Download PDF | David Rollo - Glamorous Sorcery_ Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages - (2000).
261 Pages
INTRODUCTION
According to Georges Duby, the sophisticated lay culture that developed in twelfth-century England and France was a direct consequence of improved fiscal control.1 As systems for calculating and coordinating levies gained greater efficiency, the francophone baronies of the era augmented their disposable wealth and began to appropriate some of the literate prerogatives previously restricted to the clergy.2 Learning became an object of acquisition, as younger sons were sent in increasing numbers to receive a formal education at cathedral schools;3 and, toward the end of the century, the education they thereby acquired itself became a commodity liable to trade.4 Not only did the royal courts enlist the services of the literate in the spheres of dynastic historiography and political administration; even minor landholders took clerics into their employ, primarily as tutors for their children, but also on occasion as private scribes of regional histories.5
One of the results was a considerable corpus of Latin writing, produced in a secular environment for the edification of a lay public. But, as Duby also demonstrates, this historical fact of patronage creates something of a cultural paradox. Although representatives of the landed barony acquired these insignia of learning, few of them displayed an advanced literacy and the competent understanding of the Latin language it would presuppose: inheritance by primogeniture required first sons to submit themselves to a seigneurial training in arms that would prepare for the eventual succession to title and territory, and under these circumstances relatively little time was devoted to their formal education.6 As a consequence, it remains unclear by what means these titular magnates understood the often extremely sophisticated Latin texts that were written for their benefit: What could have been the practical function of a work such as the Historia Gaujredi duds, in Latin?
Was it read? Where, in what circumstances? How—in translation, with annotations? This work shows Geoffrey Plantagenet besieging the castle of Montreuil-Bellay: the "educated count" (litteratus consul) requested that a copy of Vegetius be brought from the abbey of Marmoutier. To be sure, it was not claimed that he read this book himself: he had it read to him by a monk. In Latin? Translating, commenting on the text? (259-60) Thus, Duby implies, at least some of the Latin writing dedicated to seigneurial magnates may have gained general intelligibility only through oral paraphrase and glossing in the vernacular. In such cases, the Latinity of the text would certainly provide evidence of the cultural aspirations nurtured by the patron. But it would not prove his or her linguistic competence. Alternatively, Duby ventures, the increase in supply could perhaps be taken to suggest an increasingly informed and increasingly discerning demand, with the implication that the landed barony of the era in fact commanded a more advanced literacy than has previously been recognized: Among the lords and ladies to whom Hildebert and Baudri of Bourgueil dedicated their sophisticated poems, were there really so few who could enjoy these works without an interpreter?
The canon who composed the history of the lords of Amboise about 1160, specifically citing Boethius, Horace, Lucan, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Seneca, and who strove to make the affective bond forged by vassalage resemble Ciceronian amidtia—did he not expect that the grace and vigor of his Latin composition would be appreciated by persons other than his clerical colleagues? Must we not assume a significant enlargement of the lay audience, people sufficiently cultured to be able to communicate with and appreciate the language and knowledge of the schools without an intermediary? (259) Duby abstains from committing himself to either of the positions he hypothesizes. Yet the issue he raises is of great sociological and literary importance, even though it remains difficult to scrutinize with historical accuracy. As M. T. Clanchy and Franz H. Bauml have demonstrated in studies that implicitly engage Duby's questions,7 many early analyses of medieval lay literacy were compromised by reductive anachronism. Today one is either literate, meaning able to read and write, or illiterate, mean ing incapable of either. However, this clarity of distinction is ill-suited to the medieval context.8
The ability to read did not always take as its corollary the ability to write.9 Conversely, writing was widely regarded as a demeaning activity best fulfilled by functionaries, and if, therefore, a given magnate never signed his or her name, it does not inevitably follow that he or she was incapable of doing so.10 Other difficulties have arisen through failure to distinguish between complete and partial literacies. To define, in classic fashion, the medieval litteratus or litterata as a man or woman who could read and write Latin is methodologically expedient.11 Yet it fails to accou " for the fact that a basic grasp of Latin lexicon and syntax was at times a sufficient qualification for these epithets, even if this partial control of the language was accompanied by the inability to read, to write, or both.12 Further compounding these problems, even those who were fully literate in the modern sense could have been inadequate to the task of understanding the full complexities of given works produced for their benefit, since grammatical competence does not presuppose a skill in applied hermeneutics, a discipline that required years of study to master and remained the esoteric domain of the clerical minority.
