French Medievalism and Its Discontents:
Testimony from the Proceedings of a Conference
Vincent Ferré, ed., Médiévalisme: Modernité du Moyen Âge.
Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010.
Reviewed by William
Calin (wcalin@ufl.edu)
Vincent Ferré,
"Introduction (I). Médiévalisme et théorie: pourquoi maintenant?":
7-25. This is the longest and most
important essay in the collection. Ferré
observes pertinently that, although work – good work – on the presence of the
Middle Ages in the post-medieval cultures has been published in France, going
back to the Poitiers La Licorne
collection of 1982, the term médiévalisme,
employed in our sense of "medievalism," dates from 2007. Ferré
modestly avoids a personal plaudit; nevertheless, it would appear that he
introduced the neologism into French. He
offers a rich, five-page (21-5) bibliography of French medievalism –
specifically the works cited in his essay.
Ferré is fully aware of the Anglo-American origins of the field; he
gives full credit to Studies in
Medievalism and to leaders in the discipline: Leslie Workman, followed, in
alphabetical order, by Karl Fugelso, David Metzger, Tom Shippey, Claire
Simmons, and Richard Utz. Finally, and
of special importance, Ferré discusses the place of theory in medievalism. Recognizing the pride of place awarded theory
in volumes 17, 18, and 19 of Studies in
Medievalism (ed. Fugelso), he calls for a similar reflection in
France. It is that theoretical
reflection which dominates the Metz-Malbrouck colloquium of November 2009, the
volume under review being the proceedings of that conference.
Comment: An
important, path-breaking study.
Bravo! Among the most active
figures in American medievalism, Ferré ought perhaps to have cited also
Gwendolyn Morgan. He did not probably
because, in addition to her scholarly publications, he is not acquainted with
the journal The Year's Work in
Medievalism, which has evolved, under the editorship of Morgan, M. Jane
Toswell, and now Edward Risden, into a venue of important, refereed scholarly
articles. It is also a pity that Ferré
said nothing about American contributions to French medievalism. Here the leading figure is Elizabeth Emery,
who, scrutinizing the late nineteenth century, brought about a paradigm shift
in our understanding of the reception of the Middle Ages in France. These recommendations are not meant, in any
way, to question the quality of this superbly crafted, innovative essay.
Éric Necker, "Introduction (2). Le château de
Malbrouck, un château médiéval d'aujourd'hui": 27-32. The conference took place in Metz, and in
this restored castle in Lorraine.
Malbrouck itself is significant.
A fortified castle built late in the fifteenth century when the
fortification structures were already out-of-date, it testifies to cultural
nostalgia (late-medieval medievalism?).
The ruins were tastefully restored in the 1990's, so that Malbrouck now
responds to our images of the Middle Ages, whatever they may be.
Comment: A
good contribution.
Jeff Rider, "L'utilité du Moyen Âge":
35-45. Rider distinguishes between the
historicist or scholarly representation of the Middle Ages and the popular,
anachronistic, medievalist representation.
In both cases the outcome is largely the same: to imagine a world which
is not ours yet one where we could have lived and which acts upon our
being-in-the-world today. "For
historicism, the Middle Ages is a historical concept; for medievalism, it is a
style" (42).
Comment: A
good, challenging essay. One can respond
that the historicist historians also partake of medievalism, and consequently
that medievalism should not be limited to the aesthetic. I should also have liked some scholarly
references other than citations from Paul Ricoeur.
Gil Bartholeyns, "Le passé sans l'histoire. Vers une
anthropologie culturelle du temps": 47-60.
In an intelligent, challenging essay Bartholeyns discusses the
significant presence of the past, including the Middle Ages, in cinema. He argues that film makers do not seek to
reconstitute history in a quest for "realism." Instead, they create their own world of
"reality" as part of their creative, aesthetic search for a human
truth which will transcend history. In
theoretical terms, next to history and memory, he places a third domain: the
past without history, the a-historical past in antithesis to historical
reality. This would be an aesthetic past
which nurtures creativity and play.
Thomas Honegger,
"(Heroic) Fantasy and the Middle Ages: Strange Bedfellows or an Ideal
Cast?": 61-71. Honegger argues
persuasively and with finesse that the Middle Ages serves as a "temporal
fantasy" (62) offered to modern readers by Lewis, Tolkien, and the author
of the Conan the Barbarian
series. He concentrates on the knight as
the typical medieval secular figure, combining strength and courtliness. The knight is perceived to be a figure for
non-alienated men and to be the high representative of hierarchical order. Modern fantasy then shares certain core
characteristics of romance: wandering, obscured identity, idealization, the
marvelous or supernatural, and narrative delay.
Comment: When
Honegger gives as an example of narrative delay the interlace pattern in
Chrétien de Troyes (68), he should have cited instead the Lancelot-Grail Prose Cycle.
Chrétien only begins the process which will be expanded and perfected by
later writers.
Myriam White-Le Goff, "Quel Moyen Âge dans l'édition
pour la jeunesse?": 73-83. In this
chapter the author scrutinizes deftly and insightfully the place of medieval
literature in French children's literature.
The largest segment includes chansons
de geste and courtly romance. There
are certain publishers who aim for an accurate modern translation of the
medieval texts, respecting their integrity.
The majority, however, expurgate, revise, and entirely rewrite, usually
without notifying the reader. And, since
we are dealing with literature meant for the schools in a resolutely secular
educational establishment, the ties with religion are cut as much as is
possible. The result is a literature
without savor, texture, and the power of suggestion. However, the literature inspires young
people's imagination anyway, especially when the heroes are youths growing up
such as Perceval and Huon de Bordeaux.
If the Middle Ages is associated with childhood, this is not a bad thing
‒ for children and for
creative writers.
Comment: The
term "family romance" comes from Freud before it was adopted by
Marthe Robert (80-1).
Anne Larue, "Le médiévalisme entre hypnose numérique
et conservatisme rétro": 87-96. In this, the worst essay in the collection,
Larue indulges in an early-phase feminist and populist diatribe. Against all the evil unleashed upon the world
in the 1980s by the "United Patriarchy" (88), "le backlash" against the progressive
impulses of the preceding decade, "medievalism undertakes a hidden
struggle on the terrain of the imaginary . . . a counter-discourse in fantasy which . . . contains a force of
denunciation against the imposed ideology" (88, 89). "La Fantasy"
offers hope and consolation. Larue
denounces high culture in all its manifestations, including the literature
published by Gallimard, the leading press in France. It is on the Web, on medfan sites, that true masterpieces, appreciated by a true public,
will be disseminated. As Larue sees it,
"meditation on the soul and on God . . . [are] retrograde religious values
belonging to patriarchal America" (91) and "vampires in the forest,
werewolves, women, all that folklore . . . kept secret for millennia, all this
explodes today" (90).
Comment:
Explodes indeed. This contribution
demonstrates why conference proceedings have to be refereed by external
evaluators.
Jean-François Thull, "L'inspiration médiévale des
Pères de l'Europe contemporaine: l'exemple de Jean de Pange": 97-109. In this moving, profoundly Humanist chapter,
Thull evokes the memory of a scholar and intellectual from Lorraine, who
partook of and contributed to a current of thought after the Great War, one
which imagined an integrated, unified Europe based on the example of
Charlemagne and his Carolingian Empire.
The Middle Ages was the model for this line of thinking, because of
Charlemagne and because of what was thought to be medieval Christian
spirituality and unity. Just as
Lotharingia bridges France and Germany, so also the new Europe could bridge,
and serve as a counter-example to, the United States and the Soviet Union.
Véronique Dominguez, "D'Oberammergau au Jeu d'Adam: le sacré à l'épreuve du
médiévalisme": 113-23. She
discusses two modern translators of the twelfth-century Jeu d'Adam and how they help shape the meaning of the medieval text
and of the several stagings of the play in the twentieth century. She sees an element of tragedy in the
text. Dominguez believes that, although
the Oberammergau passion play appears to the public to be solidly anchored in
the Middle Ages, in fact its mythology is not medieval at all. The German play dates from the seventeenth
century and was rewritten in the nineteenth.
More to the point, it relies upon the amateur status of the actors, the
confusion between the actor and the spectator and between the stage and the
auditorium, and the play conceived as a ritual act, a Mass which unites the
Christian community and excludes others.
Comment: All
these Oberammergau practices which Dominguez denounces can be envisaged as
typically medieval and as inherent in medieval theater, whether it be the
French mystery plays or the English miracle plays. The performance itself as quasi-sacred
liturgy uniting the spectators in a Christian community is a splendid insight
which can be applied to medieval sacred drama.
Dominguez states that, concerning Oberammergau, she relied upon three
books: two in English and one in French, all three, in my opinion, hostile to
the Bavarian passion play. She evidently
missed the dozen and more books in German devoted to Oberammergau. They would have given her a richer, more
complex, and more nuanced perspective.
Michèle Gally, "L'aura du Moyen Âge sur la scène
contemporaine": 125-37. In a rich,
complex, and nuanced essay, Gally scrutinizes the problematic of adopting
medieval romance to our contemporary stage, with two central questions: how to
treat material from a world distant in time and reeling with alterity, and how
to adapt for the stage material from vast, interlaced, multiple-character and
multiple-plot narratives. The obstacles
offer, of course, genuine possibilities for creativity. Gally recognizes the importance of the
staging and how the director shapes in a major way the audience response. She examines these questions by way of two
French stagings of a play by Tankred Dorst: Merlin
oder das wüste Land (Merlin ou La terre dévastée), one by Rodolphe Dana,
the other by Jorge Lavelli. Gally
insists upon the resolute modernism of Dorst and his adapters, strangely
congruent with the Middle Ages.
Corneliu Dragomirescu, "Cinéma médiéval: trios
niveaux de sens d'une expression ambiguë": 139-51. In a not especially original contribution,
Dragomirescu takes the side of creative directors against the scholars who
accuse them of being anachronistic. He
discusses films whose plots are located in the Middle ages; films set in the
Middle Ages where we see projected images, something like cinema itself; and
medieval themes and motifs in modern cinema, such as Fisher King, Knightriders,
and Pulp Fiction.
Comment: Dragomirescu
cites the medieval poet as "Chrétien de Troie" [Chrétien of Troy],
which does little to reassure us as to his command of the medieval Urstoff.
Mónica Ann Walker Vadillo, "Comic Books Featuring
the Middle Ages": 153-63. Walker
Vadillo offers an overview of comic strips set in the Middle Ages. She emphasizes the fact that the protagonists
are painted as exemplars of noble chivalry, in contrast to historical reality.
Comment: She
cites a strip which treats of England in 1193, "when Christianity began
displacing the original religions of the Isles" (154). She also cites as scholarly authority dubious
material on the Web.
Gérard Chandès, "Réplicateurs visuels et sonores du
monde néo-médiéval": 167-75. In a
challenging, thought-provoking, path-breaking essay, Chandès argues "that
the Middle Ages can be visually and verbally represented by basic forms linked
to sensory perception of space and self-perception of the body"
(167). Other historical periods lack
these simple forms. Among the replicators
he cites the circle, the cross, and the crenel.
He then discusses the phonology of the verbal replicator
"oyez."
Comment:
Chandès assumes the final grapheme "z" to be unpronounced. In the Middle Ages it was pronounced and
often still is in British and American legal proceedings.
Céline Checchetto, "Médiévalismes d'une sémiose: Le
Moyen Âge en chanson": 177-88. In a
penetrating study, Checchetto observes that song is or ought to be envisaged as
partaking of several different approaches, including "text, music, voice,
interpretation, orchestration, iconography, and scenography" (178), thus
forming a semiotic network. These
contribute to a new field of study: cantologie. Among the medieval intertextualities we find
the text itself, the music (early instruments, Gregorian modalities, rhythmic
modes, polyphony), and the pictorial: the medieval "look" performers
may adopt. We can consequently term the
medievalisms in song as a "medieval transsemiotic" (185).
Comment: An
illuminating contribution. But do we
really need cantologie? Well . . . why not? Academics have a right to their jargon, and
"cantology" is no worse than "medievalism" itself.
My conclusion: As is inevitable with non-refereed conference
proceedings, this is a mixed bag. The
weaker papers suffer from amateurism.
Indices of amateurism include inadequate footnotes or the absence of
footnotes altogether. Also, the mass of
critical work on medievalism, especially in English, demands engagement with
the preceding scholarship. Unlike Ferré
himself, the contributors are, for the most part, unacquainted with Studies in Medievalism; The Year's Work in Medievalism remains terra incognita. In addition, they can make mistakes
concerning the Middle Ages. And, as a
simple matter of course, scholars have to know the relevant lingue di cultura: English, French,
German, and Italian. And there can be no
place in scholarship for the crude expression of one's ideological loves and
hates.
It is also true that traces of amateurism are to be
expected in what is, after all, in France a new discipline. Especially heartening is the high quality of
the majority of the essays: powerfully intelligent, innovative, insightful, and
making a genuine contribution to the field.
The theoretical turn called for by Ferré has been answered, and answered
brilliantly.
Significantly, most of the essays concentrate on the
twentieth century and on popular culture.
Given that American medievalism has been expanding in precisely that
direction, it is normal that French médiévalistes
would do the same. The insights from the
majority of papers in this collection are superb – innovative and
thought-provoking in the best tradition of cultural criticism. However, Anglo-American medievalism, under
the aegis of Leslie Workman, began with a concentration on high culture: above
all, literature, but also music, the fine arts, architecture, and the life of
the mind in general. It also began
scrutinizing the past, from the Renaissance on, with special attention accorded
the nineteenth century, when the Middle Ages emerged as a counter weight to
classicism as a potential and actual norm and model. Major books by Alice Chandler, Kim Moreland,
and others created a paradigm shift in English studies comparable to Emery's
work on France. It is to be hoped that
French equivalents will come to the fore and enrich the domain of
pre-twentieth-century literary medievalism in the way that a number of studies
in this volume have done for the popular culture of our contemporary
world.
William Calin, University of Florida
William Calin, University of Florida
