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GENDER, POLITICS, AND THE BOOK: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A
NARRATIVE OF EMPIRE, MS BN FR 60, CA. 1330
Tina-Marie Ranalli
A DISSERTATION
in
Romance Languages
Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania
in
Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
2010
Supervisor opff DDiisssseerrttaattiioqr i *.
Signature
Kevin Brownlee
Professor of Romance Languages
Graduate Group Chairperson
Signature
Lydie Moudileno
Professor of Romance Languages
Dissertation Committee
Lance K. Donaldson-Evans, Professor of Romance Languages
Rita Copeland, Professor, Classical Studies and English
UMI Number: 3414194
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply grateful to my advisor Kevin Brownlee for his encouragement and
guidance since I first arrived at Perm as well as to my committee members Rita Copeland
and Lance Donaldson-Evans for their invaluable insight and support. I would also like to
thank the faculty and staff of the Romance Languages Department, particularly Lydie
Moudileno, Michele Richman, Gerry Prince, and Kate McMahon. Gary Ferguson has
been a valuable resource on the issues of gender and politics, Robert Maxwell kindly
offered his expertise in art history, and Roger Tharp helped with seemingly
insurmountable computer issues. Raymond Cormier, Suzanne Kocher, and Lori Walters
provided much appreciated input and were among the Medieval Academy of America and
Kalamazoo Conference participants who made my foray into continental and
international colloquia so rewarding.
I am very appreciative to the Department of Romance Languages for the research
grants which afforded me the opportunity to acquaint myself with the manuscript room of
the BN and to discover codex 60.
Finally, I am profoundly grateful for the loving support of my family and friends.
iv
ABSTRACT
GENDER, POLITICS, AND THE BOOK:
THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NARRATIVE OF EMPIRE, MS BN FR 60, CA. 1330
Tina-Marie Ranalli
Kevin Brownlee
The Roman de Thebes, Roman de Troie, and Roman d'Eneas, medieval renderings of
some of the best known epics of classical antiquity, were composed in the mid-twelfth
century by different authors and were then assembled together as three components of a
larger narrative, a century-and-a-half later, in only one extant manuscript, BN fr 60. I
examine this codex within the context of the political climate at the time of its
completion, ca. 1330 in Paris. It is my contention that this manuscript was commissioned
as an attempt to legitimize the new Valois dynastic line. The ascension of the Valois king
Philip VI in 1328, which would have been approximately when this codex was ordered,
occurred during a royal succession crisis which lasted from 1316 to 1350. The decisions
in these decades to crown male heirs of patrilineal ancestry over female and English
contenders to the throne were soon to be elaborated into the Lex Salica, which established
this practice as the standard. Based on the premise that politics construct gender, I
postulate that it would have been necessary to articulate clearly demarcated gender roles
in order to facilitate this means of succession. The texts under consideration promote
normative gendered behavior and patrilineal primogeniture, a term I use to encompass
both aspects of the advocated succession practice. This dissertation considers
V
manuscript 60 to have functioned as a political tool that informed external relations with
England while simultaneously policing women internally. Manuscript BN fr 60, I
suggest, constituted a French appropriation of texts that were originally composed for the
Anglo-Norman Plantagenet court at a key moment in Anglo-French history, occurring
shortly before what we now term the outbreak of the Hundred Years War and at a time
which witnessed a growing sense of proto-nationalism and progress toward a distinction
between notions of "French" and "English", so intertwined and embroiled since William
the Conqueror's victory in 1066.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1 introduction 1
chapter 2 Le roman de Thebes: Oedipus 34
chapter 3 Le roman de Thebes: sins against nature 65
chapter 4 Le roman de Troie 107
chapter 5 Le roman d'Eneas 146
bibliography 183
1
chapter 1 introduction
"Out of all this gradually emerged one of the great
constitutional myths of French history, the Salic
law, which royal lawyers later claimed proved the
immemorial system of male primogeniture in the
succession to the throne, ensured dynastic
continuity, and excluded all foreign succession."
David Potter1
The Old French Roman de Thebes, Roman d'Eneas, and Roman de Troie are
relatively contemporary works of the same genre, romances of antiquity, which they
largely serve to define.2 There is only one extant manuscript that features all three of
these mid-twelfth century works. This codex, BN fr 60, presents these texts in order of
narrative logic, or Thebes, Troie, Eneas, and includes a rubricated introduction which
relates them to one another as a genealogy of empires.
It is my contention that manuscript BN fr 60 was designed as a book, with its
constitutive texts functioning as parts of a larger, cohesive narrative. The other codices
that feature these same romances of antiquity contain works which generally relate to one
another in other ways.3 This connection usually involves genre, as medievals would have
conceived it. For instance, the romances of antiquity were probably considered
historical, similar to works like chronicles and chansons de geste. In longer codices,
similar texts are sometimes arranged together, although not expressly divided into
sections. The uniqueness of ms 60's global, intentional design situates it within an
See David Potter, "Introduction," Short Oxford History of France: France in the Later Middle Ages,
Ed. David Potter (New York: Oxford UP, 2003), p. 14.
There is a fourth romance of antiquity, the Roman d'Alexandre, which is an assemblage of several
texts by different authors. When I refer to the romances of antiquity in this study, I mean only the
three that are featured in manuscript 60.
There is a detailed discussion of the extant manuscripts that include these romances of antiquity at
the end of this chapter.
