Things Highly has been reading lately

Between Women: friendship, desire and marriage in Victorian England – Sharon Marcus, Princeton University Press 2007.

Someone recommended this to me a couple of months back, before I made my excellent if rather sudden decision to apply for an MDST masters next year. I’d been toying with the idea of doing a masters in Aus. lit – an idea which I might have been able to follow up without moving towns again. The author I was (still am) interested in was writing in early 20th century Australia, and besides which, I’ve got a bit of a running interest in late 19th and early 20th century women’s literature at the moment.

So I picked up Sharon Marcus’ book, and as it happens, I think I can use some of her methodology in this thesis I’m proposing (it’s on female homosociality in Chrétien de Troyes’ romances). Between Women is an interesting – and in my opinion, very solid – book in that it is both a historical and a literary study. Marcus has divided her text into three types of relationships or portrayals of relationships: the homosocial, the homoerotic and the homosexual (the distinction between the last two is interesting, and I don’t think I fully understand it after reading the intro – hopefully the respective parts of the book will enlighten me). For each, she has two chapters: one looking at historical sources and reconstructing something of actual women’s experience and practice; and the other looking at Victorian novels and the narrative functions of women’s homosocial, homoerotic and homosexual relationships respectively.

This makes sense: although you can use literature as a historical source,  and you can certainly do a literary analysis of a historical work like an autobiography, here, the division is one of fundamental purpose. The historical chapter attempts to reconstruct what women did, thought, experienced; and the literary looks at one or several author’s expression of an ideal – what women should do, think, experience.

In the literary chapter “Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot”, Marcus looks at female friendship as a “narrative engine” which complements, supports, drives and enforces the heteroromantic plot and its conclusion. She takes issue with feminist readings which see all female homosociality as a rebellion against patriarchal forces (I cannot speak for whether or not this is an accurate assessment of feminist studies of Victorian literature), and emphasises instead the way that female friendships provide space for character development in the early stages of the novel, and are used to reconcile the heteroromantic plot in the later stages.

It strikes me that this is exactly how Lunette and Laudine’s friendship functions (assuming you accept Cheyette and Chickering’s approach to “love” as a social contract within the poem; if you prefer to read Laudine as powerless, Lunette becomes an abusive friend): in the early stages of the poem, their debate over love and marriage provides us with an opportunity to assess each woman’s character and to understand, through their argument, the reasoning which eventually leads to Laudine’s marriage; and in the later stages, Lunette’s intervention serves to reconcile Yvain and Laudine and bring about a stable resolution to the romantic plot. Interestingly, unlike the Victorian era examples Marcus gives, Lunette and Laudine’s relationship is not without its own strife – which Yvain (in disguise) has to step in to resolve.

I’m not yet entirely sure how far I can go with applying Marcus’ methodology – or where I’m going to end up with it – but the take-home message (or the put-in-my-proposal message) so far is: to really understand the value that an author and/or their society place on female homosociality, it is important to look at women’s same-sex friendships as integrated with their heterosocial relationships. Only by considering their weight in the plot as a whole can we get an idea of what weight the author ascribes to them.

Logical, huh?

And just in case you’re enthused by this, Between women is largely available on googlebooks.

Look! A Distraction!

While I’m engaged in a probably-doomed effort to finish my thesis in the next twelve hours, you should all go over here. Eggs Maledict, another of our nutty crowd of wannabe medievalists at USyd, has a little rant about how ‘history from below’ hasn’t penetrated the ranks of medieval boy history military historians.

Delbrück, the Clausewitz-ian (my term, clearly) historian, decided that medieval warfare was essentially individualist, primitive and stupid. His entire writing on the topic displays poor use of sources and a number of conclusions based on faulty assumptions. Verbruggen cut Delbrück to pieces in his work, but it’s been almost ignored by modern historians. I have my own conspiracy theories about this which relate to another ‘great’ historian of medieval warfare, Smail. He published shortly after Verbruggen and somehow managed to completely eclipse the Belgian, who, in an edited and expanded edition of his original work, showed a number of holes in Smail’s work. Almost no-one acknowledges Verbruggen, which is strange, because he makes his arguments much more incisively than Smail, particularly in his criticism of Delbrück; Verbruggen is especially sharp on Delbrück’s use of sources and suggests that the German lacked familiarity with them, being over-reliant on his students.

You tell ‘em, Eggs . And better you than me: I’ll be over here with my early 11th century manuscript historians.

ED: Oh, and while we’re at it, if you follow this link you will find that K has a “Who’s Who In The Holy Land From 1174 to 1187″ type post.