Therefore, as Bauml refreshingly emphasizes, the formulaic hyperbole with which authors celebrate the literate accomplishments of prospective benefactors cannot necessarily be taken at face value.13 Because flattery tends to be self-interested, often entails exaggeration, and at times accommodates calculated falsehood, prefatory eulogies of lay literacy do not prove that the literacy eulogized was anything more than a polite fiction designed to transform a hope for patronage into a remunerative reality. Further, because potentially venal, the act of dedication cannot be taken to imply that the work dedicated necessarily glorifies the behavior, character, or aspirations of the semiliterate potential benefactor. On the contrary, it may bespeak an extreme irony. While it is no doubt justified to state that on many occasions medieval authors did indeed enlist their scribal talents to the edification of secular powers, it is also at least hypothetically legitimate to posit particular cases in which they did not.
By its very nature, superior learning could lead to the production of texts that aggressively challenged the interpretative capacities of their inscribed patron, ultimately to yield a message that is the very opposite of flattering. In the present study, I propose to reengage some of these problems, but with a complementary emphasis on an epistemological tension that is central to the culture of the High Middle Ages. As even my minimal paraphrase of Bauml's arguments has shown, much of the information pertinent to the lay literacy of this era is derived from texts written by representatives of the clerical minority. I would like to add that many of the clerics responsible for such works project themselves as manipulators of hieratic and contextually invisible powers. To intimate what these may be, it is apposite to call briefly on the testimony of the twelfthcentury English historian, William of Malmesbury. In the short section of the Gesta regum Anglorum devoted to tenth-century Italian politics, William observes that Pope Silvester II was considered by many to have owed his prodigious scientific achievements and economic success to necromantic talents.
Yet he counters this view with a simple rebuttal: "But any of us could believe this to be popular fantasy, since the common people tend to slight the fame of the lettered, saying that anyone they see to excel in a given field must converse with a demon."14 Subliminal to the popular opinion William paraphrases is a distrust of literate accomplishments that are perforce arcane and exclusive, and these are rationalized by the disadvantaged as magical, malign, and deceptive gifts of the devil. It is precisely this ambient charge of sorcery that I wish to integrate into the study of medieval literary reception, concentrating on twelfthcentury Latin and Old French works produced in the British Isles and the Continental domains owing fealty to the English Crown. Some writers, I demonstrate, strove to dissolve the hieratic aura that had come to be associated with their clerical status, ultimately to demystify and to educate. Others, I show, exploited magic as a metaphor of their own to configure the epistemological and financial prerogatives they believed themselves and their literate peers to enjoy. My primary topics of analysis are the particular degrees of literacy the authors in question explicitly or otherwise adduce as prerequisites to the understanding of their texts; the means whereby such thresholds of understanding are expressed through self-reflexive themes of performance and reception; and the consistent presence of sorcery in these thematic rehearsals, with surrogate author projected as magician and the written medium he controls designated through a lexicon that collapses the verbal arts with glamorous sorcery (gramaire/grimoire), performative conjuring (praestigia), intoned spells (incantationes), and drugs capable of seducing, bewitching, transforming, or curing those to whom they are administered (medicamenta/medicamina).
