University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-1992 Byzantium and France: the Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Birth of the Medieval Romance Leon Stratikis University of Tennessee - Knoxville Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Modern Languages Commons Recommended Citation Stratikis, Leon, "Byzantium and France: the Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Birth of the Medieval Romance. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1992. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2521 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Leon Stratikis entitled "Byzantium and France: the Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Birth of the Medieval Romance." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in Modern Foreign Languages. Paul Barrette, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: James E. Shelton, Patrick Brady, Bryant Creel, Thomas Heffernan Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation by Leon Stratikis entitled Byzantium and France: the Twelfth Century Renaissance and the Birth of the Medieval Romance. I have examined the final copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in M�n Foreign Languages. I - LJ���-L� If Major Professor we have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Accepted for the Council: - Associate� Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Graduate School BYZANTIUM AND FRANCE: THE TWELFTH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE AND THE BIRTH OF THE MEDIEVAL ROMANCE A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Leon Stratikis December 1992 DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my parents for their inspiration over the years of my studies, and their expectations which kept me going even at the most difficult times. 11 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the diligent and enthusiastic support of my advisor, Prof. Paul Barrette, who read my manuscript several times and met with me regularly commenting on my findings and always broadening my view with other recommended sources. I would also like to thank the members of my committee, Profs. Patrick Brady, James Shelton, Thomas Heffernan and Bryant Creel, for each bringing their own expertise and insight to this work with their helpful suggestions, and for their willingness to accommodate graduate school deadlines on short notice. I would also like to thank Linda J. Besl and Ann Lacava, without whose generous assistance in editing I may not have mastered Word Perfect commands in time for graduation. Finally, this work could not have been written without the excellent resources of the University of Tennessee library, and the supplemental assistance of the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, Dum barton Oaks, and the Greek library at the University of Cincinnati. 111 ABSTRACT This work hopes to fill the need for a complete treatment of the question of possible influence of the Hellenistic and Byzantine romance on the Old French romance of the twelfth century. Adopting a traditional historical approach, along with a consideration of symbols and motifs, it hopes to trace the coherent development of a genre from the Hellenistic world of the beginning of our era to the religious milieu of early Christianity and ultimately to the translation centers of monasteries and ports and the courts of Western Europe at the time of the Crusades. We conclude that, far from composing their works in a vacuum, inspired only by half-forgotten, obscure Celtic tales, the twelfth-century authors were part of a tradition whose presence helps to account for some puzzling motifs in their works. lV PREFACE In recent years, the validity of the historical approach to literature has come into question. The works of Michel Foucault, particularly The Archeology of Knowledge and The History of Sexuality, emphasize the alleged weaknesses of the historical method and the need for a structuralist approach to historical phenomena. According to Foucault, the concepts of tradition and influence obscure our understanding of individual historical moments by fitting them into a pattern which may be arbitrary. However, while it is true that sweeping generalizations not based on rigorous research may reduce individual moments, events, and texts to what Foucault derisively terms "reminders to our general unconscious", strictly formalist approaches to documents, whether historical or literary, do not allow for a proper context. Thus, a formalistically biased approach to historical or literary documents is just as biased as a strictly anti-formalistically biased approach. No work is created in a vacuum, and no work can be fully appreciated in one. This observation is particularly relevant to the literature of Medieval Europe, which German literary historians, and particularly E. Curtius, view as, by definition, an inter­ disciplinary field. Whereas it is the general academic practice to study particular national literatures (and the Medieval counterparts from which they arose) and relegate the study of international influence to a secondary, "comparative" field, Medieval scholars, since the 18th century, have realized that the authors of the works in their particular field of specialization were aware of contemporary works in different languages, some of which they would translate or freely adapt. Their borrowings from contemporary works were v far greater than those of any age since, and they drew freely from the wealth of classical sources, available in Latin or Greek, proud of imitation and oblivious to the modern stigmatization of plagiarism. For medievalists, therefore, modern structuralist methods do not replace traditional approaches, but rather enhance them. According to Eugene Vance, "There is nothing more historically or culturally determined than the conviction among modern linguists that their discourse is ahistorical and [there is] a growing awareness of this paradox.. Critics today who address themselves to the discourses of medieval texts have interesting alternatives before them: whether to confine themselves to a historical perspective, whether to cast their lot with modem analytical techniques, or whether to draw on the insights of both. "1 We agree with the author of that statement that the third alternative, if employed lucidly and coherently, is the best. 2 In that context, the study of tradition and influence is not only relevant but essential to a full understanding of the works involved: it is not possible to arrive at such a full appreciation of the text by studying only the text itself, if it incorporates borrowings from other texts or allusions which only History can clarify. And although new studies of anthropology and folklore suggest new interpretations or contribute to the full picture, they can only be put in their proper perspective by their placement within the framework of history. Northrop Frye's observation in The Secular Scripture of the universality of romance serves to underline the importance of the study of tradition: "The conventions of prose romance show little change over the course of 1Eugene Vance, Marvelous Signals, (Lincoln, 1986), p. 153. 2Ibid. VI centuries, and conservatism of this kind is the mark of a stable genre. In Greek romances we find stories of mysterious births, oracular prophecies about the future contortions of the plot, foster parents, adventures which involve capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine. We open, let us say, Guy Mannering [Scott], written fifteen centuries later [it was thought at the time that the earliest Hellenistic romances dated from the third century A.D.], and we find that, although there are slight changes in the setting, the kind of story being told, a story of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies, capture by pirates, and the like, is very much the same. In Greek romance the characters are Levantine, the setting the Mediterranean world, and the normal means of transportation is by shipwreck. In science fictionthe characters may be earthlings, the setting the intergalactic spaces, and what gets wrecked in hostile territory a spaceship, but the tactics of the storyteller generally conform to much the same outlines. "3 Another natural modification of the practice of modem literary analysis, when dealing with Medieval works, is the restitution of a stress on the relationship between genesis and content when studying an incomplete text, such as Chretien's Perceval, whose meaning is obscured by its fragmentary nature. It is only possible to attempt a hypothetical reconstitution of the complete work through understanding the forces at work not only in the completed portion of the work, but also in the projected portion, a circumstance which must of necessity lead us into that shadowy realm of the author's conception of the work which, granted, can never be fully known, and which may indeed be irrelevant to the final product. If, however, we might hope even to approach an understanding of the fragment, we must approach it through an understanding of context and influences. It is our hope in this present work to adapt the techniques of the historian to the 3Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture, (Cambridge, 1976) pp. 4-5.