Durendal, Translated: Islamic Object Genealogies in the Chansons De Geste
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Article Durendal, translated: Islamic object genealogies in the chansons de geste Shirin A. Khanmohamadi Department of Comparative and World Literature, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA. Abstract The transfer of Saracen arms into Frankish ownership is a leitmotif of many chansons de geste, but one whose significance for translatio imperii has yet to be elucidated. In this essay, I focus on the Chanson d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century epic set in Calabria that narrates the pre-history of Durendal, Roland’s sword of Song of Roland fame, as an object inherited by Roland from its former royal Muslim owner. Drawing on cultural history and a number of object-translation models derived from material and spolia studies, I read the sword’s symbolic transfer as evidence of Norman desire for and appropriation of former Fatimid imperium in Sicily. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2017). 8, 321–333. doi:10.1057/s41280-017-0061-3 Medievalists working in language and literature departments recognize words like ‘renovation’, ‘appropriation’, ‘supersession,’ and ‘homage’ as proper to the trope of translatio studii and the complex recontextualization of borrowed literary materials that it describes, but what may be less known to them is that much the same language is being used by art historians analyzing the cultural work of material artifacts that combine objects from multiple traditions and/or chronologies (see Hansen, 2003;Walker,2012). One reason that the use of the trope of translatio in material culture studies might surprise literary critics is Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 321–333 www.palgrave.com/journals Khanmohamadi 1 For a recent that medieval literary studies have thus far been slow to recognize the 1 treatment of relic movement of objects (with the notable exception of relics) as part of the translation as a complex dynamics of translatio imperii et studii or the movement of universal form of translatio empire and learning.2 imperii, see Perry (2015). The Medieval Translator, devoted to the topic of translatio/n, only recently moved ‘beyond translation’3 to consider of the translatio of non-textual 2 For an overview of materials, including images and artifacts (Renevey and Whitehead, 2009), medieval translatio/n studies, while literary analyses that have effected a ‘material turn’ in tracing the see Campbell and movement of objects in order to display the appropriative and emulative self- Mills (2012,1–20). fashioning of rival medieval empires have stopped short of deploying the term The medieval ‘translatio’ in their descriptions of these cross-cultural and inter-imperial translatio topos 4 combines transfers dynamics (Burns, 2002; Kinoshita, 2012). Literary critics have, moreover and of power, learning, no doubt relatedly, been slow to recognize and fully marshal the utility of relics, and text, emerging models of object translation within art history and material culture … ‘without [ ] studies for literary studies, models for rethinking such germane questions as how opposition between the literal and the recontextualized art objects ‘accumulate’ rather than supersede past meanings in figural meanings’ new contexts (Forsyth, 1995), or how object transfers create networks of (Stahuljak, 2004, affiliation and homage between parties – individual, institutional, imperial, 38), i.e. between cultural – to an object exchange (Buc, 1997). While some of these object objects and texts. Translatio imperii translation models ‘think across’ the object-literature boundary by treating and translatio objects as symbols of power and complex social relations legible in the manner studii appeared in of texts (Forsyth, 1995; Hansen, 2003; Flood, 2009), others follow more recent the ninth century, interdisciplinary posthumanist trends in interrogating the human-non-human becoming boundary to show the ‘mutual imbrications’ of animate subjects and inanimate increasingly 5 coordinated in the objects (Flood, 2009, 12; Buc, 1997), and, by implication, of their study. The later Middle Ages impact and negotiation of these posthumanist trends together with the recent (Stahuljak, 2005, ‘material turn’ of the new medievalism (see Block et al., 2014) have made 144–145). premodern literary study, for its part, ever more open to the investigation of 3 The title of the literature through extra-literary models.6 final section of the This essay advances its own material turn on the traditionally linguistic 2009 issue, ‘Lost in Translation?’ delimitation of the trope of translatio imperii et studii, first by enfolding the spatial movement or translation of secular objects into the trope’s opera- 4ButseeWacks (2014)for tion, and then by deploying models of ‘object translation’ drawn from synonymous recent spolia and material culture studies to interpret the meanings of those treatment of relics translated objects. My focus is on a set of object transfers commonly found and other objects in high medieval Old French chansons de geste and their later vernacular and texts, and Akbari translations: the transfer of swords and other personal war effects from (2012, 2014)on Arab to Frankish hands. I take as my primary example the Chanson how bodies and d’Aspremont, a twelfth-century Charlemagne-cycle epic of southern Italian monuments provenance that plots a royal Muslim pre-history for one of the most symbolically signal translatio imperii in famous swords of all medieval literature, Roland’s Durendal (see La 7 siege poetry and Chanson de Roland, 1922). In her ground-breaking book Medieval chronicles. Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita suggests the power of literary objects such 322 Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 321–333 Durendal, translated 8 as the (translationally overdetermined) Trojan cup of Floire et Blancheflor to 5 Flood describes unsettle governing critical assumptions about both the theory and practice of how the Islamic translatio imperii et studii and interconfessional relations in the medieval khil’a or honorific Mediterranean (Kinoshita, 2006, 77–104).9 The movement of Durendal in the robe finds circulation as ‘part Chanson d’Aspremont similarly unsettles critical understandings of the nature of the donor’ of Islamic-Christian relations in the medieval period, still dominated by the himself in a gift narrative of the crusades, as well as of the practice of translatio imperii et economy (2009, studii, but does so, notably, within the genre of epic: a genre rarely considered 76–77). in relation to medieval ideas of universal monarchy or its movement (but see 6 See Chaganti Sunderland, 2012), whose pervasive Saracens are rarely regarded as some- (2008) for an early thing other than the enemy foils of European civilization. Against these use of material culture, in this case critical expectations, the Chanson d’Aspremont forges a mode of translatio reliquaries, to read imperii that genealogically grafts European imperial authority not to the late medieval Greco-Roman imperial past, but to the Islamic one. English texts. As a Charlemagne-cycle epic set and likely composed in Italy, the Chanson 7 This is not the only d’Aspremont, which survives in six manuscripts and numerous fragments, Muslim genealogy forms part of the diverse corpus of the ‘French of Italy,’ vernacular texts of Durendal in composed or copied in French or Franco-Italian for Francophone and Italian Carolingian epic: in Mainet, audiences in Italy from the twelfth to the fifteenth century (see French of Italy, Durendal is 2017). It is, then, a work of translation in more than one way. As a text set in a stripped off the Calabria and Sicily that Charlemagne must defend against Saracen incursion, it body of the reflects the translation of Carolingian legends and the matter of France into an Saracen Braimant by Charlemagne Italian context, i.e. translatio studii traditionally conceived, and endeavors himself. (along with other Italian translations of the matter of France) to provide the Italian prequel or ‘antefatto’ to the famed events and characters of the 8 Virgil’s Aeneid instantiates a Chanson de Roland (Everson, 2001). But the Chanson d’Aspremont at once celebrated narrates another, material form of translatio: the translation of Roland’s example of personal war effects of Song of Roland fame – his sword Durendal, his horse translatio imperii Veillantif, and his oliphant – from royal Muslim hands into the hands of in Aeneas’ translation of his Roland himself. Indeed, Durendal is invoked in the opening lines of the ‘household gods’ Aspremont, those announcing the matter of the song’s geste, forecasting its from Troy to central role in the epic (Aspremont, 14–15).10 Latium; it is by But why should these object transfers be so central? What political and way of Troy that many European cultural work are they effecting for Roland, Charles, or the French (or Italians royal houses thinking about Roland, Charles, or the French from a southern Italian horizon), traced their lineage and why do they all come from the enemy Arabs? The theme of transfers of to the classical swords and other war objects from Saracen to Frankish hands in Old French and world. See Virgil (1983, 1.10–11, other vernacular epics has certainly not escaped critical attention. A generation 93–94) and ago Paul Bancourt took note of it in his magisterial study of the matter of the Waswo (1995). Saracens in the Charlemagne cycle, Les Musulman dans les chansons de geste du Ó 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 8, 3, 321–333 323 Khanmohamadi 11 9 The study of cycle du roi (Bancourt, 1982, 947–950). There Bancourt attributed the trend material culture to the high market value of such technologically advanced, beautifully made has been at the Arab swords, a reading that collapses the circulation and value of Arab war forefront of objects within texts with their circulation outside the text in the world.