Three Things:

1. You have no idea how much I hate the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos right now (unless of course you read my LJ, in which case you saw all the frothing at the mouth). Every time I think I have an idea, I can’t pin it down; it turns out to be wrong; it turns out I have two contradictory ideas; it turns out someone else already thought it and it’s not quite right; or despite the fact that my gut and a reasonable amount of historical evidence tells me that Wulfstan did not particularly want AEthelred back in 1014, I still can’t figure out how to read the Sermo except as advocating the return of AEthelred. What kind of person presides over the ordination of a new bishop of London, despite said bishop not being in your province, and despite the current bishop of London being in exile with your exiled king, and then turns around the next day and says ‘you know, it’s very sinful to kick out the king, we should get him back’. AND THEN KEEPS PREACHING SAID SERMON FOR FOUR OR FIVE YEARS, even after said king has been exiled and the young Viking dude you rejected in 1014 is now on the throne.  WTF, Wulfstan, WTF?

Oh, and the Thing is due in three weeks. Someone please preside over my execution immediately.

2. Hey, a medieval blog I didn’t know about! Hannah is studying at Melbourne with Stephanie Trigg, and is writing her honours thesis on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She’s talking about “Duality and Ambiguity”, being the ways in which the poet sets things up with two possible interpretations; and about the relationships between devotional and romantic literature in SGGK. Gawain, however, is not all she talks about: check out her blogo-biography of Henry VI.

3. Oh, and I can tell my blog’s up and running again when I start getting loopy porn search hits on a daily basis. To the person hunting for Gawain slash fic, try a Google advanced search restricted to livejournal.com, that should do the trick.

For the benefit of the person who wanted to see medieval women naked, here are both Eve AND Adam naked. Eve is the one on the right, who appears to have two nipple rings. Adam is the one with the pot belly. (Apologies to the illuminator of MS Junius 11 for my terrible LOLmanuscript):

‘Marvels’ in the Song of Roland

Hello again intarwubs… it’s coming down to thesisy crunch time, and I really haven’t the brain to be coming up with new medieval content. But here’s a paper I gave for my French class!

‘Le Merveilleux’ in the Chanson de Roland

Let us talk about ‘le Merveilleux’ in the Chanson de Roland. As I frequently have to be reminded, the term doesn’t mean ‘miracles’, but, in the case of Roland, we will be talking about miracles and divine manifestations. Other things we will be talking about include: Charlemagne’s active dream life; the weather’s deep interest in Roland’s health and wellbeing; a few mentions of divine intervention on someone’s behalf, as with Thierry in the judicial duel; Roland’s reception into heaven by Gabriel and Michael. Then we have the spectacular strength of all the major characters, but particularly of Roland, Olivier and Turpin; Roland’s ability to blow his brains right out his ears with his horn-blowing; and the ridiculously long time that all our heroes continue, after receiving mortal wounds, to run around bashing people heroically before dying with appropriate glory. For supernatural items, we have the sword of Roland (given to him by Charlemagne after a divine vision), and Charlemagne’s varicoloured sword Joyeuse, both of which are miraculous in their own right, and both of which also bear holy relics which invoke saintly protection upon their bearers and the French generally.

From all of this, there are several directions of enquiry one can take. I found, for example, that there was an extremely contentious debate in the 1920s regarding whether or not Charlemagne’s allegorical dreams were ‘proof of Teutonic influences due […] to the Norman descent of the author’.[1] More relevantly, there was a little squabble in Speculum in the early 60s, involving Alain Renoir and D.D.R Owen, drawing particularly on the work of Piere le Gentil before them, over whether or not Roland constitutes a true martyr, which drew heavily on these aspects of the poem.[2] However, I feel the role of les merveilleux, in marking out the character of our hero, was underestimated in this conflict. Accordingly, I will be looking at that which is ‘marvelous’ about Roland himself, and at the role external supernatural signs play in indicating his character.

The first marvel we must consider is Roland himself. The most outstanding thing about Roland- and we know, because the poet goes on about it for laisse after laisse- is that he is a supremely excellent warrior. He conquers vast swathes of land for Charlemagne; in the doomed battle he sets out to ferrai de Durendal granz colps (l. 1055), and does exactly that, bashing in heads and impaling people left right and centre. When he goes to blow his horn, he doesn’t just blow the horn- he bursts his temples with his heroic determination to do everything to the extreme- and then he fights on until he is the last man standing, attends to the bodies of his friends, and then dies facing the enemy. This is, needless to say, beyond the scope of normal men. The second remarkable thing about Roland is that he apparently dies a martyr’s death, which we shall return to in a moment.

Let us stop here to consider what kind of hero Roland represents. I’m going to take a detour for a moment into Beowulf studies. Not because I want to compare Roland to Beowulf- this would be interesting but largely pointless, I feel. However, there’s a discourse of heroism there which is relevant to understanding Roland, too. Fred C. Robinson, in his 1974 article ‘Elements of the Heroic in the Characterisation of Beowulf’, argued that there were two possible modes of heroism: the ‘high mimetic hero’, whom Robinson characterises as a ‘heroic man’, capable of extraordinary feats but not characterised by supernatural powers himself; or the ‘romance hero’, who is not only superior to other men in degree but also bestowed with supernatural powers which make him superior to his environment and thus different to other men in kind.[3] The heroic man, as Robinson articulates it, is like other men only more so: his human powers are magnified to the point of the marvellous, in order to indicate that which the best of men is capable against all odds. The romance hero, on the other hand, is removed from other men by his supernatural powers, and his tale becomes all about the fabulous. Now, I’m not sure what definition of Romance Robinson is working on here- as far as I can tell, high Romance heroes are still supposed to be an imitable example in their personal qualities if not their actions. And I know my supervisor Dan is currently happily shredding Robinson’s argument with regard to Beowulf. But all of that is beside the point for our purposes: for our purposes, Robinson’s paramaters will do, because they allow us to see that Roland does indeed differ from other warriors in degree rather than in kind.

This, then, is how we should view Roland’s extraordinary personal strength: he is not superhuman, but rather a super-hero. And sure enough we find that our other heroes are endowed with similar qualities of strength and endurance, although to a degree which is slightly less than that of Roland: Olivier is wounded and still fighting even though he has been blinded; Turpin, like Roland, outlives all of the enemy warriors. All the heroes of the cycle are figures of human heroism writ large: Roland is not unique in his ethos, or his feats, but in the scale at which he performs them.

Now, let us consider the role of marvelous signs in marking out Roland as an exceptional hero, beginning with his sword. In lines 2319-2321 we find out that Roland is indirectly appointed by God as Charles’ captain. Roland’s sword Durendal was given to Charlemagne in an angelic vision, with instructions to pass it on to one of his Captains, and Charlemagne presented it to Roland. Durendal becomes the physical embodiment of Roland’s martial prowess: the Saracens talk about going up against Durendal as well as against Roland (cf. ll. 926, 988); Roland himself emphasises that he will strike with Durendal (l. 1055). Finally, in the scene right before his death (ll. 2297-2354), Roland attempts to break Durendal on the rocks of Roncevaux, but the sword remains miraculously resilient. Just as Roland is not destroyed in battle, Durendal cannot be destroyed by Roncevaux. Furthermore, Roland accompanies his attempts at destroying the sword with a monologue about all the lands he has conquered for Charlemagne wielding Durendal, cementing this symbolic association between Roland as conquering hero and the sword he bears. [4]

In the aforementioned squabble back in the sixties, Alain Renoir analysed Roland’s speech to his troops in the middle of the battle as a conversion point. According to Renoir, Roland’s lament that the French will due pur mei constitutes an acknowledgement of fault.[5] Roland’s fault, according to Renoir, is firstly the pride demonstrated in the opening of the poem, but more importantly the sin of demesure: the pursuit of a noble end to a reckless degree.[6] D.D.R. Owen, who titled his paper ‘The Secular Inspiration of the Chanson de Roland’, argued that the religious framework of Roland’s life is flimsy; that the poet places most emphasis on the fact that he dies a conqueror, facing into enemy territory, than on Roland’s faith. In particular, he argued that Roland’s address to his soliders in the middle of the battle does not constitute recognition of, let alone repentance for, the sin of démesure.[7] In this, I agree with him: Roland’s heroic prowess is celebrated, and although it is clear that prudence is not his virtue, negative assessments of Roland’s character are largely based on Oliver’s criticisms of his companion,[8] despite the fact that the poet sets them clearly as equals- ambedui unt merveillus vasselage (l. 1094). Roland merits his reception into heaven by his martial heroism- he merits an exceptional reception, at the hands of the Archangels themselves, because he is exceptionally heroic.

D.D.R Owen does not discuss the marvelous elements of the poem in relation to Roland’s ‘secular’ character, which is a particular weakness of his argument. In Durendal alone, we have an angelic vision, and a supernatural sword, signifying divine investment in, and blessing upon, Roland as a vassal. He is not directly ordained as a warrior by God; he recieves his sword, and his divine mandate, through Charlemagne. Furthermore, we are of the sword’s divine origins in the same laisse as we are told of Roland’s attempt to destroy it. Here, we have an equally valid refutation of Renoir’s argument: Roland is not condemned by God or poet in the first part of the poem, only to undergo a conversion mid-conflic and go on to die a holy martyr. On the contrary, here we have clear evidence, stated at the end of Roland’s life, that God ordained him from the beginning; and in the sword’s failure to break, I believe we have a statement that all of Roland’s career has been blessed and approved of by God.

