Middle Ages, The
1. Origins of the Term
The notion of a Middle Age (medium œvum) separating the ancient world from modern times was first developed by humanists in the 14th c., although the term itself was not used until the beginning of the 17th c. Petrarch and his contemporaries were aware that a ‘dark age’ separated ‘modern’ Italians from their Roman roots. Petrarch's own attitude was ambivalent, since, while deprecating the ‘barbarities’ of pre-Dante Italian and regarding his own Italian writings as unworthy trifles, he admired the troubadours and, like Dante, used their example to develop his own poetics. It was the French humanists of the mid-16th c. who rejected out of hand an age identified with the Sorbonne and scientific logic expressed in a Latin which had remained a living idiom, in favour of a ‘renaissant’ return to Ciceronian purity of style and rhetoric. Rabelais, who also exploited both medieval epic and romance for subject-matter, and preaching manuals for narrative techniques, was most influential in inspiring scorn for the period, with his use of the pejorative words ‘gothique’ and ‘languegoth’ (which he coined on the model of langue d'oc) to describe respectively a whole culture and a literary style.
2. Political and Ideological Exploitation of the Term
The ‘Middle Ages’ have been more subject to manipulation for political and ideological ends than any other of the artificially identified segments into which Western historiography has traditionally divided its culture. It did, however, require a certain distance in time to provide a perspective within which the notion could be deployed as a symbolic shorthand in discourse on contemporary problems. The 16th c., engaged in defining its own distinctiveness, largely eschewed this temptation (although Claude Fauchet used his knowledge of medieval texts to bolster Gallicanism, an attitude which earned him lettres de noblesse in 1586); it is not until the reign of Louis XIV that we find the first manifestations of the phenomenon. The background to the Fronde was steeped in the idea, derived from a view of feudalism, of the peers as equals not only of each other but of the king, whose personal domination they sought to resist. The attitude is satirized in section 20 of ‘De la cour’ in La Bruyère's Caractères, in which a nobility marginalized by the king and his ministers seeks refuge in heraldic quarterings, crusader ancestors, and the ‘gothic quaintness’ of its non-modernized châteaux.
The use of the medieval past to resist the centralized rule of an absolutist monarchy supported by non-noble ministers became a commonplace at the end of the reign of Louis XIV and throughout the 18th c., finding expression in dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and treatises on nobility and chivalry. The Glossarium ad scriptores mediæ et infimæ latinitatis of Du Cange was published in three volumes in 1678. While its prime purpose was purely erudite, to provide a dictionary of medieval Latin, a number of articles included explanatory quotations from literary texts and charters in Old French. This aspect of the work, spotlighting ancestral French custom and culture, was consistently expanded by revisers producing successive new editions of the dictionary throughout the 18th c. Like Du Cange,
It was only with the Restoration that royalist Romantics, led by Victor Hugo, found in the Middle Ages a source of sound governance and national pride. The mood did not last, however, and the transformations can be plotted through the shifting attitudes expressed in successive redactions of Michelet's Histoire de France, notably in those essays dealing with the Crusades and Jeanne d'Arc. While the original versions are a paean to the vigour and independence of the French people under feudal monarchy, later redactions stress the ignorance, superstition, and oppression institutionalized by the alliance of Throne and Altar. The shift to a diabolic and barbaric Middle Ages represented in part an opposition to the espousal of medieval fashions by the regime of Napoleon III. A reaction against that view of the period was provoked by the events of 1870 [see
3. Scholarship and the Medieval Canon
In spite of the condemnation of the Pléiade, the process of preserving a corpus of medieval literature began in the 16th c. Clément Marot, in his translation of Le Roman de la Rose and his edition of Villon's Testament, was largely concerned with keeping alive a tradition of native culture still seen as vital. This was also the attitude of Fauchet, whose essentially philological researches into the origins and development of the French language incidentally preserved a large corpus of texts relating to French literature and to customary law. The 17th c. saw a hiatus in this activity, and interest in medieval texts was not seriously renewed until the 18th c., apart from the continued circulation of epic and romance texts as chapbook literature [see Bibliothèque Bleue]. The first attempt to produce a comprehensive history of the literature of the period was the monumental Histoire littéraire de la France, inaugurated by the Maurists in 1733; this is still proceeding under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. The comte de Tressan shows both his extensive knowledge of, and supercilious attitude to, medieval theatre in his article ‘Parade’ in the Encyclopédie, an ambivalence which is also manifest in his translations and adaptations in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, which included not only texts that have remained in the canon, like Huon de Bordeaux, but more marginal texts like the late prose romance Petit Artus de Bretagne. These were treated according to the tastes of the roman libertin. Rather more precious and moralistic in approach was Pierre Jean-Baptiste Le Grand d'Aussy, whose adapted editions of medieval contes and fabliaux (1781) tended to edulcoration. In 1756 Étienne Barbazan produced an anthology of texts transcribed from manuscripts in the Bibliothèque Royale and published in the original Old French, ranging from obscene fabliaux like Le Sentier battu, through Aucassin et Nicolette and the congés of the Arras poets, to pious and didactic works such as the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci and L'Ordene de chevalerie. The vogue for vulgarization did not die with the new century, and popular scholars like Achille Jubinal contributed regularly to periodicals, including women's magazines. Notable in this area was Le Journal des demoiselles which, in the 1830s and 1840s, specialized in ‘medievalism’, including adaptations of literary texts and biographies of great figures, among them several women, including Christine de Pizan.