As this last point makes clear, I am not preoccupied with the per ceived reality of magic itself, either to the twelfth-century community or to individual authors. I am exclusively concerned with its literary function and the sociological implications of its metaphorical use.15 My interest in the literate and their relationship with the public has in large measure been inspired by Brian Stock's seminal The Implications of Literacy.16 Stock's purpose, however, is to demonstrate the interdependence of oral and written traditions in the development of a hermeneutic textuality. Thus, he does not directly broach contemporary appraisals of reception, concentrating rather on metamorphoses in patterns of thought and, through them, social negotiations.17 Nonetheless, he appeals for a renewed sensitivity to issues of dissemination and understanding, and he lays a particular emphasis on the contemporary public for whom medieval texts were produced: "To investigate medieval literacy is... to inquire into the uses of texts, not only into the allegedly oral and written elements in the works themselves, but, more importantly, to inquire into the audience for which they were intended and the mentality in which they were received" (7). Consistent with the frames of inquiry Stock proposes, I shall investigate literacy in its sociological implications. But I shall do so exclusively through the prism of highly literate texts. I make this caveat because my analyses are not intended to retrieve precise data that can be objectively adduced to define how various sectors of the twelfth-century public responded to writing that was prepared for their benefit. Rather, they demonstrate how and by whom particular authors imagined and suggested their writing should or should not be understood, and they are therefore glosses of literary strategies and not disclosures of historical fact. As a result, my principal focus is on literate seJ/perceptions that are textually constructed through the hypotheses of encoded readers and listeners, and the social conclusions I draw concern the duties, privileges, and powers of lettered clerics as they were explored and obliquely defined from the evidently partial perspectives of the clerical community itself.
Analysis of reader/listener response in the context of medieval writing inevitably bears the influence of Hans Robert Jauss, who, some thirty years ago, as both theorist and medievalist, first argued that each literary work must be appraised in its relationship with prior normative structures.18 Reading thus becomes an engagement with a horizon of expectations that must be attributed to the original recipients of a given text and analyzed as a paradigmatic criterion that is variously reproduced, realigned, or flouted in the generation of new meaning (and, ultimately, in the creation of new horizons and new conventions to be manipulated).19 Although Jauss devotes part of his analysis to the vernacular genres of the Middle Ages,20 the test cases he uses in his detailed studies of the evolution of expectations and aesthetic responses are selected from post-Enlightenment literature.21 Within the context of the vernacular High Middle Ages, however, this evolutionary process was often realized in a manner that finds no equivalent in the later writings Jauss considers, since in many cases it had to be negotiated across the barrier of linguistic difference. Vernacular writers of the twelfth century regularly challenged expectations (and, prospectively, obliged them to alter) by making implicit or explicit reference to works that were either ill understood or totally arcane to unlettered recipients because couched in Latin. Under these circumstances, the study of response resolves into the study of not only literate competence, particularly in the domain of intertextuality, but also linguistic accomplishment.22
If a given author structures his or her work through allusions to antecedent paradigms that would by necessity remain inaccessible to his or her chosen public, then familiarity and recognition break down, and expectations are replaced by the unexpected and unrecognizable. Certainly, as Jauss points out, the initially outlandish comes to be neutralized by later generations of recipients. But this prospective evolution by no means compromises Jauss's own stress on the original moment of challenge, on the point at which an implied public could be confronted with a level of expectation it could not match. Such confrontations are found to particularly striking effect in romances, which, by the contemporary evidence provided by medieval authors, were prepared for noble men and women who had at best a rudimentary literacy. Yet, as many modern critics have demonstrated, these works are densely allusive literary artifacts, and much of their significance is comprehensible only through the Latin antecedents they intertextually invoke. Under these conditions, the lucid understanding of the romance would presuppose an understanding of an extraordinarily wide corpus of often extremely recondite Latin texts, ranging from those of the classical auctores2 * to the works of Saint Augustine24 and allegories of creativity by such Neoplatonic writers as Macrobius and Martianus Capella.25
But, if this is so, then romances would necessarily militate against the full comprehension of the illiterate or semiliterate. By this I do not mean they would be utterly devoid of sense to the disadvantaged listener, but that they would always carry a residue of significance that would be immediately intelligible only to those displaying a high degree of competence in Latin. To be sure, through the very act of transposing the obscure, a given author could be moved by a desire to elucidate the previously unknown for the benefit of those who lacked the proficiency to do so for themselves. But he or she could also be employing the barrier of linguistic impenetrability to promulgate meanings that were by design inaccessible, thereby challenging not so much expectations, but the interpretative capabilities of his or her public.
