Gaston Paris and the Dance of Philology - and to purchase copies of this book in:

This book makes us love Gaston Paris: it makes us love the Middle Ages too.

Our Lady’s Tumbler was discovered and distributed through international scholarly cooperation. In the distribution process, the prime mover was Gaston Paris (see Fig. 1.23). Leader of the pack among professors of French in the capital, he was no mere scholar’s scholar but a public intellectual. He played his role not by crafting disquisitions of his own about the text or interpretations of the tale, but solely by condensing an article by a German researcher into three lines. Nonetheless, he made a twofold mark. First, he furnished a vehicle for the original publication of the text;

second, he popularized it by remarks in books of broad reach in both France and abroad.

Fig. 1.20 Illustration of Henri de Bornier’s La fille de Roland. From left to right, the portraits at top depict Jean Mounet-Sully, Henri de Bornier, and Sarah Bernhardt. Illustration by H. Meyer, 1875. Paris, Bibliothèque

Fig. 1.21 Charlemagne surveys the dead at Roncevaux. Engraving by Émile Berthiault, 1872.

Published in Léon Gautier, ed., La chanson de Roland (Tours: Alfred Mame et Fils, 1872), frontispiece.

Fig. 1.22 Title page of Léon Gautier, ed., La chanson de Roland (Tours: Alfred

Mame et Fils, 1872).

Fig. 1.23 Gaston Paris, age 61.

Photograph by Léopold Reutlinger, 1900.

Who was Gaston Paris? At a moment when Lady Philology reigned arm in arm with Lady History, he acquired just recognition in his nation as the philologist above all philologists in Romance philology. As such, his special field of interest was medieval French. He cultivated his specialization at the precise time when the elite shaping culture sought to fashion and reinforce national identity on the grounds of the languages and literatures of France in the Middle Ages. For all that, the story of this scholar’s engagement with the story must not be caricatured simplistically as a crude and rough-spoken tale of cultural jingoism: it was anything but that. The nineteenth century was indeed one of nationalities and of nationalism, but the jongleur belonged more to his class or profession than to his nation—except when political crises reached their boiling points. His status as a popular performer upstaged all realistic hope of packaging him explicitly as a proto-Frenchman.

In the argot of textual scholarship, the first edition of a text to be brought into print is known technically by a Latin phrase that means just that. The editio princeps of the medieval French Our Lady’s Tumbler was published by Wendelin (or Wilhelm) Foerster (see Fig. 1.24). This German-speaking philologist is today recognized mostly for editing the romances of Chrétien de Troyes and for two text series he founded.

His strong concentration on editorial production was probably the main stimulus that drove him to his toils on the original French of Our Lady’s Tumbler. Secondarily, his Catholicism could have predisposed him further to the contents of the poem. Foerster had access to only a single witness to the text. Although subsequently four additional manuscripts would be brought to light, he had the happy lot to base his editorial efforts on the superior one upon which he happened first. His base manuscript could be placed early in a single-branched stemma or family tree, and it transmitted a text

that scarcely differed from the only other codex preferable to it. The upshot is that other editions have been printed and have brought advances of various sorts, but thanks to the piece of luck that this first editor chanced to find the best manuscript, the text has stayed substantially as he constituted it.

The edition appeared in Romania. The title of that august journal signifies, more or less, “the Romance languages.” It remains still today one of the premier publications for the analysis of French language and literature of the Middle Ages. The periodical had been cofounded in the capital city in 1872, only a year before the publication of the edition—and that means only a year following the debacle of the war. The joint inaugurators, who also shared the editorship, were the foremost grandees of Romance philology at the time among French nationals, Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris. The germ for the periodical’s foundation existed already before the war, but the nature of the project was unquestionably conditioned by the checkmate of France at the end of the combat. In the prospectus for the new publication, the brace of scholars avowed that their aim was concurrently scholarly and patriotic. By their own lights, the scientific study of the Middle Ages could redress the rupture of the French nation from its past, which from their standpoint had contributed to the recent military and political disasters. They set out deliberately to heal the break with the medieval period that had begun in the sixteenth century and become total in the eighteenth. On a learned plane, they sought to work for the intellectual and moral reform of their country. The two efforts went hand in hand.

