Studies in Medievalism XVI: Medievalism in Technology. Old and New [16] 1843841568, 9781843841562

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Medievalism in Technology Old and New

Studies in Medievalism XVI 2008

Studies in Medievalism Founded by Leslie J. Workman Volume I 1. Medievalism in England. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1979. 2. Medievalism in America. Edited by Leslie J. Workman. Spring 1982. Volume II 1. Twentieth-Century Medievalism. Edited by Jane Chance. Fall 1982. 2. Medievalism in France. Edited by Heather Arden. Spring 1983. 3. Dante in the Modern World. Edited by Kathleen Verduin. Summer 1983. 4. Modern Arthurian Literature. Edited by Veronica M. S. Kennedy and Kathleen Verduin. Fall 1983. Volume III 1. Medievalism in France 1500–1750. Edited by Heather Arden. Fall 1987. 2. Architecture and Design. Edited by John R. Zukowsky. Fall 1990. 3. Inklings and Others. Edited by Jane Chance. Winter 1991. 4. German Medievalism. Edited by Francis G. Gentry. Spring 1991. Note: Volume III, Numbers 3 and 4, are bound together. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV.

Medievalism in England. Edited by Leslie Workman. 1992. Medievalism in Europe. Edited by Leslie Workman. 1993. Medievalism in North America. Edited by Kathleen Verduin. 1994. Medievalism in England II. Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1995. Medievalism in Europe II. Edited by Leslie J. Workman and Kathleen Verduin. 1996. Medievalism and the Academy I. Edited by Leslie J. Workman, Kathleen Verduin, and David D. Metzger. 1997. Medievalism and the Academy II. Edited by David Metzger. 1998. Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud. Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2001. Film and Fiction: Reviewing the Middle Ages. Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2002. Postmodern Medievalism. Edited by Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan. 2004. Correspondences: Medievalsm in Scholarship and the Arts. Edited by Tom Shippey and Martin Arnold. 2005. Memory and Medievalism. Edited by Karl Fugelso. 2006.

Medievalism in Technology Old and New Edited by Karl Fugelso with Carol L. Robinson

Studies in Medievalism XVI 2008 Cambridge D. S. Brewer

© Studies in Medievalism 2008 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2008 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–156–2 ISSN 0738–7164 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Studies in Medievalism Founding Editor Editor Advisory Board

Leslie J. Workman Karl Fugelso Martin Arnold (Hull) Geraldine Barnes (Sydney) Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr. (Leiden) William Calin (Florida) A. E. Christa Canitz (New Brunswick, Canada) Philip Cardew (University of Winchester) David Matthews (Newcastle, Australia) Gwendolyn Morgan (Montana State) Ulrich Müller (Salzburg) Richard Osberg (Santa Clara) Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis) Clare A. Simmons (Ohio State) John Simons (Lincoln University) Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan) Toshiyuki Takamiya (Keio) Jane Toswell (Western Ontario) Richard Utz (Western Michigan) Kathleen Verduin (Hope College, Michigan) Andrew Wawn (Leeds)

Studies in Medievalism provides an interdisciplinary medium of exchange for scholars in all fields, including the visual and other arts, concerned with any aspect of the post-medieval idea and study of the Middle Ages and the influence, both scholarly and popular, of this study on Western society after 1500. Studies in Medievalism is published by Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., P.O. Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK; Boydell & Brewer, Inc., 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA. Orders and inquiries about back issues should be addressed to Boydell & Brewer at the appropriate office. For a copy of the style sheet and for inquiries about Studies in Medievalism, please contact the editor, Karl Fugelso, at the Dept. of Art and Art History, Towson University, 8000 York Rd, Towson, MD 21252–0001, USA, tel. 410–704–2805, fax 410–704–2810 ATTN: Fugelso, e-mail . All submissions should be sent to him as e-mail attachments in Word.

Acknowledgments The Editor would like to thank Elizabeth Emery and the advisory board, particularly Gwendolyn Morgan, Nils Holger Petersen, Tom Shippey, Clare Simmons, Jane Toswell, Richard Utz, and Kathleen Verduin, for their assistance in the preparation of this volume. The device on the title page comes from the title page of Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder, edited by L. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano (Heidelberg and Frankfurt, 1806). The epigraph is from an unpublished paper by Lord Acton, written about 1859 and printed in Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge University Press, 1955), 212.

Studies in Medievalism List of Illustrations

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Editorial Note

Karl Fugelso

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Alicia C. Montoya

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Albert D. Pionke

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An Eastern Medieval Revival: Gretchen Kreahling McKay Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting

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“I Am Weary of That Foolish Tale”: Yeats’s Revision of Tennyson’s Idylls and Ideals in “Time and the Witch Vivien”

Chene Heady

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Bruce C. Brasington

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Stefano Mengozzi

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Contes du Style des Troubadours: The Memory of the Medieval in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Victorian Medieval Revival, and Victorian Ritual Culture

The Doughboy Comes to Chartres: Stars and Stripes and the Middle Ages Constructing Difference: The Guidonian Hand and the Musical Space of Historical Others

Medievalism in Video Games An Introduction to Medievalist Video Games

Carol L. Robinson

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Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity

Oliver M. Traxel

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Romancing the Game: Magic, Writing, and the Feminine in Neverwinter Nights

Amy S. Kaufman

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Revising the Future: Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

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Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs

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Notes on Contributors

Lauryn S. Mayer

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Volume XVI 2008

Two great principles divide the world, and contend for the mastery, antiquity and the middle ages. These are the two civilizations that have preceded us, the two elements of which ours is composed. All political as well as religious questions reduce themselves practically to this. This is the great dualism that runs through our society. Lord Acton

Illustrations An Eastern Medieval Revival: Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting Fig. 1:

Monreale. View towards apse. Duomo, Monreale, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [image ART141552]

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Fig. 2:

Capella Palatina, Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo, Christ flanked 49 by Saints Peter and Paul. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY [image ART215173]

Fig. 3:

Flandrin, Hippolyte. Detail of nave mural showing saints in procession. Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY [ART327495]

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Fig. 4:

S. Apollinare Nuovo, interior with side nave. Ravenna, Italy. Photo Credit: Vanni/Art Resource, NY. [ART45665]

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Fig. 5:

Christ Saviour. Detail from apse mosaic, SS. Cosma e Damiano, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [ART135188]

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Fig. 6:

Engraving of ivory of Archangel Michael, published in Jules Labarte, Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, London: John Murray, 1855.

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Fig. 7:

Archangel Michael ivory panel, British Museum, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. [ART209481]

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Fig. 8:

Christ Enthroned with Emperor Leo VI. Mosaic in narthex, 57 Hagia Sophia, Instanbul, Turkey. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. [ART103131]

Fig. 9:

Engraving of Christ mosaic in narthex of Hagia Sophia, first published in Wilhelm Salzenberg, Alt-christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII Jahrhundert, Berlin: Ernst and Korn, 1854.

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Fig. 10: Icon of Madonna and Child, S. Francesca Romana, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [ART82071]

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Fig. 11: Sts. Sergius and Bacchus Icon, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art. [DSC05328]

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List of Illustrations

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Constructing Difference: The Guidonian Hand and the Musical Space of Historical Others Fig. 1:

The Guidonian Hand, from Fra Bonaventura da Brescia, Breviloquio musicale (Brescia, 1497).

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Fig. 2:

The Order of the Diatonic Pitches in a Standard Guidonian Hand from [Gamma] to e".

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Fig. 3:

The Gamut in Franchino Gafori’s Practica musicae (Milan, 1496), fol. aijv.

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Table 1: The Author’s (Mengozzi’s) Illustration of the 7 Pitch Letters Compared with the 6 Syllables in the Guidonian Hand.

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The editor, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions. Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Editorial Note As is obvious from recent conferences, medievalism in new technology is rapidly gaining scholarly interest. And when several papers on medievalism in video games came through my transom within days of each other, I knew it was time to present a primer on that area. I therefore enlisted Carol L. Robinson to edit and introduce those papers. She has conducted extensive research on the history of computer games and knows many of its key players, so to speak. Moreover, she is planning several book-length projects that should nicely complement our introduction to medievalism in that medium. Of course, in welcoming new technology, we would not wish to ignore more traditional vehicles of medievalism, and so our section on computer games is preceded by six papers on the ways in which the Middle Ages have been interpreted in older media. In “Contes du Style des Troubadours: The Memory of the Medieval in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales,” Alicia C. Montoya looks at how the Middle Ages were invoked by, and adapted to, the rise of a new genre, especially as the founders of that genre pursued their own particular agendas. In “A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Victorian Medieval Revival, and Victorian Ritual Culture,” Albert D. Pionke gives a new explanation for the staging and condemnation of an early Victorian pageant that may not have been as great a debacle as has been suggested by its critics. In “An Eastern Medieval Revival: Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting,” Gretchen Kreahling McKay explores potential motives for an extraordinarily sharp surge of interest in a culture that otherwise has not fueled as much medievalism as its historical significance might merit. In “ ‘I Am Weary of That Foolish Tale’: Yeats’s Revision of Tennyson’s Idylls and Ideals in ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’,” Chene Heady excavates a largely unstudied response by W. B. Yeats to the Middle Ages as filtered through one of that poet’s chosen foils. In “The Doughboy Comes to Chartres: Stars and Stripes and the Middle Ages,” Bruce C. Brasington looks at medievalism in the main U.S. military newspaper during World War I. And in “Constructing Difference: The Guidonian Hand and the Musical Space of Historical Others,” Stefano Mengozzi takes a postmodern look at the post-medieval afterlife of an extraordinarily popular device for explaining musical arrangement. The old and new are thus paired in not only each paper but also the volume as a whole, and, as we push into new territory while continuing to mine the past, great innovation is revealed alongside the great continuity that has always distinguished our field.

Contes du Style des Troubadours: The Memory of the Medieval in Seventeenth-Century French Fairy Tales Alicia C. Montoya In 1690, a new literary genre was launched in France. The forty-page story L’Ile de la félicité (The Island of Happiness),1 incorporated into MarieCatherine d’Aulnoy’s historical novel L’Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas, is generally considered to be the first French fairy tale to be published. Although this first fairy tale was not explicitly designated as such, it was soon followed by others that were more ambitious in their attempt to create an autonomous literary genre. In 1697, Charles Perrault published his Histoires ou contes du temps passé, the collection of eight tales that quickly became the model for the genre and that included the first-known versions of classics such as Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots. The term conte des fées (“tales of the fairies”) was itself first used in the title of another collection published in the same year, d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des fées. It was followed shortly thereafter, in 1698, by the introduction of the term more commonly used in France today to designate “fairy tales” – conte de fées – in the title of a collection authored by the Countess of Murat. Raymonde Robert, in her classic study of the literary fairy tale in seventeenth- and eighteeenth-century France, has established that during the first decade of fairy-tale production, that is to say, the years 1690–99, fully half of the fairy tales published drew on folkloric motifs.2 Although she does not state this explicitly, her study suggests that many of these motifs went back to older traditions, and in a number of cases, she traces them back to specific medieval texts. Thus, the first published French fairy tale, d’Aulnoy’s L’Ile de la félicité, bears a similarity to the Breton lai Guingamor, which, according to Robert, suggests a common source, if not actual, direct influence.3 The famous opening scene in Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant), during which the fairies each bestow a gift on the newborn princess, appears Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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to go back to the fourteenth-century chivalric romance Perceforest. In the preface to her tale L’Enchanteur (The Magician), included in her collection Les Fées, contes des contes (1697), Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force declared that she had drawn her inspiration from an episode in a twelfth-century anonymous chivalric romance, the Livre de Caradoc, in the so-called Continuation Perceval (which, for English readers, has the interest of being a variation on the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight theme). Evaluating fairy-tale authors’ regular use of medieval or medievalist elements, Jean-Paul Sermain, in one of the most perceptive studies of the French fairy tale to appear in recent years, has suggested that by these references to the medieval, the fairy-tale genre “contribute[d] to the moral rehabilitation of ‘old-fashioned romances’ ” and announced a “timid return to the Middle Ages” that was to mark later eighteenth-century literature (including, of course, some of the texts that we now consider as precursors of Romanticism).4 However, despite the clear presence and importance of folkloric and/or medieval motifs in early French fairy tales, the medievalist character of the genre was limited by several constraints. The first is the modest scope of the phenomenon in historical terms. As Robert has also established, almost all of the fairy tales that exploit folkloric material were published during two key years, 1697 and 1698, i.e., the years during which the classic collections of Perrault and d’Aulnoy were published. A second remark that needs to be made concerns the implicit rather than explicit nature of these folkloric and/or medieval motifs. Although Robert’s meticulous comparison of the tales with the extant corpus of medieval French literature clearly demonstrates the existence of a link, the fairy-tale authors themselves only rarely mention any such connection, and only in a few, exceptional cases do they go so far as to mention a precise source. Most often, the closest they come to textual references is in their inclusion of passages deliberately phrased in an antiquated language – which, in fact, is usually closer to sixteenth-century French than to medieval ancien français. A tale like La Force’s L’Enchanteur, with its explicit reference to a medieval textual source, thus appears to be the exception rather than the rule. Having said this, it is, however, good to bear in mind that the concept of “source” itself, with its heavy bias towards the textual, is perhaps not completely adequate in describing medieval influences in French fairy tales, which drew on oral tradition and collective memory as well as on more well-known textual precedents. Thus, Sermain has drawn a useful distinction between, on the one hand, Romantic “reinventions” of the medieval, and, on the other hand, early modern “memories” of the medieval: “Fairy tales didn’t set out to reinvent the Middle Ages, as would Walter Scott; they used the image the Middle Ages had given of itself in its romances, or more exactly the fleeting memory of this image

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which remained in the 17th century.”5 Although Sermain here continues to emphasize the textual – in this case, medieval romances – it is clear that several fairy-tale authors drew not only on texts or the “memory” of these texts, but also on more widespread cultural practices and collective memories – hence the continuing relevance of Robert’s and other scholars’ folkloric approach to these tales. Lastly and most importantly, authors’ actual use of medieval elements in their fairy tales, perhaps because of medieval tradition’s fluid nature, is frequently vague and imprecise. In another article, Sermain has argued that fairy-tale allusions to the medieval can in many instances be considered simply as a literary convention or commonplace required by the genre. Thus, fairy tales routinely contain descriptions of castles, sorcerers, magical objects, and other medievalist attributes, or refer to characters bearing names such as Merlin or Mélusine, but these elements in fact differ little, according to Sermain, from the medievalist elements used by Walt Disney in his modern fairy-tale adaptations or in his commercial theme parks. The title of Perrault’s famous collection is symptomatic. His Contes du temps passé, or “Tales from times past,” are singularly imprecise in their reference to the past evoked, for although this is certainly a vaguely medieval past, it is not so in any historically identifiable sense. Sermain concludes his most recent article on the subject on an unexpectedly negative note by writing that, despite fairy tales’ important role in shaping eighteenth-century literature, “for an enthusiast of the Middle Ages, what fairy tales can show or tell him about this period is nonexistent.”6 In this essay, I would like to take up Sermain’s argument by exploring in greater detail the existence or persistence of medieval elements in the fairy tales of one of the authors central to his work: Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, who was the niece of Charles Perrault and who was one of the few fairy-tale authors who did include explicit references to the Middle Ages in her works. I would like to ask what function these references fulfill within the broader context of her oeuvre and within the context of seventeenth-century literary polemics. Finally, I would like to question Sermain’s thesis that fairy tales’ relation to the medieval past is primarily fictional by proposing another model, whereby the fictionality of the medieval elements in fairy tales does not necessarily preclude an interest in the “real” Middle Ages.7 Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier is an obvious focus for these questions. Her works indeed stand out for the number and scope of their references to medieval tradition, while her biography situates her within a network linking various authors and artists who had at one time or another come to the defense of the medieval. These included first and foremost her own family members, the most well-known of whom was her uncle Charles

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Perrault, whose fairy tales may well have been born out of a salon game of competitive emulation with L’Héritier. Charles’s brother Claude, the architect famously responsible for designing the Louvre’s colonnade, gained notoriety through his practice of placing Corinthian columns in pairs, an innovation explicitly inspired by medieval buildings. L’Héritier’s father, Nicolas L’Héritier de Nouvelon, sieur de Villandon, had in his capacity as royal historiographer produced works of a more scholarly nature on the French and German Middle Ages and had also written a patriotic tragedy about the Frankish king Clovis. Finally, as the protégé of the successful novelist and salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry, some of whose works also had a medieval setting, L’Héritier had ample occasion to interact with the literary luminaries of her day, both in her original role of protégé and in her later one of acknowledged successor and inheritor of her mentor’s salon. Most importantly, L’Héritier vigorously sided with the party of the Moderns, whose acknowledged leader was her uncle Charles, during the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes – the French Battle of the Books – which divided literary society into two warring factions during the last decades of the seventeenth century. The debate opposed the Moderns, who defended the achievements of contemporary French culture, to the Ancients, who held that French culture would forever be unable to equal the great works of Antiquity. Although the heritage of the Middle Ages never played a central role in the debate, it did surface in some of the arguments of the Moderns, who granted at least a modest role to medieval literature in their defense of French tradition against classical Antiquity. Among the Moderns with whom L’Héritier surely exchanged ideas was the critic and French Academician Jean Chapelain, the author of a dialogue entitled La Lecture des vieux romans (On Reading Old Romances), which contains an unprecedented defense of medieval romances, and which is one of the most remarkable texts in French medievalist thought. Certain passages in L’Héritier’s own work certainly suggest that she had read Chapelain’s text, which remained in manuscript form until its first, posthumous, publication in 1728. L’Héritier’s direct circle of colleagues, in other words, was engaged in debates about the nature of good art and literature – today we would say “canon formation” – and in the production of works of historiography that sought to revise classicist views of the medieval. This context is important, I believe, because it encourages us to read L’Héritier’s tales (contes) as not just works of the imagination but also active contributions to the debates on literature and literary historiography. And, indeed, the fact that the fairy tale was not yet an established literary genre and was in search of theoretical justification during the years in which she started to publish her contes probably explains in large measure the extraordinarily prominent role she gave the paratext, i.e., prefaces, postfaces, and other material reflecting or

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commenting on the tale genre. Of equal relevance is the fact that L’Héritier herself never published a collection of tales explicitly designated “fairy tales,” but always included them in larger works or collections. These are, principally, her Œuvres mêlées, published in 1695, and La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux, contes anglais, published in 1705.8 In these works, she uses various names for these stories: fables (fables), contes (tales), fabliaux, nouvelles (novellas), nouvelles historiques (historical novellas), petites nouvelles morales (short moral novellas), nouvelles en vers (verse novellas), romans rimés (rhymed novels), histoires (histories), historiettes (short histories), and ouvrages en prose et en vers (works in prose and verse), but almost never contes des fées (fairy tales). Although some of these terms go back to the period before the institutionalization of the fairy-tale genre around 1697–98, it is worth noting that L’Héritier still continued to use them in 1705. This would seem to suggest that, in her theoretical work, she was aware of the existence of important distinctions between different tale genres, which included not only fairy tales but also tales about fairyland (L’Ile de la félicité), folk tales (Perrault’s Three Wishes), morality tales (Bluebeard), and warning tales (Little Red Riding Hood).9 In the following, I will nevertheless discuss together all of L’Héritier’s short texts published in the two volumes I have mentioned, the Œuvres mêlées and the Tour ténébreuse,10 because the fact that she brought them together here suggests an attempt to create some kind of thematic or formal unity.11 All these tales do in fact have in common their use of motifs that are presented as being folkloric, whether or not they also include supernatural intervention, and regardless of their formal characteristics, i.e., whether they are verse or prose tales. Another trait shared by almost all of the tales L’Héritier included in these volumes is the prominence of medievalist attributes and/or specific medieval sources. All but one have an explicitly medieval setting.12 Her story Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie (Marmoisan, or Innocent Deceit) starts in ironic fashion: In the times when France was divided among several kings, I haven’t been told during which reign, nor in which century, but no matter: there lived a nobleman, named the count of Solac. Dans le temps, que la France était partagée entre plusieurs Rois, on ne m’a pas dit sous quel Règne, ny en quel siecle, mais il n’importe, il y avoit un Seigneur, nommé le Comte de Solac. (OM 6, emphasis added) In a similar vein, L’Adroite Princesse evokes a recognizably medieval past in its first sentence, which frames the narrative and instructs the reader about the way in which he or she should read the rest:

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Studies in Medievalism During the time of the first crusades, a king of I don’t know which kingdom of Europe, decided to go wage war on the infidels in Palestine. Du temps des premieres Croisades, un Roy de je ne sais quel Royaume de l’Europe, se resolut d’aller faire la guerre aux Infidels dans la Palestine. (OM 233, emphasis added)

In these examples, the narrator’s stance is ambiguous, for he or she simultaneously insists on the medieval element while flirting with his or her lack of precise knowledge concerning the period. On one level, the narrator’s statements that no one has told him or her what century the tales take place in, and that he or she does not know in what country they are set, underline the expressly fictional nature of the narrative: these tales certainly have a link to the past, but they are not history. On another level, however, though we cannot equate the narrator with L’Héritier herself, the narrator’s stated lack of historical knowledge may seem to evoke the female author’s position in particular: women, lacking formal education, learned their “history” from novels, which, as everyone knew, were notoriously inaccurate. In the course of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, the poet Nicolas BoileauDespréaux, the leader of the Ancient party, famously derided the novels of L’Héritier’s mentor, Madeleine de Scudéry, for their fanciful – and typically feminine – use of ancient history, which he appeared to consider the preserve of male writers.13 By her ironic framing of her tales, L’Héritier thus demonstrated that she was well aware of the criticism then being leveled at narrative fiction, yet deliberately chose to go against Boileau’s classicist precepts. Her choice of a medieval setting, seen in this light, was not accidental. L’Héritier’s history was not that of French classicism, which drew its inspiration from Greek and Latin Antiquity, but another, more “modern” and more national, history. In other stories, the narrator’s stance, at least at first sight, appears somewhat different. The tale Artaut, ou l’avare puni (Artaut, or the Punished Miser) openly states its source: the tenth chapter of the Mémoires ou vie de Saint Louis by the fourteenth-century chronicler Joinville (OM 120). However, L’Héritier adds a telling comment on Joinville in her paratext when she describes him as “this historian who is as exact as he is naive” (cet Historien aussi exact que naïf ). This is an echo of one of the comments most frequently made about medieval authors, by their supporters as well as their detractors. Thus, half a century earlier, Jean Chapelain had also juxtaposed the two terms when writing that the medieval romance Lancelot “is a naive representation and, so to speak, a certain and exact history of the morals which reigned then at court” (une représentation naïve et, s’il faut ainsi dire, une histoire certaine et exacte des mœurs qui régnaient dans les cours d’alors).14

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As Chapelain went on to explain, the naiveté of the medieval text was double-edged, possessing both a moral and an aesthetic dimension. While the naiveté of the medieval text was admirable from a moral point of view, both for its inherent truth-value and for its description of sentiments purer than those obtaining in the modern world, Chapelain clearly condemned this naiveté from an aesthetic viewpoint. In aesthetic terms, indeed, the medieval author’s naiveté was revealed by his text’s lack of stylistic refinement, betraying a complete ignorance of the rules of rhetoric, which also dictated how a good narrative should be constructed: The author is a barbarian, who wrote in barbaric times and for barbarians only; he has no idea what a plan is, nor a proper disposition, nor the correct proportioning of the parts, nor what a subtle plot is, nor a natural ending. He drones on for as long as he can; he always uses the same tone; he is hard; he is unpolished; he is the opposite of the graces. L’auteur est barbare, qui a écrit durant la barbarie et pour des barbares seulement; il ne s’est jamais douté de ce qu’était qu’un plan d’ouvrage, qu’une disposition légitime, qu’un juste rapport des parties, qu’un nœud subtil ni qu’un dénouement naturel. Il va tant que terre le porte; il est toujours sur un même ton; il est dur, il est raboteux, il est l’antipode des grâces.15 L’Héritier, who was, like Chapelain, an avowed defender of the medieval, nonetheless shared his deep uneasiness concerning the aesthetic qualities or “naiveté” of medieval literature. Her implication in acknowledging this point therefore seems to be that if the medieval chronicler is exact, but, in aesthetic terms, suffers from his naiveté, she herself does not pretend to exactness yet is also not naive. As a sophisticated seventeenth-century author, writing immediately after the glory years of French classicism, she was fully capable of detecting her medieval predecessors’ literary failings. In this light, the fairy-tale narrator’s flaunting of his or her lack of precise historical knowledge is offset and explained by that of the real author, i.e., L’Héritier’s literary sophistication as suggested in the paratext. As if to drive this point home, L’Héritier pointedly adds a reflexive, self-referential twist to her tales. Her tale Les Enchantements de l’éloquence (The Enchantments of Eloquence), which contrasts different models of eloquence, is again very obviously a comment on the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, in its opposition of “natural” eloquence to scholarly rhetoric.16 The action in Ricdin-Ricdon, similarly, is set in the “kingdom of Fiction” (royaume de Fiction). In this tale, the characters’ allegorical names clearly invite the reader to read this fairy tale as a meta-fictional fiction. Thus, for example, the Queen of Fiction combats

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Dreamer (Songecreux), while the latter is helped by the Arabs, who in turn have come from the Arabian Nights (the first volume had just been published in 1704 by Antoine Galland). L’Héritier’s own stance is underlined by her authorial intervention half-way through the tale: I myself, who speak to you here, am very advanced in that faction, amusing myself as I do by bringing back from oblivion the antique nonsense of King Richard who [. . .] was also on occasion, just like us, fairly committed to the faction of the dreamers. Moi-même, qui vous parle icy, je suis peut-être des plus avant dans ce Party, m’amusant comme je fais à tirer de l’oubli les antiques Sornettes du Roy Richard, qui [. . .] fut aussi quelquefois, ainsi que nous, assez passablement engagé parmi les Songecreux. (TT 220) In other words, L’Héritier suggests here that, although she herself is engaged in the act of writing fairy tales, she recognizes these texts for what they are – fiction. While she may amuse herself by penning these trifles, the ironic distance she assumes demonstrates that she is of course sophisticated enough not to take these amusements altogether seriously. I thus agree with Christine Jones’s statement that “frivolity is an aesthetic principle in the work of the conteuses,” but I would argue that frivolity itself is an aristocratic authorial stance designed to demonstrate the authors’ underlying aesthetic sophistication.17 As these examples reveal, L’Héritier was anything but naive in her approach to the tale genre. I would therefore like to argue that she was pursuing two goals by weaving allusions to the medieval past into her tales. The first and perhaps most important of these was to provide an alternative genealogy of literary production that would be more welcoming to women’s authorship than the prevailing classicist aesthetic.18 The need to substantiate this first claim was in turn linked to her second goal, which was to move beyond the mere hypothesis of a medieval literary tradition to the actual rediscovery and/or recreation of this forgotten tradition. Legitimizing a Modern Female Tradition In her dedication of Les Enchantements de l’éloquence to the duchess of Epernon, L’Héritier described how her tales were transmitted in order to demonstrate the existence of a “direct line” (droite ligne) between the medieval past and the present: You would therefore, good duchess, like to interrupt for some moments your serious and learned occupations to listen to one of

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these Gallic fables, which apparently come to us in a direct line from the tellers or troubadours of Provence, who were so famous in another age. Vous voulez donc, belle Duchesse, interrompre pour quelques moments vos occupations serieuses & sçavantes, pour écouter une de ces Fables gauloises, qui viennent aparemment en droite ligne des Conteurs ou Troubadours de Provence, si celebres autrefois. (OM 163–64) Fairy tales are now redefined as “tales in the style of the troubadours” (contes du style des Troubadours) (OM 307) or “novellas from the source of the troubadours” (nouvelles de la source des Troubadours) (OM 317). L’Héritier’s invocation of the figure of the troubadour is not unexpected. The troubadour had in fact been making something of a comeback during the last decade of the seventeenth century, after a period during which his memory had been kept alive primarily in the works of antiquarians and regionalist authors. Starting in 1682, the Parisian society journal Mercure galant published a series of articles on the troubadours, while other, popularizing, works, such as Pierre de Galaup’s Apologie des anciens historiens et des troubadours (1704), gained fame thanks to their authors’ connections with influential Parisian literary figures, including – once again – the salon hostess Madeleine de Scudéry. L’Héritier herself was directly linked to the troubadours when, in 1696, she was elected to Toulouse’s newly resuscitated Académie des Jeux Floraux, a literary academy that since its inception during the fourteenth century purported to continue the poetic activities of the troubadours.19 The seventeenth-century rediscovery of the troubadours, in turn, almost invariably went back to an older work, Jean de Nostredame’s bestselling, and frequently reprinted, Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (1575). This work had been intended partly as a roman à clef about the author’s own circle of aristocratic friends, and partly as a regionalist adaptation of the known troubadour biographies, but was increasingly read as a work of history. Nostredame, in a strategem worthy of his more famous brother, the prophet Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), mixed biographies of fictitious troubadours with those of real ones, and gave his work an aura of authenticity by listing his source manuscripts – invented, for the most part – and detailing his scholarly method of careful textual analysis. While medievalists have, until well into the twentieth century, condemned Nostredame’s Vies as a work of literary imposture, a more recent interpretation has on the contrary suggested that Nostredame could perhaps more usefully be viewed as one of “a long line of ‘improvers’ of [medieval traditions] that went back to the medieval performers and scribes themselves.”20 As Laura Kendrick writes, “What Nostredame did was further fictionalize

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and modernize medieval vidas [troubadour biographies] that were, in his view, already fictions (both those ‘sources’ he invented and those that earlier interpreters had invented before him).”21 In other words, in the seventeenthcentury reception of the troubadours, which itself went back to Nostredame’s influential sixteenth-century text, one can detect two traits relevant to L’Héritier’s later appreciation of the troubadours’ work: the ease with which fictional elements were incorporated into a “historical” narrative, and the idea that in writing about the troubadours, authors may not so much have been trying to give a “definitive” picture of the Middle Ages – “reinventing” the medieval, as would Walter Scott – as ensuring the continuity of a tradition or a “memory” that had been transmitted and transformed through the intervening centuries. In the domain of literary historiography, the troubadours, by virtue of their association with royal and noble patrons, and because of the reputed refinement of their poetry, seemed to furnish a suitable ancestry for later literary productions. Indeed, in a period strongly marked by a classicist aesthetic, they were perceived to observe at least some of the rules of classical rhetoric and to express a suitably elevated aristocratic ethos. As in other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century representations of the medieval, the troubadours, too, were in a sense “classicized” in order to render them worthy of literary notice. They were “naïve,” but not too much so. Thus L’Héritier traced the heritage of the troubadours down to her own time, linking them to the esprit galant or élégant associated with seventeenthcentury salon culture: The troubadours were the authors of the little histories of which I have spoken. [. . .] They filled their tales with surprising wonders produced by fairies and sorcerers. [. . .] However, these gallant troubadours saw their projects much improved on. Before them, no-one had ever heard of romans: they were then composed. From century to century, these kinds of productions were embellished and finally reached the summit of perfection to which the illustrious Mademoiselle de Scudéry has brought them, with such brilliance that posterity will agree with us that the admirable romances of this learned maiden are veritable prose poems, but of a prose as eloquent as it is polite. Les Troubadours sont les Auteurs des petites Histoires dont j’ay parlé. [. . .] Ils remplirent leurs recits de prodiges étonnans des Fées & des Enchanteurs. [. . .] Cependant ces galans Troubadours virent beaucoup encherir sur leurs projets. Avant eux, on n’avoit point entendu parler de Romans: on en fit: de siecle en siecle ces sortes de productions s’embellirent, & elles sont venues enfin à ce

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comble de perfection où l’illustre Mademoiselle de Scudery les a porté [sic], avec tant d’éclat, que la posterité conviendra, aussi-bien que nous, que les admirables Romans de cette savante fille sont de veritables Poëmes en Prose: mais d’une Prose aussi éloquente que polie. (OM 303–05) L’Héritier’s ambiguous use of the term roman here recalls that of her predecessors, Claude Fauchet and Pierre-Daniel Huet, whose earlier histories of French literature she cited as sources for her knowledge of its development. The noun roman indeed refers variously, in their texts, either to medieval works composed in the Occitan language or Langage Roman – including the lyrical poetry of the troubadours – or to the modern prose texts (novels), which were confusingly also called romans in seventeenth-century usage. L’Héritier appears to consciously exploit this ambiguity in suggesting that the troubadours’ poems, known as romans because they were composed in Langage Roman, were the real ancestors of the modern prose novel or roman, as exemplified by the works of L’Héritier’s salon companion Madeleine de Scudéry. Interestingly, there is no mention in L’Héritier’s text of any link between medieval French (Arthurian) romances, with which she was also familiar, and the modern roman, suggesting that her choice of a troubadour ancestry was a deliberate one.22 L’Héritier’s co-opting of troubadour poetry for the novel, while it may seem surprising to us today, can be understood in the context of the increasing preoccupation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with writing national literary history. During the course of the eighteenth century, it was to become a commonplace for historians to trace the origins of French literature to the troubadours – even in the complete absence of evidence to support the claim. This tradition had started already with regionalist celebrations of the troubadours, which regularly drew attention to the fact that Petrarch – and hence, modern poetry – had drawn his inspiration from their compositions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, with the publication of the first modern histories of French-language literature, this commonplace was substantially developed in several works. Thus, the abbé Mervesin’s Histoire de la poésie française (1706) dates the origins of modern French literature to the beginning of the twelfth century and the advent of “these worthy geniuses, who drew the Muses out of the slumber into which they had long ago fallen in France” (ces agréables génies, qui tirèrent les Muses de l’assoupissement où elles étoient depuis longtems en France).23 In his Histoire de la poésie française, avec une défense de la poésie, written at the same time as Mervesin’s work but published only in 1739, the French Academician abbé Massieu likewise granted a place of honor to the troubadours. In the realm of theater historiography, the historians Claude

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and François Parfaict, again basing themselves on Nostredame, devoted a large part of the first volume of their Histoire du théâtre français (1735) to a demonstration of the theory that the first French plays had been written by the troubadours. Not to be deterred by the lack of texts, they supplied a series of apocryphal texts, which had already been circulating for some time in literary circles, to back their claim. It thus appears that L’Héritier, in tracing the origins of the novel back to the troubadours, was actually helping to create a literary fashion that was to mark the century to come. What is of equal interest in L’Héritier’s approach, however, is that she draws a link between the troubadours and a specifically female modern tradition – hence the pointed reference to Scudéry, among others. In the preface to Les Enchantements de l’éloquence, she comments on the transmission of folktales that, significantly, traveled along female lines: You are doubtless surprised, you who the profoundest scholarship has never surprised, that these tales, as incredible as they are, have come down to us from age to age, without anyone having taken the trouble to write them down. They are not easy to believe But as long as there will be children in the world Mothers and grandmothers Their memory will be kept. A lady very knowledgeable in Greek and Roman antiquities, and even more knowledgeable in Gallic antiquities, told me this story when I was a child. Vous vous étonnez sans doute, vous que la sçience la plus profonde n’a jamais étonné [sic], que ces Contes tout incroiables qu’ils sont, soient venus d’âge en âge jusqu’à nous, sans qu’on se soit donné le soin de les écrire. Ils ne sont pas aisez à croire: Mais tant que dans le monde on verra des enfants, Des meres & des mere-grands, On en gardera la memoire. Une dame tres-instruite des antiquitez Grecques & Romaines, & encore plus savante dans les Antiquitez Gauloises, m’a fait ce Conte quand j’étois enfant. (OM 164–65) In other words, these “Gallic fables” (Fables gauloises) presumably went back to the literature of the troubadours and represented a homegrown French Antiquity as worthy of emulation as Greek and Roman Antiquity. At the same time, because this Gallic Antiquity had been transmitted by

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generations of women – “children, mothers and grandmothers” (des enfans, des meres & des mere-grands) – this gave women a literary tradition of their own. Women’s right to take up the pen, it was implied, was justified by the fact that it had been they who had preserved and transmitted national literary heritage across the centuries. L’Héritier’s fairy tales, seen in this light, are comparable in intent to her more openly polemical texts in praise of women authors, from her Parnasse reconnaissant, ou le triomphe de Madame Deshoulières, which closed her first volume of fairy tales, to her Apothéose de Mademoiselle de Scudéry, published in 1702. Her genealogy of the fairy tale served not only to give it legitimacy by providing it with a noble ancestry – that of the newly classicized troubadours – but also to present the genre as representing a specifically female tradition. Recreating Medieval Literature It is therefore clear that L’Héritier’s interest in medieval literary tradition proceeds at least in part from her ideological intent, and can be considered a discursive or rhetorical strategy. There is, however, also a relationship between L’Héritier’s rhetorical Middle Ages and the “real” or historical Middle Ages. Indeed, what enabled her to set up an opposition between Classical Antiquity, which she saw as predominantly male, and Gallic Antiquity, which she presented as being female, was precisely the fact that Gallic Antiquity was so largely unknown and unappreciated. This becomes apparent in her texts in praise of women authors, in which she tried to situate these women in a larger, historically female tradition but could not come up with very much for the medieval period. Although L’Héritier did name Marie de France, the Countess of Die, and Christine de Pizan, these remained merely names or “memories” that she was unable to link to concrete literary works – or at any rate, literary works that she could value as such by the aesthetic criteria of her day. Thus, tellingly, the only work that she named by these authors was Marie de France’s Ysopets (rather than her more well-known Breton Lais), animal fables that, as adaptations of Aesop’s fables, possessed the proper classical pedigree (and that, incidentally, may have influenced the major work of another recognized French classicist author, Jean de La Fontaine). This lack of real knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of medieval literature justified L’Héritier in going one step further and attempting to move beyond the invocation of a forgotten medieval tradition as a mere literary topos. In order to make her argument in favor of a female transmission of medieval tradition more credible, she actually went about recreating and rewriting this lost medieval literature. In her fairy tale L’Adroite Princesse, L’Héritier provides an example of what this method of historical recreation

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could entail. In the preface to this tale, she explains that she took as her point of departure two popular proverbs and then proceeded to write a fairy tale that would illustrate them. L’Héritier, however, also implies that, in writing this tale, she may in fact have been continuing an older tradition that had come down to her only in the fragmented form of the proverbs: My little story provides enough [morality], and may thereby be pleasing to you. It hinges on two proverbs, rather than one. It is the fashion: since you like them, I follow it with pleasure. You will see in it how our elders were able to insinuate that one falls into endless dissolution, when one is content to do nothing, or to speak like them, that idleness is the mother of all vices; and you will doubtless appreciate their way of persuading their audience that one must always be on one’s guard: you understand that I mean caution is the mother of security. Mon Historiette en fournit assez [de moralité], & par là elle pourra vous être agréable. Elle roule sur deux Proverbes, au lieu d’un: c’est la mode: vous les aimez, je m’accomode à l’usage avec plaisir. Vous y verrez comment nos Ayeux savoient insinuer qu’on tombe dans mille desordres, quand on se plait à ne rien faire, ou pour parler comme eux, qu’Oisivité est mere de tous vices; & vous aimerez, sans doute, leur maniere de persuader qu’il faut être toûjours sur ses gardes: vous voyez-bien que je veux dire que Défiance est mere de seureté. (OM 230–31) The slippage of personal pronouns is revealing. While L’Héritier starts out by referring to her short story (mon historiette), after her mention of “our elders” (nos ayeux) she refers to their way of persuading their audience of the proverb’s meaning. L’Héritier implies that, beneath the surface impression of literary invention, her tales are in fact doing nothing more than perpetuating older traditions. At the same time, she further classicizes these hypothetical medieval literary traditions by insisting on their moral value, in accordance with the Horatian injunction – which classicist authors had adopted as their own – placere et docere. Interestingly though, even while legitimizing medieval tradition by associating it with a classicist aesthetic, L’Héritier subtly attacks specific classicist authors whose works she judged less edifying than the folktales she purported to transmit: Yes, these tales are very striking, More than the deeds of the monkey and the wolf; I took an extreme pleasure in them, All children do:

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[. . .] Therefore deign to bring to light The artless tales, yet full of skill, That were invented by the troubadours. The mysterious meaning which their turn of phrase envelops Well equals that of Aesop. Oüi, ces Contes frapent beaucoup, Plus que ne font les faits & du Singe et du Loup; J’y prenois un plaisir extrême, Tous les enfants font de même: [. . .] Daignez-donc mettre dans leurs jours Les Contes ingenus, quoique remplis d’adresse, Qu’ont inventé les Troubadours. Le sens mysterieux que leur tour envelope Égale bien celuy d’Esope. (OM 297–98) The jibe at the fables of La Fontaine seems likely here, since it would fit into a pattern of fairy-tale authors’ explicit references to the fabulist, most notably in d’Aulnoy’s 1697 Contes des fées. The two animals L’Héritier mentions, the monkey and the wolf, had only appeared together before this date in a fable by La Fontaine, his Le Loup plaidant contre le renard par-devant le singe, published in his 1668 Fables. Fairy tales, according to L’Héritier, are more suitable reading matter for children than are animal fables, not only because of their present-day transmission by mothers and grandmothers but also because of their clearer moral purpose. This is why their original inventors, the “naive” troubadours, are presented as a worthy alternative to the more sophisticated authors of classical antiquity and their seventeenth-century classicist imitators. Once again, medieval naiveté is valued on moral grounds while rejected on aesthetic ones. In the Lettre à Madame D.G** which concludes the first part of her Œuvres mêlées, L’Héritier further refines her theory of the origins of fairy tales: Our ancestors, who were ingenious in their simplicity, remarking that the wisest maxims impress themselves poorly on our spirit, when they are presented completely naked, clothed them, so to speak, and made them appear in ornament. They exposed them in little stories which they invented, or in the telling of events which they embellished. And since these stories had no other goal than the instruction of young people, and only the marvelous strikes the

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Fairy tales, according to L’Héritier, are thus short tales that go back to the Middle Ages and the time of the troubadours and were originally designed to explain proverbs. Speaking from the stance of a late seventeenth-century woman of letters, L’Héritier was, however, faced with a problem because, in many cases, only the proverb had survived and been faithfully transmitted. It was up to the modern author, she seems to imply, to recreate or reinvent the original story. Such an enterprise, rather than being a form of literary imposture, could more accurately be described as the practice of what during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was described as “conjectural history”: a perfectly legitimate tool, according to later Enlightenment thinkers, for the serious historian faced with an absence of documentary evidence, and one applied particularly often to medieval history. A particularly complex example of this practice of “conjectural history” is to be found in L’Héritier’s second collection of tales, La Tour ténébreuse. The framing strategies she uses in this volume are revealing, beginning with the collection’s composite title: The Dark Tower and the Luminous Days, or English Tales, Accompanied by Short Histories, and Taken from an Ancient Chronicle Composed by Richard, Known as the Lionheart, King of England. Containing the Story of Diverse Adventures of this King. LA TOUR TENEBREUSE ET LES JOURS LUMINEUX, OU CONTES ANGLOIS, Accompagnez d’Historiettes, & tirez d’une ancienne Chronique composée par RICHARD, surnommé COEUR DE LION, Roy d’Angleterre. Avec le Récit de diverses Avantures de ce Roy. This is in fact a hybrid text that, by mixing the genres of history, the novel,

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poetry, and fairy tale, renders problematic the narrator’s position. After an introduction that briefly summarizes the political career of Richard I, La Tour ténébreuse starts off as a historical novel recounting the episode of Richard’s captivity in Linz (Dürnstein Castle) during his return from the Third Crusade. According to the legend retold by L’Héritier, Richard is discovered by one Blondel de Nesle, a troubadour in his service who becomes instrumental in securing his release. Barely fifteen pages into the narrative, however, the plot veers off in another direction, as Richard, to pass the time while in captivity, amuses himself by telling stories, which L’Héritier then writes down. These stories, it turns out, are fairy tales, and make up the largest part of the book: 450 out of a total of 493 pages. What is perhaps most interesting about these fairy tales is the question of their authorship. A contemporary reader picking up La Tour ténébreuse in 1705 would have expected these tales to be of L’Héritier’s own composition, since she was at this date well-known as an author and theorist of the genre. However, L’Héritier develops a theory suggesting that, although she may indeed have been the author of the printed version of these tales, she was in fact only transmitting a tradition that went back to Richard himself. Her approach is two-pronged. First of all, using a well-worn topos of medievalist fiction, she posits the existence of a rediscovered medieval manuscript containing these forgotten literary works of Richard I: Chroniques & Fabliaux de la composition de Richard Roy d’Angleterre, recueillis tout de nouvel, & conjoints ensemble par le labour de Jehan de Sorels, l’An 1308. The description that follows is very believable as a description of a medieval codex: This manuscript dating from the eighth year of the fourteenth century contains, first of all, a history of the life and principal actions of King Richard, written by himself [. . .]. After King Richard’s history, there are in this manuscript several tales and several short gallant novels, all likewise designated as fabliaux. These works are preceded by a notice by Jehan de Sorels, where he describes to his readers his efforts and exactitude in collecting all these texts dispersed in the works of different authors and in different books. Ce Manuscrit daté de la huitieme année du quatorzieme Siecle, contient premierement un recit de la Vie & des principales actions du Roy Richard, écrit par lui-même [. . .]. Après l’Histoire du Roy Richard, il y a dans ce Manuscrit plusieurs Contes & plusieurs petites nouvelles galantes, renfermez tous également sous le titre de Fabliaux. Tous ces ouvrages sont precedez d’un Avertissement de Jehan de Sorels, ou il rend compte à ses lecteurs des peines & de l’exactitude avec lesquelles il a recueilli

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Studies in Medievalism toutes ces pieces dispersées dans divers Auteurs et dans divers livres. (TT, unpaginated preface)

L’Héritier’s purpose in describing this manuscript is both fictional and extra-fictional. In the context of her narrative, the manuscript gives historical credibility to the tales supposedly composed by Richard while in captivity. On an extra-fictional level, however, the manuscript also creates an aristocratic literary genealogy within which L’Héritier, the real author, can inscribe herself. Taking her cue perhaps from Nostredame, who had already portrayed Richard as a poet and patron of the troubadours who “passed his time rhyming and delighted in reading their good romances” (passoit le temps à rithmer et se delectoit à lire leurs beaux romans),24 L’Héritier, too, presents Richard as the author of romans, i.e., in the seventeenth-century definition of the word, prose narratives. As an author of prose narratives herself, L’Héritier was of course flattered by this portrayal of Richard and could therefore present herself not as the author of frivolous novels but as the worthy literary successor of a well-known monarch of old, Richard the Lionheart. The second, and more spectacular, of L’Héritier’s strategies in establishing that Richard I really was the author of the tales consists in accurately reproducing, and integrating into her own narrative, a series of texts that are authentically medieval. In the preface to La Tour ténébreuse, she reproduces in their original languages (Occitan and Old French) versions of three songs composed, according to her, by Richard himself and by Blondel de Nesle, the poet with whom Richard was linked in the legend of his Austrian captivity. And, indeed, close examination of these texts reveals that L’Héritier’s statement is surprisingly accurate, surprising in that French medievalist studies were virtually non-existent in 1705. The second song she cites, in Old French, is indeed the sixth strophe of a song by Blondel de Nesle, “chanson IV” in Yvan Lepage’s recent edition, which begins (in L’Héritier’s version) Se loyautez valoit mielx que trahir.25 The spelling of her version reveals that she took it from Claude Fauchet’s Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie française, which she had cited as one of her sources in her Œuvres mêlées.26 The third song, in turn, is an accurate rendering of a song still ascribed to Richard I, the Occitan lyric Ja nuls hom pres non dira sa razon, which he was reputed to have composed during his Dürnstein captivity, and which had been reproduced in previous publications, including (partially) in Nostredame’s Vies. Only in the case of the first song was L’Héritier not correct: the lyric she cites is not by Blondel, as she claims, but by another thirteenth-century troubadour, Blacatz. According to Alfred Jeanroy, her version shows that she must have read this lyric in ms. I of the Bibliothèque du roi, the ancestor of the modern Bibliothèque nationale de

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France.27 L’Héritier perhaps had access to the library, which was generally open only to serious scholars, through her contacts with Jean-Paul Bignon, the later Bibliothécaire du Roi and himself an occasional author of fairy tales. In all three cases, these were therefore authentic medieval texts, one of which was known only through manuscript transmission, and which L’Héritier was thus the first to publish, preceding by more than a century the first scholarly editions of these songs. While L’Héritier’s publication of authentic medieval texts is in itself noteworthy, it is just as interesting to note that she attempts to integrate them into her own text. After presenting the original texts in her preface, she then proceeds to work modern translations of the songs into the plot of her novel and tales, where they are made to play a functional role. In other words, just as she had previously invented tales to explain authentic proverbs that she claimed went back to the Middle Ages, she now invents a narrative to explain authentic medieval songs. This literary reconstruction, however, acquired an entirely new dimension, for the Tour ténébreuse, unlike other fairy-tale collections, was also a multimedia production. Concurrently with her writing of the book, L’Héritier commissioned a salon acquaintance of hers, the amateur poet and musician Chéron de Rochesources, to compose new music for her modern translations of these songs. This music was published, also in 1705, in the well-known periodical Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire, which in monthly issues brought out the words and melodies of the most popular songs of the day (later reprints of the Tour ténébreuse, in their turn, added the music to the text). The short text presenting the music draws attention to the care L’Héritier took in modernizing the lyrics so as to respect the spirit of the medieval source. It appears that her conception of her own role as a participant in a medieval tradition, who as such was free to build on it by adapting and further fictionalizing it, was nevertheless subject to the constraints imposed by the existence of an ultimately “real” Middle Ages: The five following airs, by Monsieur Chéron, have been taken from the Contes Anglais which Mademoiselle L’Héritier will shortly publish. These tales were composed, some five centuries ago, by the King of England Richard I, named the Lionheart, during his captivity. The old words of these airs were in the Roman language, which people spoke then in the greatest part of Europe. Mademoiselle L’Héritier, in translating these songs into French, has preserved with exactitude all the terms and their thoughts, not wanting in any way to alter such a respectable original in order to give a more lyrical or easy turn to the music.

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Studies in Medievalism Les cinq Airs suivans de Monsieur Cheron, sont tirez des Contes Anglois que Mademoiselle L’Héritier doit mettre au jour. Ces contes ont esté Composez, il y a environ cinq Siecles, par le Roy d’Angleterre Richard Premier, surnommé COEUR DE LION, pendant sa Prison. Les anciennes Paroles de ces Airs estoient en Langue Romande, qu’on parloit à lors dans la plus grande partie de l’Europe. Mademoiselle L’Heritier en traduisant ces Chansons en François, en a conservé exactement tous les termes & les pensées, ne voulant point altérer un Original si respectable, pour donner un tour plus Lyrique & plus aisé pour la Musique.28

L’Héritier here juxtaposes an emphasis on “original” texts (un Original si respectable), and the need to translate and popularize for a modern audience, through the highly accessible medium of music, these lyrics, which had been forgotten and had become unreadable to all but a few antiquarians. In other words, through her collaboration with Chéron, L’Héritier created a unique situation whereby medieval lyric was not only exhumed from the manuscripts where it had lain forgotten, and recontextualized in modern fairy tales, but also brought back to life as modern, orally transmitted song. In keeping with an early modern focus on the memory of the medieval, which did not depend on the notion of a perceived break with the past, L’Héritier thus privileged dynamic oral transmission, rather than scholarly, textual fixity. That L’Héritier’s attempt to recreate medieval lyric met with more than passing success is suggested not only by the publication of the music in the popular Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire, but also by another intriguing detail. When, only a few years later, literary historiographers started writing the first overviews of French literature, their treatment of the medieval period was clearly influenced by L’Héritier’s fairy tales. The first medieval “author” mentioned by name in Mervesin’s Histoire de la poésie française, for example, is Richard I. Mervesin explicitly refers to Richard’s “tales” (contes) and to L’Héritier’s novel in a manner that appears to imply that her text could be used as a source for scholars who, like himself, were engaged in writing French literary history: Emperor Frederick attracted several [troubadours] to his court. Richard the Lionheart, king of England, honored them with his friendship, as one can see in the tales of this king, which Mademoiselle L’Héritier has recently published, but since they wrote only in Provençal or Roman, it would not be fitting to consider them further.

