Table Of ContentBy Virtue of the Past: Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Ethics in Twelfth-Century
Anglo-Norman literature
Geoffrey Rector
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2004
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
UMI Number: 3147270
INFORMATION TO USERS
The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy
submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and
photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper
alignment can adversely affect reproduction.
In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized
copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.
®
UMI
UMI Microform 3147270
Copyright 2004 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company.
All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against
unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.
ProQuest Information and Learning Company
300 North Zeeb Road
P.O. Box 1346
Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
©2004
Geoffrey Rector
All Rights Reserved
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
ABSTRACT
By Virtue of the Bast: Pedagogy, Rhetoric and Ethics in Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Literature
Geoff Rector
In 12th century England, literature, as a field of cultural activity that includes reading,
writing, and forms of sociability, is organized by educational practices and methods, even
where no educational institution is directly involved. This dissertation investigates these
conditions in the case of Anglo-Norman literature, the principal vernacular literary
culture of 12th century England. In the introduction, “L ’escok des letrer. Pedagogy and the
field of Anglo-Norman literature,” I show that the claim, made by authors and readers,
that literature is a “school of virtue” is not an empty trope of didacticism, but rather a
legitimate invocation of the practices of the “school.” The larger field of 12th century
English letters operates as a Scola literaria, a model that parallels Renaissance and
Enlightenment notions of the Respublica literaria. The school not only lends authors' and
readers their methods, but also their models of sociability and rhetorical influence within
a larger field of public activity. The first chapter shows that the early formative period of
Anglo-Norman literature is characterized by the attribution of the practices and texts of
monastic study to secular, and particularly female, readers. In chapter 2,1 show that the
Vie de Saint Alexis was composed as an instrument of meditative study and its manuscript
as a complete manual of monastic education for a particular community of religious
women. This chapter develops a theme introduced in the first chapter, that the aesthetic
and manuscript forms of Anglo-Norman literature evolve from pedagogical methods
and intend to elicit pedagogical effects. This is developed with particular attention in
chapter 3, which looks at Jordan Fantosme’s use of pedagogical maxims as the principal
figure of both stylistic and civic rhetoric, and chapter 4, which shows that the plot forms
of Marie de France’s Lais follow the central pedagogical trope of medieval historical
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
literature: the ethical ‘recuperation’ of the lost and unfamiliar. In conclusion, I argue
thatAng! o-Norman’s capacity to assume the social and aesthetic operations it inherits
from pedagogy is predicated on its medial status between Latin, the language of high
literary functions, and English, which was socially and aesthetically degraded after 1066.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Dedication iii
Introduction: L ’escole des hires'. Pedagogy and the field of Anglo-Norman literature. 1
Chapter 1: Reading Gaimar in Bed: Studious beginners and the formation of 38
12th century Anglo-Norman literature.
Chapter 2: Histories in Venerable Places: The Vie de Saint Alexis, the leceun as 98
femes and the St. Albans Psalter as Institutio Inclusarum.
Chapter 3: Miel^valt bele parole: Pedagogical oratory and chastening the 163
Royal Heart in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle (1175-76).
Chapter 4: Marie de France and the History of the Unheard-of. 233
Conclusion: By Virtue of the Past: Anglo-Norman literature as historical 315
accommodation
Bibliography 320
l
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this dissertation was generously supported by the Whiting Foundation, the
Mellon Foundation through Columbia University and, with a particular debt of gratitude, the
Social Sciences and Flumanities Research Council of Canada.
The 8 years spent preparing and writing this dissertation have been enriched by the friends
and professors who so generously gave of their time both in conversation and in class.
Thanks are due to Kathy Eden, Caroline Bynum, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and David Kastan.
I would like to thank Joan Ferrante and Susan Crane for their patience, charity and good will
in reading this dissertation for defense. To Mary Carruthers, Robert Hanning and Robert
Stein, I owe my introduction to this material, and to their wise and tempered guidance are
due both thanks and apologies. Special thanks are due to Bobby Forrester, whose whispered
admonitions kept me enrolled while I was dearly tempted to leave for his trade, and to Gord
Clarke who paid me both to stay and to go; to Brian and Rose Logan, for their inestimable
help; to my mother Marilyn and sister Kristen for every possible form of support and
encouragement; to Eric Bulson, Mika Ephros, Mike Malouf, Aliza Mendel, Kent Puckett
and Pete Tierney, for making New York a home; and to Denise, Gabriel and Isaac, to
whom I owe all this and more.
