(Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures) Virginie Greene (Eds.) - The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature-Palgrave Macmillan US (2006)

THE MEDIEVAL AUTHOR
IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH
LITERATURE
STUDIES IN ARTHURIAN AND
COURTLY CULTURES
The dynamic field of Arthurian Studies is the subject for this book
series, Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures, which explores the
great variety of literary and cultural expression inspired by the lore of
King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Grail. In forms that range
from medieval chronicles to popular films, from chivalric romances
to contemporary comics, from magic realism to feminist fantasy—and
from the sixth through the twenty-first centuries—few literary subjects
provide such fertile ground for cultural elaboration. Including works in
literary criticism, cultural studies, and history, Studies in Arthurian and
Courtly Cultures highlights the most significant new Arthurian Studies.
Bonnie Wheeler, Southern Methodist University
Series Editor
Editorial Board:
James Carley, York University
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University
Virginie Greene, Harvard University
Siân Echard, University of British Columbia
Sharon Kinoshita, University of California, Santa Cruz
Alan Lupack, University of Rochester
Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia
THE MEDIEVAL AUTHOR
IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH
LITERATURE
Edited by
Virginie Greene
THE MEDIEVAL AUTHOR IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH LITERATURE
© Virginie Greene, 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 ISBN 978-1-4039-6771-8
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53015-1 ISBN 978-1-4039-8345-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403983459
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The medieval author in medieval French Literature / edited by Virginie
Greene.
p. cm.—(Studies in Arthurian and courtly cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–6771–7 (alk. paper)
1. French literature—To 1500—History and criticism. 2. Authors,
French—To 1500. 3. Authorship—History—To 1500. I. Greene, Virginie
Elisabeth, 1959– II. Series.
PQ156.M43 2006
840.9⬘001—dc22 2005057633
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This volume is dedicated to the memory of Katalin Halász
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Virginie Greene
1. Authorial Relays: Continuing

Chrétien’s Conte du Graal 13
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
2. Borrowing, Citation, and Authorship
in Gautier de Coinci’s Miracles de Nostre Dame 29
Margaret Switten
3. The Roman de la Rose as a Möbius
Strip (On Interpretation) 61
Alexandre Leupin
4. The Medieval “Author”:An Idea
Whose Time Hadn’t Come? 77
Stephen G. Nichols
5. From One Mask to Another:The Trials and Tribulations
of an Author of Romance at the Time of Perceforest 103
Anne Berthelot (translated by Darla Gervais)
6. The Experiencing Self and the
Narrating Self in Medieval French Chronicles 117
Sophie Marnette
7. Neutrality Affects: Froissart and
the Practice of Historiographic Authorship 137
Zrinka Stahuljak
viii CONTENTS
8. Portraits of Authors at the End of the Middle Ages:

Tombs in Majesty and Carnivalesque Epitaphs 157
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (translated by Darla Gervais)
9. Frontally and in Profile:The Identifying Gesture of the
Late Medieval Author 173
Danielle Bohler (translated by Lia Brozgal)
10. Medieval Bestsellers in the Age of Print: Melusine and
Olivier de Castille 189
Ana Pairet
11. What Happened to Medievalists
after the Death of the Author? 205
Virginie Greene
Bibliography 229
Index 245
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
he editor of this volume would like to thank Christie McDonald for

T supporting this project.Without her gentle and firm encouragement, it
would not have been undertaken. Many thanks to Eugene Vance for his
generous support and productive critique, to Judith Ryan for her advice at
a crucial moment, to Lia Brozgal and Darla Gervais for their translations, to
Lia Brozgal, Stefanie Goyette, and Irit Kleiman for their assistance in
preparing this volume, to Pierre-Yves Cachard for his help in obtaining the
cover illustration, and to Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Melissa Nosal, and Julia
Cohen for their diligent editorial work.To Bonnie Wheeler I owe a special
“thank you,” not only for her intellectual and editorial support for this
project, but also for the attention she has given now for many years to my
progress as a medievalist.To use her laconic style:“Bonnie, thanks.”To all the
contributors of this volume, I also owe a special debt of gratitude: Plus doi
que rendre ne porroie.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Anne Berthelot is a professor of French and Medieval Studies at the

University of Connecticut. She has published a book on Fonction et figures de
l’écrivain au XIIIème siècle, based on her French Doctorat d’Etat on the
writer figures in thirteenth century literature. She specializes in Arthurian
Literature with a comparatist approach. She is working on a book-length
study of the Roman de Perceforest and is also planning a new edition of Le
roman des fils du roi Constant.
Danielle Bohler is a professor of Medieval French Literature at the Université
Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux III. Her main fields of research are late
medieval narrative literature, norms and normativity, manuals of conduct,
family romances, literature at the court of the duke of Burgundy, early
printed books. She has published numerous articles and edited several
books, such as La Légende arthurienne: Le Graal et la Table ronde and Splendeurs
de la Cour de Bourgogne: récits et chroniques.
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner is a professor of French at Boston College. She has
published numerous books and articles in the fields of French romance and
troubadour lyric, including Shaping Romance: Interpretation,Truth, and Closure
in Twelfth-Century French Fictions and Songs of the Women Troubadours. Her
current book project focuses on Chrétien’s Grail romance and its four verse
Continuations.
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet is a professor of French medieval literature at the
Université Paris IV (Sorbonne), a member of the Institut universitaire de
France, and director of a research unit (Université-CNRS) devoted to
studying and editing medieval texts. Her books and articles focus on late
medieval literature, lyric poetry, the history of the book, Guillaume de
Machaut, canon, and authors. Her book La Couleur de la mélancolie (1993)
has been translated in English in 1997. She is presently working on a book
on Christine de Pizan.
xii CONTRIBUTORS
Virginie Greene is a professor of French in the Department of Romance

Languages and Literatures, and in the Program of History and Literature at
Harvard University. She is the author of Le Sujet et la Mort dans La Mort Artu
(2002) and several articles on medieval literature and culture. She is
presently working on the notion of ambivalence in classical and medieval
philosophy and literature.
Alexandre Leupin is Florence Kidd and Isaac M. Gregoire professor in
French Studies at Louisiana State University. He is the author of several
book and articles dealing with Medieval French literature, religion, psycho-
analysis and epistemology. His most recent book is Lacan Today:
Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (The Other Press, NY). He is the founder of
the journal www.mondesfrancophones.com.
Sophie Marnette is a University lecturer in Medieval French and fellow of
Balliol College at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Narrateur et
points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: Une approche linguistique
(Peter Lang, 1998) and of Speech and Thought Presentation in French: Concepts
and Strategies (John Benjamins, 2005), in which she studies reported dis-
course in medieval literary texts and in contemporary oral narratives, writ-
ten press, and literature.
Stephen G. Nichols is James M. Beall professor of French and Humanities
and chair of the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at The
Johns Hopkins University. He received the Modern Language Association’s
James Russell Lowell Prize in 1984 for Romanesque Signs: Early Medieval
Narrative and Iconography. In 1991, The New Philology, conceived and edited
by Nichols for the Medieval Academy of America, was honored by the
Council of Editors of Learned Journals.
Ana Pairet is an Associate professor of French at Rutgers University.
Specializing in literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, she is the
author of “Les mutacions des fables”: figures de la métamorphose dans la littérature
française du Moyen Âge (Honoré Champion, 2002). Her current research
addresses the transformations of medieval romance in early print culture.
Zrinka Stahuljak is an assistant professor of French at the University of
California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Bloodless Genealogies
(University of Florida Press, 2005). She has also published on medieval
translation and on contemporary translation theory. She is currently work-
ing on the relationship of shame and sexuality in the Middle Ages, while
being a member for the year 2005–2006 at the Institute for Advanced
Study.
CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Margaret Switten is Class of 1926 professor of French at Mount Holyoke

College. Her research focuses on medieval music and poetry, particularly
the songs of the troubadours. Her books include The Cansos of Raimon de
Miraval: A Study of Poems and Melodies, 1985, and Music and Poetry in the
Middle Ages: A Guide to Research on French and Occitan Song, 1100–1400,
1995.With Robert Eisenstein, she has created a multimedia CD-ROM on
medieval lyric including works of Gautier de Coinci.
INTRODUCTION
Virginie Greene
he question of the author will probably be seen one day as a minor

T digression in the broader quarrel of the subject, which occupied many
scholars during the second half of the twentieth century A. D.1 Now that
the quarrel of the subject seems to be over (or at least not to gather the
polemical energy it used to attract), the question of the author may seem
doomed to vanish in the purgatory of yesterday fashions. But the fact that
the author is not in question or not a question any more may also reveal that
we have gone beyond the stage of questioning and entered the stage of
answering. Like other literary scholars, medievalists went through a phase of
scepticism and submitted their authors (including the anonymous ones) to
ontological doubt: “Did you even exist?” It never hurts to question one’s
concepts, but few scholars can maintain an attitude of radical questioning
for long. Today the question “What is an author?” and the sub-question
“What is a medieval author?” do not keep many people awake at night and
busy during day time. But the question “What does an author do?” and the
sub-question “What did a medieval author do?” are regularly addressed in
publications and talks, and given answers.
Yet we cannot forget that not too long ago the ontological question was
asked and the legitimacy of the concept was submitted to inquiry. The
pragmatic questions we try to answer now derive from this sceptical phase.
They may also constitute a response to the broader question of the subject.
Instead of arguing about what a subject is or if a subject exists, many scholars
view the subject as an agent defined by actions, intentions, productions, and
expression.These manifestations of the subject can be examined and inter-
preted along various theoretical and methodological lines, including those
that posit the subject as the subject of the unconscious. Today, studying
authors and authorship mostly means studying a practice and the status
associated with this practice in the eyes of authors and their public. This
implies that scholars detach themselves as much as possible from the values
2 VIRGINIE GREENE
and virtues commonly attributed to the diverse views of the author they
encounter. From the inspired creator to the humble scribe, there is a gamut
of authorial positions that are all capable of sustaining literary excellence
and revealing a subject. At the same time authorial postures always contain
a certain degree of imposture that a scholar should be able to identify and
expose without acrimony since it is part of the trade.
This collection of essays presents a series of case studies illustrating the
agency of authors whose common characteristic is to have written in
French between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries. These essays also
show how new research directions in medieval literary studies have
contributed new answers to the five basic questions: What did medieval
authors do? What did they think they were doing? How did they see
themselves? How were they seen by their contemporaries? How have they
been approached by modern scholars? The first question has greatly
benefited from the development of codicology as a fundamental—rather
than auxiliary—part of literary analysis.The study of manuscripts and early
printed books has provided new facts about authors’ activities and involve-
ment in the production of books, and also new lines of interpretation of
medieval texts, taking into account page layout, illustration, musical
notations, marks of ownership, and readership. From this perspective, the
author tends to be viewed either as a collective agency or as a specific
function in a collective enterprise. The second question “What did they
think they were doing?” supplements this view by seeking insider information
on the authorial function. Prologues and other meta-discursive elements
(including arts of poetry) provide rich material for studying the ways
authors define their activity and their role. The third question “How did
they see themselves?” brings the matter back to a more individualized
framing of the author. It addresses what can be called the reflexive practice
of authorship in medieval works and scrutinizes the subtle marks left by a
subject in a text. Such marks can be what modern readers would recognize
as “autobiographical” elements. More often they consist of linguistic
practices such as the manipulation of pronouns, rhetorical figures such as
the systematic use of antitheses, and poetic tropes such as recurring
metaphors.The question “How were they seen by their contemporaries?”
locates authors in a network of texts responding to the growing circulation
of vernacular literature in medieval societies. Razos and vidas are a well-
known acknowledgment of the troubadours as authors. In Northern
France, evidence is more scattered but can be found in the ways some
authors mention their predecessors and contemporaries, and in the ways
manuscripts introduce and present the texts they contain. In the late Middle
Ages, the first attempts to create a canon of vernacular authors and the first
literary quarrels precisely document the increasing visibility of the author.
I N T RO D U C T I O N 3
The last question “How have they been approached by modern scholars?”
displaces the inquiring gaze to the discipline itself and acknowledges that
the notion of “author” is also constructed by those who study it. The
medieval field is probably the only literary field that provides (at least in
English) a specific term for its self-study: medievalism. This term encom-
passes all uses and abuses of the Middle Ages in subsequent eras, including
the development of the study of medieval literature as an academic discipline.
The construction of the medieval author is a crucial element in the evolution
of the field and in its positioning within the broader field of literary criticism.
Looking at how previous medievalists envisioned their authors (or lack
thereof ) may allow current medievalists to better understand and justify
their own practice.
So far the questions listed and presented here could apply to any author
in any period. However, such a collection of essays can be justified only if
there is something special about medieval authors that sets them apart from
other authors. One obvious distinctive feature of the medieval author is that
he/she/it is a difficult animal to corner and describe. Not all medieval
authors are anonymous, but anonymity and pseudonymity occur often
enough in medieval literature to create a specific onomastic problem and to
destabilize any common sense relation between name and person, name
and author, author and person. Generally medievalists become accustomed
to it, but once in a while the issue resurfaces as, for instance, in Howard
Bloch’s latest book, The Anonymous Marie de France.2 Another characteristic
of medieval authors is the instability of their works and their lack of control
over them once in writing. If medieval authors do not seem to have greatly
suffered from the anxiety of influence, they certainly were affected by the
anxiety of interference—for good reason. Medieval authors were also living
in a world in which oral transmission and performance still played a role in
literature. For us, a medieval author can only be someone whose literary
productions were at some point put in writing. But for medieval authors
themselves, story tellers, jugglers, and singers were part of the literary
landscape—even those whose works were never collected into books, and
even if the more literate poets tended to frown upon their illiterate colleagues.
The dual nature of medieval literature (oral and written) persists well into
the era of print, and affects figures of authors and practices of authorship all
along the period.The last trait of medieval authors I would like to point out
is the difficulty they had in establishing literary authority in vernacular lan-
guages. In Latin Christianity, to write vernacular verse and prose about reli-
gious or secular matters was not an easy undertaking. It involved redefining
the difference between laymen and clerics, exporting the culture of the
book from monasteries into castles and cities, creating new models of the
Christian self and new figures of the author. In sum, the traits characterizing
4 VIRGINIE GREENE
the medieval author indicate a figure which was not yet viewed as a social
or professional type, nor as belonging to a specific order or estate, but as
standing at the threshold of several important social and cultural borders.3
In this sense, an author was above all “a translator in the broadest sense of
the term” as Howard Bloch qualifies Marie de France.4
If there are some common traits justifying the study of the medieval
author, one may ask if it is legitimate to identify such a thing as the “French
medieval author.” The history of the discipline has shown enough how ten-
dencious it is to project modern national entities and identities (i.e., from
the nineteenth and twentieth century) onto the Middle Ages. This book
does not attempt to sketch a multifaceted portrait of the medieval archetype
of Victor Hugo and Marguerite Duras. However, it is undeniable that
the terms “France” and “françois” were in use between the twelfth and the
fifteenth centuries and meant something. Authors chose to write in a
language or another (not necessarily their maternal language as Brunetto
Latini demonstrates), and these choices shaped literary traditions. That
is why Wolfram von Eschenbach cannot be viewed as one of the continuators
of Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal.Wolfram did not continue Chrétien’s
romance; he did it all over again, translating, adapting, integrating it into
his own literary and linguistic tradition.The author with whom Wolfram is
in dialogue in Parzival is Gottfried von Strassburg, not Chrétien de Troyes
or his fictional representative, the provençal Kyot. Mastering a language is a
key function of medieval authors. Studying “French medieval authors”
means looking at authorship as practiced by those who chose to master
French in its various dialectal guises. No doubt that non-French authors
such as Virgil, Saint Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch have to be taken into
account as role models for all European medieval authors, including the
French. Such figures are mentioned in some essays in this volume, but no
single essay is entirely devoted to them. It is symptomatic of French
medieval literature that it did not produce a towering figure that could be
equaled to the four above-mentioned beacons. It did produce fine writers
though. I hope this book will be read as a praise of fine writers of all times
and all places, with a particular thought for fine French medieval writers. I
am deeply grateful to the contributors of this volume for the attention they
devoted to their authors, no matter how difficult to grasp they are.
The eleven essays collected here do not trace a clear chronological line
from “no author” to “the Author.” This collection could be subtitled
“Toward the Author” to indicate the Author as an ideal goal always some-
what announced but never fully and simply realized, at least in the corpus
of works studied herein—a corpus spanning from the late twelfth-century
with the first continuations of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal (in Matilda
Bruckner’s essay) to the sixteenth century and even later with the printed
versions of Melusine and Olivier de Castille (in Ana Pairet’s essay). It is not that
nothing changes during these four or five centuries: by studying authorial
manifestations in well-defined genres (chronicles and lyric poetry) from the
thirteenth to the fifteenth century, Sophie Marnette and Jacqueline
Cerquiglini-Toulet bring appreciable changes to the fore.
Marnette’s quantitative and qualitative analysis of first-person markers in
a corpus of chronicles demonstrates a trend from third-person narrator
(Villehardouin, Clari) to first-person narrator ( Joinville, Froissart,
Commynes, Monstrelet, and the Heraut Berry). This trend, however, is
complicated by the numerous functions that the “I” can assume in historical
narratives: author, narrator, witness, actor, character, commentator. The
choice of the grammatical person establishes the position of the narrator
with respect to his text and its truth. Marnette remarks that in earlier chron-
icles, “the absence of I-narrator, . . . illustrates how vernacular prose came
to be used as a discursive modality expressing an impersonal, single, imma-
nent truth.” In later chronicles “the I representing the narrator” comes to
coincide with “the reference to the name and the function of author.”
Thus, a “chameleon I” is in charge of establishing a “rhetoric of truth,”
which by the end of the thirteenth century is no longer supported by the
mere fact that a text is written in prose. Since “the I-narrator-author is
engaged in the global coherence of his work,” the conjunction of the
“experiencing self and the narrating self ” in later chronicles contributes to
the establishment of a subjective truth which, Marnette suggests, may be
comparable to the subjective truth emerging in lyric poetry.
In lyric poetry, according to Cerquiglini-Toulet, changes occur first at
the level of the “writing stage,” on which the poet must establish who or
what makes him or her write. If the question “for whom is it written?”
never becomes obsolete since patronage remains an important frame of
literary production throughout the period, a new question is asked:“why is
it written?” For Cerquiglini-Toulet this question is related to the
emergence of the “sentement” [inspiration] as an authority from within,
justifying the act of writing poetry independantly of any patron: “The
writer, even when he or she is commissioned, is no longer a servant or a
minstrel, but is instead an author.” But this new freedom is related to a more
complex relationship between the author and his or her book. The book
comes to be seen as a “son” which will survive his “father” and represent
him for posterity. Then paradoxically, “the author begins to exist once he
has disappeared and survives in his work.” For fourteenth- and fifteenth-
century writers the consequences of such a change might be nothing less
than the invention of literary history through the celebration by poets of
their predecessors and masters. By writing a ballad about Guillaume de
Machaut’s death, Eustache Deschamps “gives the first sign of recognition of
6 VIRGINIE GREENE
a poet writing in French.” Literary tombs and epitaphs of writers will even-
tually multiply, giving monumentality to authors’ names, but also blending
reverence with derision. “Is this transformation of the figure of the author
into a mythical character a coronation?” Cerquiglini-Toulet asks. All the
other essays answer this question by catching an author or a group of
authors in delicate and paradoxical postures. Crowned or aspiring to a
crown perhaps, but with what strange crowns and on what unstable thrones
they present themselves, when they care to do so.
To wit, if we don’t know much about who Chrétien de Troyes was, his
name was sufficiently recognizable as an authorizing sign in the decades fol-
lowing his literary activity to stimulate in more than one reader the desire
to “continue” where Chrétien had left off. Matilda Bruckner finds in the
continuations to the Conte du Graal “the whole gamut of authorial identity
from anonymous to the fully weighted proper name—but significantly not
presented in that order.” This “collective enterprise” was a testing ground
for authorial attempts, but the unexplained failure of the first grail hero,
Perceval, became emblematic of the continuators’ failure to end his quest
and to gain a “fully weighted name.” One of the continuators,Wauchier de
Denain, can only be characterized by his “modesty as author,” and by his
tendency to appropriate from his main character “the strategy of the nice”
unable (or unwilling?) to resolve the tensions set up by Chrétien “between
Grail and girl.” This may be after all a sign of true literary flair: we may not
have met here with a “great medieval author” like Chrétien, but with a
good medieval reader aspiring to carry on the pleasures of reading through
writing—endlessly and aimlessly.
If the continuators repeatedly failed to end the romance of the Grail,
about a century later Baudoin Butor repeatedly failed to start a Roman des
fils du roi Constant that, as such, never got beyond the stage of hopeful
planning. Anne Berthelot shows that the four drafts found in the blanks and
margins of MS BnF f. fr. 1446 reveal better than successful romances the
complex position of the author of romance after the great anonymous or
pseudonymous prose cycles have been written. Like his colleagues, Baudoin
“dreams of inserting newly minted characters into the still rather loose plot
of the chronicles of Britain.” But unlike most of them, he is keen to insert
a new authorial name,“Baudoin Butor,” in the lineage of fictitious or semi-
fictitious names used to “authorize” prose romances such as Robert and
Helie de Boron. In this literary context, a name like “Baudoin Butor” has
no authorizing power in itself. In his four drafts Butor uses patrons’ names,
fictitious characters, the classic dream frame, and numerous first-person
assertions.This was obviously not enough—or too much. However, the fail-
ure may be not so complete. Berthelot cautiously suggests relating Butor’s
drafts to a romance that did not fail to exist, the duly anonymous Le Roman
de Perceforest. The trajectory thus indicated is from an author without a

romance toward a romance without an author. In any case, the difficulty of
conjoining a romance and an author’s name is clearly rooted in the practice
of borrowing and rewriting, as Berthelot points out in her essay.
In the case of Gautier de Coincy’s Miracles de Nostre Dame, the practice
of borrowing and rewriting is not adverse to the establishment of a strong
authorial claim over the work. Margaret Switten’s main goal is to demon-
strate how Gautier “uses borrowing and citation to define authorship
within his text.” It may seem at first sight that his status as a monk would
contradict his assertion as a vernacular author. But Gautier answers those
who object to monks singing and composing chansons nouvelles [new songs],
by “separating himself from monks who become jongleurs and travel about
the world.” It is “from within the monastery” that a monk can be justified
in using the talents granted to him by God to celebrate God. Gautier, how-
ever, does not celebrate God directly, but God’s mother.The Virgin allows
Gautier to justify his use of vernacular language and of secular literature and
music. Switten insists on the resonance of the word Dame and its ambiguities:
a feudal term adapted to the religious sphere,“the word dame also recalls the
secular lady of courtly lyric, allowing Gautier to play ambiguously on secu-
lar lyric traditions in order to convert ma dame [my lady] to Notre Dame
[Our Lady].” To better serve his Lady, Gautier feels justified in borrowing
from all sources and “[converting] secular sources to sacred use.” His true
authorial signature consists in the ingenuity he displays in adapting bor-
rowing and citation to his own project—not only as a poet but also as a
composer. By demonstrating that Gautier the composer resorts to tech-
niques similar to those of Gautier the poet, Switten reminds us that the
question of the literary author can be illuminated by research on other
forms of authorship—music in particular, given the importance of “song”
and “singing” in medieval poetry and poetics.
What if Guillaume de Lorris and/or Jean de Meun had been monks?
Could they have written the Roman de la Rose “from within the monastery”
and dedicated it to the “Rose of all roses,” that is Gautier’s Lady? Obviously
not. But the proximity in time of the Miracles de Nostre Dame and the Roman
de la Rose, as well as their great success (97 manuscripts of the Miracles, about
250 of the Rose) should make us reflect on the thin and unstable divide
between religious and secular literature in the thirteenth century. If the
Miracles can be seen as a result of the fruitful import of secular culture into
the monastery, the Roman de la Rose could be defined as a wild product of
monastic culture unleashed in the secular world.Alexandre Leupin submits
the Rose to an anachronistic treatment by transforming it into a Möbius
strip, a paradoxical unilateral surface that was “invented” in the nineteenth
century by German mathematician August Möbius (1790–1868). Used as
8 VIRGINIE GREENE
an interpretative tool, the Möbius strip reveals that “the structure of the
Roman de la Rose is grounded in a very old art of interpretation, the concordia
discors of the two Testaments created by the church fathers in order to read
the Bible.” For Leupin, the vexed question of double authorship in the Rose
can be solved by reconsidering the relationship between the two names of
the Rose5 as a paradoxical blend of unity and duality, represented by inscrib-
ing both names on a Möbius strip. This should remind us how much
medieval logicians loved insolubilia [insoluble problems], including the
famous paradox of the liar:“I am a liar” is a statement the truth or falsity of
which can never be decided because of its self-referentiality.6 Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean de Meun’s names and agency are inscribed in the Roman de
la Rose in a similar self-referential and undecidable fashion, with the ulti-
mate result being that “no part or author has a privilege of truth over the
other; contradictions will simply coexist in the eternal day which is a dis-
tinctive feature of the Roman’s temporality.”
The coexistence of contradictions at all levels of the Roman de la Rose
does not happen without a measure of violence. Leupin underlines the
brutality of the Rose’s ending:“the sexual conquest (which is a rape) of the
Rose.” Stephen Nichols sees the sexual violence present in various parts of
Jean de Meun’s text as a direct reflection of the “initial agon or struggle for
control of the work.” Jean de Meun proposes a model of poetic generation
built on the myth of Saturn’s castration by Jupiter, a fertile castration since
it gives birth to Venus. Here Nichols suspects a break with earlier practices
of writing:“whereas for Guillaume de Lorris and other poets of the twelfth
and early thirteenth centuries, adapting, translating and rewriting pre-
existing works was a natural poetic process, Jean de Meun portrays it in
rather more brutal terms.” A century or so later, Petrarch was able to find
and uphold a “link between life and letters,” and therefore to design “a new
concept of a ‘modern’ authorial persona.” Jean de Meun and to some extent
Guillaume de Lorris as well—why was he unable to finish his “dream”?—
failed to free their “authorial personae” from the traditional structures of
transmission and interpretation they still needed in order to find a space in
which to write. But one may praise and enjoy the Roman de la Rose because
its authors (including, as Nichols points out, the numerous scribes and illus-
trators who tinkered with the Rose) are part, rather than owners, of the rich
texture of the romance. In any case, the modern dyad of “author” and
“work” that is present even in the thoughts of thinkers rejecting the idea of
a work expressing its author’s personality (for instance T. S. Eliot and
Barthes), should not be projected onto medieval works such as the Roman
de la Rose.
Zrinka Stahuljak explores another form of violence associated with the
practice of writing: the violence resulting from the “tensions inherent to
neutral authorship.” Stahuljak demonstrates that Froissart’s claims “that he is

a neutral recorder of history” should not be taken as a noncommital topos.
Nothing is less noncommital than to be neutre [neutral] in fourteenth-
century political language and practices. Froissart’s commitment to neutrality
affects the structure of his work, his choice of episodes to narrate, his mode
of retelling them, and the abrupt way his Chronicles come to their end. One
may be surprized to see Gaston Febus described as “the glorious embodi-
ment of neutral politics,” but Froissart’s text as well as what is known of
Febus’s actions support this description. Febus plays a central role in the
Chronicles “as Froissart’s political alter ego,” exposing the paradox of a
neutrality that, to be maintained, requires strength and, when needed,
murderous violence. But, in Froissart’s narrative, if neutrality is presented on
one hand as a virile quality, on the other hand it is also connected to “the
passive, negative position of submission” and an “effeminate” type of rulers.
Froissart constructs neutrality as a “duplicitous” and unstable position.
Moreover, Froissart describes the language in which he writes, French, as
full of “deceptive words and covered ones.” Even if this is reported as the
opinion of the English, such an avowal sets the author of the Chronicles in a
suspicious position—perhaps we can see here yet another form of the liar
paradox:“I, Jean Froissart, neutral historiographer, will tell you the truth in
French, which is the language of liars.”
Danielle Bohler captures prose romance “authors” in a curious posture,
presenting themselves to their readers both “frontally and in profile.”
Traditional topoi of textual genesis provide a “well-established pose” by
which the author receiving an older book in order to write a newer one
affirms “his respectful affiliation with an authority.” But the gesture of
receiving or discovering a “little book” is now inscribed in the time of the
writer’s life and “at the heart of a private space in which the writer is alone.”
The topos of the found manuscript becomes “an individualized encounter”
between an old book and the writer of a “book-to-be,” which will exist as
“a direct result of the author’s mental state.” Bohler studies the variations of
the opening scene in several fifteenth-century anonymous and named
romances. Encountering an older book means encountering an older
language in need of updating, which justifies the intervention of the
rewriter and founds his or her authorial claim. This can also stir a melan-
choly meditation on the destiny of books, condemned to oblivion if they
are not rediscovered. In Raoul Lefèvre’s striking prologue to L’Histoire de
Jason, the encounter with the book becomes an encounter with the mythic
hero. Jason elects Lefèvre to a special literary destiny and allows him to find
peace by “anchoring” his troubled mind in a worthy project. Bohler’s
observations demonstrate that in late romances, a rich array of metaphors
and renewed topoi allow authors to depict themselves at work both in the
10 VIRGINIE GREENE
material world in which books are produced, and in the immaterial world
in which books are conceived and dreamed.
Ana Pairet’s essay focuses on the destiny of two late romances, Jean
d’Arras’s Melusine and Philippe le Camus’s Olivier de Castille, in order to
examine “how the shift from script to print affects medieval conventions of
authorship.” Print has certainly not bestowed on Jean d’Arras and Philippe
le Camus the status of “author” in its modern sense; on the contrary, Pairet
shows that “the fundamental instability of authority” characteristic of
medieval romances is carried on into the era of print and complicated by
the intervention of a new actor on the “writing stage” (to use Cerquiglini-
Toulet’s expression), the printer.According to Pairet, because printed books
“now reach a much broader audience,” printers are expected “to guarantee
readability” and “to assume hermeneutic forms of authority.” Jean d’Arras’s
authorship was preserved in print until the end of the seventeenth century,
but his romance was divided by printers into two very successful romances.
Philippe le Camus’s name was also preserved in the first printed editions of
Olivier de Castille, but the printer Louis Cruse (alias Louis Garbin) inscribed
his name and detailed his interventions “thus construct[ing] a meta-textual
didactic voice framing the original narrative and Camus’ prologue.” Pairet
also shows that early modern translators could go further than printers by
routinely practicing “deliberate omission of authorial marks and erasure of
paratextual signatures.” For Pairet, the advent of print tended to preserve the
“authorial self-representation” and the “multi-layered authorial persona”
typical of medieval romances. But it also enabled editors/printers “to
inscribe their names and agency in the liminary spaces of the book more
assertively than had medieval copyists.”
The eleventh essay of this collection reflects upon the ways medievalists
have considered their “authors” during the last half-century. Because of its
paradoxical and elusive nature,“the medieval author” became a much more
interesting phenomenon once the “author” or the “Author” had been
submitted to Roland Barthes’s and Michel Foucault’s vigorous questioning.
The trajectory of Paul Zumthor demonstrates that medievalists could, for a
while, feel attuned to cutting-edge aspects of literary criticism as they
embraced a “textualist” approach made easier for them by the dearth of full-
fleshed authors in medieval literature.This was done at the price of sweep-
ing under the carpet numerous marks of authority and authorship present
in medieval texts, and of considering the later Middle Ages as a form of
decadence. Even Zumthor at some point moved toward another position—
more inspired by Foucault’s historicism than by Barthes’s criticism—which
allowed him to reopen the text to its context and consider author and
authorship as part of medieval literary and cultural reality. In the 1980s
medievalists debated the status of medieval authors such as Chrétien de
Troyes, Marie de France, and Jean Renart, seen by some as pure textual
effects. At the same time, the complex games of anonymity and pseudo-
nymity in prose romances attracted more interest. During the last two or
three decades, medievalists came to accept their authors as a paradoxical
object, “both a tool and a projection which cannot be analyzed in logical
terms.” The goal of this volume of essays is to demonstrate that glancing at
medieval authors—“frontally and in profile”—is indeed a productive
approach to medieval texts.
Notes
1. See Vincent Descombes’s summary of the “Querelle du Sujet” in Le complé-
ment de sujet: enquête sur le fait d’agir de soi-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2004),
pp. 7–13. On the question of the author, see pp. 204–205.
2. R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003). I discuss Bloch’s assessment of Marie as an author in my
essay “What happened to medievalists . . . .”
3. In the Dance of Death printed by Guyot Marchand in 1490, the author is not
represented among the various social types dancing with Death, but appears
in the last two woodcuts as the sage who overcomes mortality by meditating
and writing about it. See The Dance of Death Printed at Paris in 1490:
A Reproduction Made from the Copy in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library
of Congress (Washington D.C.: Library of Congress, 1945).
4. Bloch, The Anonymous, p. 315.
5. I owe this pun to Stephen Nichols, who originally wanted to title his own
essay “The Names of the Rose.”
6. On the insolubilia and the paradox of the liar, see Robert Blanché and Jacques
Dubucs, La Logique et son histoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 2002), pp. 160–161.
CHAPTER 1
AUTHORIAL RELAYS: CONTINUING

CHRÉTIEN’S CONTE DU GRAAL
Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
ow should we talk about the medieval vernacular author when, as

H Anne Berthelot has reminded us, l’écrivain—the writer as metaphor of
origin rather than the literally writing scribe—does not yet exist in twelfth-
century vocabulary and still poses methodological problems in thirteenth-
century usage?1 Hence a diversion toward the adjectival mode in my title:
“authorial relays” conjures up the image of successive figures who, like
runners, pass along the baton of a shared text, which is thereby enabled to
complete its trajectory from start to finish, beginning to end. Of course,
when that image connects with the notoriously unfinished and repeatedly
continued romance in which Chrétien de Troyes launched the Grail quest,
we can appreciate how richly problematic such a relay race may become. By
focusing on authors’ names, I offer here a preliminary guide to help
navigate the obstacles of the course.
If anonymity constitutes the degree zero of vernacular writing in the
Middle Ages,2 we must nevertheless recognize in the case of romance a
dynamic play operating between anonymous and named authors. In
Medieval French Romance, Douglas Kelly’s comprehensive list includes
approximately 120 items for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; 59 names
account for 76 works.3 While in many cases the name comes with no état
civil attached, the impetus to name authors is nevertheless remarkable in its
persistence. Without the paratextual apparatus of modern authorship,
romancers who emerge from anonymity do so when their names penetrate
textual boundaries. Named by themselves or others in prologues and
epilogues, less often in medias res, their proper names establish an intermediary
space in which the extra- and intradiegetic meet. The presumption of a
14 M AT I L DA T O M A RY N B RU C K N E R
historical referent built into the proper name (however unverifiable or

fictional it may be) establishes, on the one hand, a relationship between
literary artifact and social setting—the patrons and courtly public of
romance—and authorizes, on the other, a particular reinvention of the
romance’s source material, guaranteed by a kind of signature.The author’s
proper name functions as a textual slot for accumulating literary capital or
as a magnet for attracting varieties of intertextual play. And in this respect,
all names are not equal, as Perceval and its continuations amply demonstrate.
What difference does a name make in this game of the author? Naming
announces an identity, the identity of a narrator’s I and the author’s he, even
as it signals their difference.The overlap simultaneously uncovers and cov-
ers over the space between inside and outside, keeps narrator and author in
tandem throughout the text, although the third person author designated
by name appears only fleetingly in comparison with repeated first person
interventions.When more than one author’s name lays claim to a particular
romance, the apparent constance of the I may waver disconcertingly. For
many modern readers of the continuations, their heterogeneous and con-
tradictory accumulation of materials makes it difficult to see them as true
continuations forming a coherent whole in relation to Chrétien’s romance.
And yet the manuscript tradition suggests that we should consider them in
this light, not only to understand better how medieval writers put them
together or how medieval readers read them, but also to grasp an underly-
ing logic that plays on fragmentation and continuation in order to realize
achèvement (in both its French and English uses). This logic is not without
ramifications for other romances and other kinds of writing in the Middle
Ages.4 Since anonymous as well as named romancers participated in this
process, close examination of their acts or omissions of authorial naming
leads irresistibly into the labyrinthine logic so characteristic of Chrétien’s
Grail romance, both unfinished and continued.
Three continuators’ names—Wauchier de Denain, Manessier, and
Gerbert—appear in the manuscript tradition.We do not have a name for the
first continuator who remains as anonymous as the other writing entities who
generally operate below the level we consider worthy of the term “author.”
Within Perceval and its four continuations, we thus encounter the whole
gamut of authorial identity from anonymous to the fully weighted proper
name—but significantly not presented in that order, as summarized below:
(P) Le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes (typically designated as

Perceval), ca. 1181–91
(1) First Continuation (also known as the Gauvain Continuation), in
three redactions: Short, Long, and Mixed, late twelfth century
CONTINUING CHRÉTIEN’S CONTE DU GRAAL 15
(2) Second Continuation (also known as the Perceval Continuation) by

Wauchier de Denain, late twelfth century
(3) Third Continuation by Manessier, ca. 1214–27
(4) Fourth Continuation by Gerbert (de Montreuil?), ca. 1226–30;
inserted between the Second and Third Continuations in manu-
scripts T and V, ca. 1250 (or later)
In the larger context of the many Grail romances that rewrite Chrétien’s
seminal text, we may be struck by a number of anomalies involving the
continuations’ form and authorship, which I need to point out briefly in
order to explain why they have received relatively little attention and why
they deserve much more. Emmanuèle Baumgartner has formulated a set of
rules that seem to operate in romance from the thirteenth century on: all
romances or new versions of the Grail will be in prose (except for the
continuations); all Arthurian romances will be in verse, and there will be no
Gauvain en prose [prose Gauvain], although Arthur’s nephew will star in
many verse romances.5 Sophie Marnette’s statistical and qualitative analysis
of data on authors/narrators further confirms the tendency of Grail
romances to opt for prose and anonymous authorship in order to be
consistent with the type of truth claims associated with the now Holy Grail
once Robert de Boron’s version enters the arena.6
The logic of these analyses is persuasive but requires us to set aside the
verse continuations as exceptional. Yet these exceptions deserve further
analysis precisely because they accumulate anomalies in such an insistent
fashion.Anomalous on three counts, the Perceval Continuations continue in
verse, continue to name authors, and continue to associate Gauvain with
the Grail quest (even if his role will gradually be reduced). What are the
verse continuations telling us about Chrétien’s romance and romance
writing that may have been overlooked by other rewritings?
A quick overview of the specific acts of naming that both announce and
efface the changes of gear from one author to another across the segments
that connect Perceval and its four continuations will allow me to begin
responding to that question and then speculate on how these positive or
negative acts of authorial naming relate to the question of reading the letter,
the problem that is so insistently staged in Chrétien’s romance. If we
consider the collection of names given, their differences in status or role
obviously mark out three subsets of texts:
The first, le vieux perceval, as it is designated by one scribe’s explicit,7
remains in place as the initiating romance throughout the manuscript
tradition.8 In the prologue, “Crestïens” twice identifies himself as author,
the repetitions forming a frame around the praise of his patron, as well as a
kind of fanfare to announce the tale he is about to tell. In its current con-
text, the author’s name has become a collection point, the point of inter-
section between previous romances signed by “Crestïens” or “Crestïens de
Troies” and the continuations that take off in direct descent from his Grail
story. In relation to other works, Chrétien’s name anchors his romances to
particular places and periods evoked by patrons (here Philippe de Flandre).
Within the romance the public of connoisseurs recognizes in that proper
name a certain kind of textuality and narrating voice. As the author of five
romances,“Crestïens” has accumulated a thickness and weight incommen-
surate with that of his continuators, who will show their deference through
silence as well as citation.
Second, the first two continuations, both of which date from the last part
of the twelfth century,9 form a unit insofar as they continue largely under
the aegis of Chrétien’s authorship and together reprise the zigzagging
pattern of interlace he set up between the two heroes: the Gauvain
Continuation is thus followed by the Perceval Continuation.10 An author-
ial name surfaces briefly in the Second Continuation, when the interlace
formula reappears to introduce the final episodes in the contribution of
“Gauchier de Dondain.” That is the name as given in manuscript E
(Roach’s base text).11 Arguments for and against identification of the author
as Wauchier de Denain have recently been decided again in his favor.12
What we do with that identification outside the text and how we read it
inside in relation to both the First and Second, as well as the Third and
Fourth Continuations, will require further commentary.
Third, the last two continuations also form a set insofar as both
Manessier and Gerbert are keen to situate their work in relation to the
originating author: both refer to the issue of interruption and continua-
tion, both seek to clarify where they started, and both look toward an end-
ing. Gerbert’s desire to write to the end was perhaps frustrated when his
continuation was inserted between the Second and Third. Manessier, whose
continuation closes the series in eight manuscripts, announces his name
twice, as did Chrétien, who remains unnamed although clearly designated
in an epilogue that arches back to the prologue by way of a genealogy of
patrons:13
El non Jehanne la contesse,

Qu’est de Flandres dame et mestresse, . . .
Ai en son non finé mon livre.
El non son aiol comença. (42643–44, 42653–54)
[In the name of Jeanne the countess who is lady and mistress of
Flanders . . . in her name I have finished my book; it began in the name of
her ancestor [great uncle].]
Most scholars accept the likelihood that Gerbert and Manessier worked
independently of each other to pick up where the Second Continuation
ended. Only manuscripts T and V include Gerbert, whose authorial
intervention frames Perceval’s return to Blancheflor and includes five
repetitions of his name, as well as an acknowledgment that others had
continued Chrétien’s work before he did: “Gerbers, qui a reprise l’oevre /
Quant chascuns trovere le laisse” (6998–99) [Gerbert who has taken up the
work again when each other poet leaves it].
Manessier, by contrast, claims that he is the first to put a hand to the
romance since it was begun.
Ne puis ne fu des lors en ça

Nus hons qui la main i meïst
Ne du finner s’antremeïst. (42654–56)
[Since then until now no one put his hand to it or undertook to finish it.]
Does he believe that Chrétien was the author of both the First and
Second Continuations? They clearly form part of his model, just as they
do for the Fourth Continuation. Manessier’s assertion mirrors the written
evidence, the absence of breaks which led the editor William Roach to
conclude “that in all the manuscripts which have preserved both the First
and the Second Continuations, the redactors and the copyists thought of
the corpus as a single, continuous story.”14 None of the acts of authorial
naming found in these manuscripts coincide with the textual moment of
passing from one writer to another. The writing continues precisely to
mask the shift in reference covered over by the narrating I, whose chang-
ing identity will only be signaled after the fact.This repeated technique of
delayed authorial naming15 seems designed first to fool the readers into
missing the transitions and then to invite them back to find the place
(if they can).The requirement to read forward and backward, to superim-
pose retroactively corresponding segments of narrative, are the very
techniques of writing and reading already inscribed in Chrétien’s Perceval,
and they remain fundamental to the continuations. The succession and
placement of authorial names play a key role in triggering and
retriggering the system.
This initial view of the Big Bang originating in Chrétien’s romance
suggests a second phase of lumpy collective authorship.The gradual spread-
ing out of authorial galaxies guarantees the continuing authenticity of the
text, at least for medieval readers. But the identities given are decidedly
uneven, unpredictable, and difficult to determine; they certainly do not
account for all the writing gathered together. We need to return to the
series of continuations in order to examine in greater detail continuities and
discontinuities, obvious as well as less obvious segmentation connected to

authorial naming. My focus here, limited to the first two continuations, will
give some sense of that play.
The Gauvain Continuation is anonymous, which suggests that the
continuator has no borrowed authority to claim his status as writer, as
Godefroi de Leigni alleged in the epilogue to Chrétien’s Chevalier de la
Charrette—hence the effacement of the first continuator’s identity, at least
on the surface level of the narrating voice.What is at stake in this authorial
silence? While Chrétien was willing to allow another writer to finish a
previous romance, Godefroi’s decision to delay mentioning it until after the
fact suggests that Chrétien’s proper name in the prologue stakes a claim that
should set his work apart. Like other medieval writers, Chrétien appropriates
the already written, but the authorial character he projects also suggests
someone who proudly lays claim to his own.The prologue to Erec et Enide
plays on his name and fame “[t]ant con durra crestientez” [as long as
christianity will endure].16 The tone of the Perceval prologue is set by the
opening figure of the sower, as well as the superlatives attached to “le meillor
conte / Qui soit contez a cort roial” [the best story told in a royal court].17
Gerbert, writing about fifty years later, alludes to his predecessor’s death
and thus establishes his right to continue without impinging on the dead
author’s copyright, as understood in medieval terms.18 By contrast, the First
Continuation carries a sense of starting in close proximity to Chrétien, and
then gradually moving away from him spatially and chronologically. This
evolution appears in several guises in the letter of the text. In the first place,
the Gauvain Continuation picks up immediately after Chrétien’s last, unfin-
ished sentence without in any way signaling a change of authorship. The
eleven manuscripts that offer the First Continuation reflect successive stages
of elaboration in which a kernel of episodes, established early in the process,
remains constant, while variation is such that the editor has published three
different states, the short, long, and mixed redactions.The play of reinven-
tion among these versions gives a picture of Chrétien’s authorial presence,
at first strongly felt, then receding but always retaining the potential to be
reactivated, as if Chrétien’s authority operating at a further remove allows
greater intervention from continuators, remanieurs, and scribes, but still
keeps the canonical character of the group in evidence. Interestingly, it is
only in manuscripts T and V, probably dated some time after 1250, that the
gap as well as the continuity between Chrétien and the continuations have
become certified sufficiently for the mixed redaction to add two references
to “Crestïen.”The first occurs when Gauvain arrives at the Grail Castle and
the narrator refers back quite legitimately to Chrétien’s praise of the
fortress: “Crestïen en ai a garant” (I, 1234) [Chrétien is my guarantor].
The second reference, however, falls into the category of false claims. It
occurs in the Livre de Caradoc and supports the description of an automaton
not to be found anywhere in Chrétien:“tel costume avoit / Dont Crestïens
mix le prisoit” (I, 4117–18) [such was its custom for which Chrétien prized
it more]. It is not often that we catch a writer so blatantly making up his
source. Perhaps “Crestïens” is serving here in the guise of authority rather
than author, in circumstances in which there is little risk that readers might
conflate his name with the narrator’s I.
There has, however, been considerable confusion about where Chrétien’s
text ends and where the First Continuation begins. I have already quoted
Roach’s assessment of how much the manuscripts seem designed to finesse
the transitions and support continuity. But scholarship has not been content
to leave it at that. Our modern sense of what should belong to an author,
what constitutes authenticity, has led to considerable polemics about what
should be credited to Chrétien.When Maurice Wilmotte enters the fray in
1930 to weigh in against Paul Meyer’s 1906 identification of Wauchier de
Denain, the debate is still open on whether or not Chrétien should be given
responsibility for the First and Second Continuations.19 Wilmotte concedes
parts of the First and all of the Second Continuation to “ces obscurs
rimeurs” [these obscure rhymers],20 while reserving most of the Gauvain
Continuation for Chrétien’s authorship at least by extension. Recognizing
“le faire du grand maître” [the great master’s touch]21 in much of the
writing of the First Continuation, Wilmotte hypothesizes an anonymous
continuator working from the original author’s notes and following his
characteristic élan.
No contemporary critic contests where Chrétien’s romance ends, as
attested by manuscripts that do not include any continuations. But the
current certainty about where the First Continuation begins does not
necessarily apply to where it stops. Common agreement follows the alter-
nation of Chrétien’s heroes and locates the beginning of the Second
Continuation at the point where the narrative finally returns to Perceval.
This is a reasonable choice inasmuch as it replicates the textual situation in
which Wauchier de Denain chooses to identify himself, almost 12,000
verses later, by placing his proper name at the crossroads of the interlace:
Einsint remest o lui Gauvains,

Dont li contes ne plus ne mains
Ne conte avant a ceste fois;
Mais de Perceval lou Galois
Porroiz le conte avant oïr,
S’a gre vos vient et a plesir.
Gauchiers de Dondain, qui l’estoire

Nos a mis avant en memoire,
Dit et conte que Perceval, (IV, 31415–23)22
[Thus Gauvain stays with him, about which the story will tell no more at this
point, but you can hear the story of Perceval the Welshman, if it pleases you.
Wauchier de Denain, who has put the story forward into memory for us,
recounts that Perceval . . .]
Corin Corley has argued, however, that the change in character does not nec-
essarily indicate a change in author. Based on manuscripts, rhymes, repeated
expressions, etc., he distinguishes a section that straddles the First and Second
Continuations (vv. 4882–10268) and hypothesizes different authors operating
across three rather than two continuations before Manessier.23 In his view,
Wauchier’s part would begin after Perceval’s visit to the Castle of the Magic
Chessboard, that is, with the ensuing Hunt of the White Stag (episode 5 in
Roach’s analysis), the sine qua non of his return there.
My intention is not to debate the pros and cons of Corley’s hypothesis
but to take his analysis as a model for understanding why it is impossible to
pin down exactly where Wauchier may have begun since he gives no indi-
cation of this at the moment of naming. In rereading the Second
Continuation recently, I too found myself wondering if a different writer
might be responsible for the opening series of short episodes that do not
seem to know quite where they are headed. Perceval’s meeting with the
lady at the Chessboard Castle is the first major scene in the continuation
and generates a whole series of adventures, as Perceval pursues his quest of
the lady’s favors. Later episodes seem to get better as they go along: they are
more developed, get more out of the constituent elements, common mat-
ter and Chrétien matter. Another continuator or just a writer who
improves? Or the story itself, as the narrator claims?
Que por l’estoire consomer

Fait l’an lou conte durer tant.
Assez i avroit plus que tant,
Qui tot vorroit an rime metre;
Mais li miaudres est an la letre,
Et miaudres vient adés avant,
Que li contes vet amandant. (Second Continuation, IV, 29202–08)
[One makes the story last so long to bring it to an end. For one who wanted
to put everything into rhyme, there would be much more but the best part is
in the writing, and better yet lies ahead as the story improves.]
Inevitably one has the sense of different hands at work—this is a collective

enterprise of writing.There is as well an overwhelming impression of being
in the middle of proliferating stories that may and do expand at any point
throughout the continuation. But there is also, at some level, a structure that
holds the mass together and moves it forward, like the river of water moving
through the Everglades: the concatenation of episodes tied together by
Perceval’s need to reach Mont Dolerous, to complete the Chessboard quest,
and, above all, to return to the Grail Castle.These interlaced quests operate
like a series of parentheses opened, piled up, recalled, deferred, and finally,
progressively, closed, as the later episodes complete the structural impetus of
the opening moves. How can we tease out of this mass what “Anonymous”
(one person, two, or more?) and Wauchier de Denain may be responsible
for? Should we try to tease apart what has been so assiduously written
together, if we are trying to get a sense of what the continuation is about?
In this section, the only instance of authorial naming highlights rather the
open-ended interlacing of two heroes and identifies authorship with this
shift between heroic identities and the fundamental impulse of writing
characteristic of the ensemble.
But what of the name Wauchier de Denain: does it give any information
with which to evaluate his role? As I indicated earlier, the proper name
serves as a kind of collector at the interface of extra- and intradiegetic
concerns. The trouble is, Wauchier de Denain is a name with very little
content. As a translator of saints’ lives, his authorial character has been
variously defined as inconsistent with his role in the Second Continuation
or perfectly compatible.24 But even if the attribution is credited by modern
scholars and may have been recognized by some medieval readers in his
immediate social setting, it seems unlikely, given the variants that deform his
name across the manuscript tradition, that most scribes or readers were able
to identify the author or associate much with the name.25 The possible
referent of the proper name does not help us read the Second Continuation
one way or another.
Reading the letter of this name metaphorically may be more promising.
In this light, I suggest that the modesty that characterizes the act of naming
at the interlace accords with the general character of the Second
Continuation. I would locate that modesty in the deference shown to
Chrétien’s romance model, not only in its reprise of certain key elements
from Perceval, but especially in the effort to ask through insistent narrative
elaboration the most puzzling and unresolved questions left open by the
originating author: What is the relationship between love and the Grail?
How is Perceval’s relationship to Blancheflor to be understood in light of
his quest to return to the Grail Castle? Since there has been no return to
Perceval in the Gauvain Continuation, no possible answers have as yet been
assayed, except insofar as Gauvain has been allowed to reach the Grail Castle
without changing his typically amorous character.The second continuator
has not tackled the issue directly, and we may wonder if he arrives at a
definitive answer at all. In fact, I would suggest that it is the continuator here
rather than Perceval who plays the role of the nice, the simpleton who asks
the question over and over again but is not quite able to get to an answer.
Is Wauchier’s obtuseness a match for the consummate cleverness of
Chrétien, who typically offers more questions and contradictions than
answers? Let me explain how I understand the strategy of the nice.
Readers of the Second Continuation cannot fail to be struck by the
prominence given to the Chessboard Castle adventure, along with the
necessity to go to Mont Dolerous, in Perceval’s highly dilatory efforts to
return to the Grail Castle.The role of Mont Dolerous has some authoriza-
tion from Chrétien’s romance: it is one of the adventures announced at
Arthur’s court (4724), when the knights disperse in different directions,
with only Perceval headed to the Fisher King’s. So we may not be surprised
that it is precisely the link with Mont Dolerous, reinvented after its role in
the First Continuation, that marks the opening and closing moments of
Wauchier’s continuation (as well as the place for his signature). With the
continuation thus anchored to its originating text, the bulk of the narrative
is mapped out by the stages of the Chessboard adventure, which has no
direct precedent in Perceval and bespeaks, from certain points of view, the
imaginative excess of the continuation, its discontinuous difference. What
I am calling Wauchier’s modesty has struck other readers as the opposite—
a blatant diversion from the sense of his predecessor’s romance. For
Laurence Harf-Lancner, who usefully identifies the basic module—hero
meets fairy defended by giant26—which furnishes a narrative format for
variation in six of the twelve episodes linked to the White Stag quest,“[c]e
roman de Perceval n’est nullement un roman du Graal mais un long conte
de fées” [[t]his Perceval romance is not at all a Grail romance but a long
fairy tale].27 From her perspective, Grail story and fairytale fail to coalesce.
And yet the narrative concatenations insist repeatedly on connections,
even if the narrator fails to make explicit any reason for the links between
Grail quest and Chessboard adventure. The tie-in is carefully reiterated
when Perceval leaves the Chessboard Castle after receiving the favors
promised by the lady. The lady herself puts Perceval directly on the “droit
chemin” [right path] (28166) to the Fisher King’s. Perceval promises a
return to the Chessboard lady after his visit to the Grail Castle, just as he
promised to return to Blancheflor earlier in the narrative.This doubling of
promises may, in fact, be the signal to help explain what is going on with
the fairytale diversion.
The puzzle of intertwined quests suggests that the puzzle of Perceval’s
relationship to love and Blancheflor has been displaced onto his adventure
with the Chessboard lady. The continuator can thus experiment with
possible outcomes and keep Blancheflor safely on the side in a kind of hold-
ing pattern until the issue of Perceval’s sexual involvements may be resolved
in another context. Following the comic precedent set in Chrétien’s
romance by the Tent Maiden episode and the more courtly developments
with Blancheflor, Perceval’s erotic gear and potential are kept in good
working order, on the back burner, so to speak, until his return to the Fisher
King may open the way to working out how the love motivation and the
Grail achievement might be connected in a romance that differs so
substantially from the combination of love and prowess typical of Chrétien’s
previous romances.
Significantly, Perceval’s pattern of failure, the unique feature of his
character as hero first established at the Grail Castle, plays a key role in the
initiation of his Chessboard adventure: he fails to win at chess against the
magic board, he fails to keep the lady’s dog and the white stag head, just as
he fails to keep his focus on the Grail quest. Of course, these failures are
important benefits for a continuator who wants to keep his narrative from
rushing too quickly to an ending. But the association may have ramifica-
tions on other levels of meaning, inviting us to speculate about Perceval’s
ability to recuperate failure, or combine sexuality and Grail achievement.
In this respect, it is useful to recall Perceval’s connections with Gauvain
across the interlace of their entwined itineraries. In unraveling the puzzle of
why the Chessboard adventure takes on such an important role here, we
cannot fail to notice a small thread leading back to Chrétien’s authorizing
text that passes through Gauvain’s adventures and furnishes a number of key
elements that will be shifted to Perceval and revamped significantly by
Wauchier. At Escavalon, Gauvain dallied with a lady, the sister of his host,
who unfortunately turned out to be the daughter of the man he has been
accused of killing. When attacked by the townspeople, Gauvain used a
chessboard as shield, while the lady hurled chess pieces at the assaillants.This
episode obliges Gauvain to set off on his own Grail Castle quest—versions
of which appear in the various redactions of the First Continuation, along
with complicated adventures that feature a seductive lady in a tent. Gauvain’s
reappearance in the Second Continuation, on his way to find Perceval and
the Grail Castle, includes yet another amorous interlude.28
The pattern of these encounters and echoes sets up an expectation that
Grail quests and love may have something in common, or at the very least
are not exclusive (as they will definitely become once the thirteenth-
century prose romances rewrite Chrétien’s story). When Perceval success-
fully returns to the Magic Chessboard Castle and unambiguously receives
the lady’s favors, is the second continuator suggesting through his narrative
deployment that the hero will be able to bring together the girl and the
Grail?29 But the nice, who may be the continuator rather than the no-longer
comic Perceval, still does not quite know how to articulate such a resolu-
tion. The Second Continuation’s replay of Perceval at Biau Repaire left
open the question of sexual relations between Perceval and Blancheflor,
though there was a strong hint that they have already been initiated
(22834–42). The narratorial ambiguity allows Wauchier the author to
continue asking the questions through the architecture of his continuation:
how it will end, how the dichotomy between Grail and girl, if it is indeed a
dichotomy, can be resolved. We modern readers, doubtful of Wauchier’s
status, are not certain he knows where he is going and we are even less sure
that he understands where Chrétien’s romance might have ended. But in
some sense,Wauchier’s modesty as author leads him to replicate in his own
way the unfinished character of the master text. He has remained faithful to
Chrétien’s tendency to maximize the tension of contradictions without
eliminating them for the sake of reductive solutions.
Lack of resolution or the impossibility of resolution is another of the
major issues left by Chrétien’s romance. In that respect, the Second
Continuation is strangely related to Perceval’s problematic ending in mid-
sentence. We know where the Second Continuation ends because both
Manessier and Gerbert take pains to signal retroactively that their continu-
ations began at the moment at which Perceval put back together the two
pieces of the sword, the preliminary test for getting answers to the questions
added by the First Continuation.
Manessier . . . l’a finé

Selonc l’estoire proprement,
Qui conmença au soudement
De l’espee sanz contredit. (V, 42658–61)
[Manessier, who began without contestation at the soldering of the sword,
has finished it properly according to the story.]
Gerbers, qui le nous traite et dite

Puis enencha que Perchevaus
Qui tant ot paines et travaus
La bone espee rasalda
Et que du Graal demanda
Et de la Lance qui saignoit
Demanda que senefioit . . . (I, 7008–14)
[Gerbert, who tells it for us from the point where Perceval who had so
much pain and trouble, resoldered the good sword and asked what the Grail
and the Lance that was bleeding signified.]
But why did the second continuator stop there? We certainly find no
answer in the text or the manuscripts, no explanation of the sort given
elsewhere: “he died” or “he gave the task to another writer.” Wauchier’s
name placed at the interlace gave no explicit information on ending, although
the placement at the Mont Dolerous episode insinuates a movement toward
closure as the series of announced adventures are fulfilled.“Et Percevaux se
reconforte” (32594) [And Perceval is comforted] is the last line of the
Second Continuation. Did Wauchier finish? It does not seem so, since he is
mid-scene even if he is not mid-sentence, as the two continuators read him
by adding subordinate clauses. By describing Perceval’s joy (32595–97),
Manessier interprets the scene as indicating that the hero has successfully
completed his quest and will now go on a post-Grail mop-up for about
10,000 verses. Gerbert, on the contrary, interprets the scene as requiring
further effort on Perceval’s part in order to bring together the two pieces of
the sword without leaving even the tiniest gap, and thus finds authorization
for a 17,000 line continuation.
As a result, the passage from the Second to the Third Continuation, or
in manuscripts T and V from the Second to the Fourth to the Third
Continuation, will take place with a sleight of hand—no narrator, no
manuscript rubric will announce the shift until their authors speak up
thousands of verses later. And in each case the transition will occur in the
crucial scene at the Grail Castle, as if to look back each time to the name of
the romance given in Chrétien’s prologue, a title unlike any of his previous
romances, connected not directly to the hero but to the enigmatic object
that keeps requiring questions and returns. Did Wauchier stop in the midst
of the Grail scene on purpose, unintentionally, by chance, par aventure
carried by the logic written into Chrétien’s master text and carried forward
into the continuations?
In any case, it is clear that the continuator participates fully in the general
impetus of the series and successfully mirrors the inherent invitation to
continue already structured by Chrétien’s own (un)ending. In the context
of this elaborate textual edifice, the location of an author’s name at the
interlace, at the belated beginning of a return, constitutes a narrative gesture
that points to the momentum of continuity and the continued uncertainty
of ending sustained throughout this Grail romance in verse.The strategy of
the nice who has understood all and nothing ultimately reveals the paradox
of authorship that characterizes the entire structure formed by Perceval and
its continuations—whose author is and is not Chrétien, whose authors are
and are not individual continuators. In modern terms, we may clearly limit
Chrétien’s authorship to the originating and unfinished romance. But in
terms of medieval practice, it is no less clear that Chrétien’s initial setup
continues to exert authorship throughout the cycle, as successive named
and unnamed romancers write freely but still remain under his tutelage
through repeated returns to their common model, its narrative material, as
well as its puzzles and questions.While the verse continuations retain a dis-
tinctive character that properly sets them apart within the context of Grail
romances, the play of authorial naming examined here nevertheless demon-
strates—through the shifting, sometimes hidden, always intertwined,
identities that map their extended itinerary from Chrétien de Troyes to
Manessier—how their collective enterprise may bring into sharper focus the
complex nature of authorship functioning throughout medieval textuality.
Notes
1. Anne Berthelot, Figures et fonction de l’écrivain au XIIIe siècle (Paris:Vrin, 1991),
pp. 19 and 28–31.
2. Roger Dragonetti, Le mirage des sources, l’art du faux dans le roman médiéval
(Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 9. Cf. Sarah Kay on authorial pseudonyms in “Who was
Chrétien de Troyes?” Arthurian Literature 15 (1997): 1–35.
3. Douglas Kelly, Medieval French Romance (New York:Twayne Publishers, 1993),
pp. xiii–xxiii.
4. Alexandre Leupin has identified the fundamental and fundamentally contra-
dictory impulses that build this immense textual edifice with what he calls “la
logique de la faille” [the logic of the fault], a compelling image taken from
the continuations themselves.“La faille et l’écriture dans les continuations du
Perceval,” Moyen Age 88 (1982): 237–269.
5. Emmanuèle Baumgartner “Les techniques narratives dans le roman en
prose,” in The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Norris J. Lacy, Douglas Kelly, and
Keith Busby, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1987, 1988), 1: 168–169.
6. Sophie Marnette, Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale: une
approche linguistique (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 94, 114, 182, 199, 203. Robert
de Boron’s Roman de l’estoire dou Graal, written in verse but quickly prosified
and pseudonymously expanded, requires that transition, in Sophie Marnette’s
view, by bringing out the profound contradiction between the subject of a
Holy Grail, whose truth is connected to a monologic value system located out-
side romance, and named authors associated with verse romance who typically
guarantee a truth built into the romance’s own internal logic, as Michel Zink
has described in “Chrétien et ses contemporains,” Legacy, 1: 16, 18–20.
7. This is Guiot’s version, manuscript A, which includes Perceval and the First
and Second Continuations. For information on the manuscripts, see the
introduction to William Roach’s edition, The Continuations of the Old French
Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, Volume I: The First Continuation, Redaction of
Mss TVD (Philadelphia, PA:American Philosophical Society, 1965).
8. Only in manuscript K does a continuation appear without Perceval. Perceval
appears without the Continuations in three manuscripts and four fragments.
9. According to Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arturische Versroman von
Chrestien bis Froissart (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980), from Perceval to 1200,
there is no clear evidence of Arthurian work in romance form, other than the
First and Second Continuations.
10. They always appear together except in manuscript R (BnF, MS fonds

français 1450) where Perceval and the First Continuation are integrated into
a different cyclical structure with the Roman de Brut and Chrétien’s other
romances, and in manuscript K (Stadbibliothek 113) where the Second
Continuation stands alone.
11. Roach, ed., The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes,
Volume IV:The Second Continuation (Philadelphia, PA:American Philosophical
Society, 1971).
12. Roach, ed., The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes,
Volume V:The Third Continuation (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical
Society, 1983), pp. xi–xii.
13. Two authors’ names, Chrétien in the prologue and Manessier in the
epilogue, compete for the traditional role of authorizing proleptically and
analeptically the text thus framed (cf. the relationship between Chrétien and
Godefroi de Leigni in Le Chevalier de la Charrette). Within the verse cycle,
there are no other prologues or epilogues to give authors’ names.
14. Continuations, IV, p. xvii.
15. Cf. Rupert Pickens on Robert de Boron and his exordium a insinuatione in
“Histoire et commentaire chez Chrétien de Troyes et Robert de Boron et le
livre de Philippe de Flandre,” in Legacy 2:25 (see above n5).
16. Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes, I Erec et Enide, ed. Mario Roques, Classiques
Français du Moyen Age 80 (Paris: Champion, 1970), l. 26.
17. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Roman de Perceval ou le Conte du Graal, ed. William
Roach,Textes Littéraires Français 71 (Geneva: Droz, 1959), ll. 63 and 65.
18. According to the God of Love’s speech, the death of Guillaume de Lorris
also works to legitimate Jean de Meun’s authorial necessity in the Roman de la
Rose. See Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, Classiques Français du Moyen
Age 95, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1966), vol. 2, 10531–10534, 10557–10560.
19. In Maurice Wilmote, Le poème du Gral et ses auteurs (Paris: Droz, 1930), see the
chapter on “La part de Chrétien de Troyes dans la composition du poème.”
20. Wilmote, Le poème, p. 58.
21. Wilmote, Le poème, p. 52.
22. Only manuscripts T and V localize the moment in the text with a chi (here) but
then give alternate adverbs avant and aprez: “Gautiers de denet qui l’estoire a
mis chi aprez (T) / avant (V) en memoire.”V’s aprez might suggest that the new
author’s work is only starting in the final episodes of the Second Continuation
(which seems unlikely) but all the other manuscripts agree in using the expres-
sion mettre avant en memoire, which Wilmotte (Le poème, pp. 19–70) compares
with Chrétien’s metre devant in Cligès (4282): not a spatial location in the text
but a movement in the mind, which links author/narrator and public:“Nos a
mis avant en memoire.” See Guy Vial,“L’auteur de la deuxième continuation
du Conte du Graal,” in Mélanges d’études romanes . . . offerts à Monsieur Jean
Rychner (Travaux de linguistiques et de littérature, 16 [1978]:126–29): metre avant en
memoire ⫽ “conter plus loin, poursuivre la narration de” [to tell further on,
pursue the narration of ] (529). Cf. some scholars use of “Pseudo-Wauchier” to
designate the anonymous First Continuation.
23. Corin Corley, “Réflexions sur les deux premières Continuations de

