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A text transformed: Prose textuality and notions of history in the thirteenth-century version of the "Roman de Thdbes*

Lynde, Molly Margaret, Ph.D.

Indiana University, 1993

Copyright ©1998 by Lynde, Molly Margaret. All rights reserved.

UMI300N.ZeebR<L Ann Aibor, MI 48106

A TEXT TRANSFORMED:PROSE TEXTUALITY AND NOTIONS OF HISTORY

IN THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY VERSION OF THE ROMAN DE THEBES

Molly Margaret Lynde

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of French and Italian,Indiana University

March 1993

ii

Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

i L ~ t7)UA4Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr., Ph.D.

Doctoral Samuel N. RosenbergCommittee

Richard Carr

March 11, 1993 Sidney Johnson

@ 1993 Molly M. Lynde

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

iv

For Michael D. Recchia, in gratitude for the companionship, encouragement,

and sustenance that enabled me to complete this project.

VAcknowledgments

First and foremost I would like to express my appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee, Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr., Samuel N. Rosenberg, Richard Carr, and Sidney Johnson, for their careful reading of my work and their many helpful suggestions. I am especially grateful to Samuel N. Rosenberg for his assistance with the Old French passages. I owe an inestimable debt of gratitude to Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr., not only for being available to me and providing invaluable criticism on the thesis at every stage of its progress, but also for introducing me to the world of Old French literature.

In addition, several institutions have also been most helpful to me in this endeavor. I am very appreciative of the Indiana University Grant-in-Aid that I received in 1991- 92, which made the purchase of manuscript microfilms possible. I would also like to thank the personnel of the British Museum in London and that of the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna for allowing me to acquire the microfilms. I am grateful to the personnel of the BibliothSque Nationale in Paris, first for allowing me access to certain manuscripts, and furthermore for their assistance in my purchase of manuscript photocopies and microfilms.

Finally, I also wish to express my deep appreciation to the following individuals: I found a role model and much

support in Margaret Brooks; Robert Lynde and Emily and Stuart Rowe also provided me with support and unfailing encouragement. Deborah Piston-Hatlen's kindness and Greg Sumner's advice were very valuable to me. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Michael Recchia for his unflagging assistance and generosity.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter OneThe Histoire ancienne iuscru*̂ C6sar and Universal History

Chapter TwoChristian Didacticism and Verse Moralizations

Chapter Three ThSbes

Chapter FourProse: The New Literacy

Chapter FiveThe devise of Thebes

Chapter SixNarrative Voice and Auctoritas

ConclusionTh&bes as Transformation

Appendix I Verse passages

Appendix IISummary of the prose Thdbes

Works Consulted

Introduction

The story of Th6bes is one of the oldest myths in the West, and throughout its history has taken on various shapes: Greek drama (Sophocles' Oedipus Rex). Latin epic poem (Statius' Thebaid), and medieval French history (the twelfth-century anonymous Roman de Thdbes). Although the text speaks to certain eternal themes such as the immutability of destiny and the horrors of incest and war, each culture is reflected in the way in which these themes are presented. As such, the text operates as a cultural artifact, opening new possibilities for understanding the manner in which the writers and the readers of this tale understood their world. The text mirrors the epistemology of its cultural context, and as such a mirror, invites our gaze.

An unnamed poet, believed to have been writing in England or in western France in the Anjevin court of Henry II, adapted Statius' Thebaid into French octosyllabic verse around 1150.1 The Roman de Thfebes and its permutations exemplify the new intellectual activity of the period: although classical works had never been in disfavor, a new expansion of literacy brought increased attention and a wider public to the page. During this renaissance, a

1 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poStique m£di£vale (Paris Seuil, 1972) 347.

renewed appreciation and esteem of classical texts were the impetus not only for the creation of this French "classic" text but also for French versions of the Aeneid. the story of Troy, and that of Alexander the Great.2

The Roman de Th&bes was a popular text, as is evidenced by the existence of different verse versions which circulated during the second half of the twelfth century. Between 1208 and 1214, it was recast into prose and incorporated into a larger work generally known as the Histoire ancienne iusou't C^sar.3 It is this early thirteenth-century adaptation that occupies our attention in this study: while previous studies have shown how the verse Roman de Thdbes reflects contemporary values, no such in- depth study of the prose ThSbes exists.4

This study is a heuristic discussion of the historical

2 Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Harvard UP 1927; Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1957; 1967) 115.

3 The Histoire ancienne juscm'S. C6sar remains unedited, with the exception of the Genesis section (See Mary Coker Joslin, "A Critical Edition of the Genesis of Rogier's 'Histoire ancienne' based on Paris, BibliothSque Nationale, ms. fr. 20125," diss., U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,1980) . For this study, I have used Bibliothdgue Nationale f.fr. ms. 20125 as a base manuscript.

4 See Aim§ Petit, Naissances du roman: Les techniqueslitt^ralresdans les romans antiques du Xlle siScle 2 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine, 1985) and L'Anachronisme dans— les romans antiques du Xlle siScle (University de Lille III: Centred'£tudes m£di§vales et dialectales, 1985). See also Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "The Traditions of the Old French Roman de Thebes: A Poetico-Historical Analysis," diss., (Princeton U, 1980) . Blumenfeld-Kosinski devotes a chapter to the prose TkSkSfi.

vision implied by the transformation of the verse text to the prose and its inclusion in the larger history. While it is understandable that a story as compelling as that of Oedipus' patricide and the resulting fratricide of his warring sons may interest people of any period, the rationale that placed this text in the domain of historiography is less obvious.

The inclusion of what we consider to be mythical material within the context of a work that presents itself as serious history is striking to the modem reader. Short of simply discounting such historiographical practice as inferior, it is necessary to suspend not only disbelief but also scepticism concerning the historical value of such myths, and to attempt to frame analysis, if not strictly within the bounds of the medieval perspective, at least along its general lines.

A starting point in attempting to understand the historical vision that informed Thebes and its transformations is the fact that in the Middle Ages, vernacular historiography took a variety of forms: there are several types of French texts that, without fitting into our modem concept of history, were seen as having historical value. Medieval people saw both the saint's Life and the epic as historical. In addition to these, poets produced twelfth-century translations of Latin chronicles, formal precursors to the roman, and the fourth crusade provided an

impetus for prose historiography in the early thirteenth century. However, the adaptation of four classical texts from Latin into French verse in the middle of the twelfth century, as mentioned above, represents the most important vein of vernacular historiographical activity for our purposes here.

The romans d'anticruit€--the stories of En6as. Troie. Thdbes. and Alexandre--were also seen as historical texts in the Middle Ages.3 This is due to two factors: first, the great respect that medieval people had for classical written texts as auctoritas guaranteed the works' reception as legitimate history;6 secondly, insofar as the Roman de Troie is concerned, the sources used (Dares and Dictys) were believed to have experienced the events themselves; the assertion of an eyewitness account combined with the prestige of Latin did much to heighten a text's prestige in this period.

In addition to the status of the content, these French versions of the classics are thought to have evolved out of the combined influence of both the epic and the French translations of Latin histories;7 thus the works from which

3 Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance(Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992) 70.

6 For the notion of auctor. see Zumthor, Essai . . ., 44- 48; for a discussion of the sources of the romans d'antiauitg.see Kelly, The Art . . ., 130.

7 Zumthor, Essai . . ., 346-47.

they took their formal and structural inspiration were themselves historical. And more specifically, the Roman de Thebes was contemporary to Geoffrey Gaimar's Histoire des Anglais and to Wace's Brut, both of them translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia reoum Britanniae. and was plausibly circulated in the same English circles, leading one to believe that the same taste for history was illustrated in these works.8 Thus the problem of understanding Thebes as history is posed at its very moment of insertion into the preexisting literary tradition.

In fact, the translation of Statius' Thebaid into the Roman de Thebes in the mid-twelfth-century is indicative of the same impulse as is the later verse-prose transformation, in that in each case the writer takes the classic tale and, in rewriting it, selects both form and content in order to serve the text's new function in its new context. Whereas the verse Roman de Th&bes is centered in a courtly context and serves as an exemplum illustrating the negative effects of interfamilial conflict at a time in which such strife was present around Henry II,9 the prose Thfebes. functioning as one chapter in a universal chronicle, exemplifies the misery and suffering of those who did not have Christ as an ally because of the epoch of their birth: the writer seems to suggest that by contrast, in contemporary times such

8 Zumthor, Essai . . 347.9 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "The Traditions . . .," 80.

suffering is needless if one only follows Christian precepts. The preference of prose over verse reinforces the text's validity as truthful history.10

The special status of the romans d'antiquity provides us with a partial answer to how the specific story of ThSbes was seen as history. But a different sort of Latin historiography is the key to understanding the global historiographical vision embodied in the Histoire ancienne iusqu'3. Cgsar.

Leaving aside biography, as it does not relate to our subject,11 there are two aspects of Latin historiography of the Middle Ages that concern us: the annal and the chronicle. These two historical genres were originally distinct but underwent considerable change, eventually combining in the twelfth century.12

Although annals existed in the Roman period, those created by medieval historians are different, originating in notes about contemporary events made in the margins of the Easter tables used from the eighth century onward. These

10 Omer Jodogne, "La Naissance de la prose franyaise," Bulletin de la classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques 5th ser. 49 (1963): 306.

11 For a discussion of medieval biographies, see Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974) 67-78.

12 For the following discussion, I draw upon Michael McCormick, Les Annales du haut moven &qe. Typologie des sources du moyen tge occidental 14 (Louvain: University Catholique de Louvain, 1975) 11-21.

historical notes, once copied onto independent manuscripts, are termed "minor annals." "Major annals" received their birthright from the royal annals of the ninth century, and as the name implies, in this type of history one sees longer entries; they are organized according to content but still lack structure according to modern standards. It is important to note that the longer form did not succeed the shorter: during the entire Middle Ages, paschal annals and minor annals continued to be written alongside the major annals.

The medieval chronicle can be traced back to Eusebius, and differs from the annal both in its classical origin and in its content. In form, it tends towards internal organizational elements such as prefaces and division into books and chapters, and its scope is universal: it relates all of history beginning with creation. This in turn illustrates another important difference between the annal and the chronicle: the chronicle is primarily a means by which the writer addresses the question of Christian salvation, whereas the annal is a record of contemporary events only. While these two historiographical genres remained independent in the eighth and ninth centuries, RSginon de PrCim incorporated elements from the Carolingian annals into the framework of his Chronicon. a traditional chronicle, and in so doing the process of integration of the two modes of historical writing was begun. By the twelfth

century, major annals and chronicles evolved to such a point that they were indistinguishable, a fact which can be attributed to the prestige of the universal chronicle. Moreover, the chronicle flourished in the twelfth century in the hands of such writers as Sigebert de Gembloux, Otto of Freising, and Orderic Vitalis.

The Histoire ancienne iusqu'i. C^sar follows closely upon this Latin historiographical tradition. As a universal chronicle, it tells the tale of humanity with a focus on salvation; its potentiality as annal--unfulfilled because of the work's being unfinished--is illustrated by the compiler's expressed desire to include the history of the people of Flanders.13 The Histoire ancienne is best seen as a continuation and extension of the Latin chronicle: continuation because the arrangement and the concept motivating the historian are traditional; extension because the work is no longer in Latin nor even in French verse, but in French prose. The Latin historiographical influence is

13 The compiler states in the prologue that:Des quels gens Flandres fu puplee Vos iert l'estoire bien cont£e,Com se proverent, quel il furent,Com il firent que fere durent. . .

(Histoire ancienne iuscru'3. Cgsar. BibliothSque Nationale f. fr. ms. 20125, f. 2c, cited from Paul Meyer, "Les Premidres Compilations d'histoire ancienne," Romania 14 [188] : 56 [lines 243-46]. In subsequent citations this manuscript will be cited by folio. Unless otherwise identified, transcriptions will be my own: i and u are transcribed as ± and v according to modern practice, abbreviations are resolved and punctuation is added.).

clearly an Important one.Therefore, the prose Thebes as part of the Histoire

ancienne comes out of two divergent historical practices.The Histoire ancienne as a whole is an extension of the tradition of the Latin universal chronicle whose primary focus is the relationship between the secular and the spiritual, initiated by Eusebius but extended by the addition of the annals. The historical value of the prose Thebes stems from its privileged status as a text with an authentic Latin classical source, the notion of truthfulness reinforced in this version by the use of prose rather than verse.

The study of medieval historiography, both in Latin and in the vernacular, requires the modern reader to make certain conceptual adjustments, as noted above in relation to the wider scope of vernacular texts believed to have been accepted as history. An even more challenging notion is the fact that the very discipline of history as we know it did not exist. Throughout the Middle Ages, history was considered a branch of literature and, like all literature, fit into the trivium under the heading of the language arts {grammar and rhetoric). It is significant that insofar as vernacular writing was concerned, "no generally acknowledged terminological distinction was made between epic, romance, hagiography, and history in the time of the romans

10d'antiquitg.1,14 The very term roman must not be understood in its later connotative value as fictional work, but in its first sense as a translation from a Latin text into the vernacular. Consequently, in confronting the problem of the medieval concept of history and historical writing in the Thebes text, one is also facing the problem of genre.

Although the notion of genre as pertaining to vernacular literature was ill-defined at best in the Middle Ages, different types of works were categorized by mati&re; Bodel's description of the three matiSres (Rome, Bretagne, France) in his Chanson des Saisnes is well-known and frequently cited in discussing medieval attitudes to texts. However, as concerns the notion of history and historiograpy, his comments are less useful here than is the general idea of how medieval people understood the idea of truth and how this informed their concept of historiography.

The best example of this notion of truth is found inhagiography and can be extended to certain epics; both the saint's Life and the chansons de create of the cycle du Roi had a higher moral value because of the focus on God and his truth as it is played out through the characters and events recounted.13 It is this same moral value that endows these kinds of texts with historical value: in the Middle Ages,

14 Kelly, The Art . . ., 318. Kelly notes that afterChretien de Troyes, the generic notion of the roman as a separate kind of writing did come into being.

15 Kelly, The Art . . ., 316.

11although it had other functions as well (such as encomiastic or legitimizing), history's primary purpose was edificatory:

"Historical" . . . might be thought of as an exemplary narrative based upon events which had occurred at some point in the past, told in order to move and persuade its audience to imitate the good and eschew the evil, a "true tale about the past" which included a vast range of what modern readers would regard as invented material and inappropriate, if implicit, moralizing.16

While modern historiography requires proof and documentation, medieval histories often dispense with proof and offer instead a moral portrait in illustration of a higher truth--that is, once the source was deemed valid. According to Zumthor, medieval histories such as Wace's Brut "n'avaient pas pour fonction d'apporter la preuve d'une v6rit6; ils exposaient cette v6rit£. . . ,"17 And Kelly finds that in the saint's Life "veracity stems less from the historicity of events and their documentation . . . than from 'Deu' and 'sa vertu' revealed through the principal figures in the narrative."1*

As part of a universal chronicle, the prose Th&bes illustrates a higher truth; at the same time, as literature it conforms to certain expectations of style and offers some

16 Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages; Rhetoric. Representation, and Reality (Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1991) 6.

17 Zumthor, Essai . . ., 347.** Kelly, The Art . . ., 316.

12interest as a work of art in its own right. In fact, many aspects of this work derive from dualities that, without necessarily being in opposition to each other, represent diverging concepts. The notion of "competing systems of values,"19 a phrase used by Morse to describe the clash between medieval Christianity and classical historical poetry, is also useful in describing the relationship between verse and prose; between didacticism and entertainment; between history and romance; and between an allegorical mode of interpretation and a literal one. However, rather than competing for dominance, these aspects complement one another in the creation of the text's overall function and meaning.

The discussion above outlines the general concepts that serve as a framework to the analysis of the prose Thdbes and its function as history in the Histoire ancienne. Through an examination of the text as seen as part of the larger compilation, it is possible to arrive at a better understanding of medieval historiographical notions and of the modes of textuality that embodied those notions. The prose ThSbes is particularly interesting because of its creation at a time in which ideas about texts--both written and oral--were changing, and it offers insight into the general trend towards prose that occurred throughout the thirteenth century. This classic text functioned as moral

19 Morse, Truth . . ., 94.

13exemplum for Its medieval public; for modern readers, it is exemplary not in the moral sense but rather in the generic sense, illustrating a concept of history as well as a kind of formal and conceptual literary transformation that can be seen as mouvance.

14Chapter One

The Histoire ancienne iusou'd C6sar and Universal History

The Histoire ancienne iuscru'a C6sar is the earliest known universal history written in Old French prose.1 Paul Meyer first brought this text to the attention of the scholarly community in 1885, outlining seven sections in the compilation: Genesis; Assyria and Greece; Thebes; the Minotaur, the Amazons, and Hercules; Troy; Eneas; Rome. The text, unfinished, abruptly ends in Caesar's campaign in Gaul in 57 B.C.2

The compiler of the Histoire ancienne does not identify himself in the work. Ferdinand Lot believed that Wauchier de Denain was the author, citing as proof the fact that he had inserted moralizing verse passages into his translation of Vitae of the desert fathers; Paul Meyer agreed. Guy Raynaud de Lage did not see enough evidence to support this idea.3 In spite of the fact that we do not know the name of

1 Paul Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations d'histoire ancienne," Romania 14 (1885): 1.

2 Guy Raynaud de Lage, "L,HiatQlre_ancienne iusqu'a C6sar et les Faits des Romains." Le Moven Age 4th ser. 55 (1949): 5. See Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .," 48-53.

3 Ferdinand Lot, rev. of La Mort le roi Artu. by Jean Frappier, Romania 64 (1938) : 120-22. Paul Meyer, "Wauchier de Denain,” Romania 32 (1903): 585. Guy Raynaud de Lage, "La Morale de l'histoire," Le Moven Age 4th ser. 69 (1963): 365- 66.

15the creator of this text with any certainty--or even the title he intended for it (Meyer called the work Histoire ancienne -iuscru'a. C^sar simply because it reflected the contents of the compilation), we do know a certain number of things about him and his work because of a'verse prologue which precedes the Genesis section. In this prologue, he identifies his patron as Rogier, Castellan of Lille, and he outlines the shape of his text. The overview of all human history was intended to continue up through the contemporary period, including the history of Flanders.

It is significant that the Histoire ancienne was commissioned in Flanders. Flanders was a center of literary activity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, rivalling both the courts of France and of England. This geographical origin is useful in defining the text's patron and public.A comparison with the cultural factors surrounding the creation of another historical text, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, provides us with a larger historical context.Like the Histoire ancienne. the Pseudo-Turpin was very popular; it is the earliest extant example of vernacular prose historiography. Between 1200 and 1230 there were six independent translations of this text from Latin into French prose, all of which were sponsored by members of the French- speaking Flemish aristocracy, such as Yolande, Countess of Saint-Pol, the sister of Count Baldwin VIII of Flanders, and

16her husband Hugh IV.4 According to Gabrielle M. Speigel,. . vernacular historiography in general, and Pseudo-Turpin in particular, addressed itself with special urgency to the needs of the French aristocracy at a moment of crisis. . .

"5

The crisis referred to is the series of power struggles that took place during Philippe-Auguste's reign (1179-1220) between the French king and the Flemish lords, who also felt the pressure of unfavorable economic change: during this period, their gradual impoverishment was contemporaneous with the increasing acquisition of wealth by Flemish cities.

Based on her study of the prologues to the Pseudo- Turnin. Spiegel believes that the most important motive for the translation of this work was its value as ancestral literature: Charlemagne was a distant progenitor of the family of the Count of Flanders, and in this sense the work is interpreted as being an expression of anti-Capetian sentiment and it illustrates a resistance against the centralizing policies of Philippe-Auguste. Other reasons for the popularity of the text include the desire to revive chivalric values and the notion that moral profit can be gained from a knowledge of Charlemagne as an exemplary figure, as well as an explicit preference for prose as the

4 Gabrielle M. Speigel, "Pseudo-Turpin, the Crisis of the Aristocracy and the Beginnings of Vernacular Historiography in France," Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986): 208.

5 "Pseudo-Turpin . . .,« 211.

17proper language of history.6

The fact that there is no specific reference to genealogy in the prologue of the Histoire ancienne indicates that the compilation was probably not created with the glorification of an ancestral line in mind. But the Histoire ancienne is similar to the Pseudo-Turpin in the respect that each exemplifies the concept that history has a value as exemplum and moral lesson, and in the preference for prose over verse.

In all likelihood, the Histoire ancienne was created for the same kind of public that was interested in the Pseudo-Turpin. It is quite possible that Rogier IV was himself a part of the aristocratic circle whose members sponsored the Pseudo-Turpin in its various versions. The nobles in Flanders and Picardy were often in personal contact with each other, and judging by their patronage, had similar tastes in literature.7 Unfortunately, we cannot be precise about the reasons for which Rogier commissioned the Histoire ancienne. The abandoning of the project leaves us without an appreciation of the role that the ch&telain and other members of the local lay aristocracy would have played in the contemporary section of the history.

Perhaps the compilation simply reflects a desire on his

6 Spiegel, "Pseudo-Turpin . . .," 214.7 Diana B. Tyson, "Patronage of French Vernacular History

Writers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," Romania 100 (1979): 203.

18part to emulate his more prestigious neighbors in the patronage of historical writing. In the light of the literary activity going on around him, Rogier may have wished for a text that could rival and perhaps surpass those of the neighboring courts. The choice and emphasis of material on Rome could have been intended to fill that function. It is also possible that the recent vogue in vernacular writing awakened a genuine interest in history.It does appear, from remarks made by the compiler at various moments, that Rogier was primarily interested in a text that contained entertaining secular material.8

Because of the reference to his patron, we know where the work originated and approximately when. Rogier IV held the title of ch£telain from 1208 until his death in 1230, reaching his majority in 1211.9 The outside dates of composition are therefore 1208-1230. There are two pieces of internal evidence, references to the respective deaths of the Count of Flanders (1205) and an unnamed king, that assist in determining the date of the text's composition:

Obl££s fu tost Alixandres;Ausi est li bons cuens de Flandres Bauduins, qui fu emperere De Constantinoble, et sa mere Qui nomee fu Marguarite,Et tant fu bone dame eslite.De ce raconter est enfancel

8 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," iv.9 Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .,"56. Raynaud

de Lage, "L'Histoire ancienne . . 15.

19Oblles est 11 rois de France Qui mout honora sainte iglise;E Deus qui le bons loe et priseEn sa plus haute mansionL'en rende si haut gueredonCom il fist a la MagdeleneQui de pech€s est monde et sainel10

Meyer suggested that it may have been the death of Rogier that caused the compiler to stop his work on the text, and postulating either Philippe-Auguste or Louis VIII as the "rois obi16s," proposed a probable date of composition as occurring between 1223 and 1230.11

However, further research has changed the hypothetical time period of the composition. According to Guy Raynaud de Lage, it is very likely that the vast majority of the text was completed before 1213, because of the text's mention of the benefits of peace currently being enjoyed: it is unlikely that remarks such as the following would be made after Bouvines.

E, por Deu, segnor qui o6s et entend€s les merveilles qui en celui tans avenoient, quar record£s en vos meismes le tans ou vos estes ore. EsguardSs et entend€s en vos meimes les batailles et les pestilences qui adonc onques ne cessoient, et si pens6s en vos meismes la pais et le grande plants que nos ore avons. Mout a petit de sens qui bien i prent guarde qui ne seit dont ce nos vient ne habunde. Ce nos vient et

10 f. 252b; also cited in Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .,” 57.

11 Meyer, "Les Premieres compilations . . .,"57. While one cannot be certain about the identity of the king mentioned above, it is possible that the writer had the pious Louis VII in mind. See Lot, rev. of La Mort . . ., 121.

20descent dou segnor a cui nos servomes et aoromes.12

Another hypothesis that supports the idea of an earlier date of composition is that the author stopped writing when he learned of the existence of a contemporary text treating ancient history: the Fet des Romains. a prose translation of De bello crallico. was written by a Parisian in 1213-14.13 It is plausible that the creator of the Histoire ancienne gave up writing upon learning that someone else was treating similar material in more detail and greater depth. This theory is based on the premise that Rogier was above all interested in the material on Rome, an idea supported by comments in the work such as the following, made after the account of Trojan migrations:

De ce ne vos voil or plus dire, ains voill revenir a la matere por cui tote ceste choze et ceste hystorie fu comencee, c'est de Rome et des Romains et de lor ovres et coment la cites fu primes comencee.1*

One less convincing aspect of this suggestion is that the compiler's supposed discouragement and willingness to

12 f. 192d; similar comments are made on f. 277d and f, 331a-b. Cited from G. Raynaud de Lage, "L*Histoire anclmnp . . .," 15, n. 23.

13 j_g m .F. Lot's hypothesis; it is discussed byRaynaud de Lage in "L'Histoire ancienne . . .", upon which I draw for the following discussion.

14 f. 148b, cited from Raynaud de Lage, WL'Histoire ancienne . . .," 7.

21abandon his project upon the discovery of a competing history of Rome does not correlate with his stated intention to recount history all the way up to the present time in Flanders. Contemporary history is not included in the Fet des Romains. This weak point has been counterbalanced by the discovery of one Histoire ancienne copy with an eighth section, entitled "Hexodes" (in BibliothSque Nationale f. fr. ms. 9682). This section corresponds with the intention announced by the author upon leaving Genesis, which expresses his regret at leaving aside spiritual history, explaining it by his patron's wishes:

Ci laira de la lignee Abraham. Or seroit drois et mesure que je avant des fiz d'Israel, c'est de la lignee les fiz Jacob, vos delse et contasse avant, et continuasse l'estorie comant et par quele ochoison il issirent d'Egypte, et comant et par maint grant paine il conquisterent la terre de Chananee; mes non ferai ore, ains dirai preincrement des paiens qui adonques regnerent, et comencerai au meaus que je porrai des rois et des regnes trosques a la destruction de Troies, quar si le veut, ce me sambla, et comande mes sires, et lores apres ce revendrai et repairerai as Ebrius, coment il issirent d'Egypte, quar d'aus est et doit estre plus droiturere et plus amee l'estorie, quar il en nasqui et issi la dame gloriouse qui porta et alaita en terre le sauveor dou munde.13

Although he acknowledges that this eighth section could be the work of a continuator, Raynaud De Lage sees no reason why it would not be authentic; he believes that this section offers proof that it was not an untimely death that brought

13 f. 82-83, cited from G. Raynaud de Lage, "L'Histoire• • • i ** ^ •

22a sudden end to the Histoire ancienne. This substantiates the idea that the compiler may have wanted to continue with the work even after becoming aware of the Fet_des_Romains, but that his patron was no longer interested in the Histoire ancienne because the Fet des Romains provided him with the material he desired.16

A final conjecture as to why the work remains unfinished could be that the clerk did not receive the promised payment, or did not have a guarantee of the promised payment for his text. Several times in the text the author stresses the importance of keeping promises and sharing wealth, thus demonstrating a concern with financial commitments. It is possible that the writer had an inkling that payment would not be received, and decided not to continue for that reason. By the same token, Rogier himself could have instructed the compiler to stop work on the text out of loss of interest in the face of the Fet des Romains or a sense that the drift of the work did not match his expectations.

As mentioned above, the author does not name himself in the text. In spite of the fact that we do not know his name with any certainty, we do know certain things about him because of comments he makes in the work. These remarks indicate a preoccupation with moral lessons to be had from

16 Although the logic of this speculation is appealing, there is no proof of the Fet des Romains' dissemination in Flanders.

23the historical texts he sews together in the creation of his compilation. They are easily identifiable as verse passages inserted throughout the work.17 In addition to the verse prologue mentioned above, there are nineteen of these passages, which vary in length from six to 146 lines in length. They are in octosyllabic rhymed couplets and are only loosely applicable to themes present in the text in which they are interpolated. They often carry their own rubric (in red, as the other rubrics) and because of the uneven line length are visually set apart from the rest of the text. There are other moralizing remarks incorporated within the prose narrative as well. Therefore even if we cannot know the name of the person who created the Histoire ancienne. the narrative persona he created is quite accessible. It is made clear that it is the compiler himself who interrupts the narrative flow with these rhymed commentaries, especially in the first few cases, by prefatory remarks such as "Ci parole cil qui le livre fait e doctrine laisser mal a faire."18

These verse moralizations are present in only two of the 55 extant manuscripts of this text: BibliothSque

17 In ms. 20125.18 f. 10b, Cited from Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .,"

35.

24Nationale 20125 and Vienna 2576.19 Because B.N. 20125 is an earlier and better copy than Vienna, I have chosen to use it as my base manuscript. B.N. 20125 is believed to have been copied at the Acre scriptorium in 1287.20 A curious fact about this copy is that although it is not the earliest extant version, it represents an earlier state of the text in that the verse moralizations are present as are the numerous incidences of direct address to a listening public.21 Later versions of the text gradually eliminated these features, sometimes partially prosifying the moralizations instead of completely removing them.22 Known to art scholars as the Histoire universelle. B.N. 20125 contains numerous illuminations that have been the subject of independent studies.23

19 Brian Woledge, Biblioaraphie des romans et nouvelles en prose francaise antSrieurs 3. 1500. (Geneva: Droz, 1954) 56-57; Supplement 1954-1973 (1975) 42. The manuscripts are grouped in three categories: Meyer's premiere redaction which contains all seven sections as outlined above; his seconde redaction which does not contain Genesis and in which a longer prose version of Benoit de St. More's Roman de Troie replaces the prose version based on Dares' text, and which lacks the prose ROBffff.' Alexanders; Woledge's troisiSme redaction in which both the Genesis and St. More's Troy section are present, as wellas sections taken from the T£es_or_de__Sapience. The 55 extantmanuscripts referred to above are copies of the premiere redaction. See Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .,"49- 51.

20 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," viii-xi.21 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . xi-xii. Meyer,

"Les Premidres Compilations . . .," 57-58.22 Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .,"58.23 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," iii; ix-xi.

25Relatively little research has been done on the

Histoire ancienne. Guy Raynaud de Lage has published several significant articles about this text. In addition to his work relating to the date of the history and its relationship to the Fet des Romains.24 he has studied the four romans d'antiquite in prose as they appear in the compilation and has examined the sources the writer used in creating these prose versions.25 The same type of study, in more detail, has been done by David A.J. Ross on the Macedonian development in the section on Rome.26 A little more than ten years ago, different sections were the foci of two independent dissertations: Mary Coker Joslin did a critical edition of the Genesis section27 and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski studied the prose as well as the verse Thebes in her thesis which compared the social functions of the different versions of the text.28

One problem that must be confronted immediately when dealing with the Histoire ancienne is that of its taxonomy. Should one consider it a universal history or an ancient

24 Raynaud de Lage, "L*Histoire ancienne . . . ."25 See "Les 'Romans antiques' dans 1'Histoire ancienne

-jusqu'£ Cesar. 11 Le Moyen Age 4th ser. 63 (1957): 267-309.26 See "The History of Macedon in the Histoire ancienne

iusqu'£ C6sar: Sources and Compositional Method," Classical et Mediaevalia 24 (1963): 181-231.

27 See supra. p.2 n.3.28 See supra. p.2 n.4.

26history? The author's intent was to create a universal history that would proceed up through the settling of Flanders; yet the fact that he did not succeed in bringing his history past Julius Caesar places his work squarely in the category of ancient history. Although at least one scholar considers it to be an ancient history,29 and the very title in use stresses this aspect of the text, if one considers it through the perspective of the compiler's goal one must see it as an unfinished universal history.

