Wolfram von Eschenbach: Nice Guy (TM)

If anyone now speaks better of women, then truly I have no objection. I would be glad to hear their joy bruited wide. There is only one to whom I am unwilling to offer my loyal servitude. My anger is always new against her, ever since I detected her in deviance.

I am Wolfram von Eschenbach and I know a little of singing, and I am a pair of tongs holding m anger against one woman in particular: she has inflicted such wrong upon me that I have no choice but to hate her. That is why I bear the brunt of other women’s enmity. Alas, why do they act in this way!

Although their enmity grieves me, it stems from their womanliness, after all, because I have spoken out of turn and done myself wrong – the chances are it will never happen again! Yet they should not be overhasty in storming my bastion – they will find valorous battle. I have not forgotten how to be a good judge of their bearing and their ways. If chastity keeps company with a woman, I will be her reputations’ champion. Her sorrow grieves me from the heart.

He’s a nice guy, really! Except for that one time, but it was totally justified!

… is it wrong of me that this is my favourite bit of Parzival?

IAS update #2 – Gawain and Guinevere, my two favourite Arthurian peeps

[Note: both these papers, and my recaps of them, deal with encroachment on personal and physical autonomy; the second in particular covered some distressing gendered violence in the narrative structure.]

The first paper I went to at Bristol was on what might just qualify as my favourite subject – the objectification (or, in this case, commodification) of Sir Gawain, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Warning against the wyles of women - David Sweeten

This paper moved very fast, especially in the middle, so I missed chunks of it, but I really look forward to reading a hard-copy version at some point

David began with this quote:

For were I worth al the wone of wymmen alyue,
And al þe wele of þe worlde were in my honde,
And I schulde chepen and chose to cheue me a lorde
…
Þer schulde no freke upon folde bifore yow be chosen.
[ll. 1269-71,75; Tolkien & Gordon 2nd ed. (ed. by Norman Davies); my quotation, not David Sweeten's.]

Gawain, or Gawain-as-husband, is something which can be purchased with appropriate wealth. David went on to argue that Gawain’s honour is also a commodity to be bargained for: he read the bedroom scenes not as Lady B’s attempt to sleep with Gawain (or purchase sex from him), but an endeavour to get him to accept the girdle. She takes her time setting up the appropriate stakes: first offering a too-high price (sexual favours for his honour) in order to make the lower price, the girdle, more acceptable. The values of the items in question – Gawain’s honour, and the girdle, seem slippery: Lady B. can reduce Gawain’s standing by questioning his identity; and her revelation of the properties of the girdle forces him to re-value the item within the context of the exchange.

As well as this reading, which was fun in its own right, David offered some historical context. He argued that the poem is both rooted in its NW Midlands homeland, and closely tied to London politics of the day. SGGK’s anxiety about women’s commodification of male honour he linked to contemporary anxiety about the position of influence held by Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. The nobility of the NW Midlands relied heavily on direct royal patronage: Alice’s strong influence over Edward threatened that relationship.

I really liked this paper. But then, I really like most things which have to do with someone bossing poor Gawain about.*

Next up, I missed the first five minutes or so (but enjoyed the rest of)….

The Queen was in her Parlour: Guinevere and Space – Kristina Hildebrand

This paper was in a session (“Women in Arthurian Literature”), which, perhaps due to its snazzy content and perhaps due to its respected moderator, Bonnie Wheeler, was so jam-packed that people (myself and David Sweeten included) were sprawled on the floor around the edges of the room.

Kristina argued that Guinevere marks out and defines royal space; her presence identifies civilisation in the text. This power is not to be confused with political clout, but it seems to be impossible to rule England without her.

Guinevere is a stable figure at the centre of the court (for the most part), when compared to, say Iseult, who comes and goes from her husband’s court. She has a defined space, her personal chamber: Kristina talked about the stress in the social fabric of Malory’s Arthurian world caused by differing values placed on the queen’s space. To Arthur, he alone should have access to it; Gawain argues that because the queen has a public function as rewarder of knights, her chamber is a public space.

With this framework set up, Kristina talked about Guinevere in Meleagaunt’s castle: her space grows smaller and smaller; she attempts to defend a single room, and in the end she cannot even maintain control over her bed. This is a pretty distressing situation by any measure, but the framework Kristina set up around it, in which Guinevere’s space is not just about her person but her identity as queen, the whole process sent chills up my spine. Not-good chills, except insofar as I admire the careful authorial choices necessary to produce such effects.

Guinevere, then, is under constant threat: she is most safe inside Arthur’s court, but never entirely so. Kristina drew in Igraine, here, who was not safe even within her husband’s court; and then she asked if the convent to which Guinvere retires is a safe personal space at last? There, she has authority, and ought to be able to prevent male encroachments on her territory. However, Lancelot ignores her command and tries to see her. Kristina noted that Guinevere is saved, in the end – by death. Only God can protect her; and even then, only terminally.

I liked this paper! It was Relevant To My Interests, even if it was about Malory. Totally worth scrunching up on the floor for.

~

* I feel I ought to specify, since apparently many people assume otherwise, that I do not personally wish to shag Gawain! Boss him about, sure. My feeling on Gawain is that he should be my big brother, and his life would be much better if he had me to tell him how to run it.** And many other people’s lives would be improved because I would be bossing Gawain about, and not them. What, you mean you don’t all have fictional characters you want to adopt? *sidles off*

** I have a feeling the Maiden With Small Sleeves shares my feelings on Gawain, too.

How to insult a man who turns you down (in the late 12th century)*

* Insult only applicable if you are not yourself a man.

This morning I had the great delight of translating a chunk of Marie de France’s Lanval. I present, for your edification, the insulting of Sir Lanval, by Guinevere, whose advances he has rejected:

Lanval, fet elle, bien le quit,
Vus n’ames gueres cel deduit.
Asez le m’ad hum dit sovent
Que des femmes n’aves talent!
Vallez avez bient afeitiez,
Ensemble od eus vus deduiez.
(ll. 277-82 – Lanval, she said, well do I believe it: you do not love this pleasure much. Very often men [lit. a man; generic] have said it to me, that you do not have a desire for women! You have much preferred young men, with whom you take your pleasure.)

Apparently I have picked a side in the Great Gay Debate of pre-modern history, vis, it does not seem sensible to argue that there can be no concept of same-sex-preference as an identity prior to the invention of the handy terms ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. We see enough of this trope, women accusing men of preferring young men to women, in vernacular literature that evidently it made sense to authors an audiences: one reason a man might not be into you is that he’s into young men. Which means we have a mental category for ‘men-who-prefer-young-men’. And, for added bonus points, we can go around shaming men by implying that they’re in that category of men-who-prefer-young-men.

There’s two such fabulous passages in the Roman d’Eneas, in which first Lavinia’s mum warns her that, if she shacks up with Eneas, he will bring hot young men into their marital bed (this is not supposed to be an incentive; perhaps Lavinia takes it as one? She marries him, anyway); and then, after Eneas buggers off on her, Lavinia soundly denounces him for being insufficiently heterosexual.

I’m sure someone’s written on this trope in particular, but I’m having a mental blank and can’t remember who (Simon Gaunt touches on it, but he doesn’t deal with Lanval, so far as I can recall). At any rate, it seems to be a conceivable response, in 12th century French lit, for a woman to accuse a man who’s rejected or abandoned her of preferring to seek his pleasure with young men.

Accordingly, it’s really intriguing to me that Lunette does not launch this accusation against Yvain, despite the fact that Gauvain has basically single-handedly coaxed Yvain away from his wife and ‘distracted’ him so much that he forgets to return home. I really don’t think it’s because the concept didn’t exist: manifestly, it did.

Also, for bonus points, guess who Lanval had been hanging out with immediately prior to being propositioned by Guinevere?

YOU GUESSED IT. GAUVAIN AND YVAIN. This is pleasing to the part of me that likes to pretend all Arthuriana is contiguous, even when it clearly isn’t.

Leeds Report #6b, or, more fun with Computational Linguistics!

After Rombert Stapel’s paper, we moved onto two further papers which were perrhaps more ambitious in scope, and concerning which I have less certainty about the method and its application. All presenters talked about using control samples, and talked us through the process by which they deterrmined that Delta could tell the difference between their target author and unrelated samples, but each paper raised some questions for me which might just be revealing my ignorance.

Karina van Danlen-Oskam was attempting to use quantitative computational analysis to distinguish between different scribes of the same text. She talked about some of the difficulties of using computational linguistics for medieval studdies: you need an electronic text – but when you fling your electronic text into Delta, are you identifying the medieval author, the medieval scribe or the modern editor as your unique language user? During the course of her own analysis she also had to control for variant spellings – some manuscripts which looked really whacky turned out to be quite conventional once you controlled for variant spellings in feminine pronouns.

I liked Karina’s idea here – that you could bypass that question if you used computational linguistics to distinguish between different scribes of the same text. In this case, she took 15 MSS of Dutch text, a chronicle of biblical history. She made the transcriptions herself – necessarily short sections, the same sections from each text. She picked sections with interesting women in them partly because that seemed like fun to her, and partly because sections with interesting womein in them occur regularly but infrequently across the whole of biblical history.

What she found was that different samples showed different levels of variance across the whole set of manuscripts- one episode from the New Testament involing the thee Mariaswas wildly different across the boad. What she also found was that while the Judith episodes overall were pretty consistent, one scribe had got seriously inventive and not only changed things but added whole sections, effectively becoming an author for that stretch of the text.