Perceval,” Romania 103 (1982): 235: 58. See also Corley’s book The Second
Continuation of the Old French Perceval: A Critical and Lexicographical Study
(London: the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1987), pp. 31–41.
24. Incompatible because too austere and humbly Christian (Wilmotte, Le
poème, p. 111) or compatible given the variety of commissions a medieval
writer might expect and a medieval audience might enjoy (Vial,“L’auteur,”
pp. 119–24). Ferdinand Lot suggests we read the name as a reference to an
authority (“Les auteurs du Conte du Graal,” Romania 57 [1931]: 136)—as
“Crestiens” functioned in manuscript T. But where is authority with so little
recognition?
25. Out of nine manuscripts, one omits it entirely and seven variations appear in
the remaining eight.There is nevertheless a certain consistency for the first
name: E: Gauchier de dondain; L: Gauciers de donaing; M: Gauchier de
doudain; P: Gautiers de dons; S: Gauchier de dordan;TV Gautiers de denet;
U: Gauchier de doulenz.
26. Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les fées au moyen âge: Morgane et Mélusine, La
naissance des fées (Paris: Champion, 1984), pp. 371–372.
27. Harf-Lancner, Les fées, p. 367.
28. Gauvain reappears in Episodes 29–32 (the interlacing that furnishes the final
delay in reporting Perceval’s return to the Fisher King and the occasion of
authorial naming). Gauvain’s first adventure is marked by his amorous
interplay with the Petit Chevalier’s sister.
29. Cf. Lori Walters’s reading in “The Image of Blanchefleur in MS Montpellier,
BI, Sect. Méd. H 249,” in Les manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby,
Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1993) 1:437–55.
CHAPTER 2
BORROWING, CITATION,AND AUTHORSHIP

IN GAUTIER DE COINCI’S MIRACLES DE
NOSTRE DAME
Margaret Switten
he Miracles de Nostre Dame (1214–1236) by Gautier de Coinci, a

T Benedictine monk from Northern France,1 is one of the most
celebrated collections of medieval Marian miracle tales in a vernacular
language. It is unusual because it contains songs, that is, musical composi-
tions, as well as stories.2 Both a lyric and a narrative poet, Gautier draws
upon several rich traditions. The position he stakes out with reference to
these traditions determines his authorial stance and the nature of his
enterprise. As is well known, Gautier’s attitude toward these traditions is
both favorable and critical: he writes with Latin miracle stories, hymns, and
chants and against “courtly” narrative and lyric genres, demonstrating exten-
sive knowledge of secular and sacred works and a determined effort to
“convert” secular sources to sacred use. I focus here on basic techniques
Gautier uses to achieve his goals. Foremost among these are borrowing and
citation. Borrowing has often been mentioned with respect to Gautier, fre-
quently with negative undertones, particularly with regard to the music.
But Gautier does not merely borrow. He takes material at hand and boldly
transforms it into something else: he transfers Latin into the vernacular; he
cleverly manipulates the melodic borrowing known as contrafactum; he
develops his arguments by citation and allusion. By reevaluating these tech-
niques of transformation, I hope to provide a better understanding not only
of how Gautier reaches his goal of “conversion,” but also of how he uses
borrowing and citation to define authorship within his text.3
The Miracles de Nostre Dame has an intricate structure, not entirely stable
in the ninety-seven manuscripts, mostly from the late thirteenth and early
30 MARGARET SWITTEN
fourteenth centuries, that have preserved it in whole or in part. I base my

discussion on the Koenig reconstruction, drawn from the main manuscripts,
and use Koenig’s system to refer to the miracles and songs.4 The entire col-
lection, some 36,000 lines of poetry, is divided into two books. Book I con-
tains two prologues, a cycle of seven songs, and thirty-five miracle stories.
The thirty-fifth story is the Saint Leocadia miracle, the only miracle that
does not have a Latin source; following this miracle, three songs close book I.
Book II contains one prologue, a cycle of seven songs, twenty-four miracle
stories, and a series of epilogue pieces including the Saluts Notre Dame as well
as a final song “Entendez tuit.” Four short prayers then conclude the work.
The miracle stories are the nucleus to which Gautier added songs, prologues,
epilogues, and prayers. Arguably, Gautier is the first vernacular writer to
attempt to create a unified collection of lyric and narrative poetry which,
when he sends it to his friend Robert de Dive so that it may be copied and
disseminated, he calls his “livre” [book] (epilogue, 97–111).5
Certain features of Gautier’s program are clear from the outset.The first
prologue of the first book (I Pr 1), informs us that his purpose is to extol
the Virgin; he will be a vassal in Her service; the subject of his work will be
Her miracles; his task will be to “translate,” that is to “transfer,” them from
Latin into “rime et metre” [rhyme and meter] so that even those who do
not understand Latin will learn how essential it is to serve Her. His own
personal hoped-for reward is that Mary will be grateful for his service,
which consists of making the miracles known, so that eventually he may
reach paradise.
In this first prologue, Gautier does not speak of songs or music.These
subjects are addressed in the second prologue to the first book (I Pr 2).
After announcing that before opening “le grant livre” [the big book] from
which, presumably, he will draw his stories, he wishes to sing, he explains
the value of song, the types of song he will include, and exhorts all to lis-
ten to the way he sings about the Sweet Lady.This sequence of two sep-
arate prologues reflects an initial structural distinction: the songs will not
be inserted into the miracles but will frame them. It is only in the pro-
logue to the second book (II Pr 1) that telling miracle tales and singing
are integrated.6
By his initial statement in I Pr 1 that his task is to put Latin stories into
romance, Gautier signals the fact that borrowing undergirds his entire pro-
ject.The grant livre to which Gautier refers as a source for his miracle stories
has not come down to us, so we cannot know how much the tales were
transformed, only that they were rewritten, cast into verse, and endowed
with moralistic conclusions likely of Gautier’s entire invention. But Latin
stories were not his only sources. Although Gautier does not openly adopt
and adapt complete vernacular texts, he adroitly exploits subtle techniques
G AU T I E R D E C O I N C I ’ S M I R AC L E S D E N O S T R E D A M E 31
of allusion and reference to stake out his various claims. In contrast to the
Latin sources, we can recognize many of the vernacular sources, which
allows us to examine Gautier’s tactics.
The narrative genre to which Gautier makes most frequent reference is
romance.7 This is scarcely surprising; his work shares with romance the
opening tactic of announced transformation of a Latin source or sources.
A la loenge et a la gloire,
En ramambrance et en memoire
De la roïne et de la dame
Cui je commant mon cors et m’ame
A jointes mains soir et matin,
Miracles que truis en latin
Translater voel en rime et metre
Que cil et celles qui la letre
N’entendent pas puissent entendre
Qu’a son servise fait boen tendre. (I Pr 1, 1–10)
[To the praise and the glory / And in the memory / Of the queen and the
lady / To whom I give my body and soul / Hands joined, evening and morn-
ing, / I wish to “transfer” miracles I find in Latin / Into meter and rhyme
(i.e., into the vernacular) / so those who do not understand [Latin] letters /
May understand / That it is good to be in her service.]
Romance is born of translation: it initially presents itself as the bringing of

Latin bookish knowledge into the romance language.This is already a famil-
iar topos in prologues from the early romans d’antiquité [romance of antiquity].
For example, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie (1160–1170), tells us:
E por ce me vueil travailler
En une estoire commencer
Que, de latin ou je la truis,
Se j’ai le sens et se ge puis,
Le voudrai si en romanz metre
Que cil qui n’entendront la letre
Se puissent deduire el romanz. (33–39)8
[That is why I want to make every effort / To begin a story / Which, from
the Latin in which I found it, / If I have the intelligence and the strength, /
I intend to translate into romance / So that those who do not understand
(Latin) letters / May find pleasure in the romance (vernacular) text.]
Chrétien de Troyes, just slightly later than Benoît de Sainte-Maure, uses a

similar topos in his Cligés:
Cest estoire trovons escrite,

Que conter vos vuel et retraire,
32 MARGARET SWITTEN
En .I. des livres de l’aumaire

Mon seignor saint Pere a Biauvez.
De la fu li contes estrez . . . (18–22)9
[We find written the story / That I want to tell and relate to you, / In one of
the books in the library / Of my lord Saint Peter of Beauvais. / From that
book was taken the tale / That Chrétien made into this romance.]
Or again in Perceval, Chrétien explains that he will put into rhyme on the
count’s order the greatest story ever told in a royal court:
C’est li contes do greal,

dont li cuens li bailla lo livre. (64–65)10
[This is the tale of the grail / Whose book the count gave to him.]
In saying that he will put into romance stories found in a Latin book,
Gautier redirects a known topos. He will neither provide knowledge as
such nor mere pleasurable reading/listening to a public that does not
know Latin. Instead and in contrast, he wishes to lead the public to
service of the Virgin Mary; the redirection of the topos makes that
distinction.
In Gautier’s dedication to Mary as the source of his inspiration and the
goal of his hopes, one might discern another romance intertext:
Chrétien’s Lancelot.11 The celebrated Lancelot prologue dedicates the work
to Marie de Champagne, rendering homage to her (“come cil qui est
suens antiers” [as one who is entirely hers], line 4), roughly comparable to
Gautier’s I Pr 1. But we may have here a double subversion. Michel Zink
has recently suggested another literary context for Chrétien’s prologue,
“celui de la littérature spirituelle” [that of spiritual literature].12 Religious
poets propose God as the true author of their works. Chrétien de Troyes
may have subverted the topos “en lui donnant une coloration profane”
[by giving it a profane coloration].13 After examination of a religious
work dedicated to Marie de Champagne and probably composed at her
court, along with other works that develop the theme of divine poetic
inspiration, Zink concludes with a reference to Gautier, proposing that in
his II Pr 1, when Gautier states the following, he may be subverting
Chrétien’s subversion:
Mais la dame pour cui g’i met

Ma povre cogitacïon
Seit bien et voit m’ententïon (102–104)
[But the lady for whom I put into this work / My poor intelligence / Knows
and sees well my intention.]
Although the idea is not identical to Chrétien’s prologue,“le mouvement et

les mots y sont, au point que l’on soupçonne cette fois une substitution de
la Vierge Marie à la comtesse de Champagne et la transposition édifiante du
célèbre hommage de Chrétien” [the same gesture and words are used
here, which makes one suspect that the Virgin Mary replaces the countess
of Champagne, and that Chrétien’s famous homage is tranposed into
edification].14 Such a maneuver, typical of Gautier’s approach to citation and
allusion, allows him to turn vernacular narrative away from praise of the
lady back to praise of Our Lady.
But this redirection demands a reeducation of the public, particularly a
public attracted to satirical tales such as those about Renart and his cohorts.
In II Pr 1, Gautier affirms the superiority of his miracles, even considered
simply as entertainment:
Pus delitant sont si fait conte

As bonnes gens, par saint Omer,
Que de Renart ne de Romer
Ne de Tardiu le limeçon. (46–49)
[These tales are more entertaining / To good people, by saint Omer, / Than
those about Renart and Romer / Or about Tardif the snail.]
The passage could almost be a reply to the prologue to Branche IV of the

Roman de Renart:
Or me convient tel chose dire

Dont je vos puisse fere rire;
Qar je sai bien, ce est la pure,
Que de sarmon n’avés vos cure
Ne de cors seint oïr la vie. (1–5)15
[But I want to tell you something / That can make you laugh / For I know
for pure truth / That you do not care to hear / A sermon or a saint’s life.]
And in another passage from II Pr 1, that reminds one of a famous passage

from Chapter VI of the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century romance
Aucassin et Nicolette, in which Aucassin proclaims himself happy to go to hell
for love of Nicolette because hell is where all the beautiful people are,
Gautier informs us that great lords who commission or compose “les bor-
des qui . . . font rire” [tall stories that make people laugh] (194) will go to
hell along with those who listen to liars (196–311). But those who listen to
Gautier and reject frivolous story-tellers can be assured of paradise.
While romance writers routinely affirm that the tales they tell are
superior to those of others,16 Gautier’s allusions have a precise purpose: to
34 MARGARET SWITTEN
criticize the current tastes of those who do not know Latin, and sometimes
of those who do, as a crucial step in reorienting their reading habits toward
spiritual enrichment.
The few brief examples I have brought forward can suggest that Gautier
manipulates romance allusions in different ways to define his authorial
goals. He adopts topoi which he then subverts in order to situate his work
both within and in opposition to narratives familiar to his intended
audience. But he directly criticizes his public through references to those
narratives most contrary to his enterprise.
If romance allusions serve to define Gautier’s authorial purpose, it is yet
the nuanced presentation of himself as a lyric poet/composer that most
fully determines his author persona. In what ways, then, do Gautier’s refer-
ences to lyric themes and techniques participate in his self-representation?
At the outset of I Pr 1, when Gautier describes himself as a vassal of his
Lady stating that he wishes to enhance the glory
De la roïne et de la dame
Cui je commant mon cors et m’ame
A jointes mains soir et matin (3–5)
[Of the queen and lady / To whom I commend my body and my soul, /
Hands joined every evening and every morning]
he situates himself immediately within a familiar lyric tradition (one has

only to think of Bernart de Ventadorn’s classic statement: “Mas jonchas, ab
col cle, / vos m’autrei e.m coman” [Hands joined, head bowed, / I give and
commend myself to you]).17 Gautier will pay homage to his Lady; he will
be Her “man.”This image has a rich ambiguity that suits Gautier’s purpose
admirably because of the intertwining of sacred and profane: the joining of
hands is both a gesture of homage and a gesture of prayer.
The title of this work, Les Miracles Nostre Dame, announces clearly the
identity of the lady.Yet because it is the transfer of “feudal” terminology to
the religious sphere that led to the expression Notre Dame, the word dame
also recalls the secular lady of courtly lyric, allowing Gautier to play ambigu-
ously on secular lyric traditions in order to convert ma dame to Notre Dame.
Service to the lady permeates the entire work: just as serving the secular
lady leads the poet to the supreme “good” (paradise, to some troubadours);
just as the secular poet’s reward is the lady’s acceptance of him and his work;
just as the secular poet claims to be inspired by his lady—just so does Gautier
seek his reward from the Virgin, Our Lady, and is inspired and taught by Her:
Por qu’ai ceste matere emprise,

A traitier si bien la m’apregne
Que boen essample aucuns i pregne

Et qu’ele gre m’en daint savoir.
Autre loier n’en quier avoir. (I Pr 1, 16–20)
[Since I have undertaken to work on this subject / May she teach me so well
how to treat it / That it may furnish a good example / And that she may be
grateful to me for it. / No other reward do I seek.]
These lyric references provide a kind of subtext or intertext, a set of

ambiguous images upon which the poet can draw. But Gautier addresses
one important lyric theme directly in order to reject it: suffering.At the end
of I Pr 2, he states:
Qui que vos chant chançons polies

De risées et de folies,
Je ne veil pas chanter tex chants,
Car trop i a pleurs et deschans:
L’ame souvent pleure et deschante
Dou chanteür qui tex chans chante.
Qui l’anemi velt enchanter
De la grant dame doit chanter
Dont jor et nuit le angle chantent.
Dyable endorment et enchantent
Tout cil qui chantent sen doz chant. (63–73)
[No matter who sings to you polished songs / Made of jokes and twaddle, /
I do not want to sing such songs, / For they contain too much weeping and
wailing: / The soul of the singer who sings such songs / Often weeps and
wails. / He who wants to enchant the Enemy / Must sing about the great
lady / About whom night and day the angels sing. / The devil is lulled to
sleep and enchanted / By all those who sing her sweet song.]
In a typical concluding flourish, Gautier plays on “chant” to emphasize his

point.The word “polie” suggests the refinement of many troubadour songs
and the polishing and repolishing they claim to bring to their compositions.
But the value of the polishing is immediately denied by the characteriza-
tions “risées” [jokes] and “folies” [twaddles], the latter suggesting perhaps
the notion of fol’amor [foolish love]. Lyric poets weep and wail; their refined
techniques lead only to suffering. Gautier will not sing that type of song,
diabolical in its intention and result. Instead, he will sing of the “grant
dame” as do the angels in order to rout the devil.The implication, though
it is not stated outright, is that his kind of singing will not lead to endless
tears but to endless joy.
It will lead to endless joy because he will tell the truth instead of
engaging in technical virtuosity. In II Pr 1, Gautier makes an important
36 MARGARET SWITTEN
distinction between the plain, unvarnished truth he intends to convey and

the glittering but false language of the poets.18 Following Saint Jerome, he
claims,“Que simplement la veritez / Vaut milz a dire rudement / Que biau
mentir et soutilement” [That it is better to say coarsely / The simple truth /
Than to utter handsome and subtle lies] (II Pr I, 60–62).This is followed by
another revealing assertion “Plus veil enssivre le prophete / Que je ne face
le poete” [I prefer to follow the prophet / Rather than the poet] (65–66)
which leads to an affirmation of the importance of biblical sources and a
rejection of Latin poets such as Lucan, Juvenal, or Virgil (68–70). Simply to
please the public with carefully wrought and beautiful verses is not his goal.
He seeks greater substance and greater depth (“Mielz vaut li grains ne fait
la paille” [The wheat is worthier than the chaff] 86).The references here are
specifically to Latin poets; but many vernacular poets sought to be admired
for their skill. Gautier’s argument proceeds to a back-handed modesty
topos, which is in fact a pointed critique of secular emphasis on versifica-
tion, particularly on infinite varieties of rhymes:
Vous grant seigneur, vous damoysel,
Qui a compas et a cisel
Tailliez et compassez les rimes
Equivoques et leonimes,
Les biauz ditiez et les fiaus contes
Por conter as roys et as contes,
Por Dieu, ne m’escharnissiez pas
Se je ne di tot a compas.
N’ai pas les mos toz compassez.
Se de biau dire me passez,
Avoir n’i doi honte ne blasme. (II Pr 1, 89–99)
[You great lord, and you young squire, / Who in a perfectly measured manner
and with a chisel / Crafts and measures out rhymes / Equivocal and leonin /
Elegant poems and deceitful tales / For the ears of kings and counts / By God,
don’t deride me / If I don’t say everything perfectly. / My words are not
expertly crafted. / If you surpass me in beautiful speech / I should have
neither shame nor blame.]
Gautier should not be blamed if he does not seek refinements of the rime.
His mission is to tell the truth about his lady in simple words where the
“grain” [the wheat] is more important than the “paille” [the chaff].
The irony is that Gautier was in fact a skilled versifier who shone precisely
in the manipulation of rhymes.And he was not unaware of his skill. Indeed,
he concludes I Pr 1 by affirming it:
La mere Dieu, qui est la lime

Qui tout escure et tout eslime,
Escurer daint et eslimer,

Por ses myracles biau rimer,
La langue Gautier de Coinsi,
Qui por s’amor comence einsi. (325–330)
[The Mother of God who is the file / That sharpens and files everything /
Deigns to sharpen and file / —So he may rhyme her miracles beautifully— /
The language of Gautier de Coincy, / Who, for her love, begins in this
manner.]
The twist is that Gautier is not responsible for creating beautiful verses; the
Virgin is.
The modesty topos and unvarnished language are linked to a further
development intended to justify the activity of composing verses and even
singing by a monk. According to Gautier, slanderers criticize him for
undertaking such activities (II Pr 1, 100).
N’est pas ordre, ce vont disant

Par derriere li mesdisant,
M’entente mete a rimoyer,
Mais petit pris leur groignoier (113–116)
[It is not right—this is what / Slanderers say behind my back— / That I
devote myself to rhyming, / But I don’t care much for their grumbling.]
In the above verse, the term mesdisant suggests the lauzengier [slanderers] of
the troubadour and subsequently romance traditions. Gautier insists that
praising the Virgin is eminently appropriate:
Noir moigne et blanc et gris et bai,

Et tempre et tart, soir et matin,
Et en roumans et en latin,
Doivent loer la virge monde
Par cui Dex a mondé le monde: (120–124).
[Monks in black, white, brown, and grey, / Early and late, night and day, / In
Romance (vernacular) and in Latin, / Must praise the pure virgin / By
whom God purified the world.]
Some troubadours and jongleurs were monks, and there exist even poems
debating the superiority of monks or knights as lovers. For a monk to
compose is thus not unheard of. Gautier appears to be seeking a way to jus-
tify making songs of his own from within the monastery, separating himself
from monks who become jongleurs, and travel about the world.
Indeed, Gautier attacks what is sometimes considered a jongleur reper-
tory, and his criticism of the concoctions of jongleurs parallels his attack on
38 MARGARET SWITTEN
the Roman de Renart.19 In I Pr 2, he briefly criticizes the singing of “caroles”

(27).20 In II Pr 1, such criticism is much more developed. Clerics should
praise the Virgin instead of singing profane songs such as the pastourelles
whose stock figures are quoted to express disdain. “De Tyebregon et
d’Emmelot / Laissons ester les chançonnetes, / Car ne sont pas leurs chan-
chons netes” [Of Tyebregon and Emmelot / Let us not sing the ditties, /
Because these songs are dirty] (324–326). Singing about “Maret” and
“Maroye” will lead straight to hell (328–335). One should never abandon
“la dame esperitable” [the spiritual lady] for these “garces” [sluts] and “rib-
audes” [whores] (340–341), nor turn from Marie to Marot (381–386).21
Gautier calls on monks to leave aside “les chans qui rien ne valent” [the
songs that are worthless] ( 363) and sing “les chans piteuz et doz / Et les
conduis de Nostre Dame” [merciful and sweet songs / And conducti (sacred
songs in Latin) of Our Lady] (366–367). Monks can and do sing, but their
singing must be directed toward praise of Mary and the word of God,
eschewing the “chans de lecheries” [the songs of lust] (350). By extension,
that is what Gautier will himself do.
While Gautier refers to singing in the prologues to his books, he does
not there present himself specifically as a trouvère. This he does in the
important miracle about Ildefonsus (I Mir 11). For Gautier, as later for
Alfonso the Learned, king of Castile and León and author of the Cantigas de
Santa Maria, Ildefonsus is a crucial figure. He loved and honored the Virgin;
he was both a father of the church and the author of a book dedicated to
the Virgin, composing for her, among other things, “mainte sequence et
mainte hymne” [many sequences and hymns] (I Mir 11, 24). Gautier
specifies that the book was gratefully received by the Virgin to whom
Ildefonsus had commended himself, just as he hopes his own book will be
received (I Mir 11, 2191–2195). At the close of the Ildefonsus miracle,
Gautier recapitulates themes of the prologues presenting the Virgin as an
inexhaustible source of inspiration whose “escrivainz” (2301) he aspires to
be.22 Rejecting secular poets who write for fame and glory, he proclaims:
. . . Car troveres ne sui je mie

Fors de ma dame et de m’amie
Ne menestrex ne sui je pas. (2315–2317)
[For I am not a trouvère / Except for my lady and my love / And I am not a
minstrel.]
By thus recalling his prologues and making the point that he is a trouvère
but unwilling to be counted among the ordinary trouvères, Gautier links
his authorial persona as the “trouvère of his Lady” to the prestigious model
of Ildefonsus.
If Gautier thinks of himself as a trouvère, does he present himself as a

composer as well as a singer of songs? Most critics are willing to attribute
the song texts to Gautier; melodic composition is less willingly recognized.
Based on the fact that melodic sources can be located for many of Gautier’s
melodies, his songs are more usually described as new poems set to bor-
rowed melodies. Because of Gautier’s use of contrafacta, some critics tend to
deny him musical originality.23 Kathryn Duys has pointed out that:
“Gautier makes no explicit statement regarding the authorship of the songs
in the MND [Miracles de Nostre Dame]; he merely states that he wants to
sing.”24 But composing was not entirely distinct from singing in the time of
Gautier. Further, contrafactum strictly defined means substituting one text for
another without substantially changing the music, and Gautier’s procedure
can differ considerably from that description. And, finally, Gautier does,
especially in his songs, use a terminology that would suggest his own inven-
tion. His musical “borrowing” seems to reflect a technique similar to textual
“borrowing.” Let us take a closer look.
The words Gautier uses to speak of his role as poet and, potentially,
musician include expressions such as planter [to plant], or joncier [to strew],
“florir,” [to embellish] and “enflorer” [to embellish] (I Pr 2,18, 32–33, 44),
in addition to the main verb chanter and terms associated with it.25 At the
beginning of I Pr 2, Gautier asserts:
. . . Ainz que plus lise, veil chanter.

En cest livre volrai planter
De lius en lius chançons noveles
De Nostre Dame mout tres beles . . . (17–20).
[Before reading further, I want to sing. / In this book I would like to plant /
Here and there beautiful / New songs about Our Lady.]
The notion of planting leads naturally to flowers “Tout cest livre volrai
joncier / Et florir d’odorans floretes” [I would like to strew and embell-
ish this entire book / with sweet-smelling flowers] (32–33).26 If the
Virgin gives him the courage, “Des floretes de mon prael, . . . / Tout
enflorer volrai cest livre . . .” [With the flowers from my own meadow /
I would like to embellish this whole book] (42 and 44). The words “de
mon prael” [from my own meadow] suggest that he will have “grown”
the songs that are planted in his work. Does this mean that he will com-
pose both words and music? Since the passage is prefaced by the word
“chanter” (17) and since, as I have suggested, the separation we now
adopt between words and music was not necessarily operative in the
Middle Ages, one may well assume that Gautier intended to “grow” both
words and music in his garden.
40 MARGARET SWITTEN
The passage under discussion may be compared to the beginning of the

Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole by Jean Renart, a romance con-
text slightly different from the ones discussed above. It is not possible to
know which of the two works, miracles or romance, came first. If one
accepts recent arguments by John Baldwin, one may date Renart’s Rose to
around 1209, placing it slightly earlier than the Miracles de Nostre Dame.27
With respect to the joining of songs and narration, miracles and romances
are both avant-garde compositions in a thirteenth century that we now
understand as characterized by a rich array of citation techniques.28 Beyond
the subject matter, secular on the one hand, religious on the other, the main
differences between the works are: (1) Renart quotes parts of song texts
within his narrative while Gautier includes entire songs but not within the
narrative, and (2) in the one manuscript containing Renart’s Rose, there is
no music, whereas a large number of Gautier manuscripts have music.The
two authors use different metaphors to speak of the songs in their works.
Renart draws on textile imagery, saying that his romance will be
“. . . brodez, par lieus, de biaus vers” [embroidered in some places with
beautiful verses] (14), while Gautier speaks of a garden. Renart’s textile
imagery and the notion that the weaving will be so skillful that it will seem
to everyone “Que cil qui a fet le romans / Qu’il trovast toz les moz des
chans, / Si afierent a ceuls del conte” [That he who composed the romance /
Might have invented all the words of the songs / So well do they fit those of
the tale] ( 27–29) indicates that the songs do indeed come from somewhere
else but the clever way they are “embroidered” will make it seem that they
are original compositions. Renart clearly denies authorship of the songs.
Gautier’s garden imagery, in contrast, allows for the possibility of his own
cultivation. His assertion “Tout cest livre volrai joncier . . .” (32), quoted
above, immediately follows mention of the “caroles / Dou parage de
Ronquerolles” [caroles (social dances) / From the vicinity of Ronquerolles]
(28–29). Since in Renart’s Rose, “caroles” and “Ronquerolles” are also
linked by rhyme (550–551), one may argue that Gautier is here alluding to
the romance, if the earlier date for Renart’s work is accepted. Gautier has
been chiding those who fall asleep and begin to snore,“roncier,” when lis-
tening to sermons; they would, it seems, prefer caroles.Then come the verses:
“Por eus tolir tout leur roncier, / Tout cest livre volrai joncier / Et florir
d’odorans floretes” [In order to draw them away from snoring / I would
like to strew and embellish this entire book / With sweet-smelling flowers]
(I Pr 2, 31–33). The juxtaposition “roncier” / “joncier” indicates that
Gautier intends to replace snoring by the pleasurable perfume of flowers.
Arguably, by extension, he repudiates the kind of profane lyric insertion
used by Jean Renart. Is this rejection of the kind of citation used by Renart
also a rejection of his method? Can we understand that Gautier is
not merely weaving the borrowed songs into his text but creating some-
thing new?
To investigate further this question, let us turn to the word chanter, and
associated terms.29 Gautier uses the word chanter in the singular and in the
plural. The plural usage is usually intended to convey the importance of
singing for monks (see above). It is the duty of monks to praise the Virgin
(II Pr 1, 321–323); they should not sing worthless songs but rather “les
chans piteuz et doz / Et les conduis de Nostre Dame” [merciful and sweet
songs / And conducti (sacred songs in Latin) of Our Lady] (366–367). If this
development toward the end of II Pr 1 serves to legitimize Gautier’s singing
as a monk, before closing his prologue, he returns to the first person:“Talens
me prent que de li chant / Et novel dit et novel chant” [I desire to sing
about her / A new poem and a new song] (395–396). His endeavor is
placed in a communal context but stands out from it. Religious music was
a part of daily life for the monks. But in the Chant tradition, at least, monks
did not compose so much as they learned to perform songs and integrate
them into their lives.Thus Gautier seems to be negotiating a position from
which he as a monk can justify making new songs of his own from within
the monastery.30
The importance Gautier attaches to his own singing is clear from the
multiple uses of the singular, je chante, as we have seen in the prologues. In
the troubadour/trouvère tradition, chanter frequently occurs in the first
stanza of a poem, the “prologue,” as it were, explaining the agenda of the
song. There, it can be understood as almost synonymous with making or
composing: not until the later Middle Ages, as I mentioned above, was
composition clearly distinguished from performance. When Bernart de
Ventadorn opens with the statement “Non es meravelha s’eu chan / melhs
de nul autre chantador,” [It is no wonder if I sing / Better than any other
singer]31 he is arguably thinking more of the quality of his song than of the
quality of his singing. Several of Gautier’s songs include in the first stanza je
chante or je veux chanter [I sing or I want to sing] (I ch 3, I ch 4, I ch 6, I ch 8,
II ch 4, II ch 5, II ch 7), or an expression such as dire son [to sing a song]
(I ch 6, I ch 9). On two occasions, he adopts the verb faire which would
more specifically refer to composition:“D’autre dame ne d’autre damoisele /
Ne ferai mais se Dieu plaist, dit ne son” [About no other lady or damsel /
Will I make (compose)—if it please God—a poem or a melody] (I ch 4,
8–9) and “Chascun an fas de la virge sacree / un son nouvel . . .” [Every
year I make (compose) about the holy virgin / A new song] (II ch 7, 5–6).
Singing, therefore, is arguably for Gautier a creative act.
But it is creative in a medieval sense that included incorporating the
work of others.As we have seen, borrowing and citation are conspicuous in
Gautier’s work—probably more conspicuous for his contemporaries than
42 MARGARET SWITTEN
for us, and the melodic borrowings are so intricate that ferreting out the
details cannot be attempted here.32 The important point for this discussion
is that Gautier does not merely borrow: he reshapes, restructures, and
combines, so that the end result is uniquely his own.This phenomenon is
particularly important for the songs.
Three general remarks can be made about these songs. First, so far as we
can judge in the present state of our knowledge, borrowing and citation are
less widely used in the group of seven songs that open book I of the Miracles
than in the seven songs that open book II, or in the concluding song
“Entendez tuit.” As the work develops, borrowing techniques are intensi-
fied. Second, for the centrally placed Saint Leocadia series of three songs, a
more complex approach to borrowing has special meaning, as we shall see.
Third, from a somewhat different angle, the sheer range of musical and
poetic borrowing and citation in Gautier is remarkable. He refers to
the trouvère chanson, to numerous vernacular refrains, to organum and the
conductus, both in Latin, and to the motet. Organum, conductus and motet are
polyphonic compositions cultivated in Gautier’s time by what is known as
the Notre Dame School of composers in Paris. The conductus, the subject
matter of which was frequently the Virgin, held special appeal for Gautier,
as his numerous references to the conduis Nostre Dame attest. This genre
underwent spectacular development in Paris from ca. 1160 to ca. 1240.
During the thirteenth century, the motet became a pre-eminent form of
polyphonic music. It incorporated elements of the vernacular, demonstrat-
ing a jostling of different styles and languages not wholly unlike what we
find in Gautier’s work. Gautier’s easy familiarity with the fashionable
contemporaneous trends in song making, both in Paris and in the provinces,
gave him access to a vast reservoir from which he drew his citations.
The most straightforward borrowing technique is contrafactum in the
narrow sense: a melody is exactly borrowed from another song (I ch 8;
II ch 4). In these cases, the melody serves as a clear reference to a trouvère
song that usually undergoes textual reorientation, as both Anna Drzewicka
and Kathryn Duys have pointed out.33 A more complicated technique is the
borrowing of a melody that refers to a trouvère song, but then reconfigur-
ing the song by adding a refrain or refrains not in the original song but
taken from elsewhere. The chanson is thus converted into a hybrid genre
similar to the chanson à refrain or the chanson avec des refrains (II ch 5; II ch 7).
Still further complications can be introduced by what might be called dou-
ble contrafactum: the use of a melody that has served for both sacred and pro-
fane compositions, constituting what Ardis Butterfield has described as “a
reversion to piety of a religious text that had been converted into secularity,”34
a tactic not unlike the double subversion noted above with reference to
Chrétien’s Lancelot.
It is not possible here to enter into the details of these different

techniques. One illustration will serve to demonstrate the imaginative
reconfiguration of melodies and texts that characterize Gautier’s borrow-
ing. Let us take II ch 7,“Ja pour yver, pour noif ne pour gelee” [Never for
winter, snow, or frost]. (See appendix 1). The melody of this song is bor-
rowed from a chanson by Blondel de Nesles ( “Li plus se plaint d’amours mès
je n’os dire” [Many complain about love, but I do not dare to speak]).This
melody is more or less exactly taken over; thus the allusion would likely
have been clear to Gautier’s public.Then the song is reoriented in two ways:
first thematically, second generically. Since in Gautier’s stanza 1 the expression
“la dame honouree” [the honored lady] replaces “ma dame” [my lady] of
Blondel’s song, it is clear that Gautier will substitute the Virgin for the lady
to give the thematics of love a spiritual meaning. Generically, Gautier adds
five different known refrains, selected from “popularizing” materials, chiefly
dance songs, to transform a chanson into a chanson avec des refrains [song with
refrains].35 Two of the refrains, the first and the last, appear in the Renart’s
Rose. These refrains are textually and, to a degree, melodically integrated
into Gautier’s design.The thematics of love characterizes both refrains and
stanzas, but because refrain and stanza belong to different poetic registers,
they bump up against each other, as it were, in a series of sometimes jarring
thematic shifts.The first stanza, for example, moving in the direction of spir-
ituality is suddenly followed by a jaunty, secular refrain on the pains of love.
From the standpoint of versification and structure, each refrain is linked to
the preceding stanza by at least one rhyme sound. Further, in the Soissons
manuscript,36 the arrangement of refrains underscores the verse structure of
the poem. Stanzas 1–4 are grouped two by two by rhyme sounds (exclusive
of refrains), an arrangement known as coblas doblas, and the same refrain is
used for each group of two stanzas: refrain I for stanzas 1–2, refrain II, for
stanzas 3–4. Stanzas 5–7 have different rhyme sounds for each stanza, thus
coblas singulars, and there is a different refrain for each stanza, refrains III–V.
Musically, the refrains through stanza 5 share some melodic contours with
the chanson melody borrowed from Blondel de Nesles, and a G tonality. One
could imagine that Gautier selected the refrains partly because of such sim-
ilarities. However, the last two refrains shift tonal focus to close on F (with
a B [flat] clearly indicated in the manuscripts). There is a jarring musical
effect corresponding to different poetic registers. Further, one may posit the
kinds of rhythmic differences between refrains and stanzas that are usually
considered to pertain to dance and chanson repertories: dances are thought
to have been strongly rhythmic whereas chanson melodies are unmeasured.
The strikingly opposed rhythmic characteristics of chanson and refrain, as
well as the slightly discordant melodic conclusion may have been intended
to underscore the contrasting types of song Gautier has made into a single
44 MARGARET SWITTEN
composition. Refrains and chanson are welded together to create a new song
the inner tensions of which, poetic and musical, held in check by a tight
structure, reflect Gautier’s desire to bring his entire public to the service of
the Virgin. No aspect of secular song will be left out. One could argue that
the prominent presence of refrains used also by Jean Renart underscores the
idea expressed above that Gautier repudiates the kind of lyric insertion used
by Renart. In “Ja por yver,” however, it is less a question of repudiation than
of redirection.The last refrain makes this point and neatly ties up the argu-
ment. For the most part, the texts of the refrains are unchanged, but Ardis
Butterfield has pointed out a telling substitution in the concluding refrain:
“Mère Dieu” [Mother of God] replaces “amie” [beloved]37—just as “la
dame honouree” had replaced Blondel’s “ma dame” in the first stanza. Both
dance song and courtly song are “converted.” Juxtaposing two worlds,
clearly demarcated by thematic, structural, and melodic tensions, Gautier
thus exploits techniques of borrowing and citation to make his project all-
inclusive.
In Gautier’s work, citation does not stop with borrowing material from
others. Gautier also borrows from himself, using the technique of self-
citation.This is perhaps the most original of his manipulations and deserves
a close examination. It engages the Leocadia songs and the first and the last
song in the Miracles.
The Saint Leocadia songs close book I and, in the main manuscripts,
mark the midpoint of the work. The story of Saint Leocadia is intimately
bound up with the composition of the Miracles de Nostre Dame. It is related
in the only miracle that is not taken from a Latin source (I Mir 44) and fur-
ther elaborated in the songs following the miracle.The stages of the story of
Saint Leocadia that are important for our discussion can be briefly summa-
rized. The priory of Vic possessed relics of Saint Leocadia. In 1219, while
Gautier was composing his book, the devil appeared to him and, angered at
being described as evil, swore revenge. Gautier forgot the vision. But the
devil took vengeance by making Saint Leocadia’s relics, and with them a
statue of the Virgin Mary, disappear. Gautier was plunged into feelings of
despair and guilt and could no longer write. Four days later his prayers to
the Virgin Mary were answered; the relics were retrieved from the river
Aisne where they had been discarded.At that spot, the waters began to heal
the sick, a cause for jubilant celebration. Leocadia had also been described
as having performed a miracle for Saint Ildefonsus in the story devoted to
him (I Mir 11, 24). She links Gautier and Ildefonsus. Not only did she per-
form a miracle for Gautier as she had for Ildefonsus centuries earlier, but
her relics were brought to his priory, after a period of turmoil in Toledo
(I Mir 11, 1739, 1774 ff).38 Gautier even claims to have Ildefonsus’s Leocadia
relic, the piece of her veil cut from her shroud when she arose from her
tomb to tell Ildefonsus how much the Virgin appreciated his work on her
behalf.Thus the Leocadia miracle and songs are not only bound up with the
actual composition of the Miracles; they are powerfully linked to the authority
Gautier draws from the Ildefonsus model.
This relation is expressed in musical terms through self-citation of
melodies. The melody of the first song in the Miracle collection, I ch 3,
“Amors qui set bien enchanter” [Love who knows well how to enchant],
which immediately follows I Pr 2 and takes up themes from this prologue,
is exactly repeated for the second Leocadia song, I ch 46,“Sour cest rivage”
[On this shore], a song of rejoicing from the banks of the river from which
Leocadia’s relics had been rescued. (See appendix 2). In this way, the return
of the relics is linked to the poet/composer’s singing and particularly to the
introductory song whose melody was likely composed by Gautier. The
melody of the third Leocadia song, I ch 47, “De Sainte Leochade” [About
Saint Leocadia], a hymn to Leocadia relating again her story and great
worth, is repeated for the last song in the Miracle collection II ch 36,
“Entendez tuit ensemble et li clerc et li lai” [Listen all together, clergy and
laymen], which follows the Marian Psalter and urges all to pray to the Virgin
who saved mankind by giving birth to Jesus. But in this case, the borrowing
does not stop there. The melody of I ch 47 comes from the celebrated
conductus by Perotinus,“Beata viscera Mariae Virginis,” the text of which is
likely by Phillip the Chancellor, a song of praise to the Virgin for the
Christmas season.39 This last example offers a double contrafactum: citation
and self citation.We are invited to fold the Virgin, Perotinus, and Phillip the
Chancellor into Gautier’s grand plan, linking them to Leocadia and to his
own creation.
Let us look more closely at the double contrafactum. The Leocadia song
“De Sainte Leochade” keeps both the versification and the melody of the
Latin original, with several modifications, however, to adapt the florid
conductus melody to the vernacular idiom. Because it seems closer to the
original, Chailley proposes that it was composed first, which seems
logical.40 “Entendez tuit” would then be a contrafactum of “De Sainte
Leochade” and, through that song, of “Beata viscera.” From the standpoint
of versification, “Entendez tuit” differs notably from its models. Both
original stanzas (“Beata” and “Leochade”) had eight lines followed by a
four-line refrain, all with six syllables. “Entendez tuit” has four alexandrins
with epic caesura followed then by a four-line refrain with six syllables.This
rearrangement duplicates the stanza form (without refrain) of the Saluts,
which the song immediately follows. However, the difference in versifica-
tion is a kind of trick: two poetic lines in the models have become one
poetic line in “Entendez tuit” so that the same melody fits all three songs.
Further, both original texts, Latin and vernacular, have seven stanzas plus
46 MARGARET SWITTEN
refrain. “Entendez tuit” has twelve stanzas plus refrain. By enlarging the
scope of his last song, Gautier produces an expansive conclusion to the
entire work.
The textual relationship of the first and last songs (“Amors qui seit” and
“Entendez tuit”) in the complex linking by melody of Leocadia and
Gautier reinforces this perception. In the first song, I ch 3,“Amors qui seit,”
Gautier states his position as a singer/composer:
Amors, qui seit bien enchanter,

As plusieurs fait tel chant chanter
Dont les ames deschantent.
Je ne veil mais chanter tel chant.
Mais por celi novel chant chant
De cui li angle chantent. (1–6)
[Love who knows well how to enchant, / Makes many people to sing a song /
Such that their souls will be disenchanted (or: will despair). / I no longer
wish to sing such a song. / But I will sing a new song / For the one of whom
the angels sing.]
The last song, “Entendez tuit,” embodies crucial elements of the “novel
chant” that Gautier wishes to sing.The first stanza of the song recalls both
his overall goal of reaching a broad audience and the singing of the angels:
Entendez tuit ensemble et li clerc et li lai

Le salu Nostre Dame. Nus ne sait plus douz lai.41
Plus douz lai ne puet estre qu’est Ave Maria.
Cest lai chanta li angeles quant Diex se maria. (1–4)
[Listen all together, clergy and laymen / To the “Hail to Our Lady.” No one
knows a sweeter song. / No sweeter song than Ave Maria can exist. / The
angels sang this song when God married.]
The melody recalls a Latin conductus, the very kind of song monks are
supposed to sing to express their love of the Virgin, (II Pr 1, 366–367) in
contrast to the songs “Dont les ames deschantent.”“Beata viscera” is indeed
a spectacular example of a song to the Virgin. It is by Gautier “translated”
into the vernacular, first directly, retaining the original poetic structure, in
“Leochade,” and then expansively in “Entendez tuit.”The process recalls his
initial goal with respect to the miracles: “Miracles que truis en latin /
Translater voel en rime et metre” [The miracles I found in Latin / I want to
“transfer” into rhyme and meter] (I Pr 1, 7–8).“Entendez tuit,” in roman but
with a prestigious sacred reference, is, in miniature, an emblem of Gautier’s
new work. By drawing Latin into the realm of vernacular song, he reiterates
at its conclusion the nature of his entire enterprise: to transform Latin into
something all can understand. The process of borrowing and self-citation
inscribes the inspiration of Leocadia and the Virgin, the goals of the Miracles,
and techniques of composition into the structure of the work.
Through a complex web of citations, references, and borrowings,
Gautier creates his authorial identity by positioning himself with respect
to secular and sacred, narrative and lyric traditions in order to lay claim
to new territory. He speaks as a lover who sings to his lady, as a storyteller
who wishes to instruct and entertain, and as a monk whose desire is to
bring all who will listen into the service of the Virgin. He establishes his
authority as a writer/composer by reference to or appropriation of
already existing materials, weaving his web of allusion into a coherent
argument. Gautier demonstrates superbly that original composition can
be achieved by reinscribing known materials into a new context where
they take on new meanings: the ones he has given them.When the web
is complete and its full meaning revealed by melodic borrowing, Gautier
is ready to sign off, which he does at the close of “Entendez tuit,”
stamping the song, and indeed the entire collection, with his authorship:
“Sa chançon ci finee li prïeus de Vi a” [The prior of Vic ends here his
song] (92).
48 MARGARET SWITTEN
Appendix 1: Ja pour yver pour noif ne pour gelee

50 MARGARET SWITTEN
Appendix 2: Amours qui seit bien & Sour

cest rivage compared
Appendix 3: Beata viscera, De Sainte Leocade, & Entendez tuit:

melodies compared
52 MARGARET SWITTEN
54 MARGARET SWITTEN
Notes
I would like to thank Howell Chickering, English Department, Amherst College
for a careful reading of the essay and perceptive comments, and Robert Eisenstein,
Music Department, Mount Holyoke College, Director of the Five College Early
Music Program for computerizing the melodies of Gautier de Coinci.
1. Gautier de Coinci was born in 1177 or 1178.When he was fifteen or sixteen
years old, he became a monk in Saint Médard, a royal Benedictine abbey in
Soissons, in northeastern France. In 1214 he become prior of Vic-sur-Aisne,
a tiny priory established in 1194.Ten years later he left to become grand prior
of Saint Médard, where he died in 1236. See Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles
de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci, ed. Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva:
Droz, 1966–70), introduction, pp. xviii–xxx for the life of Gautier.
2. The presence of musical composition likens Gautier’s miracle collection to
that of Alfonso the Learned, The Cantigas de Santa Maria (late thirteenth
century). Although the two authors have music in common, although some
of the miracle stories are the same, and although both call themselves
troubadour/trouvère of the Virgin, the way they handle music is quite
different: all of Alfonso’s miracle stories are set to music whereas with Gautier
the songs are separate from the stories.
3. I will be emphasizing particularly the textual construction of an author, a
concept that cannot be treated in full here. For general consideration of
authorship in contexts not wholly unlike Gautier’s, see David Hult, Self-
Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First Roman de la Rose
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 25–64; Emma
Dillon, Medieval Music-Making and the “Roman de Fauvel” (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 3; and the article by Kevin Brownlee
also on the Roman de Fauvel, a text which, though later, also combines lyric
and narrative, “Authorial Self-Representation and Literary Models in the
Roman de Fauvel,” in Fauvel Studies:Allegory, Chronicle, Music, and Image in Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 146, ed. Margaret Bent and
Andrew Wathey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 73–103. The
vividness of Gautier’s poetic persona is brought out in David A. Flory, Marian
Representations in the Miracle Tales of Thirteenth-Century Spain and France
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), ch. 3;
and the lyric persona (with no significant reference to music) is characterized
by Anna Drzewicka, “Le Livre ou la voix: le moi poétique dans les Miracles
de Notre Dame de Gautier de Coinci,” Le Moyen Age 96 (1990): 33–51.The
most complete study of Gautier’s work including some aspects of borrowing
and citation in the songs is Kathryn A. Duys,“Books Shaped by Song: Early
Literary Literacy in the ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame’ of Gautier de Coinci”
(PhD diss., New York University, 1997). Several studies have addressed the
question of borrowing and conversion, particularly from “courtly” to sacred,
but they do not specifically examine borrowing as a technique of authorial
representation: Paule V. Bétérous, Les Collections de miracles de la Vierge en gallo
et ibéro-roman au XIIIe siècle. Etude comparée: thèmes et structures, Marian Library
Studies 13–14, (Dayton, Ohio: University of Dayton, 1983–1984), pp. 347–74

and 408–421; Anna Drzewicka, “La Fonction des emprunts à la poésie pro-
fane dans les chansons mariales de Gautier de Coinci,” Le Moyen Age 91
(1985): 33–51 and 179–200; William Calin, “On the Nature of Christian
Poetry: From the Courtly to the Sacred and the Functioning of
Contrafactum in Gautier de Coinci,” in Studia in honorem prof. M. de Riquer,
4 vols. (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1988) 3: 385–394; Ardis Butterfield,
Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch 6; Tony Hunt,
“ ‘Monachus curialis’. Gautier de Coinci and courtoisie,” in Courtly Literature
and Clerical Culture, ed. Christoph Huber and Henrike Lähnemann
(Tübingen: Attempto Verlag, 2002), pp. 121–135; Michel Zink, Poésie et
conversion au Moyen Âge (Paris: PUF, 2003), pp. 219–227.
4. Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci, ed.
Frédéric Koenig, 4 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1966–1970). All references to
Gautier’s Miracles will be to that edition. Translation of medieval texts into
English have been made by Virginie Greene and Margaret Switten. Koenig
lists the parts of the Miracles using three criteria: Roman numerals I and II
refer to Gautier’s books I and II; abbreviations such as “Pr,” “Ch,” or “Mir”
refer to the type of composition; and the Arabic numerals list all items of one
book in sequential order.Thus I Pr 1 is the first Prologue of the first book;
I ch. 3 is a song, the third item of book I; I Mir 11 is a miracle story, the
eleventh item of book I.The music has been edited by Jacques Chailley, Les
chansons à la Vierge de Gautier de Coinci (Paris: Heugel, 1959). Chailley dis-
cusses the various manuscript traditions for the music. The basic study of
Gautier manuscripts remains that of Arlette P. Ducrot-Granderye, Etude sur les
miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci (Ann.Acad. Scient. Fenn., B–XXV,
1932, repr. Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1980). A detailed review of all of the
Gautier manuscripts and a detailed study of the structure of the Miracles may
be found in Duys,“Books Shaped by Song.”
5. For a discussion of the various uses of the word livre in Gautier’s work, see
Drzewicka,“Le Livre ou la voix.”
6. Gautier seems to have added the songs after he composed the first book. See
Chailley, Les Chansons, p. 35 “. . . le premier état de l’oeuvre ne comportait
pas de partie lyrique.” This could explain why there are two prologues to the
first book and why only the prologue to the second book integrates songs
and stories.
7. David Hult has pointed out that “it is specifically with the romance tradition
that the image of the vernacular author becomes solidified,” Self-fulfilling
Prophecies, p. 31. References to romance thus could offer Gautier a way of
identifying himself as an author who uses the vernacular.
8. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, traduction
et présentation par Emmanuèle Baumgartner (Paris: Union générale d’éditions
[10/18], 1987). On the image of the writer in Benoît de Sainte-Maure, see
Emmanuèle Baumgartner,“Sur quelques constantes et variations de l’image de
l’écrivain (XIIe–XIIIe siècle),” in Auctor & Auctoritas: Invention et conformisme
56 MARGARET SWITTEN
dans l’écriture médiévale, Actes du colloque de Saint-Quentin-en Yvelines

( 14–16 June, 1990), ed. Michel Zimmerman (Paris: Ecole des chartes, 2001),
p. 395 [391–401].
9. Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Charles Méla and Olivier Collet (Paris: Livre
de poche “Lettres gothiques,” 1994).
10. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du graal, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de poche
“Lettres gothiques,” 1990).
11. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrette ou Le Roman de Lancelot,
ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de poche “Lettres gothiques,” 1992).
12. Michel Zink, “La dédicace du Chevalier de la charrette et les transferts de
l’inspiration,” in “Ce est li fruis selonc la letre,” Mélanges offerts à Charles Méla,
ed. Olivier Collet, Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Sylviane Messerli (Paris:
Champion, 2002), pp. 591–600.
13. Zink,“La dédicace,” p. 591.
14. Zink, “La dédicace,” p. 600. The religious work dedicated to Marie de
Champagne, a French commentary on Psalm 44 (Eructavit), is analyzed in
Morgan Powell,“Translating Scripture for Ma Dame de Champagne: The Old
French Paraphrase of Psalm 44 (Eructavit),” in The Vernacular Spirit,
ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Bradley
Warren (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 83–103.
15. Le Roman de Renart, ed. Jean Dufournet et Andrée Méline, 2 vols. (Paris: GF
Flammarion, 1985), 1:308.
16. It was common practice as well to oppose the miracles of the Virgin to
secular tales. See Zink, Poésie et conversion, p. 223 n. 4.
17. Carl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn, Seine Lieder (Halle: Niemeyer, 1915),
p. 208,“Pois preyatz me seignor,” ll. 50–51.
18. See Zink, Poésie et conversion, pp. 224–226, for a discussion of this point.
19. But of course not the jongleur who plays so beautifully to the Virgin,
II Mir 21.
20. See Uberto Malazia, “Gautier de Coinci e la chanson medievale,” Quaderni
de filologia e lingue romanze 3:2 (1987): 64 [61–75].
21. This word play is developed at length in I Mir 21.
22. For the word “escrivainz” in the context of Gautier’s poetic activity, see
Drzewicka,“Le Livre ou la voix,” p. 249.This would be Gautier’s only use of
the word.
23. The specific meaning of the term contrafactum is difficult to pin down.The
article on contrafactum in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
points out that the difference between “strict” and “free” contrafactum is not
always entirely clear (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed.
Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, 2nd edition [London: Macmillan, 2001]).
Nevertheless, the statement that Gautier’s poems are set to pre-existent
melodies always seems to suggest mere borrowing on his part. For example,
Tony Hunt writes: “. . . [Gautier] seems not to have been the composer of
his own melodies, all the transmitted melodies with his chansons being
contrafacta of existing melodies” (“ ‘Monachus curialis,’ ” in Courtly Literature,
p. 124). In his New Grove article on Gautier, Robert Falck, while fully
recognizing the borrowing, does assert that Gautier composed some

melodies:“Gautier was, however, no mere musical parodist: a number of the
songs that are certainly by him are set to melodies elsewhere unknown; most
notable, perhaps, is the very beautiful strophic lai Roine celestre” (Robert
Falck, “Gautier de Coincy,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy [Accessed
November 27, 2003], http://www.grovemusic.com). It is my argument that
the very act of borrowing can be considered “original composition” in
medieval terms.
24. Duys,“Books Shaped by Song,” p. 81.
25. Gautier also speaks of “traire ma lire / . . . atemprer . . . ma vïele” (I Pr 2,
56–57), which raises the issue of instruments, actually played or metaphori-
cally evoked to represent a certain type of song, an issue that cannot be
discussed here.
26. This passage is discussed by Duys,“Books Shaped by Song,” p. 62.
27. John W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. xii. Baldwin’s dating is based on histori-
cal and political contexts. In his edition of Renart’s Rose, Félix Lecoy argues
for a later date, ca. 1228 (Le Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. Félix
Lecoy [Paris: Champion, 1979], p. viii). For this question and fuller compar-
ison of Jean Renart and Gautier de Coinci, see Duys, “Books Shaped by
Song,” p. 74 and Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France, pp. 105–106.
All references to Jean Renart in this essay will be to the Lecoy edition.
28. The major study on thirteenth-century citation technique is now
Butterfield’s Poetry and Music in Medieval France.
29. See Drzewicka,“Le Livre ou la voix,” for a discussion of the verb “chanter”
in relation to the question of actual or metaphorical performance of
Gautier’s Miracles.
30. Although the idea of “new song” can be found in many contexts from the
Psalms to our own day, it is a concept that particularly defines a new burst of
song activity at the end of the eleventh and beginning of the twelfth century
in both secular (troubadours) and sacred (a new type of Latin song
frequently designated “versus” in Aquitanian sources) domains.The versus are
monastic songs that deal frequently with the Virgin. It has been argued that
these versus also “provided opportunities for individual expression” and
bespoke, already in the twelfth century, a new worldliness, characteristics not
wholly unlike Gautier’s thirteenth-century undertaking (see James Grier,
“A New Voice in the Monastery: Tropes and Versus from Eleventh- and
Twelfth-Century Aquitaine,” Speculum 69 (1994): 1069 [1023–1069]).
Jacques Chailley has noted that before Gautier, “comme chansons mariales
on ne connaissait que les versus et les conduits latins,” (Les Chansons, p. 20).
Gautier certainly knew the conductus; whether he knew the earlier Marian
monastic songs cannot be ascertained, but it is tempting to think that, as a
monastic writer himself, he might have been aware of an effort so like his
own to create new songs from within the monastery. For a discussion of how
Gautier might have renewed the Chant, see Uberto Malazia, “Gautier de
Coinci: la voluntá di rinnovare la musica lirica ne ‘Les Miracles de Nostre
58 MARGARET SWITTEN
Dame,’ ” in La Lengua y la literatura en tiempos de Alfonso X, ed. Fernanco

Carmona and Francisco J. Flores (Múrcia: Universidad de Múrcia, 1985),
pp. 319–332, and “Intorno al lessico tecnico-musicale ne Les Miracles de
Nostre Dame di Gautier de Coinci,” Actes du XVIIIe Congrès International de
Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, ed. Dieter Kremer, 7 vols. (Tübingen:
Niemeyer, 1988), 6: 408 [405–417], as well as Dominique Colombani, “La
Liturgie dans les Miracles de Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci,” Mosaic 12
(1979): 41 [33–54].
31. Carl Appel, Bernart von Ventadorn, Seine Lieder, p. 188,“Non es meravelha s’eu
chan,” lines 1–2. For the use of “faire” to indicate the activity of writing or
composing, see Baumgartner, “Sur quelques constantes et variations de
l’image de l’écrivain,” in Auctor et Auctoritas, pp. 392–393.
32. The extensive and excellent study by Drzewicka, “La Fonction des
emprunts,” analyzes texts for the most part; Duys,“Books Shaped by Song”
devotes a chapter to lyric citations and does take music into consideration;
the sometimes complicated sources for Gautier’s borrowed melodies are
given in Chailley, Les Chansons. See also Duys, “Books Shaped by Song,”
pp. 128–131. Further difficulties are provided, however, by a complex man-
uscript tradition through which the songs have not been uniformly pre-
served. In some cases, the manuscript tradition shows for a single song two
or more different melodies, one borrowed, one not, as in I ch 4, for which
only the melody in manuscript B is the same as a melody by Blondel de
Nesles, whereas the melody in other manuscripts does not appear to be
borrowed.
33. Drzewicka,“La Fonction des emprunts,”; Duys,“Books Shaped by Song.”
34. Poetry and Music in Medieval France, 109. Speaking of II ch 6,“Hui main a l’a-
journee,” Butterfield notes that the contrafactum “appears to have originated
as the duplum of a three-voice clausula from the Notre Dame Organum,
Benedicamus domino.This clausula made its way into at least two Latin motets,
one of which includes a French contrafactum in the form of a pastourelle.”The
pastourelle taken over by Gautier is then “reconverted” to a sacred song to the
Virgin.
35. This song is discussed by Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France,
pp. 109–112, specifically in the context of converting secular to sacred song,
looking at the refrain texts and melodic style in detail.
36. The Soissons manuscript, BnF naf 24541, is a deluxe and beautifully illus-
trated manuscript dating from the 1330s and a main manuscript for Gautier’s
Miracles. It was used by Chailley for his edition of Gautier’s melodies.
Koenig’s edition of this song (Gautier de Coinci, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame)
draws also on this manuscript. It is to be noted, however, that other manu-
scripts, in part defective, do not show the orderly coordination of refrains
and versification that is found in the Soissons codex.
37. Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France, p. 112. Butterfield argues that
Gautier incorporated refrains to make his songs “as directly and ‘popularly’
appealing as possible” so that “the religious message is a result of a process of
absorption rather than of negation.” In the course of her chapter on
contrafacta, Butterfield refers to numerous parallels between Renart’s Rose and

Gautier, suggesting that they “may well indicate that Gautier saw himself as
a direct rival to Renart, intent on replacing romance with a sacred context”
(p. 114). For distinctions between “courtly” and “popular” in the thirteenth
century, see Butterfield’s chapter 7.
38. Of Spanish origin, Saint Leocadia, largely invented by the Visigothic
monarchs in the late sixth century, was the patron of the royal capital,Toledo.
For a detailed discussion of the Leocadia songs in different manuscripts, and
particularly of the pivotal position of the songs reinforced by melodic bor-
rowing so that they “radiate [Gautier’s] authorial presence,” see Duys,
“Books Shaped by Song,” pp. 132–137 and 200–235. My analysis is indebted
to her ground-breaking study.
39. Perotinus was a composer of conductus who worked in Paris around 1200, likely
at the cathedral of Notre Dame. Philip the Chancellor lived in Paris, from about
1170 to 1236. He is noted for his Latin poetry. For the relationship between
Philip the Chancellor and Gautier, see Duys, “Books Shaped by Song,”
pp. 88–91, and for a detailed analysis of the “Entendez tuit” text, pp. 93–99.
40. Chailley, Les Chansons, p. 152. One might briefly diagram the repetitions in
this way:
I ch 3 “Amors qui seit bien enchanter” : melody of I ch 3, composed by
Gautier
I ch 46 “Sour cest rivage” : repeated for I ch 46
I ch 47 “De Sainte Léochade” : melody of I ch 47, contrafact
of “Beata viscera”
II ch 36 “Entendez tuit ensemble” : repeated for II ch 36, making a
double contrafact.
41. “Lai” here and elsewhere in Gautier means “song” in general. Olivier Collet,
Glossaire et Index critique des oeuvres d’attribution certaine de Gautier de Coinci
(Geneva: Droz, 2000), p. 297.
CHAPTER 3
THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE AS A MÖBIUS

STRIP (ON INTERPRETATION)
Alexandre Leupin
C’est fous sens, c’est sage folie

(Roman de la Rose, v. 4320)
classical topic in Medieval French studies is the problem of the unity or

A bipartition of the Roman de la Rose, always considered from the angle of
a single or dual authorship.1 We can represent the position in favor of a bipar-
tite novel graphically, by inscribing the supposed authors’ names, Guillaume
de Lorris and Jean de Meun, one on a side each of a paper strip.This strip
represents the manuscripts in which the Roman’s two parts are preserved:
Conversely, single authorship can be represented by inscribing the names of

both authors on the same side of the strip:
62 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
Both interpretations present us with an epistemological conundrum: the

text’s unity or duality is ultimately referred to a conception of authorship
that is not medieval, one in which the ultimate deciding criterion is the
author’s or authors’ intentionality. After all, almost all that we know about
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is derived from the fiction in which
their names are inscribed; we might inadvertently take for a real difference
or a real identity what are diacritical marks produced by a literary fiction.
To solve the problem, I propose to submit both strips to the same treatment,
which will produce an identical result: first, I operate a 180-degree torsion
on the strip; then I glue the extremities together.What is known as a Möbius
strip is then produced, a unilateral surface. Hence, instead of being opposed
or merged into a unity, the two parts of the Roman will be united on the sin-
gle side of a surface that endlessly designates at the same time Guillaume de
Lorris and Jean de Meun and alternates between them. Just build the strip
and run a finger along the length of the surface to verify the result:
What this means is that each signifier of the entire text is doubly inscribed
on a single surface that bears the authors’ names. Each and every utterance
of Guillaume de Lorris has its interpretative counterpoint (most often an
antinomy) in Jean de Meun. Concomitantly, Jean de Meun’s statements
must be interpreted through those of Guillaume de Lorris. In other words,
the first part anticipates the second, and the second is a retroactive reading
of the first. No part or author has a privilege of truth over the other; con-
tradictions will simply coexist in the eternal day that is a distinctive feature
of the Roman’s temporality.2 The Möbius strip renders this phenomenon
manifest, since it is not swiveling in space or time; the epistemological
conundrum is resolved, beyond the problem of authorship. Indeed, were we
to discover in the future incontrovertible (historical, archival) evidence of
dual authorship, we still should have to account for the decision evidenced
by most manuscripts, which present the Roman de la Rose as a unified work.
In the inverse case, in which the first part is alone in a manuscript, we can
T H E RO M A N D E L A RO S E 63
simply think of the second part as an interpretation of the first, and this
interpretation will have to be inscribed on a Moebian strip as well.3 Let us
note that the first part also builds its own strip, inasmuch as its statements
are far from univocal and can be seen as written on the unilateral surface.The
strip is a tool that helps us formalize the double-entendres found everywhere in
literature. For example,
De l’eve clere reluisant

Mon vis refreschi et lavé, (118–119)4
is normally translated as “With the help of the clear and brilliant water /
I refreshed and washed my face.” But it could also be translated thus:“With
the help of the clear and brilliant Eve, I refreshed and washed my dick.”This
is not the only example of a double-entendre in the work of Guillaume de
Lorris. Because of language’s ambiguous nature, any statement can be
inscribed, and thus interpreted, at least twice. Here is a graphic representation
of the process:
The black dot is the point, marked on both the “sides,” from which a sin-
gle statement produces two significations.This very ambiguity allows Jean
de Meun to add the (huge) “grain of salt” that is in the second part of the
romance, and further commentators, like Christine de Pizan and ourselves,
to write our articles and books. Were language an univocal code of signs
akin to the songs of whales, literature (and humanity) would cease to exist
because texts (and all our utterances) would interpret themselves and
produce only one definitive meaning.
The text produces the Möbian theory of its enunciation through the
logic of contradictory “things,” by which Jean de Meun means signifiers:
Ainsi va des contraires choses,

Les unes sunt des autres gloses;
64 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
Et qui l’une en veult defenir,

De l’autre li doit souvenir,
Ou ja, par nulle entencion,
N’i metra diffinicion:
Car qui des .II. n’a connoissance,
Ja n’i connoistra differance,
Sanz coi ne puet venir en place
Diffinicion que l’en face. (21577–25186)
[So it goes with the contrary things / The ones are a gloss of the others; / And
who wants to define one / Has to remember the other; / If not, whatever his
intention, / He will no define it. / For, he who doesn’t know both things, /
Will not understand the difference. / Without this, no definition that one
makes / Can succeed.]
All the statements contained in the Roman can be defined by their

opposites, and this, regardless of the intentions (entencion) of the author(s) or
readers. This applies to both parts, whether considered as separate or as a
single entity. The production of meaning is here akin to Derrida’s différance,
a term we can find spelled that way in the romance’s manuscripts.
Signification will be born from the clash of antonymic statements. In his
edition of the Roman, Armand Strubel has linked this passage to the art of
distinctiones practiced by philosophers (among them Alain de Lille and
Nicolas d’Amiens) in the medieval schola [schools].5 This is only partially
true: the pre-scholastic Distinctiones use grammar, philosophy, and logic to
determine the meaning of the same term used in different contexts.They
are to be framed by a conception of language that is realist, in the sense
given to this epithet through the Quarrel of Universals. To the opposite,
the logic of contraires choses [contrary things] in the Roman is akin to the
extreme nominalism of a Derrida or a Foucault, for whom, in the closed
realm of the text and more generally of language, meaning never ceases to
deconstruct itself, preventing an ultimate decision regarding its real sense.
This is exactly what Amant, the hero and narrator of the Roman, declares to
Raison:“En ma leçon a tant contraire, / Que je n’en sai nul mot entendre.”
(4360–4361) [In my lesson there are so many contradictions / That I can-
not comprehend a single word of it]. Hence, our romance/ Möbius strip is
wrapped “around” a central void of sense and nonsense, the existence of
which Amant does not doubt, but which he is never able to ascertain and
control.The distinctiones, on the contrary, are a tool the purpose of which is
to unveil a real meaning outside the self-referentiality of language.
I give here only one central example of the process of the contraires choses.
Since it is the very structure of the text itself, even a simple list would
exceed the limits of this chapter. In that sense, the Möbius strip is not just a
convenient metaphor or a descriptive device apprehending the text from

the outside: I contend it is the Roman itself.
In the middle of the narrative, a strange character appears, Faus Semblans
[False Figure], accompanied by an equally strange companion, Abstinence
Contrainte [Constricted Abstinence]. Faus Semblans symbolizes a mendicant
friar, against whom Jean de Meun does not mince words. He is the double
(Möbian inscription) of a character, Papelardie [Hypocrisy or Pope-
Holiness],6 that was painted on the walls outside of the love orchard by
Guillaume de Lorris. Faus Semblans takes up successfully the roles of the
many guides whose help Amant has sought in his quest for the Rose. In
other words, an entirely negative principle is now introduced by Jean de
Meun in the orchard, and this principle will be the character to whom the
conclusion of the huge narrative is attributable. Abstinence Contrainte is
the inverted double (again, think about the Moebian inscription) of Amour
in Guillaume’s orchard. As such, she is a negative interpretation of courtly
love, in which the Lady always forbids and defers the poet’s sexual pleasure
to an uncertain future. It is to these two characters, Faus Semblans and
Abstinence Contrainte—that is to lie, deception, and hypocrisy—that
Amant owes his final success, the sexual conquest (which is a rape) of the
Rose. His former guides, Raison [Reason], Bel Accueil [Fair Welcome], or
Ami [Friend], embodiments of positive qualities, have fallen by the wayside.
The narrative quest hence is tied to the problem posed by the representations
of femininity, which I examine now in a more detailed fashion.
The Roman de la Rose is often seen as the classic manifestation of medieval
misogyny, but we can find in the text an equally damaging assessment of
men. For example, Nature says of man that he is:
Orgueilleus est, murtriers et lerres

