Thebes, Troy, Alexander the Great, and the founding of Rome. An odd mix of the secular and the religious—one that merges biblical and pagan history without proclaiming one superior to the other, at least in terms of plot—it is punctuated fairly insistently with addresses to the audience and occasional calls to prayer, before returning to the political and military scandals of the pre-Christian world, which it relates with zest and gusto.31 The mixing of

27  Many scholars have now adopted Wauchier as the presumed author, following Paul Meyer’s i­nitial suggestion in 1903 (see Meyer 1903) and Michelle Szkilnik’s support for that position in 1993 (see Szkilnik 1993). The identification has never been made definitively, however, and Montorsi (2016), the most recent to publish on the issue, sees in it scholarly opinion rather than demonstrable fact. See also Szkilnik 1986, Croizy-Naquet 2015, and Douchet 2015. 28  The verse prologue is found in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20125, dated by Folda (2005) to the 1280s (1287) in Acre, and Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2576, from early fourteenth-century Venice. The recently discovered Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 2231 has all the verse passages found in BnF fr. 20125, but not the prologue. On this manuscript, see Rochebouet 2016. 29  Francesco Montorsi (2016) reverses the case, arguing, against what has come to seem scholarly unanimity, for a pre-1214 ad quem date. He further maintains that the text is not pro-Flemish, that Roger of Lille most likely sided with the French rather than against them, and that the true preoccupation of the author (and patron) was almost certainly the vicious battle of succession for the county of Flanders (which meant also for the Latin Empire) that followed the death of Baldwin IX of Flanders. 30  Ferdinand Lot (1938, 121–2) was the first to put forward the explanation relating to the Faits des Romains, a text with which the Histoire ancienne is sometimes paired in manuscripts, and he followed Meyer in the identification of Wauchier de Denain. See also Croizy-Naquet 2004. 31  For a complicated but valuable discussion of what the notion of the secular might mean in the Middle Ages, see Blanton 2010.

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136  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the Christian and pagan registers goes on throughout: while recounting the story of the birth and lineage of Europa (mythical founder of the European continent), for instance, the author stops to announce suddenly that at that very moment Moses the prophet was dying in another spot in the Middle East (de Visser-Van Terwisga 1995, 12).32 This interest in the ‘secular’ or pagan world does not, of course, mean a world without God or a world in which God does not matter: just a world in which he is for a time more or less hidden, not yet on stage, waiting to make his appearance.33 Biblical and pagan history exist on the same continuum, working together to produce a historical model. The appeal of ‘secular history’, moreover, is obvious: it allows the author to chronicle the building up and subsequent decline of empires, the migration of peoples in response to political events, the treachery and self-interested blindness of powerful families, and the triumph of those who rise above adversity, with the occasional insistent disclaimer that all these disasters are clearly due to the fact that these people did not believe in the true God. It is hard to imagine that residents in Acre might not have seen some parallels with their own situation. The author had clearly learned his history from the classical authors and, as such, does not hold necessarily to any of the known medieval genres of romance or epic. Using a wide range of identifiable sources, he delights in chronicling exotic places and variations on the human form, the splendours of wealth and power, love and sex, prestige, and earthly renown. Yet the Christian subtext is rarely far from the surface, though perhaps a bit further than some churchmen and schoolmen would have liked. Placing mythical figures like Hercules or Oedipus on the same plane as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph binds biblical history into other accounts of the past, and the use of euhemerism is striking even today. The prologue informs us that the Histoire was intended to begin with the bib­ lical Creation; travel through the milestones of ancient history, chronicle the story of Rome, the passion of Christ, the martyrdom of the saints, the early peoples of France, the Christianization of Europe, the barbarian invasions, the Normans, and the pillaging of France; and finally relate how the Flemish comported themselves and proved their worth through noble deeds. This is followed by a vow to tell the absolute truth in composing his text for Roger, the author’s ‘segnor’ from ‘Lisle’ (de Visser-van Terwisga 1995, l. 263). The author claims to have translated the text from Latin into French without ever changing the meaning or inciting envy, in his words, ‘Por qu’envie m’en laist en pais’ (l. 269, ‘so that envy may leave me in peace’).

32  Such chronological flipping from one site and moment to another can be found as well in Latin universal histories from the period, including earlier in the twelfth century. 33  Minervini 2004 makes a similar argument about another text.

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History, Time, and Empire  137

C. 1260 The problem with saying almost anything definitive about the Histoire is that there are no manuscript witnesses from the period of its composition. The earliest extant copy dates from some fifty years later, between 1260 and 1290.34 Not only that: four of those early manuscripts, and the most copiously illustrated, were copied in Acre, rather than in the north of France or Flanders where the prologue leads us to believe the work was composed.35 Jaroslav Folda, the eminent art historian of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, dated the first two of those manu­ scripts, Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562 and Brussels, Biblibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 10175, to the decade between 1260 and 1270; and the last two, Paris BnF fr. 20125 and London, BL, Additional MS 15268, to the final years of the Kingdom, towards the end of the 1280s. The latter two are the more elab­or­ate and luxurious copies, probably because they were produced for prestigious ­clients: the London manuscript, it is speculated, was made for the coronation of Henry II, the last king of Jerusalem to serve on Latin Kingdom soil (mentioned above, p. 125), and BnF fr. 20125 produced for another eminent but unknown patron.36 In 1989, Doris Oltrogge refuted Folda’s claim that BnF fr. 20125 was an Acre production, but the evidence is inconclusive, and Fabio Zinelli has recently confirmed that it uses linguistic forms and spellings that are generally seen only in Outremer manuscripts.37 This—and parallels with the iconographic programmes of the three manuscripts that are certainly from Acre—means that if BnF fr. 20125 was not actually copied in Acre then it was copied from a model made in Acre. No one questions that the artists involved were trained in Paris, but Folda has shown 34 Derbes and Sandona (2004, 212) speculate that the Histoire might have come to Acre with William of Dampierre, son of Margaret, daughter of Baldwin IX of Flanders, first Latin Emperor of Constantinople, and his wife, Marie, who herself took the cross and died in Acre in 1204. William accompanied Louis IX on the Seventh Crusade in 1248 and may have taken with him a copy of the Histoire manuscript that had been composed in his mother’s favourite residence of Lille and whose version of universal history she favoured. The Dampierre family were important patrons of French vernacular texts, especially those dealing with historical and crusader themes, and, as Corrie has argued, the same family transported a text of the Histoire to Angevin Naples. See Stanger 1957, 222–4 and Tyson 1979, 209 on the Dampierre as patrons, and Corrie 2004 on the Angevin connection. 35  The other early manuscripts include London, BL, Additional MS 19669; Pommersfelden, Schloβ Bibl. MS 295; Aylsham, Blickling Hall MS 6931; and The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, MS 78 D 47. All of these have been dated to this same period, c. 1260–75, but all have a more abbreviated text than the Acre manuscripts, and it is those latter manuscripts (especially BnF fr. 20125, on which see The Values of French project: https://tvof.ac.uk) which have attracted the most scholarly attention. 36  Folda 2005, 423–4. Rodríguez Porto 2013 argues for a Flemish or northern French source for the Acre Histoire ancienne manuscripts, of which a hypothetical archetype served as the model for BnF fr. 20125, though one produced several decades earlier. She also repeats Buchtahl’s hypothesis that the fact that Roger of Lille’s brother was a Templar might explain the almost immediate travel of the text to the Latin Kingdom and the favour that it encountered there (2013, 62). 37  See Oltrogge  1989, 302 and Zinelli  2013, 12. Others, including Joslin (1986) and Derbes and Sandona (2004), agree on the Acre origin, as does Patricia Stirnemann, who confirmed in a letter to Rodríguez Porto (20 December 2010) that the manuscript’s pen-work initials ‘are blatantly of the style of the Holy Land’ (Rodríguez Porto 2013, 62 n. 29).

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138  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad that the artist of this particular cycle of illumination, the Master of the Hospitaller, practised his art both in Paris and in Acre and on that basis dated this manuscript to 1287. Both he and Marijke de Visser-van Terwisga agree that it was probably a copy of an earlier codex that could be dated closer to the presumed composition date of 1209–14, largely because of its inclusion of the verse mor­al­iza­tions—which were subsequently dropped from the text or, more commonly, incorporated into the prose.38 It is this manuscript that has since served as the base text for all the (partial) editions so far published.39 Despite the undoubted importance of BnF fr.  20125, Dijon 562 is the earliest Histoire manuscript of the Acre group if it was copied between 1260 and 1270, as Buchthal and Folda argue, which Zinelli suggests (2013, 10) was a key decade in the transmission of French-language manuscripts in Outremer. When the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem finally fell to the Mamluks in 1291, it was the culmination of a catastrophic century of civil wars, internecine rivalry, and generally self-destructive governance that followed Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem in 1187 and the subsequent transfer of the Kingdom’s capital to Acre. Though never very secure in its governance in the thirteenth century, its final thirty years were particularly tumultuous.40 Joachim da Fiore (1135–1202), several decades earlier, had prophesied that the year 1260 would mark the beginning of the third age of man, the Age of the Holy Spirit, when humanity would enter into an era of direct contact with God, with no further need for laws, Church, or civic institutions. Needless to say, this was hardly borne out by the example of Acre, nor welcomed by the Church, but the disappointment that must have been felt was certainly not reflected in a turning away from artistic production. Instead, it seemed to fuel an increased appetite for legendary and historical material, sometimes with an apocalyptic cast and sometimes for compensatory narratives about Swan Knights and the like as well. Alongside these literary or metaphorical responses, multiple narratives circulated about the legacy and future of the Latin Kingdom, the legitimacy of its rulers, even something so fundamental as the nature of its true enemy. Was it Islam in any form, or the rival Christian rulers of Beirut, Cyprus, and Sicily; the Mongols, or the warring mercantile forces of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, all of whom seemed bent on destroying the Kingdom from the inside rather than waiting for an external blow? In 1256–58, these tensions exploded in what amounted to a civil war, when the Genoese were defeated by the Venetian and Pisan forces within the city walls. The military tower of their quarter, the Lamançoia, was toppled to the ground and 38  Folda 1976, 95–102 and 2005, 429–33. 39  See Joslin 1986, 24; de Visser-van Terwisga 1995, 11 and 24; Folda 2005, 429–33. Again, see The Values of French project, which is producing online editions of two manuscript versions: the thirteenthcentury Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20125 and the fourteenth-century London, BL, Royal MS 20 D I. 40  In 1265, the forces of the Mamluk Sultan Baibars had succeeded in taking Caeseria, Haifa, and Arsuf and then Antioch in 1268. Thereafter the threat was ever-present.

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History, Time, and Empire  139 dismantled as a result (Jacoby 1979). The year 1260 also saw Kublai Khan take the throne of the Mongol empire in Asia; a time in which hope still survived that the Mongols—sometimes associated with the legendary Prester John—might prove to be effective allies against the Mamluk armies. However, when they, too, were defeated by the Mamluks at Ain Jalut, in that same year, it was clear that that av­enue was also at least temporarily closed. Lurking not far from the surface of much of that thinking regarding the role of the Latin Kingdom in the Christianempire-to-come is the legend of Prester John and his fabulously wealthy and powerful kingdom, located just beyond the grasp of the Latin Christians, however extended their reach.41 The letter that he was thought to have composed, offering assistance to the Western Christians in their fight against the pagan, was sup­ posedly addressed to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel Komnenos, in 1165. It was not, of course, penned by the fictional priest-king but was a cunning, politically mo­tiv­ated appeal to Western universalist dreams, the same dreams that had mo­tiv­ated the continuing fantasy of an established Christian presence in Palestine for the previous sixty years or more. The letter details not only the riches and bounty of a land beyond what any Latin Christian had seen but also sketches the outlines of a Christian utopia, one in which no vice or sin has ever been detected; Judaism is tolerated but is subordinated to Christianity; mankind is fed on milk and honey, has sex four times a year (for procreation only), and is surrounded by the full range and variety of God’s creation, over which mankind unquestionably dominates. It was in 1260 as well that Marco Polo’s father and uncle set sail from Constantinople for Sudak in search of profitable markets for their wares and ended up taking the long and circuitous journey to Catai (Cathay, that is, northern China), to the court of Kublai Khan. When the Khan charged them with asking the pope to send him a hundred learned men and holy oil from Jerusalem, they returned in 1269, stopping in Acre on their way, only to learn that Pope Clement IV had died and not yet been replaced. Two years later, departing again from Venice and without having had an opportunity to speak to a pope (the post remained vacant for three years due to internal wrangling), the Polos set off to return to Cathay, this time with Marco, their seventeen-year-old son and nephew, in tow. This time they met in Acre with Teobaldo Visconti, a prelate who was supporting their venture.42 Shortly after they left, they learned that Teobaldo himself had been elected pope, and they returned immediately to Acre to receive his blessing. It could even be there that Marco first met Rusticiaus de Pise (Rustichello da Pisa), the man with whom he would later write of his travels. Rusticiaus, who is 41  For an overview of the history and development, geography, and uses of this material, see: http:// globalmiddleages.org/project/peregrinations-prester-john-creation-global-story-across-600-years (accessed 8 August 2017). See also Gosman 1982. 42  Teobaldo was well-placed as the nephew of Ottone Visconti, archbishop of Milan, the first of the long line of Visconti rulers of that city. See Chapter 5, pp. 159–162.

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140  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad supposed to have been in Acre around that time, may also have met there the future Edward I of England, who had travelled there to plan a new crusade. Rusticiaus reports that he received from Edward a collection of Arthurian tales that would become the basis for his Franco-Italian Arthurian compilation (see Chapter  2, above, pp. 73–9).43 Another figure of the same period, Erard of Valeri, inherited from Eudes of Nevers three manuscripts which he had in his possession in Acre at his death. Erard left for Naples shortly thereafter and fought in the battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268, as a result of which Conradin, the last heir to Frederick II, died, and all hopes for the Hohenstafen empire with him. Shortly thereafter, Erard showed up back in Acre with Edward I at his arrival in 1271 (Jacoby 1982, 623). The Latin Empire may have been on its last legs in the 1260s, but Acre was clearly still a major centre for intercultural networking. This long period of internal crisis had, of course, begun earlier, in the 1230s, following the short stay of Frederick II, then king of Sicily and Naples and Holy Roman Emperor. His coronation in 1229 as king of Jerusalem (though technically he had been king since 1225, when he married by proxy the heiress to the throne, Isabella II of Jerusalem (also known as Yolande of Brienne), followed by a ceremony in Brindisi. Fifteen years of absentee governance ensued after Frederick’s short stay in Acre, during which time the rival pretenders to the region, including the wealthy Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian merchants, descended into the simmering state of civil war mentioned earlier. Frederick had reacquired the city of Jerusalem, or at least part of it (excluding the holy Muslim sites), through diplomatic wrangling with the Ayyubid sultan Al-Kamil in 1229; but instead of allaying the nobles’ fears and attracting praise for his nonviolent reoccupation of the Holy  City, Frederick’s presence and diplomatic success only heightened fears amongst the resident aristocratic families that they were losing control. When the Khwarismian Mamluks descended from northern Syria to take Jerusalem in 1244, it was the turn of French King Louis IX (canonized in 1297 as St Louis) to step into the fray. Louis led the Seventh Crusade to Egypt, intending to come up to Jerusalem from the south after having knocked out the Ayyubid forces. Initial success at Damietta was followed by catastrophe at Al-Mansurah in the Nile delta (this battle is the setting for the Chanson du bon William Longespee, discussed in Chapter 3, pp. 112–13), and he ended up captured in 1248 and ransomed in 1249. Instead of returning to Paris after this ignominious defeat, Louis took refuge in Acre, where he spent the years 1249–53. This four-year interlude provided the Latin Kingdom with a moment of political stability, a renaissance of artistic production (witnessed by the magnificent Arsenal Bible, Paris, BnF, MS Arsenal 5211), and the

43  All were there, though their intersections at exactly the right moment are entirely imagined. See Prestwich (1997, 81), who speculates on the encounter and discussion between Edward and Marco Polo.

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History, Time, and Empire  141 reinforcement of Latin defences, largely funded by royal coffers.44 He returned to Paris after the death of his mother, Blanche of Castile, only to return again in 1270 to lead the Eighth Crusade, a debacle in which he perished (of malaria) along with his son, Jean Tristan (who had been born in Damietta during the previous crusade), and his son-in-law, Thibaut de Champagne (son of the trouvère). The ­double loss was devastating for the Latin Kingdom, yet there follows in Acre a period of renewal, an adrenaline rush of cultural dynamism. This period, from the 1260s to the 1290s, represents the high point of artistic production in the Kingdom, and it is during this period that most of the surviving Acre manuscripts were copied. The most popular text, as already noted, was William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer, of which eight illuminated manuscripts from Acre are extant (plus eight others from French-speaking areas of continental Europe and one from England) and the four copies of the Histoire ancienne.45 Though these two texts deal with different historical eras—one with the ancient world, the other almost contemporary—both are clearly concerned with such questions as how the present can be constructed on the vestiges of the past; how mistakes can be instrumental in constructing a successful government; and how readers can fit themselves into a historical narrative that features greed, war, and factionalism yet rise above it to embody a new kind of history. Not that Acre’s reputation had ever been spotless. Long before the year 1260, it was thought to be a den of corruption, even amongst Christians (Prawer 1972, 83–99). It was seen increasingly as a mercantile enclave of thieves, a port city fit only for adventurers, Christian fanatics, deluded pretenders to the throne, and rival Italian mercantile interests. Jacques de Vitry, bishop of the city from 1216 to 1225, described it as ‘a monster or . . . beast with nine heads, each . . . at odds with the other’ (Huygens 1960, 83), yet it nonetheless functioned relatively successfully as a commercial and political capital for a century and managed to establish itself as an artistic centre to rival anything in the West. The stories of some of those warring heads of Acre are told in the Chronique du templier de Tyr, more 44  The Arsenal Bible is of considerable interest as a product of travel. It can be viewed at: http:// gallica.BnF.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550071673/f1.item.r=MS%20ff%205211. Its text is selective and composed in the vernacular; its twenty illuminated folios, preceding each of the biblical books, are further subdivided into 115 scenes that show parallels with the Oxford Bible moralisée (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 270b) that Louis was said to have taken with him on crusade and then transported to Acre. 45  One copy of the continuation of William of Tyre known as the Roman d’Eracles (Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, MS 828) has been authenticated as an Acre production and dated to 1280; and another copy of the Eracles, now held in Paris (BnF, MS fr. 2628), also shows signs of having been scripted in Acre. Often such manuscripts reverse the European perspective, referring to western European centres as ‘outremer’ (‘overseas’) and to the Kingdom sites (Acre or Cyprus) as ‘deça mer’ (‘on this side of the sea’). See Raynaud 1887, 4; Melani 1994, 72, § 16 and 76, § 21; and the Chronique du Templier de Tyr in Minervini 2000, 421. Juridical texts include the Assises de Jerusalem (Beugnot 1843a) by John of Ibelin (nephew of the lord of Beirut) and the Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois (Beugnot 1843b). For a fuller discussion, see Aslanov 2006a, 33–39 and Aslanov 2006b. On the William of Tyre, Histoire d’Outremer manuscripts, see Folda 2012, 142.

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142  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad commonly known as the third part of the tripartite Geste des Chiprois, from whose second section the quotation above (pp. 125–6) concerning the 1287 cor­on­ation festivities was taken. This text, written in French just after the 1291 downfall, was not widely disseminated but provides some evidence of what we have been asserting was the state of mind in the final thirty years of the Kingdom.46 It was composed as part of yet another universal history, which promised the same sort of universal coverage as the Histoire ancienne.47 The first section of the Geste begins very much like the Histoire ancienne, with biblical history in French; this is then  followed by an account of the years 1131–1224, finishing just prior to Frederick II’s assumption of the title of king of Jerusalem. The second section ­covers Philippe de Novare’s telling of the struggles between Frederick, the Ibelins, and the aristocratic claimants to the throne in the years 1228–43 (Minervini 2000, 1–2). Finally, we arrive at the Chronique, which covers the period from 1243 to the early fourteenth century, and it is here that we get coverage of the fall of Acre, the flight to Cyprus, and the aftermath of that dislocation between 1291 and 1309. No one has yet studied the Geste des Chiprois and the Histoire ancienne together, but they make for an interesting juxtaposition. Though supposedly written some fifty to eighty years apart, they were both copied in either Acre or Cyprus, and both attempt in their way to make sense of the explosive events taking place around them. Each takes a longue durée view of human development while subtly questioning whether anything fundamental ever really changes. In other words, both rely on the sort of anachronistic piling of one historical era upon the other that was discussed in the first section of this chapter. This sort of vision of time, from within and simultaneously without, can produce an extratemporal sensation in which the uncanny present seems somehow immune to the ravages of change, as if knowledge itself could somehow serve as a shield. Cole and Smith’s sense of ‘being in time’ goes a step further: the acts of remembering, contemplating, and anticipating on the concurrent levels of past, present, and future, while seeing yourself all the while as somehow less subject to it—privy to the ability to stand inside and out of history—produces instead a sort of apocalyptic, God’s-eye-view of creation.48 If it is true that the reader/listener of the medieval text was able to experience at particular moments such a richness of sensation, it might also explain why the production of manuscripts exploded in the thirteenth century, in Acre particularly post-1260, and shed some light as well on why the Church hierarchy and 46  The fall of Acre in 1291 spelt the end of the Kingdom in everything but name, though it con­ tinued to be referred to as a living entity for centuries thereafter. Those who escaped the city by sea before the fall, including Henry II, brought the Kingdom to Cyprus and maintained its claims, though there was never again a Frankish presence on the mainland. 47  The sole copy of this manuscript was done by Jean de Miège while in prison in Kyrenia Castle in Cyprus in 1343. See Minervini 2000. 48  Cole and Smith 2010b. This phenomenon is hardly limited to the Middle Ages; a God’s-eye-view of time and the self is also characteristic of a great many colonial endeavours.

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History, Time, and Empire  143 monastic institutions so distrusted the pretentions of secular narrative. In the course of these massive traditions, people and events pass by at a dizzying rate, but their protagonists’ motivation, mores, and excesses remain eminently comprehensible. Such narratives may have offered their reader/listeners a sense of stability in the form of a relentless timeline—a linear model of history that marches from the creation of the world to the glories of Christian conquest to come—and perhaps within such a worldview the tragedies of the present could be seen in what seemed like proper perspective. For all its acknowledged faults, even from the contemporary perspective, the Latin Kingdom, as the embodiment of prophecy, the importation of Christian culture back upon the grounds of sacred history, could have been seen by many as the vortex of historical evolution.

Acre Manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne The four surviving Acre manuscripts might also represent just the tip of a much wider production of the Histoire ancienne, the other exemplars of which having disappeared in the destruction following the Latins’ defeat in 1291.49 Those wealthy inhabitants who made it to Cyprus before Acre’s fall would have brought with them their treasures, including their manuscripts, and the travel of some of those manuscripts can still be traced. Fabio Zinelli, for instance, has recently confirmed that one fourteenth-century manuscript of the Histoire, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 9682, though thought to have been copied in northern France, shows linguistic signs of Outremer French. He has also demonstrated that Paris, BnF, MS fr. 686, a sumptuous and substantial early fourteenth-century manuscript made in Bologna and containing the Histoire ancienne, a part of the Faits des Romains, and other shorter texts, some translated from Italian, had an Outremer source for the Histoire ancienne.50 Finally, Zinelli has suggested that BnF fr. 20125 could have left Acre or Cyprus before the conquest and travelled to Barcelona, given the

49  This may well be true for other texts as well. For example, Zinelli (2007, 46–7) notes of Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS 1642, a fourteenth-century copy of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, that on the final flyleaf are written three poems: the anonymous Occitan poem BdT 461 18a: Amors m’a fach novelamen asire, the Italian sonnet: Bela dona uostro guardo orgoloso; and a third poem now damaged beyond legibility but also in Italian. Their presence would support, in his view, the Outremer provenance of the text, given that French, Italian, and Occitan were all in use in the Kingdom. See also Novati 1898, who notes a Greek colophon attesting to ownership in which the word ‘franc’ is used. Zinelli remarks that such usage might again support an Outremer origin, as ‘franc’ meant essentially ‘Westerner’ in Outremer usage, and the use of Greek script might indicate a Cypriot connection. 50  On BnF fr. 9682, see Zinelli 2007 and 2012; also Nobel 2012 and 2013, and Minervini 2010a. On MS fr. 686, see Zinelli 2016, 108–19. Paris, BnF, MS fr. 168, also made in Bologna in the fourteenth century, clearly derives from Outremer sources as well. The provenance of the multiple sources of Vienna ONB 2576 (made in Venice in the fourteenth century) is harder to pin down, but it transmits the prologue and verse moralizations found otherwise only in BnF fr. 20125 (prologue and mor­al­iza­tions) and Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 2231.

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144  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad notations in Catalan that can still be deciphered in the margins.51 Stefano Cingolani’s study of royal libraries in Barcelona shows that there were three texts identified as ‘universal histories’ listed amongst the library’s possession in the ­fifteenth century, any or all of which could have been Histoire ancienne ­manuscripts, though there are none listed now in Catalan collections (Cingolani 2008). If we add all this to Zinelli’s evidence that one of the families of the some ninety extant manuscripts of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, which we examined in Chapter  2, was based on a model made in Outremer, most probably at Acre, this would fit with other indications that the city’s scriptoria might have specialized in legal and philosophical texts, probably produced in the very same workshops that were producing the Histoire ancienne.52 Such manuscripts, like Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, containing rhetorical texts and signed by a certain John of Antioch, offer further evidence of the highly polished work being done in Acre.53 All four of the Acre manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne were produced by Parisian-trained illustrators and scribes, assisted by locally trained scribes and decorators, hence some of the Byzantine elements noted in the drafting and painting of the scenes.54 None is a copy of any of the others, yet all show unmistakable signs of local production: a similar visual scheme with occasional Byzantine touches, some local details (including linguistic usage), and a taste for luxury, clearly the work of a well-run workshop. The very fact that the Histoire was composed in French likely favoured its popularity in Outremer. French was the language of most of the manuscripts produced in Acre, not Latin (other than missals or ecclesiastical works), further evidence that they were composed for the private libraries of wealthy mercantile and aristocratic families.55 Referencing what was said earlier about anachronism, it would appear that what pleased these aristocrats and merchants in the Histoire tradition was a version of the past that flattered

51  Zinelli  2013, 12–13. This does not, of course, preclude the possibility that the notations were done by a Catalan reader somewhere like Rhodes or Cyprus, where the Aragonese had a presence. See further on this question in Gaunt 2016b. 52  Zinelli 2013, 14–15. See also Zinelli 2007, Scariati 2008, 35–92, and Bolton Holloway 1993. As for evidence of one workshop producing a variety of different types of texts, the First Master of the Bible historiale of Jean de Berry is credited with having worked on more than twenty-five manu­scripts, including books of hours, saints’ lives, legal manuscripts, romances, and histories. As many of the Acre artists were trained in Paris, the same situation doubtless obtained in Outremer. See Hederman and Morrison 2010, 185 and Folda 2008, 103–52. 53  The manuscript contains Cicero’s De inventione and the Ad Herennium and includes illuminations reproduced later in this chapter. 54  Folda claims that MS Dijon 562 was done in the same workshop as the contemporaneous Arsenal Bible, produced for Louis IX and by his own artists, during his stay in Acre c. 1250–3 (Folda 2008, 104–13). For more on Dijon 562, see Maraszak 2008, 2013, and 2015. 55 Buchthal  1957, 96. Examples of highly refined ecclesiastical work done in Acre include the extant Riccardiana Psalter (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 323), made for Isabella II, queen of Jerusalem and second wife of Frederick II (c. 1225), and the Perugia missal (done in Acre in the 1250s): Perugia, Museo capitolare di San Lorenzo (Museo dell’Opera), MS 6 (formerly 21). See Folda 2012, 127 and 132. Illuminated manuscripts of ‘historical’ works, such as that of William of Tyre, done in Acre include Paris, BnF, MS fr. 9084 and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. Lat. 1963.

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History, Time, and Empire  145 their own learning, their own military culture, and their own language, and all in a framework that raised their accomplishments to the scale of the most famous of classical heroes. Yet even as these manuscripts were being produced, Acre, the last vestige of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was crumbling around them. Such a precarious environment would probably have favoured a narrative history that portrayed their own wild mix of conflicting loyalties, treason, trade, and travel with a familiar cast of biblical and historical characters, set out as part of a wider view of history involving overlapping and unpredictable events. Empires crumble, things do not necessarily proceed by plan, unforeseen connections sometimes prove the most decisive: this all fits with a narrative attempt to make some sense of the networks within which the protagonists of Acre were embedded and to see those networks as part of an intertwined collection of events—pictorial and narrative snapshots—in search of a point of view, a question to which universal history seemed to offer an answer. Biblical narrative clearly provided one model, pointing always towards a foreseeable and final resolution, but the form that that resolution would take was not necessarily as clear and readable as many were claiming. Apocalyptic thinking was, of course, rife in the thirteenth century; and the Latin Kingdom, with its pretensions to world dominance and the reinstitution of order, favoured such fantasies and the prophecies by which they were transmitted. The decisive event which would kick off the final judgement was always imminent, depending upon the point of view of the author/observer, but it was also indefinitely suspended and not necessarily identifiable from within the network or its narrative. The teleo­logic­al view inherent in Christian history, while providing some certainty about a pre-established order, is always pointing to something just out of reach, something just ahead, not quite graspable. Prophecy and apocalyptic thinking work in unison to provide material grounding for those fantasies, especially in that both tend to veer quickly into violence and destruction. Given an intellectual ambiance in which such fantasies flourished both in legend and in intellectual circles—again Joachim da Fiore and the spiritual Franciscans provide a good example—it is understandable that the patrons of Acre and Cyprus seem to have favoured both universal histories which made sense of the vagaries of fortune and legal and philosophical documents which emphasize system, tradition, stability, and logic. These latter texts may have suggested a more solid social structure, one that could withstand the upset and violent threats to stability from within and without, while also providing some intellectual ballast to the notion that, one way or another, the Christian world would abide.56 56  According to Akbari 2012, 621, ‘violent con­quest . . . is normative in that each empire rises in its turn and then falls, to be replaced by another in a cyclical repetition; it is transformative in that the ultimate succession of temporal rule by Christian rule replaces the conventional linear flow of time with a new mode—that of apocalyptic time, where perpetuity gives way to eternity’. For an earlier view on what Akbari calls ‘apocalyptic historiography’ in the thirteenth century, see Rubinstein 2011.

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146  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad And indeed, the final fatal decade of the Kingdom only accelerated the rush to destruction at the same time that it could have been seen as a long wished-for resolution of an extended period of crisis, an expiatory redemption in the form of a prestigious Christian emperor. This final figure in the dénouement of the Latin Kingdom was Charles of Anjou. Charles regarded himself as the fulfilment of a century-old promise of a Capetian saviour: first in the form of King Louis VII and the botched Second Crusade (1149), then in 1189 that of Louis’s son, Philip Augustus, then his grandson, Louis IX in 1248 and 1277, and finally the latter’s younger brother, Charles himself. In 1277, Charles, already king of Naples and  Sicily, had murdered Conradin, the grandson of Frederick II and the Hohenstaufen heir to the throne of Jerusalem (as Conrad III). Having eliminated the final barrier to his acquisition of Jerusalem, a useful step in his goal of a Mediterranean empire, Charles simply bought the royal title in 1277 from the presumed heiress, Maria of Antioch. With that acquisition, he added another gem to his crown, but his days of glory were numbered. Sicily fell in 1282 to the Aragonese as a result of the Sicilian Vespers (fomented by Byzantine interests), and Charles died shortly thereafter in 1285. Conradin, grandson of Frederick II, had been beheaded in Naples on the orders of Charles some months after his victory at Tagliacozzo, and was succeeded by the Lusignan dynasty. That brings us to Henry II, whom we discussed earlier and who survived the sack of the Acre in 1291 by fleeing to Cyprus just as the Mamluk forces broke through the city walls. It is within this climate of imminent destruction and ruthless politicking that the scribes producing the late luxury manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne worked— uncertain of their future, and of the fate of their work, yet continuing to insist on the inevitable triumph of Christianity in the East as the fulfilment of prophecy, a Hegelian end to history.57 How could they not have seen parallels between the stories of greed and ambition that they were illuminating on the manuscript page and the plight of their own kingdom? Just as the great cities of the East were reduced to rubble and then rose again in another form over the course of the Histoire ancienne, they could picture Acre as the latest in a long chain of capitals under attack, with the fateful difference that this was a Christian capital, the stand-in for Jerusalem, the cul­ min­ation of God’s favour. Though typological readings are also possible here, in which Jerusalem stands in for both the Hebrew past and its fulfilment in the new Kingdom of Jerusalem, it seems at least as likely that artists are also implicitly referencing contemporary events.58 Torn then between the impulse to shore up 57  See Folda 2005, 423 and 433, for some speculation on these workshops. 58  For more on typological readings, see Akbari 2014, Kühnel 2004, and Derbes and Sandona 2014. The last authors argue persuasively for a direct connection between patronage and manuscript il­lu­ min­ation, speculating that Alice (Alix), countess of Blois, who visited Acre in 1287 and died in 1288, might have actively supported the emphasis on female heroism and mourning that mark the Acre manuscripts as once again original and exceptional.

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History, Time, and Empire  147 belief, against all evidence, in the Christian empire-to-come, and inclined as well to see themselves within the relativized view of the Histoire ancienne’s chronicle of noble cities razed to the ground by the forces of non-believers, they could hardly be faulted for not looking much beyond their own particular condition when illustrating textual events which so strongly echoed their own. According to Buchthal and Folda, there were few pictorial precedents for ­representing most of this classical and mythological material in the Christian West. Artists therefore had to come up with their own pictorial programmes, based in part on available missals, psalters, and Byzantine and western European models, especially those coming from Paris, where many of the artists had been trained, and perhaps as well on simple observation.59 Many of the scenes they illustrate resonate with their own contemporary experience of waiting and hoping and believing, against all odds, that salvation was imminent, as well as with the pagan and biblical antecedents that they knew from their earlier work. Folda has noted that the first illustrations in manuscripts of William of Tyre’s Histoire d’Outremer were done shortly after the second fall of Jerusalem in 1244. Following that pattern, it seems likely that the Histoire ancienne manuscripts done in Acre between 1260 and 1290 could also be expected to reflect, however indirectly, the city’s accumulating woes (see Folda  2012, 138). Scenes of betrayal and warfare, death, prophecy, and triumph over adversity are matched by visions of secure governance and heroism against superior odds, as the concurrent streams of history converge and branch off into different, perspectival views of human history.60 Neither straight tragedy nor triumphalist declarations of mastery (like those that followed the First Crusade), these manuscripts convey the full range of conflicting history: interpretation of the events portrayed depend upon where the viewers situate themselves in relation to the past, present, or future. As Rosa María Rodríguez Porto has argued, the illuminations to these manuscripts suggest what she calls intervisualities—that is, the process of reading from text to event, or text to text—as being comparable to the same way that intertextualities are approached by literary historians: ‘Instead of considering . . . images only as the consequence of miniaturists copying from older exemplars, . . . we should scrutinise their role as 59  Rodríguez Porto agrees: ‘It was not until the middle of the thirteenth century . . . that artists began to depict pagan heroes in chivalric fashion. . . . [B]ut the challenge for miniaturists . . . was the absence of an iconographic tradition, except that of biblical illustration’ (2013, 61). 60  Buchthal 1957, 72. Buchthal hypothesises that Dijon 562 and the other three Acre manuscripts were following a now lost Parisian or northern French (Picardy, Arras) manuscript that might have been available to them in their Acre scriptorium. This model has never come to light, however, and Buchthal admits that they seem also to have been following prototypes inherited from a variety of other traditions, such as the Roman d’Alexandre, in the case of the account of Alexander, or a fifthcentury manuscript that he has located for the suicide of Dido. He was particularly impressed with the ingenuity of the illuminations dealing with mythological material in this manuscript since such subjects were rarely illustrated before the end of the thirteenth century, though he found the artistic quality of the execution somewhat lacking. Nonetheless, he expressed somewhat grudging admiration and, more recently, Maraszak 2013 has carried this discussion forward.

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148  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad bearers and catalysers of memories, along with the mechanisms that govern their creation, mutation, and migration from the realms where they were first formulated’ (2013, 57).

Illuminations Let us look more closely at a few of the miniatures from MS Dijon 562 to test what we have been saying. The miniature of the Tower of Babel (f. 9r; Figure 4.1) provides an interesting view of construction materials (and a racy tunic),61 including a prominent axe in the foreground, as does the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (f. 23r; Figure 4.2).

Figure 4.1.  Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 9r, detail

61  For more on the importance of clothing in these Acre illuminations, see Maraszek  2015 and Ruhland 2019.

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History, Time, and Empire  149

Figure 4.2.  Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 23r

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150  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad This latter image refers to one of the stories that most exercises our author, prompting a verse moralization dedicated to the horrors of sodomy; found in BnF fr. 20125, this is one of the verse moralizations to be retained in prose in Dijon 562 (ff. 21r–21v). The miniature here (see Figure 4.2) focuses not on the sinners, however, and not on their punishment directly, but on the destruction of the city, the walls collapsing in on themselves at the urging of the avenging angel, and on Lot’s wife, incapable of not turning to see what she is leaving behind. The Babel and Sodom miniatures and the building of Rome (f. 130v) must surely have called to mind the images of local castles built and then ripped to the ground and burnt in the Latin Kingdom over the previous decades (see Figure 4.3).62 The nearby fortified crusader castles of Toron and Beaufort had fallen in 1244 and 1268; Antioch fell in 1268 and Montfort in 1271, to say nothing of the mayhem within the city of Acre and the destruction of the imposing Genoese tower.

Figure 4.3.  Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 130v 62  Many of these fortifications have since been partially rebuilt and are now under study by arch­ aeo­logic­al teams. See ‘The Fortifications of the Crusader Period: News’, http://www.crusader-castles. com/news.html, accessed 2 March 2019, for updates on ongoing reconstruction projects. On war damage, see, for example, McNearney 2017 or, on Acre harbour, Galili et al. 2010.

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History, Time, and Empire  151 The story of Oedipus and of Thebes also provided a particularly rich field of visual imagery to exploit, given its emphasis on internecine war, prophecy, and misunderstanding: on f. 67v Oedipus meets the sphinx, who delivers him his riddle, and this is followed by the combat of his fratricidal sons, the twins Polynices and Eteocles (f. 70v). Two other illustrations, the Alexander miniature of the emperor on his knee before the talking tree (f. 181v) as it warns him that he will never gain access to its lands, and Aeneas taking his leave of the grieving Dido (f. 114r) might also have had some specific resonance for a Latin Kingdom audience (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5). A final example of Acre illumination may give a more optimistic view. Joachim da Fiore had claimed in his prophetic writings that the second age of man would be one in which justice and law ruled over an imperfect society, an era that would last until the reign of freedom began in 1260. Those who believed in Joachim’s prophecies may have taken some comfort in the fact that Acre had clearly turned towards justice and legal tracts in those final years, and that alone might have held out some promise that the third age was still on its way. The various Assises, or law collections, of the period are some of the most remarkable texts produced in Acre, and they are seen today by legal and textual scholars as far more advanced and sophisticated than most such documents being produced in European ­centres. Clearly valued by their patrons, their copying seems to have been something of an industry, and there remains extant a series of important manuscripts that illustrate these interests.63 Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, as already mentioned, provides one impressive example. Produced in 1282, and illuminated by the Paris-Acre master, a Parisian-trained illuminator from a workshop that produced a whole series of extant manuscripts, including the Histoire ancienne in London, BL, Additional MS 15268, Chantilly 433 includes the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad herennium, both attributed to Cicero.64 It is signed by John of Antioch, who had translated the texts for William of St Stephen, a jurist and Hospitaller knight from Acre, in 1282 (Minervini  1995, 155–72). According to Folda, that makes this manuscript ‘the only extant illuminated secular codex yet identified that is clearly dated and localised [and] . . . documented to have been done in the Crusader capital’ (Folda 2005, 412). It is also the earliest translation into French of any rhetorical manuscript, other than some selections from the

63  These manuscripts form the most complete body of legal texts found in the records of any c­ ulture or government from the Middle Ages and include the manuscripts of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor discussed in Chapter 2. 64  Zinelli 2007, 7–69 notes that this manuscript and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 2024 of Brunetto Latini share similarities in details of the decoration. BnF fr. 2024 is thought to have been made in northern France (Picardy, Arras) or in Provence, in imitation of the Parisian style, though that style might also have passed through the Latin Kingdom, as shown by his linguistic analysis. Two other manuscripts which are also cited as possibly related are Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 1533 and 19166, both done in Paris but influenced by the style of the Hospitaller Master. See Folda 1976, 12.

