Partonopeus de Blois: Romance in the Making (Gallica)

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS Romance in the Making

Penny Eley

Penny Eley

Partonopeus de Blois is one of the most important works of twelfth-century French fiction; it shaped the development of romance as a genre, gave rise to adaptations in several other medieval languages and even an opera (Massanet’s Esclarmonde). However, partly because of its complicated transmission history, and partly due to the fact that it has been overshadowed by the works of Chrétien de Troyes, it has been unjustly neglected. This first full-length study of the romance brings together literary, historical and manuscript studies to explore its making as it evolved through seven medieval ‘editions’, the earliest of which probably predated most of Chrétien’s romances. The book’s thematic analyses show how the Partonopeus poet applied established techniques of rewriting to a wide range of classical, vernacular and Celtic sources, combining this literary fusion with political subtexts to create a new and influential model of romance composition. Detailed studies of the Continuation reveal more ambitious experimentation by the original author, as well as the activities of a series of ‘editors’ who continued to modify the text for over a century. A final discussion of patronage proposes a new reading of the poem's distinct narratorial interventions on women and love, and suggests a link between Partonopeus and a disturbing episode in the history of Blois. PEnny ElEy is Professor of Medieval French at the University of Sheffield.

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620, USA www.boydellandbrewer.com

Gallica

Gallica Volume 21

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS ROMANCE IN THE MAKING

Gallica ISSN 1749–091X General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and Renaissance French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French and Italian, Princeton University, 303 East Pyne, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA The Managing Editor, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS ROMANCE IN THE MAKING

Penny Eley

D. S. BREWER

© Penny Eley 2011 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Penny Eley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2011 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978–1–84384–274–3 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

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Contents List of Tables

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. Patterns of Youth and Age The very young man: Partonopeus The older woman and the very young girl: Melior and Persewis The older man and his doubles: Gaudin, the packhorse knight and Ernoul More young men: Anselot and Lucion

19 22 32 39

2. Power, Birth and Values: The fils à vilain Theme A programme for reading: the prologue The fils à vilain defeated: Sornegur and Marés Ambivalent recurrences: the bishop of Paris and Farés

50 52 59 68

44

3. Walter Map and Other Animals A horse, a lion and the Roman de Thèbes Anselot’s tirade: context and content Creatures too close for comfort Ten ravening beasts The Walter Map connection

75 76 84 91 96 102

4. Experiments in Fiction: Anselot’s Story The manuscript tradition and authorship of Anselot’s story An exemplary fusion Doubling and mis en abyme

112 115 127 139

5. When is an Ending not an Ending? Questions of Closure The first continuation? The Sultan: a real-life enemy figure The ending of the Continuation

150 153 157 162

6. Poets and a Patroness: The Making of Partonopeus de Blois Form and fusion: the Roman d’Alexandre and Florimont The mysterious disappearance of Urraque Passe Rose: beloved patroness?

179 179 187 192

Conclusion

207

Appendix 1: Notes on Editions and Manuscripts

215

Appendix 2: Synopsis

218

Bibliography

229

Index

251

List of Tables Table 1: Lengths of sequences in Anselot’s tirade Table 2: Comparison of vv. 10787–96 in MSS BGPT Table 3: Comparison of vv. 10817–26 in MSS BGPT Table 4: Structure of the Anselot episode Table 5: Comparison of the first and second epligues Table 6: Versification in the Continuation

87 92 97 113 171 186

The preparation of this book was supported by

Each year the AHRC provides funding from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from archaeology and English literature to design and dance. Only applications of the highest quality and excellence are funded and the range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK. For further information on the AHRC, please see our website www.ahrc.ac.uk.

Acknowledgements I owe a debt of gratitude to many organisations and individuals without whose help and support this project would never have come to fruition. Through its Resource Enhancement scheme, the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the Partonopeus de Blois Electronic Edition project which provided both an impetus to, and invaluable data for, a detailed analysis of certain aspects of the text. The AHRC also awarded me a shortterm Fellowship that allowed me to complete this book. The University of Sheffield contributed via a period of institutional study leave and a grant towards the costs of publication from its Arts and Humanities Research and Innovation Fund. Elspeth Ferguson and Caroline Palmer at Boydell and Brewer guided me with sure hands through the publication process. Glyn Burgess read the manuscript with meticulous care, suggesting a number of improvements to content and organisation as well as correcting my erratic typing. Sarah Kay’s incisive comments sharpened up both the title and the Introduction. Esperanza Bermejo and Eugénia Margarida Neves dos Santos kindly provided me with information and materials that had proved impossible to locate from the UK. Professor Emily Rose drew my attention to sources relating to the Jews in Blois and their implications for the composition of Partonopeus. Fellow members of the International Courtly Literature Society gave invaluable feedback on papers I presented at ICLS national and international meetings; searching questions and perceptive comments from audiences at other conferences and colloquia also helped me to refine sections of the argument. Colleagues in the Department of French at Sheffield cheerfully tolerated my obsession with Partonopeus and claims that it shaped all subsequent fiction in French. Amongst those who have shared this obsession, my particular thanks are due to the three Research Associates on the Electronic Edition team (Catherine Hanley, Mario Longtin and Philip Shaw), who enabled me to see things in this text that I would never have noticed without the benefit of their scholarship and enthusiasm. My greatest professional debt is to my colleague, collaborator and friend Penny Simons, who re-awakened my interest in Partonopeus de Blois in the 1990s. Her companionship and willingness to spend hours in wild – but often highly productive – speculation about twelfth-century literary culture have enriched this book in ways that cannot be quantified. It goes without saying that its faults are all my own. Last, but certainly not least, is my husband Adrian Eley, who has provided unfailing support throughout the long and sometimes difficult life of this project.

Introduction INTRODUCTION

For much of the critical history of twelfth-century French romance, Partonopeus de Blois has been one of a group of texts that have existed on the periphery of mainstream scholarship (others include the romances of Hue de Rotelande, especially Proteselaus, Aimon de Varennes’s Florimont and the anonymous Guillaume de Palerne). Writing in 1953, Sikko Pieter Uri lamented the fact that ‘the romance of Partonopeus seems nearly forgotten in the twentieth century’.1 Even in 1999 a critic could still claim, with some justification, that ‘the medieval bestseller Partonopeu […] is scarcely known today even by specialists in the field’.2 It is only in the last twenty years that it has really started to come out from under the critical radar and take its rightful place in discussions of how the genre evolved. The marginalising of Partonopeus is less a function of its intrinsic quality – the great Edmond Faral described it as one of the most elegant of all Old French romances, while Jean Frappier pronounced it a masterpiece3 – than of its complex manuscript tradition and its chequered history as a published text. Partonopeus survives in seven complete or near-complete manuscripts, three fragments of lost manuscripts and thirty-three extracts – probably from three more lost manuscripts – incorporated into an anthology codex and two later vernacular texts (a checklist of all these witnesses, together with the sigla that will be used to refer to them, is given in Appendix 1). The romance also exists in three different versions. One has a long final sequence leading up to a description of a triple wedding involving the hero and heroine, the heroine’s sister and the king of France, and the hero’s companion and the 1 ‘Some Remarks on Partonopeus de Blois’, p. 84. Opinion has been divided as to whether the hero’s name should be rendered as ‘Partonopeus’ or ‘Partonopeu’, the former being favoured by Crapelet and earlier scholars, the latter by Gildea and critics working from his edition. I use ‘Partonopeus’ throughout, except when citing or quoting from the work of critics who have adopted the spelling ‘Partonopeu’. For an explanation of the rationale behind this, see the section headed ‘Title’ in the General Introduction to the electronic edition. 2 Bruckner, ‘Romancing History and Rewriting the Game of Fiction: Jean Renart’s Rose through the Looking Glass of Partonopeu de Blois’, p. 94. 3 Faral, Le Manuscrit 19152 du fonds français de la bibliothèque nationale, p. 46; Frappier, review of Fourrier, Le Courant réaliste dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Âge Tome I: Les débuts (XIIe siècle), p. 546.

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heroine’s cousin. Another has a shorter final sequence and a single wedding, of the hero and heroine. Each of these versions has survived in a single manuscript (Paris, Arsenal 2986 = A and Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1971 = V respectively). The third version, represented by the remaining five complete or near-complete manuscripts, has the shorter ending and a continuation in which the hero faces further hostilities from an old rival (see Appendix 2 for a full synopsis of the romance, including the major narrative variants). However, only one of these five witnesses (Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 939 = T) brings the Continuation to some kind of a conclusion: the other four break off at different points earlier in the story.4 Moreover, the Continuation itself seems to be a composite entity: it consists of two sections written in octosyllabic couplets arranged either side of a long sequence in alexandrines and a shorter one in decasyllables. Add to this the fact that there are significant interpolations, abridgements and lacunae in individual manuscripts or subgroups of manuscripts, and it is perhaps easier to understand why this remarkable poem remained for so long on the sidelines of scholarship devoted to Old French narrative fiction. Research on Partonopeus de Blois has been further complicated by competing views as to which of the three extant versions best represents the primitive form of the romance. Is it the third, majority version, in which case are we to assume that T has preserved the original ending of that story? If this is so, then we have to conclude that the V version was abridged by a remanieur who took exception to the Continuation, and that the ending of A was rewritten at a later date. Or is it the Vatican text, which would suggest that the romance first circulated in a non-continued form before being either extended or rewritten? Or does the Arsenal text represent the earliest form of the poem, the ending of which was subsequently rewritten to give the V version, before a continuation was added? Each of these scenarios has had its committed proponents since scholars first began to look closely at the manuscript tradition in the early nineteenth century. As a result, the editorial pendulum has swung from using A as a base manuscript, via support for V and G (Paris, BnF fr. 19152), to a combination of B (Bern, Burgerbibliothek 113) and T, and back again to A, supplemented by BT.5 The scholarly history of our romance began promisingly enough in 1811 with a substantial notice by Jean-Baptiste de Roquefort, following on from

4 I use the capitalised form throughout to designate the Partonopeus Continuation, in order to distinguish it from other continuations and the process of continuation. 5 Editions based on V and G were never published, although Smith argued strongly for the former in his PhD dissertation (‘The Manuscript Tradition of the Old French Partonopeus de Blois’) before changing his mind in favour of B. Fourrier illustrated his detailed discussion of the romance with lengthy transcriptions from G, supplemented by P (Paris, BnF fr. 368) and T (Le Courant réaliste, pp. 315–446). The remaining long text, L (Paris, BnF nouv. acq. fr. 751), is the least satisfactory from an editorial point of view.

INTRODUCTION

3

earlier synopses and adaptations, including an eighteenth-century French prose rendering by Pierre Le Grand d’Aussy (1781), a free translation of which into English verse by William Rose appeared 1807.6 The first full edition of Partonopeus, by A. C. M. Robert and Georges-Adrien Crapelet, appeared in 1834,7 four years before the first published text of any of Chrétien’s romances, and thirty-five years before the appearance of Aristide Joly’s edition of the Roman de Troie, an equally seminal work in the history of Old French romance.8 It was largely due to sheer bad luck that Partonopeus did not develop the editorial momentum of Chrétien and Benoît de Sainte-Maure, which led to the publication of Wendelin Foerster’s editiones principi of four of Chrétien’s romances between 1884 and 1899, and of Léopold Constans’s six-volume edition of Troie from 1904 to 1912. A new project led by Edmund Stengel was announced in 1898 but seems never to have got off the ground; Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier then stepped into the breach, announcing their own plans for a new edition in Romania in 1902.9 The following year, Paris died and this project was also abandoned. Although new manuscripts of Partonopeus were discovered and scholars continued to study the manuscript tradition during the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries,10 it was not until the late 1920s that Leon Purdue Smith undertook a complete review of all the extant witnesses, with a

6 For details, see Corbellari, ‘De la “Bibliothèque des romans” au grand opéra: les métamorphoses de Partonopeus aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles’, pp. 76–81 (Corbellari gives 1813 rather than 1811 as the date of Roquefort’s ‘Notice historique et critique du roman de Partonopex de Bloys’). Both Le Grand d’Aussy and Roquefort based their discussions on MS G. 7 See the Bibliography for details of editions and of the adaptations of Partonopeus into other European languages. It is accepted practice to refer to Robert and Crapelet’s work as the Crapelet edition. 8 A ‘quite inaccurate’ transcription of Yvain appeared in Lady Charlotte Guest’s 1838 edition of the Mabinogion and other tales. The first accurate editions of Chrétien were Tarbé and Jonckbloet’s texts of Le Chevalier à la Charrette, published in 1849 and 1850 respectively (Dembowski, ‘Editing Chrétien’, p. 76). 9 See G[aston] P[aris], ‘Chronique’, p. 473. 10 See, for example, Pfeiffer, Über die Handschriften des altfranzösischen Romans ‘Partonopeus de Blois’ (1884), which studied the inter-relationships of MSS ABGPF. Pfeiffer’s dissertation was re-published the following year with additions by Stengel which included a description of MS L. Fragment C was described and transcribed by Meyer, ‘Notice sur quelques manuscrits français de la Bibliothèque Phillipps, à Cheltenham’ (1891), while MS V came to the attention of critics in 1916 via Christ’s catalogue Die altfranzösischen Handschriften der Palatina. Fragment X did not become known until some forty-five years later (see Smith, ‘A Newly Discovered Manuscript Fragment of the Old French Partonopeus de Blois’). Müller included thirteen pages of corrections to the Crapelet edition in his Sprachliche und textkritische Untersuchungen über den altfranzösischen ‘Partonopeus de Blois’ (1920), based on his re-assessment of the manuscript tradition.

4

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS

view to preparing a new critical edition.11 A report published in 1941 indicated that another edition, by Henri Martin, was currently in progress, but this, too, came to nothing.12 Smith’s text had still not seen the light of day when he died in 1964; his work was finally completed and published by Joseph Gildea from 1967 to 1970, though without any of the literary analysis that we have come to expect in the introduction to a modern critical edition. Despite Gildea’s explanation that he omitted much of the normal supporting material in order to publish the text ‘with minimum delay’ (Preface to Vol. II.2, p. v), Lewis Thorpe summed up many readers’ disappointment with this aspect of the book when he noted that ‘there remain only one or two sentences of comment by the editor, and even in these he continues to hide from us any suspicion he may have that Partonopeus [sic] is a work of art composed multo cum sudore by a talented narrative poet who was also a human being. I recently saw a television programme about birdlife in the Moroccan Sahara, where, if you are lucky, it rains for about ten minutes every four years. After studying this edition I felt about as dry as one of these Senegal grouse.’13 Another forty years were to pass before the third critical edition was published by Olivier Collet and Pierre-Marie Joris, this time with a fuller appreciation of the text; but, once again, it was prepared by an editorial team tasked with bringing to fruition the work of a predecessor (in this case, Félix Lecoy) who had died before completing his task.14 Critical momentum began to gather following the publication in 1960 of Anthime Fourrier’s Le Courant réaliste, which included a substantial chapter on Partonopeus (with extracts based on MSS G and T), and the subsequent appearance of the Gildea edition. From the 1970s onwards there was a growing number of articles, book chapters and theses devoted to Partonopeus,15 together with some significant discussions of the text in thematic studies of subjects as wide-ranging as author-figures in medieval 11 12 13 14

Smith’s dissertation was submitted in 1930 but never published in its entirety. Newstead, ‘The Traditional Background of Partonopeus de Blois’, p. 916, n. 1. Review of the Gildea edition, p. 264. See Z[ink], ‘Avertissement’. I cite the text from this edition except where otherwise indicated (see Appendix 1 for details of the line-numbering conventions used here and in the Collet-Joris edition). 15 Dissertations include Petrucelli, ‘Narrative Art in Partonopeus de Blois’ (1970); Hilton, ‘Convention and Innovation in Partonopeu de Blois’ (1984); a series of partial editions and commentaries based on the text of MS G by students at the Université d’Aix-Marseille-I in the 1990s (see the entries in the Bibliography for Clavel, Filali, Giacomi, Granier, Oliveira and Spiteri), and Young, ‘Aspects of Intertextuality in Partonopeu de Blois’ (2004). Articles and book chapters have tackled subjects ranging from the use of regional vocabulary (Roques, ‘Les Régionalismes dans Partonopeus de Blois’) to physical space (Friede, ‘Dualität und Integration. Zur Typologie der Räume im Roman d’Alexandre, in Chrétiens Lancelot und dem Partonopeu’) and twelfth-century fashion (Heller, ‘Fictions of Consumption: The Nascent Fashion System in Partonopeus de Blois’).

INTRODUCTION

5

romance, orientalism and go-betweens.16 However, it is still true to say that this romance remains very much a poor cousin to the romans d’antiquité, the Tristan romances, the Lais of Marie de France and the works of Chrétien de Troyes in terms of the amount of critical attention it has attracted. The first volume of essays focused entirely on Partonopeus and its medieval adaptations into other European languages did not appear until 2004.17 This is, to my knowledge, the first monograph to have been published on the text, compared with the ‘many dozens’ devoted to Chrétien.18 Partonopeus still offers enormous critical opportunities alongside – and, indeed as a result of – the challenges posed by its textual tradition. By picking up the gauntlet of a book-length study of the romance, with a consistent focus on how it came to be in the forms that have been handed down to us, I hope to open up some of the twists and turns in this interpretative maze and encourage others to follow the same path in future. The title of this book contains a deliberate echo of Foster Erwin Guyer’s 1954 volume Romance in the Making: Chrétien de Troyes and the Earliest French Romances. The reasons for this are twofold. In the first place, this study also has as one of its principal aims to explore the processes by which romance is made; in the second, it subscribes to the view articulated by Douglas Kelly, among others, that Old French romance is a ‘conspiracy of allusion’, an intricate, shifting network of texts that are in constant dialogue and competition with one another.19 In the true spirit of medieval allusion, my title repeats and rewrites Guyer’s in order to draw attention to an underlying difference between the two volumes. Whereas Guyer argues that Chrétien should be seen as the founding father of courtly romance (and indeed, the modern novel),20 I reserve that honour for the anonymous poet of Partonopeus de Blois. While I toyed with the idea of adapting Guyer’s phraseology and subtitling this book ‘the making of romance’, I kept coming back to the fact that his formulation encapsulates something fundamental to my own approach. One of the key contentions of this book is that Partonopeus de Blois helps to establish romance as a form that is always in the making, never made. This text shows how a narrative that appears to achieve closure can be re-opened; how new intertexts can be accommodated as they come into circulation; how familiar characters can metamorphose into 16 Halász, Images d’auteur dans le roman médiéval, XIIe–XIIIe siècles; GaullierBougassas, La Tentation de l’Orient dans le roman médiéval; Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus. 17 Partonopeus in Europe: An Old French Text and its Adaptations, ed. by Hanley et al. 18 Lacy and Grimbert, ‘Introduction’, p. xii. 19 Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance, and The Art of Medieval French Romance; Bruckner, ‘Intertextuality’. 20 See his Chrétien de Troyes: Inventor of the Modern Novel, passim.

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new roles and how one poet’s work can be interpolated by others who feel that they have more to say on certain topics. At the same time, it provides a case study of how an individual poet makes a romance through a process of fission and fusion of pre-existing stories, and in so doing provides new narrative nuclei for other writers to work with. Both these avenues of enquiry were opened up in the 1990s by Matilda Bruckner in a series of key publications which helped to kick-start the critical rehabilitation of Partonopeus (the notion of fission and fusion in particular is derived from her 1993 article in L’Esprit Créateur).21 Where this study differs from Bruckner’s work is in its revisionist chronology, which places Partonopeus among the very earliest of Old French romances and so makes it a prime shaper of the genre, and in the attention it pays to the manuscript tradition of the text. While Bruckner approached the 14,000 verses of the Gildea edition as a fairly unproblematic combination of romance proper and continuation, and accepted Fourrier’s dating for the whole of approximately 1182–85, this book sees Partonopeus as a series of versions – or editions – of a story that first went into circulation at the beginning of the 1170s. As Penny Simons and I have argued elsewhere, setting this chronological cat among the pigeons of literary history calls for a wholesale re-evaluation of the evolution of romance as a genre, and of the place of Chrétien de Troyes, in particular, within that tradition.22 Bruckner’s concept of fusion is central to understanding how the Partonopeus poet created his romance. His key innovation was to take the two major currents that dominated vernacular fiction at the end of the 1160s – the romans d’antiquité and other narratives based on classical sources on the one hand; the Lais of Marie de France and stories derived from Celtic sources on the other – and try to fuse them into a single work of literature. The idea of combining materials from different sources was not new; indeed, it underpinned the culture of rewriting that gave rise to medieval vernacular fiction. The author of Eneas supplemented Virgil’s Aeneid with stories and details taken from Ovid, Dares, Lucan, Servius’s commentary, the mythographic tradition and bestiary material.23 The poet who ‘translated’ the story of Pyramus and Thisbe into Old French combined the basic story-line from Book IV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with elements taken from Book X, from Ovid’s own erotic poems and from the Book of Revelation.24 What was new about Partonopeus was the scale of the enterprise. Where others had seen the 21 Bruckner, ‘From Genealogy to Romance and Continuation in the Fabulous History of Partonopeu de Blois’; see also her Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fictions, pp. 110–15. 22 Eley and Simons, ‘Partonopeus de Blois and Chrétien de Troyes: A Re-assessment’. 23 Mora-Lebrun, L’“Enéide” médiéval et la naissance du roman, pp. 172–3 and 191–3. 24 Piramus et Tisbé, ‘Introduction’, pp. 13–17.

INTRODUCTION

7

potential of enriching – and even re-orientating – a pre-existing story by means of details and digressions borrowed from a range of intertexts, this poet set out to bring entire narrative paradigms into alignment and fuse them together.25 The potential of combining classical and Celtic material had already been demonstrated on a small scale in Narcisus et Dané, which has a number of features in common with our romance. In this tale, Ovid’s basic story-line is rewritten to accommodate a heroine who is simultaneously the classical Echo, the Old French Lavine – who falls in love with Eneas after seeing him ride past her castle window – and a Celtic fairy mistress who offers her love to a mortal man during a hunting expedition. This intriguing combination prefigures the fusion in Partonopeus de Blois of the classical story of Cupid and Psyche, the vernacular romances of Thèbes, Eneas and Troie, and the lai of Guigemar and other fairy-mistress stories. It also raises the question of whether Narcisus may have been one of our poet’s early works, and a kind of trial run for Partonopeus, in just the same way as another Ovidian conte, Philomena, appears to have been one of Chrétien’s œuvres de jeunesse. It is very unlikely that the seignur who is praised for his liberality in the Partonopeus prologue would have commissioned a lengthy romance from a poet without an established literary pedigree. Narcisus is a little tour de force, characterised by exactly the same hybridising mentality and sparkling sense of humour as Partonopeus de Blois.26 ‘Fusion’ as I use the term here partially overlaps with the notions of medieval intertextuality and ‘allusion’ in Kelly’s sense of the word. It encompasses the traditional notions of imitatio – rewriting based on a recognisable model – and aemulatio – rewriting that corrects or improves upon the model – but draws attention more explicitly to the fact that a given narrative may exploit more than one model.27 It also acknowledges that those models can be blended in such a way that it is impossible to say either ‘This is narrative model X with an admixture of model Y’ or ‘This is narrative model Y with an admixture of model X’ (as might be the case for, say, Eneas or Piramus et 25 Trachsler has studied the ‘interference’ of genres as marked by the mixing of proper names associated with different matières, but did not include Partonopeus in his analysis (see Disjointures – Conjointures. Etudes sur l’interférence des matières narratives dans la littérature française du Moyen Age). 26 The humour is particularly evident in the portrayal of Dané’s sleepless night, when the princess drags her poor nurse out of bed to help turn her mattress, which she believes is keeping her awake (the real cause of her insomnia is, of course, love). See Narcisus et Dané, vv. 177–220. 27 For Ruhe, imitatio and aemulatio together define the twelfth-century model of inventio, which was challenged in the thirteenth century by the idea of invention as finding new subject matter: see ‘Inventio devenue troevemens: la recherche de la matière au moyen âge’, pp. 293–4. On audience responses to imitation, see Goldberg, ‘Imitation as a Narrative Function: Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better’, pp. 23–4 and 34–5.

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Tisbé). Fusion produces narrative Z, which is recognisably both X and Y, but also something quite different from either of them. In the making of Partonopeus de Blois a complex series of both intrageneric and intergeneric blendings has taken place: the genealogical prologue brings together Eneas, the Roman de Troie and the underlying structure of Wace’s Roman de Brut;28 the initial adventure fuses the Achilleid and the classical tale of Cupid and Psyche with Guigemar (and possibly Lanval and Yonec as well);29 the hero’s name and a number of his adventures reference both the Thebaid and the Roman de Thèbes;30 the overall story-line represents a marriage between a fairy-mistress lai and a dynastic romance.31 If the crossing of generic boundaries within Old French narratives can often be understood in terms of dialectical engagement and contestation,32 the eclectic intertextual play of Partonopeus also points to something more speculative, and perhaps more appropriate to a period when those boundaries were still in the process of formation. It is as if the poet said to himself ‘What would happen if I were to mix this story with that story?’ – and then kept repeating the question in relation to an ever-expanding corpus of narratives. In some respects, the concept of nuclear fusion is a useful analogue for this process of literary creation. In the same way as fusion reactions between light elements form heavier ones, so the blending of two narrative models can produce a ‘weightier’ story – not necessarily a longer tale, but one with added meaning or resonance. However, this analogy can also be misleading, in that, once nuclear fusion has taken place, all that is left behind is the product of the reaction: there is nothing to show us exactly where it happened, or which particular atoms were involved. As we shall see, one characteristic feature of Partonopeus is the way in which it signposts not only the ingredients in its blend, but also some of the places at which the blending occurs. For this reason, I have found it helpful at times to conceptualise the making of this romance in geological terms. The meeting of very different literary models can be likened to a transform boundary between tectonic plates. Just as an

28 In this respect, I disagree with Bruckner’s characterisation of the genealogy as unidirectional and linear (‘From Genealogy to Romance’, p. 27): its blending of different models calls for both linear and lateral reading. We should also note that one of the genealogical lines evoked, from Troy to Rome, is deliberately broken (see Chapter 2, p. 55) in a humorous attempt to reinforce the status of France as the endpoint of translatio studii et imperii. On genealogical disjunctions in other texts, see Stahuljak, Bloodless Genealogies of the French Middle Ages: ‘Translatio’, Kinship and Metaphor, Chapters 1–3. 29 Young, pp. 20–51. 30 See Joris, ‘“Thèbes avec Troie”: Partonopeu de Blois ou le sens d’un retour’, pp. 64–70. 31 Bruckner, Shaping Romance, pp. 122–6. 32 Gaunt, ‘Romance and Other Genres’, pp. 50–51. Hanning sees Partonopeus in terms of conflicting models of romance, embodied in the figures of Melior and Urraque (‘The Audience as Co-Creator of the First Chivalric Romances’, pp. 17–18).

INTRODUCTION

9

apparently solid land mass can in reality be made up of two plates slipping slowing past one another (as in California, where the Northern Pacific plate is sliding past the North American plate), so a deceptively smooth narrative surface can hide the tensions between two models whose internal logic points in rather different directions. And just as the fracture zone along a transform boundary may sometimes reveal itself in a visible sign on the surface of the earth (think of the long, narrow ridge that marks the San Andreas fault inland from Los Angeles), so the faultlines between our poet’s models are, on occasion, apparent as anomalies and discontinuities in the narrative. The extent to which these faultlines are consciously revealed will be a recurrent theme in the first part of our analysis of the dynamic processes of romance-making.33 As already suggested, this study rests on three principal assumptions. The first, shared by many critics, is that Old French romance emerged within a culture of rewriting, where ‘originality’ in the modern sense of the word counted for less than the skilful re-using of existing materials.34 The reception of rewritten narratives worked on two levels: appreciation of their effectiveness as stories in their own right, and evaluation of their treatment of the model or models on which they drew. Sometimes, as in the case of the Roman de Thèbes and Benoît’s Roman de Troie, the principal model(s) were explicitly identified in the text, and much of the process of evaluation must have been confined to a small subset of the audience who were familiar with the Thebaid or Dares and Dictys respectively. In other cases, playing the game of ‘spot the intertext’ seems to have formed part of the enjoyment of romance for a much larger proportion of its hearers. This was true even of the earliest texts that we would think of as courtly romances. Gautier d’Arras’s Ille et Galeron, for instance, is clearly aimed at a public familiar with Marie de France’s Eliduc; this text also provides a clue as to its principal intertext in the use of the term lai in the prologue and in a later reference to the fantastical nature of certain lais.35 By the mid thirteenth century this game had given rise to a romance such as Cristal et Clarie, in which direct quotations of up to 175 lines from a dozen other texts, including Partonopeus, are cleverly incorporated into a humorous love story. Reading romance (by which I also mean listening to romance within the 33 Bruckner’s assertion that ‘the romancer tends to naturalize his transpositions from other genres, smoothing over the differences in his seamless text’ (‘Romancing History’, p. 107, n. 21) is valid in some instances, but not in others. While agreeing with her conclusion that Jean Renart takes the whole process one step further, I am inclined to believe that the Partonopeus poet makes his seams more visible than she suggests. 34 As Edwards puts it, in this period ‘the theory of aesthetic invention is […] a theory of intertextuality’ (‘Ratio’ and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative, p. 86). On modern concepts of rewriting, see Lefèvre, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, pp. 1–10. 35 Ed. by Eley, vv. 131b and 931–6. All references are to this edition, unless otherwise indicated.

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context of a public reading or performance) was clearly quite a sophisticated task, involving a degree of literary analysis and interpretation that might seem daunting to the reader of modern novels. It is evident from Marie de France’s Lais, however, that such ‘glossing’ was perceived as a normal part of the audience or reader’s activity as well as an essential component of the process of literary creation.36 It is also likely that the evaluation of rewritings was facilitated by the conditions of performance and reception themselves. Public reading must almost inevitably have led into discussions of what had just been heard and sharing of ideas about how, and how well, a particular romance engaged with other narratives.37 It would be no surprise if those discussions were then fed back to authors, who may have modified the next instalment of a lengthy narrative in the light of audience response. It will be suggested later that the Partonopeus Continuation contains coded references to the operation of just such a feedback loop. I therefore make no apology for assuming that the original audience of Partonopeus and other twelfth-century narratives included ‘a public of connoisseurs able to recognize the interplay of repetition and transformation’.38 It is worth stressing here, however, that the terms ‘public’ and ‘audience’ are a convenient critical shorthand for the many different groups and individuals who engaged with romance texts in a variety of contexts, both public and private, and at a number of different levels of interpretation.39 By the same token, if I impute intentionality to a figure described as the author/ writer/ poet, this needs to be understood in terms of an attempt to reconstruct the workings of a creative intelligence for whom composition necessarily implied direct, unmediated interaction with the listening consumers of literature.40 This is not to deny that twelfthcentury writers sometimes exploited the fact that their compositions would be read as well as heard, as suggested by Simon Gaunt.41 It does, however, make it difficult to maintain a consistent distinction in the discussions that follow between ‘author’ and ‘narrator’, since romances were made in the knowledge that they would be read in the first instance by the original author to an audience liable to identify the narrative voice as belonging to the person standing in front of them. The author-narrator distinction becomes more important in 36 See Hanning, ‘“I Shal Find It in a Maner Glose”: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature’, pp. 32–6, and Kelly, ‘The Medieval Art of Poetry and Prose: The Scope of Instruction and the Uses of Models’, esp. p. 10. 37 On evidence for audience participation in the presentation of romance, see Regalado, ‘Performing Romance: Arthurian Interludes in Sarrasin’s Le Roman du Hem’, pp. 103–19. See Vitz et al., ‘Introduction’ (p. 2), for a useful bibliography of work in this area. 38 Bruckner, ‘The Shape of Romance in Medieval France’, pp. 13–14. 39 Krueger, ‘Textuality and Performance in Partonopeu de Blois’, p. 57. 40 For an entertaining survey of modern approaches to the medieval author, see Greene, ‘What Happened to Medievalists after the Death of the Author?’ 41 Retelling the Tale: An Introduction to Medieval French Literature, passim.

INTRODUCTION

11

the subsequent stages of reception, when the author is no longer physically present and the narrator is voiced by a third party. My second assumption is more controversial and concerns the dating of the first version of Partonopeus de Blois. Ever since the publication of Fourrier’s study in 1960, those scholars who have engaged with our romance have done so on the basis of the dating that he proposed, of around 1182–85. This is hardly surprising, given the amount of detailed historical evidence that Fourrier put forward in support of his theory (see pp. 315–446). His dating had the advantage of not disturbing the prevailing orthodoxy that saw Chrétien de Troyes as the father of Old French courtly romance and other romanciers as his successors. However, Fourrier’s dazzling scholarship obscured two questionable assumptions: firstly, that the version of Partonopeus preserved in Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 939 (T) is the work of a single poet, and secondly that this text represents the original version of the poem.42 His choice of dating was also influenced by his belief that the emergence of the so-called roman réaliste in the early thirteenth century (notably in the works of Jean Renart) was preceded by the appearance in the later twelfth century of a sequence of works in which this ‘courant réaliste’ began to make itself felt (pp. 9–15). It was clearly easier to argue for this evolutionary theory of realism in Old French narrative if Partonopeus and the romances of Gautier d’Arras were dated to the early 1180s rather than a decade or so earlier, and consequently formed a neat bridge between Thomas’s Tristan (1172 according to Fourrier), Chrétien’s Cligés (1176–77) and Florimont (1188). There had always been a strong current of thought that located Gautier’s romances in the late 1160s or very early 1170s.43 My own research on Gautier tended to confirm this view, and this encouraged Simons and myself to revisit the dating of Partonopeus. The first results of this enquiry appeared in print in 1995.44 The question of the different versions of the romance also resurfaced: Simons published an important re-examination of the manuscript tradition in 1997;45 at around the same time, Lecoy was working on a new edition of the poem, to be based on A, having independently come to the conclusion that this witness represents the earliest version of our text. These currents fed into our 1999 article in Romania, which argued for a dating of around 1170 for the first (A) version of Partonopeus and for a re-assessment of the relationship between our romance and the works of Chrétien de Troyes.

42 Doubts were raised about the single-author theory almost as soon as the book appeared: see Frappier, review of Le Courant réaliste, p. 547. 43 See Calin, ‘On the Chronology of Gautier d’Arras’. 44 Simons and Eley, ‘The Prologue to Partonopeus de Blois: Text, Context and Subtext’. 45 ‘A Romance Revisited: Reopening the Question of the Manuscript Tradition of Partonopeus de Blois’.

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Anne Reynders responded in 2005 with an article in Le Moyen Age that comes out in favour of Smith’s original view that the first version of the poem is best represented by V, and re-affirms Fourrier’s dating.46 My main purpose in writing this book is not to return to the debate on chronology, although I will adduce some additional evidence to support the primacy of the A version of the text, and an early dating for it. It is, rather, to approach particular aspects of the poem that have so far received little or no attention from critics and to ask ‘What if?’ What if the only models available to the poet for the main body of the romance were texts that are known to have been in circulation by about 1170? What if the Tours version of the text is not the original but the final ‘edition’ of a poem that started life as something like the Arsenal text and went through a whole series of rewritings? Both the absolute and the relative chronology of twelfth-century French texts are notoriously difficult to pin down, but there is a considerable degree of consensus among scholars that three of the romans d’antiquité – the romances of Thèbes, Eneas and Troie – were in existence by the end of the 1160s, together with the three short narratives based on Ovidian tales (Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et Dané and Philomena).47 At least one version of the Seven Sages story was in circulation at this time,48 and audiences were certainly familiar with the Tristan legend, either through Thomas’s romance (often dated to around 1170), or the lost compositions that preceded it, or both. It is also highly likely that some, if not all, of the Lais of Marie de France were circulating, both in England and in the courts of northern France. Denis Piramus provides evidence of their popularity, and cites them alongside Partonopeus as examples of the kind of fantastical writing that he intends to eschew in his own Vie Saint Edmund le rei (vv. 25–48; curiously, these lines convinced both Francisque Michel and Amaury Duval that Denis was the author of our romance).49 Whether the juxtaposing of Partonopeus and the Lais in his critique of vernacular fiction implies that Denis perceived a partic46 ‘Le Roman de Partonopeu de Blois est-il l’œuvre d’un précurseur de Chrétien de Troyes?’. Reynders rightly points out some inconsistencies in our work, but her argument places too much faith in Smith’s linguistic analysis and his grouping of the manuscripts. We will see in Chapters 4 and 5 that Smith misinterpreted some key linguistic evidence, and that the relationships between manuscripts are more complex than his study suggests. 47 The relationship between Partonopeus and the Alexander romances will be discussed in Chapter 6. 48 I follow Speer in dating the ancestor of the two extant verse redactions to ‘perhaps just a little later than Gaston Paris’s suggestion of c. 1155’ (‘Introduction’ to Le Roman des Sept Sages de Rome, p. 70). The prologue to the K redaction (Paris, BnF. fr. 1553) suggests that a vernacular version of the Orpheus story may also have been in circulation by this time; unfortunately the prologue is missing from the C redaction (Chartres, Bibliothèque municipale 620), making it impossible to be sure that the reference to ‘Alpheus’ was not added by the K redactor. 49 D[uval], ‘Partonopeus de Blois par Denis Pyram, poète anglo-norman’, pp. 629–31. This misattribution is repeated in a hand-written note on the first flyleaf of MS L, where it

INTRODUCTION

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ularly close link between them is not entirely clear. In a recent article on Denis, Ian Short argues convincingly that the Vie dates from between 1190 and 1193. However, he also suggests that the references to Marie and Partonopeus can be read as implying either that Denis got to know them before he retired to the monastery of Bury St Edmunds (which would place their composition in the 1160s or early 1170s), or that they were still hugely popular in court circles when Denis came to write his Vie (which would again point to an early date of composition).50 The question of the relationship between Partonopeus and the romances of Gautier d’Arras is a very complex one, and probably deserves a book to itself. It is possible that Eracle may have been known to our poet, as it was probably composed in the late 1160s, and both he and Gautier were associated with the Blois–Champagne milieu. Gautier’s second work, Ille et Galeron, exhibits some curious points of convergence with Partonopeus, not simply in the way that they both rewrite Marie de France, but also in terms of the thematics of sight and blindness (Ille loses an eye in combat, and subsequently tries to make himself invisible to his first wife Galeron, before fleeing with the help of a devoted retainer after she breaks the ban on her seeing him). These parallels might imply that Gautier knew Partonopeus and was engaging with it, but much more work needs to be done before conclusions can be drawn about whether and how far one of these poems may have influenced the other. Until we have a clearer picture of the interaction between these works, I have chosen to remain neutral on this question, and to make no assumption of anteriority for either text. Readers may be surprised to have come this far without finding any reference to Floire et Blancheflor, a text that, like Partonopeus, features a young and very beautiful hero alongside journeys to and from the mysterious East. Floire is frequently dated to around 1150 in histories of Old French literature.51 However, Francine Mora has recently made a compelling case for seeing Floire, even in its earliest version, as a response to Piramus et Tisbé, which would make it roughly contemporary with Partonopeus – or perhaps just a few years older.52 Here, too, there are suggestive echoes between the two texts, including references to the city of Montoro (Montoire) in is also claimed that Denis lived in the later thirteenth century (Duval dated Partonopeus to the middle of that century). 50 ‘Denis Piramus and the Truth of Marie’s Lais’, pp. 326–8 and 337. 51 See Gaunt, ‘Romance and Other Genres’, p. 51; the selective chronology at the beginning of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance gives 1147–60 for this text (p. xiii). This early dating derives primarily from Leclanche’s work on the text: see ‘La Date du conte de Floire et Blancheflor’, ‘Contribution à l’étude de la transmission des plus anciennes œuvres romanesques françaises. Un cas privilégié: Floire et Blancheflor’ and the introduction to his edition (Conte de Floire et Blancheflor, p. 11). 52 ‘Le Conte de Floire et Blancheflor peut-il être considéré comme un roman d’Antiquité?’.

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Andalusia and a judging scene in which the physical beauty of those being judged determines the outcome of events. Like Partonopeus, Floire is marked by a mischievous sense of humour (witness the comic pushing and shoving in the judgement scene, as the protagonists vie for the honour of being the first to be decapitated by the emir), and an unusually wide vocabulary, especially in relation to technical matters such as architecture and seamanship.53 At the risk of being condemned for attributing all anonymous texts to my favourite author, I am half inclined to see Floire as another of our poet’s compositions – perhaps the one that won him the commission for Partonopeus. For my present purposes, however, a more circumspect approach is called for. In view of the fact that Floire shares with Partonopeus the distinction of having an extremely complex manuscript tradition, and of existing in markedly different versions, the relationship between which is not yet fully understood, I propose to tread carefully and assume only that some version of this text was in circulation at roughly the same time as our romance. The third basic premise underlying parts of this book is that twelfthcentury French romance cannot be read in isolation from what is known about the context in which and for which it was composed. Imaginative reconstruction – in so far as the evidence permits – of the life-worlds of medieval authors and their audiences is an integral part of reading their work from a distance of several centuries.54 This is not to say, however, that medieval French narratives can or should be read as ‘footnotes to history’, simple reflections of the political, social and economic realities of their time. Romance refracts rather than reflects: as real people and events enter this new medium, so their contours shift and change, like objects viewed through water, and they take on colours that disguise their true identity. Even Fourrier, who was the first to establish the extent to which the fantasy world of Partonopeus was grounded in political and geographical realities, recognised the alchemical power of fiction to create new and unknown worlds out of elements of the known (pp. 402–5). Nevertheless, the unmistakable, though intermittent, realism of our romance does invite us to keep looking beyond literary models for the poet’s sources of inspiration.55 In Chapters 2 and 5 I 53 Mora notes similarities between Floire and Partonopeus in terms of their fusion of classical and oriental material (p. 617); her description of Floire as a ‘glorification ludique de la clergie’ (‘a playful glorification of learning’, p. 625) could apply equally well to our romance. 54 The term ‘life-world’ is taken from Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, pp. 12–13. The Jaussian concept of the audience’s horizon d’attente can be seen as part of this attempt to situate the medieval text within its historical, cultural and psychological frameworks. Cf. also Haidu, ‘Romance: Idealistic Genre or Historical Text?’, pp. 6–7. 55 The concept of ‘intermittent realism’ comes from Bruckner, ‘Rewriting Chrétien’s Conte du Graal – Mothers and Sons: Questions, Contractions, and Connections’, p. 220.

INTRODUCTION

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therefore take the opportunity to bring three more real-life figures into the frame, suggesting new ways in which the process of fictionalisation plays out in both the main narrative and the Continuation. Although the discussion of the fils à vilain theme in Chapter 2 is grounded in a broadly New Historicist reading of structures of power, I do not approach Partonopeus primarily as a text that contests dominant political or religious ideologies.56 As the second part of Chapter 4 will show, its subversiveness is essentially aesthetic, targeting accepted ways of telling stories rather than socio-political orthodoxies. Another key strand running through this study is the importance of understanding, or trying to understand, the manuscript tradition of our poem. When the Crapelet edition, based on MS A, was the only printed text available to scholars, it was only too easy to overlook the fact that six other complete or near-complete manuscripts offered radically different versions of the ending of the main body of the romance (to say nothing of a continuation). For the forty or so years when the Gildea edition, based on B and T, became the standard text, it was equally possible to overlook the A version, unless one also had access to Crapelet or made a mental note to keep checking the variant text in Gildea’s Appendix I. And it was almost impossible to form a clear picture of the Continuation from a printed edition, given the sheer number of differences between the manuscripts in this section of the romance. All these problems fed into the decision to create an electronic edition of Partonopeus that would make the full text of all the different versions available to scholars in a format that did not assume the primacy of any one of them.57 The publication of the electronic edition in 2005 was followed by the appearance later that year of the new printed edition by Collet and Joris, whose layout constantly reminds readers of the existence of alternative versions of significant portions of the text. The studies that make up this book have all been shaped by the experience of preparing, and then using, the electronic edition. I have been conscious throughout of the need to keep returning to the unedited text of the manuscripts in order to test the validity of readings (my own as well as others’) based on printed sources, and to take account of the physical state and characteristics of the manuscripts wherever possible. In this, I follow in the footsteps of the increasing number of scholars who have been returning to manuscripts as our first and best guide to the interpretation of medieval texts – what Keith Busby calls ‘the codicological imperative’.58 This return to the

Bruckner sees intermittent realism in terms of psychology and intrigue as characteristic of romance in general, but the phrase is equally applicable to extradiegetic allusions. 56 On this aspect of New Historicism, see Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’, pp. 4–6, and Montrose, ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’. 57 ‘Partonopeus de Blois’: An Electronic Edition, ed. by Eley et al. 58 Busby, Codex and Context: Reading Old French Verse Narrative in Manuscript, I, p. 2.

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manuscript tradition explains the bias in this book towards the Continuation, which forms the principal focus of three chapters. The Partonopeus Continuation is the least-studied part of the poem, partly because of a perception that its curious mingling of forms and preoccupation with military matters make it less interesting than the main body of the story. It is also the most complex and frustrating section in terms of the relationships between manuscripts. And yet the very complexity of its manuscript tradition probably holds the key to understanding how Partonopeus was made, and how Old French romance embarked on a career of open-endedness that contrasts sharply with much of later fiction (though not, it must be said, with modern cinema). It should be clear by now that this book is not intended to be a reader’s guide to Partonopeus de Blois, although it does not assume detailed knowledge of the poem on the part of users. Rather, it presents the results of original research on aspects of the text that have hitherto been unexplored, or where there is significant scope for further exploration. The first two chapters address thematic concerns that are explicitly signalled to the audience and invite our close attention. In Chapter 1 we focus on the interplay of youth, age and gender, in an attempt to understand why this romance features an extremely young hero, an ‘older woman’, and an unusually mature knightly companion, not to mention the doubling of some of these roles. This proves to be a fruitful topic in terms of illustrating the key techniques of fusion; in addition, it shows the poet thinking through the consequences of some of his rewritings. Chapter 2 is devoted to the portrayal of the fils à vilain (a low-born individual promoted to high estate), proposing both a coherent overview of the different manifestations of this theme and real-life models for two of them. It also argues for a reading of the text as something more than a wish-fulfilment fantasy designed to entertain contemporary noblemen and noblewomen. At a deeper level, Partonopeus is a political fiction attuned to their deep-seated anxieties about the changing relationship between the social classes. Chapter 3 takes up another current that runs through the main body of the romance and the first part of the Continuation, namely the presence of animals in unexpected and sometimes puzzling combinations. The first section provides another case study in fusion, showing how the story of Capaneus’s horse from the Roman de Thèbes is rewritten as a hinge linking the two main panels of the hero’s development, while the second explores the use of animal analogues in Anselot’s tirade against the fils à vilain. An unexpected chain of connections leading via bestiary material to Walter Map ends in a re-evaluation of the curious epilogue found in MS L. In Chapter 4 we look in more detail at the story that Anselot tells to Partonopeus’s court in the first part of the Continuation, after he has been reunited with his former lord. This self-contained first-person narrative is read as an experiment in romance composition, in which techniques of doubling, mise en abyme and the rewriting of familiar narrative schemas are fused into a new way of telling

INTRODUCTION

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stories. Awkwardnesses and inconsistencies in its narrative frame may betray another process of fusion, determined this time by the need to re-open a closed book. The two final chapters are devoted to detailed analysis of the evidence for the dating, authorship and ‘assembling’ of the Continuation. Chapter 5 considers the evidence for rewriting in the later sections of the Continuation, within the context of a broader discussion of narrative closure. It concludes that the ending of MS T was manufactured in the fourteenth century, and that the romance must therefore have been received as an unfinished ‘work in progress’ by a succession of earlier audiences. Chapter 6 brings together the manuscript tradition, intertextual relationships with the Roman d’Alexandre and Florimont, and other versions of the Partonopeus story, notably the Middle Dutch romance, to propose a complete scenario for the development of the Continuation, which appears as the work of at least two poets and three interpolators. It also suggests a new reading of the relationship between the narrator figure and his beloved, and brings in some disturbing historical evidence about when and how the romance may have been commissioned.

Chapter 1 Patterns of Youth and Age PATTERNS PARTONOPEUS OF YOUTH DE BLOIS AND AGE

A toy-boy and an older woman may be part of the stock-in-trade of modern romantic fiction, but they are not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the heroes and heroines of twelfth-century French romance.1 A more typical pairing might be Erec and Enide, the one in his early twenties and the other still young enough to be unmarried at the start of the romance that bears their names. Or, again, the hero and first heroine of Ille et Galeron, who meet when Ille has been knighted and has spent three years establishing himself, and when Galeron is almost certainly no older than he is.2 In Partonopeus de Blois, however, the hero is thirteen at the start of the action, and within a matter of days he has been seduced by the empress of Byzantium, a woman several years his senior. The narrator draws attention to the question of the hero’s age by stressing that he was only thirteen years old and by insisting that, despite his youth, Partonopeus is fully developed, both morally, physically and socially: […] n’ert hom nés Qui tant eüst en soi [bontés], Et si n’avoit que seul .xiij. ans Si ert solonc ço gens et grans. Molt ert et pros et coragos Et dols et humles et hontos, Larges et frans et envoisiés; 1 An early version of part of this chapter, co-authored with Penny Simons and Philip Shaw, was presented in a session on ‘Perceptions of Youth and Age in Medieval Literature’ at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2005. I am grateful to Drs Simons and Shaw for suggesting avenues of enquiry that I have followed up here. 2 The poet’s insistence on the equality between the pair in terms of beauty, courtliness and worth seems to suggest that they are well matched in age as well (Ille et Galeron, vv. 899–900). Although knighting was seen as a key rite of passage, it was not linked to a specific, legal age of majority: see Bumke, Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, pp. 231–2. The age at which a young man was knighted varied in real life and in literature, but fifteen was common in both: Henry II’s son Young Henry was fifteen when he was knighted and crowned in 1170; in the case of Raoul de Cambrai, ‘li .xv. an fure[n]t acompli et passé’ (‘a full fifteen years had passed’) when he was knighted by King Louis (Raoul de Cambrai, v. 259). So Ille is probably about eighteen when he first goes to Conain’s court and falls in love with Galeron.

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Nus nel veoit n’en fust tos liés. Ja tant n’esgardissiés sa vie, Ja i trovissiés vilonie. (vv. 541–50) No man alive possessed as many good qualities as he did, and yet he was only thirteen years old, but tall and good-looking for his age. He was very bold and courageous, gentle and modest and self-effacing, generous and open, with a sunny disposition; no one could set eyes on him without feeling joyful. However closely you examined the way he lived, you would find no trace of baseness there.3

The hyperbolic portrait that follows this passage also hints at the hero’s sexual precocity: we learn that his mouth is perfectly formed for kissing (v. 569). The various translations and adaptations of the story produced across Europe during the next two hundred years support the idea that the original hero’s age represents a departure from, and possibly a challenge to, an accepted literary paradigm. In the majority of these other versions, Partonopeus is noticeably less precocious: some of them explicitly make him older, while one attenuates his youth through deliberate imprecision. Konrad von Würzburg is the only one of the adaptors who retains the original age of the hero, but even he rewrites the Old French text so as to give additional emphasis to the idea of Partonopier being unusually young at the start of the action. He gives the figure thirteen on two separate occasions, once in the initial presentation of Clogiers (Clovis) and his nephew, and then again in a speech attributed to the king after Partonopier has been successful in the boar hunt. This speech, which has no counterpart in Partonopeus, presents the youth’s single-handed killing of the boar as an extraordinary achievement for one so young.4 Both versions of the thirteenth-century Partalopa Saga make the hero fifteen at the beginning of the story; both narrators also introduce a variant on the puer senex topos, as if even fifteen were rather young for the kind of action that is to follow.5 In the later Catalan adaptation, and the 3 Translations from Old French texts are my own, even when I quote the original text from an edition that includes a facing-page translation into modern English. Occasionally, I have had to add explanatory words and phrases in order to clarify the syntax or supply cultural information; these additions have been placed in square brackets. 4 Partonopier und Meliur, vv. 396–400. Konrad’s text has been dated to 1277. For a detailed study of the relationship between Partonopier and its Old French model, see Obst, Der Partonopier-Roman Konrads von Würzburg und seine französische Vorlage. 5 ‘He was then fifteen years old, but he was old in wisdom, so that no one was his match in France, thus in all accomplishments as in stature and appearance’ (A version); ‘He was then fifteen years old, and although he was young in age, he was then proven in strength and knighthood, so that no one was his match, neither young nor old’ (B version): Partalopa Saga, pp. 4–5 (text) and 131–32 (translation). The saga was composed either in Norway between 1226 and 1263, or a little later in Iceland (Præstgaard Andersen, ‘Partalopa saga, homologue scandinave d’Eros et Psyché’, pp. 58–9).

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21

Spanish translation that was made from it, Partinobles is said to be approaching fifteen when he is encountered by the messengers sent out to find a suitable consort for Marmoria (Melior).6 The fifteenth-century Middle English version goes much further and raises the hero’s age to eighteen,7 while the fourteenth-century Italian Bel Gherardino simply describes the hero as the youngest and most courtly of three brothers. The fact that their dying father commends Gherardino to the care of his eldest brother at the beginning of the story suggests that he is probably still quite young, but no numerical age is ever given for him.8 While we should be careful about reading responses from later periods and different cultural contexts as evidence for the reception of our text in twelfth-century France, the fact that all the adaptors have engaged with the question of the hero’s age in one way or another does seem to suggest that it was anomalous in relation to their expectations of a romance hero. This raises the possibility that Partonopeus may have been not just young, but too young in the eyes of the original French audience for the sexual and military exploits attributed to him. It is all the more curious, then, that the hero’s age has never been the subject of detailed analysis, and that a recent study of adolescent sexuality in medieval French literature has nothing to say about Partonopeus at all.9 The extreme youth of the hero is only one element in a strangely polarised age profile involving both principal and secondary characters in Partonopeus de Blois. At the other end of the scale, Gaudin seems unusually old to be the hero’s companion-in-arms, given that the age gap between him and Partonopeus is some thirty-five years. Between these two extremes we find the ‘older woman’ Melior, plus a very young woman who falls hopelessly in love with the hero before marrying his mature companion in one version of the text. On top of this there are at least three other characters whose age seems to be marked out for particular attention. The implications of this age profile for our understanding of key elements in the making of Partonopeus will form the main focus of this chapter.

6 Història de l’esforçat Cavaller Partinobles, p. 8; Historia del esforçado Cavallero Partonoples, conde de Bles, p. 13. See Neves dos Santos, ‘D’un imaginaire à l’autre: Partonopeus de Blois et la Història de l’esforçat Cavaller Partinobles’, for a useful summary of the Catalan version. 7 ‘Hys age was forsothe, as I gesse,/ xviij yere, neyther more ne lesse’ (Partonope of Blois, vv. 520–21). Mieszkowski argues that ‘xviij yere’ may be a scribal error (‘Urake and the Gender Roles of Partonope of Blois’, pp. 182–3). However, the fact that the niece of the King of France, who is seen as a perfect match for Partonope, is also said to be eighteen (‘Xviij. yere she wes of age’, v. 5148) suggests that the reading may be correct. No age is given for this character in the Old French text. 8 Cantare del Bel Gherardino, stanzas IV–V. 9 Sobczyk, L’Érotisme des adolescents dans la littérature française du Moyen Age.

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The very young man: Partonopeus A closer look at the cultural context within which the Partonopeus poet was working suggests that a thirteen-year-old hero would have been doubly unusual even in the later twelfth century, confounding expectations arising from both the learned and the literary traditions of the time. According to the predominant currents in the ages of man tradition, at thirteen an individual was not yet ready to make the transition from boyhood to the next stage of life, when he would become capable of autonomous action.10 The influential paradigm in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (XI, ii), for example, gives the key ages for men as seven, fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty and seventy, with fourteen marking both the transition between pueritia (boyhood) and adolescentia (adolescence) and the onset of sexual maturity.11 Partonopeus is even less typical in relation to the emerging conventions of vernacular literature, which privilege fifteen as the age at which a youth learns about love and becomes the hero of his own story.12 In the Roman de Thèbes Edyppus is said to be fifteen when he is knighted and embarks on a glittering military career (vv. 137–8 and 145–6), while Athes is the same age when he joins the fighting outside Thebes and is killed by Thideüs (vv. 5767–8).13 Piramus and Narcisus are both fifteen when they first experience sexual desire (Piramus et Tisbé, vv. 115–24; Narcisus et Dané, vv. 59–60 and 113–14); the fact that Narcisus’s age is stated twice, immediately before and immediately after the description of his extraordinary physical beauty, draws attention to the idea that he is now the ‘right’ age to experience love.

10 On this tradition, see Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought, esp. pp. 12–36 and 79–92; Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle, and Dove, Perfect Age of Man’s Life. H. A. Kelly’s review of Burrow contains useful commentary on Sears and Dove as well. 11 On the difference between medieval and modern connotations of the term ‘adolescence’, see Schultz, ‘Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Silence of German Narrative’, pp. 528–31. By the time Partonopeus was composed Isidore’s schema had become ‘an article of school learning’ and was reproduced in the works of several important twelfth-century thinkers, including Abelard and Hugh of St Victor (Sears, pp. 64–5 and 77–8). 12 Gaffney, ‘The Ages of Man in Old French Verse Epic and Romance’, p. 573. Gaffney did not include Partonopeus in the corpus of texts that form the basis for this article and for her 1982 doctoral dissertation ‘Child and Youth in Some Old French Narrative Poems’. 13 Unless otherwise indicated, I cite the Roman de Thèbes from the Raynaud de Lage edition, which is based on the C version of the text (Paris, BnF fr. 784). There is strong evidence that this was the version known to the Partonopeus poet and his audience (see Chapter 3, pp. 000–00), rather than the S text (London, British Library, Additional 34114) edited by Mora-Lebrun. Athes is twice described as an enfant in this episode (vv. 5803 and 5833), which seems to confirm that fifteen represents the earliest age at which a youth can realistically participate in war and tournaments.

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These conventions are explicitly acknowledged by the Partonopeus poet in the prologue, where Marcomyris is said to be fifteen (v. 321) when he leaves Italy for Gaul to start an independent existence. The age of the principal protagonist therefore has to be read as a deliberate disruption of a pattern that was known to both the poet and his audience. This is underlined by the fact that the first adventure in which Partonopeus is involved, before being knighted or undertaking any military activity, is a full-blown sexual liaison with a mysterious woman. For a public familiar with Thèbes, Piramus and Narcisus – or at least au fait with the thinking behind the age of their male protagonists – Partonopeus is exceptionally precocious, reaching full sexual maturity at thirteen and being an outstanding warrior only a year later.14 The fact that our hero’s age is given immediately before his portrait, and that the portrait itself is so detailed and hyperbolic, suggests that a deliberate echo of Narcisus may have been intended. If this is so, then it would seem that the audience is being invited to compare the two heroes – and, in particular, to note the age difference between them. The intertextual echo serves to flag up the age of the hero of Partonopeus as a sign to be decoded, a puzzle to be solved by the audience: why is he so exceptionally young? According to Fourrier, there was a simple solution to this puzzle, to be found in recent events associated with the French royal family (p. 400). He suggested that the opening sequence of our romance alluded to an incident recorded by Robert of Torigni in his additions to the Chronica of Sigebert of Gembloux (col. 529). It seems that in 1179 the thirteen-year-old heir to the throne, Philip Augustus, became separated from his hunting-party and spent a night alone in the forest before being found. For Fourrier, the correspondence between the two narratives was too close to be coincidental: the hero’s age had to be part of a deliberate topical allusion. From this point of view, the whole romance could be seen as a humorous fictionalisation of Philip Augustus’s adventure, filling in the blank narrative space of the prince’s lonely night in the forest with a tale of what might befall a young man who took a wrong turn during a hunt. It has been noted, however, that there are as many differences as similarities between the opening sequence of Partonopeus and the story as told by Robert of Torigni, and that this may well be a case of life imitating art in an age when getting lost while out hunting must have been a common enough occurrence.15

14 In the K redaction of the Seven Sages romance, thirteen is given as the minimum age for male baptism in the early Christian church, when a youngster could give his own assent to baptism rather than having godparents speak for him (vv. 169–84). This seems to indicate an intellectual rather than a physiological landmark, and the proviso that a thirteen-year-old would only be baptised if he showed signs of maturity (v. 175) and could understand the creed suggests that the definitive end of childhood was still perceived as somewhat later. 15 Eley and Simons, ‘Partonopeus de Blois and Chrétien de Troyes’, pp. 320–21.

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The question of age apart, the Partonopeus narrative is far closer to Marie de France’s Guigemar than it is to the story in the Chronica. The presence of the magic boat, which transports the hero from an unknown shore to a land where he finds love, is an obvious indicator of the primary model for this sequence. Other parallels seem to confirm that the Partonopeus poet was engaged in conscious rewriting of Marie’s tale, the most obvious of which is the motif of sexual ambiguity. The white doe with stag’s antlers wounded by Guigemar can be seen as an externalisation of his own undefined sexuality, previously signposted in the fact that he is said to have shown no sign of interest in love or women.16 The following episodes can then be read in terms of the development of sexual identity, as Guigemar encounters the malmariée and falls in love with her. In Partonopeus, the function of the doe-stag is transferred to the hero’s Trojan ancestry (homosexuality being known as ‘the Trojan vice’ in the twelfth century), reinforced by a portrait that stresses the youth’s androgynous appearance.17 Partonopeus’s true sexual identity is then triumphantly revealed in an almost pornographic bedroom scene that seems to be a deliberate response to Marie’s discreet refusal to describe her protagonists’ first sexual encounter.18 However, Marie does not define her hero’s age, noting only that Guigemar ‘came of age’ (vv. 45–6) before he was knighted. Given that he is then described as having spent some time winning renown in Flanders before the main events of the tale took place, he has to be older than the male protagonist of Partonopeus de Blois. Another potential solution to our puzzle lies in the figure of Alexander the Great, who is said to be thirteen years and five months old when he is knighted in Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre (vv. 503–4). Alexander is advanced for his age in terms of the literary conventions outlined above, but this is perhaps not surprising for an iconic figure who would figure as one of the Nine Worthies throughout the Middle Ages. Is the age attributed to Partonopeus just a discreet allusion to the great Greek hero, designed to suggest to the audience that this young man with a Greek name will prove to be as exceptional a warrior and leader as Alexander? The problem here is that Alexandre de Paris’s romance probably came into existence in the early 1180s, several years after the likely date of composition of the first version of Partonopeus. However, if the precise reference to the hero’s age was present

16 17

On sexual (con)fusion in Guigemar, see Bruckner, Shaping Romance, p. 164. Simons and Eley, ‘Male Beauty and Sexual Orientation in Partonopeus de Blois’, pp. 43–7. 18 ‘Bien lur covienge del surplus,/ de ceo que li altre unt en us!’ (Guigemar, vv. 533–4; ‘may the bonus that other lovers normally enjoy prove fitting for them!’). It is also worth noting that both Guigemar and Partonopeus spend exactly a year and a half with their respective ladies before being forced into exile, the former in one uninterrupted idyll (vv. 535–6), the latter in two periods of residence at Chief d’Oire, the first of one year, the second of six months.

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in one of the earlier romances which were incorporated into Alexandre’s compilation, then it is possible that our poet was making a deliberate allusion to a text that was familiar to him and his audience. Unfortunately, there are still too many question marks over the evolution and circulation of the Roman d’Alexandre for us to come to any firm conclusions. It is perhaps worth noting that the influence of the Alexander romances on Partonopeus is only discernible elsewhere in a section of the Continuation that was composed some time after the main narrative, probably in the 1180s, and that the only reference to Alexander the Great (v. 13802) comes in a passage which appears to have been added in one of the thirteenth century ‘editions’ of our poem (see Chapter 5). If current events and vernacular intertexts cannot provide a definitive solution to the question of why our romance has a thirteen-year-old hero, the structure of the narrative does suggest a possible answer. Partonopeus’s age is in fact pre-determined by the internal logic of his story, which requires him to be both Melior’s secret lover and her husband. As Bruckner has noted, Partonopeus is a generic hybrid that attempts to fuse the Breton lai, in the form of a fairy-mistress narrative, with courtly romance (Shaping Romance, pp. 120–26). If we accept an early dating for the first version of Partonopeus, then it is clear that the romance model is dynastic rather than Arthurian, Eneas (and possibly the works of Gautier d’Arras) rather than Lancelot or Yvain. The attempt to fuse this with Celtic material involves negotiating a path between two conflicting narrative imperatives. If Partonopeus is to enjoy a sexual idyll with Melior (as dictated by the fairy-mistress model), but is also to marry her and become emperor (as required by the dynastic model), then marriage has to be deferred.19 However, the deferral must be motivated in such a way that it does not contradict other elements of either model. A fairy-mistress cannot be subject to the authority of a father or brother whose consent needs to be won by the hero, after the fashion of Latinus in Eneas or Conain of Brittany in Ille et Galeron. Nor can the obstacle to marriage take the form of a first husband, as in Guigemar: the heroine of a dynastic romance, whose role is to facilitate and legitimise a translatio imperii, cannot be an adulteress.20 The only obstacle that is compatible with Melior’s dual

19 On other aspects of this deferral, see Nickolaus, Marriage Fictions in Old French Secular Narratives, 1170–1250, pp. 26–8. Although he does not engage directly with the A version of the text, Nickolaus’s analysis of competing models of marriage in Partonopeus lends weight to the idea that this version, which ends with three contrasted marriages, may have been the original. See also Sullivan (= Eley), ‘Love and Marriage in Early French Narrative Poetry’, pp. 94–100 (my views on the relative chronology of Partonopeus A and the works of Chrétien de Troyes have changed since the publication of this article). 20 Although see Chapter 2 (pp. 54–56) on the undercutting of the dynastic model in the prologue.

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status as enchantress and empress is age: if Partonopeus is too young to be emperor at the beginning of the story, this opens up a narrative space in which the fairy mistress scenario can be played out before the political drama takes over. The hero must therefore be old enough at the outset for his sexual initiation to seem credible, but not so old that he could be an immediate contender for the throne, in the eyes of either Melior’s barons or the consumers of Old French fiction. Thirteen is just about the only age that will do, given that Partonopeus must also have time to prove himself as a warrior before appearing at the tournament as a legitimate contender for Melior’s hand.21 The poet’s choice of vernacular textual models may not provide him with a direct precursor for his very young protagonist, but it does, crucially, determine both the shape of the hero’s trajectory and the point at which it must start. Three Latin literary models are also clearly in the frame here, two of which were routinely taught in the schools, while the third was beginning to achieve some currency during the twelfth century. The Parthenopaeus of the Thebaid is a very young man indeed, and it is more than likely that the Partonopeus poet was familiar with the Latin text as well as its vernacular adaptation (which gives no age for Parthonopieus, implying only that he is older than Athes, since his amie is the elder sister of Athes’s beloved Ysmeine).22 Studying Statius as one of the auctores may have given our author the idea to use the name Partonopeus for his own very young hero.23 Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova shows that Parthenopaeus was the standard point of reference for exceptional youth in Latin poetry, and there is no reason to think that this was a recent development when he was writing his treatise between 1208 and 1214.24 Another very young and exceptionally beautiful young man 21 The hero’s first military exploits, in the war against Sornegur, take place after his first, year-long sojourn at Chief d’Oire, in other words when he is fourteen. In contemporary educational practice, military training began in earnest at about the age of fourteen, when boys were judged to have reached an appropriate level of physical maturity: see Simons, ‘The Theme of Education in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century French Epic and Romance’, p. 29. Again, Partonopeus is presented as precocious, but not so precocious as to make him unacceptable to the contemporary audience. 22 The long account of events leading up to the youngster’s death in Book IX of the Thebaid (IX, 570–907) is peppered with references to his still being a boy (puer); none of these is retained by the author of the Roman de Thèbes. On other aspects of the Thèbes poet’s rewriting of Parthenopaeus, see the excellent analysis in Donovan, Recherches sur le ‘Roman de Thèbes’, pp. 124–86. The Thèbes poet does introduce the notion of extreme youth in relation to a woman: in his dying message to his mother, Parthonopieus recalls that she was only eleven when she gave birth to him (vv. 8805–8). 23 On Statius as a literary and linguistic model for vernacular poets, see Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes. History and Narrative in the OF ‘Roman de Thèbes’, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate, pp. 2–18. 24 Geoffrey’s model description of a male protagonist includes the lines ‘Certat cum Paride vultus, cum Parthonopeo/ Aetas, cum Creso census, cum Caesare sanguis’ (vv.

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is the centre of attention in Statius’s second, incomplete epic, the Achilleid, which in the twelfth century became one of the six texts in the so-called Liber Catonianus, used for teaching Latin throughout western Europe.25 There are a number of suggestive parallels between this work and aspects of our romance. Partonopeus’s initial journey to Chief d’Oire recalls the sequence in which Thetis carries her sleeping son in a fabulous boat to the island of Scyros; his subsequent concealed affair with Melior echoes Achilles’s love for Deidamia, which blossoms when the Greek hero is disguised as a girl and hidden among the maidens at Lycomedes’s court in order to prevent his fellow countrymen from taking him to Troy. The ‘rape’ of Deidamia by Achilles may be the model for Partonopeus’s forceful love-making, while the dramatic episode in which he throws off his female garments and reveals his physical beauty to Ulysses and Diomede is surely behind the disrobing of our hero in the judging scene (Achilleid, I, 640–44 and 874–85). Achilles is presented throughout this text as a precocious man-boy very like Partonopeus: despite his size and strength, he is described as sleeping like a child, and recalls that he was only twelve when his tutor Chiron set him extreme physical challenges – a stage of his education that appears to be quite recent at the moment of speaking (I, 228–31, and II, 110–67). If our hero’s name and physique betray the influence of Statius, the first half of his story contains unmistakable echoes of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which displays a similar preoccupation with extreme youth and sexual awakening. The fullest version of this tale is found in Books IV to VI of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius.26 The question of whether the Partonopeus poet knew Apuleius’s work at first hand has been the subject of some debate.27 The major argument against our poet’s having read Apuleius rests on the fact that so few extant manuscripts of the Metamorphoses date from before the fourteenth century. This might suggest that the text did not initially circulate far beyond Monte Cassino, where the key late Classical exemplar had been preserved and copied. Fourrier was of the opinion that our

632–3; ‘His beauty rivals that of Paris, his youth that of Parthonopaeus, his wealth that of Croesus, his lineage that of Caesar’). Translations from Latin sources are my own, unless otherwise indicated. On the dating of the Poetria Nova, see Faral, Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle: recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du Moyen Age, pp. 28–33. 25 Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England, pp. 68–9; see also pp. 78–9 on Statius as one of the standard authors on the syllabus. 26 Pp. 237–355. All quotations from Apuleius are taken from Hanson’s translation. 27 See Gröber, Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, 2.1, p. 587; Kawczynski, ‘Ist Apuleius im Mittelalter bekannt gewesen?’; Huet, ‘Le Roman d’Apulée était-il connu au Moyen Âge?’; Brown, ‘The Relationship between Partonopeus de Blois and the Cupid and Psyche Tradition’, and Moreschini, ‘Sulla fama di Apuleio nel medioevo e nel Rinascimento’.