The medieval universal history has been compared to today's world history; however, the two are not conceptually related. Each is informed by a different set of principles, and within the tradition of medieval universal history writing, there are important variations and differences.The universal history is based upon the truth of Christianity as a revealed religion. A medieval historian who wrote universal history did not hesitate to include biblical texts (most obviously. Genesis) as well as other material that was generally considered to be authentic and fit in with the Christian concept of the ordering of the universe. The universal historian viewed the world as framed by three events: creation, fall, and redemption.30

29 Tyson, "Patronage . . .," 208.30 R.w. Southern, "Aspects of the European Tradition of

Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of St Victor and the Idea of Historical Development," Transactions of the Roval Historical Society 5th ser. 21 (1971): 159.

27Within that context, secular and church history fused to tell the story of humanity. No separation was possible between spiritual and worldly events, the theological perspective embracing every event and individual.31

This union of history and theology, inherited principally from Augustine, was also a descendant of Eusebius, Orosius, Cassiodorus, and Bede.32 This concept includes the final judgment as an event guaranteed to occur in the human story, as the ultimate conclusion to creation and the fall. However, few medieval historians actually described the final days. Although theologians such as Joachim of Fiore did focus on the apocalypse, Bede and Otto of Freising stand alone, as far as chroniclers are concerned, in the inclusion of the final days in their works.33

Within the tradition of universal historiography, there is considerable variation. Three main types of universal histories can be defined: that which, like Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, is organized by years or other segments of time such as regnal years (series

31 See Peter Classen, "ReB Gestae. Universal History, Apocalypse," Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century- eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable with Carol D. Lanham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) : "In the twelfth century the question concerning the place of the present in the history of salvation was posed more emphatically than ever ..." (404) .

32 Classen, "Res Gestae. . . .," 415.33 Classen, "Res Gestae. . . .," 403-14.

28temporum); that which contains a more detailed narrative divided into books and/or chapters, as is Orosius' Historiarum aduersum paqanos libri septem (mare historiarum); the encyclopedic type such as Isidor of Seville's Etymoloaiae (imago mundi). At the same time, it is also important to recognize that these categories are interconnected and that it is possible for the different features to be found together in the same history.34

R.G. Collingwood noted in 1946 that "Any history written on Christian principles will be of necessity universal, providential, apocalyptic, and periodized. "3J This view of medieval history writing has been challenged recently by the notion that Rome, not Christ, was the central preoccupation of medieval historians.36 It is noteworthy here because this challenge can be seen to live itself out in the Histoire ancienne. The narrator's remarks cited above demonstrate that Rogier, the patron, was apparently more interested in the material on Rome than he was in biblical subjects. The compiler, on the other hand, was not ready to eliminate history's spiritual aspect and included moralizing remarks in order to highlight it. When

34 Karl Heinrich Kruger, Die Universalchroniken. Typologie des sources du moyen Sge occidental 16 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1976) 21-23.

35 The Idea of History. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1946; 1962)49.

36 Richard Vaughan, "The Past in the Middle Ages, " Journal of Medieval History 12 (1986): 1-14.

29histories are written in the face of such conflicting concepts and demands, the resulting text calls for a change in our modern concept of medieval historiography. In the case of the Histoire ancienne. both Christ and Caesar--that is, both religious principles and secular stories of Rome la grant- -share the writer's attention.

The Christian worldview was a given in medieval thought; beyond this underpinning, however, medieval historiography was also highly individualistic in that each text was created under unique circumstances and pressures. Universal histories are far from universal insofar as the author's perspective is concerned. Each creator of a universal history, although he may have based his work on an illustrious predecessor, composed a text that represented his own preoccupations and interests, indicated by the selection of the material included and by the treatment of it. This is illustrated by such histories as Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Analorum. in which the contemptus mundi theme plays an important role in setting the tone for the work,37 and in Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastics, a universal history begun as a history of his Norman abbey, which retains a strong focus on Normandy. In a sense, it is ironic that these histories are called universal, in that they are deeply rooted in the particular. It may be more

37 Nancy F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in Twelfth-Century England. (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1977) 11-48.

30accurate to describe these historical texts as the particularized expression of religious and social truths held to be universal in this period, accompanied by the description of people, places, and events of the regions in question.

In spite of these reservations, one can apply all of Collingwood's criteria to the Histoire ancienne in a certain limited way if one qualifies the terms. It is universal in that it starts with the creation of humanity; providential in that events such as the destruction of the city of Thebes occur because of the sins of the people; apocalyptic in that Christ is the central figure--although we see this only through the narrator's occasional comments because the work ends before Christ appears on the scene; and periodized to the extent that human life differs before Christ and after him, again according to various comments made by the narrator.

However, it cannot easily be placed into one of the three types of universal histories as delineated by Kruger. It is clearly not of the encyclopedic variety. Although the material is organized in a chronological fashion and dates are occasionally mentioned, time segments do not constitute a dominating structure of the work. The narrative is highly developed and it would therefore seem to fit into the second category, except for the fact that there are no interior divisions to speak of other than the incipit and the

31explicit that are part of each section. If one considers each part as a chapter or book, even though they are not designated as such, the work can be loosely designated as an example of the type termed mare historiarum.

There are certain features of the Histoire ancienne that do not correspond with what one might expect in a universal history. One aspect of the Histoire ancienne that is noteworthy in this regard is its beginning. In the Histoire ancienne the author says nothing at all about geography, whereas in other universal histories, the authors begin by describing the earth. For example, in Otto of Freising's Historia de Duabus Ciuitatibus. he briefly notes the existence of Asia, Africa, and Europe, referring the reader to Orosius for a fuller explanation of the provinces and topography of the world: "Quarum provintias, situs,regiones qui velit cognoscere, legat Orosium.1,38 Furthermore, Otto quickly passes over pre-lapsarian history, noting merely that paradise was believed to have been in the east and that "Ubi dum primus homo positus, verbo Dei factus inobediens, in hanc peregrinationem iusto Dei iudicio deiectus est. . . .1139 This is in stark contrast to the

38 Chronica sive Historia de Duabus Ciuitatibus. ed. Walther hammers (Berlin: Rfitten and Loening, 1960) 60.

39 Chronica . . ., 60 ("While the first man dwelt therein, he became disobedient to the word of God, and so by a righteous judgment of God he was cast out . . . " [Otto of Freising, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.P.. trans. Charles C. Mierow, ed. Austin P. Evans and Charles Knapp (New York: Columbia UP, 1928) 123]).

32Histoire ancienne. in which an elaborate version of the fall is presented. The dialogue between the serpent, Adam, and Eve in this version of the temptation bears some similarity to that of the Jeu d'Adam:40 this underscores the author's desire to entertain as well as educate. In addition, the author of the Histoire ancienne utilizes a rhetorical style that departs from the more sober tone employed by Otto of Freising in his opening passage. After describing how God created the heavens and the earth, he describes the creation of the first man:

Segnors, le premerain home, de quoi le fist e forma Nostre Sires? Fist le il sans nulle matere, par sa parole, si com il avoit fetes les autres creatures? Nenil. Ensi ne le fist il mie. Fist le il done d'or, ne d'argent o de riche pierre preciouse, o d'acier, o de fer, o de cuevre, o d'estaign, o de plomb, o de bosc, por avoir riche entailleure e durable? Certes, segnors, nenil. Onques de tout ce n'i ot rien au fere. Ainz le fist de terre. Fu ce done de bone terre ferme, dont cil bon ovrer funt ces bones ovres? Nenil. Ains le fist de terre fraille e mole e auques vermeille.41

The lack of the traditional beginning material is a signal that this history is not intended to be a pedantic repetition of previously acknowledged facts, but an engaging work that nonetheless contains important truths. His repeated addresses to the public as "Segnors et dames"

40 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," lxxviii and 275-77.41 f. 3b-c, cited from Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .,"

12.

33emphasizes the courtly, leisure-oriented context in which the work was intended to be performed.42

In the prologue the author announces the ending point of his text as the history of the people of Flanders. Strictly speaking, the only real ending point for a universal history would be the final days of judgment. As noted above, Otto of Freising's is one of the few histories of this period that does continue up through the final days. Since so few historians did write complete universal histories with the called-for ending, the single fact that our author did not plan to continue up through the end of all things is not meaningful. Nevertheless, the fact that he neither begins nor plans to end his history with traditional material is significant because it sets him apart from other historians who wrote similar kinds of histories.

Thus far we have seen that the compiler of the Histoire ancienne substitutes the traditional beginning for a more entertaining one, and does not plan to sketch out commonly perceived notions of the end of history. Another feature of the Histoire ancienne that differentiates it from other universal histories involves its structure.

Histories such as Otto of Freising's and Orderic

42 The Histoire ancienne exemplifies the recreational literacy that M.B. Parkes associates with the lay aristocracy of the 12th century in his "The Literacy of the Laity," The Medieval World. eds. D. Daiches and A. Thorlby, (London: Aldus Books, 1973) 555-56.

34Vitalis' recount a great diversity of historical events. Great figures such as Alexander, Eneas, and Caesar are to be found among them, but they do not dominate the text. The author does not emphasize any one character over another, but focuses rather on the continuing stream of peoples, individuals, and what befalls them from a relatively safe distance. However, in the Histoire ancienne. the focus appears to be on important characters as individuals. We see Adam, then Oedipus, Polynices, Tydeus, and Eteocles; then Eneas, Alexander, and Caesar. The degree to which these characters are individualized and dominate other segments of the narrative (for example the section on the Minotaur and the Amazons) is noteworthy. These men truly stand out in relief against the mosaic of wars, lands, and peoples.

A consideration of the sources used by the creator of the Histoire ancienne reveals that even though the compilation is considered to have been based on Orosius' Historiarum aduersum paganos libri seotem. only two of the seven sections contain a majority of material that is taken from Orosius; moreover, these sections tend to be brief and summarize transitional material that does not have any real development. These sections are: Assyria and Greece (f. 83- 88) and the Minotaur, Amazons, and Hercules (f. 117c- 1 2 3 c ) S o m e Histoire ancienne copies from the fourteenth

43 Raynaud de Lage, "Les Romans antiques . . .," 268-69.

35and fifteenth centuries are entitled Livre d'Prose: this error was signaled by Meyer in his initial article.44 In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, VSrard printed an expanded version of the Histoire ancienne under the title Prose.45 The confusion between Orosius' history and this work is a regrettable one.

In fact, if one examines the Histoire ancienne with regard to length and to the sources used by the author, it comes out as the following in B.N. 20125:1) Genesis: principally based on the Historia scholastica of

Petrus Comestor; other sources include the Latin Josephus. the Vulgate, Orosius' Historiarum aduersum paqanos libri septem. Jerome's Interpretatio of Eusebius' Chronici canones. This section also reflects the influence of the Jeu d'Adam: 3b-82d.46

44 Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .,” 60.45 Ross, "The History of Macedon . . 181, n. 3; Cf.

Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .," 62, n. 1. Ross states that the V€rard edition is "quite clearly a linguistically modernised version of the Histoire ancienne containing all the original material in the original order with the addition of a few episodes from elsewhere. A detailed study of the VSrard 'Orosius' might well show it to be no more than a modernised and expanded Histoire ancienne. at any rate for the part extending down to about 70 B.C." However, according to Meyer, "Cette compilation correspond pour le plan, pour la matiSre, et m§me en certains passages, pour la redaction, $l notre Histoire ancienne. mais il en diffdre consid€rablement en plusieurs de ses parties. L'imprim€ de V€rard a notamment substituS en maint endroit une traduction d'Orose cI la redaction qu'offre 1'Histoire manuscrite.”

46 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," lxxiii and lxxviii.

2) Assyria and Greece, based on Orosius: 83-88.47 Thismaterial serves as a transition.

3) Thebes, thought to be based on a vernacular Roman deTh&bes in verse that was close but not identical to the longer (unedited) version of this text: 89-117b.48

4) The Minotaur, the Amazons, and Hercules, partially basedon Orosius: 117c-123c.49 This material also serves as a transition.

5) Troy, based on Dares' account: I23c-l48b.506) Eneas, based on Virgil: 148C-178.317) Rome: 179-375. The section on Rome is very diverse, and

contains the following subdivisions: the history of Rome, stopping in the middle of the wars against the Samnites and the Gauls, 179-198c; a development about the Medes and the Persians, Cyrus, Cambyse, Holopheme and Judith, Darius, Xerxes, Assuerus and Esther, 198c- 220c; a Macedonian section consisting largely of a prose version of the Roman d'Alexandre. 220c-257; a return to the history of Rome, beginning with the war against Pyrrhus, continuing until the text's abrupt end

47 Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .," 39.48 Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'Romans antiques' . . .," 269-70.

49 Meyer, "Les Premidres Compilations . . .,"41.30 Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'Romans antiques' . . .," 278.31 Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'Romans antiques' . . .,"297.

37in 57 B.C. in Caesar's campaign in Gaul.52

Within this long section, research has concentrated on the Macedonian development: its sources are principally Orosius and the Epitome of Julius Valerius as well as the Epistula ad Aristotelem. In addition, the compiler used Jerome's Interoretatio chronicae Eusebii Pamohili. Petrus Comestor's Historia Scholastica. and Alexandre de Paris' version of the Roman d'Alexandre.53

As the above summary indicates, the clerk used a variety of sources and models in writing this history that had to be entertaining yet truthful. The compiler selected and arranged material with great care, in a manner which reflected his own interests as well as those of his patron.

The presence of Genesis is of primary importance. The dominating feature of this compilation is not its reliance on Orosius but the placing of the four sections of mati£re de Rome in an historical framework, one in which the dominating Christian perspective is made clear by the prominence of Genesis. It has been pointed out that the Old

52 Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'Romans antiques . . .,"269.53 Ross, "The History of Macedon . . .," 225. Cf. Raynaud

de Lage, "Les 'Romans antiques' . . .," 306. Raynaud de Lage finds that the author was familiar with the vernacular R om an d*Alexandre but did not use it as a source, preferring instead the direct use of the same sources that the author of the Roman had used.

38Testament was the only source for the distant past, and that therefore the inclusion of biblical passages in medieval histories does not necessarily indicate a Christian historical perspective.54 However, it is my view that the author's inclusion of Genesis in the Histoire ancienne is a reflection of the unity of secular and salvation history-- any true history would be incomplete without it, and it serves to set a moral tone and an emphasis on salvation history that will find occasional echoes in the rest of the compilation. The importance of its moral teachings is stressed by the author's verse moralizations. At the same time, it is a version of Genesis that, in certain sections at least, is highly entertaining.

If Genesis and salvation history provide the primary framework, a secondary framework is provided by Orosius.This material is used in a transitional manner between Genesis and Thebes and between Thebes and Troy. Although in length these sections are not as drawn out as the others, they fulfill an important conceptual role in providing reference to a known auctoritas. and the use of Orosius as a source legitimizes the compilation.

The remaining four major sections--on ThSbes, Troy, En€as, and Rome, respectively--are developments of material that was also popular in vernacular verse texts at the time; this fact along with the narrator's comments cited above

34 Vaughan, "The Past . . 5.

39(see pp. 20-22} suggest that these sections represented the primary interest of the Ch&telain. However, the texts had to meet the writer's criteria of truthfulness. His concern about veracity is demonstrated by the fact that he selected Latin sources for these versions (with the important exception of Thebes) and that he did not hesitate to comment on the different versions and to amend where he felt the previous version to be false.55 Furthermore, as I shall discuss below, the choice of prose rather than verse reflects the author's attempt to validate the contents of this compilation.

We can surmise that the Histoire ancienne. although written by a clerk who was conscious of both the potential conflicts between truth-telling and history and history's role as teacher, was probably commissioned by Rogier out of a interest in the matiere de Rome as entertainment. As a result, its Christian perspective is flavored by an element that one could call courtly, for lack of a more precise term. Although Christian in its moralizing, it tends to romance in the central role given to heroic figures. The writer of this history conceived of it as a work to be performed in a court setting, and it privileges the type of male character familiar to readers of romance: alone and

55 As in the description of Tydeus' embassy to Eteocles, in which the narrator insists that Tydeus could never have been so uncourtly as to remain on his horse before the king and his court (f. 99c).

40separated from family, he seeks identity and fulfillment via challenges in arms and amour.

Furthermore, it is courtly in the sense that the brief verse passages provide a refinement and a self-consciousness that would otherwise be lacking. The use of verse is an understood but silent acknowledgment of the aristocratic quality of the listening public.

In sum, this compilation of historical tales that was loosely fashioned after the manner of universal histories exemplifies some interesting conflicts and juxtapositions. There is a kind of layering that results: The patron was especially interested in stories of Rome, while the compiler's literary vocation led him toward Christian didacticism. The clerk's penchant for moral didacticism, largely excluded from the narrative, finds refuge in the verse interpolations.

The Christian historical perspective and the desire to entertain are intertwined throughout the compilation. It is because of this context that the prose version of the Roman de ThSbes. as the focal point of this study, provides us with an opening onto aspects of medieval thought relating to literary practice and aesthetic. The opportunity is a special one because we have before us a text transformed, rewritten in a new mode formally, contextually, and, I would argue, conceptually. In the pages below I shall explore the implications of this transformation and of the text's

41inclusion in the Histoire ancienne.

42Chapter Two

Christian Didacticism and Verse Moralizations

As has been seen above, the Histoire ancienne must be considered in the light of the tradition of the universal history; in the present chapter, I shall discuss the Christian view of history and its presence in the Histoire ancienne.

The medieval concept of history cannot be separated from the notion of time. In the pre-Christian classical period, there was a tendency to view history either as a unidirectional movement from the past towards an unending future, or conversely as a series of never-ending cycles.1 Saint Augustine was the principal architect of the new vision of history that would dominate the Middle Ages.2 He

1 Smalley, Historians . . .,"28.2 Augustine's system differs from that developed by

Eusebius. Although he delineated a Christian view of history prior to Augustine, it was somewhat in opposition to certain aspects of his system that Augustine brought forth his own. They differ in the fundamental matter of the role of the national state in Christian life. Eusebius linked the power and success of Rome to Christianity, even using Caesar's actions to prefigure Christ. In this view, secular life and salvation history were on the same plane. For Augustine, the two cities--the sacred and the secular--exist side by side yet are not metonymous; individuals' actions place them either in the divine or in the secular city, not in both at the same time. Augustine basically rejected the linkage of the secular state to salvation history and ascribed instead the strong role to the individual Christian. Robert W. Hanning, The vision of History in Early Britain; From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York: Columbia UP, 1966) 1-43.

43delineated six ages of the world, corresponding to the six days of creation, and in so doing he set into place a linear model with definite beginning and ending points. He relied on scripture for knowledge of the past, and on revelation for knowledge of the future--that is, for the fact of Christ's second coming although he did not predict a specific time frame for the final days. In this scenario, his own age was part of the sixth day of the world, which had begun with the birth of Christ. The seventh day would be that of eternal rest.3

Saint Augustine's six ages were not the sole notion of history's movement. Accompanying his division was the idea that there were to be four world monarchies before the end of all things, and that the last monarchy's destruction would signal the end of all time and the final judgment.This genre of prophetic historical thinking and writing, known as appealvose. is best exemplified by the Old Testament book of Daniel as well as the New Testament book of Revelation, in which beasts represent the four empires. Daniel's vision of the four beasts was first interpreted to refer to the Babylonians, the Medes, and Persians, and the Macedonians; later, in order to accommodate the Roman empire and to keep the number of great world powers at four, the

3 Michael Haren, Medieval Thought:__ lbs HsateffhIntellectual Tradition from Anticruitv to the ThirteenthCentury {New York: Saint Martin's P, 1985) 53.

44Medes and the Persians were put into the same group.4 Still later, Otto of Freising considered the demise of the Roman empire and the rise of West as translatio imperii, a transfer of the same empire's power.3

The view of time can be visualized as a sort of geological strata or layers: as a basis for the two separate but complementary notions above, the foundation for the two structures above was the essential division of all time into that preceding the incarnation and that following it. With the exception of a few towering figures (such as Alexander), those who lived before Christ can never be redeemed.6 There were no people or events at any time or place that escaped God's plan, although that plan could only be comprehended by the human mind in part.

This clear concept of human time and experience establishes a relationship between world time and divine eternity. But what of developments that occur strictly on the worldly scene? Bede refined Augustine's schematization of the six ages by adding the notion-of dawn, growth, and destruction to each age; he further developed Augustine's approach by relating the seven stages of human lifespan to

4 Smalley, Historians . . ., 35.3 Classen, "Res Gestae . . 401-02.6 Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, trans. Julia

Barrow (Cambridge MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990) 165-9.

45the seven ages.7 Thus even the physical degeneration of an individual and the decline of a world empire are explainable and reflect the divine organization of the universe. And finally, Fortune's wheel provided the medieval world with an explanation of the uncertainties of life.

The universal historian wrote within the context of this Christian totalizing perspective. This elaborate construction of time liberated the historian from the need to focus on human causality--which in any case would merely function as an agent of providence--and left him free to consider other, more important questions. The writer of the universal history, encompassing the entire human experience in one fell swoop, united the divine perspective of an eternal present with the human view of his precise instant and localization on this mapped-out journey. Since the end result of all time was already known, the true subject of

7 Southern, "Aspects . . .," 162. The creation of Adam corresponds to childhood, the law of Noah to youth, the calling of Abraham to adolescence, the kingdom of David to maturity, the Babylonian exile to old age, and the coming of Christ to decrepitude. Although he is credited with having spread Augustine's view of history, Bede nevertheless followed Eusebius' notion that the fortunes of the city state do relate to salvation history. Thus the medieval notion of history is based both on Augustine's notion of linearity and the six ages, with a precise beginning and ending point, and Eusebius' emphasis on the nation state as participating in the salvation story. See Hanning, The Vision . . ., 67. Bede's workinfluenced all medieval historical writing that followed it. It was well known even during his lifetime, and many copies of his text went into Gaul with Christian missionaries. See Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974) 1: 16-17

46the universal history is a reflection on the problems that humanity confronts on earth and a representation of humanity's past actions and their implications for contemporary times and individuals. Although the narrative is by necessity sequential, the focus is not on the sequence of events themselves but on the questions of good and evil that humanity must face throughout its sixth age in order to gain salvation.

This focus on good and evil--that is, the question of moral character and Christian faith and behavior--is clear in Orosius' Historiarum aduersum naqanos libri sentem. which had a great influence on medieval historians. An apologetic work intended to illustrate Augustine's De ciuitate Dei. Orosius' goal is to demonstrate to those who blame Rome's decline on Christianity that in previous times there were just as many disasters, and that Christianity is not to blame for contemporary problems.

In his text, history is seen to be the manifestation of divine will. There is no action or event that is exempt from this worldview. He develops a link between God and Rome, particularly between Augustus and Christ's coming. Although a disciple of Augustine, Orosius used a Eusebian approach by virtue of his insistence on the role of the secular state. Orosius attaches special significance to the fact that Augustus Caesar began using the title Augustus on January 6, the day of the epiphany. In the fact that Christ

47was born in the Roman empire, he sees a divine preference for Rome above other nations:

It is undoubtedly clear for the understanding of all, from their faith and investigation, that our Lord Jesus Christ brought forward this City to this pinnacle of power, prosperous and protected by His will; of this City, when he came, he especially wished to be called a Roman citizen by the declaration of the Roman census list.8

He explains the Barbarian invasions as God's punishment for the persecution of Christians, and then offers proof of God's beneficence towards Christian Rome by recounting Theodosius' "bloodless victory" over Maximus.9 Orosius also explains how Alaric spared Christians and Christian holy places when he sacked Rome, specifying that "...the storming of the City took place because of the wrath of God rather than because of the bravery of the enemy..."l0 and ascribing a role to God in the destruction, he adds:

...lest anyone perchance doubt that this was permitted the enemy for the chastisement of the proud, wanton, and blasphemous City, at the same time, the most famous sites of the City were destroyed by lightning, sites which could not be set on fire by the enemy.1*

Paulus Orosius, The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans. trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1964) 281-2. At the time of this printing, a Latin text was not available to me.

9 Orosius, The Seven . . ., 343.10 Orosius, The Seven . . ., 353.11 Orosius, The Seven . . ., 355.

48Orosius' carefully drawn connection between the

successes and failures of Rome and the development of Christianity and treatment of Christians is an important theme that will be carried into the Middle Ages. God ordains all things, according to this view, and the rise and fall of nations represent divine approval or anger. Orosius has established a link between human action and divine retribution and reward that will be at the basis of medieval historical thought.

There is a juxtaposition at the very heart of medieval Christian historiography: contemporary events, individuals, and decisions are placed in an eternal frame of the divine story, complete with beginning, end, and judgment. Medieval history viewed from this angle is a branch of Christian theology. However, theology was not the only influence on medieval historiography. From its origins in the classical period history was considered a branch of literature, and in the Middle Ages was part of the trivium under the category of grammar and rhetoric. It required stylistic treatment and had to correspond to certain aesthetic standards.

Classical texts played an important role in setting these standards. Works such as Suetonius' De vita Caesarum. Sallust's Bellum Catilinae. and Virgil's Aeneid were widely read and constituted stylistic and formal models for

49medieval historiographers.12

Medieval history writing, then, can be seen to stem from two distinct factors: early Christian thought about time and the secular life's place in salvation history, and classical textual practices.

These two elements are both present in the Histoire ancienne. The majority of the contents of the compilation are not only secular but also specifically classical in origin; at the same time, the narrator's voice, communicating with the public via the verse passages, stresses the moral side of the material he recounts.

These verse interpolations, which I shall discuss in detail below, clearly demonstrate a preoccupation with history's lesson and a desire to edify and admonish the listening public. This creates a didactic framing of the tales of events and peoples before Christ and invites a new, moralizing interpretation of their contents. These verses can be seen as a feature of the text that helps it achieve balance in the face of the largely non-spiritual texts presented in the compilation. They demonstrate the writer's commitment to the creation of a work that would teach spiritual values while entertaining the public with worldly texts. They also indicate a desire that the compilation be

12 R.W. Southern, "Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: l. The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth," Transactions of the Roval Historical Society 5th ser. 20 (1970): 177.

50seen as one text with many parts. They are a unifying feature and as such provide an important point of departure for understanding the ethic and the aesthetic of the compiler.

The writer first presents his case in the prologue (284 lines), in which he presents both the material he will treat and a Christian framing of it.13 After a discussion of spiritual values (lines 1-112), it is not surprising that he begins his summary with God: "De Deu est bons li comenciers" (113). He first will tell the story of Adam and Noah (including their respective descendants), the tower of Babel, Babylon and its restoration, and other famous cities as well as the kings, their lands, and their peoples (113- 55), and then promises to tell of Thebes, Troy, Rome, and the people of France (156-84) .. The text will then turn to the story of Christ, his resurrection, the apostles and the saints and their miracles (185-214). The narrator then plans to speak of the first Christian emperors and the end of the persecution of Christians, the Christian kings of France, and the churches they founded (215-30). He will continue with the story of the Vandals, Goths, Huns, and Normans and the destruction they wrought; the people of Flanders, their origin, and "Com il firent que fere durent" (231-46). After emphatically declaring the truthful nature of his text, as discussed above, the poet closes by

13 The prologue is cited in full in appendix I.

51attacking the envious (247-84).

The first 109 lines are of great value in determining the compiler's attitude to history and to his text. He begins by explaining that life is short and that if one serves God, the just reward awaits; therefore, one must do one's utmost in his service, putting both intellect and will ("sens et voloir" 16) into the task. God is represented as a good lord who rewards his servants, in contrast with the devil, "mauvais segnor" (21), whose helpers will have only exile, everlasting suffering, and misery for their recompense. The poet laments the fact that although the devil hates reason, moderation, goodness, loyalty, and morality, he has many servants who do his wishes. It is interesting that rather than speaking of them in condemnatory terms, the poet seems to feel sympathy for them, indicated by his interjection "E! las, dolent que feront il? / Por lor luiers avront escil" (31-32), and by his remark "Meaus lor venist que n€ ne fussent, / Car ne font pas ce qu'il deussent" (37-38), which offers a certain conciliatory tone in that those of whom he speaks are not castigated as profoundly evil, but rather their behavior, which can change, is qualified as not being what it should be.

The author reminds the listeners of the covenant these (and all) Christians have undertaken with God, and that if the covenant is not kept, or if transgressed, redeemed with

52penitence, they will not enter into heaven (39-52).Recalling how Adam brought pain and suffering to humanity by biting into an apple and was cast out of paradise for only one sin, the poet points out that if Adam had not transgressed God's commandment, he would still be there instead of in the world of pain and death where humanity now resides. Noting how Adam was cast out of paradise for this one action, the narrator asks his public to consider what will become of them (including himself in the group), since they anger God a hundred times in a day compared to Adam's single wrongdoing. He admonishes people (still including himself) for not remembering this and for no longer believing the clergy in spite of their attempts to tell the truth. These criticisms are softened by the writer's inclusion of himself in the group he addresses:

Qu'iert il de nos qui chascun jor Corrossons cent foiz le Segnor, (69-70)[...]Ne creons mes ni cler ni prestre Tant nos sachent verity dire (76-77).

A lamentation about the general state of decadence of earthly life follows; people are lazy when it comes to "bien fere" (80) and death is not feared as it should be.The poet emphasizes the pain of death's grip, impossible for even a saint to describe "Que si aigrement pince et mort / Que la dolor ne puet descrire / Sains ni sainte, tant sache dire" (82-84). The theme of death as the great equalizer

53inspires the following lines:

C'est ce que la mort aprochomes,E nos cors acompaigneromes As vers de terre sans orgoill.N'en porterons c'un soul lensuel Dont nos avromes vestedre.Segnor, e n'esteroit mesure Que nos nos en porpensessimes,E nos malisses lessesimes? (87-94)

It is interesting to note that the poet's vision presents the individual's post-death consciousness as accompanying the body, the fate of which is gruesomely evoked by the mention of the earthworms. The vulnerablility of the body is further emphasized by the fact that it is covered only by a single shroud. The reference to the corpse's ultimate destiny is coupled with the remark that we will be "sans orgoill;" thus human pride and corporal existence meet the same end. The poet does not miss an opportunity to insert his call for a moral awakening, which will be the antidote for the rather unsettling scenario he has just presented.

He continues with a comparison between strength, nobility, beauty, and wealth and the universal fate that he has just described: "Que vaut force, que vaut noblece? /Que vaut beut§s, que vaut richece? / Que vaut hautesce ni parages?" (95-97). Despite all the wealth that his public may have, upon death they will wear a single garment; despite their strength, they will be prey to insects; despite their nobility and beauty, they will be humbled.

54Instead of the ubi sunt thematic which asks what the great men and women of generations past have become, here the poet asks what the future will hold for those whom he addresses at the present time. The answer is identical and he emphasizes it by adding that "Certes, li horn n'est mie sages / qui en tout ce a sa fiance, / Car il n'i a fors trespassance" (98-100): those who put their trust and faith in the transitory are foolish.

These first hundred lines serve as a moral frame to his text; following them, he introduces his work and details exactly what he intends to include in it. We shall first consider how the writer speaks of his text.

He describes it as having "sens et mesure" (104) "sens" referring to the work's meaning and "mesure" representing not only the moral quality of moderation but also, by extension, the just selection and treatment of materials included in the compilation. Moreover, the narrator claims that

Qui la matiere porsivraE de cuer i entenderaOir porra la plus haute ovreQui encore pas ne si descuevreC'onques fust en nos lengue traite (105-09).

Those who listen with their "cuer" will hear the greatest work that has ever been translated into French. The reference to the "plus haute ovre" in this context refers to a story with the highest spiritual import and implications.

