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6 - Tribute to a Duchess: The Book of the Duchess and Machaut's Remede de Fortune
- from II - The Intertextual Duchess
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- By Sara Sturm-Maddox, Professor Emerita of French and Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
- Jamie C. Fumo
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- Book:
- Chaucer's Book of the Duchess
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 April 2018
- Print publication:
- 20 April 2018, pp 119-134
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Summary
Sometime after the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt, in 1368, Geoffrey Chaucer undertook to compose the poem that he called The Death of Blanche the Duchess, now generally known as the Book of the Duchess. As its original title suggests, the poem is topical: the recall in its opening section of the tragic Ovidian tale of Seys and Alcyone and the definitive closing pronouncement ‘She ys ded’ (1309) frame it with dramatic revelations of the death of a beloved spouse and the despairing grief of the bereaved partner. This response to the death of the wife of the most powerful prince of the realm has also been termed ‘the first clear instance of “courtly” literature in English’, a suggestion due in part to its borrowing from a substantial number of French poems.
Here I examine the strong intertextual presence in the Duchess of the Remede de Fortune (after 1341, and before 1357), one of the major dits of Guillaume de Machaut, against the background of what Elizabeth Salter has aptly characterized as ‘the cosmopolitan years’ that followed the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, during which the ‘captivity’ of King John II of France and his sons intensified the already considerable prominence of French courtly poetry in England. That presence is particularly prominent in the longest segment of the Duchess, the story told by the Man in Black, which in its telling closely follows the account in the Remede of the origin, development, and effects of love for a highborn lady widely known for both her beauty and her virtue. The lady of the Remede, generally acknowledged to be John II's first wife Bonne of Luxembourg, is identified by the narrator as ‘ma dame, qui est clamee / De tous sur toutes belle et bonne. / Chascun par droit ce non li donne’ (54–6) [my lady, who is proclaimed by all to be the most beautiful and best above all. Everyone rightly gives her this name]. This discreet but transparent anonymity enables the depiction of her beauty and goodness with an intimacy and candor that might well have appeared presumptuous in the poet's own voice even within the courtly fiction in which he portrays her.
9 - Erec et Enide: The First Arthurian Romance
- Edited by Norris J. Lacy, Joan Tasker Grimbert
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- Book:
- A Companion to Chrétien de Troyes
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 23 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 11 August 2005, pp 103-119
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Summary
Erec et Enide enjoys pride of place among the works of Chrétien de Troyes and in the history of medieval narrative fiction as well. First among the Champenois poet's five Arthurian romances, it also marks a new departure in medieval vernacular narrative: it is the first Arthurian romance, in contrast with the earlier romans d’antiquité, the Latin pseudo-chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1137), and its vernacular avatar, the Brut of the Anglo-Norman poet Wace (1155). As regards versification, like Wace's Brut and such ‘romances of antiquity’ as the Roman de Thebes, the Roman d’Eneas, and the Roman de Troie, Chrétien's narratives are in rhyming octosyllabic couplets; yet he defied the metric constraints of the octosyllabic line to achieve a syntactic suppleness prefigurative of the kind of prose that emerged around 1200 in Old French fiction and chronicle. Chrétien was also an innovator in terms of form. Whereas Geoffrey and Wace depict the rise, political and social fortunes and ultimate fall of Arthur's realm, Chrétien's Arthurian court assumes prominence only at the beginning and end of the story and sporadically in between. These ‘Arthurian scenes’ are largely ceremonial loci at which to initiate heroic exploits, positively sanction their completion, or else to bring the adventuring hero momentarily into contact with the court. Chrétien thus sacrifices the comprehensive Arthurian historia elaborated by Geoffrey and Wace, choosing instead to portray his eponymous hero or couple against an attenuated background of Arthurian pseudo-history. He relinquishes the ‘epic’ military campaigns featured by Geoffrey and Wace in favour of heroic episodes linked by a developmentally meaningful design, a format well exemplified in Erec et Enide.
At Easter, King Arthur decrees the observance of the customary hunt of the White Stag. His nephew Gauvain warns against it, because according to that custom the slayer of the stag must kiss the loveliest maiden at court, and the five hundred young knights will each be eager to assert in combat the supreme beauty of his own beloved. Yet Arthur insists, and the hunters all depart save Erec who, hastening after them, suddenly offers to accompany Queen Guenevere and her lady-in-waiting. They encounter an armed knight, his maiden, and a malicious dwarf who strikes first the Queen's attendant, then Erec. The latter, unarmed, vows to pursue the knight, procure arms and avenge the insults.
“E fer en cortoisie retorner li villan”: Roland in Persia in the Entrée d’Espagne
- Edited by Barbara K. Altmann, Carleton W. Carroll
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- Book:
- The Court Reconvenes
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 31 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2002, pp 297-308
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Summary
The “epic” Entrée d’Espagne, composed in Italy probably in the first half of the fourteenth century, purports to set forth in the vernacular the account of Charlemagne's Spanish conquest as recorded in Latin by the (pseudo) Turpin. Notable as innovation is the portrayal of its hero Roland, whose familiar epic profile is significantly nuanced in this text, making of him, in the words of one reader, “l’éclatante illustration d’une conception originale de l’héroisme épique.” Henning Krauss and others have explored the socio-economic context of such a transformation, determinant not only for the Entrée but for other poems in the franco-italian tradition that reflect the search for a new ethic appropriate to a new communal culture. And among the prominent elements of this conception figure “courtliness” and, more broadly, “courtoisie.” In the Chanson de Roland, the epithet curtois is reserved uniquely for Roland's companion Olivier, a denomination that, like his “sagesse” – in the famous formula “Roland est preux et Olivier est sage” – underlines the contrast between him and the principal hero of the poem; the adjective “cortois” to characterize the actions of individuals did not appear, Ulrich Mölk observes, in the earliest chansons de geste, and the abstract term “cortoisie” derives in all probability from the usage of the troubadours (43). Now, in the Entrée, we find a new portrait of a Roland who is not only personally “courtois” but responsible, in the long interpolated segment that recounts his sojourn in the Orient, for a civilizing mission defined as the introduction of the practices of “courtoisie” into a pagan (Saracen) world.
The importance of this thematic element is underlined by the narrator as he prepares his hero's transition to the Orient from the battleground of Spain, which Roland leaves behind after being struck by Charlemagne. Roland's subsequent adoption of a pagan disguise and his service to the Persian Sultan is not without precedent in certain late French epics, in which Christian knights evince little reluctance to participate in wars between pagans or to adopt their ways, at least in appearance.