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152  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 4.4.  Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 181v

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History, Time, and Empire  153

Figure 4.5.  Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 562, f. 114r

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154  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 4.6.  Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 13r (cliché CNRS-IHRT, © Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condée)

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History, Time, and Empire  155 Tresor of Brunetto Latini.65 Beautifully illuminated (see Figure 4.6) with various scenes recounted in the De inventione, it begins with a historiated initial showing on the top and bottom of a double-decker design the effects of good and bad

Figure 4.7.  Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 9v (cliché CNRS-IHRT, © Bibliothèque et archives du musée Condée) 65  This John is thought also to have been the translator of Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia imperialia. See Minervini 1995, 167.

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156  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 4.8.  Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 11v (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433, f. 9v)

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History, Time, and Empire  157 rhetoric on a community: factions battle one another and destroy the city in the top one, while they dialogue in peace in the other. The manuscript also includes exquisite filigreed lettering, a speciality of Acre manuscripts, and two intricate diagrams: the first of the branches of knowledge, beginning with philosophy; the second of what the manuscript calls ‘la reson civile’, namely the various branches of rhetoric (see Figures 4.7 and 4.8). These two miniatures represent another aspect of Acre: a determination to formalize and institutionalize a new civic ethic that would go beyond the practices of the kingdoms and feudal entities in the West, and that testify to a craving for order, intricacy, and sophistication.66 Buchthal claimed years ago that ‘as soon as St Louis and his entourage had left the country, Acre reverted to its role of a provincial outpost of Western civilisation situated at the extremes of the Christian world’ (1957, 78). In the twenty-first century, it is quite another image that prevails: that of a congregation of international artists, catering to commercial trade and local aristocratic interests, trying their best to reflect and make sense of the violent and mercantile world in which they somehow survived longer than the odds might have suggested. To quote Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, speaking of a different context, Acre was a place ‘where versions of the past and future (of persons, collectives, and things) assume[d] present form in relation to events, political needs, available forms and emotional dispositions’.67 Past and future assuming present form is another way of saying ‘writing history’; and universal history, replete with anachronism and temporal dislocation, was a way forward for those dislocated souls who found themselves in the desperately fragile en­vir­on­ment of Acre in its final years. To see themselves as part of a wider network must have offered some relief, one in which their dilemmas could be seen in perspective, in which their God could be felt even when not heard, and in which their religious and political identities could be mapped onto earlier models, bib­lical and secular, regardless of temporal distance. Such histories fed as well into universalist dreams of reconquest and reunion with the sacred, feeding the prophetic tone of contemporary commentators and allowing readers to see themselves as pioneers in a utopian space in which they would eventually prevail against all odds. That did not come to pass, of course, but we are fortunate that they left for us a record of their yearning in the form of French-language manuscripts, manuscripts that travelled and were marked, and which left for us, in those cryptic markings, a trace of their universalist dreams.

66  Folda’s research over the past forty years makes the point convincingly that these are not just slightly debased copies of Parisian models, as some had characterized them, but work that would have appealed to a sophisticated and intellectually engaged audience. 67  Hirsch and Stewart 2005, 262.

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5

The Movement of Books Two Manuscript Studies

In the previous chapter, we looked at how a specific environment may reshape and recalibrate a textual tradition, taking it places where it might never have expected to go or pushing its implications to their furthest limits. The text of the Histoire ancienne will mean differently in Acre from its homologue in Flanders; and its manuscript witnesses add to that difference by encoding subtle environmental factors or overt artistic choices that orient its reading toward its presumed audience. Those who had spent time in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem would likely have seen in such manuscripts things that might have escaped the notice of  readers in Flanders. Individual manuscripts can shape and reshape textual ­traditions, often by combining them with other texts; and this, in turn, can orient them toward other uses, other audiences, marking them with details of ownership, place, or culture along the way.1 When such manuscripts migrate, they accumulate new contexts for reading, new associations with libraries and collections, possibly even new spaces within their folios for markings, additions, and illumination programmes, all of which can reconfigure the paradigms within which they had been read but never eradicate entirely the evidence of their earlier wanderings, readers, and uses. Whilst the previous chapter looked at Acre manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne, manuscripts which imply distance, movement, and perhaps a tinge of the exotic without even necessarily moving great distances themselves, this chapter will look at two manuscripts in French which clearly moved considerable distances for ­reasons of connoisseurship and prestige, though in different directions and perhaps in rather different ways. In the first part of this chapter this movement and mixing will be addressed materially, in the form of a single Tristan en prose manuscript, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 5667E. This is a manuscript made up of two distinct parts, an earlier, late-thirteenth-century section from northern France/the southern Low Countries and a later, fourteenth-century Italian one which precedes it. The two parts were deliberately conjoined and fashioned into a single codex in northern Italy, probably at the Visconti court in Milan or Pavia. In the second part of the chapter the question of movement and mixing will be 1  Zinelli  2007 offers an interesting case study along these lines of texts moving from the Latin Kingdom to the Veneto. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  159 addressed more textually, by considering the celebrated BL manuscript, Royal MS 20 D 1. This manuscript was made in Naples in the 1330s but was then taken to France, probably via Spain, at some point before 1380, where it became the direct or indirect source of subsequent copies of the so-called second redaction of the Histoire ancienne. While our approach remains committed to offering a holistic reading of these manuscripts within their various geo-cultural contexts, most of the evidence for the travels and understanding of these manuscripts resides in their material presence, the movement of the artefact but also of the tradition. This can be reflected in the touch and markings, erasures and additions of those who owned them after they left the scriptorium but also in the complex intertextual relations that a tradition may entertain with its own divergent witnesses.

Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5667E Milan was the largest city under Visconti family rule (1277–1447) in what is now Italy, numbering 200,000 residents according to the chronicler/scholar Bonvesino da la Riva (c. 1240–c. 1313)—double the size of the next largest Visconti city and one of the largest cities in the Italian peninsula, alongside Venice and Florence. Bonvesino’s account of the city lists 6,000 drinking fountains, 300 public ovens, ten large hospitals, forty copiers of manuscripts, and seventy teachers running private schools.2 Milan stood then, as now, at a crossroads of north and south, east and west, and was clearly an intellectual, as well as a commercial and financial centre. The Milanese dialect spoken at the time constituted a branch of the western Romance languages, closely affiliated with French, Occitan, Romansch, and others of the Gallo-Italian variety.3 The extravagant, skilful, and ruthless Visconti ruled the city and area for almost 200 years, beginning with their insinuation into circles of power in the late thirteenth century and ending with the death of Filippo Maria Visconti (1412–47) (Cariboni 2008). One branch of the family took control of Pisa in the twelfth century, before moving on to Gallura in Sardinia; the other stayed in the north and gained control of Milan in 1277 with Archbishop Ottone Visconti’s ousting of the ruling Della Torre family, essentially a victory of the lower nobility and mercantile class over an arrogant and established aristocratic power.4 Filippo’s death, and lack of a male heir, marked the end of direct family rule 177 years later. At that point, the exhausted residents of the

2  Chiesa 2009, ch. 3 and further Chamberlin 1965, 11–14. 3  According to Bonvesino, Milanese ‘was the easiest of all languages to speak and to comprehend’ (Chiesa 2009, III, I). 4  Ottone’s infuence spread in the ecclesiastic as well as the secular political sphere (to the extent that these are distinct). His nephew from Piacenza, Teobaldo, was elected Pope Gregory X in 1271, and it was he who sanctioned the Polo expedition back to Kublai Khan when Marco, his father, and uncle met with him in Acre shortly after his election (Chapter 4).

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160  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad city returned to their pre-despot roots, instituting a brief and undistinguished response in the form of the short-lived Ambrosian republic (1447–50), very much a rejection of the final dour years of Filippo’s reign. That ended with a power grab on the part of Filippo’s son-in-law, Francesco I, and the Sforza ruled for most of the next century (1450–1535). The Visconti remain of great interest to scholars today, partly because of their  successful rise—from lower Ghibelline nobility in the small commune of Lago de Maggiore to becoming the hegemonic rulers or despots over much of the Lombard plain—and partly because that rise and fall is emblematic of the swing between despotism and communal republicanism that marked the high and late Middle Ages throughout most of northern Italy (including Tuscany). The family was acutely aware of its need to establish its credentials and was therefore keen to create and maintain an aura of legitimacy, authenticity, refinement, and power in the volatile mix of Milan’s dependencies and amongst the noble families who claimed for themselves hereditary privilege. Their project involved a good deal of cultural collecting, architectural grandeur, and rebranding. Manuscripts like Aberystwyth 5667E can be seen as having played a part in that process. Family records were largely destroyed in 1447 with the death of Filippo Maria and the institution of the republic, followed by the Sforza coup, so research has been somewhat blocked. If we move back two generations, however, to the figure of Gian Galeazzo Visconti (1351–1402), son of Galeazzo II (c. 1320–78), we can follow the rise of the family and their external efforts to strike fear and awe in their opponents. Gian Galeazzo took over as signore of his father’s lands in 1378 but shared power with his uncle, Bernabò (1354–85), a formidable figure who was not about to cede to his young nephew’s demands. Gian Galeazzo set out to build himself a reputation for military might, administrative acumen, and artistic patronage to rival or better Bernabò’s, and did so with aplomb. When, in 1385, he invited his uncle and two cousins for a meeting, supposedly to ease tensions, he arrested them on the spot and imprisoned his uncle, later poisoning him, and pulling off in the process what has been called ‘the most spectacular coup d’état in medieval Italian history’ (Black 2009, 53). Gian Galeazzo thereafter turned to a quest for legitimacy and, towards that end, an official title. When he was finally crowned duke of Milan in 1395, he was the first of his family to hold any title other than signore, a full 118 years after the family had come to power. Ruthlessly ambitious, he burnished his reputation as a cultural and artistic patron until his death. The construction of the Duomo of Milan, the Certosa di Pavia, the university, and the Visconti Castle in Pavia, a city which the Visconti considered to be their intellectual and cultural capital, all carry his stamp. In addition, he kept his eye on the realm of letters and was largely responsible for the Visconti library’s collection of scientific treatises and illuminated manuscripts, also housed in Pavia at the time.5 5  On which, see Chittolini 1979, 254–91, Lubkin 1994, Zaninetta 2013.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  161 Cultural capital was key to the Visconti quest for the sheen of nobility and legitimacy, as Gian Galeazzo well understood, but so were political ties, and the Visconti concentrated their energies largely on the influential powers north of the Alps and on intellectual figures from the peninsula who carried with them enormous cultural prestige. Petrarch, for example, resided during Gian Galeazzo’s childhood at his father’s court (1353–61) and was even in attendance in Paris at the 1360 marriage of the nine-year-old Gian Galeazzo to Isabel of France, daughter of the French king, John II, the Good. By the mid fourteenth century, the family’s negotiations had paid off, and they were linked to major noble and royal families through marriages arranged by Gian Galeazzo’s father and by Bernabò. Bernabò turned north to the Hapsburgs, the dukes of Bavaria, and the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire, while Galeazzo II turned to England and France, marry­ ing his son and heir to Isabel and his daughter Violante to Lionel of Antwerp, son of Edward III of England, an occasion which brought together Petrarch, Chaucer, and Eustache Deschamps, all in attendance, though none marked the occasion in writing (Lubkin 1994, 12–17). With the ascendance of the Visconti, aristocratic rank, aside from a very few ancient feudal families, was essentially determined by the Visconti themselves. Though their own family name reflected simply the fact that one of them had once served as a viscount, it was they who ultimately became the arbiters of family glory. In the late thirteenth century, Archbishop Ottone Visconti had compiled a list of some 200 names, gathered from the nobility and the merchant class, from which henceforth the ordinaries of the Metropolitan Church would be chosen. In doing so, he not only established the Visconti claim to a noble title but established as well the nobility of each of the other names listed. His success is attested to by the fact that in the fifteenth century the dukes of Milan were still establishing familial aristocratic credentials by adding names to this by now ancient list (Lubkin 1994, 13). As the dates of Visconti family rule (1277–1447) correspond almost exactly to the period in which French prose romance manuscripts were moving into northern Italy as well as covering the heyday of their local production in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we should not be surprised to learn that the family collected manuscripts and engaged in the manuscript trade with a view to heightening their prestige through association with legendary heroes and with a view to solidifying their claim to absolute political control. Not only did the Visconti hold one of the largest collections of manuscripts in Europe, but many of those manuscripts were associated with ‘France’ and ‘England’, and there were ample opportunities for cultural exchange through gift-giving. The ceremony at which Gian Galeazzo’s sister, Violante, was married to the English prince was sufficiently lavish to leave its mark in Milanese legend. Links to France were not limited to the crown. By virtue of his marriage to Isabel, Gian Galeazzo was count of Vertus, in Champagne, and it was during those years that the poet Eustache

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162  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Deschamps—a native of Vertus who often puns on the name when referring to his ‘virtuous’ self—was supported by his patron, Gian Galeazzo’s and Isabel’s daughter, Valentina, the subsequent heir to the property. Valentina (d. 1408) married her first cousin, Louis of Orléans, brother of Charles VI of France, and was the mother of the poet and duke Charles d’Orléans (held captive in England 1415–40). Her cousin, also Valentina (d. 1393), was queen consort of Cyprus and titular queen consort of Jerusalem, thus assuring a Visconti presence in the saga of the mythical Latin Kingdom. Gian Galeazzo’s ambitions were amply rewarded. By the time of his death, he had expanded his holdings and titles considerably: lord of Verona, Vicenza, and Padua, he had also conquered Florence and Bologna shortly before his unexpected death. His new Lombard empire, extending almost the full length of the Po valley, disintegrated shortly after due to family infighting. Gian Maria Visconti, Gian Galeazzo’s first son by his second marriage, to his cousin Caterina, took over as duke of Milan but was assassinated a decade later, in 1412, and was succeeded by his younger brother Filippo Maria. Filippo married Beatrice Lascaris di Tenda but had her beheaded for adultery in 1418. When he died without an heir, as we have seen, the title passed eventually to Francesco I Sforza, husband of Filippo’s i­ llegitimate daughter, Bianca Maria. The Visconti had lost their vaunted title, and power moved directly to the equally ruthless and infamous Sforza. The prose Tristan, about which we have already spoken at length in Chapter 2, is one of those chameleon texts which travelled widely in the Middle Ages and was adapted for its audiences to reflect local tastes and contemporary historical concerns. Initially composed c. 1215–35, it moved from being an elaboration of the traditional story of doomed love transmitted by the twelfth-century verse texts of Beroul and Thomas d’Angleterre—and thereafter by Gottfried von Strasbourg, Eilhart von Oberge, and the Scandinavians—to a chivalric romance in the mould of the prose Lancelot and a model for its later prequel, Guiron le courtois.6 Italy played a major role in the development and dissemination of the prose Tristan. Twenty-six of the more than eighty manuscripts now extant (including fragments) were compiled there,7 and the earliest known witness of the tradition (dated 1278), Paris, BnF, MS fr. 750, was probably copied in Outremer (Acre or Antioch) or the south of Italy.8 Only ten of the extant manuscripts can be considered ‘complete’ in  that they tell a more or less uninterrupted tale from prologue to ­epilogue; but  there is still no universally accepted view as to how the different

6  See further our Introduction, p. 23. The terminus a quo for the Tristan is supplied by the Vulgate Lancelot-Grail cycle, which was known to the author(s) of the Tristan in its entirety. See Stones 1977. 7  On the circulation of the Tristan material in Italy and Italian manuscripts of the Tristan en prose, see Delcorno Branca 1998a, 49–76, Cigni 2003 and 2014. 8  On this question, see Cigni 1999, 41 n. 26.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  163 families of manuscripts interrelated or which version preceded others.9 According to Emmanuèle Baumgartner, there was an attempt to produce a homogeneous cycle with the Tristan, one that involved a more seamless story­line than that provided by the loosely connected components of the Vulgate cycle. She saw behind its composition an attempt at ‘expand[ing] a narrative from within its own time constraints’ (Baumgartner 2006, 330). The result was ‘a power­ful story-producing machine’ which, in tearing Tristan away from the stasis and pleasures of the Joyeuse Garde, launched him on a series of new adventures that would integrate him fully into the Round Table (Baumgartner 2006, 330). The prose Tristan maintains the priority of the individual over the social networks in which he finds himself operating, as in the earlier verse narratives, but it establishes this theme through an incessant series of struggles involving chivalric rivals and knightly honour. Set in the poisoned environment of a court in which, at least according to some of the later manuscripts, King Marc has killed his brother and is driven by hatred for his nephew, the text provides a damning portrait of royalty. Here we have a king who is so deluded about his own merit that he kills the nephew who has saved his life and thereby dooms the kingdom of Loonois to infamy.10 To modern readers, the prose Tristan is reminiscent of a Game of Thrones but for a northern Italian audience; it is a tale that cannot have failed to be read as echoing the grimy details of intra-family violence: a tale that can go on and on, interweaving generations, perpetuating paranoia and delusion, repeating motifs in different scenarios and characters, sprinkled with a shocking amount of violence. Aberystwyth 5667E offers an opportunity to study a Tristan manuscript which travelled from northern France/the Low Countries to northern Italy and carries traces both of its origins and its repackaging. It is not the easiest manuscript to study, not yet being available in digitized form, and has not received much scholarly attention.11 Housed today in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, it is a huge volume (340 × 240mm, 526 folios) bound in a late nineteenth-century binding of dark green morocco leather, tooled in gold, with marbled endpapers pasted onto parchment flyleaves. The volume is labelled appropriately ‘Les aventures de Tristan’ and consists of two parts that were put together in the fifteenth century. 9  For a summary of scholarly opinion, see Baumgartner  2006 and Grange  2015, as well as Baumgartner’s foundational studies from 1993 and 1998. 10  Thus Damien de Carné’s observation (2010, 567) that the prose Tristan offers a profoundly pessimistic portrait of knighthood and chivalric culture, one that aligns it more with the Mort le roi Artu than with the Lancelot. Marc’s murder of his own brother and the attempt at revenge on the part of his nephew, Alixandre, son of the deceased, is part of a sequence that is found in the manuscripts that Baumgartner (1975) called Version IV of the tradition. This may well be a late addition (fifteenthcentury), but it provides a taste of the level of treachery and violence that predominate throughout and a possible reminiscence of Gian Galeazzo’s murder of his uncle and the sons’ subsequent attempts to reclaim their father’s lost lands. 11  See Ker 1977, 22 for a brief notice.

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164  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Part  1, produced in the latter half of the fifteenth century in northern Italy, is made up of eighty-five folios of text followed by three blank folios, and covers Löseth’s §§ 171–247. Part  2, on the other hand, is a late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century collection of 434 folios (ff. 89–523), probably from what is now north-eastern France (but perhaps even from imperial lands—no definitive site has been suggested), full of chivalric illumination, and covering Löseth §§ 252a–282a and §§ 338b–571.12 Further details of this composite manuscript include: • The 526 parchment folios are numbered up to 524 but include an additional two blank folios numbered 132A and 136A. • The writing block on ff. 1–88 is c. 240 × 170–175 mm and on ff. 89–524, 235–245 × 170–180 mm. • The writing is in two columns: forty lines in part 1, thirty-eight to forty in part 2. • The volume is bound with one marbled sheet of paper in the front, next to the binding board, which has written on the verso: ‘This ms begins with SS 171 (Löseth, 1891)’ and one sheet of blank parchment at the end. • The rounded, quite conservative script of a couple of the scribes of part 2, and some orthographical traits (sarmon, Tritans, second-person plural verb endings in -oiz), suggest an origin in eastern rather than northern (modern) France. Unsurprisingly, Aberystwyth 5667E includes the interpolated Queste, a standard feature of what Baumgartner (1975) called Version II of the Tristan and one that is present in most manuscripts produced in Italy, a solid indication of its audience’s preference for the glamorization and spiritualization of chivalric ­culture (see Chapter 6, pp. 195–211). There are a number of indicators that the manuscript was once part of the Visconti library in Milan, even though it cannot be identified in any of the surviving records. Then again, as we have seen, most of the records were destroyed at the death of Filippo Maria, in 1447. The earliest events in the most complete versions of the prose Tristan tradition (in narrative chronology: the events preceding the birth of Tristan) are rarely recorded in the twenty-six or so manuscripts produced in Italy.13 Instead, they usually begin after the early material (see Chapter 6, pp. 195–211) and go straight 12  The standard way in the scholarship of referencing textual material in the prose Tristan tradition is to follow Löseth’s numbering of narrative blocks from his analysis of the manuscripts held in Paris (Löseth 1891). 13  For details see the catalogue in Delcorno Branca 1998a, 51–57 and further Delcorno Branca 2011 and Heijkant 2014, 43. However, questions remain as to whether the Viterbo fragment, which Heijkant considers part of a northern Italian production of a prose Tristan manuscript, could equally be from a Rusticiaus (Rustichello) manuscript. Delcorno Branca (1998a and 2011) identifies nine manuscripts as being from Genoa or Pisa. See also Allaire 2002, 13–25.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  165 for the later and more courtly and spiritualizing material in which we can at least speculate that patrons and audiences saw a reflection of their own aspirations. Delcorno Branca identified within this tradition one particular narrative sequence that she considers characteristic of manuscripts produced in Italy. It begins with the rise to power of King Felix of Cornwall, father of Marc, and goes on to relate the marriage of Marc’s sister Helyabel to Meliadus, father of Tristan, before moving on to Tristan’s early adventures in Ireland and Brittany (Löseth 1891, §§ 19–74a; see Delcorno Branca 1998a, 73). Other of the volumes produced in Italy take up the story at an even later stage. Aberystwyth 5667E is one such witness, and so is an example of the ‘modular structure’ identified by Delcorno Branca in which the different witnesses were ‘conditioned by the material that was locally available for this sprawling tale. Copies in circulation were either partial texts, texts with missing episodes, or abbreviated versions resulting from the juxta­pos­ition of non-contiguous episodes’.14 The Italian part of Aberystwyth 5667E (the first part) opens with Löseth § 171, at which point Tristan’s adventures are already well under way (see Figure 5.1). The second portion of the manuscript (ff. 89–524) begins at Löseth § 252a and was probably copied, as we have seen, somewhere in the northeast of France, or perhaps in Burgundy, in the early fourteenth century. It is uncertain whether it made its way to the Visconti court in Milan as a separate manuscript, or as part of a longer manuscript, before its integration into the larger two-part volume we find in Aberystwyth (Delcorno Branca 1998a, 61). Written in gothic script, there are at least four different hands which contributed to the version as we have it, including the incorporated section dealing with the quest for the Holy Grail.15 This second—but earlier—section of the manuscript (part 2), which occupies five-sixths of the total length of 526 folios and which opens on f. 89 (after three blank folios, two of them ruled), is visibly older and springs from a different, northern chivalric aesthetic. Its first folio, though clearly the opening of a new sequence, is not what one expects from the beginning of a manuscript, at least not one as profusely illuminated as this one. There are no illuminations to signify that we are beginning a new text and no historiated initials to announce a new section. It is only at the bottom of the folio that we find a decorative panel, which in fact seems to replicate the one on f. 1r of part 1 (the later, fifteenth-century part) of the manuscript. Both f. 89r and f. 1r feature three shields with multicoloured foliage surrounding them, though the central shield on f. 1r is blank, while the second one is painted. Folio 89r (see Figure 5.2) features in its middle oval the Visconti

14  Heijkant 2014, 46, who draws on Delcorno Branca 1998b, 389–92. 15  The quest section begins at f. 241v with a miniature and continues until f. 523v, with Boors’ return to Camelot. Bogdanow identified the following sequences from this part of the manuscript as having been taken from what some have called the ‘Post-Vulgate Queste’: ff. 241v–263r, 387v–483v, 500r–521v, and 523r. See Bogdanow 1966, 282–3.

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166  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 5.1.  Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f.1r (part 1; fifteenth century). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  167

Figure 5.2.  Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f. 89r (part 2; thirteenth–fourteenth century). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

crest—the biscione, a twisted serpent consuming a small human figure—slightly damaged, but unmistakeable nonetheless (Zaninetta 2013, 143–163). Clearly the opening folios of the two parts are meant to echo one another. Either the artist(s) of the first part of the manuscript used the opening page of the earlier part 2 as his model, which seems unlikely given that the design we see here

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168  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad is stylistically typical of the fifteenth century, or the artist of part 1, having finished his work on the first folio of the newer section of the manuscript, then turned to the opening of the older manuscript which was going to be appended to the newer composition and sought to impose a superficial degree of decorative homogeneity between the two disparate parts being joined together. The latter seems by far the more likely explanation, since the general design of f. 89r is rough in comparison with that of f. 1r. Slightly unbalanced and sitting awkwardly in the space to which it has been consigned, the decoration at the bottom of the page was either impinged upon by the scribe in writing the text or is a later add­ ition. It is therefore entirely possible that the representation of the Visconti arms which are displayed on f. 89r were also once displayed on the shields on f. 1r but were scraped off when the manuscript passed to another owner following the transition of power from the Visconti to the Sforza in 1450. The slightly over-large, intrusive design on f. 89r looks out of place, reinforcing the idea that it was added to the original page close to a century later, hundreds of miles from where the earlier manuscript was made. There are then two pos­si­bil­ ities: either the fifteenth-century Italian artist executing the work simply added to an illumination already present on f. 89r in order to make it appear con­tem­por­an­ eous with the fifteenth-century design of part 1; or he felt the need to rebrand the existing manuscript with a similar design so as to make it appear that both parts made up a single codex belonging to the exalted Visconti collection. In the latter case, this may not have been a simple decision: he may have been asked to conjoin the two sections so as to make the connection appear seamless, one coherent artefact, worthy of a place in the Visconti library. In any case, though this attempt was not entirely successful and the two manuscript parts are easily distinguishable, someone went to some trouble to paper over the cracks. If the illuminator did, in fact, add the encomiastic crest on the first folio that he had inherited (i.e. f. 89r), the work was undercut not only by the rough quality of the workmanship but also by the far greater number and quality of the historiated initials in part 2. These initials, rather than acting simply as beautifying and dec­ ora­tive elements, as they do in part 1, imply a quite different understanding of the purpose of illumination and its relation to the narrative. They comment continually on the story, introducing portraits of the protagonists, battle scenes, and climactic and emotive illustrations of partings and deaths. More than fifty initials in part  2 have been historiated, quite apart from other large initials extending up to ten to twelve lines in height, painted in pink or blue on contrasting background. The pictorial content of the historiated initials appears in orange, blue, rose, and grey on a gold background, and some are further furnished with foliage extensions. On f. 96v, for example, we find a four-line decorated initial with foliate scrollwork infill and decoration extending into a bar on its edge to which an edge-of-text miniature is attached, all in the same palette; or take f. 499v, where we have a historiated letter O

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  169

Figure 5.3.  Aberystwyth, MS 5667E, f. 499v, detail (Marc’s features effaced). By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales

which relates the death scene of Tristan and Iseut, with the murderer, King Marc, looking on (see Figure 5.3). Elsewhere, two-line initials alternate in gold and blue with contrasting blue or red penwork; and on f. 286r we find a large ink and wash drawing of a hybrid beast in the lower margin. In the fifteenth-century part 1, there is no attempt to emulate that sort of illumination. Daniela Delcorno Branco suggested some years ago (1998a, 67) that this late thirteenth/early fourteenth-century manuscript was probably already in the hands of the Visconti when it was taken up, added to, and decorated at the command of the court, but the question remains as to why the subsequent owners, if they had ordered the scraping of the f. 1r crest, allowed the second crest on f. 89r to remain. Could it be that they did not see it, buried as it is in the middle of the manuscript; or could its current appearance, rubbed and a bit indistinct, be the result of a half-hearted attempt to deface? Though we can take the shields in question to signify Visconti possession, or at the very least an attempt to flatter that family, we have already noted that extant inventories of the dukes of Milan apparently do not mention this manuscript. A 1466 inventory of

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170  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the Visconti-Sforza library—probably drawn up shortly after Aberystwyth 5667E underwent its remake—mentions no Tristan manuscripts, though the later inventories of 1488 and 1490 show thirty-three entries dealing with Arthurian material, and any number of those could contain sections of the Tristan (Allaire 2014, 192). Furthermore, Gloria Allaire usefully reminds us that a Latin title in an inventory is not necessarily an indication that the text to which it refers is a Latin-language text. Several of those volumes indicated as Latin could have contained texts in French or other languages (Allaire 2014, 192). Much of what we know about the early Lombard collections comes from the 1426 inventory of the Visconti library in Pavia. Of the 988 titles that are recognizable there, at least ninety are in French, and many of those are illuminated. Thanks to the prestige of these collections, many of these manuscripts are still extant, identifiable, and consultable in major collections around the world.16 Some of this material might have come in the form of gifts: as we have seen, the Visconti were connected with French royalty through marriage and political alliance. Others were commissioned or recast as hybrid artefacts, as we suspect was the case with Aberystwyth 5667E, though the possibility of its having been offered as a gift cannot be ruled out. The presence of these manuscripts in the collection does not necessarily mean that patrons, recipients, or family actually read these books, but it does provide evidence of their interest in maintaining their reputation as collectors of beautiful and prestigious objects and as promotors of wellknown, ideologically charged narratives. It also fits with other data from northern Italian courts that indicate that Arthurian material was highly collectable and among the most popular, not only with patrons but also with those borrowing manuscripts.17 The Gonzaga library at nearby Mantua gives a further indication of what romances and vernacular historical material were being read and held by major Lombard patrons and collectors. D’Arcais (1984) notes that, of the twenty-five manuscripts with Old French texts held at the Marciana library in Venice, twenty-four were acquired through a gift by Giambattista Recanati in 1734, who had originally purchased many of them in 1707 from the last duke of Mantua, Ferdinando Carol Gonzaga. Sixteen of the twenty-four manuscripts donated were later identified as having come from the duke’s collection, of which fourteen were illuminated, including the late thirteenth-century Tristan manuscript, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS francese Z XXIII and the sumptuous late fourteenth-century Histoire ancienne manuscript, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS francese Z II. Though D’Arcais follows the earlier attribution of the Tristan to a Neapolitan workshop, she does acknowledge that it belonged to a larger

16  See Cornish 2015, Kirsch 1991, Pellegrin 1955. 17  Lubkin 1994, 110–11 and Delcorno Branca 1998a, 42.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  171 group of some twenty manuscripts from the same workshop. These manuscripts have since been attributed to a Genoan source (Cigni 1993 and 2007).18 The 1407 inventory of the Gonzaga collection lists sixty-seven French manuscripts amongst the more than 400 mentioned.19 Two of these deal explicitly with the Tristan tradition: one already mentioned, Marciana francese Z XXIII, with the other being London, BL, Additional MS 23929, a later fourteenth-century production, possibly from Padua, which is a twin to Paris, BnF, MS fr. 755. This latter manuscript contains the second part of the Tristan romance, while Additional 23929 contains the first. Both are among the most sumptuously decorated witnesses of the tradition, with BnF fr. 755 alone containing some 320 painted images, fourteen of which display on the arms carried by Palamedes the heraldic crests of two wealthy families, the Dei Danio and the Dei Moleno.20 It has not yet been established that this manuscript was actually commissioned by the Sforza–Visconti, but all signs point in that direction; it later travelled to Blois, having been confiscated by Louis XII during his Milan campaign of 1500.21 The accounts of the Este library at Ferrara are less complete, but they also include four Tristan manuscripts, not yet identified (Heijkant 2014, 45). It is likely that some of these manuscripts consisted of anthologies of sorts, in which bits of the Tristan are juxtaposed with favourite scenes from other chivalric romance, as discussed in Chapter 2. Manuscripts such as these circulated freely between the east and west of northern Italy but also between Naples and Tuscany in the period when Boccaccio, for instance, was spending time in both; and they often moved as well from collections of merchants and the urban elite to the princely libraries. The 1325 will of Filipone Bonacoli, for example, mentions six codices that were being held in pawn to a Florentine banker, among them a copy of the Tristan; three years later all of these were the hands of the Gonzaga (Heijkant 2014, 45). At some point after Aberystwyth 5667E’s stay with the Visconti, the manuscript moved into the collection of the de la Rochefoucauld family, illustrating how such French material could move back into the sphere of the French kingdom in a slightly different form. On the first folio of the manuscript, 1r, and on f. 524v, the final folio on which there is writing, can be found the stamp of the library of the Château de la Roche Guyon, one of the de la Rochefoucauld libraries. The manuscript was subsequently sold at the Roche Guyon sale in Paris on 2 July 1927, 18 Seven volumes of the Tristan were produced in the same Genoa-Pisa atelier at the end of the  thirteenth century: Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 446 E, London, BL, Harley MS  4389,  Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS α.T.3.11, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1463, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, MS francese Z XXIII, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Ashburnham 123. 19  Though, again, some of the manuscripts given Latin titles may have been in French. See Braghirolli, Meyer, and Paris 1880; also Allaire 2014, 192, and Morgan 2009, I, 13. 20  These occur on ff. 12r, 13r, 32r, 32v, 34v, 38v, 47r, 47v, 48r, 51r, 52r, 56r, 56v, and 57r. 21  Avril and Gousset 2005, 26. Louis was, through his father, a grandson of Valentina Visconti, and to many it seemed that he actually had a greater claim to the dukedom than the notorious Ludovico (Il Moro) Sforza.

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172  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad in lot 9, to Jean Bloch, domiciled at 17 avenue d’Eylau, Paris, and it was thereafter sold on his behalf at Sotheby’s on 12 December 1927, numbered lot 176. It was at that sale that it was purchased for the National Library of Wales.22 To return to the textual construction of Aberystwyth 5667E, the (later produced) part 1 opens with Löseth § 171, a fairly common break in the story, though not one that imposes itself from a narratological perspective. It is not clear why the preference to begin at § 171 was frequent amongst compilers, but the simplest explanation is not any particular decision to eliminate earlier episodes but that a widely disseminated model, which served as the basis of several copies, began at that point. Tristan is here at the peak of his powers, and Yvain has just been ambushed by Marc and left for dead. As points of comparison, London, BL, Additional MS 5474, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 349, and part  2 of Geneva, Bodmer Collection MS 164 all begin at that same point; and London, BL, Royal MS 20 D II no doubt would have done so as well had its opening leaf not been lost. It appears, then, that the makers of Aberystwyth 5667E’s part 1 took up an earlier manuscript (the present part 2) that included Löseth §§ 252a–282a and 338b–571, and then (in part 1) copied an account of events that preceded those sequences, right up to those that took place at Arthur’s court in London, ending with Löseth § 247. As Cigni has noted (2012, 264), the sequence §§ 252a–282a, dealing with the departure of Marc and Tristan, the former’s duplicity, and the latter’s connivance with Iseut, also appears in the northern Italian manuscript Paris, BnF, MS fr. 94 and the Tuscan manuscript Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12599. This would suggest that this sequence, originally from a manuscript of northern French making, was adopted quickly by Italian scribes. Furthermore, its inclusion is one of the signs of what Baumgartner called a Version II manuscript, one that also includes the quest for the Holy Grail. Thus, though the Lombard part  1 is visibly independent of the northern French part 2, it is still peripherally connected, linked to it narratologically in that both are accessing different sections of the same tradition that can be found in many other manuscripts. An adjunct to all of this is the fact that much of this material may also have been circulating independently as discrete incidents or segments. The notes accompanying the manuscript at the National Library of Wales observe that a translation into Italian of the episodes that make up Löseth §§ 338b–386—the arrival of Tristan and Iseut at the Joyeuse Garde and the tournament at Louvezerp—may have been available in Italy from as early as 1250. Possible evidence of such circulation may include the presence of these same episodes in the Tristano Riccardiano, a translation into Tuscan Italian from the late thirteenth century thought to have been made in a merchant milieu, and also in the Tristano

22  Our source is the notes that accompany the manuscript at the National Library of Wales.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  173 Panciatichiano, an early fourteenth-century translation into Pisan/Luccan.23 These episodes make up ff. 123r–237r in the northern French part  2 of Aberystwyth 5667E. That these folios present a portion of the text that is autonomous with regard to the episodes that come before and after is not surprising. Northern French/Low Countries and Italian manuscripts alike often juxtapose sequences (or episodes) that have no clear relation to one another, a move that is facilitated by the prose romance style, which often interlaces apparently unconnected episodes. It has not been determined whether the compiler of part 2 of Aberystwyth 5667E used northern French material as its source—probably the case since the manuscript is thought to have been compiled somewhere in northern France/ Low countries area—or whether the compiler had at hand another collection of familiar sequences from an Italian source from which to pick and choose. The first scenario is surely more likely but the popularity of the Löseth segments §§  338b–386 in Italy could also have something to do with the choice. That suggests that manuscript makers may have been responding already to the tastes of audiences/patrons, even perhaps producing manuscripts for distinct, and distant, markets. Although a (not entirely successful) attempt was made to blend the decorative style of f. 1 and f. 89, there is no disguising the fact that the extensive and regular decoration throughout part 1 is also quite different from that of part 2. Folio 1r in fact sets the tone for this. The first historiated initial, at the very beginning of the text (see the reproduction of 1r on page 166, above), extends over nine lines and shows two pink towers on a gold background, one round and one rectangular, both with crenellation and spires, linked by a staircase and patterns of flowers and foliage; the illustration has no obvious relation to the narrative and in any case is  not naturalistic since the towers, flowers, and foliage float in the air. A tiny bearded man, dressed in red and blue, peers out round the back of the initial on the left-hand side, enhancing the surreal effect. The foliage and flowers are painted red, green, and blue on a yellow background, all touched with white, and the text block is surrounded by a full border of foliage and flowers in the same palette. There are many eight-line decorated initials reprising these colours on a gold background, as well as frequent two-line initials in alternating red and blue with contrasting pen-work in purple and red. On the second folio, the first illuminated initial gives a further indication of the whimsical appeal of the decoration to follow—decoration that consists of exquisite calligraphy and colour but offers no comment on the story through pictorial interpretation. In every sense, part 1 is making a statement about the modernity of its style and approach. Historiated 23  See Heijkant 2014, 50–51. Other manuscripts which include this sequence are Paris, BnF, MS fr. 755 (where it occupies the whole manuscript), Paris, BnF, MS fr. 760 (where a rubric summarizes the sequence as if it were an independent unit of the narrative), and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12599. It is also in the Tristano corsiniano, in the ‘Estense’ prose Tristan in the Vatican Library MS Barb. Lat. 3536, and in the Tavola Ritonda. Our thanks to Huw Grange for a discussion of this material.

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174  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad initials seem to have been considered redolent of an earlier aesthetic, no longer appropriate for a Visconti manuscript in which illumination is cut off from narrative, a beauty-enhancing element rather than a narrative aid. Yet it is decidedly the second part of the manuscript which provides the chivalric gloss and the historical glow with which the Visconti were so anxious to be associated. Aristocratic patronage in general in the north of Italy seems to favour in French romance its narrative drive, its portrayal of heroics and leadership, and very possibly its subtle allusions to the messy doings of contemporary politics (see Chapter 2). Aberystwyth 5667E is not a manuscript which could be confused with an ecclesiastical, philosophical, or grammatical text. It is both too beautiful and too abstract, too historical and too contemporary, to point in just one direction. Meant to be consumed for the hedonistic pleasure one can take in historical material rather than the moralistic or exemplary reading of history found in some other romance presentations, it stands as an object at the crossroads between history and politics, a sign of age and authenticity married to a contemporary celebration of power and taste.

London, BL, Royal MS 20 D 1 This sumptuously illustrated manuscript was made in Naples in the late 1330s, either for, or in the orbit of, the court of Robert of Anjou, the Wise (r. 1309–43), king of Naples. By 1380 it was in France, where it had been taken as a gift for the king, Charles V, from Henry II, king of Castile and León. It had probably found its way to Spain shortly after 1367 as part payment for the ransom sent to the previous king, Peter I, the Cruel (Henry II’s half-brother and his rival for the throne) by Joanna, Robert’s granddaughter and successor, in order to secure the release of her third husband, James of Mallorca, who had been captured at the battle of Nájera (1367). If this is how the book came to Spain, it would have passed into the hands of Henry II, along with many other items of value, when he defeated Peter, who was killed in 1369.24 This book therefore has a notable trajectory, but it is also, as we will see, a remarkable work of art as well as being quite exceptional in demonstrably occupying a crucial position in the textual tradition to which it belongs. It is almost unheard of to be able to point to a specific manuscript as the source of a particular version of a text, but Royal 20 D 1 contains what, for want of a better word, is the Ur-text of the so-called second redaction of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. This does not necessarily mean that Royal 20 D 1 is the ‘original’ copy of the second redaction, of course, but rather that it is the point of origin for all subsequent copies.

