Chansons de geste and Chansons d'aventures : Recent Perspectives on the Evolution of a Genre

Abstract

This article will concentrate on recent developments in research into the Old and Middle French epic, concentrating very specifically on the French area but with some consideration given to Occitan and to Franco-Italian. The French domain naturally includes the insular French of the medieval British Isles, generally called Anglo-Norman, but translations and adaptations of Anglo-French poems into Middle English Charlemagne romances will be left to one side, as will their German, Dutch, and Scandinavian equivalents. French material does not enter Spain as epic poetry, surfacing only in the later romancero or appearing in chronicles: this material is also beyond the scope of the present article. A sound overview of international scholarship on all these manifestations of the matière de France can be found in the annual descriptive bibliography published by the Société Internationale Rencesvals.1 A more analytical account of activity between 1955 and 2005 can be found in the volume of essays published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Société Rencesvals.2 Equally important for identifying longer-term trends, as well as new departures, in chanson de geste studies are the fascicules of the Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters devoted to the topic.3 Finally, the very recent survey of the whole field by François Suard gives both his own particularly acute assessments of poems and of current research on Old French epic and its prolongations in several areas.4 The starting point for this survey of recent scholarship is the paper given by William W. Kibler to the ninth international congress of the Société Rencesvals in 1982.5 The significance of this paper, which effectively launched the term chanson d'aventures to describe the poems that arose from the revival of interest in epic poetry as an actively creative genre in France in the mid-fourteenth century, lies in the way in which it focused attention on what was original and distinctive in these texts. Kibler enabled scholars to resituate them in the cultural context of the chivalric romances, also called romans d'aventure, which arose at the same period and which had a similar relationship to the earlier Arthurian romance as the chansons d'aventures had to twelfth- and early thirteenth-century chansons de geste. His intervention was timely, because it coincided with the increasing awareness among scholars in the field that the centuries between c. 1100 and c. 1500 could no longer be considered a homogeneous period: cultural and political evolution was so rapid across much of Western Europe between c. 1250 and c. 1350 that the previous habit of treating the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a decadent and etiolated extension of the ‘glorious’ twelfth and thirteenth centuries had become inadmissible. The understanding of the distinctiveness of compositional modes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been explored more recently by Hans-Erich Keller and Dorothea Kullmann, both of whom stress the importance of écriture in the discourse adopted by authors of epic poems and of the prose adaptations of them: while Kullmann explores the application of epic discourse to the biographical chronicle La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, Keller emphasizes the distinction between celebratory discourse in the poems and the assimilation of epic to exemplary history in prose versions.6 This new interest in the culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has produced some significant editions of poems, previously edited, if at all, only by antiquarians in the mid-nineteenth century. Larry S. Crist and Robert Francis Cook, who were precursors in this field, published the first scientific edition of Baudouin de Sebourc in 2002.7 Other recent editions of chansons d'aventures are La Belle Hélène de Constantinople and Hugues Capet.8 These later poems are broadly differentiated from their twelfth- and thirteenth-century counterparts by the incorporation of important elements of plot and characterization, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, will be the mark of the picaresque: heroes of obscure or illegitimate birth; rapid shifts of geographical location; adventures blending sexual exploits more akin to those found in fabliaux with the chivalric or crusading, the hagiographic, and the courtly; and a strong admixture of folktale motifs. This last feature is notably present in La Belle Hélène de Constantinople, the plot of which concerns the adventures in a number of countries of the heroine, who disfigures herself and flees to escape the incestuous intentions of her father, the emperor. Claude Roussel made an extensive study of the folklore elements of the poem in his Conter de geste au xivesiècle, in which he also speculates that many of these late poems emanated from a single milieu, and many of them do seem to belong to the province of Hainaut; his other, off-the-cuff suggestion, based on a shared rhetoric and exploitation of motifs, that they might derive from a single atelier seems less convincing given the diverse cyclical associations of the poems, the chronological span of their composition, and the fact that authors were evidently feeding a popular market.9 Roussel himself and Hatem Akkari have further studied folktale elements, while Denis Collomp argues that sociopolitical conditions in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries gave particular impetus to the theme