Representations of storytellers and their performance within medieval narratives provide rich material for study. Particularly revealing in this regard is a subset of medieval narratives in which characters temporarily assume the identity of a professional storyteller. In such key moments, readers or listeners witness the process by which an actual, extradiegetic storyteller constructs the fictional figure of an intradiegetic storyteller. The tale of ‘Renart jongleur’ – branch Ib of the Roman de Renart – is one such narrative. This story, wherein Renart disguises himself as an inept Breton minstrel, shows us how the author constructs Renart's identity as a storyteller.

In ‘Renart jongleur’ (also sometimes referred to as ‘Renart teinturier’), Renart the fox paradoxically conceals his verbal prowess behind the mask of an incompetent minstrel whose unmasking reveals and affirms Renart's essential identity as a master narrator. The author structures the branch using a complex verbal game in which the power and authority of verbal expression continually passes from one character to another (from Noble to Isengrin, from Isengrin to Tibert, from Tibert to Poncet and so on) until the dénouement when Renart assumes the place of primary storyteller and asserts his verbal domination through exclusive possession of the power and pleasure that language confers. In telling his story, the medieval author of ‘Renart jongleur’ self-reflectively uses his own narrative to assert the ultimate power of storytelling and storytellers.

In the pages that follow, we first establish the essentially linguistic nature of the fox's disguise. We analyze how Renart conceals his powerful mastery of speech under the mask of an innocuous and inept minstrel. We then study the ironic inversion that propels the narrative, a reversal by which Renart, disguised as a professional storyteller, cedes verbal expression to others to become the auditor of stories of his own adventures. Renart yields the pleasure of storytelling and the power to direct the plot to other characters until he captures them in his verbal trap and reduces them to silence. The branch reaches its culmination when Renart is reborn as the narrator of his own story and regains mastery of both the narrative and the laughter that the narrative elicits.

Introduction

The rising costs of healthcare and other social welfare programmes and the efforts of the federal, state and local governments to reduce services that are provided by governmental agencies have increased the importance of distinguishing personal and familial responsibilities from public (that is, governmental) obligations to dependent individuals. Societal debates about collective, familial and individual responsibility for dependent individuals are not new, but demographic and social changes have made the issue of who will assist dependent family members an increasingly important topic.

Increased longevity and reduced fertility in the past few decades have profoundly affected the structure of families in the US. Just as in other industrialised nations, life expectancies in the US have been increasing (Vaupel and Kistowski, 2005), which has resulted in more multiple-generation extended families than ever before (Uhlenberg and Kirby, 1998). These multiple-generation families are different than in the distant past, however, because lowered fertility means that there are fewer younger family members to care for greater numbers of older people than was true just a couple of generations ago. Younger adults are therefore likely to have more older kin who potentially need aid, which has fuelled societal concerns about the well-being of older adults.

Unlike many other industrialised nations, the US lacks a comprehensive system of government-sponsored social programmes for its citizens. Although there are a few federal support programmes for older adults (that is, Medicare, which provides funds for health-related needs), and even fewer state programmes that are primarily for low-income older people, for the most part responsibilities for the care and support of older adults have been seen in the US as belonging primarily to families.

The belief that families are obligated to care and support older kin is so widespread that 30 of the 50 states have filial responsibility laws that define which family members are obligated to provide care and what care they are obligated to provide (Bulcroft et al, 1989). Critics have argued that these laws and other US social policies about intergenerational care and assistance are based on the outdated and questionable assumptions that kin networks are unwaveringly emotionally close and loving, families have readily available members to assist older kin and family membership is stable (Hooyman and Gonyea, 1995). These assumptions do not reflect the experiences of many, if not most, families in the 21st century.

In the midnight quiet of June 8, 2004, in her French Department office at New York University, Nancy Freeman Regalado and I celebrated her sixty-ninth birthday by sealing a Federal Express box containing the manuscript for Performing Medieval Narrative, the volume we had edited with Evelyn (Timmie) Birge Vitz. Fortified by Nancy's favorite fig cookies, we wrapped up years of work on our book dedicated to the performance of medieval stories. Work on this volume made me more keenly aware than ever before of the centrality of performance and the performer in medieval French culture.

In this essay I examine how authors construct and define the most pivotal figure in that performance culture: the minstrel. I focus particularly on the latetwelfth-century anonymous Folie Tristan of Oxford and the “Tristan ménestrel” episode in Gerbert de Montreuil's Continuation de Perceval from 1226–30. In both of these verse narratives an exiled Tristan disguises himself as a minstrel in order to enter Marc's court and visit his beloved, Yseut. In the Folie, Tristan adopts the mask of a minstrel-fool and travels alone to Tintagel. There he amuses Marc's court with a mixture of true and fictive stories in which he claims to be not Tristan, but Tantris, the minstrel-harpist as whom Tristan masquerades in other medieval narratives. In the Continuation, Tristan recruits Gauvain and twelve other knights of Arthur's Round Table to join him in minstrel disguise. Together they travel to Lancïen and present themselves as minstrel-watchmen to Marc's court where, still masked as minstrels, they fight on the king's behalf in his tournament against the Roi des Cent Chevaliers. Both Gerbert and the author of the Folie use the terms menestrel and jogleor or jugleres to refer to Tristan (and his companions) in disguise, yet their concepts of the minstrel differ remarkably.

The disguise passages in the two narratives reveal how different authors create the same character, Tristan, and how they define the minstrel disguises he assumes. In addition, the Folie demonstrates how one author constructs two different minstrel disguises – those of the minstrel-fool and the minstrel-harpist – in a single narrative. Analysis of the signs authors use to create Tristan's minstrel masks shows the complexity and flexibility of authorial notions of the medieval minstrel, and more generally of character.