A Medieval Culture of Fragments and Macrotexts

Abstract

A Medieval Culture of Fragments and Macrotexts Ignacio Navarrete Among the many virtues of Heather Bamford's Cultures of the Fragment is the fact that it reflects a tremendous breadth of scholarship across many different areas of our field, including jarchas, oral epic, Morisco writing, and, far from least, magic. Writing it required her to become familiar with the conventions and secondary literature of all those different areas, which is no small feat. In that sense, her book is almost an introduction to the areas of study in medieval Hispanic literature. And I use the last term purposely, because hers is a literary study at its most fundamental, an investigation into the uses and practices of writing. She is a true medievalist; she loves the handwritten word. And like all great books, this one gives you the feeling that it is making you aware of something that you should have known all along. Because I do not share Bamford's expertise in all those fields, I am not so much going to respond to her specific arguments, as I am going to try to [End Page 19] apply their implications for some areas that I have studied myself, and that I therefore know better. These include lyric poetry, manuscript anthologies, epic, and historiography. But first, some words about fragment culture. As Bamford makes us aware, medieval culture was a culture of fragments, or, to be more precise, a culture in which our own notions of fragment and whole did not necessarily hold. The clearest example of this, to me, is the liturgy. Clearly, some people in the Middle Ages read the Bible; however, many, even the educated and literate, encountered scripture not by the kind of through-reading that would enable narrative criticism and other modern approaches. Rather, their exposure to Scripture was in bits and pieces, encountered aurally and in writing, in the Mass and especially in the Liturgy of the Hours. I believe that what I am describing also holds for analogous practices in Judaism and Islam. Moreover, the selection of scriptural fragments would be encountered cyclically, but with the readings running on different kinds of cycles. Readings might be paired or combined for a particular occasion, but on other days the combinations would be more arbitrary. The result would be training the reader (or listener) in a certain mode of typological interpretation, in which the challenge lay in interpreting the message of a particular combination of fragments. How does this Old Testament/Hebrew Bible fragment combined with a particular Psalm, with a particular selection from the Gospels, sometimes with a particular epistolary or patristic fragment, convey meaning? And that meaning needed to be both unique, in the sense of reflective of the particular combination, and also congruent with the general meaning, because interpretation was highly circumscribed. Thus, the obverse of fragment culture was the existence of complex macrotexts that might never be read in their entirety, works that could easily be fragmented. Moreover, the conceptual dichotomy of fragments and macrotexts was not limited to Biblical or religious texts alone; the experience of this kind of reading created many parallel instances. Jean Leclercq, one of the founders of the Kalamazoo conference, described daily readings of selections from Virgil in monastic schools. Petrarch arranged his vernacular poems into [End Page 20] a collection of 365 lyrics, and while this probably was not intended to be a daily fragment, it was nonetheless a gesture in the direction of daily reading of a fragment, as was the original Latin title of the collection, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta. Boccaccio's 100 stories in the Decameron provided another canonical number that implied both macrotextuality and susceptibility to fragmentation, through excerpting, substitution, and reordering, all of which feature in the fifteenth-century Castilian translation.1 The tension between macrotext and fragment is particularly notable in anthologies. Nearly twenty-five years ago I wrote about the order of the poems in Juan de Encina's cancionero, and tried to tease out a selfreferential narrative (Navarrete), but were the large anthologies really read in this way, one poem after the other, from beginning to end? Or did the cancioneros just stand for the principle of collectability, of...