55His later use of the expression "qui voudra raison entendre" (249), which echoes the above phrase "de cuer i entendera" also suggests that the meaning of the text may be perceived by dint of effort and interpretation and may not be entirely self-evident, but rather might require that the listener listen carefully in order to hear the truth. Finally, the closing couplet is telling: "Si dirai: qui voudra entendre / Oir y porra e aprendre" (283-84). The poet's rhyme of "entendre" and "aprendre" spells out the true purpose of the compilation, which is to teach the listener something.

The emphasis on verite is another striking element in the prologue. The author insists that his story will be entertaining and at the same time contain no fictions; moreover, he asserts that truth itself is good to hear and offers its own pleasures, establishing an association between love of truth and the following of God's commandments.14 He affirms that "Je n'i vuell fors verit# dire" (259).

A third important feature of the compiler's remarks about his text involves his reference to sources. Upon

L'uevre iert mout bone e delitable E d'estoire, sans nulle fable;Por ce iert plaisans e creue Que de verity iert creCie.La verity fet bon entendre,0£r, retenir et aprendre.Qui verit€ aime e retientAs comans Damedeu se tient (251-58).

56first introducing the text, he states "Car j'ai entrepris un a faire / a traitier selonc l'escriture" (102-03) claiming that his work is a translation of an unnamed Latin text. In announcing the biblical material he will treat, he later comments "Si com je le truis ou latin / Le vos dirai a mon pooir" (154-55); and alluding to the section on Rome, he remarks "Car, ce tesmoine le latins" (179); looking ahead to the story of the apostles, he repeats the idea: "De lor vies la v6rit£ / Dirai selonc l'auctorit#" (201-02). Towards the end of the prologue, he makes the claim again, mentioning his patron:

Longue en iert ass€s la matire Qu'en pensee ai contier a plain,Por qu'il plaise le chastelain De l'Isle, Rogier, mon seignor,Cui Deus doint sant€ e honor,Joie [e] paradis en la fin.S'il veut, en romans dou latinLi cuic si traire lone la letreQue plus ne mains n'i sera metre (260-68).

In fact, the compiler worked from a variety of sources, not all of them Latin ones; his affirmation that he istranslating must be seen in the light of the medievalwriter's traditional reference to textual auctoritas. a conventional introductory comment whose importance lies in its guarantee of the text's authenticity.

It is noteworthy that in the prologue as a whole, the topical emphasis is on salvation history rather than on

57the marvels or the heroes of the stories to be told. Secondly, the focus on salvation history is specifically related in the context of its impact on the present-day listener and the moral obligation to honor the covenant all Christians have with God, or face exile, everlasting pain, and misery. This opposition is seen in terms of a choice that must be made by the individual at the present time, not as an ancient event. Thus the time framework of the compilation is three-dimensional: ancient history is set off with a contemporary injunction to action and moral choice that will determine the individual's imminent eternal reward or punishment. In this compiler's view, history clearly has a close relationship with theology.

The first moralization in the text is also particularly revealing as regards the attitude of the poet compiler and the function of these verse passages. In this case, the verse is preceded by a prose introduction in which he recalls the fall and stresses that God, who is eternal, never fails to reward his servants:

Ci parole cil oui le livre fait_e_doctrine laisser mala faire15

Segnors e dames, por Deu entendds e reten€s. Si fer€s que sage. Adans par son pech€ perdi paradisqu'il tous jors eust eft en heritage. E sa generationsfu perie tote par lor vils pechSs e par lor outrages, e No€s toz sous entre tant de gent salvSs par ses bones ovres. Certes encor est e iert parmenablement cil

15 f. 10b-c, cited from Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," 35-37.

58sires qui a ces que je vos ai dit si droiturerement lor dessertes rendi, c'onques encor n'i out faillance.Gncor rent il les merites . De ce ne soit nus en doutance.

After enjoining his public to do good rather than evil and to believe "... l'Escriture / qui a bien faire nos doctrine," the author ends his verse passage of 52 lines by acknowledging his didacticism:

N'en dirai plus, ains reviendrai A ma matiere e si dirai De No€ e de ses enfans Dont l'estoire est plenere e grans. Mes a la fois, si je pooie,Aucun mot volentiers diroie Ou on bon essample preist Des ovres faire Jhesucrist.

It is noteworthy that the author closes his moralizing with an explanation of what he intends by this interruption. It is also of interest that he uses the final verb (prendre1 in the subjunctive mood, accompanied by an imperfect- conditional construction in the two lines above. This tentativeness might indicate an awareness that his preaching may not meet with great enthusiasm on the part of his public. At the same time, his choice of the verb doctrine in the rubric as well as his description of himself elsewhere as maitres16 makes it clear that he sees himself as a teacher. As Joslin points out, "for the author of the Histoire ancienne . . . history directs the path to

16 f. 14a.

59salvation;n she concludes that "he manages to assume the role of spiritual instructor while producing a 'true' history that will appeal to his patron's requirement for secular material in prose designed to entertain his guests."17 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski has studied these didactic moralizations and their interplay with the prose text and sees them as "the principal purpose of the Histoire ancienne.,|18

A general review of the other verse passages reveals a focus on impending death and the necessity to serve God or face everlasting punishment.19 Of the nineteen passages, in six cases the red rubrics that introduce them specifically announce the topic of death. For example, "Que mout est grans merveille que nus horn ne doute la mort" precedes a 46- line passage that repeats the same concerns expressed in the prologue. The poet expresses surprise that people do not change their behavior in the face of death, which forces us to leave behind wealth, honor, beauty and prowess. God ordains death, which can strike quickly and exempts no one. Misdeeds are punished after death, and those who think to

17 Joslin, "A Critical Edition . . .," vi-vii.18 "Moralization and History: Verse and Prose in the

Histoire ancienne iusau'H C6sar (in B.N. f. fr. 20125)," Zeitschrift ffir Romanische Philoloqie 97 (1981): 46.

19 Appendix I contains the previously unedited verse passages as well as a list of those already published.

60challenge God should reflect on this.20

The passage described above occurs in the section on Rome, preceding the death of Daire. It fits into the narrative, but the poet's intent is to appeal to the listener more than to relate historical information.

With the exception of one 32-line passage on the sins of the Sodomites, which has a very specific link to the narrative and is descriptive rather than instructive, other moralizations are dedicated to topics such as pride, envy, greed, the loyal servant, the guardianship of God, God's love for the prodom. and His mercy, and indicate a definite concern with proper Christian behavior and morality of the thirteenth-century public.

After death, wealth and the correct use of it seems tobe a second major preoccupation of the writer. This isvisible in moralizing passages on covetousness and greed, such as that in which he criticizes the Cistercians as well as other religious for their interest in money.21 It is also present in other, non-moralizing passages where he praises generosity and reward-giving to loyal servants. The

20 f. 212b.21 Mes cil de l'ordre de Cisteaus

en aiment mout les plains sacheaus;il n'en ont cure de petit,guar en poi a povre petitpor bien emplir sa grande borse (33-37)

(Cited from Guy Raynaud de Lage, "La Morale de 1'histoire," Le Moven Age 4th ser. 69 [1963]: 365-69).

61wealth motif may well find its origins in the writer's self- interest: perhaps he is thinking of a promised payment when he says:

E par prometre sans doner Peut on le fou reconforter,Mais ce ne fait ou le sage home.Ja Romulus qui funda Rome N'eust vaincus ses anemis Si sans doner efist promis.22

However, the mention of wealth is always intertwined with the moral question of proper Christian behavior, and in this case his self-interest as a poet who has probably not yet been paid for a commissioned work lies in the same direction as his didacticism.

There remain two short passages that do not fall into the above categories--one on the brevity of sadness and one criticizing cowardly knights (which could also be seen as moral teaching). Thus out of a total of twenty verse passages, only one--six verses on the fleeting unhappiness occasioned by Regulus' sudden departure from Rome without adieux-- is clearly not in the sphere of spiritual instruction.

A Christian didacticism thus pervades the work. It is interesting that there are no verse moralizations within the Thdbes section or in the other sections based on previous verse romances of antiquity. However, the absence of

22 f. 180c-d.

62explicit verse moralizations cannot be taken as an absence of moralizing intent and consciousness in the narrative. A prime example of this can be seen in the Christianization of the Alexander section, in which Christ is literally written into the text. During his visit to Jerusalem, at a given point Alexander descends from his horse and bows down to a book held by a prophet dressed in white, on the cover of which is the name of "nostre segnor" in Hebrew.23

In the case of Thebes. the author does not write Christ into the text. Rather, the narrator's didacticism makes itself felt most obviously by occasional comments in the course of the narrative that express a direct criticism of paganism. For example, he comments on the foolishness of the people who worshipped the sun and who prayed to a golden image inhabited by the devil:

Cil deus si estoit apel€s e nom€s en lor language Apollo. Segnor, c'estoit li solaus qu'il aoroient ensi si l'apeloient. Imagene i avoient faite d'or. . . .Li diables habitoit en cele ymagene qui parloit e donoit respons a ceaus qui a li venoient e qui la oroient. . . . Or esguardSs com les gens estoient fol e non sachant adonques, que creoient e cuidoient que li solaus fust deus e la lune deuesse: si laissoient aourer le creator de tote choze, si aoroient le creature qu'il avoit cre£ e faite.24

Another example of the author's condemnation of non- Christians is found in the episode in which the earth

23 f. 232. See Ross, "The History . . .," 195-98.24 ms. isma; f. 90c.

63swallows up Amphiaras, a character described as being equivalent to an archbishop in importance and function ("sires estoit de lor loi ausi com sunt ore arcevesque"23) . After the narrator relates how the earth opens up, engulfs him, then closes up again as it was before, he explains that it was his reward for serving the- devil:

Segnor, ce fu par sa tresgrant desloiaut€ qu'il trop avoit demenee, quar il cuidoit les deables servir toz les jors de sa vie e lor ovres avoit faites faire as gens de son regne e anunciees. G qui le deable sert n'en a autre loier a la persone, que ce qu'il en est honis. Quar c'est li merite qu'il por lui servir rent e done.26

The placement of these comments is important. In each case, the comments are added in a place where there is or was a reference to pagan gods. While Apollo has been retained, he has all but been transformed into angin the battle scene Amphiaras' death is re-written as his reward for serving the devil--understood as a sort of divine punishment--instead of as an event in the battle between the gods described in the verse. In fact, except for these two references and occasional remarks such as Oedipus' declarative lament "je sai bien que li deu me heent"27 upon realizing his terrible misdeed, the gods and goddesses have been entirely written out of ThSbes. Oedipus does not ask

23 f. 107b.26 f. 113c.27 f. 93c.

64the gods to destroy his sons; Capaneus does not blaspheme the temple. Where the author has not simply removed the Greek gods, he has glossed them with a Christian perspective.

By eliminating pagan deities and explicitly commenting on the wrongs of the events related, the writer has transformed the text into an entirely different story and created a new textual economy, within which old characters and events can be seen to take on a new significance. The context of the Histoire ancienne with its overt didacticism invites the reader to see the prose Th&bes not as a simple recasting of the roman but as a work with a moral cast bearing its own message.

65Chapter Three

Thebes

I From the Thebaid to the Prose ThebesThe legend of Oedipus and the war between his two

sons was well-known in antiquity, treated in both epic and tragedy. When Publius Papinius Statius wrote the Thebaid in the first century of the Christian era, he used a variety of source material as a basis for his text.1 Like the Aeneid. the Thebaid is an epic poem composed of twelve books. Homer and Virgil provided the guiding concepts of the epic as a genre; in style, however, Statius was influenced by the mannerism and the Stoicism of Ovid, Seneca, and Lucan. Statius admired and imitated all five of these poets.2 Although Statius can rightfully be termed a poet of the second order, he was widely read and appreciated in the Middle Ages.3

There are several possible reasons for Statius' popularity. Medieval readers may have seen Statius as an undeclared Christian.4 This may have been due in part to

1 David Vessey, Statius and the Thebaid. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1973) 67-71.

2 Vessey, Statius . . .,49.3 vessey, Statius . . ., 2.4 J.H. Mozley, introduction, Statius, by Publius Paulus

Statius (New York: Putnam, 1928) xxvi-xxvii.

66his reverence for Virgil, himself believed to be a latent Christian. The medieval emphasis on this filiation between Virgil and Statius is illustrated by Fulgentius's comment that "in [Statius'] composing of the Thebaid he is the faithful emulator of Virgil's Aeneid.1,5

Another possible reason for the medieval appreciation of the Thebaid is rooted in the allegorizing tradition of the Middle Ages. Just as the Aeneid was read as an allegory,6 so also was the Thebaid. Fulgentius, as a Christian, interpreted the Thebaid as a symbolic representation of the two evils of greed and lust (the brothers) struggling for domination of the soul, which is represented by the city of Thebes. Although the soul is destroyed in the. battle, it is freed by the grace of the goodness of God, symbolized by Theseus.7 Statius' text lends itself to such a reading: his use of contrast and antithesis invites a view of the story as an allegory in which good and evil battle each other, in accordance with the Stoic concept of a balanced universe.8

Furthermore, although the text is overflowing with pagan gods, much of the ethic corresponds easily to

5 Leslie George Whitbread, Fulgentius the Mvthograoher (Ohio State UP, 1971) 239.

6 Whitbread, Fulgentius . . ., 109.7 Whitbread, Fulgentius . . ., 239-243.8 Vessey, Statius . . ., 67.

67Christian norms. In the middle of the Thebaid. before the war begins, Jupiter explains to Bacchus that the events are decreed by Fate, and cannot be changed. The will of the supreme deity, Jupiter, is synonymous with that of preordained Fate.9 Vessey sees Jupiter's speech as an illustration of the underlying Stoicism of the Thebaid; in his analysis, he states the following:

The fate of Thebes is the fate of all mankind. The laws which Jupiter enunciates are not particularised in time or space; they operate unceasingly. It is true that the austere rigidity of predestination is to some extent mitigated by the idea of divine mercy but, in the end, sin cannot remain unpunished. The individual life of man, like the lives of Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices and the other characters of the epic, is not self-contained, but an inseparable part of an ordered whole governed by moral law and administered by a just and impartial Deity.10

This description could have been written about the Christian concept of the Deity and His ordering of the universe. Furthermore, Vessey sees in the character of Theseus the triumph of virtue over sin. In his view, "The Thebaid is an epic not of sin but of redemption, a chronicle not of evil but of triumphant good."11 The similarities between the Stoic union of Jupiter and Fate, softened by mercy, and the Christian notion of God's will and providence, as seen here

9 Vessey, Statius . . ., 90.10 Vessey, Statius . . ., 91.11 Vessey, StatAug ...» 316.

68in the portrayal of Jupiter, were not likely to have escaped the medieval reader.

In addition, in the flourishing of vernacular texts in the twelfth century, the Thebes story, like the other romances of antiquity, was likely to have found a special legitimacy in contemporary eyes because of its classical origin and its strong written tradition.

Finally, the Thebaid probably had a special appeal in the twelfth century because of the theme of internecine war. In it, contemporaries found an echo of the problems Henry II had with his rebellious sons: Richard of Devizes refers to the Angevins as the "troubled house of Oedipus."12

This leads us to the anonymous twelfth-century Roman de Thdbes. Its extant manuscripts date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; since the nineteenth-century scholar Leopold Constans first worked on them, they have been grouped into three categories, excluding the remnant known as the Fragments d'Angers (220 verses). The short version is represented by two manuscripts (B and C, 10541 and 10562 verses, respectively) and has been edited and published by Guy Raynaud de Lage. The long version remains unpublished. It is represented by two manuscripts (A and P, 14627 and 13296 verses respectively). Manuscript S alone makes up the

12 Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "The Earliest Developments of the French Novel: The Roman de ThSbes in Verse and Prose," The French Novel: Theory and Practice French Literature Series11 (U of South Carolina, 1984) 3.

69third category (11546 verses).,3 In addition to its value as a different version of this popular text, it carries linguistic particularities: the lexicon and morphology indicate a Poitevin origin, while the spelling follows Anglo-Norman patterns.14 To these three versions of the Thebes story must be added a fourth--Constans' attempt to reconstruct an ur-text. Although he based his text primarily on ms S, it also included comparisons with the other four manuscripts.15

There are some interesting differences between the short and the long versions of the verse Roman de Thebes.The matter of interest here is the genre of the text. While Statius' version is clearly an epic, the same cannot be said for the twelfth-century versions. The Roman de Thebes is a locus for the coinciding of epic and romance, and in each of the two versions, epic and courtly motifs are present in different degrees, lending a distinct shape to each text.

The short version preceded the long, dating from 1150 or 1155. It follows Statius' version more closely than the

13 Aim£ Petit, Naiggjmces roman: Les techniqueslitteraires dans les romans antiques du Xlle si£cle. 2 vols. (Paris-Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1985) 2: 1085-88.

14 M. Nezirovic, Le Vocabulaire dans deux versions du Roman de Thdbes (Clermont-Ferrand: Association des publications de la Faculty des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1980) 3-4.

15 Leopold Constans, Le Roman de ThSbes. public d'acres tous les manuscrits 2 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1890; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968).

70long version and is considered to be "savante" and "pr^cieuse" in comparison to the longer version.16 Edmond Faral called it "le premier roman courtois;"17 it marks "le passage de l'£pop£e au roman."18 It is the earliest extant romance that grants a role to love.19 At the same time, it has a notable debt to chansons de geste (in particular to Che Chanson de Roland),20 and it presents an epic subject (war) with typical motifs such as the sending of an ambassador before hostilities begin.21

The longer version, comparatively, contains more of an emphasis on the courtly element. For example, in its structure, love and war episodes alternate, more monologues and dialogues provide a greater degree of psychological depth to the characterization, and the Ovidian love thematic is present.22 This longer version of Thebes is therefore considered "courtoise et plus romanesque" than the shorter

16 Petit, Naissances . . 2: 1186-7.17 Edmond Faral, "Les Commencements du roman courtois

frangais," Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moven £ae (Paris: Champion, 1913) 409.

18 Alexandre Micha, "Couleur epique dans le Roman de Th&bes." Romania 91 (1970): 145.

19 Micha, "Couleur . . .," 160.20 See Hoepffner, "La Chanson de geste et les debuts du

roman courtois" 427-37, cited in Alfred Adler, "The Roman de Th&bes. a "Consolatio Philosophiae," Romanische Forschunqen 72 (1960): 257-76.

21 Micha, "Couleur . . .," 146.22 Petit, Naissances . . ., 2: 1183-84.

71version.23

In both versions, there are primarily two areas in which the early Roman de ThSbes diverges from the epic tradition. These consist of the inclusion of a love thematic and the choice of octosyllabic rhymed couplets instead of laisses.24 Insofar as reception is concerned, it is thought that the romans d'antiauit^. like the epics, were seen as historical texts.25 The use of octosyllabic rhymed couplets in the mid twelfth-century would not have had a negative effect on the perception of the Roman de Thebes as historical: other historical texts were translated from Latin into verse in this period, a fact which indicates an acceptance of the form as appropriate for serious material.

But the emphasis on the love thematic may have caused the second version to be less acceptable as history in the eyes of our compiler. Because of certain plot similarities, it is surmised that it was a version close but not identical to the longer version which served as a model for the writer

23 Petit, Naissances . . .,2: 1187.24 Although the Roman de Th&bes is in octosyllabic rhymed

couplets, A. Micha sees a "survivance . . . de laisse" in the organization of the narrative of the verse Thebes: "Couleur . . .," 152.

25 Emmanu&le Baumgartner, "Temps linSaire, temps circulaire et 6criture romanesque (Xlle-XIIIe si&cles)," Le Temps et la durSe dans la literature au Moven toe et £ la Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bellenger Actes du collocrue organist par le Centre de Recherche sur la Literature du Moven Age et de la Renaissance de 1'university de Reims (Nov. 1984) 9.

72of the prose ThSbes.26 It is interesting that he chose not to include many important aspects of the longer version, such as the love relationships between Antigone and Ismeine, the daughters of the house of Thebes, and Parthenopeus and Athon, respectively, as well as that between Salemandre and Eteocles.27 It is also true that he omits episodes not related to the love motif (notably the vast majority of the war scenes), but in so doing he comments about his omission, justifying it with the reason that stories of battles lend themselves to falsehood.28 Unlike the combat descriptions, the loves of Antigone and Ismeine apparently merited neither inclusion nor acknowledgement in passing.

It is tempting to see the shorter Roman de Th&bes as a text primarily received as history, the longer version as one primarily received as romance, and the prose version as an attempt to correct and revalidate the history that had

26 Petit, Naissances . . .,2: 1187.27 The love relationships are present in the short version

as well, but are more developed in the long version. Petit, Naissances . . ., 1: 453-63. Cf. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "The Traditions . . . ." She interprets these courtlyembellishments as an indication that the longer text's function was that of "enjoyment of art for art's sake" (168), whereas the shorter had a value as anti-war exemplum (110-12) . This is a subject that merits further attention.

28 ". . . descrire lor batailles ne les aguais qu'ilfaisoient dedens e defors tant com il au siege furent n* est mie grans mestiers que je vos descrise, quar ass6s tost por bel parler i porroie dire me[n]songe qui ne seroit raisnable ne convegnable ne a profit ne tomeroit a nulle creature. Por ce lairai je a deviser lor conrois e lor batailles . . ." (f. 114b).

73become too courtly, without falling into the usual excesses in relating battle scenes. The very neatness of this categorization is problematic, however. While the writer of the prose version does not include the romantic elements surrounding Antigone and Ismeine, he does tell of the brief encounter between Tydeus and Ligurge's daughter.Furthermore, in designating one version as history and another as romance (that is, fiction), we are using a set of concepts that were not operative in the twelfth century. As Suzanne Fleischman notes, this is a "pseudo-problem which arises in the context of our contemporary critical preoccupation with taxonomies and oppositionally defined systems."29 Without accepting the facile and imprecise distinction between epic-history and romance-fiction, we can nevertheless note that the verse Roman de Th&bes was a text fluctuating between history and romance; it underwent a series of modulations that placed it at various times closer to history and then closer to romance. The writer of the prose ThSbes was in all likelihood aware of these different permutations of the text. We shall now examine where he placed his version on this continuum.

The prose Thebes is relatively short: in double columns of 39 lines each over 28 folios, if one counted each line as if it were verse the text would have an approximate

29 "On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages," History and Theory 22 (1983): 279.

74length of 4,500 lines.30 This constitutes an elimination of close to 10,000 lines as compared to the longer verse version in its extant form. This radical change in length as well as changes in certain plot and narrative elements could correspond to the supposed other verse version used as a source, close but not identical to the longer version in content, and shorter in length. However, it is also possible and it is my belief that the author of the prose version did not copy his text from a source unknown to modern scholars but used the existing tradition as a basis and modified the text to suit his purposes.31

II The Prose Thebes; Epic or Romance?As noted above, the verse Roman de Th&bes possesses

characteristics of both epic and romance. Following the well-known distinction between group action as characteristic of the epic and the individual guest as typical of romance, the prose ThSbes can be seen as the

30 A summary of the text is provided in appendix II.31 A prose version of the Thebes story had a certain

posterity in Lydgate's fourteenth-century Siege of Thebes. According to Axel Erdmann and Eilert Ekwall, Lydgate based his text on a version close to that which was printed by Pierre Sergent in the sixteenth century as Le Roman de Edipus (reprinted in the Collection Silvestre in 1858). This published version is not the same as that previously mentioned in chapter 1 (note 45), which was published in 1491 as the Hy-g.to l r e d e ThSfreg, being the first volume of Les histoires de Paul Prose traduites en francois. Axel Erdman and Eilert Ekwall, Lvdoate's Siege of Thebes. 2 vols. Early English Text Society Extra Series 125 (Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1973) 2: 6.

75former in that it is the story of a fratricidal war pitting groups of men against each other; yet it also functions as the latter when it is seen as the tale of the tragic posterity of one man's self-realization. Rewritten as prose history as one episode in a longer history, the story of Thebes represents a combination of epic and romance motifs.A destructive war is the central epic focus of the text, but at the same time some of the elements in the tale owe a debt to romance. The analysis of two characters, Oedipus and Tydeus, presents an interesting angle on this question.

Although Oedipus the heir of Polibus is "orgueullos," "fel," and "malicious"32 towards his companions, Oedipus the young man who seeks his parents is brave before the Sphinx:

Edippus esguarda la beste si le vit mout hisdose e grande e parcreue; ne fu mie merveille s'il en ot doutance, mes totes voies ses verais cuers li rasegura son corage.33

He is further described as "beaus e preus a desmesure . . . mout bien sambloit haus hom e de grant noblece."34 This positive view of Oedipus then dominates the text: when Jocasta is encouraged to remarry by the barons, one of the reasons given is that a lord is necessary to keep the peace; after her marriage to Oedipus, immediately after a

32 f. 89d.33 f. 91c.34 f. 92b.

76moralizing remark about the sinful times, the author recounts: "Mout fu Edippus li rois preus e sages. Mout guoverna bien le roiaume un grant tens si c'onques ne trova home ne voisin qu'il eCLst que li fesist guerre."35 It seems that the author has divorced Oedipus the valiant and good ruler from the role that he must play in this story as a sinner. The fact that Oedipus was able to maintain the peace is a crucial factor in the laudatory remark about his reign.

Aside from the fact that Oedipus is a sinner--and this is attributed rather to the times than to his individual will--he is an admirable character. He is heroic, but his exemplary qualities cannot absolve the single great wrong that ultimately qualifies him and brings about not only his own destruction but also that of his family and his city. One is reminded of the noble pagan motif, an aesthetic usually associated with epic. If only Baligant were Christian, he would be a great man; if only Oedipus had not taken his mother to wife, he would be equally admirable.

If this characterization hints of epic grandeur, the scene in which Oedipus and Jocasta realize their true relationship to each other is indicative of romance aesthetic by virtue of its attention to detail and psychology and its use of dialogue. The author creates a certain amount of suspense by the fact that Jocasta notices

35 f. 92b.

77the scars on his feet while he is bathing during the day, but says nothing until night when they are together in their bed. In this version, unlike both the long and the short verse versions, Jocasta has known all along that the infant son she had by Laius was left hanging from a tree by the soles of his feet and quickly discovered and taken off by a group of hunters; she does not know that her present husband killed her first husband. Therefore her knowledge of Oedipus' true identity is instantaneous as soon as she sees the scars. Oedipus, however, is unaware of this until nightfall. When they are alone, instead of immediate explanation and lamentation this is what happens:

La dame geta un souspir de cuer parfunt si com cele qui estoit entree en pensee. Edippus qui ne dormoit mie li dist: "Dame, que pens6s ore qui se durement souspir€s? Mout m'en vient a grant merveille." "E si ne vos esmerveill€s mie." "Dame," dist Edippus, "en totes fins veull je que vos me dites de ceste choze que vos pens£s ore en vostre cuer e de vos pensee la verit€."La dame li respondi: "Je nel vos celerai mie. . . .n36

After her explanation of the events surrounding the birth and abandonment of her infant son, Oedipus reacts:

Quant Edippus oi ensi parler la roine Jocaste mout s'en comensa a esmerveillier en lui meisme, e seut bien tantost que c'estoit il meismes dont la roine li avoit contee l'aventure. Adonc ne se puet abstenir de jeter un grant sospir qui delor faisoit demonstrance.37

36 f. 92c.37 f. 93a.

78The interiorized, self-contained reflection and emotion

soon tranforms itself into action. After Oedipus' story of his upbringing and his realization that he killed Laius at Phoces, Jocasta, weeping, examines the soles of his feet by candlelight. Once the truth is known, lamentation is not held back and the narrator tells us that "qui tote la voudroit descrire mout i avroit a faire e a dire."38

Several aspects of the above narrative are similar to Chretien's treatment of a similar problem in Erec et Enide. In that text, Enide's weeping wakes up Erec unintentionally and he must ask his question of her three times before getting a truthful answer. In this case, Oedipus is not asleep and Jocasta makes no attempt to hide the reasons for her concern.

However, both texts contain a gradual progression from interior lament to verbalization, and from verbalization to action. Both texts illustrate a passage from what is kept secret--and thus a certain degree of suspense is created--to what is irrevocably exposed. There is a sort of transgression of a taboo not only in the incestuous sense of the term but in the fact that the woman's private anguish must become public and more suffering will result, an inevitable consequence of her revealing of her innermost thoughts. In the ThSbes text, it is the speaking of the thoughts that brings on the misery, whereas in Erec et

38 nis. ffaire: f. 93c.

79Enide. it is the fact that Enide did not speak to Erec earlier about the character assassination that was going on behind his back, this constituting a kind of treasonous participation in the slander. Thus when Enide speaks she is implicitly admitting that she has done him wrong: she betrayed him by her previous silence. The thematic of speaking, secrets, suspense, and betrayal in the narrative provides a link between the two texts that could be a result of the compiler's acquaintance with Chretien de Troyes' work.

While both partners in Thebes are distraught, the text pointedly focuses on Oedipus' great misery. He has suddenly become an old man who weeps and sighs all of the time, and the narrator explains that "Tant plora li rois Edippus que par les larmes que assidueusement des oills li cheoient, perdi il sa veue."39 Oedipus does then tear his eyes out and cast them before his sons, as in the traditional version, but it is after his loss of sight by weeping. Here the writer follows neither the classical nor a verse model in the expression of the grief and horror.40 It is tempting to associate this embellishment of the story with the emphasis on sentiment and emotionality that was strong in romance, particularly in texts such as Chretien de Troyes'

39 f. 93d.40 Cf. Constans, Le Roman . . ., 2: 1-4 and 107-20;

Statius, Statius. ed. J.H. Mozley . . ., 1: 345.

80Lancelot and Yvain.

The character of Tydeus and the events surrounding him, as compared to earlier versions of Thebes. also reveal the guiding aesthetic at work in the mind of the writer. From the moment he appears in the text, he seems to personify the perfect knight. He is described as "preus e cortois e sages,"41 and the author uses the phrase "par grande mescheance"42 to describe Tydeus' killing of a relative in a forest, the reason for which he has left his father's kingdom (Calidonie). It is Polynices who does not wish to share his shelter with this new arrival, and it is Tydeus who again proves himself to be the more courtly when the offer of King Adrastus' daughters is presented to them: he defers, for no apparent reason, to Polynices for the choice of the two brides, and grants him his choice without disagreement.

Tydeus, courageous and hardy, volunteers to serve as Polynices' messenger and the narrator insists upon his correct etiquette at Eteocles' court. He is intelligent, sees Eteocles' hidden treachery, and is able to defeat fifty knights singlehandedly. It is after his victory over these knights that, on his way back to Adrastus' court, he passes through the territory of King Ligurge. Nearly dead, he stops to rest in a garden and falls asleep. He is found by

41 f. 95d.42 f. 95d.

81the daughter of the absent king, who takes him into her rooms, tends to his wounds, and tries to convince him to stay longer than the one day which he allows himself before returning to Adrastus' court. There is something curious about this in that later when Tydeus and the Greek army pass through the same king's lands and the young son is killed by the snake, there is no mention of any daughter.

This episode is not linked with the rest of the plot in any way; there is no mention of the princess either before or after the scene. It seems that its only function is to heighten the portrayal of Tydeus as a courtly knight: like Lancelot and Erec, he can now be seen as one who is capable of great self-sacrifice when loyalty commands it. He returns as quickly as possible to Adrastus and Polynices so that they will be apprised of Eteocles' ill will and murderous attack.