Fel, couvoiteus, avers, trichierres,
Desesperez et mesdisanz
Et haïnneus et despisanz,
Mescreanz, envieus, mentierres,
Parjurs, faussaires, foz, vantierres,
Glouz, inconstanz et foloiables,
Ydolastres, desagreables,
Traistres et faus ypocrites
Et pareceus et sodomites.
Briement, tant est chaitis et nices
Qu’il sers a trestouz les vices
Et trestouz en soi les hesberge. (19229–19241)
[Man is full of pride, a murderer and a liar / A felon, lascivious, avaricious, a
cheater, / Full of hate and scorn / A miscreant, envious, mendacious / Perjuring,
fraudulent, mad, boasting, / He is inconstant and easily duped, / Idolatrous,
66 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
disagreeable / Treacherous and hypocrite / Lazy and sodomite / In brief, he is

so weak and stupid / That he is slave to all vices / And he houses them all in
him.]
As a matter of fact, any statement about men or women found in the

Roman can be contradicted by its opposite: such is the logic of the contraires
choses. No concept escapes it, not in the least masculinity and femininity.
We should therefore expect to find at least two opposing definitions of
femininity in the Roman, which we can at any time reverse in each other.
But will this discourse on femininity find its true object? That is the
question.
Schematically, the first definition reproduces the classical courtly Lady.
She is so inaccessible that she petrifies the lover, as the God of love tells the
lover/dreamer/narrator/author:
Or renvenra maintes foïes

Qu’an pensant t’antroblieras
Et une grant piece seras
Ausis com une ymage mue
Qui ne se crole ne remue,
Sanz piez, sanz mains, sanz doiz croler,
Sanz iaus movir et sanz parler. (2282–2298)
[This will happen often: / You will forget yourself in your thought / And, for
a very long time, you will be / As a mute image / That cannot move its feet,
its hands, its fingers / Its eyes, and that cannot speak.]
What is the meaning of this petrification, or better, “phallification”? It

means that the lover’s desire, and hence his song or romance, is maintained
eternally alive in the hope that there will be an intercourse with the courtly
Lady. Her inaccessibility therefore maintains an infinite hope:
Esperance li fet soffrir

Les maus dont nus ne set le conte,
Por la joie qui .c. tanz monte.
Esperance par soffrir vaint
Et fait que li amanz vivaint; (2622–2626)
[Hope makes the Lover endure / The ills, which nobody can count,7 / For
the joy that is worth a hundred times more. / Hope defeats suffering / And
makes the lovers live;]
In other words, the whole strategy of courtly love is to deny the absence of
a sexual rapport (that is, a logical statement that could posit a logical
relationship between femininity and masculinity, not a sexual act or a sex-

ual relationship8) by maintaining that it could happen in an infinitely
remote future. At the end of the first part, however, the lover will have
obtained nothing but a kiss:
N’i ot onques plus demore:

Un baisier douz et savoré
Priz de la Rose erraument. (3475–3477)
[I didn’t delay anymore / And, right away, I took a sweet kiss full of flavor /
From the Rose.]
The other image of femininity is enclosed within the Rose as the second
part of the novel defines it.This new image seems to be the opposite of the
first one, but we will see that they have a lot in common.
In order to understand this second metaphor, we have to read it through
the mythical episode of Pygmalion that introduces the orgasmic conclusion
of the romance. Pygmalion has created the perfect woman, except that she
is made of stone.As such, she is the absolute negation of his desire for her:
J’aime une ymage sourde et mue

Qui ne se crosle ne ne mue,
Ne ja de moi merci n’avra! (20855–20857)
[I love a deaf and mute image, / That doesn’t move at all / And will never
have pity of me!]
And later he describes her in the following words:
Car, quant je me vueill aaasier

Et d’acoler et de baisier
Je truis m’amie autressi roide
Com est un pels et aussi froide:
Et quant pour li baisier i touche,
Toute me refredist la bouche. (20905–20910)
[When I want to have pleasure / And embrace and kiss her, / I find my com-
panion as rigid / as a post, and so cold that / When I touch her for a kiss, /
She freezes my mouth.]
The petrification/phallification that affected the courtly lover facing his

Lady in the first part has been displaced to Pygmalion’s Lady. It now signifies
the abyss between Pygmalion and femininity, an abyss from which the
Roman extracts itself only by a fictitious, textual miracle:Venus makes the
statue come to life. Of course, this doesn’t happen in “real” life, wherein what
confronts us is always the unapproachable nature of our unconscious desire.
68 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
This story forms the framework of the last scene, in which the
lover/dreamer/narrator/author finally copulates with the Rose through a
violent rape (of course the Rose consents, since she is walled in stony
silence!).At first, he seems assured of the possession of the phallus:
Et puis que je l’oi receü,
Pres de moi l’aiz touz jors eü,
Si que nel perdi onques puis
Ne nel perdrai pas, se je puis,
Car n’en voudroie estre delivres
Pour .v.c. foiz .c.m. livres! (21391–21396)
[From the moment I received it / I have always had it near me / And I never
lost it / And never will, if I can, / For I would not give it away / For five
hundred millions pounds!].9
However, the reiteration of the possession, as well as the hyperbole of the

monetary value attached to the phallus points to the fact that it could indeed
be lost.The same assurance seems to conclusively mark the possession of the
Lady in the penultimate line of the long poem: “Ainsint oi la Rose ver-
meille”10 [So I had the vermilion Rose].At first glance, the conclusion of the
romance seems as felicitous as the ending of Pygmalion’s adventure: the sex-
ual ratio happens through the miracle of fiction.The final copulation scene
is structured in its entirety by simulacra: the Lover’s sexual organs are reduced
to the pilgrim’s stick and double bag, the Rose is a stony castle,11 her sex a
sacrilegious reliquary. No miracle here. Nothing happens but the copula of
metaphors and images: the dream fulfills the wish, but the fulfillment remains
a dream.We could read this conclusion as yet another instance of the reifica-
tion of femininity: after all, there is no more brutal image of woman than as
stone object. But this reading forgets that the lover is himself reduced to the
level of a desultory object. A metaphor has forcibly copulated with another
one; nothing has really happened; and Jean de Meun goes to extreme lengths
to make his readers understand the radically textual, unreal nature of his con-
clusion.The end of the lover’s quest is equivocal to say the least. But that is
precisely the point.The reader is sent back to the Roman’s Möbius strip, this
endless loop wrapped around a void (a nonsense), in which figures infinitely
repeat their “différances”: indeed, the “definition” cannot be completed.
We can therefore read the ending of the romance as a radical criticism of
reification/objectification. In the end, nothing has happened; it was just a
dream, as the last verse indicates:“Atant fuz jorz, et je m’esveille” (21750)12
[It was dawn and I wake up]. But this dream was present since the very
beginning, dreamed this time by the courtly lover:
Lors feras chastiaus en Espaigne

Et avras joie de noiant,
Tant con tu iras foloiant

En la pensee delitable
Ou il n’a que mençonge et fable. (2440–2444)
[Then you will build castles13 in the air / And will have joy of nothingness /
Because you will rejoice / In the delicious thought / Where there is but lie
and fable.]
The dream framework of the whole poem thus serves the purpose of an
implicit criticism of all the copulative solutions to the enigma of sexual
difference found in the text. From the very beginning the Rose is but a
narcissistic vision of the lover himself, since he discovers it as a reflection in
the mirror formed by the fountain of Narcissus. The Roman de la Rose
therefore terminates as it had begun, in an abject failure, a copulation of
simulacra denounced as such. In fact, we can see the whole romance as a
vast and circular presentification/denegation of the truth that “there is no
sexual ratio.” It is hence at the same time an exposition and a radical
critique of all the images that one can superimpose on femininity; whatever
their sheer mass in the course of these more than twenty-one-thousand
lines, in the end, femininity will have escaped the grasp of language.
We can now “fill” the void at the center of the Möbius strip with the
names of that which the text cannot represent:
Of course, this partial interpretation has no pretense of delivering the

“ultimate meaning” of the Roman de la Rose. Its only ambition is to clarify
the structure of the romance on a specific problem, using a tool that may
lead to an almost infinite number of readings.The experiment should then
be repeated again and again, with the inclusion of as many contraires choses as
possible, and at different levels (mythology-Christianity, reason-nature, or
love in Antiquity and modernity, to name but a few of the possibilities).
A fundamental difference between the Möbian structure of the contraires
choses (or signifiers) and Derrida’s deconstruction should be pointed out here.
70 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
The former revolves around a real and external reference at its center, which
the strip evokes and alludes to in the failures of representation (as demonstrated
by the ultimate checkmate at uniting male and female in the Roman). Derrida’s
theory, on the contrary, does not tolerate such a lack. A signifier will always
ultimately refer to another signifier, ad infinitum, in accordance with Derrida’s
inherent nominalism. In other words, in the first conception, double inscrip-
tion and repetition of the signifiers are the processes that produce meaning. In
Derrida’s theory, the play of the signifier (différance) produces indecidability.
Since there is no central reference or lack in the theory, it cannot be repre-
sented by a Möbius strip, which presupposes an exteriority of language.
The structure of the Roman de la Rose is grounded in a very old art of
interpretation, the concordia discors [discordant concord] of the two Testaments
created by the Church Fathers in order to read the Bible.The Old Testament
is seen as the literal level of the Gospels, which unveils its meaning, even if it
is by a repetition, since the New Testament can also be considered as an
extensive quote of the Torah.
Hence both Testaments wrap themselves around a central void, which, in
the case of the Bible, is God, an entity out of the world inasmuch as it is its
creator, and is therefore, according to the tenets of apophatic theology, real,
but nonrepresentable.14 “Nova Lex de veteri Lege texta est” [The New Law is
embroidered from the Old one], writes Hildegarde von Bingen; Saint
Augustine declares:“In veteri Testamento est occultatio Novi, in Novo Testamento est
manifestatio Veteris” [In the Old testament, we have the occultation of the New,
in the New Testament we have the manifestation of the Old Testament].15
Each figure in the Torah and the Prophets has its elucidating correspondent in
the New Testament, and in reverse, each statement in the New Testament can
be explained through a statement of the Old Testament (Jesus is the new
Adam, Mary is the new Eve, etc.; here again, as in the Roman de la Rose, the
examples are countless). From an initial difference, we reach a contradictory
unity.Again, the Möbius strip is the structure of the entire text:
To be born, this structure has to result from an active reading. Even if, in a
certain sense, the Church Fathers only repeat a construction already
consciously present in the two Testaments (in particular in Paul’s letters,
which found the tropological interpretation of the Old Testament), they still
formalize the relationship by this very repetition. Hence, we can construct
another Möbius strip, with God always in the central void:
I will make a seemingly outrageous claim: Medieval exegesis, which has

no equivalent in the hermeneutics of antiquity,16 has to be considered as
the model for a modern art of interpretation.The first condition for such a
claim to be at all possible is to understand the Middle Ages as the cradle of
modernity. First, the Incarnation is the foundation of modern science,
which defines modernity in the terms of the scientific revolution.17
Second, medieval exegesis is applied to the history, life, deeds, and acts of a
historical character, Jesus; the historicism at work in the Torah receives here
its full expression, contrary to mythology. From my point of view, it doesn’t
matter if Jesus’ life happened or not: suffice it to be deemed historical by the
Church, which is, as Hegel said, “not a sect, but a real world in which
men live.”18 Finally, modern academia was born in the universities of the
twelfth century and retains many characteristics of medieval culture: for
example, the zeal applied by scholars to literary texts is a displacement of
the diligence devoted to the sacra pagina’s interpretation by medieval
doctors.19
Let me add that, indeed, the Möbian strip is itself a historical structure.
It determines the conditions of writing, for example, according to the
symbolic and real constraints of each period: the structuring signifiers of
each period have thus to be considered in constructing the strip.“To each
period its own strip” could be the motto here.
The Möbian structure that informs medieval exegesis shows clearly that
the reader is always involved in the observation of text, even if uncon-
sciously (that is, even if the interpreter does not want to know anything
72 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
about his or her own involvement).Writing texts, then reading them, and
writing commentaries on them again loops around a central void—an
unconscious truth and the desire of the reader:
Since the notion of authorship is called into question by medieval literary

culture (as well as by modern thinkers like Foucault), a better way to iden-
tify the entities on the strip may be this one:
Let me give now an example of a modern text that obeys the Möbian
structure: Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.The possibility of writing the
work is opened only at the end, in a moment of revelation recounted in
Le temps retrouvé. But we have been in the text’s writing since the very first
page. Again, the solution to this epistemological conundrum can only be a
Möbius strip. All the events, fictional or not, of a wasted life are given
meaning by the revelation of writing.Through their Moebian, active trans-
formation, all the senseless signs of life are redeemed and given meaning;
indeed, Proust describes his central experience in specifically religious
terms: his is a mysticism displaced to art. The central void is occupied by
Proust’s desire, of which he leaves traces in the work itself; for example (and
I do not claim this is the only form desire takes in La recherche):
I had had two young laundry-girls, from a district where Albertine had often
gone, brought to a house of assignation. One of them, beneath the caresses of
the other, suddenly began to utter sounds which at first I found difficult to
identify, for one never understands precisely the meaning of an original
sound expressive of a sensation which one does not experience oneself . . . It
took me some time, too, to understand that this noise expressed what, by
analogy with the (very different) sensations I myself had felt, I called pleasure;
and the pleasure must have been very great to overwhelm to this extent
the person who was expressing it and to extract from her this strange utterance
which seemed to describe and comment on the exquisite drama which the
young woman was living through and which was concealed from my eyes by
the curtain that is forever lowered for other people over what happens in the
mysterious intimacy of every human creature.20
Let us then draw a figure as follows:
Even if Proust’s desires have disappeared with his death, La recherche gives us
enough indications about them (as did the long-gone Guillaume de Lorris
and Jean de Meun about their own desires). These figures of desire that
survive in their works are the same ones that cause our own (unconscious)
desire as readers; we may not wish to know about it, but our desires implicate
us in our work.
Of course, as defined, the Möbian theory of the sign has innumerable
applications. But that would be the topic for innumerable books, so I leave
it to the readers to imagine and write them, at the risk of frustrating them.
Notes
1. On the dual authorship, see David Hult’s study, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies:
Readership and Authority in the First ‘Roman de la Rose’ (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), which considers the part attributed to
74 ALEXANDRE LEUPIN
Guillaume de Lorris as an independent romance and presents a summary of

the “classical” position. On single authorship (or the unity of the romance),
see Roger Dragonetti’s article,“Pygmalion ou les pièges de la fiction dans le
Roman de la Rose,” in Orbis mediaevalis: mélanges de langue et de littérature
médiévales offerts à Reto Raduolf Bezzola à l’occasion de son quatre-vingtième
anniversaire, ed. Georges Güntert, Marc-René Jung, and Kurt Ringger (Bern:
Francke, 1978), pp. 89–111. All quotations from Le Roman de la Rose come
from the edition by Armand Strubel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992), except
when otherwise indicated.Translation is mine.
2. For more details, see my study “Le temps dans le Roman de la Rose,” in
Il tempo, i tempi: omaggio a Lorenzo Renzi, ed. Rosanna Brusegan and Michele
A. Cortelazzo (Padova: Esedra, 1999), pp. 141–142.
3. See below.
4. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Felix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1965–70) 3: 5.
5. Le Roman de la Rose, ed.A. Strubel, p. 1235.
6. “Pope-Holiness” is Dahlerg’s translation of “Papelardie.” The Romance of the
Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971),
p. 36.
7. Or, by homophony, “the words that nobody can count” (again a double-
entendre that, like all of them, is accounted for by the strip).
8. The translation of Lacan’s “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel” by “There are no
sexual relationships” is thus erroneous and generate a lot of misreadings. For
Lacan, the sexual act, the existence of which, of course, he does not deny, is
an imaginary veil that masks the absence of logical sexual rapport. More on
this in my Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New York: Other
Press, 2004).
9. “Pounds” or “books.”
10. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, vol. 3.
11. See the miniatures reproduced by Giorgio Agamben as well as his reading in
Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez,
Theory and History of Literature 69 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1992), ill. 13–22.
12. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, vol. 3.
13. These castles anticipate the last figuration of femininity, the Rose as a
dungeon.
14. See A. Leupin, Barbarolexis, Medieval Writing and Sexuality (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989).Without going into details, the void of the
Bible and its commentaries and the void of the Roman de la Rose overlap:
“God is the space of non (sexual) rapport.” François Regnault, Dieu est
inconscient (Paris: Navarin, 1985), p. 11. I have developed these questions in
Lacan Today.
15. Hildegarde, Patrologia Latina 197: 1010 A; Augustine, De catechizandis rudibus,
quoted and commented in Henri de Lubac’s chapter “Concorde des deux
testaments” in L’exégèse médiévale: les quatres sens de l’écriture, 4 vols. (Paris:
Aubier, 1959–1964) 1: 328.
16. H. de Lubac demonstrates that Christian exegesis is homonymous to

Classical allegory. See “La nouveauté chrétienne” in L’exégèse médiévale,
2: 511–522.
17. As Lacan reminds us in “La logique du fantasme,” Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil,
2001), p. 327. On Lacan and the Middle Ages, see my article,“Médiévisme et
psychanalyse,” Perspectives Médiévales: numéro jubilaire de la société de langues et
de littératures médiévales d’Oc et d’Oïl (March 2005): 319–336.
18. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard,
1980), p. 258, and the introduction to my Fiction and Incarnation
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
19. On the relationship between Humanities and Christianity, see my article
“The Impossible Copula (Humanities and Judeo-Christianity),” Rhetoric
Society Quarterly 29.3 (Summer 1999): 11–20.
20. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and
Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols. (New York:Vintage Books, 1982) 2: 561.
CHAPTER 4
THE MEDIEVAL “AUTHOR”:AN IDEA

WHOSE TIME HADN’T COME?
Stephen G. Nichols
The “Author,” Philology, and Literary Study

The term “author” has become so much a part of our vocabulary and
literary attitude that it’s natural to feel that it must always have been so. As
Heidegger says:“The artist is the origin of the work.The work is the origin
of the artist. Neither is without the other.”1 Since the Renaissance, the
author has been conceived as the professional “literary figure” who writes
works according to conventions, which he both internalizes and transforms
to make an “original” creation. Literary criticism, theory, and history were
bound to consider the work and the author together.
Opinions have varied radically as to the extent of the author’s being qua
individual that may find expression in his work. What has not been
questioned—at least until recently—is the fact of there being an authorial
presence behind the work and recoverable through it. T. S. Eliot, for example,
argued that the author is someone who comes to grips not with a personal
psyche, but with a poetic medium, which he calls “tradition”:
[T]he poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which
is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences
which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those
which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in
the man, the personality.2
Kenneth Burke argues, on the other hand, that it may be precisely the
discovery of his “personality,” or at least aspects of it, that the poet
78 S T E P H E N G. N I C H O L S
captures symbolically:
Consider the hypothetical case of a poet who would identify himself with
some particular imagery of transformation selected from . . . the imagery of
Life and Death.We can easily conceive of a poet who, wanting to symbolize
the transformation of some evil trait within himself, writes a poem accord-
ingly; and in this poem he might identify himself with a figure who, marked
by this trait, takes his own life, thereby ritualistically transforming the trait.
(That is, if the figure in the fiction possessed some outstanding vice, and slew
himself as an act of judgment against this vice, such imagery of suicide could
be a ritualistic means whereby the poet sought to purge his own self of this
vice, or purified the vice by identifying it with the dignity of death.)3
If the concept of the author has been a constant in modern literary study,
the ubiquity of the belief has not gone unchallenged. Some forty years ago,
Roland Barthes pointed out:
The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging
from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the
personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individ-
ual, of, as it is more nobly put, “the human person.” It is thus logical that in
literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capi-
talist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the “person” of
the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of
writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters
anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs.
The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the
author, his person, his life, his taste, his passions . . .4
Although Barthes’s is arguably the most famous (or most extreme)

formulation of the modernity of this concept, it was far from the first. In the
late 1940s and 1950s, scholars like Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer
remarked divergent attitudes toward the author beginning in Early Modern
times as opposed to previous eras. In Mimesis, Auerbach consistently
underlines differences in self-presentation between classical and medieval
writers and their post-Renaissance counterparts.5 In Linguistics and Literary
History, Leo Spitzer observes that the concept of the author’s presence qua
“individual” in his work derives from the theory of “original genius” not
possible before the eighteenth-century. Premodern writers only use associ-
ations prompted by a literary tradition. “Dante, Shakespeare, Racine are
great literary ‘individuals’, but they did not (or could not) allow their style
to be permeated by personal phobias and idiosyncrasies (even Montaigne
when portraying himself, thought of himself as ‘l’homme’).”6
T H E M E D I E VA L “ AU T H O R ” 79
What has been less remarked, however, is the link between the
emergence of textual philology and the modern concept of the author.We
tend to think of philology as concerned principally with the quest for an
original text, the poet’s text, the Ur-text. The latter is in no sense simply
another text, even one that might be seen as primus inter pares. As an ideal
construct, the Ur-text, from the perspective of textual philology, has no
equals; it is, in the words of Karl Uitti, “the pristine original state” of the
work.7 And indeed the quest for a reliable text, a stable text that reflects
something like the author’s intentionality has driven philology from the
time of Petrarch, Poliziano, and the other early humanists.8
Yet philology had, of necessity, to take as its corollary of the search for a
stable text, the quest for its originator.That is, the “author,” the poet viewed
not as authorial agency, but as a “person” in the metaphysical sense of the
term; in short, the active “presence” in the text of both a mind and a body.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht speaks to this phenomenon when he observes:
“Text editing conjures up the desire of embodying the text in question,
which can transform itself into the desire of also embodying the author of
the text.”9 Gumbrecht means that with the advent of rigorous textual
criticism, beginning with humanism, the concept of the author arose.
Textual philology requires an author. Without an author, there can be no
philology.10 More precisely, we should say that the concept of the work of
art as the expression of an individual voice, predicated on a particular life
experience originates with humanism. For the humanists wrote about their
quest, produced treatises setting forth their doctrines.They also wrote about
themselves as authors, demonstrating a keen appreciation for the subtle,
psychic relationship between life and literature.
Perhaps the first and most influential personal document of this sort is
Petrarch’s “Letter to Posterity.” Here, Petrarch establishes a new model for
what it means to be an author. He defines his trajectory through life, above
all his relationship to his world—his birth, childhood, travels, relations with
others, his life “project” in short—in relationship to his writing. We need
look no further than the exordium to discover the link between life and
letters. Petrarch begins by citing his literary reputation as the reason readers
could possibly have for learning about his life. As though heeding
Heidegger’s question “by what and whence is the author what he is?”
Petrarch sets out to explain how an exile born in Arezzo could have
become the poet he did and how the work allowed him to “emerge as a
master of his art.”
Greeting.—It is possible that some word of me may have come to you,

though even this is doubtful, since an insignificant and obscure name will
scarcely penetrate far in either time or space. If, however, you should have
heard of me, you may desire to know what manner of man I was, or what was
the outcome of my labors, especially those of which some description or, at
any rate, the bare titles may have reached you.11
Petrarch goes on to describe in this letter the trajectory of his personal and
public life, including his travels, various benefactors, and patrons.While he
details aspects of his personal and spiritual life—including his youthful
struggles with sexual desire—we must read this letter, and “The Ascent of
Mount Ventoux,” closely allied to it, as examples of how he creates a new
concept of a “modern” authorial persona, who grapples not with a
transcendent spiritual ascent, like Augustine or Dante, but rather with a
concrete, material relationship to the physical world and to history.
The “Ascent of Mount Ventoux” invokes authoritative precursors—
Dante and Saint Augustine, for example—in the manner of medieval
writers, but does so in a way that marks a difference in perspective. If the
“Letter to Posterity” echoes the earlier chapters of Confessions, particularly
book 3 with its accent on confronting fleshly desire, the “Ascent” conflates
Dantean and Augustinean references. As Dante-pilgrim, guided by Virgil
and then by Beatrice, ascends the mountain of Purgatory in order ulti-
mately to glimpse the ineffable light of Paradise, so Petrarch ascends Mount
Ventoux, a place unclimbed, he is told by a peasant, in living memory.
Throughout his narrative, Petrarch makes us aware of the fact that his
mountain, unlike Dante’s imaginary one, towers over the local landscape,
and his climb, unlike Dante’s dream allegory, occurs in real time.“For many
years I have been minded to make this trip. As you know, my destiny—
tossed about as fate buffeted the affairs of men—has been to live since
childhood in these parts where this mountain, visible from any direction, is
always in your view. So I was at last seized by the impulse to accomplish
what I had always wanted to do.”12
As much as Dante seeks to map the reality of contemporary Italian and
papal politics onto an eschatological reckoning that, by definition, will be
outside of real time, Petrarch is just as determined to keep his narrative
within the sphere of reality, or rather a composite reality consisting of
visualized space and time in the present but continually in dialogue with
antiquity. He undertakes his ascent, he tells us,
after having re-read some days ago in Livy’s history of Rome how Philip, the
king of Macedonia—the one who waged the war against the roman
people—ascended Mount Hemo in Thessaly, since he believed the rumor
that you can see two seas from its top: the Adriatic and the Black Sea.13
Livy’s text, and Petrarch’s performative reading of it, is what matters here.
He is not suggesting that he climbed Mount Ventoux in order to emulate
King Philip.This anecdote, apposite though it be in the context, is simply a

heuristic device to make a more profound point. Petrarch casts his ascent of
Mount Ventoux as a demonstration of how classical literature, properly
understood, enables the modern reader to connect his own environment—
the physical context that has heretofore been nothing more than a passive
backdrop to daily life—with philosophical and contemplative practices as
represented in classical texts. Petrarch does not advocate a mindless aping of
antiquity, quite the reverse. Antiquity serves as an example of how true
philosophical contemplation does not take place exclusively in the psyche,
but rather engages the entire spectrum of one’s existence, very much
including the physical environment. Petrarch’s performative reading illus-
trates his recognition of what Timothy Reiss calls the “reactive relation” of
the person with the “existential spheres” that formed his subjectivity.14
Antiquity, Petrarch recognized, understood and taught how the individual,
qua person, developed from contemplating and discovering “experiences of
being whose common denominator was a sense of being embedded in and
acted upon by [spheres that included] the material world and immediate
biological, familial and social ambiences, as well as the soul’s . . . cosmic,
spiritual or divine life.”15 By showing how his reading acts upon him,
Petrarch illustrates his understanding that the individual did not discover
himself as a human entity unique au monde, according to the modernist
paradigm. Rather, he contemplates his existence as imbricated in a continuum
that is both temporal and physical.
Human agency entailed “acceptance” of actions preceding and enveloping

their doer, acceptance due to anything from imperative constraint to rational
consent. Reasoning and knowing meant slotting oneself into reason and
knowledge already present in the universe,“having one’s life shaped by a pre-
existent rational order.” Such experiences of doing and knowing grounded
perceptions of the human capacities taken to enable them. Will did not name
a capacity of an agent subject responsible for actions it alone chose.16
Close reading of the “Ascent” reveals a host of classical and scriptural

precursors—for example, Ovid, Virgil, Macrobius, St. Anselm, Seneca,
Juvenal, Pliny, Livy, Matthew, Job, Psalms, St. Paul, etc.—interwoven
throughout the narrative by way of illustrating the intellectual formation in
which he and his venture are embedded.The crucial text, however, and the
one that demonstrates definitively how Petrarch utilizes performative read-
ing to declare both his embeddedness in tradition, and the independent use
he makes of it, is the one to which he alludes at the summit: the tolle lege
passage from book 8 of Augustine’s Confessions. In this case, however, if
the allusion is clear, so is the modification Petrarch brings to the scene.
Whereas Augustine responds to the voice like a child’s crying tolle lege,
tolle lege [take, read; take, read] by opening a codex of St. Paul, Petrarch,
reacting to his contemplation of the view from the summit—the Alps near
Lyon, the sea near Marseilles and Aigues Mortes, the Rhone “directly under
our eyes”—turns to a codex of St. Augustine given to him by his patron
Dionigi, to whom he writes this epistle. Just as the verse from St. Paul
dumbfounded Augustine by its appositeness to his situation as he tells it in
Confessions, so the sentence from Augustine literally takes Petrarch’s breath
away—or at least the desire to speak for the rest of the day. He takes care,
even at the risk of mitigating dramatic tension, of showing just how embed-
ded is the possibility of reading Augustine at this juncture in a web of
contemporary and historical relations. Note also the fourfold focus of
Petrarch’s contemplation: on the vista spread out before his eyes, on the
physical book, a gift, that he carries, on the text toward which he turns, and,
finally, on the inner thought processes by which he synthesizes these stim-
uli to arrive at a conclusion about the nature of his own being in relation to
the plethora of sensory data.
While I was admiring [the panorama],at times thinking about earthly things and
at times following the example of my body, raising my mind to loftier things, it
occurred to me to look into the Book of Confessions of St. Augustine, a gift of
your kindness, which I shall always keep on hand in remembrance of the author
as well as of the donor [Dionigi], a handy little work very small but of infinite
sweetness. I opened it and started to read at random, for what can emerge from
it except pious and devout things? By chance it was the tenth book of that work
to which I opened. My brother stood by attentively to hear me read something
from Augustine.May God be my witness and my brother that my eyes happened
to light where it was written:“And men go to admire the high mountains, the
vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the
ocean and the revolutions of the stars—and forget themselves.”17
When he continues by saying,“satisfied that I had seen enough of the moun-

tain, I bent my inner eye toward myself, and from that moment no one heard
me speak until we arrived back at the foot of the mountain,” we have no
doubt as to the complex purpose of Petrarch’s intention. Mount Ventoux
becomes, as we read the account, at once a defining moment in the life of the
poet, and a symbolic manifesto regarding the relationship of present to past,
and the poet’s responsibility for dealing with it. His experience is personal in
the same way the tolle lege passage was personal for Augustine, although both
render the lesson universal through their written, and public, reflection.
These words more than occupied my silence, nor could I believe that it hap-
pened by chance but rather thought that whatever I had read there had been
directed to me and to no one else. I recollected how Augustine had supposed

the same thing happening to him when in his reading of the book of the
Apostle, as he himself relates, he first came across these words: “Not in
banquets nor in drunkenness, in beds or in rudeness, in strife or in envy, but
put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not provide nourishment for the flesh in
your lusts.”18
Henceforth, he will seek to make past works accessible to the present and
future, less for their authoritative status per se, than for what they can do to
reveal the horizons of human contemplation. He cast himself in short as
both actor and author; the one who contemplates, reflects in his inner eye,
and mediates between past and present. On his view, none of what he has
to offer, however, would be worthy of consideration were it not part of his
personal experience. Author and text are thus indissolubly entwined in a
recursive dynamic of subjective experience.
A century earlier, the experience of writing is very different.While we
may have names of poets, we do not have their “persons” in the sense that
Petrarch defines himself “for posterity.” There are, as always, exceptions like
Abelard’s Historia calamitatum, but this is, in its precociousness, an exception
that proves the rule. Its uniqueness may also explain the fascination
Abelard’s story exercised on later writers like Petrarch, Jean de Meun, and
so many others who come to mind. Petrarch, for example, owned and
annotated a thirteenth-century manuscript now in the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France (BnF Lat. 2923), which contains Héloise and Abebard’s
correspondence, including the Historia Calamitatum.19 Jean de Meun, for his
part, translated Abelard’s letters, and quoted the Historia in several important
passages in the Roman de la Rose.20 Now, when one thinks about it, those
two works deal with authorship in starkly different ways.Whereas Abelard’s
persona constitutes the subject—in the term’s several senses—of the
Historia, the Rose projects a much more complex and blurred picture,
continually renewing its “origins.”
In fact, this romance offers about as fascinating an example of the work
of art in the manuscript age as one could find. Not the least of this allure
stems from what we might call its open-ended composition. Far from
boasting a single poet presiding over a continuous creative effort, it’s a
work that, from the moment it was begun seems to have experienced con-
tinuations, rewritings, and interventions of different kinds by poets, scribes
and artists, both known and anonymous. It is this very plurality of the
material structure that renders the work of its editors so difficult. Félix
Lecoy, for instance, speaks of the “terrifying mass of variants” posed by the
250 or so manuscripts of the Rose.21 Citing Langlois’s efforts at classifica-
tion of the manuscript tradition, Lecoy characterizes the transmission of
Guillaume’s part of the work as “confused, tangled, uncertain, and, frankly,

bad.”22 Accordingly, he cites the “rewriting” of couplets, or even passages,
by copyists as grounds for rejecting the authority of certain manuscripts so
far as Guillaume’s text is concerned.23
Parenthetically, one may legitimately wonder how—given what he
describes as the bad manuscript tradition for Guillaume’s poem—Lecoy (or
any editor) can assert with confidence that a given reading can be authori-
tatively labeled a réfection totale [complete reworking].24 Ordinarily, one
would need to have the original to substantiate such a statement. Since in
these cases that is not possible, editors hypothesize “a logical substitute”
based on a consensus of readings for a given passage from control
manuscripts.Although each control will vary in minor ways from the other
manuscripts for the passage in question, the group as a whole will offer a
similar reading.When one runs across a manuscript that proposes a differ-
ent lesson altogether, by the logic of group consensus, there is little choice
but to call it “a complete reworking.” Why? Because, from the viewpoint of
the text editor, the alternate version sounds a dissonant note in a scenario
scripted to recover a single voice, the author’s voice. It is the duty of the
editor, Lecoy reminds us, to protect “the author’s thought” from being
betrayed or traduced by the manuscript.”25 What is truly curious—and
unremarked—is the esthetic reversal here whereby multiple repetitions of
the same take precedence over poetic variation. Usually, of course, esthetic
judgment prefers poetic originality. Lecoy himself occasionally frets at the
tyranny of conformity. His base manuscript, MS BnF fr. 1573, offers
the reading que j’enromance [that I romance] at v. 2069. Even though, he says,
the expression is “seductive, even probable,”26 he rejects it because his
control manuscripts don’t corroborate it. So the felicitous j’enromance gives
way to the prosaic j’encomance [that I begin].
Although variation from the norm may pose a problem for textual
philology, from a historical viewpoint they attest to the vitality of collabo-
rative creativity that, at its best, can make different manuscript versions of a
work so interesting. In the case of the Rose, the collaborative enterprise is
extensive, well attested, and often acknowledged by name.To cite only a few
examples, in addition to Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun themselves,
there is Gui de Mori’s revision of the poem from 1290, or named scribes,
like Girard Acarce (MS Morgan 948) who portray themselves presenting
“their” work to noble patrons; see Morgan 948, fol. 4r, where Acarce kneels
before François 1er and presents his Rose to the king. Clément Marot
“modernized” the Rose for the same monarch in 1526 or 1527, an edition
reprinted four times between 1529 to 1538.27 These instances do not
include the many anonymous interpolations of shorter or longer passages to
be found in Rose manuscripts, nor do they include the sumptuous
presentation manuscripts by anonymous scribes, some of which give quite

as much space to lavish and ingenuous paintings as they do to the text.
While space does not permit an extended exploration of the “collabora-
tive” composition of the poem here, we can at least gain an insight into the
dysfunctional poetic intentionality of the Rose by looking at the initial agon
or struggle for control of the work in what, for us moderns would be the
least problematic of gestures: naming the work and its writer.
Neither of these acts turns out to be simple or straightforward in this
work of multiple poets and names. Moreover, if the Rose arguably consti-
tutes a limit case of textual and authorial instability, it is nonetheless and for
that reason all the more forceful a lesson on the mode of existence of the
medieval literary work. As such, the Rose and other vernacular literary
works differ markedly from modern conceptions of text and author. It is
not that medieval poets wanted it that way. Why would they? We know
from the efforts of poets like Dante, Machaut, Petrarch, and others to give
their work definitive form that they would have preferred to exercise as
much control over their writing as possible.
No, if the will was there, the technology was not, no more than was the
idea of personal “rights.” If it took the establishment of a print culture to
promote the concept of the unique text and author, it took the writer’s
recognition of his professional standing as author-of-the-unique-text to
connect this product with the effort to produce it that gave one the right
to call it “intellectual property.” But several more centuries would have to
elapse after the introduction of printing before the concept of authors’
rights would finally be recognized, and, more importantly, confirmed in law.
And that did not happen until well into the eighteenth century.
Writing the Rose

Everyone knows who wrote the Roman de la Rose. At least they think they
do. Guillaume de Lorris composed the first four-thousand lines sometime
around 1235 and Jean de Meun completed the long dream allegory by
writing another 18,000 lines or so some forty years later. Their names
appear on the title page of all editions and translations of the poem, as well
as in handbooks of literary history. Reading such notices, we recognize how
colored they are by the modern concept of authorship. Scholars recount as
historical fact information originally internal to the text, now externalized
by the authority we accord such informed statements.28
We don’t know much at all about Guillaume de Lorris, but Jean de
Meun’s existence in Paris in the late thirteenth century is well attested.That
he continued to figure in French literary life may be seen from the numer-
ous copies of his works made throughout the period and even as late as the
reign of François 1er. If his popularity is a matter of record, so, then, is the
controversy he aroused: Christine de Pizan famously chastised her long-
dead predecessor for his nastiness toward women. These facts are certain,
and, in so far as the names of the poets are concerned, come to us on
the best of evidence: the work itself, and, initially, exclusively from that
source.This, alone, should give pause, and that’s what I want to explore in
the following pages.
The poem does not name the poets in the preface, where, in any case, it
would have been a question of only one poet, Guillaume de Lorris. It could
well have done so, for the poet does not hesitate to address the reader in his
own voice:
El vintieme an de mon aage,

el point qu’Amors prent le paage
des jones genz, couchier m’aloie
une nuit, si con je souloie
et me dormoie mout forment,
et vi un songe en mon dorment
qui mout fu biaus et mout me plot;
mes en ce songe onques riens n’ot
qui tretot avenu ne soit
si con li songes recensoit. (21–30)29
[When I was twenty years old, just at the age when love takes its toll on
youth, I went to bed one night in the usual way, and when I was sound asleep
I had an exceedingly lovely dream that pleased me much; but in this dream
nothing occurred which did not actually soon come to pass, exactly as the
dream foretold].
Although the poet does split himself subjectively between his younger self,
shortly to become “l’Amant” [the Lover], the protagonist of the dream alle-
gory, and his mature self, the poetic voice, he neither reveals his identity nor
gives us more biographical details beyond his accustomed bedtime (at
least of his younger self). Instead, it is not until we have read more than
ten-thousand lines of the poem that we discover the names of the poets
(vv. 10465–10648, Lecoy edition). At this point, Amor cites Guillaume and
Jean as he harangues the troops convoked to attack the castle where
Jalousie, Dangier, and Male Bouche, among others, have imprisoned Bel
Acueil, the character who can grant the Lover access to “the Rose.”Amor’s
discourse focuses less on the identities of the two poets per se than on their
status as poetic voices serving him in the tradition of classical love poets like
Tibullus, Catullus, and Ovid.We learn that Guillaume is in peril of death at
the hands of Jalousie and will die unless Amor and his troops come to his
rescue.
In prophetic mode, Amor states that it will not do for Guillaume to die
for “he must serve me, and in order to deserve my good will, he has to begin
the romance which contains all my commandments.”30 The poet clearly
figures here both as a participant in the narrative—one in mortal danger
from the action of the story—and as the poet who undertakes the story to
do the bidding of Amor by recounting his laws. But in a surreal gesture that
combines prophecy and elegy, Amor then says that Guillaume will indeed
fulfill his duty but only up to a specific passage in the existing narrative.
Then he will die and be honorably entombed. The passage in question,
which Amor now recites verbatim, occurs some six thousand lines earlier
when Guillaume/Lover, apostrophizes the imprisoned Bel Accueil, saying:
“Mout sui durement esmaiez

que entroubliez ne m’aiez
si ai deul et desconfort,
ja mes n’iert riens qui me confort
se je per vostre bienveillance,
car je n’ai mes ailleurs fiance.
Ci se reposera Guillaumes,
cui li tombleaus soit pleins de baumes,
d’encens, de mirre et d’aloé,
tant m’a servi, tant m’a loé.” (10525–10534)
[“I am sorely troubled lest you have forgotten me, which grieves and dis-
comforts me; were I to lose your good will, I would never again have any
comfort, for in nothing else have I faith. Here will lie Guillaume, may his
tomb be filled with balm, incense, myrrh, and aloes, so greatly has he served
me, so greatly has he praised me.”]
With Guillaume gracefully entombed (though he has yet to begin writing),

Amor turns to Jean de Meun to explain how he will, more than forty years
after Guillaume’s death, pick up precisely where his predecessor put down
the pen and continue the poem to the end (even though he has, himself, not
yet been born):
Puis vendra Johans Chopinel,

au cuer jolif, au corps inel,
qui nestra seur Laire a Meun,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Cist avra le romanz si chair
qu’il le voudra tout parfenir
se tens et leus l’en peut venir,
car quant Guillaumes cessera,
Jehans le continuera,
enprés sa mort, que je ne mante,
anz trespassez plus de. XL.,

et dira por la mescheance,
par poor de desesperance
qu’il n’ait de Bel Acueil perdue
la bienvoillance avant eüe:
“Et si l’ai perdue, espoir,
a poi que ne m’en desespoir,”
et toutes les autres paroles,
quex qu’els soient, sages ou foles,
jusqu’à tant qu’il aura coillie
seur la branche vert et foillie
la tres bele rose vermeille
et qu’il soit jorz et qu’il s’esveille. (10535–10537, 10554–10572)
[Then will come Jean Chopinel, light of heart and fleet of body, who will be
born on the Loire at Meun . . . He will hold the romance so dear to his heart,
that he’ll wish to continue it to the end, if he be granted time and place. For
when Guillaume breaks off, more than forty years will pass after his death, and
then Jean will take it up—let me not lie—at the point where he will say on
account of the [lover’s] misfortune and despair that he has not after all lost Bel
Accueil’s good will that he had enjoyed: “and so perhaps I have lost it, and I
am close to despair,” and all the other words, whatever they may be, wise or
foolish, up the point where he finally plucks from the green and leafy branch
the beautiful vermillion rose and day breaks and he awakens.]
Amor continues to recount how Jean’s birth will, when he has been properly
instructed in the art of love, lead to his writing the poem we are, in fact, read-
ing. Despite the ongoing narrative,Amor’s revelations impart a retrospective
thrust that obliges the reader to pause and at least to rethink the preceding
six-thousand lines, if it does not suggest an urgent need to go back and
reread the transitional episode altogether. In effect, the mid-point disclosure
confronts us with an enigma. Instead of the poem whose purpose and
provenance we thought we knew, there is now incontrovertible evidence of
a different work, a different origin.That is, undoubtedly, part of Jean’s strategy:
to force a retro-reading that will permit us to reconsider and re-evaluate
what the change in poetic voice says about the works unstable structure.31
Jean de Meun raises fundamental questions about the origin of the work
of art throughout his part of the poem. He begins obliquely in the first dia-
logue where he surreptitiously picks up Guillaume’s interrupted narrative
without comment. The dialogue features lady Reason, a character only
briefly mentioned earlier by Guillaume, now transformed by Jean into a for-
midable dialectician and arch-enemy of Venus, and thus of Amor. One of the
first anecdotes Reason tells to the lover, by way of dissuading him from his
allegiance to Amor, is the myth of the castration of Saturn by his son Jupiter.
Having excised Saturn’s testicles, Reason continues, Jupiter throws them
into the sea, here perceived as a maternal womb, for Venus is born from the
conjugation of Saturn’s testes and the ocean. She tells the story to remind the
Lover that Venus was born from this filial aggression, but we also understand
the lesson as broaching the issue of one person’s illicit appropriation of
another’s generative power (as in Jean’s appropriating Guillaume’s work?).
The mythical anecdote occurs as an aside at the beginning of a long
speech in which Reason recalls the golden age under Saturn when Justice
governed by love held sway.The love that Reason favors (because it tempers
justice with mercy) is compassion or even agape; but certainly not eros, which
she rejects as stemming from the contingency associated with Fortuna.32
Joutice, qui jadis regnot,

au tens que Saturnus regne ot,
cui Jupiter coupa les coilles,
ses filz, con se fussent andoilles,
(mout ot ci dur filz et amer)
puis les gita dedanz la mer,
donc Venus la deesse issi,
Car li livres le dit issi (5505–5512)
[ Justice, who held sway in the time when Saturn ruled, whose balls Jupiter,
his son, cut off as though they were sausages—a really hard and bitter son that
one! —then threw them into the sea whence issued Venus, the goddess, just
as the book tells us.]
Although the syntax clearly marks the anecdote as an aside, the rhetoric and
imagery make it anything but an ancillary bit of lore. First, Jean uses the
ordinary language term “coilles,” [balls] to refer to the castrated members.
This is the first instance in the text of such a solecism.The linguistic effect
is akin to detonating a canon; the word “goes off ” as it were with a roar
capable of reorienting the reader’s attention from the main clause to the
parenthetical observation. We are not alone. Several hundred lines later, the
Lover brings up this word, reproaching lady Reason for its crudity.The ensu-
ing debate between them ignores the original context, foregrounding the
expression itself, and with it the anecdote of appropriation and substitution.
Secondly, Jean compounds the effect of earthy language by adding an
equally graphic and colorful image when he compares the excised members
to “andoilles,” [sausages]. The analogy extends the image by evoking
“sausage” as phallic form. At the same time, the metonymy devalorizes the
victim’s stature, since andouille has had the immemorial connotation in
French of imbécile. Loss of social stature and respect befalls those who allow
themselves to suffer Saturn’s fate—a lesson not lost on Héloise’s uncle when
he arranged for Abélard to suffer a similar ignominy (an historical fact
prominently recalled by Jean on several occasions later in the poem).
The aside takes on the proportion of a mini-poetics once the reader

understands the allusions Jean has managed to incorporate in such an appar-
ently unmotivated passage. First,Venus, erotic love, is born from a sordid, not
to say heinous crime of appropriation and succession: a parricide, in fact.
Erotic desire and violence go hand-in-hand, a point that Reason will make
repeatedly in this two-thousand-odd-line diatribe against the folly of Eros.
Indeed Reason will expound on the theme of disordered desire and
violence in a series of examples immediately following the castration scene:
for example,Virginius’s beheading of his daughter Virginie to prevent her
being raped by Appius; or Nero’s having his mother’s stomach sliced open
so he could see the womb whence he issued, etc.These establish not only
the relationship of violence and erotic love, but also the history of inter-
generational family aggression.
Implicit also here is the link between Venus and the poetry written in
her honor. From the time of the troubadours on, the Middle Ages accorded
multiple meanings to the term “Amor,” chief among these being to desig-
nate lyric poetry whose theme was love. As we know, the Occitan art of
poetry bears the title Les leys d’amor [The Laws of Love].That Guillaume had
this traditional equation of love and poetry in mind can be seen from the
couplet he incorporates into his prologue:“ce est li Romanz de la Rose / ou
l’art d’Amors est tote enclose” (37–38) [this is the Romance of the Rose / in
which the whole art of Love is enclosed], a couplet that becomes the work’s
identifying figure by its inscription on the incipit of many manuscripts:
“Cy commence le rommant de la rose / ou l’art d’amor est tout enclose”
[Here begins the romance of the rose / in which the whole art of love is
enclosed].
Daniel Heller-Roazen has recently recalled that it was Roger
Dragonetti who first pointed out the anagram that makes eros a figure for
the rose and vice versa.33 The medieval penchant for such anagrams is not a
matter of rhetorical cleverness but instead reminds readers that rather than
excluding each other, opposites often evoke, even contain their contraries—
cf. Eva/Ave for the Virgin Mary and Eve. In this case, the implications go far
to underscore the problematic dialectic between erotic desire, its celebra-
tion in lyric and romance, and the complex, if veiled, interplay of power and
aggression such poetry evokes.34 Amor is, of course, the term for Eros, the
son of Venus. It is not simply that a new dynasty with close ties to the nat-
ural world arises from the dismemberment of Saturn; that was already well
established in classical mythology. No, the novelty here is that Jean has
openly grafted this genealogy onto the equally well-known poetics of
French love poetry with anything but common-place results.
This unconventional juxtaposition suggests why we find three distinctly
different attitudes toward erotic love and the poetry that celebrates it in the
dialogue between Reason and the Lover. First, the viewpoint of moral phi-
losophy. For Reason, the sordid and scandalous birth of Venus symbolizes
the disorder of erotic love so roundly denounced in her long diatribe. She
counsels something like the golden mean in the Lover’s behavior: “Just
because I forbid drunkenness doesn’t mean that I forbid drinking:”35
Sez tu pas qu’il ne s’ensuit mie,

se lessier veill une folie,
que fere doie autele ou graindre?
Ne por ce se je veill estaindre
la fole amor a quoi tu bees,
conmant je por ce que tu haies.
Ne te sovient il pas d’Orace,
qui tan ot de sen et de grace?
Horaces dit, qui n’est pas nices,
quant li fol eschivent les vices,
si se tornent a leurs contraires,
si n’en vaut pas mieuz leurs affaires;
n’amor ne veill je pas deffendre
que l’en n’i doie bien entendre,
fors qu’a cele qui les genz blece. (5699–5713)
[Don’t you know that if I allow myself to commit one folly, it does not fol-
low that I must do another one, similar or worse? This is why, if I want to
snuff out this insane love that you lust after, I do not command that you hate.
Don’t you remember Horace, so full of wisdom and grace? Horace, who was
no fool, says that when those besotted with vices flee them, it is only to run
the harder after their opposites, and this does nothing to improve matters. Let
it be clearly understood that I do not forbid love itself, but only the kind that
harms people.]
Second, we have the Lover’s viewpoint firmly committed to the conven-

tional rhetoric of fin’amors.The courtliness of courtly love refers as much to
the maintenance of refined linguistic codes as to its social milieu. And, of
course, the code of linguistic refinement seeks to veil the primal scene of
violence underlying passionate love.The Lover evokes that code in reprov-
ing Reason’s “lapse” into ordinary language:
Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise

quant ci m’avez coilles nomees,
qui ne sunt pas bien renomees
en bouche a cortaise pucele.
Vos, qui tant estes sage et bele,
ne sai con nomer les osastes,
au mains quant le mot ne glosastes
par quelque cortaise parole,

si con preude fame en parole (6898–6906)
[I hardly think it courtly for you to use the term “balls,” which is unseemly
coming from the mouth of a refined young woman. I can’t imagine how you,
who are so wise and beautiful, can dare to name them, instead of glossing the
word by some courtly euphemism, in the manner that noble women have of
speaking.]
Jean himself, however, offers us a third viewpoint that takes a less circum-
scribed view than those of Reason or the Lover, by reminding the reader of
the dynamics of the scene as a whole. We know this because the Lover
rejects Reason’s lesson in moral philosophy, not only to remain faithful to
what Reason has called his fole amor, but also, as we have just witnessed, to
return to the word evoking the scene of castration:“Mes oï vos ai nomer ci, /
si con moi semble, une parole / si esbaulevree et si fole / que, qui vodroit,
ce croi, muser / a vos emprendre a escuser, / l’en ni porroit trover deffenses”
(5670–5675) [Now it seems to me that I heard you utter a word so shame-
less and outrageous, that, in my judgment, if anyone took it upon himself to
accuse you, it would be impossible to defend yourself ].
While the Lover has excellent dialectical reasons to discredit Reason—
though the task turns out to require more sophistication than he possesses,
as John Fleming pointed out over twenty years ago36—there’s more at stake
here than a simple accusation of linguistic impropriety. The long and
spirited defense that Reason mounts against the Lover’s accusation permits
Jean to cite historical, mythological, and social examples equating love and
violence. This suggests that Jean wants to establish, early in his poem, the
idea that the invention of love occurs as the result of two related acts:
the usurpation of power via castration, and the creative disposition of the
excised generative organs.
In each case, it is the testicles principally that provide the focus of the action
and its consequences: Jupiter arrogates Saturn’s power to himself by castrating
his father, and invents erotic love, and, by extension, its poetic expression, by
“mating” the testes with the sea.This provides an unexpected, indeed illogical
consequence to the aggression that deserves pondering for a moment.There is
something strange in this sequence. How can procreation result from excising
the organs of generation?Yet Saturn’s seed has made the sea fecund withVenus.
The anomaly here is Jupiter. He it is who impregnates the ocean: not with his
own, but with his father’s semen.As heretical as the thought may be for our own
sex-obsessed culture, on this account, power resides not in the sexual act per se,
but with control over the generative scenario.
Jean seems to be saying that, unlike ordinary procreation,Venus and her
poetry require a mediating agent, a third party. Indirect generation—an
oblique gaze on the erotic act—produces if not love poetry tout court, then
certainly the love treatise, l’art d’amour, that is toute enclose in the Rose. Is it
for this reason that this poem has such an abundance of mediating agents
from the very beginning? Think of Guillaume de Lorris’s mature poetic
persona presiding over the dream exposition; or of Amor as tutelary genius,
first at the fontaine périlleuse, then at the poem’s midpoint; or of Jean as the
successor to Guillaume as the guiding spirit for the Lover who improbably
survives the death of his older self, Guillaume the poet.And we can all think
of other examples.
While critics have recently tended to equate the pen and the phallus,
Jean emphasizes the scrotum—for which the medieval French term was
bourse or purse—as the operative force of generation. If the testes are
the generative force in this scenario, castration—poetic borrowing and
appropriation—is the act that releases that generative force by putting the
bourse in circulation.Whoever controls the bourse controls the work. Is not
the dried flesh of the parchment manuscript at least figuratively something
akin to this bourse?
Jean de Meun does no more than adumbrate these themes obliquely in
the dialogue between Reason and the Lover, but he returns to them more
and more explicitly as the work progresses, and with ever more portentous
implications for the poem, particularly as regards its philosophy of poetic
invention. In so doing, Jean offers a radically different view of thematic
appropriation and borrowing that is so common a trait of medieval vernac-
ular literature (as Marie de France forthrightly states in the “Prologue” to
her Lais).
Whereas for Guillaume de Lorris and other poets of the twelfth and
early thirteenth centuries, adapting, translating, and rewriting pre-existing
works was a natural poetic process, Jean de Meun portrays it in rather more
brutal terms. Although, as we saw, he has Amor portray him as the chosen
successor to Guillaume who has died before his birth, the work as a
whole—beginning with the passages we have just examined—suggests a
less anodyne scenario. To understand exactly what Jean is getting at, and
why he has so complex a relationship between Amor’s belated naming
scene and the beginning of his section, we must look at how Guillaume de
Lorris begins the Rose.
And it is a strangely oblique, almost abrupt beginning. Rather than
announcing that he intends to write a dream allegory with a dual narrative
focus—a love adventure of the poet’s younger self experienced in a dream
recounted by the mature poet—Guillaume breaks into speech with an
assertion about how people view dreams.37 Are they or are they not
prophetic? Do they or do they not come true? Calling Macrobius as
witness, and thus placing his own dream allegory under the authoritative
aegis of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (of which Macrobius had written a well-
known commentary), Guillaume raises the question of how to evaluate the
work even before he tells us what the work will be.
Qui c’onques cuit ne qui que die

qu’il est folor et musardie
de croire que songes aviegne,
qui se voudra, por fol m’en tiegne,
quar endroit moi ai ge fiance
que songes est senefiance
des biens as genz et des anuiz,
que li plusor songent de nuiz
maintes choses covertement
que l’en voit puis apertement. (11–20)
[Whoever believes and says that it is folly and fantasy to believe that dreams
come true, let him who so wishes think me foolish for believing that dreams
do indeed foretell the good and ill that befall folk; for many people have
dreamed secretly at night things that subsequently happen in real life.]
Guillaume now begins to speak of the origin of the work in a dream that befell
him some five years previously. But thanks to the opening discussion about the
prophetic nature of dreams—and the appeal to classical precedent—Guillaume
conveys the impression of an “immaculate” conception for his poem. As a
dream vision, it comes under the heading of revelation. Instead of borrowing
and adapting the work of precursors—Boethius, Martianus Capella, Alain de
Lille, and other auctores, all of whom we know to be reflected in the Rose—the
work constitutes an oneiric revelation, a divine prophecy.
Jean plays directly—and satirically—to this vision in Amor’s long
naming scene.There, we recall, Jean has Amor prophesy the life and death
of Guillaume and the birth and poetic fame of Jean himself as continuator
of the poem—“I will lend him my wings and sing such melodies to him,
that, once he has left childhood behind, and I have taught him my
doctrines, he will sing our words in the crossroads and schools in the lan-
guage of France.”38 We can now see that Jean satirically invokes the
prophetic vision Guillaume cites at the beginning, while at the same time
exposing its pretentiousness. How so?
First of all, he counts on the reader’s remembering Guillaume’s claim
that dreams were considered prophetic. Guillaume, of course, knew that
works like the Song of Roland and others that made use of prophetic dream
visions, did not actually show the divine source of the vision.39 By bringing
Amor on stage to prophesy what Guillaume had only hinted at, Jean liter-
alizes the original prologue in a wonderfully outrageous fashion. In essence,
he undermines Guillaume’s rhetorical strategy of mystery and deferral.
Guillaume chose the path of narrative tension whereby the unfolding of

the plot would putatively have revealed the truth of the original claim that
dreams really do foretell future events. Jean, on the other hand, aborts that
tactic by having Amor simply announce what will happen. Enigma and ten-
sion dissolve along with the pretense that the dream and its narrative “really
happened.”At the same time, by reminding us that Guillaume de Lorris has
long since died without completing the poem, Jean throws the status of
Guillaume-lover into doubt. Like Aeneas in the Underworld in book 6 of
the Aeneid—the prophetic section of this epic that occurs at the mid-point
of the twelve books (another hint as to why Jean would defer Amor’s
revelation until the mid-point of the Rose?)—the Lover will play out the
remainder of the poem in the dream that has now become “the big sleep.”
There is literally no possibility that Guillaume-lover can awaken, no longer
any pretense that the dream can “come true.” What can happen, what has
happened is that Jean has arrived to write the posthumous life of Guillaume
and his alter ego, the Lover.
Looking at the operative lines in Amor’s prophesy, we can see how Jean,
recognizing that Guillaume “invented” himself in a vision, has the God of
Love dispose of him in the same way:
Ci se reposera Guillaumes,
cui li tombleaus soit pleins de baumes,
d’encens, de mirre et d’aloé,
tant m’a servi, tant m’a loé. (10531–10534)
[Here will lie Guillaume, may his tomb be filled with balm, with incense,
myrrh and aloes, for he has served me so well and praised me so handsomely.]
It is the otherwise antecedentless “ci” [here] that alerts us to the fact that the
poem itself constitutes Guillaume’s tomb, reminding us of the medieval
connotation of tumulus “tombeau,” which not only could be a tomb made
of stone, but also a commemorative work.This is the sense that comes into
modern French in which tombeau designates a poem commemorating or
celebrating a deceased person as in Mallarmé’s poems, Le tombeau d’Edgar
Poë, or Le tombeau de Baudelaire.40
Guillaume’s pretension of making his romance a prophetic dream finally
suggests why Jean handles the naming sequence as he does. First, he defers
it for some six thousand lines after Guillaume breaks off.That is to say, he
defers until he has constructed a poetic edifice half again as long as the orig-
inal.Although very different in tone, the new poem refers constantly to the
original, even reprising scenes and characters first encountered there. But
the insistent specularity has been deliberately skewed as though refracted
through a prism (a device first introduced by Guillaume). Jean points to this
dynamic of asymmetrical specularity when he has Amor announce the

altered title for the poem: le Miroër aus Amoreus (10621).
Second, Jean does not name Guillaume de Lorris or himself in his own
voice, but through an intermediary—exactly the strategy by which Jupiter
presides over Venus’s creation. In naming the poets and prophesying the
future writing of the poem,Amor irrevocably transforms the project. It will
now become what his elected poet chooses to make it. In short, Amor
evokes the “Jupiter principle”—creation by castration and usurpation. Is it
for this reason that immediately before he prophesies the death of
Guillaume and the birth of Jean,Amor describes the birth and genealogy of
Faux Semblant?
Third, Amor refers so specifically to the passages in which Guillaume
stops and Jean begins—quoting the exact lines in each case—as to send the
reader back to the sections in question. Armed with the revelation that
these sections were written by different people, the reader inevitably finds
new meaning in the passages, as we saw.
This is, on a larger scale, precisely the technique that Jean employs when
the Lover—after some hundreds of lines have elapsed—forces Reason (and
the reader) to return to and reconsider the passage where the term “coilles”
appeared. The principle of “retro-reading” here established clearly
constitutes an important part of Jean’s poetics. It also differentiates his
approach from that of Guillaume.
To begin with, Jean de Meun understood exactly the hostile nature of
appropriation and adaptation. He did not shrink from demonstrating it
with reference to his relationship to Guillaume. This gives a new sense to
Amor’s boast when he prophecies that his preferred love poet, Jean, will,
once he is born and ready to undertake the continuation of Guillaume’s
poem, “vodra si la chose espondre / que riens ne s’i porra respondre”
(10573–10574) [so wish to reveal the thing, that nothing more need be
said].41 Indeed, everything Jean does, at some level, may be taken as a dialec-
tical reformulation of Guillaume’s project in larger philosophical terms.
Yet, as clearly as we can trace the palimpsest of Guillaume’s project under
Jean’s rewriting, the plethora of Rose manuscripts, in their turn, overlay
Jean’s work with their own commentary and glosses in the form of minia-
ture paintings, historiated and decorated initials, extensive rubrication,
bas-de-page paintings, and often elaborate marginal decoration, not to
mention interpolations of diverse lengths. These may espondre or reveal
Jean’s ideas—as we see in the vivid miniatures depicting the castration of
Origen or the emasculation of Samson when Delilah approaches the sleep-
ing strongman with not one but two pairs of oversize scissors.42 Or they
may impose their own interpretation on his passages. But, whatever their
effect, they demonstrate that for the medieval poet, the material structure of
a work, that is its contingent existence in multiple manuscript copies, was

an ineluctable fact of life.
For the Middle Ages, the original poet is a palimpsest in the manuscript,
one voice among several, and indeed a voice that, not unlike Echo’s—
though perhaps not quite so severely limited as Guillaume’s evocation of
her plight—can only repeat the last words of the scribe’s discourse or the
artist’s vision. Under the circumstances, can we really speak of the medieval
author in the same sense as his modern counterpart?
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975),
p. 79.
2. T. S. Eliot,“Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays, New Edition
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), p. 9. Writing ten years
later, in 1929, Eliot begins his essay on Dante even more emphatically: “In
my own experience of the appreciation of poetry I have always found that
the less I knew about the poet and his work, before I began to read it, the
better. . . . an elaborate preparation of historical and biographical knowl-
edge has always been to me a barrier.”“Dante,” Selected Essays, p. 199.
3. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 10th printing, 1984), p. 12.
4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. and
trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), pp. 142–143. My
emphasis.
5. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation Of Reality in Western Literature,
trans.Willard R.Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). See, in
particular, essays on Homer,Tacitus, the Chanson de Roland, etc.
6. Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History (New York: Russell & Russell,
1962), p. 32, n. 7.
7. Karl D. Uitti, “Philology,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory &
Criticism (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 567b.
8. For a fuller discussion of the paradigm of textual philology, including the
idea of “one text, one author” that it fosters, see my article “Petrarch and the
Paradigm of Textual Philology,” to appear in Petrarca(s) Philologie, ed. Gerhard
Regn and Andreas Käblitz. Forthcoming in 2007.
9. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Powers of Philology: Dynamics of Textual
Scholarship (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), pp. 6–7.
10. This is not to say, obviously, that there are not writers before the fourteenth
century. Nor does it mean that poets were not visible in their works in
earlier periods. Troubadours, for example, celebrated their desire, their
world, their beliefs; but they chose to represent themselves by their mastery
of poetic form and of love—the two being synonymous in their amorous
economy.They did not sing of themselves as what we would call “authors.”
Rutebeuf, perhaps the most “confessional” of medieval poets writes at

length about his condition as husband, Parisian, gambling addict, indigent;
he does not write reflectively about himself as author. Which is not to say
that he—or other poets of the period—do not speak about writing.
11. “Fuerit tibi forsan de me aliquid auditum; quanquam et hoc dubium sit, an
exiguum et obscurum longe nomen seu locurum seu temporum perventu-
rum sit. Et illud forsitan optabis nosse: quid hominis fuerim aut quis operum
exitus meorum, eorum maxime quorum ad te fama pervenerit vel quorum
tenue nomen audieris.” Francesco Petrarca, Lettera ai posteri, ed. Gianni
Villani (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1990), p. 34. English translation: James H.
Robinson, Francesco Petrarca: The First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters
(New York: G. P. Putnam, 1898), p. 59.
12. “Multis iter hoc annis in animo fuerat; ab infantia enim his in locis, ut nosti,
fato res hominum versante, versatus sum; mons autem hic late undique
conspectus, fere semper in oculis est. Cepit impetus tandem aliquando facere
quod quotidie faciebam . . .”“Ad Dyonisium de Burgo Sancti Sepulcri ordi-
nis sancti Augustini et sacre pagine professorem, de curis propriis.” Francesco
Petrarca, Familiarium rerum libri, IV: 1, in Prose, ed. G. Martelloti, P. G. Ricci,
E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi, La Letteratura Italiana: Storia e Testi 7 (Milan:
Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1955), p. 830.Translation with my own modifi-
cations: “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of
Man, ed. E. Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 36.
See also, Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarum libri I—VIII, trans. Aldo S.
Bernardo (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1975), p. 172.
13. “. . . precipue postquam relegenti pridie res romanas apud Livium forte ille
michi locus occurrerat, ubi Philippus Macedonum rex—is qui cum populo
Romano bellum gessit—Hemum montem thesalicum conscendit, e cuius
vertice duo maria videri,Adriaticum et Euxinum, fame crediderat . . .” Prose,
p. 830.Translation: Bernardo, p. 172.
14. Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early
Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 2.
15. Reiss, Mirages, p. 2. Reiss’s emphasis.
16. Reiss, Mirages, p. 2.
17. “Que dum mirarer singula et nunc terrenum aliquid saperem, nunc exemplo
corporis animum ad altiora subveherem, visum est michi Confessionum
Augustini librum, caritatis tue munus, inspicere; quem et conditoris et dona-
toris in memoriam servo habeoque semper in manibus: pugillare opuscu-
lum, perexigui voluminis sed infinite dulcedinis. Aperio, lecturus quicquid
occurreret; quid enim nisi pium et devotum posset occurrere? Forte autem
decimus illius operis liber oblatus est. Frater expectans per os meum ab
Augustino aliquid audire, intentis auribus stabat. Deum testor ipsumque qui
aderat, quod ubi primum defixi oculos, scriptum erat: ‘Et eunt hominess
admirari alta montium et ingentes fluctus maris et latissimos lapsus flu-
minum et occeani ambitum et giros siderum, et relinquunt se ipsos.’ ” (This
quotation comes from: Augustine, Confessions, 10. 8. 15). Prose, p. 840.
Translation: Bernardo, p. 178 (with modifications).
18. “Tunc vero montem satis vidisse contentus, in me ipsum interiores oculos
reflexi, et ex illa hora non fuit qui me loquentem audiret donec ad ima per-
venimus; satis mihi taciti negotii verbum illud attulerat. Nec opinari poteram id
fortuito contigisse, sed quicquid ibi legeram, mihi et non alteri dictum rebar; recolens
quod idem de se ipso suspicatus olim esset Augustinus, quando in lectione
codicis Apostolici, ut ipse refert, primum sibi occurrit:‘Non in comessation-
ibus et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus et impudicitiis, non in contentione et
emulatione; sed induite Dominum Iesu Cristum, et carnis providentiam ne
feceritis in concupiscentiis vestris’.” Prose, pp. 840, 842. Translation:
Bernardo, p. 178 (with modifications).
19. Abelard, Historia Calamitatum, ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris: Vrin, 1959),
pp. 18–19. I am indebted to Virginie Greene for this reference.
20. Jean recounts the story of Héloise and Abelard in vv. 8729–8802 of the Rose.
Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy,
Les Classiques français du moyen âge 95, 3 vols. (Paris: Librairie Honoré
Champion, 1966), vol. 2. For a discussion of Jean de Meun and Abelard’s
Historia, see the Eric Hicks’s introduction to his edition of the translation of
Abelard’s life and letters attributed to Jean de Meun: La Vie et les epistres
Pierres Abaelart et Heloys sa fame. Traduction du XIIIe siècle attribuée à Jean de
Meun (Paris-Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1991).
21. “E. Langlois s’est donné beaucoup de mal pour essayer de mettre un peu
d’ordre dans l’effroyable amas de variantes que présentent nos manuscrits.”
Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy,
vol. 1, p. xxxvii.
22. “La tradition de la première partie est confuse, embrouillée, incertaine, et
pour tout dire, mauvaise . . . .” Lecoy, vol. 1, p. xxxvi.
23. Lecoy, vol. 1, pp. xl-xli.
24. “Le texte de Guillaume de Lorris donné par le [MS. BnF f.fr.] 1573 est
médiocre, défiguré par un grand nombre d’erreurs de toutes sortes, depuis le
simple lapsus de plume jusqu’à la réfection totale de certains vers, même de
certains couplets, dont la leçon originale était sans doute perdue dans la lignée
manuscrite à laquelle appartient notre copie . . .”. Lecoy, vol. 1, pp. xl–xli.
25. “Nous ne possédons pas, en effet, pour nos textes anciens, de copies sans
reproche, sans lapsus, sans faute ou sans écart individuel. L’éditeur se voit
donc obligé d’intervenir, c’est-à-dire de corriger son modèle, là où celui-ci
est franchement barbare, d’abord, mais là aussi où ce même modèle lui
apparaît trahir trop violemment la pensée de l’auteur . . .”. Lecoy, vol. 1,
p. xxxix.
26. “La leçon enromance n’apparaît pas dans nos manuscrits de contrôle. Elle est
séduisante, probable même, mais, fait notable, n’est que médiocrement
attestée.” Lecoy, vol. 1, p. xlii, n. 2.
27. Lecoy, vol 1, p. xxxii.
28. Even so cautious a notice as that given by Félix Lecoy in the introduction to
his three-volume edition of the Rose illustrates how textual ploy and play
become transmuted to historical fact. Here are the first lines of his introduc-
tion: “Le Roman de la Rose est l’œuvre de deux auteurs qui y ont travaillé
successivement, Guillaume de Lorris et Jean Chopinel (ou Clopinel—les

manuscrits hésitent entre les deux formes, mais les meilleurs donnent
Chopinel) de Meun, le second ayant repris et achevé l’œuvre interrompue
du premier.” Lecoy, vol. 1, p. v.
29. Le Roman de la Rose, ed. F. Lecoy, vol. 1. All quotations are from this edition
and all translations are my own.
30. “Et plus oncor me doit servir, / car por ma grace deservir / doit il
commancier le romant / ou seront mis tuit mi commant . . .”(vol. 2,
10517–10520).
31. Of course, once the Rose had attained popularity and become a known
entity, it was impossible to maintain the fiction of a single poet until the
mid-point revelation. People knew there were two authors. At that point,
they wanted naturally enough to know where the break occurs.That is why
most manuscripts, and now printed editions, indicate where Guillaume
leaves off and Jean begins. They do so via an illumination showing Jean
composing at his desk, or by inserting rubrics in the form of couplets.The
lack of surprise in no way detracts from one’s appreciation of the poetics of
the new voice.
32. “The fullest development of the figure of Fortune is to be found in the
second part of the romance, in which Jean de Meun, recalling a figure
mentioned only once in the first half of the work (vv. 3953–3963), dedicates
over two thousand lines to the description, analysis, and judgment of
Fortune by Reason (vv. 4673–6870). . . . Here Reason, whose teaching
draws on a series of classical, late ancient, and medieval auctores, articulates
her discourse on love as a polemic against a single, unexpected figure:
Fortune.” Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces:The Roman de la Rose and
the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003),
pp. 64 and 65.
33. Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces, p. 65; Roger Dragonetti, “Pygmalion ou les
pièges de la fiction dans le Roman de la Rose,” Orbis Medievalis: Mélanges
d’études de langue et literature médiévales offerts à R. R. Bezzola, ed. Georges
Güntert, Marc-René Jung, and Kurt Ringger (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1978),
p. 99 [89–111].
34. Jean de Meun incorporates another clue to the problematic nature of his
portrayal of love by having Amor—in the long scene in which he names the
poets and offers his account of the work’s origin with which we began—
change the name of the work to the Miroër aus Amoreus:“car tant en lira pro-
prement / que tretuit cil qui ont a vivre / devroient apeler ce livre / le
Miroër aus Amoreus, / tant i verront de bien por eu, / mes que Reson ne soit
creüe / la chetive, la recreüe” (10618–10624).
35. Por ce se je deffent ivrece, / ne voil je pas deffendre a boevre (5714–5715).
36. John V. Fleming, Reason and the Lover, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984).
37. Aucunes genz dient qu’en songes / n’a se fables non et mençonges; / mes
l’en puet tex songes songier / qui ne sont mie mençoniger, / ainz sont aprés
bien aparant (1–5).
38. “je l’afubleré de mes eles / et li chanteré notes teles / que, puis qu’il sera hors
d’enfance, / endoctrinez de ma sciance, / si fleütera noz paroles / par
carrefors et par escoles / selonc le langage de France” (10607–10613).
39. Dream visions traditionally showed at most a saintly emissary mediating
between the human dreamer and the divine source. So St. James of
Compostella appears to Charlemagne to urge him to free James’s sepulcher
at Compostella in the Historia Karoli Magni et Rotolandi of the Codex
Calixtinus.
40. Certain illuminations corroborate this point by showing Guillaume
reverently laid out, naked and ready for burial, while Jean de Meun—or the
now orphaned Lover—stands outside the viewing room. See for example,
the half-page miniature painting in the Pierpont Morgan Library’s MS
Morgan 948, fol. 44r, which situates this scene precisely at the end of
Guillaume’s section and the beginning of Jean’s. This manuscript may be
viewed at the Hopkins Rose Project website, a joint undertaking of the
Milton S. Eisenhower Library and the Department of Romance Languages
at Johns Hopkins University: http://rose.mse.jhu.edu/
41. Lecoy’s note to vv. 10573–10574 is revealing. He does not seem to accept
the fact that Jean eschews Guillaume’s allegorical mode, and that the
promised exposition has and is taking place in the sections we have discussed
as well as in others to come.“Ces deux vers semblent annoncer une ‘expo-
sition’ du songe, c’est-à-dire, sans doute, un commentaire en clair du
poème allégorique (lequel, il faut le reconnaître, n’en avait guère besoin).
Cette ‘exposition,’ cette interprétation n’existe pas, mais il est possible que
Jean de Meun y ait vraiment pensé, car il reviendra sur cette annonce ou
cette promesse aux vers 15115–15123.” Lecoy, vol. 2, p. 279.
42. Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 195, fol. 122v, and fol. 120r.This, and six other
manuscripts may be consulted on line at the website of the Roman de la Rose
Project: http://rose.mse.jhu.edu/
CHAPTER 5
FROM ONE MASK TO ANOTHER:THE TRIALS

