New Studies in Medieval Culture Ethan Knapp, Series Editor
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INTERVENTIONS: NEW STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL CULTURE Ethan Knapp, Series Editor Eschatological Subjects Divine and Literary Judgment in Fourteenth- Century French Poetry J. M. Moreau The Ohio State University Press • Columbus Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moreau, J. M. (John M.), 1983– Eschatological subjects : divine and literary judgment in fourteenth-century French poetry / J. M. Moreau. — First edition. pages cm. — (Interventions : new studies in medieval culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1269-1 (hardback) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1269-7 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9373-7 (cd) 1. French poetry—To 1500—History and criticism. 2. Eschatology in literature. 3. Judgment Day in literature. 4. French poetry—Appreciation—History—14th century. 5. Guillaume, de Deguileville, active 14th century—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Guillaume, de Machaut, ap- proximately 1300–1377—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Froissart, Jean, 1338? –1410?—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Title: Divine and literary judgment in fourteenth-century French poetry. PQ193.E83 2014 841'.109—dc23 2014008291 Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Printed by Sheridan Books The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii INTRODUCTION Literature as Eschatological Scene 1 I. La scène judiciaire: Big and Little Judges 1 II. The Eschatological Procès 25 III. Scope of the Book and Chapter Outline 28 CHAPTER 1 Representation in Heaven: The Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Rhetor Divinus 34 I. Quid sum miser tunc dicturus? 34 II. From Legal Subject to Eschatological Subject 38 III. Human Rights and the Devil’s Rights: The Virgin’s Divine Advocacy 44 IV. Divine Rhetoric in Action: The Puys 57 CHAPTER 2 A Particular Judgment: The Case of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme 63 I. Introduction 63 II. Des ouvrages quë il a fait: The First Two Pèlerinages 70 III. Preliminary Judgments 80 IV. Satan v. Guillermus de Deguilevilla 88 vi • Contents CHAPTER 3 Post-Apocalyptic Judgment: Machaut’s Jugement dou roy de Navarre 102 I. Introduction 102 II. The Judgment of the Living and the Dead 108 III. Bonneurté’s Case and Guillaume’s Livres 121 IV. Judgment in the Court of Charles de Navarre 131 CHAPTER 4 T he Judgment of Jupiter: Froissart’s Joli buisson de Jonece 144 I. Introduction 144 II. Froissart’s Judgment of Paris, or a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Machaut 151 III. God’s Capital, Venus’s Gifts, and the Judgment of the Patron 166 IV. Recollection and Redemption in Froissart’s “Lay de Nostre Dame” 177 CONCLUsiON In Lieu of a Last Judgment: Beyond the Fourteenth Century 189 Bibliography 209 Index 228 AcKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is ultimately the product of a dissertation completed in the Department of French and Italian at Princeton University. It could not have been written without the support of numerous people. Chief among them is my reader Sarah Kay, whose piercing insight, selfless dedication and tireless good humor helped to keep me going through thick and thin. Sim- one Marchesi, who read early drafts of the project, also played a pivotal role in its evolution. I have also to acknowledge those who made it financially possible for me to conduct research, including the Department of French and Italian, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship at Princeton, the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition, I am grateful to the editorial staff at The Ohio State University Press for their very hard work. Last but not least, this project would not have been at all possible without the patient encouragement of my wife Samantha Mahar. To all those who have lent a hand, and to you, the reader, thank you. vii INTRODUCTION Literature as Eschatological Scene I. La scène judiciaire: Big and Little Judges1 When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions appeared posthumously in 1782, the book met readers with an imagined scene of the author’s judgment before God: Que la trompette du Jugement dernier sonne quand elle voudra; je viendrai ce livre à la main me présenter devant le souverain juge. Je dirai hautement: ‘Voilà ce que j’ai fait, ce que j’ai pensé, ce que je fus. J’ai dit le bien et le mal avec la même franchise. Je n’ai rien tu de mauvais, rien ajouté de bon, et s’il m’est arrivé d’employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n’a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire; j’ai pu supposer vrai ce que je savais avoir pu l’être, jamais ce que je savais être faux. Je me suis montré tel que je fus, méprisable et vil quand je l’ai été, bon, généreux, sublime, quand je l’ai été: j’ai dévoilé mon intérieur tel que tu l’as vu toi-même. Être éternel, rassemble autour de moi l’innombrable foule de mes semblables; qu’ils écoutent mes confessions, qu’ils gémissent de mes indignités, qu’ils rougissent de mes misères. Que chacun d’eux découvre 1. The section title is borrowed from Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani’s La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Mathieu-Castellani’s reading of Rous- seau generally informs my own, and I first discuss her work in detail on page 3. 