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
To my sister, mother and father.
To Denise
To Gabriel
To Isaac
iii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Introduction
Uescole des letres: Pedagogy and the field of Anglo-Norman literature.
In the preface to her Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters, one of the very few
monographs dedicated solely to England’s francophone literary traditions, M. Dominica
Legge observed that Anglo-Norman literature has a “serious and didactic bias” that “has
never been satisfactorily explained.”1 Calling them to a cause to which they were at best
ambivalent, Legge first asks her English readers to recognize their own essential
Englishness in this francophone literature, since its didactic bias was a certain indication
that it had been written for a “decent, law-abiding people,” as the English imagined
themselves historically.2 However, just as quickly passing over this ideological stratagem
for the inclusion of Anglo-Norman literature in the English national literary tradition,
Legge turns to the influence of the “cloisterers,” monks, as the most proximate cause of
its didactic quality.
Yet, in many ways, both of Legge’s explanations are relevant to the question of
how Anglo-Norman emerges as a literary vernacular in 12th century England and how it
operated as a literary culture. Anglo-Norman French was the principal medium of
vernacular literary expression in England from the Norman Invasion up the age of
Chaucer. And as is now being increasingly recognized, this body of literature is ‘English’
by every measure of literary historicisation except philology. Setting aside the notion of
1 Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters, 2. The other great monographs on the subject are Legge’s,
her Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (1963), Johan Vising’s Anglo-Norman Language and
Literature (1923) and Emanuel Walberg’s Quelques aspects de la litterature anglo-normande: lemons faites a
I'Ecole de Chartres (1936). Although not named as such, see also Roe,Caroline Medora. Vernacular
Didactic Literature in England in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Unpublished PhD Thesis,
University of Toronto, 1974, which is almost exclusively concerned with Anglo-N orman works.
2 Legge, Anglo-Norman in the Cloisters, 2.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
2
an ahistotical English national character that is inherently tied to a language, Anglo-
Norman was written in England by authors working within England’s institutional and
social structures for English readers, addressing English literary and political subjects and
problems.3 However, Anglo-N orman literature’s particularity is also due to its operation
within a multi-lingual and, as we would say, multi-cultural society. England is a cultural
world of two principal vernaculars, romanv^ and engleis, which after 1066 develop together—
alternately negotiating, contesting, supporting and suppressing one another, but always
and everywhere together. The presence of two vernaculars is a key factor in any attempt
to answer Legge’s question, for it is only by virtue of its relation to English that Anglo-
Norman can appear so “serious and didactic,” two terms which we will henceforth
contest, and tend rather towards “high” and “pedagogical,” for reasons that will become
clear.
To adapt Legge slightly, thus, there is a surprisingly pedagogical character to
Anglo-Norman literature, which can be seen in rather more quantitative terms since the
1999 publication of Ruth Dean’s Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and
Manuscripts. Of the 986 texts that Dean catalogues, fully 544 are what she calls ‘religious’
material: works of Biblical translation and commentary, hagiography, homiletic
devotion, prayers and meditation. Among these works we find the very earliest Biblical
translations made into any French vernacular, including among others the earliest
translations of the Psalter and the Book of Kings.4 Yet, these works cannot by reason of
3 See, for example, Susan Crane’s “Anglo-Norman cultures in England, 1066-1460,” in Wallace,
ed. Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 35-60; and the inclusion of Anglo-N orman
materials in the new Norton Anthology of English Literature.
4 See Vising, Anglo-Norman Language and Literature, 21; Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its
Background, 176-179. The earliest Psalters are the Oxford (Bodleian MS Douce 320) and
Cambridge (Cambridge, Trinity College R.17.1); the IVLitres des Reis is found in Paris, Mazarine
54.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Description:In 12th century England, literature, as a field of cultural activity that includes reading, writing, and forms of sociability, is organized by educational practices and methods, even where no educational institution is directly involved. This dissertation investigates these conditions in the case of