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poet could only have known the story in the form of a resumé of Apuleius’s tale given by Fulgentius, which circulated in France from as early as the sixth century (pp. 385–6).28 However, Douglas S. Robertson had already shown that some of the extant fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts of the Metamorphoses are descended from a lost copy made no later than the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century, which might suggest a resurgence of interest in the text around the time Partonopeus was composed.29 A recent study of Apuleius concludes that ‘from around the middle of the eleventh century on, the literary and rhetorical works of Apuleius were available in a way that they had not been for several hundred years’.30 This adds weight to Thomas H. Brown’s argument, based on details common to the Metamorphoses and our romance that are not to be found in Fulgentius, that the Partonopeus poet probably did know Apuleius’s version. The story of Cupid and Psyche as told by Apuleius provides a double model for a very young protagonist who is nonetheless sexually active. Cupid is always represented as a boy in classical art and literature, and Apuleius retains this characterisation: Cupid is introduced as ‘that winged and headstrong boy’ (IV, 30; p. 241) and Venus later refers to him as ‘a mere boy’ and castigates his ‘unrestrained, immature lovemaking’ (V, 29; p. 305). Psyche is also portrayed as a child, albeit one who is capable of conceiving: when Cupid breaks the news to his wife that she is pregnant, he tells her that ‘your womb, still a child’s, bears another child for us’ (V, 11; p. 273). To incorporate Apuleius’s story into a fairy-mistress narrative requires a reversal of gender roles, so that the supernatural partner will be female and the human lover male. This in turn makes it possible for the hero of Partonopeus to take on characteristics of both protagonists of the classical story. He can be the extraordinarily beautiful victim of a plot to lure him to a fabulous palace for sex, as well as the (apparently) dominant partner in that staged sexual encounter.31 The patterns of rewriting that we have discerned so far may not all have been evident to all sections of the original audience of the romance, but the text does eventually provide everyone with an answer to the puzzle of the hero’s age. Those who were familiar with Apuleius and Statius might have

28 The same view is taken by Harf-Lancner, Les Fées au Moyen Âge: Morgane et Mélusine, p. 318. For this version of the story, see Fulgentius, Mythologies, 3, vi (Opera, pp. 66–70). 29 ‘The Manuscripts of the Metamorphoses, I’, p. 36. 30 Haig Glasser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass. A Study in Transmission and Reception, p. 63. See pp. 59–66 and Appendix 3 (p. 307) for details of the manuscript tradition of the Metamorphoses. 31 Harf-Lancner (pp. 317–28) argues that the Partonopeus poet may have taken his inspiration from a folk-tale in which the gender roles of the underlying Beauty and the Beast paradigm had already been reversed.

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found their solution first, once the hybridisation of the Cupid and Psyche narrative with the Achilleid and a fairy-mistress story had become apparent.32 Those who knew only vernacular models would probably have had to wait for Melior’s post-coital revelations to understand that this hero could not be the usual fifteen (or older) at the start of the action because he was destined to be both the lover of a mystery woman and the protagonist of a dynastic romance. The foregrounding of Partonopeus’s age is therefore an essential part of the romance’s hermeneutic and intertextual codes, alerting the careful reader to the fact that this text needs to be aligned within a network of other texts for its sens to become apparent. It can also be seen as one in a series of signposts that draw attention to the faultlines that occur where incompatible models collide and have to be accommodated. In this case the collision is between, on the one hand, narratives such as Thèbes, Eneas, Piramus and Narcisus that are firmly located in time and map out the careers of their heroes from youth to death or the establishment of a dynasty; and, on the other, fairy-mistress stories such as Lanval and Guingamor that take the hero outside human time on either a temporary or a permanent basis. The conventions of the former seem to demand that the hero’s age be specified, and that he be about fifteen at the start of the action; the anomalous age of Partonopeus signals the intrusion of the latter and the difficulty of melding two fundamentally different types of narrative. Before moving on to consider the age of the heroine in Partonopeus, we should note that the positioning, as well as the content, of the hero’s portrait can also be understood in terms of his age – in this case, the interplay between youth and the thematics of hunting. At first sight, it may seem odd that this lengthy and detailed portrait is located within the initial description of Clovis’s hunting expedition to the Ardennes, which it interrupts in a rather disconcerting way. We learn that Clovis went hunting after the feast of the Holy Cross (14 September), when the wild boar were fattening on nuts and acorns. He rose early one morning, assembled his party and selected the right dogs for the task: packs of hounds including animals trained to tackle boars (vv. 525–34). It is at this point that the young hero is introduced, with full details of his lineage, his qualities and his physical beauty. This passage separates the description of the preparations for the hunt from the account of its first phase, which consists of one huntsman tracking the boar with a scenting dog. We might have expected the poet to introduce Partonopeus before entering into the technical detail of date, season, condition of the quarry and choice of hounds; and to find a long portrait of an exceptionally handsome

32 Newstead’s conclusion that ‘the Psyche story has contributed little to the romance’ (p. 946) reflects earlier critical unease with the idea of an equal fusion of Latin and Celtic source materials.

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boy in the context of the court rather than the chase.33 Here, however, the portrait is displaced into the narrative of the hunt – and specifically into that part of the account that defines the prey and the method of hunting it. There is an interesting echo here of the story of the boar-hunt in Calydon, as told by Ovid in Book VIII of his Metamorphoses. Intercalated between Ovid’s description of the hunting party and the account of the hunt itself we find a portrait of the huntress Atalanta that draws particular attention to her androgynous looks: ‘as for her face, in truth in a boy you would say it was girlish, but in a girl it would be called boyish’ (VIII, 322–3; my translation).34 It is tempting to conclude that this classical model was in the poet’s mind when he decided to incorporate the rather feminised portrait of Partonopeus into a boar hunt, particularly when we remember that Statius explicitly refers to Parthenopaeus as the son of Atalanta (Thebaid, IX, 789). The lines immediately following the portrait in Partonopeus go on to describe the specific target of this hunt: a boar ‘bien el quart an’ (v. 587; i.e. an animal between three and four years old), which Partonopeus will kill with a single blow of his boar-spear. The portrait of the hunter is therefore framed by descriptions of prey; a link is also established between man and beast in that the precise age given for the prey echoes the precise age given for the hero in v. 543.35 The parallelism between huntsman and quarry does not end there. According to one early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman hunting manual, which may have been based on an earlier French work, four is the age at which a young male boar leaves the sownder (the social group of sows and their young) to begin its solitary adult life in the forest.36 However, it is not yet in a position to become sexually active: a wild boar is not generally mature enough to compete with other males for mating rights until it is about five. As we have seen, Partonopeus is approaching the age at which he can begin to operate as an autonomous agent, but in conventional terms he is still

33 We should note that the portrait of Narcisus precedes any reference to hunting, while Chrétien de Troyes sets his portrait of Cligés within an account of the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Cologne. Konrad von Würzburg reorders the narrative, introducing the hero before the account of the hunt in the Ardennes (Partonopier und Meliur, vv. 233 ff.), as do the Partalopa Saga and the Catalan and Spanish versions. 34 This tale also provides a model of a boar as agent of a supernatural female: Ovid’s boar is sent by the goddess Diana to punish the people of Calydon for failing to honour her (VIII, 281–2). 35 Konrad von Würzburg breaks the metaphorical link between the young huntsman and his quarry by turning the immature boar into a large, aggressive animal that is clearly fully grown (Partonopier und Melior, v. 336). 36 Planche, ‘La Bête singulière’, p. 494. Planche reminds us that the French term sanglier derives from the Latin singularis porcus, i.e. the (male) wild pig that lives alone, except during the mating season. On the subtle blend of realistic and unrealistic elements in the boar hunt, see Bleach, ‘The Voice of Nature? Pseudo-science, Sources and Symbols in the Old French Partonopeu de Blois’, pp. 60–64.

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a little too young for love. His pursuit and killing of the young boar foreshadows the solitary adventure to come, but also points to his precocity: in overcoming his animal counterpart, the hero demonstrates that, despite his age, he is ready to move on to the next stage of his development, which will involve an encounter with a sexually mature female.37 The second phase of the hunt plays on the ambiguity of a figure who is still a boy in terms of years, but whose qualities of body and spirit locate him at the threshold of jouvent. The hero’s successful encounter with one boar is swiftly followed by another which highlights his youthful inexperience. The baying of the hounds as they crowd in for the curee causes another, older and larger, boar to break cover; the ‘fol chien’ (‘foolish hounds’) set off in pursuit, and the hero rides after them to turn them back. Having failed to restrain the dogs, he then compounds their folly (vv. 619 and 626) by following them deeper into the wilderness, leaving his uncle behind. As Laurence HarfLancner points out, ‘on ne court en effet qu’un seul animal par chasse. Ce serait donc “folie” que de se lancer ainsi à la tombée du jour, la chasse terminée, à la poursuite d’un second animal’ (‘only one quarry is pursued in each hunt. It would therefore be “folly” to set off like this, when the hunt is over and evening is drawing in, in pursuit of a second quarry’, p. 323).38 The negative associations of the adult boar as a highly dangerous beste noire now come into play, suggesting to the expert audience that the hero will be led into a perilous situation in which dark forces may be at work.39 And, indeed, he becomes hopelessly lost in the forest before eventually coming across the magic ship that takes him to Melior’s kingdom. When she later explains that she had brought all this about in order to take him as her lover, it becomes clear that Partonopeus has himself been the quarry in a different kind of hunt. While pursuing and killing the young boar he was actually being lured into a position from which he would ride straight into the trap that Melior had set for him. The idea of Melior as a huntress is subtly anticipated by the use of a hunting metaphor to describe the speed of the magic ship that takes the hero to Chief d’Oire: ‘La nés sigle dusque a la nuit/ Plus tost que cers levriers ne

37 On the association between boars and the hero’s initiation into adulthood in Celtic mythology, see Walter, Tristan et Iseut. Le Porcher et la truie, pp. 92–4. 38 Gingras sees this disruption of hunting protocol as indicating the transition towards ‘l’extraordinaire’ (Érotisme et merveilles dans le récit français des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, p. 222). 39 Planche, ‘La Bête’, pp. 498–9. On the negative, and even diabolic, associations of the boar, see also Pastoureau, ‘La Chasse au sanglier: histoire d’une dévalorisation (IVe-XIVe siècles)’, and Strubel, ‘Bêtes rouges et bêtes noires: à propos d’une classification cynégétique’, pp. 723–7. In the anonymous lai of Guingamor a white boar leads the hero to a fairy mistress; the boar in Partonopeus is clearly not albino, and so cannot easily be identified as a benevolent animal guide.

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fuit’ (‘the ship sails until nightfall more swiftly than a stag fleeing a greyhound’, vv. 763–4). The positioning of the portrait of Partonopeus between two evocations of the quarry therefore serves a double purpose. By establishing a relationship of equivalence between hunter and hunted, it invites us to read the killing of the young boar in terms of the hero symbolically putting an end to his own boyhood. In Marcelle Thiébaux’s words: ‘The quarry may […] function as an extension of the hero’s own nature, a restless, uncontrolled or older aspect of himself. Details of the quarry’s dismemberment may correspond to the hero’s conquest of his former self, which he is now enabled to cast from him.’40 While there is no direct description of Partonopeus dismembering the young boar, he does perform the ritual act of sounding his horn over the dead beast (vv. 601–2), which could be seen as its aural equivalent. At the same time, however, the emphasis given to the hero’s folly in pursuing the second boar reminds us that he may still be too young to make sensible choices about some of his actions. The framing of the portrait also prefigures the dual nature of hunt, in which one paradigmatic narrative (‘the hunter triumphs’ in Thiébaux’s taxonomy) dovetails into another (‘the hunter is hunted’).41 This fusion of two archetypal story-lines occupies a liminal space that also marks the generic shift from dynastic romance (as signalled by the genealogical prologue) to fairy-mistress narrative. As the old boar races into the wilderness beyond the boundary-markers set up at the limit of human occupation, so it metamorphoses from potential quarry into decoy, leading the hunter closer to a huntress’s territory. Neither the victim of a successful hunt nor a conventional animal guide, this boar embodies a narrative strategy based on leading the audience into a forest of alternative paradigms that never quite resolve themselves into a univocal storyline.42

The older woman and the very young girl: Melior and Persewis The literary sources on which the Partonopeus poet drew for the composition of his romance provided him with models of relationships between two equally young people (Piramus and Tisbé; Narcisus and Dané; Cupid and

40 41

The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature, p. 57. Cf. Gingras, Érotisme et merveilles, p. 276: ‘L’homme d’abord présenté en chasseur n’est plus conquérant mais conquis’. There is a similar reversal of roles within the context of a boar-hunt in Guingamor, vv. 26–424 (Dubost, Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, pp. 339–40). The Partonopeus poet’s manipulation of the portrait sets a precedent for Renaut’s use of such descriptions as ‘movable counters’ in his game with the audience: see Colby-Hall, ‘Frustration and Fulfilment: The Double Ending of Le Bel Inconnu’, esp. pp. 126–31. 42 On the hunt as a metaphor for the relationship between author and audience, see Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, p. 105.

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Psyche; Floire and Blancheflor; the young couples in the Roman de Thèbes),43 between a rather older man and a young woman (Enéas and Lavine), and even between a rather older man and a rather older woman (Enéas and the widowed Dido). Nowhere in the network of texts with which he engages is there a model of a love-affair between a very young man and an older woman. Lanval and other fairy-mistress narratives present us with a supernatural heroine who exists outside human time, and is therefore presumably ageless, although her dominant role in the relationship with her mortal lover may create an impression of a certain maturity. Melior, however, is very much of the human world, and is quite explicitly characterised as being older than Partonopeus.44 Her seniority is implied from the outset when she presents herself to the hero as empress of Byzantium in her own right, ruling without the need of a regent. When Partonopeus breaks her taboo she reveals the full details of her extraordinary education, which provide the information needed for the audience to establish how old she is. Among her revelations is the fact that she had completed the study of the seven arts, medicine and divinity before the age of fifteen: ‘Ains qu’eüsce .xv. ans pasés/ Oi mes maistres tos sormontés’ (‘I had surpassed all my tutors before I was fifteen years old’, vv. 4595–6). She then went on to study nigromance, natural science45 and astronomy, and perfected them to the extent of being able to create all kinds of marvels for the entertainment of her father the emperor, who was still alive at this stage. We already know, from her first conversation with the hero, that some time after her father’s death she sent spies out to discover a suitable candidate to be her husband, and that these spies reported back after a year’s exhaustive research (v. 1356). We also know that at least eighteen months have elapsed between Partonopeus’s first arrival in Chief d’Oire and his breaking of the taboo. Putting all this information together, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Melior must be approaching twenty at this point, an age that would lend credibility to her barons’ increasingly urgent pleas to her to choose a

43 The Thèbes poet explicitly draws attention to the fact that Parthonopieus would make a good match for Antigoné because they are exactly the same age: ‘Mout fussent bien jousté andui,/ Car andui furent d’un aage,/ D’unne biauté et d’un courage’ (‘They would have been very well matched, for the two of them were equal in age, in beauty and in disposition’, vv. 413–34). 44 On the links between Melior and other fairy figures, see Harf-Lancner, pp. 34–5 and 227–9, and Schindler-Dufaux, ‘De Melusine à diablesse: un aspect de Melior/Meliur dans les romans Partonopeu de Blois et Partonopier und Meliur de Konrad von Würzburg’. 45 Fisique (v. 4603) is clearly differentiated from mecine (v. 4583) and belongs to the more advanced syllabus; it probably has the sense of ‘connaissance des choses de la nature’ (‘knowledge of natural phenomena’) given by Greimas, rather than Collet and Joris’s ‘médecine’ (‘medicine’).

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husband and secure the future of the empire through marriage.46 This sense of urgency may have been heightened for the original audience by the fact that men’s and women’s lives were not believed to follow exactly the same pattern: since the lifespan of a man was generally thought to be longer than that of a woman, the ‘ages of woman’ were proportionately shorter than those of her male counterpart (Dove, p. 23).47 In the twelfth century the age difference between the empress and her young lover must have been even more striking than it is for the modern reader. Melior’s status as an ‘older woman’ may have been determined in part by the poet’s desire to weave in another topical allusion. There are obvious parallels between the heroine of Partonopeus de Blois and Maria Komnenos, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos by his first wife, Bertha of Sulzbach. Throughout the 1160s it looked as though Maria would succeed to the empire, as neither Manuel’s first nor his second marriage (to Maria of Antioch) produced a male heir until the very end of the decade. Attempts were made from 1163 onwards (when Maria was ten) to arrange a suitable marriage for her, but she was still unwed by the time her half-brother Alexios was born late in 1169. Until he was formally recognised as heir apparent in 1171 she was still a passport to the throne of Byzantium and, as a young woman in her late teens, notably older than potential partners such as John, youngest son of Henry II, who was only three or four when an embassy was sent to Henry in 1170 to try and arrange a marriage.48 In terms of the twelfth-century marriage market, Maria was very much an older woman by this point. However, the Partonopeus poet’s narrative strategies are rarely onedimensional, and it is unlikely that the decision to make Melior a woman of comparatively advanced years was motivated simply by the desire to rewrite current affairs in the Byzantine empire. Her age is also determined by the role she has to play, in the earlier part of the romance at least, as an agent of the hero’s education.49 As we shall see in relation to Gaudin, the role of tutor implies maturity and experience; since Melior sets out to educate

46 On the age of marriage for noblewomen and heiresses, see Shahar, The Fourth Estate. A History of Women in the Middle Ages, pp. 134–6, and Schultz, p. 528. Melior is an obvious exception to Gaffney’s rule that ‘women and girls are ageless’ in vernacular narrative poetry (‘The Ages of Man’, p. 574). 47 In the T redaction of La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne (last quarter of the twelfth century), the protagonist embarks on a life of promiscuity as soon as she reaches the age of twelve (vv. 99–100). While Marie may be an extreme case, this does suggest that girls were believed to achieve sexual maturity earlier than boys. 48 Eley and Simons, ‘Partonopeus de Blois and Chrétien de Troyes’, pp. 321–4. 49 See Vines, ‘A Woman’s Crafte: Melior as Lover, Teacher and Patron in the Middle English Partonope of Blois’, and Bermejo, ‘Hacia una definición de la función de la mujer en Partonopeus de Blois’, pp. 203–4.

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Partonopeus as well as to enjoy a secret love-affair with him, convention demands that she must be the senior partner in the relationship.50 Her educative role is evident not only in the geography lesson that she gives the hero during their second night together (vv. 1715–62), but also in the precepts of courtly conduct that she expounds to him the evening before he returns to France for the first time (vv. 1913–30). This aspect of the heroine’s role reveals the author thinking through the consequences of his initial decision to fuse a fairy-mistress narrative and a dynastic romance. We have seen that the hero has to be very young when he is taken away from the environment in which he would normally complete his education. It follows that he must somehow learn what he still needs to know in Chief d’Oire, before he can embark on the next phase of his life as a warrior and defender of his native country. Given the conditions of his residence, guidance on how to conduct himself in society can only come from Melior, who therefore has to become his tutor as well as his lover. And a tutor has to have completed his (or, in this case, her) education, and to have gained some experience of life, in order to be a fit guide for a pupil. Within the narrative economy of Partonopeus, Melior cannot be anything other than an older woman. This, in turn, determines the course that the hero’s career must take if he is ultimately to become the founder of a Franco-Byzantine dynasty. If he is not to follow the trajectory of a Lanval, forever in the power of his supernatural mistress, Partonopeus cannot remain indefinitely in the junior role assigned to him in the first section of the story. Nor, within the context of a narrative treatment of the material, can he continue to act out the lyric role of the submissive lover – an imperative that is, perhaps, implicit in the ‘lyric’ narrator’s recognition of the differences as well as the parallels between his own situation and that of the hero.51 There has to be a fracture that allows for the two principal narrative strata – fairy-mistress story and dynastic romance – to be re-aligned, so that the latter can gradually come to overlay the former once again. That fracture is, of course, the breaking of Melior’s taboo, preceded by the warning tremor of the hero’s short-lived engagement to the niece of the King of France. As Lanval and Graelent show, the breaking of a taboo does not have to lead to the permanent disruption of the previous status quo. The motif does, however, carry the potential for a more seismic relaunching of the action, and it is precisely that aspect of the fairy-mistress-taboo model that the Partonopeus poet has chosen to exploit. Once the taboo is broken, Partonopeus is free to metamorphose into an autonomous agent who can win Melior back by his own efforts. The stages of

50 Cf. Bruckner, Shaping Romance, p. 124. Bruckner also links Melior’s role as tutor to her fairy-mistress ancestry. 51 The intermittent nature of the narrator’s lyric stance is noted by Krueger, ‘The Author’s Voice: Narrators, Audiences and the Problem of Interpretation’, p. 126.

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his transformation are clearly delineated: at first he is helpless and determined to die; then he is reborn, recovering health and strength under the less coercive guidance of Urraque; finally, he breaks away from female tutelage altogether, finds his rightful advisor in the person of Gaudin, and participates in the marriage tournament as an independent knight. As the hero goes through this process of growing-up and self-actualisation, so Melior seems to follow an opposite trajectory, triggered by her lover’s decision to set eyes on her. It is no coincidence that this is the point at which more precise information about Melior’s age is revealed. Hitherto, despite her self-confessed status as marriageable empress of a real-world empire, the fact that Melior remains unseen allows both hero and audience to retain some level of belief in her supernatural nature and consequent agelessness.52 With the loss of her ‘invisibility’, Melior definitively enters human time, and the emotional separation of the lovers is mirrored in the revelation of the age gap between them. Both these ruptures are then progressively diminished: as Melior moves towards reconciliation with her transformed lover, so the ‘older woman’ seems to be replaced by a younger figure. Bruckner remarks that the reader tends ‘to forget [the] theoretical age difference’ between hero and heroine after their estrangement (Shaping Romance, p. 124). I would argue that the age difference is not simply allowed to fade into the background, as this implies, but is actively reversed, with Melior regressing to a seemingly younger and less autonomous version of herself.53 The breaking of the taboo leads to the loss of her ‘magic’ powers, but we should not lose sight of the fact that these powers are actually described as the product of her years of advanced study rather than true magic. The loss of these powers can thus be read as the undoing of the last stage of Melior’s education, returning her to be the person she was before the age of fifteen: an intelligent, well-schooled girl who will make an ideal consort for an emperor. This process is made easier by the fact that Melior’s numerical age is not authorised in the same way as those of Partonopeus and Gaudin. The hero’s age is given by the narrator, whose reliability is not contested at the beginning of this text; Gaudin’s is publicly stated by Anfors, the official spokesman of the tournament judges, and is corroborated by the knight’s own testimony. Our information about Melior’s age comes from a private bedroom conversation between her and her secret lover, which automatically undermines its status as unalterable fact. By

52 Grossel’s comment that Melior ceases to be supernatural as soon as Partonopeus sees her and no longer entertains the belief that she may be supernatural (‘Fée en deçà, démone au delà: remarques sur les aspects inquiétants du personnage mélusinien’, p. 68) applies to the reader as well as the hero. 53 On the way in which this regression is mirrored in the portrayal of Chief d’Oire in the Middle English adaptation, see Jackson, ‘The City as Two-way Mirror in the Middle English Partonope of Blois’.

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the end of the romance the age differential between hero and heroine has been skilfully occluded. When Partonopeus finally wins his bride he is sixteen, according to the internal chronology of the text, which is set out with a degree of precision that is unusual for works of vernacular fiction.54 The action begins in mid September, when the hero is thirteen; he then spends one year with Melior at Chief d’Oire (v. 1881). He returns to France to conduct the war against Sornegur, before returning to Melior for another six months (v. 4195). Soon after his second return to France, he breaks Melior’s taboo and is banished from Chief d’Oire. After his banishment, Partonopeus spends a full year in self-imposed solitary confinement in Blois (v. 5382) before seeking death in the Ardennes and being rescued by Urraque. He leaves Salence and travels to the tournament during the early summer of the same year: we are told that the boating incident which strands him on Tenedos takes place a week after Ascension Day, when the weather is too hot for other activities (vv. 7607–14).55 According to Ernoul’s instructions, the fair that precedes the tournament begins at Pentecost and is scheduled to last for fifteen days (vv. 6555–64); the three-day tournament itself begins on the Monday after the end of the fair (vv. 6595–7). By the time Partonopeus emerges as the victor, some thirty-three months have passed since he went out hunting with his uncle. As the tournament takes place a year and some months after the breaking of the taboo and the reversing of the heroine’s ‘higher’ education, we could say that Melior’s functional age is also sixteen, or thereabouts, at this point. The generic shift towards the romance model in the latter part of the text is therefore marked by a return to normality in terms of the protagonists’ ages: Partonopeus is now the right age to be knighted and win a bride who no longer overshadows him in terms of experience and education.56 The very precise chronological indications given throughout the narrative allow the

54 Cf. Glasser, Studien zur Geschichte des französischen Zeitbegriffs, Chapters 1–3, and Eley, ‘How Long is a Trojan War? Aspects of Time in the Roman de Troie and its Sources’, pp. 144–9. 55 The Collet-Joris text reads ‘.viij. jors enprés l’Asencion’ (‘eight days after the feast of the Ascension’), although this is translated as ‘huit jours avant l’Ascension’ (p. 475, my emphasis). Enprés is unique to MS A; all the other witnesses have devant or avant, which might suggest that the A reading is a scribal error. However, the A chronology is perhaps the more plausible of the two. Ascension Day falls forty days after Easter and Pentecost nine days later. In A, Partonopeus lands on Tenedon two days before the start of the fair, and meets Gaudin the day before the tournament; he therefore spends two and a half weeks as a prisoner (as opposed to over a month in the other MSS) before being released by Armant’s wife. 56 Cf. Donagher’s comment that ‘the expectations of the lai are simply pushed aside, at least partially because the lai has played itself out and can no longer furnish any forward movement to the text’ (‘Socializing the Sorceress: The Fairy Mistress Theme in Lanval, Le Bel Inconnu and Partonopeu de Blois’, p. 73).

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listening audience to build up their own mental time-line and arrive at the same conclusion. Despite this normalising tendency towards the end of the narrative, Melior’s initial role as a combination of Cupid and fairy-mistress precludes her playing the part of the young woman who has to learn about love, a role that is fundamental in the presentation of other romance heroines.57 She may be a virgin when Partonopeus appears in her bed (v. 1300), but she already knows what love is: not for her the confusion of Lavine or Dané, or their gradual recognition of a new and painful emotion. The same fusion of narrative paradigms also makes it impossible for the poet to explore nascent love in relation to the hero, since as a Psyche figure he cannot see Melior and experience the ‘inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex’ that forms the first phase of love for Eneas, Narcisus and Ille.58 And yet all the vernacular models available to our poet place particular emphasis on the topoi of undeclared and unrequited love. Even Marie de France reconfigures the fairy-mistress narrative in order for Guigemar and his lady to sigh and suffer before confessing their love for one another. If Partonopeus is to follow suit, then the role of apprentice lover has to be displaced on to another character or characters. This may help to explain the presence in the romance of Persewis, the young daughter of the King of Crete and lady-in-waiting to Melior’s sister Urraque, who appears at first sight to be one of the ‘superfluous ladies’ identified by Rosemary Morris.59 Although her story may lead nowhere in the majority version of the text, she does provide an opportunity for the narrator to expand, with a certain irony, upon unrequited (as opposed to lost) love and to analyse the effects of first love on a young and inexperienced woman. When we first meet her, Persewis is explicitly characterised as being too young to understand love: Quant parler en ot, si se test, Mais ele en savra, se Deu plest, Car el nel fait par chasteé, Ains est de trop petit aé. (vv. 6231–64) 57 On the importance of this interplay between youth and emotion, see FoehrJanssens, La Jeune Fille et l’amour. Pour une poétique courtoise de l’évasion. 58 Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, p. 28, my emphasis; on other links to Andreas, see Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives, pp. 143–4. Unlike his classical counterpart, the vernacular Narcisus is convinced that the image he sees in the spring is the face of a woman, whom he describes as a nymph, a goddess or a fairy (Narcisus et Dané, vv. 679–82). 59 Morris, ‘The Knight and the Superfluous Lady: A Problem of Disposal’; see also Simons, ‘A Romance Revisited’, p. 399. Trampe Bødtker noted that Persewis does not feature in either the saga or the fifteenth-century Danish Persenober og Konstantianobis (‘Parténopeus de Blois. Étude comparative des versions islandaise et danoise’, p. 32). For a complementary rationale for the introduction of Persewis, see Chapter 6, pp. 000–00.

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When she heard people talking about it, she said nothing, but if it please God, she will learn all about it, for she did not behave like this out of concern for chastity, but because she was too young.

In terms of the Isidorean paradigm outlined above, this would make her fourteen or younger, as her sexual awakening takes place soon after, when she sees and falls in love with Partonopeus. The ‘unnatural’ pairing of the young hero and older heroine is thus doubled by the more conventional love of a young girl for a young man a year or so her senior.60 Yet this attachment is not reciprocal, and Persewis experiences all the sufferings of love without any of its rewards (while Melior experiences the suffering after the reward, in a playful inversion of the lyric paradigm).61 In the A version of the text she subsequently transfers her affections to the older Gaudin, whom she marries to become the new countess of Blois, a development that inverts the hero’s spatial trajectory from Blois to Byzantium and creates another link within this complex network of echoes and doubling. The pairing of a very young woman and a man in late middle age may recall the figure of the mal mariée, notably the heroine and her much older husband in Marie de France’s Yonec, but there is no indication that Gaudin’s marriage to Persewis is likely to end in tragedy.62 At most, there may be a playful suggestion that the new count of Blois might find his young and spirited wife a bit of a handful.63 It is also possible that this union represents another instance of aemulatio in relation to the Roman de Thèbes, where the main action begins with a double wedding involving four characters whose age profile is similarly drawn to the reader’s attention. Gaudin can be seen as a rewriting of Thideüs, the older of the two bridegrooms in Thèbes, who marries the younger daughter of King Adrastus, while his younger companion Polinicés weds the older of the two girls.64

The older man and his doubles: Gaudin, the packhorse knight and Ernoul Gaudin is yet another character whose age is deliberately foregrounded in such a way as to invite interrogation. First introduced during the preliminaries

60 Could this doubling be the model for the dual heroines of Florimont and Le Bel Inconnu, which rewrite Partonopeus by introducing a second relationship for the hero? 61 On the significant modifications to the story of Persewis in the Middle English version of the poem, see Hosington, ‘Voices of Protest and Submission: Portraits of Women in Partonopeu de Blois and its Middle English Translation’, pp. 63–4, and Ihle, ‘The English Partonope of Blois as Exemplum’, p. 309. 62 On the model of marriage implied by this union, see Sullivan, pp. 99–100. 63 Eley and Simons, ‘Poets, Birds and Readers in Partonopeus de Blois’, pp. 10–12. 64 Both redactions agree that Thideüs is older than Polinicés (v. 767 in C, ed. by de Lage; v. 828 in S, ed. by Mora-Lebrun); Polinicés is said to be ‘not yet twenty’ at the start of the main action in S (v. 826), but ‘not yet thirty’ in C (v. 765).

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to the tournament at Chief d’Oire as ‘.j. chevaliers gros et corsus,/ A chevolz bloiz entrechenus’ (‘a big, thick-set knight with greying fair hair’, vv. 7765–6), he is characterised in more detail during the judgement scene, when Anfors presents the victors of the tournament for the judges’ consideration. In four out of the five manuscripts that contain the full presentation of Gaudin, he is described as being very handsome for his age, which is then defined as ‘over fifty’ (v. 9894).65 Gaudin is the only one of the victors for whom a definite age is given: there is no mention of age in relation to Lohier, Sades or Aupatris, while the Sultan is described vaguely as a ‘jones hom’ (‘a young man’, v. 9971). Anfors’s comment that Partonopeus is the equal in wisdom and virtue of any man his age (vv. 9955–6) implies youth, but again no number is mentioned at this point. There is likewise no mention of age in relation to the king of England, who is added to the list of Christian victors in MSS LPT. The audience is clearly being asked to focus on Gaudin’s age, and the implication is that he is (considerably?) older than any of his fellow candidates. This passage complements and clarifies the earlier scene in which Partonopeus first meets Gaudin and the latter reveals that thirty years have passed since he was dubbed a knight. Anfors’s speech enables us to establish a full chronology of Gaudin’s life: knighted and converted to Christianity at twenty (thirty in T), and now just over fifty, he has spent the intervening years fighting on the tournament circuit or as a mercenary. Such precision is unusual, not only within this text, but for secondary characters in Old French romance as a whole. At one level, the foregrounding of Gaudin’s age serves to underline his close relationship to the hero, whose age was similarly defined at the beginning of the main action of the poem. At another level, however, it draws attention to the disparity in years between the two men, and raises the question of why the very young protagonist of Partonopeus should have been paired with a companion so much older than himself. One answer to this question lies in the dual function attributed to the figure of Gaudin. He fulfils the role not only of companion-in-arms, in the tradition of the chansons de geste, but also of tutor, constantly instructing Partonopeus – on the best way to make an entrance at the tournament and the judgement, on how to ensure that his prowess outshines that of his rivals, and so on. Among texts that may have been known to the Partonopeus poet and his audience, the Seven Sages tradition provides compelling evidence that knowledge and the ability to transmit it to others were both associated with men of more advanced years.66 Gaudin’s age and salt-and-pepper hair can therefore be

65 BLPT have the figure fifty; G has ‘Plus a de .xl. aniz passez’ (‘more than forty years’). This line forms part of a couplet that is not in V, and A has a lacuna at this point. 66 In the K redaction of the Old French verse romance, both Ausires and Cathon are described as old and white-haired (vv. 328, 1664, 3045–6), while Jessé is ‘de biel aé’ (‘of mature years’, v. 3656), with a waist-length beard to match his age. In the C redaction,

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seen as the external signs of his wisdom and his fitness to educate the young hero in tournament etiquette. The seven sages, however, never rode into battle with their young charge, nor did Aristotle or the other tutors mentioned in the early representations of the Old French Alexander tradition.67 In Isidorean terms, Gaudin is at the threshold between iuventus and gravitas, between ‘the strongest of all ages’ and ‘the age of mature judgement’ (Sears, p. 59).68 This may explain the precision with which his age is defined: to anyone familiar with the six-age paradigm, fifty signals the moment when a man is still capable of physical prowess but has also acquired the wisdom necessary to act as a mentor to a younger man. The slightly incongruous picture of the very youthful hero and his very mature companion fighting side-by-side may therefore be no more than a by-product of the poet’s decision to combine two roles – companion-in-arms and teacher – in one character. It is possible, though, that it may be yet another literary allusion, designed to call to mind the pairing of the mature Guillaume and his very young nephew Gui on the battlefield at l’Archamp in the Chanson de Guillaume.69 The slippage from child-warrior and mature knight to adolescent knight and senior companion would be consistent with the Partonopeus poet’s strategy of working variations on all the literary models he invokes. The doubling that we have noted in the case of Melior and Persewis also has its counterpart in relation to Gaudin. When Partonopeus returns to Blois after his initial stay in Chief d’Oire he encounters a baggage train of twelve black packhorses led by twelve youths accompanied by a single knight: Uns chevaliers qui tot ço guie Salus li dist de par s’amie; Viols ert et cenus et floris Et grans et beaus, gens et traitis. (vv. 1993–6) A knight who was in charge of them all brought him greetings from his beloved; he was elderly, white-haired and hoary, tall and handsome, with a distinguished physique.

This knight is the first of the four key adjuvant figures who appear at moments of uncertainty or crisis to help the hero.70 When he appears,

Chaton is ‘viel et chanu’ (‘old and white-haired’, v. 326) while Jessé is ‘viel et barbé’ (‘old and bearded’, v. 826); both are presented as the wisest of men. 67 See Simons, ‘The Theme of Education’, pp. 104–22. 68 Although the Pythagorean system has iuventus ending at 60, in the majority of other systems this key transition falls between 40 and 50 years of age (H. A. Kelly, review of Burrows, Ages of Man, p. 631). 69 On the implications of this pairing, see Bennett, ‘La Chanson de Guillaume’ and ‘La Prise d’Orange’, pp. 31–3. 70 The others are Urraque, Anselot and Gaudin; the Greimassien function of the

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Partonopeus has returned to a desperate situation: King Clovis and his own father are dead, France is in turmoil and Blois is besieged on all sides by its enemies (vv. 1909–12). The audience might well wonder where the young count will find the resources he will need to defend his patrimony. The knight provides an explanation: the horses are loaded with gold and silver from Melior; she has also sent a message, urging Partonopeus to become a warrior and remain true to her. There are a number of striking parallels between the hero’s encounter with the packhorse knight and his first meeting with Gaudin. In both cases, Partonopeus has just disembarked after a sea journey (the meeting with Gaudin takes place after the hero has negotiated his release from captivity on Armant’s island and sailed to the mainland). He has also just encountered a setback: in the first case, he has learned about events in France; in the second, the wind is against him, with the result that he has not been able to travel directly to Chief d’Oire, but has landed some ten leagues away from the location of the tournament. Both knights are accompanied by an impressive monochromatic retinue: the twelve youths leading the twelve black packhorses are matched by Gaudin’s five youths carrying red lances with scarlet banners and five squires leading chargers with red saddles and saddle-cloths. The packhorse knight resolves the problem of how Partonopeus can fund a war in France; Gaudin provides all the resources that the hero has not been able to put in place because of his imprisonment (a lodging near the tournament field, squires and other attendants, a supporter on the field). This is in many respects a classic example of the romance technique of repetition with variation, where similarities and differences between parallel episodes point to meanings that are never made explicit in the text.71 Here, the parallels might lead us to conclude that Gaudin too is some kind of emissary from Melior. Is he a simple avatar of the packhorse knight, another character who fulfils the role of intermediary between the fairy-mistress and her mortal lover and provides the solution to a practical problem? The differences between the two episodes invite a subtler reading, however. The epithet viols (‘old, elderly’) is never used of Gaudin, and his hair is greying rather than the pure white of old age. Moreover, he has a fully human life-story, which he explains in some detail to Partonopeus, and which makes clear that the narrative has now moved away from the fairy-mistress model and into the sphere of dynastic romance, where knights win renown without supernatural assis-

opposant has more numerous human embodiments, including Marés and other fils à vilain figures (see Chapter 2), the hero’s mother and the bishop of Paris, Armant and the Sultan. 71 Bruckner’s comment that ‘variation [is] always inseparable from repetition in romance practice’ holds for repeated elements within an individual narrative as well as for the process of imitation between narratives (‘Repetition and Variation in Twelfth-Century French Romance’, p. 103).

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tance. The functional equivalence of the two older men extends only to their helping the hero to achieve his goals; as their contrasting colours suggest, they belong to quite different diegetic worlds. Another figure combines elements of the presentation of both Gaudin and the packhorse knight. Ernoul of Malbricon is consistently described as elderly and comes to play the same role in relation to Melior as Gaudin does for Partonopeus. There is no reference to Ernoul’s age when his name is first mentioned during Melior’s description of Chief d’Oire and its hinterland. He is, however, presented from the outset as a notable individual (Melior does not name any of her other barons at this stage) and a loyal defender of the realm from pirates (vv. 1741–52). When he re-appears in the second half of the romance two key attributes are repeatedly highlighted: his advanced years and his intelligence. Melior describes him to her sister as ‘Hernols de Marbrecon/ Ki molt est saiges de raison/ .j. grans hom lons, veolz et chanus’ (‘Ernoul of Malbricon, a tall, rangy, elderly man with white hair, who is very skilled at making an argument’, vv. 6486–7) and ‘li viols Ernols’ (‘elderly Ernoul’, v. 7369). Even her petulant complaint about ‘cil Ernols/ de [Malbricon], li malartos,/ Par cui li tornois fu ci pris’ (‘that scheming Ernoul of Malbricon, who persuaded them to hold the tournament here’, vv. 7157–9) specifically acknowledges his qualities of mind. During the judgement scene the narrator presents him as ‘Hernolz li chanus […] qui par sens et par raison/ I fist venir cele grant gent’ (‘white-haired Ernoul […] who brought this great company here through his intelligence and his eloquence’, vv. 10096–9). In the main narrative we only ever see Ernoul engaged in activities that are in keeping with this characterisation. He proposes and organises the marriage tournament, but does not participate in the fighting; although he offers to defend his judgement on the victors against all comers (vv. 10257–8), he is not required at this stage to demonstrate his prowess. Unlike Gaudin, he seems to inhabit a single role, that of the wise old counsellor whose integrity is beyond question. When Melior regresses towards her younger self as the centre of gravity of the narrative shifts from lai to romance, so this role becomes increasingly prominent, and it is Ernoul who argues the case for Partonopeus against Clarin and the other judges who seem disinclined to risk offending him. As a fairy-mistress, Melior had no need of an experienced vassal to advise her; as a young unmarried heiress, she now becomes more dependent on the good counsel of an older man who can defend her against the vested interests of certain parties at her court. In the Continuation Ernoul moves up into the first rank of the protagonists. Although his age and wisdom continue to be emphasised (e.g. vv. 11713, 11729–33, 11853–4, 11951–2), he is also portrayed as a doughty warrior who leads his sons into battle against the Sultan’s forces. He even merits the epic compliment of being likened to a wild boar setting about the hounds when he is surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces (vv. 13399–402). If the characterisation of Partonopeus is too nuanced, despite his precocity, for him to be a

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stereotypical puer senex, Ernoul does seem to correspond here to the conventional figure of the senex fortis – an old man who transcends the limitations of his physical age to achieve great deeds in battle.72 The previous distinction between the senex Ernoul and the gravis Gaudin is blurred in other ways, too, in this section of the text. The two characters increasingly function as doubles, notably in Ernoul’s proposal that he and Gaudin should together undertake the mission to negotiate with the Sultan because of their shared language skills and steadiness of character (vv. 12085–8). In the event, neither of the older men is sent to the enemy camp, although a reason is only ever given for excusing Ernoul (Melior argues that he should stay behind to see to the defence of Malbricon). The fact that Gaudin does not then lead the embassy, notwithstanding his obvious advantages, suggests that he and Ernoul have come to form one undifferentiated pole in a binary opposition between youth and age, the other pole of which is occupied by the adolescents who take their places on the mission.73 In contrast to the main narrative, the Continuation is marked by an intermittent sense of conflict and distancing between young and old that first surfaces in Ernoul’s arguments with his sons, is reinforced by the Sultan’s determination to make the old man pay for using his authority (as he sees it) to have Partonopeus declared the victor of the tournament and re-appears in Ernoul’s dealings with Lucion, which will be discussed in the following section. Whether this is the result of changes in authorship, changes in audience expectations or simply a desire for variety is difficult to say, but it does mean that the romance ends with a much more polarised picture of the generations than the one with which it began, of the ageing Clovis and his beloved nephew heading out together for a day’s sport in the Ardennes.74

More young men: Anselot and Lucion There is yet another web of doublings in the Continuation, which also takes us back to the figure of the very young hero with which we began. Like Gaudin, Partonopeus too has a counterpart in this section of the romance, in the person of Anselot, son of Fabur King of Greenland and nephew of

72 On notions of transcendence, see Burrow, pp. 123–34, and Gaffney, ‘The Ages of Man’, pp. 576–80. We should note, however, that Ernoul’s age is not subject to the epic hyperbole that makes Charlemagne over 200 years old in the Roland or has Eteoclés leading 10,000 centenarians into battle in the Roman de Thèbes (vv. 4825–31 and 4909–12). 73 This substitution of youth for age forms part of a pattern to which we will return in Chapter 4. 74 Clovis is described in the Prologue as having had a long life (v. 485); the fact that he dies during Partonopeus’s first visit to Chief d’Oire confirms that he is intended to be quite elderly at the start of the action.

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Sornegur. Sent by his uncle as a vallet to complete his education in France, he helps the ailing Partonopeus to flee Blois after his rejection by Melior and re-appears as an important character in the Continuation. Not only does he lose his way in the Ardennes, as the hero had done earlier, and subsequently find love at an imperial court, he is also portrayed as being extraordinarily handsome (v. 5570), in which he takes after his father, described earlier as ‘tos li plus beaus des sarasins’ (‘quite the most handsome of the heathen’, v. 2406). The figure of Anselot will be discussed in more detail in Chapters 2 and 4; for the moment, we should note the similarity between his role and that of Persewis in opening up a space for exploration of aspects of young love that are excluded from the portrayal of the hero. Anselot’s hopeless love for Euglar involves a conflict between passion and feudal loyalty, complicated by the machinations of a fils à vilain, none of which can feature in Partonopeus’s relationship with Melior. Unlike Persewis, however, he seems to take over his counterpart’s role after the marriage of hero and heroine, providing a prolongation of the youthful adventures associated with Partonopeus. As the narrative then evolves through the different phases of the Continuation, Anselot himself is doubled by Souplice, the youngest and least experienced of Ernoul’s sons (v. 11872), who accompanies him on his embassy to the Sultan. In a curious reworking of the older knight–younger knight dynamic that underpins the tournament scenes, the adolescent Anselot has to restrain the impetuous Souplice from defying the Sultan and jeopardising their mission to buy time for Partonopeus to organise the defence of his realm. Souplice is also unable to avoid a simple counter-attack during the fighting on the return journey, and has to be rescued by another youngster, Alés. Anselot is finally eclipsed by Gautier, the fourth of the five brothers, a clerk-knight who embodies the puer senex topos (cf. v. 12776) which was merely alluded to in the main body of the narrative. A link is also established between Anselot and Lucion, a young member of the invasion force who becomes the Sultan’s go-between in his negotiations with Melior. The initial description of Lucion associates him with the term oublious (‘forgetful, oblivious’), which was the nickname that Euglar gave to Anselot after he kept ‘forgetting’ to turn up for their amorous assignations: Uns niés le roi de Mec, Lucio[n]s l’Amourous, De tous les sarrazins .j. des plus oublious, .j. blons, .j. lons, .j. gens, .j. moult chevalerous. (vv. 13496–8) A nephew of the King of Mecca, Lucion the Amorous, one of the most oblivious [to danger] of all the heathen, a tall, blond, goodlooking and very valiant young man.

His behaviour on the battlefield is as reckless and impetuous as Anselot’s decision to defy the emperor, and earns him a sharp rebuke from the narrator as well as the disapproval of more experienced fighters:

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Je[l] di por Lucion qui trop estoutement S’embat en son peril et encombreement, Et plus mal fait que bien et plus desreement. Ernouls et Aupatris l’en blasmoient souvent. (vv. 13607–10) I say this on account of Lucion who rushed too recklessly into the thick of it, putting his life at risk, acting wildly and doing more harm than good. Ernoul and Aupatris frequently found fault with him for this.

Lucion’s own nickname, ‘l’Amourous’, suggests sexual precocity, as does the rather ambiguous description of the conclusion of his mission to Chief d’Oire. Depending on how this passage is punctuated, it can be taken as implying either that Lucion flirted with Melior’s attendant demoiseles after speaking to the empress, or that he spent the night taking his pleasure with them before returning to the Sultan’s encampment at dawn: Lucions a tant prist congié Quant il ot assés soulacié Et joué o les damoiseles Dont il i avoit moult de beles: Si s’en part a l’aube du jor, Vers l’ost au soudan prist retour. (vv. 14551–6) Then Lucion took his leave when he had spent some time amusing himself and flirting with the many beautiful damsels who were there: he left [the city] at daybreak and made his way back to the Sultan’s army.

Neither Gildea nor Collet and Joris punctuate at the end of v. 14551, so their text asserts that Lucion took his leave from Melior after spending some time with the damsels, and then went back to the Sultan’s camp the following morning (having presumably passed the night in lodgings). If we put a full stop at the end of this line, the meaning changes significantly: Lucion first takes his leave from Melior, then passes the night with the ladies-in-waiting before returning to camp at dawn like the protagonist of an alba.75 Although the pronoun en in v. 14555 could be taken to refer to the empress’s city it seems more likely that it stands for the damoiseles, which supports the second interpretation and reinforces the image of a precociously amorous young man. Whichever way we read this passage, it implies that Lucion is a puer senex in matters of the heart, as the Sultan recognised when the young

75 The two key verbs used to describe Lucion’s activities have both an innocent and a sexual meaning: soulacier can be either to amuse or to caress, while jouer covers both flirting and sexual activity.

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man advised him to release the captured Ernoul in order to win favour with Melior: Quant Lucion a si parlé, Li preus soudans l’a regardé, Si l’en set gré si bonement; Si l’en mercie loiaument, Et dit qu’il l’a miex assené Que n’ont li viel ne li sené. (vv. 14329–34) When Lucion had spoken these words, the gallant Sultan looked at him and was extremely grateful to him for what he had said; so he thanked him affectionately and said that he had given him better advice than the older and wiser men.

The Sultan’s reaction is obviously coloured by his love for Melior, but his words add more weight to the idea of a growing generation gap in the later sections of the Continuation. This part of the Continuation was probably not written by the same poet as the main narrative and Anselot’s story, as we shall see in Chapters 4 to 6. It is curious, then, that the thematics of youth and age return with such insistence in the concluding section of the romance as we have it. While Lucion works yet another variation on the motif of the precocious youth, there is a further echo of the Partonopeus–Gaudin pairing in the fact that it is Ernoul who is given the task of looking after him by the emperor: A Ernoul le baille a garder, A chierir et a honorer. Viex hommes fu Ernous et durs, M[olt] sambl[e] nubles et oscurs, Et Lucion fu envoisiés. (vv. 14485–9) [Partonopeus] assigned Ernoul to look after him, to care for him and to treat him with honour. Ernoul was a tough old man who gave the impression of being very sombre and unsmiling, while Lucion was full of high spirits.

Unlike Gaudin, however, Ernoul recognises the discrepancy between himself and his young companion and suggests that the latter seek more congenial company with Melior and her ladies. On one level, this is a neat solution to the narrative problem of engineering a private interview between the Sultan’s messenger and the empress. On another, Ernoul’s hope that Lucion will fall for one of the puceles and stay for good seems to suggest that the whole cycle of a youth finding love and sex in a foreign land could be about to repeat itself ad infinitum. *

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The patterns of youth and age in Partonopeus de Blois highlight some of the ways in which this romance was put together, revealing how the poet went about constructing the plot of his romance, assigning roles and attributes to his characters and even choosing the name of his male protagonist. The ‘toy-boy’ hero provides an entry point into a network of Latin and vernacular models that contributed an eclectic range of ingredients to its composition. The number and variety of these sources highlight both the author’s learning and the ambitious nature of his project. A basic blend of fairy-mistress lai, dynastic romance and the story of Cupid and Psyche is enlivened with elements of Latin epic and Ovidian conte, while cultural expectations relating to enfance and jovent derived from classical and patristic sources also have their part to play in shaping the narrative. The anomalous age of the male protagonist draws attention to some of the difficulties inherent in fusing such heterogeneous story-lines; similar problems are also illustrated in the poet’s handling of the age of the heroine. The gradual transformation of the ‘older woman’ into an equal partner for the maturing hero shows the poet attempting to negotiate incompatibilities between his basic paradigms via a subtle shift in emphasis from numerical to functional age. Our analysis of the opening scenes in the Ardennes and Chief d’Oire confirms that Partonopeus is something more than an exercise in imitatio of familiar texts. The rewriting of so many different models to create a hermeneutic challenge for the audience points to a deliberate intention to outdo all those models in a spectacular display of aemulatio. This sequence also reveals the extent to which a shared cultural background – in this case detailed knowledge of hunting practices among the aristocracy – can be brought into play to give added resonance to a story. Only by understanding the life-cycle of the wild boar and the protocols of the hunt can we appreciate the full significance of Partonopeus’s portrait and discern a didactic element in the text that will become more apparent in some of its later sequences. Underlying the dramatic account of the hero’s arrival in Chief d’Oire is a sense that, at thirteen, he is too young to be drawn into a love-affair of such intensity. Just as his youthful folly allows Melior to lure him into pursuing the second boar, so his inexperience in matters of the heart is later exploited by his mother, who persuades him to betray his lover and so drives him to the brink of suicide. Unlike his predecessors, Piramus and Narcisus, our hero survives his quest for death and achieves a happy outcome to his love; his story can nonetheless be read alongside theirs as a cautionary tale about the dangers faced by youngsters who are unable or unwilling to assess the risks involved in emotional entanglements. The ages of secondary characters further illustrate our poet’s ability to think through the consequences of his initial choices. As a man in his early fifties, Gaudin is precisely poised between the age of prowess and the age of wisdom, as required by his dual function as the hero’s companion-in-arms

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and his tutor;76 meanwhile, Ernoul li viols grows into the role of counsellor as Melior grows out of her fairy-mistress persona. In the main narrative and the Continuation respectively, Persewis and Anselot embody aspects of young love that cannot be explored through the relationship of Partonopeus and Melior, by virtue of its mixed roots in classical and Celtic traditions. The importance of doubling as a structural device throughout the text is highlighted not only by these two characters, but also by the packhorse knight and the young warriors Souplice, Gautier and Lucion. Although the thematics of youth and age is sustained throughout the Continuation, suggesting attentive reading on the part of the continuator(s), its treatment in the later sections is noticeably less nuanced than in the main body of the romance. Whereas Partonopeus was portrayed as both precocious and inexperienced, an ardent lover of an unseen woman and a frightened boy in the forest, characters here map more readily on to stereotypes such as the puer senex and the senex fortis, and relations between young and old become more one-dimensional. This is just one of a number of contrasts between the Continuation and what precedes it that will be explored in more depth in subsequent chapters.

76 Medieval illustrations of the six-fold schema of the ages of man tend to show iuventus as an armed warrior, while gravitas appears in civilian dress, sometimes in the attitude of a counsellor: see Sears, Plates 15 and 19.

Chapter 2 Power, Birth and Values: The fils à vilain Theme Power, Partonopeus Birth and de Values Blois

The binary opposition between cortois and vilain underpins a whole range of medieval French texts intended for aristocratic audiences. A concern with what is courtly and what is not manifests itself in a variety of ways, from the less than flattering portraits of those outside court circles found in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain and Le Conte du Graal to more explicit debates such as that dramatised in Raoul de Houdenc’s Meraugis de Portlesguez. In this romance, two knights fall in love with the same lady: one, Gorvain, on account of her physical beauty alone, and the other, Meraugis, ‘por sa cortoisie,/ Por sa bonté sanz vilonie’ (‘on account of her courtliness, her goodness untouched by ill-breeding’, vv. 573–4).1 Raoul’s hero makes it quite clear that if Lidoine had shown any hint of uncourtly qualities, then he would have found it impossible to love her: ‘Car qui s’amor entameroit Por cors sanz cortoisie amer, Bien i porroit sentir amer.’2 (vv. 500–502) ‘For anyone who would corrupt his love by loving somebody who lacked courtliness might well find a bitter taste in it.’

Counter-arguments are sometimes made, as in a jeu-parti by Pierre de Beaumarchais in which the poet and a lady discuss whether it is better to love a man who has prouece but no cortoisie, or a courtly man who demonstrates no prowess. The lady opts for the former, declaring that a noblewoman should be prepared to overlook any lack of courtly qualities in a knight and be content with his prowess: ‘Si s’en doit bien bele dame paier/ Et oublier tote sa vilenie’ (‘So a fair lady ought to be satisfied with this and turn a blind eye to all his uncourtliness’).3 This suggests, however, that elements of vilenie can

1 Cortoisie and vilenie often occur as a rhyme pair encapsulating the idea of two mutually exclusive sets of values. 2 My punctuation (Szkilnik inserts a comma after cors in v. 501). These lines make use of conventional word-play on cors (‘body, person’) and cortoisie (‘courtliness’), amor (‘love’) and amer (the verb ‘to love’, but also the adjective ‘bitter’) which it is impossible to convey in English translation. 3 Paris, BnF fr. 844, fol. 173, and BnF fr. 12615, fol. 51; edited text in Studer and

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be tolerated only if compensated by other qualities on which the court places a premium. The fundamental incompatibility of vilain and cortois underpins even this kind of questioning. In some twelfth-century narratives this opposition is problematised through the introduction of the fils à vilain, a figure who threatens to blur class distinctions and re-align the distribution of power that they determine. The fils à vilain is a low-born individual who has been raised to a position of influence at court, and is sometimes (though not inevitably) ennobled by the ruler who singles him out for promotion. Typically, the fils à vilain abuses his power to amass wealth for himself and his relatives and perverts the course of justice, either by committing some outright act of treachery or by turning his master against the noble vassals whose duty is to provide him with auxilium et consilium. This basic idea is found, with variations, in the long redaction of the Couronnement de Louis (c.1150), where Charlemagne advises his son and heir never to have a vilain as a counsellor (vv. 207–8), and in Girart de Roussillon (composed between 1136 and 1180), where the narrator devotes a whole laisse to lamenting the hero’s betrayal by the low-born Richer, whom he has promoted to the rank of seneschal (vv. 940–47). It features strongly in passages of moral commentary in Branches III and IV of Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre (early 1180s) and in the earlier Mort Alixandre on which it drew.4 It even appears, in a slightly oblique form, in Branch I of the Roman de Renart (early 1170s), as part of Renart’s speech for the defence in his trial before the court of King Noble (vv. 1226–37).5 The emergence of this theme is clearly associated with the development of an administrative class in France and England and the disquiet that this provoked among the hereditary nobility. Its appearance in French texts has been linked to the practice of the

Waters, Historical French Reader, pp. 148–9. On humorous exploitation of the binary, see Gravdal, Vilain and Courtois: Transgressive Parody in French Literature of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. 4 The first three stanzas of the Mort Alixandre, in which the theme is foregrounded, were recycled by Alexandre de Paris as part of the conclusion to Branch IV of his poem. Among various warnings about the folly of trying to teach a vilain chivalry or turn a buzzard into a falcon, there is a particular emphasis on the dangers of promoting the low-born: ‘Fous est qui conseil creit de serf ne de felon/ Ne qui fait de nul d’aus prince de sa maison’ (‘Only a madman believes the advice of a serf or a traitor, or makes one of them master over his household’, Le Roman d’Alexandre, IV, vv. 1665–7). In Branch III, Aristotle criticises Darius of Persia for promoting ‘des fieus a ses garcons’ (‘the sons of his menial servants’, v. 33) and advises Alexander against giving serfs access to wealth; reliance on serfs is also associated with bad rulers in Alexander’s discussion with Porrus (III, vv. 2266–83). On the political implications of these diatribes, see Gosman, La Légende d’Alexandre le Grand dans la littérature française du 12e siècle, pp. 215–16. 5 Renart does not use the phrase fils à vilain: his criticisms are levelled at ‘cil qui sont serf par nature’ (‘those who are serfs by nature’, I, v. 1231), but they display the same behaviours (alienating the monarch from his loyal barons, amassing personal wealth at others’ expense, disregarding the key virtue of moderation).

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Capetian kings of appointing and subsequently knighting non-noble advisors, and to the growing power of the ministeriales at the court of the Holy Roman Emperors.6 It also reflects the concerns with Nature, Nurture and lineage that inform other twelfth- and early thirteenth-century texts such as Guillaume d’Angleterre and the Enfances Vivien. Critics have long recognised that the fils à vilain theme occupies a peculiarly prominent place in Partonopeus,7 which makes it all the more surprising that there has been no detailed study of this aspect of the text since Fourrier explored its possible historical referents in 1960 (pp. 411–28). The theme makes no less than three overt appearances in our romance, all of them substantial and fully integrated into the overall narrative economy of the poem. In the prologue it occurs in both a politically motivated rewriting of the history of Troy and a genealogy of the kings of France. It shapes a long episode dealing with an invasion of northern France by the pagan King Sornegur, and returns in the first part of the Continuation, which tells the story of Sornegur’s nephew Anselot. Some idea of the significance of the theme in Partonopeus can be gleaned from the fact that, of 199 occurrences of the term vilain across the whole manuscript corpus, 145 (72.8%) come in passages devoted to the fils à vilain, and the phrase fils à vilain itself occurs no less than 57 times. Although the hero himself never makes the mistake of relying on low-born advisors, he moves in a world where key players suffer at the hands of the fils à vilain, and he comes from a family that has a direct connection with just such a figure. The linking of the theme to the idea of lignage via the hero’s genealogy and the blood relationship between Sornegur and Anselot provides further evidence of how deeply it is embedded in the text’s exploration of questions of power, birth and courtly values.

A programme for reading: the prologue The long prologue to Partonopeus de Blois divides readily into two main sections: an authorial justification for the work and a genealogy of the hero. As well as arguing for the validity of composing historical fiction in the vernacular (vv. 77–82), the first section establishes a framework within which the remainder of the prologue (and, by extension, the poem as whole) should be interpreted. The two key elements of this framework are, firstly, a coded

6 On the ministeriales and their place in the structure of society, see Bumke, pp. 33–5. Bumke includes a telling quotation from Lampert of Hersfeld criticising Henry IV (emperor from 1084 to 1105) for having promoted non-nobles to positions of honour and for plotting with them to ‘exterminate’ the blood nobility (p. 35). 7 See, for example, Sneyders de Vogel, ‘La Suite du Parthénopeu de Blois et la version hollandaise’, pp. 18 and 21; Moret, L’Originalité de Conrad de Wurzbourg dans son poème “Partonopier und Melior”, p. 88; Bruckner, ‘From Genealogy to Romance’, pp. 33–4.

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declaration of aemulatio in the form of a comparison of three types of birdsong,8 and, secondly, an emphasis on the poet’s youth and leisure, and the delight he takes in composition.9 This sets the scene for some light-hearted jousting with familiar texts in the second section, which in turn provides an additional programme for reading the narrative that follows. The second part of the prologue provides a resumé of the Trojan War and traces the ancestry of Partonopeus back to Marcomyris, the youngest son of King Priam, who was supposedly smuggled out of Troy by his nurse and taken to Italy on one of Eneas’s ships. The part of the genealogy that tells of the fall of Troy can be seen as a deliberate and humorous rewriting of Eneas and the Roman de Troie. One of its objectives is to undercut the literary propaganda of Henry II of England by proposing an alternative vision of Troy and a new dynastic myth linking its true legacy with France rather than with Britain.10 Another is to introduce the fils à vilain theme and establish a pattern of allusion, displacement and disjunction that defines each of its subsequent appearances. In this version of events King Priam is a very different figure from the noble monarch proposed by Benoît de Sainte-Maure: according to the Partonopeus poet, the two principal reasons for his downfall were, firstly, his pride, and, secondly, the fact that he had vested authority in ‘un serf [t]rové’ (‘a serf and a foundling’, v. 177).11 The serf is identified as Anchises, no longer the venerable father figure of Virgil’s Aeneid but a man ‘plains d’envie,/ De contens et de felonie’ (‘full of envy, contentiousness and treachery’, vv. 305–6), who claimed that he was descended from the gods in order to cover up the fact that he was a foundling. This unexpected picture of Anchises is developed at some length and the narrator invites those who never knew the true story of his involvement in the fall of Troy to listen while he relates it word by word (vv. 187–8). There could hardly be a more explicit challenge to the familiar narrative established by Virgil and his Old French adaptor. The irredeemable otherness of Anchises sets the pattern for the fils à vilain figures who appear later in the narrative: explicitly labelled a serf on two separate occasions (vv. 177 and 282),12 he is

8 9

Eley and Simons, ‘Poets, Birds and Readers’, pp. 2–4. Gally, ‘Etre ou ne pas être oiseus. Lecture de quelques prologues du XIIIe siècle’, p.

108. 10 11

Simons and Eley, ‘The Prologue’, pp. 7–8. Gaullier-Bougassas explains this negative portrayal of Priam in terms of the poet’s desire to avoid placing the blame for the destruction of Troy on the Greeks, whom the twelfth-century audience might have identified with the Byzantines, and hence with Melior (‘L’Orient troyen des origines: l’orient byzantin de Mélior et l’occident français dans Partonopeus de Blois’, pp. 298–9). 12 It is not clear whether the poet makes any real distinction between the serf and the vilain (strictly speaking, a free-born peasant), or whether he uses the term serf for Anchises as a way of indicating historical context.

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also described as a ‘fils a diable’ (‘the son of a demon’, v. 253) and is further compromised by the disturbing and unnatural phenomenon of having no identifiable family.13 This being so, we are hardly surprised to learn that he betrayed Troy to the Greeks for personal gain, and then calmly stowed his treasure on his waiting ships and sailed away with his son Eneas to conquer Italy. The negative portrayal of Anchises in this section of the prologue is not, however, entirely of our poet’s own invention. It represents an extrapolation from the less well-known (to modern readers) of the two conflicting traditions relating to Aeneas that the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity. The more familiar of these, given definitive expression by Virgil, portrayed Aeneas as a hero favoured by the gods, who was destined to preside over the rebirth of a glorious civilisation in Italy. The other, derived from the De Excidio belli Troiani of Dares the Phrygian, painted him as a cowardly traitor who brought about the fall of Troy in collaboration with Antenor. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, following Dares, had made Anchises into a minor character who was never explicitly identified as the father of Eneas.14 The vernacular romance of Eneas had restored the family connection in the minds of the courtly audience, but it also had to acknowledge the existence of the alternative tradition. Mora-Lebrun has shown how the Eneas poet exploits the idea of Aeneas’s guilt to recreate Virgil’s epic as a story of individual redemption, in which the hero has to atone for his ‘original sin’ in relation to the destruction of Troy.15 This rewriting involves some subtle negotiation between competing narratives, which may have given our poet the idea of introducing his own deliberately fractured blend of the two traditions. Partonopeus develops and embellishes the negative implications of the portrayal of both Anchises and Aeneas in the works of Dares and Benoît, but combines them – initially, at least – with the Virgilian premise that they are father and son. The logic deployed here is impeccable, if not altogether serious. If Anchises is the father of a notorious traitor, then he must also be a

13 It is worth noting that abandoned children of the nobility in twelfth-century French literature, such as the heroine of Marie de France’s Le Fresne, are invariably accompanied by some token of their status that facilitates their eventual recognition as the offspring of aristocratic parents. In the Continuation, when Partonopeus cites Xerxes the Persian as an example of a fils à vilain with integrity, Anselot claims that Xerxes’s mother Lavain was found abandoned, covered in a silk cloth, and so must have been ‘de halt lin’ (‘of noble lineage’, v. 11039). 14 In the Roman de Troie Anchises appears only twice, once with Antenor, Eneas and Polidamas, as one of those who favour returning Helen to Menelaus (vv. 24471–5), and again with Antenor and Eneas leading the sack of Troy (vv. 26132–8). In the latter instance, all three men are described as ‘feus e cruëus e desfaez’ (‘treacherous and cruel and disloyal’, v. 26138). 15 L’”Enéide” mediéval, passim.

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rotten apple, since ‘maus fruis ist de male raïs’ (‘bad fruit comes from a bad rootstock’, v. 307). Nothing could be more rotten in the eyes of the aristocratic audience than a fils à vilain acting as justice and advisor for a ruler of Priam’s status. The fact of Anchises being a foundling makes matters even worse, carrying as it does the implication of illegitimacy – to say nothing of an echo of Edyppus from the Roman de Thèbes, another getés who went on to commit parricide and incest. The attribution to Anchises of demonic parentage is probably a humorous extension of the classical tradition according to which Aeneas was the son of Aphrodite, inflected by the tendency of Christian writers to identify the pagan deities of classical literature as devils.16 It may also reflect the key role of Anchises in both the Aeneid and Eneas as an inhabitant of the underworld who prophesies the future to his son. On the other hand, our text also follows the positive tradition in depicting Eneas as a noble and god-fearing man. Virgil’s pius Aeneas is referenced in the description of his Old French counterpart as ‘dols et pi[u]s’ (‘gentle and compassionate’, v. 301; my emendation, based on the BGP reading); at the same time, Eneas is presented as a feudal role model who combines the key virtues of wisdom and prowess (v. 304). The romance thus openly acknowledges both strands of its literary heritage, and in so doing raises an uncomfortable question. How can Eneas, the future founder of Rome, be the son of a serf, with the blood of devils in his veins? At this point, the Partonopeus poet draws attention to the disruptive nature of his narrative by overtly attempting to paper over the crack that he has just created. The problem is resolved after a fashion by the narrator asserting that Eneas must have been Anchises’s stepson, rather than his true son, for the logic of v. 307 demands that sound fruit must come from an untainted rootstock.17 There follows a short passage praising any lady married to a man of low estate who manages to ensure that her son does not inherit his father’s ignoble blood: France dame soit ennoree Qui a [frarin] est mariee, Qui si bel maine son engin Que ses fils ne seit de put lin! Miols vaut bons fils [en pechié] nés Que mauvais d’espouse engenrés. (vv. 309–14) A noble lady married to a low-born wretch should be congratulated if she cleverly contrives things so that her son does not have base 16 Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods. The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, pp. 42–5. 17 This type of partial resolution of narrative problems is one of the poet’s ‘basic gestures of noticeability’: see Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation, pp. 47–58. See also Chapter 3, pp. 82–84.

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blood! Better a good son born in sin than a bad one fathered in wedlock.

Although the poet never says in so many words that Eneas was the illegitimate son of an unknown father, the implication is clear (and, incidentally, the scene is also set for a narrative in which a franche dame manages to manipulate sex and marriage to her own advantage).18 This second disruption of the bloodline mirrors the poet’s own treatment of inherited traditions, which he skilfully denatures for the amusement of his audience. The prologue’s hybridised version of the fall of Troy is designed not only to undermine the claims of Eneas and the Roman de Troie to represent the truth about ancient history but also to provide a knowing commentary on accepted notions of the translatio studii et imperii. If Eneas is not the offspring of Anchises after all, then Rome was not founded by a fils à vilain, but an unspoken question still remains: how valid is Rome’s hegemony if the city and its empire owe their existence to a bastard, conceived in premeditated adultery? This genealogical disjunction between Troy and Rome is explicitly contrasted with the unbroken line of succession that the poet then traces from Marcomyris to the kings of France.19 Again, the implication is obvious: the only true translatio operates directly from Troy to France, bypassing Rome altogether. Such apparently playful rewriting of history may have had a particular resonance in the context of French anxieties about the power and ambition of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The remainder of the story of Eneas in the Partonopeus prologue introduces another contradiction, one that remains unresolved and can only be explained in terms of the deliberate signposting of a faultline that we noted in the Introduction.20 When Marcomyris grows up he bears such a striking resemblance to Hector and Paris that his foster mother flees with him to France, afraid that the exiled Trojans will discover his true identity. Once there, the young man reveals that Eneas has undergone a complete change of character: no longer sages and pius, he has become a cruel oppressor of the peoples he conquers in his new homeland (vv. 371–82). The startling re-appearance of the negative Aeneas in Italy can be read as another gibe directed at the rival dynasty to the east, designed to evoke Barbarossa’s imperial ambitions, including his Italian campaigns of 1155–66, which resulted in the formation of the Lombard League in 1167 to oppose him.

18 19

Bruckner, ‘From Genealogy to Romance’, p. 33. On the representation of the bloodline in the romans d’antiquité, see Stahuljak, chapters 1 and 5. Stahuljak does not discuss the Partonopeus poet’s mischievous rewriting of Eneas and the Roman de Troie. 20 On other aspects of contradictoriness in Partonopeus, see Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, Chapter 7, esp. pp. 291–8.

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There seem to have been genuine fears during the 1160s that Frederick would march into France to try and seize Pope Alexander III, which might explain the emphasis given here to the need for the Gauls to start building defences against invasion.21 Identifying a real-life model for Eneas the empire-builder may have amused the original audience, but it does not solve the problem of how a man who is so clearly not the son of Anchises in this version of events appears ultimately to have inherited his stepfather’s bad blood. In some respects these lines might be seen as foreshadowing later episodes in the poem where a ruler’s conduct is changed for the worse by prolonged contact with a fils à vilain. The fact that Anchises participates in the initial conquest of ‘Romenie’ alongside Eneas might support this view. While underlining the fundamental opposition between franc hom and vilain, the description of their long journey to Italy could also be seen as establishing the conditions for the subsequent corruption of the one by the other:22 Eneas oirre od Anchises, Li bons, li beaus od le mauvais, Par mer, par terre, et nuis et jors. (vv. 315–17) Eneas travelled with Anchises, by land and sea, day and night, the good and noble man alongside the bad.

If this was the poet’s intention, however, it is odd that the passage in which Marcomyris explains that Eneas has become a tyrant who poses a threat to all his neighbours contains no reference to the baleful influence of Anchises. The radical nature of the rewriting here – a complete inversion of the Virgil-Eneas tradition and of the poet’s own initial characterisation of Eneas – suggests that something else is being drawn to our attention. The incompatibility between the prologue’s two versions of Eneas is perhaps best construed as a deliberate flagging-up of the ways in which the story of Partonopeus is to be understood. The idea of an embedded programme for reading the romance may be another of our poet’s debts to Eneas, where the preliminary account of the Judgement of Paris sets out the structure and themes of the story and establishes a meta-narrative for the prin-

21 See Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics, pp. 102–4 and 248–54. This rather obvious allusion would make little sense if the first version of Partonopeus had been composed after 1176, when the Lombard League inflicted a heavy defeat on Barbarossa at the battle of Legnano. This defeat effectively marked the end of his attempts to restore the empire to the size and prestige it had enjoyed under Charlemagne. 22 Gaullier-Bougassas traces the corruption back to Eneas’s education by Anchises, but does not explain why it apparently takes so long for his upbringing to bear fruit ( ‘L’Orient troyen’, p. 299).

