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Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature, Configurations 12.2 (Spring 2004): 167-193

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Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature, Configurations 12.2 (Spring 2004): 167-193 Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College History Faculty Research and Scholarship History 2004 ‘Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance’: Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth- Century French Literature, Elly Truitt Bryn Mawr College, [email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/history_pubs Part of the History Commons Custom Citation Truitt, Elly R. 2004 ‘Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance’: Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature, Configurations 12.2 (Spring 2004): 167-193. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/history_pubs/26 For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance”: Knowledge and Automata in Twelfth-Century French Literature E. R. Truitt Harvard University A war hero, after being injured in battle, is taken to recuperate in an enormous chamber of unparalleled splendor. Made of alabaster, adorned with precious gems and stones, peopled with noble repre- sentatives of an aristocratic court, the chamber also boasts some of the most wondrous marvels ever seen by man. There are four pillars, one in each corner of the room, arranged by “three poets, learned teachers, who were well-versed in the knowledge of necromancy [Trei poëte, sages dotors, qui mout sorent di nigromance] . so that on each there was a figure of great beauty, cast in metal. The two most beautiful were in the form of maidens; the other two, of youths, no man had looked upon more beautiful.”1 The war hero is Hector, and his sickroom—known as the Chambre des Beautés or Alabaster Chamber—and the four metal people are found in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (c. 1165). One of the maidens holds up a mirror to the inhabitants of the chamber so that they may see a true reflection of their appearance, while the sec- ond maiden, an acrobat, performs gymnastics and conjures up other automata. One of the youths plays music and replaces the flowers in the chamber twice a day. The second youth, in addition to carrying a censer filled with aromatic gums and spices that ease pain and cure 1. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans, Publications de la Société des ancièns textes français, 6 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1904–12), lines 14657–14680. (Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this paper are my own.) Configurations, 2004, 12: 167–193 © 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature and Science. 167 168 Configurations disease, secretly conveys to the people in the chamber ways in which their manner is or is not suitable to a courtly society.2 What is more remarkable than the presence of these metal people in this romance is the fact that automata in human form were found frequently in the pages of twelfth-century French romances—copper knights and damsels, golden archers, children, and guardians of tombs. The early twelfth-century chanson de geste Le voyage de Charlemagne contains a description of the emperor of Constantino- ple’s palace, upon which two golden children blow ivory horns and laugh in a lifelike manner when the wind blows.3 In Le roman d’Eneas, written around 1160, a metal archer ensures that the sanc- tity of Camille’s mausoleum remains inviolate.4 Another mid- twelfth-century romance, Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor, mentions the speaking, moving statues of the eponymous lovers erected on Blancheflor’s mock tomb.5 The Roman d’Alexandre, completed around 1180, features two golden youths, made by augury (par au- gure) and enchantment (enchantement),6 armed with maces, guarding a drawbridge. In addition, two copper boys, armed with shields and pikes and made by enchantment (enchant) guard the tomb of the emir of Babylon.7 The First Continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval, com- pleted in the first decade of the thirteenth century, has two figures guarding the tent of Alardin, an “Eastern” potentate, who can dis- cern knight from churl and maiden from nonvirgin, and then bar the entrances of the latter to the tent.8 Furthermore, in the early 2. Ibid., lines 14631–14936. 3. Le voyage de Charlemagne, ed. and trans. Jean-Louis Picherit (Birmingham, Ala.: Summa Publications, 1984), lines 351–361. These figures are reminiscent of the Salva- tio Romae, in which an automaton sounds an alarm whenever a province of the Empire is threatened, and then points in the direction of the threat. See John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 37–41. For an account of the derivation and narrative function of the automata in Le voyage de Charlemagne, see Patricia Tannoy, “De la technique à la magie: Enjeux des automates dans Le Voyage de Charlemagne à Jerusalem et à Constantinople,” in Le merveilleux et la magie dans la littérature, ed. Gérard Chandès (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), pp. 227–252. 4. Le roman d’Eneas, ed. J. J. Salverda de Grave, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1925–29), lines 7531–7724. 5. Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris: Champion, 1983), lines 597–604. 6. Alexandre de Paris, Le roman d’Alexandre (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), lines 3391–3421. 7. Ibid., lines 7178–7183. 8. Perceval le Gallois, ed. Charles Potvin, 6 vols. in 3 (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977), vol. 3, lines 13352–13372. Truitt / Knowledge and Automata 169 thirteenth-century prose cycle Lancelot do lac the hero must defeat two copper knights, and must obtain from a copper damsel the keys of the enchantment over the fortress Doloreuse Garde.9 Nor are metal people to be found only in the pages of literature. William of Malmesbury, in his twelfth-century Latin account of the kings of England, told the story of Gerbert of Aurillac, later Pope Sylvester II (999–1003), and his discovery of an underground treasure hoard from antiquity. Gaining access to the catacombs by using the “familiar arts of necromancy,” Gerbert and his servant found a golden palace in which “golden knights seemed to be diverting them- selves with golden dice, a king and queen of precious metal reclining, with their dishes in front of them and their servants attending them; plates of great weight and price, in which craftsmanship surpassed nature [ubi naturam vincebat opus].”10 When Gerbert’s servant tried to steal a knife, “all the figures leapt to their feet with a roar and the boy shot his arrow into the carbuncle and plunged everything into dark- ness.”11 Quickly replacing the knife, Gerbert and his servant managed to escape the palace unscathed, but with their cupidity unslaked. The works I have just noted form by no means the entire corpus of medieval romances and historical narratives in which human au- tomata are mentioned, but this gives an indication of the scope of the presence of such figures in narrative texts.12 Yet despite the fairly common placement of metal people in twelfth- and early thirteenth- century texts, actual automata were quite rare in Europe during this period. They were, however, much more common in areas under Muslim control and in the Byzantine Empire. The twelfth and early thirteenth centuries saw an influx of texts and artifacts from the Dar 9. Lancelot do lac, ed. Elspeth Kennedy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 183, 249–250. 10. William of Malmesbury, De gestis regum Anglorum libri quinque, II, 169, ed. J. P. Migne, Patrologia cursus completus, Series Latina (Paris, 1862), p. 179, col. 1141. (There is also available an English translation of the whole work, edited and translated by R. A. B. Mynors, completed by R. M. Thompson and M. Winterbottom [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998]). 11. Ibid. 12. There are some important and helpful catalogues of human automata in medieval literature, sometimes containing extensive quotes: see Otto Söhring, “Werke bildender Kunst in altfranzösischen Epen,” Romanische Forschungen 12 (1900), esp. pp. 590–598; James Douglas Bruce, “Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Medieval Ro- mance,” Modern Philology 10 (1912–13), esp. pp. 515–526; Edmond Faral, “Le mer- veilleux et ses sources dans les descriptions des romans français du XIIe siècle,” in idem, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1913), pp. 307–388. 170 Configurations al-Islam and the Byzantine Empire into Western Europe—both pre- viously unknown works of ancient philosophers and early Christian writers, and also more recent commentary by Muslim and Jewish scholars. Mainly dealing with philosophy, medicine, and science, these previously unknown writings helped to introduce the Latin West to scientific and technological ideas that had been previously unknown. The actual production of automata did not become com- mon in Europe until the very end of the thirteenth century, due in part to the invention of the mechanical escapement and the more widespread use of toothed gears. I have chosen to focus my study on the period when automata were becoming more widely known in intellectual and courtly communities but when the ability to make them was not yet developed, because of the interesting epistemolog- ical questions this disjunction raises. I focus on twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature due to the many examples of human automata that these texts pro- vide. I am limiting my inquiry to metal people for several reasons: Oracular brazen heads are known in this literature, but are suffi- ciently different ontologically from moving metal people that to in- clude them in this study would be unnecessarily confusing.
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