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L’Empereur Frederic en attira plusieurs [troubadours] à sa Cour. Richard Cœur-de-Lyon, roi d’Angleterre, les honora de son amitié; ce qu’on peut voir dans les Contes de ce roi, que Mademoiselle Lheritier vient de mettre au jour, & comme ils n’ont écrit qu’en Provençal ou en roman, il ne seroit pas à propos d’en parler davantage.29 The abbé Massieu, in turn, commented at length on the legendary episodes that had been the subject of her Tour ténébreuse, citing as his source – not surprisingly, since these early literary histories freely borrowed topoi from the medievalist novel – “an ancient chronicle” (une vieille chronique).30 In both cases, scholarly works, therefore, made use of fictional as well as “authentic” sources in reconstructing the medieval past, and apparently felt no special need to justify this practice now unanimously rejected by serious scholarship. Thus, in the case of L’Héritier’s medievalist tales, it appears that her “fictional” recreation of medieval literature inspired and conditioned later, more serious, attempts to retrieve this forgotten heritage. This early link between fiction and scholarship, I believe, may hold clues as to the subsequent development and professionalization of the field of medieval studies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marked by a discourse increasingly – and increasingly conspicuously – seeking to distance itself from artistic or “non-scholarly” productions (including, perhaps, especially those of what came to be known as “silly lady novelists”), the development of the scholarly field of medieval studies indeed suggests that, by its very emphasis on medieval textual “sources,” it was perhaps seeking to obscure its own “sources” in the popular fiction and culture of the early modern period. It seems fair to conclude that Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier’s conception of the conte, by its assimilation of the medieval and the modern, betrays a fluid relationship to the medieval past, a relationship that was perhaps characteristic of the pre-Romantic period as a whole. Rather than adopting the objective stance of the modern editor, L’Héritier chose to inscribe herself in a storytelling tradition that itself, so she claimed, went back to the Middle Ages. Like later eighteenth-century medievalists, whom she clearly inspired, she saw herself as continuing the work of medieval poets, who had of course themselves been engaged in the perpetual rewriting and recreation of texts. Her tales do not merely “use” medieval elements for decorative or polemical purposes; they actually engage in a direct dialogue with the past and attempt to perpetuate its heritage by resetting it in a modern context. Through L’Héritier’s writings, the memory of the past could very concretely intrude into the present and give birth to – engender, so to speak – modern literature, including that quintessentially modern genre, the literary fairy tale. Or,

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to conclude with an intriguing quotation from one of her literary colleagues, Chapelain, the memory of the medieval could be said to represent, in L’Héritier’s medievalist works, “the dark recesses of our modern Antiquity” (les ténèbres de notre Antiquité moderne).31

NOTES 1. All translations of French fairy-tale titles are my own, except in the case of the well-known tales of Charles Perrault. 2. Raymonde Robert, Le Conte de fées littéraire en France de la fin du XVIIe à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1981), graph nr. 4. 3. Robert, Le Conte de fées, 99. 4. Jean-Paul Sermain, Le Conte de fées du classicisme aux Lumières (Paris: Desjonquères, 2005), 70. 5. “Le conte n’entend pas réinventer le Moyen-Age, comme le fera Walter Scott, il se sert de l’image qu’il avait donnée de lui dans ses romans, plus exactement du souvenir fuyant qu’on en garde à la fin du XVIIe siècle” (Sermain, Le Conte de fées, 70). 6. “Pour un ami du Moyen Age, ce que peut en dire ou en montrer le conte de fées est inexistant” (Jean-Paul Sermain, “Le Conte de fées classique et le Moyen Age [1690–1712],” in Peter Damian-Grint, ed., Medievalism and Manière Gothique in Enlightenment France [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2006], 68–85 [84]). 7. On the relationship between fairy tales and their medieval sources, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). On seventeenthcentury French knowledge of medieval literature, see Nathan Edelman, Attitudes of Seventeenth-Century France toward the Middle Ages (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1946). 8. Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier, Œuvres mêlées (Paris: Jean Guignard, 1696), and La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux, ou contes anglais (Paris: veuve de Claude Barbin, 1705). Throughout this essay, I refer to page numbers in these two volumes in brackets, following the abbreviation OM for the first of these volumes, and TT for the second. 9. I would like to thank Ruth Bottigheimer for drawing my attention to the important differences between these genres. On the distinction between “fairy tales” and other brief narratives, see her article “Fairy-Tale Origins, Fairy-Tale Dissemination, and Folk Narrative Theory,” Fabula 47.3/4 (2006): 212–21. 10. For purely practical reasons, I have included in my corpus only the tales published in these two volumes. Unfortunately, there still does not exist a complete bibliography of L’Héritier’s published works, many of which appeared not in book form but as short pieces in the literary periodicals of her day. The tales I consider here are Marmoisan, ou l’innocente tromperie; Artaut, ou l’avare puni; Les Enchantements de l’éloquence; L’Adroite Princesse; Ricdin-Ricdon; and La Robe de sincérité.

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11. For a discussion of the function of the recueil or tale collection in L’Héritier’s writing, see Raymonde Robert, “L’Insertion des contes merveilleux dans les récits-cadres: pratique statique, pratique dynamique. La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux de Mlle L’Héritier, Les aventures d’Abdalla de l’abbé Bignon,” Féeries 1 (2003): 73–91. 12. The only exception is La Robe de sincérité, with a classical setting. 13. Notably in his Satire X and in his Dialogue sur les héros de roman. 14. Jean Chapelain, La Lecture des vieux romans, in Fabienne Gégou, ed., Lettre-Traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des romans (Paris: Nizet, 1971), 177. 15. Chapelain, La Lecture des vieux romans, 180. 16. Marc Fumaroli, “Les Fées de Charles Perrault ou de la littérature,” in Le Statut de la littérature. Mélanges offerts à Paul Bénichou (Geneva: Droz, 1982), 153–86. 17. Christine Jones, “The Poetics of Enchantment (1690–1715),” Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 17.1 (2003): 55–74 (56). 18. On this feminist aspect of her fairy tales, see Jean Mainil, “Mes Amies les fées. Apologie de la femme savante et de la lectrice dans Les Bigarrures ingénieuses de Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier (1696),” Féeries 1 (2003): 49–71. 19. This academy, originally known as the Consistoire du Gai Savoir, was supposedly founded in 1323 by seven troubadours who regularly held meetings, established poetic rules, and awarded literary prizes. In 1694, the almost forgotten academy was revived and granted patent letters by Louis XIV, thereby underlining the new interest within official circles for elements of France’s medieval past. 20. Laura Kendrick, “The Science of Imposture and the Professionalization of Medieval Occitan Literary Studies,” in R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, ed., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 95–126 (101). 21. Kendrick, “The Science of Imposture,” 100. 22. On L’Héritier and troubadour theory, see Roger Francillon, “Une Théorie du folklore à la fin du XVIIème siècle: Mlle L’Héritier,” in Ursula Brunold-Bigler and Hermann Bausinger, ed., Hören-Sagen-Lesen-Lernen: Bausteine zu einer Geschichte der kommunikativen Kultur (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995), 205–17; and Friedrich Wofzettel, “Ces Vieux Fatras: Moyen Age et folklore au 17e siècle,” in Danielle Buschinger, ed., Réception du Moyen Age dans la culture moderne (Amiens: Presses du Centre d’Etudes Médiévales, Université de Picardie, 2002), 211–18. 23. Abbé Mervesin, Histoire de la poésie française (Paris: Giffart, 1706), 62–63. 24. Jean de Nostredame, Les Vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux (Lyons: Alexandre Marsilii, 1575; repr. Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1971), 139. 25. Yvan G. Lepage, ed., L’Œuvre lyrique de Blondel de Nesle – textes (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1994), 91–109. 26. Claude Fauchet, Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie française, rime et romans (Paris: Mamert Patisson, 1581), 130–31. 27. Alfred Jeanroy, review of Wiese’s Lieder des Blondel de Nesle, Romania 34 (1905): 329–31 (329, note 1). Ms. I has now become f.fr. 854 in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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28. Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire (1705), 130–31. 29. Mervesin, Histoire de la poésie française, 69. 30. Abbé Massieu, Histoire de la poésie française, avec une défense de la poésie (Paris: Prault fils, 1739), 134. 31. Chapelain, La Lecture des vieux romans, 177.

A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Victorian Medieval Revival, and Victorian Ritual Culture1 Albert D. Pionke In its own time the Eglinton Tournament was, and today it remains, one of the most famous failures of the Victorian period.2 The range of epithets applied to the event testifies to the unanimity of critical opinion on this point: christened an “absurdity” by one critic;3 a specimen of “medieval mania” by another;4 and “the most bizarre manifestation of medievalism in the early years of the Victorian period” by a third;5 the tournament has also been labeled “a splendid failure,”6 “a fiasco,”7 “the greatest folly of the century,”8 and – my personal favorite – “the most magnificent abortion that has been witnessed for two centuries.”9 Despite, or perhaps because of, this widespread agreement, explanations of the Eglinton Tournament’s failure rarely get beyond memories of the weather on the opening day. However, such exclusively meteorological recollections risk ignoring the productive significance of the failure to which the rain undoubtedly contributed, and the ways in which that failure can serve as a productive point of entry into Victorian England’s elite public ritual culture. Three critics – none principally interested in the Eglinton Tournament – approach the event with sufficient theoretical sophistication to begin to account for its enduring reputation among critics as a failure. In his survey of the historical context for the 1844 Robert Burns Festival, Alex Tyrrell casts the Eglinton Tournament as “a symbolic statement” of Scottish aristocratic paternalism “protesting against [. . .] the ideology of modernization and social divisiveness that Whig reformers had pursued in the 1830s.”10 Tyrrell’s argument suggests that the tournament failed, at least in part, because it could not persuade its contemporaries to adopt a specific political program and class position. The Earl of Eglinton’s decision to attempt persuasion-by-tournament is explained by Helene Roberts, who uses Thomas Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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Carlyle’s theory of clothes in Sartor Resartus (1833–34) to understand the Victorian medieval revival. The brief section of her article devoted to the Eglinton Tournament makes perspicuous the degree to which the event relied on contemporary theories of signification.11 Reconnecting the tournament, and the medieval revival of which it was a conspicuous part, to Victorian attempts to justify imperial expansion through the construction of epic history, Colin Graham offers a Bakhtinian reading of the event. According to Graham, the Eglinton Tournament “represented an ideological vision of the past which not only resisted and abhorred current change but insisted upon a model of the present and future founded on that past,”12 but this chronological collapse of epic past and present concerns led to a “breach” of “epic distance” whereby the tournament’s monologism was “made self-conscious, forced to speak to an unpredictable future world. An alternative of this always possible ‘breach’ is Bakhtinian ‘carnival,’ the undermining of the authority of monologism by parody of itself.”13 Graham’s highly theorized reading is helpful for two reasons: first, it shows how the theatrical medievalism described by Roberts could be used to produce the political message identified by Tyrrell; and second, it offers a paradigm – Bakhtinian carnival – for understanding the event’s rich representational legacy.14 My own reading of the Eglinton Tournament builds on the insights of Tyrrell, Roberts, and Graham even as it relocates the tournament in the context of Victorian elite public ritual practice. I argue that, as a ritual, the Eglinton Tournament was both a practical and an ideological failure, and that its failure can help to illuminate the limits of the larger public’s acceptance of elite public ritual in the Victorian period. After providing a brief definition of ritual, as well as background material on the tournament, I show the degree to which it was originally conceived and critically received with strict attention to ritual precedent. I then trace the reasons for the event’s failure, including the practical effects of the rain, the competing meanings of the medieval past in the 1830s, and the class dynamics of Victorian ritual culture. Finally, I examine the afterlife of the Eglinton Tournament in Victorian popular entertainment and literature, and beyond, and consider what is at stake in these later representations of the event. The Eglinton Tournament as Ritual Reexamining the Eglinton Tournament in the context of “Victorian elite public ritual culture” presupposes a definition of “ritual” generally, and “elite public ritual” particularly, that is expansive enough to include the diversity of practices required to merit the label “ritual culture” without becoming so broad that it includes every Victorian cultural activity. For the purposes of

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this essay, I would like to define as a ritual any highly formalized, selfconscious, and potentially repeatable collective activity that strives for a level of meaningfulness not found in quotidian life. More specifically, an elite public ritual requires an audience, made up of “the public,” whose presence and assent are invited to confirm the elite status of the participants and whatever ideological position they and the ritual activity represent. Elite public rituals typically include appeals to precedent, unusual costumes and accessories, and archaic forms of address, although different rituals may deploy these elements in various ways, depending upon the ideological message that the ritual is intended to convey. This definition excludes a range of everyday rituals – for instance, shaking hands, wearing widow’s weeds, exchanging nosegays – as insufficiently invested in either public assent or elite public status; at the same time, it allows for the broad range of practices – including, but not limited to, judicial oath-taking, military processions, the opening of Parliament – through which members of the elite public performed their possession of truth, patriotism, and ability to lead the nation. To what degree and for what reasons the Eglinton Tournament failed to attribute these qualities to the Earl and his fellow Scottish Tories will become apparent in the pages that follow. The Eglinton Tournament was hosted by Archibald William Montgomerie, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, Scotland, about twenty miles southwest of Glasgow. Held from Wednesday, August 28, 1839, to Friday, August 30, 1839, it featured thirteen knightly participants in full armor and hundreds of spectatorparticipants in period costume. The armor, most of the costumes, the knights’ pavilions, the grandstands, and other tournament trappings were supplied by London armor dealer Samuel Pratt. Tens of thousands of spectators attended, some from as far away as Calcutta, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, and the United States.15 Transporting and housing these crowds required the employment of two special trains (one, in homage to Sir Walter Scott, named the Marmion), about a dozen steamships, and every cart, carriage, and room, public or private, in a twenty-mile radius. The tournament cost the Earl approximately £40,000,16 in addition to the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of pounds spent by its aristocratic participants and invited guests.17 The extent of the preparations, and the amount of money being spent, attracted the attention of a significant portion of western Scotland; in the words of the Glasgow Chronicle, “From the announcements of the Glasgow shopkeepers strangers would think that our citizens had fairly turned tournament mad.”18 According to Ian Anstruther and other historians of the event, it was dissatisfaction with the abandonment of royal ritual at Victoria’s so-called “penny coronation” that inspired the Eglinton Tournament in the first

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place.19 If Victoria’s greatly redacted and botched coronation was the initial trigger, however, there was also a complex of class- and party-specific motives that found their logical and imaginative outlet in the tournament. Hostility to the growing influence of Utilitarianism, alarm at the radicalism of the Reform movement, pressures on the landed class resulting from an increasingly cash-based economy founded on competitive commercialism and urbanization; all of these fostered a sense of belligerent nostalgia.20 That the controlled violence of a medieval tournament would become the ideal outlet for this nostalgia is due in large part to the enormous popularity of Sir Walter Scott, who, in novels like Ivanhoe (1819), offered his readers an attractively detailed vision of an ordered medieval society led by a chivalrous aristocracy.21 The Earl’s meticulous efforts at authentic medievalism were widely reported in the periodical press, and encompassed everything from modifications of the castle grounds to individual costumes and martial conduct. In the months prior to the tournament, the Earl substantially reconfigured the land surrounding his family’s castle in order to better accommodate the crowds expected to witness the tournament; at the same time, he instructed Pratt to construct a full-sized jousting arena, complete with covered grandstands for invited guests, elaborate pavilions for each knight and his retinue, and a full array of jousting paraphernalia. These alterations were handdrawn and recorded in the highly supportive leading article of the November 1839 issue of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, entitled simply “The Eglinton Tournament.” The Earl also publicly appealed to future spectators of all classes to arrive at the event in fancy dress, preferably medieval-period costume, although Highland garb was also allowed. Many aristocratic guests enthusiastically complied.22 For the knightly participants, a periodappropriate suit of armor was also required; those without ancestral armor of suitable size relied on Pratt to acquire or manufacture some. The efforts and expense of John Balfour of Balbirnie, Lord Glenlyon, the tournament’s Knight of Gael, have been particularly well-preserved. Margaret Swain offers full descriptions and photographs of two of the costumes he actually wore, as well as of a suit of armor worn by one of his fellow participants,23 a combined effort at authentic sartorial splendor that, in the case of Lord Glenlyon, cost him at least £346 9s 6d.24 Roberts explains that wealthy Victorians would devote such effort and expense to the authentic reproduction of the medieval past because they actually believed that “by assuming the superficial appearances, the deeper spirit of the age could also be captured. The more accurately the details could be reproduced, the more convincing would be the complete transformation.”25 Hence, the £346 9s 6d that Lord Glenlyon spent at Pratt’s did not purchase merely a suit of armor, but a return to medieval aristocratic supremacy.

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In a conscious echo of one of the rituals that would have accompanied an English monarch’s traditional coronation, the tournament was scheduled to begin with an elaborate procession of the hundreds of costumed participants, all carefully arranged by rank.26 The combat was just as tightly regulated, with rules based on those originally composed for Edward IV in 1465. At the heart of these rules were the criteria to be applied by the judges for scoring each bout: The rules of chivalry define the actual encounter thus: Actions worthy of honor 1. To break the most lances. 2. To break the lance in more places than one. 3. Not to put in rest until near your opponent. 4. To meet point to point of the lances. 5. To strike on the emblazonment of shield. 6. To perform all the determined courses. Actions most worthy of honor To brake [sic] the lance in many pieces. Actions of dishonor 1. To break the lance across the opponent. 2. To strike or hurt the horse. 3. To strike the saddle. 4. To drop the lancer’s sword. 5. To lose the management of the horse at the encounter. 6. To be unhorsed – the greatest dishonor. 7. All lances broken by striking below the girdle to be disallowed. These rules of combat were widely reproduced,27 and, in one case, were accompanied by the following approbation: “Others feel no surprise that one descended from the best blood of Normandy, and since intermarried with the royalty of Scotland, should have bethought himself to revive the many amusements of his ancestors, one of whom, by an unlucky mischance, killed a king of France in one of the knightly encounters of the olden time.”28 In addition to lending an aura of authenticity to the event, by recalling Norman England – of which more later – this passage signals that at least one observer from that time was very much aware of the Earl’s efforts to use a selective portion of the medieval past to support his own present Tory politics. Collectively, this drive for historical authenticity – the careful reproduction of historical setting, archaic dress, traditional forms of social organization, and antiquated rules of combat – used to reinforce a social and political ideology, in this case Scottish Tory paternalism, not only made the

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Eglinton Tournament “the first accurately medieval spectacle of the new Victorian epoch,”29 but one of the most notable rituals of the period as well. It was on the grounds of ritual authenticity that the tournament was criticized even before it began. On the subject of costume, several commentators noted that the inclusion of Highland attire was historically inaccurate. N. P. Willis, an aristocratic guest and a friend of at least one knightly participant, may have found such anachronism “the zest of the tournament,” but one writer for the Glasgow Chronicle was more typical in considering it “to indicate great want of taste.”30 In another criticism, this one relevant to the method of social organization by rank implied by the procession, one letter writer to the Times suggested that if rules of antiquity – that “no one was allowed to grace the lists unless he turned out to be a gentleman of blood” – were strictly enforced, “half our exclusive Almack-going people will be sent to the right-about; so will the greater part of the German people of title attached to the Court.”31 A different letter writer, signing himself “No Tilter”, cited the legal precedent of Blackstone’s Commentaries “to remind the noble lords and gentlemen who seek to revive this antiquated and barbarous usage, that supposing death to ensue from their sport,” the tilters could be prosecuted for manslaughter, a felony punishable by transportation, or hard labor in prison; and the spectator-participants, like the Queen of Beauty, for aiding and abetting, a misdemeanor that could result in a fine or imprisonment.32 Liable for prosecution or not, the knights were also open to criticism for failing to live up to the example of prowess set by their medieval predecessors. Prior to the event itself, all those planning to participate in tournament combat held practice sessions at the Eyre Arms Tavern. The Times correspondent invited to the final session on July 13, 1839 was not impressed, writing, “these doughty ‘men at arms’ [. . .] will be miserably defective in their imitation of the knights of the ‘olden times’,” and pejoratively describing the participants as “almost as fierce as the men in armour who ride in the ‘Lord Mayor’s show’.”33 Jousting was clearly the most difficult and dangerous form of ritual combat in which the participants would engage. To learn how to do it without hurting one another, they charged an armored mannequin, denoted “Dummy” who was mounted on a wooden horse and propelled down a railroad track. Commenting specifically on this practice, the writer for the Times declared, “ ‘Dummy,’ however, proved in the long run the best man of the lot, and sat with imperturbable patience whilst all the chivalry of the Eyre-arms attacked him in turn. He remained unscathed, and looked as much like a stalwart warrior as any of his antagonists.”34 The design and the probable results of the Eglinton Tournament were thus open to question on historical grounds; because the tournament was premised on its authentic appeal to tradition, these early critiques

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already hint at the difficulties of converting the spectators to the Earl’s social and political way of thinking by means of a medieval tournament ritual. The Eglinton Tournament as Failure These early critiques also help to explain why the opening-day rain secured the tournament’s practical and, to a lesser extent, ideological failure: it disrupted the event’s ritual forms and therefore also the message that those forms were meant to express.35 Rather than projecting an air of aristocratic authority, for example, the Marquis of Londonderry, according to one source, “was completely drenched: he had a most grotesque appearance.”36 The procession of which the Marquis was a part was similarly “deplorable,”37 and its ritual was truncated when the Queen of Beauty was packed off to the lists in a closed carriage.38 From the vantage point of these carriages, “The entire park [. . .] was one vast extent of umbrellas, and it looked [. . .] like an army of [. . .] gigantic mushrooms, shouldering each other in a march.”39 Once everyone had arrived at their places even more of the ritual was omitted: “the Knights were denied the romantic ceremony of riding up to the grandstand to choose their paramours and of being given scarves or handkerchiefs to tie to their lances or helmets; the Eglinton Herald was denied the privilege of standing alone in the hushed arena while reading out the rule,” and there was no ritual of challenge, “the first opponents suddenly appear[ing] without the smallest ceremony.”40 Even the jousting was unspectacular and abbreviated,41 although, due to the ubiquitous umbrellas, few in the crowd were able to see it: Between the portly gentleman and his umbrella, I could see but little of the sport – sport to some, but sore annoyance to many, and almost martyrdom to me. [. . .] but if I could not see, I could hear, and I hope never again to hear such a confusion of disagreeable sounds – the neighing of horses, the braying of wheezy trumpets, the patter of the rain in the puddle, the mournful howling of a cold wind among the trees, and the cursing, swearing, and groaning of my neighbors. Feeling was another of my senses which was remarkably acute; for I was nudged by one, pushed by another, had my feet trodden on by a third, and a stream of water poured on me from my fat friend’s umbrella.42 Finally, the rain also spoiled the banquet scheduled to conclude the first day, forcing the hundreds of well-to-do guests to join the thousands of regular spectators in what one described as a nine-mile, knee-deep-in-mud “ ‘purgation by’ tournament.”43 A ritual enshrining aristocratic paternalism had become a rainout exposing aristocratic impotence.

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Concentrating too exclusively on the rain, however, risks obscuring both the other factors contributing to the failure of the tournament and the significance of that failure for broader interpretations of the period. Even before Wednesday could be rained out, the event was derided, not just as an inauthentic ritual, but as “a piece of aristocratic folly” and, in its ostentation, an insult to the poor.44 Moreover, even after Wednesday’s rain, the tournament continued for two more days. Although many accounts, both contemporary and historical, conveniently forget the relative success of Thursday and Friday, one article in the London Times of September 3, “The Tournament,” offers a brief account of the activities on Thursday and Friday, including indoor sword- and staff-fighting on Thursday; the reprise of the tournament proper on Friday, described as “a gorgeous and most splendid pageant”;45 and the dancing, “feasting and carousing” each night. By itself, the rain is insufficient to account for either the strenuous criticism directed at the tournament before, or the collective amnesia surrounding the event after, the opening day. That the Eglinton Tournament failed on an ideological level is due in part to the Earl’s method of expressing his Tory paternalism. Despite the popularity of Scott’s vision of an organically structured and unified Middle Ages, by 1839 the medieval past was not the transparent signifier that the Earl appears to have believed it to be.46 Tory aristocrats tended to recall the feudal system established by the Normans after the Conquest, and filtered through both Scott and Arthur Kenneth Digby’s The Broad Stone of Honour (1st edn 1822), as the medieval precedent that justified both their class position and their political opposition to utilitarian reform.47 Whig reformers, by contrast, looked back beyond the so-called “Norman Yoke” to England’s Anglo-Saxon past, where, they claimed, a primitive egalitarian and parliamentary spirit offered a model for the renewed England they were trying to legislate.48 Even working-class radicals and, later, Socialist critics, following the example set by William Cobbett, waxed nostalgic for the late-medieval period immediately after the collapse of Norman feudalism, which they characterized as a time of independent yeoman farmers whose rights were subsequently eroded by the advent of commercial capitalism.49 There were, then, three explicitly politicized versions of the medieval past competing with one another at the time of the Eglinton Tournament, and the balance among them was shifting.50 According to Mark Girouard, by the 1830s “the spirit of chivalry” was increasingly being used to underwrite middle-class cultural norms.51 This shift in the class dynamics of chivalry corresponds with the increasing social and cultural dominance of the middle classes more broadly, and, as both Girouard and Alice Chandler note, it is a shift influenced by and perspicuous in the writings of Thomas Carlyle. For Chandler, Carlyle “alone fully appreciates the inevitability of

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industrialism. Unlike his predecessors he did not think it possible to diminish the importance of commerce and industry and make a neofeudal agriculture serve as the basis of a national economy.”52 Instead, Carlyle was diligently adapting England’s chivalric past to his own gospel of Work, a process that only four years after the Eglinton Tournament would result in Past and Present (1843), with its heroic transfer of divine authority from the medieval Roman Catholic Abbot Sampson to the middle-class Victorian Plugson of Undershot and the Captains of Industry.53 A neo-medieval tournament, then, rain or shine, would not automatically make everyone yearn for a return to feudal paternalism. As A. Dwight Culler remarks: Victorian medievalism meant many different things to different people [. . .]. The Middle Ages seem not to have been related by their admirers to the present by any process of historical change, but are simply set against the present as an ideal or paradigm. That is perhaps why there is so much emphasis on costume, armor, castles, feudal relations, hierarchy, and ritual.54 Culler’s final word, “ritual”, evokes a facet of Victorian culture that has received far less attention than the medieval revival but that remains equally important to elucidating the ideological failure of the Eglinton Tournament, namely, Victorian elite public ritual practice. Judged on the basis of the state of royal ritual, the Victorians may at first appear ritual-poor when compared with George IV, for example, who consciously deployed medieval iconography, architecture, and ceremony to secure his own place as monarch. At his lavish coronation ceremony, and in keeping with royal tradition: the King’s Champion still rode into the hall in armour, escorted by the Lord High Constable, and the Earl Marshal, also on horseback, threw down his gauntlet three times, and challenged anyone to dispute the king’s right to the throne.55 For a number of reasons, including public impatience with the King’s orgiastic profligacy in lean economic times and the potential for the ceremony of the King’s Champion to be disrupted by parody, the coronations of William IV (1831) and Victoria (1838) did away with this ritual altogether, and replaced most of the subsequent ceremony and feasting with much simpler public processions.56 Even that small portion of the coronation ritual retained during Victoria’s assumption of power was marred by the inattention, confusion, and incompetence of many of the participants.57 The ineptitude of royal ritual was accompanied through the middle part of the century by a decline in civic ceremonial and reinforced by public

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hostility to several prominent examples of ritual practice. Events like mayoral inaugurations, celebrations by the municipal corporations, and the Colchester Oyster Feast all displayed a lack of polish and enthusiasm during the first two decades of Victoria’s reign.58 Moreover, as is evident from the early responses to the Eglinton Tournament, even the Lord Mayor’s Show had become something of a joke.59 At the same time, the enactment of ritual by trade unions and Tractarians – in the form of union initiations and the elaboration of the Anglican liturgy, respectively – was met with strong public disapprobation that, in the case of working-class groups like the Tolpuddle Martyrs or the Glasgow Spinners, resulted in criminal prosecution for conspiracy. Royal ritual may have reached its nadir in the first half of Victoria’s reign, and civic ceremonial may have suffered a similar neglect, but the strong reactions of many in the 1830s and 1840s against certain displays of ritual indicate that the Earl’s Victorian contemporaries still invested ritual forms with a great deal of significance. As was the case with contemporary references to England’s medieval past, however, the class connotations of ritual were moving towards the middle. In fact, for members of England’s increasingly powerful professional and administrative constituencies, public ritual played a central, and hitherto overlooked, role in the creation and maintenance of their elite public status. Doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament, army and navy officers, university professors and deans, and other sub-groups of what Walter Bagehot famously labeled “the educated ‘ten-thousand’ ”60 all participated in a wide range of ritual activities designed to foster intra-class solidarity, establish political and social authority, and render themselves and their professions sacred in the eyes of the general public. A brief survey of one of the simplest and most ubiquitous forms of Victorian elite public ritual, namely oath-taking, offers a representative glimpse of the prevalence of ritual in the lives of the elite public more generally. Promissory oaths – those guaranteeing future conduct – were the central feature of initiation rituals for doctors, lawyers, and MPs in Victorian England: doctors, most often physicians, publicly swore a version of the Hippocratic Oath during graduation from medical school; lawyers, whether members of the “upper branch” of barristers or the “lower branch” of attorneys and solicitors, swore an oath before a sitting judge once they had completed their residence at one of the Inns of Court or their terms as an articled clerk; and MPs in both Houses swore an oath of allegiance to the crown upon appointment or election.61 Grounded in precedent, these oaths share certain generic elements – the invocation of the divine and the subordination of material gain – even as through subtle variations of form and context they instantiate hierarchical divisions within each profession,

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separating physicians from surgeons and apothecaries, for instance. Crucially, without these oaths, individuals could not claim from a receptive broader public the elite public status for which the oath-takers might otherwise be qualified by birth, education, or wealth. And oaths were just the points of entry into a largely upper-middle-class, professional, elite public culture saturated with ritual. The Eglinton Tournament as Farce Clearly, then, the Earl was assuming a cultural context for his revival of medieval tournament ritual that, in the case of his medievalism, was at least a decade out of date, and, in the case of his ritualism, was profoundly out of step with the middling-class tenor of contemporary elite public ritual.62 Considered collectively, the advance criticism and the Earl’s fundamental misapprehension of both the medieval revival and Victorian ritual culture all suggest that the Eglinton Tournament would have been an ideological failure even if fair weather had allowed it to be a practical success. In fact, as a practical success but an ideological failure, the tournament could have been a suitable object of performative parody, even Bakhtinian carnival, for those seeking to appropriate for themselves the authority that the Earl had spent so lavishly to assert for himself and his class and party.63 As a practical and ideological failure, the Eglinton Tournament became instead a popular joke. The immediate representational legacy of the tournament centered on the opening Wednesday. According to Anstruther, popular references to the Eglinton Tournament included, in 1839, a “Gorgeous Delineation” at Astley’s Amphitheatre, a Christmas pantomime at Covent Garden, and a play by Yates at the Adelphi Theatre entitled The Knight of the Dragon and the Queen of Beauty; and, in 1840, on August 6, the so-called Tournament at Wormsley at the house of Colonel Fane, in which the knights rode donkeys and battered one another with kitchen hardware while observed by a bearded queen of beauty in drag.64 More accessible to modern readers, perhaps, is Alfred Crowquill’s “The Eglinton Tournament: A Mock Heroic Ballad,” printed in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review in February 1840. Prefaced by an illustration entitled “Waiting for It to Leave off to Begin,” showing an armored knight in a greatcoat leaning on the edge of an upturned shield and being ineffectively protected from the rain by a costumed attendant with an umbrella, the poem opens with a series of stanzas memorializing “knights who were not slain,” “knights who never ran,/ Though boastful of their race! ”, knights who, like the trees, “were green.”65 When the first of these untested knights appears, “o’er his head, (the blushing muse/ Records it with regret,)/ A silk umbrella bore the knight,/ To shield him from the wet!”66 Continuing in this vein, the poem

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offers humorous accounts of three of the jousts, described as tests of “skill at thrust and thump,”67 and ends with seven enthusiastic stanzas devoted to the banquet afterwards, at which all of the knights show themselves more proficient participants, closing with the following ironic benediction: Long live the Tourney, and the tilt, – Long may it be our task To sing how gallant Knights wassail, When they have tapp’d a casque.68 Subsequent allusions to the Eglinton Tournament in less occasional works of mid-Victorian literature range from fleeting images to lengthy engagements; all, however, confirm the original event’s ideological failure by aligning it with the inappropriate transgression of normative middle-class standards of propriety. In R. S. Surtees’s rollicking Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853), for example, the title character emerges from the shop of Frippery and Flummery through the broken plate-glass window mounted on his horse, which “was found to have decorated himself with a sky-blue visite trimmed with Honiton lace, which he wore like a charger on his way to the Crusades, or a steed bearing a knight to the Eglinton tournament.”69 A con man and a social parasite, Sponge has even less claim to enter the lists than an Almack’s swell or a member of the Anglo-German nobility, especially since he has just swindled a young snob into overpaying for a vicious horse.70 A less overt, but more substantive, reference, in Alfred Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), associates the Eglinton Tournament with Princess Ida’s ultimately unsuccessful plan of female education. The poem’s fifth section concludes with a recognizable but more violent version of the original tournament that is sparked by Ida’s refusal to abandon her college and return to the domestic sphere.71 In his presentation of the Thornes of Ullathorne, and particularly of Miss Thorne’s fête champêtre in the Ullathorne Sports section of Barchester Towers (1857), Anthony Trollope offers the most sustained engagement with the Eglinton Tournament in Victorian fiction. Comically out of date, the Thornes spend their time at Ullathorne living in the eighteenth century and dreaming of the eighth century.72 Monica Thorne, described by the narrator as “always glad to revert to anything,”73 invites the neighborhood to an outdoor party complete with “every game to be played which, in a long course of reading, Miss Thorne could ascertain to have been played in the good days of Queen Elizabeth.”74 In an unmistakable allusion to the original event, her preference would have been “for something small in the way of a tournament; but, as she said to her brother, that had been tried, and the age had proved itself too decidedly inferior to its fore-runners to admit of such a pastime.”75 Plagued by a number of familiar logistical difficulties76 –

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although, fortunately, no rain – Miss Thorne’s fête provides an appropriate climax for the novel’s martial imagery,77 and, as Joseph Weisenforth notes, a symbolically rich setting for the downfall of Obadiah Slope: In Act II of Ullathorne Sports Slope loses Eleanor and leaves Arabin to win her hand. The Chaplain’s defeat finds its analogue in Harry Greenacre’s wild charge at the quintain – a device that when awkwardly touched unhorses a clumsy sportsman with a merciless swat. Slope’s grasp at Eleanor’s waist earns him an immediate slap in the face that ends his untimely pursuit forever.78 In Barchester Towers, then, the Eglinton Tournament is simultaneously a past failure, a present product of outdated opinions, and an occasion in which to enforce middle-class attitudes towards overzealous religious opinions and unwelcome social climbers, both embodied by Mr. Slope. These more literary treatments of the Eglinton Tournament hint at the productive potential the event might have had it if had been a practical success. Had the association of medievalism and aristocratic paternalism been linked without a snicker at the original tournament, Surtees’s critique of the affectations and snobbery of the fashionable hunting set might have been able to borrow some of that authority for the class of genuine sportsmen he so enthusiastically represented. Instead, the Eglinton Tournament permits him a throwaway joke that cannot do more than make everyone seem slightly ridiculous. Similarly, Tennyson’s more violent tournament in The Princess could have appropriated for Ida some of the paternalistic authority asserted by her father if the original to which it alludes had offered a more edifying example. Trollope gets the most out of his allusion to the Eglinton Tournament by making the Ullathorne Sports, themselves, farcical; this creative decision allows him to poke gentle fun at the Thornes while reasserting a conservative social order with the downfall of Slope. However, Trollope’s own assertion throughout the novel of a version of upper-middle-class paternalism could have benefited from being able to borrow from and replace a legitimate source of aristocratic authority, instead of simply countering the shrill assertiveness of Broad Church evangelicalism. Epilogue: The Eglinton Tournament as Object of Nostalgia In the final years of Victoria’s reign, the tone of references to the Eglinton Tournament began to change from gently mocking to wistfully nostalgic.79 Benjamin Disraeli’s Endymion (1880), for example, devotes three gorgeously superficial chapters to the Montfort Tournament, a thinly disguised and historically inaccurate paean to the original ritual. Imagined, planned, and

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carried out by Berengaria, one of Disraeli’s characteristically formidable women, the Montfort Tournament is put on to “sustain the Whig government in its troubles.”80 Free of rain, and full of excellent jousting, the event is a testament to ironic nostalgia that effectively confirms Eglinton’s ideological failure through selective memory.81 Nearly twenty years later, three turn-of-the-century articles in The Pall Mall Magazine, Atalanta, and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine offer their readers even more rose-colored memories of the original event, which they describe as a “revival for a brief space of the golden days of chivalry,”82 “accomplished with great satisfaction,”83 in order to bring “the eidolon of chivalry before the prosaic, stock-exchange, everyday world.”84 Late-Victorian nostalgia for a whitewashed version of the original tournament lasts to the present day, when a quick internet search reveals dozens of sites using the event to promote the Scottish tourism industry. This virtual afterlife of the Eglinton Tournament is perhaps the clearest sign of its ideological failure, as the Earl’s original medieval ritual is readily assimilated by the very middle-class commercial culture it was designed to fight.

NOTES 1. I gratefully acknowledge that the research for this project was completed with the support of a University of Alabama Research Advisory Council 2006 Summer Grant, and that the writing of this article benefited from the productive criticism of my colleagues Sharon O’Dair and Heather White. 2. The Eglinton Tournament, although frequently mentioned in footnotes or critical asides, has rarely received article or book-length treatment. Ian Anstruther’s The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963) remains the definitive history of the event, which also serves as the subject of individual chapters in Mark Girouard’s Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), and Robert Martin’s Enter Rumour: Four Early Victorian Scandals (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). 3. A. Dwight Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 159. 4. Elizabeth R. Epperly, Patterns of Repetition in Trollope (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 36. 5. Clare A. Simmons, ed., Medievalism and the Quest for the “Real” Middle Ages (London: Frank Case, 2001), 7. 6. Martin, Enter Rumour, 131. 7. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 101. 8. Anstruther, The Knight, 12. 9. “Eglinton Tournament,” The Catholic Telegraph, October 3, 1839, 342, ProQuest , accessed June 1, 2006.

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10. Alex Tyrrell, “Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844,” History 90.297 (January 2005): 42–61 (48, 47). 11. Helene E. Roberts, “Victorian Medievalism: Revival or Masquerade?” Brownings Institute Studies 8 (1980): 11–44 (21–27). 12. Colin Graham, Ideologies of Epic: Nation, Empire and Victorian Epic Poetry (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 35. 13. Graham, Ideologies of Epic, 36. 14. Graham’s larger argument – that the “seeds of decolonization lie in the very process of empire itself, ‘exporting’ with it the concept of ‘nation,’ as the paradigmatic process of cultural and ethical cohesion, which will eventually become transformed into the anti-colonial conceptual weapon” (19) – remains open to challenge because it assumes a complete absence of the idea of the nation in colonized parts of the world prior to colonization. Also, Graham’s thumbnail definition of carnival neglects the positive sense of renewal that Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswalsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), attributes to carnival laughter, which “denies, but revived and renews at the same time [. . .] in order to bring forth something more and better” (11, 21). 15. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 94. 16. Anstruther, The Knight, 234. 17. An impressive but by no means complete list of the dignitaries present at the tournament is provided on p. 716 of “The Eglinton Tournament,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 6 (November 1839): 697–716. 18. Quoted in “The Tournament,” The Times, August 29, 1839, 3. 19. Anstruther, The Knight, 10. 20. On motives for the tournament, see Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon, 1999), 152; Culler, The Victorian Mirror, 152; and Graham, Ideologies of Epic, 35. In the words of Mark Girouard, “As the excitement grew the tournament grew with it, until it became not only a full-scale re-enaction of a mediaeval event, but even more a symbol of Tory defiance, of aristocratic virility, of hatred of the Reform Bill, of protest against ‘the sordid, heartless, sensual doctrines of Utilitarianism’ ” (93). 21. Scott’s imaginative influence over the Eglinton Tournament has been widely remarked upon since the event itself. Even Alfred Crowquill’s poetic parody – of which more later – alludes to Walter Scott as a source of inspiration for the tournament (61). Alice Chandler, in A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), helpfully connects Scott’s use of the medieval past with his politics: “Like Burke, Scott also believed that the common man’s love for the state, once established, had to be nourished and sustained by rituals and illusions [. . .] the best of these illusions were the customs and ceremonies of monarchy, and the Middle Ages the period at which they were most picturesque” (47); she goes on to cite “the tournaments and games” in several novels, “in which the glittering garments of the nobility serve to enrich the buff coats of the yeoman and serve to remind the populace of the ceremonies of rule and the oneness of their society” (48). As Barbara Bell, in “The Performance of Victorian Medievalism,” in Lorretta M. Halloway and Jennifer A.

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Palmgren, ed., Beyond Arthurian Romance: The Reach of Victorian Medievalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 191–216, notes, there were also theatrical adaptations of several of Scott’s novels in the 1820s and 1830s, some of which included the staging of tournament combat. 22. On the care taken to uphold the authenticity of costumes, see Anstruther, The Knight, 161. 23. Margaret H. Swain, “Two Costumes and Armour Worn at the Eglinton Tournament, 1839,” Scottish Art Review 12.3 (1970): 23–29. 24. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 93. 25. Roberts, “Victorian Medievalism,” 32. 26. The Programme of the Procession was widely reprinted, and can be found in “The Tournament,” The Times, August 31, 1839, 3; “Grand Tournament at Eglinton Castle,” The Albion. A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, September 28, 1839, 308, ProQuest , accessed June 1, 2006; the Tait’s article, 705–07; and Anstruther, The Knight, 249–59. 27. The rules of combat are reproduced in “Tournament at Eglinton Castle,” Niles National Register 1837, September 28, 1839, reprinted from “Tournament at Eglinton Castle,” London Court Journal, August 28, 1839, 75, ProQuest , accessed June 1, 2006; “Grand Tournament at Eglinton Castle”; and Anstruther, The Knight, 206–09. 28. “Tournament at Eglinton Castle,” Niles National Register 1837. 29. Anstruther, The Knight, xiii. 30. “The Tournament” (August 29, 1839). He continued, somewhat pedantically, “The tourney was of Gothic, not of Celtic origin. It was never practised by Celtic nations at all. We should suppose that [the] Eglinton tournament will have been the first at which the tartan and the kilt were at all conspicuous. There is nothing in the Highland dress which renders it appropriate for such a scene.” A separate article, “Vauxhall Gardens,” The Times, August 20, 1839, 5, reprinting material from the Ayr Observer and other Scottish papers, more humorously wonders, “We have much pleasure in apprising our brethren of the press, that a favourable position will be set apart for them to witness the tournament; but an important question naturally occurs – in what costume ought the knights of the ‘broad sheet’ to appear?” Several responses to this tongue-in-cheek announcement were also reprinted, including one acerbically suggesting a foolscap and bells. 31. Letter, The Times, August 8, 1839, 5. This same letter also offers the following amusing suggestion for knightly costume: “On the ceiling of the corridors in the Town-hall at Nuremberg is a representation of a tournament, in which all the tilters are habited as Court fools. Allow me to suggest this to the heroes of St. John’s-wood, as pointing out an appropriate costume for the approaching tournament at Eglinton Castle.” 32. Letter, The Times, July 11, 1839, 5. 33. “Tilting at the Eyre Arms Tavern,” The Times, July 10, 1839, 5. 34. “Tilting at the Eyre Arms Tavern.” 35. Not only did the rain interfere with the ritual forms on the opening day of the tournament, it also discouraged future Victorian medievalists from hosting a

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similarly authentic event, thereby diminishing the chance that the Earl’s painstaking tournament ritual would be repeated. 36. “Eglinton Tournament,” The Catholic Telegraph, 341. 37. “Eglinton Tournament,” The Catholic Telegraph, 341. 38. See “Tournament at Eglinton Castle.” 39. N. P. Willis, “The Eglinton Tournament,” Spirit of the Times, November 16, 1839, 440, ProQuest , accessed June 1, 2006. 40. Anstruther, The Knight, 202, 204. According to one Times correspondent, even the grand entrance of the procession was diminished by the rain: “The trumpets sounded gallantly as the procession entered the barrier, and those who could exalt their voices, and were not afraid to open their mouths for the rain, shouted amain” (“The Tournament,” The Times, September 2, 1839, 5). 41. On the first day’s jousting, see “Tournament at Eglinton Castle”; Willis, “The Eglinton Tournament”; and Anstruther, The Knight, 209–11. 42. “Eglinton Tournament,” The Catholic Telegraph, 342. 43. Willis, “The Eglinton Tournament.” Anstruther’s account of the crowd’s departure is particularly poignant: “Then began a confused exodus which truly defied description. As one hundred thousand spectators began to make their way from the Lists, forced to head for home on foot, the rain pouring, the wind howling and mud pulling their shoes from their feet, young and old, rich and poor, jostled together like cattle at a fair and behaved with as little civility” (The Knight, 213). 44. See John Killham, Tennyson and The Princess: Reflections of an Age (London: Athlane, 1958), 273, which cites articles from The Examiner and the Glasgow Argus. 45. According to Anstruther, “Friday, in fact, was quite a success although it was only a poor reflection of what Lord Eglinton had dreamed. For although the jousts had taken place, the Lists had been covered with a foot of mud; although the roof of the Grandstand had been mended, all the hangings had been torn to ribbons; and although the spectators had arrived and enjoyed it, many had come in ordinary clothes for their fancy dress had been ruined” (The Knight, 223). 46. Although focused specifically on the contemporary debate surrounding the Crimean War, Olive Anderson’s article “The Political Uses of History in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England” (Past and Present 36 [April 1967]: 87–105) shows the many ways in which historical precedent was used to support a broad range of political ideals and economic and military policies in Victorian England. She comments briefly on competing deployments of the medieval past on pages 99–105. 47. In “The Origins of the Gothic Revival: a Reappraisal,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society ser. 6, vol. III (1993): 105–50, Giles Worsley provides ample documentary and photographic evidence of the frequency with which aristocratic and conservative individuals and institutions in the Victorian period projected their authority through a revival of Gothic architecture, whether in the construction of country estates, Gothic churches, or university buildings. 48. On Tory versus Whig constructions of the Middle Ages, see Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 39–44, 152; J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Chandler,

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Dream, 83–91; Culler, The Victorian Mirror, 155; Charles Dellheim, The Face of the Past: The Preservation of the Medieval Inheritance in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 16–19; and Clare A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990). 49. On Radical appropriations of the medieval past, see p. 5 of Alice Chandler, “Order and Disorder in the Medieval Revival,” Brownings Institute Studies 8 (1980): 1–9; and Rosemary Jann, “Democratic Myths in Victorian Medievalism,” Brownings Institute Studies 8 (1980): 129–49. 50. Further examples of Victorian medieval nostalgia less explicitly connected to the dominant political parties are traced by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, “Counter-Medievalism: Or, Protestants Rewrite the Middle Ages,” in Halloway and Palmgren, Beyond Arthurian Romance, 147–68; Charles Dellheim, “Interpreting Victorian Medievalism,” in Florence Boos, ed., History and Community: Essays in Victorian Medievalism (New York: Garland, 1992), 39–58 (44–46); and R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 51. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 76. 52. Chandler, Dream, 148. 53. Girouard also traces Carlyle’s significance to the revival of chivalry (Return to Camelot, 130–31), as well as his later influence on muscular Christianity (143). As final evidence for the distinctly middle-class shift in Victorian medievalist rhetoric, Girouard cites the popularity of Dinah Maria Mullock’s John Halifax Gentleman (1856), which explicitly applies the ideal of chivalry to trade (149–50). 54. Culler, The Victorian Mirror, 160. Similarly, Dellheim remarks, “medievalism had no single significance or use in nineteenth-century Britain [. . .] medievalism was a social language composed of myths, legends, rituals, and symbols that was appropriated by Victorians both to criticize and to affirm their own times” (“Interpreting,” 39). 55. Girouard, Return to Camelot, 18. For George IV’s use of medieval symbolism, see Girouard, 26–28. 56. For the reasons behind the abolition of the traditional coronation ceremony, see Anstruther, The Knight, 8–9. 57. Victoria’s coronation is one of many botched ceremonials during this period; a list of others can be found on pages 117–20 of David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c. 1820–1977,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–64; pp. 211–13 of David Cannadine, “Splendor out of Court: Royal Spectacle and Pageantry in Modern Britain, c. 1820–1977,” in Sean Wilentz, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 206–43; and pp. 17–24 of Jeffrey L. Lant, Insubstantial Pageant: Ceremony and Confusion in Queen Victoria’s Court (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1980). John Plunkett, in Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 17, has recently argued that this drastic reduction in the number and efficiency of royal ceremonials during the first forty

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years of Victoria’s reign was part of a distinctively modern media campaign to remarket the monarchy as a populist institution: “Time and again, the freely given support of the People was placed over and against the role of the organized pageantry. [. . .] Royal events between 1837 and 1861 had an imaginative potency precisely because they were not overladen with militaristic or aristocratic ceremony.” 58. On the status of civic ceremonials in urban areas outside London, see Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority and the English Industrial City 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), and “Ritual and civic culture in the English industrial city, c. 1835–1914,” in Robert J. Morris and Richard H. Trainor, ed., Urban Governance: Britain and Beyond since 1750 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 226–41; as well as James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); on the Colchester Oyster Feast, see David Cannadine, “The Transformation of Civic Ritual in Modern Britain: the Colchester Oyster Feast,” Past and Present 94 (February 1982): 107–30. 59. In 1837, William Herbert, the Librarian to the Corporation of London, self-published his History of the Great Livery Companies of London, in which he lamented the change in public taste that had led to the decline of the Lord Mayor’s Shows into ridiculousness: “However childish, and in a few instances ridiculous, some of them [company pageants] may seem in the present intellectual age, which threatens to bring us all to the plainness of Quakers, it will be seen in others that occasionally much taste and ingenuity were exercised; and that in almost all, particularly the latter spectacles, an excess of magnificence was displayed, which, if sights had not gone quite out of fashion with us, would draw crowds even now, aye, and crowned heads among them too, as they once did” (195–96). 60. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, 1867, ed. Miles Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8. 61. On doctors’ oaths, including a historical survey of versions of the Hippocratic Oath, see W. H. S. Jones, The Doctor’s Oath: An Essay in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924); on lawyers’ oaths, including the text of oaths sworn by attorneys and solicitors, see Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 76; on the oaths taken by members of the House of Commons, see, for example, Daniel O’Connell’s appeal to the House to end denominationally specific oaths for Roman Catholics, in Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: Forming a Continuation of “The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Periods to the Year 1803”, 3rd series (London: T. C. Hansard, 1830–91), XXII: 17–19. 62. The Earl’s misapprehension of the public’s appetite for medievalism in the early years of Victoria’s reign can be productively contrasted with the highly successful commemoration of the death of Alfred the Great in Victoria’s final year as queen. Not only did the 1901 event enjoy excellent weather, it was perfectly in agreement with late-Victorian attempts to construct a national – as opposed to Scottish and Tory – identity derived from the Saxon past, and was a celebration centered not on a dozen anachronistically costumed contemporaries, but on an already recognized giant from England’s medieval past. Moreover, the Alfred commemoration benefited from the accumulated medieval enthusiasm of the entire Victorian period,

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and was preceded by decades of Alfred-themed art, literature, popular mythology, and public ritual. For more on the Alfred celebration, see Joanne M. Parker, “The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great,” Studies in Medievalism 12 (2002): 113–36. 63. By “performative”, I am imagining specifically the potential for what Judith Butler describes in “For a Careful Reading,” in Linda Nicholson, ed., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 127–44 (134): “For a performative to work, it must draw upon and recite a set of linguistic conventions which have traditionally worked to bind or engage certain kinds of effects. The force or effectivity of a performative will be derived from its capacity to draw on a reencode the historicity of those conventions in a present act.” 64. Anstruther, The Knight, 228–30. 65. Alfred Crowquill, “The Eglinton Tournament: A Mock Heroic Ballad,” Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review 6.2 (February 1840): 65, ProQuest (lines 4, 7–8, and 10), accessed June 1, 2006. 66. Crowquill, lines 73–76. In an echo of both the pejorative dismissal of the practice session at the Eyre’s Arm Tavern by the Times correspondent and the show at Astley’s, one working-class member of the crowd in the poem declares that the procession on the sunny second day tops both the circus and the Lord Mayor’s Show (lines 125–28). 67. Crowquill, “The Eglinton Tournament,” line 184. 68. Crowquill, “The Eglinton Tournament,” lines 257–60. 69. R[obert] S[mith] Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, 1853 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), 83. 70. Not only is this particular moment devoid of gentlemanliness, the entire novel lacks the moral didacticism so prevalent in middle-class fiction: Sponge’s swindling ways eventually secure him a wife and a successful business. As Bonnie Rayford Neumann notes in Robert Smith Surtees (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 88, Surtees’s rather defensive preface makes clear that even he was uncomfortable with the degree to which the novel transgresses mid-Victorian novelistic norms. 71. Alfred Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley, 1847, pp. 219–330 in Christopher Ricks, ed., Tennyson: A Selected Edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). John Killham even argues that the tournament “might have given the best clue to the way in which the whole poem was to be read” (Tennyson, 272); however, other than citing it as one of “the bizarre medley of incidents drawn from fairy tale, science and medieval chivalry” that contributes to the poem’s “light-hearted representation of the extraordinary complexity of contemporary thought and taste” (276), he does fully explain how the tournament scene could function as the key to the whole text. 72. See the initial description of the Thornes in Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1857, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, introduction and notes by John Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1: 211–18. 73. Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1: 222. 74. Trollope, Barchester Towers, 2: 64.