The problem which arises out of this is that… we don’t know what it means. Using her existing data, Karina plans to look at the Esther episodes; she said she thought the scribe might have been inspired by traditions on the Nine Worthies, so if she was going back for more data she’d start with sections which dealt with the nine male Worthies. But without full transcripts of entire manuscripts, it’s not really possible to say how inventive that scribe was or how unique the manuscript.

My other problem here is that while computational linguistics clearly can demonstrate that the scribe of MS I (in Karina’s numbering) was creative in his account of Judith; and the dot plots were nicely illustrative; and it’s exciting to know this fact – you didn’t actually need computational linguistics to do it. All you needed was someone to look at the Judith sections of all fifteen MSS, and it just so happens that a computational linguist got to it first. Given that the scribe had *added entire lines*, I’m sure Karina noticed this when she was transcribing.

Mike Kestemont was using computational linguistics to argue that one Johan the Clerk was the author of a group of twelve poems from Antwerp, usually attributed to the ‘Antwerpschool’ of poems. Now, this is a long stoush – we have one known poem by Johan and one almost-certainly-by Johan poem¹ – and we have about 12 anonymous poems from the same period, and 20th century scholarship was greatly devoted to arguing about whether Johan wrote all of said poems or none of said poems.

Mike’s computational states focused on rhyme words, on the reasonable logic that a poet might change his topic, change his format, but he’s unlikely to change his list of ‘words which rhyme with purple’. And he discovered that all the anonymous poems used substantially the same rhyme words as Johan’s identified works!

Mike was good humoured about this: he knew well that exciting as his multivariate statistics were, he’s unlikely to put an end to the argument anytime soon; but he wanted to put his evidence down on the record for the ‘maximalist’ position.

My quibble with this – he was rigorous about his control sample and so on – is that I’d like to see some other statistical studies done on rhyme-words. While, sure, any two or three or twelve friends are probably not going to use the same stock rhyme words, what about teachers and students? In an oral poetic culture, wouldn’t one of the key things you teach your students be a stock of rhyme words for every occasion? But we don’t have much vernacular poetic evidence where we can identify teacher-student pairs or groups, at least not for the European middle ages. Medieval and early modern Arabic poetry might be able to help here – but I’m not even sure if Arabic poetry is rhymed; and the distinctly different oral cultures might cancel out the usefulness of such data for European medievalists.

I would also be interested – just because I’m interested – to see a stack of computational analysis done on known Latin authors, particularly authors trained in the same place or by the same people. I’d like to know if the statistical difference between the language use of two second-language users trained in the same place is different to the statistical difference between two native speakers, especially since Latin composition has always been such a stylistically specific art. I’d like to know if you could use computational linguistics programs to run grammatical analyses on a Latin text and identify the author’s native language. These are all things that would be interesting to me! But I don’t have either the Latin or the statistical proficiency to do either of these things myself. Latinists and statisticians of the world, hear ye.

~

1. This was a fun story. In his identified poem, Johan announces that his patron had rejected his previous work because it was too misogynist. Conveniently, we have a remarkably misogynist poem, the Lehenspeigel, dedicated to the same patron, by ‘John, your poor Clerk’. So ten points to Rogier van Leef for turning down misogynist poetry?

Also, fun fact – John the Clerk fromAntwerpturns up in the wardrobe accounts of Edward III– he received payment from the English for spying on the French.

Leeds Report #6, or, I saw multi-variate statistics!

One of the most interesting sessions by far, from my humble perspective, was 1209: Whodunnit? Literary Forensics and Authorship Attribution for the Middle Ages. Three Middle Dutch scholars, all of whom work on questions of authorship and transmission, all spoke on different uses of statistical analysis in looking at textual variants. Before recapping each paper, allow me to talk for a bit about the interesting ideas and issues the session raised.

Firstly: computational linguistics. This method of linguistic analysis rests on the fact that individual speakers of a common language have distinct linguistic markers. These markers are not topic-specific, but show up in really common words (articles, conjunctions, subordinators) and grammatical patterns. Put simply, you can tell the difference between a post by Magistra and a post by me by the fact that Magistra talks about early medieval history and I talk a high medieval sex; but a computational linguist would run our two anonmymised posts through a computer program and discover that I use certain conjunctions far more than she, and she uses some particular grammatical structure a lot more than I do.