24  For a summary, see Barbieri 2005, 10–12 and 2007, 15–16.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  175 This second redaction of the Histoire ancienne begins with the story of Thebes, and, although with the exception of the Troy section (on which more in a moment) it follows the text of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne fairly closely,25 the transmission of this material without the extensive biblical material with which the first redaction opens is transformative: no longer a sacred universal history, the Histoire ancienne becomes a history of Europe focused on clas­ sic­al, and particularly Trojan, history.26 In the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne, Troy is a staging post in the story and is quickly left behind; in the second redaction, Troy is at the heart of the narrative. This new emphasis is achieved in two ways. First, in addition to the biblical material having been removed, the Histoire ancienne also loses its Alexander section and its final section on Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, which means that the direct movement from Troy to Rome is uninterrupted by the presence of the great Greek hero and also that the amount of material devoted to the Romans is shorter. Secondly, and more im­port­ ant­ly, the relatively brief translation into French of Dares that makes up the Troy section in the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne is replaced with a much longer version of the Troy narrative. This fifth mise en prose of the verse Roman de Troie, known as Prose 5, is derived only indirectly from Benoît de Sainte-Maure: long passages lifted directly and often verbatim from two prior mises en prose (Prose 1 and Prose 3, both late thirteenth-century, composed in the Morea and Italy respectively) are spliced together, and these far outweigh passages drawn directly from Benoît. In addition, a few passages may have been written spe­cif­ic­ al­ly for this context, deriving from a variety of sources, and then loose translations of fourteen of Ovid’s Heroides are famously embedded, sometimes carefully and sometimes a little more jerkily, into the Troy narrative so as to offer extensive first-person perspectives in the form of letters from a range of female characters (and a couple of men), some of whom are somewhat marginal figures in the Roman de Troie.27 This foregrounding of first-person perspectives is further 25  Barbieri’s comparison of the rubrics of Royal 20 D 1 with those of Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2576 (2005, 11–17) shows how closely the Royal manuscript follows a firstredaction text for the material it has in common with the first redaction (which is to say everything except Prose 5). Extensive further information concerning the relation between Royal 20 D 1’s text of material it takes from the first redaction may be found at https://tvof.ac.uk/ (The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages 2015–20). 26  For Barbieri (2002, 112), the second redaction enacts ‘le passage d’une histoire universelle ecclésiastique à une véritable histoire ancienne laïque et courtoise’ (‘the transition from a universal ecclesiastical history to a truly secular and courtly ancient history’). 27  Barbieri 2005, 22–8 gives a useful table that details the sources, where these have been identified, of all of Prose 5; see also Barbieri  2002 and his forthcoming edition of Prose 5 to be published at https://tvof.ac.uk. On Prose 1 and Prose 3, see Jung  1996, 440–84 and 499–503, and Barbieri’s entries on La Vie en proses website: http://users2.unimi.it/lavieenproses/index.php/component/ search/?searchword=Roman%20de%20Troie&searchphrase=all&Itemid=468, accessed 17 August 2018 = La Vie en Proses: riscrivere in prosa nella Francia dei secoli XIV–XVI. Prose 1 is the most widely disseminated of the five mises en prose, surviving as it does in nineteen manuscripts. It is generally thought to offer a moralizing and euhemeristic interpretation. Prose 3 only survives in its entirety in one fifteenth-century French manuscript (Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS O.33), but there are a

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176  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad enhanced by a marked proclivity for direct speech that enhances the modernity of Prose 5’s style. It is possible, but by no means certain, that this utterly compelling version of the Troy story was put together (‘composed’ is not quite the right word) specifically for inclusion in this new redaction of the Histoire ancienne: all we can say for sure about its date of composition is that it postdates Prose 1 and Prose 3 and that it predates the completion of Royal 20 D 1. Its provenance too is uncertain, though it is not unreasonable to assume that, like Royal 20 D 1 itself, Prose 5 comes from Angevin Naples, or the Neapolitan region. It is also possible, though perhaps less likely, that the translations into French of Ovid’s Heroides were made specifically for inclusion in this compilation.28 The Troy section of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne in Royal 20 D 1 takes up 166 of its 363 folios; this might instructively be compared to the most extensive version of the first redaction, that found in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20125 (on which see Chapter 4), where Troy takes up just twenty-five of its 375 folios. Royal 20 D 1 is thus truly a book of Troy,29 and once it was in France copies were made, and then copies of these copies. Prior to this the book also seems to have left its mark in Spain,30 but interestingly as far as we can tell it left no trace in Italy. Royal 20 D 1 is, however, almost certainly the direct or indirect source of all known copies of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne.31 Indeed, this manuscript’s presence in France seems to have been the catalyst for a new interest in the Histoire ancienne—in a rejuvenated form—in northern France during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.32 We will return to the significance of this. Royal 20 D 1 offers, like many of the other manuscripts we discuss in this book, an imagined cultural and historical geography and one that was to prove number of late thirteenth-century Italian fragments that indicate an Italian origin for the text and early circulation in northern Italy. 28  As Barbieri (2005, 42–77) has demonstrated, close parallels between the Heroides in Prose 5, contemporary Italian glosses, and Italian translations of the Heroides point to the existence of a prior and independent version of the Heroides in French as a common source. However, when he posits ‘un manoscritto francese, probabilmente dell’ultimo quarto del XIII secolo, che doveva contenere la storia troiana, le Eroidi rilette a base al modello elegiaco medievale e probabilmente anche il commento vicino all’Ovide moralisé’ (78, ‘a French manuscript, perhaps from the last quarter of the thirteenth century, which must have contained the Troy story, the Heroides reread according to an elegiac medieval model, and probably also commentary similar to the Ovide moralisé’), this is pure hypothesis. Rochebouet 2009 does not agree with the hypothesis that Prose 5 was composed specifically for inclusion in the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne. Pending the publication of Barbieri’s edition of Prose 5 as it appears in Royal 20 D 1 on the http://www.tvof.ac.uk/ website and Rochebouet’s longawaited critical edition, the text may be consulted (though as found in a rather eccentric manuscript) in Otaka 2016. 29  See Desmond (2013, 190): ‘Royal 20 D 1 expands the siege of Troy and sack of Troy so that the matter of Troy emerges as the central paradigm of universal history.’ 30  See Barbieri (2005, 11): ‘the miniatures of Escorial h.I.6, which is a Spanish version of the Roman de Troie, are strongly reminiscent of those of Royal 20 D 1’. 31  We concur with this view, almost universally held by scholars, though Rochebouet 2009 articulates some doubts. 32  An interest that encompasses the production of new first redaction manuscripts as well as manuscripts of the second redaction. See Jung 1996, 507 and Rochebouet 2016.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  177 particularly influential. The role of the movement of books in the production and the impact of this book is particularly striking, and we will pursue three lines of enquiry: (a) the movement of books to Naples; (b) how translation in and of itself figures the movement of books, particularly in the new and compelling reworking of the Troy story; (c) finally (and more briefly), the effects of the movement of Royal 20 D 1 itself from Naples, to Spain, to France. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, we will refer to the Troy section of Royal 20 D 1 as Prose 5 and to its author as ‘the redactor’, but questions of textual integrity and authorship are particularly fraught in this instance. Naples was an important centre for vernacular literary culture in the first half of the fourteenth century. The towering figure of this period of Neapolitan literary culture is undoubtedly Boccaccio, who was resident from 1326 until the early 1340s, but Naples also saw extended visits from the other giant of Italian humanism, Petrarch. The Angevin court was French-speaking (though no doubt not exclusively) and strongly networked with French- and Occitan-speaking aristocratic circles in western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean: Robert the Wise, grandson of Charles of Anjou (see Chapter  4), inherited the titles of count of Provence and king of Jerusalem as well as king of Naples. Naples therefore stood at a crossroads between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean— a pos­ition comparable to, though different from, several cities in northern Italy. It is worth stressing that literary culture in Naples was multilingual and erudite. Boccaccio, for example, wrote in both Italian and Latin, certainly read widely in French as well as Latin, and had more than a passing interest not just in translations from Greek but also in teaching himself enough Greek to appreciate the prosody of Homer. Indeed, Homer was beginning to circulate in Greek in humanist circles as well as in Latin translation. The purpose of translations of Homer is in itself interesting, since some may have been cribs for reading Homer in Greek rather than free-standing translations. One such is that of Leonzio Pilatus, a close friend of Boccaccio, who was living in his house for much of the time he was at work on his Homer translations, which Petrarch also used.33 It is from this literary milieu that the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne emerges (even if there are no grounds for assuming any direct connection between Boccaccio and Royal 20 D 1). There is clear evidence that whoever composed Prose 5 was not only familiar with the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne, and with Prose 1 and Prose 3 of the Roman de Troie, but also knew Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, possibly the Ovide moralisé, and the Roman de la Rose, as well as Ovid’s Heroides, and a range of other Latin Ovidian texts (Barbieri 2002). This implies a broad literary culture in French and Latin and access to a fairly substantial library. Royal 20 D 1 is by no means the only important manuscript in

33  For an excellent and thought-provoking account, see Desmond 2012.

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178  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 5.4.  BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 363r, detail. © The British Library Board, London

French known to have been made in Naples or the Regno (‘kingdom’).34 For example, London, BL, Additional MS 12228 of Guiron le Courtois and the im­port­ ant two-volume prose Tristan, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 756–757 were Neapolitan. One question that arises therefore is: where did the French-language manuscripts that were used to make these copies come from? Royal 20 D 1 offers some suggestive clues that may help answer this question. Its colophon (see Figure 5.4) reads: Ici finies les livres des estoires dou commencement dou monde. C’est d’Adam et de sa lignie, e de Noe et de la seue lignie, et des .xii. filz d’Israel, et la destruction de Thebes, et dou commencement dou regne de Feminie, et l’estour de Troie, et d’Alexandre li Grant et de son pere, et de Cartaje et dou commencement de la cité de Rome e des granz batailles que li Romain firent jusque a la naisance nostre signor Jesu Crist, qu’il conquistrent tot le monde. Here finish the books of the history of the beginning of the world. It deals with Adam and his lineage, and Noah and his lineage, and with the twelve sons of 34  On the literary culture of Angevin Naples, see most recently Gilbert, Keen, and Williams 2017.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  179

Figure 5.5.  BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 28v, detail. © The British Library Board, London Israel, and with the destruction of Thebes, and with the beginning of the realm of the Amazons, and with the Trojan war, and with Alexander the Great, and his father, and with the foundation of the city of Rome and with the great battles the Romans fought up to the birth of our lord Jesus Christ, for they conquered the whole world.

As others have pointed out, this does not correspond with the contents of Royal 20 D 1 (e.g. Barbieri 2005, 17), which begins with the story of Thebes and also lacks the Alexander the Great section of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne. However, it may instructively be read alongside the brief summary of the biblical sections of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne found near the beginning of Prose 5 (see Figure 5.5). As already noted, with the exception of the Troy section, the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne follows the text of the first closely. This paragraph, which draws on the Genesis section of the first redaction (§§ 95 and 106–108),35

35  References for the Genesis section are to Joslin 1986.

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180  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Figure 5.6.  BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 27v detail, summary of the Flood. © The British Library Board, London

indicates clearly that the redactor of Prose 5 worked with a copy of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne in front of him. This is also evident from the opening paragraphs of Prose 5 (ff. 27r–27v), where textual material (§§ 47–48) from the Genesis section of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne reminds readers of the Flood, and then of the tripartite division of the world into three continents (using the text of §§ 71–72), before seamlessly introducing the prehistory of Troy by reproducing all but the first few lines of the first paragraph of the Troy section of the first redaction (see Figure 5.6). This is the only use the redactor of Prose 5 makes of the Troy section of the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne, since as already noted the rest of the text is drawn from other sources (or perhaps occasionally newly composed), but once again we can see that he undoubtedly had a copy of the first redaction in front of him, one which included the biblical material, and this heightens the probability (without offering conclusive proof) that Prose 5 was composed specifically for inclusion in a new redaction of the Histoire ancienne. One corollary of all this is that the second redaction does not lack the biblical material because the compiler was working from an incomplete source. The colophon also offers evidence:

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  181 although it is clear that the colophon of a first redaction manuscript has been copied unthinkingly (and inappropriately) in Royal 20 D 1, since no modifications have been made to reflect the actual contents of the manuscript, it is equally clear that the compiler (not necessarily the scribe of Royal 20 D 1 of course) was working from a complete first redaction manuscript. Interestingly, then, the colophon in Royal 20 D 1 corresponds closely with that found in a manuscript made in Venice: Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2576, f. 154r. Despite orthographical variants and the mention of Abraham in the Vienna colophon, the otherwise identical text and the identical reading for the second word (‘finies’) indicate a common source; generally, Royal 20 D 1’s text of those parts of the first redaction that it transmits is closer to that of Vienna 2576 than it is to the text of BnF fr. 20125.36 It may also then be significant that Vienna 2576 is one of only three manuscripts (along with the much earlier BnF fr. 20125, made in Acre, and the closely related but much later fifteenth-century Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 2231) to transmit in verse the moralizations that are believed to have been integral to the original version of the Histoire ancienne,37 and that, although Vienna 2576 does not have the complete set of verse moralizations, it does have almost all of them. Of course we have no idea what other manuscripts have been lost, but, on the basis of the evidence we have, we seem to be dealing here with a trajectory for the versified moralizations that moves from east to west, which is to say from Acre to Venice to Naples, and which does not pass through France—even though in some other respects the text of the first redaction in Vienna 2576 is closer to northern French/ southern Low Countries manuscripts than to Acre manuscripts.38 There are other indicators that the vernacular sources for the version of the Histoire ancienne that we find for the first time in Royal 20 D 1 came not from France but from the eastern Mediterranean or northern Italy: again, books in French seem to be moving from east to west, not from a French heartland outward towards a Mediterranean periphery. Most notably, Prose 1, on which the Royal 20 D 1 Troy sections draws extensively, was composed in the principality of the Morea on the Peloponnese peninsula. After the opening folio (27r–27v) of the Troy section, which we have already discussed, Royal 20 D 1 reproduces the text of Prose 1 with only minor modifications (such as the summary of biblical history 36  Barbieri (2005, 17) also makes this point. However, as Vienna 2576 is almost certainly later than Royal 20 D 1 (c. 1350), it cannot be its source. Finies is usually classified as an error, but verb morph­ ology is notoriously inconsistent in some Franco-Italian manuscripts. 37  The verse moralizations survive more frequently than had previously been thought, but they are often copied as prose or prosified. On the recently discovered manuscript that is Rennes 2231, see Rochebouet 2016. 38  It has many of the abbreviations with respect to the text of BnF fr. 20125 and other Acre manuscripts that are characteristic of the manuscripts of the northern French/southern Low Countries abbreviated version found in the four manuscripts of the so-called noyau ancien. For further details see http://tvof.ac.uk, accessed 28 January 2019.

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182  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad drawn from the first redaction of the Histoire ancienne on f. 28v that we have also already discussed) up to the end of the story of Jason and Medea on f. 36v. This means that Royal 20 D 1 includes the detailed and accurate account of the geog­ raphy of Greece with which Prose 1 opens, including its reference to ‘la noble cité de Corinthe’ (§ 2, 28; f. 28v in Royal 20 D 1), the significance of which we will return to shortly. Greeks, we are then told, may in fact really be Romans: Les gens se trairent volentiers pour la seürté as illes, dont il a en Grece sans nombre, qui toutes furent habitees jusqu’a tens que il orent la segnorie des Romains, et meïsmant de Constantin, qui longement le tindrent en pais. Et por icele seürté laisserent il mout de ces illes et se retrairent a habiter a large terre, ou il faisoient plus de lour profit et de leur aises. Et por ce fu li pais apelé Romanie et change le non de Grece. Car encore, se vos demandés a un Grezois en son language quez honz il est, il respondera que il est Romain, quar ce li samble une maniere de franchise. Et surqueutot, quant il avient que aucun Grizois veulle franchir son serf de liberal franchise, si li dist ‘Soies Romain’.39 The people willingly take to the islands, which are countless in Greece, for safety, for they were all inhabited until they were ruled by the Romans, and even by Constantine, for they governed peacefully for a long time. And because it was safe to do so, they abandoned a lot of these islands and went to live on the mainland, where they were able to make a living more easily. And for this reason, the land became known as Romania and the name of Greece was changed. For still today, if you ask a Greek in his language what kind of man he is, he will reply that he is a Roman, for this seems a form of freedom to him. And above all, when it happens that a Greek wants to free his serf so that he might be free, he says to him ‘Become a Roman’.

Royal 20 D 1, however, has a modified version of the end of this passage: Et encore se vos demandes en gregiois quelz hons est grec, il vos respondra ‘Romeos’ qui vaut autant conme franc. Et se aucun Gregios vuille son serf franchir, si dit ‘Soiés franc’, non seulement comme li hons franchist son serf, mes ‘Soiés ausi frans come Romain’.  (28r) And yet if you ask in Greek what a Greek man is, he will reply ‘Romeos’, which is is the equivalent of being free/being a Frank. And if a Greek wishes to free his serf, he says ‘Become free/a Frank’ not just as a man frees his serf, but as if to say, ‘Be as free as a Roman’.

39  Quoted from Constans and Faral 1922, § 3, 10–22.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  183 Whereas Prose 1 narrates how Greeks are proud to proclaim themselves ‘Roman’ because they equate being Roman with being free (‘une maniere de franchise’), so that when a serf is freed he ‘becomes Roman’, the Royal 20 D 1 text first makes a proper name out of ‘Roman’ and then seems to pun deliberately on the etymology of franc, perhaps anticipating the passage at the opening of the Eneas section of the Histoire ancienne which speculates as to the origins of France and the French, but in all likelihood also playing on the common usage of the term ‘Frank’ in the eastern Mediterranean as a blanket term for western Europeans (the Angevins in Naples being after all ‘Franks’ in the broadest sense of the term). Rome and being Roman thus become a kind of quilting point that reinforces while eliding translatio imperii:40 Greeks are always already Romans, who are in fact always already Franks (though it is hard to imagine the reverse being true!). This elision is further compounded in §§ 4–5 in Prose 1 and ff. 28v–29r in Royal 20 D 1 (into which is interpolated the summary of the biblical sections of the first redaction discussed earlier), which effectively give an accurate description of territory corresponding roughly to the kingdom of Naples, stressing that Greek is still spoken in much of Calabria and Sicily and that the cities of Labour (in Prose 1), or Partonope (in Prose 5) are in fact Naples. The assertion that the inhabitants of the kingdom of Naples ‘furent ancïenement tous grizois’ (§ 4, 12, ‘were all formerly Greeks’) is not retained in Prose 5 (one of the few excisions to this passage), but this does not detract from the close relation between Greece and Naples that is explicitly articulated.41 The specifically eastern Mediterranean and then Neapolitan-Angevin orientation of this telling of the Troy story is further reinforced at the end of the Troy section in Royal 20 D 1, where on ff. 191r–193v we find the story of Laudomata, who is a son of Hector and Andromache. This relatively brief episode was prob­ ably originally the work of the author of the Prose 1. It is adapted somewhat by the author of Prose 3 (almost certainly an Italian, working in Italy), and it is this last version that the compiler who produced Prose 5 uses. Some years after the fall of Troy, Laudomata returns from the refuge further east to which his father had sent him, liberates Troy, and then tracks down, one by one, the Trojan traitors and his father’s surviving Greek enemies. He then rebuilds Troy, marries, and sets about conquering the neighbouring lands: Georgia, Turkey, Armenia, Syria, and Egypt. Eventually he ‘tint tout le païs oriental’ (f. 193v, rubric, ‘held all the country to the east’) and ‘gaagna tout le païs iusques as desers de Nubie et a la mer d’Inde, et que par amour que par force: tout le païs oriental mist il sous sa seignorie’ (193v, ‘conquered all the land as far as the Nubian desert and the Indian ocean,

40  Lacan uses the metaphor of the quilting point or point de capiton to describe the process whereby different layers of signification become attached and compacted. See note 28 in Chapter 6. 41  Zinelli (2012, 167) also comments on this.

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184  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes by force: he placed the entire Orient under his lordship’). The end of the story in Prose 1 reads as follows: Si vos ai ore menee a fin la veraie histoire de Troie selonc ce qu’elle fu trovee en l’almaire de saint Pol de Corinthe en grijois languaje, et dou grizois fu mise en latin et je la translatai en françois et non pas par rime ne par vers, ou il covient par fine force avoir maintes menchoignes com font ces menestriez qui de lor lengues font maintes fois rois et amis solacier de quoi il font sovent lor profit et autrui domage, mais par droit conte selonc ce que je la trovai san riens covrir de vérité ou de mençoinge demoustrer, en tel maniere que nus n’i poroit riens ajoindre ne amermer que por vraie deüst ester tenue. Explicit. Amen. Que Dieuz tous nos gart.42 I have thereby brought to an end for you the true story of Troy, as it was found in the chest of Saint Paul of Corinth, in the Greek language, and from Greek it was put into Latin, and I translated it into French, but not in rhyme or verse, which always necessarily have many lies as told by all those minstrels who with their tongues often entertain kings and friends for their own personal benefit, but often to the detriment of others, rather I have made a straight story of what I found, without concealing any truth, or propagating any lies, so that no one could add or remove anything except what must be considered true. Explicit. Amen. May God protect us.

The author of Prose 1 thus returns to the city of Corinth, rounding off his Troy story by vaunting the authority of a local, Greek source, while also explaining (using the established topos that verse is mendacious) why he uses prose rather than verse. The redactor of the version found in Royal 20 D 1 adds a paragraph to the more abrupt ending of Prose 3, which simply states ‘Or vos ay conté la vraie ystoire de Landomatha le filz Hector’ (‘Now I have told you the true story of Laudomata, the son of Hector’): Mesure est que nous facons a fin de cestui livres car nous avons bien dit et raconté la vraie ystoire de Troie selonc ce que li aucteur en ont dit et retrait si que riens plus ne main iest mis que droite verité.  (f.193v) It is reasonable that we should finish this book for we have told and related the true story of Troy according to what the authors have said and recounted about it, so that nothing more or less has been put in it other than pure truth.

The ending of Prose 1 is of course the conclusion of an independent text, whereas the ending of the Troy story in Royal 20 D 1 is the conclusion to an episode in a 42  Quoted from Williams 1953–4, 148.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  185

Figure 5.7.  BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, f. 193v, detail. © The British Library Board, London

longer narrative. While the concluding paragraph in Royal 20 D 1 lacks much of the detail of the end of Prose 1, the reference to the aucteur, the claim not to have added anything, and the insistence on droite verité (cf. droit conte and verité) all seem to echo the conclusion of Prose 1, as if the redactor has both versions (Prose 1 and Prose 3) open in front of him. Is it too fanciful then, to wonder whether the bas-de-page illustration immediately underneath the concluding paragraph (see Figure 5.7), which also encases a final rubric, is intended to represent the church of Saint Paul in Corinth? As is often the case in Royal 20 D 1, this bas-de-page scene is part of a double-page illustration, but whereas usually the two pages stress continuous narrative across the opening, here (unusually) there seems to be no connection between the left-hand illustration on f. 193v and the right-hand illustration on 194r (see Figure 5.8). There can be no more visually striking way of marking a break between two episodes, but it is also worth dwelling for a moment on the closing rubric on f. 193v, which reads ‘Ci finist l’ystoire de Landomatha’. This is in fact the conclusion to the entire Troy story, which opened by being called in a rubric ‘la vraie ystoire de Troie’ (f. 27r), which is how it is referred to also in the final paragraph that seems to have been added by the compiler of Prose 5.

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Figure 5.8.  BL, Royal MS 20 D 1, ff. 193v–194r. © The British Library Board, London

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  187 This stress on Laudomata is interesting because it offers an intriguing counterblast to the usual narrative of translatio, even though this is instantly picked up again in the opening rubric of the Eneas section: ‘Ci comence de Eneas qui si part de Troie et ala en Ytalie’ (f. 194r, ‘Here begins the story of Eneas, who leaves Troy and went to Italy’). For in this book, a burning Troy may be left behind by departing Trojans such as Aeneas, as usual, who go off so that their descendants can found new Troys elsewhere—but meanwhile, and unusually, the original Troy rose from the ashes to become the centre of a glorious eastern empire. The ori­gin­al Troy, in fact, never really died. This is disconcerting news indeed for readers familiar with the conventional translatio topos, according to which the glories of Troy disappear from the east to be reborn in western Europe, only to be restored to the east via crusading. However, the story of Laudomata, copied from a book that comes from the east, does greatly enhance the eastern Mediterranean focus of Royal 20 D 1. This manuscript thus offers a historical perspective that looks back to the east from Naples far more than it looks to the west (in spite of where it has ended up), a perspective which is entirely consonant with Angevin Naples’ claim to the defunct Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. We have been making a case for seeing Royal 20 D 1 as a book that in its central Troy section is made from other books, some in French and some in Latin, and from texts, some of which at least travelled to Naples (whether directly or indirectly) from the eastern Mediterranean. These were not, however, the only books the redactor used for his version of the Troy story, and one of the most radical transformations he enacted on his source texts is the embedding of translations of Ovid’s Heroides, filtered through several layers of vernacular literary culture. Our understanding of the significance of the presence of these translations of the Heroides in Royal 20 D 1, and indeed of the nature of both the process of translation and of the embedding of the translations in the longer narrative of the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne, is greatly enhanced by Luca Barbieri’s extremely careful and deep scholarship (2002, 2005, and 2007). But his work also raises interesting methodological issues: although he gives us a wealth of information (upon which we draw heavily here) about the literary qualities of the translations, their treatment of their Latin models, their use of other sources, exactly how they are embedded in the text of Royal 20 D 1, and indeed about the text of Royal 20 D 1 and the manuscript as a physical object more generally, the fact that he extracts the Heroides from Royal 20 D 1 and edits them in the order in which they appear in manuscripts of Ovid (rather than in the order they appear in Royal 20 D 1) is revealing of what he considers the main point of his scholarly enterprise. In presenting the letters derived from Ovid in Royal 20 D 1 primarily as the ‘Première traduction connue des Héroïdes’ (2007, cover, ‘the first known translation of the Heroides’) Barbieri abstracts the letters from their manuscript context, despite the wealth of information he gives about Royal 20 D 1. In practice, the French Heroides are extracted from Royal 20 D 1 in his two editions of them

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188  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad and reconstituted in a textual form that is quite different from the one in which they are embedded. Marilynn Desmond has published an important article on the influence of Prose 5’s translations of Ovid on later writers, particularly Chaucer, that goes some way towards restoring this original context to the Ovidian material in Barbieri’s edition. She stresses that ‘the Heroides in this context become separated from Ovidian authorship and take on the status of his­tor­ic­al­ly authentic letters’ and that ‘the French textual tradition of the Heroides has entirely erased their Latin textual origins’ (2013, 191–2). However, this last point may be nuanced. While it is certainly the case that Ovid is never explicitly referenced in Royal 20 D 1, the second redaction of the Histoire ancienne (like the first) implicitly and explicitly acknowledges throughout that it is a translation from Latin, while on the other hand recognizing that Greeks and Trojans did not speak Latin in any case. There is thus no need to signal that the Heroides included in Prose 5 are translations, because everything in the text is implicitly presented as a translation: even where it derives from another French source, this is presented as a translation from Latin and/or Greek. If Desmond’s work shows the great interest of understanding how and why the translations of the Heroides are so carefully embedded in this new narrative context, her evaluation of the quality of the translations is not positive: they are ‘quotidian’ and ‘banal’, and she contrasts Ovid’s ‘rhetorical integrity’ with the translator’s ‘earnest simplicity that is as expressive as it is inelegant’ (2013, 195). We would like to propose a more positive evaluation, one that looks at this ma­ter­ial on its own literary terms as these emerge from the broader frame of Royal 20 D 1.43 One striking feature of Royal 20 D 1 is its linguistic homogeneity. Italianisms may be a little more prevalent in sections that the Prose 5 redactor has added (new portions of the Troy story that may have been composed by him, the translations of the Heroides, portions of the Troy story he has adapted from Benoît de Sainte-Maure), but overall all the material in the manuscript is copied in a homogenous Italian-French scripta.44 This parallels the effort that has been made to embed material seamlessly in a continuous narrative and to make the manuscript visually coherent. Let us then, in the light of this, consider the first of the Heroides to be included in the Troy story, the letter from Cenona to Paris (which is the fifth in Barbieri’s edition, because he reorders them in order to reflect Ovid). Cenona (also known as Oenone) does not appear in the Roman de Troie, but the redactor prepares the inclusion of her letter carefully. First in a section that has no analogue in Prose 1 43  Catherine Croizy-Naquet (2011, 172) makes some suggestive remarks along these lines, but does not go into any detail: ‘les «  infortunes du texte ovidien  », selon Léopold Constans, relève . . . d’une réécriture informée par la tradition lyrique et par les modèles romanesques antiques et arthuriens’ (‘the “unfortunate fate of the Ovidian text”, in Léopold Constans’ words, is due to . . . a process of rewriting informed by the lyric tradition, and models from Arthurian and classicising romances’). 44  Though far more work is needed on this question.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  189 or Prose 3, and which therefore may have been composed newly by the redactor,45 which narrates, but more expansively than in the Roman de Troie, the Judgement of Paris, we are also told of Paris’s birth and of how once he has grown up he ‘prist a fame la deesce Cenona qui li donna de nobles dons et de gratieus’ (Barbieri 2005, 299; Royal 20 D 1, f. 39r: ‘took as his wife the goddess Cenona, who gave him noble and gracious gifts’).46 Secondly, the letter itself is introduced by a rubric, but, immediately prior to this, there is a rather abrupt sentence that is set off as a paragraph on f. 53v: ‘La novele s’espandi par toutes les terres et les païs de Troie que Paris out espousé dame Helaine; si que Cenona l’oï, si en fu molt dolente, si li enoia ceste epistre’ (Barbieri 2005, 306, ‘news spread throughout all the lands and the territories of Troy that Paris had married lady Helen, so when Cenona heard this she was made very unhappy by this, and she sent him this letter’). This is actually the conclusion of a long new section devoted to the birth of Helen, her exceptional beauty, and her first encounter with Paris. This new section therefore provides a narrative context to the jealousy that Cenona articulates in her letter, and the procedure here is not unlike that adopted in Jakemes’s romance Le Chastelain de Coucy, in which generic emotions expressed in the lyrics by the Chatelain de Coucy are given specific narrative weight and context.47 The account of the birth of Helen and of her beauty opens with a fairly detailed recapitulation of the story of the birth of Venus following the castration of Saturn: Anciennement out uns rois en Crete qui fu appellés par son nom Saturnus, et l’aouraient li Gregeois comme dieu . . . Puis aprés par son sens et par son savoir vit et aperçut qu’il engendrerroit .i. fils en lié qui le priveroit de son honneur naturele, si que pour ce il commanda a sa fame que elle li aportast les enfans que elle enfanterait et les li aportoit, et dit on que il les mangioit. A la fin enfanta .i. enfant mult biaus, de qui la mere out pitié por sa grant biauté, si le fist porter en une autre lieu celeement pour nourir et out a nom Jupiter, et manda Saturnus une statua de pierre et li dist que ce estoit l’enfant que elle avoit enfanté et il la menja en poudre. Puis après, quant Jupiter fu grans et parcreüs et sout que Saturnus son pere le cuidoit avoir fet tuer, si fu mult courrouciés contre lui et commença a persecuiter son pere, et tan le persecuita que il le trouva pres la mer là ou il purgioit son ventre, et il sailli soudainement et li trencha les coillons et le jeta dedans la mer, et li dist : « je sui ton fils qui tu cuidoies avoir fet tuer qui tu doutoies tant: or as trouvé ce de quoi tu avoies si grant paour. Des ormais 45  Unless his manuscript of Prose 3 contained a different version, which is possible. Barbieri edits all the substantial portions of Prose 5 which do not have analogues in Prose 1 and Prose 3; see Barbieri 2005, 297–306. 46  Barbieri (2005, 136–8) details the introduction of names in Prose 5 to prepare the ground for a number of the Heroides. He makes a distinction (138–44) between ‘functional additions’ and ‘add­ itions due to the authorial agenda’ to make the text more courtly. On this point, see also CroizyNaquet 2011, 171–2. 47  See Gaullier-Bougassas 2009 for the text; for her comments on the process, 31–2.

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190  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad regnerai je, voilles tu ou non ». Quant Jupiter out geté les coillons son pere en la mer si se conjoinst le sanc o l’escume de la mer et en issi une masse grosse par la vertu du soloil et de la lune, et de celle masse selonc aucuns aucteurs nasqui la deese Venus. Mes selonc la vraie ystoire, et raison acordant a verité, elle fu fille de Saturnus et de Rea, car c’est donné a entendre que li coillon signefient le pere, li sanc segnefie le sperme de l’omme, la mer segnefie la mere et l’escume la substance nutritive de la mere, et ensint le doit en entendre. (Barbieri 2005, 300–1; Royal 20 D 1, f. 47v) There was in former times a king of Crete who was called Saturn and the Greeks worshipped him as if he were a God. . . . Some time afterwards he saw and realized, through his wisdom and knowledge, that he would father a child with his wife who would deprive him of this natural honour, so he ordered his wife to bring to him all the children she would bear, and she did bring them to him, and it was said that he ate them. In the end, he fathered a very handsome child, on whom the mother took pity because he was so good-looking, so she had him secretly taken to another place to be brought up, and he was called Jupiter, and she sent Saturn a statue made of salt and told him that it was the child she had just borne, and he ate this so it became powder. Some time afterwards, when Jupiter was tall and grown up, he learnt that Saturn his father had intended to kill him, so he was very angry with him about this and began to persecute his father, and he persecuted him so much that one day he came upon him by the sea, defecating, and he leapt upon him and cut off his balls and he threw them into the sea. And he said: ‘I am your son that you thought you had had killed and whom you feared so: now you have found what you feared so much. Now I will rule, whether you like it or not.’ When Jupiter had cast his father’s balls into the sea, the blood mingled with the froth of the waves and a solid mass came forth because of the powers of the sun and the moon and from this mass was born Venus. But according to the true story/history, and reason here agrees with the story/history, she was the daughter of Saturn and Rea, for it is to be understood that the balls signify the father, the sea signifies the mother, and froth the mother’s nourishing substance, and this is how this is to be understood.

Barbieri has suggested that this material may be drawn directly from the Ovide moralisé (Barbieri 2005, 126–128). While the version of this story in the Ovide moralisé is less detailed, the narrative contextualization of the story in Royal 20 D 1 resonates far more with the contextualization of the story in the Ovide moralisé (even if it is not identical) than, for example, with the more schematic and passing reference to the castration of Saturn in the Roman de la Rose (which is simply to the episode and gives it no narrative context);48 furthermore, the in­ter­pret­ation 48  See Lecoy 1966–70, 5,505–5,524 and 20,003–20,052. The most salient feature of the Rose reference is its rampant punning on the word escoillié.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  191 of what all the elements in the story mean, and also the acknowledgement that the verisimilitude of the story itself might be questionable, is entirely consonant with the Ovide moralisé’s euhemeristic treatment of Ovid more generally. This is underlined in both texts by the fact that Saturn is introduced not as a god but as a king of Crete who is worshipped as a god (Ovide moralisé, 1, 515, cited from de Boer  1915). However, in the Ovide moralisé there is no in­ter­pret­ation of the symbolic elements in the story as there is in Prose 5, precise lexical parallels between this passage in Prose 5 and the Ovide moralisé are in fact rather slight, and the accounts differ on points of detail. Thus, although both texts use the words parcreus (Ovide moralisé, 525), which is a little unusual, and mention the escume (Ovide moralisé, 653), there is no reference in the Ovide moralisé to Rea in this context; the statue is made of stone (584) rather than salt, and perhaps most tellingly Saturn’s testicles are referred to as genitaires in the Ovide moralisé (651), not coillon, which gives the whole passage a rather different tone. It is not impossible that the redactor of Prose 5 had a copy of the Ovide moralisé in front of him, but, given this text was probably composed in France in the 1310s or 1320s, it would have needed to find its way more or less instantly to Naples. But one also need not assume a vernacular source here, and further Latin sources may be identified among commentaries and glosses on Ovid. In any case, what seems more significant than identifying the source of the story (even though this is undoubtedly an interesting question) is the process whereby material from a wide range of different sources (and possibly some material composed for the occasion), including sources in at least two languages, is not just being spliced together to make a coherent narrative but also rendered into a uniform style. There is thus a striking parallel to the bricolage that we observed in Aberystwyth 5667E in the first half of this chapter to render portions of texts drawn from different physical sources apparently homogeneous on a material level, although in the present case the process of ­bricolage is at work on the level of the text itself.49 Of course, it is impossible to know whether the author of this passage is the same person who produced the translations of the Heroides that have been in­corp­or­ated into the narrative, but the homogeneity of style and language in Prose 5 is nonetheless striking.50 This is particularly apparent in the letters based on the Heroides. Here the redactor or translator is constrained by following a model, but the translation is far from literal.51 At times whoever produced these translations (not necessarily the redactor of Prose 5 of course) does so much more than translate (if by translate one means simply transposing from one language to another). 49  We use the term ‘bricolage’ as adumbrated by Lévi-Strauss 1962. 50  For further discussion, see Gaunt 2016a. 51  The changes the translator makes to his source are so extensive as to call into question Barbieri’s description of the Heroides in Royal 20 D 1 as ‘the first known translation of the Heroides’, or Desmond’s claim that ‘they mark the earliest attempt to render a literal, French equivalent to classical Latin poetry’ (2013, 192).

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192  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad We will take just one example, again from the first letter to appear in Prose 5 (Oenone/Cenona), the introduction to which we have already discussed:52 tu quoque clamabis. nulla reparabilis arte laesa pudicitia est; deperit illa semel. V, 103–104 You too will lament: ‘By no art may wounded chastity be restored: it is ruined once and for all’. Aussi t’en plaindras tu et ne le poras amender, ne ja n’en sera plains, car tu vois ja bien et sés sa fauseté et sa mauvaise foi, et a ja sa loiauté et sa chateé faussee. (V, 113–115) You too will lament and will not be able to make amends, nor will you be lamented, for you can see and know very well her duplicity and bad faith, and she has already falsified her loyalty and her chastity.

Ovid’s pithy couplet contrives to be at once astonishingly laconic, yet rich in meaning, playing as it does on ideas of wounding and healing, damaging and restoring, while playing ironically on the idea of art and artifice, which cannot undo the consequences of the actions of the unchaste (by implication through surface appearance), and climaxing in the crushing and unequivocal finality of the present indicative deperit and the adverb semel. The Prose 5 redactor (wisely and realistically) makes no attempt at emulating Ovid’s economy of expression, and of course in any case concision is never the main virtue of Old French prose. What he does instead is to home in on some of the main elements of Ovid’s coup­ let and riff upon them: lamentation (plaindras, plains), art and artifice (fauseté, faussee), chastity and virtue (loiauté, chasteé), and finality (ja, ja). This is rhet­oric­ al­ly and semantically embellished (with the talk of making amends and of being pitied), but the most sophisticated effect of the translator is to create a play on words between fauseté and faussee, which picks up on pudicitia (‘chastity’ or ‘purity’) and arte (‘art’ or ‘artifice’) in the Latin text, to imply the inherent falsity or duplicity of art. This is an intelligent and extremely interesting response to Ovid’s text. Royal 20 D 1’s legacy is not necessarily extensive: there are twelve extant copies of the second redaction (if one includes Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 860, which only includes Prose 5), at least one of which (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 301) is a direct copy of Royal 20 D 1 and reproduces a substantial portion of its illustrations. However, its legacy is crucial. First, as already noted, Royal 20 D 1 is the direct or indirect source for all subsequent copies of the second redaction.

52  Ovid quoted from Showerman 1977, the French translations from Barbieri 2005. Although the Heroides appear in a different order in Royal 20 D 1, Barbieri numbers them according to their trad­ ition­al ordering in Latin.

