Sharon Kinoshita

Pagans are wrong and Christians are right: Alterity, Gender, and Nation in the Chanson de Roland

Recent metahistories of our discipline have uncovered how strongly the canonization of the Roland as the preeminent French epic is linked to the historical exigencies of the late nineteenth century. Prized as a precocious assertion of French national sentiment, it performed important cultural work as the Third Republic strove to overcome the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. At this foundational moment in the history of medieval French studies, epic was thus defined as the perfect expression of a feudal, Christian, nationalist ethos in which women had no part. In this essay I revisit this gendered construction of difference to suggest that the representational regime of the Roland is far less secure than it initially appears. In part one, I suggest that the poem is haunted by a crisis of nondifferentiation strongly at odds with the monological fixity usually ascribed to it. Disengaging its representation of the pagans from modern racialist and Orientalist paradigms reveals how strongly it exemplifies a concept of alterity markedly different from our own. The stark simplicity of Roland’s pronouncement “Paien unt tort e crestiens unt dreit” conceals the instability unsettling each side of the confessional divide. The dualism it implies is

Heldris de Cornualle's Roman de Silence and the Feudal Politics of Lineage

The thirteenth-century French text Le roman de Silence is the story of a counts daughter, Silence, brought up as a boy because the king has prohibited female inheritance. Whereas previous readings...

Translatio/n, empire, and the worlding of medieval literature: the travels of Kalila wa Dimna *

Around the turn of the fourteenth century, the French queen, Joan of Navarre, commissioned an otherwise unknown physician named Raymond de Béziers to execute a Latin translation of an eastern tale collection known as the Book of Kalila and Dimna. Ultimately derived from the Panchatantra (a Sanskrit mirror for princes dating back to c. 300 CE), Kalila and Dimna had already been translated into Pahlavi, Old Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek and Spanish, and, within a few years, would be rendered into Turkish and even Mongol. Joan died before the project was complete, but in 1313 a luxurious manuscript of the translation was presented to her husband, King Philip IV; entitled the Liber Regius and richly illuminated with 143 miniatures (BNF MS Lat. 8504), it was indeed a book fit for a king. A few years later, far to the east, another manuscript of the same tale was compiled in Tabriz, the capital of Ilkhanid (Mongol-ruled) Persia: a twelfth-century Persian translation (the text now largely lost) accompanied by illustrations which, some time in the sixteenth century, were cut out of the original and remounted in a large Ottoman picture album (IUL F.1422) according to size and shape. What are we to make of these two nearly contemporary manuscripts of the same text, made thousands of miles apart in milieux associated with the Capetian kings of France and the Ilkhans of Persia, respectively? In this essay I take this surprising ‘coincidence’ as the point of departure for a critical examination of the medieval culture of translation and a long tradition in the ideological construction of empire. In the prologue of his late twelfth-century French romance Cligés, Chrétien de Troyes gives what has become a canonical articulation of the twinned motifs of translatio studii (the transfer/translation of learning) and translatio imperii (the transfer of empire)*the historical migration of knowledge and power (the latter as exemplified, for example, in Virgil’s Aeneid). In Chrétien’s (proto-Hegelian?) vision, intellectual and political hegemony, having passed together from Greece to Rome, have now come to settle in France. (A similar assertion appears in the work of Chrétien’s contemporary, chronicler Otto of Freising* except that in his scheme, letters and empire have come to rest not in France but in the German empire ruled by Otto’s nephew, Frederick Barbarossa.) The transmission history of Kalila wa Dimna, on the other hand, charts an alternative history of translatio. Originating in India and running through

Ports of Call: Boccaccio's Alatiel in the Medieval Mediterranean

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron II.7 recounts the adventures of Alatiel, the beautiful daughter of the sultan of Babylon (Cairo). Dispatched from Alexandria to be wed to the Muslim king of Algarve (southern part of current-day Portugal), she is shipwrecked on the island of Majorca. There she is rescued by a nobleman, Pericone of Visalgo, who, taken with her beauty, quickly seduces her. Pericone, however, is soon stabbed by his own brother, who wants Alatiel for himself. This inaugurates a string of adventures in which Alatiel passes from one man to another — including two Genoese shipowners, the prince of Achaea, the duke of Athens, the prince of Constantinople, the Turkish emir of Smyrna, and a Cypriot merchant — the strange power of her beauty driving each to murder or other acts of malfeasance in order to possess her. Eventually, in Famagusta, she is recognized by one of her father’s former retainers, who returns her to the sultan and supplies her with a cover story to explain away her long absence. Restored to her rightful rank, Alatiel is once again dispatched to marry the king of Algarve, presumably to live happily ever after. Typically, this astonishing tale has been read for the ways it exemplifies the theme of the Decameron’s Second Day (those who attain unexpected happiness after suffering a series of misfortunes); for its thematics of silence (the way Alatiel, unable to communicate with her Christian captors, conceals her identity in order to protect her reputation);

Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary

Just after their marriage, Chretien de Troyes’s protagonists Erec and Enide lead a procession to church, where Erec donates 60 silver marks and a gold crucifix containing a piece of the True Cross once belonging to Emperor Constantine. Enide then approaches the altar, prays for the birth of an heir, and makes her offering:1 Puis a ofert desor l’autel un paisle vert, nus ne vit tel, et une grant chasuble ovree; tote a fin or estoit brosdee, et ce fu veritez provee que l’uevre an fist Morgue la fee el Val Perilleus, ou estoit; grant antante mise i avoit. D’or fu de soie d’Aumarie; la fee fet ne l’avoit mie a oes chasuble por chanter, mes son ami la volt doner por feire riche vestemant, car a mervoille ert avenant; Ganievre, par engin molt grant, la fame Artus le roi puissant, l’ot par l’empereor Gassa; une chasuble feite an a, si l’ot maint jor en sa chapele por ce que boene estoit et bele; quant Enide de li torna, cele chasuble li dona; qui la verite an diroit, plus de cent mars d’argent valoit. (2353-76, emphasis added) [Then she placed on the altar a green paille, the likes of which no one had seen, and a great embroidered chasuble all embroidered in pure gold. It was well known that Morgan la Fay had made it in Val Perilleus. She had taken great care over it. It was of gold Almeria silk. The fairy hadn’t at all made it to be a chasuble to sing mass in, but wanted to give it to her lover to make a rich garment out of. Through a clever scheme, Guenevere, wife of the powerful King Arthur, got it through Emperor Gassa. She had a chasuble made from it, and had kept it in her chapel for a long time, for it was good and beautiful. When Enide left her, she gave her this chasuble; in truth, it was worth more than a hundred silver marks.]

Male-Order Brides: Marriage, Patriarchy, and Monarchy in the Roman de Silence

Continuing her previous work on the Roman de Silences conservative politics, the author analyzes two specific mechanisms through which King Ebain enhances monarchical power: exchanging an adulterous, exogamous wife for a chaste, endogamous one; and dispossessing the earl of Chester, a great baron of the realm.

Two for the Price of One: Courtly Love and Serial Polygamy in the Lais of Marie de France

The represention of repudiation and remarriage in Fresne and Eliduc constitutes a vindication of feudal dynastic politics over the churchs efforts to regulate aristocratic marriages.

“Noi siamo mercatanti cipriani” : How to Do Things in the Medieval Mediterranean

This volume, the first to address Philippe Mezieres (1327-1405) and his legacy comprehensively since 1896, gathers twenty-two contributions shedding new light on Philippe’s literary, political, and mystical writings, and places him in the context of his age and his contemporaries.

Negotiating the Corrupting Sea: Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean

What is medieval Mediterranean Literature? Since literary texts are defined in the first instance by the language in which they are composed, it is not immediately apparent what could count as “Mediterranean” literature. This essay explores what a “Mediterranean” literary corpus might look like: texts that highlight themes (connectivity, piracy, commerce, cultural contact, and more) described by historians of the Mediterranean; texts in which the sea or sea travel play a central role; texts that through translation and adaptation have themselves traveled across two or more Mediterranean cultures; texts in which the Mediterranean is an indispensable frame of reference; texts shaped by significant Mediterranean events (such as the Sicilian Vespers ). Special attention is given to the longue duree of Mediterranean literature (in a nod to Fernand Braudel ) and to texts that highlight the mutual intelligibility linking politically, linguistically, or religiously different societies.

Reflections: Talking Mediterranean

Reflecting back on the colloquium, Catlos suggests that Mediterranean studies should not be conceived of as a new, rigidly conceived paradigm to replace old, rigidly conceived paradigms, but rather a loose approach to certain problems that old approaches do not seem to be able to account for. Kinoshita notes the inevitable problems that come with terminology as it becomes associated with certain concrete concepts, and reflects on the composite nature of the Mediterranean. Hilsdale sees in the “thalassal optic” and the Mediterranean a means of distinguishing overlapping circles of influence that together lend meaning to objects. Farago sees in the Mediterranean frame, the potential to build out further towards a global understanding of art and culture. Finally, Horden reflects on the inevitability of politics invading our historical and cultural discourses, however determinedly we might wish to avoid it.