Before the battle, when Jocasta and her daughters are negotiating a settlement between the two parties, it is Tydeus who is mentioned in the text as successfully insisting that Eteocles also depart from Thebes for his year, as Polynices has done. Polynices, who should be playing this role, is not even mentioned, upstaged by his more courtly and heroic friend. Finally, at the end of the text it is Tydeus who has an heir. The narrator announces that his wife will bear Diomedes, who will play an important role in future events. The fact of his being blessed with

82progeny when none of the other characters is seems to indicate a more favorable view of him.

These features of the characterization of Tydeus demonstrate a mix of both epic and romance aspects. Like Roland, he can defeat incredible numbers of the enemy single-handedly. Like a hero at king Arthur's court, he is waylaid in a garden by a maiden who gladly heals his wounds and attempts to prolong his all-too-short stay with her.This is a very different Tydeus than the savage and bellicose character presented by Statius, who becomes so brutal and animalistic when mortally wounded by Melanippus on the battlefield that he sends Capaneus to kill his assaillant and then, gruesomely, bites into the dead Melanippus' skull and brain.43

The manner in which the prose author treats the thematics of war is also significant. He omits all of the group battle scenes, preferring to give the names of those killed in arms instead. He prefers the duel scene to pitched battle; thus he relates the combat between Polynices and Tydeus when they first meet, taking shelter in Adrastas' castle, as well as the final duel between Eteocles and Polynices. He also elaborates on the battle between Tydeus and the fifty knights, explaining how he saw the moonlight glinting on their armor as he approached the cave of the Sphinx that Oedipus had killed, and how he used the mouth of

43 Vessey, Statius . . ., 148-52 and 292-3.

83the cave to his advantage, as well as how he crushed several men with a boulder. This moment in the text is more thestory of Tydeus, the single knight, than it is that of groupwarfare. This is evidenced by the fact that the proseredactor, unlike the verse authors, does not name any of themen who attack Tydeus.44 The one scene that contains a group of people in an organized attack is that of the Theban women's assault on the walls of Thebes, clearly not a typical epic element.

War as a concept is vilified in the prose Thebes. It is enlisted as a misery-provoking character in the great alignment of examples of good and evil throughout humanity's tenure on earth. War is qualified as one of the primary evils that can befall humanity, and peace as one of the blessings brought by Christ:

Quar bien sach€s, segnors e dames, c'onques ces grans batailles ne ces grans malaventures ne cesserent ne ne finerent, si com vos por€s oir e entendre, trosques atant que nostre sires vint e descendi a terre mes tantost fu humaine creature, tote apaisee e cesserent les batailles e les pestilences par tot le monde.43

The presence of strife and warfare is a necessary expression of the sinfulness of the times. This treatment of the war thematic can be ascribed to the didactic purpose of the author.

44 Petit, Naissances . . ., 1:42 and 2:862-63.43 f. 117b.

84In sum, while the prose Thdbes echoes certain epic

traits such as, insofar as Oedipus is concerned, a variation on the noble pagan motif and, for Tydeus, courage and prowess in the face of the enemy, other aspects seem to point towards romance: suspenseful intimate dialogue between Oedipus and Jocasta and a romantic, if inconclusive, detour for a heroic but not bloodthirsty Tydeus.

The writer who created this new version of the fall of the house of Oedipus was also pointedly unenthusiastic about war. This is a key indication of the moral perspective that serves as an underpinning to the text. As noted above, the clerk's desire to illustrate the truth that is at the core of human experience rather than events that have dubious edificatory value causes him to pass over the battle scenes, declaring that "ass€s tost por bel parler i porroie dire menso[n]ge que ne seroit raisnable ne convegnable ne a profit ne tomeroit a nulle creature.1,46 This emphasis on truth and the explicit rejection of bel p a r l e r in favor of profit are also at the heart of his preference for prose over verse, which I shall discuss in the following chapter.

46 f. 114b.

85Chapter Four

Prose: The New Literacy

Although the first use of prose in texts intended to entertain occurred at the very end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, vernacular prose had long been a familiar form to the medieval clerk.1 However, there are few extant early French prose texts--from the period between 1100 and 1170, there exist two psalters, a lapidary, a biblical translation, and a collection of 64 sermons by Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris from 1160 to 1196.2 The relative paucity of early French prose texts, in comparison with the many prose works of the thirteenth century, has led to the general misconception that prose was born with the early thirteenth century. It is important to recognize that in the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Villehardouin wrote his Conqu£te de Constantinople, "la prose n'est plus dans l'enfance, . . . la prose est adulte. "3

Our concern here therefore is not centered on the birth

1 Jeanette M.A. Beer, Earlv Prose in France: Contexts of Bilingualism and Authority (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992) 2.

2 Jodogne, "La Naissance . . .," 296-301.

3 Jodogne, "La Naissance . . .," 301.

86of a form but on the uses of a form: at the very end of the century and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, the use of prose expanded to include material that had formerly been cast in verse, that is, history and romance.

It is this spread of the use of prose from texts written for spiritual edification to texts written at least in part to entertain that is exemplified in the Histoire ancienne: texts that had previously existed in French verse were rewritten in prose. Contemporary early prose works of this sort include the verse-prose transformation of Robert de Boron's Roman du Graal and the translation of the Pseudo- Turpin from Latin to French prose. All three of these texts have historical pretensions, as do Villehardouin's and Clari's respective crusade histories which were not translated or rewritten but originally composed in French prose. A change in literary aesthetic is taking place.

As the thirteenth century progresses, more twelfth- century verse romances will be transformed into prose, which will become the preferred medium for vernacular texts by the end of the century. The reasons for the sudden popularity of prose over verse are not entirely known. Writers of the twelfth century had used Old French verse in translating Latin prose historical texts such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia recrum Britanniae. which became Wace's Brut, as well as other texts such as the sermons of Saint Bernard. In the

87face of this tradition, Nicolas de Senlis' remark in his prologue to the Pseudo-Turpin that "nus contes rim6s n'est verais," echoed by other writers of this period, seems surprising.4 It constitues direct evidence that a shift in aesthetic had taken place but does not explain why. These two facts are at the root of our inquiry: first, writers of the early thirteenth century expressed a preference for prose over verse; secondly, this represented a departure from previous literary practice.

While some have focused on the practice of deversification or de-rhyming in the search for an understanding of this shift in aesthetic, this approach would not be fruitful here.5 The prose Thebes was theoretically based upon a verse Roman de Thdbes that is no longer extant, and therefore a direct comparison is impossible. One can speculate, however, that the compiler was a remanieur rather than a dgrimeur because of the narrator's occasional interventions in the thread of the narrative, in which he comments about other versions of the tale. It would be very unlikely for such remarks to

4 Cited from Jodogne, "La Naissance . . .," 302. He also cites other similar remarks.

5 See Georges Doutrepont, Les Mises en prose des SpopSes££— dss— comane— chevalereBques du xive au xvie sifecie.(Brussels: Palais des Academies, 1939); Hans-Erich Keller, "La Technique des mises en prose des chansons de geste," 01ifant 17 (1992) : 5-28; Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, TheEmergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaics. (Minneapolis, U of Minn P, 1987) 27-45.

88accompany simple de-rhyming of a text. In addition, as previously discussed, the compiler of the Histoire ancienne worked with a guiding concept of moral and spiritual edification that framed his approach to the prose Thebes. Consequently, it is my view that the compiler did not perform a simple transposition of the story from one form into another, but rather created an adaptation of it, using the source material as he saw fit and modifying it when he chose to.

I shall orient the discussion of the increasing use of prose around the notions of orality and literacy, first by discussing the theoretical link between oral literature and vernacular verse, and secondly by suggesting that the spread of the use of prose is related to the new lay literacy of the twelfth century.

It is appropriate to begin by considering different views of what constitutes an oral text. Milman Parry's research, begun in the 1920's and continued by his student and collaborator Albert B. Lord, has provided a theoretical basis for later scholars working on this question.6 Through Parry and Lord's work on the orality of the Homeric epic as demonstrated by analogy in field observations in modern-day Yugoslavia, they brought an awareness of the oral nature of all traditional epic poetry into view.

6 See John Miles Poley, The Theory of Oral Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988).

89In what became known as the oral- formulaic theory, they

argued that poets living in traditional oral societies create their poems anew each time they perform them, using as a basis for their works a vast reservoir of poetic formulae that they stitch together at the very moment of performance. Por the adherents of the oral-formulaic theory, being inheritors of a formalistic orientation, orality is constituted by the presence of discrete formulae and in addition by the straightforward simultaneity of composition and performance; it is a domain of textual activity from which all writing is excluded. In this view, by counting formulae, one can verify the oral nature of a medieval text which has been transmitted in writing.

In reaction to this theory, scholars have focused much attention on the oral aspect of poetic creation, in particular on the role of the formula. While it has been suggested that the analogy of modern-day Serbo-Croatian poets might not be applicable to those of the Middle Ages,7 most of the criticism of the oral-formulaic theory falls under the general area of definitions and distinctions.

Critics have taken proponents of the theory to task for using the term "oral literature" when what they meant was "oral poetry", and furthermore for using the term "oral poetry" when what they meant was formulaic poetry composed

7 D.H. Green, "Orality and Reading: The State of Research in Medieval Studies," Speculum 65 (1990): 270.

90at the moment of performance.8 The exact definition of the formula has also been debated. The four critics that I cite below see the problem of defining the oral text in different ways; however, all of them point out various aspects of the complex interrelationship between the written and the spoken modes of discourse and textual performance.

Ruth Finnegan demonstrates that the notion of orality can apply separately to textual composition and performance, a distinction that Parry and Lord do not make because they see them as necessarily simultaneous in order for a text to be considered oral.9 She rejects the very notions of formula and of oral literature. In her view, formulae are nothing other than poetic language, and the notion of oral literature is not clearly enough defined to form a separate category from that of written literature. She points out that the notion of oral literature is meaningless without further differentiation.10

Franz L. B&uml sees essentially the same flaw--that of lack of differentiation--in the oral-formulaic theory, but

8 Green, "Orality and Reading . . 271-72; See RuthFinnegan, "What is Oral Literature Anyway? Comments in the Light of Some African and Other Comparative Material," Oral Literature and the Formula, eds. Benjamin A. Stolz and RichardS. Shannon III (Ann Arbor: The Center for the Coordination ofAncient and Modem Studies, U of Michigan, 1976) 127-66.

9 Finnegan, "What is . . .," 144-45.10 She also gives examples of cases in which a text is

composed orally but then memorized before performance, a scenario which Parry and Lord exclude from their theory.

91tackles the problem from the opposite direction.11 Instead of rejecting the terms, he refines them, detailing primary, secondary, and tertiary aspects of the theory. His functional approach leads him to a highly structured system within which one can recognize the oral dimension of texts that would not be considered oral by Parry and Lord, such as those that are written but are performed aloud.

D.H. Green presents a third approach to the problem of defining a medieval text that has an oral aspect but does not fit squarely into the category of either written or oral, proposing the notion of an "intermediate mode of reception . . . in which a work was composed with an eye to public recital from a written text, but also for the occasional private reader."12

Paul Zumthor offers yet another perspective: he rejects the oral-formulaic theory outright, largely on the basis of the equivalency set up between formula and orality. He calls for a change in orientation, asserting that all medieval texts were read aloud (even when the reader was alone) and that performance, not origin, is the issue. He focuses therefore on the poetic function of the human voice as a dimension of the text, seeing the issue "less as a question of fact (supposing reconstitution and evidence) but

11 "Medieval Texts and the Two Theories of Oral-Formulaic Composition: A Proposal for a Third Theory," New L i t e r a r y History 16.1 (1984): 31-49.

12 "Orality and Reading . . .," 277.

92more one of interpretation (with a view to overcoming a reciprocal alterity by unravelling it)."13

The above remarks exemplify the fluidity of the notion of orality as applied to medieval texts. However, there is unity in the idea that the oral and written modes are interdependent. Most useful here is the recognition that there is more than one sort of oral text in the Middle Ages, and in particular that the spoken dimension of a written text which is performed should not be neglected.Medieval orality and literacy as they relate to twelfth- century texts are not mutually exclusive, but rather always a question of degree.

Although literacy was never absent from the post-Roman west, the period between the sixth and tenth centuries witnessed a predominance of oral culture in lay society. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the use of writing increased, both in Latin and in the vernacular, in a variety of social domains: writing was re-established in law and government by the mid twelfth century,14 there was an expanded use of written records,15 and lay literacy spread

13 "The Text and the Voice," New Literary History 16.1 (1984): 68.

14 See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976).

15 M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979).

93among the aristocracy and the growing middle class.16

This increase in the use of writing was not an overnight phenomenon, but gradual and progressive. As writing was slowly re-incorporated into a culture in which the oral mode had dominated, the result of this was that oral discourse suffered a loss of prestige, illustrated by its increasing incorporation into a written text. The oral text without written support was seen as less worthy and less credible, as is demonstrated by Orderic of Vitalis' remark that it is preferable to have a relatio autentica (reliable, written account) to a cantilena (popular song) when writing history.17 The written text as a source is all the more important in that it was a guarantee of a text's authenticity and seen as factually reliable.

The interconnectedness and interdependence of oral andwritten cultures remained, but the social value placed onthese skills was not a constant throughout the period. Asmedieval life became permeated by the revival of writing andincreased literacy brought certain attitudes with it, the"preliteraten of the tenth century became an "illiterate" of

«

the thirteenth century, now holding a disadvantaged position with regard to the literate: "For literacy's rise did not automatically spell the demise of traditional attitudes and tastes, although . . . altered values reclassified them as

16 Parkes, "The Literacy . . .," 556-58.17 Stock, The Implications . . ., 76.

94'popular,' meaning unlettered."18 Widespread literacy gradually influenced the development of certain ways of perceiving and ordering the world. It brought with it a change in attitude about texts, their modes of existence, and what these modes connote.19

Thus, the early medieval dominance of the oral mode over the written shifted so that by the twelfth century, written texts were more highly valued than oral ones. This rise in the use of writing within medieval society had a profound effect on attitudes about literary form, and resulted in the thirteenth-century-preference for prose as opposed to verse. The concept of literacy provides the key to this idea.

To be called litteratus in the Middle Ages meant that one had a knowledge of Latin. This included grammar, the ability to read and to compose texts, and in the most expanded sense of the term, a familiarity with Latin literature.20 In the medieval period the ability to read

18 Stock, The Implications . . ., 71.19 Although Stock may rely rather heavily on Goody's

anthropological approach, in which oral and literate cultures and ways of thinking are opposed, he nonetheless presents historical evidence in great detail which supports his assertions. Cf. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, rev. of Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past, by Brian Stock, Speculum 66 (1991): 480-82.

20 In fact, the definition changed over time, being applied as time went on more and more frequently to people with less knowledge. This was due in part to the benefit of clergy law in England which exempted clergy from execution. In earlier periods, the term was used only for those who had

95was distinct from that of writing, which was a special skill that required specific training and tools.21 Although the term litteratus did not apply to the vernacular, the existence of a literacy limited to French is affirmed by Nicolas de Senlis in his prologue to the Pseudo-Turpin.22

Several considerations of this problem have been made in recent scholarship. D.H. Green refers to the traditional definition of litteratus as unable to meet the needs of those working in the field of vernacular literature because it denies "that there was any such phenomenon in the Middle Ages as a layman able to read a vernacular text,1,23 and adds that studies in literacy should take into account the history of reading as well as writing.

Nearly twenty years ago, M.B. Parkes suggested an expansion of the notion of medieval literacy to include the ability to read and write in the vernacular, and delineated three kinds of literacy: professional reading (usually non­secular) , cultivated reading (for recreation), and pragmatic reading (business transactions)This trend towards a

knowledge of literature in addition to the ability to read; by the fourteenth century, litteratus referred to a minimal ability to read Latin. Clanchy discusses in detail the changing semantics of litteratus and clericus in his From Memory . . ., 175-201.

21 Clanchy, From Memory . . ., 88-115.22 The prologue is cited below.23 "Orality and Reading . . .," 274.24 "The Literacy . . ., " 555.

96refinement of the concept of literacy has continued in more recent scholarship.

Franz H. BSuml calls for more elaborate distinctions in his discussion of the notion of medieval literacy. He points out that the traditional definition of literacy as it applies to the medieval period "... will not serve when the intention is to describe, implicitly or explicitly, the function of literacy in medieval society.1,25 In his view, literacy and illiteracy are "conditions defined by two differing modes of communication," the first dominated by Latin, the second by the vernacular.26 He recognizes that literacy is a matter of degree when considering the individual case.

Bauml's focus on function, on the degrees of literacy, and in particular his notion of Latin and the vernacular as dominating two differing modes of communication are useful here.27 One cannot separate the social function of those

23 "Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy andIlliteracy," Speculum 55 (1980): 239. B&uml's criticism of the definition has three major points: First, he callsattention to intermediate levels between literacy and illiteracy in which a person is neither completely one nor the other. Secondly, he notes that the definition neglects the use of literacy by illiterate or partly literate individuals, thus obscuring the social function of literacy. Finally, he adds that the definition excludes the vernacular and the relationships between Latin and the vernacular.

26 "Varieties . . .," 239.27 See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The

Technol poizing of the Word (1982; London and New York: Routledge, 1989) . Ong's designations of primary and secondary orality can be loosely applied to vernacular and Latin

97first French prose histories from the question of Latin versus French literacy.

It can be said that all of those mentioned above seek to articulate and differentiate various levels of both literacy and orality. Their exploration of these levels is in itself an affirmation that the relationship between orality and literacy as two forms of expression is complex and multi-faceted rather than oppositional.

For D.H. Green,

"there is no clear-cut line between oral and written literature and . . . there was a long period of interaction between the two, so that the introduction of written literature in the vernacular did not immediately deal a deathblow to oral forms."28

Brian Stock also stresses the interdependence of the written and the oral and discusses the uses of texts as supplementary elements to an oral system of communication and contract. He narrows the scope to suggest that "to investigate medieval literacy is accordingly to inquire into the uses of texts. "29

Notions of orality and literacy overlap both in terms of skills and texts. There is a complex interplay between

culture, respectively, in that vernacular verse texts, as performed, were not as oriented around writing (if they were at all) as was Latin textual activity, which was strongly based on texts although it was vocalized and had an oral dimension.

28 "Orality . . 272.29 The Implications . . ., 7.

98the oral and the written, in which one is never completely absent from the other.30 It would be inaccurate to oppose them or to isolate them from one another. It may be said that in the earlier period (tenth century) the oral mode dominated as a means of textual expression, and that in the later period (late twelfth century and onwards) the written mode dominated, but one cannot separate the two. They were each used in the service of the same culture.

Medieval 'literature' from this viewpoint appears as if it is made up of a tangled intertwining of texts, each one of which barely lays claim to its own autonomy. Fuzzy contours encircle it imperfectly and the lines of communication from one part of this network to another are never cut off.31

This commment on the intertextuality of medieval literature can also be applied to the concepts of orality and literacy as they relate to the texts we have inherited from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They are not entirely oral because they have been transmitted in writing; at the same time, written texts contained at the very least the oral dimension of performance and reception.32 These "fuzzy contours" make the distinction between oral and written modes of textuality difficult to define.

30 That is, in the texts which have come down to us.31 Zumthor, "The Text . . .," 77.32 See Ruth Crosby, "Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,"

SESCUiUffi 11 (1936); 88-110.

99Against this backdrop of changing valuation of modes of

signification, it is possible to align orality with verse and prose with the expanding literacy of the period. This is what Wlad Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay have done in their book The Emergence of Prose: An Bssav in Prosaics.

The authors establish the notion of verse and prose as two different signifying practices and two entirely separate forms of literary expression. Verse is concrete and relies on the personal authority and physical presence of the jongleur who performs the text, giving it a personal voice. This personal guarantee of the text's authenticity came into question in the early thirteenth century. Prose is abstract and has no such authorial presence to substantiate its claims. It "operates in a purely textual space of its own making" and is voiceless.33

These ideas are supported by BcLuml, who notes the ephemeral quality of speech, the role of memory in oral culture, and the fixity and independence of writing. The consequences of this functional difference are in part that in oral performance, "themes are units of narrative composed primarily of an imagery of action" and "abstractions, if not personified, rendered in visual imagery, or cast in the form of proverbial expressions, are absent" while the written text "exists independently of the writing writer and the

33 The Emergence . . ., 34.

100reading reader".34 Also, the fixity and the independence of the written text allow a distance between the reciter or reader and the text and therefore a critical or ironic perspective in regard to it.

Godzich and Kittay explain the discrediting of verse by reason of its orality. There are two dimensions to this theory. Verse, as performance-based, is closely associated with the jongleur and therefore to the entire oral tradition. In their view, a loss of prestige on the part of the jongleur had a contaminating effect on verse. Secondly, they suggest that in the early thirteenth century, verse texts came to be seen as false by medieval people because of the importance of sound over sense in creating rhymes: truth was thought to take a back seat to rhyme in verse texts.The preference for prose would therefore be due to a deep distrust of orality as a signifying mode.

As evidence for this theory, Godzich and Kittay cite two medieval authors. Because of the importance to their thesis, it is significant that these texts be cited in their entirety. The first is the prologue to the Pseudo-Turpin (1202) , by Nicolas de Senlis:35

34 BcUiml, "Varieties . . .," 248. These ideas are also mentioned by Walter J. Ong, in Oralitv . . ., with the important distinction that he qualifies all writing as presenting utterance and thought as self-contained, not just prose.

35 Cited from Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . .,xiii-xiv.

101En l'enor nostre Segnior qui est Peres e Fils e Saint Esperis et qui est un Dex en trois personnes, e au nom de la gloriose mere madame saincte Marie, voil commencier l'estoire si cum li bons empereires Karlemaines en ala en Espagnie por la terre conquerre sour les Sarasins. Maintes gens si en ont oi conter et chanter, mes n'est si mengonge non go qu'il en dient e en chantent, cil chanteor ni cil jogleor. Nus contes rim£s n'est verais; tot est mengongie go qu'il en dient; car il n'en sievent riens for quant pour oir dire. Li bons Baudouins, li cuens de Chainau, si ama most Karlemaines. Ni ne vout onque croire chose que l'on en chantast; ainz fist cercher totes les bones abeies de France e garder par totes les aumaires por saver si l'om i troveroit la veraie ystoire; ne onques trover ne li porent li cler. Tant avint que uns sis clers si ala en Borgognie por l'estoire querre eissi cum Deu plot: si la trova H Sans en Borgognie, icele istoire meismement que Turpins li bons arcevesques de Reins escrit en Espagnie, qui avec le bon empereur Karlemaines fu e tot les miracles, e tot le conquest qu'il fit, por so qu'il sot que vers fu, si les escrivit par nuit et par jor quant il en vait lisir, si cum il li avenoient le jor. Dont on feist mieux cil £ croire qui i fu, qui le vit, que ne font cil qui riens n'en sevent fors quant por oir dire. Li clers au bon comte Baudouin contrescrit l'estoire et 3. son segnor l'aporta, qui most la tint en grant chert£ tant que il vesqui. E quant il sot qu'il dut mourir, si envoia son livre 3. son seror, la bonne Yolande la comtesse de Saint-Pou, e si li manda que par amor de lui gardast le livre cum ele vivroit. La bone comtesse ha gard€ le livre jusqu'3. ore. Or si me proie que je le mete de latin en romans sans rime; por go que teux set de letre qui de latin ne le seust eslire, e por ce que par romans sera il mieus gardes. Or se or€s qui li bons arcevesques en raconte.

The second is a brief excerpt from La Mort Avmerie de Narbonne (1180) :36

Nus horn ne puet changon de jeste dire que il ne mente la ou li verse define, as mos drecier et a tailler la rime.

36 Lines 3055-62, cited from Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 145.

102Ce est bien voirs, gramaire le devise, uns hom la fist de l'anciene vie,Hues ot non, si la mist en un livre Et seela el mostier Saint Denise.La ou les jestes de France sont escrites.

In the view of Godzich and Kittay, Nicolas de Senlis' remarks constitute a mise en question of oral literary practice and the citation from Mort Aymerie is ". . . specifically an attack ad hominem. against the class of versifiers among which it counts its author as an exception.n37

However, a close reading of these citations allows for a different interpretation of precisely what is under attack. In neither text do the authors criticize jongleurs per se; rather, they criticize the fact that the jongleurs do not rely on written sources.

In the prologue to the Pseudo-Turpin. Nicolas de Senlisaffirms the superiority of his text because even though thestory has been told, "n'est si menqonge non go qu'il en dient e en chantent, cil chanteor ni cil jogleor." His explicit justification for this condemnation of the singers and jongleurs is because "il n'en sievent riens for quant pour oir dire," and not because of the manner of performance of their works. Nicolas further stresses the importance of the written Latin tradition as his source by recounting how

37 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 145.

103Baldwin sought the "veraie ystoire" in the "bones abeies" and the "aumaires," finally finding it in Sens. His validation of the text becomes contingent upon the recognition of the superior source, and to evoke the full power of this auctoritas. he names the city and the region where the Latin text was found, Turpin's name with its accompanying epithet "li bons arcevesques de Reins," "Espaigne" as the place of the original composition, his status as Charlemagne's companion and his role as witness guaranteeing the truth. Moreover, he specifies that Turpin himself wrote the text "par nuit et par jor quant il en vait lisir, si cum il li avenoient le jor," a phrase which suggests that Turpin did not dictate to a scribe but physically wrote the manuscript himself without the potential falsification of an intermediary scribe.

The comment that "Dont on feist mieux cil d croire qui i fu, qui le vit, que ne font cil qui riens n'en sevent fors quant por oir dire” sums up the entire purpose of his prologue as well as his criticisms of the jongleurs: hearsay does not stand up next to a text guaranteed by an eyewitness and transmitted in Latin. Nicolas' careful description of the transmission of the text--how it was copied by Baldwin's clerk, then given to Yolande, who has asked "que je le mete de latin en romans sans rime" underlines this central focus on the written source. The reason why no rhymed works are truthful is because they are based on hearsay.

104The preoccupation with written sources is also

demonstrated in the citation from La Mort Aymerie de N a r b o n n e. in the claim that "ce est bien voirs, gramaire le devise;" as in the prologue to the Pseudo-Turpin, the poet backs up his text with as much precise information as possible: the name of the author of the written source, the fact of his old age, and the association of the book with Saint-Denis and the aestes de France are all intended to cause the reader to see this text as truthful because of the documented written source and the prestige of its place of origin and the other texts being written there.

The citation from La Mort Avmerie de Narbonne clearly substantiates the idea that verse's rhyme associated it with lying and falsehood in the eyes of the medieval writer, yet this writer appears to be more concerned about delineating the text's history and establishing it as trustworthy than about criticizing jongleurs as a class.

Thus the remarks excerpted above are not relative to the "whole system of transmission of the oral tradition1,38 and a distrust of orality as a signifying mode but rather to the specific question of oral versus written sources, as distinct from performance and textuality. In addition, the fact that the second text is itself in verse needs less explaining if one considers that the prevalent question in the mind of the composer is that of source and not of the

38 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . .," xv.

105entire oral-verse tradition.

Godzich and Kittay present verse and prose as opposites, one as oral and the other as silent. This assertion poses certain problems. Although they acknowledge that monastic reading was uttered39 and that early punctuation served as an aid to reading aloud,40 their general perspective is that prose was a form read silently, not enunciated aloud. A prose text is "a silent communicative framework."41 In fact, they do not offer a definition of the notion of orality, nor do they consider the dynamics of the reading aloud of a prose text. While the reading aloud of a prose text may have met a different type of reception than a jongleur's performance, they are both oral. Virtually all reading was voiced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.42 And as the above discussion of orality and literacy has shown, the two concepts are not readily separated when considering texts of the medieval period. It would appear that the hypothesis that verse was discredited because of its orality would be tenable only if

39 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 123.40 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 134.41 Godzich and Kittay The Emergence . . ., 37.42 Stock, The Implications . . ., 408-09. See Paul

Saenger, "Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society," Viator 13 (1982) : "Most twelfth- and thirteenth- century miniatures continued to show people reading in groups.To read in groups was to read aloud; to read alone was tomumble" (379-80).

106one were certain that prose was not oral In any sense of the term.

The oral dimension of prose is not necessarily limited to the fact of its vocalization. In this perspective, one can cite the work of Walter J. Ong, who, like Parry and Lord, has developed a set of criteria that can be used to distinguish a text composed orally from a text composed in writing.43 These criteria may be applied to a prose text as well as to a verse one.

Ong delineates several features that are significant as oral residue in a written text. One such aspect is an aggregative as opposed to a subordinative syntax in the narrative style. Another is a narrative voice which is empathetic and participatory rather than objective and distanced. Ong qualifies medieval romance as "a product of a chirographic culture but heavily reliant on oral modes of thought and expression.1,44 His perspective, which acknowledges the influence of both oral traditions and the effects of writing, accommodates the medieval text that owes

43 Ong, Oralitv . . . . He sees literacy as an autonomous set of skills that, once learned, changes the manner of ordering knowledge and of perceiving the world. Thus the adoption of certain thought processes is associated with the acquisition of literacy by non-Westerners. Thisanthropological approach is also employed by Goody. For a criticism of this approach to literacy, cf. Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).

44 Ong, Oralitv . . ., 159.

107something to both forms of textual expression.

In spite of the reservations mentioned above about the strict dichotomy between the verse as oral and the prose as written, the connection of verse to the oral tradition--here meant in the limited sense of texts performed by jongleurs-- is logical. It is possible that the octosyllabic rhymed couplet was a pre-literate form which retained a certain resonance of orality even after it had become a written form.45 This argument is supported by the idea that the line's brevity in and of itself may have served as a mnemonic device. Evelyn Birge Vitz argues plausibly that its rapid and widespread adoption in written twelfth-century texts indicates that as a form, it had already been fully developed in oral texts and was not a clerical invention, as has been commonly believed.46

If one considers the notion of orality to refer to the idea of reading before an audience, then prose texts such as the Histoire ancienne. which was manifestly created to be read aloud (as evidenced by many instances of direct address to a listening public), could not be considered to be other than oral. As such, it could be considered as fitting into Green's intermediate category, that is to say as a written

45 See Evelyn Birge Vitz, "Rethinking Old French Literature: The Orality of the Octosyllabic Couplet," Romanic Review 77 (1986): 307-321.

46 This hypothesis is very interesting but is not substantiated by any proof, given that widespread adoption of the form does not necessarily preclude clerical invention.

108text created for performance.

The narrator in the prose Th&bes makes himself most clearly heard in the verse prologue and in the nineteen verse moralizations interpolated in the text. While the author's choice of verse here would appear to support Godzich and Kittay's idea that verse was a form more associated with a subjective presence, it would also appear to contradict their idea that verse was perceived as a non- credible form, hence inappropriate for serious content.There is a gradual effacement of oral markers in later versions of the Histoire ancienne.47 This might indicate that if there were a negative value judgment of orality, and if verse were strongly associated with orality, it was not as strong in the beginning of the century.

In my view, the theory that identifies the increasing use of prose with the discrediting of verse by reason of its association with orality is inviting but does not provide a complete answer to the new use of prose. As discussed above, spoken and written textual practices were intricately linked; it may therefore be profitable to direct our attention once again to the change that was taking place in the twelfth century in regard to uses and concepts of written texts. As mentioned above, the use of written texts increased during this period, as did the skills in reading

47 As noted by Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 243-44, n. 41.

109and writing that created them. In this period, religious reformers, the scholastics, and the lay aristocracy all began to use written texts in different functional contexts than they had in the past. All three of these groups are illustrative of a change in mentality about writing.

