Social Functions of the Medieval Epic in the Romance Literatures
Oral Tradition, 1/3 (1986): 728-66 Social Functions of the Medieval Epic in the Romance Literatures Joseph J. Duggan The Milman Parry Lectures on Oral Tradition for 1985 I Studies on the medieval epic in France and Spain have in recent years been devoted largely to individual works or to internal aspects of the texts, rather than to the ways in which contemporaries perceived and used it. This is, I think, partially because the study of medieval literature is largely carried out in the academy, and is thus correlated with teaching: as a result one tends to encounter again and again a handful of texts that are frequently assigned for classroom treatment, and to read even those few through a microscopic lens rather than in a broader context. Treatments taking in the medieval epic in the Romance languages as a whole are rare and outdated; thus it is that, in this fi eld, interest in the social function of epic, such as might have been aroused by synthetic works informed by reader-oriented literary theory—perhaps one should modify that to “listener-oriented” for our purposes—or by the sociology of literature, has not really developed. I will attempt to delineate in these lectures the functions of the medieval epic composed in French, Provençal, and Spanish from the point of view of the philologist, that is to say of one who is interested in texts and everything that might illuminate them. This includes, among other specialized pursuits, literary theory, textual criticism, evaluative criticism, and sociological criticism. What good does it do
[Show full text]