The Futures of Medieval French: Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay 1843845954, 9781843845959, 9781800101746

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Gallica Volume 46

THE FUTURES OF MEDIEVAL FRENCH

Gallica

ISSN 1749-091X Founding Editor: Sarah Kay Series Editors: Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and early modern French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Simon Gaunt ([email protected]) Professor Peggy McCracken ([email protected]) The Editorial Director, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

THE FUTURES OF MEDIEVAL FRENCH ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF SARAH KAY

Edited by JANE GILBERT AND MIRANDA GRIFFIN

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2021 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 2021 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978-1-84384-595-9 hardback ISBN 978-1-80010-174-6 ePDF

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 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: The branches of Philosophy, from a thirteenth-century illustrated French translation of Cicero’s De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Chantilly, Bibliothèque du musée Condé, manuscript 433, folio 9v Photo credit: CNRS-IRHT – © Bibliothèque du musée Condé

For Sarah Kay With affection, gratitude, and respect

• CONTENTS • List of Illustrations List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

xi xiii xv

Introduction 1 Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin

Part I: Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry Introduction

15

Third Gender Solace

19

Troubadour Selves under Debate

34

‘Je tiens ma personne morte’: Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry

49

Ruth Harvey

William Burgwinkle Miriam Cabré

Helen Swift

Part II: The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions Introduction 67 Jane Gilbert

‘He wishes that everyone were leprous like him’: Infectious Counternarratives in Ami et Amile

71

Feminism-plus: Sarah Kay’s The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions and the ‘Roman de’ Waldef

85

Charlie Samuelson

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

vii

viii

• CONTENTS •

Connected Literature: Chansons de geste, Burgundian livres de gestes, and the Writing of Literary Theory Today

99

Part III: Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century Introduction

115

Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier

119

At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love

150

Logic, Meaning, and Imagination

166

Zrinka Stahuljak

Peggy McCracken Susan Boynton

Joseph R. Johnson Virginie Greene

Part IV: The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature Introduction 181 Nicolette Zeeman

Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts

185

The Disembodied Tongue; or, The Place of the Book in the Livre de la Cité des Dames

200

Stephen G. Nichols

Christine Bourgeois

The Place of Pain: Confronting the Trauma and Complexity of Kingship in the Political Dream Narrative 213 Deborah McGrady

Part V: Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry Introduction

229

Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities in the Chastelaine de Vergy

233

Troubadour Attachments

250

Simon Gaunt

Sophie Marnette

Emily Kate Price



• CONTENTS •

Forms of Repetition: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century Simone Ventura

ix

264

Part VI: Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries Introduction 283 Miranda Griffin

Between Skin(s), Between Faiths: Caesura, Animality, and Comedy in Thirteenth-Century Christian–Jewish Relations

287

Rupturing Skin through the Power of Vox

301

Sheep, Elephants, and Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde

314

Afterword

329

General Bibliography List of Manuscripts Bibliography of Work by Sarah Kay Index

333 359 361 369

James R. Simpson

Elizabeth Eva Leach Sharon Kinoshita

Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken

• ILLUSTRATIONS •

‘Je tiens ma personne morte’: Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry, Helen Swift Figure 1 Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque (Paris: Antoine Vérard, 1501), fol. 258v; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Réserve Ye 168.

57

Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier, Susan Boynton Figure 1 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 856, fol. 308r. Source gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France 123 Figure 2 Musical form of ‘Pus sabers’

130–1

At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love, Joseph R. Johnson Figure 1 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125, fol. 57va (detail). Courtesy of Princeton University Library 158 Figure 2 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125, fol. 40rb (detail). Courtesy of Princeton University Library 159 Figure 3 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125, fol. 52vb (detail). Courtesy of Princeton University Library 159 Figure 4 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125, fol. 49ra (detail). Courtesy of Princeton University Library 160 Figure 5 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125, fols 49ra and 52vb (details overlaid in composite). Courtesy of Princeton University Library 160 xi

xii

• ILLUSTRATIONS •

Figure 6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12560, fol. 8va (detail)

163

Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts, Stephen G. Nichols Figure 1 València, Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 387, fol. 2r (Northern France, c.1400–1406)

192

Figure 2 Detail of València, Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 387, fol. 2r (Northern France, c.1400–1406)

195

Forms of Repetition: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, Simone Ventura Figure 1 Graphic representation of the sequence of end-words and stanzas in a sestina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina#/ media/File:Sestina_system_alt.svg [last access: 4 September 2019]. Graphic by Phil Wink, reproduced under license CC0 1.0. 267 Table 1

Sequence and succession of end-words in Arnaut Daniel’s ‘Lo ferm voler’ (Perugi 2015)

267

Rupturing Skin through the Power of Vox, Elizabeth Eva Leach Figure 1 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, fol. 87v. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford

304

Figure 2 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, fol. 89r. Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford

305

The editors, contributors and publisher 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 publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

• CONTRIBUTORS • Christine Bourgeois, Assistant Professor of French, University of Kansas Susan Boynton, Professor of Music, Historical Musicology, Columbia University William Burgwinkle, Emeritus Professor of Medieval French and Occitan Literature, University of Cambridge Miriam Cabré, Associate Professor, Universitat de Girona Simon Gaunt, Professor of French Language and Literature, King’s College London Jane Gilbert, Senior Lecturer in French, University College London Virginie Greene, Professor of French, Harvard University Miranda Griffin, Lecturer in Medieval French, University of Cambridge Ruth Harvey, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Occitan Literature, Royal Holloway University of London Joseph R. Johnson, Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Georgetown University Sharon Kinoshita, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz Elizabeth Eva Leach, Professor of Music, University of Oxford Sophie Marnette, Professor of Medieval French Studies, University of Oxford Peggy McCracken, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities, University of Michigan Deborah McGrady, Professor of French, University of Virginia Stephen Nichols, James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, John Hopkins University Emily Kate Price, Lecturer in French, Robinson College, University of Cambridge Charlie Samuelson, Assistant Professor of French, University of Colorado, Boulder James R. Simpson, Reader in French, University of Glasgow xiii

xiv

• CONTRIBUTORS •

Zrinka Stahuljak, Professor of Comparative Literature and French, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Helen Swift, Professor of Medieval French Studies, University of Oxford Simone Ventura, Lecturer in Romance Linguistics, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate, Kings College London Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thomas F. X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature (Emerita), Fordham University, New York Nicolette Zeeman, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, University of Cambridge

• ABBREVIATIONS •

DMF FEW

PC Tobler-Lommatzsch

Dictionnaire du moyen français, 2015 version (ATILF–CNRS & Université de Lorraine). http:// www.atilf.fr/dmf Walther von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: Eine Darstellung des galloromanischen Sprachschatzes (Bonn: Schröder, 1922–) ‎Online version: https://apps.atilf.fr/lecteurFEW Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933) Adolf Tobler, Erhard Lommatzsch, and Hans Helmut Christmann, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, 11 vols (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1915–2002)

Sarah Kay: monographs frequently cited Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) Political Fictions The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) Courtly Contradictions Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Place of Thought The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) Parrots and Nightingales Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Subjectivity

xv

xvi

Animal Skins

• ABBREVIATIONS •

Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017)

All translations are contributors’ own, unless otherwise specified. All italics in quotations are original, unless otherwise specified. Troubadour lyrics are identified by their number in the edition used and also by PC number, referring to Alfred Pillet and Henry Carstens, Bibliographie der Troubadours (Halle: Niemeyer, 1933). We include those of Kay’s publications that are cited in the course of this volume (outside the Introduction) in the General Bibliography, as well as in the Bibliography of work by Sarah Kay.

• Introduction • Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin

T

his volume celebrates the scholarship of Sarah Kay, one of the world’s foremost scholars of medieval French. Kay’s work combines methodological and theoretical rigour to explore medieval literary culture from new and challenging angles; her insights are always innovative and sometimes startling, and have played a major role in shaping our understanding of the field today. This introduction offers a brief overview of her career and publications in order to situate the essays in this book relative to her work. Not only has Kay’s scholarship significantly shaped the field, the power of Kay’s analyses and range of her materials are such that they attract audiences not usually attuned to medieval French literature. Therefore, and in keeping with Kay’s publications, which address writing in Occitan, Catalan, Italian, and Latin as well as Old and Middle French and which maintain a consistent dialogue with other disciplines and periods, we aim to make this volume accessible to readers who are not specialists in medieval French literature, whether students of the French Middle Ages or advanced scholars in other fields. Kay undertook her undergraduate and research degrees at Oxford, and a Masters degree in Linguistics at the University of Reading. At Oxford, she was taught by two inspirational women medievalists: Rhoda Sutherland, a remarkable teacher, and Elspeth Kennedy, a pioneering scholar of prose romance. Her first professional post was at the University of Liverpool, from where she moved to a university lectureship at Cambridge in the early 1980s. There, Kay became a Fellow of Girton College, where she later served as Senior Tutor (a major administrative post, involving responsibility for the education and welfare of the college’s student population); she also undertook the role of Head of the University’s Department of French. After two decades in Cambridge, Kay moved to Princeton in 2006 and then to New York University, where, as well as teaching and continuing to produce world-leading research, she held head of department and other influential leadership roles. For this volume honouring Kay’s scholarship, we invited twenty-four academics working across the disciplines of medieval studies to write in response to one of her six major monographs. Each part is devoted to one of 1

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these monographs, and introduced by a scholar whose own work intersects closely with its subject matter. The first is Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, published in 1990 (and introduced here by Ruth Harvey), in which Kay dissects the presentation of selfhood and desire in troubadour love lyric, and emphasises the importance of these lyrics to modern understandings of dynamics of love. In the 1995 The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (introduced by Jane Gilbert), Kay questioned modern views of two major types of medieval French narrative fiction: the chanson de geste, typically understood as characterised by violent masculinity; and the romance, conventionally read as representing the development of masculine emotional identity and of love between men and women. Kay exposes this division as specious and provides innovative and illuminating readings of the dynamics of a wide range of chansons de geste. Kay’s third monograph, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, published in 2001 (and introduced here by Peggy McCracken), addresses high medieval literature across a spectrum of genres, to think through models of contradiction in these texts, in medieval philosophy, and in modern critical theory, in order to demonstrate the centrality of these models in the creation of the ‘literary object’ – that with which medieval literature concerned itself, and the things and people it framed. Her 2007 The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature (introduced by Nicolette Zeeman) represented a shift of perspective and a shift of period for Kay: moving from the twelfth century, Kay turned her focus to French literature of the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries; her approach moved from contradicting opposites to an examination of unity. Oneness, in Kay’s book, is rigorously investigated in its multiplicity as it is deployed to ask questions about the world, the individual, and the divine, by medieval literature, and medieval and modern philosophy. Whereas Place of Thought interrogated structures of knowing about the world, Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry (2013, introduced by Simon Gaunt) asked serious questions about the aesthetic and epistemological value of practices of quoting, citing, and repeating in the European poetic tradition. Kay’s thesis is that these practices, often dismissed today as arcane or inferior, are central to the conception of poetic form and content in the earliest proponents of the genre. The figures of the parrot and the nightingale stand, in this book, for different conceptions of repetition, ranged along a spectrum of innovation and replication. Animal figures once more take centre stage in the most recent monograph we engage with in this volume. Kay’s 2017 work, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (introduced by Miranda Griffin), explores what is at stake in the representation of animals as figures to understand humanity and divinity



• INTRODUCTION •

3

in the medieval bestiary – and, engaging creatively with the animal turn in critical theory, examines the implications for human readers encountering these texts inscribed on pages fashioned from animal skin. A perusal of the list of Kay’s publications included in this volume, however, shows that her scholarship extends well beyond this already diverse list of monographs, and we cannot pass over her many other contributions without some comment. Kay’s publications have throughout her career helped other scholars to widen the accessible corpus of medieval French texts. They have contributed in various ways to bring more, and more varied, works into mainstream scholarly discussion. The appendix to Political Fictions, for instance, combats the often-lamented narrow focus on the Oxford Chanson de Roland in medieval studies by providing plot summaries of over thirty lesserknown chansons de geste, thereby opening these up to a readership beyond the subfield of romance epic specialists (Parrots and Nightingales and Animal Skins contain similarly practical appendices). This move, especially significant for anglophone scholarship, accords with her systematic provision in her publications of English translations for quotations in all medieval languages. The fact that Kay's definitive edition of Raoul de Cambrai (1992) contains not only a learned literary and textual introduction but also a full English translation shows her practical commitment to inclusive scholarship. The ‘student’ volumes in her output – The Troubadours: An Introduction (Gaunt and Kay 1999) and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Gaunt and Kay 2008), both edited with Simon Gaunt, her close colleague and collaborator for many years; the seminal ‘Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love’ essay in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, edited by Roberta L. Krueger (2000); and the contribution to the Grant & Cutler series of short Critical Guides, The Romance of the Rose (1995b) – place her combination of high intellectual and scholarly standards at the service of non-specialists and novices. By allowing such audiences to witness how traditional philological skills yield new literary-critical insights, her publications effectively promote the desire to learn those skills. These writings position us all, with Kay herself, as co-researchers and co-learners. Kay’s publications similarly defy the (now dated) dichotomy between critical theory and traditional scholarship (her 1999 ‘Analytical Survey 3: The “New Philology”’ and 2017’s Philology’s Vomit may stand as manifestoes), principally by highlighting the conceptual aspects implicit as well as explicit in each approach and putting them into productive dialogue. Although her analytical frameworks are different from those of more traditional scholars, much of her work engages with traditional problems. Thus her important article ‘Who was Chrétien de Troyes?’ (1997) mobilises Foucauldian notions of the author-function, Derridean work on the signature, and attention to reception studies, alongside ideas drawn from medieval studies like the senhal

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(a troubadour ‘code-name’) and D. D. R. Owen’s research on the twelfthcentury currency of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, to challenge notions of genre, author, and even coherence (cf. Courtly Contradictions). The same article shows how some traditionally held views of the Middle Ages have, in fact, been influenced by modern publishing norms in ways that are understandable but essentially anachronistic, while at the same time demonstrating how medieval thinking advances late twentieth-century challenges to these norms. Kay’s work has in fact been consistently interested in ‘how we read’, asking how far and in what ways our institutionalised knowledge is both historically conditioned and subjective. She often elaborates a playful psychoanalysis of medievalist literary history and literary criticism by showing how these are shaped as much by the outlooks and affects of medieval scholars as by the nature of the medieval evidence – and how the former can get in the way of the latter. Many medievalists will meet these refreshing and provocative interventions with a half-rueful smile of self-recognition. They are exemplified by her review essays, notably ‘The New Philology’ (1999a), ‘Surface Reading And The Symptom That Is Only Skin-deep’ (2012), and ‘Is Interdisciplinarity the New Theory?’ (2013b). In these she communicates a clear vision of certain states of our discipline, and reflects upon the opportunities and limitations afforded to that discipline by these and other states, actual or potential. Such essays provide us with the means and impetus to consider critically our own networks, practices, and institutions, and help us develop strategies to bring them into line with our ethical, political, cultural, and professional values. Kay’s commitment to a critical assessment of the disciplines of medieval studies and French studies is at the root of her insistence on being in the room with modern scholars on an equal footing. Perhaps the best example is the Short History of French Literature that Kay co-wrote with Terence Cave and Malcolm Bowie (2003). The three co-authors were not only among the most eminent scholars of French and shapers of the discipline; each was committed to moving across the boundaries traditionally separating literature from thought, poetics from philosophy. Their varying preferences and expertise led to a multifaceted interlocution: Bowie and Kay, for instance, found inspiration in the distinctively phenomenologically influenced, Lacanian form of psychoanalysis, Cave in critiquing it robustly. Philosophically oriented dialogue between pre- and postmodernists is evident not only in Kay’s volume on Slavoj Žižek for the Polity Key Contemporary Thinkers series (2003; the only medievalist contributor, to our knowledge, to this Who’s Who of contemporary philosophy and theory), but also in some of her most recent enterprises: a special number of Paragraph on ‘Sounding and Soundscapes’ (2018), co-edited with philosopher François Noudelmann, and a volume on the Modernist Bestiary, co-edited with French modernist Timothy Mathews.



• INTRODUCTION •

5

It is typical of Kay’s publication strategy to pursue at one and the same time interdisciplinarity, challenges to conventional periodisation, and philosophical seriousness in medieval contexts. These interdisciplinary and collaborative instincts have enabled Kay to forge productive connections. She was at the forefront of the move in UK academia, necessitated by shifts in funding patterns for university research, to collaborative research projects in humanities subjects based in several locations and undertaken by several scholars. The research project ‘Poetic Knowledge in Late Medieval France’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, 2004–2007), was a very early example. In partnership with Adrian Armstrong, then based at the University of Manchester, Kay proposed an investigation into the relationship between late medieval poetic form and the types of knowledge it conveyed or connoted. Poetic Knowledge (or PoKno, as it inelegantly came to be called) was unusual also for being strictly intellectual, without the quantitative, digital elements then commonly considered essential to procure funding for large-scale research projects in the humanities. The funding (nevertheless) provided for this project meant that Kay and Armstrong could collaborate not just with one another and the other members of the project team, but could organise a workshop in which scholars from Europe and the US could scrutinise and critique a draft of what was to become Knowing Poetry. This genuinely, rigorously collaborative pattern of working also proffered original models of work to be appreciated and borrowed within the humanities, then (and still) dominated by the monumental, singleauthored monograph. Kay has been a key participant in other important joint enterprises. She has co-edited several volumes of essays or special issues of journals. Along with four other eminent scholars of medieval French, she produced Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, which sheds new light on one of the most revered and written-about authorial figures in the canon. Earlier in her career, Kay joined forces with three other women medievalists to produce an extraordinarily influential article, cited several times in the present volume: ‘Feminism and the Discipline of Old French Studies: Une Bele Disjointure’, written with E. Jane Burns, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer (1995), is a comprehensive assessment of the place of women – by which the authors mean both female characters and female scholars – in medieval French literary studies in the mid-1990s. Published in a collection which positioned itself as setting out the stall for a new, exciting, theoretically engaged medievalism, this essay argues that ‘Feminist studies entail […] the risk of bringing together both the personal and the professional’ (225). Kay has throughout her career taken this risk with fierceness and courage, and engaged in this bringing-together in illuminating and constructive ways. And, to take the leap into the personal first person, we, the editors of this book, have both benefited immeasurably

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from Kay’s intensely practical mode of feminism. As a teacher and supervisor she is rigorous, perceptive, and exacting; as a colleague and interlocutor she is generous, interested, and acute; as a mentor she is enterprising, challenging, and pragmatic. Along with many colleagues of her generation, Kay has been a pioneer and advocate for women in the academy. Fairly early on in her Cambridge post, Kay published an article entitled (with her characteristic fondness for a good – or terrible – pun), ‘French without Spears’, in an issue of The Cambridge Review: A Journal of University Life and Thought dedicated to women in the university. In a few pages, this article gives a devastatingly limpid insight into the experience and worldview of a woman medievalist in 1980s academia, from an anecdote about being mistaken for a job candidate’s wife (or, she worries to her horror, his mother), to a trenchant proposition that ‘the term “courtly love” should go, and be replaced by the less appealing, but more accurate one of “gentrified misogyny”’ (Kay 1987b: 100). This article is as good an example as any of Kay’s irreverent humour, as well as another characteristic of her career and scholarship: the deep-rooted interconnections between the personal, the professional, the intellectual, the political, and the practical. As we reconsidered Kay’s work in the preparation of this book and worked with our contributors, we were struck by how Kay’s scholarship not only enables important questions to be asked that shed urgent light on medieval scholarship – even on scholarship in general – but also provides intellectual scaffolding to address these questions. While each part of The Futures of Medieval French addresses a separate monograph, it is also intriguing to see themes emerging across the parts. For instance, many of the essays invite us to scrutinise the formation of subjects and objects. At one end of the volume, the essays on Subjectivity consider the complex issue of what it means to say ‘I’ in a poem, and how lover, beloved, poet, and audience shape and are shaped by poetic discourse. At the other end, those inspired by Animal Skins attend to the way that modern and medieval readers might construe themselves as embodied human subjects in relation to texts about non-human animals written on animal skin. Our contributors show how troubadour lyrics and (more surprisingly) bestiaries both become the object with which it is good to think in order to constitute a medieval or modern reader as a subject. In the middle of the volume, the literary object comes into view from a different angle: Virginie Greene suggests that Courtly Contradictions, a work that focuses on literature itself as an object of pleasure, desire, and knowledge, is in fact best described by its subtitle: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (167). Kay’s scholarship often draws on psychoanalytic theory to scrutinise the structures of power, language, and pleasure which frame subjects and objects,



• INTRODUCTION •

7

and the authors in this volume also refer to psychoanalysis in a number of productive ways. The essays by Greene and Joseph R. Johnson could both be said to excavate a textual unconscious. Johnson, like Elizabeth Eva Leach, cites Kay’s adaptation of the concept of the ‘codicological unconscious’ to think through slips and rips in manuscripts; Zrinka Stahuljak reads a medieval library and its categorisation as functioning as a political unconscious. Psychoanalysis can, then, be a productive lens through which to view the operations and sublimations of unspoken desire in literary networks. In his seminar, ‘L’Amour courtois en anamorphose’ (Courtly love as anamorphosis: Lacan, 1986, 167–84), Lacan dissects the language and tensions of troubadour lyric to reveal the formation of the object of desire. Many medievalists, including Kay, have responded to Lacan’s provocative thesis to show that this emphasis on the formation of the object reveals that gender in troubadour lyrics is articulated as a set of contingent intersubjective projections and positions, rather than a natural, given, binary division. In this volume, the essays by William Burgwinkle and Charlie Samuelson call on queer and trans theories to draw out the implications of this troubling of gender identity, and build on the challenges that Kay articulated to understandings of gender in troubadour lyric and chansons de geste in Subjectivity and Political Fictions, respectively. Reflecting on the differences gender can make, Christine Bourgeois focuses on transitions and sanctity in the writing of Christine de Pizan. Jocelyn WoganBrowne provides a lucid, passionate reminder in her essay of the importance of retaining a feminist practice when engaging with the political fictions of our own contemporary events, as we read them through and against medieval representations of power and identity. Psychoanalysis traces memory and language to understand trauma and affect: Deborah McGrady explores these operations in her reading of the landscape of mourning. Emily Kate Price’s essay considers troubadour lyric both as an expression and as an object of that affect, through the practices of repetition and recollection Kay discusses in Parrots and Nightingales. Affect and repetition are both articulated with reference to, or in representation of, voice: resonating with the work that Kay has most recently produced (and with her current project, on song and breath), several essays respond to Kay’s scholarship by emphasising the importance of the vocal in medieval literary culture. For Miriam Cabré, poetic subjects, identities, and hierarchies are forged and undermined by the dialogues between poetic personae in lyrics; Susan Boynton also explores the voices of poetic protagonists which evolve and echo within a sequence of lyrics by Guiraut Riquier, pointing out, however, that any fixity in their positions is subtly dismantled by the contradictions in temporality and melody of Guiraut’s poetry. Sophie Marnette’s detailed dissection of the quotation of lines from a Chatelain de Coucy lyric in La Chastelaine de Vergy shows how the practices

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of quotation and citation inflect the layered voices and subject positions of the text. Bourgeois and Helen Swift both evoke voices emanating from the very edge of possibility: for Bourgeois, voice resonates everywhere in the place of thought that is Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames; Swift focuses on the voice of the ever-expiring martyr-for-love. Leach examines the intimate connections between voice and subjectivity in vox, the non-linguistic element of living sound. Such exchanges constitute a looping temporality, where subject and object recurrently construe, place, and replace one another, and many of our contributors have chosen to attend to temporality. In Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, Kay and her fellow authors call upon the notion of ‘logical time’, drawn from Lacan, which foregrounds an intersubjective, cyclical mode of temporality, whose privileged tense is the future anterior (Stahuljak et al. 2011: 3–4; see also Griffin 2005). What is emphasised in logical time is what will have been, the way in which the future will reflect on the past, and how the present is formed and reformed by this reflection; for the authors of Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, logical time can provide a key to the structures of plot, action, and thought in Chrétien’s œuvre. It should perhaps come as no surprise that the authors of essays in a volume reflecting on an important career in medieval French Studies and the implications of that career for the future of the discipline would call on a model of temporality which enmeshes past, present, and future to illuminate central concerns of affect and reasoning. This is evident in the essays by Boynton and Swift: Boynton takes a lyric cycle as her topic, Swift an anthology. Both contributors show that their chosen artefact proposes a narrative sequence of subjectivity in which time is out of joint. Stahuljak explicitly invokes the future perfect to show how the chanson de geste summons the future by confecting a narrative of a fantasised past. Meanwhile, in her reading of the troubadours’ temporal networks of affect, Price calls on the notion of kairos, as distinct from chronos, while McGrady draws attention to the ways that national trauma and personal pain can shortcircuit conventional ideals of memory and time. With this attention to temporality, the essays in this volume enable us to address wider questions of literary history, of the kind that lie at the heart of much of Kay’s work. Political Fictions troubles the conventional narrative which positions the chansons de geste as prior to romance in an evolutionary progress, for example, whereas Parrots and Nightingales proposes that the reiteration of troubadour know-how results in the poetic peerlessness of Petrarch and Dante. The essays by Greene and Simone Ventura are the only ones in this volume not to take medieval texts as their principal focus: both show that the aesthetic and philosophical structures identified by Kay’s scholarship extend far beyond the Middle Ages, Greene by exploring contradiction in the fantastical landscapes and storylines of Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels, Ventura



• INTRODUCTION •

9

by tracing the resurgence in the twenty-first century of the sestina form first practised by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel. The pleasure of reading medieval literature for Kay, and for us, of reading it with Kay, depends crucially on that literature’s intellectual robustness. The essays in this volume reiterate her engagement with the complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect which characterise much medieval literature. This is true not just for texts that wear their intellectual credentials on their sleeve, such as the flashily encyclopaedic Roman de la Rose and its allegorical ancestors and descendants, or the didactic Breviari d’amor (examined by Kay in The Place of Thought), but also for texts that are generally seen as more plot-driven, such as romances or chansons de geste (Political Fictions), or works which communicate messages of piety in the vernacular, such as hagiography or bestiaries (Courtly Contradictions and Animal Skins), lyrics which revolve around the agonies and ecstasies of desire (Subjectivity) – and even practices which repeat them in ways that might at first blush appear unthinking (Parrots and Nightingales). Medieval literature thinks differently – and knows that it thinks differently – from other medieval discourses, practices, and art forms even as it cross-pollinates with them in self-aware and often playful ways. The conviction that knowledge changes according to the shapes that it inhabits informs much of Kay’s work, notably her enduring interest in the varying affordances of genres (lyric, chivalric romance, grammatical treatise, dit), forms (verse, prose), and hermeneutic (allegorical, courtly, pious); and in the conversations that individual works entertain with and between such differing patterns of expectation. Many of the contributions in this volume similarly highlight how the devices, patterns, or systems that structure thought move across cultures – and/or to their cultural limitations. Wogan-Browne’s essay shows how the Anglo-Norman ‘romance’ of Waldef brings another perspective and a distinctive dialectic to the debates that Kay charted in continental French; Stahuljak argues that the formal definitions of narrative genres that have long directed our critical debates should be replaced with categories based in verifiable medieval practices. In contrast, Ventura shows us how the aesthetics of the medieval sestina form continues to seduce twenty-first-century poets writing in English. Extending Kay’s argument that contradiction as a mode of argument in the twelfth century formed ‘perverse’ connections between texts that were unlikely bedfellows, Greene tracks the curious collocation of logic, imagination, and meaning that make up ‘the literary’ from Homer and Aristotle to Carroll and Lacan. As is clear from the above, many of these essays also develop Kay’s insistence on the political dimensions encoded in ideas, materials, and literary procedures. Cabré, Wogan-Browne, and Sharon Kinoshita all demonstrate the importance of political geography for contextualising pervasive modern understandings of the Middle Ages. Kinoshita reveals shared and divergent cultural traditions

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• JANE GILBERT AND MIRANDA GRIFFIN •

revolving around materialist readings quite different from those of the bestiaries. James R. Simpson, too, compares Christian and non-Christian frameworks with an eye to inter-cultural politics, presenting us with differences between medieval Jewish and Christian parchment production, and their use in constructing and policing human relationships. The violent potential of textual technologies is also emphasised by Johnson. Just as the ‘bleeding edge’ is that point where imagination fails to keep pace with modern technology, he argues, so we can apply advanced digitisation techniques to a reading of Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain. Stephen G. Nichols too regards medieval books as technologies and foregrounds how our views of medieval textuality change with its material supports; like Greene, he emphasises that certain patterns are both fundamental to human thinking and historically specific in their variants and meanings. At the macropolitical level, McGrady details how, in Henri de Ferrières’s Songe de pestilence, allegorisation of history is presented as the path to effective political action. The dialogue between metaphor and materiality, its value for exploring differing systems of thought, and its potential to reconfigure gender politics is the subject of Bourgeois’s essay. One of Kay’s significant contributions to the discipline of medieval studies has been her position as editor of the Gallica series with Boydell & Brewer, from its inception in 2009 to 2019, when Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken took over leadership. It is fitting, then, that this appreciation of her work is published in this major series of studies on medieval and early modern French culture. From a range of intellectual backgrounds, reflecting different engagements with and interest in the Middle Ages, and at diverse points in their careers, the authors in this book have produced essays which engage with Kay’s work to bring out and expand upon the range of pressing issues she has raised – and continues to raise. It was this sense of continuously looking forward that inspired our choice of title for this volume: The Futures of Medieval French of course takes a retrospective view of an eminent career, but more importantly, it looks forward to the prospects for the academic disciplines of medieval studies. As we write this in the spring of 2020, these prospects seem uncertain, to say the least, as universities grapple with the pedagogic, economic, and logistic difficulties presented by the global pandemic that is COVID-19. Speculating on possible futures from this standpoint is fraught with doubt, but vital. What makes scholarship in the arts and humanities urgent at this moment is what makes it urgent at any moment: the imperative to reflect and learn from our past, to enhance our present, and to plan for our future. Kay’s scholarship and working practices, like all the most inspiring academic work on the Middle Ages, not only galvanise scholars at all stages of their careers, but also provoke questions about a chronology that divides history into distinct and specific eras, to propose a narrative of inexorable progress. And Kay’s work and the responses to it in this volume



• INTRODUCTION •

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present us with the medieval past as a time of sophisticated, rigorous thought, of preoccupation with aesthetic value, and profound emotional insight, from which our presents and futures have much to learn. A significant amount of work on this volume was done at a workshop at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in April 2019, supported by the generosity of the University of Cambridge French Section. At that workshop, we, the editors, were delighted and amazed by our contributors’ dynamism and generosity. The quality of discussion at that workshop, and the calibre and range of the essays in this collection, testify to their commitment – personal and scholarly – to thinking with Kay’s work. We wish to thank all those who worked on this volume with us with such dedication and creativity. It has been our pleasure and privilege to work so closely with a team of such exceptional scholars. It has been a genuine source of delight to see the collaborative work emerging, and to be part of the community which has built up around this volume. We thank all our contributors wholeheartedly both for their work and for the generous spirit in which it was offered. We have made an editorial decision to omit footnotes thanking us for our editorial and organisational work. But, as more than one contributor has pointed out to us on more than one occasion, erasing these footnotes means that our work would stay under the radar, and our contributors’ collegial acknowledgements go churlishly unacknowledged; moreover, that removing expressions of gratitude for our own labour, while it might spare our blushes, is not at all a feminist gesture. We are therefore reclaiming those thanks for our work here, and we are glad to do so. It also enables us each to thank the other for all the support, creativity, and time which have gone into this volume.

• PART I  • Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry

•  Introduction  • Ruth Harvey

S

arah Kay’s first book was a ground-breaking project to revise and rehabilitate one of the cornerstones of traditional troubadour scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century, what she calls the ‘autobiographical assumption’ (Subjectivity: 2). In this, scholars took it as read that what the ‘I’ of a song’s text says reflected the views and experience of the historical author of the poem, and that these were readily accessible to us because, although the grammar and syntax of a lyric might be tricky to untangle, seizing the meaning of poetic language was not identified as a problematic exercise. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, formalist and intertextual approaches to medieval lyric poetry evacuated the individual from the songs which came to be seen rather as instances of a collective discourse. At the same time, the lyrics’ historical dimension was also subordinated to Marxist-inflected sociological readings: these took the personal element as primarily a figure or synecdoche for a social group, the ‘young men’ (Occitan joven, Latin iuvenes) who, in the view of Erich Köhler (1966), the most influential scholar in this school of criticism, constituted the main focus for the courtly lovesong. Against the backdrop of these analyses which privilege structures, Kay’s achievement is to return to the texts a full sense of their variety and complexity and to reposition their creators within their own vibrant poetic and socio-cultural context. Drawing on a range of critical thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century (Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Lacan), Subjectivity reintroduces (auto)biography, in the sense of textual self-representation, into intertextuality. It restores depth and vitality to the troubadour canso (courtly love-song) and opens up new ways of thinking about medieval courtly poetry, especially the gender relations and social interactions it expresses. Rereading Subjectivity now, nearly thirty years after its initial appearance, one is struck by how fresh and exciting it still is, how lively the writing, and how rich the insights it continues to offer and inspire. Kay chooses to concentrate on the cansos, which are concerned with the inner, affective universe of the lover, rather than on troubadour songs with overtly political or satirical themes. This reinforces the coherence of her project, which is already ambitious enough, but she also demonstrates that 15

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• RUTH HARVEY •

this inner universe is not hermetically isolated from the outer, social world, but tied in myriad ways to social concerns, interaction with the milieu of the court, transactions with the audience of the lyric, and is located, at least in the song’s initial moment of composition, in a particular historical reality. The canso involved one man – and in the vast majority of cases, it was a man, for reasons which her discussion of the female trobairitz makes clear – standing up in front of an audience and sharing publicly with them what purported to be his psychic conflicts and his most intimate, private, and risky desires. His feelings are unique to him and yet also representative of an affective refinement exclusive to a noble caste. He is subordinated, but to a beloved lady whose status, however noble her rank in society, is lesser than his own and undermined by a tradition of clerical misogyny. All this was recognised before the publication of Subjectivity. What Kay does is to dissect the strategies that the troubadours, those creators of vernacular amorous discourse, adopted in their attempt to reconcile or paper over such paradoxes in the self-representation of the speaking subject. Several defining features of her approach and a number of her particular interests were already apparent in her first article on Occitan poetry, ‘Love in a Mirror: An Aspect of the Imagery of Bernart de Ventadorn’. Here she takes the famous comparison of the speaker to Narcissus, from what is probably the most famous troubadour love-song both then and now, ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ (‘When I see the lark beat its wings’, PC 70, 43), and overturns established interpretations of it. This characteristically innovative early foray into the troubadour lyric combines a wide range of expertise: medieval optics, philological questions of verb pronominalisation, the cultural precursors of the Roman de la Rose (to which Kay later devotes a short book, Kay 1995b), attention to differences in the manuscript readings, and close analysis of rhetorical devices. A sensitive unpicking of literary structure shows how the pivotal stanza of Bernart de Ventadorn’s song which contains the image also acts itself as a mirror, both stylistically, through a range of reflecting figures of rhetoric, and formally, for repetitions and reversals of motifs on either side of the strophe underline this song’s bipartite structure. The Narcissus reference becomes an emblem of the fin’amor relationship described by the speaker: what he hopes to see and aspires to attain is replaced by an image of inadequacy and disappointment. The mirror has fulfilled its medieval function of broadening the viewer’s/speaker’s understanding, if only by adding insight to the injury of unrequited love. Subjectivity looks first at the rhetorical schemata which constitute the first-person subject position but whose deployment also generates instability of meaning, then at the political and social context into which this subject is inserted and which give it depth, and finally at what three later narrative poets made of the lyric ‘I’ elaborated by the troubadours. If indeterminacy of



• PART I: INTRODUCTION •

17

meaning is a preoccupation with which all modern readers must now wrestle, the fundamental slipperiness of language also worried the troubadours themselves. Among the canso’s most frequent topoi are the problematic notions of sincerity, inexpressibility and the smooth lies of the lauzengiers (enemies of courtly lovers: see Kay 1996). Kay employs these topoi to explore the creation of the poet-singer’s persona, and then, with characteristic elegance, deftly uses these same motifs in chiastic reverse order to elucidate the collective participation of the song’s public in the construction of meaning (138–45 and 161–7). Under her scrutiny, troubadour figures of rhetoric lose their innocence and become more complex, more challenging – and often more fun. Her discussions (69–83) of the role of allegory include the debate within a divided or fragmented self, where more than one voice is present without the dialogue form being conventionally underlined, and anticipate her recent interest in soundscape, song, and voice. Kay’s analysis of the canso’s gender politics, informed by feminism and psychoanalysis and brought to bear on the categories of masculine and feminine, leads her to posit a hybrid, third-gender object of desire in the lovesong, the domna whose ‘gender is an effect of language and metaphor’ (97) and whose social and moral attributes are masculine, or at least androgynous. Her tightly argued theoretical intervention reconfigures the landscape of the lovesong. It is this fluid, intermediate continuum between the binary extremes of masculine and feminine which William Burgwinkle develops in his chapter. Situating Subjectivity’s ideas in the vanguard of critical thinking on gender in its time, he explores how Kay’s notion of the mixed gender might combine and interact with trans and queer theories today. Distinguishing rank (a social given) from status, ‘a cultural construct which admits of negotiation’ (112), allows Kay to recuperate a number of Köhler’s insights and to make some very important points about the relationship of troubadour imagery, heavy with feudal terminology, to the hierarchical society and the ‘real world’ which informed it. Key here is the idea of ‘metaphorical depth’, a term which Kay first employed in the preliminary study, ‘Rhetoric and Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry’ (1987a: 103). Just how far can we take literally what the poet/singer says? How literally might a song’s first audience have taken the lyrics, given that they lived in this ‘real world’ and knew it first hand? Kay reminds us of the fact that songs were originally performances, by the troubadour or by a joglar, and need also to be considered as such. Names embedded in the songs and the work they do are one important indication of this, although sometimes their very omission is just as telling. Such instances betray, like the tip of an iceberg, the assumed knowledge of poetic tradition and social context which a sophisticated public was expected to bring to bear on the songs and the selves of the performers. Miriam Cabré picks up on one aspect largely omitted from Subjectivity and subsequent scholarship: debate-poems in

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which the speakers (re)present themselves explicitly as social actors, frequently noblemen in dialogue with joglars in a historically specific context. She explores how the insights of Subjectivity might be taken forward to illuminate the construction of these roles, with reference both to Occitan tensos and to Gallego-Portguese cantigas de escarnho of the later Middle Ages. Helen Swift takes the figure of the amant martir, a continuation of the fin’aman, in a late medieval anthology. Like Kay’s chapter on ‘Romance Appropriations’ and her more recent attention to Middle French in Place of Thought, this contribution explores later narrative poetry which takes over the lyric ‘I’. Swift examines the ways in which the subjectivity of this figure, like the coherence of the collection, is constructed through the juxtaposition of the anthology pieces and their interaction, both with each other and with their active readership. In all three essays, the rhetorical self emerges as relationally constituted. It is the product of processes involving a sophisticated public itself possessed of considerable expertise and readerly competence in the poetic tradition.

•  Third Gender Solace  • William Burgwinkle

The three genders of male-authored troubadour poetry emerge here in their classic form: a ‘masculine’ subject of desire; a ‘feminine’ gender whose readiness to sate men’s desire incurs their contempt; and a third, ‘mixed’ gender which assimilates the domna to ‘masculine’ norms, while continuing to represent her desirability as female. (Subjectivity: 95) This kind of backward birthing mechanism makes the hunt for the roots of queerness a retrospective search for amalgamated forms of feelings, desires, and physical needs. (Stockton 2009: 7)

I

begin with two short quotations, one from Sarah Kay’s Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry that provides a taster of her critical bite and acumen; and another by Kathryn Bond Stockton, which, while targeting the backward turn sometimes required for queer self-recognition, also addresses a problem of historical methodology.1 How is one to learn about what was censured in the past other than by seeking out occluded expressions of feeling, abandoning narratives of growth and progress, bypassing the usual routes of social recognition – pretz and onor – and paying special attention to poetic forms that hide rather than expose such feelings, needs, and desires? These are not new questions: they were faced by feminist scholars in the 1970s and have resonated ever since; but they have taken on a new urgency in the twenty-first century as the gendered categories upon which so much feminist theory is based have come under renewed scrutiny. Kay’s simple suggestion of a third gender in troubadour song, a mixed gender that would appear only from distinct vantage points and from certain already established points of view, was a brilliant first step in recognising that the terms ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, cannot be 1 I am grateful to Blake Gutt for bringing the latter piece to my attention and for stimulating discussions on the topic.

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• WILLIAM BURGWINKLE •

taken in troubadour song or elsewhere as self-evident. Much of gender theory, and later of queer and trans theory, has established that these categories depend for their integrity much more on structural positions and relations with power than on physiology, and that they move along a continuum upon which they coexist and overlap. In this essay, I will be reexamining this issue of occluded identity more closely, not to pronounce on men and women in the name of natural philosophy but to muddle those categories as much as the troubadours did, and to reveal that muddling as part of an ancient tradition that found rich expression in the medieval Occitan lyric. In other words, my aim is not to divulge what the troubadours thought they were saying and where they went wrong, or to argue about how a contemporary audience might have received this material (as if that could ever be determined) but instead to look closely at what the poets appear to have said and then take that seriously, without resorting to some superior, ‘scholarly’, or modern(ist) knowledge. Even to assume authorial control of discourse on the part of twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors is often discredited as naive. Somehow, while it is acceptable to assume that poets indulged in rhetorical play (figura and allegory, for example), they were supposedly unable or unwilling to use the same double-speak when regarding issues of gender. The brand of patronising scholarship that assures us that ‘medieval people’ could not possibly think ‘like that’ – that they were either without subjectivity of any kind, lost in religious ideology, or so under-educated and dominated by patriarchy that their rational capacities were hindered and ineffective – is long gone. Its arguments were particularly absurd when we observe that troubadour lyric is a body of verse which routinely refers to female figures (domna) by ‘masculine’ senhals (codenames) such as midons (my lord) or fraire (brother) and to male figures by erotic names such as desirat (desired one), without bothering to offer an explanation or apology. Gender play is part of the terrain, and we have also to assume that the delight taken in paradox, contradiction, and obfuscation that we find in some trobar clus poets is more than just empty provocation (Courtly Contradictions: 40–71). When poets gesture toward a non-binary sexual order in which gender emerges as a function of a wide variety of factors, including, as Kay argues, rank and status, they are factoring into their work such phenomena as samesex performance environments, class privilege and patronage (troubadours from the highest rank masquerading as commoners), and notions of love which figure the poetic subject as subjected to higher, and not necessarily benign, powers to which all must bend. Subjectivity was published in 1990 and was by some length the most important theoretical study of, and challenge to, troubadour scholarship that had appeared in some considerable time. As a recent Ph.D., it shook me



• THIRD GENDER SOLACE •

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and made me question all that I had said on the subject beforehand, and it has retained that power to put one off balance in the decades following. It remains the essential work to contend with when discussing not just poetic subjectivity, but the importance of the troubadours as intellectual and artistic figures who transcend the narrow confines of the courts for which they composed and performed. Just attributing, as Kay did, to the troubadours a status as serious thinkers, as bearers of philosophical import, rather than as structuralist lemmings, represented a break from the predominant Zumthorian readings of the previous two decades. While there is no doubt that great historical and philological work on the troubadours was produced in the years following 1945, much of the theoretical work of that period used troubadours simply as ciphers, illustrations of Marxist theory in the case of Köhler (1966) or of structuralist thinking chez Zumthor (1972), without focusing enough attention on the variety of their production, the particularities of their composition, or their communication within a network. Kay’s book came as a clarion call to US and UK scholars, shortly after Maria Luisa Meneghetti had issued her more social and political readings (1984), urging scholars to pierce the sometimes rebarbatively solipsistic rhetoric of court poetry to find within not only signs of agency and one-upmanship but of engagement with conscious gender play and of the exploitation and critique of Christian and ‘feudal’ mores. This essay is not an attempt to critique Kay’s book or even to supplement it but, rather, to interrogate it, thirty years on, and, I hope, to carry forward its project. How might the book mean differently today than it did when it was written? What has happened in the interim that further informs our understanding not only of poetic composition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but also of the gender configurations to which it called attention? After all, Subjectivity was published the year before Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1991) and Giorgio Agamben’s La comunità che viene (1991), six years before Leo Bersani’s Homos (1996), and just five years after what Jay Prosser calls ‘arguably lesbian and gay studies’ first book’, Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985) (Prosser 2006: 258), yet it anticipates and advances many of the claims made in those classic studies and in some cases moves considerably beyond them. Still, inevitably, there are lacunae that need addressing, and I will focus on just one of those, taking it in a slightly different direction. The most influential section of Subjectivity, it seems to me, is the concept of the third gender, the domna as an in-between space, neither male nor female but partaking of characteristics of both of those subject positions (91–101). The passage that is my first epigraph provides one brief indication of how complex the concept is and yet how superficially simple it could seem; and the following statement gives us a clear snapshot of what is at stake:

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The third gender is sexually female, but its sexuality is consciously presented as passive. […] The domna is therefore morally and psychologically androgynous. In terms of social status, however, she is masculine. (Subjectivity: 91–2)

These days, it is to this concept of mixed gender, passivity, and androgyny that younger students of the troubadours inevitably turn, but they are not always completely satisfied with what they read. I want to interrogate this concept further, looking at how queer theory, and especially trans theory, have complicated Kay’s intuition and clarified it in ways that would have been almost impossible thirty years ago. Prosser argues that in Sedgwick’s Between Men, ‘heterosexuality is shown to be constructed through the sublimation of a cross-gendered identification; for this reason, making visible this identification – transgender movement – will become the queer mechanism for deconstructing heterosexuality and writing out queer’ (2006: 258). He further notes that in Sedgwick’s next book, Epistemology of the Closet (1990), the methodological function of transgender is foregrounded in order that it might serve ‘as a reason for the development of a theory of (homo)sexuality distinct from feminism’ (Prosser 2006: 258). The implication is that, although the transgender figure and ‘transgendering’ as a verb were crucial to the birth of queer theory, they were subsequently written out of the emerging field. It is only really since the new millennium that the category of ‘trans’ has been incorporated into contemporary theory on a (somewhat) equal basis, and even more recently that the essential role that it plays in queer and gender theory has finally been acknowledged. To counter this tendency to treat ‘trans’ as important but still marginal, and in critiquing feminism’s sometimes fraught relationship with the concept, Rita Felski lionises ‘the figure of transsexuality or trangenderism as the site of deeply invested and symbolically charged rewritings of history and time’ (2006: 571). But Felski’s revindication, welcome as it is, is also a little tarnished by its presentism: it focuses only on theory today and implies by lack of acknowledgement that the category of trans is a new and almost exclusively modern issue. It is not; it is only that its theorisation has been more slowly absorbed than expected, and that its concurrent packaging as an identity coherent to modern sensibilities has emerged only in the past century. There have always been trans figures, after all, as many anthropologists and scholars have maintained for decades. The ‘third sex’ thesis, best well known through the work of Gilbert H. Herdt on New Guinea and Will Roscoe on Native Americans, owes much to the notion of a ‘third gender’ that M. Kay Martin and Barbara Voorhies introduced in a 1975 book, Female of the Species. The concept itself is surely much older, and though it has been rightfully critiqued



• THIRD GENDER SOLACE •

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for its sometimes unsubtle application and unfortunate tendency to view the superior non-binary gender system as a rebuke to ‘the West’, all the while ignoring the trans subjects in the West who have stepped out of that binary and been rebuked, it was nonetheless a timely, if partial, step away from the cognitive dissonance on the topic that has marked ‘the West’ (see Herdt 1981, Roscoe 1998, Martin and Voorhies 1975, and Towle and Morgan 2006). Kay’s use of the concept of a third gender is clearly very different from these anthropological models, but it shares some elements and certainly struck a note when it first appeared. Unlike Butler, for example, she was dealing with a literary phenomenon; and unlike almost all the theorists mentioned above, she was referencing neither the present day, nor gender trouble as a symptom of modernity. Instead, Kay was speaking about a Middle Ages that mattered and evoking a very specific locale and unique discursive situation. Like Sedgwick, she was acknowledging that in ‘the West’ gender binaries were (and are) much more elastic than is usually admitted, especially – as in the concept of the elected closet – when such elastic identities favour masculine relations and networks. Kay’s evocation of the third gender topos asserted that there existed a precise moment (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and a place (Occitania) when some named poets, male and female, were playing with the strict gender binary that we attribute to the past; and she did so without apology or any defensive need to establish a claim that many would have considered anachronistic – the usual reason alleged for banishing critical theory from the Middle Ages.2 In the next section, we will look at two examples of this stretching of categories in two different poets, and I will be arguing not only that such lyrics gesture toward the notion of a third gender – albeit with a formulation that figures male poetic subjectivities rather than masculine-framed women as somehow part of that third category – but also that they adumbrate a move toward a trans identity that accommodates as well the notion of gender fluidity. Despite his impressive output, technical ingenuity, political status, and connections with Peire Rogier, Bernart de Ventadorn, Giraut de Bornelh, and Bertran de Born, Raimbaut d’Aurenga’s work remains surprisingly understudied. The influence he exerted on Arnaut Daniel, for example, is evident, yet Arnaut has overshadowed him in critical reception, and the same could be said for Bernart and Bertran. This could perhaps be explained by those latter two poets’ choice to compose in some variation of trobar leu (easily comprehensible) over trobar clus (recondite) verse, but it also has to do, in the case of Arnaut and Bertran, with Dante’s stamp of poetic approval in the Purgatorio and De vulgari

2 Several recent publications also argue for some form of trans identity in the Middle Ages, including Mills 2015, McCracken 2017, and especially Gutt 2018.

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eloquentia. There has been no new, complete edition of Raimbaut’s work since 1952 – partly because Walter Pattison’s edition is already very good, partly because of the early death of Luigi Milone, who had edited a good number of the songs, and probably partly because Raimbaut still has the reputation of being difficult, even a little rebarbative.3 That difficulty is, however, not necessarily a function of deliberate obfuscation, rather a result of his unusual choices of form, vocabulary, and the sonic effects of rare and isolated rhyme.4 But these may signal a larger project of concealment and game playing that unites form and content. In one of the classic twelfth-century songs, Peire d’Alvernhe’s ‘Chantarai d’aquest trobadors’ (I shall sing of those troubadours, PC 323.11),5 which satirises twelve of the most prolific composers, Raimbaut is assessed as stuck-up, too elusive in his referents, and only interested in social outcasts: E·l novens es En Raembautz, qe·s fai de son trobar trop bautz; mas eu lo torni en nien, q’el non es alegres ni chautz; per so pretz aitan los pipautz que van las almosnas queren. (lines 55–60) (And the ninth is Sir Raembautz, who shows himself too proud in his singing, but I consider it [or him] worthless, neither light-hearted nor warm; that’s why he really goes for beggars who go around seeking hand-outs.)

I am not about to claim that Raimbaut d’Aurenga was in any conscious way trans, or at least not in a way that would chime with twenty-first-century identities, or that he was perceived as such by his contemporaries, though Peire’s judgement might be a backhanded joke about Raimbaut’s sexual tastes – a way of indicating his taste for ‘a bit of rough’; yet his songs – playful, mocking, concealing and revealing, focused often on shifting poetic identities – offer themselves quite invitingly to trans or queer readings.6 Certainly gender 3 Milone produced excellent editions of songs PC 389.1, 2, 3, 8, 11, 15, 18, 20, 26a, 37, 41 (now collected on RIALTO, http://www.rialto.unina.it) and a book in Catalan (Milone 1998). 4 Among Raimbaut’s innovations are a number of unique rhyme patterns (twentyone of his thirty-nine attributed songs), perhaps the first use of coblas capfinidas, coblas capcaudadas, unrhymed refrain words, shifting word rhyme, the new genres of no-sai-ques’es, and the carta (Pattison 1953: 51). 5 Raimbaut’s songs will be identified by the number given in the Pattison edition, then, in brackets, by the Pillet-Carstens number. 6 By which I mean that a trans identity in the twelfth century might not be all that identifiable by twenty-first-century standards, though it could be quite similar in its basic



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identity could have been played with in linguistic and rhetorical terms that were admissible to contemporary audiences. Raimbaut’s songs, for example, often speak of a subject (or are voiced by a subject) who only tentatively speaks from a clearly ‘masculine’ position and who seems to shift between gender poles, if such poles are determined by such issues as mastery, activity, economic and social control. If we look at Raimbaut’s output, we can find many examples of his clouding of those binaries, opting for games of linguistic hide-and-seek, presenting himself insistently as a victim of unjust accusations, relentlessly blocked and misinterpreted in discursive exchanges. In his song, ‘Ab vergoignha part mar(r)imentz’ (With shame along with distress, Pattison song XII [PC 389.2), for example, Raimbaut highlights first the topic of shame, then moves to three major themes: the construction of the subject through subjection; the assault on his honour by enemies who accuse him of lying; and finally, his trust that the domna is not among the attackers and that she will overlook their accusations. All three could be seen as characteristic of both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ discourse as the subjected subject shows himself to be attacked, rejected, and dependent for pity on an authority who has no obligation to treat him with dignity. Death is foregrounded throughout and the speaker acknowledges that midons (my lord/lady), the purported object of interest, has the power to kill him (‘no.m pot mais mal far de mort’, [cannot harm me more by death, line 11]) and to save him (‘E donc en breu, ses duptanza, / per merce.m tornatz en acort, / si no.us platz ma mort o.l valentz!’ [And so, swiftly, and without hesitation, return me through mercy to your favour, if you do not want to see me die or suffer its equivalent, lines 43–5]), making her/ him/it/them far more than a passive object. His subjection to unpredictable and unreliable authority is completed and undermined with the reference to God’s own arbitrary yet convincing co-option into the game at hand: E si d’aizo no son cre(zentz), non pusc als: mas Dieus qu’es leials, me don encar ogan un ver colp de cairel o de lanza, ho!, com en escut freig m’en port, e puis er l’enveios manentz. (lines 13–18) (And if, for all that, I am not a believer, I cannot do much about that; but let God, who is loyal, give me a real wound, with a lance or arrow, right now, and let them carry my body out, cold, on a shield, and then those jealous ones will be satisfied.) questioning of rigid gender barriers. Raimbaut died very young, probably at twenty-seven, never married, and seems not to have had children (Pattison: 12–13, 25–6).

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If God is part of the plan, an ally to call upon in the poet’s depiction of himself as a besieged subject, Raimbaut displays a variety of strategies for travelling less openly, guarding secrets to which very few have access. In ‘Ara non siscla ni chanta’ (Now neither sings nor warbles, Pattison song XIV [PC 389.12]), several of these themes come together. Claiming that ‘midons’ begs him to cast off his sorrow, he turns – meaningfully – to bodily imagery to capture this internal and self-sufficient joi (joy). In the third cobla (stanza) he describes himself thus: C’a pauc lo cors no.m avanta, q’esquirols non es, ni cabrols, tan lieus com eu sui, q’el test m’es la joia q’eu cercava; don son jais en trepans e serai tot lans, pos ma dona vol mos enans. (lines 15–21) (For the body almost gets away from me, for there is no squirrel, or goat, as light-footed as I am, for the joy that I was seeking is in my head; and for this I am joyful and frisky and will be all bounding leaps since my lady wants my advancement).

This body that gets away from him, that metamorphoses into animal shapes and causes him to leap about, could also be seen as an effect of the lady within him, not just as the effect of seeing the lady. This vampiric image of the lady who has taken control (seen also in other poets) is credited with changing him, making him dart about rather than dwell in sorrow. In the final cobla he returns to this sort of body/species merging: C’ap ton cor q’el mieu se planta, sai qe.m tols – car donar no.m vols – […] Ar m’en creis talans Don cairai el sol ablasmans! (lines 36–42) (For with your heart which installs itself in mine, I know that you take from me – for you do not want to give to me. […] For now my desire rises, which is why I will soon fall to the ground in a faint.)

This lady/vampire who takes without giving – a complaint often levelled at the masculine sexual aggressor – leaves him without will or control, a subject in the grasp of a desire (‘talans’) which will consume him and leave him finally spent.



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On the other hand, of course, the importation of the lady’s heart into the poet’s body could equally be read as the intermixing of the sexes or the realisation of a transgender identity. In the second of two tornadas, Raimbaut distinguishes between his two ‘loves’, the domna (lady) and the Joglar (Jongleur, Performer), one of his favoured senhals. After professing his desire to kiss and hold the first of the two, he closes with an address to the latter: ‘Joglar, vostre enans / voil, e Dieus lo vol mils aitans’ (Joglar, I want your advancement, and God wants it a thousand times more, lines 45–6). As we have seen in the previous quotations, Raimbaut is hardly pious in his use of God’s name or in appropriating God’s volition. I would imagine that the last statement quoted is more a rhetorical exaggeration of his own desire than any validation of God’s will or divine plan, and the notion of ‘advancement’ remains unclear: just as the lady wishes it for him in line 21, he now wishes it for Joglar. Many attempts have been made to identify Joglar with a particular lady or patron, following the assumption that the male poet must be writing for a female object of desire, but the explanations have been largely unsatisfying.7 Is it not equally plausible that Joglar is a projection of one part of Raimbaut’s persona, the one that is out on the public stage, the male or female side of his self as he imagines it; or, even more simply, a male jongleur? That would mean either that his supposed object of desire is actually male, or that they represent an aspect of himself, or that he and the lady are, in fact, uneasily distinguished one from the other, both playing a double role from the beginning. In song IV (PC 389.10), Raimbaut also addresses these themes but here his status as subject is complicated by his submission to the ‘verga’ that love carries and directs against him, a motif that Arnaut Daniel will take up after him: Soven pens q’aillors mi derga E pueis Amors ten sa verga, Qe.m n’a ferit de grieus pols, E’m ditz c’ap mals non’m aerga; Q’ieu non sui escarniz sols (lines 13–17) (Often I think I should direct my attentions elsewhere and then Love takes up her rod/stick/phallus, with which she has pummelled me with such heavy blows, and tells me that misbehaving will not get me where I want to go; and I am not alone in being so mocked.)

This feigned lack of mastery is again deliberately misleading. The colonised and subjected poet, unable to control body or desire, is left bullied, vulnerable, 7 Appel thought him/her/them a confidant; Kolsen thought that Joglar might be Giraut de Bornelh; Pattison opts for one of Raimbaut’s sisters. See Pattison: 60–1.

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able only to entertain vain musings of erotic fulfilment and success through the intercession of a God who, like the ‘lady’, takes much more than they give. Perhaps we might set this figure of the poet, for comparative purposes, alongside Kay’s view of a troubadour notion of the ‘“feminine” gender’, quoted in the epigraph, with the poet being, like the lady, one ‘whose readiness to sate men’s [midons’] desire incurs their contempt’?8 The final song to consider is Raimbaut’s best known, ‘Ara resplan la flors enversa’ (Now shines forth the inverted flower, song XXXIX [PC 389.16]), a brilliantly playful and perverse work in which technical innovation battles with paradoxical lyrics to produce one of the marvels of Occitan verse. Using the same eight rhyme words, in the same order from coblas one to six, Raimbaut creates a sort of puzzle, a machine that stamps out the same form and format, but into whose lines the poet has poured deliberately obfuscating lyrics that will frustrate listeners who cannot but think in gendered binaries.9 Enversa (reversed/inverted), tertres (hills), conglapis (sleet), trenca (slices), siscles (shaft or rod or phallus), giscles (hiss), joys (joy), croys (evil): these are the building blocks from which the poetic fantasy is constructed. Forms alternate between ‘enversa’ (coblas 1, 3, 5) and ‘enverse’ (2, 4, 6), ‘tertres’/‘tertre’, ‘conglapis’/‘conglapi’, ‘trenque’/‘trenca’, ‘siscles’/‘siscle’, ‘giscles’/‘giscle’, ‘joys’/‘joy’, ‘croys’/‘croy’. This is a world in which poetic control tightens cumulatively. Every element has been calibrated to induce a closed and selfcontained unit which upsets expectations, turning in on itself with no need for external validation – the work of a poet’s poet. The flower inverted, or reversed, offers an immediate suggestion of outof-placeness and sexual profligacy, shining out in the harsh and cutting world in which it finds itself. This weapon-like flower is made of ice and snow and defies expectations. Surrounded by the calamitous vision of wounded nature (lines 5–6), the metaphor is personalised when the poetic subject, open and green, is bolstered by the sight of the lausengiers (rivals/flatterers/backbiters/ telltales) desiccated by the harsh conditions, while he alone withstands the hardships to which they will succumb. The second cobla introduces a change that suggests that the horrors of the first cobla were but a subject’s musings. The key line is: ‘Quar enaissi m’o enverse’ (For thus may I be inverted! line 9). In the first cobla it was things that were inverted; in the second it is the active subject; and what he encounters is an anamorphosis of perception that is 8 I have added to the quotation the word ‘midons’ (my lord) to emphasise the gender ambiguity. 9 As Ventura remarks in his essay on the sestina in this volume (265–8), the binding of form with linguistic challenge continues to inspire contemporary poets. Though referring to the sestina, his term ‘a spiral-like machine’ applies equally well to Raimbaut’s ‘Ar resplan’.



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all-determining. Plains are hills; sleet is flowers; cutting cold is warm; thunder is song; bare twigs are green: yet the subject is so bound by joy – literally tied up by it – that they/he/she/it can see no evil. By the third cobla, the evil-speakers are the inverted ones, whose tongues are cut and whose discourse hisses. Nothing can deter them as their evil is their only joy. In the fourth, another pseudo-reversal: for in kissing the domna, he does not reverse/invert her (turn her over or bend her backward), for even plains and hills, ice and sleet cannot overcome him, as if nature itself were conspiring to intervene in his sexual life. Powerlessness (or impotence) cuts him off, as he explains to the lady to whom he sings and whispers. Her eyes are weapons that punish him, should he harbour evil desire for her. Madness strikes in the fourth cobla as he runs, scattered like a crazy thing, to search the landscape as he is assailed, in this counterinversion, by the sleet that torments him. He remains unfazed by song and singing, like students who remain immune to the power of the rod, until Joy takes him under her wing despite the best efforts of the lausengiers. In the final cobla, he sends out his song. He will sing to his midons (my lady = my lord) (line 45), so that his song’s shoots will take root in their heart (or its phallus will enter into the heart). Two short tornadas (envoys) terminate the song: the first is discussed below and in the second, addressed to Joglar, the poetic subject declares that he now has much less joy since he does not get to see him/her/them anymore, and this lends him a sad demeanour. A simple reading of the song in its complexity signals suspicion. Any song that begins with inversion – traditionally a term for sexual vagrancy or crossgendered identification – merits careful attention. According to this song, people around us are blind to our state of difference, unable to read our hearts. This is hardly a transparent love song, in other words, and a trans reading might bring to light further complexity. The text’s obscurity has been further cemented for some anglophone readers by Pattison’s sometimes questionable translations. The simple mention of a domna, for example, certainly does not dictate that the song is thereby a heterosexual love song, as Pattison implies, rather than, say, a fan’s tribute, or a sign of transgender identification. Who, for example, are these two figures to whom the song is being sent in the tornadas? The first, addressed to the ‘dona’ (‘Doussa dona, Amors e Joys / Nos ajosten malgrat des croys’, lines 49–50) is translated by Pattison as ‘Sweet lady, let Love and Joy couple us in spite of the evil ones’, but it may also be rendered as ‘Sweet lady, may Love and Joy line up to protect us despite (against) the evil ones’, implying that the lady and poet could be allies rather than, or as well as, sexual partners. Similar examples of a male and heterosexual bias pepper Pattison’s translation. When Raimbaut says ‘Qu’ar en baizan no.us enverse’ (line 25), Pattison punctuates and translates in such a way that not even the unwelcoming natural phenomena we have encountered

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thus far (hills, plains, ice, sleet, etc.) can prevent the lover from bending his lady over backwards as he kisses her. The message is that his strong desire cannot be thwarted. The simpler translation, however, would be: ‘may I not invert/reverse you when kissing you (enverse)’. Then, the poet blames ‘nonpoder’, that is, powerlessness or impotence, which cuts off (‘trenque’) his possibilities: ‘mas non-poder trop en trenque’ (line 28). Pattison translates this as: ‘I find myself in a stupor induced by love which keeps me from it’. Pattison’s male lover perseveres and is held back by his own swoon; he is a determined lover thwarted by forces who oppose him. But we could read this as a lover suffering from weak desire and insufficient power, beaten back by the eyes of the lady, which he compares to rods/phalluses/whips that castigate him for entertaining evil desires about her. Pattison’s rendering suggests the noble failure of a man’s man; mine, a flighty dreamer who lacks the will for erotic conquest and takes refuge in a world of his own making; while a third reading might see the poet ‘inverting’ gender under the assault of the lady’s phallus, thus writing, again, as a ‘passive’ or subjected subject. Nor do I believe that I am alone in reading Raimbaut (died 1173) this way. Arnaut Daniel (died c.1200), a poet younger than Raimbaut but of his era, was strongly influenced by him, and Arnaut’s famous sestina, ‘Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra’ (The firm will which enters into my heart [PC 29.14]) shows signs of that emulation.10 Here, Arnaut plays on Raimbaut’s model(s), choosing to work with just six rhyme words that are repeated over the course of the six coblas, combining and variegating in meaning as they move. Most interestingly for our purposes, he has followed Raimbaut’s lead in introducing multiple referents and polyvalent words that can point in several different directions simultaneously (Jernigan 1974). From the opening we are in familiar territory, with Arnaut’s ‘Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra’ recalling lines 45–6 of the Raimbaut song just discussed, ‘Ara resplan’: ‘a midons lo chant e.l siscle / clar, qu.el cor l’en intro.l giscle’ (that the song and the warblings might go to midons, such that the rod (bramble) might enter into her heart). While Raimbaut’s suggestive couplet seems to be expressing a wish that his song should enter the lady’s heart and take root, what he actually implies is that the rod/shoot/phallus should enter into her heart, thereby equating song with weapon, a fate which he also has suffered in the previous cobla (lines 30–2) . The vegetal metaphor seems sweet; the penetrating implement anything but. Arnaut also plays throughout his sestina on 10 The song, the first sestina, in coblas retrogradadas, is found in MSS ABCDEGHIKMMcN2QRSSGUVVeACg1g2, a testament to its popularity in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. I am using the edition of the song by the Lyrica medievale romanza (LMR) group at La Sapienza in Rome: https://letteraturaeuropea.let.uniroma1. it/?q=laboratorio/testo-e-traduzione-16. See also discussion by Ventura (266–7) in this volume.



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the multivalent ‘verga’, a synonym for ‘giscle’, as a way of claiming pleasure in evading authority/regulation/discipline and of relishing the ‘firm will’ which has entered his heart, echoing the claims about Raimbaut’s invasive lady. If the firm will is not his to begin with but has entered his body as an invader, we must question its source: Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra no.m poc becs jes escoissendre, ni ongla de lausengier, qui per mal dir s’arma; e car no l’aus batr’am ram ni ab verga, sivals a frau, lai on non aurai oncle, jauzirai joi en vergier o dinz cambra. (lines 1–6) (The firm will which enters my heart: no beak or nail of a scandalmonger who loses his soul/weapon through his evil talk can ever rip it from me; and since I dare not beat them with branch or rod/stick/phallus, except under cover, someplace where I’ll have no uncle, I will enjoy my joy in an orchard or chamber.)

The subject exults in his ability to evade the control of the uncle as well as counter the lausengier, such that he will enjoy his joy alone, hidden from regulation. The second cobla continues the evocation of indeterminate gender and picks up on Raimbaut’s insinuations about ‘inversion’, then carries them further in the direction of gender intermixing rather than simple role inversion: Qan mi soven de la cambra on a mon dan sai que nuills hom non intra anz me son tuich plus que fraire ni oncle, non ai membre no.m fremisca, ni ongla, aissi cum fai l’enfas denant la verga; tal paor ai qe.il sia t[p]rop de l’arma. (lines 7–12) (When I think back to the chamber where – to my misfortune – I know that no man enters, then they are all much more to me than brother or uncle, I have no member that does not tremble, not even a fingernail, as the child does before the rod/phallus; such fear have I that it/he/she/they will get too close to my weapon/soul.)

The threat of invasion of the body or chamber – be that a bedroom, vagina, or anus – by the foreign matter produces fear in the subject that the verga (phallus) will overwhelm him or come too close to his soul or weapon. The closing tornada adds a final complication:

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Arnautz tramet sa canson d’ongla e d’oncle, a grat de lieis que de sa verga l’arma, son desirat, cui pretz en cambra intra. (lines 37–9) (Arnaut transmits his song of the fingernail and uncle, thanks to her who arms him with her rod/phallus, to his Desirat, whose worthiness enters into the chamber.)

The scribe of the early-fourteenth-century manuscript H (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican Latino, MS 3207) has noted carefully in the marginal notes that Desirat is, in fact, a senhal for ‘An Bertan de Born ab cui se clamava deszirat’ (The poet Sir Bertran de Born, with whom Arnaut shared the name of ‘Desired One’) (Careri 1990: 483). Despite the ambiguous gender referents, the equivocal vocabulary, the muddling of the spiritual and sexual registers, and Dante’s attention to the matter in Purgatorio 26, Raimbaut, Arnaut’s model, is rarely if ever discussed as a sexual rebel. Agamben sees both poets as political models who refused useful art, clear communication, and communitarian sensibilities. Instead, he claims, they went for the resolutely circular, self-contained, and non-reproductive, creating miniature poetic universes that were self-referential and technically unyielding (Agamben 1999: 109–18), caught in what Luke Sunderland has called ‘the metapoetical dimension of (troubadour) metrical experimentation’ (2018: 80). In a different but related vein, Slavoj Žižek once had this to say about social regulation: What if the subject invents social norms precisely in order to escape the unbearable pressure of the Moral Law? Isn’t it much easier to have an external Master who can be duped, towards whom one can maintain a minimal distance and private space, than to have an ex-timate Master, a stranger, a foreign body in the very heart of one’s being? (2000: 280)

Following this logic, Raimbaut and Arnaut would prefer to invent a pestering lausengier, perhaps even a lady, as an external rival and detractor rather than deal with the ex-timate Moral Law of heterosexual imperative. And in dramatising their suffering at the hands of this stand-in master, they are able to have it both ways: play to one audience who think they understand their dilemma yet speak to another who see that the master is a screen behind which another drama is being enacted. But is this not always a temptation or necessity for LGBTQ+ artists: to construct walls and bridges, speak only to the initiates, in the guise of more general appeal, especially through camp and drag aesthetics? And this brings us back to Stockton’s reminder, quoted in my second epigraph, that such figures, and such art, can only really be



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appreciated as other than desiccated figures of formal and metrical play through a ‘retrospective search for amalgamated forms of feelings, desires, and physical needs’, most of which would never have been recognised as such by most of their contemporary audiences, whether in the twelfth or twentyfirst centuries. The third gender that Raimbaut and Arnaut exploit is both a heart and a womb, a space for themselves, a backroom in which they can call time out; or, alternately, a space in which to stretch the boundaries of social regulation and encounter the female within, be that their internalised poetic masters and counterparts or the social regulators and family members who keep them under close watch. From this perspective, Kay’s third gender could be broadened beyond the sense of a male fantasy/female straitjacket to include a nurturing male who is despised for nurturing, or a female who acts as a sexual aggressor. In other words, it might encompass both a safe space and an enemy within. From one feminist perspective, the third gender proves a convenient dustbin in which to chuck the inconvenient female who challenges homosocial solidarity; but, from a more positive vantage point, it can provide for the closeted poet of any gender a space of sexual irregulation, from which to unveil the self or the desired object just enough to provide narrative intrigue, while always retaining the possibility of keeping gender slide under wraps, disclosable only to those in the know.

•  Troubadour Selves under Debate  • Miriam Cabré

A

mong the principles guiding the current editions of troubadour poetry, both the perceived centrality of the author and the complex relationship between the historical and the rhetorical selves stand out as prominent approaches. The existence and relevance of the historical self – the real biographical details of the author – remain an acknowledged starting point, bolstered by the trends of medieval readings of troubadours, notably chansonnier (song-manuscript) compilers’ preference for attributed poems and their tendency to order materials around the author as a central building block. Just as medieval biographers did in their vidas (the brief prose accounts of a troubadour’s life that introduce his corpus in some chansonniers), we still consider it necessary to reconstruct the troubadour’s biography, sometimes resorting to clues within the poetic compositions. However, nowadays information from vidas is (not unreasonably) filtered to reject everything that is not considered historical. The result is a more reliable historical portrait, but an important aspect is lost: the persona used by troubadours to voice and perform each composition, which through iteration and accumulation of details becomes their identifying, distinctive persona. This rhetorical self is not usually defined and reconstructed by modern critics. Medieval vidas, in contrast, though they might not have fully distinguished historical and rhetorical selves, leaned more heavily towards the latter, and with good reason, since their goal seems to be a biography of the rhetorical self.1 While modern editions of the complete works of a particular troubadour show the effort that has gone into gathering biographical details, there is a clear bias towards characterising the whole corpus in ‘objective’ formal terms, such as metrical or stylistic. Moreover, partly because information is so scarce, biographical data is generally linked to the poetic corpus only at very specific points, mostly the interpretation of topical poems or the reconstruction of itineraries and chronological sequences. Accordingly, there is little place for a

1 The exegetical outlook of the vidas is adopted by Zink 2013. See also Bertolucci Pizzorusso 1991 on Bertran de Born.

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reconstruction of the rhetorical self, even though this self, built out of elements springing from the entire poetic corpus, might very well be essential to convey the meaning of single poems. In this respect, the situation has not developed as far as might have been expected from Sarah Kay’s call for ‘improved’ attention to subjectivity in the analysis of troubadour poetry (Subjectivity: 4). Mostly by challenging Paul Zumthor’s (1972) assumptions about the role of the subject, Kay advocates the need to ‘reinscribe the subject in the framework of autobiography, provided that this term is not taken as referring to an individualistic narrative which is anecdotally true, but rather to self-representation in which discursive generality is tempered by a sense of historical specificity’ (16). With this observation (and complaint), I am not questioning the extent of the influence of Kay’s study, but suggesting that it might be appropriately and usefully considered in further contexts, such as the troubadour debate poetry on which I shall focus here, and also in reading transversally across related lyric traditions beyond Occitania. In this essay I will illustrate how interpreting subjectivity in the nuanced way Kay recommends is key to understanding troubadour debate poems, which in turn can illuminate some larger issues generated by the role that rhetorical selves play. Debate Poetry: Sociological Lines, Sociological Pitfalls In troubadour literature, debate has a substantial presence, whether in intertextual dialogue or in co-authored explicit exchanges within a single poem involving two or more troubadours, who may be versing on a stupendous range of topics.2 Even more openly than other genres, debate poetry is theatrical, exhibitionist, and untrue, and yet has often been read in terms of sincerity or personal belief. It is also more difficult to interpret, and its authorship more problematic, in the absence of contextual knowledge. For instance, the wildly fluctuating census of trobairitz (women troubadours) reflects the uneven recognition of their presence in debate poems, while authorship issues underlie the struggle by manuscript compilers to accommodate this genre. ‘Serious’ debates might be assimilated to scholarly quaestiones,3 in which some formal distance may be maintained between the topic and the self; in more ‘personal’ debates, however, the topic is, or ends up being, the self, as the interlocutors themselves, be it through their biography, personality, or poetic and performing skills, become the main issue under debate. In these cases, the rhetorical self is pushed to the foreground and given more specific features. When analysing exchanges of this kind, we need to attend to the interaction between historical and rhetorical selves and to untangle 2

2008. 3

See the corpus edited in Harvey and Paterson 2003 and the discussion in Paterson Highlighted by Guida 1983.

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it as far as possible in order to interpret the poems. As Simon Gaunt aptly puts it (glossing Kay 1987a), ‘a troubadour might adopt conventional attitudes, play a role of his own invention or pretend to be in a certain situation in order to create a desired dramatic effect, but he may also be relating his own personal experience’ (1989: 88). Debate poems are present across medieval poetic traditions: they exhibit distinctive features when different periods and circles are analysed in isolation, but also share fundamental traits, some of which are intrinsically linked to their theatrical nature and the playful interaction of rhetorical selves.4 From the late twelfth century, they amount to a substantial body of Occitan poetry, which flourished more noticeably in specific centres of activity – the most celebrated being perhaps the court of Rodez – and sometimes seems to grow into poetic cycles.5 The connections between these particular nodes, their political and cultural links within a wider network, and the reconstruction of textual sequences within and beyond each poetic circle are relevant to the dynamics of debate poetry. I have chosen examples from the poetic circles at the Crown of Aragon and at some northern Italian courts, mainly Este, as well as from Castile and the western Iberian Peninsula, and mostly during the thirteenth century, since in this period circulation of poets is well attested between these courts, as are their political contacts and the multilingual nature of their culture. It is particularly interesting, for instance, that recent historical research has linked the origins of Galician-Portuguese poetry to contacts between Catalan and Galician nobility (Souto Cabo 2012a), or that courts could be as culturally multilingual as that of Alfonso X of Castile, where he welcomed poets from all the centres mentioned above.6 In addition to allowing for better substantiated readings, the context of performance and the idiosyncratic traits of each textual community appear essential to the purpose behind exchanges of this kind: both microcontextual details and local iterative tendencies are of paramount importance in deciphering them. However, I would like to explore some shared trends, and how the complementary angles brought by the poetic practice in different traditions – and the scholarship on them – help to elucidate the whole debate corpus. Among other elements already outlined, debates are a forum where patrons, troubadours, and so-called jongleurs interact, particularly so when exchanges turn personal: they invite questions about whose interests are the driving force and about how authors and performers are represented. 4 On debates across Western poetic traditions, see Pedroni and Stäuble 1999 and Bec 2000. For an overview of Galician-Portuguese debates in a European context, see Corral 2013. 5 Paterson highlights their nature as ‘petits drames à deux ou plusieurs dramatis personae’ (little plays for two or more characters, 2008: 108). 6 See Beltran 2005.



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One issue seems to me to hamper our explorations of these questions. Despite the current critical tendency to filter data so as to distinguish between historical and rhetorical selves, the typology of debating selves has often been defined along sociological lines, thus in effect conflating these two sides of the self and implying that the personae assumed are determined by social categories. Scholars have noted that some debating troubadours are noblemen, even powerful patrons, in contrast to so-called ‘professional’ troubadours, often called jongleurs by rival poets (or by scholars). This comes with an added problem: while nobility is relatively easy to ascertain, a jongleur-like social condition is frequently assumed with much less, and often unreliable, evidence. A professional status is regularly presumed when lack of archival evidence about their origins seems to exclude troubadours from the nobility, and a jongleur condition is often added with scant proof, for instance, when it is suggested by the proper name or by association with the poetic topics I will discuss below. On the basis of such assumptions, different rules have been applied to the readings of each category, in particular the relation between historical figures and the rhetorical personae they appear to construct: while noble poets’ degree of commitment to their work has often been left unexplored, troubadours deemed to be professionals have been assumed to anchor their participation in their need to acquire patronage, to exhibit their skill, to justify their livelihood, or to defend their condition. Debates are particularly important places in which to observe this phenomenon because they tend to produce more detailed, fleshed-out selves, probably due to performance and interaction with an opposing self as well as to the dynamics of debate. Significantly, poetic exchanges are also an important source for both modern and medieval readers in search of details which might be used to reconstruct a biography. Although many modern scholars frequently perceive irony or comedy within these poetic exchanges (especially in debates involving jongleurs), the set of assumptions about what a jongleur is and the weight accorded these assumptions when interpreting the direction taken by the debate invariably create a bias towards a literal reading. Debating a Noble Profile In Occitan debates, accusations of being a mere jongleur are present from the very beginning, as illustrated by the exchange between Marcabru and Uc Catola (PC 451.1 = 293.6).7 Uc tells Marcabru that talking so disparagingly 7 Harvey and Paterson 2010: 1255–60. All quotations and translations of Occitan debates are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated. Troubadour poems will be identified by PC number, where the first number refers to the troubadour and the second

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about love debases him, as befits the crazy jongleur he is. The term jongleur is known to have become established as a handy insult (Harvey 1993) and the opposition jongleur/lover was recurrent: for instance, in the conventional putdowns towards the end of a debate, when both parties wish to demonstrate that they are unconvinced by the opposite argument. Jongleur-bashing is recognised as a recurrent topic (particularly in the Galician-Portuguese tradition; see Tavani 2002: 85). This rhetorical weapon recurs in personal debates, or debates that turn personal, to the point where one entire category of Occitan debate poetry has been typified as ‘jongleuresque’ (Bec 2000: 223–53). However, Carlos Alvar (2003) surveys the important percentage that debates represent in the extant corpus of noble troubadours: some 70% of their poems are some form of dialogue or exchange. This is even more remarkable since they often account for the lord’s only extant foray into poetic activity; it also invites the questions of why debates constitute a good forum for the nobility, and what these occasional poets get out of them. It could also be observed that no literary conventions defining the role assumed by noble troubadours have yet been identified. These are important issues for understanding debate culture in these courtly traditions, both Occitan and beyond. Yet modern scholars do not usually question the motives of patrons and noblemen or attempt to describe this prevalent category in the way they have jongleuresque debates. Debates with a patron are simply not perceived to be something that needs explaining. This prevalent lack of enquiry means that we are without explanation for some of the most superficially puzzling cases: for instance, why would Marquis Alberto Malaspina willingly participate in a debate with Raimbaut Vaqueiras (PC 15.1 = 392.1) that harshly accuses the lord of saying ‘enoi e vilania’ (vexatious, churlish things), and of committing ‘engan’, ‘fellonia’, and ‘malvestat’ (deceit, treachery, wickedness)?8 After only a handful of earlier debates, in the last three decades of the twelfth century we find one of the first substantial tensos (debate poems), in which King Alfons of Aragon and Giraut de Bornelh (PC 242.22 = 23.1a) discuss a topic that could hardly be more suited to a powerful participant.9 It illustrates the complex interaction between historical and rhetorical selves, and surely benefited from the clarification and the interpretative limits that performance afforded: if we assume that both Alfons and Giraut to the poem. In the case of debates, as there are two or more troubadours involved each will have an identification, separated by =. Editions of all lyrics can be found on RIALTO, rialto.unina.it. 8 The question is only asked, to my knowledge, by Fèvre 2009, who accounts for the involvement of noblemen in some debates in terms of propaganda or prestige, generally taking all the accusations against them to be actual criticism. 9 See Harvey and Paterson 2010: 699–705.



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were actually present and engaged in the debate, then, as illustrated by the following examples, some interactions emerge that may be startling when they occur between a patron and his protégé; other statements may be attributed to debating convention; and still others invoke an irony that was no doubt clearly signalled in live performance. The exchange starts with a feigned attack by Giraut (or an attack that pretends to be feigned?): he asks the king: se·us cuiatz qu’en la vostr’amor a bona domnpa tant d’onor com d’un autre pro cavaler; e non m’en tengas per guerrier, anz mi respondes franchamen. (lines 4–8) (whether you think a virtuous lady is as honoured by your love as by that of any noble knight. And do not think me hostile for asking, but give me a straightforward answer.)10

This opening is followed by a series of tongue-in-cheek replies by Alfons. He establishes himself as a bona fide lover while also claiming to be better than others, and backs up his superiority with statements that could also easily validate Giraut’s initial concern with the king’s value as a lover: Pero be vos tenc a follor se·us cuiatz que per ma ricor vailla menz a drut vertadier: aissi vos pograz un denier adesmar contr’un marc d’argen. (lines 12–16) (Nevertheless, I think it a great folly on your part to imagine that because of my exalted position I am less estimable as a true lover: you might as well compare the value of a penny to a silver mark.)

Or, in stronger terms, ‘Ja sol hom dir el reprovier / que cel que val mais, e miels pren’ (People commonly say, according to the proverb, that he who is wealthy takes the best, lines 31–2). Both the monetary comparison and the proverb seem provocative, given the accusation implicit in the opening question (that the king is arrogant and uncourtly as a lover), as is Alfons’ final boast, ‘Mas a mi non dones parier, / qu’eu n’ai guazaignat per [un] cen’ (But take no man to be my equal, for I have conquered a hundred times more often, lines 53–4). 10

For other poems on a similar topic, see Lazzerini 2001: 104–10.

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Despite the rhetorical bait of this boast, Giraut does not much apply himself to contradicting Alfons. His focus might be showing himself as a knowledgeable master of courtliness who aptly expounds the dangers of false lovers and powerful men, or letting his opponent hang himself with his own rope. But we might also wonder whether the two speakers are in fact playing for the same team. Precisely by presenting the king with a quaestio that impinges on his royal status, Giraut might allow Alfons to reject the personal implications of the opening question (in the course of the debate Alfons denies putting jazer [having sex] first and explicitly claims to love ladies finamen, that is, according to the troubadour code), while still agreeing that the problem posed is serious. In this sense, is the result not in fact a declaration of the king’s adherence to courtly values? By proposing a topic (the disputed value of the powerful as lovers) that fits Alfons’ historical self like a glove, Giraut might in fact be offering an ideological canvas on which the king can paint his courtly image, in a safe enough environment to be a little boastful and playful. This technique could point to the kind of aid that (alleged) professionals offer noblemen, and, hypothetically, to a greater occurrence of a type of disingenuous debate in fact designed to showcase the noble patron’s courtly attributes.11 Within this framework, the tone might vary: while on other occasions the interactions between noblemen and troubadours of lower status might use this social distance to humorous effect, here Giraut’s expert role does not call for self-debasement or insult-hurling in any direction. These questions about the benefits of debating are not answered in the poem itself. However, within the historical context of these poems, debating with such a celebrated troubadour was surely a wise move for a king aiming to establish his court as a point of reference for troubadour culture, with its patent potential for propaganda.12 The fact that the topic brings historical and rhetorical selves so close may have added interest and piquancy to the performance: this could work similarly for troubadours of all conditions. However, the king has the last word and presents himself from the beginning as able to hold his own, maybe not so much against Giraut as with Giraut against his genuine opponents. When he says ‘de mi non crezatz lauzengier’ (do not believe any scandalmonger’s word about me, line 47), Alfons might be referring to the likes of Bertran de Born, who had branded him as ‘Tal que·s lausa en chantan / e vol mais diners c’onor’ (He who praises himself while singing and prefers money to honour, lines 37–8, ‘Molt m’es descendre car col’, Gouiran 1985: 507–30; XXV; PC 80.28).13 Bertran’s statement and the 11 While Alvar 2003 assumes that professional troubadours also created the nobleman’s answers, he does not clarify how this affects performance. 12 On Alfons’ approach, see Riquer 1959, Aurell 1981, and Grifoll 2017. 13 In the few troubadour poems quoted by other editions than Harvey and Paterson



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tenso with Giraut seem to me closely connected (Cabré 2017a), although the direction of the connection is uncertain as the chronology of the two works is not well established. What is evident, however, is that Alfons’ courtliness was subject to sharp criticism: this tenso depicts him confronting it with humour in his exchange with Giraut.14 If the previous debate shows that patrons may also adopt a role, the following example turns role-playing into the centrepiece, even addressing explicitly my initial question: why would a patron put himself in such a position? Thus Bertran de Gordo exclaims to Peire Raimon de Tolosa (PC 84.1 = 355.19):15 ‘Peire, mal m’abondet sens / qar de tensos vos comis’ (Peire, my good sense betrayed me when I challenged you to a dispute, lines 19–20), after having exchanged insults that stereotype them as useless jongleur versus stingy patron, respectively. However, in a second round of stanzas, they express the opposite opinions, turning the debate into a display of wit. They are evidently not too worried about giving much coherence or biographical detail to their rhetorical selves, since they then proceed to reverse their positions twice more. Focused on the double twist, they simply seize upon a series of motifs and anecdotes – thereby demonstrating for us what the suitable available motifs were. In this context, Pierre Bec’s characterisation of the poem (2000: 145) seems somewhat tone deaf: ‘tenson (humoristique) entre un jongleur et son seigneur (sans doute pas assez généreux)’ ([humorous] tenso between a jongleur and his master [who was surely not generous enough]). Like King Alfons, Bertran cheekily underlines with a monetary comparison the fact that ‘aver’ (wealth) is a potentially contentious issue for powerful troubadours; yet even when pretending to flatter Peire Raimon, he compares him to a jongleur: ‘e negus joglars non vai / qe plus tart fezes faillia / ni plus tost fezes bon plai’ (no jongleur walks the earth who would more unwillingly make a mistake or more readily put forward a good argument, lines 25–7). From this debate and others in a similar vein, the range of attributes that can be appropriately ascribed to a patron or baron begins to emerge: cowardly, stingy, appalling as a warrior, unethical as a ruler, happy to gather tainted wealth and/or unable to manage his own business, boastful, disloyal. In this light, what to make of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras versus Alberto Malaspina, described by Bec as ‘violent débat, véritable tenson au sens propre’ (a violent debate, a literal tenso [altercation], 2000: 129)? If performed 2010, I give the poem number in the edition in roman numerals. 14 The risk of wrong interpretations side-tracked by wrong historical data or assumptions is always there, so this may need rethinking as Grifoll develops her research on Alfons (see Grifoll 2017 and 2019). 15 On the uncertainties regarding the identification of both interlocutors, see Harvey and Paterson 2010: 163–71, who propose a date towards the end of the twelfth century.

