Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space

Abstract

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space E. L. Risden The focused, confined narrative form of Marie de France's late-twelfth century Lais allows for interesting concentration on a limited number of spaces. We might expect a medieval author to direct attention pretty clearly to a thematic purpose and to use spatiality to enhance that purpose; Marie did exactly that. Each lai/story uses space, especially a comparison of open and confined spaces, to enhance a moral purpose, and the collection as a whole exploits space to take a specifically spiritual turn at its conclusion. The medieval context of spatiality is interesting in itself. The imaginary Middle Ages often relies on dungeons and castles as common motifs, but the most significant "spaces" historically may instead be cathedrals, architectural marvels and normally centers of their community. Frederick Artz notes in The Mind of the Middle Ages that "[t]o support the vaulting above, the [Romanesque] walls had to be heavy . . . and the isles had to be narrow" yielding "dark interiors . . . pierced only with small windows."1 Artz adds that the "great churches" had attached monasteries that were "great centers of learning and craftsmanship" and "exchanged with other monastic centers": enclosed spaces in themselves, they opened connections in the larger world. The Gothic approach that followed, however, finding more means for expansiveness and the introduction of light to the interior, modified "the whole structure and feeling of [a] church."2 The movement from the darker and more enclosed Romanesque architecture to the brighter, more airy and expansive Gothic style echoes the time's growing cosmology. While Dante used an earth-centered universe, the Commedia at least has a global earth with an expansive Empyrean (though of course it focuses on God); Dante's world offered growing opportunities for individuals to travel imaginatively and in fact beyond the environs of their own birthplace. [End Page 65] Medieval literature kept also an interest in small places—see for instance Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), accounts of or for anchoresses, where the hermetic cell represents an ideal of detachment from the world and absorption in prayer and devotion. In such cases the spatial limitation comes from a religious choice, not from someone else's imposition, with a goal of reaching the ultimate spiritual expansion in Salvation. We can contrast hermetic works with Margery Kempe's religious pilgrimages—at once worldly and sacred—and the spiritual expansiveness of The Cloud of Unknowing, but also with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville—in the latter case, while the story is expansive, the author or compiler probably wasn't John Mandeville, and he probably didn't undertake any of the travels elaborated in the collection. John Mandeville, Englishman from St. Albans, was perhaps a Frenchman or a Fleming, deriving his sense of places and spaces from books rather than actual travels. The stories provide alternatives—pretty spectacular ones—to spiritual enclosure, choices for or descriptions of an active rather than enclosed life. Consideration of how medieval authors use spatiality requires yielding to allegorical as well as literal readings: broader application of narrative layering comprises an essential part of their narrative landscape and its expansiveness. Marie's spatial context entered the medieval world long before Dante's and Chaucer's. While all three at one time or another used courtly love, the Lais centralize it, turning secular or profane space toward spiritual space.3 The temporary ascending spiral of Dante's Purgatory with its periods of waiting modulates the permanent spirals of Inferno (descending) and Paradise (ascending), and movement through space brings attention to memorable—from terrifying to illuminating—individual places. Chaucer's social space contracts within the Tabard Inn, expands along the road to Canterbury, and contracts repeatedly around the individual pilgrims for their storytelling. The Old English "Wanderer" and "Seafarer" poems open up the world to the nearly endless space of loss and exile, while riddling poems such as "The Wife's Lament" and "Wulf and Eadwacer" seem to contract it around enclosures. Christine de Pizan metaphorizes her "City of Ladies" as the book in which the accounts of the ladies appear: the book encloses...