The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio by Laura Chuhan Campbell

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio by Laura Chuhan Campbell Karen Green Campbell, Laura Chuhan, The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio (Gallica, 47), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2017; hardback; pp. viii, 211; R.R.P £60.00, ebook £19.99; ISBN 9781843844808. In the Phaedrus, 275e, Socrates says of books that ‘once written down they are tumbled about anywhere, all alike among those who understand them and among strangers, […] the book cannot protect or defend itself’. This comes to mind when reading medieval manuscripts, transcribed by poor scribes, so that, ‘Viviane, the bonne clergiesse’ becomes ‘Niviene […] la demoiselle cacheresse’ (p. 79). Bound together, hybrids are refashioned for new uses. Like Chinese whispers, messages are transmuted and deformed. The medieval Merlin manuscripts are no exception. The focus of this study are lateish Italian versions; the early fourteenth-century Florentine La Storia de Merlino ‘translated’ by Paulino Pieri into a text that ‘consists of a combination and rearrangement of material’ from the early thirteenth-century French Merlin en prose by Robert de Boron, and the late-thirteenth-century Les Prophecies de Merlin (p. 187), and two Venetian texts, Lo Libero dello savio Merlin by Jachomo de Çaune Barbier and La Historia di [End Page 190] Merlino compiled by Luca Venitiano. To glean these facts, turn to the appendices, for the Introduction jumps straight into a confusing account of Pieri’s rendition of Merlin’s story of the corrupt city of Orbanza, which was, according to Pieri, translated by ‘a Maestro Riccardo at the behest of Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor’ (p. 1). Socrates’ observation not only applies to medieval manuscripts, but also to the philosophy of language. Campbell is not content to follow those ‘obsessed with binary oppositions within the translation model […] too concerned with defining and redefining the relationship between translation and the original’ (p. 25, n. 80, quoting Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere). Instead she engages with ‘Charles Sanders Peirce’s tripartite sign, rather than Saussure’s signifier-signified dichotomy’. Peirce, she tells us, ‘regarded all interpretation as a translation between signs, creating a continuum of related signs that he termed “semiosis”’ (p. 25). Semiosis is produced by the mutual interaction of the three components of the sign—the object (similar to the signified), the sign itself (the signifier) and a third component: the interpretant, which is a mental sign produced in response to an object. Ouch! Poor Saussure, poor Peirce! Seeing them tumbled about into so inaccurate a repetition of words, by a stranger to their enterprise, is insufferable. Campbell’s appeal to Peircean semiotic theory is only pretentious window dressing. In the detailed descriptions of the way in which stories from the Merlin en prose and Prophecies are reworked by Pieri, Barbier, and Venetiano, she claims that the transformations are not so much distortions from some archetypal original, but are new elaborations, that gain new significance from the new context in which the text is confected (pp. 35–36). No elaborate theory of meaning is applied. In this vein, the first chapter deals with the various, sometimes contradictory, versions of the story of Merlin’s conception by the devil, as found in in the original Merlin and its continuations, and the way in which differing treatments of the origins of the devil’s seduction of his mother, offer alternative accounts of the sin of despair, lack of faith, temptation, and redemption. In the next chapter, a similar comparison is made of the varying explanations of the success of the Lady of the Lake in entombing Merlin, focusing more on the French Suite de Merlin, and the Historia di Merlino than on Pieri’s version, and reading the incident through a variety of other stories in which women ‘undo’ men, such as Samson and Delilah or Aristotle and Phyllis (pp. 65–66), or even Adam and Eve (pp. 92–93). It is observed that different versions of the story convey different moral messages and explanations of the source of Merlin’s downfall. The fourth and fifth chapters turn to the topic of prophetic discourse in general. As Campbell is well aware, the meaning of the...