Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain was really more fiction than history. To the history of Britain it harnessed Celtic vernacular oral traditions about King Arthur and his Round Table and the powers of Merlin. Geoffrey’s Latin work was disseminated widely throughout Europe and was almost immediately translated into French, Middle English, and Welsh, and other vernacular languages in due course. Scholars have shown that a remarkable feature of the twelfth century is that Latin could be instrumental in boosting the development of literate vernacular culture by facilitating the textual transmission of one vernacular tradition into many others. Latin also helped transmit some of the old French epic poems known as the chansons de geste. The chansons concerned heroic deeds of saints or of military heroes. Ninth - and late tenth/early eleventh-century Latin versions existed of material concerning the exploits of William ‘of Orange’ (Count William of Gellone). French redactions stem from the beginning of the twelfth century. Wolfram von Eschenbach (fl. c.1200-20) used the Bataille d’Aliscans, one of the chansons about William of Orange, when he wrote his remarkable Willehalm in the 1220s. The best known chansons de geste concern Charlemagne and his vassals. The first redactions of the greatest of these, The Song of Roland, date from the late eleventh century. By this time the story had already been recounted in Latin and Old French versions with many local variations. The Song of Roland narrates graphically the betrayal of Charlemagne’s loyal vassal Roland by the felon Ganelon and Ganelon’s ultimate downfall. It is an action-packed story of heroes and villains rather than the stuff of keen human introspection, the story of Christian Franks overcoming Muslims in Spain on behalf of Charlemagne. Epics like The Song of Roland also show how historical themes were woven into works of fiction: Roland (d. 778) was Charlemagne’s prefect of the Breton March who was killed by the Christian Basques, not Spanish Muslims.
In Germany, Old High German epic poems shared material with the Old Norse Eddas, episodic poetry that had been transmitted orally from the sixth century before the onset of written redactions in the tenth. The most important of these was the Nibelungenlied, which was redacted in Austria in the thirteenth century. The Nibelungenlied centres on the adventures of Siegfried, who had travelled to the Burgundian court to marry Kriemhild and relates the complicated events surrounding the vengeance that Kriemhild tried to exact from her kin for his murder. Beowulf, the most important Old English epic, is set in Scandinavia. It was probably composed in the eighth or early ninth century. Old English literature developed in Anglo-Saxon society, which had a long-standing tradition of using the vernacular alongside Latin for a wide variety of purposes, from religious texts to legal documents to chronicles like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle from the ninth century until 1154. In Scandinavia, sagas and skaldic poetry were composed about leaders and kings of the Viking era. They were recited by skalds and committed to writing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The most famous saga collection is the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) of Iceland.
From the end of the eleventh century new literary forms took shape that fed off and reshaped older material into stories about young men striving to win the love of (usually) exalted ladies. The codes of behaviour were determined by chivalric norms. These works went far beyond the ‘sabre rattling’ of the chansons de geste. They dealt with courtly love and explored feelings of unrequited passion and situations that challenged individuals to search their conscience to make the right decision. This material would seem to epitomize the individualism so many scholars have ‘discovered’ in this period (see Further Reading). Although it is certainly possible to interpret this material in this way, one does have to be cautious. The composers of these tales and those who recited or performed them could not have been free agents in a society where patronage was a fact of life. The shape, durability, and indeed the very completion of long intricate compositions were directly reliant on the successful reception by those who had commissioned the work and had asked for it to be performed, or both. It is, therefore, equally valid to suggest that these explorations of courtly love say as much about the audiences for which they were written as about their composers. It would seem that we are encountering a similar kind of creative tension between individual artists and the multilayered social and religious conventions in which they worked, which we met in the case of authors of intellectual and historical texts who had to find their way within their own milieux (see above, p. 150). What must be true is that the mass of material produced on courtly love reveals the real interest and pleasure both men and women experienced in speculating about the psychological complexities governing human relations, especially between the sexes. Many patrons of these tales were lay noble women. This has prompted many scholars to wonder what this material actually reveals about the position of women in central medieval courtly society. For, next to the figure of noble ladies inspiring pure, and usually unfulfilled love, there are many scenes in which women are subjected to ridicule and violence. There is no simple explanation that would overwrite the contradictory messages it contains. Perhaps those contradictions accurately reflect the paradoxes women were faced with in their different functions in society.
Duke William IX of Aquitaine (1071-1125) adopted courtly love themes in his troubadour* poetry. By the first half of the twelfth century there was a proliferation of troubadour songs at the courts of southern France. Well-known troubadours were Marcabru (fl. 1150s), Bernart de Ventadorn (fl. 1147-70), and Peire Vidal (fl. late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries). Among female troubadours, Countess Beatrice of Die (fl. late twelfth/early thirteenth centuries) is particularly interesting, because in her poems women express their yearnings for love. In northern France trouveres* such as Chretien de Troyes (c. 1140-90), Blondel de Nesle (b. c.1155), and Gace Brule (c.1159-after 1212) carried on the work of their southern counterparts. The love lyrics of the 1170s and 1180s of Heinrich von Veldeke (Hendrik van Veldeken, d. c.1200) and Friedrich von Hausen (d. 1190) clearly show active Minnesanger* (poets of love) in Germany. Other notable Minnesanger were Hartmannn von Aue (fl. 1180-1220), Wolfram von Eschenbach, and, especially, Walther von der Vogelweide (fl. 1190-1230). South of the Alps, courtly love poetry in a form of Italian was introduced in the early thirteenth century under the patronage of the Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250). A particularly influential innovation of this ‘Sicilian school’ of poets was the fourteen-line love sonnet.