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by both troubadours, it is difficult to imagine it not being humorous, as its apparently outrageous accusations fall well within the pattern already established.16 Alberto questions Raimbaut about his relationship with a lady from Tortona (one of the marquis’s residences), which has ended in mutual dishonour thanks to their poetic activity: a reference to Raimbaut’s famous bilingual debate (Linskill, 1964: 98; III; PC 392.7), where a Genoese woman calls him a jongleur. In turn, Raimbaut accuses Alberto of saying and doing all kinds of wickedness. The marquis ambiguously confirms that he has ‘aver tout’ (taken possession of resources) for the pleasure of giving and boasts of his wealth, but focuses on likening his opponent to a penniless jongleur, who should never have left his true occupation to become a useless knight. The range of attacks hurled to and fro seems to depend heavily on topicality and on real experiences, but it is encased in an exchange between rhetorical selves adopting roles associated with a particular range of conventions and rhetorically suitable topics. And this seems true for both participants: the ‘violence’ comes from freely used insults, almost grotesquely piled up, and it is not one sided, each giving as good as he gets. One last example, the debate between Aimeric de Peguilhan and Guillem de Berguedà, illustrates a role reversal of sorts.17 It confronts this ‘fils de borges’ (the son of a townsman, according to the vida) with the celebrated bully, scion of the viscounts of Berguedà. On this occasion, Aimeric is treated as an equal, even called ‘Bar n’Aimeric’ (Lord Aimeric) by Guillem, who assumes the role of a cad rather than having it imposed by his rival’s accusations: presented with the choice of loving yet being unloved or being loved without loving, he unequivocally chooses the latter, affirming ‘q’anc en amor no vengui a muzar / ni anc non fui d’aqels desfazendatz’ (I never embarked on love to waste my time nor was I ever one of those who get nowhere, lines 13–14). He is therefore choosing to cast himself as the reprobate nobleman, a figure that Giraut de Bornelh deplored when debating with King Alfons. However, no insults are here proffered. This civility strongly contrasts with other exchanges in their extant corpus: it is worth remembering that this same Guillem demolishes his enemies in a series of sirventes (topical poems), and that Aimeric is called all manner of names in other debates and characterised as a jongleur-like figure (as we shall see below).

16 Harvey and Paterson agree with a humorous interpretation, despite the topical nature of many accusations by Raimbaut (2010: 68–79). This interpretation is corroborated by Bampa 2017, while Caïti Russo 2005 discusses broader political connotations. It might be worth remembering that Peire Raimon de Tolosa and Aimeric de Peguilhan (who will appear shortly in my discussion) were also connected with the Malaspina court (see Caïti Russo 2005). 17 Harvey and Paterson comment on the ironic nature of Guillem’s polite address (2010: 38–45).



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In short, debates may have been a public forum where, with the aid of (perhaps professional) troubadours, patrons could be seen to be competent, knowledgeable troubadours themselves. They could take the opportunity to answer specific accusations that had been laid against them previously, but they could equally just register and dismiss insults generically appropriate to their ‘nobleman’ character (or caricature). Overall, these exchanges might be used as a way of becoming part of troubadour culture, as well as a convenient courtly entertainment, with an additional cohesive effect or the potential to become a propaganda weapon. Rather than mutually exclusive, these interpretations could be complementary factors, aided by the humour which seems to have been a guaranteed element: whether it involved exaggerating one’s role and opening it to jokes and self-deprecation, or some role reversal on either side of the debating arena. Jongleur Costumes I turn now to the role of jongleur figures in debates, with a view to showing that, contrary to the views of many scholars, they might differ from the characterisation and dynamics of patron roles only in a matter of degree. Unlike debates that depend heavily on a ‘nobleman’ persona, jongleuresque exchanges are well known as a type, although very often considered in descriptive rather than analytic terms. To my knowledge, classifications of debates have not tried to elucidate a clear definition of a jongleur. On the contrary, often it is the fact of being called such in these debates that sparks the assumption that certain troubadours, and particularly some Galician-Portuguese poets, were actual jongleurs. Nevertheless, the nature of joglaria is a thorny issue that still needs much research.18 While in the Occitan tradition the ambivalence of the term and of its medieval usage is generally acknowledged, in the GalicianPortuguese tradition it has been mostly assumed that the division between trobador and xograr (jongleur), both in social (noble versus non noble) and artistic (poet versus performer) terms, is fairly clear cut.19 Jongleur selves are a common fixture in debates. Their presence makes it more likely that a debate will include personal innuendo or have personal issues as the main topic. If the previous analysis of patron personae in poetic

18 Two studies approach it from a solely literary point of view: Noto 1998 and Menegaldo 2005. Cabré (2011: 88–103; 187–93) outlines interpretative problems and proposes new readings of Cerverí de Girona’s comments on the topic of joglaria. 19 See Oliveira 1994 and 2001. To my knowledge, only José Antonio Souto Cabo questions this distinction: ‘salvo se atribuirmos ao termo “jogral” o significado genérico de “poeta de condição social não aristocrática”, sem qualquer conotação profissional’ (unless we give the term jongleur a generic sense of ‘poet of non-aristocratic social status’, without any professional connotation, 2012b: 275).

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exchanges has confirmed that the biography of the historical authors is relevant, this does not preclude other sources for the rhetorical motifs, nor does it impose a literal reading. The questioning of poetic skills and authorship is not inherently more conducive to straightforward literality than is love poetry, nor are personal debates necessarily more ‘sincere’ or closer to experience and reality. Just as love debates ironically point at conceptual inconsistencies, so personal debates challenge sincerity and experience. Additionally, why would a jongleur’s real problems be a legitimate and interesting topic for a medieval audience? This, to me, makes it surprising that topics associated with jongleur selves, such as ‘I need money’ or ‘I am desperately looking for a patron’, as well as critical comments on certain patrons’ qualities, should ever be taken at face value. A group of troubadours, active in the Este court in northern Italy, with otherwise varied poetic corpora, are involved in a satirical cycle where they speak of each other in unmistakably jongleuresque terms, drawing from a range of widespread topics regarding their low moral, social, and poetic standards. Whether they are or impersonate jongleurs (that is, adopt a ‘butt of the joke’ profile), they illustrate the mechanisms used to create a jongleur self.20 They include Aimeric de Peguilhan, so politely addressed by Guillem de Berguedà but here referred as an old miser, full of himself, and ready to milk any chance; and Sordello, portrayed as addicted to gambling, always in debt, a possibly homosexual coward. Thus Aimeric affirms that ‘Anc al temps d’Artus ni d’ara’ (Never in Arthur’s time nor now) has anybody ever taken ‘tan bel colp cum en las cris / pris Sordel […] mas el a·l cor tan umil e tan franc / q’el prend en patz toz colps pois no·i a sanc’ (such a beautiful blow as Sordello took in his head […] but he is so humble and generous that he peacefully takes any blow, provided there is no blood, lines 3–8, Boni 1954: 173–5; XXX; PC 10.7a = 437.3a). Aimeric himself is at once qualified as ‘veils arlots meschis’ (despicable old low-life) by his adversary. Conceivably based in (exaggerated) anecdotes, the profiles are developed by repetition; this contributes greatly to the comic effect, as catchphrases and recurrent gags still illustrate today. Among the recurrent topics, physical attack with ludicrous weapons such as a loaf of bread or a piece of cheese (compare the battle of Torelore in Aucassin et Nicolette) or commentary on sexual preferences are common. Cecilia Cantalupi observes that scholars have been side-tracked by trying to determine the historicity of these anecdotes and baffled by the inconsistent accounts, while, for instance, Guilhem Figueira’s medieval biographer draws on this satirical cycle to portray him as a regular customer in taverns and brothels, highly jealous of his colleagues’ greater literary success. In a remarkably similar vein to these exchanges within the so-called ‘Estense 20

See Cantalupi 2016.



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bohemia’, the trobador Men Rodriguez Tenoiro challenges Juião Bolseiro (‘Juïão, quero contigo fazer’ Juïão, I would like to do with you) to a debate that consists solely of an exchange of threats of physical violence.21 As in the Este poems, the interpretation of this piece has been coloured by its being seen as an exchange between a nobleman and a low-life jongleur.22 Since physical attacks, revenge, and old injuries are central to the recurrent jokes of the Este cycle, Cantalupi suggests that local legislation that allowed offended citizens to injure jongleurs is an important context for this cycle. While interesting to gauge the reality behind jongleur commonplaces and the audience’s expected reaction, this context does not make it more or less likely that the Este poets were jongleurs: what it clearly shows is that they are using the imagery associated with a jongleur profile, perhaps mentioning generic metaphorical and evocative injuries in the same way as insults and other means of disqualifying an adversary.23 In this sense, Juião Bolseiro’s case might be an important warning beacon: often considered as a xograr, he has been identified as a bursar at the cathedral of Santiago (Souto Cabo 2012b: 275–6), a position that seems to preclude any suspicion of jongleur status – this corrective shows how literary preconception can bias the reading of some poems and the characterisation of their authors.24 The question of what or who a jongleur is becomes urgent when analysing a well-established category within Galician-Portuguese tensos and other satirical poems: debates between a troubadour and someone presented as a ‘jongleur’ (attacking whom constitutes the main feature). While Giuseppe Tavani (2002: 84) classifies these exchanges as focused on literary issues but driven by personal feelings or resentment, Bec (2000: 231) regards the debate between Johan Perez d’Aboim and Lourenço (‘Lourenço, soías tu guarecer’ [Lourenço, you used to earn a living]) as the echo of the rivalry between troubadours and jongleurs (Lourenço being for Bec a ‘jongleur d’un certain talent […] reconnu bon instrumentiste mais probablement mauvais 21 For Galician-Portuguese poems, I follow the spelling indicated in MedDB: Base de datos da Lírica Profana Galego-Portuguesa, and quote from this database [http://bernal. cirp.gal/ords/f?p=MEDDB3:2; accessed 17 January 2020] where references to the chosen editions and other relevant bibliographic references are given. Poems can be retrieved by the author’s name or the incipit. 22 However, it has been interpreted, in various lights, as humorous by Lopes 2002: 326 and Correia 2011. 23 See Léglu 1996 and 1997. 24 Juião Bolseiro is elsewhere defined as a xograr; for instance, Ângela Correia corroborates his status from stylistic analysis (2016: 138–40) and Oliveira from chansonnier analysis and the attitudes of his interlocutors (2001: 118). For another case, where a diminutive is the basis for an identification as a jongleur see Cabré and Albert Reixach, ‘Un cercle poètic al bisbat de Girona de 1250–1280: pistes documentals’, in preparation.

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poète’ [a jongleur of some talent […] well-known as a musician but probably a bad poet]). Bec’s over-literal portrait of Lourenço takes at face value Johan Perez’s accusations regarding his interlocutor’s skill, which are at odds with references elsewhere to the alleged jongleur. Lourenço has a considerable and varied corpus and seems to be the focus of many debates: included or mentioned in many exchanges, derided as a jongleur whose right to compose poetry and technical ability are questioned, he is also described as a feared poetic critic by another poet, Johan Soarez Coelho, in his ‘Joan Soares, non poss’eu estar’ (Johan Soarez, I cannot restrain myself). It must be admitted, however, that this favourable portrait of Lourenço, an absent third party, might only be a means for Johan Perez d’Aboim to exalt himself as the best trobador (since he claims to be the only one Lourenço has not faulted), a notion that his interlocutor Johan Soarez Coelho treats as laughable. The humour of the attacks becomes particularly sophisticated in the interplay between several exchanges: in another debate (‘Quen ama Deus, Lourenç’, ama verdade’ [He who loves God, Lourenço, also loves truth]), when Johan Soarez Coelho questions Lourenço’s skill and legitimacy as a poet and accuses him of poetic theft, it is the alleged author of Lourenço’s poems who ends up being challenged.25 The joke has a double edge: Lourenço is a thief, but the poems he allegedly stole from Johan Garcia de Guilhade are totally worthless. This greater elaboration of some jokes does not preclude the reference to the usual antics: the threats of physical violence, presented as licit coming from someone of higher social status (evoking or mimicking legal practice), are also recurrent. For instance, Johan Garcia threatens to bash Lourenço’s head with his citolon (a large citole) in ‘Lourenço jograr, ás mui gran sabor’ (Jongleur Lourenço, you greatly enjoy). Patronage is the starting point of Picandon’s debate with Johan Soarez Coelho (‘Vedes, Picandon, soo maravilhado’ [You see, Picandon, I am amazed]), which links western Iberian circles with the Estense debates. The trobador is nonplussed that Sordello has introduced Picandon to the court, since he is such a talentless and ignorant jongleur. To vouch for Sordello’s expected good judgement, he affirms having heard his tensos, ‘muitas e boas’ (many and good): yet, as we have seen, in debate poetry Sordello is actually described as a low-life, suggesting an intertextual joke. As an interesting addition to my small sample of rhetorical selves, Picandon does not dispute his xograr status, but defends his right to be remunerated because of the quality of his ‘cançoes, cobras, e serventes’ (songs, one-strophe poems, and topical poetry). Indeed, he finishes the poem asking for a gift, thus surely engaging with role-play by accepting and recreating the role of a penniless jongleur. The portrait of Picandon as a jongleur has certainly all 25

See Tavani 2002: 86–7 and González 2013.



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the commonplace features: tavern customer, brawl-seeking, ready to demean himself for patronage and ‘dom’ (gift). Elsa Gonçalves (2005) has suggested, acutely, that the name Picandon (from picar, ‘sodomise’) is a literary construct to attack Sordello by implying that he has employed a talentless jongleur on account of the sexual favours he enjoys from him rather than for the quality of his performance.26 In this last example, the jongleur ‘costume’ again serves the purpose of demeaning its wearer, but also makes a third party the butt of the joke. Picandon’s role in the exchange is also a reminder that rhetorical sophistication is not always apparent at first sight. Even the coarser jokes can contribute to a well-made rhetorical construct rather than simply reflecting anecdotes from these poets’ non-literary lives. Some Conclusions The above comparison between what have been considered different categories of debates may allow us to rethink both the notion of jongleur and some nuances in the clear-cut division between trobadores and xograres. On the one hand, despite being considered a special sub-category, debates involving jongleurs do not seem to differ substantially from those featuring noblemen: both are developed within the same parameters of humour, role-play, use of anecdotes, repetition, development of selves, and insult dynamics. The rhetorical constructions may be analogous and the goals not dissimilar: whatever the specific circumstances and purpose of each debate, all participants use a persona created from a given set of traits in order to generate a polarisation that allows the debate to take place and to be entertaining. While the presence of jongleurs, or poets identified as jongleurs, might imply content or register intended to be offensive, this is only a matter of degree. On the other hand, we may review the idea of social tension as a driving force for these poems. It has often been assumed that hostility from noblemen to members of lower social states fuels these debates, but this should be established on solid evidential ground before we allow it to influence our interpretation of the debates.27 We would have to explain convincingly why poetry was so powerful that noblemen would want to deny jongleurs (that is, non-noblemen) access to it, or to consider the possibility that the term xograr might be defining members of the court of a non-noble origin. Looking forwards, more analysis across the different circles and poetic traditions is needed. Some caveats are worth highlighting. One is the possibility 26 With similar arguments, Guida 2006 has identified Sordello as a ‘Reculaire’ who debates with Uguet (Uc de Sant Circ). 27 See Brandenberger 1999 and Ventura 2017, following arguments advanced by Menéndez Pidal.

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of role inversion, illustrated by Marcabru’s ‘L’autrer jost’ una sebissa’ (The other day, beside a hedge, Gaunt, Harvey, and Paterson 2000: 375–87; XXX; PC 293.30), where he makes the shepherdess voice his moralising arguments; another is over-interpretation, for instance when modern scholars identify jongleurs as such simply because they are given the diminutive form of a name. In the context of these personal debates, the rhetorical self is highlighted and given specific attributes, making literal readings at once more tempting and also, crucially, less reliable. This is especially important to bear in mind because the approaches and assumptions of critics about the different nodes in the medieval lyric network (Occitan, Catalan, northern Italian, GalicianPortugese, etc.) are at odds: while some discuss the slippery interactions between real and rhetorical selves, others propose blatantly literal readings for the same poems.28 While recognising the importance of available and validated historical and sociological details for interpreting tensos, I have argued against the temptation to put the cart before the horse by deciding a priori who is a jongleur and interpreting the impact of this characterisation on the debate. In that sense, Kay’s proposal of ‘improved subjectivity’ is vital, since the jongleur image can respond both to historical circumstances and to rhetorical imperatives. Accordingly, I have discussed instances of noblemen and patrons debating from positions that can be defined as rhetorical constructs, what I have called rhetorical selves, one example of which would be the jongleur. The examples discussed are intended as an encouragement to explore the connections between contemporary medieval poetic traditions: common trends are easily perceived, ensuring the relevance of the analysis, but local trends might help to explain individual poems and suggest new points of view from which to analyse neighbouring traditions.

28 See these discrepancies in the poems analysed by Cantalupi 2016, for instance, and also, regarding Lourenço, as shown by the survey of conflicting interpretations in Falcão 2014.

•  ‘Je tiens ma personne morte’  • Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry Helen Swift

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y first encounter with Sarah Kay’s work was with Subjectivity when, as a second-year undergraduate, I was being guided by Jane Taylor through fifteenth-century courtly poetry. Its most substantial impact has been on my thinking ever since about the first-person subject of late medieval narrative verse. My long-standing preoccupation with narratorial subjectivity has most recently manifested itself in a topical interest in fictional stagings of the voices of the dying and the deceased, especially, by way of a particular object of focus, in an oft-cited but under-studied compilation, Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque (c.1500). Extant in eight early sixteenth-century editions, this popular anthology of lyric and narrative poetry adumbrates a rudimentary story arc of a lover’s wander through a garden that leads him through the experience and expression of love, loss, bereavement, and his own ultimate demise; martyr-for-love (amant martir) subjects thus abound. Here I shall bring Subjectivity to bear on two questions arising for the future of medieval French scholarship: methodologically, what is the most fruitful way to think about subjectivity in narrative poetry, and especially narratorial subjectivity? And, topically, how do we grasp the organisational principles of anthologies like the Jardin de plaisance? As poststructuralist critics of the poetic ‘I’, we should never cease interrogating our approach to narrative selfhood, lest we slip into complacency (for instance, should we consider that a simple distinction between poet and persona suffices – Kay holds it to be ‘deeply unsatisfactory’ [Subjectivity: 138]) or dereliction of critical responsibility (through an unreflective surrender to indeterminacy of identity). The so-called material turn has pushed such interrogation in fruitful new directions, privileging space as well as time in terms of how subjectivity is constructed within the manuscript page, both textually and paratextually (through rubrication, illustration, layout, etc.; see Stephen G. Nichols in this volume, pp. 185–7). At an interesting and still under-explored juncture lie late medieval anthologies with their multiple, composite subjectivities in lyric and narrative verse. Of especial 49

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note are those, like the Jardin, which republish in print earlier manuscript texts, and thereby can be seen to work, through their selection of material, to circumscribe a past for late medieval French (however one defines that period and demarcates it from ‘early modern’), or at least to define a certain corpus, for the benefit of future audiences.1 Subjectivity and the Jardin de plaisance Subjectivity is of particular interest in the Jardin in at least two ways. Firstly, its collection of narrative verse, my focus here, bristles with a plurality of poetic subjects elaborated into tales of love and loss.2 The most significant cluster of narrative items occupies the final fifth of the 267-folio volume.3 Title-rubrics loosely situate each item in relation to the volume’s eponymous locus, typically beginning ‘Comment au jardin de plaisance …’, and sometimes transgressing its boundaries: ‘Comment au jardin de plaisance malebouche chasse le chevalier dudit jardin de plaisance dont la dame en meurt de courroux’ (How in the garden of delight Foul Mouth banishes the knight from the aforementioned garden of delight, as a result of which the lady dies of grief, fol. 229r) or ‘Comment l’amant yssant du jardin de plaisance entra en la forest cuydant avoir plus de joye, et il entra en tristesse en plusieurs façons’ (How the lover, leaving the garden of delight, plunged into the forest, thinking he would find greater joy, and plunged into sadness in several ways, fol. [203]v).4 How are we to read the relationship between the poems insofar as the rubrics establish a sense of narrative sequence? Is any biographical thread implied that integrates this chain of locationally linked rhetorical subjects? A key concept from Subjectivity that has informed my thinking about ‘I’-hood within individual texts is helpful to us for reading between texts: the notion of ‘subjectivity perceived as process and interaction’ (Subjectivity: 4). Resisting both the idea of a globalising, preformed subject ‘I’ and ‘I’-hood as inherently dispersed and fragmentary, such a model usefully privileges coherence emerging as and through interrelation. 1 Relatedly, Zrinka Stahuljak in this volume (pp. 100–1) reads the titles listed in the late fifteenth-century inventory of the Burgundian ducal library as a network, in a practice she terms ‘connected literature’. 2 For the Jardin’s 626 lyric items, see Taylor 2007: 229–91. 3 Droz and Piaget 1910–24, I. I restrict my discussion to the first two editions of the Jardin, identical in content and layout, published by Antoine Vérard. For its publication history, see Swift 2016: 120–40, 307. 4 The page numbering in Vérard’s editions is not wholly continuous: 203 and 204 do not exist; instead, the numbering 205–6 is repeated (so the numerical progression proceeds: 202, 205, 206, 205, 206, 207). I thereby create a page reference here so as to instate a continuous sequence between 202 and 205 ‘proper’.



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A second source of interest pertains to the anonymity of the Jardin’s constituent items; or, rather, the lack of explicit identification of their authorship, which is not the same thing. Authorial identity simmers variously in the anthology: in possible signatures through wordplay within its poems, such as ‘pres de la vigne’ pointing to André de La Vigne in the penultimate stanza of ‘Comment la dame se complaignant douloureusement en requerant la mort et depriant, soubdainement la vint frapper de sa darde mortelle dont piteusement elle mourut’ (How the lady, lamenting dolorously and beseechingly soliciting Death, was suddenly pierced with its fatal arrow, from which she died piteously, fols 231r–234r); and as named practitioners of verse form acclaimed in the anthology’s opening treatise on versification, L’Instructif de seconde rhétorique (c.1470?) (for the serventois, Alain Chartier, Arnoul Greban, Christine de Pizan, Jean Castel [Christine’s son], Pierre de Hurion, George Chastelain, and Vaillant, fol. 10v); and as renowned authors of constituent items that are here unattributed, including Baudet Herenc (Le Parlement d’amours, 1425–26, fols 139r–142v), Achille Caulier (La Cruelle Femme en amours, 1430, fols 142v–148r), Alain Chartier (rondeaux, fols 161r–162r; Le Débat de deux fortunés d’amours, fols 153r–161r), George Chastelain (L’Oultré d’amour, before 1450, fols 234r–244v), Jacques Milet (La Forest de Tristesse, 1459, fols [203]v–224v), Jean Molinet (Le Donnet baillé au roy Charles VIII, 1491?, fols 21v–25v), Charles d’Orléans (seven lyrics dispersed across the volume), Pierre de Hauteville (La Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de dueil, 1441–47, fols 247r–258r), and François Villon (1431–c.1463; assorted lyrics, fols 107v–109v, 205v). We may infer a certain textual knowledge and intertextual competence presupposed of the volume’s audience by its anonymous compiler. Fifteenthcentury poetics of engagement delighted in literary debate, responding diversely and intensively to Le Roman de la Rose and to Chartier’s infamous debate poem, La Belle Dame sans Mercy (1424), about a voluble lover who, having been spurned by a rhetorically adroit lady, reportedly dies of grief. The Jardin features a number of textual items responding to the Belle Dame including Herenc’s Parlement, Caulier’s Cruelle Femme, Milet’s Forest, de Hauteville’s Confession, and, as part of its wider body of amant martir fictions, Chastelain’s Oultré. Paratextual pointers highlight intertextual threads: Herenc’s Parlement is preceded by a rubric stating that it ‘fut tenu au jardin de plaisance contre la belle dame sans mercy’ (took place in the garden of delight against the Belle Dame sans Mercy, fol. 139r), and is accompanied by a woodcut whose stock figure of a woman is labelled ‘Sans mercy’ rather than the more usual generic ‘Dame’ (fol. 139v); the title-rubric of de Hauteville’s Confession casts its protagonist in relation to the poem by Chastelain that precedes it: ‘Comment le chevalier oultré d’amours trespasse de dueil de sa dame’ (How the knight overcome with love dies of grief for his

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lady, fol. 247r). We can safely assume readers’ awareness that the Jardin’s works existed prior to their anthologisation, and thus, in relation to another key concept from Subjectivity, that they had an interesting apprehension of the ‘time of insertion into rhetorical and linguistic tradition’ (Subjectivity: 4) of each poem’s ‘I’. Such ‘insertion’ has a triple translation into the context of an anthology, and becomes spatial as well as temporal: the time of composition of the individual item (for the Jardin’s texts, between about 1425 and 1470); the time of compilation of the collective volume (around 1500); and the time and space of production of each edition, inserting a poem’s ‘I’ into a material context (textually and paratextually) as a snapshot of a particular rhetorical and linguistic tradition (1501, for the first Jardin edition by Antoine Vérard). The time of compilation manifests itself, for instance, in textual remaniement that adapts a poem to fit with its neighbour in the anthology, as when the seven final stanzas of Chastelain’s Oultré (fols 244r–244v) are replaced by five others to merge with the scenario of the following poem. The time of production is revealed, for example, when an item’s date is altered, in the case of Le Purgatoire d’amour, an anonymous response to the Belle Dame: 1463 is attested in the text of extant manuscript witnesses of the poem, but is modified by the Jardin’s compiler to accord with its date of first publication, 1501 (fol. 184v). In the context of a fifteenth-century poetic culture of intensive intertextual engagement, to what extent may we see such modifications as toying with an audience’s competence, part of a collusive literary game to test – and thereby to allow the display of – expertise? In using Subjectivity to help me, I want also, reciprocally, to give back to Kay’s approach by inflecting its use in some way, which is what I am doing in respect of ‘the process of performance’ (Subjectivity: 156) through which a poetic subject is generated: I take a considerable leap from the sphere of early medieval sung performance to the late medieval written domain of a print anthology. Both Kay and I push back against an ahistorical approach to the poetic subject as blank space, striving instead to articulate the activity of subjectivity between generalised abstraction and discrete individuality. An incunable edition is not the same object of study as unique moments of orality, and applying Kay’s approach to the anthology’s written culture enables us to valorise analogous, important particularities of temporal and spatial relationality that risk otherwise being overlooked: for example, the impact of mise en page (page layout) on readerly apprehension of the poetic subject (compare Nichols in this volume, pp. 185–99). My study of a late medieval material context for performance thus complements the consideration of troubadour stage personae and of social performance and gender performativity by Miriam Cabré and William Burgwinkle in this volume.



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I proceed below with my twofold aim to consider subjectivity in, and the structural coherence of, the Jardin. The recurrent amant martir subject of its narrative verse items is profoundly intertextually and relationally constituted. A particular frame for the dying self is created by the volume’s book-ending testamentary fictions: Molinet’s Donnet and de Hauteville’s Confession. These poems’ moribund first person is deployed to elaborate, in Kay’s words, a probing analysis of how ‘the relationship between self and other, subject and object, is seen as complex and precarious’ (Subjectivity: 213). A mock last will and testament was a popular fictional framework for first-person subject development in the late medieval period. Its parody of testamentary form – most famously in François Villon’s Testament (c.1461) – serves as a vehicle to explore the relationship between death and identity and to construe selfhood as legacy: an epitaphic reputation composed for and constructed posthumously by an audience of heirs. A common pretext for anticipating one’s death is the agony of a martyr for love. ‘Je tiens ma personne morte’: Not Dying for Love A distinctive trait of fifteenth-century literary subjectivity is how frequently and intensively it defines itself in relation to death. The masculine subject position espouses the posture of an amant martir, common to courtly poetry since the troubadours and trouvères, which elevates erotic desire into noble destiny, authenticates his true love, invigorates his rhetoric of self-expression, and dramatically raises the stakes of his pledged devotion. But in deploying hyperbole a poetic persona also courts irony, and fifteenth-century narrative poets capitalised on the stuckness of the urgently-dying-but-not-yet-deceased, languishing lover. Lyric verse does not demand linear progression; one can cycle unproblematically through infinite rounds of rhetorical posturing which eke out the process of self-construction, as in the refrain of one of the rondeaux by Chartier included in the Jardin: Ou mon desir m’assouvira Ou ma tristece m’occira Pour vous, belle, prouchainement. (fol. 161r) (Either my desire will overwhelm me or my sadness will kill me, for you, fair lady, very soon.)

The posited alternatives oscillate continuously such that projection forwards to a given future moment ‘prouchainement’ is absorbed into the back-andforth repetition of the refrain rather than gesturing towards realisation in chronological time. That said, the lyric appears in the Jardin in a sequence of

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fourteen rondeaux under the umbrella title ‘La Complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance’ (The Complaint of the prisoner of love made in the garden of delight, fols 161r–162r), and is thereby integrated into the volume’s overarching narrative framework, even if not itself presenting progression. In narrative verse, time moves forward, which requires taking a dying lover at his word or otherwise risking considerable bathos: what if he just cannot die? This is the predicament of de Hauteville’s subject in the Confession. He determines the fitting moment: ‘Il est temps de ma vie finir’ (It is time for my life to end, fol. 248r), reasons the logic of his appropriate demise (‘Mieulx vauldra que sois trespassé / Qu’au monde a regret tousjours vivre’ [It will be better for me to be dead than to live on sorrowfully in this world, ibid.]), and defines himself as being dead, or wanting to be so (‘Car je tiens ma personne morte’ [For I hold myself to be dead, fol. 250v]), but he fails to argue himself to death. He languishes in unfulfilment, unable to enact the stereotype to which he aspires. His testament is a failed exercise of will, in all senses, and parody ensues. An important stimulus to this irony is Chartier’s Belle Dame: the poem’s debate inserted itself into literary tradition at a propitious moment to propagate its influence on courtly subjectivity, enmeshing as it did with the ongoing literary debates known as the querelle du Roman de la Rose and the querelle des femmes, so as to exercise a profound influence on three firstperson subject positions: the lover, the lady, and their conversation’s narratorwitness. Chartier’s lover presents himself as an amant martir, but his selfstylisation risks unravelling as the lady denies him that status, declining to be cast as either tormentor or saviour: Ne pour mon plaisir ne mourrez, Ne pour vous guerir ne guerray. (Chartier 2004: lines 699–700) (You will not die for my pleasure, nor will I put myself out to heal you.)

She dismisses his fatalistic posturing as melodramatic foolishness: Sy gracïeuse maladie Ne met gueres de gens a mort. (lines 265–6) (Such a gracious malady causes the death of no one.)

Furthermore, the narrator of the encounter – l’Acteur – is unable to determine the lover’s death as certain fact: Depuis ne sceüs qu’il devint Ne quel part il se transporta;



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[…] Et depuis on me rapporta […] Qu’il en estoit mort de courroux. (lines 777–8, 781, 784) (I do not know what became of him afterward nor to where he fled; […] Not long after, someone told me […] that finally he had died of his distress.)

For all the lover’s impassioned rhetoric, his ability to fulfil the type that he has embraced is jeopardised, opening the door to irony. The lady is another first person, whose rational and quick-witted discourse of rebuttal forges a feminine subject position, whether this is valued specifically as a profeminine gesture or simply insofar as it counterpoints the courtly lover and serves to comment on his position’s limits of validity. Further commentary is supplied by the third subject, the narrator as witness. The stance of eavesdropper was already literary currency as a framing device in, for example, Guillaume de Machaut’s dits, but, via Chartier, the trellis set-up for covert listening developed l’Acteur’s role into something more elaborate; to complicate matters, Chartier’s narrator is himself a thwarted lover, prompting intersection between the poem’s two masculine subjects. Elaboration of the Belle Dame’s subject positions occurred through several cycles of poetic response, most frequently deploying a courtroom fiction as a framework for interrogating the lover’s and lady’s identities, charging her with his murder, as in Herenc’s Parlement and Caulier’s Cruelle Femme within the Jardin. Of course, neither an interlocutor nor a witness is structurally required to provide a critical perspective on a masculine lover subject: in lyric, he can both enact his posture and observe its enactment; but in narrative, such self-reflection is nonetheless amplified through the tale’s dramatisation (through recollection, dream vision, etc.) – all the more so in a compilation of narrative scenarios within the framing fiction of the Jardin’s anthology. The nature of the Jardin’s coherence – regarding both literary subjectivity within it and the overall architecture of the volume – has proved challenging to articulate. Its organisation combines both unity and fragmentation, assemblage and dispersal, in ways that are predicated neither on wholeness which subsequently becomes disjoined, nor on disparate elements agglomerating unitarily in harmony.5 In Subjectivity, Kay resists conceiving of subjecthood with reference to unique individuality or abstract generality; her promotion instead of, as already noted, ‘subjectivity perceived as process and interaction’ (Subjectivity: 4) will assist us in understanding the incunable’s ‘process of 5 Kay took up such questions in more depth and in a late medieval context in The Place of Thought.

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performance’ in its material presentation. Study of the Jardin has tended to privilege its fixed-form lyric items, depicting them as its centrepiece with narrative/didactic pieces in verse and occasional prose fulfilling a framing role. I wish, however, to valorise the latter, forty-six items, for two reasons: first, to reflect the Jardin’s own ‘table des choses contenues en ceste presente oeuvre’ (table of things contained in this present book. fol. [259r]), which presents, in fact, two tables, beginning with a sequential enumeration of its narrative/didactic pieces following the chronology of the volume and listing them according to the rubric that situates them ‘au jardin de plaisance’, before offering an alphabetical index by first line of lyric items that proceeds, for each letter, by form (e.g. ballades and rondeaux commencing with the letter ‘h’). My second reason is my focus on the two book-ending narrative fictions, the Confession and the Donnet, that together reconfigure our sense of the volume’s framing coherence. In that light, it makes sense for my discussion to begin at the end of the Jardin and end at the beginning, to explore the anthology’s structure. Relational Subjecthood and Material Performance I referred above to the Confession and the Donnet as book-ending items of the Jardin, but we can refine this formulation. The Confession (fols 247r–258r) both is and is not the volume’s closing poem: this formal ambiguity is due to the uncertain status of a short poem that features at the end of fol. 258, a fifteen-line Épitaphe. On the one hand, this quinzain stands alone on the verso, its titlerubric and text separated from the Confession on the recto by a three-quarterpage woodcut, configuring it paratextually as a stand-alone lyric (Figure 1). On the other hand, in the anthology’s table of contents on the following folio, the quinzain is referred to as part of the preceding, narrative text, thus as a final chapter to the Confession: ‘Comment le chevalier oultré rend l’ame et de son epitaphe’ (How the overcome knight dies, and about his epitaph, fol. 259v).6 In its epitaphic function, L’Épitaphe both signals closure and opens up a retrospective gaze; it represents, we infer, the death of the lover whose amorous trajectory has been traced through the Jardin’s garden fictions, and, in the manner of an epilogue to the volume, presents commentary on what precedes. It solicits identification of the deceased subject and, in how it presents that identity, models the kind of relationally constituted selfhoodin-process that is performed across the anthology – confecting allusively the biography of a rhetorical subject:

6 Manuscript versions of the Confession do not include L’Épitaphe. For Jardin editions’ varied presentation of the poem, see Swift 2016: 125–7.

Figure 1  The Épitaphe presented as stand-alone lyric. Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, fol. 258v; BnF Réserve Ye 168.

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Cy gist le corps de l’amant nompareil, Qu’on doit sur tous, tant en terre qu’en mer, Plaindre, plorer, louer et estimer Car onques doeil n’en fut veu le pareil. C’estoit des preux l’excellent appareil, Des vaillans gens le patron et l’exemple. […] […] il est pour verité Nommé l’oultré d’amours pour amour morte. (fol. 258v: lines 3–8, 14–15) (Here lies the body of the peerless lover who should be lamented, mourned, praised, and esteemed above any other on land or sea, for never was there seen a grief like his. He was the highest model of nobility, the template and example for honourable people. […] He is in truth called the one overcome by love who died for love.)

The rhetoric of exemplarity deployed to commemorate this amant martir figure suspends his identity somewhere between superlative singularity (nompareil in its immediate sense of ‘peerless’) and general representativeness (nompareil through homonymic wordplay as ‘same name’), signifying all superlativelysuffering-for-love-lover-figures in the anthology. He thus exists neither as ‘individual conceived of contrastively, as differing in some essential way from others’ (Subjectivity: 5) nor as universal generality; he is aggregatively constituted in relation to the volume’s preceding amants martir. The concluding line of L’Épitaphe, which baptises the deceased, echoes the typified identity of the ‘oultré d’amours’ protagonist of Chastelain’s Oultré, the antepenultimate work in the volume, whom we saw above to be evoked in the title-rubric of the Confession. The relationality of subject identity has implications for narrative structure. The very boundaries of L’Oultré as a discrete text are expanded by L’Épitaphe: as mentioned above, the Jardin’s version of L’Oultré remodels its original ending, replacing the seven final stanzas in whose concluding line Chastelain’s protagonist was named ‘l’oultré d’amours’; that line is thus, in effect, deferred until the last line of the last poem of the Jardin, namely L’Épitaphe. L’Épitaphe’s lover is only definable in terms of his relationship to others, in a way that renders porous the parameters of ‘self’ and ‘other’. ‘Others’ include the lover-subject of de Hauteville’s Confession, on two counts – the first, paratextual, as its speakerrubrics pursue the tale of ‘le chevalier oultré’, evoking at once the figures of L’Oultré and L’Épitaphe; the second, intertextual, as its subject concludes, in the Confession’s closing stanza: ‘icy dois finer mon terme’ (here I must end my term, fol. 258r), only for L’Épitaphe to pick up that deixis with its epitaphic incipit: ‘cy gist …’ (here lies …). To tie together the paratextual



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and the intertextual, one could see the Confession’s speaker-rubrics in fact as raising the question of what de Hauteville’s lover should be ‘nommé’ (named), given their recourse to several different labels for him: ‘le serviteur vefve d’amours’, ‘l’oultré’, ‘le malade’ (the bereaved servant of love, the one overcome, the invalid). With hyperbole, tone is often uncertain: is L’Épitaphe an earnest apotheosis of a lover unjustly killed or is its emphatic exemplarity excessive and thus tinged with irony? The asseveration ‘pour verité’ (in truth) could be read either as vehement sincerity or as sardonic acknowledgement that there is no univocal, objective validation of the lover-subject’s identity, since it is the product of an audience’s judgement, like the narrator’s verdict at the end of Chartier’s Belle Dame that its lady may be named (‘qu’on peut appeller’, line 799, my italics) the ‘belle dame sans mercy’. The audience’s engagement is invoked in L’Épitaphe by the ‘cy’ of ‘cy gist’, since it is the ‘here and now’ of the reader of the page from whose point of view the deceased is defined. ‘Cy’ on fol. 258v has at least three possible referents as a pick-up of the Confession’s ‘icy dois finer mon terme’: narratively, it designates the point we have reached in the volume’s overarching fiction of the lover in the garden; through textual deixis, it denotes the words of the epitaph itself; and, through spatial deixis and juxtaposition, it gestures to the woodcut above L’Épitaphe which pictures the nobly laid-out corpse of a young man, or perhaps his effigy. This woodcut dramatises the construction of identity. It is one of only four of such size in the Vérard editions of the Jardin, thereby according significant status to the short Épitaphe text through its mise en page. The other three dominant woodcuts are a presentation scene (fols 2r and 21v) and an image of a lady (labelled ‘la dame’) being targeted by Death represented as an arrow-throwing figure of indefinite gender hovering above the intended victim (fol. 231v). The latter opens the anonymous poem attributed to André de La Vigne, ‘Comment la dame se complaignant douloureusement en requerant la mort …’ (How the lady, lamenting dolorously and soliciting Death …, fols 231r–234r), which precedes Chastelain’s Oultré. Its text recounts the lament of a lady who, having been deserted by her lover, dies of grief and is mourned by the narrator. The woodcut, positioned at the heart of the cluster of amant martir texts towards the Jardin’s close, foregrounds the thematic prominence of death and also furnishes, in the narrative logic implied by the collocation of items within the volume, a prospective view on the demise on which fol. 258v provides a retrospective, because posthumous, gaze. We recall my observation that L’Épitaphe’s lover is definable only in terms of his relationship to others, in a way that renders porous the parameters of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Such porosity encompasses shifts in gender, since ‘other’ may include the feminine amant martir of the item attributed to de La Vigne, and also, through even more intricate intertextual interlacing, the deceased feminine beloved of the masculine protagonist of Chastelain’s Oultré: she

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identifies herself in that poem, from beyond the grave, as yet another figure overcome by love who died for love: ‘Je suis morte en amour martire’ (fol. 236v). Juxtaposition of the de La Vigne-attributed poem and L’Oultré implies a continuity of identity: the former’s feminine subject, bereft of her love and whose death the poem stages, in effect becomes the feminine love object of the latter, dead and mourned in her turn. Identity is key to the volume’s concluding woodcut in respect of a further, founding relationship between self and other, subject and object: that between the individual laid out in the bottom third of the image and his visually more dominant audience, the courtiers and ladies pictured mourning his demise. Unusually for the Jardin, this woodcut carries no banderol, leaving the deceased without classification even as a type (le chevalier, l’amant, etc.) – his identification is wholly the collective responsibility of his audience. The ‘here lies’ of L’Épitaphe, after all, implies the point of view of the reader of a grave’s epitaphic inscription – a responsibility that we as readers of the volume, positioned facing the audience depicted within the final woodcut, in parallel to them across the body of the deceased, assume. The lady of the de La Vigne-attributed poem lamented her banished lover before dying and being mourned by the narrator; the lover of L’Oultré mourned his lady, as did his counterpart in the Confession. Our – the readers’ – process of having digested the preceding poems composes the identity of the woodcut’s deceased as a kind of literary mourning; through textual and paratextual reading, we fabricate his effigy, and the identity fiction that we confect, cued into activity by L’Épitaphe, itself then stands as his epitaph. L’Épitaphe’s author is properly anonymous – no author is elsewhere known, and nor is the text; we might infer that this absence of named author positions us as author, affording us a witness perspective akin to the third-person retrospective gaze famously supplied in the so-called ‘Ballade de Conclusion’ of François Villon’s Testament: ‘icy se clost le testament / Et finist du povre Villon’ (here ends and concludes the will of poor Villon, Villon 2014: lines 1996–7). As a coda to the Confession, L’Épitaphe offers one possible last word on its amant martir, an uncertain someone, which is by no means definitive. Compilatory Coherence and Testamentary Framing I end this essay at the beginning of the Jardin, with the Donnet, the third item in the anthology after a preliminary versification treatise, L’Instructif, and Regnaud Le Queux’s La Doleance de megere. While third, it nonetheless merits being seen as a beginning for how it opens with a three-quarterpage presentation scene woodcut (fol. 21v). The Donnet complements L’Instructif, in that it is cast as an instructive manual on grammar (after the standard grammatical primer, Donatus’s Ars minor), but in the form of



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a curious poetic fiction which presents the confession and testament of a good friend of its narrator, who serves as an intermediary or witness. The ostensibly moribund friend is a penitent who, now ventriloquised by the narrator, confessed to him his excessive amorous adventures as and through an exposition of verb conjugation: Mais il fault que je me recolle De amo, amas, lequel je vy Du temps que avoye la teste folle Et que je descline amavi […] Amavi j’aym[a]y bien de faict Tellement que c’estoit oultrage. (fol. [24]v) (But I must remember I love, you love, which I knew when I lived foolishly, and decline I have loved […] I have loved, I loved well, indeed – quite outrageously.)

Lamenting his present impotence in old age – ‘present suis ung simple passif’ (now I am a simple passive, fol. 25r) – the penitent punningly repents to God: ‘J’en demande remission / Devant le grand indicatif’ (I request remission before the Great Indicative, fol. [24]v). The Donnet is dazzlingly witty in how it manipulates both the literary testamentary model and grammatical categories across French and Latin. Defining his gender, the penitent remarks: Je suis mon genre congnoissant, Qui est masculin, touteffoys Je me suis trouvé fort pensant Au feminin aucuneffoys. (fol. 23r) (I am well aware of my gender, which is masculine, although I have sometimes found myself thinking very intently in/of the feminine.)

In terms of characterisation, these lines prompt an ironic reading of a lascivious, skirt-chasing subject who has thought lustfully of women as sexual objects of his erotic desire – which is also cast as thinking ‘in the feminine’. Read in the context of my above analysis of L’Épitaphe, they expose the shifting possibilities of gender in the relationship between self and other. The Donnet’s playful presentation of subjecthood, dramatising the constitution of a dying lover from the basic building blocks of verbal expression, stages subjectivity in process in an elemental way that is fundamental to the articulation of selfhood promoted across the Jardin:

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Je suis ung povre substantif, Qui tout par moy bien me decline. (fol. 23r) (I am a poor substantive who am greatly declining all on my own.)

In light of what we saw, towards the end of the volume, of the defining relationship between self and other, subject and object, and mindful here of the specific scenario of the Donnet with its relay by the narrator of his friend’s confession, ‘je suis’ emerges not as an originary statement of individual selfhood, but as a relational articulation of identity. ‘Me decline’ is arguably the Donnet’s acme moment of self-formation, since its productive ambiguity, as both ‘I deteriorate’ physically and ‘I decline myself’ in a grammatical sense, encapsulates the underpinning logic of the poem: it uses an instance of corporeal decrepitude to fuel literary composition viewed in terms of the very nuts and bolts of language. This sets up the Jardin itself, right through to the corresponding testamentary fiction of the Confession at the volume’s close, as an elaboration of the subjecthood of the courtly lover and as a critical reflection thereon: for example, is not the Donnet’s supposed penitent ethically rather anti-courtly in his unapologetic account of his cynical promiscuity? And is the insistently ‘oultré’ lover of Chastelain and de Hauteville not a little overweening: excessively extravagant in amorous grief, like the voluble suitor in Chartier’s Belle Dame, and then, bathetically, unable to fulfil the courtly model of amant martir that he has espoused? It is the process more than the product that engages our attention, and this process is necessarily interactive. My proposed connection between the Donnet and Confession, and between the Donnet and the whole cluster of concluding items, indicates that such interaction is not purely linear – it is not limited to the sequential ordering of items in the volume. The Donnet parses the friend’s identity into the tale of an overbearing lover; mere allusion to amorous adventure is activated into narrative existence by the narrator’s account of his life. In miniature, this represents the overall composition of identity in the Jardin: each narrative item offers fragments, which are not to be understood as constituent parts of a unitary whole nor as disparate entities in opposition to wholeness; these elements compose and are composed by ‘the biographical movement of the compilation’ (Frieden, forthcoming), tracing the articulation of a lover’s life through the volume’s rubrics, which themselves exercise a double movement of ‘fragmentation and defragmentation’ (ibid.). Constructing this kind of enmeshing, overlapping, dynamic coherence is the role of the volume’s audience’s several subjectivities, whose interaction with the texts and their ordering is crucial. Such a role is foregrounded by the concluding woodcut of the mourning scene but is also betokened along the way in many narrative pieces by the presence of a narrator acting as scribe or



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secretary to a given speech or encounter. Several title-rubrics evoke through their oblique formulation the need for a storytelling agent’s intervention: ‘le racomptement fait au jardin de plaisance de deux amans fortunez d’amours’ (the account given in the garden of delight of two lovers’ fortunes in love, fol. 153r) or ‘la relation faicte au jardin de plaisance du debat de l’amant et de la dame qui est sans conclusion’ (the account given in the garden of delight of the endless debate of the lover and the lady, fol. 148r). An accompanying woodcut image in both cases counterpoints referential obliqueness with direct ontological representation of the subject concerned, labelled ‘l’acteur’ (the narrator, fol. 153r) or ‘Le relateur’ (the relater, fol. 148r). There is no tale without its teller; fragments suggestive of an amorous trajectory are pieced together and elaborated by the reader-viewer, whether or not they proceed in a continuous, linear movement through the volume. What precisely was expected of the Jardin’s contemporary audience remains to be determined. The above discussion usefully inflects our understanding of their anticipated competencies as reader-viewers of the page; it may also tell us something about their relationship to courtliness. Taylor (2007: 260) considers how L’Instructif offers amateur poets in the urban milieu of the Paris law courts a toolkit for composing courtly poetry – the kind of verse that follows thereafter in the anthology, both narrative and lyric – and how the Donnet’s primer may have been ‘an appropriate pendant’ (ibid.) to the verse treatise. We should of course beware of positing an absolute distinction between ‘urban’ and ‘courtly’; while the lawyers would need to acquire the skills to compose and produce poetry, it is clear that their existing readerly competence, as a receiving audience, is expected to be thorough and deft – they are expected to know, for instance, the tradition of literary testaments that underpins the Donnet, the Belle Dame quarrel, or the identity of L’Oultré’s protagonist as ‘l’oultré’. Whereas Aelius Donatus wrote a popular elementary grammar, the author of the Donnet requires his reader already to have a sophisticated grasp of courtly poetics so as to discern its ironies. Is the Jardin, in fact, offering a training in pastiche or even parody? That would match the tone of the Confession, with its frustrated amant martir, and L’Épitaphe’s possible suggestion of overweening lovers. Or does such a suggestion indicate a modern misapprehension of courtly irony? It is impossible to provide in a short space a holistic reading of the Jardin, or to account for every item through one approach to its coherence. But no single approach needs to account for everything – after all, the Jardin’s own table of contents already caters for two ways of indexing its material. It is nonetheless clear that Chartier and his Belle Dame are key to the volume intertextually, materially, and ideologically. In L’Instructif, he is invoked as a rhetorical authority (‘entier / Grant maistre […] / En rethoricque’ (truly a great master […] of rhetoric, fol. 5r)), and later convoked in dialogue from

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beyond the grave (‘si est ressuscité’ [he is resurrected, fol. 10r])) to lament a decline in rhetoric and, it is claimed, a consequent waning of his renown. The Jardin offers a window onto fifteenth-century courtliness presented very much in the vein of Chartier’s cultivation-cum-criticism of the aesthetic and its ethics, thereby reviving that renown. It is perhaps a specific indebtedness to Chartier that explains the compiler’s preference, around 1500, for less immediately contemporary narrative poetry – preferring verse forms and authors who were more strongly and closely invested in their earlier-fifteenthcentury inheritance of debate about the Belle Dame and associated querelles, and whose works could be gathered together in tribute to the long-dead author through an extended elaboration of the amant martir as poetic subject in a spectacular material performance. Could we possibly even construe the unnamed, honoured deceased of the concluding woodcut as a representation of Chartier, whose courtly poetic subject – as author and diegetic character – underpins the volume’s fictions, and whom we as audience honour in a posthumous dedication scene, curating a certain legacy of medieval French literature for present and future audiences?

• PART II  • The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions

•  Introduction  • Jane Gilbert

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eading Political Fictions today, I am struck by how many of its arguments and ideas remain ground breaking. Some, it is true, have been absorbed into the critical mainstream. The chansons de geste are no longer viewed as vestigial, ‘popular’ survivals of primitive oral traditions that were superseded during the twelfth century by the sophisticated romance genre, but as self-conscious artworks and serious political theorising in a rich tradition that continues throughout the medieval period. Even before Kay brought to bear her characteristic blend of psychoanalysis and Marxism, building here especially on Fredric Jameson (1981) and on Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to argue that chanson de geste and romance reveal each other’s ‘political unconscious’, critics who worked extensively with chansons de geste knew that they entertain dialectical relationships with other genres and discourses and that their engagement with Islam, women, and alterity is multifaceted and complex; Kay drew notably on such scholarship in German and, to a lesser degree, in French. Nevertheless, the image of the ‘monologic’ song, always and only an epic celebration of white, Christian, western European, elite male warriors baying for the mass slaughter of dehumanised, homogenised ‘pagans’ – principally European and North African Muslims – continues to meet modern needs. Even a little research into the field shows that this stock summary of chanson de geste politics and poetics was long ago discredited by critical assessments that in the best cases manage to be nuanced and informed without being apologetic. Some of the key ideas in Political Fictions, however, have been neither assimilated nor debated, including Kay’s original thesis of the ‘poetics of the gift’. Drawing on feminist social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s magisterial The Gender of the Gift (1988) and on the example of R. Howard Bloch’s Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (1983), Kay develops the anthropological distinction between ‘commodity’ and ‘gift’ economies into large cultural paradigms that bear on both Old French literature and its modern reception.1 1

Anthropological work informed literary studies and critical theory in several ways 67

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Kay argues that critics today find medieval romances appealing because they adopt a ‘commodity’ poetics familiar to us: a single, ‘individual’, almost always masculine viewpoint negotiates a world of opaque ‘objects’ – things, words, and people – and worries about the adequacy of such objects to mediate between that viewpoint/individual and the world. Chansons de geste, contrastingly, exemplify a ‘poetics of the gift’, in which numerous viewpoints and narrative accounts contend and where ‘gifts’ – women, Saracens, children, the lower orders, swords, horses, lands, titles, treasure – have agency and opinions that matter. The socially marginal figures who voice these ‘counternarratives’ often give the most morally or politically robust accounts to be found in a work, though often violently opposed by the elite characters. Challenging the traditional view that the chansons de geste were gradually tugged in the direction of romance, Kay argues that it is we today who suffer ‘romance influence’: attuned to ‘commodity’ thinking, we are cloth-eared when it comes to the poetics and politics of the gift. Thus she weaves Old French literary history, a niche interest within the humanities, into cultural history on a grand scale. Instead of simply positioning the Middle Ages as the origin-point of modern phenomena, Kay relativises modern thinking from a medieval standpoint that she conceives as fundamentally different from today’s. Consequently, any (apparent or real) continuities between medieval people and ‘us’ are not self-explanatory, but invite analysis which draws on literary, philological, cultural, historical, political, and psychoanalytic resources. Alert to modernity’s ‘political unconscious’ – its repressed as well as its manifest investments – this analysis demonstrates the value of medievalist criticism to modern cultural critique. The ‘poetics of the gift’ promises insights into medieval genres, discourses, and practices beyond chansons de geste. Gift cultures’ tendency to personify, and to highlight relationships between these ‘persons’ may throw light on personification allegory and on the device of abstractum agens in lyric and romance, for instance. Attention paid to gift poetics can also enrich current debates over the agency of things, ecocriticism, and network theories that aim to flatten the modern distinction between humans and non-humans and to relocate the modern boundary between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ worlds. Similarly, it may help us to analyse more precisely the objectification and oppression of human beings carried out in, through, or around medieval texts. In a collaborative article published in the same year as Political during the 1980s and 1990s; for instance, structuralist and post-structuralist approaches drew on Claude Lévi-Strauss; New Historicism on Clifford Geertz; French critics drew on the comparative religion and mythography of Georges Dumézil; feminists on Gayle Rubin and Henrietta Moore, among others. ‘The gift’ was an important focus, drawing on Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay (2002).



• PART II: INTRODUCTION •

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Fictions, ‘Feminism and the Discipline of Old French Studies: Une Bele Disjointure’, Kay and her co-authors asked how feminist medieval criticism, besides enacting ‘a sort of creative destruction of medieval studies as it has long been formulated’ (250), can ‘maintain the edge of marginality and nonauthoritarianism that has sparked feminist research from the beginning’ (229) while reckoning with the social and institutional privilege awarded to some of its most prominent practitioners. A fierce commitment to different voices and counternarratives may open up medieval studies ‘in unforeseeable ways’ to ‘others who have been marginalized or oppressed: children, servants, serfs, the urban poor, non-Christians, people of color’ (251). The ‘poetics of the gift’ offers a feminist practice as well as an instrument for literary analysis. Charlie Samuelson takes careful account of Kay’s model of the chanson de geste in exploring the limit case of Ami et Amile, an Old French chanson de geste whose story, retold in many languages, is notoriously generically unstable. Like Kay, Samuelson interrogates how the chanson de geste framework generates both a dominant narrative and counternarratives, which in Ami et Amile interact to highlight anxieties around gender and sexuality haunting the genre. Ami et Amile has in recent years been commonly considered to present its heroes’ extremely intense and committed friendship as the basis for an ideal male-only community. Via an account of contemporary debates about leprosy in marriage, and mobilising Leo Bersani’s account of barebacking, Samuelson builds outwards from Kay’s focus on feminist counternarratives and on misogyny. He argues instead that Ami et Amile presents marriage and heterosexuality as the queerest variant of desire, whose anti-normative, contagious, and antisocial force at once threatens and thrills both within the diegesis and in the dominant narrative’s dangerous fraternisation and flirtation with the counternarratives. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne notes how both intersectional developments in feminist theory and advances in medieval women’s history since the publication of Political Fictions allow us to build on Kay’s theses, reflects on their vital political role today, and calls for greater attention among cultural historians of gender to the medieval period. She accepts the challenge to think about the poetics of the gift outside the chanson de geste as narrowly defined by laisse form, ‘matter of France’ content, and French politics; she examines the AngloNorman octosyllabic ‘romance’/‘history’ Waldef (c.1200), set among the competing kings of pre-Conquest East Anglia. Developing Kay’s discussion of the bele Sarrasine motif – the Saracen princess who gifts herself, and so much more, to a Christian hero – Wogan-Browne treats the female characters of Waldef not as representing ‘romance’ elements of love and masculine individuality, but as figures whose ‘presence elicits the full complexity of socio-political life’ (p. 91). Waldef stages some male characters’ attempt to realise an exclusive homosociety, only to show its disastrous consequences; female characters –

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including the text’s supposed destinatrix – and their counternarratives generate fully political criticisms of and successful alternatives to the internecine violence that marks masculine political life. Zrinka Stahuljak continues the challenge to genre, but in a way that connects with Kay’s later work on medieval knowledge systems. She proposes that we should abandon stylistic and formal categories such as ‘epic’ or ‘romance’ in favour of exploring how library inventories, specifically the 1467–69 inventory of the ducal library of Philip the Good of Burgundy, group texts into clusters whose contents and descriptions direct reading practices. These inventories point readers towards grand ideological enterprises and their local realisations – such as the crusading impetus that fired Burgundian cultural production under Philip the Good. We should therefore see the library inventory as the Burgundian ‘political unconscious’, ‘because the clusters of the inventory are not just a historical record of a culture and its practices (whether conscious or unconscious, visible or repressed), but they are unconscious of a political future that they otherwise seek actively’ (p. 110). By naming her approach ‘connected literature’, Stahuljak invites comparisons both between her practice and recent ‘connected history’ methodologies (see Douki and Minard 2007) and between Philip’s expansionist, territory-overleaping project and the modern, globalised world for which those methodologies were developed. Not content to leave critique to historians or to modernists, however, she uses literary theory and medieval studies to challenge modernity’s political unconscious.

•  ‘He wishes that everyone were leprous like him’  • Infectious Counternarratives in Ami et Amile Charlie Samuelson

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or Sarah Kay (Political Fictions: 83), ‘the epic community is more divided, and less univocal, than traditionally thought’. Chansons de geste, she argues, actively foment ‘counternarratives’, which combat patriarchy’s ‘dominant narrative’. These ‘counternarratives’ are associated with ‘the agency of un-epic figures’, such as ‘children, women, the non-noble, “good” Saracens’ (76). Kay particularly focuses on women. Bucking a tendency to understand the genre as a male preserve, she shows how ‘the politics of male society in the chansons de geste are also sexual politics’ (70). Her volume itself becomes a (feminist) ‘counternarrative’ to the (largely masculinist) ‘dominant narrative’ about this corpus. Kay’s argument seems, in turn, to invite a particular sort of response. For if Kay underscores the importance of ‘counternarratives’, it makes sense to respond to her by attending to the ‘counternarratives’ spawned by her larger argument. This essay is, accordingly, concerned with a text which, like female characters and ‘counternarratives’ in chansons de geste, appears to have an unequal claim to epic status: Ami et Amile. Usually dated to around 1200, this chanson de geste is about two perfectly identical friends, often described as ‘compainz’ (companions), whose lives revolve around each other. The two initially come together and enjoy great success at Charlemagne’s court; yet they provoke the envy of the terrible Hardré, Charlemagne’s steward. This traitor attempts to have them ambushed, but when his plan fails, he offers his niece, Lubias, to Amile, who instantly passes her off to Ami. Hardré has not finished stirring up trouble for the companions, however. Soon thereafter, he observes Amile succumbing to the seductions of Belissant, Charlemagne’s daughter. Because he has indeed ‘vergondee’ (shamed, 730) Belissant, Amile cannot defend himself in a trial by ordeal, so Ami, upon learning of his friend’s

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struggles, decides to replace him.1 Since he has not lain with Belissant, Ami can emerge victorious; yet Charlemagne then attempts to force Belissant on him in marriage. Via an angel, God warns Ami that if, as Amile, he promises to take Belissant as his wife, he will be stricken with leprosy. He nonetheless does, and he is, prompting his vindictive wife to seek the dissolution of their marriage. Indeed, Lubias forces Ami from the palace and forbids the townsfolk to aid him. With few places to turn, the ailing count is carried by two servants throughout Europe, until they stumble on Amile at Rivières. Amile attempts to care for Ami. This is, though, to little avail until another angel descends to inform Ami that he will be cured if Amile bathes him in the blood of his children. When Amile does this, Ami instantly regains his health. Amile’s children are, moreover, miraculously brought back to life quickly thereafter. The text then winds down quickly. The companions complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Land before dying at Mortara. As this cursory summary suggests, Ami et Amile exemplifies crucial features of the chanson de geste genre, notably how the ‘partnership of companions in arms’ constitutes their ‘emotional nucleus’ (Political Fictions: 147). Because the text focuses on the perfectly identical protagonists’ efforts to fend off threats to their unique bond, it may also epitomise the genre’s desire to suppress difference.2 The location of the sole extant version of the chanson de geste – at the heart of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 860, an important collection of five chansons de geste, including the Paris Roland – corroborates this notion that Ami et Amile is most definitely at home among chansons de geste. Indeed, it is the ‘central text’ of a recueil where ‘the central ideal […] is male bonding and companionship’ (Gaunt 1995: 45) – the ideal often referred to as compagnonnage. Yet, ‘it might be objected’, as Kay admits in an important article, ‘that Ami et Amile is not a real chanson de geste’ (1990: 130). As the friends ‘pass’ for each other, so too does the ‘Amicus and Amelius’ legend pass in many a genre, appearing, for example, as a romance, a conte, and a miracle play (barring details, the above summary is, in fact, applicable to most versions of the legend).3 Ami et Amile seems, therefore, ill-positioned to encapsulate something essential about the genre of chanson de geste. Rather, a similarity is apparent between the way in which, for Kay, women relate to the ‘dominant narrative’ within chansons de geste, and the way in which Ami et Amile relates 1 Ami et Amile, ed. by Peter Dembowski (1969). Hereafter cited in text by line number or laisse (§). 2 See Gaunt 1995: 45–52. 3 For the Anglo-Norman ‘romance’, see Amys e Amilyon, ed. by Hideka Fukui (1990). For the Middle English romance, see Amis and Amiloun, ed. by MacEdward Leach (1937). See especially Planche 1977 for differences among versions.



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to notions of the chanson de geste genre. Both bring to the fore tensions between sameness and difference and between ‘inclusion and exclusion’ (Political Fictions: 124, 126).4 Both Ami et Amile and female characters have, that is, a paradoxical relation to the epic universe, even existing in what Derrida conceives of as a state of ‘appartenance sans appartenance’, belonging without squarely belonging (2014: 81). As Évelyne Grossman puts it, Derrida ‘elaborates’, throughout his career, ‘a paradoxical topology of the notion of belonging, a sort of deformed (défigurée) figure of belonging which would be the antidote (or maybe the pharmakon) to our old, tired notions of being-together (l’être-ensemble)’ (2006: 10). In this essay, I explore how desire, in this chanson de geste where leprosy (dis-)figures so crucially and where its antidote is so troublesome, ‘deforms’ normative or stable notions of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and not belonging. I begin by building on Kay’s work on female ‘counternarratives’ in Ami et Amile, observing how curious echoes – almost what Leo Bersani (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 86) calls ‘liquefying speech’ – entangle the ‘dominant narrative’ with female ‘counternarratives’. Yet, while Kay focuses on gender politics, I then look to two unlikely bedfellows – canon law and Bersani’s work in queer theory – to tease out a ‘counternarrative’ about illicit sexual behaviours, which is not entirely embodied by (or does not perfectly ‘belong’ to) women. Sexuality, argues Bersani, ‘is that which is intolerable to the structured self’ (1986: 38); similarly, Ami et Amile stresses how desire is ‘intolerable’ to the ‘dominant narrative’. And yet – in a manner also in keeping with Bersani’s thought – the ‘dominant narrative’ engages in risky, perverse, but all too alluring ways with this ‘counternarrative’, which asserts that desire disfigures order. * * *

In an important article which reads Ami et Amile ‘against the other redactions of the story, with other epics […] and in the light of modern feminist criticism’, Kay (1990: 130–1) contends that ‘the process of exclusion of women’ is ‘demonstrable’ in Ami et Amile; the narrative attempts to ‘suppress’ female agency. When Belissant seduces Amile, for instance, she asserts her agency problematically. Her forwardness must then be contained; and indeed it is, when Charlemagne later gives her to Ami(le), thus reinscribing her within an economy whereby women are gifted among men (Kay 1990: 134). Perhaps, though, Belissant’s troublesome behaviour is not quite so neatly ‘suppressed’, because it also curiously announces that of Amile later in the text. Indeed, just as Amile will substitute himself for Ami when lying beside the latter’s wife,

4

See Gilbert 2019 for a reconsideration of these issues.

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so too does Belissant pretend to be someone else in the bedroom; feeling a woman beside him, Amile declares that he will not sleep with the ‘fille Charle’ (daughter of Charlemagne, 677) but will happily consort with any woman who is ‘beasse ou chamberiere / De bas paraige’ (low-ranking or a lowly servant, 680–1). As Amile will later trick Lubias, so too Belissant tricks Amile into believing she is someone else, declaring, ‘Par bel engieng voz ai prins et maté’ (by crafty cunning I have tricked and overcome you, 698). If, then, the narrative attempts to ‘suppress’ Belissant’s agency, a more curious entanglement between her ‘counternarrative’ and the ‘dominant narrative’ also seems to be at play, albeit under the surface – or the covers – of this ‘dominant narrative’. No doubt this has gone unnoticed, though, because Belissant does indeed come to exemplify what Kay calls ‘the problematic of the “gift’”, according to which ‘women are both subjects and objects, included within and excluded from the social world of men’ (Political Fictions: 229). For Kay, that is, ‘the gift economy affirms, as well as it conceals, their importance as “persons”’ (162), and Belissant will continue to exercise agency; yet her agency becomes directed toward securing the quasi-sacred status of Ami’s and Amile’s compagnonnage. More precisely, she ‘maintain[s] the clearest perception’ of the text’s ethical stakes, as Kay suggests that female characters often do (189). She is thus the first to recognise that Hardré is ‘felon’ (evil, 419). She also reasons that Amile will emerge victorious over Hardré, because he is fundamentally better (721–2). Belissant explicitly recognises, however, that Hardré’s oath, where he swears that she and Amile have slept together, is entirely accurate (1434–41); yet she nonetheless prays that God will protect Amile (1439–41) and is willing to blame herself for instigating this conflict (1522–7). Much later, upon learning that Amile has sacrificed their children to cure his companion, she is also strikingly willing to second her own interests. Her only regret, apparently, is that she was unable to help her husband pool the blood of their innocent children to cure his leprous friend (§166). Belissant emerges, even, as our principal interpreter of the couple’s actions; the text appears to need her both to articulate the ethical stakes of the protagonists’ behaviours and to offer her approbation (Foehr-Janssens 1996: 270–4). Hellbent on prying the compainz apart, Lubias seems, though, to have the opposite function, illustrating differently how epic women can ‘personify social critique’ (Political Fictions: 230). For example, when Amile, posing as Ami, lies beside her but places his sword between them, she angrily threatens to parade her no-good husband before the bishop (§65). Her words are her weapon, and Lubias is apparently willing to do almost anything with them. Lying beside Amile – whom she believes to be her husband Ami – she will, in fact, falsely accuse Ami’s compainz of having previously attempted to violate her. For Kay, ‘women are excluded from chansons de geste […] not because they cannot



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participate in heroic action, but because they stand in a negative relation to language and hence the text’ (1990: 140). Lubias here stands in a ‘negative relation’ not only to the protagonists’ compagnonnage but also to language’s truth-value more generally. Moreover, because Lubias’s ‘indignation is better founded tha[n] she knows’, as Kay (1990: 138) puts it – because, that is, she is correct that Amile is intimate with her without her consent – she introduces a corrosive irony into the text. This irony may be taken further than Kay takes it. For if Lubias, slandering Amile, appears to be fundamentally right, although dead wrong when it comes to the details of her accusation, this is oddly similar to the heroes’ comportment, as the heroes are depicted as essentially in the right despite having an often dubious relationship with the literal truth. Again, then, under the covers of this text which appears to posit a neat distinction between man and woman, right and wrong, ‘dominant’ and ‘counternarrative’, lies the spectre of their more curious entanglement. Looking beyond the text corroborates this idea that Lubias’s ‘counternarrative’ interacts in convoluted ways with the ‘dominant narrative’, in such a manner as to bring important ethical ambiguities to the fore. The chanson de geste is the only version of the legend where Lubias, in her efforts to rid herself of her leprous husband, drags him before ecclesiastic authorities (§106ff). Her recourse to bishops is consistent with the notion that, ‘by the thirteenth century, the Church was able to exercise real and exclusive jurisdiction over marriage cases throughout western Europe’ (Reid 2006: 116).5 It is also in keeping with canon law’s insistence ‘that married women could initiate separation and divorce actions against their husbands, even though civil law denied them this right’ (Brundage 1987: 411). Lubias is, moreover, confronting the bishops with a timely issue. ‘An initial willingness on the part of the papacy to allow divorces in cases of leprosy’ would, as Carole Rawcliffe (2006: 268) observes, give ‘way to a conviction that marriage was indissoluble, whatever the circumstances’. Determined to make marriage ‘easier to contract and more difficult to dissolve’, Pope Alexander III (d.1181) is the crucial figure in this change (Brundage 1987: 333). In his decretal Pervenit (Richter 1879: ii, 690), he rejects local customs permitting separation in such instances, because husband and wife are one flesh: ‘vir et uxor una caro sint, non debet alter sine altero esse diutius’ (husband and wife are one flesh; the one should not be without the other).6 Our chanson de geste is aware of this injunction: according to it, ‘Maris et fame ce est toute une chars / Ne faillir ne se doivent’ (husband and wife are of one flesh; neither should let the other down; 2117–18).

5 6

For the Church’s jurisdiction, see also Brundage 1987: 319 and Karras 2005: 12. For discussion of this decretal, see Duggan 1998: 78, 86.

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If the text echoes the ecclesiastic line, it nonetheless alludes, like Alexander, to the law’s divergence from received opinion: ‘Droit a ma damme, que mal est mariee’ (my lady is correct, her marriage is a bad one, 2152), say the townsfolk. The chanson de geste also touches on such specific issues as whether Lubias must cohabit or copulate with her diseased husband. These would be hotly debated questions among thirteenth-century canonists, as Charles Reid Jr. (2006: 119–22) has shown. Geoffrey of Trani (d.1245) held, for example, that the parties may ‘be separated, but the healthy spouse should continue to reside in the vicinity’ (as Ami initially does, in a hovel supplied and enforced on him by Lubias). Bernard of Parma (d.1266) agrees, while Hostiensis (d.1271) observes that ‘the healthy spouse might simply be incapable of rendering the debt because of the horror of the disease’ (Reid 2006: 121) – as Lubias appears to be. Even Pope Innocent IV (d.1254) goes somewhat soft when faced with the question of rendering the conjugal debt to a leprous spouse. Perhaps ‘out of kindness (de benignitate) some other arrangement could be tolerated’, he writes (Reid 2006: 121). Lubias is, therefore, evoking a messy problem which, as Reid insists, would become a ‘test case’ for canon law’s emerging conception of marriage. Her behaviours in relation to her leprous husband also introduce important, insidious ironies. It is, for example, striking that the text should insist that ‘maris et fame ce est toute une chars’, as it is rather Ami and Amile who appear to be ‘flesh of one flesh’, as Finn Sinclair puts it (2008: 203). Lubias’s predicament also curiously reflects that of the protagonists. For just as the protagonists will be called upon, by God, to do something horrible, so too does Lubias – for whom her husband is too horrific to look at, much less to touch or sleep with (‘Que nel deingna veoir ne esgarder, / Ne de son cors servir ne honorer’, 2064–65) – find herself before an overly demanding religious injunction. Unlike the male protagonists, she does not rise to the challenge; yet, we might wonder, how could she, in this text so bent on vilifying her? We might even understand the leprosy plaguing Ami as the displacement of the chanson’s representation of Lubias; the text views her, not him, with horror.7 It is, then, because Lubias is horrible that she takes things too far, proclaiming the un-Christian interdiction against aiding her husband. Yet, given the blood bath that the compainz have in store for us, it would be difficult to maintain that taking things to excess is, in the world of this text, necessarily reprehensible. Both looking to canon law and feeling for parallels between the ‘dominant narrative’ and Lubias’s ‘counternarrative’ within the text corroborate, therefore, Kay’s contention that chanson de geste women tap into zones of ethical ambiguity, raising valid – and poignant – criticisms of the ‘dominant 7

For a similar idea, see Pearman 2013: 305 and Grigsby 2004: 95.



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narrative’, which works to deny their voices authority. Yet, while Kay seems to effect a slide between ‘sexual politics’ and ‘gender politics’, the preceding analysis suggests that sexual misdeeds may be as much in the crosshairs of the chanson de geste as gender. The desire to be rid of a leprous spouse is theoretically gender neutral, and men no doubt had more opportunities than women to seek the dissolution of marriage. The remainder of this essay, which continues to look both beyond the text to its contexts and under the covers of the ‘dominant narrative’, will explore a reading of Ami et Amile in which gender and sexual politics are separated. A ‘counternarrative’ about illicit sexual behaviours does spread through this chanson de geste. The text touches on other concerns of ecclesiastic law, notably bigamy. The angel says to Ami, ‘Tu preïz fame au los de tes parans […] / Hui jures autre, Deu en poise forment’ (With your parents’ blessing, you already took a wife […] Today, you promise yourself to another woman, which greatly angers God, 1813, 1815). It is unsurprising that God should be perturbed by bigamy, which was unanimously considered ‘unlawful and immoral’ by canonists (Brundage 1987: 407).8 Interestingly, though, the law admits one exception: ‘when the practice was permitted by divine inspiration’ (Brundage 1987: 407). As the chanson de geste does not attempt to avail itself of this loophole, it seems to be taking a rather inflexible position by affirming divine disapproval – especially since it is not certain that Ami does indeed commit bigamy. The text appears careful to have Ami and Belissant only promise to marry in the future: Belissant swears, ‘Que je panrai Amile le baron’ (that I will take the baron Amile, 1837), while Ami, who has tried to promise that she ‘will be taken’ by an indefinite agent, ‘n’ose desdire’ (dares not refuse, 1799) Charlemagne’s insistence that, ‘Ainz la panréz, frans chevaliers nobile’ (No, you will take her, frank, noble knight, 1798). As Brundage (1987: 268–9) observes, ‘consent in the present tense was almost universally accepted by canonists after the late 1180s as the critical test of whether a marriage existed’. If Ami and Belissant exchange consent in verba de futuro (in the future tense, rather than the present), their engagement could, therefore, later be broken off – according to virtually any canonist. Kay considers Ami et Amile in relation to Georges Duby’s ‘two models’ of medieval marriage: a ‘feudal model’, whereby women are gifted, and a ‘clerical’ one, which, ‘deriv[ing] its support from commentaries on Biblical antitypes (Eve, Delilah), invests women, or more specifically female sexuality, with malign agency’ (1990: 131). While Political Fictions develops the ambiguity inherent to the ‘feudal model’, I am stressing that of the ‘clerical’ one, to which this ‘counternarrative’ about illicit sexual behaviours lends 8

For debate about why the angel punishes Ami, see e.g. Mickel 1985: 24.

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itself. Ami et Amile and canon law seem, in fact, to conceive of sexuality in broadly similar ways. Both adopt a ‘dim view of the role of sex in human life’ (Brundage 1987: 260); yet both seem drawn to deviant sexual mores. Both elect, moreover, to attempt to rein in the havoc sex wreaks, by casting all sexual behaviours as harbouring danger and thus as potentially deviant. Such a conception of desire resonates intriguingly with Leo Bersani’s work in queer theory. Bersani famously begins his 1987 ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ by claiming that, ‘There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it’ (2010: 3). In this essay as elsewhere, Bersani explores how sex ‘shatters’ the ego, ‘shocking’ and ‘fragmenting’ notions of coherent, stable ‘selfhood’ (1986: 38).9 Normative society then tries to ‘repudiate’ the ‘shattering’ which sex causes, by recasting sexual relations as the potential solution, and not an existential threat, to the instability of the subject: ‘sex as self-hyperbole is perhaps a repression of sex as self-abolition’ (2010: 25). In outlining his argument in ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’, Bersani engages considerably with the work of such anti-pornography feminists as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Dismissive of many aspects of their analysis, Bersani nonetheless posits that, their indictment of sex – their refusal to prettify it, to romanticize it, to maintain that fucking has anything to do with community or love – has had the immensely desirable effect of publicizing, of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable value of sex as – at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects – anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving. (2010: 22)

Ami et Amile seems similarly to view sexuality as ‘anticommunal’; as Kay observes, ‘male community and consensus are’, in chansons de geste, ‘lost, not made, through heterosexual desire’ (Political Fictions: 164). Kay also argues that romances ‘practise a politics of evasion, which seeks to sanitize or disguise the rifts in the social and symbolic order which the chansons de geste exhibit’ (6). Ami et Amile refuses to ‘sanitize’, ‘disguise’, ‘prettify’, or ‘romanticize’ desire. This chanson de geste (like others) may, then, be more about desire than romance tends to be; for unlike the romance gesture of casting desire as a personal and political good, the chanson de geste will not dress up its ‘ineradicable’ negativity. For Ami et Amile and Bersani, desire is a radical threat to order, and there is simply no pretending otherwise. Recourse to Bersani, who stands out among queer theorists for his particular insistence on male homosexuality, may, in turn, encourage us to follow in the footsteps of ‘recent queer scholarship’ on the Middle English romance, which 9 The quoted terms are from Adam Phillips’s discussion of Bersani’s use of ‘shattering’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 93).



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has examined the text’s ‘possible homoerotic undercurrents’ (Pearman 2013: 286).10 Ami et Amile’s gory denouement, in particular, does intersect with key concerns of queer theory. It evokes the spectre of sexual transgression, as Ami seeks a cure for a disease associated with ‘disordered desires’ and ‘impure sexual fantasies’ (Resnick 2012: 118). Queer theory frequently draws attention, moreover, to the ways in which shame and the unsayable haunt ‘disordered desires’ and practices. Ami et Amile also stresses shame and the unsayable; Ami fears, for example, that Amile will consider the angel’s advice, ‘a desverie / Et a oultraige et a moult grant folie’ (to be insane, outrageous, and a very great crime, 2872–3), all terms potentially associated with sexual deviancy in Old French. Were he to kill his children, Amile reflects, ‘Nus n’en porroit le pechié pardonner / Fors Dex’ (no one but God could forgive such a sin, 2931–2). The friends are, then, fully cognisant of the sinfulness of their behaviour; yet they not only persist in this horrible endeavour, but even take things further than their most obvious models do.11 For, faced with analogous scenarios, neither Abraham nor the Emperor Constantine actually kills the innocent children. In the Old Testament, an angel prevents infanticide by suddenly carrying off Abraham’s sword and child (as the Queen remarks in her prayer [1281–2]), while in the hagiographic legend of Pope Sylvester, the leprous Constantine takes pity on the innocent children, repenting before being baptised and cured.12 Our heroes’ sacrifice is, therefore, a clear manifestation of what Kay calls the ‘infanticidal fantasy’ common to chansons de geste, which exposes ‘the father’s ambivalence towards his family’ (Political Fictions: 91). It is tempting to relate it, too, to what Lee Edelman dubs the ‘association between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity’ (2004: 19), an idea to which Bersani’s work lends itself, as both emphasise how queer behaviour upsets normativity’s most fundamental claims. Ami et Amile does, after all, culminate in a grotesque instance of same-sex touching: Or fu Amis en la cuve en parfont, Li cuens Amiles tint le bacin reont, Dou rouge sanc li a froté le front, Les iex, la bouche, les membres qu’el cors sont, Jambes et ventre et le cors contremont, Piés, cuisses, mains, les espaules amont. Dou sanc partout le touche. (3061–7) For a critic who does just this, see Delaney 2004. For these models, and others, see esp. Pichon 1987. For Abraham, see also McCracken 2002. 12 For Sylvester, see also Resnick 2012: 95–6. 10 11

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(Now Ami was deep inside the tub. Count Amile holds the round basin. He rubs red blood on his forehead, eyes, mouth, the members of his body; on his legs and stomach and upper body; his feet, thighs, hands, and shoulders above. Everywhere he touches him with blood.)

This scene may be productively considered alongside Bersani’s work on the deliberately risky sexual practice of barebacking. As the friends fully expect to be executed for killing Amile’s sons (§164), ‘there is’, as in barebacking, ‘no speculation about the possibility of something other than death’ arising from the experience (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 41). And as barebacking debunks the association of sex with life, ‘advertis[ing] the risk of the sexual […] as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self’ and ‘dangerously represent[ing] jouissance as a model of ascesis’ (Bersani 2010: 30), so too do self-dismissal and sacrifice here rub shoulders with an awesome and awful spiritual, emotional, and physical experience. It is worth being more precise about the stakes of this comparison. Compare Ami’s and Amile’s action in the tub to the following description of barebacking between a ‘bug-chaser’ (a man ‘pursu[ing] infection’ with HIV) and a ‘gift-giver’, who ‘is willing to infect’ the former (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 43 for these terms): A horror of heterosexual breeding (Lee Edelman’s recent book, No Future, is already the classic textbook of this horror) becomes the sexual excitement of transmitting or conceiving death instead of life. It is here that we can legitimately speak of barebacking as a manifestation of a sexualized death drive. What could be more ecstatically vertigineux than to participate in […] this suicidal act that is also potentially a murder? More exactly, what could be more fantasmatically explosive for the bug-chaser than to feel the infected gift-giver’s orgasm as an anticipatory shattering of his own biological life and the murder of the ‘baby’ itself by virtue of the fatal properties of the reproductive seed? Violent aggression toward the other not, as Freud would have it, as a deviation of an original drive toward the subject’s own death, but the two ideally, ‘creatively,’ condensed in sexual climax. (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 45)

Reading Ami et Amile alongside Bersani’s powerful prose allows us to perceive a persistent ‘horror of heterosexual’ relations throughout the text, giving way to this ‘ecstatically vertigineux’ (vertiginous) bloodbath, where life and death seem too closely intertwined. The text culminates in this ‘explosive’ instance where the ‘seed’, Amile’s blood, is literally ‘the murder of the “baby” itself’, the young sons whose throats he has cut. In this horrific tub, the two protagonists are ‘condensed’ in a most curious, even ‘creative’, ‘climax’ – which, like barebacking, leaves us ‘horrifyingly intrigued, fascinated, and morally confounded’, but certainly not ‘indifferent’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 111).



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Of course, medieval leprosy and modern HIV are not the same thing, and the confusion between the two can, as Rawcliffe (2006: 19ff) observes, be unhelpful. ‘Illicit or ill-judged sexual activity constituted’, moreover, ‘only one of many explanations for the onset of lepra’ (Rawcliffe 2006: 86). The disease also does not appear to be associated with sexual behaviours between men; according to one anecdote (Resnick 2012: 121), ‘Arnaud of Veniolle was so terrified of contracting leprosy from a woman that he turned instead to sex with a man.’ There is, then, no reason to think that the characters Ami and Amile, despite overlap between the text and key concerns of queer theory, are portrayed as sexually involved, or that the text’s horror is inspired by the spectre of such involvement.13 This does not, however, mitigate the usefulness of considering Ami et Amile alongside Bersani’s thinking. For, similar to the barebackers in whom Bersani is interested, our heroes are compelled to embrace ‘shame and disgust’, ‘overcom[ing]’ these ‘barriers’ which normative society poses (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 48). If, for Bersani, ‘barebacking’s distorted and regressive version of community’ serves ‘as a model of an ultimately unfathomable spirituality, a spirituality at once exalted and unrelievedly somber’, such is undeniably the case here (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 49). The heroes’ shocking behaviour is an ‘exalted’ and ‘sombre’ hymn to their anointed compagnonnage. And it is simultaneously ‘exalted’ and ‘sombre’ because, as in Bersani’s reading of barebacking, it stages the most abject interpenetration of life and death, self and other, bliss and disgust, the shameful and the holy. Ami et Amile may, moreover, be capitalising on the medieval association of leprosy with such radical ambivalence. Medieval conceptions of this debilitating disease do have an uncanny knack for tapping into many of the distinctions which Kay identifies as crucial to the economy of chansons de geste. Kay emphasises, for example, how chansons de geste trouble the opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.14 Similarly, when it comes to leprosy, ‘the lines of demarcation between inner and outer, physical and moral infirmity, shift and remain elusive’, as Irven Resnick (2012: 99) observes. For Kay, chansons de geste nonetheless particularly emphasise the ‘enemy within’, with salvation often coming from without. Leprosy also functions as an ‘enemy within’: a disease inside bodies, which risks infiltrating society. For Kay, chansons de geste disrupt, too, this opposition of ‘individual’ to ‘society’, and leprosy also brings this to the fore. While often thought to be ‘incurred […] because of personal misdeeds’ (Rawcliffe 2006: 53), leprosy is nonetheless routinely cast as a sign of the putridness of the bodily politic.15 See also Pugh 2008: 102. See Leach in this volume (301–13) for discussion of the breaching of inside/outside distinctions in the context of Kay’s Animal Skins. 15 See Rawcliffe 2006: 46, 111. 13 14

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Most crucial, though, is leprosy’s ethical ambivalence. A punishment for individual or group sins, leprosy was, owing in large part to Jerome’s ‘rather free translation of the Book of Isaiah 53:4’ (Rawcliffe 2006: 61), equally associated with the suffering of Christ on the Cross: Christus quasi leprosus. No less an authority than Bernard of Clairvaux ‘argued that the disease should be embraced as a divine gift, pregnant with opportunity’ (Rawcliffe 2006: 55). Leprosy is, therefore, a gift in the deeply ironic and paradoxical way in which Kay and Bersani both employ the term; it is a kiss of life and death. This ‘gift’ could nonetheless be extremely alluring. There were, apparently, proto-bug chasers of sorts: ‘Medieval hagiography reveals many examples of holy men and women who did not simply welcome leprosy as a mark of divine favour, but apparently begged God to inflict it upon them’ (Rawcliffe 2006: 59). For Kay, in chansons de geste, ‘the enemy within’ often ‘succeed in contaminating the world around them’ (Political Fictions: 192). I am suggesting that leprosy – this ferocious ‘enemy within’, this intractably ambivalent ‘gift’ – also contaminates Ami et Amile; for not only does the text refuse to ‘sanitise’ desire, but it also allows the ‘counternarratives’ to interact in risky, unsafe ways with the ‘dominant narrative’. This is apparent in the curious ways whereby the behaviours of the protagonists and antagonists interpenetrate. When the behaviours of the protagonists and the antagonists get too close, this contact risks tainting or defiling the ‘dominant narrative’, as we have seen in the convoluted ways in which the companions’ ‘dominant narrative’ becomes entangled with Belissant’s and Lubias’s ‘counternarratives’. We also see this, perhaps more concretely, in the proliferation of instances where characters allege illness, which spreads throughout the text. Wishing to delay his duel with Hardré, Amile says that he must attend to his wife, ‘Que je laissai si malade avant ier’ (who was so sick when I left two days ago, 954). Amile hurries back to Blaye, ‘Qu’en mon chief sui malades’ (because I have a headache, 1109). He tells Lubias he cannot have sex with her, because, ‘Moi dist uns mires […] Que en mon cors avoie grant frison’ (a physician told me […] that my body was very feverish, 1195–7). When Ami returns, he informs Lubias that he is feeling better, with the phrase ‘les dolors […] Parmi le cors me sont outre corrues’ (the sickness […] has made its way through my system, 1990–1), but symptoms of leprosy appear, as if summoned, immediately thereafter. Like the theme of illness, leprosy’s symptoms also spread most curiously throughout the text. Ami describes his ailments in some detail: ‘Toute la chars m’est de mes cuisses sevree / Desci as os n’en i a point remese’ (All the flesh is gone from my thighs; nothing is left covering the bone, 2587–8). Soon thereafter, the Angel who appears asks him, ‘A mais sor toi membre nes un entier?’ (is any single part of you intact?, 2780). Ami’s symptoms are strangely similar to the wounds he has earlier inflicted on the treacherous Hardré, who complains in their battle: ‘Tout le visaige ai je desfiguré’ (my whole face is



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disfigured, 1620). Charlemagne thereafter orders his flesh to be destroyed: ‘La char Hardré voz convient a destruire / Traïnéz soit par champ et par courture / Tant qu’il n’ait mais robe ne vesteüre’ (You must destroy Hardré’s flesh: drag him through fields and farms until no clothing or cover remains, 1750–2). This description seems to announce Ami’s plight, as he is carried, diseased and decrepit, through Europe on a ‘charrette’ (cart). Throughout Ami et Amile, the ‘dominant narrative’ and ‘counternarratives’ seem, then, to be getting too close; they come together in confusing – and risky – ways. No doubt this speaks, at one level, to the text’s fascination with what Kay calls ‘monstrous doubles’ (Political Fictions: 156–67): most obviously, the leprous Ami in relation to Amile, but also, as we have seen, Lubias in relation to Belissant or Lubias and Hardré in relation to our heroes.16 Yet, while Ami et Amile has been influentially read as attempting to quash difference – by remoulding the ‘monstrous double’ into the valiant compainz and by ‘suppressing’ female agency – I am advocating an opposite reading. For the text seems not only to invite us to embrace the leprous ‘monstrous double’ that is Ami (literally meaning ‘friend’) in all its horror, but also to extend that action to these other ‘un-epic figures’. Lubias complains that Ami ‘wishes […] that everyone were leprous like him’ (Il voldroit or […] que touz li mons fust meziaus avec soi’, 2359–60), and this chanson de geste does encourage us to witness how the ‘dominant narrative’ risks getting too close to – or dangerously intimate with – the ‘monstrous double’ and other ‘un-epic figures’. But why, we might ask, would this be? Bersani, as we have seen, understands desire as in opposition to coherence (whether of the subject or of the body politic). This suggests an alternative way of conceiving of the relations between ‘dominant narrative’ and ‘counternarratives’ in chansons de geste such as Ami et Amile. For while Kay analyses the relations between the ‘dominant narrative’ and ‘counternarratives’ in terms of structural necessity or anthropological logic, the ‘dominant narrative’ also seems attracted to ‘counternarratives’, in keeping with Bersani’s understanding of desire, which precisely opposes desire to either utility or coherence – indeed, which makes a mockery of order and normative notions of belonging. In this sense, desire serves both as a ‘counternarrative’ and as a framework for conceiving of the interactions between the ‘dominant narrative’ and ‘counternarratives’ in Ami et Amile. Yet, shifting the focus from women to desire comports a significant risk: that of erasing women. By way of conclusion, I would, though, insist that not only did Kay’s feminist work provide the departure point for my queer 16

For comparison of the female characters, see Foehr-Janssens 1996.