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The Movement of Books: Two Manuscript Studies  193 Secondly—and even more significantly for our purposes—it moves from Naples via Spain to the royal court of France, which is where all these copies are made and where the tradition it represents also impacts upon the production of some first redaction manuscripts.53 As noted, the elimination of the biblical sections of the first redaction and the substitution of the original Troy story with Prose 5 with its translations of Ovid’s Heroides enact an ideological reorientation of the ma­ter­ ial. This makes Royal 20 D 1 into a vehicle for ideas and a style that are being expressed for the first time in Italy in the first half of the fourteenth century, precisely in the cultural milieu from which it emerges (the Naples where Boccaccio spent his formative years). It is well known that some of these ideas and this style find their way into French culture around 1400, in the work of Christine de Pizan, for example, or in that of Laurent de Premierfait. But the arrival of Royal 20 D 1 in France predates their activity by several decades. Could this manuscript, then, be one of the principal vectors whereby new ideas arrived in France from Italy and indirectly from the eastern Mediterranean?

53  See Jung  1996, 507. London, BL, Additional MS 25884, Malibu, J.  Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig XIII 3, New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M 516, and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 250 are all later first-redaction manuscripts that borrow elements from Prose 5.

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6

Dark Networks Prehistories, Post-histories, and Imagined Geographies

Like the earlier chapters of this book, this one will trace the various networks along which medieval texts and manuscripts travelled; but unlike those other chapters, this one will focus specifically on the links between, on the one hand, the documentable development and circulation of textual traditions and, on the other, the more elusive connections that traditions, texts, or manuscripts may forge through the prehistories, post-histories, and imagined geographies that they purvey. In the first section, we shall argue that certain Arthurian materials relating to the prose Tristan, a major textual tradition that putatively concerns the north-western edges of Europe, are deeply woven into a Mediterranean fabric: in these materials, one historical period stands in for another, and the idea of a political and geographical entity returning to its supposedly rightful owner is always in the background. The mixing of classical and contemporary history in these Arthurian materials goes on as it did in the Histoire ancienne and still with the aim of justifying and aggrandizing territorial expansion and empire-building; the Holy Land is reconceptualized as the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem avant la lettre. As Robert T. Tally Jr. claims in his book on spatiality: [L]iterature . . . functions as a form of mapping, offering its readers descriptions of places, situating them in a kind of imaginary space, and providing points of reference by which they [i.e. readers] can orient themselves and understand the world in which they live.1

Such imaginary spaces become the focus of this chapter as first the prose Tristan and then the Alexander tradition conjure up politicized and multilayered spaces which facilitated readers’ reorientation along ideological lines. While the previous chapter focused on the material object and its relations with a variety of actants— earlier source materials, manuscripts, authors, courts, artistic conventions—this one will focus on the textual unconscious that those actants bear: conjured spaces

1  Tally 2013, 2. Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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Dark Networks  195 and imagined genealogical and prophetic actions and utterances that gesture simultaneously to the past and to the future. The initial section will concentrate on the first part of what is, in fact, an extensive prologue to the prose Tristan, published as Volume One in the series of three edited by Renée Curtis.2 This prologue provides a prehistory to the information provided by the better-known (at least by today’s readers) French verse romances by Beroul and by Thomas d’Angleterre, both likely produced in Plantagenet lands. As the earliest known romance accounts of the tradition, they are often credited with telling the version of the story that was circulating in the twelfth century, but of course there may have been other versions as well which went on to influence the composition of the prose romance in the first decades of the thirteenth century. In either case, once the prose Tristan romance was circulating, from 1215 or so, it was that vastly enhanced version of the tale which became the standard reference. In the process of introducing this material regarding the ancestors of Tristan and the political conflicts in Cornwall and Ireland, the prologue looks first to an earlier period of travel between the Irish Sea, the English Channel (or Sea of Brittany), the coast of Normandy, and the eastern Mediterranean. In doing so, it establishes ties, some perhaps inadvertent, between (a) an imagined prehistory of Irish and Cornish ancestry, through an occluded association with the Holy Land; and (b) a post-history which alludes to the ultimate dream of forming one united Christian empire. This new orientation proved ultimately even more influential than the verse texts.3 Instead of simply tracing the tragic history of the doomed lovers and the political questions about the contemporary world that their coupling raises, our author, like most authors of thirteenth-century prose romance, broadens the tale, moving backward to describe the genealogical and political roots of the hero’s family. In so doing, he also focuses on the maritime settings through which the lovers pass—Cornwall, Ireland, Wales, and Logres— without ever losing sight of the Mediterranean as the ultimate source of tale’s power and destiny. If asked what the prose Tristan is about, one could summarize, from the perspective of the prologue, that it is about how a Palestinian Christian convert, who has travelled north to convert the pagans, is tragically separated from his (presumably) pagan wife, the princess of Babylon and most beautiful woman ever seen, then reunited, to ever more tragic ends. This woman, Chelinde, who was on 2  Curtis 1963–85 (1963), 1–259. In Löseth’s summary, this amounts to sections §§ 1–15 of the text, summarized in Löseth 1891, 1–13. 3  It is difficult to refer to the ‘authors’ of this tradition as it is very likely that there were multiple authors adding to and transforming the tale as it circulated. If one were to believe the manuscripts, however, the two authors who are credited are Luce del Gat and the later Hélie de Boron, who took up the work of Luce and completed it. Neither can be identified, though Hélie’s name carries some historical cachet as he claims to be the nephew of Robert de Boron, author of the trilogy of Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin, and (probably) a lost Perceval.

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196  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad her way from Babylon to Persia, where she was set to marry the king, is shipwrecked on an island off the shore of Ireland and is the sole survivor of that mishap. Instead of seeking instant transit to Persia, as one might expect, she gratefully marries her Palestinian saviour, Sador, who has found her unconscious on the Irish shore and nursed her back to health. Not long afterward, the newlyweds are separated because of climatic and political storms, and she is passed from one man to the next, is raped repeatedly, gives birth to two sons, and is finally reunited with her first husband many years later. Following Sador’s subsequent murder by their son, Apollon, Chelinde marries that son and is finally very happy for a very short time, until Augustine, a Christian hermit, appears on the scene to denounce her ‘sin’ and condemn her as a wanton woman. Chelinde, anxious to keep her hard-earned peace and rightly wary of the Christian truth-teller, denies his charges and calls for the hermit’s death, knowing already that his piety will spell the end of her happiness. As the flames are lit under his body, however, a miraculous intercession sees the flames leap from the site of execution to the window of Chelinde’s lodging in the nearby palace, and it is her body which is ignited. A hid­ eous stench spreads from the palace as the woman’s body plummets to hell. Periodic opportunities to link the story of Tristan to a Christian evangelical project are seized upon in the folios that follow, with the telling of the complete Grail quest incorporated into the later sections of what Emmanuèle Baumgartner called Version II of the textual tradition. But that is not the only occasion on which Mediterranean subject matter (such as the Grail and its passage to the north with the family of Joseph of Arimathea) is deployed; layers of mythological allusion (linking Chelinde’s son Apollon to Oedipus, and references to the Passion story of Christ in the New Testament, most notably) are interwoven in the French and Celtic materials, and at such moments we see that Tristan’s story is being subsumed within a larger tale of chivalric glory that is intimately tied to the Grail quest.4 The first part of this chapter focuses at least partially on the notion of networks— geographical, topological, and mercantile—and the ways in which they structure both the narrative and the textual tradition, while the second part will emphasize networks and travel, referencing a single, very famous manuscript containing a much-expanded version of the Roman d’Alexandre (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264). Like the Tristan prologue, the Alexander tradition maps the hero’s travels—first in the eastern Mediterranean, then to the British Isles (in the Perceforest)—superimposing one itinerary upon another, each with differently localized concerns. While in the first section of the chapter this reorientation is carried out textually (through the diegesis of the Tristan prologue-prequel), in the second it is carried out by both the textual tradition and by the movement of  the specific manuscript, Bodley 264. We shall be arguing, therefore, that

4  For more on this prequel material, see Traxler 1987.

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Dark Networks  197 both manuscripts and textual traditions signify on several levels simultaneously: that both may include or accumulate data (of varying kinds) which circumstance may render significant and which goes on to colour the subsequent tellings of the tale as well as the manner in which it is told. In the case of both the Tristan and the Alexander, western European concerns about sovereignty and hegemony are shown to work in silent conjunction with myths of eastern origins that explain and justify the settlement of both the East and the West by Christians—and sometimes by other groups. The role of the Mediterranean is pivotal in linking prehistories (of Alexander’s conquests and eastern Mediterranean travels, and of Tristan’s unruly ancestry) with post-his­tor­ies, played out on the land and seas of northern Europe and the Mediterranean via dreams of Christian world dominance and of empire. Alexander and Tristan become harbingers for crusading and proselytization, as local conflicts are conflated with ‘universal’ Christian concerns. The models for the textual development, dissemination, and circulation of manuscripts of the prose Tristan that we have inherited are not altogether convincing, despite the impressive credentials of the various editors and scholars. Baumgartner and Curtis, responding to the foundational work of Löseth and Vinaver, moved discussion in the right direction, i.e. away from the sole question of which author—Luce del Gat or Hélie de Boron—wrote which text; but they disagreed on the question of which ‘version’ came first and how such versions developed. Their work has now been supplemented by that of scholars such as Fabrizio Cigni, who emphasizes not only the fact that many of the manuscripts were composed in Italian centres but also the elusive quality of this massive trad­ ition and the impossibility of providing a critical edition of a text that is not one (Cigni 2012, 250; see also Chapter 2). In other words, much of the scholarship on the Tristan suffers not from lack of logic, intuition, or good intention but from the fact that it is sometimes excessively reliant on logic and reason and far too dismissive of the aleatory, contingent, and unpredictable, the hallmarks of network theory. In their commitment to good scientific practice, scholars have not always paid adequate attention to the messier aspects of textual transmission, the role of exchange and commerce, and the counter-intuitive model (at least from a modern, Western perspective) of a world upside-down, in which the Eastern and the Southern have priority over the Western and Northern.5 Too often the strictures of ‘scientific practice’ mask the extent to which the methodologies themselves struggle (a) to account for the extent to which the evidence is fragmentary

5  A world, in other words, that is better captured by medieval maps than by modern conceptions and hierarchies. T-O maps that portray Asia on top, Jerusalem at the centre, and Europe and Africa in parallel position at the bottom provide a better reading of how textual and manuscript transmission (and commerce) worked in the thirteenth century.

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198  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad (e.g. most manuscripts have not survived); and (b) to address the fact that the lines of transmission they seek to account for are often multidirectional, sometimes simultaneous, and rarely as genealogically pure as a traditional stemma would suggest. An Actor-Network Theory reading of the text simplifies or alleviates these problems through what Bruno Latour (2013) calls a process of ‘flattening’ that relegates the temporal and the cultural to simple ‘modes of existence’, which impair understanding as often as they aid it. Taking information as it is given, without assigning hierarchy or replacing elements with others that appear more understandable to a ‘modern’ perspective, and seeing a narrative as moving on a horizontal plane, in new and sometimes unexpected directions, allows for clearer, less prejudicial vision and produces a more viable and valuable anthropological (and literary) reading. Instead of prioritizing the north-western European origin of the Tristan legend with an emphasis on the movement of the tradition and manuscripts towards the south—the general view in twentieth-century literary histories and the starting point for Chapter 2 and the first section of Chapter 5 in this book—we will be looking here at the move northward and eastward of both the manuscripts and the legend. Several recent studies on the transmission of literary texts in the Mediterranean have, for example, signalled that the power and popularity of the Tristan in the thirteenth century, like that of its almost exact contemporary, the Histoire ancienne, might have had much to do with the fact that manuscripts containing the text had already travelled south and were present and consultable in the Latin Kingdom and the environs of Genoa (in the northern Italian setting or at its centre in Acre). This one factor—the availability of the textual tradition and its likelihood to be copied in local scriptoria—probably assured the tradition’s success, or at least shared that credit with the desire of local aristocratic and mercantile patrons, in northern Italy, the Low Countries, France, and the Latin Kingdom, to burnish their genealogical credentials by association with these heroic models. Gousset’s suggestion that the earliest known manuscript of the prose Tristan, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 750, copied by Pierre de Tiergeville in 1278,6 is either of Latin Kingdom or southern Italian fabrication chimes interestingly with Fabrizio Cigni’s tracing of Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 756–757 to Naples and the Carracciolo family, arrived at on the basis of heraldry and decoration.7 When considered in conjunction with the evidence that some of the earliest manuscripts of the Histoire ancienne were made in Acre, and with Zinelli’s speculations on the dissemination of Brunetto Latini’s Tresor, both discussed in Chapters  2 and  4, we have little choice but to take seriously the idea that place and travel play a larger role in 6  A colophon on f. 316v indicates this: ‘Anno Domini MoCCo septuagesimo octavo scripsit Petrus de Tiergevilla istud Romanum, Benedictum sit nomen Domini’. See Avril, Gousset, and Rabel 1984, 64. 7  Avril, Gousset, and Rabel 1984, 163–4; Cigni 2012; Fabbri 2012; Zinelli 2015.

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Dark Networks  199 text­ual transmission, and thereby literary history, than has sometimes been allowed.8 In all cases, a text that was clearly composed in a French not particularly marked by regional forms but which addresses larger concerns—law and rhetoric in the case of Brunetto, origins and forbears in the Histoire ancienne, legitimacy and disputed sovereignty in the case of Tristan—is shown to have become somewhat of a commodity in the Latin East, a desirable and fashionable token of modernity. If scholars are right about the importance of Acre (or Cyprus) as a place of origin, an eastern twin to such commercial centres as Rome, Genoa, Pisa, Venice, Bruges, and London, then we have to rethink the premises of literary transmission in order to make room for merchants, non-aristocratic patrons, consumers, and the vagaries of travel, albeit along well-established routes. Acre had already been described in the late twelfth century, by Ibn Jubayr, as a place that served as the focus of ships and caravans, and the meeting-place of Muslim and Christian merchants from all regions. Its roads and streets are choked by the press of men, so that it is hard to put foot to ground. Unbelief and unpiousness there burn fiercely, and pigs (i.e. Christians) and crosses abound. It stinks and is filthy, being full of refuse and excrement.9

Such a description of an archetypal marketplace and contact zone hardly inspires a desire to visit, but its allusion to the intermixing of languages, beliefs, men, ships, caravans, excrement, and objects is one that we should be alert to as literary his­tor­ ians. Out of this muddle come the nodes and networks that will mark the thirteenth century as one of the most vibrant and contested in the political history of the Christian West. The literary traditions that were being conscripted as the maps, models, and alibis for this brave new world of intercultural conquest, violence, and failure also provided useful links between a sometimes ignoble past and dreams of a brighter world to come, often by a projection of the past into that future. With this in mind, we need to find new narratives to focus on these post-feudal but pro-mercantile networks that can capture the pre-nationalist flavour of a broadened thirteenth-century identity and explain phenomena in terms other than the exclusively historical or empirical.10 Just as these literary traditions travel along 8  See: Cigni 1993; Zinelli 2007, 2008, and 2012; and the introduction to Beltrami 2007. We would add that determining the language of an author or prose text on the basis of a manuscript is always a tricky proposition, given that the scripta might well reflect scribal practice or a scriptorium rather than the language of the author(s). 9  Ibn Jubayr 1952, 318; Cassady 2011, 249. 10  Feudal and mercantile are clearly linked even where they were socially differentiated, though the degree to which the twelfth century, never mind the thirteenth, was ‘feudal’ remains a major bone of contention. Clearly the nobles of northern Italy were heavily implicated in mercantile practices, and merchants, especially wealthy and socially ambitious merchants, were equally implicated in courtly culture, including the literary. See Wickham 2015 on northern Italian city-states and Oksanen 2012 on the Low Countries.

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200  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad trade routes, mutate in relation to other known traditions, and are exchanged as aristocratic gifts or valuable commodities, they eventually return in their modified states to the centres of French-speaking Western Europe where they are received as founding ethical and historical texts for a new Christian order (see discussion in Chapter 2).11 This order would, of course, be based on Alexandrian, Roman, Arthurian, and Carolingian models (at least inasmuch as Charlemagne is reflected in some chansons de geste as a patriarch and law giver), but it would now be centred in Jerusalem, a place that could and would, in this ideologically twisted version of teleological history, reunite Christian narratives with their eastern sources to form a new earthly empire extending from Ireland to Persia, Constantinople, and beyond.12 This dream of empire is further fuelled by the ever-present spectre of the loss of Jerusalem and the new wars of reconquest that will be needed to extend that empire beyond the Catholic Church in Rome and to recover the ancestral empires of old. As the cities and maritime powers that dominated the Mediterranean at the time—especially Venice, Pisa, and Genoa—were also cultural and manuscript centres, it is hardly surprising that representations of this shifted world view also took on local colourings.13 Textual traditions often veered towards local interests, and patron figures and manuscript and artistic production in Acre, Venice, Genoa, and Sicily become truly hybrid in relation to their audience, emphasizing Celtic and northern, even Norman, terrain. The Arthurian and Tristan traditions are woven into this Mediterranean fabric, allowing for a reconceptualization of the Christian-global network in the form of a pseudo-contemporary precedent. The travels of the French king Louis IX and the about-to-be king of England, Edward I, plus the marriage of the Hohenstaufen Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, to the daughter of the Latin monarch, and the association of the French royal sibling Charles of Anjou, later Charles I of Naples, with a Latin heiress who sold her access to the throne, testify not only to the continued investment in the area by Western powers but also to the usefulness of literary imagery to the process of political self-fashioning.14 Edward I, for example, who is said to have imagined himself a new Arthur (see Chapters 2 and 3),15 had built a huge replica of the Round Table, eighteen feet across and weighing three-quarters of a ton, 11  Gérard Sivéry entitles one section of his 1983 book on Saint Louis, ‘Les fondements de la nouvelle civilisation’ (see Sivéry 1983). 12  See the essays collected in Morato and Schoenaers 2018 and Burgwinkle 2006. On Charlemagne, see Sunderland 2017 and the HERA-funded international collaborative research project Charlemagne: A European Icon, https://www.charlemagne-icon.ac.uk/. 13  ‘This is why the notion of a centre from which literature gradually radiates outwards must be abandoned for one in which the centre comes to absorb texts and literary traditions which may have originated earlier in the surrounding regions. Simultaneously with this centripetal movement, texts and traditions simply move from their point of origin to other areas, not necessarily by way of the centre. . . . Modern concepts of the capital and the provinces do not obtain until the later Middle Ages in France’ (Busby 2002, 586). 14  On Charles of Anjou, see Jehel 2014 and Dunbabin 1998. 15 King 2016.

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Dark Networks  201 probably in 1285, as part of the commemoration of his conquest of Wales, around which his council was symbolically seated.16 Other biographers dismiss this association, claiming that he simply called upon that identification with the empirebuilder and greatest of British kings from time to time, when politically expedient; but it was an association that caught the interest of contemporary chroniclers, one of whom described a wedding feast at Edward’s court in which the Round Table played a part in a theatrical interlude and in which a young squire played the role of the Loathly Damsel.17 The status of manuscripts in these courts and centres is hard to categorize in any definitive way because they appear to have been seen, at any one moment, as simultaneously merchandise, repositories of knowledge, guarantors of legitimacy, vestiges of Christian culture, and precious heirlooms. How they travelled, and where, can also explain why a prose textual tradition—which at least claims to spring from some common, northern source (while sometimes claiming as well southern or eastern ancestry)—can take on a variety of virtual shapes and textures in later, mutated form, all of which can contribute to, but also rival, those earlier models from which they supposedly ‘descended’, and their earlier but related manuscript witnesses. Some of the messiness, contingency, and ritualized perambulation of manu­ script travel can be observed in somewhat covert form in the narrative of the first section of the prose Tristan. Not that the author(s) necessarily had that in mind when they composed their work, but their attempt to connect east and west, the Mediterranean and Irish seas, and give to the Celtic material a Christian (hence ‘universal’) cast involves several rhetorical sleights of hand. Firstly, the circular navigational routes of the diegetic characters in the first part of the Tristan evoke the eternal return of the questing Grail knights. This isomorphism gestures as well towards the movement of texts (including religious texts): how they travelled and survived and established themselves through chance encounters, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The peculiarities of the intradiegetic model—the pattern of movement and encounter within the narrative (as in the travels of Tristan)—and its parallel within the extradiegetic frame (as in the manuscripts that transmit the tradition) thus require closer analysis; and one way to look at that question is, again, through the prism of Actor-Network Theory. The writings of Bruno Latour provide us with an anthropological model of how objects move through space and evolve through exchange, and key to such a reading are his notions of the network (which has been discussed previously, pp. 24–5) and the actant (an entity which induces mediation or translation, therefore not simply 16  Morris 2008a, 203, Morris 2008b, 280, Prestwich 1997, 120–2, Prestwich 1980, 23, 34, Prestwich 2003. 17 Prestwich  1997, 121. See also Chapter  3 for Arthur in English historiography of the late ­thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Edward’s interest in Arthur by no means excluded his use of other legendary associations.

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202  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad an ‘actor’ or ‘agent’).18 Manuscripts operate as objects within networks and exchanges, but they also perform as actants during those same peregrinations. As Latour puts it: A good ANT account is a narrative or a description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there. Instead of simply transporting effects without transforming them, each of the points in the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of a new translation. As soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries but as mediators, they render the movement of the social visible to the reader. Thus, through many textual inventions, the social may become again a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society.19

The movement of those manuscripts and their encounters often take priority over the immediate concerns or intentions of their makers or owners. Reading the Tristan as an encounter between a Mediterranean political mentality (the spread of the Christian global empire) layered over a Celtic-flavoured topography (to reflect its earliest witnesses and setting) allows us to see how prehistory works in conjunction with post-history in the vernacular romance tradition. Arguing that literary history has quite often been wrongly conceived, we might say that Actor-Network Theory offers an alternative approach. Instead of seeing from a singular national (or temporal or cultural) viewpoint, without con­sid­er­ ation of the criteria that were used in qualifying some actions as more valid and more appropriate for commemoration than others, ANT proposes the flattening of the landscape so as to take into account all kinds of movement and change.20 According to Latour, one of the somewhat reluctant founders of this school of thought and its admittedly awkward terminology, ANT is about expanding the potential regimes of truth available to us. It thereby exposes as fruitless our efforts to understand one kind of truth using a set of interpretive tools that were developed to understand another phenomenon; in so doing, we falsify our findings by aiming consistently beyond, or to the side of, the phenomenon we are studying. We miss, and miss out on, specific truths by failing to refine our methods in each instance to match a new set of circumstances. There is no one truth, in other words: there are truths that arise from different sets of conditions, governed by 18  Latour’s terminology deliberately recalls that of Greimas, one of the founding figures of structuralist semiotics and narratology (see Greimas 1966). 19  Latour 2005, 128. 20  In this sense, ANT shares a basic premise with the computational analyses of Franco Moretti. Moretti (2005, 76) argues that we get literary history wrong by avoiding some necessary features (sales, contracts, thematic fashions) and emphasizing others (style, moral messages, and the in­fam­ ous­ly elusive criterion of taste). In another echo of ANT, Moretti declares: ‘I no longer believe that a single framework may account for the many levels of literary production and their multiple links with the larger social system’ (2005, 91).

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Dark Networks  203 different rules. The key to unlocking a truth is to determine the ‘felicity conditions’ necessary to grasp it and to avoid the infelicitous interpretation that is dulled by our own somewhat tedious work habits and lack of will.21 This thinking, though originally developed in response to information networks and anthropology, is also germane to medieval studies. As Franco Moretti (2005, 76) puts it, though referring to a different era and literary phenomenon: ‘texts are certainly the real objects of literature . . . ; but they are not the right objects of knowledge for literary history’. Literary history should be looking elsewhere than in the text itself if it wishes to provide a large-scale model or understand transmission as other than an exclusively person-to-person or institutional exchange. While we are certainly looking at texts in this chapter, we have not lost sight of the fact that we are also situating them in a network or ‘large-scale model’, in keeping with the thinking of Actor-Network Theory. ANT theorists advocate cracking open the paradigms through which we read by making visible the infrastructures and intermediary stages of interpretation. In doing so, they demonstrate just how important the slow, hard work of interpersonal cooperation and good luck are in allowing for what we like to celebrate as scientific discovery or acts of genius. Humans, places, institutions, and objects play roles on the same plane in these narratives of discovery, and their interaction must be seen in a holistic sense. What Latour calls ‘translation’—not limited to the process of transmitting a message from one language in another—is the process by which the actants define their terms and language, making them accessible to someone outside the her­men­eut­ic circle, then transmit their findings over a variety of networks that in­ev­it­ably add to, warp, and recombine them with others. This retransmission might take place in the form of publications or oral transmission, in the context of a conference or a report in the media, all of which might affect differently how the meaning is received. Ultimately, as Latour admits, the key to unlocking ‘truth’ is a process of exegesis, revisiting and revising findings, and changing those perspectives. In his view, truth emerges through a comparative technique for weighing rival truth claims. This is not done by imposing binary oppositions which confront one supposed known entity (such as the natural) with a challenger (such as the supernatural, the cultural, or the artificial) but by broadening the possibilities to recognize that even such reliable standbys as nature, culture, and the supernatural are constructions and do not in themselves make for stable bases for argument. Latour claims that the modern world is still stuck in the trap of seeking universal truth (which we define very narrowly) and that we thereby exclude or foreclose essential questions, or rely on faulty criteria, so as to arrive at what we have already determined to be the desired answer. How then is this insight useful for considering manuscripts and historical/literary texts?

21  This is Latour’s terminology, at work in Latour 2012 and 2013.

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204  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad At this point, it is worth returning to the account of the incident mentioned in Chapter 4: in 1287, the new king of Jerusalem, Henry II of Lusignan, visited the city of Acre, capital of the Latin Kingdom since 1187, to celebrate his coronation. He had been able to take the title after the death of Charles of Anjou in 1285, who had contested Henry’s claim while defending his own. Henry had a tempestuous reign: while he was successful in wrenching the Kingdom back from the Neapolitan Angevins and modernizing it by instituting a judicial system and by working in the vernacular (French and Italian) rather than Latin for official documents, he was deposed through the efforts of one of his brothers (Amalric, with the aid of the Templars, in 1306—just months before their own abolition in 1307), after having killed another brother (Guy, in 1303) who had conspired against him. He returned to power in 1310 after the fall of Acre, just in time to take revenge on the conspirators and to oversee the dismantling of the Templars’ holdings in 1313, the result of the edict of dissolution by Philip IV, le Bel (the Fair). The feasting surrounding Henry’s coronation was said in contemporary chron­ icles to be the most extravagant ever seen and involved pantomimes based on the stories of the Round Table, knights playing ladies from the all-female land of Femenie (from the Alexander romances), and knights jousting as Tristan and Palamedes, rivals for Iseut’s love.22 Let us recap to let the scene take shape: in order to celebrate the arrival of the newly crowned King Henry, knights cross-dress, joust, and re-enact courtly romance, with scenes from the Tristan a favourite. As we saw in Chapter 2, the Tristan exerted enormous appeal and proved versatile in lending itself to a whole range of interpretations. Paris, BnF, MS fr. 750, the earliest known manuscript of the text (copied in 1278)—as we saw earlier—is thought to have been produced in either the Latin Kingdom (Acre or Cyprus23) or even southern Italy, and it is not unlikely that other such romance texts were similarly produced in such sites that did not survive (see Cigni  1999, 41 n. 26). In the northern Italian courts and republics, the Tristan and Alexander seem to have served as secular models for aristocratic behaviour in a world where chivalric ritual filled a didactic niche. While the various Alexander works are clearly Mediterranean texts in terms of topic and origin, telling of the conquests of the very lands which the Latin Kingdom then claimed or controlled, the Tristan could seem more anomalous. This ancient legend, dealing with the Celtic lands of Ireland, Cornwall, Brittany, Wales, and Scotland, might not at first glance seem the most logical choice for entertainment in the Latin Kingdom, but its portrait of conflicting feudal, family, 22  Minervini 2000a, 170, sec. 203. See the opening to Chapter 4 (p. 125) for a full quotation. 23  Cyprus was conquered by Richard I, the Lionheart, in 1191 and was therefore closely linked with the Latin Kingdom. After the fall of Acre in 1291, it became the Kingdom’s capital and remained so, in principle, under Lusignan rule. With the movement of artists between the two sites, it is sometimes almost impossible to distinguish exactly where a manuscript was compiled and decorated, Acre or Cyprus (which essentially became Acre transplanted).

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Dark Networks  205 and erotic ties has more to say about the poisonous environment of Acre in its final years than most other traditions.24 The mention of 100 years in the festival description in the Cronaca del Templare di Tiro seems clearly to refer to Acre itself, the city which had then served as the Latin Kingdom’s capital for almost exactly a century and in which the reception of romance texts would no doubt have been coloured by the vagaries of its multilingual and cultural environment. One could argue that the prose Tristan, when looked at as a whole tradition (begging the question of whether or not it ever constituted a single tradition, now or then) gestures towards a fantasy of global Christianity. Beginning with the negotiations within the family of the progeny of Joseph of Arimathea, it tells a Palestinian story of travel and dispersal which circles around, in at least one version (Baumgartner’s Version 2), to include an embedded quest for the Holy Grail. Of Joseph’s twelve nephews, all but one, who has been charged with guarding the Grail, come before their father to arrange their marriages before they are sent out across the world in that odd echoing of the New Testament Pentecost.25 Sador, the youngest, is the exception. He announces he will find his own wife, in defiance of family practice, and his uncle is reluctantly forced to agree, telling him only that he will surely come to regret that decision. Sador is then sent to Ireland, along with two of his brothers, as evangelists of Christian truth; but little of the ensuing tale recalls his initial reason for settling in chilly north-western Europe. Evangelizing is entirely absent from Sador’s mission. Instead, his time is spent in fleeing enemies, searching for his wife, and making, defending, and betraying friendships. At the start of his adventures, he is one day walking along the foggy coast when he spies a shipwreck and finds soon thereafter the inert body of what appears to be a dead woman cast onto the sand. He hastens to her side and carries her home; this is Chelinde, whose history is recounted above. A map of the eastern Mediterranean is thereby transposed onto the Irish Sea as the transplanted Jew falls for the alluring Babylonian princess in his new post as ambassador for a Middle Eastern religious sect.26 From this moment on, the prose Tristan explicitly provides the narrative with Christian roots and ties it directly to the story of the Grail. The Irish Sea is henceforth Mediterraneanized and becomes the site of a network of exchanges and 24  Just a glance at the description above of Henry II of Cyprus and Jerusalem, who ruled at the time the city fell to the Mamluks, speaks volumes about the level of treachery and underhandedness that reigned, a level matched by the court of King Marc in the Tristan. 25  This is all preserved in the prehistory section of the Tristan, for which the Carpentras manu­script BM 404 served as the base in the Curtis edition 1963–85. 26  This scenario is not as surprising as it might seem. A recent excavation at Tintagel has brought to light evidence indicating a strong connection between Cornwall and the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth and sixth centuries: ‘The people who lived in these well-constructed buildings appear to have been of elite status. The archaeological evidence—scores of fragments of pottery and glass—show that they were enjoying wine from what is now western Turkey and olive oil from the Greek Aegean and what is now Tunisia. What’s more, they ate their food from fine bowls and plates imported from western Turkey and North Africa’ (Keys 2016). For more on the Irish connection, see Busby 2017.

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206  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad collisions to produce a version of the tale which echoes a host of other early Mediterranean romances—most particularly the Apollonius de Tyr, which also involved frequent island-hopping, mixed identities, incest, treachery, vengeance, a sexually vulnerable heroine, and a forthright hero—and would surely resonate with a contemporary crusade-era audience.27 The similarities do not extend to the descriptions of the landscape—no olive trees and rosemary here; instead there is a homology which bears on crossings, peregrinations, passage, islands, riddles, and so forth and which structures the text in Mediterranean terms. Various nodes, or connection/meeting points—many of them marine-like—act as points de capiton (see also Chapter 5), allowing the Mediterranean gameboard to be superimposed onto the Celtic topology inscribed in the diegesis.28 The Mediterranean names and references mentioned in the prologue become more and differently significant, as one real, but also culturally and imaginatively invested, topography and habitus (the eastern Mediterranean) is read onto another (the Celtic sphere of the Irish Sea and, more widely, the Atlantic islands and coast, including the British Isles), thereby transforming both. The north-western topography quickly displaces the south-eastern as the primary referent, to the point that the latter has often been overlooked completely in modern scholarship. This Mediterranean setting then shifts into the realm of fantasy or metaphor, a presence that thereafter haunts the narrative through its absence, what Foucault once called the textual unconscious.29 It is an overlooked node, in the Latourian sense, or a repressed connection, in the Lacanian sense, but in both models it performs an important linking function whether or not it is recognized by the observer. This deep echo of the Mediterranean and its complicated networks can nonetheless be felt especially clearly in the Oedipus allusions that pervade the later sections of the prologue. The most obvious example concerns the birth of Apollon, the legitimate son of the doomed couple, Sador and Chelinde. When 27 On Apollonius, see Zink 2006, Archibald 2001. Though the extant French-language text seems to be from the fifteenth century, the Latin version was ancient and widely diffused, and early witnesses in French might well have been extant in the thirteenth century. 28  In the thought of Jacques Lacan, the point de capiton represents a binding between two orders of being (or between the signifier and the signified), a button that brings together two points in a set that he compares to a mattress quilting. A point de capiton could therefore be seen as a moment within a loose sort of structure when the subject (or reader) is able to find a mooring or anchoring, however temporary, in the seemingly amorphous narrative or voyage s/he is following (see Chapter 5, p. 183, for another usage of the term). 29  In Foucault’s terms, taken from a 1965 interview with Alain Badiou: ‘Thus, in discovering the unconscious, psychology discovered that the body itself forms part of our unconscious, that the collective to which we belong, the social group, the culture in which we have lived form part of our unconscious. . . . The unconscious is a word, not a language. It isn’t a system that allows us to speak, it is what is effectively written, words that were deposited in the existence of man, in the psyche of man that were literally discovered when the mysterious operation that is psychoanalysis was practiced. We discover a written text. That is to say, we discover in the first place that there are signs deposited. Secondly that these signs want to say something, they are not absurd signs. And thirdly we discover what they want to say.’ See: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/criticalmoment/2014/05/22/what-ispsychology-badiou-interviews-foucault-in-1965/ (accessed 9 September 2018).

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Dark Networks  207 Chelinde’s new husband (essentially her rapist) takes the baby to the forest to be killed, it is because he has had a prophetic dream which warns him that the boy will eventually kill him, a clear reference to the Greek tragic legend (Curtis 1963, 48, sec. 23; f. 4r).30 Metaphorical incest arises, in oblique form, in other episodes as well, involving characters travelling the same routes and interacting with one another with no knowledge of who they are or how they are related. Take, for example, Pelias, king of Leonois, the land which will later pass to King Marc and should by all rights be ruled one day by Tristan. When we first meet Pelias, he is circling around his forest endlessly, arriving after each tour at the very same fountain where he started (52–3, secs 34–37; f. 5v); or Sador, the nephew of Joseph and first husband of Chelinde, who bounces from boat to island to boat to island, landing finally near a fountain (another recurring motif throughout), then a temple pillar, always on the run, even at the moment of his death. These characters follow paths that they cannot intuit and which they follow almost blindly, as if in the grip of drives more powerful than themselves. The landscape of islands, forests, fountains, and temples, repeated at length, resembles nothing more than a laboratory rat-run. People collide constantly, travelling the same terrain, making and breaking alliances as they go. Though none of these actually involves incestuous relations (until, that is, Chelinde’s marriage to her son), such episodes put into motion characters who run repeatedly into their unrecognized children, or into children born of their spouses, or into their own friends and enemies, re-enacting the repetitious pattern of Mediterranean trade routes but without the legal agreements and rituals that keep those economic relations in tow (at least in theory). Narratologically none of this is arbitrary or aleatory and is all quite predictable, but for the reader, such coincidences are redo­lent of some larger plan, some marker of teleological design. The fountains and the boulder which indicates passage into the giant’s lands, both of which characters return to repeatedly with no memory of where they have been or foresight into where they are heading: these serve to mark the crossroads on a map of itineraries that everyone seems somehow to be following. The characters simply arrive, inevitably, at a landmark heavy with unspoken significance, where they proceed to deal with the giant or the foe who reveals to them something about their past or about where they must go next, before sending them on their way or holding them against their will. The regular appearance of the giant and the role that he plays in settling the fates of the characters are resonant with classical references, especially The Odyssey’s flesh-eating Cyclops, but they also echo the themes of repetition, re­cyc­ ling, and incest that typically mark foundation myths. This is clearest in the 30  References to Curtis’s text will indicate Curtis’s page numbers and folio indications from her base text, Carpentras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 404. For the later volumes of the collected romance, see Ménard 1987–1997.

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208  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad episodes involving riddles exchanged between the giant and his charges (75–84, secs 97–118; ff. 12v–15v).31 Exegetical skills, on the part of the diegetic characters/readers, must be activated in order to interpret these riddles, more or less guaranteeing that no one untrained in such skills (or simply not fated to play a role in this Christian fantasy) would ever arrive at the correct interpretation. And that is how it should be: these riddles are written to exclude the reader and befuddle the protagonist, and only the chosen will be able to decipher a meaning that comes from beyond. Again, a hint of incest reigns over these scenes, but it is incest which can only be spoken of in veiled language and as the subject of deflected intentions—repetition of another kind altogether. When, for example, Sador is held prisoner by the giant with the son (Luce) of his wife (Chelinde)’s second marriage (of which he has no knowledge), the giant tells a riddle of having eaten his mother (‘what was once enclosed in her body ends up enclosed in his’).32 In the riddle (80, sec. 109; f. 14br), the giant refers to having trapped his brother and buried him alive, covering him with the body of his ‘mother’ (the earth). Sador is later said to consume ‘the heart and rib’ of his host, Pelias, the man who had earl­ ier saved his life (82, sec. 111; f. 14v). Whether metaphorical or actual, the incest theme (as well as the cannibalistic theme) echoes the repetitious recycling of the characters and their deadly encounters along similar paths; one body is layered upon another and family members become unlikely bedmates. As we have seen, what Nietzsche once referred to as the ‘eternal return’ is a consistent feature of this romance, as it was in the earlier versions in verse by Thomas and Beroul. Though the returns differ in type and quality, repetition and return are the constant feature of the verse and prose Tristans. Almost all of the featured male characters eventually end up stranded at a particular fountain, just as they do in the keep of the giant, and this fountain also becomes a locus for lifeor-death encounters, for recognition, and inadvertent reunion. Men who find themselves at this fountain, abandoned or separated involuntarily from their communities (or fellow hunters), are likely to turn to violence when confronted with a newcomer. In one such encounter, Nicoraut, who some twenty years earlier had saved the baby Apollon (son of Sador and Chelinde) when he had been abandoned as an infant by his stepfather, Canor, in the forest, is left to die at the foot of the fountain, having been stabbed by the self-same Canor (88, sec. 127; f. 16v). Paternal substitution ensues uncannily when this Nicoraut, the adoptive father, replaces the son (Apollon) he raised after having saved his life, at the very spot where he once found the child. 31  See Huot 2016, 155–96, 259–65 for a fascinating discussion. 32  These riddles, as well as material borrowed for other episodes, make the Tristan a compendium of romance themes and motifs. The previously mentioned Apollonius of Tyre, the ultimate tale of Mediterranean travel and tangled hierarchies and kin, is the likely inspiration for the riddles and perhaps even for the incest motif, though no vernacular version of the text is known at this time. See Archibald 2001 and Huot 2002.