Within the poem, Roland is marked out as unique by his martyr’s death. As Eugene Vance points out in his 1991 article ‘Style and Value: From Soldier to Pilgrim in the Song of Roland’, when Charlemagne finds Roland, he finds that his nephew has effectively made his own sanctuary: surrounded by rocks of marble, Roland dies in a cruciform position, like a saint’s statue, and (although Charlemagne does not know it), Roland has already been welcomed into Heaven by Michael and Gabriel themselves.[9] The narrator does not pause over any other character to tell us that they are personally received into heaven by Michael and Gabriel; no one else is noted to have died in cruciform position. Gerard Brault, in a 1971 article entitled ‘Structure et Sens de la Chanson de Roland’, used typological analysis to interpret the Chanson. By this method, he interprets Charlemagne as an Abrahamic patriarch figure: ordained and sent forth by God; father of God’s people; called to sacrifice his son (or, in this case, nephew). Ganelon becomes a Judas figure, and Roland the Christlike martyr.[10]

Why, then, do we see no evidence of divine intervention on Roland’s part during the battle? Here, I’m going to change sides again and agree with Owen- I think he underestimates the religious framework of the chanson, but he’s right that the Christ-type is not the strongest element of Roland’s characterisation. It is unarguably there, particularly in all the storms and turmoil which begin at the third hour of the day (the hour the sky went dark for Christ on the cross) and continue until after Roland’s death. However, there is nothing particularly holy about Roland’s personal characterisation: his defining traits all the way through are those of the hero. Brault himself does understand the centrality of Roland’s heroism, taking issue- like Owen- with Renoir and le Gentil’s argument that Roland’s recklessness does not constitute a sin. Rather than a sin, Roland’s courage and heroism merit a martyr’s death.[11] That, I think, is the fundamental reason why we don’t see God intervening on Roland’s behalf on the battlefield: because that would remove him from the realm of human heroism.

This is not to say that Roland is not marked out as of particular interest to God throughout the battle. We do not find out until his death scene that his sword is of divine origin, but Charlemagne’s active dream life serves to keep us aware that God and the angels are deeply invested in the fortunes of Roland, as do the storms and natural disasters leading up to his death. This begins with the dream in which Ganelon breaks Charlemagne’s lance- a fairly straightforward symbolic association with Roland, in my mind (ll. 720-725). After that, the dreams get more complex in their symbolism, which I’m not about to go into here because quite frankly dream-symbolism makes my head hurt.

In order to divert your attention from my laxity in matters of allegorical dream interpretation, I’m going to point out the significance of the fact that they are Charlemagne’s dreams. Roland himself never experiences a moment of divine revelation, until the point of his reception into heaven. He serves Charlemagne, and through Charlemagne, he serves God. Charlemagne’s dreams, his sword Joyeuse which shifts and changes colour (l. 2502) combined with Charlemagne’s patriarchal status, serve to glorify him and elevate him as a living saint. Roland, on the other hand, is not represented as particularly holy, but sanctified by his service as a vassal to Charlemagne.

Thus, to come back full circle:

I would argue that Renoir, le Gentil before him, and more recently, Eugene Vance, are correct in that Roland is glorified and dies a martyr’s death. However, the argument which Renoir presented, based on a supposed conversion moment mid-battle, is insupportable, not because- as Owen argues- the poem is insufficiently spiritual, but because the poem glorifies martial heroism and feudal service as meriting the best of Christian rewards.

It’s not complex theology. It’s probably not even orthodox all the way through. But I don’t think that the poet is even concerned, as Renoir and Owen are, with the sin of demesure or Roland’s inner holiness. Turpin promises the Frankish warriors that they will all be rewarded in heaven, without moralising; Roland, as the best of warriors, merits the best reward. Furthermore, the distribution of marvelous signs throughout the poem: Charlemagne’s dreams; the turmoil in the weather; the divine origins of Roland’s sword, and its refusal to break at the last; serve to reinforce the fact of divine blessing upon Roland’s heroism from the moment he enters Charlemagne’s service, right through the course of the poem, and finally at his death.

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

• Burgess, Glynn (trans): The Song of Roland (Penguin: London, 1990).
• Short, Ian (ed & trans): La Chanson de Roland, 2^nd ed, Le Livre de Poche 4524 (Librarie Générale Française: Paris, 1990).