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cipal protagonist’s actions.23 The initial contradiction in Partonopeus paves the way for other obvious discontinuities and alerts the audience to two important narrative strategies. In the first place, it tells them that the story they are about to hear will not only rewrite a variety of familiar sources, but may also fuse different versions of the same material and – more unusually – engage in conscious self-rewriting (as we shall see in Chapter 4). Secondly, it is likely to contain episodes that fictionalise current and recent events to create a number of inter-related political subtexts.24 The way in which the poet reconfigures Anchises as a negative version of the Virgilian father- figure reveals a desire to critique the Plantagenet milieu from which both Eneas and the Roman de Troie emerged. The sudden re-identification of Eneas with this undesirable predecessor shifts the focus towards the Holy Roman Empire and suggests that we can expect other rapid changes of subtext to follow. It is no accident that this blueprint for reading Partonopeus subtends the career of the first fils à vilain that we encounter. Without this preliminary training exercise the audience might be ill-prepared to understand the more complex manifestations of this figure in the remainder of the main narrative. The final section of the prologue also guides our interpretation of the romance as a whole by establishing a pattern, likewise presented in genealogical terms, which dictates that the hero’s life will be shaped by the careers of low-born advisors or those they advise. Once Marcomyris has made the symbolic journey across the Alps to Gaul he founds a new Trojan dynasty that eventually produces the first king of France, Pharamond, great-greatgreat-great-uncle of the hero Partonopeus. Having correctly glossed the allusions to the Holy Roman Empire we might expect that the French royal house will now function as a counter-example to Rome, and, indeed, the poet is at pains to point out that the succession passes legitimately ‘d’oir en oir’ (‘from rightful heir to rightful heir’, v. 395) from Marcomyris to Pharamond, and thence to his son Chlodion (Ludon or Ludom in the majority of the manuscripts), his grandson Maroveus, his great-grandson Childeric and his greatgreat-grandson Clovis, in whose reign the main narrative begins.25 Interestingly, this insistence on proper linear succession seems to open up the possibility that the past will repeat itself. Priam’s original sin of promoting a serf recurs in a later generation: the second French king, Chlodion, distrusts his nobles so much that he confers high office on more than one fils à vilain, and only his early death saves the kingdom from disaster. Clovis is the first 23 Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Reading Myth: Classical Mythology and its Interpretations in Medieval French Literature, pp. 33–6. 24 On the ‘systematic’ projection of contemporary events and structures into the fictional past in Old French narrative, see Boutet, Formes littéraires et conscience historique: aux origines de la littérature française 1100–1250, Chapter 1, esp. pp. 17–26. 25 On other ways in which the Partonopeus prologue contests the Roman foundation myth, see Joris, ‘“Thèbes avec Troie”’, pp. 71–4.

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king described as being cortois, and it is significant that the initial qualities highlighted in the poet’s long account of his virtues are, firstly, that he never used mercenaries in his many campaigns, always rewarding his knights with fiefs, and, secondly, that he never raised a fils à vilain to the status of clerk or knight. Given that Clovis is introduced as having lived ‘molt sagement’ (‘very wisely’, v. 449), we can conclude that one part of wisdom consists in never blurring the boundaries between the landed aristocracy and ‘the others’.

The fils à vilain defeated: Sornegur and Marés The foregrounding of the fils à vilain theme throughout the genealogy section of the prologue not only teaches the audience how to read the text but also conditions them to expect a narrative development featuring a low-born advisor in the main body of the romance. This expectation is fulfilled in the first major episode in which the hero has the opportunity to demonstrate his prowess, namely the war against Sornegur. The use of the fils à vilain theme in the Sornegur episode appears at first sight to be relatively straightforward. The Scandinavian king Sornegur has invaded France, bringing with him Norsemen from Greenland and Orkney as well as contingents from Ireland and Denmark. The combined forces have penetrated as far as Gisors, where Sornegur has set up his headquarters, and have established a forward position at Chars, from where they are threatening the French king’s new castle at Pontoise. The night before a planned battle on the plain near Chars, Sornegur holds council with his barons: Kings Loemer of Norway and Maruchin of Orkney argue in favour of trying to find a peaceful settlement; their counterparts Faburin of Greenland and Fursin of Ireland favour combat. The last to speak is Marés, who belongs to Sornegur’s own household. He proposes manœuvring the young King Lohier of France into renewing his offer to buy off the invaders. Marés is not initially marked as anything other than a valid participant in the debate. He may not be of royal status, like the previous speakers, but he is introduced as count palatine and the monarch’s principal advisor; moreover, we are told that he is expert in law, and so he is well qualified to contribute to the discussions. His authority is evident from the fact that his plan finds favour with the majority of the barons. The outcome of the debate is not to Sornegur’s liking, but he finds himself outnumbered and is forced to agree to it. So far, so conventional: similar council scenes, with heated arguments between parties favouring combat or negotiations, are found in a number of chansons de geste, most notably the Chanson de Roland, as well as in the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman de Troie.26 26 There are some intriguing parallels between Sornegur’s council and Priam’s penultimate council in the Roman de Troie (vv. 24471–750): in both, a clash between opposing viewpoints is followed by a scene in which the monarch privately laments the ascendency of the anti-war faction and schemes with an intimate to subvert their plans.

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After the conclusion of the deliberations, however, things take an unexpected turn. Sornegur retires to his bed and laments that he has been betrayed by Marés, who it turns out is a fils à vilain whom he has promoted to high office and whose exactions have turned the king’s vassals against him. As a result, a significant proportion of Sornegur’s army is made up of men who are effectively mercenaries: they have joined the campaign in the hope of making money rather than to support their overlord. The length of this lament – at 100 lines it is more than half as long as the council scene itself – brings the fils à vilain theme insistently to the fore and forces a re-reading of the preceding debate. Sornegur’s words are given authority by his initial presentation as a valiant young man whose only defect is his pagan beliefs; as a result Marés is now clearly identified as an enemy figure. His key characteristics are spelt out through a series of repeated lexical items: he is a traitor (vv. 2542–3, 2637) and a coward; he was by birth povre et caitif (‘poor and wretched’, vv. 2550–51);27 he and his family are vil (‘base’, vv. 2551, 2573), and he has Sornegur’s men thrown vilment into jail (v. 2570); he is guilty of felonie (‘treachery’, v. 2582); he dishonours his master and the nobility (vv. 2541, 2569). He emerges as the negative image of courtliness, demonstrating neither a sense of honour, nor personal courage, nor respect, nor integrity, despite his rank and influence. As a consequence of these revelations, the seemingly conventional debate between proponents and opponents of battle becomes more problematic and more interesting. The audience is invited to consider, in retrospect, whether the majority decision was fatally tainted with vilenie as a result of Marés’s corrupting influence. The subsequent development of the episode also suggests that the involvement of a fils à vilain in matters of state has broader ramifications. Sornegur decides to overrule his council and arranges to settle the question of dominion over France by means of a single combat between himself and a French champion (a role reluctantly accorded by Lohier to Partonopeus). The working out of this alternative plan echoes the discussion of good and bad advice found in texts such as Béroul’s Tristan, and implies that a monarch is free (or perhaps even obliged) to reject decisions shaped by those whose values are inimical to the court. When Sornegur sends for a trusted clerk to help him contact the French king, the audience is treated to a further forty-eight lines of criticism of the low-born advisor, placed this time in the mouth of the king’s confidant. The clerk repeats Sornegur’s charge of felonie and also accuses Marés of showing one face to the king and another to his vassals (vv. 2673–6, 2687–90). As he sees it, Sornegur’s promotion of Marés has had far-reaching consequences:

27 The Old French terms can have moral as well as financial connotations, and are both repeated in successive lines.

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‘Tos li siecles est coreciés De ce c’un vilain tant proisiés Qu’en avés fait de nos segnor.’ (vv. 2655–7) ‘The whole world is angered and disturbed by the fact that you value a vilain so highly that you have made him master over us.’

The clerk exploits the polysemic terms siecle (‘the world in general’, ‘contemporary society’) and corecier (‘to anger’, ‘to shock or offend’, ‘to distress or grieve’) to suggest that Marés’s rise to power is not only an affront to the entire nobility but also a disruption of the whole natural order of things. The restoration of order through the neutralisation of the fils à vilain now becomes a narrative priority, alongside the need for the hero of the romance to prove himself by saving France from Sornegur. The way in which the Partonopeus poet reconciles these two imperatives demonstrates both his skilful manipulation of literary conventions and his talent for the subtle rewriting of current affairs. Once again, the author adopts the framework of a conventional literary set-piece – the description of two warriors settling the fate of nations in front of their assembled armies – but opens it out in unconventional ways to focus attention on the threat posed by non-noble officials. A long and virtuosic account of the combat between Sornegur and Partonopeus ends with the hero gaining the upper hand, but, before he can press home his advantage, Marés storms the field with 3,000 armed followers, convinced that he can win back favour with Sornegur by saving him from defeat. For all his ingenuity, he has fatally misjudged the situation: as a vilain by birth, he has no understanding of the concept of honour on the field of battle. Far from being grateful to Marés, Sornegur commands him to withdraw; when Marés refuses, the king calls for the death of the traitor who has dishonoured him, and tries, unsuccessfully, to prevent Partonopeus being taken prisoner. At nightfall, Sornegur returns incognito to Pontoise along with the French, and there surrenders to Lohier, but not before he has made another long speech denouncing the fils à vilain (vv. 3569–620). Faburin and Fursin set out in search of Marés, kill him in his lodgings, and rescue Partonopeus. We might reasonably have expected the episode to end here: the hero’s military superiority has been demonstrated by the manner of his near-victory over a valiant opponent; France has been saved; the fils à vilain has been disposed of; courtly values have been re-affirmed through Sornegur’s honourable surrender and swearing of homage to Lohier. As it turns out, the poet devotes a further 170 lines or so to the aftermath of these events, including a detailed account of the legal consequences of the killing of Marés. The programme for reading set out in the prologue now comes into play. There, the addition of a coda portraying Eneas as a tyrant invited the audience to identify him with the Holy Roman Emperor; here, a second extension of the narrative beyond its natural end-point orients them towards

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another, more fully realised, political subtext. No sooner has Marés been dispatched than Faburin and Fursin start to have misgivings; together with Maruchin and Loemer, they cry mercy as soon as they encounter Sornegur, but he postpones consideration of their case until they have left France. The four kings then go to Partonopeus and beg him to intercede on their behalf if they can convince him that their action was justified. In a long speech Fursin sets out the grounds for acquittal, which are worth considering in some detail. Firstly, Marés had suborned Sornegur’s men and caused them to break the sworn terms for the single combat, for which he deserved to be put to death. Secondly, his intervention had given the spectators to understand that Sornegur was about to concede defeat, which had brought shame on the king. This constituted an act of treason, likewise punishable by death. Thirdly, those responsible for guarding the field have the right to kill anyone who interferes in a judicial combat between knights: Marés had forfeited his life by attacking Partonopeus. The kings would have killed him on the spot if they had been able to. Fourthly, Sornegur’s words – ‘Segnor, merci!/ Mors soit Marés qui m’a traï!’ (‘Have mercy, my lords! Death to Marés who has betrayed me!’, vv. 3475–6) – constituted a command to kill the traitor; in doing so at the first opportunity, they had only been performing their duty. The speech concludes with an offer to undertake judicial combat against anyone who might in future accuse Fursin of having committed a crime. Sornegur asks Fursin to make his declaration binding with a gage, he is seconded by Partonopeus, and so the matter is settled. There is nothing unusual per se in explicit discussion of legal matters within the framework of a courtly narrative. The author of the Roman de Thèbes devotes considerable attention to the question of whether Daire le Roux is guilty of treason for having allowed the enemy into his tower after he had been publicly assaulted by his overlord (vv. 7763–8146), and critics have long commented on the detailed legal proceedings described in Marie de France’s lai of Lanval. Nonetheless, certain aspects of this passage in Partonopeus de Blois do seem to confirm that there is more to it than simple imitation of two popular predecessors. To begin with, the guilt or innocence of Marés’s killers has no bearing on the main thrust of the narrative – in contrast to Lanval, where the hero himself is the defendant. Indeed, these legal discussions could be seen as a structural fault, unduly prolonging the Sornegur episode and delaying the crucial moment in the romance: that is, the hero’s disastrous breaking of his mistress’s taboo. Secondly, neutralising the threat to the ‘true’ nobility represented by the fils à vilain requires only that Marés be disposed of. Debating whether or not it was justifiable to kill him is superfluous in terms of this thematic development, and might even be seen as questioning the moral imperative which was so insistently expressed in the speeches attributed to Sornegur and his clerk. If the fils à vilain is such a threat to society, then surely his death should call for celebration rather than heart-searching. This raises the question of why the Partonopeus poet should

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risk undermining a theme that he had set out in the prologue, had so cleverly combined with the hero’s first military exploits and would return to, in no uncertain terms, at the beginning of the Continuation. The only plausible answer is that this section of the Sornegur episode was designed to resonate with something known to the poet’s audience, something that would add layers of meaning to the poem and reinforce the fils à vilain theme in other ways. In his discussion of Partonopeus, Fourrier argued that the poet’s foregrounding of this theme reflected concerns among the French aristocracy in the early 1180s about Philip Augustus’s reliance on non-noble administrators such as Bouchard le Vautre and Robert Clément (p. 425).28 There are two problems with this interpretation. Firstly, the same concerns were expressed in relation to Philip’s father Louis VII, and his grandfather Louis VI, so the presence of the theme in Partonopeus de Blois does not necessarily point in the young king’s direction.29 Secondly, the legal ramifications of the killing of a non-noble counsellor have no clear connection with events associated with either of the French kings. A more obvious point of reference – particularly if the original version of Partonopeus de Blois was composed in the early 1170s – is the murder of Thomas Becket. Is the ‘epilogue’ to the story of Marés an invitation to re-read the Sornegur episode through the prism of the events of December 1170? We have already noted that the council scene has to be re-interpreted retrospectively in order to appreciate the true nature of the role played by Marés. If Norris Lacy is right to see the ‘formal techniques [of medieval romances] as non-sequential, the proper method of reading them as retrogressive’, then a twelfth-century audience would have had no difficulty coping with a whole episode built around a political subtext whose presence was signposted only at the very end.30 Various aspects of this episode map convincingly on to the life and death of Archbishop Becket. To start with a relatively small detail, there is no obvious reason why the legal discussions should involve four kings. Only Faburin and Fursin were involved in the murder of Marés; Maruchin and Loemer had nothing to do with it, had vehemently opposed the kings of Greenland and Ireland when they argued in favour of war at Sornegur’s council and had supported Marés’s plan for ending the conflict. Why should they ally themselves with the guilty parties at the point when retribution is likely? Is this just a demonstration of aristocratic solidarity, designed to show 28 For an example of contemporary criticism of Bouchard, see Walter Map, De Nugis curialium, Dist. v, c. 5 (pp. 446–7). 29 Van Look and Kawcyzinski argued that the target of the Partonopeus poet’s criticism was abbot Suger, whose parentage was unknown, and who served under both Louis VI and Louis VII (Fourrier, p. 424, n. 331). The same point was made by Fisher, Narrative Art in Medieval Romances, p. 32. 30 Lacy, ‘Spatial Form in Medieval Romance’, p. 161.

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that any differences of opinion between nobles pale into insignificance beside a conflict between kings and a fils à vilain? This is certainly possible, but the four figures who come to make the case to Partonopeus do form an interesting counterpart to the four knights who killed Becket and whose fate exercised Henry II and church authorities in the years that followed the murder. More significantly, perhaps, part of Fursin’s case for the defence hinges on the interpretation of words uttered by Sornegur in the heat of the moment, when Marés had refused to obey his command. Did ‘mors soit Marés!’ (‘death to Marés!’) constitute a royal command to kill the disobedient counsellor, or was it just an imprecation, a non-specific wish for him to die before he could cause any more trouble for Sornegur? Here the parallels with the Becket controversy become more explicit. While Henry II never apparently uttered the exact words ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ he is recorded as publicly exclaiming, probably on Christmas Day 1170, ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’31 This outburst triggered the secret plot by William de Tracy, Reginald fitzUrse, Hugh de Morville and Richard le Bret that ended in Becket’s murder, and led to considerable debate as to where responsibility for the archbishop’s death ultimately lay. Henry himself imposed no punishment on the four, which has been seen as a sign that he believed they acted in good faith (Barlow, Thomas Becket, p. 258). Sornegur’s reaction to Fursin’s arguments implies that he too accepts responsibility for what has happened. It might be stretching the point too far to suggest that the first words of his response – ‘N’en demant plus/ Fors [que] seul le costume et l’us’ (‘I ask for nothing more than what custom and usage require’, vv. 3825–6) – allude to Henry’s championing of the Customs of Clarendon. Nevertheless, the issue of what constitutes a royal command to kill a troublesome subject is unmistakably written into this section of Partonopeus. Becket’s social background also invites identification with Marés. Coming from a merchant family, he was certainly not a member of the courtly classes and could legitimately have been described as ‘low-born’ by the man who raised him first to the chancellorship of England and then to an archbishopric. His fervent supporter John of Salisbury described him as ‘the distinguished offspring of a modest family’ (‘parentum mediocrum proles illustris’),32 while William of Canterbury likened him to a great cedar

31 ‘Inertes ac miseros homines enutrivi et erexi in regno meo, qui nec fidem ferunt domino suo quem a plebeo quodam clerico tam probrose patiuntur illudi’ (Edward Grim, Vita S. Thomae, p. 42). The translation comes from Barlow, Thomas Becket, p. 235. We can only speculate as to the Old French term used by Henry and translated by Edward as plebeo; vilain is certainly one possibility. 32 Vita sancti Thomae, p. 302.

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growing out of tamarisk bushes.33 Vernacular hagiographers clearly felt that they had to negotiate the question of Becket’s origins. When Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence describes Thomas as being ‘des barons de la cit [London] estraiz et alevez’ (‘descended from and raised by aldermen of the city [of London]’, v. 36), he is careful to choose a polysemic term (barons) that can be understood as ‘aldermen’ (or perhaps, more broadly, ‘worthy citizens’) in an urban context, while at the same time connoting the valour and nobility associated with true ‘barons’.34 Becket’s social promotion was as remarkable as that of Marés, plucked from obscurity by Sornegur, and made justiciar and seneschal of a kingdom. Both the real-life archbishop and the fictional count palatine had achieved unprecedented power. While there is no firm evidence that Becket used the wealth to which he had access as chancellor to enrich his friends and family, he had certainly lived like a king,35 was accused by contemporaries of lining his own pockets36 and had been associated with unpopular exactions such as scutage. He was the king’s favourite during these years, the most trusted of Henry’s household officials, and also his companion in war. In 1161 he participated in a military campaign in the Vexin, leading a force of some 2,000 knights in fighting around Gisors (Barlow, Thomas Becket, p. 61). After his return from exile in France, Archbishop Becket was widely believed to be guilty of treason, in that his attempt to excommunicate the bishops who took part in the coronation of Young Henry was an insult to both Henry II and his son, and therefore constituted lèse-majesté (Barlow, Thomas Becket, p. 235).37 It does not take too much imagination to see in Marés an exaggerated poetic reflection of a man whose career was well known in court circles in England and in France. If this is so, then Sornegur is inevitably cast in the role of Henry II, Becket’s patron and eventual enemy.38 Here, too, there are some interesting paral33 34

Vita et passio S. Thomae, p. 3. Writing ten years later (in 1184), Benoît of St Albans is less equivocal, and more concerned to locate Becket squarely in the tradition of aristocratic saints exemplified by the Vie de Saint Alexis: ‘Il esteit de Lundres né,/ Des plus nobles de la cité’ (‘he was born in London, from among the noblest inhabitants of the city’, vv. 19–20). 35 See William fitzStephen’s accounts of Becket’s liberality and his sumptuous embassy to France (Vita sancti Thomae, pp. 23 and 29). 36 Notably by Stephen of Bec (aka Etienne de Rouen) in his Draco Normannicus of 1169 (vv. 910–14); see also Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics, p. 188. 37 See also Barber, Henry Plantagenet, pp. 93 and 96. In Guernes de Pont-SainteMaxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas, Becket’s killers refer to him three times as ‘traitres le rei’ (‘a traitor to the king’, vv. 5502, 5515 and 5583). 38 The suggestion that Sornegur might be a fictionalisation of Henry II was first made by Keller, ‘Literary Patronage in the Time of Philip Augustus’, pp. 198–9. Keller links the Sornegur episode to the encounters between Henry and Philip Augustus near Gisors between 1180 and 1188 rather than to the murder of Thomas Becket.

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lels between the fictional and real-life characters. Sornegur is a Scandinavian king, a Northman – a Norman to anyone who knew their history, or had heard the careful explanation given by Wace in his Roman de Rou (Troisième partie, vv. 47–74, and Appendix, vv. 95–118).39 His invasion of northern France recalls the Viking invasions of the ninth century, a detailed account of which had become available to a vernacular audience for the first time thanks to the efforts of the Jerseyman.40 However, the precise geography of his campaign – headquarters at Gisors, raids towards Pontoise, showdown at Chars – maps more readily on to Henry II’s campaigns in the Vexin, particularly the campaign of 1167, which led to the capture of Thibaut of Champagne and the besieging of Louis VII’s brother Henry at Chaumont.41 Sornegur’s lengthy complaint about having to lead men who are interested only in receiving their soldees (‘wages’, vv. 2591–610) recalls the fact that Henry II was well known for using large numbers of mercenaries (Barber, pp. 93 and 96). ‘Norman’ aggression on the border of French territory by a monarch who had a notable contingent of mercenaries in his army could hardly have failed to ring bells with a French audience in the early 1170s. The only problem with this identification of Sornegur with Henry II is that it appears to clash with the anti-Plantagenet subtext evident in the prologue and elsewhere in the romance. Having thrown off the influence of Marés and acted in a most honourable and kingly fashion, Sornegur comes out of the episode in a very positive light, which does not seem to fit with a strategy of subverting Henry’s pretensions. We should note here that two rather different versions of Sornegur’s actions have been preserved in the manuscript tradition. Six out of the seven major witnesses present the version summarised here; but in MS B Sornegur is taken prisoner by the French, admits that

39 The explanation of the name ‘Norman’ in the ‘Troisième partie’ was recycled from the text given in the Appendix, which was probably composed in the early 1160s, at around the same time as the ‘Deuxième partie’, which deals with Rollo, William Longsword and Richard I (the ‘Troisième partie’ appears to date from the 1170s). Although Holden treats the Appendix text as a rejected first draft, this view is now being contested, notably by Le Saux, A Companion to Wace, pp. 154 and 162–9. It is therefore quite possible that this explanation was in circulation before Partonopeus was composed. 40 For details of the parallels between this section of the text and real-life Viking campaigns, see Wolf, ‘Partonopeus und die Wikinger’, pp. 431–46. Wolf suggests that the Sornegur episode may have been based on a lost Chanson des Normands; it seems more likely that the Partonopeus poet drew his inspiration from Wace. Wolf himself notes the close parallels between the presentation of the contingents in Sornegur’s army in Partonopeus and the list of Scandinavian kings given in the Brut (pp. 441–2), and between events of the fictional campaign and the account of Richard I’s accord with the French king Lohier in the Rou (p. 439). 41 On the relocation of this episode from the Vexin to Ponthieu in the Middle English version, see Thorrold, ‘Mistranslation or Modification? Toponymical Transformation in Partonope of Blois’.

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Partonopeus would have defeated him if Marés had not intervened, and agrees to do homage to Lohier, without any further mention of the fils à vilain. This alternative story-line presents a far less flattering picture of Sornegur – and, intriguingly, the editors of the new Lettres gothiques edition of the poem suggest that it may represent the original version of this part of the episode.42 So it is possible that the author initially intended Sornegur to come out of the Marés affair as a loser, admitting his inferiority to the young count of Blois. Be that as it may, even the majority version of the episode does not present an entirely flattering picture of the hero’s Scandinavian enemy. By his own admission, Sornegur was so blinded by the wealth that Marés acquired for him that he could not, or would not, see that it came from fleecing his barons. He had concentrated so much power in the hands of Marés that he himself was powerless to stop the fils à vilain turning his men against him. He had been wholly taken in by Marés’s flattery and false counsel. His belated recognition of the truth and surrender to Lohier are admirable, but cannot undo the damage inflicted by his own private confession, by the clerk’s reproaches and by his public admission of responsibility for promoting Marés to a countship. Sornegur is certainly instrumental in re-establishing courtly values, but he himself is unquestionably flawed and is forced to abandon his hopes of conquest. So even in this version the episode can be read as a subtle attempt to remind a French court audience of the recent difficulties of a powerful enemy, and to question his judgement in relation to a political appointment that brought him literally to his knees outside the cathedral of Avranches in May 1172 (Barber, pp. 160–62). One final point to be made in relation to this episode is the forceful way in which it illustrates the disruptive power of the fils à vilain. Not content with having Sornegur’s clerk declare that Marés has subverted the natural order of things, the Partonopeus poet seems determined that the audience should experience this for themselves in the subversion of literary conventions that accompanies his actions. Models such as the Couronnement de Louis lead us to expect that a single combat between the hero and his pagan opponent will end with the Christian warrior’s outright victory. Here, however, the single combat ends in chaos, with Fabur and Fursin striking out at their own side, with the winning combatant being taken prisoner and with the pagan leader passing himself off as a Frenchman before surrendering. Partonopeus is rescued by the men who were originally keenest to do battle with his forces, and who have just killed their own seneschal. For a while, the world is truly upside-down, as Partonopeus and Sornegur trade places, the former in Gisors

42 In their view, vv. 3499–618 of the majority version read like an interpolation or reformulation of an original similar to B (p. 251). It is frustrating that Koenig did not give his reasons for declaring that the B lines are ‘obviously not representative of the original’ (review of the Gildea edition, p. 251).

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and the latter in Pontoise, and as each man’s supporters believe he is dead while his enemies know he is still alive. Normality is duly restored, but the point has been made: if the fils à vilain is allowed to prevail, then the outcome is anarchy.

Ambivalent recurrences: the bishop of Paris and Farés Although the Sornegur episode ends with the defeat of Marés, the ways in which it is made to echo the Becket controversy make complete closure impossible. The audience is left with an uneasy feeling that the fils à vilain will return to haunt the protagonists, just as Becket’s memory hung over Henry II for the rest of his reign.43 Given the numerous instances of doubling that we identified in Chapter 1, it is perhaps not surprising that the Continuation should see a recurrence of the figure of the non-noble advisor. It is possible, however, to discern further traces of the theme in the main body of the romance, in the rather surprising person of the bishop of Paris, who is summoned by Partonopeus’s mother to help rescue her son from the fée she believes has enchanted him. The role of the bishop as a catalyst for the hero’s disastrous decision to break Melior’s taboo is inherently ambiguous. On the one hand, he embodies an orthodox Christian response to unregulated sex and the threat of diabolic intervention in human affairs. He is shown to react as a bishop should to the report that an important member of the nobility has come under the malign influence of a supernatural being. On the other hand, he is explicitly characterised as manipulative and deceitful in his dealings with Partonopeus. The narrator invites the audience to hear ‘con faitement il le sosduit’ (‘exactly how he misled him’, v. 4368; my emphasis), and later sums up the bishop’s intervention in a passage marked by an accumulation of negative associations: Tant li promet, tant l’espoente, Tant met en lui traïr s’entente, Tant l’a par losenge encanté, Toute en fera se volenté. (vv. 4423–6) He made so many promises and inspired such fear in him, he made such a determined effort to deceive him, he cast such a spell on him with his flattery that he would get him to do whatever he wished.

Bribery, threats, deception, flattery – hardly what we would expect of such a senior churchman. The demonising of the bishop fits into a pattern we have already noted, of

43 Barber sums up the ambivalent outcome of the affair in these words: ‘Thomas the archbishop had lost and won’ (p. 145).

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things never being quite what they seem in this fictional world. But extending this technique to a powerful figure in the church would surely be courting disaster unless the poet were sure that he could count on the complicity of his audience in such an attack. Once again, a narrative discontinuity alerts us to the presence of a subtext designed to appeal to a community with shared knowledge and values. The fracture line here is marked by an ecclesiastical irregularity which would surely have been picked up by the original audience. When the hero’s mother decides to take action she does not seek help either from her local prelate, the bishop of Chartres, under whose jurisdiction Blois lay throughout the Middle Ages,44 or from the most senior churchman in the region, the archbishop of Sens. Her sending in the first instance for the bishop of Paris is a breach of protocol, and there is no attempt to justify her action by establishing a kinship link between the countess and this particular individual.45 At the time Partonopeus was composed the bishop of Paris was Maurice de Sully (bishop from 1160 until his death in 1196), who was quite literally a fils à vilain. Maurice came of peasant stock and is said to have made no secret of his humble origins.46 As bishop, he was a strong supporter of Thomas Becket in his confrontation with Henry II over the relationship between Church and state.47 It is not hard to see how his views on the need to subordinate temporal to ecclesiastical power could have made him suspect in the eyes of great nobles on both sides of the Channel. Add in his peasant origin, and we have all the conditions necessary for an unflattering fictionalisation of Maurice de Sully as an antagonist of the noble Partonopeus. It cannot be a coincidence that in 1171 Maurice and the count of Blois found themselves involved – presumably on opposing sides – in trying to resolve a bitter conflict between the bishop of Le Puy-en-Velay and the vicomte de Polignac, one of the most determined opponents of the extension of ecclesiastical power (Mortet, p. 264). The identification of the bishop of Paris with de Sully is made all the more convincing by the narrator’s insistence on his bishop’s standing as someone ‘qui molt est sages de sermon/ Et molt seit bel dire raison’ (‘who was very skilled at giving speeches and sermons, and knew how to make an argument sound very convincing’, vv.

44 45

Souchet, Histoire du diocèse et de la ville de Chartres, I, p. 38. The lack of such a justification is all the more noticeable given that the bishop of Chartres at this period was Guillaume aux Blanches Mains, the younger brother of Thibaut V, who held the office from 1164 to 1176. 46 Contemporary and later sources all seem to agree that he came from a family of poor peasants in the seigneurie of Sully (Mortet, ‘Maurice de Sully, évêque de Paris, 1160–1196’, p. 115). According to one story, Maurice refused to receive his mother when he was archdeacon of Notre-Dame until she changed back into her peasant’s clothes, after having been given a more ‘suitable’ outfit by the ladies of the parish (Martin, Un grand évêque d’Occident: Maurice de Sully, pp. 109–10). 47 Mortet, pp. 241–53; Martin, pp. 143–6.

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4351–2). Maurice was famous for his erudition and, particularly, his vernacular and Latin sermons, copies of which travelled across the length and breadth of Europe (Martin, pp. 91–2).48 This allusion to another real-life fils à vilain underlines the importance of the theme in Partonopeus, while at the same time preparing the way for its final re-appearance in the Continuation. The consequences of the bishop of Paris’s intervention are more serious than the havoc caused by Marés; moreover, like his real-life counterpart, this fils à vilain figure is very much alive at the end of the episode in which he features. The possibility of future anarchy has not been removed. The continuing threat posed by the low-born individual who occupies a position of influence is highlighted right at the beginning of the Continuation. When out hunting one day, Partonopeus encounters a young man in the forest delivering an impassioned tirade against the fils à vilain. After a curious scholastic debate as to the merits of his argument, the hero recognises this individual as his long-lost squire Anselot. Back at court, Anselot tells his story: he had ended up in the service of the emperor of Rome, but his career, and his love for the emperor’s niece Euglar, had been wrecked by the scheming of the low-born Farés, initially his companion, later his enemy. As his name suggests, Farés is in many respects a reincarnation of Marés, and the association of this episode with Rome via the figure of the emperor is a deliberate echo of the Anchises–Eneas section of the prologue.49 But this final manifestation of the fils à vilain theme does more than simply remind the audience that non-noble advisors work against the interests of the nobility across Europe (the reliance of the Holy Roman emperors on the ministeriales would seem to be very much in the frame here). It also takes us into new territory by suggesting that the fils à vilain can threaten the very essence of cortoisie, namely ‘courtly’ love.50 The initial didactic treatment of the theme in the Continuation seems to have struck a particular chord with some of its medieval readership, who then added their own contributions to the discussion, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

48 The extant French sermons were composed between 1168 and 1175: see Robson, Maurice of Sully and the Mediaeval Vernacular Homily, p. 3. The negative qualities attributed to the bishop of Paris clearly echo those associated with Marés, described by Sornegur as a losengier (‘a flatterer’, v. 3581) and a traitor (vv. 3573, 3595, 3599, 3601, 3607), as well as someone who can easily persuade others to do what he wants. 49 As is the reference to Farés’s success being due to the devil in vv. 11207–8. The link with Marés is reinforced by Anselot’s use of the same arguments and lexis employed earlier by Sornegur: Farés treats nobles as vilz (v. 11205); enriches his own relatives (v. 11206); is two-faced (vv. 11209–34), a traitor (vv. 11238, 11356, 11586, 11606) and guilty of felonie (vv. 11233, 11579, 11584); he dishonours his master and other nobles (vv. 11587–8, 11599–604). 50 Collet and Joris note the contrast between the political activity of Marés and Farés’s influence in the emotional sphere (Introduction, p. 42), but without exploring its implications for the vilain–courtois opposition.

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It would seem, however, that the original poet also felt the need to re-assert the otherness of the fils à vilain by showing as well as by telling.51 The story of Anselot and Euglar goes on to develop the implications of the bishop of Paris episode, in that once again ‘the enemy within’ is not neutralised. But, whereas the bishop’s meddling proves fruitless, as Partonopeus and Melior are eventually re-united, this time the damage inflicted by fils à vilain is never repaired. The activities of Farés may have the beneficial effect of reuniting Anselot and Partonopeus, but this reunion comes at the price of the former squire’s love. The relationship between Anselot and Euglar is never referred to as fin’amor, but it has all the hallmarks of courtly emotion: it is intense, enduring, a source of joy and despair, socially exclusive (both parties are of royal blood) and gives rise to some truly lyric outpourings by the unhappy lover. More significantly, perhaps, Anselot’s mal d’amour functions as a comparator for the narrator’s own feelings (vv. 11753–74) in exactly the same way as the love between Partonopeus and Melior had done in the main body of the romance.52 Sanctioned by the same type of narratorial intervention as the relationship between hero and heroine, this love is marked as conforming to the norms of courtly romance. It is all the more significant, therefore, that Farés is shown to succeed in disrupting it. He does so firstly by denouncing Euglar’s secret affections to her uncle, and subsequently by accusing the empress of being too close to Anselot, after she has persuaded her husband to give his niece in marriage to the young man. Not only does Farés usurp the political birthright of the nobility by becoming the emperor’s prime counsellor, he also plots to replace Anselot in the emotional sphere by trying to blackmail Euglar into having a liaison with himself. The fils à vilain’s triumph over courtliness is symbolically enacted in the scene in which Farés goads the jealous emperor into killing Anselot’s beloved white greyhound Noon, an obvious metaphor for nobility, loyal affection and courage. In contrast to the Marés episode, this embedded narrative does not achieve closure with the destruction of the Other and the consequent reinstatement of courtly values. Instead, it remains wide open, with Farés unpunished and Anselot separated – permanently, it would seem – from Euglar, as a cautionary tale for both the inscribed and the

51 On the evidence for common authorship of the Anselot episode and the main body of the romance, see Chapter 4, pp. 118–23. 52 And as the Sultan’s unrequited love for Melior will do in the remainder of the Continuation: see Walters, ‘The Poet-Narrator’s Address to his Lady as Structural Device in Partonopeu de Blois’, pp. 233–4. Walters does not discuss the narrator’s brief identification with Anselot, which seems designed to smooth the potentially difficult transfer of emotional allegiance from the Christian hero to his pagan opponent. On the originality of the Partonopeus poet’s decision to combine a ‘lyric’ narrator with romance structures, see Halász, pp. 70–72.

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implied audiences. Anselot ends his story by stating that he has learnt never to trust a fils à vilain, and begs Partonopeus to follow suit: ‘Ja vilain n’ert mes amis mes Et je vos pri, biau sire dous, Que j’ain sor toutes et sor tous, Que ja por tant come vos vivés, Vilains ne soit vostre privés.’ A tant fine Ansiaus sa raison; N’a chevalier en la maison Ne li acreant bien son dit Et qui vilain n’ait en despit.’ (vv. 11678–86) ‘I will never be friends with a vilain again and I beg you, fair sweet lord, whom I love more than anyone, man or woman, never to have a vilain among your intimates for as long as you live.’ With this, Anselot finished his account; every knight in the building concurred with what he had said and expressed contempt for vilains.

His judgement is immediately validated as the whole knightly audience re-affirms the fundamental incompatibility between themselves and those outside the court. * The insistent re-appearance of the fils à vilain theme throughout Partonopeus de Blois suggests that the text aims to elicit the same response from its own listeners. In this respect it can be seen as voicing the concerns of the knightly classes in the face of the growing social mobility that threatened to undermine their privileged position in the later twelfth century.53 There is a considerable degree of overlap between the fils à vilain in Partonopeus and the enemy figures of later twelfth-century chansons de geste analysed by Sarah Kay, with the key difference that the latter, though also traitors to their lords, are invariably of noble birth. To borrow Kay’s terminology, Partonopeus is also a ‘political fiction’, but one designed to reflect more on a class-based distribution of power, and the identities that derive from it, than on ‘a society fissured by violence and fraught with contradiction’.54 It does this not by

53 On the ways in which Konrad von Würzburg’s portrayal of Marés was influenced by his status as a ‘Bürger’, see Ehlert, ‘In hominem novum oratio? Der Aufsteiger aus bügerlicher und aus feudaler Sicht.’ 54 Kay, The ‘Chansons de geste’ in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions, p. 200; see also pp. 177–99. Kay sees courtly romance as lagging behind epic in redirecting hostility towards an insider (‘the traitor at court’), rather than a member of an alien race, in response to ‘problems internal to the hero’s own society’ (p. 234). Partonopeus seems to represent a transitional phase in this process, in that the true enemy is the fils à vilain, but he is not a true insider: his birth still marks him as alien. The prevalence of the fils à vilain theme in both epic and romance texts of the 1170s and 1180s also suggests a need to

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creating an ideal world in which the low-born know their place, or even by ridiculing their attempts to rise above their station, but by presenting a series of disturbing case studies of individuals whose dubious talents have enabled them to gain the patronage of powerful men. There is a clear gradation in the deployment of these exempla that supports our analysis of the prologue as a pilot study designed to teach the audience how to read this theme (and others) in the remainder of the romance. In the case of Anchises, the fils à vilain is identified at the outset by the narrator and the audience is asked simply to witness his role in the fall of Troy. The final transformation of Eneas into a tyrant who seems somehow to have inherited his stepfather’s cruelty and aggression hints at more complex manifestations to come. Marés is not marked out as a fils à vilain on his first appearance, but it is not long before Sornegur attaches this label to him, forcing the audience to re-evaluate their first impressions and learn that a low-born advisor can look for all the world like an aristocrat. The story of Farés shows how hard it is for a young and inexperienced nobleman to see through a surface veneer of courtliness, and how great a threat his failure to identify the fils à vilain can be. While the same essential defects are highlighted in all three figures, there is also a progression from the purely political upheavals associated with Anchises and Marés to the emotional damage inflicted by Farés. What marks these men as enemy figures is not their non-Frankish nationality, but their lowly birth and their antagonism to values that are traditionally regarded as courtly: honour, loyalty, integrity, and a certain respectful way of loving.55 They are all the more dangerous for being in the court, but not of it. It is not clear whether the recurrence of this theme in Partonopeus was dictated by the poet’s desire to fictionalise real-life personalities or prompted by other considerations and just happened to converge invitingly with recent events. The Marés episode seems to be informed by the Becket controversy, and it is possible that the presence of the fils à vilain in the prologue was designed to prepare the way for this plot development. The figure of Maurice de Sully certainly looms large in the episode of the bishop of Paris. However, the foregrounding of the theme in the Anselot episode suggests a level of engagement that goes beyond topical allusion. For the courtly readers of this poem, the fils à vilain does seem to focalise a range of deep-seated anxieties about government and identity. A key feature of the romance is the way in which these anxieties are

nuance Kay’s assertion of a clear differentiation of the two genres in this period in relation to their enemy figures. 55 Partonopeus presents a picture of a world that readily accommodates geographical mobility (the hero’s two closest companions, Anselot and Gaudin, hail from Scandinavia and Spain respectively), while rejecting the idea of permeable boundaries between social classes.

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projected onto an insidious enemy whose rise to power demands the connivance of misguided sovereigns. Repeated references to the degree of influence conferred by Priam, Sornegur and the emperor on Anchisés, Marés and Farés respectively suggest that the latter embody concerns not only about the breaching of traditional social divisions but also about the growing centralisation of power in this period. One of the functions of these figures is surely to provide a mechanism for an indirect critique of kings who seek to reduce the role of the nobility in government. At the same time, the threefold use of the fils à vilain theme in a romance that has such a clear genealogical framework produces a curious variation on the idea that ‘birth determines values’, which Bruckner sees as underpinning the theme (‘From Genealogy to Romance’, p. 33).56 While the fils à vilain can never share the values of the court by virtue of being born outside its circle, rulers who once betray those values by promoting the uncourtly seem to introduce a heritable taint into their bloodline. Priam promoted a fils à vilain, and some of his descendants fell into the same trap; Sornegur was completely taken in by Marés, and his nephew suffered at the hands of another such impostor. This link to lignage makes the theme more open-ended than the individual case studies might imply. At one level, the influence of the fils à vilain is seen to be neutralised: Anchises’s bad blood is apparently prevented from contaminating the founding dynasty of Rome; Marés is killed; Anselot’s link with Farés is broken and he is re-united with Partonopeus. However, Anselot is saved only by exile and loss, Farés remains unpunished, and the text is ultimately ambivalent about the extent to which monarchs may heed its cautionary tales. The binary opposition courtois–vilain is nuanced by a tacit acknowledgement of a more complex reality.57 Although the three major fils à vilain figures in Partonopeus de Blois are firmly excluded from the hero’s polities, the possibility of a future threat is not. Alongside the wish-fulfilment narrative of Partonopeus’s rise from thirteen-year-old vallet to emperor of Byzantium lies a much less comfortable story grounded in the equally meteoric rise of other, more pernicious, elements of society.

56 The genealogical framework in Partonopeus functions in a similar way to lignage in the prose Lancelot. Hahn’s comment that ‘[genealogical] knowledge provides a context within which adventures in the narrative present may be understood, for they often stem from unresolved problems in the past’ (‘Genealogy and Adventure in the Cyclic Prose Lancelot’, p. 139) is particularly relevant here. 57 Cerguiglini-Toulet argues that binary modes of thought began to break down towards the end of the twelfth century, giving way to a different mentality that privileged paradox rather than dualistic oppositions (‘Penser la littérature médiévale: par-delà le binarisme’, p. 3; see also Pensom’s riposte, ‘Littérature? Le défi du texte’, passim). The chevalerie–clergie distinction is also blurred in Partonopeus: the warrior king Lohier is a clerc, while the clerk Gautier is a notable warrior in the Continuation.

Chapter 3 Walter Map and Other Animals WALTER MAP Partonopeus AND OTHER de BloisANIMALS

The fils à vilain theme examined in Chapter 2 is only one of a number of unifying threads that run through Partonopeus de Blois, helping to tie its various rewritings more closely together. Others include the frequent interventions of the ‘lyric’ narrator who constantly aligns the progress of his own extra-diegetic love-affair with the changing fortunes of the hero and heroine, and the regular appearance in the central section of the narrative of women characters who act as as adjuvants and obstruants for the hero (Urraque, Persewis, Armant’s wife versus the hero’s mother and the niece of the king of France). One thread that runs consistently through the whole poem is the presence of animals and birds, and the use of animal imagery. The first section of the prologue features a skylark, a nightingale and an oriole that represent three different approaches to literary creation. The lark re-appears at the end of the A version of the text, alongside a corn bunting, a quail and a raven, in a metaphorical prelude to the triple wedding of Melior, Urraque and Persewis.1 The great forest of the Ardennes is the scene for three important episodes, each of which stresses the variety of creatures to be found there: elephants, lions, snakes, dragons, boars, leopards, bears, tigers and wolves are all mentioned, in a careful mingling of the familiar and the unexpected. In Chapter 1 we saw how two wild boars in the Ardennes are used to add layers of meaning to the portrait of the hero and to position the narrative at the intersection of the Breton lai and the dynastic romance. Pierre-Marie Joris has explored the role played by the black horses and dogs associated with Melior’s kingdom in alerting the audience to the text’s subversion of conventional associations.2 We have also seen in the previous chapter how Anselot’s white greyhound Noon functions as a symbolic corrective to the pernicious figure of the non-noble advisor. The second part of this chapter will discuss the animal analogues used to describe the fils à vilain in the introduction to the Anselot episode. As well as revealing some interesting beliefs about particular creatures, these analogues provide two miniature case studies of the mechanics of interpolation in the Continuation. We will also explore a curious connection between them and the De Nugis curialium of Walter Map,

1 2

Eley and Simons, ‘Poets, Birds and Readers’. ‘Note sur le noir dans le Partonopeu de Blois’, pp. 143–5.

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which may shed some light on the making of one version of our romance. We begin, however, with two animals that appear in a central episode of the main narrative and provide a point of entry into understanding the underlying structure of the romance. They will also, incidentally, enable us to establish which version of a key intertext was known to the Partonopeus poet and his first audience.

A horse, a lion and the Roman de Thèbes It could be argued that the pivotal episode in the main narrative of Partonopeus de Blois is not the hero’s breaking of Melior’s taboo and subsequent banishment from Chief d’Oire, but his decision one year later to seek death in the Ardennes, from where he is rescued by Urraque. This episode marks both the lowest point of his trajectory from thirteen-year-old huntsman to emperor of Byzantium, and the start of his new life as a more autonomous agent who renegotiates the terms of his relationship with Melior.3 The description of the hero entering the Ardennes, and subsequently being found by Urraque and taken back to Salence, occurs at the exact mid-point of the main narrative in MS A (vv. 5743–6272 in a text of approximately 12,300 lines).4 This description is framed by two parallel narratorial interventions announcing a shift of focus back to the hero after digressions involving Anselot and Persewis respectively: ‘De Parthonopé vos vuel dire,/ Ki se vuet livrer a martire’ (‘Let me tell you about Partonopeus, who meant to abandon himself to suffering and death’, vv. 5741–2);5 ‘Or commandons dames a Deu,/ Si dirons de Partonopeu’ (‘Now let us command ladies to God and speak about Partonopeus’, vv. 6273–4). Although the first of these interventions does not figure in A because of a lacuna between folios 33 and 34, the agreement of the other six manuscripts suggests that this framing was deliberately intended to draw attention to a key episode. The lacuna means that the first third of the account of Partonopeus’s suicide mission is absent from MS A. The evidence of the extant text suggests, however, that the original poem probably did not differ markedly from the other witnesses in its account of how Partonopeus’s horse was attacked by a lion, and how its cries were heard by the occupants of a passing ship, who then came ashore and rescued the hero.6 3 For a detailed analysis of the psychological aspects of this episode, see Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, pp. 80–102. 4 The text of A ends at v. 12082 in the Collet-Joris edition, whose numbering includes the lacunae that have been filled from B. The total of ‘somewhat over 12298 verses’ proposed by Smith (‘The Manuscript Tradition’, p. 7) allows for one missing folio at the end of A. 5 It is impossible to convey the full connotations of se livrer a martire in modern English: the use of this idiom implies not only that the hero is actively seeking to suffer, but also that he intends to become a martyr for love. 6 The text of A resumes at the point where the landing party find the dead lion:

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The idea of placing Partonopeus’s symbolic death and resurrection at the mid-point of the romance is probably derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, which is divided into two contrasting halves by the hero’s return from the underworld at the end of Book VI. In this case, the borrowing is unmediated by the vernacular Eneas, where the catabasis occurs approximately one-third of the way through the narrative, and greater emphasis is given to the Italian episodes of the hero’s progress.7 But if the diptych structure is derived directly from Virgil, the content of the episode that forms the hinge between its two panels is unmistakably a rewriting of the story of Capaneüs’s horse in the shorter version of the Roman de Thèbes. This story, which does not feature in the Thebaid, is intercalated into the description of the siege of Thebes, where it forms part of the build-up to the death of Capaneüs. The Capaneüs episode does not appear in the longer text as preserved in British Library, Additional 34114 (S), and there has been some debate as to whether or not it is a later interpolation. As a result of Aimé Petit’s detailed investigations, it is now fairly clear that it must have figured in the original version of the redaction of Thèbes found in Paris, BnF fr. 60 (B) and fr. 784 (C).8 The obvious similarities between Urraque’s rescue of Partonopeus from the Ardennes and this addition to Statius indicate that our poet and his audience in Blois must have been familiar with the shorter BC redaction of the Roman de Thèbes.9 The Thèbes episode tells how the horse was sired by a sea-demon (noitun) on a wild mare, who gave birth to her foal near a great rock on the sea-shore. It was a difficult birth, and the mare’s dreadful cries attracted a hungry lion from the mountains. The terrified horse abandoned her foal and fled, only to be caught and eaten by the predator. The helpless and starving foal was discovered next day by a local peasant, who took it home and had it fostered by a tame hind that he had raised. Later, he sold the young horse to the son of the count of Venice, who gave it to Adrastus in payment of a tournament ransom; Adrastus in turn gave the animal to Capaneüs (Thèbes, vv. 8968– 9032). All the key elements in the Partonopeus narrative are here: a horse, a hungry lion, the sea-shore, the horse’s neighing being heard from a distance,

Maruc identifies the palfrey’s blood and reconstructs the combat between the two animals before setting off to track down the horse. It is interesting that Yvain’s encounter with the lion which is to become his companion also takes place at the exact mid-point of Le Chevalier au Lion (Frappier, Étude sur ‘Yvain’ ou ‘Le Chevalier au Lion’ de Chrétien de Troyes, pp. 43 and 186). 7 On the shifting of the narrative centre of gravity in Eneas, see Baswell, ‘Men in the Roman d’Eneas: The Construction of Empire’, pp. 150–51. 8 Petit, ‘Un passage controversé du “Roman de Thébes”: La Capanéïde’. Walter suggests that a Celtic tradition may have been the Thèbes poet’s source for this episode (pp. 119–21). 9 Hue de Rotelande gives a character called Capaneüs a pivotal role in the closing stages of Ipomedon, which may suggest that he was also writing for a public that knew the short redaction of Thèbes.

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its flight, a helpless creature being rescued and restored to life. Characteristically, though, they have been transposed and re-ordered to suit a different narrative context and to demonstrate the poet’s mastery of borrowed materials. So, instead of the lion devouring the mare, the hero’s horse kills the lion with a well-timed kick before fleeing to the shore where its cries attract passing humans, one of whom replaces the peasant as rescuer. The helpless foal becomes the equally helpless Partonopeus, who has engineered his own abandonment in the forest. Precise details are also re-used, alongside the broader scenario: the fact that the foal in Thèbes is left lying in the grass ‘sanz norreture’ (‘without food’, Thèbes, v. 9002) re-appears in Partonopeus’s conversation with Urraque, where he describes himself as overcome by hunger, crawling across the forest floor in search of erbetes (‘small herbs’, vv. 6113–18). The differences between the two episodes indicate that they will have different outcomes: just as Partonopeus’s horse survives the lion’s assault, so the hero will not meet the same fate as Capaneüs.10 This positive reorientation of the story fits in with a general pattern noted by Dominique Boutet of vernacular writers turning away from the ‘stérilité’ and the ‘ruine sans remède’ of the Roman de Thèbes.11 The recasting of Partonopeus in the role of the new-born foal implies that this episode represents the hero’s rebirth, the start of his ‘second life’. The rewriting also privileges courtliness over chance. The peasant rescuer of Thèbes is transformed into an empress’s sister (in her own words, ‘almost a queen’, vv. 6011–14), and in contrast to his coming upon the foal by chance (Thèbes, v. 9001), the rescue of Partonopeus hinges on the exercise of will. Urraque insists on coming ashore to investigate the palfrey’s cries; when she comes across the emaciated figure in the forest, it is her compassionate request to hear his story and her aristocratic refusal to be rebuffed that lead to mutual recognition. While the peasant eventually receives thirty besants for the creature he saves, Urraque’s action places the accent on selfless generosity, as she and Persewis tend the hero and provide him with fine clothes and, ultimately, arms and a new horse. The description of this horse, Vairon, as ‘beaus sor tote rien’ (‘the finest creature of all’, v. 6885) and ‘fort et delivre et bon’ (‘strong, agile and sound’, v. 6898) may be an echo of the passage in Thèbes devoted to Capaneüs’s horse, which likewise insists on its speed and beauty: ‘N’en a pas trois en l’ost plus biax./ Bien ert aates et delivres’ (‘there were not three finer horses in the army; it was very swift and agile’, Thébes, vv. 9028–9). The horse’s name may also be an 10 This episode can also be seen as rewriting the combat between Partonopeus and Sornegur, during which the hero is likened to a lion shortly before killing his opponent’s horse: see Hüe, ‘Faire d’armes, parler d’amour: les stratégies du récit dans Partonopeus de Blois’, p. 119. 11 ‘De la translatio imperii à la finis saeculi: progrès et décadence dans la pensée de l’histoire au moyen âge’, pp. 68–70.

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allusion to Thèbes. Some scholars have interpreted OF vairon as ‘skewbald’12 – in other words, a horse whose coat consists of patches of white, brown and sometimes other colours. Capaneüs’s horse is described as having one white ear and one white haunch, while the rest of its coat is bay (Thèbes, vv. 9023–5). With its reversal of the roles of horse and lion, the rewriting in Partonopeus also establishes a pattern for the Anselot episode, where once again the king of the beasts will come off worse in an encounter with a domesticated animal. It is interesting that our poet includes in his account of the forest lion a brief scientific excursus emphasising its noble nature and reluctance to attack benevolent creatures: it has to lash itself into a fury with its tail in order to hunt the palfrey. This seems to represent a fusion of Pliny’s account of tail-flicking as a sign of aggression with a bestiary tradition, derived from Isidore, according to which the lion will only kill humans when it is starving.13 The poet is at pains to establish that this particular lion is ‘geons et familhos et aigres’ (‘starving, famished and ferocious’, v. 5776) before it launches its attack; this increases the suspense, making it all the more likely that the huge beast will turn its fury on the hero if it fails to catch the horse (or indeed after it has done so). Its ignominious death – from a fatal kick between the eyes after mistiming its attack – then raises a number of questions. Are we to see this as another aspect of the ‘courtlification’ of the literary model, in that the ravening predator of Thèbes (Thèbes, vv. 8983–5) is revealed to be so ‘gentils et debonaire’ (‘noble and gentle’) in our poem that it cannot quite steel itself to make an effective kill if the prey is not savage or aggressive (vv. 5785–8)? Is it significant that the wild mare of Thèbes has been replaced by a nobleman’s palfrey, and that, in this combat between the exotic forest creature and its civilised cousin, it is the wild beast who is defeated? The presence of lions, leopards and elephants in the Ardennes undoubtedly signals that this is a liminal space between the known world of northern France and the exotic East, with its connotations of the merveilleux,14 but it is important not to overstate the otherworldliness of our poet’s vision of the great forest. References to guivres (either vipers or, more probably, wyverns in this context), dragons, monsters and demons (vv. 512–23, 5752) may prepare us for unexpected happenings in the uninhabited zone beyond the boundary markers, but none of the human beings who enter this wilderness actually comes into contact with any supernatural creatures. In the opening sequence Partonopeus sees the tracks of snakes and ‘venimos vers volans’ on his way through the forest (‘venomous flying serpents’, v. 676), but does not 12 13 14

See, for example, the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. vairon. Histoire naturelle, XIX, 48–50; Isidore, Etymologiae, XII.2, 3. See Cavagna, ‘Le Désert-forêt dans le roman de Partonopeus de Blois’, and Weill, ‘Les Ardennes dans la chanson de geste’.

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encounter a single living thing during the two nights and one day he spends there. On his later suicide mission, he rides unharmed through a region infested by serpents before deciding to stop in a rocky area where the only animal to make an appearance is the lion. Anselot likewise fails to meet any malfez (demons or monsters) on his quest for Partonopeus (vv. 11113–14), while Noon proves his worth in the wilderness against bears, wolves and lions rather than anything with supernatural connotations. As we noted in Chapter 1, there is not even a white boar or a white hart to signpost the transition into a different kind of world. The animals of the Ardennes are largely off-stage presences; when they do eventually appear on scene, they are reassuringly down-to-earth and familiar.15 As Anselot’s story illustrates, it was common practice for great men in Europe to keep exotic animals such as big cats as status symbols; members of their courts would therefore have had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with non-European fauna even if they did not travel abroad. While this is no doubt one element in the strategy of demystification that transforms the fairy-mistress Melior into an heiress with an elite education, it also reminds us that the Partonopeus poet was something of a naturalist, with his feet very firmly in the real world of twelfth-century wildlife. The prologue and the final sequence of the A version reveal the breadth and depth of his knowledge of birdsong and avian behaviour. The Continuation includes carefully observed sketches of a terrified dog (vv. 11436–8) and a bear shaking the water from its coat after swimming (vv. 11426–7). The fact that the Sardinian bear is described by Anselot as ravaging the island’s vineyards (v. 11377) suggests that the poet also knew that bears are particularly attracted to sweet berries. It is worth noting at this point that when a lion appears in an Old French romance, modern readers should beware of identifying it with the sub-Saharan African lion who appears so frequently on their television screens. The classical and bestiary traditions with which medieval writers were familiar were inspired by the Barbary lion of North Africa (extinct since the early twentieth century) and the closely related Asiatic lion, Panthera leo persica, whose range once extended as far west as Greece, and which was widespread in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and northern India until the nineteenth century.16 Medieval audiences associated lions, and indeed elephants, with the Orient rather than with central or southern Africa, which remained

15 Cf. Lefèvre’s comment on the use of the supernatural in general in Partonopeus (‘Partonopeu de Blois’, p. 276): ‘Le merveilleux […] est ici intelligemment utilisé pour piquer la curiosité, mais sans inquiéter, et il se trouve, en définitive, ramené à un élément naturel et rassurant’ (‘the marvellous […] is used intelligently here to arouse curiosity, but without provoking anxiety; when all is said and done, it is reduced to a natural and reassuring element’). Keller attributes this rationalisation to the influence of the nominalists of Chartres (p. 205). 16 Nowell and Jackson, Wild Cats, pp. 3–39.

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unknown territory for them.17 Unlike their surviving African counterparts, male Asiatic lions conform more closely to the general image of cats as solitary creatures by spending long periods away from the small femaledominated pride, sometimes in sibling pairs, but often alone.18 So the lone lions encountered in European wildernesses by Partonopeus and Yvain are not entirely unrealistic, and are not necessarily a sign that the hero has entered the realms of fantasy. The encounter between a romance hero and a solitary lion can be read as a transposition of a real-world meeting of West and East, and the killing or taming of the lion as a desire either for military supremacy over the East or for more peaceful cohabitation with it. The constant re-appearance of lions in Partonopeus betrays a preoccupation with the relationship between West and East that is also visible in the hero’s repeated journeys between France and Constantinople and his confrontation with the Sultan of Persia.19 The ambivalent way in which the king of the beasts is presented in our romance speaks volumes about the mixture of fascination and unease that the East inspired in the French nobility in the 1170s.20 If the lion in the Ardennes represents the East, then its death at the hooves of the hero’s horse might be seen as foreshadowing the ending of the A version of the romance, where Partonopeus kills the Sultan – and we should remember that when the Sultan re-arms for the final combat, he chooses a shield covered in lionskin (A, vv. 10851–4). At the precise moment when all seems to be lost for the hero in the great forest, the poet provides us with a zoomorphic combat that figures not only his survival against the odds but also his final triumph over an eastern potentate. Given the evidence discussed in Chapter 2 for reading Partonopeus de Blois as a political fiction, it may be appropriate to adopt a political reading

17 Isidore notes that elephants used to come from Africa (i.e. northern Africa) as well as India, but are now (in the early seventh century) found only in India (Etymologiae, XII.2, 16). 18 Nowell and Jackson, p. 37. Today’s African lions become solitary only in old age, and tend not to survive for long once they have left the pride (Turner, The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives, p. 153). Their social behaviour may have evolved in response to an environment rich in large prey animals requiring cooperative hunting tactics. 19 Gaullier-Bougassas sees this relationship as a central concern of the period, reflected in Floire et Blancheflor, Cligés and Athis et Prophilias as well as Partonopeus de Blois (La Tentation de l’Orient, p. 69). 20 Le Goff, L’Imaginaire médiéval, pp. 36–7. Gaullier-Bougassas overemphasises the utopian vision of the East and the dream of peaceful union between East and West in Partonopeus (La Tentation de l’Orient, pp. 52–4; ‘L’Orient troyen’, pp. 300–303). Bercovici-Huard’s description of Byzantium in the romance as ‘le lieu de rencontres ludiques des princes chrétiens et païens, et non le cadre d’affrontements guerriers’ (‘the locus of playful encounters between Christian and pagan princes, not the setting for warlike confrontations’) overlooks both the killing of the Sultan at the end of A version and his hostile return in the Continuation (‘Partonopeus de Blois et la couleur byzantine’, p. 185).

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for this episode as well. The lion is a well-known symbol of monarchy, while the horse was a key adjunct of the knightly classes, and ‘the symbol of [the knight’s] military superiority’.21 Is the animal combat in the Ardennes then a coded comment on what may happen if a king misguidedly directs his aggression against his knights and barons instead of his true enemies? The lion incident in Anselot’s story certainly seems to have political overtones, set as it is within the frame of a cautionary tale about the over-reliance of monarchs on non-noble counsellors. The killing of the emperor’s pet lion by the hound Noon is a symbolic challenge to royal power, justified by the ruler’s failings (in this case, his failure to control himself, as represented by the animal that has not been properly caged).22 The killing of the lion in the forest may carry a similar symbolic meaning, while also reminding us of the essentially noble nature of this king of the beasts. Finally, this episode provides us with another example of a faultline in the text, a narrative discontinuity that draws attention to a site of intertextual fusion. In this case the discontinuity relates to the hero’s behaviour once he has penetrated deep into the Ardennes. Reaching an area where there is clear evidence of lion activity, Partonopeus decides that this is the place for him to meet the death he longs for: Des lions conoist bien les traces, Lor teches set et lor estraces. Es roches ot d’eals le murmure; Illoc se vuelt laissier destruire. (vv. 5759–62) He recognised the paw-prints of the lions, he knew their marks and their tracks, he could hear them growling among the rocks; this was the place where he intended to let himself be killed.

Yet instead of making himself an easy, visible target for predators, he lets himself down from his horse into the hollow trunk of a fallen oak tree (vv. 5763–9).23 Consequently, when the hungry lion emerges as evening falls, it sees the grazing palfrey rather than its rider, who is at least partially concealed from view. The logic of the overall narrative obviously requires that Partonopeus should survive his attempted suicide by lion;24 the poet’s 21 Hanley, War and Combat, 1150–1270: The Evidence from Old French Literature, p. 27. On political readings of the lion in relation to English kings, see Haist, ‘The Lion, Bloodline and Kingship’, pp. 8–12. 22 It is interesting to compare this incident with the scene at the beginning of Cantar III in the Poema de Mio Cid where a caged lion escapes and terrifies the court, but submits to being led back into its cage by the hero. Here the king of the beasts recognises the legitimate authority of a ‘king’ of men (vv. 2278–303 and notes p. 177). 23 The tree trunk must be hollowed out along its upper side like a canoe: Partonopeus could not let himself down directly from his horse into a hollow trunk that was open only at the end(s). 24 This motif is also found in Floire et Blancheflor, where the hero tries to end his life

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decision to achieve this outcome via a rewriting of the story of Capaneüs’s horse likewise requires that the lion should attack the palfrey rather than an ostensibly willing human target. Unlike a newborn foal, however, Partonopeus cannot lie unseen in the grass until he is rescued, so a hidingplace of sorts has to be invented. The resulting contradiction between the hero’s actions and his intentions is the surface sign left behind by the process of fusing a narrative development copied from the story of Cupid and Psyche (the rejected lover seeks death) with a rewriting of the Roman de Thèbes. The fact that there is no attempt to negotiate this awkwardness – for example, via a narratorial comment to the effect that Partonopeus was too weak to dismount in any other way – suggests that this continuity error is not an error at all, but another clue as to how to read the romance. The contradiction between the hero’s desire to die and his desire to conceal himself is actually made more obvious by the way in which the hiding-place is presented. Just like the city of Chief d’Oire in the opening sequence of the romance, the fallen tree trunk is not introduced objectively by the narrator.25 Rather, we see it through the eyes of the hero as he first notices it, then rides up to it, then observes its size and position, before finally lowering himself into it: I[l] voit .j. choque de chene, Si torne cele part sa rene. Li chaines fu chaüs par soi, Porris gisoit en .j. rif[l]oi. La choque est basse et grosse et lee. Parthonopex l’a esgardee; Si se lait dedans devaler. (vv. 5763–9) He saw the trunk of an oak tree, and turned his horse’s head towards it. The oak had fallen of its own accord and was lying rotting in a clearing. The trunk was low, thick and broad. Partonopeus looked at it, then let himself down [from his horse] into it.

These lines trace a coherent decision-making process, making it impossible to see Partonopeus’s lowering himself into the tree trunk as a random action prompted by a disordered mind. The idea that the hero is deliberately seeking a hiding-place is reinforced by an echo of the opening sequence of the romance, where he spent his first night alone in the Ardennes under an oak tree that gave him shelter until morning (v. 649).26 The absence of any explanation by entering the pit where his father’s lions are kept. There is a strong possibility that the lion episode in Floire is a later addition to the original version of the text, modelled on the Ardennes episode of Partonopeus (Lorna Bleach, PhD student at the University of Sheffield, personal communication). 25 See Bermejo, ‘Chief d’Oire dans Partonopeus de Blois: la ville comme espace de totalisation’, p. 226. 26 In the Middle English version, this first oak tree is also described as being hollow

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for this illogical action implies that the faultline is being deliberately drawn to our attention as a way of indicating that there is more to the following action than will initially meet the eye. By the end of the episode the attentive readers among the audience will have realised that this sequence is not just an inversion of the ‘predator kills prey’ motif, but a conscious remodelling of a story from the Roman de Thèbes designed to signal the transition to Part Two of the hero’s adventures. The litterati among them, who had studied Statius in the schools, may also have noticed that what is being reworked is not actually part of the Thebaid, but a modern addition to the classical story, created by the Old French adaptor himself. In other words, this episode foregrounds the mechanics of romance composition by making visible the different layers of vernacular rewriting (including a vernacular rewriting of a vernacular rewriting) that underpin it. The faultline reveals strata that might otherwise have remained hidden under a deceptively smooth surface; the fallen tree trunk that affords the hero shelter from the lion but then allows Urraque to find him figures a narrative that both hides and reveals its own mechanisms.27

Anselot’s tirade: context and content Faultlines of a different kind are evident in the first section of the Continuation. Unlike the very visible incongruities that signpost one poet’s fusing of disparate source materials, these tiny fractures betray the activity of one or more interpolators engaged in trying to ‘improve’ an original by amplifying its rhetorical developments. Smith did not discuss possible interpolations in Anselot’s tirade against the fils à vilain and his debate with Partonopeus, assuming that differences between witnesses in this part of the Continuation stemmed from abridgement of a longer original rather than expansion of a more succinct redaction. And indeed, without the electronic edition to simplify the process of collation and draw attention to tell-tale anomalies, it is unlikely that I would have looked any further than he did. My analysis will focus predominantly on the tirade rather than the debate, and in particular on the lists of analogues in which animals feature as prominently – and realistically – as they do in the main body of the romance. A reminder of the context and content of this tirade may be in order before we begin to explore its manifestations in more detail. After his marriage to Melior, Partonopeus enjoys a twelve-month honeymoon period before his peace is shattered by the return of the Sultan. Out hunting in the forest near Chief d’Oire one day, he hears a voice lamenting nearby. Spotting a young (McCobb, ‘The Traditional Background of Partonopeu de Blois. An Additional Note’, p. 608). 27 My thanks to Penny Simons for this insight into the self-referential nature of this episode.

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man who is clearly in some distress, he leans against an oak tree (once again the tree of choice for shelter and concealment) to listen to what is being said without revealing his own presence. The speaker launches into an impassioned denunciation of the fils à vilain, likening such individuals to a variety of undesirable phenomena which divide roughly into six categories. An initial overview including items such as arrogance among serfs, the howling of wolves and the devil setting traps for humans (vv. 10777–86) is followed by a second sequence in which the low-born advisor is equated with various creatures that have come too close for comfort, among them a toad in one’s hand and a scorpion in one’s armpit (vv. 10787–96). A third sequence links back to the Sornegur episode by comparing the fils à vilain to various perturbations of the natural order, including snow in August and storms in May (vv. 10797–806). After this comes a series of mainly social ills, such as rebellion against an overlord and strife between father and son, some of which were also seen as unnatural in the twelfth century (vv. 10807–16).28 A fifth sequence focuses on ravening aggression, with more animal analogues, including a werewolf and a starving bear (vv. 10817–26), while the sixth consists of a list of negative emotions and experiences such as shame, dishonour, poverty and treason (vv. 10827–36).29 Taken together, these sequences pick up and amplify all the key characteristics of the fils à vilain identified earlier in the romance. Partonopeus then makes his presence known and engages in debate with the stranger as to whether raising lowborn men to positions of power has always produced negative results. After a lengthy exchange of example and counter-example, Partonopeus finally identifies his interlocutor as Anselot, the squire he had previously abandoned in Albigés, and a joyful reunion takes place. Even this brief summary of the text of the Collet-Joris edition is misleading, however, since it obscures both a complex pattern of agreement and non-agreement between the five manuscripts that contain the tirade and a number of obvious corruptions and interpolations, ranging from single words to a passage some twenty lines long. In the edited text, based on B, the first four lists of analogues are introduced by the words ‘fil(z) a putain’ (‘son of a 28 Guernes de Pont Sainte-Maxence comments on the anarchy that ensues when a son tries to take over from his father: ‘Quant li filz fait le pere, li ordres est müez/ Li ciels est suz la terre, n’est un point estelez’ (‘When the son takes on the father’s role, the natural order is disrupted, the heaven is under the earth and no stars shine in it’, La Vie de Saint Thomas, vv. 4824–5); see note on vv. 4823–4 (II, p. 268) for the meaning of faire and the probable source of this aphorism. It is tempting to see this comment and the reference in Partonopeus as allusions to the hostility between Henry II and Young Henry in the early 1170s. 29 It is not entirely clear whether the items in this final sequence are intended to be seen as analogues, or whether this is a resumé of the likely consequences of promoting a fils à vilain. On the medieval tradition of using animals as human exemplars, see Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages, pp. 103–36.

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whore’), but it is clear from comparison with GLPT that this is the result of a scribal error: each of the six sequences originally began with the hemistich ‘filz a vilain’ (which appears in vv. 10817 and 10827 in B).30 In G the tirade consists of eight sequences: the six sets of analogues identified above, followed by a description of what happens when the fils à vilain abandons his plough, pitchfork and flail to meddle in other business (G, meta 13104–13), plus a passage commanding him to the devil and wishing all Anselot’s recent misfortunes on him (G, meta 13114–23). L contains only these last two sequences, the previous six having been omitted either as a result of deliberate abridgement or of an unfortunate saut du même au même triggered by the fact that all the sequences begin with a similar hemistich.31 It is probably safe to assume that the seventh and eight sequences represent interpolations. The seventh sequence stands out immediately because of its discursive syntax, which is quite different from the listing of analogues that forms the structure of the six previous sections. The eighth likewise breaks the pattern of analogues and reads like a later attempt to amplify the two-line curse that ends the tirade in P and is retained at the start of the seventh sequence in GL. We can deduce from the configuration of G and L that an interpolated version of the tirade was in circulation by the second half of the thirteenth century, if not before. It is very unlikely that the seventh and eighth sequences were added by one of the Italian scribes of L (whose command of Old French often leaves a lot to be desired) and then copied into G or its immediate predecessor. They must have featured in the Anglo-Norman exemplar of L, which may have been significantly earlier than L itself (the only extant Anglo-Norman text of Partonopeus, V, dates from the end of the twelfth or very beginning of the thirteenth century). The GL interpolation is evidently motivated by a desire to elaborate on the folly of promoting non-nobles to high office. That being so, we might legitimately ask whether any of the manuscript variations in the other six sequences also point to later amplifica30 The B reading filz a putain seems to be the result of the scribe unconsciously substituting a common, everyday insult for a phrase that is graphically and phonically very similar to it. The fact that L has ‘Fil a putan’ in meta 13104, where GP both have ‘filz a vilein’ (this line is not in BT) suggests either that another scribe made the same error independently, or that L’s exemplar already had filz a putain in some or all of the first six sequences (which have been omitted from this manuscript). The latter scenario would raise interesting questions about the relationship between L and B. 31 Comparison with G suggests that approximately 54 lines are missing from L, which is very unlikely to correspond to a missing folio from its exemplar. There is evidence of both abridgement and eye-skips elsewhere in the Anselot episode in L: 138 lines (corresponding to vv. 11307–444 of the edition) are missing from Anselot’s story, where the scribe appears to have skipped from the description of Anselot being threatened by the emperor’s lion to the description of him being threatened by the Sardinian bear; the final section of Anselot’s story in L lacks five passages of between two and eight lines which are all present in GPT (B ends before this point). The agreement between the GP grouping and T at this point implies abridging activity in L.

