Scriveners' Tales:

Scribal Versions of the French Prose Romances

Richard A. Dwyer

Under the unprepossessing title of "Miscellaneous French Prose Romances", the late Cedric Pickford analyzed six works for Roger Sherman Loomis's collaborative history, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages.¹ Those texts include both works in the modern sense of original authorial compositions as well as distinctive manuscript assemblages. They are Palamedes, Le Prophecies de Merlin, and Le Chevalier du Papegau, and the compilations of Rusticiano da Pisa, Jehan Vaillant and Michel Gonnot. Although Pickford proceeded without a general introduction into the analysis of individual works, it is apparent that they form collectively a more-than-miscellaneous corpus of thematic and methodological interest. The intent of several of them seems to have been to gather in one place as much of the vast Arthurian Cycle as possible, and their techniques in doing so, if not their artistic success, continue to attract scholarly attention.

            Further study of these and related works in the past three decades has confirmed their common bond. Indeed, the investigation that serves as a splendid introduction to these texts and their associated problems was published by Pickford the same year as ALMA. He called it L'Evolution du roman arthurien en prose vers la fin du Moyen Age.² It centers on an examination of MS BN fr. 112--the compilation made by Michel Gonnot in the 1470s--but it unfolds into an inquiry involving some 200 MSS. Later studies by Pickford probe the early printed versions of those romances several of which he brought out in facsimile editions³ -- and one of his last efforts was an address to the International Arthurian Society on "The Maturity of the Arthurian Prose Romances.⁴ His pre-eminence in this area of Arthurian studies has recently been honored by a festschrift.⁵

            One critical issue of great interest here has to do with the ways that late medieval book production met the demands of readers for books about king Arthur and his knights. Individual authors might respond to the existence of the whole corpus of Arthuriana by creating new works about the existing cadre, with new or revamped episodes, or new characters. These might hark back to an earlier generation of heroes, or provide enfances of the present ones, or look forward to their descendants. Characteristic episodes, also interlardable at will, include ambushments, abductions, imprisonments, tournaments, sieges, and instructional huddles with innumerable hermits.

            An alternative mode of production lay with the bookmakers and purveyors of manuscripts. They might assign scribes the job of assembling, out of whatever exemplars were available, compilations to meet the tastes of particular audiences. The most competent scribes and editors might also write incipits, explicits, transitions, abridgments and summaries to make these compilations seem more unified. As Pickford says of Palamedes, "The lack of guiding principle and controlling pattern made it easy for scribes to omit, rewrite, or add episodes."⁶

            Between these poles of writing as creative authorship and writing as mere copying lies a whole range of possibilities, many of them realized in individual manuscripts. Finally, there are late medieval works by particular authors who composed them according to the aesthetics of bricolage. Thus, a work like Le Chevalier du Papegau is as miscellaneous and episodic as if it had been scribally assembled out of available bits and pieces. On the one hand, then, we have medieval editors attempting to cobble together works having the appearance of unity, or at least comprehensiveness, in presenting a complete history of the Arthurian realm, and, in the later Middle Ages, we have original authors composing heterogeneous texts as if "unity" were of little interest--witness the endless controversy over Sir Thomas Malory's one book or eight,

            The principal esthetic effect of all this compilation and homogenizing is a medieval anticipation of Grub Street hackwork. And there has been little self-deception among modern scholars about the lack of literary quality in these late prose romances. It was exactly works like these that set the stage for Malory's condensation and Cervantes' send-up of the whole genre. Motivation for modern study of these romances has derived from a sociological interest in medieval book-production and popular taste, and a desire to tie up bibliographic loose ends. With the advent of theoretical interest in the topic of "intertextuality,"⁷ these romances claim some additional notice as vast echo-chambers of so much Arthurian writing of the Middle Ages. But study of these texts by such scholars as Baumgartner and Lathuilliere has alternated between a focus on the narrative techniques of authors and the editorial techniques of the scribes, without much development of a common vocabulary for dealing with their intersection.⁸

Palamedes

            Of the six works discussed by Pickford in ALMA. Palamedes receives the most attention. And this favor continues to the present day in the studies of other scholars, principally Fanni Bogdanow and Roger Lathuilliere.⁹ Work in the past thirty years has ranged from the discovery of new manuscripts and fragments to full-scale studies of the whole manuscript tradition and of the evolution of narrative technique expressed in this and related texts.^1O

            Palamedes itself evolved as a text out of the first version of the prose Tristan and contributed to the evolution of the second or cyclic version. Since Pickford wrote, interest has focused less on Meliadus, the first half of the romance concerned with Tristan's father, than on Guiron le Courtois who rescues him and then proceeds with his own adventures.