DEGREES OF LATIN COMPETENCE The problems of understanding I delineate above are also found in the Insular Latinate writings of the period, although here the internal hierarchy of understanding is constructed between, on the one hand, readers who were hermeneutically proficient and, on the other, readers who were grammatically competent yet could not grasp the full complexity of the work. I devote my first two chapters to these divisions, addressing the following categories of recipient: the accomplished (litteraturaeperitus), controlling intertextual mechanisms and endowed with a complete mastery over the polyvalences of tropes;26 and the unaccomplished (parum litteratus), capable of reading but incapable of the interpretative acts solicited from within the text.27 There is also the category of the implied listener of Latin, though it is rare.28 When evoked, the listener serves as a counterpoise to the reader and is less proficient.
In this case, differences in hermeneutic engagement arise not from implied ability but from the mode of reception, since, certain authors imply, listening granted a more restricted access to significance than reading. The listener of the Latin text could of course be divided into subcategories corresponding to the accomplished and unaccomplished readers, since under any circumstances listeners obviously bring to bear varying levels of competence. Yet this is never an encoded concern in the Latin texts I treat. The third category I consider is the surrogate for the author, a thematic figure who is the peer of the accomplished reader and is always endowed with the figuratively magical powers I have briefly rehearsed.
The reason for this consistent choice of metaphor is clarified by the interpretative positions outlined above: by its very nature, magic implies recondite, even superior knowledge; it is the possession of a minority; it is powerful, however illusory its consequences; and it instills respect, if not fear. My first chapter is devoted to certain anecdotes that William of Malmesbury inserted into the Gesta regum Anglorum, written at the juncture of the first and second quarters of the century. I begin by analyzing William's apocryphal biography of Silvester II with three primary motives. First, to demonstrate that William employs the seemingly frivolous context of the anecdote as a medium for sophisticated thought, in this particular case to create a performative parable of literate control. Second, to show how the theme of magic functions as the diegetic term in a complex allegory of reading, in this case contrived to reflect the literate proficiency that must be brought to bear to uncover successfully the subterranean didacticism William has placed beneath the verbal surface of his tale.
Third, to reveal that William turns this conflation of literacy and sorcery against the accomplished and successful reader, finally to warn against what he considers the demonic hubris of literate arrogance, the idolatry of those who would use their education only to the furtherance of worldly ambition and who adopt a supercilious view toward their true, divinely sanctioned vocation—to educate those lacking the skill to educate themselves. I further pursue this concern with learned hubris by investigating William's use of rhetoric as a metaphorically necromantic device that is capable of effecting unlimited metamorphoses. The logic of the rhetorical maneuver I consider is of course already inherent in the function of the trope, which, assessed in the most straightforward of terms, realizes a superimposition of senses and evokes two signifieds from within one verbal structure.
Throughout the anecdote from the Gesta regum that I consider in this light, the operative trope is the word asinus, meaning both "donkey" and "idiot," which bridges diegesis and reception to create superficially unflattering effects on the unaccomplished reader. Those who fail to engage the anecdote with a sensitivity to the trope themselves emerge as figurative dumb asses who maintain a steadfast belief in the reality of magic; those who read with the clear vision William invites see that the only transformative power operative is that of rhetoric itself. Yet again, however, William maneuvers the accomplished to recognize in themselves an unduly supercilious view of those who are less proficient, on this occasion by elaborating a parallel set of intertextual signals to reveal that the truly asinine disposition is displayed by the educated who refuse to allow others to benefit from the clarity of insight that advanced literate competence bestows. In chapter 2,1 demonstrate that William's anecdotal exploration of the rhetorical medicamentum—both stupefying drug and medicinal cure— finds its functional analogue in the most celebrated scene in the slightly later Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth.