Now, I seem to have a lot more faith in computational linguistics than many literary scholars – I think this is because I got taught the basic principles (although by no means how to do it) in first year, thank you Craig Ronalds. I know, for example, that this business about individual language markers has been rigorously tested on modern speakers from different language backgrounds. I know the method has been used to expose cases of police interfering with witness testimony (police members as a group show certain linguistic traits that are not shared by the general population, as a result of their training). I know it’s uses for humanities scholars haven’t been fully explored or tested yet, but I also suspect that a lot of the distrust people have for evidence drawn from computational linguistics is to do with the unfamiliar kind of evidence. Computational linguistics relies on data and statistical analysis and sciencey-kinds of things: I get the feeling that a lot of humanities scholars don’t trust that (it’s repeatable, sure, but you can’t go through your edition and mark it up and SEE the evidence right there). Our discipline trains us to check everything against the text, rather than checking it for thorough and repeatable experimental process: maybe we’re not so willing to trust people who branch out into other kinds of evidence.

With that said, it must also be stated that I don’t know enough about computational linguistics for my bullshit detector to work properly when hear about it. So I have no way of knowing if an individual scholar is doing their computational linguistics Rong. Given that the application of computational linguistics to literary scholarship is a relatively new field, one risk would be that there aren’t enough trained bullshit-detectors around, but that can only change with time and the increasing usefulness of computational techniques.

So what are some of the uses of computational linguistics to medievalists?

Rombert Stapel has been using computational linguistics to determine how much of Hendrick Gerardsz van Vianen (sp?)’s Croniken van der Duytcher Order, a late 15th c. chronicle of the Teutonic Order with specific focus on the area around Utrecht, was written by the said Hendrick. Several segments are easily identified as being from other sources – the prologue claims to be by a 12th century bishop who certainly wasn’t in Acre when he said he was; and the Balliwick chronicle for Utrecht seems separate from the main body of the text.

Traditional philological analysis would look at unusual words, and has been of some use to Rombert Stapel, but in the absence of original source texts it’s hard to tell where emendation has been happening. Instead, he took samples from the privileges written by the said Hendrick in his capacity as secretary to the Lands Commander Johan von Drongen. The samples are not just written at a different time to the Croniken, they’re also in a completely different style – something which would usually override philologically distinct vocabulary features, but doesn’t usually override the grammatical data used in computational linguistics.

The full set samples which he fed into the program (Delta, by someone named Burrows – it’s free, and apparently easy to use) were:

• 2 sets of samples from the Croniken where traditional philological evidence (comparisons to original sources, I believe) shows Hendrick left traces as author.
• The privileges mentioned above
• The Sachenspiegel, known to have been copied by Hendrick
• 2 unrelated texts of the same period and genre – one hagiography and one chronicle.

After testing that Delta could distinguish between the unrelated texts and the Hendrick texts, he then compared the samples to the entire rest of the Croniken, and pulled up several sections clearly not by Hendrick, including the first half of the prologue (but not the second); the Balliwick chronicle; and some formulaic documents- privileges and court pleadings. The rest appears to be either by Hendrick or substantially modified by him.

Rombert then argued that Hendrick’s strong presence across the Croniken suggests that he was both author and compiler at once; noting the existence of other Teutonic Order chronicle texts in this period in theLowlands, he says this points to a strong, self-aware hagiographical tradition in the balliwicks, away from the administrative centre of the Order.

—

Note: I’ve probably got the author/scribe’s name spelled wrong, but I’m pretty sure Croniken was on the slides, with a C not a K.

Leeds Report #5, or the one where Highly went to the wrong side of campus

Here are some things that happened to me on Wednesday morning at Leeds.
1. I overslept and missed breakfast.
2. I drank truly abysmal tea in Boddington. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to have coffee and plain boiling water and hot chocolate all coming out of the same spout on the machine? I ended up with tea that tasted of hot chocolate!
3. I dashed onto the bus to Weetwood, running late.
4. I got to Weetwood and discovered that the session I wanted, ‘Royal, Patron and Civic Saints’, was actually back at Boddington.
5. I scanned the program, saw the words ‘pontificate’ and ‘Innocent’ and dashed off to Session 1127.

Of course, it turned out that Session 1127 was about Innocent II, not my buddy Innocent III. One presenter, Damian Smith, wasn’t present; and I missed enough of Anne J. Duggan’s paper on legal reform that it made very little sense to me.

But I learned interesting things from Dale Kinney’s paper ‘The Artistic Patronage of Pope Innocent II’.

What I liked best about Dale Kinney’s paper was that she said from the outset that she was correcting an assertion she’d made in her own PhD thesis, with which she now disagreed. I like a person who’s happy to argue with themselves in public!

The second thing I liked about this paper was her lovely slides – art historians are good at slides, I have noticed. The third fabulous thing was that she accidentally referred to scholar Herbert Black as ‘Herbert the Black’. More scholars should have fearsome monikers, I feel.