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tion of a theme that seems to have had continuing resonance for vernacular audiences. The most obvious discrepancies in the main section of the tirade are found in P, which has significantly shorter versions of all six sequences of analogues than B, G or T, as shown in Table 1. Table 1. Lengths of sequences in Anselot’s tirade. Sequence

MS B

MS G

MS P

MS T

1

10 lines

10 lines

4 lines

10 lines

2

10 lines

10 lines

6 lines

10 lines

3

10 lines

10 lines

2 lines

10 lines

4

10 lines

10 lines

6 lines

10 lines

5

10 lines

6 lines

4 lines

10 lines

6

10 lines

8 lines

2 lines

10 lines

It is generally recognised that MS P presents an abridged version of the romance as a whole, and of the Anselot episode in particular: even allowing for a lacuna of up to 250 lines in its exemplar, the P text of the episode is at least 25% shorter than the longest version.32 It would then be logical to conclude that Anselot’s tirade has also been abridged, either by the P scribe himself, or by his predecessor. In this case, however, the logical conclusion may be misleading. Given that the tirade is supposed to give expression to the strong emotions of a young man in a very distressed state, there is something rather suspicious about the relentless symmetry of the BT version, with its six matching sequences of exactly ten lines each. This suspicion is confirmed by the fact that G, which gives the fullest possible account of the Anselot episode elsewhere,33 breaks the regular pattern and has fewer lines than BT in sequences five and six. This in turn raises the possibility that the first four sequences in this latter version may have been modified to create neat ten-line units, and that the original text of the tirade was more similar to P, with its irregular blocks and shorter, more emotive denunciations of the fils à vilain. The faultlines that often betray the presence of interpolations – unmotivated shifts in style and content, illogicalities in a line of argument, sudden instabilities in the manuscript tradition – are particularly visible in the final 32 For a more detailed discussion of the abridgements in P, see Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 68–71. 33 See Chapter 4, pp. 115–17.

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six lines of the first sequence, which liken the non-noble advisor to a series of attributes of the devil. The first of these three couplets is very unstable, and none of the extant versions of vv. 10781–2 makes good sense (which is why I have not attempted to translate them as they stand): Pies de Sathan et crois et ains, Ses pris, ses tenailles, ses mains. (B) Pieche a Saten, ses gros es meins, Ses braz, ses tenailles, ses seins. (G) Plaine de maufés, col et mains, Ses pies, ses entrailles, ses rains. (T)

As the next line consists of a list of weapons – ‘S’arbaleste, ses dars, ses ars’ (‘his crossbow, his darts, his bows’, v. 10783) – it is more likely that this couplet originally referred to instruments or forms of torture associated with the devil than to parts of his or the vilain’s body.34 B ‘ains’ (‘hook or hooks’) and ‘tenailles’ (‘pincers’) refer to objects that are commonly found in representations of Satan and his demons, and ‘pris’ may also refer to some kind of tongs. ‘Ses mains’ may be a corruption of es mains (cf. G); the original text of v. 10782 may thus have conjured up an image of the devil with these instruments in his hands, ready to torture a victim. The noun crois is obscure, since it is unlikely that the cross would be associated with Satan, even as a means of inflicting pain. It may, however, represent a miscopying of rois/reis (‘a net’), which belongs to the same semantic field as the ains. It would then be logical to assume that pies at the start of the line is a corruption of piege (‘a trap or snare’ (G ‘pieche’ is suggestive here), and that the original version of v. 10781 evoked the devil hunting his prey. Whatever the six nouns may originally have been, though, these two lines disrupt the pattern of pairs of balanced hemistichs that characterises the first four lines and returns as the dominant structural characteristic for the rest of the tirade. The ternary structure of noun-noun-noun, which is repeated in both lines of the following couplet as well, makes for an awkward change of rhythm just as Anselot is beginning to warm to his theme. This six-line passage about the devil also interrupts a train of thought that leads logically from the wolf and peacock of v. 10780 to the animal analogues of the second 34 Collet and Joris adopt the T reading, on the grounds that it presents the only coherent alternative offered by the manuscript tradition (p. 677, note to v. 10781). While T presents fewer lexical and syntactic challenges here, it is more problematic than either B or G from the point of view of coherence, as the six nouns in this version have no connection at all with what comes before, and the absence of the proper name Satan means that there is no contextualisation for the reference to the fils à vilain as the offspring of the fallen Lucifer in v. 10785. T has a number of clearly corrupt readings in other parts of the tirade which cast doubt on the reliability of its text here (e.g. vv. 10800, 10816 and 10817).

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sequence. The diabolic theme re-appears at the very end of the tirade in the edited text – ‘Confusions et puors d’er,/ Gole d’asbime et puis d’infer!’ (‘contamination and stench in the air, mouth of the abyss and pit of hell!’, vv. 10835–6) – but this final couplet is exclusive to BT, which almost certainly marks it out as another addition. The remainder of the tirade is notable for its emphasis on the real world of nature, contemporary society and human emotion; the sudden appearance of an image of Satan armed with a variety of metal implements surely betrays the hand of an interpolator. If the P text of the first sequence therefore seems to be the original, it would probably be an oversimplification to suggest that this witness represents the ur-text of the remainder of the tirade. Two of the sequences in P consist of only two lines, which makes for some very abrupt transitions and may suggest a degree of abridgement. Looking more closely at sequence three, we find that the eight lines which do not appear in P divide into two distinctive subsets: four lines that pursue the line of argument lucidly and coherently and four that simply reiterate earlier analogues. The idea of the fils à vilain being as much of an aberration as wintry weather in the growing season is first introduced by vv. 10797–8, which are present in all four manuscripts.35 This train of thought is then developed in BGT through an evocation of all the weather conditions that would be unwelcome at this time of year: En mai tempest, [en] jun gelee, A vigne tost sa flor rimee, Roges matins et soirs [nuous] Nuis tempestose et jors neblous. (vv. 10799–802) A storm in May, frost in June, the flowers swiftly frozen on the vine, red sky in the morning and a grey evening, a stormy night and a cloudy day.

The next two couplets are clumsy and repetitive by comparison: Ver sens delisce et sens verdor, Aous sens f[r]uit et sens valor, Yver tenebrous et foldrans, Estés pluous entene[b]rans! (vv. 10803–6)36 35 ‘Filz a [vilain], putisme gars/ Noif en aost et pluive en mars’, my emendation (‘son of a vilain, lowest of the low, snow in August and rain in March’). These meteorological analogues are probably modelled on Proverbs 26: 1: ‘As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honour is not seemly for a fool’. For other echoes of Proverbs in the Anselot episode, see Chapter 4, pp. 000–00. Biblical quotations are taken from the Authorised Version, where this does not differ materially from the text of the Latin Vulgate that would have been known to our poet and his audience. In a small number of instances where the two versions diverge significantly, the Vulgate text is given, together with my own translation. 36 The editors have chosen to be as faithful to B as possible, but a case could be made

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A spring without delight and without greenery, August without fruit and without profit, a dark and thundery winter, a rainy, gloomy summer.

None of the manuscripts presents a satisfactory text here, which may be further evidence of interference by a scribe or redactor. The mechanical repetition of the motifs of a poor spring and August, gloomy weather, storms and rain strikes me as problematic, particularly when combined with the use of rare Latinate terms such as ver and entenebrans. I would hazard an informed guess that the original version of this sequence consisted of the six lines 10797–802, which were edited down to a single couplet in the P tradition and amplified into a ten-line block in an ancestor of BGT. The sixth sequence is less obviously composite in the non-P tradition, so it is possible that the original contained all eight lines common to BGT (we have already noted that the final couplet of the BT text is probably an interpolation), which rise to a satisfying crescendo of twenty-two ills associated with the fils à vilain: Fiz de vilain nés a rebors, Honte et vergoigne et desonors, Ire et dehaiz, dols et perilz, Destructions, gas[t] et essilz, Nonpooirs, sofraite et poverte, Mesaise et vains travals et perte, Ennuis et vilonie et tors, Envie et trahisons et mors. (vv. 10827–34) Son of a vilain, born all awry, shame and disgrace and dishonour, anger and dismay, pain and harm, destruction, devastation and ruin, helplessness, deprivation and destitution, hardship and wasted effort and loss, trouble and wickedness and wrongdoing, envy and betrayal and death.

It could be argued, however, that this sequence has also been expanded by four lines from an original that consisted of vv. 10827–30. It is interesting that no attempt has been made to modify the noun-noun-noun structure in the last two couplets (compare v. 10829, with its two pairs of lexical items, which skilfully varies the ternary rhythm of the two lines either side of it). The banal, anticlimactic rhyme pair tors–mors could easily have been avoided by placing vilonie and envie in line-final position; foregrounding vilonie at the rhyme would have made for a much more effective end to the sequence of analogues for the fils à vilain.

for adopting T’s reading of the first couplet: ‘Ver sans delice et sans doucour/ Aoust sans fruit et sans savour’ (‘a spring without delight and without sweeetness, August without fruit and without flavour’). The second couplet is barely comprehensible in T.

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Taken together, the faultlines in sequences one, three and six therefore suggest a pattern of occasional abridgement in P alongside more consistent interpolation in the tradition from which BGT all derive. These passages also point to the tirade’s having been through the rather heavy hands of a redactor who was a less accomplished versifier than the original author. In the primitive form posited here, Anselot’s speech must have provided a well-structured and poetically satisfying denunciation of the nobility’s archetypal fifth columnist. Its rhetorical technique must also have constituted an open invitation to any remanieur who felt that more could only be better where condemnation of the fils à vilain was concerned: the paratactic, largely verbless constructions would have made it only too easy to slip a few additional analogues into each sequence.

Creatures too close for comfort If I am right that the final six lines of the first sequence (the attributes of the devil) represent an interpolation, then it looks as though analogues from the animal world were uppermost in the poet’s mind when he began to compose Anselot’s tirade. In my reconstruction of the original there would be a seamless transition from the end of sequence one to the beginning of sequence two: two creatures that announce their presence to the world through unnerving sounds (the howling wolf and screeching peacock) are followed by two more that conceal themselves close to human beings with the potential to shock and horrify when they are discovered (the ‘iraigne en sain’ and ‘tarente en lit’ of vv. 10787–8). The tarente may or may not be a tarantula (this term seems also to have designated a venomous snake or a scorpion in the twelfth century), but it is definitely not something that you would want to find lurking in your bed, any more than you would welcome a spider inside your shirt.37 Both these analogues give effective expression to the idea that the fils à vilain is all the more dangerous for having insinuated himself into close proximity to a ruler. While the remainder of the second sequence follows through the creepy and crawly thematic established by its opening couplet without the obvious digressions and repetitions of sequences one and three, this does not mean that it is unproblematic from the point of view of authorship. Sequence two also shows signs of having been interpolated; what is more, it gives us some valuable clues as to the kind of person the interpolator might have been. The text of this sequence in the four witnesses that contain the main body of Anselot’s tirade is shown in Table 2.38 37 See Eley and Shaw, ‘A Tarantula in Your Bed? A Lexical Problem in Partonopeus de Blois’; part of the argument that follows is taken from pp. 315–18 of that article. 38 The B text translates as ‘Son of a whore, spider in the bosom, tarente in the bed, toad in the hand, asp fleeing the snake charmer, dipsa caught by the sun, wounded dragon

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Table 2. Comparison of vv. 10787–96 in MSS BGPT. MS B

MS G

Filz a putain iraigne en sain Tarente en lit crapoz en main Aspis quant fuit enchantement Dispas quant soliaz la soprent39 Dragons quant de sa plaie brait Grive quant de son ventre vait Escorpions desor aisseile Serpens amorsez a mameile Orellies pres de cervel Coluevre sorbie en ruisel40

Filz a vilain iraigne en sain Tarente en lit et mort de fain Aspis quant fait enchantement Dispar quant soleus le sorprant Dragons quant de sa plaie bret Guivre quant de son ventre vet Escorpions desoz essele Serpenz amorsez a mamele Orilliee pres de cervel Coluevre sorbie en vessel

MS P

MS T

Filz a vilein iraigne en sain Tarente en lit boz pis en main41

Fils a vilain iraigne en sain Talent en lit. crapaut en main Aspis quant fu enchantement Dispar quant soleil la souprent Dragons quant de sa plaie brait Guivre quant de son ventre vait Escorpion dessous aissele Serpens amorsses a mamele Oreilliere pres de cervele Culoevre sobre sous rosele

Escorpion desoz aissele Serpenz amorssez a memele Oreilliere pres de cervel Coluevre sorpie en vaissel

bellowing, viper going on/ from its belly, scorpion in the armpit, snake with its fangs in the breast, earwig close to the brain, adder engulfed in a stream’. 39 Dispas is attested in medieval Latin scientific writing as an alternative form of dipsa, for instance in MS D of Alexander Neckam’s De naturis rerum (p. 195); the feminine article la is therefore the correct reading. GT ‘dispar’ probably represents scribal adaptation of an unfamiliar word into an approximate form of the verb disparoir. G has taken the adaptation further, substituting le for la and linking the whole line to the aspis in an attempt to make sense of the couplet. 40 GP ‘en vessel/ vaissel’ (‘in a tub, drinking vessel or dish’) makes better sense than B ‘en ruisel’ or T ‘sous rosele’ here. The focus is on poisonous creatures hiding in places where they would not normally be found: a snake in a domestic container is a more effective analogue than one in its natural environment in a stream or under reeds. 41 P ‘Boz pis’ is somewhat obscure, but may represent the original reading. Pis/piz is attested in the sense of ‘urine’, so this might be an oblique reference to the fact that toads secrete a toxic liquid that makes them unpalatable to many predators, and which can cause an adverse reaction in humans who touch it. The BT reading appears to be a lectio facilior: it is easy to see how a scribe familiar with boz as the nominative of bot (a toad) but puzzled by pis might substitute the disyllabic synonym crapoz/crapaut for the whole phrase.

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At first sight, the agreement of BGT against P would seem to indicate that the absence from the latter of vv. 10789–92 represents a scribal abridgement. However, our analysis of the first sequence of Anselot’s speech has shown that this kind of agreement may equally well be evidence of interpolation in the majority tradition. The degree of contamination between the other three manuscripts that contain the first part of the tirade makes it less implausible that passages common to all of them, but not shared with P, do not necessarily represent the original text.42 The suggestion that vv. 10789–92 might be an interpolation is supported by a closer examination of their form and content. All four of these lines are identical in structure: a disyllabic name of a snake is placed first, followed by quant and then a five-syllable phrase characterising the creature. This mechanical repetition contrasts markedly with the following four lines, which likewise all begin with the name of a creature and end with a phrase describing its location, but demonstrate the most subtle variations in rhythm and structure. In these lines the creatures’ names have four, two, four and three syllables respectively, while the descriptive phrases that follow all start in different ways: three phrases introduced by three different prepositions are arranged around one beginning with a past participle. The same lack of finesse is apparent in the content of this putative interpolation. Whereas in the last four lines of the sequence rhetorical complexity is combined with clarity of meaning, the preceding two couplets are highly elliptical, at times almost to the point of obscurity. The first and last lines can be fully understood only with reference to certain biblical and bestiary traditions relating to different types of serpent. The correct reading of v. 10789 is represented by B ‘Aspis quant fuit enchantement’, which alludes to the belief that the asp protects itself against snake-charmers by placing one ear against the ground and stopping the other with its tail, so that it cannot hear their music or spells.43 The final line (‘Grive [GT guivre] quant de son ventre vait’, v. 10792) appears initially to be such a banal statement that one wonders why any poet should have chosen to include it: surely all snakes could be described as moving on their stomachs? On closer inspection, however, the use of the preposition de, rather than sus/sur, before the noun ventre suggests that this may not be the intended meaning. This line seems to be a drastically compressed reference to bestiary accounts of young vipers emerging directly from their mother’s belly (either because the female viper’s anatomy does not 42 43

See Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 76–82. Cf. Psalm 58 (57 in the Vulgate), 4–5: ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder [asp in the Vulgate text] that stoppeth her ear;/ Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisefully’. The account of how the snake manages to block both ears simultaneously is attributed to St Augustine (McCulloch, Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries, p. 89). For a characteristic illustration of the asp in its defensive pose, see fol. 67v of the Aberdeen Bestiary at http://www.abdn. ac.uk/bestiary/comment/67vasp.hti.

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allow for a more conventional way of giving birth, or because they are in such a hurry to be born that they gnaw their way out, leaving the mother dead).44 The idea that this passage is directly informed by the scientific literature of the day is further supported by the use of the Latinate forms aspis and dispas, which stand out among the common vernacular names of the other snakes. Medieval bestiaries, including Isidore’s ‘De animalibus’, classify the dipsa as a type of asp, so the order asp–dipsa may derive from a source in which general discussion of the asp and its habits was followed by a subsection on the dipsa. The description in v. 10790 of the fils à vilain being like a dipsa caught by the sun is even more opaque, but seems to refer to another piece of scientific lore, attested in Virgil and in Walter Map’s De nugis curialium, but not in the Physiologus tradition from which most Latin and vernacular bestiaries are derived. At the end of his ‘mini-romance’ of Sadius and Galo, Walter likens the defeated queen to a snake ‘which, caught in the day’s heat, has found no shade from its burning, and vengefully spews out all its venom [in vain] upon any and everything that crosses it’.45 This idea seems to represent a conflation of two pieces of information found in Book III of Virgil’s Georgics (vv. 414–39), where the poet warns his readers about the dangers posed by snakes. Firstly, he notes that the adder (coluber) is in the habit of hiding under the thatch of cattle-stalls and spraying its venom on to the animals. Then he describes a certain snake (anguis) that is found in Calabria: as long as there is water in the pools where it lives it does not pose a threat to humans, but ‘when the fen is burnt up, and the soil gapes with heat, he springs forth to dry land and, rolling his blazing eyes, rages in the fields, fierce with thirst and frenzied with the heat’ (vv. 432–4).46 The attribution in Partonopeus of these behaviours to the dipsa, rather than to snakes in general, may reveal the influence of the well-known passage from Lucan’s Pharsalia that details the ‘host of serpents’ encountered by Cato and his soldiers on their forced march through Libya (IX, 604–937).47 The dipsa features strongly in this natural history lesson, firstly as one of the two species (the other is the asp) that have been forced by thirst to congregate at a crucial spring in the desert. There follows an account of Perseus’s killing 44 This trait is recorded in the early Latin Physiologus tradition (McCulloch, p. 183) and in Isidore, Etymologiae, XII.2, 10. 45 ‘Qui per estum interceptus adumbrari a fervore non potuit, et in quoduis ultor obstaculum frustra totum virus evomit’ (Dist. iii, c. 2; pp. 244–5). 46 Pliny seems to take it as read that all snakes spit their poison at their victims as well as injecting it through their fangs, noting that the amphisbaena has two heads, one at each end of its body, as if one mouth were not enough to spill out its venom (Histoire naturelle, p. 52). 47 This passage was one of Isidore’s main sources of information about snakes, but the recombination of facts that underlies our v. 10790 suggests that the Partonopeus interpolator had independent knowledge of Lucan.

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of Medusa, and a list of seventeen snakes believed to have been created by blood dripping from the Gorgon’s severed head as the hero flew over the desert with his trophy. Lucan names each snake and gives a brief description of its distinctive features: the name of the dipsa is accompanied by the single word torrida (‘parched’ or ‘dried up’). This association of the dipsa with desiccation and burning heat is reinforced in the subsequent lurid description of the effects of its venom on Aulus, an Etruscan standard-bearer unlucky enough to tread on one. The poison dries up his saliva, sweat and vital organs, and makes him feel as if he is on fire (vv. 743–6). Although Lucan does not say in so many words that the desert sun makes the dipsa more likely to attack and kill humans, such an inference could easily be drawn from his later remark that ‘Libya made death more deadly; and the dipsas, when aided by the heat of that country, deserves less fame for its powers of destruction’ (‘Accessit morti Libye, fatique minorem/ Famam dipsas habet terries adiuta perustis’, vv. 753–4). The remaining ophiological analogue (‘Dragons quant de sa plaie brait’, v. 10791) does not appear to reference any precise source or belief about the behaviour of dragons. Lucan remarks that dragons ‘are made deadly by the heat of Africa’ (‘dracones/ Letiferos ardens facit Africa’, vv. 728–9), to the extent of despatching bulls and elephants with blows from their tails, but says nothing of their behaviour when wounded. Pliny includes a long description of the ways in which dragons attack and kill elephants in India (pp. 34–5), and the bestiaries retain the idea of a particular enmity between the two species, but neither of these sources mentions bellowing as an attribute of the dragon. This line reads more like an allusion to folktale or romance, where dragons are often found fighting with one another (as in the combat of the red and white dragons related by Geoffrey of Monmouth) or with human adversaries. Although dragons are clearly dangerous, and presumably more so when wounded, there is no obvious reason why this particular species should have been chosen as a point of comparison for the fils à vilain. This creature seems to have been mentioned simply because it falls into the category of snakes evoked by the serpens of v. 10794 (and perhaps because it is the first individual species to be described by Pliny and Isidore). The conspicuous irrelevance of the dragon should not obscure the fact that the other three analogues listed in this passage also fail to fit into the argument that is being developed in relation to the fils à vilain. The lines either side of these two couplets express the idea that it is as undesirable to have a low-born advisor in a position of intimacy with a ruler as it is to have a venomous animal (spider, toad, scorpion, snake or earwig) in close contact with, or proximity to, a human being. While the asp, the dipsa and the viper may all be venomous (the bestiaries, following Lucan, say that the dragon is not poisonous, although venomous dragons feature in non-scientific texts), the idea of something unnatural – a harmful creature in a place where it should not be – is lost. The common thread running through vv. 10789–92 is

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in fact the exact opposite of what immediately precedes and follows them: what is described here is the natural behaviour of the asp, the dipsa and the viper, according to the authorities of the day. For readers with the relevant scientific knowledge, each of these three snakes could be seen as an appropriate analogue for the fils à vilain. The picture of the asp blocking its ears against music and charms is presumably intended to convey the idea that such an individual would resist all attempts to lure him out of his well-feathered nest. Evoking the way in which a young viper comes into the world seems to suggest that a low-born advisor could well end up destroying the person who had nurtured him, like the snake killing its mother. The reference to the dipsa implies not only that the fils à vilain will have a poisonous effect on anyone and everyone who crosses his path, but also perhaps that he becomes more dangerous by association with a ruler (the sun) who increases his ability to do harm. The key points, however, are that none of these analogues is appropriate in this context and that, unlike the comparisons in vv. 10787–8 and 10793–6, they cannot be understood without recourse to specialist sources. Hippeau noted that parts of some medieval Latin poems are incomprehensible without a detailed knowledge of bestiary material.48 Latin verse was composed by scholars for a readership who had received the same training and were familiar with the same texts. The presence of such inappropriate allusive references in Anselot’s tirade suggests not only that we are dealing with an interpolator but more particularly with one who was perhaps more used to writing for fellow intellectuals than for a vernacular court audience.

Ten ravening beasts The fifth sequence of analogues is also devoted to animals, including an unsuccessful lion that recalls the episode of Partonopeus’s failed suicide attempt in the Ardennes. In the Collet-Joris edition this sequence reads: Fil a vilain, [lous] gar[el]ous, Ors sens char fresche femelous, Lions sens proie repairiés, Unicornes a fenme iriés, Bufleise de veel robee, Tigre en abai de chiens dervee, [A vostre prou love tres fiere, Troie famiere et pautonniere], Loz revelos, glos et gaignars, Gorpiz farcillous et guichars! (vv. 10817–26) Son of a vilain, werewolf, famished bear without fresh meat, lion returning without prey, unicorn furious with a woman, buffalo cow 48

Guillaume le Clerc, Le Bestiaire divin, pp. 56–7.

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deprived of her calf, tigress maddened by baying hounds, she-wolf ferocious to your advantage, hungry savage sow, insolent, gluttonous and thieving wolf, mocking and wily fox!

The text of B is problematic here, as is obvious from the fact that the editors have adopted corrections made by Gildea in vv. 10817 and 10823–4. As we shall see, the second of these corrections (based on T) is also problematic, to say nothing of the apparent illogic of vv. 10820 and 10826. The difficulties facing editors at this point are easier to appreciate if we compare the text of the sequence across the four manuscripts in which it appears (Table 3). Table 3. Comparison of vv. 10817–26 in MSS BGPT. MS B

MS G

Fil a vilain gentils garous Ors sens char fresche femelous Lions sens proie repairies Unicornes a femme iries Bufleise de veel robee Tigre en abai de chiens dervee A altrui pro love cervine En altrui prou voire pantere Loz revelos glos et gaignars Gorpiz farcillous et guichars

Filz a vilain lox garelox Ors sor char fresche fameillox Lion sanz proie repairiez Unicorne a feme iriez Buglesse de vel robee Tigre en abai de chiens desvee

MS P

MS T

Fiz a vilein los guarelos Ors sor char fresche fameilleus Leons sanz proie repairiez Unicorne de fain iriez

Fils a vilain juis garous Ours sor char fresche fameillous Lions sans proie repairies Unicorne a fame iries Bufflesse de veel robee Tygre en abai de chien desvee A vostre prou love tres fiere Troie famiere et pautonniere Lous revelous lous gaanars Goupil fameillous et guichars

The first four lines of the sequence occur in all four witnesses, and establish a set of analogues in which the key theme is ferocity linked to ravening hunger. The use of ravening beasts as analogues is very appropriate for the fils à vilain, whose hunger for wealth and power makes him exceptionally dangerous to rulers. The first three analogues are quite straightforward: the

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fils à vilain is likened to a werewolf,49 a lion returning from the hunt without prey and a starving bear falling on fresh meat. The fourth analogue (v. 10820) varies significantly between manuscripts: BGT all have variations on ‘unicorne a feme iriez’, while P has ‘unicorne de fain iriez’. The logic of the first three analogues, with their emphasis on hunger, points to the P reading being the original, and a good case can be made for seeing the BGT reading as a later reworking. The most widespread tradition relating to the unicorn in the Middle Ages is the idea that the beast can be captured only by using a virgin as bait. The animal is irresistibly attracted to her and lays its head in her lap (or suckles from her bosom in some versions), which allows the hunters to take it unawares. Whatever the exact origins of this tradition, it stems in part from the notion that the unicorn is so fierce a creature that it cannot be hunted in the normal way.50 Pliny comments on the aggressive nature of the monosceros, as does Aelian (McCulloch, p. 180); Biblical references to the strength and ferocity of the rinoceros (Numbers 23: 22 and 24: 8; Deuteronomy 33: 17; Job 39: 9–12) became conflated with references to the unicornis in the Psalms (e.g. 22: 21) and Isaiah (34: 7) to create an image of a single powerful, dangerous one-horned creature.51 In the early Physiologus tradition the creature is described as being the size of a goat – rather than of an ass or horse, as in Pliny – but still extremely fierce. While its ferocity is played down in some Old French bestiaries, possibly in order to facilitate its interpretation as a type of God or Christ,52 the perception of the unicorn as a very dangerous beast was nonetheless widespread. In Guillaume le Clerc’s early thirteenth-century Bestiaire divin it is described as ‘si osee,/ Si conbatant et si hardie’ (‘so daring, so aggressive and so bold’, vv. 1312–13) that it attacks elephants; it is also ‘de tel vigor/ Qu’ele ne crient nul veneor’ (‘so powerful that it fears no hunter’, vv. 1327–8).53 The various Old French versions of the story of Barlaam and Josaphat also describe the unicorn as a

49 The GP reading is clearly correct for v. 10817. Contemporary belief in the ravening nature of the werewolf is reflected in the prologue to Marie de France’s Bisclavret: ‘Garulf, ceo est beste salvage;/ tant cum il est en cele rage,/ humes devure, grant mal fait’ (‘the werewolf is a savage beast; as long as it remains in this frenzy, it devours men and wreaks havoc’, vv. 9–11). 50 According to McCulloch, ‘the ultimate origin of the role played by the virgin in ensnaring the unicorn is lost, although non-Christian tradition has probably influenced the story’ (p. 181). 51 The King James Bible translates both rinoceros and unicornis as ‘unicorn’. Given that both references to the rinoceros in Numbers occur in contexts that also feature lions, we might conclude that the collocation of the two creatures in vv. 10819–20 reflects the poet’s familiarity with biblical sources. 52 See, for example, Philippe de Thaün, Bestiaire, vv. 393–460. 53 Pierre de Beauvais, writing during the period 1180–1217, describes the unicorne as ‘crueus’ (‘cruel’ or ‘aggressive’, Bestiaire, p. 71).

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ferocious beast which is identified with death.54 Seen against this background, the unicorn is an ideal companion for the werewolf, bear and lion in a list of creatures which are particularly dangerous when hungry. The BGT reading of v. 10820 is suspect for two reasons. Firstly, it contradicts all the traditional and bestiary accounts of the unicorn’s behaviour, which stress that the normally fierce creature becomes meek in the presence of the maiden. There is no suggestion that it was believed to display any aggression towards her. Secondly, all the sources agree that the woman involved has to be a virgin: in the Old French texts only the words pucele and meschine virge are used to describe her. ‘Unicorne a feme iriez’ (my italics) represents such a departure from this tradition (particularly when we remember that OF feme often has the sense of ‘married woman, wife’) that it is hard to believe that this line is authentic. It is far more plausible to see it as a reworking of an exemplar similar to P by a scribe or remanieur who associated the unicorn with the virgin story and tried to make the text match his mental image without having to rewrite the whole line – and without thinking through the contextual implications of either the original wording or his own adaptation. If we follow through the logic of this analysis (which supports the hypothesis we developed in relation to the first animal sequence, namely that the text of P is closest to the original), then there may be up to six lines of interpolation in this passage. There is a clear distinction between vv. 10821–2 (‘Bufleise de veel robee/ Tigre en abai de chiens dervee’), which feature in G as well as BT, and vv. 10823–6, which are found only in BT. Moreover, this latter passage has obviously become corrupted at some stage, while the preceding couplet is stable across the three manuscripts. The variation BT bufleise/bufflesse vs G buglesse in v. 10821 is purely chronological, bugle being an earlier form (found in the twelfth century in the Roman de Renart and Dolopathos), while buffle is a later development, attested from the early thirteenth century. This couplet does not sustain the motif of hunger, but still respects the underlying theme of the sequence in that it describes two animals in situations designed to increase their ferocity and unpredictability: a buffalo cow separated from her calf and a tigress (as indicated by the feminine adjective dervee/ desvee) at bay.55 It is possible that these lines may have been present in the original, and that P could either have lost a couplet here in the normal course of scribal transmission or continued the pattern of small-scale abridgements that we posited earlier. The following couplets (vv. 10823–6), on the other hand, show clear signs of interpolation and scribal interference. There is a close relationship between 54 55

Planche, ‘La Double Licorne ou le chasseur chassé’, pp. 207–9. It may be no coincidence that Isidore’s account of the bubali (buffaloes), which stresses their ferocity, comes immediately after the entry for the vitulus or veal calf (Etymologiae, XII.1, 32 and 33).

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T and B throughout this first section of the Continuation,56 and the T reading of lines 10823–4 (‘A vostre prou love tres fiere/ Troie famiere et pautonniere’) could be seen as an attempt by the T scribe to make sense of the obviously corrupt couplet in B (‘A altrui pro love cervine/ En altrui prou voire pantere’). B ‘love cervine’ is almost certainly a copying error for love cerviere, which would make a correct rhyme with pantere; ‘en altrui prou’ in the second line is clearly a simple repetition from the preceding line, which must originally have read ‘a altrui proie’. If this is correct, then these lines in the B version would seem to have been written by someone with particular knowledge of the vernacular bestiary tradition. The term love cerviere is given by Philippe de Thaün as the French equivalent of the Greek hyena: Hyena est grius nuns Que nus beste apeluns, Ço est luvecerviere, Cler veit e mult est fiere. (vv. 1177–80) Hyena is the Greek name for the animal that we call love cerviere, which has excellent eyesight and is very fierce.

Guillaume le Clerc declares that he does not know the French name for the yenne, and then equates the love cerviere with the panther: La beste qui a non pantiere, En dreit romanz love cerviere, Veit bien ci estre amenteue; Onques sa per ne fu veue. (vv. 1947–50) The animal that is called the panther – love cerviere in French – certainly deserves to be mentioned here; its like has never been seen.

The use of such a rare term as love cerviere as a rhyme-word for pantiere, plus the presence of en in initial position in Guillaume’s v. 1948 and our v. 10824, might suggest that B’s exemplar read: ‘A altrui proie voire pantere/ En dreit romanz love cerviere’ (‘a true panther – love cerviere in French – towards other animals’ prey’). The actual state of the text in B could then be accounted for by a fairly simple sequence of line-skip errors on the part of the scribe. However, such a couplet would imply a considerable degree of confusion of bestiary material: none of the principal sources refers to the panther as an animal that takes others’ prey, and most describe it in positive terms as a gentle creature, whose only enemy is the dragon. Pliny remarks that it emits a sweet smell to attract prey animals that it then seizes (p. 45). Later texts note the scent but do not generally describe the panther as eating the creatures that 56

See Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 80 and 94.

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are drawn to it; Isidore describes it as the friend of every animal except the dragon (Etymologiae, XII.2, 8).57 It is more likely that the first line of the couplet originally read ‘a altrui proie love cerviere’ (‘hyena scavenging other animals’ prey’), and that the second contained another reference to bestiary material, in which Christ is sometimes described as the ‘true panther’.58 Let us assume for the sake of argument that the original text of the B version of vv. 10823–6 consisted of a series of four additional animal analogues (one per line, following the pattern established by the previous six lines), and that each of these creatures was evoked in a context in which it was known to be fierce, or dangerous, or both. The only logical way in which the panther could feature in such a list would be if it was seen in relation to its archenemy the dragon. A possible reconstruction of v. 10824 would therefore be ‘envers dragon voire pantere’ (‘a true panther towards dragons’), which would mirror the first line of the couplet in both syntax and allusions to bestiary lore. The T version of this couplet can then readily be explained as a scribal rewriting of the garbled text of B: the imperfect (and probably unfamiliar) rhyme word cervine has been replaced by the rather lame tres fiere; the confusing description of the panther gives way to a more familiar creature with a reputation for eating anything when it is hungry. The unexpected contrast between the sow and the ferocious wild creatures that make up the rest of the list of analogues further supports the idea of its being a scribal substitution. The final two lines of this passage (‘Loz revelos glos et gaignars/ Gorpiz farcillous et guichars’, vv. 10825–6) are curious in terms of both structure and vocabulary. The notion of the animal in context gives way to a simple accumulation of adjectives, and while the wolf might seem to be an appropriately fierce creature for this sequence, the fox is significantly less so. The fox’s epithets in B, farcillous (‘mocking’ or ‘a joker’) and guichars (‘cunning, wily’), have little in common with the theme of ferocity and danger that underlies the preceding four couplets. There is, however, a link to the motif of hunger, in that the bestiaries stress that the fox is most ingenious and deceitful when it is hungriest, usually citing the story of how it coats itself in red mud (to look like blood) and plays dead in order to lure birds within range of its jaws (McCulloch, p. 119). The wolf does not appear in the works of Philippe de Thaün, Guillaume le Clerc and Gervaise; Isidore (XII.2, 23–4) notes its greed and rapacity, which are evoked here by the adjectives glos and gaignars. As Salisbury notes, ‘courtly fables turned the wolf into the villain 57 See also McCulloch, pp. 148–50. Pliny’s predatory panther is reflected in the lyric ‘Ensement com la panthere’ preserved in Paris, BnF fr. 844 (fol. 199). 58 See Meyer, ‘Le Bestiaire de Gervaise’, vv. 167–8: ‘Nostre signor et nostre pere/ Dex qui est veraie panthere’ (‘our Lord and our Father, God who is the true panther’), and the Aberdeen Bestiary, fol. 9r: ‘dominus noster Iesus Christus verus pantera’ (‘our Lord Jesus Christ, the true panther’).

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not because he was a predator, but because he was excessively greedy’ (p. 130).59 There is, however, nothing in the Latin or French traditions to account for the epithet revelos, which is more usually associated with horses, in the sense of ‘restive, high-spirited’, but is unexpected even in its alternative meanings of ‘rebellious’ or ‘insolent’. In some respects, these lines read more like an allusion to the principal characters of the Roman de Renart – the wily, unscrupulous Renart and his gluttonous adversary Ysengrin – than a coherent addition to the series of animal analogues for the fils à vilain. If, as seems very likely, our learned interpolator was also at work in this penultimate series of analogues, before it passed through the hands of one or more less knowledgeable scribes, then he appears to have been a man who was familiar with beast epic as well as biblical and scientific material.

The Walter Map connection By this stage, the reader may be forgiven for wondering what Walter Map is doing in the title of this chapter. The aim of this final section is to explore the possibility that the individual who introduced so many additional animals into Anselot’s tirade was none other than Walter himself – an exercise that is made all the more problematic by Map’s reputation for being economical with the truth, and by the attribution to him in the Middle Ages of a large amount of Latin poetry, as well as the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort Artu.60 It is now well established that Walter could not have been the author of either of these thirteenth-century prose romances; what is less well known, however, is that a similar claim was also made in relation to Partonopeus de Blois, in a curious colophon found in manuscript L. The version of the poem preserved in this witness ends with the conclusion of the Anselot episode (v. 11696 in the Collet-Joris edition), followed by a twelve-line ‘epilogue’: L’istorie ici finerai Qar ge plus nen trovai, E suns autres vos dit avant, Ne l’en creez ne tant ne qua[n]t, Qar Gauter Mape plus n’en dist. Trestoz de Deo nos benist Qi l’istorie avons oïe, En paradis tenions la vie. Explicit liber Partolopei de Bleis. A Deo vos comandons et a ses leis,

59 Morton also stresses the importance of voracious appetite in medieval perceptions of the wolf (‘Wolves in Human Skin: Questions of Animal Appetite in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose’, pp. 997–80). 60 Cartlidge, ‘Masters in the Art of Lying? The Literary Relationship between Hugh of Rhuddlan and Walter Map’; De nugis, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.

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Q’il nos fera d’infern garanz, Si atendons le suen comanz. (L meta 14016–27; my punctuation) I shall end the story here as I found no more of it written down, and if someone else tells you what happened next, do not believe a word he says, for Walter Map had no more to say about it. May God bless all of us who have heard the story and may we be granted life in paradise. Here ends the book of Partonopeus of Blois. We commend you to God and his commandments, so that he will protect us from hell, and we await his bidding.61

On the first flyleaf of the codex a modern hand has added a note that reads ‘But see at the 4 Verses from the end of this M.S. a reference to Gautier Map as the original source of not author of this Romance.’ The idea that Walter provided the inspiration for our romance, but did not compose any part of it, does not fit well with the ‘signing-off’ formula used in meta 14016–20, which collocates with authorship in other manuscripts. The same combination of first- and third-person verbs is found in the Guiot manuscript of Chrétien’s Yvain (Paris, BnF fr. 794, fol. 105): Del Chevalier au lyeon fine Crestïens son romans ensi; N’onques plus conter n’en oï Ne ja plus n’en orroiz conter S’an n’i vialt mançonge ajoster.62 This is how Chrétien ends his romance of the Knight of the Lion; I never heard anyone relate more of the story than this, nor will you hear any more unless someone means to add fabrications to it.

A similar claim that there is no more to tell, juxtaposed with the author’s name, appears in the P version of Gautier’s Ille et Galeron (Paris, BnF fr. 375): Ne en l’estore plus n’en aut, Ne plus n’i a, ne plus n’i mist Gautier d’Arras qui s’[en] entremist. (vv. 6590–92) And let no more go into this story about him [Ille]; there is no more to it, and no more was included by Gautier d’Arras, who undertook it. 61 The syntax of metalines 14021–7 is somewhat incoherent; my translation attempts to make some sense of it. 62 Text and punctuation from the Roques edition, vv. 6804–8. There is a numbering error in the printed text: deduct two from each figure to arrive at the correct line-count for the manuscript.

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We cannot be sure whether these lines were composed by the authors in question, referring to themselves in both the first and the third person, or by scribes (possibly the individuals to whom the poems were first dictated or who made the first copies from rough work or wax tablets). Even if they are scribal in origin, as seems more plausible, the attribution of authorship is unequivocal: in the writers’ view, the preceding verses mark the end of Chrétien’s and Gautier’s narratives respectively. The individual who composed the L colophon clearly intended to convey the idea that Walter Map had actually composed some or all of the romance. The natural critical reaction to the L colophon has been to dismiss it as part of the same process of literary obfuscation as the claims relating to the Queste and the Mort Artu.63 Walter Map was certainly not the author of Partonopeus de Blois, in either its continued or uncontinued forms. For one thing, it would be difficult to reconcile the anti-Plantagenet subtext of parts of the main narrative with Map’s position at the court of Henry II and his repeated praise of Young Henry. But just as the editors of De nugis were unwilling to reject out of hand the idea that Walter was in some way associated with the production of romance (‘Introduction’, pp. xxi–xxiii), so I am reluctant to dismiss the colophon as pure mischief-making on the part of the copyist of L’s Anglo-Norman exemplar.64 In this case, however, there is a little more evidence to support the claim that Walter Map had some kind of direct involvement at some stage in the poem’s development. As we have already seen, the elliptical reference to the dipsa in the second sequence of Anselot’s tirade can best be understood in relation to a belief about snakes that is most clearly expressed in Walter’s story of Sadius and Galo. But there is an even closer link between the dipsa in the Partonopeus Continuation and another section of De nugis. This is the well-known Dissuasio Valerii ad Ruffinem, also known as the Epistola Valerii (Dist. iv, cc. 3–4), an anti-feminist tract designed to dissuade the writer’s friend from getting married. Walter tells us that he wrote this text for his red-haired friend John (‘Ruffinus’), Latinising his own name to ‘Valerius’, and that it circulated independently before he incorporated it into De nugis (Dist. iv, cc. 2 and 63 Fourrier, p. 365 n. 108; Martin, ‘L’explicit de Partonopeus de Blois dans le ms. Bib. nat. n. acq. franç., 7516’, p. 228. Martin argued that Walter Map had become confused in the minds of scribes with Walter the archdeacon of Oxford, who supposedly provided Geoffrey of Monmouth with source material. He suggested Walter’s name was added to the colophon in order to invest the L version of the text with the borrowed authority of an expert on literary matters. 64 Cartlidge (pp. 3–4) suggests that Walter may have composed romances in Latin rather than the vernacular. It is unlikely that the colophon was added by one of the Italian scribes of L (what interest would they have had in an Anglo-Welsh raconteur and cleric who died in 1209 or 1210, at least fifty years before they were active?). It is possible, however, that the final three lines of the colophon, after the explicit, are the work of one of the copying team.

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5). Some readers either denied or did not know that he was the author, with the result that this ‘pamphlet’ came to be regarded as anonymous, being attributed to Walter in only one out of the numerous extant manuscripts.65 In the middle of the Dissuasio Valerius accuses Ruffinus of refusing to listen to him, just as Julius Caesar refused to heed a warning about his imminent assassination, and uses five comparisons to drive his point home: Tu vero michi stilorum tuorum prenuncio aurem inclinas ut aspis veneficis; animum adhibes ut aper latratibus; placaris ut dipsas cui sol incanduit a cancro; tibi consulis ut spreta Medea; tibi misereris ut equor naufragis. (Dist. iv, c. 3) But you give ear to me who predict your dagger as the asp does to the charmer; you pay attention as the wild boar to the barking of the hounds; you show as much good temper as the dispa under the white heat of the sun in Cancer; you are as wise in your own interest as Medea when she was cast off; you have as much mercy on yourself as the sea has on wrecked sailors.66

The correspondence with vv. 10789–90 of Anselot’s tirade could hardly be clearer. In both texts exactly the same pieces of information about the asp and the dipsa are juxtaposed in a series of animal analogues for undesirable human behaviour, within the broader context of a warning against the threat posed by a particular social grouping (marriageable women in one case; the fils à vilain in the other).67 The simplest explanation for this very precise convergence between the Partonopeus Continuation and De nugis is that Anselot’s speech was written by a poet who had read the Dissuasio while it was circulating as an independent composition, and had retained from it both the idea of a series of animal analogues and the two items from Walter’s list that referred to snakes. This is chronologically possible: the tirade could not have been composed before the late 1170s at the very earliest, and Walter’s comment that his tract ‘has caught the fancy of many’ and is ‘eagerly copied’ suggests that it had been entertaining readers for some time before De nugis was compiled in the early 1180s (Dist. iv, c. 5).68 However, the history of the Continuation is rarely simple, and this scenario rests on a number of questionable assumptions. The first is that the tirade has not been interpolated at the point where the asp and the dipsa are mentioned, whereas all the evidence that we considered earlier – from content, structure and versification – points in the 65 66

De nugis, ‘Introduction’, p. xix. James translated aspis as ‘adder’ and dipsas as ‘thirsty snake’; I have reinstated the original terms in the translation. 67 I am grateful to Dr Philip Shaw for drawing this link to my attention. 68 On the dating of Dist. iv, see the Introduction, pp. xxviii–xxx. According to the editors, De nugis ‘did not circulate at all’ (p. xx).

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opposite direction. The second is that the idea of comparing a man’s conduct to that of one or more undesirable animals could not have occurred to two writers independently. There is ample justification elsewhere in our romance, including the lion episode analysed at the beginning of this chapter, for believing that the Partonopeus poet had a keen enough interest in natural history to come up with this idea without having to turn to a written model for inspiration. Thirdly, if an external source does lie behind the basic structure of the tirade, it is more likely to have been Walter’s model – the Bible – than the Dissuasio itself. We noted earlier that Proverbs 26 probably inspired the meteorological analogues, while Psalm 58 (57) uses the asp as a point of comparison for human behaviour in exactly the same way as Anselot does. The possibility that the direction of influence was the other way round need not detain us for long. The allusion to the dipsa in Partonopeus is so compressed and opaque as to make it scarcely credible that Walter Map could have derived his description from it. A third way of explaining the convergence is to acknowledge that interpolation did indeed take place, and to assume that the lines which were added to sequences two and five were contributed by a remanieur who knew the Dissuasio. A well-read individual could have recognised the structural affinities between Walter’s pamphlet and Anselot’s attack on the fils à vilain; he might then have decided to incorporate two of Walter’s animal analogues into the tirade, along with ‘scientific’ information that he had found in other sources. But it is highly implausible that such an individual could also have added the L colophon, attributing authorship of the romance to Map on the basis of a two-line borrowing, even if he was one of the privileged few who knew the true provenance of the Dissuasio. If we accept the idea of an anonymous remanieur we are forced back on to the view that the colophon is nothing more than a literary joke. That leaves us with the possibility that Walter Map was himself connected with the process of interpolation, and that the L colophon is a joke that contains a germ of truth. Admittedly, we have no direct proof of his involvement, but the circumstantial evidence is intriguing. As a clerk who had studied in Paris and a member of the highly literate court of Henry II, Walter would have come into contact with a wide range of sources, including in all probability those that lie behind the additions to Anselot’s tirade. He was a man who clearly enjoyed displaying his learning, and did so in the form of elliptical asides as well as direct quotations: some forty-four authors, plus a number of anonymous texts, are either cited or alluded to in De nugis.69 The oblique accounts of the asp and the dipsa in the second sequence of the tirade fit better with the picture of an intellectual casually (or even unconsciously) referencing his own work than they do with the idea of a scribe introducing third-party material into a text he is being paid to copy. It is worth noting that 69

See the Index of Quotations and Allusions, De nugis, pp. 524–6.

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the other preoccupation of our putative interpolator – hell and the devil – also features prominently in De nugis. The introduction to Walter’s book consists of a long and complex analogy between the court and the infernal regions, and is followed by chapters devoted to the torments of Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion. The scrapbook quality of De nugis suggests that Map would have had no qualms about organising the serial insertion of his own material into a text that had happened to catch his eye, and he certainly had access to the physical means of doing so. That Walter had some connection with the world of vernacular romance is strongly suggested by the fact of his name being attached to two branches of the Lancelot-Grail cycle as well as to Latin poetry. It is quite likely that he knew of Partonopeus de Blois, whose popularity in England is attested by Denis Piramus; his colleague Hue de Rotelande certainly knew our romance and assumed that the audience of Ipomedon was familiar with details of its plot.70 Even if Walter had somehow missed Partonopeus in England he could still have come across it while visiting the Count and Countess of Champagne in Troyes on his way to the Third Lateran Council in 1179.71 A plausible scenario might be that Walter either had a copy of the romance made for his own use or was acting in a supervisory role for someone who was having it copied. When the scribe reached a section of the poem where learned material could be readily incorporated, Walter decided to dictate a few ‘improvements’ to the original from his own well-stocked mind. The colophon could then be read in terms of the scribe recording the fact that Walter Map had finished making his contribution and had instructed him to complete his task. It is equally possible that Walter made his additions and then dictated the colophon shortly afterwards. It would surely have appealed to his sense of humour to have his name recorded at the end of the text in a way that would allow unsuspecting readers to infer that he was the author of the whole narrative. Such a cheerful display of disingenuousness would be entirely in character for the man described by Hue de Rotelande as an inveterate liar. In the light of this hypothesis it may be appropriate to ask whether there are any grounds for linking Walter Map to other interpolations in the Continuation or the main body of the romance. We will see in Chapter 4 that the exchange of views between Partonopeus and Anselot that follows the tirade has probably been amplified from a much shorter original (and it is worth noting here that vv. 10925–11062 do not feature in manuscript P, which seems to be closer to the original than the other witnesses where Anselot’s first speech is concerned). Walter certainly could not be ruled out as the author of amplifications to this sequence, whose style and content might well 70 There is an unmistakable allusion to the bedroom scene in Partonopeus in the episode in which Ipomedon rejects the nocturnal advances of Ismeine on the journey from Sicily to Calabria. 71 See McCash, ‘Chrétien’s Patrons’, pp. 19–21.

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have prompted him to deploy his own debating skills and knowledge of historical figures. On the other hand, the moralising developments that have been inserted into speeches in the hero’s council scene in the Continuation are very unlikely to be by Walter.72 They are found only in T, which dates from well after Walter’s death, and there is evidence that the T scribe or his immediate predecessor was a redactor as well as a copyist, who made various additions to the later sections of the Continuation (see Chapter 5). Whatever degree of credence we give to the L colophon, it does seem to imply that Map was associated with a version of our poem that ended with the Anselot episode and did not contain the council scene or the accounts of fighting that follow. There is another series of obvious interpolations in the culminating episode of the main narrative. In MSS LPT we find several passages designed, among other things, to amplify and enhance the role of the king of England: in these witnesses, he is nominated as a seventh victor in the tournament, alongside the six winners common to ABGV. In the last of these additions, the king of England is praised at some length by Anfors for his good government, prowess and generosity (meta 10396–427). He is so handsome, so rich and of such high birth that he would automatically be declared the overall winner were it not for the fact that he has already ruled himself out of contention: Mais il en dit un grant essoine, S’en a des suens buen testemoine, C’onques femme n’ot ne n’avra, Ne ja ne se mariera; Por Deu se tendra castement Et puis donra son chasement Au meillor parent qu’il avra Et que ses regnes eslira. (P meta 10428–35, my punctuation) But he gave an important reason for excusing himself, supported by the valid testimony of his men, namely that he never had had nor ever would have a wife, and would never marry; he would live chastely for God’s sake and subsequently he would leave his estates to the most worthy of his relatives, and the one selected by his kingdom.

This is a neat riposte to the anti-English commentary earlier in the text, where the king is said to be unable to maintain his realm without constant warfare, while his knights are too fond of the bottle (vv. 7273–82). It allows the interpolator to establish the king of England’s superiority to the other participants without fundamentally altering the outcome of the tournament. It might 72 Passages have been added to speeches by Partonopeus (vv. 11785–844 and 12027–55), Gaudin (vv. 11915–50) and Ernoul (vv. 11959–2002). For linguistic evidence against the originality of these passages, see Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 71–2.

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also be intended as coded flattery of an actual king of England, though it is not immediately obvious which one. The king’s vow of chastity calls to mind the figure of Edward the Confessor, whose failure to produce an heir soon gave rise to rumours that he had made a similar pledge.73 Why an interpolator should want to evoke Edward’s succession over a century after the event is not clear, unless this is a rather oblique reference to Henry II’s accession. Henry was a descendant of William the Conqueror, who the Norman chroniclers claimed had been designated as Edward’s heir before the king apparently – and controversially – reversed the decision in favour of Harold Godwinson. The eulogy cannot be a direct reference to Henry II, who married Eleanor of Aquitaine before he became king, and had eight children by her, including his appointed heir Young Henry. The description is a far better match for Richard I, who was known throughout Europe and beyond for his exploits as a warrior and was still unmarried when he succeeded to the throne in 1189. There must have been a period before he finally married Berengaria of Navarre in 1191, at the advanced age of thirty-three, when it looked as though he would never marry and produce an heir, despite a series of high-profile engagements. There was also a question-mark during these years over which of his relatives would succeed him in the event of his being killed in the Holy Land. Although his younger brother John hoped that the succession would pass to him, in 1190 Richard designated his nephew Arthur of Brittany (posthumous son of his elder brother Geoffrey) as heir presumptive to the throne of England.74 If this passage is an allusion to the Lionheart in the early years of his reign, then it is difficult to link it to Walter Map, who left his position at court on the death of Henry II in 1189. Walter has little to say about Richard I in the additions he made to De nugis in the early 1190s, and what he does say includes relating the unflattering accusation that the king had a hand in the assassination of the marquis of Montferrat in 1192 (Dist. v, c. 6). Map is far more complimentary about Young Henry than about his brother, to the extent of devoting most of the first chapter of Distinction iv to praise of the young king’s qualities and achievements (though without overlooking his rebellion against his father, which earns him the labels of ‘parricide’, ‘traitor’ and ‘lovely palace of sin’). Given that Walter described himself as one of the young king’s friends and intimates, it is possible to read the LPT interpolation as his tribute to Young Henry, perhaps composed after the young king’s death in 1183. Henry was an enthusiastic participant in a series of major tournaments in France in the years 1176–80, and in old age William Marshal remembered him as the man ‘who revived chivalry’ (Barber, p. 205). He did marry, in 1172, but his only child by his wife Marguerite of France died in infancy and his inheritance

73 74

Barlow, Edward the Confessor, pp. 81–2. Gillingham, Richard I, pp. 122 and 136–7.

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passed to Richard. However, Walter Map notes that Henry’s heart was ‘withered with hatred’ for his brother, so for him to allude to Richard in the guise of the king of England’s ‘meillor parent’ might be stretching the bounds of probability. It seems safer to assume that, if Walter was involved in the process of amplifying Partonopeus de Blois, his activities were restricted to the Continuation, in Anselot’s tirade and the scholastic debate between the young man and his once and future lord. * Following the thread of animal references through our romance has taken us in a number of expected and unexpected directions. The episode of Partonopeus’s attempted suicide in the Ardennes not only underscores the importance of the Roman de Thèbes as one of the author’s principal intertexts but also reveals that he and his original audience must have known the shorter redaction of the text, which is the only one to feature the sequence on which it is modelled. The Partonopeus poet’s rewriting of this encounter between a horse and a lion provides fresh insights into the nature of the literary alchemy he practises. Originally a prelude to death and disaster, the story of Capaneüs’s horse is transmuted here into a new beginning for the hero, through the agency of a courtly lady and her attendants. The negative merveilleux represented by the horse’s demonic sire in Thèbes makes way for the beneficent maistrie of Maruc, which guarantees Urraque safe passage through areas infested with wild beasts. Just as Maruc’s powers lie somewhere in the grey area between magic and learning, so the Ardennes occupies an ill-defined zone between the familiar territory of northern France and the exotic East, as symbolised by the lion. Nonetheless, the deliberate suppression of any encounters in the forest between human beings and supernatural creatures foreshadows the transformation of the Otherworld into a New World, where the hero will ultimately establish his true identity and found his own dynasty. The two series of animal analogues in Anselot’s tirade against the fils à vilain tell a more complicated story. Some of these analogues undoubtedly featured in the original version of the first part of the Continuation, providing more evidence of the author’s engagement with the natural world, alongside written models, as a source of poetic inspiration. Whereas an obvious non-sequitur in the Ardennes episode draws attention to the reconstruction of a familiar narrative, smaller faultlines in Anselot’s speech point to the presence of interpolations throughout the tirade, designed to reinforce the message about non-noble advisors and to give it a spurious rhetorical symmetry. Additional animals have almost certainly been introduced into the second and fifth sets of analogues, although the opaqueness of some of the allusions and the instability of the manuscript tradition make for difficult reading. If I have attempted to reconstruct both the original text of the tirade and the exact wording of these interpolations, it is not because I believe that

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this is a valid approach to editing medieval romance in general; rather, I hoped that it might shed some light on the genesis of different versions of our romance in particular. My analysis suggests that the interpolator was acquainted with some fairly specialised bestiary material, but was not as skilled as the original poet in turning animal lore into convincing Old French octosyllables. A curiously precise correspondence between one of the interpolations and an animal reference in De nugis curialium could mean that the interpolator was none other than Walter Map, who is named in manuscript L in such a way as to suggest that he was the author of the whole romance. While this overall attribution is highly implausible, the L colophon may be a tongue-in-cheek record of the fact that Walter was somehow involved in the making of one early copy of Partonopeus. How the expanded text of Anselot’s speech then found its way into the dominant manuscript tradition remains to be explored. It is not impossible, however, that an Anglo-Norman exemplar associated with one of Henry II’s courtiers came to exert a powerful influence on the transmission of a text that was conceived – in part, at least – as anti-Plantagenet literary propaganda. The irony of this would surely not have been lost on Walter Map.

Chapter 4 Experiments in Fiction: Anselot’s Story Experiments PartonopeusindeFiction Blois

Bruckner was one of the first critics to draw attention to the experimental nature of much of the writing in Partonopeus de Blois, a work that she saw as setting a standard ‘for beauty and pleasure, for experimentation in form and fusion, that becomes exemplary for the romancers who follow’. Noting the mingling of different styles and genres in the Continuation, she comments in passing that ‘Anselot’s story itself is a kind of lai told in the first person.’1 This brief description of the 600 or so lines that contain Anselot’s account of what happened to him after he was abandoned by Partonopeus in the Ardennes is rich in insights. The use of the term lai captures the selfcontained nature of the story, which could quite easily be detached from the episode that frames it to stand alone as a tale of court intrigue and thwarted love. The idea of a lai which is also a first-person narration points to the startling originality of this passage: there are no other lais or equivalent short narratives from this period that present themselves in this way.2 When we look more closely at the form and structure of the story we find that it offers, in miniature, a summa of the experimental approach that Bruckner sees as characterising the romance as a whole. Multiple narrative techniques – extended first-person narration, écriture en abyme, doubling, repetition with variation of schemas from the main body of the romance, fusion of different intertexts – are brought into play and combined with the political subtext that we identified in Chapter 2 to create a truly innovative piece of fiction. And if this were not enough, the whole story also functions as an exemplum. Whether the end result meets the standard for beauty and pleasure set by the main body of the romance is another question – and one to which we will return at various points in this chapter. Before we can begin to analyse these experiments in fiction more closely, however, we need to step back and see Anselot’s story in context, as part of the first major section of the Partonopeus Continuation. This section (vv. 10657–1696 of the Collet-Joris edition of the text) is often called ‘the Anselot

1 2

‘From Genealogy to Romance’, pp. 37 and 38. Although Marie de France’s Chievrefueil and the Lai du Lecheor maintain the fiction that they were composed by one or more of their protagonists, they are narrated in the third person.

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episode’,3 although Anselot continues to play a role thereafter, notably as leader of an embassy to the Sultan’s camp after his invasion force has landed near Malbricon. Despite its shortcomings, I propose to continue to use this convenient shorthand here, and to reserve the term ‘Anselot’s story’ for the first-person narration around which the rest of this section of the text is constructed. The term ‘Anselot episode’ does reflect the fact that the beginning and/or end of this segment of text is marked in some way in the majority of the manuscripts. MS B has a large initial at the beginning of the segment (the text breaks off before the end). MS L starts at a different point from the other manuscripts, without a large initial, but marks the end of Anselot’s story with a brief epilogue. MS P does not have a large initial at the start, but signals the relaunching of the action after this episode with a large capital P (for Partonopeus) at the beginning of v. 11697. MS T has a large initial at the start of the episode and at v. 11697. Only MS G does not mark a break at either the beginning or the end of the segment, but the placement of initials in this witness can be erratic (e.g. vv. 11063 and 11191, which do not mark any kind of subdivision of the narrative or of Anselot’s argument). To help the reader navigate the discussion that follows, Table 4 clarifies the structure of the episode and the terminology that will be used to refer to its constituent parts. Table 4. Structure of the Anselot episode. Collet-Joris edition Electronic edition

Summary of content

10657–704 Meta 12916–965

Prologue; the poet says that he will Second prologue defer his account of the Sultan’s return until after he has told another story

10705–76 Meta 12966–3043

Partonopeus goes boar-hunting; Forest interlude separated from his companions, he hears a young man’s voice

10777–866 Meta 13044–153

The young man launches into a Anselot’s tirade fierce attack on the fils à vilain, and prayer then prays for God’s guidance

10867–1072 Meta 13154–369

Partonopeus engages the young Scholastic man in a discussion of the merits debate and demerits of various low-born figures

3

Referred to as

Collet and Joris refer to it as ‘l’épisode d’Ansel’ in their Introduction (p. 38).

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Collet-Joris edition Electronic edition

Summary of content

Referred to as

11073–106 Meta 13370–403

Partonopeus recognises the Transition young man as Anselot and takes passage 1 him back to Chief d’Oire

11107–682 Meta 13404–4001

Anselot recounts his experiences in Anselot’s story the Ardennes and at the court of the Holy Roman emperor

11683–96 Meta 14002–15

Anselot remains with Partonopeus, Transition is dubbed and wins renown as a passage 2 knight

What this summary obscures, however – like most critical discussions, including Bruckner’s – is that this ‘episode’ is far from being an organic whole. The manuscripts are not in full agreement on exactly where it starts and ends, and there are significant disparities between them in terms of its content. We have already seen in Chapter 3 that there are good grounds for arguing that the fils à vilain tirade has been quite extensively interpolated in some of the manuscripts; the same may also be true of the pseudo-scholastic debate between Anselot and Partonopeus that precedes their mutual recognition. If we follow through the logic of the conclusion that MS P is closest to the original in the tirade, this would suggest that some 125 lines of the debate which do not feature in P (vv. 10925–1062) may also represent a later addition. This conclusion is supported by a narrative discontinuity in the recognition scene that forms part of transition passage 1. Partonopeus is the first to identify his interlocutor, when he hears the latter claim to have witnessed Sornegur’s betrayal by Marés; he then promptly steps forward and makes himself known to Anselot. The debate scene has taken place in bright moonlight (vv. 10748–50), with the two participants in very close proximity (vv. 10762 and 10841–8), and yet Partonopeus has to name himself before Anselot realises who he is. How is it possible that a devoted squire who had spent two years in Blois could fail to recognise his lord, by voice or appearance, during the course of such a lengthy discussion? The recognition scene works only if the original version of the conversation was much shorter, as in P, where Partonopeus’s first intervention (vv. 10877–92; P meta 13164–79) is followed by a concise rebuttal of his argument by Anselot (vv. 10893–924; P meta 13180–211), which leads in directly to the reference to Marés (vv. 11063–72; P meta 13360–69).4 Such problems are not limited to what we might think of as the preliminaries in this section of the Continuation: even 4 Further evidence for interpolation can be found in a peculiarity in the versification of the non-P versions. The putative addition ends with a couplet rhyming in -ent, which is

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Anselot’s story proper is anything but stable in the manuscript tradition, despite the fact that it lies at the core of the episode. The first part of this chapter will therefore focus on issues arising from this instability and try to draw out their implications for understanding how Anselot’s story came into existence and how it came to occupy its present position within the romance as a whole.

The manuscript tradition and authorship of Anselot’s story Anselot’s story is an editor’s nightmare. Four out of the five manuscripts that contain this part of the Continuation have either developed significant lacunae or were copied from exemplars that already had significant lacunae in this segment of text. Only Paris, BnF fr. 19152 (G) presents a complete text of the story, and this witness has never been the editors’ first choice as base manuscript either for a complete edition of Partonopeus or for the Continuation.5 Despite being a much-studied codex written in a careful hand, this manuscript does not always offer reliable readings, and there are frequent signs of scribal inattention in its version of our romance and other poems. More importantly, there is clear evidence that the scribe of G had access to two different exemplars for the whole of the Anselot episode, one of which was very similar to P, the other related to BLT.6 Smith showed that the partial duplication of six lines in the forest interlude can only be explained by a scenario in which the scribe of G switched exemplars after meta 12987 (v. 10726) in order to incorporate a 45-line passage that was not in the P-type text that seems to have served as his primary model.7 The state of the text in G suggests that the scribe was consulting his second exemplar in a rather haphazard way, and had no clear plan for amalgamating the two versions he immediately followed by one in -ant at the beginning of the text common to all witnesses (vv. 11061–2 and 11063–4). A clumsy rhyme sequence like this does not occur anywhere else in the episode (presenterent-erent and manant-grant in vv. 11179–82 are visually misleading: the syllable count indicates that the -ent ending of the former must have been elided), suggesting that vv. 11061–2 are the work of a remanieur. 5 A number of extracts from G were published by Roquefort, Renouard and Massman (Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 2–3); Crapelet filled the lacunae in A with text from G. A series of partial editions based on this manuscript has been produced by students at the Université d’Aix-Marseille I (see Bibliography). 6 Cf. Busby, I, p. 119: ‘Centres of scribal activity often possessed more than one copy of a particular text’. This suggests that Partonopeus continued to be popular enough for at least one such centre to own multiple copies. 7 Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 76–7. There is evidence that the scribe of BnF fr. 19152 was using two different exemplars for at least two of the other texts he copied: see Faral, Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge, p. 220, and Piramus et Tisbé, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. It is not clear whether meta 12988–3023 represent an addition to an original similar to P, or whether the P version was abridging at this point.

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had in front of him.8 Elsewhere, the G scribe appears to combine readings from both exemplars, producing hybrid couplets such as meta 13464–5 and meta 13524–5.9 The G text of the Anselot episode is thus of considerable interest as an example of medieval editorial technique, but its combination of carelessness and ‘contamination’ (as such editing has traditionally been labelled) has not recommended it to scholars. Editors have therefore been faced with the unenviable task of producing their own composite text, to compensate for absences and obvious lacunae in each of the other witnesses. Gildea used the longest text (T) as the base manuscript for editing the whole of the Continuation, supplementing T with G (partially supported by L) for the account of Noon’s killing of the emperor’s lion, Farés’s denunciation of the young lovers and Anselot’s journey to Sardinia (vv. 639–750 of the Continuation in his edition). Collet and Joris follow B until it breaks off shortly after Anselot’s arrival in Rome (v. 11226), then switch to its close relative T, filling the central lacuna in T with the text of G in the same way as Gildea. Although Collet and Joris claim that B offers the best-preserved text for the first part of the Continuation (p. 55), my own analysis of the first 120 lines of Anselot’s story across the five extant manuscripts indicates that B is often idiosyncratic (e.g. v. 11155 ‘Ja nule beste ne dotaist’, where GLPT have ‘Ja nule beste nel blecast’), and quite frequently presents lectiones faciliores which suggest that the scribe was either working from an illegible exemplar or was deliberately rewriting a text that his audience might not have understood.10 On the other hand, T also contains frequent idiosyncracies (e.g. T meta 11134, 13450, 13455, 13488–9, 13508, 13519) and a number of obvious errors (T meta 13460, 13523, 13529, 13534), making the choice between these two witnesses an invidious one. In addition, BT present a shorter version of Anselot’s description of Farés, 8 The scribe must have copied meta 12982–7 from the shorter, P-type exemplar before realising that his other manuscript had a fuller version of events. He then switched to his BLT-type model, in which the ‘extra’ text ends with six lines (meta 13018–23; vv. 10753–8) that are very similar to the six that he had just copied. Although he omitted the final couplet of the insertion, one line of which duplicated meta 12987, he did not take the trouble to rewrite meta 13021 (v. 10756), which duplicates meta 12985. 9 The presence in G of meta 12994–95 and 13002–3, which are found in L, but not in BT, suggests that the second exemplar was a lost manuscript, possibly the exemplar of L, or a text closely related to it. G is closer to LP than to BT in the lines that follow the inserted text (see meta 13032 and 13036–7). 10 E.g. B vv. 11135–6 ‘Grans fu et fors et escreüs/ Et bels et gens et bien corsus’ (‘he [Noon] was big and strong and well-grown, fine and good-looking and very thick-set’) vs GLPT ‘Granz ert et fors et escheviz/ Et bien tailliez et bien forniz’ (‘he was big and strong and elegant, well proportioned and well endowed’; text of P); B v. 11196 ‘Nez et norris de molt mal grain’ vs GLPT ‘De mal estrace et de mal grain’ (text of T; translations given below). The idiosyncratic nature of B was noted by Tyssens, ‘L’Édition du Partonopeus de Blois. Problèmes de méthode’, pp. 29–30, and ‘Une nouvelle édition de Partonopeus de Blois’, pp. 357–9.

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which shows all the signs of having been abridged or copied from a damaged exemplar. In BT Anselot states simply that the emperor ‘found’ Farés and that his court suffered for it: ‘A fil a roi le tign en fin O fil a conte palazin, Mais il ert filz a .j. vilain, Nez et norris de molt mal grain; Li empereres le trova, Tote sa cort en mestorna.’ (vv. 11193–8) ‘I came to the conclusion that he was the son of a king or a count palatine, but he was the son of a vilain, a thoroughly base man born and bred; the emperor discovered him [as a foundling] and his whole court was thrown into confusion as a result.’

In GLP, however, Anselot explains that Farés was abandoned by his vilain father in a church where he was discovered by the emperor. Although the emperor later learned the full story of his birth, he still brought Farés up at his court despite his dubious origin: ‘Mais il ert fiz a un vilain De male [es]trace et de mal grain Qui en un mostier lo gita. Li empereres lo trova, Qui puis sot lo por quoi assez Et por quoi il i fu gitez, Mais por sa mauvese nature Ne li fist peior norreture.’11 (P meta 13500–507; my punctuation and emendation) ‘But he was the son of a vilain of base extraction and base blood who abandoned him [as an infant] in a church. The emperor discovered Farés there and later learned the full story about why he had been abandoned, but did not give him a worse upbringing because of his servile nature.’

With its signposting of the nature–nurture debate at the rhyme in meta 13506–7, the longer text seems much the more appropriate, given the emphasis throughout the Continuation on Farés’s bad blood. The BT version absolves the emperor of some responsibility for the suffering inflicted on his barons (which might suggest that we are dealing with a politically motivated cut in these witnesses) but makes it impossible for the audience to understand how the ruler of Rome could have come across a foundling. From the point of 11 P reads paroir, which is clearly a scribal error for peior (G poior). The repetition of por quoi may indicate a scribal lapse in meta 13505.