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reading, but this reading can and should return us to women. For if Ami et Amile is about the pleasure of embracing the ‘monstrous double’, and women figure prominently as ‘monstrous doubles’, then – almost paradoxically – the queerest reading is that which largely (though not exclusively) focuses on heterosexual relations in the text. This chanson de geste invites us, in a manner, to ‘quee[r] straight sex’ by attending to the ‘anticommunal’ nature of desire, and foremost of heterosexual desire.17 I am not claiming that this gesture sits perfectly with more explicitly feminist concerns.18 I would, though, insist that in this text, relations between men and women line up with crucial concerns of various queer theorists in ways that would be obscured or foreclosed by an exclusive focus on same-sex behaviours. Phillips asks of Bersani’s particular conception of Eros, ‘does the love relation need to be same sex?’ (Bersani and Phillips 2008: 106). This chanson de geste, despite – or maybe because – it seems so focused on male compagnonnage, suggests that it absolutely does not have to be. It is not gay desire which represents a threat to heteronormativity, but desire which is threatening to normativity: which disfigures, which horrifies – and for which there is no antidote which is not at least as disturbing as the disease ever was.

17 18

This is the title of a chapter in Sullivan 2003: 118–35. See Bersani 2010: 41, for brief remarks on this subject.

• Feminism-plus: • Sarah Kay’s The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions and the ‘Roman de’ Waldef Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

T

he centrality of feminism to Sarah Kay’s work is relatively uncommented on, partly because Kay’s feminism is conceptualised and practised in lithe and complex ways that are always already intersectional (as we now say) with so much else. Her 1995 Political Fictions combines feminist critique with rethinking the genre of the chanson de geste and genre history: it disrupts the literary genealogy whereby women, courtly love, and twelfth-century modernity come to influence and ultimately to replace with romance the chanson de geste’s epic gravitas and privileged access to an orally transmitted heroic masculine and historical past. Demonstrating that the majority of the chansons are contemporary with romances over the period from c.1160 to c.1240, Kay uses Fredric Jameson’s (1981) notion of the political unconscious to argue for chanson de geste and romance as ‘political fictions’, both working with particular assumptions about what can and cannot be represented. Moreover, the genres relate to each other dialectically: the conflicts exposed by chansons de geste are repressed or disguised in romance, while romance similarly offers clues to the political unconscious of the chansons. It is not, Kay concludes, that the chansons de geste have undergone ‘romance influence’, but that their critics have. In fact, the modern ‘literary object’ (on which see Courtly Contradictions) derives from medieval romance, with its preferences for complex relations between words and things, single narratorial lines or foci, and ‘the individual’: what Kay terms ‘the poetics of the commodity’, in contrast to the chanson de geste’s ‘poetics of the gift’. It seems worth concentrating here on feminism(-plus) both for its key role in Political Fictions’ extensive rethinking of literary history and because of the continuing pertinence of Kay’s account of women in the chansons de geste to where we are now. Arguing that romance representation of women as objects of erotic interest is not acceptable as the acme of women’s aspiration, 85

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Kay dispenses with the teleological history that makes romance a progression from epic: ‘the forms that sexism and patriarchy take are redefined in every new political mentality’, making it impossible ‘to discount them by relegating them to the primitive past’.1 Her arguments anticipate much subsequent analysis of women’s agency, and remain live: they receive, for instance, vivid confirmation in Joan Wallach Scott’s recent work on ‘The Persistence of Gender Inequality’ (Scott 2018, 2011). Given that, as Kay argued in 1995, reifications of gender are reinvented and made foundational whenever a particular politics requires them, it should be unsurprising that they are with us now.2 Women remain the majority minority on the planet and rereading the medieval with Kay’s help is important in peeling away the pernicious and ridiculously self-flattering contemporary standpoint from which the Middle Ages is so often identified as the emblematic era of misogyny, enabling our own (White, Western) society to be constructed contrastively as a progressive era for women. Such a standpoint offers a hierarchised way of perceiving Political Fictions: 14. Henceforth referenced by page number in the text. While thinking about this essay, I was working at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, and Kay’s book joined for me with hearing Joan Wallach Scott speak there (lecture on ‘Gender and Politics’, 28 November 2018, Central European University). It was near the end of the long, tortured process whereby Hungary’s Premier Orbán forced the CEU’s American-affiliated degrees out of Hungary, and shortly after he had banned gender and refugee studies throughout the country. Scott, an emerita professor of social science at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, joined CEU students’ protest pop-up classes in tents on Kossuth Square outside Parliament. There, in freezing November weather, she dauntlessly lectured on the persistence of gender inequality and, in terms similar to Kay’s, on its use in political regimes. Orbán has subsequently announced tax concessions for Hungarian women who have four children. His actions suggest how treating gender as illicit (because supposedly superfluous to biologically fixed categories of male and female) leads, among other consequences, to the privatisation and domestication of women. The tax concessions are not a measure immediately to rectify the immigrant ban that has cut down Orbán’s cheap labour pools for German car manufacturers and prompted his law that workers can be asked to do four hundred hours’ overtime a year, to be paid for over the following three years. However, they help maintain nationalist fervour and will perhaps mitigate the unpalatable effects of this new so-called ‘slave’ overtime law for Hungarian workers. The fact that the tax concessions for women offer no immediate solution to the labour crisis is itself an indication of the ideological importance attached to the domestication and control of women in modern populist movements. At the end of the CEU semester, I returned from Budapest to the US, where White women overall earn 81.5% and Black and Hispanic women around 60–65% of the White male dollar (see e.g. Hegewisch and Hartman 2019 (https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-2018, accessed 12 January 2020). Hegewisch and Hartman project that women’s (i.e. majority White) parity with men’s earnings will not be achieved before 2059, with the still more distant dates of 2119 for Black and 2224 for Hispanic women’s median annual earnings). A war on women’s autonomy over their bodies also currently rages in the US. 1 2



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the rest of the world that is as invidious as – and intimately entwined with – the hierarchies of race and class. Among much else, Kay’s work offers appropriately complex political and cultural models of agency and narrative representation together with attention to gender’s mobility of deployment and its relation with genre. The vitality of feminist hermeneutics at the moment of her book and its continuing importance now is demonstrated as Kay pursues ‘a feminist criticism’ of the chanson de geste, ‘needed to show the importance of epic women as persons, as political actors, and as articulators of narrative, and not only objects of oppression or desire’ (Political Fictions: 15). Gender and the Gift ‘The Problem with Women: Price or Gift?’, the opening chapter of Political Fictions, uses the figure of the Saracen princess found in some twenty chansons de geste as a way of unlocking the politics of epic and genre history. Twentiethcentury critics, Kay argues, assign la bele Sarrasine a romance value in order to make a distinction between individual sentiment and political collectivity. The Saracen princess always brings romance to the heart of epic: she signals individual and amorous adventure rather than political or religious ‘aventure collective’ (collective adventure, Combarieu du Grès 1979: 183). Here, comments Kay, ‘“L’aventure collective” presumably refers to the usual epic menu of battle and council scenes and means “all-male”, while “amoureux” means “involving women”, whose presence apparently makes an episode less “collectif”.’ She adds: ‘This extraordinary formulation, whereby if you add women to men you get individuals and if you take them away you get society, is characteristic of commentaries on the Saracen princess narrative’ (32). In her counter-argument, Kay looks at what the princesses do: bring vast estates under Christian control, sometimes assume military leadership, pursue the defeat of the Saracens, and the killing of their leaders. Since these are often necessary steps to the princess’s rescue of the Christian hero of her choice from prison, followed by his marriage to her, taking a romance view, Kay points out, would show that it is the hero who is the damsel in distress (33). The argument continues with an important consideration of gender and the gift. Gender in the chansons de geste, Kay argues, is always a predicate ‘that can be attached to persons or actions without defining or categorizing them’; it can be ‘contingent and provisional’ (35). The chansons de geste can and do take sexual difference as fundamental and they also (sometimes in the same text) subordinate it to the category of the person, thus on the one hand licensing ‘the misogyny to which they often give expression’ in the many anti-female outbursts of characters and narrators, and on the other representing female characters as persons, who, like male characters, are ‘the site of an ethically informed will’ (35–6). These considerations collide and intersect in the fact

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that women are given between men. Kay uses the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s dialectic of ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ to look at the politics of gift exchange, emphasising that while ‘interest in commodities [is experienced] as a desire to appropriate goods, […] in a gift-oriented economy, the desire is to expand social relations’ (39; Strathern 1988: 143). If, through largesse, ‘the giver both empowers and constrains the recipient, who receives wealth, but also finds himself within the frame of a new relationship’, then women make ‘perfect presents’ because ‘they increase the resources of the household while continuing to represent within it the donor family from which they came’ (40). Kay’s ‘poetics of the gift’ uses gender as a means for grasping the dynamism whereby gifts are objects of exchange and yet exert constraint on the participants to the exchange. Concern with the representation of women is thereby widened to the entire configuration of gift exchange and becomes a contingent political and aesthetic matter. The gender of the gift is, Kay concludes, ultimately shorthand for ‘the ineluctable ambiguity of ethical and political interaction’ (42). Her Saracen princesses, and the chanson de geste genre which features them, open up matters of agency and gendered action as fluid, transferable, and multiple: these are gifts that characteristically give themselves in pursuit of their own desires. They open the way conceptually for considering women and other people or things as gifts that do not necessarily want to be given, gifts that carry with them the imprint of the politics of their exchange and of other possibilities. Women thus become a source of narrative plurality and alternative stories (‘counternarratives’) within the chansons de geste. This plurality includes many potential intersections of racism and sexism: Saracen princess are figures who can be designated both as subaltern (they become ‘Western’ and Christian in the end) and as exotic, precious others (who perform many services, especially enrichment and ideological confirmation, for their appropriators). Older views of Saracen princesses as infiltrators of romance in epic can see them as instrumentally necessary for the heroic antique masculine epic to think ‘women’, and for militarised Western cultures to deal with ‘the East’. But Kay’s Saracen princesses open up chanson de geste as a genre, and genre as a political form, and viewed thus, the Saracen princesses become not an exotic infiltration of good bad-girls moving epic towards romance, but (among other possibilities) a model for registering the volition and agency of female characters across a range of narrative genres – epic, romance, historiography, and hagiography. Indeed, this fully political model of gift exchange is valuable for considering the agency and representation of almost any marriageable woman in almost any genre of European medieval text. In hagiography, for instance, virgin martyr saints give themselves as brides to Christ and are also coveted gifts, their relics donated to monastic households, and themselves powerful patrons of the houses to which they are



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given. In cases where virgin martyrs are acquired through holy relic thefts (furta sacra), this is always understood as an expression of the saint’s will: if she had not wanted her new abode, it would not have been possible to move her there. Such reasoning, literally applied, can look like a rationale for the abuse of women (‘she must have wanted it or she would have resisted more strongly’), but in context opens up the question of the desires and powers of the gift herself.3 These are often powerfully articulated in the virgin martyr’s determination to exchange a pagan father or fiancé for Christ and his family. Gender and Genre, Time, and Place In this essay I will try to extend the poetics of the gift and some of the related questions of genre and gender to Waldef, an insular verse narrative of some 22,000 lines, composed c.1190–c.1210, and thus contemporary with the central part of Kay’s corpus of chansons de geste and romances, c.1160– c.1240.4 Set principally among the minor kingdoms of East Anglia after the departure of the Romans, Waldef recounts the career of an eponymous supposed king of Norfolk, his allegiances and wars with other sub-kingdoms, and the lives of his sons Guiac and Gudlac, whose trajectories embrace Morocco and the German Empire. One factor making Waldef pertinent for the present discussion is the way it complicates genre: the poem is usually called (without manuscript warrant) a romance, but also looks like chanson de geste and sometimes like historiography. Simon Gaunt builds on Political Fictions’ dismantling of genre assumptions to argue that we might think of texts not as generically hybrid (a model that presupposes an anterior purity for their constituent elements) but as chameleon, changed by their varying contexts, including their manuscript and varying regional receptions (Gaunt 2013a). Waldef is extant in only one manuscript, but exhibits chameleon capacity in its textual career.5 Formally, too, Waldef resists our older genre models. It Wogan-Browne 2001: 67–90 (work much indebted to Kay’s Political Fictions). Waldef (Holden 1984, cited by line number in the text) is mostly known through valuable pioneering articles by Rosalind Field (2000) and Judith Weiss (2002): for their more recent work, see Further Reading in the first modern translation of Waldef (trans. Djordjević, Clifton, and Weiss, 2020). 5 The French text survives only in Coligny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 168, fols 1r–133v: https://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/fmb/cb-0168/133v/0/Sequence-887. It is not titled ‘Roman’ in the manuscript, where it is followed by Gui de Warewic (an insular romance) and Otinel (an Anglo-Norman version of a chanson de geste). Busby (2002: 500) argues that by the mid-thirteenth century the Anglo-Norman literary public made no codicological distinction between romance and epic. Waldef’s material is understood as historiographical in the early fifteenth-century Latin prose translation (from French and [lost] English texts) by Johannes Bramis, a Benedictine monk of Thetford Priory, Norfolk (see e.g. Imelmann 1912: 3), extant in 3 4

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is composed in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, not the assonanced laisses regarded (for all their widespread use across many genres in continental and insular French) as a determining characteristic of chanson de geste viewed as a French national form. However, form and style are less rigid markers of genre across borders than was previously thought.6 Place and regional tradition may affect form and style (Short 2007: 350–61), and, given the complicatedly different but overlapping histories of insular and continental prosody, verse form may be a less stable genre marker in one place than in another (Wogan-Browne, Fenster, and Russell 2018: 414–29). Thematically, Waldef is a notable variant of the ‘rebel baron’ tradition identified by Luke Sunderland as a rival discourse to sovereignty – a discourse informing fluid, transregional, and diachronic developments of chanson de geste (Sunderland 2017). Baronial perspectives are important in various ways in insular romances (Crane 1986), but Waldef’s male protagonists are regional kings: a baronial assembly in post-Roman England rejects external rule as a model and divides the country into individually sovereign counties (lines 261– 72). Yet, since it is also agreed to endow the king of London and Winchester with the right to summon other kings to his feasts and fights, the other kings’ position is quasi-baronial (lines 277–98). This makes Waldef at once a text appropriate for the decade or so preceding Magna Carta (1215) and, as also in the poem’s trajectory from post-Roman England to the German Empire, an exploration of the logic of conquest and power from the local to the imperial scale. Waldef is also a detailed account of elite lineage strategies and dilemmas, and many of its motifs can be found both in texts we call romances and in those we call chansons de geste. Its range of Saracens, for instance, include, in England, invading pagans (‘d’Eskanie’ [?] Sweden, line 4283); in the German Empire, ideological enemies who are ‘pute gent Apolin’ (foul worshippers of Apollo, line 11,736); and in family romance, kidnappers of Waldef’s queen and two sons who trade them and gift them in exotic locations, in a mercantile shadow discourse of aristocratic lineal and dynastic arrangements. Unlike most romances, Waldef becomes increasingly bleak. Waldef himself is eventually cut down in the streets of Rochester, fighting a coalition of his enemies in the absence abroad of his sons. Hearing of this death and

a manuscript (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 329) of local chronicles. 6 Kay herself sees the insular ‘romance’ Boeve de Haumtone as a chanson de geste, for all its unusually short laisses and brief overall length (Political Fictions: 8 n. 8; Ailes 2008). Marianne Ailes argues that texts such as Boeve, the ‘Roman’ de Horn, and Fierabras are not hybrids of insular and continental forms but a regional development of the chanson de geste (Ailes 2006; Ailes and Hardman 2017: 32–109). One chanson de geste, Gormant et Isambart, is extant in an insular fragment that presents it in octosyllables arranged in laisses, some interspersed with a rhyming quatrain refrain (Dean with Boulton, no. 80; Bayot 1931).



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the loss of Waldef’s conquests, Waldef’s older son, Guiac, who has become the German Emperor after much slaughter, drops his ambition to become a second Alexander the Great (‘celi qui tant fist sanc espandre’, he who caused so much bloodshed, line 15538). Citing his devastation of cities and regions and his responsibility for the violent deeds inevitably done by men serving in his battles, Guiac abandons the imperial crown and exiles himself as a pilgrim (lines 21529–88). But he charges his brother, Gudlac, with vengeance for their family (lines 21855–76). Waldef’s conquests within England are now all refought by Gudlac, making the initial violence of their acquisition even more pointless and excessive. Ultimate futility in the energy with which Waldef and his sons pursue conquest remains largely unconverted into Christian penitential value: Guiac walks barefoot away from conquest as a pilgrim, but does so amid his brother’s and his court’s dismayed and prolonged expressions of the indispensability of a militarily successful leader (lines 21597–22160). From the narrative’s comment on Waldef’s father, King Bede, ‘Perdre covent e gaangnier / Qui en gerre voldra ester’ (whoever wants to wage war must expect both to win and to lose, lines 1579–80) to Waldef’s own lonely death (lines 21339–69), the necessity and the costs of maintaining and pursuing power are increasingly clear (Weiss 2013: 549–53). A system dependent on constant expansion by conquest is shown to be tragically unstable, no matter how many intelligent attempts at negotiation and confederation are made. Waldef’s focus on war, scenes of council, the making and breaking of allegiances, and acts of vengeance is complicated and sometimes interrogated by the women in the text. There are no Saracen princesses, but Kay’s treatment of that figure can alert us to women’s participation here: her poetics of the gift offers a way of grasping the full political world of Waldef. It is not just that women in Waldef, as I shall argue, exercise various kinds of agency, but that their presence elicits the full complexity of sociopolitical life. This is explicitly and remarkably shown in Waldef’s initial staging of an attempt to structure political life on the exclusion of women. To test Lord Gimund as a potential counsellor, Waldef’s father, King Bede of Norfolk, commands him to present his best friend, his jester, and his enemy at court. Gimund presents his dog as his friend, his infant son as a source of greater delight and amusement than any jester, and his wife as his enemy who, if he punishes or strikes her, will betray his secrets (lines 1787–1808). The furious wife now reveals that Gimund has been secretly looking after his father in his cellar, regardless of Bede’s law banishing all old men from his straitened kingdom. She thus provides material for a long misogynistic speech by King Bede on women’s untrustworthiness and manipulativeness (lines 1925–2100). In fact, the wife has been set up, if anyone has: Gimund’s father had counselled the presentation of the dog, the

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infant, and the wife in their roles of friend, jester, and enemy. The narrative underlines the inadequacy of misogynist cliché by breaking off to warn against blaming women as a group and to praise the narrator’s own lady (lines 1853–68). Bede now appoints Gimund’s father as his own counsellor and revokes the expulsion of the kingdom’s old men. In the humiliation of Gimund’s (unnamed) wife, Bede stages the banishment of women from public life and attempts to construct a lineage of male–male counsel based on ‘knowledge’ of the wiles of women (though it will be Bede’s steward who usurps his throne and nearly murders his son, Waldef). The wife’s humiliation and the extended recitation of misogynist clichés is continuous with Bede’s mis-valuation of women and allegiances in political life. He has previously had temporarily to flee his kingdom for Normandy, having failed to maintain his subjects with gifts or to cultivate external allies. He helps Duke Morgan of Normandy in Morgan’s own wars, but neglects to make official alliances with him, refusing land, and eloping with the Duke’s sister (thereby potentially forfeiting the value of negotiated alliance that is a standard driver of elite medieval marriage). Bede’s linear patriarchal vision ignores the lateral functions fulfilled by links and allegiances in which women represent a natal family lineage while adopting a marital one. His scene of performative misogynist citation is in the service of a dysfunctionally homosocial model of kingdom-building founded on fear of women and foreigners and the restriction of human alliances and resources. Waldef draws the friend, jester, enemy story from Dolopathos, a version of the Seven Sages wisdom tradition (Hilka 1913, Leclanche 1997), but, with typical genre fluidity, gives it a remarkable new context and function. The exemplum becomes part of an initial analysis of political dysfunction before the text narrates Waldef’s own career and the vicissitudes of his more politically adept but still vulnerable commitment to war and conquest. Like the Saracen princesses (and like some Anglo-Norman romance heroines, Weiss 1991), some women in Waldef express their own desires before or in the absence of any match planned by men. When she sees him at a feast, Waldef’s mother, Ereburc, sister of Duke Morgan of Normandy, identifies Waldef’s father, King Bede of Norfolk, as what she wants. ‘Deus, tant sunt Engleis beles genz’ (God, how fair the English people are! line 1044), she muses. When dinner passes without Bede making a move, she crossly soliloquises about the breeding of the English: big brave hunks who are too passive, they should not leave their country and go abroad if they do not know how to talk to people (lines 1071–82). She willingly elopes with Bede to their subsequent marriage in England, a self-giving gift. Even in more conventional arrangements, women’s power to be given – or not – is assumed, and it illuminates and drives the expansion of social relations. Waldef’s own queen is Ernild, daughter and sole heir of Erkenwald,



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king of Lincoln. She is one of several women in the poem who refuse proposed matches, in Ernild’s case with the king of London and also with King Osmund of Oxford. Her wishes are repeated and confirmed by her father. This of course underlines both the supreme fitness of Waldef, the latest aspirant, to win Ernild and the value for Erkenwald of allying with Waldef, his Norfolk neighbour, but the assumption that women’s reluctance is a factor of potential political value is noteworthy. Erkenwald uses it to keep ‘tyrannical’ King Uther of London at bay, informing him that Osmund and Waldef are already due to fight for Ernild (lines 3650–73). Once wounded in the combat, however, Osmund, before he has to lose more blood for her sake, asks Ernild whom she prefers. When her answer is Waldef, Osmund does not so much give up Ernild to Waldef as Waldef to Ernild: Si avant tant dit m’eüsiez Ces plaies n’eüsse encontré Ne en batalie fusse entré; Quant Waldef plus de moi amez, E vus de moi quite l’aez. (lines 3836–40) (If you’d told me before, I would not have received all these wounds, or undertaken the battle. Since you love Waldef more than me, have him freely, as far as I am concerned.)

Osmund subsequently explains to Waldef that ‘de ma part quite l’aez’ (for my own part, you may freely have her, line 3846), and in exchange converts his rivalry into alliance with Waldef against Uther. His explanation that ‘Ernild la bele avoir devez / Car mult bien deservi l’aez’ (You must have the beautiful Ernild for you have greatly deserved her, lines 3843–44) underlines both the bonding nature of male rivalry and the redundancy of much of the violence with which political life is conducted in the masculine. But far from making Ernild simply a token between the two men, this revolving exchange of positions suggests that Ernild’s preference is an alternative, equally powerful sorting mechanism. Osmund could have asked her first. There is a wide spectrum of represented gift-exchange in the poem. While we never, for instance, see or hear, let alone imagine the volition of Earl Harding’s bride (who functions as a mere switching-point in dispossessing one of Waldef’s retainers for another, lines 5275–314), the soliloquies of women like Waldef’s mother, Ereburc (as also Ykenild, Waldef’s daughter-inlaw, lines 13268–86), suggest that a more centre-stage treatment of exchange includes women’s wishes. In elaborated cases such as Ereburc’s, the women’s desire for outsiders and foreigners signals their capacity for the exogamous exchanges so vital to the broadening of allegiances.

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Expressions of female choice may of course be seen as an ultimately ironic cover for the narrator’s determination for his protagonists to achieve sexual and/or patriarchal as well as military victory over opponents. Kay considers this in discussing the subject status of the Saracen princess of epic: she asks whether Saracen princesses, ‘complicitous with male Frankish interest’, may not be ‘a mystification of the Christian conquerors’ claims to the spoils of war? And are they not then still confined to the role of gift, but one given by the narrator to his hero?’ (Political Fictions: 45). In reply, she argues that Saracen princesses participate in narration and have some control over the future in their use of prophecy, and so exercise authority at the level of the telling. They are also often doubles for the narrator (usually cast in chansons de geste as a participant in a tradition rather than the creator of a fictive world) as he negotiates the discrepancies and accumulations of chanson de geste materials. Chansons de geste speak through a wide range of (often dissenting) characters, not just a single focal viewpoint (45–6): this is Kay’s ‘poetics of the gift’. At the level of the telling, Waldef’s narrator represents himself as contesting narrative control with the most powerful woman in the text’s diegesis, its commissioner and destinatrix. In the prologue, this is a literate, francophone, and anonymous amie for whom the narrator has agreed to translate English stories across time and languages, and whose name he will reveal together with his own if he can ‘le livere […] parfere’ (complete […] the book, line 89).7 Later, at the point where Waldef’s queen, Ernild, is left lamenting on the unknown shore to which a Saracen shipwreck has brought her while Waldef searches for her, the narrator reports that he dare not speak further about Waldef: his lady wishes that he ‘m’en repos’ (take a break from writing, line 7144). She, it seems, is either less engaged by Waldef than her narrator or wants to move to the next generation. The patron’s staged intervention precedes a scene in which Waldef offers a notable defence of women after he has rescued the calumniated queen of Poitou from burning at the stake. He warns the King of Poitou that he should not punish women without ascertaining guilt: N’est nule femme en icest mund De tutes celes qui i sunt, Qu’a tuz hummes purra pleisir Ne a tuz fere sun pleisir, Qu’aucune foiz ne mesprendroit, Que a tuz pleisir deveroit. […]

7

On Waldef’s prologue see Bainton 2018.



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S’ele est cortoise e enseingnié U ele est juefne e envoisé, Quant a la gent s’envoisera, Alcon humme qui ço verra Asés tost il le quideroit Que pur folie le feroit; Si envoisiee la veez Ja pur ceo meins ne la creez, Ele fera tel s’envoiseure De qui pur voir ele n’a cure (lines 8077–82, 8093–102). (Of all the women in this world, there’s not one who could please all men without ever making a mistake through trying to please everyone […]. If she’s polite and well brought up, or if she’s young and vivacious, some men who see her being cheerful and friendly with people might readily think that she acts that way out of wantonness. Do not trust her any the less if you see her making merry: she’ll behave cheerfully to someone without actually caring for them.)

Waldef’s defence can be weighed against the misogynistic exclusion of women from political life staged by his father, Bede. The rebuke to the King of Poitou (lines 8071–108) comes, as noted above, as part of the narrative following the reminder of the patron and the expression of her desires for the work (lines 7141–48), and is thus analogous to the narrator’s dissent and reference to his lady (lines 1853–68) in the Bede sequence. In rescuing the queen of Poitou from the stake, Waldef reasserts the value of men’s service to women, while his defence of the queen acknowledges the social pressures that make women vulnerable to harassment and sexual slurs. The various ways in which women are represented as commenting in and on the narrative are underwritten here by the recognition that, given patriarchy’s insecurities, women’s required social duty of amiability can make them irrationally distrusted as well as valued. The women of Waldef do not use prophecy, but they can read and intervene in the oncoming course of events. Most spectacularly, Ernild, Waldef’s queen, urged by an angelic vision, runs into the fight (‘el champ se lança’, line 14453) between the unwitting Waldef and his older son, Guiac (who, together with his brother, is trying to recover their inheritance in England). Standing between them, Ernild asks Waldef the key question, ‘Vulez vus vostre fiz occire?’ (Do you want to kill your son? line 14462). She thus simultaneously voices and regulates patriarchy’s conflicted desire. She also draws on all the intercessory power of the Virgin in the heavenly patriarchy when she tells Guiac that he is their lost son, restored by a God ‘qui est e pere e fiz’ (who is both father

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and son, line 14493), bares her breasts, and brings Guiac to the recognition that she is his mother, and Waldef his father (lines 14485–507). The sons now kneel to Waldef, asking forgiveness for making war on him, while Waldef rejoices that they will have his castles, cities, lands, and fiefs after him (in fact the sons subsequently refuse to remain in England, departing for a career of conquest of their own). This patriarchal scene is produced and conducted by Ernild through her insistence on the specific realities of giving birth to and nurturing a particular child and her instantiation of women’s roles as custodians of family memory and genealogy. By the end of the narrative, the validity of Ernild’s action has been more strongly underlined than ever: death, heirlessness, political devastation, and the ending of lineages prevail where reconciliation and coexistence would be better. As well as representing a presiding female patron as germane to its own existence, Waldef accepts women’s socio-political importance as landholders, patrons and gift-givers within its narrative (see e.g. the narrative of Bede’s sister Odenild and her son Florenz, esp. lines 421–784, 2337–42, 8959–9222). Fergus of London makes his daughter his heir and gives her seisin of his property (line 20860): the German emperor is inconsolable after losing his female heir (lines 19653–670). Women are included in Waldef’s background assumptions, as well as in foregrounded gift exchange: their cultural patronage, political participation, and the significance of the maternal line in genealogies and allegiances are built in from the beginning. A further level of women’s textual participation is the medieval female reading public for such narratives: a frequent topos in insular writing of this period is the need to woo women readers away from chanson de geste to other reading (Wogan-Browne, Fenster, Russell 2018, 130, lines 21–36, 133, lines 7–10 n.). The principal evidence for Waldef’s female readers, like chanson de geste materials themselves, extends much later than its composition: there are four early modern women’s signatures in Waldef’s manuscript, including that of Jane Grey, a probable attendant of Edward IV’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville, and her daughters (Djordjević, Clifton, and Weiss, ‘Introduction’). In the early 1990s, Waldef’s conventions and assumptions might well have been taken as simply relegatory, proof of the unimportance of women, rather than as showing the indispensable and normative quality of women’s contributions to the socio-political fabric. Kay’s feminist critique and the models of genre and gender with which she imbricates it in Political Fictions, however, continue to give us more complex ways of seeing representations of women and political cultures across a transregional and generic range in high-medieval narrative. She thus enables romance, epic, and other narrative types to be explored with greater sensitivity to context and to apparent or real anomalies. But, as earlier suggested, there are also longer-term implications to Kay’s argument, especially as it concerns women as actors in narrative and



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the political necessity of feminist critique. Her poetics of the gift remains a valuable model in part because questions of agency and gender themselves continue to need reconsideration and retheorisation. Feminism and Our Political Fictions Work over the twenty-five years since Political Fictions appeared in 1995 has continued to produce such extraordinary amounts of new knowledge about medieval women as political and cultural actors that the historical consciousness of critics may, or at least ought to, have changed over this time. New histories of medieval women’s individual and collective political and cultural activities continue to appear, and our understanding of structures assumed to be foundational and hegemonic in European socio-political systems continues to be modified by new work. To take just one example: although patrilineal inheritance systems have typically been studied as a norm, recent work reveals much more flexible systems of agnatic and cognatic inheritance: Medieval women’s claims to land and power were more mobile and less standardised than men’s, as they shifted between families and locations for marriage and inherited mainly when a male heir was lacking. Likewise, the legacies female characters transmit in literature are often less static and tangible – such as spiritual authority, learning, public positions, ancient land rights, motherhood, and charisma. (Bérat 2017: 10)

So too, the assumption that patriarchal systems are the norm in Western history is further dislodged in a recent demonstration (McDougall 2017) that the status of the mother is usually the critical question, more so than the legitimacy of the child (as is the case with Waldef’s Odenild and Florenz). It is disappointing, in the light of this new knowledge, how few current histories and reassessments of feminism look at the pre-1500 period. This is usually not a matter of concern about historically negotiating the term ‘feminism’ (though that position is sometimes invoked). It is rather an absence in works still bound by romance influence, by the Renaissancecentred periodisation of much literary study, and by the construction of the Middle Ages as a pre-feminist era, which secures a ‘primitive past’ than which ‘we’ are better.8 No doubt partly because of the sheer mass of data on women since second-wave feminism, feminist historiography attempting full-length histories of European culture (such as Gerda Lerner’s 1986 The 8 See e.g. Ross 2009 (with Christine de Pizan treated as a Renaissance figure). Current work on women intellectuals and leaders of the medieval world may help redress some of these perceptions: see Kerby-Fulton, van Engen, and Bugyis (2020).

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Creation of Patriarchy – referenced by Kay in Political Fictions – or Lerner’s 1993 Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen Seventy) are now more difficult. But in modern collections where essays from different periods at least allow soundings in particular eras, more movement across diachronic boundaries might have been hoped for. In 1995, the year of Political Fictions, there also appeared a collaborative article by Sarah Kay, E. Jane Burns, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer on ‘Feminism and the Discipline of French Studies: Une bele disjointure’, offering a collective historical, ethical, and political meditation on and readings of different medieval genres. Acknowledging the privilege of being able to think and write in even a misogynist academy, and the way that privilege can blind perceptions of diversity, the authors argue that theorising how women can be read confronts the problem of where lived experience intersects with social constructions of gender. They see this as presenting analogous challenges to those of the professional medievalist who necessarily reads difference, variation, and mouvance in shifting and unstable texts: material and historical exploration of the past can enact the practice of reading differently. Difference can never be fully known, but its material existence is not to be forgotten, they conclude. Self-aware medievalist feminism proves the need for socio-cultural diversity and can help us demystify the cultural construction of the European past. It also challenges easy assumptions about women’s history as always an arc towards (modern) improvement. Kay’s own use of feminist theory in imbrication with other areas of enquiry offers a model for writing that demonstrates the multiplicity, the generative power, and the mobility and variety of feminist thought. She makes both the contemporary recognition of intersectionalities and resistance to them intelligible by demonstrating how feminism contributes to the up-ending and reopening of so much else. Hers is also a model that entirely outflanks the presentism in the way much modern feminist theory locates and historicises itself, offering instead a rich, fully historicised but not merely historicist practice that can continue to inform the futures of French. There, as in so many disciplines and political fields, feminisms will continue to be needed, by whatever name.

•  Connected Literature:  • Chansons de geste, Burgundian livres de gestes, and the Writing of Literary Theory Today Zrinka Stahuljak

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ow might we write contemporary literary history from the medieval perspective in the age of world literature? It may seem unexpected, unorthodox, and almost incongruous to do so by taking up the question of the chansons de geste, the French ‘epic’ of the Middle Ages.1 If that is at all possible, it is because Sarah Kay laid the ambitious groundwork in her 1995 Political Fictions, when she tethered the critical study of individual texts ‘to the wider project of contributing to medieval French literary history by re-examining the relationship between the chansons de geste and romance’ (Political Fictions: 1). She interrogated the neglect (and contempt) of the chansons de geste in favour of the romance genre, showed the mutual connections and influences between the genres, and introduced the radically transformative notion of ‘simultaneity’ of romance and chanson de geste in history, thereby rewriting the traditional linear, genealogical, and teleological discourse of literary history that saw medieval epic literature give birth to romance, orality to writing, and verse to prose. Yet the general perception in the West, despite contestations, is that we live today in the age of romance: the novel, seen as the heir of medieval romance, is the dominant genre of contemporary world literary production and of the world translation market.2 The epic is squarely seen as a genre of the past. At best, the term may be used today as an adjective to describe, for instance, a narrative quality: a novel or

1 While Kay rejected the conflation of the ‘epic’ and the ‘chanson de geste’, I use the term chanson de geste as part of a broadly defined epic narrative, especially in the context of a wide-ranging debate on world literary history (Dimock 2006). Chanson de geste as a self-contained genre has been term-specific to the French (of France) epic literature, problematically setting it apart from other epic traditions, see Sunderland 2017. For interchangeability of terminology, Suard 2005 and 1988. 2 See the summary of the debate over the novel genre in Moretti 2012 [2003]; Dimock 2006. For the translation market, Sapiro 2016.

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film may thus be qualified as having ‘epic’ proportions. How timely, if at all relevant, then, is the invocation of the epic genre, what is more the medieval European epic, to the articulation of the literary theory of world literature? In other words, how might the task that Kay’s book defined for medievalists be extended, beyond the writing of the ‘French literary history’, to world literary history and our future writing of it? One way in which world literary history has contested this largely Eurocentric claim of the novel’s dominance has been to bring in examples from outside the Western literary tradition and to demonstrate the coexistence of the two models of epic and novel throughout history and across the globe (Dimock 2006). These efforts have largely been part of the debate around ‘what is world literature?’ (Damrosch 2003), with which I engage from the medieval perspective, taking as my starting point Kay’s notion of the simultaneity of chanson de geste and romance. I propose a series of rapid moves toward a ‘connected literature’ (Stahuljak 2020a). Connected literature is inspired by the method of connected history – with a difference. Like connected history, connected literature offers a vision of totality by pulling in all the interdisciplinary means (social, political, economic, cultural, literary) available to medieval studies. It is also global and local: global via its interconnections and intersections on different (spatial and temporal) scales; and local because of its situated, non-universal point of view (Douki and Minard 2007, Subrahmanyam 2005, Subrahmanyam 1997). In this particular instance, I work with manuscripts locally situated in the Burgundian fifteenthcentury ducal library; connected literature is in fact a model of world literature proposed from within the medieval library.3 My main objectives are threefold: based on Kay’s original analysis, to provide an alternative definition of medieval genre; then, picking up her challenge of a new literary history, to focus on clusters, rather than on individual texts and traditions; and, finally, to propose the Burgundian fifteenth-century library as a laboratory of political experimentation for the future and thus to rearticulate the notion of ‘political fictions’ used by Kay. In that sense, connected literature is not just a way of writing history, it also a method of reading literature as history. In this essay I will nevertheless not attempt to (re)define the genre of the French chanson de geste nor present a detailed historiography of entire methods or concepts (connected history, genre, chanson de geste, romance, world literature, etc.). Instead, I trace how what we have defined as a genre we call the chanson de geste is distributed across the inventory of the late medieval Burgundian library, and how it blends into new categories of the inventory. Reading these

3 On the ways in which specific medieval libraries provide the material for general reflections, see Hinton and Sunderland 2016.



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categories as a set of parameters for a different, active, and agentive genre likewise renews the possibilities for writing literary theory, and specifically world literature, from the medievalist perspective (rather than principally from the perspective of the specialists of contemporary global literatures). Kay suggested that twelfth- and thirteenth-century chansons de geste and romances are simultaneous throughout their narrative deployment in the Middle Ages. In a much needed corrective on the construction of medieval genres, Simon Gaunt (2013a) argued that the main features of distinction between romance and chanson de geste are formal and stylistic; while this is undoubtedly true, I would add the caveat that stylistic appreciation is precisely what led to the erroneous twentieth-century theory of medieval genres. Simultaneity remains true to an even higher degree in the fifteenth century, to the point that from the perspective of genre theory we may speak of hybridity or even ‘genre trouble’, were genre theory itself not flawed because it is an expression of nineteenth- and twentieth-century canons of aesthetic and literary-historical thought, grounded in the contemporaneous European national thinking.4 In the same article, Gaunt also suggested taking up Keith Busby’s Codex and Context and returning to the manuscripts, or more precisely codices, ‘in order to rethink the history of medieval literary genres’ (Gaunt 2013a: 37). To rephrase Gaunt and Busby, in their codicological contexts, medieval ‘texts’ can only be understood as utterances, instances of discourse. Hence each manuscript is a variant (whence Paul Zumthor’s mouvance (1972)) without the possibility of ever finding the first object or establishing an original source or master text. A manuscript of a text or a work is the inscription of an utterance; a codex – codices often combine several manuscripts (texts) – is an instance of discourse. What we have commonly called a ‘compilation’ is a configuration of a larger thought – and yet each codex is only one of the thought’s possible articulations, that is, an instance of discourse. Sometimes the compilation takes the form of a less cohesive florilegium and sometimes it is intended as a coherent whole (e.g. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2810, that contains Marco Polo’s description of his travels).5 But I would like to take this a step further: for almost 150 years, medievalists have mainly focused on tracing the ‘utterances’ of a single work (or cycle), that is, on establishing the textual tradition of a work in one language, and 4 For an overview of the verse chansons de geste, their prosifications, compilations, and continuations at the court of Burgundy, see Doutrepont 1909. For an overview of late medieval French epic tradition, Suard 1988, 1994 (esp. 243–54), and 2005. 5 BnF fr. 2810 was a gift of the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, to his uncle, the duke of Berry, also John. In the Burgundian ducal library there are a number of compilations that are characteristic of Burgundy, e.g. Jean d’Avesnes, Histoire de Charles Martel, Croniques et conquestes de Charlemagne.

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its ramifications into other languages via translation. More recently, we have followed the itineraries, that is, the mobilities of these works (agents, sites, exchanges) (Wallace 2016, Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France; Values of French). While Busby advocates a codicological definition of genre, I would like to propose a library approach that reinforces the notion of the work as an utterance, an approach that I call connected literature: in the medieval context, a literary work connected to its place and connected to the other works in the cluster of the collection in which we find the manuscript. The ‘place’ to which it is connected at any particular moment, its discursive instance, is a book collection, a library. The ‘cluster’ is a collectivity of manuscripts, whose analysis stands in contrast to the study of individual works or cycles. If we see a work within the categories of the library inventory, we then ask: what is the network each chanson constitutes with the other works in that category? What is the instance of discourse of the cluster – a genre, as it were – that the inventory proposes? What do the chansons de geste, in verse and in prose, copied, composed, or collected at the court of Burgundy and to which the library inventory ascribes descriptions and titles that either refer to or recall earlier medieval chansons de geste or their heroes, tell us if we take off the eponymous hero-lineage glasses and put on the cluster contact lenses? Connected literature takes a global look at a book collection, either by inventory (if there is one) or by looking at the record of the collecting of manuscripts (works) (e.g. Margaret of Austria) and of their use (e.g. Philip of Cleves).6 In this instance, I focus on the inventory of the library of Duke Philip III of Burgundy (Philip the Good), established after his death, between 1467 and 1469. When Philip succeeded at the head of the duchy after the assassination of his father, John the Fearless, according to the 1420 inventory, the ducal library had 248 volumes. At the time of his death, the library had grown to 875 volumes.7 Since scholars have found a varying number of manuscripts that bear the marks of Philip but do not appear in the inventory, it is safe to say that the library may have contained around nine hundred manuscripts at the time of Philip’s death (Falmagne and Van den Abeele 2016: 35). In comparison, by 1477, the year of the death of Philip’s son, Duke Charles the Bold, the library had grown very moderately to around a thousand volumes (Bousmanne and Delcourt 2011: 104). The categories of the inventory are instructive on late medieval thinking, and are not based on our modern notions of genre: no title (175 items); ‘Bonnes meurs, ethiques et politique’ (Good morals, ethics, and politics; 193 items); ‘Chapelle’ (Chapel; 56 items); ‘Meslée’ (Miscellany; 33 items); ‘Livres de For Margaret of Austria, see Stahuljak 2020c; for Philip of Cleves, see Wijsman 2010. Over six hundred manuscripts were acquired through commissions and gifts, see Falmagne and van den Abeele 2016; Lemaire 2000; Doutrepont 1909 and 1906. 6 7



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gestes’ (Books of deeds; 72 items); ‘Livres de ballades et d’amours’ (Books of ballades and love; 103 items); ‘Chapelle’ (7 items); ‘Librairie. Croniques de France’ (Library. Chronicles of France; 110 items); ‘Oultremer, medecines et astrologie’ (Outremer, medicine, and astrology; 75 items); ‘Chapelle’ (33 items); additional entries in ‘Declaracion des parties a mectre encore en l’inventoire’ (List of parts yet to be added to the inventory; 18 items).8 These categories have been set aside in favour of the modern understanding of literary genres – such as romance, chronicle, lyric (poetry), epic – that define literary history and literary studies. To emancipate ourselves from the modern genre, however, allows us to assume the medieval genre. The argument that there is a ‘medieval genre’ different from the modern one is perhaps reinforced further by the fact that the categories of the inventory were not necessarily built in situ, in one centralised ducal library, but that the inventory was ‘the result of a stocktaking of books from at least four depositories’ (Falmagne and Van den Abeele 2016: 41). Its organisation was thus deliberate, and based on a set of criteria. It was compiled by David Aubert, the duke’s ‘escripvain’, a charge that was scribal, secretarial, and that of a writer; Aubert compiled, composed, and transcribed some of the largest and most important of Philip’s commissions; he was also in charge of Philip’s library. This organisation that the inventory presents does not emerge, however, out of one man’s notational process but out of the practice of the library, its use, such as Aubert could have observed during his time as Philip’s escripvain from 1459 to 1467.9 For instance, the first category, without a title, is a collection of books that seems to have been Philip’s portable library that travelled with him (Wijsman 2021, forthcoming). ‘Meslee’, a ‘mixed’ category, was also perhaps a portable collection (based on the number of works). One category stands out, repeatedly, as a clear-cut practice: ‘Chapelle’.10 Each of its three iterations in the inventory testifies to a mix of what we consider different genres: books of hours, psalters, breviaries, saints’ lives, missals, antiphonals, etc. It is therefore all the more striking that, if the hypothesis of four other library sites is correct, Aubert would not have catalogued the manuscripts according to their in situ arrangement but, as I propose, according to the practice that bound them together – much in the same way that portability binds one group, use in religious practice another.

8 All references to the inventory are to its most recent edition in Falmagne and van den Abeele 2016. 9 Aubert lost his position after the duke’s death and the completion of the library inventory in 1469, but returned in 1474 to the service of Margaret of York, Charles the Bold’s wife. His name disappears from records after 1479; see Paviot 1999, Naudet 2005. 10 Wijsman 2021 (forthcoming) believes that the three instances of ‘chapelle’ are not respectively subcategories of ‘Good morals, ethics, and politics’, ‘Books of ballads and love’, and ‘Library. Chronicles of France’, but individual categories on the same footing.

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In other words, I would propose that we understand medieval genre as defined by practice, by the ways in which books were used, rather than a set of stylistic and formal characteristics, which did not seem to encourage their classification (we do not find poetry entirely separate from romance, chansons de geste from chronicles, etc.).11 Returning to the chansons de geste, the first observation of the connected literature approach is that they do not constitute a well-defined or separate category in the Burgundian ducal library inventory of 1467–69. Rather, the works that we have defined for almost 150 years as chansons de geste are strewn across several large categories. Titles we would associate with chansons de geste are included in the croniques de France (traditionally considered to be histories; 110 items), in the livres de geste (what we traditionally call romances; 75 items), and in the livres de ballades et d’amours (again, traditionally romances; 103 items). In the croniques de France, we find a single chanson de geste, albeit in multiple variants: ‘Le livre de Gerard de Roucillon, duc de Bourgogne’ in verse (#676, again in #680), then two volumes (presumably in prose) of ‘L’istoire de Gerard de Roucillon’ (#677–8), and a small manuscript of ‘Le rommant de Gerard de Roucillon, duc’ (#679). These variants appear alongside titles concerning what we may understand to be the longer and more broadly conceived history of France and of French-speaking or French-influenced areas beyond it: the compilation of Les conquestes de Charlemaine (#748–9), histories of the British Isles (Croniques de la Grant Bretaigne, #666, or of the reign of Richard II, #659, 686; Croniques d’Escoce, #668), chronicles of the Burgundian Low Countries (Brabant, #661; Flanders, #671–2, 674; Hainaut, #662–3; Holland, #673), numerous chronicles of the kingdom of France (Monstrelet, #643; Froissart, #655–8; Les Grans Croniques, #649–50, etc.). Within the larger ‘history of France’ that this category incorporating England, Scotland, France, and the Low Countries outlines, the presence of copies of a prosified Girart de Roussillon can be easily explained: Girart was the first historical duke of (southern) Burgundy, who at once validated the claim of the dukes of Burgundy to autonomy from the French crown and legitimised their ducal title; in literature, Girart valiantly fights to maintain his lands and title against Charles the Bald until reconciliation and submission to the king, much like Philip’s 1435 Treaty of Arras with Charles VII of France (which marked the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years’ War between the kingdoms of France and England).12 But this category also contains works 11 For an insight into the medieval mindset of classification, see Foucault 1970 [1966]. For a distinction between category/categorisation and class/classification, see Jacob 2004. 12 The prose Girart de Roussillon exists in several versions. Jean Wauquelin, another of Philip’s writers, completed one in 1448, as one of the first three major works of Philip’s



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dealing with the East. We thus find crusade histories centring on the chanson de geste heroes Godefroy de Bouillon (#681–5) and Baudouin de Jerusalem (#704), several histories of Alexander (#708, 709, 714), Jean Mansel’s universal history La Fleur des histoires (#731–4), a Bible moralisée (#736–7), Jacques de Voragine’s La Légende dorée (#739–40), and Augustine’s Cité de Dieu (#743–6). Croniques de France is thus constructed of many types of narratives, and adumbrates a large concept of the history of France at work, one that stretches from Great Britain to the Near and Middle East. Narratives relating the conquest of the Near East, or Holy Land, primarily by crusaders whose lingua franca was French (Morreale and Paul 2018), a conquest whose theologico-juridical justification lay in the life of Christ and the lives of saints, unite biblical and crusading history into a contiguous francophone area and continuous temporality. The claim of the fifteenth-century dukes Philip and Charles of Burgundy to the imperial title – perhaps a justification for multiple Alexander narratives in this category – completes this French-language vision of the world. Philip’s and Charles’s quest for the imperial title, and Charles’s military efforts to unite all the Burgundian territories, non-contiguous between the Low Countries and the duchy of Burgundy – the Carolingian Lotharingia – would in fact lead to Charles’s death in 1477 at the siege of Nancy, and the collapse of Burgundy’s fortunes.13 The other category with few chansons de geste titles is the livres de ballades et d’amours, where we find Ogier le Danois. It existed both in verse, ‘en rime’ (#540–1), and in prose (#535–6). It is accompanied by a version of the cycle of the chanson de geste hero Guillaume d’Orange, ‘li livres de Eymery de Nerbonne, de Guillaume d’Orenges, de Vivien et de Renouart au tyner’ (#571). Both find themselves in the mix with, for instance, Ovid’s Metamorphoses (#542–3) and Ars amatoria (#569), the Roman de la Rose (#544–8), the Roman de Renart (#549–551), Christine de Pizan’s Les Cent Ballades (#554–7) and Épître d’amour (#625), Guillaume de Machaut’s and Charles d’Orléans’ poetry (#530–2; #623), Le Bestiaire d’amour (#563–4), a manuscript of La Dame de la licorne followed by Floire et Blanchefleur (#572; Floire is not today considered a chanson de geste hero, yet scribal reign: the Chroniques de Hainaut, Girart de Roussillon, and Les Faits et conquêtes d’Alexandre le Grand. On the vision of the world and policy that these simultaneous commissions (1446) give for Philip’s reign, see Stahuljak 2019. Aubert, who succeeded Wauquelin in 1459, wrote an abbreviated Girart de Roussillon in the vast romance-historyepic compilation known as the Histoire de Charles Martel (1463–65), replacing Charles the Bald with Charles Martel. Aubert’s Charles Martel also includes a different, full-fledged prose version of Girart de Roussillon in Book 3 (Naudet 2005). 13 For an overview of Burgundian history, geography, and spheres of influence, see Vaughan 1970 and 1973; Blockmans and Prevenier 1999; Stein and Pollmann 2010; McKendrick 2012; Lecuppre-Desjardin 2016; Stein 2017; Stahuljak 2020b.

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notation of ‘gestes’ appears in the margins), the series of texts of chivalric vows continuing the Alexander cycle, Voeux du paon and Restor du paon (#574, 575; #598, only the Vœux), the Roman de Guillaume de Palerne (#585, ‘gestes’ in the margins), Chastelain de Coucy (#624; again, a surprising ‘gestes’ in the margins) and the Chevalier au cygne (#570; 609). At entry #593 seems to begin a sub-category of ‘ballades’ (the title-rubric is above the margin; Falmagne and Van den Abeele 2016: 238nA), where the majority of the works, though not all, are ‘en rime’. Livres de ballades et d’amours is the only category that seems to be defined by a combination of form and theme: verse and love themes in narrative and lyric poetry. Yet Ogier le Danois both in verse and prose stands out. The verse versions may be Adenet le Roi’s Enfances Ogier (#536) and ‘le livre d’Ogier le Danois, en rime’ (#540–1) may represent the chanson de geste relating Ogier’s rebellion, La Chevalerie Ogier, since its inventory entry indicates that, no matter the consequences, Ogier will do battle, ‘Charles que toute soit / ma terre gastee’ (Charles, may all my land be devastated, #540). There is another ‘rommant Ogier’ (#535), whose inventory entry seems to point to a love story when it mentions a maiden speaking, ‘dist la pucelle’ (the maiden said). This is perhaps a second volume of #536, since they are both described as ‘un petit livre(t)’ (a little book); the Enfances had a love story. But the prose version is likely the now-lost manuscript of the prosification of the Chevalerie Ogier containing the liberation of Rome and Jerusalem and adventures in the East, without Ogier’s rebellion, known today thanks to the first printed editions of Antoine Vérard. Adenet le Roi’s two other works, Berthe aux grands pieds and Cléomadès, were also placed in this category (#552–3). Of all the Ogier le Danois manuscripts, only #535 also carries in margins ‘gestes’: and this is precisely the prose manuscript that contains the love story and is likely a prosified Enfances Ogier. Yet, for example, in this category both Floire et Blanchefleur and Guillaume de Palerne, neither now considered to be a chanson de geste, carry ‘gestes’ inscribed in the margin. This category challenges our notion, very much influenced by the traditional scholarship of the Chanson de Roland (and its quasi-nonexistent love story between Aude and Roland), that the chansons de geste are stories of military and historical import but also ‘loveless’.14 While it may be unclear why all of Ogier is in this category, the works centring on Guillaume d’Orange (listed both in the books of love, #571, and in the books of deeds, #526) – despite being full of battles against Saracens – also feature many Christian–Saracen

14 For further elaboration of Kay’s ground-breaking insistence that chansons de geste were not ‘loveless’, see also Wogan-Browne and Samuelson in this volume (pp. 71 and 85–7).



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love stories.15 Thus we have works relating to Guillaume d’Orange in two categories; and this could have been – though it is not – also the case of Ogier le Danois, the two different branches of whose high-medieval versions, one centred on courtly action, the other on rebellious battles, could have been split between two different categories. The greatest number of titles associated with high-medieval works that we commonly understand to be chansons de geste is to be found among the livres de geste: prose versions of Renaut de Montauban (#470–1), Huon de Bordeaux (#502), Beuve de Hantone (named after his father, Gui, #499), and Garin le Loherain (#521);16 and verse versions of the Geste des Lorrains (#505, ‘vielle chansson’), Guillaume d’Orange (#526), Ayméri de Narbonne, and Garin de Monglane (#521). This category also contains Guillaume de Machaut’s verse history, the Prise d’Alixandre (#489), the romanced history of Baudouin de Flandres (#514), and Raoul Lefèvre’s history of the founding figure of the ducal Order of the Golden Fleece, the Histoire de Jason (#494, this time with a happy ending), the romanced Belle Hélène de Constantinople (#495, 497, characterised in the margins as a ‘vie de sains’ [saint’s life]), Arthurian prose romances (Lancelot du Lac, #458–9; La Mort le roi Artu, #461, #487–8; Tristan en prose, #466–9; Perceforest, #472–6, #477–82; Erec en prose, #501; the Histoire du Saint Graal, #517–18), romances of Greco-Roman antiquity (Brut, #513; Eneas, #510; Les Sept Sages de Rome, #462; Buscalus, #464; Florimont, a genealogy of Alexander the Great, #511; Apollonius de Tyr, #519), Boccaccio’s Decameron (#483–4, #486) and the Burgundian-made Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (#485), some of the historical exploits of the most famous Burgundian knight, Jacques de Lalaing (#523), and all the Burgundian prose chivalric narratives that deal with the East and the Crusades, such as Jehan de Saintré (#492), Gilles de Chin (#516), the Histoire des trois fils de rois ou Chronique de Naples (#515), the cycle of Jean d’Avesnes (#503), the Histoire des seigneurs de Gavres (#504), and others.17 What emerges is that the chanson de geste is not a genre in the inventory of the fifteenth-century medieval library; in any case, it is not a genre according to our commonly accepted parameters. Instead, inventory categories are an active and agentive genre. The function, if not form, of narratives that we would normally classify as chansons de geste seems to vary according to the cluster that they are in. The name of the category in which they appear – ‘croniques’ – 15 This inventory classification supports Kay’s point in Political Fictions that such alliances characterise later chansons de geste. 16 Garin le Loherain also figures in Aubert’s Histoire de Charles Martel (#add.3–6 in Falmagne and van den Abeele 2016), in manuscripts #4 and #6. The general description of Charles Martel carries ‘gestes’ in the margins. 17 For an excellent introduction to these prose chivalric narratives, see Brown-Grant 2008.

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and the works in whose company we find them emphasise, even produce, the historical quality of the two versions of Girart de Roussillon, in verse and in prose. We can note in the historicity of this category a strong degree of presentism: many of the geopolitical areas that these chronicles touch upon are of importance to the Burgundian present, as part of the Burgundian sphere of influence or rule, and they are somehow connected to and even dependent on the speakers of the French language. In other words, the historical quality of the prose chanson de geste of Girart de Roussillon – the ancient claims to the autonomy of Burgundy – and its connection to Carolingian history, make it a part of the ‘history of France’ – of France’s larger, even global history – that is still active or being reactualised geopolitically in the Burgundian present. According to the inventory’s marginal notations, different types of narratives qualify as ‘gestes’, among them some we traditionally define as ‘romances’ (e.g. Floire et Blanchefleur and Guillaume de Palerne).18 It is true, nevertheless, that most narratives that we would call chansons de geste have found their place in the livres de geste category (with the exception of Girart de Roussillon in the croniques, and Ogier le Danois and a version of Guillaume d’Orange under livres d’amours). It is as if the narratives associated with chansons de geste are more easily fitted within the ‘books of deeds’ than into croniques, the ‘history’ genre. But what does this different appellation, livres de gestes, mean for the chansons de geste? The different narratives of the livres de gestes category, whether verse or prose and whether they represent high- or late medieval compositions, share the fact that they are an object, regardless of the kind of narrative; that is, they are a book. And they share a quality of ‘deed’: geste derives from the Latin past participle gesta, ‘things done’. Not unlike the croniques de France category, the livres de geste could also be seen as histories. What distinguishes them then from those in the croniques de France category? First, they are not connected to ‘France’: while written in French, they concern parts of the world that were not necessarily at the time under Burgundian influence, such as Greece. The most outstanding characteristic seems to be that the action of most narratives, if not all, takes place wholly or partially in the contact with Saracens – Spain, Sicily, Greece, the Holy Land, Egypt – or in ancient Greece. One can discern, then, a certain engagement with ‘Orientalism’. One third of narratives, mostly Arthurian, are books of chivalry. Crusades were also a matter of chivalry: Lefèvre’s Histoire de Jason is perhaps a quintessential work here. Jason was the founding figure 18 Recent editors of the inventories of the ducal library (Falmagne and van den Abeele 2016) have been tempted to qualify the marginal notations as indications of ‘genre’, but if it is possible to imagine ‘geste’ as a genre, that is harder for a notation of ‘Girart’. Regardless of the inventory categories, other common marginal notations are ‘vie de sains’ and ‘oultremer’ (overseas/Crusade).



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of the ducal chivalric Order of the Golden Fleece. Since the task of the Order was the defence of the Christian faith, this category poses a foundational link between Jason and the Order of the Golden Fleece, between Troy and the Crusades, between past gesta (things done) and future chivalric action in the ‘Oriental’ sphere (for example, in the form of a Burgundian crusade, launched in 1464 but failed in 1465). Thus, if we understand ‘gestes’ not only in the Latin past value of the term but closer to the contemporary meaning of ‘feat, action’, it is possible to conceive the category of the ‘books of deeds’ as an action genre. This, then, is a prospective genre: matter which is related in the form of ‘things done’ – ancient Greece, combat against Saracens – is also, crucially, what may again be done – future action, ‘gestes’; or even, what never was but may yet come to pass (Burgundian crusade or imperial title), under French-speaking rule: the East was conquered once, and will be again, Lotharingia existed once, as it may again, Spain was never Burgundian but may be, etc. The livres de geste category describes what will have been, a future anterior or future perfect.19 The thrust of this category is in its agency and impact on the world, rather than in any stylistic or formal quality that would qualify its literariness. It takes the form of a future anterior because it contains works that are histories, but its force is projective, its potential is in the chivalric deed. This category is beyond the ‘genre’ of the chansons de gestes, for any narrative can be a livre de geste.20 The future anterior of the livres de geste makes this category, I submit, a medieval genre: a genre defined by a chronotopography – a site (Lotharingia and the East) and a time (simultaneously ancient, contemporary, and prospective) – rather than by literary style or form. In that sense, the books of deeds embody another aspect of connected literature: works are connected to the world as actors of it, they effect action in the world. Questions of genre do not motivate the organisation of the library but, rather, its organisation turns around the conception of the world and its agency in the world. And this is the agency of a network (rather than of a single work or cycle). The categories of the Burgundian library do not merely redraw our genre distinctions, but show that the library as network is an actor in and of the world. Inside the library, the chansons de geste are thus not just the political 19 For another take on transtemporality and what literature does, see Price in this volume (pp. 251–3). McGrady in this volume (p. 222–3) also discusses the future perfect and second future. 20 That puts Girart de Roussillon in a new perspective: even though it is a cronique rather than a geste, it aims to bring about a new, greater Burgundy. The agentive aspects of the livres de gestes category bring to light this prospective aspect in other categories of the library inventory and enable a way of reading literature as history: chapelle incites, in addition to being a category of practice (see above), to piety and salvation, just as Outremer inspires crusade and conquest (see Stahuljak 2019). I am grateful to Jane Gilbert for this reading.

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unconscious of romance and vice versa (as Kay sees them); rather, the library simply is the ‘political unconscious’. This is because the clusters of the inventory are not just a historical record of a culture and its practices (whether conscious or unconscious, visible or repressed), but they are unconscious of a political future that they otherwise seek actively. Understanding the term ‘political fictions’ in all of its temporal dimensions means not only that the medieval library is the place where literature stores the past and the past’s unconscious (as Kay proposed), but also that the library itself stores the future.21 The library is an archive of possibles – a past archive of the future possibles – where the rewriting of the chansons de geste projects a future anterior of the Burgundian state. Let us take the examples of Girart de Roussillon (croniques de France) and Garin le Loherain (livres de geste).22 Together they reconstruct the ancient Carolingian kingdom of Lotharingia, defended by Girart de Roussillon against the claims of Charles the Bald and incorporating Lorraine, the fief of the Loherain clan, allied to Germany but loyal to France, refusing the treachery of the Bordelais lineage that dominates the rule of Pepin the Short. Between these two works, Burgundian Lotharingia stretches from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. This is consistent with Burgundian imperial policy, begun under Philip the Good and enacted under Charles the Bold, to unite the Low Countries and the duchy of Burgundy into a continuous territory inclusive of Lorraine and Liège. As medievalists we have to persevere in what Kay’s work has opened: both in revealing the persistent, still invisible blind spots of the nineteenthcentury foundations of medieval studies (the foundation of all literary history as teleological progression: from chanson de geste to roman – whether we translate that as romance or [romance-influenced] novel – from verse to prose, from orality to writing) and by rethinking literary history. In fact, I submit that, faced with the dominance of world literature and global studies (of which the global Middle Ages are just one manifestation), we must recommit with urgency to the writing of literary theory, rather than literary history. In order to do so, we should once and for all abandon the genealogical thinking of medieval origins: many recent efforts at inscribing the Middle Ages as a field of relevance in the humanities today have implicitly valorised the Middle Ages as the origin, the formative moment of modern discourses on nation, race, White supremacism, etc. To this list, I would unhesitatingly add genre. Nevertheless, to show that modernity has its origins in the medieval has not sufficed to make the medieval modern. Rather, the question is in what ways 21 For this future temporal dimension of literature, the literary potential for historical event, see Boucheron 2016–17 and Boucheron 2017–18. 22 The Histoire de Charles Martel by David Aubert combines precisely those two great gestes into a single continuous narrative.



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the medieval can make the modern, and the moderns, grasp what we have until now failed to see about modernity – and its future anterior (Agamben 2009). To return to world literature, it is interesting to note the dominance of literary history at its foundation. Two of the game-changing and foundational works of world literature, Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters (1999) and David Damrosch’s What is World Literature? (2003), situate themselves within a traditional European national space and chronology: Casanova starts with du Bellay and Damrosch with Goethe. While Damrosch immediately circumvents the national boundaries with the idea of circulation of texts, Casanova’s analysis (into the twentieth century) reads as a genealogy of autonomous literary spaces originating in the Renaissance. It would be an error to respond to the writing of such literary genealogies that exclude the Middle Ages with a literary history;23 I do not see what is to be gained today with a demonstration that the romance is the precursor of the novel, and that the notion of ‘author’ was fully fledged already in the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, in the Renaissance). In the age of global studies, perhaps we can be less focused on the stylistic and aesthetic formalism of the literary genre and more on the proximity and synchronicity of works in clusters that are a kind of provisional genre, acting or interim, as it were, because enacting a discursive instance of a vision of the world. I propose connected literature as a historical archive that can produce a new connected (literary) theory. Not only are medieval genres locally situated sites that beg for a connection, but we can likewise connect and engage directly with literary theory without needing to inscribe our work in the assumption of genealogical or historical legitimacy.

23 Damrosch has become one of the literary critics most sensitive to and interested in early periods.

• PART III  • Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century

•  Introduction  • Peggy McCracken

I

wanted to begin this introduction by pointing out that Courtly Contradictions is nothing less than a new account of medieval literary history. But then when I looked at Sarah Kay’s publications as a group – a perspective this volume invites – I realised that this description could apply to almost all of her major projects. Here, as elsewhere, her claims are not merely about formal change or about influence, but about ways of thinking with and through literature, elucidated through medieval philosophy and modern psychoanalysis. In Courtly Contradictions, Kay turns to the twelfth century, investigating the development of courtly literature as literary entertainment and arguing for the role of contradiction in this development. Contradiction lay at the heart of twelfth-century intellectual life, she points out; it was both an object of thought and a mode of thinking. As such, contradiction shaped literary texts, and in enduring ways. The success of courtly literature, she suggests, ‘may lie in the way the contradictions which it embodies appeal to the contradictoriness of our own impulses and desires’ (37). And the signal innovation of Courtly Contradictions is the exploration of medieval philosophical traditions in tandem with modern psychoanalytic understandings of the formation of the subject, particularly in relation to its objects. Courtly Contradictions may be Kay’s most Lacanian book; it is certainly one of her most challenging, moving not just between medieval philosophy and modern psychoanalysis, but also among genres and across the twelfth century with a series of readings that structure a claim about the development of courtly literature. In the first instance, Courtly Contradictions demonstrates how the courtly genres of lyric poetry, hagiography, and romance move between Augustinian and Aristotelian understandings of contradiction, that is, between an Augustinian understanding of contradiction as possible within a higher unity, and the Aristotelian principle of noncontradiction whereby neither contradictory nor contrary statements can be true of the same thing at the same time. Kay shows that, under the influence of secular logic, literary texts become less caught in oppositions and more able to play with complex chains of reasoning; they became less invested in resolution and more engaged with argument for its own sake. Troubadour poetry, 115

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hagiography, and romance influence each other, and in a series of compelling close readings Kay demonstrates that each genre moves from a rhetoric of opposition to explorations of negation and irony. This is already a strong and innovative argument, but the second half of the book makes the even bolder claim that psychoanalysis – and primarily Lacanian psychoanalysis – and courtly literature explore some of the same dynamics, particularly in the way that both think with and about objects. For Lacan, objects mediate between the subject and the other, they conceal absence and ward off threats; objects are thrown up between the subject and the Other to falsely shore up the solidity of both. Following Lacan, Kay claims that medieval authors and audiences think with their objects. Objects are produced in texts and as texts, she argues, and as courtly literature emerges in the twelfth century, the locus of contradiction shifts from the subject to the object in its sublime and perverse – and sometimes moving from one to the other – forms. To my mind, a somewhat neglected insight of Courtly Contradictions is the surprising discovery (‘a discovery which has surprised me’, Kay writes [309]) of gender as a secondary phenomenon of the object, and this when seen through the lens of psychoanalysis as well as in the medieval text’s own representation of privileged objects. To be sure, the courtly Lady is objectified in twelfth-century literary texts, but not primarily because of her gender difference from the poet or lover who defines her as object. Calling on Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan 1992), Kay stresses that in courtly literature the Lady’s importance does not derive from her otherness from the man, but ‘from her being positioned against the real of death which is his first and most significant Other’ (309).1 She also notes the many cases in which the privileged object is represented by the bodies of male saints and warriors; the subject may be represented in the object, she argues; the text may offer male protagonists as objects for our desire, resulting in the queer ambiance of some late twelfth-century texts (310). If Courtly Contradictions is a challenging book, that is because it is complex, not because of a lack of clarity. As I reread the book in the context of Kay’s œuvre I gained a new appreciation for how pedagogical all her writing is, for how precisely she situates her claims, and for how openly she acknowledges contradiction in her own argument. Courtly Contradictions offers careful explanations of concepts from both medieval philosophy and modern psychoanalysis, along with measured assessments of the relevance of psychoanalytic structures to – and sometimes their divergence from – medieval structures of thought. And it is a book that rewards return, as the

1 Michelle Warren also calls out this insight in her review of Courtly Contradictions (Warren 2004).



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three essays collected here demonstrate in returns to Courtly Contradiction that extend its arguments about contradiction to music, use its analysis of the gaze to theorise a perspective on digital manuscripts, and interrogate the work of logic in contradiction. In ‘Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier’, Susan Boynton traces the operations of contradiction in Riquier’s pastorelle sequence, showing, first, that this set of explicitly related poems follows the trajectory Kay identifies: surface contradictoriness, particularly associated with conflicting temporalities highlighted in the poems, turns to an ironic undermining of the authority of the text itself. Here, too, she shows, contradiction shifts from the subject to the object, and from the subject of the poems to the poems themselves. Boynton then uses contradiction in the texts of the pastorelles to ground an extension of thinking about contradiction into music, tracing the thematisation of the object through a reading of opposing utterances unfolding in time, as in, for example, the contradiction in a reversed melody that disrupts the continuity promised by the musical structure. Joseph R. Johnson begins ‘At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love’ by invoking Kay’s reading of the shared structure of the sublime and the perverse in Lacan and in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion; the one can reverse into the other, she argues, particularly in scenes that insist on the gaze or on visual fields. Johnson extends Kay’s emphasis on this reversibility, what she defines as the ‘twist’ of the sublime into the perverse, in order to investigate new methods for viewing manuscripts. Calling on the computer science term ‘bleeding edge’ (which refers to advances so recently made that the consequences of their use remain unknown), Johnson posits that digitised manuscripts offer new affordances for reading that we have yet to fully understand. Grounding his claims in a study of the digitised manuscripts of the Chevalier au lion, Johnson argues that the affordances of the digitised manuscript enable an augmented vision that may ‘twist’ to return our gaze. Focusing on textual variation and building on Kay’s work in Animal Skins, Johnson argues for a ‘palaeographic unconscious’, an engagement with the handwritten text and its material support in relation to the hand of the scribe who copied it. In the third essay in this part, ‘Logic, Meaning, and Imagination’, Virginie Greene returns to her first reading of Courtly Contradictions and its influence on her own 2014 book in order to open an exploration of the relationship among logic, meaning, and imagination. Greene takes as her proof texts Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which she sees as ‘offspring of courtly literature’, that is, texts that playfully enact the relationship between contradiction and desire that Kay identifies as the enduring appeal of courtly literature. Greene’s readings of Alice’s adventures demonstrate both the closeness of logic and fiction and their unresolvable difference. Her

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readings of the play of imagination and logic endorse Kay’s claims about the relationship between contradiction and desire that reveals the unconscious mechanisms that structure relationships to the world, and extends this view to insist on the instability of the objects with or through which subjects view the world.

•  Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier  • Susan Boynton

I

n Courtly Contradictions, Sarah Kay demonstrates the central place of contradiction (or the quality of ‘contradictoriness’) in the emergence of courtly poetics in the twelfth century. Elucidating the trend in lyric, romance, and hagiography ‘toward explicit negation and its implicit counterpart, an ironic undermining of the text’ (Courtly Contradictions: 70) she argues that ‘contradiction is increasingly shifted from the subject to the object, both within the text and to the text itself as an object’ (Courtly Contradictions: 38). In what follows I apply this observation to the role of contradiction as a rhetorical framework in the poetic and musical structures of works by the thirteenth-century troubadour Guiraut Riquier. My first example is Riquier’s pastorela cycle, in which the passage of time and playful dialogue produce a series of asserted contradictions. Then, I turn to one of his cansos, ‘Pus sabers no.m ual ni sen’ (Since knowledge is of no avail to me, nor wisdom; PC 248.66), in which the combination of text and music enacts a form of contradiction through opposition, realised in the reversal of the two halves of the melody during a sung performance. In both cases, contradiction occurs through the negation of a stated premise, requiring a linear sequence of utterances. Poetry and music both manifest the quality of contradictoriness through the dimension of time. The notion of time is of central importance to the corpus of Riquier, which is literally inscribed within a metatextual framework of fictive temporality. In troubadour Chansonniers R (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 22543) and C (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 856), his works are presented within an assigned chronology; each song is preceded by a rubric stating the year, often the month, and sometimes even the day of its purported composition. Although the historical figures and events mentioned in several of the poems anchor them in an external reality, the dates situate the ensemble of texts in a fiction made (as in the Latin fingere, ‘to make’ and by extension ‘to imagine, to represent’) for them by Riquier. Each rubric begins with an indication of the genre and the number of each song within the group representing that genre within Riquier’s corpus. 119

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The introductory rubric in Chansonnier C states that the collection of Riquier’s songs was copied in order from a book that was written in the hand of the poet: Aissi comensan lo cans d’en Guiraut riquier de narbona enaissi cum es de cansos, et de verses, e de pastorellas, e de retroenchas, e de descortz, e d’albas, e d’autras diuersas obras enaissi ad ordenadamens cum era adordenat en lo sieu libre, del qual libre, escrig per la sua man son aissi tot translatat. E ditz enaissi cum de sus se conten. (Thus begin the songs [literally, ‘the song’] of Sir Guiraut Riquier of Narbonne, consisting of cansos, and vers, and pastorelas, and retroenchas, and descorts, and albas, and other diverse works, in the order in which they were ordered in his book, from which book, written by his own hand, they were thus all transcribed. And thus it says here as was stated above.)1

This statement, and the organisation of the corpus, signals a form of authorial control based on the technology of writing to convey song as constitutive of a persona. The introductory rubric in Chansonnier C expresses the contradiction of song (designated here by the collective noun lo cans) as an art that is both an oral performance and an object fixed in writing. The bifurcation of sound and writing is not a dichotomy, however. Although ‘the categories of orality and writing are neither stable nor discrete’, as Kay observes (Subjectivity: 133), the performative act of reading brings the poem into being, recovered from its visual trace, in a cognitive mode that is different from hearing or singing a song. The very concept of trobar was the product of a culture for which writing had become increasingly important (Harvey 2016: 4) and commonplace. The generation of song, while seemingly inseparable from its performance, implied its inscription. If, as Marisa Galvez (2012) has argued, the chansonniers shaped the emergence of the author corpus for lyric poetry, then the collection of Riquier’s songs in troubadour Chansonniers C and R effectively asserts the idea of the poet as a unitary subject. By the time these manuscripts were copied, ‘written texts […] were events in themselves which could be documented or authenticated by other texts in turn’ (Holmes 1994: 143). The implicit narrative created by the chronological ordering of Riquier’s corpus presents each poem as a past event that provides a context for subsequent texts in the collection. Conversely, the efficacy of using specific years as a frame for poems depends on the conceit of exact dates as evidence of the veracity of the asserted time-frame. Thus, the use of contradiction in the pastorela cycle calls

1

BnF fr. 856, fol. 288r; translation by Simon Gaunt.



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attention to its reliance on the idea of a consistent, linear temporality – while at the same time ironically throwing into relief the artificiality of setting a series of pastoral encounters into such a rigidly defined temporal sequence. Riquier’s six pastorelas constitute a multilayered reflection on trobar as a performative act that brings into being the object of its discourse. In the poetry of the troubadours, trobar means both producing and performing song, which is understood as comprising both text and melody. Composing can be understood as the combining of music and poetry, bringing together two elements, or parameters, that are complementary but fundamentally different in substance. Contradiction is inherent to the word trobar, which is associated with the dual meanings of finding and making or composing (Paden 2019). The idea of finding something that one has made is contradictory; finding presupposes the found object’s prior existence, whereas making entails bringing the object into existence. In his pastorela cycle, Riquier plays on the ambiguity of the distinction between finding and composing through statements that he ‘has found’ (‘ai trobada’) his invented interlocutor. The cycle of six poems recalls the encounters of a protagonist named Guiraut Riquier with an unnamed woman over a period of decades, subverting the convention of the pastorela as the account told by an unnamed narrator of a unique meeting with a generic shepherdess. (Quotations are taken from the complete texts of the pastorelas, for which see Appendix.) In accordance with the fictive chronology of Riquier’s corpus, each of the six pastorelas is preceded by an inscribed date (respectively 1260, 1262, 1264, 1267, 1276, and 1282) which underlines the temporal allusions within the text. Other elements that cultivate verisimilitude include the naming of the narrator as the poet Guiraut Riquier, and allusions to the senhal (codename) ‘Belh Deport’, which is used throughout the rest of Riquier’s corpus to refer to the unnamed love object.2 These are not unique poetic strategies; Riquier’s contemporary Cerverí de Girona names himself in his pastorelas, which also contravene convention by incorporating political and moral commentary.3 Guiraut’s pastorela cycle is carefully constructed as an integrated ensemble thematising the passage of time. In Chansonnier C, the only manuscript that contains the pastorelas, the texts are copied separately after the series of interwoven cansos and vers.4 While the pattern of the encounters, like the protagonist, remains the same (‘Guiraut Riquier’ accosts the shepherdess, and she refuses his advances), the shepherdess does not; she matures, changes, and has a child, who grows into a woman. 2 3 4

Bertolucci Pizzorusso 2006; Franchi 2008: 169. Cabré 1998: 139–43. BnF fr. 856, fols 306r–310r.

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The conceit that the interlocutors maintain the same identities over the course of six poems reinforces the idea of a structuring narrative recounting sequential events. All the poems after the first refer to the previous ones, evoking the accumulation of memory. The conventionally vague expression for an unspecified time (as in the opening of the second pastorela, ‘L’autrier, trobey la bergeira d’antan’ [the other day, I found the shepherdess from before]; PC 248.51) exists in tension with the precise dates assigned to the pastorelas by the chansonnier, and with the references to moments in the life cycle of the shepherdess. In the second stanza of the first pastorela (PC 248.49), trobar describes the action of finding/inventing the shepherdess. The poetic persona describes himself as ‘pesses de chan’ (I was thinking of song) as he encounters her, and he continues, Toza, mot m’agrada Quar vos ai trobada. (‘Wench, I am very glad that I found [or made] you.)

The underlying theme of the pastorela cycle is thus the persona of the author as maker of poems and the finder of the shepherdess. Michel-André Bossy (1991, 1994) argues that, despite their being grouped separately, Riquier integrated the pastorelas into a self-fashioning metanarrative constructed by the vers and cansos that are the predominant genres in his corpus. The naming of Riquier in every pastorela heightens the self-referential character of the cycle. In the first pastorela, for example, the shepherdess says that she hears Riquier’s songs wherever she goes: Senher, on que·m vaya, Gays chans se perpara D’En Guiraut Riquier. (My lord, wherever I go, a gay song by Sir Guiraut Riquier is to be heard.)

In Chansonnier C, the visual alignment of the poet’s name in the first pastorela and in the rubric for the second pastorela visually illustrates Riquier’s self-naming both inside the poem and in the attribution external to the poem, further emphasising the metanarrative described by Bossy (Figure 1). Contradiction is the parameter that defines the relationship between the narrator and the shepherdess, and by implication the poet’s relationship to his own creation. The principal form of contradictoriness employed in the cycle



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Figure 1  Visual alignment of the poet’s name in the first pastorela and in the rubric for the second pastorela. BnF fr. 856, fol. 308r.

is that of negation. A dialectic of assertion and negation constitutes the ‘plot’ of approach and refusal that characterises the pastorela genre more generally, making it resemble debate poetry (on which, see Cabré in this volume). In Riquier’s cycle, the forms of negation and contradiction deployed cover a spectrum from a single word (such as a negative particle) of a rebuttal built into the structure of reported speech, to the denial of the implied narrative that frames the set of poems as a sequence unfolding in time. In the first pastorela, the dialogue moves quickly from the shepherdess’s refusal of the narrator’s advances to his contradiction, in the first line of the fourth stanza, of her

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statement at the last line of the third stanza: ‘Senher, faitz folhor.’ / ‘No folley, Na Toza’ (‘Sir, you are acting foolishly.’ ‘I am not being foolish, wench’). This voicing of an immediate contradiction of an assertion continues and intensifies over the course of the six pastorelas, as described in more detail below. Beneath the surface level of individual utterances, Riquier’s pastorela cycle stages contradiction more subtly through the confrontation of mutually exclusive conditions. Whereas the premise of the cycle as a whole is evidently that the narrator and the shepherdess meet repeatedly over years, in some of the individual pastorelas one interlocutor disputes the narrative. The asserted truth-value of competing claims brings out the contradiction generated by contrasting points of view: they have met before, and (one of them says) they have not. The shepherdess has to exist in order to be found, but Riquier has found/invented her. These paradoxes are essential to the cycle’s thematisation of trobar as rooted in the pastoral encounter. In the third pastorela (PC 248.32), the male narrator does not immediately recognise his interlocutor; the drama of delayed recognition, led by the shepherdess to comic effect, is the real subject of the poem. The dialogue proceeds in a series of contradictions. In the third stanza, the shepherdess points out the inappropriateness of the narrator’s advances, since she thinks he has never seen her before; in the fourth stanza, however, she states that he has desired her for four years (‘M’avetz en dezire / Bien quatr’ans tenguda’), alluding to the date of 1264 in the rubric. He responds that he has never seen her before, but in the next stanza, calling her ‘Na Toza’ (wench), he asks if she is ‘la chantada’ (the one he has sung). As Catherine Léglu has pointed out, the object here ‘becomes a domna-toza hybrid, the object of the poet’s corpus as a whole’ (1998: 138). The shepherdess’s naming of the poet, who only belatedly identifies her as the product of his singing, reverses the premise of the pastorela as the constitution of the object by virtue of the poetnarrator’s ventriloquism. Approaching the midpoint of the cycle, this poem most explicitly signals the combined meaning of trobar as finding, making, and singing, suggesting that the shepherdess represents poetry itself. Indeed, Claudio Franchi reads the cycle as a metadiscourse that amounts to a poetic treatise (2008: 175). Following Franchi’s interpretation, it is possible that the unique rhyme schemes of the second, fifth, and sixth pastorelas (all composed of coblas singulars, in which each stanza has a distinct set of rhymes) reflect an intention of didactic display.5 In the fourth pastorela (PC 248.50), which marks the beginning of the second half of the cycle, a veritable crescendo of contradiction undermines the identification of Riquier the poet with the narrator who energetically 5

On the versification of the pastorelas see Franchi 2008: 111–12.



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asserts his authorship of poetry and of the shepherdess alike. The narrator, in the act of finding the shepherdess, refers back to previous times he has found or created her: ‘L’autrier, trobei la bergeira / Que d’autra uez ai trobada’ (The other day, I found [or made] the shepherdess that I have found [or made] other times). The use of the simple past in the first clause brings out the potential range of meanings implied by the perfect tense in the second (I have found or made). In a variation on her own words in the previous pastorela (‘Senher, en parvensa / Mai no m vis’) (My lord, I do not believe I have ever seen you before) she again denies having seen him previously: ‘Senher, tro en aquest dia No·us vi, segon ma parvensa.’ ‘Toza, falh vos conoyssensa?’ ‘Senher, non, qui m’entendia.’ (‘My lord, I do not believe I have seen you before today.’ ‘Wench, do you not recognise me?’ ‘My lord, no, whoever is listening to me.’)

By denying the existence of their past encounters, the shepherdess undermines the fiction of a continuous narrative linking the pastorelas organised in chronological order, and also the purported relationship that constitutes the background for the exchange. However, the shepherdess uses the language of perception (‘I do not believe’) rather than of direct contradiction. She refers to a person named ‘Guiraut Riquier’ who, she maintains, is not her interlocutor: Senher, aital me dizia En Guirauts Riquiers ab tensa, Mas anc no.n fuy escarnida. (My lord, Sir Guiraut Riquier used to say the same thing aggressively, but I was never mocked by this.)

In this paradoxical moment of trobar, the poet Guiraut Riquier finds/makes up a contradiction about himself by casting doubt on the referent of the name ‘Guiraut Riquier’. The narrator seems to acknowledge the fracturing of his poetic self by the shepherdess (his own creation!) as he names himself in the third person: Toza, ·N Guirauts no·us oblida, Ni·us pren de mi sovinensa? (Girl, Sir Guiraut does not forget you, do you not remember me?)

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But the shepherdess rejects this expression of desired reciprocity, and persists in contradicting the narrator’s self-identification as Guiraut Riquier. At the beginning of the fourth stanza – the midpoint of the poem – he proclaims, Quar selh per qui etz auzida Chantan suy hieu, ses duptansa. (For without doubt, I am he because of whom you are renowned in song.)

She denies his certainty vigorously, with repeated negatives: Senher, non etz, ni crezensa No n’auria e ma vida Ni neys no n’avetz semblansa. (My lord, you are not, nor would I ever believe this in my life; you do not even look like him.)

These lines stand out in the pastorela cycle for their use of alliteration and anaphora that strengthen the denial of the poet’s identification with the firstperson subject. The second half of the poem enacts a gradual reversal of this intense contradiction, until the shepherdess admits that she recognised Riquier but had pretended not to know him in order to get even with him for not having recognised her earlier (in the previous, third pastorela). By the fifth pastorela (PC 248.22), the identity of the narrator not only as maker but even as the subject of the songs comes into contradiction. Encountering the shepherdess as she comes from Compostela, the narrator asks her to give him news ‘pus vos ai trobada’ (because I have found/ invented you). When she responds that the king of Castile is on the way to Granada, he contradicts her: ‘ieu no crey que fassa’ (I do not believe he is). When he attempts seduction, the shepherdess – whom the narrator calls ‘la bergeira mia’ (‘my shepherdess’) but, in yet another contradiction, addresses as ‘dona’ (‘lady’) – contradicts the self-evident fact of her own reification in trobar while addressing her interlocutor by name: Senher· N Guiraut, lassa, Riquier, no·m bergeira Suy d’aquest chantar. (Alas, my Lord Sir Guiraut Riquier, I am not the shepherdess of this song.)