Also, there were some arguments in this paper. Basically, in her PhD thesis, Dale Kinney had asserted that Innocent II was ‘not a building pope’. This, she now realises, rested on a strange assumption that there was such a thing as a ‘building pope’ in the 12th century; and that Innocent II’s well-attested rebuilding projects (described by Cardinal Boso; mostly it was falling rooves. Apparently rooves were falling in on churches all over Rome) had no particular project.

Now, she thinks otherwise. She discussed three facets of Innocent II’s building programs:

• Gifts (possibly re-gifts?) to various churches, including a big shiny silver cross to St Peter’s, which may be a deliberate parallel with a similar gift of Constantine’s. Such gifts seem to point to a high value placed on churches in general and church decoration in particular.
• Technologically demanding rebuilding projects – for example, the Cathedral of St John Lateran had collapsed in the 9th century, been rebuilt in the early 10th, but struck by lightning in 1115, after which it began to collapse again. Innocent II seems to have been the first to attempt a complete reconstruction. Many of these reconstructions involved deviating significantly from the original plan – at St Pauls, for example, Innocent II’s architects halved the span of the columns, with shorter arches and windows placed above, for lack of the technology to replicate the originals. At St Stephanus Rotunda, which had originally had several (2? 3? I’m not sure and didn’t write down) concentric colonnades, they had to fill in the second colonnade in entirely and cut the outer one out entirely, making the whole church dramatically smaller.
• Innocent II was also a great spoliast, removing and re-using a number of features from Roman monuments. This is by no means the lazy option – as Dale Kinney pointed out, much of Rome was actively hostile to the Papacy at the time; dragging great big columns and whatnot across the city is no mean feat.

Perhaps most interesting of all, she told us the story of Innocent II’s own sarcophagus. It was found ‘in media giro’ (in the middle circuit) of the Mausoleum of Hadrian, which was at the time a heavily-used fortress.

First of all, the Mausoleum of Hadrian doesn’t have circuits, so no one’s quite sure what that meant. The passage from the entrance to the two central chambers was a sort of spiral, so it could mean in the middle of that; or perhaps in one of the two central chambers.

Secondly, Innocent II laboured under the delusion that the sarcophagus was Hadrian’s; but Hadrian was cremated and buried in an urn. So it must be someone else’s sarcophagus. But whose?  Everyone else buried there – the last person was a woman named Julia Domina – would also have been cremated. So the sarcophagus must have been *moved in there* from another tomb at some point.

At any rate, Innocent II took it out and got it across Rome, through largely hostile territory – Dale Kinney suggested a route, involving floating the sarcophagus upriver as far as possible. This probably saved it from destruction in an assault on the  Mausoleum. In fact, it ought to have been perfectly safe forever – except the church it was placed in burned down on top of it in the 14th century. Ooops.

This post needs more pictures, but, unlike Dale Kinney, I don’t have access to a lot of educational and illustrative pictures of medieval reconstructions of various Roman churches. I can’t even find a picture of St Stephanus Rotunda.

 

[NB: Dear person who's sending me compliments via google search strings - <3. Dear person who's googling 'stairway fantasy', I got nuffin' for you.]

The cute cat theory of manuscripts?

At IAS I went to a postgrad masterclass on ‘publishing and getting published’, which, strangely, seemed to be mostly about why you should leave academia for publishing careers.¹ And at this session, the speaker from Boydell and Brewer endeavoured to impress upon us the fit-for-purpose nature of hardcopy books. They’re portable, and often have their own inbuilt search engine, called the ‘index’! If we had no books, she said, and someone came up with the idea of printing things out, binding them, and putting indices and contents pages in them, everyone would be standing around going “oooh, what a clever idea! Clearly it is the way of the future!”

In other news, I have been particularly enjoying Got Medieval’s series on Cute cats in Harley 6563.

I would like to propose that the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism applies to books.

Specifically: Book 1.0 was created to allow people to share research papers intellectual content of some sort. Book 2.0 was created to allow people to share cute pictures of cats (or monkeys²).

OK, that’s clearly not the *sole* purpose of Book 2.0, wherever you want to draw the boundary, but there is a clear increase in cute pictures in manuscripts over time, yes?

Consider also the porn part of the Cute Cats Theory:

Hypothesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.

If there’s no porn, the tool doesn’t work.

If there are no activists, the tool doesn’t work well

Now, by this logic, the book doesn’t work at all until 1748, which is clearly not true. But consider that Charlotte of Savoy liked naked people alongside her daily devotions. I’m sure we can stretch the definition of ‘porn’ to include titilating marginalia, yes?

And from there, can we draw a long bow and say that the use of books in popular activism increases at the same time as the amount of titilating marginalia increases?