The Compilation of Rusticiano da Pisa

            The Compilation of Rusticiano da Pisa exists complete in four MSS and fragmentarily in four others. Two of the complete MSS (B.N. fr. 340 and 355) continue the work, the former going all the way to the death of King Marc. Pickford remarks the "confused patchwork of adventures narrated without regard to chronology."¹¹ The compiler, who seems to be the same man who later went on to transcribe in French the adventures of his fellow prisoner Marco Polo, blames the multiplicity of his models for this incoherence. He apparently began his effort by assembling Arthurian extracts to entertain king Edward I of England on Crusade in the early 1270s, but he soon went beyond this in making his own thematic arrangement and composing a narrative matrix for the assemblage. Thus, two centuries before Malory we find creative editorial activity intermediate between the traditional roles of authors and copyists. And his work was subjected to the sort of continuation practiced even earlier on the verses of Chretien's Perceval. The compilation was quite popular, especially with Italian and Spanish writers.¹²

The Prophécies de Merlin

            According to Pickford, between 1272 and 1279 a Venetian, writing in French and referring to himself as "Maitre Richart d'Irlande,” composed a long series of prophecies attributed to Merlin and now known as the Prophecies de Merlin. Merlin's pronouncements here refer mainly to the political events which occurred in Italy and the Holy Land in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the author; in order to liven up the work, interwove it with a considerable amount of material copied or adapted from the Arthurian prose romances. Of the thirteen extant manuscripts of the Prophécies listed by Lucy Allen Paton in her 1926 edition of the prophetic material, most deliberately omit the Arthurian Sections. But four MSS (B.N. fr. 350; B.L Harley 1629 and Addit: 25434; and a Ms in Bodmer's library in Geneva) present the bulk of the Arthurian incidents Additionally, Bogdanow has discovered in the State Archives of Modena fragments from four different previously unknown MSS of the Prophécies which contain some of the Arthurian material.¹³ In 1975, Pickford republished the 1498 print of Antoine Verard.¹⁴

            It is significant for the purposes of this discussion that this work celebrates the activities of scribes. The prophecies are presented as more than 300 short conversations between Merlin and his scribes - Blaise, Maistre Antoine, Bishop Tholomer, the "Sage Clerc" and Maistre Petronne. This observation should be balanced by the judgment of Langlois who described the style of the compilation as “une detestable logorrhee d'homme sans culture litteraire ni autre, qui s'adresse a des illettres."¹⁵

The Compilation of Jehan Vaillant de Poitiers

            The compilation of Jehan Vaillant de Poitiers was made for Louis II, Duc de Bourbon, probably in 1391. It survives in MSS B.N. fr. 358-363 and in a shorter form in the Bodmer collection in Geneva. Jehan's conception of the cycle was pseudo-historical. To quote Cedric Pickford, the only student of this remarkable assemblage, Vaillant began:

with the story of the 'Grantz Geantz' who inhabited Albion before the conquest by Brutus, and a short history of the island up to Uther's reign, based on Geoffrey of Monmouth. The adventures of Guiron and the Le Brun brothers follow. Next we have the whole Palamedes, extracts from the Prophecies de Merlin and an abridged version of the enfances and the first knightly deeds of Lancelot. We return to Guiron, and then proceed to extracts from the Prose Tristan and a prose redaction of Chretien's Erec up to the marriage with Enide. The episode of the false Guenievre is followed by the tournament of Sorelois, and the long pastiche concludes with the final exploits of Guiron and his death as a hermit. Thus Vaillant produced a fairly complete fabulous history of Britain before the downfall of Arthur (ALMA, 355).