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view of coherence, these ‘extra’ lines really should be incorporated into the edited text – but this would add yet another piece to the patchwork and take us even further away from the principles of best manuscript editing. Of the two remaining manuscripts, L is probably the least suitable of all as the basis for a working edition of this part of the romance. As an Italian copy of an Anglo-Norman exemplar, produced by a group of up to four scribes, some of whom clearly had limited knowledge of French, L can be used only as a control manuscript, although it does occasionally appear to have preserved an original reading that has become corrupted in the other manuscripts (e.g. vv. 11465–7; L meta 13782–4). In Anselot’s story L generally agrees with P (and G where this is following its P-type exemplar) against BT, but there are some puzzling instances of agreement against GP that make firm conclusions about its place in the manuscript tradition of the Continuation impossible. As for P, we have already seen that a good case can be made for seeing this manuscript as closest to the original non-interpolated version of the fils à vilain tirade. In many instances it offers the most coherent text of Anselot’s story as well, but has some obvious lacunae (and possibly some abridgements, too). To avoid confusion for the reader I shall continue to use the Collet-Joris BGT text as the main point of reference in the discussion that follows, with comments on other manuscripts as appropriate. It needs to be borne in mind, however, that an alternative composite text, made up of P supplemented by G, might take us closer to the original version of this part of our romance. The question of the authorship of Anselot’s story is prompted by a short passage in the main body of the romance that follows Partonopeus’s decision to abandon Anselot and seek a solitary death in the Ardennes. Having described Anselot’s fruitless search for his master, the narrator promises that he will return to the young man’s adventures at a more appropriate moment: N’en dirai plus a ceste fois Ne ses dolors ne ses destrois, Mais la avant cant je devrai Ses aventures conterai. (vv. 5737–40) I will say no more about him at present, nor about his sufferings and hardships, but I will relate his adventures later on, when I need to.

These lines seem to imply that the romance was composed with continuation in mind, or at least that the poet intended to write another story which would have Anselot as its protagonist. Frustratingly, we cannot be certain that this anticipation figured in the original version of the text, as there is a lacuna in A at this point. It is possible that this passage was inserted when the ending of the main romance was rewritten in order to allow for a continuation of the rivalry between Partonopeus and the Sultan. What does remain in A suggests that this is unlikely, however. MS A breaks off some 150 lines before this

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point, at the end of the account of Anselot’s background. The final lines of folio 33 verso tell us that Partonopeus had decided to call his new squire Guillemot rather than Sorsin, because his Scandinavian name was unfamiliar in France (vv. 5581–4 in the printed edition); either one or two folios then appear to be missing between this point and folio 34 recto. A contains all the details found in the other manuscripts about Guillemot-Anselot’s beauty and personal qualities, his ancestry and the reasons behind Sornegur’s decision to send him to Blois. As Kornelis Sneyders de Vogel pointed out, if Guillemot were destined simply to facilitate the hero’s suicide mission to the Ardennes and then disappear from the narrative, then this is surely a case of ‘too much information’.12 The careful detailing of Guillemot’s appearance, origin and character implies that some kind of future is intended for him. It could perhaps be argued that Guillemot is foregrounded in this way because he is about to be converted to Christianity, and that Partonopeus’s determination to save his squire’s soul before pursuing his own death is enough to justify the amount of backstory provided. There is, however, no incontrovertible evidence that the conversion figured in A, since the lacuna ends after this point, in the middle of the account of Urraque’s rescue of Partonopeus. Curiously, even in BGLPT Anselot makes no reference to this key event in his life in the recapitulation of events with which his story begins. One way to account for the current condition of A is to assume that folios were torn out of the manuscript – and there is clear evidence that they were torn out rather than accidentally detached – at points where the story differed substantially from the revised version of the romance, perhaps with a view to replacing them with text copied from the ‘new edition’. This would help us to account for the loss of individual folios from the middle of the text (as between folios 33 and 34) as well as the loss of a whole gathering from the description of the tournament (references in the extant portion of A indicate that it must have diverged significantly from the other manuscripts in this section of the poem). It could also explain the loss of the final folio or folios. If the A version had ended like Eneas with references to the unbroken happiness of the new ruling couple and an evocation of their descendants, then this would have been difficult to reconcile with the return of the Sultan in the continued version of the romance. Someone looking to update an older edition of the poem could not have eliminated the triple wedding in A without doing considerably more violence to the manuscript, but he could at least ensure that the happy ending did not absolutely preclude a continuation. This raises the possibility that the A version of events between Partonopeus 12 ‘Le poète nous a intéressé trop vivement à ce personnage pour l’écarter tout à fait dans la suite’ (‘The poet has evoked too lively an interest in this character to sideline him altogether in what follows’, p. 23). The equivalent figure in Gautier d’Arras’s Ille et Galeron, whose role is purely to help the ailing Ille to leave Brittany, is not even named, let alone described in such detail (vv. 1937–55).

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leaving Blois and encountering Urraque differed from that preserved in the other manuscripts; it may have featured a shorter account of the journey to the Ardennes, perhaps without the conversion scene. Even if the conversion was present in A, the argument that this development justifies the foregrounding of Guillemot is hard to sustain. Crucially, it overlooks the way in which audience expectations are conditioned by the opening description of the Ardennes as a fearsome wilderness. If the original version of the romance did not contain the narratorial intervention in vv. 5737–40, then it would have presented a scenario in which Guillemot was introduced, baptised under false pretences, and then left at the mercy of the lions and other predators with which the great forest is infested. We have to ask ourselves why the poet would have gone to the trouble to convert a pagan Norseman just to abandon him in a situation where he was likely to be eaten by the local wildlife. The inherent implausibility of this scenario suggests that even in the A version of the romance Guillemot-Anselot was always destined to return as the hero of some kind of sequel to the main story. This in turn makes it more plausible that Anselot’s story was composed by the poet who wrote the original romance. Whereas Fourrier believed that the whole poem as preserved in MS T was the work of a single author (p. 317, n. 11), Smith argued on the grounds of language that none of the Continuation should be attributed to the poet of the main narrative (‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 91–2). It is worth noting, however, that only one of the rhymes Smith identifies as strongly suggesting that the original poet could not have written this segment of the poem occurs in the Anselot episode (the remainder come from the dodecasyllabic section of the Continuation, in passages that may well be the work of a different poet). And this single instance (vv. 11661–2, cited as fols : sols < solus) is actually the result of a misreading by Smith, based on the obviously corrupt text of T (the original rhyme pair was either fos : sos = sot, as preserved in MS P, or possibly foz : soz).13 Where literary and stylistic features are concerned, Anselot’s story is cut from exactly the same cloth as the main body of the romance. As we shall see in the second part of this chapter, the links between Anselot’s story and the first two-thirds of the romance proper are so close and so carefully constructed that it is difficult to believe that they are not both the work of the same poet. The way in which Sorsin-Guillemot-Anselot is introduced provides further evidence for common authorship, signposting as it does a number of issues around identity that are picked up and developed in the first section of the Continuation. The repeated instances of renaming highlight the instability of the young man’s identity as he crosses a series of geographical and cultural

13 Collet and Joris note the unreliability of the T reading and correct v. 11662 by reference to P (pp. 774–5).

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boundaries. The Viking Sorsin is partially integrated into the world of the French nobility as the squire Guillemot, but remains an ambiguous Other whose alterity is simultaneously foregrounded and contested. In Blois, Sorsin-Guillemot is both insider and outsider. An insider by virtue of his uncle’s special relationship and his own bond of personal loyalty to the young count of Blois, he is also an outsider by virtue of his stubborn refusal to adopt his hosts’ religion. When he does finally accept Christianity, another geographical dislocation hints at continuing instability: the ceremony takes place not within the settled community of Blois, but in a remote, unfamiliar location on the edge of the Ardennes.14 And immediately after his religious integration is completed, the newly baptised Anselot is cast adrift by his master and literally loses his bearings in the forest.15 This pattern is replicated in Anselot’s story, where the young man tells how he came to the court of Rome as an outsider whose identity underwent a similar series of shifts and reversals. Initially welcomed by the emperor as a young nobleman of royal blood, Anselot then found his status compromised by Farés, a crosser of social boundaries determined to marginalise the incomer. Alternately in favour and out of favour with the emperor, Anselot became both the fêted killer of the Sardinian bear and the man responsible for the death of his lord’s pet lion, both the emperor’s prospective nephew by marriage and his prisoner, incarcerated on a remote island. It is less easy to draw conclusions about the authorship of other elements of the Anselot episode, but there are some grounds for believing that the original versions of these passages were also composed by the same poet as the main body of the romance. If the second prologue is not by the original poet, then it represents a very skilful pastiche of the tone and style adopted by the lover-narrator of the main narrative. The seamless interweaving of references to the narrator’s own love-affair with evocations of the hero’s emotional situation and generalising sententiae strikes exactly the same note as in the numerous interventions which precede this section of the text. There are also some telling textual details in the lines that mark the transition from the prologue to the forest interlude: Mais cest conte met en respit Tant qu’un altre vos aie dit. Parthonopex a bel loisir D’envoisier tot a son plaisir, 14 I have suggested elsewhere that name given to the location of Guillemot’s conversion, Albigés, is actually a corruption of Maubeuges, an important medieval religious centre near the Ardennes; see Eley, ‘Albi and the Ardennes in Partonopeus de Blois’. 15 Payen’s comment that the hero’s role in the conversion of his squire is an indicator that the grace of God is always with Partonopeus (Le Motif du repentir dans la littérature française médiévale des origines à 1230, p. 480) makes the abandonment of Anselot even more problematic.

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D’aller en riviere ou en bois, Le quel qu’il vuelt tot a son chois. (vv. 10703–8) But I will defer this story until after I have told you another. Partonopeus had all the time in the world to enjoy himself as he saw fit, to go hawking for waterfowl or hunting in the woods, whichever he wanted, just as he chose.

This passage contains two verbal echoes of the scenes that describe Partonopeus’s way of life in Chief d’Oire as Melior’s secret lover. The construction avoir bel loisir is used when the hero wakes up alone after his first night with Melior and decides to get dressed:16 Et quant il volt ses dras vestir, Dont il a ore bel loisir, N’i a mie les siens trovés. (vv. 1585–7) And when he went to get dressed, which he now had all the time in the world to do, the clothes he found were not his own.

The rhyme en bois : c(h)ois is found in close proximity to loisir in Melior’s speech during their second night together, as she explains the options he now has for entertaining himself during the day:17 ‘Quel vie volrés demener, En bos u en riviere aler? Se vos volés aller en bois Et ce vos plaise en vostre cois, Quant vos serés bien atornés Et aprés a loisir disnés, Uns cors vos ert devant vos mis; Il n’a si buen dusque a Paris.’ (vv. 1781–8) ‘How do you want to spend your time, hunting or hawking for waterfowl? If you wish to go hunting in the woods and this is your choice of amusement, when you are dressed and have then enjoyed a leisurely meal, a hunting-horn will be placed in front of you; there is no finer horn between here and Paris.’

Whether conscious or unconscious, these echoes form an effective link to an earlier period of peaceful cohabitation with Melior, while also recalling the 16 Interestingly, avoir bel loisir also occurs in the main prologue in relation to the poet-narrator himself: ‘Bel [loisir] ai et bon sejor,/ La [merci Deu] et [mon] segnor’ (‘I have all the time and opportunity in the world [for composing], thanks be to God and my lord’, vv. 73–4). 17 Chois occurs at the rhyme in only one other couplet (vv. 6659–60), where it rhymes with blois.

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figure of the young Partonopeus, who is about to make a re-appearance in the form of Anselot. It seems more likely that such resonances would surface in a passage written by the original author than in the work of a continuator. If we accept the evidence for common authorship and the primacy of the A version of Partonopeus then it is clear that, at the point when he composed vv. 5737–40, our poet could not have envisaged Anselot’s story in the context in which we now find it – that is, as a ‘curtain-raiser’ for the account of Partonopeus’s war with the Sultan. It is possible that he did not have any detailed plans at this stage for developing the further adventures of his young protagonist. Perhaps he simply kept the idea of a roman d’Anselot on the back burner until it became clear that there was to be a ‘second edition’ of the poem, with the original ending modified to allow for a continuation of the rivalry between Partonopeus and Margaris. A fresh story about war with the Sultan could easily be made to accommodate Anselot, alongside other new cast members such as Ernoul’s sons; all that was needed was an account of where he had been and what he had done in the interim. There is, however, some support in the text for a different explanation of how Anselot’s story may have come into existence. Three clues suggest that the poet may actually have composed part of his roman d’Anselot before he completed the remainder of the main narrative. He then incorporated it into the first part of a continuation at a later date. The first of these clues is the fact that although there is clear and frequent doubling in Anselot’s story of features found in the first 8,000 lines of the main narrative, there are no echoes whatsoever of themes and incidents that occur after Partonopeus is released from captivity on the island of Tenedon (this technique of doubling is discussed in more detail below). This would be consonant with Anselot’s story having been composed before the final third of the romance was in existence – perhaps not long after the second Ardennes episode was written, while the character’s possibilities and the fils à vilain thematic was still uppermost in his mind.18 It is very noticeable that this theme does not recur in the main narrative after the intervention of the bishop of Paris and the subsequent estrangement of hero and heroine. The second piece of evidence is the self-contained nature of the tale, which prompted Bruckner to describe it as a lai. Unlike the first-person narration of the fall of Troy in Eneas, on which it is probably modelled, Anselot’s story has no preamble: its first words simply evoke the moment at which the speaker was abandoned by his master: ‘“Sire”, fait il, “en Albigés/ Vos perdi ge, mais n’en pou mes”’ (‘“My lord”, he said, “I lost you in Albigés, but there was nothing I could do about it”’, vv. 11107–10). Nothing that Anselot says links his story to the specific occasion on which it is told. Eneas, on the other hand, begins

18 Chrétien’s Lancelot and Yvain apparently show us a writer working on two linked compositions side-by-side, so this may not have been an unusual modus operandi.

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his account with a prologue that includes repeated verbal bows to queen Dido, who has asked him to tell his story in front of the highest-ranking barons at her court: ‘Dame’, fait il, ‘ma grant dolor me remembrez et ma tristor; ja nel comencerai a dire, de cele ore n’aie grant ire quant me remanbre del grant duel; ja nel conteroie mon voel, mais quant vos plest que gel vos die, ja en orroiz bien grant partie.’ (vv. 849–56) ‘My lady’, he said, ‘your words remind me of my suffering and my sorrow; I cannot begin to relate it without feeling distraught as I recall a time of such anguish; I would not choose to recount it, but since you wish me to tell you the story, you will hear the sum and substance of it now.’

The context of Eneas’s story is thus embedded in the story itself, while the beginning of Anselot’s tale implies only the presence of Partonopeus as listener, with no acknowledgement of his new imperial status. The end of the story is similarly non-specific: Anselot concludes by begging his ‘biau sire dous’ (‘fair sweet lord’, v. 11679) never to rely on a fils à vilain, and his words are approved by every knight present in the maison (‘building’ or ‘palace’, v. 11684). Again, there is no mention of the fact that the sire is now an emperor and a married man, while the term maison tells us very little about the setting for Anselot’s performance. Given that the first transition passage includes a statement to the effect that the telling of the story was deferred until the empress was present, it is odd that there is no reference here to her reaction (Eneas’s story is followed by a detailed description of the emotions it aroused in Dido). It is also curious that the term maison is used for the setting implied by this passage, namely Melior’s palace in Chief d’Oire. In the initial description of the city in the main narrative, every dwelling evoked, including Melior’s residence, is called a palais (see vv. 831, 847, 885, 921, 928, 953, 955, 964), never a maison. The lack of specific referencing has the effect of detaching Anselot’s story from the context established by the first transition passage. This again suggests that it may not have been composed of a piece with the rest of the first segment of the Continuation.19 19 It is tempting to see further evidence of this in a chronological discontinuity between the Continuation prologue and the text that follows the second transition passage. The prologue tells us that Partonopeus ‘a et joie et pais .j. an’ (‘lived in joy and peace for a year’, v. 10679) after his marriage before the Sultan’s invasion, while the later passage implies that three full years have passed: ‘Partonopex sejorne en pes/ Et a deduit entent

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The most compelling piece of evidence to support the view that Anselot’s story had some kind of independent existence before being incorporated into a continued version of the romance is to be found in the scene at the end of the scholastic debate in which Partonopeus finally recognises his interlocutor. We have already noted that the process of recognition is triggered by Anselot’s reference to his own first encounter with a fils à vilain: ‘Mais je vi ja .j. Alemant Vil et chaitis, povre et malvés, Et si l’apeloit om Marés, Que Sornegur li riches rois Retint et aleva manois.’ (vv. 11064–8) ‘But I once saw a German who was called Marés, a base wretch, poor and ill-natured, whom the noble King Sornegur took into his service and immediately promoted.’

The Sornegur episode contains no reference in any of the manuscripts to Marés being from Germany: he is described there in terms of his social rather than his national origin. The absence of any other information must have led the audience to infer that his father was a Scandinavian vilain from Sornegur’s own territories. If the poet had pictured Marés as a foreign interloper at this stage, why did he not include some reference to his nationality in the lists of derogatory comments attributed to Sornegur and his clerk? Judging by the Savari episode of Aymeri de Narbonne, negative stereotyping of Germans was certainly appreciated by French audiences in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries,20 so this would have been a perfect opportunity to heap a little more opprobrium on inhabitants of the Holy Roman Empire. The most likely explanation for Marés suddenly becoming a German in the debate section of the Anselot episode is that the poet had already composed Anselot’s story, which features Farés, a German foundling raised to high estate by the emperor. If v. 11064 forms part of a passage designed to graft that story into the Continuation, it is easy to see how the near-homonymy of

adés./ Droit au quart an a tout conquis/ Quanque ses cuers li a promis’ (‘Partonopeus dwelt in peace and devoted all his time to pleasure. By the fourth year he had obtained everything that he had set his heart on’, vv. 11697–700). This discontinuity is more apparent than real, however: the reference to the fourth year of the hero’s reign in v. 11699 occurs only in T, where it probably represents a scribal corruption of an original closer to P ‘Droit a quar il a tot conquis’ (‘he was entitled to do so, because he had won everything’), a reading confirmed by G ‘Doit a que il a tot conquis’. 20 See Calin, ‘Aspects of Realism in the Old French Epic: Aymeri de Narbonne’, pp. 39–42. On the representation of Germans more generally, see Zimmermann, ‘Die Beurteilung der Deutschen in der französischen Literatur des Mittelalters mit besonderer Berüchsichtigung der chansons de geste’, passim.

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the characters’ names and their identical roles as low-born traitors could have led to the unconscious transfer of one of Farés’s attributes to his predecessor Marés. Returning to our starting-point, it now seems clear that the prolepsis in vv. 5739–40 of the romance proper was always intended to let the audience know that Anselot was destined to return as the protagonist of another narrative. What it does not do, though, is suggest where his story might fit into the larger structure of the work. The narrator does not say, for instance, that he will recount the young man’s adventures after he has completed those of his principal hero – only that he will return to them ‘la avant cant je devrai’, which leaves all the options open. Perhaps, as we have already suggested, the idea was subsequently to compose a roman d’Anselot, of which lines 11107–682 (and possibly 11683–92 as well) were the first instalment.21 Alternatively, the plan may have been to bring Anselot to Chief d’Oire during the triple wedding celebrations, so that his story would form a coda to the main romance, reiterating the important fils à vilain theme at the moment of closure. Perhaps Anselot’s story did originally occupy the final folios of MS A and its exemplar, and was displaced to its present position during the process of continuation.22 In all probability, we shall never know. The complexities of the manuscript tradition make any conclusions about the genesis of this part of the text both speculative and provisional, but there do seem to be grounds for believing that the story as we have it was composed by the author of the main narrative, some time before the original romance was reworked with a view to being continued. Some – but almost certainly not all – of its narrative frame as presented in the published editions may also be the work of same poet. These two premises underlie the discussion of literary experimentation that occupies the rest of this chapter.

21 The dubbing of Anselot and his winning renown as a knight (vv. 11689–92) form a natural end to his enfances. The following four lines (vv. 11693–6) read like ‘narrative glue’ designed to link these enfances into the Continuation: the recurrence of chevalier at the rhyme in v. 11694, only one couplet after the destriers/ chevaliers rhyme of vv. 11689–90, is uncharacteristically clumsy for the poet of Anselot’s story. 22 Crapelet argued that only one folio was missing from the end of MS A, represented by the surviving fragment of folio 62 (p. 22), while Sneyders de Vogel declared that it was ‘obvious’ that only a few lines were missing (p. 6). Given that folio 62 would have been the fifth folio of a gathering, and that Anselot’s story would have occupied rather less than four folios in the format of MS A, it is nonetheless possible that A could originally have consisted of ten full gatherings of eight folios each, with Anselot’s return occupying the second half of the final gathering. Crapelet’s hypothesis would imply that the final gathering contained either one or three blank folios at the end, depending on whether it was made up of three or four bifolia. See the description of MS A in the electronic edition for further details.

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An exemplary fusion Another argument in favour of common authorship is the redeployment in Anselot’s story of the virtuosic technique of literary fusion that characterises the main body of the romance. Here, too, we find evidence of multiple intertexts contributing a variety of narrative nuclei that combine in unexpected ways to create a new mode of discourse. This discourse is both allusive and exemplary, in two senses of the word. In the first place, it provides a model of how to fuse a wide variety of sources together within the confines of a 600-line narrative. In the second, Anselot’s story clearly presents itself, as we saw in Chapter 2, as a cautionary tale about the influence of the fils à vilain. It is, in many ways, less of a lai than an exemplum, in the medieval Christian sense of ‘counsel for living’, a story designed to ‘educate and persuade’ its audience, with a goal of inducing ‘ethical transformation’ and behavioural change among its hearers.23 The definition of the medieval exemplum given by Claude Bremond, Jacques le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt privileges its theological dimension, as does their insistence on the presence of ‘un auditoire particulier, celui de fidèles ou de disciples à qui l’on donne une leçon’ (‘a specific listening public, made up of the faithful or of disciples who are being given a lesson’).24 They also point out, however, that although the use of exempla in the Middle Ages seems to have started in the monasteries and to have been closely associated with predication, in the course of the twelfth century such stories rapidly became part of the rhetorical toolkit of secular writers as well; some exempla may even have found their way from popular tales into sermons (pp. 50–53). A key role in this process of diffusion was played by the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi;25 more significant, perhaps, in relation to Anselot’s story was the influence of the Seven Sages tradition, which provides some of the key elements in its intertextual mix. It will be useful to isolate the ingredients in

23 Gelley, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–6; see also Speigel, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography, pp. 91–3. This concept of exemplarity more readily accommodates the notion of the cautionary tale than the idea of the exemplum as ‘the paradigm which must be copied or aspired to’, as suggested by Ramm, ‘Making Something of Nothing: the Excesses of Storytelling in the Lais of Marie de France and La Chastelaine de Vergi’ (p. 13). 24 L’Exemplum, pp. 37–8: ‘Un récit bref donné comme véridique et destiné à être inséré dans un discours (en général un sermon) pour convaincre un auditoire par une leçon salutaire’ (‘a short narrative presented as a true story and designed to be inserted into a speech (generally a sermon) in order to convince an audience via a salutary lesson’). See Welter, L’Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du Moyen Age, and Les Exempla médiévaux: nouvelles perspectives, ed. by Berlioz and Polo de Beaulieu, for more detailed discussions. 25 See Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers, pp. 73–91.

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this mix before moving on to consider how it functions as an exemplum, and whether or not its exemplarity is problematised. The major external influences on Anselot’s story are Eneas and a version of the Old French Seven Sages romance, probably the common ancestor of the extant K and C redactions. Eneas provides a structural model for an extended first-person narrative integrated – or designed to be integrated – into a larger composition, in the form of the hero’s account of the fall of Troy, which is delivered to Dido’s court after he has made his way to Carthage (Eneas, vv. 849–1196). In Partonopeus, the model is signalled not only by the fact that Anselot, like Eneas, recounts a story of his own misfortunes, but also by specific parallels in their careers. Anselot, too, has escaped from his enemies and has left behind the country of his birth (though in reverse order), travelling long distances before reaching a land where he can tell the story of some, at least, of his wanderings. These resonances are consonant with the way in which Eneas is referenced in the main narrative, both in the prologue and the scene in which Melior, like Dido, finds herself unable to pronounce the name of the man she loves (Eneas, vv. 1272–325; Partonopeus, vv. 7245–54). But Anselot is not a second Eneas, as the reconfiguration of the broader context makes clear: his trajectory leads from West to East, and he is forced to leave the woman he loves not by the gods, but by his own impulsive reaction to the killing of Noon. This reconfiguration can also be seen in the figure of Euglar, who shares Dido’s forwardness and fole amor, but not her tragic fate.26 The displacement of the story-telling function away from the principal hero (Partonopeus) towards the protagonist of a new tale of thwarted love is also characteristic of our poet. The Seven Sages tradition is the source for the white greyhound that Anselot rescues from a shipwreck on the ninth day of his quest for Partonopeus and christens Noon. This hound is a fusion of two dogs from two separate tales in the earlier work; its double origin is revealed in the doubling of the emperor’s attempts to dispose of it. The model for the first attempt, when the emperor has Noon thrown from a cliff in retaliation for its killing of his pet lion, is found in Canis, the second of the fifteen stories that make up the K redaction of the Seven Sages.27 This tells how a rich man decapitates his own favourite hound after being led to believe that it has attacked and killed his infant son (the dog has in fact killed a large snake that was threatening the child, which is finally discovered safe and well). In Partonopeus, the infant becomes Anselot, at this stage the emperor’s protégé, who is about

26 Fol(e) and its derivatives are repeatedly associated with Euglar’s love for Anselot: see vv. 11264, 11269, 11520, 11555, 11560, 11568. 27 Sneyders de Vogel, p. 22; Peruzzi, ‘Tematica cortese ed elementi folclorici nel Dit dou levrier de Jean de Condé’, pp. 400–402. Neither Sneyders de Vogel nor Peruzzi makes the link to Tentamina.

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to be attacked and killed by the lion when Noon intervenes to defend him. The revenge motif is retained, but on this occasion the emperor’s rage leads to serious injury for the dog, rather than death. The final killing of Noon is a rewriting of Tentamina, the eighth story in the sequence, in which a would-be adulterous wife is advised by her mother to test out her husband’s willingness to swallow affronts by first cutting down his special fruit tree and then killing his favourite greyhound bitch. In the K redaction this animal is white (v. 2611),28 and it is knifed through the heart in a passage that has very close visual and verbal parallels with the scene of Noon’s death: La levriere devant li vient, Si le joïst, car rien ne crient. Ele bouta son chainse avant, Et ele saut sus maintenant. La dame li fu male suer: Le canivet li boute ou cuer! Morte chaï, si giete .i. brait. (K, vv. 2647–53) The greyhound bitch came up to her and made a fuss of her, for it did not suspect anything. The wife thrust her dress forward and the dog immediately leapt up. The lady was far from sisterly towards it: she thrust the knife into its heart! The dog let out a yelp and fell dead.

In Anselot’s words, ‘“Noons li miens [me vint] joïr”’ (‘“my Noon came and made a fuss of me”’, v. 11623) as the emperor is inspecting one of a pair of swords that a smith has just presented to him. Farés whispers to the emperor to put Anselot in his place by killing the dog, and the emperor acts on his advice, just as the wife in Tentamina does exactly as her mother suggests: ‘Il feri Noon en boutant Parmi le cors du pic devant; Parmi le cuer li mist l’espee. Noons fu mors sans demouree.’ (vv. 11639–42) ‘He struck Noon, thrusting the point through his chest; he drove the sword through his heart. Noon died on the spot.’

In both narratives, the final outcome is not quite what the killer anticipated. After a third test of her husband’s quietism, the wife in Tentamina is subjected to a forced bleeding that convinces her that she would lose her life

28 The C redaction starts just after the passage in which the wife describes the hound to her mother, so we cannot tell if it was white in both versions. The prose text which the C redaction has been used to complete refers to the animal as a lissete (a hunting dog), without specifying its colour.

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if she tempted fate by taking a lover. In Partonopeus, Anselot publicly defies the emperor and is imprisoned for two months on an island before escaping with the help of the empress. The choice of two models from the Seven Sages tradition is evidence that Anselot’s story was conceived as an exemplum; it is not simply an entertaining narrative to which a moral has been added as an afterthought. Each of the embedded tales in the Seven Sages is told in order to make a specific argument, and each is glossed by its teller as part of a strategy designed to persuade the hearer (the king) to take a particular course of action. To this extent, Anselot’s story reproduces the structural characteristics of a Seven Sages tale: it is embedded in a larger narrative, leads to an explicit moralisation (which in turn fits in to a pattern that runs through that larger narrative), and is shown to persuade an inscribed audience of the wisdom of never trusting a fils à vilain. Its originality lies not only in fusing this model of an exemplary tale with the first-person narrative model taken from Eneas, but also in the fact that it goes one step further and integrates elements of the Seven Sages frame story into this embedded narrative. The frame of the Seven Sages is provided by the story of the king’s son, educated by the sages of the title, who returns to court at his father’s command but refuses to speak for seven days because of an omen he has seen in the heavens. His stepmother fails to make him break his silence by offering to poison his father and then marry him; she then accuses him of attempted rape and tries to have him executed. The first fourteen stories are told alternately by the queen and each of the sages in turn, as they try to persuade the king either to proceed with the execution or to delay it for another day. The final story is told by the young prince on the eighth day, when he breaks his silence and reveals the truth about his stepmother’s actions. Anselot’s story casts Farés in the role of the wicked stepmother who tells tales to the emperor, and himself as the prince who is alternately in favour and out of favour with his sovereign. In a characteristic role-reversal, the empress takes the beneficent role of the sages, first persuading her husband to agree to Anselot’s marriage to Euglar, and then releasing him from prison after the death of Noon. Even the Potiphar’s wife motif reappears in modified form when Farés accuses the empress of taking too much pleasure in Anselot’s company. If the influence of the Seven Sages frame story can be seen in the way in which the struggle for influence over the emperor is mediated by words – Farés’s flattery and accusations, Anselot’s tales of his past and of his exploit in Sardinia – it is equally true that the Partonopeus poet is making this borrowed material his own. He turns the frame-story upside-down by having evil triumph over good; at the same time, he enhances the impact of the competing speakers by having Anselot be his own advocate with the emperor as well as the narrator of the frame-story. Moreover, he combines the war of words with physical action, but, curiously, this all takes place at one remove: either literally, in Sardinia, or metonymically, par bêtes interposées, in the

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killing of the lion and Noon. While the latter two instances derive from the role of animals in stories within a story in the Seven Sages, the geographical distancing of the combat between Anselot, Noon and a giant bear points to the existence of a third significant intertext for Anselot’s story. Anselot’s journey to Sardinia and killing of the bear belongs to a tradition that goes back to Jason and the Argonauts, of a hero being set a seemingly impossible task in order to gain (or regain) the favour of a powerful individual. Certain features of this particular quest/test narrative suggest, however, that the poet may also have been drawing on a much more recent model. The central adventure of this section of Partonopeus seems to represent a fusion of Canis and a famous episode from the Arthurian section of Wace’s Brut. Canis includes the detail that the rich man’s absence from his house was the consequence of his owning a bear as well as a greyhound: he had acceded to requests to organise and attend a baiting, which was held in a meadow near the Tiber (K, vv. 1195–216). This bear-baiting, which involves a pack of large fierce dogs (K, vv. 1213–14), may lie behind the role of Noon, who attacks the bear, but is unable to deal with it single-handedly. Combined with this we find a number of intriguing echoes of the passage in the Brut that describes Arthur’s combat with Dinabuc, the giant of Mont St Michel (Brut, vv. 11239–598).29 The first of these concerns the context and location of the two adventures. Arthur does battle with Dinabuc on a small offshore island, shortly after he has made a sea crossing from England to Barfleur; he finds that the local population have abandoned their lands in terror as a result of the giant’s raids on the mainland. Anselot’s adversary has likewise established itself on a small island off the coast of Sardinia, whither our protagonist has sailed from mainland Italy. The bear’s repeated raids on fields and vineyards have also driven the inhabitants away (vv. 11403–6);30 it has routed ‘great companies of knights’ (v. 11381), just as Dinabuc has so far repelled all those who have tried to attack him (Brut, vv. 11296–308). Both combats are also associated with mountains: Arthur’s takes place on the higher of the two peaks on the Mont St Michel; Anselot spends the night before his battle in a clearing on a mountain overlooking the monster’s lair, and Noon’s struggle with the bear begins just below this clearing. Secondly, there is the figure of the bear itself. Arthur’s combat with Dinabuc is preceded by an account of a dream that came to him during the voyage to Barfleur, in which he sees a huge bear, ‘mult lai, mult fort, mult gros, mult grant’ (‘very ugly, very strong, very powerful, very large’, Brut, v. 11248), do battle with a dragon, which finally overcomes it. Some of the 29 Joris (‘“Thèbes avec Troie”’, p. 72) reads the story of Marcomyris in the prologue as a deliberate overwriting of the Brut. See also Gingras, ‘Le Miel et l’amertume: Partonopeus de Blois et l’art du roman’, pp. 136–7. 30 The reference to the bear destroying vineyards may be an echo of Psalm 79: 14, where the ‘vine out of Egypt’ is destroyed by wild beasts.

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king’s advisors tell him that the dragon represents himself and the bear a giant that he is destined to kill. The emphasis in Partonopeus on the extraordinary size of the Sardinian bear – ‘“un ors fier/ Qui ert si grant et si corsu/ C’onques nus autretex ne fu”’ (‘“a fierce bear, so large and so thick-set that there was never another one like it”’, vv. 11370–72) – suggests that this antagonist is a fusion of the creature from Arthur’s dream and the giant it symbolises. It is interesting to note that the Partonopeus poet refers to Anselot’s adversary as a bear only at the beginning and end of the adventure: in the central section the word ours is replaced by terms that foreground the supernatural aspect of the creature rather its animal appearance, such as aversier (‘fiend’, v. 11406), dyables (‘devil’, v. 11415) and maufés (‘demon’, vv. 11426 and 11448). It is almost as if, in the poet’s imagination, the giant Dinabuc is resurfacing through his ursine precursor. Although the outcome of the two combats is the same – Arthur and Anselot both overcome their enemy and have his severed head displayed as a merveille (Brut, vv. 11556–60; Partonopeus, vv. 11509–10) – the details of the fighting are quite different. Arthur tackles Dinabuc single-handedly and overcomes him in conventional combat, surviving a massive blow from the giant’s mace before driving his sword into his opponent’s brain. In Partonopeus, Noon is the first to attack, and is dragged downhill into the sea by the retreating bear; only then does Anselot spring into action, swimming after them and killing the bear with a hunting knife as the valiant greyhound prevents it from diving. This unconventional aquatic combat between man, dog and bear can be read as a playful display of aemulatio, designed to show that the author can outdo his model through novel recombination of the four elements island, water, giant adversary and faithful companion (we should note that Wace’s Arthur is accompanied by Kei and Bedoer, even though they play no direct part in the fighting). At the same time, it neatly avoids equating the unknighted Anselot with the great warrior king of Britain by introducing a note of bathetic humour. There is something faintly ridiculous about the description of Noon, his teeth firmly fixed in the bear’s head, turning pleading eyes towards his master as the two animals seesaw up and down in the water: ‘Li ours le tiroit el parfont Et Noons envers moi amont. Si me regardoit li dolens Et par pitié me mis je ens.’ (vv. 11467–70) ‘The bear was dragging him down into the depths, and Noon was dragging the bear up towards me. The poor dog was looking towards me and I dived in out of pity for him.’

The unconventional nature of Anselot’s achievement in killing the bear calls to mind an incident in the Romance of Yder, when the eponymous hero wins

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renown at Arthur’s court by confronting a huge bear that has escaped from a baiting and invaded the royal chambers. While Gauvain searches for a weapon, Yder wrestles the bear across the room and pushes it out of a window (Yder, vv. 3301–98). Although the extant romance probably dates from the reign of King John (1199–1216), the editor suggests that it may derive from an older story ‘which certainly predates Chrétien’ (‘Introduction’, p. 18). It is not impossible that the Partonopeus poet was familiar with this story as well as Canis and the Brut. The multiplication of external models does not stop there. Anselot’s story also seems to incorporate echoes of two Solomonic texts – or rather one biblical text and one that became associated with Solomon. The incident with the emperor’s lion brings to mind Proverbs 22:13 ‘The slothful man saith; There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.’ Anselot is never described as being slothful either before or after he escapes from the lion, but it is curious that this incident follows immediately after an account of how he kept deliberately putting off Euglar and ‘forgetting’ pre-arranged meetings with her, until she started to call him ‘Ansiaus Oublieus’ (‘Anselot the Forgetful’) in public and the whole court adopted the nickname (though without knowing what he had forgotten). The import of the verse from Proverbs is that a man who is unwilling to take action will come up with any excuse to justify his reluctance,31 which is exactly the situation that Anselot finds himself in. The configuration of the scene with the lion is also suggestive. Anselot rejects another opportunity to declare his love for Euglar and rushes out of the chamber; once outside, he encounters the lion, but refuses to take refuge back in the chamber with Euglar. Instead, he runs away to his lodgings with the lion at his heels. Anselot does not actually say that he ran ‘through the streets’, but a public setting is clearly implied by his comment that no one who saw him would have dared to help him (vv. 11307–8). It is tempting to conclude that this scene is a deliberate reworking of Proverbs 22: 13, designed to reinforce through allusion the idea that Anselot failed to act when he should have done. The link is made all the more plausible by the number of other points of contact between this chapter of Proverbs and Anselot’s experiences. The young man’s impetuosity and failure to anticipate the actions of Farés echo verses 2 (‘A prudent man foreseeth the evil and hideth himself’) and 15 (‘Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child’), while the denunciation in verse 16 of the man who ‘oppresseth the poor to increase his riches’ chimes perfectly with the critique of the fils à vilain himself. Anselot’s insistence that the greyhound Noon was his only friend and companion (vv. 11159–60) recalls the words attributed to the people of

31 This is the interpretation given in the standard biblical commentaries known to medieval authors: see Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria, II, p. 680. See also Bridges, A Commentary on Proverbs, pp. 411–12.

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Tintagel in Béroul’s Tristan à propos of Husdent’s devotion to his master: ‘Salemon dit que droituriers/ Que ses amis, c’ert ses levriers’ (‘Solomon quite rightly says that a man’s best friend is his greyhound’, vv. 1461–2). Lecoy traced this idea back to a well-known tale in which a knight who has offended his king is summoned to present himself at court and accomplish certain paradoxical tasks, including being accompanied by his best friend and his worst enemy. The best friend is the knight’s hound, which proves its loyalty by licking its master’s hand even after he has wounded it with his sword (the worst enemy turns out to be the knight’s wife). In most versions of the tale the king is not named, but in two of its extant French manifestations the action is said to take place before Solomon. The tale was certainly in circulation by about 1180, when Alexander Neckam included it in his De naturis rerum.32 The points of contact between this tradition and Anselot’s story (the ruler’s displeasure, the court setting, the nobleman whose only true friend is his hound, the unprovoked attack on the dog using a sword) are strong enough to suggest that the Partonopeus poet may have been familiar with it. Whether conscious or unconscious, his echoing of such a moral tale adds weight to the binary opposition loyalty–disloyalty that underpins this section of the Continuation. The presence of possible allusions to the wisdom of Solomon is one of a number of factors that underline the exemplary nature of Anselot’s story, reinforcing the explicit moralisation with which the speaker concludes his narrative. The first transitional passage carefully sets the scene for the presentation of the story in a way that suggests it will prove to have more than just entertainment value. The narrator explains that Partonopeus had previously told Melior about Anselot, with the result that she now extends a warm welcome to him. The imperial couple’s privés are summoned to hear of the young man’s aventures (v. 11098), an obvious link back to the scene of Anselot’s last appearance in the main body of the romance, where the narrator also promises to recount the youth’s aventures at an appropriate point in the future (v. 5740).33 It is made clear, however, that Anselot will be invited to recount only part of his experiences to the assembled court. As he and Partonopeus make their way back from the forest: Ansels li conte ou a esté Et comment a son siecle usé, Mais del vilain qu’il a maldit Ont il mis le conte en respit 32 33

Lecoy, ‘Sur les vers 1461–62 du Tristan de Béroul’, p. 82. Aventure occurs more frequently in the text in the sense of a story or account of something remarkable than in any other meaning. The author-narrator refers to his own activity in the main prologue as ‘[en escrit] metre [une aventure]’ (‘putting an adventure into written form’, v. 70), which reinforces the idea that Anselot is the latest in a series of surrogates who take on the narratorial function at various points in the text.

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Duque devant l’empereris. La iert li contes trestos dis. (vv. 11085–90) Anselot told him where he had been and what kind of life he had been living, but they decided to defer the story about the vilain he had been cursing until they were in the presence of the empress. The full story would be told there.

The implication is that this conte is particularly appropriate for the empress and her court, which can only be because it will serve as a mise en garde about appointing low-born advisors. Anselot’s own story is thus presented as the last and most significant piece of evidence in his case for the prosecution against the fils à vilain. Its exemplary value for the extradiegetic as well as the inscribed audience is underlined by a narratorial plea for attention – ‘Ore fait il bon escolter’ (‘Now this is worth listening to’, v. 11106) – that complements an earlier exhortation to learn from the young man’s tirade in the forest (vv. 10773–6).34 There can be little doubt, then, that Anselot’s story was conceived as ‘counsel for living’ for aristocratic audiences both within and outside the narrative. The only difference between this story and the medieval exemplum as defined by Bremond, Le Goff and Schmitt is its secular context, where the preacher is replaced by a young nobleman and his congregation by an imperial court. This being so, it is appropriate to ask how successful Anselot’s story is as an exemplum. The moral that is drawn from the story – ‘never trust a fils à vilain’ – certainly seems appropriate and is both approved and internalised by the inscribed audience. This is no Chatelaine de Vergi, where an obvious mismatch between the narrative and its moralising frame calls out for a re-evaluation of both.35 And yet there are hints that this, too, is a tale whose cautionary payload may be more complex than its final lines seem to suggest. As a self-contained narrative, Anselot’s story appears to meet medieval criteria for exemplarity in that it is short, presented as authentic testimony, and designed to convince the intradiegetic audience of an important truth. However, this is not ultimately a lai that stands or falls on its own merits. The manuscript tradition presents this story as part of a broader narrative, and even if it may have had some kind of independent existence before being incorporated into the Continuation, it was always going to be received by an extradiegetic audience whose response would be conditioned by their familiarity with the main body of the romance. That audience knew Anselot as the nephew of Sornegur, himself the victim of a fils à vilain and moral successor 34 On this earlier passage, see Collet and Joris, ‘Introduction’, pp. 38–9. Both of these appeals feature in all five of the manuscripts, and the concluding moralisation is present in each of the four witnesses that include the end of Anselot’s story. 35 See the discussions by Hunt, ‘The Art of Concealment: La Chatelaine de Vergi’, and Ramm, esp. pp. 3–7.

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to Priam. That audience was in a position to pick up the allusions to Thomas Becket and Maurice de Sully that we discerned in Chapter 2. Their assent to the moral lessons of the Trojan prologue, the Sornegur episode and the bishop of Paris’s intervention would surely have been as immediate and unequivocal as that of Anselot’s hearers. Like proverbs and sayings, exempla are designed to reinforce social cohesion within a group through the memorable expression of common values. But does there come a point at which further demands for assent to those values become self-defeating? How many times can one text warn its audience about the unreliability of non-noble advisors without fils à vilain fatigue setting in? Reservations about this aspect of Anselot’s story have certainly been expressed by modern critics, notably Sneyders de Vogel, who dismissively remarked that the whole of the Anselot episode was just an invective against vilains (p. 21). Even if we assume that the twelfth-century public’s appetite for this theme was keener than ours, by virtue of its political topicality, questions still remain in relation to the reliability of the voice in which the exemplum is told. Anselot’s story dramatises competing models of authority. The allusions to Canis and Tentamina evoke a clerical model in which a story’s authority derives from the status of its teller as a man of acknowledged wisdom and learning. Both these tales are told by the sages (Canis by Ancillas and Tentamina by Gentullus), whose authoritative glossing of their stories seems to have infiltrated the Partonopeus poet’s presentation of his material. The gloss to Canis (Ancillas advises the king not to imitate the rich man’s over-hasty killing of the dog by putting his son to death that day) establishes a clear identification between the greyhound and the prince which provides an intriguing parallel for the way in which Noon serves as a double for Anselot. The gloss to Tentamina provides an argument for ridding the queen of her put sanc (‘ignoble blood’, K v. 2819) in the same way as the wicked wife in the story. There is an obvious link between both these characters and Farés, whose ‘bad blood’ derives from his put lig (‘ignoble lineage’, v. 11328) and leads him to act in the same dishonourable fashion. However, the autobiographical nature of the story points in a different direction, to the eye-witness model, in which authority derives from the speaker’s personal participation in the events narrated. As Peter Damian-Grint has observed, ‘an extraordinarily high degree of authority was accorded to eyewitness accounts in the historiographical tradition of the middle ages’: the testimony of men who could say ‘I was there and this is what I saw’ carried greater weight among their contemporaries than potentially falsifiable written sources.36 Anselot as eyewitness thus overwrites the

36 The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, p. 68. See also Polo de Beaulieu, ‘L’Émergence de l’auteur et son rapport à l’autorité dans les receuils d’exempla (XIIe–XVe siècle)’, pp. 179–80 and 185–8.

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bookish sages Ancillas and Getullus, retelling their tales as relived in his own experience. This substitution of youth for age repeats a pattern found in the main body of the romance, where Lohier the ‘jovene roi’ (‘young king’, v. 2074) replaces Clovis as King of France, and Partonopeus replaces both his father and Melior’s, as count of Blois and emperor of Byzantium respectively.37 However, none of these earlier substitutions is unproblematic: both young men have to confront the consequences of their lack of age and experience. Melior’s account of events that have taken place in France during the hero’s first sojourn in Chief d’Oire implies a cause-and-effect relationship between the accession of a young ruler and political turmoil in his territory: ‘Mors est Cloevis li bons rois, S’en sont desconfi li François, Et vostre pere rest finés Et Blois assise de tos lés.’ (vv. 1909–2) ‘Good King Clovis is dead and the French are facing defeat as a result, and your father has also died and Blois is besieged on all sides.’

This suspicion is confirmed when Lohier later explains to Partonopeus that his appeals for extra forces to fight Sornegur have fallen on deaf ears: most of the men who should owe allegiance to him refuse to recognise him as their king (vv. 2107–14). Melior’s earlier post-coital conversation with the hero had also made it very plain that as a tousel (‘a youngster’, v. 1490) he could not be expected to rule an empire without some further formative experiences. So there may be more to Anselot’s usurpation of the story-telling function than initially meets the eye. This apparent valorisation of youth may actually call into question the authority of his narrative, which presents itself as a warning about the fils à vilain. Taken together with the rhetorical overkill of the tirade in the forest (even in the short form preserved in MS P), it seems to proffer an invitation to look beyond the obvious – perhaps too obvious – message. Just as the story of the fall of Troy is filtered through the figure of Eneas, who is the true focus of attention at Dido’s court, so Anselot’s account of the machinations of Farés constantly points back to himself as narrator. By his own admission, he was too young and too inexperienced to suspect the motives of the emperor’s advisor. This lack of discernment was the real cause of his downfall, together with his reckless response to the killing of Noon. A 37 This pattern is found in a number of other twelfth-century texts, including Ille et Galeron, which places considerable emphasis on the young hero’s role as an agent of political renewal (Castellani, ‘La cour et le pouvoir dans les romans de Gautier d’Arras’), and the Chanson de Guillaume, which privileges the ‘demotion and replacement of representatives of the older order’ (Bennett, ‘La Chanson de Guillaume’, p. 33).

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more experienced man would have seen through Farés, bided his time, and plotted to expose his enemy. He might also have seized the moment with Euglar and spared himself the torture of prolonging her unhappiness (cf. vv. 11545–8). Viewed from this perspective, Anselot’s story could also take its place alongside Piramus et Tisbé and Narcisus et Dané as a cautionary tale about youthful impetuosity, lack of understanding of the nature of love and the absence of consel.38 But if the story is thus doubly exemplary, this second implicit moral may also threaten to undercut the whole enterprise by constituting Anselot as a potentially unreliable narrator. How much authority can be invested in eye-witness testimony if the eyes are those of a young man who cannot yet read the world around him? The tension inherent in all narrative exempla between the universalising dynamic of the moral and the uncompromising specificity of the individual story is all too apparent here.39 Ultimately, however, the two competing models of authority are brought into alignment, and a kind of resolution is achieved. Unlike the eye-witness testimonies recorded by historiographers such as Wace and Jordan Fantosme, Anselot’s story is not a simple narration of events in which he was a participant. His adventures as an innocent abroad at the court of the Holy Roman emperor are mediated by his own slightly older, but significantly wiser self, who has learned some important lessons for living from his interactions with Farés. Unlike the protagonists of the two Ovidian tales, he lives to fight another day, his eyes now open to his former shortcomings. Although we never find out how Anselot discovered the truth about Farés, his story is essentially two narratives unfolding in counterpoint: on one level the events and emotions that he experienced at the time; on another, his reflections on those experiences, informed by knowledge acquired after the event. This meta-narrative emphasises the contradictions between appearance and reality that marked life at the court of the Roman emperor, with particular emphasis on the double-dealings of the young man who looked like the son of a high-ranking nobleman. Moving backwards and forwards in time, it fills in backstories and anticipates future developments in a way that calls to mind the cross-referencing habits of medieval textual commentaries.40 Like those glosses, it also provides explicit and continuing guidance on how the underlying text is to be read. Anselot’s first pause for comment ends with a prolepsis that signposts two major themes of his story, the treachery of the vilain and the injustices he perpetrates:

38 Piramus et Tisbé, ‘Introduction’, pp. 25–30; Narcisus et Dané, ‘Introduction’, pp. 23–30. 39 Cf. Gelley, pp. 13–14, and Ramm, p. 5. 40 See Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture. ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, esp. pp. 126–41 on Servius’s commentary on the Aeneid.

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‘A moi moustroit il grant amor, Sel comperai au chief du tor Tout sans forfait et sans deserte. Or oés traïson aperte.’ (vv. 11235–8) ‘He [Farés] made a display of great affection for me, but I paid dearly for it in the end, without ever having done anything to deserve it. Now hear a story of bare-faced treachery.’

These concerns are reiterated in a passage of commentary on Farés’s denunciation of the empress, where the prescriptive Oés reappears as anaphora: ‘Or oés cruel felonnie! Oés du vilain, du maufé; Oés du traïtre prouvé, Oés com honni son seignor Sol por moi faire deshonnor, Et de sa dame a escient Dit si felon encusement.’ (vv. 11584–90) ‘Now hear a story of wickedness and treachery! Hear about the vilain, the devil; hear about the proven traitor, hear how he brought shame on his liege lord, simply in order to disgrace me, and deliberately made such treacherous accusations against his liege lady.’

And the meta-narrative ends in the same key, with Anselot summarising what his painful experiences have taught him: ‘Tout ce me fist faire Farés./ Ja vilain n’ert mes amis mes’ (‘Farés brought all this on me. I will never be friends with a vilain again’, vv. 11677–8). This sustained self-glossing puts Anselot in the unique position of being both eye-witness and cleric, both inexperienced youth and reflective sage. As a result, both the obvious and the implied morals are finally validated. Youthful ignorance of the ways of the world can lead to disaster; it can also lead to greater understanding of the danger posed by men like Farés. This is a story that revels in multiplicity, fusing three major – and possibly two minor – intertexts into an exemplum that operates in ever-expanding circles: while the protagonist invites the inscribed audience to learn from his own learning from experience, the author-narrator presents their internalising of the message about the fils à vilain as a lesson for the extradiegetic public or reader.

Doubling and mise en abyme Anselot’s story is closely linked to the main narrative not only by its redeployment of the fils à vilain theme but also by its extensive use of doubling; that is, the very visible repetition of figures, motifs and scenarios to create a network of links and echoes between different parts of the narrative. As we saw in Chapter 1, doubling is an important structural principle in the main

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body of the romance, where it forms part of a wider pattern of imitations of the Roman de Thèbes.41 Its use is carefully limited, however, and never threatens to overwhelm other aspects of the narrative; in Anselot’s story, by contrast, the technique seems to take on a life of its own. Anselot’s trajectory parallels that of Partonopeus: he gets lost in the forest and falls in love in a foreign land; he is imprisoned by a vindictive ruler and secretly released by his captor’s wife. Noon’s killing of the emperor’s pet lion recalls the hapless lion that attacks Partonopeus’s horse in the second Ardennes episode. Noon himself echoes the two black greyhounds that become the hero’s steadfast companions during his first sojourn at Chief d’Oire, when he is in a foreign land and deprived of human company. In the figure of Euglar we can see the doubling of Persewis, another emperor’s niece whose love for a young man comes to nothing.42 This story also mirrors the multiplication of author/ narrator figures that is so characteristic of the main romance. There, the lover-narrator was doubled by both Melior and Urraque,43 the one attempting to shape her own narrative of love leading to marriage, the other telling stories about Partonopeus to Melior and about Melior to Partonopeus. Here the lover-narrator competes with Anselot telling his own story at the Byzantine court – a story in which Anselot also tells how he told an earlier version of his own story at the court of the emperor of Rome. At its simplest level, this doubling involves internal repetition of elements within Anselot’s story itself. Perhaps the most obvious are the two attempts on Noon’s life, which are closely linked by spatial context (the emperor’s court), dramatis personae and motivation (revenge for an actual or perceived affront to the emperor). Yet the two scenes are not carbon copies of one another: in the first, Noon commits the ‘crime’ for which he is punished, while in the second he is the scapegoat for an action attributed to his master. Likewise, the first attack leads directly to Anselot’s successful attempt to win back the emperor’s favour by going to Sardinia, while the second triggers his défi and consequent arrest. The Sardinian episode includes a reprise of the initial rescue scene, as Anselot swims out to help Noon who is repeatedly being dragged down by the bear and then resurfacing, just as he was being

41 On doubling in Thèbes, see Ferlampin-Archer, ‘Le Roman de Thèbes, geste des deus freres: le roman et son double’, pp. 309–18. Eneas may also have provided a model for this aspect of Partonopeus: see Huchet, ‘L’Enéas: un roman spéculaire’, pp. 66–75. 42 There is an interesting verbal parallel between the description of Persewis as being ‘de trop petit aé’ (‘too young’) to have experienced love before she sees Partonopeus (v. 6234) and Anselot’s decription of Euglar as ‘bele […] et de petit aage’ (‘beautiful […] and very young’, v. 11242). As the cousin of Urraque and Melior, Persewis stands in the same relationship to the their dead father as Euglar does to the unnamed emperor. 43 Hanning, ‘The Audience as Co-Creator’, pp. 17–18. Wyss sees the Sultan in the Continuation as another surrogate for the author (‘Partonopier und die ritterliche Mythologie’, p. 371).

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submerged and tossed up again by the waves during the storm (vv. 11123–4). The deliberate echo of the shipwreck that brought them together may be intended to reinforce the idea of mutual dependency: it is a reminder that Noon owes his life to Anselot just as much as Anselot owes his life to Noon’s hunting and lion-killing skills. This in turn sharpens the contrast between Anselot and Noon on the one hand and the dysfunctional pairing of the emperor and Farés on the other. The recurrent association between Anselot, Noon and water may also hint at the fluidity of the boundaries between them. Noon is both companion, protector and alter ego for his master – a fact acknowledged by Farés when he advises the emperor to attack Anselot by attacking his dog. Anselot’s imprisonment on ‘une isle en mer’ (‘an island in the sea’, v. 11667) doubles both Sardinia (described as ‘an island belonging to the emperor’ in v. 11374) and the smaller ‘isle en la mer’ (v. 11414) where the giant bear has its hideout. Here, however, the motif is repeated in the minor key, as Anselot’s role shifts from that of ridding the empire of a threat to threatening the emperor and being got rid of himself. The killing of Noon also dovetails with the second of Farés’s two denunciations of Anselot: having accused his rival of inappropriate intimacy with Euglar, and having seen his plot foiled by the emperor’s response to the Sardinian adventure, Farés then makes exactly the same accusation in relation to the empress, with gratifying results. The web of repetitions becomes even more intricate when we consider that the two instances of animal-killing in this story (the bear and the greyhound) are both triggered by the arrival at court of a stranger. The peasant who brings news of the ravaging of Sardinia reappears as the smith who arrives with a gift of two swords for the emperor, one of which is used to kill Noon. This handsome pair of weapons functions as a fairly transparent visual metaphor for the skilful internal doubling that runs right through this section of the Continuation. More interesting, though, from the point of view of romance composition, is the sustained, systematic doubling in Anselot’s story of elements from the first two-thirds of the main narrative. Anselot’s role as a double of Partonopeus is foregrounded in the first lines of his story, which show him re-enacting both of the hero’s journeys into the Ardennes simultaneously. The linking of death and the forest invites an identification with Partonopeus on his ‘suicide mission’: ‘Por ce me laissastes dormir Que je n’alasse od vos morir. Quant m’esveillai, a mort me ting; Montai et duc’al deser vign.’ (vv. 11109–12, my emphasis) ‘You let me carry on sleeping so that I would not go and die with you. When I awoke, I felt as good as dead; I got on my horse and rode into the wilderness.’

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At the same time, the young man’s reckless decision to leave Albigés unaccompanied in search of his lord recalls the hero’s foolish decision to leave the hunting-party on his own to follow his errant hounds in the opening sequence of the romance proper. This telescoping of a previous doubling prepares the way for a new kind of rewriting: while continuing to point outside itself to a range of other narratives – some familiar from previous episodes, some not – the romance now also becomes its own intertext. The paradoxical mixture of closeness and distancing that characterises our poet’s rewriting of his own scenarios is immediately apparent in the first sequence of Anselot’s story, which recounts his experiences in the wilderness. On the one hand, here is another very young and extraordinarily handsome individual whose first adventure as an independent agent involves a desperate search in a forest, from where he is transported by a passing ship to an imperial court to learn important lessons about love and statesmanship. Anselot’s youth is signalled by the diminutive endings of both his pre-baptismal and baptismal names, Guillemot and Anselot, and by his backstory, as told during the episode in which he helps the ailing Partonopeus to leave Blois and return to the great forest: Li vallés ot non Guillemos Et fu beaus con uns angelos Et pros et debonaire et frans. Rois Sornegur, bien a .ij. ans, L’avoit tremis Partonopeu, Mais ne croit pas encor en Deu. Il est fils al bon roi Fabur Et de la seror Sornegur Qui Partonopeus l’ot tremis Por aprendre l’us del païs Et de François l’afaitement Les mors et le contenement. (vv. 5569–80) The young man’s name was Guillemot and he was as beautiful as a cherub and brave and noble and generous. King Sornegur had sent him to Partonopeus a good two years previously, but he still did not believe in God. He was the son of King Fabur and the sister of Sornegur who had sent him to Partonopeus to learn the customs of his country and the manners, morals and conduct of the French.

Since Sornegur himself had been presented as a jovenceaus (‘youth’ or ‘young man’, v. 2087) when he invaded northern France two years previously, his nephew can hardly have been more than a teenager when he left his native Scandinavia to complete his education in Blois.44

44

When Hue de Rotelande’s hero leaves Apulia to learn ‘affeitement’ at the court of

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Anselot’s youth, beauty and status as the son of a king’s sister all mark him out as a potential doppelganger for the hero of the main narrative. The poet also replicates the narratorial intervention at the end of the portrait of Partonopeus, by having Anselot explain that the audience will realise subsequently why he is giving so much detail about Noon’s abilities: Avant el livre ert bien mostré Por coi je lo[e] tant se beauté. (vv. 579–80) ‘Assez orés al conte avant Por coi je parol de lui tant.’ (vv. 11163–4) It will be made quite clear later in this book why I am devoting so much praise to the beauty of Partonopeus. ‘Later in the story you will hear exactly why I have so much to say about Noon.’

This maps Noon on to Partonopeus, and Anselot on to the main narrator, reinforcing the web of surrogates.45 On the other hand, these familiar elements are displaced and recontextualised so as to suggest that this journey into the wilderness will lead both protagonist and audience to a very different destination. Whereas Partonopeus pursues his hounds and finds a mistress, Anselot pursues his master and finds a hound; while Partonopeus’s beauty plays a key role in winning Melior, Noon’s strength and courage contribute directly to Anselot winning and then losing Euglar. The time-frame is similarly reconfigured: Anselot survives a very much longer ordeal in the forest than his counterpart, but this then serves as a prelude to a much shorter period of residence at an imperial court. There are signs here of the poet submitting his own work to the same techniques of rewriting that he applies to external intertexts elsewhere in the romance. Further doublings of Partonopeus come thick and fast in the remainder of the story. The events that lead up to the killing of the emperor’s lion include Anselot arriving too late at the palace for the emperor’s levée and finding the chamber empty – or so he thinks. The room is dark, and he cannot see Euglar, who is resting there, until she suddenly appears and embraces him: ‘En ses braz si m’estraint vers soi’ (‘she clasped me in her arms and drew me towards

La Fiere in Calabria, he is described as not yet having either a beard or a moustache, i.e. a youth on the cusp of puberty (Ipomedon, v. 209). 45 Anselot adopts narratorial discourse again after the lion episode in order to switch attention away from Noon and back to his own love-affair: ‘Or[e] vos dirai d’Euglariz’ (‘now I will tell you about Euglar’, v. 11324). He also demonstrates a quasi-narratorial omniscience in relation to behind-the-scenes developments, for instance by appearing to know that Farés was not fulfilling his promise to plead Euglar’s case with his companion, when there is no obvious way for Anselot to have obtained this information.

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her’, v. 11294). There is an unmistakable link here to Partonopeus’s first encounter with Melior in a darkened room in the seemingly uninhabited palace in Chief d’Oire, during which the young man is just as determined as Euglar in his attempt to embrace a reluctant partner: ‘Et il estroit a soi l’embrace’ (‘and he embraced her and drew her close to him’, v. 1290).46 The link is reinforced by the poet’s redeployment of the technique of reversing gender roles that has already seen Cupid become Melior and Psyché become Partonopeus. In Anselot’s case, though, the romance model wins out over the fairy-mistress scenario as the protagonist refuses the sexual opportunity that is offered to him, preferring to defer gratification out of respect for ‘real-world’ conventions.47 As in Piramus et Tisbé, the lion is clearly an externalisation of the force of sexual desire,48 while its throttling by the faithful Noon re-enacts the suppression of Anselot’s attraction to Euglar by his loyalty to the emperor. The fact that loyalty is then punished illustrates the perverse nature of the emperor’s court, Noon’s fractured bones figuring the social fractures of an empire in thrall to the fils à vilain. Although Anselot then heals Noon and rebuilds his relationship with the emperor, it is only a matter of time before both are destroyed for good. The death of Noon is both the narrative trigger needed to release Anselot from his obligations to the emperor, as a prelude to his returning to Partonopeus, and another element in the poet’s self-rewriting. Anselot’s story rewrites the three key phases of his young lord’s history: the opening sequence, which takes Partonopeus from the Ardennes to a foreign land where he falls in love; the Sornegur episode, where he demonstrates physical prowess and becomes the victim of a plot by a fils à vilain; and the second Ardennes episode, whose key features are separation from the beloved and a symbolic death and resurrection. The killing of Noon doubles Partonopeus’s ‘death’ in the forest, while Anselot’s reckless defying of the emperor is the functional equivalent of the hero’s breaking of Melior’s taboo: both lead to banishment, heartbreak and rescue by a woman closely associated with the object of their affections. The motif of imprisonment also re-appears,

46 The verb estraindre is used for Partonopeus’s preliminary action in the earlier scene: ‘Et il l’estrainst par les costés’ (‘and he grasped her round the body’, v. 1288). The other manuscripts all have ‘la prent’ (‘took hold of her’) here, but estraindre appears in BGPV 1290 (meta 1310) instead of A estroit, which suggests that it must have figured in either v. 1288 or v. 1290 in the original, and was displaced by an inattentive scribe one of the traditions. It is also possible that the use of the unusual term fé (‘person’) in Anselot’s comment that there was nobody in the chamber apart from Euglar (vv. 11290–91) is another deliberate echo of the bedroom scene, where in MSS GPV uns fez approaches Partonopeus as he lies in bed (v. 1125; meta 1139; T ‘.i. feu’ is clearly a corruption of fez, while A ‘une arme’ and L ‘une dame’ read like lectiones faciliores). 47 Cf. Bruckner, ‘From Genealogy to Romance’, p. 35. 48 Lucken, ‘Le Suicide des amants et l’ensaignement des lettres: Piramus et Tisbé ou les métamorphoses de l’amour’, p. 386.

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providing another example of the telescoping that we noted earlier: Anselot’s imprisonment on the emperor’s island echoes both Partonopeus’s selfimposed confinement in Blois and his captivity on Tenedon. The poet is effectively rewriting the whole arc of his main narrative up to the point where Partonopeus sets out for the tournament at Chief d’Oire. The combination of such sustained doubling with two of the intertexts we identified earlier points to the true nature of the experimentation in Anselot’s story. Eneas and the Seven Sages are classic examples of the récit enchâssé: the former demonstrates a simple technique of embedding one story in another as a way of breaking the linear narrative, while the latter sets a pattern for the frame story that incorporates multiple independent embedded tales, as later exploited to brilliant effect by Chaucer and Boccaccio. Anselot’s story embeds fusion within fusion – fusing two of the Seven Sages tales with elements of their frame story, then fusing this with the first-person narrative from Eneas and a well-known episode from the Brut – but does not stop there. The poet has gone beyond these two models to create an embryonic mise en abyme, in the broad sense of the incorporation within one story of another story that replicates the structure or the key themes of the larger narrative (and may act as a gloss or commentary on it).49 By establishing a complex web of links to the main body of the romance Anselot’s story presents itself as a miniaturised version of the first panel of the original tale, its downbeat, unresolved ending perfectly mirroring the uncertain future of the principal hero when he is released on parole by Armant’s wife. The mise en abyme is not fully realised, however, as this miniature romance is not, strictly speaking, incorporated into the story it replicates; rather, it is presented sequentially, as a self-referential extension that redraws the boundaries of that narrative.50 Nonetheless, the poet can be seen as contesting and commenting on the larger story, in that the career of this second Partonopeus shifts the balance away from love and chivalry towards the continuing threat posed by the fils à vilain, transforming itself from adventure story into exemplum. Anselot’s story develops the implications of the bishop of Paris episode that we explored in Chapter 2 by attributing the failure of a love-affair directly and explicitly to the intervention of a low-born counsellor, unmediated by the complicit actions of the hero. It brings the social change represented by the fils à vilain closer to home: whereas Marés disrupted the functioning of a pagan Scandinavian court, Farés operates within the ambit of the Holy 49 Anselot’s story can be seen as a mise en abyme horizontale or mise en reflet, according to the typology developed by Meyer-Minnemann and Schlickers, ‘La Mise en abyme en narratologie’. 50 It is also possible to see Partonopeus as a truly recursive narrative that simply generates a complete copy of itself at a particular point in its creation, without any further implications as to how that copy might be used.

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Roman emperor, France’s near neighbour and political rival in mainland Europe. In its extant state, the story also seems to question two key elements of romance composition embodied in the happy ending of the main narrative. Unlike Partonopeus (not to mention Eneas and Ille), Anselot ultimately fails to establish a new identity for himself and negotiate a better position through marriage.51 He wins Euglar’s hand and two cities by his exploits in Sardinia, but then loses them and ends up back where he started, as an unmarried member of Partonopeus’s court. Why does Anselot’s story end with him separated from Euglar and ruefully recounting his own humiliation at the hands of Farés? Within the framework of the Continuation as we have it, this lack of closure would seem to be preparing the audience for the ambivalent ending of the story of the Sultan’s invasion. However, as we shall see in Chapter 5, that ambivalent ending is open to question, and it is highly unlikely that it was present in the mind of the original poet when he composed either Anselot’s story or its immediate frame. The complex patterns of repetition that we have observed seem to support our earlier hypothesis that this story is part of an unfinished roman d’Anselot. They would appear to culminate logically in a rewriting of the second panel of the romance, in which, perhaps, Anselot-Eneas would find a new homeland (and possibly a new love, if we see Euglar’s passionate advances as being modelled on the fole amor of Dido), while AnselotPartonopeus would be knighted and achieve military glory before making an advantageous marriage. Tantalisingly, the second transition passage tells how he was dubbed by Partonopeus and then set off to ‘querre son pris/ Tant qu’il l’ot bon et bel conquis’ (‘seek renown until he had well and truly won it’, vv. 11691–2). This would seem to promise something more than the supporting role he actually plays in the remainder of the Continuation, as one member of a group of seven young warriors, suggesting a change of direction after the story was grafted on to the rewritten ending of the main romance. It is possible that this change of direction signals a change of authorship for the remainder of the Continuation; or perhaps the original poet had simply changed his priorities (or had them changed for him by his patron) and decided not to follow through all the implications of his earlier composition.52 * We began this chapter by suggesting that Anselot’s story might usefully be approached as an experiment in fiction, before looking in more detail at its manuscript tradition and the combinations of different narrative techniques 51 On these two features as being central to the specificity of early romance, see Gaunt, ‘Romance and Other Genres’, p. 47. 52 It is worth noting that the Continuation restores the link between love and prowess (the Sultan’s invasion is motivated by his continuing love for Melior) that is compromised in Anselot’s story.

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that it explores. In the final analysis, two questions need to be asked of any experiment: firstly, did it work? And secondly, if not, is it worth repeating with some modifications, in the hope of achieving a more satisfactory outcome? For me, Anselot’s story is not entirely successful. Fascinating though it is to unravel all the different threads in its construction, overall it never quite lives up to the standard of the main body of the romance, and I wonder whether the Partonopeus poet felt the same niggling sense of dissatisfaction. The reader’s unease stems in part from the tensions that we have noted between the story itself and the context in which it is presented to its readership. Although there is good reason to believe that this conte was initially composed as a semi-independent entity, we also know that it circulated primarily as an integral part of a larger composition; the way it is perceived to fit – or not – into that broader narrative is therefore an important element in its reception. Two other problems contribute to the relative failure of the experiment. Given the length of the story, the number of instances of fusion and doubling is extraordinary, as is the range of elements involved: multiple external intertexts, characters and scenarios from the main poem, and motifs within Anselot’s story itself. To combine all these elements in some 600 lines of verse is a very ambitious undertaking, and it is perhaps not surprising that it ends up over-reaching itself. In the end, the web of allusions and crossreferences becomes so complex that it risks overwhelming the simple ‘boy meets dog and girl; boy loses dog and girl’ plot-line around which it has been woven. There is just too much going on here, in too many different directions, for the coherence of the intrigue to be effectively maintained. There are also too many invitations to think back to the adventures of Partonopeus, which constantly remind the audience that the protagonist of this new story is not the warrior prince they have come to know and admire, but his attendant. Anselot may repeat his master’s trajectory in a number of important respects, but this second Partonopeus inevitably remains a rather pale, and occasionally bathetic, avatar of the eponymous hero (his martial endeavours, for instance, involve killing a bear rather than saving France from pagan invaders). Despite its moments of humour, this section of the Continuation ends on a downward cadence, and it seems inherently unsatisfying (to this reader at least) to repeat a theme in the minor key when the major key has proved to be so outstandingly successful. A similar criticism can be made of Anselot’s story as a mise en abyme or recursive narrative: the original romance is so rich and subtly patterned that any attempt to miniaturise or mirror it is almost doomed to failure – or at least, to only partial success. Whether the twelfth-century audience perceived these shortcomings is another matter, though I would argue that some elements of the intertextual dialogue between Partonopeus de Blois and Chrétien’s Yvain suggest that they did. If we take the view that Anselot’s story was in circulation before

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Yvain was composed,53 then certain elements of Chrétien’s romance can be read as a classic exercise in aemulatio, identifying and correcting weaknesses in the model. The structural similarities between Anselot’s story and Calogrenant’s tale are too obvious to need much explanation, and would surely have been enough to flag up the intertext for a contemporary audience. Both are accounts of personal humiliation told in the first person to a court audience that includes the highest-ranking woman in the land (this element of personal, rather than national, defeat makes it less likely that Eneas was the direct model for Chrétien’s narrative). Both form part of a recursive structure involving the main protagonist of a longer, related narrative. Other echoes of Partonopeus reinforce the identification. The hideous villein’s account of his ability to control the wild animals of the forest recalls Maruc’s description of his particular skills, which can reduce the ferocious beasts of the Ardennes to the same fearful, trembling state (vv. 5857–64). The vilain himself performs a similar role in relation to Calogrenant as the fils à vilain Farés in relation to Anselot, apparently being helpful while actually encouraging the protagonist to provoke a situation that puts his life at risk.54 The impulse to improve on the model can be seen in two aspects of Chrétien’s rewriting, namely the positioning of the story and the reconfiguration of outcomes that this generates. Putting Calogrenant’s story first allows for a modulation from minor to major key, as the principal hero successfully repeats the trajectory of a secondary character and then goes on to greater adventures (which involve further rewriting of Partonopeus). To continue the musical analogy, the récit dans le récit structure is much more successful as a prelude than as a coda – as Virgil and the Eneas poet both knew. Chrétien’s re-ordering also makes a virtue of the unfavourable comparison between Anselot and Partonopeus, providing us in the process with a model of Yvain’s own textual strategy. Just as Calogrenant is now satisfyingly outshone by his cousin Yvain, who repeats and improves on his flawed adventure, so Yvain repeats and rewrites a section of Partonopeus that has fallen short of its own ambitions. The fascinating but flawed experiment of Anselot’s story is rerun under different literary conditions to produce what Frappier rightly called ‘cette ouverture brillante’ to Chrétien’s masterpiece of romance composition.55 53 See Eley and Simons, ‘Partonopeus de Blois and Chrétien de Troyes’, pp. 332–9, for evidence that Chrétien’s romance contains explicit rewriting of elements from Partonopeus. 54 The fact that Yvain features a giant associated with a mountain (Harpin de la Montagne), who wears a bear skin instead of a hauberk, suggests that Chrétien had also identified the rewriting of the Brut in Anselot’s story. 55 Frappier, Étude sur ‘Yvain’, p. 29. Frappier notes of Calogrenant’s story that it is ‘le seul exemple de récit rétrospectif qu’on trouve dans l’œuvre de Chrétien’ (‘the only example of retrospective story-telling to be found in all of Chrétien’s works’, n. 1), which might suggest that this was not his first choice of literary technique. This in turn may

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A full picture of the genesis and reception of Anselot’s story is unlikely ever to emerge from the frustratingly incomplete textual evidence of the manuscript tradition. However, these tentative speculations do remind us once again of the importance of seeing romance as a process of creation as well as the product – or rather products – preserved in the extant witnesses. This is a theme to which we shall return in the next two chapters.

support the idea that Calogrenant’s récit is a response to a rival composition that had adopted such an approach. Ollier’s claim that Yvain contains the only first-person ‘récit dans le récit’ (‘story within a story’) in Old French literature overlooks both Eneas and Anselot’s story (‘Le Discours “en abyme” ou la narration équivoque’, p. 87).