Secondary Readings:

• Brault, Gérard J: ‘Structure et Sens de la Chanson de Roland’, The French Review XLV, Special Issue No 3. (1971), pp. 1-12.
• Krappe, Alexander Haggerty: ‘The Dreams of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland’, Papers of the Modern Literature Association 36.2 (1921), pp 134-141.
• Owen, D.D.R.: ‘The Secular Inspiration of the Chanson de Roland’, Speculum 37.3 (1962), pp 390-400.
• Paden, William D.: ‘Tenebrism in the “Song of Roland”’, Modern Philology 86.4 (1989), pp 339-356 (p. 346-348).
• Renoir, Alain: ‘Roland’s Lament: Its Meaning and Function in the Chanson de Roland’, Speculum 35.4 (1960), pp 572-583.
• Robinson, Fred C.: ‘Elements of the Marvellous in the Characterisation of Beowulf: a Reconsideration of the Textual Evidence’, in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, pp 119-138.
• Vance, Eugene: Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, Neb., 1986), p. 66.
• Vance, Eugene: ‘Style and Value: From Soldier to Pilgrim in the Song of Roland’, Yale French Studies 80 (1991) pp 75-96.

---

[1] Alexander Haggerty Krappe, ‘The Dreams of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland’, Papers of the Modern Literature Association 36.2 (1921), pp 134-141 (p. 134).

[2] Alain Renoir, ‘Roland’s Lament: Its Meaning and Function in the Chanson de Roland’, Speculum 35.4 (1960), pp 572-583.
D.D.R. Owen, ‘The Secular Inspiration of the Chanson de Roland’, Speculum 37.3 (1962), pp 390-400.

[3] Fred C. Robinson, ‘Elements of the Marvellous in the Characterisation of Beowulf: a Reconsideration of the Textual Evidence’, in Old English Studies in Honour of John C. Pope, pp 119-138 (p. 119-120).

[4] Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, Neb., 1986), p. 66.

[5] Renoir, ‘Roland’s Lament’, p. 573-4.

[6] Renoir, ‘Roland’s Lament’, pp 575-577.

[7] Owen, ‘Secular Inspiration’, 393-396.

[8] William D. Paden, ‘Tenebrism in the “Song of Roland”’, Modern Philology 86.4 (1989), pp 339-356 (p. 346-348).

[9] Eugene Vance, ‘Style and Value: From Soldier to Pilgrim in the Song of Roland’, Yale French Studies 80 (1991) pp 75-96, (pp. 84, 90).

[10] Gérard J Brault, ‘Structure et Sens de la Chanson de Roland’, The French Review XLV, Special Issue No 3. (1971), pp. 1-12 (pp. 8-9).

[11] Brault, ‘Structure et Sens de la Chanson de Roland’, p. 10.

Chastity Belts! Prof. Classen’s Sydney lecture available online

Just a quick heads-up: Albrecht Classen’s lecture ‘The Myth of the Medieval Chastity Belt’ is now available as a podcast from the University of Sydney’s website, via this newsfeed article. It may have the pictures with it- I know it took ages to be uploaded because the media people were trying to synchronise the powerpoint slides with the podcast, not sure if they actually succeeded.

In other news, my Inter-Library Loan of Prof. Classen’s Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany arrived yesterday, and I’m having a rollicking good time reading it. ‘Tis most hilarious. I heartily recommend it!

Chastity Belts: An “Academically Approved” Forum for Talking About Sex

So says Proffessor Albrecht Classen of the University of Arizona, author of “The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process”. The estimable Prof. Classen gave a paper for the Centre for Medieval Studies here, by the same title as his book. Many new and interesting things were learnt by all, I’m sure. For example, did you know:

* That before Classen, only five major studies of the medieval chastity belt had been written? The earliest was published in the 1880s, and the last in the 1990s. They all rely more-or-less on each other, are very difficult to get hold of due to the shady associations of the topic, and one of them was self-published and only two copies survive. It is also Classen’s opinion that none of them did very thorough artefact research- as well as not considering the possibility that the items in castles and museums might not be as old as their owners claim, apparently none of these five authors felt obliged to give useful details like item numbers and locations to back up their studies.

* There are no manuscript or literary examples of chastity belts before 1405? The aforementioned five books all cite various literary examples, which Classen carefully went through and demonstrated to be gross misinterpretations of a trope which associated belts with either a) prowess and heroics or b) love and romance, and sometimes both. See, for example, our dear friend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Apparently Gawain’s girdle is cited by all these five books as an example of a chastity belt! Excuse me while I die of hilarity now.)

* Belts, chaste or otherwise, didn’t come into fashion until around 1170? Before that, you had no idea where your top ended and your bottom began!

* The first known image of a chastity belt was drawn by a siege weapons designer? It appears, in 1405, in a manuscript called the Bellifortis, written by Kyeser von Eichstadt, accompanied by a rhyme about the dirty habits of Florentines, who supposedly invented the things. This is interesting, because everywhere else, although later, blames the Paduans. At any rate, this first example seems to have been a joke, a way of picking on the Florentines by mocking their sexual practices. As anyone who’s spent any time on a school bus knows, insults directed at by group A regarding the sexual practices of group B can be very inventive, often refer to anatomically impossible practices, and almost certainly do not give hard evidence of what group B get up to of a weekend.

