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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Imagining Troy Fictions of translation in medieval French literature Stoll, Jessica Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Title: Imagining Troy: Fictions of translation in medieval French literature Author: Jessica Stoll The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ You are free to: Share: to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. IMAGINING TROY FICTIONS OF TRANSLATION IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH LITERATURE Jessica Stoll Submitted for the degree of PhD Abstract Stories of the Trojan War and its aftermath are the oldest – apart from those in the Bible – to be retold in medieval literature. Between 1165-1450, they catch the imagination of French-language writers, who create histories in and for that burgeoning vernacular. These writers make Troy a place of origins for peoples and places across Europe. One way in which writers locate origins at Troy is through the device of translation. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the writers of the prose Troie, the Histoire Ancienne and the Roman de Perceforest all claim to have translated old texts; for Benoît and the prose Troie writers, this text is a Latin copy of an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. The writers thus connect their locations with Troy retroactively, in both space and time. Within this set of highly successful stories, writers’ presentations of translation therefore have important consequences for understanding what is at stake in medieval French textual production. Taking Derrida’s Monolinguisme de l’Autre as my theoretical starting point, this thesis sheds new light on medieval writers’ concepts of translation, creation and origins by asking two questions: • To what extent is translation considered integral to creation and textual production in medieval French texts? • Why does the conceit of translation from a lost source seem to shape narratives even when this source is a fiction? All these writers produce texts in French, or translate from that language, but these texts were written in geographically distinct areas: the Roman de Troie comes from Northern France, the prose Troy traditions are copied mainly in Italy, 2 John Gower wrote in London, Christine de Pizan was at court in Paris and the extant Perceforest manuscripts were produced in Burgundy. The Trojan material therefore inspires writers throughout this period all over Western Europe. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 5 Abbreviations 6 Introduction: The Lexicon of Translation 7 1. Translation, Reproduction and Women in the Roman de Troie 66 2. Translation and Secondary Creation: the Prose Troy Tradition 110 3. Translation, Multilingualism and Making Fiction 162 in John Gower and Christine de Pizan 4. The Uncanny Translation: the Roman de Perceforest 212 Conclusion 264 Appendix: Corpus of Texts Studied 273 Bibliography 278 4 Acknowledgements All the mistakes in this thesis are my own, but it would have never seen the light of day without the kindness and inspiration of many individuals. I would first like to thank Simon Gaunt, my supervisor, for his constant brilliance, intellectual generosity and endless support. I have been so happy at King’s College London. Both the Department of French and the Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, under the leadership of Julian Weiss and Clare Lees, have provided tremendous support and stimulation. I would especially like to thank Karen Pratt for her meticulous, challenging comments on parts of the Introduction, Chapter Two and Chapter Three, and Emily Butterworth, Patrick ffrench and Jane Gilbert, who all read my work and discussed it with me. I would also like to thank John Pitcher, who has been my inspiration for a long time. I am lucky to have such gifted friends and intellectual companions. These in particular deserve special mention: Philippe Frieden, John Marrill, Hannah Morcos, David Murray, Chrysi Papaioannou, Malcolm Pillar, Jessica Stacey and, most of all, Hugh Wilkinson. I am most grateful for the AHRC grant I enjoyed from 2010-13, and I would also like to thank the librarians at Senate House Library, the Maughan Library and the British Library for all their hard work. Final thanks are for my terrific family: the Crowleys, the Irwins, and Jan, Chaz and Sophie Stoll. 5 Abbreviations BnF Bibliothèque Nationale de France DMF Dictionnaire du moyen français: http://www.atilf.fr/dmf/ FEW Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, ed. by Walther von Wartburg, 25 vols (Basel: Zbinden, 1925-) Godefroy Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, 12 vols (Paris: Vieweg, 1880-1902) Lewis and Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Short Clarendon Press, 1879; repr. 1980) MED Middle English Dictionary: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/ OED Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) SATF Société des anciens textes français TL Adolf Tobler and Ernst Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, 10 vols (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1925-) 6 Introduction: The Lexicon of Translation Medieval French Literature and Translation From the start, writing in medieval French is translation. The Strasbourg Oaths are generally accepted as the first piece of writing in French, and are conserved in a principally Latin manuscript that dates from around 840.1 These oaths record a moment of bilingual contact through diplomacy. Two kings (and brothers), Louis the German and Charles the Bald, give speeches in the vernacular spoken by the other’s army. Thus the first extant example of a French text is attributed to the ruler of Germany, Louis the German, who chooses to use French for diplomatic purposes; the ruler of France, Charles the Bald, gives his speech in German according to this text. The full significance of the Strasbourg Oaths can only be understood with reference to its manuscript setting, which demands translation between vernaculars, and places French alongside Latin texts. The second earliest text written in French, La Séquence de Sainte Eulalie, also from the late ninth century, appears alongside a Latin version of the same text, Cantica Virginis Eulalia. The text draws on a long history of Latin hagiography, and appears in a multilingual manuscript that also contains a German text, the Rithmus Teutonicus (882), written in the same hand.2 From the start, written French is located within a multilingual context, and implicitly, is a language in translation. 1 BnF, MS f. lat. 9768. For dates, see Philippe Lauer, ‘Introduction’, to Nithard, L’Histoire des Fils de Louis le Pieux, ed. by Lauer (Paris: Champion, 1926), pp. i-xx (pp. xiv-xv); text of the oaths, pp. 102-9. 2 Bibliothèque Municipale de Valenciennes, 150. 7 Three centuries later, textual production soars in both the langue d’oc and the langue d’oïl.3 Many of the textual practices that form this burgeoning literature ostensibly begin with some form of translation, usually but not invariably from Latin: hagiography, lais, fables, bestiaries and romance. These texts often account for their own production through a process of translation, whether fictional or not. One writer whose work forms part of this growing activity is Marie de France. The narrators of both her Lais and Fables (ll. 11-20) suggest that these texts were created through a process of translation.4 For example, in her Lais, Marie notes the prevailing tendency to translate from Latin (ll. 30-2), and wants to distinguish her own work. This desire makes her think of the lais that she has heard (l.