Table Of ContentMedieval Romances
Across European Borders
MEDIEVAL NARRATIVES IN TRANSMISSION
CULTURAL AND MEDIAL TRANSLATION OF
VERNACULAR TRADITIONS
Editorial Board
Simon Thomson, Editor, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Matthew James Driscoll, Københavns Universitet
Jane Hawkes, University of York
Marion Uhlig, Université de Fribourg
Evelyn Birge Vitz, New York University
Jonathan Wilcox, University of Iowa
Volume 1
Medieval Romances
Across European Borders
Edited by
Miriam Edlich-Muth
H
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2018, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2018/0095/91
ISBN 978-2-503-57716-6
e-ISBN 978-2-503-57717-3
DOI 10.1484/M.MNT-EB.5.113962
Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
MIRIAM EDLICH-MUTH
Genre and Context
The Value of Genre for the Study of Multi-Text Codices 15
BART BESAMUSCA
‘L’aventure ke avez oïe | Veraie fu’: Bisclavret, Slender Man, and
Story Transmission 33
ELIZABETH DEARNLEY
A Saint’s Romance: Rósa, Rosana, and the Hispano-Scandinavian Links
Shaping Flóres saga ok Blankiflúr 57
MIRIAM EDLICH-MUTH
Translation as Adaptation
Femininity and Masculinity in Flores och Blanzeflor 79
VIRGILE REITER
Laudine and Lunete Moving North 95
SOFIA LODÉN
The Romans Antiques Across Time and Space 107
VENETIA BRIDGES
vi contents
The Phantom of a Romance: Traces of Romance Transmission and
the Question of Originality 133
SIF RIKHARDSDOTTIR
Continuities
Translating Treason: Shameful Death in French and English Romances
of Arthur’s Last Days 155
ROGER NICHOLSON
Between Father and Son: Interpreting Motherhood in L’Estoire de Merlin
and its Middle English Adaptations 177
SUXUE ZHANG
The Serpent with a Woman’s Face: Transformation in Libeaus Desconus
and the Vernacular Fair Unknown Tradition 205
NATALIE GOODISON
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elisabeth Lienert for her generous support of the 2014
conference at the University of Bremen, where many of the papers contained
in this volume were first presented. I am also very grateful to Antonia Murath
for her invaluable help in preparing this volume for publication, to Simon Thom-
son and the peer reviewer for their helpful feedback on the collection, and to Guy
Carney for his patience in bringing this collection to completion.
Introduction
Miriam Edlich-Muth
To consider the journeys medieval texts take across European borders is to
risk implying a set space, a geographic area neatly contained by the con-
joined political borders of nation states within which a shared literary tra-
dition can be located. The aim of this book is not to focus on a notional space of
the type that might be fully contained by the past or present political borders of
Europe. Rather, it is to consider the individual trajectory of certain medieval texts
and themes across the mobile cultural and linguistic boundaries of some of the
regions that now constitute European countries.1
The editors of the Interfaces journal of medieval European literature have recently
defined the project of studying medieval literature from a European perspective as
one that ‘seeks comparisons and connections, and is driven by questions that cross
traditional geographical, chronological or disciplinary boundaries’.2 In this context,
the term ‘European’ does not serve primarily to imply a fixed geographical area;
instead it offers an alternative to the post-medieval boundaries of the nation state
and the segregated literary canons they contain. Such an alternative makes it pos-
sible to emphasize the regional rather than the national and to highlight the shifting
borders and linguistic and dialectal shading of a pre-nation state era.
However, if regional literature is one key aspect of how we might conceive
of European literature in a pre-nation state Europe, then the concept of ‘world
1 Several of the chapters in this volume are based on papers given at the conference on ‘Medi-
eval Romances Across European Borders’, which was held at the University of Bremen in Novem-
ber 2014. I would like to thank Professor Elisabeth Lienert and the Bremen Institute for Medieval
and Early Modern Research for their kind support in organizing and financing the conference.
2 Borsa and others, ‘What Is Medieval European Literature?’, p. 8.
Medieval Romances Across European Borders, ed. by Miriam Edlich-Muth, Medieval Narratives
in Transmission, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 1–12.
FHG 10.1484/M.MNT-EB.5.115490
2 Miriam Edlich-Muth
literature’ is its necessary counterpart. In an attempt to describe ‘world litera-
ture’, David Damrosch writes ‘world literature is not at all fated to disintegrate
into the conflicting multiplicity of separate national traditions; nor, on the other
hand, need it be swallowed up in the white noise that Janet Abu-Lughod has called
“global babble”’. My claim is that world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable
canon of works, but rather a mode of circulation and of reading, a mode that is as
applicable to individual works as to bodies of material’.3
Approaching European literature from this broader perspective acknowledges
the category of ‘European’ as a helpful, but ultimately artificial subcategory within
the broader remit of world literature. Far from representing a clearly delineated
space, populated by a known and defined set of languages, that category can be
read as describing a network of individual works from different parts of the region,
whose defining feature is their mode of circulation across boundaries. In this con-
text, European literature becomes a category that is continuously being dismantled
and re-built in light of the texts under discussion.
Pre-National Perspectives
At first glance, the chapters in this volume do little to disrupt a culturally and histo-
rically limited idea of ‘Europe’ as a space firmly centred on northern and western
European countries. If the notion of ‘Europe’ is continuously under construction,
then the ‘medieval Europe’ that emerges from the scope of these papers perpetuates
the much-touted hegemony of medieval France as ‘romance central’, in that many
of the chapters contained in this volume engage with narrative traditions whose
hub is located in France. The inclusion of studies on the lais of Marie de France,
the romans d’antiquité, l’Estoire de Merlin and different versions of Le Bel Inconnu,
Le Chevalier au Lion and Floire et Blanchefleur creates a clear focus on francophone
regions, testifying to the role of medieval French romance literature as a crucible
whose sparks transcended the edges of the francophone world.
At the same time, this volume bears witness to the concrete ways in which the
role of French as what Simon Gaunt has described as the lingua franca of medie-
val Europe contributed to elements of a shared European literary tradition in
this period.4 Thus, the focus of many of these studies is not on France, but on the
3 Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, p. 5 and Abu-Lughod, ‘Going Beyond the Global
Babble’, p. 135.
4 Gaunt, ‘French Literature Abroad’, pp. 25–61.