Chapter 5 When is an Ending not an Ending? Questions of Closure When is Partonopeus an Ending not de Blois an Ending?

Although their primary focus lies elsewhere, the previous two chapters have both engaged obliquely with questions of narrative closure. Walter Map’s possible involvement in expanding Anselot’s tirade against the fils à vilain reminds us that interpolation is not something that ‘just happens’ to medieval texts. Rather, it is a conscious process, undertaken by a specific individual who either finds the original composition lacking in some way or wants to add his own contribution to it. Interpolation of this kind is based on the premise that a vernacular narrative is ‘open’ in a way that scriptural or classical texts are not: it can legitimately be expanded or modified to suit different tastes or circumstances. A different kind of non-closure is associated with Anselot’s story. Our account of its development features an author who composes a second narrative in parallel to his first but leaves it unfinished, before incorporating this incomplete text into a continuation of the original romance. Even without the strong probability that the process of continuation required a significant rewriting of the first ending, this points to a general sense that vernacular fiction is not bound by the same concept of completion as other works with which readers and copyists came into contact. Precisely what our poet and his contemporaries thought about the nature of closure is more difficult to determine, however. Manuals such as Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria (completed some time before 1175) and Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova and Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (early thirteenth century) give us an idea of how students were trained in the art of composition, but have little to say about the more theoretical aspects of writing.1 Although they both proceed from the assumption that a work of literature always has a conclusion, neither of these authors pays much attention to endings in comparison with the amount they have to say about introducing or developing a subject. Matthew devotes only three out of fifty paragraphs on writing fabulae (fiction) to ways of bringing a narrative to a close. He insists on the need for the conclusion to provide an appropriate ending for what has 1 Matthew’s treatise probably summarises the courses he gave in Orleans: see Faral, Les Arts poétiques, p. 14.

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gone before, but most of his advice consists of illustrating the different techniques used by classical authors. His own epilogue provides a model of a Christian conclusion, praising God and attributing any merit the work may have to Him (IV, 49–51). In the section of his Poetria nova devoted to ordo (the internal organisation of a composition), Geoffrey of Vinsauf deals almost exclusively with effective ways of beginning a poem; his thoughts on closure are restricted to two lines in the preliminary remarks on definitions, which assert that the end of a work should be clearly signalled by a fitting conclusion.2 He has a little more to say on the subject in the Documentum (six paragraphs, compared to seventeen on beginnings), where he quotes Horace’s criticism of overblown endings before going on to recommend three strategies to his readers: finishing with a brief recapitulation of the material, or with a pertinent proverb or with an exemplum (II, 162 and III, 1–5). This does not mean, however, that the vernacular writers of the twelfth century neglected the endings of their narratives, even if there was a tendency for some early courtly narratives to conclude rather abruptly, in comparison to the leisurely pace of their prologues.3 Peron’s study of romance epilogues demonstrates a genuine concern on the part of Old French poets with bringing their stories to a bone definaille (‘a fitting conclusion’).4 Whether that involved narrative closure as some modern scholars have interpreted the term – an act of writing that induces ‘a feeling of completeness’ such that the reader, viewer or listener is left with the intuition that ‘there is nothing left to say, nor has anything that needed to be said been left unsaid’ – is another matter.5 Some of the models available to the poet of Partonopeus de Blois do create the impression that the story has come to a natural conclusion, largely because they end with the deaths of all the principal protagonists and the fulfilment of a destiny announced at the beginning of the story (the Roman de 2 ‘Finis, quasi praeco/ Cursus expleti, sub honore licentiet illam’ (‘Let the ending, like a herald announcing the result of a race, sign the work off with the honour due to it’, vv. 73–4). 3 Menegaldo, ‘Prologues et épilogues “lyriques” dans le roman de chevalerie en vers au XIIe et XIIIe siècles: quand le narrateur est amoureux’, pp. 156–7. The Roman de Troie is singled out by Baumgartner (‘Fin du récit et roman arthurien’, p. 25) for the length of its prologue. Other texts that demonstrate a similar imbalance include Narcisus et Dané and Ille et Galeron. On the different concluding strategies used, see Perret, ‘Typologie des fins dans les œuvres de fiction (XIe–XVe siècles)’. 4 Peron, ‘“Ci faut li romans”. Topique et fonction de l’épilogue dans les romans français médiévaux’. 5 Carroll, ‘Narrative Closure’, pp. 2–3. On the importance of the concept of ‘a subject effecting the work’s conclusion’, see Hult, ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. iv. Zumthor argued that the oral delivery of vernacular romance tended to confer on it ‘le trait d’incomplétude et d’indéfinité des paroles ordinaires’ (‘the incompleteness and indeterminacy characteristic of ordinary speech’; La Lettre et la voix: de la ‘littérature’ médiévale, p. 300).

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Thèbes, Piramus et Tisbé, Narcisus et Dané). The subject matter of others, however, seems to impose a condition of open-endedness. The genealogical structure of the Brut effectively precludes closure: regardless of the fact that Wace, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, chose to stop at the death of Cadwallader, this story has the potential to go on and on, as each generation of Britons is succeeded by the next. As Noël Carroll notes, national histories, like soap operas, fall into the category of narratives that ‘stop or come to rest, rather than ending or concluding’ (‘Narrative Closure’, p. 2). As prequels to the history of the Trojan diaspora, the other romans d’antiquité gave added currency to this paradigm. Eneas ends with a reminder of Anchises’s underworld prophesy and a fast-forward through the generations of legitimate heirs who would connect Eneas with the founding of Rome. Superficially a tale of death and destruction like Thèbes, Benoît’s Roman de Troie is nonetheless inscribed within a larger narrative that traces the family trees of twelfthcentury rulers back to the cultural glories of Troy.6 We should also remember that by the middle years of the twelfth century the chansons de geste were already caught up in the processes of rewriting and extension that were to culminate in the creation of the great epic cycles.7 The close temporal and structural relationships between the first truly fictional narratives in medieval France and those that can be described, however loosely, as national histories might suggest that closure was not perceived as a necessary condition of romance during its formative period in the second half of the twelfth century. As much is implied by those scribes and writers, including Gautier d’Arras and Chrétien de Troyes, who feel the need to assert that their narratives have indeed come to an end, and that there is no more to tell (quoted above, p. 103). The formulations used at the end of both Ille et Galeron and Yvain allow us to glimpse a literary context in which it is assumed that there may well be more to say, and where the notion of completeness as posited by the author/narrator or the copyist has to be explicitly signalled to the audience instead of being left to their intuition. That is not to say that what Carroll calls erotetic narrative – ‘narrative of the sort that sustains closure’ (p. 5) – did not exist at this period, only that it seems to have been understood that the closure sustained by romance narratives was of a more temporary or provisional nature than the sense of finality associated

6 Boutet notes that the order of composition of the Troie-Eneas-Brut ensemble is the exact opposite of the chronological order of the events they narrate (‘De la translatio imperii’, p. 41). This underlines the genealogical impetus behind early vernacular writing, in that it mirrors the process of tracing a family tree back in stages from the current generation. On other connections between vernacular fiction and genealogy, see Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages, and ‘Genealogy as a Medieval Mental Structure and Textual Form’; Speigel, pp. 99–110, and Stahuljak. 7 See Bennett, ‘La Chanson de Guillaume’, pp. 13–20.

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with many traditional novels.8 Gautier d’Arras seems to have gone back to Ille to create a second version of the story for a different patron, and even the tragic, childless protagonists of Thomas’s Tristan find themselves drawn into a genealogical dynamic, spawning a neo-Iseut and a neo-Tristan in Chrétien’s Cligés and Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon respectively. A picture emerges of a world in which no narrative is perceived to be an island entire of itself; all stories have potential prequels and sequels waiting to be actualised by the original author or his successors. Partonopeus de Blois is located squarely within this tradition of open-endedness by both its genealogical prologue and the reprise towards the end of the A version, where Lohier informs the tournament judges that the hero is not only his cousin but also a direct descendant of the lineage of Troy (vv. 10491–8). It therefore comes as no surprise to find that the original end-point of the romance is only a temporary moment of closure before the process of continuation begins. What is surprising, however, is the radical nature of the adjustments that are made to the core story in order to accommodate the further adventures of the hero and his associates. If the Sultan can be brought back from the dead and two marriages can be not dissolved or annulled but totally unmade, then anything appears to be possible. One of the questions that will occupy us in this chapter is why the Sultan has to be resuscitated in the Continuation – and indeed, why he should have been chosen in the first place as the hero’s principal rival in love and war. Our main focus, however, will be on what the manuscript tradition can contribute to our understanding of the problematics of closure in this section of the text. Two key questions will be explored: firstly, does the continued version of our romance come to an end at all? And, secondly, are there any signs that other parts of the Continuation have been opened up by interpolation in the same way as the Anselot episode? Before that, however, we need to pause and consider the validity of the assumption that the Continuation is a separate entity whose completeness (or lack of it) can be explored independently from the rest of the romance.

The first continuation? Partonopeus is one of the earliest extant Old French romances that invites us to make a distinction between a main narrative and a supplement to the original story, but whether that supplementary material should be described as a continuation or a sequel is open to question. Genette proposes the term continuation for material supplied by someone other than the original author 8 To this extent, romance endings can be seen as more transparent about the fact that closure is a narrative construct rather than a natural phenomenon. According to Miller, ‘closure is an act of “make-believe”, a postulation that closure is possible’ (‘Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel’, p. 275).

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in order to bring an unfinished work to a conclusion, noting that in this case ‘l’hypertexte doit rester constamment dans le prolongement de son hypotexte, qu’il doit seulement mener jusqu’à une conclusion prescrite ou congruente’ (‘the hypertext must never stray from the task of extending its hypotext, which it should only ever bring to a fixed or congruent conclusion’). Following Littré, he defines a suite as a sequel to or prolongation of a work (usually one that was perceived as finished at the time it was first circulating), designed to capitalise on its popularity.9 Neither term provides an adequate description for the Partonopeus Continuation, which begins as a suite composed by the original poet, then becomes a continuation; whether it ever reaches a ‘conclusion prescrite ou congruente’ is a moot point, as we shall see later in this chapter. A further level of complexity arises from the fact that the original narrative was composed with a suite already in mind. As this part of our poem has come to be known as ‘the Continuation’, despite the fact that it has many of the characteristics of a sequel, I have chosen to use the terms ‘continuation’ and ‘sequel’ almost interchangeably. Whatever the date of the earliest version of our romance, an extended version of the text certainly existed before either of the continuations of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal.10 It was probably also in circulation before the two poems on the avenging of Alexander’s death which are generally described as continuations of Alexander de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre.11 Kevin Brownlee has used the term ‘continuation’ for Godefroi de Leigni’s contribution to Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrete, although the two sections of this narrative are defined after the event, in the epilogue, rather than being signposted en route like the component parts of Partonopeus.12 If we accept that ‘Godefroi’ designates a second writer, rather than being a playful alias for Chrétien himself, then it is possible that the Charrete and Partonopeus were both being continued at almost exactly the same time, though the title of ‘first continued Old French romance’ probably belongs to

9 10

Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, p. 182. On the dating of the Perceval Continuations, see Bruckner, Chrétien Continued. A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations, pp. 4–5. 11 Jean le Nevelon’s Venjance Alixandre and Guy de Cambrai’s Vengement Alixandre were composed towards the end of the twelfth century, but before 1191 (Roman d’Alexandre, ‘Introduction’, pp. 25–6). Some part of the Partonopeus Continuation may have been in existence even before Alexandre de Paris began to compile and continue previous Alexander poems to create his own romance. Given the complexity of the genesis and manuscript tradition of the Roman d’Alexandre, it is difficult to say whether Eustache’s Fuerre de Gadres, Lambert le Tort’s account of Alexander’s expedition to India, and the anonymous poem on the death of Alexander should be seen as as independent poems or as continuations of the work of Alberic de Pisançon and his Poitevin adaptor (or of Lambert’s work, in the case of the Mort Alexandre). 12 ‘Transformations of the Charrete: Godefroi de Leigni Rewrites Chrétien de Troyes’, p. 161.

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the latter, by virtue of its having circulated in non-continued form before being extended (see below). Defining Partonopeus as a continued romance is not entirely unproblematic, however, despite a consensus among modern critics that Joseph Gildea was right to divide the text of his edition of the poem into a ‘romance proper’ and a continuation.13 As Gildea appreciated, there is a distinction between, on the one hand, a ‘main narrative’, ending with the hero’s victory in the three-day tournament and subsequent marriage to the heroine Melior, which is found in all the extant complete or near-complete manuscripts, and, on the other, the supplementary stories of Anselot’s return and the Sultan’s renewed conflict with Partonopeus, which appear in five of the seven major witnesses (although the Sultan’s story is found in only four of these). In six out of the seven witnesses the main story ends with an epilogue (which I shall refer to as the ‘first epilogue’, in order to distinguish it from the closing lines of manuscripts that continue beyond this point) in which the narrator announces his intention to leave his hero to enjoy his blissful marriage to Melior: ‘Et od cest aise le vos lais’ (‘and I leave him with you at his heart’s ease’, v. 10607). The first epilogue itself concludes with a conventional mark of closure in the form of a prayer on behalf of the author, his amie and ‘all the ladies in the world’ (vv. 10650–56). Against this must be set the fact that my ‘first epilogue’ has not always been understood as defining the end of the main narrative, by either medieval or modern readers. Only two of the five manuscripts that contain all or part of the Continuation (BT) have a large initial at the start of v. 10657, and in neither case does the initial differ in size or decoration from the initials that mark other narrative sequences throughout the work. In the others (GLP), the prayer is not marked off visually from the following lines that refer to the narrator’s amie and her request for the story to continue; these witnesses have large initials instead at the start of the two passages that evoke the situation in which Partonopeus now finds himself (vv. 10665 and 10677).14 We can only speculate as to whether someone reading aloud from these manuscripts would have paused respectfully at the end of the prayer, thus giving the listeners a sense of discontinuity. For Ward, the first epilogue was the work of a continuator: he believed that the original romance ended with v. 10600, and that vv. 10601–56 formed part of the prologue to the Continuation.15 That view was not shared by Gildea or by the poem’s most recent editors, who 13 The discontinuity of the text was over-emphasised, however, by Gildea’s decision to publish the Continuation in a discrete volume, with its own separate line numbering. The Collet-Joris edition gives a better sense of how the text appears in the manuscripts. 14 The large initial at the start of v. 10665 was not inserted in L, although space was left for it. 15 Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, Vol. I, p. 704.

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follow the BT configuration, but it does point to differing perceptions of what constitutes a ‘natural’ break in the narrative. At another level of coherence, the closure represented by the hero’s marriage and accession to the throne of Byzantium is explicitly flagged up as both partial and provisional, on two separate occasions. We have already seen that the narrator’s promise to return to the story of Anselot at an appropriate moment is probably not an interpolation, and that the main romance was therefore composed with some kind of future development in mind. In the first epilogue the narrator repeats this promise and also holds out the prospect of further tales concerning Partonopeus himself, if the poet’s amie commands him to tell them. This configuration seems to fit very well with Bruckner’s view of romance as a narrative form that only ever reaches ‘temporary stopping places’ rather than a final destination.16 From this perspective, it might be argued that Partonopeus is best seen as a continuing rather than a continued narrative, to be approached holistically rather than in segments. Fourrier’s description of the text as a roman-fleuve written in three or more phases certainly anticipates this view; moreover, his assertion that the entire poem as preserved in manuscript T is ‘l’acte créateur d’un poète’ (‘the creative act of a single poet’) suggests an organic process of composition quite different from that of romances continued by someone other than their original author (pp. 384 and 317; my emphasis). Nonetheless, the conclusions that we have come to about the manuscript tradition suggest that the idea of the Continuation as a discrete object of enquiry is well founded. It seems unlikely that the first version of the poem, as represented by manuscript A, contained a substantial continuation. The codex appears to be almost complete (although Anselot’s story might conceivably have occupied part of the final quire); moreover, all the main threads of the narrative, with the exception of the fate of Anselot, are securely fastened off at the end: the Sultan is dead and all the other major protagonists are neatly married off and firmly established in pacified territories. It is equally unlikely that the first epilogue figured in this version: it almost certainly dates from the time when the original ending was rewritten, and was designed to pave the way for a continued form of the poem. So the original romance probably demonstrated a far greater degree of closure than the majority of the surviving versions, but it also contained the seeds of its own continuation in the figures of Anselot, the Sultan, Urraque and Gaudin. Once this potential had been identified, some deft rewriting of the concluding episodes opened up the possibility of developing these characters further if the generous patron of vv. 7–11 and 73–4 so wished (in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it seems likely that the revised version of

16

‘Romancing History’, pp. 106–7, and Chrétien Continued, pp. 23–5.

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Partonopeus de Blois was composed for the same patron as the original).17 The fact that one of the extant witnesses (V) ends with the first epilogue may be evidence that the romance circulated in a revised but non-continued form before the supplementary episodes were added.18 The fact that there has been some disagreement as to exactly where the start of the Continuation might lie shows how skilfully the process of re-opening a closed book has been handled.

The Sultan: a real-life enemy figure A key aspect of the Continuation that has always seemed to sit uneasily with one of the basic premises of this book – namely that the original version of Partonopeus ended in the same way as MS A – is the choice of the Sultan as the principal opponent for the hero and his allies. If the ‘first edition’ of the poem did indeed end with the defeat and death of the Sultan in single combat, then why bring him back from the dead? Why did the poet not choose another worthy, living antagonist from among the other unsuccessful candidates for Melior’s hand – the king of Syria would have been an obvious choice – rather than force himself to undo so much of what he had already written? It is possible that this, too, may be evidence of feedback shaping the composition of romance: perhaps the audience response to the Sultan was so positive that the poet decided that providing more opportunities for him to confront Partonopeus was worth the trouble of a major rewrite of the original dénouement. There is another explanation, however, which fits in with the conclusions we drew in Chapter 2 about Partonopeus’s status as a political fiction that demonstrates a deep engagement with current affairs under the veneer of an ‘estoire d’antif tens’ (‘a story of the olden days’, v. 78). The mysterious resuscitation and return of Margaris and the sidelining of the king of Syria can be most easily understood in terms of what was happening in real life to the east of the Byzantine empire in the 1170s and 1180s. The Sultan’s given name is clearly a literary rather than a historical allusion: he is named after a character in the Chanson de Roland who is described as being one of the most physically attractive of all the Saracens:19 Curant i vint Margariz de Sibilie; Cil tient la tere entresqu’as Cazmarines. Pur sa beltét dames li sunt amies: 17 It is worth noting that Gautier d’Arras took pains to identify changes of patron in his Eracle and Ille et Galeron, while Chrétien de Troyes tells us that he wrote the Conte du Graal for Philip of Flanders, whereas Le Chevalier de la Charrete is dedicated to the countess of Champagne. 18 See below, Chapter 6, pp. 189–90. 19 Noble notes the use of the same name in Partonopeus, but does not explore its significance (‘Partonopeu de Blois and Chrétien de Troyes’, p. 209).

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Cele nel veit vers lui ne s’esclargisset; Quant elel veit, ne poet müer ne riet. (vv. 955–9) Margariz of Seville came galloping up; he held the land as far as Cazmarines. Ladies lost their hearts to him because of his physical beauty: no woman could see him without her face lighting up; whenever she set eyes on him, she could not help smiling.

This intertexual allusion is designed to foreground the role played by male beauty in the romance, just like the name of the eponymous hero, which calls to mind the very similar description of Parthonopieus in the Roman de Thèbes: Un mul chevauchoit espanois, De par biauté semble bien rois. Souz ciel n’a feme, s’el le voit, Qui mout vers lui ne s’asoploit. (vv. 4125–8) He was riding a Spanish mule, and his physical beauty made him look every inch a king. No woman on earth could set eyes on him without surrendering to his charms.

The Sultan’s title, on the other hand, seems to refer to some kind of geographical reality. The problem is trying to understand what ‘Persia’ meant to an author and audience in twelfth-century France. The Sultan of Persia is the first of the non-Christian warriors to be listed by Melior in her review of likely participants in the marriage tournament; his importance is underlined by the fact that he is also named in her initial remarks (vv. 7163–4), unlike any of the Christian participants. The Sultan is one of a group of four eastern monarchs who will fight on the ‘home’ team: ‘Od els ert li sodans de Perse Et li rois d’Inde la desperse – Et ne quit pas qu’il ensi parte – Li rois de Mede et cil de Parte.’ (vv. 7207–10) ‘The Sultan of Persia will be on their side, and the King of the savage land of India – and I do not believe that he will leave as such – and the kings of Media and Parthia.’20

20 The second hemistich of v. 7209 is somewhat obscure. Collet and Joris translate the line as ‘je doute que ce dernier renonce’ (‘I doubt that he will give up’) and suggest that partir is used here in the sense of ‘s’abstenir’ (‘to refrain from’), even though this usage is not attested elsewhere (p. 455). I take this line to mean that Melior believes the King of India is likely to emerge victorious from the tournament; in other words, he will be emperor of Byzantium rather than king of ‘Inde la desperse’ when he leaves.

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Although the reference to the kings of Media and Parthia might be no more than a reminiscence of the biblical Medes and Persians, it is noticeable that the poet distinguishes between three different entities here, suggesting some kind of awareness that the area east of Byzantium is not a homogeneous legendary ‘Persian empire’. The ‘away’ side will also have its non-Christian contingent, consisting of the kings of Syria, Arcaie, Armenia, Palestine, Libya and Egypt and their forces.21 It is interesting that the king of Syria is mentioned first, while his Egyptian counterpart comes last, despite being marked out for attention as a scholar and astronomer (vv. 7224–6). Between 1169 and 1174 Egypt formed part of the ascendant Zangid sultanate, ruled from its base in Syria by the charismatic figure of Nur ad-Din (Nureddin). Nur ad-Din was well known in the West as a determined opponent of Christendom, whose expansionary activities brought him into constant contact and conflict with the crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean.22 While the notion of a king of Syria participating in a tournament to win the hand of the empress of Byzantium in marriage is obviously fiction, the idea that a Syrian could feature among the most distinguished Muslim leaders of the time is not. Some, at least, of the original audience of Partonopeus de Blois would surely have been able to make the connection. At this period, the area to the north of Syria was divided up into a number of smaller emirates that had become effectively independent after the breakdown of the mighty Seljuk sultanate earlier in the century. Seljuk power persisted in Hamadan (roughly modern Iran) and Rum (Iconium) in central Anatolia, on the eastern border of the Byzantine empire.23 Throughout the twelfth century the Sultans of Rum were intent on absorbing the neighbouring emirates, provoking anxiety and resistance from both the Byzantines to the west and the Zangids to the south. The most actively expansionist leaders of Rum were Kilij Arslan I (d. 1107), who first adopted the title of Sultan,24 and his grandson Kilij Arslan II, who ruled from 1155 until his death in 1192. In 1176 this second campaigning Sultan routed a Byzantine army at the battle of Myriokephalum, which the defeated Manuel Komnenos likened to the disaster of Manzikert (1071), in terms of its potential consequences: both battles left Byzantium psychologically weakened and exposed

21 The referent of Arcaie is uncertain; the inclusion of Armenia amongst the paiens reflects the fact that the former Christian kingdom had come under Muslim control after the battle of Manzikert in 1071. 22 William of Tyre twice refers to Nur ad-Din as ‘a mighty persecutor of the Christian name and faith’ (A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, XVII.10 and XX.31). 23 See McEvedy, The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, pp. 68–9. 24 Runciman, A History of the Crusades 2: The Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Frankish East, pp. 13 and 108–11.

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to invasion from the east.25 By the early years of the thirteenth century the Seljuks of Rum had indeed taken control of most of Anatolia. Given that the Partonopeus poet identifies Media and Parthia (both in modern Iran) as separate kingdoms in the same broad geographical area as ‘Perse’, but not subject to it, it seems quite possible that these two countries together are intended to evoke the eastern Seljuk dominions, while ‘Persia’ represents the western branch in Rum, with the Sultan as a fictionalisation of its ambitious leader.26 Like Nur ad-Din, Kilij Arslan II would have been familiar to the West as an immediate and potentially dangerous neighbour of Christian monarchs. In the middle years of the twelfth century he had posed a greater threat to Byzantium than his Syrian counterpart, forcing Manuel to launch his successful campaign against the Seljuks at the end of the 1150s.27 Treadgold notes that this expedition ‘showed the persistent strength of the Sultanate of Iconium, the enemy nearest the Byzantine heartland’ (p. 644). The Sultan of Rum had been received in Constantinople in 1161, to mark the (short-lived) peace treaty that signalled the end of this offensive (Runciman, pp. 356–7). It is surely too much of a coincidence that the two fictional Muslim finalists in the contest for Melior’s hand – and therefore the greatest threats to the hero – occupy the same roles as the two real-life Muslim leaders who constituted the greatest danger to Christian interests in the eastern Mediterranean.28 If the Sultan of Rum is indeed the reality behind the figure of Margaris, then our poet’s decision to unwrite the latter’s death at the hands of Partonopeus and bring him back in the Continuation as the leader of an invasion of ‘Bizance’ becomes less puzzling. As we have just seen, the idea of armed conflict between Byzantium and its eastern neighbour takes on a new significance in the later 1170s. Rewriting the end of the original romance may have seemed a reasonable price to pay in order to bring the political subtext up to date and reflect the increased level of threat from the east.29 It may also have been the only viable way to link a new war to the main intrigue, given that events in the real world seemed to have ruled out the option of bringing the other unsuccessful non-Christian finalist back as an 25

Runciman, pp. 413–14; Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society, p.

649. 26 Although the Seljuks were Turkish in origin, they had been firmly established in Persia since the mid eleventh century and had become identified with that territory; by the later twelfth century ‘Persia’ probably denoted both the original Seljuk conquest and its western extensions. 27 Lilie, Byzantium and the Crusader States 1096–1204, pp. 183–4. 28 We should remember that the King of Syria is one of the final shortlist of four contenders for Melior’s hand, alongside the Sultan of Persia and the Christians Partonopeus and Lohier, after the withdrawal of Gaudin and Aupatris. 29 Other possible reasons for the radical rewriting of the A ending will be considered in Chapter 6.

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enemy figure. Nur ad-Din had died in 1174 and had been succeeded by his eleven-year-old son; the boy monarch was immediately sidelined by Saladin, who went on to ensure that Syria was absorbed into his own Egyptian sultanate. Once this had become known in the West, the king of Syria could hardly return, even in fiction, as a credible opponent for the emperor of Byzantium. It might be overstating the case to suggest that the Sultan of Persia in Partonopeus is a direct fictionalisation of Kilij Arslan II, although his doings were certainly known in France. Some critics have argued that the name Cligés derives from Kilij, possibly as a result of Chrétien’s hearing about him during the visit to Champagne in 1173 of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, who had met the real-life sultan in the Middle East the previous year.30 The choice of this particular figure as the key antagonist for a hero who is destined to become emperor of Byzantium is highly suggestive, given what was happening in Asia Minor in the early 1170s. The composition of the first version of Partonopeus coincides exactly with the period when the Sultan of Rum was once again beginning to flex his muscles towards the Christian empire to the west. Awareness of this resurgence in the courts of Europe may lie behind Melior’s assertion that the Sultan of Persia was the only man in the world who could rival her father, the emperor of Constantinople, in wealth and power (vv. 4559–68). The ending of the A version also aligns particularly well with the years immediately preceding the disaster at Myriokephalum. The Sultan’s refusal to accept the result of the beauty contest and his subsequent challenge to the hero can be seen as echoing Kilij Arslan’s renewed activity in the east, while his defeat by Partonopeus provides an optimistic literary solution to a real-life problem at a point when it was still possible to imagine Byzantium neutralising the Seljuk threat once and for all.31 After 1176, however, the idea of a Byzantine emperor-elect disposing singlehandedly of the Sultan becomes less plausible, even as a wish-fulfilment narrative, which may help to explain why the whole combat episode disappears from the revised version of the text. The intensification of the threat from ‘Persia’ in the Continuation may reflect anxieties in the later 1170s and 1180s that Byzantium could fall to the Sultan of Rum at any time. The ease with which the Sultan manages to invade the new emperor’s territory, and the

30 Henry and Renee Kahane, ‘L’Énigme du nom de Cligés’; von Ivánka, ‘Fragen eines Byzantinisten an Germanisten und Romanisten’. 31 The Sultan is also killed by the hero at the end of Bel Gherardino. Predelli suggests that Gherardino is a fourteenth-century rewriting of an earlier tale (the ‘Ur-Gherardino’) that was also used by the Old French poet (se Alle origini del Bel Gherardino, and ‘The Italian cantare of Bel Gherardino: A source for Partonopeus?’). While the common source theory remains contentious, Predelli’s argument that the extant Gherardino retains elements from an early stage in the development of the story supports the view that MS A represents the original version of Partonopeus.

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rather surprising portrayal of Partonopeus as deeply troubled and uncertain in the face of the invasion (vv. 11745–50) both dovetail perfectly with what is known about the mood in Constantinople at this time.

The ending of the Continuation The next avenue that needs to be explored, in the light of the Perceval continuators’ inability (or unwillingness) to achieve closure, is whether the continued version of Partonopeus was brought to any kind of conclusion by the poet or poets who worked on it. This may strike the reader as a superfluous question, given that the published text of the Continuation ends with an obvious epilogue and brief prayer of the kind that often signals the close of vernacular narratives. It is prompted by the fact that each of the extant manuscripts that continues beyond the original story ends in a different way at a different point in the narrative. It may be helpful at this point to summarise what is known, or can be inferred, about the ending of each of these witnesses. B: Ends at v. 11226 of the Continuation, half way through Anselot’s story. The text ends part way down a column, with no explicit; it is followed by a single blank line and the opening lines of Durmart le Gallois (without a rubric).32 This configuration suggests that the scribe was working from an incomplete exemplar. G: Ends at v. 12927 of the Continuation; contains the first octosyllabic section and part of the dodecasyllabic section. The text ends mid-episode on the fifth line of the second column of a verso, followed by the word explicit and the opening lines of Blancandin. This configuration again suggests that the scribe was working from an incomplete exemplar. L: Ends after the Anselot episode with a brief epilogue claiming that the authentic story goes no further and attributing its composition to Walter Map. The text of the Continuation shows evidence of some abridgement and a lacuna (approximately 140 lines). P: Ends at v. 12717 of the Continuation; contains the first octosyllabic section and part of the dodecasyllabic section. The text breaks off mid-sentence on the final line of the verso of the last folio of a gathering. Either the manuscript has suffered the loss of an unspecified number of folios at the end; or for some reason the scribe stopped copying at the end of a quire from an exemplar that contained additional text; or, less plausibly, the scribe was 32

See the Collet-Joris edition (p. 725) for additional details.

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mirror copying from an exemplar that also broke off at the end of a quire.33 There is evidence of a lacuna of approximately 250 lines in the Continuation. T: Contains the longest version of the Continuation, ending with a ten-line conclusion to the Sultan’s love for Melior and his war with Partonopeus, followed by a sixteen-line epilogue referring to the narrator’s amie, and a four-line prayer. The text ends on the antepenultimate line of a recto, followed by Amen on the penultimate line and the explicit ‘Ci fenist li rommans de partenopeu’ on the final line. There is evidence of a lacuna (c.112 lines) in the Anselot episode. Three out of the five extant versions are therefore incomplete, as were two of their exemplars; a fourth (L) concludes the narrative before its two closest relatives (G and P) with an epilogue whose wording appears to acknowledge that a longer text may already be in circulation.34 In these circumstances it is legitimate to ask whether the Continuation as preserved in T is indeed complete. On one level it appears to be so: it brings the Sultan’s love for Melior and his invasion of Partonopeus’s territory to a conclusion; it presents the hero and heroine as living happily ever after; and it ends with a reference to the poet’s amie and his continuing devotion to her that mirrors the closing lines of the main body of the romance. The fact that it manages to do all this in some thirty lines might give us pause for thought, however.35 This highly compressed ending certainly seems at variance with the leisurely pace of the remainder of the Continuation, with its detailed descriptions of combat and lengthy council scenes. Moreover, although the ending of T does bring certain elements of the story to a more or less satisfactory conclusion, a significant number of narrative threads remain unfinished. These include not only a major element announced in the programme for the sequel given in the first epilogue, but also developments within the Continuation itself. Among the stories promised for the sequel is one in which Gaudin is going to play a major role. In four out of the six manuscripts that include this passage we are promised an account of Gaudin’s feats in the war against the Sultan: ‘Si vos dirai du bloi Gaudin,/ Comment il traist sa guere a fin’ (‘and I will tell you about Gaudin the fair-haired and how he brought his war to a conclusion’, vv. 10633–4, text of P).36 The other two witnesses have ‘s’amor’ rather than ‘sa guere’ and thus announce the conclusion to Gaudin’s

33 34 35

On mirror copying, see Busby, I, pp. 64–93. See above, Chapter 3, pp. 102–03. The Collet-Joris edition has the heading ‘dénouement et épilogue’ (‘conclusion and epilogue’) at v. 14551; this passage includes ten lines recounting Lucion’s return to the Sultan’s camp as well as the concluding material introduced by the abbreviating formula ‘Ne vos voil faire lonc sermon’ (‘I do not intend to go on at length about it’, v. 14561). 36 LTG have ‘Cum (T Com) il traist (T vint) de sa (G la) guere (T guerre) a fin’.

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love-affair. Neither of these stories features in the Continuation as we have it. Gaudin participates in one military encounter that forms part of Partonopeus’s war with the Sultan, but is certainly not involved in anything that could be called ‘his’ war, nor does he play a part in bringing the conflict to an end. As for his love for Urraque, a plot development introduced towards the end of the main narrative in all the manuscripts except A, there is no mention whatsoever of this in the Continuation.37 Likewise, the Anselot episode makes a good deal of the protagonist’s thwarted love for Euglar, which is also referred to at the beginning of the second main episode of the Continuation. This leads us to expect some kind of resolution, but we never hear any more of Euglar or of Anselot’s lovesickness, even though his suffering is said to be intense enough to prevent him concentrating on the council of war called in response to the Sultan’s invasion (vv. 11751–9). The way in which the character of Alés is introduced in the dodecasyllabic section of the Continuation also implies a dénouement to his story which does not feature in the text as we have it. He comes from the land of the Amazons, which the Sultan had tried unsuccessfully to conquer: Sor eles fu en ost o grant chevalerie; Quant conquerre nel pot, si fist la resortie. Por quant n’i fu por nient, car il i ot amie: La royne l’ama, s’en ot la druerie. Ore vorrai parler d’Alés de Femenie: Ça le tramist sa mere aprendre cortoisie, Sens d’escu et d’auberc et de lance forbie. Si li ot deffendu qu’au soudan qui l’ost guie Ne se voist acointier pour nul besoing d’aïe, Ains qu’il ait armes prises et que par tout le die. (vv. 12208–17) [The sultan Margaris] had been on a campaign against them with a large army of knights; when he found he could not conquer the land, he withdrew his forces. Nevertheless, he did not leave empty-handed, for he acquired a lover there: the queen fell in love with him and granted him her favours. Now let me tell you about Alés of Femenie: his mother sent him over here to learn courtliness and the arts of handling a shield, wearing a hauberk and wielding a polished lance. She had forbidden him to make himself known to the Sultan who was leading the army, no matter what predicament he might be in, before he had been knighted and made everyone aware of it.

37 It is tempting to see BV as the original reading of v. 10634, and the GLPT reading as deriving from a version in which a scribe substituted guerre for amor, after realising that the love between Gaudin and Urraque was never mentioned in the continued romance, but that Gaudin did at least feature in the account of the wars with the Sultan.

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The text of the Collet-Joris and Gildea editions, based on T, implies that the queen of the Amazons and Alés’s mother may be one and the same person, but never actually says so. The connection is made explicit in the other two manuscripts that contain this passage, which have a different version of v. 12212 and an additional line following it: Sin engendra Alés qui dan Turquin deffie; Li sosdans nel conoit, n’ainz nel vit en sa vie. (P meta 14551–2)38 And he was the father of her son Alés who was now challenging Turquin; the Sultan did not recognise him, for he had never seen him before in his life.

The text of v. 12212 is not entirely satisfactory in the published text, based on T (the repetition of the full appellation ‘Alés de Femenie’, which appears only ten lines earlier, is surely redundant), which suggests that the GP reading may be the original. This further implies that Alés’s story will end with the revelation that he is the Sultan’s son, after he has proved himself worthy of his father.39 Once again, the implied plot development does not materialise: Alés is last mentioned (by Aupatris) in vv. 14239–49, during the debate in the Sultan’s camp over the fate of the captive Ernoul. And yet the fact that Aupatris reminds the Sultan so insistently about his conduct in respect of Alés, mentioning the young man by name three times in the space of ten lines, seems designed to bring the two characters together in the mind of the audience, as if preparing for a dénouement which will feature their relationship. Fourrier found the ending of the Continuation in T ‘fort rapide et succinte’ (p. 383, n. 141), and proposed the theory that this manuscript did not represent the original ending. In his view, there must have been a more substantial conclusion, along the lines of the Middle Dutch adaptation, in which the Sultan falls in love with Urraque, whom he mistakes for Melior, and converts to Christianity. Anne Reynders argues convincingly against Fourrier’s theory, and suggests instead that the conclusion of Parthonopeus van Bloys is the work of the Middle Dutch adaptor, and is designed to negotiate potentially problematic elements of the Old French romance.40 Reynders also argues that

38

My punctuation and capitalisation of proper names; minor orthographical variants

in G. 39 Shortly after this, Alés finds himself joining forces with the sons of Partonopeus’s vassal Ernoul, which suggests that the poet might have been planning a climactic combat between father and son, in the manner of Marie de France’s Milun. 40 These include its ‘amoral’ perspective on love, and the equivocal approach to non-Christians implied in its lack of conversions and the strong Christian–Muslim friendships that develop during the Sultan’s invasion of Partonopeus’s territory (see ‘La Version

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the ending of T is far less unsatisfactory than Fourrier believed if it is seen as a continuation of the French poem’s subversive approach to narrative conventions. In her view, the sudden resolution of the intrigue, with its refusal to fulfil audience expectations of a full-scale war between the Sultan and Partonopeus, is not a sign of incompleteness, but evidence of the way in which the Continuation takes up and develops the playful, ironic approach to narrative conventions found in the main body of the romance. From this perspective, the implausibility and over-compression that characterise the ending of T are quite deliberate and not at odds with the remainder of the poem. They represent a humorous response to the audience’s desire for closure, which simultaneously fulfils and subverts that desire, in much the same way as Melior’s manipulation of the judging scene at the end of the romance proper manages both to respect and to subvert conventional gender roles. Moreover, if Old French romance is a form of ‘semi-erotetic’ narrative, as we suggested earlier, then audience expectations may not have included finding answers to all the questions raised by the intrigue of the Continuation.41 This is a very seductive interpretation, but it fails to take account of the physical layout of T, which calls into question the authenticity of the last thirty or so lines of the text. As noted above, the T version of the Continuation ends very neatly at the bottom of the final column on a page; so neatly, in fact, that the text of Partonopeus ends on the antepenultimate line, leaving space for the conventional Amen on the penultimate line and explicit on the very last line of all. This is suspiciously tidy at the end of more than 14,500 lines of text.42 A closer look at the final lines of T raises further questions. Sneyders de Vogel was convinced that these lines had been added by a later remanieur, citing a marked discrepancy in style between this concluding passage and other parts of the narrative (pp. 6 and 21–2). Compared with the other octosyllabic sections of the Continuation, the twelve lines between the account of Lucion’s return and the beginning of the epilogue are clumsy – not to say clunky – and contain some features uncharacteristic of the main body of the romance and the rest of the Continuation. It is often difficult to pin down exactly why a suspected interpolation

en moyen-néerlandais du Partonopeu de Blois est-elle une traduction fidèle d’une version française aujourd’hui perdue?’). Faems follows Reynders in seeing the final section of the Middle Dutch romance as being the Dutch poet’s own invention (‘Le Narrateur amoureux de Parthonopeus van Bloys’, pp. 153–4). 41 On the question and answer model of closure, see Carroll, pp. 4–7. 42 It is, of course, possible that the T scribe was copying not only the text but also the exact mise en page of an exemplar that ended at the bottom of a page, but this does not invalidate the basic premise of the argument that follows: it simply means that we have to attribute to the scribe of that exemplar the sequence of actions that I attribute to the scribe of T.

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sounds and feels different from the text that surrounds it, but this passage contains at least three elements that mark it out as non-authentic. The first is the use of the imperative sachiés by the narrator in the couplet that summarises the Sultan’s reaction: ‘Quant li soudans l’a entendu,/ Sachiés que moult fu esperdu’ (‘when the Sultan heard his [Lucion’s] account, you should know that he was distraught’, vv. 14559–60).43 Despite the frequency with which the narrator of Partonopeus addresses his audience throughout the romance and the continuation, I can find only one other occurrence of this particular form of direct address in the whole of T. It comes in the Sornegur episode of the main text, and forms part of a long and grammatically complex passage describing the French response to Partonopeus’s presumed death and Sornegur’s act of homage to Lohier. Both the syntactical and the conceptual contexts of this occurrence contrast strongly with the absolute banality of vv. 14559–60.44 If this couplet reads like the work of a not-very-talented scribe trying to make up the number of lines required to fill a folio, then what can be said about the following ten lines, describing the Sultan’s return to Persia, which contain no less than four abridging formulae? Ne vos voil faire lonc sermon: Ci finerons nostre leçon. Je ne vos puis mie conter Les dolors qu’il prist a mener; Puis s’en ala en son païs, Mes ains que il fust en mer mis, Firent il bon acordement Partenopeu et a sa gent. Je n’en sai plus avant conter Com li soudans passa la mer. (vv. 14561–70) I do not intend to go on at length about it: we will bring our text to an end here. I cannot describe for you the grief that he began to experience; then he returned to his own country, but before he set sail they concluded a fitting peace with Partonopeus and his followers. I cannot describe the Sultan’s voyage home in any more detail.

Such formulae are likewise extremely rare in the rest of the poem, where the poet’s tendency is to over- rather than under-narrate events. Also uncharacteristic are the very awkward shift of subject from il singular in v. 14566 to il

43 The brevity of this reaction is also surprising, given the length at which the narrator describes the Sultan’s agonising over whether or not to send his love-letter to Melior (vv. 13849–976). 44 T meta 3681–8; vv. 3633–40 in the Collet-Joris text. T meta 3682–3 differ somewhat in lexis (though not in overall meaning) from vv. 3634–45, but the immediate context in which sachiés appears is identical.

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plural in v. 14567, with no clear indication of the referent for the latter, and the curious use of the oblique case as a dative with the verb faire in v. 14568. The voice of these lines is not the same as that of the main narrative or that of most of the other octosyllabic sections of the Continuation. The remaining twenty lines – the ‘second’ epilogue, which I shall refer to as the Passe Rose epilogue – are a different matter, however. Here syntax and versification flow in the manner to which the reader has become accustomed, and the voice that extols a lady’s virtues and bestows on her the charming name of Passe Rose seems like that of an old friend. The sense of a discrepancy with the previous twelve lines is reinforced by the narrator’s claim here that he could devote another whole book to his amie, a claim that sits very uneasily with the earlier proliferation of abridging formulae. It is as if the scribe has suddenly started copying again, after having invented the right number of lines to take him from the point where his exemplar breaks off to the beginning of another piece of text with which he plans to end, and which he knows will fill up the bottom two-thirds of the second column of his page. But what could such a piece of text be? Where could a scribe find a ready-made epilogue featuring Partonopeus, Melior and the narrator’s amie? One answer might be at the end of another version of the romance which has not come down to us, or which has not come down to us with its ending intact. One tiny piece of evidence to support this hypothesis is the form boine, which occurs at the beginning of the Passe Rose epilogue: Partenopex maine grant joie, Avec lui Melior la bloie; Mainent bon tans et boine vie. (vv. 14571–3) Partonopeus experienced great joy, with Melior the blonde at his side; they experienced happy days and a happy life together.

Boine does not occur anywhere else in MS T. The only form of the adjective used by the T scribe is bon(e): there is not a single instance of any other form, even bonne, nor are there any occurrences of the stressed form buen(e), for which boin(e) is an alternative graphy in some regions. This suggests two things: firstly, that the T scribe did not compose these lines himself (had he done so, he would surely have used his normal form of the word); secondly, that he may have copied these lines from a different exemplar from the ones he had been following for the rest of the text.45 The two extant manuscripts

45 The graphy boine may suggest that this additional exemplar was of Northern provenance. There is clear evidence that the T scribe had access to at least two different copies of the text: one related to PL which he used for the main body of the romance, and another, closer to B, in the first part of the Continuation.

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that are incomplete because they have lost their final folios or gatherings (as opposed to having been copied from incomplete exemplars) are P and A. P breaks off part way through the Continuation, while A ends in the middle of the wedding episode that brings the main body of the romance to a close. Neither of these witnesses contains any occurrences of the graphy boine, which suggests that the T epilogue could not have been copied directly from either of them. However, both contain numerous instances of the stressed adjective buen(e), so it is reasonable to conclude that the graphy boine might have occurred in a lost manuscript closely related to either of them. Of the two, A seems the more likely candidate for a conclusion along the lines of the Passe Rose epilogue.46 The story in this version is heading for closure at the point where the text breaks off. If all that is missing is a description of the closing stages of the wedding celebrations, plus possibly some indication that Partonopeus and Melior ‘lived happily ever after’, then the lines preserved in the Passe Rose epilogue would have formed a very fitting conclusion. There is, moreover, no reason to suppose that Arsenal 2968 was the only copy ever to have been made of the A version of the text. As this witness dates from the end of the twelfth century or the very beginning of the thirteenth, if the first version of the text was composed around 1171–72, then there must have been at least one other copy in existence before our MS A was created. The extant fragments and extracts of the text provide direct evidence for the existence at various points of at least five more manuscripts in addition to the seven complete or near-complete witnesses that have come down to us, suggesting that this was a much-copied text. Of these five, only one (the exemplar of DC) definitely contained the continued version of Partonopeus; any of the other four could, in theory, have contained the shorter version, with either the A or V ending. There is evidence of other scribes having access to more than one version of the poem, so the idea that the T redactor might have copied text from an A-type manuscript as well as a continued text is not inherently implausible. The theory that the scribe of T was working from an incomplete exemplar which he completed tant bien que mal is further supported by two features of the Middle Dutch version of the poem. Frustratingly, the passage corresponding to the last folio of T is not among the fragments of Parthonopeus van Bloys that have survived, so no direct comparison of the two is possible. However, certain tentative deductions can be made. Firstly, although the poet’s amie figures in the brief epilogue with which the Middle Dutch romance ends, she is never named: there is no equivalent to the senhal ‘Passe 46 Moret concluded that Konrad von Würzburg’s French exemplar was closely related to our MS P (pp. 195–7). There is nothing in Konrad’s work that corresponds to the last thousand or so lines of MS T, suggesting that Partenopier und Melior may have been adapted from a French version that also lacked an ending. It is therefore possible that P’s exemplar was similarly incomplete and that P never contained a second epilogue.

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Rose’ that marks the conclusion of T. Instead, the Dutch poet prays to be united with his beloved in paradise: Hier indet in walsche; vondics meere, Ic dichet in mijns lieves eere, Diet mi wel verghelden sal. God gheve haer ere ende goet gheval, Ende na dit leven hemelrike, Ende mi met hare al die ghelike. Amen.47

Fourrier comments that ‘ces derniers vers ressemblent à ceux du ms. français’ (p. 383, n. 141). There is a much closer resemblance, however, between these lines and the closing couplets of the main body of the romance than with the end of T, as can be seen if we compare Fourrier’s translation of the Middle Dutch with the relevant passages of Partonopeus (see Table 5): Ici finit le poème français; si j’en trouvais davantage, Je le versifierais également en l’honneur de mon amie Qui m’en récompensera, je l’espère. Que Dieu lui accorde honneur et félicité, Le paradis après cette vie, Et, à moi, le même bonheur avec elle.

If the version of the French text from which the Middle Dutch poet was working had included the Passe Rose epilogue it is difficult to see why he would have chosen to model his own conclusion on the first epilogue of the French poem rather than drawing on the more striking ending found in T.48 Given the consistency with which the adaptor preserves – and even elaborates upon – the narrator’s praise of his lady and commentaries on his own love-affair, it seems unlikely that he would have rejected the opportunity to include the Passe Rose reference if he had had it in front of him. This strongly suggests that vv. 14571–90, at least, of the French continuation did not appear in his exemplar. It can also be argued that the same was true of vv. 14551–70, which describe Lucion’s return to the Saracen camp and the Sultan’s abrupt departure. There are two possible scenarios here. If, as the Middle Dutch poet claims in his epilogue, he followed his French exemplar to the point where it ended, then his model could not have included this account of how the Sultan

47 48

Bormans, Ouddietsche Fragmenten van den Parthonopeus van Bloys, vv. 8401–6. According to Sneyders de Vogel, the Middle Dutch poet’s exemplar was related to a common ancestor of G and T, but showed some influence from P as well (pp. 14–15). Reynders notes how the text of Parthonopeus van Bloys oscillates between the Old French manuscript groupings and concludes that its exemplar was probably ‘contaminated’ (De Middelnederlandse Parthonopeus van Bloys. Een studie van de vertaal- en bewerkingstechniek, pp. 115–24).

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Table 5. Comparison of the first and second epilogues.49 T meta 11186–201 = vv. 10645–56

vv. 14574–90 = T meta 16942–58

Tout dirai ce que cele veult De coi li cuers du pis me deult; Se non, si finerai d’escrire Et ouvrerai de moi ocire. Veilliers et penssers et souspirs Me trairont des ore a morir; Des or morrai en sa merci, Ne puis garir se n’est par li: Du tout me met en sa merci. A Deiu le commant et otri, Et toutes les autres du mont Qui furent et sont et seront, Qu’Il lor doint la grant joie estable, La pleniere, la pardurable, Et Il m’otroi qu’au derrien jour Soit m’ame en joie entre les lour.50

Ainssi voussisse user ma vie A servir la bele plaisant Que je de fin cuer aime tant; Et tant est bele a mon avis, Rose de mai ne flor de lis Ne s’i pueent apartenir Ne a sa biaute parvenir. Ele s’apele Passe Rose; Icele ai en mon cuer enclose Et la bonté ne puis escrivre. Faire en porroie .j. autre livre. Ele est de si grant bonté plaine Que de tous biens est la fontaine. Si prions a Dieu bonement, Celui qui ne faut ne ne ment, Que s’amour puissons deservir Qu’en sa glorie puissons venir.51

made his peace with Partonopeus and returned to Persia. It is highly unlikely that any French version of the Continuation would have had the Sultan setting sail for Persia one moment and visiting Chief d’Oire the next, let

49 BV have an alternative, slightly shorter version of part of the first epilogue (vv. 10645–9 in the Collet-Joris edition, equivalent to meta 11188–94). For the sake of consistency, I have quoted the text of both epilogues from T, giving my own punctuation for the first passage. 50 ‘I will relate everything that she (the one for whom my heart aches) desires; if she does not desire it, I shall give up writing and turn my hand to dying. Sleepless nights and anxious thoughts and sighs will soon bring about my death; I shall soon die at her hands, for only she can cure me: I place myself entirely at her mercy. I command and entrust her to God, together with all the other women who were, who are and who will be in the world, and may He grant them unchanging, complete and everlasting joy, and let Him grant that on the last day my soul may be found amongst theirs in heavenly joy’ (my punctuation). 51 ‘I would like to spend my life this way in the service of the sweet beauty that I love so truly and deeply; and in my opinion she is so lovely that neither the rose in May nor the lily can compare with her or come near her beauty. She is called Passe Rose; she is the one I have sealed within my heart, and I cannot put her goodness into words on parchment. I could write another book about her. She is so full of excellence that she is the source of all virtues. So let us pray earnestly to God, who can do and say no wrong, that we may deserve His love and attain His glory.’

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alone falling comically in love with Urraque and converting to Christianity. If, on the other hand, these closing episodes are the Dutch poet’s own invention, why should he have felt it necessary to continue the story if his French original already provided an ending? It could be that he was working from a version similar to T, found the T ending unsatisfactory, and decided to write his own conclusion, in which the final stages of the Sultan’s love-affair would receive less peremptory treatment. But in that case, why did he not conclude with the Passe Rose epilogue? A more plausible explanation is that his exemplar presented an incomplete text that broke off during Lucion’s interview with Melior, requiring some kind of conclusion to be added.52 Taken together with the physical and linguistic evidence from T itself, these features of the Middle Dutch romance strongly suggest to me that there was no completed version of the Continuation in existence before the T scribe decided to impose his own form of closure with a borrowed epilogue and a brief bridging passage designed to explain how Partonopeus and Melior could once again find themselves living ‘the good life’. The possibility that the T scribe made his own contribution to the development of the text is supported by research on another passage which indicates that the Continuation is much more of a patchwork than has previously been recognised, and continued to evolve long after the twelfth century. The passage in question is the second love-letter that the Sultan writes to Melior while lying in bed during a sleepless night after the battle in which Ernoul is taken prisoner by his forces (vv. 13725–848). Having decided to make his feelings known to Melior, the Sultan composes a brief love poem in octosyllables (the main narrative is still in dodecasyllabic laisses at this point): ‘Par Melior en ma mort vif Qui me lie ore en fort estrif; La vie est nove c’ai volu, Qui vie et joie m’a tolu.’ (vv. 13705–8) ‘Through Melior, I am suffering a living death that holds me fast in bonds of inner torment; the life I expected proves unexpected: it has taken my life and joy away.’

Dissatisfied with this first effort, he tries again, this time producing a 124-line ‘Salut d’amour’ in decasyllabic couplets linked by homonymic rhyme. Collet has suggested that this passage must be an interpolation, since the ‘Salut d’amour’ was a comparatively short-lived poetic form in Old French, whose heyday coincided with the middle fifty years or so of the

52 Van der Roest (‘De Middelnederlandse Parthonopeus van Bloys: een getrouwe bewerking met een eigenzinning einde’) has also concluded that the Dutch poet’s French exemplar was probably unfinished.

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thirteenth century. The form was current in Occitan poetry in the twelfth century, but many critics, including Collet, believe that it was not adopted in the North before the 1220s or thereabouts.53 If that is so, then the ‘Salut d’amour’ in the Continuation could not have been composed of a piece with the rest of the alexandrine section, which reflects the recent influence of the twelfth-century Roman d’Alexandre, as we shall see in Chapter 6. Collet also reminds us that this decasyllabic sequence is extensively plagiarised, along with numerous other episodes of Partonopeus, in a curious addition to the French version of the Disciplina clericalis preserved in BnF nouv. acq. 7517, a manuscript that dates from the final quarter of the thirteenth century. Basing his deductions on the fact that the Middle Dutch version of the romance, which clearly contained an episode dealing with the Sultan’s love for Melior, dates from around 1260, Collet concludes that ‘c’est donc dans les années 1225–1260 que le Roman de Partonopeu se serait constitué en une entité solidaire, sous la forme, dérivée, que nous retransmet le manuscrit T’ (‘it was therefore during the years 1225–1260 that the Roman de Partonopeu took shape as a coherent entity, in the derivative form that has been passed on to us by manuscript T’, p. 100). There are two potential problems with this hypothesis. In the first place, the chronology of the ‘Salut d’amour’ as a poetic form may be open to question. Elizabeth Poe has argued that references to saluz in a number of twelfth-century narratives, including Eneas and Floire et Blancheflor, indicate that Old French poets were aware of the existence of the form as early as the 1150s or 1160s. In her view, Marie de France’s Milun, in particular, seems to demonstrate a detailed knowledge of the conventions governing the composition of a salut, perhaps derived from lost compositions by Bernart de Ventadorn.54 This objection to Collet’s argument is more apparent than real, however. If saluz were known in northern France by the time the Partonopeus Continuation was composed this might explain the inclusion of the original four-line missive – indeed, it provides a very coherent rationale for the poet’s decision to have the Sultan communicate his feelings to Melior in rather mannered verse – but it does not invalidate the case for seeing the decasyllabic sequence as an interpolation. There are enough faultlines in the text to support the conclusion that this sequence was inserted after most, if not all, of the remainder of the Continuation had already been written. The use of a

53 Collet, ‘“Armes et amour” ou “amour sans armes”? Un aspect négligé de la circulation et de la réception du Roman de Partonopeu de Blois au XIIIème siècle’, pp. 99–100 and n. 21; see also Newcombe, ‘A Salut d’amour and its Possible Models’. 54 ‘Marie de France and the Salut d’amour’, pp. 308–21. Girolamo (‘Maria di Francia e il salut d’amour’) highlights some problems with Poe’s chronology and suggests that lyric poets may have been inspired by descriptions of letters between lovers in romances, rather than the other way around. He does imply, however, that the salut may have been in existence as a poetic form by the end of the twelfth century.

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third metre, in particular, especially one that was not normally associated with romance, has always struck me as suspicious. These suspicions are confirmed by the way in which the second salut is integrated – or rather, conspicuously not integrated – into the surrounding narrative. The whole incident of the Sultan’s compositions is curiously detached from its context: the letter containing the ‘Salut’ is never sent, and the events of the following day proceed without any further reference to it whatsoever. It seems very odd that such a long and distinctive missive should be introduced simply to disappear from view. There is also some tell-tale confusion in the passage that describes the Sultan subsequently leaping out of bed and trying to decide whether and how to send his letter(s) to Melior. One moment he throws both letters down and leaps out of bed, then the next ‘si s’en revient et prent le brief’ (‘he turns back and picks up the letter’, v. 13857; my emphasis), without any indication of which one is meant. The one couplet that refers to there being two letters (vv. 13853–4) is completely self-contained and could be removed without any loss of clarity (and, indeed, with a significant gain in coherence). These two lines could well have been inserted at a later date by the interpolator who decided that the first letter was not impressive enough, and added a second, simultaneously attributing his own dissatisfaction with the octosyllabic effort to the Sultan. Postulating the existence of an earlier version of the Continuation which corresponded to our MS T minus the longer of the two saluz makes it easier to understand why the text reverts to octosyllabic rhyming couplets immediately after the Sultan’s second letter. If one aim of including the text of the first letter was to demonstrate that the Sultan was an educated man who could compose his own billet-doux in a fashionable verse form, then it made sense to differentiate his words from those of the narrator via a change of metrical form from dodecasyllabic laisses to octosyllables. If the writing of this letter coincided with a natural break in the process of composition, we can imagine that a poet who found alexandrines heavy going might have instinctively continued in octosyllables when he resumed work.55 It makes far less sense for the same poet to revert to alexandrines for a narratorial intervention (vv. 13709–24), then compose a second letter in decasyllables, and then suddenly resume a narrative metre that he has not used for over fifteen hundred lines. The best explanation for the multiple shifts in T is that the central twelve- and ten-syllable sequences were interpolated into a form of the text in which a single shift of form, from alexandrines to octosyllables, was originally motivated by a change in content. The second part of Collet’s conclusion, that the T version of our text must

55 The audience’s attention is drawn to the difficulty of composing in the longer form in the passage of narratorial commentary that immediately precedes the switch to alexandrines (vv. 12117–27).

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have been compiled in the years 1225–60, is more questionable. The passage corresponding to the Sultan’s sleepless night is not among the fragments of the Middle Dutch romance that have survived, so there is no incontrovertible proof that the decasyllabic sequence was in existence before 1260. It is entirely possible that the version of Partonopeus from which the Middle Dutch poet was working (and which must have been copied some time before 1260) contained only the first, four-line octosyllabic love-letter, and that the ‘Salut’ and the 16 alexandrines that introduce it are a later addition to the French poem. The difficulties associated with the ‘Salut d’amour’ do not stop there. Comparison of the decasyllabic ‘Salut’ in T and in Paris, BnF nouv. acq. 7517 (to which Collet refers as N, its siglum in the Disciplina manuscript tradition, but which I have designated as DC) reveals significant differences between the two. DC presents a much shorter version of the letter than T, and there is enough variation in the lines that it does have in common with T to indicate that it could not have been abridged from the Tours manuscript of Partonopeus.56 Moreover, DC contains three couplets that do not figure in T, and towards the end of the sequence it presents twelve lines in a completely different, and noticeably more coherent, order. Collet suggests that, given the DC poet’s tendency towards greater concision in this sequence, the six ‘extra’ lines in DC should be regarded as authentic, rather than his own creation. The implications of Collet’s research are twofold: firstly, it implies the existence of another lost manuscript of Partonopeus that contained a better text of this part of the Continuation than the surviving witness;57 secondly, it suggests that the ‘Salut d’amour’ itself may have been quite extensively interpolated. Closer analysis supports the idea that the ‘Salut’ as we have it may indeed be a composite text. A number of lines found in T but not in DC seem entirely redundant, not to say disruptive of the train of thought being developed. Two passages in particular stand out by virtue of a curious comparison, a peculiar concern for Melior’s state of health, and an explicit sexual element completely absent from the rest of the ‘Salut’: ‘Quant on me dit qu’estes pesant et vaine, Ne me remaint point de sanc vif en vaine; Quant l’en me dit qu’estes joiouse et saine, Plus sui joious que n’est le lus de Saine.’ (vv. 13745–8)

56 The text of the other extracts from Partonopeus plagiarised in DC also differs sufficiently from that of T to confirm that the Tours manuscript could not have been the DC poet’s exemplar (Collet, p. 98). 57 Collet and Joris adopt a significant number of readings from DC to emend obvious errors in T (see vv. 13727–30, 13741, 13751, 13763–4, 13769–72, 13778–9, 13790–92, 13820, 13837).

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‘Sains sui et drus se saine estes et drue, Mais plus et plus, s’estre daigniés ma drue. Mes cuers i tent plus haut que une [n]ue58 Se soufrissiés que vous sentisse nue.’ (vv. 13833–6) ‘When they tell me that you are weary and exhausted, not a drop of life-blood remains in my veins; when they tell me that you are happy and healthy, I am happier than the pike in the Seine.’ ‘I am healthy and lusty if you are healthy and lusty, but even more so if you will deign to be my lover. My heart soars above the clouds in hope that you would allow me to caress you naked.’

To my mind, both of these sequences are suspect, and not simply because of their content. They also disrupt the pattern of different successive rhymes that holds for the rest of the letter and it should be noted that only two lines separate the first passage from a preceding couplet also rhyming in -aine. Moreover, although v. 13748 is clearly a variant on the proverbial expression ‘heureux comme un poisson dans l’eau’ (literally ‘as happy as a fish in water’), it is hard to see why the Sultan of Persia should be using the fish life of the river Seine as a point of comparison, particularly when he is addressing a letter to the empress of Byzantium. A continuity error of this kind is more likely to have been committed by a remanieur than by the individual who first inserted the ‘Salut’ into a scene in which the Sultan is the only protagonist.59 Dating these probable interpolations is an inexact science, but another couplet that features in T but not in DC seems to confirm that they could not have been added before the thirteenth century at the earliest. The rhyming of os (< ossem) with assaus (< assaltum) in lines 13761–62 would not have been possible at an earlier date. The diphthong au resulting from vocalisation of preconsonantal l levelled to an intermediate stage of lengthened open o, which is only evidenced from the thirteenth century onwards, before passing to [o]. This intermediate stage would have rhymed with open o < tonic blocked o, and may have persisted until the sixteenth century in some areas.60 It is interesting that the scribe of T uses the graphy Alaus for Alos in v. 11878 (where the word is not at the rhyme), but elsewhere in the Continuation,

58 The manuscript reads ‘une grue’. The scribe probably intended to write ‘une nue’, but the idea of reaching up to the sky seems to have triggered the image of a crane, which led to his actually writing ‘grue’. However, vv. 13753–4 also present a non-homonymic rhyme (soi-effroi), so grue might not be an error. 59 Another passage that does not feature in DC (vv. 13793–800) also contains references to locations in France (Metz, Mont Cenis, Tours, Rheims, Bourges, Lyons), suggesting that it may have been written by the same inattentive author. 60 See Fouché, Phonétique historique du français. Volume II, Les voyelles, pp. 232 and 300–301. My thanks to Olivier Collet for his help in clarifying the development of au.

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where comparison with other manuscripts shows that he is definitely copying rather than composing, Alos rhymes in [us].61 Unless Alaus is a simple copying error, this graphy suggests that au and o can have the same value for him, but that they did not for the original poet or poets of the Continuation. This in turn makes it all the more likely that lines 13761–2 and other passages in the ‘Salut d’amour’ that do not appear in DC were added in the fourteenth century by the T scribe himself.62 * We began by suggesting that the notion of narrative closure in Old French romance was profoundly influenced by models related to national history and genealogy, which are intrinsically open-ended. The idea that poets and their audiences perceived the ending of a story as a provisional form of closure, that always allowed for later additions and developments, is supported by our conclusion that Partonopeus can rightly be described as consisting of a main narrative and a Continuation, whose separate but linked identities would have been apparent to the medieval reader or listener. The discovery of a real-life model for the Sultan of Persia answers a key objection to the theory that the A version of the poem was the original, the ending of which was then rewritten to accommodate the Continuation. The political situation to the west of the Byzantine empire in the 1160s and very early 1170s provides a rationale for the choice of the Sultan as the hero’s principal antagonist, in preference to all the other kings and princes who feature in the tournament. The events of 1174–76 determine the direction in which the Continuation will develop and explain why the Sultan has to be brought back from the dead rather than being replaced by an alternative enemy figure. The fact that Kilij Arslan II has also been linked with Cligés might suggest that the resurrection of the Sultan was also the result of an ongoing literary rivalry. Did Chrétien de Troyes set out to rewrite the enemy figure of the first version of Partonopeus as a pseudo-Tristan, thereby provoking the Blois poet to retaliate by bringing the Sultan back to life as the victim of love for a now-married woman? Whether or not our author had Chrétien’s hero in his sights, this act of radical rewriting could only have taken place in a context that tacitly acknowledges the impossibility of closure and the lure of incompleteness. Even so, it goes well beyond the modifications that Gautier d’Arras felt able to make to his own work or that epic poets were starting to apply to the traditions of the chanson de geste: in the epic sphere, Roland and Vivien remain definitively dead and can only live on in the world of their enfances. The contribution of

61 Collet and Joris transcribe the name as ‘Alans’ and emend to ‘Alous’, but the penultimate letter is clearly u rather than n. 62 Fourrier concluded that the DC poet had abridged the ‘Salut’ (p. 377, n. 132); it now seems more likely that this text has preserved the original thirteenth-century version of the Sultan’s letter.

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Partonopeus to the making of romance as a genre is not just to demonstrate that an author need not be constrained by what he has already ‘published’, but also to legitimise an iconoclastic approach to closure that brings us both the factitious conclusion of Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon63 and the infamous non-ending of Le Bel Inconnu. Our study of the last thousand lines of MS T leads to two other important conclusions. To begin with, it is very likely that the Continuation was left unfinished by the twelfth-century poet or poets who composed its various sections, and that it circulated in this form for a hundred years or more before the T scribe manufactured an ending to produce a neat final page for his codex. There is, moreover, a real possibility that this manufactured ending preserves part of the original epilogue to the A-type version of the text. Secondly, the T scribe was probably responsible for making some incongruous additions to the Sultan’s ‘Salut d’amour’, which had itself been interpolated in the thirteenth century into a form of the Continuation that contained only the one, short letter from Margaris to Melior. The activities of our fourteenth-century redactor also reveal a curious tension between openness and closure. On the one hand, he seems to have had no qualms about modifying various sections of the text that he had in front of him, which suggests that, like Walter Map and the author of the king of England interpolations before him, he saw this romance as an invitation to contribute to an ongoing process of creation. The fact that different versions of the text were in existence from quite early on may have helped to promote this sense of its permeability. Indeed, if the T scribe had access to the original version of the romance as well as a continued (but unfinished) text, then it is possible that his knowledge of these competing narratives encouraged him to indulge his own spirit of aemulatio. It has to be said, though, that he was probably a better copyist than poet: his ‘improvements’ are decidedly inferior in style and versification to the narratives he inherited. On the other hand, the T scribe was clearly unwilling to pass the text on to a new readership in its incomplete state, and felt the need to supply the story with an ending, however brief. As it turned out, this ending answered only one of the questions raised by the intrigue that preceded it, namely ‘will the Sultan succeed in defeating Partonopeus and winning back Melior?’ Its refusal to tie up the threads involving Alés, Gaudin, Urraque, Anselot and Euglar leaves the warp on the loom, so to speak, with the potential for further weaving to take place in the future. Even in its ‘finished’ form, the Continuation seems to be asking to be continued.

63

See Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning’, pp. 103–4.

Chapter 6 Poets and a Patroness: The Making of Partonopeus de Blois POETS Partonopeus AND AdePATRON Blois

The evidence presented in the previous three chapters reveals that the Partonopeus Continuation is undisputably the work of more than one individual, and that it took a considerable period of time for it to evolve into the form in which it has come down to us. That process of evolution seems to have consisted of several separate stages and to have involved at least four continuators: the original poet himself, who was responsible for the Anselot episode and part of the invasion narrative; one or more twelfth-century interpolators (who may have included Walter Map); a thirteenth-century remanieur who added the ‘Salut d’amour’, and the fourteenth-century scribe of manuscript T. One of the aims of this chapter is to ask whether we can put any more flesh on these chronological bones and come to a more detailed understanding of how and when the various components of the Continuation were assembled. We will also need to look further into why the romance was continued in the first place, and why this sequel to the adventures of Partonopeus and Melior took on the shape it did. The question of patronage provides a fitting conclusion to this chapter and to the book, for without the impetus provided by the shadowy figure who inspired and rewarded the composition of Partonopeus de Blois, Old French romance might not have developed in the ways with which we are familiar. We begin, however, with questions of poetic form and intertextual influence which may shed some more light on the genesis of this most disconcerting section of the narrative.