The Bellifortis manuscript image

* Oh, and it would be actually impossible to survive more than a few days in one of these things? The hygeine issues alone would’ve been a disaster. This one below seems to provide more ample exit holes than some of the ones Classen showed us- making up for with spikiness for its lack of coverage. (Interestingly, only two of the examples Classen showed, this one and one from a German museum, thought to put spikes on the back door, so to speak. Regardless of spikes, they were all invariably far too small to use without serious waste disposal problems.)

Copyright- The Medieval Torture Museum, San Gimignano, Italy

* Chastity belts in art and literature really took off in the late 15th and 16th centuries? Everyone seemed to find them enormously fascinating, except for the English and the Spanish. There are, apparently, no references to chastity belts at all in England or Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Classen then moved into talking about the 19th century, when fascination with chastity belts was quite the thing. He showed us a few pictures of belts actually used on young boys, and talked about the appeal in the 19th century of chastity belts as a popular and “approved” way to talk about sex and sexuality in an academic environment. If, as Classen seems to have found, chastity belts weren’t actually used in the middle ages, when what becomes very interesting is the way that the early modern and modern periods have constructed and reconstructed the past to create this image of the barbaric, torturous middle ages, this ultimate symbol of the violent medieval patriarchy, out of a few very late medieval references which are probably facetious.

Speaking of modern reconstructions of the past, this brings us to our final ‘did you know’ for the night:

Did you know that…

A room full of medievalists can sit there very solemnly nodding away and not sniggering even once, while being shown slides of images from online S&M catalogues? Because apparently we can. I’m not sure if that’s evidence of the superior maturity of SRS ACADEMICS, or just evidence that they’ve learnt not to snigger at people’s papers by now.

All in the name of investigating modern responses to and reconstructions of the past, of course…

~

Oh, and Prof.  Classen told us a fabulous story about Dietrick von Something, an incompetent knight, and his cross-dressing wife. I’ve put in an inter-library loan for his book ‘Erotic Tales of Medieval Germany’, and when I get it, I promise a rousing retelling. It has love! Marriage! Adventures! Adultery! Seducation! Homoerotics! Cross-dressing! Magic Belts! Everything you want in a story, really.

Stop presses!

A Momentous First has just occurred. Highlyeccentric just drafted a paragraph- the very first paragraph in the essay, discounting the introduction- defining her theoretical approach to literature. Apparently, I use a ‘dialogic’ theoretical basis, as defined by Laurie A. Finke in her chapter on Sexuality in Old French Literature, in the aforementioned Bullough & Brundage ‘Handbook of Medieval Sexuality’.

It’s just as well I started reading B&B, really- I picked up my feedback forms from the honours conference today, and although I thought I’d gone through reasonably clearly for the benefit of everyone the way I saw literature (or at least SGGK) relating to social context, most of them came back with ‘please define your theoretical approach’. So now I have a definition, and I will wave it around. I like this definition, because it will also allow me to argue the validity of the study of literature before historians, should I meet any historians in a fightin’ mood. Also, thanks to Finke, I have names and publication titles which I can use (later) to read MORE about this theory, and generally advance in the world of literary awesomeness.

Everybody witness this amazing first:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a product of the chivalric ideals of the fourteenth century English nobility. It is not a pure reflection of the practices of that class, by any means, but rather a stylised expression of the ideals by which they identified themselves. The poet guides his audience to identify with Gawain, rarely presenting a scene outside of his point of view. For a fourteenth century audience, the poet’s artistry in this respect would only serve to emphasise a personal identification with Gawain based on his status as representative of Arthur’s court, the embodied figure of the golden age of English chivalry to which fourteenth century chivalry aspired to emulate. The literary depiction of the chivalric ideal is not a static one, however, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in its construction of this ideal can be seen respond to the anxieties facing the knightly class in the fourteenth century. The literary construction of chivalry is, if you like, in dialogue with the actual situation of chivalry in society. This set of assumptions about the relationship between literature and history is defined by Laurie A. Finke, in his overview of theoretical approaches to the study of sexuality in Old French literature, as a ‘dialogic’ approach, emphasising the dynamic, two-way interaction between a literary formulation of an ideal, and the historical realities affecting that ideal.

Please note that it’s very draft-y, and you’re bereft of the rest of the essay it goes with (although so am I, not having written it). If it strikes you, however, that this makes no sense as an introduction to the basic assumptions underlying the essay I’m about to write, please do tell me.
In case you think I need to actually explain the anxieties of the fourteenth century chivalric classes if I’m going to argue anything based on them, yes, I know, and the next paragraph will be a SRS version of this post, plus some more stuff I’ve picked up along the way.