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75. Trollope, Barchester Towers, 2: 64–65. 76. Among Miss Thorne’s problems, as Robert Polhemus observes in The Changing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 46, is that her desire to rigidly arrange the guests by class – as the Earl did in the procession – cannot account for the more complex social realities of the 1850s. 77. Epperly, Patterns of Repetition, 33. 78. Joseph Weisenforth, “Dialectics in Barchester Towers,” in Tony Bareham, ed., Anthony Trollope (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1980), 36–53 (37). For Harry Greenacre’s charge at the quintain, which later descends to a childish toy, see Trollope, Barchester Towers, 2: 101; Slope’s slap can be found on 2: 144. 79. As evidence for this nostalgia, Girouard lists several neo-medieval tournaments in Europe in the years between the Eglinton Tournament and the start of World War I: Parham in Sussex (1875), Taymouth Castle in Perthshire (1880), Budapest (1902), and Empress Hall at Earl’s Court (1912); however, Parham was small and Taymouth only projected (Return to Camelot, 8). 80. Benjamin Disraeli, Endymion, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, 1880), 2: 213. 81. In the mature author’s treatment of the Montfort Tournament, Richard Levine, in Benjamin Disraeli (New York: Twayne, 1968), 153, detects “the younger Disraeli’s belief in the value of ceremony and ritual and Sidonia’s pronouncement on man’s desire to obey.” Although relatively brief – only eleven pages (144–54) – Levine’s appraisal of the novel is more sympathetic and, in this context, more productive than those offered by Thom Braun, Disraeli the Novelist (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981) or Daniel Schwarz, Disraeli’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1979), neither of whom mention the Montfort Tournament at all, and both of whom regard the novel as a tired failure; Braun does supply useful publication information, however. See Braun, 141–45; and Schwarz, 138–48. 82. Caroline Fairlie-Cunninghame, “The Eglinton Tournament,” Pall Mall Magazine 8.33 (January 1896): 28–38 (38). 83. George Morley, “A Famous Modern Tournament,” Atalanta 9 (June 1896): 596–602 (602). 84. “The Eglinton Tournament,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 162 (December 1897): 810–18 (818).

An Eastern Medieval Revival: Byzantine Art and Nineteenth-Century French Painting1 Gretchen Kreahling McKay As the nineteenth century progressed, interest in medieval romance, literature, and art intensified, especially in France.2 The reasons for this were varied, but certainly the revival spirit of French Catholicism at mid-century and the ubiquitous search for a deeper spirituality at the end of the century contributed significantly to this attraction to the medieval period.3 In addition, the growing nationalistic fervor in nineteenth-century France encouraged an increased fascination with the French Middle Ages.4 While the western Middle Ages were clearly of interest to the nineteenth-century French, the eastern medieval world, specifically Byzantium, was also becoming a topic of great attraction and curiosity. The interest in Byzantine art, architecture, and history resulted in a plethora of printed journals, books, and other publications that featured engravings of many Byzantine monuments, and motivated many to travel to Italy, Greece, and Turkey, where they encountered Byzantine monuments first-hand. Whether seen in person or through representations, such an acquaintance with Byzantine images encouraged and inspired a number of nineteenth-century artists. For example, mid-century mural painters and the late-century artists who called themselves “the Nabis” (“the Prophets”) each expressed a distinctly Byzantine influence through iconographic choices, formal compositions, and painting techniques. At mid-century, French artists were creating apsidal and nave murals that reflected, if not copied, forms from Early Christian and Byzantine churches. The church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris provides an excellent example of the reappropriation of what was understood at the time as the Byzantine style. Jakob-Ignaz Hittorff inherited the patronage of the building of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul from his father-in-law, Jean-Baptiste Lepère.5 Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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When Hittorff took over the construction of the church, he remodeled the structure to reflect the form of Early Christian basilicas and desired a decorative program that would match this architectural style. In 1848, Hittorff chose François-Edouard Picot to decorate the apse of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. In a letter dated August 14, 1848, Hittorff urged Picot to study the images in L’Architecture moderne de la Sicile (1835), Hittorff ’s own book, and to use the illustrations in that volume to inform the compositions for the church.6 In his apsidal painting, Picot displays Christ seated on a cushioned-throne.7 Cross-nimbed, clad in a blue tunic, and wrapped in a red cloak, Christ blesses with an outstretched right hand while he holds a book in his left. This composition is very similar to Byzantine representations of Christ the Pantocrator, which are very common in the art of Byzantium. At either side of the seated Christ, Picot added an attending angel, each of which is rendered in a slightly smaller scale than the central figure. The entire composition is painted on a gold background, a classic identifying characteristic of nearly all Byzantine monumental art, especially that which was created during the middle Byzantine period, which was the apex of Byzantium’s rule, affluence, and political influence. Picot’s apsidal composition bears affinity to Byzantine mosaics, particularly those in twelfth-century Sicilian churches, engravings of which were published by Hittorff and to which Picot was urged to turn for inspiration. Hittorff felt the most powerful Sicilian image was that of the Pantocrator in the Cathedral of Monreale (Figure 1),8 which depicts a powerful Christ who dominates the space and decorative schema of the church.9 An engraving of the Pantocrator mosaic at Monreale was published in Hittorff ’s book and would therefore have been accessible to Picot as he was designing his mural. While the mosaics at Monreale may have inspired Picot to create an apse that imbued a sense of power, authority, and control over his space, the image of Christ in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul is seated on a throne, differing from that in the Monreale apse, where we see only a bust-length portrait of Christ. However, also on Sicily is the Cappella Palatina, built by Roger II between 1130 and 1140. On the west wall of the nave of the Cappella Palatina, Christ is depicted seated on a throne between Saints Peter and Paul (Figure 2).10 The throne and its cushions, as well as the standing saints to either side, mirror Picot’s apse decoration in the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Thus, the Cappella Palatina may have been Picot’s model as he planned his apsidal mural for the church in Paris.11 The nave murals of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul likewise echo Byzantine compositions. Hippolyte Flandrin was commissioned to paint the upper nave, which depicts a procession of saints (Figure 3) and bears a striking resemblance to the images of saints found in the nave of the sixth-century church of San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (Figure 4). Contemporary

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Fig. 1: Monreale. View towards apse. Duomo, Monreale, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [image ART141552]

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Fig. 2: Capella Palatina, Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo, Christ flanked by Saints Peter and Paul. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY [image ART215173]

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Fig. 3: Flandrin, Hippolyte. Detail of nave mural showing saints in procession. Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, Paris, France. Photo Credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY [ART327495]

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Parisian critics made a connection between Flandrin’s nave design and the Ravenna mosaics,12 and while these critics did not necessarily identify the mosaics in San Apollinare Nuovo as specifically Byzantine, they did reference them as the potential source of Flandrin’s composition. Indeed, it is likely that Flandrin knew of these mosaics, and may even have seen them. Travel to Italy became essential after the establishment of the Academy, and records show that Flandrin first visited Italy in 1833 after winning the Prix-de-Rome.13 Flandrin returned to Italy in subsequent years, and thus it is entirely possible that he had first-hand knowledge of San Apollinare Nuovo and its mosaics.14 Flandrin’s next monumental mural, the apse for the church of Saint-Martin-d’Ainay in Lyon, completed in 1855, is arguably even more clearly inspired by Byzantine and Early Christian art than his previous works.15 Charles Questel was in charge of the restoration of this Romanesque church16 and, like Hittorff at Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, wanted the interior decoration of this venerable edifice to be decorated in the manner of early Italian basilicas, even specifying that he wished the apse to be decorated with real mosaic tile.17 Flandrin’s composition includes an image of Christ standing against a gold background and flanked by various saints, all identified with the typical inscriptions found on Byzantine murals. The most obvious Byzantine parallel is the use of the abbreviated title “IC XC” for Christ, which stands for the first and last letters of Christ’s name in Greek and appears on nearly every image of Christ created in the Byzantine world after the ninth century. An additional reference to Byzantium is the fact that the entire apse is made to look like a mosaic, with a gold background painted to resemble individual tesserae. While it was the patron’s original intention to install mosaic in the apse, it was deemed impossible when no craftsmen specializing in the laying of tesserae could be found to complete the project. Thus, the trompe l’oeil painting technique was employed to simulate mosaic tiles. This desire for mosaic decoration exposes a particular interest on the part of the French at mid-century in the art of the early Christians and Byzantines; the formal characteristics of the apse at Saint-Martin-d’Ainay display close parallels with earlier Byzantine monuments. For instance, the sixth-century apse mosaic at Saints Cosmas and Damian in Rome (Figure 5) depicts Christ standing on visionary clouds, hailed by Peter to the left and Paul to the right. In both the French and Byzantine compositions, the figures appear to be standing on a ledge. The images of Christ in both works are placed centrally, and are remarkably similar in pose and dress. Indeed, the compositions are so similar that it is conceivable that Flandrin saw the mosaic composition in the church of Saints Cosmas and Damian.18 As early as the seventeenth century, historians were beginning to

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Fig. 4: S. Apollinare Nuovo, interior with side nave. Ravenna, Italy. Photo Credit: Vanni/Art Resource, NY. [ART45665]

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Fig. 5: Christ Saviour. Detail from apse mosaic, SS. Cosma e Damiano, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [ART135188]

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investigate the Byzantine Empire. Indeed, the first scholarly study of the Byzantine period is attributed to the French during the period of Louis XIV.19 During Louis’ reign, a large number of Greek manuscripts were added to the royal library. In addition, by 1711, thirty-four folios of works by Byzantine historians had been published.20 The leading Byzantine scholar in the seventeenth century was Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange, who wrote numerous works on Byzantine history, many of which are still considered relevant and significant works on the period.21 France thus became the center of Byzantine research until the middle of the eighteenth century. At that time, opinion on Byzantium changed and the Empire became synonymous with immorality and decadence. Such eighteenth-century thinking culminated in Edward Gibbon’s widely read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was published in six volumes from 1776 to 1788. In the nineteenth century, an interest in Byzantium was rekindled. Architects such as Charles Texier and Albert Lenoir studied Byzantine monuments, and Lenoir in particular began to classify the differences between styles that gradually became identified as “Byzantine”, “Latin”, and “Romanesque”.22 While there is not sufficient space here to discuss the influence that Byzantine forms had on French architecture, interior church decoration at mid-century clearly shows the renewed interest in those forms. The churches just examined, Saint-Vincent-de-Paul and Saint Martin d’Ainay, reflect an interest in Byzantine forms on the part of both the artists and their patrons. It is certainly possible that artists like Picot and Flandrin encountered Byzantine monuments in their travels to Italy, especially in Rome, Ravenna, and Venice. However, a more plausible scenario is that nineteenth-century French artists discovered Byzantine monuments in the pages of illustrated texts. In the nineteenth century many scholarly works were published on Byzantine subjects.23 Many of these publications often included engravings that illustrated works considered at that time to be major Byzantine monuments.24 If engravings were the primary means by which artists in nineteenth-century Europe experienced Byzantine art, the way in which the engravers “interpreted” Byzantine forms would be particularly important. Several examples illustrate the point that the engravings, representations in themselves, often slightly altered the characteristics of Byzantine monuments and subsequently influenced those potentially using them as models. For instance, an engraving of a sixth-century Byzantine ivory depicting the archangel Michael was published in Jules Labarte’s 1855 Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.25 When comparing the nineteenth-century engraving of the ivory (Figure 6) with the Byzantine original (Figures 7), specific differences may be observed. The engraving presents a more modeled face and head than the original

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Fig. 6: Engraving of ivory of Archangel Michael, published in Jules Labarte, Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, London: John Murray, 1855.

Fig. 7: Archangel Michael ivory panel, British Museum, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/ Art Resource, NY. [ART209481]

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Byzantine ivory. While in both images the feet seem to defy weight-bearing gravity, which arguably would be a characteristic of a bodiless angel, the original ivory seems less heavy than the engraving. In the engraving, the folds of the angel’s garments appear to add weight to the figure, making the angel seem more physical and less ephemeral than the ivory. In representing this Byzantine ivory, the nineteenth-century engraver employed a three-dimensional rendering, which, though considered standard European practice in drawing and painting, failed to capture the austerity and two-dimensionality of the medieval work. One further example also discloses the propensity of nineteenth-century artists to alter Byzantine forms. One of the most important Byzantine monuments is the image of Christ and Leo VI located in the narthex of Hagia Sophia (Figure 8). An engraving of this mosaic was first published in Wilhelm Salzenberg’s 1854 Alt-christliche Baudenkmale, which was among the first illustrated scholarly studies of the historic church (Figure 9).26 As in our comparison of the Archangel Michael, when the original mosaic in Hagia Sophia is compared with the nineteenth-century engraving specific differences are apparent. The modeling of the faces is not entirely faithful to the Byzantine example. The composition and basic layout follows closely, but the forms themselves disclose an academic style that is grounded in nineteenth-century artistic practice, which was based on Renaissance principles of perspective and foreshortening. This modification of Byzantine originals by nineteenth-century engravers may explain Flandrin’s rendering of rather full-figured bodily saints in Saint-Vincent-de-Paul. Flandrin may have used Byzantine forms when creating his saintly procession, but their lack of conformity to Byzantine standards might be explained by the artist’s use of engravings of the San Apollinare Nuovo mosaics as his model.27 As discussed above, the mosaics were well-known and often cited by nineteenth-century critics, and, presumably, had been published by that time. We have focused mainly on the mid-nineteenth century, which saw many important European publications on Byzantine monuments. However, a much stronger interest in Byzantine art existed at the end of the century, especially in France. For instance, in 1883, Charles Bayet published one of the earliest treatises on Byzantine art, simply titled L’art byzantin.28 In 1886, Charles Diehl published Ravenne: Études d’Archéologie byzantine, which includes engravings of the art and architecture of Ravenna.29 Gustave Léon Schlumberger provided a look at Byzantine coins, weights, seals, ivories, and icons in his 1895 Mélanges d’archéologie byzantine.30 By the end of the century, scholars recognized the wealth of monuments in the East and their importance and relevance to understanding the Byzantine Empire. Thus, in 1888, the French scholar Gabriel Millet began a campaign to

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Fig. 8: Christ Enthroned with Emperor Leo VI. Mosaic in narthex, Hagia Sophia, Instanbul, Turkey. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. [ART103131]

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Fig. 9: Engraving of Christ mosaic in narthex of Hagia Sophia, first published in Wilhelm Salzenberg, Alt-christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII Jahrhundert, Berlin: Ernst and Korn, 1854.

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restore the mosaics in the eleventh-century church at Daphni in Greece, one of the most important monuments from the middle Byzantine period.31 At the same time that the spirituality and mysticism of Byzantine art were being discovered through French publications, the Nabis’ search for the spiritual in art led them to various religions, including early Christianity.32 The Nabis desired to move painting away from the traditional museum product and into a more mystical realm. They were also seeking a more decorative aesthetic and thus turned away from the tradition of easel painting.33 Other artists working in the late nineteenth century, such as Puvis de Chavannes, Monet, and Gauguin, also favored this decorative aesthetic. Additionally, the Nabis felt that the essence of art was truly spiritual, or, as Jan Verkade, one of their members, said, “without religion, there is no really great art, and all great art has stood at the service of religion.”34 As artists, the Nabis admired and endeavored to emulate the so-called primitif artists of the Middle Ages, a period of art that was viewed at this time as stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire to the start of the Italian Renaissance.35 Verkade’s search for the spiritual in art certainly seems to resonate in a comparison of his works with medieval forms, particularly those from the Early Christian and Byzantine periods. For instance, Verkade’s undated gouache painting of the Virgin and Child 36 bears a remarkable similarity to a seventh-century Byzantine icon of the same subject from Santa Maria Antiqua (Figure 10). Both representations of the Virgin include flat, wide, almond-shaped eyes, as well as long, abstract noses that lead to small, pursed lips. The size and shape of the halos is also similar in both examples. It is possible that the painters among the Nabis had first-hand knowledge of icons, perhaps even collections of them, since Paul Ranson often referred to their paintings as “icons.”37 Other members of the Nabis had similar religious longings, and an examination of their art would suggest that they too found inspiration in Byzantine art. The idea of the unification of art and religion, as well as an interest in icons, can be seen in the art of Mögens Ballin, a painter from Copenhagen.38 Now in a private collection, Ballin’s self-portrait of 1892 is particularly evocative of spiritual and medieval emphasis, for in it the artist portrays himself in a way that mimics the traditional formula of the Byzantine icon.39 This work, like most authentic icons, features a bust-length portrait completed in gouache on a gilded gold background. Traces of the date 1892 and some indistinguishable letters emulate the inscriptions found on Byzantine icons. The flatness and frontality of the presentation and the deep, wide, and penetrating eyes also reveal Ballin’s familiarity with the traditional Byzantine medium. Finally, Ballin’s self-portrait appears to be crowned with a halo, though this in itself was not

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Fig. 10: Icon of Madonna and Child, S. Francesca Romana, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY. [ART82071]

wholly unusual, as other members of the Nabis were sometimes depicted with halos.40 The formal elements of gold background, frontality, and bust-length format suggest comparisons to Byzantine icons such as the sixth-century icon of Saints Sergius and Bacchus (Figure 11).41 Ballin’s self-portrait seems to modernize the Byzantine icon, with a tie and Western dress replacing the antique robes of these two early Christian saints. But apart from the clothing, Ballin’s self-portrait seems so Byzantine that one wonders if he

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Fig. 11: Sts. Sergius and Bacchus Icon, Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art. [DSC05328]

might have been looking at an actual icon, or perhaps a representation of one, when he was completing this work. And, in fact, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Porphyry Uspensky brought the icon of Sts. Sergius and Bacchus from its original location at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai to the Ecclesiastical Academy of Kiev, where engravings of it were published by Uspensky and circulated throughout Europe.42 An overall interest in medievalism, particularly as it related to the visual arts, took shape in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Medieval culture influenced poets such as Paul Verlaine,43 as can be seen in his poem Sagesse, which was illustrated by the Nabis artist Maurice Denis.44 As this study has shown, artists were similarly affected by Byzantine art. The interest in Byzantine forms no doubt shifted from mid-century to late century, and artists from these two distinct periods were undoubtedly drawn to different aspects of the ancient eastern Empire.45 Flandrin and Picot, working at mid-century, were clearly influenced by the reproductions, or perhaps the actual monuments, of Byzantine art, which can be seen in their use of gold backgrounds, painting techniques to simulate mosaics, and repetition of iconographic forms such as Christ the Pantocrator. At the end of the century, the Nabis, in their search for the spiritual in art, were drawn to medieval art in general, and it would seem from the examples by Verkade

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and Ballin, to Byzantine art specifically. While scholars have focused on the nationalistic pride that the nineteenth-century French felt towards the western European Middle Ages, it would appear that the eastern Byzantine medieval world held equal fascination for these artists.

NOTES 1. Several people must be thanked for their help in bringing this article to fruition. My interest in the intersection between the nineteenth century and Byzantium began with an independent study with Anna Kulow, one of my undergraduate art-history students at McDaniel College. This was followed by work with another student, Zeynep Esendemir. Lauren Risby translated some key texts for her undergraduate Honors Project in French. My project was also greatly enhanced by ideas, questions, and comments from my colleagues Michael Marlais, Elizabeth Emery, and Laura Morowitz, as well as the anonymous reviewers for Studies in Medievalism. I would also like to thank Martine Motard-Noar, Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages at McDaniel College, for her help on several tasks. I also thank the Faculty Development Committee of McDaniel College, and specifically Trustee Christine Royer, for financial assistance in obtaining the images that are reproduced in this article. 2. French interest in the Middle Ages is explored by Elizabeth Emery and Laura Morowitz in Consuming the Past. The Medieval Revival in fin-de-siècle France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). See also Elizabeth Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 2001); Janine R. Dakyns, The Middle Ages in French Literature: 1851–1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); and Elizabeth Emery and Laurie Postlewate, ed., Medieval Saints in Late Nineteenth Century French Culture: Eight Essays (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2004). 3. The Catholic revival, as especially evident in French literature, is discussed by Richard Griffiths in The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870–1914 (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1965). 4. See Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, chapter 1: “The Middle Ages Belong to France: Nationalistic Paradigms of the Medieval,” 13–35. 5. J. B. Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (London: Phaidon, 2003), 63–65. 6. Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 145, n. 73. In this footnote Driskel states that the letter from Hittorff to Picot may be found in the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris, MSS. CP. 3636. I have not yet been able to travel to France for research, and thus have not had access to this file. For Hittorff ’s book, see Jakob-Ignaz Hittorff, Architecture moderne de la Sicile (Paris: Paul Renouard, 1835). 7. For a color reproduction of the apse mural by Picot, see Bullen, Byzantium, 64, fig. 48.

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8. Hittorff, Sicile, 59. The apse mosaic with the Pantocrator is reproduced as an engraving in plate 68. On p. 46 in Representing Belief, Driskel discusses Hittorff ’s views on the images in Monreale. 9. For more contemporary publications on the mosaics and architecture of Monreale, see Ernst Kitzinger, The Mosaics of Monreale (Palermo: S. F. Flaccovio, 1960); W. Krönig, The Cathedral of Monreale and Norman Architecture in Sicily (Palermo: S. F. Flaccovio, 1966); and Otto Demus, The Mosaics of Norman Sicily (London: Routledge and Paul, 1949), 91–177. 10. For the most recent discussion of this mosaic, see William Tronzo, The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 68–77. 11. Images of Christ seated on a throne are very common in Byzantine art. By the nineteenth century, several such images would have been known, including this one in the Cappella Palatina. There is also an image of Christ seated on a cushioned throne at the east end of the nave mosaics in San Apollinare Nuovo, which will be discussed presently. 12. Driskel, Representing Belief, 147. Driskel says specifically that “San Appolinare Nouva [sic] [. . .] this ‘source’ for Flandrin’s murals was recognized immediately by most critics of the project even if they did not discuss the problem of [. . .] whether the mosaics at Ravenna were ‘Byzantine’ or not.” Driskel, however, does not list specific critics or their publications. 13. For a history of Hippolyte Flandrin’s travels, see J. Foucart, ed., Hippolyte, Auguste et Paul Flandrin, Une Fraternité picturale au XIXe siècle, exhib. cat. (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1984). 14. Critics were not unanimous in their admiration for Byzantine-inspired French art. For instance, Hippolyte Taine described the San Apollinare Nuovo mosaics as “the bastardization of the human figure that goes far beyond the ineptitude of the mosaicist,” in Hippolyte Taine, Voyage en Italie, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette et cie, 1866), 1:270. While certainly not complimentary, this quotation does indicate that Byzantine art was known in the nineteenth century and embraced by some while reviled by others. 15. For a color reproduction of Flandrin’s apse mural in Saint-Martin-d’Ainay, see Bullen, Byzantium, 81, fig. 58. 16. Driskel, Representing Belief, 148. 17. Driskel, Representing Belief, 148, n. 78. Driskel notes that Questel’s letter of intent is filed in the Archives de la Commission des monuments historiques, Dossier 1112. I have not been able to travel to France and access this report. 18. Driskel has noted that the image of Christ in Saints Cosmas and Damian influenced Ingres, especially his Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, a painting dated to 1820. See Michael Paul Driskel, “Icon and Narrative in the Art of Ingres,” Arts Magazine 56 (1981): 100–07, esp. 102–03 and fig. 8. 19. A good introduction to Byzantine historiography may be found in A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire (Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 3–42. 20. Vasiliev, History, 4. 21. Vasiliev, History, 4–5. See also Jean-Michel Spieser, “Du Cange and

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Byzantium,” in Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys, ed., Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium Through British Eyes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 199–210. Du Cange is also referenced numerous times in Marie-France Auzépy and Jean-Pierre Grélois, ed., Byzance Retrouvée. Érudits et voyageurs français (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2001). 22. Lenoir is discussed in Barry Bergdoll’s Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), and Bergdoll’s “ ‘The Synthesis of All I Have Seen’: The Architecture of Edmund Duthoit (1834–89),” in Robin Middleton, ed., The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth-Century French Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 217–49. For the best summation of the interest in Byzantine architecture in nineteenth-century France, see Robert S. Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850–1950 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 45–50. 23. Nineteenth-century studies on Byzantine art in French with reproductions include, among others: André Couchaud, Choix d’églises Byzantine en Grèce (Paris: Didron, 1842); Charles Bayet, Recherches pour servir à l’histoire de la peinture et de la sculpture chrétienne en Orient avant la querelle des iconoclasts (Paris: E. Thorin, 1879); Charles Bayet, L’art byzantin (Paris: Ancienne Maison Quantin LibrariesImprimeries Réunies, 1883); and Charles Diehl, Ravenne: Études d’archéologie byzantine par Charles Diehl (Paris: J. Rouam, 1886). 24. Later scholarship has changed the attribution of a few works from Byzantine to Early Christian, or, in some cases, to other periods in the medieval world. However, many works called “Byzantine” in the nineteenth century have retained this attribution into modern times. 25. Jules Labarte, Handbook of the Arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (London: John Murray, 1855), 12–13, fig. 7. 26. Wilhelm Salzenberg, Alt-christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ernst and Korn, 1854). 27. This must stay conjecture, however, as I have been unable to find a contemporary publication that included engraving of the mosaics from San Apollinare in Nuovo. They are reproduced on p. 19 in Diehl’s Ravenne, but this publication dates to 1886, well after Flandrin completed his nave murals in Saint-Vincentde-Paul. 28. See n. 23. 29. See n. 23. 30. Gustave Léon Schlumberger, Mélanges d’Archéologie Byzantine (Paris, E. Leroux, 1895). 31. His crusade to restore the mosaics eventually led him to publish the first monograph on the church and its mosaics: Gabriel Millet, Le monastère de Daphni (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899). Millet’s interest in the renovations at Daphni are discussed in Haris Kalligas’s “Twin Reflections of a Byzantine City: Monemvasia as seen by Robert Weir Schultz and Sidney H. Barnsley in 1890,” in Cormack and Jeffreys, Through the Looking Glass, 23–44. For information on Daphni itself, including information on the mosaic decoration, see R. Janin, Les églises et les monastères des grandes centres byzantins (Paris: Institut français d’études byzantines, 1975), 311–13; B.K. Panagopoulos, Cistercian and Mendicant Monasteries in

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Medieval Greece (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1979), 56–62; and Doula Mouriki, “Stylistic Trends in Monumental Painting of Greece during the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34–35 (1980–81): 94–98. 32. For more information on the Nabis, see Claire Frèches-Thory and Ursula Perruchi-Petri, Nabis 1888–1900 (Zurich Künsthaus and Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 1993); C. Frèches-Thory and Antoine Terrasse, ed., The Nabis. Bonnard, Vuillard, and Their Circle (New York: Abrams, 1991); George Mauner, “The Nabis, their History and their Art” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1978); and Agnès Humbert, Les Nabis et leur époque (Geneva: P. Cailler, 1954). 33. Several exhibitions have presented the decorative aesthetic at the end of the nineteenth century, as can be seen from the following catalogs: Frèches-Thory and Perruchi-Petri, Nabis: 1888–1900; Gloria Grooms, Beyond the Easel: Decorative Painting by Bonnard, Vuillard, Denis, and Roussel, 1890–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and Aimée Brown Price, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), which is an excellent exhibition catalogue and devotes a great deal of attention to Puvis’ views on the decorative aesthetic. 34. Dom Wilibrord (Jan) Verkade, Yesterdays of an Artist-Monk, trans. John L. Stoddard (New York and London: P. J. Kennedy and Sons, 1930), 89. His search for the spiritual dimension in art also led to his eventual conversion to Catholicism and subsequent vows to become a monk and priest. 35. The developing interest in the primitives in the late nineteenth century in France is discussed by Emery and Morowitz, Consuming the Past, chapter 2: “Packaging the Primitifs: The Medieval Artist, the Neo-Primitif and the Art Market,” 37–60. Laura Morowitz goes on to develop this theme further in her article “Medievalism, Classicism, and Nationalism: The Appropriation of the French Primitifs in Turn-of-the-Century France,” in June Hargrove and Neil McWilliam, ed., Nationalism and French Visual Culture, 1870–1914 (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 2003), 225–41. 36. A reproduction of Verkade’s Virgin with Child may be found in Caroline Boyle-Turner, Jan Verkade: Hollandse volgeling van Gauguin (Zwolle: Waanders, 1989), 135, fig. 50. 37. Mauner, Nabis, 32. On the Nabis’ interest in medieval art, see also Laura Morowitz, “Consuming the Past: The Nabis and French Medieval Art” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996). For instance, Morowitz notes on p. 119 that the Nabis “often emulated the ‘timeless’ quality of icons.” 38. Upon arriving in Paris in 1889, Ballin met Paul Sérusier, one of the leaders of the Nabis who soon introduced the newcomer to the rest of the group. The Nabis’ influence on Ballin is obvious when one examines his work, though he is not usually considered a founding member. 39. For a reproduction of Ballin’s Self-Portrait, see Boyle-Turner, Verkade, 135, fig. 51. 40. A good example is Paul Sérusier’s 1890 portrait of Paul Ranson, who is shown with a red halo. A color reproduction may be found in Frèches-Thory and Perruchi-Petri, Nabis, 252, fig. 107. For more on this image see Caroline Boyle-Turner, Paul Sérusier (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), 39–41. 41. For the most recent color reproduction of this icon, see the exhibition

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catalogue Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2006), cat. entry no. 3, with full bibliography. 42. In addition to Uspensky’s publication, the Saints Sergius and Bacchus icon was reproduced at the end of the nineteenth century in Josef Strzygowski’s Byzantinische Denkmäler, 3 vols. (Vienna: Mechitharisten-Congregation in Wien, 1891), 1:117, 120–22. Further bibliographic entries may be found in Kurt Weitzmann, The Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai, the Icons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 28. The icon is also reproduced in Nelson and Collins, Holy Image, Hallowed Ground. 43. Paul Verlaine’s importance in the context of the Catholic revival in French literature is discussed by Griffiths in Revolution, and by Michael Marlais in Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Siècle Parisian Art Criticism (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). Verlaine is discussed in various contexts by Emery and Morowitz in Consuming the Past. 44. For more on Denis’ illustrations, see Jacques Guignard, “Les livres illustrés de Maurice Denis,” Le Portique 4 (1946): 49–71. Denis’ illustrations are also discussed by Emery and Morowitz in Consuming the Past, 54–55, fig. 2.7. 45. Further study is needed to determine how the French at mid- and late century defined “Byzantine”, and why it resonated with them. This project will continue with that question in mind. In particular, more work can be done on the influence of Byzantine art on other late nineteenth-century artists such as Puvis de Chavannes, Paul Sérusier, and Charles Filiger. It is hoped that further research into the art of these and other late nineteenth-century artists will help to determine in more depth the reasons why the Byzantine style held special significance at that time.

“I Am Weary of That Foolish Tale”: Yeats’s Revision of Tennyson’s Idylls and Ideals in “Time and the Witch Vivien” Chene Heady William Butler Yeats’s primary contribution to Arthuriana is his early poem “Time and the Witch Vivien” from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). Yeats’s poem explicitly references Tennyson’s idyll “Merlin and Vivien” and purports to relate what happened to Vivien after she imprisoned Merlin. The work can thus fairly be said to constitute a sequel to “Merlin and Vivien.” As “Time and the Witch Vivien” opens, the narcissistic Vivien is contemplating her own beauty and her magical powers but is interrupted by a sound upon her threshold: the approach of Father Time. Vivien mistakes Father Time for an elderly peddler and lets him into her chamber. Upon realizing the identity of her visitor, Vivien attempts to obtain his hourglass, the possession of which would literally allow her to stop time. Time refuses to sell the hourglass but wagers it in a game of dice against Vivien. Time defeats Vivien first at dice and then at chess. Immediately upon her second defeat, Vivien dies, having paid the price for playing against Time. In his quest to construct his identity as a distinctively Irish poet, Yeats from 1895 omitted this explicitly Tennysonian poem from his collected works.1 Perhaps as a result of this omission, the work has escaped critical attention almost entirely. However, for the original readers of his first book of poems, Yeats’s revisionist sequel to Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” was one of his central works. Yeats carefully followed the reception of his first book and noted that in the twenty-two reviews of the volume he had read, “Time and the Witch Vivien” was, after the title poem, the work most praised.2 Yeats’s unexpected contribution to the Arthur myth or “Matter of Britain” deserves scholarly study, both as a milestone in his development as an Irish poet and as a fascinating revision of Victorian neo-medievalism. In “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats critiques the British Empire by Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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rewriting its poet laureate. His Vivien is heroic in that she refuses to accept the limitations of mortality, but, entrapped in her own materialist, capitalist paradigm, she is doomed to fail in her quest to defeat Time and seize eternity. Yeats foils Vivien with the more successful Irish questers after eternity, Oisin and the Stolen Child, the subjects of the preceding and subsequent poems in the volume, to make his polemical point that while a materialistic English literature can only die, a spiritual Irish literature might attain eternity. The Oxymoron of Irish Arthuriana Although in “Time and the Witch Vivien” Yeats is directly grappling with Tennyson’s poetic legacy, his literary relationship with the Victorian poet laureate has rarely been discussed. Gary Sloan, one of the most insightful critics on the subject, asserted in 1978 that Tennyson’s “considerable influence on the early Yeats has been virtually ignored,” and the observation still holds.3 Yeats’s early essays, however, suggest that he sought to define his poetic identity against, and in relation to, Tennysonian Arthuriana. Yeats’s second published essay, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II” (1886), lays out both a critique of Tennysonian Arthuriana and, implicitly, the conditions under which an Irish author might write in this genre. On the face of it, Yeats seems in this essay to assert that no Irish poet should write Arthuriana. He mocks “the most cultivated of Irish readers” for their desire to “be servile to English notions” and suggests that the Irish taste for tales “of Arthur and of Guinevere” best illustrates this tendency.4 Moreover, although by 1897 he would come to affirm the Celtic origins of at least the Grail legend,5 Yeats in 1886 held Arthur to be a distinctively and quintessentially English myth. Since Yeats’s early poetic theory is based in large part on nationalistic ideas of race, his identification of Arthur with Englishness implies that Irish authors cannot legitimately write Arthuriana. The early Yeats admires Arthurian myth and grants it a place alongside “the Indian; the Homeric; the Charlemagnic; the Spanish [. . .]; the Scandinavian; and the Irish” myths in his list of “the seven great cycles of legends” that are the “seven great fountains” of “the garden of the world’s imagination.”6 Through these timeless myths, Yeats suggests, “the poets of the earth” can find “the truth about nature and man” and escape from the daily “world of mere shadow and dream” in which they find themselves.7 However, since Yeats holds each of these myths to be the organic product of the national character of the country that produced it, “the voice of some race celebrating itself,” the Arthur myth is logically the property of the English.8 For the early Yeats, it seems, the Irish poet retelling the Arthur story can only be slavishly imitating his imperial masters; the Irish poet who would

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write with mythic power must retell ancient Irish legends. Yeats’s first two published essays are written in praise of the minor Irish writer Sir Samuel Ferguson, who, although he explicitly disassociated himself from the Irish nationalist movement, “went back to the Irish cycle” for poetic subject matter and “sought to lay the foundation of a literature for Ireland that should be in every way characteristic and national.”9 The job of the true Irish poet, Yeats concludes, is to be thoroughly Celtic, and thereby to “restor[e] to our fields and rivers their epic interest.”10 Ferguson, Yeats suggests, was “the greatest poet Ireland has produced because the most central and most Celtic” and was rejected by the reviewers precisely because he chose not to write “of Arthur and of Guinevere.”11 Here we are faced with a paradox. If for the early Yeats the Arthur story is the rightful property of English authors, and the primary duty of the Irish poet is to retell Irish legends, then Yeatsian Arthuriana is an oxymoron and “Time and the Witch Vivien” ought not to exist. The poem’s principal critics, David Clark and Rosalind Clark, account for this difficulty by means of chronology; Yeats finished the poem (as part of his longer play Vivien and Time) in January 1884 and became devoted to Irish subject matter only in the second half of that year.12 However, both Yeats’s later revision of the poem for inclusion in his deliberately nationalistic first book and its prominent place as the second poem in that volume suggest that, despite his strictures of 1886, Yeats in 1889 still felt that an Irish Arthuriana was possible, that the second poem in The Wanderings of Oisin did not conceptually negate the titular opening poem. In the same early essay in which Yeats mocks the Irish taste for Arthuriana, he offers a more specific critique of Tennyson, a critique that can also serve as the logical justification for “Time and the Witch Vivien.” Yeats praises the “radiant words” of the Idylls of the King and lauds the “excellence” of the work but suggests that Tennyson’s characters are artistically compromised by his national and class biases. Yeats sarcastically refers to “Lord Tennyson’s ideal women” as “Girton girls” and suggests that they “will never find a flawless sympathy outside the upper English middle classes.”13 For Yeats, the Idylls of the King is not a timeless myth but the ultimate fantasy of the English acquisitive classes. In “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats poetically enacts this critique of Tennysonian Arthuriana by narrating the least ideal of Tennyson’s women. Arthuriana, it seems, can find a place in Yeats’s vision of Irish literature precisely because of its English origin; Irish Arthuriana is allowable precisely as a critique of English literature’s highest ideal, as an account of how England has distorted even its own foundational myth.

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Tennyson and the Witch Vivien This theoretical justification for Yeatsian Arthuriana may also help to explain one otherwise baffling element of “Time and the Witch Vivien”: its explicit Tennysonian references. Although the contemporary reviewers of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems noted Tennyson’s apparent influence on the volume,14 Yeats typically represses or erases Tennysonian traces in his work. As Martin McKinsey has noted, one of the reasons Yeats rewrote “The Wanderings of Oisin” so many times over the course of his career was to remove the “Tennysonian echoes” from the poem.15 However, in “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats seems, quite uncharacteristically, to be at pains to emphasize his work’s literary dependence on Tennyson. Marion WynneDavies has referred to Yeats’s “directed indebtedness to Tennyson” in this poem,16 and Clark and Clark deem it “almost a sequel” to “Merlin and Vivien,”17 but even these strong observations may understate the case. In their introduction to the only major collection of theoretical articles on the subject, Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg define a sequel as a “chronological extension of a narrative [. . .] that was originally presented as closed and complete in itself.”18 If Budra and Schellenberg’s definition of the sequel holds, “Time and the Witch Vivien,” which both insistently references “Vivien and Time” and is set chronologically subsequent to Vivien’s last appearance in the Idylls of the King, must be read as a sequel to Tennyson’s work. Vivien’s name is itself sufficient to establish an intertextual relation between these poems. Prior to Yeats, only Arnold and Tennyson had named the sorceress who ensnares Merlin Vivien/Vivian, rather than the traditional Nimue or Nenive.19 Since Arnold spells Vivian with an “a”, Vivien’s name is itself a clear Tennysonian reference. Yeats also directly references Tennyson when Time warns Vivien, “No taste have I for slumber ‘neath an oak.”20 With the sole exception of Tennyson, all Arthurian literature prior to Yeats placed the captured Merlin either in a hawthorne tree (as in Arnold and Swinburne) or a cave (as in Malory).21 Tennyson’s Vivien is also the only precedent for the character notes of Yeats’s Vivien: an evil, conniving plotter of misdeeds.22 In fact, as Yeats revised “Time and the Witch Vivien” for publication, he carefully increased its dependence on Tennyson. Yeats initially wrote his exchange between Vivien and Father Time as a short scene in his first verse play, Vivien and Time, which was written between 1882 and 1884 but published only posthumously. While Vivien and Time does include the Tennysonian parallels I have related, it contextualizes these parallels as part of the play’s larger narrative, in which Vivien, identified in the Dramatis Personae as “the Goblin Queen,” is thwarted in her love for the poet Clarin

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by the beautiful Asphodel. Vivien forces Clarin to judge whether she or Asphodel is more beautiful. Clarin declares for Asphodel, a decision that both slights Vivien and makes her aware of his love for Asphodel. Vivien revenges herself on both Asphodel and Clarin by casting Asphodel into a deep sleep, from which she will awaken to wander the earth in misery only after Clarin has died. Clarin raises a fairy army to fight Vivien, but Vivien dies at the hands of Time before his army storms the castle. He arrives to find Vivien dead and immediately thereafter dies himself. The play ends with Asphodel awakening to begin her wanderings, since Vivien’s spell remains effectual after her death. In this play, Vivien essentially seems the wicked queen of Snow White and even asks a mirror on the wall who is the fairest of all;23 though this Vivien has imprisoned Merlin, she does not otherwise seem Arthurian, much less Tennysonian. By detaching Vivien’s death scene from its original context as “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats preserves the work’s Tennysonian parallels, while eliminating the alternative mythic narrative of Clarin and Asphodel. Without this alternative mythic structure, the late Victorian readers of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems would naturally read a fragmentary poem replete with Tennysonian echoes in terms of Tennyson’s popular narrative.24 Furthermore, by changing the poem’s title to “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats renders it grammatically parallel to “Merlin and Vivien,” a parallelism that also suggests that the two works should be read in tandem. Yeats’s revisions may even construct a certain parallelism between the basic structure of his poem and Tennyson’s. By extracting Vivien’s conflict with Father Time from the rest of his play, Yeats turns his dramatic poem into a philosophical dialogue or debate, the literary form that dominates Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien.” The rhetorical consequences of this deliberate recasting of the poem as a Tennysonian sequel have never been explored by critics, but they are the direct result of Yeats’s final revisions of the work for publication, and thus constitute the conditions under which he considered the poem worthy of publication. Yeats insists that the poem be read in a Tennysonian context, and it is in this context that we can best understand its meaning. Why Time Defeats Vivien The basic plot of Yeats’s “Time and the Witch Vivien” is rather simple: Vivien is forced to replay her conflict with Merlin as a battle with another old, bearded man, Father Time, and, this time, loses. Yeats’s Vivien is both charismatic and hyperbolically self-absorbed, and the complexities of her character give this brief scene its primary narrative interest. In certain aspects of her character, Vivien is a Yeatsian hero, one who follows a single passion

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with a more than human intensity. Tennyson attributes Vivien’s victory over Merlin to the fact that Merlin “waver’d” in his thoughts and purposes, while Vivien was “fixt in her will,” and this fixity of will becomes one of the primary character traits of Yeats’s Vivien.25 In an early draft of “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Vivien says that her “soul grows/ The image of the mighty viewless ones,” the gods, because it has undergone a “sweet metamorphosis/ To one great throbbing string that throbbing calls/ Only one wild word [. . .]/ Power.”26 She contrasts with herself “the fleeting race/ Of men who bend to every sudden blast/ Of joy or grief or scorn”; for her own part, her will honed to one fine point, she “shall not bend.”27 Vivien’s passionate refusal of human limits carries over into the published version of the poem, in which she refuses to buy Time’s “Mansions of memories and mellow thoughts” (21), vows “I cannot go into the bloodless land/ Among the whimpering ghosts” (67–68), and defiantly challenges Time himself. In this aspect of her character, Vivien, in the second poem in The Wanderings of Oisin, parallels the traits of the Yeatsian hero Oisin, who is similarly single-minded and similarly defies mortality. Oisin’s lament that “Light is man’s love, and lighter is man’s rage-/ His purpose drifts away” and proud refusal (in Niamh’s words) to “turn to [his] rest” could be Vivien’s as well.28 The other primary character trait of Yeats’s Vivien is her complete and utter narcissism.29 Although in “The Lady of Shalott” Tennyson had composed one of the most important Victorian analyses of artistic narcissism, his Vivien contains just a hint of narcissism. She is compared to a cat, one of the primary Freudian symbols of narcissism,30 and passionately hates being the object of laughter (173–75, 150–65). Again, Yeats takes a character trait from Tennyson’s carefully rounded, all-too-human Vivien, and magnifies it to mythic proportions. Yeats’s Vivien, quite plainly, is Narcissus. As the poem opens, she is worshipping her own reflection in a body of water, rhetorically asking: Where moves there any beautiful as I, Save, with the little golden greedy carp, Gold unto gold, a gleam in its long hair, My image yonder. (1–4) This picture of a literally narcissistic Vivien is both the reader’s first vision of Vivien, and a new addition to the poem, present in Yeats’s final revisions but not in the original play. Like Lilith, one of the most famous narcissists in literature and a possible source for Tennyson’s Vivien,31 Yeats’s Vivien worships her own beauty and denies the forces of change and birth, complaining that she is “weary of ” the “foolish tale” of Adam and Eve (33). Vivien, as the poem’s title emphasizes, is a “witch,” a practitioner in magic,

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the cultural practice that Freud considered to best embody the narcissistic fantasy of the omnipotence of thoughts.32 Although Yeats had not yet read Freud at this point, Vivien’s magic does seem to consist particularly in the omnipotence of her thoughts. She exultantly declares that no one possesses “equal power in spells and secret rites” to herself and that, consequently, “The proudest or most coy of spirit things,/ Hide where we will, [. . .]/ Obeys” (7–9). Supernature itself is subject to her whims. Vivien’s quest, like that of the Freudian narcissist, is for self-enclosed stasis, a world created by her thoughts, where she alone exists. Vivien lives in a single “marble-flagged, pillared room” and keeps magical “sentries” who let her know if any force is attempting to penetrate her barriers (10). Ironically, the end result of Vivien’s magic powers has been simply her own entombment. Like Malory’s Merlin, or the victim of the spell of “woven paces” and “waving arms” in Tennyson, who imagines himself to be “Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower,/ From which was no escape forevermore” (Tennyson 205, 207–08), she is encased in stone, shut off from the world forever. The primary action of the poem is triggered by Time’s evasion of her barriers against the outside world, as Vivien dismisses her initial fears that a “fierce magician” has passed her sentries, and hence makes no effort to resist the entrance of the “little light old man” who turns out to be Father Time (9, 13). Although she embodies many traits of the Yeatsian hero, Vivien falls short of, and fundamentally perverts, the Yeatsian ideal in her materialism, a vice that Yeats considered to be the fatal flaw of both Tennyson as an individual and England as a country. In Yeats’s mature work, the devouring witch is sometimes a figure for “materialistic success,”33 and the witch Vivien’s spiritual power is fatally limited by her materialism. She is passionately single-minded, but this passion finds its primary outlet in powerhungry plotting that she pictures in terms of capitalist economics. Tennyson has Merlin describe Vivien as a maker of “fine plots” (Tennyson 818) and casts her as a quester for power. Both aspects are heightened in Yeats’s Vivien, who worships power, plans “war plots, peace plots, love plots – every side,” and declares, quite accurately, “Should my plots fail I’d die” (Yeats 52, 66). Power and control, literally, are life for Vivien. In keeping with her bent towards the material and the tangible, Vivien expresses her drive for power in economic terms. She opens her conflict with Time in economic language, saying that she wants to “buy” of him and insisting that they get down “to business” (Yeats 17, 19). She is angered when Time refuses to play according to the rules of supply and demand and rejects her offer of currency in exchange for control over the passage of time, insisting instead, “My glass I will not sell” (28). Vivien’s own economics are another expression of her narcissistic character. As befits, in Freudian terms, one turned to the self and

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away from the object world, she is pictured as a miser.34 She is terribly afraid of becoming poor and mocks Time precisely as “The wrinkled squanderer of human wealth” (16). Vivien’s quest for stasis and turn toward the material make her conflict with Time inevitable and render her particularly vulnerable to his onslaughts. Time, as Yeats depicts him, is the antithesis of stasis, a force of pure action and change. As he tells Vivien, “Lady, I nor rest nor sit” (18). Like Tennyson’s Merlin before him, he infuriates the narcissistic Vivien by laughing at her and, further, assures her that he “laugh[s] the last always” (25). Vivien sees her conflict with Time as a logical inevitability but construes this inevitability optimistically. If she can conquer Time, she will have eliminated the last, and most serious, threat to her narcissism. Freud notes that the immortality of the ego is both the fundamental illusion of the narcissist and the point at which the narcissist’s illusions are most apt to be punctured by reality.35 Time alone can pierce Vivien’s defenses; however, by the same token, if Vivien were to defeat Time, she would have removed the last real threat to her quest for permanent stasis. As Vivien reflects during her culminating chess match against Time: Thus play we first with pawns, poor things and weak; And then the great ones come, and last the king. So men in life and I in magic play; First dreams, and goblins, and the lesser sprites, And now with Father Time I’m face to face. (53–57) Vivien’s battle with Time is the primary action of the poem. While Time is not willing to sell his powers, he is willing to compete in games of chance or skill for them. Vivien first plays dice with Time for his hourglass, for if she possessed the hourglass, she would be able to stop Time. Twice in Yeats’s bracketed stage directions in this dramatic poem Vivien “lays the hour-glass on its side,” desperately attempting to halt the passage of time, only to have Time right the glass again (26–27, 49). Vivien loses the game of dice and then challenges Time to a rematch, a game of chess, the rewards for which would be success in her plots (for Vivien, life itself ) and the penalty for which, Time stipulates, would be death. The poem’s ending, through a series of images added in Yeats’s final revision of the work for publication, recapitulates its plot and accentuates its themes. Vivien has difficulty concentrating during the chess battle with Time. She is bothered by “how swift” the moves of Time are and contrasts them with “how still it is” in her room, a comparison that recalls the poem’s fundamental conflict between change and stasis (61–62). In this stillness, Vivien can hear even “the carp” in her fountain and “a bird walk on the

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doorstep” (62, 64), echoing earlier imagery for both herself and Time. The blond-haired and ambitious Vivien has habitually admired the image of herself she sees reflected in the “golden greedy carp” in her fountain (1–2), and early in the poem, Vivien, not yet knowing who is approaching, describes her visitor as a “fierce magician [who] flies or walks/ Beyond the gateway” (9–10), language that suggests the walking bird now breaching Vivien’s doorstep. Just as Vivien notices the bird – a symbol of time – Time puts her in check and soon thereafter checkmates her. Upon being checkmated, Vivien cries out and dies. Vivien’s passion has succumbed to time and mortality. In her quest for stasis, her materialism has caused her to fare perhaps worse than Merlin, for he, if also enclosed in literal or figurative stone, is invulnerable to time. Why Oisin and The Stolen Child Defeat Time Although in my interpretation Vivien’s materialism is the direct cause of her death, no other critic of “Time and the Witch Vivien” has interpreted the poem in this manner. And my analysis may seem to violate the basic principle of Occam’s Razor, for since, in the end, all human beings die at the hands of Time, it may seem unnecessary to look beyond Time himself to find the cause of Vivien’s demise. However, a poem about a witch written by W. B. Yeats may not be the most apt place to apply Occam’s Razor, and, particularly in his early years, Yeats often quarreled with Time and refused to accept its finality. Indeed, in the opening poems of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, Yeats calls the all-conquering power of time into question, and, as Paul Kirschner notes, the poetry of the early Yeats is marked by the theme of “revolt” against time.36 As Hugh Kenner and other critics have suggested, for Yeats the proper unit of meaning is not the individual poem but the poetic volume, since Yeats carefully ordered the succession of poems to achieve a precise effect.37 In The Wanderings of Oisin, “Time and the Witch Vivien” – a failed Arthurian quest for immortality – is sandwiched between more successful – and more Irish – quests for the same goal.38 In the poem preceding “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Oisin lives for 300 years and then goes to battle the devils in hell. In the poem following it, the Stolen Child leaves the mortal world, presumably to live with the fairies forever. In context, Vivien stands out precisely for her singular failure to achieve immortality – she even dies young – and the causes of this failure are central to the meaning of the poem. As Yeats himself observed when placing The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems together as a volume, “it [the book as a whole] is almost all a flight into fairy land, from the real world, and a summons to that flight.”39 To understand Vivien’s failure to escape the material world, we must carefully compare her efforts with those of Yeats’s more successful spiritual escapees.

