"EN SA CHAMBRE SOVENT LE LIT": LITERARY LEISURE AND THE CHAMBER SOCIABILITIES OF EARLY ANGLO-FRENCH LITERATURE (c. 1100-1150)

Abstract

By the middle of the twelfth century, Anglo-French literature was operating as a fully articulated Kterary culture, with matters of taste, form, reading practice, and textual circulation seemingly worked out. It does not appear in fits and starts, as early Middle English does, when 'each attempt to put pen to parchment' seemed to require 'a reinvention of vernacular literacy', as we see most powerfully in the example of the Orrmulum (?*.uso- 8o).1 Orm's text seems, even to its author, as a literary singularity, lacking 'stabilizing precedents' not only for the orthography of his English, but also for broader features of the literary field: audience, transmission, and rhetorical effect.2 Yet, despite the almost complete absence of any evidence of a vernacular literary culture in Normandy prior to 1 1 oo, Anglo-French literature seems not to suffer from such a destabilizing lack of precedents. By 1150, Anglo-French had established a relatively stable range of rhetorical capacities and genres, including bibKcal (most notably in the several translations of the Psalms), devotional, and historical texts. Yet, the question of which stabilizing precedent Anglo-French literature reKed upon for its formation remains vexed. Historians of the 'twelfth-century renaissance* have seen Anglo-French literature as one example of a drive to translate Latin texts for courtly audiences that produced new vernacular literary cultures across western Europe, while increasing scholarly attention has been turned to the continuities (rather than ruptures) between Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-French Kterary cultures.3 Certainly, the prominence of the Psalms, saints' lives, and chronicle historiography en romctn^ suggests that, even where translating from Latin, Anglo-French was displacing English as the inheritor of the 'stabilizing precedents' of prior local, Anglo-Saxon literary cultures.Both of these possible genealogies suggest that the answer lies somewhere in questions about the place of literary culture. Were its precedents 'English* or 'French*? Were they local or international? But rather than trying to address the question of emergence and place through the reformulation of such categories as 'English' or 'nation', as has so fruitfully been done, for example, by Ardis Butterfield, this article proposes to consider the social spaces and the architecture of vernacular literature in England and northern France between 1100 and 1150.* In so doing, it emphasizes the structuring role of sociabilities that linked locally distributed networks of readers and writers, which, like the texts themselves, were experiencing complex processes of vernacularization.5 Over the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Latin literary sociabilities emerged in England and France that linked monastic authors and aristocratic readers in forms of literary, social, and material exchange, commonly framed through discourses of friendship.6 Through verse letters, poetic pledges of friendship, and other prefatory materials, monastic authors interpellated their aristocratic readers into the temporalities and spaces of the monastic otium, a period of studious leisure wherein the traditional goals of formation were lightened by recreation, play, even pleasure. These calls to literary leisure invited aristocratic readers into the chamber (camera or thalamus), a space of elite withdrawal that was the traditional location of the monastic otium and, as we will see, the focal point of innovations in Anglo-Norman domestic architecture. In neither case, however, do we see a withdrawal to the solipsistic privacy of the lonely reader. As the chambers themselves will show, the otium represented a withdrawal from work (negotium) to elite sociabilities marked by friendship, by networks of literary and material exchange, by courtly competition and display. The chamber was, in effect, a theatre of conspicuous withdrawal.Starting in the first years of Henry Fs reign, Anglo-French literature emerges as a vernacularization of the texts and sociabilities of chamber reading. …