Stock has shown how heretics and religious reformers such as the Cistercians based their beliefs on written texts, using them for justification of their ideas.48 At the same time, the rise of the universities out of the cathedral schools gave birth to a new use of texts and a new kind of reading. While the older style of monastic reading involved a self-identification with the work being read, the new scholastic reading was more ratiocinative,49 demanding a sequence of question, argument, and conclusion in an intellectual debate. This kind of focus on written texts was the foundation for a growing intellectualism. And perhaps most importantly for the purposes of our present discussion, the lay aristocracy, in particular Henry II and the Flemish dukes, used historical texts in the service of their political aspirations, to bolster their images by aligning themselves genealogically with mythological heroes and great men of the past.

This wider use of texts brought with it a greater valorization of texts and reading. The act of reading was

48 The Implications . . ., 88.49 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 123.

110no longer limited to the world of the Latinate clergy, as is evidenced by the flourishing of verse vernacular written texts in the twelfth century--texts that were written at the behest of aristocratic lay patrons. This new lay vernacular literacy (Parkes' recreational literacy) and spread of texts has been associated with the aristocracy's attempts to establish and maintain itself as a social class distinct from the rising bourgeoisie and the expanding royal power. Vernacular verse, as represented by the jongleur and his oral arts, did not provide the lay patrons with a sufficient range of expression for their social and political aspirations.

Orality was the other side of the intellectualism mentioned above; it was associated with the customary and the transient, while writing was associated with the canonical and the permanent. The oral carried a connotation of the popular as opposed to the learned, and as oral sources began to be seen less favorably than written sources, the written word gradually took on a higher level of status than the spoken word.

The loss of the jongleur's status, perhaps caused by the new preference for a written auctoritas. accompanied by the social and political aspirations of the aristocracy, brought about a need for a form that would resonate with the voice of truth and validity. Prose, as the form used in the Bible as well as in all of medieval society's most serious

Illcontexts--theology and law--was an obvious choice for the writer who wished his text to be received as truth. This is especially pertinent because of the historical pretensions of all of the vernacular prose texts of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries: the Histoire ancienne. the Pseudo-Turpin. the crusade histories, and the Roman du Graal. to name the better-known titles.

The increasing popularity of vernacular prose may therefore be linked to the rise in lay vernacular literacy and in an expansion of the social uses and function of writing. This widening of literacy and its uses brought into being a need for a form that could be for the aristocratic vernacular public a corollary of what Latin prose was for the clergy. It is quite possible that a clerk with a moralistic bent such as the creator of the Histoire ancienne also saw in the use of vernacular prose an opportunity for the spread of knowledge among the illiterati. In this light, the use of French prose in historiographical texts represents the same evangelizing movement illustrated in earlier periods by Augustine's endorsement of a simple Latin style in the creation of the early biblical texts, and the shift to preaching in the vernacular, respectively.

As Nicolas de Senlis himself affirmed in the prologue cited above, not everyone could read Latin. This was especially true of aristocratic women, who were nevertheless

112in the position to commission texts as Yolande did. The use of prose represents not only an emulation of the Latin tradition, but an expansion of Latin's savoir and an attempt on the part of the aristocracy to speak in a voice which would draw its authority from both the prestige of the form itself and the explicit reference to truth and auctoritas: in the case of both the Histoire ancienne and the Pseudo- Turpin, the author specifically emphasizes a written source in the prologue.

In Nicolas de Senlis' prologue, one of the reasons which he states for translating the text into "romans sans rime" is so that it will be "mieus gardes"--an expression that can refer both to modem French "garder" --being better kept in the sense of more permanent, and to "regarder" -- more accessible to being read. This substantiates the idea that a prose text such as this one is intended to be received as serious literature and to fit into a vernacular literary context that parallels the existing Latin intellectual tradition.

The use of prose in the early thirteenth century is representative of several things: a higher level of discourse than verse, it is the establishment of a vernacular form that corresponds in function to Otto of Freising's sermo simplex, which he designated as arnica

113veritatis :50 at the same time it is the grounding of a textual community composed of those who are not able to read Latin or who prefer the vernacular. Furthermore, it is the affirmation of either written sources or personal authority of the author over oral hearsay as a source and thus signals the demise of the jongleur tradition. In addition, it marks the move from the jongleur's performance to the clerk's reading performance.

The written French prose of this period signals the shift from primary orality to secondary orality as far as the vernacular is concerned: henceforth the oral dimension of vernacular texts will be increasingly based on a written text. This also parallels the Latin tradition in its dependence on the written text and not on free performance.51 The writing of vernacular prose brings into being a new literacy, specifically vernacular, that rivals

50 Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . 149. This idea is also supported by the fact that prose is the language of the Bible and hence the language of truth.

51 The importance of the existing Latin tradition and its prestige as a primary influence on the move from vernacular verse to vernacular prose is capital. In Earlv Prose . . ., Jeanette M.A. Beer has shown that French prose was consistently created in a context of social and political prestige and authority, and that it was greatly enriched by the bilingual context of the Middle Ages, borrowing both lexicon and syntax from Latin more freely than did French verse (141). She questions the notion that deversification produced the lengthy prose texts of the thirteenth century (6), and in her discussion of the Jonah Fragment points out that "vernacular prose . . . early acquired a whole range of rhythms, vocabulary, and syntactic devices from its bilingual presentations of Scripture" (57).

114and will eventually replace the tradition of Latin literacy.

115Chapter Five

The devise of jThSbes

"Et apres vos ferai savoir De Tebes tote la devise."1

The compiler's use of the word devise in describing the Thebes story can be read in two ways. The term can signify "entretien" or "conversation" but also refers to a "signe distinctif." In the following discussion, I shall examine the prose Thebes as both story and sign, focusing first on its function as entertainment and exemplum, then on its meaning as myth and metaphor, and finally going on to consider the importance of narrative organization in determining meaning.

As previously noted, the author of the Histoire ancienne eliminated nearly all of the battle scenes that traditionally occupy at least half of the text. The resulting structure of the prose Thebes is as follows:1. Oedipus' birth, upbringing, marriage with Jocasta,

discovery of true identity;2. Agreement for alternate yearly rule of Eteocles and

Polynices: Polynices leaves Thebes and goes to Argos;3. Tydeus goes to Thebes as messenger, returns to Argos;

1 f. 2a, cited from Meyer, "Les Premieres compilations . . 55.

1164. Greeks assemble and march on Thebes;5. Confrontation and mutual destruction.

The major events of the plot involve the moving into place of the main characters. Their eventual joining brings about the double annihilation. Thus the dynamic of the first part, in which Oedipus as infant leaves Thebes but eventually returns, causing the destruction of his family, plays itself out in the rest of the text: Polynices leaves, and his eventual return brings death to both parties of the conflict. Tydeus as a proxy for Polynices sets into motion what was before merely the potential for violence, his victory over his fifty assailants functioning as a peripeteia: it illustrates the villainous nature of Eteocles' character while providing a note of false optimism, Tydeus' valor suggesting a possible eventual conquest for Polynices. A second peripeteia is the Greek army's eventual success in finding water and the killing of the snake that claimed the life of Ligurges' child.

Each major plot movement is seconded by the motifs of military prowess and a feminine presence. In the Oedipus section, these are illustrated by his defeat of the Sphinx and Jocasta; in Polynices' departure from Thebes and arrival at Argos, by his fight with Tydeus and their subsequent marriages to the daughters of King Adrastus. In the third section, when Tydeus goes as a messenger to Thebes, these motifs are visible in his defeat of the fifty knights who

117ambush him and his brief stay in the garden and rooms of the daughter of King Ligurges. After the Greeks have begun their march on Thebes, this pattern reverses itself, the feminine presence manifesting itself first in Hypsipyle and the military might following in the necessary destruction of the serpent responsible for the death of Ligurges' infant child. The same is also true of the events that precede the actual joining of battle: Jocasta, Antigone and Ismeine form a delegation to Polynices, and the Greek soldiers' killing of the pet tiger initiates hostilities. Finally, after the brothers have killed each other, Adrastus is reduced to the status of observer by the fact of his having no soldiers left to command against Creon who holds Thebes. Here the action is transferred to others: Theseus and Creon. The bipartite sub-structure of feminine presence either following upon or preceded by death is folded in upon itself as the Greek women attack the walls under Theseus; the resulting victory causes the death of the men of Thebes and the sale and servitude of the women and children.

The appeal of the prose Th&bes to its public can be linked to its exploitation of popular literary motifs and its portrayal of feudal power relationships. The presence of the fantastic is most obvious in the form of strange and exotic creatures: Oedipus is confronted with the Sphinx and successfully solves a riddle that saves his life; a monstrous serpent kills a young child; Antigone and Ismeine

118have a domesticated tiger. In addition, there is the presence of paganism. It is illustrated by an ymages inhabited by the devil, who speaks through it; its priest, Amphiaras, can see into the future and knows the defeat that will take place at Thebes. His attempt to hide and to avoid going to battle with Adrastus and the others on the Greek side is a foreshadowing of his own destiny, in which he is swallowed into the obscurity of a gaping chasm in the earth that mysteriously closes up again.

Another aspect of the text that was surely highly entertaining to the medieval public is the vision that Adrastus has concerning the arrival of Tydeus and Polynices at Arges. In a dream that the narrator describes before it in fact occurs, the gods tell Adrastus that a boar and a lion will be his two future sons-in-law; when the two men arrive and a dramatic battle ensues between them for the right to shelter on this stormy night (which in itself is a reminiscence of the Aeneid), the juxtaposition of the animal symbolism and the mens' combat reminds the knowing listener of Charlemagne's dream of being attacked by a leopard and a boar in the Chanson de Roland. After Adrastus intervenes in the struggle, the reader is told that this is the night on which he has the already-mentioned dream. The next day, Adrastas seeks an interpretation for his dream and is told by the gods that if he examines the shields of the two young men, he will see the two animals of his vision. This

119development and the accompanying single combat scene exploit the epic motifs of prowess and ferocity in battle; the use of the animal symbolism could also represent the writer's attempt to establish a parallel between the heroism portrayed in the Chanson de Roland and the calibre of these two men.

Feudal power relationships are portrayed in several ways. First, as has already been noted, Eteocles is seen to be unfaithful to his word and thus plays the role of the offending party. More interestingly, the barons play a meaningful role in the text. This may be a result of the fact that the writer is working for a member of the nobility and not the royal house. They are first present in the Oedipal prologue in which they urge Jocasta to take a husband in order to keep the peace. Later, they have an instrumental role in the establishment of the agreement between Eteocles and Polynices. In both of these situations, the barons are simply referred to as a unit and are all in accord with one another. At no point in the text is a single baron or advisor given an independent identity. However, when Eteocles tells his barons that he does not wish to keep the agreement, dissent is registered by the writer, still without the development of any individual characters.

One of the most interesting episodes of the text in terms of the illustration of feudal relationships occurs

120after Tydeus has defeated all fifty knights sent to ambush him. He allows one of the knights to live and sends him back to Eteocles to tell of the outcome of the attack. The knight upbraids Eteocles for his treachery, then commits suicide before the court. The disastrous attempt to kill Tydeus results in the murmuring of the Thebans against Eteocles. The fact that Polynices is presented as the wronged party unjustly ousted from control and that Eteocles as the holder of the throne is presented in such negative terms may be an echo of the dispute over the territory of Artois, in which the king dominated but was felt to be in the wrong by Flemish nobles.2 The narrator's preference for Polynices as the outsider is an interesting parallel to the Flemish aristocracy's diminishing power in this period.3

I shall now turn to the text's function as moral lesson, first exploring the mythic dimension of the text functioning in the service of Christian belief, and then going on to examine the role of paratactic narrative structure in presenting the text as exemplum.

2 Spiegel, "Pseudo-Turpin . . 212-13.3 The narrator clearly indicates this leaning by such

remarks as the following (speaking of the people of Thebes): n. . . meaus amoient Pollinicet qu'il ne faisoient Ethiocles quar Ethiocles estoit plus fel de mout d'afaires que ne fu Pollinices" (f. 97d).

121Prose Thibes as Christian Mythology

For the classical world, the Theban myth told the story of fate that could not be avoided or denied. It was an expos# of the inexorable character of the gods' judgment.It has already been noted how Fulgentius' Christian allegorizing offered a Christian interpretation of the Thebaid. The fact that the pagan deities are almost entirely absent from the prose Thibes is also expressive of another sort of Christianizing tendency. It is noteworthy that those aspects that do have a strong mythic tincture can be seen to function in the service of Christian values.This is illustrative of the compiler's general transformation of non-Christian mythic content into Christian exemplum. His use of classic material to express a Christian meaning is not unusual: medieval commentators also found the Aeneid to be a ready vehicle for Christian values, seeing in its general structure of fall and rebirth the human story of fall and redemption.

There are two critical moments that illustrate this transformation; each is an important recognition point in the narrative.4 When Jocasta sees the scars on the bottom

4 Here I employ the notion of a point of recognition as discussed by Northrop Frye; it is na moment at which suspense dissolves and the overall pattern of the text as a whole becomes clear to the reader. Such points of identification reveal hidden truths; they are often associated with talismans, birthmarks, or other identifying objects or features'* (Fables, of Identity; Studies in Poetic Mythology

122of Oedipus' feet, the text takes a decisive turn. As mentioned above, Jocasta already knows that her infant son was rescued from the tree where the servants hung him from the soles of his feet. Therefore the sight of his scars is accompanied by instant knowledge of his true identity. Interestingly enough, as readers we know it before Oedipus does. This is a moment of crisis: the revelation of Oedipus' identity as her son ensures the misfortune of their children. The overall design of the text thus emerges: after this, a non-tragic ending is impossible.

The recognition scene in which Oedipus knows with fatal certainty that "li deu me heent"5 is the point in which the reader also knows with finality that in spite of the heroism and handsome looks of Oedipus, qualities that could designate the protagonist of a comedy as well as that of a tragedy, the text is tragic. Until that moment, the unknowing reader (if one can imagine an unknowing reader of the Oedipus story) could have visualized the text turning in either direction.

It is interesting that although the pagan deities are almost entirely absent from the text, they are mentioned by Oedipus upon his realization of this condemnation. Guided as he is by fate, the fact that Oedipus has committed these monstrosities means that the gods do not favor him; he knows

[New York: Harcourt, 19633 21-38) .5 f. 93c.

123that he must face divine punishment for these impious acts. In a Christian sense, one can see that Oedipus' false gods have led him astray. He is lost because he did not know the true God, and his misdirected behavior can be seen as a reflection of his misdirected religious sentiment.Moreover, the generic manner in which they are denoted allows a parallelization with the Christian God. Although Oedipus may feel and state that the gods hate him, the thirteenth-century Christian reader knows that it is the one true God "who never lies" that will punish him.

The second point of recognition in the text takes place when the pagan bishop Amphiaras is swallowed up by the earth on the battlefield before Thebes, just after the war has begun.6 This event causes consternation in the Greek army and is generally perceived as a sign of the gods' disapproval of Polynices and the Greeks. Up until this occurrence, the chain of events appears to be positive for Polynices: he is in a position of moral superiority established not only by the fact that it is Eteocles who wishes to transgress the agreement, but also by the treacherous attack made on Tydeus when he was sent as a messenger, a personage traditionally granted safe passage between enemy camps. Even when drought threatened the Greeks' enterprise, circumstances were in their favor in the

6 This scene might not constitute a typical recognition scene by Frye's standards, in that there is no revelation made about a specific character's identity.

124person of Hypsipyle. It is at this point that the characters realize that the gods do not favor their cause, and appropriately enough, the narrator uses this point to comment on the wages of serving the devil, as noted above in chapter two:

. . . e Amphioraus toz vis fu trebuch€s en infer e el parfunt abisme. Segnor, ce fu par sa tresgrant desloiaute qu'il trop avoit demenee, guar il cuidoit les deables servir toz les jors de sa vie e lor ovres avoit faites faire as gens de son regne e anunciees. E qui le deable sert n'en a autre loier a la persone, que ce qu'il en est honis. Quar c'est li merite qu'il por lui servir rent et done.7

This moment serves not only as a recognition point for the characters in the text, but also for the reader, albeit each recognition concerns different gods and mores, some pagan, the other Christian.

Here the writer has specifically referred to Amphiaras' gods as deables. then, echoing a similar remark made in the verse prologue, he speaks to the public, reminding them that those who serve the deable will receive the same reward.The parallel use of the singular deable to the plural establishes a clear relationship of equality between the pagan gods of long ago and the devil who continues to lead people astray.

These features of the classical non-Christian myth bear a new Christian significance in the hands of the prose

7 f. 113c.

125compiler, who removes or alters pagan trappings to reveal a Christian core. This displacement8 of the mythological material brings the prose Thebes into line with thirteenth- century notions of spirituality, and as historical truth it must establish a firm condemnation of pagans, illustrations for modem Christians who might be prone to such foolishness and wrong-headedness.

In addition to the Christian transformation of the Thebes material by means of displacement of references to pagan deities, the presence and the influence of Genesis as a framing text introducing the entire compilation must not be overlooked. The tale of Thibes is that of a double fratricide, and in the manner in which it is told here it functions as a reminder of Cain's murder of Abel.

Cain's bad character and his jealousy of Abel's success and well-received holy sacrifices repeat themselves in Eteocles. In Genesis, when Cain's insincere offerings are not welcomed by God, the author explains that "Chains qui ce veoit en estoit mout dolans ne n'en savoit que fere, mes par tout ce ne se voloit il mie amender ne dou mal retraire," and when Cain sees Abel's success, the author adds: "cruit en Chaym li male pensee, et li envie, e la haine envers son frere qui de tot ce ne s'apensoit mie."9

8 Displacement denotes "the techniques a writer uses to make his story credible, logically motivated or morally acceptable--lifelike, in short" (Frye, Fables . . ., 35).

9 f. 6a, cited from Joslin, "A Critical . . 21-22.

126In the prose Th&bes. Eteocles' greed is stressed in the

description of his "grant covoitise de tenir le regne en pais toz les jors de sa vie.”10 He tells his barons that "il le feroit s'il pooit ocire"11 (speaking of Polynices)and he speaks with "felonie" and "decevance"12 to Polynices'messenger Tydeus and then sends fifty men to ambush him. It is Eteocles who refuses to keep the agreement of shared rule that he had previously made before all of the barons of the court,13 and Eteocles' state of pariure is stressed at the same point in the text in which he invokes his gods: he is clearly in the wrong both by secular legal standards and by eternal spiritual ones, and the writer has carefully united these two themes in this passage:

Sa mere meisme la roine Jocaste l'en pria moult e li dist que vers son frere ne se parjurast mie. Etioclesjura toz les deus ou il avoit sa creance que ja n'enferoit envers lui tel partie, quar la puis n'avroient pais ensamble. Li baron l'en blasmerent mout, cil qui sage home estoient, e distrent qu'il mout fol seroient s'il ensi por li de la convenance qui entr'aus .ij. estoit faite se parjuroient .14

The writer has explicitly presented Polynices as being

10 f. 94d.11 f. 98b.12 f. 100b.13 The author's preference for Pollinices has also been

noted by G. Raynaud de Lage in "Les 'Romans antiques'. . . ."14 f. 111b.

127the one who Is wronged. Even though it is he who strikes the first death-blow on the battlefield, the author reinforces the idea of his innocence by having him dismount and weep before his dying brother, who then treacherously kills him as he is least prepared for the blow:

Quant Pollinices vit le grant fuison dou sane issir dou cors son frere, il en ot grant piti§ a son cuer. Si descendi de son cheval a terre e lors l'acola e baisa tant en plorant, quar li cuers li ratenrisoit e tornoit a dousor par nature. E mout li disoit que dolans estoit de ce qu'il le veoit morir encor l'eust il forfait vers lui par sa covoitise. Etiocles, qui mout ot grant ire, e qui ja sentoit au cuer auques la mort prouchaine, se porpensa de grant cruautS e de grant felonie quar un poi soushausa la o il gisoit a terre, e son frere qui le ploroit e entendoit a lui de ce alegier qu'il li pooit faire li bota par de sous les pans del hauberc l'espee ou ventre.15

Polynices' tenderness toward his brother and his forgiveness of Eteocles' misdeed and greediness are neatly contrasted with Eteocles' anger, cruelty, and wickedness: as Polynices tries to alleviate his suffering as he lies dying on the ground, Eteocles uses his brother's vulnerable proximity and his position underneath him to his advantage, striking him in such a way that his sword negotiates a path behind the hauberk into Polynices' unprotected lower torso.

Polynices and Eteocles replay the original fratricide and serve a symbolic function as characters in the great Christian story of sin and salvation. In this light, one

15 f. 114c-d.

128could also see the Oedipus story as having a spiritual significance in that it was Oedipus' search for knowledge that caused him to commit patricide and incest: in the earthly paradise, it was the temptation of knowledge that caused Adam and Eve to sin against their divine father.

The mythical dimension of Thebes. which in the classical version served to teach a lesson about fate and the ineluctable nature of destiny, has now been recoded to remind the public of the key elements of salvation history. It is well known that Biblical hermeneutics endowed literal signs with figurative meanings;16 while scholars are in disagreement as to whether or not this type of reading was also applied to all secular texts, it is commonly understood that classic texts did benefit from this type of interpretative strategy, as is evidenced for the case of Thebes by Fulgentius' commentary. In addition to Fulgentius' didactic allegorical interpretation of the Thebaid. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski argues that the verse Roman de Thebes had a certain secular value as an anti-war

16 Throughout the Middle Ages, Augustine's De doctrina Christiana dominated textual hermeneutics with the notion that figurative signs must be interpreted in the light of caritas in order to find the true meaning of a biblical passage. Later, in the first half of the twelfth century, Hugh of Saint Victor created a more fixed hierarchy of interpretation, based on the Augustinian model. In his widely-disseminated Didascalion. he outlined three dimensions of textual interpretation : the literal, the allegorical (referring to spritual meaning), and the tropological (referring to moral implications) (Robert Con Davis and Laurie Finke, Literary Criticism and Theory; The Greeks to the Present [New York: Longman, 1989] 123-44).

129exemplum.17 These allegorical practices aside, the framing presence of Genesis as the lead-in text for this compilation as well as the compiler's didactic comments in the verse passages bring out the moral and spiritual values previously dormant in the prose ThUbes.

As noted above, the text replays the key moments in the salvation story; it functions as an exemplum of the suffering of humanity in the pre-Christian era. At two points in the text the writer explicitly comments on the difference between a world that was without God's presence and a world saved by Him. First, when narrating Oedipus and Jocasta's marriage, he states:

Segnor e dames, ce fu une dolorouse assemblee, quarc'estoit sa mere e si avoit ocis son pere. Or po€s vosbien savoir e entendre que diables avoit adonques ou monde grant puissance, quar poi estoit de gens que Deu coneussent. La feste fu grande en Thebes de celui mariage, mes puis en fu grans dolors cre&e si com vos porrSs ass£s brigfment entendre ains que l'estorie faille. Bdippus ot prise a feme la roine Jocaste sa mere.18

The author explains the great power of the devil by the ideathat in those times few people knew God: in spite of thevagueness of the phrase, one can see his implication that such things do not happen in a Christian universe.

It is in the explicit that the writer comments more fully on the difference between ancient pre-Christian days

17 "The Traditions . . 60.18 f. 92b.

130and contemporary times, emphasizing the role of Christ in bringing the suffering to an end.

Ne vos quier plus faire mencion ne parole de Thebes, ains dirai avant de ceaus qui ou siecle adonc habitoient e regnoient, a quels fins il venoient por ce que Damedeu ne cremoient ne aoroient. Quar bien saches, segnors e dames, c'onques ces grans batailles ne ces grans malaventures ne cesserent ne ne finerent, si com vos por§s oir e entendre, trosques atant que nostre Sires vint e descend! a terre mes tantost fu humaine creature, tote apaisee e cesserent les batailles et les pestilences par tot le monde. E por ce doit on esguarder raison e droiture: c'est Deu amer e servir, par cui nos est donee pais e concorde en cest siecle, e en 1'autre repos sans tristece e joie parmanable.19

Here the compiler explains that he is telling what became of those who lived in those times because they neither feared nor worshipped God. He makes a claim that these battles and misdeeds did not cease until Christ's earthly sojourn, at which time the miseries stopped. Finally, he adds that this is why one must love and serve God: He gives us peace on earth and everlasting joy in the hereafter.

The exemplum was a common teaching and literary practice in the Middle Ages. In Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica. he uses it to provide a positive example of behavior after recounting some negative examples. In one instance, Orderic relates how the Norman women's passion for their husbands and their threats to find new husbands if they did not return to Normandy from England

19 f. 117b-c.

131caused the men to desert William's pacifying force when he needed them.20 He is openly critical of what he sees as licentiousness on the part of the women and follows the episode with a description of Matilda's behavior: William's wife was able to endure long periods of time without him and helped maintain order in his absence. The reason for the inclusion of the description of Matilda is not given; in fact, there is no specific event having to do with her that is recounted at this moment in the text. She simply serves as a backdrop to better show the irresponsible behavior of the other Norman women by the example of her comportment, which is based on reason rather than on emotion and impulse.

A similar case in which a negative example of behavior is contrasted with a positive example also occurs in Orderic's discussion of ecclesiastical flatterers.21 He criticizes those men of the church who ingratiate themselves to William for their own personal gain, then introduces an anecdote about Guitmond, a monk who refused to come to England to be an abbot because he knew that the monks would serve him unwillingly, they being English and he Norman. Orderic inserts a letter supposedly written by Guitmond in which he explains his refusal in terms that are neither

20 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Yifcalia. 6 vols., ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969-80) 5: 218-20.

21 Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical . . ., 5: 268.

132obsequious nor haughty, but rather maintain a noble level of discourse, as one equal addresses another.

At another point, immediately after summing up William's English victory and rule, Orderic uses the name as an excuse to bring in the legend of Saint William (Court- nez).22 The laying side by side in parallel structure of the two Williams--one a military conquerer, the other a former knight who dedicates his life to God--establishes a false equality between the two lives. Orderic praises William I; however, without explicitly criticizing him here (although he does elsewhere), he provides an immediate antidote for this life committed to secular goals in the reminder of another William, also renowned for his military prowess, who found his crowning glory in the spiritual realm.

In this way certain episodes serve as moralizing mirrors for an event or individual described immediately beforehand. In all three of these cases, the positive examples followed the negative, as if to point out to the reader that although certain things were in fact done, there were better ways to do them. Orderic does not explicitly state this; the structuring of the narrative forces an obvious comparative value judgment in each situation.

22 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy. 4 vols., trans. Thomas Forester (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853) 2: 243. (The necessary volume [4] of theChibnall edition was not available to me at the time of printing.)

133This kind of juxtaposition without transitions, as a

narrative technique, implies and requires the ability of the reader to fill in the appropriate meaning. An adroit narrative organization then obviates the necessity for the kind of explicit moralizing that Orosius includes in his history. The episodical framing within the narrative replaces direct authorial intervention.

In Mimesis. Erich Auerbach associates this kind of paratactic narrative structure, in which episodes follow one another without causal narrative articulation, with the Christian fathers' use of the low style.23 They favored the use of a simple style for evangelical purposes. With this low style came short phrases and a paucity of variety in connectives: the parataxis that pervades the Vulgate and other early medieval writings, as a rejection of horizontal articulation, is therefore expressive of the Christian belief that God has a vertical, or figural, relationship with all things. It is God who creates meaning and who causes events. Relationships between occurrences are not always discernible by the human intellect. This explains the simple juxtaposition of events in this kind of narrative: it is not the horizontal transition--the perceived relationship between this event and another one-- that is important, but rather the vertical relationship that

23 As discussed by Nancy F. Partner, S e r i o u s Entertainments . . . , 194-211.

134each worldly event has to God. Every event has a significance. This kind of vertical reading is key to understanding the figurative interpretation so prevalent in the Middle Ages.

Orderic Vitalis' episodic structuring without explicit transitions or explanations of why the material is included at that particular point is a manifestation of the paratactic horizontal organization elaborated by Auerbach. The reader must supply the reasoning and the interpretation: God has supplied the material, and the writer has simply exposed it.

The prose Thebes is also organized as a series of episodes joined essentially by an additive framework as opposed to an elaborated causal mechanism. Although the author does not hesitate to make moralistic remarks on occasion, these are not remarks that introduce an episode in order to explain its significance as an episode, but rather to emphasize one aspect of it.

The story told by Hypsipyle in the prose Thibes serves as an episode-exemplum in the same way as those noted above in the Historia Ecclesiastica. She recounts that she was in forced exile from her home, the island of Lemnos, because she had refused to take part in the murder of her father, the king, as instructed by women who plotted to kill all of the men. As an example of someone who refused to commit patricide, suffering exile and some degree of servitude

135instead, this narrative diversion demonstrates the proper mode of conduct required by filial piety. It is true that the Oedipus described in this text would not have willingly undertaken his father's murder; however, the parallel massacre about to be played out by his sons, in full cognizance of their mutual criminality, is the act mirrored and opposed by Hypsipyle's story.

This aesthetic of juxtaposition and figural reading offers an explanation for the absence of verse moralizations in the prose Thebes. Different elements in the myth function as metaphor, allowing the individual to represent the universal. The particular and the general are united, as brother enemies--in this case specific, named brothers-- demonstrate the strife to which their forefather's sin condemns them--in this case a specific, named father with a revolting sin he was destined to play out. Religious doctrine (here, the doctrine of original sin and the degradation that humanity must suffer until Christ's redeeming sacrifice) is taught by exemplum using individual life stories, as in the Bible. The particular brothers' warfare is used to illustrate the general truth that war and strife will dominate until Christ brings peace.

Mvth. History, and Narrative

Just as the didact uses the specific case of the family

136of Oedipus in order to illustrate a general case of human suffering, the historian must balance the inclusion of the particular (in the form of detail) with the general (the larger event). This is also true in that the Christian historian explains particular historical events in the light of larger spiritual principles. This notion of the confluence of the particular and the general, occurring as it does in historical writing as well as in myth, holds some interest for us here.24 On a more abstract level, historians seeking to recount the events of their times must select those individuals and those events that represent general truths. In this way, one individual's story can be said to tell the story of many. This can be seen in the Vita Karoli by Einhard. Not only does it represent Charlemagne, it also represents that which every great emperor should be, and this all the more emphatically in that it is modeled on Suetonius' biography of Augustus.

Myth, in its metaphorical aspect, and history, in its technical aspect, therefore share the same concern. The same thought process must guide the writer when working with myth and when writing history; the particular must be carefully selected in order to evoke the general, in the domain of metaphorical myth and in that of historical truth. In this regard, certain types of historiography (narrative

24 Albert Cook, Historv/Writinq (Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1988) 20.

137as opposed to annalistic) are akin to metaphor.25 In some cases, one could claim that concrete elements in the historical text are a metaphor for the writer's abstract concept of reality--a reality that cannot be directly apprehended and is therefore permanently out of grasp of both the writer and the reader. In the case of the prose Thdbes. that reality would be the notion of sin and redemption, concepts traditionally taught by exempla.

Myth and history also share the constraints of the narrative structure. The historian must make a judicious choice in the narrating of events, for every detail cannot be included, and chronology must be respected. Without emplotment, historical narrative is not credible.26 The narrative must articulate a progression within which a beginning, middle, and end are clear. For historiography, this necessary structure presents certain problems. Without a clear ordering and subordination of events, any narrative lacks coherence and therefore believability. However, reality in its raw form lacks the tidiness that narrative calls for. Auerbach notes that

25 See Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," The Writing of History, eds. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978): "Properly understood, histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that "liken" the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture" (52).

