On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages

Abstract

One of the criteria invoked by Hans-Robert Jauss in his theory of medieval literary genres to distinguish epic from romance is the degree of historicity which the purveyors and the consumers of medieval texts attached to their subject matter.' The Old French chanson de geste, Jauss maintains, contains an historical core: it treats of known events and agents still present in the collective memory. By contrast the legend of King Arthur and his knights, through a long process of temporal and geographic displacement, had become sufficiently detached from its historical moorings and overlaid with fantasy that it was received by a twelfth-century French public as fiction, as Romance, whose truth was of a different order.2 My point of departure for the present inquiry is an assumption, implicit in Jauss's discussion and that of other analysts of medieval forms of discourse, that in the Middle Ages history and fiction were conceptually distinct. I propose to explore the nature and limits of such an opposition and to test its utility as a criterion for genre classification. Under examination here will be selected literary and historiographical texts from medieval Spain, France, Provence, and England. If history and fictionwere indeed discrete categories, then where did one end and the other begin? To be sure, the magnitude of this question far exceeds the scope of a single