Brunhilde on Trial: Fama and Lydgatean Poetics

Abstract

Brunhilde on Trial: Fama and Lydgatean Poetics Mary C. Flannery The concept of fama pervaded medieval life. Legal disputes, social and political standing, and reputation were all affected or determined by fama. Nevertheless, despite its ubiquity in the Middle Ages, this term possessed multifarious definitions. It could mean 'rumor' and 'idle talk'; 'the things people say'; 'reputation'; 'memory' or 'memories'; 'the things people know'; "'fame,' or perhaps 'glory,' as well as their opposites, 'infamy' and 'defamation.'"1 As these various definitions indicate, fama is both the process of cultivating a particular reputation or "name" and the end result of that process: reputation itself. In this essay I will suggest a potential parallel between the function of fama in medieval English law and the role played by fama in medieval English literature, arguing that the influence of the medieval courts on a person's fama may be read as similar to the late medieval English poet's power over the fama of his subject matter. An episode from John Lydgate's Fall of Princes (written between 1431 and 1438–39 at the request of Humphrey duke of Gloucester) will serve as one example of the poet acting as "judge" in two ways: first by determining a character's fama and then by passing judgment on that character's testimony. My point is not that Lydgate is using the discourse of law to explore the discourse of poetry or poetics, but that the way his poem assesses and determines reputation is remarkably similar to the way that medieval law made use of and affected fama. In other words, both law and literature employ a shared discourse of fama. Recognizing this parallel will not only open up new ways of thinking about Lydgatean and Boccaccian poetics (particularly in relation to Chaucerian poetics), but will also bring us to a clearer understanding of the role of reputation in medieval society. This essay will be divided into three parts. I will begin by briefly outlining the role of fama in medieval European and English law until the fifteenth century, focusing on the ways in which fama shaped and was shaped by legal procedure. I will then consider Lydgate's depiction of the confrontation between Brunhilde and Bochas in Book IX of the Fall of Princes in the light of fama's role as a social, legal, and cultural force. [End Page 139] Finally, I will conclude by suggesting some ways in which the idea of fama might affect our conception of late medieval poets and poetry. Fama in the Courts Medieval attitudes toward fama were rather different from ours today. No modern reader familiar with TV courtroom dramas could fail to acknowledge that the power of fama (in the sense of 'rumor' or 'popular opinion') is strongly felt by modern-day judges, lawyers, and lawmakers. We are, however, used to seeing this power excluded from the courtroom—venues are changed if public opinion is thought to make an "objective" judgment in a particular case impossible; judges are quick to dismiss potential jurors who evince too fixed an opinion regarding the appropriate outcome of a trial; and juries are (theoretically, at least) cut off from the contagion of public opinion. Fama has been deemed incompatible with the modern legal process. It may seem exceedingly strange to us, then, that medieval law acknowledged the power of fama by incorporating it into the legal system and even regulating its use in legal disputes. As Thelma Fenster and Daniel Lord Smail have recently pointed out in their collection of essays on medieval fama, although medieval courts and jurists regarded fama with ambivalence, they accepted it as one basis of proof and status: [T]hirteenth-century jurists gave fama and its equivalents in customary law a precise set of meanings (and thus the practical application of such fama can readily be explored through the extant proceedings of law courts). This was so even where vernacular equivalents replaced the word fama, as in the customary legal system of northern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for example, which featured words such as renommée (renown) or notaire (notorious). [This] became a veritable jurisprudence of fama, expressed both in statute law...

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