26 Hayden White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987) 4-5.

138Legend arranges Its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted.27

The historian thus trods on dangerous ground, for if he or she errs too much in the direction of narrative clarity, the hazy uncertainties that define reality are lost, and the historical text enters the domain of fiction.

Any narrativizing, therefore, has a fictionalizing effect on content.28 As Frye comments, "literary form and plausible content always fight against one another"29--this because literary form demands certain conventions in content that are in fact implausible in real life.

In considering these questions about the nature of historical writing and similarities it holds with the kind of thinking that characterizes myth, it becomes clear that it is ultimately the narrative that is the controlling force in determining meaning. The selection of plot elements and detail dictate metaphorical meaning as well as the

27 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. Willard Trask (1953; New York: Doubleday, 1957) 16.

28 The distinction between real and imaginary events "presupposes a notion of reality in which 'the true' is identified with 'the real' only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity" (Hayden White, The Content . . ., 6).

29 Frye, Fables . . 36.

139inclination to accept or not to accept content matter as historically truthful. The narrative constitutes the authority that guides signification,30 and the historian plays the role of mediator between the particular and the general.31

We have seen that the structuration of the text plays an important role in determining a work's credibility as history. We can now consider the question of medieval narrative structures in general and go on to discuss the organization of the narrative in the prose Thebes.

As noted above, parataxis is a common structural principle of medieval narrative. This kind of horizontal serial development is an unarticulated metonymic relationship of continuity in which causation is ultimately (or originally) divine. In this way, all secular history is part of spiritual history, regardless of the content. This organizational principle is aligned with the Christian notion of linear time, in which humanity begins at a certain point and is currently en route to a final destination, at which judgment and significance are decided by God, who has a vertical relationship to earthly events.

The paratactic structure is the underlying conceptual basis for the use of serial episodes in medieval narrative. However, the structure that reflects and embodies each

30 White, The Content . . ., 13.31 Cook, Historv/Writing . . ., 49.

140event's and each person's figural relationship with God may also be explained by the fact that Aristotle's poetics were not known in the Christian west until the thirteenth century, and even then did not have an immediate effect on narrative.32 Therefore his ideas of emplotment, in which every story must have a beginning, middle, and end, and every aspect in the story must somehow relate to the main event recounted, did not govern medieval textual practice and our fascination and uneasiness before this unfamiliar structuring must be at least partially attributed to our modern unquestioning adoption of Aristotelian aesthetic.

The paratactic structure is not the only organizational principle at work in medieval narrative. Evelyn Birge Vitz has noted that narrative can be structured less by techniques than by figures.33 She sees episodes as motif clusters and the overall unity in the static pattern visible in the work as a whole, rather than in the process of the telling, which is the focus of the notion of linearity as mentioned above. This perspective is an interesting one: in the prose Thebes. one can see that the figures of Oedipus and Tydeus dominate, as discussed above, and that certain other figures represent other motifs, such as Hypsipyle and the theme of patricide and fratricide. The idea of the work

32 William W. Ryding, Structure in Medieval Narrative (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) 10.

33 See Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratolocry: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York UP, 1989).

141as a whole presenting a visual image as a static pattern can also be seen in Vinaver's landmark essay, The Rise of Romance. The structure of the text can be imagined as an arabesque pattern in which various shapes and motifs intertwine with each other in a profusion of detail and interconnections. However, in the prose Thebes this kind of interlacing is not apparent, the dominant shape of the text representing rather a constant vertical (spiritual and exemplary) line in relationship to the descending horizontal axis which is the literal destiny of the house of Thebes.

Robert W. Hanning provides another perspective on narrative structure in historical writing. His analysis of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia recrum Britanniae demonstrates a cyclical vision of history rather than a Christian unidirectional one: eschatological fulfillment is absent and repetition replaces linear movement in the portrayal of Britain's rising and falling. He sees a special significance in Merlin's prophecy of an apocalypse in which divine judgment is absent; in his view, "There is no clearer indication in all of Historia recrum Britanniae that its author's vision of past and present has bolted free of the Christian theology of history."34 The interest that this notion holds for us here lies in the distinction between a circular structure and a linear one. It must be

34 Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in EarlyBritain:_From Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth (New York:Columbia UP, 1966) 172.

142noted however that the two structures are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as is exemplified by the prose Thebes in which certain repetitive patterns create a circular effect within the larger structure of the linear text.

The prose Thebes contains aspects of linearity, repetition, and strong figures as organizational modes. It is linear in that the action is uni-directional and cannot be reversed: it is the tale of the fall of the house of Oedipus, and as such operates in a reversal of the ascending type of Saint's Life. The beginning, marked by birth, can be neatly contrasted with the ending, in which all have died. This is clearly a one-way journey. However, as noted above, within the narrative, there is a repetition of the motif of the male hero's movement followed by an illustration of his courage and valor in combat and the interactive presence of feminine characters that serve to soften the focus on war. This repetition occurs systematically throughout the linear development. The use of strong figures as signifying features of the text and episodes as motif clusters is an aspect of the structure of the prose Thebes that nuances the underlying combination of linear and repetitive modes. The structure of the text, as a signifying practice, operates on all three levels s imultaneously.

Finally, I return to Frye to examine his division of all literature into two categories: "Fictional" writing

143includes characters and tells a story, while "thematic" writing includes as characters only the author and the reader.33 This notion illustrates the problematic facing those who would analyze medieval historiography. Today's history writing would prefer to see itself as thematic rather than fictional. Medieval historiography, still designated as a branch of literature and not as a separate discipline of study, would clearly belong to the fictional group. Today's reader of medieval history must face a medieval text that overtly uses all the same techniques as myth and fiction but was nevertheless seen as valid history, and lays a stake to the claim of truth which is also our own.36

Suzanne Fleischman raises several interesting points about the intersection of history and fiction in medieval historiography.37 In her view, what we moderns today

33 Frye, Fables . . ., 21.36 We are thereby confronted with our own uses of

narrative techniques that do not differ from history tofiction and realize that our own claim to historicalobjectivity may also be rooted in the ideological. This is the view of Hayden White, Metahistorv! The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973).

37 Fleischman, "On the Representation . . . ." Aspreviously noted, she points out that the desire to differentiate between these two modes of perceiving is a modern one that does not correlate to medieval textual practices. She also highlights contradictory twentieth- century attitudes about medieval historiography: Barnes, as an example of the traditional approach, sees chronicles and annals as essentially flawed because of a lack of narrative dimension, while according to Hayden White, narrativity is a

144consider to be the real historical authenticity of a text is less important than the intent of the writer and the text's reception. For a medieval view of the difference between historical and fictional narrative, she turns to Bodel's classification of the three mati^res as well as Alfonso el Sabio's Primera Crdnica General, into which are incorporated fourteen epics along with remarks about truth and falsehood pertaining to events in the narrative. She finds that there was a difference between the two modes of writing, but that it is not the same difference that exists today. In discussing this difference, she states:

. . . an historical narrative makes events intelligible by unfolding the story that connects their significance, and as such does not differ from fiction insofar as it depends on and develops our skill and subtlety in following stories. History does differ from fiction insofar as it must rest on evidence of the occurrence in real space and time of what it describes, and insofar as it must grow out of a critical assessment of the received materials of history, including the analyses and interpretations of other historians.38

Alfonso does evaluate sources but the criteria are based on function (such as propaganda) and the desire to

psychological impulse that has nothing to do with raw reality and ultimately deforms reality by requiring it to conform to narrative expectations. According to White there is an "essentially fictive nature of all history that is properly narrative" (293; emphasis hers).

38 Fleischman, "On the Representation . . .," 300; shecites W.B. Gallic's PfcU.aaphY ansi & £ HistoricalUnderstanding.

145tell a good story. This criteria would seem to describe that informing the Histoire ancienne as well, the function being both that of moralizing and that of entertaining.39 The question of sources is also an area that must be broached. In the definition above, stress is placed on evidence? in the case of the Histoire ancienne. unlike the writer of an annal, the evidence is not fact that is directly experienced by the author or by someone who recounts it. Instead, historical evidence is constituted by other texts. The function of Thebes as history is therefore dependent upon the compiler's assessment and use of auctoritas.

This reliance on other texts for authenticity and validity did not, however, preclude the adaptation and re­fashioning of old matifere in new ways. And because the creator of the prose text made certain changes in his version of the tale, he had to present a convincing narrative to his public. The narrative pact and the notion of truth and auctoritas in medieval history are the subjects of the discussion in the following chapter.

39 In fact, there are other features that invite comparison between the Histoire ancienne and the Primera Cr6nica General; both include Genesis as well as Thebes and other classical texts. However, whereas epics are included in the Primera Crdnica General, the author of the Histoire ancienne does not indicate any intent to include epic works in his compilation.

146 Chapter Six

Narrative Voice and Auctoritas

In chapter four, the idea was presented that the choice of prose was made in order to present the appearance of a more serious, truthful text, in imitation of Latin and in opposition to vernacular verse: the writer wished for his vernacular text the prestige of auctoritas. The compiler therefore uses the same form as that used in spiritual and judicial texts. The prose is intended to ring as truth, in opposition to verse's connotation of falsehood. The prose redactor notes in his prologue that he is copying the texts "si com je le truis ou latinnl--an exaggeration, strictly speaking, since we have seen that he departs from his models at several points, but a statement that serves to indicate both his concept of historiography as representative of a profound truth, here aligned with the notion of the authoritative text, and his preoccupation with the status of his work as legitimate history.

The writer's choice of prose is therefore related to the didactic impulse expressed in the verse passages that present reminders about the lessons to be learned from history; the use of prose, like the insertion of the verse

1 f. 2a, cited from Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations 55• • • | •

147passages, Is a vehicle for his preoccupation with morality and truthfulness.

The sudden verse interruptions also offer the unexpected in terms of theme, placement, and length; they provide pleasure and variation to the ear of the listener by the use of rhyme (they may have even been sung or chanted); and their secondary focus on the proper sharing of wealth and the keeping of promises betrays a personal focus in addition to the avowed, spiritual one on the part of the narrator. Thus although at face value the verse passages reinforce history's value as spiritual teacher, in fact the intrusion of the verse on the prose causes the listener to hear two voices: one in prose, one in verse, each carrying different connotations. While the prose form represents an attempt to guarantee the content, the verse form punctuates the narrative, inserting the "je" of the narrator into the autonomous text. The Histoire ancienne as a whole can be seen as a text with two voices: one that speaks in prose, attempting to echo authority, and one that speaks in verse, inserting an individuation into the text and thereby disrupting its authoritative ploy.

In the prose ThSbes. as previously noted, there are no verse moralizations. However, there are several points at

7which the narrator intervenes in the text, commenting on the events he narrates. These remarks are outside of the narrative in the sense that they draw the listener's

148attention from a focus on the material being recounted to one on the fact and the manner of its narration. In this regard, these prose comments are analogous to the verse passages in the other sections of the Histoire ancienne. in that they insert the narrator's individuation into the text. These interventions receive our attention in the discussion below, which examines their implicit involvement of the listener's validation of the text as truthful material, and their function in establishing the text's auctoritas.2 Three other texts will serve as counterpoints in the discussion: Guillaume de Poitier's Ex gestis Guillelmi-ducis Mormannorum et reqis Analorum. Orderic Vitalis' Historia Ecclesiastica. and the prose version of Robert de Boron's Roman du Graal.

The narrative interventions are of three sorts. The first type is one in which the narrator presents mutually exclusive options to the public and either does not select one over the other(s) or explicitly asks the members of the listening public to decide for themselves which version they prefer. The second type involves the mentioning of a different version of events and the rejection of that alternate version for the reason that the behavior does not harmonize with the character in question. In the third type

2 Cf. Blumenfeld-Kosinski, "The Traditions . . .," 194- 201. She cites several of these interventions in her discussion, which revolves around the prose redactor's rejection of the verse Roman de Thebes as the source of questionable information.

149of intervention, the narrator rejects a different version because it is not truthful.

The first incidence of narrative interruption of the flow of the text occurs when we are told how Oedipus kills Laius:

La recomensa la bataille grans e pleniere, e entre les autres Edippus i ocist le roi Laium son pere. Teus i a qui dient qu'il 1'ocist au clore dou flael de la porte, et teus i a que dient de s'espee; or vos en tenes auquel que vos voudr€s mes ensi fu mors li rois de Thebes.3

Just as the intrusion of personal verse on the prose disrupts the compilation, the call to the listeners to decide for themselves also interrupts the narrative flow.

This choice given to the reader has been characterized as a "version 'optimiste' et une version 'pessimiste.'"4 It has several implications, the most obvious relating to the possibility that the death was pure accident, being the result of the town gate's closing and having the appearance of being entirely chance and non-willed action by Oedipus. Although in the traditional myth Oedipus does not wish to kill his father, as in the second version here, it is nevertheless a case of his taking a definite action to kill someone rather than a simple case of happening to be the unwilling cause of an accident that costs someone his life.

3 f. 90d-91a.4 Raynaud de Lage, "Les 'romans antiques' . . .," 272.

150The author's unwillingness to chose between the two versions is an apparent testimony to his impartiality before the "facts" offered by other texts. But it is also noteworthy that in this version, Oedipus does not curse his sons and ask Ceres for their destruction. In both of these aspects, there is a removal of causality from the text: Oedipus does not take action to kill someone who turns out to be his father; he does not invoke the gods' anger on his sons.This removal of human causation from the text can be ascribed to the notion that God's providence ordained earthly events, a notion that informs Christian historiography and that finds formal expression in the paratactic structure discussed in chapter five.

Another example of this type of intervention that simply presents options to the public follows the introduction of Tydeus:

Cis Tideus ot .ij. freres dont li uns ot a non Menalippus, preus e cortois e sages, e li autres Meleager. S'en avoit l'un ocis en une forest par grande mescheance. Li un dient e s'acordent que ce fu Menalipum e li autre Meleagrum, e teus i a qui dient que ce fu un sien oncle.5

Here the narrator does not explicitly ask the audience to make a judgment, he merely lays out three mutually exclusive options. It is crucial here for the characterization of

5 f. 95d.

151Tydeus as courtly and brave that he is not presented as a fratricidal character. The multiplication of options--in particular the final comment that "e teus i a qui dient que ce fu un sien oncle"--has the effect of diluting the wrong committed in such a way that the reader notes in passing the reason for Tydeus' exile without ascribing to him any fundamental character flaw. The narrator emphasizes Tydeus' innocence by describing the event in terms of "grande mescheance;" Tydeus did not wilfully commit fratricide, he merely presided at a tragic accident.

The comment that the public should believe the version they prefer, made during the first of these two interventions, and the careful presentation of options concerning Tydeus' misdeed also serve to indicate that the narrator does not believe everything he reads. He demonstrates to his public that he is not simply recopying whatever is written in the text, and that there is perhaps more than one text or version available. He shows his critical acumen by acknowledging the possibilities and thus establishes himself as a trustworthy narrator. In this case he implies at the same time that it does not matter how Oedipus killed Laius, nor whom Tydeus accidentally killed, the sole matter of importance being the deaths themselves.

The second type of intervention, in which the narrator mentions previously known versions and rejects them because they do not harmonize with his presentation of the

152character, is exemplified in comments concerning Tydeus. When Tydeus is sent to Eteocles' court as messenger for Polynices, the narrator explains:

Tideus ala tant qu'il vint devant le roi e si le salua mout hautement e lui et sa maisnee si come cortois e sages. Segnor, li auquant dient que Tideus vint devant le roi tot a cheval la ou li rois seoit au mangier encore. Me[s] ce me samble qu'il ne le fesist mie, quar ce samblast vilainie e couardise e Tideus n'avoit nulle de ces .ij. teches quar il estoit plus cortois e li plus tres hardis de fin cuer e de corage qui fust, si com je cuit, adonc en trestot le roiaume de Gresse de son eage. E por ce fu ce voirs sans doutance qu'il son cheval laissa fors del huis de la sale. E si dist au roi quant il l'ot salu€ qu'il estoit messages de par son frere Pollinicet qui a lui l'avoit envois par grant amistage.6

In this case the author insists on a certain aspect of his tale--the courtliness of Tydeus--and emphatically rejects the idea that he could have ridden his horse into the audience before the king Eteocles because such behavior constitutes a grave breach of etiquette. The author may be thinking of Statius' more aggressive Tydeus, who exhibits an unrelenting desire for war and vengeance. As discussed in chapter three, the Tydeus of the prose Th&bes is the picture of the ideal knight and is nothing like Statius' bloodthirsty warrior. The correctness of Tydeus' behavior is further stressed in the narrative by the comments made by the barons after his departure:

6 f. 99c.

153Li chevalier qui ou le roi remSs estoient en la sale parlerent assls entre aus e conseillerent e distrent que mout avoit Pollinices eu bon message, hardi e preu e bien parlant. . . . "7

Another example of this type of narrative intervention occurs when Jocasta and some of the barons pressure Eteocles not to commit perjury and to resolve the situation peacefully:

A cest conseill dient li pluisor que Edippus fu lor pere, mes ce ne peust estre quar s'il fust bien en vie n'i venist il mie, tant les haoit il e tant voloit il lor grandes malaventures.*

Here the narrator refuses to entertain the idea that Oedipus could have been present, his hatred for his sons too strong for such participation in their lives. This is all the more interesting in that early on in the prose ThSbes. when it might have been logical to bring up the question of Oedipus' attitude towards his sons, the narrator focuses on the sons' disrespect for their father. Eteocles and Polynices

. . . tant le blasmerent e raisnerent de vilaines paroles qu'il s'aira si que par grande deverie sacha il les .ij. oils de sa teste, qui la tuit estint estoient en lor viltances, e si les geta devant les oils de ses fils en presence. Li jovencel, qui nonsachant estoient, monterent a lor pi€s sor les oils de lor pere e si les esquicherent laidement e defolerent. Or po€s vos savoir e entendre que trop ot li rois Edippus dolor e pesance; si dui fill en une fosse l'avalerent ou il

7 f. lOla-b.8 f. lllc.

154fu a grant dolor e a grant destrece, qu'il fina en trop grant misere e en trop grant povrete sa vie e sa hautece.9

According to this passage, we may assume that Oedipus is clearly out of the picture, ending his life in misery and emprisonment. Oedipus' role in the prose Thdbes ends with this scene; it is therefore odd that the narrator chooses to deny his presence at the barons' counsel more on account of his hatred for his sons than because of his emprisonment and death. As previously noted, in this version, Oedipus does not curse his sons and invoke the gods' wrath upon them.One may attribute the comment that Oedipus hated his sons too much in order to assist in their reconciliation to the narrator's knowledge of the Thebaid.

The narrator intervenes in this same manner when Ligurge's daughter nurses Tydeus in her rooms after his victory over the fifty knights sent to ambush him.

Segnor et dames, li rois Ligurges n'i estoit mie, ains estoit al€s an autre liu en son afaire; quar s'il i fust, il efist mout Tideus honor£ et ais€ por l'amist€ le roi Adrastus e por sa vaillandise. E sa fille qui mout estoit cortoise li ot port€ mout grant honor e feist encor plus s'il de repairier n'eust tel haste en sa contree.10

Here the narrator justifies Ligurge's absence from the

9 f. 94a.10 ms. aaifiii f. 104a.

155scene: he is too courtly to have been remiss in offering hospitality, therefore he must have been occupied elsewhere. His explanation of Ligurge's activity is rooted in an affirmation that he knows the type of individual involved and that he would not behave out of character.

It has been noted that this type of remark shows how much these characters were real for the medieval writer and his public;11 more important, these comments also serve a function in the establishment of the narrative persona. His role is to sift through the historical "facts" as they have come down in various texts, and to present the true story.

In the first type of intervention, the narrator showed in an almost scholarly fashion that without absolute proof he could not guarantee which versions were accurate.Instead he focused on what he did know, which was that Oedipus killed Laius and that Tydeus accidentally caused the death of either a brother or an uncle. In the second type of intervention, his comments emphasize his knowledge of the character: since Tydeus was neither villanous nor cowardly he simply could not have come into the court without dismounting and following prescribed language and custom.It is a question of logic, for the historian must evaluate the pieces of information that come down to him against that of which he is certain. These interventions prove to us, as

11 Raynaud de Lage mentions the narrator's insistence on Tydeus' courtesy in "Les 'romans antiques' . . .," 275.

156the listening public, that we can trust the narrator because he is telling us the true story. Furthermore, his emphasis on the correct characterization of Tydeus, Oedipus, and Ligurges tells us that as a narrator he knows where his story is going, and his certainty is meant to inspire our own confidence in his relating of the tale.

The third type of narrative intervention concerns the rejection of a different version of events on the explicit basis that they are not found in the true story. Once again, Tydeus occupies our attention:

Ci dient li pluisor que Pollinices e Tideus e Parthonopeus vindrent en Thebes avec la reine por conduire e au palais descendirent, e qu'au repairier les firent contreguaitier cil de la vile por ocire.Mes je ne truis mie si bien en la veraie estorie que je vos veull afermer e dire. E Thideus n'estoit mie plains de si grant folie qu'il s'enbatist si abandoneement toz desarm€s sor ses anemis dont il avoit maint en la vile. E por ceste samblance ne fait il mie a croire ni que Pollinices s'enbatist si en la poeste son frere, qui mout estoit traitres.12

In this case the narrator justifies his rejection of this alternate version for two reasons: first and foremost, this is not found "en la veraie estorie que je vos veull afermer e dire;” and secondly, it would be out of character for both Tydeus and Polynices to behave so foolishly as to go unarmed into a city full of enemies. The emphasis on the true history is repeated at another point at which the narrator refuses to relate an episode known to those familiar with

12 f. 113b.

157

the long version of the verse Roman de Thebes. This comment directly follows his remark that he will not tell of all the battle scenes because they contain falsehoods:

Que dou increment de Daire si com li romans le conte n'est mie l'actoritSs veraie ne en auctoritg certaine. Segnor, e bien sach€s ausi que ne me veull antremetre de raconter le jugement de Daire le rous qui sa tor rendi a Pollinicet par quoi la vile dut estre perdue, quar trop en seroit longe la parole. E lone d'auctorit£ seue; mais por beau parler est mainte choze contee e dite que n'est mie voire en tote traitie d'estorie. Por ce le lairai ester e maintes chozes a retraire qui as pluisors poroient par aventure plaire.13

In this case, the narrator expressly rejects the story of Daire, who held one of the towers of Thebes but who lost it to Polynices, because it is not "en auctorit£ certaine," which in this case probably refers to the Latin version.14 This comment underscores the compiler's attention to sources, his devotion to veracity, and his evaluation of the Latin text as being superior to the vernacular. He again affirms his aversion to things related merely for the sake of a good story, and even claims that this occurs in traitie d'estorie. Although these things might please his audience, he will not recount them. In affirming that the material in his history is true, as the material in other histories is not, and in declaring a high moral standard of truth and

13 f. 114c.14 In extant manuscripts, the most fully developed

version of the episode of Daire le roux is found in ms. S.

158explicitly sacrificing entertainment to this more noble goal, the narrator asks the public to believe that his work is different: more true, more valuable, more serious than other histories.

In each of the interventions mentioned above, the writer uses a narrative persona in order to establish the authenticity of the text and to emphasize his good faith as the text's creator. He seems to know that at the very least, certain parts of his history are suspect; his use of the narrator's voice encourages the listener's suspension of disbelief, and promises not only honesty (not knowing which versions of Laius' death and Tydeus' misdeed were accurate) but also intelligence (Tydeus is too courtly to have behaved ill at Eteocles' court) and truth (he will relate only the true version, and battle scenes and other events are to be shied away from because in the telling they take on false embellishments), even if it means losing a good story.

These are different kinds of interventions from the moralizing comments such as those that occur when Amphiauraus is swallowed up by the earth, when Oedipus marries Jocasta, and at the close of the text, which have a different function. They serve to teach the lesson of the text. The comments discussed above, however, in addition to establishing the true meaning of the text, serve to establish a pact between the transmitter of the text and his public, in which the narrator's explicit display of

159sincerity and sense of Christian morality require the good faith and trust of his public. To borrow an image from commerce, this is a request on the part of the merchant for an even exchange of goods, difficult for the buyer to refuse when confronted so piously.

The writer's use of this narrative persona stems from the fact that, strictly speaking, he has no authority for his version of the text. Statius' version, being full of pagan gods, is unacceptable to the Christian. The verse versions, being vernacular, do not constitute a reliable authority, and in addition, relate things that are seen as fictive. It is my view that the prose history writer selected his material carefully from a variety of sources,15 and that his lack of a single accepted authoritative text caused him to write in the narrative interruptions as a substitute for that authority. He clearly wished that the story be read as truth and not as fiction, and used truthfulness as an explicit criterion when deciding which elements to include in his version and how to present them.

It has often been noted that medieval writers accepted many things as truthful that we would not. This can be

15 As previously mentioned, it has been thought that the writer used a verse Roman de ThSbes that was similar to the long version as a compositional source. His remarks about the episode of Daire le roux not being in the true auctoritas. cited above, demonstrate at the very least a familiarity with the narrative of Statius' Thebaid. if not a direct knowledge of the text.

160attributed to several factors, including the belief in Christian miracles, ignorance about other lands and what they held, the respect granted to written authority, i.e., other texts, and a sense of liberty with details when the important features of a text illustrated a general truth: that is to say, a pre-eminence of moral truth over physical truth. This notion of truth that differs from our own has a relationship with the didactic use of historical texts, a fact recorded by medieval people themselves. The importance of history's function as moral example is stressed by Walter Map in the following remark about the equal merit of fact and fiction:

. . . both kinds of narratives have the same practice and design. For history, which is based on truth, and fable, which weaveth a tissue of fancy, both bless the good with a happy end so that virtue may be loved, and damn the bad with a foul ending, wishing to render wickedness hateful.16

History as exemplum borrowed freely from both true stories and false ones, for according to John Bromyard, "Sive sit hystorie veritas sive fictio non est cura quia exemplum non ponitur propter se sed propter significationem.",7

16 De nuois curialium. cited in Judson Boyce Allen, The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1971) 68.

17 "It doesn't matter whether this is the truth of history or a fiction; an exemplum is not used for its own sake, but for the sake of its meaning" (Summa Praedicantium. "avaricia," art. xiv, lix, cited in Allen, The Friar . . .,

161Furthermore, medieval historical practice, as a branch

of literature, allowed and to a certain extent required certain textual conventions in which the plausible operated in place of the factual.18 This perspective gave ample room to development of events that could very well have happened given the tradition, the set of circumstances, and the individual in question.

The use of speech as attributed to characters provides an example of this. In his Ex gestis Guillelmi ducis Normannorum et reais Ancrlorum. Guillaume de Poitiers states that William I offered to participate in a duel with Harold, in order to spare the lives of their men. This is generally not considered to be historically accurate, in the sense that the offer is not believed to have been made. However, Guillaume was writing a panegyric, and the requirements of the genre were such that the protagonist had to be portrayed in heroic terms. In this view, it is not important whether or not William I actually did offer to duel Harold, because the writer believed that it was in character for him to do such a thing and that the event demonstrated the essence of his temperament. Thus the detail supports the character; the individual is represented truthfully by anecdotes that

68) .18 Servius defined history as 11. . .quicquid secundum

naturam dicitur, sive factum sive non factum ..." ("something told according to nature, whether it happened or not"); Servii Grammatici. I, 89, cited in Allen, The Friar .. ., 66.

162may be inaccurate by our standards.

Another example of this practice occurs when Orderic Vitalis cites a long speech supposedly made by William I on his deathbed, in which he acknowledges the wrongs he has committed and asks forgiveness of God for his many sins. Unlike elsewhere in his Historia Ecclesiastica. Orderic does not cite a written source for this text. Although the existence of an oral tradition preserving William's last words is not outside the realm of possibility, it is very unlikely for him, as a twelfth-century monk, to have known exactly what William may or may not have said in such detail. Yet he quotes both the deathbed speech and ensuing dialogue with those present: literary convention allowed, and in some cases seemed to demand, that great men make speeches at important moments in their lives, and in this case the story of William's piety is supported by the fact of his generosity to the church.

It is interesting that he does not cite a source for the text of the speech because this implies a tacit understanding that for these kinds of events one does not need to cite a written authority. He affirms the truth of what he has recounted by commenting:

Ecce subtiliter inuestigaui, et ueraciter enucleaui quae in lapsu ducis pie ostendit dispositio Dei. Non fictilem tragediam uenundo, non loquaci comedia cachinnantibus parasitis faueo; sed studiosis

163lectoribus uarios euentus ueraciter intimo.19

By comparison, he does cite authority for his versions of various Saints' Lives and for a vision of purgatory seen by a priest known to him as well as for other more worldly events.

While one can say that in medieval historiography, truth can be more closely aligned with painting the moral portrait than with presenting an accurate record of deeds and concrete details, medieval historians did evaluate sources and commented on their relative value. They preferred a written Latin source above all; they also valued the testimony of a witness (as when Orderic cites the story of the White Ship's wreck as coming from a butcher,- the only person who survived the disaster that claimed the lives of two sons of Henry I and approximately 300 others). They disdained old tales that had been handed down. Thus it is important to recognize that although literary convention allowed the inclusion of somewhat standardized and conventional material for illustrative detail, the medieval historian did not lack critical acumen.

In the prose Thebes. the dialogue between Oedipus and

19 "See now, I have carefully investigated and truthfully described what God's ordinance providently revealed in the duke's last days. I neither compose a fictitious tragedy for the sake of gain, nor entertain cackling parasites with a wordy comedy, but truly record events of different kinds for studious readers" (Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica. ed. trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6-vols. [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969-80] 4:106-07).

164Jocasta is an embellishment of the text that the author could have allowed himself while still telling only the truth of the story of Thebes. The episode does not detract from the moral lesson of the text and does not contradict any of the known traits of the two characters. In fact, the medieval historiographer might defend the inclusion of such a scene by commenting that no one can prove that such a conversation did not indeed take place at the crucial moment of recognition.

The emphasis on truth and auctoritas in this vernacular prose history echoes the concern expressed in the prose version of Robert de Boron's Roman du Graal. The comparison is useful because the two texts hold several things in common: each is a vernacular prose version written with the aid of a previous vernacular verse version at approximately the same time;20 each claims historical truth; each has a spiritual dimension; and each is a recasting of a story whose veracity could be put into question because it was either not based on a Latin model at all, as in the case of the Roman du Graal. or it diverged from it, as in the case of the prose Thebes.

In the Roman du Graal. the author has created a somewhat complex system of transmission by which the contents of the text achieve a value of truth. The narrator

20 The Roman du Graal dates from the late twelfth century.

165is written into the text in the person of Blaise, a scribe in Northumberland, to whom Merlin returns periodically in order to recount events so that Blaise can commit them to writing. This is expressly related a number of times. The purpose was obviously so that the text would be received as truth because the events had been told by someone who had witnessed them, and then immediately written down so that they did not suffer permutations in oral retelling.

One can presume that the strategy met with some success, given the tradition of identifying witnesses as exemplified by Orderic Vitalis in the cases mentioned above. It is interesting to note in passing the opposite effect that such emphasis on transmission has on the modern reader: When reading such a text one has the sense of being distanced from the events because of the stress on the repeated relating of the tale and the three-tiered process of 1) event; 2) Merlin's narrative; 3) Blaise's narrative. Modern textual convention associates truth and realism with an immediacy that is lacking here.

Both the Roman du Graal and the prose ThSbes demonstrate a concern about the reception of the text as truthful, a concern that would not exist were that truthfulness not somehow in doubt or not yet established.The narrator's emphasis on the validity of the material related is a call to the readers to put their faith into the text. As in the prose ThSbes. the final power of

166determining signification rests with the reader who must juggle the two voices: one prose and neutral and the other, also prose this time, but personal and contrasting with the surrounding narrative flow.21

This invitation of the audience's participation is not the prose redactor's invention. There are other examples of vernacular authors who expect their listeners to contribute to the text's meaning, especially insofar as the understanding of exempla is concerned.22 Marie de France's prologue to her Lais is a case in point:

Custume fu as anciens,Ceo testimoins Preciens,Es livres ke jadis feseient, Assez oscurement diseient Pur ceus ki a venir esteient E ki aprendre les deveient,K'i pefissent gloser la lettre E de lur sen le surplus mettre.23

These phrases serve as an illustration of how the medieval

21 The neutral tone of the prose form and the disappearance of the first person pronoun from prose texts has been noted by Bernard Cerquiglini in his study of the Roman du Graal. He sees the prose text itself as speaker, therefore conflicting with the personal voice of the narrator. (Bernard Cerquiglini, La Parole mgdi&vale [Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1981] 111-16.) Prose's independent "voice" would be that of the auctoritas which it connotes.

22 Kelly, ThS-AEfc . . ., 246-55.23 Lines 9-16 (ed. Rychner); this quote from Marie de

France is cited from Robert S. Sturges, Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative. 1100-1500 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1991) 82.

167writer and his or her public together invested a text with sen. For Douglas Kelly, Mgloser la lettre" refers to the topical amplifications that an author uses to illustrate a text's exemplary significance. In his view,

explicit and implicit glosses enhance the public's appreciation of and its reflection on the mati&re. Author and public are both reader and interpreter of a given mati&re in the transmission of which they cooperate.34

Here the public's interpretative role is that of comprehending in explicit terms what the author suggests by means of topical development, i.e., understanding the text the author presents as exempla and/or allegory of a larger meaning.25 It is this type of active participation that the

34 Kelly, The Art . . ., 255.25 Cf. Sturges' Medieval Interpretation . . . for a

different interpretation of Marie's comments. Following Tony Hunt in understanding the phrase "lur sen le surplus mettre" as "something readers bring to the text themselves," Sturges further states:

Note how closely related are the functions of audience and author. . . . A good audience adds new understanding to the old works,thus recreating them, that is, becoming an author. [. . .] What she desires is not simply that he or she understand the story, if by "understanding" is meant only acceptance of her own point of view toward it; equally necessary is the reader's very act of engagement with the text, the process itself of interpretation (82-83).

Sturges' emphasis on the individual reader's role in the creation of the the text's meaning is of value here; however, it does appear that in the prose Thebes. the narrator hopes for an acceptance of his own point of view regarding the text and its significance.

168redactor of the prose ThSbes also demands from his public.

Although the text has a certain indeterminate quality without the public's participation, the narrator does not open the text to a wide possibility of literal interpretations. The audience must choose for itself among different versions of events, but is gradually led by the narrator to approve of his refusal to include events that do not appear truthful either because they do not harmonize with the characterization developed by the author or because there is no authority to back them up. The drive of the text in general demands the listeners' acquiescence in the recognition and acceptance of truth and moral duty as Christians.26 The compiler's narrative interventions gradually induce his public to participate with him in the establishment of the text's meaning as the story of divine ordering of the universe, in this case the exemplum of human suffering, sin, and redemption. In sum, these interventions operate as a persuasive psychological device.

The selection of BibliothSque Nationale 20125 as the base manuscript for this study was made in part because of its inclusion of the verse moralizations. It is noteworthy that in later copies, the verse moralizations are often

26 "[T]he kind of public anticipated precluded misunderstanding or lack of understanding, and the universal expectation of exemplary significance guaranteed attention to exemplifying intentions" (Kelly, The Art . . ., 249).

169omitted entirely or, if left in the text, recast into prose.27 This appears to substantiate the idea that the narrator's personal voice was somehow incompatible with the establishment of a legitimate historical text, and had a disqualifying effect on the attempt to establish a prose auctoritas. An indication that the Histoire ancienne did succeed in establishing the legitimacy of prose vernacular history that was not a direct eyewitnessing of events such as in the case of the crusade histories, but was a vernacular version of texts available in the much more prestigious Latin is the title of another manucript copy, this one without the verse passages:

Cy commence le tresor des ystoires, compile de la Bible, de Justin, de Josephe des anciennetes, de Titus Livius, de Saluste, de Julie Celse, et de Lucain et de Suetone.28

The Histoire ancienne. seen in this light, represents an innovative attempt to employ a vernacular form for the same purposes and seriousness as Latin, and in so doing to endow the form with its own prestige. The prose redactor of the Histoire ancienne attempted to infuse his Thdbes with its own auctoritas by the choice of prose and by inviting the members of his public to assist him in determining the signification of the text, thus legitimizing the form by

27 Meyer, "Les PremiSres Compilations . . .,"58.28 British Library Add. ms. 19669, f. 4.

170their participation in the narrative pact.

171Conclusion

Thfebes as Transformation

The transformation of Thebes from verse to prose and from isolated text to a part of a larger text, as seen in the light of medieval historiographical practice, leads us to draw several conclusions.

The prose Th&bes is a locus where two sets of contrasting notions meet and are mediated and articulated by the prose redactor. The first of these pairs is the notion of history and romance, or seen in modern terms, the opposition fact-fiction; the second is implied in the verse- prose rewriting.

The first set of oppositions is in fact a false one for the medieval period. Romance as a genre was not opposed to history in any tangible sense of the term but was created in imitation of it. Furthermore, historiography, as a branch of literature, was an art form and writers used the same techniques and practices that sustained them in the writing of other texts. The function of historiographical texts in the Middle Ages was both to edify and to entertain, and in order to do so narrative had to be well-organized and characters clearly drawn--two features which often do not accommodate the untidiness of raw experience and reality.

For all that, however, medieval historians did not

172freely accept and relate any material that came to their attention. They respected sources and preferred a written source or an eyewitness account to hearsay. A respect for written precedent animated their view of history, and this included both content and style. In the case of the prose Th&bes, we have seen that the Thebaid*s status as a classical text merited its acceptance as legitimate history; at the same time, the historian had the right--and perhaps the obligation--to follow certain literary conventions in his telling of past events. For the writer of the prose Thdbes. the tradition of attributing speeches to characters at crucial moments in life was transposed to an intimate dialogue between Oedipus and Jocasta at their mutual moment of truth. In addition, the medieval historian evaluated the material that had come down to him: for our compiler, this meant the systematic elimination of the pagan gods that dominated Statius' Thebaid. A valid history *had to speak to the truth, and in the dominant Christian perspective, the inclusion of pagan divinities would have destroyed the historical value of the work.

The most important aspect of the historical value of the prose ThSbes lies in its worth as moral exemplum; the story of Oedipus and his warring sons demonstrated to the medieval public the sin and misery in which humanity lived before Christ's redeeming life. In this sense, the Thfebea text functions as an illustration of an abstract truth, and

173the specific details in the text do not play any significant role in establishing the text's message as lesson except by establishing its verisimilitude. They are therefore exempt from the kind of scrutiny and the emphatic focus on accuracy that modern historians apply to their work, and the medieval historian is free to treat them as the modern writer of a fictive text would: he uses them to underscore characterization and to establish plausibility. I have also suggested that the prose ThSbes. read in the allegorizing tradition of the Middle Ages, could have been interpreted as an allegory of the original fall.

Medieval historiographers, therefore, aimed at portraying a different kind of truth from that illustrated in modern historiography; history in the Middle Ages had a social function unlike that of today, a function not limited to a uniquely spiritual set of interests. We have seen that the French-speaking aristocracy of northern France who sponsored vernacular prose historiography in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was threatened both by the encroaching, centralizing power of the French monarchy and by the increasing wealth and power of the Flemish cities. In sponsoring histories such as the Pseudo- Turpin and the Histoire ancienne. the lay aristocracy attempted to do two things: first, establish a cultural identity distinct from monarchy and bourgeoisie by emphasizing famous ancestors such as Charlemagne; secondly,

174stake a claim to the kind of literary prestige and authority inherent in the prose form as used in Latinity. These prose histories therefore owe their existence in part to the social and intellectual aspirations of the aristocracy, just as the impetus for verse histories in the mid-twelfth- century is thought to have been partly due to the political ambitions of Henry II.

The association of history with ideology is double as concerns the prose Th&bes. It represents both a spiritual ideology in its content and a literary ideology in its form: the use of vernacular prose is an attempt to speak through an authoritative literary voice that would bypass the suspicion of falsehood and connotation of frivolity associated with verse. It is less a rejection of oral modes of textuality than an embracing of a form that offered Latin's seriousness and prestige to those literate only in the vernacular. For the medieval reader, prose carried the weight of truth: the verse-prose tranformation of Thfebes must be seen above all as a quest for a voice that would offer its own vernacular auctoritas. This authoritative voice was neutral and operated on a different tonal register from the jongleur's individual, personal voice, which was no longer well-perceived as guarantor of the text's truth.

This change in aesthetic occurred at a time in which oral modes of discourse were losing status in comparison to

175written modes, which experienced a general resurgence.1 In particular, it is noteworthy that the twelfth century witnessed the birth of lay recreational literacy, a new type of literacy that would continue to increase and whose logical outcome was the need for a written vernacular that would make available to the vernacular-literate the entire spectrum of tone and content possessed by Latin. Given the fact that Latin histories were written in prose and that the first texts to appear in vernacular verse were of a historical nature (including the epic), it is not surprising that vernacular prose makes its first prominent appearance in historical guise.

In sum, medieval historiography must be seen in the light of an association with the Christian worldview, narrative modes seen today as fictional, and particularized social function. Although scholars have traditionally emphasized the differences between this type of historiographical practice and modern history writing, we have found certain shared characteristics: the importance of

1 It is also interesting to note the parallel between the increasing preference for prose and the changing political balance of power. The neutral voice of prose began to supplant the personal guarantee of the jongleur's verse at the same time in which the monarchy's power began to dominate over regional lords: "Prose looks like the vdioma of the state. In its emergence, it is a sicrne avant-coureur of that political entity. . . . The state . . . will act as somethingtranscendental to the social sphere, yet, through its apparatus, it will be quite immanent to it. Prose will fulfill similar functions in texts" (Godzich and Kittay, The Emergence . . ., 102).

176narrative in creating credible historiographical texts is constant in both medieval and modem history writing. In Hayden White's view, the framing of experience into narrative is essential in order for it to be perceived as valid and truthful as history, yet at the same time the narrativizing fictionalizes the material related, by the fact of necessary selection of detail and of organization into beginning, middle, and end.

Furthermore, White emphasizes the poetic aspect of the historian's task, in which he or she "prefigures the historical field"2 according to a given explanatory theory, and he asserts a deep ideological basis for all historiography.3 While this perspective touches on areas that are out of the scope of this study, I note in passing that it has the merit of challenging the notion of nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical "objectivity." Its interest for us here lies in the fact that it highlights the subjectivity that informs every objective stance: just as most modem historians do, medieval historians undoubtedly saw themselves as objective; one must recognize the validity of the objective impulse, however flawed its expression may appear. The fact of its being based on a particular set of truths and values does not differentiate it from our own historiographical

2 White, Metahistorv . . ., x.3 White, Metahistorv . . .,21.

177practice.

One can loosely qualify the Histoire ancienne as a vernacular history in imitation of Orosius that successfully inaugurates a new era of vernacular literacy and prose auctoritas. speaking to that objective truth as the writer saw it. The narrator's verse interventions in the Histoire ancienne and his narrative intrusions in the prose Th&bes function to highlight the clear expression of that truth, while they insert a personal voice and disrupt the flow of the history itself, focusing increased attention on the signification of the text and unsettling it to a certain limited degree by asking the reader to participate in the creation of the story.

Thfebes functions in the Histoire ancienne as an edifying tale about the past that contains a universal moral truth. It is provided both as exemplum of pre-Christian humanity's suffering and, in the allegorizing tradition of medieval hermeneutics, as a re-playing of the original fall from grace. The story is linear and uni-directional, organized in accordance with Christian notions about time in that the human story began at a certain, definitive point and leads to another precise moment, which is the second coming of Christ and the final judgment. All elements in it relate to the divine plan for the universe; in that sense, the meaning of Thebes is pre-determined.

However, inasmuch as the prose Thfebes offers a known

178vernacular text in a new form and yet does not explictly designate Statius as his source, the narrator's remarks to his public about the truth of his text serve to open the meaning in that he asks for their approval of the new auctoritas of his history of Thebes.

There is a contrast created by the interruption of narrator's personal voice in the text; it injects a subjectivity that is foreign to the prose form in its function here. The narrator's comments can be seen to underscore the text's validity; paradoxically, their later omission by other copyists would seem to indicate that they ultimately created the opposite effect: one may assume that they felt such intrusions to be inappropriate and that they detracted from the text in some way.

The prose ThSbes represents a middle ground, difficult to name: histoire but not history as we know it, romance but lacking the essor of that genre. It can be best described in the light of Hans-Robert Jauss' theory of medieval genres and the notion of mouvance.

Jauss' concept of medieval genres is based on that of a horizon of expectations of the text's public. Every new text is by necessity circumscribed by these horizons, but often breaks the boundaries and creates new horizons when it does so.4 Within this understanding of genres as historical

4 See Toward an Aesthetic of Reception trans. Timothy Bahti Theory and History of Literature 2 (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982). M[T]he relationship between the

179textual families, the prose ThSbes inscribes itself as a combination of tradition and innovation. It is tradition in that it is a reprise of Statius' Thebaid and innovation in its new function as Christian exemplum and in its formal dimension--the use of prose. The change from verse to prose also represents the adoption of a function from one genre to another: the aura of truth and seriousness that had been the sole property of Latin literacy is now transposed into the vernacular.3 The prose text revalidates the story of Thfebes. rehabilitating material whose pagan emphasis was too great to be of value to the imitator of Orosius, and whose prior form was suspect, lacking the requisite prestige and resonance of auctoritas.

This tranformation of the story of Thebes is a form of mouvance in two ways. First, the authorial interventions and changes in the content of the tale represent the kind of "editing" described by Elspeth Kennedy:

. . . the scribes . . . felt free to make any alterations which would in their eyes improve the text, t . . .] If they discovered a factual inconsistency

individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons. The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and 'rules of the game' familiar to him from earlier texts, which as such can then be varied, extended, corrected, but also transformed, crossed out, or simply reproduced" (88).

3 For the notion of "shift of functions" see Jauss, Towards . . . , 106.

180within the cycle or with some other well-known text, they . . . would alter the actual text.6

Secondly, the rewriting of the Roman de Thdbes in prose constitutes a kind of formal mouvance that, like the adaptations in other verse-prose transformed texts,

reflect[s] back on and thus show[s] in a new light earlier mati^res . . ., producing a new vision that conforms more closely to the truth of the matifere as the new author or scribe perceives it.7

At various points throughout this study, the question of the genre of the story of Thebes has been raised: the medieval translator began with a Latin epic poem and created a roman, that is, a vernacular work, that held value both as history and as the type of entertainment that would later be called roman in the generic sense of the term. The problems posed by this generic ambiguity of the text are external to it. They are brought by the modern reader at a distance of several centuries, and stem from the contemporary concern with form; they are not inherent to the twelfth-century sense of aesthetics which organized texts into categories by other criteria, seen in Nicolas de Senlis' classification of texts by mati&re. However, this inquiry into the changing nature of the text, as illustrated by the aspects of

6 Cited in Kelly, The Art . . ., 83-84.7 Kelly, The Art . . ., 212.

181mouvance described above, is a valid one.

Certain aspects of Ralph Cohen's examination of the usefulness of genre theory are consonant with this discussion. According to Cohen, "genre theory is analogous to social and scientific theories which seek to explain changes in matter, man, and society."8 As such, the notion of genre is useful in our attempt to understand the changes that occurred in literary aesthetics at the turn of the thirteenth century. Generic distinctions allow us to identify continuity and discontinuity within the filiation of texts as seen by Jauss. Because a given text finds at least part of its identification in the kinds of texts to which it is related (as the Histoire ancienne has a relationship with Orosian universal history), it becomes possible to speak of textual transformation when a text shows a divergence from its family pattern.

However, as Cohen points out, when using the term "transformation," two separate notions are brought into view: it can refer to variations of a sort that do not involve a conceptual change as well as to those that do.9 In some cases, the transformation of a text from one genre to another involves the putting into place of an entirely

8 "The Problems of Generic Transformation," Romance: Generic Transformation from Chretien de Troves to Cervantes, eds. Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee (Hanover: Dartmouth College, 1985) 267.

9 Cohen, "The Problems . . .,"275.

182new system of values as implied by changes in content and presentation, whereas in others the transformation is merely formal.

The debate about generic values, the notion of transformation, and the establishment of the prose Thibes as a text that exhibits mouvance leads us closer to understanding the text and to appreciating its full value.As a prose work created from a set of preexisting Latin and verse models and as an exemplum operating within the confines of a Christian historical perspective, it exemplifies formal transformation in the purest sense of the word while it is also motivated by conceptual transformation (The notion of form as used here applies strictly to the verse-prose distinction). But what of the text's genre?

We have seen that the story of Thebes fits into medieval historiographical practice. But because history's function and the aesthetic concepts associated with it are dissimilar to contemporary norms, our lexicon is not adequate to describe this kind of text, belonging, strictly speaking, to a genre which is extinct: the words history and estoire do not have the same referent. Therefore in designating the genre of texts like the prose Thebes with modern terminology, the best solution requires the acknowledgment that the text belongs to both history and romance in our sense of the terms. In this sense, neither history nor romance constitutes a generic dominant singly;

183they operate together.10 As noted above, the problem of generic characterization is a modern one superimposed on the text; we gain a better appreciation of medieval literature through it, however, especially when considering that texts such as the prose Th&bes served as models for subsequent textual creation.

The prose Thfebes illustrates the changing literary aesthetics of the early thirteenth century, but also exemplifies the ability of the redactor to accommodate different aspects of the text that, considered separately, might appear incompatible. The conceptual and the formal transformations are not revolutionary, but rather can be conceived of, in musical terms, as a new variation on a previously composed melody. Zumthor's comment about texts in mouvance is apt here:

L'oeuvre, ainsi congue, est par definition dynamique. Elle croit, se transforme et decline. La multiplicity et la diversite des textes qui la manifestent constituent comme son bruitage interne.11

10 Jauss uses the example of the Roman de la rose to illustrate the notion of generic dominant: ". . . a work can also be grasped according to various generic aspects, as, for example, the Roman de la rose of Jean de Meun, in which--held together through the traditional framework of the minne- allegory--satire and travesty, allegory and mysticism in the manner of the school of Chartres, the philosophical tractatus, and comedic scenes . . . all crisscross one another. But such a division does not relieve the critic from posing the question of the generic dominant within the relational system of the text {in our example it is the lay-encyclopedia . . . )" (Towards . . ., 81) .

11 Zumthor, E&aai . . ., 73.

184This particular manifestation of the story of Thdbes

found its value for the medieval writer and his public both as moral exemplum and entertainment. Its importance for readers of the late twentieth century, however, lies in the fact of its accommodation and mediation of the conflicting pressures placed on the text by the conjunction of history and romance, truth and fable, and the spiritual and the secular. Its formal and conceptual transformation is illustrative of history's social function and its changing voice in the early thirteenth century.

185Appendix I: The Verse Passages

As discussed in chapter two, the prologue and the verse interpolations are crucial in demonstrating the didactic intent of the Histoire ancienne*s redactor. While the prologue has been edited and published, as have ten of the verse moralizations, the remaining nine passages have not. This appendix contains a full citation of the prologue and transcriptions of the previously unedited passages.1

I The Prologue:2

Segnors, je ai oi retraire C'on doit ad£s bien dire et faire Tant con on ou siecle demore.

4 Li horn ne vit c'une sole ore,Ainz trespasse e va a la fin.S'il a eu vrai cuer e fin,Qui s'uevre ait est€ bone e fine,

8 A cel Segnor qui tot afineEn a la desserte si grande Com ses cuers le veut e demande; Car c'est li sires qui tot rend

12 Quanc'on li fait si justementQue ja ne s'en devra nus plaindre.

1 Raynaud de Lage refers to "un prologue et vingt-deux chapitres en vers" ("La morale de 1'histoire" Le Moven &ae 4th ser. 69 (1963): 365), as does Joslin ("A Critical Edition . . ., vi) . Blumenfeld-Kosinski, however, describes B.N. 20125 as containing nineteen verse passages in addition to the prologue ("Moralization . . .," 41). We have also found there to be nineteen passages in addition to the prologue, rather than twenty-two.

2 f. la-2c; the entire prologue is cited from Meyer, "Les Premieres Compilations . . .," 53-56. Meyer's punctuation has been slightly modified.

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186Por quoi ne se doit nus horn faindre De lui servir a son pooir:Metre i doit on sens et voloir.Qui se le fait sauve iert sa paine, Quar qui por bon segnor si paine En la fin en a tel merite Qui mout charement li profite.Et qui siert a mauvais segnor,II n'i a ne preu ni honor;De ce seit sa pensee certe,Ja ne s'en tornera sanz perte.Li mauvais sires, c'est deables Qui point ne nos est profitables,Car il het raison e mesure,BontS, loiautS e droiture.Mout a sergans, e nequedent Qu'il le servent a son talent,Elas! dolant, que feront il?Por lor luiers avront escil,Delor parmenable e misere.Damedeu laissent, le vrai pere,Si se tienent al enemi.S[e] il ont si mauvais amiMeaus lor venist que n§ ne fussent,Car ne font pas ce qu'il defissent.Crestiein furent apelSQuant il furent regenerSEns es fains fons, si com il devrent,E l'uile et la cresme recevrent,La orent il a Deu covenent Qu'en lui creiroient fermement,C'est qu'il ad€s le serviroient E ces comandamens feroient.Por Deut segnor, s'il ne le font, SavSs quel luier en avront?PassS avront obedience;S'amendS n'est par penitence,Perdu en avront la contrSe Que paradis est apellSe.Sovienge vos tostans d'Adam Qui en dolor et en ahan Nos mist par le mors d'une pome. Segnor, Adan, cel premier home Aveit nostre Sires formS,A sa semblance et figurS,E si l'ot mis en paradis Ou il efist estS toz dis Se passS n'eCist son comant,Dont nos somes encor dolant.Par le comant qu'il trespassa Ens el pas de la mort passa;C'en fu mis ens en la paine

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187Dont chascuns e chascune paine. Seignor, et puis qu'Adans fu mis Por cel fait hors de paradis,Qu'iert il de nos qui chascun jor Corrossons cent foix le Segnor,Qui a Adan se corrossaPor un comant qu'il trespassa?Bien nos en devroit sovenir.Mes nos lessomes covenir La choze si come puet estre:Ne creons mes ni cler ne prestre Tant nos sachent verity dire.Li siecles chascun jor enpire;C'est grans dolors e grans tristece. Chascuns de bien fere a perece,Ne nus ne redoute la mort Que si aigrement pince et mort Que la dolor ne puet descrire Sains ni sainte, tant sache dire. C'est merveille que ne cremons Ce qu'a nos propres oils veons:C'est ce que la mort aprochomes,E nos cors acompaigneromes As vers de terre sans orgoill.N'en porterons c'un soul lensuel Dont nos avromes vesteure.Segnor, e n'esteroit mesure Que nos nos en porpensessimes E nos malisses lessisimes?Que vaut force, que vaut noblece? Que vaut beut£s, que vaut richece? Que vaut hautesce ni parages?Certes, li horn n'est mie sages Qui en tout ce a sa fiance,Car il n'i a fors trespassance.N'en dirai plus: el ai a faire,Car j'ai entrepris un a faire A traitier selonc l'escriture,Ou mout avra sens et mesure.Qui la matiere porsivraE de cuer i entenderaOir porra la plus haute ovreQui encore pas ne si descuevreC'onques fust en nos lengue traite.Mes n'ai encor mension faiteOu ne a cui comencerai.Or fetes pais, jel vos dirai.De Deu est bons li comenciers:A lui comencerai premiers,Coment Adan forma e fist,Coment en paradis le mist,E com Adans entra en paine,

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Por quo! nos vestons dras de laine, Coment Adans ot sa lignee Dont la terre fu alignee.N'i lairal rlens que d'oir en oir Ne dole dire a mon pooir,Trosqu'al dololve sans falliance. Apres n'lere je en doutance De No€ ne dole retralre:Quels hom 11 fu, de quel afaire,De ses enfans, de lor llgnage Ou 11 out malnt prodome e sage E malnt felon e malnt mauvais.Avant sera 11 livres fais Coment les terres devlserent E departirent e sevrerent,E qui funda la tor Babel,De Babilolne et dou rol Bel,Des autres citSs renomees,Des provlnses et des contrees E des Isles qui sunt en mer.Pou en 1 lairal a nomer,S'on en doit fere mension,Que n'en dole dire le non,E quel rol es terres regnerent,Quand eles crivrent e puplerent.Des gens de diverses figures Vos dirai totes les natures.Apres l'estoire porsivrai E tot en ordene vos dirai:Coment Ninive fu fondeeE Babilonie restoreeQui dont fu la dame dou monde;De Babilonie la secunde Qui or est Damiete dite,Sor le flum siet qui vient d'Egypte, E qui funda Ebbatanin.Si com je le truis ou latin Le vos dirai a mon pooir.E apres vos ferai savoir De Tebes tote la devise.Ou Jherusalem est assise,Ce dirai je, e en quel terre;Qui le funda, qui li fist guerre.Et apres ce voudrai retralre De Troies tot le grant afaire,Qui le funda, en quel contree E por quoi fu Troie apelee,Qui le destruist e que devindrent Cil qui la vile grant tens tindrent. Apres vos redirai la some De la veraie estoire de Rome,Qui les murs en funda e fist

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189E les lois premerains i mist.Des haus barons, des jugeors,Des contes et des senators Vos sera toute 1'uevre dite.Apres, n'iert pas 1'uevre petite, Quant vendra as empereors Qui conquisent les grans honors Par quoi la cit£s fu cremue E en grant orgoill embatue;Car, ce tesmoine le latins,Toz li mons fu a Rome aclins,Quant Cesar Augustus regna.Apres l'estoire porsivra Tot si com France fu puplee E de quel gent fu abitee.Puis vos voudrai le tens descrire Qu'en terre nasqui nostre Sire:E coment crucifiez fu,Ce n'i sera mie teu;E com au tiers jor suscita E ses amis d'enfer geta;E com au jor d'assension Monta en sa grant mansion.E coment furent doctrin€Li apostre e enlumindDou saint Esperit e de sa grace,E par combien apres d'espace II s'en partirent et sevrerent E par trestot le munt errerent Por anuncier la loi novelle,Qui mout par est saintisme e bele.De lor vies la verit#Dirai selonc 1'auctoritS:Ou preecherent ou mururent.Com firent bien que fere durent.Des sains, des saintes redirai Selonc raison e conterai.Sous quels segnors recevre[n]t mort, As comans Deu se tindrent fort; Onques nel laisserent par paine Ne por cremor de mort procheine.Tot ce fera mout bon oir,Si s'en devra on esjoir Quant on les miracles orra Dont Deus lor fais enlumina.Segnor, dont recovendra dire Des empereors tot a tire Qui primes fu crestienSs E bons crestieins apelez,Regener€s ens es sains fons;Quant cessa la destrucions De ceus qui la loi Deu tenoient

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190E lul e ses ovres amoient.Ce covendra plenierement Dire sanz nul delaiement.E puis apres, sans demorance,Qui premerains £u rois de France Fais crestieins, coment ot non,E de sa generation Quel furent, coment estorerent Les riches glises qu'il funderent. Apres sera dit en comun Coment li Wandele, Got e Hun France pelfirent et guasterent,E les iglises desrouberent;E des Normans vos iert retrait E lor conqueste e lor fait,Coment destruirent Germanie, Couloigne e France la guarnie, Angou, Poitou, Borgoigne tote;De ce ne rest il nule doute Que Flandres Wandes n'envaissent E mout de maus ne lor feissent.Des quels gens Flandres fu puplee Vos iert l'estoire bien contee,Com se proverent, quel il furent, Com il firent que fere durent.Ce vos sera trestout retrait Tot si a point e tot a trait,Que, qui voudra raison entendre, Petit i avra a reprendre.L'uevre iert mout bone e delitable E d'estoire, sans nulle fable;Por ce iert plaisans e creue Que de verity iert creCie.La verit£ fet bon entendre,Oir, retenir et aprendre.Qui verity aime e retient As comans Damedeu se tient:Je n'i vuell fors verity dire. Longue en iert assSs la matire Qu'en pensee ai contier a plain, Por qu'il plaise le chastelain De l'lsle, Rogier, mon seignor,Cui Deus doint santS e honor,Joie [e] paradis en la fin.S'il veut, en romans dou latin Li cuic si traire lone la letre Que plus ne mains s'i sera metre, Por qu'envie m'en laist en pais, Qui a maint home kierche fais. Segnors, envie est male choze, Qu'ele a petit onques repose: Tempre ne tart ne main ne soir

191Ne li lalt il le pais avoir.Cuers enveious n'iert ja a eise,

276 Poi voit onques qui bien li plaise;Ne ja d'enveious plus ne mains Ne quier plus dire, mais lontains Ne soit il ja ens en sa vie.

280 De parlier d'eus n'ai nulle envie--Deus les ament qui le puet fere.A l'estoire me vuell retrere,Si dirai: qui voudra entendre

284 Oir i porra e aprendre.

II The Interpolated Verses3

10. The fate of the persecutors of Christians and the poet's obligation to remember God; f. I22c-d.

Segnor e dames, e que sera ce done de ceaus qui sainte iglize guerroient, e ceus font mal e heent qui Damedeu servent, le segnor de tote creature?

3 In addition to the prologue, Joslin edited the first nine interpolated passages in her dissertation, "A Critical Edition of the Genesis of Rogier's Histoire ancienne Based on Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 20125." Their respective subjects and lengths are noted here. Page numbers in parentheses refer to Joslin's thesis.1. Death; f. lOb-c; 28 lines (35-37).2. Pride; f. 14a-c; 74 lines (48-50).3. Death; f. 2lc-d; 40 lines (74-75).4. God as guardian; f. 24b-c; 38 lines (83-85).5. Sodomy; f. 28d; 32 lines (99-100).6. The prodom: f. 30b-c; 50 lines (104-06).7. Envy; f. 41b-c; 52 lines (141-43).8. Death and judgment; f. 43a-b; 38 lines (148-49).9. The loyal servant; f. 62b; 30 lines (210-11).

The last moralization (19. Greed and money; f. 304b-305b; 146 lines) has been edited by Guy Raynaud de Lage in "La Morale de l'histoire," Le Moven Age 4th ser. 69 (1963): 365- 69.

The numbering of the verse passages as it appears in this appendix is my own.

