Medieval France
. In Old French, the term roman, used as early as 1150 in the Romances of Antiquity, originally designated a work in French as opposed to Latin. Even when Chrétien de Troyes employs an expression like entreprendre/faire un roman (“to embark on/to make a roman”) a usage that emphasizes the writer’s creative activity, roman still maintains its primary meaning of a “story composed in French,” intended for a lay courtly public that did not know Latin. Only later did the term take on the generic meaning of “romance” (and, even later, “novel”) associated with it today.
With the important exception of the Roman d’Alexandre, written in epic laisses, romances of the 12th century were composed in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, a form used also in didactic and scientific literature of the period, as well as in historical chronicles in French. In the 13th century, with the appearance of literary prose, romances in verse and prose existed side by side. Only in the course of the 14th century did prose become the preferred medium of romance.
Unlike chansons de geste and lyric poetry, which were sung, romances were intended to be read, aloud and before a select company, from manuscript books. Their prologues often insist upon the talent of the writer and generally give the author’s name and the title of the work. Romances assert their status as a written product.
The first text considered a “romance” is the Alexander fragment by Albéric de Pisançon (first third of the 12th c.). In the decade after 1150, the Romances of Antiquity and vernacular chronicles, which evoked Britain’s past, appeared simultaneously (Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Wace’s Brut and Rou, Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie). Both romances and chronicles sought to celebrate the past for the benefit of the men and women of their day. The act of writing, above all an act of remembering, also represents the diffusion of knowledge and wisdom. Several romances open with references to classical, pagan, or biblical wisdom and repeatedly invoke the writers’ obligation to exploit their God-given talent. Blessed by their historical situation, writers of romance could build upon the inherited Latin sources and interpret them in a definitive manner, giving them, in Marie de France’s words, a surplus de sens (“an abundance of meaning”). Writers of romance thus saw themselves as the privileged heirs of a secular translatio of learning and chivalry, from Greece through Rome to France and Norman England, whose destiny and deeds they were to celebrate.
Jehan Bodel’s famous distinction among the Matter of France (chansons de geste), the Matter of Rome (Romances of Antiquity), and the Matter of Britain:
N’en sont que trois materes a nul home vivant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Ronme la grant;
Ne de ces trois materes n’i a nule samblant.
Li conte de Bretaigne si sont vain et plaisant,
E cil de Ronme sage et de sens aprendant,
Cil de France sont voir chascun jour aparant. (Saisnes, ed. A.Brasseur, 11. 6–11) masks a continuity that the romances themselves exploit between the Matter of Rome and that of Britain: Brutus and the British nation are, in the fiction of the chronicles, both the descendants of Aeneas and his Trojans and also the ancestors of King Arthur. This distinction nonetheless takes into account the two principal sources of romance inspiration in the 12th century and the differences in their expression.
Composed in the continental domains of Eleanor of Aquitaine after 1150, the Romances of Antiquity (Thèbes, Énéas, Troie, Alexandre, and the Ovidian tales) are on one level a vulgarization of myths, legends, and historical figures of classical antiquity. Their didactic intent is evident in the role accorded to descriptions, which offer scientific knowledge (as in Alexandre de Paris’s third branch of the Roman d’Alexandre) as well as idealized models of the beautiful (portraits, descriptions of towns, art objects). It is also seen in extensive discourses on politics and on love, notably in the Roman de Troie.
The Matter of Britain is represented in the 12th century principally by the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and by the verse romances about Tristan and Iseut. The anonymous Breton lais and those by Marie de France exploit a wide variety of motifs and legends, in which the Fairy Mistress and the rivalry between the otherworld and this world play an essential role. Originally transmitted orally, the Matter of Britain was first written down in French in Wace’s Brut. The account he gave of Arthur’s reign and deeds provided the setting and time frame for key characters and motifs—Arthur and Guenevere, Merlin, Gawain, Kay, the Round Table—exploited by Chrétien and his immediate followers and, in the 13th century, by the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles. Better than the Matter of Rome, which was seen as more or less historical, the Matter of Britain was the ideal locus, with its blend of the real and the fantastic, in which to explore other modes of structuring romance materials (focused on the knight-errant and the quest for adventure) and to test a complex meditation upon the nature of love and its relation to bravery. Exemplified in the “Breton romance,” this meditation reached its highest expression in the Grail.
