Understandably, since both the history and the philology of individual European languages developed inside the context of nineteenth-century nationalism, attempts were made to infix Our Lady’s Tumbler within the framework of French national identity. Yet the jongleur drew back and balked at being trammeled by boundaries of nation-states. As a matter of fact, when reactivated, he became even more free ranging than he had been in the reality of the medieval period. The story of the performer was ideally equipped to appeal to what is touted in the American context as the Gilded Age (the equivalent in French is la belle époque). Both stretch roughly fifty years, from the late nineteenth to or into the early twentieth century. Although in very different ways, the zeitgeist of both periods comprehended openness to medieval cultures and medievalizing tastes, within the context of prewar high life. Afterward, things changed.
The worst of the twentieth century began effectively in 1914, with the commencement of World War I.
The narrative in the French poem marshals many important elements associated with the Middle Ages. The hero is shown as a distinctively medieval type of
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0143.03
entertainer. As such, he belongs initially to a class of craftsmen who at times were mustered into guilds. Most of the action in the tale takes place within a monastery.
In its architectural setting, the story focuses upon a church. Although not a cathedral, the edifice is sufficiently cavernous for a person inside to slip away unobserved to the crypt. Every one of the principal characters, most particularly the protagonist, has undertaken a monomaniacal commitment to attend to a single fair lady. They do so even though their service is not strictly chivalric, since the maiden in question is Mary.
All these figures and features—jongleur, monks, large church, adulation of a woman, and the Virgin—certify the text as having the right stuff for application in a Gothic revival.
After the publication of the medieval verse for the first time in 1873 in a learned periodical, the story attracted notice initially among a restricted readership of academicians throughout Western Europe and North America. Over the next few decades, it proliferated among the public a little at a time in translations and paraphrases. Consequently, the narrative was very present in the ferment of the decades on either side of 1900, that great climacteric in the culture of the times. Owing to the intense historical self-consciousness of the nineteenth century, the year 1900 meant more than had 1800, 1700, or any previous round number of the double-aught sort. Technologically, the tale came into its own at precisely the right instant to enjoy creation and re-creation on paper and parchment in medievalesque styles.
Reproductive processes such as lithography, chromolithography, and photography disseminated medieval art far more widely among nonspecialists than had hitherto been imaginable. Thanks to the broad circulation, printers, calligraphers, and designers had at their disposal models for inspiration that had earlier been limited or altogether lacking. France saw a distinctively book-centered bohemianism arise in its upper bourgeoisie. These bibliophilic bohemians bought beautiful books, including books about books and about book collectors. The French vogue rolled across the Atlantic to lap the American shores first in Boston, at the time an inter-elite haven for
both aspiring bohemians and bookmakers.
Eventually the medieval narrative of Our Lady’s Tumbler was transformed radically in an adaptation into modern French prose. This new version achieved great popularity. By no stretch of the imagination can the recasting be deemed a translation.
In France, this late nineteenth-century form rendered the medieval one effectively extinct, except among scholars. Among English speakers, the success of the new composition did not dislocate the original as put into modern language. The two versions, medieval and modern, coexisted to mutual advantage, or at least not to each other’s disadvantage. Long after the French short story appeared, craft publishers brought into print multiple English translations of the poem from the Middle Ages.
Individuals even copied out such translations in pseudomedieval manuscripts. In keeping with the very etymology of the word, these handmade copies were anything but what we call cribs or trots, word-for-word renderings intended for use by students in language classes.
With the nineteenth-century industrialization at full throttle, consumers were treated to the boons and banes of large-scale standardization. Consequently, they proved to be wistful for handicrafts and handmade objects. Since such items lay beyond the means of many, would-be purchasers developed a keen taste for factory-made surrogates that would be reminiscent somehow of the preindustrial era. More than any other period, the Middle Ages epitomized romanticized days of yore. To manufacture mass-produced but medievalesque products was to rebel, albeit only in a token way, against the relatively unestablished despotism of the factory.
In the nineteenth century, French formed the main source for translation into English—of medieval literature, of the most recent high literature of realism, naturalism, and decadence, and of popular literature, from children’s literature through serialized melodramas. Thus, 1872 saw the publication in English of both the narrative poems or lays of Marie de France and Ballads and Lyrics of Old France by the prolific Scots author Andrew Lang, known still for his works on folklore and mythology. The cover of the latter book flaunts discreetly, if that action may ever be anything but indiscreet, a lily to signify the Frenchness of the collection. The fleur-de-lis and its floral original were the primal French connection (see Fig. 3.1). Similarly, both the Song of Roland and Aucassin et Nicolette (see Fig. 3.2), in translation, came into print in 1880. Not irrelevantly, all the texts just mentioned still receive attention even today for their avowed folkloric features.
Fig. 3.1 Front cover of Andrew Lang, trans., Ballads & Lyrics of Old France, with Other Poems (London: Longmans, Green,
1872).
Fig. 3.2 Front cover of Alexandre Bida, Aucassin and Nicolette, The Lovers of Provence: A MS Song-Story of the Twelfth Century, trans. A. Rodney Macdonough
(New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1880).
The book containing the translation of Aucassin and Nicolette is noteworthy for the extent of its artwork. One of the illustrations depicts the Saracen heroine, Nicolette.