of the persecuted queen or princess.10 The complex web of unconventional family relationships in these poems has been explored by Dorothea Kullmann, who invokes the evolving civilization of the fourteenth century to explain the problematization of traditional epic values.11 The interest in late medieval approaches to the epic has also resulted in an upsurge in researches on the mises en prose of epic material, which marks fifteenth-century appropriations of the older poems and which comes some two centuries after the same phenomenon affected Arthurian romance. Since chansons de geste had always been considered by contemporaries as vehicles for preserving History, one cannot consider the use of prose by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century authors as an attempt to rehistoricize the material. However, the melding of epic, romance, and historiographical discourse in the prose texts does signal the assimilation of the inherited Matter of France to current norms of chronicle and history writing.12 Work on epics of the earlier period has also seen a greatly renewed interest in the edition of poems, including new editions of texts published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these have been produced for the ‘Lettres gothiques’ series of Livre de poche, or for Champion Classiques, both series incorporating a translation into modern French with a view to the editions being used more widely in French university courses. However, while the former offer more general introductions, the latter take a more philological approach and also have the usual critical apparatus of the ‘Classiques français du Moyen Âge’. A significant feature of recent work on chansons de geste is the realization of the importance of studying the poems in manuscript and cyclical contexts. To some extent, interest in modes of writing, transmission, and reception implied by the insertion of epics into manuscripts, either with other chansons de geste to constitute a definable cycle or in compilations with poems of different genres, especially romances and hagiography, has superseded the increasingly sterile debate over the oral and literary origins of the chanson de geste that was a mark of much research on the Old French epic in the mid-twentieth century. This has generated two important collective editions, one of the Crusade Cycle and one of all the French texts of La Chanson de Roland;13 it has also produced a number of studies approaching the question from different angles, especially from the 1990s, when ‘cyclification’ became a serious focus of attention. An important milestone in the development of this area of research affecting many types of literature in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was the colloquium organized at the University of Amsterdam in 1992, although Michael Heintze's thesis, which to some extent stimulated the organizers, had appeared the previous year.14Cyclification also marked a shift, which has intensified in recent years, away from studying various genres of medieval French literature in isolation, treating them instead as related parts of a global cultural phenomenon. While Simon Gaunt's Gender and Genre tended to reinforce distinctions between the genres,15 two important studies by Dominique Boutet bring various literary strands together, whether from the perspective of the historical transformation that saw the birth of vernacular literature as a written monument, or from that of ethnography, philosophy, and mythology.16 Published in 1995, Sarah Kay's The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance took issue with the traditional view that epics giving space to female protagonists and notions deriving from fin'amor were influenced by Arthurian romance; her view that both genres developed in tandem discussing common sociocultural problems from different perspectives contributed greatly to intertextual and intergeneric studies involving chansons de geste.17 Keith Busby has taken this holistic approach in the domain of manuscript studies, as has Luke Sunderland, studying manuscript cycles as vehicles for the discussion of ethics.18 Sunderland's book, which looks more generally at the question of cyclic generation, in prose romance and beast epic manuscripts, as well as in chansons de geste, concentrates in its first section on the Guillaume Cycle, the most completely elaborated cycle of epics in medieval manuscripts; in this respect he follows the fashion established by most scholars working on French epic cycles.19 However, the interest in cyclic elaboration, often seen as part of a wider intellectual trend towards encyclopedic summations of knowledge in the thirteenth century, has stimulated work on minor cycles, especially the Lorraine cycle and the gestes of Nanteuil and Saint-Gilles.20 For some time the trend in France, based on a culture of organizing colloquia and collaborative volumes, has been to explore themes across medieval literature, although sometimes the epic is selected as the focus.21 This approach is also apparent in some monographs, and notably in the work of Alain Labbé, much of whose research approached the epic through architecture and landscape understood as elements structuring the thematics of the poems.22 More recent works taking this approach give exhaustive studies of messengers, of foreigners, and of representations of the Orient.23 A particularly fecund line of research on the representation of the law in Old French literature, including the chansons de geste, has been led by Bernard Ribémont, while other scholars have also developed a