And now, to bed, to mourn the demise of my happy theory-free existence.

Banging Shield and Shield Together: Lesbians in Medieval French Literature

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Instead of writing up my Gawain paper, and instead of doing any real blogging; and in between learning how to be an efficient receptionist, and giving my patent Twitface Look to first the incoming Principal of Women’s College and then to our soon-to-be Head of State, The Governor-General Designate, I’ve been perusing one of the gems of Awesome’s bookshelf, the Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Bullough and Brundage. I particularly enjoyed Jaqueline Murray’s article ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’. I give her the highest praise I can give to a theory-dense article: she works through the historiography and the Theory background systematically, making it clear at every step just how the Theory relates to historical study, and she gives you big clear pointers for further reading. And, as if that wasn’t enough, as the article goes on, she demonstrates a good range of primary source work (although I guess I’d have to go and look at the primary sources in question and particular scholarship on them in order to evaluate her use of them properly).

I could give you a run-down of Murray’s theoretical approach, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to give you a titilating segment from Etienne de Fougères’ Livre des manières, translated by Robert L.A. Clark and appended to Murray’s article.

These ladies have made up a game:
With “trutennes” they make an “eu”,
they bang coffin against coffin,
without a poker to stir up their fire.

They don’t play at jousting,
but join shield to shield without a lance.
They don’t need a pointer in their scales,
nor a handle in their mould.

Out of water they fish for turbot
and they have no need for a rod.
They don’t bother with a pestle in their mortar
nor a fulcrum in their see-saw.

They do their jousting act in couples
and go at it full tilt;
at the game of thigh-fencing
they lewdly share their expenses.

They’re not all from the same mould:
one lies still and the other makes busy,
one plays the cock and the other the hen
and each one plays her role.

*p. 210 in Bullough & Brundage. Words in italics have not been successfully translated.

This passage follows a comparison of the ‘beautiful sin’ of heterosexual fornication with the ‘vile sin’ of homosexuality and instructions to kill homosexual men ‘like any cur’, so I doubt we’re meant to look favourably upon ‘these ladies’ either. However, some features Murray notes:

* de Fougères shares with canon and secular law a phallo-centric approach to sex: lesbian sex is defined by the absence of a penis.
* HOWEVER, unlike the canon and secular law, he doesn’t presume that lesbians must grow or manufacture penises as substitutes for manly apparatus. If you look at the stanzas above, he’s obviously pointing and laughing at the futility of ‘banging coffin upon coffin’, but he presents his Ladies as perfectly happy without a pestle in their mortar. He think’s they silly and unnatural for not desiring a penis in their sex act, but he does grasp the fact that they don’t want one.

and something I noticed myself, from the last stanza:

* de Fougères also shares with the legal examples Murray gives the assumption that sex involves an active and a passive partner. This meshes nicely with David L. Boyd’s side note, in ‘Sodomy, Misogyny and Displacement’, that medieval sexuality is defined by an active/passive binary, which, for men, meant that the recieving partner in homosexual penetrative sex was debased and shamed, for being made passive and therefore feminised. I wonder how this binary transfers over to lesbian sex? Murray may have addressed it, I’ll have to have a closer look at the article sometime…

In the meantime, happy innuendo, everyone!

More Fourteenth-Century Hijinks

Along with uprisings and social anxiety, guess what else was going on in the fourteenth century?

An old, rich, well-established although now militarily irrelevant crusader order, the Templars, was being rounded up by the French monarchy (including, amusingly, one Templar rounded up while tax-collecting for the self-same French monarch), being tried, and then re-tried by the papacy, ordered to disband, and disbanding by bits and stages all over Europe (or, in the case of Portugal and Aragon, being staunchly defended by the relevant monarchs and given permission to transmute into national orders) in a process that took half a century.

On Tuesday, I went down with the Centre for Medieval Studies to view the University’s new facsimile of the Templar trial papers. I’m sorry to say they looked just like pieces of faux-vellum and paper to me, but I can now say I’ve seen the handwriting of Pope Clement the Something, at least. The facsimile includes four or five faux-vellum documents, most of which stretched right across the huge veiwing table, and some of which are barely readable. There is also a paper facsimile which consists of the summaries of the French trials, as put together by or for Pope Clement, and including notes in his own handwriting; and there’s a small square document which is the proceedings of the papal trial at Chinon. These last two, I gather, were only recently found, miscatalouged, in the Secret Archive by Barbara Someone-or-Other (sorry for the lack of details, pens aren’t allowed in the Rare Book library so my notes were all made at the end), who was studying paeleography there. Another two of the vellum documents were edited in the 19th century, but according to JP, none of the documents in the facsimile have been used by modern Templar historians. Michael Barber, the big cheese in Templar studies, doesn’t refer to them in his book on the subject, or in the edition (catalogue?) of Templar documents which he and one of his students published more recently.
The facsimile pack also includes a full transcription (including UV transcriptions of the illegible documents), and replica seals of the papal curia.