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This not-shepherdess points to the defining conceit of the pastorela (the pretence of a shepherdess persona) while simultaneously disrupting it. The irony inherent in her denial would be all the more salient during a performance of the song. Riquier, still contending that she is the subject of his verse, threatens to complain about her in song: ‘Tot farai rancura de vos […] en chantan’ (I will complain about you […] by singing). This statement constitutes a speech act by which the poet brings into being the object of his invective, the shepherdess whom he found/invented in the first pastorela. The cycle culminates in the sixth pastorela (PC 248.15) with a convergence of all the themes introduced in the previous five – recognition and its lack, identification and rupture, memory and forgetting, and the self-referential temporality engendered by the sequence of poems. The narrator happens upon the (former) shepherdess as the proprietress of an inn working with her grown daughter in Saint Pons de Thomières, a town with a Benedictine abbey that was a pilgrimage site. In a clever echo of the third pastorela, at first he does not recognise the object of his decades-long affection. Recalling that time has passed, he realises that the ‘vielha’ (old woman) is ‘selha que ja fos bergeira’ (she who was once a shepherdess) and calls her ‘pros femna’ (good woman). Contradiction surfaces in the two interlocutors’ respective experiences of time; although the cycle places them in the same chronology, they have not aged in the same way. In response to his comment that ageing has made ‘chans amars’ (bitter songs) for her, she responds that he seems untouched by the passage of time: ‘Pros femna, quar vilheza Vos a faitz chans amars.’ ‘Senher, de vos se deza Tant qu’als vielhs non etz pars.’ (‘Good woman, old age has made bitter songs for you.’ ‘Sir, it distances itself from you to such an extent that you do not resemble an old person.’)

But this contradicts her statement in the fifth pastorela that he has not matured with time: Senher, ab mezura Ges bos sens no·us trava, Ni canas, ni an. (My lord, neither good sense, nor white hair, nor years ensnare you with moderation.)

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While he insists on referring to their past encounters, she speaks of her future, and she expresses her regret that Riquier has followed the path of ‘aquestz leugiers chantars’ (these light songs), again a reference to the poet as maker. The sixth pastorela completes the cycle’s combination of surface contradictoriness (in the debate between the two interlocutors) with ‘ironic undermining of the text’ (Courtly Contradictions: 70). Thus, by the end of the pastorela cycle, contradiction has shifted ‘from the subject to the object, both within the text and to the text itself as an object’ (Courtly Contradictions: 38). The unifying theme of the pastorela cycle is revealed to be the duality of trobar as finding and making the shepherdess, herself a contradictory object, and, by extension, the pastorelas are understood as a reflection on the nature of the poetic work. A similar degree of self-reflexivity can be perceived in Guiraut’s works that survive with their melodies (which the pastorelas do not). The remainder of this essay will address the thematisation of the object through contradiction in music. Unlike language, music does not have the property of negating established semantic units to express contradiction. However, the musical performance of a song offers the possibility of presenting mutually opposed utterances that occur in parallel over time, as the melody and text proceed in linear time, each according to its own internal logic. It is the nature of trobar to bring together text and melody, and also to call attention to the difference between them as in Marcabru’s ‘Pax in nomine domini’ (PC 293.35): ‘Fetz Marcabrus los motz e.l so’ (Marcabru made the words and the melody) and Jaufré Rudel’s ‘Non sap chantar qui so non di / Ni vers trobar qui motz non fa’ (One who does not sing a melody does not know how to sing, nor does one who does not compose words know how to invent poetry; PC 262.3). Riquier’s canso ‘Pus sabers’ is a striking expression of such dynamic contradictoriness arising from the performed conjunction of text and music. The form of the poem is designated in its manuscript sources as redonda et encadenada (rounded and enchained), meaning that the final line of each stanza is repeated in the first line of the subsequent one and that the rhymes of the first stanza are reproduced in reverse order in the second. The reversal of the rhymes embeds contradictoriness in the poetic form. Each ten-line stanza is divided into two halves, the melody marked in the middle by a cross in Chansonnier R.6 The uniquely circular, chiastic musical form of this song is prescribed by an introductory verbal instruction present in both chansonniers (even though C contains no music) that explains how to sing the song. In the usual strophic form of the canso, all stanzas are sung to the same melody, producing different combinations of text and music as the singer adjusts the melody to each successive stanza. In ‘Pus sabers’, the two halves of the melody are reversed: 6 On this song, see Boynton 2012. The text in Figure 2 is from BnF fr. 22543 (the only manuscript with notation for this song), whereas the quotations from the text below are taken from the other manuscript witness to the song, BnF fr. 856.



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the first half of the second, fourth, and sixth stanzas is sung to the melody that was used for the second half of the first stanza, and the third and fifth stanzas are sung like the first (Figure 2). e.l sos de la segonda cobla pren se el mieg de la premeira, e sec se tro la fin. Pueys torna al comensamen de la primeira e fenis en la mieja de la primeira, aissi quon es senhat; pueys tota la cansos canta se aissi: la primeira et la tersa e la quinta d’una maneira, et la segonda et la quarta et la sexta d’autra maneira.7 (The melody of the second stanza begins at the middle of the first and stops at the end. Then it returns to the beginning of the first [stanza] and finishes in the middle of the first [stanza], as indicated. Then the whole song is sung thus: the first and the third and the fifth one way, and the second and the fourth and the sixth another way.)

The reversal of the two melodies in performance enacts a musical process of contradiction in the constantly shifting relationship between text and music. The perception of contradiction arises from hearing or singing a reversed melody while the structural principle of the text creates the impression of continuity, for in a canso redonda et encadenada the final line of each stanza returns at the beginning of the next. Citing obedience and doubled anguish, the stanza articulates both the enchainment of the verse and the two-part structure of the melody. Pus sabers no.m ual ni sens qu’az amor aus ren desdire que.m fassa uoler, paruens m’es, qu’aman me deu aucire tant li suy obediens. qu’ieu auia malanans estat d’ans .XX. fis amaire, pueys a.m tengut .V. ans guerit ses ioy del maltraire, eras ay de mal dos tans.8 (Since knowledge is of no avail to me, nor wisdom, for to Love I can refuse nothing that she makes me desire, it seems to me that, loving, I shall have to die since I am so submissive to her. For I had unhappily been for twenty years a true lover, and since she has had me in her service for five years, cured without the joy of suffering, now I have two times as much anguish.) 7 8

BnF fr. 856, fol. 300r. BnF fr. 856, fol. 300v.

Figure 2  Musical form of ‘Pus sabers’

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The musical form is complemented by the contradiction in the structure and on the surface of the poem. The statement ‘Amors, don no suy clamans’ (Love, of whom I do not complain), which is the final line of the third stanza and the first line of the fourth stanza, contradicts the predominant sentiment of the song halfway through the six stanzas. This statement, which appears somewhat paradoxical in the midst of a love complaint, initiates a series of more explicit paradoxes that are expressively enhanced by the use of anaphora (the repetition of conjunctions and the infinitive form): Amors, don no suy clamans, m’a fag donar et estraire e dezirar pros e dans ez esser ferms e camjaire e percassar plors e chans et esser pecx e sabens. que re no.l puesc contradire. donc qual esfortz fa, si.m uens e.m fai languir de dezire ses esper d’esser iauzens.9 (Love, of whom I do not complain, has made me give and withdraw and desire profit and harm and be firm and changing and strive for tears and songs and be foolish and wise. Since I cannot contradict her in anything, what effort is she making if she vanquishes me and makes me languish with desire, without any hope of being joyful?)

Due to the reversal of the two halves of the melody, the words ‘e chans’ (and songs), are sung to the same musical phrase as ‘dos tans’ (two times) in the first stanza; this verbal connection established through a musical position in the song could be a subtle reference to the bipartite structure of the melody. In any case, for a listener or singer accustomed to the strophic form of troubadour song, the melodic reversal in ‘Pus sabers’ creates an aural/oral conflict. The articulation of the melody of ‘Pus sabers’ in two parts, which makes possible the dualism approximating the idea of contradiction, corresponds to the role of the halfway point in the fourth and fifth pastorelas as initiating a reversal of ideas established earlier. Although analogous points of articulation, these junctures function differently, for the perception of one depends on hearing or singing the melody while the other is grasped by memory for the entire cycle of six pastorelas. In sung performance, the forms of contradiction described

9

BnF fr. 856, fol. 300v.



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here would unfold or gradually reveal themselves in time, to be perceived by an audience familiar with the pastorela and with debate genres explicitly involving contradiction and refutation. In both instances discussed here, time is key to the overt articulation of contradiction. Contradiction can be episodic (and thus temporally dispersed), as in the moments of denial of the long-term chronology of the implied narrative framing the sequence of pastorelas, or concentrated, as in the opposition of music and text that creates the contrast between strophes in ‘Pus sabers’. Contradictoriness is thus a potentiality that is realised in performance. Music and text, like the other dualities in trobar – finding and making, performance and composition, oral and written – exist in symbiosis and creative tension. The works of Guiraut Riquier display the relationship between time and contradiction that is fundamental to trobar.

• Appendix: Pastorelas of Guiraut Riquier  • Texts reproduced from the Corpus des troubadours (https://trobadors.iec.cat/), which is based on Audiau 1923: 44–79. 1. L’autre jorn, m’anava (1260); PC 248.49 I

5

10

L’autre jorn, m’anava Per una ribeira, Soletz delichan, Qu’Amors me menava Per aital maneira Que pesses de chan; Vi gaya bergeira, Bell’e plazenteira, Sos anhels gardan; La tengui carreira, Trobei la fronteira A for benestan, E fe·m belh semblan Al primier deman.

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• SUSAN BOYNTON •

II

15

20

25

III 30

35

40

IV

Qu’ieu li fi demanda: – ‘Toza, fos amada Ni sabetz amar?’ Respos mi ses guanda: ‘Senher, autreyada Mi suy ses duptar.’ – ‘Toza, mot m’agrada Quar vos ai trobada, Si·us puesc azautar.’ – ‘Trop m’avetz sercada, Senher? Si fos fada, Pogra m·o pessar.’ – ‘Toza, ges no·us par?’ – ‘Senher, ni deu far.’ – ‘Toza de bon aire, Si voletz la mia Yeu vuelh vostr’amor.’ – ‘Senher, no·s pot faire: Vos avetz amia Et ieu amador.’ – ‘Toza, quon que sia Ye·us am, don parria Que·us fos fazedor.’ – ‘Senher, autra via Prenetz, tal que·us sia De profieg major.’ – ‘Non la vuelh melhor.’ – ‘Senher, faitz folhor.’

– ‘No folley, Na Toza; Tan m’es abellida



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

45

50

55

V

Qu’Amors m’o cossen.’ – ‘Senher, fort cochoza Son que fos partida D’aquest parlamen!’ – ‘Toza, per ma vida, Trop es afortida, Qu’ie·us prec humilmen.’ – ‘Senher, no m’oblida Tropa for’aunida, Si crezes leumen.’ – ‘Toza, forsa·m sen.’ – ‘Senher, no·us er gen.’

70

– ‘Toza, que que·m diga, Non ajatz temensa, Que no·us vuelh aunir.’ – ‘Senher, vostr’amiga Suy quar conoyssensa Vo·n fai abstenir.’ – ‘Toza, quan falhensa Cug far, per sufrensa Belh Deport m’albir!’ – ‘Senher, mot m’agensa Vostra benvolensa, Qu’ar vos faitz grazir.’ – ‘Toza, que·us aug dir?’ – ‘Senher, que·us dezir.’

75

– ‘Digatz, toza gaya, Que·us a fag dir ara Dig tan plazentier?’ – ‘Senher, on que·m vaya, Gays chans se perpara

60

65

VI

135

136

• SUSAN BOYNTON •

80

VII 85

90

D’En Guiraut Riquier.’ – ‘Toza, ges encara Le ditz no·s despara De qu’ieu vos enquier.’ – ‘Senher, no·us ampara Belhs Deportz, que·us gara, De laus esquerrier?’ – ‘Toza, no·m profier.’ – ‘Senher, a·us entier?’ – ‘Toza, tot m’afara May ·N Bertrans m’ampara D’Opian l’entier.’ – ‘Senher, mal si gara; Et iretz vo·n ara, Don ai cossirier.’ – ‘Toza, sovendier Aurai est semdier.’

2. L’autrier, trobey la bergeira d’antan (1262); PC 248.66 I

5

10

L’autrier, trobey la bergeira d’antan; Saludei la, e respos mi la bella, Pueys dis: ‘Senher, cum avetz estat tan Qu’ieu no·us ai vist? Ges m’amors no·us gragella?’ – ‘Toza, si fa, mai que no fas semblan.’ – ‘Senher, l’afan per que podetz sufrir?’ – ‘Toza, tals es qu’aissi m’a fag venir.’ – ‘Senher, et yeu anava vos sercan.’ – ‘Toz’, aissi etz vostres anhels gardan.’ – ‘Senher, e vos en passans, so m’albir.’



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

II

15

20 III

25

30 IV

35

40

– ‘Toz’, al prim jorn fuy vostres, ses mentir, Pueys del vezer m’an tout afar aizina.’ – ‘Senher, aital vos puesc ieu de mi dir, Qu’aissi quo vos m’es fis, vos suy ieu fina.’ – ‘Toza, be·m plai quar o sabetz grazir.’ – ‘Senher, si fas tot aissi com s’eschai.’ – ‘Toza, vulhatz donc tot so qu’ieu volrai.’ – ‘Senhe·l voler vostre vuelh ben auzir.’ – ‘Toza, que vuelh de vostr’amor jauzir.’ – ‘Senher, faitz o lai on no seray.’ – ‘Toza, nulhs joys ses lo vostre no·m plai D’autra del mon, ni dar no li poiria.’ – ‘Senher, aquo es aissi quon ieu sai; Mas cavalgatz e tenetz vostra via!’ – ‘Toza, no vuelh anar; ans dissendrai.’ – ‘Senher, que·us val er quan etz dissendutz?’ – ‘Toza, sapchatz que serai vostres drutz!’ – ‘Senher, si·us plai, entendetz que·us dirai.’ – ‘Toza, digatz tost, que be·us entenrai.’ – ‘Senher, sejam que ben siatz vengutz.’ – ‘Toza, tan m’es le deziriers cregutz De vos jauzir, qu’ades coven a faire.’ – ‘Senher, quo·us es tan tost dessovengutz Le vostre Belhs-Deportz? No l’amatz gaire!’ – ‘Toza, si fas, tant que ja so vencutz.’ – ‘Senher, s’o sap, grat vo·n deura saber.’ – ‘Toza, de trops vils faitz me fa tener.’ – ‘Senher, per so n’es lauzan mentaugutz.’ – ‘Toza, s’amors autre joy no m’adutz.’ – ‘Senher, no·us par que vivatz ses plazer.’

137

138

• SUSAN BOYNTON •

V

– ‘Toza, no·m vol mos Belhs-Deportz valer, Ni re no vey el mon que tant me playa.’ – ‘Senher, ben cre que·n sap far son dever Si a valor, tant quo dizetz, veraya.’ – ‘Toza, tan val que totz m’en desesper.’ – ‘Senher, avetz per lieys nul melluyrier?’ – ‘Toza, oc, tal que n muer de dezirier.’ – ‘Senher, ans n’es mentaugutz de saber.’ – ‘Toza, que·m val, pus joy no·n puesc aver?’ – ‘Senher, loy jo perdetz per cor leugier.’

45

50 VI

– ‘Toza, ·l cor ai leyal e vertadier Vas lieys, don mortz deziran me guerreya.’ – ‘Senher, tant aug dir d’En Guiraut Riquier, Que, si no·us val, no fa ren que no deya.’ – ‘Toza, no fan a creire lauzengier.’ – ‘Senher, per mi sai tot vostre talan.’ – ‘Toza, be·us am, mas vos m’anetz trufan.’ – ‘Senher, autra n’ametz atertant yer.’ – ‘Toza, vau m’en que no m’avetz mestier.’ – ‘Senher, anatz et veja·m vos autr’an!’

55

60

3. Gaya pastorelha (1264); PC 248.32 I

5

Gaya pastorelha Trobey l’autre dia, En una ribeira, Que per caut la belha Sos anhels tenia Desotz un’ombreira: Un capelh fazia De flors e sezia



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

10

II

15

20

25

III 30

35

Sus en la fresquiera. Dissendey en via, Que s’amor volia En calque maneira. Ylh fon prezenteira, Sonet me primeira. Dissi li: ‘Poiria De vos solatz traire Pus m’es agradiva?’ – ‘Ylh dis que queria Amic de bon aire, Nueg e jorn pessiva.’ – ‘Toza, ses cor vaire, E senes estraire, M’auretz tant quan viva.’ – ‘Senher, be·s pot faire, Quar, a mon vejaire, Amors vos abriva.’ – ‘Toza, oc, esquiva.’ – ‘Senher, be ys sobtiva.’ – ‘Toza, s’ans de gaire No m’en faitz valensa, Vostr’amors m’esglaya.’ – ‘Senher, ab maltraire Conquer hom guirensa, Donc espers vos playa.’ – ‘Toza, tant m’agensa Vostr’amors e·m tensa, Qu’ops m’es qu’ades l’aya.’ – ‘Senher, en parvensa Mai no m vis; falhensa

139

140

• SUSAN BOYNTON •

40

IV 45

50

55

V

60

65

70

Faria savaya.’ – ‘Toza, ·l vista·m playa.’ – ‘Senher, donc no ys gaya?’ – ‘Toza, tant comensa L’Amors ab martire, Qu’ops m’es vostr’ajuda.’ – ‘Senher, ab temensa, M’avetz en desire Bien quatr’ans tenguda.’ – ‘Toza, no m’albire Qu’ie·us vis mai; no·us tire Si ar etz ma druda!’ – ‘Senher, be·us puesc dire Que·n faretz mans rire: Suy desconoguda?’ – ‘Toz’, etz esperduda?’ – ‘Senher, non, ni muda.’ – ‘Toza, no·m cossire Tant qu’aisso entenda: Etz ges la chantada?’ – ‘Senher, quan que·us tire, Pro er qu’ie·us car venda Vostr’ amor malvada.’ – ‘Na toza, contenda Ai ab vos d’emenda Totaz vetz trobada.’ – ‘Senhe· N Guiraut, renda, Riquier, tanh que·us renda Aital, quar suy fada.’ – ‘Toz’, ans etz membrada.’ – ‘Senher, s’o m’agrada!’



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

VI

75

– ‘Toza, tal fazenda Ai qu’ops m’es que·y tenda; A Dieu siatz dada!’ – ‘Senher, aissi·us prenda Per tot ses emenda; E ve·us vostr’ estrada.’ – ‘Toza, etz irada.’ – ‘Oc, per vostr’anada.’

4. L’autrier, trobei la bergeira (1267); PC 248.50 I

5

10

II 15

20

L’autrier, trobei la bergeira Que d’autra vez ai trobada, Gardan anhels, e sezia, E fon de plazen maneira; Pero mont fon cambiada, Quar un effant pauc tenia, En sa fauda, que durmia, E filava cum membrada. E cugey que·m fos privada Per tres vetz que vist m’avia, Tro vi que no·m conoyssia, Que·m dis: ‘Lai laissatz l’estrada?’ – ‘Toza, fi·m yeu, tant m’agrada La vostra plazen paria, Qu’er m’es ops vostra valensa.’ Elha·m dis: ‘Senher, ta fada No suy quo·us pessatz que sia, Quar en als ai m’entendensa.’ – ‘Toza, faitz hi gran falhensa, Tant a que·us am ses falcia.’ – ‘Senher, tro en aquest dia

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No·us vi, segon ma parvensa.’ – ‘Toza, falh vos conoyssensa?’ – ‘Senher, non, qui m’entendia.’ III 25

30

35

IV

40

45

V 50

– ‘Toza, ses vos no·m poiria Res dar d’aquest mal guirensa; Tant a que m’etz abellida.’ – ‘Senher, aital me dizia En Guirauts Riquiers ab tensa, Mas anc no·n fuy escarnida.’ – ‘Toza, ·N Guirauts no·us oblida, Ni·us pren de mi sovinensa?’ – ‘Senher, mai que vos m’agensa Elh e sa vista grazida.’ – ‘Toza, ben trop l’es gandida.’ – ‘Senher, si ven, be cre·m vensa.’ – ‘Toza, mos gaugz se comensa Quar selh per qui etz auzida Chantan suy hieu, ses duptansa.’ – ‘Senher, non etz, ni crezensa No n’auria e ma vida Ni neys no n’avetz semblansa.’ – ‘Toza, Belhs Deportz m’enansa Que·us es tres vetz aütz guida.’ – ‘Senher, res non es la crida, Trop vos cujatz dar d’onransa.’ – ‘Toz’, avetz de mi membransa?’ – ‘Senher, oc, mais non complida.’ – ‘Toza, ye·us ai embrugida E tenc m’o a gran pezanza; No·us pessetz pus vos enqueira.’



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

– ‘Senher, be·m tenc per fromida Qu’eras ai preza venjansa De l’autra vista derreira.’ – ‘Toz’, ab qui etz parieira En l’efant? Es d’alegransa?’ – ‘Senher ab selh, qu’esperansa N’ai de mais, que·m pres en gleira.’ – ‘Toza, quo·us giec en ribeira?’ – ‘Senher, quar es ma uzansa.’

55

60 VI

– ‘Poiriam far acordansa Amdos, toza plazenteira, Si n’eratz per mi celada?’ – ‘Senher, non d’autr’ amistansa Que·ns fem a la vetz primeira, Pus tro aissi·m suy gardada.’ – ‘Toza, be·us ai assajada, E truep vos de sen entieira.’ – ‘Senher, s’ieu ne fos leugeira, Mal m’agratz vos assenada.’ – ‘Toza, vau far ma jornada.’ – ‘Senher, mete·us en carreira!’

65

70

5. D’Astarac venia (1276); PC 248.22 I

5

D’Astarac venia, L’autrier, vas la Ylla Pel camin romieu, E pres de la via, Desotz una trilla, Vi, e no·m fon grieu, La bergeira mia Que sec ab sa filha.

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15

II

20

25

30

III 35

Conoc me tan lieu, Ris, si be·s planhia, E·s det meravilha, Comandet s’a Dieu. Tost dissendi yeu: Ylh fon se levada, Tornet el loc sieu, Quan l’aic saludada. Vi la fort camjada Vas que ja fon bella; Dissi: ‘Don vinetz?’ – ‘Senher, tan senhada Suy, de Compostella Que·us o conoyssetz.’ – ‘Pus vos ai trobada, Comtatz me novella De lai, si sabetz.’ – ‘Senher, vas Granada Va·l Reys de Castella; Doncx tost lai tenetz!’ – ‘Dona, que dizetz? Qu’ieu no crey que fassa.’ – ‘Senher, mout falhetz Non seguen sa trassa.’ – ‘Enquer no·us espassa, Fi·m yeu, la maneira De mi a ehuflar?’ – ‘Senhe· N Guiraut, lassa, Riquier, no·m bergeira Suy d’aquest chantar.’ – ‘De mi penre·us plassa



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

40

45

IV 50

55

60

V

65

70

L’alberga enteira Anueg, e·l jogar.’ – ‘Senher, per Dieu, massa M’avetz per leugeira: No·us cal covidar!’ – ‘Dona, ges no·m par Ajatz de mi cura.’ – ‘Senher, non d’amar, Ni no·m fa frachura.’ – ‘Tot farai rancura De vos, quar m’es brava, Hueymais, en chantan.’ – ‘Senher, per drechura, De Dieu, si·us membrava, Fosson vosfcre chan!’ – ‘Dona, ges vilhura Non ai, qui·m jutjava Dreg, que·m des soan.’ – ‘Senher, ab mezura Ges bos sens no·us trava, Ni canas, ni an.’ – ‘Dona, per semblan, Mal me cujatz dire.’ – ‘Senher, no·us ten dan: Tant es bos sufrire!’ – ‘Pro femma, que·us tire Non ai dig encara; Per que·m dizetz mal?’ – ‘Senher, ai dezire Tenessetz per amara Via temporal.’

145

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• SUSAN BOYNTON •

75

80

– ‘Per ren no m’albire Qu’om veya la clara, Per sermon aital.’ – ‘Senher, mo martire Doblatz parlan ara, Et a vos no val.’ – ‘Per totz temps vos sal Dieus! Pus no·us diria.’ – ‘Senher, no m’en cal. E nom de Dieu, via!’

6. A Sant Pos de Tomeiras (1282); PC 248.15 I

5

10

15

II

A Sant Pos de Tomeiras Vengui l’autre dia, De plueja totz mullatz, En poder d’ostaleyras Qu’ieu no conoyssia; Ans fuy meravelhatz, Per que·l viella rizia, Qu’a la jove dizia Suau calque solatz; Mas quasquna·m fazia Los plazers que sabia Tro fuy gen albergatz; Que agui sovinensa Del temps que n’es passatz, E cobrey conoyssensa De·l vielha, de que·m platz. E dissi·l: ‘Vos etz selha Que ja fos bergeira E m’avetz tant trufat.’



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

20

25

30

III 35

40

45

IV 50

Elha·m dis, non pas felha: – ‘Senher, mais guerreira No·us serai per mon grat.’ – ‘Pro femna, de maneira Tal vos vey segon teyra Qu’esser deu chastïat.’ – ‘Senher, s’ieu fos leugeira Non a trop qu’en carreira Fuy de trobar mercat.’ – ‘Pro femna, per aizina Fon dich d’ome cochat.’ – ‘Senher, ans suy vezina D’est amic non amat.’ – ‘Pros femna, d’aital toza Cum vos deu amaire For esser dezirans.’ – ‘Senher Dieus! Per espoza Mi vol; mas del faire No suy ges acordans.’ – ‘Pros femna, de maltraire Vos es ben temps d’estraire, Si es hom benanans.’ – ‘Senher, assatz ad aire Pogram viure; mas paire Lo sai de.VII. efans.’ – ‘Pros femna, gent servida Seretz per sos filhs grans.’ – ‘Senher, ja·n suy marida, Q’un no n’a de.X. ans.’ – ‘Na femna descenada, De mal etz estorta, E peitz anatz sercan.’

147

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• SUSAN BOYNTON •

55

60

V

65

70

75

80 VI

– ‘Senher, ans suy membrada, Que·l cor no m’i porta Si que·n fassa mon dan.’ – ‘Pros femna, via torta Queretz, don seretz morta, So·m pes, enans d’un an.’ – ‘Senher, ve·us qui·m coforta, Quar de mon gaug es porta, Selha que·ns es denan.’ – ‘Pros femna, vostra filha Es, segon mon semblan.’ – ‘Senher, pres de la Ilha, Nos trobes vos antan.’ – ‘Pros femna, doncx emenda Convenra que·m fassa Per vos de motz pezars.’ – ‘Senher, tant o atenda Qu’a sso marit plassa, Pueys faitz vostres afars.’ – ‘Pros femna, no·us espassa, Enquers, e dura·us massa Maishuey vostre trufars.’ – ‘En Guiraut Riquier, lassa Suy quar tant seguetz trassa D’aquestz leugiers chantars.’ – ‘Pros femna, quar vilheza Vos a faitz chans amars.’ – ‘Senher, de vos se deza Tant qu’als vielhs non etz pars!’ – ‘Pros femna, de mal dire No·m feratz temensa, Mas aisso solatz par.’



• FINDING CONTRADICTION IN GUIRAUT RIQUIER •

85

90

95

VII

100

105

– ‘Senher, ges no m’albire Que ma malsabensa Vos saubessetz pessar.’ – ‘Pus e vostra tenensa Suy, ben devetz sufrensa De tot ab mi trobar.’ – ‘Senher, ges no m’agensa Qu’ie·us diga ren per tensa, Ni·us fassa malestar.’ – ‘Dona, ja no poiriatz, Quar no·us puesc desamar.’ – Senher, quant o fariatz, Ye·us vuelh totz temps honrar.’ – ‘Al pro Comte agensa D’Astarac nostra tensa, Dona, qu’om deu lauzar.’ – ‘Senher, sa grans valensa Lo fai ab bevolensa A totas gens nomnar.’ – ‘Dona, si·l sa veziatz, Saubessetz l’amparar?’ – ‘Senher, ben auziriatz Que n’ay en cor a far.’

149

•  At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love  • Joseph R. Johnson

What news from the bleeding edge of courtly love?

I

t is one of the most memorable scenes in the corpus of Arthurian romance: having just avenged his cousin Calogrenant’s shame by mortally wounding the guardian of the mysterious fountain in the forest of Brocéliande, the knight Yvain gives chase. Driven mainly by concern for his reputation – he hopes to retain sufficient proof of his victory to silence the mockeries of a sardonic Keu – Yvain goes so far as to follow the dying knight into his otherworldly castle, becoming trapped inside. Just as the situation is looking grim, with the lord dead and his men out for revenge, a woman named Lunete repays a past kindness by giving Yvain a magic ring that hides him from their searching eyes. The intruder can now marvel at the beauty of the castle’s grieving widow from a point of safety. Despite his invisibility, however, he does not go unremarked. The occupants know that Yvain is among them: the slain guardian’s wounds continue to bleed, a marvel interpreted as certain proof that the killer remains present at the scene.1 In Courtly Contradictions, a sustained study of the role played by contradiction in structuring both the production and reception of works of ‘courtly’ literature, Sarah Kay reads this scene in terms of the surprising affinity that it suggests between the sublime and the perverse. Kay sets her analysis against the backdrop of courtly texts’ reception within Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse: Jacques Lacan argues that courtly love (l’amour courtois) plays a foundational role in the modern subject’s desiring experience, and Slavoj Žižek cites Lacan’s account approvingly. However, Kay notes, a kind of contradictoriness seems at the same time to oppose these thinkers’ rhetoric.2 For Lacan, courtly love exemplifies sublimation: the delay of 1 See Corinne Pierreville’s recent edition of the romance (2016: lines 883–1240). In subsequent references, the text of this edition will be cited as Yvain, while references to Pierreville’s editorial apparatus will be cited as Pierreville 2016: [page number]. 2 I adopt the terminology employed in Courtly Contradictions (41).

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sexual gratification and the redirection of its associated energy to other ends. In Žižek’s appraisal, courtly love corresponds instead to perversion, which implies precisely the sort of release of the sexual drive that sublimation would preclude (259–60). Kay demonstrates that the apparent contradictoriness of these interpretations actually reveals an important structural feature in Lacan’s thought: the terms ‘sublime’ and ‘perverse’ ‘are interconnected in Lacan’s teaching, so much that they constitute the two ends of the same structure’ (260). Kay then shows how Yvain, as a courtly text, bears out her insight into this structural relation. Certain key scenes in the romance – particularly those that deal with the gaze and the representation of the visual field, as in the case of the ‘bleeding wounds’ scene described above – act as pressure points at which this shared structure discloses its presence by suddenly flipping: readers encounter a ‘“twist” […] whereby the sublime shifts into the perverse’ (260). This essay will return to the wound’s mysterious bleeding and the sublime– perverse structure Kay uncovers within it as a means of reflecting on the new modes of visual engagement that characterise medieval French studies at its own bleeding edge. I draw this term from the computer software lexicon, where the concept of the ‘bleeding edge’ refers to advances so recently made that the possible future consequences of their use remain obscure in the here-and-now. It may at first seem odd to speak in such terms in the context of medieval French studies; however, the discipline has undergone profound methodological changes since the original publication of Courtly Contradictions. Large-scale institutional efforts of manuscript digitisation like the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica and the Vatican Library’s DigiVatLib have transformed the previously costly and travel-intensive process of consulting a wide array of original literary manuscript objects.3 These systems invite us to employ them in a manner that recalls Yvain’s use of the magic ring: just as the knight receives unlimited access to the spectacle of the grieving widow without needing to leave his position, today we can scrutinise, imagine, and compare the minute gestures of now-absent scribal bodies without so much as leaving our homes. Our technologically augmented acts of looking, moreover, seem magical in their opening of new interpretive horizons: with digital techniques, we can freely cut up the images we discover in the manuscript record and reassemble them in potentially revealing ways, engaging actively – even creatively – with medieval textuality. Here, at the bleeding edge of the discipline, what new wounds might appear in the Yvain of Kay’s analysis in Courtly Contradictions – and what could our discoveries tell us about the future of medieval French studies?

3 Kay’s more recent work stresses the importance of the digital: see for example Philology’s Vomit (16–17).

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In preparing this essay, I have employed the available range of digital facsimiles in order to consult all seven complete extant manuscripts of Yvain (MSS ACGPRSV), as well as a fragmentary witness, MS F, which contains the early portions of the text in their entirety.4 Each of the sections below will question how the reversible sublime–perverse structure uncovered by Kay can be found to play itself out within this manuscript tradition as glimpsed in digital form. First, I will argue that through what I term a ‘low-level’ analysis of medieval manuscripts in their form as digital reproductions, the twist linking the sublime to the perverse can be found to animate the play of minute but heavily charged details in these copies. I will then propose a new concept to complement Kay’s more recent work on what she has termed the ‘codicological unconscious’ (Animal Skins: 142): I contend that the ‘low-level’ reversals at play in the Yvain manuscript tradition also point to the insistence of a ‘palaeographic unconscious’ that decentres these handwritten texts from within their very shapes on the page. Yvain’s Vanishing Heart Because the attentive study of textual variation often requires recourse to details that are difficult (or impossible) to reconstruct from the variant apparatus of a critical edition, such work seems poised to benefit from the heightened visibility of medieval manuscripts in digital reproduction. What might paying attention to the textual variation made immediately available by online facsimiles bring to our understanding of the structure linking the sublime to the perverse in Yvain? Gazing from the voyeuristic position of one who sees without being seen (he has been rendered invisible by Lunete’s ring), Yvain beholds a striking spectacle: the widow grieves the loss of her husband, harming herself in her sorrow (Yvain, lines 1142–70). In Courtly Contradictions, Kay notes that a ‘lack of reciprocity in the visual field’ (267) sustains the scene and permits Yvain to perceive the Lady as sublime (273), with the bleeding wounds’ gaze serving as a reminder of the trauma of death that sublime objects can only incompletely 4 A (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794); C (Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château, Musée Condé MS 472); G (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12560); P (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1433); R (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125); S (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12603); V (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Reginensi Latini 1725); F (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1450). I follow the sigla proposed by Corinne Pierreville, who adapts Wendelin Foerster’s convention and promotes the Guiot copy (so called because this manuscript’s interventionist scribe names himself as ‘Guiot’) to the position of A. On this and related questions, see Pierreville’s introduction (2016: 45–53).



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mask. At the same time, however, the ‘whole structure flip[s] over’ into the apparently contradictory arrangement (271). With a minor shift in perspective, Yvain becomes legible as the pervert who occupies the ‘position of the gaze as object-instrument’, with our own reading occupying the subject position: ‘privileged by his invisibility, we too can gaze at the scene’ (274–5). By comparing digital facsimiles of this romance, we can push a step further in this direction. We can spy not just through Yvain, but at him – indeed, at the range of possible Yvains that the manuscript tradition has preserved for us to find. Just as the knight struggles to untangle the web of his emotions when confronted with a scene that is tantalising, frustrating, and frightening all at once, the Yvain witnesses waver over the crucial particulars of how they convey his desire to us. The most intriguing variation clusters around the narrator’s deployment of the Ovidian discourse of love-as-sickness, which appears as follows in Pierreville’s edition (based on the Guiot copy, BnF fr. 794): [Amors] si dolcemant le requiert que par les ialz el cuer le fiert. Et cist cos a plus grant duree que cos de lance ne d’espee: cos d’espee garist et sainne molt tost, des que mires i painne, et la plaie d’Amors anpire, qant ele est plus pres de son mire. Cele plaie a messire Yvains dom il ne sera jamés sains, qu’Amors s’est tote a lui randue. (Yvain, lines 1369–79) ([Love] solicits him with such sweetness that through his eyes, she [Love] strikes his heart. This blow lasts longer than the blow of a lance or a sword: a wound left by a sword heals very quickly, as soon as a doctor works on it; [but] the wound of Love gets worse when it is nearer to its doctor. Lord Yvain has a wound from which he will never recover, because Love has given herself completely to him.)

The artfulness of this scene lies in its blurring of the distinction between a rhetoric of disembodiment and a rhetoric of physical suffering, offering a window into the ‘twist’ that links the sublime to the perverse in the process. Approached from the angle of the Lady’s sublime perfections, we can read Love as entering immaterially, passing as light through the eyes and reaching the heart qua metonymy for the capacity to love. Approached from another angle, however, this structure flips to reveal Yvain’s body and capture him as object: Love strikes; it deals a blow; it leaves a wound. The sublime potential

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• JOSEPH R. JOHNSON •

that Yvain uncovers in the scene links up with the latent capacity of his own body to disintegrate into allegorised parts, whereas the perverse potential links up with the figure of an Yvain wounded, made the object of an attack (Love’s blow) whose physicality mirrors the spectacle of the Lady’s self-harm in the preceding scene (Yvain, lines 1153–8). This delicate balance breaks two different ways in the manuscript tradition, most significantly around the question of just how Yvain is made vulnerable to Love’s assault (cf. Yvain, line 1370):5 Q(ue) p(ar) les oils dou cuer le fiert (Vatican, Reg. Lat. 1725, fol. 41rb) (so that through the eyes of the heart, [Love] strikes him.) p(ar) coi le iex el cors li fiert (BnF fr. 12603, fol. 79va) (in such a manner that [through] the eyes, [Love] strikes him in [his] body.)

By invoking ‘the eyes of [his] heart’, the first manuscript (V) effectively erases Yvain as an anatomically embodied subject; rather than a naturalistic body, we find a network of allegorised parts that connect directly to one another. This text therefore upholds the vision of Yvain as awestruck by the sublime beauty of the Lady, since (as Kay shows) that vision depends upon his absence from the scene. By swapping out the reading ‘heart’ (found in all other copies) for the ‘body’ as the locus of Yvain’s loving experience, on the other hand, the second manuscript (S) turns the tables on Yvain with an awkward construction that nevertheless reduces the illusion of his own invisibility (we now have a much stronger sense that his body is there).6 A very similar irruption of the word ‘body’ occurs just afterward in the fragmentary text of MS F: Vne plaie a messire y(uains) dont il ne sera iamais sai(n)s car en son cors sest respandue amors q(ue) sest a luj randue (BnF fr. 1450, fol. 211va; cf. Yvain, lines 1377–80) 5 Transcriptions of manuscript material provided in this essay are my own. In each transcription, I have sought to represent the original text as closely as possible while normalising word spacing and making limited concessions for typographical clarity. Abbreviations have been expanded in parentheses. On the ‘interpretive diplomatic’ method of transcribing from Old French, see Foulet and Speer 1979: 44. 6 The scribe seems to have reversed the readings found in other witnesses, which all contain variants on que par or qui par, into par coi (‘in such a manner that’). In the process, the idea of ‘through’ becomes lost.



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(Milord Yvain has a wound from which he will never recover, because Love, who has given herself to him, has spread throughout his body.)

Whereas all other witnesses consulted give a version of ‘Les leus ou ele ert espandue’ (‘The places where she [Love] had spread out’, Yvain, line 1380) or another similarly euphemistic construction at this point, MS F plainly discloses what the reader may have suspected all along: that the passion experienced by Yvain is not merely one of abstract aesthetic appreciation. The knight’s heart, which had touched a sublime ideal, recedes in favour of a body that leaves little room for us to believe that his pleasure is being delayed.7 When the structure linking the sublime to the perverse ‘flips’ in this way from copy to copy, Yvain’s crucial invisibility flickers, and the Lady’s sublimity gives way to the portrait of a grieving woman being spied upon by her husband’s killer.8 Toward Lower Levels of Love The experimental ‘bleeding edge’ of medieval French studies, however, affords us further insights into courtly love’s reversals. Although the digital delivery of medieval manuscripts undoubtedly facilitates the kind of reading proposed in the preceding section, the notion that variation lies at the heart of medieval orality and textuality is no longer particularly forward looking: several decades now stand between us and the pioneering concepts of mouvance (a term coined by Paul Zumthor to capture the complex relationship between what we think of as a single medieval ‘work’ and its many constitutive copies which differ due to uncertainties inherent in the oral transmission process) and variance (Bernard Cerquiglini’s more writing-focused development of this idea).9 For the remainder of this essay, I will push out in the direction of a less familiar idea: can digital techniques help us seek out the reversibility of the sublime and the perverse in the very mechanisms by which words take shape on parchment? In chapter two of Courtly Contradictions (72–108), Kay unpacks the ambiguous and unstable relationship linking the contrary terms ‘high’ and ‘low’ (and their associated registers) in the evolution of courtly texts, casting their connection as a ‘conduit of contradictoriness’ (72). I will make use of 7 On the dichotomy between heart and body, see Knight 1998 and Klosowska 2005: 106; cf. Yvain, lines 3173–4; Chrétien de Troyes (1992: line 4697). 8 See Kay’s analysis of this dynamic, Courtly Contradictions: 257. 9 On the distinction between the terms, see Cerquiglini 1989: 120 n. 19; cf. Zumthor 1972: 91–3. For a useful overview of the role played by Cerquiglini’s Éloge de la variante in the development of the ‘New Philology’, see Kay 1999a.

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similarly mechanistic terminology to grasp a relation of ‘high’ and ‘low’, albeit this time with the goal of thinking through the role played by digital reading techniques in uncovering the play of contradictories. In the field of computer science, different kinds of code are imagined as positioned along a vertical spectrum from the language spoken by human beings (natural language), at one extreme, to the harshly illegible machine code (binary code) that computers can understand without translation, at the other. Code that is closer to the human-understandable end of this spectrum is termed ‘highlevel’, short for ‘with a high level of abstraction’, because it abstracts away the reality of the machine’s operation in favour of easy comprehensibility by human minds – but in the process masks the details of how the computer ‘thinks’. Code that remains more closely connected with the complexity of the machine’s logic, on the other hand, is termed ‘low-level’.10 Reading and writing low-level code allows for a much greater degree of interactivity between the human being and the machine, since it enables every detail of machine thinking to be accounted for in full transparency. When one reads a medieval manuscript on a computer screen, one literally reads within what Kay termed a ‘conduit’ between the high and the low in this computing sense. Interacting with a manuscript deployment system like the BnF’s Gallica means engaging with a mix of high-level systems (tasked with less critical tasks like the drawing of a user interface) and the low-level ones that support them (tasked with fundamental operations like the way in which colours are made to appear on the screen, or how the computer is able to turn on in the first place). One is engaging with a piece of medieval technology – the codex – by interfacing with a modern machine designed in this manner. I suggest that the act of reading is transformed in the encounter between these different kinds of machine; to borrow another turn of phrase from Kay, the reading act has ‘become shot through’ (Courtly Contradictions: 262) with a machinic logic that invites readers to seek out greater interactivity and transparency, to tease out the possible meaning that might hide in the minutest, seemingly nonsensical details. In other words, I contend, readers are unconsciously guided to regard the manuscripts themselves as technology structured according to principles similar to those of the computer. In the same gesture, they are invited to work like a computer programmer by interfacing with the system’s lower levels: those elements of manuscript materiality which (like low-level computer code) can seem alien or resistant to analysis when approached from the standpoint of natural language, but which nonetheless play crucial roles as supports to meaning. This occurs because digital delivery systems present 10 On the concept of levels of abstraction, see Turner and Angius (2019: § 8.1), as well as the classic treatment in chapter four (‘Metalinguistic Abstraction’, 359–490) of Abelson et al. 1996: especially 360. On the high-level, obfuscatory operation termed ‘Double Click’, see Price in this volume, pp. 250–3.



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codices in a way that encourages machinic interaction, a constant exploratory shifting between different ways of framing the same material, rather than acts of passive consumption. The point of speaking in such terms is not to force a rhetoric of surface and depth onto the interpretation of medieval manuscripts but, rather, to capture a difference in the degree of our potential engagement with what Kay has recently termed the ‘kernel of unintelligibility [that] is the very condition of legibility’ (2017b: 17). A high-level analysis, as I define it, would be one that approaches its object as having already taken shape and become meaningful as a text that can be read and interpreted. To move from here to the low level would not imply a departure from the surface, but a shift toward a more open engagement with the less intelligible forms that support the production of surface meaning. In this account of the manuscript-as-machine, the variant reading that I proposed in the preceding section would be classified as a ‘high-level’ analysis: it works with handwritten words as already constituted, waiting fully formed in different manuscript copies, ready to be read and compared. But can we tease out the twist linking the sublime to the perverse at a ‘lower level’ than that of variant diction – a level that is much less obviously meaningful to human eyes, but nonetheless foundational to meaning? Can we use digital techniques to track Yvain not just in the varying representation of his body from one codex to another, but also in the subtle proximity of his textual identity to the scribal body that first set him down on parchment in a given copy? The well-known philological problem of the Lady of Landuc’s name is an ideal site for testing this question, since the controversy surrounding it touches on a dilemma of letters and their shapes. In three manuscripts (BnF fr. 1450, Garrett 125, Reg. Lat. 1725), the Lady’s proper name is given as ‘Laudine’ or ‘Laudune’; in the rest of the tradition, however, she remains the ‘Dame de Landuc’ (Courtly Contradictions: 267). The traditional editorial solution to this problem has been to provide the name ‘Laudine’ if it is lacking from a base copy being edited. In her recent edition of the Guiot text (BnF fr. 794), however, Pierreville deliberately maintains the anonymising reading, arguing that it represents a periphrastic emphasis on the Lady’s feudal rank (2016: 57–67):11 Veant toz ses barons se done la dame a monseignor Yvain. Par la main d’un suen chapelain

11 My translation incorporates Pierreville’s innovative interpretation of ‘lendemain’ (2016: 57–8, 261).

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prise a la dame de Landuc lendemain, qui fu fille au duc Laududez, dom an note un lai. Le jor meïsmes, sanz delai, l’espousa et firent lor noces[.] (Pierreville 2016: 56–7; Yvain, lines 2150–7) (Seeing all of her barons, the lady gives herself to milord Yvain. By the hand of one of her chaplains, the next day he took [the hand of] the Lady of Landuc, who was the daughter of Duke Laududez, about whom a lay is sung. The very same day, without delay, he wed her and they held the ceremony[.])

What might explain the presence of this consequential and controversial variance in the manuscript record? Because of the potential for a strong visual resemblance between pen-strokes readable as Laudine and as la dame in the ‘petite écriture d’allure gothique’ (small, gothic-style script; Careri et al. 2001: xxvi) characteristic of the vernacular French manuscripts of the period, one way of accounting for the rival forms would be to suggest visual confusion on the part of whoever read the text aloud for it to be copied. Either the more difficult manuscript reading (lectio difficilior), Laudine, was reduced to la dame in the transmission process, or else it was la dame that was misunderstood. Whichever reading one is inclined to prefer, the question would hinge on what I would term a ‘low-level’ dynamic of resemblance that plays out across these words and subtly influences the representation of the literary character. But what about Yvain, who is also invoked in a rhyming position at this crucial juncture in the narrative? Could the production of his narrative identity (his ‘character’) relate in some way to the form of his handwritten name, as la dame/Laudine’s seems to? MS R (Garrett 125) is unique among the eight codices I have consulted for its use of two different proper names to refer to the romance’s protagonist. The words that appear in rhyming positions can be used to track the variation. In one case, Yvain is invoked under the name by which he is now commonly called, and which is standard in the other copies: ‘yuain’, equivalent to ‘Yvain’ in the orthography of the period, which distributes the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ differently from modern French. As Figure 1 shows, this form appears just as the giant Harpin de la Montagne is about to die in combat with the hero (cf. Yvain, lines 4227–8):

Figure 1  yuain. Garrett 125, fol. 57va (detail).



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Si chiet ses colps (et) p(er)t en uai(n) p(ar) dales mon segnuour yuain (And his blow falls and misses into the void beside milord Yvain.)12

In the remaining six examples found in rhyming positions,13 however, an idiosyncratic form occupies the same number of syllables: Yain.14 This is the first form by which the knight’s name appears in the Garrett 125 text (cf. Yvain, line 56). The digital delivery of this manuscript means that with a quick roll of a mouse wheel (or a pinching of the fingers), the reading in question can be rendered in a form much larger than that of its original inking, and then saved and reproduced as in Figure 2.

Figure 2  yains. Garrett 125, fol. 40rb (detail).

Returning now to the scene of the naming (or not) of the Lady of Landuc, we see that Garrett 125 opts for ‘Yain’ here, but in a distinctive form. Here again, digital reading helps us glimpse this change through techniques of enhancement, reproduction, and side-by-side comparison (Figure 3): a mon segnor yain (‘[…] to milord Yain’)

Figure 3  yain. Garrett 125, fol. 52vb (detail).

12 In translating ‘vain’ here I take inspiration from Pierreville (cf. Yvain, line 4227), whose modern French translation draws out an ambiguity between the Old French en vain (‘in vain/uselessly’) and vain as ‘empty’, a sense to which I return below. 13 I omit the use of the abbreviation of the hero’s name [.y.], which suspends the question of whether we are dealing with ‘Yvain’ or ‘Yain’. 14 We find ‘yain’ on fols 40rb, 43rb, 51rb, 52vb, 54va, and 59rb.

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Because the spelling ‘Yain’ omits the ‘v/u’, the first letter of the knight’s name is now the sole element that separates it from the Old French adjective vain (vain). In this particular scene’s ‘Yain’, however, the first letter’s initial descender has been inked shorter than in other examples of the letter ‘y’ in Garrett 125 (see Figures 1 and 2 for examples). Though still legible, the distinction between ‘vain’ and ‘Yain’ is noticeably less clear. By way of comparison, Figure 4 shows the word ‘vain’ – in this context, ‘drained’ by feelings of love – as it appears in Garrett 125 to describe the state in which Lunete finds the knight after his prolonged contemplation of the grieving widow (cf. Yvain line 1549).

Figure 4  vain. Garrett 125, fol. 49ra (detail).

What is the extent of the difference between the ‘Yain’ of the marriage scene and this earlier ‘vain’? Using image editing software, it becomes possible to answer this low-level question by overlaying one onto the other, as if we were looking at a single word in motion (Figure 5).15

Figure 5  Composite of yain (Figure 3) and vain (Figure 4), overlaid. Garrett 125, fols 49ra and 52vb.

By setting ‘Yain’ onto ‘vain’ in this way, it becomes obvious that the only difference between the two words is that the first letter of the former tapers into an uncharacteristically short descender that falls just below the baseline, whereas the latter is constituted by an ascender that rises just above the headline. At the moment of the wedding, in other words, Garrett 125’s ‘Yain’ is almost entirely ‘vain’. Plucking a handwritten word from elsewhere in the romance and dropping it here may not, on its own, prove much: that the Garrett 125 scribe should have intended any of this would practically be unthinkable. Yet vain is not just any word: the romance closely associates this term with the knight’s identity.

15 For an animation of the transition between these two forms, see http://josephrjohnson. com/publication_supports/yvain.html.



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The Garrett 125 copy, for instance, rhymes ‘Yain’ or ‘Yvain’ with ‘vain’ on three separate occasions (fols 45ra, 49ra, and 57va). In this scene, moreover, many of the potential meanings of vain denoting literal and figurative lack can be said to hover along the margins of our awareness as readers. In Old French, one could act ‘in vain’, and one could be ‘vain’ in the sense of excessive pride. The latter meaning, especially, applies: the wedding constitutes a watershed moment of the knight’s vanity, since, just after it concludes, Gauvain’s taunts will wound Yvain’s pride and spur him to betray his wife (‘vain’, for that matter, is the very syllable that Gauvain and Yvain’s names have in common). Other definitions of vain were closer to the literal meanings of the Latin etymon vanus, conveying ‘emptiness’: the veinne pasture of barren lands, for example, or the empty space into which Harpin de la Montagne’s missed blow uselessly falls (see Figure 1); applied to a person, these meanings could convey exhaustion and weakness, as seen above in the heartsick Yvain (see Figure 4).16 At the scene of the wedding, Yvain can also be said to be ‘empty’: the romance’s narrative arc traces his development from the glory-minded knight who had sought proof of his triumph over Esclados into a knight who directs his prowess to serving others, and this transformative investment of the knight’s life with ethical meaning has not yet occurred at the time of the marriage. What if the copyist’s hand were to have moved a little in response to a confluence of factors, offering readers the fleeting vision of a knight barely differentiated from his alter ego – Milord Vain, the hollow one, the one whose actions bear no fruit – just before his deeds in the narrative remove any doubt about that emptiness? Readers of this page might then witness what Kay in Courtly Contradictions termed the tendency of ‘sublime and perverse structures [to] revers[e] one into the other’ (265), since they would be invited to consider the merits of his imminent actions through the eyes of the Lady about to be betrayed. Codicological Unconscious, Palaeographic Unconscious In recent studies, Kay has built on Martha Rust’s concepts of ‘codicological consciousness’ and the manuscript matrix (Rust 2007: 14) to argue for the insistence of a codicological unconscious that structures readers’ engagement with medieval manuscript books. As articulated in Animal Skins, this concept offers a means of capturing how ‘reading can be subject to contingent interference from the look and feel of the page itself’ (142). The analysis of the codicological unconscious could therefore be characterised as ‘low-level’ in the sense that I am proposing: it concerns the potentially disquieting supports to meaning in the codex that ‘higher-level’ readings risk taking for granted. 16

For definitions and uses of vain in Old French, see FEW and Tobler-Lommatzsch.

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Does the preceding section’s analysis of Yvain’s handwritten name constitute a study of the codicological unconscious in Kay’s sense? To the extent that it seeks to show how Yvain’s identity is made open to disruption by contingent interference from the manuscript page’s look and feel, this is surely the case. It may be useful, however, to draw a further distinction between the codicological unconscious and a more specifically ‘palaeographic’ unconscious, the difference being that the former is primarily a question of mise en page (page layout) and the latter primarily a question of mise en texte (the scribe’s adaptation of oral messages into written textual forms through the use of spelling, inking, abbreviation, and related techniques). As the ‘codicological unconscious’ discloses the hybrid sensory/multimedia page’s meaning as always in-production and subject to contingent interference, the play of the ‘palaeographic unconscious’ reveals individual words and letters as subject to contingent interference from the desiring and symptomatic movements of the scribal hands that inked them. The written forms left by these movements can condense meanings which could have been disentangled, but which in fact were not (or not completely): for instance, ‘Yain’ and that about him which is ‘vain’. The way in which a specifically palaeographic unconscious can complement Kay’s notion of the codicological unconscious may be further clarified with a return to the famous ‘bleeding wounds’ scene of Kay’s analysis. Recalling the introduction to this chapter, we find Yvain looking on in hiding as the vengeful inhabitants of the castle seek him out. The wounds betray his continued presence: Mes enmi la sale amassa entor la biere uns granz toauz, que li sans chauz, clers et vermauz rissi au mort parmi la plaie. Et ce fu provance veraie qu’ancor estoit leanz sanz faille cil qui ot feite la bataille, et qui l’avoit mort et conquis. (Yvain, lines 1176–83) (But a large crowd amassed in the room around the coffin, because the hot blood, bright and vermilion, issued forth from the corpse through the wound. And this was sure proof that without a doubt, he who had given battle, and who had conquered and killed [their lord], was still there.)

In BnF fr. 12560, however, Esclados is not the only corpse to disrupt the scene by means of a wound, nor is his the only body by which this scene discloses what Kay terms ‘the alarming irruption of the real of human destructiveness’ (271). The passage is reproduced in Figure 6. In the transcription, I have attempted to visualise the parchment tear in diplomatic fashion by using backslashes:



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(Et) ce fu prouance ueraie . Q(ue)ncor estoit leenz sanz faille . Cil q(ui) fete \ auoit la bataille . (Et) qui lauoit mort \ (et) conquis Lors ont partot cer \ chie . (et) quis . (And this was sure proof that without a doubt, he who had given \ battle [fete auoit la bataille], and who had killed [mort] \ and conquered [their lord], was still there. Then they sear \ ched [cerchie] and looked everywhere.)

Figure 6  Parchment tear and bleeding wounds. BnF fr. 12560, fol. 8va (detail)

The identification here is so strong between the events being narrated and their representation on parchment that the play of the codicological unconscious in this passage would be hard to miss. In Yvain, a wound bleeds out of place, disrupting the scene of grieving. On the folio, a stitched-up wound disrupts the smooth progression of the text, with the disruption increasing with each successive line (first it touches no words, then obscures the end of one [mort], then bisects another [cerchie]). In the narrative, the bleeding of the wound is interpreted to mean that the killer is near; on the page, the word mort (‘killed’) partially overlaps with the tear, uncannily reactivating the association between wound and killer through the interplay of multiple registers of information in the codex. In this at once revelatory and disruptive intersection of different kinds of embodied mortality, the codicological unconscious makes itself heard. The ‘palaeographic’ unconscious can contribute to this account by bringing the scribe’s own body and desire into consideration, particularly as they manifest in the shape of one important word: mort. What intrigues me is that the tear seems to have been present at the time of copying, since the scribe left extra space to avoid it on the third line (‘fete \ auoit’). When the time came to set the word ‘mort’ down in writing, however, the hand nevertheless strayed

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into the tear in the page, with the letters ‘rt’ visibly distorted by their contact with the wound that so closely mirrors that of Esclados. Recalling the blurring of ‘Y(v)ain’ and ‘vain’, it is as if the hand were drawn into the site of the wound against its own better judgement, swayed by an unconscious affinity between the material being written and the immanent context of its writing. The distorted ‘mort’ offers a lasting trace of that desire, its form marking the point of contact between hand and signifier, ink and page, sense and nonsense at a low level – so low that it might have been missed by the naked eye. Conclusion As Kay notes in Philology’s Vomit, ‘many philologists […] are now wondering how best to respond to what seem to be an almost unlimited number of [manuscripts] in cyberspace’ (2017b: 16–17). Through two related gestures, I have sought in this essay to open up some new angles by which this challenge might more confidently be faced. The first has been to sketch what it would look like to read medieval manuscript texts in a way that is essentially digital, rather than merely ‘accidentally’ so (to borrow Aristotelian terminology): we can leverage the unique capabilities of our augmented vision to turn the tables on the magically augmented Yvain. The second has been to attempt to lessen the potentially uncomfortable or jarring historical disconnect produced in the encounter between medieval manuscript objects and modern computer technology by introducing a vocabulary that foregrounds the role of that technology in structuring our reading. When we work with medieval manuscript texts on a computer screen, we are working with the final output of a complex array of computer systems that emanate from the alien ‘low level’ of machine language (binary code) and that allow us to work with manuscript objects in new kinds of ways. This interaction, in turn, facilitates the teasing out of ‘lowlevel’ operations at play within the technology of the books themselves. Some of the differences that arise from the transition to computer reading are merely a matter of degree: one can of course ‘zoom in’ on a physical page with the aid of a magnifying glass, but it is still simpler (for the reader) to scroll a mouse wheel or pinch one’s fingers to produce a reliable, high-resolution, reproducible image. Other differences, however, represent substantial methodological transformations: one can cut out a word and paste it over another using computer software, whereas one would never cut out a word from a manuscript held at the BnF (at least if one values one’s life and library card). As immaterial representations that are in sight even as they remain physically inaccessible, digitally reproduced manuscript objects are imbued with an ‘“eternal” quality’ (Courtly Contradictions: 262), and in this sense are like sublime objects. Perhaps it is for this very reason that the structure so easily flips: through the same transformation, digitised manuscripts have



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been turned into machines disburdened of the reverential aura that surrounds physical prestige objects as unique, priceless, and implicitly calling for methodologically conservative approaches. In this shift, which Kay termed the reversal of the sublime ‘sequence’ into the sequence of perversion (264), we become like object-instruments of the machine’s desire – scrolling and enhancing the texts in ways the machine was programmed to facilitate, using its functionality to seek out lower levels of meaning as it seems to demand. In this perversion, I believe, lies one possible future for our discipline.

•  Logic, Meaning, and Imagination  • Virginie Greene

W

hen I first read Courtly Contradictions, not long after its publication, I was hypnotised by the word ‘contradiction’, which I related to ‘ambivalence’, a psychoanalytic concept of interest to me at that time. As I was struggling with psychoanalytic theory and courtly literature, Courtly Contradictions indicated another direction to pursue: medieval logic. In her introduction, Sarah Kay presents the various trends of thought related to contradiction, opposition, contrarieties, paradoxes, and similar figures available to thinkers and writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (11– 25). Not only does she manage to introduce clearly and succinctly the main ideas, agents, and texts necessary to open the door of the intimidating field of medieval logic to the novice, but she proposes to locate logic in dialogue with theology and literature, without fuss about disciplinary etiquette. The first troubadour is at eye level with the first logician. Augustine talks to Chrétien de Troyes, and Chrétien talks to Augustine. Other medievalists paved the way for this epistemological reconfiguration (Hunt 1977, 1979, Vance 1987, Brown 1998). Building on their work, Kay locates courtly writers within a ‘clerical culture’ for which ‘contradiction lay at the heart of intellectual life’ (25). In this essay I will revisit Courtly Contradictions and the impact it had on the development of my thoughts related to logic, meaning, and imagination. I will first examine the relation Kay posits between contradiction as a trope and the emergence of literature as an object of desire in the courtly context she studies. Second, I will look at the paradoxical creation of sense through nonsense, and at contradiction as an operator of meaning between logos and mythos. I will end by examining the notion of the unconscious as a point of encounter and contradiction between psychoanalysis and logic. Throughout I will use Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 1936a, first published 1865) and Through the Looking Glass (Carroll 1936b, first published 1872), two tales demonstrating both the closeness of logic and fiction and their unresolvable difference. I view these tales as late offspring of courtly literature, and, more specifically, of chivalric romances and dream

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visions.1 By expanding the scope of Courtly Contradictions to Victorian literature, I examine another key moment in the history of logic and fiction, coinciding with what Jan Ziolkowski calls ‘the medievalizing of modernity’ (2018). Carroll uses the deck of cards and the chessboard (both ancient Eastern games arriving and developing in medieval Europe) as matrices for the fictional worlds of his two tales featuring Alice. He also uses tropes borrowed from courtly literature via its revivals in nineteenth-century European culture, populating his tales with talking animals including lions and unicorns, as well as with duchesses, queens, kings, knights, heralds, and squires. Alice herself follows the paths of adventures in unknown lands like an errant knight. Contradiction as a Trope and Literature as an Object The epiphany I experienced in Courtly Contradictions both illuminated and obfuscated my understanding of the field of medieval literature. The luminous part was the title; the obscure part was the subtitle, ‘The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century’. I could recognise the historical and hermeneutic value of promoting courtly tropes to the level of logical reasoning. I was, for my part, trying to make sense of psychological discrepancies in La Mort Artu by elevating them to the dignity of psychoanalytical Ambivalenz (Greene 2002: 217–23). That move prepared me to jump backward to Aristotle and the principle of non-contradiction (hereafter, PNC), as expressed in Metaphysics IV, ‘that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect’ (Aristotle 1984: II, 1588; 1005b20). More than any other critical text, Courtly Contradictions introduced me to an intellectual landscape in which literature is a way of thinking, and writing a total human fact: physical, mental, and social. In contrast to my earlier view, I believe now that its whole title could have been The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century. This is the true subject of the book. Contradiction is an important theme but – according to my reading – an ancillary one. The last sentence of the last chapter states: ‘The bizarre representation of love in Yvain and Partonopeu, texts which were imitated and translated across Europe, confirms the existence, in the last third of the twelfth century, of courtly (or contradictory) literature in a form that would persist for centuries’ (Courtly Contradictions: 299). The persistence of this form is due not so much to its use of contradictions as to its impressive deployment of the ‘object’ in the Lacanian sense of an ‘object of desire’ that marks the ‘place of the real’ and therefore reveals ‘the rule of the drives beyond the law of desire’ (311). Whether this 1 I also follow in the footsteps of May Plouzeau’s La Geste d’Aalis el païs de Merveilles, a translation into Old French verse of Lewis Carroll’s tale. The first chapter is titled: ‘Coment Alis cheï el pertuis d’un conin’ (How Alice fell into the rabbit hole, Carroll 2017: 7).

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object is the lady of love poetry or the Lady of hagiography, the Golden Fleece or an invisibility ring, Yvain for Gauvain or Gauvain for Yvain, the author for the reader or the reader for the author, the ego for the subject or the subject for the perverse, objectification is the key operation that transforms mental games, saints’ lives, riddles, and love songs into literary texts, that is, into ‘cultural products’ that we can use as ‘objects’ to think with or, more humbly, to enjoy (310–11). Since these objects are attractive because they are never what they seem to be, always standing for something else or for nothing, contradiction is part of their make-up as it is part of the attractive literary object known as Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, but contradiction is not only an object to enjoy or to think with, if we choose. It is deeply rooted in our minds, like the ability to make sense of phonemes. It is a trope without which we cannot think. The main thesis of Courtly Contradictions is that courtly literature is contradictory because it has shifted the emphasis from the subject as an enigma toward the object as a substitute for something else. The shift is contradictory in that it confuses the positions of object and subject, creating an equivalence between them that is productive of contrariness or contradiction between high and low, desiring and being desired, the abject and the sublime, inanimate and animate, dead and alive, and other opposites set in tension through plots and tropes. This shift is historically related to the shift of weight between two fields of the trivium, rhetoric and logic, which happened during the twelfth century as more Aristotelian logic made its way into the Latin intellectual world: ‘the gradual shifts discernible in vernacular texts over the twelfth century attest to the increasing prestige of the logical tradition over other ways of negotiating contradictoriness’ (110). It is also related to the development of book production outside cloisters and cathedral schools. The thirteenth century saw the emergence of the literary object, as it saw the production of books as objects that could be traded and collected (de Hamel 1994: 142–67). The roots of such a cultural investment are to be found in mechanisms of desire related to new social forms of belonging and behaving defined by possessing. In Logical Fictions, I argue that Aristotle himself created a borderline fictional character, named the Opponent, whom he presents as both necessary to establish the PNC and also impossible (Greene 2014: 97). I now view the figure of the Reader of courtly literature as occupying a position symmetrical to that of the Opponent of logic, the former defining contingency, the latter defining impossibility or fiction. Following Daniel Heller-Roazen’s use of the modal concept of ‘contingency’ (2003), I have established a ternary pattern emerging from Anselm of Canterbury’s Proslogion, that distinguishes God as a necessary being from humans as contingent beings, and from characters such as Aristotle’s Opponent or Anselm’s Insipiens (the fool who says there is no God in Psalms 9, 13, and 53) as impossible or fictional beings (Greene 2014: 117). Seeing ‘their object a’ (Courtly Contradictions: 37) in the literature that distinguishes them as the



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‘courtly’ ones, the contingent Readers, figures as refined as the impossible Opponent is uncouth, play with contradiction in order to assert their difference and overcome their lack of clerical authority. During the croquet game, the Duchess says to Alice: ‘Be what you would seem to be’ – or if, you’d like it put more simply – ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’ (Carroll 1936a: 98)

To be is to imagine oneself to be, and it is advisable to imagine oneself in a way that seems to correspond to the otherwiseness of appearances. This Carrollian notion is close to the Lacanian notion of ‘signifier’ or ‘that which represents a subject for another signifier’ (Lacan 1977: 207). Such ways of thinking, however, do not make much sense unless they are turned into literature: ‘I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said very politely, ‘if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.’ (Carroll 1936a: 98)

Alice locates the Duchess’s pseudo-ontological puzzle in its correct context: signification. She thus inscribes herself in the lineage of heroic hermeneuticians who see right through the code and are generally introduced in stories as naive or idiotic. Perceval is one of her most famous medieval ancestors. Medieval as well as modern logic asks the question of significatio or meaning. How does meaning happen (Marquez 2015)? Does it pertain to logic, grammar, or psychology?2 Or to theology (Courtly Contradictions: 19–24)? It is in any case related to language, in the same way that ‘mechanisms of opposition (contrariety, relation, privation, and negation) inhere in language’ (300)? The courtly texts Kay examines are particularly rich in contradictions and contradictoriness, and ‘[result] in experimentation with, or exposure of, the limits of rational thought’ (38). ‘Rational thought’ pertains to the rational animal, that is, according to Aristotle in Politics, the human: ‘Man is the only animal who has the gift of speech’ (Aristotle 1984: II, 1988; 1253a10). The Greek expression dzoon logon echon or to logikon dzoon (the animal who has language) was translated in Latin as animal rationale (the rational animal).3 In 2 See Taki Suto’s brief presentation of the semantic tradition of Aristotle and Boethius, rooted in psychology according to Frege and Russell, proponents of a semantic rooted in logic and avoiding psychology (2012: 9–12). Between logic and psychology, there is room for ‘Psychologic’, the additional member of the trivium I invented (Greene 2011: 44). 3 It is probably via Boethius’s translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge that the expression entered scholastic vocabulary (Porphyry 1998: 6). Brunetto Latini says that humans surpass

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this ancient and medieval vision of humanity, the limit of rational thought is the limit of language, and vice versa. Hence the importance of nonsense, paradox, contradiction, and the like in the culture that saw the emergence of the literary object, for such games or tropes engage the very possibility of making sense.4 Making Sense out of Nonsense Since we cannot discuss meaning without being already involved in the production of meaning, it is even more important than usual here to establish in what sense we take our key terms and concepts. I share Heller-Roazen’s relative optimism about our ability to make sense about sense: ‘Speaking without being aware of the rules by which we speak, reasoning in given languages without reflecting on the logics that they imply, we are able to make use of a capacity that is obscure to us, without examining it as such. But we are also capable of bending our thinking back upon its idiom, listening to the system of constraints that our words and phrases exhibit’ (2017: 11). Rereading Courtly Contradictions, I finally understood that a major factor of misunderstanding in discussions about contradiction and logic comes from confusions of scope or size, for, as Alice says to the Caterpillar, ‘being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing’ (Carroll 1936a: 54). So, if we do not want to lose sight of our own feet or swim in our own tears, we had better keep track of the size or scope that concepts take in our minds, and especially of the difference between their narrow or broad senses. Logic in a narrow sense was in the twelfth century a scholarly field dealing with certain modes of reasoning (e.g. deduction, dialectic, syllogism, refutation, analysis, demonstration) to establish firm knowledge. It was part of the sciences of language, along with grammar and rhetoric. Today it is still a scholarly field, but belongs to a different constellation of disciplines: linguistics, mathematics, computer sciences, psychology, and philosophy (of the analytic kind). Logic in a broad sense could be best expressed as a ‘-logy’ without a root – a floating suffix, designating the basic ability of making sense and producing meaning through various systems, of which the most used is called ‘natural language’. Logy is both intersubjective and intrasubjective, but it is neither conscious nor unconscious. It operates across various levels of awareness or consciousness, while logic in the narrow sense is highly conscious. This is relatively simple.5 With contradiction, the question of size or scope is more complicated. other animals in ‘la parleure’ (speaking) (2003: 5). 4 Hence too the importance of the relation between human and animal in this culture, as Kay underscores in Animal Skins and as do Sharon Kinoshita, Elizabeth Eva Leach, and James Simpson in their essays in this volume (Part VI). 5 Only very relatively. For more complicated definitions of logic, see Hanna 2006: xi–xv.



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Contradiction in its narrow sense has to be deduced from Aristotle’s PNC (Greene 2014: 89–92). A contradiction emerges as a statement that proposes that something belongs and does not belong at the same time and in the same respect to the same subject. Contradictions stricto sensu are exceedingly rare in everyday life and language because they are truly idiotic. Aristotle was of the opinion that they cannot even be seriously stated because they explode language and reasoning, condemning speakers and listeners to dwell in a world where a rose is a horse is a chair is my aunt is …, and so on. The opinion or fear that transgressing the PNC would open an endless shift of signifiers has been contradicted by various logicians. For instance, Graham Priest denies that if we accept that a and not a can both be true, then everything can be true (2006: 5–6). I do not know where the logician Charles Dodgson stood on this issue, but the author Lewis Carroll describes in Through the Looking Glass a memorable scene of havoc when Alice arrives at the Eighth Square and becomes a Queen. Then words and things get so confused that the world through the looking glass becomes unliveable and unspeakable, for objects, plants, animals, and people constantly morph into one another, change size, disappear into soup, or fly away like birds (1936b: 260–7). As the only ‘real’ person present, Alice has to re-establish the PNC through drastic action: ‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ she cried as she jumped up and seized the table-cloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor. (266)

Destroying at once all the untethered signifiers that threaten her own identity is not enough. She has to confront and silence the Opponent: ‘And as for you,’ she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief. […] ‘As for you,’ she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, ‘I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!’ (266–7)

Once the Red Queen is shaken back into the kitten she really is, the world makes sense again. Dream and reality are neatly separated, although Alice awake cannot resist asking the kitten to help her solve a conundrum encountered in the dream: ‘Now, Kitty, let’s consider who it was that dreamed it all. […] You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream too!’ (267). Are we dreaming or are we dreamt? What remains in our dreams of the PNC and other fundamental principles of identity, differentiation, and signification?

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Aristotle’s dogged assumption that humans are condemned to be logical and cannot possibly contradict themselves calls for immediate push-back. How naive! How simplistic! Paul Grice’s ‘Cooperative Principle’ provokes the same reaction (1967: 41–58). Like the PNC, it seems to be based on a naive view of humans as primarily geared to using language angelically, that is, for the sake of usefulness, cooperation, truth, and rationality. However, it is hard to consider Aristotle and Grice as naive moralists, although they tend to use a vocabulary loaded with moralising. Considering their principles within a well-defined, narrow scope helps avoid that misunderstanding and therefore offers a better critique of the PNC and the Cooperative Principle. Even without anachronistically calling Alice to the witness stand, we can claim that ancient Greek literature is full of contradictions and metamorphoses, its logos being counterbalanced by its mythos, that is, a way to view language that does not anchor it in the PNC, but, on the contrary, in the ability of human language to express various states of tension at the border of the rational and the irrational, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the intelligible and the unintelligible, or ‘at the edges of reason’ (Courtly Contradictions, 109–11). To give only one example, Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae stages a tragic hero who dies because of his obdurate defence of rationality against the mad cult of Dionysos. The chorus, commenting on Pentheus’s blind opposition, says: ‘But being wise isn’t wisdom’ [to sophon d’ou sophia] (Euripides 2002: 44–5; l, line 395), which seems to imply that a single subject could be wise and not wise at the same time and in the same respect. Does this mean that the PNC must definitely be debunked and abandoned? It may be costly to do so, particularly if one wants to fight lies, sophisms, or fake news. The PNC should be generally preserved as a garde-fou (safeguard) against contradiction in its narrow sense.6 I apply here to daily usage Priest’s logical definition of the correct domain of validity of the PNC (2006: 208–9). But contradiction in a broad sense should also be allowed, as irony, paradox, ambivalence, ambiguity, nonsense, etc. To be a human speaker, one needs to admit a maxim that is the reverse of the PNC and which I call Tolerance of Contradiction (in the broad sense of ‘contradiction’). This maxim enables us to be attuned to the power of mythos, like Alice when she falls into the rabbit hole or passes through the looking glass, at the same time that we continue to obey generally the PNC (in the narrow sense of ‘contradiction’), that is, to submit to the discipline of logos, like Alice as she doggedly fights the powers of nonsense inside her dreams, which is truly heroic: ‘I won’t be 6 I say ‘generally’ because I leave aside here the contradictory paradoxes of the Liar kind, which are not idiotic and are encountered beyond conversations between logicians. ‘I am a liar’ may be a meaningful breach of the PNC that nevertheless does not break down the whole system of language.



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introduced to the pudding, please,’ Alice said rather hastily, ‘or we shall get no dinner at all’ (1936b: 262). Courtly literature presents innovative ways to handle contradiction in its different scopes and sizes by translating mythos into fables and logos into debates. As Kay points out through her use of psychoanalytic theory, this translation is efficient and durable because it works with unconscious mechanisms. Medieval thinkers (whether logicians, theologians, or fabulists) did not theorise the or an unconscious, but they engaged with their own ability to reason, think, and perceive, admitting dark zones of sin, unknowing, or songe (dream). They also admitted vision, ecstasy, or illumination, that is, a bedazzling instead of a dark unconscious. It’s the Unconscious, Stupid! Aristotle located the PNC at the unconscious core of the psyche and viewed the mind as deeply logical (Greene 2014: 102–3). In a post-Hegelian world it is possible to conceive of an unconscious unbound from the PNC, as Freud and Lacan do (Courtly Contradictions: 300), and of logics breaching the PNC, as some modern logicians do (Haack 1974, Priest 2008). Nonetheless, if, in the twelfth century (that is, in pre-Hegelian terms), contradiction taken in a broad sense can be enjoyed by anyone having access to logy (speaking animals), and taken in its narrow sense discussed by those who understand logic (logicians), then a convergence between the medieval and the psychoanalytic can be located in courtly literature, explaining its resonance then and now: ‘the success of courtly literature may lie in the way the contradictions which it embodies appeal to the contradictoriness of our own impulses and desires’ (Courtly Contradictions: 37). The mysterious object petit a articulates the difference between Freud’s unconscious and Lacan’s unconscious, or the passage from a dynamic/ topological to a semiotic/linguistic description of the unconscious. Freud’s unconscious has often been compared to an iceberg – that is, a topological and geological model – although Freud insisted on its dynamic aspect (repression, resistance) – that is, a model inspired by physics. Lacan’s unconscious is clearly related to signs and language, although his semiotics is, in some ways, an anti-semiotics. Among other Lacanian statements on language and the unconscious: ‘There is no unconscious except for the speaking being. […] It speaks, does the unconscious, so that it depends on language […]’ (Lacan 1987: 9). The object petit a is an object that does not exist except as a signifier without a signified, but that, nonetheless, exercises a strong power on the subject by channelling desire and signifying the unconscious. Medievalising somewhat, one could say that a is the seal of the unconscious.

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When Lacan medievalised, he saw a representation of a in the evasive domna of the troubadours, and, in their understanding of desire, a confirmation of his own (Lacan 1986: 174–84, Kay 1999b: 212–27). Kay went a notch further (I am tempted to say that she outlacanised Lacan) by replacing the domna with courtly literature itself: ‘at some point, and in some respect, audiences and readers of courtly literature have been able to see in it their object a’ (Courtly Contradictions: 37). I suspect that this apparently slight difference between courtly lady and courtly literature (slight because the domna is a literary creature) signals in Courtly Contradictions a point of feminist resistance. The mysterious a remains good to think with for thinkers of any gender, sex, inclination, etc., only so long as it does not become the transparent cypher of a femininity conceived as emptiness. Conversely, the Grail remains good to think with as long as it does not reveal any content, and remains ‘conspicuous by its absence’ (Griffin 2005: 53). The contradictoriness of a could be logically expressed as: a is something because it is nothing, which entails that a = 0 and a ≠ 0, a flagrant breach of the PNC, and one on which a whole economy of desire is built. In chapters VII (‘The Lion and the Unicorn’) and VIII (‘It’s my own Invention’) of Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters amours et armes in a mini-epic and an abbreviated romance, illustrating perfectly the shift from subject to object that Kay observed in twelfth-century courtly literature, and the destiny of the object a along this shift. The unconscious of Carroll’s text is neither logical nor illogical: it is prosodic. Two traditional nursery rhymes and an Irish ballad by Thomas Moore (1779–1852) provide a subtext that generates the plot and the characters Alice encounters. The nursery rhymes are ‘The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown’ and ‘I love my love with an A’. The ballad the White Knight sings parodies Moore’s song ‘I give thee all, I can no more’. This self-referential literary device functions like a Moebius band, with song and story being the recto and verso of a single, continuous surface: ‘Who are at it again?’ she ventured to ask. ‘Why the Lion and the Unicorn, of course,’ said the King. ‘Fighting for the crown?’ ‘Yes, to be sure,’ said the King: ‘and the best of the joke is, that it’s my crown all the while! Let’s run and see them.’ And they trotted off, Alice repeating to herself, as she ran, the words of the old song: – ‘The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown:



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The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town. Some gave them white bread, some gave them brown; Some gave them plum-cake and drummed them out of town.’ (Carroll 1936b: 226)

In such a paradoxical, self-generating plot, characters are floating on the edge of being and nothingness. The White King, waiting for his messengers, asks Alice: ‘Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.’ ‘I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice. ‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!’ (Carroll 1936b: 223)

This is a reiteration of the Homeric play on outis (nobody) becoming the proper name Outis (Nobody) in the Odyssey (Heller-Roazen 2017: 9–11). Being able to see Nobody, Alice is unable to see an identifiable object of desire in somebody. Introduced to the messenger Haigha, she remembers a nursery rhyme: ‘I love my love with an H,’ Alice couldn’t help beginning, ‘because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with – with – with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name is Haigha, and he lives – ’ (Carroll 1936b: 223)

She is compulsively in love with language, and it does not matter whether Haigha or his fellow messenger Hatta is the desirable object, since both have names starting with ‘h’. The original nursery rhyme ‘I love my love with an A’ is transformed into a narrative matrix, in which the Lacanian object a becomes an indefinite variable that cannot be stabilised. Let’s call it the Carrollian object H. Haigha and Hatta produce this object while pulling out of their bags ham sandwiches, hay, and dry bread. They indiscriminately feed each other, the White King, the Unicorn, the Lion, and Alice, seen by the Unicorn as a ‘fabulous monster’ and by Haigha as ‘a child […] as large as life and twice as natural’ (1936b: 229). Reduced to the status of an infant, playing with sounds without understanding meaning, and obeying the commands of H without minding its fundamental inconsistency, Alice is ready to be presented with the quintessential form of H: Haigha took a large cake out of the bag, and gave it to Alice to hold, while he got out a dish and carving-knife. How they all came out of it Alice couldn’t guess. It was just like a conjuring-trick, she thought. (1936b: 230)

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In this pre-verbal Grail scene, Alice is not supposed to ask any questions, but to manage cutting and distributing the cake, although not in this order. To prevent the cut-up cake from reassembling itself before she can share it, she obeys the Unicorn’s advice: ‘Hand it round first and cut it afterwards’ (1936b: 232). This works, but leaves her with the task of cutting a nonexistent cake in an empty dish, while the Lion and the Unicorn resume their endless, thoughtless, and useless quarrel. The drums of war begin and become so deafening that Alice ‘started to her feet and sprang across the little brook in her terror’ (1936b: 233). The epic chapter ends with a horrific reminder of the noise of ancient and modern wars. If Alice had sung then, she might have added to the rhyme the line ‘I love my love with an H because these are times of Horror.’ Escaping H, Alice finds romance. Chapter VII is pure romance. Two knights errant fight over the damsel who has just escaped something horrific. The Red Knight wants to take her as his prisoner, but the White Knight defeats him. Putting himself at her service, the White Knight escorts the damsel to the place where she will be crowned a queen. Then he turns back and renounces seeing her forever. As if this was not enough to impart to the reader that, whether she likes it or not, she is immersed in romantic fantasy, the White Knight sings a love ballad that Alice will remember for the rest of her life: ‘Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday’ (1936b: 244). It is a rare moment of anticipatory nostalgia conjuring the image of a grown-up Alice, looking back at her childhood, and specifically at the moment when she abandoned H for a, entering adolescence at least in her dream. While running away from the drums, she unconsciously held on to the dish: ‘there was the great dish still lying at her feet’ (1936b: 233). The dish is for her a proof that she did not dream the previous adventure, or, put differently, that Horror exists but can be escaped. However, the dish loses its aura once she has been identified by the two knights as an object of contention. The victory of the White Knight allows her to articulate her identity as a desire for something: ‘It was a glorious victory, wasn’t it?’ said the White Knight, as he came up panting. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice said doubtfully. ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s prisoner. I want to be a Queen.’ (1936b: 236)

She would have forgotten the dish if the White Knight had not asked her about it:



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‘What’s the dish for?’ ‘It’s meant for plum-cake,’ said Alice. ‘We’d better take it with us,’ the Knight said. ‘It’ll come in handy if we find any plum-cake. Help me to get it into this bag.’ (1936b: 237)

The Dish has been demoted to a dish and the Horror reduced to possible encounters with plum-cakes. The brutish lion-warrior is replaced by a travelling salesman who is also a marketing genius and a relentless inventor, producing objects a on a large scale (e.g. rain-proof because upside-down tin-boxes, beehives to scare mice away, anklets to protect horses against shark bites, upright sticks to prevent your hair from falling off your head). His motto: ‘it’s as well to be provided for everything’ (1936b: 237). Such is the price to pay for becoming a queen in Carrollian times: to be faithfully served by inept inventors who constantly fall on their heads and have to be put back on their horses, while their inventions litter the surface of the earth. The contradictory object of courtly literature, which was something because it was nothing, has evolved into another contradictory formula: a = a. The object equals the matter and energy it wastes. The fact that our desires and their objects come in large part from unconscious impulses, mechanisms, or scripts is no excuse. Literature at its worst duplicates the economy of desire in which it is embedded. At its best, it uses imagination as logic (Greene 2011) and language as a Trojan horse ‘to transform the reader’s conception of language, and hence of reality’ (Kim 2018: 85–6). Conclusion Courtly Contradictions plays a pivotal role in medieval literary studies by defining literariness as a mental attitude, located within a broad intellectual, aesthetic, and cultural landscape. Without losing sight of materiality and historicity, Kay invites reflection on the medieval literary corpus in relation to the experiments on meaning that twelfth-century writers and readers pursued. She rightly locates logic (stricto sensu) as a site not limited to itself but in dialogue with other sites of knowledge and innovation. If I took Courtly Contradictions too literally as an injunction to go logical, that path led me to encounter the enemy of logic and the father of fiction, the Opponent, and to realise that, as an imaginary creature, he performed well his office of guardian at the threshold of reason and madness, sense and nonsense, conscious and unconscious, until courtly culture, allied with scholasticism, reinvented literature as an object of desire, leaving to courtly Readers the task of reconciling reason and fable.

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Using Carroll’s tales was my way to deal with the Lacanian component of Courtly Literature. The Middle Ages of Jacques Lacan are after all not so far from the Victorian Middle Ages of Carroll. For both authors, courtliness reveals human desire and its contradictions. However, if Lacan unveils the root of our pleasure in reading literature (medieval and otherwise), Carroll renews it. What makes his tales so enduring for audiences of all kinds is similar to what Kay suggests for courtly literature: a special association between contradiction and desire that playfully reveals the unconscious mechanisms by which, in a given culture, subjects view the world with or through their objects, whether stable, like a, or unstable, like H. Coda As soon as the caterpillar becomes aware that there are more things beyond and behind the things she perceives, she acquires imagination, and as soon as she starts to deduce one thing from another, she founds logic. Then she can take a break on her favourite mushroom to smoke her hookah and dream of herself as a butterfly, a fox, a little girl named Alice, a grin, a cat, a logician, a battleship, or whatnot. She imagines the world lurking beyond the cabbage leaf that defines her horizon full of these variations of herself. At this point she is in great danger of projecting herself onto the unknown world. She is also confusing a cabbage leaf with a looking glass, which must have consequences on the formation of her ego and the choice of her objects a. But, being both logical and imaginative, the caterpillar knows how to restrain the scope of her enquiries to the right size. No self-idolatry will divert the caterpillar’s curiosity away from what lurks behind the next cabbage leaf. ‘Actually, most likely, another cabbage leaf.’