Also, cats.³

I rest my case.
~

1. Apparently I am a prime candidate for this, because I was able to identify Stephanie Meyer as the only author other than JKR who could probably get away with a Pottermore-style self-publishing venture. I’m actually not sure that SMeyer *is* the only such person – there are smaller-scale YA authors with particularly net-savvy audiences, like Tamora Pierce.
2. Speaking of monkeys, how cute is the monkey in The Lady and the Unicorn? VERY CUTE, is how cute. I resisted the urge to buy a throw cushion with the monkey on it, and was rather disappointed that you could buy cuddly toy unicorns but not cuddly toy monkeys.
3. Got Medieval reckons the BL are anti-kitteh! Clearly not. They published a whole book about kittehs in books. How recursive.

Gratuitous Cathedral Post

One thing I hadn’t quite been expecting, when setting out to poke my nose in as many churches as possible, was that so few of them would be exhibiting a single cohesive architectural style. It makes sense, if you think about it – a cathedral takes a century or more to build, and then you tack new frilly bits later on as well, if you can afford it. A lived-in church is going to be a bit of a hotch-potch, and if done well the combination of styles can be attractive in its own right.

Nevertheless, in my head, hotchpotch ecclesiastical architecture is something I associate with antipodean church-builders who ran out of money and/or standstone for their neo-gothic edifices. I don’t have any good photos of the new part, but St Pauls Dunedin is a good example of what I’m talking about – they’ve managed to integrate a concrete chancel into a neo-gothic nave.

I think this is a product of the way architectural history is taught (at least the way it was taught to me – and bear in mind that I’m not a visual learner and shied away from art-history heavy subjects). Hey hey kids, Romanesque churches! *photo of a Romanesque ediface* Norman Cathedrals! *photo of the most Norman bits of a church with surviving norman bits* High Gothic! *photo of the flying buttresses of Notre Dame* I do remember one lecture which involved a lot of photographs of 14th-century additions to once-small parish churches in the wool-farming areas of England (they ended up looking like particularly horrendous wedding cakes), but I guess it hadn’t sunk in properly.

I’m not very good at differentiating between architectural or artistic styles, but seeing them all jammed up together in the one place is remarkably educational.

Consider Saint-Gatien de Tours:

This is, for my money, a rather obnoxious façade (and also not a brilliant photo). The church was started in the late 12th century, but I think (from wikipedia and the guide sheet, which I don’t have to hand right now) that it was the 14th century before they got so far as the main doors. Note the heavy high gothic decoration on the arches. The towers, on the other hand, are 16th century additions

The chancel, which I think is mid-13th century, has the whole Gothic Spiderweb effect going on (although it’s quite hard to get a good shot of it, since there’s construction work all down one side).  Flying buttresses about to take off and fly away, methinks.

The insufferably lucky sods still have some of the original 13th century murals – here you’ll see St GregoryMartin tearing his cloak in half and sharing it with a beggar.

I couldn’t figure out what this mural actually depicts – it wasn’t signposted, and although I could follow the conversation of the people near me when they were discussing the restoration process, I didn’t pick up what the picture’s actually *of*. I think it might be a little older than St Greg, though – if you look above, St Greg’s halo is breaking out of the picture boundary into the text, whereas what I could see of thi sone seemed to be keeping within the frames. I learned something in the class I taught this year, and that’s that 12th-century figures stay within their frames, whereas mid/late 13th century sees figures creeping out of frames. Congrats to my supervisor, she managed to teach me *something * about art. Ten points to her.

Coming later – the cloister of St Gatien, a nifty progression from 12th century to renaissance.

Improbable story time, or, Highly grumbles about dude-centric assumptions

Let me tell you a story.

Let’s say we have a girl, born in France, oh, around 1150. She’s the daughter of nobility; not royalty or the daughter of a duke, but well-established baronial class. Let’s say she’s not the eldest daughter; perhaps the second or third child. Let us suppose that she also has at least one uncle well-placed in the secular clergy, or perhaps female relatives in a nunnery. Let’s suppose that she spends some time with these religiously-inclined relatives. Perhaps she even considers taking vows herself, but just as they lack money for a dowry right now, her family don’t have the money to make the substantial donation required. Or perhaps they have a falling-out with the religiously-inclined relative and their institution. Maybe they need her in order to broker a treaty-and-marriage arrangement with a former enemy, but the former enemy decides he’d rather be a current enemy, and the deal falls through.

One way or another, our young noblewoman – let’s call her Helene, for no particular reason – never enters the church, but she picks up a knack for Latin (she’s always been good with languages) and a passing familiarity with bits and pieces of Christian doctrine. What Helene likes best, though, is poetry. She really, really likes Ovid.