AND TRIBULATIONS OF AN AUTHOR OF
ROMANCE AT THE TIME OF PERCEFOREST
Anne Berthelot
Translation: Darla Gervais
hether it be the prologue to the Lais by Marie de France or the

W prologues to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, twelfth-century
texts are never evasive about the importance of the issue of authorship: how
does one write a text, how does one claim for oneself the status of writer,
how does one justify the unbelievable presumptuousness of undertaking
any mise en écrit [writing down], made worse by the choice of the vernacu-
lar and the audacity of appending one’s signature, be it fictional? Chrétien,
Marie, Gautier d’Arras, and Païen de Mézières, and, somewhat later,
Renaud de Bâgé and Jean Renart keep on rehashing various ways of
answering these questions.That is not to say that Robert de Boron and his
thirteenth-century successors were less interested in this issue, but there is a
certain sense in which the choice of the prose form brought about some
sort of balance for authors in this area and solved the problem temporarily
by pushing it back into the narrative space. Robert and Hélie de Boron,
Luces de Gast or Walter Map (that is, the improbable reincarnation of the
genuine twelfth-century Latin polygraph!) are mostly fictional figures, each
one playing his role on the threshold of the romance as if he acted on the
parvis of a church in a play staging the conditions of the romance writing,
thereby saving any hypothetical real authors the trouble of placing
themselves in a not yet imaginable system of representations.
Yet this cluster of questions, which writers of the great prose cycles had
been able to put off or master through trompe l’oeil composition during
104 A N N E B E RT H E L O T
two or three generations, returns with a vengeance at the end of the

thirteenth century and during most of the fourteenth. These questions
infect all narrative areas but display a marked preference for the matière de
Bretagne [Breton material] and its derivatives, and they become so acute as
to actually hinder the composition of the work proper. The techniques
used to overcome this block might be different from one text to another;
nonetheless, they always point to the same impossibility of assuming
responsibility for a text and the same hopeless quest for an impeccable assig-
nation locking the text into place, both in its ancestry and descent, thus
guaranteeing its authenticity at all levels. In this chapter, I study two differ-
ent cases that look strangely alike, responding to one another through a
dense network of echoes from a distance of some thirty or forty years.The
first is that of Bandoin Butor, author of the “four drafts” (as Lewis Thorpe,
their editor, has called them) of the Roman des fils du roi Constant1; the
second is the Roman de Perceforest—better known because of the remarkable
editorial work carried out by Gilles Roussineau—which I examine more
briefly and essentially as a point of comparison to the former work.2
In the case of Baudoin Butor, the term “romance” is poetic exaggeration,
and that is precisely the problem. The text does not exist, never manages to
come into existence, despite repeated efforts by its author. What does exist,
however, is the announcement of a text, with all the apparatus for a prologue
carefully put together, repeated from one draft to another and providing the
same information, while on the other hand the narrative content, whenever it
is actually written,is strikingly heterogeneous.The Roman des fils du roi Constant
is clearly in the tradition of Merlin by Robert de Boron—a prose text almost
eighty years old at the time the presumed Baudoin Butor begins his enterprise.
Just as Thomas of England or Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence3 (and many
others) before him, Baudoin Butor intends to correct earlier works and to give,
finally, the correct version of the facts. Like the authors of the prose-romances
tree, he wants to complete the pre-existing corpus and fill in the gaps in the
Merlin, which indeed does not spell out in much detail Vortigern’s loves or the
years of exile of Uther and Pendragon in Brittany. Like all of the compilers of
the great cyclical manuscripts, he dreams of inserting newly minted characters
into the still rather loose plot of the chronicles of Britain.
Thus, the title he gives to what is to become his work has nothing to do
either with the sons of King Constant or any other known character of the
Arthurian world:
Ichi en apriés porrés oïr les histoires de Dafinor et Doruant et de Pierchefier,

liqueil furent frere et fil au bon roi de Thailleborch.4
[Hereafter you will be able to hear the stories of Dafinor and Dorvant and of
Pierchefier, who were the brothers and son of the good king of Taillebourg.]
RO M A N C E AT T H E T I M E O F P E R C E F O R E S T 105
A detail left out by Thorpe in his edition ought to be mentioned first: the
title he places at the top of the first draft actually appears in folio 108v of
MS BnF f. fr. 1446, in the margins and blanks of which Baudoin Butor has
been composing his work, beginning in folio 70v. This sketching-out is
thus a second attempt, and is much shorter than the first (367 lines in the
edition compared to 979) and is rather logically followed by two other even
shorter attempts: the third draft is but a 53-line prologue and an extremely
terse (two lines) introductory phrase to the narrative; the fourth, which on
the contrary almost totally eliminates the prologue, bringing it into propor-
tion with the text it precedes, totals 280 lines. It would thus seem that the
author, despite the sophistication of the layout and organization of the
prologue in the second draft, was discouraged by the failure of his first
attempt and lacked the energy to continue with much enthusiasm an
enterprise which had gotten off to such a bad start.Within this perspective,
the title placed at the opening of what constitutes a new beginning, on the
basis of an initial failure, takes on new meaning. One might even go so far
as to consider it a fifth attempt, a blank check for future use, as if the author
in recognition of his inability was renouncing what was so important to
him, that is, the playing out of novelistic inspiration on the one hand, and
on the other, the rewriting of the Breton material which had clearly not lost
its charm for him; and, in a break with tradition, was inaugurating a new
“matière” and a radically novel topic.
That is after all exactly what will occur in the Perceforest some thirty years
later, and the only de facto, identifiable source of the Perceforest, if one leaves
aside its own discourse of justification to which we will return presently, is
this title—a title that has no relationship with what precedes or follows in
what Baudoin Butor wrote. Even if the “bon roi de Thailleborch” has not
been passed down to posterity, it may nonetheless be noted that Betis
d’Angleterre is regularly called “bon roi Perceforest.” And while it is true
that “Perchefier” may be in the tradition of the Percevals or Perlesvaus who
flourished for more than a century in Breton literature, one might also
imagine that he constitutes the “missing link” between Chrétien de Troyes’s
“valet Gallois” and the king Perceforest, vassal and contemporary of
Alexander the Great.As for Dorvant,5 one might see in it a deformation of
“Darnant,” which according to the principle of retroaction pointed out by
Vinaver and reused by Pickford in his study of MS BnF 1126 is to be taken
as the source of the forest of Darnantes or d’Arnentes encountered in
recent (meaning late) Arthurian texts such as the Prophesies de Merlin.
According to this same logic, he might also be taken to be the prototype
of the fearsome enchanter of whom King Betis will rid the kingdom of
England a half-century later at the beginning (if one might call it such) of
the Roman de Perceforest.
The “draft” following Baudoin Butor’s programmatic title, without ever

making any of its elements a reality, would seem to bear the trace of its prox-
imity to the prose continuations of the Sept Sages de Rome cycle in the mar-
gins of which the new author inserted his production: the narrative of the
loves of the usurper Vortigern and the daughter of the Saxon leader Angis.
The text contains a number of pseudo-classical romance topoi, but, more
importantly, it poses the problem of the heroic status bestowed upon
Vortigern. Indeed, whether it be in the Vulgate Lancelot-Grail or in Latin texts
such as the Historia regum Britanniae,Vortigern’s place is that of the traitor, and
therefore he cannot be a main character.7 Moreover, the logic of such a story
is markedly different from the classical scenario of the beginnings of the
Arthurian legend: clearly, it is a narrative dead-end, and Baudoin Butor stops
writing once again, for perhaps opposite reasons to those which led him to
interrupt his first, longest, and most elaborate account. Indeed, the telling of
the loves of Pandragus and Libanor8 (prefiguring sometimes word for word
the story of Troïlus and Zellandine in Perceforest) and the deviant version of
the “enfances Merlin” [childhood of Merlin] given in this sketch produce a
particular kind of dizziness in the reader.This parallel narration, neither quite
the same nor quite different, never frees itself from its classical prototype in
order to stand on its own two feet.9
What is most striking in this group of texts is that each attempt begins
again from an absolute point of origin from the romance point of view, and
takes the same path as in the preceding prologue. We do not have one
“roman des fils du roi Constant” [romance of king Constant’s sons], but
only dispersed and contradictory fragments. We do, however, have the
prologue to this romance, a prologue that is remarkably coherent as its
different versions demonstrate. While Baudoin Butor apparently has only
the vaguest idea of what he wants to tell, he knows very well, on the
contrary, what he wants the paratext to express. His name, that of his patron,
the political and historical circumstances that motivated him to begin
writing a work of edifying propaganda, all of this is repeated with surprising
constance (to make a poor play on words).The four prologues begin with a
formula, the solemnity and biblical tonality of which make its repetition all
the more impressive:“Il est seüt, seit on et est a savoir” [It has been known,
it is known and it is to be known].
That which is thus presented as being under the seal of absolute knowl-
edge (this is appropriate in a text which is more or less about Merlin, who
owes his knowledge of the past and present to his father, the devil, and his
partial knowledge of the future to divine grace) varies, however, at least in
its modes of exposition.The message’s tenor is that Baudoin Butor is under-
taking the composition of a text at the request or for the benefit of Gui de
Flandres and Huon de Châtillon, as well as for the love of Jean d’Avesnes,
all three of whom are engaged in complex political negotiations of which

Baudoin does not entirely approve. Like many of his predecessors, the
writer begins his writing of a “biaus contes” [beautiful tale] at the request of
his lords to whom he can refuse nothing, thus placing himself squarely in a
literary tradition which, in a sense, justifies itself. Within this continuity,
however, there are interesting variants or more precisely an evolution from
one draft to another showing the growing discomfort of a candidate to
authorship faced with unforeseen difficulties. It is partly for this reason that
it is so important to rectify the order of the fragments as they appear in the
manuscript. Indeed, between the first and third prologue, the first person of
enunciation grows both grammatically (one need only count the occurrences)
and in terms of its semantic variations.
The first passage introduces the authorial first person in the position of
object:“m’est il pris a talent” [the desire took me], the declaration of inten-
tion is mediated here by an impersonal verb and entirely subject to the
patrons’ desire.While in the following lines there is a high density of “je”
[I], it remains anonymous, unlike the lords, whose titles are all listed; in
short, given the period (unspecified in this first version, we may point out
in passing), and given the topic, a very average prologue in which the figure
of the author is grammatically very present but semantically disembodied.
The same cannot be said of the prologue following the “false” title of the
work to come. Here, to begin with, the first person is plural and the
“spokesperson” of two of the patrons, taking on the position of writer in
order to authorize the subsequent activity of “Butor, notre clerch et boin
ami” [Butor, our cleric and good friend], who thus avoids having to intro-
duce himself by the untenable formula “je, soussigné” [I, the undersigned].
Once the obstacle has been bypassed in this fashion, nonetheless, the “je,
soussigné” can appear, even superlatively, unless we take this repetition more
as a sign of nervous stuttering than as a sign of assurance:
Pour la quele honor je, Butors desus dis, je encore por tres noble seigneur . . . ,
me veil entremetre . . .10
[For which honor, I the undersigned Butor, I once again for a very noble
lord . . . , wish to begin . . .]
But the result of this set-up is that in the nineteen lines of this prologue, we
have two first-person writers who do not overlap. One is plural and seems
to come close to the majestic “nous” [we], the other is singular and seems
to be putting great energy into disavowing the permission granted by
the former in order to place himself under the patronage of yet a third party
who is not even given any say in the matter. An unspoken political agenda
weighs heavily on this version in which “Butor” uses the authority given to
him by his syntactic double to pledge allegiance to another patron, if one

who precisely has not ordered the work can be given such a title:“si veil je
ici endroit comencier en teil maniere ke ce puist iestre a la confusion de
anemi . . .” [I wish to begin here in such a way as to bring confusion to
the enemies . . .]; the beginning will alas soon miscarry, but indeed, the
confusion, of the reader at least, is complete.
It gets even worse in the third prologue, which is an absolute coup on the
part of the author, since, instead of representing himself at the edge of his
narrative, at the risk or in the hope of becoming a character of his own
fiction, as were his great ancestors Robert or Hélie de Boron, he brings in
from the book what should have been the main character in order to
receive from him an absolutely unimpeachable guarantee. It must first be
noted that the direct object of the almost judicial opening formula is the
person of the author himself, presented in great detail (we are given one of
the most precise dates in literary history!) in the context of an activity
which is at the same time common (falling asleep in the midst of unpleas-
ant thoughts) and promising. Sleep indeed, leads to dreaming, an honorable
fictional framework, which ever since the early thirteenth century authorizes
the writer to attribute to himself first-hand knowledge later invested in his
text. The qualitative leap, in comparison to this corpus which he might
claim as a precedent, has to do with the choice of the “personality” appearing
in this dream.At the margin of a romance playing on merlinesque intertext,
the figure of a seven-year-old child can only be assimilated with Merlin
himself; consequently, Butor places himself in exactly the same situation as
Blaise toward the “sage enfes” [wise child] at the beginning of the Merlin by
Robert de Boron.All of the different details in the account of this improb-
able scene come from the “matière de Merlin,” from the “col de mallart”
[mallard-green] color of his clothing (a reference to the Suite-Vulgate11), to
his wavering between wisdom and youth (specifically taken from the Huth-
Merlin12); the mention of the “rollet” [scroll] the child holds is a bit peculiar,
since it points rather to the prose Estoire de Joseph,13 in which case the model
is to be identified with Christ and not Merlin—but are they very different?
Thus, instead of becoming one of the creations inside his fiction,
Baudoin Butor initiates a reverse procedure in which he attempts to embody
fictional characters, if not quite in the real, day-time world, at least in that
signifying space that are dreams or “dorveille” [between sleeping and
wakefulness]. Nonetheless, as might have been expected, this attempt fails:
how might the course of one’s narrative, or indeed any narrative, be taken
up smoothly again when the foundational scene that makes any other story
look unbearably banal has just been revealed to one’s dumbfounded public?
The third prologue is thus the only one in which what should be the
narration proper does not begin with the second introductory formula so
dear to Baudoin Butor, “Com il soit ensi que . . .” [And thus let it be
that . . .].That is because the reader has already been in a fictional space for
around fifty lines, and any interest one might have in “histoires de Bretons”
[stories of Bretons] pales in comparison to the autobiographical experience
of the writer designated as author by his own subject. In this fashion, Butor
has exhausted for all intents and purposes the various combinations which
would have made possible the writing of an original tale; the only thing left
for him is to reduce the paratext as much as he can in the hope of avoiding
a loss of meaning of the fictional in comparison to the real. The very drastic
action he takes, only five lines of prologue for the last draft, reveals itself to
be insufficient since the narrative is interrupted after 275 lines; the atypical
experiment of this radically marginal (in every sense of the term) writer ends
up being a resounding failure.
Resounding precisely in that, the great fourteenth-century “pre-
Arthurian” Breton romance, the Perceforest,14 comes to the correct conclu-
sions about the aporia in which the Roman des fils du roi Constant encloses
itself and proposes an alternative which at the very least works—since there
can be no doubt that the Perceforest exists—but only takes on its full
meaning in comparison with the missing pre-text which is its matrix.
Unlike Baudoin Butor, the author of the Perceforest, whoever he may be
(Baudoin himself, older and having learned by experience,15 or a disciple
conscious of the dead ends in which his master had lost his way, and wish-
ing to steer clear of them?), does not try to establish his bona fides in a pro-
logue asserting once and for all his identity and bestowing on him the
authority necessary to assume responsibility for the narrative to follow.The
medieval variant of what would become for nineteenth-century authors
writers’ block manifests itself in the author’s resorting to an excursus having
nothing to do with his subject and which puts off almost indefinitely the
beginning of the “roman de Perceforest” as such. Instead of telling us
straightaway the—indeed radically—new/untold adventures of Alexander
the Great in Great Britain, the text instead seems to reculer pour mieux sauter,
to go backward in order to go forward, launching into a geographical
presentation of the country taken word for word from Orosius, then Dares
Phrygius. It then goes on to a summary copied from the Historia regum
Britanniae, carefully avoiding the sensitive question of the concordance, or
agreement, of dates. If one adds to that a few secondary or second-degree
digressions so to speak, the author is able to put off the moment of truth for
over two-thousand lines.
He then resorts to another strategy, which makes up the unlikely
“chapitre xiii” [chapter 13] of a romance which has still not yet begun:
rather than presenting in a synthetic way the impossible trinity of author,
patron, and addressee of the work as does Baudoin Butor, the Perceforest
focuses instead on what might be called the outside circumstances of its

own transmission. This question is not a new one; the Lancelot as well as
other great thirteenth-century compilations had already addressed this
problem and made regular use of a very convenient device, that of scribes
appointed by the characters of the fiction themselves to put their adventures
into writing.These ambiguous creations serve as an interface between the
real, in which the operation of writing takes place, and the diegesis, within
which the events these fictional chroniclers are supposed to keep in
memory occur. Still, in the case of the Perceforest the problem will be posed
again several times within the very midst of the narrative, each time in its
proper place (en situation), when for each generation it becomes necessary
to specify how it had been possible, in a context at the very least unfavor-
able, not only to preserve the memory of the great deeds of preceding
generations as a model for their successors, the new heroes, but also to give
it some sort of form and engrave it, so to speak, in stone in order to defy
both time and the destructive will of intervening “anti-heroes” bent on
erasing any trace of a glorious past.
Thus the Perceforest, even before having recourse to any Ponchonnet16 sit-
uated in the narrative itself, launches into the romance of its own discovery—
a book in a wardrobe in a wall in an abbey—and its very difficult translation
in the linguistic sense of the word, since it is necessary to justify at least two
stages in this process. The relationship of the romance with the “matière
alexandrine” [Alexandrian matter] clearly warrants an initial Greek compo-
sition. However, it is at the next stage that things become particularly con-
fusing; indeed the incident of a Greek exile passing through the abbey in
which the precious manuscript has been discovered and translating it into
Latin is nothing but logical. However, as we might expect, it is not the clas-
sical languages that pose a problem, but the different vernaculars, of which
the hierarchy is ill-defined, playing a strange game of musical chairs in
which nothing justifies giving priority to one over the other:
Quant je eubz apperceu le livre et la couronne, je les fiz porter en ma

chambre et ouvry le livre, mais je ne peuz sçavoir en quel langaige il est
escript . . . Et tant fiz depuis a cellui clerc qu’il a translaté le livre de gregois
en latin, car riens ne sçavoit de breton . . . Briefvement tant pria le gentil
conte a l’abbé qu’il eut copie ainçois qu’il se departist de l’ylle, et l’apporta en
Haynnau sa conté. Depuis prist le conte moult a viser qui luy pourroit trans-
later de latin en françois. En la fin il s’avisa qu’il y avoit a Crespin en l’abbaye
de Saint Landelain ung moine de son amistié auquel il requist et pria que de
cest oevre se voulsist entremettre . . .17
[When I had seen the book and the crown, I had them brought to my room
and I opened the book, but I was unable to know in what language it was
written . . . And after that, I did so much to that cleric that he translated the
book from Greek to Latin, because he didn’t know any Breton . . . Shortly
after, the gentle count asked the abbott so persistently that he took a copy
when he left the island and brought it to Hainaut, his county. After that the
count began to think much about who might translate it from Latin into
French. Finally, he realized that there was in Crespin in the abbey of Saint
Landelin a monk with whom he was friendly and he asked and requested
that he take on this enterprise . . .]
Even though it has been established once and for all, in exquisitely anachro-
nistic fashion, that the text was translated into the language of the new
queen of England Philippa de Hainaut,18 whose symbolic presence comes
as a crowning explanation for the extraordinary importance granted to
Hainaut—under the guise of Selve Carbonnière—in the course of the
romance, the said romance is still unable to begin. Instead of making a new
attempt by beginning again from scratch as in the case of Baudoin Butor,
the author of the Perceforest searches elsewhere, and when we think he is
finally going to begin his narrative,19 we quickly notice that we are still only
dealing with a rewriting of the Vœux du Paon by Jacques de Longuyon.20
In the end, however, the writer must renounce these more or less
suitable props and begin work on his original project, which by definition
has no guarantor or guarantee in all of literary history, since the logically
inexplicable silence of the chronicles concerning “the bon roi Perceforest”
can in fact be explained by the envy and jealousy of those sovereigns, the
successors to the king of England, who were able to completely mask this
nonetheless glorious episode in the history of the country. Unfortunately,
the argument is double-edged. On the one hand, it is irresistible: the
Perceforest’s radical originality (not a compliment in the Middle Ages) cannot
be blamed since the silence of the other sources is the result of a very deliber-
ate will to mask a particularly admirable episode of History with a capital H—
or at least of historical chronicling. Reciprocally, however, and despite a
wealth of “markers” of authenticity at the level of the “invention” of the
original document, the Perceforest remains cruelly deprived of any real
documentary status.As a floating text justifying itself within a kind of closed
circuit, it consequently never rises to the ontological status of an authentic
chronicle confirmed by a whole network of proof and corroborating
arguments. Having renounced tackling the problem of “authorization”
from the point of view of the writer, the Perceforest is equally unable to
arrive at its ends through intratextual legitimation based on external
“authorities.” The romance is written, but it is not justified.When the nar-
rative really gets under way, it does so discreetly, without attracting any
attention, since all previous attempts at legitimizing the work came to a
sudden (or, rather, prolonged) end. It is in Alexander’s dream, when a new
character who will much later be identified as the malicious “spirit” Zéphyr
comes to him, that the romance leaves the purely Alexandrian territory and
shifts toward Great Britain.
In order to overcome this difficulty, Baudoin Butor tries desperately to
construct the persona of a writer who would be able to establish a
framework for enunciation, at least, if not the enunciation itself, in the midst
of a concrete historical and political reality verifiable at any moment by any
person. In the Perceforest, the course of action is apparently the opposite:
there is no trace of an official writer, but there exits instead a patchwork of
earlier works and authors compensating for the lack of authority of the
text. Nonetheless, in the end both texts work according to the same
principle of diverting preexisting materials: they are epigone texts, very
subtly interfering with their intertexts without ever crossing the Rubicon
of true originality, and concealing from their readers the problems inherent
to the activity of writing by putting on an act of mise-en-abîme of their
modes of production.
Notes
1. See Baudouin Butor, Le Roman des fils du roi Constant, ed. Lewis Thorpe, in
Notthingham Medieval Studies, 12 (1968): 3–20, 13 (1969): 49–64, 14 (1970):
41–63. Since its edition by L.Thorpe and its partial reworking by L.-F. Flûtre
in his article “Le roman de Pandragus et Libanor par Baudouin Butor,”
Romania 94 (1973):57–90,the Roman des fils du roi Constant has not attracted very
much attention;it is mentioned,though erroneously,by Gerard Sonnemans,“Het
lineaire schrijfproces bij middeleeuwse teksten,”Nederlandse Letterkunde,5 (2001):
323–332. I myself gave a talk about it in 2001 at the International Medieval
Congress of Kalamazoo:“A Marginal Text: the Four Drafts of the Roman des fils
du roi Constant by Baudouin Butor” (May 3–6, 2001). I hope to produce a new
edition of this text sometime in the not-too-distant future.
2. Roussineau’s edition, a work in progress, already includes several volumes
which present the text of the second, third, and fourth parts. To read the
Perceforest, one has to use the following editions: Perceforest, première partie.,
ed. Jane Taylor (Geneva: Droz, 1979); Perceforest, deuxième partie, ed. Gilles
Roussineau, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1999–2001); Perceforest, troisième partie
(3 vols) et quatrième partie (2 vols), ed. Gilles Roussineau (Geneva: Droz,
1987–1993). For the rest of the text, which is not yet available, one can refer
to the eight Etudes sur le Roman de Perceforest published by L.-G. Flûtre in
Romania 70 (1949): 474–522; 71 (1950): 374–392 and 482–508; 74 (1953):
44–102; 88 (1967): 475–508; 89 (1968): 355–386; 90 (1969): 341–370; 91
(1970): 189–226.
3. The case of Guernes de Pont-Saint-Maxence is particularly interesting since
he writes his Vie de Saint Thomas Becket barely two or three years after the
saint’s assassination and still prior to his canonization, which Guernes’ text
may have contributed to bring about. However, he too claims to give a better
version than his rivals, who—he complains bitterly—give the profession a

bad name. See: Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, Vie de Saint Thomas
Beckett, ed. E.Walberg (Champion: Paris, 1936) p. 190 (vv. 6171–6175).
4. Thorpe, Notthingham Medieval Studies 13 (1969): 51, ll. 1–2.
5. “Dalfinor” immediately returns to the nothingness which he never should
have left; unless one is to go quite a bit further in picking out likenesses, see-
ing in this curious name the origin of the “Chevalier au Dauphin” who
plays an important part in the Perceforest.
6. This principle is called “prolongement rétroactif.” See Cedric Pickford,
L’évolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du Moyen Age d’après le
manuscrit 112 fr. de la BN (Paris: Nizet, 1960), p. 62.
7. On a smaller scale, this problem is also posed in the Middle-English
romance, Of Arthour and of Merlyn: the episode of the young girl disguised as
a man who weds the emperor is moved to a different place (or perhaps its
correct place, according to the principle of a three-part structure requiring
three “exempla” of Merlin’s gifts) and linked to the figure of the usurper. This
obliges the writer to “kill” in just a few lines a heroine above all suspicion
whose virtue was to be awarded by the royal wedding which in fact leads to
her death in the context of the present work. Of Arthour and of Merlin,
ed. O.D. Macrae-Gibson, Early English Text Society 268, 2 vols. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1973–1974).
8. See the edition made of this draft by L.-F. Flûtre,“Le roman de Pandragus et
Libanor par Baudouin Butor,” Romania 94 (1973): 57–90. It is interesting to
note that L.-F. Flûtre, one of the first scholars to examine the Roman de
Perceforest, also wrote an article about the text by Baudoin Butor, which
otherwise was ignored by the critics.
9. Nonetheless, the virtuoso practice of rewriting with variations demon-
strated in the first “draft” (in particular, in those passages concerning Merlin’s
mother and two sisters) will be exploited to the full in the Perceforest. Instead
of being divided between the anxiety of betrayal and the anxiety of faithful-
ness, Perceforest turns this practice into a systematic way of proceeding.This
can be seen in exemplary fashion in Perceforest’s treatment of the figure of
Merlin in the two complementary figures of Zéphyr and Passelion.
10. Thorpe, Nottingham Medieval Studies 13 (1969): 51, ll. 7–10.
11. See in Les Premiers faits du roi Arthur (another title of the so called Suite
historique du Merlin) the episode in which Merlin, under the guise of a
vilain comes to give the ducks he has hunted to the young king Arthur.
This text is edited following the Bonn manuscript, translated and anno-
tated in Le Livre du Graal, ed. Philippe Walter, Daniel Poirion, and Anne
Berthelot, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 476 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001)
1:855–856, par. 44.
12. This text, also called Suite romanesque du Merlin, has recently been edited by
Gilles Roussineau: La Suite du Roman de Merlin 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1996).
Merlin, not long after King Arthur’s coronation, comes to him in the guise
of a child. When he declares that he knew King Uther Pendragon well,
however, Arthur sends him away and accuses him of lying, given his age;
Merlin then returns as a much more credible, wise old man whose speech
can only be convincing to the young king (par. 13).
13. In the lengthy romantic prologue of Le Livre du Graal (see above n. 11), the
narrator tells how Jesus Christ helped him obtain a “livret” containing the
story he was about to put into writing, then took it away from him and
finally gave it back after an “aventureuse” quest (Livre du Graal, 1:4–22, par.
2–15).
14. The bibliographic situation, so scant in the case of the Roman des fils du roi
Constant, is much better when it comes to the Roman de Perceforest. Besides
Jeanne Lods, Le Roman de Perceforest: origines, composition, caractères, valeur et
influence (Geneva: Droz, 1951), one can list among the most recent works:
Christine Ferlampin-Acher, “Perceforest et ses déceptions baroques,” in
Deceptio: Mystifications, tromperies, illusions de l’Antiquité au XVIIe siècle
(Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul-Valéry, 2000), pp. 441–465;
Anne Berthelot,“Le mythe de la transmission historique dans le Roman de
Perceforest,” in Représentations de l’Histoire médiévale. Colloque d’Amiens Mars
20–24, 1985, ed. Danielle Buschinger, Wodan 16 (Greifswald: Reineke
Verlag, 1992), pp. 38–49; Anne Berthelot,“La sagesse antique au service des
Prestiges Féeriques dans le Roman de Perceforest,” in “Ce est li fruis selon la
letre.” Mélanges en l’honneur de Charles Méla, ed. Olivier Collet, Yasmina
Foehr-Janssens, and Sylviane Messerli (Geneva: Champion, 2002),
pp. 83–193; Denyse Delcourt,“The Laboratory of Fiction: Magic and Image
in the Roman de Perceforest,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval
and Renaissance Culture 21 (1994): 17–31; Michelle Szkilnik, “Le clerc et le
ménestrel: Prose historique et discours versifié dans le Perceforest,” Cahiers de
Recherches médiévales (XIIIe-Xve s.) 5 (1998): 87–105; Michelle Szkilnik,
“Les morts et l’histoire dans le Roman de Perceforest,” Le Moyen Age 105: 1
(1999): 9–30.
15. The consensus, if there can be said to be one about this text for which there
is so little criticism, is that Butor began his draft of the Fils du roi Constant
fairly late in life and that he died shortly thereafter without ever having
attempted the experiment again. Nonetheless, a detailed study of these
opening narratives and some of the episodes of the Perceforest will demon-
strate, I think, similarities and parallelisms that are so pronounced that they
lead one to reconsider more favorably the hypothesis of a common author,
or at least of a conscious transmission of the narrative material from master
to disciple.
16. Ponchonnet, the “roy des menestrels,” plays a very important part in the
transmission of the memory of the text. Not only does he compose and sing
before a select audience “lais” commemorating the feats and adventures of
the heroes of the first “renaissance” described in this romance, after the
destruction brought about by the Romans; he also is the one who tells
the new generation about the great deeds of their parents, thus allowing for
the ideal of the King Perceforest to rise from its ashes.
17. Le Roman de Perceforest, première partie, ed. J. Taylor (Droz: Geneva, 1979),
pp. 122, 123 and 124.
18. This is an anachronism since the occasion on which the count of Hainaut
visits Great-Britain is that of the wedding of Isabella of France and Edward II
in 1308; it is in 1328 that the daughter of the count of Hainaut becomes
queen of England by marrying Edward III.
19. He uses a somewhat disenchanted formula at this juncture:“Et pour ce qu’il
n’est chose qui puist avoir fin sans commencement, nous commencerons
cest œuvre a l’onneur de Dieu et de la benoite Vierge Marie, qui commence
ainsy selon la cronique.” [And since there is nothing that may end that does
not have a beginning, we will begin this work in honor of God and the
blessed Virgin Mary, which begins that way according to the chronicle.] (Le
Roman de Perceforest, première partie, p. 124, ll. 2151–2155).
20. See Jacques de Longuyon,“Les Vœux du Paon,” in The Buik of Alexander, ed.
R.L.G. Ritchie, Scottish Text Society 12, 17, 21, 25, 4 vols. (Edinburgh:
W. Blackwood, 1921–1929), vols 2 and 3. It is among the “seconds rôles” of
this text, a romance reworking of the Alexandrian material which some-
times introduces new characters whose historicity is not exactly demon-
strated, that the Perceforest chooses its own protagonists.
CHAPTER 6
THE EXPERIENCING SELF AND THE

NARRATING SELF IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH
CHRONICLES
Sophie Marnette
Introduction
Contrary to many other vernacular texts from the same period, medieval
French chronicles usually state their author’s name, thereby seemingly
avoiding any conflict between our modern notion of “author” as the
unique origin that created the text and the ambiguous notion of “author”
constructed by other medieval texts without attribution or with multiple
author names (e.g., Chrétien’s Perceval and its four continuations). In the
following study, the term “author” is to be understood as what the text posits
as the creative entity at the origin of the narrative, while the term “narrator”
is the entity that tells the story.1
Medieval chronicles were often rearranged and modified, either by the
chroniclers or by the copyists.While the narrator is directly represented in
the text, the author’s persona can only be reconstructed inductively, for
example, from his style or from his choice of story line, sometimes without
any possible distinction between different versions or scribal additions.The
differentiation between narrator and author is very clear in the earliest
vernacular chronicles of the Prise de Constantinople (Clari and Villehardouin,
early thirteenth century), where the author is referred to with the third
person (he) while the narrative voice is in the first person singular (I) and
more often in the first person plural (emphatic we). It is only later, in
Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis (early fourteenth century), that the author’s
name coincides with the I-narrator.
118 SOPHIE MARNETTE
However, the I-narrator is not only telling the story as a narrator but also
as a specific individual who sometimes offers his opinion about the
narrative and links it to the external world where he is living.While these
opinions can be fairly impersonal, they can also be introduced by strong lin-
guistic markers such as I say that, I think that, etc. In that sense, even the most
deliberately objective chronicles also constitute judgements about history.
With Joinville, the I staged in the text becomes both the one who
recounts the story (narrating self ) and the one who lived history as witness
or even as participant (experiencing self ). The two latter functions occur in
the third person in Clari and Villehardouin’s chronicles. Not all chroniclers
attended the events narrated, and even in Joinville’s text, some anecdotes are
based on what he heard or read. At some point, however, all chroniclers
insist that they witnessed a portion of the events or that they interviewed
trustworthy eyewitnesses. As I will show, it is that strong link between the
I-narrator, I-author and I-witness or participant that vouches for the his-
toricity of these narratives, thus creating what I call the rhetoric of truth in
the chronicles.2 It is important to note that I am not discussing whether the
events presented in the chronicles are historically true in the modern sense
of the term. What is of interest here is that they are presented as true by
the narrative. In fact, we cannot even be sure that the chronicles were expe-
rienced as true by the medieval audience since, as Beer shows, references to
eye-witness or insistence on sincerity are rhetorical topoi borrowed from
ancient Latin texts.3
This chapter studies nine chronicle excerpts ranging from the thirteenth
to the fifteenth centuries and examines the various roles played by the
chameleon I which can be narrator, author, witness or even a character in
the story. My corpus includes two accounts of the sack of Constantinople,
one composed by Clari prior to 1212 and one by Villehardouin composed
after 1216; the story of Saint Louis’s life by Joinville (1309); three excerpts
taken from three different books of Froissart’s chronicles (excerpt 1 from
volume 1 ca. 1380, excerpt 2 from volume 3 ca. 1400, and excerpt 3 from
volume 4 ca. 1400); one excerpt of Monstrelet’s chronicle (book 2, ca.
1450); one excerpt taken from Les Chroniques du roi Charles VII by Gilles Le
Bouvier dit Le Héraut Berry (ca. 1455) and one excerpt of Commynes’s
Mémoires (volume 1, ca. 1490).4
Thirteenth-Century Chronicles
In order to understand the evolution of the chronicle as a literary genre, one
needs to go back to the birth of prose romances and vernacular chronicles
in the thirteenth century when prose was equated with truth.5 Indeed, as
Gabrielle Spiegel notes, vernacular prose existed alongside Latin historical
M E D I E VA L F R E N C H C H RO N I C L E S 119
and religious prose texts: bible translations, sermons, saint’s lives, historiog-
raphy, etc.6 In previous works, I analyzed linguistic and narratological
features of early prose chronicles looking at the narrator’s position and the
perspectives through which the story events are filtered (focalization).7
Clari and Villehardouin’s chronicles of Constantinople, which are the
oldest chronicles in French, refer to the narrator with an exclusive and
authoritative we [1] instead of the singular subjective I and they use third
person singular markers in order to designate an individual as author,
witness and character of the story [2,3].8
[1] Or vos lairons de cels et dirons des pelerins, dont grant partie ert ja venu
en Venise.(Villehardouin, par. 51, l. 1–2)9
[Now we will leave them and we will speak about the pilgrims, many of whom
had already reached Venice.]
[2] Et bien testimoigne Joffrois li mareschaus de Champaigne qui ceste
oevre dita, que ainc n’i menti de mot a son escient, si com cil qui a toz les
conseils fu, . . . (Villehardouin, par. 120, lines 1–3).
[And Joffrois marshal of Champagne who dictated this book, testifies
that he never lied deliberately, as somebody who was present at all the
meetings . . .]
[3] . . . chis qui i fu et qui le vit et qui l’oï le tesmongne, Robers de Clari,
li chevaliers, et a fait metre en escrit le verité, si comme ele fu conquise; et
ja soit chou que il ne l’ait si belement contee le conqueste, comme maint
boin diteeur l’eussent contee, si en a il toutes eures le droite verité contee, et
assés de vérités en a teutes qu’il ne peut mie toutes ramembrer. (Clari, par.
120, lines 4–10).10
[Robert de Clari, the knight, who was there and saw it and heard it, bears
witness to it and he has put in writing the truth of how [Constantinople] was
conquered; and although he has not narrated the conquest as well as many
good poets might have, he has always told the straight truth, and he has said
nothing about a few truths because he cannot remember all of them.]
The absence of I-narrator, which is also characteristic of early prose

romances such as those of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, illustrates how
vernacular prose came to be used as a discursive modality expressing an
impersonal, single, immanent truth. This, however, does not prevent the
chroniclers from inserting subjective comments carrying precise political
messages to the listeners-readers.11 For instance, when some of the
crusaders decide not to go to Venice,Villehardouin comments:
[4] Ha ! Cum grant domages fu quant li autre qui alerent as autres porz ne
vindrent illuec! Bien fust la crestïenté halcie et la terre des Turs abassie.
(Villehardouin, par. 57, lines 1–3)
120 SOPHIE MARNETTE
[Ha! What a pity it was that the others having gone to other harbors did not
come there! Christianity would have been enhanced and the land of the
Turkish diminished.]
And when the emperor and Louis count of Flander die and the army flees,
Clari concludes:
[5] Ensi faitement se venja Damedieus d’aus pour leur orguel et pour le male
foi qu’il avoient portee a le povre gent de l’ost, et les oribles pekiés qu’il
avoient fais en le chité, aprés chou qu’i l’eurent prise. (Clari, par. 112, lines
31–35)
[So did God take his revenge on them because of their arrogance and for the
bad faith they had shown to the poor people of the army, and the awful sins
they had perpetrated in the city, after they had overtaken it.]
Clari and Villehardouin’s chronicles thus initiate a narrative voice that

appears to be neutral and indivisible, based on an authoritative source (eye-
witness) and equating the notion of prose with that of authority, reality, and
truth.
Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Chronicles

Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles stage a I-narrator who is the
author dictating or writing the story, a moralist speaking in the present, the
direct or indirect witness of story events and a character who sometimes
participated in the past actions.These chronicles retain all the main features
typical of the genre: political message, events seen from the outside, use of
the past as the unmarked tense of the narrative, and clear separation
between the time of narration and the time of the story events. They are,
however, written at a time when prose is no longer seen as an expression of
truth, nor as excluding the first person I.
In Joinville’s, Froissart’s, and Commynes’s chronicles, the frequency of
first-person singular pronouns and verb endings referring to the I-narrator-
author-moralist is always higher than or equal to 2 percent of the narrative
space,12 a number that would increase if one were to include references to
the chronicler as a character who either participated in or witnessed past
events. In these texts, the frequency of first-person singular markers is
always higher than that of second-person markers so that the I-narrator,
witness and character is given more importance than the listeners-readers.13
Even in Monstrelet and the Héraut de Berry chronicles, in which the fre-
quency of first-person singular markers outside the prologues is very low,
the I does not only appear as narrator but also as author (by name) and
witness (see infra).14 This highlights the trifold position of I: he attends

and/or takes part in the story events, he commits them to paper thereby
objectifying them, and he judges the events and links them to his own time
through moral commentary.
I as Narrator qua Narrator

The purely narrative function (i.e., referring only to the storytelling, not to
the function of author, nor to the individual opinions) can be expressed
with a first-person singular marker [6,7,9] or plural [8] and can also appear
into addresses to the listeners-readers [9].
[6] Lequel depuis fu parfait et confermé, comme cy-après sera déclairié en

mon tiers livre. (Monstrelet, lines 2518–2519)15
[Which since then was perfected and confirmed, as will be told in my third
book.]
[7] Pour revenir à mon propoz de ceste armée d’Estampes, comme tous eussent
soupé et qu’il y avoit largement gensse pourmenans par les rues, monsr
Charles de France et monsr de Charroloys estoient à une fenestre et parloient
eulx deux de très grand affection. (Commynes, book I, chapter V)16
[Going back to my subject-matter about this army of Estampes, when everybody
finished supper and there were a lot of people walking in the streets, Lord
Charles of France and Lord Charolais were at a window talking to each other
with great affection.]
[8] Or revenons a nostre matiere et disons ainsi que aprés ces choses tint le roy
une grant court a Saumur . . . (Joinville, par. 93, lines 1–2)17
[Now let us come back to our subject matter and let us say that after these things
the king held a high court in Saumur . . .].
[9] . . . si comme je vous déclarerai assez prochainement, car la matière le
demande. (Froissart, excerpt 3, p. 632, ll. 31–2)18
[. . . as I will tell you very soon since the subject-matter requires it.]
The purely narrative function represents the majority of the total number
of first person singular occurrences in the Constantinople chronicles
(Villehardouin 67 percent, Clari 84 percent), and in Froissart’s excerpt 1
(72 percent). It accounts for a quarter or a third of all occurrences in
Froissart’s excerpt 3, Monstrelet, Commynes, and Berry. Only Froissart’s
excerpt 2 (Le voyage de Béarn) and Joinville’s text devote less than 10 percent
of first-person singular occurrences to the purely narrative function because
these texts mostly refer to the chronicler as witness or participant in the
story events (experiencing self ).
122 SOPHIE MARNETTE
I as Narrator-Author
As discussed above, what distinguishes fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
chronicles from those of Clari and Villehardouin is the coincidence
between the I representing the narrator and the reference to the name and
the function of author.
[10] En nom de Dieu le tout puissant, je, Jehan sire de Joyngville,

seneschal de Champaigne, faiz escrire la vie nostre saint [roy] Looÿs, ce que je
vis et oÿ par l’espace de sis anz que je fu en sa compaignie ou pelerinage
d’outremer, et puis que nous revenimes. (Joinville, par. 19, lines 1–5)
[In the name of almighty God, I, Jehan lord of Joinville, marshal of
Champagne, am having the life of our saint king Louis written down, what
I saw and heard during the six years I spent in his company in the pilgrimage
across the sea and after we came back.]
[11] Je faiz savoir a touz, que j’ai ceans mis grant partie des faiz nostre saint roy
devant dit, que je ai veu et oÿ et grant partie de ses faiz que j’ai trouvez qui sont
en un romant lesquiex j’ai fet escrire en cest livre. Et ces choses vous ramentoif-je,
pource que cil qui orront ce livre croient fermement ce que le livre dit, que
j’ai vraiement veu et oÿ. Et les autres choses qui y sont escriptes, ne vous tes-
moigne que soient vrayes, parce que je ne les ay veues ne oÿes. ( Joinville, par. 768,
lines 1–6, end of book)
[I let everybody know that I have put here a great part of the actions of our
saint king Louis, that I saw and heard and a great part of his actions that
I found were in a book in French, which I had written in this book. And
I remind you of these things so that those who will hear this book believe
firmly what the book says, that I truly saw and heard. And the other things
that are written in it, I do not vouch for their truth since I have not seen them
nor heard them.]
The same coincidence appears in the excerpts from Froissart, Monstrelet,

Berry, and Commynes (see quotes [12, 13, 14, 15] in appendix).19
It is because he directly witnessed certain events, heard witness accounts,
or borrows from specific written works (a “roman,” that is a book in French
in the case of Joinville [11], the chronicle of Jean le Bel in the case of
Froissart’s excerpt 1 [12]) that the I- narrator-author can vouch for the
truth of his narrative.20 This fact is reinforced by the use of legal formula
such as “I ⫹ name” as Marchello-Nizia notes (see bold highlighting in
[10, 12, 13, 14]).21 Importantly, such performative formulas in the chroni-
cles are always followed by a first-person expression insisting on the author’s
role as witness.22 Although Monstrelet’s chronicle contains relatively few
first and second person singular markers (0.7 percent and 0.3 percent
respectively), the text begins with the legal formula je Enguerran de

Monstrelet [13]. Furthermore, while three quarters of the first-person
singular markers in the excerpt refer to the I-narrator, one quarter of these
occurrences designates the I as witness, contrary to Clari and Villehardouin’s
older chronicles that use the third person for the witness function (see [2,3]
above). Similarly, while the majority of first person singular markers appear-
ing in the Héraut de Berry’s chronicle are confined to the prologue, they
are clearly linked to a performative formula, that is to the authorial and the
witness functions (64 percent and 12 percent, respectively) [14].
Not only is the I-author associated with a specific name, it also appears
in moral commentaries as an individual who has certain opinions about
story events, fulfills a particular objective in telling certain events, dedicates
his work to a specific patron ([15]), or describes the writing process. Indeed,
in his prologue, the chronicler may explain why he decided to compose his
work by mentioning a particular inclination or aptitude, his merits as
traveler (Froissart, Monstrelet, Berry) or his privileged position alongside a
specific historical character (Louis IX for Joinville, the Queen of England
for Froissart, Louis XI for Commynes). In addition to maintaining textual
cohesion by unifying the text as what I will tell you or what I told you, the I-
narrator-author is engaged in the global coherence of his work, a concern
that did not exist explicitly in Villehardouin and Clari’s texts.
The I as Moralist
As could be seen in examples [4,5] taken from the Constantinople chroni-
cles, even the most seemingly objective texts may express the chronicler’s
opinion. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chronicles tend to be more
explicit because, rather than using exclamative expressions only, they use
reflexive formulas that put the author’s opinions on stage via the narrator’s
voice.
[16] Le comte Gaston de Foix, dont je parle, en ce temps que je fus devers lui,
avoit environ cinquante-neuf ans d’âge. Et vous dis que j’ai en mon temps vu
moult de chevaliers, rois, princes et autres; mais je n’en vis oncques nul qui fût
de si beaux membres, de si belle forme ni de si belle taille et viaire, bel, san-
guin et riant, . . . (Froissart, excerpt 2, p. 534, l. 7)
[The count Gaston of Foix, of whom I speak, was around fifty-nine years old
when I met him.And I tell you that in my time I have seen many knights, kings,
princes and others, but I never saw one who had such beautiful limbs, such
fine shape, such a good looking figure and face, handsome, full of life and
joyful, . . . ]
124 SOPHIE MARNETTE
[17] Ledict de Contay hayait ledict Guillaume Bische; toutesfois il disoit ce

que plusieurs autres disoyent comme luy; et croy que sa suspicion ne l’en faisoit
parler, mais seulement la necessité de la matière. (Commynes, ll. 1831–1842)
[The aforementioned de Contay hated the aforementioned Guillaume
Bische; however, he was saying what many others said, and I believe that his
mistrust did not cause him to speak, but rather the urgency of the matter.]
In an utterance such as I am telling you that X, the pronoun I refers both to

the narrator qua narrator (who tells the story) and to the narrator as a
person of the world who holds a specific discourse and expresses certain
opinions [16].23 This speech act in the present tense enables I to elaborate
his own discourse with respect to that of the Other. One also finds expres-
sions such as I believe that or I think that [17]. Both types of expressions
contain verbs in the present tense and in the first person singular, which
could be seen as reflexive reported speeches and which entail a certain
amount of dramatization of the narrator’s speech and thoughts.24
Expressions such as I say that are used in the following amounts: Joinville
0.2 percent, Froissart (excerpt 2) 0.5 percent, Froissart (excerpt 3) 0.2 percent,
Commynes 0.4 percent. Expressions such as I believe that or I think that
appear with the following frequency: Clari 0.1 percent, Joinville 0.1 percent,
Froissart (excerpt 1) 0.02 percent, Monstrelet 0.1 percent, Commynes
1.4 percent. Although these frequencies seem rather low, they are in fact
substantially higher than in the fictional narratives studied in a wider cor-
pus.25 Notice the relative importance of these reflexive expressions in
Commynes’s text (1.4 percent), which indeed is not surprizing in the work
of a memoirist.
The I as Witness and Story Participant

The I-narrator may from time to time acknowledge his ignorance with
regard to certain facts because he did not witness an event or because he
does not recall everything [18, 19]. This apparent sincerity reinforces
the position of the I-narrator as guarantor of the truth of the narrative
since he cannot humanly remember every single detail and can only
vouch for what he has seen or heard from trustworthy witnesses.
Nevertheless, the narrative is always the result of a subjective choice made
by the narrator-author, who may or may not justify his choices of
information [19].
[18] Je ne sçay de ces choses que ce qu’il m’en a compté, car je n’estoie point
sur les lieux. (Commynes, book I, chapter 15)
[About these things I only know what he told me since I was not there.]
[19] . . . et pluissieurs hauls barons et bacelers, desquelz je ne puis mie ossi de

tous parler car trop porois ma principaul matere ensonniier. (Froissart, excerpt
1, par. 1, ll. 47–9)
[. . . and many high barons and young men, which I cannot all mention because
I would stray from my main subject-matter.]
The impossibility of reporting the exact words heard at the time of the
event may explain why the chronicler does not pretend that he faithfully
quotes the characters’ speeches with direct speech but prefers to include
them within his narration through indirect speech, using his own words and
therefore retaining control.26 Froissart is indeed well aware of the problem
since in the Voyage de Béarn (excerpt 2) he minutely describes the way he
takes note of the stories told by his informants (see [23] infra). One can
certainly add the fact that some chroniclers quote speeches that were
reported by intermediary witnesses, which makes it impossible to go back
to the supposedly original utterances. Moreover, the original words might
have been uttered in a language (or dialect) other than French, a problem
that easily disappears in indirect speech.27 In the same vein, the characters’
thoughts are rarely represented in chronicles, as this would require a certain
amount of invention on the author’s part. Finally, one also notes that the
frequent use of direct speech by Monstrelet is not an exception since he
mostly quotes written words, such as official letters and other legal
documents he was able to copy without having to make any memory
effort. In short, what makes these words true is not that they are reported
tels quels [as they were said] (which is impossible) but that they are reported
by the I-narrator as direct or indirect witness. The chroniclers’ preference
for indirect speech keeps these words in the past and at some distance from
the listeners-readers, presenting them as a historical truth that is objectified
and remote. On the contrary, in the chansons de geste, historical events are
re-lived as they are re-presented by the voice of the narrator-jongleur.28
In the texts of my corpus, as already mentioned, the testimonial function
cannot be dissociated from the authorial one. However, it is possible to find
references to the witness other than the simple author’s name in the
prologue (see [20] below). Such references occur with the following fre-
quencies: Joinville (1.3 percent), Froissart’s excerpt 1 (0.1 percent) and
excerpt 3 (0.9 percent), Monstrelet (0.2 percent), Berry (0.2 percent),
Commynes (3.6 percent). This category is difficult to evaluate since the
I can be a direct witness, in which case his role may be confused with that
of participant. Indeed, when Joinville, Froissart and Commynes say that they
took part in certain events, they do so in order to reinforce their position as
witnesses of history and therefore bolster their credibility. Joinville,
nonetheless, often tells his own story rather than Saint Louis’s.29 Other
126 SOPHIE MARNETTE
examples more clearly depict the chronicler as “external” witness [22]. In

any case, these examples of testimonies and participation portray an I that
does not only tell facts (narrating self ) but also lived through them (experi-
encing self ).
[20] Et je, auteur de ce livre, qui fus présent à toutes ces choses, quand j’en vis
si grand’foison, je me merveillai où l’on en avoit tant pris; (Froissart, excerpt 3,
page 611, lines 28–30)
[And I, author of this book, who attended all these things, when I saw such a
great number of them, I wondered where so many were taken.]
On the other hand, when I is presented as an indirect witness, that is as hav-

ing read or heard about an event, he can be confused with the narrator-
author as person of the world who has collected various sources to
compose his book (narrating self ).30
[21] Et là, de tous costés se commencèrent de très grandes escarmuches, aux-

quelles se porta très vaillamment, comme il me fut rapporté, messire Gauwain
Quiéret, Hue de Longueval, et pluiseurs aultres, avec les chiefz dessus nom-
més. (Monstrelet, ll. 2006–2010)
[And there, skirmishes began on all sides, where, I was told, Lord Gauwain
Quiéret and Hue de Longueval behaved very bravely, as well as many others
together with the aforementioned leaders.]
[22] Les dessusdits rapportèrent les nouvelles à l’ost des Bretons, qui en eurent
très grand joye, cuydant que ainsi fust, esperant les biens qui leur fussent
advenuz si ledict monsr Charles eust esté roy; et tindrent conseil, comme il m’a
esté dit depuis par ung homme de bien qui estoit present. (Commynes, book I,
chapter V)
[The aforementioned people reported this news to the Britons’ army; the
Britons were very happy, thinking that it was so, hoping for the good things that
would have come to them if the aforementioned lord Charles were king, and
they held a meeting, as I was told afterwards by a gentleman who was present.]
As mentioned above, some chronicles such as those by Joinville, Froissart

(excerpts 2,3) and Commynes do not only refer to the I as witness but also
as participant in the story.31 The three excerpts taken from Froissart are
especially interesting in this regard as they each present a different aspect.
Excerpt 1 is taken from the first book in which Froissart, using mainly Jean
le Bel’s text, recounts events that he did not attend; he therefore mostly
describes himself as narrator-author. In excerpt 3, taken from the fourth
book, Froissart portrays himself as narrator-author (76 percent of the total
number of first-person singular occurrences) but also as direct and indirect
witness (17 percent). However he does not insist on his own activities at the
time of the events (5 percent). Excerpt 2 is quite distinct from the two
others.32 In the Voyage de Béarn, Froissart narrates his journey to the court
of Gaston Phébus and his stay there, during which he had the opportunity
to spend long moments with informants who told him about important
events they had witnessed and gave him information about the region and
Gaston Phébus. In that excerpt, Froissart often presents himself as character-
traveler and “reporter” as well as writer-chronicler. He tells his informants
that he will include their stories in his chronicle and he explains in the text
how he would jot down all these anecdotes as soon as he arrived at his
lodgings at the end of a day’s traveling.
[23] Des paroles que messire Espaing de Lyon me contoit étois-je tout réjoui,
car elles me venoient grandement à plaisance, et toutes trop bien les retenois,
et sitôt que aux hostels, sur le chemin que nous fesismes ensemble, descendu
étois, je les escripvois, fût de soir ou de matin, pour en avoir mieux la mémoire
au temps à venir; car il n’est si juste retentive que c’est d’écriture. (Froissart,
excerpt 2, chapter XII, lines 1–7)
[The words that Messire Espaing de Lyon was telling me, filled me with joy
because they were very pleasing to me.And I memorized all of them very well.
And as soon as I arrived at our lodgings, on the journey we were taking
together, I would write them down whether at night or in the morning, in
order to remember them for the times to come, because there is no better
memory than in writing.]
The Voyage de Béarn contains a high number of first-person singular

markers that refer to Froissart as I-narrator-author on the one hand
(2.7 percent) and character-witness on the other hand (37.6 percent).33 It
also uses a substantial amount of direct speeches (80 percent of the
narrative’s space), much of which was uttered by Froissart himself in dia-
logue with his informants. Here the function of direct speech is not only to
dramatize an historical event but also to dramatize and thus authenticate his
source gathering.34 Therefore the use of I and direct speeches does not
appear to involve the listeners-readers in the narration (you is relatively
infrequent) but rather to insist on the verisimilitude of the testimonial
process: the Voyage portrays Froissart as a “reporter” interviewing an eye-
witness and as a writer taking notes and speaking about his work. The
excerpt is thus a representation of his work as a historian, a “chronique des
Chroniques” that guarantees the truth of the whole opus.35 This original
dramatization is essentially confined to Voyage de Béarn since Froissart
returns to a more traditional narration in the rest of the third book and in
the fourth one (excerpt 3). However, one finds similar dramatizing effects
in the references to the function of the direct witness in Joinville’s text
(1.3 percent first person singular markers) and in Commynes’s excerpt
128 SOPHIE MARNETTE
(3.5 percent of first person singular markers) and in the references to their
participation in the story events (21 percent first person singular markers in
Joinville and 1.3 percent in Commynes’s excerpt).
Conclusion
The chronicles show a deliberate effort to emphasize the chroniclers’
creating and writing activities as narrators-authors as well as their roles as
witnesses and characters of the story. Each function helps to vouch for the
truth of the events recounted.The above analyses have highlighted a clear
shift occurring at the turn of the fourteenth century, with the use of first
person singular markers to refer to the author-witness-character in
Joinville’s text. From then on, “l’engagement personnel du témoin” [the
personal involvment of the witness] and “l’inscription du narrateur dans son
récit” [the inscription of the narrator in his tale] contributed to the rhetoric
of truth in the narrative.36 It would be most interesting to use the same type
of linguistic analysis in order to investigate whether this evolution is also
reflected in lyric poetry in terms of a more purportedly “biographical” je-
poet, such as one might find in the works of Christine de Pizan, Charles
d’Orléans, or François Villon. 37
Appendix
[12] Froissart, Book 1, par. 311
Pluiseur gongleour et enchanteour en place ont chanté et rimet lez guerres
de Bretaigne et coromput par leurs chançons et rimes controuvees, le juste et
vraie histoire, dont trop en desplaist à monseigneur Jehan le Biel qui le coum-
mencha a mettre en prose et en cronique et à moy, sire Jehan Froissart, qui
loyaument et justement l’ay poursuiwi à mon pooir. Car leur rimmez et leurs
canchons controuvees n’ataindent en riens le vraie matere més velle ci si
comme nous l’avons faite et achievee par le grande dilligensce que nous y
avons rendut car on n’a riens sans fret et sans pene. Jou, sire Jehans
Froissars, darrains venus depuis monseigneur Jehan le Bel en cel ouvraige, ai
ge allé et cherchiet le plus grant partie de Bretaingne et enquis et demandé as
seigneurs et as hiraux les gerrez, les prises, les assaux, les envaies, les bataillez,
les rescousses et tous les biaux fés d’armes qui sont avenut mouvant sus l’an de
grasce mil.CCC.XL poursieuwans jusquez à le darrainne datte de ce livre, tant
à le requeste de mes dis seigneurs et à ses fraix que pour me plaisance acomplir
et moy fonder sus titre de verité et dont j’ay estet grandement recompenssés.
[Many jongleurs and enchanters sang or put into rimes Britain’s wars and
corrupted by their songs and their invented rimes the just and true story,
which highly displeased my lord Jehan Le Bel who began to transpose it in
prose and chronicles and myself, sir Jehan Froissart, who faithfully and
justly have continued to do so, in as much as I could. Because their rimes and
invented songs do not relate to the real material facts at all, here is how we
did it and achieved it by the great care we put into it since one gains nothing
without hardship and pain. I, sir Jehan Froissart, coming after my lord
Jehan le Bel in this work, have gone and searched through the greatest part of
Britain and inquired and asked noblemen and heralds about wars, attacks,
assaults, invasions, rescues and all the beautiful battles that happened during
the year 1340, carrying through the latest date of this book, to the request of
my master above-named and with his funding as well as for my own pleasure
and to entitle myself to the claim of truth, for which I was greatly rewarded.]
[13] Enguerran de Monstrelet, Chronique, ed. L. Douët-D’Arq (Paris: Société
de l’histoire de France, 1857), book II, prologue.
Pour lesquelles ramener à mémoire et recordacion véritable, je Enguerran
de Monstrelet, faisant ma résidence en la cité de Cambray, qui autreffois ay
prins laborieux plaisir à faire mettre par escript, par manière de cronique, les
mervilleuses adventures et vaillances d’armes dignes de louenges et recorda-
cion, advenues au très crestien royaulme de France, ès pays voisin, et ès
marche loingtaines, tant de la crestienté comme d’aultre loy, à mon petit
entendement, sans polir les choses ne yssir hors de la matière, mais mettant le
fait directement en ensuyvant les récitacions qui faictes en ont esté à moy par
plusieurs hommes nobles et autres notables personnes . . . , qui ont esté
presens aux besognes, me suis remis à continuer et à poursuyvir ce que de long
temps avoie et ay encommencée, et a entendre les besongnes pour compiler ces
présentes hystoires; qui se comprennent comme on pourra veoir à les lyre et
oyr, en batailles mortelles, désolacions de plusieurs églises, cités, villes et
forteresses, dépopulacion de moult de pays et aultres merveilles piteuses à
recorder.
Si commencera ycellui mon second livre, ou mois d’octobre mil quatre cens
et vint et deus.
[In order to bring them to memory and to true remembrance, I Enguerran
de Monstrelet, having my residence in the City of Cambrai, who formerly
took arduous pleasure in putting into writing, in the form of chronicle, the
wonderful adventures and brave battles worthy of praises and remembrance,
that occurred in the most Christian kingdom of France, in neighboring
countries, and in faraway regions, both of Christian faith or of other religion,
in my modest understanding, without polishing things nor straying from the
subject-matter, but telling the straight facts following the stories reported to
me by many noblemen and other notable people, . . . who attended
these events, I undertook to continue and pursue what I had begun for a long
time, and to hear these facts in order to compile the present stories, which
consist—as one will see by reading and hearing them—in mortal battles,
ruins of several churches, city, towns and fortresses, depopulation of many
countries and other wonders pitiful to recount.
So now my second book will begin, in the month of October one
thousand four hundred and twenty two.]
130 SOPHIE MARNETTE
[14] Gilles Le Bouvier dit Le Héraut Berry, Les Chroniques du roi Charles VII,
ed. H. Courteault and L. Celier (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979) p. 3–4.
Je Berry, premier herault du roy de France, mon naturel et souverain
seigneur, et roy d’armes de son pays de Berry, honneur et reverance. A tous
ceulx qui ce petit livre verront plaise savoir que au XVIe an de mon aage, qui
fut l’an mil CCCC et deux, je eu voulenté et fermay ma pensee, ainsi que nature
me ordonna et que en jeune aage ung chacun se applicque a faire labour ou
sa plaisance se encline, je prins mon plaisir et delectation a veoir et a suivyr le
monde ainsi comme ma complection y estoit encline. Et pour ce que en cel
an le noble royaume de France et la bonne cité de Paris estoient a cel heure
en la plus haulte auctorité et renommee de tous les royaulmes chrestiens et
ou habondoient plus de noblesse, d’onneur et de biens tant en largement
princes, prelaz, chevaleries, marchans, clercs et commun, comme autrement,
et pour les haultes honneurs, richesses et plaisirs qui en ce noble et bon roy-
aulme estoient, je me appensé que, a mon petit povoir et selon ce que je porroye
comprandre en mon petit entendement, je vouldroye veoir a mon poveoir les
honneurs et haulx faiz de cellui tres noble et tres chrestien royaulme, et moy
trouver par le plaisir de Dieu partout ou je saroye a veoir les haultes assemblees
et besoingnes d’icellui royaulme et des autres a mon povoir, et avecques ce, la
veue d’icelles haultes choses seroient mises en escript par moy ainsi comme je
le saroye comprandre, tant les biens faiz comme les maulx faiz. Si me doint
Dieu grace que ce que j’en feray soit plaisant a ceulx qui le liront, orront ou
vouldront veoir. Car toutes choses qui se escripvent ne puent pas estre
plaisans a ung chascun, et ce ne porroit estre justement escript ne loyaument
qui de telles matieres ne escriproit la verité, comme des choses cy aprés adv-
enues, lesquelles sans nulle faveur j’ay entencion d’escripre a mon povoir et en
ma conscience a la verité sans donner louange a l’une partie ne que a l’autre
des divisions et guerres qui cy aprés ont esté ou dit royaulme de France et
aussy des autres choses advenues et autres royaumes ou je me suis trouvé.
[I Berry, first herald of the king of France, my natural and supreme lord, and
king of arms of his county of Berry, [give] honor and respect. May all these
who will see this little book enjoy knowing that in the sixteenth year of my
life, which was the year one thousand four hundred and two, I decided and
made up my mind, as nature ordered me and as at a young age everybody takes
care to work toward what his predilection leads him to do, I took pleasure and
delighted in seeing and following the world, which my temperament was
inclined to do.And because in that year the noble kingdom of France and the
good city of Paris were at that time in the highest prominence and reputa-
tion where abounded more nobility, honor, and goodness as much in princes,
prelates, knights, merchants, clerics, and common people, as in others, and
because of the high honors, richness and pleasures that were in this noble and
good kingdom, I thought that, in my modest capacity, and according to what
I could understand with my humble intelligence, I wanted to see in as much as
I could the honors and lofty facts of this very noble and good kingdom, and
to be with God’s will, anywhere where I could see lofty gathering and events
of this kingdom and others in as much as I could, and with this, the descrip-
tion of these lofty things would be written down by myself as I could
understand them, both the good events and the bad events. May God give me
the grace that what I will make of it will be pleasant to those who will read it,
hear it or will want to see it. Since all written things cannot please everybody,
and since it could not be written fairly nor faithfully if it did not write the
truth about such subjects, as for the things that happened hereafter, I intend to
write them without any bias, in my capacity and my conscience truthfully,
without praising one party or the other for the divisions and the wars that
hereafter occurred in the said kingdom of France and also in the other
kingdoms where I happened to be.]
[15] Philippe de Commynes, Mémoires, ed. J. Calmette (Paris: Les Belles