• PART IV • The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature

•  Introduction  • Nicolette Zeeman

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he Place of Thought is one more example of Sarah Kay’s inventiveness and bold theoretical bent in the reading of medieval texts – here the Occitan and French ‘didactic literature’ of the later Middle Ages. Kay has always risen to the challenge of tackling what might look like familiar works and genres from new angles. What also marks out her work, however, is the degree to which she believes that the literature is up to the challenge. Kay is utterly uncompromising in her use of both medieval philosophy and modern theory to read this literature – and in her belief that the literature is sufficiently robust in its self-understanding and internal logic to talk back. This seriousness and lack of condescension marks out the very best readers of the literature of the Middle Ages, and Sarah Kay is one of them. If Kay’s first book, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, was a reaction against the structuralist turn in the reading of the medieval lyric, there is also a sense in which she has never ceased thinking structurally, not only about texts in general, but also about subjectivity. I recall a conversation many years ago at the Cambridge medieval reading group in which she (rightly) emphasised that views about the possible social or medical dysfunctionality of the fifteenthcentury English woman Margery Kempe were entirely irrelevant to what Kempe’s Book could tell readers about the social and religious structures within which Kempe experienced the world. It can be no coincidence that so much of Kay’s work on the human subject has actively avoided approaching texts via theories of psychology, intentionality, or voice, and has worked instead to identify other structures that shape textual meaning – whether socially and historically situated, gendered, psychoanalytic, ‘animal’, textual, or manuscript. If some of these structures are occluded by texts’ explicit meanings and require some kind of excavation (gender, the psychoanalytic, the human/non-human animal relation), one of the features that makes Kay’s work so engaging is that many of the structures that interest her are graphically apprehensible on the surfaces of her texts (the lady as midons, tombs, skin, trees, quotation). Kay was kind enough to note that The Place of Thought was partly inspired by a chance remark of mine that ‘monologism might be more challenging than dialogism’. For me, the remark was about voice (the un-ironic voice that speaks 181

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without acknowledging, or defending itself against, difference); tellingly, Kay heard the remark in entirely structural and philosophical terms. The overarching question that her book poses is whether or not later medieval ‘didactic literature’ is monologic. Kay’s final answer is a very clear ‘no’, but the real argument of the book is that issues of ‘oneness’ provide a powerful means of prising open many later medieval theological and philosophical poems. The book is a series of studies of the imbrications of ‘the one’, tracking, among other things, the relationship of the one to the many (Matfre Ermengaud), the universe to beings (Ovide moralisé), the whole subject to the divided (Deguileville), the public to the private (Machaut), or the universal to the particular (Froissart). The book speaks directly to medieval theological and philosophical issues, and to some social and psychological ones, connected to the idea of ‘oneness’ and also to what it might mean to be ‘one’. The later part of the book returns repeatedly to a widespread philosophical doubt as to whether the particular can actually be known by the intellect – though in fact by the later Middle Ages most scholastics had agreed that it could;1 what this part of the book does really successfully is to play out the problematics of the individual versus the group and the tension between personal and general forms of knowledge. However, the most original move of the book lies in its focus on how these texts think with imagined ‘place’: the ecphrastic diagram, the metamorphic tale, the narrative dialogue, and the textual picture, all of which look like ‘common places’ but turn out in due course to be elusive and at odds with themselves. It is one of the delightful paradoxes of the book that the ‘place’ of thought looks as if it is going to be the book’s ‘one’, but is in fact, as the title says, complex and multiple. It is here that Kay locates the most subtle conceptual work of these texts. Matfre Ermengaud’s upside-down and rhizomatic trees, for example, subvert the ‘Porphyrian tree’ model of the Christian universe, but they also throw into question the distinction between the rhizome and the tree originally made by Deleuze and Guattari. Deguileville’s subject, split between soul and body, and strung out between two paths divided by a hedge of ‘penance’ which is also a person with a broom (Kay’s ‘cleaning lady supremo’, 81), turns out to be a bizarre version of the cogito of Augustine and Descartes. Froissart’s shimmering ‘joli buisson de jonesce’ (‘pretty bush of youth’), pierced by the finger of a narrator who peers into it from an uncertain place somehow inside it, poses the problem of the relation of the subject to universal knowledge, but also speaks to Aristotle and Lacan on ‘the unthought within thought’ (145). It is at this level – in the ecphrases and narratives which 1 On the ways that later medieval philosophers countered the philosophical notion of ‘veil of ideas’ that supposedly masked perceived objects, see Smith 2014; Panaccio 2014 (citation p. 351).



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discover that the place of thought is not one but many, not one but divided, not thought but sometimes unthought – that Kay repeatedly finds the most challenging articulations of the problematics of the one. I am struck by the fact that all of the texts that Kay discusses here could have been described as ‘allegorical’. Although Kay does use this term, however, she tends to use it as a generic category (though it is also productive of ‘other speaking’, or an engagement with ‘loss’, 160, 170–1). Perhaps her reluctance to use allegory as a primary term of analysis is due to the fact that a long tradition of notionally allegorical reading has tended to disempower imaginative structures by redescribing them as metaphors: the crucial point for Kay, after all, is that such structures have to be taken on their own terms. In The Place of Thought this happens not, as some other ‘surface’ readers of allegory have done, by insisting on some kind of material or literal meaning,2 but through a determined focus on the conceptual consequences for thought of the structures themselves. The ‘anamorphic’ implication of the metamorphoses of the metaphysical Ovide moralisé is that the changing figures’ ‘non-self identity is the form in which identity is disclosed’, but also that metamorphosis is the place where ‘the n’estre that is inherent to nestre, the fissure of being within non-being’, is revealed. The allegorical fountain that Kay takes to be one of the structuring ‘places’ in Christine’s Chemin de long estude is a machine producing an endless flow of particulars in a selfdestructive world that cannot be resolved back into one (59–60, 160, 178). The essays that follow build variously on Kay’s book. For Stephen Nichols, the ‘one’ that in the Middle Ages problematises the notion of the ‘one text’ is the multiple patterning and, behind it, the multiple agency that make up the ‘cognitive field’ of the medieval manuscript. Christine Bourgeois and Deborah McGrady both attribute a polemical purposiveness and a dark undertow to the images with which their texts do their thinking. Bourgeois discusses how in La Cité des Dames Christine de Pizan refigures books as (in several cases transvestite) hagiographical female bodies, using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’ to analyse how Christine suspends the usual signifying relationships of women’s bodies and language. McGrady is prepared to see in Henri de Ferrières’s Songe de pestilence something closer to allegory, when she claims that Henri describes the destruction of France as wounds inflicted on the body of the king, Charles V. Henri’s insistence that, like a traumatic Christ, the king himself should identify with, and undergo, the suffering of his war-torn kingdom allows McGrady to reflect on the problematics of the identification of the monarch and his people, the ultimate political one and the many. 2

See, for example, Raskolnikov 2009.

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To conclude, Virginie Greene has suggested to me that The Place of Thought is quite a humorous book – and it is true that, locally, Kay can be killingly funny. But Kay is also always serious. As with all her writings, The Place of Thought advocates for the conceptual and philosophical ambition of medieval literature, all the while engaging with the many ways in which this literature explores the difficulty and strangeness of human relationships and the experiences of exclusion or loss. It is concerns of this sort that will ensure Kay’s impact and influence in studies within and beyond medieval Occitan and French literature.

•  Places of Thought:  • Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts Stephen G. Nichols

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ow one encounters medieval vernacular poetry shapes perception of its thought, language modes, images, texts, and textuality. The insights provoked, meanings assigned, and critical methodology deployed correlate with its representational environment. In the case of modern editions, discourse – transposed from a base manuscript into a printed critical text – provides the locus for thought, as for other elements of the works. Texto-centric critical approaches based on such editions have contributed significantly to the vitality of medieval studies in recent decades, not least in debates about the senses, sexuality, gender, corporeality, globality, and race. Among the most prolific and original exponents of such studies, Sarah Kay stands pre-eminent, as colleagues and graduate students on both sides of the Atlantic can attest. In keeping with Kay’s critical spirit in The Place of Thought, as well as with her later work on manuscript materiality (notably in Animal Skins), I want to take here a viewpoint based not on the modern critical edition but on another representational environment: that of the manuscript matrix. A visual and aural environment, the manuscript matrix mixes verbal narrative and graphic image to create a complex representational field appealing to multiple senses: sight, hearing, touch, even smell, since parchment and pigments have distinctive odours. Adding to the complex variables of the folio, each manuscript – even of the ‘same’ work – is a unique event produced by the hands of scribes and artists. In consequence, the manuscript matrix consists of a cognitive field distributed over multiple focal points produced by several agents; namely, the scribe(s) and artist(s) collaborating to offer their version of the poet’s work (for which – especially for works prior to the fourteenth century – there is often no original). In other words, the manuscript confronts the reader not with one, but with multiple marks of the mental, each looking at the same object from different intentional stances. While these perspectives differ, they have a common goal: to produce an intelligible and aesthetically pleasing form of the work. 185

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These facts have consequences, and not least for the nature of text and textuality in vernacular literary manuscripts. For one thing, since the manuscript folio aggregates poetry and image as constituent elements of its representative environment, they cannot logically be separated. Kay makes the same point in reminding us of the complementarity of thought and image for both Aristotle and Aquinas: ‘without an image thinking is impossible’, and ‘understanding never takes place without images and there are no images apart from the body’ (Place of Thought: 4). In any definition of ‘the text’ in the manuscript matrix, then, word and image belong together. Similarly, any definition of manuscript textuality must consider the extent to which medieval structures of thought are polymorphous. This fact may be perceived more readily in manuscript versions of a work than in a critical edition, whose purpose is to promote a unified or fixed verbal text meant to stand as a surrogate for the poet’s original. This modern drive towards textual unity or oneness exacerbated the belief in the monovocality of medieval didactic works, as Kay argues when demolishing Bakhtin’s (1981) dichotomy, ‘monologic/dialogic’, for medieval poetry (Place of Thought: 3–16). A great strength of The Place of Thought is to show how seriously medieval poets meditated the nature of ‘oneness’, and to force us to reflect on their views. ‘My contention’, says Kay, ‘is that when didactic texts promote some “one” of thought, this inevitably commits them to thinking, at some level, about the meaning of “one”, and that this commitment has aesthetic as well as intellectual consequences’ (Place of Thought: 4, my italics). In keeping with Kay’s example, my purpose will be to contest the assumption that in medieval manuscripts the verbal narrative is both ‘one’ and the principal narrative agent. In so doing, I hope to redefine the manuscript matrix as an ecological space of agency, whose intentionality, or ‘aboutness’ (Dennett 1996: 35) results from the engagement of the material object and human subject(s) acting upon one another to produce a jointly constituted artefact. Material engagement in this sense is not a ‘representational mechanism’, as print culture understands it, but, rather, a product of mind, body, and object functioning to produce complex, multivocal text-patterns. Real Patterns What we see on any given manuscript folio is therefore a complex but unitary representative space, and not the traditional binary consisting of separate signifying registers: on the one hand, the poetic narrative, and on the other, a programme of ancillary illustrations painted as an adjunct to the poetic narrative. That viewpoint made it acceptable to divide poetry and pictures into distinct disciplines under the aegis, respectively, of textual criticism and art history. The former underlay the genre of the modern print edition conveying



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only the written narrative, whereas the latter motivated studies of manuscript illuminations, often displayed as vignettes rather than in the context of the folio as a whole. In this essay, I build on my earlier calls to consider the various signifying elements on a folio as a composite text, to see it as a ‘manuscript matrix’ (Nichols 2016: 110), to explore the ways in which the ensemble of signifying elements come to form a textual unit. By ‘textual unit’ and ‘coherent, unitary configuration’ (below), I refer to formal, organising principles, rather than to Kay’s problematisation of the one. Indeed, as will become apparent, it is within these unitary configurations that the dialogue Kay envisions between various forms of ‘the one’ can occur. Such dialogue is assured by the kinetic disposition of entities within a pattern. What makes the differing mediatic parts cohere in the space of the folio? And what leads the viewer to read, understand, and interpret the disparate elements in dialogue as a coherent, unitary configuration? In fact, as we now recognise, they’re configured as patterns. Recent studies in cognitive perception explore the significance of patterns for understanding the issues raised by textual identity in the medieval manuscript matrix. Two philosophers, in particular, have written formative works in this domain: Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland. In 1991 Dennett published ‘Real Patterns’, drawing upon several earlier works (1969, 1981, 1987) in which he argued for the ontological reality of abstract objects like beliefs. Abstract beliefs are real, Dennett argues, ‘because they are (somehow) good abstract objects. They deserve to be taken seriously, learned about, used’ (Dennett 1991: 29). What Dennett calls ‘abstract beliefs’ or ‘abstract objects’ correspond to Kay’s discussion of abstract qualities or ideas, which in themselves are not in a place, but reside in a thing which is in a place (Place of Thought: 7–8). Dennett extends and refines his proposition about the reality of abstract objects ‘via the concept of a pattern’ (1991: 29). In the broadest sense, patterns are the signs we have learned from birth to predict as probable meanings of events that guide our own actions. Without our pattern-based ability to predict, Dennett notes, ‘we could have no interpersonal projects or relations; human activity would just be so much Brownian motion; we would be baffling ciphers to each other and ourselves’ (1991: 29). That predictions would be based on patterns makes sense; but, Dennett asks, how do we isolate and perceive patterns, and how do we demonstrate their form and function in given contexts? Dennett shows that we must answer these questions by looking at the most common objects in a different light: by looking behind or under them, we may discern the pattern shaping their structure. To do so, he argues, we must have a way of focusing on discrete instances of pattern formation by setting them apart, by placing them within a frame.

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By way of example, Dennett begins with ‘a much simpler, more readily visualized […] sort of pattern’, the bar code. To facilitate our thinking of these objects as patterns, he calls them ‘frames’. ‘We can understand a frame’, he continues, ‘to be a finite subset of data, a window on an infinitely larger world of further data’ (1991: 31). Dennett’s bar code illustration yields three insights: • first, the concept of the ‘frame’ as a finite data set that opens onto ‘an infinitely larger world of further data’; • second, the visible marks in the frame, when compared with similar marks in other frames, allow us to recognise a pattern. We call the individual frame ‘a candidate for pattern recognition’ (Dennett 1991: 32), while the series of frames with similar – though varied – markings confirms our intuition that, taken together, these markings constitute a pattern, ‘rather than simply a randomly generated set of marks’ (1991: 32); • third, while each frame contains unique data distributed in conformity to a pattern, we recognise the series of frames as functionally related by the similarity of the markings. The bar code is, however, a very simple example, and we need to be able to account for much more complex instances. Dennett calls the category of pattern he finds especially intriguing an ‘indiscernible pattern’, and urges that its ‘self-contradictory air […] should be taken seriously’ (1991: 32). Since Dennett speaks of a pattern’s ‘loose but unbreakable link to observers or perspectives’, we should understand the ‘indiscernible pattern’ as one hitherto unperceived or existing to be noticed. That is, in fact, one of Dennett’s aims in writing ‘Real Patterns’: to make ‘these intuitions about the discernibility-inprinciple of patterns precise’ (1991: 32). To this end, he shows patterns to arise from and stimulate cognitive perception. At once visual and intellectual (1991: 41), patterns reveal the acts of practical reasoning whereby we create order from miscellaneous data (1991: 43). In keeping with his idea that patterns are intellectual as well as visual, Dennett speaks of the idiosyncrasy of perceivers’ capacities to discern patterns. ‘Differences in knowledge yield striking differences in the capacity to recognize patterns’ (1991: 34). Therefore, Expert chess players can instantly perceive and subsequently recall with high accuracy the total board position in a real game but are much worse at recall if the same chess pieces are randomly placed on the board, even though to a novice both boards are equally hard to recall. (1991: 34)



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Dennett extrapolates from this experiment the fact that it is not sufficient simply to have a casual ability to recognise patterns in order for them to make sense cognitively: that is, for one to be able to make or do something with them, one also must have the knowledge and skill to interpret them. He again turns to chess to make this point: ‘Expert chess players not only know how to play chess; they know how to read chess – how to see the patterns at a glance’ (1991: 34). This is one reason that, in John Haugeland’s view, chess is an ideal example of how ‘context-dependent’ pattern recognition liberates the perceiver from being ‘oriented exclusively to the “internals” of the recognized pattern’ (1998: 274). Haugeland’s reflections on Dennett can provide key insights for conceptualising text-patterns in medieval manuscripts. In ‘Pattern and Being’, his perspicuous essay on Dennett’s ‘Real Patterns’, Haugeland notes that although patterns may be considered either abstractly or concretely, it is the concrete instances that lend themselves to recognition, with all that implies. In addition, Haugeland observes, patterns, viewed ‘from above’ are context-dependent: ‘one may recognize the existence of a pattern simply by looking at context-informed phenomena without considering content’ (Haugeland 1998: 274). Haugeland’s formula broadens the concept of pattern from the narrowly defined ‘orderly arrangement of parts’ to include ‘patterns (including behavioural patterns that support intentional interpretation) which do not seem to be made up of well-defined bits or elements’ (1998: 275). Haugeland’s insight here confers greater flexibility on patterns as an interpretive tool generally, but also, and more particularly, opens the way to proposing an ontology of text-patterns in medieval manuscripts. For example, the environment for context-dependent patterns in codices is the folio or page matrix. To envisage how pattern primacy functions in that environment is to postulate representative patterns – verbal and visual – guiding the narrative presentation of a work in a way that infuses each folio context with intentional interpretation. In essence, scribe and artist work with the graphic potentialities of the manuscript matrix to shape a representation of the poem. Even more to the point, one can think of context-dependent patterns as the material manifestations – the enabling mechanism as it were – for situating in the space of the folio the ‘thinking bodies’ emphasised by Kay. Manuscript folio text-patterns realise the version of a given manuscript in such a way that we see both the thinking body and the person’s thoughts as vivid narrative. In Kay’s view, The place where a person’s thinking body sits in philosophical contemplation provides the means for outlining, authorizing, and communicating the thoughts that are produced in that place. Although thought, in its nature, does not belong in place, to associate it with place is a way of grounding it in individual experience and of implying that it is orderly and rational. (Place of Thought: 8)

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It is not surprising that Kay uses ‘orderly and rational’ to describe ‘thought’ and that Dennett and Haugeland use the same terms with reference to recognitionbased patterns, which are precisely the orderly and rational expressions of cognition. Similarly, Kay notes, when thinking about human nature in universal terms, it seems obvious to begin from an individual body and to locate that body in a place appropriate to its dimensions. A telling example is the prison cell in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which is repeatedly recast as a study by Christine de Pizan. (Place of Thought: 8)

As we will see in the next section, text-patterns on incipit-folios of Rose manuscripts, and of many of Christine’s as well, enable the material realisation of such scenes. Dennett links context and content by viewing the outer manifestation of patterns as context-dependent pattern recognition, while equating content pattern recognition (the view that patterns assure the orderly arrangement of elements) with the inner pattern structures. For example, ‘individual chess pieces are recognition patterns serving as the elements of rule-constituted games, themselves understood as orderly arrangements’ (1998: 282). The chess analogy provides a concrete example of intentional states as the mark of the mental. It also allows Haugeland to introduce and explain intentionality as the ‘intentional stance’ (1998: 283). He thus builds upon Dennett’s concept of pattern formation and pattern recognition via the notion of ‘Intentional systems’, by which he means a rational posture or attitude whose ‘behavior can be explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and hopes, fears, intentions, hunches, …)’ (Dennett 1971: 87). While Dennett predicates Intentional systems on any object whose behaviour is predictive, humans figure largely. ‘Whatever else a person might be – embodied mind or soul, self-conscious moral agent, “emergent form of intelligence” – he is an Intentional system, and whatever follows just from being an Intentional system thus is true of a person’ (1971: 100). When someone adopts a posture or attitude toward something with an intent to interpret, decipher, understand, predict, or otherwise deal with an object, he or she takes what Dennett calls a stance. As Haugeland puts it, ‘a stance is a strategy that one might adopt in order to predict and explain the behaviour of something’ (1998: 283). Key here is the idea that a stance involves recognition. And recognition, for Haugeland, is not neutral; it involves evaluation and judgement, which, in turn, involve object determinacy and normativity. Being determinate and being recognisable, Haugeland affirms, ‘are related because only insofar as something determinate is supposed to be recognized, can there be an issue of recognizing it rightly or wrongly; and



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it is only as that which determines rightness or wrongness that the object of recognition is determinate’ (1998: 272, my italics). It follows from this that ‘a stance is more than just an attitude toward or a perspective on things’; it is nothing less than ‘a commitment to constitutive standards’ (1998: 284). ‘Stance’, as the active pursuit of ‘recognition’, entails normative interpretation, and it is this engagement, on Haugeland’s view, ‘that allows that toward which the stand is taken to stand out as phenomena, to stand over against us as objects’ (1998: 284, my italics). Within the terms of my argument in this essay, the phenomena in question are patterns, whose status as real objects becomes apparent thanks to recognitive analysis, or discovery. The kind of stance one takes determines the particular constitutive standards at work in any given situation. For the intentional domain – the one we are interested in for textual patterns – ‘rationality is the constitutive standard’ (1998: 284). In terms of what I want to call the ‘literary stance’ – which is simply a domain-specific version of the intentional stance, but which, crucially, extends the meaning of ‘literary’ beyond its common, narrowly verbal focus to include the multimedia experience of the manuscript matrix – rationality means assuming that scribes configured works as text-patterns that disposed all content on a folio in a meaningful way. A logical corollary to that premise presupposes that the text-patterns configure various levels of meaning, the most basic of which would be apparent to readers generally, whereas deeper levels of signification would yield to more skilled interpreters. The ontology of patterns means they exist as objects, and interpretation must respect that specificity. One may misrecognise a pattern – an error that can be pointed out – but it is not acceptable to posit a pattern recognition that is just ‘not there’. Of course, even as there are expert chess players who know how to ‘read’ chess as well as play it, and less skilled players with imperfect ‘chess literacy’, so pattern-recognition skills will vary among those encountering manuscripts. Text-Patterns in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts By way of illustrating how text-patterns function in the manuscript matrix to configure narrative poetry, I want to look at an incipit of a manuscript of the Roman de la Rose (c.1235). This exercise will also suggest how text-patterns created for manuscripts reinforce arguments that Kay makes about the staging of thought in didactic texts. I am thinking in particular of Kay’s exposition of the ways in which Jean de Meun, Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, and Christine de Pizan rewrite didactic texts from the past so as to place them in dialogue with their own thought (Place of Thought: 70–176). The substrate of medieval manuscripts, particularly those made from parchment, is ideally suited to create text-patterns. Once cured, tanned, and polished, individual vellum folios were laid out and ruled to accommodate the

Figure 1  Opening folio of the Roman de la Rose. Universitat de València, BH 387, fol. 2r (Northern France, c.1400–1406)



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content to be written or painted on them. While not as rigidly codified as, say, a chessboard, manuscript pages were rationally ordered in accord with a few proven configurations. The representational space of each folio was divided into horizontal lines and vertical columns, with margins on the top, bottom, and sides of the page. The resulting grid determines that representational content be deployed – and thus perceived and read – both horizontally and vertically, beginning at the top right and ending at the bottom left. If the grid delineates the space of representation, it is the context of the folio – its place within the overall narrative or manuscript – that determines its representational content. In other words, the folio’s configuration embodies the ‘context-dependence’ characteristic of recognition-based patterns (Haugeland 1998: 274–5). Figure 1 offers a concrete example of context-dependent, recognition-based pattern on a manuscript folio. The image represents the incipit, or first folio, of a version of the Roman de la Rose: València, Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS. 387, produced in northern France for the duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, probably between 1400 and 1406. The folio incorporates four kinds of media: painted images, lines of narrative written in sepia ink, and two kinds of hybrid letter- or word-images set off visually from the poetry. There are two rubrics (red captions with flourishes) – one, running across the top of the folio, and a second, at the bottom of the first column; and three different kinds of decorated letter-images: the nine-line-deep and three-quarter-column-wide red, green, blue, and gold initial ‘A’ of the opening line – ‘Aucunes gens cuident que’ (Some people think that) – and two smaller blue-letter on red background initials, ‘Q’ and ‘A’, lower down on the first and second columns. As we recall, Dennett speaks about the role of knowledge in pattern recognition, which he illustrates by distinguishing those who play chess and read chessboards to a relatively low level from experts (1991: 34). Knowledge also matters in recognising the context-dependent pattern in a multimodal manuscript folio like the incipit of València 387. The knowledge differential here lies between simply remarking the horizontal/vertical representation of content versus recognising how (and why) the folio choreographs complex textual elements along horizontal and vertical axes in order to implement the dual-track narrative mode characteristic of the Roman de la Rose. Manuscripts of the Rose typically present a syncretic version of the work consisting of the poetic narrative interspersed with graphic images and rubrics where each element inflects ‘the work’ with the ecological visual perceptions of scribe and artist.1 These are what have traditionally been seen as separate representational 1 I use ‘ecological visual perception’ as defined in Gibson 2015. ‘Seeing’ for Gibson involves not simply ocular perception but engages the body as situated in its experiential context. Gibson describes ‘the environment as the surfaces of substances’ that exist in the same space as humans and that ‘offer themselves’ to visual perception as ‘their composition

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systems, tagged as ‘text’ and ‘image’. I want to argue that they are elements of a sophisticated representational system: a text-pattern. To clarify this point, let us look first at the more elementary textual disposition of the folio: the horizontal/vertical structure determined by its ruled gridlines. Even a novice reader recognises that the folio consists of images, historiated or decorated letters, and tag lines, as well as of a number of narrative lines. These last are sometimes headed by decorated letters, or, on two occasions, separated by visually distinctive tag lines that comment on the poetic narrative, much as do the paintings. Pictures and coloured letters share representational space with the poetry, while differing visually from it. The novice reader can logically deduce that the double image spread across the top of the folio, above the narrative columns, depicts events at the beginning of the poem. This assumption is reinforced by the rubric above the image panel: ‘Ci commence le Rommant de la Rose autrement dit Le mireoir aux amoureux’ (Here begins the Romance of the Rose, otherwise called The Mirror of Lovers). Our reader will also gather that the first column contains the prologue of the poem, since the rubric at the bottom of that column announces: ‘Ci fine l’aucteur son prologue’ (Here the author ends his prologue). As for the very large, ornate initial ‘A’ or the smaller decorated initials, they signal transition points in the narrative as determined by this particular scribe, and play an important role in configuring the poetic narrative to conform to the text-pattern. While this reading offers a basic description of the folio by outlining ‘what’s there’, it does not view the space of the folio as anything other than a parchment sheet on which a scribe has copied a portion of the poem and an artist painted some ‘illustrations’. The basic description fails to conceive of the folio as a matrix interacting with what Wilfrid Sellers terms the ‘manifest image’ in the minds of scribe and artist.2 Thanks to the manifest image, ‘descriptive and explanatory resources […] are united with the language of community and individual intentions to provide the ambience of principles and standards […] which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible’ (Sellars 1963: 40). People think and act for reasons, and both of these ‘can occur only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which they can be criticised, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated’ (Sellars 1963: 40). The manifest image being essential to Dennett’s concept of stance (see above, pp. 190–1), the simple description I gave above of the incipit of València 387 clearly falls short of the ‘literary stance’, that is, it does not and layout’ (Gibson 2015: 119). 2 Dennett defines the ‘manifest image’ as ‘the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of solid objects, colours and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people […] [including] such intangible things as songs, poems, opportunities, and free will’ (Dennett 2014: 69).

Figure 2  Detail of Universitat de València, BH 387, fol. 2r.        

1. Lover asleep in bed, 2. Lover dressing, 3. Lover leaving bedroom (horizontal and vertical action)

4. Lover leaving château, 5. Lover approaching stream, 6. Lover kneeling and washing (all acts performed in dream while ‘real’ lover sleeps)

A  Decorated initial ‘A’

B Rubric

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engage in context-dependent pattern recognition and interpretation. Adopting the ‘literary stance’ yields a deeper appreciation of how the folio-matrix interweaves media modes into a coherent segment of the ongoing narrative on any given page. This means, in effect, that the manuscript matrix configures horizontal and vertical zones of data distribution in a pattern that both conveys a complex narrative segment and interprets it in terms of the larger intellectual trajectory of the work. Bearing in mind that we’re analysing the incipit of a unique manuscript version of the Rose, this folio bears the added weight of establishing a pattern for the manuscript matrix that will be replicated, mutatis mutandis, for each of the following pages in the codex.3 By way of concluding this schema, let’s adopt the ‘literary stance’ to examine more closely the initial rubric and image panel in the upper register of the incipit of the València Rose (Figure 2). First, note how the rubric ‘Ci commence le Rommant de la Rose autrement dit Le mireoir aux amoureux’ scrolls just above the image panels, thereby including the images in the beginning of the poem, the written text of which begins just below the pictures. Since the rubric announcing the beginning of the work usually appears between the image panels and the opening lines of the poem – that is, below the images and above the writing – the València incipit is unusual in having the initial rubric embrace both pictures and writing. Conventionally, rubrics caption images to identify the matter portrayed. That is certainly one purpose of the rubric here, since the image panels do depict opening scenes of the Rose. The left-hand panel shows three views of the lover: asleep in his bed; then seated donning his shoes; then, fully dressed, preparing to leave his room. In the wider, right-hand panel, we see three more images of the lover: outside the castle; then advancing into a natural setting towards a stream; and, finally, kneeling beside the stream washing his face. As we look at the double panel we take in the sleeping lover and his waking apparitions at a glance. Rationally, we read the images from left to right as a narrative sequence occurring over an unspecified, but relatively short time. But that’s not what’s happening; or, rather, the narrative sequence is only part of the story. The pictures (Figure 2) form a prologue – similar to that of the written narrative that begins in the left-hand column below the image panel – but a prologue that offers a schematic example of the romance’s multifaceted conceptual and narrative structure, which the poetic prologue then elaborates more allusively in the first column. By showing in close proximity the 3 The term incipit is significant in this respect. From the Latin incipio, -ere ‘to undertake’, ‘to begin’, ‘to take in hand’, the word has the connotation of ‘taking charge of’, a meaning reinforced by its etymology, in-capere, ‘to seize upon’, ‘lay hold of’. It is thus apposite for the first folio of a manuscript, since this will present its own version of a work.



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protagonist as asleep in bed and as dressing and leaving the house, the picture panel imprints on the viewer’s mind the simultaneous horizontal and vertical existential modes of action that structure the poem. The composite picture reminds the viewer that Guillaume de Lorris – the first of the two Rose poets – frames the poem as a first-person allegory which recounts a dream which he, Guillaume, purportedly had five years earlier. In the logic of dream allegories, the dreamer/lover remains asleep, and thus horizontal, while his oneiric, vertical double experiences adventures exemplifying an art of love. Consequently, besides concretely portraying the poem’s duality, this first picture panel graphically correlates the horizontal/vertical grid of the page’s representational matrix with the work’s similarly configured overall vision and structure. In other words, it shows the context-dependence of text-patterns, confirming the importance of context in pattern recognition. Looking again at the incipit of València 387 (Figure 1), we can see how the graphics form a transition from the picture panel to the poetic narrative via the nine-line-deep initial ‘A’ of ‘Aucunes’, the opening word of the prologue. Prominently descending below the first cartouche on the left – the dual scene of lover simultaneously sleeping in bed and dressing – the decorated initial is as tall and nearly as wide as the picture above it, thereby reinforcing the identification of picture and letter as a graphic continuum. With its bright blue and gold vertical strokes and bold gold horizontal middle bar, the initial stands as a dramatic icon of the horizontal/vertical pattern established in the picture band. Indeed, by having the frame of the first picture form the upper horizontal bar of the flat-topped ‘A’, scribe and artist signal the continuity of the two representative modes. As noted earlier, Kay stresses interior spaces and enclosed natural loci like gardens as ‘places of human habitation, relaxation, or labor’ (Place of Thought: 8). She would certainly include the iconic bedroom of Guillaume’s poet/lover, since both Guillaume and Jean make clear that the Rose’s dream allegory originates from this chamber (as Boethius’s reverie emanates from his cell, and Christine’s dream from her study). While it might be objected that ‘a person’s thinking body sitting in contemplation’ (Place of Thought: 8, quoted p. 190 above) is not the same as a body lying down or falling asleep, allegorical dreams constitute an important vehicle for philosophical exposition in Boethius, the Rose, and Christine de Pizan (not to mention a host of other medieval poets). In short, lying down, or falling asleep over a book as Christine does, is a device to immobilise the physical body while reflecting on its oneiric visions. The fact that miniatures in didactic manuscripts of the period (often incipit miniatures) show bedroom and study as the same chamber reinforces Kay’s point that the place of thought is commensurate with human dimensions.

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We have seen how València 387’s incipit weaves the modes of the waking dream into a narrative pattern. By way of conclusion, let us note how it illustrates Kay’s sense of the Rose’s poetry as an apt thought mode. For, according to Kay, Jean de Meun had demonstrated that verse was not just a possible vehicle for thought but actually a highly appropriate one. The twin themes of the Rose, desire and knowledge, are dialectically intertwined so that desire for knowledge generates knowledge of desire, and vice versa. By using a verse form associated with vernacular romance, and adorning it with features associated with courtly lyric, the Rose implies that poetic genres are directly relevant to philosophical and theological reflection. (Place of Thought: 179)

Look again at the outsize initial ‘A’, which brings the picture plane down into the space of the poetry. Its dual graphic mode – as picture and letter – does more than bind painting and poetry into the horizontal/vertical text-pattern. If one peers closely at the interior expanse of the initial – a space widened by designing a flat-topped rather than a pointed ‘A’ – the negative space turns out to be composed of a pattern of blue-grey circles, lightly flecked with the same gold found on the vertical strokes and horizontal bar of the ‘A’. The circles themselves are filled with stipples or dots, while the horizontal bar of the ‘A’ shows gold script-like symbols against a blue background. Viewed from a normal distance above the folio, the dark expanse of the negative space of the ‘A’ resonates with the bedroom and sleeping lover above to suggest the oneiric darkness into which the dream unfurls. The folio design visually choreographs the three smaller decorated initials to echo the first: ‘Q[uiconques cuit ne quique die]’ (Whoever thinks or says) in column 2a; and in column 2b, ‘O[u vintiesme an de mon eage]’ (When I was twenty years of age) and ‘A[duis m’estoit qu’il yere mais]’ (It seemed to me that it was May). The colour scheme of the smaller initials differentially incorporates the red, blue, and gold of the original, but alternates between blue letters on red background for the ‘Q’ and ‘A’ of column 2a and 2b of the bottom half of the page, and gold on a blue background for the ‘O’ at the top of column 2b. This letter stands directly opposite the large initial ‘A’ at the top of column 2a, which, in red, blue, and gold, combines both the motifs of the others, as though to indicate its generative primacy. The symmetrical distribution and colour scheme of the decorated initials serve as visible markers of the underlying text-pattern by transposing into the space of writing the horizontal/vertical pattern developed by the picture panel. But in a second inflection of meaning, they also delimit units of thought-exposition in the prologue, and in the opening poetic sequence, where the question of the veracity and status of dreams for moral philosophy unfolds. These units of thought development also correspond to the positing by Guillaume de Lorris of



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his version of desire and knowledge, the Rose’s ‘twin themes’. Although these themes assume a radically different philosophical agenda in Jean de Meun’s poem, it is Guillaume who first introduces them, albeit in courtlier guise. Finally, València 387’s incipit intertwines the motifs of desire and knowledge from the outset when it couples the picture of the sleeping lover experiencing his erotic dream with the outsize ‘A’ of the prologue affirming the moral truth of dreams in column 2a. Erotic desire drives the beginning of the poem proper, which starts at the top of column 2b, introduced by the blue-gold initial ‘O[u vintiesme an de mon eage]’. Then, the blue-on-red initial ‘A[dvis m’estoit qu’il yere mais]’ near the bottom of column 2b (diagonally echoing the introductory ‘A’ at the top of the first column) initiates the narrative proper of the dual quest for Eros and knowledge. Not only does València 387’s incipit initiate the poem, it also introduces a metacritical reflection alerting the reader to the competing, even contradictory currents of meaning subtending the narrative. In this case, while the literal level of image and language steers us toward realising Guillaume de Lorris’s promise to unveil the secrets of Eros and knowledge, adopting the ‘literary stance’ shows how the incipit already foreshadows Jean de Meun. In Kay’s words, ‘There is no dramatic unveiling of the truth of the poem’s principal dream. Instead [Jean de Meun] undermines belief in the existence of such truth’ (Kay 1995b: 16). By interweaving horizontal/vertical media modes into a coherent segment of the ongoing narrative, the folio-matrix accommodates these contradictions: Guillaume’s courtly worldview and Jean’s sceptical analysis of love. The genius of the scribe and artist who undertook to represent the contrasting worldviews of the two poets in their manuscript may be appreciated from their ability to convey such complexity via an ontology of text-patterns that manages to be content-agnostic while confirming the importance of context in pattern recognition.

•  The Disembodied Tongue; • or, The Place of the Book in the Livre de la Cité des Dames Christine Bourgeois

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t is difficult to call to mind a vernacular French work more committed to concretising a didactic message through spatial allegory than Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames. Here, the author devotes her narrative to an involved metaphorical construction project, that of the eponymous City of Ladies. This space is envisioned by an intradiegetic Christine character and her divine guides, the personified forces of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, as a physical stronghold in which virtuous women may take refuge from the calumny of men. The City of Ladies, however, is not nearly so materially territorialised as it may initially seem. The Christine character digs its foundations, for instance, using the ‘pioche de [s]on entendement’ (pickaxe of [her] intelligence).1 This non-pickaxe, which is not used for digging at all but, rather, for asking questions, produces a non-hole and, as the walls go up, the referent of the City metaphor becomes ever more obvious. The Christine character uses the ‘truelle de [s]a plume’ (trowel of her quill, 104) in order to build walls that are painfully difficult to imagine as stones joined together by mortar, but easy to identify as what they are: a series of literary exempla shaped in ink by a quill. The City of Ladies, in other words, is the Cité des Dames, an overlaying of text and space which the author is at pains not to conceal (Reisinger 2000: 629–31). That the allegorical stronghold that is the City of Ladies should point so emphatically at its real-world referent of a literary text may seem at first glance to take a parodic stance with respect to the culture of didactic writing into which the Cité des Dames emerged. As Sarah Kay compellingly demonstrates, by the time the Cité des Dames was completed in 1405, spatial allegory had, for well over a century, figured the conceptual distance between

1 Christine de Pizan 1997: 64. Hereafter, all quotations from the Cité des Dames will be marked parenthetically with page numbers only.

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physical bodies and their intellectual knowability by cultivating a kind of productive tension between territorially incarnate metaphor and the invisible work of thought.2 Although the apparent collapsing of the symbolic City into the textual object it represents may seem to leave little room for interpretive hesitation, however, the conflation of the literary Cité des Dames with the metaphorical City of Ladies serves not to push back on allegorical systems of meaning but, on the contrary, to problematise the vertiginous role of the book as concrete object in supporting the inherently abstract process of thought. This tension between physical and intellectual spaces comes to a head in the third and most clearly metaphysical book of the Cité des Dames, as Lady Justice invites the group of female saints whose life stories she simultaneously narrates not only to inhabit the newly completed City of Ladies but to take control of its political future. With the defensive powers of the central metaphor thereby transformed from concrete to abstract, the tropes of sanctity highlight an irresolvable tension between the visible semiotic system of the saintly body and the invisible meaning of saintliness itself. In this way, Book III of the Cité des Dames becomes, as this essay will argue, an object lesson in literary meaning-making, the fraught corporeality of the saintly experience figuring a gap between the phenomenological book object that is the Cité des Dames and the knowledge incarnated by the allegorical City of Ladies. It was a commonplace of hagiographical writing, well entrenched in the literary field of late medieval France, to treat saintly stories as devotional substitutes for saintly relics; hagiographical texts, in other words, were widely regarded as almost indistinguishable in thaumaturgical power from the bodily remains of the individuals whose life stories they narrate.3 The Cité des Dames makes liberal use of this ready-made equivalency. It does so, however, not so much in order to erase the space between corporeal and intellectual experience as to galvanise that space. In the paired lives of Saint Marina and Saint Euphrosine, for example, the discipline of gender modification becomes, as Kathryn Hall has argued, an act of pious (re)writing of the body itself (2002: 415–18). Marina and Euphrosine are women who express their sanctity by taking on the identity of monks. Because this exceptional performance of masculinity constitutes the proof of saintliness, they are not recognisable as saints so long as they are living; in death, however, their sanctity is revealed through the physical form of the female body. When Marina’s brothers come to prepare her corpse for burial, for 2 This is among the main contentions of Place of Thought; see, for example, 1–4 for a succinct summary. I borrow the notion of allegory as a figure based on the ‘gap between the place where knowledge is claimed to reside […] and the place where it is rendered explicit’ from Armstrong and Kay 2011: 19–20. 3 An excellent and highly representative example of devotional and literary overlaying of living body, physical relic, and written text is described by Smith 2016: 586–610.

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instance, her sexual organs become the words of her hagiography as the brothers read the true meaning of her life for the first time, thanks to the corporeal text of her gender: ‘Et si comme [les freres] l’orent despoullié et ilz virent que c’estoit une femme, ilz se commencierent a batre et a crier comme dolens et confus du mal que on avoit fait a tant sainte creature’ (And when [the brothers] undressed him and saw that it was a woman, they began to beat their chests and to cry out, mournful and distressed, on account of the ill that had been done to so saintly a creature, 478). If the textuality of the body is merely subjacent in the Marina episode, the Euphrosine narrative, which immediately follows, works to concretise this tacit conflation of corporeal and written surface. While Euphrosine’s community is also prompted to re-evaluate the meaning of her embodied experience thanks to the physiological semantics of gender, the ‘text’ of the body is supplemented here by an actual written text in which the saint’s biological femininity is revealed not in the ‘language’ of her organs but in the scripted words of an ‘escript’ (written document, 480). At first glance, the motif of gender reassignment qua writing may appear to be an extension of the poetics of authorial legitimisation used by Christine de Pizan two years earlier in her 1403 Livre de la mutacion de Fortune. Here, the author figures her own entry into the literary field by having an intradiegetic Christine character transform before the reader’s eyes into a man (Weisl 2009: 112). The mechanics of this metamorphosis, however, differ significantly from that of the transvestite saints in the Cité des Dames. In the Mutacion de Fortune, the Christine character’s transition between genders marks a teleological shift in both embodied experience and social role from female to male (Mills 2015: 128).4 Marina and Euphrosine, contrastingly, undergo no such fundamental reconfiguration of biology. Although, in life, their bodies function for all socially perceptible purposes as male bodies, masculinity for them is merely a patina of meaning, which can only be construed as sanctity thanks to the unwavering fact of their physiological femininity. If Marina and Euphrosine were biologically male, after all, their exceptional status as saints would be difficult to discern, if not utterly absent. At the same time, sanctity is not phrased as femininity here. The female bodies of the transvestite saints do not have any discernible impact on the expression of their ascetic discipline, revealing a purely pragmatic utility only once the physiological and social consequences of gender have been extinguished by death. Unlike the Christine character in the Mutacion de Fortune, then, Marina and Euphrosine do not go through a transformation but, rather, a suspension of gender expression, as their sanctity becomes the product of sustained dialogue between the male and female miens of a single corporeal text. 4

See, for example, I, lines 1347–61.



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The construction of sanctity as a space of in-betweenness falls well within the confines of hagiographical precedent. As Kay argues, the narrative tropes of martyrdom had, since at least the twelfth century, systematically translated the mysteries of the saintly condition in terms of what Lacan has called the ‘zone between two deaths’. The lives of the martyrs take as their centrepiece an often gruesome series of theoretically fatal torments each of which, nevertheless, leaves the saintly body completely unscathed. The result, Kay argues, is the revelation of a ‘sublime body’ suspended on the natural threshold between life and death (Courtly Contradictions: 217–25). While Marina and Euphrosine, of course, are not martyrs, their passage from mortal to eternal life might fruitfully be compared to that of the heroes of the twelfthcentury passiones. There is, however, a key distinction between the ‘zone between two deaths’ occupied by these martyrs and what we may call the zone between two genders which the Cité des Dames constructs for Marina and Euphrosine. In the former case, as Kay shows, the protracted state of liminality in which sanctity is revealed serves fundamentally to transform the saint’s body into a locus of meaning-limitation: the supernatural endurance of his or her physical form in the face of unendurable torture enacts the unity of divine Truth as it is simultaneously conveyed by both the hagiographical text and its saintly subject (Courtly Contradictions: 229–31). The material ‘writing’ of and on Marina and Euphrosine’s bodies, however, does not pit the Christian self against the pagan other. Rather, it fractures saintly identity according to two incompatible but concurrent readings of the same bodily text. On the one hand, the saints’ embodied lives as men can be interpreted as saintly thanks only to the femininity of their corporeal forms. On the other, these female forms signify sanctity in death only inasmuch as they performed masculinity in life. In this respect, sanctity as it appears in Book III of the Cité des Dames might best be defined, not through the Lacanian notion of the sublime, but instead according to the structure that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have termed the ‘body without organs’. An exceptional entity, the body without organs is not created, like the organic body, by the output of its constituent systems, but by the suspension of these systems in an infinite network of unrealised possibilities. Like an egg, ‘crisscrossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 19), the body without organs ceases to exist as such at the moment that its inherent multiplicity of meaning is concretised into a single discernible meaning, just as the egg ceases to be an egg when a bird hatches from it. In the cases of Marina and Euphrosine, sanctity is a state in direct conflict with the limited possibilities of organic embodiment. Beyond the capabilities of purely narrative representation, it transcends the limitations of gender

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(i.e. male versus female), in order to figure an intellectual space, not of one meaning as opposed to another or even of one meaning versus many, but instead of continual semantic exchange within a network of simultaneously possible meanings. Although potentially consonant with medieval hagiographical systems broadly conceived, the ‘body without organs’ has not yet enjoyed broad application in scholarship on this topic, nor has it been a significant point of reference for the work of Christine de Pizan.5 In the Cité des Dames, however, the disruption of the signifying power of bodily organs compellingly supports one of the text’s central missions: that of demonstrating the intellectual and spiritual equality of women with respect to their male counterparts. For Marina and Euphrosine, after all, gender is significant in the formation of saintly and social identity only to the extent that its semiotic function is suspended. Nevertheless, by expressing the mystery of sanctity as a body without organs, Christine de Pizan provocatively compromises the female form as a carrier of hagiographical meaning. The concrete ‘language’ of gender, although a clue to saintly identity in the Marina and Euphrosine episodes, is ultimately antithetical to the saintly condition that each corpse reveals. Inasmuch as the textual surface of the body here limits the complexity of the saintly experience, the written word seems to be staged as falling short of its communicative goals. The Marina and Euphrosine stories, however, do not dialogue only with one another. On the contrary, the saintly narratives in the Cité des Dames are not episodes in isolation but, rather, in communication, variously adding to and modifying a limited number of themes (Blumenfeld-Kosinski 1996: 169, Brownlee 1991: 116). Among these, the interpretive relationship between physical bodies and textual meaning looms large, taking on a crucial role at the chronological and thematic core of Book III with the story of the author’s own patron saint, Saint Christine.6 The daughter of a well-to-do pagan family, Saint Christine is disowned by her father when he discovers that she is a practising Christian. From this point onwards, she becomes the victim of not one but three members of the prevailing patriarchal power structure, who submit her, each in turn, to the longest series of torments endured by any saint in the Cité des Dames. It is her third and most terrible judge, a certain Julian, who, in a vain attempt to silence her prayers, decides upon the removal of the young girl’s tongue. Unsurprisingly, this physical interruption of Saint Christine’s powers of articulation is counterproductive to Julian’s ends. Once 5 A notable exception is provided by Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown, who apply this concept to Christine de Pizan’s notion of the body politic (2005: 473). 6 For comments on the centrality of the Saint Christine narrative, see Brownlee 1991: 116–18.



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deprived of the essential organ of speech, in fact, the saint’s words issue forth ‘mieulx que devant et plus cler’ (more eloquently and clearly than before, 470), so much so that her new-found verbal lucidity brings the young girl into direct dialogue with the divine. Referred to only as ‘la voix’ (the voice, 470), the godly incarnation with which Saint Christine speaks is not clearly embodied. This represents a meaningful departure from the explicitly cited source for Book III, Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum historiale, which Christine de Pizan mentions (460) not by its Latin title but by that of its popular vernacular translation, the Miroir historial.7 In the Cité des Dames, differently from Vincent’s account, when the voice first speaks, it is not identified as Christ – a figure who has already appeared in the narrative in corporeal form – but, rather, as a third party, a witness to the special relationship between Saint Christine and Christ: ‘toute la compaignie des sains beneyst Dieu pour toy, car tu as des ton enfance soustenu le nom de ton Crist’ (The whole company of saints is blessing God for you, for, since childhood, you have upheld the name of your Christ, 470).8 Although reproduced almost verbatim in the Cité des Dames, Vincent’s account nevertheless reads slightly differently, plainly associating the saint’s disembodied interlocutor with Christ: ‘Toute la compaignie des sainctz beneist Dieu pour toy car tu as en ton enfance soustenu tant pour moy’ (The whole company of saints is blessing God for you since, during childhood, you withstood so much for me, II, fol. 174v). Not content simply to modify the divine speaker from Son to Father or Holy Spirit, Christine de Pizan subsequently has the divine voice identify itself, as in the Miroir historial, as none other than Christ himself: ‘Vien, Cristine, ma tres amee et tres eslicte fille, et reçoy […] le guerredon de ta passionable vie en la confession de mon nom’ (Come, Christine, my chosen and most beloved daughter, and claim […] your reward for having spent your fervent life testifying to my name, 470). While slippage between divine Persons might naturally be explained as an enactment of Trinitarian unity, the blurring of boundaries between the entities of the Godhead is not an end unto itself. On the contrary, it enacts the fraught relationship between verbal message and corporeal being at the heart of Saint Christine’s exceptional identity. Although it defies heavenly embodiment in the Cité des Dames, the voice of God in the Saint Christine episode nevertheless cleaves to the organic body of the tongueless martyr, presenting, at least to Julian’s ears, a set of sensorial qualities so similar to the saint’s own voice that her tormentor experiences it 7 For more on the relationship between the Cité des Dames and this source, see Curnow 1975: 189–93. Hereafter, all references to the Miroir historial will be indicated parenthetically, with reference to volume and folio numbers according to the 1531 edition. 8 All italics in quotations in this paragraph are mine.

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in the most corporeal terms possible. Julian’s impression that God’s voice is produced by the small stump of tongue left in the young girl’s throat, of course, is factually inaccurate; Lady Justice’s narration is very clear on this point. Nevertheless, Julian’s experience – the only reported sensory experience to emerge from the narrative universe – is not fundamentally wrong. In fact, it reproduces a particularly orthodox interpretation of Christian miracle. Saint Christine’s tongueless body may not produce the divine voice but, moved by divine animus, it does verbally respond.9 In this sense, the martyr’s words proceed from what might be thought of as a zone between two voices. Identifying Saint Christine’s tongueless speech, in other words, as the voice of her body, would be to deprive it of its divinely inspired quality; situating it entirely outside of the body, however, would be to undermine the miraculous nature of the speech itself, produced by a body no longer capable of the work of articulation. Saint Christine’s voice, emanating at once from the earthly realm and its heavenly counterpart, from her physical body and a patently disembodied Trinity, performs sanctity much as Marina and Euphrosine’s gender does, through the suspension of the signifying relationship between bodily organs and the message they generate. Nevertheless, the Saint Christine episode does not so much operate in parallel to the Marina and Euphrosine stories as it complements the system of textual interpretation they promote. In the case of the transvestite saints, meaning is profoundly caught up in physical form, as the saintly condition reveals itself to the reader through sustained interpretive hesitation between female and male readings of the bodily text. The story of Saint Christine, however, conceptually suspends sanctity between the poles of an even more fundamental binary: that of embodiment versus disembodiment. As Elizabeth Eva Leach shows in her contribution to this volume, the voice occupies an inherently liminal position between the spaces inside and outside of embodied experience, mediating, for instance, between the corporeal apparatus of verbal production and the world of ideas it communicates. In the story of Saint Christine, the removal of the martyr’s tongue elevates this common facet of human experience to the crux of sanctity itself; Saint Christine’s exceptionality, like that of Marina and Euphrosine, is rendered by a puzzle of interpretive negotiation, though not in this case between multiple readings of the body as meaningful phenomenon. Instead, Saint Christine’s sanctity straddles the divide between the tangible surface on which meaning is made manifest (i.e. her body) and the intangible space of meaning itself (i.e. its divine source in heaven). 9 The mechanics of this miracle would be comparable to those which animate the impossible speech of Balaam’s ass (Numbers 22. 27–30). For comments on the relevance of this biblical episode to medieval thought, see Alexander 2008: 14.



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As Kevin Brownlee has compellingly demonstrated, Saint Christine’s voice operates for Christine de Pizan as a privileged mise en abyme not of textuality as a general quality but of the Cité des Dames in particular (Brownlee 1991: 117–34); just as Saint Christine refuses to be silenced by the error of her pagan tormentors, the Cité des Dames represents Christine de Pizan’s own rejection of voicelessness in the face of another patriarchal fallacy: misogyny (Walters 2002: 885). Taken together with the Marina and Euphrosine narratives, however, the story of Saint Christine also contributes to a more sweeping meditation on literary signification. If the transvestite saints tie textual interpretation to the concrete forms of the body, the Saint Christine story vexes the link between physical body and abstract signification. One might go so far as to suggest that between them, the Marina–Euphrosine pair on the one hand and the Saint Christine episode on the other figure the locus of textual signification as a body without organs in its own right, suspended in a process of negotiation between the necessary limitations of the visible book object and the higher meaning which evades its forms. While this view of literary communication may appear somewhat generic, the notion of interpretation it promotes – as a process not of meaninglimitation but of meaning-suspension – has special application to the Cité des Dames. As Kay argues, the proliferation of exempla which makes up the space and citizenry of the City of Ladies is particularly dependent on an interpretive game of back-and-forth: ‘The meaning of the exemplum […] is to be sought both within and outside itself, since its form both determines its particular character, and can only be comprehended from the standpoint of the universal’ (2001b: 445). This protracted hesitation between unicity and universality is supported by the formal tension between the Cité des Dames as textual unit and the broader literary context with which it dialogues. As Kay shows, the exempla selected by Christine de Pizan are frequently made to mean in opposition to the source texts from which they are drawn. The reader is therefore regularly called upon to mediate between the contextual cues of these source texts and the new contexts provided to them by the Cité des Dames itself (Kay 2001b: 445).10 It is in many ways as an elucidation of this interpretive praxis that Lady Justice introduces the Miroir historial. Although all three of Christine’s spiritual guides construe the city-building process as one of both implicit and explicit exchange between literary sources, Vincent’s work is the only text to be explicitly offered up to the reader as a supplement to the Cité des Dames:

10 For more on this dynamic of intertextual exchange, see Kay’s work on quotation, e.g. Parrots and Nightingales, 17–19. Emily Kate Price’s contribution to this volume (pp. 252–3) provides more intensive analysis of this facet of Kay’s work.

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Se de toutes les saintes vierges qui sont ou ciel par constance de martire te vouloie raconter, longue histoire y convendroit, si comme sainte Cecile, sainte Agnes, sainte Agate et infinies autres. Et se plus en veulx avoir, ne t’esteut que regarder ou Miroir histoirial. La assez en trouveras. (460) (If I wanted to tell you about all the saintly virgins, like Saint Cecilia, Saint Agnes, Saint Agatha, and an infinite number of others, who earned their place in heaven through the steadfastness of their martyrdom, the story would be long indeed. And if you want more, you only need to look in the Miroir historial. There you will find many [examples].)

Lady Justice’s suggestion here that Book III of the Cité des Dames is in some way incomplete is tacitly promoted throughout this section of the text. While some thirty-nine saintly women are mentioned over the course of her narration, only eleven receive any significant development. By contrast, the truncated stories of the remaining twenty-eight women hint at just the kind of directed reading programme that Lady Justice proffers up in the form of the Miroir historial. Indeed, should any reader choose to take on this reading list, she could hardly fail to notice the myriad ways in which the stories of the saints named but not narrated in Book III work together with the textual fabric of the Cité des Dames to form a carefully curated expansion of the major themes developed by Christine de Pizan (Quilligan 1991: 206). The three saints whose stories are first mentioned as the subject of future reading, for example – Cecilia, Agnes, and Agatha – each pick up at least one major trope from the story of Saint Christine, which immediately follows Lady Justice’s call to consult Vincent’s text. Agatha’s breasts, like Saint Christine’s, are amputated (II, fol. 123v). Agnes and Cecilia suffer death through the impairment of their organs of speech: Agnes has her neck transpierced with a sword and Cecilia is decapitated (III, fol. 78v; II, fol. 118r). The final miracle that Vincent attributes to Cecilia, in particular, powerfully echoes the figure of Saint Christine’s miraculous speech: following a botched attempt at decapitation, Cecilia continues preaching the word of God for three full days in spite of her severed windpipe. This intertextual cooperation between the Cité des Dames and the Miroir historial serves a purpose that is more than simply reiterative: it causes textual meaning to transcend the boundaries of the single literary unit and to inhabit instead an immaterial space of exchange between the two. The case of Mary Magdalene provides a powerful example of this mechanism. Of the saints featured in the rubrics to the Cité des Dames, Mary Magdalene receives by far the least attention. This lack of emphasis is curious, not only because her vita was among the most popular in high- and



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late medieval France,11 but more specifically because Christine de Pizan goes out of her way to integrate Mary’s story into the City’s very foundations.12 When Mary Magdalene arrives to inhabit the City that her virtue has helped build, however, her narrative takes up no more than a single short paragraph. This creates an obvious aporia in both the structure of the City and the narrative fabric of the Cité. It can, however, be easily filled by following Lady Justice’s advice and turning to the Miroir historial, where the story of Mary Magdalene appears in pride of place.13 And while it does not deviate from the typical structure of this narrative, Vincent’s account adds an uncommon detail to explain Mary’s key transition from preacher to penitent:14 ‘Entretant que la benoiste Marie Magdaleine preschait la parolle de Dieu, il vint a sa cognoissance que l’apostre commandoit les femmes taire en l’Eglise’ (While the blessed Mary Magdalene was preaching the Word of God, it came to her attention that the apostle ordered women to keep silent in the Church, II, fol. 66v) – presumably a reference to Saint Paul and his repeated injunctions against women participating in the intellectual life of the Christian faith.15 Mary’s story as told in the Miroir historial seems to speak antithetically to the Cité des Dames and specifically to Christine de Pizan’s foundational claim to literary authority. While Vincent may side with Paul, however, Lady Justice’s reading list does very much the opposite. In the chronologically organised Miroir historial, the story of Mary Magdalene precedes all but five of the narratives cited in the Cité des Dames. A reader working her way forward from the Mary Magdalene life would therefore discover in its wake a veritable florilegium of stories which methodically challenge its promotion of female silence. Cecilia, for example, first instructs her pagan husband and then his brother in the ways of Christ before going on to broker the conversion of no fewer than four hundred individuals (II, fols 117r–118v); the erudite Benedicta, who begins by 11 This is suggested by the sheer volume of her corpus which, as Olivier Collet and Sylviane Messerli’s edition demonstrates, contains no fewer than thirty vitae in the vernacular alone. See their comments (2008: 21–2). 12 Her story is given on two occasions by Lady Reason in answer to the questions through which the Christine character prepares to lay the foundations of the City (86–8). 13 The story of Mary Magdalene acts as a frame here for the stories of Martha, Maximin, and a variety of other disciples who emigrate with them from the Holy Land to France, all of which are subordinated to the authority of Mary’s life and miracles (II, fols 94r–101r). 14 This detail is not present in any of the thirty versions edited by Collet and Messerli. 15 This passage most nearly cites I Corinthians 14. 33–5, but Paul repeats similar injunctions throughout his writings, for example, I Timothy 2. 11–12. There can be little question that Paul and his opinions on women are a central concern of the Cité des Dames since his caput/corpus (head/body) distinction (see I Corinthians 1. 3–9; Ephesians 5. 22– 30) plays a key role in the structure of Christine’s rhetoric (Kellogg 2002: 437–8).

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spreading her knowledge of Christ exclusively among women, arrives at her true saintly purpose only when an angel instructs her to expand her teaching practice to address a broad audience (II, fols 203v–204r); Fausta’s eloquence is such that she convinces both her male executioners not only of the truth of her belief system but to follow her into martyrdom (II, fol 203r–v); the story of Julie and her son Cyr frames the work of motherly care as that of passing along ‘science divine’ (divine knowledge, II, fol. 119r). Lady Justice, in other words, by inviting the reader to consult the Miroir historial, ventriloquises this text,16 producing both argument and counter-argument in support of Christine de Pizan’s message of female empowerment. When read in this context, even the stories of martyrdom which do appear in the Cité des Dames take on new significance. With the notable exceptions of Marina and Euphrosine, every saint to receive protracted treatment in this part of the text lived and died during the period of Christian persecutions under the Roman Empire.17 For early Christians facing a hostile government, sanctity was not yet – as it later would be – defined broadly by an exemplary life. Rather, it was determined exclusively by an individual’s willingness to die for the faith (Brown 1981, 1–22). In the Miroir historial as in the Cité des Dames, this dedication is systematically demonstrated by public speech acts, as the saint in question outlines the superiority of her Christian belief system with respect to the paganism of her tormentors. The succession of female martyrs who come together in the City, then, dialogues with Lady Justice’s inserted selection from the Miroir historial, serving not only to represent the power of the female voice but, more importantly, to highlight its role in any mainstream view of Christian history – like that presented by Vincent de Beauvais, for instance – which places high value on the institution of martyrdom. In this sense, the physical torments, mutilations, and modifications to which the saintly bodies in the Cité des Dames are subjected meticulously reveal the process by which the author creates her exempla. The Cité des Dames gives new form to Vincent’s text, sometimes even its exact words; at the same time, Christine de Pizan carefully despoils the Miroir historial of its original signifying systems. Like the bodies of Marina and Euphrosine, the Cité des Dames offers a regendered version of the Miroir historial, making itself a text which speaks, like the body of Saint Christine, in a voice that is at once its own and that of another. This painstaking procedure of appropriating the words of a male auctor is, of course, highly typical of the strategies at work in the Cité des Dames as a whole (Mühlethaler 2005: 253–5). As Lady Reason reminds the Christine 16 The use of the term ‘ventriloquise’ to describe Christine’s method of rewriting is borrowed from Walters 2002: 884. 17 A traditional, if perhaps not historically accurate, terminus ad quem for this period is the year 313. See Barnes 2010: 97–150.



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character, books do not inherently transmit knowledge; rather, knowledge is derived from a process of critical and, when necessary, antiphrastic interpretation of the written word. As Lady Reason explains it, men who publish unfair criticism of women ought to be read according to ‘une figure de grammaire qui se nomme antifrasis’ (a grammatical figure known as antiphrasis), advising the Christine character ‘que tu faces ton prouffit de leurs dis’ (that you turn their words to your advantage, 48). While the Cité des Dames is, in many ways, a manifestation of compliance with this precept (Quilligan 1991: 204), Christine de Pizan nevertheless does not aim primarily to pontificate but, rather, to provide her reader with a replicable model of textual evaluation, a goal she makes manifest in her closing words to a readership that she is careful to project as female:18 Et briefment, toutes femmes […] vueillez estre sur toute riens avisees et caultes en deffence contre les ennemis de voz honneurs et de vostre chasteté. […] Si deboutez arriere les losangeurs decevables, qui par divers attrais tachent par mains tours a soubtraire ce que tant souverainement devez garder. (500) (Finally, all women, […] remain in all ways wary and vigilant in defending yourselves against the enemies of your honour and virtue. […] Beat back those lying flatterers who would, through various charms and ruses, steal that which you ought most sovereignly to protect.)

Although this passage clearly puts Christine de Pizan’s readers on their guard against would-be seducers, the interpretive principle promoted here is essentially the same as that extolled by Lady Reason. The author is warning women that words can be dangerous, going on to explain that only she who knows how to interpret verbal cues will be able to protect herself against their abusive power. The theme of self-protection is, of course, at the very heart of the City metaphor. The City of Ladies, after all, is primarily a defensive structure. If the metaphorical City, though, is to stand for the literary Cité, this textual object can take on the protective qualities of a fortress only if it becomes, to borrow Kay’s terms, a ‘place of thought’: an allegorical container for the work of intellection.19 Specifically, the City metaphor is made to function as a paradigm of intellectual dexterity, a process of interpretation based not on adopting one viewpoint over another but, rather, on developing a perpetual exchange between individual literary works and the ever-changing body of 18 That these remarks are those of an authorial Christine de Pizan and not of the Christine character is supported by Brownlee 1991: 133. 19 See, for example, Place of Thought: 3.

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knowledge to which they contribute. The coincidence of metaphorical City and textual Cité, then, is not the end of Christine de Pizan’s didactic project but its starting point. As the City morphs into a literary object, a normative system of critical interpretation emerges, a hermeneutic practice designed to shield women from the harmful effects of misogynist cultural production. It is for this reason that Book III is especially crucial to the pedagogical mission of the Cité des Dames. Although antiphrastic interpretive practices permeate Books I and II, the texts with which Christine de Pizan engages in these sections were not likely to have been present in the libraries of her female contemporaries; the Miroir historial, however – and most especially its vernacular translation – was (Green 2010: 84–8). Hagiography, too, had long provided a privileged means for women to participate in intellectual culture, not only as readers but also as writers (Wogan-Browne 2001: 3). To the extent that Lady Justice’s inserted reading programme reveals the mechanics of the author’s creative process in an intertextual language that her female readers would have been particularly primed to recognise, it does so not as an aesthetic flourish but as a blueprint. The saintly narratives of the Cité des Dames work to keep the intellectual paradigm that is the City of Ladies intact in the minds – and perhaps in the quills – of the women, living, dead, and yet to be born, to whom Christine de Pizan dedicates her work: the ‘dames, damoiselles et generalment toutes femmes qui amastes, amez et amerés vertus’ (ladies, young girls, and all women who have loved, love, or will love virtue, 426).

•  The Place of Pain:  • Confronting the Trauma and Complexity of Kingship in the Political Dream Narrative Deborah McGrady

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artime trauma is often cast as an unavoidable but deeply regrettable outcome of conflict that permanently scars the human psyche. For at least one fourteenth-century French writer, however, subjecting his reader to the physical and mental anguish of combat held the promise of achieving peace and thus of healing the wounds of war. Rather than protect his privileged reader and sovereign, Charles V of France (r. 1364–80), from the ravages of war, Henri de Ferrières attaches to his ninety-six-chapter, predominantly prose political dream narrative, the Songe de pestilence, a final guided meditation in prose of twenty-one chapters, in which the king experiences war as violence inflicted on his own body, followed by two verse prayers on peace.1 This already unconventional meditation, in which the king is called on to experience an ongoing war as physical agony, is further destabilised by its initial staging as a prophecy delivered by an unidentified learned friend of the dreamer. The friend’s prognostications recast decades of war already endured by the French kingdom as physical wounds to be suffered by the reigning king. That is, past battles that were first explained in the dream as a divine curse on the French kingdom that would cause it to be ‘plus tourmenté que nul autre royalme’ (more tormented than any other kingdom, ch. 240, lines 61–2) are recast as future trauma to be suffered by the king, who will be ‘en grant aventure de mort’ (at 1 The modern editor presents the Songe de pestilence as a continuation of Henri’s previous work, the Livre de Deduis du Roy Modus. Hence, he numbers the chapters of the Pestilence from 140 to 259 (Tilander 1932). Although never openly identified as the privileged reader, Charles V is referenced in chapter 243, where the third Valois king is identified as the work’s central subject (see p. 219, below). The penultimate poem addresses Charles and invites him to meditate on the work (ch. 248, lines 24–5). Finally, that the majority of historical events recounted in the work concern Charles V’s reign and that the explicit dates completion to one year before the death of Charles V provide further evidence that this work was likely intended for this king. Hereafter, quotations from the Pestilence will be followed in the text with reference to chapter and line.

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great risk of death, ch. 246, lines 15–16). This gripping reimagining of past battles as personal wounding gives way to the first of the two closing verse prayers, in which the author beseeches God to ‘gar[der] de mal et de tourment, / De mechief et de villennie, / Nostre roi (protect from evil and torment, from harm and villainy, our king, ch. 257, lines 2–4). The French king is counselled to recognise the ‘maleficence’ (malfeasance) already done to his kingdom: Roy, regardés a mes premissez Comment, pour la cause des vices, Vo(stre) roialme fu a tourment. Prenez garde sus vos offices Comme(nt) ils sont plains de malifices. (ch. 257, lines 25–9) (King, examine my arguments that because of vices, your kingdom has been tormented. Take heed of your offices and how they are filled with corruption.)

The subsequent stanzas of this first prayer provide a passionate reassessment of kingship that challenges the singularity often ascribed to the royal subject. After staging this traumatic cycle of suffering, a plea is made to bring an end to this agony in order to preserve both king and kingdom. Playing off Sarah Kay’s study of the ‘complexity of oneness’ in the Place of Thought, we might refer to Henri’s treatment of medieval theories of sovereignty as revealing the ‘complexity of kingship’. Kay shows that the late medieval thinkers she studies used dream narrative to engage critically with the interrelatedness of concepts of oneness in late medieval didactic poetry, including ‘the one of uniqueness (individuality, singularity), the one of universality (genus, species), the one of “a common nature,” and the triune One of the Godhead’ (Place: 18). Similar to Kay’s thinkers who figuratively staged the struggle between the singular individual and the promise of community contained in other expressions of oneness, Henri is interested in guiding the king to abandon his unique brand of singularity as a sovereign – which sets royalty apart from and above all other human subjects – in order to become one with his kingdom, conceived as both a territory and a people. Henri presents this solution as the only hope for survival of king and kingdom. By choosing to examine the sovereign as an individual who must abandon his singularity to become part of the community, Henri confronts struggles similar to those Kay noted in the works of Jean Froissart and Christine de Pizan, both of whom recognise that their past trauma threatens to keep them isolated from the community unless they learn how to associate their singularity with



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the universal experience.2 Henri, however, presents the personalised trauma imposed retrospectively on the king as a necessary prerequisite for his ability to commune with his subjects. The first stage in guiding Charles V to this novel understanding of his position within the community entails teaching the king to read figuratively the recent historical ‘torment’ of war and sickness plaguing his kingdom as physical trauma inflicted on his own body. Through personalised suffering of the pain experienced by his people and his lands, the king will become part of the community. Through this process, Henri introduces a dramatic reconceptualisation of kingship that strikes directly at the underlying aporia of medieval theories that identified the sovereign as both distinct from his subjects and yet inextricably linked to this community. Henri revises two dominant medieval figural treatments of kings to present this novel understanding of kingship: the metaphor of the king as the head of the body politic, and the Christo-mimesis of sovereigns. Through extended meditation on the king’s capacity to experience physical anguish, Henri will insist on the sovereign’s oneness with his kingdom, a strategy that will ultimately replace the concept of sovereign singularity and exceptionalism. In this manner, the dream vision as a ‘place of thought’ becomes, as my title intimates, a privileged ‘place of pain’. Learning to Read the Self Allegorically In late medieval France, the political dream narrative emerged as a powerful literary genre for confronting leaders about charged issues, whether ethical, political, or social. Scholarship on these works often references the protection that the dream frame provided authors who dared to speak out and even sometimes challenge leaders on their actions. Often overlooked in these studies is the concomitant protection they allowed readers, who were provided a safe space in which they could broach these issues through hypothetical reflection that freed them from their own prejudices or social expectations. An important precursor to the Pestilence that reflects this ambition is Evrart de Trémaugon’s Songe du vergier, addressed to Charles V one year prior to the completion of Henri’s dream narrative. Evrart records a debate between a cleric and a soldier that allows the king to hear opposing views on multiple pressing topics. The Pestilence appears to be modelled on Evrart’s work at the outset, since the narrator restricts his participation in the dream to that of an unobtrusive observer who recounts courtroom debates and battles without 2 For Froissart, this process requires forgetting the personal in the name of the universal (Place: 149), whereas for Christine, it requires recognising that individual experience can create a pathway to understanding ‘a universal moral and political order’ (Place: 175).

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further comment as he moves through a vast landscape. In his dream, he stands on the edges of courtrooms where first the three Estates and then Satan stand trial, and crosses battlefields upon which the Vices and Virtues wage war, before facing the Holy Spirit, who responds to the complete corruption of the world with a curse that humanity shall endure the ‘pestilence de guerres et de mortalité’ (plague of wars and death, ch. 234, lines 14–15). This harsh sentence is sealed with a screeching eagle descending from the heavens crying ‘vé, vé, vé’ (woe, woe, woe, ch. 235, lines 16–17), thereby echoing the angel in Revelation 8. 13 who anticipates the extreme suffering man will endure before the Second Coming. The eagle’s cry jolts the dreamer awake, leaving him with a vision that he is ill-equipped to understand. If Henri had followed faithfully Evrart’s representative model, the dreamer would have then presented his vision to the king and requested that he judge and comment on the work. Instead, Henri provided a fascinating twist by having the dreamer turn to an unnamed learned cleric and friend who is renowned for his intellect. The cleric agrees to gloss the vision on condition that his interpretation remain secret until his death, because it will include discussion of events to come (ch. 235, lines 50–3). That is, in lieu of a straightforward reading of the issues alluded to in the dream, the friend will elucidate its truths by revealing terrestrial events that have directly resulted from the Holy Spirit’s curse. The cleric’s demand for initial secrecy alerts us to the fact that the dreamer is expected to share the vision and its interpretation with others who, by the time of the revelation, will have lived these events, so that they may understand their past. In place of metaphysical truths derived from the actual vision, as was common of medieval dream narratives, the cleric’s glossing-turned-prophecy concerns temporal events that, as we learn, merit an allegorical reading. Having accepted this condition, the dreamer announces that the cleric sent him a written interpretation of his vision three days later, in the imagined year 1300 (ch. 235, lines 55–7), hence seventy-nine years prior to the claim in the explicit that the actual text we read was completed in 1379. The process of linking celestial vision with lived human affairs is achieved by the cleric’s initial brief presentation of several interpretative stages that progress from a metaphysical overview to a more temporally anchored reading. He sets out the theological meaning of the vision in ways that recall Kay’s account: relating it to the complexity of the Godhead – that is, that ‘tout est une chose, car le Pere et le Filz et le Saint Espirit ne sont que un dieu, une substance et une essence’ (all is one, since the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are but one god, one substance, and one essence, ch. 236, lines 5–6) – and promoting the universal over the singular by recalling that God created all men in his image (ch. 236, lines 15–25). He then addresses directly the components of the dream, giving special attention to the psychomachia represented by the multiple battles between Vices and Virtues (ch. 237) and



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to the dreamer’s passage through the heavens, which inspires an astrology lesson concerning the influence of the stars on world events and individuals (ch. 238). The subsequent shift to a prognostication concerning the French kingdom is explained by the fact that the psychomachia recounted by the dreamer prefigures ‘tant de maulz avenir’ (much suffering yet to come, ch. 240, line 53) which will disproportionately affect ‘le royalme de Franche [qui] sera plus tourmenté que nul autre royalme (the French kingdom which will be more tormented than any other kingdom, ch. 240, lines 61–2). The switch to prophecy causes the cleric to reference three trees said to represent distinct dynasties, of which he will now discuss the final tree at length. Thereupon, the dreamer interrupts the narrative to note that he only now shares these prognostications because they have already come to pass (ch. 241). Internal dating underscores his point. Having already specified receipt of the written prophecy in 1300, the dreamer places the events prophesied between 1341 and 1362 (ch. 241, lines 55–6). These dates confirm retrospectively that the last of the three figural trees represents the Valois dynasty and the three kings linked to this tree represent the first three Valois kings, Philip VI, John II, and Charles V. The cleric’s prophecies concern a number of traumas, endured under these reigns, and that can be easily dated, beginning with the arrival of the plague in 1345 (ch. 240, line 18). Thereafter follows a series of ‘maux’ (calamities, ch. 241, rubric) that are yet to befall France, and that stretch the timeline beyond the prognostication’s declared end date of 1362 to include the 1373 Battle of Chiset (ch. 255). The events thus ‘foretold’ concern both defeats and revolts that have, indeed, brought great harm to the kingdom, but hope is not lost, since the prophecy also speaks of the subsequent triumphant regaining of lands under the direction of Bertrand du Guesclin. This highly original combination of dream narrative with history writing that recalls past battles and with epic chivalry that celebrates the most renowned knight of late medieval France may help explain the uncommon success of this work. It is important to acknowledge, however, that in the majority of the extant manuscripts, the Pestilence follows Henri’s highly successful hunting manual. Of these thirty-one extant copies that contain the Pestilence in full or in part, there are only four cases of the work circulating independently in manuscript and one in early print. Although the manuscript history provides little information about the actual audience for the work – none of the original owners of the extant manuscripts has been identified – it is clear that the work was primarily appreciated in royal circles, including both princes and high-level members of their entourage. In spite of the dream’s implication that Charles V was its privileged reader, no extant manuscript can be linked to his royal collection. Nonetheless, several extant copies bear witness to an enduring Valois interest in the work. Turin, Archivio di Stato, MS Jb.II.18, for instance, bears an ex libris on fol. 202 ascribing it to the duke of Berry, Charles V’s brother. The fact that

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Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1300 was decorated in part by the Master of the Berry Apocalypse (New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 133) also suggests Valois ownership, while BnF fr. 1300, which was first owned by Louis of Bruges, earl of Winchester, later figured in Louis XII’s royal library. Along with members of the Valois dynasty expressing interest in this work, high-ranking military officials appear to have also appreciated the work’s celebration of Guesclin. The base manuscript for Tilander’s modern edition, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12399, was likely first owned by Charles de Trie, count of Dammartin and Guesclin’s comrade in arms, before eventually entering the Burgundian ducal library (Tilander 1937: xi). It is also noteworthy that Louis XII’s admiral, Louis Malet de Graville, would own his own copy of the two works by Henri in the form of Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr. 168. In addition, at least one later constable of France under Charles VI, Louis de Sancerre, owned a copy of this work that celebrated his illustrious predecessor. Albeit scant, this ownership history points to a restricted circle of readers who, if they read the Pestilence, would have discovered a complex reading of a key period in the Hundred Years’ War when fortunes turned, and the Valois dynasty successfully retook lands and reasserted its claim to the kingdom. If they read to the end of the work, they would discover that this achievement was attributed to the king’s personal suffering on behalf of his land and people, a point revealed especially in the penultimate verse prayer (ch. 258). This poem provided them with an uncommon meditation on their sovereign, who was presented in Christ-like fashion, suffering on behalf of his people. In their reading of the king’s detailed suffering that hinged on identifying the war-ravaged landscape as the king’s own skin, a larger audience was invited to apply to a political narrative the affective devotional practices studied by Sarah McNamer (2009), that invited readers to feel love and compassion for Christ and to find models of behaviour in saints’ lives. The transference of devotional practices to a political event would have encouraged readers to understand the ongoing war as violence done to the actual body of their sovereign. Whether guiding the king to embody this suffering or directing a large public to identify with the sovereign and even assume his torment as their own, the Pestilence is unparalleled in its efforts to place its readers in the skin of the traumatised wartime victim. The remainder of this essay will focus on Henri’s efforts to sensitise the king to the violent effects of war. When the Kingdom’s Turmoil becomes the King’s Trauma The cleric’s prophecy opens with the declaration that Charles V will endure catastrophic physical violence:



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Le tiers roi [Charles V, third of the Valois dynasty] […] sera batu en toutes ses parties, c’est a entendre que il sera moult plaié et navré en tous ses membres, c’est a savoir en la teste, et bras, es mains, es jambes, es pies et endroit le cuer. (Ch. 243, lines 32–5) (The third king […] will be beaten all over his body, that is, he will receive many wounds and injuries inflicted on all his members, including the head, the arms, the hands, the legs, the feet, and in the area of the heart.).

Subsequent chapters clarify that the cleric is not foretelling an attempted or actual assassination of the king (although one cannot help but think of the possible attempted poisoning of Charles V in 1359), but a figural physical trauma suffered by the king that relates directly to battles and uprisings that will occur throughout the kingdom. This mapping of battles onto the king’s body takes inspiration from the dominant metaphor of the body politic best developed in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, in which the king occupies the head of a ‘body’ made up of the other estates. Defying the actual chronology of events, Henri rearranges historical events so as to begin his account of the sovereign’s physical torture with the most potent strike to his body. Thus the first ‘grant plaie’ (serious wound, ch. 246, line 4) listed refers to the Jacquerie uprising in Paris in 1358 because it targeted his capital (‘head’ of his kingdom), and Henri reserves for later in his account earlier violence that is depicted as striking lesser parts of the king’s body. Concerning this ravaged body, Henri rejects the view that the corpus politicum includes other members of the kingdom, to argue instead that the king’s body alone endures the violence rendered throughout his lands. Henri portrays the desecrated kingdom, the corpus regnum, as the king’s own fractured body, with limbs akimbo and covered in open wounds. This reconceptualisation exploits the lexicon of sovereignty that confuses the boundaries between person and territory through insistence on the intimate association between the sovereign and his lands, while also pressing the near-divine status of the French king by likening his torment to Christ’s Passion. Recalling the crucified Christ, the king’s head, identified as Paris, his own Jerusalem, is first shown to suffer the lesions of his own crown of thorns, forced on him by his people during the Jacquerie. Then follows the treatment of his arms, stretched westward and southward, upon which appear the wounds from early English alliances with Brittany (ch. 246, line 19), attacks in the French province of Guyenne in 1345 and 1355 (ch. 246, line 20), and the taking of Calais in 1345 (ch. 246, line 20). His lower body is covered with lacerations. His legs expose a zigzag scar of revolted cities throughout the kingdom, and, in place of the nails attaching Christ’s feet to the cross, his feet are punctured with injuries

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inflicted by the ‘maines gens du plat païs’ (the many people of the countryside) (ch. 246, lines 32–4). Finally, in contrast to the post-mortem wound to Christ’s body inflicted by the lance of Longinus, Charles suffers multiple lacerations to his torso: English claims to Maine and Anjou dating back to at least Henry II of England are experienced as lacerations piercing Charles’s kidneys and ribs (ch. 246, line 23), and his stomach suffers from attacks on the environs of Paris and along the Seine, with an open wound on his stomach stemming from the breaking of the 1360 Treaty of Brétigny by the English in the winter of 1363–64 (ch. 246, lines 25–8). These multiple aggressions do not confirm his death, as was the case with Christ, but, instead, leave the ruler ‘en grant aventure de mort’ (at great risk of death, ch. 246, lines 15–16). Later chapters not only elaborate on this initial mapping of wartime violence onto the king’s body but also, crucially, mention the first steps to healing the king’s body, conceived as the life-saving interventions of the king’s constable, Bertrand du Guesclin, cast as an Eagle. The Eagle is said to apply ointment to the king’s wound, most often consisting of the spilled blood of the enemy, and to suture his lacerations, typically by reconquering royal territories. Throughout this imaginative transposing of military battles, revolts, and treaty activity onto the king’s body as a series of lacerations, Henri uses two terms whose semantic richness and elasticity set them apart. These terms are plaie and tourment, both of which are closely associated with the concept of trauma. Plaie has a long history dating back to at least the Oxford Chanson de Roland, in which it serves to refer to a blow or strike, or to their effect – an injury or wound. This term has an unrelenting presence in Henri’s friend’s prognostication; in chapter 246 alone, the detailing of the king’s suffering entails twelve repetitions of ‘plaie’. It is further enhanced by a partial synonym, ‘tourment’, which commonly appears in Old and Middle French to refer to the ‘suffering and torture’ of a person.3 Its frequency in the Pestilence is also striking, most especially in the first of the two verse prayers already mentioned, where it appears eight times as an end rhyme. Both terms have secondary meanings that, although rare, are fundamental to Henri’s enterprise. According to the FEW, plaie carries another, albeit less commonly witnessed, meaning in which it also signified ‘a track of land, a region, or a country’.4 Although Henri never uses the term explicitly in this sense, this second definition strengthens his claim for associating the king’s physical wounds with boundaries transgressed when lands are conquered and colonised by the enemy. In a similar fashion, tourment also lends credence to locating the violence done to the kingdom on the king’s body, since it

3 4

FEW: see tormentum, 1. FEW: see first entry for plaga, I and II.1.



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also served in Old and Middle French to speak of environmental violence, specifically related to storms and sea swells (FEW, tormentum, 2), and also to the violence of warfare, as seen in the expression, ‘tourment d’assaut’, which refers to relentless assaults on the battlefield (DMF, under tourment, 2). Both plaie and tourment anticipate later enhancements to the definition of trauma. The term trauma, first in ancient Greek and then when its equivalents entered the English and French languages in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively, signified both physical and emotional wounding of an individual. Beyond evoking the common association of trauma with physical and emotional suffering, Henri’s repeated uses of ‘plaie’ and ‘tourment’ anticipate recent developments in trauma studies on the fluidity between personal trauma and environmental violence, which has led to the concept of collective trauma. Similar to scholarship on the effects of war and catastrophic environmental events on communities defined by their shared lands (see especially Erickson 1994 and Alexander 2004), Henri uses the ravaged kingdom to bind the sovereign to his people. Here, space does not mark the boundaries of the individual but, rather, the kingdom’s contested borders, thus the severe physical trauma caused by warfare tampers with the integrity of the sovereign person. With each wound inscribed onto the king’s body, Charles V becomes less of an individual, instead through his suffering he becomes one with his kingdom (conceived as both land and people), in accordance with the Christo-mimesis crucial to medieval theories of kingship. Sacred Sovereignty, Time, and the Healing of Wounds All the while accentuating the king’s mortality because he can suffer the physical trauma of warfare, rebellion, and illness, Henri never loses sight of contemporary arguments concerning the corpus mysticum regni (mystical body of the kingdom) that closely aligned the sovereign with Christ. Of particular importance to Henri are two concepts linked to the Christo-mimesis of kings: the notion that a king might fulfil a Christ-like role for his people by suffering on their behalf and that, as a semi-divine figure, a king inhabits a physical, hence mortal, body even as his sovereignty places him beyond time since it survives even death (Kantorowicz 1957: 193–272). As we have witnessed, in detailing the king’s injuries, Henri uses geographic orientation to evoke Christ’s Passion. This sacred allusion, however, does not follow the expected path toward meditation on Christ’s suffering.5 Instead of (only) providing the king with the means to reflect on his personal

5 Henri’s originality in reworking contemporary devotional literature is best appreciated when read alongside Boulton 2015, esp. 229–84.