The journal bore the epigraph “To recall the sayings, deeds, and customs of ancestors.” Yet red-blooded patriotism did not trump cooperation in research that transected the boundaries of nation-states. In the final line of Foerster’s introduction to our text, he registers appreciation of Gaston Paris “to whose expertise [he] had recourse on many occasions.” By the same token, the Frenchman’s commitment to the culture of his motherland did not render his literary history and other writings less palatable to scholars of other languages and literatures, or to those who might be styled comparatists. In fact, the opposite held true. For example, W. P. Ker (see Fig. 1.25), a great Scottish critic of medieval literature, took two papers by Paris, both composed during the Franco-Prussian war, to prove how the French philologist

“believed strongly in his own country, and hardly less strongly in the community of learning over all the world. [He] knew to the full the claims of patriotism and of learning, and tampered with neither when they were accidentally opposed.”

Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer formed a heavyweight team within the academy.

They occupied unrivaled positions—the first even more than the second—inside the intellectual life of their country in general and within medieval studies in particular.

Within the clubby world of medieval French philology in France, they made up a two-man coalition of absolute authority and influence. In the politics of ancient Rome, it would have been called a duumvirate. Among the special fortes of the pair, one lay in creating new institutions for teaching and scholarship, another in reorganizing

old ones. In both initiatives, they brought French higher learning into alignment with the model of philology already established in German universities of the day. In part, they accomplished their objective by setting up a seminar in the true etymological sense of the original Latin word. That is, they produced a seed plot that could flower within the academic culture dependent upon them.

Fig. 1.25 Bust of W. P. Ker. Sculpture, date, and artist unknown. Photograph published in Charles Whibley, ed., Collected Essays of W. P. Ker, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1925), frontispiece.

The grandiloquent name given to the sheaf of skills required for access to the languages of the Middle Ages was philology. The rigmarole applied by philologists to arrive at reliable editions of medieval texts was the exacting and even fastidious scrutiny of manuscripts that is called recension. It was associated in its prevailing form with an editorial procedure that has long been associated with the German Karl Lachmann, a Prussian classical philologist and Germanist (see Fig. 1.26). The Lachmannian method certifies that manuscripts are related when they chime with each other in their wording. The specific prognostic is when they depart from the correct text in the same ways. By implication, common errors mean that they share common origins.

Gaston Paris may not have liked the Prussian Germanist as a person, and he may not have deigned to cite him, but he subscribed to the methodology named after him.

In 1866, he reviewed an edition by a German of a medieval German text, and in his assessment, he set forth the superiority of Lachmann’s modus operandi. In fact, he promoted the common-error approach to editing so convincingly as to guarantee that it would hold sway among textual scholars in his nation for more than a generation to come. In the study of vernacular languages, philology was a tool applied in the search for (or manufacture of) national origins. Likewise, Lachmann’s attention to supposed mistakes became an instrument for the reconstitution of lost originals. It was standard operating procedure for the scholarly cleaning crews that sought to make sense of texts transmitted in medieval manuscripts.

Fig. 1.26 Karl Lachmann. Steel engraving by A. Teichel, from photograph by H. Biow, ca. 1850.

The dynamic duo of Paris and Meyer shared a philosophy of discovery and knowing that is typical of their period. This combined heuristics and epistemology goes by the name of positivism. The theory maintained that positive knowledge rests on positive fact. All beliefs should be testable. In philology, this epistemic system strives to brace arguments and interpretations with cross-checkable data, such as historical facts or linguistic evidence. Meyer had been trained in Paris at the École Nationale des Chartes, a French state institution (see Fig. 1.27). Founded ultimately in 1821, it is devoted to the education of archivists and librarians. As such, it purveys instruction in such fields as paleography, diplomatics, and, more broadly, archival studies. He joined the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 1863.

