Les Écoles de pensée du xiie siècle et la littérature romane (oc et oïl). Études réunies par Valérie Fasseur et Jean-René Valette.

Abstract

There are clearly many potential benefits to studying literary history alongside intellectual history, and attempts to persuade researchers from these different fields to cross disciplinary boundaries to engage in dialogue are to be welcomed, for all the difficulties in doing so. This collection comes out of an interdisciplinary conference that had the aim of exploring the relationship between the explosion of literary production in the vernacular in France and the ‘schools of thought’ that characterize intellectual histories of the twelfth century, most famously the Neoplatonic thought of the schools of Saint-Victor and Chartres. Valérie Fasseur and Jean-René Valette’s brief Introduction acknowledges the difficulties of their interdisciplinary approach, noting that many of the contributions do not so much answer the question at stake as interrogate the terms of reference: What is a ‘school of thought’? How can its influence be shown? Some of the collection’s essays give useful overviews to broader questions, charting the foothills of the issue if not quite scaling the peaks, such as Fasseur’s interesting discussion of Occitan literature’s possible intellectual debts to twelfth-century schools of thought or Valette’s survey of criticism about Grail literature. Dominique Boutet catalogues instances where twelfth- and thirteenth-century French literature discusses the creation of the world and suggests a potential link to Chartrian Neoplatonism. Strangely, several essays are included that, as they openly acknowledge, do not engage with the volume’s problematic, such as Jacques Verger’s chapter on Bernard of Clairvaux and secular audiences, Jean-Yves Tilliette’s interesting discussion of Victorine literary style, Jean-Marie Fritz’s comparison of clerical literary production at the court of Marie de Champagne, or Dominique Poirel’s presentation of secular values in Hugh of Saint-Victor’s writing. Articles on allegorical poetry in the final third of the volume are somewhat disappointing. Damien Boquet usefully suggests a link between Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose and Aelred of Rievaux’s De spirituali amicitia but does not explain how this might affect interpretation of the poem. Marie-Pascale Halary picks up Guillaume de Lorris’s games with mystical traditions in his part of the Rose but strangely neglects the poet’s ludic irony to offer an unproven hypothesis, namely that Guillaume is influenced by Cistercian thought. It is difficult to know what to do with Armand Strubel’s article on vernacular allegory, which does not engage with twelfth-century thought and which has only six references to secondary literature. Ultimately, this collection provokes a serious and valuable question: how should medieval texts be studied in an interdisciplinary way? The approach here, tending towards inclusivity and choosing to juxtapose articles that stay within their own disciplines, cannot be said to be an unqualified success and one can only wish that much of the good work in the volume had been brought together in a more focused way to answer the interesting questions raised.