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Dark Networks  209 In another such episode (68, sec. 77; f. 10v), Sador is about to be executed for a murder that he has not committed, and Luce, the son of Pelias, volunteers to replace him. Sador had once saved Pelias’s life, so Pelias, having been called upon by the community to adjudicate between the two ‘criminals’, saves his own sa­viour, Sador, rather than the life of his own son.33 Sons, then, can step in to save fathers, replacing them when necessary, but a father is unlikely to save his son. When it is the young Apollon’s turn to pass by the aforementioned giant’s boulder, another milestone by which all good heroes must pass, and submit to the confinement the giant imposes, including attempting to solve the riddles he presents, he finds himself in the company of his father (Sador) and half-brother (Luce), both of whom are unknown to him. Apollon solves the riddle, killing the giant and saving his father’s life, though he and his father have never met and know nothing of each other’s existence (89–93, secs 130–136; ff. 17r–18r). Like the fountain, this boulder seems always to turn up at a decisive moment and to serve as an impediment that determines one’s fate. In Actor-Network Theory terms, we might say that the protagonists (usually thought of as the principal actants) meet a challenge at this barrier (which is, of course, also an actant, be it fountain or boulder) on their way to becoming what they are to become (another sort of actant) and that such encounters structure the narrative. Pelias is just one of the actants who has previously passed through this same actantial space, replicating without knowing it the fate of so many others. Surviving this obstacle means that one can move on into another state or state-of-the-narrative: Pelias ingeniously solves the giant’s riddle and issues riddles of his own, before moving into the next phase of his activity: fatherhood and judicial responsibility. The cycle continues without pause. The woods of Venus, in which one of the climactic scenes of missed encounters and mistaken identity takes place, were named in the past, it is explained, to commemorate the death of another giant, this one killed by Hercules, thus explicitly connecting the classical (Venus) and medieval (Tristan), Mediterranean and Celtic pasts (95, sec. 143; f. 19r). A map could be drawn of such over-determined lieux de mémoire (which this tale is always anxious to resurrect), places around which things happen, with memory being retained by the places themselves (as actants) rather than passed on to others of the social body (Nora 1989). The difference in the case of Pelias, the last to survive this test, is that it marks the site as one around which an emerging Christian culture can be constructed to replace a pagan past, a Christian culture which involves transposing a field of biblical and Mediterranean reference upon a Celtic bed of knowledge. Indeed, the geography of the Tristan as a whole could be seen as an abstract reiteration of the tracks of former travellers, former battles, former scenes of emotional bereavement. The body

33  As one can see, such examples of narrative logic are thinly disguised borrowings from the New Testament and from classical lore.

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210  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad of Chelinde alone serves as a tragic and trampled map of pain and defilement.34 First traded and promised to one husband, she is abandoned, then married, then claimed by another owner; she then gives birth to the child of the first husband while living with the second; she is stolen again and raped, gives birth again, is raped, is stolen again, gives birth, is claimed as wife by a new owner, is possessed by the new ruler, and dies. It is easy to forget in such a prolonged tale of violence that this woman’s body is an eastern, Mediterranean one, princess of Babylon, betrothed of the king of Persia. Trading on family alliances and politics, the first section of the Tristan insists on uniting men with their wives’ children, unbeknownst to either party, such that political wrangling is deflected and d ­ oubled by an encounter with loss, misunderstanding, and failure to decipher. The abuse of the woman who gave birth to those children is overwritten in such a way that her lifetime of grief culminates in the revelation that she is sleeping with, and married to, her previously unseen son. Who can blame her for wishing ill on the saintly finger-pointer, Augustine, who stands poised to strip her of the only peace and happiness she has ever known (103–5, secs 165–169; f. 22)? Instead, she is vilified as diabolical, and her stinking carcass is carried away to hell at the climax of the final conflagration. Likewise, King Pelias is confronted with paternal shortcomings: while he is being held prisoner by the giant, he finds himself allied with Luce and Apollon, the son born of his wife’s earlier marriage to Sador. Finding oneself in a particular place, and by chance, is apparently the only way to confront paternity and come to terms with one’s progeny. Parallels with the Oedipus legend (and also the more immediate twelfth-century life of Saint Gregory the Great) arise most explicitly with the murder of Sador by his son, Apollon, and the marriage between Apollon and the mother he never knew, Chelinde.35 It comes to a head, once again, at the fountain, where Sador lies wounded and left for dead by Canor, the man who had claimed his wife illegally and attempted to kill his son (96–7, secs 146–150; f. 19). Apollon kills his father, not knowing who he is, then inherits the throne in the place of his father and, when pushed to marry, sends out a message across his lands that he will take as his bride the land’s most beautiful female inhabitant. When all have paraded before him, he of course chooses Chelinde (99–100, secs 156–158; f. 20); and then, when he later hears of a holy man who has worked miracles, he invites the man (Augustine) to his palace. The hermit Augustine reveals to him his sin, and Apollon repents, but not Chelinde. Rightly mistrusting all men by this point, and

34  On literary cartography and narrative mapping in general, see Caquard and Cartwright 2014. 35  Interestingly, the name ‘Augustine’ recalls both Augustine of Hippo and Augustine of Canterbury, both foundational figures who stamped out local ‘heresies’ in favour of Roman Christianity—the former in northern Africa and the latter in Britain, having been sent by Rome to do its bidding. It was Gregory the Great who sent Augustine to Canterbury and who serves in the Church as patron saint of musicians and singers, a bit like Tristan. On the life of St Gregory, see Sot 1977.

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Dark Networks  211 seeing no benefit at all in Christian moralism, she denounces Augustine and dies as a result, ensuring the conversion to Christianity for the kingdom. Her sacrifice becomes the agent which shifts a pagan culture towards its uncertain religious future, one which ensures that it will thoroughly deny its pagan past while operating on its traces. All signs of her Middle Eastern presence are swallowed up by the global Christian project, her noble bloodline both celebrated and occluded. Royal and Middle Eastern are good, in other words, once they are dead and can be read as markers gesturing towards the Christian messiah to come, once, that is, their bloodline has been absorbed into the royal bloodline of north-western European Christian monarchs.36 To return to Actor-Network Theory, one might ask if all of the narrative strands in this romance could be seen to work together within the category of a network or whether they entail multiple networks, one stacked upon the other, and interacting across all levels. If a Latourian network consists of an act linked together with all of its influencing factors (which are all further linked through their own networks), then it seems that a romance could indeed be seen as an actor-network— a prequel in particular—as it strives to clarify or exemplify the network from which a narrative strand proceeded and the paths it takes, rather than the particular agents who produced it or the end it eventually met. Characters and things operate together on the level of actants, each with a part to play, like the rings exchanged by Tristan and Iseut or the letters in verse which move from one actant to another at key moments of the Tristan narrative. All contribute to, and play their role in, perpetuating the actor-network that is the romance, and in inciting further modifications; or, as Moretti (2005, 80) would have it, ‘a successful convergence usually produces a powerful new burst of divergence’. If the principal historical impulse of at least one redactor of the Tristan romance was to ground the Celtic story in a Christian ambiance, to rebrand pagan lieux de mémoire as Christian sites commemorating the errors of the pagan past, and to provide a familial and intercultural history to the Tristan legend, this was done by tying the legend to specific places, landmarks, and values which are distant from those that we conventionally associate with it. Clearly, mere his­­toric­al fact—however it is arrived at—is inadequate to register the complexities of the medieval present. The protagonist of this new Tristan is born into a tangled web of hierarchies in which he is, from the very beginning, simply a pawn; the incest motif and endless returns are mises en abyme of the way that historical texts consume their own sources, sitting suspended in networks that are endlessly and necessarily intertwined.

36  This same machination by which nobility and privilege are preserved only if made Christian through threat or conversion (or both) is observable in several chansons de geste (the Saracen bride topos) and in Floire et Blanchefleur.

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212  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

The Peacock and the Low Countries Networks are not just relations between persons: they are, like the Net, both the effect of vehicles mobilised to carry messages and the resultant passages and translations which co-mobilise different orders of phenomena. Edwards and Strathern 2000, 162

Projects to reconstruct and visualize the paths along which medieval material and cultural goods moved have proven enormously productive in recent years. However, such projects usually limit themselves to what can be documented: a place, person, or object needs to be positively indicated in order to be registered. ANT’s mission of bringing to light hinterland networks—routes, connections, workings, and phenomena that we do not habitually notice—invites us to pay attention also to what is not necessarily verifiable in positivistic terms. The unmentioned or unmentionable will not appear in a visualization that bases itself on positive evidence, such as Moretti’s graphs and maps (where significant absences become perceptible only when we compare visualizations representing different cultural or historical situations). Academic writing, however, can take paths not available to databases. Here, therefore, we focus on what we call ‘dark networks’, on the analogy of ‘dark matter’: a substance that scientists hypothesize makes up almost the whole universe and which is not directly detectable with current technology but which can be inferred from its gravitational impact on other substances and structures.37 Attending to dark networks allows us to explore how substances, relations, and forces may shape a text or manuscript and the trajectories it follows while leaving on the primary materials no traces that are directly detectable using present methods. This is a reminder rather than an innovation. The fragmentary nature of the medieval archive—the loss of medieval manuscripts and texts being acute in England and France—has always obliged scholars to engage in interpretations that highlight methodological principles as much as empirical evidence. It is normal for philo­logic­al stemmas to posit missing links between surviving manuscript witnesses, for example, while large areas of medieval women’s experience became studiable only with the acceptance of new kinds of historical evidence and new principles of interpretation. Efforts to identify hitherto overlooked phenomena, and to develop the means needed to appreciate them, have always dynamized medieval studies. ‘Dark’ networks are obscure rather than ominous, but the choice of term also carries a corrective. Anthropologists Jeanette Edwards and Marilyn Strathern 37 This is, of course, only a heuristic analogy. Brief introductions from CERN (‘Dark Matter’) and NASA (‘Dark Energy, Dark Matter’) outline the concepts on which we wish to draw.

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Dark Networks  213 detect in Euro-American academic commentary a ‘touch of sentimentality’ that ‘renders ties somehow productive and generative in themselves, as though longrange contact with people or information flow were good things in themselves’ (Edwards and Strathern  2000, 162). But any network may be a locus of the am­biva­lence that Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle term ‘hostipitalité’: the inassimilable presence of hostility within any instance of hospitality (and vice versa) (Derrida and Dufourmantelle 1997, 45). As we have seen in the first section of this chapter, the Tristan prologue actualizes this observation by depicting again and again scenes of blind encounter in which family relations are both occluded and overdetermined, never consistent or predictable. This ambivalence is inherent not only in romance but also in diplomacy, gift-giving, or any situ­ation in which power relations are negotiated, whether or however it surfaces in expressions of emotion. Moreover, not all networks are amicable. ‘We’ may loathe ‘them’ and seek to damage them; consider the complex requirements of feud in the Roman de Troie or in many chansons de geste, for example. More extremely still, ‘we’ may reject ‘them’, a people with whom ‘we’ do not trade, socialize, or intermarry, to the point where referring to their existence becomes taboo. The patterned relationships thus produced form or impact on networks that affect the behaviour and communications of either group or both. Even absences that are not obviously invested may point to networks; if I do not holiday in a particular country, that decision may be underpinned by multiple individual, local, and global factors even if it never crosses my mind to make the trip. Edwards and Strathern argue further that endlessly extended networks would be unlivable and that networks are always being truncated in order to create manageable groups. Their example is English kin groups: people cannot possibly invest equally in everyone who is, in principle, ‘related’ to them, so the networks must be cut somewhere. Cutting networks is not in itself a bad thing, therefore, though this does not stop people from being anxious about the points of severance (see also the acute commentary on network concepts in Strathern  1996). This points us towards a second issue raised by the term ‘dark network’, namely the need to include in any discussion of a particular network questions of how, when, and where connections terminate, of what explanations are given for termination and of what affects termination creates, and of what lies on the near and the far sides of the boundaries thus created. All groupings also exclude, and the limits of a network serve to define groups. Who and what is cut off by a particular truncated network, and why, and what responses does truncation generate? Among ‘dark networks’, we include severed, neglected, or potential-but-unactivated connections in which texts and manuscripts do not—apparently—engage. A full account of such situations needs to pay attention to how hospitality, hostility, anxiety, and even indifference attach to both overt and unacknowledged networks and to both the construction and the termination of networks.

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214  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Following Latour’s insistence on the heuristic value of surprise (Latour 2013, 33, for example), we here take the counter-intuitive step of discussing the celebrated illustrated Alexander compilation that is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 by tracing the pathways around a text not included in it: Jean de le Mote’s Le Parfait du Paon. The omission needs no explanation; the Parfait tells us that it was written in 1340, whereas, according to the colophon in Bodley 264, the copying of its French Alexander texts was completed in 1338, their decoration in 1344 (f. 208r).38 Tracing the networks around the Parfait, however, permits a broader perspective on the regional and supralocal context within which Bodley 264 belongs than comes into view if we work only on the materials that the manu­ script includes or on its own production. Most discussions of this luxury manu­ script and its contents have focused on the kingdoms of England and France and on the position relative to them of the county of Flanders, where Bodley 264 is believed to have been produced. It is thought that the patronage of such a manifestly expensive object must have involved royalty; French, English, and Scottish have all been proposed (Cruse 2011, 188–94). However, as is widely recognized, Bodley 264 was not constituted only by these great royal powers, which modern processes of state- and nation-formation have made principal determinants of modern academic disciplines and histories. It emerged from a multilingual and linguistically divided region of overlapping domains, jurisdictions, and influences that defy reduction: the Low Countries. Putting the question like this risks prejudging it, however. Although localities, physical places, and displacements are crucial, we are talking about a series of networks that on a map will appear as routes and connections rather than as a bounded ‘area’. We aim to describe what we see as medieval attempts to delineate a culture and advantages characteristic of and shared by Low Countries’ territories in order to put them ‘on the map’ as a collective of political forces. By tracing side-by-side two particular networks which a narrower focus might render almost invisible to each other—one centring on Bodley 264 and the other on the Parfait—we aim to depict how this region’s composite, networked, and contingent viewpoint inhabits some of its cultural productions in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. In other words, we decline to cut the network of analysis around Bodley 264 at the points to which historical analysis usually limits them, arguing that we need to go beyond disciplinary conventions if we are to recover a sense of the Low Countries and/as their networks in their historical actuality. Even today, the Low Countries are difficult to define or to map, and views differ according to the onlookers’ politics and histories. Modern Belgium, for instance, defies assumptions about the homogeneity of the nation state; nineteenth-century 38  We cite the Parfait by line number, from Carey  1972. Bodley 264 is digitized: https://digital. bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/90701d49-5e0c-4fb5-9c7d-45af96565468. The manuscript is described in Leo 2013, 263–71; much the most extensive study is the excellent Cruse 2011.

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Dark Networks  215 Belgians celebrated a complexity that recent decades have tended to simplify or reject. The medieval area included (but did not coincide with) the modern Benelux countries, areas of what is now northern and north-eastern France, and parts of modern Germany (Kügle 2000, Margue 2011).39 The region cannot, however, be defined neatly by means even of medieval political bound­ar­ies; in fact, the European river network provides a better guide, with the Rhine, Meuse, Escaut/Scheldt/Schelde, and Ems (often regarded as the eastern boundary) all flowing into the North Sea in the Low Countries.40 Low Countries’ domains and titles were also notably unstable; they moved in and out of personal unions, were divided or subsumed into others in response to the tides of a dynasty’s fortunes or to local or international events. The region knew a large variety of political forms and forces, secular and religious, which differed both across and within provinces (some of the complexity may be gathered from the short his­tor­ies in Blockmans 1999 or Prevenier 2000, who contrasts the region’s political and institutional diversity with its social, cultural, and economic unity). Any political map of the region’s alliances and holdings would need ideally to be tied to a particular decade; although Rombert Stapel’s map (see Figure 6.1) depicts the state of affairs in the fifteenth century, it nevertheless identifies and broadly localizes territories operative also in the first half of the fourteenth.41 It must also be recognized that the Low Countries’ network of interests extended further east and south than the region itself, notably into imperial territories in the Rhineland and Lotharingia (Lorraine, Burgundy). Within the kingdom of France, this network stretched beyond the (debatably French) counties of Flanders and Artois to include (at least) those areas with close geographical, cultural, economic, or dynastic links to the Low Countries: Picardy, Champagne, Burgundy, the Vermandois, Ponthieu, Bar. Although modern scholars agree that a relatively durable frontier between Romance and Germanic dialects can be traced (e.g. Kooper 1994, xvi; Moeglin 2010, 38 continues the frontier considerably to the east and south), they recognize that it was riddled with exceptions and complications during the medieval period. In any case, it would be reductive to consider the region only a contact zone between these large politico-cultural language groups. With differences that depended on factors like social rank and function, location and mobility, many

39  To explore the region’s past, we therefore need to look not only at histories of the modern Low Countries, such as the first and second volumes of Henri Pirenne’s magisterial though dated national history of Belgium (1902–32), but also at regional or local histories in other countries, such as Platelle and Cauzel 2008. 40  The river map has, of course, changed since the Middle Ages and also changed over the medieval period through both natural and human activity. It is worth noting that, although they are often used to mark political frontiers, rivers enable rather than prevent traffic. 41  We are grateful to Rombert Stapel for providing us with a copy of his map and for permission to reproduce it here.

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Figure 6.1.  Late medieval boundaries in the Low Countries (Stapel 2018)

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Dark Networks  217 people must have functioned in more than one of the several regional language variants, as well as in such non-vernacular languages as Latin or Hebrew.42 Networks may become dark at different historical moments, and today the regional viewpoint of the medieval Low Countries is hard to describe or even to perceive. No single successor state directs and funds scholarly attention; indeed, much of the area is marginal to modern national interests. The northern and eastern French pasts, for example, are largely the concern of local historians and not well funded centrally. Scholars of the Low Countries comment repeatedly on how little work has been done on certain connections across the area. While some of these medieval networks have been obscured because they cross modern national boundaries, others have suffered from internal problems, such as the increase of political tensions along linguistico-ethnic lines in modern Belgium. Networks that in the fourteenth century connected and represented the Low Countries across and beyond Europe are now truncated, their hospitable and hostile energies redirected along different lines.43 The difficulties of studying the region today are compounded by the crucial fact that the medieval Low Countries’ characteristic self-presentation is of a kind that further enhances its obscurity now. What we seek to portray challenges modern approaches because it is not an ‘identity’ in the modern, substantive, in­di­vidu­at­ing, bounded sense; rather, it expresses itself in a claim to networking potential and practice, as well as in particular networks. A further distinguishing aspect of these Low Countries productions is that they offer a space in which hostility and hospitality are creatively ambiguous and reversible: a space for ne­go­ti­ation. The region’s characteristic impulse to network (read as a verb) resists logical coherence: it encourages non-exclusive, even contradictory affiliations, and subsumes cutting as part of the networking process. The resulting networks are, typically, diplomatically subtle and discreet; masterly unobtrusiveness advertises the Low Countries’ distinctive skills. This self-effacement is both a strength and a weakness, since they make its productions culturally mobile in part by opening them to appropriation and adaptation. The cultural products of the Low Countries that we discuss in this chapter invite others to invest them with their own interests; and their producers, we shall argue, were aware of and maximized this aspect to promote their potential. However, this strategy makes them still harder to appreciate today. By focusing on two such productions, we aim to provide a larger picture 42  Among the variants identified today as ‘languages’ in the region are Champenois, Franconian, Limburgian-Ripuarian, Lorrain, Picard, Walloon, West Flemish, and West Frisian. These and others may be found in the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger; users are invited to suggest further endangered languages for inclusion by filling in a form indicating the language’s name, degree of vitality, and location—an invitation and procedures which illustrate some of the issues raised by modern language taxonomy. http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas, accessed 13 February 2019. 43  Some of the ‘sequences of places’ (I, xxviii) that structure David Wallace’s major late medieval literary history by place are more representative of medieval people’s usual routes than are others. For the Low Countries, see Wallace 2015, I, 53–69 and 481–595.

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218  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad of how the Low Countries network presented itself (rather than how the various territories ‘presented themselves’) to the world in the first half of the fourteenth century. We shall begin with Bodley 264, then move to the Parfait du Paon, and finally turn to a ballade debate over the proper af­fi li­ations of literature in French between Le Mote, author of the Parfait, and Philippe de Vitry, aligned with the University of Paris and with the extended French royal family. Our starting point for the first of these networks is Bodley 264, a densely illustrated manuscript of exceptionally high quality. The Bodleian Library website description indicates some of the routes which brought the manuscript to its present state and location: (fols. 3r–208r) The Romance of Alexander in French verse, with miniatures illustrating legends of Alexander the Great and with marginal scenes of everyday life, by the Flemish illuminator Jehan de Grise and his workshop, 1338–44; with two sections added in England c. 1400, (fols. 209r–215v, with fol. 1r) Alexander and Dindimus (Alexander Fragment B) in Middle English verse, with coarser miniatures, and (fols. 218r–271v, with fol. 2v) Marco Polo, Li Livres du Graunt Caam, in French prose, with miniatures by Johannes [probably another Flemish illustrator, working in London] and his school. (https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/inquire/p/90701d49-5e0c-4fb5-9c7d45af96565468. Accessed 30 January 2020.)

We are concerned here only with the manuscript’s first phase, to which we can add further details. The ‘Romance of Alexander in French verse’ is the Roman d’Alexandre of Alexandre de Paris, from Bernay in the Angevin domain of Normandy (composed 1185–90; ff. 3r–195v). The Roman d’Alexandre was already a composite work drawing on a number of earlier accounts, but in Bodley 264 several other works of varying dates have been interpolated into this matrix text at the appropriate point in the diegesis, providing a full biographical cycle in a Picard scripta: La Prise de Defur (early or first half of the thirteenth century; ff. 102r–109v and 182v–185r), Les Vœux du Paon (c. 1310; ff. 110r–163v), Le Restor du Paon (between 1310–12 and 1338; ff. 165r–182v), Le Voyage au paradis terrestre (early or first half of the thirteenth century; ff. 185r–188r), and La Venjance Alixandre (last quarter of the twelfth century; ff. 197r–208r). Like other French-language continuations of the verse Roman d’Alexandre, all these ori­gin­ate in the extended Low Countries area (Gaullier-Bougassas 2014, I, 50).44 The colophon that dates the manuscript, however, gives its contents as ‘li romans du boin roi Alixandre . / Et les veus du pauon . les acomplissemens . / Le Restor du pauon . et le pris’ (‘the romance of the good king Alexander; and the vows of the peacock; their fulfilment; the Restoration of the peacock; and the prize 44  Details are taken from the entries for each text in Gaullier-Bougassas  2014, IV. The Frenchlanguage writings about Alexander are summarized briefly at I, 47–56.

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Dark Networks  219 [for the best fulfilment of a vow]’).45 Among the additions to Alexandre de Paris’s text, therefore, only the Vœux and Restor du Paon merit special mention. Bodley 264 belongs to that phase of Roman d’Alexandre dissemination in which its popularity was impelled by this short but influential cycle of interpolations into the Prise de Defur, itself an interpolation into the Roman d’Alexandre (Busby 2002, I, 315; Cruse 2011, 4).46 Since Alexandre de Paris presents his own work as a creative com­pil­ation and reworking of earlier poems, this ‘grafting’ (enter; see below, pp. 228–9) of further narratives into the matrix text reorients that text from within. The action of the Paon poems takes place during what is presented as a brief hiatus (a matter of days) before Alexander proceeds to Babylon, where he will die. Bodley 264, like some other manuscripts that graft the Prise and the Paon poems into the Roman d’Alexandre, appends them to the Fuerre de Gadres in Branch 2.47 This position imparts a chanson de geste flavouring to the interpolations, but the bloody battles and glorious feats of arms are tempered by the Fuerre’s ‘truly remarkable’ emphasis on ‘the spirit of mutual respect that almost always prevails between the two sides’ (Baumgartner 2002, 36). The Vœux and Restor du Paon develop this mutual respect into long scenes of courtly pastimes that give much more prom­in­ ence to female characters and to love than is the case elsewhere in the extended Roman d’Alexandre corpus. Hostilities are initiated and then put on hold as captors and captives sit down to feast. Knights and ladies on opposing sides meet in a courtly setting that encourages sudden passions and displays of bravado; the emotions and norms of war encounter those of tournament chivalry. Mutual respect is stretched to the point where chivalric magnanimity endangers military strategy, becoming almost as damaging as betrayal would be (Grigsby 1985, 568–70). In the Vœux, the principal dish at the feast is a roast peacock, over which men and women pledge to perform certain exploits in the forthcoming battle. The peacock embodies the ambivalence of Derrida and Dufourmantelle’s ‘hostipitality’: shot by the prisoner Porrus, it was the beloved pet of Fesonas, a lady of the city who will eventually fall in love with its killer. (His father, Clarus, king of India, intends to disinherit Fesonas’s brothers, Betis and Gadifer, and to marry her himself; Alexander foils the plan; Fesonas and Porrus fall in love, and their marriage is one of several between the erstwhile enemy sides that Alexander decrees at the end of the Vœux). The pledges made over the bird express varying mixtures of respect for honourable opponents with high-minded defiance; tempers fray and

45  The colophon in fact divides each poem into two. On this division in Restor manuscripts (nine of which contain only Restor II: the Pris), see Donkin 1980, 39; van der Meulen 2011. 46  On cyclicity in the Paon poems, see especially Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1986; Bellon-Méguelle 2011; Menegaldo 2015, 145–201. 47  Five other manuscripts include the Roman d’Alexandre, the Prise de Defur, and the Vɶux du Paon (Bellon-Méguelle 2008: 42–4). Of these, three add the Vɶux at the end of the Roman d’Alexandre (in which other texts are interpolated); two interpolate the Vɶux into the Prise, itself within the Roman d’Alexandre.

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220  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad participants must be reconciled through courtly pastimes. Much of the poem is taken up with battle scenes, both before and during the fulfilment of the vows. The Restor takes up the story of the only pledge remaining unfulfilled at the end of the Vœux: the lady Edea’s vow to recreate the peacock in gold. Further pledges over the golden peacock are exchanged and fulfilled, in the same spirit as in the Vœux. A debate leads to the drawing of lots to decide whose was the best pledge and fulfilment of it in the earlier poem. Cassamus’s name is drawn, although it was never entered, thus crowning with marvel his feat of chivalrously re-horsing his adversary in single combat on the battlefield. (Uncle of Fesonas, Betis, and Gadifer, and the man whose sorrow brought Alexander into their cause, Cassamus died in the Vœux.) Marriages and alliances are finally agreed once these battle scenes have allowed the hostile forces full rein and established Alexander as a ‘conquérant preux et juste, pacificateur et réconciliateur’ (Margue 2011, 273, ‘a brave and just conqueror who brings peace and reconciliation’). As several critics have observed, the Vœux and Restor du Paon alter the character of the Roman d’Alexandre texts as well as of Alexander himself, emphasizing the values of peace, justice, and conciliation, as well as the importance of court life and of chivalry in bringing about those ideals. Interpreting chivalry and courtliness as spaces in which conflict may be negotiated by means other than military might, the Paon texts not only allow the conquered a dignified voice but espouse their point of view. Art historian Mark Cruse (2011) has shown that the Paon texts dominate the glorious visual programme of Bodley 264 and how both frame the manuscript itself as a spectacular courtly object.48 In this visual programme, much attention is paid to those who produce courtly objects as well as to those who consume them. Whereas the framed illuminations and historiated capitals contain dignified scenes of courtly and chivalric activities that illustrate the text, the many basde-page or marginal illustrations portray especially the infrastructure that underpins them. The technology and sociology of jousting and feasting are on display, as people make and sell clothes, armour, and weaponry, cook, train performing animals, or play musical instruments to accompany courtly dances. Some (not all) of the lives and actions that supply the court with luxury goods and services are here displayed in number and variety. The professional skills of merchants, artisans, performers, servants, and peasants are emphasized in scenes of bargaining, craftsmanship, showmanship, animal husbandry, table service, training, domesticity, 48 Counts of the number of illustrations vary, but, according to Ross, Bodley 264’s Roman d’Alexandre proper (i.e. without the interpolated poems) contains 110 pictures (miniatures, historiated initials, or marginal images) on its 106 folios. The figures for the Vœux and Restor du Paon in the same manuscript are sixty-nine pictures for fifty-four folios and thirty-nine pictures for nineteen folios, respectively. The Restor is therefore the most densely illustrated of the Peacock texts in the manuscript (and compare its ten images in Paris, BnF, fr. 12565, and one, two, or none in the remaining thirteen manuscripts) (Ross 1988, 12–16). The Restor also benefits from one of Bodley 264’s magnificent full-page introductory miniatures (f. 163r), unlike the Vœux.

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Dark Networks  221 leisure, and so on. In the lower register appropriate to them, the activities ­supporting courtly life are here portrayed as civilizing forces analogous to the more conventionally celebrated deeds of the great. Prominent among the many objects, processes, and skills that pass through the margins is the peacock whose material presence and transformations are central to the Paon texts. The job of illustrating the narrative passes to the bas-de-page when a two-page spread (ff. 164v–165r) shows smiths producing various parts of the golden peacock, overseen by Edea. This emphasis on collaborative production accords with the text of the Restor, where both Edea and the goldsmiths who prod­uce the statue are equated with the poet (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1986, 441). As the most conspicuous, and conspicuously produced, courtly object in text and manuscript, the peacock is the emblem of the socially more inclusive perspective that Bodley 264 advances: a perspective that does not dismiss differences of occupation or rank but situates them relative to a social order articulated visually on the page. Whereas in the texts of the Vɶux and Restor du Paon, the aristocratic principal characters alone occupy the foreground, Bodley 264 draws our attention in its margins to those who service their activities. Reading the Alexander texts in this manuscript, we become aware of these people, whose unobtrusiveness in the poems testifies to how well they perform their services. Their position on the page is hierarchically inferior to the miniatures and illuminated capitals but not therefore less significant. In the texts as in the manuscript, the Peacock exemplifies the specialized sense that Latour gives to the term ‘hybrid’: a phenomenon in which culture is added to nature (Latour 1993, 10 and see Strathern 1996). (We capitalize Peacock in order to distinguish the emblem from its manifestations in particular birds or texts.) Its malleability showcases how natural forms and human techniques may be variously intertwined: it is a pet bird, a corpse, a dish to grace a royal feast, a support for pledges, a golden figure in production and then display, a text cycle, a manu­ script illustration, and so on. It parallels and re-signifies the imperial conqueror himself: Alexander, who repeatedly faces human-natural or technological-natural mixtures and is himself at once a marvel who pushes the boundaries of what it means to be human, a product supported by a vast infrastructure, a patron-founder of cities and statues, a tracer of new and existing paths, and the focal point around which texts, narratives, and expensive objects proliferate.49 As a parallel, however, the Peacock puts the emphasis not on Alexander’s glorious conquests but on the working and networking that they require and stimulate. It conjures up precisely

49 ‘[L]e Roman d’Alexandre dans Bodley 264 présente l’exercice du pouvoir comme dépendant d’ensembles hybrides . . . et nous invite à contempler la fluidité de la frontière entre l’humain et le nonhumain’ (Cruse 2015, 319, ‘The Romance of Alexander in Bodley 264 presents the exercise of power as dependent on an ensemble of hybrids . . . and invites us to ponder the fluidity of the boundary between the human and the non-human’).

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222  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad the just, peaceful, expensively maintained environment necessary for luxury items such as manuscripts and texts—and their makers—to flourish. As an item of property, the Peacock represents ‘a network in manipulable form’ (Strathern 1996, 525). Items of property are the summation of networks, the gathering of their actual and potential value into a single object. Strathern emphasizes that this process gives the owner exclusive access to the networks thus embodied. However, the Peacock as it appears in Bodley 264 also presents the owner with the needs of others, in particular those who have been involved (in a broad sense) in its production. It therefore works to extend networks that ‘property’ commonly cuts, so as to include (some of) those who are commonly excluded. Even as an item of property, this object wants to be a resource through which (some) other agents can access the networks’ value; thanks to it, they may be able to exploit, even to renegotiate, their own relationships with those networks. It functions as what Latour (following Michel Serres) terms a ‘quasi-object’: a thing which ‘designate[s] by default the places that potential subjects could come to fill later on’, thus producing ‘original forms of subjectification: skills, creations, objectivities’ (Latour 2013, 289). Hence the Peacock invites ethical behaviour while offering the opportunity to change what that might mean. Texts and manuscript each contribute to producing this hybrid object. Thus the Vɶux and Restor du Paon revise Alexander’s behaviour and goals, their Peacock standing in for the explicit passages of moral reflection that more didactic texts might advance. In Bodley 264, complementarily, the Peacock draws attention to the infrastructure of courtly life, inviting courtly audiences to expand their awareness of human and non-human activities and networks and, along with it, their definition of ‘the courtly’, which will become hybrid in its (articulated) inclusion of those who allow the court to function. The Peacock implies that collaboration between different social, textual, and manuscript ‘registers’ is necessary to produce such a merveille as Bodley 264. The Peacock itself is, therefore, a material and ideal resource inviting new interventions and interpretations that will be brought out and refined by courtly and chivalric meaning systems and by artisanal skill, a co-project to tempt authors, copyists, illustrators, patrons, readers, purchasers, and imitators. An important aspect of the ethical revision that the Peacock offers is therefore an emphasis on the civilizing powers of artifice and artistry, which it presents as both work and play (Bellon-Méguelle 2008, Grigsby 1985). The Vɶux and Restor reinterpret battle as tournament, promoting ritualized encounters that allow conflicts to be negotiated with prowess and honour while aspiring to limit the widespread devastation caused by warfare. Bodley 264 extends the value of play, ritual, and mimicry as forces of social cohesion into lower registers (Davenport  1971, Ménard 2003). The chivalric confrontations and courtly negotiations of the mini­ atures and historiated initials are reprised in less damaging bas-de-page rivalries: tilting at barrels, spinning tops, puppet shows, board games, and cockfights (not less damaging for the birds, of course) are some of the many images that tempt us

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Dark Networks  223 to look closely and that reward our engagement. Courtly audiences of all stations may be flattered by reflections in both principal and marginal images, and recognizing both these continuities and their differentiation promotes a sense of community across social rank and function. The values we have been discussing are ascribed by these artefacts to the Low Countries, which therefore become a ‘place’ in a complex sense. As it appears in both Bodley 264 and the Paon texts, the Peacock asserts the specifically social and political importance of luxury items, of workmanship, of gifts, feasting, and fighting, and of the networking activities these all involve. Furthermore, it posits these as Low Countries specialisms. More significantly still, the Peacock is not an inert representative of these phenomena but a quasi-object inviting consumers and producers to envisage how their world may change in the light of new forms of potential subjectification thus far unrealized in the ‘real’ world.50 This ‘real’ world is formatted, so to speak, in terms that advantage the great powers and fortunes; but the Peacock artefacts nudge us to ask how the world might alter if it thought itself in terms more like those of the Low Countries. Bodley 264 articulates this question with polite discretion and occasional urgency. On f. 127v one of two peacocks in the margins points its beak at a line describing how, in a game of chess, ‘Li Baudrains traist sa fierge por son paon sauver’ (Ritchie 1921–29, II, 2773, ‘[Cassiel] the Baudrain moves his queen in order to save his pawn’). As S.  K.  Davenport (1971, 88) observes, ‘paon’ here is both peacock and pawn: a minor piece on the board, in need of active protection from both queens and lords. Although a consummate work of art and diplomacy with which both manuscript and texts identify, the Peacock is not invulnerable—indeed, its vulnerability is highlighted, and it requires active maintenance from those who enjoy it. The point is underlined on f. 152. Where the recto presents us with a battle scene in which riderless horses trample dismembered human bodies, the verso shows a carter driving a waggon full of heads, while, on the right, one man carefully manipulates another’s head. Davenport (1971, 86) interprets this last scene as an attempt to replace the head on a body and the whole sequence as tipping into absurdity the manuscript’s emphasis on the professional competence of craftsmen and servants. If we wryly or wistfully note that artisanal skill in the world outside the manuscript is less efficacious, then we accept limitations on the powers that the Peacock claims for artworks and consequently acknowledge that the truth it promises remains a fragile ideal—an acknowledgement that calls upon us to take action in that outside world. Caught up in greater rivalries, the Low Countries may be unable to perform their most significant service for those rivals: the stimu­la­tion, production, maintenance, and skilful repair of vital connections. 50  The ‘quasi-objects’ discussed in the second part of this chapter are also ‘actants’, in the ter­min­ ology developed in the first part, since they are transformative; calling them ‘quasi-objects’ highlights how they transform subjectification, specifically.

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224  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad The different Paon compositions and Bodley 264 are all recent and local in reference, as well as timeless and international in the scope to which they aspire. Each was caught up not only in the political manoeuvrings of Edward III of England and Philip VI of France in the early stages of what would become the Hundred Years War but also in those of the Holy Roman (German) Empire and Italy. Economically ­dependent on England and politically on France, the county of Flanders was deeply affected by the Anglo-French hostilities, and not only because it was the site of much of the actual fighting. It was also internally divided in multiple ways. Although the counts of Flanders held fiefs that, like almost all the Low Countries territories, lay within the Empire (‘imperial Flanders’), the county proper was a fief of the French crown, and Philip IV enforced French suzerainty by invading at the turn of the fourteenth century against fierce resistance.51 Relations between the towns, countryside, nobles, and clergy were often tense and conflicted; the Hundred Years War both added to and had to fit into an already very complicated situation (Nicholas 1992, especially 180–258). Tournai, where Bodley 264 was probably produced, lay on the border between Flanders and Hainault and was controlled by the French king; Edward III laid siege (1 August–26 September 1340) in order to hand it over to the Flemish towns under their leader Jacob van Artevelde, who had rebelled against the count of Flanders and by implication the king of France (for different perspectives, see Nicholas 1992, 217–26, Ormrod 2011, 225–7, Cruse 2011, 70–5). Flanders also had complicated relations with its neighbour Hainault, then in the ascendancy under its magnificent count William I of Avesnes, the Good (r. 1304–37), who was also (with different seigneurial numbering) count of Holland and of Zeeland and lord of Friesland. The Dampierre counts of Flanders and the Avesnes counts of Hainault descended from the warring offspring of the two marriages of Margaret of Constantinople (countess of Flanders and Hainaut, d. 1280); their separate inheritances were decreed by Louis IX of France (St Louis) in the mid thirteenth century (Charles of Anjou was briefly involved, before pursuing his ambitions in southern Italy instead) but remained contested for generations. It is noteworthy that family connections did not prevent the various nobles from supporting opposing sides in the Hundred Years War; nor did their political differences cause them to break off relations. Jacques de Longuyon composed the Vɶux around 1312–14 for Thibaut de Bar, who was then prince-bishop of Liège in the Empire; formerly allied with Philip IV of France, Thibaut afterwards became closely associated with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, who was also count of Luxembourg and who competed with the French Angevins for control of southern Italy and Rome. The Bar family were based in the east of modern France, in the Meuse-Moselle area, then the western 51  In Belgium today, Flemish Community Day, 11 July, commemorates the Battle of the Golden Spurs at Kortrijk/Courtrai in 1302; modern ‘Flanders’ is, however, much larger than the medieval county.

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Dark Networks  225 fringe of the Empire (Thibaut’s brother was bishop of Metz). As the name of Thibaut’s nephew Edward I, count of Bar, indicates, they were also closely connected to the English crown. The motif of vowing on a bird may have been suggested to Thibaut by its earliest recorded instance, the grand knighting of the future Edward II of England in 1306.52 These vows presented the young prince as a Swan Knight recalling Godfrey of Bouillon, also from the Low Countries, the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem (Murray 2000, and see above, pp. 133–4), and the final Worthy in the sequence of Nine Worthies, a topos developed in the Vɶux that travelled throughout Europe and beyond (Schroder  1971, Bellon-Méguelle 2008, 489–96 and for bibliography, 510–13). Written at the same time as the Vɶux du Paon, the Vɶux de l’Épervier relates Emperor Henry VII’s disastrous expedition to Rome and his alleged poisoning by his rival, Robert of Anjou, king of Naples (the Wise, r. 1309–43). Thibaut of Bar died on the same expedition, fighting with Robert’s men.53 This traditional account of the Vɶux du Paon’s origins has been challenged by Hélène Bellon-Méguelle, author of the major monograph on the poem. Noting that the attribution rests principally on a short epilogue found only in Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12565, ff. 188v–189r, Bellon-Méguelle argues that the Vɶux should in fact be ascribed to the Picard region, thus further west than is usually thought (and therefore perhaps within the French kingdom rather than the Holy Roman Empire) (2008, 471–88). Michel Margue, however, argues that Bellon-Méguelle allows modern geopolitics to colour her perception. He details the intimate connections that ensured mobility of medieval people and things over an area running from ‘l’espace Meuse-Moselle incluant la Lorraine, la France du Nord-Est et du Nord’ to ‘le Brabant médiéval’ (2011, 280, ‘the Meuse-Moselle area, including Lorraine, north-eastern and northern France’ to ‘medieval Brabant’). These eastern lands, in other words, were also part of the Low Countries network, whether they fell within the kingdom of France or within the Empire. Insofar as the dynastic, political, economic, cultural (and so on) connections across these more largely conceived Low Countries remain under-represented in current scholarship, they also remain under-studied; so, necessarily, do their cultural products, whose full meaning requires broader and more detailed contexts. It is part of the present chapter’s argument that this conglomerate of multiple, heterogeneous, frequently warring political units, groups, and forces was difficult to encapsulate and assemble also in the early fourteenth century, and that the artefacts analysed here have recourse to legendary, mythical, and historical resources 52  Summerfield (2005, 40) suggests that the festivities may have included performing a section of Langtoft’s geste, on which see Chapter 3. 53  Two further bird-vowing phenomena in the extended Low Countries network are the Vɶux du Héron, which relates how Robert of Artois triggered the Hundred Years War in 1340 (perhaps composed not much afterwards); and the Vɶux du Faisan banquet organized by Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, in 1454 (Margue 2011).

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226  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad in order to represent its (their) political and cultural value and thereby to give it (them) a valid voice on the international stage. We turn now to other parts of the Low Countries: the counties of Hainaut, Holland, and Zeeland and lordship of Friesland, which were held in personal union throughout the fourteenth century (in 1345, the Bavarian imperial Wittelsbachs replaced the Avesnes dynasty, moving the capital from Valenciennes to The Hague and changing the main language from French to Dutch). These territories’ imperial allegiance allowed their ruler during the first third of that century, the Avesnes count William I of Hainault, to turn to his advantage the same networks that constrained his Dampierre cousins in Flanders. It was at the HainaultHolland-Zeeland-Friesland court that, according to Janet van der Meulen (2011), Brisebare composed the Restor du Paon in 1326–7, shortly after the same en­vir­ on­ment produced an alternative sequel to the Vɶux in the shape of the vast Alexandrian-Arthurian romance of Perceforest, in which Alexander conquers the Low Countries and Britain and awards them to the heroes of the Paon cycle (a move also made in the Restor).54 Our point of departure, however, will be the concluding poem in the Paon cycle: Jean de le Mote’s Parfait du Paon (1340). Composed after the copying of Bodley 264’s Alexander compilation but before its decoration was complete, the Parfait could obviously not have been present in that phase of the manuscript. It does, however, emerge from a closely related milieu at precisely the same moment as Bodley 264. Tracing this extended network will allow a larger picture to emerge of the complexities experienced by inhabitants of the lands on or near the northern front lines of the great rivalry between England, France, and the Empire, and of the role played in those by the Peacock. In the usual histories of French literature, the third and final poem in the Paon cycle is a minor work. It survives in only two manuscripts, both fourteenth-century: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 165, ff. 183–246 (incomplete; contains also the Vœux and Restor; Donkin  1980, 19–20) and Paris, BnF, MS fr. 12565, ff. 233v–297v (illustrated by Jeanne de Montbaston; contains also the Prise de Defur, Vœux, and Restor; Donkin 1980, 23–4). Readers of these manuscripts would have tapped into the Peacock significances and associations we have outlined; they would presumably have been reminded of the Roman d’Alexandre tradition. In the present section, we pursue a set of connections relating to Le Mote’s productions. The picture that emerges is of a particular way of working that privileges ‘grafting’ as a poetic method and as a particular way of constructing and interpreting networks that, we suggest, is characteristically Low Countries in nature. Since composing the Parfait earns Le Mote only a minor place in medieval French studies (though a somewhat larger one in English studies), we begin with 54 The Restor’s date remains a matter of debate. Its terminus post quem is the date of the Vɶux, c. 1312; ante quem, 1338, the completion date of the copy in Bodley 264. On date and author, see Donkin 1980, 4–9.

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Dark Networks  227 an overview of his career, which will also handily map one variant of the complicated environment within which Low Countries artisans worked (Menegaldo 2015, 24–74 gives a full account of Le Mote’s life and works). Le Mote is sometimes said to be originally from the town of Ghent, which lies in Flemish-speaking Flanders on the political boundary between ‘royal’ and ‘imperial’ Flanders. He is recorded in 1326 working as a chancery clerk for Joanna of Valois, sister to the future Philip VI of France and wife of William I, count of Hainault.55 In 1338 he was granted a pension of twenty pounds a year by Edward III of England, Joanna’s son-in-law, and in 1339 completed for Philippa, Edward’s queen and Joanna and William’s daughter, a dream-vision that memorialized her recently deceased father and Joanna’s husband: Li Regret Guillaume Comte de Hainaut (Scheler 1882, 4,564–4,573).56 In 1340, however, Le Mote was in Paris, writing at the commission and living in the house of Philip VI’s jeweller, Simon of Lille, for whom he wrote Le Parfait du Paon and La Voie d’Enfer et de Paradis.57 Le Mote evidently returned to England, for there is a record of his entertaining Edward III at the royal palace of Eltham in 1343 (Wilkins 1986, 299). Thereafter we lose his trace, although he was apparently still living in 1350.58 Le Mote appears to have enjoyed considerable esteem among fellow pro­fes­ sionals as well as a successful career with patrons, and he was a significant figure in fourteenth-century artistic and political circles in England, France, and the Low Countries. With the Regret Guillaume, Le Mote is an early contributor to the important fourteenth-century French tradition of the dit and shares the contemporary preoccupation with reconciling the different elements of the Roman de la Rose. Some scholars consider the Regret a source for Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (Rosenthal 1933, Wimsatt 1991, 55–8 and see more broadly 43–76 on Le Mote’s verse, both in contact with English and in a continental context). His verse influenced (or possibly, was influenced by) Guillaume de Machaut, whom Chaucer also imitated. Le Mote and Machaut may have met in Paris in 1340 via Machaut’s 55  Joanna’s patronage is stressed by van der Meulen 2011, 143–4; see also Mulder-Bakker 2003. In 1327, the countess paid a significantly larger amount to Brisebare (who in 1319 had written verses for Joanna of Burgundy, queen of Philip V of France) for producing the Escole de Foy and perhaps also the Restor (van der Meulen 2004, 73–4). 56  It is possible that Le Mote travelled to England in Philippa’s entourage when she arrived as a bride (Butterfield 2009, 120), but he may rather have sought her patronage after her father died and her mother retired to the abbey of Fontenelles in 1337. As her mother’s clerk, he must have known Philippa before her marriage, and he may have come to her attention again in 1338–40, which Philippa and Edward spent in the Low Countries (Menegaldo 2015, 44–7; Benz St John 2012, 60–1). 57  Lille lay in ‘royal’ Flanders, the county proper. On Simon’s personal links with Lille, see Rouse and Rouse 1997. 58  Gilles li Muisis (abbot of St Martin in Tournai and a possible link between the artisans who prod­uced Bodley 264 and their noble, French or French-allied patron; Cruse  2011, 191–2) in his Meditations of 1350 refers to Le Mote as a living poet (li Muisis’s text is quoted in Menegaldo 2015, 11–14). Silvère Menegaldo, in the only monograph thus far dedicated to Le Mote, suggests that he may have retired to the town of Ath in Hainault, where a Jean de le Mote is recorded among the citizens in 1359, but stresses that the identification is far from certain, the name being fairly common in the region (Menegaldo 2015, 59).

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228  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad patron John, the count of Luxembourg and king of Bohemia, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, whose connections with the Low Countries and the Peacock are mentioned above (pp. 224–5) (Plumley 2013, 229, and see 197–275 for a larger discussion of Le Mote’s verse in a continental context, in particular on the relationship with Machaut). The poet Eustache Deschamps—whose political loyalties, like Vitry’s, lay with the French royal family—quotes from a ballade exchange between Le Mote, Philippe de Vitry, and Jean Campion in his own famous ballade to Chaucer, no doubt referencing the earlier exchange’s cross-channel dynamics (on which, see especially Butterfield 2009, 111–51). Le Mote himself is considered to have been responsible for a number of influential in­nov­ations in ballade form and content. He is known especially for ‘building his lyrics around citations’; indeed, Plumley argues that he established citation ‘as a formal characteristic of the ballade c. 1340’ (Plumley  2013, 214, 215). Machaut termed entees (grafted) these ballades constructed around intertextual citations, which would become very popular in the later Middle Ages (Plumley  2013, 218; the discussion of mu­sic­al and textual ‘grafting’ practices in Plumley 2013 may be supplemented by Butterfield 2003). The term enter is of interest here because it is also a privileged term used to describe Brisebare’s practice in the Restor du Paon. Not limited to Low Countries artists, ‘grafting’ is nevertheless characteristic of their work and a further demonstration of their art. We shall argue that grafting is a key practice and concept pointing us towards the area’s peculiar, discreet advertisement of its special skills. We return to the concept of dark networks to expand on this idea. We mentioned earlier that the Paon cycle in Bodley 264 is interpolated into the Roman d’Alexandre in a way that emphasizes the latter’s composite nature. The same procedure is true within the cycle itself: each Paon narrator carefully details how his work relates to the previous one, highlighting his own professional competence and his place in the professional tradition (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1986). Each, however, also claims that his predecessor forgot or overlooked the narrative about to be told, implying that its imminent rescue from obscurity will be at once corroborative and somehow revelatory or transformative. Neglect and forgetfulness are interpreted creatively as stimuli to memory: they allow each narrator to claim that he is exposing previously dark networks and thereby open also the possibility of articulating new ones. This process reaches its height in the Restor, where Brisebare ties his poetic identity and achievement to the verb enter: ‘Ore faut en Alixandre encore .i. molt biaus plois, / Mai je, qui només sui Brisebare a le fois, / L’i vuel metre et enter anchois que past li mois’ (Donkin 1980, I.9–11; ‘Now there is missing to Alexander another excellent story, but I, who as it happens am called Brisebare, want to place and graft it there before the month’s end’). His addition to the Peacock/Alexander corpus is also Brisebare’s own self-insertion into the company of ‘Celui qui du paon les veus i ajousta’ (Donkin 1980, II.1333; ‘the one who added the vows of the peacock’) into the larger cultural networks which that corpus represents and into

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Dark Networks  229 the goodwill and prayers of the tradition’s very large audience: ‘Explicit du paon, bien ait qui le lira / Et qui en tous endrois le dit en prisera. / Du bien doit on bien dire, ch’oï dire piecha’ (Donkin 1980, II.1340–1342; ‘Here we end about the peacock, blessed be whoever may read it and whoever shall praise/appreciate the poem (dit) in all places. One should speak (dire) well of what is well, this I heard say (dire) long since’). Poetic ‘grafting’ and ‘speaking’ create relationships based on reciprocal exchange and obligation: Brisebare blesses those who may be willing to pray for him and praise his work, as well as those who read his text and—or?— Longuyon’s. Networks spread outward from the Peacock like rings from a stone dropped into water. In different manuscripts, moreover, the two texts are so entangled that the Vɶux’s original ending is in doubt; there is not space here to go into details, but see Donkin 1980, 35–8, Carey 1966, 20–8, Casey 1956, xv–xx, Ritchie 1921–9, III, lv–lxiv.59 Alternating quotation with new material blurs the point where Brisebare takes over from Longuyon and reorients the latter’s narrative. This procedure underscores differences in the poems’ accounts while demolishing material distinctions between their texts. Thus the literary technique of ‘grafting’ emphasizes that co-operation does not require agreement even on such basic matters as fact or intention. Even viewpoints that contradict each other can be harmonized by adept practitioners in a spirit of ‘hostipitality’ that neither ignores nor resolves differences. The dis/junctive works thus produced propose that artisanal skill may allow differences and conflicts to be acknowledged without being disastrously played out. This is one way to understand the model offered by the Peacock. Taking up narratively where the Restor left off, Le Mote’s Parfait du Paon operates a radical change of tone. Peace and reconciliation dominated the two earlier poems, and courtesy to opponents seemed more important even than victory (Grigsby 1985, 568). In contrast, ‘le Parfait du Paon est mis sous le signe de la haine et de la destruction’ (Bellon-Méguelle 2011, 96, ‘The Parfait du Paon is presided over by hatred and destruction’), producing vengeful new vows which are ‘funestes . . . sanguinaires . . . suicidaires’ (Bellon-Méguelle  2011, 97, ‘morbid . . . bloody . . . suicidal’). By the end of this poem, all the characters introduced by the earlier Paon poems are dead, quashing the optimism that accompanied this younger generation, their friendships and marriages. As well as foreclosing these potential socially and politically constructive networks, the Parfait shows existing networks malfunctioning: the wide-reaching impact of high-level treachery and aggression, divided allegiances, and the peculiar horror of war between brothers, 59  Donkin (1980, 35) comments that ‘it would have been impossible to disentangle the contributions’ of Longuyon from those of Brisebare if the only surviving manuscripts of the Vœux and Restor were those in which the latter is inset into the former: Paris, BnF, MS fr. 24386, Bodley 264, Paris, BnF, MS fr. 20045, and New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS G.24. It is clear, however, that the interweaving, overlap, and complex temporality of the two Peacock texts are not accidents of manuscript planning but integral to Brisebare’s design.

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230  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad allies, and kin. Thus the brothers Betis and Gadifer, in a dilemma, choose to fight, one with Alexander and one against; Betis then unwittingly kills Gadifer in battle before himself dying in suicidal heroism. This double loss emblematizes the unethical and devastating effects of what is nevertheless a strongly justifiable war according to political conventions. With tragic irony, it was to rescue these very brothers that Alexander was drawn into the first of the Paon narratives. Having severed the positive connections that the Vɶux and Restor worked to establish, the Parfait rejects further continuations: this is the Peacock’s parfection, its consummation. Van der Meulen (2006) considers the Parfait to be a pro-French, anti-English political statement. She observes that its destructiveness is triggered when characters who ended the earlier poems as Alexander’s liegemen (Porrus, Cassiel, Marcien) break that fealty and instead help Clarus’s brother Melidus in his revenge on Alexander; she argues that this cannot but recall Edward III’s breach of vassalic duties to Philip VI, his suzerain for fiefs held in France, his military raids on France in October 1339, and his proclamation as king of France in January 1340 (Ormrod  2011, 179–246, covers the relevant years in detail). The Parfait’s literary target, for van de Meulen, is Perceforest, which around a decade earlier had celebrated/invented links between Alexander, the Low Countries, England, and Scotland. By proleptically killing off Betis and Gadifer, the prose romance’s heroes and Arthur’s ancestors, the Parfait symbolically cuts the kinship networks that link the English king to the continent and denies him a legitimate stake in European politics. Simon of Lille, goldsmith to Philip VI, would have commissioned this work to show his loyalty, adding piquancy by employing a retainer of the English king to do so. This account is plausible, but we offer an alternative. Jean de le Mote and Simon of Lille claim to bring the Peacock to the parfection or consummate expression of the networks that have been involved in its elaboration. Their work therefore imposes on the Peacock cycle’s extended narrative (‘a hybrid imagined in a socially expanded state’ (Strathern 1996, 521)) a halt which allows ‘a moment of interpretative pause’ (Strathern  1996, 522). The tragically ironic deaths of Betis and Gadifer emphasise the importance of this hiatus and of the choices it implies: which threads will continue, which be severed? Readers are invited not only to respect the networks that they know contribute to their own wellbeing but also to ponder what dark networks might do so—to explore what US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld memorably (though not originally) called ‘unknown unknowns’ (‘News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers’, 2002). Densification and complication of networks is a characteristic strategy as well as a representation of the Low Countries, so intra-, inter-, and extra-connected economically, politically, dynastically, socially, and culturally: as noted above, the region is better thought of not as a number of discrete places or polities but as a series of connections and lines of transmission that extend far beyond what the

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Dark Networks  231 eye can see or the rational mind can calculate—and of human and non-human phenomena travelling along those lines and being transformed in the process. We suggest, therefore, that the Flemings Simon of Lille and Jean de le Mote from Ghent—the former a goldsmith to the French king, the latter a retainer of Joanna, sister to that king and countess of the imperial territories of Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland, and then of her daughter Philippa and the latter’s husband, Edward III of England (who was also Joanna’s first cousin once removed)—collaborate to represent the Low Countries as the beating heart that propels vital substances along major European arteries. An alternative to viewpoints sponsored by the great kingdoms and to the nationalisms and linguistic standardizations so often said to be developing in the fourteenth century (see Chapter  3), this regional perspective is also supralocal and international. The Parfait agrees with Strathern and Edwards in presenting networks as not inherently or only constructive phenomena, but it also both warns and pleads against cutting existing and potential networks by dramatizing the effects of their bloody severance. Although addressed to Philip, the Parfait could equally well have been presented to Edward, his royal cousin. It bespeaks a Low Countries perspective: offering the region’s skills in the service of negotiations that necessarily combine hostility with hospitality but that are nevertheless preferable to all-out warfare. Given that the Low Countries was the arena for much of the fighting and raiding that preceded and marked the Hundred Years War, the expression of this viewpoint by two of its successful artisans is hardly surprising.60 In spite of the Parfait’s sharp deviation from the other Paon texts, it is also carefully attached to the cycle. Like the Vɶux, it includes an extensive feasting and vowing section before moving to battle. The Parfait, however, stresses the preference for court over battlefield. Lords and ladies from the warring sides come together in a chambre amoureuse to compete in ballade composition and judge one another’s efforts, in a kind of courtly puys that occupies six hundred of the Parfait’s four thousand lines. If, as Richard and Mary Rouse (1997, 296–9) speculate, Simon of Lille presented Le Mote’s poem at court along with a golden peacock of his own fabrication, then the invitation to the king of France to re-enact the magnificent feast with the king of England strengthens the implicit plea for diplomacy, gift-giving, games, and ritual as ways of managing conflict: hostilities can be worked out through hospitality. The alliance between goldsmith and poet in the Parfait recalls the Restor (Blumenfeld-Kosinski  1986, 441). Its rhetorical

60 Lucas  1929 remains the most detailed account. Recent contributions are DeVries  2013 and Boffa 2005. The series of volumes in which these essays appear is the more important because it sets itself to remedy the fact that almost all ‘general works written during the last three generations . . . have interpreted the Hundred Years War narrowly, as an Anglo-French conflict (with side theaters), rather than as a more broadly defined Western Europe war’ (DeVries 2013, 457). The volumes contain exceptionally wide-ranging supporting materials, in the form of maps, genealogical tables, lists of battles, and so on.

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232  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad seal, however, comes at the beginning of Le Mote’s other production for Simon, La Voie d’Enfer et de Paradis, where the play around oevre/descoevre knits this work also into the expanding intertextual network: Cils qui son sens ne met a oevre, Il resamble a celui qui oevre Un grant tresor sans descouvrir, Car qui son tresor ne descoevre Riens ne lui vault, ains s’en descoevre; Plus pour ce ne me voel taisir, Car li taisirs me puet nuisir Et li parlers puet acomplir Grace en moi.  (Aquiline Pety 1940, 1–9) Whoever does not put his expertise to work (a oevre) resembles one who crafts (oevre) a great treasure without showing it off (descouvrir), for if someone does not display (descoevre) his treasure, then it is of no use to him—on the contrary, he lays himself open to harm (s’en descoevre). This gives me the more reason not to be silent, for silence may harm me, whereas speaking may do me some good.

Le Mote’s and Simon’s collaboration, therefore, brings two respected, expert Low Countries artisans in respectful union to the French court to plead that that court’s vocation, its greatest and highest expression of courtliness, lies in the arts of peace with their conspicuous display, not in internecine warfare. Such pacifism does not imply failed allegiance but is in the king’s, indeed kings’, best interests. Le Mote’s opening to the Parfait highlights workmanship and its payment: ‘on lait maint bon ouvrage par mainte region / Par defaute d’argent’ (Carey 1972, 10–11; ‘many good works in many regions are abandoned for want of money’). His terms for the Paon work are rapidly shifting, intermedial metaphors. He cites Longuyon and Brisebare by name, recalls the latter’s ‘grafting’ (13), and credits them with having produced ‘mouvement et moilon’ (14, ‘impetus and centre’), suggesting both dynamism and trajectory. His own work is presented first as fine-metal smithery—‘le plus meillor coron’ (15, ‘the very best crown’)—then as tailoring: ‘cilz qui son plet lesse a la droite raison / C’est cilz qui fet la cote et laist le chaperon’ (16–17, ‘he who abandons his beautifully expressed design is like one who makes the coat but omits the hood’).61 Embroidering on the Restor, Le Mote celebrates ‘artificiality to the second power’ (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1986, 445). This foregrounding of expert workmanship and the mutual involvement of different social groups and perspectives are features also of Bodley 264, which

61  Some of these terms are themselves cited from the Restor, thus ‘grafting’ the later poem into the earlier one.

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Dark Networks  233 emphasizes both the luxurious surface of aristocratic life and the highly skilled infrastructure that supports it—and how the latter may be made visible to the former. That this is a contribution of the Low Countries network is emphasized in the manuscript’s Picard scripta and in the superb workmanship and wit of the dis­tinct­ ive­ly Flemish illustrations. The Paon texts and Bodley 264 (and Simon’s golden peacock, if it existed) invite ethical reflection on and offer to renovate both the conditions of life that they represent and the networks that sustain them. Displays of artistry are an implicit argument not to destroy the foundation which sustains both magnificence and community. The Peacock artefacts impose on these networks ‘a moment of interpretative pause’ (Strathern  1996, 522), freeze-framing them in order to highlight a crisis and thereby—hopefully—to avoid their definitive severance or turn to the bad. As items of property, the Peacocks crystallize for the consumer’s gaze a particular (self-)image of the Low Countries, which otherwise, being diffuse, dispersed, and riven by various antagonisms, may be difficult to bring into focus or may seem to lack importance. If taken as small, heterogeneous communities and polities, the political and cultural significance of the lands and peoples of the medieval Low Countries may be difficult to envisage and appreciate. But it is in their combinations, networks, and—vitally—their translational capacity that their claim to pan-European, indeed global, importance lies. By summing up these networks in items of property that can be presented to potential patrons as quasi-objects encouraging ethical reflection and renewal, local artists played their part in protecting the Low Countries from greater, preda­tory powers. The Low Countries viewpoint that, we are proposing, the Parfait du Paon advances is essentially composite: the Low Countries are a web of nodes and transmitters that can turn sour, falter, and cease, or result in new marriages and allegiances, depending on the choices of those who meet there. Meeting in (the spirit of) the Low Countries enables new, creative choices to be made that look beyond the immediate priorities of the major realms to longer-term goals that may be in those very realms’ best interests. The Low Countries are providers of luxury services and goods, ethically and politically invested trappings that offer courtly perfection and interchange and that will enable medieval lords to graft their own stories into Alexander’s. Evidently their collaboration on the Parfait did not cause either Le Mote or Simon de Lille to burn their boats with warring patrons, nor is that likely to have been their goal, especially given the rapidly changing political situation. Le Mote returned to England and royal favour by 1343; Simon of Lille supplied the Hainault comital court as well as the (closely related) French royal one (Rouse and Rouse 1997, 285 and 290 n. 37). Like the other works in the Paon cycle, the Parfait offers poem, virtuoso golden ornament, and festivities—and the places, connections, and people who produce them—as fruitfully exempt from the pressure to take sides between England and France and therefore as potentially mediating between the rivals. Intermediality and technique are key to this resource.

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234  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad A further aspect of Low Countries’ artistic practice emerges when we consider Le Mote as an early adopter (if not inventor) of the extremely popular practice of building ballades around references to and names from classical mythology.62 This practice is both exaggerated and debated in the ballade exchange between Le Mote, Philippe de Vitry, and Jean Campion, dating probably from the 1340s or 1350s. Le Mote’s citational practice draws caustic responses from Vitry and Campion, who pastiche his methods while censuring his references.63 The deployment of classical citation and the language politics manifest in this exchange have largely escaped the attention of specialists in medieval French, although scholars working out of English departments or musicology have provided rich discussions connecting them to questions of cultural identity. Paris, BnF, MS latin 3343 preserves six mythological ballades in sequence: two by Le Mote, then one in which Vitry attacks him, Le Mote’s response, a ballade seconding Vitry by Jean Campion, and a final riposte to Campion from Le Mote.64 The battleground established is the proper practice of lyric poetry in French. One issue is where and for whom this poetry should be composed. Vitry, an early humanist with links to Petrarch, and a poet, musician, and churchman affiliated to the French crown and to the University of Paris, opens hostilities by de­noun­ cing Le Mote: De terre en Grec Gaule appellee Castor fuitis, fuyans comme serfs, En Albion de flun nommee, Roys Antheüs devenus serfs; Nicement sers.  (Poem 3, 1–5) Out of the land called Gaul in Greek, runaway beaver, fleeing like a deer to Albion named after the river, rude Actaeon, turned into a stag; you serve foolishly. 62  Le Mote may have been following Brisebare, who composed ‘a number of ballade-like lyrics with classical imagery that probably date from the 1330s’ (Plumley 2013, 259). 63  The most recent edition of the ballades is by Menegaldo (2015, 353–85), who offers extensive notes and a tentative French translation. We here cite text and translation from Plumley (2013, 270–5), who prints poems 1, 2, 5, and 6 from Pognon 1938 and poems 3 and 4 from Diekstra 1986, giving the latter’s English translation of these two poems and adding her own for the other four, also identifying the citations that link the poems together (see Plumley 2013, 254 n. 8, for her editing practice). All editors emphasize that the texts are highly compressed and readings not always certain, and translations vary considerably. 64  The two central poems, Vitry’s ‘De terre en Grec Gaule appellee’ and Le Mote’s ‘O Victriens’, also survive in Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS French 15 (nos 62, 63), the famous manu­ script including the ‘Ch’ lyrics: French poems possibly by Chaucer. See especially Pognon  1938, Diekstra  1986, Wimsatt  1982, Wilkins  1986. More recently on the exchange, see Butterfield  2009, 111–51; McDonald 1996; Plumley 2013, 251–75; Menegaldo 2015, 298–317; Strakhov 2016. A Latin triplum by Vitry, ‘Phi millies’, may also be directed against Le Mote; see Zayaruznaya 2018 on the Aachen fragments. For the texts of this triplum and a Latin jeu-parti between Campion and the Parisian canon Jean de Savoie/Johannes Rufi de Croce, judged by Vitry, see Pognon 1939; for a recent discussion and tentative dating to 1356–7, see Zayaruznaya 2018. On these three poets’ careers and connections, see Pognon 1938; Wathey 2019.

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Dark Networks  235 Vitry criticizes Le Mote for serving in ‘Albion, de Dieu maldicte’ (poem 3, 9/ refrain; ‘Albion, cursed by God’), presumably a reference to his work for Philippa and Edward in England. Vitry’s phrase ‘de terre en Grec Gaulle’ is significant. ‘Gallia’ could in the fourteenth century designate either the Romance-speaking lands of the Empire west of the Rhine but outside France, or the Romance-speaking bloc that included this (Low Countries) area and the kingdom of France (Moeglin 2010). By using it in the latter sense, Vitry dismisses political distinctions between the French kingdom and the Romance-speaking Low Countries, thus essentially claiming that the latter owe at least cultural allegiance and obedience to the French kingdom. For Butterfield (2009, 151), Vitry’s frustration with Le Mote may stem in part from the failure of the French language to become a politically and culturally unifying force across these and other domains—that is, from the failure of a narrative of Parisian international leadership that is still only potential for Vitry although similar to that often cited by modern critics. Vitry’s association of Gaul with Greek further transmits a particular version of classicizing culture, which he inflects to enhance the international prestige of France and, specifically, of Paris and the French crown. Although the version of translatio studii et imperii that emphasized the sequence Greece-Rome-France is more familiar today, in the twelfth century and increasingly from the thirteenth, French writers also traced a direct transmission to France from a combined Troy-Greece. According to Colette Beaune (1991), the fourteenth century emphasized especially France’s ‘Gallo-Trojan’ character and stressed the Greek flavour of the French language, acquired from the hellenized Trojans who had travelled west in the diaspora. In  a  development parallel to that detailed in Chapter  5, pp. 181–3, these claims acknowledged Roman culture by referencing Julius Caesar’s account of his conquest of Gaul, where he comments that the Gauls wrote using Greek characters.65 At the same time, they limited Rome’s influence over France’s historical development. The Roman incomers had mingled with the Gallo-Trojan population, and French had descended from Greek in parallel with Latin and Italian, and with equal distinction. Medieval France—and particularly Paris, where classical learning was strong—was therefore the equal of Rome and Italy (Beaune 1991, 242–43, 268–72, and 333–45). Butterfield’s multilayered reading of the ballade exchange concludes (2009, 130): Speaking from ‘over there’ [au-delà] puts Le Mote on a different cultural footing from Vitry. Both poets, however they express themselves, are aware that

65  ‘Neque fas esse existimant ea litteris mandare, cum in reliquis fere rebus, publicis privatisque rationibus Graecis litteris utantur’ (‘And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances [Druidic verses] to writing, although in almost all other matters, and in their public and private accounts, they make use of Greek letters’); Caesar 2014, 338–9 (VI.14).

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236  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad something is different about their French, even if it cannot easily be expressed. Their language is both the same and different. Neither is in a position to speak outside it, yet each seems to feel the other has impugned his right to speak from within it.

The poets’ positions are, however, not symmetrical. Le Mote replies to Vitry with a flood of high rhetoric and of antique names that signal large common ground and admiration: O Victriens, mondains Dieu d’armonie, Filz Musicans et per a Orpheus, Supernasor de la fontaine Helye, Doctores vrays, en ce pratique Auglus, Plus cler veans et plus agus qu’Argus, Angles en chant, cesse en toy le lion, Ne fais de moy Hugo s’en Albion Suis. Onques n’oÿ ailleurs bont ne volee.  (poem 4, 1–8) O man of Vitry, worldly god of harmony, son of Musicans and peer of Orpheus, superlative Naso of the fountain of Helicon, true doctor, Aulus Gellius in the world of affairs, more clear-sighted and more acute than Argus, angel in song, restrain the lion in you; do not make Hugo of me because I am in Albion. I have never heard that anywhere else anyway.

Although pacific, Le Mote stands his ground. He claims his right to compose verse in French by eloquently doing so and defends himself against the accusation of ‘aucune traïson’ (poem 4, 26, ‘any treason’) on the grounds, among others, that ‘je ne sui point de la nacion / De terre en Grec Gaulle de Dieu amee’ (poem 4, 9–10: ‘I in no way belong to the nation of the land in Greek called Gaul, loved by God’). He acknowledges being in Albion, but, by refusing to specify his ‘nacion’, he de-territorializes composition in French against Vitry’s aggressive attempt to localize and restrict it. As we shall argue, this seeming de-territorialization is itself a claim to Low Countries distinction. A second issue concerns the cultural networks to which literature in French properly belongs or should aspire. In the six ballades preserved in MS lat. 3343, each poet uses mythological citations to situate himself and the others relative to politically freighted cultural networks. Ballades 1 and 2 demonstrate Le Mote’s practice of dense classical citation: the many unusual names and narratives he sometimes attaches to otherwise well-known figures elicit a despairing tone from most commentators, who speculate on alternative spellings and sources or suggest that Le Mote is inventing. Thus in poem 2, Thisbe is said to have been flayed

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Dark Networks  237 (‘escorchié’; poem 2, l. 12); the two-line refrain to poem 1 invokes ‘Delf, Orius, Narcisus ne Constanches, / Cridus, Pias, Lilions ne Curibles’ (poem 1, 10–11), which Plumley renders as ‘Delphi, Oreus, Narcissus, or Constantia [?], Crius, Pias, Lamia, or Curibles [?]’ (question marks original), among whom only Narcissus can be confidently identified (or can he?). Arguing in part by example, Vitry asserts in response that poetry ought to be a vehicle for a learning whose authority rests not only on its classical, Mediterranean origins but also on its transmission via certain routes, to the exclusion of others. For Vitry—and for Campion in his wake—classical culture in French is properly oriented and transmitted along a north–south axis linking Paris with the kingdom of Naples. Naples had been for a century under the rule of the Angevins, a cadet branch of the French Valois royals, to whom it also provided a launching pad for their ambitions in the Frankish states of the Aegean. King Robert of Anjou, especially, promoted his kingdom as the heart of the ancient region of ‘Magna Graecia’ in order to justify claims to the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean (see Chapter 5, pp. 181–3). Vitry and Campion consider that Le Mote’s political and poetic practice (to which the preceding two ballades in MS lat. 3383 testify) traduces this translatio. Their denunciation reveals the political stakes that early humanism could have in France.66 Le Mote’s practice, however, performatively denies that antiquity and its authority move only via the cultural and educational pathways that Vitry allows. While employing Vitry’s culturally Mediterranean language, he introduces ­double meanings and acoustic echoes that bring the Low Countries and its networks to inhabit that language (compare the discussion of the prose Tristan’s reorientation, in the first part of this chapter). Le Mote’s reference to ‘Angles’ (poem 4, 6), recalls Angleterre; the ‘lion’ of the same line is a heraldic staple of England, Scotland, and several Low Countries territories, as also of Alexander the Great. Alexander, and especially the extensions to the Roman d’Alexandre that emerged from the Low Countries in the fourteenth century, is key to Le Mote’s cultural history and political map. It is these references that allow him to recode the valence of Vitry’s ‘terre en Grec Gaulle’, which he emphasizes by taking it as his refrain. Thus Zephirus (poem 4, 14) is not only the Roman west wind but also the Merlin-figure and tutelary spirit of Britain in Perceforest, the vast, early fourteenth-century romance which (like Le Mote himself) claims the patronage of William I of Hainault and 66  Desmond (2018, 415) describes how Petrarch supported the Angevin deployment of Magna Graecia using manoeuvres similar to Vitry’s: ‘Petrarch collapses ancient and medieval Greek identity in Calabria in order to argue that Greek South Italy has a more authentic claim on the cultural capital of ancient Greece than does the contemporary city of Constantinople: “quod desperat apud Graecos, non diffidit apud Calabros inveniri posse” (what he despairs of finding among the Greeks, he feels certain he can find among the Calabrians). Petrarch thus reclaims Magna Graecia as a contemporary geographical reference in order to promote Italy over the Byzantine East as the proper heir to the translatio studii from the ancient world.’

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238  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad which puts British and western European history and legend onto the same pathway as Alexander, conqueror of Asia and Africa.67 Perceforest presents itself as a continuation of the Vɶux du Paon (Szkilnik 2002, Chardonnens  2011), hence of the Roman d’Alexandre; it is a grand, Low Countries-oriented Alexander-conglomerate to match Bodley 264. It relates how, after the descendants of the Trojans have declined into barbarity, Alexander ­re-founds civilization in Britain and in north-western Europe. Introducing such key Arthurian and late medieval cultural features as tournaments and the recording of chivalric exploits, Alexander becomes a new, improved Brutus (Szkilnik 2002, 206). Before returning eastward, he awards England and Albanie (Scotland) respectively to figures familiar from the Paon cycle: Betis (now renamed Perceforest) and Gadifer. In an aside, he entrusts to another follower the Selve Carbonnière (Carboniferous Forest) which will later become Hainault and Brabant (on either side of the Romance/Germanic language division, thus rejecting the French territorial claims that Vitry extends by his use of ‘Gaule’).68 After Alexander’s departure, Perceforest develops along Arthurian lines, knitting the Eastern imperial hero to the Western one. Arthur himself descends from Alexander, Betis, and Gadifer; characteristically Arthurian events, personae, and supernatural phenomena take over a narrative which ends on the threshold of the events related in the Lancelot-Grail cycle. The young heroes of the Paon cycle enjoy a life long enough to witness Britain’s Christianization and the prehistory of the Estoire del saint Graal. Thus Perceforest grafts the Alexander-Peacock tra­di­tions of the Low Countries onto the Arthurian traditions of Britain-England—and/or vice versa—to their mutual benefit since, although from one perspective Alexander saves Britain and the Low Countries, from another they save him by providing the lasting kingdom, posterity, and link to Christianity that he lacks in the Roman d’Alexandre tradition (Szkilnik 2002, 214). Although Le Mote pays Vitry the compliment of quoting the latter’s opening line in his refrain, by introducing echoes of Perceforest and of the Paon cycle to support the legendary-historic independence of the imperial Low Countries from France, he reorients it culturally and politically. His response stresses the intimate connections that link the Low Countries to England and Scotland and, more 67  Edea, invoked in poem 2, 16, appears in the Paon cycle, though the reference to her sea troubles may derive from Perceforest (Menegaldo 2015, 363, n. 32). On Perceforest, see especially Lods 1951, Huot  2007; Jane Taylor has addressed the ways in which Perceforest rewrites and interweaves the Alexander and other literary traditions in several articles, e.g. Jane Taylor 2002, 2004. On the tradition of Alexander’s conquest of the West, see Gaullier-Bougassas (2000), who considers Perceforest to be another example of an east–west translatio deliberately drawn to bypass Rome (2000, II, 399). 68  In the Restor, Alexander distributed some of the same territories: Ireland (and India Major) to Porrus and Fesonas, England to Betis and Ydorus, Friesland and Holland to Marciens and Elios, Wales and Scotland to Gadifer and Lidoine (and Norway to Cassiel and Edea) (Donkin 1980, I, 1093–1141). The Parfait includes several Low Countries and northern French territories among Alexander’s conquests (Carey  1972, 54–71). On the relations between the Restor and Perceforest, see van der Meulen 2011.

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Dark Networks  239 broadly, the global East to the global West. Access to the East passes not via Angevin Naples but via Alexander, treated as a distinctively Low Countries figure (on Alexander, crusades, and the Low Countries, see especially Cruse 2011, 145–80; Devaux  2000). Le Mote’s version of translatio studii et imperii is no less inter­ nation­al­ist than Vitry’s, but it draws a different map for literary practice in French. This map does not exclude the French kingdom but is by no means limited to it, nor constrained by the policies of French kings. It reflects to a noticeable extent the marriages of Joanna and William of Hainault’s children along a west–east corridor stretching from England to Bavaria.69 Nevertheless, the limited need or desire to look south represents not a severance (the use of French as well as dynastic, political, economic, etc., links kept many doors open), but an assertion of political and cultural significance and equality. Like Vitry’s objection to Albion, Campion’s accusation that Le Mote uses ‘noms de bretesque’ (poem 5, 15) divides the world into England and France and limits it to that bipartite distinction. Plumley translates as ‘unknown Breton names’, while Menegaldo (2015, 379) suggests ‘noms de publication officielle’ (‘official names’) or ‘noms ronflants’ (‘grandiloquent’).70 Evidently pejorative, ‘bretesque’ works on different levels, mimicking the pronunciation of ‘British’ while adding to ‘Breton’ a pejorative suffix (deriving from Italian): hence ‘British-iano’, at once mimicking, condemning, and correcting Le Mote’s own practice (as does Campion’s two-line refrain of mythological names, in poem 5). Vitry and Campion purport to find Le Mote’s citations incoherent, even unintelligible. Thus Vitry refuses to admit Le Mote to the Muses’ company: ‘Car amoureus diz fais couvers / De nons divers, / Dont aucuns enfes scet user / Com tu’ (poem 3, 22–5; Plumley gives Diekstra’s translation, ‘For you make amorous poems filled with divers names, which any child knows how to use like you’, though divers has rather the sense of ‘odd’ and ‘haphazard’). Le Mote’s practice is not only eccentric but immature: unreasonable, ignorant, and undisciplined. Although several critics have suggested that Le Mote knowingly invents his mythology, he himself defends his practice as deriving from wider-ranging sources. He replies mildly to Vitry, ‘N’ains noms ne mis en fable n’en chançon / Qui n’ait servi en aucune contree’ (poem 4, 29–30: ‘nor have I ever put any name in fiction or in song which has not served in some country’). Campion receives 69  William and Joanna’s son, William II of Hainault (r. 1337–45), married Joanna, heiress to the imperial duchies of Brabant, Lothier, and Limburg. Margaret married the Bavarian duke who later became Emperor Ludwig IV Wittelsbach; Philippa married Edward III of England; Joanna married the duke of Juliers/Jülich, an imperial territory in the lower Rhineland; and Isabella married Robert of Namur, of a junior branch of the Flanders comital family (later a Knight of the Garter). 70  ‘Bretesche’ is usually taken to mean a crenelated fortification, sometimes understood to have a British origin (Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, s.v. bretèche), but Menegaldo here references another, northern meaning: a balcony on the hôtel de ville from which public pronouncements were made, leading to phrases such as ‘crier/publier à breteche’, which imply public shaming (Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé; Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, s.v. bretèche).