This National Library of France, likewise in the capital city, developed out of the Royal Library of the French kings. Gaston Paris was the son of Paulin Paris, himself a specialist in medieval French literature (see Fig. 1.28). Paulin moved eventually from employment in the Royal Library to a chair created for him at the Collège de France.

He held this post until his retirement in 1872, when his son replaced him. In time, the younger Paris became a considerably more widely known personage than either his father or his chief workmate.

In the Paris family dynasty, the scion’s most obvious legacy may be the phrase amour courtois, translated into English as “courtly love.” Unattested in any medieval language, the phrase was coined by Gaston Paris and first employed in writing in 1883. The venue was none other than the pages of Romania. The expression refers to an alleged code of love between women and men. This protocol is argued to form

Fig. 1.27 Paul Meyer. Engraving by Louis Rémy Sabattier, 1898.

Published in George Bonnamour, Le procès Zola: Impressions d’audience

(Paris: A. Pierret, 1898), 123.

Fig. 1.28 Paulin Paris. Engraving by AT, 1899, after photograph by Jean Nicolas Truchelut. Reims, Bibliothèque municipale de Reims. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.

org/wiki/File:Paulin_paris_1881_BMR_41_318.jpg

Fig. 1.29 Master of the Taking of Tarento, The Triumph of Venus, 1360. Tempera on wood, 51 cm. diameter. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Image from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.

wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Master_Taking_of_Tarento_-_Triumph_of_Venus_(Louvre).jpeg

the backdrop to the lyric poetry of troubadours as well as to the Arthurian romances that followed. The specific type of sentiment often centered upon the idealization of a married noblewoman. Although the object of attraction was usually inaccessible, the adulation could lead sometimes to adultery. Just as often (and not necessarily excluding any less hallowed inclinations), such adoration has spiritual dimensions.

In psychological terms, it embraces such raw and powerful emotions as desire, joy, and anguish. The etiquette associated with such adulation is chivalry, while the social order is feudalism. The lover renders homage to his lady and renders to her the service of love as a vassal does to his lord (see Fig. 1.29). In many ways, Our Lady’s Tumbler puts on show the opposite of courtly love. Etymologically, chivalry rides on the back of steeds: the noun derives from a Late Latin word for a horseman, itself from a Latin word for a horse. Though at the beginning of our medieval tale the protagonist owns a mount, he relinquishes it. Even before doing so, he is not a knight. The politesse on display in the poem is not knightly, and its social setting reflects monasticism rather than the feudalism of the secular world. In fact, the gymnast lacks all the negative undertones that are embedded in the feudal system. One of these medieval equestrians could exercise power either rightly or wrongly. To take two adjectives that derive from the same roots for equestrian, he could behave either chivalrously or cavalierly. The jongleur has none of either extreme. Instead, he forges his own chivalry and courtliness. At the same time, he endures all the seething emotions of a gallant lover in pursuit of his unreachable lady. It could even be said that the jongleur embodies passion, in the sense of both suffering and exaltation. He agonizes for the one he adores. In return, he receives compassion. The acrobat’s loved one stands on an actual pedestal. His attentions to her can be truly called idolization, and yet he displays none of the fixation with her beauty that is ubiquitous in chivalric literature.

Finally, he serves her with all the unswerving loyalty that a romance hero manifests for the love of his life.

