AUTHORSHIP AND THE DISCOVERY OF CHARACTER IN MEDIEVAL ROMANCE Caitlin G. Watt A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2018 Approved by: Robert Babcock Reid Barbour Shayne Legassie Carolina Digital Repository Tedprovided Leinbaugh by View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk CORE brought to you by Jessica Wolfe 1 ©2018 Caitlin G. Watt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Caitlin G. Watt: Authorship and the Discovery of Character in Medieval Romance (Under the direction of Shayne Legassie) This dissertation argues that by pioneering new ways of constructing and reading literary character, writers of twelfth- to fourteenth-century romance also claimed a new authority for vernacular fiction. Through readings of several key medieval texts, the dissertation not only illuminates character as an underestimated critical tool used by medieval writers in but also intervenes in the ongoing scholarly discussion of medieval authorship. It begins with Le Roman d’Enéas, a twelfth-century adaptation of Virgil’s Aeneid that, by revising tensions in the characters of the Latin royal court, familiarizes the epic for a courtly audience and posits its writer as an authoritative interpreter of the Aeneid. Next, medieval concepts of memory and contemporary serial narrative theory are used to argue that Chrétien de Troyes, inventor of French Arthurian romance, creates a model of character that requires audiences to read his romances as a corpus and thus establishes himself as the author of a new literary tradition. Chapter 3 narrows its focus to a single character, Merlin, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, Laȝamon’s Brut, and Of Arthour and of Merlin, arguing that Merlin proves a useful site for examining tensions of gender and national identity inherent in the act of transforming legend into written historical narrative. The dissertation concludes with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. It demonstrates that in his portrayals of Antigone and Cassandra as literary creators, Chaucer examines the problem of affective identification with literary characters, questioning the association of compassion and femininity and offering alternative models of authorship. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a great debt of gratitude to the many people who helped this dissertation come to be. Thanks are due first to Dr. Shayne Legassie, my dissertation director, whose patient willingness to talk through ideas, thoughtful recommendations, and enthusiastic encouragement helped both me and this dissertation grow. I would also like to thank Drs. Sahar Amer, Robert Babcock, Reid Barbour, Ted Leinbaugh, and Jessica Wolfe, who have been wonderfully generous with their time, advice, knowledge, experience, encouragement, and libraries throughout my time at UNC. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with all of them, and with the other faculty and administration in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, Classics, and Romance Languages. I’d like to give special thanks to Drs. Sharon James and Kathryn Starkey, whose introductions to Roman comedy and medieval material cultures have helped me immensely. I am extremely grateful to the Graduate School at UNC for providing me with a dissertation fellowship this year. I cannot imagine how this project could have been completed without the time and financial support this fellowship provided me. Thanks also to the Department of English and Comparative Literature for funding my studies in paleography and medieval Latin at the University of Notre Dame with a summer research fellowship in 2010; and to the Graduate and Professional Student Federation and the Medieval and Early Modern Studies program for providing travel funding for me to present my work at conferences. iv A portion of Chapter1 has been published in Neophilologus as “Droit and Engin: Mesencius and Drances as Feudal Counselors in Le Roman d’Enéas.” I thank them for permission to reproduce it here. Though it would be impossible to list all the friends who helped me get through this project here, I need to list a few. To Amanda Bates, Angélica Castillo, Aditi Deodhar, Dakota Derryberry, Laurel Foote-Hudson, Robert Gottlieb, Abbi Hattem, Alex Jacobs, Paul Johnston, Cathy Meerbergen, Rebecca Nesvet, Hannah Palmer, Jennifer Park, Meredith Ringel-Ensley, Stephanie Schuft, Anneke Schwob, Rebecca Shores, Doreen Thierauf, Luigi Troiani, Didem Türkoğlu, Brittany Whitford, Mishio Yamanaka, and many others, thanks for reading drafts, exchanging goals, asking about my work, listening to me ramble, distracting me with coffee, and telling me I could finish. Last but not least, I could not have done this without my family. To aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents, but most of all to my brother Brendan and my parents Steve and Nonie, thank you so much. Thanks for the phone calls, the feedback, the cookies, the cat pictures, the quiet space to work on holidays, the calm when I was panicking, the understanding and advice, and your love and faith in me. I love you. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….1 Character……………………………………………………………………………3 Authorship…………………………………………………………………………..9 Emotion…………………………………………………………………………….13 Chapter Overview………………………………………………………………….18 CHAPTER 1: INTERDEPENDENT CHARACTERIZATION AND THE LATIN ROYAL COURT IN LE ROMAN D’ENÉAS………………………………………23 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………23 Mesencius and Drances as Feudal Counselors……………………………………...28 The Royal Marriage of Laurente……………………………………………………48 Parental Influence and Lavine’s Characterization…………………………………..63 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..76 CHAPTER 2: MEMORY, SERIAL NARRATIVE, AND CHARACTERIZATION BY CONJOINTURE IN CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES………………………………………..78 Introduction………………………………………………………………………….78 Conjointure and Serial Narrative Theory……………………………………………81 Reading Forward: Gauvain’s Arc as Evolving Serial Narrative…………………….90 Reading Backward: Recursive Progression from Erec to Perceval………………...110 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………..124 CHAPTER 3: MERLIN, ARTHURIAN ANXIETY, AND AUTHORSHIP IN BRITAIN………………………………………………………………………………...128 vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………...128 Natura Creatrix?: Authorial Ambivalence in Vita Merlini………………………...135 Ich wes iscæpen him to bone: Laȝamon’s Merlin…………………………………..146 Merlin and Motherhood in Of Arthour and of Merlin……………………………...159 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….173 CHAPTER 4: COMPASSION AND THE FIGURE OF THE FEMALE WRITER IN CHAUCER’S TROILUS AND CRISEYDE......................................................................175 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………175 Pain, Compassion, and Writing Troilus’s Story…………………………………….178 Antigone and the Rejection of Pain…………………………………………………195 Cassandre and the Composition of History…………………………………………212 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………......222 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………...224 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...227 vii INTRODUCTION This dissertation argues that, as writers of medieval romance began to develop distinctly vernacular and medieval models of narrative authorship in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, literary character allowed them both to refine conceptions of their own roles as writers and devise new methods of presenting narrative. To demonstrate this, I consider a range of medieval fictional narratives that might be termed “romances,” beginning in the twelfth century with an early French redaction of classical epic, Le Roman d’Enéas; moving to Arthurian material in the French romances of Chrétien de Troyes and on to treatments of Merlin in Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth and in English by Laȝamon and the writer of Of Arthour and of Merlin; and finally Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Although these texts vary in language, genre, and positioning of the writer with respect to his material, all of them represent innovative transformations of their source material—be it oral narrative, classical history and epic, or previous romances—and illustrate the ways in which adapting long narrative works allowed medieval writers the opportunity to examine and revise their predecessors through the portrayal and arrangement of characters. By applying a variety of theoretical lenses and methods of reading to the characters of these narratives, I hope to contribute to current scholarly discussions of medieval authorship. While explicit interventions by narrators or in prologues and explicits have received much scholarly attention, implicit statements of purpose accomplished through narrative have been less frequently explored. This dissertation argues that close study of 1 particular characters, their portrayals, and their narrative functions can bring new insights to the theoretical discussion of authorship. Although the depiction of protagonists is certainly relevant to this project, many of the characters whom I discuss in the following chapters are not “main characters” but marginal figures whose relationships to the narratives’ central plots are indicative of larger patterns in these writers’ revisions of their source material. These often neglected characters illuminate the connection between authorial self-representation and character portrayal in fruitful ways that would otherwise be invisible. Another goal of this dissertation, therefore, is to draw attention to the underexplored role these characters