            It might be mentioned here that a comparable historical intention may have motivated the anonymous medieval editor who assembled MS B.N. fr. 1450, embedding the verse romances of Chretien de Troyes within a collection starting with the Roman de Troie, the Roman d'Eneas and part of Wace's Brut, and following them with the rest of the Brut and concluding with the Roman de Dolopathos. This earlier effort to set the disparate romances of Chretien into a roughly historical cycle of other texts linking the matter of Britain with that of Greece and Rome reveals a kind of editorial sophistication that needs further scholarly recognition.¹⁶

The Compilation of Michel Gonnot

            The compilation of Michel Gonnot was completed in 1470 for Jacques d'Armagnac, Due de Nemours, and it was this compendium that launched Pickford on his monumental study. L'Evolution du roman Arthurien en prose ver la fin du Moyen Age d'apres le manuscrit 112 du fonds francais de la Bibliotheque Nationale.¹⁷ After investigating the sources, technique, aesthetic and ethical effects of Michel’s work, Pickford concludes by comparing it with Malory’s and Caxton's. Lacking their respective imagination and editorial talents, Gonnot and his readers nevertheless shared something of their tastes in contrast to those of the thirteenth century:

The cyclic romance, in which each event is explained and each adventure is followed to its end, did not suit the tastes of either copyists or readers. When the scribe found himself obliged to leave nothing unexplained, the chronology of the incidents became bizarre and the text swarmed with contradictions and absurdities. The late medieval reader preferred, it seems, a much looser narrative than that in the prose Lancelot. He liked to follow only one episode at a time, an episode more or less complete, concerning a single character, without interruption. Perhaps he was also too lazy to scan tens of parchment folios in search of the sequel to a story he had begun reading.¹⁸

Le Chevalier du Papegau

            This taste for a different kind of assemblage motivates much of the authorial and scribal activity we have been surveying, but in the last work to be considered here, it takes a new twist. Le Chevalier du Papegau is the exception in this collection in that it is not a cyclic romance, and it concerns the adventures of the young King Arthur himself rather than those of his retinue. But like the other late prose romances, it is heavily derivative and episodic. Its chronology and geography are confusingly vague, but its anonymous author had a taste, indeed a thirst, for the marvelous. Arthur acquires a talking, singing parrot which not only entertains but advises the king. Such inventiveness fails to square with the formal conventionality of the prose romance tradition, and indeed may be seen as a febrile struggle against it.¹⁹ Recent work on this romance by Henry Kratz and Kurt Wais has linked it with its analogues, Eckenleid and Thidrekssaga.²⁰

            While Bogdanow, Lathuilliere, Pickford and others have probed the details of these late French prose romances, they cannot be said to have developed a general theory of them. A step toward supplying that lack has been taken by such volumes as The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics,²¹ and in particular by Douglas Kelly's essay in that volume. There he contrasts Chretien's technique of conjointure with the prose romancers habitual practice of disjointure, although I do not think he makes sufficient distinction between the techniques of the makers of the Vulgate cycle and those of the later compilers:

In place of the smooth narrative design of a Chretien de Troyes, the writers and scribes who put together the prose romances developed an intricate system of interlace and dovetailing of narrative parts. Each incident acquired meaning by virtue of its relationship to the whole. Moreover, successive adaptors, continuators and even ordinary scribes could insert new material without destroying the coherence of the whole because of the relation of each part to a central organizing principle or image represented by the grail as a source of adventures and signification.²²

            Such statements indicate the concern of contemporary theorists for developing a vocabulary to accommodate those aspects of late medieval artistic practice which we have seen in the "scribal romances" that differ both from better-known earlier techniques and from those of our own latter-day writers. The distinction between the high calling of authorship and the servile one of copying was becoming blurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As many more people became involved in book production in the late Middle Ages, the division of the labor of making books elaborated, and the species multiplied. The techniques which textual scholars have discriminated for us--compilation, abridgement, remaniement, conflation and so on--were the working tools of a new artistry. Using them, scribes and their editors were able to accommodate another set of changes, those in the readership of fiction. If what this means in terms of artistic excellence is the paving of the mean streets of mediocrity, it also allowed for a growing public access to Logres. In order to appreciate fully the textual, literary, and social aspects of this complex phenomenon, we may have to integrate and adjust our vocabularies and points of view. Thus, as these vast compilations become more familiar to us in their particulars, thanks to the labors of historical scholars and editors, they may also be expected to attract the attention of critics and theorists.

            Florida International University

NOTES

¹Loomis, ALMA, 1959, 348-57.