strong theme of researching the links between the romans d'antiquité and the epic.24 Although, in the last half-century, theoretical approaches, especially psychoanalytical ones, have been much more in evidence in research on Arthurian romance and courtly lyric, those working on the epic have not totally eschewed them. The purely achronic approach to structuralism adopted by Alfred Adler has not proved a popular strand,25 but structural analyses of chansons de geste have provided some fruitful results.26 With regard to structuring elements, the work of Jean-Pierre Martin on motifs, several studies taking new looks at the notion of the epic formula, and Edward A. Heinemann's extensive work on the metrics of the chansons de geste have contributed significantly to our understanding of the poetic mechanisms of the genre.27 In addition to studies by Kay and Boutet mentioned above, socio-anthropological studies, especially those based on the ideas of Georges Dumézil28 and Mikhail Bakhtin29 have opened up important strands of thought about the epic. Alongside gender studies, queer theory has become increasingly important in the English-speaking world, although as yet it has not made an impact in continental Europe.30 Despite the traditionally perceived lack of characterization in the epic, several studies have approached the poems from the perspective of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, especially with reference to the writings of Jacques Lacan; most recently, various approaches to cognitive psychology and the eclectic mix of theories espoused by Slavoj Žižek have been increasingly applied to the epic.31 Interest in the poems of the First Crusade Cycle is certainly not new. However, the perspective on them has changed significantly in recent years, from considering the extent of their reliability as historical sources, although this only ever applied to the Chanson d'Antioche and the Chanson de Jérusalem, to analysing them as literary artefacts with the same problematic relationship to the history they purport to transmit as all other chansons de geste. Alongside studies of the poetics of the songs, which the publication of the complete cycle in modern editions has facilitated, there has been considerable interest in the patronage of the poems as part of the genesis of the cycle, and indeed in that of the prose abridgements of the cycle that arose in the late thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.32 The last area of studies to be considered is that dealing with what may be termed the Old French epic diaspora. This expression would certainly be considered controversial in respect of Occitan epic. The debate over the relationship of poems in Occitan to those in French has been animated in recent years, as has that over the possible role of Occitan epics in the formation of the northern songs. This has concerned not only the Chanson de Roland and the Guillaume Cycle, but the Crusade Cycle with the edition and study of the Canso d'Antioca.33 Much of this interest stems from the political attitudes of scholars, especially in France, towards the relationship between modern France as a centralized state and the lands south of the Loire; this has also stimulated studies of the conflicting ideologies and myth-histories encapsulated in the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise.34 There are similar historical, though not contemporary, political implications relating to research on the other two significant areas in which the chansons de geste developed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. The first of these, Anglo-Norman England, is a particular case, because it was part of the French-speaking world between the late eleventh and the late fourteenth century, at least as far as the aristocratic and educated mercantile and administrative classes were concerned. Until recently the accepted doctrine was that there were no Anglo-Norman chansons de geste, and that the copies of continental French epics made in England were no more than that; moreover, where they showed significant divergence from continental exemplars, they were corrupt and unreliable. Finally, the making of copies of these poems in England was offered as proof of the provincial conservatism of the Anglo-Norman barons deemed to provide a public for them. Most of these positions are now seen to be untenable. Work on the unique insular manuscript of the Chanson de Guillaume and on the insular manuscripts of Fierabras has shown that they offer sufficient variation from what is known or can be deduced about continental versions to merit being considered adaptations, with all that that implies of creativity, even if they are not completely original works.35 These insular adaptations have implications for the cultural life of Norman and Plantagenet England, and research into them is an integral part of that on the complex interactions of French and English during these centuries. Similar questions of the interchanges between language, culture, and politics have fuelled work on Franco-Italian chansons de geste, whether adaptations of French poems or original compositions produced in the Italian peninsula. Alongside editions of the works, studies of language and the cultural and political imperatives that drove the development of these poems have greatly enriched our understanding of the processes that led from the French epic to the poems of Boiardo and Ariosto, which kept the matière de France alive in literature and on the operatic stage well into modern times.36

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