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Yeats’s Oisin conquers Time because, like Vivien, he pursues his passions single-mindedly, but, unlike Vivien, he does so without regard for material consequences. In the first section of “The Wanderings of Oisin,” the goddess Niamh falls in love with the mortal warrior Oisin and takes him from this earth. In Tir-nan-Og, the land of the immortals, Oisin learns that the immortals have rejected both social order and pragmatics in favor of spontaneity and joy and hence are invulnerable to “change and death” and, especially, Time.40 The immortals, who “have known neither law nor rule,” need not “feel the clutches/ Of grievous Time on his old crutches.”41 The immortals – and Oisin himself, who suggests that he has “pluck[ed] the wings of Time”42 – are implicitly foiled here with Vivien; they are marked precisely by their inability to be conquered by Father Time. Like the immortals, Oisin defeats mortality since he throws himself fully and passionately into everything he does, without regard to consequence. He spends 100 years fighting, feasting, and dreaming, and rejoices in them all. In exact opposition to Vivien, Oisin rejects the temptation to consign himself to any one place, even paradise, or any one fate, even stasis; his is an unappeasable “dynamism.”43 He transcends time by being more active and more dynamic than time itself. Missing his comrades – the Fenians – Oisin returns to earth and, upon contact with the soil, suddenly becomes mortal again. He loathes the mortality that has fallen upon him with his return to earth. However, he defies Saint Patrick’s attempts to convert him to a spirit of Christian resignation, as he expects soon to pass into the afterlife, either to feast with the Fenians in the Irish afterworld or to fight the devils with the Fenians in the Christian afterworld.44 In other words, Oisin, who will never “turn to [his] rest,” intends to feast or fight forever, resuming in the next world the pattern of his last 300 years of life.45 In his pursuit of passion and carelessness for consequence (“flames” and “feast” are equally welcome to him), Oisin’s restless spirit really does have the last word on both Time and St. Patrick. In this poem, as elsewhere in Yeats,46 the intensity of passion becomes the means and measure of one’s liberation from the finite. Although the “The Stolen Child” differs radically from “The Wanderings of Oisin” in style and subject matter, the two works possess significant, if easily overlooked, literary and thematic similarities. Both poems are based on distinctively Irish legendary material, although “Oisin” draws from one of the most famous myths of Irish antiquity and “The Stolen Child” draws from nineteenth-century folk tales. The plots of the poems are also roughly analogous. While Oisin is a famous mythic warrior and The Stolen Child is an anonymous peasant youth, both are seized by immortal spirits (Niamh and the fairies, respectively) and taken from this temporal world. Both characters willingly consent to this abduction. Both poems possess a certain ambivalence about the trade of the mortal for the immortal; the ending of

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“The Wanderings of Oisin” returns the poem’s protagonist to the earth, and the final stanza of “The Stolen Child” (with its quaint images of “the kettle on the hob” and the mice on “the oatmeal chest”47) evinces a nostalgia for the domestic, otherwise absent from the poem. Both poems, however, ultimately renounce the mortal in favor of the immortal, the temporal in favor of the spiritual. Oisin refuses both life on earth and St. Patrick’s religion and vows to pass into eternity, passionately feasting or fighting. Despite the famous final stanza, “The Stolen Child” ends by repeating the chorus; the Stolen Child does leave the mortal world to dance, play, feast, and steal with the fairies. His final decision and immortal destiny are not unlike Oisin’s, and the ambivalence of the final stanza is perhaps best understood in the end in terms of the opposition between the domestic and the spiritual that runs throughout much of Yeats’s early work. Yeats asserted in 1888 that “the chorus to the ‘stollen [sic] child’ sums [. . .] up” the argument of his first book.48 Vivien herself serves as the instructive antithesis of this argument. The plot of “Time and the Witch Vivien” is exactly the reverse of that of both “Oisin” and “The Stolen Child.” In the midst of her dreams of grandeur, Vivien is suddenly seized not by the immortal fairies but by the personification of the temporal, Time himself, and she is not flown off to eternity but, rather, dragged down into oblivion. In “The Wanderings of Oisin,” Yeats both explains the means by which Oisin gains true immortality and suggests the cause of Vivien’s failure at the same quest. As I have already implied, for Yeats the desire for stasis is inherently a form of materialism; only a truly dynamic spirit can conquer time. More explicitly, in Tir-nan-Og, the land of the immortals, Oisin learns that “The soul is a drop of joy afar” but that, upon falling to the earth from the heavens, the soul “To all things cried; ‘I am a slave!/ Trickling along the earth, I rave;/ In pinching ways I toil and turn.’ ”49 Vivien wishes to throw off her slavery to the earth and to things mortal, but, being both a capitalist and a materialist, she self-defeatingly imagines eternity in fixed, finite terms. To hoard money through “pinching ways” and to “toil” for material prosperity and temporal success, as does Vivien, is to be a slave to matter and, thus, to Time. Yeats’s early essay “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II” (1886) further amplifies this diagnosis of the differences between Oisin and Vivien. As I have shown, in his early essays Yeats identifies the Irish mythic cycle and the Arthurian mythic cycle, from which Oisin and Vivien are respectively derived, as two of the world’s seven great legends. Yeats writes that, through the knowledge of “great legends,” one can escape “that leprosy of the modern – tepid emotions and many aims.”50 Both Oisin and Vivien are mythic characters with intense emotions and desires, but Vivien’s materialism inherently involves her in the multiplicity of things material, as witnessed by the myriad plots upon which she stakes her very life. With her

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“many aims,” Vivien is subject to “the leprosy of the modern” and, like the Victorian literary culture that created her, cannot transcend time. Yeats and the “Witch” Tennyson When considered in its full intertextual context, “Time and the Witch Vivien” can be read as an Irish nationalist criticism of English poetry and English culture. With “The Wanderings of Oisin,” Yeats turns from his early retellings of Arthurian material to an attempt to create an Irish national myth worthy of comparison with England’s Arthuriad; indeed, Clark and Clark suggest that it is “because of this new direction [that] we find little of Arthurian subject matter in Yeats’s mature poetry and drama.”51 In his 1933 Collected Poems, Yeats himself asserted that with The Wanderings of Oisin, “my subject-matter became Irish.”52 Tellingly, in another late essay, Yeats narrates the same shift in his poetry in terms of renunciation rather than affirmation; Yeats writes that in this volume, “I turned my back on foreign themes.”53 In ways important to my argument, Martin McKinsey analyzes how the poem “The Wanderings of Oisin” poetically enacts Yeats’s critique of English culture and affirmation of Irish culture. As McKinsey notes, Yeats saw the “Anglo-Saxon soul” as being “materialistic” and “calculating” and intended “The Celtic swerve of a poem like ‘Oisin’ – aesthetic, visionary, idealistic – [. . .] to showcase the possibilities of a distinctly Irish alternative” to the ideals of English poetry and culture.54 Critics have overlooked, however, the crucial role of “Time and the Witch Vivien” in “showcasing” the “alternative” of Irish literature to English literature, the poem’s importance as a moment when Yeats “turn[s] [his] back on foreign themes.” By placing Oisin and Vivien in direct succession, Yeats is contrasting the Irish and English ideals, the Irish and English mythic worlds. All that is most noble in English culture, even Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which Yeats held to be the best Victorian epic, must fail to achieve immortality, as it is enmeshed in the plots of empire and the materialistic web of capitalism. In his obituary of Tennyson, written three years after the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, Yeats critiques Tennyson and his oeuvre in just these terms. Yeats asserts that, although Tennyson had aspirations toward the transcendent and affinities with the Romantics, he never achieved his potential literary greatness because his belief in capitalism and his belief in science stunted his poetic development. Yeats praises Tennyson’s final volume of poetry as a renunciation of these errors but suggests that, for most of Tennyson’s career, his poetry was corrupted by his “great faith in material progress” and his fearful awe before “the mere corporeal bigness of the universe.”55 Yeats asserts that Tennyson had dreamed of “that coming

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day when ‘the heavens’ would ‘fill with commerce’” and that his “spiritual” development and poetic vision had been correspondingly hampered.56 For Yeats, Tennyson, like Vivien, is a grand failure, an unsuccessful spiritual quester held back by his own materialism and capitalism. By 1895, a more self-confident Yeats would no longer feel the need to legitimate his Irish nationalist verse by critiquing Tennyson, and he would cut “Time and the Witch Vivien” from his oeuvre. Yeats allowed “Time and the Witch Vivien” to be included in the 1892 reprint of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems but omitted it from his 1895 Poems, and from every edition of his works thereafter. Interestingly, while Tennyson lived, Yeats kept the poem in print, and he suppressed it shortly after Tennyson’s death. In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats said that modern poetry begins “three years before the death of Tennyson.”57 Yeats thus dates the birth of modern poetry as literally coinciding with The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and figuratively coinciding with the death of Tennyson (1892). The metaphorical suggestion is that Yeats has killed Tennyson, and, interestingly, this chronology may also suggest the murder weapon. In “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats kills off one of Tennyson’s characters in order to metaphorically kill Tennyson, contrasting a materialistic British literature that, for all its glories, must die with a spiritual Irish literature that, for all its imperfections, might live evermore.

NOTES 1. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, “Sailing from Avalon: Yeats’s First Play, Vivien and Time,” Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 5 (1987): 1–86 (1). 2. Yeats to Katherine Tynan, March 21, 1889, in John Kelly, ed., The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1:157. 3. Gary Sloan, “Yeats, Tennyson, and ‘Innisfree’,” The Victorian Newsletter 54 (1978): 29–31 (30). The few critics who have discussed Yeats’s relation to Tennyson have generally done so in a very limited and inconclusive manner. For instance, Stephen George (“Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’,” The Explicator 52.1 [Fall 1993]: 25–26) suggests that “The Second Coming” is an inversion of Tennyson’s “The Kraken,” but stops short of claiming influence. Fred Milne (“Yeats’s ‘The Cap and Bells’: A Probable Indebtedness to Tennyson’s Maud,” Ariel 3.3 [1972]: 69–79) argues that Yeats’s “The Cap and Bells” is influenced by Tennyson’s Maud, but, again, the connection is only probable, and the direct parallels are rather loose. William Davis (“Tennyson’s ‘Merlin and Vivien’ and Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’,” Colby Library Quarterly 20 [1984]: 212–17) notes some interesting, but broad, parallels in theme and imagery between Tennyson’s “Merlin and Vivien” and “The Second Coming.”

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4. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II,” in John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 1:87–104 (89–90). 5. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 72. 6. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I,” in Frayne, Uncollected Prose, 1:81–87 (81). 7. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I,” 81. 8. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I,” 81. 9. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – I,” 82, 86. 10. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II,” 103, 89–90. 11. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II,” 103, 89, emphasis mine. 12. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 1–3. 13. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II,” 95. 14. See, for example, “A New Irish Poet,” Review of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, by William Butler Yeats, The Scots Observer, March 9, 1889, 446–47 (447). 15. Martin McKinsey, “Counter-Homericism in Yeats’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’,” in Deborah Fleming, ed., W. B. Yeats and Postcolonialism (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2001), 235–51 (238). 16. Marion Wynne-Davies, “Yeats and Arthur,” Yeats Annual 6 (1998): 134–47 (135). 17. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 51. 18. Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg, introduction to Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg, ed., Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 3–18 (7). 19. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 8, 51. 20. Yeats, “Time and the Witch Vivien,” in Richard J. Finneran, ed., The Poems: A New Edition (New York: MacMillan, 1983), 514–17 (line 31). Subsequent references are cited in text. 21. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 54. 22. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 52. 23. Yeats, Vivien and Time, in Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 16–36 (1.2.1–2). 24. See also Clark and Clark’s observation that in Yeats’s revisions of Vivien and Time into “Time and the Witch Vivien,” “References to specific settings, characters, or incidents which would have been unintelligible to readers of only the single scene were removed” (13). 25. Alfred Tennyson, “Merlin and Vivien,” in Oscar Williams, ed., Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems (New York: Signet Press, 2003), 126–52 (lines 185–86). Subsequent references in text. 26. Yeats, Vivien and Time, 2.2.5–10. 27. Yeats, Vivien and Time, 2.2.15–17, 19. 28. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” in Peter Alt and Russell Alspach, ed., The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: MacMillan Company, 1965), 1–63 (2.243–44; 3.129). Yeats obsessively revised The Wanderings of Oisin over the course of his career. Since I am looking at the poem precisely as it sheds

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light on “Time and the Witch Vivien,” a poem which Yeats printed only in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889, 1892), all references to this poem will refer to the 1889 edition of the work, as it is reprinted in the Variorum edition of Yeats’s poetry. 29. For the early Yeats, narcissism, like magic, is not necessarily a negative trait, however; in The Wanderings of Oisin the song-birds of paradise “ponde[r], in a soft vain mood/ On their own selves in the waters white” (1.182–85). 30. See Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Peter Gay, ed., The Freud Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 545–62 (555). 31. Thomas Hoberg, “Duessa or Lilith: The Two Faces of Tennyson’s Vivien,” Victorian Poetry 25.1 (Spring 1987): 17–28 (22). 32. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 541. 33. Patrick J. Keane, “Don’t (Do) Look Now: Hag-Iography and Anagnorisis in Yeats,” Yeats: An Annual 8 (1990): 166–87 (175). 34. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Gay, The Freud Reader, 584–89 (589). 35. As Gregory Eaves observes in his article “‘Reading the Glass’: Fictive Solutions to the Narcissistic Quandary in Freud and Yeats” (in Lieve Spaas, ed., Echoes of Narcissus [New York: Berghahn Books, 2000], 167–78), while Yeats and Freud come to fundamentally different solutions to the “narcissistic quandary,” their analyses of narcissism itself are in many ways compatible (172–73, 176). 36. Paul Kirschner, “Yeats and Time,” in Paul Kirschner and Alexander Stillmark, ed., Between Time and Eternity: Nine Essays on W. B. Yeats and his Contemporaries Hofmannsthal and Blok (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1992), 1–20 (1). 37. George Bornstein, “‘It is Myself that I Remake’: W. B. Yeats’s Revisions to His Early Canon,” in Judith Kennedy, ed., Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision, Motivations, and Modes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991), 41–56 (42). 38. Bornstein notes in his article “ ‘It is Myself that I Remake’ ” that The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is dominated and given coherence by the trope of the quest for immortality, by an “antinomial vacillation between the human and supernatural worlds” (43). See also Bornstein’s comment (“Introduction,” in George Bornstein, ed., The Early Poetry, 2 vols. [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], 2:4) that a primary effect of Yeats’ extraction of “Time and the Witch Vivien” from the larger play Vivien and Time is a shift in focus from a “love plot to a characteristic encounter of a human quester with his or her own mortality.” 39. Yeats to Katherine Tynan, March 14, 1888, in Kelly, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1:54. 40. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 1.316–17, 283–84, 286. 41. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 1.340, 341 a–b. 42. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 2.199. 43. Anca Vlasopolos, “The Dialogical Combat in The Wanderings of Oisin: The Shape of Things to Come,” Yeats: An Annual 6 (1988): 165–74 (172–73). On Oisin’s refusal of stasis, see also McKinsey, “Counter-Homericism,” 248. 44. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 3.201–04, 223. 45. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 3.129.

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46. See J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 121. 47. Yeats, “The Stolen Child,” in Finneran, The Poems: A New Edition, 18–19 (lines 44, 46, 48–49). 48. Yeats to Katherine Tynan, March 14, 1888, in Kelly, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1:54. 49. Yeats, “The Wanderings of Oisin,” 1.276–77, 280–82. 50. Yeats, “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson – II,” 104. 51. Clark and Clark, “Sailing from Avalon,” 50. 52. Quoted in McKinsey, “Counter-Homericism,” 235. 53. Yeats, “I Became an Author,” in Frayne, Uncollected Prose, 2:506–09 (508). 54. McKinsey, “Counter-Homericism,” 239. 55. Yeats, “The Death of Oenone,” in Frayne, Uncollected Prose, 1:251–54 (252). 56. Yeats, “The Death of Oenone,” 252, 253. 57. George Bornstein, “Last Romantic or Last Victorian: Yeats, Tennyson, and Browning,” Yeats Annual 1 (1982): 14–32 (15).

The Doughboy Comes to Chartres: Stars and Stripes and the Middle Ages1 Bruce C. Brasington Of course, all wars are relics of the ancient eras; and Armies, with which wars are waged, must, to run true to form, retain many aspects of the medieval.2 The following explores references to the Middle Ages in the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Recently digitized for the Library of Congress’s website “American Memory,” it is a fresh source for exploring the medievalism of the Great War. From poems praising Joan of Arc to didactic articles on the history of the cities the doughboys were fighting – and dying – to liberate, Stars and Stripes chronicles a distinctively American encounter with the medieval “Old World.” Stars and Stripes merits close reading by students of medievalism. It differs markedly from the elite texts examined by Paul Fussell and others since the 1970s.3 While Fussell’s thesis that the war marked a cultural divide has been criticized in recent years, notably by Jay Winter, 4 scholars have still focused their attention largely on England, not America.5 Stars and Stripes was self-consciously American; its pages also transmitted a variety of views, from official military reports to soldier’s letters and poems. Unlike the poems and novels of the literati, this soldiers’ newspaper covers both elite and popular cultures. Both enrich our understanding of how the AEF, from its commanders to the doughboys, remembered the Middle Ages.6 The American Middle Ages on the Eve of War In early twentieth-century America, the Middle Ages were susceptible to any number of interpretations. American optimists had long found both the “Dark” and “Middle” Ages useful foils for contrasting old, decadent Europe with young and vigorous America.7 Others had followed romantics who Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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encouraged medievalizing fashions in architecture and literature. Many considered the Middle Ages in racial terms, for example the “germ theory” explaining the origins of modern English and American governments in the dark forests inhabited by virile, freedom-loving Germans.8 Pessimists were drawn to Madison Grant, who warned that this American racial heritage, with its roots in both the medieval and ancient worlds, was now threatened: We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America “an asylum for the oppressed,” are sweeping our nation towards a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control, and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to “all distinctions of race, creed, or color,” the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.9 Anxious times require heroes and heroines, and no medieval figure was more suitable to prewar Americans than Joan of Arc. Her combination of womanly virtue, patriotism, and courage had attracted many admirers, for example the Prohibitionists.10 Despite America’s neutrality, sympathy for France had only heightened admiration for Saint Joan, typified by the erection of a sculpture in her honor in New York in 1915.11 After 1917, she was drafted for the Cause. The icon of noble, suffering France, she became the model soldier.12 Home-front Propaganda and the Middle Ages After April 1917, neutrality was dead. The government did not apologize for propaganda. “100 Percent Americanism” was the order of the day.13 George Creel’s Committee for Public Information rapidly developed a wide-ranging, sophisticated bureau of propaganda.14 Alongside spokesmen from industry, advertising, and myriad civic and philanthropic organizations (most famously, the “Four Minute Men”),15 we also find scholars, including the medievalist Dana Munro of Princeton,16 who, as Creel bluntly put it, could “tear the mask of civilization and modernity from the medievally minded, medievally organized Prussian militaristic state [. . .].”17 As for the “Four Minute Men,” their references to “feudalism,” an “old spirit” soon to fall before the might of American democracy, would echo in Stars and Stripes.18 The most common medieval reference in home-front propaganda was “crusader”. From the outset of American involvement, both official and popular writers delighted in comparing the AEF to the medieval armies of

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Christendom, gone East to defeat the infidel. Propaganda thus chose a high discourse that welded a romantic and Christian Middle Ages to the energy and ideals of democracy. Democracy replaced Christianity in this new crusade, as poems proclaimed doughboys “freedom’s crusaders” who “war against war.”19 Stars and Stripes From its initial publication in 1917, Stars and Stripes strove to be more than a mouthpiece for the government and army.20 Granted, there would be propaganda;21 but informed by the spirit of Progressivism and selfimprovement, the paper would also educate its audience.22 It would also provide, again within limitations, a place for the soldier/reader’s selfexpression. While there was censorship, the editorial staff – an extraordinary group that included Harold Ross, the future editor of the New Yorker – had considerable freedom.23 There were periodic clashes between the staff and the army brass over what would be published and how it would be presented. Not surprisingly, commanders were sensitive to any hint of criticism.24 There were some articles, for example President Wilson’s Labor Day speech in 1918, that had to be printed.25 But propaganda, at least in its most enthusiastic forms, was largely absent. It could only be in “small doses”; the doughboys would see through “bunk.”26 The home front might be frightened, and titillated, by lurid posters of “Huns” (another common medieval reference in propaganda), but the AEF would likely only laugh.27 Stars and Stripes was also self-consciously democratic. Given the profound class divisions existing in the AEF, with college-educated officers leading men drafted from all levels of society, this was a prudent decision if the army was to fight as a coherent force.28 Instead of columns devoted to exclusive colleges or fraternities, the paper emphasized what American men commonly enjoyed: sports and entertainment.29 There was also a great deal of slang and humor. While the brass did not always approve,30 the paper was filled with jokes, many coming from the soldiers themselves. As we shall see, these occasionally referred to the Middle Ages. The Army periodically reminded the doughboy why he was in France. Medieval subjects occasionally found their way into these reports, which were reprinted by Stars and Stripes. References to “crusade” and “crusaders” appear frequently in republished texts, either from stateside newspapers or politicians’ speeches.31 In February 1918, the paper reminded soldiers going on leave to remember: “That, like the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table – whose spiritual successor, from the nature of his task, he most certainly is – he consider himself bound ‘to hold all women as sacred.’ ”32 “Chivalric spirit” is also noted in the issue of July 12, 1918, a remarkable, even

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prescient phrase, given that the AEF would, within the week, begin the counterattack that initiated the German collapse.33 As noted above, a commonplace in civilian propaganda was that the Germans were the evil “other,” the “Huns” that had to be defeated if Christian civilization were to be saved. As various scholars have noted, for example Samuel Hynes,34 soldiers returning from the front not only found such propaganda nauseating but often developed a feeling of solidarity with the Germans, with whom they shared the “front experience.” If not exactly the “enemy,” the home front became the adversary, for its values and discourse were uninformed by experience. If American soldiers were feeling the same way after months of fighting in France, there is no trace of this disillusionment in Stars and Stripes. Of course, this comes as no surprise. As noted above, the editors, while resisting the transformation of the paper into a broadside for army propaganda, were still committed to maintaining morale. There is evidence, moreover, that at least some soldiers still believed in the grotesque depiction of the German. The Germans could be the harbingers of a new “Dark Ages,” as we read in October 1918: The light that came from Douai in the days of long ago/ When monks of Douai labored, their Master’s truth to show/ Unto a darkened Europe/ Now shines with brighter glow/ The monks who then translated/ The Bible of Douai/ Look down, we may be certain/ With horror and dismay/ Upon the German savagery/ That blights their home today.35 Six weeks earlier, a poem praising the river Marne, site of the German defeats in 1914 and 1918, contrasted Attila and his Goths with Clovis and Charlemagne. The “Hunnish nation” had again broken “like waves upon a granite rock.”36 Another subject of home-front propaganda, Joan of Arc, also appeared in Stars and Stripes. In April 1918, the paper compared Joan to the martyred English nurse, Edith Cavell.37 At the height of the German offensive in May 1918, the embattled city of Compiègne became a city of refugees: “[. . .] at the exact spot where Joan of Arc was captured, a portable kitchen was set up [. . .].”38 Later there is the report of a YMCA-sponsored pageant in preparation.39 Here was battlefield propaganda in its purest form, an amateur theatrical performance in the midst of the intense fighting during the last summer of the war. The heroic martyr’s story was also advertised in a translated digest of French news that could be purchased by the soldiers.40 The Joan they had encountered at home, saint of statues, sheet music, and posters, greeted them in Stars and Stripes.

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The Maid of Orleans was the ideal subject for the sentimental war poet, who echoed stateside tributes to the woman who had “saved France.” No irony here. In Stars and Stripes, chivalry was alive and well. In the final month of the war, we read that American soldiers fighting in Lorraine: [. . .] buy picture postcards, little gold Lorraine crosses, little medals – any and all fit to make glad the heart of an American mother. But it is violating no secret to say that many of those little medals of the Maid find themselves attached, sooner or later, to the sweaty cords on which the identification tags of the Americans are strung; for if they had not considered themselves, in part at least, the knights of Jeanne d’Arc, the followers of her white and gold banner, the co-deliverers with her of the fair land which she loved so well and for which she laid down her fair young life – why, they would not have their pilgrimage to Domremy.41 Bathos transported Joan to a future when “all the toil of war is done/ some maid like she of Orleans/ in some old forest of Argonne/ May see again at evensong/ a vision passing without sound and halting at each cross-marked mound.”42 This is textual kitsch, a vulgarization of the war, making it less threatening, more bearable.43 Thus, Stars and Stripes reflected popular culture. Like many of the English sources studied by Jay Winter,44 it demonstrates that traditional values, both secular and religious, did not vanish on the Front. In particular, Stars and Stripes interpreted the war in the language of American popular religion. Evangelical Christianity and the cult of “motherhood” could be linked to the Crusade.45 In a particularly good example, Chaplain Thomas F. Coakley prayed God to protect his “mother dear,” his “partner in this last Crusade.”46 If the war caused a crisis of faith for some, one finds no trace of doubt in Stars and Stripes.47 Stars and Stripes also entertained. The most authentic humor came from the soldiers themselves. Here was the ironic humor of the trenches, the jokes and complaints that vented the doughboy’s exasperation with officers, food, clothes, and the myriad other burdens in his life. “Crusaders,” from the bitter winter of 1918, contrasts the noblest of medieval warriors with the harassed doughboy: Crusaders: Richard Coeur de Lion was a solder and a king; He carried lots of hefty tools with which his foes to bing; He cased himself in armor tough – neck, shoulder, waist, and knee; But Richard, old Coeur de Lion, didn’t have a thing on me. For while old Coeur de Lion may have worn an iron casque, He never had to tote around an English gas-proof masque.48

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The remainder of the poem continues in the same vein. Again, there is kitsch at work, disguising both the monotony and horror of the war. Frustration encouraged parody. Sometimes its subject was the Germans, whose decidedly unchivalric fighting was contrasted by one poet with the merry predations of Robin Hood who “had no chance to learn the teuton creed.”49 Others mocked the filthy monotony of life in the trenches. “Chivalry” became “shovelry,”50 the muddy reality confronting the troops as they arrived in force in spring 1918. The editorial staff could permit themselves some irony as well. A response to a letter to the editor concerning the proper number of chevrons for a soldier in the AEF remarks, “Not a single person on this blessed earth, even if he began to fight the Germans in the Crusades and has been doing it ever since, has the right to compute towards his chevron any time served before April 6, 1917.”51 A more bitter comment appears on September 27, 1918. Entitled “Hun Casualty List: Chivalry: Dead,”52 its irony is heightened when we recall the context, the bitter fighting at the outset of the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, just begun, that would soon bog down at a tremendous cost of life. Given the fighting Americans experienced in the month to come – the last month of the war – one suspects that more than a few readers placed Chivalry on their own casualty list as well. Remembrance We sometimes use memory as a synonym for history to soften our prose, to humanize it, and to make it more accessible. Memory simply sounds less distant, and perhaps for that reason, it often serves to help draw general readers into a sense of relevance of history for their own lives.53 Occasionally, Stars and Stripes attempted – sometimes programmatically – to locate the American experience in a medieval context. The present of 1917–19 is explained through simultaneity, a remembrance of history.54 The reader is reminded of the medieval history of locations the American forces were attacking, defending, or occupying. A series of articles, “America in France,” began in the summer of 1918 and continued well into the American occupation in the following year. The second installment, Picardy, began with Cantigny, the Allied headquarters.55 The undistinguished history of the town, unadorned with a cathedral, unmentioned in “French chronicles,” is contrasted with its present fame in “American history.” The American struggles around Cantigny remind the author of the Picards, who, from Condorcet in the Enlightenment to Calvin in the Reformation, had been rather like proto-Americans, lovers of liberty

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and defiant towards oppression: “Even in peace times the Picards fought. Nowhere else in France did the fight of the workers against all lordly injustice and oppression by the rich come so early. Nowhere else was the fight so hardy and so stubborn.” This spirit is traced back to none other than Peter the Hermit: “[. . .] the strange, swarthy little man who led the Peasants’ Crusade, the first of the gallant expeditions which Christendom sent to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the desecrating hands of the Turks.” While the failure of Peter’s Crusade is duly noted (his followers are described as a “horde” and “grotesque”), it is, clearly, the spirit that counts. The American Crusade has now fulfilled its mission, for the article concludes, “In the days to come, when sightseers from America make a pilgrimage to streets of Cantigny, they will find it no more than a good afternoon’s walk up the road to Amiens, where Peter the Hermit was born.”56 This was a landscape worthy of Crusaders old and new. Subsequent installments continue this theme. An article on “Toul” describes one of the places Americans had played a major role in halting the German offensive that spring. The city’s importance is related first to recent history, the Franco-Prussian War, then the importance of its bishops, “when the dark sun of the Middle Ages was setting.”57 Alongside this decidedly faint praise, the article also comments on both Toul’s early Christianization and location in the later Lotharingian kingdom. The message is clear: this was a city worth fighting for.58 Article four does much the same for Alsace.59 In September, the Marne is remembered as “the holy land of French arms.”60 The successful Franco-American offensive begun the previous July is linked with heroic battles going back to the days of the Gauls resisting Caesar. As with previous articles, the Crusades are recalled, with Joinville and Saint Louis IX taking their place in the long line of warriors leading to the doughboys of 1918. The series continued after the Armistice, when the focus shifted to territory occupied by the AEF. References to the Middle Ages are no longer framed by the need to connect present conflict with crusading past. Instead, the medieval aspects of German towns are described through the eyes of their modern, American conquerors, conquerors fascinated by the strangeness of their surroundings but even more anxious to return home.61 The description of Christmas at the castle of Molsberg along the Rhine, the easternmost area of occupation, is particularly evocative: “On this turret pace watchful American sentinels. On this turret they paced Christmas night, with the snow falling and the wind blowing, and everyone back home across the sea having a good time.”62 Alongside the romantic Middle Ages, there is also melancholy, the authentic longing for home that deserves more than condemnation as mere bathos. Medieval language could, however, still be used for humor. In a breezy

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article from May 1919, we are informed that “This Cusanus was Frankly Pro-Ally.”63 Troops from the 90th Division, men from Oklahoma and Texas, had occupied Bernkastle-Kues, home of Nicholaus Cusanus, who, according to the article, had been influential in convincing Columbus to come to the New World. Thus, Cusanus was responsible for the American victory: no Columbus, no doughboys on the Rhine: [Cusanus] [. . .], natives of Berncastle say, is responsible for the Fatherland losing the war [. . .]. If he had only gone on founding hospitals and universities and not meddled with such subjects as astronomy, which was none of his business, the profane hobnails of the Texas-Oklahoma cowpunchers would not be polluting their immaculate streets today. The article concludes with the comment that, perhaps, Cusanus had hoped for this all along, that he had been one of the “good spirits” who had fought the previous fall alongside the “Texas-Oklahoma crusaders,” so that “Deutschland über alles” could be vanquished by “truth and justice.” Other remembrances appeared outside the didactic program of “America in France” and articles about the experience of occupation. These often convey a particular relevance, a relating of the moment to the perceived medieval precedent. As the Americans advanced in late July, the countryside is described as having roads “that hadn’t been mended since Joan of Arc advanced along them.”64 On September 27, news of General Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem meant “the golden quest of three disastrous crusades in the Middle Ages has been definitely snatched from Turkish rule [. . .]. There may be other results; what, for instance, does Constantinople think of it?” The present was linked with the medieval past; but the future intruded. Conclusion Vulgarity, too, has feeling, and its expression in art has truth and even pathos, but we shall have time enough in our lives for that, and all the more because, when we rise from our knees now, we have finished our pilgrimage. We have done with Chartres. For seven hundred years Chartres has seen pilgrims, coming and going more or less like us, and will perhaps see them for another seven hundred years; but we shall see it no more, and can safely leave the Virgin in her majesty, with her three great prophets on either hand, as calm and confident in their own strength and in God’s providence as they were when Saint Louis was born, but looking

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down from a deserted heaven, into an empty church, on a death faith.65 Henry Adams bid farewell to the Chartres of 1913. On the eve of an unimaginable war, he seems to have anticipated Fussell: chivalry was emptied of meaning; faith was dead. In their place were now restless energy and irony. Perhaps this was true, all too true, for elites who read critics like Adams and, decades later, Fussell. There was, however, another vision. In June 1919, shortly before Stars and Stripes ceased publication, an article entitled “Last Yanks Leave Ancient Chartres” noted that AEF trucks passed by the cathedral for a “final view.”66 The writer remembered a year before, when the army had passed by, going east, “Some of the men in those hot and dusty cars never lived to see another French cathedral; some saw many. The delicate carvings about the altar of this church are as beautiful today as they were when the master workman of the middle ages [sic] laid down his tools.” In this leave-taking of Chartres we encounter something more than the picturesque medieval world. We read an evocation as profound as Adam’s elegy. If the doughboys passing the great cathedral likely would have laughed at being called Crusaders, they were, whether they believed it or not, pilgrims. In June 1919, Chartres was no longer the pilgrimage site of wearied esthetes. She stood as a place of meaning, of remembrance. The readers of Stars and Stripes had learned much. The Old World, including its medieval legacy – from great cathedrals to humble villages – was now remembered through experience, not merely learned through texts and art. Never again would it be quite as foreign as it had been in 1913. When we reflect on American medievalism,67 we would do well to remember not only pioneering scholars like Adams but also the doughboys. The Middle Ages belonged to them as well.

NOTES 1. I thank the Interlibrary Loan staff of West Texas A&M for assistance in obtaining many of the works used in this essay. An earlier version was presented at the 2005 International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. 2. Stars and Stripes, June 13, 1919, the last edition of the newspaper, accessed at , August 12, 2005. All citations of the newspaper will be found at this site. See also , accessed on August 25, 2006. 3. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford

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University Press, 1975), with, to date, some eighty-four book reviews of (according to JSTOR). To Fussell, the disillusionment brought by the war shifted discourse from “chivalry” to irony. For his later views on this shift, see his introduction to Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey: Selections from the Sherston Memoirs (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983). Among many related studies, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989); Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Atheneum, 1990); and Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). On the “myth of the war experience,” see George Mosse, “Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience,” Journal of Contemporary History 21.4 (1986): 491–513. 4. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On English literary responses to the pessimism and irony of the postwar critics, above all Remarque, see Hugh Cecil, The Flower of Battle: British Fiction Writers of the First World War (London: Secker and Warburg, 1995), part 2. On chivalric imagery and language in the war, see Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004). An interesting study of poetry that moves beyond obsession with elite views comes from Mark van Wienen, “Poetics of the Frugal Housewife: A Modernist Narrative of the Great War and America,” American Literary History 17.1 (1996): 55–91. 5. See, however, Tim Cross, The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988). 6. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–50. 7. Paul Freedman and Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “Medievalisms Old and New: The Rediscovery of Alterity in North American Medieval Studies,” The American Historical Review 103.3 (1998): 677–704; also James A. Morone, “The Struggle for American Culture,” PS. Political Science and Politics 29.3 (1996): 424–30. 8. Robin Fleming, “Picturesque History and the Medieval in Nineteenth Century America,” American Historical Review 100.4 (1995): 1061–94. A particularly striking example from the 1890s is the “medieval” float in the “Sunflower Carnival” from Colorado Spring (August 1897), available at American Memory , accessed on March 26, 2005. Regional carnivals and fairs are an excellent source for the study of American medievalism around 1900. For an English celebration from the same period, see Joanne M. Parker, “The Day of a Thousand Years: Winchester’s 1901 Commemoration of Alfred the Great,” Studies in Medievalism 12 (2002): 113–36. 9. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 245. 10. Robin Blaetz, Visions of the Maid. Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), chapter 1, the “revival of medievalism,” and pp. 18–35 for her service in the causes of reform, progressivism, and the “strenuous life.” By way of contrast, see the discussion of French views on Joan during the Third Republic by Gerd Krumeich, “Joan of Arc Between

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Right and Left,” in Robert Tombs, ed., Nationhood and Nationalism in France: From Boulangism, to the Great War 1889–1918 (London and New York: Harper Collins Academic, 1991), 63–73. A good example of American enthusiasm for Joan of Arc is a pamphlet for a speaker on the Redpath Chatauqua, Virginia Brooks, who was proclaimed a “20th Century Joan of Arc”: , available on the “Traveling Culture” database of American Memory, accessed on November 18, 2004. 11. See the photographs and captions in the New York Times for December 12, 1915, available in the “Newspaper Pictorials” section of American Memory , accessed on November 18, 2004. The statue served propaganda purposes after 1917, as seen in the Times’ photographs of a rally on July 21, 1918: , accessed on November 18, 2004. Joan continued to be popular in post-war sculpture, as demonstrated by the statue outside the American Legion building in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A picture can be found at American Memory , accessed on November 18, 2004. 12. See “Jeanne d’Arc in the First World World War,” available at , accessed on February 4, 2005, with accounts of pilgrimages to Donrémy, posters, and sculpture; also Blaetz, Visions of the Maid, 36ff, discussing the immensely popular song “Joan of Arc, They Are Calling You.” The song is available in a digitized recording from Henry Burr at: from the “Authentic History Site,” accessed on February 5, 2005. For the lyrics, see the “Historic American Sheet Music” section of American Memory: , accessed on November 17, 2004 (the song was so well-known that it was not even necessary to give its full title, as seen in the Redpath Chatauqua publicity for the “Hun Hunters” quartet, available from American Memory at , accessed on November 18, 2004). Among many poems expressing the same sentiment is Theodosia Garrison’s “The Soul of Joan of Arc,” in Franklin K. Lane and Guy Stanton Ford, ed., The Battle Line of Democracy: Prose and Poetry of the World War (Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1917), 99, where Joan, accompanied by Saint Michael, longs to come down from heaven to aid France. On the ubiquitous poster “Joan of Arc Saved France,” see Blaetz, Visions of the Maid, 35ff, and the photograph preserved by American Memory at , accessed on November 18, 2004. 13. Barbara Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Americanism in Boston during World War I,” American Music 4.2 (1986): 164–76, focusing on the Symphony’s conductor, Muck, who resisted playing the “Star Spangled Banner” prior to each concert. 14. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Arno Press, repr. 1972), and The Creel Report: Complete Report of the Chairman of the Committee on Public Information 1917: 1918: 1919 (Civil Liberties in American History, repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972). Among many studies on Creel and government propaganda efforts, see Stephen Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy,

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Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 15. Alfred E. Cornebise, War as Advertised: The Four Minute Men and America’s Crusade 1917–1918 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984). 16. An interesting parallel to the involvement of the distinguished French medievalist Bédier, on whom see Per Nykrog, “A Warrior Scholar at the Collège de France,” in R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols, ed., Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 286–307. Munro’s major publication for the Committee of Public Information was his edition of German War Practices, vol. 1. Treatment of Civilians (Washington, DC: Committee on Public Information, 1917), which invites comparison with Bédier’s work. Munro belonged to a circle of pro-English scholars interested in promoting American involvement in the war, on which see Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1975), 84; and Vaughn, Holding Fast the Inner Lines, 66–67. Not all American medievalists had such a positive experience. For criticism of James Harvey Robinson’s Medieval and Modern Times, whose first edition was judged too favorable towards Germany, see George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront. American Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 82–38 (and 48–49 on Munro). 17. Creel, How We Advertised America, 106. On Munro’s contribution to History Teacher’s Magazine, designed to promote the war effort in schools, see Blakey, Historians on the Homefront, 110–11. 18. Cornebise, War as Advertised, 129–30. 19. For a representative selection from a Creel publication, see Katherine Lee Bates, “The New Crusade,” in Lane and Ford, The Battle Line of Democracy, 75. On the “crusade” in early twentieth-century revivalist Christianity, see, among many studies, Lyle W. Dorsett, Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991), with discussion, for example, of his “crusade tabernacles.” It is striking, if not unexpected, that “crusade” and “crusader” have been invoked by various commentators since the attacks of September 11, 2001. As early as September 14, 2001, the U.S. House of Representatives proclaimed the use of American forces a “national crusade.” For this and other examples, see the texts available at the Project Avalon website , accessed on August 12, 2005. 20. The New York Globe called it, “the most American of newspapers.” The excerpt appeared on the front page of the July 12, 1918 issue of Stars and Stripes and also notes the Army’s “chivalric spirit.” The editorial in the last edition, June 13, 1919, gives an indication of how the paper attempted to be loyal, but independent. For an early appreciation of the newspaper and other Army papers, including those published in the stateside camps, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Khaki Journalists, 1917–1919,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 6.3 (1919): 350–59. For a comprehensive study, see Alfred E. Cornebise, The Stars and Stripes: Doughboy Journalism in World War I (Contributions in Military History 37: Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984); and, on Stars and Stripes’ postwar successor – The AMAROC News (still not digitized), which served the AEF occupation forces – see Alfred E.

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Cornebise, The AMAROC News: The Daily Newspaper of the American Forces in Germany, 1919–1923 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981). 21. Among many studies, see Clayton D. Laurie, “‘The Chanting of Crusaders’: Captain Heber Blankenhorn and AEF Combat Propaganda in World War I,” The Journal of Military History 59.3 (1995): 457–81, especially 461, where Laurie discusses Blankenhorn’s association with Creel and the Committee for Public Information. 22. Laurie, “The Chanting,” 160–65, for the Army Educational Commission, which, while stressing “practical” and “technical” education, also set up colleges in France for the study of liberal arts. Some American soldiers even took classes at the Sorbonne and heard lectures such as “The Cathedral at Reims.” 23. Cornebise, The Stars and Stripes, 8–9, also the American Memory site: , accessed on August 25, 2006, which highlights the energy and vision of the editor for Stars and Stripes, Guy T. Viskniskki, who made sure the paper would not merely parrot the Army’s views on the war. An extensive treatment of Ross’s career at Stars and Stripes can be found at “Doughboy Center”: , accessed on August 25, 2006. 24. Cornebise, The Stars and Stripes, 10. 25. Cornebise, The Stars and Stripes, 9. 26. Cornebise, The Stars and Stripes, 7–9. 27. On the “Hun” motif, here in connection with fantasies about the consequences of a German invasion of America, see Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 8–9. “Hun” appears more than 100 times in Stars and Stripes, but rarely in a medieval context. For an exception, however, see below. 28. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 8–9. 29. Schaffer, America in the Great War, chapter 8. 30. Schaffer, America in the Great War, 9–10, on a famous complaint that the paper’s use of slang derived from baseball made it difficult for the French to understand. The staff rejected the criticism out of hand. 31. Stars and Stripes, June 14, 1918, reprinted from the San Francisco Examiner of May 4. Wilson’s postwar speeches also favored the term, and soldiers could read it in his addresses at Versailles, reprinted on January 31 and March 14, 1919. Of interest as well is the newspaper’s discussion in the months after the war of the proposed names for what eventually became the American Legion. The “American Crusaders” was considered “flowery” (March 21, 1919). 32. Stars and Stripes, February 22, 1918. The editorial also reminds him that he could have a “bully good time in France” without “excesses that will impair his efficiency.” 33. For a succinct treatment from the American perspective, see S. L. A. Marshall, The American Heritage History of World War I (New York: American Heritage, 1964), chapter 13. 34. Hynes, A War Imagined, 116ff. 35. Stars and Stripes, October 11, 1918. The Allied armies are “righteous.” 36. Stars and Stripes, August 20, 1918. The author, James Beverage, was

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apparently attached to the headquarters of the First Army. One wonders if he had seen combat. 37. Stars and Stripes, April 19, 1918, mentioning other atrocity reports, followed by a critique of why Germany had failed to become modern. 38. Stars and Stripes, May 10, 1918, on Mother’s Day and the feast of St. Joan. 39. Stars and Stripes, August 30, 1918. Mrs. John Craig played the “Matchless Maid.” Such pageants continued the stateside festivals and parades discussed above. 40. Stars and Stripes, August 16, 1918. 41. Stars and Stripes, August 16, 1918, a month before the Armistice, in the midst of the bloody stalemate of the Meuse–Argonne Offensive. 42. Stars and Stripes, April 11, 1919. A picture of Joan soaring above the battlefields appears in the Mother’s Day edition of May 9, 1919, which can be compared with Paul Klee’s Angelus novus, discussed by Winter, Sites of Memory, 223ff. 43. George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 126–56, with numerous examples, especially from postcards. 44. Winter, Sites of Memory, chapter 5. 45. See Jonathan Hans Ebel’s dissertation “ ‘Heroes in the Cause of God’: Faith, Suffering, and American Soldiers’ Experiences of the Great War,” 2 vols. (Divinity School of the University of Chicago, 2004). 46. Stars and Stripes, May 31, 1918, in a flood of sentimental poems unleashed in the days after the first Mother’s Day away from home. By way of comparison, see also the reference to “Crusader Boys” in the issue of November 1, 1918. On the cult of motherhood, including its depiction in “chivalric language,” see Michael T. Coventry’s dissertation “ ‘God, Country, Home, and Mother’: Soldiers, Gender and Nationalism in Great War America” (Georgetown University, 2004). We also find recognition of the roles played by women on the front, one of the most profound social changes wrought by the war. In the March 1, 1918 edition, the paper notes, in thoroughly traditional language, that “Over here she has more than made good in every line of endeavor she has tackled; and we would be sadly lacking in chivalry and sportsmanship and everything else to deny her that open avowal of our admiration and regard.” 47. Stars and Stripes, May 18, 1918, also the reference to “our new Crusade” in an Easter poem from April 11, 1919, where Judea and France are both “holy ground.” 48. Stars and Stripes, February 8, 1918. See also the edition of May 31, 1918 for a similar work. 49. Stars and Stripes, February 22, 1918, which also enlists the pirate Henry Morgan in the Allied cause. Like Robin Hood, he was far less vile than the Germans, for even he had never “crucified his foes,” a reference to atrocity reports from early in the war, long before American involvement. For a careful analysis of these reports, which locates the origins of many in tales told in the Franco-Prussian War, see John Horne and Alan Kramer, “German ‘Atrocities’ and Franco-German Opinion, 1914: The Evidence of German Soldiers’ Diaries,” The Journal of Modern History 66.1 (1994): 1–33.

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50. Stars and Stripes, April 19, 1918. In the same edition, see also the discussion of “cavalryman” with reference to those “birds who back in the dark ages used to sit straddle of a four-legged animal.” There is also an amusing reference to “thoroughly medieval” helmet designs in the issue of November 8, 1918, and, in the edition of May 10, 1918, the soldier’s cap is jokingly compared to a monk’s cowl. 51. Stars and Stripes, August 2, 1918. The letter and response are under the heading “Remember the Date.” 52. Stars and Stripes, September 27, 1918. 53. Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory,” 129. 54. Fussell, The Great War, 335, on “recognition scenes.” These resemble the remembrances that follow. 55. Stars and Stripes, June 28, 1918. 56. Stars and Stripes, June 28, 1918. 57. Stars and Stripes, July 5, 1918. 58. Similar attention to historical detail appears in Article 13, “Tours,” published by Stars and Stripes on November 8, 1918. 59. Stars and Stripes, July 19, 1918. While Alsace may have been a “Germanic affiliate” in the Middle Ages, she had no connection to “Prussia.” And that was the point. 60. Stars and Stripes, September 6, 1918. 61. Stars and Stripes, May 30, 1919, discussing AEF sporting contests taking place “where Joan of Arc’s warriors once fought” and where “doughboys played in the shadow of an old feudal castle.” A connection with ancient Carthage appears in the issue of June, 6, 1919, where the “Yanks are a sensation” as they arrive at Oran. 62. Stars and Stripes, January 10, 1919. 63. Stars and Stripes, May 23, 1919. 64. Stars and Stripes, July 26, 1918. 65. Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 213. 66. Stars and Stripes, June 6, 1919. 67. I draw here on Ernst Robert Curtius, “The Medieval Bases of Western Thought,” in The European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (Bollingen Series 36, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 587–98. On Curtius, see Carl Landauer, “Ernst Robert Curtius and the Topos of the Literary Critic,” in Bloch and Nichols, Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, 334–54.

Constructing Difference: The Guidonian Hand and the Musical Space of Historical Others1 Stefano Mengozzi To reconstruct the pre-modern understanding of the fundamentals of music has been a preeminent occupation of music historians at least since Martin Gerbert published a major anthology of medieval music-theory writings in the late eighteenth century.2 The earliest comprehensive music histories by John Hawkins and Charles Burney already featured lengthy discussions of medieval and Renaissance conceptualizations of musical space (interval, scale, harmony, counterpoint, etc.).3 Later generations of scholars continued and expanded the systematic study of early musical treatises, de facto establishing a new musicological discipline – the history of music theory – that until roughly the mid-twentieth century aimed primarily at reconstructing the origin and the evolution of the Western “tonal consciousness,” i.e., of the principles governing Western harmony and rhythm, and specifically the musical language of the Classical/Romantic era from, say, J. S. Bach to Gustav Mahler.4 From its inception the history of music theory has been inherently comparative in nature, and in this sense it recalls rather closely the history of anthropology. We have been studying the musical conceptualization of historical Others as a way of casting light on the modern ways of systematizing and categorizing musical sound. In many ways, and predictably, Latin music theory de-familiarizes us from our musical past as much as (and often at the same time as) it mediates that past and brings us closer to it. The basic questions that guide the work of the historian change a great deal, of course. It is possible to observe a marked shift in the research program of the history of medieval and Renaissance music theory after World War II. Since then, in line with the pursuit of authentic recreations of early music in performance – a pursuit that occupied academics and Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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performers through the 1980s – a good portion of Latin music theory has been directed at emphasizing the vast cognitive differences that separate the “modern” ways of parsing the materials of music (that modern “tonal consciousness”) from the “pre-modern” ones. Latin music theory has bequeathed to us valuable knowledge on how the materials of music were taught, classified, and reflected upon, thus in a sense experienced in a period of European cultural history that in recent musicological parlance has been portrayed as pre-modern far more frequently than as pre-modern. Thus, a confrontation with medieval and Renaissance musical treatises is rightly perceived to be vital for a historically grounded appreciation of Western musical cultures of those historical eras, which often exhibit structural features and modes of signification that are quite remote from those of more recent periods. Aware of the cultural uniqueness of the past, music scholars have, in recent times, been turning to Latin theory for critical leverage in an attempt to approximate the musical mindset of the “natives” as much as possible: to interpret the structures of “early” Western music from a modern perspective (inevitably so), yet taking into account as fully as possible the cognitive frameworks and the cultural practices that regulated the pre-modern musical experience. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the music theory literature can assist us in our attempts to reconstruct the “insiders’ view” only to a point because a contextual reading of such sources is often fraught with difficulties. Terminological and/or conceptual differences across music-theory treatises, for instance, may be interpreted as being more or less substantial. More importantly, the description of musical experience through language, and even the parsing and the ordering of the elements of music, are by nature metaphorical (think of the common notions of “musical space,” “high” and “low” pitches, and tonal “center”), or derived from other disciplines or experiential domains (harmonic “function,” musical “phrase”), and thus may not necessarily signal dramatic changes in “tonal consciousness” in and of themselves, particularly when such changes do not appear to find corroboration in the evolution of musical style. For instance, should we take the emergence of the concepts of “scale,” “chord,” and “modulation” in music-theory literature as a reliable indicator of momentous shifts in musical perception and musical awareness at particular historical turns, and thus as basic structural or syntactical changes that should be highlighted in our music-analytic endeavors? One could simply point out that there is no signified without signifier and leave it at that. Yet things are not so simple: arguably, music theory in the West did not evolve in response to radical shifts in musical perception or tonal consciousness, but rather in response to pedagogical and (later) interpretive concerns. Furthermore, studies in the history of music theory have not looked at twentieth-century philosophy of language as an

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epistemological model; rather, they are grounded in the more traditional methods of philology and textual exegesis. Given this disciplinary scenario, it is easy to understand that the idiosyncratic and at times esoteric world of Latin music theory has been for centuries a privileged battleground for setting up and reinforcing the historical boundaries between musical modernity and its medieval past (or, conversely, for downplaying them). The particular case study discussed in the following pages aptly illustrates this point. I wish to argue that from the beginning of music historiography the pedagogical method of the so-called Guidonian Hand, used throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the early modern era, has been a powerful symbol of the tonal distinctiveness of medieval and Renaissance music. The very idea of mapping musical notes on a bodily part seems conceptually naive and technologically primitive, thus ultimately non-scientific and anti-modern (though modern historiography has never characterized the Hand in these terms). But historical distance is constructed in the blink of an eye, without the need for elaborate explanations: the convoluted mechanisms of the Hand (to be described below) give the modern reader immediate and irrefutable proof of the seemingly unbridgeable gap between modern and pre-modern approaches to the classification of musical sound. The Hand in Context Students and scholars of medieval culture are likely to have some familiarity with the so-called Guidonian Hand, a music-pedagogical tool modeled after the musical pedagogy of the eleventh-century monk Guido of Arezzo and later used throughout the Middle Ages (and as late as the Baroque era) to teach the rudiments of music to choirboys and singers in training (a reproduction of a Hand is given in Figure 1, while Figure 2 shows the sequence of the pitches within the Hand). The overall range of medieval music (i.e., of the medieval diatonic system) stretched through twenty pitches from low Γ (gamma, a 12th below middle c) to high e' (a 10th above middle c) (Figure 3). Since nature has given humans nineteen joints and fingertips on each hand, it was found convenient to map those twenty pitches on the palm of the left hand following a spiral motion from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the middle finger (the twentieth note was positioned on the nail of the middle finger, or sometimes omitted).5 The mapping of the notes onto the hand, however, was rather complicated. As shown in Table 1, there was a set of seven pitch letters, ABCDEFG (the same ones still used today in the Anglo-Saxon system of pitch nomenclature), and a set of six syllables yoked with those pitch letters, namely, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la. Since the syllables mi-fa conventionally indicated a

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Fig. 1: The Guidonian Hand, from Fra Bonaventura da Brescia, Breviloquio musicale (Brescia, 1497), fol. 23 (reproduced from the facsimile by Broude Brothers: New York, 1975).

Fig. 2: The Order of the Diatonic Pitches in a Standard Guidonian Hand from [Gamma] to e”.

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semitone, there were three “places” (loci) on the Hand where the syllabic set mirrored exactly the underlying letters: ut on C (up to la on A); ut on G (up to la on E); and ut on F (up to la on D, with fa on B-flat, the only regular “black key” in the medieval system). Thus Renaissance theorists (though not their medieval ancestors!) referred to the segment ut–la on C as the hexachordum naturale, ut–la on G as the hexachordum durum, and ut–la on F as the hexachordum molle. These six-fold groupings appear in Gafori’s gamut in the form of organ pipes (see Figure 3).6 The six syllables were superimposed onto the seven pitch letters as a way of facilitating the correct singing of the intervals indicated by the letters. The main function of the six syllables was to provide singers with a mnemonic trace of not just intervals, but of types or classes of intervals. For example, when a singer had memorized the interval ut–mi he could intone correctly not only the notated interval C–E, but also G–B and F–A. In short, every time a singer identified a major third on the musical staff and was not sure about how to sight-sing it, he could think of it as ut–mi and perform it correctly. Likewise, the syllables mi–fa always corresponded with the semitone, and so on. The whole point of the Guidonian Hand, then, was to remind singers which syllable (or syllables) went with which letters, so that the correct intervals could be recalled while singing unknown melodies. As many scholars have pointed out, the Hand was first and foremost a mnemonic device; as such it was undoubtedly widespread from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.7 As shown in Table 1, the key feature of the Hand is the coexistence of two uneven entities, namely, a set of six syllabic names (ut re mi fa sol la) superimposed onto a historically earlier set of seven pitch letters (ABCDEFG). But why adopt the seemingly counter-intuitive strategy of juxtaposing six labels against a cycle of seven notes? Did medieval theorists grant priority to one set over the other for defining pitches and intervals, or were the syllables and the letters thought to be equally important for that purpose? In short, which type of musical space does the Guidonian Hand represent, exactly? If labeling is a way of knowing and of establishing relationships among discrete objects or ideas, should we not conclude that the six-fold set of syllables trumped the octave as the regulative segment of musical space through the Renaissance and beyond? For instance, the Hand shown in Figure 1, which carries on its palm a musical staff with six ascending and descending notes, seems to indicate that the segment of six notes, the so-called “hexachord,” did operate as a scale. Perhaps Fra Bonaventura did indeed mean to suggest with this figure that the six-note segment corresponding with the ut–la syllables carried more weight than the octave (cognitively and structurally, or “grammatically”) for contemporaneous musicians.

