The Matter of Pseudo-History: Textuality, Aurality, and Visuality in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle

Abstract

The Matter of Pseudo-HistoryTextuality, Aurality, and Visuality in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle Joyce Coleman Considerable attention has been paid in medieval literary studies to the later stages of the relation of immaterial to material text—to the transition, as Sylvia Huot famously labeled it, from song to book.1 Romance has strong early associations with oral performance from memory—whether the minstrels’ and jongleurs’ recitations derived from their own composition or from memorization (and mental revision) of preexisting oral or written texts. Written romances perpetuate this history with phrases evoking a listening audience, for instance, “as you have heard,” referring to previous narration.2 There is a problem, though, if we imagine the transition from oral composition and delivery to written text as a unilinear, evolutionary progression—book replacing song, silent reading replacing oral performance—since medieval audiences most often experienced the material text through the voice of someone reading the book aloud.3 This point needs emphasizing because for some scholars the “as you have heard” phrases evoke Walter Ong’s category of “oral residue,” or fossilized vestiges of orality lingering into the world of private reading.4 But the abundant evidence of public reading among medieval elites through the fifteenth century and beyond suggests that these phrases persisted into more literate times because the texts were still, in fact, being heard—even after the supposed watershed moment when romances began to be written in prose, which is often equated with the advent of private reading. As late as circa 1455, for example, the Prose Guillaume d’Orange announced: “Who of arms, love, nobility, and chivalry would hear fair and pleasant words . . . be quiet, or read, who would rather read.”5 Here the audience’s literacy is assumed, so that the choice to hear the text or read it privately depends only on personal preference (and on [End Page 71] the possible presence of other people wanting to share the reading experience). Though written down, the text still speaks, through the immaterial voice of the prelector.6 But if the materiality of the medieval book was enfolded within the immateriality of the voice, the book still carried authority. Whether romances involved actual historical characters or not, their authors frequently cited alleged written sources: for example, Chrétien de Troyes claims he learned about Cligès from a tome held at the library of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Beauvais, “which proves that the story is true.”7 At the same time, the voice could also produce authority, in the form of eyewitness verbal accounts allegedly recorded and preserved, then transmitted to the romance’s readers and hearers.8 Eyewitness narration and clerical transcription, authoritative written sources and the prelector’s public reading, the voice and the book, weave in and out of each other in many medieval romances. The eyewitness accounts are as fictional as the recording clerks and as the ancient sources allegedly uncovered in cathedral archives. Yet, as Miranda Griffin has suggested, such “paradoxically positioned truth guarantees in medieval historiography and literature do not represent the exploitation of a naïve audience, but an invitation to participate in the play between truth and fiction.”9 This play of realities, I would add, can sometimes function as what anthropologist Clifford Geertz labeled “deep play.”10 That is, it creates stories so resonant with cultural and individual aspirations that their value and impact transcend issues of actual historicity. In one particular set of romances, this play takes on a visual component as well, through illuminations that envisage the creation of the texts themselves. The early thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances comprises the Estoire del saint Graal, the Merlin and Suite du Merlin, the Lancelot en prose, the Queste del saint Graal, and the Mort Artu—in English, the History of the Holy Grail, the Merlin and Continuation of Merlin, the Prose Lancelot, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the Death of Arthur. The individual texts probably had different authors, but there is evidence of coordination in cross-references and overall themes. An early version of the Lancelot was probably completed ca. 1215–20. Then, “subsequent parts were gradually added to it, starting with the...