There’s nothing terribly inflammatory in the documents; they, as the assembled academics remarked in a satisfied fashion, throw a bucket of cold water on the whole Da Vinci Code hullaballoo. (Not that Templar conspiracists will care…) According to JP, who did say he hasn’t had a chance to really look at the documents, Pope Clement was rather suspicious of the confessions garnered from the French trials, and was trying to do the best he could for the Order in a sticky political situation.

Ours is copy number 300 of 799 copies for public sale (Pope Palpatine Benedict got number 800). Neil Boness, the Rare Books Librarian, thinks all 799 probably won’t sell, or won’t sell quickly, due to the high asking price.

The only other thing of interest I noted was that all the academics were standing around nodding solemnly about the scope for a really kick-arse PHD based on these documents. If you’ve an interest in Templars, or in Phillip the Fair, or Pope Clement, or any such thing, get yourself a grad school application for a school which owns a copy of this facsimile. (And if you can’t get Barber for your supervisor, you could do worse than JP, even if his speciality is more in the Crusade direction… just sayin’… There’s a woman in Melbourne who works on the Italian Templar trials, but I believe we have the only copy of the facs. in Australia.)

Fun in the Fourteenth Century

Executed Today (a most entertaining and grizzly blog) has a fascinating post on the execution of Guillame Cale, leader of the Jaquerie.

I’ve had a poke at this sort of thing on here before: the fourteenth century wasn’t a secure time for anyone, and can’t have been a good time to be a peasant, but the goings-on going on were also inducing considerable angst for the knightly classes. Executed Today tells how the Jaquerie terrorised the local aristocracy (quoting someone contemporary named Froissart):

Thus they gathered together without any other counsel, and without any armour saving with staves and knives, and so went to the house of a knight dwelling thereby, and brake up his house and slew the knight and the lady and all his children great and small and brent his house. … And so they did to divers other castles and good houses; and they multiplied so that they were a six thousand, and ever as they went forward they increased, for such like as they were fell ever to them, so that every gentleman fled from them and took their wives and children with them, and fled ten or twenty leagues off to be in surety, and left their house void and their goods therein.

Because this post has no actual point, I’m going to use it to make a random fantasy literature recommendation, which is loosely related because it contains the slaughtered knight and his family just mentioned.

Sara Douglass’ ‘The Crucible’ Trilogy, set in a very-nearly-real-world version of 14th century Europe is, as far as I’m concerned, the best modern example of the fact that it takes a medievalist to write good fantasy fiction. (Old examples: Tolkien, Lewis. Another modern (also Australian!) example is the children’s author Catharine Jinks, who studied under JP, and her interests- Crusades, the office of notary, among other things- strongly reflect his.)

Douglass messes around with facts of time and chronological order, so if you’re a stickler for that sort of thing, don’t go there. The Crucible is, as well as an intricate story with a labyrinthine plot, a fascinating rendering of the medieval mind. Her main character, an embittered and warped monk, has internalised all that is ugly about medieval religion, and twisted it around his own unpleasant character. It took me a whole two months to get through the first two books, because she kept successfully convincing me that I was inherently evil by virtue of my gender. Her depiction of the demonic world is terrifying- she knows her Aquinas, that one, and this book is an unpleasant glimpse into what it might feel like to really, truly believe in the demonic world of the middle ages.

On the other hand, she takes the unsettling changes of the fourteenth century, which she depicts as the turning point between the ‘modern’ and the ancient worlds, and draws them in similarly captivating form. Are the uprisings across Europe, the Black Death, the political upheavals, the outbreaks of heresy, all part of a demonic assault on the established order (as no doubt they seemed to some), or are they part of something new, something better, something freer? It would be a criminal generalisation in academic work, but it makes for a brilliant story.

Douglass could’ve written an academic paper about any aspect of fourteenth century social change- and maybe she did, in her past life as an academic. Instead, she drew all this together, made leaps and associations you can’t make in historical study, and rendered it real and captivating in a way that no academic paper ever is. Don’t read it if you’re a stickler for chronological order. But do read it if the fantasy canon ticks you off with its faux-medieval setting and the fact that every fantasy novel out there seems to be set in exactly the same post-Tolkien world.

Oh, and don’t read these books if you get offended at Phillip Pullman. Really, don’t. (Having said that, I liked her depiction of Jesus. But l found Phillip Pullman spiritually inspiring rather than the reverse…)