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Fig. 3: The Gamut in Franchino Gafori’s Practica musicae (Milan, 1496), fol. aijv (reproduced from facsimile by Forni Editore: Bologna, 1972).

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Table 1: The Author’s (Mengozzi’s) Illustration of the 7 Pitch Letters

Thus, the mechanism and the widespread use of the Guidonian Hand in “pre-modern” musical life raises profound issues about the nature of the medieval musical space and about the ways in which medieval musicians and listeners processed that space. Yet, inevitably, this question directly impinges upon the historical origin of our own sense of “musical space.” Is the “modern” way of hearing pitches and intervals against the yardstick of the octave no older than, say, the Enlightenment? Or is there a basic line of continuity with the medieval sense of musical space, and perhaps even that of earlier times? If pre-modern music was indeed “hexachordally coded,” ought we not to set aside our octave-based sense of pitch relationships every time we listen to a troubadoric song, a Landini ballata, or even a Monteverdi madrigal? If so, what would such a cognitive exercise entail? Indeed, is it possible at all?8 At least since the eighteenth century, there has been a marked tendency in music historiography to view the Guidonian Hand as the mapping of a kind of musical space that was quite different from the one that readers of this article are used to. To the great majority of theorists and historians of the modern era, the complex overlapping of syllables and letters within the gamut (thus within the Hand) amounted to a theory of the diatonic space of medieval and Renaissance music with general and universal validity, not simply a particular representation of that space with limited functions and applications. To be sure, in the last few decades music scholars have been careful to portray the Hand as a mnemonic tool, i.e., as a chapter in the long history of ars memorativa that was itself part of rhetorical training from classical antiquity (Rhetorica ad herennium, to name only one source) to humanist education in the Renaissance. Now, to portray the Hand as a mnemonic

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device is to downplay its grammatical significance, since the mnemonic links that we set up for the purpose of remembering the “objects” of reality and their relationships are often ad hoc and fictitious, and do not necessarily reflect the mapping, the order, and the function of those objects in the real world. Yet, scholars have been quick to interpret the mnemonic function of the Hand as a sure sign of the Hand’s indispensable role in the medieval musical system. Thus, the current perception is that the Hand was not just a fundamental chapter of early musical training, but rather a foundation of medieval musical space tout cour. For example, Harold Powers, who has authored numerous articles on the theory of musical pitch in the pre-modern era, surely expressed a widely accepted view when he warned his readers that: The resemblance of elements in the Guidonian diatonic [i.e., the hexachordal system mapped onto the Hand] to elements in the post-17th-century European conceptual model of tonal space [. . .] should not blind us to the drastically different premises of the Guidonian diatonic. Those premises flow from its historical origin in vocal music, and are thoroughly confusing if imagined in terms of its post-17th-century successor model of tonal space, a model whose premises are of instrumental origin, with the keyboard as its visual ground.9 Carl Dahlhaus moved from identical premises in setting forth his theory of the origin of the tonal language of the Classical and Romantic era. He wrote, for instance, that “In the later Middle Ages, the three-hexachord system, the overlapping of the ‘hard’ (G–e, g'e'), ‘natural’ (c–a, c'a'), and ‘soft’ (f '–d"), was the presentational and conceptual form of the tonal system.”10 Later in his book, Dahlhaus uses the hexachordal system as an analytic tool for elucidating the harmonic structure of works of “pre-tonal” composers such as Josquin Desprez and Claudio Monteverdi. The crucial observation here is that both the scholars of early music and those of the post-eighteenth-century tonal era (or at least a member of the latter group as prominent and influential as Dahlhaus) viewed the three-hexachord system in “structural” terms, or as a fundamental network of pitch relationships (more on this later). Other scholars followed suit. Karol Berger, for instance, has interpreted the Guidonian syllables as necessary for defining the intervals between the steps of the medieval gamut.11 According to this view, the distances between the letters was in a kind of fluid state, or at any rate not determined until the syllables were superimposed onto them. Margaret Bent argues along these lines when she states that “E–F was a semitone only by virtue of being superimposed to the syllables mi–fa.”12 The view of the syllables as space-definers may perhaps be taken as the latest application of the basic idea of the

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hexachord as a central diatonic paradigm for medieval and Renaissance musical practice. There is no denying that musicologists who have argued along these lines can marshal some historical evidence to their support. First, no one would doubt, for example, that up until the sixteenth century the Guidonian Hand was a common pedagogical tool by which singers in their early stages of instruction grouped musical sound in strings of six elements. Second, the specific language used by at least a few medieval and Renaissance theorists in their presentation of the Guidonian solmization system does seem to attribute a grammatical or foundational significance to it. And third, representations of the musical hand such as the one in Figure 1 seem to suggest that those strings of six elements operated as a musical scale, or at any rate as some sort of musical paradigm that regulated virtually all aspects of musical practice in the pre-modern era. For all these reasons it would not seem too much of a stretch to conclude that pre-Baroque authors on the whole “conceptualized” musical space in strings of six notes, and that the principle of octave equivalence, although nominally acknowledged in Latin theory from its early phases, became the rule of the land no earlier than the seventeenth century, thus paving the way for the musical wonders of modern absolutmusik. Yet the documentary evidence pertaining to this subject is vast and can only be correctly evaluated when it is thoroughly investigated and properly contextualized. Even a cursory reading of the anthologies of Latin music theory by Gerbert and Coussemaker cited above might caution against treating the hexachordal system as a musical grammar valid for all musicians in all places. My own investigation of Latin music theory leads me to conclude that the six Guidonian syllables were not as widespread as we tend to think. Until around 1200 – that is to say, for a century and a half after Guido of Arezzo – the syllables made only rare appearances in music pedagogical literature. Until that time musical pitches and intervals were indicated far more frequently by means of the seven letters only, and even in later periods it is not uncommon to find musical treatises that mostly or completely avoid the six syllables.13 Other very prominent figures, such as the composer Johannes Ciconia (fl. 1390–1410) and the Carthusian monk Johannes Gallicus (more on whom later), were harshly critical of the method of the Guidonian Hand and of the use of the six syllables in musical instruction.14 It is also possible to overestimate the number of Guidonian Hands that are present in Latin music theory. Thus far I have been able to locate no more than about 140 of them in the overall body of approximately 1600 manuscripts that date from the Carolingian era to the early sixteenth century and that are described in the six volumes of the RISM catalogue and other sources.15 Even more remarkable is the fact that about 85 percent of those

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hands come from Italy and German-speaking countries, and about 70 percent of them date from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. These figures include a small group of early musical Hands that do not show the six syllables, and thus are not “Guidonian” in a strict sense. While such a statistical count is not sufficient to draw reliable conclusions on the use of the musical hand prior to 1500, it does suggest that its transmission was less thorough and uniform than has been suggested in the past. There are other important elements to consider in this debate. For instance, medieval musicians measured the diatonic intervals not against the major sixth, but rather against the octave (which they called the diapason, meaning “through all”). To them, as the theory and practice of medieval counterpoint tell us, the interval of a tenth was equivalent to that of a third, the interval of a ninth was equivalent to that of a second, and so on, regardless of which Guidonian syllables corresponded to those pitches. Furthermore, the theory of the eight Church-modes for the classification of Gregorian chants assumed a model of musical space based not on the major sixth, but again on the octave. The consonance of the octave was considered the most perfect of all, not only because it corresponded to the simplest numerical ratio (2:1), but also because two sounds an octave apart were felt to be virtually identical, to the point that theorists from at least the Carolingian era onwards (though one could go back all the way to Ptolemy) call them not just consonant, but aequisoni, that is to say, equivalent or identical sounds. Then there is what we might call the fons et origo of all acoustical instruments in the West, namely the monochord, which had been used since Antiquity for investigating and explaining the physical and mathematical relationships between musical sounds. In Latin music theory the instructions on how to divide the monochord for locating the pitches of the diatonic system are both older and possibly more common than the Guidonian Hand. Even the originator of the six syllables, Guido of Arezzo, refers in his writings much more often to the monochord than to the six syllables (let alone the Hand, which, as is well known, Guido neither shows nor discusses in his pedagogical treatises). Rather, a famous illustration from the twelfth century shows Guido in the act of teaching the rudiments of music to bishop Theodaldus via the monochord, rather than through the syllables.16 Guido’s choice of medium is not surprising: after all, he did place the octave at the center of his musical system, and the theory of the monochord started precisely from the basic assumption of octave duplication. One could argue, as have others, that the monochord was more often used for speculative purposes that had few or no consequences for musical practice.17 But though there is some truth to this claim, there is also robust evidence that the monochord was indeed frequently used in musical instruction up until the thirteenth century and then again in the fifteenth century, when the call for

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a renovatio of musical pedagogy reawakened interest in the musical writings of the pre-Scholastic period.18 The picture does not change substantially when we move from music pedagogy to the related front of speculative music theory. Here the obvious authority was Severinus Boethius (480–c.524), whose De institutione musica provided the foundation for any study of musical mathematics from the ninth century to the Humanist era, when, thanks to the availability of new printed editions of the text with new commentaries (and to other humanist treatises, such as Franchino Gafori’s Theorica musicae, that were thoroughly grounded in the Boethian-Pythagorean tradition), it became the object of renewed study.19 Cecil Adkins points out that before the Carolingian era, Boethius’s text, along with those by Cassiodorus and Isidore of Seville, “[was] used for both speculative and practical requirements of the curriculum,”20 although the teaching of musica practica at this stage – unlike that of post-Carolingian times – must have included a heavy dose of musical mathematics. Boethius’s own division of the monochord in Book IV of De institutione musica aimed at providing a visual representation of the proportional relationships that regulated the sounds of the Greek gamut (called Greater Perfect System, or sistema teleion), and of the medieval gamut modeled after it. The main consonances, for Boethius as well as for generations of subsequent writers, were the octave (diapason, corresponding to the ratio of 2:1, both in numbers and in string lengths), the fifth (diapente, 3:2), and the fourth (diatessaron, 4:3).21 The centrality of these intervals in Boethian music theory (itself a reflection of Greek models) was never disputed; rather, it formed the core of a conceptual paradigm of musical sound that later informed post-Carolingian pedagogy. The entire tradition of medieval and Renaissance modal theory is incomprehensible without acknowledging the primacy of those consonances, in primis that of the octave, for both the musicus and the cantor. Guido of Arezzo disregarded Boethius’s treatise not because he took issue with its theses, but because he recognized that its scope and mode of exposition vastly exceeded his more modest and practical objectives, as well as the intellectual maturity of his intended readers.22 Yet when in the mid-fifteenth century Johannes Gallicus proposed his reform of Church musical pedagogy, which involved a phasing out of solmization, he claimed to have found inspiration in Boethius’s treatise, which he had studied in the humanist school of Vittorino da Feltre in Mantua in the 1440s.23 Strands of Musical Medievalism Given the overwhelming presence of the octave-based division of the monochord in Latin theory as a basic tool for demonstrating the foundations

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of musical space, it is puzzling that so much current musicological literature, down to textbooks and non-specialized literature, has instead been highlighting the Hand and the hexachordal system as providing those foundations. Which particular factors have led to the modern preference for one mode of spatial representation over the other? Has post-World-War-II musicology accepted without sufficient scrutiny the hypothesis that the musical foundations of early music were hexachordally conceived? An affirmative answer to this last question seems plausible when one considers that, to my knowledge, no thorough investigation of medieval theory was undertaken in the 1960s, 70s, or 80s to verify (or falsify) the hexachordal hypothesis. It is intriguing to observe that the publication of two English translations of Gafori’s Practica musicae in the late 1960s may have contributed to the recent wave of hexachordal analyses in a significant way (more on Gafori’s treatise below).24 Other articles by Richard Crocker, Jehoash Hirshberg, and Oliver Ellsworth, in addition to the publications by Margaret Bent and Karol Berger already cited, supported the hexachordal hypothesis and paved the way for its analytical applications.25 In hindsight these contributions, while expanding our knowledge of medieval theory in many important ways, have focused on select aspects of it and have espoused too quickly the conclusion that the hexachord played a structural role in medieval and Renaissance music. As I will attempt to argue in the remainder of this article, the relatively recent rise of scholarly interest in hexachordal theory is an expression of the particular “medievalist” agenda that has informed the study of medieval and Renaissance music in the last few decades. At the same time, I also wish to suggest that the present strand of musicological medievalism may have its historical roots in Renaissance music theory. In order to illustrate this point, I wish to go back one more time to the Hand in Fra Bonaventura’s treatise and elaborate further on those strings of six notes indicated on the lower palm (see Figure 1). The publication of Fra Bonaventura’s treatise took place at a key juncture in the history of Guidonian solmization, during which a handful of Northern Italian theorists were formulating a new understanding of the function of the six syllables that marked a significant departure from earlier approaches to this topic.26 Whereas previous writers had described the Hand primarily as a pedagogical tool that did not pretend to account for the foundations of musical sound, late fifteenth-century theorists began to suggest, more or less explicitly, that the six syllables and the mechanism of the Hand captured the basic organization of musical sound. Guido’s guidelines for singing, in other words, became a Theory of musical space with a capital “T”. The treatise Practica musicae of 1496 by Franchino Gafori, who was professor of music in Milan in the age of Ludovico il Moro, very skillfully

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proposed this new understanding of Guidonian theory in which the hexachord is portrayed as the main diatonic yardstick of Christian music and as the direct heir of the Classical tetrachord. The following excerpt illustrates this change of perspective: Guido paid great attention to the arrangement of the seven interlocking hexachords. He either joined the beginning of each hexachord to the first tetrachord of the preceding hexachord, or he set it up a whole step away from the preceding hexachord. Thus the first tetrachords of two hexachords make up a heptachord. But where the first tetrachord of the second hexachord ends, the third hexachord, called the B-molle hexachord, which can also be called conjunct, begins and is contiguous to it. This is done in order that the harshness of the tritone may be made sweeter in modulation and also so that the composition of several of the modes may proceed by means of different species of consonances of the “commixed” and also “acquired” variety. The fourth hexachord is separated from the first tetrachord of the second hexachord by the interval of a whole tone above. The fifth hexachord is joined onto the first tetrachord of the fourth hexachord. The sixth hexachord is connected to the first tetrachord of this fifth hexachord and can be called synemmenon, or conjunct. The seventh hexachord is set apart from the first tetrachord of the fifth hexachord by the interval of a whole tone higher.27 Even those untrained readers who are not at home with the technical nuances of this passage may appreciate its main implication, namely, that of a momentous transfer of the baton from tetrachordum to hexachordum as the organizing yardstick of the diatonic space. Needless to say, such a narrative confers a distinct aura to the figure who engineered that transfer, Guido of Arezzo. Quite possibly, Gafori is here skillfully mobilizing historiography and Greek music theory to defend the hexachordal system from the increasingly loud voice of critics such as Bartolomeo Ramis de Pareja (Musica practica, Bologna, 1482).28 The pseudo-humanist portrayal of Guido as the foremost heir of the Classics, unprecedented in medieval writings, appears to be a calculated rhetorical strategy by Gafori that aimed at manufacturing the consent of his readers. At a time when the ruler of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, aspired to turn his city into a nuova Atene, there was arguably no better way to defend Guido against his detractors than to portray him as the legitimate heir of Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and Boethius. Presented with such a compelling and erudite narrative, any reader of Gafori’s generation could have easily

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reached the conclusion that Guido’s hexachords were simply beyond criticism, as they constituted a necessary stage in a long historical process by which the default organization of musical space had been carefully adjusted through time to satisfy new needs. Gafori’s unwavering and brilliantly executed defense of the hexachordal method of solfege was itself a form of medievalism that created a mythical aura around its creator and ultimately served the purpose of protecting the status quo, i.e., the music curriculum of his time. The enormous success of Gafori’s Practica musicae (five Latin editions and a partial Italian translation were issued by 1518) bequeathed to modernity the cliché that the Classical tetrachord had been to Greek music what Guido’s hexachords had been to Christian chant. This argument conflates different entities and distorts the origin and the function of the Guidonian hexachord. Yet the evolutionary logic it proposes is quite compelling, so much so that one encounters it in one form or another in the writings of even the most influential music scholars in the West, from Gioseffo Zarlino to Charles Burney and Hugo Riemann, where it was co-opted as an important component of various kinds of musical medievalism in the modern era. Certainly by the nineteenth century, and with very few exceptions, Guido’s name was strongly associated with his alleged invention of the hexachord as the central diatonic yardstick of the Christian era, before the advent of octave-based tonality. Logically and temporally situated between the tetrachord of Antiquity and the octave of Modernity, Guido’s hexachord has provided a tangible proof, if any was needed, that there surely was a media aetas in Western musical culture. Thus, the post-Renaissance image of Guido of Arezzo and his hexachord has played an important role in the creation of the modern image of the musical Middle Ages. But potentially more fruitful (inasmuch as it may contribute to the ongoing critical reflection on the current state of the musicological discipline, and particularly of the study of early music) is the possibility that the opposite may also be true, namely, that a shared image of medieval music, well-rooted in Western historiography, has in turn corroborated the “foundational” view of Guido’s solmization system. It is not difficult to see how such cognitive reinforcement may have taken place, as the hypothesis of a six-note diatonic yardstick lends support to some of the traditional binary oppositions that have often guided the modern study of medieval music vis-à-vis that of the Classical/Romantic tradition: “nontonal” vs. “tonal” but also “horizontal/ intervallic” vs. “vertical/chordal” notions of musical space, “oral” vs. “written” modes of transmission, “composite” vs. “organic” notions of musical form, “performance-based” vs. “text-based” models of the musical work, etc. By indirectly honoring such conceptual dualisms, Guido’s hexachord operates and has been operating as a historical agent that effectively distances “early music” from its modern

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counterpart. Predictably, analytic method and historiographic image have mutually legitimized each other. Without question, a concern for respecting the perceived historical gap between us and them has been central to musicological studies of medieval and Renaissance music for a good portion of the twentieth century, and particularly since World War II.29 As other scholars have abundantly observed, the pursuit of authenticity in the analysis and performance of early music was predicated on the basic axiom of an essential rift separating the “modern” and “pre-modern” musical traditions at all levels of intellectual and material culture. Such an attitude has inevitably led to the placing of a premium on a scholarly approach to “early music” that stressed its essential “otherness” from musical life and culture of the modern era. As Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has recently observed in his review of the history of the analysis of early music in the last century: Pushing the Middle Ages away from us, seeing the time gap that separates them from us as a chasm rather than a process, makes them necessarily strange, indeed, absolutely requires that they be so. Shock thus becomes a defining feature of correct research findings. The more different one’s story looks from everything with which we are familiar, the more likely it is to be right. Scholars thus acquire a license to startle, and at the same time become essential as intermediaries who can explain and guide us through the alien landscape that at first only they understand.30 Crudely formulated as it may be, Leech-Wilkinson’s argument begins to explain the prominent role of the Renaissance account of the Guidonian solfege system in recent analytic studies of medieval and Renaissance music. For if one wishes to maintain a chasm between “early music” and the Classical-Romantic tradition, between us and them, then probably nothing is more appealing than to describe that chasm in quasi-genetic terms, i.e., by invoking the idea of a six-note scale serving as a “central concept” of music until just around the time when the modern “harmonic tonality” walked onto the stage.31 Just as the post-1950 early music performance movement, in its quest to differentiate itself from the post-Romantic expression and subjectivity of the musical mainstream, strove for the ideals of objectivity, emotional detachment, and authenticity, so the analytic study of early music was expected to follow a path that was sufficiently independent from the theoretical models adopted in increasingly specialized music departments for the study of “common-practice” tonality. The mapping of the pitch structures of early music into strings of six notes fulfills these goals almost miraculously, if subliminally: in its mechanistic and often counter-intuitive rigor,

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hexachord-based musical analysis avoids the suggestions of tonal pitch space and organicism that were felt to be alien to this repertory, and conveniently refrains from making any claims on matters of pitch hierarchies and harmonic function, perceived to be subjective (in their applicability to early music) and anachronistic.32 Again, such research agendas and rigid scholarly compartmentalizations make loud claims not only about the musical space of “historical others” but also, by implication, about the origins of the modern “tonal” mindset – origins that are patently linked with the emergence of bourgeois individuality and self-consciousness. When Dahlhaus presents the three-hexachord system as the “conceptual form of the tonal system” of the later Middle Ages, his ultimate goal is to portray the modern notion of harmonic tonality as built on a kind of musical space that was not only intrinsically more rational and dynamic than its ancestor, but also radically insulated from it. Thus, the key role assigned by Dahlhaus to the hexachordal system as a heavy-duty, structural device in the “pre-tonal” era amounts to a radical dehistoricization of the tonal language of Mozart and Beethoven. Such a strategy aims at protecting not only the categories of musical aesthetics, Classical-Romantic absolutmusik, and individual genius from the material influences of tradition and collectivity, but also the truth-value and the exclusivity of particular scholarly approaches to the study of mainstream concert music, and their attendant modes of musical analysis and interpretation.33 In short, ideological pressure to place “historical distance” at the core of the study of early music has come from outside as well as inside the early music movement. One passage of Annette Kreutziger-Herr’s article cited above bears on this point. Commenting on the rhetoric of “separation” that became prominent in the world of early music performance after World War II, the author writes that: This separation of early music from the rest of music history introduced a new and different meaning of “separation,” which kept medieval music from entering the canon of concert repertoire. For this, I see essentially two reasons: the early music movement argued that the conditions for performance of medieval music are so different from those of the 19th-century orchestra and choir – on which our concert life still depends – that its integration into the canon would be impossible even if it were desired. Secondly, the separation of medieval music has been so successful that the desire to adapt it to the classical concert repertoire is simply non-existent.34

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There may be more than meets the eye in the first sentence of the citation. When the author points to “the separation of early music from the rest of music history,” she implicitly, if unintentionally, hints at the role of the musicological canon – as it was solidifying in the mid-twentieth century – in shaping the canon of concert repertoire. It may be useful to analyze this process of canon formation from the perspective adopted by Johannes Fabian in his critique of structuralist anthropology.35 Fabian has argued that the representation of the Time of the Other in anthropological writings has been routinely informed by what he calls “a denial of coevalness” with his own time on the part of the knowing subject, i.e., by a pervasive strategy “to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producers of anthropological discourse” (31). Such “allochronic” practices produce the effect of distancing the ethnographic subject from its object, thus denying the possibility of communication – of sharing time and experience – between the culture of the knower and that of the known. It is in the act of listening, more than anything else, that we share time and experience with our ethnographic/historical objects. Thus, listening provides by definition a golden opportunity for the practice and the affirmation of temporal and cultural coevalness. Yet we have to come to terms with that most powerful allochronic factor, Latin music theory, which reminds us of the dangers of imposing a-historical modes of perception onto “early music.” Ergo the widely accepted tenet, in musicological studies, that our interpretations of medieval and Renaissance music may safely run roughshod over our aural experience of it. Indeed, analytic studies of those repertories often move from the premise that “it ain’t the way it sounds,” effectively alienating us from it even as they bring it closer to us by highlighting key aspects of structure and social meaning.36 Similarities in harmony, counterpoint, rhythm, and phrase structure between “early music” and mainstream concert music are likely to be characterized as superficial or at any rate inconsequential for any music history or musical analysis worthy of the name. This is not to advocate acritical modes of listening, or to suggest that we ought not to adjust our listening habits and expectations when enjoying a Josquin motet (though just what those adjustments may be, and at what costs, is still far from clear). The question is ultimately one of (pre)judgment: is the modern baggage that accompanies us to the recital hall a priori a liability, or could it also be an opportunity to evaluate a posteriori the impressive achievements of long-gone historical actors? The very fact that “early music” can still move us deeply, that we can still aurally appreciate its form and propriety in the context of easily learned historical conventions of genre and style, surely tells us that our “modern” musical baggage is firmly rooted in “pre-modern” musical experiences and sensibilities. Even the value

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judgments quite often overlap: close familiarity with Schönberg and Duke Ellington does not diminish our ability to understand fairly quickly, upon listening, why the new “English sound” of John Dunstable and Leonel Power and their colleagues deeply impressed continental composers in the early 1400s, or why the madrigals by Jacques Arcadelt were prized throughout the sixteenth century far more than those by countless other “Kleinmeistern”. In a similar manner, we may decry the engrained habit of hearing “chords” in medieval and Renaissance polyphonic works composed “successively,” that is to say, composed by overlaying melodic parts on top of one another, rather than simultaneously. But to view these distinctions – however pertinent or significant – as affecting the very ontology of musical sound may be to miss the point. For it was certainly the continuous practice of overlaying melodic parts synchronically (i.e., homophonically), according to conventional rules of counterpoint and harmony, that eventually led music theory and pedagogy to the recognition and classification of “chord” as an empirical component of polyphonic music. The fact that we are able to hear “chords” in Machaut and Dufay is a testimony to the ability of at least some aspects of the medieval musical language to acquire new meanings in new contexts, thus to be constantly reconceptualized, reimagined, and reheard. It may be that the goal of historically informed listening actually invites us to have our cake and eat it too, i.e., to enjoy our “chords” in medieval music to the fullest, while placing in historical perspective the pre-modern lack of interest in that concept.37 Perhaps our best hope to avoid colonizing past musical cultures is to recognize from the outset the large role they played, for better or worse, in shaping our own, and to accept their essential coevalness with us.38 No one, of course, will seriously challenge the scholar’s self-imposed obligations to respect historical distance and to acknowledge even the assumption of the “cultural otherness” of the Middle Ages as a sound methodological premise. But the paradox of an uncritical acceptance of that assumption is a historical account that ends up imposing modern interests and perspectives onto the study of the past – precisely what the presumption of otherness is meant in principle to forestall. The debate worth having, then – one that is slowly beginning to take place in early music studies – is about precisely locating our position in history as a precondition from which our “distance” from past musical cultures can even begin to be properly measured. For at what point does a justifiable concern with respecting historical distance lead to overshooting it? When the tenet of “distance” guides our historical narratives, which safeguards are in place to prevent those narratives from being reduced to foregone conclusions? How do we walk the fine line between, on the one hand, the desirable goal of inquiring about the historical roots of modern musical consciousness and sensibilities,

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and, on the other hand, the questionable outcome of appropriating the past for our own purposes, of turning our historical subjects into the mere pawns of our teleological narratives? As I hope to have demonstrated, the historiography of the hexachordal system in the modern era offers a privileged perspective from which to address those questions, not only because it raises once again the eternal problem of how to interpret the primary sources, but also because it reveals the close interconnections between the historiography of early music after World War II and the consolidation of a scholarly musical canon centered around the Classical-Romantic tradition. Following Christopher Page, I wish to suggest that the Guidonian Hand, seen as a music-theoretical paradigm, is high on the list of the entrenched images of the Middle Ages that are badly in need of being discarded, or at least seriously revisited. Such an adjustment, far from erasing the historical distance between us and them, would make us rethink the relationships between the modern and the pre-modern sense of musical space, recasting them in different shades of gray, rather than in terms of historically untenable oppositions. NOTES 1. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 21st Annual Conference on Medievalism held at The Ohio State University on October 13–14, 2006. My warmest thanks to Karl Fugelso and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2. Martin Gerbert, Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum, ex variis Italiae, Galliae & Germaniae codicibus manuscriptis collecti et nunc primum publica luce donati, 3 vols. (St. Blaise: Typis San-Blasianis, 1784; repr. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1963). Gerbert’s anthology included the complete writings of (among others) Hucbald of St. Amand, Guido of Arezzo, the Reichenau theorists, Elias Salomon, Franco of Colon, Engelbert of Admont, Marchetto of Padua, and Adam of Fulda. About a century later, the French scholar Edmond de Coussemaker built on Gerbert’s path-breaking publication by issuing an additional four-volume set that included the writings of many other writers from the Carolingian era to the late fifteenth century, including Regino of Prüm, Jerome of Moravia, Magister Lambertus, Johannes de Garlandia, Jacques de Liège, Johannes Gallicus, and Johannes Tinctoris (E. de Coussemaker, Scriptorum de musica medii aevi. Novam Seriem a Gerbertina alteram, 4 vols. [Paris: Durand, 1864–76]). The rightful and worthy heir of Gerbert and Coussemaker in the computer age is the invaluable Thesaurus musicarum latinarum, which provides access to the complete texts of hundreds of music theory treatises in Latin from Late Antiquity to the seventeenth century. (The database, headed by Prof. Thomas Mathiesen of Indiana University, continues to grow; it is accessible online at , which also provides links to other databases of medieval and Renaissance music theory in French, Italian, and English.)

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3. John Hawkins, A general history of the science and practice of music (London: T. Payne and Son, 1776; repr. New York: Dover, 1963, 2 vols.); Charles Burney, A general history of music from the earliest age to the present period (London: Payne and son, et al., 1789; repr. New York: Dover, 1957, 2 vols.). 4. Undoubtedly two of the most influential scholars who studied the history of harmonic theory and practice in the West were François-Joseph Fétis (Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmonie considérée comme art et comme science systématique [Paris: Impr. de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1840]) and Hugo Riemann (Geschichte der Musiktheorie im IX.–XIX. Jahrhundert [Leipzig: M. Hesse, 1898 and 1921]; partial English translation: History of music theory, books I and II: polyphonic theory to the sixteenth century, translated, with a preface, commentary, and notes by Raymond H. Haggh [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962]). For an excellent discussion of Fétis’s view of tonality in historical perspective, see Thomas Christensen, “Fétis and emerging tonal consciousness,” in Ian Bent, ed., Music theory in the age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–56. On Riemann’s theory of harmony, see now the fundamental study by Alexander Rehding, Hugo Riemann and the birth of modern musical thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5. For a concise description of the medieval and Renaissance diatonic system, see David Fallows, “Gamut,” in Laura Macy, ed., Grove Music Online , accessed March 11, 2007. 6. Basic information on the medieval system of hexachordal solmization may be found in the articles on “Solmization” (by Andrew Hughes) and “Hexachord” (by Jehoash Hirshberg) in Macy, Grove Music Online, both articles accessed March 11, 2007. For a more detailed treatment of this topic, see Karol Berger, Musica ficta: theories of accidental inflections in vocal polyphony from Marchetto da Padova to Gioseffo Zarlino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 7. For a representative sample of these musical Hands, see Joseph Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung: Lehre, und Theorie der Musik im Mittelalter, Musikgeschichte in Bildern: Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, vol. III/3 (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1969), 126–41, figs. 61–80. 8. I adopt the label “hexachordally coded” from Thomas Brothers. See his Chromatic beauty in the late-medieval chanson: an interpretation of manuscript accidentals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 43. 9. Harold Powers, “Is mode real? Pietro Aron, the octenary system, and polyphony,” Basler, Jahrbuch für Musikpraxis 16 (1992): 9–52 (15). 10. Carl Dahlhaus, Studies on the Origins of Harmonic Tonality, trans. R. Gjerdingen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 171. Originally published as Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der Harmonische Tonalität, Saarbrücker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, vol. 2 (Kassel, New York: Bärenreiter, 1968). 11. Berger, Musica ficta, 190. 12. Margaret Bent, “Diatonic ficta,” Early Music History 4 (1984): 1–48 (8). Also reprinted in Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica ficta (New York: Routledge, 2002), 115–59 (120). For a discussion of this point, see my “Virtual Segments: The Hexachordal System in the Late Middle Ages,” The Journal of Musicology 23 (1996): 423–67 (458–63). 13. I discuss this point at length in a forthcoming monograph on the

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transmission of the hexachordal system in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, and in the article “Si quis manus non habeat: Charting Non-Hexachordal Musical Practices in the Age of Solmization,” Early Music History 26 (2007): 181–218. 14. On Ciconia’s critique of the Hand, see my “The Ciconian Hexachord,” in Philippe Vendrix, ed., Johannes Ciconia: musicien de la transition (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 279–304. On Gallicus, see my “Si quis manus non habeat,” 184–87. 15. The Theory of Music, series B III of the Repertoire international des sources musicales, vols. 1–6 (Munich: Henle, 1961–2003). These numerical data are obviously preliminary, since they are not the result of first-hand examination of the primary sources. 16. The image is reproduced in Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung, 83, fig. 31. 17. See, for instance, Margaret Bent, “Diatonica ficta,” 3–7 (Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica ficta, 116–19). 18. In his dissertation on this subject, Cecil Adkins wrote that “the monochord was used extensively as an aid to teaching” until around 1450, when it was replaced by other keyboard instruments” (“The Theory and Practice of the Monochord,” [Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1963], 337). Likewise, in his preface to his recent edition of medieval texts explaining the division of the monochord, Christian Meyer emphasizes the role of this instrument in shaping the medieval understanding of musical space (“Les mesures de monocorde procurent ainsi un regard original non seulement sur l’évolution du système acoustique occidental, mais également sur la manière dont ce système fut organisé et pensé”). See Christian Meyer, Mensura monochordi: La division du monocorde (IXe–XVe siècles) (Paris: Klincksiek, 1996), xii. 19. For an overview of Boethius’s De institutione, see Calvin Bower, “Boethius,” in Macy, Grove Music Online, accessed March 19, 2007. 20. Adkins, “The Theory and Practice of the Monochord,” 72. 21. Gafori’s gamut (see Figure 3) shows the humanist practice of indicating conventional numerical values for each pitch, thus also the proportional relationships between them. 22. At the very end of what was probably his last treatise, the Epistola ad Michahelem, Guido writes, “I adjusted my presentation for children, in this following Boethius whose book is useful to philosophers only, not to singers” (as recorded in Dolores Pesce’s Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule Rithmice, Prologus in Antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem. A Critical Text and Translation, with an introduction, annotations, indices, and new manuscript inventories [Ottawa: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999], 531. Pesce’s introduction to her edition [1–38] provides an excellent overview of Guido’s musical pedagogy). 23. Johannes Gallicus, Ritus canendi vetustissimus et novus, ed. Albert Seay, pars prima: vol. 1 and pars secunda: vol. 2 (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1981). The explicit of the prima pars includes the following passage: “All of these [rudiments of music] I had learned in the French city of Namur from my childhood. But after settling in Italy, where I heard diligently Boethius’s text on music from the mouth of that excellent man, my teacher Vittorino of Feltre, I realized that I had not yet learned the true practice of this art, even though I had earlier

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thought of myself as a musicus. For the true practice of music, which I formerly ignored altogether, is this: to wish to know the universal principles that are described in these pages and that have been drawn from the pure source of Boethius, and not to ignore anything that I have mentioned above” (“Haec omnia Namurci didiceram a cunabulis, quod est oppidum in Gallia. Sed cum ad Italiam venissem ac sub optimo viro, Magistro Victorino Feltrensi, musicam Boetii diligenter audissem, qui me prius musicum estimabam, vidi necdum veram huius artis attigisse practicam. Vera namque practica musicae quam funditus tunc ignorabam, haec est, universa, quae scripta sunt hic et e puro fonte Boetii prorsus exhausta velle scire, quae vero supra tetigimus non ignorare”). Ritus canendi, ed. Seay, vol. 1, 78. 24. Practica musicae [by] Franchinus Gaffurius, translation and transcription by Clement A. Miller (Dallas, TX: American Institute of Musicology, 1968); and The Practica musicae of Franchinus Gafurius, translated and edited with musical transcriptions by Irwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 25. See Margaret Bent, “Musica Recta and Musica Ficta,” Musica disciplina 26 (1972): 73–100 (also in Counterpoint, Composition, and Musica Ficta, 61–94), and “Diatonic ficta”; Jehoash Hirshberg, “Hexachordal and Modal Structure in Machaut’s Polyphonic Chansons,” in John Walter Hill, ed., Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto Albrecht (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1980), 19–42; Karol Berger, “The Hand and the Art of Memory,” Musica disciplina 35 (1981): 87–120; Richard Crocker, “Perchè Zarlino diede una nuova numerazione ai modi?” Rivista italiana di musicologia 3 (1968): 48–58, and “Hermann’s Major Sixth,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 25 (1972): 19–37; and Oliver Ellsworth, “The Origin of Coniuncta: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Music Theory 17 (1973): 86–109. For more recent studies on the use of the hand as a mnemonic device, see Karol Berger, “The Guidonian Hand,” in M. Carruthers and J. M. Ziolkowski, ed., The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 71–82, esp. 76–78; Claire Richter Sherman and Peter M. Lukehart, ed., Writing on hands: memory and knowledge in early modern Europe (Carlisle, PA: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College; Washington, D. C.: Folger Shakespeare Library; Seattle: University of Washington Press [distributor], 2000); and Anna Maria Busse Berger, Medieval Music and the Art of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), esp. 85–94. 26. See my “Virtual Segments,” 463–67. 27. “[. . .] tanta fuit ad commixtotum septem exachordorum dispositionem ipsius Guidonis animaduersio. Namque vniuscuiusque exachordi principium vel primo praecedentis exachordi tetrachordo coniunxit: vel ipsum ab eo toni disiunctum instituit interuallo. Qua ex re In eptachordo: duorum exachordorum prima comprobantur tetrachorda. At vbi primum secundi exachordi tetrachordum terminatur: tertium exachordum b molle dictum: quod et coniunctum dici potest: summit exordium superductum quidem: vt et trittoni asperitas fiat in modulatione suauior: et nonnullorum tonorum compositio possit per variatas consonantiarum species commixte atque item acquisite procedere. Quartum vero exachordum a primo secundi exachordi tetrachordo toni interuallo disiungitur in acutum. Quintum autem exachordum primo quarti exachordi coniungitur tetrachordo. Verum primo quinti huius exachordi tetrachordo sextum connexum est

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exachordum. Quod sinemenon seu coniunctum potest appellari. Septimum exachordum a primo quiuti exachordi tetrachordo toni distantia disiungitur in acutum” (Practica musicae, fol. aiijr–aiijv). The English translation is from The Practica musicae of Franchinus Gafurius, trans. Young, 17–18. 28. See the edition of the treatise by Johannes Wolf, Musica practica, Bartolomei Rami de Pareja, Bononiae. Impressa opere et industria ac expensis magistri Baltasaris de Hiriberia MCCCCLXXXII (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901; repr. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1968); for the English translation, see Bartolomeo Ramis de Pareja, Musica practica, trans. and comm. Clement A. Miller (NeuhausenStuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag, 1993). It seems that Ramis’s treatise was actually the first one to use the term “hexachordum” in the context of Guidonian solmization, and to present it as an expansion of the Classical tetrachord. See my “Virtual Segments,” 463–67. 29. For an overview of the leading forces that have shaped the approach to medieval music since the Enlightenment, see Annette Kreutziger-Herr, “Imagining Medieval Music: a Short History,” in Studies in Medievalism 15 (2005): 81–109. 30. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 209. 31. Eric Chafe makes this point when he argues that “The legitimizing of the seven-tone major scale and its eventually taking over the transpositional role of the hexachord [. . .] is an important aspect of the emergence of the modern tonal system” (Monteverdi’s Tonal Language [New York: Schirmer Books, 1992], 25). 32. For a discussion of the process and compromises by which the analytic study of early music came to be accepted as a legitimate academic goal and activity, see Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music, 182–205. 33. For an insightful assessment of the scholarly agenda pursued by Carl Dahlhaus in three phenomenally productive decades of musicological research, see James Hepokosky, “The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-musicological Sources,” 19th-Century Music 14 (1991): 221–46. In a nutshell, the author identifies Dahlhaus’s overarching goal as a defense of the notion of Absolutmusik against the Marxian (specifically post-Adornian) strand of critical theory that dominated the German academia of the 1950s and 60s: “[. . .] at the heart of the Dahlhaus Project was an effort to keep the Austro-Germanic canon from Beethoven to Schöberg free from aggressively sociopolitical interpretations” (222). A critical analysis of the role played by Dahlhaus’s formulation of the origins and the constituent principles of “harmonic tonality” in the context of his overall research project remains a project worth pursuing. 34. Kreutziger-Herr, “Imagining Medieval Music,” 99–100. 35. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983; repr. 2002). 36. Thus, after observing that “[t]he primary tonal elements of Renaissance music are pitch-classes and triads, to all intents and purposes acoustically the same as those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music,” and that “there is much in the detail of tonal relationships in Renaissance polyphony that is comfortably familiar,” Harold Powers proceeded to develop a theory of “tonal types” that relies on visual (i.e., music-notational) markers far more heavily than on sonorous ones (see his

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“Tonal Types and Modal Categories in Renaissance Polyphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 [1981]: 428–70 [428]. See also the passage from Powers’ “Is mode real?” cited earlier in this paper.) In the same fashion, Eric Chafe acknowledges the tonal basis of Monteverdi’s music, yet he resorts to approaching it from the “theoretical past,” in the form of an ad hoc “modal-hexachordal system that, as later commentators have pointed out, is also a modern construct in medieval clothes” (Monteverdi’s Tonal Language, xii–xiv). See the review by Massimo Ossi in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 491. In his own review of Chafe’s study, Geoffrey Chew points to Dahlhaus’s Studies on the Origin of Harmonic Tonality as the source of Chafe’s music-analytic method (Notes 20 [1994]: 115). 37. My argument here is indebted to an insightful comment by Philip Weller on a passage from Christopher Page’s Discarding Images. Reflections on Music and Culture in Medieval France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): “[. . .] the relationship between linear interaction and vertical sonority, in both the composer’s and the listener’s minds, is a rich and complex question that cannot be discussed in such simple terms. We may wonder, for instance, to what extent ‘chord progressions’ are similar to a ‘succession of sonorities’ [. . .], and in what ways these extremely generalized descriptions of how we perceive textures might differ from other, more flexible and potentially richer accounts of how the ‘acoustic fusion’ of distinct pitches or contrapuntal lines can be aurally perceived. Is there not, rather, a multitude of ways in which an experienced listener may resolve the tension between the ‘purely’ linear and the ‘purely’ harmonic? Instead of seeing a stark opposition of sharply individuated lines that resist each other, or a smoothly blended overall sound that softens the angularity and friction of independent linear movement, might it not be more fruitful and realistic to view polyphony as offering a multiplicity of possible textural and aural ‘solutions’? From the eclectic standpoint of our present-day musical culture, we might consider whether any polyphonic texture, in whatever style, does not admit – even invite – different hearings based on the free distribution of the listener’s aural attention. This, it could be argued, is as true of the medieval as of the Renaissance motet, of a Haydn or Bartók quartet as of the ‘Jupiter’ Symphony or Symphonies of Wind Instruments” (“Frames and Images: Locating Music in Cultural Histories of the Middle Ages,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 [1997]: 7–54 [32–33]). 38. As Karol Berger has reminded us, we should wish to engage in a dialogic relationships with the past “not in order to celebrate our modern superiority, or to efface all difference between us and our ancestors, but in order to find out how we got from there to here. The obscurantist gesture of establishing a protected space where the questioning of the other is not allowed ‘protects’ not only the other, but also ourselves, ensures that our modern comfort will not be disturbed by any genuine confrontation with another way of viewing things. The objectifying distancing between the interpreting historian and the interpreted subject [. . .] ensures that there is little the historian might have to learn about himself as a result of his interpretation” (“Contemplating Music Archeology,” a review essay of Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others [Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993], The Journal of Musicology 13 [1995]: 404–23 [410]).

An Introduction to Medievalist Video Games1 Carol L. Robinson In his 1997 book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen J. Aarseth argues that the pleasure in reading traditional texts is “the pleasure of the voyeur, safe but impotent.”2 The reader cannot affect the outcome of, say, a game in such a text, but neither does he or she run any risk from it. That is to say, the barbe of the Green Knight’s sword will never threaten the reader’s neck quite as literally as it does that of Sir Gawain in their famous “beheading” game.3 However, video-game narratives are not traditional texts; they are cybertexts, and they demand a different role from their reader. Indeed, Aarseth argues that cybertext readers may not in fact be readers, for they must also function as co-authors and therefore are not safe.4 In interacting with narratives, they refashion them and may suffer personal rejection, such as the failure of a quest or even the death of an alter-ego. Of course, cybertext readers may also enjoy great rewards and may perhaps do so on a far more vicarious level than that of traditional readers. Some of those cyberrewards are tangible within the fiction of the text, such as the gold and jewels that often await at the end of a successful quest. But many of the rewards stem from the interactive experience itself, from having some control over contexts outside of daily modern life. And that may be particularly true for contexts perceived as being near yet far, as being contiguous enough with our own culture to be at least somewhat familiar, yet as being distant enough to seem at least somewhat exotic, as is often true for the Middle Ages. As Oliver M. Traxel demonstrates below in “Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity,” the Middle Ages, particularly as they have been treated in medieval and post-medieval literature, have enough historical associations and enough common coin in contemporary culture, yet enough ambiguity and association with fantasy, to dominate entire areas of the Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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computer-game industry. Of course, to some degree that success has been fueled by specifically adapting these games to the demands and demographics of desired audiences, as discussed by Amy S. Kaufman in “Romancing the Game: Magic Writing, and the Feminine in Neverwinter Nights.” And to some degree, that success includes the importation of medieval and pseudo-medieval elements to contexts that ostensibly have little do with the Middle Ages, as closely observed by the Moberly brothers in “Revising the Future: The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.” But the success of medievalism, particularly in the most interactive of games, has also had much to do with the formation of identities in these games relative to (supposedly) medieval roles, as discussed by Lauryn S. Mayer in “Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs.” And therein lie many of the challenges for cybertext medievalism. As scholars of this subject deal with works that give their audiences unprecedented opportunities for risk and reward, they themselves may face unprecedented risks and rewards. Not only must scholars presumably engage their subject first-hand, but, by their writings about those engagements, they may shape the parameters of games to come. Accepting the risks, scholars have the opportunity to help write what they read: from individual narratives to entire genres in this most risky and potent of fields.

NOTES 1. For a general history of video games, including medievalist games, see Leonard Herman, Jer Horwitz, Steve Kent, and Skyler Miller, “The History of Video Games.” GameSpot. CNET Networks, Inc. 2007. , and Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond – The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001). 2. Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 4. 3. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, c.1375–1400. 4. Aarseth, Cybertext, 4.

Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity1 Oliver M. Traxel Introduction The Middle Ages have long served as an inspiration for film and literary works.2 However, since the late twentieth century, they have also fueled an ever-growing number of re-enactments and games, especially computer games.3 Some of the latter are grounded in thorough research on the historical circumstances of the Middle Ages, but many more depend on overt fiction from or about the period, and almost all incorporate at least some pseudo-medieval elements. This article explores some of those medieval and pseudo-medieval elements, as well as the types of computer game in which they appear. As the number of these games is far greater than could reasonably be covered here, I will focus on those that revolve around role-playing.4 But to give some idea of the range of medievalism and pseudo-medievalism in computer games as a whole, I will address examples from three different subgenres of roleplaying games. After briefly outlining the genre as a whole – as well as some of the others into which computer games have traditionally been divided – I will summarize Starbreeze Studios’ Knights of the Temple: Infernal Crusade, which represents simple, action-based games set in comparatively historical circumstances, Piranha Bytes’ Gothic 2, which is a more complex, questbased game set in a fantasy locale with mere overtones of the Middle Ages, and Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot, which is a massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game (henceforth referred to as an “MMORPG”) set in a milieu largely derived from medieval fiction. I will then examine three key aspects in the development of these games – namely, the medieval themes that apparently served as their inspiration, the manner in which these conceptions were altered for the benefit of the games (and the motives behind these Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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alterations), and the differences among anticipated levels of interaction in the games – before concluding with a summary of my main points. The Types of Computer Game Containing Medieval Elements As is suggested by the vast differences among the genres and subgenres to which specialty publications often assign the same computer games, categorizing the latter can be highly problematic.5 Games from one genre often contain features associated with other genres, and some features are found in almost all genres. For example, games that fundamentally revolve around role-playing almost always contain at least some form of action, strategy, and/or adventure, and at least some form of role-playing is almost always found in games that fundamentally revolve around action, strategy, and/or adventure. Indeed, perhaps all computer games could be defined as roleplaying in that they require players to somehow assume the identity of specific characters or groups of characters.6 Moreover, no genre is completely devoid of some of the broader common denominators found in computer games, including medievalism and pseudo-medievalism, though these features may be significantly less prominent in some genres than in others.7 One genre in which medievalism and pseudo-medievalism are particularly prominent is that of strategy and management-simulation games.8 These games are often set in historical milieux because of the challenges involved in recreating past socio-economic systems, particularly in carrying out such fundamental activities as providing adequate resources for the members of a community, constructing sufficient shelter for them, and conducting warfare on their behalf. And, in fact, many of these games are quite successful in reconstructing the known circumstances of a particular location at a particular time. For example, Firefly’s Stronghold 2, which promises to be “the most accurate, amazing and dynamic depiction of siegewarfare and castle-life ever portrayed,” does indeed include highly realistic representations of Harlech Castle in Wales and Stolzenfels Castle in Germany.9 Of course, military themes are particularly popular in a genre devoted to management and strategy, and though aristocratic and economic themes are also well-represented in this genre, they and other, less prominent, themes, such as the religious component in Firefly’s Stronghold Crusader,10 are often clustered around the preparation for, and conduct of, battle.11 But perhaps more surprising than the military presence in this genre is the great degree to which the latter revolves around the Middle Ages and to which strategy and management-simulation appear in medievalist or pseudo-medievalist games that are otherwise more closely affiliated with other genres. Evidently, the martial associations with the Middle Ages make that period ripe for such games, and perhaps the common belief that even

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the largest medieval communities were largely inclusive and self-sufficient lends itself to establishing societies that are big but not unwieldy, that invite careful resource management and clever tactics, but do not involve so many variables as to simulate the chaos often associated with other historical milieux. Of course, action- and fighting-games, such as Enlight’s Wars and Warriors: Joan of Arc,12 frequently involve medieval or pseudo-medieval figures whom players can direct or with whom they, as fictional characters, can interact. In most cases, little more than the names of the historical figures are authentic. For example, in Wars and Warriors the reference to Joan of Arc has little significance other than to provide a pretext for combat, which is carried out by players in historical roles associated with the Maid of Orleans. That is to say, the setting is merely an excuse for attacks with medieval or pseudo-medieval weapons, and there is little or no reference to Joan’s actual life. Indeed, the historical content of these games is often so thin that they could be classified as simple role-playing games, rather than as truly medievalist action- or fighting-games.13 There are a few adventure games set in the medieval period, but these are generally older and less popular, such as Arxel Tribe’s Pilgrim, which tries so hard to be authentic that it comes with an encyclopaedia about the Middle Ages, and Cryo Interactive’s Arthur’s Knights, which, in its focus on largely legendary characters, is less realistic.14 It is difficult to determine why this genre does not have more games set in the Middle Ages, but one explanation may be that its frequent pointing and clicking favor advanced technical weaponry over medieval swords, axes, and so forth.15 In any case, adventure games constitute a very small portion of those that refer to the Middle Ages. Role-playing games, on the other hand, constitute a large percentage of medievalist and pseudo-medievalist games. Indeed, apart from strategy games, they may constitute the most prominent category of computer games containing such themes. As is the case with the other genres, there are various subgenres of role-playing games, such as action-based games, quest-based games, and MMORPGs. However, as in assigning computer games to genres, strict lines cannot be drawn among the subgenres of role-playing games. Action-based games, for example, may contain quests; quest-based games may contain a great deal of action; and MMORPGs, which tend to be particularly complex, often contain a tremendous amount of both action and questing.16 Nevertheless, each of the role-playing games that I will discuss in detail tends to stay within one of these categories: Knights of the Temples contains many action sequences and few quests; Gothic 2 focuses on the completion of quests, many of which may be achieved by wit and other non-action means; and Dark Age of Camelot works on a variety

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of levels that do not particularly privilege action or questing. Of course, there are so many computer role-playing games that there are inevitably others that also privilege one subgenre of this category over all others, but few of those games contain as many medieval and pseudo-medieval references as do my three main examples. Background Information on Three Particular Games Containing Medieval Elements Knights of the Temple was created by a group of Swedish developers and published in 2004.17 A diary on the former official webpage for the game gave the origins of the story: after reading a novel about the adventures of a Swedish warrior in the Crusades, marketing manager Nick Kyriakidis thought, “you could make a good game out of that.”18 Originally, the game revolved around a troubled relationship between a father and his son. But the designers came to believe that this theme was too complex for younger players. So, after experimenting with several other storylines, they settled on a much simpler but no less dark premise: the protagonist, a Knight Templar named Paul de Raque, would try to save a young girl from an evil bishop who literally intends to release hell on earth. The story is not set in any particular year,19 as complete historical accuracy apparently was not considered central to the game, but it obviously takes place sometime after the start of the Crusades in 1095 and before their end in the fifteenth century.20 Thus, Knights of the Temple could be summed up as a game with a simple interactive story aimed at a rather young audience and involving a rescue mission set during the later Middle Ages. Gothic 2, on the other hand, is more complex and concomitantly intended for more experienced players.21 It was published in 2002 in Germany and translated into English the following year.22 The official webpage has a link to a developer’s diary, which is divided into six chapters and gives background information on the development of the game.23 It is set on the fictitious island of Khorinis at an unspecified time, but it has a pseudo-medieval environment that includes kings, castles, swords, dragons, and other themes frequently associated with the Middle Ages. In its predecessor, Gothic, the nameless protagonist is thrown into a prison camp – a valley surrounded by a magic barrier – and is forced to battle his way through various adventures, until a final showdown with a supernatural enemy leads to the destruction of the magic barrier.24 In Gothic 2, the story begins with the reanimation of the half-dead protagonist by a necromancer, who then charges the hero with solving the mystery of an evil presence within the valley. The story includes several quests, and each of its six chapters has a specific goal whose attainment leads the player to another stage in

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the narrative. Of course, as is common in such games, the last chapter ends with a “final” battle – this time against an undead dragon – and, in this case, with the destruction of the evil force that threatens the valley. The first version of Dark Age of Camelot, which is available in not only English but also German, French, and Spanish, was released in 2001.25 Its format differs from that of the other two games in that its story has a continuously evolving gameworld, for, as a MMORPG, it is played over the Internet and receives patches and updates on a regular basis. Moreover, its designers have supplemented it with not only better graphics and improved gameplay but also further territory, more accessories, and, within specific expansion packs, additional quests.26 At present, it includes three main settings, each of which was inspired by medieval literature and folklore: Albion by later medieval tales about King Arthur, Hibernia by pre-Christian Welsh and Irish stories, and Midgard by Old Norse sagas.27 The story is set in approximately the middle of the sixth century, not long after the supposed date of Arthur’s death,28 but, like other MMORPGs, and in contrast to offline role-playing games, it does not have one main story and is completely open-ended. Specific quests or tasks can be initiated by approaching non-player characters (henceforth referred to as “NPCs”), and they can be solved either alone or with a group of other players. But the ultimate aim of the game is to develop one’s character beyond those of other players by accruing equipment and experience in fighting enemies, completing tasks, and fulfilling quests. The Use of Medieval Elements Within These Games All three games chosen for this study make heavy use of locations and/or actions associated with the Middle Ages. As mentioned above, Knights of the Temple revolves around an actual series of medieval events, namely, the Crusades. Dark Age of Camelot, on the other hand, rests to a great degree on settings and events from medieval literature, from texts that are, in fact, not even from the portion of the Middle Ages that Dark Age of Camelot purports to represent. Though some of its sources, such as Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur,29 may have been considered “historical” at the time they were written, they actually represent much later perspectives on stories that had probably changed greatly since their apparent origins in the sixth century. Thus, Arthur and his contemporaries would probably have had a much more difficult time than would Malory and his contemporaries, much less us, in associating the Albion of Dark Age of Camelot with the sixth-century Britain it is supposed to embody. Yet, though Dark Age of Camelot would seem to be rooted even less than Knights of the Temple in the known circumstances of the places and events those games purport to represent, it at least

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strives to be more authentic to the spirit of the Middle Ages than does Gothic 2. Though the stonework and other details of the setting in Gothic 2 may conform to modern medievalist notions of the Middle Ages, the game does not even pretend to derive directly from actual medieval literature, much less medieval history. Consequently, while Knights of the Temple and Dark Age of Camelot have recreations of actual medieval cities, such as Salisbury, and sites at least associated with the Middle Ages in medieval literature, such as Camelot, Gothic 2 has Khorinis and other overtly imaginary settings that are almost pure fantasy, and are more akin to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth than anywhere on medieval Earth. In other respects, however, these three games are more alike than different in their references to the Middle Ages. For example, all three games have castles, monasteries, and houses that look at least somewhat like late medieval architecture. Moreover, all three games have clothing, armor, weapons, and other tools that are also late medieval in appearance. Indeed, an early version of the website for Knights of the Temple had illustrations of thirteen swords, seven axes, four maces, and three bows;30 Gothic 2 has an even larger selection of medieval weapons, armor, and clothing, including many items with such pseudo-medieval names as “Orc Battle Blade,” “Torturer’s Axe,” and “Raven’s Beak”;31 and Dark Age of Camelot has a comparable range of medieval equipment, much of which comes with no-less-descriptive names than those found in Gothic 2. Of course, none of the medieval items in these games represents a particular historical counterpart. But, as with the architecture in these games, complete historical accuracy apparently is not the goal of the game designers, for like the buildings, the weapons, armor, and clothing would seem to be more about evoking a general medieval “air” than locating the narrative in a particular historical site. And, in fact, the same could be said for the social aspects, daily life, and occupations of the characters in these games. For example, the protagonist in Knights of the Temple, as mentioned above, is a Knight Templar, but not a particular, historical knight. And though other characters in this game also pursue actual medieval professions, such as torturer and assassin, they, too, do not refer to particular historical individuals.32 Nor do any of the figures in Dark Age of Camelot, as they each assume one of thirty-nine character-classes that include such actual medieval occupations as friar, mercenary, and minstrel.33 Evidently, as mentioned above, the game designers believed precise historical recreation was less important than evoking a general medieval environment. Of course, at times, the lack of precise historical recreation can substantially undermine the medieval ambience of these games. Their religious content is a case in point. Knights of the Temple, for example, is religious in

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little more than name, as, apart from the general backdrop of the Crusades, even its Knight Templar is largely divorced from religious considerations.34 Gothic 2 includes monasteries and other elements associated with religion, but there is no overt Christianity in this game, and many of its superficially religious elements either assume secular functions or are associated with beliefs that did not have a following during the Middle Ages, as in the dedication of the monasteries to fictional gods that are particular to this game. And though Dark Age of Camelot has Christian elements in its Albion, such as clerics and friars, and has pagan worshippers in its Hibernia and Midgard, it does not capture the ubiquity of Christianity or of any other spiritual belief system associated with the Middle Ages.35 But authenticity in medievalism should perhaps be measured in not only its similarity to medieval literature and/or the historical Middle Ages but also its avoidance of known anachronisms. Most computer games set in medieval or medieval-like environments omit pre-medieval elements, such as aspects of Classical Greece and Rome, as well as post-medieval elements, particularly modern equipment, inventions, and professions. In fact, to my knowledge, no games set during the Middle Ages feature such ubiquitous modern innovations as electricity, radiators, or running water. Even gunpowder is widely avoided, though it was introduced during the Later Middle Ages and may occur in computer games set specifically at the end of the period, such as Related Designs’ strategy-game Castle Strike.36 Nor have I found any evidence in these games of post-medieval clothing, though many of their garments seem to be far cleaner and more colorful than was probably typical during the Middle Ages. And I have seen modern body language, such as “thumbs up” or “gang signs,” only in specific emotes introduced by MMORPG players. Thus, the games in question often seem to avoid overt dissonance with the Middle Ages – at least as the latter have been perceived by game designers and their contemporaries – and to thereby promote the possibility of interacting within an environment that at least invokes, if it does not in fact represent, the Middle Ages. The motives for this effort are, of course, numerous and not completely determinable. But many of them surely stem from a perception of the historical and fictional Middle Ages as entertaining in their own right, as not needing to be spiced up with anachronisms. Particularly for modern consumers who find combat entertaining, the common equation of the Middle Ages with the Crusades and with other wars of their time may be a sufficient pretext in and of itself for a game, as would seem to be true for Knights of the Temple. Though these consumers may overestimate the degree and frequency of barbarity in these historical conflicts, the latter could hardly help but have entailed a significant amount of drama, and that drama unfolded through such simple weapons and on such a comparatively small

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scale that it may be far easier to envision, and vicariously experience, than the much more distant and much more massive acts of destruction inflicted by such modern technology as “smart” bombs and nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Middle Ages themselves sanction the perception of conflict as entertaining, in that they treated jousts and other mock battles as enjoyable spectacles.37 Thus, particularly in relation to the martial themes that pervade medievalist computer games, designers have had great incentive to adhere to what is known about the Middle Ages, or at least to what the designers believe their audience knows about the Middle Ages. Pseudo-Medieval Elements Within These Games, and Reasons for Changes Yet, despite these incentives to achieve authenticity, many seemingly medieval elements in these games depart from, or expand on, the known circumstances of the Middle Ages. Not only are weapons given ahistorical identities, clothes made anachronistically elaborate, and locations pulled from post-medieval myths, but pure fantasy and supernatural elements are often introduced. Dark Age of Camelot, for instance, allows players to assume non-human avatars (physical representations of characters), such as elves, dwarves, and trolls. Moreover, it permits players to cast spells if they choose to inhabit particular types of character, such as sorcerers, enchanters, or spirit masters. And, like Knights of the Temple and Gothic 2, it includes a huge catalogue of fantastic monsters, such as dragons, orcs, and demons. Of course, these fantasy and supernatural elements are not, strictly speaking, pseudo-medieval, for they are frequently found in medieval literature and folklore.38 Trolls, for example, are common in Old Norse sagas; elves are an integral part of Celtic folklore; demons, dragons, and other monsters pop up throughout medieval literature; and, judging from texts of the time, magic was everywhere. But there are also truly pseudo-medieval elements in these games, elements that are presented as medieval yet have no basis in the history or literature of the Middle Ages. Chief among these pseudo-medieval elements is the language of the games. Names and the denotation of specific features are sometimes given in Latin or another language actually used during the Middle Ages, as when characters in Knights of the Temple are given abilities with names like “curatio” for healing powers and “punitor” for divine damage. But since large passages of Old or Middle English – never mind Old High German or medieval Latin – would be incomprehensible to many players, most of the dialogue and other verbal components of the games are given in modern languages that have been merely sprinkled with deliberate archaisms, as when Origin’s Ultima series uses the pronoun “thou” alongside an inflected verbal form in the second-person singular ending in “st”.39 Evidently, though

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the designers of these games may have wished to be true to the Middle Ages, and though such authenticity may be desired by players, these goals have been trumped by market demands for clarity and accessibility. Except in the most general sense of the term “accessibility,” those goals do not, however, explain the pseudo-medieval choice of music for these games. All three games would be functional regardless of their musical backdrop, yet none of them include medieval songs. The trailer for Knights of the Temple features modern rock music by the Dutch band “Within Temptation”;40 the actual soundtrack for Knights of the Temple recalls that of a modern adventure movie;41 and the same is true for Gothic 2 and Dark Age of Camelot, as they, too, unfold to loud, fast-paced music played on modern instruments. Of course, not much, if any, known medieval music lends itself to the rollercoaster pacing of these games, particularly for players raised on Hollywood movies. And, in fact, the advantage of modern music may be explained by the history of “In Extremo,” a modern German band whose music is incorporated into the first part of the Gothic series.42 They began their career by appearing in recreations of medieval markets and trying to play medieval music as they understood it. But, evidently frustrated by the difficulty of recreating authentic medieval music, and presumably wanting to expand their audience, they have since moved into hard-rock music, albeit with an echo of the hurdy gurdy in their bagpipes. Now they no longer have to worry that some of their music might be too religious for modern audiences, or, in guessing the speed at which medieval composers wished their music to be played, that they are off-tempo.43 Nor do they or their producers have to worry about choosing the appropriate medieval music for the precise milieu of a game, which would require great care in many cases, as music changed substantially over time and from place to place during the Middle Ages. Thus, it would seem that, as with the language of these games, market forces favor pseudo-medievalism over medievalism, albeit in this case for purposes of entertainment rather than legibility. Indeed, market interests would seem to determine every aspect of the relationship these games have with the Middle Ages. The historical Middle Ages have enough drama associated with them, yet enough ambiguity, to serve as an ideal backdrop for adventure, particularly for those games involving the combat with which the Middle Ages are often connected. Moreover, the Middle Ages have enough continuity with modern Western culture to be somewhat accessible, yet are distant enough from that culture to also be rather exotic. However, they are evidently not exotic enough for many players, or, at least, many anticipated players, for the designers of these games have often overtly departed from history as they tried to amplify the appeal of their products. In many cases they have turned for inspiration to the monsters, magic, and other fantastic elements in medieval literature. And

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in other cases they have merely elaborated on the historical character of the time by, for example, sharpening the colors and cleanliness of the clothes. But in some cases they have turned to pseudo-medievalism, to, say, weaving post-medieval renditions of medieval languages into the modern languages of their text and dialogues, or to music that pulls on the rollercoaster soundtracks long associated with adventure movies set in the Middle Ages. Levels of Interaction Of course, game designers have also responded to market forces in choosing the degree and kind of interaction they allow players to have with each other and with the game itself. In Knights of the Temple, as noted above, the player begins the game by assuming the identity of the fictitious Knight Templar Paul de Raque, who, judging from his graphic representation, is a strong man in his early twenties. And in Gothic 2 the player begins the game by assuming the identity of an anonymous male character who is also in his early twenties and apparently quite strong. But in Dark Age of Camelot, the player gets to fashion multiple identities for himself or herself. Indeed, he or she may create up to eight characters for each realm and may even play them simultaneously if he or she has multiple accounts.44 The characters are chosen from eighteen races, including several that are non-human, and thirty-nine classes, which are roughly equivalent to professions. These choices determine the player’s skills, such as the ability to fight and perform magic, as well as the level of some attributes, such as hardiness, quickness, and charisma. Players also get to choose the name and gender of their characters in Dark Age of Camelot, as well as some aspects of their appearance, such as their hair style and facial features. Indeed, other games, such as Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind,45 even prompt this development by posing a series of questions that describe certain situations and ask the player how he or she would respond under certain circumstances, with the answers eliciting the suggestion of a class that would best fit the player’s personality. After the player inhabits at least one avatar, he or she continues to interact with the game – and, in multiple-player games, with other players – by controlling the avatar’s actions. Usually, the player has to act according to the principles of the game and is limited by what the computer controls will allow him or her to do. But within those confines, the player often has considerable freedom to choose actions that will advance his or her character, which is the main aim of Dark Age of Camelot and which helps in the progression of the storyline in Knights of the Temple and Gothic 2. This advancement is usually measured in set levels that are gained by acquiring experience points through the effective application of skills, such as fighting,

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or, as mentioned above, by completing tasks and fulfilling quests posed by NPCs. Each new level then provides the player with points that can enhance his or her abilities and other attributes. In Knights of the Temple, that progression up the ladder of experience is rather basic and consists mostly of ever more elaborate ways of attacking opponents. But in Gothic 2 and Dark Age of Camelot, the player has more choices and is even encouraged to join guilds, through which he or she can advance in rank, become more powerful in specialized fields, and influence how he or she is treated by other characters. For example, in Dark Age of Camelot, a player of the Briton race belonging to the Fighter class can join guilds for armsmen, mercenaries, paladins, or reavers, each of which has different strengths and weaknesses that directly affect how the player’s avatar will interact with other characters that are not in the same guild. In Gothic 2, a player can join a guild whenever he or she wishes to do so, but in Dark Age of Camelot a player cannot join a guild before he or she reaches the fifth level, and then he or she must do so. Moreover, Dark Age of Camelot has player guilds that are run by other players and are intended for mutual support within the game. The types of interaction a player may have in the course of a game vary widely from program to program and often overlap in many different ways. Among the most basic types of interaction are those with one’s own character, the computer-generated environment of the game, NPCs, and, in MMORPGs, other player-characters. In Knights of the Temple, one has no choice but to interact with Paul de Raque – and the rest of the game – from a third-person viewpoint. But in Gothic 2 and Dark Age of Camelot, the player can assume either a third-person perspective outside the avatars or a first-person perspective as an avatar. In either case, the player then manipulates the computer controls to advance the avatar and to interact with NPCs. In Knights of the Temple, such interactions are almost exclusively devoted to fighting, but in Gothic 2 and Dark Age of Camelot they allow for more complexity, including substantial dialogue. Such conversations are largely defined by choices from predetermined sets of text for both the NPCs and the player. Usually, these texts revolve around an NPC offering quests or tasks, which, as mentioned above, the player may attempt to fulfil or to complete in an effort to gain experience points and to enhance the attributes of his or her character. These quests often involve fighting monsters, retrieving items, or escorting another NPC, and they usually require the character to return to the giver or givers of the quest in order to receive the promised reward. Of course, MMORPGs usually include not only those forms of interaction but also engagement with other players.46 The nature of these engagements depends on the servers hosted by the MMORPGs, as these determine the players’ general code of conduct towards each other.47 An MMORPG

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like Dark Age of Camelot may have different types of servers: “regular” servers, in which the realms that the players’ avatars inhabit are hostile to one another, communication between realms is not permitted, and an avatar cannot attack another member of his or her realm; “player vs. player” servers, in which both communication and fights are possible without any restrictions; “cooperative” servers, in which communication is allowed, but attacks on other players’ avatars are prohibited; and “role-playing” servers, in which players are not only encouraged to act according to their character, but are, in fact, also forbidden to step completely out of character at any time during the game. In contrast to off-line single games, MMORPGs do not limit the amount of a player’s textual communication, and, as that communication is carried out on “chat channels,” the players do not even need to share a game environment with one another. Nor is communication among players limited to verbal interaction. Indeed, visual interaction among characters is often critical to MMORPGs, as fights and quests can often be resolved much more quickly and easily if they are carried out by groups of figures in visual contact with each other. For example, a mage can throw fireballs at a monster from a distance and reinforce the attack of a swordsman if he can see where that swordsman stands in relationship to the monster and thereby avoid hitting the swordsman. At the end of each completed task and fulfilled quest, such cooperation is rewarded by an equal distribution of experience points from defeated opponents and/or from the NPC who originally assigned the task or quest. MMORPGs thus encourage social cooperation to an extraordinary degree, but, as we have seen, they are not the only role-playing games to foster interactivity. In each of the three examples we have discussed in detail, players begin the game by assuming – and in the case of Dark Age of Camelot, creating – the form of one or more characters. The players then develop each character, as well as the story line of the game as a whole, by shaping their avatar’s actions and communication. Though those actions and communication are somewhat proscribed in Knights of the Temple, they are quite flexible in Gothic 2, as, for example, players are given great choice in the type and timing of the guild they wish to join and in their communication with NPCs. Yet, compared with Dark Age of Camelot, even Gothic 2 greatly constrains the actions and communication of a player, for unlike both Knights of the Temple and Gothic 2, Dark Age of Camelot does not follow a fixed story line or pursue a single, predetermined aim. Whereas Knights of the Temple follows the same hack-and-slay principle game after game and Gothic 2 allows only slight deviations in its narrative, Dark Age of Camelot may change substantially from engagement to engagement, as avatars pursue different quests in different combinations of characters, and as the neverending narrative changes between the occasions when players log on to it.

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Evidently, medievalism and pseudo-medievalism can facilitate, or be accommodated by, a wide range of interactivity. Conclusion The compatibility of interactivity with medieval and pseudo-medieval computer role-playing games is, of course, a product of the very nature of computer games, of the opportunities they provide to inhabit a virtual world. And interactivity with computer games is certainly not limited to those that have medieval and/or pseudo-medieval themes. Indeed, it may not even be unique in any significant respect to those games. But as medievalism and pseudo-medievalism represent popular notions of the Middle Ages, they particularly foster interactivity, for they often revolve around the belief that success, and perhaps even survival, during that period required both rugged individualism and careful diplomacy. Like modern players of the least regimented computer games, one often had to assert oneself and make myriad decisions on one’s own; yet, like players of computer games with the greatest intragame interactivity, one also had to selectively but extensively cooperate with others to achieve one’s goals. Of course, this may, at least in its most extreme forms, be a misperception of the Middle Ages. But, as we have seen, it would not be the only such distortion behind the popularity of medievalist computer games. Though history often plays a part in how these games portray the Middle Ages – for example, the Crusades form the backdrop for Knights of the Temple – medieval literary descriptions of the period are also given great weight and rarely, if ever, distinguished from the actual historical circumstances of the period. Monsters, magic, and myths mingle with people, places, and things that actually reflect medieval life. Yet even medievalism based on the literature of the Middle Ages is apparently not always sufficiently entertaining, for it is often augmented by pseudo-medievalism. In some instances this pseudo-medievalism entails the mere embroidery of historical and/or literary themes from the Middle Ages. For example, in building off of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which has itself been called a “pseudo-medieval [. . .] fantasy epic,”48 Turbine’s MMORPG The Lord of the Rings Online treats minstrels not in their historical capacity as mere bards or skalds, but as a character class akin to their role in Dark Age of Camelot, that is, as highly skilled fighters and as singers whose songs may directly affect the outcome of a battle.49 In other instances, however, pseudo-medievalism in computer games entails far more radical departures from the historical circumstances of the Middle Ages, as in the modern rock soundtracks of the games and in the only slightly archaicized modern languages used for almost all verbal communication within the

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games. Clearly, the Middle Ages themselves have been sacrificed to perceptions of the kind and degree of entertainment consumers expect and/or desire from these games. Why then bother to locate these games in contexts that at least pretend to be medieval? Why not construct them from scratch? In part, perhaps, because doing so would entail much more work, particularly if one does not worry about historical accuracy in drawing inspiration from the past, but perhaps also because perceptions of the Middle Ages as a period in which rugged individuals negotiated their way through small, comparatively primitive, largely self-sufficient communities facilitate intimate, concrete narratives with sufficient variables for a wide range of exciting developments. Indeed, the Middle Ages stand out as being near enough to have continuities with modern Western cultures yet distant and ambiguous enough, particularly in the popular imagination, to allow great freedom of interpretation. Moreover, to the degree that the Middle Ages are firmly formed in the popular imagination, their history is so closely mingled with the literature of their time and with post-medieval myths about them that they are synonymous with extraordinary war, barbarity, and zeal, with many of the major ingredients for action-, adventure-, and strategy-games. Thus, medievalism and pseudo-medievalism have played a prominent role in computer games since the very first action-adventure game, Atari’s Adventure (1978), and the very first animated videogame on laserdisc, Cinematronic’s Dragon Lair (1983),50 and they will presumably continue to do so for as long as the Middle Ages retain both their historical associations and their mystery in the popular imagination.

NOTES 1. This article is a revised and enlarged version of a paper given at the Interactivity of Digital Texts Conference, which was held at the University of Münster May 20–22, 2005. The webpages referred to in this article are subject to continuous alteration and may no longer have the information available at the time of the original presentation. For example, most material originally found at has been removed. When a specific computer game is referred to, the name of the developing studio is mentioned but not the publisher, as the latter may vary according to the country in which the game was released. Note that the terms “Middle Ages” and “medieval” in this study refer to the period from about the sixth to the fifteenth century in Western Europe. 2. Gillian Polack of the Australian National University is currently conducting a project on modern fiction with medieval themes, as announced in her paper “How Fiction Writers Use the Middle Ages,” delivered at the Once and Future Medievalism Conference, which was held at the University of Melbourne

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September 27–28, 2004; see . For more information on this project, see also . For a guide to films influenced by the Middle Ages, see Kevin J. Harty, The Reel Middle Ages: American, Western and Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian Films about Medieval Europe (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999). For a critical article on this subject, see, for example, A. Keith Kelly, “Beyond Historical Accuracy: A Postmodern View of Movies and Medievalism,” Perspicuitas (6 Feb 2004), . 3. An up-to-date guide on re-enactments and related events in Germany is found at . With regard to card and board games with medieval themes, see, for example, GMT Games’ Medieval, published in 2003, and for more information on this game, see . 4. For a recent survey of such games, see Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, RolePlaying Games, Game Guru Series (Boston, MA: Thomson, 2004). 5. See, for example, the annotated genre lists in Mark J. P. Wolf, “Genre and the Video Game,” in his The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas, 2001), 113–34, revised in Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein, ed., Handbook of Computer Game Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 193–204; John E. Laird and Michael van Lent, “The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Computer Game Genres,” in Raessens and Goldstein, Handbook of Computer Game Studies, 205–15; and Steven Poole, Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 35–57. 6. Ilya Stremovsky has even argued that “it will be possible to introduce an RPG element into virtually any game,” as noted in Morris and Hartas, Role-Playing Games, 67. 7. Note that even some video games generally classified as “sports games” have medieval themes, such as English Software’s Knight Games from 1986, which features duels between two knights with a variety of weapons as well as crossbow and archery contests. For a brief description and review of this game, see, for example, . 8. For a recent survey of such games, see Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, Strategy Games, Game Guru Series (Boston, MA: Muska & Lipman, 2004). Significantly, the cover of this publication depicts an armored knight engaged in various activities, such as shooting a crossbow or riding a horse. 9. For the quote, see . For more on the representations of Harlech Castle and Stolzenfels Castle, see . 10. . 11. Many such games have the terms “medieval” or “knight” in their title. See, for example, Knights and Merchants, Knights of Honor, Medieval Lords, Medieval Conquest, etc. 12. .

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13. See also Knights of the Temple, discussed below. 14. There are no official webpages for these games, but information on them can be found at such independent websites as . Note that the encyclopaedia for Pilgrim contains information relating to the historical background of this game, which is set in 1208 and deals mostly with events relating to political and religious intrigue in Europe at the time. 15. The database of computer adventure games at lists a range of historical settings, but these are generally connected to the solving of a mystery and are often played from a modern perspective, for example, in an Indiana Jones style. 16. For more information on such games, see M. Filiciak, “Hyperidentities: Postmodern Identity Patterns in Massively Multiplayer On-Line Role-Playing Games,” in Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, ed., The Video Game Theory Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 87–102; and R. V. Kelly, Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: The People, the Addiction and the Playing Experience (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004). A database of MMORPGs, which is continuously updated, is found at . 17. The official website was . However, at the time of completing this article, this address is no longer valid, and no alternative site containing the respective information used in this study has been set up. Information on this game may be found on pages belonging to more general servers, for example, at . A follow-up to this game was published in 2005. 18. . Unfortunately, this information has since been removed from the webpage. 19. This approach may be different within other games set during this period: for example, Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, an action-oriented game scheduled to be published in 2007, is specifically set in 1191, during the time of the Third Crusade; see . 20. See, for example, Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 21. The official website is . See also . 22. There is also an expansion pack called The Night of the Raven, which adds further content and was subsequently incorporated into the main game under the title Gothic 2 Gold, and the series features independent first and third parts that can be played separately. 23. This diary, as well as further information on the game, is found at . 24. The events of Gothic, Gothic 2, and The Night of the Raven, as well as the actions required to experience all storylines and complete these games successfully, are described in detail in Hanna Franck, Stefan Bollmann, and Uwe Dauselt, Lösungsbuch zu Gothic II & Add-On “Nacht des Raben” inkl. Lösung zu Gothic I, PC Quick Tipps (Düsseldorf: Data Becker, 2004).

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25. The official websites are and . Official support and further information can be found at . The guidebook by Mythic Entertainment, A Newbie’s Guide to Dark Age of Camelot (Fairfax, VA: Mythic Entertainment, 2002), can be downloaded at . 26. These are called Shrouded Isles, Foundations, Trials of Atlantis, New Frontiers, Catacombs, Darkness Rising, and Labyrinth of the Minotaur. 27. . 28. A warrior named Arthur, possibly an inspiration for later stories, fell in battle around the year 539; see, for example, Norris J. Lacy, Geoffrey Ashe and Debra N. Mancoff, The Arthurian Handbook, 2nd edn, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, vol. 1920 (New York and London: Garland, 1997), 16. 29. The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd edn, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 30. . Unfortunately, this information has since been removed from the webpage. 31. . 32. . Unfortunately, this information has since been removed from the webpage. 33. . 34. . 35. For more on that ubiquity, see, for example, John A. F. Thomson, The Western Church in the Middle Ages (London: Arnold, 1998). 36. . 37. See, for example, Juliet R. V. Barker, The Tournament in England 1100– 1400 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, Eng., and Wolfeboro, NH: Boydell, 1986). 38. For an extensive guide, see Medieval Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs, ed. Carl Lindahl, John McNamara, and John Lindow, 2 vols. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2000). 39. . Of course, this example is also found in Early Modern English, as noted by Charles Laurence Barber in Early Modern English, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 165–66. 40. . 41. The soundtrack could previously be accessed at . Unfortunately, it has since been removed from the webpage. 42. For information on In Extremo, see . 43. On medieval music, see, for example, Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989). An essay collection with particular regard to the representation of music in manuscripts is John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld, ed., Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance: Essays Dedicated to Andrew Hughes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 44. See also Bioware’s Baldur’s Gate or New World Computing’s Might and Magic series:

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; . 45. . 46. On interaction within a MMORPG and the response of an adolescent player to such a game, see James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 169–77. 47. Mythic Entertainment, A Newbie’s Guide to Dark Age of Camelot, 8. 48. Courtney M. Booker, “Byte-Sized Middle Ages: Tolkien, Film, and the Digital Imagination,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 35 (2004): 145–74 (148). 49. The official websites are and . 50. On these games, see Steve L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2001), 186–89, and 224–26.

Romancing the Game: Magic, Writing, and the Feminine in Neverwinter Nights Amy S. Kaufman “[. . .] tell him I feare hym nat whyle I can make me and myne in lyknesse of stonys, and lette hym wete I can do much more when I se my tyme.” (Morgan le Fay, in Malory’s Morte Darthur) Feminist criticism of video games often focuses on their function as a sexist medium, one designed to allow teenage boys to fulfil fantasies of violent empowerment. A majority of the characters with whom the video-game player can identify are male, and when female characters do exist, their avatars are usually hyper-sexualized fantasies of the feminine physique, with a breast-to-waist ratio that would topple any human woman forced to stomp around in the stiletto-heeled boots of her digital sisters.1 However, now that more female players have emerged as consumers, reviewers, and even designers of video games, companies have begun to reconsider their target market, and they are consequently beginning to add female non-player characters to game plots, create extensive portrait choices and avatars for female players, and construct complex storylines complete with romantic interludes, many of which are geared toward a female audience.2 The intrusion of the feminine into the landscape of imagined digital masculinity is not limited to the addition of these superficial features. Changes are also occurring on the deep structural level of games, particularly video games that take place within “medieval” environments. These games have evolved markedly from linear, combat-oriented plots characteristic of games like the original versions of Warcraft, Diablo, and Dungeon Siege to the free-ranging, creative, and sprawling magical environments of Neverwinter Nights, Baldur’s Gate II, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and World of Warcraft. In other words, as game designers expand their products to embrace their growing female Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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audience, games themselves are undergoing a significant shift in genre, evolving from male-oriented epics into female-friendly romances. The shift in game genre that accompanies the increasing financial power of female consumers echoes a similar shift in medieval literary genres – one that began over 800 years ago, as some medieval poets also abandoned epic in favor of romance. In twelfth-century France, for instance, poets were increasingly sponsored by and writing for female patrons – patrons who either indirectly (through their financial sponsorship) or overtly encouraged the development of tales told for women. Though both the merits and sincerity of the “feminine” genre inspired by this audience have been debated by scholars, the overall presumption seems to be that romance is marked by its particular concern with love and lovers, allowing for an inclusion of female characters as something more than the spoils of battle.3 To be sure, medieval romance includes its share of star-crossed couples, adulterous affairs, and the frequently challenging courtship of reluctant but beautiful ladies; yet a nostalgic collective idealization of courtly love conventions sometimes overshadows the fact that lover and beloved were not the only roles medieval women could imagine themselves playing. Romance is also replete with women who wield power, especially magical power. Recurring and dominating characters such as Morgan le Fay, Vivien (along with her Malorian counterpart Nimve), and numerous other sorceresses and fairy mistresses actually act within romance; they are not simply acted upon. Romantic love may be one of the features of the movement to femaleoriented literature, but empowering representations of magic and magic users are equally characteristic of the genre. Romance wizards and sorceresses are often omniscient, omnipotent, or, at the very least, powerful and prophetic. Most importantly, however, they are overwhelmingly female, so much so that magic itself seems to belong to a “feminine” realm.4 Today’s women, eager to spend their money on games but demanding more recognition from their entertainers, have had an effect on the development of games that is strikingly similar to the influence female patrons such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her court of lady readers had on the development of literature.5 While the designers of these games, like the medieval authors on which they model themselves, add female characters to their tales – as lovers, protectors, and even as enemies – they also increasingly reproduce the focus of medieval romance on feats of magic and sorcery. One of the most illustrative examples of these changes to both the gaming environment and game genre occurs in Neverwinter Nights, which came out in 2002. The designers specifically announced their intention to attract more female players, and thus the game features powerful female characters in its plots and subplots, and offers more options for playing as a woman than did its predecessors.6 Yet Neverwinter Nights has also dipped into the wellspring

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of medieval tradition by assigning a special prominence to magic and magic users. Based in part on the pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons games of the twentieth century, which themselves borrow from medieval literary tradition, video games such as Neverwinter Nights are set in magical landscapes, where enchanted items and weapons are provided or purchased for protection. Yet in Neverwinter Nights, magic is not only prevalent, but privileged. While most of the game’s medieval-themed predecessors can be completed in full by any character, Neverwinter Nights has remade itself as a specifically magical genre. Shapeshifting, magical spells, and magical protection are sometimes the only ways in which certain quests may be completed, puzzles solved, or enemies defeated. Most importantly, magic-users alone can access side quests that are unavailable to other classes.7 These quests include learning spell components, finding lost texts, crafting magical items, and joining an exclusive guild. A Neverwinter Nights magic-using player becomes an agent of fate, manipulating her environment by learning its magical rules and crafting powerful outcomes, and thereby also taking part in a distinctly feminine literary inheritance. In order to market their game within an increasingly egalitarian future, the designers of Neverwinter Nights have had to turn to the past, and have discovered that one of the keys to earning and retaining a female audience is rendering might inferior to magic. The Many-Starred Cloak Neverwinter Nights begins by assigning the player a mission to save the city of Neverwinter from a mysterious plague. The player’s guide and employer is the elven paladin Aribeth, whose character develops extensively throughout the game’s ever-twisting plot. Aribeth’s strong, complex characterization, and the fact that the narrative seems to focus much more on her story than on that of the player, is one way in which this game announces its investment in women. In addition, an equal number of male- and female-player characters are available for creation, with a wide range of portraits and avatars from which to choose. Adding these options was part of Bioware’s deliberate attempt to make the game “transgender.”8 Still, these adjustments have not been entirely satisfactory. As Hilde Corneliussen and Torill Elvira Mortensen point out, the female avatar’s full-body armor calls attention “to feminine forms, with ‘Madonna-like’ metal corsets which accentuate the breasts,” and although both male and female avatars have highly gendered, highly idealized and stylized body types, the female avatar’s body is distinctly more sexual.9 Yet despite the eroticized body of the shapely fighting-female avatar, her physique is not necessarily inherently anti-feminist. An interesting parallel case exists with the female action-hero in film, what Jeffrey A. Brown calls the new, female “hardbody.” Brown argues that the female action-heroine is

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“not offered up as a mere sexual commodity,” but is “presented in these films as first and foremost a functional body, a weapon. The cinematic gaze of the action film codes the heroine’s body in the same way that it does the muscular male hero’s, as both object and subject.”10 Likewise, the female avatar, shapely though she is, also functions as a weapon, particularly in Neverwinter Nights, a game with advanced graphics in which combat moves are intricately acted out by the avatar. Different fighting styles may be chosen by the player through the selection of certain “feats,” and one’s avatar is able to wield a variety of weapons, the different uses of which are graphically performed on screen. These complex and rather beautiful animations allow players to experience a distinct immersion in “being” the chosen avatar, celebrating the vicarious thrill of the power and functionality of such a well-formed, if borrowed, body. While it is true that, as Corneliussen and Mortensen point out, Neverwinter Nights “creates a ‘natural’ position for a female warrior and heroine in the masculine context of adventure and fighting,” the beginning of the game makes immediately apparent its preference for spell-casting classes over fighting classes.11 To those who cannot practice magic, part of the text of the game becomes unreadable. Secret laboratories and houses cannot be entered; certain characters will not communicate with the player; and certain magical books are useless. Side quests that seem especially designed for thieves, fighters, clerics, and druids can also be acquired by any other character. A non-magic-using player, however, will find himself or herself completely rebuffed by the non-player character who serves as the gateway to magical quests, guild membership, enchanted tomes, arcane research, and even special magical items – a character who also happens to be a woman. The formidable wizard Eltoora Sarptyl, the character in question, dismisses any mundane intruder to her Cloaktower coldly: “I’m sorry,” she explains, “but this is the spellcasters’ guild. It will not interest you.” Not only are non-magical characters unable to complete Eltoora’s quests in the first and third chapters, but they will be denied access to the guild, to two of Eltoora’s laboratories, and to four special houses. Though in the second chapter Eltoora will hire a player of any class to retrieve books for her, the player requires the ability to cast magical spells in order to use these books. In the third chapter, access to Eltoora’s laboratory is blocked by magical means, and the many tomes that players acquire throughout this long level of the game turn up blank, literally unreadable to non-magical classes and therefore utterly useless. When one is a magic user, however, one is not simply a player, but also a member of the elite – a reader, writer, and creator. Should one choose to play the game as a wizard, sorcerer, or bard, all three of which can cast magical spells and read arcane scrolls, the game suddenly opens up into a new level of playability. It is as if the use of magic becomes a

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special way of reading the text of the game, a choice of class that makes new meanings possible.12 Because of the game’s complex and lifelike graphics, these privileged acts are graphically reproduced for the player. The avatar reads scrolls, crafts potions, and casts spells so realistically that the player almost feels as if he or she is performing these magical feats himself or herself. Bob Rehak explains that a player’s psychological connection to the avatar is the “crucial relationship in many games,” and he maintains that “avatars reduplicate and render in visible form their players’ actions – they complete an arc of desire.”13 Just as a reader may enjoy a story through psychological association with a hero, the game player physically becomes the heroine by means of the avatar. He or she is therefore more entirely immersed and empowered than even the reader of a text. The Neverwinter Nights magic-using avatar, who is capable of feats that are physically impossible for the player in real life, has powers that are represented as vastly superior to those with other skills, making her even more capable of bending the artificial world to her will. The full potential of the female player to indulge in a fantasy of complete empowerment is thus realized through the selection of, and therefore identification with, a character who uses magic as the primary means of affecting her environment. The omnipotence of the spellcaster/writer and the opportunities for female autonomy and power fulfilled by Neverwinter Nights are also linked by their common connection to the past. This connection can be traced back to a very particular triad of power found in medieval romance, the same triad that makes medieval romance a “feminine” genre: the creative supremacy of magic, women, and writing. Perhaps programmers, whose own encoded language seems mysterious and inaccessible, and who act as the invisible yet omnipotent force behind a game, have a certain affinity for magic-users, whose enchantments, encrypted texts, and need for secrecy are not unlike their own. Medieval romance authors may have had similar sympathy for magic users because, in the Middle Ages, writing and “magic” were linked in the popular imagination. The “magical writing” trope appears frequently in medieval romance, where supernatural and often invisible “authors” constantly mark objects with their prophecies. As Kathy Cawsey points out, in medieval romance writing is “simply a part of the magical landscape, unquestioned by the knights just as helpful damsels and enchanted castles are accepted unquestioningly. In this formulation, the written word is not familiar and comfortable, but is itself mysterious and magical.”14 A similar reverence for magic and authorship is encouraged by Neverwinter Nights, which happens to come with its own world-building toolkit for the advanced player who would like to construct games for others. Learned and skilled “readers” are urged to

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become “writers” themselves, using a set of tools dictated by the “magical” realm of computer technology: the savvy user can manipulate items, icons, characters, and landscapes encoded by the “secret” language of programming to create an original story within the world of the game. This reverence for authorship may also be indicated by the magical powers of the bard, or storyteller, a class that, alongside more traditional sorcerers and wizards, is considered a privileged “magic-user” by the game. The link between writing and magic is, for better or worse, inherent in the status of medieval romance as a feminine genre.15 Although the pessimist might qualify this link by placing all three in the disempowered realm of fantasy and deception (as R. Howard Bloch puts it, “the alliance of woman with rhetoric against grammar and logic places her on the side of the poet”),16 the power and privilege that both medieval romance writers and medieval-themed video-game designers grant to women, magic, and writing are still very real. Agents of Desire Medieval scholars have argued specifically that the literary transition from epic to romance in the Middle Ages marked a shift in audience and influence, a change from emphasis on the stories about men told for men to stories both about and for women. Historical circumstances seem to indicate that the increasing courtly power of women contributed to this shift to varying degrees. Larry Benson explains that there was a Court of Love under Charles VI and Isabel of France at which poems honoring ladies had to be read.17 Ladies also patronized some of the most popular romance writers. For instance, Benson adds that the Countess Marie of Champagne is supposed to have been the patron of Chrétien’s “Lancelot.”18 Elizabeth Archibald also presents a number of other medieval women as patrons of romance writers: We do know that many women read or listened to romances, and that aristocratic women sometimes commissioned translations or original compositions. Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of France and then of England in the late twelfth century, was an important patron of French poets and translators, and so were her daughters; much later, Caxton tells us how Margaret Duchess of Burgundy, sister of Edward IV, encouraged him to translate The History of Troye, the first book printed in English. [. . .] Evidence for women as readers of romance is also to be found in some romance texts.19 Though, in a sense, these patrons had roles as “authors” through their influence over authors, women had power beyond literary patronage in the societies that produced these romances. As Lynn Ramey reminds us, “there were

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real women exercising real power in 1170 when Chrétien was writing,” including women left in positions of power by the Crusades, women who “obtained and successfully defended their inheritance,” and female mystics and monastics who found shelter from patriarchy in the religious orders.20 Finally, the twelfth century “witnessed the blossoming of the Cult of Mary accompanied by the explosion of cathedrals dedicated to the mother of Jesus.”21 Hence the growth of a genre that contains plentiful examples of women with mysterious and comprehensive powers, and which attempts to speak directly to women and their interests, makes a lot of sense. Romance imagines women not only as lovers and love-objects, but as the possessors and protectors of arcane knowledge, enchanted objects, and magical spells.22 In fact, with the exception of Merlin’s magical work, most of the widespread and powerful sorcery in medieval romance is practiced by women. Even more surprisingly, magic can both solve and create problems that weapons cannot. Feats of arms may be prevalent and celebrated in romance, but magic is the “trump” card. Chrétien de Troyes’ romances, for instance, feature a proliferation of female characters wielding magical powers that they use to rescue heroes and heroines from seemingly insurmountable challenges, sometimes by providing mysterious oils, potions, and magical rings, and other times simply by casting spells.23 Érec et Énide features magical healing-women who revive the hero, and in Lancelot, le Chevalier de la Charrette, Lancelot repeatedly relies upon a ring that will detect enchantment given to him by a fairy damsel. Two magical rings in Yvain, le Chevalier au Lion are gifts from women. One of these rings makes the hero invisible, and the other protects him from damage in battle. Arguably the most powerful of Chrétien’s characters appears in Cligès: Thessala, the “nurse” of love-interest Fenice, practices both medical and magical arts and hails from a land in which all women know how to make charms and spells. Her magic helps Fenice preserve her chastity to fool an emperor who has taken her as an unwilling bride. In the later Vulgate and Post-Vulgate romances, magical women such as Vivien and Morgan le Fay variously foster and kidnap Lancelot, mate with and murder Merlin, and either facilitate or complicate the relationship between Arthur and Guinevere through the use of sorcery.24 Countless other damsels and enchantresses work magic in medieval French romance, rescuing some knights and impeding others, and generally interfering with the overall course of the stories in which they are featured. In Malory’s English Morte Darthur, damsels such as Lynet and Nimve have nearly unlimited magical power, while Morgan le Fay consistently causes trouble and evades capture by means of her magical abilities.25 Finally, in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s tale, as well as numerous other Arthurian romances, many fairy women are also shapeshifters. Possession of this particular power, according to Susan Crane, serves both to “indict” the body’s “tyranny over

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the feminine by dramatizing its arbitrariness,” and to demonstrate that beauty is “not native to women but [. . .] an artificially produced masquerade.”26 In other words, women’s magical means often feature in medieval texts as acts of resistance against patriarchal culture. Female readers interested in such resistance might easily have identified more strongly with these powerful and independent sorceresses than with the many faceless desirable damsels so often acquired at the end of an epic battle. For female readers of medieval romance, to whom weapons were off-limits as part of the realm of the masculine, magic may have been the imaginary vehicle through which these women envisioned themselves achieving their desires.27 The magic user in medieval romance functions as another self for an othered gender, a superhuman feminine that can be neither understood nor contained. If, as Rehak argues, “avatars enable players to think through questions of agency and existence, exploring in fantasy form aspects of their own materiality,” then the fantasy aspect of the materiality of the medieval woman may have been the enchantress, the most powerful “avatar” available to the female romance reader.28 The Dark Side of the Female Force: The Dying Screams of the Medusa Predictably, even the noblest of authorial intentions provokes an element of backlash against female power. For medieval romance, perhaps directly due to the prevalence of and the connection between magic and powerful women, that means many medieval and contemporary readers have labeled the genre itself “feminine,” and therefore inferior.29 A heavy body of scholarship also argues that romance is designed to erase female power by juxtaposing “good,” non-magical women against “evil” sorceresses.30 Mary Carruthers makes an important point, however, in an afterward to her landmark piece on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath (who is herself, in a sense, a romance writer). Responding to a number of articles that have claimed that the Wife is merely a hollow fantasy constructed by misogynist writers, Carruthers wonders why critics want “to deny or restrain the one quality which Chaucer deliberately gave to this character in abundance, and that is power.”31 She concludes that “Power is always troubling to those who are subjected to it, even when we may understand the need for it. And female power is particularly troubling, because we – men and women both – are unused to it.”32 Historical discomfort with female power permanently altered the image of the sorceress in the medieval imagination, resulting in the literary, and then popular contemporary, figure of the female witch. Michael D. Bailey contends that the assignation of witchcraft to women was a gradual process. He explains that medieval clerical authorities discovered “classical, Hebrew, and Arabic texts on occult arts” in the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.” In these

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texts, the “systems of magic described [. . .] were highly learned, undoubtedly authoritative,” and sorcerers were depicted as using specially crafted rings, mirrors, phials, and other objects to aid them in their work.33 Because of the highly technical nature of the learning involved, Bailey assumes that, “although never explicitly described in terms of gender, the practice of necromancy as clerical authorities conceived it seems to have been a decidedly masculine act. It involved skill, training, preparation, and above all, education.”34 According to Bailey, magic is not “feminized” until later, in the early 1440s, when “the performance of harmful sorcery by witches was seen to rest wholly on submission to evil rather than on training or preparation, and on susceptibility to temptation rather than on intellectual striving,” thus making magic “particularly suited to women.”35 But the evidence presented by medieval romance casts doubt upon such assumptions, and would seem to suggest that the causes and effects of the witch stereotype and the resultant trials ought rather to be reversed. Romance was composed at the same time as texts on “occult arts” were being discovered, and in fiction, it is women, not men, who are firmly in charge of magic and its arts. Feminist scholars therefore offer an alternate explanation to Bailey’s: that magic, once imagined as a ubiquitous and feminine power in the Middle Ages, was forcibly diminished into weakness and subjugated to demonic possession, precisely because of clerical discomfort with female power.36 As Mary Carruthers explains, when we become uncomfortable with female power, we try to “channel it ‘properly’ – that is, through a man.”37 For this reason, it may have been easier for the late medieval mind to believe that a weak-willed woman was under the sway of a demon than that she could have possessed power herself. Demonic influence may have been used to “explain away” or “erase” powerful women in history, but in medieval romance, discomfort with female power also results in a backlash that manifests itself in a terrifying, devouring female enemy, one who represents the dangers of the unconstrained feminine, and with whom it is difficult, if not impossible, for the female reader to identify. As romance literature moved into the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, female magic users were degraded from the status of goddesses, or at least women who knew how to use the magical powers of the earth to bend events to their will, to witches: lustful, ugly, and weak-willed servants of male demons. Morgan le Fay is the prime example of such a figure. Margaret Jennings traces Morgan’s changing character from her early noble manifestations of the Celtic goddesses Morrigan, Macha, and Modron, to representations of Morgan as a healer in early romances, and finally, to an unsightly, malevolent villain, noting in conclusion that “our latter-day lascivious and/or vengeful witch, muttering incantations, is nothing more than a disagreeable, bleary-eyed hag, since the romancers had long rejected the body of popular mythological tradition in their descriptions of Morgain.”38

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Oddly enough, women undergo the same transition in Neverwinter Nights, in which the enemies faced by the protagonist serve as reminders of the dangers of excessive female power.39 In the video game, which requires the protagonist to slay his or her enemy in order to win, the magical feminine monster can also only be identified against. In Neverwinter Nights, the enemy behind the plague is a lizard-woman named Morag, the dreaded queen of the ancient “Creator Race,” which was a cruel, atavistic, and apparently matriarchal society. Morag is attempting to use magical “Words of Power” to restore her rule and to return her people to supremacy: in other words, her goal is matriarchal world domination. Morag herself, like the “Morgan” who might be her namesake, hints at a denigrated goddess figure, linked to ancient culture by her powers of creation. With her raspy, lisping voice, her snake-like skin, and her horrifying appearance, Morag also evokes the Medusa of ancient mythology.40 Through the character of Morag, the links between writing (the dangerous “Words of Power”), magic, and women are warped into a warning about the dangers of organized and unrestrained female power. In order to defeat Morag, the player must first strip her of her magical power. This is achieved by killing at least one of her enchanted “word slaves,” who are all in thrall to the magical literary power of the feminine. Should the Morag-to-Medusa analogy seem to be a bit of a stretch, the official extension-pack module for Neverwinter Nights, entitled Shadows of Undrentide, provides the player with an actual medusa to slay.41 Heurodis, both medusa and sorceress, is the villainess behind the quests of the second game, quests that begin because Heurodis has attempted to murder the kindly powerful mage and father figure, Drogon – she is a clear threat to proper patriarchal organization. During the first part of the game, Heurodis is only a mysterious, cloaked figure; her actual identity as a medusa is revealed in a terrifying climax in which she turns the protagonist into stone. Once revived, the protagonist must interfere with Heurodis’s plans to resurrect an ancient city over which she will claim power, and through which she will take over Faerûn, the “world” of the game. In other words, the threat in the second game is more than mildly reminiscent of the first: matriarchal world domination. The player must once again shatter the enemy’s magical defenses – in this case, maintained by a magical token called the “Mythallar” – in order to begin to damage Heurodis and to end her reign of terror. According to Susan Bowers, Medusa is “charged with a profound sensuality and physicality that cannot be purged from her matriarchal origins. [. . .] She is actually the icon of the female gaze, that powerful expression of female subjectivity and creativity.”42 We can see these origins in both Morag and Heurodis, both of whom seek to be world-builders, claiming (or reclaiming) the title of “Creator” for themselves. But the disturbing sexual aspects of the female creator, made monstrous by the first two incarnations

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of the game’s anti-feminist icons, are finally brought under the yoke of patriarchal domination within the game’s third expansion, through the figure of “The Valsharess.”43 The Valsharess is a Drow elf who looks, for all intents and purposes, as though she has been copied straight from the pages of a pornographic magazine, complete with impossible physical proportions, long, flowing hair, kinky lingerie, high-heeled boots, and a glowing red whip.44 Her links to witchcraft and her matriarchal leanings are revealed as early as the initial cut scene, in which she orders her male servant to cast a divination spell that visually manifests itself in the image of a red pentagram. These male servants refer to her as “Dread Mistress” and “Dark Queen of Shadow,” and she is next shown killing one of them in a random fit of pique, demonstrating that men are the usual victims of her undeserved power. The Valsharess is also portrayed as so sexually accessible and enamored of power that she offers herself to a protagonist of either gender once the player proves “strong” enough to foil her plan. This plan, unsurprisingly, is to take over the world. Since Drow society is, much like the world of the “Creator Race” (and, one would assume, any world governed by a medusa), notoriously cruel and ruled by women, the intrepid hero is once again faced with the threat of matriarchal world domination. But there is a complication in this final plot: the player eventually learns that defeating the Valsharess is not the final quest after all. Though the Valsharess has been controlling the demon Mephistopheles in order to advance her now-predictable quest for matriarchal world domination, the demon has really been the one pulling the strings. The Valsharess is killed off before the end of the game, and the player continues on to face “real” male power. Thus, the Neverwinter Nights’s manifestation and resulting repression of female power follows the same evolution as the literature: first, this female figure appears as a nebulous force tied to creation and given the name “Morag,” evoking ancient goddesses. Next, she materializes into the classical icon of patriarchal fear of female power, the medusa. Finally, she is co-opted and controlled, made sexually available to men and the thrall of male power as the Valsharess, much like the witches of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.45 One would hope that the devolution of the female enemy in Neverwinter Nights to a sexualized paper doll operated by a demon marks a temporary setback rather than a trend toward the full containment of female power in gaming. In some sense, however, Bioware’s treatment of writing in this new game eventually suffers similar restraint. Neverwinter Nights indeed offers players the chance to create games of their own, but does so by providing “official” module-making tools and rationed, carefully distributed programming hints for players. In the past, independent module-makers have been known to write code that turns straight characters gay, good characters evil, and transforms winners into losers. They made these altered

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game modules free for those who wished to download them, and transformed the space of the otherwise commercial video game into an arena of creative play that was strikingly communal. Ownership over the space of the video game is much clearer, however, in the proscribed and limited Neverwinter Nights module-making universe. Whereas before, diligent and creative programmers allowed outsiders to manipulate the world of the game, less experienced players can now create worlds of their own with a proscribed tool set, leaving the original programmers omnipotent, still the official “voice of God” in the games. It is as if, with the pre-assigned module-creation tools and pre-designed paper-doll avatars, game designers wish to limit the language and effects to a fixed set of possibilities, mystifying the means of production by supplying the would-be writer with a predetermined set of symbols. Ultimately, Neverwinter Nights may be working to control potential module writers by allowing them a “safe” space in which to play, while the “words of power” remain mysterious and protected, under the control of the author, or in this case, the corporation. For women and for writers alike, the freedom and power offered by Neverwinter Nights may simply be a shortening of the leash. On earth and on Faerûn, magic, female power, and unrestrained creative play may be only fantasies after all.