She has changed her skin color black, dressed in different clothing, and effectively disguised herself as a minstrel. In this get-up, she traveled to Christian France and rejoined her beloved, Aucassin (see Fig. 3.3). The story made good provender for medievalizers, as they peered out at their contemporary worlds through spectacles with stained-glass lenses. It also furnished the right stuff for orientalizers who viewed the Middle East and beyond as distorted in the funhouse mirror of their preconceptions and misconceptions.
Fig. 3.3 “Nicole the Minstrel at Beaucaire.” Engraving after design by Alexandre Bida, 1880.
Published in Aucassin and Nicolette, The Lovers of Provence: A MS Song-Story of the Twelfth Century, trans. A. Rodney Macdonough (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1880), facing p. ix.
The folklore that was imagined to be embedded in such tales accounted for part of their attraction at a juncture when the purported primitivism of the Middle Ages could have been a plus. At the same time, Our Lady’s Tumbler’s draw was nearly opposite to the appeal of folklore and popular culture—after all, it was set in a monastery, not among the common folk. The cloister, and the cloistered life, occupied a privileged space within Victorian medievalism. Its celebration runs onward from Thomas Carlyle to William Morris and the 1858 Defence of Guenevere. In general, the late nineteenth-century Anglophone world constituted an especially receptive environment for medieval texts
in translation. France could pride itself upon Hugo and the architect Viollet-le-Duc.
Across the Channel, English speakers had the reworking of Arthurian material by the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the advocacy in “The Nature of Gothic” by the art critic John Ruskin, and the whole Gothic revival in art, architecture, literature, and everything else. The roots of all this medievalizing sank deep into English culture, even before Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that was founded in 1848.
The members of the P.R.B., as it has become known, professed to spurn the manner of artists who succeeded Raphael. In so doing, they echoed a preference expressed already by Gautier’s 1832 short story title character, Élias Wildmanstadius: “Raphael was almost too recent for him.”
Within the medievalism of the English and those aligned culturally with them, Tennyson wielded an extraordinarily powerful hold. Lovely testimony of the sway exercised by the Tennysonian medievalesque is found in a painting entitled Mariana (see Fig. 3.4). In his conception of this work, the artist was indebted ultimately to the woman of the same name of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604), but even more to a British poet’s “Mariana” from 1830. One of the P.R.B., the English painter Millais, follows the poet laureate of Great Britain by retaining implications of isolation and frustration, but with a vibrancy that forgoes any trace of desolation. The scene relates strongly to Our Lady’s Tumbler by being tied to the Virgin as closely as are the names Mary and Mariana.
In the painting’s composition, circumstances would suggest that Mariana’s thoughts dwell unbroken upon a pane of stained glass. Her own gaze seems to be locked with that of an angel depicted in the colored rectangle. The heavenly messenger could be a stand-in (or fly-in) for her own lover, whose arrival she awaits in vain. Not in her line of vision is the vitreous sheet next to the spirit that shows the Virgin herself. In the darkness behind Mariana and to her right stands a sideboard with a petite triptych—what appears to be a crucifix, a hanging votive candle, and a second installment of colored glass, barely visible. The artwork could be another portrayal of the Annunciation; because of the medium, this in vitro fertilization would make Jesus the closest medieval equivalent to a test tube baby. Mariana, a damsel trapped claustrophobically in place, forms a strangely apt equal and opposite to the knight-errant who is missing from the picture. Her chapel-like boudoir is as quiet as a church, even down to the church mouse on the floor. The autumnal leaves, signaling mortality, lie still and unrustling.
The English versions that were translated directly from the medieval French poem of Our Lady’s Tumbler, rather than from Anatole France’s recasting, were almost invariably beautified with medievalesque touches. The most common of these flourishes would be ornamented initials, such as on the opening page of the translation brought out by the Bostonian publishing house, Copeland & Day (see Fig. 3.5). Some of these printings were done on a kind of paper that was designed to resemble, at least after a
Fig. 3.4 John Everett Millais, Mariana, 1851. Oil on mahogany, 59.7 × 49.5 cm. London, Tate Britain.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Everett_
Millais_-_Mariana_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
fashion, genuine parchment. A few were printed or even handwritten calligraphically in medieval-like scripts. This assiduity about faux medieval craft, with features meant to appear redolent of the Middle Ages, owed much to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
It had other roots as well, since many turns toward the Middle Ages had taken place over the preceding decades.
Fig. 3.5 Isabel Butler, trans., Our Lady’s Tumbler: A Tale of Medieval France, Translated into English from the Old French (Boston: Copeland & Day, 1898), 1.
For more than a century since the rediscovery and translation of Our Lady’s Tumbler, medievalizing flourishes have remained extremely common, if not an absolute constant, in books containing versions of the poem. This trend has continued especially in the productions of personal or vanity presses with low print runs, but also in sizable commercial runs. One playwright referred tellingly to love for the Middle Ages in terms of “glowing old folios of black letter with gilt and florid initials.”
In a small touch that is evident in his own private-press printing, the first letter of the introduction and all the stage instructions are printed in crimson ink, to call to mind the rubrics of medieval manuscripts. The redness reminds us of a time when red ink was not associated with unpaid debts but hallowed words—when publication was a red-letter day.