Form and fusion: the Roman d’Alexandre and Florimont One of the most striking features of the extant Partonopeus Continuation is the instability of its metrical form. In the printed edition the first 1,522 lines follow the pattern of the main body of the romance, consisting of uninterrupted octosyllabic couplets. There follow 1,526 dodecasyllables, which make up fifty-seven laisses linked by minimal rhyme, rather than assonance.1

1 The laisses are marked by a large capital at the beginning of the first line in all three manuscripts (GPT) that contain part or all of the dodecasyllabic sequence. The metrical

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Then come the four octosyllables of the Sultan’s first love-letter, a further laisse of sixteen alexandrines, and the 124 decasyllables of the ‘Salut d’amour’, arranged in couplets linked by homonymic rhyme. The text then reverts to octosyllabic rhyming couplets for the remaining 742 lines. We saw in Chapter 5 that the decasyllabic sequence was probably added in the thirteenth century to an earlier version of the Continuation that originally contained only octosyllables and alexandrines. If we accept that the majority of this ‘edition’ of the Continuation (with the possible exception of Anselot’s story) cannot have come into existence before the late 1170s, it is possible to see the mixing of forms as part of a broader phenomenon of metrical experimentation in the last quarter of the twelfth century. Wace’s Roman de Rou provides an obvious model for the juxtaposition of different metres within one text,2 although we should perhaps be wary of assuming that a writer or writers of fiction would necessarily set out to imitate a narrative that presents itself as historiography. Unusually, the Partonopeus poet goes into some detail about his versification, informing his audience about the first switch from octosyllables to alexandrines in advance, and explaining not only that the length of the lines is about to change, but also that the disposition of the rhymes will be different: Je qui ceste chançon vos chant Voeil que la fin voit amendant. Jusques ci ai traitié la lime Que chascuns couplés a sa rime; Or le vous trairons par lons vers, Si vous deviserons par [mers]. L’oevre en est cousteuse et plus fort, Mais n’est ma vie ne ma mort Que [celi] face son vouloir De qui je ai petit espoir, Car trop [voi denoi] d’autre part? (vv. 12116–27)3

form is less clearly signalled in G, which has a number of large capitals within laisses as well (e.g. meta 14541, 14658, 14730, 14853, 15006, etc.). The average length of the laisses is 26 to 27 lines. The penultimate laisse is 93 lines long (!), which might imply that the poet was struggling to sustain the variety of rhymes needed for this form of versification, and might help to explain the shift back to octosyllables shortly after this point. 2 On the likely reasons for Wace’s changes of metre, see Le Saux, p. 154, and Bennett, ‘Epopée, historiographie, généalogie’, pp. 17–20. 3 My emendation to v. 12125, based on P. It would probably be better to adopt the P reading throughout vv. 12124–7 – ‘Mais (en) ce est ma vie et ma morz/ Que je face tot lo voloir/ Celi de qu’ai petit d’espoir’ (‘but my life and death depend on carrying out every wish of the lady who holds out a little hope to me, for otherwise rejection stares me in the face’) – and punctuate the last four lines as a declarative rather than an interrogative sentence.

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I who am singing this song for you would like it to finish on a high note. Up to this point I have polished my work into rhyming couplets; now we will draw it out into alexandrines and organise them in laisses. This is more demanding and more difficult work, but do not my life and death depend on doing the bidding of the lady who holds out a little hope to me, for otherwise rejection stares me in the face?

This suggests that, whatever other writers may have been doing at the time, adopting a different metre was something worthy of comment in the context in which the Partonopeus poet was working.4 The most notable feature of this passage, however, is the fact that our poet goes on to attribute this technical innovation to the intervention of his beloved. Despite the inherent difficulty of composing in longer lines, he will happily take up the challenge if it is what his unresponsive amie wants. This begs the question of why the lady in question should have been so keen on alexandrines. The simple response is that they must have been in fashion at the time, and it was felt that the remainder of the story of Partonopeus and the Sultan would be enhanced by the use of an up-to-the-minute verse form. A slightly more specific answer might be that this change represents a response to the popularity of the dodecasyllabic Alexander poems that appeared in the 1170s and culminated in Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre.5 Evidence to support this idea can be found in the fact that the first incident to be narrated in the longer metre in the Continuation has as its hero Alés de Femenie, sent by his Amazon mother to learn cortoisie from the sultan Margaris, with whom she had had an affair. Alés’s name and family history may represent another instance of literary fusion, in which the epic motif of the renewal of hostilities by an old enemy combines with the well-known Amazon episode in Branch III of the Roman d’Alexandre. In this episode the queen of the Amazons forestalls Alexander’s planned conquest of her kingdom by offering him her homage and a yearly tribute of four camels laden with gold and silver. The idea of an amorous liaison between Alés’s mother and the warlike Sultan could have been suggested by the terms of the message sent by the Amazon queen to Alexander: ‘La roïne vos mande que ele est vostre amie, Son anel vos envoie par molt grant drüerie,

4 Gröber saw the change of metre as indicating a change of authorship (pp. 73 and 287), although it is not clear why a second poet would have used octosyllables to introduce his distinctive contribution. 5 Bruckner, ‘Romancing History’, notes that the verse form of this section of Partonopeus was ‘borrowed from the Roman d’Alexandre’ (p. 107, n. 21), but does not explore the connection any further. The popularity of Alexander material in the late 1170s/early 1180s is further attested by Walter of Châtillon’s Latin epic the Alexandreis, which was completed between 1176 and 1184 (Alexandreis, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xv).

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Ves le ci en present, ne le refusés mie.’ (RomAlex, vv. 7597–9) ‘The queen wants you to know that she is your dear friend and sends you her ring as a token of her very great affection; see, here it is now, do not decline to accept it.’

The use of the ambivalent nouns amie and drüerie (which can also mean ‘lover’ and ‘sexual love’) is a clever diplomatic ploy on the part of the queen, designed to suggest to Alexander that he has already conquered her heart – and so invading her kingdom would be superfluous. It is easy to see how this vocabulary could have created the impression of an actual love-affair between the Amazon leader and a would-be conqueror, an impression that is reinforced by the long account of the (non-diplomatic) drüerie that develops between the queen’s two messengers, Floré and Biauté, and two of Alexander’s followers. There may be further echoes of the Roman d’Alexandre in two of the characters who appear for the first time in the dodecasyllabic section of the Continuation. A major player in the war with Partonopeus is the Sultan’s bellicose cousin Macabré, or Marcabré, whose name recalls the equally pugnacious Macabrun (or Macabrin) who figures prominently in the second battle for Babylon.6 Likewise, the Sultan’s ally and messenger Lucion, whose epithet is ‘l’Amourous’ (vv. 13496 and 14303) may well be a reflection of Lisiart l’Amourous (RomAlex, v. 6718) who also fights at Babylon. These echoes would place the composition of the alexandrine section of the Partonopeus Continuation in the early 1180s, after the appearance of Alexander de Paris’s compilation, unless the passages concerned had featured in almost exactly the same form in Lambert le Tort’s Alexander poem, which probably circulated during the 1170s before being incorporated into the Roman as we have it.7 Further evidence about the relative dating of other sections of the Continuation can be gleaned from a careful comparison of Partonopeus and Florimont. Links between the two texts were first identified by Gröber (p. 590), but it was Fourrier who argued that Aimon de Varennes must have known Partonopeus in its continued form, and incorporated various echoes of the Continuation into his romance, which is dated in its epilogue to 1188 (pp. 449–59). Douglas Kelly took issue with Fourrier’s conclusions, suggesting that the resemblances between the two romances were too general to support the idea that Florimont was a conscious rewriting of the earlier work. For

6 Roman d’Alexandre, laisses 356–413. MS T has the form Macabrons in v. 12963, which Collet and Joris emend to Macabrés. 7 Roman d’Alexandre, ‘Introduction’, pp. 21–5; Gosman, pp. 32–3. On Alexander de Paris’s treatment of his sources, see Gaullier-Bougassas, Les Romans d’Alexandre. Aux frontières de l’épique et du romanesque, passim.

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him, Aimon’s poem is only ‘occasionally reminiscent’ of Partonopeus; a number of parallels can be accounted for in terms of two poets drawing independently on a common stock of narrative ideas.8 Kelly is certainly right that some of the evidence presented in Le Courant réaliste is open to question, but this does not invalidate the case for seeing other elements of Florimont as a direct response to the earlier narrative. In this instance, I remain convinced of the justesse of Fourrier’s intuition, although there are more convincing arguments in its favour in relation to the Continuation than some of those he put forward. The first of these questionable assertions is that Florimont’s behaviour towards another contender for the hand of Romadanaple is a deliberate echo of the final sequence of the Partonopeus Continuation: ‘Finalement, il se réconcilie même avec le roi de Crète, tout comme la suite en alexandrins de Partonopeus s’achevait par un bon acordement entre le héros et son rival le sultan’ (‘finally, he is even reconciled with the King of Crete, just as the sequel in alexandrines to Partonopeus ended with a bon acordement between the hero and his rival the Sultan’, p. 458).9 As we have seen, it is doubtful whether the passage describing the bon acordement could have figured in any version of Partonopeus known to Aimon de Varennes. This is not to say, however, that this episode of Florimont is not engaged in some kind of intertextual dialogue with our romance. While the figure of the king of Crete may well have been loosely modelled on the Sultan,10 the way in which his story is developed – or rather, not developed – is more suggestive of a desire to subvert rather than to imitate Partonopeus. Whereas the Sultan responds to the hero’s marriage by boycotting the wedding festivities, returning to Persia, mustering an army and invading Byzantium, the king of Crete attends the marriage of Florimont and Romadanaple and makes peace with the hero before returning to his kingdom. If Aimon knew a version of our romance in which the Sultan made war on the hero, and in which that war remained unresolved, what better way could he have found to make a humorous comment on his model than to bring the rivalry to a swift and peaceful conclusion before a lance was even couched in anger? Fourrier also sees evidence of the influence of Partonopeus in Aimon’s decision to include in his romance a character called Alpatris, who is intro-

8 9

Kelly, ‘The Composition of Aimon de Varennes’ Florimont’, pp. 277–9 and 291. Fourrier appears to overlook the fact that the sequel reverts to octosyllables some 720 lines before this point. 10 A ruler of Crete figures in Partonopeus in the person of Persowis’s father, ‘le roi de Milete/ Qui fu casez de tote Crete’ (‘the King of Miletus, who was in possession of the whole of Crete’, vv. 6221–2). Is this another example of Aimon’s technique of displacing elements borrowed from his source so as to signal both knowledge of and independence from an influential model?

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duced in a passage that makes reference to Nubia, and who recalls the crucial role played in the Continuation by Aupatris, king of Nubia (p. 458). The problem here is that Aupatris also plays an important role in the main body of Partonopeus, where he is elected one of the three pagan victors of the marriage tournament. The borrowing of the name does not necessarily mean that Aimon knew a continued version of our poem. It may be more significant that Florimont also features an Alos, given that Ernoul’s son of that name appears only in the Continuation of Partonopeus. However, Aimon’s Alos is a very minor character, who is named on only three occasions (Alpatris is named nineteen times), so it might be unwise to read too much into this apparent borrowing. The author of Le Courant réaliste is on firmer ground when arguing that Aimon’s decision to continue his story for another two thousand or so lines beyond the wedding of Florimont and Romadanaple betrays the influence of the Partonopeus Continuation. There are some interesting parallels between the intrigue of the final section of Florimont and the episodes of the Continuation dealing with the Sultan’s invasion. Aimon’s hero is pitted against an old adversary (the emir of Carthage) bent on revenge (for the killing of his nephew); his father has been taken prisoner (an element that seems to echo the capture of Ernoul), and has to be rescued from a fortress whose location and impenetrability recall the castle of Malbricon around which all the action of the Continuation takes place. However, Fourrier does not discuss an earlier passage, which, to my mind, provides almost certain proof that Florimont was composed after a continued version of our poem came into circulation. While Florimont’s true identity is still unknown to the Macedonian court, he manages to sneak into Romadanaple’s quarters disguised as a tailor’s apprentice. After a chaste encounter, he returns to his lodgings without being seen, at which point the narrator comments: Puels orent ambedui maint jor Riche soulas de lor amor, Si com m’oreis avant conter, Se vos me volez escouter. (vv. 9191–4) Subsequently, they both obtained rich satisfaction from their love for many a day, as you will hear me tell later on, if you have a mind to listen to me.

This is followed by a passage in which Aimon gives the etymology of his own name, presents himself as a true lover who has composed the story of Florimont for his amie Vialine and concludes with a six-line prayer that he will achieve victory in love in such a way that his eternal salvation is not compromised. The narrative then starts up again, but only after a brief recapitulation of the situation, more self-naming by the author-narrator and an

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announcement to the audience that the story they are about to hear will exemplify a range of courtly and chivalric virtues. These seventy-eight lines in Florimont (vv. 9195–272) are effectively an embedded epilogue and prologue which irresistibly call to mind the first epilogue of Partonopeus and the reprise that marks the beginning of the Continuation. All the same elements are present: the repeated anticipations of the action to come, the references to the narrator’s own love-affair, the reflections on the nature of love, the prayer, and the poet’s obligation to continue the story.11 This passage has to have been calqued on a version of Partonopeus that contained at least the beginning of the Continuation. The curious positioning of the calque, at a point some 2,300 lines before the marriage of hero and heroine, and between the burlesque tailoring episode and the description of the court at which Florimont’s true identity is revealed, may be another example of Aimon’s tongue-in-cheek engagement with the earlier romance. By displacing the ‘first epilogue – reprise’ element to an unexpected and not entirely logical position in his own story, Aimon may be humorously drawing attention to the curious ‘stop–start’ construction of his model. Aimon’s reference in his embedded prologue to the difficulty of his task in taking up the narrative again – ‘Mai del trover et de l’escrire/ Ayme ait mout grant poengne et grant faix’ (‘but Aimon finds it very difficult and burdensome to compose it and write it down’, vv. 9249–50) – may be no more than a conventional way of foregrounding the figure of the romance poet. It is tempting, however, to see in it another echo of the Continuation, this time of the passage we cited earlier in which the Partonopeus narrator explains why he is going to switch from octosyllabic rhyming couplets to more challenging dodecasyllabic laisses. The links we have established between Partonopeus on the one hand and the Roman d’Alexandre and Florimont on the other lead to two main conclusions. Firstly, a version of the Continuation containing the first octosyllabic section and the dodecasyllabic section up to and including the capture of Ernoul was in circulation before 1188. Secondly, the dodecasyllabic section could have been composed either in the 1170s or in the early 1180s, depending on whether it was influenced by Lambert le Tort’s Alexander poem while this text was circulating independently, or after it was recycled by Alexandre de Paris as Branch III of his compilation. In the absence of clear allusions relating to the Sultan’s lovesickness or the judging of Ernoul, the status and dating of the final 900 lines of the Continuation remain unclear. Some evidence can be gleaned, however, from a study of the versification of

11 Aimon’s comment that ‘love isn’t what it used to be’ (vv. 9195–8) comes at the beginning of his ‘epilogue’, whereas in Partonopeus the reflections on the force of thwarted love come at the end of the Continuation ‘prologue’ (vv. 10683–702), suggesting an element of deliberate rewriting.

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Table 6. Versification in the Continuation. % of masculine / % of rimes riches % of rimes feminine rhymes insuffisantes Sornegur’s council fols 18–23

84.4 / 15.6

9.2

12

Partonopeis’s council of war fols 106–111

82.7 / 17.3

14

13.3

The Sultan’s council fols 142–144

85.6 / 14.4

14.8

18

the octosyllabic sections of the Continuation. I compared two passages of 500 lines each from the octosyllabic sections of the Continuation with a passage of the same length from the main body of the text, all taken from the unedited text of manuscript T. The passages were matched as far as possible for content (all are council scenes), and analysed in terms of three variables: the percentage of masculine and feminine rhymes; the percentage of rimes riches, and the percentage of rimes insuffisantes (Table 6). There is little difference between the passages in respect of the ratios of masculine and feminine rhymes, but rather more where the quality of the rhymes is concerned. The figures for rimes riches might appear to support Smith’s view that the author of the main body of the poem did not write any of the Continuation (‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 90–92). However, the increased use of such rhymes in the second two passages may just be a sign that some years had passed between the composition of the Sornegur episode and the writing of the Continuation, and that in the interim the original author had grown more confident in his poetic powers or had been influenced by a developing fashion for greater numbers of rimes riches.12 The increase in the proportion of rimes insuffisantes in the final section of the Continuation is less easy to account for in terms of a single poet’s activities.13 It is possible that it may betray the presence of a second author, competent enough to find a good number of rimes riches, but less able (or less concerned?) to avoid minimal rhymes than his predecessor(s). 12 An analysis of two control passages from the main body of the poem (the two descriptions of the hero in the Ardennes on fols 4–8 and 49–53) shows that the percentage of rimes riches is very stable for this part of the text: they produce figures of 8% and 8.4% respectively. 13 The control passages produce figures of 12.4% and 12.8% respectively.

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The mysterious disappearance of Urraque Another curious feature of the Continuation is the disappearance of Urraque, which provides further evidence for the dating of this section of our romance. Although it is more than a century since Adam Trampe Bødtker drew attention to the fact that neither Urraque nor Persewis had any part to play in the Continuation (p. 49, n. 1), no convincing explanation has yet been given for this state of affairs. Urraque occupies a central role in the main narrative, simultaneously playing Anna to Melior’s Dido and Brengain to Partonopeus’s Tristan. It is all the more puzzling, then, to find that there is not a single mention of her in the second prologue or any of the episodes that follow, despite the fact that the first epilogue signposts a significant narrative development involving Melior’s sister and Gaudin. If Urraque was destined to play an important role as the focus of Gaudin’s love, we might have expected her name to come up at some point, perhaps during the description of Anselot’s arrival at Chief d’Oire, or during the preliminaries to the war with the Sultan. To find that she has been completely written out of the Continuation is disconcerting, to say the least.14 One possible reason for this might lie in developments concerning real-life Urraques – or Urracas, in the name’s original Spanish form. The Partonopeus poet’s decision to use the very unusual name Urraque in the main body of the romance may have been partly motivated by his personal interest in Spain, as evidenced by the detailed knowledge of Spanish geography displayed in the description of the participants in the tournament.15 However, in the 1170s and 1180s the name could hardly fail to resonate with anyone who was aware of political developments in the peninsula – and that must have included the court of Blois, for which Partonopeus was almost certainly composed. In the twelfth century, the ruling families of northern Spain were closely linked by diplomatic and marital ties to those of northern France and England: Louis VII had married Constance of Castile in 1154, while Henry II’s daughter Eleanor (Leonora), a maternal half-sister of Marie de Champagne and Alix of France, married Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1176. In 1177 Henry II himself acted as arbiter in a longstanding territorial dispute between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre.16 The most famous

14 Urraque does appear in the final section of the Continuation in the Middle Dutch version of the poem, but, as we have seen, this section may well have been the Dutch poet’s own invention. 15 See Fourrier, pp. 404–10; Buchanan, ‘Partinuplés de Bles. An Episode in Tirso’s Amar por Señas. Lope’s La viuda valenciana’, and Eley, ‘Les Toponymes espagnols dans Partonopeus de Blois’. 16 Barber, pp. 194–5. The connections were equally strong in the following generation: Berengaria of Navarre married Richard I of England in 1191, while her younger

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twelfth-century Urraca was probably Urraca I (d. 1126), Queen of LéonCastile, daughter and sole heir of Alfonso VI of Léon-Castile. Nearer the time of the composition of Partonopeus, the name was also borne by the daughter of Alfonso I of Portugal, who married Urraca I’s grandson Fernando II to become queen of Léon in 1165. Their son and heir Alfonso IX was born in August 1171. In 1175, Pope Alexander III declared the marriage null, ostensibly because the spouses had a common great-grandfather in Alfonso VI; in reality, it appears that Fernando had repudiated his wife. In the early 1180s he had a liaison with another Urraca, Urraca López de Haro, a noblewoman of Léon, whom he eventually married in 1187 and who then disputed the succession of Fernando’s son by the Portuguese Urraca, Alfonso IX, in favour of her own son.17 Between 1165 and 1175 the name Urraca/Urraque could readily have been pressed into service for a highranking princess in a story that was designed to echo certain aspects of contemporary political reality.18 Indeed, after August 1171, it could even have been chosen as a graceful compliment to the young queen who had now assured the succession to the throne of Léon. After 1175, however, the name Urraque would have been a much more problematic choice, and a poet starting to compose a romance in the Blois–Champagne milieu would surely have been wise to avoid it. The existence of an important character called Urraque can therefore be seen as additional evidence for an early date of composition for the first version of Partonopeus. If this is so, Fernando II’s repudiation of his wife may have been one of the factors that prompted the reconfiguration and continuation of the original narrative. If that narrative ended, like our manuscript A, with Urraque as queen of France, then after 1175 the romance was no longer a refraction of the real world, in which Urraca of Portugal had ceased to be a royal consort and had returned to her father’s court – and yet the character’s uniquely distinctive name would still have functioned as an invitation to look for parallels between her and the real-life Urraca. By ‘unmarrying’ Urraque and

sister Blanca (Blanche) married Thibaut III of Champagne, son of Henri I le Libéral eight years later. 17 See Reilly, The Medieval Spains, pp. 108–33, and de Vajay, ‘From Alfonso VIII to Alfonso X’. A fourth Urraca, born in 1186, the daughter of Alfonso VIII of Léon and Eleonor/Leonora, married Alfonso II of Portugal. 18 Although we should note that the reign of Urraca I had displeased some contemporaries, who were unhappy about the idea of a woman ruling a kingdom in her own right, and it had led to civil war after the breakdown of her second marriage to Alfonso I of Aragón (Reilly, The Kingdom of Léon-Castilla under Queen Urraca 1109–1126, esp. Chapter 2). However, more than half a century had passed by the time the original version of Partonopeus was composed, and it seems reasonable to assume that the poet’s contemporaries would probably have associated the name Urraca with Fernando II’s wife rather than his grandmother.

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keeping her at the court of Byzantium, the poet was able to re-align his narrative with contemporary reality and avoid embarrassment for himself and his patron. If the only reason for continuing the romance had been a desire to develop the character of the Sultan in order to reflect political developments on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire (see pp. 157–62), then there was no need to change Urraque’s marital status or to bring her back from France. This aspect of the rewriting makes more sense if the impetus for a sequel also coincided with political developments in Spain. The annulment of the real-life Urraca’s marriage could be discreetly alluded to, and the suggestion of a love-affair with Gaudin would maintain continuity with the main body of the romance, where Urraque is central to the working-out of her sister’s love for the hero.19 The subsequent appearance on the Iberian scene of Urraca López de Haro must have made it almost impossible, though, to develop this story-line in a way that would not have been open to potentially awkward readings. Once it became clear that this second Urraca was a force to be reckoned with, perhaps the only thing to do was to allow the fictional Urraque to fade quietly from view and re-focus the role of Gaudin so that he would appear in the Continuation as a counsellor and warrior rather than a lover. If this web of Iberian connections and (extra-)marital intrigue might explain why Urraque disappears so abruptly from the Continuation, it also suggests that the decision to write a new ending for the main romance must have been taken before Fernando’s liaison with the second Urraca became common knowledge in the courts of northern France and made the associations of the name Urraque too complex to handle. Given that the couple’s first (illegitimate) child was born in 1182, it seems reasonable to suggest that the revisions must have been initiated before that date, but that most of the Continuation as we have it (apart from Anselot’s story) dates from the early to mid 1180s, after the decision to write out Urraque altogether had been taken. Such an act of literary repudiation fits very well with one intriguing aspect of the manuscript tradition, namely the existence of an early manuscript (V) that contains the reconfigured ending but no Continuation. The final folio of V (59v) has two short columns of 30 and 33 lines respectively, rather than the normal 44 lines. The remainder of the folio is ruled, but has been left blank. In column b, the final couplet of the main body of the romance has been aligned with the final couplet in column a. The final three lines of column b consist of the additional couplet ‘Amen en dient li plusur/ ki servent Deu le creatur’ (‘Amen say the many people who serve God the creator’) followed by ‘Amen. AMEN’. This layout suggests that the scribe’s

19 Mieszkowski’s comment on the Middle English Partonope that ‘this love story works itself out not between the lady and her lover, but between the lady and her go-between’ applies equally well to the Old French poem (Medieval Go-betweens, p. 112).

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exemplar finished at the end of the romance proper, that he calculated the length of column needed to finish with two equal columns on 59v, and then added a ‘signing-off’ couplet to column b. The fact that the scribe chose this layout for folio 59v suggests that he had no intention of adding any more material to the text he had just copied, which further implies that he had no knowledge of a continued version of the poem. MS V has been seen as preserving the ‘first edition’ of Partonopeus – in other words, a story that ends with a single wedding and promises a sequel in which Anselot will return and Gaudin will bring his love for Urraque to a successful conclusion.20 Following Lecoy, I remain convinced, however, that A represents the earliest tradition; for me, V provides compelling evidence that the Continuation came into existence gradually, in a number of different stages. This process began with the original poet revising the ending of his narrative to deal with the Urraca problem and make it possible to develop a large-scale continuation that would reflect the changing face of ByzantoPersian relations. At the same time, he set out to test demand for a sequel by outlining a series of plot developments that could be worked up once the signal had been given to continue. If I am right in believing that Anselot’s story had already been written in tandem with part of the main narrative (see Chapter 4), then the first instalment of the sequel could have been produced in fairly short order, to keep the poet’s amie, his patron and his audience happy. These indications as to the chronology of different sections of the Continuation are clearly more consistent with the earlier dating for the original romance than with Fourrier’s 1182–85. Putting them together with evidence from the state of the extant manuscripts, and from the adaptations of Partonopeus in other European vernaculars, allows us to suggest the following overall scenario. The first version of Partonopeus de Blois, an octosyllabic romance of approximately 12,000 lines, closely related to the extant manuscript A, was composed in the early 1170s, perhaps not long after the murder of Thomas Becket. This original version was in circulation for a fairly short period before the poet decided to revise its ending and advertise a possible continuation; this decision was taken at some point after 1175 or, more probably, 1176 (the date of the battle of Myriokephalum). The revised version (a poem that probably ended with v. 10656 of the Collet-Joris B text) existed independently as a ‘second edition’ before any part of the Continuation was added: this version was represented by the exemplar of V and the text used by the poet of the Middle English romance Partonope, which also ends with the marriage of the hero and heroine and has no continuation.

20 This was Smith’s original conclusion, which has received support more recently from Reynders, ‘Le Roman de Partonopeu de Blois’.

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Anselot’s story had already been composed in the early years of the decade; when the decision to continue the narrative was taken, these 600 or so lines were then grafted on to a hunting episode calqued on Partonopeus’s first adventure in the Ardennes and appended to the second prologue. The allusions to the Anselot episode in Chrétien’s Yvain would imply that this third version was in circulation by the late 1170s. This ‘third edition’, which was probably all the work of the original poet, later suffered quite extensive interpolation, possibly at the hands of Walter Map (which would give a terminus ad quem for the modifications of 1209/1210, the date of Walter’s death). The story was subsequently continued for approximately two thousand lines with the account of Partonopeus’s council of war and most of the alexandrine section describing the war with the Sultan. It is likely that some of this section was also composed by the original author, and almost certain that it postdates the appearance of a dodecasyllabic romance dealing with Alexander’s oriental campaign. This ‘fourth edition’ became known in the circles where Aimon de Varennes worked before 1188. Since Aimon gives 1188 as the date at which he completed his 13,680-line romance, he must have come into contact with the continued poem by the mid 1180s at the very latest. The fact that Konrad von Würtzburg’s Partonopier und Melior ends with the inconclusive skirmishing beneath Malbricon, and does not include the Sultan’s love letters or the judging of Ernoul, provides corroborative evidence for the existence of a version of the French text that ended at this point.21 We suggested in Chapter 5 that our MS P may also have ended here and therefore represents a variant, non-interpolated fourth edition. Another thousand or so lines, including the capture and release of Ernoul, were then added at a date that is difficult to determine, but certainly before 1260, and probably by a second poet. This section of the poem was still incomplete when the ‘fifth edition’ that included this episode, along with the previous instalments of the Continuation, came into the hands of the Middle Dutch poet of Parthonopeus van Bloys. Some time before about 1275 the Sultan’s second love letter was also added, creating a ‘sixth edition’. Finally, in the fourteenth century, the T scribe added his own contributions to this ‘Salut d’amour’ (and probably to other episodes as well) and manufactured a very compressed ending to the story, perhaps recycling the original epilogue of the A version of the romance.22 It is an intriguing thought that after a century and a half and seven ‘editions’, Partonopeus may have come back to its first stopping point again. 21 For evidence that Konrad’s poem was adapted from an incomplete French text, rather than just being unfinished, see Classen, ‘The Struggle against Fear as a Struggle for the Self in Konrad von Würtzburg’s Partonopier und Melior’, p. 228 and n. 24. 22 It is more difficult to pinpoint the stage at which other interpolations were made, notably the King of England material in LPT (see pp. 108–09) and additions to the council of war scene at Partonopeus’s court in the Continuation.

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Passe Rose: beloved patroness? This brings us back to the question of ‘Passe Rose’, the name given by the narrator to his beloved in the lines that follow the evocation of Partonopeus and Melior’s boine vie together: ‘Ele s’apele Passe Rose;/ Icele ai en mon cuer enclose’ (‘she is called Passe Rose; she is the one I have sealed within my heart’, vv. 14581–2). Fourrier rightly draws attention to the parallels between this pseudonym and the senhals used by troubadour poets to conceal the identity of the lady to whom their songs are dedicated. He then suggests that its first element may be a deliberate echo of the war-cry ‘Passe avant’ and the device ‘Passe avant le meillor’, which have associations with the counts of Blois.23 In his view, the second, floral, element might have been an allusion to Marguerite of Blois, eldest daughter of count Thibaut V. In a moment of uncharacteristically romantic speculation, Fourrier goes on: Ne se peut-il qu’avant le mariage de Marguerite, un jeune et modeste chevalier, comme semble l’avoir été notre poète, ait soupiré pour elle en lui donnant, dans un roman qui exaltait la grande maison de Blois, le pseudonyme de Passe-Rose, par quoi, jouant sur la devise des comtes et le prénom de sa belle, il voulait laisser entendre qu’à ses yeux l’humble marguerite passait la rose, reine des fleurs? (p. 440) Is it not possible that before Marguerite’s marriage a young knight of modest origin, as our poet seems to have been, lost his heart to her and, in a romance that glorified the great house of Blois, gave her the pseudonym of Passe-Rose, and so, by playing on the devise of the counts and his beloved’s first name, meant to imply that in his eyes the humble daisy [marguerite] surpassed the rose, the queen of flowers?

23 The nature of this association may not have been as straightforward as Fourrier implies. The devise is usually attributed to the counts of Champagne, rather than of Blois. In the periods when the two counties were united, as under Thibaut V’s father, the individual entitled to use it would have borne both titles. However, in the 1170s and 1180s the counties were separated: Thibaut was count of Blois, while his elder brother Henri le Libéral was count of Champagne. As Fourrier notes, the devise appears on the seal of a number of Henri’s charters (p. 439, n. 387a). However, in Huon d’Oisi’s Tornoiement des Dames, also cited by Fourrier, the cri ‘Passe avant’ is used by ‘Katherine’, who can only realistically be identified with Catherine de Clermont, wife of Louis count of Blois, son of Thibaut V (see Jeanroy, ‘Notes sur le tournoiement des dames’, p. 241, vv. 34–6). At this period, the title of count of Champagne was held by Louis’s cousin Henri II. In the other text cited by Fourrier, Wace’s Roman de Rou, Thibaut I, count of Blois and Chartres, is described as crying ‘Chartres!’ and ‘Passavant’ as he rides into battle (Deuxième partie, v. 3927). This evidence suggests that the cri may have been used by the counts of Blois in the second half of the twelfth century, even when they were not also counts of Champagne, but the same is not necessarily true of the devise.

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Our analysis suggests a number of difficulties with this scenario. Firstly, the Partonopeus poet is far more likely to have been a clerc than a chevalier: it is very unlikely that a ‘modeste chevalier’ would have been familiar with the wide range of classical, post-classical and vernacular texts that contributed to the making of our romance. Secondly, if the Passe Rose epilogue dated from the period 1182–85, Marguerite could not have been more than ten years old when it was written, which seems too young for such a coded dedication to make sense.24 If it formed part of the original version of Partonopeus then Thibaut’s eldest daughter may not even have been born when the predecessor of our manuscript A first went into circulation. Thirdly, if this epilogue was written by the scribe of manuscript T or his immediate predecessor then it must date from the late thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, long after Marguerite’s death. Lori Walters sees the Passe Rose epilogue as the work of ‘the author of the continuation (or the end of the continuation)’ and proposes an alternative interpretation: for her, the floral pseudonym and the use of the rose–enclose rhyme reveal the influence of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, which would place the composition of these lines well into the thirteenth century (pp. 237–8). Both Walters and Fourrier overlook the fact that in the twelfth century passe rose denotes not simply ‘something fairer than a rose’, but a flower in its own right, as it does in Modern French. In Modern French passe-rose is an alternative name for the rose trémière, or hollyhock (Alcaea/Althaea rosea). In the Middle Ages the name seems to have been used (like its counterpart in Middle English, holihoc or holihokke) for two common wild flowers, the marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis) and the corn cockle (Agrostemma githago).25 Although these two plants are now recognised as belonging to different families, their flowers are sufficiently similar (both come in shades of pink and have five similarly shaped petals) for the same common name to have been applied to both. The medieval passe-rose had strong symbolic associations with love, as is clear from the later twelfth-century debate poem Le Jugement d’Amours (also known as Florence et Blanchefleur), in which the nightingale and the parrot both don floral armour before engaging in combat to prove whether clerks or knights make the better lovers: Lor haubert sont de passe rose Et lor hiaume de primevoire, Et lor gambison(s) sont de voire, Les ventailles orent lacies,

24 Shadis and Berman put her birth in the period 1175–80 (‘A Taste of the Feast: Reconsidering Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Female Descendants’, p. 198). 25 The Ménagier de Paris gives passe-rose as an alternative name for the ‘perceau’ or ‘nëelle’, i.e. nielle des blés or corn cockle (see Tobler-Lomatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, s.v. passe-rose), which can be used for dyeing white wine red.

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A clous de girofle atachies, De flors de genoivres ouvrees Et de roses orent espees. (vv. 360–66)26 Their hauberks were made from corn cockles, their helmets from primroses and their gambesons were of glass;27 their ventails, fashioned from juniper flowers, were laced and fastened with cloves and their swords were made of roses.

Likewise, in Huon de Méry’s Tornoiement Antechrist (c.1234), the passe-rose forms part of the blazon of the God of Love, alongside four nightingales and a sparrowhawk: L’escu qui est sanz vilenie, A IIII. roussignous d’argent, A l’esprevier courtois e gent Qui de voler ne se repose, L’escu a une passe rose, Asise sour or floreté, Au label de joliveté Qui tout le tornoi enlumine. (vv. 1722–9) The shield, which bore no sign of baseness, was emblazoned with four nightingales argent and with the courtly and noble sparrowhawk volant; the shield was emblazoned with a corn cockle on a gold field fleury, and the label was of joyfulness, which lit up the whole tournament.28

The reference in the Jugement is particularly significant, as it shows that in the later twelfth century passe-rose could have presented itself quite naturally to a poet as a pseudonym for a beloved, without the necessity for there being any further floral connections such as those adduced by Fourrier.29 By the same token, there is no need to look to the Roman de la Rose for an explanation of the choice of senhal. The fact that the rose–enclose rhyme is used by two poets does not have to indicate that one of them imitated it from the other; however, if it is a sign of influence, then it is equally plausible that Guillaume de Lorris ‘borrowed’ it from Partonopeus. He certainly knew and

26 In one manuscript the helmets are made of ‘parse rose’ and the shields are made of primroses. Oulmont’s glossary gives simply ‘fleur’ for passe-rose (p. 226). 27 Or possibly of miniver, if we take ‘voire’ to be a variant of vair/ voir. 28 I have tried to convey a sense of Huon’s use of precise heraldic images and terminology (argent = silver; volant = depicted in horizontal flight; fleury = strewn with fleur de lys; label = a strip across the top of the shield, normally with vertical tabs descending from it). 29 The use of ‘Passerose’ as a pseudonym for a beloved persisted into the fourteenth century: it is found in Froissart’s Trésor amoureux, XIV, vv. 17–20 (Poésies, III, 90).

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imitated the Old French Narcissus story, which was composed c.1160–65, so there is no reason why he should not have read or heard a version of Partonopeus as well.30 Alternatively, it is possible that, as with the question of chronology, Fourrier’s argument is valid – but in a different context from the one he envisaged. Just as 1182–85 is a very plausible dating for one ‘edition’ of the romance, although not for the original, so the pseudonym Passe Rose might indeed be a disguise for a real-life individual – but not Marguerite de Blois, and not the poet’s (as opposed to the narrator’s) beloved.31 An Faems has suggested that in the epilogue to the Middle Dutch adaptation of Partonopeus the referent of the term lieve (‘beloved’) shifts from the narrator’s fictional lady to the patroness who commissioned the translation, and who will quite literally reward (verghelden) the poet for his efforts (p. 158). This insight opens the way for a new reading of the relationship between the poet-narrator and his lady in the rest of the text, and in its Old French original as well. What if the figure of the narrator’s amie was never intended to be either a fictionalisation of a real-life lover or a literary device designed to create a space for reflecting on the nature of love and composition? What if this figure was conceived primarily as a stand-in for a patroness, and the love-affair between the narrator and his amie as a coded representation of the delicate financial relationship between the poet and his paymistress? Silvère Menegaldo came close to asking this question, before dismissing the idea of a patron-centred paratext in favour of a more individualistic reading of the narratorial interventions: ‘En faire une femme aimée, est-ce une manière de souligner le rôle séminal du commanditaire dans la narration romanesque, ou au contraire est-ce montrer que le narrateur ne compte plus sur la notoriété de sa dédicataire pour mettre en valeur son ouvrage, mais plutôt sur lui-même et le sentiment qui l’inspire?’ (‘is making her into his beloved a way of underlining the seminal role of the patroness in romance narrative, or, on the contrary, is it showing that the narrator is no longer reliant on the renown of his dedicatee to draw attention to his work, but rather on himself and the emotion that inspires him?’). For Menegaldo, the absence of extended praise of the lady and the withholding of her name rule out any identification with a real-life noblewoman (p. 154). Yet, as Bruckner points out, the fact that the Partonopeus poet never names himself or his patron may simply suggest that he was working – initially at least – for a homogeneous court audience who did not need to have the identities of those concerned spelled out for them (‘Romancing History’, pp. 113–14). In this kind of local context, the patroness as amie conceit may have been transparent from the outset, particu-

30 31

See Narcisus et Dané, ‘Introduction’, p. 21. As implied by Grigsby, ‘The Narrator in Partonopeu de Blois, Le Bel Inconnu and Joufroi de Poitiers’, p. 543.

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larly if the conditions of performance were such that the poet could address the lady directly whenever he came to read out one of the narratorial interventions. One problem with this interpretation is the fact that the poet refers explicitly in the prologue to the generosity of his segnor, suggesting that the motive force behind the romance was a patron rather than a patroness. As there is little reason to doubt that Partonopeus was written for the house of Blois,32 that segnor must have been Thibaut V, count of Blois from 1152 to 1191. However, a brief poetic bow to Thibaut in the opening lines does not mean that other dedicatees are automatically excluded. Gautier d’Arras tells us in his prologue that Thibaut V was the generous patron who commissioned Eracle, but later mentions that he also received encouragement and support from both Thibaut’s sister-in-law Marie de Champagne and Count Baudouin of Hainault (vv. 51–86 and 6523–31). Ille et Galeron likewise evokes more than one possible patron: in one manuscript the poem is dedicated solely to Beatrice of Burgundy, wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, while in the second, Thibaut V is credited with urging Gautier to complete the work that he had undertaken for the empress.33 There is no reason why another poet working in the Blois milieu should not have chosen to address his work both to the count and to a noblewoman who also supported his endeavours. The language of fin’amor, as adopted by the narrator, is peculiarly well suited to the description of a poet’s dealings with his patroness. The expression of individual desire is a perfect cloaking mechanism for the writer’s need for financial fulfilment, yet transparent enough for the underlying message to be unmistakable. As Laura Ashe puts it, ‘the romance was born for a precise form of exploitation – the generation of patronage – and in the courtly romances written for courtly audiences, that desire is worn upon the sleeve’.34 Like the lyric lover, the poet is entirely dependent on the lady’s continuing goodwill, forced into the role of anxious subordinate, serving (composing) without ever being confident of receiving the reward he feels he deserves. Both relationships are transactional in nature, and one party is frequently led to complain that the other does not seem to be keeping her side of the bargain. The lover’s reiterated pleas for attention and affection map readily on to the poet’s need to receive payment for the work he has already done – or at least

32 Fourrier, p. 426. Roques provides corroborating evidence that the original poem was composed in the Western region. 33 ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–xix. See also the introduction to Foerster’s edition, pp. vii–xix. 34 Ashe, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. On desire as the narrator’s dominant mode of discourse, see Bateman, ‘Problems of Recognition: The Fallible Narrator and the Female Addressee in Partonopeus de Blois’.

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an assurance that such payment will be forthcoming. The very first narratorial intervention is couched in terms that are highly suggestive from this point of view: Partonopeus a son delit, Li parlers de lui molt m’ocit, Car il a tos biens de s’amie; Jo n’en ai riens qui ne m’ocie. (vv. 1873–6) Partonopeus takes his pleasure, but speaking about him is torture for me, for he enjoys all his beloved’s favours; I have nothing but torment from mine.

The use of the noun biens (which denotes material wealth as well as favours) to describe the lover’s reward points immediately to a financial as well as a sexual interpretation. The equation love = patronage becomes noticeably more transparent in the first epilogue, at the end of the non-A versions of the text, and in the second prologue at the beginning of the Continuation. In the first of these two passages the narrator brings his narrative to a close, but also bemoans his lack of recompense and holds out the promise of more stories to come if his lady so desires: Par li empris je cest labor Que j’ai perdu al chef del tor. Bien sai que je l’ai tant perdu Quant onques de melz ne m’en fu N’en dit n’en fait n’en bel semblant. Tot ai perdu, mais neporquant Tant la redot et tant la crien Et tant a son lige me tien A son servise sens orguel Que s’ele me gignot de l’uel Que je die l’ystoire avant, Faire m’estovra son commant. (vv. 10613–24) It was through her that I undertook this task, which turns out to have been a waste of effort. I am well aware that it has all been a waste of effort, since I am no better off because of it in terms of either words or deeds or kind looks from her. Everything has been wasted, but nevertheless I stand in such fear and awe of her, and consider myself to be so much her liege, so humbly in her service, that if she gave me the nod to continue the story, I would have to obey her command.

After summarising the content of such a continuation, he returns to the idea that everything depends on his receiving some mark of favour from his beloved:

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Tot ce dirai se cele vuet Por cui li cuers del piz me duet; Si non, si plorrai mon dehait: Ne puis faire el, si mal m’estait. Si me tenrai en sa merci: Ne puis garir se n’est par li. (vv. 10643–8) I will relate all this if it is the wish of the woman for whom my heart aches in my breast; if not, I will express my suffering in tears: things are going so badly for me that I cannot do anything else. I will place myself entirely in her hands: I cannot be saved except by her.

This is very different from the well-worn convention of the beloved as a source of inspiration for poetry or song: here the object of the narrator’s affections has the power to decide whether the composition that he already has in mind will ever be written or not. The beloved is explicitly cast in the role of patroness, inviting us to reverse the equation. The second prologue maps just as readily on to a continued dialogue between the poet and his sponsor, expressing the former’s gratitude once he has received the command to provide further entertainment for the court: Ma joie, ma vie, mes tresors, Clers vis et dolz ris et gens cors, Velt que plus die; en sa merci Et en Deu me met et en li. Quant il li plaist qu’en die plus, Fere l’estuet, quar [a] li mus. O[r] n’i puet avoir reprochaille, O il vaille ou il ne vaille. (vv. 10657–64) My joy, my life, my treasure, with her radiant face and sweet smile and lovely figure, wants me to continue my story; I place myself at her disposal and in God’s hands and hers. Since she wishes me to continue the story, I must obey, for she is the one who occupies my thoughts. Now there can be no recriminations, however well or badly things turn out.

The interaction described here between the lover and his lady mirrors the transaction between poet and patroness. The poet can no more refuse a request from his patroness than the fin amant can ignore the wishes of his lady, and has to commit himself to providing the continuation that he had so publicly advertised. In return, he will have confidence in the continued support of his benefactress. The B text of this section of the prologue is not necessarily the most reliable, however: the first line is hypermetrical, while the last is hypometrical, and v. 10662 is garbled.35 This may imply a degree of 35

B reads ‘quar il est mus’; the edited text has been emended following GLP.

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scribal rewriting, which may in turn suggest that the T reading of v. 10657 – ‘Mes giex, ma vie, mes depors’ (‘My pleasure, my life, my delight’) – best represents the original.36 If that is so, the case for reading the second prologue as a dialogue between poet and patroness becomes even stronger. Two of the three terms used in this line to refer to the narrator’s amie identify their addressee with notions of playfulness and entertainment (giex and depors both have strong connotations of play). This not only forms a link to the prologue of the main narrative but also fits very well with the idea of a flattering pseudo-flirtation being carried on through the medium of the literary service that the patroness demands of the writer. The third term, ‘ma vie’, could refer equally well to a poet’s livelihood, his economic reliance on a patron, as to a lover’s emotional dependence on his beloved. It is interesting that the transition from the second prologue to the continuing story of the hero is also constructed around the ideas of pleasure and story-telling. These lines (vv. 10665–72) evoke the enviable situation of a man who can recount his past woes from a position of present joy, with repeated linking of the lexis of enjoyment and narration. The identification of Partonopeus as a narrator who has achieved his heart’s desire (v. 10670) lends itself to being read as a gentle reminder to the amie-patroness that the original story-teller also deserves to find himself in this fortunate position. Glossed retrospectively, in the light of the prelude to the Continuation, the first epilogue reads more and more like the words of a poet trying to ensure that his services will be retained by advertising a sequel to a composition that has caught the imagination of its audience. Transmuting the financial relationship between writer and commissioner into an emotional tie between lover and lady is a graceful trick that not only flatters the patroness but also allows the poet to finesse his angling for further paid work into a proof of devotion. Although the figure of the narrator in Partonopeus has attracted more attention than almost any other aspect of the text, critics have not always distinguished clearly between the narrator-amie dynamic and the discourse on women that is interwoven with it. Anne Reynders, for example, gives a central place in her analysis to three interventions in which the narrator takes issue with the misogynist comments made by certain clercs (vv. 5482–514), attacks chastity in beautiful women (vv. 6239–74) and makes an unfavourable comparison between the religiosity of ladies of his own day and the attitude to

Reprochaille in v. 10663 also appears to be a lectio facilior for T repostaille (or possibly GP tresbuchaille). 36 The repetition of cuer in two successive lines – ‘Mes cuers, ma vie, mes tresors,/ Cler vis et doz cuer et jent cors’ (‘my heart, my life, my treasure, with her radiant face and sweet heart and lovely figure’) – probably marks the P reading as corrupt, while G ‘Mes cuers, ma vie et mes tresors/ Cler vis et dolz et le gent cors’ (‘my heart, my life and my treasure, with her sweet and radiant face and lovely figure’) seems to be the rather clumsy result of a scribe attempting to avoid the same repetition.

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love displayed by their counterparts in the past (vv. 7981–8038).37 For Reynders, the contradictions between these interventions and their narrative context – the first attacks the clerks’ mise en garde about women at the exact point where a woman has driven the hero to the brink of suicide, the last appears to criticise its own audience – are part of a strategy designed to undermine the reliability of the narrator, whom the author increasingly turns into a figure of fun as the romance progresses. It is not clear, though, how this distancing between the narrator and the implied author figure would have been conveyed under the original conditions of performance, when the poet himself was physically present, voicing the narrator to an audience who knew him to be the author of everything they heard. Such distancing effects can surely only come into play when the text is removed from its original context and heard or read at one remove, geographically or chronologically speaking. So while Reynders’s reading opens a window on to the possible later reception of the text, it does not help us to understand what prompted either the creation of the lover-narrator figure or the attribution to him of a series of reflections on the conduct of women in general. These reflections on women in general alternate with the narrator’s comments on his own love-affair throughout the main body of the romance, and the two strands rarely overlap in the same intervention.38 This differentiation of focus indicates that the discourse on women in Partonopeus belongs to a different conversation from that between the poet and his patroness, namely the ongoing dialogue between our romance and the Roman de Troie. Our narrator’s defence of ladies against their detractors is not at heart a demonstration of cortoisie, but another manifestation of the poetic and political rivalries encoded in the prologue and the construction of the plot. His attack on the clergeastres is a humorous riposte to the antifeminist commentary that Benoît de Sainte-Maure had woven around the story of Briseïda’s relationships with Troïlus and Diomedès. Moreover, the contradictions that Reynders notes in our romance are tongue-in-cheek reminders to the audience in Blois that Benoît had tied himself in logical knots at one point, giving rise to the famous ‘riche dame de riche rei’ (‘noble lady of a noble king’) intervention in Troie. After describing Briseïda’s tearful parting from Troïlus,

37 ‘“Si vuelt om de moi gaber”: le narrateur dans le Roman de Partonopeu de Blois’, pp. 177–84. 38 Of the fifteen interventions in the main narrative that are attested in two or more manuscripts, only two combine reflections on women in general with specific commentary on the narrator’s own love affair. One reflection on women appears only in MS T (T meta 7846–75), and is probably a later interpolation. Overall, the length of the interventions increases in the second half of the romance (cf. Hilton, pp. 64–79), although there are some significant differences between witnesses. The fact that the longest versions of these passages are consistently found in MS A (up to the beginning of the major lacuna) suggests a pattern of abridgement in other manuscripts.

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the Troie narrator anticipates the subsequent transfer of her affections to Diomedès and launches into a tirade against the fickleness of women in general (vv. 13438–56). He then suddenly appears to realise that his comments might not go down well with the ‘riche dame’ who will be listening (usually taken to be Eleanor of Aquitaine), and hastens to praise her many virtues which, he claims, more than compensate for other women’s failings (vv. 13457–70). The ‘get-out clause’ duly established, he then returns to his original theme with a reflection on how rare it is to find beauty and chastity combined in the same woman (vv. 13471–91).39 While the Partonopeus poet’s pro-feminist discourse could be seen as a response to misogynist rhetoric in general, his mischievous critique of chastity in beautiful women surely reveals that the main target of these interventions is Benoît and, by extension, the patrons for whom he was working. The humour here is both transparent (to the initiated) and self-deprecating. By juxtaposing the discourse on women with the figure of the poet-lover courting his patroness-amie, the author declares himself to be just as vulnerable as his rival to the displeasure of powerful women, and just as capable of tying himself in dialectical knots (with the key difference, of course, that he will do so consciously and with malice aforethought). If the lady’s love is a metaphor for financial reward, then the poet is forced to sing the praises of wantonness, since in this equation chastity equals parsimony – which he literally cannot afford to celebrate. And yet his story also requires that the hero and heroine demonstrate absolute sexual fidelity to one another, so as not to jeopardise the dynastic imperative set out in the prologue. The use of the ‘things aren’t what they used to be’ trope is even more contradictory: glossed in terms of the love = money equation, it implies that the strict observance of religious duty results in contemporary women failing to enact the key Christian virtue of generosity. At the same time, however, the surface meaning of these passages remains intact, encouraging us to read them as a lecher’s charter that cheerfully undercuts the text’s apparent rejection of the contempt for womankind demonstrated by clercs such as Benoît. The illogicalities are obvious and undisguised: like the other faultlines we have identified in the poem, they invite interrogation in terms of the intertexts and subtexts that form a common bond between the writer and his audience. What we have here is not so much an unreliable narrator being held up to ridicule by the implied author as an author-narrator setting out to ridicule the Roman de Troie by creating an exaggerated mirror-image of its narrative problems. It

39 Reading Partonopeus against the Roman de Troie provides an additional explanation for the inclusion of the ‘superfluous’ character of Persewis (see Chapter 1, p. 000). The fact that Persewis succeeds in transferring her affections from Partonopeus to Gaudin without incurring criticism suggests that this figure may have been intended as a corrective to Briseïda.

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cannot be a coincidence that the discourse on women disappears from sight in the Continuation, where the poet’s attention turns (or is turned) away from Thèbes and Troie towards the Alexander romances.40 Exactly why the poet offered to continue his romance is open to speculation. Did his patroness make some favourable comment that encouraged him to believe that an extended commission might be on the cards? Was the response of the rest of the audience so positive that he felt it was worth the risk? Did someone criticise the elimination of the Sultan and suggest that he might be brought back?41 In the light of our earlier conclusions about the development of the romance, we might hazard a guess that the poet was also motivated by a desire to bring Anselot’s story into the public domain, and by political developments in Asia Minor. If one of the ‘selling-points’ of the original romance was the way in which it managed to fuse literary models with reflections on current events such as the Becket controversy, then it is easy to see how the news from Myriokephalum could have suggested a story-line involving a renewed threat from an old enemy in the East. If that story-line could also be made to accommodate the narrative experimentation of the roman d’Anselot, then the sequel could be trailed as tying up a loose thread from the first story as well as promising further appearances for the main protagonists. It is worth noting that the ‘trailer’ section of the first epilogue goes into far more detail about the further adventures of Anselot (eight lines, including a clear statement that they end with him being reunited with his lord) than about those of Gaudin (two lines), or Melior, Partonopeus and the Sultan (eight lines for all three characters). It also fails signally to indicate how the conflict between the Sultan and the erstwhile hero might be resolved, ending with a simple evocation of how ‘[li soldans] Parthonopeu soprist,/ Et com grantment sor lui conquist’ (‘the Sultan caught Partonopeus unawares and how he made significant gains at his expense’, vv. 10641–2). This lack of precision might be no more than canny advertising, designed to increase suspense about the fate of Partonopeus and Melior and so encourage the patroness to fund the composition of the sequel to find out what happened to them. Juxtaposed with the promise of closure for Anselot, however, it may imply that the first epilogue was written when Anselot’s story was already finished, but when the rest of the Continuation was only an outline in the poet’s mind, with the dénouement yet to be decided. If the segnor of the first prologue has to be Thibaut de Blois, then the lady

40 The absence of any interventions in the last 1900 lines of MS A may also reflect the distancing of the narrative from the concerns of the Roman de Troie as the hero defeats his enemy and achieves lasting happiness with Melior. 41 On evidence for and against feedback loops involving the audience of medieval texts, see Curschman, ‘The French, the Audience and the Narrator in Wolfram’s Willehalm’.

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evoked in the second prologue is most plausibly identified with his wife.42 Thibaut was betrothed to Alix (Alice), the younger daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, in 1153 and married her in 1164, when she was thirteen or fourteen.43 June Hall McCash notes that ‘Capetian custom following such betrothals clearly dictated that the princess be given over to her betrothed to be raised in his lands’, so it is possible that Alix spent her formative years in the county as well.44 If she was brought up in Blois, Alix was certainly well educated: she knew enough Latin to be able to understand letters written to her in that language.45 Whether or not she or her sister had any continuing contact with their mother as Eleanor’s involvement with vernacular literature developed, Alix undoubtedly moved in circles where poetry mattered: there is nothing incongruous in the idea that she was the thinly disguised amie who asked ‘her’ poet to adopt a fashionable verse form for the next instalment of his Continuation.46 The historian Emily Rose has suggested that Thibaut and his wife were the ‘poor relations’ in the Blois–Champagne cultural nexus, and struggled initially to afford major literary commissions (which might help to explain why two other patrons seem to have become involved in supporting the composition of Eracle, which probably dates from around 1167). All that changed with the persecution of the Jews in Blois in 1171, which brought them a financial windfall.47 Some thirty Jews were burned in May of that year after an accusation of ritual murder, as a result of which their property would have been forfeit to the count; a significant ransom payment was also made to save other Jews in Thibaut’s territories from the same fate.48 In a 42 Keller concluded that our poem was ‘surely written on commission for the House of Blois – very likely at the request of Alix of France’ (p. 197). As Keller followed Fourrier’s dating, this would mean that he believed Alix was in her early thirties when she commissioned the work. My dating implies that Alix was associated with literary compositions from a much earlier stage. 43 Shadis and Berman claim that Alix was not married until 1174 (p. 182), but this is clearly an error: Ephraim ben Jacob (see n. 48 below) refers to Thibaut’s wife in his account of the events of 1171. 44 McCash, ‘Marie de Champagne and Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Relationship Re-examined’, p. 707. 45 Benton, ‘The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center’, p. 586. Is Melior’s extraordinary education a flattering allusion to the countess’s intellectual powers? 46 For an example of a patroness at the Byzantine court imposing a particular verse form on a writer, see Jeffreys, ‘The Comnenian Background to the Romans d’antiquité’, p. 480. Uri’s suggestion (pp. 88–90) that Alix provided the Partonopeus poet with a manuscript of a Byzantine romance (possibly a version of the story of Parthenope and Metiochus) to work from is implausible, not least on linguistic grounds. 47 E. M. Rose, personal communications, May 2008 and April 2010. Professor Rose’s discussion of financial affairs in Blois will form part of her forthcoming book, provisionally entitled The Monk, the Knight, the Bishop and the Banker. Murder and Sanctity in Medieval Europe, to be published by Penn State University Press. 48 Ephraim ben Jacob, A Book of Historical Records, in Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World. A Sourcebook: 315–1791, pp. 142–5.

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context where family members and political rivals were all engaged in using vernacular narrative as a form of self-promotion it is easy to see how Alix might have encouraged her husband to invest some of his new-found wealth in literary composition before the windfall was eaten up by other demands on his coffers. At this time Countess Alix would have been around twenty, and so old enough to be cast in the role of dompna (unlike her daughter Marguerite in the early 1180s), but still young enough for a playful literary pseudo- courtship to be appropriate.49 The fact that she was Eleanor’s daughter and the great-granddaughter of the troubadour William IX should also give us pause for thought. Katalin Halász has noted that Partonopeus is the first Old French romance to feature a specifically ‘troubadouresque’ inscribed author figure (pp. 70–74).50 The sudden appearance of this figure, which bears no resemblance to the inscribed authors of the romans d’antiquité or the short courtly narratives of the 1160s, becomes less puzzling if we see it within the context of an attempt to please and flatter the countess of Blois. The frequent intrusions of the narrator into the story-line then serve a dual purpose. On the one hand, they celebrate Alix’s literary heritage by overlaying the love-affair of Partonopeus and Melior with a meta-narrative calqued on the poetry associated with the house of Aquitaine; on the other, they remind the poet’s patrons of his own continuing need for ‘love’ – that is, material support. This strategy allows for a diplomatic double dedication: the one, overt and conventional, giving pride of place to a male patron in the prologue, the other covertly honouring his wife and her cultural background at various points during the story. In this context, the failure of the narrator’s own love-affair is inevitable.51 Success would imply that the poet had been so well recompensed that he had no need ever to compose again, an unlikely scenario for a clerc at the court of Blois. If Passe Rose is a pseudonym for a patroness, and if the epilogue in which she is named was indeed the original ending of the first edition of the romance, then Roberta Krueger’s description of Passe Rose as ‘a lady who exists primarily as a catalyst for future poetic activity’ could hardly be more fitting.52

49 She may also have given birth to her first son, Thibaut (although it was another son, Louis, who eventually succeeded his father in 1191). Was Partonopeus composed in honour of the infant Thibaut, anticipating a glorious future for him, in which he would outshine his cousin Philip Augustus (b. 1165) in the same way that Partonopeus outdoes his cousin Lohier? 50 On other echoes of troubadour poetry in the text, see Spetia, ‘Echi trobadorici nel Partonopeus de Blois’. 51 Colby-Hall argues that the lyric framework of Le Bel Inconnu makes the writing of a sequel to the hero’s adventures impossible. Renaut takes the lyric model much further than Partonopeus: his work is ‘a narrativized chanson, which, by definition, must not allow Guinglain’s dream of love to be fulfilled in the here and now’ (p. 125). 52 Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance, p. 190.

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* It is a sobering thought that, according to one scenario explored in this chapter, Partonopeus de Blois might never have seen the light of day but for the persecution of the city’s Jews in 1171. That one of the most playful and entertaining of all Old French romances could be linked, however indirectly, to such brutality is one of the unexpected ironies of literary history. It also raises the question of where the money may ultimately have come from to pay for other masterpieces of medieval narrative. How many more persecuted minorities form part of the economic background to vernacular literary production? Whatever the truth about its financing, there is a strong case for associating Partonopeus with both a patron and a patroness, most probably Count Thibaut V and Countess Alix of Blois. The use of language that supports a financial as well as an emotional interpretation invites us to identify the narrator’s amie with the countess, who has the power to grant or withhold her monetary favours in relation to a dependent poet. While the conceit of the lyric narrator is a graceful acknowledgement of Alix’s literary heritage, it also suggests that she may have been the motive force behind the commission. Why else would the poet have chosen to weave a coded address to her into so many different episodes of his text? Why should he credit her with the decision to switch to a new, more fashionable verse form in the middle of the Continuation? The way in which the narrator links his programme of writing, the progress of his own love-affair and his very existence in some of these passages points to a special relationship with the figure behind the senhal Passe Rose. This reading of the narratorial interventions confirms me in the view that the poet composed the first edition of his romance with some kind of continuation in mind. He then rewrote the ending in order to advertise a sequel featuring the same charismatic antagonist as the main body of the tale. After what was probably only a brief interval, the countess commissioned the sequel, and launched Partonopeus on a career of extension and interpolation that lasted for over a hundred years. The piecemeal construction of the Continuation can also be explained in economic terms. If a windfall guaranteed the composition of the main narrative, perhaps the follow-up had to be composed in instalments as and when there was a cash surplus to invest in literature. We might also hazard a guess that the original author failed to complete the work because there was no money left to pay him. In the final analysis, it may be that the poet’s skill and inventiveness, like his patrons’ cultural ambitions, were not matched by their ability to sustain a long-term financial commitment to the making of romance in Blois.

Conclusion Partonopeus Conclusion de Blois

This book set out to explore both the making of a romance – Partonopeus de Blois – and its impact on the making of Old French romance as a genre. In the process, it has become clear that one of our poem’s key contributions to the development of twelfth-century fiction was to validate the notion of vernacular romance as a form that is always in the making, never definitively made. In some ways, then, it seems to go against the spirit of open-endedness embodied in Partonopeus to try to impose on this book the conventional mark of closure represented by a chapter headed ‘Conclusion’. Perhaps it would have been better to call this chapter the ‘Epilogue’, on the tacit understanding that, as in our romance, a first epilogue may be succeeded by a second prologue, in a potentially endless chain of continuation. On the other hand, an ending of sorts has been reached, in that the results of many years of work are finally to appear in print, and a number of conclusions – some of them tentative, others less so – have emerged about facets of this text that have remained under-researched until now. As anticipated, exploring the highways and byways of the manuscript tradition has proved essential for understanding how Partonopeus took on the form(s) in which we know it. Complex and fragmented as it is, this tradition has helped us to tease out answers to questions about the likely configuration of the first version of the text as well as the type and extent of interpolation in subsequent additions. It has provided the basic framework for developing a coherent, plausible story of how the romance took shape through seven ‘editions’ dating from the final third of the twelfth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. Along the way, we have highlighted the strong probability that the Continuation was itself continued and then left unfinished for over a century before someone decided to bring it to a conclusion. It has also emerged that the text of parts of the Continuation is deeply unstable, a fact that will need to be taken into account in future research; readings from other witnesses, notably MS P, will have to be brought into the picture alongside the published editions based on B and T. Reading Partonopeus consistently against the vernacular texts that preceded it and the Latin models studied by twelfth-century French poets has illustrated more clearly than before the particular varieties of imitatio and aemulatio that directed its composition. Guiding metaphors derived from nuclear fusion and plate tectonics have helped to characterise in greater detail

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the poet’s approach to the broad range of models on which he drew. Our romance was essentially made from pre-existing stories, some of them familiar to all the members of its first audience, others well known only to groups or individuals within that public. While the basic stock for this intertextual soup was made from relatively simple materials – a Celtic fairy-mistress tale, the story of Cupid and Psyche and a dynastic romance modelled on the romans d’antiquité – the supplementary ingredients and the end product are anything but simple. In addition to the Roman de Thèbes, Eneas, the Roman de Troie, their Latin sources and Apuleius, we have identified echoes and rewritings of Statius’s Achilleid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Wace’s Brut (and possibly the Roman de Rou as well), the Chanson de Roland and the Chanson de Guillaume, at least one of the vernacular Alexander romances, the Seven Sages material, the Lais of Marie de France, the Psalms, the Book of Proverbs and a story that came to be attributed to Solomon. Even the story of Tristan and Iseut appears in a discreetly modified form in the special wine prepared by the hero’s mother for her son and the niece of the King of France.1 In Denis Hüe’s memorable formulation, Partonopeus is ‘une histoire à la fois originale et héritée de toutes, mère peut-être de toutes’ (‘a story that is both original and inherited from all other stories, that may have given birth to all other stories’, p. 111). While many of these texts would have formed part of the mental store-cupboard of any well-educated court poet in the later twelfth century, in this instance the skill and imagination with which they have been combined and reconfigured is definitely out of the ordinary. In most cases, the fusing of two or more intertexts to form a new plot-line or episode is remarkably seamless; on occasion, however, the mixing of divergent materials produces narrative discontinuities that I have characterised as faultlines. Some of these faultlines are deliberately left uncamouflaged in order to draw attention to the mechanics of rewriting, or alternatively to prompt the audience to look behind the story and identify an underlying political subtext. The multiplicity of source materials in Partonopeus is matched by the proliferation of subtexts: we have found signposts pointing to a broad anti-Plantagenet meta-narrative embodied in the rise of the hero, but also to more specific critiques of Thomas Becket and Maurice de Sully, anxieties relating to the changing structure of feudal society, rivalry between France and the Holy Roman Empire, and a continuing reflection on the balance of power between Byzantium and its eastern neighbours. Partonopeus shows us a poet and an audience who are anything but provincial, involved in networks of communication that stretch from Spain to Constantinople and attuned to the fictionalisation of information that emerges from them. It also makes a case for a return to historicist readings of Old French romance, not because history 1

See Gingras, ‘Le Miel et l’amertume’, p. 140.

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can be used to ‘explain’ fiction, but because understanding the lifeworld of its audience may enable us to read more effectively through their eyes. One of the initial premises of this study was that Lecoy was right to see the version of our poem preserved in Paris, Arsenal 2986 as being closest to the original. Another was that the A version must have been composed a decade or so earlier than Fourrier’s dating of 1182–85 for the continued romance. Nothing that we have discovered in the manuscript tradition invalidates either of those assumptions; moreover, the key intertexts we have identified all belong to the ‘first wave’ of vernacular composition in the 1150s and 1160s, while fresh correspondences between events and personalities within the text and those outside it in the real world all point in the same direction. The Becket–Sully connection in particular suggests that the ‘first edition’ of Partonopeus must have appeared during or shortly after 1171, a dating supported by the evidence of a financial windfall that year for the patron and patroness of the romance. This early dating is also consistent with the experimental nature of the writing in our romance, which shows through in the poet’s lengthy justification for composing vernacular fiction (vv. 76–134) and in his decision to embed in the prologue a dual programme for reading the romance. The ornithological prelude, with its championing of the oriole against the symbolically over-determined skylark and nightingale, sets out to distance the text from conventional interpretations.2 The subsequent account of the careers of Anchises and Eneas repeats the call for readers to be alert to the subverting of familiar story-lines, while also showing them how to recognise the presence of a politically motivated subtext. The over-ambitious experimentation of Anselot’s story, which I believe also belongs to this first phase of composition, likewise betrays a sense of insecurity – not the insecurity of a poet who does not trust his own abilities (there is ample evidence throughout the text of his confident handling of the arts of writing and rewriting), but the uncertainty of an author working in a field whose boundaries are yet to be properly defined. If the shape of Old French romance was determined in part by a process of trial and error, then this riot of doubling and mise en abyme may be one of the errors that allowed other writers to see where the limits of formal exuberance might lie. Some shared sense of what writing vernacular fiction entailed certainly existed before our poet embarked on his tale of ancient love and contemporary politics. His deft manipulation of the age profile of his characters reveals an acute awareness of emerging conventions and the effects that could be created by departing from them. Tracing the patterns of youth and age across the main body of the romance and the Continuation allowed us to see the poet thinking through the consequences of such subversion in other areas of the narrative paradigms he set out to imitate. The treatment of animals in the first 2

Eley and Simons, ‘Poets, Birds and Readers’, p. 5.

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and second Ardennes episodes opened another window on to the complexities of vernacular rewriting, notably when this involved merging tales of the merveilleux with narrative imperatives derived from classical sources and the romans d’antiquité. Our author’s most radical departure from convention, however, was to reject the idea that the death of a fictional character meant the closure of his story-line. The resurrection of the Sultan of Persia may have been dictated by events in the real world to the east of the Byzantine Empire, just as the ‘unmarrying’ and subsequent disappearance of Urraque may be linked to sensitive developments affecting her real-life namesakes. But, whatever the poet’s motivation, his decision to undo the ending of his original composition and remake it in a form that allowed for a continuation of previous rivalries took the openness of vernacular narrative to a new level. It was one thing to trail a sequel involving Anselot and then start to compose a development of his story; it was quite another to incorporate the resulting unfinished roman d’Anselot into an intrigue that brought the Sultan back from the dead and left Blois with no obvious successor to the hero. To what extent this large-scale self-rewriting authorised other parties to implement their own changes and additions to the romance is not clear, but the making of Partonopeus certainly involved an ongoing process of interpolation that lasted for over a century. To refer, as I have done at various points in this book, to ‘the audience’ and ‘the reception’ of Partonopeus de Blois is an over-simplification: we should be talking instead of its audiences and their responses in the plural. The question of reception is made all the more complex and absorbing by the fact that Partonopeus demonstrably existed in different forms at different times; each form must have had its own set(s) of listeners and readers, each with their own horizon d’attente.3 The first public, at the court of Count Thibaut and Countess Alix of Blois, was sophisticated, intelligent and alive to the possibilities of rewriting presented by the relatively small number of vernacular courtly narratives that were in circulation by the early 1170s. They were also receptive to coded commentary on their neighbours, particularly Henry II, whose accession to the throne of England and marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine had dealt a double blow to the ambitions of the house of Blois.4 The testimony of Denis Piramus and the existence of two or more Anglo-Norman manuscripts, at least one of which dates from the turn of the twelfth century, point to an early audience on the other side of the Channel, where supporters of the house of Blois might still have been entertained by a

3 See Furrow, Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England for a diachronic study of ‘reactions to romances’ (p. 3) in insular culture. 4 We should remember that King Stephen was the paternal uncle of Thibaut V of Blois, and that Thibaut had attempted to detain and marry Eleanor himself following the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII.

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story that put a fictional ancestor on the throne of Byzantium.5 Interpolations in the tournament episode in MSS LPT contest the dominant anti-Plantagenet narrative and are clearly designed to appeal to another audience, with a different view of the English royal house. The fact that these interpolations found their way into three out of the seven principal texts of the poem that have come down to us suggests that this alternative vision had a certain currency. Further audiences – or subsets of audiences – are also implied. Those who heard or read the first part of the Continuation were expected to be able to recognise and appreciate the wealth of literary innovation we identified in Anselot’s story. I have argued that this audience included Chrétien de Troyes, who saw the weaknesses inherent in positioning a mise en abyme after the virtuoso narrative that it replicates, and then set out to produce a more satisfying structure in Le Chevalier au Lion. Another practitioner who seems to have known this section of our poem – or who could appropriately be associated with it – was Walter Map. Although the nature of his involvement with Partonopeus remains frustratingly unclear, the linking of his name with the ‘third edition’ of the text in manuscript L suggests that knowledge of the revised and continued versions extended well beyond the court of Blois. Whether the learned additions we identified in Anselot’s tirade came from Walter’s pen or that of another remanieur with a similar background, they presuppose a readership of scholars who knew their bestiary material well enough to make sense of cryptic allusions. Other additions to the Continuation speak of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century audiences who appreciated verbal play in the expression of unrequited love and moralising commentary on the relationship between ruler and ruled. Last but not least is the modern reader, who stands at such a distance from the lifeworld of the text that even the slow processes of scholarship may not be able to open doors onto all its many meanings. The interplay between text and audience is crucial for understanding the process for which I have borrowed Bruckner’s term ‘fusion’. In Partonopeus de Blois fusion operates along a sliding scale from the incorporation of brief echoes of other texts (such as the lion in Proverbs 22) to the deliberate melding of structures that characterise whole genres. This kind of rewriting is possible only if the majority of the audience can identify the different narrative nuclei that are being fused and recognise the end product of the reaction as a new element in the expanding chemistry of romance. As Francis Gingras notes, ‘pour l’auteur du Partonopeus, le roman n’est pas d’abord le fruit du

5 Hibbard further suggested that the shorter Middle English version (Partonope B) and Partalopa Saga both derived from a lost Anglo-Norman redaction (Mediæval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-cyclic Metrical Romances, p. 204).