Introduced by Chrétien de Troyes in the Conte du Graal, where it was attached to the person of Perceval, the motif of the Grail offered an alternative to the quest for earthly love. But it quickly became, with the story of Grail origins launched by Robert de Boron in the verse Roman de l’estoire dou Graal, a myth of origins relating simultaneously to the central figure of Joseph of Arimathea, the holy vessel, and chivalry itself. The interrelated stories of the Grail and Arthur’s kingdom became, in the first third of the 13th century, the subject of immense cyclical prose romances: the trilogy of the Pseudo-Robert de Boron (Jo seph, Merlin, the Didot Perceval), the Perlesvaus, and above all the Vulgate Cycle, or Lancelot-Grail. Organized around the motif of the Grail quest, these works function as a summa of the Matter of Britain and as a rewriting of the Arthurian “pre-text.” They also offer a reflection on “courtly” chivalry and on its relation to royal authority and its ability to penetrate the sphere of the sacred (Perlesvaus, the Queste del saint Graal). The choice of prose is explained by the belief in its greater veracity and by the very form of these stories, which were written to resemble historical chronicles. Above all, prose was the medium most suitable to a form of writing that sought to saturate narrative time and space and capture its fictional universe in its fullness and complexity.
Similarly attached to a Celtic framework, but with less emphasis on the fantastic (the love potion is but another name for carnal lust) and with a biographical structure, the 12th-century Tristan romances by Béroul and Thomas d’Angleterre present a more realistic but also darker view of the passion of love, which cuts off the individual from society and admits of no outcome other than death.
The Britain of King Arthur remained the favorite setting for romance throughout the Middle Ages (Perceforest, Ysaie le Triste, Froissart’s Méliador). But after 1150, a number of works were set in an equally imaginary Near East. Prime among these are the idyllic romance of Floire et Blancheflor, Chrétien’s “Byzantine” romance Cligés, and, at the end of the 12th century, poems like Florimont, Ipomedon, and Partonopeu de Blois. These substitute for the wonders of the fairy otherworld the more concrete marvels of Byzantium, a city that becomes, in Gautier d’Arras’s Eracle, a story that hovers between hagiography and romance, the site of an exemplary and creative past.
Gautier’s other romance, Ille et Galeron, which though based on Marie de France’s lai of Eliduc locates the adventures of its heroes in a “real” world, is one of the first examples, in the late 12th century, of a new form of romance writing, sometimes termed “realistic.” The most representative writer of realistic romances is Jean Renart (Guillaume de Dole, Escoufle, Lai de l’ombre). Also of this type are texts that, like Galeran de Bretagne, the Roman de la Violette, Joufroi de Poitiers, the Roman du castelain de Coucy et de la dame de Fayel by Jakemés, the Occitan romance Flamenca, and others, strive for the illusion of reality. But the narrative cohesiveness of these works comes primarily from preexisting literary traditions, such as popular stories and courtly lyrics.
The interpenetration of the lyric and the romance occurs first in the form of lyric inserts in Guillaume de Dole, then in the Violette, the Castelain de Coucy, and other works. But it is the very source of the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris, a poem that works the motifs of the courtly lyric into a narrative while using the methods of allegorical writing to create an exemplary erotic quest that is also an art of love. It is this latter dimension that Jean de Meun prefers to exploit, turning the second Roman de la Rose into a “Mirror for Lovers,” a didactic locus of philosophical reflections with encyclopedic pretentions, on the relation of humankind to love and nature.
Also significant among 13th-century romances are tales of extraordinary adventures, such as Adenet le Roi’s Cleomadés and Girart d’Amiens’s Meliacin, or of edifying adventures (Philippe de Beaumanoir’s La Manekine or Belle Helaine de Constantinople), or tales, like Amadas et Ydoine and Jehan et Blonde, that develop the theme of social climbing by a hero, either a bastard or of lower rank, who triumphs over all obstacles and wins the hand of his lady.
From its appearance in the 12th century, medieval romance gives an impression of astonishing diversity, with stories that examine both mythical and historical regions and time. One theme that stands out, however, is that of the bride quest, which is a vehicle for exploring the relationship of love with independence and power, love being the means by which the hero achieves that ideal model of civilization that the 12th century called courtliness. The romance transforms the warrior hero of the chanson de geste into a bold but courtly knight, worthy of inspiring love and ensuring his power over his own world.
Emmanuèle Baumgartner
[See also: ADENET LE ROI; ALEXANDER ROMANCES; ANGLO-NORMAN LITERATURE; ANTIQUITY, ROMANCES OF; ARTHURIAN VERSE ROMANCE; BEAUMANOIR, PHILIPPE DE REMI, SIRE DE; CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES; GAUTIER D’ARRAS; GAWAIN ROMANCES; GRAIL AND GRAIL ROMANCES; IDYLLIC ROMANCE; MARIE DE FRANCE; OVIDIAN TALES; PERCEVAL CONTINUATIONS; PROSE ROMANCE (ARTHURIAN); REALISTIC ROMANCES; ROBERT DE BORON; TOURNAMENT ROMANCES; TRISTAN ROMANCES; VOW CYCLE; VULGATE CYCLE; WACE]
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