Twelfth-century French Romance Research Articles

Pearl and the Fairies of Romance: Hermeneutics and Intertextuality in a Fourteenth-Century Religious Dream Vision

Abstract: This article focuses on the parallels that can be drawn between the characters and landscapes of the fourteenth-century Pearl poem and the fairy characters and otherworlds that frequently appear in works of medieval romance. It argues that the Pearl -poet is consciously engaging with readily identifiable fairy themes and motifs, made popular through a wide range of romances and other sources, in order to help propagate a certain ambiguity within the poem: one that feeds into the broader epistemological themes that are present within the text. More specifically, this article shows that the poet's manipulation of these motifs forms part of the broader unraveling of the poem, in which both the dreamer's and the reader's ability to comprehend the nature of the vision develops as the poem progresses. Drawing on two works in particular, the fourteenth-century alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century French romance Le Conte du Graal , this article argues that Pearl parallels these texts in the way that they utilize otherworldly conventions to inhibit both the protagonist's and the reader's ability to rationalize the events taking place within the poem. By identifying the poet's use of fairy conventions in Pearl , a poem that consistently draws attention to the limits of human knowledge, this article examines, from a fresh perspective, the poet's exploration of ineffability and of the divide between material and spiritual modes of existence.

The naming of Byzantium and the Old FrenchPartonopeus de Blois

This paper draws attention to the twelfth-century French romance Partonopeus de Blois and its author's original use of the name ‘Byzantium’ instead of conventional ‘Greek’ or ‘Constantinopolitan Empire’. It investigates roots of the modern-day belief that the term has been applied as a designation of the medieval state only since the sixteenth century. A linguistic and literary analysis challenges the premise and explores possible scenarios of the name's introduction into the Old French text. A suggested interpretation de-emphasizes the popular east-west ideological context in favour of simpler story-telling concerns.

Droit and Engin: Mesencius and Drances as Feudal Counselors in Le Roman d’Enéas

This article examines the radical revisions made to two characters from the Aeneid, Mezentius and Drances, in the twelfth-century French romance Le Roman d’Eneas. In particular, Mezentius and Drances are portrayed largely as vicious or unpleasant in the Aeneid, making their depictions in the Eneas surprising; from a torture-prone exiled tyrant in the Aeneid, Mezentius becomes a reasonable advisor advocating restraint and the rule of law, and the cowardly, jealous Drances becomes less obsequious, more clever, and more devoted to the well-being of the state. Although the relationship between the Aeneid and the Eneas is a popular area of inquiry for critics studying the romance, the changes made to these two characters are not often explored in any depth, perhaps because they are seen as less important to the central narrative and indicative of careless adaptation for the sake of the plot. I argue, however, that the transformations Mezentius and Drances undergo are carefully considered appropriations of their Virgilian characterizations. The author does not simplify the complexities of the Virgilian characters but instead reappropriates them to comment on the historical role of the courtly counselor and his theme of balance between private emotions and public duty for the sake of the state. By so doing, he cleverly engages twelfth-century audience’s expectations to make relevant political commentary and gives twenty-first-century readers new insights into medieval methods of adaptation.

Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Shaping Courtliness is a highly personal volume, littered with dedications to Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and praise of her work (it even contains a poem composed in her honour (‘Envoi’, p. 285)). This does not, however, detract from the fact that the eighteen essays within contain a substantial quantity of rigorous and exciting work, with considerable appeal for readers who may have no personal connection with their dedicatee. Bruckner's preoccupations with twelfth-century French romance and lais, and with the afterlife of Chrétien de Troyes's romances, are reflected by the volume's content, which includes pieces on Thomas's Anglo-Norman Tristan, Marie de France's Guigemar, the Burgundian prose adaptation of Cligès, and the process of literary evolution from Chrétien to Christine de Pizan. Meanwhile, her interest in human–animal relations is echoed by contributions examining the Conte du Papegau and Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours. Very impressively, the volume avoids being either restricted to Bruckner's immediate subfields, or becoming a motley collection of essays with no unifying theme. Peter Haidu's vitriolic opening piece sets up the guiding interest, though not the general tone or explicit politics, of the rest of the collection: ‘Psychic denial of reality is perfectly understandable, given the murderously totalizing greed that accompanies the contemporary collapse of late-capitalist civilization in its proto-fascist aftermath. […] Authentic critique relocates the text in its social co-text, over and against which the concrete text defines itself’ (pp. 43–44). From among Haidu's furious prose (which is, unfortunately, often wilfully opaque) emerges the question of relocating the ideological, literary construct of the court within its political, social, legal, and economic context. What results is a collective New Historicist account of medieval courts, guided by the relationship between the historical circumstances of the court and Old and Middle French literary productions. This intermingling of historical and literary studies occurs within individual articles such as Michel-André Bossy's piece on the British Library's MS Royal 16 F II (which contains 164 poems by Charles d'Orléans) in the context of the Wars of the Roses. Equally stimulating, however, is the fruitful juxtaposition of mutually complementary articles by specialists from different fields. An excellent example of this comes in Part III (‘Shaping Women's Voices in Medieval France’), which takes essays by two of Bruckner's ex-doctoral students, William Schenck and Daniel O'Sullivan, and the troubadour expert Elizabeth Poe. Of these three, Schenck's is the standout piece, analysing Ermengarde d'Anjou's oscillation between court and convent using hagiography, charters, and clerical letters to paint a vivid, nuanced picture of the cultural factors determining the choices and limitations facing Ermengarde as an aristocratic woman of the twelfth century. This incredibly rich account itself follows the (also excellent) essays by Poe and O'Sullivan, which, respectively, continue Bruckner's work on the female troubadours (here Na Lombarda) and explore the nature of Marian devotion in Old Occitan song. The sophisticated, pluridisciplinary examination of courtly womanhood that is the outcome of such a combination is a highlight of this superbly eclectic but also very coherent collection.