Lettres, 1964), vol. 1, Prologue of first book
Monsieur l’arcevesque de Vienne, pour satisfaire à la requeste qu’il vous a pleu
me faire de vous escrire et mettre par memoire ce que j’ay sceu et congneu des
faictz du roy Loys unziesme, à qui Dieu face pardon, nostre maistre et bien-
faicteur, et prince digne de très excellente memoire, je l’ay faict le plus près de
la verité que j’ay peu et sceu avoir souvenance. Du temps de sa jeunesse ne scau-
roye parler, sinon par ceque je luy en ay ouy parler et dire; mais, depuis le temps
que je veins en son service, jusques à l’heure de son trespas, où j’estoye present,
ay faict plus continuelle residence avec luy que nul autre, de l’estat à quoy je le
servoye, qui, pour le moins, a tousjours esté de chambellan, ou occuppé en ses
grans affaires. En luy et tous autres princes que j’ay congneuz ou servy, ay con-
gneu du bien et du mal, car ilz sont hommes comme nous.A Dieu seul appar-
tient la perfection. Mais quant en ung prince la vertu et bonnes condicions
precèdent les vices, il est digne de grand louenge, veu qu’ilz sont plus enclins
a toutes choses voluntaires que autres hommes.
[Lord archbishop of Vienna, it is in order to satisfy the request you were so
kind to make that I write for you and put in memory what I have known of the
deeds of Louis XI, whom God might forgive, our master and benefactor, and
very worthy prince, of good memory, I have done it as closely to the truth as
I could and was able to remember. About the time of his youth, I could not speak,
except from what I heard him say and talk about; but since the time I came
into his service until the day of his death, which I witnessed, I spent more time
with him than anybody else, since I was serving him either at the very least as
a chamberlain or for higher business. In him and all the other princes whom
I knew or served, I found both good and evil, because they are men like us.
Perfection belongs to God alone. But when in a prince, virtue and good dis-
position precede vices, he is praiseworthy, since princes are more inclined to
do as they please than other men.]
132 SOPHIE MARNETTE
Notes
This essay is a revised and translated version of an article published in LYNX, 32
(2002) 271–284. It was presented at the Humanities Center Seminar on
Medieval Studies of Harvard University in February 2003.
1. The problems posed by these notions in medieval literature and the differ-
ence between writer (real person) and author (textual creation) are devel-
oped in my book: Narrateur et points de vue dans la littérature française médiévale:
Une approche linguistique (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998) pp. 18–19 and 216–220. In
an “impersonal” narrative, the I is mostly absent from the text but latent since
the narrative entity can sometimes express certain opinions and often pre-
sents the events from a perspective that is distinct from the characters’ points
of view (ibid., pp. 17–22).
2. For a reflection on the notions of truth and fiction in medieval chronicles and
their links with other genres, see, amongst others: Suzanne Fleischman,“On
the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages,” History and
Theory, Studies in the Philosophy of History 23 (1983): 278–310; Robert Levine,
“Deadly Diatribe in the Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims,” Res Publica Litterarum
14 (1991): 115–126; Robert Levine, “The Pious Traitor: Rhetorical
Reinventions of the Fall of Antioch,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 33 (1998);
Robert Levine,“Myth and Anti-Myth in Cuvelier’s La Vie Vaillante de Bertrand
Du Guesclin,” Viator 16 (1985): 259–275; Sophie Marnette, “Je dis que . . . Je
pense que . . . Le je narrateur, auteur, témoin et personnage des chroniques,”
LYNX. 32 (2002): 271–284; Sophie Marnette, “Sources du récit et discours
rapportés: L’art de la représentation dans les chroniques et les romans français
des 14e et 15e siècles,” Le Moyen Français 51–53 (2002–2003): 435–459; Paul
Zumthor, Langue, texte, énigme (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
3. Jeanette M. Beer,Narrative Convention of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva:
Droz, 1981).
4. I am very grateful to Christiane Marchello-Nizia and her “Linguistique et
Informatique” team of the ENS de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (now the ENS
Lettres et Sciences Humaines, relocated in Lyon) for allowing me to access
their corpus of Middle French texts and their search engine.
5. Verse chronicles also existed in Medieval French although they were far more
rare than the prose ones.See,for example,Jordan Fantosme’s chronicle composed
ca. 1175 or fourteenth-century historical poems such as Cuvelier’s La Vie Vaillante
de Bertrand Du Guesclin or the Life of the Black Prince, by the herald of Sir John
Chandos. On these verse chronicles: Fleischman, “On the Representation of
History,” pp. 286–288; R.C. Johnston, “The Historicity of Jordan Fantosme,”
Journal of Medieval History 2 (1976): 159–168; M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman
Literature and its Background (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 75–81;
Levine,“Myth and Anti-Myth,”pp.259–275;J.J.N.Palmer,“Froissart et le Héraut
Chandos,” Le Moyen Age: Revue d’Histoire et de Philologie 88 (1982): 271–292.
6. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past. The Rise of Vernacular Prose
Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993) p. 56.
7. Sophie Marnette, “Narrateur et points de vue dans les chroniques médié-

vales: une approche linguistique,” in The Medieval Chronicle, Proceedings of the
1st International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle, Utrecht 13–16 July 1996,
ed. Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp.174–190; and Marnette,
Narrateur et points de vue (1998).
8. When assessing the frequency of first- and second-person uses (personal
pronouns, possessive adjectives and verb endings) in Clari and Villehardouin’s
chronicles, the average of first person singular markers is lower than 1 percent
and lower than the average of first-person plural markers (1.5 percent and
2 percent) and second-person markers (1.3 percent and 3.2 percent). As a
reminder, subject pronouns are not mandatory in medieval French. See note
12 below for the description of calculation procedures.
9. Geoffroy de Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. Raymond
Faral, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1961), vol. 1.All translations are mine.
10. Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. P. Lauer (Paris:
Champion, 1924).
11. As Fleischman notes, the very selection of events betrays the subjectivity of the
narrative and gives it a specific meaning (“On the Representation of History,”
p. 293). Michel Zink also highlights the subjectivity of Villehardouin and Clari’s
texts in La Subjectivité littéraire autour du siècle de Saint Louis (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1985), pp. 209–212. Despite an apparently impersonal
tone, these two texts carry specific messages.Villehardouin wants to justify the
crusaders’ decision to stop in Venice and to invade Constantinople (a Christian
city), a decision in which he participited as negotiator of the Venice treaty. Clari
brings a different point of view on the same events since his experience is that
of a poor knight who did not participate in important decisions but endured
the hardships of the army, held grudges against some high noblemen and
expressed his admiration for others. Voir Gérard Jacquin, “Robert de Clari,
témoin et conteur,” in Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble: Hommage à Jean
Dufournet Littérature, histoire et langue du Moyen Age, ed. J.-C. Aubailly, E.
Baumgartner, F. Dubost, L. Dulac, and M. Faure, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion,
1993), vol. 2, pp. 747–754. Of course, the fact that both authors claim to relate
the same historical events but from very different perspectives introduces a hint
of plurality, at least for those who would happen to read both texts.
12. Calculation: there is a number x of first-person singular markers in a text
(personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and verb endings) for a number y
of lines in the narrative part (i. e., other than direct speeches uttered by char-
acters). One divides x by y (knowing that there can be several occurrences
of first-person singular markers per line) and then one multiplies the result-
ing number by 100 thereby obtaining a percentage. Since the various edited
texts offer lines of different length, one must also transform the total number of
lines into a number of syllables and divide it by 10 to work with decimal num-
bers. Application: 80 occurrences of first-person singular markers referring to
the narrator in Froissart’s excerpt 1 for 2305.5 lines in the narrative part.There
are approximately 18 syllables per line. 80 ⫼ ((2305.5 ⫻ 18) ⫼ 10) ⫻
100 ⫽ 1.9 percent.
134 SOPHIE MARNETTE
13. Regarding the importance of I and the role of witness in fourteenth and
fifteenth-century chronicles, for Joinville, see: Michèle Perret,“A la fin de sa
vie ne fuz-je mie . . .,” Revue des sciences humaines 183 (1981): 17–37; for
Commynes see: Joël Blanchard, “Commynes et l’historiographie de son
temps,” Recherches sur la littérature du XVe siècle. Actes du VIe Colloque interna-
tional sur le Moyen Français (Milan:Vitae Pensiero Publicazioni dell’ Università
Cattolica, 1991), pp. 191–205; Olivier Soutet and Claude Thomasset, “Des
marques de la subjectivité dans les Mémoires de Commyne,” in La Chronique
et l’histoire au Moyen-Âge, ed. Daniel Poirion, Cultures et civilisations médié-
vales 2 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1984), pp. 27–44;
Jean Dufournet, Philippe de Commynes: un historien à l’aube des temps modernes
(Bruxelles: De Boeck Université, 1994). And for Froissart, see: Peter F.
Ainsworth, “Configuring Transience: Patterns of Transmission and
Transmissibility in the Chroniques (1395–1995),” in Froissart across the genres,
ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Gainesville, FL: University
Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 15–39; Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the
Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1990); William Calin, “Narrative Technique in Fourteenth-
Century France: Froissart and his Chroniques,” in Studies in Honor of Hans-
Erich Keller, ed. Rupert T. Pickens (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications Western Michigan University, 1993), pp. 227–236; G.T. Diller,
“Froissart’s 1389 Travel to Béarn: A Voyage Narration to the Center of the
Chroniques,” in Froissart across the genres, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-
Maddox (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 50–60.
and Froissart: Historian, ed. J. J. N. Palmer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1981).
Interestingly, the I is used to refer to the author-witness in Jordan Fantosme’s
verse chronicle, which is earlier than the Constantinople chronicles: “Jo ne
cunt mie fable cum cil qui ad oï, / Mes cum celui qu’i fud, e jo meismes le
vi.” [I do not tell a fable as one who heard about it but as one who was there,
and I saw it in person] (my translation). Jordan Fantosme, Chronicle, lines
1768–1769, quoted by Anthony R. Lodge, “Literature and History in the
Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme,” French Studies 44: 3 (1990): 267 [257–270].
14. Global frequencies of the use of first-person singular markers are 0.7 percent
for Monstrelet and 1.5 percent for Berry but they decrease to 0.2 percent if
one only considers the body of the texts without the prologues in which the
chroniclers present their works.
15. Enguerran de Monstrelet, Chronique, ed. L. Douët-D’Arq (Paris: Société de
l’histoire de France, 1857), book II, chapters 258–278.
16. Commynes, Mémoires, ed. J. Calmette, 3 vols. (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1964),
vol. 1.
17. Jehan de Joinville, La Vie de Saint Louis. Le témoignage de Jehan, Seigneur de
Joinville, ed. N. Corbett (Quebec City: Naaman, 1977).
18. The three excerpts from Froissart come from the following editions: excerpt 1:
Chroniques, ed. G. T. Diller (Genève: Droz, 1991), vol. 1, par. 1–100,
pp. 1–131; excerpt 2:“Le voyage de Béarn,” Chroniques, in A. Pauphilet and
E. Pognon, Historiens et Chroniqueurs du moyen âge, (Paris: Gallimard, 1952),
pp. 486–565; excerpt 3: Chroniques, in A. Pauphilet and E. Pognon, Historiens

et Chroniqueurs du moyen âge (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), pp. 605–647.
19. Commynes’s name does not appear in the excerpt chosen for the corpus but
is present in other parts of his chronicle.
20. See Blanchard,“Commynes et l’historiographie de son temps,” p. 197.
21. Christiane Marchello-Nizia,“L’Historien et son prologue,” in La chronique et
l’histoire au Moyen-Âge, ed. Daniel Poirion, Cultures et civilisations médié-
vales 2 (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1984), p. 19
[13–25].
22. In the prose Tristan and other romances mentioned by Marchello-Nizia
(“L’Historien et son prologue,” p. 21), the first person singular markers that
follow “I⫹ name” refer to the activity of translation and not to the role of
witness.
23. In short, the difference between narrator qua narrator and narrator qua
person of the world stems from Ducrot’s distinction within the notion of
locutor of two further discursive entities: Locutor-L: Locutor qua locutor
(seen only in his capacity as an entity responsible for the utterance);
Locutor-l: Locutor qua person of the world which has, amongst other char-
acteristics, that of being at the origin of the utterance. On the one hand, a
person who says “Honestly, I don’t want to go,” presents her enunciation
and, therefore, herself in her capacity as locutor, as frank and honest. On the
other hand, if the same person says “I am a very frank person,” she is not
suggesting anything about the quality of her enunciation or of herself as the
locutor of that particular utterance (locutor-L) but is, rather, assigning a cer-
tain quality to herself in general, as a person of the world who also happens
to be the locutor of that utterance (locutor-l). In I say that X, the pronoun I
refers both to locutor-L and locutor-l. In summary, the utterance I say that
X expresses two different things: a speech act and the description (staging) of
that speech act. See Oswald Ducrot, Le dire et le dit (Paris: Minuit, 1984),
p. 199. For a detailed discussion of this type of reported speech, see Sophie
Marnette, “Aux frontières du discours rapporté,” Revue Romane 37
(2002): 3–30.
24. Although expressions such as I say that express a speech act, expressions such
as I think that, I believe that, which some call “reports of a thought act” do not
work in the same way. Indeed, one does not perform the act of thinking
when saying I think that it is true, nor the act of believing when saying I believe
that it is true. Contrary to a speech act, a thought act cannot be realized
through language; it can only be described through it. However, both
expressions contain a verb in the present tense and in the first-person
singular, and I would describe both of them as “reflexive” reported speeches
and thoughts. See Marnette,“Aux frontières du discours rapporté.”
25. See Marnette,“Sources du récit et discours rapportés.”
26. For detailed numbers and a comparison with prose romances, see Marnette,
“Sources du récit et discours rapportés.” As a quick reminder, the term
“reported speech” (in French: discours rapporté) actually refers to both speech
and thoughts presentation. In direct speech, the reporting speaker evokes the
136 SOPHIE MARNETTE
original speech/thought situation and conveys, or rather claims to convey,

the exact words [ideas] of the supposed original locutor. The pronouns,
tenses and deictic words (“here”/ “there”,“today” / “yesterday,” etc.) of the
original utterance stay the same: they are not transposed [a]. In indirect
speech, the reporting speaker transposes the original utterance in his/her
own words.The reported speech is subordinated to a reporting verb and is
introduced by a subordinating conjunction.The pronouns, tenses and deic-
tics of the reported speech are switched to the reporting situation [b].
a. Froissart 2, chapter IX, line 16
Lors lui demandois-je:“Sire, et à quels gens donne-t-il ses dons?”
[Then I asked him:“Lord, and to which people does he offer his gifts?”]
b. Clari, par. 4, lines 1–2.
Quant li marchis fu venus a Sessons, si demanda as barons pour coi il
l’avoient mandé.
[When the marquis arrived in Soisson, he asked the barons why they had
sent for him.]
Of course, quotation marks [a] were not used in medieval manuscript but
are added by the modern editor.
27. One should add, however, that the impossibility of reporting words as they
were originally uttered (or even thought) does not automatically preclude
the use of direct speech. In fact the problem is exactly the same in spoken
narratives but they use direct speech as much as indirect speech, thereby
allowing the speaker to dramatize his/her story and to involve addressees.
28. Sophie Marnette, Narrateur et points de vue, (1998), p. 135; “Narrateur et
points de vue,” (1999), pp. 177–178, 185.
29. Perret,“A la fin de sa vie ne fuz-je mie . . .,” pp. 18 and 26.
30. It is the locutor-l (see note 23 above).
31. Joinville (first-person singular markers 21 percent, first-person plural
markers 12.5 percent), Froissart’s excerpt 2 (37.6 percent, 13.5 percent),
Froissart’s excerpt 3(5 percent), Commynes (1.3 percent, 2.7 percent).
32. For detailed analysis, see Ainsworth, “Configuring Transience,” pp. 17–21
and Aisnworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History, pp. 140–171; Calin,
“Narrative Technique” and Diller “Froissart’s 1389 Travel to Béarn.”
33. One can add 13.5 percent of first-person plural markers.
34. Ainsworth notes that the voices of Froissart’s informants sound much like his
own, exhibiting the same manners and expressions ( Jean Froissart and the
Fabric of History, pp. 150–151). Diller submits that one informant, Espan de
Lyon, is in fact invented by Froissart, which reinforces my point about the
staging of source gathering (“Froissart’s 1389 Travel to Béarn,” p. 57).
35. Diller,“Froissart’s 1389 Travel to Béarn,” p. 57.
36. Michèle Perret,“A la fin de sa vie ne fuz-je mie . . .,” pp. 2–3.
37. On this topic, see Zink, La Subjectivité littéraire.
CHAPTER 7
NEUTRALITY AFFECTS: FROISSART AND

THE PRACTICE OF HISTORIOGRAPHIC
AUTHORSHIP
Zrinka Stahuljak
Le Neutre ne peut se dire franchement.

Roland Barthes
ean Froissart’s Chroniques narrate the history, from 1326 to 1400, of the
J origins and the first half of the Hundred Years’War between the kingdom
of France and England (1337–1453), in which the ruling Valois and
Plantagenet dynasties disputed their respective hereditary rights to the
French royal throne.Throughout book IV, the last book of the Chroniques,
Froissart reports the efforts of the French king Charles VI to persuade the
neighboring kingdoms and domains to “se tourner neutre” [to become
neutral], in order to resolve the papal schism which was to divide the
Catholic Church from 1378 to 1449. In the very last episode which con-
cludes the narrative of the Chroniques, the citizens of the powerful city of
Liège finally align themselves with the French king and adopt the position
of neutrality, thereby disavowing their alliance to the Roman pope
Boniface IX. In response, Boniface sends a papal legate from Rome, who
himself sends a messenger from Cologne carrying papal letters in an
attempt to dissuade the citizens of Liège. But they respond to the messen-
ger:“Ne retourne plus pour tels choses sur le peyne d’estre noyé; car autant
de messages qui vendront icy pour telle matière, certes nous les jetterons en
Mouse” (XVI, 240) [Do not return any more for these affairs under the
penalty of drowning; as many messengers who will come here for this
138 Z R I N K A S TA H U L J A K
matter, certainly we will throw them into the river Meuse].1 And it is with
these very words that the Chroniques end: at the moment of the achievement
and the affirmation of neutrality of the citizens of Liège.
The statement of neutrality thus abruptly ends the narrative throughout
which Froissart has maintained that he is a neutral recorder of history. In
this chapter, I explore the connection between Froissart’s stance of histori-
ographic neutrality and the cessation of historiographic writing at the
moment of the victorious affirmation of political neutrality:“[T]out le pays
se tourna neutre à la contemplation du roy de France” (XVI, 239) [The
whole country became neutral in consideration of the king of France].
First, I argue that the abrupt ending is linked to the very condition of
neutral historiographic writing, rather than to Froissart’s death, which
critics have used to explain the end to the Chroniques.2 Froissart, unlike his
contemporaries, does not write in order to legitimize either the Valois or
the Plantagenet dynasty competing for the French throne; however, his
so-called neutral text both records and embodies the tensions inherent to
neutral authorship. In other words, I suggest that the neutral text problematizes
neutrality. Second, I address the puzzling question of three depositions that
Froissart describes immediately prior to the declaration of neutrality of
Liège: the depositions of Richard II, the English king, Benedict XIII, the
Avignonese pope, and Wenceslas, emperor of Germany and king of the
Romans.What is the connection between the depositions, the declaration
of neutrality, and the ultimate silence of the neutral historiographer?
According to Bernard Guenée, the historian has been a tool of political
propaganda and of legitimation of new dynasties since the fourteenth century,
and thus is by definition partial.3 However, critics agree that Froissart posi-
tions himself as an impartial translator of the conflict.4 He proclaims from
the beginning of the prologue to the Chroniques to merely “registrer”
[record] the events which are “notablement registré . . . par juste enqueste”
(1st redaction, II, 1) [memorably recorded by just inquiry] of the partici-
pants in the war,“sans faire fait, ne porter partie, ne coulourer plus l’un que
l’autre . . . de quel pays qu’il soient” (3rd redaction, II, 7) [without invent-
ing or taking sides, without tainting one more than the other, . . . from
whichever country they may be],5 “de quel païs et nation que il soient”
(4th redaction, II, 11) [from whichever country or nation they may be].6
Throughout the Chroniques, Froissart uses various strategies to establish his
stated neutrality.First, he shifts from verse to prose, distancing himself from
the use of rhyme, which is inadequate in the transmission of truth.7 Second,
he abandons the use of his written source, Jean le Bel’s Chronique, in
exchange for oral testimonies of war protagonists and eyewitnesses.8 If
“truthfulness seems to be linked to oral narration,” as Kevin Brownlee has
pointed out, the very orality of the testimonies collected by Froissart founds
F RO I S S A RT A N D H I S T O R I O G R A P H I C AU T H O R S H I P 139
the truthfulness of the historiographic text.9 Reliance on oral testimonies,

however, obliges the historian to distinguish between the protagonist who
is interviewing eyewitnesses, and the author who is putting their testimonies
in writing. In order to support his neutrality, Froissart creates a narrative with
a double perspective by splitting his “je.” On the one hand, there is the “je” of
the protagonist-traveler who collects the information “des vaillans hommes,
chevaliers et equiers” (4th redaction, II, 11) [from brave men, knights and
esquires]. On the other hand, there is the “je” of the author, “je Jehans
Froissars,” who forms a narrative from the testimonies collected, “mettre en
prose et ordonner selonch la vraie information” (4th redaction, II, 11) [write
in prose and organize according to the true information]. Claiming that he
did not alter the testimonies that he had collected, Froissart-author has to
assume responsibility only for the translation of testimonies into the narra-
tive, their “ordonnance” [organization].10 Finally, Froissart always attempts to
provide accounts of war events from both parties involved in the conflict, a
method and form unique to medieval historiography.11 In so doing, he
takes a double position, which is mirrored in the very structure of the
Chroniques. As Froissart adopts a balanced, impartial stance, so the text
becomes balanced. Books I and II are balanced against books III and IV:
Froissart used Jean le Bel’s Chronique as a source for the first two books of his
Chroniques, but for books III and IV he used oral testimonies of the war’s
protagonists. In addition, the end of the Chroniques mirrors its beginning,
doubling the motif of deposition: the work begins with the deposition of
the English king Edward II (1326) and it ends with the deposition of
Richard II (1399).Thus, as Froissart’s text is constantly written and rewritten
between two opposing war narratives, it is in a state of continuous tension as
it doubles itself repeatedly for the purpose of achieving an impartial narrative.
The most important neutral protagonist of the Chroniques is not Charles VI,
despite the fact that the end of the Chroniques leads us to believe so, but
Gaston de Foix, count of Foix and Béarn, also known as Fébus, whom
Froissart visits in the winter of 1388–1389. Politically, Fébus was a complex
figure. He adopted a successful politics of neutrality in the conflict, which
led to the acquisition of sovereignty of Foix and Béarn that the earldom
maintained until 1620:12 “[I]l ne courroucheroit pas voulentiers [le roy de
France ou le roy d’Engleterre]. Et trop bien de leurs guerres il s’est sceu
dissimuler jusques à présent, car oncques ne se voult armer, ne pour l’une
partie, ne pour l’autre, et est bien de l’un et de l’autre” (XI, 52) [He would
not willingly anger the king of France or the king of England. And until
now he has known only too well how to dissimulate from their wars, for
he has never wanted to take up the arms for one side nor for the other, and
he belongs to one side and to the other]. Neutrality is expressed in the
neither/nor construction,“ne pour l’une partie, ne pour l’autre.” Although
Froissart characterizes Fébus’s neutrality as “dissimulation,” Fébus’s political

neutrality only adds to his political skill: “Il fut preud’homme en régner”
(XI, 86) [He was valiant in matters of governance]. Because of his neutrality,
Fébus surpasses all noblemen in his wisdom: “[I]l est aujourd’huy le plus
sage prince qui vive et . . . nul hault seigneur, comme est le roy de France
ou le roy d’Angleterre, couroucheroit moins volentiers et plus envis” (XI, 52)
[He is today the wisest prince alive and . . . there is no noble lord, such as
the king of France or the king of England,whom he would anger less willingly
and with more displeasure]. Indeed, it is his neutrality that makes him “en
justiciant . . . le plus droitturier et le plus criminel [var. cruel] seigneur qui
vive” (XI, 54) [in dispensing justice . . . the most just and the most
criminal (cruel) lord alive].13 Justice is so well preserved in his state that
“il n’est nul François, ne Anglois, ne pillars, qui face à ses hommes tort de
ung petit denier, et est toute sa terre aussi saulve que chose puet estre,
tant y est bien justice gardée” (XI, 54) [there is no Frenchman, Englishman
or robber who would wrong his men for a penny and all of his land is as
safe as it can be, so well is justice kept in it]. Neutral and just, Fébus assumes
a figure of perfection: “De toutes choses il estoit si parfait et tant apris
que on ne le povoit trop loer” (XI, 86) [In all things he was so perfect and
so learned that one could not praise him enough]. Fébus’s court is a
neutral and just metaphorical representation of the neutral and just corpus
of the Chroniques, just like Fébus is a representation of the neutral and just
body of the historian who provides ideologically diverse testimonies.14
Fébus is the glorious embodiment of neutral politics—Froissart’s political
alter ego.15
However, a curious subplot permeates the first half of Froissart’s portrayal
of Fébus. Froissart reports three situations of mistreatment of family members
by Fébus.The first two concern two separate murders that Fébus is said to
have committed: first, Fébus supposedly killed his cousin Pierre-Arnaut de
Béarn, who refused to hand over the fortress of Lourdes. Fébus wounded
Pierre-Arnaut with a knife and then sent him to prison, where Pierre-
Arnaut died “car il fut petitement soingnié de ses playes” (XI, 70) [because
he was poorly cured of his wounds]. In the second instance, Fébus is said to
have killed his only son Gaston, the legitimate heir to the title and the lands,
who allegedly tried to poison Fébus. Having discovered the poison in young
Gaston’s possession, Fébus first imprisoned him and then later, allegedly
unintentionally and unknowingly, struck his son with a small knife.Young
Gaston, weak from self-imposed starvation (for fear of being poisoned
himself), succumbed to the wound (XI, 89–100).Third, Froissart also reports
the imprisonment of “le vicomte de Chastelbon,” the legitimate heir to Foix
and Béarn after young Gaston’s death, whom Fébus hated and whom he
ransomed and released after eight months of prison (XI, 71).
Young Gaston and Pierre-Arnaut both die from a knife wound inflicted
by Fébus, and they both die in prison, ostensibly unbeknownst to the
perpetrator. Peter Ainsworth and Kevin Brownlee have emphasized
the intricate parallelisms that exist between the two murders. According to
Ainsworth, Froissart’s narrative implies that Fébus did not intend his
cousin’s death; it is only after Pierre-Arnaut’s refusal, that, unexpectedly,
“le sang luy prist à muer en félonnie et en courrous” (XI, 70) [his blood
started to turn to violence and anger]. Likewise, young Gaston had already
been imprisoned in order to await justice for his possibly unintentional
attempt to poison Fébus—Fébus had agreed to accept the decision by his
nobles and did not need to punish his son himself. Second, Ainsworth
argues, Fébus’ intention only to imprison, not kill, both Gaston and Pierre-
Arnaut is reinforced by the treatment of the viscount of Castelbon: Fébus
“might indeed be capable of imprisoning and ransoming an heir, but would
clearly not willingly kill him, however great might be his loathing for the
man.”16 Ainsworth concludes that “the parallel” of “the two ‘murders’ and
the two tales of ill-treatment of heirs on Fébus’ part . . . goes some way
towards exonerating Fébus: the two accounts both illuminate and ‘explain’
each other.”17 Unlike Ainsworth, Kevin Brownlee does not believe that
Froissart’s narrative mitigates Fébus’s responsibility in both murders. Rather,
he argues that this parallelism provides Froissart’s narrative with a double
perspective. Brownlee shows that the murder of young Gaston repeats the
narrative structure of Pierre-Arnaut’s murder. But, while the murder of
Pierre-Arnaut is presented as an “ignoble” attack, Fébus is exculpated
narratively from the murder of his son because of the “story’s insistence
on . . . ‘pure’ intentionality.”18 Fébus accidentally struck his son in the vein
with his nail-cutter and left the prison unaware of the injury he inflicted.
Brownlee concludes that the “overall narrative . . . invite[s] two contrastive
(even contradictory) interpretations: one in which Fébus is innocent; a
second in which the count is guilty.”19
I wish to stress the fact that the parallelism between the scenes does not
bind two historical events, but instead binds a historical event, the murder
of young Gaston, to a fictional event, the murder of Pierre-Arnaut.This fact
has escaped the attention of most Froissardian critics, except for Pierre
Tucoo-Chala, who argued that the scene of Pierre-Arnaut’s murder is
fictional, since “Pierre-Arnaut figure dans la liste des personnes ayant assisté
aux obsèques du comte de Foix en 1391” [Pierre-Arnaut is on the list of
persons who were present at the funeral of the count of Foix in 1391].20
Tucoo-Chala’s argument was based on one mention of Pierre-Arnaut after
his death by Froissart; however Pierre-Arnaut’s presence at the funeral is not
clear, rather what is inferred is that he is still alive: “L’espée offry messire
Rogier d’Espaigne adestré du bourg de Copane et de Pierre Ernault de Berne,
capitaine de Lourde” (XIV, 338; my emphasis) [The sword was handed over
by Roger of Spain, second in command of the town of Copane and of
Pierre-Arnaut of Béarn, captain of Lourdes]. But in another instance, in book IV,
Froissart confirms that Pierre-Arnaut’s death is a fiction, while narrating an
event taking place several years after his visit to Foix and Béarn. He quotes
the count of Armagnac: “[E]ncoires ne sont pas tous les fors délivrés, ne
acquittés.Velà celluy de Lourde que mesire Pierre Ernault tient en garnison de
par le roy d’Angleterre . . .” (XIV, 295; my emphasis) [All the fortresses have
not yet been liberated nor paid for.There is the fortress of Lourdes which
sir Pierre Arnaut holds by the king of England]. Pierre Arnaut is thus shown
to be in charge of the very same fortress for which Fébus, we were told,
killed him.The question is then: what purpose does this fiction perform for
Froissart?
While I agree with Brownlee that the murder of Pierre-Arnaut parallels
the murder of Fébus’s son in order to prove that Fébus did not (intentionally)
murder his son, I also support Ainsworth’s argument that Froissart justifies
Fébus’s murder of Pierre-Arnaut.21 Fébus is said to have killed Pierre-
Arnaut because the latter refused to turn over Lourdes “par la foy de lignage
que vous me devés” (XI, 70) [by fealty of lineage that you owe me]. Fébus
seeks to gain control over Lourdes in order to appease the duke of Anjou
and to protect himself from future attacks by this powerful enemy:“Sachiés
que monseigneur d’Angou me veult grant mal pour la garnison de
Lourde que vous tenés, et à pou près en a esté ma terre courue . . . et est sa
parole et l’oppinion de plusieurs de sa compaignie qui me haient, disans que
je vous soustiens pour tant que vous estes de Berne” (XI, 69) [Know that
sire d’Anjou wants to harm me on account of the garrison of Lourdes
which you hold and he almost overran my lands because of it.And he says,
and it is the opinion of several of his companions who hate me, that I support
you because you are from Béarn]. In a neutral territory, a fortress with an
allegiance to the English king is unacceptable to the French.22 But Pierre-
Arnaut refuses Fébus’s request, invoking a higher loyalty—a homage given
to the king of England: “[L]e chastel de Lourde je ne renderay fors à mon
naturel seigneur le roy d’Angleterre” (XI, 69) [I will not surrender the
fortress of Lourdes to anyone except my natural lord, the king of England].
Fébus then strikes Pierre-Arnaut five times with a knife.23 How can the
perfection of the neutral figure coexist with such violence? Just before
striking him, Fébus accuses Pierre-Arnaut of treachery:“Faulx traitre, as-tu
dit ce mot de non faire?” (SHF XII, 62) [False traitor, are you refusing to do
it?]24 While neutrality is often associated with passivity and nonagression,
with a refusal to take position, precisely a form of “ce mot de non faire,”
Fébus’s accusation sheds a different light on neutrality. Here, Pierre-Arnaut’s
allegiance to the English lord, that is his non-neutral position, is a
“non-doing,” “ce mot de non faire.” Conversely, Fébus’s position, the one
of “doing,” is the position of neutrality. For Fébus, to be neutral is to be
active, not passive. Most important, neutrality is redefined, from a nonen-
gaged position, to another form of allegiance. When Fébus demands that
Pierre-Arnaut surrender Lourdes, he asks him to abandon his allegiance to
his “naturel seigneur.” But, despite appearances, this is not a demand to reaf-
firm his allegiance to the “foy de lignage.” Rather, Fébus asks Pierre-Arnaut
to swear allegiance to his neutral position. Neutrality may renounce all exist-
ing allegiance, but at the same time it turns into a form of allegiance. Being
neutral is therefore not to refuse taking a position, but rather to assume a
position. Consequently, neutrality forces the neutral figure to assert himself
and to assume the conflictual nature of this position. Fébus thus uses physical
violence in order to maintain his neutrality; he commits murder in order to
obtain the fortress of Lourdes and thus to remain neutral and avoid being
drawn into a conflict with the duke of Anjou and France, a conflict in
which Fébus could inadvertently help the English, thereby putting into
question his neutrality. Fébus’s unmasking of “ce mot de non faire” as non-
neutral and his insistence on neutrality as active reveal that it is only in
appearance that neutrality is a practice of a politics of nonconflict. Instead,
to say that one is neutral is to participate in the violence of war. Froissart can
therefore invent the murder of Pierre-Arnaut; the murder can be seen as a
demonstration of what neutrality entails and it can also serve as an example
of a just crime committed for the purpose of protecting Fébus’s neutrality:
“Je n’ay que faire d’avoir la malveillance de si hault prince comme est mon-
seigneur d’Angou” (XI, 69–70) [It is not in my interest to be the target of
such a high prince as is sire d’Anjou]. An act of violence does not detract
from his neutrality; on the contrary, according to Froissart’s interpretation of
neutrality, violence is a condition of the maintenance of neutrality. It is even
this violence of neutrality that acquires an exemplary status of perfection.
When the (fictional) murder of Pierre-Arnaut moves the French king to
offer a return gift of the earldom of Bigorre, Fébus politely declines: “[L]e
conte de Foix ne voult retenir le don, mais il retint le chastel de Mauvoisin
pour tant que c’est france terre, et que le chastel et la chastellerie ne sont
tenus de nulluy fors de Dieu, et aussi ce avoit esté anciennement son droit
héritaige” (XI, 73) [The count of Foix did not want to retain the gift, only
the castle of Mauvezin, because it is free land and the castle and the manor
belong only to God, and also because this had previously been his rightful
inheritance].While the fiction of Pierre-Arnaut’s murder probably serves to
explain the acquisition of Mauvezin by Fébus, in retaining only the castle of
Mauvezin and refusing to conquer Bigorre, Fébus highlights his choice
of neutrality: Mauvezin belongs “only to God.” Thus the fictional murder
of Pierre-Arnaut not only exculpates Fébus from the murder of his son, it
paradoxically exemplifies his very political neutrality, a neutrality that the

murderous violence is shown to protect.25 It is for this reason that Fébus is
characterized as “le plus droitturier et le plus criminel [cruel] seigneur qui
vive”—his very neutrality demands violence of him. Neutrality, as a form of
justice, is fair and cruel.
If Fébus is Froissart’s neutral alter ego, in what position do neutral histo-
riographic writing and its author find themselves? In order to maintain
Fébus’s perfect figure of neutrality despite the murder of his son, Froissart
creates a double narrative.The doubling of the murderous narrative by the
fictional murder represents the doubling that a neutral narrative must
perform throughout the Chroniques: the “je” of the protagonist-traveller and
the “je” of the author, war testimonies from both sides, structural doubling
of books I and II with books III and IV, and doubling of depositions.This
recalls another doubling that we might have observed in Froissart’s initial
description of Fébus’s neutrality:“[D]e leurs guerres il s’est sceu dissimuler
jusques à présent, car oncques ne se voult armer, ne pour l’une partie, ne
pour l’autre, et est bien de l’un et de l’autre” (XI, 52) [And until now he has
known only too well how to dissimulate from their wars, for he has never
wanted to take up the arms for one side nor for the other, and he belongs
to one side and to the other]. Neutrality is not simply a double negation, in
the form of the neither/nor construction, “ne pour l’une partie, ne pour
l’autre,” it is at the same time a double affirmation,“et est bien de l’un et de
l’autre.” In other words, in order to be neutral, the historiographic text must
be double. But this doubleness is a form of “dissimulation,” a sort of duplic-
ity, and the double/duplicitous narrative is nothing short of murderous.
Froissart maintains Fébus’s neutrality by committing a textual, symbolic
murder of Pierre-Arnaut, whom he is later obliged to resurrect silently.
What the fictional narrative ultimately tells us is that to maintain the neu-
tral figure of Fébus, Froissart must create a double narrative—the story
of young Gaston and of Pierre-Arnaut—which turns out to be doubly
murderous and the murderous effect of which duplicitously undermines its
original intention of providing a balanced narrative of Fébus’s exculpation.26
Then, in a second move, Froissart paradoxically uses the duplicity of neu-
trality to explain—and justify—that neutrality actually calls for murderous
violence, a violence which participates in the creation of the perfect neutral
figure of Fébus and a violence in which the Chroniques themselves partake.27
This doubling of the narrative, which continues throughout the
Chroniques, forces Froissart to reassess his own (double) neutral text in book IV,
when describing the political power of language during the Hundred Years’
War. He knows that language can play an important role in a conflict.The
episode of the peace talks in Lelinghen (1394) is devoted to the political force
of one language in particular: French. The inherent duplicitous nature of
French becomes apparent during the “pourparlers” [talks, negotiations]

between the French and the English: “[C]ar en parlure françoise a mots
soubtils et couvers et sur double entendement, et les tournent les François,
là où ils veulent, à leur prouffit et avantage; ce que les Anglois ne sçauroient
trouver, ne faire, car euls ne le veulent entendre que plainement” (XV, 114)
[Since in the French language there are deceptive words and covered ones
and those based on double-entendre, the French turn them, where they
wish, to their profit and advantage; which the English would not know how
to discover, or to do, since they want to understand French plainly]. The
English, incapable of such deception, are thus forced to carefully check the
French language, down to the letter, in order to make sure they understand
it well, in its plain meaning:
Ils entendoient à ce que les lettres fuissent si bien vériffiées que nulle chose
de tourblé, ne de obscur qui touchast à empeschement, n’y peuist estre
entendu, ne veu; et de ce avoient les Anglois grant soing et diligence, et
vouloient bien tous ces articles et traittiés proposer et escrutiner, avant que ils
le séellassent, ne voulsissent passer, et toutes ces paroles justement entendre.
(XV, 123)
[They intended that the letters be verified so well that nothing confusing or
leading to obscurity could be understood or seen. And the English, who
placed great care and diligence in this matter, wanted to see and scrutinize all
the articles and treaties, before agreeing to them, and did not want to pass
over any, and wanted to hear all those words exactly.]
Most important, because French is a “parlure obscure . . . en tourble”

(XV, 114–115) [an obscure language . . . in turmoil, confusion], with “tant
de paroles coulourées” (XV, 120) [so many tainted words], it can be made to
mean either war or peace: “[Q]ue quant vous voulés il est guerre, et quant
vous voulees, il est paix” (XV, 120) [When you want, there is war and, when
you want, there is peace]. Because French consists of “mots soubtils et couvers
et sur double entendement” [deceptive words and covered ones and those
based on double-entendre] it can be used to breach contracts:“[L]es condi-
tions conditionnées sur les articles de la paix . . . ils les avoient enfraintes et
brisies” (XV, 114) [The conditions negotiated in the articles of the peace-
treaty . . . had been infringed and broken]. The French language is thus,
more than any other, duplicitous; in other words, it is capable of being split
between two different and even opposed meanings.The speakers can hide
behind this duplicity to dissimulate (“se dissimuler,” XI, 52), breaching their
oath while claiming to have respected it. Linguistic duplicity is viewed as a
political asset, a war tool: depending on the circumstances, the speaker will
exploit the duplicity of language to shift his political position, to change his
intention and, with it, his allegiance. Because language is split, words can be
made to “turn” either way:“[E]t les tournent les François, là où ils veulent”
(XV, 114) [the French turn them where they wish]). Language facilitates
usurpation and conquest through betrayal.The same oath will retroactively
be reinterpreted as having meant war instead of peace or vice versa. More than
any other language, French relies on the political power of double meaning,
which facilitates political betrayal of allegiance while at the same time
hiding it.
Froissart, who writes in French, problematizes indirectly, and perhaps
even unwillingly, the neutrality of his own historiographic language in the
Lelinghen episode.28 Froissart’s historiographic work is founded precisely
on the double nature of French which can “brisier,” “enfraindre,” and
“tourner.” Even Froissart’s supposedly neutral translation of the testimonies
depends on such treacherous language. It is interesting to learn that both the
French and the English claimed Froissart’s Chroniques as their representative
historiographic text of the Hundred Years’ War. What kind of linguistic
duplicity, what “turn” of phrase, allowed this text to announce its allegiance
to both the French and the English? The neutral position appears to function
not as a position belonging to neither one nor the other, but rather as a
position belonging to both. The text of the Chroniques belongs to at least
two parties, and this double position is facilitated, or perhaps enacted,
through the duplicity of the French language. Froissart’s Chroniques may be
“French” to the extent that they too are split,“double,” and as such “shifty.”
They are shifty because obscure words, not committed to one plain
[“plainement”] or exact [“justement”] meaning, shift with the change of
intention of the speaker: “When you want, there is war and, when you
want, there is peace.” The intentional duplicity of the French language
staged in the Lelinghen episode may point to an unintentional political
duplicity of the Chroniques—an unintentional but unavoidable duplicity of
neutrality. Froissart acknowledged this problem already in the prologue to
the second redaction of the Chroniques:“Et pour ce que je n’y vueil mettre,
ne oster, oublier, ne corrompre, ne abrégier hystoire en riens par deffaute
de langage” (2nd redaction, II, 6; my emphasis) [And for this reason I don’t
want to put, take out, forget, corrupt, or shorten the story in any detail by
default of language].
Froissart’s performance of authorial neutrality is problematized again in
the sequence of episodes concerning the papal schism in book IV. The
English refuse Richard II’s promise to adopt the stance of neutrality in the
matter of papal schism, according to Charles VI’s proposal:“Ce roy est tous
françois. Il ne vise fors à nous déshonnourer et destruire . . . .Or n’en
ferons-nous riens puisque le roy de France le propose ainsi. Tiengne la
neutrale en sa puissance, et nous tendrons fermement nostre créance en
Angleterre” (XVI, 135) [This king is completely French. He aims only to

dishonor and destroy us . . . But we will do nothing of this since the king
of France is proposing it. Let him keep neutrality in his power and we will
firmly hold onto our faith in England]. When the English refuse to “se
tourner neutre” [to become neutral], they imply that language that proposes
neutrality cannot be disassociated from power, “[t]iengne la neutrale en sa
puissance.” On the contrary, language proposing neutrality is likely to “nous
déshonnourer et destruire” precisely because of its affiliation with power.
By wishing to comply with the French king’s request for neutrality, the
English king is seen as “tous françois” because he is blind to the reality of
neutrality as power. French is a language of power and not of neutrality, and
as such it is divisive in its very effort to reconcile and pacify.29 Even though
Richard II, “le roy d’Angleterre qui de tous poins s’enclinoit à la paix”
(XV, 201) [the king of England who was leaning toward peace in all matters],
is willing to accept the position of neutrality in the papal schism in order to
help achieve peace between France and England, for the English, a neutral
and pacifist position is a weakness:
Ne il ne monstre pas, ne oncques ne fist, que son père fuist le prince de

Galles; car se il l’euist esté, il euist enssieuvy ses oeuvres et prins garde et
plaisance à ses proesces, et oncques il n’a voulu que le repos et le séjour, les
oiseuses et les esbatemens des dames et des damoiselles, et estre toujours
enmy elles. (XVI, 159–160)
[And he does not show, and never did, that his father was the prince of Wales;
for if he had been his father, he would have continued his feats and taken care
and pleasure in his prowess, but he has never wanted anything else but rest
and repose, idleness and amusement of the ladies and damsels, and to be
always amongst them.]
Richard II’s acceptance of neutrality means effeminacy, making the virility

of a ruler suspect. If Richard II were to accept neutrality, he would submit
himself to the French king, and England would be submitted to France:
“Ceste chose ne se puet longuement tenir en cest estat, que Angleterre ne
soit perdue sans recouvrer” (XVI, 157) [This state of things cannot continue
for much longer, without England being lost once for all].30 Throughout
the Chroniques, Froissart has described neutrality as a double and duplicitous
state, containing both negation (“ne/ne”) and affirmation (“et/et”).Toward
the end of the historiographic narrative, this double state of neutrality is
explicitly linked to sexuality. Thus Fébus and the French could be said to
represent a “virile” neutrality—the active, affirmative assumption of the so-
called neutral position—and Richard II an “effeminate” neutrality—the
passive, negative position of submission. Sexualized, neutrality is shown to
be constructed around two complementary poles: the dominant and the

submissive. Neutrality is an exercise of highly sexualized power relations. It
is therefore not surprising to discover that Froissart uses the term “tourner
neutre” or “estre neutre” [to become neutral or to be neutral] to describe
the idea of “soustraction” [withdrawal of obedience], which was France’s
preferred method in dealing with the papal schism.The idea was to create
the conditions in all of Christianity for the withdrawal of state support from
both popes, in Avignon and in Rome, in order to force them to abdicate,
that is to “soubmettre” [to submit].31 This method, referred to in English as
the way of cession, would lead to the election of a new single pope who
could reunify the Church.32 To equate neutrality with cession—Froissart
calls “soustraction” “estre neutre”—indicates that for Froissart, French
neutrality (and neutrality spoken in French) is a position that aims to submit
by withdrawing its support. Neutrality asserts its power by withdrawing
power. In fact, to have any effect at all on the issue of division, it needs to
assert itself. Paradoxically, neutrality becomes an assertion when it should
not be one, thereby supporting the very notions of power play that it orig-
inally aimed to deconstruct. Reaching a just decision in the matters of papal
schism therefore may not be seen as neutral, but as partial and even partisan.
When the Avignonese papal legate, Cardinal de la Luna, appears at the
peace negotiations at Lelinghen, the English threaten to break off the nego-
tiations: “Nous sommes déterminés à pape auquel nous obéissons et
voulons obéir. Si n’avons que faire de oyr parler à l’encontre, et, se il [de la
Luna] venoit avant sur nos traittiés par la faveur de vous, nous clorrions tous
nos parlemens et nous en retournerions arrière” (XV, 119) [We support the
pope whom we obey and wish to obey. Therefore we have no business
being told otherwise and, if he (Cardinal de la Luna) were to participate in
our treaties with your support, we would close all negotiation and return].
What the English are suggesting is that a negotiation can never occur from
a neutral position—not simply because neutrality would be for them a sub-
missive position, but more importantly because neutrality, for the French, is
an exercise of domination that only hides behind its mask of neutrality.
Moreover, neutrality constructed on the notions of domination and sub-
mission reveals itself to be a form of affect:“[Ce Richart de Bourdeaulx] est
de cuer si françois qu’il ne le puet celler” (XVI, 135–136) [This Richard of
Bordeaux has such a French heart that he cannot hide it]. Because of his
love of the French, Richard II is ready to adopt a neutral position.33
Richard II’s neutral position is thus suspect because it issues not from an
inherently neutral and just form of “neither/nor,” but from an affective
state. Neutrality is dangerous precisely because its affective power, one that
makes Richard II sexually submissive, is dissimulated in the neutral language
of the French. The English therefore reject the dissimulating language of
neutrality, an idea consistent with Froissart’s portrayal of the English as

wanting only to “entendre plainement” and “justement,” that is, without
double meanings and, more importantly, without affect.
Neutrality as affect explains the violence of neutrality, such as we saw
with Fébus. The understanding of neutrality by the English as sexualized
power-play only emphasizes neutrality as a desire to possess and to submit.
Indeed, neutrality of the French attempts to submit the popes to its power,
which the English also interpret as the submission of their king and of their
nation. After an analysis of neutrality by Froissart—as violence, duplicity,
power, affect—the sexualized characterization of neutrality, in which there
is a dominant and a submissive partner, is the culmination of Froissart’s
thinking on neutrality as doubleness, and specifically duplicity of the
French language. Following this final development, Froissart’s analysis of
neutrality as a double position, which enabled him throughout to construct
by analogy his double position of a neutral author, turns back on itself. It is
with the analysis of Froissart’s authorial neutrality that we return to the
episode of Liège, when “[t]out le pays se tourna neutre à la contemplation
du roy de France” (XVI, 239) [the whole country became neutral in con-
sideration of the king of France].
The end of the Chroniques with the episode of Liège corresponds to the
larger narrative structure of the Chroniques which, between the narratives
of deposition, one at the beginning (Edward II), the others at the end
(Richard II, Benedict XIII, Wenceslas), achieves its moment of balance.
What is unsettling and unsettled, however, is the abandonment of chrono-
logical order by Froissart. If Froissart indeed died ca. 1400, how then could
he have written of the deposition of Benedict which occurred in 1409, at
the Council of Pisa? And if Froissart was still alive in 1409, it is curious that
he does not mention the deposition of the Roman pope Gregory XII, who
was deposed at the same time as Benedict. Finally, Richard II’s deposition
takes place in 1399, Benedict’s in 1409, and Wenceslas’s in August 1400—the
1409 deposition of Benedict is placed between the 1399 deposition of
Richard II and the 1400 deposition of Wenceslas. And the final episode of
the Chroniques, the neutrality of Liège, is also chronologically reversed.The
assumption of neutrality by Liège took place in April 1400, while Wenceslas
was deposed in August 1400. This appears to disrupt the chronology of
Froissart’s narrative twice: first, when placing Benedict’s deposition between
the other two and, second, when Froissart returns to the neutrality of Liège,
events that would have preceded both Benedict’s and Wenceslas’ depositions.
In his recent book Froissart et le temps, Michel Zink argues that the end of
the Chroniques may seem abrupt, but its symmetry between the two depo-
sitions, Edward II’s in the beginning and Richard II’s at the end, is planned
“pour clore son ouvrage sur un épisode analogue à celui qui l’a ouvert”[to end
his work with an episode analogous to the one with which he began].34
Moreover, says Zink, Froissart deliberately adds the deposition of Wenceslas
of Bohemia and of the pope in Avignon so as to emphasize the triple fall
from power, thereby sending a strong message to the rulers.35 Zink argues
that suspending the narrative signifies the end of the Chroniques, but not the
end of history.36
While I agree with Zink that the ending to the Chroniques is planned,
and therefore not interrupted by the death of the historiographer, I also
propose that the end of the Chroniques represents more than Froissart’s state-
ment to the readers that “[o]n n’en saura jamais plus” [we will never learn
anything more about it].37 First of all, the reference to Benedict’s deposition
has been interpreted incorrectly as the deposition of the Council of Pisa in
1409 and has therefore puzzled many a critic since the nineteenth century:
“On ne sait trop à quels faits Froissart fait ici allusion” [It is hard to know to
what Froissart alludes].38 I believe that Froissart calls “deposition” the events
of 1399–1400, that is, the siege of Avignon by the forces of Charles VI and
the subsequent capitulation of Benedict whereby he submitted himself to
the power and will of the king of France:
La conclusion de ce pape Bénédict fut telle que . . . il vint à merchy parmy

ce que aucuns cardinaulx en pryèrent, et se porta le traittié . . . que jamais du
palais d’Avignon ne partiroit jusques à tant que unité seroit en l’Eglise.
Et furent mises sus luy bonnes et espéciales gardes. (XVI, 131)
[The end of this pope Benedict was such that he took pity on what some of
his cardinals begged him to do, and the treaty was concluded that he would
never leave the Avignon palace until unity was restored to the Church. And
he was placed under good and special guard.]
Although this is not a true deposition, it does amount to the relinquishing

of papal powers.39 Because the French king, his most important source of
support, no longer supports him, Benedict can be said to have been deposed
from power:“Aussi fut le pape Bénédict, qui se tenoit en Avignon et que les
Franchois avoient de grant voulenté mis sus et soustenu une grant espace,
en ce temps déposé” (XVI, 239) [Pope Benedict, who resided in Avignon
and whom the French willingly enthroned and supported for a long time,
was deposed also at this time].This is in line with the two other depositions
and the Liège episode at the end of the Chroniques, all of which highlight
the pacification of conflicts, the Franco-English war, and the papal schism.
After the deposition and death of Richard II and the crowning of Henry IV,
“[s]i fut . . . reprins en main [ce traittié] de la triève, et moult bien démené
et tellement par l’accord de toutes les parties, que il fut ordonné et juré à
tenir vingt-et-six ans à venir, et quatre que elles avoient duré, ce furent
trente ans” (XVI, 238) [the truce was reconsidered and so well negotiated
with the agreement of all the parties, that it was ordered and sworn to be
held for twenty-six years to come, and with four that had already gone by,
the truce extended to thirty years]. After the deposition of Wenceslas, with
whom Charles VI had come to the agreement of neutrality, Rupert, “ce
nouveau roy d’Allemaigne” “prommist . . . à remettre l’Eglise à ung”
(XVI, 239) [this new king of Germany promised . . . to restore unity to the
Church]. Following these events, Froissart reports that the citizens of Liège
refuse to either receive from or deliver any messages to the pope: “Ne
retourne plus pour tels choses sur le peyne d’estre noyé; car autant de messages
qui vendront icy pour telle matière, certes nous les jetterons en Mouse”
(XVI, 240) [Do not return any more for these affairs under the penalty of
drowning; as many messengers who will come here for this matter, certainly
we will throw them into the river Meuse]. Neutrality has been achieved:
“Tout le pays se tourna neutre à la contemplation du roy de France” (XVI,
239) [The whole country became neutral in consideration of the king of
France]. Froissart can thus celebrate the success of political neutrality: it
resolves divisions in the civic and religious bodies, eliminates conflict, and
purges by imposing a silence.The “deposition” of Benedict allows Froissart
to close his narrative, to fall silent. But it should be noted that Froissart
chooses to call this a deposition: this is convenient because it makes neu-
trality look like a position that resolves and starts afresh. The silence of
neutrality of Liège would be a position from which one could speak the
truth and resolve the divisions of schism and war; the silence of neutrality
would be free from the divisive and submissive power of language. By
extension, Froissart’s own fall into silence, in a moment of the achievement
and celebration of neutrality, heals the divisions within the historical narrative
itself. As Zink notes, the last word of the Chroniques, “Mouse,” “est le nom
de la rivière qui coule à quelque lieues de chez lui. Parti de Valenciennes sur
l’Escaut, après avoir couru le monde et écrit tant de pages, il se retrouve à
Chimay et met le point final sur la Meuse” [is the name of the river which
flows a few miles from him. Having left Valenciennes, having traversed the
world and written so many pages, he finds himself again in Chimay and
concludes with the Meuse].40
What then is the position of Froissart the historiographer and what is
the status of the historiography that he is writing? When Froissart reverses
the chronology of the Liège episode, placing it at the conclusion of his nar-
rative, he pays one last homage to the notion of neutrality by emphasizing
the role that neutrality has played throughout his narrative. Yet, although
meant to celebrate the prowess of neutrality, the chronological reversal
highlights the reversals to which a neutral historical narrative is subject. If,
as we saw, neutrality calls for murderous violence, then the papal schism,
with which the Chroniques end, embodies the tension and the conflict in
Froissart’s text, forcing Froissart to upset the chronology and misname the
facts (of depositions) in order to praise neutrality. Moreover, the lyricism of
silence, the beauty of “symétrie”41 [symmetry], is compromised by the last
sentence of the Chroniques, in which erupts, for one last time, the murder-
ous violence of neutrality:“Ne retourne plus pour tels choses sur le peyne
d’estre noyé; car autant de messages qui vendront icy pour telle matière,
certes nous les jetterons en Mouse.” Neutrality is kept with the refusal to
hear and to speak, and it can be maintained only with the threat of murder
which would constitute the final and ultimate silencing. Since the French
language, which proposes neutrality and in which the Chroniques are writ-
ten, cannot be disassociated from power, it forecloses all possibility of neu-
trality, and it reveals itself as inherently duplicitous. Abandoning language,
the narrative breaks off abruptly into silence. If the achievement of neutral-
ity of Liège, its silence, is the position from which to resolve the divisions of
schism and war, if the silence of neutrality is indeed free from the divisive and
submissive power of language, then the historiographer, at the moment of
the achievement of a thematic and structural balance of his work, at the
moment of the celebration of neutrality, cannot speak again. It is the only
way for Froissart to maintain and celebrate his own neutrality, to escape the
violence of neutrality; he can no longer deliver or receive any new mes-
sages. Froissart’s silent neutrality will not produce judgment in the matters
of papal schism, or for that matter in the deposition of Richard II or
Wenceslas. To speak again, to dispense justice and judgment would mean
assuming a master position and, as we saw, neutrality in the name of justice
only leads again into violence: “le plus droitturier” is “le plus criminel
[cruel] seigneur.” Neutral language dominates and submits. The achieve-
ment of neutrality silences the messenger—the translator of conflict—which is
Froissart’s position par excellence. Indeed, Froissart’s voice is drowned in the
river Meuse, the last word of the Chroniques, which flows by his native town.
If language dissimulates power and affect under neutrality, then adopting
the position of neutrality in order to write a historiography ultimately
affects the ability to speak. Therefore, the final silence of neutrality can
be read as a desire to negate the power of language and the violence of
neutrality.The fall into silence affirms that it is impossible to speak frankly
in the neutral mode without participating in the violence of the conflict.
Neutrality cannot be satisfied in language. Froissart’s achievement, then,
does not lie merely in providing a neutral translation of the war, but rather
in problematizing the very possibility of neutral authorship.The tension of
the schism and the tension of the conflict of the Hundred Years’War remain
open in the form of an abrupt, suspended ending—the only end possible
for the neutral historiographer.
Notes
I wish to thank Virginie Greene for her invaluable input and inspiration.
1. All references, unless otherwise noted, are to: Œuvres de Froissart: Chroniques,
ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove (Bruxelles, 1867–1877; repr. Osnabrück: Biblio
Verlag, 1967).All translations are mine.
2. Most recently, Michel Zink posed this question:“Les Chroniques de Froissart
s’achèvent avec les événements de l’année 1400. S’achèvent ou s’inter-
rompent?” [Froissart’s Chroniques end with the events of the year 1400. Do
they end or are they interrupted?]. Froissart et le temps (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1998), p. 89.
3. Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’Occident médiéval (Paris:
Aubier Montaigne, 1980), pp. 332–336.
4. See Peter Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History. Truth, Myth and
Fiction in the Chroniques (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 123 and 303;
Kevin Brownlee, “Mimesis, Autorité, et Meurtre dans le Voyage en Béarn de
Jean Froissart” in Translatio Studii, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Kevin
Brownlee, Mary B. Speer, Lory J. Walters (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi,
2000), p. 82 [65–85]; Peter Dembowski, Jean Froissart and his Méliador.
Context, Craft, and Sense (Lexington, KY: French Forum Publishers, 1983),
pp. 16 and 44; Zrinka Stahuljak, “Jean Froissart’s Chroniques: Translatio and
the Impossible Apprenticeship of Neutrality,” in The Politics of Translation in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise
von Flotow and Daniel Russell (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001);
Michel Zink, Froissart et le temps, pp. 96 and 100.
5. “Douquel costet qu’il soit” (1st redaction, II, 2) [“from whichever side he
may be”].
6. In Lettenhove, the first redaction corresponds to the Amiens MS, the second
and the third redaction correspond to MSS. A and B of Chroniques de Jean
Froissart, ed. Léon Mirot, Société de l’histoire de France (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 1931), tome 12 (henceforth abbreviated as SHF), and the fourth
redaction corresponds to the Rome MS edited in Chroniques. Début du premier
livre. Manuscrit de Rome, ed. George T. Diller (Genève: Droz, 1972).
7. See 2nd redaction, II, 5.
8. See the first, second, and third redactions of the prologue for Froissart’s
statement on the passage from his written source to oral testimonies. Compare
to the fourth redaction where Froissart makes no mention of Jean le Bel’s
Chronique.
9. Brownlee,“Mimesis,Autorité, et Meurtre,” p. 69.
10. “[Les] discours collectifs . . . constituent un exposé passionné et neutre . . .
Neutre, puisqu’ils évitent à Froissart de prendre parti en son nom propre”
[Collective speeches make for a passionate and neutral account. Neutral,
since Froissart then does not have to choose sides in his own name] Zink,
Froissart et le temps, p. 100.
11. For an analysis of Froissart’s transnational point of view, see Stahuljak,“Jean
Froissart’s Chroniques.”
12. Pierre Tucoo-Chala, La Vicomté de Béarn et le problème de sa souveraineté des

origines à 1620 (Bordeaux: Bière Imprimeur, 1961).
13. “Cruel” is a manuscript variant given by Lettenhove.
14. Fébus actively promoted the mythology of Phoebus, the sun god.
15. Stahuljak,“Jean Froissart’s Chroniques.”
16. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History, p. 161.
17. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History, p. 161.
18. Brownlee,“Mimésis,Autorité, et Meurtre,” p. 81.
19. Brownlee, “Mimésis, Autorité, et Meurtre,” p. 82. Fébus accidentally strikes
the vein on the throat of young Gaston with “une petit long coutelet dont
il appareilloit ses ongles et nettoioit” (XI, 99) [with a small long knife with
which he cut and cleaned his nails]. But it was the king of Navarre, Fébus’
brother-in-law, who gave the poison to young Gaston telling him that the
powder could cure any sickness of his father: “Son père l’occist voirement,
mais le roy de Navarre luy donna le coup de la mort” (XI, 100) [His father
really killed him, but the king of Navarre struck him with death].
20. Pierre Tucoo-Chala,“Froissart dans le Midi Pyrénéen,” in Froissart: Historian,
ed, J. J. N. Palmer (Suffolk:The Boydell Press, 1981), p. 127 [118–131].
21. I do not agree with Ainsworth that Fébus is exonerated because he would
not be capable of such violence, but rather I believe Froissart justifies his acts
precisely because Fébus is capable of violence which protects his neutrality.
22. Despite Froissart’s rendition of the events, the French position on Lourdes is
even clearer when we learn that Gaston de Foix became the vassal of
the king of France in 1375, although the homage did not take place until
1390 in Mazères. It was reaffirmed by Matthieu de Foix, the successor to
Gaston, in 1392.
23. “L’iretaige du roy d’Engleterre . . . ne povoit vendre ne donner ne alouer
que il ne fust traitres, laquelle chose il ne voloit pas estre, mais loyal envers
son naturel seigneur” (SHF XII, 58) [Pierre-Arnaut could not sell nor give
nor rent the inheritance of the king of England without becoming a traitor,
which he did not want to be, but he wanted to be loyal to his natural lord].
“Il le navra moult villainement en cinq lieux” (XI, 70) [He badly injured
him in five places].
24. In Lettenhove:“Ho! Ho! Faulx traittre, as-tu dis que non? Par ceste teste, tu
ne l’as pas dit pour néant” (XI, 70) [Ho, ho, false traitor, have you said ‘no’?
By my life, you did not say it for nought].
25. Neutrality is thus linked to the just acquisition of the lands, as well as the
increase in wealth of the count of Foix, which dazzled Froissart.
26. This attempt at neutralizing violence has been read by Sylvia Huot as an
eruption of somnambulism in Froissart’s work:“It is in and through other fig-
ures that we now locate deviant violence, irrationality, and the eruption of a
hallucinatory world in which repressed fears and fantasies are all too real. . . .
[I]t remains that Froissart simultaneously acknowledges and denies Gaston’s
traumatic potency, the transgressive passion that he embodies. In so doing he
also simultaneously incriminates and exculpates himself as chronicler . . .”
“Unruly Bodies, Unspeakable Acts: Pierre de Béarn, Camel de Camois, and
Actaeon in the Writings of Jean Froissart,” Exemplaria 14.1 (2002): 98

[79–98].
27. As Chantal de Saulnier has shown, Fébus excessively loved hunting and was
fascinated by the excess of violence in the hunt. See her article “Gaston
Fébus: De la violence contrôlée à la folie meutrière,” in La Violence dans le
monde médiéval (Aix: Centre Universitaire d’Etudes et de Recherches
Médiévales d’Aix, 1994): 491 [487–498]. Most interesting, Fébus sought in
hunting a form of equal and just, that is neutralized, relationship of force:
“Pour plaire à Fébus, cette violence doit être équitablement répartie entre les
deux adversaires et surtout ne pas être gratuite” [In order for Fébus to like
this violence, it has to be equally divided between two adversaries and it
certainly should not be deliberate] (ibid., 492).
28. This is particularly important because Froissart was from Hainaut, which
switched allegiance to France in 1346. Froissart says in Book III, “ung
escuier du conte, qui s’appelloit Ernaulton du Pin, lequel moult liement me
rechupt pour cause de ce que j’estoie François” (XI, 84) [an esquire of the
count, whose name was Ernauton de Pau, who received me gladly because
I was French]. Froissart also praises the fact that Fébus spoke to him “non pas
en son gascon, mais en bon et beau franchois” (XI, 85) [not in his Gascon
language, but in good and beautiful French].
29. This view of language is confirmed when Henry IV, at his crowning,
addresses the people in English and is met with overwhelming approval; see
Lettenhove, notes, p. 357.
30. Froissart explicitly compares the accusations of Richard II’s effeminacy with
Edward II’s homosexuality, which was the cause of his deposition and death:
“[E]t en la fin les Londriens, quant ils veirent que ce roy Edouard se mésu-
soit et estoit tout assoté sur messire Hues le Despensier, ils y pourveirent, car
ils mandèrent à la royne Ysabel que s’elle povoit tant faire que elle euist trois
cens armures de fer, elle venist en Angleterre et . . . [ils] la . . . metteroient
en possession du royaulme d’Angleterre” (XVI, 158) [And in the end, the
Londoners, when they saw that this king Edward was abused in his power
and was besotted with sire Hugh the Dispenser, they took care of it. They
sent a message to Queen Isabelle that if she could assemble a force of 300
armored knights and come to England, they would give her the possession
of the kingdom of England]. Richard II is first compared to Edward II in
XVI, 152.
31. Froissart does use “soubmettre de la papalité” (XVI, 118) and “desmett[re]
du nom de la papalité” (XVI, 118). See also XVI, 83–89; XVI, 116–125.
32. See E. Delaruelle, E.-R. Labande and P. Ourliac, L’Eglise au temps du Grand
Schisme et de la crise conciliaire, (1378–1449) Histoire de l’Eglise 14 ([Paris]:
Bloud & Gay, 1962) for the history of this method. See also Froissart, XVI,
134–135.
33. The insinuation is also that Bordeaux, Richard II’s place of birth, predisposes
him to the French. It also introduces the question of the legitimacy of
Richard II’s birth, see XVI, 199–201, and above XVI, 159–160. Likewise,
had Pierre-Arnaut accepted to submit to Fébus’s command for the love of
“lignage,” he would have been seen to occupy the submissive position from
affect.
34. Zink, Froissart et le temps, p. 90.
38. Lettenhove, XVI, 410. Zink, for example, situates it in 1408 (Froissart et le
temps, p. 110).
39. Benedict actually submitted to the duke of Orleans. However, in a few years,
he regained his powers; see Delaruelle, Labande and Ourliac, L’Eglise au
temps du Grand Schisme.
CHAPTER 8
PORTRAITS OF AUTHORS AT THE END

OF THE MIDDLE AGES: TOMBS IN MAJESTY
AND CARNIVALESQUE EPITAPHS
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
Translation: Darla Gervais
chosen poet is introduced at the beginning of the manuscripts in

A which the complete works of Guillaume de Machaut are collected, a
chosen poet referred to by his name, “Guillaume.” The forces naming the
poet are two allegorical powers, Nature and Love, who distinguish him as a
poet “fourmé a part” [created apart].1 A chosen poetess, as a woman, the
lowest among the low, receives the grace of an apparition. Three ladies,
Reason, Righteousness, and Justice, on the model of the annunciation to
the Virgin, make known to her that she will write the Livre de la Cité des
Dames.2 These ladies also urge her to continue her work on Le Livre des Trois
Vertus.3 The poetess is referred to by the family ties linking her to these
powers, not by her proper name (notice the subtle difference with
Guillaume de Machaut), but by a relationship: “Fille chere” [Dear
Daughter].4 This is how the first lady addresses Christine.
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages set up a way of entering into a text.There
are loci one must pass through at the beginning of a work, the exordium
topoï.5 Loci, of course, but also characters to place in their relationship one
to another: the author, the patron, the person to whom the book is dedicated,
and the reader.This particular configuration makes up what might be called
the writing stage. This stage may vary and the plays played upon it be
directed in different ways.Yet in what way does the introduction of a chosen
poet modify the whole situation?
158 JAC QU E L I N E C E R QU I G L I N I - TO U L E T
From “For Whom Is It Written?” to “Why Is It Written?”