192Par foi, bien sai ja n'en gorront Quar s'il font mal e pis avront-- Li jugemens en est ja fais:

4 Chascuns hom portera son fais,Soit biens, soit maus, ja n'i faudra Qu'il tresbien 1'amendera.De ce le m'estuet laissier ore

8 Quar j'ai a faire mout encoreDavant l'uevre continuer.Mais on deit bien son dit muer-- De raison m'est qui le face

12 Ansi com on mue la faceD'une ymage quant on la paint.Ausi est droit que cil se paint Qui reconte bone matere,

16 Qu'il n'i oblit Deu nostre pere,Quar li exemple de tot bien Vienent de lui, ce seit on bien.4 E a lui tuit li buen irront

20 Qui mout se elleeceront.

My lords and ladies, what will become of those who fight the holy church and who harm and hate those who serve the lord God, master of all creatures?By my faith, I know well they will never rejoice of it, for if they do evil they will suffer worse. The judgment has already been passed on them; each man will bear his deeds, either good or evil--then it will never fail that he not make good amends for what he has done. It is now necessary for me to leave this aside for I have much still to tell before continuing this work. But one must indeed shape one's story, it is right for me to do so, as one changes the face of an image when one paints it. Also, it is right that he who recounts a good tale should take pains that he

4 Blumenfeld-Kosinski edits and comments on lines 9-18 of this passage in "Moralization and History," Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie 97 (1981): 45-46.

193not forget God our father in it, for the examples of all good come from Him--this we know well--and to Him all the good people will go, who will rejoice greatly.

11. Romulus' generosity; f. I80c-d.

Tant avoit en lui grant largece,E si fier cuer e tel proece Que trestuit cil a lui venoient

4 Qui onques parler en ooient,E il tot lor abandonoit Sans prometre ce qu'il avoit.Par ce en avoit les corages

8 Des bas, des haus, des fous, des sages.E se il ensi avenist Que sans doner lor promesist Ja les cuers d'aus en nulle fin

12 N'en eust ne soir ne maitin!Ce puet on bien apercevoirQuar on dist piessa, tot par voir,"Qui fait promesse e ne la faut

16 Le cuer a son ami se caut."E par prometre sans doner Puet on le fou reconforter,Mais ce ne fait ou le sage home.

20 Ja Romulus qui funda RomeN'eust vencus ses anemis Si sans doner eust promis.E ce avient ass§s encore

24 Qu'il sunt maint haut home ou tans d'ore,Qui tant prometent sans doner.Ja Deus ne lor puist parduner,Qu'il n'en pergent lor segnories

28 E lor honors e lor baillies,E les cuers ansi de lor homes!Mais sachent bien, sor totes somes,Que quanque il vont fauvoiant

32 Lor reviendra es nes devant.Je dirai plus: chascuns se guart E de soi pregne tel reguart Qui sa5 grant terre a a baillir

36 Qu'il ne promete sans faillir!

194A ce prist guarde Romulus,Qui n'estoit cuens, ne rois, ne dus Ne par terre, ne par balllle

40 Que nus hom 11 eCist baillie;Mais en lui se prova nature Qui les gentis cuers raseilre.

He had such generosity in him, such a proud heart, and such valor that all of those who ever heard of him came to him, and he gave them everything without promising what he had. By this he had the hearts of the lowly, the mighty, the foolish and the wise. And if it had happened that he had promised without giving, then never would he have had their friendship, neither morning nor night I This one can see well, for it has been said for a long time, truly, that he who makes a promise and doesn't fail it warms his friend's heart. By promising without giving one can assuage the foolish man, but this is not done with the wise man. Never would Romulus, who founded Rome, have conquered his enemies if he had promised without giving. And this still happens often because there are many powerful men today who promise much without giving. May God never forgive them, lest they not lose their power, honors, and domains and thus the loyalty of their men! But let them realize, on all accounts, that how ever much they go around deceiving, it will come back in their faces. I'll say more: let each man who has great land to distribute take care--and have such regard for himself--that he make no promise that he will fail to keep. Romulus was careful about this, who was

195neither count, nor king, nor duke through any land or administrative post that anyone might have given him; in him a good nature, which assures noble hearts, demonstrated itself.

12. God's mercy; f. 189a-b.

Segnor, or po€s ci entendre,Savoir, retenir e aprendre Que mout avoit de paine Rome.

4 De la parole est ce la some:Qu'ansi certainement avoient Cil qui par le mont habitoient Quar en chascune region

8 Avoit male destruction6De batailles o de faminesQuar les gens n'erent pas aclinesA Deu servir ne aorer,

12 Ne ne se voloient penerEn null endroit de null bien faire.E Deus lor sofroit lor afaire.Si, fors7 dou tot anientir,

16 Qu'il ne lor voloit consentirQu'il de lor biens en bien usassent Ne qu'en la fin s'en essaussassent,Ni que lor oir ja en joissent

20 Ne les honors apres tenissent.Ains le perdoient si li pere Que ja fill ni parent ni frere N'i clamassent part ni droiture

24 Se ce ne fust par aventureQue li uns 1'autre oceist,Qu'a force (tot) li tot li tolist.Tels estoit li siecle(s) en cel(ui) tans,

28 Por ce qu'en Deu n'ert nus creansN'a lor besoins ne le huchoient Ne en sains fons lav€ n'estoient.Mais puis qu'il vindrent a creance

32 Les mist toz Deus a delivranceDes grandes persecutions Dont vos o€s les mensions.

6 ms. mala.7 ms. fort.

196Por ce est fous qui ne l'aore

36 B qui ses grans pechi€s ne pioreE qui vers lui ne s'umelie:Quar qui sovent merci li crie De verai cuer ou repentance

40 De ce qu'il fait par ignorance,Ne puet faillir qu'il ne s'acorde Au segnor de misericorde.Quar il est si misericors

44 Que tot adSs est ses acorsA ceaus qui ne se desacordent A ses dis e qui s'i acordent.Drois est que nos i acordons

48 E si traions a tels cordonsQui ne faillent la droite corde Quar tost i avroit grant discorde. E qui de droit va descordant?

52 En bien, nel va nus descordant,Ne Deus nel claime mie quite.Ceste parole vos ai ditePor ce que de Deu vos soviegne,

56 Qui a sa loi toz nos maintiegne.Ne dirai plus, ains voill retraire As Romains dont mout ai afaire. Mais ce di je--sach€s le bien--

60 Entre xx maus un poi de bien.

Lords now you can understand here, learn, know, and remember that Rome suffered greatly. This is the essence of the tale: those who lived all over the world certainly suffered in the same manner, for in each region there was terrible destruction from battles or famines, for the people were not inclined to serve and worship God; nor did they want to trouble themselves in any manner to do any good. And God responded to their behavior not by destroying everything but by refusing to allow them to profit by their wealth or in the end find satisfaction in it, or allow their heirs to benefit from it or hold honors after them. Instead, the fathers lost their wealth, so that no son, relative, or

197brother could claim a share or rights to It, except perhaps by killing another one in order to take everything by force. Such was life in those times because no one was a believer in God; people did not call on Him for their needs, nor were they baptised in the holy fount. But since they came to belief, God has brought them all deliverance from the great persecutions of which you are hearing the tale. Because of this he who doesn't worship Him and weep over his great sins and bow down before Him is a fool: for he who often criesto Him for mercy with a truly repentant heart about that which he does out of ignorance cannot fail to be reconciled with the Lord of mercy. For He is so merciful that His peace is everlasting to those that do not dispute His will and who reconcile themselves to it. It is right that we be in harmony with it and thus pluck the strings that do not miss the right chord, for soon there would be great discord. And who rightfully causes disharmony? In goodness, no one is disharmonious, nor does God ever abandon the cause. I have spoken these words so that you may be reminded of God-- may He keep us all according to His law! I will say no more but rather want to return to the Romans, about whom I have much to say. But be apprised of this: amongst many [lit., twenty] evils, there is also a bit of good.

19813. Death; f. 212b-c.

Que mout est grans merveille que nus hom ne doute la mort.Segnors, por Deus que peut ce estre?Que nus hom ne change son estre Por la pa&r qu'il ait de mort,

4 Qui tant aigrement pince e mortQu'ele nos fait laissier richece,Honor, beautS, force e pr&ece!Si nos enbat a son voloir

8 Ou liu ou nos n'avons pooir,Fors tant com Deu vient a plaisir-- La somes mis au convenir De quanque nos poomes faire

12 C'est nulle riens, quar nostre afaireA Deus dou tot en sa baillie.La sera l'arme mal baillie Qui ne sera e caste e monde

16 Des biens qu'el avra fait ou monde.Tost muert li hom e va a fin;Tels est toz haitSs au maitin,Qui sans null cop qu'il ait de guerre,

20 Est ains le vespre mis en terre.N'i vaut ni tors ni forterece La mors a tot en sa destrece,Desques prelas e chapelains,

24 Rois e contes e chastelains,Roines, dames e contesses.Mout bien lor paie lor promesses Quar tot orguell lor fait laissier

28 E la pure terre massier;E de guerpir les dras de soie,Ou on les grans avoirs enploie Qui sunt as povres gens tolu--

32 Mais poi lor avra done valuQuant prises seront a la guerre Dont on les enfora en terre!E quant les chars soef nories

36 Seront avec les vers porries,La seront rendu li meffait Qu'en cest siecle ont esti fait.De ce se devroit porpenser

40 Qui veaut vers Deu s'arme tenser,Quar nus hom ne vit tant qu'il cuide.Por ce le di que tel estuide Mist Daires en vengier son honte:*

8 son h. Bic.

19944 Mais cil qui les orguoills desmonte

Li fist tost sa pensee vaine Par la mort qui li fu prouchaine.

What a great marvel it is that no man fears Death.Lords, for God's sake what can this be? That no man changes his way of life on account of the fear of Death, who pinches and bites so violently that she makes us leave behind wealth, honor, beauty, strength, and valor! Thus she drives us as she likes into a place where we have no power, except insofar as God wishes. There we are forced to agree that whatever we may be able to do, it is nothing, for God wholly controls our capacity to act. There the soul will be badly off which is not chaste and pure as a result of the good deeds that it has performed in the world. Man dies soon and goes to his end; a man may be completely healthy in the morning and, without suffering a single blow in war, be laid in the ground before vespers. A tower and a fortress are worth nothing here, for Death has all in her grip, including prelates and chaplains, kings, counts, castellans, queens, ladies, and countesses: she pays them back handsomely for their promises, for she makes them abandon all pride and chew pure dirt, leaving behind the silken cloths in which they enfold the great possessions that they have taken from the poor folk--but this will have been worth little to them when these ladies are taken in war and as a result are buried in the ground! And when the soft, well-fed flesh is rotting with worms, then the misdeeds that have been

200committed on earth will be recompensed. He who wants to dispute his soul with God should reflect on this, for no man lives as long as he thinks he will. Because of this I say that Darius put a great effort into avenging his shame: but He who brings down the proud soon causes imminent death to foil his plan.

14. Death; f. 252b-c.

Que chascuns hom se doit pener de bien faire, que l'en rende le merite.Segnor, ensi fait on encore:On puet veir maintenant ore Que ja tant riches ne sera

4 Li hom, si tant de bien n'avraFait en tos les jors de sa vie,Qu'apres sa mort ait nus envie De trop grant dolor entreprendre

8 Faire por lui; quar a entendreA chascuns tant a son afaire Que ne puet on tant dolor faire.Oblies fu tost Alixandres

12 Ausi est li bons cuens de FlandresBauduins, qui fu emperere De Costantinoble, e sa mere Qui nomee fu Marguarite,

16 E tant fu bone dame eslite.De ce raconter est enfance!Obliis est li rois de France,Qui mout honora sainte iglise:

20 E Deus qui les bons loe e priseEn sa plus haute mansion L'en rende si haut gueredon Com il fist a la Magdelene,

24 Qui de pech^s est monde e saine.E tos ceaus ausi qui honorent Sainte glise e qui la socorrent Quant ele est en perversitS,

28 Deus les destort d'aversitSAu jor qu'il mestier en avront!C'iert quant li angle trambleront,Que chascuns avra sa merite

32 Quar done n'iert mie cuite quite

201Des tors des maus que fais avons,Ne des vils pechies o nos sons Quar fais par dis e par pens#(e)s

36 Or ne seront mie cel#(e)s.Por ce le di que bien doit faire Chascuns qui pense a son afaire, Voire, des biens que Deus li preste

40 Quar graindre n'est nulle conquesteQu'estre avec Deus ens en la vie, Dont diables nos porte envie:C'est lassus ou saint paradis

44 Oblies somes a toz dis,Puis que nos cors sunt mis en terre: De nos avoirs entrent en guerre E nos ami e nos parent.

48 Dieu seroit drois, mon essient!En tant com nos avons pooirs Que les armes feissons oirs9 De tant por Deu del iretage

52 Qu'eles n'i eussent domage,E que ne fussent obliees La ou eles sunt alivees Au voloir Deu: quar mout tost sunt

56 Cors armes obli# ou montDes oirs kui dont la grant richece-- Mai est moillie[r]s qui ne se seche! N'en dirai plus, mais tot a fait

60 Est obli#s qui bien ne fait.

How each man must try to do well, in order that he may be rewarded.Lords, this is how people still behave: one can still see today that a man will never be so rich and have done so much good in all the days of his life that after his death another man will have any desire to undertake great mourning; for every man has to attend so much to his own affairs that he cannot show so much grief. Alexander was soon forgotten; so are the good Count of Flanders, Baldwin, who was Emperor of Constantinople, and his mother who was

9 ms. De.

202named Marguerite; and she was such a high lady. This story is child's play! Forgotten is the King of France, who honored the holy church so much--and may God, who values and approves of the good, take him into His highest resting place and give him as great a reward as He did Mary Magdelene, who is purified and cleansed of sins. And for those who also honor the holy church and who help her when she is troubled, may God turn adversity from them on the day when they are in need! It will be when the angels tremble and each man has his reward, for then there will be not be a stone unturned concerning the tricks and evils that we have committed, and of the vile sins in which we live. For deeds, both those spoken and those existing only in thought, will not be hidden then. Because of this I say that each man who is mindful of his business must do good, indeed, with the wealth that God lends him: for there is no greater victory than to be with God in life, for which reason the devil envies us--I mean up there in heaven. We are forgotten here forever; from the moment our bodies are put into the ground, friends and relatives war over our possessions. God, however, would be just. As much as we are able, let our souls leave such heirs to our inheritance, by God, that our souls may suffer no harm and may not be forgotten when they are raised on high by the will of God: for very quickly are bodies and souls forgotten in the world by the heirs to whom one gives great wealth. Weeping that

203does not end is wrong! I will say no more, but he who does no good is completely forgotten.

15. Greed; f. 273d-274a.

Quar ele fu si bien plantee Tresdonc e si enracinee,Qu'encor i pert e i parra

4 Tant com la cit£s durera.Segnor, qui auques porte a Rome De la parole est ce la some:Qu'il i entre par bone porte.

8 E qui petit, segnor, i portePetit i fait de sa besoigne,Rome nul grant fais ne resoigne.Por quoi li argens voist avant?

12 Segnor i sunt petit e grant,Fort e foible; s'il ont monoie Ne cuit que nus en i anoie.As cardonaus ens el pretorie

16 Est honores de la victorie;Cil qui plus beaus presens i maine E plus est e loiaus e saine:Sa querele est plus tost o£e,

20 E miaus amee e miaus joie.Si estoit des conceles dont Dont li livre memoire font:Qui plus avoir i conquerroit,

24 Et plus ariere en raportoitPlus ert hautement honoris Et a grant feste coronas.E quant nient n'i aportoient

28 E lor besoignes ne faisoient,N'avoient honor ne loenge,Mais honte asses e grant blastenge. Et por ce plus mout se penoient

32 Quant en autres terres venoientDe bien faire por los aquerre,Si maintenoient miaus la guerre.

For it was so well planted and rooted that it is still visible and will be as long as the city lasts. Lords, this is the gist of what X have to say about anyone who takes something considerable to Rome: he finds the door wide open

204for him. And whoever comes bearing little, my lords, little is done there concerning his need; Rome does not care for any great burden. Why is money privileged? There are small and great lords there, weak and strong; if they have money I do not think anyone troubles them. With the cardinals in the churches [the rich man] is honored with victory. The finer a man's gifts, the more he is [considered] loyal and holy. His quarrel is given audience sooner and preferred and embraced. Thus it was of the councils then, that the books record: he who won the most possessions there to bring back with him was most highly honored and crowned with great festivities. And when they did not bring anything, and did not accomplish their purposes, they had neither honor nor praise, but rather shame and great blame. And on account of this they made a great effort to conduct themselves in such a way as to acquire praise when they came to other lands; and in this manner they contributed to the war's continuation.

16. Regulus' having left Rome; f. 275d.

Quar puis que la choze est alee Tost est la dolors obliee:De ce c'on voit de ce sovient,

4 E tant la dolors au cuer tient.Ce fu tresdonc, ausi est ore Et iert, je cuit, ausi encore.

For when the thing has passed, the suffering is quickly forgotten; one remembers only that which is before one's

205eyes, and the pain afflicts the heart for that long. This was ever the case, it is now, and it will be, I believe, still to come.

17. Death; f. 283d-284b.

Que mout doit la mort doter qui n'a fait point de bien.E Deus, com la mors est doutee Quant ele est pres une jornee!C'est quant au cuer se veut a traire,

4 Adonc voudroit on dire e faireQuanc'on porroit por un jor vivre,Se fust on tant dou mal delivre O mains ass€s, quar li respis

8 I est mout doucement requis.Ce sevent li fisitien,10 Qui mout en ont efit de bien!Mais petit i vaut medecine

12 Ne laituaires ne racinePuis que la mors met a bandon,II n'i a point de raenson:De respit prendre n'i a rien.

16 Segnor, riche home, faites bien!Li mors nos espie e aguaite,Qui tostans a l'espee traite Por nos ferir en descouvert.

20 Qui cors e arme e avoir pertCertes il n'a pas mains perdu D'un mortreor o d'un pendu.Cil pert cors e arme e avoir

24 Qui eslonge le loial oirPar mauvaist£ e par envie Des biens qu'il a en ceste vie.Qui est li oirs loiaus e fins?

28 De la parole est ce la fins:Que ce doit estre nostre sires Qui dou cors e de l'arme est mires-- Cil concist totes les sant€s,

32 Si guarist totes les enfermetSs,De lui vienent li iretage Quanque tienent e fol e sage.Qui ne l'en sert forment forfait!

10 ms. fisitiein.

20636 Soumons en sera a tel plait

Que raison li coviendra rendre,0 voille o non de droit entendre.Qui de cel plait avroit recort

40 Et fin doutast, por ce la mortQu'ele trop pres ne 1'enchausast Devant ce qu'il por Deu donast Les biens qu'il avroit tres s'enfance,

44 Sorjeseroit ceste doutance.Mais cil qui la mort crient e dote Por ce que ne li toille tote La richece qu'il a e tient--

48 Par quoi de deli[s] poi li sovient?11Cele doutance ne vaut guaires:Poi en amende ses afaires.Et por ce pardoutent la mort

52 Li pluisor mout qu'il ont confortDes biens qu'il o[n]t por lor usages-- Dont nus nes doit tenir por sages! Prodom la mort ne doute mie

56 Por la perte de ceste vie,Mais li mauvais le doit douter,Qu'i[l] ne saura preu o aler Et qu'il ne seit qu'il trovera

60 Quant de cest mont departira,0 il laiss[e] a cel tant de bien Qu'il a eiit e or n'a rien-- Fors un drapeau que il en porte

64 AaaSs par une estroite porte.

How he who has done no good should fear Death greatly.Dear God, how Death is feared when she is only a day away! It is when she wants to approach the heart, then one would like to say and do whatever one could in order to live one day, if one were for that long delivered from suffering--at least somewhat, for relief is so sweetly sought. The physicians, who have reaped many benefits from it, know this! But medecine, potions, and roots are worth little once Death condemns; there is no ransom; there is nothing

11 This line is hypermetric.

207one can do to find respite. Lords, powerful men, do good! Death, who always has the sword drawn to wound us when we aren't looking, spies on us and lays traps for us. He who loses body, soul, and possessions certainly is in an equal position with a murderer or a hanged man. He loses body, soul, and possessions who rebuffs the loyal heir through evil and greedy handling of the goods he has in this life. Who is the loyal and true heir? This is the final part of my message: it must be our Lord, who is physician to the body and the soul--He sees to all salvation and thus heals all infirmity; from Him come whatever inheritances the fool and the wise man possess. He who does not therefore serve Him commits a grave misdeed! He will be summoned to a trial where he will have to give an explanation, whether he wishes or not to hear of the law. He who remembered this trial and feared the end on account of Death coming too close to him before he could give away for God's sake the goods acquired since his youth would repose upon this fear. But the man who fears Death because she takes away all the wealth that he possesses--why does he only barely remember his sins?This fear is hardly worth anything because he corrects his behavior very little on its account. And many people have a great fear of Death who find comfort in the material goods that they possess for their use; because of this no one should take them for wise! A worthy man does not fear Death on account of the loss of this life, but the evil man must

208fear it for he will not know very well where to go and he does not know what he will find when he departs from this world, leaving to it many material goods that he had and now no longer has, except for a little cloth that he wears on his way through a very narrow door.

18. Cowardly knights; f. 288d-289a.

Que la a cele dure bataille n'eussent mestier coart chevalier.Segnor, la n'eussent mestierCil blanc maminot chevalierQui bien ne font ne bien ne dient,

4 E qui es mireors espientSe bien seent lor paeleres,Et qui lor lorains a clochetes Font plus souvent terdre e forbir

8 Qu'il ne voisent la messe oir;Et qui. sunt hardi en maison Quant il ont befit a foisonEt quant il ont les robes vaires,

12 Et les dames as clers viaires.12Certes cil ne fussent dont preu Et encore or valent il peu.Dames, mout bien vos descresisse

16 Les maminos e si desissePor quoi maminot furent dit;Mais je n'ai pas tant de respit Por la bataille dont je conte;

20 Mais Deus guart et destort de honteEt oste de voie esmarie Les chivaliers sainte Marie,Qui mal ne dient, ne font bien--

24 Mes cuers a aus s'acorde bien.

How cowardly knights would not be useful in this hard battle.Lords, these white ladies' knights would have nothing to do

12 ms. las.

209there, they who neither do nor say anything good, and who peek into mirrors to see if their pale colors look good on them, and who clean and polish their bell-strung harnesses more often than they go to mass. They are brave in the house when they've had plenty to drink and when they have fur-lined clothing and ladies with pretty faces. Certainly these men would not have been valorous in the past and still today they are worth little. Ladies, I could describe to you very well the ladies' men and so would say why they were called ladies' knights, but I do not have enough time, because I am telling you about the battle; but may God keep, preserve from shame, and lead away from dangerous roads the knights of Saint Mary, who do not speak evil, but rather do good; my heart is in agreement with them.

210 Appendix II

Summary of the Prose Th&bes

The prose ThSbes begins with the words: "Ci parlerai de cil de Thebes."1

The text opens with the birth of Oedipus to Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of the city of Thebes. Because of the predictions concerning his future, two servants are ordered to carry the infant into the forest and kill him; moved to pity by the laughter of the child, they suspend him from a tree by the soles of his feet instead of following their orders. Oedipus is then found immediately after by Polibus' hunting party, and Polibus adopts him as his heir.

Oedipus the young man is described as haughty and boastful. One day he irritates some companions and they make allusions to his questionable background. He then learns from Polibus how he was found, and goes to ask Apollo about his true parents; Apollo directs him to Thebes.

At Phoces, where many have gathered for games, Oedipus kills his father Laius without realizing his identity. He continues on his way and meets up with the Sphinx--a creature with the body of a lion and the face of a "damoisele cruel e espoentable"2--in the mountains on his

1 f. 89a.2 f. 91b.

211way to Thebes. The Sphinx, who has been terrorizing the countryside, devours those she meets who cannot solve her riddle. He successfully solves the riddle about a creature that first walks on four legs, then two, then three, then four, as being a description of men in infancy, maturity, infirmity, and extreme old age, and kills the Sphinx.

News of Oedipus' bravery reaches the court at Thebes where Jocasta's barons are encouraging her to take a new husband. Oedipus and Jocasta wed and their union produces two sons and two daughters: Eteocles and Polynices, Antigone and Ismeine.

One day when Oedipus is bathing, Jocasta sees the scars on the soles of his feet and immediately suspects his true identity. At night in their room, they tell of their respective pasts and realize the mother-son relationship. Much lamentation ensues. Eteocles and Polynices mock their father, so much so that one day Oedipus tears out his own eyes and flings them before the two young men, who then trample them. They put Oedipus into a "fosse" where he ends his days.3

The two sons dispute the crown, creating discord at the court. The barons devise a plan whereby both will rule, each son holding the throne for a one-year alternating period. Eteocles being the elder, he will reign first. Both agree to this plan in the presence of the barons.

3 f. 94a.

212Polynices leaves Thebes and arrives at Arges, the city

of Adrastus, at night during a terrible storm. He takes shelter in an empty part of the castle, only to be joined by Tydeus, the son of the King of Calidonie, who has left his native land because he has accidentally killed his brother.

Adrastus welcomes them and gives his daughters in marriage to the two men. Meanwhile, Eteocles, taking counsel of his barons, expresses his wish not to share the crown of Thebes. He plots to kill Polynices at the year's end. At the same time, Polynices thinks of returning to Thebes for his year as king but is convinced by Adrastus to send a messenger before going himself. Tydeus, who has become Polynices' good friend, volunteers to go as his messenger.

Tydeus delivers Polynices' message to Eteocles, asking him to keep his promise to share the throne. Eteocles does not acquiesce and Tydeus threatens war, publicly defying him. He further invites the barons to join Polynices who will double their holdings of land and money. None respond to the invitation and Tydeus departs without taking leave of the court. Enraged, Eteocles sends fifty knights out to kill Tydeus. As he approaches the spot near the Sphinx's cave, Tydeus sees the men's arms glinting in the moonlight as they prepare to ambush him, and a heroic fight begins in which Tydeus defeats all of his attackers, leaving one alive to tell the tale.

213Tydeus takes a brief respite from his painful journey

home, receiving care from the unnamed daughter of king Ligurge. Tydeus' arrival at King Adrastus' court is greeted by surprised lamentations at his condition: Eteocles' treachery is now known.

The narrator returns to the knight whom Tydeus had left alive as a messenger. Back at Thebes, the knight accuses a furious Eteocles of treason and commits suicide before the court. The people of Thebes, angry at Eteocles for this act, go to the scene of the intended ambush to collect their dead.

Adrastus, Polynices, and Tydeus prepare their revenge. Eteocles also sends for his barons and army, swearing to the gods never to give in. The wise prophet Amphiaras, upon consultation with the "ymages",4 finds out that he will not return from the campaign against Thebes, and hides from Adrastus. His hiding place given away, he joins the muster but tells of the disaster he has foreseen, counseling against the war. The barons prevail nevertheless, convincing Adrastus not to believe him, and the forces depart, crossing into the territory of King Ligurge which is suffering from dire drought.

Searching for water, Tydeus and King Capaneus come upon a garden in which a maiden, Hypsipyle, is watching over Ligurge's only male heir, an infant. She leaves the child

4 f. 107b.

214momentarily in order to lead them to a spring, returning to find the child dead from a serpent bite.

Not yet aware of his son's death, Ligurge extends his hospitality to the Greeks. Adrastus asks for an open boon, granted by Ligurge with the exception of matters regarding his family. It is now that he learns of the boy's death. After much lamentation and the burial, Adrastus asks Ligurge for forgiveness of the young girl, which the queen is willing to grant on the condition that the serpent be found and destroyed. This is accomplished by King Parthonopeus of Arcade.

Adrastus breaks camp. As battle prepares, Eteocles' barons want war and the wise counsel peace. Jocasta seeks peace and succeeds in convincing Eteocles to take steps in this direction: Jocasta, Antigone, and Ismeine go as messengers to Polynices' camp, where Tydeus insists that Eteocles depart for his year as previously agreed.

The two daughters own a pet tiger, which escapes from the city walls and is mistaken as a ferocious creature by the Greeks, who then kill it. This precipitates the conflict. The Thebans call to arms and the women return to the city.

Amphiaras is armed and prepared to assist the Greeks in battle if necessary. While he is on his four-wheeled chariot, however, a great gulf opens up in the earth and swallows him, then closes up again. Adrastus and the barons

215elect a new spiritual leader, Theodamas.

Eteocles and Polynlces kill each other on the battlefield: Polynlces, mortally wounding Eteocles, dismounts to lament and is treacherously struck by Eteocles from beneath his hauberk.

Upon news of the deaths, the Thebans flee back into the city, where Creon, who is now king, distributes goods to them in exchange for their continued war effort. When the Greek women learn of their army's defeat, they set out for Thebes.

The Duke of Athens passes through the territory with his army--en route to subjugate a rebellious vassal--and Adrastus asks for his help in recovering the bodies of the dead from Creon. Creon's refusal brings a general attack on the city, including the participation of the women, who create a breach in the wall. The Duke enters the city and Creon is killed with many others. The Queen, her daughters, and the other women are taken as prisoners and slaves, the city is sacked and burned, and the dead are cremated and buried.

Eteocles and Polynlces are cremated together but remain miraculously separate, the flames and smoke seemingly dividing into two parts and fighting against each other. Tydeus' memory is honored; his son, named Diomedes, will show great prowess in the history of Troy that the narrator will recount next.

216Adrastus and one servant are the sole male survivors of

the conflict. The narrator ends the text by stating:E por ce doit on esguarder raison e droiture: c'est Deu amer e servir, par cui nos est donee pais e concorde en cest siecle, e en 1*autre repos sans tristece et joie parmanable.

3 f. 117c.

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MOLLY MARGARET LYNDE

College of Arts and Sciences Department of Languages and Linguistics

Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5091

EDUCATION:PhD, French Literature, Indiana University, 1993

Major field: medieval French literature Minor: Medieval Studies

Maltrise de lettres modernes, university de Lille III, 1988 MA, French Literature, Indiana University, 1987 AB, Highest Honors, University of California, Davis, 1985

Major field: French literature

DISSERTATION:"A Text Transformed: Prose Textuality and Notions of History in the Thirteenth-Century Version of the Roman

Director: Emanuel J. Mickel, Jr.In the early thirteenth century, an anonymous

writer recast the twelfth-century verse Roman de ThSbes into prose, incorporating it into the historical compilation known as L'Histoire ancienne -iusqu'lL C^sar. Through its examination of the implications of both the verse-prose transformation and the fact of its inclusion in the larger history, the dissertation presents an analysis of the prose Thibes. an as-yet unpublished text.

DISTINCTIONS:Maitrise received with mention trSs bien, 1988 Indiana University French Dept. Academic Award, 1987 Indiana University Graduate School Fellowship, 1985-86 Phi Beta Kappa, 1985, University of California, Davis First place, national awards, Pi Delta Phi French Honor

Society, 1985 Prytanean Honor Society Award, 1985University of California Regents' Scholarship, 1983-85

TEACHING POSITIONS:Assistant Professor, Western Michigan University. Visiting Assistant Professor, Ripon College, 1992-93. Visiting Lecturer, Indiana University, 1990-92. Lectrice, University de Lille III (English Dept.),

1987-88.Associate Instructor, Indiana University, 1985-87,

1988-90.

MEMOTRE DE MAITRISE r"Le Roman de Thebes: un extrait du manuscrit S" Director: Aime Petit, 1'University de Lille III

The project included the editing of 552 lines of an unpublished manuscript and the preparation of a glossary.

CONFERENCE PAPER:"Romance as Witness to Truth: An Allegorical Reading of the Prose Version of the Roman de Thebes11 (presented at the Twenty-Seventh International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1992).