Download PDF | Rima Devereaux - Constantinople and the West in Medieval French Literature_ Renewal and Utopia-D. S. Brewer (2012).
252 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I wish to thank Professor Sarah Kay and Dr Finn Sinclair for their invaluable guidance and advice during the process of researching and writing this book. Dr Anne Cobby also helped with the presentation of the bibliography and checked my Old French translations for accuracy. I am grateful to Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith and Dr Simon Franklin for their comments on a draft version of Chapter 1, especially the first section (pp. 9-14).
I wish to thank the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies at King’s College London for permission to quote from Karen Pratt’s translation of Eracle. An adapted version of part of Chapters 3 and 4 originally appeared as my ‘Constantinople as Model’. I wish to thank the Société Rencesvals British Branch for permission to reproduce this material. I also wish to thank the Société Rencesvals British Branch for permission to quote from Glyn Burgess’s translation of the Peélerinage de Charlemagne. An adapted version of part of Chapter 5 was originally published as my ‘Exposing Narratives’.
I wish to thank Peter Lang for permission to reproduce this material. Full publication details of these translation and articles will be found in the Bibliography. I am also grateful to Ellie Ferguson, Caroline Palmer and the editorial and production teams at Boydell & Brewer for their advice and professionalism. Finally, the staff of Cambridge University Library, the Bibliothéque Nationale de France in Paris and the British Library in London were invariably helpful, and the book would not have been possible without them.
Note to the reader
Throughout this book, all references in footnotes are given in an abbreviated form. Full references to all works cited can be found in the bibliography. Latin quotations are given in translation; an asterisk after each indicates that the original Latin can be found in Appendix |. Long quotations in languages other than Latin are translated after the relevant original quotation. Short quotations are translated in footnotes; single words and short phrases are not translated. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated, and have been produced with the help of reference works by Habel, Levy, Du Cange and Tobler-Lommatzsch.
Introduction
Tony Tanner writes in Venice Desired: ‘A city’s representational life is quite different from its historic, economic, demographic, cartographic, political, ceremonial, cultural life, though of course it may draw on and indirectly reflect or transcribe elements from any or all of these dimensions of the city’s existence.’! In Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, medieval France saw something of the quintessential ideal city. Attitudes to the Byzantine capital ranged from admiration and envy to a desire to imitate and compete with its many wonders.
Scholars have long recognized that manifold perceptions coalesce in medieval French vernacular texts around this city. Krijnie N. Ciggaar has developed a framework of attitudes which she sees mirrored in medieval Western representations of Constantinople. The desire to imitate and assimilate elements of Byzantine culture into the West was predicated upon a prior experience of loss of the East and all that this fluid concept stood for. This desire provided the impetus upon which the political and cultural renewal of the West was founded. Yet the city also embodied an otherworldly and irreducibly different culture, celebrated as the utopian locus of a categorical and inimitable difference.
In this study I identify and analyse the strands of this debate between different attitudes to the Byzantine capital in medieval French texts. I have chosen to study ten vernacular Old French and Franco-Italian texts. The better known texts in my corpus include the Pélerinage de Charlemagne, Girart de Roussillon, Partonopeus de Blois, the poetry of Rutebeuf, and the chronicles by Geoffroy de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari, both known as the Conquéte de Constantinople. The others, including Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle, Marques de Rome, the Franco-Italian Macario and Martino da Canal’s Estoire de Venise, have less frequently been the subject of study.
To differentiate between the two opposing poles in this debate I use the terms renewal and utopia, and define these concepts against a broad background of thought, including East—West relations, intellectual history, the theology of the city and the preoccupation with otherness informing both literary criticism and contemporary philosophical debate. The first question that the study seeks to answer is: how does the texts’ representation of Constantinople enact this debate between renewal and utopia, bearing in mind that these concepts are fluid and incorporate a variety of different attitudes? So the main contribution of this study lies in its identification and analysis of this debate across a variety of medieval French and Franco-Italian texts.
In refining the scope of my corpus I was influenced by the premise that texts from different traditions all participate in the same debate, which transcends questions of genre. The intergeneric is a term, theorized by recent critics, that expresses rhetorical and stylistic concepts that cross the boundaries of genre. My study is also a contribution to such intergeneric analysis. The second question which the study seeks to answer is therefore: how does the representation of the city of Constantinople contribute to a debate on the generic status of the texts?
