Perfectionism in the taxonomy of stories is a modern malady, or at least an affliction of professional literary critics. In the Middle Ages, authors and scribes apparently lived undeterred by any such obsession. Thus, they resort often, seemingly indiscriminately, to words that correlate to our “exemplum,” “legend,” and “miracle,” to cite only a few. Understandably, they do not apply the plethora of generic terminology that originated only after the medieval period.
In many respects Our Lady’s Tumbler has ample claim to warrant being called a miracle, and more particularly a Marian one, like those of Gautier de Coinci. Then again, the miraculous aspect of the narrative pertains more to its contents than to its literary form. In any event, the story of the acrobat or dancer is nowhere labeled as a miracle within the text itself or within the manuscripts. If calling Our Lady’s Tumbler a miracle gives pause, we have even more reason to hold back from styling it a legend.
This term, designating the biography of a saint, derives from the Latin legendum est or “it is to be read.” Such accounts of holy men were regular fare in places and on occasions where texts in the learned tongue were read aloud ceremonially, especially on the feast-days of given saints. Reading of this kind happened, for instance, in the installments that were recited in monastery refectories at mealtimes. One insuperable impediment prevents us from construing Our Lady’s Tumbler as a saint’s legend: the jongleur is not a saint or even saintly. Furthermore, the tale lacks the connection with pilgrimage that is evident in many legends, miracles, and exempla.
For whom then was the poem composed? Was it to be plowed through by individuals or declaimed in cadenced voices before groups? By whom was it copied?
To return to the question of literary form, what kind of literature was it? In modern terms, the story satisfies the generic criteria of a pious tale or, to use a modern French term, a pious récit. Both The Knight of the Barrel and The Hermit and the Jongleur have been categorized within this genre of short narrative. Stories in this category, which is associated particularly with the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, can be in prose, but are more often in verse. They bear a close resemblance to hagiography, and they draw often on the Life of the Fathers and Marian miracles.
Pious tales are more reverent and less worldly cousins to fabliaux. Contrary to the tug of instincts some of us may feel, the two forms can overlap or even be coterminous. Our Lady’s Tumbler is in fact sometimes called a fabliau. If the designation is understood to mean nothing more than a tale in verse, Our Lady’s Tumbler can be classed more precisely as a pious fabliau. It must be noted that piety need not be identical with po-faced; a pious tale may in fact be comic as well as didactic. That said, the assertion does not carry much conviction that the apparent piety in Our Lady’s Tumbler is somehow laughable.
Yet another literary type with which the pious tale deserves comparison is the exemplum, a brief story told to entertain and edify by setting an example or by exemplifying a moral lesson. Many pious tales are such illustrative stories that have been expanded and dramatized. Like exempla, they are designed to instruct. Exempla are meant to be repeated, revised, and remade. In this regard, they live up to their etymological relationship with the technique of “sampling” in today’s popular music:
a portion of one audio recording is reused, almost like an instrument or component, in a different piece of music.
The exemplum existed at the intersection of two distinct planes, amusement and didacticism. These stories throw open windows that allow us to look back upon two often distinct groups and processes in the Middle Ages—they convey the mentalities of those whose actions are described as well as of those whose writing framed that behavior within the discourses and values of Latinate, literate, ecclesiastical culture.
Short narrative was one of the many rhetorical devices that medieval preachers, above all from the twelfth century on, enlisted to make their sermons more effective.
They may have been especially reliant upon these devices when speaking before illiterate audiences of lay people. The entertainment of the tale helped to stave off
yawns of boredom, while the edification worked to win over listeners to the ethical or theological doctrine being purveyed, particularly by epitomizing the recompense of good behavior, or punishment of bad. A loose nexus to legend exists, since the accounts are often based on recent incidents, actual or supposed.
What does Our Lady’s Tumbler claim itself to be? This may turn out to be a trick question. The poem is identified in its preamble as an examplel, a “little example” or a “mini-exemplum.” The poet could have meant the noun in a broad-brush or generic sense, just as an “example.” After all, the word has that as its fundamental definition.
Yet the likelier alternative is that the French refers here deliberately and explicitly to the specific oratorical and literary genre. While the medieval text is not, strictly speaking, an exemplum in a sermon, its narrative has that form at its very core.
Like other categories of rhetoric, the exemplum is intended to persuade by its cogency. In Our Lady’s Tumbler, the narrative applies all the power of learned wordcraft toward the objective of suasion, but the persuasion ends up subverting the authority of learnedness itself. The protagonist who prevails does so despite his utter lack of learning. The prior and choir monks stand for one hegemony within medieval society:
they are the literarily and liturgically literate class. Without any conscious effort, the tumbler confronts this status quo head-on. In some high-altitude circles, he would be called counter-hegemonic for his de facto commitment to dismantling hegemonic power. The irony of ironies is that the story of his quiet and unwitting opposition comes down to us in writing that is thoroughly salted with learning, liturgy, Latin, and literature.
The exemplum is an autonomous literary genre. Yet it exists almost intrinsically to serve the construction of narrative in other genres. At the same time, we may commit a stark injustice by forcing this type upon the Procrustean bed of present-day literary-critical or -theoretical categories. To the Cistercians in the first century of their order, the form would have been anything but an abstraction. Rather, it would have occupied a space not unlike episodes in the Gospels: it recorded momentous aspects in the community life through which the monks sought redemption and expressed their shared values and aspirations, the ties that bind. Exempla offered means for tellers within the Cistercian order to inform their peers about their worldviews.
The white monks were remarkably prolific in the exemplary genre, but nowhere more than at Clairvaux. The collections they assembled there were rife with exempla about the lay brothers known in Latin as conversi. The frequent appearance of such brethren in short illustrative texts should surprise no one. Presumably this Cistercian literature served to shape the conduct of the converts as well as to forge a body of basic beliefs and principles held in common by both the choir monks and them.
Our Lady’s Tumbler is too long and too truly poetic to qualify narrowly as an exemplum. But sound reason exists to take the poet at his word when he suggests that the tale at its base originated in this genre. We may require no further evidence beyond the use of the term examplel to assure ourselves that the poet was well acquainted with preaching and perhaps even with the formal teaching of it in homiletics. If we do
need more grist for our mill, we can consider that the poem enfolds within itself a miniature authorial sermon or homily. We should have no difficulty in appreciating either how easily the narrative could have grown out of an exemplum, or how readily it could have been distilled back into one.