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relationship with God, Henri (also) guides the king to experience more fully his relationship to his kingdom and to appreciate his responsibility to his community. To enhance this experience, Henri suspends time so that the king does not simply relive events that have already occurred but experiences them from a perspective beyond human temporality. Confronting and maximising the concept that sovereigns exist outside of time, Henri presents the king’s suffering as never-ending by showing him to experience all time at once, a claim accentuated by ‘prophecies’ that transform already occurred events into future actions, inflicted on the king. Prophecy, like the adventure narrative, is driven by future events that acquire meaning only once they have come to pass. The authors of Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes – Kay among them – argued that in Chrétien’s romances, adventure resides in the future perfect; Henri’s record of the prophecy and his narration also play with time.6 In fact, Henri goes even further than placing future events in the past, since he requires his privileged royal reader to relive the past in a static state wherein a conclusion is anticipated but not delivered. That is, unlike a romance adventure, Henri’s Pestilence suspends and confounds time so as never to allow the prophecy to become fully part of the past, present, or future. The complexity of this temporal conflation is revealed in the grammar of the account, where the cleric’s prophecy is narrated through a mixture of the simple past and imperfect tenses, but experienced by the king as future suffering that both could occur potentially and could be healed potentially. This uncertain time is expressed via the second future, a tense introduced in the late Middle Ages and that is formed by the -roie ending (the precursor of the conditional).7 Thus we learn that as a result of battles and broken treaties, the king ‘seroit bien plaié’ (could be greatly wounded, ch. 246, line 10) and that, likewise, he could be healed by the Eagle: ‘l’aigle d’Ocident […] viendroit saner les plaies’ (the eagle of the Occident […] could come and heal his wounds, ch. 246, lines 41–2). Here, the second future serves to confound time by projecting lived events into the past where they introduce a theoretical cycle of never-ending suffering for the individual that may or may not (have) come to pass. In suspending the wounded body and its eventual healing in a conditional future, the Pestilence introduces a timeless destructive cycle of trauma in which the king is held hostage to a sempiternal state of suffering that has no end in sight. That is, unless readers, whether the royal implied reader or subsequent readers who identify with the suffering king, can effectively interpret its allegorical significance. My definition of adventure here draws directly from Stahuljak et al. 2011: 76–89. On the second future, see especially discussions in Hasenohr 1993: 177–8 and Fennel 1975: 101–13 and 129–32. See also Stahuljak and Price in this volume, pp. 109 and 256–61, on the future perfect or future anterior. 6 7



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The use of the second future provides a telling example of how the Pestilence engages creatively with this aporia of sovereignty, in which a sovereign is time-bound by his inhabited body – where the past, present, and future are one-directional and finite – whereas sovereignty proves to be beyond time – in infinitude, where the absence of before or after allows for the continued existence of sovereignty even beyond the mortal death of the king. For Henri, however, living beyond time demands awareness of the deep significance of events (Kantorowicz 1957: 279–82). Henri’s manipulation of this temporal aporia manifests itself most spectacularly through the king’s suffering body. On the one hand, he insists on Charles’s mortality, since the king’s open wounds are described as life-threatening. On the other hand, the king’s wounds extend beyond his mortal existence as sovereign, since some of the violence committed – including the first manifestation of the plague and the Jacquerie uprisings – predates his crowning in 1364. Thus, while Charles endures wounds to a mortal body that is subject to time, that body also inherits wounds for as long as the sempiternal essence of sovereignty inhabits it. Moreover, these wounds will continue to exist beyond the confines of Charles’s own life. In assuming the throne, a king inherits not only a kingdom but also its past trauma and, in order to break the cycle of trauma, he must experience it fully. The second future renders this new temporal reality possible by locating the king in a temporally suspended moment where the past has not receded and the future has not yet arrived, thereby creating a space wherein this trauma may be mystically, cathartically worked through. The penultimate verse prayer extends this space to provide a much-needed moment of reflection, which is intended to empower the king so that he may take future action. The penultimate verse prayer in the Pestilence, at first glance, appears to compound the king’s suffering because it forces him to remain in the perpetual feedback loop of traumatic plaie and tourment. Leaving behind prose to enter into the lyric sphere, the prayer’s structure deliberately abandons any sense of progression towards an end, typically promised by prose narrative.8 Consisting of fourteen twelve-line octosyllabic stanzas, the first of the two closing verse prayers, as noted at the outset of this chapter, identifies the king as its principal concern. In line four, it is the king for whom Henri prays, while the third stanza transitions from a prayer addressed to God to a plea that the king take seriously his responsibility to serve as shepherd to his people. A return to prayer is clear in stanzas nine and ten but, once again, stanza eleven addresses the king before the poem concludes with three stanzas addressed to the Virgin Mary. The subject matter and language of this prayer work with

8 A similar argument about poetry as rejecting progression is made in Stahuljak et al. 2011: 39.

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a plea that God save the king from ‘tourment’ (ch. 257, line 2) before then counselling the king to meditate on how his ‘roialme fu a tourment’ (kingdom has been tormented, ch. 257, line 27). ‘Tourment’ reappears six more times as an end rhyme over the 144 lines of this prayer to recall the suffering endured by both king and kingdom. If the opening line implies that God might protect the king from suffering, the subsequent lines assign responsibility to the king. After all, it is leaders, points out Henri, who are responsible for determining whether their subjects will know ‘joie ou tourment’ (joy or torment, ch. 257, line 63), adding a few lines later that too often royal subjects become innocent victims ‘par la defaut de nos chiés’ (because of the failings of our leaders/ heads, ch. 257, lines 74), whose bad government provokes the heavens to punish the masses with ‘la mort, la guerre et le tourment’ (death, war, and torment, ch. 257, line 79). The continued use of variations of tourment as end rhyme serves to create a terrifying landscape of suffering. Life is likened to ‘la mer qui tous jours tempeste, / ou il a peril et tourment’ (a sea that is always tempestuous, where peril and torment reside, ch. 257, lines 86–7), while the afterlife leads some to the fires of Hell, where they are ‘tourmenté / en grant pestilencë amere’ (tormented in great, bitter misery, ch. 257, lines 103–5). This series of generalising statements becomes personal when Henri informs the king that God provided him with a model to imitate if he wants to end the suffering: God offered his son, who saved humankind from the ‘paine et tourment’ (suffering and torment) of eternal damnation when he accepted to die in their stead (ch. 257, lines 112–13). Likewise, Charles must assume his own sacred status as semi-divine and accept to ‘souffrir la mort’ (suffer death, ch. 257, line 123), a suffering that will be eased thanks to the comfort to be offered by his subjects (‘Et pourrés de vos sougis traire / chevanche et tres grant reconfort’ [you will receive from your subjects many riches and great comfort, ch. 257, lines 129–30]). Henri’s novel reworking of the Christomimesis of sovereignty cannot be ignored. Whereas contemporary medieval theory on kingship used the concept of divine right to distinguish and elevate royalty’s exceptional status, Henri uses it to opposite ends. Here, Charles V’s sacred status requires that he imitate Christ by taking responsibility for the torment experienced in his kingdom while also assuming the resulting pain on behalf of his people. Work in recent decades on writing about trauma has emphasised similar temporal manipulations as the painful reality of the traumatic experience. Dominick LaCapra’s description of written trauma can be productively considered in relation to the Pestilence: Henri provides the king with ‘scenes in which the past returns and the future is blocked or fatalistically caught up in a melancholic feedback loop’, and wherein ‘tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past reliving the traumatic scene. Any duality (or double inscription) of time (past and present or future) is experientially



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collapsed’ (2001: 21). In LaCapra’s work this ‘feedback loop’ must be broken for healing to take place. In contrast, in Henri’s work, this vicious cycle of pain must first be experienced fully in order to ensure healing throughout the kingdom. In effect, Henri forces the king to experience the past as a trauma victim so that he may be more intimately and more urgently invested in healing the kingdom. Through his critical engagement with medieval thinking about kingship, Henri productively and powerfully challenges the dominant discourse on kingship to provide a new figural space in which a king could be led to appreciate the danger that ‘sovereign singularity’ poses to the integrity of both his kingdom and his sovereignty. In the process, Henri leads his privileged royal reader to enter into a trauma narrative in which interminable suffering is first used to create intimacy with his kingdom before then serving to assure an intimacy with his people. In so doing, the king’s trauma will emphasise the potential for a new kind of singularity that can allow for his inclusion in the larger community. That this complex treatment of oneness culminates in verse should not surprise us; for, as Kay has argued, didactic poetry has the unique capacity of suspending time and allowing for oneness to be ‘both seductively present and mysteriously elusive’ (Place: 16). How better to sway a sovereign to take action to end a war than by leaving him suspended in a prayerful state, the space of what could – if he is willing to suffer on his subjects’ behalf – come to be?

• PART V • Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry

•  Introduction  • Simon Gaunt

S

arah Kay’s work has always had a cheeky relationship to the canon. While not neglecting the so-called ‘classical’ troubadours, Subjectivity offered readings of an astonishing range of troubadours far less well known to modern criticism, but perhaps better representative of medieval tastes. Similarly, Political Fictions wilfully marginalised the Chanson de Roland to consider a large array of epic poems, many barely read since the Middle Ages, putting centre stage texts such as the riveting Occitan (and therefore marginal) chanson, Daurel et Beton. Thus, for all its interpretive originality and theoretical sophistication, Kay’s work also has major ramifications for literary history in widening the field of vision and setting the modern canon better in context. Nowhere more so than in Parrots and Nightingales, which for the most part discusses texts it would be all too easy to dismiss as dull and to consider para-literary at best, possibly barely literary at all: grammars, poetic manuals, florilegia, verse encyclopaedias. Studying the widespread practice of quoting troubadour poetry over roughly 150 years from 1200 onwards, in a variety of places mainly outside Occitania, Kay shows how this practice drives and transforms poetic practice, retroactively installing the troubadours as foundational for European lyric. Then, in a ‘hey presto’ moment at the end of her book, she offers transformative readings of somewhat marginal texts by two highly canonical authors – Dante and Petrarch – demonstrating that in order to appreciate their work one needs to understand not only how they represent moments of genius and change in a continuous tradition of song deriving from the troubadours (the traditional view), but also and more importantly, their debt to and participation in the apparently arcane tradition of quoting troubadour poetry that Kay subjects to scrutiny. If Kay’s work has been most strongly associated with innovative approaches to medieval literature informed by modern critical theory, medieval and modern philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the import of the deep and exceptionally wide-ranging scholarly and philological underpinning of her work – reflecting her training by the formidable if little-published Oxford

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scholar Rhoda Sutherland – should not be underestimated.1 The very format of Parrots and Nightingales is in this regard significant and provocative: the argument and analysis (the ‘monograph’) account for 202 pages, but these are then very slightly outweighed by 204 pages of dense appendices which catalogue exhaustively all quotations from the troubadours in non-lyric texts, all excerpted stanzas, quotations in grammars, and so on. There are seventeen appendices in total. This combination of empirical and exhaustive research with more speculative work became unusual in the wake of the structuralist revolution of the 1970s, perhaps best represented by Paul Zumthor, after which medievalists by and large increasingly did either one or the other, rarely both. While a commitment to scholarship is hardly innovative, since scholarship never went away, Kay’s way of going about it and her execution are invariably innovative. The 50:50 split in Parrots and Nightingales between her own prose and the appendices constitutes a blunt and obvious challenge to her colleagues and to students the world over to take seriously the imperative to pay attention to the scholarly underpinning of arguments. Thinking is vital, but so is evidence. With these appendices we also see Kay embracing new media and technologies, another feature of her work throughout her career. Available online as well as in print, the appendices are a resource that can be (and are being) updated in a way not possible in conventional uses of the print medium. Troubadours are by nature nightingales. They sing melodiously of love, with apparent spontaneity and unfettered commitment. As with birdsong itself, the precise content of the song may be less important than an ability to imitate (rather than reproduce exactly) a form that enables recognition of and adherence to a type (or indeed species) of discourse. Reproduction of troubadour song along what Kay calls the nightingale’s way, characteristic of Northern France, may be approximate, both linguistically and formally.2 Sometimes the use of a name, such as Bernart de Ventadorn, or the evocation of a specific song, such as ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ (PC 70. 43), is sufficient to conjure a poetic soundscape and amorous vision. But these forms of citation of troubadour song are to be distinguished from quotation, where all, or more usually part of a song, frequently just a single line, is reproduced verbatim, often attributed to a named poet. Quotation is the parrot’s way of remembering troubadour lyric, and whereas post-Romantic readers find it easy to relate to the creative and amorous élan of the nightingale, the parrot’s more exact 1 It is instructive to read Subjectivity alongside Sutherland 1962–63 (one of her mere handful of articles) to understand the importance of her teaching and training to Kay’s early intellectual trajectory. Sutherland’s other highly influential student was John Marshall. 2 This is a question explored recently to great effect by Zingesser 2020, a book that had its origin in a dissertation supervised by Kay.



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imitation through quotation may at first blush seem merely derivative, dully bookish, and tediously philological. Kay, however, is a passionate advocate of the creative, indeed transformational potential of the parrot’s way. As many of the early instances of quotation (as opposed to citation) come in the context of grammars and manuals composed with a view to helping nonnative speakers compose lyric poetry in Occitan, one immediate ramification of the practice of quotation is that it helps elevate Occitan to the status of a grammaticalised classical language such as Latin. And as all the non-lyric texts that quote troubadour poetry have Latin models (grammars, accessus ad auctores, encyclopaedias, didactic poems), this creates what Kay calls ‘an edgy relation’ to Latin practices (9). From a Derridean perspective, it is precisely the citation of troubadour lyrics as authoritative examples (of grammar, form, or knowledge) that instantiates the troubadours’ authority within a literary tradition, and from a Butlerian perspective it is the imitation and reproduction of troubadour lyrics that consecrate their originary status. But, even more significantly, because the Occitan koine of the troubadours eschews regional affiliations and because Occitan itself cannot be identified with any single political unit, nation, or regime, but was, rather, mobile and used as a poetic language in places where it was not indigenous, Occitan became a prime example of what Derrida calls a monolanguage, with its ‘seductive lure of identification offered by an alien, written language, even though the forms that promise a sense of identity by their very nature deprive one of it’ (10). If the quotation of troubadour lyric enshrines its written status and enables it to travel not just as formal or emotional conceit, but as a stable textual vehicle of knowledge, and if it is this (more than performance) that ultimately provides the conduit to figures like Dante and Petrarch, then quotation is a central part of the troubadours’ contribution to the development of ‘European poetry’, a key term in the subtitle of Parrots and Nightingales. In its concern for the colonial impetus of culture and for literary practices that could be described as ‘international’, Parrots and Nightingales was also in the vanguard of current attention in medieval studies to postcolonial and transnational concerns. If Parrots and Nightingales makes a major contribution to literary history and to our knowledge of how the quotation of troubadour poetry makes the European lyric tradition, it is no less exciting intellectually. To my mind its most provocative intellectual proposition comes with Kay’s contention that ‘the act of repetition […] is […] paradoxically, an engine of change’ (2). Since modernity from Romanticism onwards became obsessed with innovation, originality, and change, continuity and repetition have had a bad press. ‘To parrot’ is simply to reproduce unthinkingly, more of the same. But, as Kay implies, it would be a mistake to assume that parrots do not understand what they repeat, just as it would be false to assume that nightingales do understand what they sing. Furthermore, every repetition of a text or fragment of a text

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is reframed in time and space, whether voiced or on the page. As Borges amusingly demonstrated in his celebrated short story ‘Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote’ (Borges 2000: 62–71), even when rearticulated verbatim, a text is never identical to itself. Quotation of a lyric necessarily projects it into futures in which it is different. In some respects, this future variation is anticipated already by the troubadours in that stanzaic lyric poetry always works within traditions that reproduce and imitate formal structures. Yet in other respects the futures generated by quotation can never be known from the outset, since both the texts and their formal structures are repurposed in time and place, re-voiced by other people. In different ways, the three chapters here responding to Parrots and Nightingales examine how the practice of quotation projects lyrics into the future. Sophie Marnette pushes further on the question of the grey area that quotation generates between direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse, particularly in manuscript contexts – an interpretive problem raised by Kay, but not fully developed in her book. Emily Kate Price brings out how quotation is the driver for giving the lyrics themselves agency in the formation of cultural networks, across time as well as space. Simone Ventura shows how the future of troubadour poetry instantiated by quotation is far from settled, while also suggesting that the proclivity of a range of modern poets for imitating the form of Arnaut Daniel’s celebrated sestina troubles the distinction between parrot and nightingale (which for Kay are not so much rigid categories as they are contrasting modes of reproduction). The material examined in all three chapters illustrates how quotation resituates the lyrics quoted or imitated as ‘revenants’ in a new time and place. What remains constant, however, is the assumption that troubadour lyric still has something to teach us, without it always being clear what this something is. As Kay argues, this puts troubadour lyric as a discursive tradition in the position of what Lacan calls le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), the subject (in psychoanalysis the analyst) with whom we interact in order to discover things about ourselves which we do not yet know we know. Every first-person subject down the centuries who sings in the troubadour style, or who quotes from a troubadour song (even in a student essay), takes up a subject position in this discursive tradition that knows something about the subject s/he may apprehend, but has yet to discover.

•  Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities  • in the Chastelaine de Vergy Sophie Marnette

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his essay examines the insertion of lines from a lyric by the Châtelain de Coucy (a twelfth-century trouvère) into the Chastelaine de Vergy, a short courtly narrative poem composed in the thirteenth century.1 I use Sarah Kay’s distinction to argue that although, by seemingly quoting the Châtelain de Coucy’s lines verbatim, the author of the Chastelaine could appear to be a ‘parrot’, he (or possibly she – although I shall use masculine pronouns throughout this essay to refer to the narrative authorial voice) in fact becomes a ‘nightingale’ in creating an altogether new context for the words he so parrots, thereby introducing further irony and complexity into a deceptively simple text. This essay first analyses the formal insertion of the quoted lyric lines in the narrative text and its variation across manuscripts, paying particular attention to the ways in which the eight decasyllabic lyric lines are integrated into the octosyllabic narrative poem. I then explore the linguistic interplay between the quoted lyric lines and the various discourses represented in the narrative – that of the narrator and those of the characters – and their role in the construction of (inter-)subjectivity in the text. If the speaking subject of the quoted text is, as Parrots and Nightingales shows, intrinsically ambiguous in the case of inserted lyric, in the Chastelaine the quoting subject is also obscured because the lyric stanza quoted in direct discourse is embedded within what could be deemed to be a passage in free indirect discourse, or at the very least a situation of internal focalisation. It is therefore difficult to ascertain who is responsible for the quotation: the narrator or his main male character. This ambiguity is deeply significant in a text that Laurence De Looze describes as a ‘drama of language’ (1985: 45). Indeed, reported discourse is far from being unproblematic in the text since it is rarely used to express laudable feelings or straightforward information, but mostly appears in dialogues that reveal secrets, betray oaths, and deliberately cause harm.

1 The use of lyric insertion in the Chastelaine de Vergy is discussed by Zumthor 1968, Boulton 1993, and Gaunt 2006.

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The rest of this essay further takes into account the relevance of the content, context, and discursive frame of the original lyric, as well as the lyric persona of the Châtelain de Coucy in the building – or obscuring – of knowledge, authority, and meaning in the narrative poem. Text and Manuscripts There are twenty-two known medieval French versions of the Chastelaine, which appear in manuscripts ranging from the end of the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, with a length varying from 938 to 965 lines. This essay will refer to eleven of these manuscripts, based on René Stuip’s diplomatic editions (Stuip 1970), as well as to the unedited Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 445. The quotations and line numbers used here refer to the edition by Dufournet and Dulac (1994), based on Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. français 837 (958 lines). The text’s prologue and epilogue state categorically that perfect lovers should keep their love secret and offers the tale of the Chatelaine de Vergy as an exemplum of the terrible consequences of not doing so. In this story, a Knight, vassal of the duke of Burgundy, has a secret love affair with the Chatelaine, who is the Duke’s niece. The infatuated Duchess offers the Knight her love, but he rejects her advances. Humiliated and furious, the Duchess maliciously and falsely tells her husband that the Knight made a pass at her. To exonerate himself, the Knight reveals his relationship with the Chatelaine to the Duke, despite having sworn secrecy. As proof, he allows the Duke to witness one of his secret rendezvous with the Chatelaine. Although he too promises concealment, the Duke reveals the secret to the Duchess who, in turn, swears secrecy to her husband but privately vows to take revenge on the Knight who spurned her for a lady of lesser rank. The Duchess then reveals to the Chatelaine that she knows about her relationship, and the Chatelaine, wrongly convinced that the Knight has betrayed her and is in love with the Duchess, dies of grief after a long soliloquy. The Knight kills himself upon seeing her dead body and the Duke, when he learns what happened, angrily kills his wife. This story is built around seven main dialogues between pairs of characters. It revolves around the recurring divulgence of a secret, the repeated breaching of solemn oaths of secrecy, as well as continual lies and deception, especially but not exclusively on the part of the Duchess. Scholars and students have eagerly discussed whether the story illustrates the warning issued in the narrative frame, i.e. that keeping one’s love secret is paramount. This lesson appears particularly ironic, given that the existence of the secret can be seen as the reason for the disastrous denouement: the Duchess falls in love with the Knight because he hides his love so well that she wrongly thinks he is unattached. It is also because the Knight keeps his confession to the Duke a secret from the Chatelaine that



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she wrongly concludes that he no longer loves her. Secrecy thus leads the main characters into a series of misinterpretations, while the authority to hide or reveal the secret is repeatedly mishandled – including by the narrator, since retelling the tale, even as a negative exemplum, still stops it from being a secret. The centrality of irony for our reading of the text will be brought out here by an analysis of the issues of point of view and narrative level.2 Lyric Insertion: Parrots and Nightingales In Parrots and Nightingales, Kay distinguishes between lyric quotation – the verbatim reproduction of line(s) or stanzas from other lyric poems for didactic purposes – and lyric insertion, where the quoted lyric line is inserted in a narrative poem for expressive purposes. The quoting poet, as ‘parrot’, aims to convey items of linguistic or intellectual knowledge, while the poet who practises lyric insertion becomes more of a ‘nightingale’, as all or part of the original lyric poem is performed within the narrative to express specific affects and musicality. Kay therefore also differentiates between the nightingale as ‘subject of desire’ and the parrot as offering ‘a discourse of knowledge’ (Parrots and Nightingales: 15–16). All verse versions of the Chastelaine contain a single passage of a few lines quoted from a poem composed by the twelfth-century trouvère, the Châtelain de Coucy, who sings about having to leave his adored and adoring lady to travel to a foreign land (lines 295–302).3 The quoted lyric lines correspond to the third stanza of the poem ‘A vous amant, plus k’a nul’autre gent’ (To you, lovers, more than all other people), which comprises six eight-line stanzas. They appear at the end of the first third of the narrative, at a moment when 2 On irony in the Chastelaine, see among others Clifford 1986, Cooper 1984, Hunt 1993, Ramm 2006. For further work on the poem’s style, structure, and interpretation, see Arrathoon 1974, Dubruck 1985, Guthrie 1999, Kostoroski 1972, Maraud 1972, Payen 1973, Rychner 1980, Shirt 1980. 3 For editions of the lyric, see the online project Troubadours, Trouvères and the Crusades https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/crusades/texts/ of/rs679/#page1 [accessed 25 February 2019] and Lerond 1964. The lyric appears in eleven chansonniers. In addition to the twenty-two versions of the Chastelaine de Vergy, the quoted lyric lines also appear in the four versions of the mid-thirteenth-century Roman de la Violette by Gilbert de Montreuil (lines 4624–31). The lyric also appears in full in the two manuscripts of the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Roman du Chastelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel (lines 7347–98: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 15098 and Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 7514). Later prose versions of the Chastelaine de Vergy do not include the quoted lyric lines, nor do they refer to the Châtelain de Coucy (e.g. the anonymous fifteenth-century prose Istoire de la Chastelaine du Vergier et de Tristan le Chevalier and Marguerite de Navarre’s seventieth nouvelle in her Heptaméron).

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the Knight is debating what he should do regarding the Duke’s ultimatum: he must either reveal his relationship in order to disprove the Duchess’s malicious accusation and avoid exile (which would also take him away from his lover) or betray his oath of secrecy to the Chatelaine and therefore risk her leaving him. This dilemma (jeu parti, line 267) upsets the Knight terribly and, as he thinks of his love for the Chatelaine and worries about losing her, we are informed that he finds himself in the same situation as the Châtelain de Coucy in his song (see Appendix for the full passage, lines 268–311, and its English translation). The lines then quoted from the Châtelain de Coucy form one of only three monologues in direct discourse in the poem, alongside the complaints of the dying Chatelaine (lines 732–831) and suicidal Knight (lines 884–95), both of which have clear lyrical qualities centring on the lovers’ subjectivities and dramatically resonate with the quoted passage. The question of whether we are dealing here with what Kay calls a quotation or an insertion is an open one. The single quoted lyric is not performed as a song by a character;4 its formal insertion in the manuscripts as well as the linguistic interplay of discourses and intersubjectivity that it creates in the narrative will allow us to explore further Kay’s paradigmatic distinction between ‘lyric quotation-didacticism-knowledge’ and ‘lyric insertion-expressivity-affect’. Of importance for our interrogation of the parrot/nightingale paradigm is that the quoted lines in the Chastelaine are clearly linked to their author in all manuscripts but one, thereby making the lyric persona of the Châtelain de Coucy an essential part of the narrative’s textual subjectivities. In order to maintain this indeterminacy between ‘quotation’ and ‘insertion’, I shall refer neutrally to the Chastelaine’s ‘quoted lyric lines’. Formal Insertion of the Quoted Lyric Lines The quoted lyric lines appear in all twenty-two manuscripts of the Chastelaine, but the name of the Châtelain de Coucy is not mentioned in Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9574–9575 (see below). All eleven manuscripts consulted introduce the quoted lines with a similar formula, ‘Dist en un vers d’une chançon’ (he said in a verse of his song, line 294), but the inscription of the lyric stanza within the narrative varies formally across manuscripts. In five manuscripts, the lyric’s decasyllabic lines run across the manuscript columns to fit with the octosyllabic lines of the rest of the text, thereby making the quoted stanza less conspicuous (Paris, 4 The quoted lyric lines might have been sung when the text was read aloud or recited but are definitely not presented as being performed within the narrative. See Boulton 1993: 51–3, Parrots and Nightingales: 94, and Zink 1997: 114–17 for further discussion.



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Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 375; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 4531; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 13521; Bodley 445). Five manuscripts use bigger capitals to signal both the first line of the quoted lyric and the first line following the quotation (BnF fr. 375; BnF fr. 837; BnF n.a.fr. 4531; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25545; De Ricci Supplement Census, A 2200).5 Three have a bigger capital only on the first line after the quoted lyric (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2136; Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 243; Bodley 445). Three manuscripts use no bigger capitals to mark the quoted lines (Berlin, Deutsche Staatbibliothek, MS Hamilton 257; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 13521; Brussels 9574–9575). Thus, six of the eleven manuscripts do not formally highlight the beginning of the quoted lyric lines, but eight mark the return to the narrative after those lines. This is in stark contrast with Dufournet and Dulac’s edition, which uses blank spaces before and after the quoted lines and presents them in a smaller font. In the medieval manuscripts, then, the poem is less visibly presented as materially other (or ‘intertextual’) than it is in the modern edition. It appears as just another layer of the text, which, at least at first, does not require any particular foregrounding. Linguistic Interplay of Discourses and Intersubjectivity A narrator can represent his characters’ speech and thoughts in three main ways: direct discourse, indirect discourse, and free indirect discourse.6 In direct discourse, the reporting speaker evokes the original speech/thought situation and claims to convey the exact words of the original speaker. The pronouns, tenses, and deictic words of the original discourse stay the same (e.g. she said, ‘I am sad’). In indirect discourse, the reporting speaker expresses the original utterance in his/her own words. The reported discourse is subordinated to a reporting verb and can be introduced by a subordinating conjunction. The pronouns, tenses, and deictics of the reported discourse are switched to the reporting situation of enunciation (e.g. she said that she was sad). Free indirect discourse is characterised by the presence of features of direct discourse (direct questions, exclamations, colloquialisms, etc.) reported in the fashion of indirect discourse, with shifted pronouns 5 In BnF fr. 25545, the words ‘chastelain de roucy’ (sic) are underlined in lighter ink than the text. 6 See Marnette 2005: 169–223 and 2013: 300–3 for in-depth descriptions of speech and thought presentation in medieval French literature. See also Parrots and Nightingales: 19 on the link between quotation and direct speech.

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and tenses but without being syntactically dependent on a reporting clause (i.e. without being directly subordinated to an introductory verb and without being coordinated to a previous reported clause). Moreover, in a narrative text, the story is presented through a certain perspective, or ‘focalisation’.7 In ‘external focalisation’, the narrator/focaliser can choose to let us see only the actions and the attitudes of the characters (external focalisation from without). Alternatively, the narrator/focaliser can give us access to the characters’ perceptions, feelings, and thoughts (external focalisation from within) through the use of indirect discourse (e.g. she thought that…; she said to herself that…) or verbs of feeling and perception (e.g. she was sad; she felt that…). In ‘internal focalisation’, contrastingly, the locus of focalisation is within the story being told: usually it is the perspective of one of the characters, and the perception and the knowledge of the events are restricted to what the focalising character can perceive or know. This tends to be conveyed through free indirect discourse and/or subjective descriptions. The quoted lyric lines in the Chastelaine are inserted in the text as direct discourse, with the introductory verb ‘dist’ (he said, line 294).8 It is thus clear who is being quoted and how, but the issue of who is quoting is obscured by the multilayered enunciative context, as rendered by the complex syntax of the surrounding text. As shown in the passage quoted in full (and translated) in the Appendix, the narrative offers a lengthy description of the Knight’s internal debate following the Duke’s ultimatum. This debate is reported using a mix of indirect discourse and verbs of feelings and perception, as well as free indirect discourse. In short, we have access to the Knight’s thoughts and feelings both from the narrator’s perspective (external focalisation) and from the Knight’s own perspective (internal focalisation). It is, however, unclear whether the quoted lyric lines should be understood as coming directly from the narrator, who is comparing the Knight’s feelings to those expressed by the Châtelain de Coucy in his poem, or from the Knight, as part of an ongoing internal monologue reported in the third person. An ambiguity is thus created as to the quoting locutor’s identity and therefore the significance of the inserted/quoted lyric lines. We can interpret the passage in the Appendix as follows: • Lines 271–83: Dufournet and Dulac’s colon at the end of line 270 (there is no punctuation in the manuscript) indicates that the sentence introduced by Quar (which could be translated as ‘indeed’) can be analysed as free indirect discourse that develops the Knight’s thought 7 See Marnette 1998: 137–20 for an extensive discussion of focalisation in medieval French literature. 8 ‘Dist’ changes to ‘fist’ in BnF fr. 2136.



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and feelings from his own perspective, through internal focalisation. A simple test would be to transpose these lines into the first person, which would show that they could be interpreted as the Knight’s thoughts: from ‘Indeed, if I tell the pure truth – which I will if I do not want to perjure myself – I consider myself as dead’ up to ‘as long as my lover would remain with me, whom I fear to lose above all things’. • Lines 284–90 offer the narrator’s description of the Knight remembering his delight in his lady’s company and then introduce an instance of indirect discourse – ‘si se pensse’ (so he thinks, line 287) – which turns into free indirect discourse: ‘Comment porra sanz li durer?’ (How will he be able to survive without her? line 290). Again, the last clause could easily be transposed into the first person while keeping the syntactic inversion and keeping the question mark added by the modern editors: ‘How will I be able to survive without her?’ There is a clear progression here from the narrator’s discourse to the Knight’s internal thoughts. • Lines 291–4 can therefore be understood as a continuation of the Knight’s thoughts which could be transposed into the first person: ‘I am in the very same position as the Châtelain de Coucy’. Alternatively, it could be interpreted as a return to the narrator’s voice. • Lines 303–7, after the quoted lyric lines, summarise the Knight’s dilemma with indirect discourse: ‘ne set se’ (he does not know whether, line 304); ‘ne set li quels’ (he does not know which, line 307). Thus, his thoughts are transposed into the words of the narrator (external focalisation from within). • Lines 308–11, finally, switch to external focalisation from without, where the narrator shows the physical effect of the Knight’s agony: his tears. The syntax of the passage analysed above is consistently tricky across the manuscripts (see Appendix). The lines often start with conjunctions such as ‘que’, ‘qu’, or ‘quar’ (because, indeed) and sometimes with ‘et’ (and), ‘si’ (so, and), or ‘mais’ (but). While these words connect sentences to each other, they also allow for pauses in between. This makes it relatively difficult for modern editors to punctuate the text (as shown in the lack of consistency in the use of full stops and semicolons between Dufournet and Dulac’s medieval text and facing modern translation). It also has the effect of calling into question the neat conceptual distinction between indirect discourse and free indirect discourse. Indirect discourse is usually described as either subordinated to an introductory verb and/or connected

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to such a subordinated clause (‘he said that … and that …’), while free indirect discourse is described as neither: it is not syntactically dependent on a reporting clause. Here the presence or absence of ‘que’ and connectives in the medieval text make this dependence a matter of degree rather than a certainty. Modern editors and translators try to express the blurring of boundaries achieved by the connectives in the medieval text using modern punctuation, but the tools available are blunt ones. Two manuscripts substantially depart from the BnF fr. 837 version given in the Appendix. Brussels 9574–9575 does not mention the Châtelain de Coucy and thus offers a very different reading:9 Sisapense cil la meffert. Et il si par son meffet la pert Quant par soi ne len [v>p]eut mener. Comment porra sens lidurer? Qui aucueur ne voit se mort non Dist en vn ver dune chancon: Par dieu amors fors mestacorrercer (He thinks that he is serving her badly. And he is losing her thus because of his misdeed since he cannot take her with him. How will he be able to survive without her? This one [the Knight], who in his heart sees only death, says in a song’s verse: ‘By God, Love, I am so upset’.)

The ‘qui’ highlighted in bold in the above excerpt switches from being a relative pronoun referring to the Châtelain de Coucy in the other manuscripts, to becoming either an indefinite pronoun (someone) or more likely a demonstrative pronoun referring to the Knight: ‘this one’. While less elegant or convincing than the other versions, Brussels 9574–9575 seems to cut out the narrator as a possible quoting locutor in favour of the Knight, who now appears to simply sing a song, without any original poet/ author being mentioned. By contrast, Bodley 445 omits six lines of text (lines 283–8) and substantially changes the introduction to the quoted lyric, which is shorter than in the other versions:10

9 I have added modern punctuation (in bold and underlined) to Stuip’s diplomatic edition of the manuscript. 10 I have added punctuation (in bold and underlined). The line indicates where the missing verses would have been, but there is no interruption of any sort in the actual manuscript.



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Mais dupais ne lui chausist Se samie lui remansist. Pourquoy il ne len puet mener Sy ne pourroit sans lui durer Sy quil lait serui autressi Com li chastellains de soussi Qui nauoit aucuer samour nom Et dist en ces uers de chancon: Par dieu amours fors mest le con serrer du doulz semblant que My souloit moustrer Celle qui y ert ma compaigne Et mamie. Comme mypuet Durer si longuement la uie (But he would not care about the land / as long as his lover would remain with him. / Because he cannot take her with him, / he would not be able to last without her, / having served her in the same way as the Châtelain de Coucy, / who had nothing but love / in his heart and who said in these song verses: / ‘By God, Love, it is hard for me to be / deprived of the sweet looks that / she used to bestow on me, / the one who was my companion / and my friend. How can / life last so long for me?’)11

While it would be easy to dismiss the difficulty of the resulting passage as created by a rather inept scribe, it is worth noting that the change seems to extend the Knight’s free indirect discourse to include the quoted lyric lines. Here the Knight seems to compare his service to the Chatelaine (‘l’ait servi’) to that of the Châtelain de Coucy instead of comparing their states of mind. Interpretation and Intratextuality Ultimately, the blurring across the various clauses of the excerpt given in the Appendix, the variation across manuscripts, and the changes effected in Dufournet and Dulac’s edition show that the interpretation of this passage is delicate and that the boundaries between external and internal focalisation are fluid. This creates some ambiguity as to the identity of the quoting subject of the lyric poem, thus potentially conflating three male locutors and their subjectivities: the narrator, the Knight, and the Châtelain de Coucy. The 11 I have noted the line breaks in order to show the unusual enjambment in the quoted lyric lines here.

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inserted/quoted lyric lines are given not one new context but several possible contexts, depending on our interpretation of the quoting locutor’s identity. What are the consequences of choosing between the narrator and the Knight as quoting locutors for our interpretation of the text? One could see this as a choice between (a) a clear-cut interpretation of the text wherein the narrator’s words are interpreted at face value (unlike those of his characters) and the quoted lyric lines are seen as didactic (like the warnings of the prologue and the epilogue); or (b) a complex and ironic interpretation of the text wherein even the narrator’s words are not what they seem, and authority and knowledge are obscured. In this second case, quoting the Châtelain de Coucy would not be a didactic clarification of the plot but another layer of complexity that further reconfigures the relationships between the author, the narrator, and the characters. In support of this second interpretation, we can also note the strong lexical and semantic echoes that tie the quoted lyric lines to the surrounding text. The text immediately preceding, and more specifically the thoughts and feelings of the Knight, is clearly echoed through the words of the lyric. The word solaz occurs in both narrative (‘li sovient […] du solaz’ [he is reminded […] of the delight, lines 284–5]) and poem (‘m’est a consirrer del solaz’ [it is hard for me to be deprived of the delight, line 296]). The transition from the narrative’s third person (‘li’) to the lyric’s first person (‘m[e]’) is replicated in the repetition of two similar questions: ‘Comment porra sanz li durer?’ (free indirect discourse; How will he be able to survive without her? line 290 of the narrative) and ‘Comment me puet li cuer […] durer?’ (direct discourse; How can my heart remain […]? line 301, within the quoted lyric lines). These strong echoes once again blur the boundaries between the discourses of the narrator, the Knight, and the Châtelain de Coucy. In addition to solaz, to which we will return, some of the words used in the quoted lyric lines are also significantly present earlier and later in the narrative, notably semblanz (appearance) and cuer (heart).12 The word ‘semblanz’ is notoriously loaded in the narrative since it is mostly used in a negative way with the meaning of ‘false pretence’ in order to describe the behaviour of the lozengiers (slanderers) and the Duchess (lines 2, 513, 568, 661); or to refer to the Knight not showing his true feelings (‘semblant n’en fist’ [he did not show outwardly, line 54]).13 It is positive, with the meaning of ‘true appearance’, 12 As shown above, Bodley 445 omits the word ‘solaz’ both in the narrative and in the lyric in this passage, which suggests that the omission of six lines and the shortening of the quoted section are deliberate (also see footnote 10 above). The word ‘cuer’ is replaced with ‘vie’ (life), for the rhyme. 13 It is also used ironically when the Duchess shows her true feelings to the Knight but he fails to recognise them (lines 49, 52, 53), and when the Duchess reproaches the Duke for



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in the quoted lyric lines and when used in connection to the Chatelaine: ‘Et au samblant que li cors moustre / Voit bien qu’ele est morte tout outre’ (And looking at her body’s appearance, he plainly sees that she is irrevocably dead, lines 869–70). The many ‘samblanz’ of the lady loved by the trouvère in the original poem thus tragically become one ‘samblant’, that of the dead body of the lady loved by the Knight. The word ‘cuer’ is rarely used negatively in the Chastelaine narrative: when it is, this is always in connection with the Duchess, for example when she cunningly highlights her ‘cuer loyal’ (faithful heart, lines 599, 601) to the Duke. More importantly, ‘cuer’ is linked to the description of the love between the Knight and the Chatelaine, either in their own discourses or in the narrator’s description of their tryst. Most strikingly of all, the word is used four times in the dying Chatelaine’s monologue (lines 773, 782, 794, 798) and once in the Knight’s monologue before his suicide (line 892).14 Both the descriptions of their deaths evoke their hearts: ‘Li cuers li faut’ (her heart fails her, line 836) and ‘s’en feri parmi le cuer’ (he strikes himself through the heart, line 898). There are thus strong affective echoes between the Châtelain de Coucy’s lyric lines and the lyrical outpourings of the Chatelaine and the Knight, as well as in the tragic deaths that afflict all three. Coming back to the word ‘solaz’, in addition to the two occurrences mentioned above, there are five further occurrences: two used by the narrator (lines 397, 449), two in indirect discourse (by the Duke, line 370; by the Duchess, line 562), and one in the Chatelaine’s final monologue (line 752). At first sight, the word seems to be used in a positive way, to describe the pleasure and joy of love, as it is initially, when the Knight (in the narrative, line 285) and the Châtelain de Coucy (in the quoted lyric lines, line 296) both remind themselves of their ladies’ delightful company. Indeed, the narrator spends an inordinate amount of time describing how intensely pleasurable the tryst between the Knight and the Chatelaine is, noting that no one should speak or hear about such joy unless they are perfect lovers themselves, for otherwise they will not understand it. The narrator describes it as ‘joie sans corouz / Et solaz et envoiseüre’ (joy without grief, and delight, and enjoyment, lines 448–9). While this could be understood as a warning to the reader who must therefore be worthy of hearing about this love, it is also deeply ironic, pretending to be loyal (lines 537, 579, 621). For more on the word semblant in thirteenthcentury French, see Andrieux-Reix and Baumgartner 2002. 14 See, for example, in the monologue of the dying Chatelaine: ‘Ne riens grever ne me peüst / Tant conme mes las cuers seüst / que li vostre de riens m’amast’ (Nothing could have hurt me as long as my poor heart knew that yours loved me in any way, lines 781–3), or in some of the Knight’s last words: ‘Més cuers avïez si loial’ (but you had such a loyal heart, line 892).

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since the Duke is actually secretly witnessing the tryst, having himself assured the Knight that spying on the rendezvous would be ‘solaz et geu’ (delight and fun, line 370). And while the Knight is presented outwardly by the narrator as a noble lover, he is also enjoying his ‘solaz’ while knowing he is being watched and while hiding the Duke’s presence from his lover. The word ‘solaz’, used to describe the Knight’s memory of his pleasure with his amie and by the Châtelain de Coucy in the quoted lyric lines, thus loses its dignity when used by the Duke to refer to his voyeuristic pleasure, which in turn undermines the description of the tryst. The term ‘solaz’ is further undermined when used to refer to the Duchess’s ability to manipulate the Duke into revealing what he knows about the Knight while ‘entre ses braz’ and ‘en tel solaz’ (in her arms […] in such delight, lines 561–2). The Duke uses ‘solaz’ as a voyeur while the Duchess uses ‘solaz’ as a manipulator, thereby calling into question the sincerity and authority of the narrator’s own use of ‘solaz’ in his discourse on love. The word ‘solaz’ then goes on to be both ironic and pathetic in the discourse of the dying Chatelaine, who now emphatically describes her love in the past: ‘Quar c’ert ma joie et mon deduit, / C’ert mes deliz c’ert mes depors, / C’ert mes solaz, c’ert mes confors’ (for it was my joy and my pleasure, it was my enchantment, it was my enjoyment, it was my delight, it was my comfort, lines 750–2). The above analysis therefore shows that key words in the quoted lyric lines, while resonating intratextually with the lyrical tone of the Chatelaine’s and the Knight’s dying monologues, also intricately connect those moments of high tragedy both with the apparently sincere words of the narrator and with words of deceit and even sordidness: the Knight concealing his secret, the Duke hiding in the bushes, and the Duchess plotting. To cite the title of another of Kay’s monographs, courtly contradiction is very often grounded in the circulation of discourse, since value-laden courtly terms like semblanz, cuer, and solaz can be quoted and recycled both in the lozengier-ridden world of the court and through the uncertain paths of manuscript transmission in such a way that they become deeply ambivalent, and can end up indicating quite opposite ideas or sentiments. This, of course, is why one should just keep one’s love secret at court – but also why – ironically – that is impossible.15 As readers, like the text’s characters, we run the risk of misinterpreting discourse as unproblematic. However, analysing the insertion of the lyric lines in the narrative poem reveals the layering of several perspectives and the fact that the narrator’s voice and subjectivity are not clear cut, nor easy to distinguish from the voices and subjectivities of other characters. It also tends to blur the neat distinction between parrot-narrator and nightingale-Knight with which I began, or, rather, to place them on a continuum. The linguistic 15

See also Emily Kate Price in this volume, pp. 257–8.



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interplay of the quoted lyric lines with the various discourses represented in the narrative – that of the narrator and those of the characters – thus leads readers to question the construction of authority and sincerity in the text. Treating the narrator’s discourse as that of a character who can be distrusted makes it easier to distinguish from the subjectivity of the author, which is instead reconstructed/ built through the irony of the text. In quoting the Châtelain de Coucy, therefore, the text is not ‘parroting’ his words but weaving them within a complex network of signs that undercuts the knowledge they initially appear to transmit. Interpretation and Intertextuality We can understand the quoted lyric lines either as the narrator quoting a past trouvère to offer a didactic view of what his male protagonist might be undergoing, or as the Knight himself emotionally connecting with that past trouvère as he debates what to do. Or, of course, both. In other words, the knowledge shared by the parrot-narrator and the affect expressed by the nightingale-Knight are both linked to a quoted subject who is not only the author of a poem but, more importantly, a poetic persona – whom we might call ‘the Châtelain de Coucy’ – whose experience influences and foreshadows that of the Knight in the Chastelaine. Thus the ‘je’ of the quoted lyric and, especially, the trouvère’s references to his heart, delight, and lady’s love resonate both intertextually with and intratextually within the various discourses – both dialogues and monologues – of the Chastelaine narrative. However, an emphasis on the intertextual perspective might possibly bring us closer to a tragic rather than ironic interpretation of the text. What would be highlighted then is the link between the Knight and the lyric ‘Châtelain’ persona as exemplary but doomed lovers, via the original lyric by the Châtelain de Coucy, rather than the ways in which the Chastelaine narrator subtly plays with layers of sincere and insincere discourses. The emphasis would therefore be on the Knight and the ‘Châtelain’ persona as subjects of desire rather than on the narrator as subject of knowledge quoting didactically from a lyric poet. Conclusion This essay has responded to Kay’s seminal scholarship on subjectivity and quotation and to the constant careful attention she pays to literary texts and to their evolution across manuscripts. The close linguistic and narratological analysis of a single quoted lyric passage in a narrative text has developed Kay’s distinction between, on the one hand, the quotation-parrot-didacticismknowledge nexus and, on the other, the lyric insertion-nightingale-expressivityaffect nexus, by equating this with a further distinction between quotation-

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narrator-external focalisation and lyric insertion-Knight-internal focalisation. As Kay notes, ‘lyric insertion is the point where the nightingales’ way comes closest to the use of quotation on that of the parrots’ (Parrots and Nightingales: 91). When quoting from the lyric poem, most of the versions of the Chastelaine oscillate on the continuum between seeing the Knight as subject of desire and the narrator as subject of knowledge, to borrow Kay’s terms (Parrots and Nightingales: 15– 16), though some later manuscripts seem to offer a more one-sided interpretation (Brussels 9574–9575, dated c.1300, and Bodley 445, fifteenth century). The same oscillation can also been seen on a continuum between what could be deemed a more ironic interpretation of the text – where the narrator’s, poet’s, and characters’ discourses playfully echo and resonate with each other, obscuring the sincerity of words such as cuer and solaz – and what seems to be a more tragic understanding of the story, in which the semblanz of the text can be taken at face value. The quoted lyric lines may thus be perceived to play quite different roles within the same text, bringing us back to Kay’s early view that ‘time itself is relevant to subjectivity perceived as a process and interaction’ (Subjectivity: 4). Her exploration of intratextuality, intertextuality, and (inter)subjectivity is at the core of any future medieval studies.

• Appendix: • Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities in the Chastelaine de Vergy Dufournet and Dulac 1994, lines 268–311 (BnF fr. 837) 268

272

276

Cil ne set nul conseil de soi, Que le geu a parti si fort Que l’un et l’autre tient a mort: Quar, s’il dit la verité pure, Qu’il dira s’il ne se parjure, A mort se tient, s’il mesfet tant Qu’il trespasse le couvenant Que o sa dame et s’amie a, Qu’il est seürs qu’il la perdra S’ele s’en puet apercevoir; Et, s’il ne dit au duc le voir, Parjurés est et foimentie,



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284

288

292

296

300

304

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Et pert le païs et s’amie; Més du païs ne li chausist, Se s’amie li remainsist Que sor toute riens perdre crient. Et por ce qu’adés li sovient De la grant joie et du solaz Qu’il a eü entre ses braz, Si se pensse, s’il la messert Et s’il par son mesfet la pert, Quant o soi ne l’en puet mener, Comment porra sanz li durer? Si est en tel point autressi Com li chastelains de Couci, Qui au cuer n’avoit s’amor non, Dist en un vers d’une chançon: Par Dieu, Amors, fort m’est a consirrer Du dous solaz et de la compaignie Et des samblanz que mi soloit moustrer Cele qui m’ert et compaingne et amie; Et quant regart sa simple cortoisie Et les douz mos qu’a moi soloit parler, Comment me puet li cuers ou cors durer? Quant il nen part, certes trop est mauvés! Li chevaliers en tel angoisse Ne set se le voir li connoisse, Ou il mente et lest le pais; Et quant il est ainsi penssis Qu’il ne set li quels li vaut mieus, L’eve du cuer li vient aus ieus Por l’angoisse qu’il se porchace, Et li descent aval la face, Si qu’il en a le vis moillié.

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(This one [the Knight] does not know what to do, because he is faced with such a tough dilemma that he regards both options as deadly. Indeed, if he tells the pure truth – which he will if he does not want to perjure himself – he considers himself as dead, if, that is, he behaves so badly that he betrays the promise he made to his lady and lover, because he is sure that he will lose her if she learns about it; and if he does not tell the Duke the truth, he is a perjurer and oath-breaker, and he loses the land and his lover; but he would not care about the land as long as his lover would remain with him, whom he fears to lose above all things. And because at that point he is reminded of the great joy and delight that he had in her arms, so he thinks that if he serves her badly and loses her through his own misdeed, when he cannot take her with him … how will he be able to survive without her? He is in the very same position as the Châtelain de Coucy, who had nothing but love in his heart, said in a verse of his song: ‘By God, Love, it is hard for me to be deprived of the sweet delight, companionship, and favours that she used to bestow on me, the one who was my companion and my friend. And when I consider her simple courtesy and the sweet words that she used to tell me, how can my heart remain in my body? If it does not part from there, it is assuredly most wretched.’ The Knight in such anguish does not know whether he should confess the truth or lie and leave the land. And while he is plunged in his thoughts, because he does not know which way is best, water comes from his heart to his eyes, because of the distress he has come to feel and it falls across his face, so that it is all wet.)

Cil ne set nul conseil de soi, Que le geu a parti si fort Que l’un et l’autre tient a mort: Quar, s’il dit la verite pure, Qu’il dira s’il ne se parjure, A mort se tient, s’il mesfet tant Qu’il trespasse le couvenant Que o sa dame et s’amie a, Qu’il est seürs qu’il la perdra

S’ele s’en puet apercevoir;

Cil neset nu conseil de soi Que le gieu aparti sifort Que lun e lautre tient amort Que sil dit lauerite pure Voir dira sil nese pariure. A mort setient sil ne fet tant Quil trespasse le couenant Qua sadame e asamie a. Bien est seures quila perdra

Sele senpuet aperceuoir

Cil ne set nul conseill de soi Qui le ieu aparti si fort Que lun et lautre tient amort. Et sil dit la uerite pure quil dira sil ne se pariure A mort se tient sil refait tant Quil trespasse le couenant Qua sa dame et asamie a Quil set mont bien quil la perdra Sele sempuet aperceuoir

BnF fr. 2136

Sele sen puet aperchuoir

Et mort est sil se mesfait tant Que il trespasse le conuenant Qua sa dame et a samiea Que il est seur quil la perdra

Cil ne seit nul conseil de sai Quer le gieu est parti si fort Que lun et lautre tient amort.

BnF n.a.fr. 4531

1 I have chosen to show only four of the eleven manuscripts consulted. MSS Hamilton 257 and BnF fr. 837 date from the late thirteenth century, and MSS BnF fr. 2136 and BnF n.a.fr. 4531 from the early fourteenth century. The version of BnF fr. 837 is that of the Dufournet and Dulac 1994 edition, including the modern punctuation. For convenience, I have added modern punctuation (in bold and underlined) to Stuip’s diplomatic edition of the other manuscripts, which means that the original punctuation in Paris BnF fr. 2136 has been removed.

BnF fr. 837

Hamilton 2571

•  Troubadour Attachments  • Emily Kate Price

A

central claim of Sarah Kay’s Parrots and Nightingales is that in tracing troubadour quotations across time, we bear witness to ‘subjective change: the rearticulation of the subject of poetry from medieval courtly lover to Petrarchan poet’ (19), a change that marks the shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. In this essay, I engage with the temporal moves Kay’s book makes, thinking further about how quotations, and medieval literary works more broadly, can be considered to be non-human actors travelling across temporal boundaries. I am inspired to do this by two conclusions Kay reaches in Parrots and Nightingales. She writes firstly about the extent to which ‘the act of repetition on which quotation […] depends is, paradoxically, an engine of change’ (2). Secondly, she argues that quotation creates ‘a discourse of knowledge that connects together a network of potential subjects’ (16). In arguing that repetition of knowledge brings change, in maintaining that quotations are the ‘engines’ of that change, that they have agency, and in conceiving of the transmission of quotations as central to, and constitutive of, networks, I suggest that Kay’s thinking comes close to that of Bruno Latour, although Kay does not engage explicitly with Latour’s work in Parrots and Nightingales. Latour’s work seeks to dismantle a view of history that emphasises the superiority of what he calls ‘the Moderns’ (Latour 1991). As part of this project, he exposes the fantasy of Double Click or ‘[DC]’, a modern expectation of unmediated knowledge, represented by the metaphor of the double click of a computer mouse.1 At the heart of Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, or ANT, is the notion that knowledge is always mediated as it is transmitted; this mediation and transmission are the work of networks of actors, which are constantly in the process of assembling and reassembling. In his introduction to ANT Latour describes a flat ontology, undermining a modern view of human superiority by underscoring the importance of all actors, non-human as well as human, in 1

See the ‘[DC]’ entry on Latour’s AIME website: . 250



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the networks that make up our world (Latour 2005). The implications of Latourian thought for literary criticism have been investigated by an increasing number of scholars in the years since the publication of Parrots and Nightingales.2 If we understand the literary work – and the literary criticism that forms around it – as non-human actors that form attachments, then we can conceive of literature as something that matters, which does something in the world. In an era in which the humanities – and literary studies in particular – face a difficult future, such a way of thinking is welcome. For medievalists, Latour’s anti-presentist thesis that all actions and things, including ourselves, are polytemporal, that ‘Nous n’avons jamais été modernes’ (we have never been modern), is useful, as we argue for the importance of our work in caring for and remembering the literary works of the past now and in the future. Following Latour, Rita Felski’s work encourages us to think about the ways in which literature acts across not only spatial networks, but also temporal ones. Felski advocates against a restrictive understanding of context, which would trap works in their time; she maintains instead that texts themselves create and form contexts, and continue to participate in new ones, as they come into relation with an ever-changing variety of human and non-human actors (Felski 2015: 151–85). Medievalists and early modernists have been among those scholars most keen to conceive of such transtemporal literary networks. Carolyn Dinshaw’s work is perhaps the most prominent exploration of the ways in which modern subjects – in her studies, often amateur medievalists – become attached to medieval works, forming transtemporal attachments, coming together with them in a queer, transtemporal ‘now’.3 Literary scholars do not think of themselves as amateurs, but both Dinshaw and Felski suggest that we make more room for affect in our work. The works we study have found us, or we have found them, from across the centuries, and they matter to us in the present, to which they are attached in various ways.4 If the humanities are ‘curators of a disappearing past’ (Felski 2016b: 217), medievalists are key to this work and have much to contribute to Latour’s project to disillusion the Moderns.5 Despite the fact that his work ‘has long challenged modernist philosophies of history oriented toward the supremacy of the new and the now’, underscoring ‘the extent of our historical entanglements and the In terms of medieval literature, see Desmond and Guynn 2020a. Dinshaw 1999 and in particular, Dinshaw 2012. In Latour 2013, attachment or ‘[ATT]’ is one of the ‘modes of existence’ Latour defines. I am working with a slightly looser understanding of attachment as connection and as defined by Felski as ‘an affective state; a social principle; ontological fact’ (2016a: 760). 5 On this point, see Desmond and Guynn 2020b. 2 3 4

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ubiquity of transtemporal connections’ (Felski 2016b: 218), Latour does not engage with much premodern material. Felski is also a modernist. Kay’s work, however, has always been transtemporal, in the sense that it is interested in connections between medieval and (post)modern thought. Felski (2015) warns that critical theory is in part responsible for a way of looking at literary texts which she calls ‘critique’ or, following Paul Ricoeur (1970), a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, an approach which, according to her, often undermines the literary works with which it engages. Instead, she asks us to adopt a more constructive approach, focusing on the affordances of literature – in other words, on what literature does. Using our literary training, we need to try to understand ‘a work’s dexterity in soliciting and sustaining attachments’ (Felski 2015: 166) in order to come to a better understanding of it, and why it matters. To do this, we must concern ourselves not only with the text itself, nor purely with the contexts of its reception, but, rather, with ‘the question of where and how the two connect’ (Felski 2015: 178): after all, actors become actors only when they come into a network with other things. The ‘where’ and ‘how’ of medieval culture’s connection to the contemporary is at the heart of Kay’s work, which uses theory to draw attention to the particular, enduring affordances of medieval literature and thought. Her work cares for medieval poetry by taking it and its courtly audiences seriously, drawing out its sophistication and its contribution to the future precisely by putting it into dialogue with the contemporary. This essay works in the same spirit, reading medieval poetry alongside the contemporary thought of Latour and Felski to show that ‘we have always been medieval’ (Desmond and Guynn 2020b). The works I use as examples are short Occitan narratives or novas – Abril issia e mays intrava (April was ending and May beginning) and So fo e.l temps (It was at that time) (both datable to 1199– 1209) – by the Catalan poet and writer Raimon Vidal, also author of the first Occitan grammar, the Razos de trobar.6 These two works are also discussed by Kay in Part One of Parrots and Nightingales – indeed, bringing these works back into critical focus is one of the major contributions of her book. I suggest that these novas can be read as works which, through quotation, stage the mediated transmission of literary works across time. By offering such a mise en scène of the mediations undergone by troubadour poetry, the novas in turn indicate the affordances that make the troubadour lyric so ready for transmission, for attachment and reattachment. I then consider the use of quotation as a key feature of the form of the novas genre, a form that lends these narratives a complex temporality. An important affordance of this temporality is, I suggest, the ability it offers to rethink periodisation and explore the operation of

6

1992.

I refer to the two novas henceforth as Abril and So fo. The edition used is Huchet



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literary works in transtemporal networks. The mediation of knowledge and the polytemporality of actors, both major concerns of Latour’s, are, then, explored in Raimon’s early thirteenth-century œuvre. I close by turning to the medieval manuscript transmission of the novas themselves. The manuscript witnesses of the novas give the lie to any fantasy of Double Click by manifesting in their appearance the multiple temporal contexts in which these novas find themselves and the transformations they undergo as they come into relation with human and non-human actors within the pages of the codex. Felski’s suggestion that we look at the ‘where’ and ‘how’ of the contingent attachment between text and context – here, the material manuscript – yields an understanding of the features of the novas form that have afforded it futurity, and to which readers have become attached over the centuries. In paying literary critical attention to such attachments throughout this essay, I give a Felskian ‘postcritical’ (which is not to say ‘uncritical’) reading of the novas and their lyric quotations. In doing so, I offer further demonstration that Kay’s ‘parrot’s way’ of troubadour reception – typically associated with lyric quotation, which ‘underlines the knowledge that troubadour songs convey’ – and her ‘nightingale’s way’ – that of troubadour imitation and lyric insertion, which ‘foregrounds the capacity for the lyric to voice sentiment’ – do not exist in opposition to one another but, rather, on a continuum (Parrots and Nightingales: 196–7).7 The novas as Tales of Mediation and Attachment At the beginning of Abril, a narrator is in his native Catalonia when he sees a young joglar (minstrel) approach him. The joglar recounts his despair at the social decline he observes around him. He recalls a conversation he had with Dalfi d’Alvernhe – aristocratic troubadour and patron – on this subject. Dalfi tells of his own experience of past courtliness, referencing figures from a number of territories. Following this account of his conversation with Dalfi, the joglar says he has since been at the court of Uc de Mataplana, Raimon Vidal’s supposed patron, who has a starring role in So fo. The narrator responds to the joglar with some advice, drawing on his own experience, recalling the ‘trobadores’ (troubadours), recounting his dealings with Alfonso II of Aragon, and listing the courts of other prominent figures. All of these conversations are peppered with troubadour quotations.8 So fo opens in Limousin. There lives a young cavaier (knight) who has been involved with a lady for seven years. After such a long wait he feels 7 See Marnette in this volume (p. 235) for more on this distinction and a different argument for a continuum. 8 See Cabré in this volume (p. 37) on the distinction between troubadours and jongleurs.

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the time has come to ask her for sexual reward. His offended lady, however, withdraws her love from him. A donzela (maiden) in the lady’s household advises him that he has asked ‘at the wrong time’; when his second attempt at convincing his lady fails, he switches allegiance, and swears his love to the donzela – they arrange that they will share a kiss a year after she is married to her betrothed. The first lady berates him for moving on but the knight remains loyal to the donzela. Several dialogues between the various characters follow; all amateur enthusiasts of troubadour lyrics, they quote from them to support their arguments, but quite unsuccessfully.9 Arriving at a stalemate, the ladies go to Catalonia to seek advice at the court of Uc de Mataplana. Quoting from troubadour lyrics, Uc emphasises the importance of both experience and action; in so doing, he appears to be correcting the Limousin characters’ use of remembered troubadour lyric, but also seems to be critiquing the troubadour love lyric’s non-narrative and apparently circular approach to time.10 Uc condemns the behaviour of the first lady but still tells the knight to go back to her, apparently leaving the questions raised by the love lyric’s temporality unanswered. These two narratives are most obviously interested in the transmission and mediation of knowledge in that they contain quotations from troubadour poetry, showing how it moves from the past to become present again in the mouths of the various characters. By embedding troubadour quotations and topoi in narratives, the novas necessarily narrate intradiegetically the transmission and transposition of the literary object; they are tales of joglars and of amateurs and connoisseurs transmitting the lyric. In carefully gathering this troubadour material, and suggesting its affordances, the novas also demonstrate the need to care for past works in order for them to survive. The novas are generally seen as somewhat derivative, in that they ‘play out’ (Fleischman 1995: 168) the troubadour lyric they transmit in their plots, and recycle common troubadour topoi, such as the spring opening. Yet, while the novas clearly inherit something from the lyric, in some sense, they are more creative of the lyrics and of the troubadours than they are created by them: Raimon’s works are among the very first to conceive of a group of poets/ composers called ‘the troubadours’, a grouping we still rely on today, and which may have contributed to their literary survival. These medieval novas, then, are imaginative works of literary history and criticism avant la lettre; they are themselves mediating actors which help to keep the works of the troubadours alive by drawing them into new networks and (re-)composing them. Felski uses the example of artefacts inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs

9 10

See Parrots and Nightingales: 46–55. I argue for this reading of the novas in relation to Raimon’s grammar in Price 2017.



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Dalloway, to argue for the power of such mediating actors: For ANT, mediation does not subtract from the object but adds to the object; that I discuss Mrs Dalloway with my fellow students, read articles about it, watch the movie of The Hours, buy a mug emblazoned with a Virginia Woolf quote, has the effect of making the novel [Mrs Dalloway] more real, not less real. Art’s power and presence are not attenuated by its relations, but made possible by its relations, which help bring it into view. (Felski 2016a: 750)

In ‘playing out’ the lyric in narrative form, I suggest that the novas, like the film The Hours, or the mug, make the lyrics ‘more real’: they make (more) possible the presence of the lyrics across time, in part by modelling their mobility, and thus the affordances which make them so mobile. In Abril, it is the figure of the joglar who facilitates the mobility of past lyrics.11 Both the narrator and the younger joglar make reference to the courts they have visited across space and time, giving a sense of the movement of the works they transmit. The novas makes clear that the trajectory of this transmission into the future is contingent: mas aventur e siey mestier, que mant homes fan venenans, volgron qu’ieu fos a Monferrans vengutz en Alvernh’ a Dalfi (136–9) (But fortune and her ways, which make many men happy, wished me to come to Dalfi at Monferrand in Auvergne.)

Moving and travelling, the joglar emerges as a classic Latourian actormediator, shifting and changing in relation to other things and people ‘ls faitz e.ls captenemens / segon las jens deu hom camjar’ (one must adapt one’s deeds and behaviours to (other) people, lines 124–5). In his descriptions of his travels, there are constant intimations of the kinds of literal and metaphorical translations he experiences and enacts as he moves: ‘E si s’avenc entorn nadal / c’om apela kalendas lay’ (And so I arrived around Christmas, which there they call kalendas, lines 152–3). Meeting the older narrator, he asks him to listen to him as if he were a ‘messatje d’amor’ (messenger of love, line 109), announcing himself as a metaphor for (literary) attachment at once ontological and affective; as such, the joglar’s accounts of his past, his present, and his future experiences of transmitting lyrics become a way of speaking about the kinds of transtemporal attachments which constitute the world. 11

On the joglar in the novas, see Limentani 1977: 45–60.

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Back to the Future: Lyric Affordances Throughout the conversations Abril relates, and in the narrator’s frame, we find troubadour quotations. This act of remembering the troubadours while recalling a more courtly past implies the importance of troubadour song to courtliness itself. A current lack of courtliness is synonymous with a disdain for and lack of attachment to troubadour poetry in the various courts; courtliness and song go hand in hand. The young joglar needs Raimon’s advice because he would like to ‘amendar’ the ‘segle’ (repair/restore the world/epoch), implying that the transmission of poetry might make this possible: that the songs might, if met with the right attachment, change the world. Raimon established already in the Razos de trobar that troubadour lyrics themselves transmit knowledge about the world, and everything in it, good or bad.12 The works the joglar is transmitting are necessarily about attachments of various kinds. Troubadour love lyric is about attachment, or the desire for an attachment, to a lady. We could also think of the subjectivity of the lyric ‘I’ as constituted by and in relation to a network of actors: the eyes, the heart, the song, but also the lady and the lauzengiers (slanderers). It is also constituted in relation to less obvious actors, such as animals and the seasons. These lyrics, which deploy deixis and refuse to be indexed to particular moments in chronological time, nevertheless oscillate between memory and speculations about unknown and various futures. At the heart of the love lyric is the desire for a connection with the lady at the right, hoped-for moment, an unfixed, contingent future time when the lady will have recognised the lover’s long – and past – service. The temporal logic of the song, governed by affect, is, then, one of kairos rather than chronos. Chronos is a chronological, sequential, and regular conception of time, as represented by calendars and clocks. It is a view of time we find useful to refer to, but which does not reflect our lived experience of time. For Latour, a conception of time in relation to kairos – the ‘fitting moment’, the ‘right time’ – better reflects our non-linear, affective, contingent experience of time, and life, as moments or events of attachment. He describes it thus: [K]airos can be very simple, like in this little sentence you quoted me that transformed me, or in the circulation of love talk, or just even personal relation – it can be just a smile to someone in a store. […] It just says, time has this extraordinary peculiarity where it can end in the sense of being definitive, final, ‘happened’ and that has nothing to do with how long it takes. (Walsh et al. 2017: 410) 12 ‘Et tuit li mal e.l ben del mont son mes en remembransa per trobadors’ (and all the good and bad in the world are remembered by the troubadours, Razos de trobar, B text, lines 27–8). On the Razos’ grammar as speculative see Parrots and Nightingales: 29–33.



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These troubadour songs – ‘love talk’, songs of ‘personal relation’ – carry with them a hope, explicit or implicit, that there will come a moment of kairological recognition, when the song will have made the right (affective) attachment at the right time, and in the right way.13 The contingent futurity of the song is built even more explicitly into the song itself, in those lyrics which close with tornadas, messages either to the joglar or to another addressee, or to the song itself, encouraging it on its way into the future, suggesting ways in which a joglar should sing it. In such tornadas the song points to its own iterability, to the flexibility of the first-person persona of the lyric which permits another to attach themselves to it, as the joglars do in the novas, as well as the other characters who quote from the songs. Not all of the songs that the joglar transmits or the characters quote are love songs; many are lyrics about courtliness, often didactic in tone. Courtliness is a highly networked mode of being, not only because it is founded on (correct) interaction and attachment, but also in that it operates, and defines itself, transtemporally: it is rooted in the values of the past, and – in perpetuating them – hopes to uphold them into the future. Song’s role as a transtemporal actor in creating this affective community and attachment across time is made clear in the song from which the first quotation in Abril comes, Giraut de Bornelh’s ‘Per solatz reveillar’, (PC 242.55), which we could translate as ‘to revive courtliness’. The narrator quotes from this lyric upon seeing the joglar, who reminds him of the following lines from the fifth stanza of the song: E vitz per corz anar Mainz ioglaretz formitz Gen causatz e vestitz Sol per domnas lauzar (41–4) (And you have seen many a young, keen minstrel, well shod and clothed, going from court to court solely to praise ladies.)14

The wider song, which appears to be the inspiration behind the whole novas, bemoans social decline and the disappearance of solatz. Solatz has a variety of meanings (‘joy’, ‘entertainment’, ‘interaction/conversation’, ‘society’, ‘company’; Cropp 1975: 333), and is one of those slippery Occitan terms 13 For other explorations of the ‘future anterior’/‘future perfect’ and examples of medieval literature projecting a future into the past, see Zrinka Stalhujak and Deborah McGrady in this volume (pp. 109–11 and 222–3). 14 The line numbers refer to Ruth Verity Sharman’s edition of this song (1989/2006).

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which appear to be actors adapting continually to their surroundings, varying according to the words with which they are paired.15 Accordingly, ‘Per solatz’ is both a song lamenting the lack of courtliness, and a song which itself hopes to revive the solatz – the attachments – which have been lost; future attachments are dependent on a kairological recognition (that is, retrospective creation) of a (lost) past. That what has been lost might be regained through the perpetuation of song is suggested by the sixth stanza: Qu’en loc de solazar Aug er en cort los critz C’aitan leu sér grazitz De l’auca de Bremar Lo comtes entre lor, com us bons chanz Del rics affars e dels temps e dels anz. (55–60) (For in place of solatz, at court I hear these raucous shouts, so that soon the tale of Bremar’s goose will be as popular with them as a good song about remarkable happenings and the times and the years.)

In the evocation of raucous ‘critz’ in opposition to harmonious song, alienation and fragmentation are palpable. This alienation and fragmentation, it is implied, stem from an incorrect or absent attachment to the literary work. If the work were to meet with the right audience at the right time, it would, Guiraut’s song suggests, offer us access to the ‘temps’ and the ‘anz’: to a transtemporal network of customs and behaviours. Of course, nostalgically referencing a troubadour song that was already nostalgically claiming that society was in decline mostly serves to make us wonder whether what has apparently been lost ever really existed. In quoting the song, though, and a song which suggests its own potential to make relations, perhaps the novas – and the quoted song – gets close to Yves Citton’s notion that the arts ‘matter through their mattering, i.e. through their power to give actual existence to relations whose relata are still to emerge in our shared reality’. Art ‘makes us feel attached’ to ‘ANTities that still escape our shared cognitive mapping’ (2016: 316). The song then, even by looking back to a perhaps illusory past, evokes the possibility of a ‘correct’ moment at an unspecified future time. 15 It is striking that the Old French solaz (with the same general meaning as the Occitan solatz, that is, a form of attachment) is the word echoed between the narrative frame and the lyric quotation in the Chatelaine de Vergi; as such, it acts as part of a ‘complex network of signs’, as Sophie Marnette discusses in her contribution (pp. 243–4).



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The narrative of Abril does not contain the whole song, only the part about the young joglar. This act of quotation – the moment of attachment between text and a new context – produces several relevant temporal effects. It is an apt quotation, which, the correct, courtly reader will recognise, has been deployed at the right time. On the other hand, quoting only a few lines of the lyric disturbs the temporal structures of the integral song, thwarting any logic of predictability or expectation that the performance of multiple stanzas set to the same melody would encourage. Replacing the song’s predictable futurity with an unpredictable one, the act of quotation here makes the song’s temporal form more closely resemble the unpredictable, uncertain transtemporal attachments that we find within its discussion of solatz. Given the centrality of the joglar to the song’s future transmission, it is apt that the first quotation in the novas should be about his arrival from the past into the present. We Have Never Been Chronological: The Temporality of the novas The figure of the joglar is presented from the beginning of Abril as someone who travels not only across space, but also across time. The narrator describes how: venc vas mi, vestitz e caussatz us joglaretz a fort del temps on hom trobava totz essems justa.ls baros valor e pretz. (22–5) (There came towards me a young joglar, dressed and shod in the fashion of the time when knights were worthy and meritorious.)

The joglar appears out of date, but in a positive way.16 His clothes and shoes – non-human actors – have travelled from the past into the present, bringing with them a network of values and ideas – ‘valor’ and ‘pretz’ – just like the literary works the joglar transmits. This first encounter with the young joglar serves as an apt introduction to the complex temporal form of the novas, which appears to hover between lyric and narrative. Their strange temporality permits a kairological understanding of past, present, and future in constellation, a point of view that allows transtemporal networks to be seen at a certain moment of attachment. Temporality is declared as central to both novas in their opening lines; the first is set between the end of April and the beginning of May – the springtime of courtly lyric – while the second begins ‘e.l temps’, in that time which, the

16

See Heller 2007 on a ‘fashion system’ before 1350.

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narrative clarifies, is also a time of love and courtliness ‘c’om era jays / e per amor fis e verais’ (when people were joyful and made perfect and sincere by love, lines 1–2), like the one to which ‘Per solatz’ harkens back. Time is a central cause of concern for the characters of both novas; the knight of So fo wants to know if seven years has earned him sexual reward, while the joglar is mourning the loss of courtliness over time. His speeches and those of the other characters are peppered with reference to the ‘segle’ (world/epoch), while both novas include discussions of whether it is the right or wrong ‘sazo’ (moment, season) for something to take place. The narrative of Abril shifts constantly from one period and space to another, which has the effect of distancing the people and ideas discussed from the present in which the two joglars meet. The nostalgic tone with which the action in the first half of So fo is introduced has a similar effect. In both novas, where troubadours are quoted, they are referred to in the preterite. They are also referred to collectively as ‘the troubadours’ as if they were in a – uniformly – different time and place, despite being individuals from different generations.17 In So fo, this nostalgic time of courtliness is also mapped onto space, with the first half of the narrative taking place in the home town of Giraut de Bornelh, a troubadour heartland. This dual temporal and spatial effect appears, at first, to demarcate time like territory. The early part of the narrative of So fo takes place in what Jonathan Gil Harris terms a ‘moment-state’ (2008: 2; by analogy with a ‘nation-state’), here called Limousin, but also called ‘that time’. The narrative, with a bipartite structure moving from ‘old’ Limousin in the first half to cutting-edge Catalonia in the second, appears to support this periodising urge. On closer inspection, however, different periods reveal themselves to be entangled. Even in ‘that time’, the troubadours are referred to in the preterite, that is, as antecedent. However, many of the troubadours referenced are at most at a generation’s remove, the same as the gap that separates the joglar of Abril from his father, who spoke to him of better (past) times. In fact, some of the troubadours referred to in the preterite, such as Raimon de Miraval, are direct contemporaries of Raimon Vidal. With detectable enjoyment, Raimon even blends himself into this distant troubadour group he has constructed, by having a character attribute a quotation to him: si comz dis en Raimon Vidals bos trobaire mot avinens (742–3) (As Sir Raimon Vidal said, a good, very skilful troubadour.)

17

See Price 2017: 459–60.



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Here the use of a literary work enables Raimon to show himself crossing the border that he himself constructed; by exaggerating the distance between the present and his lyric, Raimon emphasises further its transtemporal mobility. The action of the plot moves from ‘old’ Limousin to ‘new’ Catalonia, ostensibly asserting both a periodising distinction and also a progression, since the season in Catalonia is ‘e.l temps d’estatz’, the summertime that follows a typical troubadour spring (implicitly, that of the Limousin). The Catalan setting is still distinctly troubadouresque in its courtliness: ‘e.l temps fo.s amoros / on s’espan ram e fuelh et flors’ (it was the time of love, when branches, leaves and flowers are in blossom, lines 1069–70). This courtly setting is another literary actor, a lyric trope which here accompanies us into a new space and time. In Abril, as the older joglar narrator speaks to the younger one about the ‘segle bo’ (good times), he lists different places where he would once have found courtliness. While many of the relevant courts and people are referred to in past tenses, the narrator also uses the future tense to introduce some still-living figures: ‘aqui trobaretz …’ (here, you will find, line 792). With courtliness as the filter, past and future enter into a constellation. This is also suggested by Dalfi’s lengthy story of the sultan and the vassal in Abril, in which a vassal is upbraided by the current sultan for wearing a headdress identical to one bestowed by a different sultan a hundred years earlier upon a different vassal with the promise that only he and his lineage should be allowed to wear it (lines 288–454). The chronological logic of lineage is disrupted by the later vassal’s adoption of the headdress, but he claims that his courtliness merits the honour as much as, if not more than, the first vassal. While this might seem like a narrative of the present’s superiority over the past, the present value of the headdress is built on that of the past version; this lives on in the present one, where it is the right moment to wear it again. Similarly, the value of the novas, which has reactivated the lyric in the present, rests on the prestige of this past literary production. So fo also rejects chronological progress. Despite the tale of a knight moving on to a donzela who declares at one point ‘segon fi val comensamens’ (the value of the beginning is determined by the ending, line 967), and the bipartite structure of the novas which ‘progresses’ from nostalgic Limousin to contemporary Catalonia, the Catalan Uc de Mataplana does not suggest that the knight run off with the maiden, but orders him to return to his first lady. The answer to the knight’s implied question – ‘when can I expect sex from my lady?’ – is, apparently, when the time is right; as the maiden explained earlier in the narrative, it is only because he came at the wrong time that he received a negative response. Uc’s decision closes the novas with an openness to kairological futurity.

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The Future of the novas: Manuscript Mediation The future attachments of the novas form can be traced in the manuscripts that transmit them. Medieval manuscripts are polytemporal objects, drawing attention to the contingencies inherent in the mediation of knowledge across transtemporal networks. Often bearing witness to works composed or performed years beforehand, they cross temporal borders, accruing signs of their attachments to different readers in different moments, surviving today in a centuries-old form we still recognise, the form of the book.18 Even from its creation, the manuscript contains a ‘matrix’ (Nichols 1990) – a network – which involves and entangles a great number of human and non-human actors: scribes, compilers, illuminators, but also images, rubrics, paraphs, prickings, tears, paper, skin. Reflecting a wider concern in medieval studies for the material manuscript, and the increased availability of digital surrogates for study, Kay’s recent work (especially in Animal Skins) has seen her rethink the role of the (components of the) manuscript itself in interactions between works and readers. In Parrots, Kay focuses creatively on manuscript variants and elements of the material manuscript such as mise en page (page layout). It is for this reason that I close my essay by looking at the presentation of the quotations in the Chansonnier N version of So fo e.l temps.19 Like Abril, So fo is composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, a predictable, regular form which contrasts with the complex combinations of rhyme schemes and metres found in the embedded lyric quotations. However, the narrative fabric of So fo cleverly weaves the lyric into itself by having the line before (and often the line after) a quotation rhyme with it: this rhyming attachment brings past and present together, the new narrative feeding off the rhymes of the lyric passages, the old lyric relying on this feat of versification to be incorporated into the narrative attachment of its future. This feature of the novas appears to have confused the scribe of Chansonnier N. In the manuscript, the beginnings of quotations are treated with care and attention, marked with large capitals in either blue or red. However, the scribe begins six out of twenty-two of these in the wrong place, sometimes before and sometimes after the beginning of the quotation, thus situating the lyric quotation at the wrong time. With no markings to indicate the end of quotations, and the narrative picking up on the rhyme of the final line of a quotation, the only sign that a quotation has ended is the return to octosyllables, which is not made obvious by the mise en page. The use of tracery feeding off the capital and extending up and down the margins of the columns enhances this contamination of lyric and narrative within the 18 19

On the polytemporality of the book form, see Desmond 2020. New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 819.



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manuscript. The lyric’s disruption of the narrative frame is exaggerated by this presentation, while the encroachment of the narrative form into the lyric disrupts it, too. The consequent disruption and blurring of temporalities is, as we have seen, constitutive of the temporal form of the novas as a genre; the scribe’s ‘mistake’ actually enhances the effect. The encounter between text and new context, the new attachment between text and reader, to which N bears material witness, encourages us to pay attention to the strange and particular formal temporalities of the novas. Drawing attention to the temporal affordances of this quotation-studded form, the manuscript helps the novas solicit further attachments with other readers in the present and into the future, making more possible its presence at some future point. Conclusion By following Latour and thinking about the lyric and the novas as nonhuman actors that form attachments with other actors across time, we have come to understand better the literary qualities which help them solicit such attachments, features that see the literary work reach out for a future kairological moment of transtemporal recognition, a moment in which parrot and nightingale, literary savoir faire and affect, come together. Following Kay by bringing medieval poetry into dialogue with contemporary philosophy, this essay has also shown that in tracing the affective attachments of lyric quotations in transtemporal networks, Raimon Vidal’s thirteenth-century novas have much to teach us about new ways to read literature as we face the uncertain future of the humanities.

•  Forms of Repetition:  • Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century Simone Ventura

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arrots and Nightingales is a bold move against Romantic and postRomantic aesthetics of inspiration in at least three respects. First, Sarah Kay devotes the bulk of her monograph to ‘didactic’ literature, often regarded as of low literary value. Secondly, when she discusses poets and works whose literary worth is recognised, she treats them as eminently ‘didactic’, highlighting how their poetry is quoted as a vehicle for teaching or conveying knowledge, and the desire for knowledge. Finally, Kay discusses repetition while distinguishing between citation and quotation. Her attention is focused not just on literary allusion (citation), which has come in for a good deal of analysis, but also on the much less discussed verbatim repetition (quotation) of prior material, or parroting. In this essay I shall focus on a different kind of repetition: the reproduction of a clearly recognisable and unique literary form, in this instance the sestina. The sestina is a particularly interesting case study because repetition is also its structural pillar: it is defined by the repetition of a unique metrical and rhetorical principle, namely the end-word. In this essay I shall discuss sestinas composed in the English language between 2000 and 2019, focusing on the debt these poems – and this genre – owe to medieval troubadour poetics. This essay revolves around three main topics. Firstly, it is well established that metrical imitation combined with variation is a key component of troubadour poetics. At the same time, the particular formal complexity and rigidity of the sestina make it a limit case, so that, in this instance at least, metrical imitation becomes a form of radical citation or even quotation, to the extent that the distinction between imitation and quotation/citation becomes blurred.1 Secondly, Kay claims in Parrots and Nightingales that the quotation practices that characterised early reception of the troubadours were foundational of the European vernacular poetic tradition: the continued reproduction today of the sestina, a form that was pioneered and most likely invented by Arnaut Daniel, the celebrated late twelfth-century ‘best craftsman 1

See Gruber 1983 and Kay, Subjectivity: 8–9 and 145–8. 264



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of the vernacular tongue’ (as Dante was to label him), demonstrates the extent to which literary culture is still determined by these quotation practices.2 Thirdly, contemporary sestinas undergo editorial selection, anthologisation, and canonisation in ways that bear interesting similarities with their medieval ancestors. For contemporary sestinas the editorial cycle typically takes place in determinate steps: poets publish their own sestinas in specialised journals; then they make their sestinas part of an authorial collection of verses; finally, an anthologist, who may or may not be a poet or be collaborating with the poets, extracts the sestinas from their authorial verse collections and places them within a selection of poems that, like a medieval florilegium, has a twofold aim: to replicate the poem but also to resituate it in a new sequence of poems, quoting it, as it were, and thereby creating a new meaningful macrotext. These three topics – the relation between imitation and quotation, the importance of quotation practices to notions of the literary, and the publication arc of modern sestinas – are closely linked, and in discussing each I will work with Kay’s insights on the transformative power of repetition, while also moving beyond the remit of Parrots and Nightingales by incorporating a broader view of citation and quotation. Commenting on contemporary replicas of an ancient poetic form like the sestina raises issues of time and temporality. Yet modern sestinas shortcircuit the temporal gap separating them from their medieval avatars: the relation with the past is undeniable, and the choice of the sestina asserts it. In any sestina, however, the circular architecture and closed structure of the poem as constructed by the placement of six end-words across six stanzas has the capacity to transform the linear and open-ended temporality of language and history into another kind of time: ‘the time that the poem takes to come to an end’, as Giorgio Agamben put it – not the end of time but its exhaustion (2005: 83). How does this short-circuit between the medieval and the contemporary, produced through use of the sestina, affect poetry and poetics? Twenty-firstcentury poets employing the sestina form are engaging in a poetic practice that is archaic but not therefore fossilised. Since the form constrains as well as stimulates the poet’s creativity, I propose that we view sestinas as what Theodor Adorno calls ‘revenants’.3 As well as alluding to return and 2 Arnaut’s only surviving sestina (Lo ferm voler, The firm desire, PC 29.14) has been edited many times, most recently by Perugi 2015. 3 Commenting on Ravel’s revisionist treatment of the traditional, technically demanding waltz form in La Valse, Adorno remarks: ‘Ravel’s La Valse seals the fate of the waltz as such. To be a revenant means that you have first to have died’ (2011: 12). The image of the revenant, which is also a principle of poetics, appears in one of the last poems of Meena Alexander (1951–2018): not a sestina but a heart-breaking declaration of love to

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repetition, the revenant revives that which was deceased, and can operate in and influence the present and future. It scares, fascinates, and compels. With its overtones of strangeness, the notion of the sestina as revenant underlines repetition’s potential to make trouble. Contemporary poets who engage with sestinas are not only seeking to subvert the essence of the form while complying with its rules; destabilising the genre in this way also offers them an opportunity to elaborate their own personal ‘theory’ of form, language, and tradition. The proclivity of modern English-language poets for the sestina borders on devotional. Daniel Nester’s 2013 collection, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, records over a hundred sestinas ranging from Pound’s ‘Altaforte’ through to W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, and the sestinas of the early 2000s, including Denise Duhamel and Marilyn Hacker, among others.4 But the sestina was, in fact, already a revenant in the Middle Ages (Roncaglia 1981; Frasca 1992). In Purgatorio, composed at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Dante articulated his admiration for Arnaut Daniel, who predated him by a century; he had already imitated Arnaut’s sestina in ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra’ (To the short day and great arc of shadow), one of his most celebrated poems. However, it was Petrarch who fixed the form firmly in the European canon, by composing nine sestinas for his Canzoniere (Menichetti 1993: 580–3). The main formal features of a sestina are as follows. A sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines each, plus a three-line envoy. It features a spiral pattern in which the same six end-words are repeated in each of the six stanzas, but in a different, fixed order in each stanza. The closing envoy contains all six end-words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. Furthermore, according to medieval Occitan grammarians, the sestina is the extreme expression of what they called rims estramps (rhyme sounds that are not repeated internally within the stanza), so that rhyme sounds (and in this instance rhyme words) repeat only once from stanza to stanza. The order of the end-words in each stanza, apparently determined by Arnaut’s first sestina, is laid out in Table 1.

poetry entitled ‘Revenant’ (Alexander 2019). 4 According to Daniel Nester: ‘After Sir Philip Sidney’s three sestinas in the 1570s […] there was a 200-year gap in English-language sestinas. Then, toward the end of the 19th century, there was a mini-comeback with Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. Rudyard Kipling’s “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” came in 1898, and ten years later came Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte”’ (2013: 21). Nester also edited the sestinas section of the McSweeney’s website from 2003 to 2007: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/sestinas [last accessed 15 July 2019].



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Table 1  Sequence and succession of end-words in Arnaut Daniel’s ‘Lo ferm voler’ (Perugi 2015)

1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th

Stanza I end-word intra ongla arma verga oncle cambra

II cambra intra oncle ongla verga arma

III arma cambra verga intra ongla oncle

IV oncle arma ongla cambra intra verga

V verga oncle intra arma cambra ongla

VI (en)ongla verga cambra oncle arma intra

If the sequence continues beyond the sixth stanza, the cycle starts again, the seventh stanza replicating the order of the first. Figure 1 gives a graphic representation of the ‘mechanism’.

Figure 1  Graphic representation of the sequence of end-words and stanzas in a sestina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina#/media/File:Sestina_system_alt.svg [last access: 4 September 2019].

This is what happens in Petrarch’s double sestina (‘Mia benigna fortuna’ [My kind fate], Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta [Canzoniere] 332), where the poem starts again at stanza VII. The technique is used also by Denise Duhamel, who, early in the 2000s, wrote both a sestina (‘On Delta Flight 659 with Sean Penn’) and a double sestina (‘The Brady Bunch (A Double

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Sestina)’).5 In its modern reincarnations, the sestina form may not replicate Petrarchan regularity, but the pattern of end-word repetition is designed to recall medieval models. In subsequent sections of this chapter I shall first focus on repetition in the framework of Parrots and Nightingales. I then consider a small corpus of sestinas in English, composed between 2000 and 2019. This corpus is not exhaustive but selected in order to illustrate the most important issues at stake, namely: poetics, metapoetics, and language; register and performance; dialogue and dialogic forms; use of prosaic effects; and the use of enjambment. In the conclusion, I return to the notion of repetition in the context of Kay’s work. Repetition In the introductory pages of Parrots and Nightingales, Kay indicates three main features of conventional modern thinking about repetition in literature. Firstly, repetition supposedly distinguishes bad poets. Good poets may ‘allude’ or ‘evoke’, but do not ‘repeat’ except in the case, often humorous, of pastiche (Parrots and Nightingales: 2). Moreover, in matters of composition, repetition is often considered ‘in itself […] faintly comic’ (Parrots and Nightingales: 2). Secondly, quoting is a form of repetition, and presupposes an act of recognition. Modern editorial conventions (for example, quotation marks, punctuation, indentation), academic practices (for example, references, footnotes), and copyright law help readers to recognise a quotation, while also strengthening the authority (and seriousness) of both the source- and the host-text. Finally, quotation involves repeating verbatim the words of others. As Kay points out, however, ‘quotability’ is in fact a distinctive trait of any ‘sign’, not just of passages (be they incipits, stanzas, or paragraphs) copied from an ‘original’ text. Both signs and texts share this inherent trait, which problematises the idea of reference to an ‘original’ source: ‘given that any utterance is indefinitely repeatable and hence indefinitely quotable, we cannot rely on there being a stable origin that can be referenced’ (Parrots and Nightingales: 17). The use of traditional poetic forms by poets relies on the traditional form being both repeatable and recognisable. It therefore has similarities with quotation, even though it does not involve verbatim repetition. From a semiotic perspective, traditional, received forms such as a sonnet, a haiku, or indeed a sestina, are ‘signs’ and, as such, they can be ‘quoted’. This feature is crucial in the case of the sestina, and not only because repetition constitutes its structural principle. As Gilles Deleuze pointed out (himself citing the Romanian writer and linguist, Pius Servien): 5

Both in Daniel Nester’s anthology (2013: 106–12).