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240  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad much shorter shrift. Le Mote taunts him: ‘Sces tu tous les mondains rommans / Et tous les noms, ou et combien? (poem 6, 10–11). Plumley translates, ‘Do you know about all secular texts, and all the names, where and how many?’, but tous les mondains rommans could also mean ‘all the world’s vernacular languages’, ‘all the world’s Romance vernaculars’, or even ‘all the Roman worlds’, thus rejecting Vitry’s assimilation of these to the kingdoms of France and Angevin Naples—and further, Vitry’s and Campion’s restrictive dichotomization of the world into two, mutually exclusive allegiances, France or England.71 In Le Mote’s riposte, references and vocables are not nonsensical just because they appear so to narrowly French-focused and philologically inclined proto-humanists or to those who value only those cultural ties linking France to Italy and a particular understanding of Latinity. Nor should cosmopolitanism be viewed as de-territorialization. Invoking the wide world’s marvellous variety, the encyclopaedic perspective, and the inter-grafting of traditions into each other that characterize the Alexander tradition, Le Mote successfully gives the impression of invoking networks that are wider and more complex as well as different from those championed by Vitry and Campion. His practice embodies the hybridity, inventiveness, and flexibility that are principal qualities of Alexander, the Peacock, and the Low Countries, as he combines local and imperial discourses: classical and recent Alexander sources, Arthurian, and chanson de geste references.72 Thus Le Mote in content and practice rejects the limits that Vitry and Campion assign to the cultural network within which French-language poetry ought to move and to the political field within which poets writing in French should circulate. He outlines an alternative network that privileges Low Countries connections and, moreover, a Low Countries way of networking that does not limit itself to specific relations identified by others. He practises instead a non-exclusive networking strategy which promises always to extend and transform already acknowledged connections in further, often surprising ways and which defies unitary readings and the principle of non-contradiction. This setting of existing networks against a background of dark networks—overlooked or potential— encapsulates the spirit and value of the Low Countries in Le Mote’s work. This is the more significant because both Vitry and Campion were very prob­ ably also Low Countries men, which perhaps adds edge and heat to their debate over allegiance and poetic practice.73 Le Mote’s exchange with Vitry and Campion, therefore, is at once a political confrontation over the political and cultural 71  For line 11, Menegaldo has the sarcastic ‘V et combien?’, translating ‘Cinq, ou combien?’ (‘Five, or how many?’). 72  The importance of chanson de geste elements is not often remarked, but Menegaldo (2015, 362) comments that Le Mote’s ‘intertexte est . . . au moins autant épique que mythologique’ (‘intertext is . . . at least as much epic as mythological’). 73  Though Vitry was long believed to hail from the Champagne area, it is now thought that Vitryen-Artois was his birthplace; Robertson 1997, 69–72; Kügle 2016. We are grateful to Karl Kügle for this information and for his comments and assistance throughout the second part of this chapter.

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Dark Networks  241 identity and agency of the Low Countries and a struggle over the soul of literature in French—which, Le Mote argues, is not necessarily ‘French literature’ in the restrictive sense; rather, it may be at once and without contradiction ‘French’ and ‘not-French’. Whereas Vitry and Campion throw in their lot with the kingdom of France, Le Mote represents the Low Countries as a series of strategies for building, maintaining, transforming, and extending networks. Politically speaking, the territories of the Selve Carbonnière may be pawns (as Bodley 264 implies—see earlier in this chapter), but they are also Peacocks. The Low Countries both have and can construct their own coherence, antiquity, authority, and currency, as well as their own allegiances. These are the threads that the Parfait du Paon warns may be cut by war and that Bodley 264 fears may be as impossible to mend as it is to revive the dead, threads whose value to others both artefacts demonstrate by their workmanship as much as by their themes. These are also the threads that Vitry and Campion attempt to limit poetically to one allegiance and one pathway, while Le Mote defends others.

Conclusion As Edwards and Strathern (2000, 162) argue, networks ‘are not just relations between persons . . . [but] both the effect of vehicles mobilised to carry messages and the resultant passages and translations which co-mobilise different orders of phenomena’. Tracing the messages, passages, and translations of the Peacock through two of its vehicles, Bodley 264 and the Parfait du Paon, allows us to gain a larger and more definite sense of the Low Countries in the first half of the fourteenth century as a network in just this sense, and one which aspires to political recognition of the sort afforded a kingdom or empire. The Low Countries promote themselves not as an exclusive or substantive identity but as a means to generate always another connection—even another kind of connection. The networks envisaged are non-exclusive, not bound by the law of non-contradiction, and are ‘hybrid’ in the Latourian sense. They offer to major and minor polities, both within the Low Countries region and beyond, the opportunity to remake their identities and allegiances and to rethink their strategies, by exploiting ‘dark’ as well as obvious networks. Discussing Bodley 264 alongside Le Mote brings to light such dark networks and their value. Instead of pinning this wonderful manu­script down to a specific context, we present it as aiming to move across contexts and to produce new ones, in ways typical of Low Countries artefacts and artisans (and many aristocrats) in the first half of the fourteenth century.

Campion was in 1350 a chaplain of Notre-Dame at Tournai and, from 1356 until his death in 1383, a canon of the cathedral of Saint Donatian at Bruges in the county of Flanders (Wathey 2019, 40).

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242  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad Much of what has just been said pertains as well, though in a very different context, to the prehistory of the Prose Tristan. Juxtaposing the two traditions here has allowed us to test, and then expand, the idea of unperceived or dark networks as networks which are usually visible only through their effects. The Tristan equally trades in messages (prophecy), passages (repeatedly, to certain locales), and translations (the giant’s riddles, for example), both literally and meta­phor­ic­al­ly. Haunted by reiterative patterns and circular travel, the diegesis manages to keep at all times at least two referents in play—what the protagonists think they are doing, on the one hand, and what the narrative voice reveals, on the other— muddying in the process the waters upon which the sometimes simplistic modern narratives of national, linguistic, and political self-sufficiency stay afloat. Buoyed by the coincidences, and the overlapping, that structure the extended prologue, we can better appreciate the authorial attempts to conjure up a world of pagan perversity that will lead to an imagined future of Christian empire. This imagined past is meant to serve as the sacrificial fodder necessary to attain the prophesied future in which Christian dominance is unquestioned, yet that Christian empireto-come will carry that past forward, unable or unwilling to cast off the classical undercurrents which will delimit and colour its choices (as we saw in the Histoire ancienne). The Tristan’s incorporation of the Queste del Saint Graal is the final evidence that its aim has always been to recuperate that past rather than reject it; and the Tristan prologue is coloured by (and colours) the Queste’s own queasy and obsessive circling, its own series of messages, passages, and translations. Nonetheless, as we have seen in the discussion of the Paon texts and Peacock artefacts, that prophesied future of political hegemony and universal harmony is threatened by dark and occluded networks, ‘drives’ in the psychoanalytical sense, which not only carry these messages but, in translating them, recombine and remobilize them, like a chain of explosives. That all of this material is delivered in French, and that the use and quality of that French becomes another point of contestation, is further demonstration that French was in continental Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a political language, capable of conveying quasi-biblical prophecy and of providing the building blocks of cultural fantasy. Medieval French can no longer be understood as a neutral means of conveying information (no language ever is, for that matter; yet influential strands of scholarship once portrayed medieval French in this way). It was already an actant, a means and a message, a double agent, linked to dark networks and transmitting to the present the unavoidable, yet obscured, spectre of an imagined past.

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Conclusion Networks, Communities, Language, and the Writing of History: Medieval French Literary Culture Outside France

The preceding chapters have traced some of the networks across which medieval French literary culture moved outside France and some of the transformations that it enabled. But the AHRC-funded MFLCOF project that ran from 2011 to 2015 began in questions about the ‘language community’ or ‘communities’ that ‘medieval French literature’ enabled or produced. ‘Community’ has since those days—arguably—become less prominent in academic medievalist discourse, where ‘network’ has taken its place in the limelight, but has become a more engrossing issue in political discourse in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (among others), where both investment in communitarian or group identity politics and worries about such investment seem to be increasing. In conclusion, we therefore return to one of the questions that founded this project: does a shared language create a sense of collective identity, and does this in turn engender a community? And how do the networks along which languages and literary culture move relate to such potential communities? ‘Community’ is, of course, a double-edged notion. On the one hand, community is a utopian ideal that may be inclusive; on the other hand, community ne­ces­sar­ily excludes as well as includes and may become an instrument of oppression, particularly where rigid and fixed identities are perceived as the basis of community formation. Thus, in seeking to understand what any given community is, one may first seek to understand the mechanisms of its formation. How may we, as literary scholars and linguists, better understand medieval language communities, as groups that cohere around a sense of some common quality relating to language? One way explored in the preceding chapters is through the role of texts and, rather differently, of textual traditions. Some years ago, in a groundbreaking book on medieval literacy, Brian Stock elaborated the notion of a ‘textual community’, which is to say a community that is formed primarily through a shared encounter with a text (Stock 1983). This model of the textual community is predicated on the image of a medieval text being read aloud to a group of people present in a particular place: the group as an entity (and therefore its identity) is thus interpellated into being by being addressed by the text and by its embodied narrator or Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad. Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, Oxford University Press (2020). © Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.001.0001

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244  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad prelector. But there is no need to take this physical experience of reading literally. It becomes rather a model to think about consumers of a text or text­ual tradition may relate to each other through a common reading experience even across distances of time, space, and culture: when- and wherever they may have encountered Arthurian literature, for instance, readers in very different circumstances may all identify as members of a community of Arthurian enthusiasts. A further implication of Stock’s model is that a text or tradition may be interpreted as a call to bring into being a community that does not yet exist. This future-oriented notion of community resonates with Agamben’s notion of the ‘coming community’ (Agamben 2001, ‘la communità che viene’): whereas we may consider as oppressive the notion of a fixed and clearly defined community, ne­ces­sar­ily in the past as soon as it is subject to definition and generally therefore viewed from the present as lost or compromised, the ‘coming community’ is still not only in process but also in the process of being called into being. It therefore offers the hope of future inclusivity rather than the exclusivity practised by every actual community, because its contours have yet to be clearly defined. The contours of this ‘coming community’ are of necessity mobile, constantly coming into focus and then receding both spatially and temporally.1 The importance of community’s temporal and spatial lability to this book’s enquiry is perhaps most evident in the history-writing in French which emerges as a focus in every chapter and from every milieu of production and reception studied. The French-language texts we have examined offer fantasies of shared pasts, which contrive to appeal to common elements (Troy, Alexander, Arthur, Rome, the First Crusade) while changing them in value—sometimes only slightly, sometimes more significantly—over time and from place to place. These shared pasts (and their revisions) in turn imply shared futures. Indeed, the common or connected subject matters are one way in which the various fantasies of shared pasts and shared futures hold together. The texts, textual traditions, and manuscripts discussed in this book share preoccupations that render the artefacts in some respects more similar than they are disparate. Most adhere to a notion of a Christian and chivalric empire in which dissent will be overcome through commonly held religious and ethical beliefs. Although this empire is linked his­tor­ic­al­ly and ideologically to crusading (especially) in the East, its call for the formation of a legitimate and cohesive community around that empire’s stated goals was used to authorize (political, economic, religious, social) projects on very different scales and with very different practical aims. 1 Agamben’s model, like Jean-Luc Nancy’s communauté désoeuvrée or ‘inoperative community’ (Nancy 1999 and 1991), works to remove the idea of community from a teleological drive towards betterment and from utopian idealism, conceived as oppressive; yet both clearly envisage a better world resulting. Medieval ‘coming communities’ may similarly envisage imperialism, universalism, or apocalypticism as open-ended inclusivity, although to us they appear exclusive and oppressive. The obviousness in hindsight of their historical blind spots should give us pause when approaching Agamben and Nancy’s supposedly non-totalizing communities.

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Conclusion  245 The common language—French—that enabled these fantasies to travel and to convince is clearly crucial and is implicitly (though not necessarily explicitly) itself a rallying cry interpellating the coming community. Although the studies in this book show how the value and function of that common language vary considerably with time, place, and milieu, they suggest too that the use of French may be a significant vehicle of communality because associated with history-writing, if we conceive that as a blanket term covering many different kinds of writing that treat of present and future times as well as of the past, free from modern anxieties about ‘pseudo-history’, legend, and myth. In fact, our case studies strongly indicate that historiography thus broadly understood mattered to medieval writers and audiences much more than did the taxonomy of genres (romance, chansons de geste, historiography, travel narrative), forms (prose, verse), or matières (Arthurian, Alexander, classical antiquity) that have traditionally driven literary history but which do not always correspond to medieval textual traditions as found in manuscripts. The studies in this book suggest that French, with its aptitude for international travel, was a privileged medium for the ‘literary’, ‘historiographical’ (both terms need scare quotes), community-producing and -performing texts and manuscripts discussed in this book. However, it is characteristic of the medieval artefacts studied here that they envisage diversity within unity. Their vision of Christian empire neither excludes nor discourages local variety as well as local rivalries and resentments, and, although some condemn such antipathies for detracting from crusading efforts, others seem to proclaim them proudly as contributions to that greater goal. Identifying and addressing issues that may potentially impede the project of universal Christian empire is a crucial priority for these artefacts, even if addressing sometimes means ignoring them. Political rivalries, language tensions, or the events of the Fourth Crusade (to give just a few examples) can influence the text­ ual account, whether acknowledged or not. In writing history, then, the texts, textual traditions, and manuscripts presented in this book move within the distinction between ‘genealogy’ and ‘pedigree’ traced by Raymond Geuss (after Nietzsche). Both produce histories of the present, but a pedigree legitimizes some contemporary person, thing, or institution by tracing its continuous transmission over a (preferably long) period, in a series of value-preserving or even valueenhancing steps, back to a (supposed) single point of origin in an actual source of value (Geuss 1994, 274–6). ‘Genealogy’, in contrast, is agnostic about the value of age and of transmission. It details hiccups in translatio, revealing that present-day phenomena ‘arise from the historically contingent conjunction of a large number of . . . separate series of processes that ramify the further back one goes and present no obvious or natural single stopping place’ (Geuss 1994, 276).2 Genealogy 2  Geuss argues that the distinction is often misunderstood, so that ‘genealogy’ is used in the op­pos­ ite sense from that which he ascribes to Nietzsche (Geuss  1994, 277). Similarly in much modern

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246  Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad may therefore be considered to render more accurately (if not necessarily to  acknowledge) ‘the ambivalent character of human sociability . . . [in which] reciprocity and hostility cannot be dissociated’ (Mouffe  2005, 3). As we have shown, many medieval artefacts and translationes—many more than commonly recognized—engage in the ‘genealogical’ mode at least some of the time. But those that trace ‘pedigrees’ may testify to the same ambivalence by papering it over.3 Past and present antagonisms may impel hopes of a future, often apocalyptic community on Agamben’s model or, alternatively, of the ‘totalitarian’ sort described by Jean-Luc Nancy as ‘une communion qui fusionne les moi en un Moi ou en un Nous supérieur’ (Nancy 1999, 42; translation from Nancy 1991, 15, ‘fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We’), thus erasing difference.4 Whether past, present, or future, ‘community’ is never a simple phenomenon; as Chantal Mouffe argues and as the artefacts discussed in this book show, ‘collective identifications’ mo­bil­ize a wide range of powerful affects (Mouffe 2005, 6). The passions that communities inspire (perhaps more than networks do) connect historiography to romance-writing; many of the chapters here detail both historywriting’s affective qualities and the historical and political dimensions of medieval romances. The point we wish to make relates not to the old chestnuts of differences between genres or between history and pseudo-history; it addresses the question of history-writing’s vocation. In his history of ‘Europe’s Forgotten Places’, Norman Davies quotes approvingly the eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper: [H]istorical philosophy is incompatible with . . . narrow frontiers. It must apply to humanity in any period. To test it, a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays on subjects on which he may be ill-equipped to write books.  (Quoted in Davies 2011, 5)

Davies and Trevor-Roper adopt the language of adventure and exploration in order to capture the philosophical, imaginative, and intellectual breadth and depth that for them characterize the best history. In short, it shares the spirit of romance.

scholarship, medieval history-writings are treated by default as ‘pedigrees’, and any ‘genealogical’ elem­ents discounted as accidents or as modern insights. 3  Chantal Mouffe criticizes modern projects for irenic, rationalist, cosmopolitan democracies as similarly utopian and ‘[refusing] to acknowledge the antagonistic dimension constitutive of “the political” ’ (Mouffe 2005, 3). 4  Apocalyptic discourse is not always associated with satisfactory community formation, of course. The Six Kings prophecy (p. 109, above) ends with the destruction of England and expulsion of its heirs. ‘Alas, alas, alas’, adds Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.1, f. 121v (a fifteenth-century manuscript that includes Langtoft’s Edward I section alongside very many other materials; for further information and digitisation, see ‘Trilingual compendium of texts (MS Gg.1.1)’; see also the online exhibition produced by the MFLCOF project at Cambridge University Library, ‘The Moving Word’: https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/moving-word/.

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Conclusion  247 Modern historians, including literary historians like ourselves, have much to learn from an errantry well suited to conveying the inevitability and enormity of historical change as well as of cultural and geographical differences. As our chapters show, these practices are already known to medieval artists and their audiences. Highly sensitive to the ‘transience of power’ that Davies identifies as ‘one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order’ (Davies 2011, 5), the writings and artefacts that we have discussed and the ‘large-scale, inclusive panoramas’ (Davies  2011, 4) that they sketch are the—embodied or explicit—stuff of historical philosophy. The international French literary culture that they deploy, with its multiple networks and trans­ form­ ations, enables these writings and artefacts both to encourage actual, bounded communities and to envisage a ‘community to come’ which energizes those local communities without being restricted to them. It is in this context, we propose, that the ‘national language’ and ‘national ­literature’ of modern times eventually emerged: one among many intense local deployments, but which successfully appropriated the reach and prestige of the international language. In fact, the idea of a ‘French of France’ appears to arise in reaction to the widespread and varied uses of French outside the kingdom; as so commonly, the ‘centre’ is a back-formation. This book has instead sought to recover fragments of the histories of places, people, objects, communities, and networks that used French literary culture without its ever becoming ‘national’ for them. Many of these have not given rise to modern nation states but have been absorbed into others, combined or separated in ways that make them difficult to study today—northern Italy, southern Italy, the greater Low Countries, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Scottish-English Borders, for example. The passage of time has changed radically the networks and communities in which these participate. Genealogies, not pedigrees, are needed if we are to recover their trace.

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Index Note: Figures are indicated by an italic ‘f ’ following the page number. http://www.arthurianfiction.org 69n.32 http://www.lancelot-project.pitt.edu/ lancelot-project.html 69n.32 http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk 4n.5, 20–1, 50, 81n.58, 82n.62 http://www.tvof.ac.uk/  137n.35, 175–6, 175nn.25, 27, 176n.28, 181n.38 http://globalmiddleages.org/project/ peregrinations-prester-john-creationglobal-story-across-600-years 139n.41 http://www.crusader-castles.com/news.html  150n.62 http://users2.unimi.it/lavieenproses/index.php/ component/search/?searchword=Roman%20 de%20Troie&search phrase=all&Itemid=468 (La Vie en Proses: riscrivere in prosa nella Francia dei secoli XIV–XVI)  46n.14, 175n.27 https://www.charlemagne-icon.ac.uk/ 200n.12 http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/criticalmoment/ 2014/05/22/what-is-psychology-badiouinterviews-foucault-in-1965/ 206n.29 https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ inquire/p/90701d49-5e0c-4fb5-9c7d45af96565468 214n.38 https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-GG-0000100001/1 246n.4 https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/moving-word/  v–vi, 246n.4 https://frenchofengland.ace.fordham.edu/ 34n.3 Abulafia, David  25, 67 Abu-Lughod, Janet L.  18n.22 Acre  16, 21–2, 28–9, 61–2, 64–5, 67, 69–70, 83, 122–57, 158, 159n.4, 162–3, 181, 198–201, 204–5 Actant  194, 201–3, 209–11, 223n.50, 242 Actor-Network Theory (ANT)  24–25, 197–8, 201–3, 209, 211–12 Aeneas/Eneas  21–2, 134n.26, 150–1, 183, 187 See also Histoire ancienne Affect 245–6 Agamben, Giorgio  243–4, 246 Ages of Man. See Joachim da Fiore

Agrégation de lettres modernes  2 Ailes, Marianne J.  33–5, 95n.19 Akbari, Suzanne  124n.3, 133n.25, 145n.56, 146n.58 Alberni, Anna  83n.63 Albert, Sophie  80–2 Alexander (the Great)  19–22, 63n.13, 64, 86, 95–6, 135–6, 147n.60, 150–1, 175, 178–9, 212–41 See also Paon (Peacock) cycle; Roman d’Alexandre; Histoire ancienne Alexander narratives  21, 30–1, 86, 95–6, 175–6, 194, 196, 197, 204, 212–41 Alexander III of Scotland  88–9 Alexandre de Paris (de Bernay)  21, 218 Alexandrine laisses  21, 86, 93–101, 110, 114 Alice (Alix), countess of Blois  146n.58 Al-Kamil, Ayyubid Sultan  140 Allaire, Gloria  62n.12, 65, 80n.53, 164n.13, 169–70, 171n.19 Al-Mansurah, battle of  110, 115, 140–1 ‘Als y yod’  109–13, 120 Ambrosian republic of Milan  159–60 Amonestement del pere a son fils 68 Anachronism  123–4, 144–5, 157 Ancestral romances  95–6 Angevins, Capetian  15–16, 146 Angevins, Plantagenet  33, 116, 218 Angevins, Neapolitan  15–16, 23–4, 68n.28, 69–70, 82, 110, 115n.37, 130–1, 137n.34, 175–6, 177n.33, 183–4, 187, 204, 224, 237–40 Anglo–Norman/French of England/AngloFrench/Insular French. See French (language) Anglo–Norman dictionary 33–5 Anglo–Saxon Chronicle  36, 43–4 Anglo-Saxon/Old English/Early English  33, 44–5, 129n.13 Anglo–Scottish conflicts  85–91, 108–10, 114 Anselm of Ribemont  128–9 Anthropology 203 Antioch  16, 126–7, 133–4, 138n.40, 150–1, 162–3 Antonelli, Armando  65n.18

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276 Index Antonio de Beatis  59–60 Apocalyptic thinking  112, 115, 122–3, 138, 142, 145, 244n.1, 245–6 Apollon  195–6, 206–11 Apollonius de Tyr  68, 205–6, 208n.32 Apter, Emily  61 Aquiline Pety, M.  232 Arabic  16–18, 62–3, 131 Aragon, Aragonese  144n.51, 146 Archibald, Elizabeth  206n.27, 208n.32 Arnold, John  125n.4 Arras  15n.18, 73n.44, 80n.54, 82, 147n.60, 151n.64 Arsenal Bible  131–2, 140–1, 144n.54 Arthur (King)  61–6, 74–82, 94–6, 99, 109, 118–20, 172, 230, 238, 244 Arthur le Petit 74n.46 Arthurian romance, ideology, lore  15–17, 19–22, 27, 41, 46, 62–3, 68–82, 114–21, 126, 139–40, 169–70, 194, 200–1, 226, 238, 245 Ashe, Laura  37, 95n.19 Aslanov, Cyril  141n.45 Asperti, Stefano  6n.7 Assises de Jerusalem. See Jean d’Ibelin Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois. See Beugnot 1843b Augustine, the hermit, character in the Tristan en prose  195–6, 209–11 Auld Alliance  88–9 Avesnes counts of Hainault  224, 226 Avril, François and Marie-Thérèse Gousset  67n.25, 68n.28, 126n.8, 171n.21, 198nn.6–7 Award of Norham  109, 111–13 Baibars, Mamluk Sultan  138n.40 Babylon  195–6, 209–10, 219 Baldwin. See Baudoin Balliol, John  84–5, 88–9, 100n.25, 105–7, 111 Balliol, Edward  90 Banniard, Michel  5, 10nn.11–12 Barbieri, Luca  46n.14, 174n.24, 176n.30, 177–9, 181n.36, 187–91, 175nn.25–28, 191nn.51–52 Barcelona 143–4 Barlaam et Josephat 127n.11 Barron, W. R. J  118n.44 Bas de page illustration  185, 221–3 Baswell, Christopher  34n.2 Bates, David  19n.26, 25n.34 Baudouin (Baldwin) IX, count of Flanders and also VI count of Hainault  134, 135n.29, 137n.34 Baudouin de Bouillon (Baldwin of Bouillon)  63n.13, 133–4

Baumgartner, Emmanuèle  23n.31, 73n.44, 162–4, 172, 195–7, 205, 219 Beata stirps  115n.37 Beaufort 150–1 Beaune, Colette  235 Bede 91–2 Beijing 24 Beirut  126n.6, 127–8, 138 Bek, Antony, bishop of Durham  92–4, 99 Bellon-Méguelle, Hélène  219n.46, 222–6, 229–30 Beltrami, Pietro  199n.8 Benedetti, Roberto  67nn.25, 27, 68n.28, 71n.38 Bennett, Philip  95n.19 Benoît de Sainte-Maure  23, 26–7, 46–7, 49–52, 55–7, 175–6, 188 Benz St John, Lisa  227n.56 Beowulf 3 Berlin  17–18, 24 Beroul  162–3, 195, 208 Bertolucci Pizzorusso, Valeria  46, 64–5, 73n.43 Bertoni, Giulio  3 Betis and Gadifer  219–20, 229–30, 238 Beugnot, Arthur-Auguste  141n.45 Bible historiale 144n.52 Biblical narrative  63, 145, 175–6, 192–3, 205, 242 Binduccio dello Scelto  47n.17 Biscione 165–7 Bisson, Sebastiano  65n.18 Black, Jane  160 Blake, Norman  94–5 Blanche of Castile  140–1 Blanton, C. D.  135n.31 Blockmans, W. P.  214–15 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate  219n.46, 221, 228, 231–2 Boccaccio  15–16, 110–11, 171, 177–8, 192–3 Boffa, Sergio  229n.59 Bogdanow, Fanni  72–4, 81n.57, 165n.15 Bolton Holloway  144n.52 Bonacoli, Filipone  171 Bonvesino de la Riva  159–60 Book of the Duchess 227–8 Bookmaking (libraires) 69–70 Boors 165n.15 Bordeaux 17–18 Boulton, Maureen  33–5, 109–10 Bouvines, battle of  134–6 Bozon, Nicolas  109 Brabant  15, 225–6, 238, 239n.69 Braghirolli, Willelmo  171n.19

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Index  277 Branor li brun  75–9 Bricolage  29–30, 190–1 Bridlington Priory  84–5, 88n.9, 92–3 Brisebare, Jean  226, 228–9, 232. See also Restor du Paon, Le Britain, the British  17–18, 21, 27, 30–46, 84, 129, 196–7, 226, 237–8 Bron 129 Brown, Michael  89n.10 Brunetto Latini, Tresor  15–16, 56, 65n.16, 68–70, 71n.39, 132, 143–4, 151nn.63–64, 198–9 Bruns, les  21, 71–2, 81 Brut legends  88–9 Brutus  129, 238 Bubenicek, Venceslas  80n.50 Buchtal, Hugo  129n.14, 137–8, 144n.55, 147–8, 157, 131nn.19–20 Burgwinkle, William  200n.12 Busby, Keith  11n.13, 15n.18, 34n.1, 46n.15, 56n.21, 59–60, 62n.12, 200n.13, 205n.26, 218–19 Butterfield, Ardis  8n.10, 10n.11, 14, 25n.35, 33–5, 227n.55, 234n.63, 235 Byrne, Eugene  130n.16, 131n17 Byzantine empire  62–3, 134, 138–9, 144–5, 147–8, 235n.65 Cadwalader 84–5 Caesar. See Julius Caesar Caïti, Russo, Gilda  65–6 Calabria  183, 237n.66 Calin, William  34n.4 Cambrai 115–17 Cambridge International A-level syllabus  1–2 Camelot  115–17, 165n.15 Campbell, Bruce  114–15 Campion. See Jean Campion Cannon, Christopher  14n.15, 16–17 Canor  208, 210–11 Caquard, Sébastien  210n.34 Careri, Maria  6n.7, 35–6 Carey, Richard  214n.38, 229, 232, 238n.68 Cariboni, Guido  159–60 Carlesso, Giuliana  47n.17 Caracciolo family  68n.28, 198–9 Cartwright, William  210n.34 Casey, Camilius  229 Cassady, Richard F.  199n.9 Cassamus 220 Casteen, Elizabeth  110n.33, 115n.37 Castilian 5 Catalan  5–7, 143–4 Cauzel, Denis  215n.39

Celtic materials  195–6, 201–2, 205–6, 209–11 Cenona 188–9 Centre or Centre/core)/periphery model  4, 17–18, 24, 35–6, 86–8, 96–7, 99, 108, 111–12, 247 CERN. See Dark Matter Chamberlin, Eric Russell  159n.2 Champagne/champenois  4, 17–18, 22, 161–2, 215 Chanson d’Antioche 133–4 Chanson de geste  15–16, 19–21, 39–40, 46, 56–7, 65–6, 86, 95–101, 105, 120, 133–4, 199–200, 212–13, 219, 239–40, 245 Chanson de Jerusalem 133–4 Chanson de Roland  3, 6n.7, 19–20, 32–3, 36, 65–6, 70–1, 96–7, 127n.11 Chanson des Chétifs 133–4 Chanson du bon William Longespee 110–15, 118n.44, 140–1 Chansonniers (lyric)  56, 65n.16, 127 Chardonnens, Noémie  238 Charlemagne  63n.13, 65–6, 81, 199–200 Charles of Anjou  65n.17, 71n.39, 75, 82, 146, 177–8, 200–1, 204, 224 Charles d’Orléans  161–2 Charles V, king of France  21–2, 174 Charles VI, king of France  161–2 Chateau de la Roche Guyon  171–2 Chaucer, Geoffrey  3, 161, 187–8, 227–8 Chelinde  195–6, 205–11 Chesney, Kathleen  47n.17 Chiesa, Paolo  159n.2 China (Cathay)  139 Chrétien de Troyes  2, 3, 19–20, 115n.36, 132–3 Christian empire. See Empire. Christine de Pizan  192–3 ‘Chronicle’  95–6, 118–19 Chronique des ducs de Normandie 23 Chronique du Templier de Tyr  69–70, 125, 141–2 Chronology and perception. See also Time 115, 122, 135–6 Cicero  132n.23, 144n.53 Cigni, Fabrizio  23n.31, 67n.27, 68, 71–6, 71n.38, 81n.59, 82n.62, 126n.8, 162n.7, 170–2, 197–9, 204–5 Cingolani, Stefano  143–4 Civil war  114, 117–18, 126–7 Clanchy, Michael  6n.7 Clark, Leah and Nancy Um  71n.38, 83n.63 Clarvus 219–20 Clement IV, pope  139 Clement VII, pope  115n.37 Cnut, king of England  14n.14, 38–41 Code-switching  27–8, 103–6

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278 Index Cole, Andrew  123–4, 142 Coleman, Joyce  95n.18 ‘collective identifications’  243–7 Collette, Carolyn P.  33–5 Community  24, 31, 243–7 Compilation  27–8, 58–9, 71–83, 108–20, 175–6, 214, 218–19, 226 Conradin  139–40, 146 Constans, Léopold  49n.18, 182n.39, 188n.43 Constantinople  115–17, 129, 134, 139, 199–200, 237n.66 Contact zone  61, 199, 204–5, 205n.26, 215–17 Coote, Lesley A.  109–10 Corinth  181–2, 184–5 Cornelius, nephew of Sallust  49 Cornish, Alison  68, 170n.16 Cornwall  94–5, 126–7, 195 Corrie, Rebecca  137n.34 Courtliness 220–1 Crane, Susan  33–5, 93n.13, 95n.19 Crick, Julia  10n.11, 111n.35 Croizy-Naquet, Catherine  125n.4, 135n.27, 188n.43, 189n.46 Crusader cycle  133–4 Crusades, crusading  8–9, 16, 28–9, 59–60, 67, 96–7, 99, 110, 112–17, 120, 122, 197, 244–6 First Crusade  132–4 Second Crusade  146 Third Crusade  130 Fourth Crusade  68–9, 134 Fifth Crusade  127 Seventh Crusade (Louis IX)  137n.34, 140–1 Eighth Crusade  140–1 Cruse, Mark  214, 218–21, 221n.49, 224, 227n.58, 238–9 Curtis, Renée  195, 197, 205n.25, 206–7 Cuvelier’s Vie de Bertrand du Guesclin 95n.19 Cyclification/cyclicity  19–23, 27–8, 72–3, 80–2, 114, 219n.46, 226, 238 Cyprus  16, 61–2, 64–5, 68–70, 83, 126–7, 130–1, 138, 141n.45, 143–4, 146, 198–9, 204–5 Damietta  127, 140–1 Dampierre counts of Flanders  224, 226 Danes 37–8 Dante Alighieri  3, 15–16, 59n.2 D’Arcais, Francesca  170–1 Dares and Dictys  23, 50–1, 123, 175–6. See also Dictys Dark networks, dark matter  212–13, 228 Davenport, S. K.  222–3 David II of Scotland  90, 119–20 Davies, Norman  246–7

Dean, Ruth  33–5, 109–10 De Boer, Cornelis  190–1 De Carné, Damien  163n.10 Dei Danio family  171 Dei Moleno family  171 Delcorno Branca, Daniela  23n.31, 46n.15, 56–7, 64–5, 70–4, 80n.51, 162n.7, 164–5, 169–70, 170n.17 Della Torre family  159–60 Delvaux, Thomas  115–17 Demotic metre. See Tail rhyme Derbes, Anne  137n.34, 37, 146n.58 Derrida, Jacques  25–6, 64n.14, 98–9, 107–8, 212–13, 219–20 Monolingualism  25–8, 64, 98–9, 107–8 Deschamps, Eustache  161–2, 227–8 Desmond, Marilynn  126–7, 176n.29, 177n.33, 187–8, 191n.51 Deterritorialization 236 Devaux, Jean  238–9 DeVries, Kelly  231n.60 Dialect 10–11 Dialogism  97–8, 121 Dictys  23, 50, 122 Didot-Perceval 68–9 Diekstra, F. N. M.  234nn.63, 63–4 Diglossia  93–4, 104 Distiques de Caton 68 Dodd, Gwilym  89n.11 Dominican order  73–4, 131–2 Donkin, Enid  218n.44, 219n.45, 226, 228–9, 238n.68 Douchet, Sébastien  135n.27 Duby, Georges  134 Dufourmantelle, Anne  212–13 Duggan, Joseph  65–6 Dunbabin, Jean  200n.14 Durham  85, 92–3 Dutch/Middle Dutch  4, 59–60 Duval, Frédéric  52–3 Eastern Mediterranean  8–9, 8n.10, 15–18, 21–3, 27, 41, 46–7, 69–70, 110, 114–15, 122–3, 130–1, 177–8, 181–4, 187–8, 192–3, 195–7, 205–6, 237, 247 Edea 220–1 Edbury, Peter  69n.33, 132n.23, 70nn.34–35 Edessa 16 Edmund Ironside  38 Edward I, count of Bar  224–5 Edward I, king of England  27, 75, 77–8, 84–97, 100–1, 105–9, 111–13, 118–19, 139–40, 200–1 Edward II, king of England  84–5, 92–3, 108, 112, 118–19, 224–5

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Index  279 Edward III, king of England  89–90, 115–17, 119–20, 161, 224, 226–7, 230–1 Edward of Woodstock, the future Black Prince 115–17 Edward the Confessor, king of England  14n.14, 40–1 Edwards, Jeanette  212–13, 241 Eilhart von Oberge  162–3 Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France, queen of England  23, 33, 51–2 Eleanor of Castile, queen of England  132n.23 Elizabeth, wife of William of Woodstock and lady-in-waiting to Queen Philippa (of Hainault) 115–17 Emma of Normandy, queen of England  14n.14, 40–1 Empire (Holy Roman et al.)  4, 15, 61–2, 99, 224 Empire/internationalist, Christian empire building  62–3, 78, 99, 114–15, 138–9, 146–7, 194–7, 199–200, 210–11, 244 Eneas. See Aeneas England, the English  14, 16–17, 19–20, 22, 32–46, 84, 238 English channel (Sea of Brittany)  35–7, 40–1, 93–4, 195 English history  32–46, 84 English language  94–5, 101–5 English sovereignty  105, 119–20 Entrée d’Espagne, L’ 65–6 Erard de Valeri  139–40 Este family and library  64–5, 70–1, 171 Estoire del saint grail  22, 68–9, 238 Estoire des Engleis, Gaimar  32–46 Estoire Merlin 22 Estoires Rogier. See Histoire ancienne Estorie de Wincestre 43–4 Eternal return  208 Ethelred the Unready  40–1 Ethnicities 126–7 Eudes de Nevers  127, 139–40 Europa 135–6 European 27 Eusebius 123 Exegesis  203, 207–8 Fabbri, Francesca  68n.28, 198n.7 Faits des Romains, Les  68, 135–6, 138 False Guinevere  110, 118–19 Faral, Edmond  182n.39 Fatti di Spagna 65–6 ‘Felicity conditions’  202–3 Femenie  126–7, 204 Fenster, Thelma and Carolyn P. Collette  33n.1 Ferguson, Charles  93n.14

Fesonas 219–20 Field, Rosalind  33–5, 95n.19 Fisher, Matthew  101 Flanders  16n.19, 17–18, 21–2, 28–9, 40–1, 59–60, 63, 72–3, 114, 132–4, 158, 214, 224, 226–7 Flemish/Flemings  23–4, 59–60, 132–4 Floire et Blanchefleur 211n.36 Flood, Victoria  109–11, 109n.31 Florea, Elizabeth  77 Florence  47n.17, 70–1, 159–60, 162 Florilegium 73–4 Folda, Jaroslav  16, 124n.2, 129n.14, 130–2, 135n.28, 137–8, 141n.45, 144n.52–55, 146–8, 146n.57, 151–7, 157n.66 Folena, Gianfranco  47n.16, 64–5 Formisano, Luciano and Charmaine Lee  65n.17 Foucault, Michel  205–6 France / French identity / the French  23, 40–1, 81–2, 97–8, 158–9, 176 Gallo-Trojan population and character  235 Francesco I Sforza. See Sforza Francien. See French (language) Franco-Italian. See French (language) Francophone  15–16, 25, 114 Franco-Venetan 60 Francus 129 ‘Fransois’ 7–8 Franks  9–10, 182–3 Fraser, C. M.  92–3 Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor, King of Sicily, Germany, Italy, and Jerusalem  62–3, 70–1, 80–1, 127–8, 139–42, 146, 200–1 French (language)  5, 7–8, 11, 17–19, 26–7, 32–6, 40–1, 43–4, 56–7, 61–2, 64, 81–2, 86, 93–4, 111, 120–1, 144–5, 157, 169–70, 177–8 Anglo-Norman / French of England / Insular French  4, 33–6, 86, 93–5, 100–1, 104–5, 113–14, 119–20 Burgundian 8 Champenois  4, 8 Francien/Central French  8 Franco-Italian  52–3, 60, 65–6, 81–2, 188 Norman  8, 131 Old French  6 Outremer 19–20 Parisian  23–4, 35–6 Picard  7–9, 18–20, 35–6, 60, 73–4, 114, 131, 218, 232–3 French of England, See https://frenchofengland. ace.fordham.edu/, https://frenchofengland. ace.fordham.edu/4 French of Italy  64–5 Friesland 226

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280 Index Froissart, Jean  15 Fuerre de Gadres, Le 219 Gaelic 93–6 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis  26–7, 46–57 Galahad 119–20 Galehaut (Galehot)  73–4, 79, 118–20 Galderisi, Claudio  35 Galeazzo II, Visconti. See Visconti Galfridian prophecy  109–11, 117–18 Galili, Ehud  150n.62 Gallais, Pierre  69n.32 Galloway, Andrew  100–1 Garin le Loherain 127 Gascony 113 Gaul 235 Gaullier-Bougassas, Catherine  134n.26, 189n.47, 218, 238n.67 Gaunt, Simon  25n.35, 46n.15, 52–4, 97–8, 144n.51, 191n.50 Gautier de Montbéliard (Montfaucon)  68–9 Geneologia deorum, de 110 ‘Genealogy’ 245–7 Genre  136, 245 Genoa  15–16, 46, 54–5, 63–5, 67–8, 73–4, 80–1, 127n.10, 130–1, 138, 164n.13, 198, 200–1 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Brittaniae  36, 44, 84–5, 88n.9, 91–2, 100n.25, 112 Geographies 194 Geopolitics 115–17 Gervase of Tilbury  155n.65 Geste. See Langtoft’s geste Geste des Chiprois  126, 141–2 Geste Francor 60n.7 Geuss, Raymond  245–6 Ghibelline 160 Gian Galeazzo Visconti. See Visconti Gian Maria Visconti. See Visconti Gilbert, Jane  25n.35, 178n.34 Gilles li Muisis  227n.58 Giordano Ruffo, Libro de marescalcie 68 Given-Wilson, Chris  85n.3 Glessgen, Martin  8 Godfrey (Godefroi) of Bouillon  63n.13, 133–4, 224–5 Gonzaga, Ferdinando Carol. See Gonzaga family Gonzaga family and library  64–5, 70–1, 79–80, 170–1 Goodman, Anthony  90–1, 119–20 Gosman, Martin  135n.27 Gottfried von Strasbourg  162–3 Gousset, Marie-Thérèse  67n.25, 68n.28, 126n.8, 171n.21, 198–9