NOTES 1. An avatar is the animated figure who serves as the virtual “stand-in” for the player. 2. In Dungeons and Dragons-based role-playing games, the “Player Character” (“PC”) is a character designed by the person playing the game. A “Non-Player Character” (“NPC”) is a pre-existing character within the game who can sometimes be recruited to join the PC’s adventuring party. Non-player characters can play a minor role in the game’s plot, or they can have complex stories of their own. 3. Scholars who question the sincerity of medieval romance depictions of powerful women include Elizabeth Archibald, “Women and Romance,” in Hank Aertson and Alasdair A. MacDonald, ed., Companion to Middle English Romance (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), 153–69; R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny & the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Lynn Tarte Ramey, “Representations of Women in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide: Courtly Literature or Misogyny?” The Romantic Review 83.4 (November 1993): 377–86; Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). However, a compelling defence of courtly love and romance traditions can be found in both Larry D. Benson, “Courtly Love and Chivalry in the

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Later Middle Ages,” in Robert Yeager, ed., Fifteenth Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 237–57, and Geraldine Heng, “A Map of Her Desire: Reading the Feminism in Arthurian Romance,” in Edwin Thumboo, ed., Perceiving Other Worlds (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 250–60. 4. See Geraldine Heng, “Enchanted Ground: The Feminine Subtext in Malory,” in Thelma S. Fenster, ed., Arthurian Women: A Casebook (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996), 97–113. Heng points out (103) that when examining medieval romance for female agency, “we must look to [. . .] the actual practice of magic itself.” 5. Highly organized groups of female “gamers” exist; in fact, WomenGamers.com, which reviews and recommends games based on their marketing efforts towards women, is one such web-based organization with a mission to “educate and influence the gaming industry itself so that the myriad of female voices is heard.” The authors of the site explain that though “women make up 43% of all PC gamers and 35% of console gamers, [. . .] Violent games with hypermasculine themes that are devoid of positive representations of women continue to dominate the market.” WomenGamers.com seeks to disrupt this domination with its buying and reviewing power. See WomenGamers.com, “Why WomenGamers.Com,” 2006, . 6. See Hilde Corneliussen and Torill Elvira Mortensen, “The Non-sense of Gender in Neverwinter Nights,” , accessed December 2006. All citations from Neverwinter Nights are to Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Nights, PC, Mac, Atari, Black Isle Studios, 2002. 7. A “class” in a role-playing game is what the player considers his or her occupation, which may include “fighter”, “cleric”, or “thief ”, among others, as well as some combination of multiple classes. Spellcasting classes in the original Neverwinter Nights consist of wizards, sorcerers, and bards. Though “rogue” classes may choose the ability to “use any item,” giving them access to spell scrolls and magic wands, they are not considered a spellcasting class for the purposes of the game. A “side quest” is any adventure that deviates from the main plot. The only other class-exclusive side quest is available to Druids, but it is limited to one series of combats on one level and is extremely brief. 8. Corneliussen and Mortensen, “Non-sense,” 1. 9. Corneliussen and Mortensen, “Non-sense,” 10–11. Corneliussen and Mortensen also point out that heterosexuality is strictly encoded into the game’s romance and plot options, and homosexuality is associated only with the darkest of characters; they therefore conclude (10–11) that “despite the inclusion of ‘feminine’ characteristics and the rejection of gender as a sign of a significant difference, the construction of gender in NWN is built on strongly stereotypical, dualistic, and heteronormative understandings of gender, both in the player characters, the story, and in the game environments.” For a discussion of the heterosexist nature of games overall, see Mia Consalvo, “Hot Dates and Fairy Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Video Games,” in Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, ed., The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 171–94.

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10. Jeffrey A. Brown, “Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the Point of No Return,” Cinema Journal 35.3 (Spring 1996): 52–71 (56). 11. Corneliussen and Mortensen, “Non-sense,” 12. 12. Eltoora tells the magical player, for instance, that the goal of her guild is “to bring each student to the heights of their potential,” and she adds that guild members will be provided with “access to our magical inventories, as well as free passage throughout the Cloaktower.” 13. Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar,” in Wolf and Perron, The Video Game Theory Reader, 103–27 (104, 106). 14. Kathy Cawsey, “Merlin’s Magical Writing: Writing and the Written Word in Le Mort Darthur and the English Prose Merlin,” Arthuriana 11.3 (2001): 89–101 (91). 15. In Gender and Romance, Crane suggests (10) that Chaucer distanced himself from romance because “Romance is a feminine genre according to medieval writers.” She also adds (32) that “magic is the generic marker that signals the inferiority of romance in the hierarchy of genres.” For a positive interpretation of these connections, see Heng, “Enchanted Ground,” 105. 16. Bloch, Medieval Misogyny, 54. 17. Benson, “Courtly Love,” 249. 18. Benson, “Courtly Love,” 240. 19. Archibald, “Women and Romance,” 154–55. 20. Ramey, “Representations of Women,” 384–85. 21. Ramey, “Representations of Women,” 384. 22. As Heng explains in “Enchanted Ground” (99), “While only one man, Merlin, is decisively associated with the practice of sorcery, the reference of magic to women is almost casual, reflexive; even nameless figures who make the briefest appearances may possess magical objects and spells, and work enchantment: it is a language depicted by the text as being ubiquitously familiar to women.” Heng also notes in “A Map of Her Desire” (255) that female magic permeates everything in the text: “Encoded into magical objects, and instruments of force such as swords, are narratives of their secret feminine origin.” 23. All citations from Chrétien de Troyes are to Œuvres Complètes, ed. Daniel Poirion (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: Gallimard, 1994). 24. For the Vulgate, see H. Oskar Sommer, ed., The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, 7 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1969). For the Suite, see Robert de Boron, La Suite du Roman de Merlin, 2 vols., ed. Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1996). 25. See The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Eugène Vinaver, rev. P. J. C. Field, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 26. Crane, Gender and Romance, 85. For “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” see Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 27. In fact, in “Enchanted Ground,” Heng considers women’s magic the equivalent to a man’s skill at arms (112, n. 39). 28. Rehak, “Playing at Being,” 107. 29. Crane, Gender and Romance, 10. 30. An exhaustive discussion of all such theories would be too extensive for

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this project, but it includes those articulated in Archibald, “Women and Romance,” 165; Ramey, “Representations of Women,” 378; Bloch, Medieval Misogyny; and Gaunt, Gender and Genre. I address this argument in full in my unpublished dissertation, “Ye Are Nat Wyse to Kepe the Swerde fro Me: Feminist Re-Vision of Malory’s Morte Darthur” (Northeastern University, 2006). 31. Mary Carruthers, “Afterword to ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’,” in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, ed., Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 39–44 (40–43). 32. Carruthers, “Afterword,” 43. 33. Michael D. Bailey, “The Feminization of Witchcraft and the Emerging Idea of the Female Witch in the Late Middle Ages,” Essays in Medieval Studies 19 (2002): 120–34 (125). 34. Bailey, “Feminization of Witchcraft,” 126. 35. Bailey, “Feminization of Witchcraft,” 127. 36. According to Nancy P. Nenno, two major factors assisted in the social degeneration of the female healer, who was associated with magical skills: medical licensing and church persecution of pagan beliefs. See Nenno, “Between Magic and Medicine: Medieval Images of the Women Healer,” in Lillian R. Furst, ed., Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 43–63. On pp. 46–47, Nenno explains that “The relegation of the woman who practiced medicine to the position of outsider evolved over time, and was influenced by the development of the European institution of medicine.” Peggy McCracken also hints that this happens because “magic” is never removed from a woman’s medical skills as it is from a male physician’s, a phenomenon most significantly represented in romance literature, in which “Literary descriptions of women’s healing practices may be seen to suggest the fluid and undefined boundaries between superstition, empirical practice, and academic theory in medieval medicine, particularly as it was practiced by nonuniversity-trained healers.” See McCracken, “Women and Medicine in Medieval French Narrative,” Exemplaria 5.2 (Fall 1993): 239–62 (241). In addition, according to Charlotte Spivack (“Morgan le Fay: Goddess or Witch?” in Sally K. Slocum, ed., Popular Arthurian Traditions [Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992], 18–23 [19]), “In a Christian milieu [. . .] the arts of healing with herbs and other natural remedies became in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance associated with older women who were accused of witchcraft. Furthermore their skills as midwives and healers conflicted with the rise of medicine as well as with the teachings of the Catholic church.” 37. Carruthers, “Afterword,” 43. 38. Margaret C. S. J. Jennings, “‘Heavens Defend Me from that Welsh Fairy’ (Merry Wives of Windsor, V, v, 85): The Metamorphosis of Morgain la Fee in the Romances,” in Glyn S. Burgess, ed., Court and Poet (ARCA 5) (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981), 197–205 (202–03). See also Spivack, “Morgan le Fay”, and Marian MacCurdy, “Bitch or Goddess: Polarized Images of Women in Arthurian Literature and Films,” The Platte Valley Review 18 (1990): 3–24. 39. As Heng points out in “A Map of Her Desire” (257), the discomfort with the power of female enchantresses in romance often caused split representations of

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magical women who oppose one another along a clear moral binary, such as the opposition between the “evil” Morgan le Fay and the “good” character Nimve in Malory’s Morte Darthur: “Fearful recognition of a distance between knightly society and the sphere of the enchantress is converted through the normative circuit of morality into a reassuring assertion of distances between enchantresses themselves.” 40. For a description of both Medusa’s many representations and her mythological inheritance, see Susan R. Bowers, “Medusa and the Female Gaze,” NWSA Journal 2.2 (Spring 1990): 217–35 (217). 41. All citations from Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide are to Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Nights, PC, Mac, Atari, Black Isle Studios, 2003. 42. Bowers, “Medusa,” 219. 43. All citations from Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark are to Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Nights, PC, Mac, Atari, Black Isle Studios, 2003. 44. In the Dungeons and Dragons canon, the “Drow” are “fallen,” darkskinned elves who are evil in nature and dwell underground. In Drow society, women are superior. The title “Valsharess” means “queen.” 45. Bowers, in fact, directly links Medusa to the witch trials, arguing that “she represents such intense female erotic power and strength, and she shares these characteristics with millions of women executed as witches, who, like the Medusa, provided a focus for woman-hating in a male-dominated society.” See Bowers, “Medusa,” 225.

Revising the Future: The Medieval Self and the Sovereign Ethics of Empire in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Brent Moberly and Kevin Moberly When science-fiction computer games imagine the future, they often do so in medieval terms. Set after the fall of empire, many such games present players with dystopian, science-fictional worlds that invariably appropriate the tropes of the medieval romance. Cities, space stations, and planetary outposts stand as pockets of order and stability, centers of government, religion, culture, and trade that simultaneously represent the remnants of the lost empire and the hopes of the new. Yet, as in medieval romance, these technological Camelots are few and far between. Surrounded on all sides by the sprawling chaos and horror of an encroaching, often alien wilderness, they are constantly in jeopardy of being contaminated, overrun, and lost. Strapped into the cockpit of starships and weighed down by armor, shields, and weaponry, players must venture forth to joust against this wilderness, to push it back and, if possible, to recover the sovereign order lost with the collapse of empire. The player’s most potent ally in such quests, however, is not the promise of exotic technologies of an alien future, but the chivalric ideals of an imagined medieval past in which the knightly hero fought to regain the glory of ancient times. While purists differentiate science fiction from fantasy (the critical difference being that, in the former, technology is magic, while in the latter, magic is magic), the two genres are much less distinct in the popular imagination. Some of this blurring may be due to the fact that both genres are equally derived from the shared pedigree of medieval romance. Although Kathryn Hume cautions that the apparent derivation of science fiction from romance is much more complicated than it initially seems, she nevertheless Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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admits that “there is some truth to [the] assumption” that science fiction “bear[s] a similar, if not identical, relationship to the medieval romance: run Guy of Warwick or some Charlemagne chansons through a transformer, and one ought to come up with space opera or space epic.”1 Of course, not all science fiction is “space opera or space epic,” but this does not necessarily invalidate Hume’s point, since much of what Hume observes concerns the relatively recent emergence of space opera as the most widely recognized (and, arguably, predominant) sub-genre of science fiction today. Coined as a pejorative play on “horse opera,” the phrase “space opera” originally referred to hack Westerns repackaged as science fiction for popular consumption. Today, “space opera” refers more generally (and less negatively) to what David C. Hartwell and Catherine Cramer characterize as “colorful, dramatic, large scale science fiction adventure, competently and sometimes beautifully written, usually focused on a sympathetic, heroic central character, and plot action [. . .] and usually set in the relatively distant future and in space or on other worlds, characteristically optimistic in tone.”2 Yet, as Hartwell and Cramer acknowledge, space opera still retains an essential nostalgia for the “guilty pleasure” of the “good old stuff ” – for the swashbuckling heroes and the epic adventures that were the mainstays of not only the so-called golden (or Campwellian) age of science fiction, but also other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-chivalric narratives, such as the Western.3 The resurgence of space opera was marked by the open admission (if not blatant celebration) of these tropes in the 1977 film Star Wars. There, the cynical cowboy (Han Solo) joins forces with the knight-in-training (Luke Skywalker) in an epic quest to rescue Princess Leia and thereby save the galaxy from the imminent threat of the evil empire.4 As Tom Henthorne writes: The popularity of George Lucas’ Star Wars can be explained in part by its skillful exploitation of a number of medieval and neomedieval texts, including stories, narrative poems, science fiction thrillers, adventure films, and Westerns. As Jay Cocks suggests, Star Wars is “a combination of Flash Gordon, The Wizard of Oz, the Errol Flynn swashbucklers of the ’30s and ’40s and almost every Western ever screened, not to mention The Hardy Boys, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queen.5 The degree to which Star Wars appropriates such traditions becomes significant when one recognizes that Star Wars was part of a larger reaction against what Lester Del Ray and other American science-fiction writers in the late 1970s perceived as the literary elitism of the British New Wave movement. Del Ray had already begun promoting space opera as an expressly

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“non-literary, or even anti-literary” alternative to New Wave aesthetics in the years before the release of Star Wars, but the popular success of the film and its sequels soon made it one of the core models for Del Ray’s campaign against what he declared to be “the pretension and the excesses and failed experiments of the New Wave.”6 It is important to note, however, that this explicit nostalgia for the past was not simply an innocent desire for the cultural productions of a bygone era, but had significant socio-political ramifications. Del Ray and others explicitly championed space operas like Star Wars as vehicles to recover values that he (and, as Tom Henthorne notes, the American public in general) perceived as having been lost.7 Del Ray’s explicit appropriation of the tropes of the past in service of a conservative literary and social agenda has many precedents. As Alice Chandler notes, the explicit medievalism of the works of Sir Walter Scott appealed to Victorian audiences “looking for a way out from the shoddiness and ugliness of life in general [. . .] a way to resolve the difficulties and dislocations of the Industrial Revolution,”8 and William Caxton published the Morte D’Arthur for what, in the context of fifteenth-century England, were similar reasons: to recall “the noble actes of chyvalrye, the jentyl and vertuous dedes that somme knyghtes used in tho dayes” for an audience “for whom,” as Felicity Riddy puts it, “the loss of the French territories in 1453 had been a personal disaster, and who could not accommodate themselves to the diminished view of their country and their own roles and prospects – both financial and social – that that loss brought with it.”9 Space opera’s explicit nostalgia for its own reconstructed past, then, recalls a much larger tradition of nostalgia for the ideals of the imagined past – ideals that are constructed in response to perceived short-comings of the present. As the latest incarnations of space opera, contemporary science-fiction computer games not only manifest the genre’s nostalgia for the neo-chivalric past but also participate in the cultural critiques that are implicit in such nostalgia. This is not to say that science-fiction computer games are explicitly conservative (though many are), but that their predilection to imagine the future as a version of some ideal, often medieval past, shares with more traditional space opera, fantasy, and romance the same basic assumption that things were indeed better in some ideal, unspecified past.10 The irony, of course, is that, as interactive simulations of alternative realities, many of these games are works of extreme technological complexity; yet in their explicit nostalgia for the past, they often represent technology as a highly suspicious, if not outright hostile, threat to the individual agency celebrated by neo-chivalric discourse. In doing so, science-fiction computer games rewrite the future as the past and thus provide players with a simulated world in which the medieval not only embodies the promise of lost agency, but serves as a compelling antidote to the worst excesses of technological,

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third-stage capitalism – the very pre-conditions that allow for, and arguably inspire, the production of these games themselves. The purpose of this paper is to explore how such tensions play out in the recent game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and, in so doing, to provide a means of appreciating the extent to which science-fiction computer games explicitly reconstruct the future from the tropes of medieval romance.11 Developed by BioWare and released by Lucas Arts in 2003, Knights of the Old Republic takes place against the backdrop of the Star Wars intraverse: an intraverse that, as the tagline of Star Wars Episode IV makes explicit (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away”), famously represents the future as a construction of the past. In a promotional overview written to advertise the game on Microsoft’s Xbox.com website, Danny Chihdo explains that Knights of the Old Republic defamiliarizes many of the technologies, cultures, and conflicts popularized by the Star Wars movies. “Droids,” he writes, “are almost pathologically constructed to resemble the more ‘modern’ look of C-3PO and R2-D2, but they have a much more primitive, gears-and-parts-showing look, with sprockets and gaskets to spare.”12 Chihdo states that the same choices are evident in the design of other technologies in the game. “Instead of Podracers,” he writes, players encounter “suped-up hovering snowmobiles (called Swoops) that run short drag races instead of Ben-Hur marathons. In place of the Millennium Falcon, the heroes of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic hop in a sleek freighter equally worthy of love and devotion, the Ebon Hawk.”13 To Chihdo, this defamiliarization results in a science-fiction role-playing game that appears novel paradoxically because it presents players with a chance to experience the past – to experience what he promotes as a “medieval (sort of ) Star Wars galaxy torn apart by war, where an enemy is as likely to pull a longsword on you as they are to whip out a lightsaber.”14 Game-designer Lukas Kristjanson also invokes the medieval to describe the challenge of developing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. According to Kristjanson, the decision to set the game 4,000 years before the events depicted in the Star Wars movies allowed BioWare’s designers “room to make the [game’s] outcome suitably large, and still have things settle down long before they would conflict with existing canon.” Kristjanson continues: Many have remarked that with its strong archetypal themes of good and evil, Star Wars is very similar to high medieval fantasy. That may be true, but moving from one to the other is far more complicated than simply find/replacing “long sword” with “lightsaber”. Star Wars has a rich and deep tradition, but as popular as the movies have been, much of it remains obscure outside of the most devoted fans.15

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To Chihdo and Kristjanson, then, the medieval serves something of a double purpose. On the one hand, it defines a strategy by which otherwise canonical elements are made new – by which the lightsaber is reinvented as the longsword, etc. – and, on the other hand, it becomes a measurement of the degree to which Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic conforms to larger traditions of the role-playing computer game: the dungeons, monsters, quests, and troubled wildernesses of conventional medieval-themed games. The medieval thus allows Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to simultaneously perpetuate and reinvigorate the canon of the Star Wars intraverse – to, as Kristjanson states, introduce “players to a galaxy they may not know as well as they think.”16 The medieval also represents a safe financial choice for the game’s publisher, Lucas Arts, and its developer, BioWare. As Adam Baratz explains in a column published on the Ars Technica website, the costs of developing complex games are such that game studios and publishers are often hesitant to produce games that challenge audience expectations. He writes: In the 1980s a high-quality game could be made for $100,000. In the 1990s, these costs began to break into the millions. Extravagant productions which used many filmed video sequences cost as much as $10 million. With the complexity and costs of games, developers were more concerned about bringing their products to the marketplace at all, rather than making them original.17 Rather than investing time and resources to develop new content and a new game engine for a design that might or might not succeed, many developers simply produce new content for existing games, which they subsequently release under a new title or as a sequel. This is very much the case with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Not only is the game constructed around an updated version of the game engine that BioWare developed for its award-winning 2002 medieval-themed role-playing game, Neverwinter Nights, but, like Neverwinter Nights, it is structured around rules derived from the Dungeons and Dragons pen-and-paper role-playing system. In this respect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic presents players with a “new” version of the Star Wars intraverse that is repackaged from the tried and true elements of the Star Wars movies and from what are, arguably, the tried and true tropes of the medieval romance – tropes that are the bread and butter of pen-and-paper and computer-enabled role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Neverwinter Nights. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic not only takes place in a sort of middle period between what Star Wars aficionados recognize as the “Golden Age” of

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the galactic republic and the events depicted in the Star Wars movies, but, like many medieval romances, it portrays this middle period as a time of darkness and strife, in which remnants of the established order struggle to stave off incursions from the ever-encroaching wilderness. The game thus adopts many of the narrative conventions that characterize medieval romance. For example, the game openly appropriates the topology of the medieval romance. As Erich Auerbach notes, this topology is seldom absolute: “all of the numerous castles and palaces, the battles and adventures, of the courtly romance – especially the Breton cycle – are things of fairyland: each time they appear before us as sprung from the ground; their geographic location to the known world, their sociological and economic foundations remain unexplained.”18 The applicability of Auerbach’s observations becomes immediately apparent on Taris. A city that is at once a planet, Taris is remarkably small and its relation to the planet as a whole remains indefinite at best. Players could explore its entirety in less than an hour if unhindered by the various obstacles imposed by the mechanics of the game. Taris thus contains, in Auerbach’s words about romance, “nothing but the perquisites for adventure. Nothing is found in it which is not either accessory or preparatory to an adventure. It is a world specifically designed to give the knight the opportunity to prove himself.”19 After crash-landing on the planet, for example, players discover that Taris is divided into three distinct regions: the Upper City, the Lower City, and the Undercity. As the description of Taris on the game’s official website makes clear, this arrangement corresponds to a rigid social hierarchy. The city’s “rich and powerful” human nobles “have segregated themselves in the Upper City, dwelling in the highest reaches of the towering skyscrapers that dominate the planet’s landscape,” while its smugglers and aliens, who represent a sort of emerging merchant-class, “struggle to survive amidst the permacrete wasteland” of the Lower City.20 In keeping with this feudal motif, the city’s underclass is composed of outcasts, or peasants, who “driven into the dark and sunless world of the Undercity must band together in small villages in a wretched, never-ending struggle to survive.”21 Such an arrangement has precedent, of course, in late medieval representations of the social body as the human body, with the nobles and clergy as the head and heart, the merchants and the middling estates as the torso and arms, and the peasants and other laborers as the legs and feet.22 It has perhaps more immediate precedent, though, in the neomedieval landscapes of the contemporary American city – in, as Umberto Eco puts it, “such postmodern neomedievalist Manhattan new castles as the Citicorp Center and Trump Tower, curious instances of a new feudalism, with their courts open to peasants and merchants and the well-protected high-level apartments reserved for the lords.”23

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Taris, in this sense, expresses the “traditional cultural arrogance” inherent in what Kathryn Hume describes as one of the essential relationships of space opera as medieval romance: that of the technocratic hero and his dehumanized (indeed, often alien) sidekick. As Hume writes: Many writers, now aware of the traditional cultural arrogance, assign it to a minor character and let the hero react against it, but in general, the chivalrous hero is chivalrous only within the limits of his own culture, and those limits include a cultural arrogance that is painfully evident in the relations between the knight and paynim as it is in those between the American spaceman and alien. The parochialism of the romances, derived as it is from medieval Christianity, has taken many subsequent colorations from the Protestant sense of election, from the industrial and technological pride, from colonial self-assurance, from the righteousness and pride in immense wealth and success. Despite these metamorphoses and changes, the effect is much the same.24 Read in this context, the explicit social hierarchy of Taris, a hierarchy that insists upon the implicit superiority of its human “nobles” to the alien, downtrodden inhabitants of the city’s lower levels, inspires much of the player’s work in the game. Although the game scripts players to disavow or, at best, remain indifferent to the smug arrogance of Taris’s human elites, it nevertheless requires that players (who themselves have no choice but to assume human avatars at the start of the game) confront the various threats menacing the city’s elites. In keeping with representations of the medieval in the popular imagination, these threats are characterized as a pair of plagues. On the one hand, there is the external “plague” (as one of the city’s more xenophobic citizens puts it) of “hideous looking aliens who walk the world of Taris” and, arguably, of the Sith, who have blockaded the planet and patrol the streets between the city’s gothic spires, wearing longswords and gleaming plate armor. And on the other hand, there is the actual plague of the Rakghoul disease, which originates from the ghouls and the other creatures populating the city’s periphery spaces, runs rampant among the disenfranchised masses of the Undercity, and ultimately threatens to transform the city and the city’s inhabitants into monstrous caricatures of themselves. For the nobles of Taris, however, these two plagues define their superiority, as it is precisely their ability to refuse to confront the plagues that separates them from the inhabitants of the Lower City and Undercity (who have no choice but to suffer the plagues). These two plagues also reinforce the apparent nobility of the players, who, in confronting the plagues, confirm that the cultural arrogance noted by Hume is

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justified when it takes the form of good deeds performed on behalf of the less worthy. As the game’s narrative transports players from planet to planet, they are required to confront successive versions of the same external and internal “plagues” that threaten Taris. Although Lucas employed a host of digital artists to expand the Mos Eisley of the original Star Wars film into the bustling frontier outpost of the movie’s 1997 re-release, there is little evidence of similar efforts on behalf of these “worlds” in the game. Just as a fragment of the city comes to represent the planet as a whole on Taris, the deserts of Tatooine are realized as a series of enclosed sand lots; the perilous depths of Kashyyyk’s treacherous forests turn out to be not much more than a maze-like tangle of interconnected trails; and even the imposing Sith ruins on Korriban contain little more than a few bifurcated tunnels. This lack of physical dimensions, however, allows for a narrative density reminiscent of that found in medieval romance. On the forest planet Kashyyyk, for example, players discover that the Wookiee leader Chuundar (whom the official game’s website describes as “black-furred”) has consolidated the traditionally loose confederation of Wookiee tribes under a repressive feudal regime that he rules from the tree-top village of Rwookrrorro. Funded by slavery and maintained by fear and violence, Chuundar’s regime is threatened not only by the external incursions of the space-faring Czerka Corporation and bands of renegade Mandalorians, but also by insurgent Wookiee elements that have established camp in the inhospitable wilderness on the forest floor beneath the tree-top villages. Like Taris, then, Rwookrrorro is constructed as a courtly refuge that is suspended between the perils of the space surrounding Kashyyyk and the perils of the planet’s wilderness – a wilderness that, in keeping with the wilderness of medieval romance, becomes increasingly inhospitable as players descend into it: “the further you descend, the more deadly the environment becomes. Terrible creatures lurk in that chaotic realm, and even with the aid of advanced technology it is difficult to survive for any length of time. Only the bravest of hunters dare to descend, and only the luckiest of those return.”25 This sense of a siege mentality is apparent even on Dantooine, home to the Jedi Academy. Described on the game’s official website as “unspoiled,” Dantooine is an “olive, blue and brown-colored world, [. . .] far removed from the bustle of the galactic trade routes.”26 Yet despite the presence of the academy and the security it promises, Dantooine is not immune from the plagues that confront the other urban refuges in the game. The rolling savanna and the farmlands that surround the Jedi Academy, for example, are infested by packs of hostile Kath Hounds and roving bands of Mandalorian raiders. Like the Sith who menace the planet from a distance, the

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Mandalorians represent the very real threat of overthrow and violent annexation from forces outside the chivalric Jedi order. The Kath Hounds, however, constitute an internal threat. Normally peaceful, the animals are driven to violence by the influence of a wayward student of the Jedi Academy, Juhani, who has turned to the dark side. As if to emphasize the degree of internal instability troubling the planet, players also discover that the workers and the farmers who inhabit the fields around the Jedi Academy are fighting with each other. As with Juhani and the unrest she instigates among the Kath Hounds, these conflicts constitute a threat to the academy and the values it represents, a threat that originates from animals and the workers who, in keeping with the medieval notion of the great chain of being, should be subject to the academy’s rules. In this respect, the game does not present players with an “Old Republic,” but with a loose collection of independent city-states (planets) whose political structures are predominantly medieval. Although the Old Republic is often referenced in the game as an ideal, it only exists, as Eco observes about the relationship of classicism to medievalism, through the “utilitarian bricolage” of the game’s medieval city-states. Eco writes: In the case of the remnants of classical antiquity, we construct them, but, once we have rebuilt them, we don’t dwell in them, we only contemplate them as an ideal model and a masterpiece of faithful restoration. On the contrary, the middle ages have never been reconstructed from scratch: we have always mended or patched them up. We have cobbled up the bank as well as the cathedral, the state as well as the church. Even when we live with Aristotle or Plato, we deal with them in the same terms suggested by our medieval ancestors. When one scrapes away the medieval incrustations from Aristotle and renews him, this reread Aristotle will adorn the shelves of academic libraries but will still not connect with our everyday life.27 Explicitly constructed as “Knights” of the game’s ideal, absent “Old Republic,” players are required to “patch up” the medieval order by confronting the external and internal threats that plague each of the game’s urban refuges. As in the medieval romance, players accomplish this through the vehicle of the quest. On Taris, for example, players are asked to help locate an antidote for the Rakghoul disease. After speaking with Doctor Zelka Forn about the plague, they learn that, though Republic scientists were close to developing a cure, the Sith appropriated the research for their own ends. Forn then asks players to retrieve a sample of the experimental serum in the hope of using it to rid Taris of the disease. As players leave

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Forn’s office, however, they are accosted by his assistant, Gurney, who informs players that the crime lord Davik is also interested in the serum and is apparently willing to pay quite well for it. Constructed in this manner, the Rakghoul disease becomes a site of factional struggle and desire. A threat that is at once external and internal (it transforms those infected into monsters and cannibals, “mindless beasts that feed on the flesh of others”), the symptoms of the plague mirror the way that the various internal factions of the city consume each other as they struggle to control the serum, and the way that, in so doing, they transform the utopian goals of the republic, as embodied by the original (but now absent) research team, into a monstrous reality. Players must ultimately determine which faction should control the serum and thereby which model of administering the cure is most appropriate for the city’s ills. Like many role-playing games, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic allows players a large degree of leeway in the particulars (how charitable they are, how much of a reward they demand, etc.) of how they complete this and many of the game’s other quests.28 In the end, though, the game only recognizes two outcomes to the Rakghoul quest: players must either choose the “light side” and hand the serum over to Forn, or the “dark side” and sell the serum to the crime lord Davik. The mechanics of the game thus demand that players participate in an overarching ethical system that ultimately requires players to espouse one of two opposing models of chivalry: the “light side” and the “dark side,” respectively. The light side generally asks players to act altruistically, to control their emotions, to work constructively arbitrating conflicts, and to treat the game’s non-player characters with civility. These imperatives are reflected in the code that Jedi Master Vandar recites: There is no emotion; there is peace. There is no ignorance; there is knowledge. There is no passion; there is serenity. There is no chaos; there is harmony. There is no death; there is the force. In its emphasis on the “force” of peace, knowledge, serenity, and harmony, the code of the light side recalls what Henthorne describes as a twentiethcentury American medievalism: “Late twentieth-century American medievalism [. . .] has a far stronger social element than the medievalism of the previous century, since it calls for not only the emulation of particular heroes, but a return to times when heroes abounded, when honor, integrity and selflessness were valued and when good prevailed over evil.”29 In keeping with this model, the game awards light-side points to players based on the

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degree to which their actions correspond to the ideals of the code. Players, for example, can earn more light-side points if they refuse rather than accept the meager reward Forn offers for delivering the Rakghoul Serum – points that ultimately determine the effectiveness of a player’s force-powers and thus serve as a tangible indicator of his or her heroic potential. The dark side, by contrast, celebrates passion, individual agency, and ruthlessness in the pursuit of power. As the game makes explicit on Korriban, the dark side does not represent the absence, but rather the inverse of a chivalric code. There, players are required to memorize the dark-side’s mantra: Peace is a lie, there is only [. . .] passion. Through passion I gain strength. Through strength I gain power. Through power I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken. The code for the dark side thus preserves the structure of the code for the light side, but inverts its principles so that the promised escape is not the result of submission to a larger power, but of individual agency. In this respect, players who choose to act selflessly or ruthlessly are not relieved of the essential burden of knighthood: the obligation to act heroically in accordance with a larger ethical system of behavior. As Hume observes, chivalry becomes a matter of following the rules. Noting that there “are many internalized limits like those mentioned which guide the chivalrous hero’s actions, and the rules are remarkably consistent for both medieval and modern romances,” she writes, “Parts of being chivalrous are the hero’s assumption that there are rules, and his making himself play by them.”30 Thus, although the selfishness and the ruthlessness implicit in the mode of behavior that the dark side valorizes ostensibly contradicts the chivalric impulse as it is popularly understood, it is consistent with Auerbach’s assertion that in medieval romances such as Chrétien’s Yvain “trial through adventure is the real meaning of the knight’s ideal existence” and often supersedes ethical imperatives.31 Despite its veneer of agency, the question of the game is not whether players will confront the various threats facing the game’s urban refuges, but how they will do so. This becomes clear at the start of the game, when players are tasked with locating Bastila, the absent “commanding officer” of the Endar Spire, a republic starship that, in keeping with its medieval name, is besieged by the Sith. The name “Bastila” is also significant in that it recalls the Middle-English “bastel,” which can mean, among other things, “turret” or

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“stronghold”.32 Bastila thus represents one of the last bastions of hope for those aboard the doomed starship and, ultimately, for the forces of the doomed republic. Yet despite Bastila’s obvious importance, the game offers players the option of refusing to search for her and “looking after [their] own skin.” This option, however, leads to a dead end. The quest-giver, Trask Ulgo, tells players that “we’ve got to stick together if we want to make it out of this alive” and then forces players to help him rescue Bastila. Players thus cannot refuse this quest. The result is that even though the game promises players agency, they ultimately have little influence over the game’s overarching narrative progression – a circumstance that Jedi Master Vandar indirectly acknowledges on Dantooine when he asks that players “understand that there is little choice in this matter for you or for us.” Yet as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic continues, it becomes increasingly apparent that players also have little choice in how they accomplish the game’s quests. This becomes clear when one realizes that the threats confronting the urban refuges are all, to one degree or another, rooted in the absence of the sovereign. Here, the game’s concern with the a priori absence of the sovereign constitutes a significant revision of the traditions of medieval romance. As Patricia Ingham writes, late Middle English Arthurian romance frequently situates King Arthur at the center of “fantas[ies] of insular union, ‘an imagined community’ of British sovereignty,” while simultaneously exploring the conflicts and tensions that render such fantasies impossible. Ingham writes, “tales of Arthur encode utopian hopes for communitarian wholeness; yet they also poignantly narrate the impossibilities, the aggressions, and the traumas, of British insular community.”33 Accordingly, late Middle English romance often fixates upon the death of Arthur, the impossibility of Camelot, and the inevitable dissolution of the precarious unity that both represent. Yet these events always occur at the end of narrative and thus allude, in Ingham’s words, “to a contested history of Briton” while at the same time “calibrat[ing] desire for a sovereign future.”34 In many science-fiction computer games (and arguably in many fantasybased computer games as well), however, the absent sovereign is an essential pre-condition to narrative that allows for the development of the player’s character into a sovereign in his or her own right. Science-fiction computer games, then, are (to use Ingham’s term) “sovereign fantasies,” but instead of proposing a larger communal unity as legible from the vicissitudes of history, they propose an intensely personal unity of the self, allowing the player to imagine his or her own agency as relatively untroubled by exterior limitations. After fighting their way to the Endar Spire’s bridge in the hope of finding Bastila (and thereby rescuing the ship), for instance, players learn that she has fled to Taris in an escape pod. Unable to restore Bastila to her

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proper position as the sovereign of the besieged Endar Spire, players escape the ship just as its defenses falter and it is destroyed. Players encounter much of the same situation upon crash-landing on Taris. Once again assigned to locate Bastila, they discover that without a unifying sovereign figure to give meaning to its explicit feudal social hierarchy, the city has degenerated into racial and factional conflicts. In the Upper City, angry nobles decry the influx of aliens, while the Sith (themselves identified as aliens) struggle to control the population of the city by maintaining a planet-wide quarantine. Similarly, the Lower City is divided between two rival swoop gangs, the Hidden Beks and the Black Vulkars, who struggle with each other and with the crime lord Davik for control of the city’s underworld. Even the outcasts in the Undercity, who are by far the most sympathetic faction that players encounter, are divided by factional differences. Gendar, their nominal leader, is unwilling to dedicate the resources either to lead his people to the “promised land,” the path advocated by the elder Rukil, or to adopt the mercenary plan proposed by the young merchant, Igear. As with the factional conflicts that rage in the Upper City and the Lower City, the result is an impasse. Unable to see beyond the immediate concerns of their portion of the city, and unable to turn to the now-absent galactic republic for aid, the city’s disparate factions only reinforce, rather than remedy, the social divisions that trouble the planet. As on the Endar Spire, however, the quest to locate Bastila and restore her to her rightful place in command of the expedition does not save Taris, but instead leads to its destruction. In part this is because Taris is beyond redemption by the time players discover it. Although the factional struggles that divide the Undercity and the Lower City are centered on specific individuals who, for good or bad, embody different approaches to sovereignty, the Upper City does not advance a champion to challenge Darth Malak, the Sith lord who supervises the invasion and quarantine of Taris from his orbiting star destroyer. Thus, while players are able to restore sovereignty and therefore restore order to the lower tiers of the city’s explicit social hierarchy (as represented by the Undercity and the Lower City), they are unable to contest Malak’s control of the highest tier of the city’s hierarchy. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that locating and restoring Bastila to her position as commander of the expedition (and hence as the most suitable candidate to challenge Malak) does not restore order to the player’s party, but occasions a crisis of leadership. In fact, the player’s second-in-command, Carth Onasi, explicitly questions Bastila’s qualifications to reassume the leadership of the party. “Your talents might win us a few battles,” says Onasi, “but that doesn’t make you a good leader! A good leader would at least listen to someone who has seen more combat than she ever will!” Coming as it does, at the moment in the game when players have reestablished order in

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the Undercity and the Lower City and are poised to confront the Sith in their headquarters in the Upper City, this exchange is telling in that, rather than confirming Bastila’s fitness to lead the mission (a fitness that had heretofore been beyond question), it reveals that, even though Bastila possesses the rare Battle Meditation ability, she is ultimately unfit to take command of the party, much less to challenge Darth Malak for control of the planet. As on the Endar Spire, then, players fight their way through the periphery of Taris’s Lower City and Undercity to the Upper City only to find that the position of the commander is, to all intents and purposes, vacant. Unable to locate a sovereign figure and therefore to restore the sovereign order to Taris, players are forced to flee the planet just as they fled the Endar Spire. In this respect, the events that transpire on Taris and the Endar Spire serve a double purpose: on the one hand, they function as a sort of cautionary tale, illustrating the fate that awaits the galaxy if, in the absence of the republic, sovereignty cannot be restored; and, on the other hand, they establish a pattern of deference in which players are asked to locate a missing sovereign only to find that they are increasingly asked to function as that sovereign. This pattern culminates near the middle of the game, when players learn that the character they have been playing is actually the Sith Lord, Darth Revan, who was betrayed by his apprentice, Darth Malak, and who lost his memory as a result of that confrontation. In this respect, the goal of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is not simply to defeat the Sith, but to restore the sovereign order of the universe, an order that was usurped when the apprentice Malak (in a move that predicts many of the game’s local conflicts) first seized control from his master. The primary quest in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, then, is not to restore the galactic republic – a republic fragmented beyond repair as a result of the Mandalor War and the subsequent Sith betrayal – but to recover the memory and therefore the figure of the sovereign. In the most immediate sense, this memory is the literal memory of Darth Revan, which was lost when his sovereignty was usurped by his apprentice. On a larger scale, however, this memory is that of a collective socio-political system, which requires a history that makes the loss of the republic and the ensuing chaos legible in light of its overriding ethical system – an ethical system that embodies the dark-side/light-side order of the universe. In this respect, it is not surprising that the game is explicitly nostalgic for the medieval, as it is the medieval that allows the game to imagine a universe centered around a sovereign, chivalric order. Nor is it surprising that the game consistently asks players to confront the rampant technology and the rampant commercialism that, in the context of the game, is synonymous with an attempt to usurp or otherwise compensate for the lack of the

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sovereign. This technological threat is embodied by the numerous droids that players encounter in the course of the game. For the majority of the game’s droids, the universe of the game is that of work: maintenance droids clean the game’s various passageways; sentry and surveillance droids maintain order; protocol droids facilitate communication; and medical droids heal the sick. The droids, in short, are the peasants of the game. They constitute (to borrow Paul Freedman’s characterization of medieval peasants) a “persuasive and familiar presence.” Yet, at the same time they are clearly “other” both in physical appearance (the most extreme look like spiders, while the most humanoid nevertheless walk with shambling, zombie-like gaits) and in their essential relation to the adventures that structure the game’s narrative world.35 In this sense, the droids of the game recall the villain in Yvain, who, as Auerbach notes, knows “the material circumstances of the adventure” but does not know “what ‘adventure’ is.”36 The salvage droids on Taris, for example, hover over the remains of a crashed escape pod without knowing (or caring) about the wider implications of the pod’s presence, and the “ancient droid” on Dantooine dutifully guards the temple and the secrets it contains, yet knows only the limits of its own programming. While many droids are explicitly subservient to the demands of players and characters in the game, others have rebelled against their would-be masters and thus constitute a threat to a sovereign order in which droids, as a representative underclass, are expected to be nameless, faceless servitors of their organic betters. On Dantooine, for example, players encounter Elise Montagne, who owns one of the farms to the north of the Jedi compound. Elise asks players to help her find her missing “companion,” which turns out to be a “personal assistance droid” created by her late husband to care for her after his death. According to Elise, the droid is “the last piece of my poor, passed-away husband that I have left.” “As the last legacy of my husband,” Elise tells players, “I need him back! His absence gnaws at me like a gaping wound.” As the ambiguous pronouns “him” and “his” in this passage suggest, Elise conflates the droid with her husband, a move that is represented as highly problematic in the context of the game. The three responses that the game affords players to Elise’s admission that her missing companion is a droid all reflect some degree of incredulity: 1. Your missing companion is a droid?? 2. A droid?!? 3. You expect me to run off to find some stupid droid?? This sense of incredulity is also reflected in the player’s quest log, which states that Elise “misses [the droid] VERY much.” When players locate the

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droid hiding in the Dantooine wilderness, he confirms the problematic nature of his relationship with Elise, telling players that “she is obsessed. She rarely sees other people, and appears to be fixated on me as her husband.” At this point, players can either destroy the droid or force it to return to Elise. Destroying the droid is the preferred solution, as doing so yields light- or dark-side points, whereas returning the droid to Elise yields no light- or dark-side points. Yet no matter what players do, the outcome of the quest serves to restore the proper sovereign order. Destroying the droid destroys the unnatural relationship and, if players choose the light side, frees Elise to find more appropriate, human companionship. Forcing the droid to return restores Elise’s authority over the droid, confirming the droid’s status as (in the droid’s own words) “a second-class being with no rights at all.”37 In either case, players must reaffirm the preeminence of the human over the technological at the conclusion of the quest, which is akin to defending the preeminence of the apparently natural sovereign from the monsters, peasants, droids, and other unnatural pretenders to the throne.38 Elise’s problematic substitution of the technological for the patriarchal is echoed on a larger scale in the game by the Sith. In the game’s title crawl, for example, players learn that the Sith’s armada of technologically superior starships has dealt the republic several major defeats and that Sith foot soldiers have invaded and occupied several planets on the outer rim of the republic. Although the Sith initially appear to players as aliens – an inhuman force of dark, faceless medieval knights – players discover that the Sith are actually composed of disaffected elements of the republic that, led by Darth Revan and Darth Malak, stumbled upon the “Star Forge” (a cache of alien technology) while fighting the Mandalorian war.39 “A machine of invincible might, a tool of unstoppable conquest,” the Star Forge is the source of the Sith’s seemingly endless supply of starships and weapons and is accordingly represented as an abomination. Only accessible through a fragmented series of Star Maps secreted in the most remote wilderness areas of Dantooine, Kashyyyk, Tatooine, Manahan, and Korriban, the Star Forge is an artifact of an ancient, violent empire that not only enslaved much of the galaxy but was also responsible for the large-scale environmental destruction of worlds like Tatooine. The Star Forge thus embodies the threat of a future-as-past that is organized around the imperatives of a fractured technological, rather than sovereign ethical, order. This is underscored by the fact that the Star Forge continues to function autonomously millennia after having caused the downfall of its creators, the Rakata, whom it subsequently imprisons on their home world in a state of near primitivism. Like Elise and her droid, then, the Sith represent an unnatural alliance of the human and the technological, an alliance in which the technological dominates rather than serves the human. As the leader of the Sith, Malak

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epitomizes this problematic blurring of otherwise sovereign divisions between the organic master and the technological servant. Involved in the betrayal that led to the fragmentation of the republic and in the betrayal that dissolved the master-apprentice relationship he shared with Darth Revan, Malak is represented as half-mechanical. The lower portion of Malak’s face is obscured by a cybernetic mask, and he speaks with a synthesized voice. When this mask is removed in one of the game’s cut-scene movies, players learn that Malak’s mouth and voice box are missing and have been replaced by machinery, a glowing technological apparatus that has been grafted over a dark rift in Malak’s lower jaw. Malak’s sovereign voice, then, has quite literally been supplanted by the voice of the technological. In this respect, Malak comes to represent the ultimate perversion of the medieval idea that the king’s ideal body was paradoxically separate yet intrinsically linked to his imperfect physical body. Summarizing this concept as it was first described by Ernst Kantorowicz, Kellie Robertson writes that the king was held to have “one body transitory, corruptible and subject to the laws which he himself enunciates, and at the same time, a body timeless, corporate, and touched by the divine.”40 Rather than express the inherent corporeal unity of these two bodies, Malak’s technological voice-box emphasizes the conspicuous fissure between his physical body and the technological source of his authority. The implications here are two-fold: that Malak’s authority is not essential to his person and (worst yet) that authority itself is a technology, and, as such, is able to be indefinitely reproduced and deferred. The game thus requires that players destroy Malak regardless of whether they espouse the light or dark side. The embodiment of an inverted social order in which the underclass, augmented by technology, is able to overthrow the nobility, Malak’s version of sovereignty is fatally flawed in its dependence upon technology as the ultimate source of its power. This becomes clear when players confront Malak in the game’s final level, appropriately entitled “The Factory.” Surrounded by the technology of the Star Forge, players discover that the key to defeating Malak is to destroy a series of stasis tanks that line the edges of the chamber. Each tank holds an incapacitated Jedi knight, from which Malak periodically recharges his powers. This arrangement represents the ultimate horror of the technological. Rather than serving the human, the technological, as embodied by Malak and his array of stasis tanks, sustains itself at the expense of the human, and, in particular, the chivalric. As Malak says, “The Star Forge is more than just a space station. In some ways, it is like a living creature. It hungers. And it can feed on the dark side that is within all of us!” The threat of the technological to the sovereign order of the game’s universe is paralleled by the equally expansive commercial threat of the Czerka Corporation. Unlike many of the other merchants whom players

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encounter in the game, the Czerka Corporation is not content with the status quo of buying and selling items from small shops but, as Crattis Yurkal, proprietor of the general store on Dantooine, relates, aspires to its own empire. The company’s interests in the game thus represent those of a third faction. One of the company’s representatives on Korriban admits as much when he tells players that “the company has to survive regardless of who is in charge. The Republic, the Sith, eh [. . .] the economy has to keep going.” Here, “the economy” equals the interests of the Czerka Corporation, interests that are clearly separate from those of the Republic or the Sith, with whom the Czerka Corporation openly acknowledges collaborating. Although Yurkal and other independent merchants in the game attribute the depredations by the Czerka Corporation to an excessive concern for profitability at whatever cost, it soon becomes clear to players that “the economy” represents a sovereign interest in and of its own right. On Tatooine, for example, the mining ventures of the Czerka Corporation are on the brink of failure due to the relatively low quality of the planet’s indigenous ore. The company’s protocol officer, however, is not concerned with extracting the corporation from its unprofitable commitment to the planet’s mining industry, but with eradicating the indigenous Sand People. Players learn that the protocol officer has exaggerated the threat of the Sand People and has understated the corporation’s role in the conflict. Local miners claim that “the raids on the crawlers hardly make a dent,” and a sandcrawler mechanic tells players that the vehicles “get pretty banged up even without the attacks.” Likewise, a local conservationist informs players that the Czerka Corporation “deployed numerous giant sandcrawlers and started tearing up the desert with ion shovels and whatever else” without first attempting to negotiate with the Sand People for “territory or resources.” “To the Sand People,” he continues, “it must have seemed like an invasion.” As the rhetoric of “territory” and “invasion” suggests, the Czerka’s conflict with the Sand People is a sovereign conflict. Accordingly, the Czerka protocol officer specifically contracts players to eliminate the chieftain of the local Sand People and retrieve the gaffi stick that serves as the unique signifier of his authority over his people and his tribe’s claim to its planetary legacy. The attempts by the Czerka Corporation at sovereign destabilization are even more pronounced on the Wookiee home world. Known to Wookiees as Kashyyyk, the planet is referred to as G5–623 by representatives of the Czerka corporation and is called “Edean” by the company’s stockholders. The choice of the name “Edean” is telling in that it recalls the mythical garden of Eden. In the context of the Czerka Corporation’s activities on the planet, the name is strikingly appropriate, for just as Eden comes to represent the post-lapsarian descent of humanity into servitude in the medieval tradition, “Edean” comes to

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represent a similar legacy for members of its indigenous Wookiee population, who are being “harvested” by the Czerka Corporation and sold off-world as “thralls.”41 In order to facilitate its Wookiee slave trade, the Czerka Corporation installs a puppet government headed by the Wookiee Chuundar, who agrees to exchange “healthy Wookiees” for weapons. Chuundar also agrees to teach his Wookiee subjects “Galactic Basic,” which, as one of the game’s many loading screens makes clear, is a universal language meant to facilitate trade among the galaxies’ various alien races – the language of “the economy,” so to speak. In the context of the Czerka Corporation’s operations on Kashyyyk, however, knowledge of Galactic Basic serves to prepare the Wookiees for servitude off-world. Players soon discover, however, that Chuundar’s rule is illegitimate. As the “runt” of his litter, Chuundar gains power by exiling first his brother and then his father, with the help of the Czerka Corporation. As is the case with Darth Malak, Chuundar rises to power by inverting the sovereign order – an inversion that, in Chuundar’s case, is made possible not by the technology of the Star Forge, but by the economic imperatives of the Czerka Corporation. The end result, however, is the same: although Chuundar is nominally spoken of as the rightful sovereign of the planet by representatives of the Czerka Corporation and many of his Wookiee subjects, he is ultimately as subject to the dictates of his corporate masters as are the “thralls” that he sells into bondage. In thus identifying the technological and the commercial with the subversion of the sovereign ethical order, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic presents players with a version of the Star Wars universe in which the good/ evil, light-side/dark-side ethical organization of the traditional romantic worldview is in danger of being supplanted by a version of the medieval that is devoid of not only values, but also the center (the Coruscant that is often spoken of, but is always absent in the game) that gives those values meaning. Thrust into this conflict, players are forced to assume the role of the disenfranchised sovereign who, in recovering his powers, rises from obscurity to beat back the nameless, faceless threat of a vast technological and commercial conspiracy. The overriding desire in the game is thus not for a return to the Old Republic, but for the realization of an ideal medieval world free of the taint of technological or commercial imposters. This desire is given voice early in the game by one of the alien refugees on Taris who longs for the security of his medieval home world: “in my world,” the alien tells players, “I lived in a splendid castle, but here on this planet, I’m forced to hide out in this slum.” Here, the alien’s lost castle is synonymous with his lost sovereign agency – his being “forced” passively to endure the deprivations of the Taris “slums.”

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In their quest to restore the ideal, sovereign medieval order, players, then, do not confront evil, per se, or even chaos, but what Frederic Jameson describes as the defining characteristic of: [a] figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature – one is tempted to characterize it as “high-tech paranoia” – in which the circuits and networks of some putative global putative computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of autonomous and interlocking information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind.42 Although Jameson is referring here to the Cyberpunk science fiction of William Gibson and others, he could as easily be speaking of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and, arguably, of many other medievalist narratives that equate technological excess with attempts to usurp the apparently natural sovereign order. Indeed, the game not only involves players in what Jameson describes as the predominant struggle between modernism and postmodernism (the struggle for and against a center that, in the works of E. L. Doctorow, is frequently also a struggle for the past and the future), but also presents this struggle to players in the context of a labyrinthine technological construction: a narrative of lost sovereignty relayed through a fundamentally disorientating pastiche of intertwining (and sometimes divergent) levels, symbols, allusions, dialog choices, and sub-narratives that, in their frequent recourse to the medieval, blur even the distinction between science fiction and fantasy. Yet, as Jameson makes clear, this is not a struggle for or against technology. Pointing out that “[t]echnological development is [. . .] in the Marxist view the result of the development of capital rather than some ultimately determining instance in its own right,”43 he writes: our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself.44

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Read in this context, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic asks players to confront and defeat the forces that made the game’s publication possible: the decentered technological and commercial production that characterizes the culture industry in third-stage capitalism. Moreover, the game structures this confrontation in such a way that if players follow the rules and apply themselves, its defeat is, if not inevitable, all but assured. In this context, the medieval is more than simply a desire for a simpler time, for a value system that is structured and organized around clear, sovereign principles. In its emphasis on the triumph of the hierarchical and the chivalric, the medieval constitutes a desire for what Jean Baudrillard (who revises Freud’s understanding of the phrase) identifies as a “reality principle”45: a “collective demand for signs of power”46 that can simulate the absent, absolute referential and disguise the fact that “power has for a long time produced nothing but the signs of its resemblance.”47 In this respect, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic not only simulates the larger struggle between the real and the hyperreal, but constructs this struggle so that the player’s inevitable triumph over the game (as a representative of the hyperreal) preserves the illusion that there is still something to struggle against: a reality principle that exists and that can be reached. In scripting its own end, the game thus encodes what Baudrillard states is the only recourse left to power: To seek new blood in its own death, to renew the cycle through the mirror of crisis, negativity and antipower: this is the only solution-alibi of every power, of every institution attempting to break the vicious cycle of its irresponsibility and its fundamental nonexistence, of its already seen and its already dead.48 It is telling, then, that when players reach the end of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – when, in a reprise of the ending of Star Wars: Episode IV, players stand on a platform and receive commendations for delivering the absent republic from its ruin – they are not treated as sovereigns but as soldiers, as cogs in a larger military machine. Players thus end the game where they began. This is the irony of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and of many other such science-fiction computer games that invoke the medieval and, in particular, the sovereign as an antidote to the ostensibly unnatural, de-centering forces of third-stage, technological capitalism: in the final moment, when the time has come for players to ascend the dais and assume the crown that they have earned by defeating the game (a defeat that was pre-ordained from the beginning), the game does not reward player with power (which is, of course, impossible to do), but instead defers and offers players the next best thing – the sequel and the chance to do it all over again.