I begin looking at the transformation of the question “for whom is it written?”
into a more existential question,“why is it written?” by examining the rela-
tionship between the author and his patron.There are three possible situations.
The patron is a historical character, referred to in the text; in this case, the
author introduces himself as a translator. He says that he is turning one book
(given by the patron) into another, his own, and putting one language,
Latin, into another, the vernacular. He presents himself as a craftsman,
investing in his work “sa peine et son entention” [his effort and his dili-
gence].This stance may be recognized as that taken by Chrétien de Troyes
at the beginning of several of his romances. Thus, at the beginning of the
Chevalier de la Charrette, when he speaks to the countess of Champagne:“Mes
tant dirai ge que mialz oevre / Ses comandemans an ceste oevre / Que sans
ne painne que g’i mete” (21–23) [I shall say only that her command is more
important in this undertaking than any thought or effort I may expend],6 or
at the beginning of the Conte du Graal: “Ce est li contes do greal / Don li
cuens li bailla lo livre” (64–65) [it is the Story of the Grail, / whose book was
given him by the count].7 The patron is here the count Philip of Alsace.
In the second configuration, authority comes from an allegorical power,
most often Love in lyric poetry, in accordance with the time-honored
expression,“Amour me semont de chanter” [Love calls me to sing]. Singing
appears as natural.The poet sings as the bird sings. It is interesting to observe
the transformation of the expression during the fourteenth century. One
goes from singing to writing. Thus, one can read in L’orloge amoureux by
Jean Froissart, for example: “Amours / . . . m’ordonne / Et me semont de
mon estat trettier” (37–39) [Love / . . . orders me / And calls me to speak
of my state].8 The function of the poet is thus modified. By order of Love,
he becomes the secretary of his own heart. He writes down, he transcribes.
The loveliest formulation in its complexity is perhaps to be found in
Dante’s Purgatorio:
I’ mi son un che, quando

Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo
ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando (canto XXIV, 52–54)
[I am one who, when Love inspires me, take note and, as he dictates deep
within me, so I set it forth.]9
The debate surrounding the translation of noto is well known;André Pézard

chooses to translate it as “chanter” [to sing], and Jacqueline Risset as “noter”
[to take down]: “Je suis homme qui note, quand Amour me souffle, et
comme il dicte au cœur, je vais signifiant” [I am a man who takes down,
when Love inspires me, and as he dictates to my heart, so I signify].10
AU T H O R S AT T H E E N D O F T H E M I D D L E A G E S 159
In one of her rondeaux, Christine de Pizan maintains the reference to

the bird as a sign of both singing and the present instant; nonetheless, it is
no longer time to sing but to make (faire):
Ce rondellet ay fait presentement,

Car survenu m’en est le sentement,
De vraie amour, qui mon cuer tout enflamme,
Est tout venu le doulz enortement
Qui esjoïst mon cuer trop grandement,
Dont suis plus gay que oiselet sus la rame,
Tout en pensant a la beauté ma dame (Rondeau 19)11
[I have just made this rondelet, / Because the feeling has come upon me, /
From true love, which inflames my heart completely, / came the sweet
exhortation / that rejoices my heart greatly, / And because of which I am
more joyful than a bird on its branch, / While at the same time I think of my
Lady’s beauty].
Above all, Love is no longer the only power giving the order to write.The
chosen poet takes dictation from an allegorical power that gives him or her
access to the spheres of knowledge. In this case, the poet transcribes scenes
which he or she was given to see.This is Christine de Pizan’s stance in Le
Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune in which she converts pictures, paintings from
the “salle de Fortune,” into narrative.12
The third situation is that in which the poet gives himself or herself the
order to write. Guillaume de Machaut puts it thus at the beginning of the
Voir Dit:
Si que parfondement pensoie

Par quel maniere je feroie
Aucune chose de nouvel
Pour tenir mon cuer en revel (57–60)
[And then I gave deep thought / To how I might compose / Some kind of
new work / That would keep my spirits high.]13
And Martin Le Franc remarks in his prologue to the Champion des Dames
“je retiroye mes sens des choses foraines” [I withdrew my senses from external
things].14 The expression is similar to that of Christine de Pizan in
L’Advision Christine: “Adonc cloy mes portes, c’est assavoir mes sens, que
plus ne fussent tant vagues aux choses foraines” [I closed those gates that are
the senses, which no longer wandered amongst external things].15 Martin
continues thus:“et selon la doctrine de Perse en moy meismes me queroye”
[and following the doctrine of Persius I searched within myself].16 Guillaume
de Machaut names the forces necessary for poetic composition: “sans,”
“matiere,” and “sentement” (62) [theme, material, and inspiration].17 While

sens and matiere are terms appearing in prologues as early as the twelfth cen-
tury, this is not the case for sentement. How might this expression be under-
stood when it is appearing for the first time in thinking on love-literature in
the thirteenth century and becoming overwhelmingly important in poetic
theory in the fourteenth century? The Roman de la Poire, in vocabulary
directly echoing that of Chrétien de Troyes in his prologues, says the fol-
lowing:
Molt pert son travail et sa peine,

Se il ne sent ou sentu a
Icelui mal qu’il i metra
Si com Amors me fist sentir. (352–356)18
[He wastes much of his work and effort / Who does not feel or has not felt /
Such great pain as he will put into it, / Just like Love has made me feel].
From the Remede de Fortune to the Livre du Voir Dit, Guillaume de Machaut
states the presiding principle:“Car qui de sentement ne fait / Son dit et son
chant contrefait” (405–406) [For he who does not create from feeling /
feigns both his poem and his song].19 But sentement is not to be understood
within a system of opposition of the mind and heart. Many examples
demonstrate the intellectual dimension this word can take. Christine de
Pizan says of her project to write about Fortune:“Fort seroit que j’en parlasse /
Proprement presentement, / A si petit sentement, / Comme j’ay” (22–25)
[It would be difficult for me to speak / properly now of these things, / with
the small understanding / that I possess].20 She points out endlessly her
“sentement trop leger” (6610) [very slight understanding],21 her “sente-
ment” which is not “En sens fondé” (36–37) [for I lack perceptiveness / Of
profound meaning],22 “son engin et sentement” [intelligence and inclina-
tion].23 The word sentement is often paired with the word entendement. Thus
says Guillaume de Machaut in his general prologue:
Einsois y doy mon sentement

Mettre et tout mon entendement,
Cuer, corps, pooir et quanque j’ay. (5: 21–23)24
[Thus must I put into it all of my feeling, / All of my understanding, / Heart,
body, power and all that I have].
The real opposition is between sentement and fiction, between sentement and
what Christine de Pizan will call controuvement:
De meschief, d’anui, de peine,
Je fais dis communement,
Car selon mon sentement

Sont, et de chose certaine;
Mais quant d’autrui voulenté
Faire dis me vueil chargier,
De cuer mal entalenté
Les me fault si loings cerchier,
Et de pensée foraine;
Pour ce y metz je longuement:
C’est un droit controuvement. (Virelay 15: 1–11)25
[Of unhappiness, pain and sadness, / I commonly make poetry, / For these
from my own feeling / Come, and are things of which I am certain; / But
when following another’s will / I wish to take on writing poems, / Because
my heart is so ill-disposed, / I have to search far for them, / And in wandering
thoughts; / For that reason, I take such a long time: / They are truly an
invention].
Sentement is rooted in what has been felt, in the truth of experience and
thought, but it is equally rooted in inner decision. Sentement is thus also
related to will. It is what makes one write, with the help of God in some
cases. At the end of the prologue to his Roman de Mélusine, and when he is
about to begin telling the story of the castle of Lusignan, Coudrette writes:
“Maiz qu’il plaise au doulz roy de gloire / De m’en donner le sentement /
Sans lequel on ne fait nayent” (126–128) [Provided it please the sweet King
of Glory / To give me inspiration for it; / For without this, nothing
is done].26
The presence of sentement in poetic theory thus complicates the rela-
tionship with the patron, when he or she is different from the author. How
is one to respond to a commission to compose on the subject of love if one
is not oneself in love, but still committed to answering to the ethic of the
writing of sentement? Furthermore, why would one wish to follow this
ethic? It is because this ethic is what sets one apart as an author, according
to one of the etymologies of the word author during the period, relating it
to the word authentic.The answer can be summarized in two words: will and
memory. In order to write about love, one must be in love or must have
been in love. In La Fontaine amoureuse, Guillaume de Machaut sings of the
prince’s loves, but reminds the reader that he himself is in love:
Je respondi que non feroie

Et que si amoureus estoie
Que la fonteinne ne son mestre
Ne porroient d’amours plus mettre
En mon cuer qu’il i en avoit . . . (1425–1429)27
[I answered that I would not do it / And that I was so much in love / That
neither the fountain nor its master / Would be capable to add / More love in
my heart].
Christine de Pizan does likewise. Once her husband has died, she writes
about an experience of love she remembers, accepting the commission
voluntarily.The envoy of a ballade serving as a prologue to her collection of
Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame demonstrates this fact:
Prince, bien voy qu’il se vauldroit mieux taire

Que ne parler a gré voy cy comment
Payer m’en fault, d’amende volontaire,
Cent balades d’amoureux sentement. (25–28)
[Prince, I see well that it would be better to be silent / than to speak unwillingly.
Here is how / I must pay a voluntary fine: / one hundred ballads of amorous
feelings].28
One can then write “d’autrui sentement” [about others’ feelings].29 The
writer, even when he or she is commissioned, is no longer a servant or a
minstrel, but is instead an author. He or she freely submits to order.
What difference does this new attitude make? It modifies both the con-
ditions of writing and its ends. The poet often presents himself or herself
writing as if cut off from the world, far from the “choses foraines” [external
things] and seeking the solitude that is, according to the words of Christine
de Pizan, “une solitude volumtaire” (23635) [voluntary solitude].30 Since
writing is no longer necessarily a response to a commission, the writer must
find people to whom he or she can dedicate his or her book; hence
Christine’s very striking strategy of multiple dedications.Writing becomes
a personal struggle to defend one’s ideas and gain acknowledgment for
one’s work. The case of Martin Le Franc and his Champion des Dames is a
perfect example of this. The metaphor of the battle and struggle for truth
and glory is already present in the prologue:
et ne souffist pas a engin orguilleux lire les fais et les livres des aultres se
quelque fois a la plume il n’espreuve sa force, comme a tout vaillant homme
d’armes veant la gloire de cil qui a bien combatu es lices se esboulissent les
vaines et tressault le cueur ou a pareil ou a greigneur honneur acquerir, ver-
itablement je deliberoye de mettre en avant mes rimes et mes vers, prenant
confort en saint Jerosme qui, nonobstant la haulteur de sa sapience et
l’aournement et doulceur de son divin langage, fust en ses plus grandes euvres
des mesdisans persecuté.31
[and it is not enough for a proud intellect to read the deeds and books of others
if he doesn’t test his own force by his pen, just like any valiant warrior, whose
veins boil and heart skips out of the desire to gain as great or greater honor
upon seeing the glory of one who has fought well in a tournament, I truly
decided to put forward my rhymes and my verses, taking comfort in Saint
Jerome, who notwithstanding the height of his knowledge and the beauty
and sweetness of his divine language, was persecuted by slanderers even in his
greatest works].
The models are inspiring. On one hand the warrior, on the other, the
author par excellence, the one who had produced that text above all others,
the vulgate. Martin thus sends his Champion des Dames to the duke of
Burgundy.The return of the book is gripping: “[c]repy en feulletz plus de
vingt, / De grifs et de couteaux navré” (4: 29–30) [of which more than
twenty pages were crumpled, / and which was damaged by scratches and
knife-cuts]; the book addresses a lament to “maistre Martin Le Franc son
acteur” [master Martin Le Franc its author].32 A new and more intimate
relationship has grown up between an author writing in French and his
book, now his son.33 Martin uses this dialogue with his book to explain the
originality of his work and of his function. His activity is no longer comparable
to that of other producers (peasants, merchants) or to that of warriors.All of
these receive the reward for their work immediately. He, instead, has to
count on the passing of time and on the recognition of the generations to
come.Thus speaks the poet to his book:“Car moy mis en terre, les vers / Et
les feulles te flouriront” (43: 339–340) [For once I myself am put into the
ground, the vers [greenery/verses/worms] / And the leaves will flourish
upon you].There is a complex play at work here surrounding the word vers,
at the same time green branches but also versification struggling against the
rotting of the corpse represented by worms.The author begins to exist once
he has disappeared and survives in his work. It is this very paradox I wish to
explore, that is, the second aspect of the constitution of an authorial figure,
his establishment as an authority by posterity, by the very sound of the name.
Tombs in Majesty
The first indication is the appearance of the author’s planctus. Funereal
laments in poetry until the fourteenth century generally had as their subject
a nobleman, a heroic warrior, or a great lord.There is perhaps one exception
to be found in provençal in the planh [complaint or lament] Giraut de
Bornelh wrote for Raimbaut d’Orange. However, Raimbaut was at the
same time prince and poet.With his double ballade deploring the death of
his master Guillaume de Machaut, “le noble rethorique,” [the noble poet]
Eustache Deschamps signs the birth certificate of a genre and gives the first
sign of recognition of a poet writing in French.34 A century will go by
before this genre really blossoms. In 1466, Simon Gréban writes his
Complaincte de la mort de maistre Jacques Milet qui composa la Destruction de

Troye;35 in 1476, Jean Robertet composes La Complaincte de la mort de maistre
George Chastellain.36 The author has acceded to a status, has earned a name
that, like that of a nobleman, brings recognition. Jean Molinet reports that
at the chapter of the Toison d’or, held at Valenciennes on May 2, 1473,
George Chastelain was made “chevalier ès lettres” by Charles the Bold for
“la subtilité de son art” [subtlety of his art].37
The Writers’ Cemetery

Another sign of the writer’s accession to authority is the poetic cemetery.
The best example of this is in the Livre du Cuer d’amours espris by René
d’Anjou. In René’s cemetery, it is not just unhappy and well-known lovers
who are celebrated, but also poets, masters of the rhetoric and theory of
love, masters of love writing. According to René d’Anjou, this “grant et
plantureux” [great and flourishing] cemetery might also pass as a library.
There are six graves “non pas loign des autres mais comme mises a part et
environnees de mur pour plus grant excellence et espicialité, lesquelles
estoient en nombre jucques a six et non plus” [not far from the others but
as if set apart and surrounded by a wall because of the greatest excellence
and distinction of these, of which there were six and no more].38 They are
those of Ovid, Guillaume de Machaut, Boccacio, Jean de Meun, Petrarch,
and Alain Chartier. This is indeed a prestigious anthology and a kind of
poetic Parnassus; through its epitaphs it is also a first draft of what will
become the lives of the artists genre, and will be made illustrious by
Georgio Vasari’s lives of painters.39 The poetic cemetery is a spatial repre-
sentation of lists of famous writers that first makes its appearance in Gilles
Li Muisis’s Méditations in the middle of the fourteenth century.40 One
witnesses here the constitution of a canon that truly takes shape in the Arts
de seconde rhétorique.This marks the birth in literary history of a genealogical
way of thinking about filiation and succession.Thus, at the beginning of the
Règles de la seconde rhétorique:
Et tout premierement maistre Guillaume de Saint Amour, lequel ou parvis de

Paris fist destruire Heresie,Ypocrisie et Papelardie . . . Et fut le premier qui
traitta de la nouvelle science.41
[And first comes master Guillaume de Saint Amour, who in the cathedral
square in Paris destroyed Heresy, Hypocrisy and Pope-Holiness . . .42 And he
was the first to write about the new science].
This is the figure of the inventor: “cil qui premier trouva” [the one who
found first].
Aprèz ycellui vint maistre Guillaume de Lorris, lequel commencha le

Rommant de la Rose . . .
Aprèz vint maistre Jehan de Meun, lequel parfist ycellui Rommant de la
Rose . . . .43
[After him came master Guillaume de Lorris, who began the Romance of
the Rose . . .
After came master Jean de Meun, who achieved and perfected the said
Romance of the Rose . . .].
Then comes a long list including brief presentations and judgements of the
works, ending with:
Aprèz sont de present Colinet l’Alexis, Hannequin le Fevre, . . . et pluseurs

aultres, qui enssivent les regles telles que nous mettrons en nostre traitié.44
[Then presently there are Colinet l’Alexis, Hannequin le Fevre, . . . and sev-
eral others, who follow the rules in the way we will write them down in this
treatise].
These two figures are relatively unknown. Even though such lists are made
so that those mentioned last participate in the glory of the ancestors, the
method does not always work.There is a similar list of authors with a few
lengthy commentaries suggesting authentic critiques in the Champion des
Dames de Martin Le Franc.Thus Martin analyzes in detail the Jugement du
Roi de Bohême by Guillaume de Machaut and the conflicting opinions
about women presented in the work. He devotes an important section to
Christine de Pizan introduced by the following rubric:
Le champion en reprenant la fetardise ou muableté de l’engin franczois, parle

de dame Cristine, dont la renommée est tres fresche et tres clere.45
[The champion, criticizing the laziness and instability of the French disposi-
tion, speaks of Lady Christine, whose reputation is so bright and clear].
The models thus become fixed: the Roman de la Rose for the fourteenth
century, Alain Chartier for the fifteenth. In the sixteenth century, the latter
is considered to be the father of French eloquence, as Pierre Fabri and Jean
Bouchet testify, and in the same fashion Marot makes Villon the father of
French poetry. This is genealogical thinking opening the way for literary
history.
In the fifteenth century the first literary quarrels about French works
strengthen the figure of the author. The quarrel of the Roman de la Rose,
surrounding the figure of Jean de Meun and the interpretation of the
romance, took place between Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson on the
one hand, and the brothers Col and Jean de Montreuil on the other.They
debated the relationship between poetic and ethical theory, the issue of
literalness, and swearwords. Particularly interesting is the way Jean de
Meun’s defenders advocate the distinction between an author and his char-
acters. Pierre Col proclaims that words put into the mouth of the “Jaloux”
ought not be attributed to Jean de Meun:
et dy que maistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait

chascun personnaige parler selonc qui luy appartient: c’est assavoir le Jaloux
comme jaloux, la Vielle come la Vielle, et pareillement des autres. Et est trop
mal pris de dire que l’aucteur tiengne les maulx estre en fame que le Jalous
en faisant son personnaige, propose.
[and I say that in his book Master Jean de Meun introduces personages, and
he has each personage speak according to its nature, which is to say the
Jealous Man jealously, the Old Woman as an old woman, and likewise for the
others. And it would be ill-taken to say that the author holds to really be in
women those evils that the Jealous Man, playing his role, proposes].46
This line of argument can also be found in Martin le Franc’s preface to the
Champion des Dames: “se en ceste livre est trouvee parolle desplaisante ou
trop legiere ou trop aigre ou trop obscure, on doit considerer la nature du
personnage qui parle” [if in this book one finds a word which is unpleasant
or too flippant or too harsh or too obscure, one must consider the nature of
the character who is speaking].47 The author is responsible for his work: he
must account for it.
Other quarrels fester. When profane and sacred poetry are opposed,
Boccacio defends the former in his De Genealogia Deorum.Yet another quarrel
opposes the partisans of clarity to those holding out for obscurity in
literature. In a letter written by Giovanni Moccia, we learn that in the
Avignon circle Laurent de Premierfait, the French translator of Boccacio,
was a partisan of obscurity, whereas Moccia as well as Muret defended
claritas.48 Petrarch, finally, unleashed a storm of controversy with the following
phrase from the Seniles: “Oratores et poetae extra Italiam non quaerentur”
[Orators and poets are not be found outside of Italy].49 According to him,
there was a single exception: Philippe de Vitry. In a letter from Padua in
February 1350, Petrarch writes to the latter, saying that he is: “poeta nunc
unicus galliarum” [now the sole French poet].50
The idea of a national poetry, of a poet rooted in his or her own native
soil begins to appear. Let us recall the incipit to Dante’s Divine Comedy:
“Incipit comoedia Dantis Alagherii florentini natione non moribus” [Here
begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, florentine by nation but not by
morals]. Eustache Deschamps makes a list of the poets of Champagne:
Dont cinq d’iceulx met en figure:

Le Mangeur, qui par tresgrant cure
Voult Escolastique traictier,
Saincte More Ovide esclairier,
Vittry, Machault de haulte emprise, . . .
Princes, le cinq fait a prisier,
Clamenges, et auctorisier,
Que rethorique loe et prise
Et tuit ly poete estrangier;
Cilz est de Langres tresorier (ballade 1474: 24–28 and 31–35)51
[Then five of these I will show here: / Le Mangeur, who with great care /
wishes to write about scholasticism, / Sainte-More who wants to explain
Ovid, / Vitry, Machaut who has the greatest accomplishments, . . . / Prince,
we ought to praise the fifth, / Clamanges, and to honor him / whom rhetoric
praises and prizes / as do all foreign poets; / he is the treasurer of Langres].
Villon, in a play on his name, introduces himself as a Parisian:
Je suis François, dont il me poise,

Né de Paris emprès Pontoise
[I am François which is my cross
Born in Paris near Pontoise].52
The author begins to exist by name; whether it is engraved in marble or in

the memory of his successors, it lasts. It is also interesting to note the devel-
opment during this period of literary genres based on the phenomenon of
the signature. I am thinking here of the Testaments, which exist only as an
utterance of the “I” and which are based on the sketching out of a portrait
or a persona.53 It is of course possible for a testament to be satirical or a por-
trait to be grotesque, but even if inspiration is turned into expiration, the
gesture itself remains, setting an individual apart and giving him a voice to
speak of heritage. From the tombs in majesty of René d’Anjou to the car-
navalesque tomb of François Villon, the figure of the grand écrivain [great
writer] has come to exist for posterity under its two appearances of exalta-
tion or derision.
One last historical jest remains to be examined. As early as 1480,
François Villon appears as a character in a comic text, the Repue franche, on
an equal footing with Pathelin in the call to a parodic sermon:
Venez y d’amont et d’aval,
Les hoirs de deffung Pathelin
Qui savés jargon jobelin,

Cappitaine du pont Abailon,
Tous les subgetz François Villon,
Soiés, ad ce coup, resveillés. (16–21)54
[Come from upstream and down, / you heirs of the late Pathelin / who speak
the tongue of rogues, / Captain of the Pont à Billon,55 / all subjects of
François Villon, / by this stroke be awakened].
Is this transformation of the figure of the author into a mythical character a

coronation? Between the patron and the reader, has the author now found
his place?
Notes
This essay is a revised and translated version of an article published in Académie
des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Comptes Rendus des séances de l’année 2002, avril-juin
(paris, De Boccard, 2002), pp. 785–796.
1. Guillaume de Machaut, Œuvres, ed. Ernest Hoepffner, SATF, 3 vols (Paris:
Firmin Didot, Champion, 1908, 1911, 1921). The Prologue is in volume 1.
Unless otherwise indicated by a note, the translations from the original texts
are those of the translator.
2. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames. Original text in La città delle
Dame, 2nd edn., ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards and Patrizia Caraffi (Milan: Luni
Editrice, 1998). English translation: The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl
Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1998).
3. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Trois Vertus, ed. Charity Cannon Willard and
Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1989).
4. Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, p. 46.
5. See: Ernst Robert Curtius,“Topique de l’exorde,” La littérature européenne et le
Moyen Age latin, trans. Jean Bréjoux (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1956), pp. 106–110. In English:“Topics of the exordium,” European Literature
and the Latin Middle-Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), pp. 85–89.
6. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Charles Méla (Paris:
Librairie Générale Française, 1992). English translation: Chrétien de Troyes,
“The Knight of the Cart,” in The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes, trans.
David Staines (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 170.
7. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal, ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Librairie
Générale Française, 1990). English translation: Chrétien de Troyes, The Story
of the Grail (Li contes del Graal or Perceval), ed. Rupert T. Pickens, trans.William
W. Kibler (New York: Garland, 1990), p. 5.
8. Jean Froissart, L’Orloge amoureux, ed. Peter F. Dembowski (Geneva: Droz, 1986).
9. Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday,
2003). This is the Dante Project translation (Copyright 1997–1998, The
Trustees of Princeton University and Professor Robert Hollander). Dorothy
Sayers translates noto as “sing” in The Divine Comedy, trans. Dorothy Sayers
(New York: Basic Books, 1962), p. 255. (Translator’s note).
10. Dante, Œuvres complètes, trans. and ed. André Pézard (Paris:
Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1965), p. 1289. Dante, La Divine
Comédie. Le Purgatoire, trans. Jacqueline Risset (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).
11. Christine de Pizan, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Maurice Roy, SATF, 3 vols. (Paris:
Firmin Didot, 1886-1896), vol. 1.
12. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, ed. Suzanne Solente,
SATF, 4 vols. (Paris: Picard, 1959–1966). See our study:“D’une mise en scène
du texte littéraire à la fin du Moyen Age: sa naissance dans l’œuvre d’art,” in
La littérature et les arts figurés de l’Antiquité à nos jours,Actes du XIVe Congrès de
l’Association Guillaume Budé (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2001), pp. 529–538.
13. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre dou Voir Dit, ed. Paul Imbs and Jacqueline
Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1999). English
translation: Le Livre dou Voir Dit (The book of the True Poem), ed. Daniel Leech-
Wilson, trans. R. Barton Palmer (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 7.
14. Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, ed. Robert Deschaux, 5 vols.
(Paris, Champion, 1999), vol. 1, p. 1.
15. Christine de Pizan, Le livre de l’advision Christine, ed. Christine Reno and
Liliane Dulac (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 110. English Translation: The
Writings of Christine de Pizan, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (New York: Persea
Books, 1994), p. 17.
16. Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, vol. 1, pp. 1–2.
17. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir Dit.Trans. R. Barton Palmer.
18. Tibaut, Le Roman de la Poire, ed. Christiane Marchello-Nizia (Paris: SATF,
1984).
19. Guillaume de Machaut, Le Remede de Fortune, in Œuvres, vol. 2.This expression
can also be found in the Voir Dit, Letter 8, pp. 168–170.
20. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, vol. 1. English
Translation: Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Kevin Brownlee, The Selected
Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 89.
21. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, vol. 2.
22. Christine de Pizan, prologue to L’Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa
(Geneva: Droz, 1999). English translation: Christine de Pizan’s Letter of Othea
to Hector, trans. Jane Chance (Suffolk and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and
Brewer, 1990 [Reissued, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997]), p. 34.
23. Christine de Pizan, L’Advision, p. 108, l. 16. English translation: The Writings
of Christine de Pizan, ed.Willard, p. 15.
24. Guillaume de Machaut, Prologue, in Œuvres , vol. 1.
25. Christine de Pizan, Œuvres poétiques, vol. 1.
26. Coudrette, Le roman de Mélusine, ed. Eleanor Roach (Paris: Klincksieck,
1982). English translation: Couldrette, A bilingual Edition of Couldrette’s
Mélusine or Le Roman de Parthenay, ed. Matthew W. Morris (Lewiston
NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), p. 61.
27. Guillaume de Machaut, Le livre de la fontaine amoureuse, ed. Jacqueline
Cerquiglini-Toulet (Paris: Stock, 1993).
28. Christine de Pizan, Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame, ed. Jacqueline

Cerquiglini-[Toulet] (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1982). English
translation: The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan, trans. R. Blumenfeld-
Kosinski and K. Brownlee, p. 217.
29. Christine de Pizan, L’Advision, p. 107, l. 23. English translation: The Writings
of Christine de Pizan, trans. C.Willard, p. 15.
30. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, vol. 4.
31. Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, vol. 1, pp. 2–3.
32. Complainte du livre du Champion des Dames a maistre Martin Le Franc son acteur,
ed. Gaston Paris in “Un poème inédit de Martin Le Franc,” Romania 16
(1887): 383–437.
33. Voir Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, “L’amour des livres au XIVe siècle,”
Mélanges de philologie et de littérature médiévales offerts à Michel Burger, ed.
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet and Olivier Collet (Geneva: Droz, 1994),
pp. 333–340.
34. Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, ed. marquis de Queux de Saint-
Hilaire, SATF, 11 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1878), vol. 1, ballades 123
and 124.
35. Simon Gréban’s Complainte is kept in three manuscripts and one old edition:
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France MS fr. 1716, fols. 15v.–26v (the text
is attributed to Alain Chartier); Paris, BnF MS latin 11414, fols. 33r–41v.; La
Haye, Bibliothèque royale, MS 71. E. 49, fols. 307r–318v. On this text, see:
Marc-René Jung, “Jacques Milet et son Epître épilogative,” Mélanges d’Etudes
romanes du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance offerts à Monsieur Jean Rychner,
Travaux de Linguistique et de Littérature, 16:1 (1978): 241, n1 [241–258]. In this
note, M.-R. Jung announces that Claude Thiry and himself plan to publish
a critical edition of Simon Gréban’s Complainte.
36. Jean Robertet, Œuvres, ed. Margaret Zsuppán (Geneva: Droz, 1970),
pp. 159–178.
37. See Luc Hommel, Pages choisies de Chastellain (Paris: Editions Universitaires,
1949), p. 21.
38. René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris, ed. Susan Wharton (Paris:
Union générale d’Editions, 1980), p. 141. New edition: ed. Florence
Bouchet (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2003), p. 135. On the cemetery
in Le Livre du Cuer, see Daniel Poirion, “Les tombeaux allégoriques et la
poétique de l’inscription dans le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris de René
d’Anjou (1457),” in Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Comptes Rendus
des séances de l’année 1990, avril-juin (Paris: De Boccard, 1990), pp. 321–334.
39. Giorgio Vasari, Les Vies des Meilleurs Peintres, Sculpteurs et Architectes [1550],
10 volumes, trans. and commented by André Chastel (Paris: Berger-Levrault,
1981–1987). See also Ernst Kris et Otto Kurz, L’image de l’artiste. Légende,
mythe et magie, preface by E.H. Gombrich, trans. from English Michèle
Hechter (Paris: Rivages, 1987). Originally Die Legende vom Künstler: ein
geschichtlicher Versuch (Vienna: Krystall Verlag, 1934). In English: Legend,
Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: An Historical Experiment, trans.
Alastair Laing (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1979).
40. Gilles Li Muisis, Poésies, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, 2 vols (Louvain: Lefever,
1882), vol. 1, pp. 86–94.
41. Recueil d’Arts de Seconde rhétorique, ed. Ernest Langlois (Paris: Imprimerie
Nationale, 1902), p. 11.
42. “Papelardie” in the Roman de la Rose has been translated by Charles
Dahlberg as “Pope-Holiness” (The Romance of the Rose [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971], p. 36) and as “Pope-Holy” by Harry Robins (The
Romance of the Rose [New York: Dutton, 1962]), p. 10.
43. Recueil d’Arts de Seconde rhétorique, p. 12.
44. Recueil d’Arts de Seconde rhétorique, p. 14.
45. Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, vol. 4, p. 176.
46. Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier et Pierre Col, Le
Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1977), p. 100.
47. Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des Dames, vol. 1, p. 6.
48. See Carla Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions françaises d’œuvres de Boccace. XVe
siècle (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1973), p. 6.
49. Francesco Petrarca, Seniles, IX: 1, latin text in: Librorum Francisci Petrarche
annotatio impressorum (Venice: 1501); English translation in Letters of Old Age:
Rerum senilium libri I-XVIII, trans.Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A.
Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 312.
50. Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarium libri, IX: 13, latin text in Le familiari,
ed.Vittorio Rossi, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca 10–13,
4 vols. (Firenze, G. C. Sansoni [1933–42]); English translation in Letters on
Familiar Matters: Rerum familarium libri XXIV, trans.Aldo S. Bernardo, 3 vols.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), vol. 2, p. 40.
51. Eustache Deschamps, Œuvres complètes, vol. 8, p. 178.
52. François Villon, Poésies diverses in Poésies complètes, ed. Claude Thiry (Paris:
Librairie Générale Française, 1991), p. 309. English translation: The poems of
François Villon, trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977),
p. 207.
53. See Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’écriture testamentaire à la fin du Moyen
Age. Identité, dispersion, trace (Oxford: Legenda, 1999).
54. Le recueil des repues franches de Maistre François Villon et de ses compagnons,
ed. Jelle Koopmans and Paul Verhuyck (Geneva: Droz, 1995).
55. The editors of this edition indicate in their introduction that the Captain of
the Pont à Billon, or the Pont-au-Change is a surname for the “trompeur”
or deceiver (Koopmans and Verhuyck, p. 25) (Translator’s note).
CHAPTER 9
FRONTALLY AND IN PROFILE: THE

IDENTIFYING GESTURE OF THE LATE
MEDIEVAL AUTHOR
Danielle Bohler
Translation: Lia Brozgal
ne text is borne of a preceding one: medieval literature demonstrates

O how enduring this topos can be.A patron transmits a manuscript, or a
mécène designates a slew of manuscripts, or an author discovers in a library
some “little book” that he is keen to translate. The mystery of textual
antecedence is often based on an alleged chance discovery coupled with
what is said of the patron’s order. In its very materiality, the forgotten man-
uscript peeks out from the layers of the library’s dust, an object of memory
capable of engendering a new text. Filial relations are indeed at play: faithful
to his father, the son gamely runs the gauntlet of innovation through either
reshaping or translating the older text. In the fifteenth century in particular,
this topos sets in motion the various components of literary transmission.A
veritable rhetoric of the genesis of the text is enacted in the openings of
many late medieval texts.
Thus, the author, or, shall we say, the narrator-to-be, strikes an identifying
pose within the space of a prologue and within a temporality defined by a
gesture—gesture toward an unknown book, drawn from the anonymity of
time.This discovery serves as the central element of the identity rhetoric. In
fact, both in manuscripts and in printed texts, the prologue is linked to a tra-
dition that is clearly and, so to speak, frontally represented as an object
unearthed by a curious gaze and then opened and decoded—oftentimes
with great difficulty—before being offered up to a wider distribution
thanks to a modernized idiom and a reworking of the raw materials. In
174 DA N I E L L E B O H L E R
these opening scenes, in the restricted space of the prologue and the fleeting
temporality of a discovery, the author stages himself through the movement
of his hand and the trajectory of his gaze.1 In other words, by beginning
with the required gesture of the opening ceremony of a romance—the
prologue—he takes on a well-established pose, which consists in affirming
his respectful affiliation with an authority.
These origin scenes have their own glorious past. Beginning with the
twelfth century and the Roman de Troie, and later on with Perceforest, scenes
of manuscript discovery and scenes of reading are embedded within the
texts themselves.2 Following in the tradition of annunciations—as we see in
Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames3—inaugural scenes tend to
replace the topos of the discovery with that of the strange apparition or the
unique encounter, which also participates in the creation of a myth of origin.
All texts are stamped with a seal of filiation, but this holds particularly true
in a century heavy with notions of heritage. In the prologue to Raoul
Lef èvre’s Histoire de Jason, a strange figure appears bearing a knowledge to
be transmitted, understood, and revived. “Ancre ta galee icy et prens ta
plume” [Anchor your ship here and take up your pen]: Jason enjoins the
author who, posturing an identity, has just described himself as a soul buffeted
by the waves, in search of calmer ports. The figure appearing to him then
becomes the hero of his book.4
The tradition is thus designated directly: the source is an object, the
book or chance meeting that calls forth the memory of a book:“ce dont tu
as leu la verité” [of which you read the truth], says Jason.5 The gesture
sketches itself out to be seen: one hand reaching backwards in time toward
the book, the heightened memory of a book once read and waiting to be
brought back to life, the movement of a gaze that questions and then directs
itself back to the pen.
The Forgotten, Neglected Book

Such is the expected posture of the author who occupies a given space in
order to achieve an effect of reality: one fine day he found himself in a library,
a reader curious to see what was buried beneath the dust, ready to exert his
gaze, eager with the anticipation of discovery. It is the closed space of the
library or the closed space of a retreat within oneself, enriched by the limited
temporality of a prologue that are the elements that permit the text to be
inscribed in the uncertain moment of its birth. During the late Middle Ages,
this representation of a filiation—one book giving birth to another—involves
a much more personal anecdote happening during the time an author
(anonymous or well-known) hovers over the source-book.This representa-
tion is based on an intimate, almost dreamlike, temporality, which is linked to
F RO N TA L LY A N D I N P RO F I L E 175
the secret of genesis. The text then becomes the fruit of an event that is
recounted, and that belongs to the time of a particular life.The topos of the
extended arm and the gaze of discovery creates a suspense linked to the fragile
chance of contingency. The author presides over the book-to-be, sketching
out gestures that function as signs. The expected movements of hand and
gaze, which apparently define the singularity of the individual, never hide
their role as the parable of a relationship with the past and oblivion.
The prologue, then, is a workspace, an atelier, a factory for the produc-
tion of the text. In the fifteenth century, this factory was governed by the
normalized tastes of the day and indications of what we might call the horizon
of expectations, which allows itself to be glimpsed by the repetition of the
signs of recognition, reproduced across multiple texts. This procedure—
whereby the text is seized right at the point when it embarks on a new
path—is the subject of a discourse that one can follow from ca. 1440 till the
beginning of the sixteenth century. It is the heir to the topos of the found
manuscript. We realize, however, that by virtue of an author’s gesture—an
author who claims that he opened a book and found therein matter worthy
of transmission—we are dealing with an individualized encounter in which
the author shows himself frontally and in profile (that is to say, in a posture
that occupies space).The book-to-be is a direct result of the author’s mental
state located in a certain space. The actual discovery of the book is
illustrated by a series of works, particularly in Burgundy. As for the mental
posture, it is carried on in a tradition ranging from Christine’s “cele” [study]
to Raoul Lefèvre’s table at which Jason, a cultural figure with a political
destiny, comes back to life.6
Already then, harbored within the space of the library, his pen almost at
hand, the writer begins to establish the birth certificate of the book. This
“documentation” takes one of two forms: either the forgotten manuscript
hidden under dust, the nameless child wandering lost amongst the crowd of
other books is granted the status of memento worthy to give birth to a new
text; or a cultural figure surging to the forefront of a day dream enrolls the
writer to serve an ideology.7 This identity gesture places itself within a space
supposedly endowed with credibility and verisimilitude, not at the heart of
fiction, in the presence of a group of protagonists forming a sort of collective
dramaturgy—as is the case in the manuscript discovered in Le Roman de
Troie or Perceforest—but rather at the heart of a private space in which the
writer is alone with the folios covered with signs.When the narrator-to-be
describes himself shuffling through the pages, he posits the text as the object
of a labor-to-come, in a genre scene that one might call archeological.
Viewed frontally or viewed in profile, the author is temporarily the center
of attention as the individual singled out to sift through the strata of the past
in a gesture linked to both the everyday and chance.
The writer-to-be is spurred into writing by the discovery or chance

meeting.The hand reaches out to the book, craving the unknown the con-
tent of which seems worthy of transmission, rewriting, even translation.
Certainly, the focus on the writer’s agency was striking in Christine de
Pisan’s work, in the slightly gloomy, empty space of an hour of reading.8
This agency appears, albeit shyly, latently, in the figure of the writer of Jean
d’Avesnes, in the cycle of La fille du comte de Ponthieu:
Ainsi comme par adventure, pour passer le temps, je m’estoie naguerez

trouvé en l’estude d’un tres noble seigneur, garny a planté de pluiseurs biaulx
livres desquels je m’aproçay et en commençay lirre, comme je trouvasse livrez
a souhait, je quis finablement tant que je m’arrestay a ung ancien livre en latin
qui contenoit pluiseurs hystoirez; et pour ce qu’il estoit comme mis en non-
challoir, je lisi dedens. Et entre les aultrez hystoirez, j’en trouve une qui pou
estoit en usaige, pour laquelle lirre je eslevay les yeulz de mon entendement.9
[Thus, by adventure, to pass the time, I found myself in the private study of a
very noble lord, furnished lavishly with many beautiful books. I reached for
them and started to read, as I found as many volumes I could hope for. I
searched until I stopped before an ancient book in Latin, which contained
many stories. Since it looked forgotten and in a state of neglect, I read
through it. Among many stories, I found one that was quite obsolete and
required that I strained the eyes of my understanding.]
Thus the speaker claims to inscribe himself within the context of a singular
moment, not unlike Claude Platin, the “humble frere” [humble friar] who
found himself one day “en une petite librairie” [in a little library],10 or the
anonymous author of Gillion de Trazegnies passing by an abbey,11 or yet
another who was seized by the activity of reading while skimming through
“plusieurs volumez et traittiez” [numerous volumes and treatises], stopping
only at “a ung livret qui fait mencion des haultez entreprisez, amours et
beaulx fais d’armes d’un conte d’Artois, dont la narracion se fera cy après”
[a booklet that mentions the feats, loves and prowess of a certain Count of
Artois, whose narration will follow here],12 or, finally, like Pierre Sala who
put on his glasses in order to read a set of worn-out letters.13 In all these
instances of the motif, it is the hunger for the unknown that is underscored.
On the threshold of the work, perception takes for its object the sub-
stantial trail left behind by times past, that is the collection of folios taken up
by the activity of the person we call both author and narrator, thanks to this
temporality which confers upon him an identity built out of topoi. Just as
the book-to-be requires a human hand to turn the pages, the materiality of
the gesture belongs to a singular history. The narrator wants to establish
himself within time while gaining an understanding of his source and of the
temporality of the book “mis en nonchalloir,” forgotten and neglected by
man.14 But this source must be chosen,as it is said,for example,in the prologue
to Isaÿe le Triste, since the narrator says that he sat down to his task “après
avoyr tourne et revolve plusieurs livres et anciens romans” [after turning old
books and ancient romances around and around].15
The singular history identifying the author can be very precise. For
instance, in Gillion de Trazegnies, after arriving at the Abbaye of Hainault, the
narrator asks about the secret of the tombs.The mortuary object will reveal
a secret that will in turn become a romance.The dead are brought back to
live their fate at the same time that the book is given a second chance to be
read.16 The narrator appears as an eyewitness to both the places and the
pages discovered. In the space of a library, the topos involves the body and
its gestures: the author of the prologue becomes the narrator of his own
anecdotal readership and an important actor in a new temporality based on
a communication cycle. The chain of memory agents appears then as the
scene of a new origin.
The liminal apparatus of the prologue places the focus progressively and
temporarily on the book’s role as an object of social consumption. This
seems paradoxical, given the prologue’s limited status as the recounting of a
chance encounter. As the author leafs through a book he takes on the role
of narrator through a fairly detailed posture, whereby he presents himself
both frontally and in profile.This singular gesture that opens the door to the
book is somewhat of a personal anecdote, one that can be interpreted in
terms of authorial identity, particularly when read against those famous pro-
logues that define well-known personalities in the literary world such as
Christine de Pizan, or Raoul Lefèvre striving for the glory of the Golden
Fleece. For such scenarios belong to a range of possible mysteries, no longer
the manuscript sealed up in an ancient tower but a simple book found
amongst many others, perhaps offered up by the hand of a friend in an act
of happy coincidence, as described by the narrator at the beginning of
Guillaume de Palerne:
A ceste occasion, par aulcun mien amy, fut a moy, humble translateur et tra-
ducteur de la presente hystoire, presente l’ancien livre auquel elle [l’histoire]
estoit contenue quasi comme en frische, en grant danger d’estre perdue,
anichilee et enrouillee d’oubly.
[On this occasion, I—humble transmitter and translator of this tale—was
offered by a friend the ancient book in which the story lay fallow, in great
danger of becoming lost, ruined and rusty from disuse.]17
Two elements commingle here: the amply developed question of the mystery
that is told in the prologue of Gillion de Trazegnies, that is, the secret of the
three tombs, and, closer to the question of productive melancholy we find
in the tradition illustrated by Christine de Pizan, the eruption from stormy

seas of a sorry figure: Jason neglected by the memory of man.18 Just like the
metaphor of the bitter man standing alone amidst fog and mist, the mystery
of the forgotten book is an invitation to writing.
Rewriting
At the beginning of the prosification of La Belle Hélène de Constantinople,
Jean Wauquelin claims to have followed “le contenu d’un livret rimé” [the
content of a rhymed book] that his lord had given him “pour retrenchier et
sincoper les prolongacions et motz inutiles qui souvent sont mis et boutez
en telles rimes” [so that that he might cut down and reduce the digressions
and superfluous words that were often added to such rhymes].19 The process
of actualizing a reading necessarily engages a judgement on the means of
transmission, be it the worn-out, incomplete, and barely legible book, or the
language itself, time-worn, outdated, and archaic.
The “aornee” [ornate] language is in itself a topos. And yet, despite its
rigidity, the evaluation of a language that is difficult to understand, obscures
meaning, and thwarts the desired goal of communication emanates from
a subjective judgment based on identity. The use of the imperfect tense
demonstrates that the “I” is at work in this process.The imperfect retraces
the narrator’s inscription in the scene and the difficulty experienced by the
character in the library who finds himself confronted with a nearly impen-
etrable text. It is the gaze of an individual that is manifest here, in this
restricted personal space of the reader who evaluates the relative worth of
the found object in terms of its quality and the linguistic difficulties it presents.
Victim of the years, the book offers itself up to a modernization of its lan-
guage,20 but the evaluation of the found book’s quality belongs to the
focused field of the reader-discoverer of that rare text worthy of being
inscribed into memory.
This desire is founded on a recurrent argument: the recognition of
exemplarity. Pulled out of the depths of the ages, the text is prepared to
seduce future readers. Its language is reworked, embellished and decorated
in order to confirm its edifying character and to display the norm in action.
He who reestablishes the older text’s position within a new horizon of con-
sumption appropriates the topos of exemplarity, that is an identity topos by
which the narrator-to-be views himself as a man with a mission. In fact, he
views his mission as double: it is an evaluative activity focusing both on the
writing practices of ancient times and on the values put forth by the work.
As an essential element of the paratext, the prologue is profoundly linked to
the work’s reception and its “consumption” by a first reader, with the goal
of transmission to a reader-to-be.21
The author, having read the work, sets himself the task of reordering the
text and creating a new language that will render the text intelligible.At the
same time, the reader-to-be looms large.This audience, which we may call
“lisans” [the readers], still finds itself often defined by its binary opposition
to another group:“escoutans” [the listeners]. For the speaking subject of the
book-to-be, sketching out its raisons d’être, the work possesses the dignity
of a material able to edify and to please, thanks to a language better adapted to
its readership and at the same time embellished for the pleasure of “delicates
oreilles” [delicate ears], as Pierre Durand will say in the fifteenth century in
his prosification of Guillaume de Palerne.22
It is most assuredly a gesture of identity when the “translateur” [trans-
mitter] addresses the mécène hungry for reading, just as the narrator of Gérard
de Nevers addresses Charles, count of Nevers:
[P]our ce que je vous sens estre enclin a prendre plaisir esleesier a voir et oïr
lire les plaisantes et gracieuses histoires des fais des nobles et vaillans princes
jadis vos predecesseurs, et meismement de tous aultres nobles homes qui par
cy devant, par leurs proeces et vaillances, au confort et a l’ayde de leur noble
chevalerye ont fait leurs conquestes.
[For I feel that you are inclined to take pleasure and enjoyment from seeing
and hearing the pleasant and gracious stories of the feats performed by the
noble and valiant princes who were once your predecessors, and by all the
other noble men who, long ago, through their prowess and their valiance, with
the support and help of their noble knights, accomplished their conquests.]23
The notion of desire is clearly present.The speaker identifies first with his
own desire, and then with the desire that he attributes to the “volentifz
liseurs, desirans nouvelles chosez veoir [qui] porroient au lire quelque pou
prendre de plaisir et recreer leurs esperis” [eager readers who desire to see
new things, things which could be read for pleasure and which could enter-
tain their minds], as the prologue to the Roman du comte d’Artois indicates.24
The role of the writer is thus confirmed. But, what of the demand for
conjointure that appears in the twelfth century? In the late Middle Ages, the
prologue assimilates writing with farming, which is a vigilant keeper of
memory.The original book lies fallow while the ground dries out.Vegetal
metaphors are placed in service of work, and the (literary) work, like any
cultivated plant, demands man’s attentions:
Tout ainsi comme la vigne qui n’est de toute facons labouree facillement est
subjecte a mauvaises herbes et si elle n’est bien et convenablement taillee le
fruit en est moins savoureux, si la convient amender et ameliorer, aultrement
facillement demourroit en frische, ainsi est des hystoires antiques et choses
dignes de memoire, qui sont proffitables et savoureuses comme le bon vin.
[Since vines are prone to weeds if not properly cared for, and produce less
tasty fruit if they are not carefully clipped, one must work to improve them,
otherwise the land could promptly lie fallow. Such is the case for ancient stories
and other things worthy of memory, which are profitable and savory like
good wine.]25
Retaling a text with new words so as to validate its worth is a gesture com-
parable to that of the attentive hand, keeper of a fertile garden.The prologue
of Isaÿe le Triste claims that forgotten noble acts resemble “vieille racine de
l’arbre qui de jour en jour pert son honneur radical par faulte d’estre
arrousee et cultivee en sa vertu primeraine” [the old tree root which, day by
day, looses its radical honor for lack of water and the proper care needed to
restore its original vitality].26 Only when the risk of infertile ground has
been averted does the book give way to the fruits of pleasure.
Pierre Durand speaks of rust—the work “en grant danger d’estre perdue,
anichilee et enrouillee d’oubly” [in danger of being lost, ruined and rusty
from disuse]—that is perhaps the effect of the outdated language of “rommant
antique rymoié en sorte non intelligible ne lisible” [an ancient rhymed
romance, neither intelligible nor legible].27 Gilles Corrozet, at the beginning
of the Roman de Richart sans paour, speaks of a “petit livre” [little book],
“nouvellement translaté de vieille rime en prose” [recently translated from
old rhyme into prose].28 At the end of the romance, Corrozet precises that
“il eust esté impossible de le translater nattement pour le langage corrompu
dont il estoit plain” [it would have been impossible to translate it precisely
due to its corrupt language].29 The acts of tidying up and rejuvenating
belong to a group of intentions set forth by a speaker who recounts the
effort undertaken, all the while evaluating the difficulties he must face and
the imperfect nature of his task.To this, he may add the factor of his own
pleasure, as in the case of the narrator of the Roman de Floriant et Florete:
“pour ce que la matiere du present livret m’est plus agreable a lire en prose
que en rime, me vueil pener de le transporter de rime en prose” [because
the content of this book is more pleasant to me when read in prose, I am
willing to take the trouble to transpose it from rhyme into prose].30
The prologue of Jean de Saintré and those of numerous other works speak
of the embellishment of language—this “flory et aorné langaige” [florid and
adorned language]—that is undertaken for the sake of the “lisans et
escoutans” [readers and listeners].31 Such claims are accompanied by the
humility topos, as well as by stylistic games that pit the narrator’s awkwardness
against the ornamental effect he seeks to achieve.We see this at work in Jean
Wauquelin’s “simplece” [simplicity] and his style that is “rude et sans fioriture”
[crude and plain],32 and in the risk of “fault” [error] or “prolixité de langage”
[chattiness] that the editor of the Lancelot-Graal manuscript apologizes for
and begs us in his prologue to correct.33 Edited in 1488 in Rouen, the

prologue to the Lancelot en prose features a speaker who excuses himself for
the “crudité et indigestion du langage qui est gros et maternel” [crudeness
and indigestibility of a coarse mother tongue].34
The author who finds himself before a work in peril of being forgotten
takes on a posture that integrates the procedures of transmission: it is not
only a question of going from rhyme to prose, but also of transferring the
material out of a badly understood language—a fearsome obstacle to the
reader. Gérard de Nevers comes from a little “livret lequel par avant estoit en
langage prouvençal et moult difficile a entendre” [book which was at first
written in provençal and very difficult to understand].35 Gillion de Trazegnies
was born from “ung petit livre en parchemin escript d’une tres ancienne
lettre moult obscure en langue ytalienne” [a little parchement book, written
in Italian, in a very old style of script that was difficult to read].36 The lan-
guage used in Histoire de Giglan is “assez difficile a entendre” [fairly difficult
to understand], and the book is written on “parchemin bien vieil” [rather
old parchement].37 Added to these various linguistic difficulties, we also find
the ravages of time, such as were faced by Pierre Sala who had to confront
the faded letters of “vieil Tristan” [old Tristan] and the “marges du parchemin
cassees” [broken edges of parchment].38
The work rescued from the clutches of time must undergo an editing
process in order to mend the archaic expressions of its language and
improve the organization of its content. It is also interesting to examine
how the printer, in listing the details of his operation, participates in these
various ways of confirming the status of identity: the relation to claimed
sources, the succession of different agents, the older book taken up by the
modern man. It is part of the daily tasks of the printer/writer to evaluate
the work done on a text that seemed to him at points not quite right, either
because of the language or because of the organization of the content.39
Casting Anchor
There is no better-known example of the display of personal temporality
than that manifested in the prologue to Le Livre de la Cité des Dames.This
example is all the more famous in that it is the first time such a display is
done by a female voice in the context of a woman’s quest for culture and
learning. Surrounded by books, her spirit weary, the narrator happens upon
a small tome, left in her study by someone else. Reading this book provokes
in Christine a deep turmoil and a state of anguish mitigated only by the
appearance of the three crowned women.40 This mini-adventure, placed at
the opening of the book, is entirely centered on the gaze and the narrator’s
face à face with the work. Although the scene possesses a well-designed and
unique poetic character, we can still compare it to the more humble literary
thresholds mentioned herein.
In Histoire de Jason, for example, the text finds its origin in an apparition
that transmits knowledge rooted in a destiny to deplore and to celebrate. In
the prologue, the fog of a latent mystery dissipates at the sound of the voice
of ideology. In this manner, we witness the fusing of the apparition’s space
with the space of the writer whose mind seeks a safe haven, a place of rest.
The work’s threshold is often defined through a poetics of patronage, which
appears clearly in more circumstantial inaugurations where the gesture of
authorship is inscribed in a social context. In this case, the author and the
patron come together as a duo, practicing a form of symbolic economy.41
But here, as in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, the birth of the written word is
brought about by absenting oneself from the world. In his prologue, Raoul
Lef èvre enters into a world of metaphors, not unlike the one Christine
enters through the acts of building and writing. In Lef èvre’s case, the
metaphor is centered aroung the casting of an anchor, much as the printed
prologue of Lancelot refers to a narrator who claims to have “fiché l’encre de
[son] entendement” [thrown out the anchor of his understanding].42
Le Livre du Coeur d’amour espris is probably the best illustration of the
complex relationship between fiction and claims of reality.The text finds its
origin not only in cultural memory—since the speaker refers to shared
readings, which he assumes are familiar to his readers43—but also in the
individual event of sleep, which marks a break with the time of daily activities
and a dissociation with the Heart that has become the sleeper’s double. In
the epilogue, the Heart returns to its proper place, the place of fiction: its
adventure has lost the status of a reality effect.Through the writing of the
dream, the text ensures that the only reality is the one established by the
work of the pen, as is the case of the narrator of Histoire de Jason, whose pen
stands in for the movement of a boat now fitted with an anchor.The clarity
of the writing project is a substitute for dreaming and the movement of
waves that is now close to become a work under construction. Cultural
know-how, for a Raoul Lefèvre wielding an expert pen, becomes a weighty
ideological tool.The metaphor of a dream about space is heavy with meaning:
constructing, handling solid and beautiful material, escaping from the
uncertainty of the waves—these all work together to consolidate memory.
The handiwork belongs to the speaker at the beginning of the book and the
maritime metaphor inscribes the narrator’s “engin” [brain] within the
uncertainty of past writings:
La galee de mon engin flotant naguieres en la parfondeur des mers de pluseurs

vielles histoires, ainsy comme je vouloie mener mon esperit en port de repos,
soudainement s’apparu decoste moy une nef conduite par un homme seul.
[The boat of my brain was afloat at that time in the deep seas of several
ancient stories that I wanted to lead my mind to a restful harbor when, sud-
denly, there appeared next to me a ship manned by a lone captain.]44
The gaze uncovers the “face triste et desolee” [sad and sorry face] and
comes alive with “grant desir” [great desire].The “galee” [boat] must come
to rest in the safe harbor that is knowledge, which in turn leads to writing.
This rests upon a truth known to the author, as Jason tells us, and this truth
functions in opposition to the “indiscret jugement” [indiscrete judgement]
of those who would slander him. Thus, in a brief annunciation, the man
claims to have chosen the narrator to present the work to Duke Philippe,
“qui toute sa vie a esté nourry en histoires pour son singulier passetemps”
[who, all his life, had been nourished by stories as his personal pastime].
Jason and his boat fade into the mist: all that remains is the mission he
imparted, and the narrator’s pensive mood,“illec pensif.”45
The “galee” [boat] has entered into the field of writing.The topos of the
threshold and the theme of the moment of origin are masterfully demon-
strated here. The indetermination of the mind that seeks repose and the
echo of divided opinion that would like to recognize a hero with con-
firmed values rests upon the indetermination of space, on the absence of
borders that mimic the floating imagination without fixed points—with
the exception of its own desire.The maritime metaphor brings together the
speaker and the man who, having sprung forth from the waters, will bring
him the truth and object of his work. As for Christine de Pizan, and for
other prologues—but here in the most simply poetic fashion—the narrator
reports a singular and intimate temporality, fertile with the possibility of
adventure.
As in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames in Histoire de Jason the morose, melan-
cholic mind conditions the possibility of writing. Here, the apparition rich
in truths issues forth from the waves—from the infinity of “vielles histoires”
[ancient stories] and from the indetermination of time and of the world of
forgetting. Suddenly, out of the mist appears the boat captained by a solitary
man, a double of the waiting writer. Only a few lines are needed to describe
the grandeur of Jason’s lineage, as well as to suggest the noble acts per-
formed by he who claims to be “enrachiné en tristese” [rooted in sadness].
To transmit such a truth, one needs no less than to be elected, like Christine.
The character standing on his boat offers up the sign of his heritage, waiting
for the author to confirm his brilliant truth.
The identity process is amplified here: the buffeting of an unanchored
boat doubles the uncertainty of a pen without a mission, the evanescence of
an undefined subject. The growing conviction of Christine and here, the
vanishing of the mist, then a surge from beyond the sea’s horizon, the words
exchanged between the man on the ship and the man of letters, all come
together to consolidate the mission of the text-to-be.
Viewed frontally or in profile, the author, narrator-to-be, evolves willingly
within a space of topoi.The origin of the book is rooted in the materiality
of the older book—a necessary condition for the gestation of the book-to-
be—and the discoverer of the book appears on stage as favored by chance.
As a cultural reflex made up of repetitions, the topos expresses the relationship
with a written object at a moment in time at which the gesture of a hand
and the man before his worktable herald the texts, and at which the library
enters fully into the world of representation. In late medieval literature, the
discovery of the book, as well as the apparition of the mythological figure
whose fate had been read before being understood, are accompanied with
gestures of surprise and glances by which the narrator takes on, in a scene
described as personal, a central role. The author’s identity gesture of a
personal discovery, circumscribed in time, confirms his filiation with the
past heritage, the book to be discovered and deciphered in order for a book
to begin.
Notes
1. The gender issue related to the author’s identity in late medieval romances
will not be addressed directly in this essay, although references to Christine de
Pizan’s opening of Le Livre de la Cité des Dames may bring this issue to the
reader’s mind. In agreement with the author of this essay, the translator took
the late medieval romance author/narrator as a figure culturally constructed
and viewed as masculine, as Christine de Pizan herself understood it when
she described in Le livre de la mutacion de Fortune the symbolic sex change that
happened to her after she lost her husband and became a professional writer
in order to pilot her family ship. On Christine’s complex position on nature,
culture, fortune, and gender, see: Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses:
Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 115–119.
2. On manuscript discovery, Emmanuèle Baumgartner remarks that the majority
of authors “identify themselves as translators, as more or less faithful adaptors of
Latin or middle-Latin sources,” which signals “their debt” and their link to the
source text. “Du manuscript trouvé au corps retrouvé,” Le Topos du manuscrit
trouvé, ed. J. Herman and F. Hallyn (Louvain: Peeters, 1999), p. 1 [1–14]. On
scenes of reading, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet,“La scène de lecture dans
l’oeuvre littéraire au Moyen Age,” Le Goût du lecteur à la fin du Moyen Age: Actes
du colloque de Bordeaux 1999 (Paris: Léopard d’or, forthcoming).
3. Original text in Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame, 2nd edn., ed. Earl
Jeffrey Richards and Patrizia Caraffi (Milan: Luni Editrice, 1998), pp. 40–46.
English translation: The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards
(New York: Persea Books, 1998), pp. 3–8.
4. Raoul Lef èvre, L’Histoire de Jason: Eine Roman aus dem fünfzehnten
Jahrhundert, ed. Gert Pinkernell (Frankfurt:Athenäum, 1971), p. 125.
5. Lefèvre, L’Histoire de Jason, p. 125.
6. Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame, p. 40; The Book of the City of Ladies,
p. 3. Lefèvre, L’Histoire de Jason, p. 125.
7. The institution of the Golden Fleece by the Duke of Burgundy is rooted in
classical culture and had an influence on Raoul Lefèvre’s Histoire de Jason,
written between 1454 and 1467.
8. Christine de Pizan, La città delle Dame, p. 40; The Book of the City of Ladies, p. 3.
9. L’Istoire de tres vaillans princez monseigneur Jehan d’Avennes, ed. Danielle
Quéruel, Textes et perspectives. Bibliothèque des Seigneurs du Nord
(Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), p. 41.
10. “Ung jour en une petite librairie [ou] j’estoye trouvay ung gros livre de par-
chemin bien vieil escript en rime espaignolle assez difficile a entendre
auquel livre je trouvay une petite hystoire laquelle me semble bien plaisante,
qui parloit de deux nobles chevaliers qui furent du temps du noble roy Artus
et des nobles chevaliers de la table ronde.” [One day, I was in a little library
where I found a big book made of very old parchment and written in
Spanish verse that was fairly difficult to understand. In this book I found a
little story that seemed very pleasing and that spoke of two noble knights
who lived during the time of noble King Arthur and the noble Knights of
the Round Table]. Claude Platin, Histoire de Giglan filz de messire Gauvain qui
fut roy de Galles . . . . Printed by Claude Nourry, Lyon, 1530, Prologue, [p. 1].
Many thanks to V. Greene for this reference.
11. Histoire de Gillion de Trasignies, ed. O. L. B.Wolff (Paris-Leipzig: 1839), p. 1.
12. Roman du comte d’Artois, ed. Jean-Charles Seigneuret (Geneva: Droz, 1966),
p. 151.
13. Pierre Sala, Tristan, roman d’aventures, ed. L. Muir (Geneva: Droz, 1953),
vv. 4–7.
14. Jean d’Avesnes, p. 41. See the temporal articulation of the beginning of Jean
d’Avesnes, quoted above.
15. Prologue to Ysaÿe le Triste. Printed by Jean Bonfons, ca. 1550, BnF Ye 72. A
parallel can be established between this activity within a space filled with
books and the abondance of representations of libraries in the iconography
of the period. See Claudia Rabel,“ ‘L’estude d’un tres noble seigneur garny
a planté de pluiseurs beaulx livres’: l’iconographie des bibliothèques médiévales
dans les manuscrits enluminés,” in Le goût du lecteur à la fin du moyen Age
(see above n. 2).
16. Histoire de Gillion de Trasignies, p. 1.
17. “Prologue de l’acteur ou translateur” in Guillaume de Palerne, ed. Olivier
Arnoullet, Lyons: 1552 (Paris MS Arsenal BnF 4288), fol. 1v. In her thesis in
progress Annie-France Garrus gives an edition of this romance, established
according to Olivier Arnoullet’s 1552 Lyon editions and Nicolas Bonfons’s
two later editions (s.d. BnF Y2 696 and Y2 685). See Annie-France Garrus
“Pierre Durand, lecteur de Guillaume de Palerne mis en prose au XVIe siècle,”
Le goût du lecteur.
18. The goal of the work was the rehabilitation of the unfaithful Jason, as it was
solemnly announced in the “proheme de l’istoire de Jason extraite de
pluseurs livres et presentee a noble et redouté prince Phelipe, par la grace de
Dieu duc de Bourgoingne et de Brabant” [prologue of the story of Jason,
taken from various books and presented to the noble and fearsome Prince
Philip by the grace of God duke of Burgundy and Brabant]. Raoul Lefèvre,
L’Histoire de Jason, p. 125.
19. Jean Wauquelin, La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, ed. M. C. de Crécy
(Geneva: Droz, 2002), p. 14.
20. In the case of printed stories, renewing the material—an event attached to
the advent of new media—may be the object of developed statements. See
Danielle Régnier-Bohler,“ ‘Pour ce que la memoire est labile’: le cas exem-
plaire d’un imprimeur de Genève, Louis Garbin,” Le Moyen Français 24–25
(1990): 187–213.
21. The paratext is defined as an ensemble of statements “which surround a
text,” destined to insure “its presence in the world, its reception and its con-
sumption.” Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 7. See Danielle
Bohler,“Le lecteur inscrit dans le projet du livre: le roman chevaleresque et son
prologue, du manuscrit aux imprimés,” in Le goût du lecteur.
22. See prologue of Guillaume de Palerne.
23. Gérard de Nevers: Prose version of the Roman de la Violette, ed. Lawrence F. H.
Lowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1928) pp. 1–2.
24. Roman du comte d’Artois, p. 151.
26. Prologue to Isaÿe le Triste.
28. Gilles Corrozet, Roman de Richart sans paour, edited by Lotrian and Janot,
Paris, ca. 1530. See also Richard Sans Peur edited from Le Romant de Richart and
from Gilles Corrozet’s Richart Sans Paour, ed. D. J. Conlon, North Carolina
Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures 192 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 71.
29. “Je Gilles Corrozet, simple translateur de ceste hystoire prie a tous lecteurs
qu’ilz veuillent suporter les faultes qui y seront trouvees, car il eust este
impossible de le translater nattement pour le langage corrompu dont il estoit
plain.”This passage is not in Conlon’s edition but appears at the end of the
Lotrian and Janot edition.
30. Roman de Floriant et Florete ou le Chevalier qui la nef maine, ed. Claude M. L.
Levy (Ottawa: Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1983), p. 1.
31. Antoine de la Salle, Jehan de Saintré, printed edition Jehan Bonfons, Paris
1553, BnF Ye 692.
32. Jean Wauquelin, La Belle Hélène, p. 14.
33. This manuscript containing parts of the Lancelot-Grail is dated ca. 1470. BnF
MS Fr. 112, fol. 1v of the fourth book.
34. Lancelot en prose, edited in Rouen by Le Bourgeois, 1488, prologue.
35. Gérard de Nevers, p. 2.
36. Histoire de Gillion de Trasignies, p. 1.
37. Claude Platin, Histoire de Giglan, [p. 1].

