Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean Robin William Girard Washington University in St
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations Arts & Sciences Winter 12-15-2016 Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean Robin William Girard Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds Recommended Citation Girard, Robin William, "Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean" (2016). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 988. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/988 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts & Sciences at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of Romance Languages and Literatures Dissertation Examination Committee: Julie Singer, Chair Seth Graebner Sharon Kinoshita Harriet Stone Hayrettin Yücesoy Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean by Robin William Girard A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2016 St. Louis, Missouri © 2016, Robin William Girard Table of Contents Acknowledgments . iii Abstract . vi Preface . viii Introduction . 2 Chapter 1: Arts of Love from Ovid and Ibn Ḥazm to Andreas Capellanus . 18 Chapter 2: The Courtly Loves of Tristan and Yseult and Vīs and Rāmīn and Cligès and Fenice . 68 Chapter 3: The Alf Layla wa Layla in France . 120 Chapter 4: Love, Arabic Medicine, and the Twelfth–Century Romance . 178 Conclusion . 232 Works Cited . 239 ii Acknowledgments As much as it often felt like solitary work, I would never have succeeded in completing this endeavor without the support and encouragement of others. I would like to thank Dr. Gabriel Asfar, who put me on this path, Dr. Julie Singer for believing in me when I first started out, Dr. Seth Graebner for his constant rigor, and Dr. Harriet Stone for her insightful questions. My thanks also go out to Dr. Sharon Kinoshita and Dr. Hayretting Yücesoy, both of whom honored me with their participation on my dissertation committee. I would also like to thank Dr. Sharon Kinoshita, as well as Dr. Brian Catlos, and funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for the 2015 “Negotiating Identities: Expression and Representation in the Christian-Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean" Summer Institute in Barcelona, Spain. I would also like to recognize the financial support of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as the emotional and intellectual support of its staff and fellows during my tenure as a Graduate Fellow in Spring of 2016. And finally, I would like to thank the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at iii Washington University in St. Louis for their unflagging support over the years and the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Rhodes College for their kindness and encouragement through this project's final days. Without all of you, this may never have been. Robin William Girard Washington University, St. Louis December 2016 iv To William and Rosalie Girard sine qua non. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Courtly Love and Its Counterparts in the Medieval Mediterranean by Robin William Girard Doctor of Philosophy in French Language and Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2016 Professor Julie Singer, Chair At least since Stendhal’s De l’Amour, scholars have argued that the theories of courtly love expressed in the Old French literature of the High Middle Ages were inspired by or drew upon elements of Islamicate culture. In this dissertation, I explore the theories of love represented in works of literature, lover’s manuals and medical treatises composed in and around the late twelfth–century court of Marie de Champagne, which I read in conjunction with contemporaneous works from the Islamicate world, ranging from Al‑Andalus to Persia, in order to show how these works reflect the common cultural orientation of the medieval Mediterranean. By showing that the theories of amatory practice described in Andreas Capellanus’s De amore cannot be accounted for exclusively from within the Ovidian tradition, I posit that by viewing the Old French theories of courtly love as a synthesis of the earlier Ovidian and Islamicate traditions, as represented by Ibn Ḥazm’s Tawq̣ al‑Hamāma, we can better understand the place of courtly love within the constellation of medieval Mediterranean cultures. This conclusion serves as the point of vi departure for my subsequent analyses as I endeavor to show that the Tristan legend drew heavily upon the Persianate epic, Vīs u Rāmīn, a claim I substantiate through a comparision between those two works and Chrétien de Troyes’s anti–Tristan, Cligès. Further, I maintain that the act of literary appropriation, whether through inspiration or translation, remained an active process that sought to recontextualize and adapt content to the needs of its new cultural milieu. I then focus on the routes of pilgrimage and trade that spanned and linked the fragmented spaces of Christian and Islamic Mediterraneans and that made such cultural and literary exchanges possible accross political, cultural, religion and linguistic borders. I do this through a study of the “Tale of Niʿma and Nuʿm” from the Alf Layla wa Layla and its old French adaptation, the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor by Robert d’Orbigny. There were, however, limits to the influence of Islamicate thought on the representation of love in Old French literature as is evinced in medical discourse: although theoretical medicine was revolutionized by the translation of medical treatises sich as Constantinus Africanus’s eleventh-century Viaticum peregrinantis, literary love-discourse resisted change. Even as theories of love and lovesickness were redefined in light of this new medical knowledge, I demonstrate that the literary representation of love medicine continued to cleave to older, Ovidian tropes through the middle of the thirteenth century. By focusing on theories of love, which intersect with as disparate domains as theology and law, politics and science, I am able to show the ways in which Old French literature engages with and extends contemporaneous cultural and literary trends within the Islamicate world, thereby resituating it in its Mediterranean context. vii Preface "All scholarship is situated." Such was Dr. Sharon Kinoshita's constant refrain at the 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities “Negotiating Identities: Expression and Representation in the Christian-Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean” Summer Institute in Barcelona. For her work, that meant that the foot of her intellectual compass, an expression repurposed from Djelal Kadir’s post-colonial critique of literary studies, rests in medieval French literature and in the post-Braudel world. My own scholarship, the most sustained example of which is this dissertation project, is situated in the post-2001 world. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 exerted a profound influence on me, my world and my scholarship: at fourteen, I was old enough to understand that the world was indelibly altered that day but too young to have any true knowledge the world that had been lost. On September 11, 2001, I was forced to engage with the world outside of the safety of Berkshire County, Massachusetts for the first time. Not particularly adept at interpersonal relations, I learned to use travel and scholarship to see beyond the stark divisions that the world seemed intent on erecting between people. The world was "us" versus an ominous "them." Somehow, in a year and a half, we went from viii "Nous sommes tous américains" on September 12, 2001 to "Freedom Fries" on March 11, 2003. How? Why? From Trijicon to Dāʿish, the rise of Crusader rhetoric to justify a clash of civilizations became pervasive as hate crimes and Islamophobia escalated to unparalleled levels in the US and in France. I set out on this project to do my part in contesting this worldview, to find evidence that there was nothing self-evident about this situation. Of course, the danger of looking for something is that you run the risk of finding it. ix “Amor qui est eros dicitur morbus est cerebro contiguus.” – Constantinus Africanus 1 Introduction What is love? Any definition of love will be situated historically, culturally, and politically. Even a definition rooted in the purely physiological or psychological response is politically, culturally and historically specific precisely because its potential is limited by historical contexts, inflected by cultural practices and activated by political forces; such a definition is, by its very rationality, contextualized. This is because love is not simply a psycho-physical response in humans but an organizing principle of social interaction that both limits and is limited by practice. Thus, beyond its psycho-physical reality, love is a construct and a given moment's definition of love not only limits and defines who one can and cannot love and be loved by as well as the contexts in which that love is deemed appropriate, but it also informs debates about the role of science and religion in the public sphere, governs access to economic and political structures and defines the roles, both