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NOTES 1. Kathryn Hume, “The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction: The Anatomy of a Resemblance,” Journal of Popular Culture 16:1 (1982): 15–26. 2. David C. Hartwell and Catherine Cramer, “Space Opera Redefined,” in James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria, ed., Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 264. 3. Hartwell and Cramer, “Space Opera Redefined,” 262. On the Western as neochivalric narrative, see John Fraser’s America and the Patterns of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 12–14 and 40–41. 4. Star Wars IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas, 20th-Century Fox. 1977. On the role played by the film in the revival of space opera, see Hartwell and Cramer, “Space Opera Redefined,” 263. The overt medievalism of the original Star Wars films has been widely noted in both popular press and scholarly sources. See, for example, Tom Henthorne’s “Boys to Men: Medievalism and Masculinity in Star Wars and E. T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” in Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray, ed., The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Company, 2004), 73–85; Verlyn Flieger’s “A Distant Mirror: Tolkien and Jackson in the Looking Glass,” in Richard Utz and Jesse G. Swan, ed., Postmodern Medievalisms, Studies in Medievalism 13 (2004), 67–78; Sylvia McCosker’s “The Lady, the Knights and ‘the Force’ or How ‘Medieval’ is Star Wars?,” [email protected] , accessed December 15, 2006; and Jim Paul’s “The Medieval Mind of George Lucas,” Salon.com, 1999 , accessed November 22, 2006. 5. Henthorne, “Boys to Men,” 78. Henthorne quotes Jay Cocks from John Baxter’s Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas (New York: Avon, 1999), 243. 6. Hartwell and Cramer, “Space Opera Redefined,” 263. 7. Hartwell and Cramer, “Space Opera Redefined,” 264; Henthorne notes that “Star Wars is more than just a coming of age story modeled on medieval and neomedieval romances, of course; it is also a product of the late 1970s, a time when Americans were increasingly conscious of their diminishing military power, rising crime, and decreasing standard of living. Many Americans – including James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan – associated the problems America faced with the erosion of traditional beliefs and values. When considered in such a context, the reactionary function of Star Wars becomes apparent: Lucas seems to be calling for a return to the traditional values just as conservative leaders of the late 1970’s did” (79). 8. Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 51. 9. William Caxton, “Caxton’s Preface,” in Eugène Vinaver and P. J. C. Field, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, 3rd edn, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

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1990), cxlv; Felicity Riddy, “Contextualizing Le Morte Darthur: Empire and Civil War,” in Elizabeth Archibald and A. S. G. Edwards, ed., A Companion to Mallory (Cambridge, Eng.: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 71. 10. Although a full discussion of these games is beyond the scope of this essay, the following survey of award-winning and best-selling games from recent years illustrates the prevalence of this general trend. Deus Ex (Eidos Interactive, 2002) begins by promising players that “soon there will be order again, a new age. Aquinas spoke of the mythical City on the Hill. Soon the city will be a reality and we will be crowned kings, or better than that, gods.” StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998), which was developed from Blizzard Entertainment’s medieval-themed strategy game Warcraft, presents players with an alien race, the Protoss, whose path to “Khala,” or ascension, is largely in the hands of a warrior class, the Templars. The Longest Journey (Funcomm, 1999) involves players in a series of quests that takes them from Stark, a Blade-Runner-like version of the near future, to Arcadia, a medieval land of “magic and chaos.” And Syberia (The Adventure Company, 2002) presents players with a Steam-Punk version of post-cold-war Eastern Europe in which the player, cast in the role of an American capitalist, is drawn further and further into the ruins of the Soviet Empire in a quest to locate the inventor of the game’s ethereal clockwork mechanisms – the craftsman-as-king whose absence is poignantly embodied in the machines that, though non-functional, give beauty to the game’s increasingly desolate, bureaucratic landscapes. 11. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC Version), Lucas Arts, 2003. 12. Danny Chihdo, “Not Your Evil Father’s Old Republic,” Xbox.com, 2003 (para. 4 of 11), accessed November 20, 2006. 13. Chihdo, “Not Your Evil Father’s Old Republic,” para. 5 of 11. 14. Chihdo, “Not Your Evil Father’s Old Republic,” para. 3 of 11. 15. Lukas Kristjanson, “RPG Vault: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Diary #1,” Ign.com, 2002 (para. 5 of 7), accessed November 20, 2006. 16. Kristjanson, “RPG Vault: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Diary #1,” para. 5 of 7. 17. Adam Baratz, “The Stage of the Game,” Ars Technica 2001 (para. 2 of 6), accessed November 24, 2006. 18. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1957), 113. 19. Auerbach, Mimesis, 119. 20. “Taris,” Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2003, , paras. 2–4 of 5, accessed November 18, 2006. 21. “Taris,” para. 4 of 5. 22. For an overview of medieval renderings of the social hierarchy around the metaphor of the physical body, see Paul Strohm’s “Chaucer and the Structure of Social Relations,” in his Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3–10.

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23. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 62. 24. Hume, “The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction,” 19. 25. “Kashyyyk,” Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, 2003,

(para. 1 of 4), accessed November 18, 2006. 26. “Dantooine,” Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2003,

(para. 1 of 3), accessed November 18, 2006. 27. Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, 67–68. 28. For example, after players have recovered the serum and return to Forn’s office, they are afforded the option of turning it over to Forn. If they do so, the game presents players with the following dialog choices: 1 Here you go. 2 Hold on. What about my reward? Regardless of the option players choose, Forn responds by offering players a modest reward of “a few credits and two spare medpacs.” The game then presents players with five additional options, two of which allow the players a chance to use their character’s persuasion skill (as indicated in the game’s dialog by the “[Persuade]” tag) to influence the outcome of the conversation: 1 Keep your reward, Zelka. You need it more than I do. 2 Thank you Zelka. That would be fine. 3 [Persuade] Are you sure you couldn’t spare a little something extra? 4 [Persuade] That’s it? After all the trouble I went to? 5 You better come up with something extra or I’ll put a smoking blaster hole right between your eyes! Although these nested narrative choices often lead to the same conclusion, they nevertheless contribute to the illusion that the game is highly interactive and affords players a large degree of narrative agency. 29. Henthorne, “Boys to Men,” 77. See also Fraser, America and the Patterns of Chivalry, 197–218. Alan Lupuck likewise discusses the development of knighthood as a moral concept in twentieth-century America in his “Visions of Courageous Achievement: Arthurian Youth Groups in America,” in Kathleen Verduin, ed., Medievalism in North America, Studies in Medievalism 6 (1994), 50–68. 30. Hume, “The Medieval Romance and Science Fiction,” 18. 31. Auerbach, Mimesis, 118. Auerbach observes that much of the combat in medieval romance occurs only for the sake of combat. He notes, for example, that in Chrétien’s Yvain “an ethical justification for [. . .] [Calogrenant’s] combat with the knight of the magic spring is nowhere given” (114). 32. “Bastel, -ile,” in Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn, ed., Middle English Dictionary, 21 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952–2005), 663–64. 33. Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 2. 34. Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, 3.

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35. Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2–3. 36. Auerbach, Mimesis, 118. 37. If players choose the dark-side option and do not tell Elise that they destroyed the droid, Elise runs off to begin an endless search for it. In this respect, choosing the dark-side path also restores the sovereign order in that it simultaneously destroys the problematic technological surrogate and punishes Elise for her involvement in the relationship. 38. We are grateful to Carol Robinson for pointing this out in her comments on an early draft of this article. 39. The text on one of the game’s loading screens explicitly makes this point, informing players that the “Sith died out centuries ago – Sith of this age are not a species, but the followers of an ideal.” 40. Kellie Robertson, “Branding and the Technologies of Labor Regulation,” in Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel, ed., The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 144. See also Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic study, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). 41. On the implications in medieval thought of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden for medieval peasants, who were held as the descendants of Cain, see Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant, 89–93, and Lee Patterson’s “The Miller’s Tale and the Politics of Laughter,” in his Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 262–70. 42. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 38. 43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 35. 44. Jameson, Postmodernism, 37–38. 45. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 22. 46. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 23. 47. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 23. 48. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 19.

Promises of Monsters: The Rethinking of Gender in MMORPGs Lauryn S. Mayer Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” itself carries a double meaning of “dramatic” and “nonreferential.”1 Yes, it’s just a game, the way that the real world is a game.2 It is a commonplace to assert that one of medievalism’s greatest virtues lies in its opportunities for the loosening of gender constrictions, and certainly a quick inventory of medievalist texts from the 1980s on seems to bear witness to this phenomenon, as it features females taking up traditionally male roles,3 alternative matriarchal societies,4 and the sharp questioning of traditional masculine values.5 Yet while these may be refreshing changes from the pale and overtressed maidens of Pre-Raphaelite painting or the vapor-prone women of Gothic novels, celebration of this phenomenon needs to be tempered with caution. Jane Tolmie’s intelligent essay on heroines in the fantasy genre, for example, shrewdly points out that like their forerunners in medieval romance, fantasy heroines’ very exceptionalism depends, within the constraints of the genre, upon the flattening of representation and upon lack of power for the other female characters. Moreover, the heroine’s access to power is frequently through the very cultural institutions that support constraining ideologies of gender in the first place.6 Other critics, such as James Noble and Lee Tolbin McClain,7 have focused attention on the problematic gender essentialism and homophobia in The Mists of Avalon, or found that overly narrow emphasis on behavioral gender roles in medievalist texts ignores the issue of determinative embodiment of these heroines: where, for example, is the place in medievalism for the “gap-tothed” Wife of Studies in Medievalism XVI, 2008

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Bath or Grendel’s grieving mother? However, most studies of the relationship of gender and medievalism have focused on traditional texts: novels, short stories, films, and, occasionally, graphic novels. Massively multi-player online role-playing games (known as MMORPGs), of which the dominant games are largely medievalist,8 complicate the idea of a medievalist “text” on a number of grounds. First, they are capable of near-infinite expansion of both narrative geography and characters; in fact, their survival depends upon continual growth in both areas. Second, they are collaborative texts formed from the templates given by the programmers and from the adventures and contextual narratives provided by the participants. Finally, a player has neither quite the power of an author or director, nor the limitations of a reader, for he or she works within the parameters set by the game but is free to play within those parameters by, say, leading quests, developing storylines, and influencing the fate of other characters. While the popular press has devoted an increasing amount of space to MMORPG-related phenomena, attention by neo-medievalist scholars and gender theorists has lagged behind, perhaps owing to three factors: methodological difficulties; bias in favor of more traditional media, often coupled with distrust and/or unfamiliarity with the world of computer games; and the daunting challenge of trying to encompass ever-growing worlds and ever-increasing populations within the narrow bounds of a critical article or book. This essay is an attempt at correcting this kind of scholarly neglect, and of moving the current discussions of gender in MMORPGs beyond such traditional questions as: “why are women gamers victims of discrimination?” “why are there so few female game-designers?” and “why are games always marketed to males?” These are valuable and interesting questions, but I want to focus on the heuristic potential of MMORPGs as a site for more fluid conceptions of gender. Being social spaces where players spend an average of twenty hours a week, where online relationships may be more “real” than those constructed in the physical world,9 and where players may spend a significant amount of time “being” a member of the opposite sex, “historically accurate” computer games and fantasy-influenced MMORPGs are the ideal places to investigate expansions and constrictions of gender identity, as well as the medievalist constructions that enable these revisions. I will begin by discussing the computer games that stake a claim to the “historical” Middle Ages and move to a discussion of the MMORPGs that work with the medieval as a narrative trope, rather than as a historical era.10

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Revisionist Histories: No Women in These Middle Ages! To enter into the world of Stronghold, Medieval: Total War, Guild, and their sequels is to enter into either an exaggeratedly male-dominated Middle Ages (in the first two games and their sequels) or a deliberately anachronistic period of gender equity (in Guild and Guild II). The premises for both Stronghold and Stronghold II run as follows: a player is responsible for setting up a thriving medieval economy around his keep in the Path of Peace; the Path of War requires the player not only to keep his economy strong, but also to conquer his enemies at the same time (the pronoun “his” is used deliberately, for though there is one female chatelaine in the multi-player format, players in the single-game format have no choice but to play as male); as lord, the player receives advice and warnings from a male adviser; and the player tries to turn his or her peasants into productive and happy members of the community by giving them employment, providing them with different varieties of food, keeping the castle dung- and vermin-free, and holding entertainments. The male peasants are given a name and occupation, along with a stock set of sentiments ranging from servile to cantankerous. The female peasants are another story. With the exception of a sole female weaver, if the player mouses over a female peasant, he or she receives the identification “Mother,” but no name and no particular occupation other than that implied by “Mother,” namely, breeding. Women are, therefore, no more differentiated from each other in this game than are the cows or children. But women do have the same power as men to make set observations, such as complaining about the price of fish or the quantity of rations. These are usually the same set of compliments and complaints as that afforded male peasants, but with a contextual difference: since the women are clearly wandering around aimlessly (unlike the industrious male peasants), they may be seen as idle, undifferentiated parasites on the resources of the productive male community, and their compliments and complaints may therefore be more likely to irritate players.11 The sole exception to this pattern is the Lord’s lady, who miraculously appears when a bedchamber is constructed for her. The most concise summary of her character comes from the player’s handbook: “The Lady spends much of her time making dresses from the weavers’ cloth. The rest of her time is divided between [sic] bathing, dressing, and spending time with her husband.”12 Thus, the Lady’s only benefits for the player are to provide honor points through marriage and to increase the player’s honor and popularity score by making dresses that allow the staging of a dance. The economic value of women as laborers, artisans, patrons, and diplomats in the Middle Ages is for the most part elided in favor of a history in which almost all productive power resides in men.

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Medieval: Total War I and II recreate much of the same exclusionary picture of the Middle Ages, insisting that their world is taken directly from history. The introduction in the player’s handbook makes this explicit: Medieval II: Total War offers the complete warfare experience, with realistic battle mechanics and historical accuracy. You will need to master the same tactics that actual field commanders used in real combat situations, and you will do it with exactly the same sorts of troops, armor and weapons that took to the field of battle in the Middle Ages. This is the time of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.13 Although, again, one must play as male, the game at least recognizes the political presence of women. “Sir Robert” is the player’s battle mentor, but “Lady Gwendolyn is your voice of wisdom when controlling your faction on the campaign map. She can advise you about settlements, recruitment, your empire, diplomacy, religion and anything else you deal with in the strategic side of Medieval II: Total War.”14 Lady Gwendolyn does have an impressive amount of strategic savvy, but it does not translate to the other female figures in the game, as the only other characters who are female are princesses and witches. The former have some negotiating skills, but their main function is to charm a general into marrying into the player’s family. The only unqualified female agency in the game lies in the character of the witch and reflects medieval fears of that agency, for though her power is considerable, it is channeled towards only death, destruction, and unrest. Guild and its successor, Guild II, in contrast, create an equalopportunity Middle Ages by cheerfully flouting medieval constraints governing class, gender, and religion; in their 1400s, one can be a female Protestant priest who rises from the ranks of commoner to patrician. While there are visual differences between male and female avatars (physical representations of the player’s character) in these two games, there is a refreshing lack of the hyper-virile males and overly mammalian females found in other games, and there are no particular behavioral or verbal differences between male and female avatars, as both express sentiments and taglines supposedly associated with their respective professions. What we are seeing here are the “democratic Middle Ages” described by Eco and employed here in service to the game’s goals of accumulating wealth and creating a lasting dynasty. But this democracy is linked to the ideals of capitalism and constitutes not only an alternative to feudalism but also a drastic rewriting of feminist critiques of Marx, for female labor is very much a part of the equation, whether it is a rival artisan, a groaning serf in a player’s employ, or a female player ascending the social scale via her production. Females are allowed to take an active part

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in this Middle Ages, but only by subscribing to a class system in which the player “wins” by severing all ties to his or her former lowly status. In each of the above games, the appeal rests upon the fiction of being able to “recover” the real Middle Ages, upon a fantasy that underpinned earlier objectivist history. The Stronghold games show a careful attention to medieval warfare and economy, while the Medieval: Total War series has been highly praised for its historical accuracy and bases a number of its games on documented battles. Even the Guild series locates itself at a precise time (1400) and in historically retrievable locations. Just as the histories they emulate privilege an exclusionary discourse under the guise of objectivity, the Stronghold and Medieval: Total War series attempt to satisfy a male-gaming market by providing fantasies of a lost world in which women serve the male gamer but never challenge him. This is a Middle Ages without Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Christine de Pisan. The Guild series, to create a world that includes women, must completely dismantle medieval ideology in the process. In both cases, the “medieval” shows itself to be the ideal repository for fantasies of either complete male domination or complete, almost unmarked, equality. The problem lies in the fantasy of the medieval as a lost, simple alternative to the indeterminate and complex modern world, and in the complications medieval gender roles pose for that fantasy. The various avenues to power and expression open to women in the Middle Ages (artisan, diplomat, mediator, patron, exemplar, ascetic, abbess, and the like) do not lend themselves well to computer games that depend to a great extent on quick action, carnage, and immediate material gain. Only in radically decoupling the Middle Ages from history and changing the connotation of “medieval” from chronology to genre can a space be imagined for women. This Middle Ages has been a staple of fantasy fiction for decades; however, the combination of the possible Middle Ages with the nature of online MMORPGs, which simultaneously impose particular values from above while promoting an unprecedented democracy within the game itself, provides a rich field of inquiry for gender studies.15 Within the neo-medieval MMORPGs, there are three main sites of interest for gender studies: the inscription of gender identities onto the avatars via physical appearance and behavior; the multiple possibilities for gender fluidity present in the avatar/user/community triad that disrupt this particular “naturalizing” of gender; and the way in which the particular neo-medievalism of the MMORPGs provides a potential space for gender equality. In order to understand the nature of MMORPGs, it is necessary to look at their predecessors, the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon and the online text-based role-playing games that created the market for their progeny, and to discuss both the way these early games recast the Middle

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Ages (in the case of Dungeons and Dragons) and how the text-based model of the online games allowed for a disruption of narrative gender and physical embodiment. From Malory to MULTI-USER DOMAINs: A Brief Prehistory of MMORPGs Neo-medieval MMORPGs originate in Icelandic sagas, Norse myth, Arthurian texts, and medieval travel literature, with their tales of fabulous beasts, unknown lands, magical objects, and sinister dungeons. While these texts were firmly grounded in history (at least in terms of production if not subject), J. R. R. Tolkien was the first to take elements from these early texts and reposition them in a world that, while having its own origin myth and temporal progression, could not be linked to any time in human history. The result was to recreate the medieval world as a virtual reality that invoked the conventions of these earlier texts as a template (battles, quests, magical items) but which was open to endless recombination, a connection apparent in the interchangeability of the terms “medieval” and “swords-and-sorcery” to describe fantasy games and fantasy novels. When Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings gained immense popularity in the 1960s, a new layer of “the medieval” became available, and it was only a matter of time before an enterprising set of authors created a way for people to immerse themselves in this world by means other than just reading. In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created and marketed Dungeons and Dragons, a paper-based role-playing game indebted to Lord of the Rings. In Dungeons and Dragons each player rolls (creates via dice-throws) one or more characters, who have a certain amount of points for strength, dexterity, intelligence, magic-use, and the like. Players proceed through a landscape (dungeon, mine, castle, etc.) created by the Dungeon Master and attempt to gain money, magic items, or the experience points that lead to achieving a higher level, which in turn provides the player with greater skills or physical abilities. These early games took place in face-to-face groups, but with the advent of computer bulletin boards, they were quickly adapted to become MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons or Multi-User Domains) in which “meetings” between players take place through computer codes and through the users’ screens. If a user named “Fluffy,” for example, types “look room”, a description of the room will appear on his or her screen, a text such as “You see a large room, filled with treasure. Darklord and Geeky are standing in the left corner.” Users’ “viewing” of other characters follows the same pattern. If Fluffy wants to know more about the character Darklord, he or she types “look Darklord” and learns “He is a short individual with a grim smile. The “emote” and “say” commands allow players to interact. If Fluffy types “emote wave” and “say Greetings”, all players in that room would see the following: “Fluffy

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waves” and “Fluffy says ‘Greetings’,” while Fluffy’s own screen would read “You wave” and “You say ‘Greetings’.” In face-to-face play, each character is tied to the physically present individual playing that character, which results in the same doubling of identity often associated with actors, as when audiences both “know” the actor Laurence Olivier and accept that he is Hamlet. The MUDs, however, enable both character and user to escape physical presence – and its pretensions to authenticity – for a world ostensibly bounded only by the player’s imagination, which has radical implications for gender theorists. As Elizabeth M. Reid notes: Social structures based on bias towards or prejudice against differing portions of humanity depend on the ease with which we can assess each other’s bodies, and ascribe identities to physical form. Male, female, black, white, young, old, poor, affluent are all terms that resonate through our culture, and each depends in part on the fixity of physical form, and our ability to affix meaning to that form.16 Without that fixity, the body exists as pure text, so that one could conceivably play a mythological beast or pass as a figure of another race or gender. I say “conceivably” because what theorists often overlook in their utopian conceptions of cyberspace is the extent to which cultural categories are internalized by their subjects. I may very well decide to switch genders in a text-based MUD, but my being accepted as “male” is dependent on a number of behaviors – decisions made, actions taken, descriptions given, conversations engaged in – that will cumulatively make me, in Judith Butler’s words, “culturally intelligible” as male. How well I can become male in a MUD depends on my mastery of these performances. Moreover, as Reid acknowledges, cyberspace is only as liberating as its coders determine, and gender is still regarded as a primary determinant of identity: All MUDs allow – and some insist – that players set their “gender flag,” a technical property of MUD characters that controls which set of pronouns are used by the MUD program in referring to the character. Most MUDs allow only three choices – male, female or neuter. [. . .] A few MUDs demand that a player select either male or female as their gender, and do not allow a player with an unset gender flag to enter the MUD.17 Even with these restrictions in place (and many MUDs have no gender restrictions), the MUDs allow characters to encompass a limitless array of

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behaviors under the rubric of “male” or “female,” allowing a space for what Katie Conroy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury describe as voices silenced by cultural notions of “real women”: the voices “emerging from bodies of color, from unclassed bodies, from lesbian bodies, from disabled bodies, from the bodies of transsexuals.”18 If a player logs on as female, and describes himself or herself as one of these marginalized classes, a link between these silenced categories and the term “woman” has been reforged. The popularity of Dungeons and Dragons and the online MUDs, in turn, motivated companies to create online multi-player computer games as an amalgamation of video- and computer-game format, the communitarianism of MUDs, and much of the content in Dungeons and Dragons. From the original games, such as Islands of Kesmai (first run on Compuserve in 1984) and Neverwinter Nights (run on AOL from 1991 to 1997) through Meridian 59 (launched in December 1995 and released commercially in September 1996) and Ultima Online (released in September 1997), online games became increasingly sophisticated, attracting ever-larger numbers of players. This pattern culminated in March 1999 with the release of Sony’s Everquest, Microsoft’s Asheron’s Call, Mythic’s Dark Age of Camelot, and NCsoft’s Lineage II. The most recent games to enter the field are Sony’s Everquest II, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft,19 and NCsoft’s Guild Wars. World of Warcraft, with 7,500,000 players worldwide, controls over 50 percent of the total market share, although the newer Guild Wars is considered a serious competitor, with 2,000,000 players worldwide. Currently, neo-medieval MMORPGs control the MMORPG market, making it the most influential space for the articulation of the relationships between gender and “the medieval.” Moreover, these Middle Ages, like those of their text-based counterparts, are designed to be at least relatively democratic in both ingame and economic terms. Once a player buys the software and pays a monthly fee (usually 15 USD or the equivalent), plus the cost of a high-speed Internet connection, he or she has continual access to the gaming world, which, for those people who play regularly, proves to be less expensive than most other forms of entertainment. Within the game, democracy begins with a lack of distinction between genders: a Level One female player has exactly the same statistics (strength, speed, intelligence, dexterity, etc.), the same resources, and the same armor as a Level One male player within the same race/class parameters. What a player can achieve in the game depends upon how well he or she deploys these abilities and resources, how well he or she manages to interact with other players in groups or guilds, and how much time he or she spends in mastering the complex game world. Status in the gaming community depends on a player’s experience (usually linked to the level[s] of the player’s character[s], mature presence in the community’s forums and online events, and honorable behavior). People who take advantage of outside

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resources (such as buying gold or magical items on Ebay), people who lie about their achievements, people who find and exploit loopholes in the rules of the game, and people who bully or prey upon inexperienced gamers will invariably find themselves the objects of blistering contempt from the other members of the community. In an extraordinary conflation, codes of honor from medieval and neo-medieval media thus merge with the desire of game companies to reach the largest possible market, creating a new Middle Ages with an aristocracy that, in accord with the original Greek meaning of the word, is potentially available to anyone who is virtuous. In the process, an exponentially expanding and international audience is forced to confront its own pre-game notions of gender, as well as its fantasies of the medieval, as it traverses not only the world of the game but also the inherently “performative and contingent” nature of gender in that world, a world in which gender roles strictly coded and imposed on players via the avatars become invariably complicated by the multivalent levels of performative possibility within the gaming community. The first check to the “aristocracy” of MMORPGs, however, comes from its own graphics-based format. In a popular text-based community, LambdaMOO, members may add rooms, create their own private quarters, or invent objects (such as the popular trainable Frisbee). But in a graphicsdependent online world, only a finite number of variables can be encoded efficiently into a visual format, with the result that control of the game is largely ceded to the programmers. When entering a game such as World of Warcraft, for example, the player is entering a world that has already been created for him or her, and he or she takes on a character and avatar over whose appearance and emotive behavior he or she has minimal control. Moreover, he or she then interacts with other characters under the same constraints, for the monsters that the player encounters are not of his or her own creation, and the magical items, weapons, armor, and adornments that come into play are not of his or her making. In short, this escapist fantasy world bears remarkable similarities to the real world, in which social opprobrium discourages one from inappropriate behavior, and in which the demands of living in late-stage capitalist society discourage one from, say, making one’s own shoes. In addition, the internalization of cultural norms that may limit imaginative creation in the text-based MUDs are now projected onto the figure of the programmer and the demands of market share. Whereas in LambdaMOO, for example, the players may build on the innovation of other players and create, say, trainable objects in addition to Frisbees, the options for players in MMORPGs are largely dictated by the programmers, who constitute a far smaller and less diverse team than would be formed by the sum of all the players, and those choices are therefore doubly encoded: first, by the culture surrounding the programmers, and

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then by the culture surrounding the players. Of course, the players’ acceptance of pre-determined conditions is typical of entry into almost any social transaction, but the MMORPGs are a unique phenomenon in that a very small number of programmers have set down the rules for millions of players without those players having much say in the matter (as demonstrated by the bitter diatribes against Sony, Mythic, and Blizzard in online game forums). Unlike the medieval feudal system, in which the symbiotic structure of allegiance/privilege enabled each member of the system to have some claim to the protection/patronage of his or her superior, the gaming world places the game in the hands of programmers who have few or no ties to the players whom they control, except in the bleak and indifferent world of market share. And this distant dictatorial control also distinguishes MMORPGs from many other games and social transactions that involve an array of possible options with varying degree of risk. For example, if I play the board game Monopoly with a group of other players, I can argue for extra privileges for a less experienced player, and, if the group agrees, the new rule goes into place. I can even take a calculated risk and try stealing from the bank, if I am willing to chance discovery and disapproval. MMORPGs, on the other hand, generally do not adapt their rules to the opinions of their players, or, at least, not quickly, and simply will not allow one to play unless one follows those rules and makes choices recognized by the program. For instance, if I ignore the cue to choose “male” or “female” while creating my character and its avatar, the system will simply keep returning me to that window until I make the choice or quit the game. In this straitened system, it is possible to see how the implicit rules governing culture would function in a purely efficient sense and make some of the less-articulated but still powerful normative forces behind that culture more visible. Avatars and Their Discontents Scrolling through the character-creation options in many of these games, one can hear a voice explicitly stating what comes across incessantly and often silently through a whole nexus of cultural codes: our identities are largely constructs. My focus in this paper is on the shaping of gender, but the creation of an avatar also involves the formation of other identities, such as race, as well as their intersections with gender and each other. To illustrate this process and some of its results, I would like to look primarily at World of Warcraft, as it is the leading MMORPG, as well as two other popular MMORPGs, Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest II. Races in World of Warcraft are divided into two groups: Alliance and Horde. Alliance races are either human or recognizably humanoid, such as dwarves, gnomes, and night elves, while Horde races are divided into other

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groups, such as orcs, trolls, the undead, and taurens (large ox-like creatures). The class (warrior, paladin, cleric, etc.) chosen by the player determines his or her clothing, weapons, and abilities but does not affect the physical appearance of the player’s avatar. Within these categories, the player can regulate, to an extent, the appearance of his or her avatar: hair can be long or short; facial features can be selected from four to six templates; and certain racial markers (the pointed ears on night elves, for example) can be exaggerated or minimized. However, in this world, the avatar is eternally in his or her mid-twenties (although certain races in games allow one to have gray hair, it is simply another style choice among colors ranging from blond to purple), and gender knows no race: female avatars from orcs to elves have exaggerated hips, enormous breasts, and a disproportionately small waist, while all male avatars display what Susan Bordo terms the “hulklike, triangular form”20 that characterizes male bodybuilding.21 In this sense, MMORPGs follow the pattern found in other cybertexts, for, as Judith Squires notes, “[m]ost of the cyberimagery and cyberfictions produced to date have done little to challenge patriarchal stereotypes of gendered bodily difference. [. . .] We might reasonably conclude that cybernetics alone will not change power relations. They merely allow us to reinscribe existing power networks in new forms and media.”22 The programs in these games allow for a kind of virtual eugenics, as the same social invisibility that marginalizes the disabled, the elderly, and those possessing bodies outside the norm reaches perfection. In these games, the player is reinscripted into a dominant aesthetic and surrounded by millions of copies of his or her own kind. Nor can this be dismissed as simply the world of the game, with the expected balance arriving from the player’s necessary return to his or her real body and the countless bodies surrounding him or her in the real world. Players need to spend an average of twenty full days of real-time playing to achieve a sufficiently high level (sixty or above) to fully explore the virtual world of the game. Furthermore, the games are designed to punish those who try to play solo. In most games, a player can only play solo up to about level six without dying multiple times during a session. The advice given to fledgling former Everquest players on one community site is even more specific: “[r]ule #1 of soloing is not to do it (at least not after the first 10 or so levels).”23 This game constraint is ruthlessly pragmatic – players in a group or guild are less likely to quit the game24 – but it also has the effect of reinforcing, in the same way as do other mass media, a particular kind of embodiment. If every male within one’s range of vision and interaction share an identically gendered body, that body becomes the default image for “masculine”, rather than a specific vision articulated by a small group of game developers. What is coded into behavior in the physical realm could possibly extend in a limited way to game control of behavior. As Nick Yee’s

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essay on the application of “automatic mimicry” to NPC (non-player character) behavior states: Virtual environments in fact provide a perfect setting for embedding subtle mimicry behaviors in NPCs because details in the environment can be rendered differently for each user. The goal of embedding mimicry would be to increase prosocial behavior in general in the community. After all, loyalty and bonds with other players is what keeps players in a community.25 Even more troubling, perhaps, is the extent of limits placed on behavior within most of these games, in which each behavior that an avatar can perform is limited to an array of “emote” commands that are already coded. One could argue that this is simply the visual translation of the kind of accepted social codes already imposed upon male and female in the “real world”; however, the cultural production of gender recognizes a variety of behaviors that fall under the codes of “masculine” and “feminine” performance, while the limited coding per race of the emote buttons recognizes only one dominant characteristic per race. If a player creates a female night-elf character in World of Warcraft (one of the two most popular races in the game), for example, that character’s behavior is disconcertingly sexualized. Whereas the command “emote-dance” produces a Highland jig in the dwarves and disco-style spinning in the male night elves, a female night elf does the equivalent of a steamy strip routine, minus the removal of clothing. This sexuality is replicated even in the fighting style of the female night elves, as that style involves a lot of pelvic thrusting for no particular reason. This kind of race-coding of allowed performances also limits the possible performances of gender in other races. Thus, while gender may be performative in all worlds, virtual or real, the array of possible performances within an MMORPG is severely restricted by its coded script.26 In a neat twist, however, the very constraints of programmer-controlled graphics provide the foundation for radical challenges to traditional concepts of gender and its embodiments. Multiplicity and the “Promises of Monsters” in MMORPGs If one focuses on only the appearance and behavior of avatars, MMORPGs appear to be a slap in the face of cyber-utopianism, which privileges cyberspace and its concomitant lack of physical embodiment as the site for radical rethinking of categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Ironically, however, the very obtrusive physical presence of the hyper-masculine or hyper-feminine avatar, and its graphic enactment of exaggeratedly gendered

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behavior can potentially serve the same function that Luce Irigaray ascribes to mimicry and Judith Butler to the drag queen: “in imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency.”27 In this case, Reid’s theory of embodiment in MUDs – “[w]ith the body freed from the physical, it completely enters the realm of symbol. It becomes an entity of pure meaning, but is simultaneously meaningless, stripped of any fixed referent”28 – must be reworked, for in MMORPGs, the body is reinscripted into a performative mimicry that announces, by its very excess, its own artifice. That announcement, in turn, creates the kind of dissonances that Donna Haraway sees as productive for rethinking our notions of gender, and it does so on all levels: between user and avatar, among players, and among the various sites of identity in an MMORPG, such as open-text chat, avatar appearance and behavior, and gaming community (including guilds, groups, forums, and live-voice chat). If the physical appearance of avatars is encoded within a strict binary model, with a limited array of performances, the multiple layers of identity linked to these avatars inevitably challenge these models and limits. The first of these productive disruptions occurs between the player and his or her avatar(s), as a player’s “gender” and his or her physical embodiment on screen may not match. A majority of players I polled about this issue quoted variations of the same “received wisdom” about avatar/player identity: “Dumah” guessed “that about 80% of the female in-game avatars have male influence behind them,”29 while “Sazz” stated more dogmatically, “[t]he men are boys, the women are men, everyone else is an Asian farmer.”30 The extent to which female characters are assumed to be linked to male players shows most strongly in a World of Warcraft forum thread on the changes Blizzard made to the male avatars of a particular new race, the blood elves, present in the Burning Crusade expansion. The running argument over the changes in appearance was brought to a halt by “Danzig,” who wryly remarked, “oh, you know most of us will roll female BE’s anyway.”31 This “received wisdom” is in stark contrast to the usually cited statistic that around 40 to 46 percent of MMORPG players are female (many of whom play male characters in order to more easily assume leadership roles or simply to avoid harassment; as “Old Tankster” tersely puts it, “I’m here to kill, not to flirt.”32). However, the data reveals that both male and female players will often create female characters in order to reap the benefits of traditional male behavior towards females (extra help, gifts, and advice), and, in fact, a majority of players I surveyed claim that female characters receive preferential treatment. “Tasteypies” admits, “whenever I start a new game online I always roll a female avatar. It’s just easier to start out when horny guys give you free swords or money, for a simple wink and gentle flirt. [. . .] Gamer

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girls, or guys pretending to be girls, have it easiest in the gaming world.”33 “Sin” concurs: “I play male characters mostly, I rolled a female character in a game to see what would happen, and ended up with a heavy bag of revenue, which I transferred over to my main [character]. Females get treated better, that’s how it is.”34 And “Bragi” sums up the particular dissonance between the assumption that most players are men and the gender-dependent treatment of characters: “You do get treated differently depending on your character’s gender. It’s funny. I assume that 90% of the people I interact with in an MMORPG are guys. Apparently I’m the only person who does”35 – except that he is not. There are several possible explanations for this kind of double-think. One may rest in the avatar’s presence itself, which may link an otherwise ambiguous gender to a “body.” Allucquère Rosanne Stone has commented on the elasticity of gender in text-based cyberspace: “[o]n the nets, where warranting, or grounding a person in a physical body, is meaningless, men routinely use female personae whenever they choose, and vice versa. [. . .] Gendered modes of communication themselves have remained relatively stable, but who uses which of the two socially recognized models has become more plastic.”36 However, in MMORPGs we have another level of symbolic “grounding” in the presence of the avatar, which may, by the primacy of the visual noted by Reid earlier, override the “knowledge” that MMORPGs are predominantly male. Another possibility is summed up by Mike Godwin, in his discussion of self and community online: “[i]f the bulk of my social contacts are in VR [virtual reality] rather than the RW [real world], then why wouldn’t VR have greater claim to the construction of my gender. That is, if social institutions determine gender and the bulk of the institutions I participate in are VR institutions, then why isn’t my VR gender my ‘real’ gender?”37 This linking of virtual reality and real-life identity is encouraged by the fact that text messages in MMORPGs follow emote commands. For example, if a player on one of these games hits the “emote – laugh” command, the text that pops up in the chat window reads as follows: “You let out a raucous laugh.” This message pattern leads to a multivalent identification of player with avatar, as the response to a message from you as player (acting on behalf of your avatar) both informs you as player that you as avatar perform the action you as player commanded and seems to command you as player to perform the same action in real life. That is, the conflation of pronouns invites identification with the avatar, a phenomenon also seen in the frequent slippage of identity that occurs in postings to the online game forums, where posters will often use the term “I” when referring to their avatars. Given the connections fostered in MMORPGs between avatar and player, as well as the strong sense of community within the games and the large number of hours these players spend in-game, Godwin’s comment

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bears scrutiny, for if some players play six to eight hours a day, and during that time are “performing” as a different gender, and if gender is a matter of social performance, we must think of these players as at least multiply gendered, especially if these players possess a number of avatars of different genders. Moreover, we may want to revisit the idea of gender as performative in the sense of being a continuous, cumulative performance. If a female player who plays a male character becomes male for the duration of the game, we may need to look at gender as performative within context (rather than see it as a general assumption of approved performative roles),38 a model akin to Stone’s concept of “consensual loci” in which “each consensual locus has its own ‘reality’, determined by local conditions.”39 It is precisely in this phrase – “local conditions” – that we can see how the generic construction of the medieval, the “swords-and-sorcery” trope, specifically creates the context for playing with gender boundaries, or even dismissing gender itself as a construct. This Middle Ages cuts itself off from history to provide an endlessly flexible, inexhaustible site for revision; if, in this world, elves and orcs are real and a night nurse from West Virginia can command a guild of international reputation, why should players feel constrained to align their real-life physical body with a correlating avatar? As “Ian Cooper” notes, “When it’s a role-playing game everyone is playing a role – that’s the point. Asking a female character if she’s a female in real life is like asking an elf if he’s an elf in real life. It’s completely ridiculous.”40 This comment directly links the flexibility of gender with the immersion into the neo-medieval world of the MMORPGs; other players note that it is in fact the role-playing aspect of MMORPGs that enable them to more freely test real-life gender boundaries. As “Joshua Hutcheson” comments, “[t]he reasons I play a female as a main character are simple: as a male roleplayer, it’s a greater challenge. I take my roleplaying seriously. To roleplay a character of a different gender without giving them the indignity of falling into stereotypes you have to put effort into it. It requires thought and consideration; you almost literally are walking in someone else’s shoes.”41 “Linolea” treats the world of MMORPGs as an essential context for gender exploration: I find that slipping into Linolea (my avatar) is often associated with a shift in mind set to one that can only be described as more feminine. I like developing this side of my nature and the world of MMORPGs and feel it is of enormous benefit in RL (real life) as well. In truth I find Linolea teaches me much about myself, as peculiar as that would sound to any but a serious player of MMORPGs.42 Perhaps the most interesting result of immersion into a neo-medieval

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MMORPG is the emergence, from these various multiple identities and performances, of a refusal to view gender as a primary marker of identity, or at least a healthy suspicion of its “natural” status as such. As “Hauhet” comments, “Gender is seemingly non-existent, and online, it really is obsolete. Gender is what I decide it is when I wake up each day, somewhat in life and certainly online.”43 “Strcpy” agrees: “I always treat online contacts as gender neutral. If someone feels like explicitly telling me their gender I note it but have a tendency to forget (what does gender matter if we are 2000 miles apart and all I see is text?”44 Whether one “forgets” gender as an irrelevance, or refuses to attach any importance to it, the MMORPGs reshape the experience of gender, a reshaping that in turn reflects back into physical reality. “Arradine” notes the connection between physical body and avatar as merely vessels for personality: “If you want to separate a person from their physical shell for a moment, and think of them as a single pool of different personality traits, then their physical housing allows them to present a number of these traits in that particular avatar, whereas they present entirely different personality traits in their online avatar.”45 “Roleplayer 101” contrasts “real world” strictures on gender with the more fluid character of MMORPGs: “Genderbending seems like a big issue in a society with very thick defining lines on genders. [. . .] A more viable truth is that people are people, emotions, feelings sexual consciousness, despite their sex, they just are. In MMORPGs I really don’t care much who’s behind the character as much as I care for the character itself.” “Linole” sees online games as a powerful force for shaping gender-related ideology: [g]ender roles are blurring in real life, and perhaps that charge is being led in the online world. I look forward to more of the same transition, for once we shed these preconceptions of what people “should be” and start to see them as they truly are, then perhaps equality will have been realized.46 As of this moment, the population of players in neo-medieval MMORPGs is equivalent to the population of many countries, and that number is growing with each hour, as new members are inducted into a realm where status is accorded by ability, where the performative aspect of gender is reduced to the level of parody, where an increasing number of community members are applying the virtual world’s gender fluidity to a reexamination of their “real world” assumptions and using the possible Middle Ages of that community to imagine possibilities for the twenty-first century. The existence of this phenomenon alone merits further study. However, the idea of gender’s irrelevance in the face of ability, personality, and community also provides a valuable third term to the tired debate within gender studies in

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general, and within feminism in particular, for it locates another site of identity beyond political pragmatism (and its possible implicit validation of prevailing gender ideologies) and gender essentialism (which supposes, in its most extreme form, the dictum that “biology is destiny”). If the existence of cyberculture creates the “promises of monsters,” then MMORPGs may create monsters in their medieval, etymological sense: wonders and portents.

NOTES 1. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Katie Conroy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, ed., Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 401–18 (404). 2. Joi Ito, commenting on World of Warcraft, as reported by Steven Levy in “Living a Virtual Life,” Newsweek On the Web (September 18, 2006) , accessed December 22, 2006. 3. Such as knight in Quest for Camelot, outlaw in Princes of Thieves, and revolutionary in Black Knight. 4. Such as those in novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley. 5. As in Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood or NBC’s Merlin. 6. Jane Tolmie, “Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine,” Journal of Gender Studies 15/2 (July 2006): 145–58. 7. James Noble, “Feminism, Homosexuality, and Homophobia in The Mists of Avalon,” in Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley, ed., Culture and the King. The Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 288–96; Lee Tobin McClain, “Gender Anxiety in Arthurian Romance,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 38:3 (1997): 193–99. 8. On April 7, 2005, Nielsen Interactive Entertainment published the first broad-spectrum study of interactive game use in the United States. Its findings: of 117,000,000 US gamers, more than half play online games; 15,000,000 of these play MMORPGs. Of the online computer games, neo-medieval games (either those that actively invoke medieval history and culture or those that invoke the medieval as a genre [i.e., swords-and-sorcery]) dominate the market: Medieval II: Total War is ranked one of the best (and best-selling) games of 2006, while swords-and-sorcery games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Final Fantasy, and the Guild Wars series dominate the market. The Nielsen study also noted that, while men still outnumber women in the total gaming universe, women make up 39 percent of the online gaming community, and the number of women in MMORPGs is growing rapidly. 9. “Matzy Nofo,” for instance, makes a telling comparison between abstract knowledge and experience in determining “reality”: “I’ve been to Naboo (a virtual

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realm) but I haven’t been to Taiwan. So which one is more real to me?” as observed by Nick Yee in “Are MMORPG Relationships Meaningless?” The Daedalus Project 3.4 (July 31, 2005) , accessed December 10, 2006. 10. This essay is the result of many hours playing the games in question, more hours visiting game-related online forums, and my own surveys, conducted over the same online forums. Additional data comes from Nick Yee’s well-researched Daedalus Project, a compilation of articles and survey results, and other secondary sources. 11. Even their status as mothers is parasitic: since children in this Middle Ages do no work, nor develop into industrious peasants, they are merely another drain on the lord’s resources. 12. Firefly Studios, Stronghold II (New York: Firefly Studios, 2005), 61. 13. SEGA of America, Medieval II: Total War (San Francisco: SEGA of America, 2006), 5. 14. SEGA of America, Medieval II: Total War, 7. 15. Moreover, the sheer number of MMORPG players (an estimated 25,000,000 world-wide, a number which is expected to grow exponentially over the next five years), makes it imperative to examine what kinds of notion of gender are being formed in this cybercrucible. 16. Elizabeth M. Reid, “Text-based Virtual Realities: Identity and the Cyborg Body,” in Peter Ludlow, ed., High Noon on the Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 327–46 (328). 17. Reid, “Text-based Virtual Realities,” 332. 18. Katie Conroy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, “Introduction,” in Conroy, et al., Writing on the Body, 1–14 (5). 19. Chris Metzen, Vice President of Creative Development for Blizzard, calls World of Warcraft “[the] Technicolor, Americanized version of Lord of the Rings,” as noted in Levy, “Living a Virtual Life.” 20. Susan Bordo, “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity,” in Conroy, et al., Writing on the Body, 90–112 (101). 21. “Heata” voices the frustration that players often experience with the limitations of character experience: “A huge reason I stopped playing Guild Wars is because I didn’t have any interest in running around in armor that looked like lingerie. In World of Warcraft, it annoys me how uncustomizable and seemingly ‘wooden’ the characters are, yet the females have these huge boobs that even bounce when you move! Whew!” as noted by Nick Yee in “Genderbending in World of Warcraft,” The Daedalus Project 3.4 (July 31, 2005), accessed December 10, 2006. 22. Judith Squires, “Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberculture,” in David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), 360–73 (364). 23. “New to the Game?,” Allakhazam’s Magical Realm, , accessed December 12, 2006. 24. David Sanftenberg notes that “people who quit are viewed as giving up on their guilds; they are ridiculed, denounced, and hated. There is massive peer pressure to keep playing.” See his article “Everquest: What You Really Get from an Online

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Game,” Slashdot (December 12, 2002), , accessed December 30, 2006. “Warren”, a respondent in Nick Yee’s Daedalus Project, comments that “[t]he main reason I play so often is so that I can keep up with others in my guild and those I befriended in my early days. Also so that I can get to a higher level to help out my guildmates especially.” (Nick Yee, “World of Warcraft Basic Demographics,” The Daedalus Project 3.4 [July 31, 2005], accessed December 10, 2006). 25. Nick Yee, “Applying Psychology to MMORPGs: Automatic Mimicry,” The Daedalus Project 2.3 (July 14, 2000) , accessed December 10, 2006. 26. One exception to this pattern lies in Everquest, which has both an open/emote (text) command (underused because of the speed of play) and primarily text-based emotes. A command such as “/emote–dance” in Everquest, for example, looks exactly like its parallel in MUD programs: “X breaks into dance”, with the same level of interpretive freedom available to both player and audience. 27. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 137. 28. Reid, “Text-based Virtual Realities,” 328. 29. “Dumah”, Survey Response, World of Warcraft

(November 29, 2006). All names are those that the players use in the online forums in which I conducted my surveys. 30. “Sazz”, Survey Response, Dark Age of Camelot Catacombs (December 8, 2006). 31. “Danzig”, Survey Response, World of Warcraft (December 30, 2006). 32. “Old Tankster”, Survey Response, Dark Age of Camelot Catacombs (December 16, 2006). 33. “Tasteypies”, Survey Response, Dark Age of Camelot Catacombs (December 12, 2006). 34. “Sin”, Survey Response, Dark Age of Camelot Catacombs (December 12, 2006). 35. “Bragi”, Survey Response, Dark Age of Camelot Catacombs (December 12, 2006). 36. Allucquère Rosanne Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures,” in Bell and Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader, 504–28 (504). 37. Mike Godwin, “Self and Community Online,” in Ludlow, High Noon, 315. 38. This model of context-dependent gender shows up in MMORPG etiquette. “Hauhet” speaks for the larger role-playing community in his post: “When someone is playing a character, address those characters as their given gender at the moment. If you see a guy, it’s a ‘he’, if it’s a girl, it’s a ‘she’, if it’s alien and

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whatever [. . .] hell, ask them what they prefer in that case,” as reported in Yee’s “Genderbending.” 39. Stone, “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” 506. 40. Yee, “Genderbending.” 41. Yee, “Genderbending.” 42. Yee, “Genderbending.” 43. Yee, “Genderbending.” 44. Yee, “Genderbending.” 45. Yee, “Genderbending.” 46. Yee, “Genderbending.”

Contributors BRUCE C. BRASINGTON received his B.A. at Oklahoma State University, M.A. at SMU, and Ph.D. at UCLA. His field of study is medieval canon law down to the late twelfth century, with additional – and related – interests in early-medieval education and textual criticism. For the past decade he has been working with Dr. Martin Brett on a critical edition of Ivo of Chartres’ Panormia. CHENE HEADY received his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. His area of scholarly specialty is English Literature in Transition (1880– 1920). He has published scholarly articles on G. K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, and Edward Irving. He has articles forthcoming on John Henry Newman and H. G. Wells. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. AMY S. KAUFMAN is Assistant Professor of English at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, where she specializes in medieval literature, women’s studies, and creative writing. Her work includes articles on women in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur and on neomedievalism and race in video games. She is currently working on a contribution about Chaucer’s fabliaux to an anthology on classical ladies in medieval texts, a book about Malory’s women and feminist theory in medieval studies, and a long and winding fantasy novel. LAURYN S. MAYER is an associate professor at Washington and Jefferson College, where she teaches medieval literature. She is the author of Worlds Made Flesh: Reading Medieval Manuscript Culture. She is currently working on a study of the Trevisa Polychronicon manuscripts. GRETCHEN KREAHLING MCKAY received her B.A. in art from Colby College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Virginia. Currently she is Associate Professor of Art History, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, and the Director of the Honors Program at McDaniel College. McKay’s main research field is Early Christian and Byzantine art, and she has published on the intersections of theology and art in several peer-reviewed journals.

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STEFANO MENGOZZI, who received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of Chicago, is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan. His recent research has concentrated on medieval and Renaissance music theory, particularly on the role played by this body of writings in shaping the scholarly images of early music in the modern era. He is completing a monograph on the reception history of the Guidonian hexachordal system up until the mid-sixteenth century, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Other articles on this topic have appeared in the Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Early Music History. BRENT MOBERLY is a doctoral candidate in English at Indiana University, Bloomington. His scholarly interests include late-medieval English works of religious instruction, the Mirrors for Princes genre, and accounts of third-estate labor. His dissertation explores changing representations of labor in late-medieval England in light of wider concerns of authority during the period. He has a chapter contribution co-authored with Kevin Moberly forthcoming on the commodification of medieval labor in contemporary role-playing computer games. KEVIN MOBERLY is Assistant Professor of English at Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud, Minnesota. He received his Ph.D. in May 2005 from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His areas of expertise include new media, cultural and visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory. His research focuses predominantly on understanding how computer games and other computer-enabled manifestations of popular culture reflect and contribute to contemporary cultural, political, and economic conversations. He is especially interested in how computer games represent labor and how they often blur (un)easy distinctions between work and play. ALICIA C. MONTOYA is Rosalind Franklin Fellow/Assistant Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). She has published Marie-Anne Barbier et la tragédie post-classique (Champion, 2007), as well as an edition of Marie-Anne Barbier’s play Cornélie, mère des Gracques (with Volker Schröder) (Sociéte de littératures classiques, 2005), and several articles on the reception of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers. Her current book project focuses on early eighteenthcentury French medievalism (working title: Literary Modernity and Gallic Antiquity: New Readings of French Medieval Literature, from Jean Chapelain to Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

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ALBERT D. PIONKE is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is the author of Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England and is currently working on a book-length study of Victorian elite-public ritual. CAROL L. ROBINSON is Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University, Trumbull. She is co-editor of two forthcoming anthologies: The Medieval in Motion: Film, Television and Electronic Games, and a collection of essays on cyberpunk science-fiction writer William Gibson. She has works published or forthcoming on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” Monty Python, medievalist video-games and films, digital and analog communication, communication chaos, William Gibson’s works, Charles Chaplin’s films, Willy Conley’s Deaf culture plays, and ASL performance artist Peter Cook’s stories. She is also a founding member of the Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization (http://faculty.trumbull.kent.edu/english/memo/memo.htm). OLIVER M. TRAXEL is Wissenschaftlicher Assistent in the English Department of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster and has just finished work on his habilitation project “Lexical Instability and Replacement in the History of English.” He has also represented the chair for English Medieval Studies at Georgia Augusta Göttingen. His degrees include a B.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Manchester as well as an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic from the University of Cambridge, where his research focused on English vernacular manuscripts from the twelfth century, as seen in his book Language Change, Writing and Textual Interference in Post-Conquest Old English Manuscripts.