Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society
This collection of conference proceedings presents forty-nine articles on French, Occitan, Latin, Middle English, German, Italian, and Spanish medieval courtly literature, with forays into Georgian, Japanese, Arabic, and Indian courtly texts, encompassing genres that include the lai, Arthurian romance, roman réaliste, devotional literature, didactic treatise, religious drama, courtly lyric, Crusade literature, and music theory. This substantial volume reflects the richness and variety of courtly literature as well as the diversity of critical lenses through which contemporary scholars view medieval texts.
The initial section, devoted to the plenary lectures, constitutes a small volume in itself. In “Book-Burning at Don Quixote’s: Thoughts on the Educating Force of Courtly Romance,” C. Stephen Jaeger undertakes a spirited defense of the capacity of courtly romances to educate their readers and audience, not by imparting dry rules of conduct, but by exerting a “charismatic” force that “seduce[s] readers to believe in and imitate” (p. 23) its idealized heroes. Christopher Page’s “Music and the Origins of Courtliness” examines the role that music played in court society, beginning in 507 when King Clovis requested that a harpist be sent north from Theodoric’s court in Ravenna. Page recounts how musical skills, a feature of early monastic religious practice, became associated with court life and how music theory (especially in John’s De Musica) came to define “courtliness” as “wandering” or undulation in the stepwise motion of a melodic line (pp. 43–44).
In two lengthy co-authored pieces that are meticulously researched and persuasively argued, Richard and Mary Rouse expand our notion of what constitutes Crusade literature. “The Crusade as Context: The Manuscripts of Athis et Prophilias” surveys two centuries of the manuscript transmission of Athis et Prophilias, a traditional friendship romance set in ancient Greece and Rome not usually associated with the Crusades. The Rouses demonstrate that significant alterations in various manuscripts of the poem’s long version reflect the political interests of Northern French crusading families after the Fourth Crusade, when Otto de la Roche became lord of Athens. Through careful analysis of eight manuscripts and various fragments and excerpts (described in detail in an appendix) and of the insertions and changes in different versions that were tailored to the interests of patrons (among then Jeanne de Châtillon, duchess of Athens, whose son embarked on a crusade to Greece), the Rouses write a fascinating chapter in literary history.
Mary and Richard Rouse’s “Context and Reception: A Crusading Collection for Charles IV of France” presents a complementary piece, showing how a classical didactic text, Vegetius’s De re militari, was re-motivated as Crusade literature within its codicological context. As he assembled several crusade handbooks in Paris BNF lat. 7470 (one of six manuscripts described in this article), the compiler transformed Vegetius’s military manual “from a work that might be useful for crusading into a work that is itself a crusade tract” (p. 113). The compiler’s prologue, his [End Page 528] organization of materials and the program of illuminations (reproduced in full, along with illustrations from other manuscripts) enhance the codex’s thematic unity. Like the Rouses’s piece on Athis et Prophilias, “Context and Reception” exemplifies how close scrutiny of codices in their historical context can illuminate the social function of medieval literature.
Section II constitutes the bulk of the volume, offering pieces that provide fresh readings of well-known texts, bring lesser-known texts into the limelight, examine manuscript compilations, and analyze literary motifs and poetic techniques. Although the book’s organization is in alphabetical order by author, I will comment upon the pieces in conceptual clusters according to genre, national literature, author, or critical approach in order to highlight some of their pertinent features.
More articles are devoted to Marie de France...