²Paris, 1959.

³Merlin, vols. 1 & 2 and Les Prophecies de Merlin (London, 1975); Guyron le Courtois (London, 1977); Meliadus de Leonnoys (London, 1980) and his article “Les editions imprimes de romans arthuriens en prose anterieures a 1600," BBIAS 13 (1961), 99-109.

            ⁴BBIAS 34 (1982). 197-206.

            ⁵Alison Adams, et al., eds., The Changing Face of Arthurian Romance: Essays … in Memory of Cedric B. Pickford (Woodbridge, 1986).

⁶Loomis, ed. ALMA, p. 349.

            ⁷Richard Dwyer, "Arthurian Intertextuality," paper read at XIIIth Congress of the International Arthurian Society, Glasgow, 1981.

            ⁸Emmannele Baumgartner, "Les Techniques narratives dans le roman en prose,” in Norris Lacy. et al., eds. The Legacy of Chretien de Troyes (Amsterdam, 1987), I, 167-90; and Roger Lathuilliere, "L'evolution de la technique narrative dans le roman Arthurien en prose au cours de la deuxieme moitie du XIIIe siecle," in Etudes de langue et de litterature francaises offerts a Andre Lanly (Nancy, 1980), II, 203-14.

            ⁹Fanni Bogdanow, "Pellinor's Death in the Suite du Merlin and the Palamedes, MS BM Addit. 36,673." Medium AEvum, 29 (1960), 1-9; "A Hitherto Unidentified MS of Palamedes: Venice, St. Mark's Lib. MS fr. xv,” Medium AEvum 30 (1961), 89-92; "Fragments of Pt.1 of the Palamedes Preserved in the State Archives of Modena," Nottingham Medieval Studies 13 (1969), 27-48; "A Note on the Second Version of the Post-Vulgate Queste and Guiron le Courtois,” Medium AEvum 39 (1970), 288-90; and Roger Lathulliere, Guiron le Courtois, etude de la tradition MS et analyse critique (Geneve, 1966); "Le MS de Guiron le Courtois de la Bibliotheque Martin Bodmer, a Geneve," Melange … a Jean Frappier (Geneve, 1970), II, 567-74; "Le Livre de Palamede," Melanges... a Pierre Le Gentil (Paris, 1973), pp. 441-49.

            ¹⁰Michel Olsen, "Guiron le Courtois, decadence du code chevaleresque," Rev. R. 12 (1977), 67-95; and Homero Vazquez, edition, D.A.I. 31: 4737A (Colo.).

            ¹¹ALMA, p.350.

¹²Bogdanow, "A New MS of the Enfances Guiron and Rusticien de Pise's Roman le roi artus," Romania 88 (1967), 323-49.

            ¹³Bogdanow, “Some Hitherto Unknown Fragments of the Prophecies de Merlin," in F.J. Barnett et al., History and Structure of French (Oxford, 1972), pp. 31-59. Rosalie Vermette, "An Unrecorded Fragment of Richart d'lrlande's Prophecies de Merlin," Romance Philology 34 ( 1951), 277-92.

¹⁴ Pickford, ed. Merlin, 2 vols. and Les Prophecies de Merlin (London, 1975).

¹⁵Quoted in ALMA, p.355.

            ¹⁶Dwyer, “Approaching Cyclicity," Paper read at 9th Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium, 1982.

            ¹⁷Paris, 1959.

            ¹⁸ Pickford, L'Evolution, p.293. The translation is mine.

            ¹⁹Thomas Vesce, "The Return of the Chevalier de Papegau," Romance Notes 17 (1977), 320-27.

            ²⁰Henry Kratz, "The Eckenlied and its Analogues," in Spectrum Medii AEvi (Goppingen, 1983), pp.231-55; Kurt Weis, "Le Chevalier du Papegau und der themensgeschichtliche Umkreis des Leides von Ecke," in Courtly Romance, eds. Guy R. Mermier and Edelgard E. du Bruck (Detroit, 1984), pp. 273-99.

            ²¹ Douglas Kelly, “L'invention dans les romanes en prose," in Leigh A. Arrathoon, ed., The Craft of Fiction (Rochester, MI, 1984), pp. 119-42.

            ²²Abstract in BBIAS (1985), p 407.