The Lyricization of Human Authority in 13Th-Century French Dits

Ego vox clamantis in deserto: The Lyricization of Human Authority in 13th-Century French dits A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Adam Tyler Grant IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS Mary Franklin-Brown December, 2014 c Adam Tyler Grant December 2014 0.1. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 0.1 Acknowledgments I must acknowledge the dedicated support and guidance that my advisor, Professor Mary Franklin-Brown, has given me over the past four years, from my initial for- rays into Medieval literature as an undergaduate student through the challenges of researching and writing my Master’s Thesis. I would also like to express my grate- fulness to my commitee members, Professors Susan Noakes and Marguerite Ragnow, for their willingness to work with me across continents and despite (several) adjusted deadlines. i 0.2. DEDICATION 0.2 Dedication Ridebis, et licet rideas. Ego, ille quem nosti, apros tres et quidem pulcherrimos cepi. “Ipse?” inquis. Ipse - non tamen ut omnino ab inertia mea et quiete discederem. ii Contents 0.1 Acknowledgments . i 0.2 Dedication . ii Introduction 1 1 Reading the dit 9 2 Rutebeuf, The Unstable diteur 27 2.1 Auto-portrayal . 36 2.2 Manuscripts . 40 2.3 A poètemaudit?.............................. 60 2.4 Scholarship . 68 3 Adam de la Halle 70 3.1 Ex immoderata cogitatione . 72 3.2 Unstable allegory . 78 3.3 Scribal manipulation . 87 3.4 Amorous topoi . 89 Epilogue 91 Bibliography 98 iii Introduction “Excuse me, but I cannot believe you,” said Woland, “this cannot be. Manuscripts do not burn.” He turned to Behemoth and said, “Come on, Behemoth, give us the novel.” The cat instantly lept to his feet from the chair, and everyone saw that he had been sitting on a thick pile of manuscripts. With a bow, the cat gave the top exemplar to Woland. Margarita began to shake and cried out, moved to tears once again, “There it is, the manuscript! There it is!”1 Thus Woland, Mikhail Bulgakov’s famous demonic character in Master and Mar- garita, reacts to a despondent writer who destroyed the sole copy of his own novel in a household oven in the wake of threats to his professional career. Working with the memories of severe state-organized repression in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, Bulgakov may have understood in Woland’s words an aphorism on the perseverance of artistic expression in adverse circumstances. Despite censorship - even what some consider to be the ultimate cultural sin, the damnatio memoriae of book burning - truly unique pieces of literature with which a wide public can associate their own experience endure. In fact, the notoriety of so many authors in the USSR who wrote material critical of the Party in the face of sanctions and imprisonment - Mikhail Bul- gakov, Boris Pasternak, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to name a few - seems to testify to an artistic law that would guarantee the existence of any work that accomplishes this feat. 1Mikhail Bulgakov, Master i Margarita (Moscow: Eksmo, 2013), 300. My translation. 1 Introduction Yet I cannot help but smile at the thought of a medievalist showing the same kind of euphoric reaction as Margarita if such an opportunity were offered, for the manuscripts that cannot be burnt by society risk being burnt by time. The neces- sity of (somewhat narrowly) perceiving medieval texts through the lens of surviving manuscripts has had varying effects over the preceding two centuries, ranging from their reception as purely artistic objects (and resulting in wanton destruction of sheets in the search of archetypical decorated initials), as raw sources to be used for comparative study and lemmatic organization, and vessels of transmission that shaped and controlled an a priori interpretation of the texts they contained. Dur- ing the past three decades, this final approach to manuscript study has, under the influence of more recent “cognitive” methodologies, yielded an immense impact on medieval literary studies by moving it away from the anachronistic philological practices that dominated the 19th and early 20th centuries. In such a way the manuscript has retained its position as a critical object of study in the field, whereas the task of the textual and literary critic have been brought so close together that serious medieval literary criticism entails manuscript consultation. The role of the scholar consulting the bound text has been greatly expanded beyond provenance description and textual editing. These trends, which have inspired much of my methodology in this thesis, together represent an evolution that, I believe, can be best demonstrated by the growth of the “New Philology” during the end of the 1980s and its development through the following decade. Emerging from