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Pius Servien distinguait à juste titre deux langages: le langage des sciences, dominé par le symbole d’égalité, et où chaque terme peut être remplacé par d’autres; le langage lyrique, dont chaque terme, irremplaçable, ne peut être que répété. (Deleuze 1968: 8) (Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of science, dominated by the symbol of equality, in which each term may be replaced by others; and lyrical language, in which every term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated. Deleuze 1995: 2)

Of all poetic forms, the sestina best exemplifies Deleuze’s (and Servien’s) paradoxical insistence on the unique and irreplaceable quality of the individual poetic word. This assertion entails further questions about the relationship between repetition and resemblance and, more broadly, between the singular and the general. Deleuze (again citing someone else, in this case Charles Péguy) outlines the nature of the problem (1968: 7–8): Répéter, c’est se comporter, mais par rapport à quelque chose d’unique ou de singulier, qui n’a pas de semblable ou d’équivalent. Et peut-être cette répétition comme conduite externe fait-elle écho pour son compte à une vibration plus secrète, à une répétition intérieure et plus profonde dans le singulier qui l’anime. La fête n’a pas d’autre paradoxe apparent: répéter un ‘irrecommençable’. Non pas ajouter une seconde et une troisième fois à la première, mais porter la première fois à la ‘nième’ puissance. Sous ce rapport de la puissance, la répétition se renverse en s’intériorisant; comme dit Péguy, ce n’est pas la fête de la Fédération qui commémore ou représente la prise de la Bastille, c’est la prise de la Bastille qui fête et qui répète à l’avance toutes les Fédérations. [my italics] (To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as Péguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation days. Deleuze 1995: 1)

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By elevating the ‘singular’ to the status of a ‘universal’, Deleuze argues, repetition transforms the status of the erstwhile ‘original’ as well as of its ‘copies’. The relationship between 14 July 1789 and all later Bastille Days becomes one not of dependence but, rather, of reproduction. I take reproduction in a double sense: firstly, that of mirroring or echoing what has already been said or done; and secondly, that of presenting something once again but as if for the first time. Thus the value of the foundational event resides in its being a promise of all the performances to come, while providing evidence for all the performances that have already taken place. Reproducibility (including but not limited to quotability) is therefore an essential part of the success of any work, whether that be a riot, a festival, or a sestina. Twenty-First-Century Sestinas Like Petrarch in his Canzoniere, the modernist tradition of poetry in English attributed great importance to the order of poems in a collection; Ezra Pound is probably the most emblematic case (Bornstein 2001: 27). Many twentiethand twenty-first-century sestinas have become part of authorial anthologies. Some of the most famous cases include Auden’s ‘Paysage Moralisé’ (1945) or Bishop’s ‘September rain falls on the house’ (c.1965). In Patience Agbabi’s first book, Transformatrix (2000), seven sestinas constitute an entire section (‘Seven Sisters’), which provides an illuminating example of Agbabi’s skilful manipulation of traditional lyric conventions, coupled with exploration of gender identities, performance, and transformation. Each poem in the section is devoted to a ‘sister’ with an ‘irregular’ attitude toward sexuality, while all seven sestinas use the same end-words (girl, boy, child, time, end, dark), which ‘convey the hypnotic, circling quality of the sestina powerfully’ (Mack 2009, quoted in Coppola 2015: 377).6 Modern sestinas tend to have a protracted life as independent compositions. Their challenging character means poets publish their sestinas in journals before giving them a place in an authorial collection. After their publication in book form, sestinas are frequently then extracted from these authorial ‘homes’ to be inserted in edited anthologies. This mobility is something that modern and medieval practices of editing poetry share: pieces are selected and reproduced, creating both a repertoire and a canon. And in modern and medieval anthologies of poetry, poems are thereby quoted as much as they are reproduced: reproduction being the extreme or most radical form of quotation. Obviously, innovations in technology mean medieval and 6 ‘Irregular’ is an adjective I borrow from William Burgwinkle’s piece in this volume, who speaks about Kay’s notion of ‘third gender’ as ‘a space of sexual irregulation’ for ‘the closeted poet of any gender’ (pp. 19–23).



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modern anthologies differ. Print anthologies reproduce the ‘original’ text of the poem without alteration. By contrast, medieval scribes always modify their model or exemplar as they transcribe. It has thus been suggested that poems in each medieval manuscript are brand new versions of the piece. But, while the distinction between medieval and modern technological means of reproduction is important, we should avoid underestimating a crucial common trait of medieval and modern anthologies: by means of the process of expropriation and reappropriation characteristic of any anthology, medieval copyists and modern editors alike graft the sestina into a new context and a new web of signifiers and signifieds. In the anthology, sestinas mean differently not because their text is necessarily different, but because the linguistic and material/sensorial context in which the poems appear is different. From this perspective, meaning, understood here as an inherently subjective experience irreducible to any comprehensive hermeneutic practice, is conveyed in both medieval and the modern cases by the material book as much as it is by the text as a ‘linguistic object’. In her chapter on florilegia, Kay talks about selection as ‘the first step towards quotation’ (Parrots and Nightingales: 73). In contemporary poetic anthologies, the poems are complete. Reproduction and quotation coincide perfectly and, as it were, the excerpt is the whole thing. On the one hand, this is in line with the technology and copyright regulations of modern times. On the other hand, in the case of sestinas and, more generally, in contemporary practices of reproducing poetry, the metonymical potential of medieval quotation that Kay highlighted in Parrots and Nightingales does not seem to work in the same way: only a part is replicated, but stands in for the whole poem from which it is excerpted.7 The antagonism and violence inherent in quotation that Maria Luisa Meneghetti (1989: 44) and Kay (Parrots and Nightingales: 72) evoke is not gone. It is just negotiated differently. On the one hand, modern revenant sestinas are preserved in their form better than their medieval avatars. On the other hand, like medieval sestinas, being selected and replaced in edited anthologies, contemporary sestinas lose control over themselves and over what they were meant to be in the first place. It may seem surprising that in a post-Whitman and post-Baudelaire era, poets go on composing sestinas, given their high degree of formal complexity and rigid rules. Ours – we are told – is the era of free verse, and freedom from rigid form is a requirement of contemporary poetry. Well into the twentieth century, William Carlos Williams understood the issue of form in these terms:

7 Arnaut’s sestina was referred to in Occitan grammars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: for precise data, see Kay’s Appendix 1 (Parrots and Nightingales: 210).

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Very early I began to question whether to rhyme and decided: No. I had to start with rhyme because Keats was my master, but from the first I used to rhyme independently. I found I couldn’t say what I had to say in rhyme. It got in my way. With Whitman, I decided rhyme belonged to another age. (Williams 1958: 14)

Since pushing at the limits of traditional forms is inherent in the post-Romantic and modernist tradition, the stress on free verse alone as characterising that tradition is misleading. As is well known, influential poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud wrote sonnets as well as free verse. April 1962 saw the publication of Al Alvarez’s Penguin anthology, The New Poetry, and the first number of Ian Hamilton’s magazine, The Review. If we take this month as the symbolic date for the beginning of ‘contemporary’ verse, it is easy to observe that poets included in Alvarez’s canon (his ‘zone’: from Gunn and Hughes to Plath – who was admitted only in the 1966 edition) went on excavating ‘holes’ in the past, through which traditional forms surface again and again, revisiting, for example, iambic pentameter, royal stanzas, sonnets – and sestinas. As Nester pointed out, poets of all orientations confess their utmost admiration for the playful patterning of the sestina, only to defy and often subvert the rules of the form.8 In fact, in spite of their rules, sestinas show a high degree of flexibility. In the small sample of sestinas I examine in this essay, for instance, we see a wide range of formal, structural, and thematic variation. Contemporary sestinas are serious artefacts, but they are not an inert homage to tradition. Nor are they pieces of jeweller’s art – as were late nineteenth-century attempts to reinvigorate the form in French by Ferdinand de Gramont (1812–97) and in Italian by Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907). The poets of the twenty-first century observe the hyperformal constraint of the sestina, but constantly and humorously deny or bypass it in a subtle interplay of enjambments, ambiguous deixis, and ironic repetition of end-words. Their revenant sestinas take extraordinary liberties with language. Their diction is not ‘lyric’ even when (or precisely because) it is obscure, as in Albert Goldbarth’s sestina ‘As There Are Support Groups, There Are Support Words’ (2001): When visiting a distant (and imponderable) shire, one longs to hear the cry ‘Hygrometer! Fresh hygrometer for sale!’ Yes, and when the fair sex sidles close and coyly murmurs ‘nitrogen’ into a burly masculine ear, I guarantee you: the translation 8 According to Nester, the sestina ‘offers something for every poet. Let’s break out the big words: postmodern artifice, numerological mystery, procedural wordplay, conceptualist or formalist reverie. All these terms apply when explaining the sestina’s appeal’ (2013: 21).



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is very easy. The allurements of a local siren, whispering the kind of patois a traveler like Lord Byron favors, never fail to comfort, and to reassure, evoking pleasant memories of one’s own beloved hygrometer at home, kept fresh in Cosmoline and camphor and awaiting one’s rearrival back in his native xenon and nitrogen. Without these occasional reminiscences, any translation from nation to nation, tongue to tongue, becomes a translation difficult to sustain.9

Notice the liberties the poet takes with the end-words, maintaining enough exact repetition for the predetermined pattern to be recognisable, but with some ‘infringements’ (for example ‘shire’/‘reassure’, ‘fair’/‘camphor’). Often the end-words sound the same but do not look the same. Thus ‘siren’ and ‘Byron’ are made to rhyme by playing with the range of homophonies offered by American English. Goldbarth thereby creates a rather comic antilyrical soundscape and smell-scape. The siren, not the bell of a medieval church, the camphor, not the perfume of flowers, are the linchpin of the familiar, evocative, and consolatory web of ‘occasional reminiscences’ that make Goldbarth’s ‘patois’ understandable, translatable, bearable. Alicia E. Stallings’ ‘Sestina: Like’ is a classically patterned sestina, structured around the end-word like, which appears with dizzying polysemy: the Like button in Facebook, like adverb, like verb, like in composition with negative prefix (dislike), and so on. The result is a satire of our social-media lives: ‘Now we’re all “friends”, there is no love but Like’. In her 2008 sestina, Kathrin Maris (‘Darling, Would You Please Pick up those Books?’) gives voice to an un-pedestalised anti-muse, a wife who ‘rages against her poet husband for writing about her predecessor’ (Rumens 2008). In Agbabi’s ‘Skins’ (2008), the poet exploits English grammar ironically, playing with her end-words so as to create a mix of free-style dramatic monologue with fixed form (Rumens 2016). So, in a panoply of sexual and racial overtones, on can appear first in isolation as a rhyme-grammatical ‘empty’ word (‘It’s not like you don’t turn me on’, line 1), and reappear later merged with the adjectival hard, to form a semantically ‘full’ nominal end-word (‘hard-on’, line 16).10 Extracts from this poem are quoted by kind permission of The Ohio State University Press. Agbabi’s craft reminds us of the poetics of inversion of Raimbaut d’Aurenga, a twelfth-century prolific troubadour, who deeply influenced Arnaut Daniel. See Burgwinkle’s piece in this volume and especially his comparison between Raimbaut’s Ar resplan la flors enversa and Arnaut Daniel’s sestina (Lo ferm voler) (pp. 30–3). 9 10

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In Jane Huffman’s ‘Failed Sestina’, the riches of the English language are reduced to a verbal concentrate of roughly two dozen words. Verbs and nouns mostly, but also ‘grammatical’ words (‘my’, ‘more’, ‘that’, ‘and’, ‘not’), are recombined and rephrased in thirteen tercets that add up to the same number of lines as does the conventional structure of six stanzas of six lines plus a three-line envoy. In ‘failing’ the schema, Huffman gives life to a sonic web artfully reminiscent of Arnaut Daniel’s lyric poetry. Take for example the first two tercets of the poem: With my ear to the door of my cell. And my want like a comb in my hair. Like a veil where there is no veil. With a ring in my ear. A ring in the hole in my ear.

As in Arnaut’s poem, Huffman’s lexical landscape looks and sounds affectively familiar: ‘door’, ‘comb’, ‘ring’, ‘hole’, ‘hair’ are the substance of the poem. It must be said, however, that in this pattern of lexical daily familiarity, ‘veil’ and ‘cell’ stand out all the more vividly. Here the circular figure of the ring in line 5, which may play on (ear)ring as a piece of jewellery and a sound ringing in one’s ear, reverberates aurally in a web of (imperfect) consonance (eaR, dooR, wheRe, theRe, eaR, Ring, eaR). This sonic line is broken by the simile, ‘my want / like a comb in my hair’. In Huffman’s simile, the pair ‘want’ and ‘comb’, split over two lines via enjambment, is part of the same syntactic unit and shares a similar sonic sequence: low/back vowel + nasal. The ‘want’/‘comb’ combination is then picked up by the ‘ring’/‘hole’ sequence: the figure of the perfect containing form, the ring, is juxtaposed with that of complete emptiness (or want), the hole. In both Arnaut’s and Huffman’s poetry, metre, figures of sound, and objects of our daily life work together in a process of refinement through repetition and calculated variation. All of which goes to show the crucial role that language plays in the sestina’s creative potential. Indeed, the linguistic challenge posed by the sestina form is the secret of its success. Poets who engage with the sestina invariably show a great deal of interest in linguistic and poetic form. And often this interest becomes a theme of the poem. In doing so, poets make language and form both personae and objects of their compositions. Sestinas become then the locus for their reflections on language and poetics. In twenty-first-century sestinas it is easy to find examples of lines readable as metapoetic statements – albeit ironic and playful. Sometimes the metapoetic meditation is more explicit. For example, in the often



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hilarious literary dialogue between Sestina Jackson and Text-Deft James in Maceo J. Whitaker’s ‘The Mad Man from Macon’ (2015), the characters are supposedly young writers, ‘so like many young (and not-so-young) writers, they fumble in their discussion of writing and life’:11 … No gap In the music. All Otis – no stopgap. The moon moved, drifted. The songs Kicked. TD whispered over fading Bass: “You wanna walk through the park? Talk about Zadie and Roth and (and and) nine Other scribes?” A nod. SJ: “I’m A. Rich-esque. Gimme Duhamel, Dove, a Clifton-esque Ode. Poetry owns me. I scan tales as a gap Between ghazals and villanelles. B. Collins’s Nine Horses, Espada’s Alabanza. Cathy Song Preaches to perceive heaven.

As a possessed character (in Whitaker’s radical declaration, ‘poetry owns me’), Sestina Jackson does not just represent poetry and poetics, rather, she is their embodiment. In all these examples, poets play with the boundaries of the sestina, stretching them often to the point of rupture. The use of enjambment is noticeable in all the sestinas quoted above. Even in Stallings’ more conventionally structured ‘Sestina: Like’, none of the six-plus-one stanzas is syntactically complete (with the partial exception of stanza II, where ‘alike’ in line 12 ends the clause – but not the sentence, which ends in line 13, the first line of stanza III). Enjambment troubles the line sequence with the temptation of prose both within the stanza and, daringly, between stanzas. This is the case in Agbabi’s ‘Skins’, where the enjambment breaks the morpho-syntactic and strophic line unity, between the second and the third stanza: Look into my eyes. I just wanted to fit in. A misfit. 11 Private email exchange. I am very grateful to Maceo J. Whitaker for generously sharing with me the final draft of his sestina as well as his views on poetry, form, and the art of composition. Extracts from this poem are reproduced by kind permission of Maceo J. Whitaker.

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The same happens between the first and the second stanzas: It’s not like you don’t turn me on. Every time you walked past I thought, She’s fit. Come-to-bed eyes. We both want to feel my skin against your skin.

Two antagonistic forces are at work here. On the one hand, the enjambment breaks through the line and the strophic division. On the other hand, the line division, imposed by the strict following of the end-word scheme in ‘feel my skin / against your skin’, as well as the very semantics of the preposition ‘against’, work in the opposite direction, keeping the poem’s form together and impeding its release into prose. In contemporary sestinas, prose is often explicitly breaking out of verse. A prime example is in Whitaker’s ‘The Mad Man from Macon’, where a text in prose follows the sestina proper.12 Prose does not appear here as a formal choice; rather, it seems to spring from the dialogue between the characters. Breaking the formal barriers of metrics and stanzaic structure, prose becomes a potentially unstoppable stream. Indeed, the sestina form seems to excite prosaic thinking in contemporary poets, and can play the role of a gloss, as in the following passage that responds directly to the point in Whitaker’s sestina (quoted above, p. 275): So, if you will, ax the horse talk. I prefer rubbery arms, Espada’s cockroaches, axes on frozen pond sludge. Sibilant rush. Gimme Yusef’s Orpheus. Or Ferlinghetti from Coney Island to North Beach. Gimme Wisława Szymborska (a name I can pronounce, FYI. RIP.) Please. Please, Text-Deft James. Not equinicide.

Reading this prose may remind us of some medieval parallels in which prose supplies an (auto)commentary on verse: Occitan razos, Dante’s Vita Nuova 12 First published in Poetry in 2015, the sestina is included with some authorial variants in Whitaker 2019: 50–2.



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or Convivio, for example. Certainly, Whitaker’s prose is far from the tone and purpose of thirteenth-century Occitan razos (which seek to supply a narrative, biographical explanation for how lyric poems and the emotions they convey came about), let alone Dante’s doctrinal, unfinished prosimetrum, the Convivio. Still, Whitaker supplies us with a prose discourse that is welded to the preceding sestina and depends on it as commentaries and glosses do on their texts. Is the link between prose and verse always ultimately ‘razoistic’, that is to say, prosaically circumstantial in explaining verse? In her beautiful ‘Sestina in Prose’, Katherine Coles’s prose is an antinarrative: it is an engine that allows the poet to herald the struggle, questioning the ‘text’ in its essence: metre, pattern, figure, speech, language. This inclination to prose is consistent with the language of the ordinary that features in the sestinas I am commenting on as one of their most obvious compositional principles. Repetition lends this poetics of everyday life both its reassuring predictability and its pathologic qualities. Everyday life is what we are. Yet, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, ‘[la parole quotidienne] se dérobe à toute mise en forme speculative, peut-être à toute coherence, toute régularité’ ([everyday language] escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity, Blanchot 1969: 357/1987: 13) and is therefore potentially dangerous (‘l’essence dangereuse du quotidien’ [the dangerous essence of the everyday, Blanchot 1969: 365]). The quotidian is amorphous in the sense that it designates what is flat, banal. However, precisely because of its being destitute of form, the quotidian is also the place of utmost ambiguity. It has the capacity to assume any form, to refer to any meaning. On the one hand, the quotidian manifests itself as what we have already seen and already experienced. It accumulates boredom on boredom ‘comme s’amasse le gaz carbonique dans un espace clos, lorsque trop de gens s’y trouvent ensemble’ (as carbon dioxide accumulates in a closed space when too many people find themselves together there, Blanchot 1969: 361/1987: 16). On the other hand, for all its repetitive dullness, the everyday is what really matters to us. It brings us back to what our existences are inescapably made of. And while we can never enclose it in discourse, yet it cannot remain unspoken. Rather, as Blanchot says, the daily makes itself heard ‘en bavardant, dans cette parole non parlante qui est le doux bruissement humain en nous, autour de nous’ (in idle chatter, in that unspeaking speech that is the soft human murmuring in us and around us, Blanchot 1969: 361/1987: 16–17). Twenty-first-century sestineers work on these paradoxical traits of the quotidian. A spoken-word sestina like Maris’s ‘Darling, would you please pick up those books?’ is an unpunctuated monologue, just waiting for a mouth to take the initiative and speak it: How many times do I have to say get rid of the books off the goddamn floor

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do you have any idea how it feels to step over books you wrote about her bloody hell you sadist what kind of man are you all day long those fucking books in my way for 3 years your acclaimed books tell me now what do you have to say for yourself you think you’re such a man silent brooding pondering at the floor pretending you’re bored when I mention her fine change the subject ask “Do I feel like I need more medication” NO I don’t feel like I need more medication it’s the books don’t you see don’t you see it’s her…13

In this scene of a marriage, a familiar habit – some books on the floor, one of those things unperceived by the senses, things that ‘one has always looked past’ (‘le regard [les ayant] toujours dépassées’, Blanchot 1969: 362/1987: 14) – suddenly become the bitter and comic trigger for the monologue. The soliloquy is a spiral-like machine, for which the sestina form is the perfect vehicle. The balance between the comic and tragic comes out of a writing made to be heard rather than seen. We can imagine this sestina as a script for the theatre. It can be shouted to the poet-husband or murmured to oneself as internal whisper, and the emphasis and the rare diacritics the poet has added work as glosses for diction and vocal interpretation. While the ‘norm’ may no longer coincide with any code that poets (as a group or as individuals) want to worship or subvert, the voice of this poetry still relies on formal normativity. But as it echoes (important word!) the sestina form, modern and medieval poets create resonances which are to be heard, rather than seen. Conclusion Are contemporary sestinas the work of parrots or nightingales, in Kay’s terms? Put in this way, I think that the question is misleading. Firstly, we are not dealing with poets anxious about the burden of tradition on their ‘creations’. They do not feel threatened by the influence of some old master. As we have seen, their performative use of the sestina is an overt, unambiguous,

13

This poem is quoted by kind permission of Seren books.



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and celebratory statement in this respect. Secondly, Adorno’s term ‘revenant’ denotes something about the posture of the poets I have considered toward the sestina form: a posture made of genuine, playful fascination for both the algebraic rules of the sestina form and its ghostly presence as a form of tradition only superficially confined to a dead past, and that can be made to speak again, uncannily. Contemporary poets’ inclination to compose sestinas (or sonnets, for that matter) is more the mark of a living dialogue with the dead than of a propensity for formal imitation. Whereas literary critics identify and explicate someone else’s use of poetic form, contemporary poets who write sestinas appropriate the form for themselves. As we have seen above with Whitaker, poetry, in the form and character of Sestina Jackson, literally owns the poet. The sestina does not simply reiterate a form of the past. Rather, as a living sign within the tradition, contemporary revenant sestinas collapse the referential character – and therefore the alterity – presupposed in the distinction between source and quotation, and thus between past and present.

•  PART VI  • Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries

•  Introduction  • Miranda Griffin

W

hile Sarah Kay’s previous books focused on the ways in which political structures or figures of thought were expressed through a range of literary genres and manifestations, the most recent monograph we explore in this volume turns to the materiality of the pages on which medieval literature is written: skin. Kay’s work has consistently attended to the idea that there is more than text in any discussion of medieval textuality; the figure she uses to do so in Animal Skins is the suture – a term borrowed from Slavoj Žižek – to indicate the moment at which ‘the distinction of levels between content and medium on which reading normally relies is momentarily suspended, with uncanny effect’ (5). A suture is also the stitching together of skin to repair a wound: the figure of the suture in Kay’s work, then, becomes a suture itself – as it refers both to the material reminders of physical fragility upon which medieval literature is inscribed, and to an often fleeting feeling of defamiliarisation, shock, or revulsion experienced by readers of that literature, as they encounter it via the medium of a parchment page displaying its origin as the flayed, scraped, soaked, stretched skin of a slaughtered animal. The work of Animal Skins is heralded in a series of innovative articles, in which Kay explores in meticulous detail the implication and impact of the medieval manufacture of books – artefacts which transmit and represent human culture as a definitive mark of human superiority – from animal skin. In ‘Original Skin’, Kay relates the flaying of animals for parchment to the hagiography of Saint Bartholomew, who, according to legend, was tortured by being skinned alive: the skin that is removed is often represented in manuscripts as looking like a second body (50–2). This article is revisited in ‘Legible Skins’, as Kay refines her argument to point out the crucial difference between human and non-human skin in the ways in which modern and medieval readers may find their own embodied experience implicated in their encounter with texts inscribed on vellum. As Kay points out, ‘There are reminders everywhere’ in medieval literature ‘that animal skins are bearers of meaning that can be assumed by speakers of human language or by selves that at other times inhabit human bodies’ (Kay 2011: 17). 283

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If the parchment which supports literature is haunted by a disavowed animal quality, present within its very materiality and only partially disguised by the process of manufacture which produces pen-ready vellum, then writing on that parchment about non-human animals, and how they are appropriated to speak about humanity, is especially prone to a reading informed by the logic of the suture. Another suture performed by Animal Skins is the dialogue Kay animates between the parchment page and the use of animals in medieval Latin and French bestiaries. The bestiary tradition seems a particularly medieval genre of writing and way of thinking from the point of view of the proudly scientific modern period: bestiaries propose an understanding of human nature and the mysteries of Christian theology via ingenious interpretations of received wisdom about the bodies and behaviours of beasts. In the bestiary tradition, animals are used, both as figures of thought and as expendable sources of raw material, to think through what it means to be human, to possess human knowledge, spirituality, and the potential for redemption. Kay describes her theoretical approach in Animal Skins as ‘plac[ing] bestiaries in the crossfire between Anzieu and Agamben’ (20). Drawing attention to the ways in which animal and human skin meet and mirror one another, Kay outlines the formulation of the ‘skin-ego’ by the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who shows that our experience of our own embodiment and that of others (including, although Anzieu does not discuss this in detail, nonhuman animals) is often played out on our skin, in a language which speaks of surface rather than depth of feeling. Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on the ‘intimate caesura’ (Agamben 2004: 15–16) insist upon a division between the human and the animal, yet also reveal that division as fluctuating and contingent, as much a continuation as a cut, resonating with the figure of the suture. ‘Such momentary erasures of distinction,’ Kay writes in a lyrical passage, ‘leave in their wake the possibility – utopian perhaps, or maybe apocalyptic – of a human relationship to other animals that is not, at the same time, a severance from them’ (17). While bestiaries treat the non-human animal as an object to think with, they also reveal the human as another sign to be interpreted in a practice of Christian exegesis: humans, like animals, are meaningful words in the book of nature to be interpreted in order to access – albeit only ever fleetingly – the divine, so as to learn how to lead a better life. The bestiary tradition is a crucial element in medieval European literary representations of knowledge about the world; it chimes with many of the works at the basis of the research project from which Knowing Poetry emerged. In that multi-authored work, Kay and her collaborators explored the ways in which knowledge about the world and literary form ground and enhance one another, arguing that the medieval Christian focus on the Aristotelian insistence on the centrality of materiality and memory is given unique and specific expression in verse. According to the



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authors of Knowing Poetry, knowledge articulated as verse is always situated within the body because physical performance is always represented by the ‘pulse of versification’ (Armstrong and Kay 2011: 97). Both Animal Skins and Knowing Poetry, then, argue that medieval representation of learning about the world is shown to be intimately involved in the body: in Knowing Poetry, that learning is mediated by the rhythm of the pulse; in Animal Skins it is haunted by the skin. Skin and blood remind medieval and modern readers that we are grounded in the physical, that even as we seek to embrace the eternal and enquire into the divine, we are limited by mortal flesh – just like the animals from which we insistently and imaginatively seek to distance ourselves. The sharply produced images which accompany Kay’s incisive text in Animal Skins show that the flayed skin of a manuscript is lively, if not alive: it puckers, rips, bears traces of blemishes and wounds – and of the measures taken to cover and repair them. These flaws and traces, Kay implies, solicit responses to the creative potential of holes from the readers of bestiary manuscripts. The authors of the essays in this part of Futures respond to this invitation in three different, complimentary modes – religious, ethnographic, and erotic. James R. Simpson captures and expands on the speculative tone of Kay’s work; his essay also explores the ethical and aesthetic potential of the cut or caesura. Responding to an admission in the Conclusion of Animal Skins that this work looks only at the use of parchment in Christian traditions, Simpson reflects on the preparation of parchment and its interpretation in medieval Jewish texts and textual practices, and relates it to the depiction of an animal skin in a text from a genre which explores embodiment from a very different perspective to bestiaries – an irreverent, obscene piece authored by Rutebeuf. Elizabeth Eva Leach offers a reading of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours, which extends the moralising work of the bestiary tradition to add a new layer of interpretation. Richard’s extraordinary bestiary is read not as a meditation on the best way to lead a Christian life but as a means to construct and understand a woman, the ostensible object of the narrator’s love. Leach exploits this slippage between animal body and human desire to focus on the abject aspects which haunt the bestiary genre: responding to Kay’s point that holes in parchment pages act as uncanny doubles to the orifices of the animals described in bestiaries (Animal Skins, 62–86), Leach looks at what emerges from these alluring yet repulsive holes – cries, offspring, sound, and song. In Leach’s argument, the vox (voice) of animals and human songs intertwine, to meditate on the aural as well as the visual and tactile experience of medieval texts. Sharon Kinoshita’s essay points out another gap in the bestiaries: that the tradition has less to say about the embodied experience and variety of non-human animals than do other medieval texts about animals. Kinoshita uses the first and last animals discussed in Animal Skins – the sheep and the elephant – to structure a wide-ranging and suggestive essay which explores

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travel writing about, and texts produced in, non-European lands. Outside of the European bestiary tradition, non-human animals become figures to understand human systems and hierarchies, but via different aesthetics and ethics of representation. And they become an object of representation more on their own terms, perhaps anticipating the theoretical ‘animal turn’ of the early twenty-first century. Animal Skins represents a formidable contribution to this theoretical turn, and may be one of the most influential of Kay’s monographs, speaking to, and soliciting responses from, a wide range of scholars in medieval studies and cultural animal studies.

•  Between Skin(s), Between Faiths:  • Caesura, Animality, and Comedy in ThirteenthCentury Christian–Jewish Relations James R. Simpson

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he investigation of relations between animality and manuscript materiality in Sarah Kay’s meticulous contextualisation of bestiary production, Animal Skins, evidently draws on and advances her earlier explorations of the shape and nature of subjectivity, whether understood as embodied or as dependent on the second skin(s) of language and text for its contouring and sensations.1 All the time attentive to specificities of illustration, ordering, and wording in particular manuscript versions, Animal Skins illuminates both long-standing traditions and immediate contexts, situating the bestiary’s handling of nature in relation to educational practices and currents in thought. Through this, Kay’s work targets the recto–verso complexities of the gospel word according to our dumb neighbours: ‘Being animal is both good news and bad for humans, for in the animal their identity is both lost and found.’ Animal skins materially support instruction that is, in the words of Thomas of Chobham, ‘useful to us in the body, but also […] useful in the soul’, therefore defining and refining humanity; but at the same time they ‘shape readers’ understanding by the constant, if silent, challenge to rethink the grounds of their identity’ (Animal Skins: 156). As with the songbirds of Parrots and Nightingales – creatures testifying to the insistence of language, poetry especially, either welling up from inside or witlessly repeated – the trouble between animality and human subjectivity finds a mirror in the parchment page’s conjunction of beast and book. In this context, the animal materiality underpinning medieval textual cultures – whether concretely as books or as an intellectual and imaginative framework – appears simultaneously mute and eloquent, gifted through human agency with something akin to a voice otherwise thoughtlessly denied in the ordinary run of exploitation. 1 On this subject see also notably Kay 2004, 2006, 2014, and 2015. Discussions of skin and tactile apprehension serve to recontextualise and amplify aspects of her earlier work on literary subjectivity.

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By exploring the bestiary’s dialectical engagement with human exceptionalism, Animal Skins and its related studies offer rich insights into the uncertain terrains that readerly intuition and apprehension negotiate or are given to occupy. Such a focus also reflects Kay’s previous engagements with the function of contradiction (in both topical logic and Marxism) and the unconscious as both spaces for and challenges to thinking. These contexts highlight the urgent intellectual and cultural pertinence of both the repressed and the interstitial. In related fashion, Animal Skins raises central questions about how contact and contemplation shaped the physical and imaginative apprehension of medieval books by their producers and audiences, especially with regard to the creaturely interdependences indissociable from reflections on human identity. Adding to Animal Skins (16), Elizabeth Eva Leach in this volume (p. 303) describes the human as ‘beset’ by the internal frontier that, for Agamben, divides the properly human from an inhuman, indeed, animal excess. Leach’s term ‘beset’ neatly captures Kay’s focus on the disquiet associated with a readerly contemplation (inescapably) implicated in the commonalities and willed disjunctures shaping our relations with our fellow creatures. Accordingly, although Kay follows Didier Anzieu in emphasising the uniquely reflexive character of touch, Leach reminds us that to be ‘beset’ by something, while not necessarily as immediate or concrete as physical contact, implies an uneasy awareness of the presence, actual or imagined, of our ontological neighbours.2 This aspect Kay too underscores through her engagement with discussion in the field of animal studies, notably Jacques Derrida’s L’Animal que donc je suis (2006, 2008). Her resulting reflections on human exceptionalism and language are more prominent in article explorations associated with Animal Skins (notably Kay 2014 and 2015), studies which reflect more closely and extensively on Derrida’s emphasis on the subordination of animals as a ‘bêtise’ (meaning both stupidity and inhuman beastliness). That human self-definition appears contradictorily dependent on la bête (‘the stupid’ and/or ‘the beast’), for its articulation is a facet Kay sees as particularly pertinent to discussion of the bestiary tradition, given its strong didactic emphasis on language (e.g. Kay 2015: 39–40). Kay links this place of besetting to what Giorgio Agamben (2003: 38) terms the ‘space of exception’, an unstable interstitial gap maintained by claims to sovereignty that are asserted through interminable violences against the animal, both without and within:3

Kay 2006: 59–60, drawing on Anzieu 1989: 61–2. For discussion, see Kay 2017: 24–5. On applications of Agamben’s discussions, see also Burns and McCracken 2013, and McCracken 2017. 2 3



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In our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living being and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. We must learn instead to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. What is man, if he is always the place – and, at the same time, the result – of ceaseless divisions and caesurae? (Agamben 2003: 16)

Drawing on Agamben and Gilles Deleuze (1969), Kay’s treatment of the phenomenological question of ‘sense’ and its relation to trauma, especially as manifested in the act of cutting and the associated concepts of caesura and event, drive her readings of medieval manuscript contexts.4 To hint at possible parallels with another of Kay’s studies and thereby risk an allusive car-crash of titles, here we have a ‘place of thought’ that ‘is not one’ but, rather, riven with ethical and ontological urgencies, with ambivalence and anxiety.5 As she remarks in another earlier study, on the uncomfortable conjunction of parchment with the human torture of flaying alive: By assuming the parchment page as his or her own skin Ego, a reader is able – albeit unconsciously – to identify with these processes too. The theme of flaying, supported on the parchment page, may awaken anxieties about the security and survival of the self, or an attraction toward pain. (Kay 2006: 60)

Kay’s dramatic characterisations of page and book reflect vividly the eloquence of materiality as a theatre in which the practice of reading is continuously challenged and animated by a violence whose effects, variously destructive and constitutive, remain ethically and imaginatively entangled. This disturbing sense of entanglement (or perhaps entailment, endowing the human with an animal coda?) is an aspect both illuminated and obscured by the paradoxical character of some terminology and discussion. While Agamben follows Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel in describing ‘man’ not as a being or substance, but rather ‘a field of dialectical tensions’ (2003: 12), his use of the term ‘caesura’ in The Open is associated with separation or division – albeit in a manner requiring constant ‘rearticulation’ or ‘updat[ing]’ (2003: 38) – as opposed to ‘conjunction’ (2003: 16). However, as a group of medievalists concerned with poetic traditions and materials might be expected to point out, Kay 2006: 61. Kay 2007 hybridised with Irigaray 1977 (for translation see Irigaray 1985), Irigaray’s discussion being an enduring influence on subsequent studies of gendered and embodied subjectivity. 4 5

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the metrical function of a caesura is to divide a line without breaking it, to mark the boundary and conjunction of two hemistichs.6 That said, Agamben’s seeming oversight of this ambiguity can arguably be read as revealingly performative in character: a caesura is thus in effect no more a thing than ‘man’ is, becoming what we might cast in a Derridean act of erasure as caesura. In that respect, the besetting power of flaying may arguably provide a kind of emphatic imaginary counter to the seemingly no less besetting anxiety that cuts are not definitive. Following on from the above, my response here to Kay’s intimate history of animal skins and the violence bound up with their uses draws on two related premises. The first is that there have been different constructions of the cultural significance and associations of parchment production. The second is that the serious ethical and existential resonances that Kay illuminates can find a useful mirror in other, less solemn moods. The next part of this essay includes a brief overview of the key characteristics of Jewish parchment production, notably the splitting of hides into layers and their processing, and their significances in Judaic commentary, ritual, and cultural practice.7 My suggestion here is that the complexities associated in Judaic cultures with splitting and layering – remembered and discussed in medieval Ashkenazi contexts, albeit seemingly not widely reflected in practice – should be recalled in the present context on account of their possible resonances in Jewish– Christian interactions. In the second part, I build on these interactions in discussing the fate of the hare in Rutebeuf’s ‘Charlot le juif qui chia dans la peau du lièvre’ (Charlot the Jew who shat in the hare pelt) (c.1265) – to explore the associations and potential substitutions of animals and their flayed skins in the tale. Rutebeuf’s jocular treatment foregrounds the importance of humour (a subject Kay touches on briefly in her treatments of bêtise) for our understanding both of the tensions and sensitivities and of the traumatic ideation underlying parchment textuality. Such an exploration of how the caesura relates to violence, especially cutting, in medieval vernacular texts may serve to illuminate some of the complexities of cultural and religious 6 On Rutebeuf’s exploitation of the caesura in the confession section of Le Miracle de Théophile in this regard, see Simpson 2015. 7 Splitting remains a standard technique in modern leather production, particularly that using mature cattle hides (for an overview, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather [accessed 26 August 2019]). Hides are separated into a ‘top grain’ outer layer and a fleshside ‘drop split’ layer, also referred to as corium. Thus, suede is a flesh-side product; nubuck is similar but produced by buffing or sanding the outer-layer split. Modern shoe leathers are typically ‘bicast’, with the flesh-side layer strengthened by coating with polyurethane or vinyl. This provides a cheaper and more readily available alternative to traditional materials such as cordovan (or ‘shell cordovan’), which is the treated, flesh-side split from horse rump hide. Hides of juvenile or unborn animals (e.g. calfskin, uterine vellum) are softer and require less involved preparation.



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tensions in medieval Europe.8 Here we see the relation of the ‘zoological machine’ (Kay 2015) to Agamben’s biopolitical ‘anthropological machine’, focused on inscribing and buttressing differentiations within human kind. The Sense of Jewish Parchment The contrast between hair-side and flesh-side is a key feature in the tactile apprehension of the manuscript page, and familiar to medievalists working on Western Christian manuscripts. But that binary admits of further subdivision and complication. One feature that distinguishes Jewish textual traditions from their neighbours lies in methods of parchment production and their cultural/ religious resonances. In medieval Christian Europe, hides were typically stretched and treated with lime.9 By contrast, traditional Jewish processes involved splitting or peeling raw hide into two layers and treating these with particular combinations of substances. Full ‘unsplit’ hide (now known as gevil) yields two products, the flesh side, referred to as qelaf, and the hair side, dukhsustus. These had different designated uses, as outlined by Maimonides in the twelfth century: It is a law transmitted by Moses from Sinai that a Torah scroll be written on gevil, on the hair side; that tefillin be inscribed on qelaf on the flesh side; and that the mezuzah be inscribed on dukhsustus, on the hair side. Anything written on qelaf on the hair side, or on gevil or dukhsustus on the flesh side, is unfit. Even though this is the law from Sinai, a Torah scroll written on qelaf is fit. Gevil was specified only to exclude dukhsustus, for a Torah scroll written on it is unfit. So also, if one has written a mezuzah on qelaf or on gevil, it is fit; dukhsustus was only specified as being preferred.10

Skin products were further distinguished in terms of the different combinations of key ingredients – salt, flour, and gall-nut tannins – associated with particular stages in their processing.11 This hierarchy of materials and 8 My discussion here is notably influenced by Trautner-Kromann 1993, Ta-Shma 1996, Cohen 1999, Yuval 2006, Horowitz 2006, Seidman 2010, and Fudeman 2010. 9 For discussion, see notably Martini 2017. See also Sirat 2002 and Tov 2002. 10 Maimonides, translation quoted from Kellner 2004: 74. For discussion, see BeitArié 2020: 229. 11 See Martini 2017: 176. Those products treated with tannins were divided from those which were not and which were therefore classed as unfit for ritual use; this latter category was subdivided into mazzah (unprocessed raw hide), hippa (salted but not treated with flour and gall nut), and diphtera (treated with flour and salt, but not gall-nut).

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practices grounded and counterpointed a taxonomy of discursive opposition and complementarity that extended through a ritual microphysics associated with religious texts and other artefacts, such as the small scrolls intended to be enclosed in the talismanic boxes known as mezuzah. To frame things in terms of Kay’s discussion, we can characterise these concerns as operations of caesura; they compound the initial skinning, thus rendering more complex and nuanced the cultural corollaries of material practice. Interestingly, although the first part of Maimonides’ outline is prescriptive in tone, his gloss on the ‘law from Sinai’ cuts from absolute requirements to considerations of what is preferable or acceptable. Alongside such qualifications, contingent accommodations reflect how Jews also had to adapt to dominant local practices – whether Muslim or Christian – of book, document, and textual production wherever they went or lived. This pragmatic relaxation might reflect the European contexts marked both by desires to mark cultural distinctions and the practical necessity to make concessions. Accordingly, factors such as constraints of supply meant Jewish communities in many parts of Europe were dependent on Christian producers, who used stretching and preservation with lime rather than the prescribed Jewish methods. Jewish writers commented favourably and unfavourably on both technical and ritual dimensions of these adaptations.12 However, Judaic traditions do not seem to have simply fallen into oblivion but, rather, continued to mark cultural-religious differences. Although the terminology relating to parchment production was associated principally with the production of scrolls and related artefacts, it is evident that these terms and the concept of the page that went with them continued to have a bearing on textuality, materiality, and cultural identity in the world of medieval books. For one thing, the term qelaf – and, as Annett Martini observes (2017: 178), particularly the phrase ‘our qelaf’ – appears in Ashkenazi sources designating consecrated parchment generally. This discursive particularity persists in spite of the material evidence: as Malachi Beit-Arié points out (2020: 227–44), from the latter part of the twelfth century, Jewish manuscripts from Northern France, England, and Germany (particularly the last) show a more ‘equalised’ processing that leaves less distinction between hair and flesh sides than is observed in material from other areas. This reduction seems to characterise codex-oriented practices and production looking to a relatively even finishing of both sides of the parchment membrane; and we may wonder whether it threatened to compromise a complex system founded in specific uses of whole hide and splits, hair and flesh sides.

12 See, for instance, Simḥa b. Samuel of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, § 517, cited from Martini 2017: 177.



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The elaboration of different products supporting Jewish written cultures was complemented by ritualised verbal performance of texts in a context uniquely marked by the dynamic interdependence of written authority and oral rabbinic commentary. It was vital that the parchment itself be marked as having received the initial consecration that would render it suitable for religious use. Key here were Ashkenazi rituals for consecrating parchment, wherein the recitation of specific formulae regarding intent were a central requirement. For instance, Barukh ben Isaac of Worms instructs that: one explicitly says: ‘I am writing for the purpose of Israel and its holiness’. And if so, the one who explicitly says [the formula] does not have to say [it] for every single letter but at the beginning [of the work only] […] and it is not enough to do it in thoughts but rather it has to be spoken aloud.13

The injunction to offer verbal affirmation of the intent in writing mirrors wider cultural and theological entailments: speech here is a necessary supplement that counterpoints the splitting of hides through its own relayering of the verbal and the material. Here we have a caesura between the ephemerality of speech and the enduring nature of script, wherein correct performance also served to reinforce the element of direct personal attestation and mimesis in the act of inscription. The same practice also figures Judaic characterisations of writing as applied to the page, simultaneously in intimate contact with that surface and yet separate from it. Judaic comment on the detail and significance of prescribed production techniques – as well as on the compromises necessarily accommodated in particular contexts – evidently speaks to anxieties that distinctions might be lost or forgotten. Such seemingly was the case within Judaic tradition, as is apparent from confusions in commentary regarding terminology and processes (Beit-Arié 2020: 227–8). It also reflects an awareness that neighbouring cultures could be not merely ignorant of or inattentive to Jewish proprieties, but even contemptuously hostile, to the point of maliciously profaning them. In a context where medieval Jews were obliged to deal with Christian tanners, the continued use of ritual terms reflected a focus on ensuring that production had been properly supervised. Such cautions and reservations were paramount, not least because the parchment being produced might also be destined for what texts such as the Sefer Ḥasidim deemed ‘idolatrous’ uses, notably the copying of Christian materials (for sources and comment see Martini 2017: 192–3). Comment in Jewish sources also highlights concerns that the purity of hides could be affected by patching with non-kosher hide or sinew, thus rendering the entire parchment unfit for ritual use (Martini 2017: 190, 192). 13

Translation quoted from Martini 2017: 185–6.

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There may be evidence that Christian attitudes to Judaism registered Judaic concern with layering both as a cultural fact and an exploitable sensitivity. A possible instance here are the scrolls which regularly accompany representations of Jews in manuscripts of the Bible moralisée, where they appear to function both as actual material objects and as ‘speech bubbles’. If Sara Lipton is correct to contend that the Bible moralisée scrolls function as visual ciphers for the errors of Judaism, then it may be that such representations reflect a contempt for the dialectic between orality and text that marked the rabbinic tradition as both living mystery and cultural archive.14 In their material character, scrolls reflect complex dialectical relations, as well as fundamental questions of ritual performance and religious expression. Routinely displayed as prestige objects, they served to solemnise acts of oath-taking, written tradition, and authority in contrapuntal reinforcement with spoken affirmation.15 Scrolls in antisemitic representation might therefore be understood as both mirroring and deriding the layered complexities that conjoined written and verbal in a caesura-event even as they peeled off in different directions. There are arguments for seeing such antiSemitic representations as inflected by intercultural contact and knowledge. Torah scrolls featured prominently among the Jewish manuscripts burned following the 1240 Paris disputation, a calculated attack on cultural memory and religious practice.16 This assault on Judaism’s material underpinnings also targeted verbal rituals associated with them. In similar fashion, Nicholas Donin’s examination of the rabbis called on to answer questions in the Disputation looked to focus suspicion on the tradition of oral interpretation they represented – especially where such exegetical gatekeeping could be cast as concealing content directly hostile to Christianity.17 A possible avenue for extending the approaches and commentary in Animal Skins would be to investigate further the resonances associated with the kind of layering outlined here, the measure in which medieval parchment cultures 14 ‘Within the iconographic world of the Bible moralisée […] the scroll signifies not just an outdated but still revered Old Law (mistakenly but usefully preserved in its original form by medieval Jews), but also a dangerous text possessed – brandished – by contemporary Jews’ (Lipton: 66). 15 For an overview of the place of scrolls in Jewish culture and textual practice, see Haran 1985. 16 For sources and discussion relating to the Paris Disputation, see Maccoby 1993, Friedman, Hoff, and Chazan 2012, and Galinsky 2012. 17 Of course, scrolls were also important in medieval Christian culture, where they similarly indicated complex convergences of written–visual and oral–aural phenomena; see, for instance, their use in illustrations in lyric compilations as a visual rendering of vocal performance (Huot 1987, notably 78–9, 245–51). Scrolls therefore provide a caesura between Jewish and Christian practice, and a site of anxiety for all concerned.



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reflect not solely the separation of skin from body, but the opening of interstices within that process. While texts directly concerned with religious confrontation would be an obvious ground in that regard, we may find resonances elsewhere. One suggestive avenue in the present volume is Leach’s discussion of Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Here, the animals ruptured by (what are presented as) natural processes of conception or parturition or by vocalisation highlight the similarly explosive tensions between letter and voice as vehicles of an unfolding subjectivity located between ‘human’ and ‘animal’, outside and inside, presence and memory, didacticism and temptation. The bestiary genre emerges from Richard’s particular recasting of it as a complex layering of oral and written, analogous to that which, Kay considers, reflects oppositions between faith communities. In this respect, Richard’s rupturing beasts may also reflect how Christian interrogations and appropriations of animality as a mirror to the human are beset by the models and practices of neighbouring cultures, an infringement that appears disquieting albeit not entirely unwelcome in its provocative effects. I turn in the final section of this essay to Rutebeuf’s exploration of such an identity in his fabliau-like narrative, ‘Charlot le juif qui chia dans la peau du lièvre’. And, unfortunately, animals will be harmed here – albeit only imaginary ones. Off with their Skins: Rutebeuf’s Flat (Parchment) Animals Kay’s interrogation of the ethical, imaginative, and emotional resonances of materiality highlights the uncertainties hanging over our feeling for manuscript history. Her invitation to reflect on whether or when the violence involved in the production of parchment was a routine fact consigned to oblivion or a live issue draws us into further questions of emotion, subjectivity, and community surrounding the materiality of manuscript pages. Although comedy does not feature extensively in Animal Skins, Kay does offer various remarks on the subject in her discussions of bêtise in Richard de Fournival, whose handling of the bestiary tradition she sees as characterised by a degree of ‘dark humour’ (Kay 2014: 308). This suggests a rather different tonality from the torture scenes and violent ideation explored in Kay 2011 or the tentatively empathic mood associated with her larger project. Humour certainly seems germane to the theoretical terrain Kay associates with discussions of the parchment page: indeed, in La Logique du sens, Deleuze characterises comedy as ‘cet art de la surface’ (the art of surface, Deleuze 1969: 18).18 This stems from the contrast he sees between the animals of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts’ playing-card courtiers:

18 Deleuze 1969. For translation and comment, see Deleuze 2011. On comedy in Logic of Sense and the relation of his discussion there to earlier works, see notably Ford 2016.

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A mesure que l’on avance dans le récit, pourtant, les mouvements d’enfoncement et d’enfouissement font place à des mouvements latéraux de glissement, de gauche à droite et de droite à gauche. Les animaux des profondeurs deviennent secondaires, font place à des figures de cartes, sans épaisseur. On dirait que l’ancienne profondeur s’est étalée, est devenue largeur. Le devenir illimité tient tout entier maintenant dans cette largeur retournée. Profond a cessé d’être un compliment. Seuls les animaux sont profonds; et encore non pas les plus nobles, qui sont les animaux plats. (Deleuze 1969: 19) (As one advances in the story, however, the digging and hiding gives way to a lateral sliding from right to left and left to right. The animals below ground become secondary, giving way to card figures which have no thickness. One could say that the old depth having been spread out became width. The becoming unlimited is maintained entirely within this inverted width. ‘Depth’ is no longer a compliment.19 Only animals are deep, and they are not the noblest for that; the noblest are the flat animals. Deleuze 2004: 11–12)

Deleuze’s allusive use of Carroll (not unlike Derrida’s in L’Animal) is consonant with the convolutions of his discourse, wherein the animals with which the card figures are contrasted subdivide in turn into ‘deep’ and ‘flat’, in a fictional domain whose magical manipulations of scale give way to a reductive imperative that we might well characterise as a playful reflection on the problem of bêtise.20 Comedy has common ground with the endless labour of demarcating human from animal, because they share constant contradictory instability and ceaseless recombinations of recognition and incongruity, kinship and difference. It is, then, perhaps for this reason that both Deleuze and Derrida present their discussions of the animal as owing a debt to comedy, even their texts more dominated by pathos, uncertainty, and intractability. For all the differences of context, what joking might reveal about the suffering and exclusion of animals and other excluded categories is a live question in medieval discussion. As Karl Steel emphasises, it is evident that medieval people invested emotionally in at least a few of the animals that lived alongside them, even as they were both less removed from animal suffering and more routinely indifferent to its immediacy than we can readily conceive (Steel 2011: 221–45). And yet some sources seem to make light of issues even as they cast light on them. 19 Lester’s translation here reads ‘complement’, which, given the usage of ‘un compliment’ in French, seems to be an error. 20 Virginie Greene in this volume also considers Carroll in relation to questions of scale (p. 170).



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In Rutebeuf’s fabliau-like narrative, ‘Charlot le Juif qui chia dans la peau du lièvre’, an errant Jewish jongleur receives one of the letters of official introduction to patrons, documents ‘bien saellees et bien dites’ (properly written and sealed, line 74), that were distributed as rewards to minstrels at a wedding.21 Armed with his token, Charlot makes his way to Vincennes to find Guillaume, bread-bearer to the count of Poitiers. As it happens, the squire – who has recently lost a horse in a hunt that yielded nothing but a hare pelt – has a trick up his sleeve, and palms Charlot off with the skin in lieu of a more valuable gift, claiming it cost him 100 sous (the value of the dead horse). By way of revenge, Charlot leaves the room, defecates in the skin and brings it back to Guillaume, pretending the latter’s wife must have left something inside it. The squire reaches in with his gloved hand … . The hunt itself is presented in a vivid mix of action, syntactic twists, and gags: […] a Aviceinnes Avint, n’a pas un an entier, A Guillaumes le penetier. Cil Guillaumes dont je vos conte, Qui est a mon seigneur le conte De Poitiers, chassoit l’autre jour Un lievres qu’il ert a sejour. Li lievres, qui les chiens douta, Molt durement se desrouta, Asseiz foï et longuement, Et cil le chassa durement; Asseiz corrut, asseiz ala, Asseiz guenchi et sa et la, Mais en la fin vos di ge bien Qu’a force le prirent li chien. Pris fu sire Coars li lievres. Mais li roncins en ot les fievres, Et sachiez que mais ne les tremble: Escorchiez en fu, ce me cemble. Or pot cil son roncin ploreir Et metre la pel essoreir. La pel, se Diex me doint salu, Couta plus qu’ele ne valu. Or laisserons esteir la pel, 21 For edition, see Zink 2001: 793–801. The texts of the editions by Zink, Jubinal 1874, and Faral and Bastin 1959–60 are accessible at http://www.rutebeuf.be [accessed 31 January 2019].

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Qu’il la garda et bien et bel Jusqu’a ce tens que vos orroiz. (lines 12–37) (And so I tell you what befell Guillaume the bread-bearer at Vincennes, not a year ago. The Guillaume of our tale – who is in the service of the Count of Poitiers – went hunting for a hare the other day when he had nothing else to attend to. The hare, who feared the dogs, went greatly out of its way. He fled as far and for as long as he could, and the squire chased him hard. He ran so fast, covering the ground and dodging here and there. Yet, in the end, I tell you true, the dogs took him by force. Sir Coart the hare was caught. But it was the nag that caught the fever, and know that he no longer shivers: he was skinned for it, so it seems. Now was the squire free to weep for his nag and hang the skin out to cure. The pelt, as may God save me, cost more than it was worth. Now let us leave the skin, which he kept safe and sound until the time you will hear about.)

Rutebeuf’s lively scene of killing interweaves three moments, all besetting in their own ways: anticipation, whether that experienced by predatory pursuer or fearful prey, the actual moment of violence, and its consequences, variously practical and emotional.22 It also foregrounds a caesura-play with identity and difference. Human agency sets one animal chasing another with the result that both end up dead and skinned. Indeed, the ambiguous construction of ‘Mais li roncins … la pel essoreir’ (But it was the nag … the skin to cure, lines 28–32), which ostensibly refers to Guillaume’s horse, seems wilfully to confuse its fate with that of the hare. The passage’s syntactic twists unfold a logic of sense that separates bodies from skins while blurring distinctions between creature kinds and the differing or competing values – utilitarian, monetary, or emotional – that can be imputed to particular animals. Humour and indifference discard the life-value while keeping the material artefact. The presentation of animal deaths as a routine end to the trembling that indicates fear or infirmity (‘Et sachiez que mais ne les tremble’ [and know that he no longer shivers, line 29]) highlights that suspensions and confusions regarding affect are a central concern – if not, seemingly, a ‘live’ one. We might say that the animals were put out of their (human-inflicted) misery, except that Rutebeuf seems to suggest that no one cared about their welfare in the first place. Deprived of depth and reduced (or ‘ennobled’, as Deleuze puts it) to a version of the flatness that Deleuze describes, both creatures are ‘hung out to dry’, both in the literal sense that their skins are left to cure and inasmuch as they are stripped of any ethical or emotional weight, a consideration 22

For further discussion of ‘Charlot’, see Simpson 2020.



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neatly captured in the rhyming couplet ‘ploreir’/‘essoreir’ (weep/dry, lines 31–2). The only losses or gains registered here are human and material, and the only pain is human irritation at inconvenience – the tears imputed to Guillaume could connote spilt milk than anything more sentimental. By way of further comedic complication, Rutebeuf’s account not merely conflates one (fictional) ‘real’ animal with another, but even draws in creatures from different text-worlds, juxtaposing the hare of his tale with the character Coart from the Roman de Renart. The everyday violence done to lesser creatures, whether by deliberate killing (the hare) or through wear and exploitation (the horse), stands as mocking commemoration of the text’s own materiality, countering its self-elevation as fiction/literature. Rutebeuf’s indifference thus provides an acerbic counterpoint to what Kay characterises as the capacity of skin narratives to render human exceptionalism unstable by pointing to the possible human resonances of animal fates. There are two aspects of particular interest here. First of all, Rutebeuf’s account – which just happens to feature a Jewish character, skinning, and written documents – seems to insist on layering and caesura at multiple levels. Rutebeuf’s syntactic structures sometimes coincide with, sometimes overrun, the line ends. We also have the layers comprising author, narrator, protagonists, internal and implied audiences – notably evoked in the complicity of Rutebeuf’s first-person plural ‘laissons’ (let us leave), a complicity that positions Guillaume as an object of hilarity rather than sympathy. There are also the divisions of faith and social class fundamental to the tale as well as the various contrasts between writing and orality. Moreover, it also just happens that in Judaism hares are ritually unclean (see Leviticus 11. 6 and Deuteronomy 14. 7), at which point, even though the tale contains no explicit reference to that issue, we are perhaps given to understand that Guillaume’s self-congratulatory joke is silently subtended by a gross religious insult. The bêtise of the interaction between Guillaume and Charlot, with its cheapskate proffering of the hare pelt against the promissory note (that is, the parchment letter of introduction), thus offers a conspicuously dumb and careless replay of the already preposterous silliness of the hunt’s distinction and conflation of animal kinds. Layering these scenes together, we see Rutebeuf shuffle his minimal pack of flat critters to stage an ethical and affective counterpoint to – and denunciation of – the squire’s attempt at humour. Given the cast of characters and the emphasis on documentary culture as part of a wider trade in skins in this fabliau-like narrative, it is not impossible that the narrative reflects the resonances of differing attitudes and practices to parchment production and the trafficking of skins. At the very least, having some sense of the importance of layer distinctions in Jewish manuscript production adds at a heuristic level to our feeling for how Rutebeuf may be playing with surfaces, distinctions, and commonalities. And Rutebeuf

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seems to side more with the cheated and insulted Jewish jongleur than the besmirched Christian squire who refuses to honour patronly obligations. In short, the caesurae here are not solely metrical, one instance being the glove that protects Guillaume from actually touching Charlot’s excrement. This scenario may mirror Jewish concerns about the purity of parchment produced by Christians (through misrepresentation or substitution; or where ostensibly kosher parchments had been compromised by patching with lesser materials).23 In all this, the evident want of feeling and justice in the treatment of animals, humans, and cultural and religious values sits either logically or incongruously with the business of comedy. Yet, just as Charlot avenges himself, so Rutebeuf maybe suggests that apparently routine animal suffering also generates its own unfinished business, thus positioning the treatment of animals and excluded groups as functions of a biopolitical ‘machine’ that we might term, after Kay and Agamben, ‘zoological-anthropological’, where the hyphen stands for a caesura. Conclusion As a response to the arguments Kay advances in both Animal Skins and the articles that articulate some of the same concerns, I have suggested that some reflection on Judaic models of parchment production and the cultural logics underlying these may add to our readings of medieval texts, whether in terms of exploring actual ethnic–religious tensions or of enriching our feel for parchment cultures. In that regard, attention to Judaic discussions and models may shed further light on the cultural and imaginative complexities associated with the place of parchment and books in contexts where various medieval European cultures found themselves ‘beset’, in terms both of their own internal preoccupations and of their relations with their neighbours. I also suggest that reflection on readerly and textual phenomenology may find further avenues in comic traditions and materials. At this point, it seems all too convenient that Rutebeuf should have left us with a gag about the (in fact not so funny) treatment of animals and Jews. Kay’s interrogation of the sense of manuscript textuality finds a surprisingly serious counterpart in a medieval joke suggestive of further possible work on the complicities, divisions, and communalities associated with medieval textual communities and their material practices.24

See Martini 2017: 190. A further parallel here would be Kay’s emphasis on riddling in medieval traditions (2001: 143–78) as a means of interrogating what she describes as the ‘raw edge beyond which language sheers off into the irrational or collapses in a tumble of nonsense’ (2001: 143). 23 24

•  Rupturing Skin through the Power of Vox  • Elizabeth Eva Leach

A

s Sarah Kay notes (Animal Skins: 1), the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries witnessed the height of the production of bestiary materials, works that detail the natures of non-human animals for the instruction of humans. Kay draws attention to the materiality of bestiary texts in medieval manuscripts, noting in particular the visual and haptic aspects of the reader’s relation to skin: the skin of the page and the depictions of the animal skins pictured within them. She notes skin scholarship’s twofold recognition of skin as a surface of inscription and a container for identity, linking this work to her earlier interest in subjectivity. In effect a bestiary’s parchment page merges the embodied subject and the subject that depends on textuality, probing the boundaries of both.1 Just as Kay added to Martha Rust’s assertion of ‘codicological consciousness’ on the part of the reader, ‘a codicological unconscious in which reading can be subject to contingent interference from the look and feel of the page itself’ (Animal Skins: 142), I would here like to extend Kay’s perspective by proposing a further sensory aspect of the page’s ‘codicological unconscious’: the sonic. The skin on which the bestiary is written proposes a porousness between human and animal, allowing the possibility for a bestiary page to perform a suture between content and medium, between reader and page: ‘a feedback loop between the page as an animal surface and the texts and images it supports’ (Animal Skins: 4). The parchment page can also be viewed as obscene, since it is a flayed creature, with the inside, the flesh side, brought to view on the surface at the same time as the hair side is de-haired, removing a vital aspect of the animal’s identity. The book’s own ruptures are visual and tactile too, with holes and splits in the parchment visible and available to touch. As a complement to the visual and tactile aspects of bestiary manuscripts charted in Animal Skins, I will concentrate here on the role of aurality and orality in the most unusual of the bestiary materials that Kay considers, Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours (before 1260), a work she notes as 1

See Simpson in this volume, p. 287. 301

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being ‘unmoored from its theological moorings’ (Animal Skins: 51) and thus unlike the other, very specifically theological purposes of bestiary materials in French and Latin bestiaries. The Bestiaire d’amours opens with a very early rendering in French of the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Leach and Morton 2017: 321–3), followed by numerous examples of animals obscenely rupturing their own bodily containers, with what is inside coming out. This description of rupture is often accompanied by some kind of aural, oral, or sonic element, that is, some kind of vox, which Aristotle’s De anima (420b5) defines as ‘vox autem sonus quidam est animati’ (‘voice is the sound of an ensouled thing’, in both the James of Venice and William of Moerbeke translations).2 It is a feature of vox that it is simultaneously a subjective emanation from the inside of an animal and an objective enunciation that not only reaches its intended audience but is also heard by the ears of the same animal that produced it. Vox thus opens up a porousness between subject and object that is mediated by its own production in the act of the self’s communication with the other. This capacity of vox to be simultaneously inside and outside the generating subject is linked implicitly with the Bestiaire’s chronicling of the rupturing of the bodily container – the skin – of animals. Central to understanding the role of sound is the fact that reading in the Middle Ages was not only (and for some ‘readers’, not even) a visual practice, but one that operated also (or solely) through the modality of hearing (Coleman 1996; Saenger 1997). Medieval reading is therefore always also listening, relying not only on engagement with the material object of the book, but also on a non-physical object: sound. The ‘readers’ of medieval literature are thus the aural equivalent of voyeurs, effectively eavesdropping, especially when reading (i.e. enjoying the sonic performance of) lyrics or intimate texts like the Bestiaire d’amours, which are ostensibly addressed by one person to another person, in the singular.3 For when performed, the ‘je’ (I) cannot be equated with the person reading (voicing) the ‘je’ aloud, and nor can what would ordinarily be a plural group of listeners be considered to be the ‘vous’ (you) addressed, although both these possibilities seem demanded by the meaning heard in the sound of the text. Kay usefully focuses on the way parchment can interfere with the reading process in that ‘bestiary chapters that focus on breaches in the skin, like the Beaver’s self-castration or the destruction by the Hydrus of the Crocodile, are often copied on a membrane that has been torn or holed’ (Animal Skins: 3). I 2 Translations from the Aristoteles Latinus Database [accessed 24 January 2020]. Isidore of Seville also applies this stricter definition to vox, noting at the same time its common misuse; see Isidore 2006: 96. 3 On the perils of the audience for a text being drawn into voyeurism and eavesdropping, see Marnette in this volume, pp. 242–3.



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shall show that the sonic realisation of the visual image of ink on parchment – the medieval reading aloud of a work like Richard’s Bestiaire d’amours – like the event of viewing and handling the parchment page, can also perform a suture: a handy but visible stitching together of the edges of such a hole.4 This time, though, the suture is between sonic content, listening ‘reader’, and auditory environment, which together sound back – or echo – onto the physical page and reinforce or complicate the visual suture through the feedback loop between the reader’s mouth and reader’s and listeners’ ears. This aspect of the text also sutures the boundary between the material aspects of a text and its immaterial aspects, since the sonic, while immaterial, is also percussive (and thus potentially violent), and exerts force, especially on bodies, which it can leave scarred by the connection it makes. Seeing and hearing in Richard’s Bestiaire d’amours become fatally entwined early in the narrator’s (deliberately) garbled Prologue. Visual and aural reading (the latter consisting in either being read to aloud, or reading aloud to oneself) overlap in their use of vox, so that once one has chosen to look at written words, one cannot avoid hearing the voice (vox) of the letters (litterae). Kay invokes Agamben’s ‘anthropological machine’ to note that ‘the labor of constructing and maintaining [the] projected division of the self (“human”) from the other (“animal”)’ is beset by an ‘internal frontier’ within the human that ‘defines only part of a human as human’, thus designating some parts of every human being as an animal self (Animal Skins: 16).5 This frontier is not a clean boundary delimiting the human self but, rather, disrupts the very idea of selfhood, defining a messiness that connects human and non-human animals; as in bestiary materials, where animals’ implied selves rely on faces, voices, and behaviours that mirror those of humans. Voice is central to this messily shared idea of animal selfhood, since the sound of the voice performs self-expression both in human-authored texts and in the animals that inhabit bestiaries. The vox that is proper to humans, distinguishing them from animals which also produce voces, is hard to define. Initial chapters in grammar treatises attempt a definition in which the relation of all voces to the subset that is vox articulata literata (the ‘written articulate voice’ proper to grammar) is a microcosm for the relation of all animals to the subset that is human animals (see Leach 2007: 24–43; Leach 2009). Thus, the division of vox has its own internal division – especially when that vox is singing, rather than merely speaking or written – akin to a shifting internal frontier of selfhood, here reflected in only some aspects of human vox being exclusively human, and these being somewhat difficult to define authoritatively (see Leach 2009). The See Miranda Griffin’s discussion of this term in the Introduction to this part (p. 283). For development of the implications of my term ‘beset’, see Simpson in this volume (p. 288). 4 5

Figure 1  The cock crows and the ass brays in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, fol. 87v.

Figure 2  The dog vomits and the wolf bites its own leg in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308, fol. 89r.

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struggle of defining specifically human vox means that animal voces, when performed in descriptions and depictions – whether in language (sonic in fact or memory), images, or letters – add bewildering complexity to the boundary between humans and non-human animals, especially when they draw specific comparisons between the two, in examples which fatally compromise the bounded self of the animal in question. Ruptured by Sound: The Ass The power of immaterial sound over the body is established early on in Richard’s Bestiaire d’amours with the text’s second animal example, that of the ass, which amplifies the opening discussion of loud and unmelodious voice that used the example of the cock. The ass brays so loudly in its hunger that it bursts apart. The text states that the ass ‘plus a laide vois et orible’ (has the ugliest and most horrible voice) and when it is hungry and unable to find food ‘met […] si grant paine a recaner que il se deront tous’ (puts […] such effort into braying that it bursts asunder, Bianciotto 2009: 162). Manuscripts typically picture this voice by showing an ass with its head up and back, neck thrust out, and mouth open (Figure 1, where it appears in MS O on a page with a similarly vocal image of the cock).6 It is worth noting that this folio, the first to discuss non-human animals (although not the first to depict them), has multiple imperfections in the skin of the parchment, including a hole and two stitched gashes. This seems especially apt for the idea of the ass’s visible (but ultimately memorially audible) bray causing a rupture in its skin.7 The audiovisual nature of the image in MS O (Douce 308) is followed by a succession of images that foreground oralities both vocal and non-vocal, including images of vomiting and self-biting (the dog and wolf respectively; Figure 2). The mouth becomes an overdetermined and obscene part of the body. With the example of the ass, the narrator describes the force of his own vox – metaphorically the writing of his Bestiaire d’amours – as being like the wild ass braying in desperate hunger. Here, a number of key dualities are bridged and breached: the ass’s appetite, felt as desire, is expressed as a sonic emanation that prompts a physical disintegration. The sonic rupturing The following sigla are used in this chapter for manuscripts of the Bestiaire: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25566 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 412 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12786 Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 526 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2609. The presence of similar imperfections in the skin of the page is central to many of Kay’s readings in Animal Skins. 6 A B C H O V 7



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of the ass’s body is caused by hunger, but because it figures the narrator’s desire for the lady, that hunger is also sexual hunger (desire). And because the expression of this vox as the text of the Bestiaire d’amours is fatal to the animal that produces the vox, the idea that the loud broadcasting of a text of desire will be fatal to the producer (or reproducer) of that text’s vox is established early in the Bestiaire d’amours. The dangerous use of the ass’s voice is a sonic refraction of the author giving sound to a first-person persona, whose utterance risks breaching the author’s own integrity by pushing his voice both outside his selfhood and outside his own bodily limits. First the voice is externalised as text onto the dead skin of an animal (Kay’s point in Animal Skins) and then, through reperformance by those who are neither the author nor the ‘je’, re-externalised as ephemeral sound that will penetrate the skins/bodies of its listeners and its performer. Two further examples, those of the viper and the weasel, link desire more specifically to both sex and reproduction, and also represent the bodies of the animals in question as ruptured or breached by their own offspring. In both cases these ‘offspring’ are also ways of figuring the authorship – and/ or performance – of a text. These two cases are contrasting versions of one another. In both cases, offspring figure a subjective textual utterance that moves dangerously – even fatally – beyond subjective control. Textual Offspring, Weasel Words The weasel conceives through its ear and gives birth through its mouth (or vice versa), then uses its mouth to carry its offspring away from the site of birth; the viper, in a more violent version, conceives through its mouth and is then ruptured as its offspring are born through its side. Kay considers the interchangeability of the weasel’s orifice of conception – the mouth or the ear – as indicative of the superfluity of sexual orifices, and of the incontinent conception and appetite of the weasel (Animal Skins: 78–85). The more common presentation in bestiary materials describes the weasel swallowing the male’s seed, explicitly referencing fellatio. But only when the weasel conceives through the ear is conception (phono)logically related to sound and vox. In the Bestiaire d’amours the narrator introduces the weasel by saying that ‘il en i a de teles qui ont les testes perchies, que canques il leur rentre en une oreille rist par l’autre; et lau ou eles aiment s’escondient, aussi comme li moustoile’ (There are some women who have holes pierced in their heads so that whatever goes in one ear comes out of the other. Where they love they also deny themselves, like the weasel, Bianciotto 2009: 178.). Here, speech goes in through one hole in the head and out through another: which hole is not specified. But while manuscripts of the Bestiaire d’amours, too, show interchangeability between the mouth and the ear, conception by ear and

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birth by mouth is the more common way round in bestiary tradition, and this version is often depicted in the illustrations, even when the other is present in the text.8 The likely reason is that the explanation for the weasel giving birth through her mouth is a classical one, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text that silently underpins several of Richard’s exempla in the Bestiaire d’amours. In Book 9, Ovid specifically links the dangers of birth and the dangers of speech with Alcmene’s tale of her maid Galanthis’s transformation into a weasel. Under Juno’s jealous influence, Lucina, goddess of childbirth, has agreed to prevent the birth of Hercules, Jove’s son. Sitting on the altar in front of the door with her right knee crossed over her left and clasped with interlocking fingers, she holds back the birth by murmured spells. In labour for seven days and nights, Alcmene is on the point of death when her servant Galanthis emerges from her chamber to urge Lucina to congratulate the mistress on a successful delivery – at this point, a lie. In a state of consternation, Lucina unclasps her hands, thereby ‘easing the bonds’ and allowing Hercules to be born successfully. Galanthis then mocks Lucina, who responds by transforming her into a weasel; because her lying mouth has helped in childbirth, she is forced henceforth to give birth through her mouth (Ovid, Metamorphoses: Book 9, lines 273–323). The act of hearing/understanding creates ideas (conceptions) that will be expressed (born) through vox but can, as in Ovid, be a lie designed to manipulate the hearer’s action and accomplish the utterer’s desire through deception. Although the Bestiaire narrator claims that the weasel stands for (certain) women, in fact the narrator himself is the weasel who wishes to utter ‘weasel words’ to get what he wants. Typically for the Bestiaire d’amours, the moralisation is confused with respect to the subject positions of narrator and lady, as the narrator attempts to explain. He says that many women have ‘conchut par l’oreille’ (conceived by the ear) in hearing so many fair words that they feel obliged to grant their love; but, because they are frightened of being captured they ‘salent volentiers par coustume en autre parole’ (willingly out of habit jump to other words), and ‘se delivrent par le bouche a un escondit’ (deliver themselves by mouth of a refusal) (Bianciotto 2009: 180). As so often in the Bestiaire d’amours, the allegory entwines multiple meanings, such that, because the woman’s words of refusal are allegorised as the weasel’s children, 8 The MSS C and H (respectively BnF fr. 12786 and Dijon 526), two manuscripts transmitting earlier and better texts, both have it this way round, while A (BnF fr. 25566), Bianciotto’s base text, has the less (phono)logical situation. Despite this, A has a tworegister illustration of how ‘li moustoile conchoit et faonne’ (the weasel conceives and gives birth) on fol. 87r, which clearly shows birth through the mouth in the lower register, confirming that this, at least, was the understanding of the artist. For links to online images of sources, see https://eeleach.blog/2013/09/12/richard-de-fournivals-bestiary-of-love/.



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conceived in the head through the ear, her refusal is figured as the product of an unwanted penetration, the child of the performance of the text to her, its (involuntary) listener. The woman’s words of refusal, the narrator explains, are also figured by the second nature of the weasel according to the bestiary tradition. This animal’s transportation of its offspring to safety – by mouth, a further exercise of orality – stands for the lady, who, afraid of losing her words, moves them to another rhetorical place: the refusal. The analogy is incommensurate, for there has been a (barely perceptible) slippage from words to idea: the offspring that the woman has conceived should be words granting love, but they are now the thoughts she can hide by producing a different set of words, a refusal. This second nature of the weasel is ‘une des grandes desesperanches d’amours c’on ne voeille oïr parler de che que gregneur mestier i puet avoir, et tous tans voeille parler d’el’ (one of love’s greatest despairs: that one wishes not to hear anyone speak of that which is most needed, and that one always wishes to speak of something else, Bianciotto 2009: 180). The impersonal nature of this gloss makes it unclear who is hearing, speaking, wishing, or needing. This ambiguity leaves the textual interpretation open for the assumptions (based on the wishes) of individual listeners and/or to discussion among listeners of exactly whose words deliberately obscure what they most need. This in turn makes it possible for a listener to ignore what someone says and – in line with the hearer’s wishfulfilment – to gauge the speaker’s desire as the opposite of what is actually expressed, which is effectively the assumption of the Bestiaire’s narrator. With the weasel, production of vox is akin to the production of offspring. Both are forms of mediated reproduction, since the animal reproduces itself through its offspring and the speaker expresses the self’s desire (or refusal) through vox. The narrator is using his speech (itself ‘tant de biaus mos’ [so many fair words], Bianciotto 2009: 180) to make the lady conceive of an idea – the idea of accepting his love. As noted above, the narrator (thinks he) knows that she has this idea but has ‘moved it to another place’, so that the lady instead voices a refusal. An anonymous text, La Response du Bestiaire, purporting to be the addressee’s response, is copied immediately after the Bestiaire d’amours in four sources (Bianciotto 2009: 277–335).9 The female narrator takes the original text’s examples in order, animal by animal. Her response to the weasel (Bianciotto 2009: 294, 296) is driven by exactly the desire for refusal that the exemplum anticipates as she repeatedly begs God to protect her from such conception. She notes in particular the potential of the birth

9 It is found in MSS A, B, H, and V: that is, BnF fr. 25566, BnF fr. 412, Dijon 526, and ÖNB 2609.

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to be ‘si griés et si perilleus’ (so painful and so dangerous, Bianciotto 2009: 294). This is ostensibly about the literal pain of childbirth but, more explicitly, when she specifies that the thing being given birth to is ‘paroles’ (utterance), the lady notes that ‘verités est que pis ne puet li hom et le feme faire que de son faonner, c’est a dire de dire chose qui n’est couvenaule, et dont uns roiaumes puet estre destruis’ (truly there is nothing worse that a man or woman might do than to give birth to sound, that is, to say that which is inopportune and by which a kingdom might be destroyed, Bianciotto 2009: 294). The destruction of a kingdom through seditious speech associates the primary fear of suffering in childbirth with a political danger, something bad that may be done by ‘li hom et le feme’ (men and women). The Bestiaire d’amours was probably written for a noble wedding (Muratova 2005), so this explicit linking of production and reproduction with the potential to destroy a kingdom if not pursued correctly may have been particularly resonant. The monstrous birth of something that might destroy a kingdom is caused by aural penetration, hearing something (unwittingly, unwillingly) that then spawns something worse, birthed in a manner that causes pain to the vessel through which it passes. The Orphaned Text: The Viper The textual instability that renders the mouth of the weasel as the site of birth in some sources and in others as the site of conception was possibly influenced by the example of the viper, which, in contrast to the variability of the tradition of the weasel, always conceives by its mouth. This conception is not the mere swallowing of seed, however, as in some descriptions of the weasel’s conception; it is explicitly violent and implicitly obscene. The male viper thrusts (‘boute’) his head down the throat of the female – the verb bouter has a primary meaning of ‘to strike, hit, or push’, usually an animal or enemy, and a secondary meaning of ‘to thrust (sexually)’.10 The female viper bites off his head: ‘ele le trenche tout a dens et l’englout’ (she completely slices off his head with her teeth and swallows it, Bianciotto 2009: 238). Eating and sex are equated here via a single orifice used for multiple purposes: the throat becomes a vagina dentata, performing a decapitation on a head that is not just that of a viper, but, implicitly since it is impregnating her, that of a (human) penis. The viper’s parturition, too, is more violent than the weasel’s: she gives birth through her side, killed by her offspring when they burst out of her, in a revenge that mirrors her killing of their father (and echoes the fatal bursting apart of the hungry, desirous, braying ass).11 DMF, bouter, I. ‘Et quant che vient a l’enfanter, si enfante par le costé, et le couvient ensi crever et morir’ (And when she comes to give birth, she gives birth through her side, and thus has to 10 11



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Kay cites the viper as an example that ‘show[s] how many of the troubles afflicting human beings in their exile from paradise are founded in the physical capacities they share with other animals for sexual pleasure and reproduction on the one hand and animosity and destruction on the other’ (Animal Skins: 65). And indeed, in bestiary materials that predate Richard’s text there is little ostensibly sonic about the viper or its moralisation. Nonetheless, in the context of the Bestiaire d’amours the viper’s offspring resonate both with the offspring of the weasel, moralised as inopportune speech, and with the ass’s hungry bray, since they burst the viper asunder. The viper’s offspring are then also symbolic of vox, and this fact is crystallised by the narrator’s unique moralisation in which he warns his lady that the viper’s offspring are like those courtly lovers who ‘depulii[ent]’ (broadcast or make public) all about the women on account of whom they do all their worthy deeds, thus effectively rendering them notorious or slandering them.12 Such indiscreet lovers are like the viper because they cannot attain worth except by doing things that detract from the worth of the women who help them to be worthy. Here the vox that causes the rupture is not the viper’s but the courtly lover’s public declaration of his love for the lady, a description that could pertain to the entirety of the Bestiaire d’amours. As a sonic reproduction of courtly love, this declaration is analogically equivalent to the weasel’s sexual reproduction. The analogy does not entirely work, as typically in Richard’s text, and surely deliberately: if the lover is like the viper offspring that rip their mother to shreds, how is the conception allegorised? Seemingly the lady has bitten off the head of another man – clearly a form of sexual penetration – to engender this lover (the viper offspring) in the first place. The lady has killed the narrator by biting off his head when it penetrated her mouth, but she in turn will be killed (reputationally) by the thing he engenders – the broadcast to listeners of her penetration by him; the second lover’s speech is an illegitimate (sonic) child of their union. In a fairly nonexact way it mirrors aspects of the elocutionary context of the Bestiaire d’amours itself, a text (viper) thrust down the throat of the woman who hears (consumes, eats) it, which in turn engenders viper offspring which will publicise her identity in a way that will destroy her. perish and die, Bianciotto 2009: 238). 12 ‘Et pour che di je que ceste maniere de gent puis je par droit apeler wivre, car aussi comme li wivre anchois qu’ele soit parnee ochist chiaus de cui ele est, aussi ne pueent il venir a chele valeur qu’il dient fors de par depuliier cheles qui les aident a valoir, mais qui les font, se point i a valeur’ (And this is why I say that this type of person I can rightly call a viper. For as the viper kills the one to whom it owes its existence before it is fully born, so these people cannot come by the worth of which they speak except by broadcasting those [women] who help them to be worthy, or rather make them [so], if there is any worth in them at all, Bianciotto 2009: 238).

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As with the weasel, the authorial admonition lurking behind the surface desire of the narrator seems to point at the way spoken utterance and, by extension, literary production, can emanate and propagate beyond the control of the producing body (whether that is the author, the ‘je’, or the performer/ reader of the text). And in fact it is the very slippage of the subject positions in the parentheses of the previous sentence that are most salient: the gaps between the ‘je’ of the text, the performing subject, and the ‘real’ author make knowledge fraught because of the elusiveness of subjective authority and thereby of truth. Thus the listener is warned about this subjective slippage so as to avoid re-authoring or reperforming any text that has entered them (sonically) and whose monstrous birth might be destructive to themselves and/or to the kingdom. Conclusion The examples of the ass, weasel, and viper discussed above might be read as indicating a specifically sonic suture, designed to heighten the emotional affect of the text so as to instruct more readily. Where Kay mainly discusses the didactic text of more straightforward bestiary materials, here in Richard’s detheologised and hybrid text, the ‘instruction’ is, as she notes, different (Animal Skins: 51, 131). Intradiegetically, the Bestiaire d’amours is designed to instruct its addressee, the narrator’s lady, about the effects of her behaviour on him and additionally to instruct her to change her behaviour so as to allow him access to her body – understood to mean sexual access to her amorous body. But the sonic suture is performed when the work is read by or, more likely, to the lady: the words of the ‘je’ would sonically penetrate her ears, whether she wanted them to or not, and thereby enter her body. Since they make him present when he is absent, the authorial persona thereby proposes an image whereby he enters the woman he addresses. Extradiegetically, however, an audience that is not the addressed lady performs the aural equivalent of voyeurism, and worse. A kind of eavesdropping is conjured here in which the members of the audience, too, are penetrated, thus making clear the promiscuity of the narrator in penetrating others, undermining his claims in the text not to be one of those who love many ladies, and thereby confirming the lady’s rectitude in resisting the narrator’s earlier advances. Kay concludes that reading ‘is a space of thinking and, more fundamentally, of being, that is framed by its physical support’ (Animal Skins: 142). Richard’s Bestiaire seems particularly to exploit the fact that reading is also a space of hearing and listening, framed by the social and physical support of having a reader read the text to the audience. Even when the reader is reading alone, probably a rare occurrence in the Middle Ages, the text is mediated sonically. And while ‘a reader may feel held or enclosed by a book, and absorbed within



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its world, even though physically he or she is the one holding the book that can be set down at any moment’ (Animal Skins: 142), my sense is that this physical connection was far less frequent than – and was always supplemented by – a different connection structured by the absorption within and of another’s actual voice. The playfulness of the dialogue between Richard’s Bestiaire d’amours and its Response calls us to be attentive to the interference from the sounds – specifically the ensouled sounds, the voces – prompted, realised, and remembered by the page.

•  Sheep, Elephants, and Marco Polo’s  • Devisement du monde Sharon Kinoshita

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n Animal Skins, Sarah Kay explores the consequences of the fact that the manuscripts transmitting the texts we read and study were composed of animal skins; the parchment page, she writes, is ‘the site of convergence between seeming incompatibles: between bare life and intellectual life, livestock and literacy, the history of the book and the seemingly ahistorical existence of nonhuman animals’ (2). Having begun with sheep as providing the very material from which medieval manuscripts were made, the book concludes with elephants – focusing on an image, reproduced on the book’s dust jacket, from Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 14969 (fol. 60r), a late thirteenth-century English Franciscan manuscript of the vernacular French bestiary of Guillaume le Clerc. Like encyclopaedias and universal histories, bestiaries seem to lay claim to a kind of fixed and authoritative knowledge. Kay’s analyses, however, reveal how unstable the ‘textual identities’ of bestiary animals are across traditions (8). In this essay, I take Kay’s study of bestiaries as the point of departure for a different kind of enquiry: how textual representations of sheep and elephants, the two creatures that bookend Animal Skins, mediate boundaries between different medieval cultures (see Kinoshita 2012). As a matrix for this exploration of the Global Middle Ages, I take Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde (1298), which, as Simon Gaunt (2013b) has shown, insistently thematises diversity of various kinds. For our purposes, sheep and elephants – exemplifying the utterly domestic and the utterly exotic, respectively – not only prove good to think with, they allow us a window onto the diversity, zoological and cultural, of animals across a range of texts, genres, and traditions. Where Kay brings out the implications of the materiality of the manuscript page, Marco shows us the material existence of the animals themselves – how they matter to humans not as allegorisations, codified by repetition, based upon a presumed set of behaviours, but by their embeddedness in the various, often interconnected cultures spanning medieval Eurasia.

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Sheep in the Latin West Sheep, as Kay notes, are relative latecomers to the bestiary tradition. Sheep come (literally) into the picture in the Latin ‘Second Family’ bestiaries that first appear in mid-twelfth-century England, which introduced new chapters – including one on Sheep (SF §33) – just after the chapter on Adam (Animal Skins: 27).1 But ‘a bestiary sheep’, as Kay puts it, is not ‘the same as a realworld sheep grazing tranquilly in a nearby field’ (8–9). Rather, it is often read allegorically, often relying on etymologies taken from Isidore of Seville: ovis, ‘sheep’, we learn, comes from oblatio, ‘sacrifice’ (34). The bestiary chapter does not develop this etymological meaning; as Kay provocatively notes, however, it may ‘prompt the recognition that one of the reasons sheep are sacrificed is to produce books’ (39) like the bestiaries themselves. Nowhere is this more evident than in London, British Library, Sloane MS 3544, where, in the Naming of the Animals scene (fol. 15r), Adam and the animals gathered around him are drawn in outline so that their ‘skin’ is the unadorned surface of the parchment page: ‘in fact all of the creatures described and drawn on fos. 16r–v are potential “skin-donors”’ (Animal Skins: 39, and see Kay’s Plate 2). Bestiaries, however, are not the only place where sheep enter Latin European textual traditions. Closer to ‘a real-world sheep grazing tranquilly in a nearby field’ is the entry found in Brunetto Latini’s encyclopaedic compendium Li Livres dou tresor (Book of Treasure).2 The ‘treasure’ of the title is wisdom, and the book is divided into three parts. ‘Sheep’ – or rather, ewes – appear in the section on Animals at the conclusion of Part I. In keeping with Brunetto’s technique throughout the Tresor, this passage is a compilation of passages drawn from multiple sources, particularly the late fourth-/early fifth-century Latin author Palladius’s Opus agriculturae (Squillacioti 2008). In contrast to the bestiary’s biblical/allegorical focus, the Tresor treats sheep as ‘bestes de grant profit, a ce que il donent lait et fromaig et char a mangier, et laine por vestir, et la pel por maint fornimenz d’ome’ (very profitable animals, in that they give milk and cheese and meat to eat and wool for clothing, and a hide for many of man’s needs, 294, 296/130).3 It gives advice on maximising their value through selective breeding and herd management to ensure that the wool they produce is of the highest quality. Curiously, Brunetto pays special 1 This is not true of all Latin European traditions. There are no sheep, for example, in the Old French Bestiary of Pierre de Beauvais, the long version of which dates to c.1245– 68 (Baker 30). 2 Brunetto (c.1220–94), who is especially remembered today for his appearance in Canto XV of Dante’s Inferno, composed his Tresor in French during his political exile following the defeat (1260) of the Florentine Guelfs by the Ghibellines of Siena. 3 Tresor citations are taken from Latini 2007 (for the Old French)/Latini 1993 (for the English translation).

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attention to their vocalisations: sheep and their young recognise each other by the sound of their voice: black sheep say ‘mé’ while white sheep say ‘bé’. Conversely, the fleeting mention of the many uses to which sheepskin is put is never expanded to include parchment. Sheep in Asia Typically known in modern English translation as ‘The Travels’, Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde (1298) was composed in French in collaboration with the Arthurian romance writer Rustichello of Pisa.4 In recent criticism inspired by postcolonial theory, Marco Polo is often cast as an early, if not originary, example of Eurocentrism and the Orientalist gaze. In fact, the binarisms like East/West or us/them that structure later colonial or Orientalist discourse are nowhere to be found in the Devisement; also absent are geographical entities like Europe, Africa, and Asia central to contemporary T-O maps as well as learned works like Brunetto’s Tresor.5 Indeed, the interest and originality of the Devisement reside not only in the accounts Marco gives of parts of the world little known to his contemporaries but in the fact that he does so not from within learned, Latinate culture but from the practical, vernacular, experiential point of view of a Venetian merchant. Throughout, foreign peoples and their practices are de-exoticised through the use of familiar vocabulary or explicit analogy. Animals, on the other hand, incarnate the difference and diversity to be found in the world.6 Throughout the Devisement, animals in various locales are emphatically described as ‘not like ours’. This culminates in Zanzibar: ‘Il ont toutes bestes devisez a toutes les autres dou monde’ (All their animals are different from all the others in the world, 563/183: §192). This goes not only for exotic creatures like giraffes but for their sheep as well. Abyssinia contains ‘maintes autres bestes […] deviséç a celz dé nostres contrés’ (a multitude of […] animals, different from those of our countries, 575/186: §193). 4 In the generation before Dante’s Commedia elevated Tuscan into a literary language, Italians who wished to write in the vernacular often chose French (as in Brunetto’s Tresor). This language, which varied greatly in style from author to author, is today referred to as Franco-Italian (Gaunt 2013b: 15–16) or, more recently, ‘the French of Italy’. On the latter, see https://frenchofitaly.ace.fordham.edu [accessed 27 September 2019]. 5 T-O maps were stylised representations found in learned sources like manuscripts of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. They are so named because the world is pictured as a large O, representing the encircling ocean, trisected by a T, separating Asia (at the top/east of the map, accounting for half the total area), Europe (one quarter, to the left/north-west), and Africa (one quarter, to the right/south-west), generally with Jerusalem at the centre. 6 Quotations from the Devisement du monde refer to Polo 2019 (for the Old French)/ Polo 2016 (for the English translation), with chapter (§) number.



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Compared with the ‘simple animal’ of the Tresor, sheep in the Devisement du monde are varied and multiple. They are found across the breadth of Asia; and, as is the case with much of the flora and fauna Marco describes, each iteration brings a local variation. In Reobar, a province in south-eastern Persia, the sheep are ‘grant com asne, et ont la coe si grosse et si large que bien poisse trente livres; il sunt mout biaus et gras et sunt buen a manger’ (as big as asses; they have tails so thick and wide that it weighs a good 30 pounds; they are very beautiful and fat and are good to eat, 77/29: §36). Those found in the South Asian kingdom of Motupalli are, Marco tells us, the biggest sheep in the world, although he does not explain why. On the island of Zanzibar, all sheep without exception ‘sunt tuit blance et ont le chief noir’ (are all white with a black head, 563/183: §192). Sometimes, Marco tells us how sheep figure in local customs. In Zardandan, in south-west China, sheep are used in a shamanistic ritual to cure the sick (§120), while in Tangut they are sacrificed to the idols so they will safeguard one’s children. Finally, in the mountains north-east of Badakhshan, said to be the highest place in the world, is a plain with ‘the best pasture in the world’, where a skinny animal can fatten up in ten days. There one finds: grant moutitude de mouton sauvages qe sunt grandisme, car ont les cornes bien .VI. paumes et ao main .IIII. ou .III.; et de cet cornes font lé pastore grant escueles la o il mengiunt. Et encore les pastres de ceste cornes encludent les leus ou il tienent lor bestes. (115) (a multitude of very large wild sheep, with horns a good six palms, and at least four or three. From these horns the shepherds make big bowls that they eat from. The shepherds also use these horns to enclose the spaces where they keep their animals, 40: §50)

These, of course, are the species now known as Marco Polo sheep (Ovis ammon polii), a species of argali: wild sheep native to the mountains of Central Asia – today the target of international big game hunters.7 In contrast to the sheep in the bestiary or the Tresor, drawn from biblical-Isidorean and Palladian traditions, respectively, Marco’s sheep – from the fat-tailed sheep of Reobar to the majestic horned Ovis ammon polii – vary tremendously in appearance and use, exemplifying the wonderful diversity that lies at the heart of the Devisement du monde. 7 On the hunting of Marco Polo sheep, see for example http://www.gssafaris. com/hunting/marco-polo-sheep-hunt/ [accessed 20 November 2016]; for conservation efforts, see https://afghanistan.wcs.org/wildlife/marco-polo-sheep.aspx [accessed 20 November 2016].

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Sheep, meanwhile, were at the centre of the Mongols’ world. In their earliest attested homeland (the forests of northern Manchuria), the Mongols had herded cattle and horses; as they migrated south-west to eastern Mongolia in the eleventh century and adapted to the ‘full-time, extensive pastoralism’ of the steppe (Allsen 1994: 330), sheep became their most important herd animal (numbering sixty to a hundred or more for each member of the household), second in prestige only to their horses (Buell and Anderson 2010: 28). Sheep provide a frame of reference for Mongol views of the world. In The Secret History of the Mongols (1252?), a disgraced member of a rival tribe laments his life as ‘worth but a sheep’s dropping’ (de Rachewiltz 2004: 42, §111); in a happier if more incongruous comparison, large pearls are said to be the ‘size of sheep dung’ (Allsen 2019: 14)!8 In the ceremonial distribution of offices just after Chinggis is chosen Great Khan, one of his companions declares: In making broth Of a two-year-old wether, I shall not fail in the morning, I shall not be remiss at night. I shall tend pied sheep, And shall fill the bottom of the cart with them. I shall tend brown sheep, And shall fill the sheep-fold with them. I was a base and greedy man; now I shall tend sheep, And tripe shall I eat! (de Rachewiltz 2004: 50, §124)

As a reward, Chinggis appoints him sheep-tender – the third in precedence, after his quiver-bearer and steward. At nearly the same time (1253–55), the Franciscan friar William of Rubruck travelled to the court of the Great Khan Güyük (Qubilai’s predecessor). In the report he subsequently wrote for Louis IX of France, he describes the meals at the Mongols’ nomadic encampments: With the meat of a single sheep they feed fifty or a hundred men: they cut it up into tiny pieces on a dish along with salt and water (since they make no other sauce); and then on the end of a knife or a fork made specially for that purpose – the sort with which we usually eat pears and apples baked in wine – they offer each of the bystanders one or two mouthfuls, depending on the number at the meal. (Jackson 2009: 79) 8 The Secret History of the Mongols was originally composed in Mongolian but survives only in Chinese transcription. The exact date is uncertain.



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A favoured guest who had been awarded more mutton than he could eat would take the leftovers away in his captargac, a square bag used not just for meat but also for bones ‘when they do not have time to gnaw them properly, so that they can gnaw them later and no food is wasted’ (Jackson 2009: 80). Even after their conquest of China – a great sedentary empire with a distinguished culinary tradition – the Mongols still mostly ate sheep. In 1330, three decades after Marco composed the Devisement du monde, a court physician for Qubilai’s great-great grandson Tugh-Temür (r. 1328– 32) compiled a dietary manual entitled Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink (Yin-shan cheng-yao). A compendium with recipes and ingredients drawn from across the Mongol empire, including many of Persian or Arabic origin, its eclecticism reflects an imperial claim to cultural universality. Yet, though some of the recipes suggest that the Mongols were interested in the cuisine of other cultures, sheep remain central, with the entire animal being used. A recipe for sheep’s heart, for example, broiled on a spit and basted with a mixture of saffron and attar of roses, ‘pacifies heart ch’i’ and ‘makes a person very happy’ (Buell and Anderson 2010: I 50), while sheep’s loin, prepared in the same manner, is highly effective in treating ‘lumbago due to strain and ocular ache’ (Buell and Anderson 2010: I 51). In his nearly two decades spent in Qubilai’s service, Marco would assuredly have consumed his fair share of sheep. Curiously, though, one would never know this from the Devisement itself. His descriptions of the Mongols make practically no mention of their foodways; his account of the great feasts held at the court of the Great Khan focus on costume, ritual, tableware, and their copious consumption of alcohol, but not a word about their diet. Writing in the 1250s in a moment of first contact, William of Rubruck had taken an ethnographic interest in the Mongols’ still largely nomadic foodways; writing over four decades later, Marco is intent above all on conveying the unprecedented splendour of the great Qubilai Khan (Kinoshita 2008: 68–73). Elephants, East and West If sheep open Kay’s Animal Skins, then bestiary elephants provide closure, anchoring both the end of the final chapter and the Conclusion of the book. And elephants were read in myriad ways in the medieval world beyond European literary traditions. In verse 71 of his Masnavi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī recounts the tale of ‘The Elephant in the Dark’: Some Hindus had brought an elephant for exhibition and placed it in a dark house. Crowds of people were going into that dark place to see the beast. Finding that ocular inspection was impossible, each visitor felt it with his palm in the darkness.

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The palm of one fell on the trunk. ‘This creature is like a water-spout,’ he said. The hand of another lighted on the elephant’s ear. To him the beast was evidently like a fan. Another rubbed against its leg. I found the elephant’s shape is like a pillar,’ he said. Another laid his hand on its back. ‘Certainly this elephant was like a throne,’ he said. (Arberry 1993: 207–8)

A variant of the well-known tale of the ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’, it is a parable about the limitations of human understanding: ‘the sensual eye’, as Rūmī puts it, ‘is just like the palm of the hand. The palm has not the means of covering the whole of the beast’ (Arberry 1993, 207–8). Unknowable in its essence or its totality, the elephant reveals itself to the blind men only in fragments – each perception correct, as far as it goes, but at best partial and at worst highly distorting.9 Rūmī died in Konya (in central Anatolia) in 1273, just two years after the young Marco Polo had begun his trek through Asia from the port of Laias in Cilician Armenia. Despite these common links to the eastern Mediterranean, however, the two in some respects inhabited different worlds. As a native of Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan) who composed his works in Persian, the literary koine of the region stretching from Anatolia to Delhi, Rūmī was embedded in a culture in which elephants were familiar creatures that had significant cultural currency.10 In the Latin West, on the other hand, elephants were rare and exotic creatures. Undoubtedly the most celebrated elephant in medieval Western history is Abu’l-‘Abbas, the elephant that Charlemagne (according to his biographer, Einhart) received soon after his coronation in 800 from Harun al-Rashid. The attention this particular gift merits in Einhart’s account underscores the diplomatic and symbolic significance surrounding this gift from the ‘Abbasid caliph. Four and a half centuries later, the elephant that Henry III of England received as a present from his brother-in-law, Louis IX of France, aroused sufficient interest The foregoing is adapted from Kinoshita 2013: 39–40. Rūmī’s telling compresses a longer version found in al-Ghazali’s Revival of Religious Sciences and Sana’i’s Garden of Mystical Truth, dedicated in 1131 to the Ghaznavid ruler Bahram Shah (Arberry 1993: 16). 9 10



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to be mentioned and illustrated by Matthew Paris in his Chronica majora (Druce 1919: 4). In 1237, Emperor Frederick II featured an elephant he had received from the sultan of Egypt in a triumphal procession celebrating his victory over the Lombard League carrying a tower and dragging captives behind it (Kinoshita 2012: 51–2, citing Abulafia 1988: 303–4). These far-flung examples are exceptions that prove the rule of the rarity of elephants in the Latin West. Live elephants, that is: for throughout the Middle Ages, elephants were present in the West in the form of the many ivory statues, panels, containers, and other carved objects to be found in royal courts and church treasuries. The creation of such artefacts, as Sarah Guérin has shown, has a history linked to fluctuations in the global trade routes that brought elephant tusks to Europe.11 Such carvings, however, are largely divorced from their source: elephants do not figure among the plethora of images they depict. Describing the elephant in his Bestiaire divin (Divine Bestiary, discussed in greater detail below), Guillaume le Clerc notes: ‘Des os fet hom yvoire chere, / Dom l’em oevre en meinte manere’ (lines 4287–8) (Of the bones they make precious ivory which they fashion in many a way, Druce 1919: 18): in the early thirteenth century – just before the French vogue for Gothic ivory carvings – ivory is presented as not a primary material but a product crafted from the bones of the elephant! In the bestiary tradition, on the other hand, elephants are a familiar presence from the beginning, exemplifying the ‘innocent sexuality’ of Eden before the fall (Animal Skins: 65). They are intelligent and chaste. To reproduce, they head eastward, toward paradise. There, both male and female eat of the mandrake root, then mate; the female subsequently gives birth in a great lake, with the water protecting her from a dragon (representing the Devil) and the male elephant safeguarding her from serpents. In addition, serpents can be driven away by the burning of an elephant’s skin and bones. In texts calculated to ‘foster an emotional, moral, or spiritual self’ (Animal Skins: 128), ‘the overall point […] is that Elephants are the opposite of, and better than, human beings, because they ate only what was needed to procreate, whereas Eve and Adam ate in disobedience to God’s decree’ (146). Some manuscripts in the Physiologus tradition illustrate this point by juxtaposing images of elephants with Adam and Eve to illuminate the lost chastity of the post-Edenic world (26). Kay’s final chapter (Animal Skins: 128–48), concludes with a reading of the interplay between text and image in chapters 25 and 26 of Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 100 (c.1250). This H Bestiary manuscript consists of ‘even-colored parchment whose hair and flesh sides are barely distinguishable’ 11 In the tenth century, tusks used in Fatimid, Umayyad, and southern Italian carvings came from East Africa; beginning in the thirteenth, the tusks used in French Gothic carvings came from the West African savannah (Guérin 2010, 2013, 2019).

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(145), enhancing the reminder to the reader handling its pages that ‘he and the book share a skin that is important primarily as the container of a pure interior – and which he may be called upon to “burn”’ (146).12 But it is the Elephant that is ‘the truly worthy inhabitant of an Eden from which Adam and Eve were expelled. The Elephant’s soul is the model for [the reader’s] own’ (146). The Conclusion of Animal Skins (149–56) analyses the elephant chapter in BnF fr. 14969, fols 59r–60v, a late thirteenth-century English copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire divin.13 Like the H bestiary, the Bestiaire divin focuses on the elephant’s distinctive procreative habits. In this manuscript, Kay calls particular attention to the contrast between the text and the placement of the illustrations; their distribution highlights the page as a ‘unit of meaning’ (152) – further enhanced by the contrast between the two sides of the parchment page: the rougher, darker hair surface (fols 59r, 60v) versus the smoother and lighter skin surface (fols 59v, 60r). Kay’s reading of Guillaume le Clerc, like her reading of the H Bestiary, focuses on the spiritual lesson that elephants provide humankind. The Bestiaire divin entry begins, however, by situating the elephant in its worldly context: it can carry great burdens and is ‘bien sage et entendable’ (very wise and understanding, line 2980); then, it shows us how elephants are embedded in the cultures of Asia: En bataille est bien covenable; Ileques a mestier moult grant; Et li Indeu e li Persant, Quant aloient es granz estors, Seulent desus charchier granz tors, De fuz dolez bien quernellees. Quant veneient es granz merlees, Ilec montouent les archier, Li serjant e li chevalier, Por lancier a llors ennemis. (Hippeau, lines 2981–90) (In battle it is very useful. There it plays a great part, and the Indians and the Persians, when they go to war, are wont to load great towers on it, of worked wood, well embattled. When they come into the great fight, there mount up the archers, the men-at-arms and the knights, to shoot at their enemies. Translation adapted from Druce 1919: 15–16) 12 The H bestiary is a Latin redaction in thirty-four chapters produced in the second half of the twelfth century. All surviving manuscripts date to the thirteenth century and were produced in the region around Paris (Animal Skins: 160). 13 Composed in 1210–11 in Old French, the Bestiaire divin consists of 4,174 octosyllabic rhyming couplets (Animal Skins: 161).



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Fol. 39r shows an elephant, bearing a ‘castle’ adorned with two heraldic devices, carrying ten men, including a trumpeter in front and a brown-skinned, curly-haired man prodding the elephant with a staff in the rear.14 In this illustration and a few brief lines, the elephant becomes a node of connection between the world of the bestiary and that of Asian and South Asian cultures. In the Devisement, we first hear of elephants when Qubilai, in quelling a revolt by a rebellious cousin, goes into battle mounted on ‘une bertresche odree sor quatre leofans’ (a wooden tower arranged atop four elephants, 203/69: §79). Though the campaign is recounted at length, the elephants are not mentioned again. Where did these elephants come from? Three millennia before, elephants were found in most of what would become China, but the destruction of their forest habitat – partly due to climatic fluctuations, but mostly from clearing the land for agriculture – had resulted in what Mark Elvin calls a ‘retreat of the elephants’ (2006: 9).15 As elephants disappeared from the landscape, Chinese emperors began receiving them as tribute (Schafer 1963: 79–83, Allsen 1994). As Marco tells it, the Mongols first encountered and acquired elephants only in 1272,16 in a great battle against the king of Mien and Bangala (109ff). In a scene that closely mirrors the description in the Bestiaire divin, the opposing army included: .IIM. leofant mout grant, et fist faire soure chascun de cesti leufanti un chastiaus de fust mult fort et molt buen fait et ordree por conbatre. Et sor chascun chastiaus avoit au moin .XII. home por conbatre, et en tiel hi avoit .XVI. et en tiel pius. (339) (2,000 very large elephants, and atop each these elephants, [the king] had a very strong, very well-made wooden castle made and fitted out for combat; and on each castle there were at least 12 fighting men; some had 16 and some more. 110: §121)

At first, the Mongols did not act ‘qe il soient de rien esbaïs’ (in the least bit awed, 341/111: §122) – a measure of their strength and superiority. As 14 h t t p s : / / w w w. b l . u k / c a t a l o g u e s / i l l u m i n a t e d m a n u s c r i p t s / I L L U M I N . ASP?Size=mid&IllID=39304 [accessed 17 July 2019]. This mention of the elephant’s usefulness in battle also appears in Latin bestiary manuscripts such as London, British Library, Harley MS 3244 (Druce 6–7). 15 In places, elephants were also hunted for their ivory and, in the south, the meat of their trunks was regarded as a delicacy (Elvin 2006: 14–15). Today, wild elephants survive only in a few protected enclaves near the Burmese border (Elvin 2006: 9). 16 Throughout the Devisement, Marco’s dates are often slightly off and his account here conflates a series of campaigns against the Burmese kingdom of Pagan spanning the years 1273–87 (109 n. 24). The date 1272, significantly, places this battle just before the Polos’ arrival at Qubilai’s court and the Mongols’ conquest of the Southern Song empire.

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the elephants drew closer, however, their horses took fright and started to bolt. Since the Mongols’ military strength, like that of other steppe nomads, was inseparable from their incomparable horsemanship, to have their mounts spooked at the sight of elephants thus struck at the core of their tactical power. But, says Marco, they quickly and very wisely dismounted, tying their horses to trees in an adjacent forest and barraging the elephants with arrows until many are wounded and the enemy forces are thrown into disarray. As a result the Mongols captured more than two hundred elephants. A few years later, in 1278, the king of Champa (coastal central Vietnam) submitted to Qubilai, and afterwards sent the Great Khan twenty of their biggest and best elephants in annual tribute. Within a decade, Mongol expansionism had secured for Qubilai a plentiful and steady supply of elephants. The Mongols were quick to make ostentatious use of them. Their annual New Year’s ceremony, Marco reports, involved a good five thousand elephants, ‘tuit covers de biaus dras entailliés a [b]estes et a osiaus’ (all covered with beautiful cloths embroidered with animals and birds, 235/79: §89), each one bearing costly chests laden with tableware for the great feast. During his spring hunting expeditions, Qubilai rides in ‘une mout belle chanbre de fust’ (a beautiful wooden chamber, 249/83: §94) atop four elephants, this time surrounded by barons who entertain him and alert him when his gyrfalcons pursue and catch cranes passing overhead – a spectacle in which he takes great pleasure and great delight. This scene, for Marco, captures the essence of the Great Khan’s outsized personality and authority, since never had any man in the world taken as much pleasure and delight as he does, ‘ne […] si en aüst le poïr de fer’ (nor […] had the power to do so, 251/83: §94). Qubilai was not the first conqueror to negotiate the new possibilities presented by a sudden supply of elephants. In the early eleventh century, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna (in eastern Afghanistan) launched a series of campaigns into north-west India that reaped him a bounty of elephants – valuable in war as ‘mobile metal fortresses’ (Anooshahr 2018: 623) and symbolically resonant in crafting an iconography of sovereignty in a South Asian context in which the traditional image of the god Indra riding a white elephant connoted power (Anooshahr 2018: 616).17 Qubilai, on the other hand, also found more prosaic uses for his elephants – using them for traction, for example, to drag 17 In the lands around Ghazna, on the other hand, the overwhelming temptation ‘to employ elephants as often and as ostentatiously as possible’ was more problematic, since for Muslims the elephant was associated with satanic pride (Anooshahr 2018: 640). Given this, Ali Anooshahr argues, Mahmud’s efforts to construct an ‘elephantine sovereignty’ across the Indo-Islamic divide represents an attempt to assemble an Indo-Islamic empire – challenging the notion that Mahmud saw himself as a purely Muslim ruler based in Ghazna (Anooshahr 2018: 620).



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large exotic trees to the Green Mound, the artificial garden constructed north of the imperial palace in the Great Khan’s new city of Dadu (Beijing). Outside the Mongol empire, the Devisement notes where elephants are to be found, with remarkably few comments on their different features or assertions of strangeness. On the contrary, elephants serve as a foil for the account of other creatures more deserving of curiosity or wonder. While the wild elephants found in the kingdom of Basma (on the island of Sumatra), for example, excite no comment, they serve as the standard of reference a few lines later in the account of ‘unicornes’ (unicorns, 465/151: §166) (rhinoceroi), described as ‘mie gueres moin qe un leofans’ (hardly smaller than an elephant) with hair like buffalo and feet ‘come leofant’ (like elephants, 465/151: §166).18 Interestingly, Marco’s most sustained attention to elephants is reserved for sites along the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean, confirming what we know of the importance of the Swahili coast in the medieval ivory trade (Guérin 2010). Mogdasio (Madagascar?) is, according to Marco, home to more elephants than any other province, rivalling Zanzibar, where ‘il font grant mercandies des dens’ (they make great commerce of their teeth, 182/563: §192). In contrast to the bestiaries, Marco correctly identifies elephants’ tusks, rather than bones, as the source of ivory.19 The passage in the Devisement most closely related to the bestiary tradition comes as something of an afterthought. In the Zanzibar chapter, Marco observes: Et encore voç di aucune cousse dou leofant, que je avoit dementiqé: or saqiés qe quant le leofant vuelt çaçer a la lefantese, il cave la tere tant qe hi mete la lefantese reverse en mainere de feme, po ce q’ele a la nature mout ver le ventre, e le leofans le monte sus com c’il fust ome. (Polo 2019: 563, 565: §192) (I also tell you something about the elephant that I had forgotten; now know that when the elephant wants to hunt the elephantess, he digs the earth enough to put the elephantess in it backward, like a woman, because her privates are close to her belly; and the elephant mounts her as if he were a man. Polo 2016: 183)

18 This account is one of several contesting received wisdom of the kind found in Brunetto’s Tresor: the ‘unicorn’ is ‘mout laide beste a veoir. Il ne sunt pas ensi come nos de ça dion et deviçon, qe dient q’ele se lai prendre a la poucelle, mes vos di qu’il est tout le contraire de celz qe nos qui dion qe il fust’ (a very ugly beast to see. They are not as we say and describe here when they say that it lets itself be captured by a virgin. But I tell you it’s just the opposite of what we all say it is like, 465/152: §166). 19 Marco has no word for ivory. His mention of elephant ‘teeth’ instead of ‘tusks’ is typical of the text’s limited vocabulary, as where he elsewhere refers to the ‘nails’ (105), not ‘claws’, of the ‘great serpents’ [crocodiles] found in the kingdom of Qarajang (Yunnan province).

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This mention of elephant mating habits takes up the central preoccupation of the bestiaries, only directly to subvert it: elephant sexuality is compared to human sexuality, not to contrast their chastity with the concupiscence of Adam and Eve, thereby showing that ‘elephants are the opposite of, and better than, human beings’ (Animal Skins: 146), but precisely to underscore shared human and elephant carnality. Like the bestiary compilers, Marco emphasises the sexual embodiment common to both, but in a way that eschews all spiritual allegorisation. Elephants feature prominently in Nuh-Sipihr or Nine Skies (composed in 1318), a treatise on the glories of India by the Delhi poet and scholar Amīr Khusrau (1253–1325) – an exact contemporary of Marco Polo’s. At the conclusion of his third chapter, the ‘Wonderful Birds and Animals of India’, Khusrau, unlike either the bestiaries or the Devisement, emphasises the interaction between human beings and elephants. At first, this interaction takes the form of subjugation: the elephant ‘obeys […] the commands of man [better than does the] monkey’ (89, §89, my italics); though physically ‘bulky and strong’, the elephant is ‘more intelligent than other animals. He obeys your orders and is anxious to know your mind and act according to your wishes’ (89, §§90–1, my italics). Then, however, the description takes a somewhat different turn: He has a great sense of discrimination between good and bad. He has many human qualities, except that he cannot talk. Like man, he lives for more than 120 years. Like man, he sits on his knees. His ailments are treated by the same medicines which are given to man. He is entirely attached to his trainer. (90, §§93–5)

As in Marco Polo’s ‘something I had forgotten’ (183), this passage highlights the affinities between elephant and man – not, as in Kay’s analysis of the medieval practice of reading, through the shared skin of the parchment page, nor, as in bestiary allegorisations, by erasing the species boundary between them, but by enumerating shared qualities and capacities. It concludes with an assertion of the elephant’s attachment to his trainer, for a fleeting moment bringing into focus the countless handlers who remain largely invisible in the other accounts we have examined. In Rūmī’s parable, the elephant is fragmented and objectified, rendered through touch but no other senses. Here, Amīr Khusrau puts the pieces together again. He speaks not of body parts – tusks to be mined for ivory, bones and skin to be burned to ward off serpents – but the shared experiences of a life lived (a hundred and twenty years!): not, to be sure, on equal terms, but on terms of close sympathy and even affection.



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Conclusions Bestiaries, like the ear or the trunk of Rūmī’s elephant, provide an important but highly partial view of medieval representations of animals. In the bestiary tradition explored in Animal Skins, non-human animals become repositories of spiritual truths to be mined for the edification of good Christians on the best way of living a Christian life – an approach that confirms our view of the overarching piety of the Latin Middle Ages. The diverse texts assembled in this chapter broaden that perspective, affording us a glimpse at the multiple ways people in the Middle Ages related to and thought about animals – not only those around them but, in the case of the elephant, those they ‘knew’ exclusively through texts. Across Eurasia, sheep provided food (in the form of meat and milk), raw materials (wool and skin) for textiles and other forms of manufacture, symbols (for the pious Christian self or the uncouth nomadic other). Elephants were used for transport and in military engagements, served as sources of ivory, were given as gifts or tribute, and served as living representations of power (to aggrandise one’s own reputation and to awe one’s subjects or enemies). Then as today, animals were good to think with, but not in ways that can be neatly compartmentalised as ‘Eastern’ or ‘Western’. In bringing the diversity of animals and their uses to light, in noting their geographical, biological, cultural, and (in the case of elephants) historical specificity, Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde opens the way for us to reconsider not just a range of medieval texts, but the people and cultures that produced them.

•  Afterword  • Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken

T

he intellectual trajectory traced by Sarah Kay’s monographs, and by the studies inspired by them in this book, offers an eloquent route map of some of the major developments in medieval French studies since the 1980s. The engagement in her work with, for example, feminism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, contemporary and medieval philosophy, and animal studies underscores the vibrant interdisciplinarity of research on medieval French literature over the last thirty or so years. If Kay at the start of her career drew inspiration from theoretically informed French medievalists writing in the 1970s – scholars like Stephen G. Nichols, R. Howard Bloch, Peter Haidu, Eugene Vance, and particularly Paul Zumthor – her commitment to feminism and her turns to psychoanalysis and philosophy set her work apart from what went before. And if there were a number of fellow travellers in the move to bring modern theory to medieval French literature, Kay seems to have always had a knack for opening new questions and pointing towards new ways of structuring those questions. This forward-looking nature of Kay’s work was one of the main reasons for calling this book The Futures of Medieval French. It seems appropriate, therefore, to end this book with a brief reflection on how Kay’s recent work may offer pointers to where the discipline is headed now. We see three main features of her recent work that are suggestive as to the directions the discipline may take over the next few decades: first, a return to philology (albeit a renewed version of it) and some core medievalist skills; second, a further expansion of theoretically informed interdisciplinary enquiry and dialogue; third, a whole-hearted and creative adoption of the potential of the digital age and methods to enhance our research. All three of these features are in evidence in the most recent of Kay’s books to be discussed in this collection, Animal Skins and the Reading Self: her close scrutiny of the manuscript page as a signifying space is deeply philological as well as codicological (and, in this respect, entirely different from the text-focused criticism Kay practised at the beginning of her career) and theoretical; the engagement with animal studies and the post-human turn brings Animal Skins into dialogue with a range of disciplines with which Kay’s work had not previously engaged systematically; the whole enterprise 329

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was enabled by the extensive programme of digitisation undertaken by major manuscript collections around the world over the last twenty or so years, which makes available to anyone with a computer high-quality reproductions of manuscripts that previously would have been inaccessible to all but an elite few researchers with the funds and time to travel to many libraries. Of course, digitised manuscripts do fall short on one key point that is vital to Kay’s work – touch – but all the same, they have revolutionised the way medievalists can do their research and, equally importantly, their teaching. Kay’s other recent and current research takes her yet further down these paths. Philology’s Vomit (Kay 2017b) is nothing less than a manifesto for how philology might accommodate itself to a theoretically informed practice of manuscript studies and material culture; her forthcoming book on song is the product of extensive interdisciplinary collaborations with musicologists and will include digital recordings of many of the songs discussed. Vital to the future of medieval French is its capacity to find an institutional home within the changing academy. As language departments shrink and disappear in UK and US universities, Romance philology departments shrink in Germany and Italy, and even some francophone universities cease to require the study of medieval texts, future posts for French medievalists are by no means guaranteed. The institutional precarity of our field makes broad interdisciplinary training all the more vital. We need to envisage (and campaign for) a future in which French medievalists within the academy teach and conduct their research beyond the confines of a discipline we call ‘French literature’. We can and should embrace the great creative potential that new institutional and professional configurations may offer for pushing research in new directions. French medievalists can bring theoretically informed historical perspectives to interdisciplinary fields like critical animal studies, the environmental humanities, and the medical humanities, to cite just a few, and it is urgent that our field continue to engage substantively with historical and discursive definitions of race and racialised hierarchies. It is also crucial to maintain the place of medieval French studies in areas like the digital humanities and feminist, gender, and queer studies, where work in our field has already made incisive interventions. Kay’s publications demonstrate that interdisciplinary enquiry need not compromise a commitment to deep and rigorous disciplinary knowledge – they show, in fact, that each benefits the other. As we look to the future of medieval French, we must find ways to support graduate students’ ability to attain a high level of expertise within our discipline, while gaining knowledge in other disciplines and fields. Collaborations with libraries, archives, creative artists such as writers, musicians, sculptors, performers will also be crucial to keeping medieval French as a vital part of cultural and academic life. Kay’s work also demonstrates the great potential in our field for collaborative initiatives and projects that



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reach across national as well as disciplinary boundaries. International and multilingual exchange must also lie at the heart of this, and a strong feature of Kay’s research on both sides of the Atlantic has been continued dialogue with continental European scholarship, as well as anglophone theoretically oriented criticism. Indeed, Philology’s Vomit grew out of a lecture given in Switzerland and some of her most recent productive interactions have been with scholars in Germany or France. The next challenge is how to ensure that medieval French remains meaningfully embedded in work on the Global Middle Ages, though we suspect that again philology and interdisciplinarity may be key to this. Judged by the essays in this volume, the study of medieval French is in a very healthy state intellectually; and while medieval French no doubt is in a precarious situation institutionally in the countries round the world where traditionally it has thrived, it is heartening that this volume includes early-career researchers who demonstrate the continued vibrancy of the field and guarantee its future. The essays collected here demonstrate that Kay’s books provide one form of the giant’s shoulders on which future scholarship will stand.

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——. 1990. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press) Seidman, Naomi. 2010. Faithful Renderings: Jewish–Christian Difference and the Politics of Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 1–40 Sharman, Ruth Verity. 1989. The ‘cansos’ and ‘sirventes’ of the troubadour Giraut de Borneil: A Critical Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Shirt, David. 1980. ‘La Châtelaine de Vergi : The Technique of Stylistic Cohesion’, Reading Medieval Studies, 6: 81–99 Short, Ian. 2007. ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Henry II’, in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. by C. Harper-Bill and N. Vincent (Woodbridge: Boydell), pp. 335–61 Simpson, James R. 2013. ‘Verse Conversions? Mise en page and Metre in Rutebeuf’s Le Miracle de Théophile’, in Performance and the Page, ed. by Kate Maxwell, Peter Davies, and James Simpson, special issue of Pecia: Le livre et l’écrit, 16: 17–40 ——. 2020. ‘Motion, Contact and Profanity in Rutebeuf’s Tales of “Charlot le Juif”: (Not) Going There, (Not) Touching That’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqaa001 Sinclair, Finn. 2008. ‘The Imaginary Body: Framing Identity in Ami et Amile’, Neophilologus, 92: 193–204 Sirat, Colette. 2002. Hebrew Manuscripts of the Middle Ages, ed. and trans. by Nicholas de Lange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Smith, A. Mark, ‘Perception’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. by Robert Pasnau, assoc. ed. Christina van Dyke. 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. I, pp. 334–45 Smith, Rachel. 2016. ‘Language, Literacy, and the Saintly Body: Cistercian Reading Practices and the Life of Lutgard of Aywières (1182–1246)’, Harvard Theological Review, 109: 586–610 Souto Cabo, José Antonio. 2012a. Os cavaleiros que fizeram as cantigas. Aproximação às origens socioculturais da lírica galego-portuguesa (Niterói: Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense) ——. 2012b. ‘En Santiago, seend’ albergado en mia pousada. Nótulas trovadorescas compostelanas’, Verba, 39: 273–98 Squillacioti, Paolo. 2008. ‘La Pecora smarrita. Ricerche sulla tradizione del “Tesoro” toscano’, in A Scuola con Ser Brunetto. Indagini sulla recezione di Brunetto Latini dal Medioevo al Rinascimento. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Università di Basilea, 8–10 giugno 2006, ed. by Irene Maffia Scariati (Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo), pp. 547–63 Stahuljak, Zrinka. 2019. ‘L’Empire des livres: imagination, matière d’Orient, et archive du possible aux Pays-Bas bourguignons’, Tirant 22: 195–205 ——. 2020a. Médiéval contemporain: Pour une littérature connectée (Paris: Éditions Macula) ——. 2020b. ‘World Collecting: Patronage, Spoliation, and Forms of Government,’ in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, vol. II: 600 C.E. to 1450 C.E., ed. by Christine Chism (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 1181–9



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•  LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS  • Berlin, Deutsche Staatbibliothek, MS Hamilton 257 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9574–9575 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 329 Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 100 Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château, Musée Condé MS 472 Coligny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 168 De Ricci Supplement Census, MS A 2200 Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 526 Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr. 168 London, British Library, Harley MS 3244 London, British Library, Sloane MS 3544 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 133 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 819 (Chansonnier N) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 445 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 375 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 412 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 856 (Chansonnier C) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 860 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1300 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1433 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1450 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2136 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2810 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12399 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12560 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12603 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12786 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 14969 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 22543 (Chansonnier R) Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25545 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25566 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 359

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4531 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 13521 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections, Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125 Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 243 Turin, Archivio di Stato, MS Jb.II.18 València, Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 387 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reginensi Latini, MS 1725 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican Latino, MS 3207 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2609

•  BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORK BY SARAH KAY  •

Monographs Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) The ‘Chansons de Geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) The Romance of the Rose (London: Grant & Cutler, 1995) Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003) (Turkish translation 2006; Korean translation 2006; Persian translation 2017) The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017) Philology’s Vomit: An Essay on the Corporeality and Immortality of Texts (Zurich: Chronos, 2017) (in preparation) Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera Co-authored books A Short History of French Literature, co-written with Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, co-written with Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sharon Kinoshita, and Peggy McCracken (Cambridge: Brewer, 2011) Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’, co-written with Adrian Armstrong, with the participation of Rebecca Dixon, Miranda Griffin, Sylvia Huot, Francesca Nicholson, and Finn Sinclair (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011) (Translated into French as Une Muse savante? Poésie et savoir, du 'Roman de la Rose' jusqu'aux grands rhètoriqueurs (Paris: Garnier, 2014))

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Scholarly edition Raoul de Cambrai. Edited with an Introduction, Translation and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) (Edition re-issued with a new introduction and translation in French by William W. Kibler (Paris: Poche, 1996))

Co-edited books Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994) The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Poetry, Knowledge, and Community in Late Medieval France, ed. by Rebecca Dixon and Finn Sinclair, with the assistance of Adrian Armstrong, Sylvia Huot, and Sarah Kay. (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008) The Modernist Bestiary: Translating Animals and the Arts with Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy, and Graham Sutherland, ed. by Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews (London: UCL Press, 2020)

Edited special issues of journals Displacement and Recognition, co-edited with Mark Chinca, Simon Gaunt, and Nicolette Zeeman, special issue on medieval literature of Paragraph, 13.2 (1990) The Practice of Medieval Literature, co-edited with Mark Chinca, Simon Gaunt, and Nicolette Zeeman, special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33.3 (1997) Crossing Branches: Occitan Studies in the U.K., special issue of Tenso: Bulletin of the Société Guilhem IX, 17.1 (2002) Soundings and Soundscapes, co-edited with François Noudelmann, special issue of Paragraph, 41.1 (2018) Versions of the Natural, co-edited with Nicolette Zeeman, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 49.3 (2019)

Articles and chapters in books ‘Topography and the Relative Realism of Battle Scenes in the Chansons de geste’, Olifant, 4 (1977), 259–78 ‘The Nature of Rhetoric in the Chanson de geste’, Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie, 94 (1977), 305–20 ‘The Contrasting Use of Time in the Romances of Jaufre and Flamenca’, Medioevo Romanzo, 6 (1979), 37–62 ‘Ethics and Heroics in the Song of Roland’, Neophilologus, 62 (1978), 480–91



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‘Two Readings of the Lai de l’Ombre’, Modern Language Review, 75 (1980), 515–27 ‘Raoul de Cambrai or Raoul sans Terre?’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 84 (1983), 311–17. Repr. as ‘Raoul de Cambrai, ou Raoul sans terre?’ in L’Orgueil a desmesure: Études sur ‘Raoul de Cambrai’, ed. by Denis Hüe (Orleans: Paradigme, 1999), pp. 71–8 ‘The Epic Formula: A Revised Definition’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 93 (1983), 170–89 ‘Love in a Mirror: An Aspect of the Imagery of Bernart de Ventadorn’, Medium Ævum, 52 (1983), 272–85 ‘The Character of Character in the Chansons de geste’, in The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, ed. by Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1984), 475–98. Repr. as ‘Le Caractère des personnages dans les chansons de geste’ in L’Orgueil a desmesure (see above), pp. 79–105 ‘La Composition de Raoul de Cambrai’, Revue belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 62 (1984), 474–92 ‘The Tristan Story as Chivalric Romance, Feudal Epic and Fabliau’, in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, Toronto, 1983, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), pp. 185–95 ‘La Notion de personnalité chez les troubadours: encore la question de la sincérité’, in Mittelalterbilder aus neuer Perspektive: Diskussionsanstösse zu amour courtois, Subjektivität in der Dichtung und Strategien des Erzählens: Kolloquium Würzburg 1984, ed. by Ernstpeter Ruhe and Rudolf Behrens (Munich: Fink, 1985), pp. 166–82 ‘Continuation as Criticism: The Case of Jaufre Rudel’, Medium Ævum, 56 (1987), 46–64 ‘Rhetoric and Subjectivity in the Troubadour Lyric’, in The Troubadours and the Epic: Essays in Memory of W. Mary Hackett, ed. by Linda M. Paterson and Simon B. Gaunt (Coventry: Department of French, University of Warwick, 1987), pp. 102–42 ‘Le Passé indéfini: problèmes de la représentation du passé dans quelques chansons de geste féodales’, in Au Carrefour des routes d’Europe: Xe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes, Strasbourg, 1985 [Senefiance 20, 21]. 2 vols (Aix-en-Provence: Publications du CUERMA, Université de Provence, 1987), vol. II, 697–715 ‘Le Roman de Flamenca et le problème du déjà-dit’, Revue des Langues Romanes, 92 (1988), 41–60 ‘Derivation, Derived Rhyme, and the Trobairitz’, in The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, ed. by William D. Paden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp. 157–82 ‘Seduction and Suppression in Ami et Amile’, French Studies, 44 (1990), 129–42 ‘Investing the Wild: Women’s Beliefs in the Chansons de geste’, Paragraph, 13 (1990), 147–63 ‘Compagnonnage, désordre social et hétérotextualité dans Daurel et Beton’, in Actes du XIe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals (Barcelone, 22–

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27 août 1988). 2 vols (Barcelona: Real Academia de Buenas Letras, 1990), vol. I, 353–67 ‘Commemoration, Memory and the Role of the Past in Chrétien de Troyes: Retrospection and Meaning in Erec et Enide, Yvain and Perceval’, Reading Medieval Studies, 17 (1991), 31–50 ‘Kings, Vassals and Queens: Problems of Hierarchy in the Old French and Occitan Chansons de geste’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 1 (1992), 27–47 ‘La Représentation de la féminité dans les chansons de geste’, in Charlemagne in the North: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference of the Société Rencesvals, Edinburgh, 4th to 11th August 1991, ed. by Philip E. Bennett, Anne Elizabeth Cobby, and Graham A. Runnalls (Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals, British Branch, 1993), pp. 223–40 ‘Allégorie et subjectivité dans la poésie des troubadours’, Atti del Secondo Congresso Internazionale della ‘Association Internationale d’Etudes Occitanes’, ed. by Giuliano Gasca Queirazza, 2 vols (Turin: Dipartimento di scienze letterarie e filologiche, Università di Torino, 1993), vol. I, 207–19 ‘Sexual Knowledge: The Once and Future Texts of the Romance of the Rose’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. by Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 69–86 ‘The Life of the Dead Body: Death and the Sacred in the Chansons de geste’, in Corps mystique, corps sacré, ed. by Françoise Jaouën and Benjamin Semple, Yale French Studies, 86 (1994), 94–108 ‘Motherhood: The Case of the Epic Family Romance’, in Shifts and Transpositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr Elspeth Kennedy, ed. by Karen Pratt (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 23–36 ‘Women’s Body of Knowledge: Epistemology and Misogyny in the Romance of the Rose’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 211–35 ‘Contesting “Romance Influence”: The Poetics of the Gift’, Comparative Literature Studies, 32 (1995), 320–41 ‘Past Culture’, Paragraph, 18 (1995), 101–11 ‘Le Problème de l’ennemi dans les chansons de geste’, in Aspects de l’épopée romane: Mentalités, idéologies, intertextualités, ed. by Hans van Dijk and Willem Noomen (Groningen: Forsten, 1995), pp. 261–8 ‘Feminism and Old French Studies: Une Bele Disjointure’, co-written with E. Jane Burns, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer, in Medievalism and the Modernist Temper, ed. by R. Howard Bloch and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 225–66 ‘The Contradictions of Courtly Love and the Origins of Courtly Poetry: The Evidence of the Lauzengiers’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 26 (1996), 209–53 ‘Adultery and Killing in La Mort le roi Artu’, in Scarlet Letters: Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. by Naomi Segal and Nicholas White (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 34–44



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‘Who was Chrétien de Troyes?’, Arthurian Literature, 15 (1997), 1–35. ‘The Birth of Venus in the Roman de la Rose’, Exemplaria, 9 (1997), 7–37 ‘Text(s) and Meaning(s) in the alba of Giraut de Bornelh’, in The Art of Reading: Essays in Memory of Dorothy Gabe Coleman, ed. by Philip Ford and Gillian Jondorf (Cambridge: Cambridge French Colloquia, 1998), 1–10. Repr. in Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, ed. by Lawrence J. Trudeau (Detroit: Gale, 2016), 120–5 ‘L’Éthique dans Raoul de Cambrai’, Op. Cit.: Revue de littératures française et comparée, 13 (1999), 5–10 ‘Desire and Subjectivity’, in The Troubadours: An Introduction, ed. by Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 212–27 ‘Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 81–96 ‘Analytical Survey 3: The “New Philology”’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 295–326 ‘The Sublime Body of The Martyr: Violence in Early Romance Saints’ Lives’, in Violence in Medieval Society, ed. by Richard W. Kaeuper (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 3–20 ‘The Didactic Space: The City in Christine de Pizan, Augustine, and Irigaray’, in Text und Kultur. Mittelalterliche Literatur, 1150–1450, ed. by Ursula Peters (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001), pp. 438–66 ‘Singularity and Spectrality: Desire and Death in Girart de Roussillon’, Olifant, 22 (1998–2003), 11–38 ‘Mémoire et imagination dans Le Joli buisson de Jonece de Jean Froissart: La fiction entre philosophie et poétique’, Francofonia, 45 (2003), 179–97 ‘Le moment de conclure: Initiation as retrospection in Froissart’s dits amoureux’, in Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Nicola F. McDonald and W. Mark Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2004), pp. 153–71 ‘Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine’, in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Cloth Work, and Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. by E Jane Burns (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 193–205 ‘Le donne nella società feudale: la dama e il dono’, Lo spazio letterario del Medioevo, part 2: Il Medioevo volgare, vol. IV: L’attualizzazione del testo, ed. by Piero Boitani, Mario Mancini, and Alberto Vàrvaro (Rome: Salerno), 2004, pp. 539–65 ‘Contradiction and Abjection in the Tristan of Thomas and the Poetry of Marcabru’, in Etudes de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts à l’occasion de son 70ème anniversaire, ed. by Ann Buckley and Dominique Billy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 27–36 ‘Original Skin: Flaying, Reading and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works’, in Theory and the Study of Premodernity, ed. by Elizabeth Clark, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 36:1 (2006), 35–74

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‘Ideology in “Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles” 62: History, Historicism and Historicity’, in Mittelalterliche Novellistik im europäischen Kontext: Kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven, ed. by Mark Chinca, Timo Reuvekam-Felber, and Christopher Young (Berlin: Erick Schmidt Verlag, 2006), pp. 224–37 ‘Grafting the Knowledge Community: The Purposes of Verse in the Breviari d’amor of Matfre Ermengaud’, Neophilologus, 91 (2007), 361–73 ‘Genre, Parody and Spectacle in Aucassin et Nicolette and Other Short Comic Tales’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 167–80 ‘Touching Singularity: Consolation, Philosophy, and Poetry in the French dit’, in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 21–38 ‘How Long is a Quotation? Quotations from the Troubadours in the Text and Manuscripts of the Breviari d’amor’, Romania, 127 (2009), 140–68 ‘Occitan Grammar as a Science of Endings’, in Medieval Grammar and the Literary Arts, ed. by Rita Copeland, Chris Cannon, and Nicolette Zeeman, special issue of New Medieval Literatures, 11 (2009), 39–61 ‘La Poésie, la vérité, et le sujet supposé savoir: citations des troubadours et poétique européenne’, in Judith Butler et al., Pourquoi des théories? (Besançon: Solitaires Intempestifs, 2009), pp. 87–111 ‘Knowledge and Truth in Quotations from the Troubadours: Matfre Ermengaud, Compagnon, Lyotard, Lacan’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 46 (2009), 178–90 ‘The Roman de la rose and the Inverted Bouquet: Reflections of Love’, in Mythes à la cour, mythes pour la cour (Courtly Mythologies): Actes du XIIe Congrès de la Société internationale de littérature courtoise, 29 juillet–4 août 2007 (Universités de Lausanne et de Genève), ed. by Alain Corbellari, Yasmina FoehrJanssens, and Jean-Claude Mühlethaler (Geneva: Droz, 2010), pp. 295–310 ‘L’Arbre et la greffe dans le Breviari d’amor de Matfre Ermengaud: Temps du savoir et temps de l’amour’, in L’Arbre au Moyen Âge, ed. by Valérie Fasseur, Danièle James-Raoul, and Jean-René Valette (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris–Sorbonne, 2010), pp. 169–81 ‘The Monolingualism of the Parrot, or the Prosthesis of Origins, in Las Novas del papagay’, Romanic Review, 101 (2010), 23–35 ‘Lover as Parrot’, New Medieval Literatures, 12 (2010), 137–45 ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics of Medieval Reading’, postmedieval, 2 (2011), 13–32 ‘La Seconde main et les secondes langues dans la France médiévale’, in Translations Médiévales: Cinq siècles de traduction en français au Moyen Âge (XIe–XVe siecles), ed. by Claudio Galderisi. 3 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), vol. I, 461–85 ‘Allegory and Melancholy in Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Christine de Pizan’, in Provocation and Negotiation: Essays in Comparative Criticism, ed. by Gesche Ipsen, Timothy Mathews, and Daragan Obradović (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 125–40



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367

‘Medieval Bêtise: Internal Senses and Second Skins in Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours’, in Uncertain Knowledge: Interdisciplinary Conversations about Doubt and Scepticism in the Middle Ages, ed. by Dallas Denery, Kantik Gosh, and Nicolette Zeeman (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 305–32 ‘Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on Folios 61v–62r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20’, Exemplaria, 26 (2014), 127–47 ‘Chant et enchantement dans l’œuvre de Guillaume de Machaut: Métamorphoses du risque et du désir’, Revue des langues romanes, 118 (2014), 447–68 ‘Post-human Philology and the Ends of Time in Medieval Bestiaries’, in Philology and the Mirage of Time, ed. by Michelle Warren, special issue of postmedieval, 5.4 (2014), 473–85 ‘“As in Heart, so in Mouth”: Translating the Scandal of Wolfish Desire from the Fables to Peire Vidal’, French Studies, 69 (2015), 1–13 ‘Before the animot: Bêtise and the Zoological Machine in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries’, Yale French Studies, 127 (2015), 34–51 ‘How Quotation Changed the Subject of Poetry: From the Troubadours to Petrarch’, Poetica, 46 (2014), 293–316 ‘The English Bestiary, the Continental Physiologus, and the Intersections Between Them’, Medium Aevum, 35 (2016), 118–42 ‘The Soundscape of Troubadour Poetry, or, How Human is Song?’ in ‘Sound Matters’, a cluster by Susan Boynton, Sarah Kay, Alison Cornish and Andrew Albin, Speculum, 91.4 (2016), 998–1039 (1002–15) ‘Chant et Désenchantement dans le Bestiaire d’Amours de Richard de Fournival’, in ‘Plus agreable a lire en prose ou en rime’ ? Vers et prose en moyen français, ed. by Michelle Szkilnik and Catherine Croisy-Naquet, special issue of Le Moyen Français, 76–77 (2015–2016), 137–58 ‘Rigaut de Berbezilh, the Physiologus Theobaldi, and the Opening of Animal Inspiration’, Reinardus, 28 (2016), 81–99 ‘Circulating Air: Inspiration, Voice, and Soul in Poetry and Song’, Paragraph, 41 (2018), 10–25 ‘Skin, the Inner Senses, and the Readers’ Inner Life in the Aviarium of Hugh of Fouilloy and Related Texts’, in Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine, ed. by Gaia Gubbini (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 35–58 (https://www.degruyter.com/view/product/508389) ‘The Voice of Light: Nature and Revelation in the Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus’, in The Modernist Bestiary: Translating Animals and the Arts with Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy, and Graham Sutherland, ed. by Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews (London: UCL Press, 2020), pp. 35–57 ‘Songs of War: The Voice of Bertran de Born’, in Sound, Music, Violence, ed. by Luis Vellasco-Puffleau, special issue of Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales, Hors-série 2 (2020). No pagination. https://journals.openedition.org/ transposition/3785

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Introductions and other short pieces: ‘Publications by Margaret Ruth Morgan’, in France and the British Isles in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Essays by Members of Girton College, Cambridge, in Memory of Ruth Morgan, ed. by Gillian Jondorf and D. N. Dumville (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), pp. 3–5 ‘Introduction’, co-written with Miri Rubin, in Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1–9 ‘Introduction: Theory of Practice and Practice of Theory’, co-written with Simon Gaunt, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33.3 (1997), 193–203 ‘Introduction’ and ‘Appendices’, co-written with Simon Gaunt, in The Troubadours. An Introduction ((Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)), pp. 1–7, 279–94 ‘Crossing branches: Occitan Studies in the UK’, introduction to Tenso, 17.1 (2002), 1–9. ‘Translating Theory’, contribution to ‘Symposium I: Can You be a Comparatist in Translation?’, New Medieval Literatures, 9, (2007), 181–211 (199–202) ‘Introduction’, ‘Chronology’, ‘Appendix’, etc., in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Response to Jane Gallop, Romanic Review, 101 (2010), 145–7 Review article: ‘Surface Reading And The Symptom That Is Only Skin-deep’, Paragraph, 35 (2012), 451–9 ‘Introduction: Animal Studies and Guillaume de Palerne’, co-written with Peggy McCracken, for a cluster of essays on Guillaume de Palerne: Cahiers de Recherches Médiévales et Humanistes, 24 (2012), 324–30 ‘Is Interdisciplinarity the New Theory? Recent Studies of Guillaume de Machaut and his Songs’, Exemplaria 25 (2013), 303–12 ‘Introduction: The Troubadours in Italy’, Tenso, 28 (2013), 3–5 ‘Tornada, in Starling Form’, in Mocking Bird Technologies: The Poetics of Parroting, Mimicry, and Other Starling Tropes, ed. by Christopher GoGwilt and Melanie D. Holm (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 269–76 ‘Soundings and Soundscapes’, co-written with François Noudelmann. Introduction to Soundings and Soundscapes, special issue of Paragraph, 41.1 (2018), 1–9 ‘Versions of the Natural’, co-written with Nicolette Zeeman. Introduction to Versions of the Natural from Antiquity to Early Modernity, special issue of Journal of Early Modern Studies, 49.3 (2019): 445–56 ‘Tailpiece’, in The Modernist Bestiary: Translating Animals and the Arts with Guillaume Apollinaire, Raoul Dufy and Graham Sutherland, ed. Sarah Kay and Timothy Mathews (London: UCL Press), pp. 161–4

Dictionary entries Some fifty entries of varying length in the Oxford Companion to French Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Some twenty entries of varying length in the Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

• INDEX • Abu’l-cAbbas (Charlemagne’s elephant)  320 Actor-Network Theory see under Latour, Bruno Adam  315 and Eve  321–2, 326 see also Eden Adenet le Roi, Les Enfances Ogier 106 Adorno, Theodore the ‘revenant’  265, 279 Afghanistan  317 n.7, 322, 324 Agamben, Giorgio  21, 32, 111, 265, 284, 288–90 ‘anthropological machine’  291, 300, 303 Agbabi, Patience Transformatrix  270 ‘Skins’  273, 275 Ailes, Marianne  90 n.6 Aimeric de Peguilhan  42, 44 Alcmene  308 Alexander the Great  91, 105, 106, 107 Alexander III, pope  75–6 Alfons I of Aragon  38–41, 42 Alfonso II of Aragon  253 Alfonso X of Castile  36 See also Castile allegory  9, 17, 20, 68, 154, 183, 197, 200–1, 211–12, 213–25, 301–13, 315 Alvar, Carlos  38, 40 n.11 Alvarez, Al, The New Poetry  272 Ami et Amile  69, 71–84 André de La Vigne  51, 59–60

androgyny  17, 22 see also gender, queer theory animal turn  3, 286 Anjou  220 Anooshahr, Ali  324 Anselm of Canterbury  168 antiphrasis  211–12 Antoine de la Sale, Le Petit Jean de Saintré 107 Anzieu, Didier  284, 288 Apollo 90 Apollonius de Tyr 107 Aquinas, Thomas  186 Arabic  319 Aragon  36, 38–41, 253 Aristotle  9, 115, 164, 169, 182, 186, 284, 302 ‘principle of non-contradiction’ (PNC)  167–74 Armstrong, Adrian  5, 201 n.2, 285 Arnaut Daniel  23, 27 ‘Lo ferm voler q’el cor m’intra’  9, 30–3, 232, 264–7, 271 n.7, 273 n.10, 274 Arras, Treaty of (1435)  104 Ashkenazi Judaism  290, 292, 293 Asia  314–27 assonanced laisses  90 astrology  103, 217 Aubert, David  103, 104–5 n.12, 107 n.16, 110 n.22 Aucassin et Nicolette 44 Auden, W. H.  266, 270 Augustine, Saint  105, 155, 166, 182 Ayméri de Narbonne 107 369

370

• INDEX •

Bakhtin, Mikhail  67, 186 Barukh ben Isaac of Worms  293 Baudelaire, Charles  271, 272 Baudet Herenc, Le Parlement d’amours  51, 55 Baudouin de Flandres 107 Baudouin de Jerusalem  105 Bec, Pierre  36 n.4, 38, 41, 45, 46 Beijing (Dadu)  325 Beit-Arié, Malachi  291 n.10, 292, 293 Belle Hélène de Constantinople, La 107 Bernard of Parma  76 Bernard of Clairvaux  82 Bernart de Ventadorn  16, 23, 230 Bersani, Leo  69, 73, 78–84 Homos  21 ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’  78, 80, 84 n.18 Bertran de Born  23, 32, 34 n.1, 40–1 Bertran de Gordo  41 Bertrand du Guesclin  217–18, 220 bestiary  2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 283–6, 287–8, 295, 301–13, 314–15, 317, 319, 321–3, 325–6, 327 Beuve de Hantone 107 see also Boeve de Haumtone Bible moralisée, La  105, 294 bigamy 77 Bishop, Elizabeth  266, 270 Blanchot, Maurice  277–8 ‘Blind Men and the Elephant’, fable of  320 Bloch, R. Howard  67, 329 blood  44, 72, 74, 76, 79–80, 91, 93, 162, 220, 285 Boccaccio, Decameron  107 Boethius  169 n.2, 169 n.3 Consolation of Philosophy  190, 197 Boeve de Haumtone  90 n.6 see also Beuve de Hantone bone, bones  82, 319, 321, 325, 326 Bossy, Michel-André  122

Bowie, Malcolm  4 Brétigny, Treaty of (1360)  220 Brittany  219 Brocéliande, Forest of  150 Brownlee, Kevin  204, 207, 211 n.18 Brunetto Latini, Li Livres dou tresor  169 n.3, 315–16, 317, 325 n.18 Busby, Keith  89 n.5, 101–2 Buscalus  107 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble  21, 23, 231 caesura  284, 285, 287–300 Calogrenant see Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain canon law  73, 75–8 Cantalupi, Cecilia  44, 45, 48 n.28 Carducci, Giosuè  272 Carroll, Lewis  8–9, 117, 166–78, 295–6 Casanova, Pascale  111 Castel, Jean  51 Castile  36, 126 See also Alfonso X Catalan language  1, 24 n.3, 48 See also Catalonia Catalonia  36, 253–4, 260–1 Caulier, Achille, La Cruelle Femme en amours  51, 55 Cave, Terence  4 Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les 107 Central European University in Budapest  86 n.2 Cerquiglini, Bernard variance  155, 158 Cerverí de Girona  43 n.18, 121 chanson de geste  2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 67–111 Chanson de Roland, La  3, 72, 106, 220, 229 chansonniers  34, 45 n.24, 119–49, 235 n.3, 262–3 Charlemagne  71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 83, 101 n.5, 104, 320 Charles d’Orléans  51, 105



• INDEX •

Charles de Trie, count of Dammartin  218 Charles Martel  101 n.5, 104–5 n.12, 107 n.16, 110 n.22 Charles the Bald  104, 104–5 n.12, 110 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy  102, 103 n.9, 110 Charles V of France  183, 213–25 Charles VI of France  218 Charles VII of France  104 Chartier, Alain  51, 53 La Belle Dame sans merci  51–2, 54–5, 59, 62, 63–4 Chastelain de Coucy, Le see Roman du Chastelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, Le Chastelain, George  51–2, 58–60, 62 Chastelaine de Vergy, La  7, 233–49 Châtelain de Coucy, ‘A vous amant, plus k’a nul’autre gent’  7, 233–49 chess  167, 188–91, 193 Chevalier au cygne, Le 106 childbirth (giving birth)  96, 295, 307–12, 321 Chinggis Khan  318 Chiset, Battle of (1373)  217 Chrétien de Troyes  3, 5, 8, 117 Yvain (Le Chevalier au lion) 10, 150–65, 166, 167–8, 222 Christine de Pizan  7, 51, 97 n.8, 190, 191, 197, 214 Cent Ballades, Les  105 Chemin de long estude, Le  183 Epistre d’amours, L’  105 Livre de la cite des dames, Le 8, 183, 200–12 Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, Le  202, Chroniques de Hainaut  104, 104–5 n.12 chronology  8, 10, 34, 41, 53, 56, 111, 119–49, 204, 209, 219, 256–61 chronotopography 109 citation  8, 92, 229–32, 264–5, 293

371

see also insertion, quotation Citton, Yves  258 Coles, Katherine  277 compilation  34, 35, 49–64, 101, 103, 104, 104–5 n.12, 262, 294 n.17, 315, 319 Complainte du prisonnier d’amours faicte au jardin de plaisance, La (poem sequence)  54 computers and computing  5, 10, 117, 150–65, 170, 250, 262, 329–30 connected literature  50 n.1, 70, 99–111 Conquestes de Charlemaine, Les 104 contradiction  2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 20, 115– 78, 188, 199, 203, 244, 288, 296 contrarieties  115, 155, 166, 169 counternarratives 69–70, 71–84, 88 courtly love  6, 7, 15–64, 85, 117, 119–49, 150–65, 233–49, 250–63, 311 see also desire, love, psychoanalysis, subjectivity crocodile  302, 325 n.19 Croniques d’Escoce, Les 104 croniques de France (category in the Burgundian 1467–69 ducal library catalogue)  99–111 Croniques de la Grant Bretaigne, Les 104 Croniques et conquestes de Charlemagne, Les  101 n.5 cross-dressing  183, 201–10 see also androgyny, transgender crown of thorns  219 Crusades  105, 107, 108–9, 235 n.3 Dalfi d’Alvernhe  253, 255, 261 Dame de la licorne, La  105 Damrosch, David  100, 111 Dante  8, 229, 231, 265 ‘Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d‘ombra’  266 Commedia  316 n.4 Convivio  277

372

• INDEX •

De vulgari eloquentia  23–4 Inferno  315 n.2 Purgatorio  23, 32, 266 Vita Nuova, La  276 de Hauteville, Pierre, La Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de dueil  51–2, 53, 54, 56–60, 62, 63 de Hurion, Pierre  51 De Looze, Laurence  233 death  25, 49–64, 71–84, 90–1, 96, 102, 116, 129, 150–65, 172, 200–12, 213–25, 233–49, 265–6, 285, 297–300, 301–13 debate poetry  17–18, 34–48, 119–49 see also tensos decapitation  208, 310–12 Deleuze, Gilles  268–70, 289, 295–6, 298 and Félix Guattari  182 ‘body without organs’  183, 200–12 Dennett, Daniel  185–99 Derrida, Jacques  3, 15, 73, 231, 290 L’Animal que donc je suis  288, 296 desire  2, 6–7, 9, 16, 17, 19–33, 53, 61, 69, 71–84, 87–9, 92–7, 115–18, 124, 126, 129, 132, 140, 150, 153, 161–4, 165, 166–78, 190, 198–9, 235, 245–6, 256, 264, 265 n.2, 285, 292, 306–13 see also courtly love, love, psychoanalysis, subjectivity didactic poetry  9, 56, 124, 181–225, 231, 233–49, 257, 264, 288, 295, 312 digitised manuscripts see computers and computing Dinshaw, Carolyn  251 Dionysos  172 direct discourse  232, 233–49 Dodgson, Charles see Carroll, Lewis Dolopathos, Le Roman de  92 Donatus, Ars minor  60, 63 Donin, Nicholas  294

dreams   30, 55, 166–78, 181–225 Duby, Georges  77 Duhamel, Denise  266, 267 Dworkin, Andrea  78 dynasty see genealogy eagle  216, 220, 222 eavesdropping  55, 302, 312 see also voyeurism Edelman, Lee  79–80 Eden  321–2 see also Adam Edward IV of England  96 Egypt  108, 321 Einhart  320 elephants  285, 314, 319–27 Elizabeth Woodville, queen of England, wife of Edward IV  96 Elvin, Mark  323 encyclopaedias  9, 229, 231, 314, 315 enjambment  241 n.11, 268, 274, 275–6 epic see chanson de geste epitaph  53, 56–60 Erec en prose 107 Este  36, 44–5, 46 Euripides, The Bacchae  172 Evrart de Trémaugon, Le Songe du vergier  215–16 exemplarity  58, 59, 207, 210, 245 Faits et conquêtes d’Alexandre le Grand, Les  104–5 n.12 Felski, Rita  22, 251–5 femininity  17, 19–20, 25, 28, 55, 59–60, 61, 174, 200–12 feminism  5, 6, 7, 11, 17, 19, 22, 33, 67, 67–8 n.1, 69–70, 71–8, 83–4, 85–98, 174, 329, 330 see also patriarchy Ferdinand de Gramont  272 Fergus of London  96 Fierabras  90 n.6 flaying  283, 285, 287–300 Floire et Blanchefleur  105–6, 108 Florimont 107



• INDEX •

focalisation  233–49 Franchi, Claudio  121 n.2, 124 Franco-Italian  316 n.4 see also Brunetto Latini, Marco Polo Frederick II, emperor  321 free indirect discourse see direct discourse Freud, Sigmund  80, 173 Froissart, Jean  104, 182, 214–5 future anterior see future perfect future perfect  8, 109–11, 222–3, 251–7 Galanthis  308 Galician-Portuguese poetry  36, 38, 43, 45–7, 48 see also xograr Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France manuscript digitisation system)  151, 156 Gallica (Boydell & Brewer series) 10 Galvez, Marisa  120 Garin de Monglane 107 Garin le Loherain  107, 110 Gaunt, Simon  3, 10, 36, 48, 72, 89, 101, 120 n.1, 233 n.1, 314, 316 n.4 Gauvain  161, 168 gay studies  21, 79, 84 gender  7, 10, 15, 17, 19–33, 52, 59, 61, 67, 69–70, 73, 77, 85–98, 116, 174, 181, 185, 200–12, 270, 289 n.5, 330 see also androgyny, cross-dressing, femininity, masculinity, queer theory, transgender genealogy   85, 90–6, 99, 102, 107, 110–11, 169, 217–18, 219, 261 genre  2, 4, 9, 24 n.4, 35, 67–70, 71–3, 85–97, 99–111, 115–16, 119, 122, 123, 133, 181, 183, 186, 198, 215, 252, 263, 264, 266, 283–6, 295, 314 see also bestiaries, chanson de geste, debate poetry, dreams,

373

novas, pastorela, romance, rondeaux, sestina, sirventes, tensos Geoffrey of Trani  76 Gerard de Roucillon 104 see also Girart de Roussillon German Empire  89, 90 see also Holy Roman Empire Geste des Lorrains, La 107 gift  46–7, 101 n.5, 102 n.7, 169, 287, 297, 320–1, 327 ‘poetics of the gift’, 67–70, 71–84, 85–98 Gilles de Chin  107 Girart de Roussillon  104, 108, 109 n.20, 110 see also Gerard de Roucillon Giraut de Bornelh  23, 27 n.7, 38–41, 42, 260 ‘Per solatz reveillar’  257–9, 260 Godefroy de Bouillon  105 Goldbarth, Albert  272–3 Golden Legend see Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée Gonçalves, Elsa  47 Gormant et Isambart  90 n.6 gospel  4, 287 Gosse, Edmund  266 n.4 Grail  174, 176 grammar  9, 15, 60–2, 63, 169, 170, 211, 222, 229, 229–31, 237–41, 252, 254 n.10, 256 n.12, 266, 271 n.7, 273–6, 297–9, 303 Granada  126, 144 Grans Croniques, Les 104 Great Khan Güyük  318 Greban, Arnoul  51 Greece 108–9 Grice, Paul  172 Grossman, Évelyne  73 Guérin, Sarah  321, 325 Guilhem Figueira  44 Guillaume d’Orange  105, 106–7, 108 Guillaume de Deguileville  182, 191

374

• INDEX •

Guillaume de Palerne  106, 108 Guillaume le Clerc, Bestiaire divin  314, 321–3 Guillem de Berguedà  42, 44 Guiot (scribe)  152 n.4, 153, 157 Guiraut Riquier  7, 117, 119–49 Gunn, Thom  272 Gutt, Blake  19 n.1, 23 n.2 hagiography  9, 79, 82, 88–9, 115–16, 119, 168, 183, 200–12, 283 Hall, Kathryn  201 Hamilton, Ian  272 Harpin de la Montagne see Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain Harris, Jonathan Gil  260 Harun al-Rashid  320 Haugeland, John  187, 185–99 heart  26–7, 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 152–5, 161, 219, 240–1, 242–3, 245, 248, 256, 295, 319 Hegel  173, 289 Heller-Roazen, Daniel  168, 170, 175 Henri de Ferrières, Songe de pestilence  10, 183, 213–25 Henry II of England  220 Henry III of England  320 Hercules  308 Herdt, Gilbert H.  22–3 Herenc, Baudet, Le Parlement d’amours  51, 55 heteronormativity 84 heterosexuality  22, 29–33, 69, 78, 80, 84 Histoire de Charles Martel, L’ 101 n.5, 104–5 n.12, 107 n.16, 110 n.22 Histoire des seigneurs de Gavres, L’ 107 Histoire des trois fils de rois ou Chronique de Naples, L’ 107 Histoire du Saint Graal, L’ 107 historiography  88, 89, 97, 99–111 HIV  80–1 Holy Land  72, 105, 108, 209 n.13 Holy Roman Empire  105, 109 see also German Empire

Holy Spirit  205, 216 homosexuality  22, 44, 78–9 homosociality  33, 69–70, 92 Hostiensis 76 Huffman, Jane  274 Hughes, Ted  272 Hungary  86 n.2 hunting  217, 297–300, 317, 323 n.15, 324, 325 Huon de Bordeaux 107 illness 71–84, 213–25, 317 illustration  49, 122, 186, 191–9, 234, 285, 287, 294 n.17, 301–7, 308, 320–3 indirect discourse see direct discourse injury  16, 25, 28, 45, 82, 93, 150–65, 183, 213–25, 283, 285, 301–13, 324 see also caesura, hunting, suture Innocent IV, pope  76 insertion  16, 52, 210, 212, 233–49, 253, 270 see also citation, intertextuality, quotation Instructif de seconde rhétorique, L’  51, 60, 63–4 intersectionality  69, 85, 88, 98 intertextuality  15, 35, 49–64, 207–12, 237, 245, 246 see also insertion irony  34–48, 39, 53–5, 59, 61, 63, 75, 76, 82, 94, 116, 117, 119–49, 127, 172, 181, 233–49, 272, 273, 274 Isidore of Seville  302 n.2, 315, 316 n.5, 317 Islam  67, 292, 324 n.17 ivory  321, 323 n.15, 325, 326, 327 Jacquerie uprising  219, 223 Jacques de Lalaing  107 Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée  105 Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī  319–20, 326, 327 Jameson, Fredric, ‘political



• INDEX •

unconscious’  7, 67, 68, 70, 85, 109–10 Jane Grey, probable attendant of Elizabeth Woodville  96 Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque, Le  49–64 Jaufré Rudel  128 Jean d’Avesnes, cycle of  101 n.5, 107 Jean de Meun see Roman de la Rose Jerusalem  105, 106, 219, 316 n.5 jeu parti (dilemma)  236 joglaria  43 See also jongleur, xograr Johan Garcia de Guilhade  46 Johan Perez d’Aboim  45–6 Johan Soarez Coelho  46 John II of France  217 John of Salisbury, Policraticus  219 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy  101 n.5, 102, 193 John, duke of Berry  101 n.5, 217, 218 jongleur  27, 34–48, 253 n.8, 297–300 See also joglaria, xograr Jove  308 Judaism  10, 285, 287–300 Juião Bolseiro  45 Juno  308 kairos  8, 256–7 Kay, Sarah ‘Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love’  3 Philology’s Vomit  3, 151 n.3, 164, 330, 331 review essays  3, 4 Romance of the Rose, The  3, 16 ‘Who was Chrétien de Troyes?’  3 Žižek: A Critical Introduction  4 and Adrian Armstrong, Knowing Poetry  5, 284–5 and E. Jane Burns, Roberta L. Krueger, and Helen Solterer, ‘Feminism and the Discipline of

375

Old French Studies: Une Bele Disjointure’  5, 69, 98 and Malcolm Bowie and Terence Cave, A Short History of French Literature  4 and Simon Gaunt (eds), The Troubadours: An Introduction  3 The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature  3 and Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sharon Kinoshita, and Peggy McCracken, Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes  5, 8, 222 Keats, John  272 Kennedy, Elspeth  1 Khusrau, Amīr  326 kingship  90, 183, 213–25 Kipling, Rudyard  266 n. 4 Köhler, Erich  15, 17, 21 Kojève, Alexandre  289 La Vigne, André de  51, 59–60 Lacan, Jacques  7, 8, 15, 116, 117, 150, 168, 169, 173–4, 178, 182, 203, 232 desire  7, 150–1, 167 logical time  8 object petit a  173, 175 ‘zone between two deaths’  203 LaCapra, Dominick  224 Landuc, la Dame de see Laudine Latour, Bruno  250–3, 255–6, 263 Actor-Network Theory  250 Laudine  157–8 lausengier  31–2 see also lozengier Le Queux, Regnaud, La Doleance de megere   60 Lefèvre, Raoul, Histoire de Jason  107, 108–9 Legenda aurea see Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée Léglu, Catherine  124

376

• INDEX •

leprosy  69, 72, 73, 75–7, 81–3 Lerner, Gerda  97–8 lesbian studies  21 libraries  7, 70, 99–111, 151, 212, 218, 330 Liège 110 Limousin  253–4, 260–1 lineage see genealogy lions  174–7 logic  9, 115, 117–18, 166–78, 288 Longinus, lance of  220 Lorraine 110 Lotharingia  105, 109–10 Louis of Bruges, earl of Winchester  218 Louis de Sancerre  218 Louis IX of France  318, 320 Louis XII of France  218 Lourenço (troubadour)  45–6, 48 n.28 love  2, 6–7, 8, 15–17, 20, 27–30, 37–42, 44, 46, 49, 50–1, 53–63, 69, 78, 84, 85, 103, 106–7, 116, 121, 129, 132, 150–1, 153–5, 174–6, 197, 199, 218, 230, 234–6, 240–5, 253–7, 259–61, 265 n.3, 273, 285, 307–9, 311–12 See also courtly love, desire, psychoanalysis, subjectivity lozengier  242, 244 see also lausengier Lucina, goddess of childbirth  308 Lunete  150, 152 Machaut, Guillaume de  182, 191 Prise d’Alixandre, La 107 MacKinnon, Catherine  78 Magna Carta  90 Maimonides  291–2 Maine (French county)  220 Malaspina, Alberto  38, 41–2 Malet de Graville, Louis, admiral to Louis XII of France  218 Manchuria  318 mandrake  321 Mansel, Jean, La Fleur des histoires  105

manuscripts Berlin, Deutsche Staatbibliothek, MS Hamilton 257  237 Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, MS 9574–9575  236 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 329  89 n.5 Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 100  321–2 Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château, Musée Condé MS 472  152 Coligny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 168  89 n.5 De Ricci Supplement Census, MS A 2200  237 Dijon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 526  306 n.6 Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, MS fr. 168  218 London, British Library, MS Harley 3244  323 n.14 London, British Library, MS Sloane 3544  315 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 133  218 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 819 (Chansonnier N)  262 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 445  234 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308  304, 306 n.6 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 375  236–7 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 412  306 n.6 , 309 n.9 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 794  152 n.4. 153, 157 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 837  237 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 856 (Chansonnier



• INDEX •

C)  119–20, 121–3, 128–9, 132 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 860  72 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1300  218–19 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1433  152 n.4 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 1450  152 n.4, 154, 157 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2136  237, 238 n.8, 249 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 2810  101 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12399  218 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12560  152 n.4, 162–3 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12603  152 n.4, 154 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 12786  306 n.6, 308 n.8 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 14969  314, 322 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 22543 (Chansonnier R)  119, 120, 128, 130 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25545  237 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 25566  306 n.6, 308 n.8, 309 n.9 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 4531  237, 249 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises, MS 13521  237 Princeton, Princeton University Library, Special Collections,

377

Manuscripts Division, MS Garrett 125  152 n.4, 157, 158–61 Rennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 243  237 Turin, Archivio di Stato, MS Jb.II.18  217 València, Universitat de València, Biblioteca Històrica, MS 387  193–9 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reginensi Latini, MS 1725  152 n.4 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican Latino, MS 3207  32 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2609  306 n.6 maps  316 Marcabru  37–8, 48, 128 ‘L’autrer jost’ una sebissa’  48 Marco Polo  101 Devisement du monde, Le  314–27 Marco Polo sheep  317 Margaret of Austria  102 Maris, Kathrin  273, 277 Martin, M. Kay and Barbara Voorhies, Female of the Species  22–3 Martini, Annett  292 Marxism  15, 21, 67, 288 Mary Magdalene  208–9 masculinity  2, 17, 19–20, 22–6, 61, 68–70, 93, 201–3 materiality  156–7, 185, 283–6, 287–300, 301, 314 Mathews, Timothy  4–5 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora  320–1 McCracken, Peggy  10 McNamer, Sarah  218 Mediterranean  110, 320 memory  7–8, 96, 125–7, 132–3, 176, 230, 239, 244, 251–7, 284–5, 294–5, 306

378

• INDEX •

Men Rodriguez Tenoiro  44–5 Meneghetti, Maria Luisa  21, 271 metaphor  10, 17, 28–30, 45, 183, 200–1, 211–12, 214–15, 218–21, 250, 255 metonymy  153, 271 metre  262, 274–8 mezuzah  291–2 Middle French  1, 18, 220–1 Milet, Jacques, La Forest de Tristesse  51 Milone, Luigi  24 Miroir historial, Le  205, 207–12 mise en page  52, 59, 162, 262 Moebius band  174 Molinet, Jean, Le Donnet baillé au roy Charles VIII  51, 53 Mongols  318–19, 323–5 Monstrelet, Enguerrand de  104 Mort le roi Artu, La 107 Nancy, siege of  105 nature  28–9, 284–5, 287 negation  115–16, 119, 122–4, 169 Nester, Daniel  266, 267–8, 272 New Philology  3, 4, 155 n.9 nightingale  2, 230–2, 233–6, 244–6, 253, 263, 278 Noudelmann, François  4 novas  252–63 Nuh-Sipihr or Nine Skies  326 Occitan  1, 15–18, 20, 28, 36, 37–8, 43, 48, 229–31, 252, 257–8, 262, 271 n.7. 276–7 Occitania  23, 35, 229 Odyssey, The  175 Ogier le Danois  105–7, 108, 214–15 oneness  2, 181–2, 186, 214–15, 225 orality  52, 67, 99, 110, 120, 132–3, 155, 162, 293–5, 299, 302–9 Orbán, Victor  86 n.2 Orientalism  108–9, 316 Ovid  105, 153 Ars amatoria  105 Metamorphoses  105, 308

Pagan (Burmese kingdom)  323 n.16 pain  8, 213–25, 289, 309–10 Palladius, Opus agriculturae  315 paradox  20, 28, 123–5, 132, 166, 169–70, 172, 269 parchment  10, 162–3, 185, 191–2, 283–5, 287–300, 301–6, 314–16, 321–2, 326 Paris  63, 219–20, 294, 322 n. 12 Paris disputation  294 parody  53, 54, 63 parrot  2, 230–2, 233, 235–6, 244–6, 253, 263, 278 Partonopeu de Blois 167 pastorela  119–49 patriarchy  20, 71, 85–6, 92–8, 204, 207 see also feminism Pattison, Walter  24, 27 n.7, 29–30 Péguy, Charles  269 Peire d’Alvernhe, ‘Chantarai d’aquest trobadors’  24 Peire Raimon de Tolosa  41, 42 n.16 Peire Rogier  23 Pentheus  172 Pepin the Short  110 Perceforest  107 Perceval  169 Persia  317, 319, 322 Persian  319, 320 Petrarch  8, 229, 231, 250, 266–8, 270 Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta)  266, 267, 270 ‘Mia benigna fortuna’  267 Philip III, duke of Burgundy  70, 102–5, 110 Philip of Cleves  102 Philip the Good see Philip III, duke of Burgundy  Philip VI of France  217 Physiologus  321 Picandon  46–7 Pierre de Beauvais  315 n.1 pilgrimage  72, 127



• INDEX •

plague  215–17, 223 Plath, Sylvia  272 poetry  2, 5, 6–8, 9, 13–64, 103–6, 115–16, 119–49, 167–8, 181, 185–6, 189, 193–9, 214, 223 n.8, 227–79, 284–5, 287, 319, 326 Pope Sylvester (legend of)  79 Porphyry, Isagoge  169 n.3 Pound, Ezra  270 ‘Altaforte’  266 prayer  79, 204, 213, 214, 218, 220, 223–5 Priest, Graham  171–2 Proper and Essential Things for the Emperor’s Food and Drink see Yinshan cheng-yao prophecy  94–5, 213, 216–17, 218–23 prose  1, 9, 34, 56, 89 n.5, 99, 102, 104–8, 110, 213, 223, 235 n.3, 275–8 prosimetrum  277 Prosser, Jay  21, 22 psychoanalysis  4–7, 17, 67, 68, 115–16, 150–1, 166, 167, 173, 181, 229, 232, 284, 329 see also courtly love, desire, love, subjectivity, unconscious psychology  167, 169, 170, 181–2 punctuation  238–40, 249, 268 Purgatoire d’amour, Le  52 queer theory  7, 17, 19–24, 69, 73, 79–81, 83–4, 251, 330 see also cross-dressing, gay studies, gender, lesbian studies, transgender Querelle des femmes, La  54 Querelle du Roman de la rose, La  54 see also Chartier, Alain, Christine de Pizan quotation  7–8, 181, 207 n. 10, 227–79 see also citation, insertion Raimbaut d’Aurenga  23–33, 273 n.9

379

‘Ab vergoignha part mar(r) imentz’  25–7 ‘Ara resplan la flors enversa’  28– 32, 273 n.9 Raimbaut Vaqueiras  38, 41–2 Raimon de Miraval  260 Raimon Vidal  252–63 Abril issia e mays intrava  252–6, 259–61, 262 So fo e.l temps  252, 253–4, 260–1, 262 Razos de trobar 252, 256 Ravel, La Valse  265 n.3 Rawcliffe, Carole  75, 81 razos  276–7 Reid, Charles, Jr.  76 Renaissance  97, 111, 250 Renaut de Montauban 107 reported discourse  123, 233, 237–8 Response du Bestiaire, La  309–10, 313 Restor du paon, Le 106 Review, The  272 rhetoric  16–18, 20, 21, 24–5, 27, 34–48, 50–64, 115–16, 119, 153, 168, 170, 209 n.15, 264, 309 Richard de Fournival, Le Bestiaire d’amours  285, 295, 301–13 Ricoeur, Paul  252 Rimbaud, Arthur  272 Rodez  36 Roman de Brut, Le 107 Roman de Horn, Le  90 n.6 Roman de la rose, Le  9, 16, 51, 54, 105, 191–9 Roman d’Eneas, Le 107 Roman de Renart, Le  105, 299 Roman de Waldef, Le see Waldef, Roman de Roman du Chastelain de Couci et de la Dame de Fayel, Le  235n.3 Roman Empire  210 romance (genre of medieval literature)  2, 3, 8, 9, 67–70, 72, 78–9, 85–98, 99–101, 103–4, 107–11, 115–16, 150–65, 166–7,

380

• INDEX •

174, 176, 198, 222, 316 rondeaux  51, 53–4, 56 Roscoe, Will  22 rubrics  49–51, 56, 58–9, 62–3, 106, 119–20, 122–4, 193–6, 208–9, 217, 262 Rust, Martha  161, 301 Rustichello of Pisa  316 Rutebeuf, ‘Charlot le juif qui chia dans la peau du lièvre’  290, 295, 297–300 Saint Pons de Thomières  127 saints  88–9, 103, 105, 116, 168, 200–12, 218 St Agatha  208 St Agnes  208 St Euphrosine  201–4, 206–7, 210 St Marina  201–4, 206–7, 210 St Paul  209 see also hagiography Santiago, Cathedral of  45 Saracens  68, 69, 71, 87–8, 90, 91, 92, 94, 106–9 Satan  216 satire  273 Scott, Joan Wallach  86 scribes  32, 62, 117, 152 n.4, 154 n.6, 160, 162–4, 185, 189, 191, 193–4, 197–9 scrolls  196, 291–5 secrecy  216, 234–5, 236, 244 Secret History of the Mongols, The  318 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky Between Men  21–22 Epistemology of the Closet, The  22 Sellers, Wilfrid  194 senhal  3–4, 20, 27, 32, 121 Sept Sages de Rome, Les 107 serventois  51 Servien, Pius  268–9 sestina  9, 28 n.9, 30–2, 232, 264–79 sexuality  19–23, 69, 71–84, 270, 321, 326

shaman  317 sheep  285, 314–19, 327 Sicily 108 sickness  71–84, 153, 215–16 Sidney, Sir Philip  266 n.4 sirventes  42 skin  181, 218, 262, 275–6, 281–327 sodomy 47 song  7, 15–18, 19–33, 34, 46, 67, 119–50, 168, 174, 194 n. 2, 229–32, 235–7, 240–8, 253, 256–9, 285, 287, 330 Sordello  44, 46–7 sound  120, 175, 230, 273, 274, 285, 301–13 sovereignty  90, 213–25, 288, 324 Spain  108, 109 Stallings, Alicia E.  273, 275 Steel, Karl  296 Stockton, Kathryn Bond  19, 32–3 Strathern, Marilyn  67, 88 Stuip, René  234, 249 subjectivity  6–8, 15–64, 74, 78–80, 83, 115–18, 119, 126, 128, 150, 152–4, 168–74, 181–2, 186, 232–3, 233–48, 250–1, 256, 271, 287, 295, 301–2, 307, 308, 312 see also courtly love, desire, love, psychoanalysis sublime  116, 117, 150–7, 161, 164–5, 168, 203–4 Sumatra  325 Sunderland, Luke  32, 90 Sutherland, Rhoda  1, 229–30 Suto, Taki  169 n. 2 suture  220, 283–4, 301, 303, 312 see also Žižek, Slavoj Swinburne, Algernon Charles  266 n.4 tanners  293 Taylor, Jane (H. M.)  49 temporality  7–9, 105, 109–11, 119, 120–8, 221–3, 250–63, 265 tensos  18, 34–48 see also debate poetry



• INDEX •

theology  166, 169, 284 Thetford Priory, Norfolk  89 n.5 Thomas of Chobham  287 Torah  291, 294 tornadas  27, 29, 31–2, 257 torture  203, 219–21, 283, 290, 295 transgender  22–4, 27, 29 see also cross-dressing, gender, queer theory trauma  7, 8, 152–3, 183, 213–25, 289 Tristan en prose, Le Roman de 107 trivium  168, 169 n.2 trobairitz  16, 35 see also troubadours, trouvères troubadours  2, 3, 4, 6–7, 8–9, 15–48, 52, 53, 115–16, 119–49, 166, 174, 181, 229–32, 250–63, 264, 273 n.9 see also names of individual troubadours, trouvères, trobairitz trouvères  53, 233–4, 235–7, 242–8 see also names of individual trouvères, troubadours, trobairitz Troy 109 Uc Catola  37–8 Uc de Mataplana  253–4, 261 unconscious  7, 67–8, 70, 85, 109–10, 117–18, 152, 161–4, 166, 170, 173–8, 288, 301 see also psychoanalysis, subjectivity unicorns  167, 174–6, 325 vagina dentata  310 Vaillant  51 Valois dynasty  Vatican Library  151 Vérard, Antoine  52 verse  9, 23, 28, 49–64, 89–90, 99, 101 n.4, 102, 104–8, 110, 119–49, 167 n.1, 198, 213, 214, 218, 220, 223–4, 225, 229, 264–5, 271–2, 276–7, 284–5 see also poetry vidas  34, 42 Vietnam  324

381

Villon, François  51, 60 Testament, Le  53 Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale  205, 207–10 viper  307, 310–12 Virgin Mary  223–4 Voeux du paon, Les 106 voice  7–8, 17, 49, 181, 194 n.2, 205–7, 210, 231–2, 285, 287, 295, 301–13, 316 voyeurism  152, 244, 302, 312 see also eavesdropping Waldef, Le Roman de  9, 69–70, 85–98 war  86 n. 2, 91–2, 94, 95–6, 104, 183, 213–25, 322, 324 Wauquelin, Jean  104 n.12 weasel  307–12 Whitaker, Maceo J.  275–7, 279 Whitman, Walt  271–2 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler  266 n.4 William of Rubruck  318–19 Williams, William Carlos  271–2 woodcut  51, 56–7, 59–64 wool  315, 327 Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway  254–5 world literature  99–101, 110–11 xograr  43, 45, 46 see also Galician-Portuguese poetry, jongleur, joglaria Yin-shan cheng-yao  319 Ziolkowski, Jan  167 Žižek, Slavoj  4, 32, 150–1, 283 see also suture Zumthor, Paul  21, 35, 230, 329 mouvance  98, 101, 155

Gallica

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Postcolonial Fictions in the Roman de Perceforest: Cultural Identities and Hybridities, Sylvia Huot

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A Discourse for the Holy Grail in Old French Romance, Ben Ramm

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