Courtly love themes were also introduced into epic poetry, softening the contours of their heroic protagonists. Scholars have illustrated this process by tracing the evolution of The Poem of El Cid, which was first redacted in Castilian around 1207. In reality the Cid was Rodrigo Diaz (d. 1099), one of the knights of King Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile (see Chapter 6). In El Cid Rodrigo falls out of favour with his king and has to leave court. He accrues great renown through his military exploits in the internecine battles between Christian and Muslim princes. The Cid dies saving Valencia from its attackers. Courtly love themes were added to the epic as it was recast time and again. Rodrigo is eventually transformed from a pragmatic fighter into a chivalric knight championing Christianity against Islam. In Germany Heinrich von Veldeke adapted the Roman d’Eneas (an Anglo-Norman adaptation of Virgil’s story of Troy) to compose his Eneit between 1170 and 1185.
In France courtly love finally became the theme of romances. French romances took the shape of relatively short rhymed narratives; in Germany they were much longer. The concept of the quest for the Holy Grail, the dish or goblet used by Jesus at the Last Supper, was grafted onto Arthurian themes. Other Celtic traditions were used too, as were a variety of classical themes. Marie de France (c.1130-1200) produced twelve narrative poems (Lais) in which she explored themes of (usually adulterous) love by blending Arthurian and Breton material. Chretien de Troyes wrote romances concerning the knights of the Round Table. His Lancelot, for example, explores Lancelot’s adulterous love for Queen Guinevere. In Perceval Chretien has his hero adopt celibate purity in his search for the Holy Grail. In Germany, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach adopted and adapted these themes, but, unlike Marie and Chretien, they wrote in praise of married love rather than adulterous love. In addition their characters gained greater psychological depth. Hartmann translated Chretien’s Erec et Enide and Yvain to compose his own Erec and Iswain; Wolfram wrote Parzival, in which he developed Chretien’s Perceval. Central to Wolfram’s work is the study of the evolution of a true Christian knight. Interestingly enough Chretien’s Lancelot was not translated into German, although an earlier Lanzelet was composed after 1195 by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, who discarded the crucial theme of adultery. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Gottfried von Strassburg produced Tristan and Isolde; the adulterous lovers are destroyed by their own dishonourable behaviour.
Andreas Capellanus (fl. 1178-80) wrote a theoretical work in Latin about love for Countess Marie of Champagne (d. 1198), who was the daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The work is full of contradictory statements about true love, advocating adulterous love in one part and condemning it in another. In the thirteenth century the Romance of the Rose was composed in French by Guillaume de Lorris (C.1213-C.1237) and continued by Jean de Meung (fl. 1275-1305). The work explores the meaning of love through the allegory of a lover dreaming about a walled garden containing a rose. The wall shuts out what the courtly lover must put aside, such as hatred, ill-will, greed, envy, old age, and poverty and allows access only to those engaged in, among other things, courtliness, delight, beauty, riches, generosity, and youth. The poem is full of contradictions, which are only compounded by its continuation. But perhaps Joachim Bumke is correct in pointing out how demanding courtly love was for its adherents by its unrealistic and contradictory requirements, which bore so little resemblance to real life (see Further Reading).
Many other forms of vernacular literature stem from our period. Old French fabliaux (short comic stories) were popular between the late twelfth century and 1250. Marie de France translated Aesop’s Fables into French and wrote her own versions, in which she combined classical with Celtic material. In contrast to classical fables, medieval ones were less didactic, funnier, and usually rude. Besides religious poetry, a wide range of vernacular poetry was produced on all kinds of profane themes. Examples of this poetry are found among the so-called Carmina Burana (‘Songs of Benediktbeuern’), some 300 Latin lyrics interspersed with lines in the vernacular including more than forty German verses. The material is in a thirteenth-century Austrian manuscript that once belonged to the Bavarian abbey of Benediktbeuern (Benediktobura). In Spain Jewish poets adapted Arabic forms of verse when writing in Hebrew. Their subject matter spanned everything from the highly spiritual to poetry about feasting, fighting, and making love. Prolific poets were Samuel Ha-Nagid (d. 1056), Solomon ibn Gabirol (d. 1053/8), Judah Ha-Levi (d. 1141), Joseph ibn Zabara (b. 1140), and Todros Abulafia (d. c.1298).
In the field of drama, mystery plays, which were liturgically based, had become so popular by the thirteenth century that they were translated into the vernacular and in due course laicized, joining all kinds of other dramatic forms. Excerpts from the Bible were put into vernacular verse, and Latin saints’ lives were translated. Especially important were the vernacular translations of the widely Popular collections of miracle stories of the Virgin Mary, which had circulated in Latin from the twelfth century. Good examples are the Miracles de Nostre Dame by Gauthier de Coinci (d. 1236) and the Cantigas de Santa Maria by Alfonso the Wise of Castile from between 1250 and 1284.
These final examples show how vernacular texts covered both the religious and the profane. Many texts combined both elements in innovative ways. Literate vernacular culture did not in any sense replace the products of Latin culture and learning that we discussed earlier. What it did do was offer large-scale possibilities for a wider spectrum of the population to participate in their culture through reading and listening to texts.
World History
