E-Book Overview
This study takes up Hans Robert Jauss's challenge to medievalists to examine the "reciprocal relations that make up the literary system of a given historical moment." The historical moment of Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence's 6180 line Vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr (circa 1174) is the struggle between Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and King Henry II of England, culminating in Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170. The generic elements within the poem constitute an ideological as well as aesthetic stance, a stance rooted in the nature of the controversy the poem details. In that conflict between Thomas and Henry we may discern one locus of the medieval shift from oral to textual modes of authority. Garnier's poem acts out that shift by narrating the life of a saint who, in the poem's view, resisted it. Chapters 1 and 2 delineate Garnier's affinities for the structural oppositions of epic, arguing that he partially assimilates his work into the chanson de geste tradition, but that he spurns the emergent romance model of narrative. Chapter 2 includes an extended commentary on the romance-inflected South English Legendary life of Saint Thomas. Chapters 3 and 4 explore a set of polarities implicit in the opposition of epic and romance: orality versus textuality. Thomas refused to countenance Henry's conversion of oral "customs" into written law. Garnier adapts the binary oppositions of medieval hagiography and chanson de geste to exploit contemporary anxiety over Henry's administrative and legal revolution. Garnier's Becket and Garnier himself emerge as symbol and spokesman, respectively, for the now vanishing values of an older, oral, feudal order. At the same time, the narrator reveals himself as a literary opportunist who has shrewdly packaged the Becket drama as commodity: the poet's commercial instincts--real or rhetorical--deconstruct his own hagiographical enterprise. This study is, then, both an examination of medieval genre as process and a re-discovery of a wily, precocious narrative artist, at work in England two centuries before Chaucer.
E-Book Content
INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper a lignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6 x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. " University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information C o m p an y 3 0 0 North Z e e b Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 4 8 1 0 6 1346 USA 3 1 3 /7 6 1 -4 7 0 0 8 0 0 /5 2 1 -0 6 0 0 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Fu