Abstract
This volume brings together thirteen essays by an impressive roster of academics from North America and Europe. Collectively, it addresses one of the most curious features of medieval allegory: its reliance on first-person narration. Dream-visions are often explicitly delivered from the position of a well-defined ‘I’ who recounts his encounters as quasi-personal experiences. However, this speaking ‘I’ occupies a vexed position: on the one hand, it is not usually biographic, or a piece of self-fashioning of the kind familiar from Greenblatt's work; on the other, it is not merely a rhetorical construct, since it will invariably ask the reader to identify its flesh-and-blood author in it. In fact, as the editors suggest in their lively and insightful introduction, the uncertain status of this ‘I’ might well account for its special kinship with allegory, since both share a ‘transgressive’ ability to ‘oscillate between fiction and discourse’, one that equally gestures towards the real world and to abstract truths' (p. 15).
The essays themselves engage with these complexities from several directions. They vary considerably – most visibly in length, but also in the dates and languages of their sources, which cover the broad period c.1225–1509, and are drawn from French, German, Spanish, Italian, English and Latin. Yet despite this breadth, the chapters show a unity in approach. The majority look closely at concrete examples, and carefully tease out the manoeuvres individual writers make when constructing their personae, often step-by-step. The first essay sets the pace. Here David Hult examines Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, focusing especially on the bridge between the original and extended texts. He locates in this fraught moment a distinct sense of author-function, albeit one that cultivates ‘uncertainty’ rather than authority (p. 31). Following Hult, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet examines Machaut's sequence of three interrelated poems, Le Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre and Le Lay de Plour. She finds concealed beneath their love-debates a self-conscious meditation on writing, one that sees Machaut's author-persona fluctuating between the roles of interrogator, co-author and narrator. Kevin Brownlee follows a similar line of inquiry in relation to René d’Anjou, suggesting that René's engagement with the Roman de la Rose and Queste del Saint Graal creates jarring disparities within his poetic self. These rifts, however, are largely the point, authorising him to talk about the chameleonic subject of love. Fragmentation continues to dominate in Robert Fajen's fascinating account of Le livre du Chevalier by Thomas III, marquis of Saluzzo. Thomas’ work is a deliberate exercise in whitewashing, seeking to assert its author's newfound maturity; however, it also tacitly acknowledges the unstable nature of the literary-mediated self it constructs, especially in its reuse of conflicting characters from Arthurian tradition.
The focus shifts a little with R. Barton Palmer's essay on Machaut's earliest narrative poem Dit dou Vergier. Although the most critically derided of its author's works, Palmer finds it a subtle hybrid of Boethian dialogue and narrative allegory, one that fixes the course for much of Machaut's later output. Sonja Glauch follows with the most theoretically situated essay in the collection, taking up Booth's idea of the unreliable narrator, and asking whether it can be fairly applied to premodern literature. The answer is firmly in the negative: her survey of candidates, which includes Chaucer, Raoul de Houdenc, and the German Unsinnsdichtung, finds little evidence of narrative voice being deliberately distanced from the author and treated as a literary puzzle. Julia Rüthemann's essay also takes a wide-angle approach, looking at the recurring symbol of the heart in the work of Johann von Konstanz, Tibaut and René d’Anjou. She argues that the heart, being part of the narrating ‘I’ and separate from him, mirrors the allegorising subject himself, who also occupies ‘the threshold between the body and allegory, between the intimate and universal’ (p. 173).
The next block of essays considers turning-points in the development of allegory. Helen Swift looks to Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans Merci and the querelle it generated, noting how Chartier's rhetorical posture actively invites debate by committing to ‘disjuncture rather than coherence’ (p. 195). Sylvia Huot returns to the Roman de la Rose and explores the ways in which its embedded Ovidian narratives cause rapid shifts between contradictory meanings and modes, setting up a ‘kaleidoscopically shifting pastiche’ of differing ‘philosophical perspectives’ that created an unsteady foundation for later imitators (p. 212). Friedrich Wolfzettel follows suit in his essay on Boccaccio. He sees the Amorosa Visione as a major rupture between medieval and Renaissance thought, steering the genre in a recognisably humanist direction and recoding love as simultaneously intellectual and erotic.
The final three pieces push the discussion towards lesser-known works. Laurence de Looze writes on two under-researched Spanish texts, Libro de buen amor and Cárcel de amor. He shows that both make themselves interpretable as pure invention and as records of individual experience, by means of their comic irony and slippage between different levels of authenticity. Susanne A. Friede analyses the work of Guiraut Riquier, focusing on his career-retrospective Libre. Although Guiraut takes the unusual step of allocating years to individual poems, in the style of an annal, the Libre is not a record of personal development; rather it cements the identity of his political community, recording his ‘contribution to the interpretation and memorialization’ of the Narbonne court (p. 251). Finally, Christian Schneider examines the ways in which Hadamar von Laber's Die Jagd treats love as a textual rather than strictly emotional process, and in the process neatly restates many of the major preoccupations of the collection. His account of Hadamar's persona, and how it constitutes ‘a performative I […] who appears in the text to do something through speaking’, effectively articulates one of the central claims of the volume (p. 267).
As this brief overview should make clear, this is a stimulating collection. It is also stimulating in another sense, since it is clearly intended to provoke further discussion. Not only does Palmer's postscript justly claim that it provides the ‘first transnational account’ of its peculiar nexus of concerns, but it makes concerted efforts to define the medieval sources as a cohesive group (p. 287). Although the introduction cautions against regarding them as a genre, preferring the term ‘family’, it also makes clear their resemblances and relationships, and concludes with a thorough catalogue of texts in this mode. Future work could have much weaker foundations.