38. Pierre Sala, Tristan, vv. 4–7.
39. See Régnier-Bohler,“ ‘Pour ce que la mémoire’ ”.
40. Christine de Pizan, La città delle Dame, pp. 40–46; The Book of the City of
Ladies, pp. 3–6.
41. See the ensemble of precautions that go along with the solicitation, in the
prologue of Fierabras by Jean Bagnyon for example, ed. H.-E. Keller,Textes
Littéraires Français 413 (Droz: Geneva, 1992).
42. Lancelot en prose, edited in Rouen by Le Bourgeois, 1488.
43. See the wonderfully rich introduction of the recent edition: René d’Anjou,
Le Livre du Cœur d’amour espris, ed. and trans. Florence Bouchet, Lettres
Gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2003). English translation: The Book of the
Love-Smitten Heart, ed. and trans. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and Kathryn
Karczewska (New York: Routledge, 2001).
CHAPTER 10
MEDIEVAL BESTSELLERS IN THE AGE

OF PRINT: MELUSINE AND
OLIVIER DE CASTILLE
Ana Pairet
he medieval vocabulary of writing reflects an awareness of the social

T fabric of texts and of the diverse types of agency involved in their
performance: it distinguishes the material role of the scriptor, the narrative
performance of the actor, and the discursive authority of the auctores, to
name only a few of the activities collapsed under the modern “author func-
tion.”The meaning of such lexical markers and their vernacular equivalents
changes according to generic conventions and historical period, creating
some leeway in textual transmission; after all, a scribe could easily enough
transform actor into auctor. It is indeed flexibility that ultimately characterizes
the construction of medieval authorship, a notion marked, as Jacques
Dalarun notes, by a near absence “of external constraints, and particularly
juridical ones, on the author and his rights” and thus by “the possibility of
an internal play on authority.”1 If we accept as a given that in manuscript
culture, authorial performance is reenacted at every stage of textual trans-
mission, we may ask how the shift from script to print affects medieval con-
ventions of authorship. My goal here is to examine the new roles taken up
by early modern printers in shaping the trajectory of medieval texts and
how the presence of these new “players” may reconfigure notions of
authorship. I will follow in particular the editorial fortunes and textual
transformations of two chivalric romances that reached a broad readership
during the first decades of print: Mélusine ou La noble histoire de Lusignan,
written in 1393 by Jean d’Arras, and the Franco-Burgundian Histoire
d’Olivier de Castille et d’Artus d’Algarbe, signed “Philippe le Camus,”
composed before 1460.
190 A N A PA I R E T
To the best of our knowledge, neither Philippe le Camus nor Jean

d’Arras ever signed another work; indeed, their only lasting mark lies in the
act of self-naming in the romance’s prologue or explicit. They made no
claims to authorship but rather presented themselves as professional writers
acting as compilers, translators, or remanieurs [revisers] who aimed to please
their powerful patrons. Authorial consecration of these modest clerks
derives in part from the activity of early publishers whose editorial strategies
both perpetuated medieval narrative traditions and introduced forms of
textual authority distinct from those at work in manuscript culture. What
will interest me here is how the literary poetics of self-naming and self-
representation operating in the late Middle Ages are modified by editorial
practices attendant to printing, including paratextual elements such as title
pages, prefaces, and illustrations. I do not intend to discuss early printed
texts as material objects nor to reconstruct the network of social relations
involved in their production, but rather to show how the rhetoric of trans-
mission, central to the medieval discourse of translatio, contributes to shaping
new and sophisticated authorial figures in the early modern period.
Introduction of the printing press in fifteenth-century France did not
substantially modify contemporary literary culture. In quantitative terms,
works in the vernacular, including translations from the Latin classical and
medieval tradition, form less than one quarter of the books printed before
1500. Attempting to reproduce in print an aristocrat’s ideal library, early
publishers turned naturally to courtly literature, in particular to those
fictions that staged the courtiers’ codes of conduct such as Martin le Franc’s
Le Champion des Dames or Pierre Michault’s Doctrinal de la Cour, along with
the works of Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier.2 Many of these works
had been composed less than a century before, with the notable exception
of the Roman de la Rose which had become a true vernacular classic, just as
Jean de Meun, placing himself after Ovid in a long line of auctores, had
intended.3 Outside of the courtly sphere, publishers favored moral and
satiric literature, ranging from the bawdy Quinze joies de Mariage to pious
works such as the Art de mourir and their tragi-comic counterpoints like the
Farce de maistre Pathelin or Villon’s Testament, not to mention a vast production
of calendars and almanacs.4
Of all the medieval literary genres, romance, with its ability to filter and
recast myths and narrative motifs, was perhaps the most apt to survive the
political upheavals and sociocultural transformations of the late Middle
Ages. Among the first printed romances we find better-known episodes of
Arthurian cycles such as Lancelot (1488), Tristan (1489), Gauvain (1493), and
Merlin (1498), but also prose works emanating from the French epic tradition,
such as Le Roman de Fiérabras (ca. 1480).5 A century later, when chivalric
romances were abandoned by booksellers in Paris and Lyons, a new form of
M E D I E VA L B E S T S E L L E R S 191
distribution developed that would ensure their survival. In 1602, Nicolas

Oudot of Troyes began printing cheap booklets with recycled typeface
and woodblocks on low-quality paper. Nearly 40 percent of Oudot’s
chapbooks—later to be known as the Bibliothèque bleue—were abridged
versions of chivalric romances published during the preceding century,
many of which derived from late medieval prosifications of epic materials
such as Doon de Mayence, Maugis d’Aygremont, or the Quatre fils Aymon.6
These in-quarto editions comprised of one to two hundred pages popular-
ized medieval romance and epic sources memory of which would persist
even beyond the eighteenth century.
The editorial trajectory of the Melusine attests to the vitality of medieval
fictions throughout the early modern period. Circulated both orally and in
writing, the story of the snake-bodied Melusine, founding mother of the
Lusignan lineage, fascinated noble and vulgar audiences alike, making her
way from the aristocratic Burgundian banquets to countryside “veillées”
[evenings spent round the fire]—if one is to believe Noël du Fail’s 1548
Propos rustiques de maistre Léon Ladulfi, Champenois.7 Since Jacques Le Goff
and Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie’s seminal article characterized the fairy as the
godmother of feudality, several important studies have approached her story
from an anthropological perspective, enlisting mythology and folklore to
explain the structure and variations of the myth of Melusine the main ele-
ments of which include the alliance between a mortal and a fairy, the fatal
flaw of the founding mother, and the transgression of the pact of secrecy on
which the prosperity of the lineage is founded.8 Mythocritical approaches to
narrative do much to explain the fascination exerted by the fairy Melusine
but obscure the extent to which poets, editors, and translators shaped the
trajectory of the texts that introduced her to medieval audiences.9
Mapping the transformations of this genealogical romance from manu-
script to chapbook is particularly complex, due to the existence of at least
two distinct, competing versions of the story of Melusine. Coudrette, to
whom we owe a version in verse composed after May 17, 1400, mentions
as his vernacular sources not Jean d’Arras’s prose version of 1393 but “deux
beaux livres en latin qu’on fit translater en francois” [two beautiful Latin books
that were translated into French], adding that the story had already been
versified once “si comme en conte” [as they say].10 Coudrette’s poem
became widely influential in Eastern and Northern Europe thanks to its
1456 German prose adaptation by Thüring von Ringoltingen. Just as
Coudrette had insisted upon the new shape he lent to his material, so too
the German adapter imprinted his mark on the story by naming himself
and his patron in the work’s prologue, and by commenting on his intention
to translate not the letter but the spirit of the French text. Diminishing the
authority of the source text, Thüring erases the very name of his author,
designating him as the “chaplain” of the duke of Parthenay.11 The 1467

German editio princeps was based on Thüring’s translation and gave rise to
further Eastern European translations.As early as 1484, a parallel chapbook
tradition developed around the Schöne Melusine, which went on to become
a European Volksbuch with lasting appeal in Germany, Russia, and
Scandinavia.
The success of Thüring’s printed translation may have incited French-
language publishers to rediscover the prose version that Jean d’Arras had
composed at the end of the fourteenth century. Published in August 1478,
the year printing was introduced in Geneva,Adam Steinschaber’s Melusine12
is one of the first two illustrated books printed in French, along with Le
mirouer de la rédemption de l’umain lignage (Martin Husz: Lyons, 1478) which
appeared the same month. With twenty-two editions between 1478 and
1597 (seven in Lyons, thirteen in Paris, and one in Rouen in addition to the
editio princeps), the status of Jean d’Arras’s Melusine as a “best seller” of
sixteenth-century fiction is clear.13 Six of these editions appeared before
1500 and at least another six in the first third of the new century, which
may explain the swift outward migration of the work. A 1489 Castillian
adaptation was produced in Toulouse by Juan Paris and Estevan Cleblat,
followed by a 1526 peninsular version that the prestigious booksellers Juan
and Jacobo Cromberger dedicated to the queen of Spain.14 Jean d’Arras’s
romance crossed the English Channel as well, perhaps in Caxton’s able
hands. Preserved only in manuscript form, the English translation bears the
following title, added in the seventeenth century:“Chronicle of Melusine in
olde Englishe. Compyled by Ihon of Arras, and dedicated to the Duke of
Berry and Auvergne, and translated (as yt shoulde seeme) out of Frenche
into Englishe.”15
A second European “best-seller” to come off the Genevan presses was
Olivier de Castille (Geneva: Louis Cruse, 1482). The story revolves around
two contracts: the friendship pact of two stepbrothers, Olivier and Artus of
Algarbe, and the agreement Olivier concludes with a mysterious protector,
trading half his possessions against the opportunity to win the hand of the
king of England’s daughter in a joust. As Danielle Régnier-Bohler has
shown, the tightly structured plot weaves together two types of folktales,
“The Two Brothers” and “The Grateful Dead”16 in a dynastic narrative pre-
senting a new model of contractual rulership and the fiction of a vast
geopolitical space covering Castille, Portugal, England, and Ireland.17 The
first printed edition of Olivier de Castille (1482) is attributed to Louis Cruse,
one of the most active early publishers in Geneva.18 Ten years later the same
printer produced an illustrated edition that supplements the story with a
second prologue, a table of contents with updated rubrics, and an epilogue
that rationalizes the fantastic elements of the tale.This refurbished version
was quickly followed by five more illustrated editions (Geneva, 1492–1497)

before Parisian printers Trepperel (1504) and Richard le Noir (1505)
caught on. Olivier saw three further editions in Paris (1520, 1546, 1587) and
one in Rouen (ca. 1625) before joining the Oudot’s Bibliothèque bleue in
1625. Translated into Spanish in 1499, it made its way into Flemish
(ca. 1510), English (1518), German (1521), and Italian (ca. 1522).19 But it
was in Olivier’s fictional fatherland that the romance met with greatest
favor: in the fifty-odd years following the Burgos 1499 editio princeps, over
ten editions appeared in the Iberian peninsula, where it would remain in
print for nearly 450 years.
Melusine and Olivier share generic and thematic features which may help
to explain their popularity during the transition from script to print. Unlike
a large number of prose romances, these works were not transposed from
rhymed verse but composed in prose during the late Middle Ages.
Presenting no explicit links to the matière of Brittany, France, or Rome, they
allowed for the creation of new models of heroism. Both histoires describe
the territorial expansion of a lineage throughout Europe and the
Mediterranean via marriage and conquest. Reflecting the esthetic, ethical,
and political values of the medieval aristocracy, these tales of love and
adventure would also appeal to a new readership that came to books
through print and sought models of conduct, courtesy, and fine language in
chivalric fiction. Thus, printers began to adapt literary materials for an
enlarged, not exclusively aristocratic public eager to gain access to courtly
models.As printer Louis Cruse states in the prologue to the second edition
of Olivier (ca. 1492):
Or est ainsi que maintenant les escriptures par l’ar & ingenieuse pratique de
l’impression se multiplient par maniere que plusieurs beaulx et salutaires
enseignemens & exemples desquels peu de gens avoient les livres et cognois-
sance maintenant sont mis avant et ottroyez a si petit pris que moindre ne se
peult dire.20
[So it is now that thanks to the artful and ingenious practice of printing, writ-
ings are multiplied in such a way that several handsome and beneficial teachings
and examples of which few persons had the books and knowledge are now
put forth and offered at the lowest price one can bargain for.]
The printer’s emphasis on technological change contrasts with the conven-

tional rhetoric of utilitas. By rendering “beneficial teachings” more accessible
than ever, the new medium amplifies the exemplarity of the literary tale.
At the same time, the fact that these examples now reach a much broader
audience may require a more active role from those who transmit them:
printers would not only need to guarantee readability, graphically and
through such textual interventions as abbreviatio or amplificatio, but also to

assume hermeneutic forms of authority.
Circulation of Melusine and Olivier in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
demonstrates both the enduring appeal of medieval romance and the
fundamental instability of authority, which is recast with each textual trans-
formation. These changes, I argue, are most apparent in the paratext21 in
which publishers act to bridge the gap between script and print audiences
and to mediate, in the case of translations, between one vernacular culture
and the other. How do editorial interventions in print, implicit in the case
of the Melusine, explicit in that of Olivier, alter these texts’ enunciatory
structure and modify the conditions of their reception? I study in particular
changes brought to the prologue, a privileged site of authorial self-presen-
tation and the place in which the text’s value is negotiated.22
The author of Melusine, who will name himself only in the work’s
explicit—“Et cy se taist Jehan d’Arras de la noble histoire de Lusegnen”23
[Here Jehan of Arras stops speaking of the noble story of Lusignan]—asserts
his presence from the beginning of the story in a four-part prologue, con-
served in extenso by all printed editions, including the seventeenth-century
chapbooks.Throughout the prologue, verbs emphasizing agency and enun-
ciation abound; in the first paragraph alone we find “requerir” [to request],
“supplie” [I beseech], “histoire . . . achever” [to finish . . . the story],
“ay commencé” [I began],“faire le traictié” [to write the treatise],“je com-
menceray” [I will begin], “ay fay” [I did], “ay sceu” [I learned], “prie”
[I pray],“commençay” [I began],“supplie” [I beseech],“ay fay” [I did].After
commending himself and his work to God, “maistre de toutes les chose
faictes et a faire,” [master of all things done and which will be done] the
author acknowledges his debt to his patron, the duke of Berry, who along
with the duke of Salisbury had given the writer access to the “vraies
croniques” [true chronicles] upon which he draws.The humility topos that
follows is undermined by the repetition of the first-person pronoun, present
no fewer than eleven times in the opening paragraph, with four occur-
rences in the final sentence alone:“Et suppli humblement a tous ceulx qui
l’orront lire ou le liront, se je y mespren a leur gré en nulle maniere, qu’ilz
me veuillent pardonner, car certainement je l’ay fait au plus justement que
j’ay pu selon les croniques que je cuide estre vraies”24 [I humbly beseech all
those who will listen to or read my story, that if I fail in any way to flatter
their tastes that they might forgive me, for surely I wrote it as judiciously as
I was able to following the chronicles, which I believe to be true].
The second and third paragraphs of the prologue develop the idea of
wonders (merveilles), the incomprehensibility of which bears witness to
God’s existence.The author submits his belief that “marvelous things of this
wide world” are “most true” to the auctoritas of the Bible and the New
Testament but also to that of Aristotle and Gervais of Tilbury, whose Otia
Imperialia exemplify in Le Goff ’s view “the scientific appropriation of the
marvelous.”25 In Jean d’Arras’s reading of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans,
miraculous signs of God are progressively restricted to mirabilia, extraordinary
events that men cannot fully understand but can grasp partially with the
help of auctores, their elders, and personal experience.This learned excursus
on the nature of wonders is followed by a fourth and final section which
turns to the oral tradition of the “elders” whose tales will give the story the
“colors of truth”:
Laissons les atteurs ester et racontons ce que nous avons ouy dire et raconter
a noz anciens, et que cestuy jour nous oyons dire qu’on a veu ou pays de
Poictou et ailleurs, pour coulourer nostre histoire a estre vraie, comme nous
le tenons, et qui nous est publiée par les vrayes croniques.26
[Let us leave the authors be and report what we have heard our elders say,
things that even today we hear about as having been seen in the Poitou country
or elsewhere, in order to paint our story in the true colors we think it
deserves from what is made known to us by the true chronicles.]
References to the atteurs recede from the romance proper only to reappear
in its epilogue, which recounts the marvelous apparition of Melusine at the
siege of the Lusignan castle during the Hundred Years’ War. The author
apologizes for the “increable” [incredible] elements of his tale by deferring
to learned tradition:“selon ce que j’ay trouvé et peu sentir des anciens aut-
teurs, tant de Gervaise comme d’autres anciens autteurs et philosophes, je
repute ceste histoire et la cronique a estre vraye”27 [according to what I have
found and understood of old authors, Gervaise and other old authors and
philosophers, I believe this story and its chronicle to be true]. It should be
noted that in his prologue Jean d’Arras makes a distinction between les
atteurs and nos anciens, while in his epilogue he blends his sources together.
What he calls anciens autteurs is a formulation vague enough to include Latin
sources including folklore, like the Otia Imperialia, and anonymous sources
both vernacular and oral, such as those mentioned in the prologue.
Furthermore, use of Scripture in the prologue and epilogue creates a strong
authorial voice, that of a clerk who posits reading as a form of experience
that heightens one’s ability to comprehend God’s mysteries and emphasizes
the writer’s agency in seeking out wonders.
Fifteenth-century manuscripts and early editions of the Melusine will
preserve the prologue’s four-part structure and its careful articulation of
auctoritas and pagan legends. For instance, in BnF MS fr. 1484, a late fifteenth-
century manuscript that contains a text close to that of the editio princeps,
rubrics identify the prologue (“Cy commance le prologue du livre de
Melusine en prose” [Here begins the prologue of the book of the prose
Melusine]) and separate the second paragraph, presented as a biblical quote
(“Allegance de david sus le prologue” [Invocation of David next to the
prologue]), from the third, which bears the caption “l’acteur” [the author].28
While it bears no rubrics, Steinschaber’s edition visually preserves the
discursive hiatus between the different sections of the prologue, thus main-
taining the multilayered authorial persona of Jean d’Arras. In subsequent
editions, however, as tightened page layout blurs the frontier between the
prologue and the story proper, the author’s voice tends to blend into that of
the narrator.This is reflected, for instance, in the Hystoire de Melusine printed
by Thomas du Guernier for Jehan Petit (BN res.Y2 177, ca. 1500), in which
no specific graphic cues separate the author’s prologue from the beginning
of the story.
The discursive hierarchy among writer, narrator, and auctores reflected in
the page layout of manuscripts and early editions disappears in editions pro-
duced around 1500, only to be reintroduced a century later by the popular
“blue booklets.” Even as the editorial conventions of the Bibliothèque bleue
favored anonymity by not including the author’s name on the title page,
chapbook versions of Melusine preserved the wording and content of both
prologue and epilogue.29 In Nicolas Oudot’s 1649 and 1660 editions, for
instance, an ample page break and decorative motifs isolate the three-page
prologue from the story’s outset.Authorial voice in Melusine thus remained
remarkably stable up to the 1698 rewriting by François Nodot, who praised
“Jean Darras’ ” naive storytelling but replaced the original prologue by his
own preface. It is indeed important to note that Jean d’Arras is acknowledged
as the author of the original story in the explicit of all early printed editions
of the romance, with the notable exception of the 1489 Spanish adaptation,
in which his name was replaced by that of “the honorable and discerning
German masters, Juan Paris and Estevan Cleblat,” who present themselves as
translators, editors, and publishers of an anonymous work.30
If the original prologue and epilogue of Melusine were preserved up to
1698, its narrative structure was torn apart as early as 1520, giving rise to
two related but distinct works: the narrative of the legendary foundation of
Lusignan by the fairy Melusine on the one hand, and the adventures of her
son Geoffroy, heir of Lusignan, on the other. The structural opposition in
the medieval romance between the serpentine mother and her sixth son
was taken up by printers as much out of economic interest as for reasons of
readability.31 The earliest preserved example of severance between mother
and son dates to the second in-quarto edition (Philippe le Noir ca. 1525),
which deletes most episodes dealing with the exploits of Geoffroy.32 Out of
these amputated episodes, a new romance was born, first published as an
autonomous work ca. 1530.33 In contrast to the abridged Melusine, in which
missing passages are disguised by careful transitions, Les gestes et faits, et nota-
bles conquestes du preux hardy & redouté Chevalier Geoffroy à la grant Dent pro-
vides little more than a patchwork of episodes hastily stitched together by
an anonymous storyteller and fronted by a new prologue laden with epic
commonplaces. Capitalizing on the success of family sagas like Amadis of
Gaul and its sequels, the two companion romances derived from Jean
d’Arras’ work would be among the most popular titles in the Bibliothèque
bleue.34
The trajectory of Olivier in print reveals distinct forms of intervention,
largely concentrated in the paratext. Printed four years after Steinschaber’s
Melusine, the Burgundian romance had a less established iconographic and
textual tradition and thus left publishers significant leeway. By recasting the
romance’s discursive structure, editorial interventions emphasize the exem-
plarity of the text to the detriment of the authority of the medieval composer.
I focus here on the ways in which successive editions and translations of the
romance reframe the chivalric narrative.
Olivier de Castille is preserved in six closely related manuscripts. Its pro-
logue records a key transformation in authorial voice: a liminary formula
that combines the first-person pronoun and the name of the speaker—
elements that remained separate until the fourteenth century—followed by
a verb that refers to the act of composition:35 “Je phylippe camus esperant
la tressainte grace ay entreprins de translater ceste presente histoire”
[I, Philippe Camus, have undertaken to translate the present story, hoping
for divine grace]. In five of the six extant manuscripts of Olivier, all closely
related, the writer claims to have translated the story from the Latin at the
request of “Jhean de Ceroy seigneur Chunay,” chamberlain of the duke of
Burgundy, “non regardant de la coucher en autre ou plus bel langaige que
le latin le porte, car ce eusse peu faillir de legier”36 [not trying to put it in a
more beautiful wording than it was in Latin, for I would have surely failed
to do so]. In a sixth, richly illuminated manuscript dedicated to Philippe Le
Bon, duke of Burgundy,37 the signature is replaced by “je, David Aubert,
clerc” (fol. 1v).38 Not only is the author’s identity transformed but also the
very nature of his task: Aubert states that he has “couchié ceste histoire en
cler francois au sens litteral non regardant d’y vouloir adjouster autre chose
que l’istoire ne porte” [written down the story in clear French, following
the literal meaning and taking care not to add anything that the story does
not contain].Was Aubert trying to present the text in BnF MS fr. 12574 as
his own, or was he simply acting as a compiler entrusted with the material
production of this particular manuscript? The manuscript’s opening rubric,
written under the clerk’s supervision, identifies this section as the “Prologue
de l’acteur,” a designation that suggests Aubert was claiming, if not authorship,
at least some extratextual authority distinct from that of the scribe.
Whereas the editio princeps of Olivier (Geneva: Louis Cruse, 1482) closely
follows the narrative structure of the story preserved in the five manuscripts
signed by Camus, the first illustrated edition (Geneva: Louis Cruse, ca. 1492)
shows significant reorganization and reflects a growing awareness of the
printer’s role. In the preface added to the illustrated edition, Cruse praises
the “ingenious practice of printing” which makes available at diminished
cost the “auctoritez des saints et sages” [the authority of saints and wise
men] and the “hystoires et exemples dignes de commemoration” [stories
and examples worthy of being remembered]. The “hystoire . . . longtemps
escrite” [the story . . . written long ago] of Olivier was one of such “beaulx
et salutaires enseignemens” [beautiful and beneficial teachings] revitalized
by printing.After proclaiming the exemplarity of the tale, the printer, writing
under the trade name “Garbin,” spells out some of his duties:
Or est ainsi que apres que la dicte hystoire fut premier imprimee c’est trouvee
incorrecte en aulcuns lieux et imparfaite et aussi que les intitulations des
chapitres ne sembloient pas partout contenir le cas clerement. Et pour ce que
Maistre loys garbin cytoyen et imprimeur de geneve a este par aulcuns
solicite de l’imprimer a la decoration de l’hystoire et visible delectation des
liseurs et a la consolation des desirans.39
[It so happens that upon its first printing the story was in many a place incorrect
and imperfect and also that the chapter headings did not clearly describe its
contents.And this is why Master Louis Garbin, citizen and printer of Geneva,
was asked to print it to better illustrate the story, for the visible delectation of
readers and to console those in want.]
The printer takes pains to present his work not as a private commercial
initiative but as a response to public demand for an improved version. He
describes, in the third person, the textual and paratextual interventions
undertaken to enhance readability. These include not only emending the
text where faulty but also adjusting rubrics and chapter divisions without
compromising the integrity of the text (“Et sans adjouster oster ne diminuer”
[And without adding, suppressing or reducing]). The reader’s pleasure and
understanding of the hystoire is further enhanced by iconography, composed
of forty-one woodcuts (either at the top of the page or immediately below
the rubric), including two chilling images placed side by side that show
Olivier lopping off the heads of his children and collecting their blood for
Artus to drink.
Paratextual additions—the printer’s preface, table of contents, rubrics,
and epilogue—provide hermeneutic cues.40 The “briesve et utile epilogation”
[brief and useful epilogue], identified in the rubrics as the final chapter, is
particularly revealing in this regard. Like Jean d’Arras, the editor uses the
teachings of the auctoritates to legitimate his own practice: “Aristote le
philosophe dit que les choses qui sont separees s’entendent et cognoissent
mieulx distinctement. Pour la quelle cause la table a este faite et mise au
commencement du present livre pour mieulx l’entendre”41 [The philosopher
Aristotle says that things that are separate are understood and known more
distinctly. For this very reason the table of contents was made and placed at
the beginning of the book for better comprehension].The main function of
the epilogue is to account for the marvelous elements in the tale. For
instance, the passage in which Olivier kills his children in order to heal his
faithful companion is compared to Abraham’s sacrifice; this gives rise to two
competing explanations: either the children died and were resurrected or an
illusion of which the Bible contains many examples prevented Olivier from
doing them harm. The paratextual apparatus of this revised edition thus
constructs a metatextual didactic voice framing the original narrative and
Camus’s prologue.
The Spanish editio princeps (Burgos: [Fadrique de Basilea], 1499), which
includes a preface, table of contents, rubrics, and epilogue, closely follows
the text and iconography of the illustrated French edition.42 However, the
“presentacion e introite” that contained Camus’s textual signature is miss-
ing, as well as the entire section of the preface where “Maistre loys garbin”
introduces himself and describes the corrections made to the first edition.
While it does not acknowledge the printer’s role in the transmission of
Olivier, the Spanish adaptation borrows his praise of the “savvy and fruitful
art of printing,” (fol. 2r) which now is placed in the service of translators.
The second half of the preface explains the origins of the story, emphasizing
patronage over authorship:“E fu la dicha ystoria por excelencia levada enel
reyno de Francia & venida en poder del generoso & famoso cavallero don
Johan de Ceroy . . . & la translado El honrrado varon Felipe Camus”43
[This excellent story was brought to the Kingdom of France and came into
possession of John of Ceroy . . . and it was translated by the honorable man
Felipe Camus]. Unlike Historia de la Linda Melosina, the adaptation of Olivier
does not provide the name of the Spanish translator, mentioning in vague
terms that the story was translated from the French at the request of
Castilian gentlemen. Camus’s signature is preserved in Spanish editions up
to the turn of the eighteenth century, when authorship is unexpectedly
transferred to one “Pedro de la Floresta,” as attested in the title pages of
editions produced between 1726 and 1841.44 During the latter half of the
nineteenth century, literary historians in both France and Spain thought
Oliveros to have been originally composed in Spanish by Camus, who thus
became the fictional author not only of Oliveros, but also of La historia del
muy valiente y esforçado cavallero Clamades, the story of another heir to the
kingdom of Castile whose French origins, like those of Olivier, had been all
but forgotten.45
Olivier’s author met with more modest fortunes across the English
Channel, where the story of the two knights was printed by Wynkyn de
Worde, Caxton’s successor.46 While adopting the paratextual divisions of
the French second edition and closely following the first two paragraphs of
Garbin’s preface, the English 1518 editio princeps makes no mention of prior
editions in any language. The translator thus suggests—by omission—that
he or De Worde resurrected Olivier’s story:“And amonge the other hysto-
ryes is one founde a longe tyme written.”47 Adding insult to injury, Camus’s
contribution is also erased from the record, for if it follows Camus’s captatio
benevolentiae word for word, the “presentacyon and introyte of this present
booke” makes room neither for the French writer nor for his patron:
I Henry Watson apprentyse of London trustynge in the grace of god hathe

enterprysed for to translate this present hystorye out of Frensshe in to
Englysshe oure moders tongue at the commaundement of my worshypfull
master Wynkyn de Worde not havynge regarde for to laye it in more dyffused
termes than the Frensshe dothe specyfye for in doynge so I myght lyghtly
haue fayled.48
The translator’s presentacyon reenacts the medieval scene of dedication

between author and patron the better to displace the primal figures of
authorship. Just as Watson replaces Camus, so does his master take up the role
of Camus’s aristocratic patron Jean de Croÿ; in parallel fashion, French
becomes to English what Latin was to French. By mimicking the commu-
nicative contract of the medieval manuscript, the dedication sidelines the
role of the public, the group of readers and listeners born with print culture
to whom Cruse had originally addressed his preface.
What conclusions can be drawn from the adventures of Melusine and
Olivier in the age of print? From manuscript to chapbook, the two
romances were subjected to structural and discursive mutations that modi-
fied their conditions of reception. In the case of Melusine, editorial inter-
ventions resulted in the creation of two related but distinct narratives even
though the text’s prologue and epilogue were preserved from one edition
to the next. Olivier, by contrast, elicited a voluminous paratext that eluci-
dates and updates the original narrative. Cruse’s preface (ca. 1492) in par-
ticular offers a rare early example of a printer explicitly presenting editorial
techniques in the service of docere [teaching] and delectare [delighting].
Transmission histories of Melusine and Olivier thus provide valuable clues
into the reception of medieval narratives in the early modern period. If the
development of new forms of textual organization prompted by printing
contributed to the reconfiguration of medieval narratives to better serve the
needs of a more diverse audience, authorial self-presentation remained
remarkably stable, until the turn of the seventeenth century when medieval
prologues and paratext added by printers were often replaced by summary
or paraphrasis. In the chain of transmission of romances such as Melusine and
Olivier, artistic rivalry was felt not between book producers and medieval
authors, but rather between publishers who worked in succession on the
same medieval texts. This competition was particularly intense in cases
crossing national or linguistic boundaries, where deliberate omission of
authorial marks and erasure of paratextual signatures were the norm. In the
generic context of the late medieval romance, the author is largely a figure
of the text whose self-representation does not conflict with the new authorial
roles assumed by publishers. Building on both scriptural practices and the
vernacular poetics of authorship, early modern editors were able to inscribe
their names and agency in the liminary spaces of the book more assertively
than had medieval copyists.
Notes
1. Jacques Dalarun,“Table ronde conclusive,” in Auctor & Auctoritas: Invention et
conformisme dans l’écriture médiévale, ed. Michel Zimmermann (Paris: École
des Chartes, 2001), pp. 571–573.
2. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, L’apparition du livre (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1958, 1999), p. 361.
3. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. A. Strubel
(Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), v. 10526. See Pierre-Yves Badel,
Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siècle: Étude de la réception de l’œuvre (Geneva:
Droz, 1980), p. 165.
4. Febvre and Martin, L’apparition du livre, p. 362.
5. Histoire de l’édition française.I.Le livre conquérant.Du Moyen Age au milieu du XVIIe
siècle, ed. Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin (Paris: Fayard, 1982), p. 211.
6. Roger Chartier, Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien régime (Paris: Seuil,
1982, 1987), pp. 110–111.
7. Conteurs français du XVIe siècle, ed. Pierre Jourda (Paris: Gallimard, 1965),
pp. 620–621.
8. Jean-Jacques Vincensini includes a selected bibliography of critical studies on
Mélusine in his edition Mélusine ou La Noble Histoire de Lusignan (Paris:
Librairie Générale Française, 2003).
9. On the structure of “Melusinian myths,” see Claude Lecouteux, “La struc-
ture des légendes mélusiniennes,” Annales Économies, sociétés, civilisations 2
(1978): 294–306; Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge. Morgane et
Mélusine ou la naissance des fées (Paris: Champion, 1984); Jean-Jacques
Vincensini, Pensée mythique et narrations médiévales (Paris: Champion, 1996).
10. Coudrette, Le Roman de Mélusine ou Histoire de Lusignan, ed. Eleanor Roach
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1982), pp. 109–110. Unless otherwise indicated, all
translations from the Old French and Spanish are mine.
11. Melusine, ed. Karin Schneider (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1958), p. 36.“So
hab ich,Türing von Ringgoltingen von Bern uß Oechtland, ein zumol seltzen
und gar wunderlich frömde hystorien funder in franckzoyser sprach . . .”
[I, Thüring von Ringoltingen of Bern in Üchtland, found a story both
strange and very surprising written in French . . . ]. A survey of the
European reception of Jean d’Arras’ and Coudrette’s Mélusine is included in
Thüring de Ringoltingen, Mélusine et autres récits, trans. Claude Lecouteux
(Paris: Champion, 1999).
12. The only extant copy of the 1478 Steinschaber edition is preserved in the
Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel, Germany). I have consulted it in a
facsimile edition: L’ Histoire de la belle Mélusine de Jean d’Arras, ed. Wilhelm
Joseph Meyer (Bern: Société Suisse des Bibliophiles, 1923–1924).
13. Laurence Harf-Lancner,“Le Roman de Mélusine et le Roman de Geoffroy
à la grand dent: les éditions imprimées de l’œuvre de Jean d’Arras,”
Bibliothèque d’humanisme et de Renaissance 50: 2 (1988): 358 [349–366].
14. Both Melusine (1526) and Olivier (1535) were listed in the Crombergers’
catalogue. On this “dynasty of printers” active from 1503 to 1553, see Clive
Griffin, The Crombergers of Seville: The History of a Printing and Merchant
Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Father and son specialized in quality
editions, producing “some of the best printing in Spanish sixteenth-century
typography” (Juan Delgado Casado, Diccionario de impresores españoles (siglos
XV-XVII) [Madrid: Arco Libros, 1996], p. 170). One of Juan Cromberger’s
employees, Juan Pablos, brought printing to America.
15. Melusine compiled (1382–1394) by Jean d’Arras englisht about 1500. Edited from
a unique manuscript in the Library of the Bristish Museum, ed. A. K. Donald
(London: Kegan Paul,Trench,Trübner & Co., 1895), p. 1.
16. Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Tradition et structures nouvelles chez Philippe
Camus: la genèse de L’histoire d’Olivier de Castille et Artus d’Algarbe,” in Actes
du Ve colloque international sur le Moyen français III (1986): 54 [54–72].
17. See also D. Régnier-Bohler, “Le monarque et son double: la légende des
Deux Frères à la cour de Bourgogne, L’histoire d’Olivier de Castille et d’Artus
d’Algarbe,” Revue des sciences humaines 183 (1981): 109–123; and D. Régnier-
Bohler,“Béances de la terre et du temps: la dette et le pacte dans le motif du
Mort reconnaissant au Moyen Âge,” L’homme 111–112 ( July–December
1989): 161–178.
18. Antal Lökkös, “La production des romans et des récits aux premiers temps
de l’imprimerie genevoise,” in Cinq siècles d’imprimerie genevoise: actes du
Colloque international sur l’histoire de l’imprimerie et du livre à Genève 27–30
avril 1978, ed. Jean-Daniel Candaux and Bernard Lescaze, 2 vols. (Geneva:
Société d’histoire et d’archéologie, 1980), p. 20 [15–30].
19. R. Foulché-Delbosc,“Review of La historia de los nobles cavalleros Oliveros de
castilla y artus dalgarbe,” Revue Hispanique 9 (1902): 590 [587–595]. The hystorye
of Olyuer of Castylle, ed. Gail Orgelfinger (New York: Garland, 1988),
pp. 247–253.
20. I have consulted BnF Rés Y2 143 in microfilm. D. Régnier-Bohler provides
a transcription of the publisher’s prologue and epilogue in “ ‘Pour ce que la
memoire est labille . . .’: le cas exemplaire d’un imprimeur de Genève, Louis
Garbin,” Le Moyen Français 24–25 (1990): 210–211 [187–213].
21. Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), pp. 7–8. On “paratextual
interaction” between writers and publishers in early print culture see
Cynthia Brown, Poets, Patrons and Printers. Crisis of Authority in Late Medieval
France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 61–79.
22. Following Jean-Luc Solère in Entrer en matière: les prologues, ed. Jean-Daniel
Dubois and Bernard Roussel (Paris: Cerf, 1998), pp. 306–310, Jean-Claude
Mühlethaler opposes the rhetorical nature of the preface to the “axiomatic”
function of the prologue in Seuils de l’œuvre dans le texte médiéval, ed.
Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses
de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2002), 1: 224–225.This distinction is implicit in my
opposition between authorial prologue and editorial paratext.
23. Jean d’Arras, Mélusine: roman du XIVe siècle, ed. Louis Stouff (Geneva:
Slatkine, 1974), p. 312.
24. Jean d’Arras, Mélusine, p. 4.
25. Jacques Le Goff, L’imaginaire médiéval (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 27.
28. On the opposition between writer (actor) and authority (auctor) in classical
culture and the medieval tradition of commentary, see Alastair Minnis,
Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle
Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), p. 26, 157. On the semantic shifts of acteur
in Middle French see Brown, Poets, pp. 203–206.
29. The Troyes editions of Melusine have been commented by Lise Andries,
“Mélusine et Orson: deux réécritures de la Bibiothèque bleue,” in La biblio-
thèque bleue et les littératures de colportage, ed.Thierry Delcourt and Elisabeth
Parinet (Paris: École des Chartes, 2000), pp. 78–92; and, in the same collection
of essays, by Hélène Bouquin, “L’illustration du Roman de Mélusine dans la
bibliothèque bleue,” pp. 138–147.
30. For a comparison of the 1489 and 1526 Spanish editions see Alan D.
Deyermond, “La historia de la linda Melosina: Two Spanish Versions of a
French Romance,” in Medieval Hispanic Studies Presented to Rita Hamilton,
ed. Alan D. Deyermond (London: Tamesis Book Ltd., 1976), pp. 57–65;
Historia de la linda Melosina, ed. Ivy A. Corfis (Madison:The Hispanic Seminary
of Medieval Studies, 1986), pp. v-xi; and Ana Pairet,“Histoire, métamorphose
et poétique de la réecriture: les traductions espagnoles du Roman de Mélusine
(XVe-XVIe siècles),” in Le mythe de Mélusine dans la littérature et dans les arts, ed.
Arlette Bouloumié (Paris: L’âge d’homme, 2002), pp. 47–55.
31. On this mother/son polarity, see S. Roblin, “Le sanglier et la serpente,
Geoffroi à la grand dent dans l’histoire des Lusignan,” in Métamorphose et bes-
tiaire fantastique au Moyen Âge (Paris: École Normale Supérieure de jeunes
filles, 1985) pp. 245–285; and Harf-Lancner “Le Roman de Mélusine,”
pp. 349–366.
32. Harf-Lancner,“Le Roman de Mélusine”, p. 361.
33. Harf-Lancner,“Le Roman de Mélusine”, p. 363.
34. Alfred Morin, Catalogue descriptif de la bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (almanachs

exclus) (Geneva: Droz, 1974), pp. 307–309; 328–329.
35. According to Christiane Marchello-Nizia, this formula, in which the name
of the speaker is generally followed by a nominal group declining his social
identity, originates in legal discourse and first appears in the prologue to his-
toriographical works such as Joinville’s 1309 Life of Saint Louis.“L’Historien
et son prologue: forme littéraire et stratégies discursives,” in La Chronique et
l’Histoire au Moyen Age, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Presses de l’Université de
Paris-Sorbonne, 1984), pp. 13–25. On the variety and poetic function of
“textual signatures” in the late medieval period, see Brown, Poets,
pp. 153–157.
36. I quote from BnF MS fr. 1484, which contains a text close to that of the editio
princeps.
37. BnF MS fr. 12574, ca. 1469.
38. The signature “David Aubert” appears in 43 manuscripts produced under his
supervision, four of which indicate that he copied them himself (manu
propria).The expression “clerc” is only recorded two other times in combi-
nation with Aubert’s name. In the manuscripts of Chronique normande and
Perceforest, two autograph manuscripts copied the same year (1459), Aubert
calls himself “clerc” and “escripvain” respectively. The expression used to
introduce himself in Perceforest, is close to the one used in Olivier:“Je David
Aubert comme l’escripvain, me suis emploié de mettre au net et en cler francois
certaines anciennes histoires” [I, David Aubert, the writer, have endeavored
to copy certain ancient stories in clear and concise French.] See Richard
Straub, David Aubert, escripvain et clerc (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 35, 76,
278–279.
39. I quote from BnF Rés Y2 143.
40. Régnier-Bohler,“ ‘Pour ce que la memoire,” pp. 202–203.
41. BnF Rés Y2 143. See also the transcription in D. Régnier-Bohler,“Pour ce
que la mémoire.”
42. R. Foulché-Delbosc,“Review of La historia,” pp. 590–591.
43. La historia delos nobles caualleros Oliueros de Castilla y Artus díAlgarve. From
Romance to Chapbook:The Making of a Tradition, ed. Ivy Corfis, (Madison:The
Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1997), p. 45. All subsequent refer-
ences are taken from this edition.
44. La historia delos nobles caualleros, pp. 31–34.
45. Foulché-Delbosc, “Review of La historia,” pp. 587–595. Miguel Ángel
Frontón, “Del Olivier de Castille al Oliveros de Castilla: anâlisis de una
adaptación caballeresca,” Criticón 46 (1989): 64 [63–76].
46. The hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, ed. Gail Orgelfinger (New York: Garland,
1988), p. XIII.
47. The hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, p. 2.
48. The hystorye of Olyuer of Castylle, p. 12.
CHAPTER 11
WHAT HAPPENED TO MEDIEVALISTS

AFTER THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR?
Virginie Greene
a naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur” [The birth

“L of the reader must be achieved at the cost of the death of the Author].1
Thus ends Roland Barthes’s short essay “The Death of the Author,”2 in
which, to their dismay, readers learn that they do not exist so long as they
believe that the Author exists, and that they are not truly reading until they
realize the Author’s tyranny over them and depose Him.Yet it is unclear from
Barthes’s essay whether readers should rise up pour faire la Révolution [to revolt]
or simply celebrate the demise of the Author as the term of an inescapable
evolution. Is Barthes’s essay a call to arms or an oracle?
Probably both. On one hand, “The Death of the Author” declared war
against certain persons or institutions that, at the time he wrote it, Barthes
loathed. On the other hand, the essay should be read as a part of the medi-
tation on life, death, reading, and writing that Barthes pursued throughout
his career. Although Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author”—there is
no dispute over this attribution—the essay has become so emblematic that
it can also be read as an anonymous pamphlet. What speaks through
Barthes’s voice could be named Mai 68, Structuralism, Poststructuralism,
Deconstruction, French Theory, New Criticism, Nouveau Roman, or, to
summarize, the spirit of the Sixties. “The Death of the Author” is a dated
text, just like J’accuse—both texts being essential to our understanding of an
important historical moment and its aftermath.
Attuned to the militant ambiguity of the Sixties, Barthes affirmed simul-
taneously that the Author is dead, quite dead, almost dead, like dead, soon
to be dead. In so doing, he held up a giant puppet named “The Author” as
206 VIRGINIE GREENE
a symbol of critical conservatism and a target for the arrows of radical

criticism. However, as Seán Burke has remarked, such a conception of the
author is hard to find in the traditions of literary criticism preceding
Barthes.3 In 1968 like in 1868, even the most provincial, narrowminded, or
traditionalist professeur de lettres would not have gone so far as to grant the
author, or any particular author, the “empire” and the “tyranny” that Barthes
claimed to overthrow. I wonder who, in modern times, would have believed
that a text is made of “une ligne de mots, dégageant un sens unique, en
quelque sorte théologique (qui serait le ‘message’ de l’Auteur-Dieu)” [made
of a line of words, expressing a unique meaning, theological so to speak,
which would be the “message” of the Author-God].4 Barthes states that the
omnipotent Author is a post-medieval creation linked to the modern
invention of individuality.5 However, his Author recalls the medieval notion
of authorship in the specific context of the Scriptures.And yet, even within
a truly theological and authoritarian mindset, the notion of the author was
far from being simple or unified, as is manifest in medieval debates about
David and Salomon’s authorship of some parts of the Bible.6 In what way
then could Barthes’s Author—dead or alive—be of any interest for
medievalists? “The Death of the Author” asked no questions and gave no
answers directly relevant to interpreters of medieval literature. But Barthes’s
essay did provoke questions, revisions, and dissent, applicable to all domains
of literary inquiry, including the Middle Ages.
In February 1969, Michel Foucault presented a paper entitled “What is
an author?” at the Société française de Philosophie.7 Obviously, Foucault did
not consider the author to be dead, since he asked “What is” and not “What
was.” Although it is highly implausible that Foucault had not read “The
Death of the Author,” he did not mention the name “Barthes” a single time.
But it was to Barthes that Foucault alluded when he observed flippantly,
“l’effacement de l’auteur est devenu, pour la critique, un thème désormais
quotidien” [the erasure of the author has now become for critics a daily
theme]8 and “la marque de l’écrivain n’est plus que la singularité de son
absence; il lui faut tenir le rôle du mort dans l’écriture.Tout cela est connu;
et il y a beau temps que la critique et la philosophie ont pris acte de cette
disparition ou de cette mort de l’auteur” [the mark of the writer is reduced
to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role
of the dead man in the game of writing. None of this is recent; criticism and
philosophy took note of the disappearance—or death—of the author some
time ago.]9 Through such remarks, the philosopher Foucault denied the
critic Barthes paternity of the idea of the author’s death. Foucault was prob-
ably right to claim that the idea was in the air before Barthes gave it a pithy
formulation. For Foucault, who had announced the death of man in his
1966 book The Order of Things,10 the death of the author might have
M E D I E VA L I S T S A F T E R T H E D E AT H O F T H E AU T H O R 207
sounded like a pale remake. Nothing must be more annoying than to see
one’s own revolutionary ideas become mainstream.
However, the essay “What is an author?” did something more important
than express Foucault’s annoyance at being outdone or watered down. It
demonstrated the philosopher’s ability to revise his previous conviction
without recanting. Instead of a call to arms, an elegy, or a prophecy,“What
is an author?” offers a program for scholarly work:
Mais il ne suffit pas, évidemment, de répéter comme affirmation vide que

l’auteur a disparu. De même, il ne suffit pas de répéter indéfiniment que Dieu
et l’homme sont morts d’une mort conjointe. Ce qu’il faudrait faire, c’est
repérer l’espace ainsi laissé vide par la disparition de l’auteur, suivre de l’œil la
répartition des lacunes et des failles, et guetter les emplacements, les fonctions
libres que cette disparition fait apparaître.11
[It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author
has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after
Nietzsche) that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must
locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution
of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance
uncovers.]
Foucault listed four directions of research: (1) the name of the author (what
makes it different from any other sort of name); (2) the relation of appropria-
tion between an author and a text; (3) the relation of attribution between an
author and a corpus of texts constituted as an opus; (4) the position of the
author as expressed in his or her own books through prologues or constructed
figures such as the narrator, the copyist, the singer, or the memorialist, and also
the position of the author in various types of discourses.12 The second heading,
“the relation of appropriation,” is the least relevant to medieval literature
because, as Foucault explained, the appropriation of a text is a form of property
that was legally defined after the Middle Ages.13 Whatever relationship we may
conceive between a medieval author and a medieval text, appropriation is not an
adequate term to describe it. But the three other headings—namely, the name
of the author, the attribution of a corpus to an author, and the various figures
of the author—are entirely pertinent to the medieval field.
At the end of his essay Foucault reverted to the lyric and oracular tone
that colors the end of The Order of Things, albeit in a more sober fashion.
Like Barthes, he predicted the disappearance of “the author-function” but
he did not announce the birth of the reader.According to Foucault, readers
would read texts with other questions in mind:
On n’entendrait plus les questions si longtemps ressassées:“Qui a réellement

parlé? Est-ce bien lui et nul autre? Avec quelle authenticité, ou quelle originalité?
208 VIRGINIE GREENE
Et qu’a-t-il exprimé du plus profond de lui-même dans son discours?” Mais

d’autres comme celles-ci: “Quels sont les modes d’existence de ce discours?
D’où a-t-il été tenu, comment peut-il circuler, et qui peut se l’approprier? Quels
sont les emplacements qui y sont ménagés pour des sujets possibles? Qui peut
remplir ces diverses fonctions de sujet?” Et derrière toutes ces questions, on
n’entendrait guère que le bruit d’une indifférence:“Qu’importe qui parle?”14
[We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long:
“Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authentic-
ity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his dis-
course?” Instead, there would be other questions, like these: “What are the
modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it
circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where
there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-
functions?”And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but
the stirring of an indifference:“What difference does it make who is speaking”]
This new set of questions resonated well with medievalists, although

Foucault certainly did not have them in mind when he wrote. It seems as if
both Foucault and Barthes projected onto the future a distorted image of a
repressed past not yet part of leading French intellectuals’ discourse.15
Barthes and Foucault needed the Middle Ages in order to historicize their
views of the author more accurately as much as medievalists needed Barthes
and Foucault to make their field more conversant with contemporary culture.
Barthes’s essay provided a general spirit of renewal and revision in the field
of literary criticism, just as his own criticism proposed both a deconstruction
and a reconstruction of the notion of author in relation to l’écriture.16 In
Foucault’s essay, medievalists found a conceptual frame which allowed them
to investigate the notions of author, authorship, and discourse within a
historical context perceived as a complete system worthy of interest in
itself, and not as the eternal forerunner of later developments.
It is easy now for us to see the limitations of both Barthes’s and
Foucault’s approaches to texts.The former can lead critics to take vagueness
and lyricism for inventive scholarship and to replace worship of the Author
with worship of l’Ecriture.The latter can induce scholars to turn into a fixed
system what has been a lived reality, a chunk of human activity submitted to
change, ambiguities, mistakes, accidents, and death. However, it would be
unfair and untrue to underestimate Barthes’s and Foucault’s contributions
to the renewal of medieval studies, whether these have been acknowledged
by medievalists or not. Barthes’s and Foucault’s propositions for change
found fertile soil in the medieval field because this field had already evolved
considerably since the nineteenth century. Medievalists starting their careers
in the 1950s or 1960s may have considered their discipline to be hopelessely
dusty and dominated by positivist dinosaurs, but in truth they were not the
first generation to desire change or to question habits.17
What perhaps had not changed much between the days of Gaston Paris
and 1960 was medievalists’ style. I will not retrace here the whole history of
French medieval studies, but in order to better understand what medieval-
ists do with their authors and the notion of authorship now thirty-five years
after the Author was declared dead, I focus on a man and on a debate.This
man is Paul Zumthor, who, in his own writings, has reflected upon his long
career and the changes that affected him along the road. The debate was
started around 1980 and involved several scholars—such as Bernard
Cerquiglini, Roger Dragonetti, and Alexandre Leupin—who submitted the
notion of author and text to a radical examination.
Paul Zumthor was born in 1915 and died in 1995. His thesis on the
character Merlin, published in 1943 appears today as a solid piece of erudite
scholarship not so different from what medievalists wrote before the war.18
In Speaking of the Middle Ages, Zumthor made scathing remarks about the
obsession with sources that characterized his mentors, adding, “dans ma
thèse, in 1943, je me rendais confusément compte de ces malentendus et
tentais avec maladresse de les éviter” [in 1943, in my thesis, I was already
becoming vaguely aware of these misapprehensions and trying clumsily to
avoid them].19 In fact, he did more than avoid them: Zumthor openly
declared that the object of his study was a corpus of literary texts that he
was investigating as such, and not as documents for mythological or lin-
guistic reconstruction:
C’est donc ici strictement un travail d’histoire littéraire. L’étude y porte sur
des textes effectivement écrits, et les questions auxquelles elle cherche à
répondre, sont, répétons-le, de l’ordre de la composition littéraire, non de la
recherche des sources en tant que matériaux bruts. Ce qui nous importe le
plus est le témoignage des textes originaux tels quels.20
[This is strictly a work of literary history.This study is concerned by texts that
have truly been written, and the questions it tries to answer are—to insist
again—a matter of literary composition, and not a matter of searching for
sources as raw material.What is most important to us is the witness of origi-
nal texts as they are.]
Zumthor was not the first to move in this direction; he had precursors in
scholars such as Joseph Bédier,21 Douglas Bruce, and Jean Frappier,22 whose
priority was to create a corpus of medieval texts that would be read and
interpreted as literary texts. One of the problems they encountered was the
lack of authorial figures likely to be placed on the list of grands auteurs of
French literature: Turoldus cannot figure on a par with Hugo; however,
La Chanson de Roland can very well figure on a par with La Légende des Siècles
(Hugo himself would not have objected).According to Frappier, some pas-
sages in the anonymous romance La Mort Artu were comparable to nothing
210 VIRGINIE GREENE
less than Racine’s tragedies.23 In order to make such a comparison possible,

Frappier needed to shift from a canon of grands auteurs to a canon of grands
textes.That shift could have been a first step on the road leading to the death
of the Author, although Frappier and Zumthor neither anticipated nor
wished for such an outcome. They still assumed that if there is a literary
work, there must be an author or a writer who produced it. Zumthor said
about Merlin:
Il faut cesser de voir dans le personnage le représentant d’une authentique

tradition celtique; il n’est qu’une création purement littéraire, œuvre de clercs
qui d’une manière très consciente en ont choisi et travaillé les matériaux.Aussi
bien, de la plupart de ceux-ci l’identité exacte est encore indéterminée.24
[We must cease to see in this character the epitome of an authentic celtic
tradition; he is a purely literary creation, the work of clerks who consciously
chose and reworked their materials. Indeed, the identity of most of these
clerks is still unknown.]
Zumthor acknowledged that medievalists generally have no information

about the identity or biography of medieval authors, but he affirmed that
medievalists have a witness to authors’ self-conscious literary skills in the
form of the texts themselves. Those who created the character of Merlin
were not just careless copyists compiling and garbling traditions they did
not understand.
For those medievalists who wanted to consider the texts they studied as
literature, the question of the author was a secondary point easily hidden
behind the question of the text. Zumthor and other medievalists of his gen-
eration constructed an author-text entity quite difficult to disentangle or to
explain, but it provided them an efficient tool with which to analyze their
texts. Since they could not explain l’œuvre par l’homme [the work by the
man], they explained l’œuvre par l’œuvre [the work by the work], or at times
l’homme par l’œuvre [the man by the work]. The peculiarities of medieval
literature led medievalists to grant texts preeminence over authors, a move
that can be seen as anticipating the general attack against the Author that
erupted in the Sixties. It is also striking that Zumthor chose the character
of Merlin as his first theme of research for, as Anne Berthelot has argued,
Merlin is the most complex writer-figure in medieval literature.25 Although
Zumthor did not focus on this aspect of Merlin, he stressed the importance
of the corpus of prophecies allegedly authored by Merlin. Zumthor even
came to think that “Merlin se tient à la disposition des auteurs comme un
instrument du métier littéraire, auquel on peut avoir recours dans certains
cas.” [Merlin is available to authors as a tool of the literary trade, which can
be used in certain cases].26
In 1954, Zumthor published Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale. In its

short preface, there is not a single mention of author, writer, or even poet.The
actors and agents of Zumthor’s history are called works, literature, and texts.The
evolution he presented is “the organic evolution of forms and inspirations.”27
Nonetheless, Zumthor gave all the information he had about named
authors, and while his thorough survey gives the impression that medieval
literature is at times made by men, it is more often made by works:Abélard
“is a first class writer,” but the Song of Roland is “our most perfect epic
poem.”28 Moreover, it is often unclear whether Zumthor is describing a
person or a piece of literature. For instance, Marcabru, “esprit bizarre,
obscur, passe pour l’inventeur du trobar clus” [a bizarre and obscure mind, is
allegedly the inventor of the trobar clus].29 Are the adjectives bizarre and
obscur qualifying the man or the work? Grammatically they qualify
Marcabru’s mind, but semantically they are more appropriate to his poems
for in French obscur means difficult to understand, hermetic when it is applied
to a speech or a text; when it is applied to a person, it means unknown.
Zumthor meant obviously the former sense, not the latter.This implies that
in his mind “Marcabru” meant “Marcabru’s poems.” Conversely, Zumthor
described the anonymous poem Pyramus et Tysbe as an “exquis petit poème
de 900 vers, . . . plein de bonhomie malicieuse et de tendresse, dépourvu
de toute lourdeur érudite” [exquisite little nine-hundred line poem, . . .
good-natured, witty, gentle, and free from heavy erudition].30 In Zumthor’s
words, the poem sounds like a charming little man, wise and gentle, learned
but not pedantic—a sort of literary hobbit.
In Zumthor’s Histoire littéraire the ambiguous bond between author and
text is not strikingly odd, unless this bond is scrutinized—but there was no
reason at that time to question the status of medieval authors. Medievalists
were finally enjoying their literary corpus as a wonderful forest of texts,
with a few names attached to a few trees. The lack of information about
authors was no longer felt as a handicap but rather, I suspect, as an esthetic
privilege. Not only could medievalists claim to have great texts, but their
authors had the supreme elegance to remain anonymous, or, even if there
were named, to be only elusive figures.This anonymity may be one of the
reasons why in the 1950s medievalists were uneasy about fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century literature.They generally saw later works as a decline from
the twelfth- and thirteenth-century masterpieces.31 Moreover, late medieval
texts tended to have full-fleshed authors, known from sources other than
their own texts, and who lacked their predecessors’ discretion. Scholars and
students used to the fluid concept of the author-text displayed in Zumthor’s
history of medieval literature may have felt uncomfortable with authors
defined by external parameters.This may be why Zumthor’s manual stops at
the beginning of the fourteenth century.
212 VIRGINIE GREENE
What happened to Paul Zumthor during the Sixties? Already forty-five

years old in 1960, Zumthor was a mature scholar whose general position
toward medieval literature did not dramatically change. A critic of the text
he was; a critic of the text he remained. But during those years Zumthor
found his écriture and abandoned traditional academic style for a more
subjective and free way of writing. Zumthor was directly influenced by
Barthes whom he often quoted, defining him not as an authority or a
scholarly reference but rather as an intellectual friend:
Cependant, aux alentours de 1960, 65, nous rencontrions un ami nouveau,

apparemment peu soucieux de nos problèmes, mais dont spontanément
j’avais senti que sans lui nous n’irions pas plus loin. J’entends Roland Barthes,
avec, à l’horizon, ceux qui n’avaient pas tardé à le suivre.32
[In the period around 1960 and 1965, we were encountering a new friend,
one who had little apparent interest in our problems but without whom I felt
we would go no further. I am speaking of Roland Barthes, and, on the horizon,
those who had already begun to follow him.]
Zumthor saw Barthes as an inspiration to go beyond the confines of the dis-

cipline. However, when Zumthor came to address the question of the
author, he seemed to heed Barthes’s call to dismiss the Author, while at the
same time resisting the convenient fashion of declaring dead a variety of
cumbersome notions such as the author, the subject, or man:
Nous ne pouvons penser l’individu qu’à partir de notre propre historicité, par
rapport à l’horizon de conscience dans les limites duquel nous nous mouvons.
Au-delà s’étend un vaste espace flou, aux coordonnées vaguement cosmiques,
rétives aux extrapolations analogiques. C’est donc moins un “auteur” qu’il
me faudra présumer qu’un foyer d’organisation des formes, un groupe
ambiant au porteur de parole et posé, relativement à lui, en statut hyposta-
tique, impliquant ou non un vouloir-faire commun. Mais pourrait-on, dans
cette situation, proclamer “la mort du sujet”, cette fausse nouveauté qui fit
assez parler d’elle voilà quelques années?33
[We can only conceive the individual on the basis of our own historicity, in
relation to the conscious boundaries within whose limits we live and move.
Beyond that stretches a vast, fluid space, with vaguely cosmic coordinates, resis-
tant to extrapolations by analogy.Thus I will have to presume, not an “author,”
but a locus for the organization of forms, a group surrounding the speaker and
posited, in relation to him, in a hypostatic position, implying or not implying a
common will. But can one, in this situation, proclaim the “death of the subject,”
that false novelty that was so much talked about a few years ago?]
In this passage Zumthor is at pains to explain what medievalists should use

to replace the “author.” His “locus for the organization of forms” recalls the
direction indicated by Foucault in “What is an author?” but nothing of

Foucault’s analytical acumen accompanies the shift from author to locus.
And what to do with the subject? Like the “individual,” the “subject” loses
its definition when we try to conceive it in a time markedly disjointed from
our own.The “vaguely cosmic coordinates” mentioned by Zumthor are the
sort of information that medievalists can attach to their author’s names, like
“Chrétien de Troyes was probably active in Champagne between 1170 and
1190.” Jean Frappier bluntly began his book on Chrétien by stating,“[v]ery
little is known about the life of Chrétien de Troyes. In this sense he is a typ-
ical medieval author.”34 Frappier expressed in a different style the same view
of the author as had Zumthor. An author, for a medievalist, is a locus
(Zumthor’s term) or a work (une œuvre named with a man’s or a woman’s
name in Frappier’s terms).35 To kill Balzac may make sense as a symbolic
gesture, but since there is so little of him, to kill Chrétien de Troyes sounds
absurd. On the other hand, it is more difficult to question preconceptions
about Chrétien de Troyes than preconceptions about Balzac.
The new spirit of the Sixties strengthened Zumthor’s previous convic-
tion that the medieval text was the proper object for the medievalist, but
this spirit also raised a set of new questions about the relationship between
text and context, and about the nature of the text itself. In Speaking about the
Middle Ages, Zumthor characterized his general evolution as a spiral that
began with Histoire littéraire, in which he “posait le principe d’une relation
étroite entre texte et hors-texte” [proposed the principle of an intimate
relationship between the text and the extratextual].”36 Then in Langues et
techniques poétiques (1963) and in Essai de poétique médiévale (1972), Zumthor
focused on the relationship between texts and language and between texts
and voice.With these two books Zumthor entered into his “hypertextualist”
and “hypervocalist” phase. In Essai de Poétique médiévale, Zumthor declared
that the lack of information about authors forced medievalists to work in an
“experimental vacuum” without biographical or historical alibis.Therefore,
he claimed, “la poésie médiévale constitue aujourd’hui un domaine de
recherche et de réflexion privilégié” [medieval poetry now constitutes for
us a priviledged area of research and reflection].37 In the chapter “The Poet
and the Text,” Zumthor considered any authorial manifestation as a
phenomenon produced within and by the text:
Le nom en effet, quand l’auteur le déclare, s’intègre au texte, y remplissant

une fonction en quelque sorte publicitaire, créant entre l’auditeur et ce qu’on
lui fait entendre la fiction d’une connivence personnelle.38
[In reality even when an author gives his name it becomes an integral part of
the text, acting as a sort of advertisement, creating an illusion of personal
complicity between the audience and what is being read or sung to them.]
214 VIRGINIE GREENE
Interventions by the narrator were also a function of the text.39 For