Finally, I seek to anchor the texts’ representation of East-West relations securely in the issue of Western socio-political identity, self-definition and intellectual and philosophical outlook during the period, of which its historical relationship with Byzantium is only a part. The limits of the period studied (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) were determined by the need to confine myself to a coherent political and socio-cultural context.’
In order to do full justice to the complexity of the theme of renewal, I focused my research on the three Old French narrative genres that were most significant during the period: chansons de geste, romance and historical chronicles. However, as I will explain in Chapter 1, I have included two narrative poems by Rutebeuf. So the third question that the study seeks to answer is: how does the representation of East-West relations in the texts react to the socio-cultural context in which they were produced, and fulfil a role within that context?
Of course, by ‘context’ is understood a much broader reality than simply the West’s historical relations with Byzantium. Renewal and utopia are concepts that help us to explain the relationship between text and context. Hence the book also engages with a broader debate about the relationship between historical and literary approaches to medieval literature. At the same time, renewal and utopia are working definitions, and the study hopes to come to a better assessment of their usefulness.
The book arranges the material chronologically, historicizing the literary texts in the concerns of the society that produced them, but also treating them as sources for the knowledge about Byzantium that vernacular society gained through them. The emphasis is on medieval France (and Italy, in the case of the final chapter) and its perceptions of various aspects of Byzantine society as conveyed in the texts. I argue that these perceptions oscillated between renewal and utopia, and that these attitudes served a purpose in the society that gave rise to them. This purpose sheds light on the role and interaction of the different genres examined in the course of the study. So the three questions that the study seeks to address are closely interlinked.
Many critics have addressed the issue of the literary portrayal of Constantinople. My debt to the many articles concerned with this theme (too numerous to mention here) will be evident in every chapter of this study. Although the critics whose interpretations I have found helpful have not often used the terms that I have chosen, their analysis of the role played by East— West relations indicates an awareness of the same debate on which I will be focusing. Thus Ilse Seidel’s study of Byzantine influence on twelfth-century French literature, a study that is not directly concerned with the representation of Constantinople, describes Byzantium as ambivalent, positioned as it is between East and West (p. 7).
I have borrowed the terms renovatio, aemulatio and admiratio from Krijnie N. Ciggaar’s interpretation of East-West relations in Western Travellers to Constantinople. I have used this terminology in order both to identify stages in a supra-temporal process, encompassing both imitation (aemulatio) and renewal (renovatio), and to map historical changes as Ciggaar does. Translatio is one means of mediating between these positions, and I have drawn extensively on Ciggaar’s account of the various translationes.
distinguish this process, the aim of which is renewal, from admiration (admiratio) of the city as utopia. Based on the premise that literary texts may exemplify these positions in complex ways, my use of this terminology aims at an interpretation of the tension played out in the texts of my corpus between Byzantine and Western sites of power.
The Augustinian idea of the city, as elucidated in medieval theology and intellectual history, has also informed my approach to a significant extent. Critical works that I have found especially helpful include The Idea and Ideal of the Town, edited by Gian Pietro Brogiolo and Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Civitas: Religious Interpretations of the City, edited by Peter S. Hawkins. My interest in this area lies in its thematization of the city as a metaphor for renewal, and the problems posed by such a theological understanding of community for the representation of Constantinople both as a geographically limited society and as a model for the West.
My conceptualization of utopia as an intellectual category participates in and contributes to the engagement with otherness informing both literary criticism and contemporary philosophical debate. In particular, I owe a large debt to Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions, and have also found Emmanuel Levinas’s approach illuminating. Greenblatt appears to suggest that wonder, or the experience of alterity (my admiratio), moves inevitably towards possession (pp. 13-25). He traces a progression from wonder, through self-recognition in and identification with the other, to the desire to replace the loss of wonder with violence, which confers possession (pp. 133-35).
At times he adopts a pessimistic view of the encounter with the Other, suggesting that it may serve as a bulwark against the necessary process of self-recognition, and seems to consider that a degree of identification is essential in order for wonder to be experienced to the full. Yet he is preoccupied with the importance of retaining wonder unsullied (pp. ix, 25). In Greenblatt’s formulation, the notion of wonder transcends the difference between renewal and utopia.?
In the process of renewal which I have analysed as moving from aemulatio to renovatio, there is a similar degree of slippage — not vested in either one of these extremes but implicated in the process itself — between identification and possession. At the same time, my category of utopia bears witness to the continued existence of newness and alterity for their own sakes in the process of cultural dialogue.
Like Greenblatt, Levinas recognizes the danger of transforming the Other into a projection of the Same, but he is more optimistic in his positing of an Other that can be preserved as such without appropriation. While my understanding of utopia, in its intellectual elaboration in Chapter 1, certainly has affinities with the Levinassian Other (infinity as opposed to totality), the representation of Constantinople as utopia in the texts that I have examined does no more than gesture towards this notion of radical separateness, and the existence of the Other tends to be merely a prelude to its imminent appropriation by the West.
The sequence in which I have chosen to present my material is explained by the need first to identify the debate between renewal and utopia and then to analyse its different stages. Thus the texts are presented in approximately chronological order. Part I is concerned with setting up the issues involved in this intellectual debate and exploring their representation in literary texts.
In Chapter 1 I therefore outline the debate in general terms. In Chapter 2 I move on to discuss the exploitation of the theme of the trans/atio of relics as a means for renewal in two twelfth-century texts, Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle and the Pélerinage de Charlemagne. These texts’ contrasting presentation of the Byzantine capital provides a fertile case study for discerning the intellectual dialectic outlined in this introduction.
In this chapter too, unlike in the subsequent chapters, I have presented my material in the order textual analysis, followed by generic comments, followed by historical background and literary/cultural intertexts, in order to clarify the different strands of my argument. In the subsequent chapters, this material is intermingled.
By analysing the close links between imitation (aemulatio) and admiration (admiratio), Part II suggests that there may be a greater slippage between renewal and utopia than is implied in Part I.° In Chapter 3 I discuss both the existence of utopia as an alternative to renewal through aemulatio, and the multiple locations of renewal, in two twelfth-century texts about marriage alliance, Partonopeus de Blois and Girart de Roussillon.
In Chapter 4 I look at two thirteenth-century texts (Robert de Clari’s Conquéte de Constantinople and the Franco-Italian Macario) that show Western protagonists viewing the utopia itself as a potential means for renewal to be achieved not through alliance but through social transformation; admiratio thus becomes a catalyst for change, leading to a reconciliation of renewal and utopia.
Through a redefinition of East-West relations as embodied in the Fourth Crusade, marriage alliance and translatio topoi, Part 3 operates a shift in focus to Western renovatio, reflecting the changed context of the thirteenth century. In Chapter 5 I turn to didactic fiction and the conflicting relationship between ¢ranslatio and truth in Marques de Rome and Rutebeuf.
The difficulty of locating renewal is demonstrated in Rutebeuf’s use of the translatio topos, which is significantly different from the use of the same topos in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés. The texts in this chapter question the effectiveness of chivalry and alliance, which in Part I were means for achieving renewal. In Chapter 6 I examine the role of the Latin Empire of Constantinople, and in particular the retrospective redefinition of the Fourth Crusade as a triumph, in promoting renewal through civic loyalty.
The texts on which I focus are Martino da Canal’s Estoire de Venise and a Venetian manuscript of Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Finally, the conclusion will assess briefly the implications of the distinction between utopia and renewal in Western attitudes to Constantinople for the texts’ generic status and the context in which they were produced.
The book’s structure can also be explained in terms of thematic focus. It begins by looking at the figure of the emperor (whether Byzantine or Western) and how he is constructed by the West, focusing on Heraclius and Charlemagne (Chapter 2). It then moves on to the Byzantine princess and examines the role she plays, the possible historical models that stand behind her representation, and what this tells us about the society’s concerns (Chapter 3).
It then looks at the representation of the people and of social conflict, and the different roles this plays in texts from different periods and areas (Chapter 4). Next it examines the theme of the loss of the Byzantine Empire in thirteenthcentury texts, asking what image of the Latin Empire and of 1261 emerges from this representation (Chapter 5). Finally, it treats the theme of the Fourth Crusade and the role it plays (Chapter 6).
It is my hope that this book, as well as presenting a strong case for the existence of the debate between renewal and utopia in attitudes to Constantinople, will help to open up new vistas of research in genre and context as well as in East-West relations, and pose more questions that will provide fruitful subjects of study for years to come.
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