Mind you, Helene has always liked poetry. Picture Helene as a child: she has a knack, she remembers things easily, she learns nursery rhymes and folk songs and charms from her nurses. When she’s old enough to join her mother and older sisters, she learns the stories women tell one another, folk stories from here and there, and the songs the troubadours come to tell them. She’s not always a part of her father’s court, and she doesn’t get to join him at the county court, as her mother sometimes does – so her chances to hear really good singers and storytellers are limited. Helene likes stories and songs; Helene’s sisters and friends enjoy stories and songs. So what they do, when they hear particularly good chansons or the newer songs, the romans of with heroes and damsels and magic – what they do when they hear them is memorise them. They don’t get everything right; they don’t have the training in metre and mnemonic skills that the troubadours have. But Helene has a knack. When they try to retell the stories to themselves, Helene is the one who’s best at putting it all together in her memory, and making up new bits to paste over the gaps.

The time Helene gets to spend with her religiously-inclined aunt, or possibly uncle, sharpens her skills. She memorises Ovid and learns the rudiments of Latin poetic metre. When she returns to her family, her mother is taken into the Countess’ retinue, and Helene goes with her. Here, she has access to some of the finest poets and artists in France. She hears several different variations of the Song of Roland and gets all excited when she finds out that there’s a poet in town who knows a new song about William of Orange and his relatives. The other ladies in the Countess’ retinue think she’s a bit weird in her fixation, but they’re happy enough to listen to the exciting bits she’s memorised and can recite for them. Sometimes she tells silly versions, makes up daft stories about Charlemagne and William when they were children. Her mother laughs and says she’s a real poet. Helene knows mama is joking, but the idea sticks anyway.

What Helene *really* likes, though, is the stories of King Arthur, and King Mark and Tristan – and Queens Guinevere and Iseult, and all the adventure and magic of the Matter of Britain. She listens to as many of them as she can, annoys as many troubadours and bards as she can, but there just don’t seem to be many such stories.

So she makes up her own. Helene makes up stories about King Mark and Tristan, and sometimes it seems like no one can tell the difference between her stories and the ones the Countess has read out of her big, beautiful books. And one day, one perfectly normal, perfectly nice day toward the end of summer, when Helene is sitting with the Countess and the rest of her ladies in the gardens, the Countess gets snappy, and sends the court poet away.

‘I think I’ve heard all his stories five times by now,’ the Countess says. She’s almost petulant. Helene’s never been very good at knowing when to keep her mouth shut.

‘I know a new story,’ she says. ‘A roman, one no one’s told at this court, at least not since mama and I came here.’

‘Go on,’ says the Countess. ‘What is it called?’

‘The Shoulder Bite,’ Helene says, and a few of the ladies’ raise their eyebrows.

The Countess looks sceptical. ‘And who composed this… Shoulder Bite?’

Helene is suddenly stuck. She hadn’t thought this far, not at all. ‘A man from Troyes,’ she says, and Mama, at least, will know at once that she’s lying. ‘A Christian man, from Troyes.’

When, some time later, the Countess says to her that she would not mind hearing more romances by this ‘Christian from Troyes’, Helene is certain the Countess knows she’s lying, too. The name sticks, though.

—

Why, yes, that was an exercise in sophistry and extremely unlikely chains of events. I don’t actually think – not even in a wishful-thinking maybe-possibly-at-least-we-should-consider-it kind of way – that Chrétien de Troyes was actually Christina de Troyes. It’s just too unlikely: the co-incidences which would have to line up to produce a young woman with the right linguistic training and literary background (to say nothing of the author’s apparent familiarity with the squishy grey bits of canon law – but note, they are the bits to do with marriage) to produce the extant romances are phenomenal. And, perhaps more telling, the length of career under the one name, and the association with two different patrons, raises the chances of pseudonymous writing from ‘quite unlikely’ to ‘extremely improbable’.

But consider for a moment the co-incidences which lined up to produce Heloise. Unlikely co-incidences but possible ones. Consider Marie de France. Consider that what’s more unlikely than Heloise, or Marie de France, is that Heloise and Marie de France are one-offs.*

It is, when you come down to it, pretty unlikely that a woman wrote any given piece of surviving medieval literature. But it’s very unlikely that every single one of the extant anonymous romances, and every single one of the extant male-attributed romances, was written by a man. Not when we know that women are more likely to write anonymously/pseudonymously, and more likely to have their authorship denied when they do write. Marie de France knew that – somewhere in one of her prologues or epilogues** there’s that fabulous rant daring any man to appropriate her words.

Y’know, we could talk about conventionally ‘girly’ literature. Gawain and Dame Ragnelle (except apparently that’s Malory now?). Ywain and Gawain, in which the ladies are a bit more prominent than in Chrétien’s original. Silence, if you want to pick a named-man-author who could be a pseudonym (I dunno about you, but the idea that Maistre Heldris was a cranky old woman amuses me no end). And you could pull out counter-arguments – the Gawain-poet is misogynist, clearly he’s a man! There’s too much hunting in this poem, ladies don’t hunt!*** And you’d probably be right, but also, you’d have made the bizarre assumption that ladies only write about lady-things, and all ladies – even in the twelfth-century – are forward-thinking in their assumptions about gender.

I’ve heard people suggest that the Wife’s Lament was written by a wife (logically enough), but no one ever suggests that the Wanderer-poet might have been a woman. You’d laugh me out of the internet if I said the Song of Roland was written by a woman, but we know nothing at all about the author. Would you consider it, though, for something like Floire et Blanchefleur? After all, F&B is less impressive, literary-wise; and it’s about ladythings, where by ladythings we mean… heroes. And heroines, but mostly heroes.

Last I checked, women live with men, care about men, read books about men, write books about men – it seems to me that this is only more likely to have been true in the Middle Ages, not less. If you need evidence that women are interested in men, and masculinity, and stories about men look at the genre of medieval romance. If you can hold down the simultaneous beliefs that romance, as a genre, catered to women *and* that ladies aren’t interested in stories about dudes, I… think you need to read some 70s feminist criticism of romance. Viz, it is, to a great degree, about dudes.****

I have nothing resembling an argument that any given text was written by anyone other than Standard Author Dude. It’s probable I never will have any such evidence. On a case-by-case basis, dude authors are usually more likely. Universal dudely authorship, or universal dudely authorship except where clearly stated otherwise and even then we’ll argue that she had a man helping her, though – that’s unlikely. And it bugs me that we have no way of talking about that. Some of these anonymous poems are probably by women! We don’t know which! There’s no secret formula for detecting ladywriting! But ladywriting certainly did happen, and probably some of it got preserved!

~

* Two-offs? Also note that Heloise is surely not the only pretty, clever girl seduced by an arrogant-but-attractive academic in the 12th century; she’s just the one we have a manuscript record for. Someone tell me why Heloise, respectable Abbess of the Paraclete, happily put down in writing (which was hardly a private mode of communication in that day and age) that she regularly thought about shagging when she should’ve been thinking about Mass? Understandable thoughts, but I’m curious as to why she didn’t think that would damage her standing when it became public knowledge!
** Can anyone give me a citation to the lai for this? All I have to hand is my year nine assignment on Medieval Women, which took the quote from a children’s book. I’ve seen it quoted enough times to know she did in fact write something to this effect, but have never got the text to hand when I want it.
*** Bullshit they don’t. They might not do the cutting-up themselves, but they’d have seen animals butchered. I am also informed by one of my students, who’s both a very bright medievalist and a re-enactor, that its’ easier to use a bow when you’re mounted side-saddle. I think it’s because you’re already in the side-on stance? And you’re basically wedged in and can’t fall off. I didn’t know this until I decided to be a horrible shit and ask my class why they thought Sir Gawain was written by a man. That was a fabulous class full of cackling and glee. Mostly on my part.

**** Joan M. Ferrante, Woman as Image. Except not in quite those words. Like a good scholar, I have paraphrased and interpreted!

Things that really annoy me

1. Bogus arguments about the origins of chivalry as a behavioral code.
2. The use of said arguments to advocate particularly 20th/21st century gendered behavior.¹

I just. Aaargh. Open doors, or don’t. Bemoan the emasculation of teh mens, or don’t, as you please. Just don’t try and tell me that It’s no accident that the word chivalry comes to us from cheval, or horse. Women love horses for the same reason; the deep sex appeal of great power under equally great control.

Aside from the odd implication that women are sexually attracted to horses,² can we please remember for a minute that chivalry comes from the word cheval in the same way that chevalier does, namely, because knights used horses for fighting and killing things. Which practice they expected to also impress women and get them laid. But. Fighting and killing things. Not necessarily in any relation to women at all.

Remember Enide? Remember the bit where Erec stayed home being nice to her, instead of hanging out with other knights, and she ends up bemoaning the fact that he has “abandoned all chivalry for me”? She certainly seemed to think that chivalry was something you do with other men, not primarily in relation to women.

*Frustrated hands* We could have all kinds of arguments about the state and future of gender roles in the 21st century! But I can’t talk to you with all this bogus chivalry business.³

~

1. I feel terribly conflicted about Chivas Regal. On the one hand, delicious delicious whiskey! On the other where’d he leave his horse, then?.
2. Universally, all of us, right?
3. Yes, yes, I do understand that I can’t mount an actual argument about the Meaning of Chivalry based on one line from one romance, and there are probably plenty of other examples out there placing the concept of chivalry bang smack in the middle of m/f relationships. And yes yes fine, semantic drift and ideological change and whatever, things can have valid meanings now which have nothing to to do with their historical origins. It still causes me great distress