1 2 • Introduction à son tour son cœur aux pieds de ton trône avec la même sincérité; et puis qu’un seul te dise, s’il l’ose: Je fus meilleur que cet homme-là.’2 Let the trumpet of the Last Judgment sound when it will; I shall arrive with this book in hand to present myself to the sovereign judge. I shall say loudly, ‘Here is what I did, what I thought, what I was. I said the good and the bad with the same sincerity. I omitted nothing bad, added nothing good, and if it so happens that I employed some ornament or other, it was only to fill a gap caused by a lapse in memory; I supposed true what I knew could have been true, and never what I knew to be false. I showed myself such as I was, wretched and vile at times; good, generous, sublime at oth- ers. I revealed my interior just as you have seen it yourself. Eternal being, assemble around me the countless crowd of my peers; let them listen to my confessions, let them cry at my indignities, let them blush at my misfor- tunes. Let each of them uncover his heart at the foot of your throne with the same sincerity; and then, let just one of them say to you, if he dares, I was better than that man.’3 Rousseau’s appeal to the Almighty reminds us that the Confessions were written partly as a response to the author’s most pitiless human judge, Vol- taire, who had anonymously published Le sentiment des citoyens in 1764.4 In this short pamphlet, Voltaire revealed that Rousseau had left all of his children at a foundling hospital and, speaking in the collective voice of the citizens of Geneva, denounced his writings as blasphemous and seditious to the state. The heavenly court scene which begins the Confessions is thus also a mise en scène of literary controversy, of the way the author must face the judg- ments of readers and critics in an endless trial process. On the one hand, as we are asked to make the right decision about whether Rousseau lived a good life, we assume the place of the divine judge to whom the book is addressed. On the other hand, the author insists on the validity of his own judgment. Rousseau promises that the version of his life contained in the book is just as God has seen it (“tel que tu l’as vu toi-même”), yet he reserves the right to employ “ornements” whenever the narrative happens to be held up by a “défaut de mémoire.” Championing his own perspective and asking that readers judge him less like Voltaire and more like a merciful God, Rousseau depicts a trial 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les confessions. Ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gal- limard, 1973. 33–34. 3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own. 4. Voltaire, Œuvres complètes. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–85. XXV: 309–14. Literature as Eschatological Scene • 3 somewhere between heaven and earth, in the elusive jurisdiction of autho- rial legacy. To readers as yet unknown, the author demands that he be tried as a unique human being with all of his particularities. But he also demands that he be judged as an author, within parameters specific to the activity of literary production: it is his book that will represent him, in both the artistic and judicial senses.5 Rousseau’s imagined Judgment Day was part of a much wider trend of literary self-representation. In her admirable study, La scène judiciaire de l’autobiographie, Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani has documented how authors like Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, and Genet deployed the trope of the writing subject on trial before the readership. As Mathieu-Castellani argues, the scène judiciaire represents the act of literary self-disclosure itself, and its reception by a literary public whose power to judge the author and his text always shares in something of the godly: Le souverain juge, le grand juge: l’entreprise de mise à nu sous le regard de l’Autre déclare ici sans détours et comme sans réticences sa visée: le tribu- nal imaginaire, présidé par Celui qui voit tout, jusques à nos plus secrètes ordures, autorise à la fois l’exaltation et la sourde angoisse.