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Living Landscape: Attitudes Toward the Environment in French Medieval Literature Katherine A. Snider a Dissertation Submitted In Living Landscape: Attitudes Toward the Environment in French Medieval Literature Katherine A. Snider A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Denyse Delcourt, Chair Louisa Mackenzie Richard Watts Stephen Hinds Program Authorized to Offer Degree: French and Italian Studies ©Copyright 2015 Katherine A. Snider University of Washington Abstract Living Landscape: Attitudes Toward the Environment in French Medieval Literature Katherine Allene Snider Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Denyse Delcourt French Studies This dissertation demonstrates the material grounding of twelfth and thirteenth century French texts by using environmental history and archaeology in conjunction with close readings. The title, “Living Landscape,” attempts to capture the physical and symbolic imbrication of humans, animals, plants, topographies, and objects in these texts, and each chapter addresses one or more of these enmeshed configurations. The first seeks to recognize the life and agency particular to the non-human environment, and the way in which the “inanimate” can nonetheless act on the human characters in the Chanson de Roland and the Roman d’Alexandre via physical manifestations. The second chapter focuses on the way in which humans live and interact with the material world around them, particularly how the non-human nodes in the network can be negatively impacted by human misbehavior, particularly in the form of physical and moral pollution in French grail romances from the Conte du Graal to the Queste del Saint Graal . The third chapter has as its subject how the historical, cultural and material conditions of one’s surroundings can impact relations to objects, based on the geo-political situation which determines the familiarity of automata, hydraulic, and fabric technologies Floire et Blanchefleur, the Voyage de Charlemagne , and De Planctu Naturae . I am not claiming that one can glean “facts” about medieval “reality” from medieval literature; rather, that the inclusion and manipulation of said “facts” can shed light on the interpretation of the text itself. In other words, here are two questions to which this project attempts to respond: what is the degree of faithfulness of depictions of geography, pollution or technology to contemporary realities or knowledge levels, and what do any alterations tell us? Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Agentic Topography ................................................................................................. 7 The Chanson de Roland ............................................................................................................ 11 The Roman d’Alexandre ............................................................................................................ 19 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 42 Chapter Two: Moral Pollution in the Grail Romances ................................................................. 44 Wastelands ................................................................................................................................ 48 Waste Forests and Moors .......................................................................................................... 69 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 79 Chapter Three: Artificial/Nature ................................................................................................... 81 Automata ................................................................................................................................... 83 Garden Technology ................................................................................................................... 90 Fabric Technologies .................................................................................................................. 95 Representational Technologies ............................................................................................... 100 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 107 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 113 Snider 1 Introduction This dissertation demonstrates the material grounding of twelfth and thirteenth century French texts by using environmental history and archaeology in conjunction with close readings. The title, “Living Landscape,” attempts to capture the physical and symbolic imbrication of humans, animals, plants, topographies, and objects in these texts, and each chapter addresses one or more of these enmeshed configurations. The first seeks to recognize the life and agency particular to the non-human environment, and the way in which the “inanimate” can nonetheless act on the human characters in the Chanson de Roland and the Roman d’Alexandre via physical manifestations. The second chapter focuses on the way in which humans live and interact with the material world around them, particularly how the non-human nodes in the network can be negatively impacted by human misbehavior, particularly in the form of physical and moral pollution in French grail romances from the Conte du Graal to the Queste del Saint Graal . The third chapter has as its subject how the historical, cultural and material conditions of one’s surroundings can impact relations to objects, based on the geo-political situation which determines the familiarity of automata, hydraulic, and fabric technologies Floire et Blanchefleur, the Voyage de Charlemagne , and De Planctu Naturae . I am not claiming that one can glean “facts” about medieval “reality” from medieval literature; rather, that the inclusion and manipulation of said “facts” can shed light on the interpretation of the text itself. In other words, here are two questions to which this project attempts to respond: what is the degree of faithfulness of depictions of geography, pollution or technology to contemporary realities or knowledge levels, and what do any alterations tell us? Before proceeding to a more detailed consideration of my chapters, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge my indebtedness to Snider 2 ecocriticism, ecotheory and its various offspring, including but not limited to object oriented ontology, new materialisms, and animal studies. I have benefited from wide-spread medievalist work on English texts, which undermine presentism in ecotheory. For example, Gillian Rudd’s “green reading” has expanded the more prevalent symbolic readings of the non-human in texts to valorize even the briefest landscape description. “Green reading poses the question of exactly what such non-iconographic, descriptive elements are being true to: of whose ‘real’ is operating at any given time and what undercurrents may be at work in those apparently insignificant ‘other details’” (Rudd 11). In the Middle Ages, the “real” at stake is at once physical and spiritual since each material phenomena had an explanatory referent in the realm of the divine. In the chapters that follow, the choice of words or the turn of a phrase that describes a landscape or an object often opens up understanding of interconnected concepts on physical and symbolic levels. For example, in Chapter Two, we see how in the Conte du Graal , the Waste Forest’s non-utilitarian value to the twelfth-century urban economy and its association with the “lande” or moor connects to Orgueilleus de la Lande, who badly mistreats his “amie,” and from there to other remote locations that lend themselves to rape. Ecocriticism’s initial fixation on the color green has recently received some backlash for the way in which it can reify “nature” and “wilderness” and thus reinforce the hierarchical divide between humans and non-humans. For example, Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green proposes alternatives to “green reading” by embracing other hues to complicate this nature/culture divide (Cohen, “Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow” XX). My second and third chapters follow somewhat in this tradition, since the second chapter is interested in non- utilitarian or destroyed environments, and the third is interested in human crafts, particularly the Snider 3 precious metals, crystals and silks representing foreign automata, hydraulic, and fabric technologies. Eileen Joy uses a “both-and” approach to advocate for non-human agency (which is at stake in Chapter One). Eileen Joy’s “You Are Here: A Manifesto,” theorizes a way of being in the world which eliminates terms of division between the human and the non-human, placing everything “on the same ontological footing as everything else, including us” (Joy 164). She admits like other critics that such terminology is unavoidable, as it will be in these chapters. Part of her manifesto involves the recognition of everything’s personhood and letting “the world happen to us for a change” (Joy 170). This idea is crucial to Chapter One, which works to recognize the way in which “[s]ilent things [...] speak, exert agency, propel narrative,” like the storm and France’s mourning in the Chanson de Roland and the
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