This concerns the conception of Arthur, orchestrated by Geoffrey under the guise of Merlin and textually described as a drama of reception that mobilizes the medicamina of rhetoric either to seduce the reader into credulity or to grant him or her the clear vision necessary to see that this apparent history is in fact a meticulously constructed fabrication. In the second half of the chapter, I consider the implications of Geoffrey's initiatives in the light of John of Salisbury's Policraticus (ca. 1159), the most extended discussion of magic, semiotics, and government to have been produced during the era. Assessed according to John's categories, Geoffrey emerges as an exemplary representative of a new secular counterculture, and his "magical" power to create ex nihilo is to be understood as a sign of the new—and for John dangerous — authorial prerogatives of fictional writing that gained their clearest expression in the vernacular romances composed in the latter half of the century.
William and Geoffrey explore differences in receptive proficiency within the ranks of those at least capable of reading the language in which they write. Such divergences could be even more pronounced in the audience of an Old French text, since the use of the vernacular presupposes an effort to accommodate those who have an incomplete mastery of Latin—presupposes, therefore, a considerable hermeneutic gulf separating, on the one hand, the author and his bilingual peers and, on the other, those who were at best partially literate and who explicitly or otherwise form his inscribed audience. In chapter 3, I consider these potential problems of romance understanding.
LITERATE READINGS OF THE ROMANCE
It is a perfectly legitimate undertaking to approach twelfth-century Latin writings as scribal artifacts bearing complex rhetorical and intertextual structures. However, according to Paul Zumthor in La lettre et la voix,2<) no such liberty is by any means guaranteed in a vernacular context. This study stands as something of a summation of Zumthor's earlier work, but with primacy placed no longer on "le texte," but on "1'oeuvre," conceived as a plenary "socialisation" that embraced performer, audience, and community through the unifying agency of the voice.30 In Zumthor's view, the methodological shift from the analysis of discursive modes to meditation on a totality of poetic experience is an imperative, necessitated by what he considers an ongoing process of critical distortion. With some exceptions, he argues, modern medievalists tend to ignore the fundamental orality of the medieval text.31 Internalizing a printed culture that invests the written word with a hegemonic primacy and locates its most cherished values in the literary artifact, they perform across time the gesture of transforming the medieval other into a surrogate of the modern self, with the effect of reenacting the imperialist reflexes that inspired their discipline at its origins.32 For these reasons, Zumthor states, their readings of medieval texts are irretrievably compromised: the immediacy granted by the shared experience of the voice is displaced by a visual scanning that is both linear and solitary,33 and ever mobile meanings are ossified by a false engagement founded on the comforts of a totalizing and ultimately totalitarian hermeneutics.34
Whether Zumthor is justified in his comments remains open to debate simply because he abstains from naming those he rebukes. Furthermore, the path to rehabilitating performative modes in the way he suggests opens onto a secondary set of difficulties: since the performative circumstances of medieval delivery and reception are situated in the medieval past, then we today can appreciate medieval "vocalite" only through leaps of the modern imagination (which could be vitiated by any number of nonmedieval criteria), efforts at physical reconstruction (which could tend toward a cultural patronage bordering on Halloween caricature), or an acknowledgment of absolute alterity (which would deny appreciation for anything but alterity itself). Zumthor is certainly not ingenuous to these problems, and he avows that his injunctions lead to something of a critical aporia35 and back to the problems of cultural perspective he himself investigated in earlier studies:36 any silent and solitary act of reading a work that at its origins constituted a performance that was both vocal and communal is perforce an act of distortion; yet it is the only mode of reception to which the modern critic—by necessity the modern reader— is truly competent. The first step to negotiating this problem, Zumthor argues, is to recognize its existence; then, he concludes, at least the pos- sibility of reconstitution could be envisaged, not with an end to seizing the medieval work in its inevitably lost historical specificity, but to witness, in however vicarious and incomplete a manner, the form of vocal and gestural "socialisation" that has been obscured by the modern proclivity to approach the grapheme as the sole vehicle of meaning.37
Zumthor considers this performative reconstitution a matter of particular urgency in modern approaches to the chanson de geste and the lyric, for him the exemplary genres of oral "socialisation." With regard to the romance, however, he is more circumspect. As the privileged arena for modern analysis,38 this would seem the most likely candidate for anachronistic abuse. But, as Zumthor himself acknowledges, it bears an ambiguous and marginal relationship to the communal ethos and vocal immediacy he addresses.39 Certainly, it depended on performative vocalization for its initial dissemination and was therefore "socialized" through the same physical mechanisms as epic and lyric forms.40 Yet, in its twelfth-century manifestations at least, it was the product of a profoundly Latinate, bilingual culture that was both peripheral to the majority and, appraised in the most negative light, potentially elitist.41 The clerical ethos Zumthor associates with the romance does not necessarily bespeak an antagonism between author and audience. On the contrary: as a point of mediation through which representatives of a literate culture addressed the anxieties and aspirations of the illiterate and semiliterate, the romance constitutes a generic interaction between the two social spheres.
