• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

_full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien B2 voor dit chapter en nul 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (oude _articletitle_deel, vul hierna in): The Poets of the North: Economies of Literature and Love _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 The Poets Of The North: Economies Of Literature And Love 51 Chapter 2 The Poets of the North: Economies of Literature and Love Eliza Zingesser* The thirteenth century saw the flourishing of such famous trouvères as Colin Muset, Richard de Fournival, and Thibaut de Navarre. To judge by most twen- tieth-century anthologies and PhD reading lists, we might think these trou- vères to be more worthy of our esteem than those from Arras, despite the well-worn idea that Arras was the most vibrant literary center of northern France during the thirteenth century. Arthur Dinaux, one of the earliest schol- ars of Artesian medieval literature, described the city as a “centre prématuré de lumières, de richesse et de civilisation,” which was, “dès le moyen-âge, un foyer littéraire, brillant d’éclat et de chaleur, au milieu des brumes glaciales qui l’environnaient” (“premature center of light, of wealth and of civilization,” which was, “ as early as the Middle Ages, a literary hub, brilliant in radiance and in warmth, in the middle of the glacial fog that surrounded it”).1 If we believe this story about Arras’s exceptionality, it is not just because of the high num- bers of poets it produced whose names we have on record – a fact that could be considered objective historical evidence for Arras’s unique status – but also because of the “hype” generated by Artesian poets themselves. One thirteenth- century arrageois poem is exceptionally transparent in its function as a kind of publicity. Its speaker declares: “Je vis l’autre jor le ciel là sus fendre; / Dex voloit d’Arras les motets aprendre” (I saw the sky split open the other day; God want- ed to learn motets from Arras, vv. 5–6).2 Given its self-proclaimed importance, it is hardly surprising that we view Arras today as a kind of medieval Parnassus. * It is my pleasure to express my debt to a handful of generous interlocutors – Catherine Bates, Bethany Moreton, Ève Morisi, Devin Singh, Scott Trudell, and Pamela Voekel – whose ques- tions and bibliographic leads were invaluable. All translations in this essay are my own. 1 Arthur Dinaux, Les trouvères artésiens (Paris and Valenciennes: n.p., 1843). Arras’s situation close to Germany also made it a convenient candidate for treatment as a literary hub by nineteenth-century philologists, whose medievalism was often caught up in nationalism. See, for example, Dinaux’s comments on Artesian trouvères: “Placés entre le Picard et le Flamand, ils ont pris la chaleur de tête du premier et la saine raison du second; cet heureux mélange a produit des œuvres où l’esprit et le sel français s’allient souvent à la solidité germanique” (Placed between Picard and Flemish, they took the warmth of thinking of the former and the healthy reason of the latter; this happy mixture produced works in which French cleverness and wit are often combined with German solidity). Ibid., 6. 2 The piece is “Arras est escole de tous biens entendre.” It is edited in full in Dinaux, Les trouvères artésiens, 15ff. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004379480_004 52 Zingesser Usually more subtly than in the poem quoted above, Arras’s medieval literary community was intensely self-referential, so fascinated with its own temporal and poetic moment that much secondary criticism has done little more than attempt to explicate the dense web of names and historical allusion that clut- ters so much of the literature of medieval Artois. This localism in Artesian lit- erature is constituted through its insistent evocations of both people and places, especially towns in Artois. Although the works of other trouvères can, of course, be linked to specific places and historical moments, non-Artesian trouvères seem to have been generally less intent on anchoring their works in a particular landscape, or on singling out their poetic confrères.3 Though the most famous Artesian trouvère, Adam de la Halle tends to limit his use of prop- er names to initial stanzas and envois in his jeux-partis, and to the latter in his love songs, that is to say, to those places where one might expect to see them in works of other non-Artesian trouvères, his fellow Artesian composers, by con- trast, take an astonishing delight in naming each other constantly and ad nau- seam, creating an aesthetic that is somewhat akin to that of a “Who’s Who in Medieval Arras.” If one were to calculate the percentage of syllables occupied by proper names in Berger’s anthology of thirteenth-century Artesian litera- ture, the results would demonstrate this.4 Proper names are, arguably, much of the “stuff” of this corpus. This aesthetic has, understandably, led to frenetic archival research on the part of many historians and literary critics, much of which has shed considerable light on the corpus. The following essay also situates Artesian poetry in a particular historical moment, without seeking to view literature exclusively as a transparent win- dow onto history. After sketching an overview of some of the key economic developments of thirteenth-century Arras, especially the growth of high-inter- est lending, I survey the poetry of some of Adam’s Artesian contemporaries, showing how these texts, despite their often moralizing tenor, find ways of rec- onciling affluence with Christian principles. I then turn to Adam de la Halle’s corpus, with an eye to highlighting the economic metaphors underlying much 3 As Marie Ungureanu has put it: “Dans cette communauté, tout le monde se connaît, se ren- contre et s’interpelle” (In this community, everyone knows each other, meets each other and calls out to each other). See Ungureanu, La bourgeoisie naissante: société et littérature bour- geoises d’Arras aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Arras: Commission des monuments du Pas-de-Calais, 1955), 97. Richard de Fournival is something of an exception to this statement in his localism. In addition to promoting Amiens-based writers, Richard states in the preface to his Biblionomia that the astrological alignment of the day of his birth mirrored that of the city of Amiens. A romance entitled Abladane, describing the history of the city of Amiens, is also, perhaps er- roneously, ascribed to him. 4 Roger Berger, Littérature et société arrageoises au XIIIe siècle: les chansons et dits artésiens (Arras: Commission des monuments du Pas-de-Calais, 1981)..

Load more

  2

Copy Link