Courtly Romance, the Vernacular Psalms, and Generic Contrafaction

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between courtly romance and the Psalms, particularly in their francophone translation and adaptation, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Documenting their convergence in material contexts, reading practices, and the general environment of the new francophone literary culture, it argues that proximity produced forms of rhetorical interaction that shaped both the translation of the Psalms and romance as a genre. To describe the way these two very different forms-one biblical, lyrical, and liturgical; the other innovative, narrative, and secular-shaped one another, the article employs the term “contrafaction,” examining both its usage in literary contexts of the period and its etymological and practical affinities with parody. Like para-ody, “contra-faction” describes processes of literary influence and exchange that are exercised “beside and with and against,” rather than through family resemblance or evolution. After documenting the role of contrafactive relationships in the formation of courtly genres, it turns to the vernacular Psalms translations and to romance to discuss how the two forms, once brought into intimate ethical and discursive engagement as neighbors and para-odes, imitated, complemented, competed and displaced one another. The article looks to major works of courtly romance, such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, the Lais of Marie de France, Floire et Blancheflor, and Flamenca, to show how the contrafactive relationship with the Psalms was figured and contemplated within romance.