the need for a theoretical basis to transpose texts from a manuscript culture onto one that privileges printed, and thus definitive, editions, 19th century philological practices provided a framework for a positivist, seemingly-scientific process of describing and editing texts. As R. Howard Bloch stated in the 1990 volume of Speculum devoted to the question of New Philology, The medievalists of the ‘interlude,’ which coincided with the era of literary naturalism or realism in France, sought to expunge from literature that which escaped the scientism of positivist methodology, or, 2 Introduction to be more specific, that which was seen to be specifically poetic.2 In other words, an academic dedication to elucidating the grammatical, syntacti- cal, and signifying properties of extinct languages resulted in practices that ignored the possibility of equivocal passages and emphasized the immediate accessibility of medieval compositions. While the earliest texts that began pushing the field of manuscript study towards cognitive and discursive trends in literary criticism appeared in the 1960s and 1970s,3 the end of the 1980s marked a turning point of reinstating the text within the “radical contingencies” of the manuscript matrix that determined its interpretation.4 There is not, in this view, a single “sense” in a text, but interacting layers of literary perceptions and interpretations laid down by various agents onto a manuscript, which passed texts among the writer, the scribe, the compiler, and the reader. As Bernard Cerquiglini typified this point of view, “Or, l’écrituremédiévale ne produit pas de variantes, elle est variance.”5 In such a way, philologists studying medieval texts have absorbed the post-structuralist and “cognitive” practices that came out of contemporary literary theory: however, in my view, this shift appears to be from a sort of collision with reception theory. As Bloch stated, New Philology seeks to reinstate the unbounded interpretative meaning expressed by mysterium in poetry by “contextualizing . literature both with respect to historical process and with respect to other discourses.”6 The attitude of the “new” philologist seeks to reconsti- tute the relations between various agents within a manuscript culture, not to simply gloss the meaning of an individual word or grammatical structure, but to explore how language’s pragmatic functions can be formed, assured, and undermined throughout 2R. Howard Block, “New Philology and Old French,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 42. 3In particular, Paul Zumthor’s Langue et techniques poétiquesàl’époque romane (1963) and Essai de poétiquemédiévale (1972). 4Nichols defines these as contingencies “of chronology, of anachronism, of conflicting subjects, of representation,” see Stephen G. Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 9. A text usually cited as marking the new attitude towards philology is Bernard Cerquiglini’s Eloge´ de la variante (1989). 5Bernard Cerquiglini, Eloge´ de la variante: Histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989), 111. 6Bloch, “New Philology,” 39. 3 Introduction the process of transmission. With regards to my work, I do not claim to offer any kind of erudite study that matches the linguistic research demonstrated by philologists.7 Yet I view that the roots of my overarching methodological approaches can be found in the same discus- sions that sought to demarcate the beginnings of, and essentially define, the period of New Philology. It is this inspiration that links Chapter 1, revolving around Latinate commentary practices, with Chapters 2 and 3, which respectively treat authoritative expression in the surviving works of Rutebeuf and Adam de la Halle. The basic question that I began with consisted of, “What allowed a vernacular writer to express himself for the very sake of speaking - of recounting his own life - and how was this expression filtered by a manuscript culture?” As I explore in my work on Old French poetry, much contemporary scholarship places a threshold on vernacular subjective expression somewhere in the late 13th century - if not entirely in the 14th century, when “authoritative” manuscripts organized by the writer and accompanying author portraits supposedly sprang into existence. My approach hits directly on this notion of the sudden appearance of the vernacular author, of an expressive subject-position that “sprang into existence” for Old French medievalists after Guillaume de Lorris’ and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose. Outside of a framework that would imply a sort of evolution or development towards 14th-century literary practices, where can earlier 13th-century writers be placed in the context of vernacular self-expression? In the first chapter, I consider

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