Thursday 16th March 9:00—10:30, Session 2
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Authors and Readers 2 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 2 |
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Moderator: |
Christiania Whitehead |
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Paper 1: |
The Problem of Authorship of Heinrich Suso’s Minnebüchlein in the Light of Its Latin Version |
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Paper 2: |
Charles d’Orléans In and Out of Europe |
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Paper 3: |
‘Short song is good in ale’: Charles d’Orléans and Authorial Intentions in the Middle English Ballad 84 |
The Problem of Authorship of Heinrich Suso’s Minnebüchlein in the Light of Its Latin Version
Mikhail L. Khorkov
Recent study of text of a complete Latin version of Middle German Little Book of Love, or Minnebüchlein (newly discovered in a Moscow manuscript), usually ascribed to German Dominican friar Henry Suso (ed. Karl Bihlmeyer, Heinrich Seuse, Deutsche Schriften, Stuttgart 1907, pp. 537-554) leads us to the necessity to ask the following questions:
1) As far as it is known, the German version of the Minnebüchlein is preserved only in one manuscript version (Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. C 96). Could this German version just be a translation from the Latin?
2) In what sense could it then be at all possible to talk about the authorship of Henry Suso in this case? And if it is still possible, what it might mean for both versions of the Little Book of Love, as well as for other texts attributed to Henry Suso?
In my paper, I attempt to find out detailed answers to all these questions.
Charles d’Orléans In and Out of Europe
Rory Critten
This paper will examine the parallel French and English texts of Charles’s balade 35 (“J’ay ou tresor de ma pensee” / “Within the tresoure haue y of my thought”), focusing in particular on one difference between the praises applied to the speaker’s beloved in the two texts: whereas in the French version of the balade, the poet’s lady is vaunted as “celle que l’on doit nommer / Par droit la plus belle de France” (ll. 6-7), in the English poem, she is said to be “callid wel trewly / the most fayrist bitwene this and Europe” (ll. 1255-56). The difference may reflect Charles’s propensity for exaggeration in his English verse, in which the tens and hundreds in the French poetry (of ills, usually) become thousands. It might also be understood to represent an aspect of a wider ranging attempt on the part of the poet to obfuscate both his continuing contacts with the Continent and his enduring allegiance to the French cause.
In my article on the political valence of Charles’s English poetry (Modern Philology 111 [2014]) I argue that in his English Book of Love Charles takes pains to represent himself in a thoroughly Anglicized and unthreatening guise with a view to taking the edge off the reputation for political guile that he held among his captors. References to France are rarer in the English verse than in the French-language poetry; where they do occur they are often processed in ways that stress the poet’s location at his captors’ behest, outre-Manche. Although the biographical researches of Pierre Champion and others have revealed extensive contact between Charles and the Continent during his English captivity, and although the hybrid “Franglais” in which the poet writes his “English” verse highlights the cultural and linguistic ties that bind the island to the mainland, in the English version of balade 35, Charles offers his increasingly paranoid gaolers an image of an England – “this” land, here – that might be viewed in distinct contradistinction to another landmass: “Europe.” In so doing, Charles effects a fresh twist in an insular tradition of imagining a distant and detached Europe that goes back at least as far as Bede. In this context, it is instructive to note that, in the fifteenth century, “Europe” was already a concept that could be deployed as part of an attempt to fortify the notion of a detached, isolated England whose connections to the Continent were otherwise only too clear and too vital.
‘Short song is good in ale’: Charles d’Orléans and Authorial Intentions in the Middle English Ballad 84
Denis Renevey
Ballads 83 and 84 are central to our understanding of the structural coherence of Fortunes Stabilnes. Ballad 83, with its French counterpart, Ballade 72, questions the narrator’s ability at composing ballads, songs and roundels due to a state of mind that is no longer propitious for such activities. The authorial posture adopted by the ‘I-voice’ is a very complex one: the consideration of past achievements is marked with a sense of their inadequacies as to their final intentions, combined with the ‘I-voice’s sense of inability at engaging in a subsequent revision process: the ‘I-voice’ devotion to ‘Indifference’ indeed prevents any serious textual activity.
If the French collection loses its structural coherence after Ballad 83, that of Fortunes Stabilnes instead is reinforced further, with the addition of Ballad 84, which has no French equivalent. Ballad 84 indeed announces a significant generic change within the collection, with an argument and announcement in favour of the roundel, with a sequence of 96 extant roundels immediately following Ballad 84. Further, the ‘I-voice’ suggests ways of reading his sequence, as well as offers significant insights as to the book’s causa finalisand the compositional process in general. Ballad 84’s assertion in favour of the composition of ‘short song’ which is ‘good in ale’, that is the composition of short songs that allow more time for drinking, marks a considerable change in authorial intentions, and is a turning point in reinforcing structural coherence and unity in Fortunes Stabilnes.