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sage, mais il s’adresse au sage, ou plus généralement à quiconque “ot et set et wet entendre” (v. 134)’ (‘for the author of Partonopeus, romance is not first and foremost the fruit of a wise man’s efforts, but it is addressed to the wise, or more generally to whoever “knows how to listen and wants to understand” (v. 134)’, p. 133). Audience expectations also shape authorial choices in complex ways, as romancers set out to meet, frustrate or exceed them (Furrow, p. 6). In the case of Partonopeus, the expectations of the audience and the patroness whom I have identified with the figure of the narrator’s beloved seem to have had a radical effect on the development of the story. The first epilogue and second prologue imply that Countess Alix was receptive to, and finally agreed to pay for, a sequel to the original romance; she also seems to have dictated that the poet change metre from octosyllables to alexandrines in order to keep up with literary fashion. What other requirements she may have imposed on him we shall never know, but there is an interesting parallel here with her sister’s apparent interventionism, as recorded in the prologue to Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrete. My reading of our poem’s distinctive narratorial interventions also stresses the degree to which the boundaries between poet and narrator, and between actual and implied audiences, may be blurred or consciously manipulated in the first stage of reception, when the author comes face to face with a familiar public. Context may prove to be a critical factor in our appreciation of how such interventions operate in other texts as well. The legacy of Chrétien de Troyes has been endlessly debated: a twovolume work under this title appeared in the late 1980s, while Lacy and Grimbert remarked in 2005 that ‘we still regularly have studies of Chrétien’s influence on other romance authors’ (‘Introduction’, p. xiii). One argument of this book – that our poem pre-dated most of Chrétien’s work and was a seminal influence in the making of romance as a genre – suggests that the legacy of Partonopeus de Blois deserves to be explored in the same kind of detail. As Alberto Varvaro observed, the predominance of Chrétien’s Arthurian model over other types of fictional narrative was not inevitable in the twelfth century,6 and there is certainly more to be said about the development of the non-Arthurian tradition. Research on the intertextual dialogue between Partonopeus and Floire et Blancheflor is already under way.7 The extent to which our poet and Gautier d’Arras were aware of each other’s work is an area ripe for further exploration. Re-reading Cligés, Lancelot and Yvain as successors to our romance, rather than its predecessors, is bound to produce intriguing results. Hue de Rotelande knew Partonopeus well enough to fuse a parody of the bedroom scene in Chief d’Oire with a rewriting of the story of

6 7

‘Ipotesi per una nuova storia della letterature francese’, pp. 580–83. Bleach, ‘Rewriting Romance: Partonopeu de Blois as an Intertextual Hub’, PhD thesis in progress, University of Sheffield, chapters 2 and 3.

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Tristan’s madness;8 other echoes and reworkings of the poem in Ipomedon and Protheselaüs may provide new evidence for the reception of continental texts in the Anglo-Norman milieu. Our romance also plays its part in the development of an increasingly sophisticated negotiation between past and present, reality and fiction, that shapes the composition of both romance and historiography. Re-reading Partonopeus against Wace’s Brut could help us to understand the beginnings of a process that leads in the thirteenth century to the constantly shifting referents of Joufroi de Poitiers.9 Another important consideration is that many of the medieval consumers of our poem must have known it as an unfinished story; indeed, some of them might have been familiar with more than one ‘edition’ and consequently with more than one end-point for the narrative. This state of affairs also invites further reflection. What happened when someone reading the text aloud from, say, BnF fr. 19152 reached folio 174v and left Ernoul’s sons riding off towards Pont d’Oire with the outcome of the war against the Sultan still in the balance? Did someone in the audience who knew a version that stopped at a different point describe what he or she had heard or read elsewhere? Did those present then complete the story for themselves and debate the merits of alternative possible endings?10 Was it perhaps an early experience such as this, with one of the partial editions of the Continuation, that led Renaut to propose two possible endings for Le Bel Inconnu? Like its fascinating and frustrating manuscript tradition, Partonopeus de Blois always seems to pose more questions than it answers.

8 Scarpini, ‘Le Roman déguisé: camouflages littéraires dans Ipomedon de Hue de Rotelande’, PhD thesis in progress, University of Sheffield, chapter 5. 9 See Simons, ‘Literary and Historical Contexts: Possible Tools for Dating Joufroi de Poitiers’. 10 The inclusion of incomplete texts in compilation manuscripts such as BnF fr. 19152 implies a different perception amongst medieval audiences of the ‘privileged positions’ of narrative, which are assumed nowadays to include both the opening and the closing sentences of a novel (Rabinowitz, pp. 58–64).

Appendix 1 Notes on Editions and Manuscripts Notes on Editions Appendix and1Manuscripts

Except where otherwise indicated, quotations and line numbers have been taken from the Collet-Joris Lettres gothiques edition, whose text of the main body of the romance is based on MS A. This edition also presents the alternative, shorter ending and the Continuation based on MSS B, G and T. Where alternative text exists, the editors have chosen a split-page format, with the text and translation of A printed on the upper half of each verso–recto pair and the alternative text on the lower half. On split pages, line numbers for A are given in standard parentheses ( ); line numbers for BGT are given in curly brackets { }. Elsewhere, line numbers appear in square brackets [ ] for text from B used to fill lacunae in A and for vv. 12117–4590 of the Continuation. I have not followed this practice because the combination of three different styles of brackets can be very disconcerting when line numbers are integrated into continuous prose. It is normally clear from my discussion whether I am referring to the ending of MS A or MS B, or to the Continuation (readers can check the positioning of the major lacunae in A by referring to the synopsis in Appendix 2). One potentially confusing feature of the Lettres gothiques edition is that the Continuation follows on directly from the shorter B ending; this means that the first 1,460 lines of the Continuation are printed on the lower half of pages whose upper half still presents the longer A ending of the main romance. All references here to this part of the Continuation therefore indicate the lower halves of pp. 662–825. Quotations from and references to the unedited text of one or more manuscripts which does not correspond to lines present in the Collet-Joris edition use the metaline system from the electronic edition, rather than folio numbers, as this system allows readers to pinpoint references more easily.1 These references are always prefaced by ‘meta’ to distinguish them from

1 The metaline system is based on a virtual composite metatext that incorporates every line present in all the witnesses and assigns a unique identification number to each line. When viewing the transcription of an individual witness, users of the electronic edition can choose to see either the internal line numbering of that particular manuscript, or the metaline numbering that allows for easy comparison with the equivalent passage in other witnesses.

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passages that are simply variants of the edited text. A checklist of the manuscripts, their standard sigla and most significant features (in terms of the text they contain) is given below.2

Complete or near-complete versions A Paris, Arsenal 2986. Late twelfth or very early thirteenth century. Contains only Partonopeus. Seven folios missing in the central section and at least one at the end, plus a whole eight-folio gathering covering the third day of the tournament and part of the judging scene. There is evidence that some, if not all, of these folios were torn out after the manuscript was first assembled. B Bern, Burgerbibliothek 113, fols 203r–236r. Thirteenth century. Anthology of vernacular texts (chansons de geste, romances, chronicles, moral poems, contes). Contains a variant version of a 120-line passage towards the end of the Sornegur episode and the first 572 lines of the Continuation. G Paris, BnF fr. 19152, fols 124r–174v. Late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century. Anthology of vernacular texts (proverbs, moral poems, fabliaux, contes, romances). Breaks off in the middle of the alexandrine section of the Continuation. L Paris, BnF nouv. acq. fr. 7516, fols 1r–145r. Second half of the thirteenth century; Italian, copied from an Anglo-Norman original. Contains Partonopeus and a selection of Italian love-lyrics (copied later). Ends after the Anselot episode of the Continuation, with an epilogue attributing the romance to Walter Map. P Paris, BnF fr. 368, fols 1r–40v. First half of the fourteenth century. Anthology of French romances and chansons de geste, some fragmentary. Breaks off in the middle of the alexandrine section of the Continuation, some 200 lines before G. Part of Anselot’s story is missing, probably as a result of a lacuna in the exemplar. T Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 939. Fourteenth century. Now contains only Partonopeus, but originally the second text in a volume that began with a short version of Athis et Prophilias. Three folios missing: one at the beginning, one at the end of the judging scene and one in the middle of Anselot’s story. Contains the longest version of the Continuation. V Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1971, fols 1r–59v. Composite manuscript containing parts of several thirteenth-century manuscripts of Old French romances and a chanson de geste. The text of 2 Fuller descriptions of all the manuscripts and fragments can be found in Smith, ‘The Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 1–16, and the MS Notes function of the electronic edition.

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Partonopeus may originally have been a single, complete manuscript from the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century. Does not contain any part of the Continuation.

Fragments and extracts C Yale, Beinecke Library 395, fols 129va–130vb (formerly Cheltenham, Phillipps, 4156). Second half of the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. Anthology of vernacular texts (moral and religious works plus Wace’s Brut). An extract from Melior’s description of preparations for the tournament, listing participants and the lands from which they come. F Paris, BnF fr. 792, fols 1r–2v. Two folios from a lost manuscript, originally used as endpapers. Thirteenth century. Begins part way through the knighting ceremony at Chief d’Oire and ends with the narrator’s attack on contemporary womanhood. X Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, EP-D-62. Two folios from a lost manuscript used as endpapers. Thirteenth century. Fol. 1 contains part of the description of the hero’s single combat against Sornegur; fol. 2 contains part of the episode in which the hero’s mother and the king of France attempt to persuade Partonopeus to marry the latter’s niece. CC Two extracts (nearly 200 lines) incorporated into the thirteenth-century romance Cristal et Clarie. Extract 1 is part of the bedroom scene where Partonopeus first meets Melior; extract 2 is a short description of a castle, taken from the earlier account of the hero’s arrival at Chief d’Oire.3 DC Thirty extracts (over 260 lines) from the main body of the romance and the Continuation incorporated into the text of the Old French adaptation of the Disciplina clericalis in Paris, BnF, nouv. acq. fr. 7517.4

3 See Eley et al., ‘Cristal et Clarie and a Lost Manuscript of Partonopeus de Blois’ (pp. 333–8), for evidence that these extracts were copied from a lost manuscript of Partonopeus which was closely related to the extant MS V. Their presence alongside extracts from eleven other vernacular narratives suggests either that the Cristal poet had access to multiple exemplars or, more probably, that he was working from a compilation manuscript in which Partonopeus already featured alongside other romances. 4 See Hilka, ‘Plagiate in altfranzösischen Dichtungen’ and ‘Die anglonormannische Kompilation didaktisch-epischen Inhalts der Hs. Bibl. nat. nouv. acq. fr. 7517’, and Collet.

Appendix 2 Synopsis This synopsis is designed as a guide for readers who may not be familiar with details of the plot of the Old French romance, or with the alternative versions that exist for certain sections of the narrative. It also indicates the positioning of the narratorial interventions that are such a prominent feature of the text. Except where otherwise indicated, the narrative is broadly similar in each of the seven complete or near-complete manuscripts listed in Appendix 1. Where versions differ significantly, or where lacunae have been filled with text from other manuscripts, changes of base manuscript are indicated by prefixes in square brackets. Where the Collet-Joris edition gives both the text of MS A and the alternative version found in one or more other manuscripts, the prefix [A] indicates those passages that are printed on the top half of the page (pp. 618–25 and pp. 636–825); the prefixes [B], [G] and [T] indicate the text printed on the bottom half of the same pages. The short passage of alternative text from MS B on pp. 250–63 is summarised in a footnote.

Prologue and genealogy of the hero (vv. 1–498) The poet praises God and his patron; he evokes spring and the singing of the lark and the nightingale, but declares that he prefers the subtler song of the oriole. He defends his decision to compose a narrative in the vernacular about the distant past, promising that his story will be of benefit to those who understand what it has to say. Authorities divide the world into three parts, the largest of which is Asia, where Troy is to be found. Priam, the last king of Troy, allowed himself to be corrupted by the influence of Anchises, a fils à vilain (son of a peasant) whom he had raised to a position of unprecedented power. Anchises betrayed Priam for personal gain and opened one of the city gates to the Greeks. When Troy fell, he sailed to Italy with his son Eneas; Marcomyris, the infant son of Priam, was smuggled on board one of the ships by his nurse. When he was fifteen, he left Italy for France and became leader of the French. France was ruled by the direct descendants of Marcomyris until the time of Clovis, whose realm stretched from Cherbourg to Russia and included the Ardennes.

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Partonopeus’s first visit to Chief d’Oire (vv. 499–1880) In Clovis’s day, the forest of the Ardennes was much more extensive and much wilder than it is now. The story begins as King Clovis goes boar-hunting in the Ardennes, accompanied by his extraordinarily handsome thirteen-year-old nephew Partonopeus. Having killed one boar, Partonopeus follows the hounds that have set off in pursuit of another and becomes lost. After spending a night and a day alone in the forest, he boards a seemingly empty ship; as he dozes, the ship transports him to a magnificent city which appears to be totally deserted. Having made his way to the main palace, he is served a sumptuous meal by unseen hands and is then escorted to a splendid bed where he is joined in complete darkness by a young woman. Despite her protests, Partonopeus makes love to her; she then informs him that she is Melior, empress of Byzantium, and that she has brought him to the city of Chief d’Oire. Under pressure from her barons to marry after the death of her father, she has chosen Partonopeus to be her husband, but he is too young to become emperor at this stage. Partonopeus declares his love for Melior, who tells him that he must live secretly in Chief d’Oire for the next two and a half years until she can present him to the barons, but he will be free to explore the city and go hunting in the surrounding area. Melior’s people will remain invisible to him during this time; she will visit him every night, but he must swear not to attempt to see her (narratorial intervention about the narrator’s beloved, vv. 1865–80).

Partonopeus’s first return to France (vv. 1881–4192) After spending a year with Melior, Partonopeus becomes homesick and obtains her leave to return to France. Melior informs him of the critical situation that awaits him: his father and Clovis have both died, Blois is under attack, and the young king of France, Lohier, faces an invasion by the pagan Norseman Sornegur. Melior advises Partonopeus on how to conduct himself in war and peace, and reiterates the taboo on his seeing her before the time she has chosen. The magic ship takes Partonopeus back to the river Loire; on disembarking, he encounters an unknown knight who presents him with twelve packhorses laden with treasure sent by Melior to fund his campaign. He re-establishes control of his county and then goes to the aid of Lohier, who has stationed his troops at Pontoise in response to Sornegur’s advance through the Vexin. Partonopeus leads a successful sortie and forces the invaders back to Chars; reinforcements arrive for both armies and a date is set for battle. Sornegur calls a council to discuss strategy; although the kings of Greenland and Ireland are in favour of continuing the war, a majority of the council support a proposal by Marés to seek a financially advantageous peace settlement instead. Left alone, Sornegur curses Marés, a fils à vilain whom he has ill-advisedly promoted to the rank of count palatine; he then sends a

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private letter to Lohier offering to decide the outcome of the war by single combat between himself and a French champion. Lohier accepts, and reluctantly agrees to allow Partonopeus to take up the challenge. A long and hard-fought combat ensues. Eventually, Partonopeus begins to have the upper hand, thanks in part to thoughts of Melior (narratorial intervention about the positive effects of love; the narrator appeals to his beloved, vv. 3415–38). Marés storms the field with armed men to save Sornegur. During the ensuing battle, Partonopeus is taken prisoner by Marés and Sornegur calls for the death of the man who has betrayed him by breaking the terms of the combat. That night, Sornegur tries to rescue Partonopeus; unable to find him, he surrenders to Lohier and agrees terms for his army to withdraw from France.5 Partonopeus is released and plays advocate for the pagan kings who had killed Marés in his lodgings and now have to account for their action to Sornegur. Partonopeus and Sornegur part with pledges of friendship (v. 3834). Partonopeus returns to Blois and reveals to his mother that he loves a woman he has never been allowed to see. Fearing that her son may have been tricked by a she-devil, she consults her nephew the king of France and they agree to try and get Partonopeus to marry the king’s niece in order to keep him in France. The hero is invited to Paris and introduced to the girl. His mother adulterates the wine that is served to him; under its influence he makes advances to the king’s niece and agrees to be betrothed to her (brief narratorial intervention about the narrator’s fidelity to his beloved, vv. 4038–42). When she boasts of having saved him from a fairy, he recovers his senses and flees to Blois, where he refuses to speak to his mother. Realising that he has not actually broken the taboo on seeing Melior, he returns, contrite, to Chief d’Oire and is forgiven for his involuntary lapse on condition that he never breaks his word to Melior in future.

Partonopeus breaks Melior’s taboo (vv. 4193–5240) After spending another six months in Chief d’Oire, Partonopeus again seeks leave to return to Blois. Melior is reluctant to let him go, but eventually agrees after repeatedly warning him not to try and see her. Partonopeus is welcomed back to France and rewards his vassals according to merit (narratorial intervention about promoting the unworthy, vv. 4327–42). The hero’s mother appeals to the bishop of Paris for help in rescuing her son from the clutches of a fairy. The bishop persuades Partonopeus that he must

5 B presents an alternative version of this episode, in which Sornegur is captured by the French and is forced to accept terms for surrender. Collet and Joris suggest that the B text may be more faithful to the original here; Gildea argued that it represents the work of a copyist trying to compensate for a missing folio in his exemplar (vol. II, part 2, p. 18).

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attempt to see Melior without her permission. The hero returns to Chief d’Oire with an inextinguishable lantern supplied by his mother; when he sees by its light that Melior is the most beautiful human being he has ever set eyes on, he realises that he has made a terrible mistake (brief narratorial intervention about the narrator’s loyalty to his beloved, vv. 4529–34). Equally distraught, Melior explains that his action has deprived her of the special powers conferred by her exceptional education, which had enabled her to keep his presence secret from her people. Now her reputation will be ruined and because he has betrayed her, he must leave, never to see her again. The following morning, Melior’s attendants are able to see Partonopeus but moderate their criticisms of the empress on account of his beauty. Melior’s sister Urraque tries to intercede on behalf of the hero, but the empress refuses to forgive him. Urraque escorts Partonopeus through a crowd of angry knights6 [B] and puts him on a ship back to Blois; he collapses in despair on the river bank.

Partonopeus attempts suicide and is rescued by Urraque (vv. 5241–6306) Partonopeus enters the city, where he refuses to see his mother. He rejects all attempts to comfort him and locks himself away, taking only a bare minimum of food and drink. Finding himself still alive after a year of self-imposed imprisonment, he prays for release from his suffering [A] and decides to seek death in the Ardennes (narratorial intervention defending ladies against misogynist clerks, vv. 5482–514). Too weak to travel alone, Partonopeus enlists the help of his squire Guillemot (a nephew of Sornegur) to leave Blois7 [B] and ride to the Ardennes. Guillemot begs to die with his lord; Partonopeus persuades him to accept baptism and he takes the name Anselot. Partonopeus then slips away into the forest, abandoning Anselot; the narrator promises to return to Anselot’s story at an appropriate juncture. Partonopeus rides deep into the forest to an area inhabited by lions and leaves his horse to graze. A lion attacks and wounds the palfrey, but is killed by a blow from its hooves. The horse gallops towards the coast; its neighing attracts the attention of Urraque, whose ship is becalmed nearby. With the help of Maruc, who casts a spell over the wild beasts of the forest, Urraque goes ashore [A] and discovers Partonopeus, now almost unrecognisable. She persuades him to live by pretending that Melior has forgiven him, then takes him back to her island of Salence, where she and her young cousin Persewis nurse him back to health (narratorial intervention on the incompatibility of beauty and chastity, vv. 6239–74). Persewis begins to suffer from unrequited love for Partonopeus. 6 7

Two folios are missing from MS A after v. 5098 (fol. 32). Two folios are missing from MS A after v. 5584 (fol. 33).

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Partonopeus is knighted incognito by Melior (vv. 6307–7606) Summoned to Chief d’Oire by her sister, Urraque does not reveal that she has rescued Partonopeus; instead, she claims to have heard that he has lost his mind8 [B] and reproaches her sister for driving him insane. Melior repents of her intransigence and then explains that Ernoul of Malbricon9 has persuaded her barons to organise a marriage tournament at Chief d’Oire; she will have to wed the victor. Despite Melior’s insistence that Partonopeus is the only man for her, [A] Urraque continues to conceal the truth and tells her sister that she will have to marry whoever is judged to be the winner of the tournament. Urraque returns to Salence and provides Partonopeus with arms so that he can participate in the tournament. He refuses to gird on the sword, as he had promised that only Melior would have the honour of knighting him. Urraque takes Partonopeus back to Chief d’Oire in secret in order to try and have him dubbed incognito by the empress. Melior’s distress almost persuades Urraque to reveal her plan, but she hardens her heart in order to punish her sister for the suffering she has caused (narratorial intervention about the virtues of ladies, vv. 7087–112). The conversation turns to the tournament and Melior lists all the Christian and non-Christian participants and the names of the judges. Next day Melior plans to start dubbing a hundred new knights for the tournament. Urraque smuggles Partonopeus into the first group of candidates, his face covered by a helmet (as was the custom at that time), and Melior girds on his sword without recognising him (narratorial intervention about the narrator’s feelings for his beloved, vv. 7517–24). Overcome by strange emotions, Melior has to postpone the rest of the dubbings. Partonopeus returns to Salence with Urraque and Persewis to await the start of the tournament (brief narratorial intervention about unrequited love, vv. 7585–8).

The three-day tournament (vv. 7607–9686) A week before the start of the tournament, Partonopeus goes boating alone to escape the early summer heat; he is overtaken by a storm and cast up on the island of Tenedon, where he is imprisoned by its cruel lord Armant. Urraque

8 9

Two folios are missing from MS A after v. 6382 (fol. 36). There are at least fifteen different graphies for the name of Ernoul’s castle across the various witnesses. The name appears only twice in MS A, as Marberon and Marbreon, which may suggest that the form used by the original poet began with Marb-. The other MSS normally use forms beginning Malb- and Maub- (with five instances of Mab-, all but one in MS L). Given that the castle plays a key role in the Continuation, which does not feature in the A version, and that forms beginning Malb- outnumber those in Maub- by a ratio of nearly two to one, I have adopted the graphy Malbricon throughout.

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and Persewis search for him in vain before leaving Salence for Chief d’Oire. Partonopeus persuades Armant’s wife to release him on parole and provide him with equipment and transport so that he can attend the tournament. A contrary wind means that he lands some distance from Chief d’Oire. Making his way towards the city, Partonopeus encounters an older knight, Gaudin, who offers to be his companion during the tournament. On the first day of the tournament, the two elicit a positive response as they proudly join the initial skirmishing; shortly afterwards, the hero’s chief rival, the Sultan of Persia, enters the fray (narratorial intervention deploring the piety and chastity of ladies today, vv. 7981–8038). The two companions provide mutual support on the field; Partonopeus acquits himself well in his encounters with the Sultan. Two of the judges, Corsolt and Clarin, express their preference for the knight with the white shield (Partonopeus) and the Sultan respectively. That evening Gaudin tries to revive his companion’s spirits (v. 8287). On the second day of the tournament Partonopeus unhorses the Sultan and approaches the tower where Melior is seated with the judges. He presents her with his lance and banner and begs forgiveness, but Melior fails to understand his gesture; rumours spread about her accepting the lance (narratorial intervention about the effects of gossip on ladies, vv. 8367–94). Urraque realises who the mystery knight must be and tells Persewis, who is overjoyed; when Melior confides that the knight reminded her of Partonopeus, Urraque tells her the truth. Melior eagerly follows her lover’s progress on the field, ignoring the continuing debate between Corsolt and Clarin. Meanwhile the French contingent suffers a reverse at the hands of the Germans and Partonopeus has to come to the aid of Lohier, but does not reveal his identity. The Germans rally and Gaudin is unhorsed by the Sultan before being rescued by Partonopeus. The leaders on both sides distinguish themselves as the fighting becomes more intense.10 [B] Partonopeus leads a recovery by the French and they force the opposing side back to the city walls before darkness falls. Melior watches Partonopeus leave the field (narratorial intervention about the pains of love, vv. 8987–9002) and reproaches herself for banishing her one true love. Next morning, Gaudin warns Partonopeus that he must impress the judges on this final day of the tournament (v. 9116). Armant rides out from the city but is unhorsed and forced back by Partonopeus; Melior bites her tongue as Corsolt and Clarin comment (narratorial intervention about the pains of love, vv. 9183–234). After being wounded by Partonopeus, Armant counterattacks with the help of allies; Partonopeus is unhorsed but kills Armant. After a brief rest, Partonopeus unhorses the Sultan. The French launch an attack; the Sultan mounts a valiant

10 Eight folios are missing from MS A after v. 8936 (fol. 49). It is clear, however, from later references in A that the text represented by this lacuna must have differed significantly in places from the account preserved in the other witnesses.

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defence, but has to retreat to the gate below the tower. Partonopeus and his allies drive their opponents back into the city three times, but are repulsed; on the fourth attempt, they manage to remain inside the gates until the signal is given for the end of the tournament. The judges have to come down and stop the Sultan trying to eject his opponents. Partonopeus, the Sultan and Melior all spend a sleepless night wondering what the judges’ decision will be. Next day, Partonopeus sets out for Tenedon; Armant’s widow releases him from his promise to return to captivity after the tournament.

Partonopeus wins Melior’s hand (A vv. 9687–12082, B vv. 9687–10656) Partonopeus and Gaudin arrive back at Chief d’Oire on the final day of the judges’ deliberations. When Melior comes down from the tower with her attendants to join the judges, Gaudin falls in love with Urraque.11 The spokesman Anfors presents the six knights who have been judged the victors: the Christians Lohier, Gaudin and Partonopeus, and the pagans Margaris (the Sultan), Sades, king of Syria, and Aupatris, king of Nubia. Gaudin and Aupatris withdraw, leaving four contenders. Clarin argues strongly for the Sultan to be proclaimed overall winner, much to the dismay of Melior (narratorial intervention on the fidelity of ladies, vv. 10077–92). Ernoul eliminates Sades and Lohier before putting his weight behind Partonopeus and pressing for a final decision.12 Melior claims to favour the Sultan, but proposes that the two contenders disarm so that their personal beauty can be taken into account. Corsolt suggests that Melior consult privately with the judges who have not yet spoken out; Melior insists that the candidates disarm first. The Sultan elicits much applause in his rich robes, but [A] Partonopeus, dressed only in a tunic, eclipses him and Ernoul declares him the winner subject to his being of appropriate status.13 Partonopeus names himself, whereupon Lohier publicly acknowledges that the young man is his long-lost cousin and a descendant of the Trojan royal family. Having learned that Partonopeus is the celebrated warrior who saved France from Sornegur, all the barons acclaim him as the victor and Melior agrees to marry him.

11 Subsequent events reveal that it is Persewis, not Urraque, who is the focus of Gaudin’s thoughts in the A version. This scene cannot have featured in the missing folios of A, unless the name Urraque has simply been substituted for Persewis in the non-A tradition. 12 The text of MS A resumes in the middle of Ernoul’s speech (v. 10163); after sixty lines it rejoins the other witnesses for a further 166 lines before the two versions diverge definitively for the remainder of the main narrative. The A ending is summarised first, before the shorter B ending, which leads in to the Continuation. 13 It is clear from this that in A Partonopeus must have remained incognito throughout the judging, whereas the identity of the knight with the white shield is revealed in Anfors’s first speech (v. 9933) in the other versions.

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Persewis realises that her love for Partonopeus is hopeless; Gaudin, on the other hand, is hopeful that his love will have a happy outcome. Angry with the decision, the Sultan challenges the impartiality of the judges and demands to prove them wrong in single combat. Despite the objections of Anfors, Partonopeus insists on taking up the challenge and Melior reluctantly agrees. After a hard-fought contest, Partonopeus kills the Sultan and is installed as emperor. Having witnessed the public betrothal of Partonopeus and Melior, Persewis begins to transfer her affections to Gaudin. During the short delay before his marriage, Partonopeus recounts his adventures to Lohier, who decides to marry Urraque in recognition of her services to his cousin. Gaudin declares his love to Persewis and is accepted by her, on condition that their union is approved by the new emperor. Partonopeus obtains Urraque’s consent to the marriage with Lohier and proposes that Gaudin should wed Persewis and be invested with his own lands in France and a fief in Byzantium. Gaudin gratefully accepts, the betrothals take place and a triple wedding is arranged. The following day, a second evocation of birds leads into an account of the preparations for the weddings, followed by an incomplete description of the marriage ceremony, the coronation and the celebrations. [B] The extraordinary beauty of Partonopeus, dressed only in a short shift and silk hose, swings the judgement in his favour. Melior repeats her preference for the Sultan, accusing Ernoul of manipulating the situation, but is secretly overjoyed to accept the judges’ decision. The Sultan returns to Persia swearing revenge, while Partonopeus and Melior are betrothed (brief narratorial intervention about the narrator’s unhappy love, vv. 10531–6). The wedding is celebrated soon after and Melior organises a sumptuous feast in honour of the ladies present (narratorial intervention about God’s favour towards ladies, vv. 10575–82). During the celebrations Lohier acknowledges the hero as his cousin. After forty days the court departs, leaving Partonopeus to enjoy life with Melior. In a first epilogue, the narrator laments his own lack of success in love and offers to continue the stories of Partonopeus, the Sultan, Gaudin and Anselot if his lady so desires.

The Continuation I: Anselot’s story (vv. 10657–1696) [B] In a prologue, the narrator expresses his delight at obeying his lady’s command to continue. After a period of peace lasting a year, the Sultan can no longer endure his thwarted love for Melior and summons an invasion force. The narrator announces that he will tell another story before relating the events of the war. After a day’s hunting, Partonopeus remains alone in the forest looking for two lost hounds. He overhears a young man giving vent to a tirade against the fils à vilain and then engages him in debate about the merits or otherwise of low-born individuals. When the young man cites the case of

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Marés, Partonopeus realises that he must be Anselot and a joyful reunion ensues. Back in the city, Partonopeus is joined by Melior, Gaudin, Ernoul and Ernoul’s five sons to listen to Anselot’s adventures (v. 11106). After failing to find Partonopeus in the Ardennes, Anselot had survived in the forest with the help of a white greyhound that he rescued from a shipwreck and called Noon. Eventually, they were picked up by a passing ship and taken to Rome, where the emperor welcomed Anselot and entrusted him to the care of Farés, who appeared to be a young man of good breeding, but was in fact a fils à vilain [T] who had manipulated the emperor into giving him an extraordinary degree of influence at court. The emperor’s niece Euglar fell in love with Anselot; although equally attracted to her, Anselot tried to appear indifferent out of respect for his new lord. When avoiding an encounter with Euglar one day, [G] Anselot ran into the path of the emperor’s lion, which had escaped from its pen; he was only saved by the intervention of Noon, who killed the lion. The emperor had Noon thrown from a cliff in retaliation, but Anselot was able to nurse the dog back to health. Euglar appealed to Farés for help, but instead of bringing the young lovers together, Farés made advances to Euglar, was rebuffed and made false accusations to the emperor about Anselot dishonouring his niece. Soon afterwards, a peasant arrived at court with news of a giant bear that was ravaging Sardinia. Thinking that the emperor was still angry about the lion, Anselot offered to kill the bear in order to regain his favour. He and Noon travelled to the island [T] and together they managed to kill the beast; Anselot brought its head back to the emperor, who showed no further ill feeling towards him. The empress learned the truth about Euglar’s love for Anselot and convinced the emperor that they had not acted inappropriately; he agreed to let the young couple marry and promised Anselot a fief. Envious of his companion’s good fortune, Farés insinuated to the emperor that his wife was too fond of Anselot’s company; egged on by Farés, the jealous monarch killed Noon with a sword that had just been presented to him. Anselot publicly insulted the emperor, was arrested and imprisoned on an island, but the empress secretly engineered his release. His story at an end, Anselot begs Partonopeus never to trust a fils à vilain. Partonopeus knights Anselot, who becomes a key member of his court.

The Continuation II: War with the Sultan (vv. 11697–4590) The Sultan summons his army and sails for Byzantium; word of his arrival reaches Partonopeus, who calls his council together. Only Anselot is inattentive, lost in thoughts of Euglar (narratorial intervention about the narrator’s own lovesickness, vv. 11760–74). Partonopeus expresses uncertainty about his rule and asks his men for advice; at their father’s suggestion, Ernoul’s sons Supplice, Gautier, Damas, Marsion and Alos give their views. Gaudin advises against immediate open warfare; Ernoul supports his policy of

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improving defences and building up forces, but says they must trust in God. Partonopeus expresses doubts and is rebuked by Alos; they finally adopt Melior’s proposal to send envoys to the Sultan to play for time while defence plans are put in place (narratorial intervention, announcing a change of metre and likening the narrator to Clytie, vv. 12117–78).14 As Anselot and Souplice ride towards the invaders’ encampment, they see Alés of Femenie skirmishing with Macabré’s contingent. They deliver their message to the Sultan, who sets out his conditions for peace: Partonopeus was wrongly adjudged the winner of the marriage tournament, and a new judgement must take place; Ernoul, Corsolt and Anfors (who all supported Partonopeus) must be replaced by new judges chosen by the Sultan and then be handed over to him and put on trial. Taken in by Anselot’s reply, which leads him to believe that he still has a chance of winning Melior, the Sultan agrees to a month-long truce. On the return journey, Anselot and Souplice join Alés in a running fight against his pursuers. As they approach Malbricon, they are spotted by Ernoul, who leads his other sons out to rescue them. Alos and the other three brothers mock Gautier’s idea that they should beat a strategic retreat; when Ernoul orders them to withdraw, the furious Gautier remains behind, unhorses Macabré and is drawn into jousting with Aupatris. Impressed by his young opponent, Aupatris helps Gautier to escape from the advancing enemy forces. Ernoul laments the loss of Gautier before thanking God for his safe return when the youth re-appears. As Macabré leads his forces towards Malbricon, Ernoul’s sons set off to destroy the bridge over the river Oire and hold the invaders up at the nearby ford. Ernoul sends his wife Beatris and their younger children to Chief d’Oire for safety before joining the fray. Beatris informs Partonopeus that fighting has broken out near Malbricon (v. 13094). On hearing the news, Partonopeus sets out immediately with a small force, leaving Gaudin to follow more slowly with the main army while Melior sends for their allies. Riding ahead of his men, he single-handedly drives Macabré’s men back from the ford. The Sultan leads his whole army into the field, until Aupatris persuades him to send large numbers of men back to defend the camp. The Sultan attacks with a thousand hand-picked knights and succeeds in cutting Ernoul off from Partonopeus; Ernoul has no choice but to surrender. Gaudin arrives with reinforcements, but he and Partonopeus are unable to rescue Ernoul before night falls and the two sides withdraw from the field (v. 13668). The Sultan passes a sleepless night thinking of Melior. He writes her a short love letter in octosyllables, then a longer one in decasyllables,15 but 14 At the end of this intervention, the narrative switches to alexandrines arranged in assonanced laisses. 15 At the end of the second letter, the narrative reverts to octosyllabic rhyming couplets.

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cannot decide whether to send it or not (narratorial intervention about love and fear, vv. 13869–900). He muses on Christianity and its emphasis on chastity. Next morning, the Sultan calls his council to decide the fate of Ernoul. The Sultan accuses Ernoul of damaging his honour by dishonestly turning the tournament judges against him and depriving him of Melior’s love. In the deliberations that follow, Macabré supports the Sultan’s right to put Ernoul to death, while Aupatris argues against him; the debate becomes so heated that they end up challenging one another to single combat. After the Sultan restores order, Lucion suggests that he should set aside his grievance against Ernoul and return him to Melior in a bid to win her favour. The Sultan agrees and sends Lucion to Chief d’Oire with Ernoul; once in the presence of the emperor, Ernoul proposes that the outcome of the war should be decided by single combat between the Sultan and Partonopeus or his champion. Lucion pays a visit to Melior and tells her of the Sultan’s love for her; she replies that if the Sultan wants her to think well of him, he should go back to Persia, because she can never love anyone but Partonopeus. The following day, Lucion reports back to the Sultan, who makes peace with Partonopeus and returns home. In a second epilogue, the narrator praises his beloved’s beauty and virtue and names her Passe Rose. The text ends with a short prayer and an explicit.

Bibliography BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions and adaptations of Partonopeus de Blois i) Complete editions Partonopeus de Blois, ed. by A. C. M. Robert and G.-A. Crapelet, 2 vols, Anciens monuments de l’histoire et de la langue française (Paris: G.-A. Crapelet, 1834) Partonopeu de Blois, ed. by Joseph Gildea, 2 vols (Villanova: Villanova University Press, 1967–70) Le Roman de Partonopeu de Blois, ed. and trans. by Olivier Collet and PierreMarie Joris, Lettres gothiques (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2005) ‘Partonopeus de Blois’: An Electronic Edition, ed. by Penny Eley, Penny Simons, Mario Longtin, Catherine Hanley and Philip Shaw (Sheffield: HriOnline, 2005) at http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/partonopeus/

ii) Partial editions Clavel, Laetitia, ‘Partonopeus de Blois: transcription et édition des vers 3773– 5682 du BnF fr. 19152’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1999 Filali, Ingrid, ‘Partonopeus de Blois ms. BnF fr. 19152 [vv. 2777–3578]’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1996 Giacomi, Marie-Françoise, ‘Partonopeus de Blois: édition et commentaires des vers 1–800 du manuscrit BnF fr. 19152’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1993 Granier, Celine, ‘Partonopeus de Blois ms. BnF fr. 19152 [fol. 152rc–159rc]’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1999 Oliveira, Daniela, ‘Partonopeus de Blois: transcription des vers 5649–6913 du manuscrit BnF fr. 19152’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1999 Spiteri, Nathalie, ‘Partonopeus de Blois: édition et commentaires des vers 801–1776 du manuscrit BnF fr. 19152’. Thesis, Université d’Aix-Marseille-I, 1994

iii) Adaptations Bormans, J.-H., Ouddietsche Fragmenten van den Parthonopeus van Bloys (Brussels: Hayez, 1871) Cantare del Bel Gherardino, novella cavalleresca in ottava rima del secolo XIV, ed. by Francesco Zambrini (Bologna: Gaetano Romagnoli, 1867; repr. Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968) Història de l’esforçat Cavaller Partinobles, ed. by Jordi Tiñena, Colleccio Lectures i Itineraris (Barcelona: Editorial Laertes, 1991)

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Index INDEX

Names of characters and places featured in Partonopeus de Blois are given in small capitals in order to distinguish them from real-life counterparts (e.g. the King of France). Latin and Old French texts are listed under the author’s name, if known; anonymous works and those whose attribution is uncertain are listed by title. Partonopeus de Blois has been abbreviated to PB. Aberdeen Bestiary 93 n.43, 101 n.58 adaptations of PB 3, 5, 17, 20–21, 190 Italian (Bel Gherardino) 21, 161 n.31 Catalan (Història de l’esforçat Cavaller Partinobles) 20–21, 30 n.33 Danish (Persenober og Konstantianobis) 38 n.59 Icelandic/ Norse see Partalopa Saga Middle High German see Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur Middle Dutch see Parthonopeus van Bloys Middle English see Partonope of Blois Spanish (Historia del esforçado Cavallero Partonoples, conde de Bles) 21, 30 n.33 abridgement 2, 84, 86–91, 93, 99, 117, 118, 162, 167–68, 200 adder 92, 93, 94, 105 aemulatio 7, 39, 48, 53, 132, 148, 178, 207 ages of man tradition 22, 39, 41, 49 n.76 Aimon de Varennes, Florimont 1, 11, 17, 39, 182–85, 191

ALBIGÉS 85, 121 n.14, 123, 142 ALÉS OF FEMENIE 45, 164–45, 178, 181 Alexander III (pope) 57, 188 Alexander romances 24–25, 41, 181– 82, 185, 191, 202, 208; see also Alexandre de Paris Alexandre de Paris, Le Roman d’Alexandre 17, 24–25, 51, 154, 173, 181–82, 185 Alfonso I of Portugal 188 Alfonso VI of Léon-Castile 188 Alfonso VIII of Castile 187 Alfonso IX of Léon 188 Alix of France, countess of Blois 187, 203–05, 210, 212 ALOS 176–77, 184 Amazons 164–65, 181–82 ANCHISES 53–58, 70, 73–74, 152, 209 ANFORS 36, 40, 108 ANSELOT 76, 80, 155, 156, 178, 187, 190, 202, 210, see also Anselot episode age of 44–45 as double of Partonopeus 140, 141–46, 147 as victim of the fils à vilain 52, 70–72, 74 love for Euglar 45, 49, 70–71, 130, 133, 141, 143–44, 146, 164 scholastic debate with Partonopeus 84, 85, 107, 110, 114, 125

252

INDEX

Anselot episode 73, 75, 79, 87, 102, 108, 112–14, 120, 153, 162–63, 164, 179, 191 Anselot’s story 16, 47, 70, 72, 80, 82, 112–49, 156, 162, 211 composition of 118–21, 123–26, 150, 180, 189, 190–91, 202, 209 fils à vilain tirade 16, 84–102, 104– 05, 106, 110–11, 114, 118, 150 Apuleius, Metamorphoses 27–29, 208 Ardennes 45, 110, 141 animals in 75, 79–83, 110, 148, 209–10 Anselot’s adventure in 112, 114, 118, 119–21, 123, 140, 141 in opening sequence 29, 44, 48, 83, 120, 144, 186, 191 Partonopeus’s second journey to 37, 76–77, 96, 110, 112, 118, 140, 144, 186 ARMANT 41 n.70, 42 ARMANT’S WIFE 37 n.55, 75, 145 Arthur of Brittany 109 asp 91–92, 93–94, 95–96, 105, 106 Athis et Prophilias 81 n.19 audience(s) 71–72, 139, 195, 200, 201–02, 208, 210–12 AUPATRIS 40, 46, 160 n.28, 165, 184 authority, models of 136–38 authorship of PB 7, 13–14, 118–23, 127; see also under Continuation Aymeri de Narbonne 125 Barbarossa, Frederick 56–57, 61, 196 Barlaam and Josaphat 98 Baudouin of Hainault 196 Beatrice of Burgundy 196 Beaumarchais, Pierre de 50 bear 75, 80, 85, 86 n.31, 96–98, 99, 121, 131–33, 140–41, 147, 148 n.54 Becket, Thomas 63–65, 68, 69, 73, 136, 190, 202, 208–09 Bel Gherardino 21, 161 n.31 Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie 3, 7–9, 12, 53–56, 58, 59, 151 n.3, 152, 200–02, 208

Benoît of St Albans, La Vie de Thomas Becket 65 n.34 Berengaria of Navarre 109, 187 n.16 Bern, Burgerbibliothek 113 (MS B) 2, 66, 85–93, 97–101, 113, 115– 19, 162, 216 Béroul, Tristan 60, 134 bestiaries 6, 16, 79, 80, 93–96, 98– 101, 111, 211 Biblical allusions see Proverbs, Psalms binary opposition 44, 50–51, 57, 70 n.50, 74, 134 birds 53, 75, 88, 91, 101, 209 Blois 69, 77, 177, 187, 188, 192, 196, 200, 203–05, 210, 211 BLOIS 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 114, 119, 120, 121, 137, 142, 145, 210 BLOIS, COUNTESS OF (mother of Partonopeus) 41 n.70, 48, 68, 69, 75, 208 boar 20, 29–32, 43, 48, 75, 80, 105, 113 buffalo 96–97, 99 Byzantium 34, 159–62, 189, 190, 203 n.46, 208, 210 BYZANTIUM 39, 81 n.20, 140, 156, 158 n.20, 183, 189 BYZANTIUM, EMPEROR OF (father of Melior) 137 chanson de geste 19 n.2, 40, 41, 51, 52, 59, 72, 125, 137 n.37, 152, 157–58, 177, 208 Chanson de Guillaume 41, 137 n.37, 177, 208 Chanson de Roland 44 n.72, 59, 157–58, 208 CHARS 59, 66 Chartres 69, 80 n.15, 192 n.23 Chatelaine de Vergi 135 CHIEF D’OIRE 24 n.18, 36 n.53, 37, 43, 76, 122, 126 hero’s first stay in 26 n.21, 35, 37, 41, 44 n.74, 122, 137, 140 in the opening sequence 27, 31, 33, 48, 83, 124, 144, 212

INDEX

in the Continuation 46, 84, 114, 124, 171, 187 location for the tournament 40, 42, 145 CHLODION 58 Chrétien de Troyes 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 25 n.19, 133, 152, 212 Cligés 11, 30 n.33, 81 n.19, 153, 161, 177, 212 Erec et Enide 19 Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain) 25, 50, 103–04, 147–49, 152, 191, 211, 212 Le Chevalier de la Charrete (Lancelot) 25, 154, 157 n.17, 212 Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) 50, 154, 157 n.17, 162 Philomena 7, 12 chronology of PB internal 33, 37–38, 40 relative to other Old French texts 6, 11–14, 107, 147–48, 154, 177, 181–85, 191, 193–95, 209 CLARIN 43 closure 5, 17, 68, 71, 126, 146, 150– 78, 177–78, 202, 207, 210 CLOVIS 20, 29, 42, 44, 58–59, 137 Constance of Castile 187 Constantinople see Byzantium Continuation 15, 16–17, 45, 47, 49, 80, 112, 118, 153–57; see also Anselot episode authorship of 47, 105–08, 110–11, 120, 160, 179, 186, 193, 206, 211 composition of 123–26, 146, 178, 179–80, 202, 205 dating of 17, 181–86, 187–91, 205 ending of 2, 162–78 fils à vilain theme in 63, 68, 70–74 manuscript tradition of 15, 16; see also manuscript tradition of PB metrical form of 179–81, 205 contradiction 56, 58, 72, 83, 138, 200 conversion 119–20, 121, 165, 172 cortoisie see courtliness Couronnement de Louis 51, 67

253

courtliness 50–51, 60, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 164, 181, 200 courtly love see fin’amor CRETE, KING OF 38, 183 Cristal et Clarie 9, 217 Cupid and Psyche story 7, 8, 27–29, 32–33, 38, 48, 83, 144, 208; see also Apuleius Dares the Phrygian, De Excidio belli Troiani 6, 9, 54 dating of PB see chronology demon 54, 77, 79–80, 88, 110, 132 devil 55, 70 n.49, 85, 86, 88–89, 91, 107, 132, 139; see also demon Dido see Eneas dipsa 91–92, 94–96, 104–05, 106 Disciplina clericalis 127, 173, 175, 217 dog(s) 75, 80, 128–29, 131, 134, 147; see also greyhound, NOON for hunting 29, 31, 43, 96–97, 105, 142 Dolopathos 99 doubling 16, 39, 41, 44, 45, 49, 68, 112, 123, 136, 139–45, 147, 209 dragon 75, 79, 91–92, 95, 100–01, 131–32 dynastic romance 8, 25, 29, 32, 35, 42, 48, 75, 208 earwig 92, 95 East see Orient editing PB 2–4, 15, 97, 115–18, 155–56 Edward the Confessor 109 Egypt 131 n.30, 159, 161 EGYPT, KING OF 159 Eleanor of Aquitaine 109, 201, 203, 210 Eleanor of England (Leonora of Castile) 187 elephant 75, 79, 80–81, 95, 98 Eneas 6, 12, 25, 29, 33, 38, 77, 119, 148, 152, 173; see also romans d’antiquité as model for Anselot’s story 123– 24, 128, 130, 137

254

INDEX

Eneas cont. Dido in 33, 124, 128, 137, 146, 187 Lavine in 7, 33, 38 rewriting of in PB 7–8, 53–58, 123–24, 128, 130, 140 n.41, 145, 146, 208 ENEAS 53–58, 61, 70, 73, 209 Enfances Vivien 52 England 12, 51, 65, 107, 109, 187, 210 ENGLAND, KING OF 40, 108–10, 178, 191 n.22 epic see chanson de geste epilogue 16, 102–03, 113, 151, 154, 162, 182, 207 first epilogue to PB 155–57, 163, 171, 185, 187, 197–98,199, 202, 212 second (Passe Rose) epilogue 163, 166, 168, 172, 183, 191–93, 204 ERNOUL 37, 108 n.72, 165, 172, 184, 185, 191 age of 43–44, 45–46, 47, 49 EUGLAR 128, 138, 140,146, 164, 178 love for Anselot see under ANSELOT exemplum 73, 85 n.29, 112, 127–39, 145, 151 FABUR, FABURIN 44, 59, 61–62, 63, 67, 142 fairy-mistress 7, 8, 28, 29, 31 n.39, 32, 33, 35, 38, 48, 144, 208 MELIOR as see under MELIOR FARÉS 71, 73, 116, 121, 133, 136, 145–46, 148 as double of Marés 70, 125–26 influence at court 74, 116–17, 129, 130, 137–39, 141 faultline 8–9, 58, 69, 87, 91, 110, 114, 173, 201, 208 signposting of 29, 56, 82–84 FEMENIE see ALÉS Fernando II of Léon 188 fils à vilain 15, 16, 45, 50–74, 75, 123–24, 127, 130, 135, 144; see also FARÉS, MARÉS, PARIS (BISHOP OF)

fin’amor 70–71, 196–98 first-person narration 16, 112, 113, 123, 128, 130, 145, 148 n.55 Floire et Blancheflor 13–14, 32–33, 81 n.19, 82 n.22 and 24, 173, 212 Florence et Blanchefleur see Jugement d’Amours foundling 53, 55, 117, 125 fox 96–97, 101–02 France 51, 53, 65–66, 79, 109–110, 152, 158, 161, 176 n.59, 187, 189 circulation of texts in 12, 21, 27– 28, 173 rivalry with the Holy Roman Empire 56–57, 145–46, 208 FRANCE 33, 37, 42, 45, 52, 56, 59, 60–62, 66, 81, 119, 137, 142, 147, 188–89 FRANCE, KING OF see CHLODION, CLOVIS, LOHIER, PHARAMOND Froissart, Jean, Trésor amoureux 194 n.29 Fulgentius 28 FURSIN 59, 61–62, 63–64, 67 fusion 6–8, 16–17, 38, 79, 112, 127– 39, 145, 147, 179–82, 208, 211– 212 signposting of 48, 58, 82, 84 GAUDIN 36, 47, 156, 163–64, 178, 187, 189, 190, 202 age of 21, 34, 36, 39–44, 48–49 Gautier d’Arras 11, 13, 25, 152–53, 157 n.17, 177, 212 Eracle 13, 157 n.17, 196, 203 Ille et Galeron 9, 13, 19, 25, 38, 103–04, 119, 137 n.37, 146, 151 n.3, 152–53, 157 n.17, 196 GAUTIER 45, 49, 74 n.57 genealogy 8, 32, 52–53, 56, 58, 59, 74, 152, 153, 177 genres 7 n.25, 8, 9 n.33, 25, 32, 37, 43, 72 n.54, 112, 211; see also chanson de geste, lai, romance Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany 109 Geoffrey of Monmouth 95, 104 n.63, 152

INDEX

Geoffrey of Vinsauf 26, 150–51 Girart de Roussillon 51 Gisors 59, 65, 66, 67 Godefroi de Leigni 154 Godwinson, Harold 109 Graelent 35 greyhound 31–32, 71, 75, 128–29, 131, 132, 133–34, 136, 140, 141; see also NOON Grim, Edward, Vita S. Thomae 64 n.31 Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de saint Thomas de Canterbury 65, 85 n.28 Guillaume d’Angleterre 52 Guillaume de Palerne 1 Guillaume le Clerc, Le Bestiaire divin 96 n.48, 98, 100, 101 GUILLEMOT 119, 120–21, 142 Guingamor 29, 31 n.39, 32 n.41 hell 89, 103, 107 Henri le Libéral, Count of Champagne 107, 187 n.16, 192 n.23 Henry II, King of England 34, 53, 64–67, 68, 69, 104, 106, 109, 111, 187, 210 Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony 161 Henry the Young King (son of Henry II) 19 n.2, 65, 85 n.28, 104, 109–10 Història de l’esforçat Cavaller Partinobles 20–21, 30 n.33 Historia del esforçado Cavallero Partonoples, conde de Bles 21, 30 n.33 historicism 14–15, 208–09 historiography 136, 138, 180, 213; see also Wace national history 152, 177 Holy Roman Emperor 30 n.33, 52, 61, 70, 114, 138, 145–46; see also Barbarossa Holy Roman Empire 58, 125, 208 homosexuality 24 horse 16, 41–42, 75, 76–79, 81–83, 98, 102, 110, 140

255

Hue de Rotelande 1, 77 n.9, 107, 142 n.44, 153, 178, 212–13 hunting 7, 20, 23, 29–32, 37, 48, 70, 84, 98, 113, 122, 142, 191 Huon d’Oisi, Le Tournoiement des Dames 192 n.23 Huon de Méry, Le Tournoi de l’Antéchrist 194 hyena 100–01 Iconium see Rum identity 24, 56, 73, 110, 120–21, 146, 184–85, 192 imitatio 7, 42 n.71, 48, 62, 140, 207 India 80, 95, 154 n.10, 158 interpolation 2, 6, 17, 77, 150, 153, 156, 179, 205, 207, 210 in the Anselot episode 75, 84, 85– 102, 105–08, 110, 114, 178, 191 in the closing lines of MS T 166– 67, 178 in the Salut d’amour 172–74, 175– 77, 178, 179 in the tournament episode 108–10, 178, 211 intertextuality 5, 7, 9, 17, 76, 110, 142, 143, 179, 201; see also aemulatio, imitatio, rewriting in relation to hero’s age 23, 25, 29 PB as intertext 17, 82 n.24, 107, 147–48, 182–85, 212–13 use of multiple intertexts in PB 7, 8, 112, 127, 131, 139, 145, 208–09 Isidore of Seville 22, 39, 41, 79, 81 n.17, 94, 95, 99 n.55, 101 Jews, persecution of in Blois 203–04, 205 John, son of Henry II 34, 109, 133 John of Salisbury, Vita sancti Thomae 64 Jordan Fantosme 138 Joufroi de Poitiers 213 Judgement of Paris 57–58 Jugement d’amours 193–94

256

INDEX

Kilij Arslan I and II see Rum, Sultan of Komnenos, Maria 34 Komnenos, Manuel 34, 159–60 Konrad von Würzburg, Partonopier und Meliur 20, 30 n.33 and 35, 72 n.53, 169 n.46, 191 lai 8, 9, 25, 29, 35, 43, 48, 75, 112 n.2; see also Marie de France Anselot’s story as 112, 123, 127, 135 Lecheor 112 n.2 legal proceedings 61–62 leopard 75, 79 Liber Catonianus 27 liminal space 32, 79, 110 lion as analogue for the fils à vilain 96–98, 99 in Anselot’s story 116, 121, 128– 29, 130–31, 133, 140, 143–44, 211 in the Ardennes 75, 76–83, 106, 110, 120 LOEMER 59, 62, 63 LOHIER 1, 40, 59, 60, 61, 67, 74 n.57, 75, 137, 153, 160 n.28, 167, 204 n.49 Louis VI, king of France 63 Louis VII, king of France 63, 66, 187, 203 Lucan, The Civil War (Pharsalia) 6, 94–95 LUCION 44, 45–47, 49, 163 n.35, 166, 167, 170, 172, 182 MACABRÉ 182 MALBRICON 43, 44, 113, 184, 191 manuscript contamination 93, 116, 170 n.48 manuscript tradition of PB 1, 17, 111, 135, 153, 155, 164, 209, 210 complexity of 15–16, 110, 114–15, 126, 149, 207 fragments and extracts 1, 9, 173, 175–76, 217 lost manuscripts 1, 86, 169

MS A see Paris, Arsenal 2986 MS B see Bern, Burgerbibliothek 113 MS G see Paris, BnF fr. 19152 MS L see Paris, BnF nouv. acq. fr. 751 MS P see Paris, BnF fr. 368 MS T see Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 939 MS V see Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1971 Manzikert, battle of 159 Map, Walter 16, 75, 94, 102–11, 150, 162, 178, 179, 191, 211 MARCOMYRIS 23, 53, 56, 57, 58, 131 n.29 MARÉS 41 n.70, 59–68, 70, 71, 73–74, 114, 125–26, 145 MARGARIS 123, 157–58, 160, 164, 178 Marguerite of Blois 192–93, 195, 204 Marguerite of France 109 Marie de France 5, 6, 10, 12–13, 208 Bisclavret 98 n.49 Chievrefueil 112 n.2 Eliduc 9 Fresne 54 n.13 Guigemar 7, 8, 24, 25, 38 Lanval 8, 29, 33, 62 Milun 165 n.39, 173 Yonec 8, 39 Marie de Champagne 107, 157 n.17, 187, 196, 203, 212 Marshal, William 109 MARUC 76 n.6, 110, 148 MARUCHIN 59, 62, 63 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars versificatoria 150–51 Maurice de Sully 69–70, 73, 136, 208–09 MEDIA 158, 160 MELIOR 41, 71, 128, 134–35, 137, 140, 157–58, 160–61, 166, 179, 187, 202 age of 19, 21, 32–38 as fairy-mistress 25–26, 42–43, 80 as huntress 31, 48

INDEX

as object of the Sultan’s love 45– 47, 163, 165, 172–76, 178 education of 33, 36, 80 relationship with Ernoul 43–44, 48 relationship with Partonopeus 42, 45, 49, 68, 71, 76, 128, 143, 201, 204 as secret lover 25, 27, 29, 38–39, 122–23, 144 marriage to 25, 26, 73, 84, 155, 168–69, 172, 183, 192 mercenaries 40, 59, 60, 66 merveilleux 79–80, 110, 209 ministeriales 52, 70 mise en abyme 16, 112, 145, 147, 209, 211 Mort Artu 102, 104 Myriokephalum, battle of 159, 161, 190, 202 Narcisus et Dané 7, 12, 22–23, 29, 30 n.33, 32, 38, 48, 138, 151 n.3, 152, 195 narrative discontinuity see faultline narrative technique 42, 112, 146; see also closure, doubling, firstperson narration, fusion, mise en abyme narrator figure 17, 71 n.52, 140, 195–201; see also narratorial interventions narratorial interventions 76, 118, 120, 135, 143, 167, 184–85, 218–28 narrator as lover in 71, 75, 121, 174, 180–81, 185, 195–205, 212 nature and nurture 117 Neckam, Alexander, De naturis rerum libri duo 92 n.39, 134 NIECE OF THE KING OF FRANCE 21 n.7, 33, 75, 208 NOON 80, 116, 130, 131–32, 136, 137, 140–41, 143–44 metaphorical function of 71, 75, 82, 144 models for 128–29, 131, 133–34 Nur ad-Din 159–60, 161 oak tree 82, 83, 85

257

Orient 13, 79, 80–81, 110, 128, 202 Ovid 6, 7, 12, 30, 48, 208 41–43 panther 100–01 Paris, bishop of see Maurice de Sully PARIS, BISHOP OF 41 n.70, 68–70, 71, 73, 123, 136, 145 Partalopa Saga 20, 30 n.33, 38 n.59, 211 n.5 PARTHIA 158, 160 Parthonopeus van Bloys 17, 165, 169–73, 175, 191, 195 Partonope of Blois 21, 36 n.53, 39 n.61, 66 n.41, 83 n.26, 189 n.19, 190, 211 n.5 Paris, Arsenal 2986 (MS A) 2, 76, 153, 156, 190, 193, 200 n.38, 202 n.40, 209, 216 ending of 157, 161, 168–69, 188, 191 lacunae in 118–20, 126, 168–69, 215, 221–24 Paris, BnF fr. 19152 (MS G) 2, 4, 86–93, 97–99, 113, 115–19, 162–63, 165, 179 n.1, 213, 216 Paris, BnF fr. 368 (MS P) 2 n.5, 86– 93, 97–98, 99, 113, 115–18, 162–63, 168–69, 179 n.1, 191, 216 abridgement in 87, 89–90, 99, 118 best text of the Continuation 87, 91, 93, 98, 99, 114, 117, 120, 165 interpolations in 108, 211 Paris, BnF Nouv. acq. fr. 2517 (Disciplina clericalis) 173, 175–77 Paris, BnF nouv. acq. fr. 751 (MS L) 2 n.5, 86, 113, 115–19, 162, 211, 216 colophon to 16, 102–03, 106, 107– 08, 111, 113, 162–63 PARTONOPEUS 47, 81, 187, 191, 199, 201 n.39, 202, 204, 210 age of 19–32, 43–44 ancestry of 53, 58, 153 PACKHORSE KNIGHT

258

INDEX

PARTONOPEUS cont. Anselot as double of see under ANSELOT

compared to the narrator 71, 197 portrait of 29–32, 48 relationship with Anselot 74, 80, 112, 121 relationship with Melior see under MELIOR

social promotion of 74, 76, 137, 156, 161, 208 suicide attempt 76–78, 82–84, 110, 118–20, 141–42, 144 war with Sornegur 61, 62, 67, 137, 167 war with the Sultan 123, 163, 166, 178, 181, 182, 183 Passe Rose 168, 172, 192–95, 204, 205 patronage of PB 17, 146, 156–57, 179, 192–205, 209 Persenober og Konstantianobis 38 n.59 PERSEWIS 38–39, 41, 45, 49, 75, 76, 78, 140 n.42, 187, 201 n.39 PERSIA 158–60, 161, 167, 171, 183, 190; see also SULTAN (OF PERSIA) PHARAMOND 58 Philip Augustus, king of France 23, 63, 65 n.38, 204 n.49 Philippe de Thaün, Bestiaire 98 n.52, 100, 101 Philomena see Chrétien de Troyes Physiologus 94, 98 Pierre de Beauvais, Bestiaire 98 n.53 Pierre de Beaumarchais 50 Piramus, Denis, La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei 12–13, 107, 210 Piramus et Tisbé 6, 7–8, 12, 13, 22–23, 29, 32, 48, 138, 144, 152 Pliny the Elder, Histoire naturelle 79, 94 n.46, 95, 98, 100, 101 n.57 Poema de Mio Cid 82 n.22 political fiction, PB as 16, 72, 81–82, 157 PONTOISE 59, 61, 66, 67, 68 Potiphar’s wife motif 130 PRIAM 53, 55, 58, 74, 136

prologue 9, 12 n.48, 25 n.20, 98 n.49, 124, 151, 185, 196, 207, 212 first prologue to PB 8, 23, 32, 44 n.74, 63, 70, 128, 131 n.29, 134 n.33, 136, 153, 199, 201 as programme for reading 52–59, 61, 73, 209 ornithological prelude 75, 80, 200, 209 political subtext in 66, 200, 209 reference to patron 7, 122 n.16, 196, 202, 204 prologue to the Continuation 113, 121, 124 n.19, 155, 185, 187, 191, 197–99, 202, 212 proverbs and sententiae 121, 136, 151, 176 Proverbs, Book of 89 n.35, 106, 133, 208, 211 Psalms 93 n.43, 98, 106, 131 n.30, 208 puer senex topos 20, 44, 45, 46, 49 Queste del Saint Graal 102, 104 Raoul de Cambrai 19 n.2 Raoul de Houdenc, Meraugis de Portlesguez 50 reception 9–11, 135, 147, 149, 211– 12 of PB by its first audience 10, 21, 28, 63, 157, 195–56, 200, 202, 210–11 of PB by subsequent audiences 17, 200, 211, 213 Renaut, Le Bel Inconnu 32 n.41, 39 n.60, 178, 204 n.51, 213 rewriting 2, 5, 6, 9–13, 16–17, 28, 75, 152, 161 n.31, 208; see also aemulatio, imitatio, intertextuality in the Roman de Thèbes 22 n.36 of current affairs in PB 34, 61 of ending of A version of PB 118, 129, 146, 150, 156, 157, 160, 177, 188–89 of other texts in PB 24, 39, 52, 77–78, 83–84, 110; see also under Eneas

INDEX

of PB by other authors 20, 39 n.60, 148, 177, 182, 185 n.11 self-rewriting in PB 58, 78 n.10, 142–43, 144–45, 210 Richard I, king of England 109–10, 187 n.16 Robert of Torigni 23 Roman de la Rose 193–94 Roman de Renart 51, 99, 102 Roman de Thèbes 7–9, 29, 55, 59, 62, 110, 140, 151–52, 202, 208 age of protagonists in 22–23, 26, 32–33, 39, 44 n.72 Capaneüs episode in 16, 77–79, 83–84, 110 figure of Parthonopieus in 26, 158 manuscripts and versions of 76, 77, 110 romance 1, 6, 9–10, 11, 16, 71, 146, 178, 179, 196, 207; see also dynastic romance, romans d’antiquité Romance of Yder 132–33 romans d’antiquité 5, 6, 12, 56 n.19, 152, 204, 208, 209; see also Eneas, Roman de Thèbes, Roman de Troie, Roman d’Alexandre ROME 8 n.28, 55–56, 58, 74, 116, 121 EMPEROR OF 70, 71, 74, 82, 117, 121, 128–30, 138, 140–41, 144 EMPRESS OF 71, 130, 139, 141 Rum, Sultan of 159–62, 177 see SYRIA, KING OF Saladin 161 salut d’amour 172–77, 178, 179, 180, 191 SARDINIA 80, 86 n.31, 116, 121, 130– 32, 140–41, 146 scorpion 85, 91, 92, 95 Seljuk sultanate 159–60, 161 Sens, archbishop of 69 senex fortis topos 44, 49 sententiae see proverbs Servius 6, 138 n.40 Seven Sages 12, 23 n.14, 40–41, 127–31, 136–37, 145, 208 SADES

259

Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronica 23– 24 single combat 60, 62, 67, 157 snake 75, 79–80, 91, 92, 93, 96, 104–05, 128; see also adder, asp, dipsa, dragon, viper social classes, conflict between 51– 52, 57, 61, 72–74 Solomon 133–34, 208 SORNEGUR 45, 52, 59–67, 73, 74, 114, 119, 125, 135 age of 142 as opponent of the hero 26 n.21, 37, 59–61, 78 n.10, 137 Sornegur episode 59, 62–63, 68, 85, 125, 136, 144, 167, 186 SORSIN 119, 120–21 SOUPLICE 45, 49 sow 30, 96–97, 100, 101 Spain 13, 73 n.55, 187–89, 208 spider 91–92, 95 Statius 8, 9, 26, 27, 28, 30, 77, 84, 208 Stephen, King of England 210 n.4 Stephen of Bec (Rouen), Draco Normannicus 65 n.36 subtext 58, 62, 63, 66, 69, 104, 112, 160, 201, 208–09 suicide see under PARTONOPEUS SULTAN (OF PERSIA) 41 n.70, 43–44, 45, 81, 113, 156, 164–65, 177, 181–82, 202; see also MARGARIS age of 40 love for Melior 45, 46–47, 71 n.52, 163, 167, 172–74, 176, 177–78, 185, 191 real-life model for 157–62 resurrection of 118, 119, 123, 153, 157, 160–62, 177, 202, 210 war with Partonopeus 84, 123, 146, 155, 164, 166, 170, 183–84, 187, 191, 213 supernatural see merveilleux Syria 80, 159, 161 SYRIA, KING OF 40, 157, 158, 161 37, 42, 123, 145 Thibaut V, count of Blois 69, 192, 196, 202–05, 209, 210

TENEDON

260

INDEX

tiger 75, 96–97, 99 toad 85, 92, 95 translatio studii et imperii 8 n.28, 25, 56 Tristan romances 5, 11, 12, 60, 134, 153, 187, 208, 212–13; see also Béroul Tours, Bibliothèque Municipale 939 (MS T) 4, 11, 86–87, 115–20, 124 n.19, 156, 179 n.1, 211, 216 ending of 2, 17, 163, 165–77 interpolations in 89–93, 97–101, 108, 200 n.38, 211 troubadours 173, 192, 204 unicorn 96–99 Urraca I of Léon-Castile 188 Urraca of Portugal, queen of Léon 188–89 Urraca López de Haro 188–89 URRAQUE 8 n.32, 38, 84, 110, 140, 156, 164, 178 as adjuvant figure 36, 37, 41 n.70, 75, 76–78, 119–20 disappearance of in the Continuation 187–91, 210 in Middle Dutch version 165, 172 Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1971 (MS V) 2, 86, 189–90, 216–17 versification 172, 173–74, 176, 178, 179–81, 185–86, 205, 212

in the fils à vilain tirade 88, 90–91, 93, 111 Vexin 65, 66 Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne 34 n.47 Vikings 66, 121 vilain 50–51, 57, 74, 117, 125, 136, 138–39; see also fils à vilain viper 79, 92, 93–94, 95–96 Virgil 6, 53–58, 77, 94, 148 Wace 138 Brut 8, 131–32, 145, 152, 208, 213 Roman de Rou 66, 180, 192 n.23, 208 Walter of Châtillon, Alexandreis 181 n.5 weather, as analogue for the fils à vilain 85, 89–90 werewolf 85, 96–98, 99 William fitzStephen, Vita sancti Thomae 65 n.35 William of Canterbury, Vita et passio S. Thomae 64–65 William the Conqueror 109 wolf 75, 80, 85, 88, 91, 96–97, 100, 101–02 women, discourse on 199–202 XERXES

54 n.13

Already Published 1. Postcolonial Fictions in the ‘Roman de Perceforest’: Cultural Identities and Hybridities, Sylvia Huot 2. A Discourse for the Holy Grail in Old French Romance, Ben Ramm 3. Fashion in Medieval France, Sarah-Grace Heller 4. Christine de Pizan’s Changing Opinion: A Quest for Certainty in the Midst of Chaos, Douglas Kelly 5. Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado, eds Eglal Doss-Quinby, Roberta L. Krueger, E. Jane Burns 6. The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred, Andrew Cowell 7. Logic and Humour in the Fabliaux: An Essay in Applied Narratology, Roy J. Pearcy 8. Miraculous Rhymes: The Writing of Gautier de Coinci, Tony Hunt 9. Philippe de Vigneulles and the Art of Prose Translation, Catherine M. Jones 10. Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song, Helen Dell 11. Chartier in Europe, eds Emma Cayley, Ashby Kinch 12. Medieval Saints’ Lives: The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography, Emma Campbell 13. Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France, eds Rebecca Dixon, Finn E. Sinclair with Adrian Armstrong, Sylvia Huot, Sarah Kay 14. The Troubadour Tensos and Partimens: A Critical Edition, Ruth Harvey, Linda Paterson 15. Old French Narrative Cycles: Heroism between Ethics and Morality, Luke Sunderland 16. The Cultural and Political Legacy of Anne de Bretagne: Negotiating Convention in Books and Documents, ed. Cynthia J. Brown 17. Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France, Katherine Kong 18. The Old French Lays of Ignaure, Oiselet and Amours, eds Glyn S. Burgess, Leslie C. Brook 19. Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes, Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sarah Kay, Sharon Kinoshita, Peggy McCracken 20. Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry, Julie Singer

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS

PARTONOPEUS DE BLOIS Romance in the Making

Penny Eley

Penny Eley

Partonopeus de Blois is one of the most important works of twelfth-century French fiction; it shaped the development of romance as a genre, gave rise to adaptations in several other medieval languages and even an opera (Massanet’s Esclarmonde). However, partly because of its complicated transmission history, and partly due to the fact that it has been overshadowed by the works of Chrétien de Troyes, it has been unjustly neglected. This first full-length study of the romance brings together literary, historical and manuscript studies to explore its making as it evolved through seven medieval ‘editions’, the earliest of which probably predated most of Chrétien’s romances. The book’s thematic analyses show how the Partonopeus poet applied established techniques of rewriting to a wide range of classical, vernacular and Celtic sources, combining this literary fusion with political subtexts to create a new and influential model of romance composition. Detailed studies of the Continuation reveal more ambitious experimentation by the original author, as well as the activities of a series of ‘editors’ who continued to modify the text for over a century. A final discussion of patronage proposes a new reading of the poem's distinct narratorial interventions on women and love, and suggests a link between Partonopeus and a disturbing episode in the history of Blois. PEnny ElEy is Professor of Medieval French at the University of Sheffield.

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