The main thrust of work in the 19th c. was, however, philological. The first-generation editors were concerned with unearthing monuments from the libraries of Europe (Francisque Michel's telegram from Oxford: ‘J'ai trouvé la Chanson de Roland’, remains famous). In this period textual editing was still an art rather than a science, with little sense of how to date either manuscripts or works; the texts produced, in such important series as ‘Les Romans des Douze Pairs’ and ‘Les Anciens Poètes de France’, were based on an impressionistic view of the best manuscript. It was in the second half of the century, as the lessons of the German philologist Lachmann's work on establishing stemmata codicon from a collocation of ‘common errors’ were absorbed, that editors started trying to recreate the ‘archetype’ or author's text by a meticulous comparison of all known manuscripts. This was also the period that saw the founding of the Société des Anciens Textes, whose mission remains to publish a definitive corpus of medieval French literature to the highest scientific standards.
The first half of the 20th c. saw both the apogee of scientific philology, in which critical editions were regarded primarily as material for linguistic study, and the first serious attack on that position by one of its great practitioners, Joseph Bédier [see Manuscripts]. The abandonment of the Lachmann-style critical edition has been particularly notable in recent years in all areas except courtly romance, and even there editorial precedence is now given to the base manuscript. In epic studies theories of oral transmission have led to the preference for synoptic editions. The theory of the instability of medieval texts in manuscript transmission has produced similar solutions for lyric, lais, and fabliaux. Since World War II theories of oral composition have influenced attitudes to the poetics of the epic, which, like romance, has been analysed for mythographic content using techniques borrowed from anthropology, folklore, and religion. Since the 1960s Structuralist, semiotic, and deconstructionist approaches have been applied to medieval as to modern literature. The concept of histoire des mentalités of the Annales school has helped open the way for the use of reception theory, and for sociological and feminist approaches.
4. The Middle Ages in Art, Literature, and Film
It is not possible here to do more than mention one or two moments in the history of representation of the Middle Ages. The 15th c. was already exploiting nostalgically an image of the ‘High Middle Ages’, a monument to which is seen in René d'Anjou's Livre du Cueur d'amors espris, and in the 16th c. Marguerite de Navarre included a version of La Chastelaine de Vergi in her Heptaméron. It was, however, the 19th c. which saw the flood of medievalism into art and literature, with the architectural Gothic recreations and ‘restorations’ of Viollet-le-Duc, the style troubadour in decorative arts, and literary reconstitutions, such as Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Flaubert's Saint Julien l'Hospitalier. The diabolic and mystic interpretation emerged in Hugo's Légende des siècles, and in Axël by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. The 20th c.'s ambivalence to the period can be seen in Tournier's exploitation of the Gilles de Rais legend in Le Roi des aulnes, in Cocteau's satirical Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, and in Gracq's mysterious reworking of the Grail story in Au château d'Argol. In the theatre Anouilh alternates between the pageant of L'Alouette and the whimsical satire of Becket, while in cinema Bresson's dark and bloody Lancelot du Lac contrasts with Rohmer's falsely naïve Perceval.
[Philip Bennett]
Bibliography
- R. Pernoud, Pour en finir avec le moyen âge (1977)
- J. Le Goff, Pour un autre moyen âge (1977)
- P. Zumthor, Parler du moyen âge (1980)