Zumthor, there was hardly any autobiography before Christine de Pizan.40
In his enthusiasm for the rich textuality offered by medieval literature,
Zumthor refashioned the literary history of the Middle Ages to fit his the-
oretical position. He viewed medieval literature as an “objective poetry,” in
which subjectivity did not play an important role. Although he conceded
that marks of subjectivity multiplied in thirteenth-century texts, he saw
them as a change in literary conventions:“l’illusion grandit, d’entendre à travers
le message une parole plus personnelle” [we have the increasing illusion of
hearing a more personal voice behind the text’s message].41 For Zumthor,
before the fourteenth century all medieval literature is anonymous, even if
a few names are attached to a few texts. Medieval literature can be personal
only in a linguistic sense, that is, in the use of first-person verbs and pro-
nouns. Following the lead provided by Robert Guiette and Roger
Dragonetti, Zumthor wrote a subtle analysis of the lyric I.42 But for him,
this I did not refer to any person outside the enunciative system of the text.
As Stephen Nichols has pointed out, for Zumthor the courtly poet is absent
from his poem.43
In 1978, Zumthor went back to the context, or “the extratextual,” in Le
Masque et la lumière, a study of the grands rhétoriqueurs.44 Most of the texts
Zumthor included in his corpus are attributed to known authors like
Molinet, Meschinot, and Lemaire des Belges. But Zumthor explained that
he was not interested in “cerner historiquement un groupe d’hommes
qualifiés de ‘rhétoriqueurs’ ” [historically identifying a group of men qual-
ified as “rhetoricians”] but rather in “reconstruire les lois ou tendances sous-
jacentes à une poétique manifestée dans divers ouvrages des XVe et XVIe
siècles” [reconstructing the rules or tendencies underlying a poetics
expressed in various fifteenth- and sixteenth-century works].45 At this
point Zumthor was able to treat later medieval literature like earlier liter-
ature, and texts with known authors like anonymous texts. His personal
evolution brought him back to literary history with all the tools and con-
cepts he had tested during his “hypertextualist” phase. He also benefited
from the work of Daniel Poirion, a younger scholar who contributed
greatly to the integration of late medieval literature into the field of
medieval literature.
In 1965, Poirion published Le Poète et le Prince. At first sight this book
looks like a traditional French thèse, thoroughly erudite and carefully
divided and subdivided. Poirion never uses words like semiotic or epistemology,
and the term structure appears only a few times. Like Zumthor in the 1940s
and 1950s, Poirion claimed primarily to address texts, and texts as literature.
But he also distanced himself from medievalists who, like Zumthor, chose
to focus on literature and language and to see literature as language. Poirion
explained his position thus:
Des philologues, comme MM. R. Dragonetti et P. Zumthor, ont commencé

l’inventaire des procédés de composition et de rédaction poétiques. Et il est
évident qu’au niveau du langage nous rencontrons l’élaboration décisive du
poème. Mais la création lyrique ne se ramène pas à une technique du
langage . . . Nous avons donc préféré terminer notre recherche par une
analyse, en somme, idéologique, admettant que les poètes avaient malgré tout
quelque chose à dire, et que le mouvement lyrique nous conduisait finalement
à une certaine vision du monde.46
[Some philologists, such as Roger Dragonetti and Paul Zumthor, started to
inventory techniques of poetic composition and writing. And it is obviously at
the level of language that we find the decisive stage of development of the poem.
But lyric creation cannot be reduced to a technique of language . . . Therefore,
we have prefered to conclude our research with an ideological—so to speak—
analysis, admiting that poets had after all something to say, and that the lyric
movement was ultimately leading us to a certain vision of the world.]
Poirion was not trying to explain l’œuvre par l’homme or l’homme par l’œuvre.
He did not see the corpus of poems he was working on as personal confes-
sions and confidences. He tried to envision the author-text relationship in a
historical context rather than in a linguistic one. In counterpart to Zumthor’s
concept of the lyric je, Poirion proposed a lyric moi.47 By looking at different
positions and postures of the self presented in the poems, Poirion was explor-
ing what Stephen Greenblatt would call later self-fashioning.Whereas Zumthor
tended to think along the lines of Barthes’s demystification of the author and
glorification of the text as text, Poirion was moving toward Foucault’s con-
cept of the author as a historical or epistemological construction. But the
trends represented by Zumthor and Poirion did not create a schism in the
medieval field, and their ways of treating authors and texts did not appear
incompatible. Poirion accepted that a poem is made of language, and when
Zumthor studied the rhétoriqueurs, he accepted a return to a more contextu-
alized interpretation of literature. Since the medieval author had never been
a fixed concept, medievalists could believe that they were naturally attuned
to modernity—and even postmodernity, if they wished—and that they
would not have to go through painful revisions in order to adopt either
Barthes’s or Foucault’s views of the author, or various combinations of both.
By the end of the 1970s, medievalists entered l’ère du soupçon.48 We have
seen, through the example of Zumthor, that a complex author-text entity
had been constructed before the 1960s in order to integrate the medieval
corpus into the general corpus of French literature,49 and that this entity
was used by all medievalists as convenient to their needs, without much
questioning of its soundness. But the desire for integration had shifted from
216 VIRGINIE GREENE
the canon of great authors taught in secondary schools toward the arena of
modern literature discussed by critics and scholars. Instead of seeing
Racine’s theater as a beacon of literary accomplishment, medievalists started
to think about Kafka’s, Joyce’s, and Proust’s novels as models of writing. If
they thought about Racine at all, it was after having read Barthes’s Sur
Racine.50 The author-text, with its vague anthropomorphism, gave way to a
sharper literary entity, the self-authored text, which allowed medievalists to
apply to their texts the critical virtuosity used by others to interpret Kafka,
Joyce, and Proust. The self-authored text was still a critical fiction but one
which made medieval romances—and particularly prose romances—readable
to a public well-versed in news ways of writing and criticizing, namely
le nouveau roman and la nouvelle critique.
In his study on the Lancelot-Grail cycle Alexandre Leupin analyzed the
fictionalization of the writer and of the act of writing within the romance.
Instead of trying to reach the inner complexity of an author, Leupin
addressed the complexity of a text he saw as a coherent and meaningful system
and not just as a compilation of tales. For him, one of the major features of
this way of writing was to undermine all references to external reality and
to the origin of the text itself:
La vulgate effondre ainsi, avec une rare systématicité, toute propriété de l’écri-
ture: préséance d’une Voix, d’un double texte, d’un ‘référent’, signature d’un
scripteur, présence authentifiante d’un ou de plusieurs auteurs: l’ensemble du
texte doit être mis au compte de ce qui ne peut pas rendre compte:
anonymie, pseudonymie, apocryphie, supplément d’origine.51
[The vulgate thus collapses, with a peculiar determination, all appropriation of
writing: preeminence of a Voice, of a double text, of a “referent,” of the
signature of a scribe, of the authenticating presence of one or several authors;
the whole text must be ascribed to what cannot vouch for it—anonymity,
pseudonymousness, apocrypha, supplement of origin.]
Indeed, writers wrote these romances, but they wrote in a fashion that
makes them elusive or even irretrievable.52 Modern readers should not con-
sider this feature of medieval romance as a lack or a loss to be mourned, but
rather as a literary strategy to be enjoyed. Leupin was probably one of the
first medievalists to bring together so clearly, in Barthes’s spirit of conquest
and renewal, the death of the Author and the pleasure of the text.
Roger Dragonetti used a similar approach to named authors such as
Chrétien de Troyes, Jean Renart, Guillaume de Lorris, and Jean de Meun.
But he went beyond Leupin in his deconstruction of the notion of author;
he went so far as to praise forgery and medieval forgers. Names of medieval
authors are rather useless if we consider them in reference to real persons
about whom we know almost nothing, but they become fascinating if we
see them as deliberate forgeries, and if we accept this sort of forgery as a

literary device and not as a crime:
S’il faut continuer à traiter de faussaires les clercs du moyen âge, c’est à
condition de tourner les procédures de falsification en vertus positives, en
pratiques de littérature, dont l’extraordinaire fécondité se retrouvera chez les
écrivains de langue vulgaire et notamment chez les grands romanciers du
XIIe et du XIIIe siècle.53
[If we must continue to call medieval clerics forgers, we must turn falsification
techniques into positive virtues, into literary practices that will prove extra-
ordinarily productive for vernacular writers and in particular for the great
romance writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.]
“Jean Renart” is not the name of a person, Dragonetti claimed, but refers to
“deux modes de la ruse” [two aspects of cunning].54 The two authors of the
Roman de la Rose are only a fiction created by a single author who is neither
“Guillaume de Lorris” nor “Jean de Meun” but rather their inventor.55 The
Roman de la Rose can then be seen as a coherent structure: “Il faut résolu-
ment changer d’optique et interpréter l’apparent désordre ou la prétendue
incohérence du roman comme un prodigieux effet de l’art.” [We must def-
initely change our perspective and interpret the apparent disorder or the
alleged inconsistency of the romance as a marvelous result of art].56 In sub-
mitting medieval authors, as they were known, to his merciless scepticism,
Dragonetti implicitly constructed other medieval authors: the brilliant forg-
ers who imagined the schemes and invented the names. The reader of Le
mirage des sources cannot help but see those refashioned authors as resem-
bling Dragonetti for their vast knowledge of medieval literature and their
great mastery of language and its tricks. It is perhaps impossible to recon-
struct figures of past authors without projecting something of one’s own
desire to be an author.
Bernard Cerquiglini dedicated his famous book In Praise of the Variant to
the memory of Michel Foucault.57 In a concise form, Cerquiglini answered
the call to work on new questions about texts, authors, and discourses that
Foucault had proposed in “What is an author?”58 But he did so from the
perspective of a specialist in medieval languages and texts—a philologist—
reflecting on the evolution of his own discipline within the larger context
of the history of the text.59 His main concern is with the text, the author
being a secondary matter—an attribute of the text, so to speak. According
to Cerquiglini, the author began to acquire a “semblance of status” when he
was excluded from the print shop and the text was protected against endless
corrections, a development which occurred at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century.60 Before that time, the author hardly existed. Cerquiglini
thus affirms,“[t]he author is not a medieval concept” and treats the common
218 VIRGINIE GREENE
expression “medieval author” as a “functional anachronism.”61 Names of

medieval authors result either from medieval strategies of writing, as Leupin
and Dragonetti suggested, or from “modern fantasy” as Cerquiglini argued
in the case of “Marie de France,” who—or rather which—is “an invention
of editors.”62
It would seem that by 1989 a deadly blow had been delivered to the
medieval author through the combined efforts of medievalists who
diversely interpreted the hints provided by Barthes and Foucault about the
author as a historical and ideological construct. However, it was precisely
during the 1980s that medieval authors like Marie de France, Chrétien de
Troyes, and Guillaume de Machaut were integrated into the general canon
of French authors carried by major publishers such as Le Livre de Poche in its
series Lettres Gothiques.The general public did not make the distinction that
Cerquiglini made between Machaut, a man who can be considered as an
emerging figure of the writer,63 and Chrétien de Troyes, a name invented to
express “the cultural ambition of the Middle Ages, namely translatio studii.”64
Chrétien de Troyes became an author’s name functioning as authors’ names
do in our times, that is, as a marketing tool.And the use of this tool may be
a more difficult trend to fight than the intellectual tradition bequeathed to
medievalists by their ancestors, the philologists.
At the same time a reaction emerged among medievalists against what
some saw as the excesses of the textualist tendency. Michel Zink presented his
book La Subjectivité littéraire as a “provocation” against “immanentist criticism”:
La critique immanente s’est attachée depuis maintenant plusieurs décennies

à dénier au texte tout référent, à montrer que le langage fonctionne en cir-
cuit clos selon ses propres lois et ne renvoie qu’à lui-même, à mettre en doute
jusqu’à la notion d’auteur.65
[For several decades now immanentist criticism has been intent on denying
the text any referent, on demonstrating that language functions in a closed
circuit according to its own structural laws and refering only to itself, and on
casting doubt even on the notion of author.]
However, Zink did not attempt to rehabilitate the notion of the author in
an unquestioned (and pre-Sixties) manner. Instead he analyzed the diverse
ways through which the writer is constructed as a subject in thirteenth-
century literature. Zink’s shift from the notions of author and authorship to
the notions of subject and subjectivity allowed him to build his reflection
within a modern theoretical framework while avoiding the stiffness that a
too-literal textualism could inflict on medieval studies.
In a similar move, Anne Berthelot began her book Figures et fonction de
l’écrivain au XIIIe siècle by apologizing (ironically) for addressing such an
“anachronistic” topic as “le problème de l’écrivain, quand la critique a passé

les trente dernières années, avec un bonheur plus ou moins grand, à traiter
celui de l’écriture” [the problem of the writer, while critics spent the last
thirty years addressing—more or less successfully—the problem of writing].66
She specified that she was not interested in the real writer, but in the image
of the writer that appeared in twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular
literature.67 But Berthelot departs from Dragonetti’s and Cerquiglini’s views
of the medieval author as a ruse when she views both anonymous and ony-
mous masks of the writer as the result of a prohibition cast by the Christian
church on writers daring to write something other than celebrations of
God or commentaries on Scripture:“Pendant plus de cent ans, en vertu de
la primauté chrétienne des notions de responsabilité et de péché, la question
fondamentale qui s’est posée, c’est: qui ose écrire?” [During more than a
century, because of the primacy of Christian notions of responsibility and
sin, the fundamental question asked was:Who dares to write?]68 By replac-
ing the notion of author with the notion of writer, Berthelot displaced her
enquiry from a textual to a cultural context.
For Katalin Halász,“l’œuvre immuable, respectée dans sa forme originelle,
signée par son auteur est une chose à peine concevable dans les conditions
de la création poétique en langue vernaculaire” [the immutable work,
respected in its original form, and signed by its author, is hardly conceivable
in the context of vernacular poetic creation].69 However, the notion of
author is still a useful category to analyze medieval romances, since these
texts produce images of authors:
Dans quelle mesure Robert de Boron est-il responsable de tous les récits qui
se réclament de lui? Et qui est maître Hélie? Ou ce curieux Gautier Map,
comment se retrouve-t-il fort probablement après sa mort, auteur d’univers
romanesques bien distincts? Dénoncer la supercherie ne nous apprendra rien
d’important et l’identité des auteurs continuera de nous fasciner. Car, après
une fréquentation plus ou moins longue des romans médiévaux, tout un chacun
trace inévitablement dans son esprit des images d’auteurs.70
[In what measure is Robert de Boron responsible for all the stories that claim
to be his? And who is Master Hélie? Or that strange Gautier Map, how come
that he became—likely after his death—author of so distinctive romance
worlds? In denouncing the hoax we will not learn anything of importance
and the authors identity will continue to fascinate us. For, once we have been
accointed for a while with medieval romances, we cannot help sketching
images of authors in our minds.]
By analyzing the narrative strategies used by medieval writers to produce

such elusive and fascinating figures, Halász called attention to the way
medieval texts “communicate” with their readers, and to the fact that
220 VIRGINIE GREENE
“authors” are parts of a system of communication located in a specific

cultural context.71
Sarah Kay made a similar gesture when she revisited the name “Chrétien
de Troyes.” On one hand she warned medievalists against the “backdoor
return” of the biographical approach;72 on the other, she located the phe-
nomenon of pseudonymy within a specific group at a specific time:
I have elsewhere elaborated the idea that “courtly literature” and the dis-
course of “courtly love” arose in an atmosphere of repressed conflict between
the clerical and lay members of aristocratic courts, and that the pervasive
irony and euphemism of “courtly love” poetry were a means of negociating
and palliating tension.Viewed in this context, the sobriquets chosen by trouba-
dours are typically self-deprecating and disarming.73
Kay suggests that the name “Crestien” may have belonged to the same cate-
gory as the senhal [sobriquet] of the troubadours, and may have been used as
“a signal of friendship and participation in poetic exchange.”74 Kay clearly
refuses to view twelfth-century authors as distinct persons whose intentions
and agendas could be uncovered by careful reading of their works (and par-
ticularly of their prologues and epilogues).Yet she does not propose a general
theory of the medieval author to replace the author-person or the author-text.
In a recent book, Kay compares the Lais of Marie de France with Adgar’s
Gracial (a twelfth-century Anglo-Norman collection of Marian miracles).
Although her point is not the question of authorship, Kay reaffirms her
skeptical position about “Marie de France” as she did about “Chrétien de
Troyes.” The title of her chapter reads “The Virgin and the Lady: the abject
and the object in Adgar’s Gracial and the Lais attributed to Marie de
France.”75 There is no need to specify “the Gracial attributed to Adgar” since
“Adgar” has not (yet?) been constructed as an author’s name; “Adgar”
appears in the prologue of Miracle IX and therefore can be used as a con-
venient tag to differentiate this collection of miracles from numerous other
collections. Kay remarks that “Marie” appears in a similarly discreet fashion
“in only one collection (in the prologue to ‘Guigemar’ as it appears in the
Harley manuscript), the two others copies of this lai either omitting or
altering the line in which the name occurs.”76 Neither does Kay take a
definitive position for or against the attribution of the twelve lais contained
in the Harley manuscript to one single author named “Marie,” nor does she
openly reject the attribution of these twelve lais to the author-translator of
the Ysopet (the only place in which the name “Marie de France” appears)
and to the author-translator of L’Espurgatoire Seint Patriz. Kay reminds
scholars that there is still an open debate about “Marie de France” and her
works, while she remarks in an endnote that the authors of the essays gathered
in the volume In Quest of Marie de France unanimously support “Marie as
author of the Lais” without engaging “the contrary position.”77
Since Kay’s remarks, the case of Marie de France has been reexamined
by Keith Busby who suggests that doubts about the identity of Marie as
author of the lais might have been created by thirteenth century copyists.78
In his last book, Howard Bloch, while accepting the uncertainty surrounding
the identity of the author of the Lais, the Ysopet, and the Espurgatoire, under-
takes to “prove from within” that “Marie is among the most self-conscious,
sophisticated, complicated, obscure, tricky, and disturbing of her time—the
Joyce of the twelfth-century.”79 Bloch’s approach may seem at first sight to
be a return to the Author. However, by combining deconstruction and
New Historicism,80 Bloch succeeds in recreating a credible authorial persona,
who does not need to be fictionalized to touch us. He also captures a
historical moment of great importance in the development of authorial
consciousness—the second half of the twelfth century—and brings to light
a process of individualization that is not incompatible with anonymity.
The case of Marie de France exemplifies the paradoxical status of the
medieval author in French medieval studies today.“Marie de France” repre-
sents the amount of faith that we, medievalists, require in order to engage
with our subject matter.Whether we believe in or doubt her existence as an
author, we feel we must occupy a specific position with regard to the origi-
nation of the group of texts gathered under her name. Although we often
prefer to avoid reopening the debate about the author, it is not over and
Sarah Kay is right to call our attention back to it. If we have not brought the
question to a closure it is probably because we have not reached the position
of “indifference” that Foucault called for at the end of his essay “What is an
author?” I do not believe that any of us can claim to be in a position in which
we could honestly affirm that “who is speaking” makes no difference. Due to
the form of our own subjectivity, the question “who is speaking (to me)?”
cannot be repressed or suppressed. But the configuration of our relationship
to the question has changed since Zumthor started to question his own dis-
cipline. Borrowing the Möbius strip from Alexandre Leupin, as he invites his
readers to do,81 I will represent this change by the two following models:
222 VIRGINIE GREENE
I understand the positions on the strip (a continuous page which both has
and does not have a recto and a verso) as the positions of identification and
projection by which a subject constructs an object allowing him or her to
define his or her desire; the position in the void delineated by the strip is
occupied by the representation of this desire. Thus, it seems to me that
the medieval author is to modern-day medievalists what the medieval text
was to philologists: both a tool and a projection that cannot be analyzed in
logical terms—at least according to the basic Aristotelian logic that we
generally imply when we speak about logic—since it violates the principle
of noncontradiction. For us, the medieval author both exists and does not
exist; it reflects us and we cannot look at it; it defines us and we cannot
define it. It is the medieval text that now occupies the position of our ideal
goal in the void in which logical abstraction is possible.82 Therefore, work-
ing on the medieval author requires accepting and even enjoying some
degree of ambiguity and paradox. I thank again all the contributors of this
volume for their willingness to glance at what is for us unobservable.
Notes
1. Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Eric Marty,
3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1993) 1: 495. English translation by Stephen Heath in
R. Barthes,“The Death of the Author,” Image, Music,Text (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), p. 148.
2. First published in English as “The Death of the Author” in Aspen Magazine
5–6 (1967), attracted more attention when published in French in Manteia 5
(1968), pp. 12–17.
3. “Barthes himself in seeking to dethrone the author, is led to an apotheosis of
authorship that vastly outspace anything to be found in the critical history he
takes arms against.” Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism
and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1992), p. 27.
4. Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” pp. 493–494. “The Death of the Author,”
pp. 52–53.
5. “L’auteur est un personnage moderne, produit sans doute par notre société
dans la mesure où, au sortir du Moyen Age, avec l’empirisme anglais, le
rationalisme français, et la foi personnelle de la Réforme, elle a découvert le
prestige de l’individu” [The author is a modern figure, a product of our society
insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the
prestige of the individual]. Barthes,“La mort de l’auteur,” p. 491.“The Death
of the Author,” p. 142.
6. Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval theory of authorship: scholastic literary attitudes in the
later middle ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984), p. 43.
7. Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 63 (1969): 73–104. This text is
given in Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits I: 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert,
François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 817–849.
A modified version has been translated by Josué V. Harari in Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1979), pp. 141–160.
8. Foucault,“Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” p. 817. My translation, since this passage
does not figure in Harari’s translation. Foucault met Barthes in 1955 and the
two were good friends for a long time (see Foucault, Dits et Ecrits I: 1954–
1988, p. 25).
9. Foucault,“Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?,” p. 821.“What is an Author?” p. 143.
10. The book ends with a sort of prophecy, announcing “one can certainly
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the
sea.” The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences, trans. of Les
Mots et les Choses (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 387.
11. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” p. 824.“What is an Author?” p. 145.
12. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” pp. 817–818.This list does not figure in Harari’s
translation.
13. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” p. 827.“What is an Author?” pp. 148–149.
14. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” p. 840.“What is an Author?” p. 160.
15. With the exception of Jacques Lacan.See Jean-Charles Huchet, Littérature médié-
vale et psychanalyse: pour une clinique littéraire (Paris: PUF, 1990), pp. 19–20.
16. See Burke’s reflection on the link between “The Death of the Author” and
S/Z in The Death and Return of the Author (see above n. 3), pp. 46–47.
17. See recent works on Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier: Ursula Bähler, Gaston
Paris et la philologie romane (Geneva: Droz, 2004); Ji-hyun Kim, “For a
Modern Medieval Literature: Gaston Paris, Courtly Love and the Demands
of Modernity” (Diss. Harvard University, 2005); Michelle Warren, “Au com-
mencement était l’île: The Colonial Formation of Joseph Bédier’s Chanson de
Roland” in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating
Cultures, ed. Ananya J. Kabir and Deanne M. Williams (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 205–226.
18. Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophète: Un thème de la littérature polémique, de l’histo-
riographie et des romans (Lausanne: Payot, 1943). For more details on the life
224 VIRGINIE GREENE
and career of Zumthor, see his own reflections: Paul Zumthor, Parler du
Moyen Age (Paris: Minuit, 1980) and Ecriture et nomadisme. Entretiens et essais
(Montréal: l’Hexagone, 1990). See also: Paul Zumthor ou l’invention permanente,
ed. J. Cerquiglini-Toulet and C. Lucken (Geneva: Droz, 1998). For a bibliog-
raphy of his works from 1943 to 1987, see Le Nombre du temps: hommage à Paul
Zumthor (Paris: Champion, 1988), pp. 3–14; for a supplement covering the
years 1987 to 1997, see Paul Zumthor ou l’invention permanente, pp. 161–164.
19. Zumthor, Parler du Moyen Age, p. 55. Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah
White (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 47.
20. Zumthor, Merlin, p. 7. My translation.
21. See Bédier’s hypotheses on the author of the Song of Roland in La Chanson
de Roland commentée par Joseph Bédier (Paris: L’Édition d’Art, 1927),
pp. 31–41.
22. Both Bruce and Frappier edited La Mort Artu.
23. Jean Frappier, Etude sur La Mort le Roi Artu (Paris: Droz, 1936), pp. 214,
243–244, 365.
24. Zumthor, Merlin, p. 5.
25. Anne Berthelot, Figures et fonction de l’écrivain au XIIIe siècle (Montréal/Paris:
Institut d’Etudes Médiévales/Vrin, 1991) p. 408.
26. Zumthor, Merlin, p. 273. According to Emmanuèle Baumgartner, Zumthor
has privileged the prophetic aspect of Merlin over his role as a writer to
stress the preeminence of the voice over the written text. “Paul Zumthor
et le roman médiéval” in Paul Zumthor ou l’invention permanente, p. 64
[63–72].
27. Paul Zumthor, Histoire littéraire de la France médiévale (VIe-XIVe siècles) (Paris:
PUF, 1954), p. v.
28. Zumthor, Histoire littéraire, pp.165 and 161. My translation.
29. Zumthor, Histoire littéraire, pp. 174–175.
30. Zumthor, Histoire littéraire, p. 192.
31. See Kevin Brownlee, Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 3.
32. Zumthor, Parler, pp. 64–65. Speaking, p. 56. Barthes is also quoted or men-
tioned elsewhere (Parler, pp. 19, 29, 53, 99, 102. Speaking, pp. 12, 22, 45, 89,
92). Zumthor met Barthes in 1934 or 1935 when both attended courses at
the Sorbonne. H. Solterer, “Performing Pasts: A Dialogue with Paul
Zumthor,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27:3 (1997),
[pp. 595–640], p. 604.
33. Zumthor, Parler, pp. 68–69. Speaking, pp. 60–61.
34. Jean Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes: The Man and His Work, trans. R. Cormier
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982), p. 3. Translated from: Chrétien de
Troyes: L’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Hatier, 1968).
35. Zumthor recognized his proximity to Frappier (and other scholars) in this
respect: “Notre tendance commune, au-delà de nos divergences, était un
repli sur le “texte seul” sacralisé” [Our common tendency, above and beyond
our divergences, was a turning back upon the text itself, the text made
sacred.] Parler, p. 60. Speaking, p. 52.
36. Zumthor, Parler, p. 46. Speaking, p. 38.

37. Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 10; Toward a Medieval Poetics,
trans. Philip Bennett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. xx.
38. Zumthor, Essai, p. 65; Toward, p. 41.
39. Zumthor, Essai, p. 67; Toward, pp. 42–43.
40. Zumthor, Essai, p. 66; Toward, pp. 66–67.
41. Zumthor, Essai, p. 64; Toward, p. 40.
42. “Les poètes que le langage d’alors désigna du nom de trouvères nous ont
donné la première poésie ‘lyrique’ qui apparaisse à l’horizon de la langue
française: mode de dire entièrement et exclusivement référé à un je qui, pour
n’avoir souvent d’autre existence que grammaticale, n’en fixe pas moins le
plan et les modalités du discours, hors de toute narration.” [The trouvères, as
the terminology of the day called these poets, gave us the first “lyric” poetry
to appear in French, being a mode of expression entirely and exclusively
referring to an I, which, although frequently no more than a grammatical
cipher, nonetheless fixes the plane and modalities of discourse to the exclusion
of any narrative element] Essai, p. 189; Toward, pp. 143–144. Later on
Zumthor affirms:“L’aspect subjectif de la chanson (le sens du je qui la chante)
n’a pour nous d’existence que grammaticale.” [The chanson’s subjective
aspect, implied by the singing I, has no more than grammatical existence for
the modern reader] Essai de poétique médiévale, p. 192; Toward a Medieval
Poetics, p. 146.
43. Steve Nichols, “Si on repensait le ‘grand chant courtois’?” Paul Zumthor ou
l’invention permanente, p. 38 [33–50].
44. Zumthor, Parler, p. 46. Speaking, p. 39. The poets nicknamed the Grands
Rhétoriqueurs wrote between 1470 and 1520.
45. Paul Zumthor, Le masque et la lumière: la poétique des Grands Rhétoriqueurs
(Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 10. My translation.
46. Daniel Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince: l’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume
de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris: PUF, 1965), p. 10.
47. The five sections of chapter 5 in Le Poète et le Prince relate lyricism directly
to the self as their titles show: Le lyrisme de l’interprète: l’ambiguïté du Moi; Le
lyrisme du flatteur: l’effacement du Moi; Le lyrisme du comédien: le déguisement du
Moi; Le lyrisme de la sagesse: le dépassement du Moi; Le lyrisme de l’action: le
dévouement du Moi.
48. Nathalie Sarraute’s volume of essays, L’ère du soupçon: essais sur le roman, was
in fact published in 1956, but its title and spirit accurately describes the type
of criticism that appeared in the field of medieval literature around 1980. My
following remarks on the ère du soupçon as applied to the medieval author are
based on a digressive section of my book Le sujet et la mort dans La Mort Artu
(Saint Genouph: Nizet, 2002), pp. 66–73.
49. On this integration, see Daniel Poirion, Ecriture poétique et composition
romanesque (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994), pp. 10–11.
50. Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Seuil, 1960).
51. Alexandre Leupin, Le Graal et la littérature (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme,
1982), p. 53. My translation.
226 VIRGINIE GREENE
52. Leupin, Le Graal, p. 53.

53. Roger Dragonetti, Le mirage des sources: l’art du faux dans le roman médiéval
(Paris: Seuil, 1987), p. 32. My translation.
54. Dragonetti, Le mirage, p. 12.
55. Dragonetti, Le mirage, pp. 200–224.
56. Dragonetti, Le mirage, p. 207.
57. “Michel Foucault a souhaité ce livre qui est dédié à sa mémoire.” Bernard
Cerquiglini, Eloge de la variante (Paris: Seuil, 1989), p. [13]. Translation: In
Praise of the Variant, trans. B. Wing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), p. [v].
58. Cerquiglini refers specifically to this article in Eloge, p. 25, n. 4; In Praise, p. 8, n. 4.
59. The subtitle of Cerquiglini’s book is,“A Critical History of Philology.”
60. Cerquiglini, Eloge, p. 22; In Praise, p. 5.
63. Cerquiglini admitted that “on peut faire apparaître , dès le XIVe siècle, la fig-
ure et la pratique d’un écrivain” [the emergence of the figure and practice of
the writer can be shown starting in the fourteenth century], and in a note
referred to Jacqueline Cerquiglini’s Un engin si soutil. Guillaume de Machaut et
l’écriture au XIVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1985). Cerquiglini, Eloge, p. 25; In
Praise, p. 8.
65. Michel Zink, La subjectivité littéraire: autour du siècle de Saint Louis (Paris: PUF,
1985), p. 23.
66. Berthelot, Figures et fonction, p. 7.
67. Berthelot, Figures et fonction, pp. 7–8.
68. Berthelot, Figures et fonction, p. 16. Leupin had also began to question the reli-
gious aspects of writing and the problems posed by secular writing within
christian literacy. See: Alexandre Leupin, Fiction et Incarnation: littérature et
théologie au Moyen Age (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).
69. Katalin Halász, Images d’auteur dans le roman médiéval (XIIe-XIIIe siècles),
Studia Romanica de Debrecen 17 (Debrecen: Kossuth Lajos
Tudományegyetem, 1992), p. 5.
70. Halász, Images, p. 8.
71. Halász, Images, pp. 9–10.
72. Sarah Kay, “Who was Chrétien de Troyes?” Arthurian Literature 15
(1997), p. 2.
73. Kay,“Who was,” p. 33.
74. Kay,“Who was,” p. 34.
75. Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the
Twelfth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 179.
76. Kay, Courtly Contradictions, p. 207.
77. Kay, Courtly Contradictions, p. 344, n. 36.The volume of essays is: In Quest of
Marie de France: A Twelfth-Century Poet, ed. Chantal A. Maréchal (Lampeter,
Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). Kay refers to two books putting in
question “Marie de France” as author: Richard Baum, Recherches sur les
œuvres attribuées à Marie de France (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1968);

Bernadette A. Masters, Esthétique et Manuscripture: Le ‘Moulin à paroles’ au
moyen âge (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992).
78. Keith Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in
Manuscript, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002) 1: 472–480.
79. R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), p. 19.
80. Bloch explains clearly his methodology in his conclusion (The Anonymous,
pp. 316–319).
81. See above,Alexandre Leupin,“The Roman de la Rose as a Möbius Strip (On
Interpretation).”
82. “L’objet de notre désir critique est un texte ou un ensemble de textes” [The
object of our critical desire is a text or an ensemble of texts]. Zumthor,
Parler, p. 41. Speaking, p. 34.
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INDEX
Abélard, Pierre (1079–1142), 83, 89, 211 Aucassin et Nicolette, 33

Abraham (biblical figure), 199 auctores, 94, 195, 196
Acarce, Girard (reviser of the Auerbach, Erich, 78
Roman de la Rose, ca. 1520), 84 Augustine, Saint, 4, 70, 80–2
Adam (biblical figure), 70 audience, see readers
addressee, see dedications author
Adgar (author of Marian miracles, ca. biography, 2, 78, 86, 128, 210, 220
1160–1200), 220 birth, 88, 96
Aeneas, 95 death, 5, 87, 93–6, 138, 149–50,
Ainsworth, Peter, 141–2 163–4, 205–6
Alain de Lille (ca. 1128–ca.1202), function, 2, 122–3, 127, 158, 189,
64, 94 207, 213
Alexander the Great, 105, 109, 111 identity, 14, 16, 62, 72, 173, 177, 184,
Alfonso the Learned (king of Castile 197, 210
and Leon, 1221–1284), 38 intentions, 62, 64, 82, 107, 180, 220
allegorical figures, 65, 86, 157–9 names, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 16, 17, 21, 25,
allegory, 80, 86, 93 61–62, 69, 83, 85–6, 93, 95–6,
Amadis of Gaul, 196 106, 117, 122–3, 125, 157, 163,
Amor, see Love 164, 167, 190, 191, 193, 197,
anagrams, 90 201, 207, 211, 213, 216, 217,
anonymity, 1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 21, 218, 220, 221
83, 84, 107, 117, 173, 174, neutrality, 137–152
176, 195, 196, 205, 211, 214, personality, 77–8, 108, 117, 167
216, 219, 221 responsibility, 164, 166
see also, author (names); rights, 85, 189, 207
pseudonymity self-presentation, 78, 108, 126, 190,
Anselm of Canterbury, Saint, 193, 200–1, 215
(1033–1109), 81 status of, see authorship
Aristotle, 195, 198–9 voice, 84, 97, 195, 196, 197
art of dying (art de mourir), 190 see also father; fictional authors;
art of love, 90, 93 first-person; moralist;
art of poetry, 90 professional; reporter;
Arts de seconde rhétorique, 164 signatures; third-person;
Aubert, David (scribe, writer for Philip witnesses
the Good of Burgundy), 197 Author, 4, 205–6, 208–10, 212, 216
246 INDEX
authorities, 80, 111, 174, 190, 195 borrowings, 7, 29–47, 93, 94

authority, 3, 10, 83, 109, 112, 120, 138, see also citations
158, 163, 164, 174, 189, 194, 197 Bouchet, Jean (1467–1557), 165
authorization, 107, 108, 111 Breton
authorship, 1, 16, 25–6, 61, 72, 85, 103, language, 108–9
107, 152, 164, 189, 190, 197, 199, material (matière de Bretagne), 104–5,
206, 208–9, 211, 218 109, 193
autobiography, 2, 79, 86, 109, 125, 214 Brownlee, Kevin, 138, 141–2
Bruce, Douglas, 209
Baldwin, John, 40 Bruckner, Matilda, 6
ballade, 162 Burke, Kenneth, 77–8
Balzac, Honoré de, 213 Busby, Keith, 221
Barthes, Roland, 8, 10, 78, 205–6, 208,
212, 215, 216, 218 Camus (or Le Camus), Philippe
Baudoin Butor (13th century author of (fl. 1430–1460), 10, 189–201
an aborted romance), 6, 104–112 canon (literary), 2, 164–8, 210, 216, 218
Baumgartner, Emmanuèle, 15 Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso the
Bédier, Joseph, 209 Learned), 38
beginning (of a text or a book), 6, 9, Castelbon (or Chastelbon), viscount of,
19, 93, 96, 105–12, 139, 149–50, 140–1
157, 158, 159, 173 castration, 8, 88–90, 92–6
see also prologues Catullus, 86
La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, 178 Caxton,William (1422–1491), 192, 200
Benedict XIII (Pedro de la Luna, pope cemetery (of writers), 164
or antipope, 1328–ca. 1422), 138, Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame
148, 149–50 (Christine de Pizan), 162
Benoît de Sainte-Maure Cerquiglini, Bernard, 209, 217–19
(fl. 1150–1170), 31 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, 5–6
Bernard de Ventadorn (ca. 1125– Champion des Dames (Martin Le Franc),
ca. 1200), 34, 41 159, 162–3,165–6, 190
Berthelot,Anne, 6–7, 13, 210, 218–19 chansons de geste, see epic tradition
Bible, 70, 119, 163, 194, 199, 206 chapbooks, 191, 192, 196, 200
biblical sources, 36, 81 Charles VI (king of France,
Bibliothèque bleue, 191, 193, 197 1368–1422), 137, 146–7, 150–1
Blaise (romance character), 108 Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465), 128
Blancheflor (romance character), 21–3 Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy,
Bloch, Howard, 3, 4, 221 1433–1477), 163, 164
Blondel de Nesles (late 12th century), Chartier,Alain (ca. 1390–1430), 164,
43–44 165, 190
Boccacio, Giovanni (1313–1375), Chastellain, Georges (ca. 1415–1475),
164, 166 164
Boethius, 94 Chevalier de la Charrette: see Lancelot
Bohler, Danielle, 9–10, 192 Chrétien Legouais de Sainte-Maure
Boniface IX (pope, ca. 1345–1404), (14th century, thought to be the
137 author of the Ovid moralisé), 167
INDEX 247
Chrétien de Troyes (fl. 1160–1190), 3, Corley, Corin, 20

6, 10–11, 12, 18, 31–2, 42, 103, Corrozet, Gilles (Parisian publisher,
105, 117, 158, 160, 213, 216, 1510–1568), 180
218, 220 Coudrette (fl. ca. 1400), 161, 191
Christian church, 219 courtly
Christianity, 69 lady, 34, 43, 66–8
Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1430), literature, 29, 34, 160, 190, 193,
63, 86, 128, 157, 159, 160, 162, 214, 220
165, 174–8, 181–3, 190, 214 love, 23, 66, 91, 161, 200
chronicles, 5, 9, 117–28, 146, 195 lover, 68, 164
chroniclers, 117, 121, 138, 140, 150–2 creativity, 41, 77, 84, 111, 117,
church fathers, 8, 38, 70–1 128, 163
Cicero, 94 Cromberger, Juan and Jacobo (Sevillan
citations, 7, 29–47 printers, fl. ca. 1500–1540), 192
self-citations, 44–5 Cruse (or Garbin), Louis (Genevese
see also borrowings printer, fl. ca. 1495), 10, 192, 193,
Clari, see Robert de Clari 198, 200
classical mythology, 67–9, 88–92, 184
classical sources, 81, 86 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 4, 78, 80,
Cleblat, Estevan (publisher, late 15th 85, 158, 166–7
century), 192, 196 Dares Phrygius, 109
Cligès (Chrétien de Troyes), 31 David (biblical figure), 206
closure (of a text or book), see end De Genealogia Deorum (Bocaccio),
Col, Gontier (ca. 1350–1418), 166 166
Col, Pierre (ca. 1352–after 1416), 166 dedications, 32, 109, 157, 162, 200
Colinet l’Alexis (unknown author Delilah (biblical figure), 96
mentioned in the Arts de seconde depositions (of kings, popes, emperors),
rhétorique), 165 136, 147–150
Commynes, Philippe de (1447–1511), Derrida, Jacques, 64, 69–70
5, 118, 120–8 Deschamps, Eustache (ca.1346–
Complainte de la mort de maistre Jacques ca. 1406), 5, 163, 167
Milet… (Simon Gréban), 164 desire, 66, 67, 72–3, 80, 90, 107, 152,
Complainte de la mort de maistre George 178, 179, 183, 217, 222
Chastelain (Jean Robertet), 164 dialectic, see logic
conjointure, 177 difference (différance, differentiation),
Conquête de Constantinople, (title of two 64, 69–70
chronicles by Robert de Clari and Dionigi (Petrarch’s patron), 82
Geoffroi de Villehardoin), 117, direct speech, 125, 127
119–20 Doctrinal de la cour (Pierre Michault),
Conte du Graal, see Perceval 190
continuations, 6, 83, 106, 117 Doon de Mayence (epic song, ca. 1205),
Continuations of Perceval, 13–28, 117 191
contradictions, 8, 23, 63–4, 70, 222 double-meaning, 63, 145–6
contrafactum, 29, 39, 45 Dragonetti, Roger, 90, 209, 214, 215,
contraries, 64, 66, 69, 90 216–17, 218, 219
248 INDEX
dream, 68–9, 80, 86, 93–5, 108, 111, François Ier (king of France,
174, 175, 182 1494–1547), 84, 86
Durand, Pierre (rewriter of Guillaume Frappier, Jean, 209–10, 213
de Palerne,16th century), French language, 4, 9, 110–11,
179, 180 144–6, 152, 163, 166, 192,
197, 200
Echo (mythological figure), 97 Froissart, Jean (ca. 1330-ca. 1404), 5, 9,
Edward II (king of England, 118, 120–7, 137–52, 158
1284–1327), 139, 147, 149
Eliot,T. S., 8, 77 Garbin, see Cruse, Louis
end (of a text or book), 6, 19, 24, 46, Gaston Fébus (or Phébus), Gaston III
68, 96, 138, 139, 149–52 comte de Foix, vicomte de Béarn
English language, 193, 200 (1331–1391), 9, 123, 127,
epic tradition, 125, 190, 191 139–44, 147
epilogues, 13, 30, 192, 195, 196, Gaston (son of Gaston Fébus), 140–4
198–200, 220 Gautier d’Arras (fl. end 12th century),
Erec et Enide (Chrétien de Troyes), 18 103
L’Espurgatoire Seint Patriz (Marie Gautier de Coinci (ca. 1177–1236), 7,
de France), 220–1 29–47
Estoire de Joseph (prose romance), 108 Gauvain (romance character), 15, 23
Eve (biblical figure), 70, 90 Gauvain (prose romance in print), 190
exegesis, 70–1 genesis (of a text), 9, 173,
explicit, 15, 190, 196 see also origin
eyewitnesses, see witnesses Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1110–
ca. 1155), 106, 109
Fabri, Pierre (fl. 1483–1515), 165 Gérard de Nevers (prose version of Le
Fail, Noël du (ca. 1520–1591), 191 Roman de la Violette), 179, 181
fairy tale, 22, 191 Gerbert (author of a Continuation,
Farce de maître Pathelin, 190 sometimes identified as Gerbert
father (author as the father of the de Montreuil), 14, 16, 18, 24–5
book), 5, 163, 173 Geoffroi de Villehardouin (ca. 1160–
fathers, see church fathers ca. 1213), 5, 117–24
femininity, 66–9 German language, 191, 193
fictional authors, 103, 108, 110, 217, Gerson, Jean (1363–1429), 165
218, 220 Gervais of Tilbury (ca. 1155–ca. 1234),
filiation, 174, 184 195
Fille du comte de Ponthieu (romance Gilles le Bouvier (le Héraut Berry,
cycle), 176 1386–ca. 1455), 5, 118,
first-person (assertion, narrative), 5, 6, 120–3, 125
14, 16, 19, 107, 117–28, 139, 144, Gilles Li Muisis (ca. 1272–1352), 164
167, 178, 194, 197, 214, 215 Gillion de Trazegnies, 176, 177, 181
Flemish language, 193 Giraut de Bornelh (ca. 1140–ca. 1200),
forgery, 216–17 163
Foucault, Michel, 10, 64, 72, 206–8, glory, 34, 160, 165, 174
213, 215, 218, 221 God, 7, 32, 70–1, 161, 194, 195, 219
INDEX 249
Godefroi de Leigni (end of 12th Hildegard von Bingen, Saint

century), 18 (1098–1179), 70
Gottfried von Strassburg (ca. 1180– Histoire de Giglan (Claude Platin), 181
ca. 1215), 4 Histoire de Jason (Raoul Lefèvre), 9,
Grail (the Holy), 6, 15, 21–4 174, 182–3
Gréban, Simon (brother of Arnoul Histoire d’Olivier de Castille et d’Artus
Gréban, fl. 1440–60), 163–4 d’Algarbe, 5, 9, 189–201
Greek (language), 110–111 Historia regum Britanniae, (Geoffrey of
Gregory XII (pope, ca. 1327–1417), Monmouth), 106, 109
147 historians, see chroniclers
Guenée, Bernard, 138 historiography see chronicles
Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence Hugo,Victor , 209
(fl. 1180–1200), 104 humanists, 79
Guernier,Thomas du (printer, Huon de Châtillon (Baudoin Butor’s
ca. 1500), 196 patron), 106
Gui de Flandres (Gui de Dampierre, Hundred Years’ War, 144
1225–1305, Baudoin Butor’s Huth-Merlin, 106
patron), 106
Gui de Mori (reviser of the Roman de I, see first-person
la Rose, ca. 1290), 84 Ildefonsus, Saint (ca. 610–667), 38,
Guiette, Robert, 214 44–5
Guillaume de Lorris (fl. ca. 1240), 7–8, illustrations
61, 84–8, 93–7, 165, 216–17 in manuscripts, 8, 85, 96
Guillaume de Machaut in printed books, 190, 192, 193,
(ca. 1300–1377), 5, 85, 157, 159 198–9
160, 161, 163–4, 167, 218 indirect speech, 125
Guillaume de Palerne, 177, 179 individuality, 77–9, 81, 118, 119, 221
Guillaume de Saint-Amour inspiration, 32, 160–2
(1202–1272), 164 interlace, 19, 20, 25
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 79 Isaÿe le Triste, 177, 180
Italian (language), 166, 181, 193
Halász, Katalin, 219
Hannequin le Fevre, (unknown author Jacques de Longuyon (fl. ca. 1310), 111
mentioned in the Arts de seconde Jason (mythological figure), 9, 174, 175,
rhétorique), 165 178, 183
Harf-Lancner, Laurence, 22 je, see first-person
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 71 Jean d’Arras (fl. ca. 1400), 10,
Heidegger, Martin, 77, 79 189–201
Hélie de Boron (one of the Jean d’Avesnes (Baudoin Butor’s
pseudonymous authors of the patron), 106
prose Tristan), 6, 103, 108, 219 Jean d’Avesnes (romance), 176
Heloise (ca. 1090–ca. 1164), 83, 89 Jean le Bel (ca. 1290–1370), 126,
Henry IV (king of England, 138, 139
1367–1413), 150 Jean de Berry (patron of Jean d’Arras,
Héraut Berry, see Gilles le Bouvier 1314–1416), 193
250 INDEX
Jean de Croÿ (patron of Philippe languages, see Breton; English; Flemish;

Camus), 200 French; German; Greek; Italian;
Jean de Joinville (ca. 1224–1317), 5, 61, Latin; Provençal; Spanish;
117–18, 120–6, 128 vernacular
Jean de Meun (ca. 1250–ca.1305), 7–8, Latin
61–75, 83–97, 164, 165–6, 190, sources, 30–1, 36, 45, 106, 109, 118,
216–17 174, 190, 195
Jean de Montreuil (1353–1418), 166 versus Greek, 110
Jean de Saintré (Antoine de la Sale), 180 versus vernacular , 2, 29, 30, 32, 42,
Jean Muret (fl. ca. 1400), 166 118–19, 158, 191, 200
Jean Renart (fl. 1200–1230), 11, 40, 43, Laurent de Premierfait (fl. 1390–1418),
103, 216–17 166
Jerome, Saint, 36, 162–3 Le Camus, Philippe, see Camus,
Jesus Christ, 45, 70–1, 108 Philippe
Job (as author), 81 Lecoy, Félix, 83–4
John of Salisbury (1350–1400, patron Lefèvre, Raoul (fl. ca. 1450), 9, 174,
of Jean d’Arras), 194 175, 177, 182–3
jongleurs, 3, 7, 37, 125, 162 Le Livre de l’Advision Cristine (Christine
Joyce, James, 216, 221 de Pizan), 159
Jugement du roi de Bohême (Guillaume Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (Christine
de Machaut), 165 de Pizan), 157, 174, 181–3
Jupiter (mythological figure), 88, Le Livre du Cuer d’amour espris (René
92, 95 d’Anjou), 164, 180–1
Juvenal, 36, 81 Le Livre de la Fontaine amoureuse
(Guillaume de Machaut), 161
Kafka, Franz, 216 Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune
Kay, Sarah, 220–1 (Christine de Pizan), 159
Kelly, Douglas, 13 Le Livre des Trois vertus (Christine de
Kyot (fictitious author in Parzival), 4 Pizan), 157
Le Livre du Remede de Fortune
lady (the courtly), 34, 43, 66–8 (Guillaume de Machaut), 160
Lady, see Virgin Le Livre duVoir Dit (Guillaume de
Lais (Marie de France), 220–1 Machaut), 159–60
Lancelot (Chrétien’s romance), 18, 32, Lemaire des Belges, Jean (1473–
42, 158 ca. 1525), 214
Lancelot (prose romance), 110, Leocadia, Saint, 42, 44–5
181, 190 Leupin,Alexandre, 7–8, 209, 216,
Lancelot-Grail cycle, 106, 119, 218, 221
180, 216 Les Leys d’Amor, 90
language library, 164, 173–4, 176, 177, 183, 190
duplicity of, 9, 63, 144–6, 149, 152; literary history, 165, 199, 209, 211, 214
see also double-meaning Livy, 80, 81
modernization of, 173, 178–81 logic, 8, 11, 14, 63–6, 92, 222
power of, 69, 147, 151–2 Louis IX (Saint Louis, king of France,
self-referentiality of, 64 1214–1270), 123, 125
INDEX 251
Louis XI (king of France, 1423–1483), Merlin (romance character), 104, 106,

123 108, 209–10
love, 21–3, 35, 66, 69, 89–91, 161–2 Merlin (Robert de Boron), 104, 106, 108
see also art of love; courtly love; Merlin (prose romance in print), 190
sacred love Meschinot, Jean (1420–1491), 214
Love (god of ), 65–6, 86–8, 90, 93–6, metaphors, 2, 40, 67–8, 162, 178, 179
157, 158, 159 Michault, Pierre (fl. 1460–1470), 190
Lucan, 36 minstrels, see jongleurs
Luces de Gast (one of the Miracles de Nostre Dame ( Gautier de
pseudonymous authors of the Coinci), 7, 29–47
prose Tristan), 103 Mirouer de la redemption de l’umain
lyric lignage (1478), 192
insertions, 40 misogyny, 65, 86
poetry, 5, 7, 29, 34–5, 90, 128, 158, Möbius strip, 7–8, 61–75, 221–2
211, 214, 215 Moccia, Giovanni (late 14th century),
166
Machaut, see Guillaume de Machaut modernity, 71, 78, 81, 215
Macrobius, 81, 93–4 Molinet, Jean (1435–1507), 164, 214
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 95 monks, 7, 36–8, 41, 46
Manessier (fl. 1206–1244), 14, 16, 24–5 Monstrelet, Enguerrand de
manuscripts, 2, 7, 14, 16, 18, 25, 29, 43, (ca. 1390–1453), 5, 118, 120–5
61–2, 83–4, 93, 96, 105, 157, 173, Montaigne, Michel de, 78
180, 189, 191, 195, 197, 198, 220 moralist (author as), 123–4
discovery of, 9, 110, 173–4, 177 La Mort Artu, 209–10
illustrations in, 8, 85, 96 music, 7, 29, 39, 41–47
Marcabru (fl. 1130–1150), 211 mythology, 9, 67–9, 88–90, 92, 95, 97,
Marie de Champagne (Chrétien de 174, 175, 178, 183, 191
Troyes’s patron, 1145–1198), see also classical mythology
32–3, 158
Marie de France (fl. 1160), 11, 93, 103, names of authors, see author (names)
218, 220–1 Narcissus (mythological figure), 69
Marnette, Sophie, 5, 15 narrative, 110, 117–28, 159
Marot, Clément (1496–1544), 84, 165 function, 121
Martianus Capella, 94 structures, 141, 147, 196, 198
Martin Le Franc (ca. 1410–1461), 159, see also first-person, third-person
162–3, 165–6, 190 narrator, 5, 117–28, 176, 177, 196,
Mary, see Virgin 207, 214
masculinity, 66–7 national literature, 166
masks, 17, 111, 148, 219 Nature (allegorical figure), 65, 157
Matthew, Saint, 81 Nero, 90
Maugis d’Aigremont (epic song), 191 Nichols, Stephen, 8, 214
Meditations (Gilles Li Muisis), 164 Nicolas d’Amiens (ca. 1147–
melancholy, 9, 177, 183 ca. 1204), 64
Melusine (Jean d’Arras or Coudrette), 5, Nicolas de Clamanges (ca. 1363–
10, 161 1437), 167
252 INDEX
Nodot, François (rewriter, end of Petrarch, Francesco (1304–1374), 4,

17th century), 196 79–83, 85, 164, 166
Noir, Philippe le (Parisian printer Philippa de Hainaut (queen of
15th century), 196 England, patron of Froissart,
Noir, Richard le (Parisian printer ca.1314–1369), 111, 123
15th century), 193 Philip of Alsace (count of Flanders,
nominalism, 64, 70 patron of Chrétien de Troyes, ca.
1143–1191), 16, 158
oral Philip the Chancelor (ca. 1170–
literature, 3, 191 1236), 45
sources, 127, 138, 139, 195 Philip the Good (duke of Burgundy,
Origen, 96 patron of David Aubert, Martin
origin (of a text), 77, 79, 83, 88, 94, Le Franc and Raoul Lefèvre,
216, 221 1396–1467), 163, 183
see also genesis Philip of Macedonia, 80–1
originality, see creativity Philip of Vitry (ca. 1285–1361),
L’Orloge amoureux (Jean Froissart), 158 166–7
Orosius, 109 philology, 79, 84, 217, 221
Otia imperialia (Gervais of Tilbury), 195 Pierre le Mangeur (Petrus Comestor,
Oudot, Nicolas (printer, 17th century), ca. 1100–ca. 1179), 167
191, 193, 196 Pierre-Arnaut de Béarn (cousin of
Ovid, 81, 86, 164, 167, 190 Gaston Fébus), 140–4
planctus, 161
Païen de Mézières (fl. early 13th planh, 163
century), 103 Platin, Claude (fl. ca. 1515), 176
Pairet,Ana, 10 Pliny, 81
paratext, 10, 13, 106, 109, 178, 190, poetry, see art of poetry; lyric poetry
192, 193, 194, 198–201 polyphony, 42
Paris, Juan (publisher, late 15th Poliziano,Angelo (1454–1494), 79
century), 192, 196 Poirion, Daniel, 214–15
Parzival (Wolfram von Eschenbach), 4 Ponchonnet (romance character), 110
pastourelle, 38 posterity, 83, 163, 167
Pathelin (character), 167–8 print
patrons, 2, 5, 6, 14, 16, 80, 82, 84, era of, 3, 10, 85
106–9, 123, 157–8, 161, 168, 173, introduction of, 83, 190
178, 182, 190, 191, 194, 199, 200 printed books, 2, 173, 181, 189–201
Paul (Saint), 71, 81–2, 195 printers, 10, 181, 189
Pendragon (romance character), 104 profane, see secular
Perceval (romance character), 20–2, 105 professional (the author as a), 77, 85,
Perceval (Chrétien de Troyes), 4, 6, 13, 158, 190
14, 32, 117, 158 prologues, 13, 18, 30, 33, 38, 94, 103,
Perlesvaus (romance character), 105 104–12, 120, 138, 146, 159–62,
Perotinus Magnus (or Pérotin, fl. ca. 166, 173–84, 190, 192–201,
1200), 45 207, 220
Petit, Jehan (publisher, early 16th prophecies, 87, 94–6, 210
century), 196 Prophesies de Merlin, 105
INDEX 253
prophets, 70 Renaud de Bâgé (or Beaujeu, fl.

Propos rustiques de maistre Léon Ladulfi, 1200–1230), 103
champenois (Noël du Fail), 191 René d’Anjou (1409–1480), 164, 167
prose, 5, 15, 103, 118, 120, 138, 178, reported speech, 124–5
179, 180, 191 reporter (author as), 127
Prose Lancelot, 181 Repue franche, 167–8
prose romances, 6, 9, 10, 15, 23, rewriting, 178–81
103–12, 118, 119, 191, 193, 216 rhetoric, 90, 91, 128, 157, 164,
Proust, Marcel, 72, 216 173, 190
Provençal (language), 179 see also Arts de seconde rhétorique
psalms, 81 rhétoriqueurs (les grands), 214, 215
pseudonymity, 3, 6, 11, 103, 216, Richard II (king of England,
219, 220 1367–1400), 138, 139,
public, see readers 146–50, 152
Pygmalion (mythological figure), Roach,William, 17, 19,
67–8 Robert de Boron (fl. 1190–1210), 6,
Pyramus et Tisbe, 211 15, 103, 104, 108, 219
Robert de Clari (ca. 1170–ca. 1216),
quarrel 5, 117–24
of the Roman de la Rose, 86, 165–6 Robertet, Jean (fl. 1460–1490), 164
of the subject, 1 romances, 10, 40, 66, 103–12,
of Universals, 64; see also nominalism 174, 190, 191, 194, 200,
quarrels (literary), 2, 165–6 216, 219
Les Quatre Fils Aymon (epic song), 191 Arthurian, 15, 103–12
Les Quinze joies de mariage, 190 Grail, 15, 22, 26
quotations, see borrowings; citations see also prose romances; verse
romances
Racine, Jean, 78, 210, 216 romans d’antiquité, 31
Raimbaut d’Orange (ca. 1147–1173), Roman du comte d’Artois, 179
163 Roman de Fiérabras, 190
rape, 68 Roman des fils du roi Constant (Baudoin
readers, 2, 10, 14, 17, 21, 32, 34, 44, Butor), 6, 104–12
46, 68, 72, 73, 79, 86, 88, 90, Roman de Floriant et Florete, 180
96, 108, 118, 119, 120, 127, 150, Roman de Mélusine (Jean d’Arras and
157, 161, 168, 174, 178–80, 184, Coudrette), 159, 189–201
191, 193, 198, 200, 205, 207, Roman de Perceforest, 7, 104–112,
216, 219 174, 175
realism (versus nominalism), 64 Roman de la Poire (Thibaut), 160
Reason (allegorical figure), 88–93, Roman de Renart, 33, 38
96, 157 Roman de Richart sans paour, 178
reception, 193 Roman de la Rose (Guillaume de Lorris
refrains, 42–7 and Jean de Meun), 7–8, 61–75,
relics, 44–5, 68 83–97, 165, 190
religious texts, 119 Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume
see also biblical sources; monks; de Dole (Jean Renart), 40, 43
music; sacred love; secular Roman des Sept Sages de Rome, 106
254 INDEX
Roman de Troie (Benoît de Steinschaber,Adam (Genevese printer,

Sainte-Maure), 31, 174, 175 fl. ca. 1470), 192, 197
rondeau, 159 story-tellers, 3, 33
subjectivity, 1, 5, 81, 83, 119, 124, 214,
sacred 218, 221, 222
love, 43, 89 Suite-Vulgate, 106
reference, 46 Switten, Margaret, 7
see also secular, sources (biblical)
Sala, Pierre (1457–1529), 176, 181 Testament Villon (François Villon), 190
Salomon (biblical figure), 206 theology, 70
Samson (biblical figure), 96 third-person (assertion, narrative), 5, 6,
Saturn (mythological figure), 88–90, 92 14, 16, 19, 117, 198
Schism, the Great (1378–1449), 137, Thomas of England (fl. ca. 1170), 104
146–8, 150, 152 Thüring von Ringoltingen (fl. ca.
scribes, 2, 8, 15, 18, 21, 83, 84, 110, 117, 1456), 191
189, 197, 201, 207, 210, 221 Tibullus, 86
secular, 7, 29, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44 title (of literary work), 103
Seneca, 81 tombs, 6, 87, 95, 164, 167, 177
sens, 157–8 see also cemetery
sentement, 5, 160–2 tombeau (poetic tomb), 95
sexuality, 8, 23–4, 65–9, 92, 147–9 topoi, 9, 31–2, 34, 36–7, 106, 118,
see also castration; courtly love; 157, 173, 174, 176, 178, 180,
love; rape 183, 193, 194
Shakespeare,William, 78 Torah, 70–1
signatures, 14, 103, 167, 190, 199, translation, 30, 110, 119, 176, 192,
201, 219 193, 197
silence (of the author), 138, 151–2 translator (the author as), 4, 83, 93,
solitude (of the author), 162 138, 139, 152, 158, 166, 180,
son (book as the son of the author), 5, 190, 196, 200
163, 173 translators, 10, 83, 191, 192,
Song of Roland, 94, 209, 211 199, 200
songs, 7, 29, 30, 35, 37, 39–47, 66, Trepperel, Jean (Parisian printer, fl. ca.
158–9, 161 1500), 193
sources, 36, 137, 194 Tristan (prose romance), 190
biblical, 36, 81 Troïlus (romance character), 106
classical, 81, 86 troubadours, 2, 34–5, 37, 41, 90, 163,
Latin, 30, 45, 106, 109, 195 211, 220
oral, 127, 195 trouvères, 38–9, 41–2
vernacular, 31, 105, 190, 195 truth, 5, 8, 36, 62, 72, 73, 95, 109, 118,
Spanish (language), 193, 199 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 128, 138,
speech 151, 161, 162, 183, 195
direct, 125, 127 Tucoo-Chala, Pierre, 141
indirect speech, 125 Turoldus, 209
reported speech, 124–5
Spitzer, Leo, 78 unconscious, 67, 72–3
Stahuljak, Zrinka, 8–9 Uther (romance character), 104
INDEX 255
Vasari, Giorgio (1511–1574), 162 Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1210),

Venus (mythological figure), 67, 103, 219
88–92, 95 Watson, Henry (translator, fl. 1518), 200
vernacular, 2, 3, 13, 29, 34, 42, 85, 103, Wauchier de Denain (fl. 1200–1210), 6,
110–111, 117, 118, 158, 190, 193, 14, 16, 19–22, 24–5
195, 201 Wauquelin, Jean, (fl. 1440–1452),
sources, 31, 190 178, 180
verse Wenceslas IV (king of Bohemia and
romances, 13–28, 30, 191 emperor of Germany,
versus prose, 138 1361–1419), 138, 147–52
virtuosity, 35–7 Wilmotte, Maurice, 19
versification, 30, 43, 45 Winkin de Worde (printer,
Villehardouin, see Geoffroi de assistant of Caxton, fl.
Villehardouin ca. 1520), 200
Villon, François (ca. 1430–ca. 1463), witness, 5, 118, 120–8, 138–139,
128, 165, 167–8, 190 144, 177
violence, 8–9, 68, 90–2, 143–4, 152 Wolfram von Eschenbach
virelai, 158–9 (ca. 1170–ca. 1220), 4
Virgil, 4, 36, 80, 81, 95 women (as authors), 157, 181
Virgin (Mary), 7, 29–47, 70, 90, 157, 220 writer’s block, 109
Virginie (daughter of Virginius in writing stage (or scene), 5,
Livy), 90 103, 157
Voeux du Paon (Jacques de Longuyon),
111 Ysopet (Marie de France),
Vortigern (romance character), 104, 106 220–1
Voyage de Béarn (Jean Froissart), 125,
127, 139–141 Zink, Michel, 32, 149–51, 218
Vulgate cycle, see Lancelot-Grail Zumthor, Paul, 10, 209–15

(Studies in Arthurian and Courtly Cultures) Virginie Greene (Eds.) - The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature-Palgrave Macmillan US (2006)

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THE MEDIEVAL AUTHOR

1. Authorial Relays: Continuing

8. Portraits of Authors at the End of the Middle Ages:

he editor of this volume would like to thank Christie McDonald for

Anne Berthelot is a professor of French and Medieval Studies at the

Virginie Greene is a professor of French in the Department of Romance

Margaret Switten is Class of 1926 professor of French at Mount Holyoke

he question of the author will probably be seen one day as a minor

de Perceforest. The trajectory thus indicated is from an author without a

neutral authorship.” Stahuljak demonstrates that Froissart’s claims “that he is

AUTHORIAL RELAYS: CONTINUING

Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

ow should we talk about the medieval vernacular author when, as

historical referent built into the proper name (however unverifiable or

(P) Le Conte du Graal by Chrétien de Troyes (typically designated as

(2) Second Continuation (also known as the Perceval Continuation) by

El non Jehanne la contesse,

Ne puis ne fu des lors en ça

discontinuities, obvious as well as less obvious segmentation connected to

Einsint remest o lui Gauvains,

Gauchiers de Dondain, qui l’estoire

Que por l’estoire consomer

Inevitably one has the sense of different hands at work—this is a collective

Manessier . . . l’a finé

Gerbers, qui le nous traite et dite

10. They always appear together except in manuscript R (BnF, MS fonds

23. Corin Corley, “Réflexions sur les deux premières Continuations de

BORROWING, CITATION,AND AUTHORSHIP

he Miracles de Nostre Dame (1214–1236) by Gautier de Coinci, a

fourteenth centuries, that have preserved it in whole or in part. I base my

Romance is born of translation: it initially presents itself as the bringing of

Chrétien de Troyes, just slightly later than Benoît de Sainte-Maure, uses a

Cest estoire trovons escrite,

En .I. des livres de l’aumaire

C’est li contes do greal,

Mais la dame pour cui g’i met

Although the idea is not identical to Chrétien’s prologue,“le mouvement et

Pus delitant sont si fait conte

The passage could almost be a reply to the prologue to Branche IV of the

Or me convient tel chose dire

And in another passage from II Pr 1, that reminds one of a famous passage

he situates himself immediately within a familiar lyric tradition (one has

Por qu’ai ceste matere emprise,

Que boen essample aucuns i pregne

These lyric references provide a kind of subtext or intertext, a set of

Qui que vos chant chançons polies

In a typical concluding flourish, Gautier plays on “chant” to emphasize his

distinction between the plain, unvarnished truth he intends to convey and

La mere Dieu, qui est la lime

Escurer daint et eslimer,

N’est pas ordre, ce vont disant

Noir moigne et blanc et gris et bai,

the Roman de Renart.19 In I Pr 2, he briefly criticizes the singing of “caroles”

. . . Car troveres ne sui je mie

If Gautier thinks of himself as a trouvère, does he present himself as a

. . . Ainz que plus lise, veil chanter.

The passage under discussion may be compared to the beginning of the

It is not possible here to enter into the details of these different

Amors, qui seit bien enchanter,

Entendez tuit ensemble et li clerc et li lai