Pucele and Sinnec wîp
In Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, the protagonist of the same name is twice placed in the pos-ition of watching women “read,” once in advance of his path through aventure and once near its conclusion. In the first scene, he voyeuristically observes Laudine’s desperation as she prays from a psalter while mourning the loss of her husband, killed by Yvain.1 The second occurs as part of the Pesme Aventure, the “most dire adventure,” which is Yvain’s penultimate trial and the last he accomplishes before returning to the Arthurian court.
Here he becomes a third spectator and listener among a private group, a nobleman and his wife who, relaxing in their garden, “take great pleasure” (mout esjoïr) in “seeing and hearing” (veoir et oïr) their only daughter read from a vernacular text (lisoit une puchele devant li / En un rommans; cf. lines 5356– 69). And well they should, for, as the narrator elaborates in an aside to his own audience, the reading girl is so “beautiful and noble”
that the god of love, witnessing the same, would descend to earth in human form to claim and keep her for none but himself:
Et s’estoit si bele et si gente Qu’en li servir meïst s’entente Li Dix d’amours, s’i le veïst;
Ne ja amer ne la feïst Autrui, s’a lui meïsmes non.
Pour li servir devenist hom, S’issist de sa deÿté hors Et ferist lui meïsme el cors Du dart dont le plaie ne saine Se desloiaus mires n’i paine.
(lines 5371– 80)
(And she was so beautiful and so gracious that the god of love himself would have desired to serve her, had he seen her, and would have had her love no man if not himself. To serve her he would have changed himself into a man, would have given up his divinity and wounded his own body with the arrow whose wound does not heal unless a faithless doctor tend to it.)
Yvain is smitten with much the same desire— but not on seeing the eminently eligible courtly bride, the pucele of the Pesme Aventure. Yvain is inflicted with the wound of love while watching the suffering reading, the grieving devotion of his victim, Laudine:2
1 Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Hult, lines 1410ff. Further references to this edition are parenthetical.
2 The description of Yvain’s wound shows striking similarity to the later passage. See lines 1367– 81.
Et Mesire Yvains est encor A le fenestre ou il l’esgarde;
Et quant il plus s’en donne garde, Plus l’aime et plus li abelist.
Che qu’ele pleure et qu’ele list Vausist qu’ele laissié eüst, Et qu’a li parler li pleüst.
En chest voloir l’a Amour mis, Qui a la fenestre l’a pris.
(lines 1420– 28)3
(And my Lord Yvain is once again at the window where he beholds her, and the more he beholds her, the more he loves her and the more he is delighted, that she weeps and that she reads, these he wishes she would leave off and that it would please her to speak to him. Love had put him in this state, who befell him at the window.)
There, indulging his desire by spying through a window, he conceives an illicit love that launches his narrative path, while here, at its end, he refuses a bride legitimately won and all but forced upon him.4 The narrative is constructed such that it displays this latter— an ironic inversion of the desire that structures the most basic narrative units of romance— as the appropriate response, even as it serves to demonstrate the depth of Yvain’s own “wound” and his fidelity to and worthiness of Laudine and thus signals the reformatio of his initial illicit desire. But both are represented as responses to reading women.
For “Chrétien’s male heroes, … nothing, it would seem, is more overpowering to a knight than the spectacle of a woman reading a well- wrought text.” Thus Eugene Vance observed of Yvain’s observation of Laudine.5 To refer to Laudine’s action— performed while also wringing her hands, beating her palms together, and apparently even attempting to strangle herself (lines 1416– 18)— as reading may appear as ill- seeming as the unbridled desire it kindles in Yvain, but there are two reasons for doing so.
First, images of psalter- reading women have long been the star witnesses to an idea that women could and did read not only as Laudine does, not only as the pucele does,
“prelecting” a vernacular text,6 but also as some hybrid of the two: enjoying vernacular texts as they read psalters; that is, “in private,” or unto and for themselves. Laudine’s reading would then correspond historically to a variety of female literacy that led, so the argument goes, directly to the composition of vernacular romances such as Chrétien’s.7
3 This passage, its punctuation and translation are discussed in chap. 8, pp. 358–60.
4 The continuation of this episode sees, as it must, Yvain accomplishing the aventure associated with this castle and thus winning the bride for whose hand it was the precondition.
5 Topic to Tale, p. 7.
6 Joyce Coleman introduces the term, “prelection,” borrowed from John of Salisbury, to describe the medieval practice of public reading for a listening audience (Coleman, Public Reading, pp. 35, 230, and passim).
7 See below, pp. 24–27.
But more revealing and less disputable is another association: Laudine’s action is placed in an analogous position not only, through Yvain, to the pucele’s reading but also— through the “reading” of the audience in parallel position to Yvain— to the narrator’s performance of the text. The narrator continues his aside on the god of love by casting his own performance (or reading as illustrated by the pucele) as the potential cure for love’s wound, in which case the interested parties, whether wounded or not, are his own audience:
N’est droiz que nus pener i puisse jusque deslëauté i truisse, et qui an garist autremant il n’ainme mie lëaumant;
de ces plaies molt vos deïsse tant qu’a une fin an venisse se l’estoire bien vos plëust;
mes tost deïst, tel i eüst, que je vos parlasse de songe, que la genz n’est mes amoronge ne n’ainment mes, si con il suelent, que nes oïr parler n’an vuelent.8
(It is not right that anyone take pains to cure it unless faithlessness be found there, and he who recovers from it otherwise does not faithfully love. I would gladly tell you more of this wound until I reached an end of it, if the story should well please you; but no sooner would I start than someone among you would say that I speak of mere dreams. There are no more true lovers; people no longer love as they once did, for they don’t even want to hear of it anymore.)
Those who still truly love, the desired audience, would suffer the same wound and hear him out. But this allows Laudine’s devotional reading, the pucele’s reading per-formance, and the performance of the narrator’s text to overlap in one “reading”
experience. The audience is placed in an analogous position to both Yvain— with whom they, too, spied on Laudine— and the god of love: all of them “read” the reading woman, and the love, or wound, thereby inflicted has no cure other than the com-pletion of the story, Yvain’s narrative adventure. Yvain’s wounding at the sight of a woman’s suffering and the narrative trajectory it initiates— one that also leads, in some sense, from a woman’s devotional reading to the performance of vernacular texts— are the audience’s as well. Chrétien’s reading women are inseparable from an articulation of the experience of romance narrative, the poetics of the performance of the narrator’s text.
In another passage frequently cited as evidence that women are anticipated as the
“literal” readers of romance, Wolfram von Eschenbach interrupts the narration of his
8 Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed. Roques, lines 5379– 90. On my preference for Guiot’s copy of this passage (I have elsewhere relied on the edition of David Hult), see below, p. 351 note 69.
Parzival at the conclusion of the sixth book and calls upon the women in his audience to judge for themselves how well he has represented their fictional counterparts:
nu weiz ich, swelch sinnec wîp, ob si hât getriwen lîp, diu diz mære geschriben siht, daz si mir mit wârheit giht, ich kunde wîben sprechen baz denne als ich sanc gein einer maz.9
(Now, I know, whatever woman of sensitive understanding—be she but of mind and body true—who should see this tale in writing, she will vouch for me in all truth that I’ve given a better account of women here than in the songs I sang of one.)
The narrator’s proud stance is based on the claim that he has fulfilled a promise— made to the same women in an excursus some 3,500 lines earlier— to deliver a new and truer portrayal of women with his poem.10 Here he invites them, it seems, to “see for them-selves” what he has presented in his favour— portraits of bereft and suffering women that have peopled the poem to this point. And to jog their memories he recapitulates them: the beautiful Belakane, thoughtlessly abandoned by her much beloved foreign husband; Herzeloyde, left a young and pregnant widow after an even shorter marriage to the same husband; Ginover, mourning the loss of her murdered kinsman; Jeschute, mistreated by an intruder and then mercilessly punished by her jealous lover; and Cunneware, pummelled black and blue merely for laughing. Are the women “who see the tale in writing” to be seen as readers called upon to reconsider what they have read, or are they instead listeners who verify a claim to the effect of the performed text? The promise in question would require the latter: the point at which the narrator engaged himself to accomplish the task is the same one at which he makes his famous claim to illiteracy, says his “right” as narrator can be “seen and heard,” and refuses to continue his tale for any who would “take it for a book.”11 There, launching his “new” narrative with the birth of the hero, Parzival (4,9; 112,9– 12), he likewise announces it as his own knightly service to a suffering woman: “der lobes kemphe wil ich sîn, mir ist von herzen leit ir pîn” (I’ll be the fighting champion of her praise; her grief is my heart’s sorrow) (115,3– 4). This profession of “militant illiteracy” may well be a literary pose, but the claims it stakes, as we shall see in a later chapter, are anything but tongue- in- cheek.12 Here it is most notable that they are put forward with the pose and the language of a legal transaction.
9 Parzival. Studienausgabe, ed. Lachmann, lines 337,1– 6. Further references to this edition are par-enthetical. Translations of the text, unless otherwise noted, are my own, for which I have consulted and compared those of Hatto, Spiewok and Kühn in addition to Knecht’s in the Studienausgabe.
10 A contrast is intended with the Minnesang, recalling polemic from the earlier passage, lines 114,5– 116,3.
11 Cf. 115,8– 9, 25– 26; also pp. 319–20, below.
12 The term “militanter Illiterat” was coined by Bumke in Wolfram von Eschenbach, p. 6.
As the earlier passage makes clear, the women evoked as addressees in either case are the figments of a fictional, or “original,” performance of the text. They are conjured at several points in the text as audience members to whom Wolfram directs pointed remarks on the legitimacy of his narration and its relationship to truth.13 It would be sin-gularly inconsistent then, at the later juncture, to figure the same women as readers; it would be a glaring contradiction, should the renewed “contract” for continuation of the story depend on its being a book, and not only this but also on book- reception to guar-antee its claim to truth.
The resolution of these seeming contradictions can be found in two aspects of the con-temporary meaning and experience of written text and the use of books. First, whether between books 2 and 3 or at the end of book 6, Wolfram’s challenge turns around seeing as believing or witnessing; in fact, it need not be taken as reading in the second case at all. Studying the process whereby written documents began to assume a role within traditionally oral legal practice, Michael Clanchy finds that documents of a legal trans-action initially filled the same function as did objects that symbolized its completion, typically a knife or turf from the parcel of land exchanged. “Witnesses ‘heard’ the donor utter the words of the grant and ‘saw’ him make the transfer by a symbolic object.”14 This audio- visual witnessing made the transaction a manifest reality. As charters came to replace the exchanged object, they also became the visual (and audible) manifestation of truth: Clanchy cites a number of charters that preserve in writing the call to witnesses to see and hear the transaction, in effect extending the act of witnessing through time and space.15 The act of visually displaying a charter— at times on the church altar— then served to authenticate the validity of a transaction. The viewer became as if a witness of the original transaction by viewing the charter that was its record. Seeing, then, may or may not be reading. Seeing is believing and, called upon in this way, signals an appeal to pre- literate conceptions of juridically empowered communication predicated on phys-ical presence.16 Rather than reflecting an expectation that women could or would read his text, then, Wolfram’s remark makes the women in his audience into the decisive witnesses to the truth of his narrating performance.
The second point is suggested by Wolfram’s appeal to the women’s memory of the suffering of their fellows in the narrative. This gesture evokes an act of visual memoria, an association between participation in a performance, visual perusal of its script, and the remembering or recalling to presence of the speech and actions of others. This is the
13 These passages, which also include the prologue, 2,23– 3,24, and the epilogue, 827,25– 30, are necessarily among the most disputed in the text and are treated in detail in chap. 7, below.
14 Memory, p. 256.
15 Memory, pp. 255– 62, see also Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, pp. 356– 65, and the literature cited there; Wolf, Buch und Text, pp. 308– 9.
16 Clanchy, Memory, p. 259; also Stock, Implications of Literacy, pp. 48, 59. Green, Medieval Listening, p. 141, argues that geschriben sehen was used to mean ‘read’ by recalling examples in which Wolfram and his contemporaries use the phrase to speak of consultation of a written source.
These examples as easily prove my point: the gesture is again one of visual witnessing, in which a text source now stands in for the authority of the author as eyewitness.
basic relationship of medieval devotional reading to the performance of the mass. As Horst Wenzel observes, “Script, image and sculpted figure are understood in the Middle Ages as memorials serving the re- presentation, the recall to presence of persons in their speech and actions, and their significance in the court sphere resided in this function even as it did in the sphere of the Church.”17 We encounter this mirroring of the culture of memoria between the courtly and religious spheres specifically described as reading practice in a passage from the prologue to the Life of Saint Margaret of Scotland. The life of Margaret was commissioned by Matilda, her daughter, during her reign as queen of England (1100– 1118) and is dated between 1104 and 1107.18 Margaret’s exemplary devotional reading and its effect on her husband will be discussed below. It had an effect on her daughter as well— herself a litterata of some renown.19 As Lois Huneycutt convincingly argues, the vita was not composed as hagiography so much as it was “a didactic tool for Matilda, to instil in her an ideal of queenly behaviour, and to provide a pattern which she could follow in her daily activities.”20 Either way, however, the reading practice was the same. This is what the author has to say about Matilda’s reasons for commissioning her mother’s vita:
Venerandae memoriae matris vestrae placitam Deo conversationem, quam consona multorum laude saepius praedicari audieratis, ut litteris traditam vobis offerem et postulando jussistis et jubendo postulastis. … Vobis congratulor, quae [i.e. Matilda] a Rege Angelorum constituta Regina Anglorum, vitam matris Reginae … non solum audire, sed etiam litteris impressam desideratis jugiter inspicere; ut quae faciem matris parum noveratis, virtutem ejus notitiam plenius habeatis.21
(You have both entreated and commanded me to offer you, committed to writing, that way of life, pleasing to God, of the revered memory of your mother that you have so often heard publicly and unanimously praised. … I congratulate you, who, made queen of the English by the king of the English, had desired not only to listen to the life of your mother the queen but also to inspect its impression in letters continually; so that, having too little known your mother’s face, you might have ample experience of her virtue.)
As envisioned by the text, Matilda’s “reading” is an ancillary, additional act to that of hearing the same content recited (non solum audire), evoked with a conspicuous cir-cumlocution, litteris impressam inspicere. Matilda is to contemplate visually the memory of her mother, the impressam, “in the letters,” a practice that serves to compensate for her too brief acquaintance with her mother’s face. The auditory and visual “impresses”
are thus complementary ways for Matilda to recall her mother’s presence and “know”
her virtue— just as Wolfram’s female audience is called upon to recall to memory the
17 Wenzel, Hören und Sehen, p. 323: “Schrift, Bild und Figur gelten im Mittelalter als Denkmäler der Vergegenwärtigung, als Memorialfiguren sprechender und handelnder Personen, und in dieser Funktion sind sie für den Raum des Hofes ebenso wie für den Raum der Kirche wirksam geworden.”
18 Huneycutt, “Perfect Princess,” 81– 97; on its significance for women’s literacy and devotional reading see Gameson, “Gospels of Margaret,” pp. 149– 71.
19 Thompson, Literacy of the Laity, p. 171; Bumke, Mäzene, pp. 234– 35.
20 Huneycutt, “Perfect Princess,” 88– 89.
21 Vita S. Margaritae 2, 328 B– C.
experience of his female protagonists, an experience they encounter in the performance of the text.22 If this experience was “true,” the way Margaret’s life is a true exemplum of Christian virtue, then this will be verified in the women’s response, in their act of memoria performed by contemplating the vestiges of those “lives” on the written page, the script. Image, performance, and script all serve one purpose; all are vestiges of the absent life. As we shall see over and again, women (or the woman) represent human memory in the experience of image and word as this recalled presence.
For the authors of these texts and their audiences, the act of perusing letters on a page was, first and necessarily, one of contemplating a visual representation of sounds and presence.23 Whether and to what extent it involved the decoding of script as lan-guage is seldom a point of interest. Matilda was certainly capable of reading her mother’s life, but, as the biographer tells us, her father Malcolm of Scotland was just as decidedly
For the authors of these texts and their audiences, the act of perusing letters on a page was, first and necessarily, one of contemplating a visual representation of sounds and presence.23 Whether and to what extent it involved the decoding of script as lan-guage is seldom a point of interest. Matilda was certainly capable of reading her mother’s life, but, as the biographer tells us, her father Malcolm of Scotland was just as decidedly