Despite the high impact of amour courtois, Gaston Paris’s enviable reputation rests on far more than his verbalization of this single concept alone. For example, one monument of his scholarship is Marian, namely, the eight-volume edition of Miracles of Our Lady, by Characters. The whole original comprises forty miracle plays in verse that are preserved in a two-volume manuscript. The cycle of dramatic pieces was an innovation in its time. As a totality, the suite of texts constitutes a major starting point for fourteenth-century theater, and it was staged every winter by the goldsmiths’

guild in Paris. Most notably, Gaston Paris remains well known for a foundational article in Romania, in which he unknotted the conceptual evolution from the Latin adjective for “Roman.” This investigation was basal in differentiating between the Romanness associated with classical Latin, and the separate identities ascribed to the languages and cultures of the Romance countries. From his outlook, the nature of Romania meant the aggregate of Romance-speaking nations. This status was attained not through shared race but rather through communal participation in a history and culture. This conception of identity abides to this day as a defining trait of Frenchness.

Paul Meyer acknowledged of his own accord that his admired colleague bested him in their common métier. At an event where partygoers were dancing, he remarked:

“Do you know why Gaston Paris is a greater philologist than me? It is because he knows how to dance.” In thus characterizing his fellow Romanist, he probably unwittingly brought to mind an image of the tumbler from the medieval French poem. Likewise, he may not have recalled that Paris published a couple of sharp-witted pages in 1892 on the terminology for dance in the Romance languages, tracing the history of the art from Greek and Roman antiquity down through the Middle Ages. Nor would Meyer have necessarily recollected that in 1899 his friend had brought out a study of accursed dancers, such as the ring-dancers of Kölbigk. Yet even if the observation was simply a bon mot motivated by Paris’s actual dancing, it had an unmistakable metaphoric dimension. It captured the intellectual agility that the contemporaries of the great philologist perceived in him.

On the one hand, Paris ranked among the most visible French exponents of philology, which he endeavored to elevate as a science predicated upon practical methods. On the other, he promoted the poetry of the Middle Ages as a fountainhead that could refresh European culture in general and French culture particularly. In his view, medieval literature could put the people back in touch with the era in which their distinctive, collective, ethnic sensibilities first took shape. Effectively, he aspired to construct a glorious past of which his countrymen could be proud.

Paradoxically, or inconsistently, this philomedieval side to him is vaguely reminiscent of the romanticism he rejected strenuously. He strove for scientific truth, but to the greater glory of his nation. This drive, at once romantic and postromantic, gave him common ground with his father. A further paradox arose from the assumption that medieval French differed so much from its modern reflex as to be difficult to translate, if not almost untranslatable. This presumption put philologists in a quasi-hieratic role of mediating, almost like Catholic priests of their day, between texts in an unapproachable medieval language and a public of lay people. The objective was to open access to a foundational past.

As Paris put it in his inaugural lecture at the College of France in 1881, “What we seek above all is history.” In this outflow of thought, the philologist expounded a manifesto for the value and relevance of the literature of the Middle Ages for Frenchmen in his own day—in the decades after the calamity of the Franco-Prussian War. To his way of thinking, literary texts surpass historical documents as entryways into “the moral condition, ideas, and feelings of our forebears.” During the medieval period “for the first time and not for the last, France had in the view of neighboring nations a role (acknowledged everywhere) of innovation and of intellectual, literary, and social direction.” In Paris’s view, medieval French poems, despite having originated centuries ago, retained their vitality. The national spirit and identity they epitomized continued to exist within his fellow citizens. Not irrelevantly, the national significance of the combat seared itself so intensely into people’s consciousness that

in the circle in which Gaston Paris orbited, it was known initially as the War of France.

The country may have lost in the encounter between armies, but it could still gloat about the originality and sovereignty of its medieval texts. From this point of view, the literature of Germany in the Middle Ages was deeply indebted and in a sense handmaid to that of France.

If being conversant with medieval manuscripts and literature constitutes a type of affluence or eloquence, then Paris was born with great inherited wealth. Thanks to his father’s position as a librarian, he spent his childhood in an apartment the family occupied within the precincts of the National Library. As a boy, he received fine schooling in the capital. But his stunning ascendance over the last four decades

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