Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Kinoshita, Sharon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812239199 ISBN 13: 9780812239195

Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

In Medieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads the Chanson de Roland, the lais of Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation.

An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and—in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory—demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity.

Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

Medieval Borders began with the curious realization that many of the best-known works of medieval French literature take place on or beyond the borders of "France" or even the French-speaking world: the Chanson de Roland, the Lais of Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes's Cligès, Aucassin et Nicolette, and a host of others. Capitalizing on this insight, Medieval Borders sets out to rethink Old French literary production (circa 1150-1225) through the thematics of cultural interaction. The inaugural phase of vernacular French literature, I will argue, is inextricably linked to historical situations of contact between French-speaking nobles and peoples they perceived as their linguistic, religious, and cultural others.

Like much recent work in the emerging field of "postcolonial medievalism," Medieval Borders is animated by theoretical problematics derived from Edward Said's Orientalism and postcolonial theory: the representation of the other, the dynamics of cross-cultural contact, the question of the crusades as a proto-colonial enterprise. To date, much of the work in postcolonial medievalism has focused on late medieval England in the age of Chaucer and after. The cultural and temporal specificity of this focus has important consequences. In late medieval England, as critics like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, and others have shown, it is possible to identify elements of the discourses of Orientalism and nationalism in nascent but clearly recognizable forms. Such exercises in postcolonial medievalism thus tend, implicitly or explicitly, to make an argument for continuity, construing the Middle Ages as the site of the origin, or at least the consolidation, of the emergent ideologies of European colonial expansionism.

Medieval Borders seeks to complicate this understanding by delineating the specificity of a representative range of medieval texts along three critical axes: periodization, geography, and vernacularization. We will begin with periodization. In her synthetic study Strong of Body, Brave and Noble, Constance Brittain Bouchard cautions against the dangers of reading history "backward," of assuming that a phenomenon or attitude found in the fourteenth or fifteenth century must also have existed in the twelfth. Medieval Borders explicitly casts the early thirteenth century as a moment of epistemic rupture, in which several key twelfth-century institutions, practices, and mentalities were, in relatively short order, reorganized, challenged, or abolished. The Fourth Crusaders' sack of Constantinople (1204) and the Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) marked a turning inward of the violence Pope Urban II had unleashed in 1095 with his famous cry, "Deus lo volt!" (God wills it!), while Philip Augustus's victory over the Angevin-Flemish coalition at the battle of Bouvines (1214) assured the ascendancy of the French monarchy over the great feudal lords—many of whom had, at the time of Philip's accession (1180), commanded greater wealth and power than the king himself. But it was the Fourth Lateran Council (convened in Rome in November 1215) that most ominously augured some of the changes to come. Most particularly, the attention devoted to identifying and regulating internal others—Jews, heretics, and lepers—gestures toward the increasingly disciplinary taxonomies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, part of an epistemic will toward totalization also manifest in the encyclopedic impulse prevalent in Latin and vernacular culture alike. Whatever the causes of this epistemic shift, medievalists working in a wide range of specializations agree on its effects. For R. R. Davies, the thirteenth century brought a new tone to the Anglo-Norman colonization of Wales: "racial distinctions became sharper and more abrasive," accompanied by "notions...of legal and even moral uniformity" that would have been alien to early twelfth-century Normans—"motivated by greed and power, not by racial or 'national' animus." For Geraldine Heng, the long thirteenth century is one of the policing of internal and external boundaries, of "interiors turned inside out for inspection," of an impulse toward containment, assimilation, and regulation; not coincidentally, it is also the century of the rise of medieval nationalism, built on "a racializing discourse of biological and spiritual difference, posited on religion, color, and physiognomy." David Abulafia likewise identifies the late Middle Ages with "the hardening of the external boundaries" between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in a process linked to the "wider process of state-building," by the fourteenth century, "even the Muslim kingdom of Granada...had become staunchly Islamic in identity" while the Christian kingdoms "increasingly legislated to separate their Jewish and Muslim subjects from the rest of civil society, even if the new laws were often honored in the breach." The "fuzzy and foggy" religious frontiers of earlier times gave way to "mental barricades," sometimes "translated into real, physical walls, dividing the judería or morería from Christian society and from the nation state of which they could not be members."

My second critical axis concerns the geography of medieval French literature. Geography, Franco Moretti has argued, shapes narrative structure: "Placing a literary phenomenon in its specific space—mapping it"—can thus be a powerful tool of analysis, "bringing to light relations that would otherwise remain hidden." Approaching medieval texts in this way requires, however, an initial effort of defamiliarization. In the twelfth century, the national borders we today take for granted were far from inevitable. Henry II and Richard I of England ruled an "Angevin empire" stretching from the Scottish border in the north to Aquitaine in the south, while the count-kings of Aragon were assembling a trans-Pyrenean empire wrapping around the Mediterranean from Barcelona to Marseilles. This means that the nationalist paradigms that have traditionally shaped our understanding of the Middle Ages are frequently ill-suited to the objects they purport to explain.i In our period, to take one example, it is impossible to correlate language with nation: by the late twelfth century, Old French was spoken in England, Norman Sicily, Lusignan Cyprus, and the crusader states of Outremer, but not in the area today known as southern France. One of postcolonial medievalism's most significant contributions has been to analyze the emergence of nationalism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in the context of England's Hundred Years War against France and the consolidation of English as a literary and national language. Conversely, one of the goals of Medieval Borders is to delink our readings of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French texts from the teleology of the modern nation, making visible alternate histories not defined by the borders of the modern Hexagon. As we will see, the interests and imagination of the crusaders, mercenaries, pilgrims, merchants, and settlers who constituted the audience of Old French epic and romance were not limited to the frontiers of twelfth-century—let alone twenty-first-century—France. A fundamental thesis of this book is that medieval French speakers had a much greater degree of involvement in and knowledge of the cultures of the Iberian peninsula and the Mediterranean than modern readers generally credit.

The third critical axis Medieval Borders seeks to make visible is the distinction between Latinate and vernacular culture. Against a trickle-down theory of medieval culture, in which Old French literature is presumed to mirror the ideologies and concerns of official and learned texts of the day, I believe, with Peter Haidu, that vernacular...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812239199
• ISBN 13: 9780812239195
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande