LIQUID SPACES, LIQUID SELVES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF MERCANTILE IDENTITY IN THE MEDIEVAL MEDITERRANEAN A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY RACHEL DEBORAH GIBSON IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY SUSAN NOAKES NOVEMBER, 2016 © Rachel D. Gibson 2016 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Researching and writing a dissertation is in many ways a collaborative experience, and I am fortunate to have a number of wonderful, dynamic people to thank for supporting me through the years. I am forever grateful to my graduate advisor at the University of Minnesota, Susan Noakes, for her support, encouragement and compassion, guiding me through many stages of intellectual and personal development as this project gradually came together. Her faith in my work has always encouraged me to try more and do more, and I am thankful for her encouragement to seize exciting and edifying opportunities through the years. My thanks to Mary Franklin-Brown, who has been an exceptional teacher and colleague, bringing an exacting and critical eye to multiple versions of my work, and helping me to elevate and refine my scholarship at every stage. Thank you to Daniel Brewer, who has been supportive as a teacher and mentor, pushing me to think beyond the medieval and see the connections I can make with my work across disciplinary and temporal boundaries. I am likewise grateful to my committee members from the Department of English and the Department of History, Ruth Mazo Karras, Kathryn Reyerson, and John Watkins – thank you for your humor, patience, and support over the years. Your enthusiasm and expertise has helped me develop a dynamic, interdisciplinary project, showing me new ways to contribute to my field and the medievalist community. Thanks must go to my Masters advisor Shirin Khanmohamadi at San Francisco State University, who first set me on the merchant’s trade route and forever converted me to Medieval and Mediterranean Studies. I have had the pleasure of working with fantastic mentors both at the University of Minnesota and abroad as well, ii each contributing to the expansion and improvement of my work, including Ron Akehurst, Gilda Caiti-Russo, Susanna Ferlito, Francesca Gambino, and Leslie Zarker- Morgan, among many others. My thanks to Juliette Cherbuliez and Christophe Wall- Romana as well; the quality, professionalization, and scope of my work has augmented each year under their guidance. I have received financial support from many sources to both research and write this dissertation – without this generosity my project would certainly not exist. Extensive research abroad and the completion of this dissertation were made possible by support from the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The University of Minnesota has consistently offered me financial support throughout my graduate studies as well, with the final stages of my research and writing funded by a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. My thanks to the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, which has supported me with two summer research fellowships, and to the College of Liberal Arts, for giving me the opportunity to participate in the Graduate Research Partnership Program. In its end stages, this dissertation received crucial support from the Hella Mears Graduate Fellowship, offered through the Center for German & European Studies at the University of Minnesota. I am grateful for each generous contribution that has afforded me the time and resources to bring this project to life. This project has benefitted from the many professional associations that have given a forum to my work, as well as the conversations, lectures, workshops, and iii symposiums that enriched my experience at the University of Minnesota. Many thanks to the faculty of the Department of French and Italian, who have provided me with an intellectually open, generous, and rigorous environment. Thank you to the people at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Early Modern History, the Center for Medieval Studies, and the James Ford Bell Library, and particularly Sarah Chambers and Marguerite Ragnow, for providing a welcoming community and a space to grow, share, and refine my research. I am likewise grateful to the helpful and accommodating staff and scholars at the following libraries, whose tireless work allowed me to conduct months of archival research on beautiful manuscripts, crumbling merchant letters, and a wealth of rare materials: the Bibliothèque Universitaire de Médecine, Université de Montpellier I in Montpellier, France; the Archivo di Stato di Venezia and the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Italy; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, at the François-Mitterrand, Richelieu Louvois, and Arsenal sites in Paris, France, and the Bibliothèque des Annonciades in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Many colleagues and friends have supported me through the years, both professionally and personally, reviewing chapters and articles at all stages, and offering invaluable advice along the way. I have been fortunate to build such a beautiful, diverse and far-flung academic community. Thank you to Will Arighi, Jiewon Baek, Sharon Fischlowitz, Rebecca Halat, Caitlin Holton, Jason Jacobs, Hannah Kilduff, Erin Maglaque, Stephen McCormick, Anaïs Nony, Basit Qureshi, Chloe Ragazzoli, Steven Romans, Anna Rosensweig, Tracy Rutler, Michael A. Ryan, Natalie Seale, Sarah Turner, iv Tiffany Vann Sprecher, Adrian Travis, and Ann Zimo, among many others, for sharing many years of friendship, perspective, and humor during this process. Finally, part of the joy of moving into each new community has been that I gain a new family in each place, and I would like to thank all my families, old and new, for their love, patience and support during the long process of dissertating. I am thankful to my parents, Raymond Gibson and Susan Porter, my sister Lesley, my grandparents Raymond and Betty, and Debbie and Katie, for years (nay, decades) of love, encouragement, and faith in my personal and professional choices. Thank you to the Nienows and the Koepkes, and especially Annie, Geri, and Shayna, for generously welcoming me into their Minnesota family and always saving a place for me at the table. Un grand merci to my newest family, the Joyeux, who have lent me encouragement as I completed this project, and who have always made me feel at home on the other side of the Atlantic. Last but not least, I thank my husband Frédéric, who has brought so much adventure, love, and balance into my life, and with whom I am excited to begin our own Joyeux family. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 Liquid Histories: Considering Class, Space, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................... 35 In French Marketplaces: Negotiating Space and Spaces of Negotiation in the Old French Fabliau CHAPTER TWO .............................................................................................................. 80 Along Mediterranean Coasts: Being Bourgeois in the Old French Epic and Romance CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................................ 139 Beyond the Dressing Room: Mastering Discourse and Spaces of Exchange in the Transvestite Narrative CHAPTER FOUR ........................................................................................................... 193 On Frontiers: Hybrid Spaces and Itinerant Texts between Champagne and the Veneto CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 241 Reconsidering the Third Estate from the Commercial Revolution to “Doux Commerce” BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 253 1 INTRODUCTION Liquid Histories: Considering Class, Space, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean By the time Marco Polo collaborated with Rustichello da Pisa to write Le Devisement du Monde (1289), or what is more commonly known as Marco Polo’s Travels, the high era of courtly literature in France had more or less come to a close.1 The text, which follows the merchant family’s travels from Venice, to the Holy Land, and across Asia to Kublai Khan in China, was extremely popular in Marco Polo’s own lifetime, being translated into multiple languages and diffused across Europe.2 With the earliest version of the text being co-written in Franco-Italian (c. 1310) and detailing moments when the merchant himself acquires languages, merchandise, and local attire throughout his travels, the text gives us a persona common to the literary depiction of the mercantile identity. Rather than centering on the errant knight seeking glory and adventure in his meanderings, the new hero’s tale, written in a Genoese prison, features another sort of adventure in a new realm of value, as well as new peaceful means by which to encounter the “other.”3 With the emergence of Le Devisement du Monde, the merchant became the first real 1 For scholars such as Gianfranco Folena, courtly literature flourished during the twelfth- and thirteenth century in part due to spatial expansion in the minds of readers, where the “kingdom” of France, spread