Kinoshita - Medieval Boundaries Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature

Medieval Boundaries

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Rethinking Difference in
Old French Literature

Sharon Kinoshita

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright 2006 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 191044112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kinoshita, Sharon.

Medieval boundaries : rethinking difference in Old French literature / Sharon Kinoshita.

p. cm.(The Middle Ages series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 9780-81223919-5

ISBN-10: 08122-39199 cloth : alk. paper

1. French literatureTo 1500History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ151.K56 2006

840.9'001dc22

2005052724

In memory of my parents,
Koujiro Koko Kinoshita
and Haruno Ogawa Kinoshita

Medieval Boundaries began with the curious realization that many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of France or even the French-speaking world: the Chanson de Roland, the Lais of Marie de France, Chrtien de Troyess Cligs, Aucassin et Nicolette, and a host of others. Capitalizing on this insight, Medieval Boundaries sets out to rethink Old French literary production (circa 11501225) through the thematics of cultural interaction. The inaugural phase of vernacular French literature, I will argue, is inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious, and cultural others.

Like much recent work in the emerging field of postcolonial medievalism, Medieval Boundaries is animated by theoretical problematics derived from Edward Saids Orientalism and postcolonial theory: the representation of the other, the dynamics of cross-cultural contact, the question of the crusades as a proto-colonial enterprise. To date, much of the work in postcolonial medievalism has focused on late medieval England in the age of Chaucer and after. The cultural and temporal specificity of this focus has important consequences. In late medieval England, as critics like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and others have shown, it is possible to identify elements of the discourses of Orientalism and nationalism in nascent but clearly recognizable forms. Such exercises in postcolonial medievalism thus tend, implicitly or explicitly, to make an argument for continuity, construing the Middle Ages as the site of the origin, or at least the consolidation, of the emergent ideologies of European colonial expansionism.

Medieval Boundaries seeks to complicate this understanding by delineating the specificity of a representative range of medieval texts along three critical axes: periodization, geography, and vernacularization. We

My second critical axis concerns the geography of medieval French literature. Geography, Franco Moretti has argued, shapes narrative structure: Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific spacemapping itcan thus be a powerful tool of analysis, bringing to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden. As we will see, the interests and imagination of the crusaders, mercenaries, pilgrims, merchants, and settlers who constituted the audience of Old French epic and romance were not limited to the frontiers of twelfth-centurylet alone twenty-first-centuryFrance. A fundamental thesis of this book is that medieval French speakers had a much greater degree of involvement in and knowledge of the cultures of the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean than modern readers generally credit.

The third critical axis Medieval Boundaries seeks to make visible is the

Nowhere is the intersection of periodicity, geography, and vernacularization more important than in representations of Latin Europes interactions with its religious and cultural others. Bracketed by the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the twelfth century is, indisputably, a century of crusade. It is certainly possible to construct a history of Christian-Muslim hostility running in a straight line from the council of Clermont in 1095 to our own present moment. My argument in Medieval Boundaries, however, is that post-colonial medievalisms disproportionate focus on the English fourteenth century has produced a skewed impression of a proto-modern Middle

But, as Ania Loomba writes, any meaningful discussion of colonial or post-colonial hybridities demands close attention to the specificities of location. Rather than attempting to trace the continuities between medieval and modern intolerance, Medieval Boundaries tries to bring into focus the messier, less codified age before the early thirteenth-century epistemic divide, a world less riven by fixed perceptions of difference. Nation was an unstable category that could be defined neither linguistically nor territorially, marking anything from regional feudal affiliations ( gens Normannorum) to a nascent sense of Latinopposed to OrthodoxChristianity ( gens latina). Representations of alterity were notably more fluid and less marked by the racializing discourses typical of later centuries than we sometimes assume.

It is particularly in analyzing the relationship between medieval Christians and Muslims that the focus on vernacular literature as such can make a difference. This is a topic that has, of course, been treated by many eminent medievalists: Norman Daniel, for example, in Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (1960), and R. W. Southern in Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages (1962). Revisiting these classic essays in the wake of Edward Said, however, we cannot help but be struck by the incommensurability underpinning both titles: an abstract, geographically defined culture, the West, on the one hand, and a world religion, Islam, on the other. Obscured in the process, however, are medieval Christians lived reactions to and interactions with Muslims and the Islamic worldinteractions much more complex and multifaceted than implied in the demonizing depictions by Norman Daniel or Edward Said himself.

Composed in a milieu often at odds with the official culture of Latin clerics, vernacular French literature offers a peek at this other Middle Ages, often lost beneath the radar of ideological polemic. An emblematic object here is the so-called Eleanor vase, a luminous honeycombed rock crystal vessel (today displayed in the Louvre) that Eleanor of Aquitaine brought north with her in 1137 when she married the French king Louis VII. There Abbot Sugerthe kings minister and architect of the new Gothic stylehad it fitted with a precious metal frame bearing the following inscription: Hoc vas sponsa dedit Alienor Regi Ludovico Mitadolus avo mihi rex Sanctis que Suger (As a bride, Eleanor gave this vase to King Louis, Mitadolus to her grandfather, the King to me, and Suger to the Saints). The vase (originally carved in pre-Islamic Sassanian Persia) had first come into Eleanors family as a gift to her grandfather, the troubadour-duke Guilhem IX. The giver, Mitadolus, has been identified as