Gowans, Linda  69n.31 Gower, John  14 ‘Grafting’, musical and narrative  218–19, 226–9, 232–3 Grail. See Queste del graal Gramaire 43–4 Grange, Huw  58n.1, 163n.9, 173n.23 Gransden, Antonia  85 Gray, Sir Thomas, Scalacronica 104–5 Great Cause, the  88–9, 109 Greek  16–18, 62–3, 143n.49, 177–8, 183, 235, 237 Green, David  115–17 Greimas, Algirdas Julien  202n.18 Gregory the Great, Saint  210–11 Griffin, Nathaniel E.  68 Grigsby, John  219, 222–3, 229–30 Groupe chevaleresque  68 Guenée, Bernard  125n.4 Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae  68, 177–8 Guilhem IX  6n.7 Guillaume de Hainaut. See William of Hainaut Guillaume de Machaut  227–8 Guillaume d’Orange  127–8 Guinevere  100, 110, 118–19 Guiron le Courtois  15–16, 21, 23, 27, 63, 67–8, 70–2, 74, 79–82, 162–3, 177–8 Meliadus (sometimes called the Palamedes)  21, 70–1, 74, 78–82 Suite Guiron 21 Le Cycle de Guiron le courtois 21 Habsburgs 161 Hainault  15, 134, 224, 226, 238 Haines, Roy Martin  89n.11 Hardman, Philippa  95n.19 Hebrew 17–18 Hederman, Anne D. See Hederman and Morrison Hederman, Anne D. and Elizabeth Morrison 144n.52 Heijkant, Marie-José  72n.42, 171, 173n.23, 164nn.13–14 Helen (of Troy)  189 Hélie de Boron  195n.3, 197 Helyabel 164–5 Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV)  119–20 Henry II, king of Castile and Leon  174 Henry II of Cyprus (of Lusignan, of Jerusalem)  110, 125–6, 137–8, 142n.46, 146, 204, 205n.24 Henry II of England  6n.7, 19–20, 23, 33, 95–6, 100–1 Daughters 19–20

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Index  281 Henry III of England  84–5 Henry VII, count of Luxembourg and Emperor  224–5, 227–8 Hercules  136, 209–10 Heroides  29–30, 175–8, 187–93 Hirsch, Eric  157 Hispanic languages  5 Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César First redaction  15–16, 20–4, 28–30, 46, 56–7, 63–4, 68, 122–3, 158, 174–94, 198–9 Verse moralizations  135–6 Second redaction  21–2, 29–30, 174–93 Prose 5 (Troie section)  23, 174–93 Histoire universelle. See Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César Historia destructionis Troiae. See Guido delle Colonne Histoire d’Outremer. See William of Tyre Historiated initials  56, 151–7, 168–9, 173–4, 220–3 Historical and political processes  98–9, 245–7 Historiography  84–6, 107–8, 111, 113, 117–18, 123, 141, 211, 245–6 History  20–2, 24, 28–9, 33, 37, 44, 46–7, 61–2, 86, 95–6, 111–12, 118–22, 125, 147–8, 157, 174–6, 194, 246 History, linear  142–3 History, perspectival  147–8 History/romance, myth and legend  65–6, 91–2, 95–6, 112–14, 123–4, 136, 157, 225–6, 245 Hohenberg, Paul M. and Lynn Hollen Lees 17–18 Hohenstafen empire  139–40 Holland 226 Holtus, Günther  15n.17, 46n.15 Holy Land  113, 194 Homer  49, 177–8 Hoogvliet, Margriet  59–60 Hopkins, Amanda  33n.1 Hospitallers  67, 129–30 Hospitaller Master. See Master of the Hospitaller. Hostipitalité  212–13, 219–20, 229 Hsy, Jonathan  33–5 Hugh of Chester  41 Hugh IV, king of Cyprus  110 Hundred Years’ War  90–1, 224 Hunt, Tony  110–13 Huot, Sylvia  126n.7, 208n.31, 32, 238n.67 Huygens, R. C. B.  141–2 Hybrid  12–13, 18–19, 52–5, 74n.45, 221–2, 241 Ibelin family  127–8, 141–2 Ibn Jubayr  199 Ile de France  22

Illumination, illuminated manuscripts  148–58, 220–1 Imaginary space  194–5 Incest 207–8 Infurna, Marco  64–5, 66n.20 Ingham, Richard  33–5, 93n.13 Insular French. See French (language) Insular French lyrics  111 Insular history  84 Insular manuscripts  84 Interlacing (entrelacement)  50, 123, 172–3 Intermediality 233 Interpellation 243–5 Intertextuality  118–19, 147–8 Invasions, Danish and Saxon  37–8 Inventione, de 151–7 Ireland  14, 94–5, 115–17, 164–5, 195–6, 199–200, 204–5 Irish sea  195, 205–6 Isabel of France, daughter of John II, queen of England, married to Gian Galeazzo Visconti 161–2 Isabella II, queen of Jerusalem (also known as Isabel or Yolande of Brienne)  140, 145 Isabella, Queen of England, mother of Edward III 90 Iseut  74, 126–7, 168–9, 172, 204, 211 Islam 138 Italian-French scripta  188 Italianisms 54–5 Italy/Italian  5–7, 15–17, 19–23, 26–7, 29–30, 46–58, 131, 158, 224 Jacob von Artevelde  224 Jacoby, David  67, 126–7, 130, 138–40 Jacques d’Armagnac  73n.44, 116n.39 Jacques de Longuyon, Les Voeux du Paon 63, 224–5, 229, 232 Jacques de Vitry  141–2 James (Jaime) of Mallorca  174 Jean Campion  227–8, 234, 237, 239–41 Jean d’Antioche. See John of Antioch Jean d’Ibelin (the jurist or ‘of Jaffa’), Assises de Jerusalem  69–70, 126–8, 132–3, 141n.45 Jean d’Ibelin, the Old Lord of Beirut  126–8 Jean de le Mote  30–1, 217–18, 226–41 Escole de Foy 226n.54 Parfait du Paon, le  214, 217–18, 226, 229–30 Regret Guillaume Comte de Hainaut, Li 226–7 Voie d’Enfer, La 226–7 Jean de Miège  142n.47 Jean d’Outremeuse, Geste de Liège 95n.19 Jeanne de Montbaston  226 Jean Tristan, son of Louis IX  140–1

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282 Index Jefferson, Judith A.  33–5 Jehan de Grise  218 Jehel, Georges  200n.14 Jerusalem. See also Latin Kingdom of  63, 99, 112, 114–17, 129–30, 132–4, 138–9, 146–8, 197n.5, 199–200, 224–5 Joachim da Fiore  138, 145, 151–7 Joanna I of Anjou, Valois, queen of Naples  110, 114–17, 174 Joanna of Valois, sister of Philip VI of France, wife of William I of Hainault  226–7, 238–9 Johannes de Stennis  55 John Comyn  89 John of Antioch  143–4, 151–7 John of Gaunt  91, 119–20 John of Ibelin. See Jean d’Ibelin. Johnson, Leslie  118n.44 Jordan Fantosme’s chronicle  95n.19 Joseph of Arimathea, Joseph d’Arimathie 68–9, 195n.3 Josephus 123 Joslin, Mary Coker  134, 137n.37, 39, 138, 179n.35 Jugement d’amour 68 Jung, Marc-René  22n.29, 23n.32, 46n.15, 47, 50–2, 54, 134n.26, 175n.27, 176n.32, 193n.53 Kabatek, Johannes  8–9 Kay, Sarah  97n.22 Kedar, Benjamin  130n.15 Keen, Catherine  178n.34 Kelly, Samantha  110 Kennedy, Elspeth  22n.30 Ker, Neil Ripley  163n.11 Keys, David  205n.26 King, Andy  88–91 Kingship 117–20 Kinoshita, Sharon  97n. 22 Kleinhenz, Christopher  33n.1 Knighthood 119 Kohler, Charles  127–8 Koine  8–10, 18–19, 65–6, 131 Kool, Robert  67n.26, 130–1 Kooper, Erik  215–17 Kublai Khan  138–9, 159n.4 Kühnel, Bianca  146n.58 Lacan, Jacques  62n.11, 183n.40, 206n.28 Lagomarsini, Claudio  80n.50 Lai d’Haveloc 37 Lamançoia 138–9 La Monte, John L.  127n.11

Lancelot (en prose). See also Vulgate/ Lancelot-Grail cycle  20–3, 27–8, 64–5, 68, 70–4, 81, 87–8, 110, 114–20, 127n.11, 162–3 Lancelot-Grail Project  69n.33, 116n.39 Langtoft, Pierre de (Peter, Piers)  27–8, 84 French-language lyrics  111 Geste (Chronicle) political songs; letters  93–7, 99–101, 103–5, 109, 111–13, 120–1 Langue d’oc  35–6 Langue d’oïl  11–12, 35–6 La Rochefoucauld, de, family  171–2 Last World Emperor prophecy. See Prophecy Lathuillère  71–2, 80–1 Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem  16–18, 21–2, 28–9, 41, 62–4, 70n.35, 77, 110, 115–17, 122, 158, 161–2, 177–8, 187, 194, 204, 224–5 Latin language  6–7, 9–11, 14, 17–18, 35, 43–4, 68, 100–1, 109, 184, 187–8 Latin verse  108 Latour, Bruno  25, 64, 197–8, 201–3, 214, 221–2, 241 Laudomata  183–4, 187–8 Laurent de Premierfait  192–3 Laȝamon 94–5 Lecoy, Félix  190n.48 Lee, Charmaine. See Formisano and Lee. Lees, Lynn Hollen. See Hohenberg and Lees. Legalistic tracts and language  106–8, 111, 145, 151–7, 198–9 Legge, Dominica  85, 85n.2, 4, 93n.13, 100, 105–6, 109 Leo, Dominic  214 Leonardi, Lino  80n.50 Leonzio Pilatus  177–8 Lerner, Robert, E.  64n.15 Le Saux, Françoise  117n.43 Lewis, C. P.  14n.14 Libro de marescalcie 68 Liège, part of the Empire  224–5 lieux de mémoire  122, 209–10 Lille  132–3, 135–6 Limentani, Alberto  46, 64–5, 80n.50 Lingua gallica / gallicana 7–8 Lionel of Antwerp  161 Lloyd, Simon  78, 110–13 Lock, Peter  131n.17 Lodge, Anthony  8nn.8–10, 10–11, 17–18, 35–6, 93–4 Lods, Jeanne  238n.67 Lohengrin 133–4 Lombardy  58–9, 62–3, 162 London  17–18, 24

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Index  283 Longnon, Jacques  115–17 Longuyon, Jacques. See Jacques de Longuyon. Löseth, Eilert  163–5, 171–3, 195n.2, 197 Lot, Ferdinand  136 Lothair 9–10 Lotharingia 215 Louis VII  146 Louis IX, St. Louis  131–2, 140, 200–1, 224 Louis XII  171 Louis XIV  24 Louis of Orléans  161–2 Louis the Pious  9–10 Low Countries  15–17, 21–3, 27, 59–60, 212–41, 247 Languages 217 Identities 217–18 Lubkin, Gregory  160n.5 Lucas, Henry Stephen  231n.60 Luce 207–9 Luce del Gat  195n.3, 197 Ludovico Sforza. See Sforza Lusignan family  69–70, 110, 125n.5, 146, 204 Lusignan, Serge  7–8, 33–6, 44, 59–60 Lymphatic system  25 Lynde-Recchia, Molly  134n.26 MacDougall, Norman  88–9 Maddicott, J. R.  89–90 Magna Grecia  126–7, 237 Malkin, Irad  25 Mamluks, the  126–7, 138–40, 146, 205n.24 Maniculae 51–2 Manuel Komnenos  138–9 Manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 466E 171n.18 Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5667E  9, 29–30, 158–193 Aylsham, Blickling Hall, MS 6892  86n.6, 108n.29 Aylsham, Blickling Hall, MS 6931  137n.35 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 10175 137–8 Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 43  86n.6, 91–2 Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.1.1 89 Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 269 3 Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 404  205n.25, 207n.30 Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, MS 1260 56n.21

Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 433 (590)  9, 132n.23, 143–4, 151–7, 154f, 155f, 156f Chateauroux, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 1 65–6 Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, MSS Cod. Bodmer 96–1 and 96–2  73n. Dijon, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 562  9, 28–9, 137–8, 144n.54, 147n.59, 148–57, 148f, 149f, 150f, 152f, 153f Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ash. MS 123  171n.18 Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS 323 144n.55 Geneva, Bodmer MS 164  172 Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 860  192–3 Grenoble, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 861  9, 47, 46–52, 48f, 52f, 53f, 55–7, 56f London, British Library, Additional MS 5474 172 London, British Library, Additional MS 10294  116n.39 London, British Library, Additional MS 12228  177–8 London, British Library, Additional MS 15268  137–8, 151–7 London, British Library, Additional MS 19669  137n.35 London, British Library, Additional MS 23929  171 London, British Library, Cotton MS Julius A V  86n.6, 87n.7, 91–2, 108, 110n.33, 112–19 London, British Library, Harley MS 114  86n.6 London, British Library, Harley MS 1808  115–17 London, British Library, Harley, MS 4389  171n.18 London, British Library, Royal MS 14 E III  116n.39 London, British Library, Royal MS 20 A II  27–8, 84, 87, 92, 102f London, British Library, Royal MS 20 A XI  86–7, 115–17 London, British Library, Royal MS 20 D 1  29–30, 134n.26, 138n.39, 158–9, 174–93, 178f, 179f, 180f, 185f, 186f London, British Library, Royal MS 20 D II  172 Marseille, Bibliothèque Municipale L’Alcazar, MS 1106  80–1 Modena, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, MS α.T.3.11 171n.18 Modena, Biblioteca Estense MS Est.39  68–9

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284 Index Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cod. gall. 51  70n.33 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 229 (formerly Philipps Cheltenham 130)  116n.39 New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS G.24 229n.59 New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS 516  193n.53 New York, Pierpont Morgan, MS 930  86n.6, 91–2 Oxford, All Souls College, MS 39  86n.6, 89 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 264  30–1, 196–7, 214–24, 226, 227n.58, 228, 229n.59, 232–3, 240–1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 270b  141n.44 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 165  226 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 196  46, 49–52 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 215  116n.39 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Miscellany MS 637  108n.29 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden MS 3457  69n.33 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal 3325  80–1 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Arsenal 5211  140–1 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr.94 172 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 95 70–1 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 110 116n.39 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 116 116n.39 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 168 143n.50 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 301 192–3 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 349 172 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 350  80n.54, 82 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 358–363 73n.44 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 686 143–4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 750  126–7, 162–3, 198–9, 204–5 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 755  71n.41, 171, 173n.23

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 756–757  177–8, 198–9 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 760 173n.23 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 854 56 Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1113 56n.21 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1423–1424 116n.39 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1463  74–5, 171n.18 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 1533 151n.64 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2024 151n.64 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 2628 141n.45 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 9084 144n.55 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 9682 143–4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 9865 56n.21 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 12154 (1)  89 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 12473 56 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 12565  220n.48, 225–6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 12599  71–3, 172–3 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 19025 70n.33 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 19026 69n.33 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 19166 151n.64 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 20045 227n.58 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 20125  134n.26, 135–8, 143–4, 150, 176, 181 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 24386 229n.59 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 3343 234 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 9603  46, 55n.20, 56n.21 Perugia, Museo capitolare di San Lorenzo (Museo dell’Opera), MS. 6 (formerly 21) 144n.55 Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, MS Fr 15  234n.64

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Index  285 Pommersfelden, Schloβ Biblibliotek, MS 295 137n.35 Rennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 255 69–70 Rennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, 2231  135n.28, 143n.50, 181 Rouen, Bibliothèque Municipale, O.33  175n.27 Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria, MS 1642 143n.49 The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 78.D.47 137n.35 Vatican City, Vatican MS Barb. Lat. 3536  173n.23 Vatican City, Vatican Pal. Lat. 1963  144n.55 Vatican City, Vatican, Vat. Lat. 4789  69–70 Venice, Marciana, Fr 2  170–1 Venice, Marciana, Fr Z 4  65–6 Venice, Marciana, Fr Z 7  65–6 Venice, Marciana, Fr Z 13  65–6 Venice, Marciana, Fr 23  170–1 Venice, Marciana, Fr. App. 6  70n.34 Venice, Marciana, Fr. App. 20  70n.34 Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare, DVIII  65n.16 Vienna Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 2576  56n.21, 135n.28, 143n.50, 175n.25, 181 Manuscript as interpretive matrix  113 Maraszak, Emilie  144n.54, 147n.60, 148n.61 Marc, King and uncle of Tristan  168–9 Marco Polo Devisement du Monde  15–16, 46, 71n.37, 73–4, 139, 159n.4, 218 Margaret Árpád  115–17, 224 Margaret of Dampierre  137n.34 Margue, Michel  214–15, 220, 225–6 Maria of Antioch  146 Marie de France, Lais  2, 32–6 Markets  139, 172–3, 199 Martin da Canale, Estoire de Venise 15–16, 46–7, 131 Marvin, Julia  93n.13, 96n.21, 109n.31 Master of the Hospitaler  137–8 Materni, Marta  80n.50 Matrix text/framed narrative  111–12 Matthews, David  100–1 McClure, J. Derrick  95n.17 McDonald, Nicola F.  234n.64 McKitterick, Rosamund  10n.11 McNearney, Allison  150n.62 Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France (MFLCOF)  4, 243 Mediterranean  17–20, 25, 27, 30–1, 62–3, 115–17, 120, 128–9, 194–8, 200–1, 205–7, 209–10, see also Eastern Mediterranean Melani, Silvio  127–8, 127n.11, 128n.12, 141n.45

Meliador 15 Meliadus, father of Tristan  164–5 Meloria 67 Ménard, Philippe  207n.30 Menegaldo, Silvère  219n.46, 226–7, 234nn.63–64, 238n.67, 239, 239–40nn.70–73 Meneghetti, Maria Luisa  91–2 Merchants, mercantile  70–1, 79–80, 124, 130, 159–60, 171, 199n.10 Merlin  94–5, 109 Meroni, Ubaldo  70–1 Metre  100n.25, 101, 109, See also chanson de geste Meyer, Paul  15n.17, 22n.29, 135nn.27, 30, 171n.19 Micha, Alexandre  22n.30, 110, 118–19 Michel Gonnot  73n.45 Middle English  94–5 Middleton, Roger  69–70 Milan  63–5, 132n.22, 158–60 Milroy, James  94–5 Minervini, Laura  8n.10, 16nn.19–20, 19n.24, 125, 126n.9, 130–1, 131n.18, 136n.33, 141–2, 141n.45, 143n.50, 151, 155n.65, 16nn.19–20, 204n.22 Miracle 110 Moeglin, Jean-Marie  215–17, 235 Mongols 138–9 Monolanguage  25–8, 98–9, 103–4, 121 Monologic, monologism  27–8, 97–9, 103–4, 107–8 Montfort 150–1 Montorsi, Francesco  133n.24, 135, 135n.27, 29 Morato, Nicola  5, 21n.28, 58n.1, 61n.10, 70–2, 73n.43, 79–82 Morato, Nicola and Dirk Schoenaers  5, 20–1, 200n.12 Mordrain, King  119 Morea  16, 23, 49, 175–6, 181–2 Moretti, Franco  202n.20, 203, 211–12 Morgan, Leslie Zarker  66n.23, 171n.19 Morreale, Laura  46–7 Morris, Marc  78n.49, 80n.51, 201n.16 Morrison, Elizabeth  27–8; see also Hederman and Morrison Mort le roi Artu  22, 68–9, 74, 163n.10 Moses 135–6 Mouffe, Chantal  245–6 Multilingualism  27–8, 83 Murray, Alan V.  224–5 Muscatine, Charles  224 Musson, Anthony  89n.11 Nancy, Jean-Luc  244n.1, 245–6 Naples  15–16, 21–2, 29–30, 64–5, 82, 134, 140, 174–93, 198–9, 237, 239–40

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286 Index Napoleon Bonaparte  24 ‘National’ 247 Networks  16–20, 30–2, 40–1, 45, 64, 90–1, 115n.39, 122–3, 139–40, 144–5, 177–8, 194, 197, 203, 211, 213–14, 217, 222, 230–3, 243, 246–7 Central place system  17–18 Network place system  17–18 Geographical, topological, mercantile  196–7 Truncated 213 Nicholas, David  224 Nine Worthies  63, 224–5 Ninove 15n.16 Nithard 9–10 Nobel, Pierre  143n.50 Nora, Pierre  58, 83, 209–10 Norman conquest  14–15, 33, 35–7, 84 Normandy  17–18, 21, 33–5, 195 Normans  19–20, 25 Northern Italy  247 Northumbria 92–3 Novati, Francesco  143n.49 Occitan  5–9, 12f, 13, 16, 65–6, 131, 143n.49 O’Donnell, Thomas  14n.15, 44n.12 Oedipus  150–1, 206–7, 210–11 Oenona. See Cenona Oksanen, Elias  25n.34, 41n.10, 59–60, 199n.10 Old English  35 Old Testament  21–2 Oltrogge, Doris  22n.29, 137–8 Ormrod, W. Mark  89–91, 115–17, 224, 230 Orosius  123, 135–6 Otaka, Yorio  134n.26, 176n.28 Otia imperialia 155n.65 Otranto cathedral  62–3, 65n.19 Ottone Visconti. See Visconti Outremer  8n.10, 16n.19, 18–19, 65n.16, 68–70, 77, 122, 162–3 Ovid  29–30, 100n.25, 175–8, 187–92 Ovide moralise  176n.28, 177–8, 190–1 Padua  55, 65–6, 70–1, 162, 171 Palamedes  75–7, 79–81, 126–7, 127n.11, 171, 204 Palumbo, Giovanni  62–3, 65–6 Paon (Peacock), cycle  212–41 See also Parfait du paon, Le, Jean de le Mote, Restor du paon, Brisebare, Voeux du paon, Les, Jacques de Longuyon Paradisi, Gioia  72n.43 Parfait du Paon, Le  214, 226–7, 229–33, 241. See also Jean de le Mote Paris  8, 17–18, 24–5, 33–5, 69–70, 147–8, 235

Paris-Acre master  151–7 Paris, Gaston  8, 37 Partenope, Cities of Labour. See Naples Paul, Nicholas  115n.38, 128–9 Pauphilet, Albert  115n.39, 116n.39, 119n.46 Pavia  64–5, 70–1, 81–2, 158–60, 170 ‘Pedigree’ 245–7 Peersman, Catharina  15n.16 Pelham, R. A.  91–2, 114–15 Pelias, king of Leonois  206–10 Penman, Michael  88–91, 104n.27 Perceforest  196–7, 226, 230, 237–8 Persia, Persian  195–6 Perugia missal  144n.55 Peter I ‘the cruel’, of Castile and Leon  174 Petrarch, Petrarca  15–16, 161, 177–8, 234, 237n.66 Petronilla de Lacy  115–17 Petrus Comestor  123 Philip Augustus  6n.7, 130, 132–4 Philip IV of France (the Fair/le bel)  204, 224 Philip VI of France  224, 226–7, 230 Philip of Alsace (Philippe d’Alsace), count of Flanders  130, 132–3 Philippa of Hainault, Queen of England, wife of Edward III  115–17, 226–7 Philippe Auguste. See Philip Augustus Philippe de Novare, Estoire et le droit conte de la guerre qui fu entre l’empereur  127–8, 141–2 Frederic et messire Johan de Ibelin 127–8 Philippe d’Alsace. See Philip of Alsace Philippe de Vitry  217–18, 227–8, 234–5, 237–9 Phillips, Helen  97n.23 Phillips, Seymour  89n.11 Picard. See French (language) Picardy  8–9, 18–19, 35–6, 80–2, 225–6 Picard scripta  8–9 Pickford, Cedric E.  74n.45 Pidgin 61 Piedmont  59, 65–6 Pierre de Tiergeville  198–9 Pirenne, Henri  215n.39 Pisa/Pisans  15–16, 46, 63–5, 67–8, 130, 138–9, 159–60, 200–1 Plantagenets  25, 78–9, 195 Platelle, Henri  215n.39 Plaut, Mathilde  80n.50 Plumet, Frédérique  80n.50 Plumley, Yolanda  227–8, 234nn.62–64, 234, 234n.63, 236–7, 239–40 Poetics/rhetoric. See also tail rhyme  104–6, 143–4, 151–7 voicing, framing  100–1 syntax 106

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Index  287 Pognon, E.  234nn.63–64 Point de capiton. See Quilting point ‘Political songs’  100–1 Politics of language  86 Pollard, A. J.  85n.5 Pollock, M.A.  88–9 Polyglossia  93–4, 98–9 Porrus  219–20, 230 Portuguese 5 Post-histories 194 Post–national 33–5 Post-Vulgate Queste  73, 165n.15 Pouzet, Jean-Pascal  85n.2, 94–5 Pratt, Mary Louise  61n.8 Prawer, Joshua  67n.26, 70n.34, 141–2 Prehistories  194, 202 Prester John  117n.43, 138–9 Prestwich, Michael  75, 78n.49, 80n.51, 88–9, 91–3, 140n.43, 201, 201n.16–17 Prevenier, Walter  214–15 Prise de Defur, La 218–19 Prise de Narbonne 65–6 Prophecy  109–11, 122–3, 142–3, 145–6, 194–5 Last world emperor  99, 115 Six kings after John (Merlin)  109, 112, See also ‘Als y yod’ Prophéties de Merlin  71–2, 82 Prose Brut  86–7, 95–6 Prose romance  50, 58–9, 114–15, 123, 128–9, 192 Prose Tristan. See Roman de Tristan Psaki, Regina  62n.12 Pseudo-Turpin 65–6 Punzi, Ariana  73n.43 Purdie, Rhiannon  106 Putter, Ad  33–5 Quasi-object  222, 232–3 Queste del Saint Graal  22, 27–8, 68, 74, 87–8, 110, 114–15, 119, 164, 195–6, 238, 242 Quilting point, point de c1apiton  183, 205–6 Rabel, C.  67n.25, 68n.28, 126n.8, 198n.6 Rægnald Everwic  37–8 Raison civile. See poetics/rhetoric Raynaud, Guy  141n.45 Recanati, Giambattista  170–1 Rees Jones, Sarah  91–2 Restor du paon, Le  218, 220–2, 226–30, 232, 234, 238n.68 Rhetoric. See Poetics/rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium 151–7 Rhineland  19–20, 215 Riccardiana psalter  144n.55

Richard I, Lionheart  67, 95–6, 118–19, 130 Richard II  119–20 Richard de Fournival  68 Ritchie, R. I. Graeme  223, 229 Robert de Brus (the Bruce)  88–90 Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy  41 Robert d’Artois (brother of Louis IX of France, St. Louis)  112–13, 225n.53 Robert de Boron, Joseph d’Arimathie, Merlin en prose, Perceval  68–71, 116n.40 Robert Mannyng of Brunne  88n.8, 94n.15, 95n.18 Robert of Anjou, ‘the Wise’, Angevin Naples  82, 174, 224–5, 237 Robert of Gloucester  43, 94–5 Rochebouet, Anne  133n.24, 134n.26, 135n.28, 176nn.28, 31–32, 181n.37 Rodriguez Porto, Rosa María  137nn.36–37, 147–8 Roger Bacon  8n.8 Roger Mortimer  89–90 Roger of Lille  21–2, 132–4 Rollason, Davis  85n.5 Roman. See Romance ‘Roman’ (language)  7–8, 10–11 Roman d’Alexandre  20–1, 123, 126, 127n.11, 147n.60, 178, 196–7, 214, 218–20, 219n.47, 220n.48, 228, 237–8 Roman d’Eracles 141n.45 Roman de Guiron. See Guiron le Courtois Roman de Lancelot. See Lancelot en prose Roman de la Rose  19n.25, 177–8, 190–1, 227–8 Roman de la terre d’outremer (Chronicle of William of Tyre)  127 Roman de Meliadus. See Guiron le Courtois Roman de Renart 127n.11 Roman de Tristan (Tristan en prose) 15–16, 20–1, 23, 30–1, 46, 56–7, 67–8, 72–5, 81–2, 126–7, 159–74, 194–211, 237–8, 242 Roman de Troie (Benoît de Sainte-Maure)  15–16, 20–1, 23, 26–7, 29–30, 46, 56–7, 64–5, 68, 82, 91–2, 127n.11, 175–6, 188–9, 212–13 First mise en prose (composed in Morea)  49, 175–8, 181–5, 188–9 Second mise en prose  26–7, 32, 46–57 Third mise en prose  175–8, 183–4, 188–9 Fifth mise en prose  29–30, 174–93 Romana lingua  7–11 Romance  117–18, 120, 123, 127, 246 Romance languages  5–9 Romanian 5 Rome  21–2, 24 destruction of  150 Rose, Christopher  127–8

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288 Index Rose, Jacqueline  17n.21 Rosenthal, Constance L.  227–8 Ross, David, J. A.  219n.47 Rothwell, William  33–5 Round Table  200–1 Rouse, Richard and Mary  131–2, 227n.57, 231–3 Rowley, S. M.  91–2 Rubinstein, Jay  145n.56 Ruby, Christine  7–8, 35–6 Ruddick, Andrea  89–90, 95n.20, 111n.35, 115n.36 Ruhland, Johannes Junge  123n.1, 124n.3, 148n.61 Russell, Delbert W.  33n.1 Rusticiaus de Pise (Rustichello da Pisa)  15–16, 21, 27, 46, 68, 71–81, 139–40, 164n.13 Ryckeboer, Hugo  59–60 Sador  195–6, 205–9 Saint Sabas war  127n.10 Saladin  134, 138 Sallust 49 Sandona, Mark  137, 146n.58, 137nn.34, 37 Saracens 96–7 Saturn 189–91 Scafeld, John  93n.12 Scandinavia  16–18, 88–9, 91–2 Scariati, Irene Maffia  144n.52 Schoenaers, Dirk. See Morato and Schoenaers Schroeder, Horst  224–5 Scotland the Scots  14, 86–95, 97, 104–7, 109, 230, 238 Scots (language)  95–6 Scottish Wars of Independence  88–90, 109–10 Scripta  8–9, 35–6, 59, 188, 199n.8, 218, 232–3 Scriptoria  16, 29–30, 69–70, 82, 131–3, 143–4, 198 Sebba, Mark  61 Second barons’ war  77–8 Secular/religious history  135–6 Segre, Cesare  66n.21 Sforza family  64–5, 70–1, 165, 167–70 Francesco I  159–60, 162 Ludovico 171n.21 Short, Ian  1n.1, 6–7n.7, 33–7, 40–1, 41n.11, 43–4, 55n.19, 94–5 Showerman, Grant  192n.52 Sicily  19–20, 62–3, 75, 138, 140, 146, 183, 200–1 Simon of Lille  226–7, 230–3 Simpson, Grant G.  88–9, 106n.28, 109 Sivéry, Gérard  200n.11 Slater, Laura  95n.20 Smallwood, T. M.  84n.1, 109n.31 Smith, D. Vance  123–4, 142

Sodom and Gomorrah, destruction  148 Sot, H. B.  210n.35 Southern, R. W.  115n.36 Sovereignty 196–9 Spain  158–9, 174, 176 Spiegel, Gabrielle  63–4, 125n.4, 133n.24 Stanger, M. D.  137n.34 Stanzaic verse  86, 100–1 Stapel, Rombert  214–15, 216f Stemmas  29–30, 197–8, 212 Stepsis, Robert  93n.12 Stewart, Charles  157 Stirnemann, Patricia  137n.37 Stock, Brian  243–4 Stone of destiny  89 Stones, M. Alison  68–9, 116n.39, 162n.6 Stones, E. L. G.  88–9, 110 Strakhov, Elizaveta  234n.64 Strasbourg Oaths  6–10 Strathern, Marilyn  212–13, 221–2, 230, 232–3, 241 Suard, François  95n.19 Substrata 5 Suite-vulgate du Merlin  22, 72 Summerfield, Thea  84–5, 88n.8, 93n.12, 95n.20, 101, 109n.31, 224n.51, 88nn.8–9 Sunderland, Luke  66n.22, 200n.12 Superstrata 5 Supralocal  5, 8–9, 18–19, 35–6, 45, 60–2, 64, 131, 214, 230–1 Swan Knights  133–4, 138, 224–5 Szkilnik, Michelle  135n.27 T-O map  197n.5 Tagliacozzo  139–40, 146 Tail-rhyme/rime couée  101, 106 Tally, Robert T, Jr.  194 Taylor, Jane  238n.67 Taylor, John  88n.9, 91–2, 95n.20 Taylor, Mark N.  94–5, 104–5 Tavola ritonda, La  75n.47, 173n.23 Teleology  112–13, 135–6, 145, 199–200, 207 Templars  67, 129–30, 204 Teobaldo Visconti. See Visconti family. Teudisca lingua  9–10 Teutonic Knights  67, 129–30 Textual community  243–4 Textual production  23–4 reception 23–4 traditions  23–4, 158–9, 243–4 transmission 23–4 written 35–6 Textual unconscious  194–5, 205–6 Thebes, Boeotia, Greece  21–2, 87–8, 110, 175–6

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/03/20, SPi

Index  289 Thérouanne 115–17 Thibaut de Bar  224–5 Thibaut de Champagne  141 Thiolier, Jean-Claude  84–7, 85n.5, 88n.9, 93n.12, 101, 109n.30 Thomas, Antoine  65–6 Thomas d’Angleterre  162–3, 195, 208 Thomas of Castleford   94n.15 Thomas of Lancaster  89–91 Time and perception of time  81, 83, 86, 100, 104–5, 120–4, 128–9, 136, 142, 144–5, 199 ‘Toom tabard’  106n.28 Toron 148f, 150–1 Tournai  115–17, 224, 227n.58, 241n.73 Tower of Babel  148–50 Trachsler, Richard  72–4, 80n.50, 81–2 Trade routes  19–20, 58, 67, 122–3, 157 Translatio imperii  183, 235, 238–9 Translatio studii  63, 238–9 Translatio/translation  30–1, 35, 41, 49–50, 75, 187, 190–1, 203, 238, 245–6 Translations médiévales 35 Translation zone  61, 63–4 Traxler, Jeanina P.  196n.4 Troy. See Roman de Troie 114 Treharne, Elaine  6n.7 Tresor. See Brunetto Latini ‘Tretys de la passion’  109 Trevor-Roper, Hugh  246 Tripoli 16 Tristan  27, 61, 64, 68, 75–6, 79, 126–7, 164–5, 172, 195–6 Death scene  81, 168–9 Tristan en prose. See Roman de Tristan Tristan verse romances  19–20, 32–3, 36, 162–3, 208 Tristano Corsiniano 173n.23 Tristano Panciatichiano 172–3 Tristano Riccardiano 172–3 Tristrams saga ok Isöndar Troie. See Roman de Troie Trotter, David  33–5, 60n.6 Troubadour chansonniers 56 Troy  19–22, 46, 129, 175–6, 187 Trudgill, Peter  16n.20 Truth claims, truth value  105, 117–20, 202–3 Turville-Petre 94n.16 Tyerman, Christopher  97n.23, 115 Tyler, Elizabeth  14, 33–5, 40n.9, 129n.13 Typological reading  146–8 Tyson, Diane  95n.19, 137n.34 Um, Nancy and Leah Clark  71n.38, 83n.63 Uncanny 123–4

Universal Christian order  122–3, 157 Universal history  21–2, 119–20, 141–4 Universalism 243–4 University of Paris  8, 17–18 Unwin, G.  114–15 Uterpendragon 74–6 Utopian notions  138–9, 243–4 Valentina Visconti 1. See Visconti family. Valentina Visconti 2. See Visconti family. Values of French project  134n.26, 137n.35, 138n.39, 175n.25 van der Meulen, Janet F.  219n.45, 266, 227n.55, 230, 238n.67 Varvaro, Alberto  55, 59nn.2, 3 Vegetius, De re militari 132n.23 Venice, the Veneto, Venetians  15–18, 46–7, 56–7, 59, 62–6, 70n.36, 127n.10, 130–1, 138–9, 143n.49, 159, 181, 200–1 Venice, the Marciana library  170–1 Venjance d’Alixandre, La 218 Vermandois, the  132–3, 215 Vernacular historiography  36 Vernacular literary tradition  33 Verona  46, 65n.19 Vertus, Champagne  161–2 Viel chevalier, le  75–8 Vinaver, Eugène  197 Visconti family  64–5, 70–1, 159–62, 165–7, 169–74 Bernabò 160–1 Filippo Maria  159–60 Galeazzo II  160–1 Gian Galeazzo Visconti  160–2 Gian Maria Visconti  162 Ottone Visconti  139n.42, 159–61 Teobaldo  139, 159–60 Valentina of France  161–2, 171n.21 Valentina, queen consort of Cyprus  161–2 Violante Visconti  161 Visconti/Sforza library at Pavia  168–70 de Visser-van Terwisga, Marijlke  133n.24, 134–8, 134n.26 Vitullo, Juliann  62–3, 65nn.19, 23, 66 Voeux de l’épervier 224–5 Voeux du héron 225n.53 Vœux du Paon, Les  63, 198, 218–19, 222, 224–5, 238 Voie d’enfer et de paradis, La  226–7, 231–2 Volgarizzamenti  46–7, 68, 73–4 Voyage au paradis terrestre, Le 218 Vulgate/Lancelot-Grail cycle  22, 110, 114, 118–19, 162–3

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 11/03/20, SPi

290 Index Wace, Roman de Brut  36, 44–45, 86–7, 115n.37 Wace, Roman de Rou 95n.19 Wales, the Welsh  14, 41, 97–8, 200–1 Wallace, David  217n.43 Wallonia (Walloon)  133–4 Wathey, Andrew  234n.64, 240n.72 Wauchier de Denain  135–6 Weiss, Daniel  131n.19 Weiss, Judith  33–5 Welsh marches  14 Wenceslas, duke of Luxembourg and Bohemia 15 Wickham, Chris  199n.10 White, Steven D.  104–5 Wilkins, Nigel  226–7, 234n.64 William I of England, the Conqueror  33, 37, 40–1 William of Avesnes, ‘the Good’, I, count of Hainault, and also III, count of Holland, and II, count of Zeeland  224, 226–7, 237–9 William of Dampierre  137n.34 William of St Omer  115–17 William of St Stephen  151–7 William of Tyre, Histoire d’Outremer 127n.11, 128–9, 132, 141, 144n.55, 147–8 William II Longespee. See also Chanson de  110–13, 118n.45, 140–1 William II Rufus  36–7, 41

William Wallace  89, 101, 102f, 103 Williams, Ella  vi, 178n.34 Williams, Harry F.  184n.42 Wilson, R. M.  100–1 Wimsatt, James  227–8, 234n.64 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn  33–5, 64–5 Woods of Venus  209–10 Wright, Thomas  84n.1, 101, 109–10, 112 Wunderli, Peter. See Günther and Wunderli, 15n.17 Yeager, Suzanne  115n.38, 128–9 Yolande of Brienne. See Isabella II of Jerusalem York  84–5, 91–2 York Minster  115–17 Young, Helen  84–5 Ysaïe le Triste 74n.45 Zambon, Francesco  64–5 Zaninetta, Paolo  160n.5, 165–7 Zayaruznaya, Anna  234n.64 Zeeland  224, 226, 230–1 Zinelli, Fabio  16n.20, 54–6, 65n.16, 68n.28, 69–70, 71, 131, 137–8, 143–5, 151n.64, 158n.1, 183n.41, 198–9 Zink, Michel  206n.27 Zufferey, François  69n.31 Zumthor, Paul  124