This mediating principle is one of its primary internal themes, creating a formal self-reflexivity through which communication becomes an obtrusive textual concern. To engage the romance under these conditions is to engage a commentary on intelligibility, understanding, and, ultimately, cultural cooperation. Witness in this regard the prologue to the Roman de Thebes: Qui sages est nel deit celer, Ainz por co deit son sen monstrer, Que, quant serra del siecle alez, En seit pues toz jorz remembrez.42 [Those who are wise should not hide it. Rather, precisely because of it, they should show their wisdom in order always to be remembered once they have left this world.]
For go ne vueil mon sen taisir, Ma sapience retenir; Ainz me delet a aconter Chose digne de remembrer. Or s'en voisent de tot mestier, Se ne sont clerc o chevalier, Car aussi pueent escouter Come li asnes al harper. (9-16) [For this reason, I have no wish either to hide my knowledge or to hold back my wisdom. On the contrary, it shall be my pleasure to recount something that is worthy of memory. So now let all those leave who in their station are not clerics or knights, for in listening to me they could only be like the ass that listens to the harpist.] The author's division of society according to cultural prerogative illuminates what has rightly come to be viewed as the distinguishing function of the earliest romances—the mediation between an increasingly leisured feudal aristocracy and a written corpus of learning previously confined to a restricted Latinate culture.43
The fact that Thebes is a translation first and foremost implies that the public for which it was prepared was incapable of negotiating the Latin of Statius. But this does not, of course, mean that the accomplished Htterati of the era were excluded from the circle of the text's reception. As he himself suggests by citing both clerc and chevalier, the author wrote to accommodate an audience demonstrating a range of literate abilities, and this desire to address a number of receptive positions is corroborated by the text itself. By dramatizing the themes of genealogical dispossession, military conflict, and the relationship of the individual to the body politic, it explores the values endorsed by the feudal magnates of the era in terms that are accessible to all. Less transparently, it also displays a web of learned references that could only have been in the first degree recognizable to the lettered. Yet, confirming Zumthor's warnings of elitism, responsible mediation is not the only role ascribed to the educated in the vernacular writing of the High Middle Ages. A more ambiguous presentation of literate power is found in the work of an anonymous redactor of Floire et Blancheflor, probably active in the late twelfth century or the early thirteenth. This is Barbarin, a performing magician in the employ of a royal court.
As a caique on barbarus, his very name suggests the linguistically outlandish, esoteric, and incomprehensible; and these subtle resonances of opacity are in turn amplified by the specific conditions in which he chooses to perform: Quant il ert en grant assanlee, de son nes issoit la fumee tele c'on nel peiist veoir ne ja son estre apercevoir.44 [When he was in a large assembly, smoke would come out of his nose so that people could not see him and lost sight of what he was doing.] These fumes amount to something of a smoke screen in their own right, and they should not blind us to the set of tropes the author is using. For Barbarin can also conjure forth magical images, one of which has unambiguous literary implications: Une harpe tint en ses mains et harpe le lai d'Orphey; onques nus horn plus n'en 01 et le montee et 1'avalee; cil qui 1'oent molt lor agree. (862-66) [He held a harp in his hands and strummed the lay of Orpheus. Never did anyone hear more of it in its rising and falling modulations. Those who heard it loved what they heard.]