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance by Monica L. Wright (review)

Review(s) of: Weaving narrative: Clothing in twelfth-century French romance, by Wright, Monica L., (Penn State Romance Studies), University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, paperback, pp. xi, 192, R.R.P. US$35.00, ISBN 9780271035666.

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance (review)

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance (review)

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance

Weaving Narrative: Clothing in Twelfth-Century French Romance

Astarte's Game: Variations in John Fowles's "The Enigma"

life-giving power of floods all of reality. Mystery squares well with Fowles's definition of man as seeker, or everlack; by discouraging the search for final explanations, promotes means-oriented thinking. As Conchis says in Magus, mystery has energy, pours energy into whoever seeks an answer to it (235). existence of mysteries is, in sense, more important than their solution because the absence of certainty refocuses our efforts. Man stops fighting the truth that reality is fundamentally mysterious and starts to work with, rather than against, nature. The Enigma, as the title itself indicates, is based on and on the characters' attempts to clear up. story is included in Ebony collection which affords us our first experience of Fowles working in the shorter fictional forms and consists of four original stories and modern prose rendering of twelfth-century French romance, Marie de France's Eliduc. In A Personal Note preceding Fowles's Eliduc the author explains that the working title he used for the volume was Variations. By this he intended to suggest variations on both certain themes in previous books of mine and in methods of narrative presentation (117). title was eventually discarded because of the judgment of his editor that was without justification except as a very private mirage in the writer's mind (117). Fowles mentions this, no doubt, because he still thinks that the working title was appropriate, belief with which some critics concur (Olshen and Onega). Thematically, the five stories in this collection amplify ideas prominent in Fowles's other works. concerns that unify them are the same as those that unify Fowles's corpus as whole: matters of love and sex, the functions of art and the artist, the uses and abuses of language, the demands of freedom and the responsibilities of free choice, and so on (Olshen 92). But Variations is an equally apt description of the narrative techniques used by Fowles, not only in the sense that the narrative method varies from story to story but also in relation to the way in which each of them transforms the expected and conventional into something unexpected and unconventional. Drawing on the whole of Fowles's work, Peter Conradi points to the way in which, in each and every one of his fictions, the author shows an evident willingness to risk himself into something new, as well as curiosity about the technical and ethical potentialities of what has traditionally been regarded as low sub-genres of fiction, all of them broadly-speaking categories of romance (16-17). Both Magus and The Ebony Tower, in different ways, approach romance in its pure state; Poor Koko and Collector use the formula of the thriller; French Lieutenant's Woman, the historical romance and sensation novel. In each case, the interest of the work lies in the consequences of subverting the expectations raised by the genre. And the same can be said of the story that concerns us. The Enigma follows the detective-story genre which began with Poe and gained popularity with the work of Arthur Corian Doyle. But Fowles uses this tradition in revolutionary way, if we measure The Enigma against other stories in the genre. While detective stories are based on the motif of solving mysteries, Fowles presents the mystery, with all its available evidence, and then blatantly leaves the enigma intact. When asked if there were particular picture of the world that he wanted to develop in his work, Fowles answered: Freedom, yes. How you achieve freedom. That obsesses me. All my books are about that. question is, is there really free-will? Can we choose freely? Can we choose? How do we do it? (Olshen 11). Freedom is generally explored along two paths simultaneously: the ethical or moral path, by involving us in the quest of the fictional characters; and the aesthetic, by illuminating the liberating possibilities, for reader and writer alike, of fiction itself. …

Review. Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance. The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200). Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Old French Tnstan Poems: A Bibliographical Guide. By DAVID J. SHIRT. (Research Bibliographies and Checklists, 28). London: Grant and Cutler. 1981. 186 pp. £8.40. IAN SHORT IAN SHORT LONDON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 4, October 1984, Pages 445-a–445, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXXVIII.4.445-a Published: 01 October 1984

A note on the Garden-Cemetery Cligès by Chrétien de Troyes

What is relevant for the purposes of this special issue is to draw attention to an interesting passage in Cliges by the twelfth-century French romance writer, Chretien de Troyes. The story is, briefly, as follows: and Cliges are in love with each other, but unfortunately is the wife of the Emperor of Constantinople. To free herself, feigns illness and then death. Her obsequies are celebrated and her body laid El plus bel leu del cemetire (v. 6023) where her sepulchre is furnished with lit de plume (v. 6028) to ensure her comfort. Chretien says at verse 6079 that Fenice est an la sepolture. Meanwhile her lover, Cliges, and his faithful servant, Jean, are anxious to rescue once night has fallen (vv. 6080-6095) and repair to the cemetery. This is encircled with high wall (... clos... tot anviron... de haut mur, v. 6098-99). The gate to it is closed and denies them entry (... que nus n'i entrast, v. 6103). Nothing daunted, Cliges jumps over the wall (v. 6108-9). Once inside, Chretien narrates, he finds himself in uns vergiers [orchard] which a dedanz estoit (v. 6110), so it is clear that the orchard must be inside the cemetery. Immediately afterwards we are told that in this orchard trees were planted (v. 6111) and we even get it specified that there is an espalier: Pres del mur en ot un plante, Ensi que au mur se tenoit (v. 6112-3).

Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200). Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

<i>Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance: The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200)</i>. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance. The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200)

Narrative Invention in Twelfth-Century French Romance. The Convention of Hospitality (1160-1200)