All this would indeed be delightful, if not innocuously enchanting, were it not for a far less benign permutation on the theme of Orpheus that has already been provided. Barbarin may perform. But he expects to be paid in return, and the commodity he offers as his part of the transaction may not be what his client initially presumes: Qui li donast .XII. deniers, sa teste trencast volentiers; tantost com il 1'avoit trencie et a home 1'avoit baillie, demandoit lui: "Ai toi gabe? As tu ma teste?" "Oil, par De!" cou li respondoit li vilains; quant il regardoit en ses mains, trovoit u laisarde u culuevre: par ingremance faisoit 1'oevre. (813-22) [For anyone who gave him twelve deniers, he would willingly cut off his own head. As soon as he had cut if off and given it to the other, he would say "Have I fooled you? Have you got my head?" "Yes, by God," the bumpkin would say. But, when he looked in his hands, he would find either a lizard or a snake. Barbarin did all this by magic.] Beneath his necromantic garb, this "encanteres molt sages" (line 810) is a figure for all those who sell their literate talents for money. He is the modern Orpheus, enchanting the ears, subordinating things to the command of his words. Yet the severed head of song that he purveys to the illiterate, to the vilains here so inappropriately placed in the royal court, is never to be trusted and may turn out to be the serpentine voice of deception. The performer only appears to sell himself, operating from a position of invisibility and rendering his moves and motives obscure to others. Under these circumstances, it is he and he alone who benefits from the transaction, since the dupe of the jape is the oaf who believes money can buy a trustworthy voice. Assessed together, the author of Thebes and the redactor of Floire et Blancheflor dramatize the alternative faces of the litteratus in his relationship with the monolingual.
The purveyor of the vernacular may be the self-effacing medium through which the values of the community are expressed. Or he may be a sorcerer of words who employs his craft as a crucible for financial advancement by selling a debased product to those who cannot scrutinize its integrity. A pioneering study that engages romance as a figurative magic has been provided by Michelle A. Freeman in a monograph on Chretien de Troyes's Cliges.4S Freeman anticipates my interests by demonstrating that Chretien diegetically reflects his own authorial procedures through the Byzantine sorceress Tessala and configures his text as a magical draught.46 Although I shall return to Freeman's work in the conclusion to gauge Chretien's Continental response to certain Insular predecessors, it is apposite at this early stage to state how my own focus on the "magical" vernacular differs.
While Freeman studies the draught as a sign of authorial self-consciousness and thereby lends weight to her contention that Cliges is primarily to be read as a performance of scribal prowess, I shall approach the vernacular as a potential vehicle for exclusion and literate control. The text I shall consider is one of the most successful romances of the entire Middle Ages, Benoit de Sainte-Maure's midtwelfth-century Anglo-Angevin Roman de Troie.47 Benoit's work is particularly relevant to my field of inquiry, since it circulated in the Middle Ages with alternative prologues, each of a very different epistemological implication. In some of the earlier manuscripts (including one from the late twelfth century), the author expresses his intent to translate the history of Troy for the benefit of "cil qui n'entendent la letre" (35), for those who, while not necessarily analphabetic, cannot understand the full complexity of written artifacts, by inference including the Latin works of Dares and Dictys. In some slightly later redactions, however, the negative verb is changed to a positive and the romance offered to "cil qui entendent la letre," to those who can indeed comprehend such texts in all their subtlety.
These alternative prologues place Troie in two apparently divergent traditions, and they suggest methodological approaches that can be used by the twentieth-century critic. An effort could be made to hypothesize horizons of reception obtaining among the illiterate or semiliterate, preparatory to engaging the text as a depiction of the values endorsed by highly self-conscious and increasingly leisured feudal magnates negotiating the transition between barony and aristocracy. Such a reading would tend to concentrate on thematic issues such as social mobility, genealogical dispossession, kingship, and varied inflections of individual autonomy. Alternatively, study of the work could consider first and foremost the scribal context of its production. In this case, the author and the authority he arrogates would become the focal points of interest, and criticism would tend toward the analysis of literary self-consciousness, intertextual allusion, and inherited systems of meaning.
I consider, however, that a synthesis of both approaches is necessary. Troie is structured of all the "magical" prerogatives I have already outlined in a Latin context, and it explores in its themes precisely the gulf of understanding that its vernacularity is prospectively designed to bridge. And it is to be read as both a performance of, and a meditation on, the relationship between the clergy and the barony, between two communities that at this period in history were becoming not only increasingly interdependent, but also, at times, openly antagonistic. The relationship at issue is already reflected in the two groups of recipients that emerge from the alternative prologues: "cil qui entendent la letre," who find their peer in the inscribed author and his "magical" diegetic surrogates; and "cil qui n'entendent la letre," comprising the greater part of the audience. This distinction is far greater than that obtaining between the divergent readers of the Latin text, since it involves not only a difference in hermeneutic competence but also the relative limitations implied by auditory reception. With this distinction in mind, I seek to establish whether Troie is indeed the work of enlightenment that its earlier prologue implies or whether it is in fact a work of occlusion.
LATIN AND VERNACULAR FANTASIES OF LITERATE CONTROL
In the remaining two chapters, I shall use some of Duby's conclusions to open an avenue of sociological inquiry that Duby himself does not pursue, demonstrating that certain of the young men who answered a clerical rather than chivalric vocation employed the learning they thereby gained to flaunt particular talents and powers beyond the grasp of the less educated.48 Amplifying the initiatives of Ralph V. Turner49 and applying them to a literary context, I argue that feudal dispossession led to a collateral empowerment, as land and title were replaced by the new prerogatives of literacy—not only, as Turner has demonstrated, social and financial advancement, but also, in particular cases, a conspicuously displayed control over what is to be known by others and what is not.50 And these prerogatives were themselves frequently explored in writing through metaphors of not only magic but also mercantile opportunism. In chapter 4, I consider three clerics whose literate prerogatives led, directly or prospectively, to social and financial advancement. The first is Thomas Becket as he is presented in William FitzStephen's Vita Sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris. While other biographers attest Becket's spectacular rise from a mercantile background to the position of archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England, Fitz Stephen is unique in projecting his career through a set of topoi adapted from the dynastic, baronial tradition initiated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Historia regum Britanniae. Following Geoffrey's precedent, FitzStephen presents London as the New Troy.
Yet he makes Becket one of the worldrenowned rulers that Geoffrey's Diana predicts to govern the new imperium, and this despite the obvious oxymoron of the bourgeois monarch he thereby creates. This emphasis on social mobility prepares for FitzStephen's subtle portrayal of Becket as the effective ruler of England during his chancellorship. Similar concerns underlie my reading of Richard FitzNigel's handbook on fiscal administration, the Dialogus de Scaccario. Here too, the author celebrates the social mobility granted by education and suggests that the members of the Exchequer are the effective lords of the land. But he does so with a marked emphasis on the cabalistic prerogatives of these secular clerics: raised from even the most plebeian origins, they are guardians of mystic secrets (sacramenta) binding together writing and political control, and they oversee the quasi-religious consubstantation of king and finance literally to forge the monarchy to the contours they design.
These points lead me to return to the Roman de Troie, in which Benoit too explores the financial prerogatives of his own clerical status by developing a figurative alchemy of writing and, ultimately, by elaborating his own vernacular analogue to the Royal Treasury itself. He is not concerned, however, with a numismatics of kingship: rather, he imprints his own authorial likeness onto the written coinage he circulates in the textuality of his romance. Finally, I devote chapter 5 to Gerald of Wales, the most prolific Latin author associated with the Anglo-Angevin court. Gerald, I demonstrate, fashions himself as the daemon of contemporary letters (and, through them, politics), and under this guise emerges as the most manipulative figure of magical literacy of the period, deliberately performing precisely the necromantic praestigia investigated and censured by William of Malmesbury. But he takes this written sorcery beyond anything anticipated in the Gesta regum and exploits his erudition to create texts that are calculatedly designed to subvert the temporal pretensions of the semiliterate to whom they are dedicated.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق