Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France 1843844362, 9781843844365

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements x
Note on quotations xi
List of Abbreviations xii
Chronology of epitaph fictions xiii
Introduction: Representing the Dead 1
1. Framing Identity: 'je suis' and 'cy gist' 37
2. Identity and/as Echo: the ''Belle Dame' querelle' and 'Le Jardin de plaisance' 91
3. Dying to be told: storytelling and exemplarity 'selon le stile Jehan Bocace' 146
4. Placing the Dead: Cemeteries, Hospitals and Temples 201
Afterword: Illustrating the dead 265
Coda: Re-Member Me 305
Appendix: Early Editions of the 'Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique' 307
Bibliography 308
Index 323

Citation preview

HELEN J. SWIF T is Associate Professor of Medieval French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Front cover image: Title page: the sins of the ‘mal advisés’, Laurent Desmoulins, Le Cymetiere des malheureux (Paris: Michel Le Noir and Jean Petit, 1511); Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 1353.

An imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620–2731 (US)

H E L E N J. S W I F T

Who am I when I am dead? Several late-medieval French writers used literary representation of the dead as a springboard for exploring the nature of human being. Death is a critical moment for identity definition: one is remembered, forgotten or, worse, misremembered. Works in prose and verse by authors from Alain Chartier to Jean Bouchet record characters’ deaths, but what distinguishes them as epitaph fictions is not their commemoration of the deceased, so much as their interrogation of how, by whom and to what purpose posthumous identity is constituted. Far from rigidly memorialising the dead, they exhibit a productive messiness in the processes by which identity is composed in the moment of its decomposition as a complex interplay between body, voice and text. The cemeteries, hospitals, temples and testaments of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century literature, from the “Belle Dame sans mercy” querelle to Le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin, present a wealth of ambulant corpses, disembodied voices, animated effigies, martyrs for love and material echoes of the past which invite readers to approach epitaphic identity as a challenging question: here lies who, exactly? In its broadest context, this study casts fresh light on ideas of selfhood in medieval culture as well as on contemporary conceptions of the capacities and purposes of literary representation itself.

REPRESENTING THE DEAD

Gallica

REPRESENTING

THE DEAD

Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France H E L E N J. S W I F T

Gallica Volume 40

REPRESENTING THE DEAD

Gallica ISSN 1749-091X General Editor: Sarah Kay

Gallica aims to provide a forum for the best current work in medieval and Renaissance French studies. Literary studies are particularly welcome and preference is given to works written in English, although publication in French is not excluded. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editor, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Sarah Kay, Department of French, New York University, 13-19 University Place, 6th floor, New York, NY 10003, USA The Editorial Director, Gallica, Boydell & Brewer Ltd., PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the end of this volume.

REPRESENTING THE DEAD EPITAPH FICTIONS IN LATE-MEDIEVAL FRANCE

HELEN J. SWIFT

D. S. BREWER

© Helen J. Swift 2016 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Helen J. Swift to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published 2016 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978-1-84384-436-5

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For Sophie and Richard

Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgementsx Note on quotations xi List of Abbreviations xii Chronology of epitaph fictions xiii Introduction: Representing the Dead 1  Framing Identity: ‘je suis’ and ‘cy gist’

1 37

2 Identity and/as Echo: the ‘Belle Dame’ querelle and Le Jardin de plaisance91 3 Dying to be told: storytelling and exemplarity ‘selon le stile Jehan Bocace’

146

4  Placing the Dead: Cemeteries, Hospitals and Temples

201

Afterword: Illustrating the dead

265

Coda: Re-Member Me

305

Appendix: Early Editions of the Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique307 Bibliography308 Index323

Illustrations Plates (between pages 162 and 163) Plate 1  George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 7r Plate 2  George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 68r Plate 3  George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 15v Plate 4  George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 24r Plate 5  George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 29r Figures Figure 1  Jean Du Pré, Le Palais des nobles dames (Lyon: n. pub. [1534]), fol. A1v; Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 1254 205 Figure 2  Jean Bouchet, Le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (Poitiers: Jean and Enguilbert de Marnef, 1538), fol. E7v; Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 363 206 Figure 3  Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré (Gouda: Collaciebroeders, c.1489); Geneva, Bibliothèque Jean Bonna 271 Figure 4  Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré, Chifflet manuscript, fol. 24v; Geneva, Bibliothèque Jean Bonna 272 Figure 5  Olivier de La Marche, Le Chevalier délibéré (Paris: [Guy Marchand or Antoine Caillaut] for Antoine Vérard, 1488); Geneva, Bibliothèque Jean Bonna 274 Figure 6  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 38v 279 Figure 7  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 87r 280 Figure 8  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 107r 281 Figure 9  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 109v 283 Figure 10  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 126v 284 Figure 11  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 115r 286 Figure 12  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 118v 287 Figure 13  Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Le Séjour d’honneur, Paris, BnF, fr. 12783, fol. 122r 288



illustrations

Figure 14  Laurent Desmoulins, Le Cymetiere des malheureux (Paris: Michel Le Noir and Jean Petit, 1511), title page; Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 1353  Figure 15  Laurent Desmoulins, Le Cymetiere des malheureux (Lyon: Olivier Arnoullet, 1534), title page; cliché Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Rés 800034. Crédit photographique Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole  Figure 16  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames (Lyon: [Guillaume le Roy?], 1485), fol. B7r; Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 27  Figure 17  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames (Lyon: [Guillaume le Roy?], 1485), fol. C3r; Paris, BnF, Rés. Ye 27 Figure 18  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames, Paris, BnF, fr. 12476, fol. 15r Figure 19  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames, Paris, BnF, fr. 841, fol. 16v Figure 20  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, MS.352 Rés., fol. 40v Figure 21  Martin Le Franc, Le Champion des dames, Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble, MS.352 Rés., fol. 30v

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293 296 297 299 300 301 303

The author and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements This book is testament to the intellectual productivity of teaching-led research. It results from a brainstorm on a scrap of paper in January 2014 in response to a colleague’s email about lecture course intentions for the following academic year; I scribbled the word ‘death’; the rest followed. I spent that January and February in Paris, just around the corner from Montparnasse Cemetery, as part of a two-term sabbatical that produced the first draft of the book. It was the most research fun that I have ever had, and I thank here all those who made it possible and nourished it along the way. My supportive institutions, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and St Hilda’s College, set me off on leave, and several wonderfully supportive individuals in those places allowed (and, at times, ordered) me to keep my distance and focus on research: Daron Burrows, Sophie Marnette (whom I also thank for the email about lecture courses), Will McKenzie, Georgina Paul, Lynn Robson and Pauline Souleau. I thank my students for many, many tutorial hours of fruitful perseverance through Villon, and my own medieval French tutors from when I was an undergraduate, especially Jane Taylor, for sparking my taste for the macabre. In the course of the project I benefited from the sage advice of many kind scholars, especially Adrian Armstrong, Guyda Armstrong, Kenneth Clarke, Philippe Frieden, Nick Havely, Neil Kenny, Sophie Marnette, Susie Speakman Sutch, Craig Taylor and Sethina Watson, and the scholarly generosity of Emma Cayley, Miranda Griffin, Sylviane Messerli and Laëtitia Tabard. My readers at Boydell provided invaluable constructive criticism, and I am grateful for their incisive remarks as well as for the publisher’s support in the production process, with special thanks to Caroline Palmer. Several repositories furnished images for the book, and I thank especially Jean Bonna for his permission to reproduce material from his private collection. I have already thanked Sophie Marnette twice, but a third, additional round would not be undue recognition of the value of her collegial support and friendship over the past decade; it cannot be overstated. It also helps to be of a cheerful disposition when spending many months with the (mercifully fictionalised) dead, dying and lovesick; Richard Todd has contributed over the past few years to my being happier than I’ve ever been, and my daily appreciation of that underpinned the progress of this project. I thus dedicate the book to both Sophie and Richard, with love.

Note on quotations I quote from a variety of medieval French editions, manuscript sources and early printed books. When quoting directly from a manuscript or an early printed book, I distinguish between i and j, v and u, expand abbreviations, such as those denoted by the tilde, modernise punctuation and normalise the long s, the ampersand and the Tironian sign to modern usage. My editorial practice follows Foulet and Speer, On Editing Old French Texts. When quoting from a critical edition of a text or its translation, I respect the conventions observed by the modern editor/ translator in question. My own editorial interventions in quotations are signalled by square brackets.

Abbreviations Abbreviations for the book’s principal corpus appear in the Chronology of epitaph fictions. Full references for works listed below may be found in the Bibliography. CUP DCVI Des cas DMC Fates Inf.

Cambridge University Press Giovanni Boccaccio. De casibus virorum illustrium Laurent de Premierfait. Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes Giovanni Boccaccio. De mulieribus claris Giovanni Boccaccio. The Fates of Illustrious Men, trans. Louis Brewer Hall Dante Alighieri. Inferno

Met. Ovid. Metamorphoses OM anon. Ovide moralisé OUP Oxford University Press Purg. Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio RR Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Le Roman de la rose st. strophe v. verse (for clarity, given the number of prosimetra under examination, I use ‘line’ to denote a line of prose and ‘verse’ for a line of poetry)

Chronology of epitaph fictions I include after each entry, where applicable, the death date of the person commemorated (or primarily/ostensibly commemorated), followed by the abbreviated form of the title used in this book. For simplicity of reference, the list below indicates only the first known or estimated date of publication; it does not take account, for example, of the later appearance in print of an earlier-fifteenth-­century manuscript work or of re-editions of printed texts. Alain Chartier. La Belle Dame sans mercy (BDSM) Baudet Herenc. L’Accusation contre la Belle Dame sans mercy (Accusation) 1426–30 anon. La Dame lealle (DL) 1430 Achille Caulier. La Cruelle femme en amours (CF) before 1441 Achille Caulier. L’Ospital d’amour (HA) c.1442 Martin Le Franc. Le Champion des dames (CdD) 1441–47 Pierre de Hauteville. La Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil (Confession) ——. La Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil (Complainte) ——. L’Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant trespassé de deuil (Inventaire) before 1450 George Chastelain. L’Oultré d’amour (OA) before 1454 ——. Les Epitaphes d’Hector (EH) 1457 René d’Anjou. Le Livre du cœur d’amour épris (LCAE) 1459 Jacques Milet. La Forest de Tristesse (FT) before 1460 anon. Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy (Erreurs) anon. Le Debat sans conclusion (Debat) 1461 George Chastelain. La Mort du roy Charles VII (d.22 July) (MRC) Simon Gréban. L’Epitaphe du feu roy Charles septiesme (d.22 July) (EFRC) c.1461 François Villon. Le Testament before 1463 ——. L’Epitaphe Villon 1424 1425–26

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1463 [Pierre Michault?]. Le Purgatoire d’amour (PA) 1463–65 George Chastelain. Le Temple de Bocace (TB) 1465 ——. L’Epitaphe de Messire Pierre de Brezé (d.16 July) (EMPB) 1467 Jean Molinet, L’Epitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne (d.15 June) 1483 1489–94

——. Le Trosne d’honneur (Philip the Good, d.15 June) (TH) Olivier de La Marche. Le Chevalier délibéré (CD) Octovien de Saint-Gelais. Le Séjour d’honneur (SH)

1491? Jean Molinet. Le Donnet baillié au roy Charles VIII (Donnet) 1494 ——. L’Epitaphe de Philippe de Crèvecoeur (d.22 April) (EPC) 1495 André de La Vigne, ‘Epytaphes et complaintes du duc de Vendosme’ (Francis of Bourbon, d.30 October) (ECDV) [1501] Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique (JdP) 1501 André de La Vigne. Les Complaintes et Epitaphes du Roy de la Bazoche (Pierre of Baugé, d.16 June) (CERB) Antitus. Le Portail du Temple de Bocace (Louis of Montfaucon, d.1501) (PTB) 1503 Jean Lemaire de Belges, Le Temple d’Honneur et de vertus (Pierre II of Bourbon, d.10 October) (THV) 1507–8 ——. Epitaphe en maniere de dialogue de feus de memoire eternelle, messire Georges Chastelain autrement dit l’Aventureux, et maistre Jean Molinet (Chastelain, d.20 March 1475; Molinet, d.1507) 1511 Laurent Desmoulins. Le Cymetiere des malheureux (CM) 1517 Jean Bouchet. Le Temple de Bonne Renommée (Charles de La Trémoille, d.16 September 1515) (TBR) 1522 ——. Le Labirynth de fortune et Sejour des trois nobles dames (Arthus Gouffier, d.1519) (Labirynth) 1528 ——. Les Anciennes et modernes gesnealogies des Roys de France et mesment du Roy Pharamond, avec leurs epitaphes et effigies (AMG) 1534 Jean Du Pré, Le Palais des nobles dames (PND) 1535 Jean Bouchet, Epistres, Elegies, Epigrammes et Epitaphes, composez sur et pour raison du deces de feu tresillustre et tresreligieuse Dame Madame Renee de Bourbon (d.8 November 1534) 1538 ——. Le Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin et sejour des illustres, claires et honnestes dames (Louise of Savoy, d.22 September 1531) (JPHF)

Introduction: Representing the Dead In 1501, under the title Les Complaintes et Epitaphes du Roy de la Bazoche, André de La Vigne framed within a dream-vision narrative a set of laments and epitaphs in memory of Pierre of Baugé, who, recently deceased, had held the title of ‘the King of the Basoche’, the head of the guild of legal clerks of the Palais de Justice.1 In the text, members of that society, represented by a personification (‘la Bazoche’), issue apostrophising invective against death and are themselves apostrophised in an exhortation to collective lament: ‘Plourez, plourez, plaignez, lermes gectez’ (v. 198 [Weep, weep, lament, shed tears]). Following this complaint, personified representatives of the societies of four other cities are seen, the persona tells us,2 bringing forward ‘les epitaphes que cy après s’ensuyvent’ (v. 462 [the epitaphs which follow hereafter]). Each eleven-verse verse epitaph offers tribute to the late Pierre and presents itself deictically as being inscribed into his tomb: Sous ceste amère, dure et dolente pierre Gist nostre Roy basilical, dit Pierre. (CERB, vv. 463–4: the Bazoche of Toulouse) [Under this bitter, hard and woeful stone lies our King of the Basoche, called Pierre.]

Pierre’s identity thus lies homonymically both beneath and in the stone (‘pierre’). Having read all eight epitaphs (each representative offers two), the persona awakes. The way in which the epitaphs function is far more complex than this simple plot summary suggests: they are exploited by de La Vigne as a potent textual tool for reflecting on the literary composition of identity and on processes

1 In Recueil de poésies françoises des XVè et XVIè siècles: morales, facétieuses, historiques, 13 vols (Paris: Jannet/Franck/Daffis, 1855–78), ed. Anatole de Montaiglon and James de Rothschild, XIII (Paris: Daffis, 1878), pp. 383–413. English translations of quotations are mine throughout, unless otherwise indicated. 2 By ‘persona’, I mean the first-person voice of a text, a literary je who usually fulfils a narrating function and is often denoted in medieval French by the term ‘l’Acteur’. I prefer ‘persona’ to ‘narrator’ as a default term because a narrating role is not exclusive to the firstperson voice – it can be fulfilled by other characters; correspondingly, the persona does not always or only narrate. The term ‘persona’ derives from the Latin for ‘mask’, on which, see below, p. 50.

2

representing the dead

of commemoration. The vital role of the reader in all of this is evoked by the Basoche of Bordeaux: Pour les passans du long cest ambulacre Est et sera pourtraict le simulacre Du noble Roy, que Mort nous veult oster Vif en vertus, plus hault volant qu’un sacré. (CERB, vv. 474–7) [For those who pass along this ambulatory, there is and will be portrayed the effigy of the noble King, whom Death wanted to take from us shining [lit. alive] in virtues, more elevated than a saint.]

The ‘passans’ designate, on one level, the physical passers-by, like the persona, who activate the text of an epitaph through their reading of it in the here and now of their present moment of viewing, and who would see, in a funerary monument setting, the effigy of the deceased adorning his tomb. On another level, though, the ‘passans’ also represent the reader passing through the text of the poem, who puts together imaginatively the identity of the departed through her/his reading of the sequence of epitaphs as a collectivity. This identity is a construction that perpetuates elements of the life of the individual beyond death (‘vif en vertus’). That the eight onzains are to be understood collectively is signalled by the Basoche of Dijon: Soubz ce sercueil, le recueil de la plume, Par divers vers deçà et delà plume L’orde vilaine […]. (CERB, vv. 540–2) [Beneath this sarcophagus, the shelter of his excellency, foul vileness despoils this side and that with vicious worms […].]

Wordplay in these verses invites a literary reflexive reading. ‘Recueil’ can mean ‘shelter’ or ‘protection’, but can also denote an action of ‘gathering together’, making of ‘le recueil de la plume’ a periphrastic description of the coffin as what ‘gathers together’ the deceased’s remains, taking ‘la plume’ as an honorific antonomasia for Pierre. As such, it activates a metatextual understanding of ‘recueil’ as a collection of writings, such as the eleven epitaphs themselves, which, through their texts, are constituting deictically Pierre’s resting place. ‘L’orde vilaine’, through further periphrasis, denotes Death, who is said to be scouring with worms Pierre’s decaying body. Exploitation of homonymy between ‘vers’ ([worms]) and ‘vers’ ([verses]) was commonplace in medieval poetry about death,3 but is handled more specifically here to direct us how to set

3 As in the various poems bearing the title Vers de la mort by Hélinand de Froidment, Robert Le Clerc and Adam de la Halle: see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Les Vers comme héritiers: aspects de la poétique du testament aux XIVè et XVè siècles’, Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 345–57, pp. 356–7.



introduction

3

about reading the epitaphs, apparently by picking elements off different verses here and there (‘par deçà et delà’). What is going on, in fact, is a complex variation on an acrostich: across all the onzains, the last letters of the last word of each verse or succession of verses, when put together, spell out a further commemoration of Pierre, a requiem blessing: ‘Requiem eternam dona dona [sic] eis domine et lux perpetua luceat eis’.4 For example, verses 463–4, quoted above, furnish the ‘re’ of ‘requiem’; verses 540–1, the ‘e’ of ‘eis’. The epitaphs together thus perform, in miniature, a mass of the dead for the deceased. The complexity does not end there. After the Basoches have presented their verses, the persona sees some people ‘faire entr’eulx une contre epitaphe’ (v. 557 [making between them a counter-epitaph]), bringing a contrary representation of Pierre’s character to bear. However, the persona outsmarts them by discerning that ‘[…] mieulx disoient qu’ilz ne pensoient dire’ (v. 561 [[…] they said more than they thought they were saying]): he perceives the possibility of recuperating a positive meaning from their intended negative portrayal, by reading the decasyllabic verses of their huitain ‘cyrographe’ (v. 555 [chirograph]) in a different arrangement from how they initially appear. A continuous, sequential reading of the eight 4+6-syllable verses deprecates those who mourn Pierre’s death, but a reading across the verses (4+4+etc. and 6+6+etc.) commends such commemoration and prayer as befitting ‘tel personnage’ (v. 566 [such a figure]). The persona’s strategic reading method thus seems to implement an approach inferable from a further literary reflexive inflection of the Basoche of Dijon’s epitaph, interpreting ‘par divers vers deçà et delà plume[r]’ as ‘[to] pluck across different verses, on one side [i.e. of the caesura] and on the other’. De La Vigne’s textual machinations provide a useful, if dizzyingly virtuosic, introduction to this book’s approach to late-medieval French literary epitaphs. We immediately see raised in CERB several issues that will be key to my understanding of how these epitaphs function: their integration into fictional narrative; their plurality in respect of a single individual (if we thought we already had enough with eight in the main body of CERB, we find two more after the end of the dream-narrative (vv. 620–38)); the scope of meaning of ‘epitaphe’ and its relation to ‘complainte’; a vibrant literary reflexivity; emphasis on processes of meaning creation rather than, or at least in addition to, the end product; interplay between the categories ‘living’ and ‘dead’ that breaks them down into a range of senses; play with features of language and versification that activates an awareness in the audience of their active role in constructing an identity for the deceased. Death and identity The topic of this book is the representation of the dead in late-medieval narrative fictions, specifically in a sub-genre of texts that I call ‘epitaph fictions’, by 4

The phrase is the introit in the liturgy for the mass of the dead.

4

representing the dead

which I mean works (usually verse or prosimetra) that use fictional resources (a dream-vision framework, characters appearing in voice and/or body from beyond the grave, personifications, literary landscape topoi, etc.) to explore the relationship between death and identity. The epitaph lies at the fulcrum of this relationship, as a text that reports death, records a more or less developed memory of the deceased and may be presented as inscribed in her/his gravestone. Death is an acme moment in the definition of identity. There is obviously a strong didactic dimension to this definition in the context of medieval artes moriendi that urge readers to make urgent moral and spiritual reparation in the face of impending death, so as to ‘die well’ with safe passage into the Christian afterlife.5 But I am thinking of identity more generally, as relating to name, renown and reputation: that is, understood as ‘what one person means to another person, for another person’.6 In this regard, death both threatens identity, jeopardising posthumous survival (one dies and one’s name may be lost to posterity, forgotten or misremembered), and also constitutes a condition for its creation as a founding moment of life definition. Such definition may occur at the hands of others, like the Basoche representatives in CERB acting as third parties in relation to deceased Pierre, or may be self-driven, being prescribed in anticipation of one’s own death, most familiarly in the context of testamentary fictions like Pierre de Hauteville’s Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil (1441–7) or François Villon’s Testament (c.1461). The ‘self’ in each of these literary instances is that of the projected persona – de Hauteville’s bereaved lover and Villon’s hardluck vagabond ‘povre Villon’. In the case of both, death is essential to the formation of identity: the elaborate amant martir posture of the former, and the latter’s enabling fiction that he is a dying man. Epitaph fictions might thus be seen as a sub-category of Donald Maddox’s ‘fictions of identity’ which stage ‘specular encounters’ – meetings with, for example, another individual that ‘occur at a major intersection of selfhood with a crucial new perspective on its own identity’.7 Death is an extraordinarily major intersection, the new perspective on identity that it introduces being posthumous. In first-person testamentary fictions, the encounter is reflexive: the ‘I’ observes the ‘I’ dying and, in the complex narrative structure of Villon’s Testament, even observes the ‘I’ dead in the ‘Ballade de conclusion’’s invitation to attend the funeral of the now-deceased testator-persona, which is pronounced in a voice that sounds tantalisingly like that persona, not least given the ballade’s recurrent rhyme in ‘–illon’.8 Our consciousness, when reading the ‘Ballade de conclusion’, of this echo of the persona points to a vital characteristic 5 On the broader role of artes moriendi in civic culture, see Amy Appleford, Learning to Die in London, 1380–1540 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 6 Miranda Griffin, Transforming Tales: Rewriting Metamorphosis in Medieval French Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2015), p. 79. I am grateful to the author for giving me access to a pre-publication copy of her chapter on Echo. 7 Fictions of Identity in Medieval France (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), p. 3. 8 See Jane H. M. Taylor, The Poetry of François Villon: Text and Context (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), pp. 33–57. I discuss the ‘Ballade’ further in Chapter 1, p. 44.



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of identity: in a sense, it is always already dead – a belated construct of an individual that will always be catching up with, and will never be one with, that individual. As Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet notes of testamentary writing, it is ‘une composition, sur la décomposition, la personne, une persona’ [a composition, on decomposition, the person, a persona];9 posthumous name, renown and reputation should never be mistaken for being someone as they were in life; they are effigial compositions – ‘simulacres’, to quote CERB. It should not surprise us, then, that the nature of the identity generated is neither monolithic nor permanent. There has been a tendency to see the literary epitaph to be concerned with fixing identity as ‘le lieu d’une vitrification de l’écriture car il s’agit d’une transformation destinée à rendre le texte imperméable à l’histoire’ [the site of a vitrification of writing since it concerns a transformation designed to make the text impervious to history],10 ‘l’ultime stabilisation du Temps par l’écriture’ [the ultimate stabilisation of Time by writing],11 supposed to ‘fixer pour l’éternité la vérité poétique’ [fix poetic truth for eternity],12 with its textuality being ‘une pratique mémoriale, embaumante, qui fixe, qui immobilise, qui retient, qui conserve’ [a memorialising, embalming practice that fixes, immobilises, retains and conserves].13 An important contextual factor influencing such views has been a sense of late-medieval writers’ attitude towards reputation becoming a proto-Renaissance, humanist celebration of fame captured in writing: ‘l’être écrit’ [being in writing],14 a Petrarchan triumph over time and death intended to ‘réparer par la facture du poème la fracture de la mort’ [repair by the creation of the poem the rupture caused by death].15 Late-medieval Burgundian and French court writers, retrospectively dubbed rhétoriqueurs, have been seen to exemplify this trait, for example in Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Epitaphe en maniere de dialogue (1507–8) in honour of his predecessors as Burgundian indiciaire Jean Molinet and George Chastelain. Lemaire lauds the commemorative role of writing as he describes his forebears’ achievements: ‘Ceulx cy font les gens vivre, et la mort ont vaincu’ ([They make people live, and have conquered 9 L’Écriture testamentaire à la fin du moyen âge: identité, dispersion, trace (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), p. 6. 10 Jean-Didier Urbain, L’Archipel des morts: le sentiment de la mort et les dérives de la mémoire dans les cimetières d’Occident (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1998), p. 207. 11 Estelle Doudet, Poétique de George Chastelain (1415–75): un cristal mucié en un coffre (Paris: Champion, 2005), p. 528. 12 Daniel Poirion, ‘Les Tombeaux allégoriques et la poétique de l’inscription dans Le Livre du cœur d’amour épris de René d’Anjou (1457)’, in Écriture poétique et composition romanesque (Orléans: Paradigme, 1994), pp. 399–414, p. 404. 13 Urbain, Archipel, pp. 195–6. 14 Doudet, Poétique, p. 622. Edelgard Dubruck perceives an evolution in poetic representation, from viewing death as mortality to privileging instead immortality and the afterlife: The Theme of Death in French Poetry (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 152. 15 Sophie Garnier, ‘Rhétorique de la consolation dans la déploration funèbre des grands rhétoriqueurs’, in Les Funérailles à la Renaissance, ed. Jean Balsamo (Geneva: Droz, 2002), pp. 389–402, p. 397. For Petrarch and fame, see Philip Hardie, Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), pp. 439–84.

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death]).16 This verse’s central caesura around which life and death pivot in a chiastic arrangement adds an undeniably neat pithiness to Lemaire’s declaration. However, that is not the whole story: whilst Lemaire and others are clearly engaged in the business of memorialising, they are interested in its processes, agencies and mechanisms in a way that opens up such statements interrogatively rather than accepting them as closing down the question of ‘la conquête du livre’ [the victory of the book]:17 how are people made to live? In what sort of life? And how does this relate to their status as dead in more nuanced ways? Later in the same poem, Lemaire stages a question and answer about preservation of the indiciaires’ deeds: – Ou sont leurs monuments et precieux tumbeaux? – En la bouche des bons, et en leurs escriptz beaux. (vv. 33–4) [– Where are their monuments and precious tombs? – In the mouths of the good, and in their fine writings.]

The answer is not quite as clear-cut as might first appear in its deployment of the familiar ‘building as text’ metaphor: for instance, it envisages an important role for oral transmission alongside the written word;18 in terms of agency, who are the ‘bons’: eminent writers, or people more generally who are morally upright? And is there a possibility left open here for self-inscription, if we take the ‘leurs’ of the second verse of the couplet to refer back to that of the first? Literary epitaphs are certainly an example of ‘écriture monumentale’ [monumental writing],19 insofar as they are often operating as, or juxtaposed with, funerary monuments (effigies, insignia, relics, etc.), but we should beware of confusing ‘monumental’ with ‘monolithic’. The epitaph is a site of tension between fixity and fluidity. On the one hand, it performs a memorialising function: representation of someone at the last, and intended to last; it may also be seen as unitary and discrete: ‘une forme close et syntaxiquement autonome’ [an enclosed and syntactically independent form].20 On the other, it is inherently open to interpretation and response by dint of its audience-oriented nature: as Robert Favreau puts it, ‘l’épitaphe est faite pour être lue’ [the epitaph is made to be read].21 Its 16 Œuvres, ed. Jean Auguste Stecher, 4 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969), IV, p. 320, v. 30. 17 Doudet, Poétique, p. 622. 18 See David Cowling, Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 164. 19 Poirion, ‘Tombeaux’, p. 400. 20 Philippe Maupeu, Pèlerins de vie humaine: autobiographie et allégorie narratives, de Guillaume de Deguileville à Octovien de Saint-Gelais (Paris: Champion, 2009), p. 575. 21 Épigraphie médiévale (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), p. 45. On the audience-oriented nature of literary epitaphs in the early modern period, see Neil Kenny, Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: OUP, 2015), pp. 116–33. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss my project with Neil in the early days of its genesis, and am grateful to him for stimulating conversation on deixis.



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deictic markers become those of the individual positioned in front of it, whether a character within a fiction transcribing the ‘cy gist’ ([here lies]) of a tomb or the eventual reader of a text appreciating the ‘cy’ of ‘cy gist’ as the text itself; we recall the implied address in CERB to ‘les passans’ for whom ‘est et sera pourtraict [my italics]’ the image of the dead King. The epitaph recounts the end of a life, but is at the same time the starting point for its immediate and future audience’s appreciation of the identity representing that life: ‘l’épitaphe, notamment dans un cadre fictif, est le point de départ d’une autre parole qui la glose’ [the epitaph, especially in a fictional framework, is the starting point for another utterance that glosses it].22 In my decision to study narrative texts, I am thus particularly interested in the context in which a given epitaph is represented as being produced, received and transmitted. An individual epitaph is often a fixed-form lyric, like CERB’s onzains, but its narrative integration into a situation of other voices and agencies inevitably compromises the extent to which it can be perceived as ‘self-contained’ and ‘syntactically autonomous’. For example, one might compare two epitaphic works written by Jean Molinet in memory of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (d.June 1467): a thirty-six-verse Epitaphe, a lyric item,23 and the prosimetrum Trosne d’Honneur, which narrativises the Duke’s demise,24 not simply according him honours but also playing out an imagined process by which he accrues various facets of renown whilst journeying upwards through several heavens, conversing with their occupants, to sit in honour on the eponymous throne.25 Epitaph fictions’ degree of development of their narrative scenario varies considerably, from a minimal degree of presentation in dialogue form (like Lemaire’s Epitaphe en maniere de dialogue or Chastelain’s Epitaphe de Messire Pierre de Brezé), often with some framing commentary by a third-person persona, to elaborate fictions in which the persona as protagonist plays a full narrative role in the fictional world, travels through a landscape, engages in a mission and has multiple encounters with people and representations (inscriptions, buildings, paintings, tapestries, etc.), such as René d’Anjou’s Livre du cœur d’amour épris (1457) or Octovien de Saint-Gelais’s Séjour d’honneur (1489–94). What these narratives have in common is that they dramatise the process by which an individual life becomes an exemplum, by which a dead body becomes a text – that is, by which an epitaph is produced. I say ‘an’ epitaph advisedly, since a further factor attenuating fixity and unitariness is their plurality, as we already saw in CERB. One epitaph is but

Poétique, p. 596. Les Faictz et dictz de Jean Molinet, ed. Noël Dupire, 3 vols (Paris: SATF, 1936–39), I (1936), pp. 34–5. See Adrian Armstrong, ‘Avatars d’un griffonnage à succès: L’épitaphe du duc Philippe de Bourgogne de Jean Molinet’, Le Moyen Âge, 113.1 (2007), 25–44. 24 For a contrary view, which sees the Epitaphe as more narrative than the Trosne, see Philippe Frieden, La Lettre et le miroir: écrire l’histoire d’actualité selon Jean Molinet (Paris: Champion, 2013), pp. 31–5, p. 32. 25 Faictz et ditz, I (1936), pp. 36–58. In early printed editions of Molinet’s work, the Epitaphe is integrated into TH as a kind of epilogue (A. Armstrong, ‘Avatars’, p. 29). 22 Doudet, 23

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one version of an identity, and we shall encounter in this book several cases of multiple epitaphs being dedicated by a writer to a single figure – such as Simon Gréban’s Epitaphe du feu roy Charles septiesme (after 22 July 1461; six under the umbrella of one) or Jean Bouchet’s Epistres, Elegies, Epigrammes et Epitaphes, composez sur et pour raison du deces de feu tresillustre et tresreligieuse Dame Madame Renee de Bourbon (1535) – and the different relationships apparently intended to be entertained between them. For instance, in Gréban’s Epitaphe, three fresh epitaphs are composed (by personified virtues) for the King when his corpse is moved to a new location for burial. An epitaph can also be seen to lie on the cusp between life and death as a threshold monument, which, akin to an effigy, looks both backward and forward:26 it recalls certain particulars (such as social rank, character, lineage) of the individual who has now died, as well as having regard for that person’s fate in the afterlife through formulaic expressions such as ‘Dieu ait garde de son ame’ [may God protect his soul].27 This is perhaps a useful moment to remind ourselves of the prevailing medieval understanding of death, not as an end, but as a moment of transition into another phase and mode of being; death is still part of the story of someone’s life. Scholars of medieval death remind their readers of this difference from a modern, assumed-to-be non-Christian perspective: ‘la mort n’est pas envisagée comme terme mais comme passage’ [death is envisaged not as an end but as a transition].28 They are right to do so, but it is interesting also to consider how, with modern biomedical developments (cryopreservation; organ transplant; life-support machines; prostheses) and pneumatic technologies in cybernetics, death is no longer necessarily conceived of as a definitive final frontier, and important questions are being asked today about the boundaries between states of being, life and death.29 Nonetheless, we should be precise as to what kind of ‘passage’ we are dealing with in medieval terms, as it has both material and spiritual dimensions. There is some evidence that ‘Northern Europeans viewed the dead body not as suddenly severed from life, but rather as losing contact slowly and deliberately with the spirit that once animated it’ for up to a year after death.30

26 For effigies in this regard, see Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1996), p. 93; Elizabeth A. R. Brown, ‘Royal Bodies, Effigies, Funeral Meals, and Office in Sixteenth-Century France’, Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 437–508, p. 449. 27 See also Doudet, Poétique, pp. 593–4. 28 Fabienne Pomel, Les Voies de l’au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 11. 29 See, for example, Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 112–15; Michael Camille, Master of Death: The Lifeless Art of Pierre Remiet, Illuminator (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 245. 30 Brown, ‘Royal Bodies’, pp. 438–9; Michael Camille, ‘The Image and the Self: Unwriting Late Medieval Bodies’, in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 62–99, p. 84. See also Patrice Georges, ‘Mourir c’est pourrir un peu … Intentions et techniques contre la corruption des cadavres à la fin du moyen âge’, Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 359–82.



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In a Christian world-view,31 life itself is a journey from and (back) towards God: as Amé de Montgesoie states in his Pas de la mort (before 1465), ‘l’omme est ung voyageur passant’ ([man is a passing traveller]).32 In this light, death is also not a negative notion: it is to be feared if it is approached in the wrong state – that is, unshriven – but death itself can be seen as the motor that encourages contrition, hence de Montgesoie’s persona’s musing address to personified death: Tu es la dame mains amee En qui plus grand valeur habite; Car se n’estoit ta force eslite, Nul ne seroit de pechié quitte. (Pas de la mort, vv. 243–6) [You are the least-loved lady in whom the greatest value lies; since if it wasn’t for your perfect power, no-one would be absolved of sin.]

Death is thus, in many respects, a relational term.33 First, in the sense that the attitude adopted towards it depends upon one’s engagement with other ideas, beliefs and practices – hell, purgatory and paradise; sin, repentance and grace; but also love more generally, thinking of the many amant martir characters in late-medieval poetry who long for death as release from amorous malady: En actendant garison ou la mort Au lit de pleurs où je gis presque mort.34 [Awaiting cure or death, in the bed of tears in which I lie almost dead.]

This couplet constitutes the refrain of a rondeau by Jean Robertet and thus, through its cyclical repetition, articulates the lover-persona’s agony suspended in a near-death state portrayed as worse than actual death, which would be the equivalent of a cure for his sickness.35 Secondly, death is relational in that it depends on what precisely we are denoting when we refer to someone as ‘dead’: a spiritual state of sin; the very moment of corporeal demise; the intermediate state of the body prior to resurrection; or the encroachment of death into life, as represented poetically through graphic depiction of signa mortis, such as Villon’s

31 What Claude Blum calls the ‘récit invariant chrétien’ [invariant Christian narrative]: La Représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Paris: Champion, 1989), I, p. 10. 32 In Thomas Walton, ‘Les Poèmes d’Amé de Montgesoie’, Medium Ævum, 2.1 (1933), 1–33, v. 281. 33 Blum, Représentation, I, pp. 9–10. 34 Jean Robertet, Œuvres, ed. Margaret Zsuppán (Geneva: Droz, 1970), rondeau IV, pp. 86–7, vv. 1–2. 35 ‘Je gis’ perhaps deliberately echoes the epitaphic incipit ‘cy gist’, on which, see Chapter 1.

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testator-persona’s sense of life having ebbed away and death having galloped in to take its place:36 Je congnois approucher ma seuf, Je crache blanc comme coton Jacoppins groz comme ung estuef.37 [I feel my thirst approaching, I spit cotton-white gobs as large as a handball.]

The grotesque simile exaggerating the size and density of his spittle is supported in its vibrancy by harsh velar [k] alliteration, while the base physicality of the overall image jars in register with the choice of lexeme to designate death: ‘seuf’, echoing the final thirst of Christ’s agony on the cross.38 In this example, we see a key characteristic of death for literary representation: its rhetorical vitality and its dynamism,39 what Estelle Doudet calls ‘la fécondité paradoxale d’un discours de mort’ [the paradoxical fecundity of a discourse of death].40 Death lends vigour to description through a macabre aesthetic; it populates medieval literature with a host of characters to provide vivid demonstration of moral lessons – suicides, tragic lovers, Christian martyrs, warrior heroes, faithful wives. It also affords the dead the opportunity to speak out from beyond the grave about their own life: to adopt a posthumous perspective on their biography, to articulate their own epitaph. The literary epitaph This all brings us to a central question: what, in my understanding, is an epitaph? In its function, it is a statement of identity from a posthumous perspective, whether that be the deceased’s own point of view expressed in the first person (uttered after the moment of death or composed in anticipation, as in the epitaphs prescribed in testamentary fictions), or a third-person vantage point, like that of the personified Basoches on Pierre of Baugé in CERB. In its form, definition is more difficult. Ian D. McFarlane made clear in 1986 the bagginess of the term for designating a particular genre: having assessed the difficulty of determining defining characteristics according to metre, theme, tone or links with the epigram

36 The persona’s chief opposition is between the pleasures of youth and the pains of old age, but ‘vieillesse’ and ‘mort’ seem to hold some synonymy, in that the privations of old age are represented as death’s intrusion into life. 37 Testament, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, with Laëtitia Tabard (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), vv. 729–31. 38 John 19:28. 39 See Christos Tsagalis, Epic Grief: Personal Laments in Homer’s Iliad (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2004), p. 1. 40 Poétique, p. 596.



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(of which it was traditionally understood as a sub-form),41 he concluded that only a minimal definition is possible: it concerns death, and it varies considerably in length.42 More recently, Adrian Armstrong has reaffirmed this malleability, which we may see, for instance, in the variety of voices staged in epitaphs (in Molinet’s case, anyone from a duke to a dog), and in formal diversity, such as use of dialogue.43 In establishing the parameters of his corpus for analysis from amongst Molinet’s works, Armstrong opts to confine himself to those poems that the textual tradition has defined as epitaphs, whilst recognising that, as McFarlane states, ‘the term itself was loosely used to cover various types of funereal verse; and the epitaph, highly porous, invaded and was invaded by a host of neighbouring genres or subgenres’.44 Would we be wasting our time, then, to linger on generic definition? Any proposed criteria will only ever be partially adequate, but let us spend a little time discussing a couple of characteristics that seem incontrovertibly fundamental and may help us probe further the more significant question of epitaphs’ purpose: what writers may have been doing in deploying the form in their narrative fictions. First, an epitaph is about someone, human or otherwise: it presents a character, whether a projected persona (‘[je] suis’) or an observed third person (‘cy gist’). Serving the memory of this figure, it thereby exists in close relation with the plainte funèbre, a similarly baggy genre which Claude Thiry concludes to be definable in terms of subject matter: a ‘mort fâcheuse et importune’ [an unfortunate and inopportune death], for which the complaint provides both lamentation and consolation as a didactic piece.45 We find several works that combine in their titles, or seem to see as interchangeable, the terms ‘epitaphe’ and ‘complainte’. A poem by George Chastelain about Hector and Achilles is transmitted as both La Complainte d’Hector and Les Epitaphes d’Hector.46 De La Vigne’s commemoration of Pierre of Baugé is entitled Les Complaintes et epitaphes du roy de la 41 Thomas Sebillet’s Art poétique (1548) states that epitaphs ‘ne sont autres qu’inscriptions de tombes, ou épigrammes sépulchrauz’ (ed. Félix Gaiffe; updated by Francis Goyet (Paris: Nizet, 1988), p. 113 [are none other than tomb inscriptions or sepulchral epigrammes]) and also remarks on their very variable length, finding examples extending up to forty verses in Clément Marot’s corpus (which is Sebillet’s primary reference point for his generic definitions). We shall see in Chapter 1 that Jean Bouchet uses the term ‘epigramme’ almost synonymously with ‘epitaphe’ in several works, including his Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (1538) and the Epistres, Elegies, Epigrammes et Epitaphes composed for Renée of Bourbon; as A. Armstrong notes, the primary significance of the term for Bouchet concerns the inscriptional character of the poems, especially in the case of short inscriptions: JPHF (Paris: Champion, 2006), p. 103; Armstrong’s remarks draw on Jennifer Britnell, Jean Bouchet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), pp. 53–5. 42 ‘The Renaissance Epitaph’, Presidential Address of the MHRA, 10 January 1986, Modern Language Review, 81.1 (1986), xxv–xxxv, p. xxxiii. 43 ‘Un cimetière bigarré: les épitaphes poétiques de Jean Molinet’, in Texte et contre-texte pour la période pré-moderne, ed. Nelly Labère (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2013), pp. 187–201. 44 McFarlane, ‘Renaissance’, p. xxv. 45 La Plainte funèbre (Brepols: Turnhout, 1978), p. 36. 46 Doudet, Poétique, p. 100.

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Bazoche: are we supposed to distinguish between different parts of the poem as assimilable to the two different genres, or is it a collective title? I think there is some identifiable difference of emphasis or inclination between the two, which may help us to grasp what the epitaph, as distinct from the complaint, is trying to do with the identity that it commemorates, particularly in the case of thirdperson pieces. I build here on McFarlane’s note that ‘for some the elegy might differ from the epitaph in that it said more about the feelings of the bereaved or mourners than it did about the deceased’.47 Another poem by de La Vigne acts as a case in point, his ‘Epytaphes et complaintes du duc de Vendosme’ that appears in Le Voyage de Naples, an extensive prosimetrum depicting Charles VIII’s Italian campaign of 1494–95.48 For the first 107 verses of ECDV, the persona is primarily concerned with the emotional response of those still living and their connection to the deceased Duke, expressed through exclamation, apostrophe, concentration on what has been lost and grief-stricken sorrow: ‘Helas! il est du monde trespassé’ (v. 4795 [Alas! He has passed from this world]); ‘O Atropos, pourquoy as tu celle ente / mortifiée […]?’ (vv. 4802–3 [O Death, why have you killed off this scion?]); ‘[…] du moys / Non pas de l’an le dueil ne cessera’ (vv. 4876–7 [[…] mourning will not cease this month nor even this year]). Then, at verse 4903, the poem seems to re-start in a different mode, which is signalled by repetition of the opening verse (v. 4795) in less exclamatory vein: ‘Or est il mort et pieça trespassé’ (v. 4903 [Now he is dead and passed away a while ago]).49 What follows focuses more on constructing the Duke’s identity in exemplary terms (‘le chief d’honneur, le pillier de noblesse’, v. 4927 [the pinnacle of honour, the pillar of nobility]), as well as recording his date of death and invoking God’s blessing on his resting place: ‘[…] que le corps et le lieu / Sa bas en terre soit en la garde de Dieu’ (vv. 4953–4 [[…] may the body and its place there below in the earth be protected by God]). I would thus see the first section of ECDV to tend

47

‘Renaissance’, p. xxxiii. Ed. Anna Slerca (Geneva: Droz, 1982), vv. 4795–954. The Voyage was not an autonomously circulating work, but formed part of the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century anthology Le Vergier d’honneur (first known edition c.1502–3), of which de La Vigne is credited as author alongside Octovien de Saint-Gelais (and unnamed ‘others’), and to which he contributed the vast majority of pieces. The ‘Epytaphes et complaintes’ feature in the principal edition consulted (Paris: n.pub., n.d.: Oxford, All Souls College, ii.5.3) at fols o3v–o4v. Two further epitaphic verse items appear in the Vergier: Saint-Gelais’s ‘Complainte et epitaphe du feu Roy Charles dernier trespassé’, commemorating Charles VIII (fols p6r–q3v; Saint-Gelais’s only identified piece in the volume), and an anonymous ‘rondeau et epythaphe de Monseigneur d’Aspremont en Poitou’ (fol. Br). Note that the Vergier’s foliation spans two sequences of signatures in the edition used for reference: a–v lower case followed by A–P upper case, which I reflect in my page numberings. 49 This pick-up seems to be signalled visually in the presentation of the poem in the Vergier d’honneur: v. 4903 is accorded the first large initial letter (‘O’) (fol. o4r) since the ‘H’ of ‘Helas’ (v. 4795) on the facing page (fol. o3v). Other editions consulted do likewise. 48



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towards the manner of a complaint, and the second, with its greater emphasis on representation of the deceased, to be more epitaphic.50 Comparison with earlier literary epitaphs, notably those of Arthurian romances, is perhaps helpful to further delineate the treatment of identity in later cases. As Régine Colliot has explored, romance epitaphs, inscriptions discovered by a hero in or on a tomb, were prophetic in nature: they reveal an identity yet to be fulfilled that incites the reader (typically a passing knight) to action, to take up the sword and undertake a mission.51 They are thus also concerned with identity formation, but prospectively rather than retrospectively, before all performable physical action by the living has been completed and what remains is a careful action of reading and reflection by others.52 Common to both earlier and later instances is the principle that epitaphs, like tombs, open up rather than close down the deciphering of meaning: they ‘are made […] to be opened, and read by whoever must read them’.53 Such reading must needs be careful given the ways in which the literary epitaph may be used to adopt an interrogative as well as an affirmative approach to identity. We may see it in twelfth-century romance already to enquire and challenge, since the epitaph as it were poses the question of who should lie there (‘Qui […] girroient’ / ‘Ci girra […]’)54 in order to elicit a response from its diegetic reader in relation to that posited identity. In later medieval examples, as A. Armstrong explores briefly with regard to Molinet’s first-person pieces, structure and word patterning can be manipulated to invite us to question the trustworthiness of the ‘nécrologue’ [necrologist] and her/his selection and interpretation of the life events and experiences recorded in the epitaph: ‘Molinet développe son discours funèbre tout en le déconstruisant’ [Molinet develops his funerary discourse at the same time as deconstructing it].55

50 One might also, for instance, compare George Chastelain’s Déprécation pour Pierre de Brezé with his Epitaphe de Messire Pierre de Brezé (Œuvres, ed. Joseph-Bruno-MarieConstantin Kervyn de Lettenhove, 8 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1971), VII, pp. 37–65, 67–73). 51 ‘Les Épitaphes arthuriennes’, in Bulletin bibliographique de la société internationale arthurienne, 25 (1973), 155–75. 52 Cf. Cerquiglini-Toulet’s comparison, along similar lines, of Arthurian cemeteries with their later-medieval counterparts: La Couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres au XIVè siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), pp. 130–1. 53 Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Fullness and Emptiness: Shortages and Storehouses of Lyric Treasure in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, in Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, ed. Daniel Poirion and Nancy Freeman Regalado (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 224–39, p. 239. 54 For example, in a cemetery in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la charrette are found tombs ‘qui les nons de ces devisoient / Qui dedanz les tonbes girroient’ (ed. Charles Méla (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992), vv. 1861–2 [which depicted the names of those who would lie in these tombs]); the conditional tense becomes future as the inscription is read and transcribed: ‘[…] Ci girra Gauvains, / Ci Looys et ci Yvains’ (vv. 1865–6 […] Here will lie Gauvain, here Louis and here Yvain]). 55 A. Armstrong, ‘Un cimetière’, p. 193.

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What enables such manipulation is, as we saw in the virtuosic case of de La Vigne’s treatment of Pierre of Baugé, use of the epitaph for complex linguistic manoeuvring, especially when in verse form. This brings us to our second incontrovertible characteristic: epitaphs are verbal compositions. Historical epitaphs became more wordy in the fifteenth century; Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan explains this extension as an increasing safeguard against oblivion: ‘épitaphes-fleuves […] qui, pour plus de précautions contre la mort et l’oubli, s’essaient à ressaisir et à transcrire, dans ses épisodes principaux, la vie du défunt’ [very lengthy epitaphs […] which, as a greater safeguard against death and oblivion, endeavour to capture and transcribe, in its principal episodes, the life of the deceased].56 Literary epitaphs are frequently wordier still, and engage in a range of rhetorical games in their construction. One important factor in common between historical and literary examples is how, whether brief or extensive, an epitaph stands as ‘l’unité narrative d’une vie’ [the narrative unity of a life], to adopt Paul Ricoeur’s terminology.57 The ‘narrative’ element applies even if the form in which it is delivered is a fixed-form lyric, since any element of biographical information, however minimal, such as the statement ‘trespassa le [date]’ [died on [date]], helps to make up what Paul Zumthor called a ‘récit latent’ [latent narrative],58 and, in turn, to return to Ricoeur: ‘le récit construit l’identité du personnage, qu’on peut appeler son identité narrative’ [the narrative constructs the identity of the character, which one can call her/his narrative identity].59 The elements that might be seen typically to constitute the basic kit of a historical medieval French epitaph’s text are: ‘Cy gist [name]’ + (biographical indications: social rank, relationships) + (sometimes mention of role fulfilled ‘en son vivant’) + ‘trespassa/deceda le [date]’ + (formula of exhortation/intercessory prayer, e.g. ‘priez Dieu pour son ame’)60

56 ‘Post-face’, in La Mort écrite: rites et rhétoriques du trépas au moyen âge, ed. Estelle Doudet (Paris: PUPS, 2005), p. 173. See also, from a cultural historical perspective, Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 213–30 (the evolution in attitudes towards death that Ariès posits, characterised by greater fear of death as an enemy in the later Middle Ages, could be seen to underpin Crouzet-Pavan’s reasoning); Urbain, Archipel, pp. 193–222; 235–9; and, drawing on documentary work across cemeteries of Paris, L’Épitaphier du vieux Paris: recueil général des inscriptions funéraires des églises, couvents, collèges, hospices, cimetières et charniers depuis le moyen âge jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIè siècle, 3 vols (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1890), I, p. vi. 57 Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), p. 193. 58 ‘Les Narrativités latentes dans le discours lyrique médiéval’, in The Nature of Medieval Narrative, ed. Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet and Robin F. Jones (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1980), pp. 39–55, p. 41. 59 Soi-même, p. 175. 60 This sample template was compiled based on a survey of epitaphs in L’Épitaphier du vieux Paris. I do not claim any peculiarity to medieval France; one need only look at Roman funerary inscription to see a similar epitaphic format, often including the deceased’s name, age at death, biographical details, a conventional character description, some formula such as



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Literary examples, using as their opening verb either gesir or estre, may adopt a similar minimal template, for instance when an epitaph is appended to the end of a longer poem, as in the case of de La Vigne’s CERB: after the close of the fiction, in which personified Basoches contributed epitaphs for Pierre of Baugé, two further texts appear, one in Latin and one in French. The nine-verse vernacular piece furnishes a concise record of Pierre’s life and death: it opens with a naming formula, followed, in apposition, by phrases denoting rank and social status, role and some evocation of virtuous character through asyndetonic enumeration of epithets: Cy gist Pierre de Baugé, filz très sage De grant lignage, bien formé de corsage, Beau personnage et advenant de mesme, De la Bazoche Roy de noble parage, Franc de courage, begnin, doulx, courtois, large. (CERB, vv. 630–4) [Here lies Pierre of Baugé, a very wise son of great lineage, in excellent physical shape, a fine figure and also gracious, King of the Basoche of noble birth, virtuous in character, benign, gentle, courteous, generous.]

Thereafter, we learn concisely his age at death (v. 635), lineage (v. 636) and the date on which he expired (vv. 637–8). Precisely what makes a given epitaph ‘literary’ in such cases is an interesting point: are we assessing the text itself (for instance, the greater or lesser development of how an identity is shaped, rather than a more straightforward statement of its particulars) or the context in which it appears (such as attached to a dream vision)? The question is further complicated by the fact that epitaphs in certain texts were designed to be – or, so far as we know, actually were – incorporated into real funerary practice. Lemaire dedicated his Epitaphe for Chastelain and Molinet to one Charles Le Clerc, who had offered to have it engraved or painted bedside the late writers’ tombs.61 The rubric of the rondeau at the close of de La Vigne’s ECDV claims that it ‘fut mis sur le sercueil […] du dict seigneur’ (before v. 4955 [was placed on the coffin [….] of the said lord]), namely Francis of Bourbon (d.1495).62 De La Vigne, who served as secretary to Anne of Brittany from 1504, also composed a series of Epitaphes en rondeaux de la Royne (1514), which were apparently embroidered into her funeral drapes in St Denis, and the whole set were published as a pamphlet ‘hic cubat’ [here lies] and salutation purportedly addressed by the dead to the living (e.g. ‘vale, viator’ [farewell, passer-by]): Alison E. Cooley, The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy (Cambridge: CUP, 2012), p. 128; John Edwin Sandys, Latin Epigraphy: An Introduction to the Study of Latin Inscriptions, 2nd edn, rev. S. G. Campbell (Cambridge: CUP, 1927), pp. 60–3. 61 Le Clerc was treasurer of wars for Margaret of Austria, Lemaire’s patron at the time (see below, n. 100). See Adrian Armstrong, Technique and Technology: Script, Print, and Poetics in France 1470–1550 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 139. Armstrong also considers the extent to which Bouchet’s epitaph poems served as genuine tombstone inscriptions (p. 198). 62 See also Garnier, ‘Rhétorique’, p. 389.

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after the ceremony.63 Furthermore, the rondeaux were reprinted a decade later in honour of the late Queen Claude, Anne’s daughter, with appropriate changes to the particulars of name and date of death (though seemingly no concern for the impact of these modifications on the rhyme scheme).64 We saw above how several epitaphs could be devised for the same person; in this case, the same several epitaphs serve two people. The issue of the positioning of an epitaph has obvious implications for how we construe the spatial deixis in its opening formula ‘cy gist’. ‘Cy’ will always denote the text itself in whose verbal composition the identity of the person commemorated is located linguistically, but alternative extratextual designations may also accrue.65 A third factor that might usually be seen to define an epitaph is its status as a text: definitions in medieval French dictionaries anchor it thus as ‘une inscription funéraire’ [a funerary inscription].66 Whether or not we see it to have been inscribed in or around a tomb, at base we conceive of it as a written piece. However, I wish also to consider epitaphs delivered orally by figures from beyond the grave: not ghosts, but the ambulant, talking dead, whose utterances could be classified as epitaphs through etymological justification, with reference to the Latin root epitaphium or ‘funeral oration’.67 That said, it is not orations that concern me so much as speeches and gestures performed by dead people which define their identity through posthumous reference to their life (and an acute consciousness of their death), and whose immediate audience is a persona who has been tasked – by the figures themselves or by a third party (such as a personified virtue in a dream) – with transcribing their first-person words; ultimately, therefore, a written record is accomplished. Voice, text, identity Mention of voices speaking from beyond the grave in dialogue with a persona immediately conjures up a rich medieval literary inheritance in the form of Dante

63

Recueil de poésies françoises, XII (Paris: Daffis, 1877), pp. 105–27.

64 Ibid.

65 Cf. Annette Tomarken, ‘“Icy dessoubz”: la rhétorique de l’épitaphe dans la génération Marot’, in La Génération Marot: poètes français et néo-latins (1515–1550), ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Champion, 1997), pp. 299–313. 66 Dictionnaire du moyen français, version 2015 (DMF 2015). ATILF - CNRS & Université de Lorraine ; Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXè au XVè siècle, 10 vols (Paris: Vieweg/Bouillon, 1880–1902), IX (Paris: Bouillon, 1898), p. 498. 67 Cf. Niall Livingstone and Gideon Nisbet’s discussion of the Classical epigram, which began with inscriptions, but with the intention that these ‘would be read, probably aloud’: Epigram (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), pp. 5, 25–30. An etymological argument is interesting in relation to the orality of ‘epitaph’: the ultimate Ancient Greek root ‘epitaphion’ could be seen to denote either a written or a spoken piece, depending on how one interprets its constituent elements: ‘taphos’ means tomb, while ‘epi’ can mean ‘on, at, over’, and so could designate something placed on the tomb or something uttered over/beside it.



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Alighieri’s Commedia and Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. We think of Dante’s pilgrim being accosted by Bertran de Born’s severed talking head: ‘Tu che, spirando, vai veggendo i morti’ ([You there still breathing, looking at the dead]),68 or Boccaccio’s persona being bombarded by demands for representation from the unfortunate dead who seek inclusion in his catalogue, which entails, in the case of Brunhilda, an argument as to the truthfulness of her self-reported story.69 Examination of late-medieval epitaph fictions in this light, and, indeed, consideration of the very scope of what an epitaph is in relation to these models, uncovers an under-explored pertinence of Dantean and Boccaccian influence on the French material. Perhaps most obviously, and as we shall explore in detail in Chapter 3, we encounter specific responses to DCVI in George Chastelain’s Temple de Bocace (1463–65), Antitus’s Portail du Temple de Bocace (1501) and Laurent Desmoulins’s Cymetiere des malheureux (1511). More generally, we find the talkative dead (whether ambulant or inscribed first persons), such as Petrarch in the cemetery of René d’Anjou’s Livre du cœur d’amour épris: Pour ce ay je fait faire tombe presente, Soubz laquelle je gis, de ce ne me veulx taire.70 [For this reason I had this present tomb made, under which I lie – about this I don’t want to be silent.]

We encounter voices speaking to establish their identity in order to serve a purpose beyond simply ensuring preservation of their name and renown: whether seeking intercessory prayer, like the pleas in Purgatorio by shades such as Belacqua,71 or presenting the didactic value of the decline of their life towards death, as when Boccaccio’s persona apostrophises Dido as a model of chastity: ‘Uno quippe ictu […] mortales terminasti labores, famam occupasti perennem’ ([Truly with one blow […] [you] put an end to mortal travail and achieved immortal fame]),72 or sees Xerxes coming towards him bemoaning his pride (DCVI, III.v). The case of Xerxes, and of DCVI’s tales more generally, reminds us that the reputation that the dead request to have set down can be a negative representation of themselves:

68 Inferno, ed. Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 16th edn (Milan: Garzanti, 2007), XXVIII.131. I follow Mark Musa’s translations for all three books: The Divine Comedy, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 1984). 69 I thank Guyda Armstrong and Kenneth Clarke for their guidance in navigating secondary criticism on Boccaccio’s DCVI. 70 Ed. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2003), vv. 1612–13. 71 Ed. Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 12th edn (Milan: Garzanti, 2007), IV.130–5. 72 Ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca, 10 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1964–83), IX (1983), II.xi. Translations of DCVI are based on The Fates of Illustrious Men, trans. Louis Brewer Hall (New York: Ungar, 1965). Hall’s text is an abridged version, and the style of translation, whilst very readable, can be quite loose; my interventions are indicated by square brackets.

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they embrace the instructional value for others of their posthumous perspective on their life as an exemplary downfall. The question of audience becomes more complex with epitaph fictions of the ambulant dead, since their relay of narrative voice, in which posthumous self-representation is caught up, concerns not only a future reader but also an immediate, diegetically present listener; the latter is charged with communicating the tale and, as we shall see in works such as Jean Du Pré’s Palais des nobles dames (1534), is thereby depicted wielding control over how the deceased’s words are recorded. Epitaph fictions that stage a ‘live’ conversation between the living persona and dead characters vary in how they represent the status of the latter, and two different models are offered by Dante’s and Boccaccio’s fictions. The Commedia, in part given its insistence on how the pilgrim’s understanding is deficient because there are things he cannot yet know until he has passed beyond mortality, distinguishes the persona as a living man from his interlocutors, who are emphatically dead,73 as when Charon the ferryman addresses him: Et tu che se’ costí, anima viva, Pàrtiti da cotesti che son morti. (Inf. III.88–9) [And you, the living soul, you over there, get away from all these people who are dead.]

These ‘morti’ are, of course, animated: the fictional framework of journey and dialogue, concerning what the persona sees and hears, requires the dead to be visible and audible, but we are repeatedly reminded of their irregular corporeality: how their bodies (‘corpi’) cast no shadow on the ground (Purg. III.28) and exist as shades (‘ombra’, XXV.101). Overall, their difference from the pilgrim in terms of their ontological status is clearly marked. This is not the case in Boccaccio’s text: in his vision, the deceased are classified, whenever a collective noun is used, not as ‘dead’, but often as ‘unfortunates’ (‘infelices’) or ‘mourners’ (‘fluentes’) – their status defined by the import and tone of the story that they (and/or the persona) tell about themselves, the attitude they have adopted posthumously to their own life.74 Both Italian authors’ approaches give rise to interesting questions, developed by later medieval French writers, about how identity is forged as an interrelation between voice, text and body, about how we construe the status

73 But not universally so: Fra Alberigo and Branca d’Oria are not yet dead in body, but hell has already taken possession of their souls, a state of affairs explained in response to the pilgrim’s question: ‘[…] or se’ tu ancor morto?’ (Inf. XXXIII.121 [[…] are you already dead?]). 74 Petrarch’s Triumphus Mortis (1351–52) can be seen to straddle the two: in a vision, the persona beholds a landscape full of dead people (‘piena di morti’, I.74) who have fallen from felicity to misery (I.79–81) for having fixed their hopes on mortal things (‘in cosa mortal’, I.85): in Francesco Petrarca, Trionfi, Rime estravaganti, Codice degli abbozzi, ed. Vinicio Pacca and Laura Paolino (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), pp. 267–346.



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of a voice that states ‘je suis mort’ and about the importance of storytelling for the constitution of selfhood.75 Storytelling and selfhood This last point requires some discussion, since, in the case of oral self-representations that are not called epitaphs in their textual tradition, but which I have decided to label thus, one might equally perceive elements of (auto)biography, obituary or exemplum when they have been set down in writing by the persona. Why is it appropriate, indeed fruitful, to cast them specifically as epitaphs? Biography is a genre concerned with ‘a chronicle of the subject’s life’;76 the self-presentations of characters in my fictions are at least as, if not more, preoccupied with the subject’s death: not so much the simple fact that they have died as the posthumous perspective that speaking from beyond the grave opens up on their existence (including, in certain cases, knowledge of events that have occurred since the moment of death) and the implications for their life story of the manner of their death. The term ‘autothanatography’ came into use in the early 1980s to account for writing from rather than simply of death, denoting ‘the dead’s own accounts of their own deaths’.77 As critics exploring this mode of representation have discussed, autothanatography configures the possibility for speaking from beyond the grave,78 which is often construed as a characteristically modern literary trope.79 Its pertinence to medieval epitaph fictions is readily discernible from critics’ extrapolations of the implications of telling one’s life from the point of view of death.80 For example, Dominique Rabaté describes how this enables one to ‘se dire comme totalité achevée’ [speak of oneself as a completed whole], and assesses the necessary conditions, in temporal terms, for such self-articulation: ‘pour pouvoir se dire tout entier il faudrait être dans le temps et hors du temps’ [to be able to speak of oneself as a whole one must be in time and 75 Medieval selfhood is, of course, an immensely complex and contested issue (Binski, Medieval Death, p. 16). Virginie Greene effects an insightful sifting of critical perspectives (Le Sujet et la mort dans ‘La mort Artu’ (Saint-Genouph: Nizet, 2002), pp. 169–76), while Maupeu unpicks the categories ‘subject’, ‘individual’ and ‘person’ in the context of autobiography in allegorical narrative (Pèlerins, pp. 12–17). 76 Sergei Averintsev, ‘From Biography to Hagiography: Some Stable Patterns in the Greek and Latin Tradition of Lives, Including Lives of the Saints’, in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St Clair (Oxford: OUP for the British Academy, 2002), pp. 19–36, p. 21. 77 Ivan Callus, ‘(Auto)thanatography or (Auto)thanatology? Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley, and the Writing of the Dead’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 41.4 (2005), 427–38. Callus’s article forms part of a special issue, edited by Susan Bainbridge, on the relation between autobiography and death. 78 Dominique Rabaté, ‘Énonciations d’outre-tombe (Poe, Faulkner, Beckett, Bernhard)’, in Poétiques de la voix (Paris: Corti, 1999), pp. 55–75, p. 57. 79 Rabaté, Poétiques, p. 56; cf. Marie-Chantal Killeen, En souffrance d’un corps: essais sur la voix désincarnée (Quebec: Nota bene, 2013), p. 51, n. 2. 80 Rabaté, Poétiques, p. 57.

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outside time].81 A less helpful facet of ‘autothanatography’ is, I think, its initial element ‘auto-’, which may risk leading us into two false assumptions: first, that the enunciating ‘I’ is the sole or primary agency shaping the account of death, and, second, that the identity composed by a first-person epitaph lies in continuity with the living person whose story is being told, rather than being a fresh construct: a ‘personnage’. As we shall see in Chapter 1’s conspectus of epitaphs from across my corpus, their structure as an ‘identity narrative’ frequently makes chronological leaps across a life/death story and is necessarily selective in what events or thematic concerns are highlighted – in relation to its particular context of appearance and given the relatively short space available within its frame. Bouchet refers to the form of the epitaphs that adorn his palace of noble ladies in JPHF as being ‘tant briefz, et abstrainctz’ (v. 1359 [so brief and concise]), a reference to their length (which averages twelve verses) but also, one could say, to their status as ‘abstracts’ of a person’s life: a compressed account whose manner of composition invites as much attention as the matter chosen to be included in it.82 This sense of abstraction fits with the idea of a ‘short obituary’, coined by Christos Tsagalis to speak about the Iliad’s ‘brief necrological vignettes dedicated to a dead warrior, Greek or Trojan, of little or no importance to the plot, in most cases reported in direct speech’.83 Homer’s longest short obituary spans forty-three verses.84 An important stylistic feature that these share with my epitaphs is their absence of sentimental terminology or explicitly stated pathos.85 Indeed, both Tsagalis and Jasper Griffin consider them to have affinity with the later practice of funerary epigrams.86 ‘Short obituary’ could thus stand reasonably well as a term for the epigraphic utterances that we find in late-medieval fictions, except that ‘epitaph’ fits better in respect of three specific features: the focus of the narrative on constructing an identity which is itself (the process of construction) and her/himself (the subject being composed) of significant importance in terms of plot; the deictic implications of a given utterance (‘je suis’, ‘cy gist’) that is being presented for display, and potentially serving as funerary monument; and the ensuing essential dynamic of communication between deceased subject and ‘passant’ that makes it ‘exhibée comme objet de lecture’ [displayed as something to be read] and contributes to its liminal status – ‘l’épitaphe apparaît comme une écriture de l’intermédiaire, entre vie et mort, entre fixité gravée et mouvement de 81

Ibid., pp. 57–8. The collocation appears again, without ‘briefz’, at v. 3770: ‘abstrainctz Epigrammes’. On the foregrounding of manner over matter in the presentation of voices from beyond the grave in a different verse genre, see Pascale Chiron, ‘“Quant le défunt prend la parole”: voix d’outre-tombe dans les épîtres en vers du premier XVIè siècle’, in De bonne vie s’ensuit bonne mort: récits de mort, récits de vie en Europe (XVè–XVIIè siècles), ed. Patricia Eichel-Lojkine and Claudie Martin-Ulrich (Paris: Champion, 2006), pp. 43–59, p. 57. 83 Epic Grief, p. 179. 84 Ibid., p. 181. 85 Ibid., pp. 187–8. 86 Ibid., p. 188; J. Griffin refers to them simply as ‘obituaries’: Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 141–3. 82



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glose qu’elle inspire’ [the epitaph appears as a kind of liminal writing, between life and death, between engraved fixity and the commentative movement that it inspires].87 A sense of ‘glose’, and thus the epitaph’s potential to function as a narrative vehicle for conveying knowledge or instruction that merits commentary, could encourage us to approach it as a type of exemplum. Late-medieval literature is awash with exemplary tales of Classical, Biblical, historical and contemporary literary figures who are usually having stories told about them because they are dead – or are being treated as dead, in the case of fictional characters whose life and death are a matter of literary contrivance. Such tales furnish complete narrative units, the life being recounted having ended, from which lessons can be drawn. For a given exemplum, any or all of its subject (such as the tale of Dido as model for chastity), its manner of telling (the shaping of the narrative) and its message (implicit in the shape of the tale and often rendered explicit at its close) may be of prime importance. To be clear, the sense in which I’m considering exemplum in relation to epitaphs is as storytelling about a character, recognising ‘the exemplum’s specificity as narrative’,88 and not the term’s more shorthand use to denote the simple citation of a figure by name, who is only implicitly subtended by her/his identity narrative, such as when Amé de Montgesoie enumerates a list of characters struck down by Accident, a henchman of Death: Le roy Saül, Acab, Cressus, Edipus, Hercules, Cathon, Odrater, Nabot et Artus, Jule Cesar, Agamenon, Hanybal, Pompee, Sampson, Socrates, Cyrus, Laumedon Et mains aultres sont mis a fin Par Accident, le tien affin. (Pas de la mort, vv. 113–20) [King Saul, Ahab, Croesus, Oedipus, Hercules, Cato, Herod, Naboth and Arthur, Julius Caesar, Agamemnon, Hannibal, Pompey, Sampson, Socrates, Cyrus, Laomedon, and many others are brought to an end by Accident, I hold it true.]

In Boccaccio’s DCVI, characters’ identity narratives (spoken by them or accorded to them as third-person tales by the persona) are presented to a didactic end, as lessons in managing one’s fate, and so have an exemplary function, yet I have chosen to call them epitaphs. It is, I think, a question of treatment. A tale may be an exemplum, such as an account of the suffering of the unrequited lover in Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424) as an exemplification of tragic love, but may not be an epitaph if its focus rests on thematic import and not on Poétique, pp. 594, 593. Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 4, 33. 87 Doudet, 88

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commemoration of the lover-figure as an individual identity, and if the account is not situated primarily in relation to that figure’s demise: to the end to which he came, which is then the starting point for the epitaph itself. Conversely, a literary epitaph, standing as a declamation of identity oriented towards its audience, is likely always to be in some measure exemplary, even if it is anecdotal, like Molinet’s epitaphs for a dog or a court jester who is not, in fact, dead, whose entertainment value stems in large part from their operation as parodies of conventional epitaphic commemoration.89 Classification of a given identity narrative as an epitaph, if it is not already so labelled or introduced by a conventional epitaphic formula (‘cy gist’), thus hinges on whether or not it mobilises a certain set of concerns about relations between death, identity and the shaping of that identity, viewed from a posthumous perspective. Corpus There exists a very rich French literature of death in the later Middle Ages:90 mobilisations of the legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead;91 the danse macabre;92 dialogues with or tournaments against personified Death;93 meditations on death as didactic ‘mirrors’ operating as artes moriendi;94 plaintes funèbres;95 epitaphs as stand-alone lyric poems, or as insertions into narratives such as cemetery fictions (what I am calling ‘epitaph fictions’);96 literary 89

A. Armstrong, ‘Un cimetière’, pp. 196–7. A useful anthology sampling texts and genres from across the medieval period is Poèmes de la mort de Turold à Villon, ed. Jean-Marcel Paquette, 10/18 (Paris: Union générale d’édition, 1979). 91 See, for example, Claude Blum, ‘Recherches sur les fonctions épistémologiques d’une représentation allégorique: l’exemple de l’apparition en Occident de l’allégorie de la mort en squelette’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 15.1 (1985), 13–27, pp. 15–17. 92 Both the Three Living and the Three Dead and the danse macabre have a rich tradition of visual representation; see Elina Gertsman, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 93 Such as Pierre Michault’s Dance aux aveugles or Amé de Montgesoie’s Pas de la mort (see Christine Martineau-Génieys, Le Thème de la mort dans la poésie française de 1450 à 1550 (Paris: Champion, 1978), pp. 221–58) or Olivier de La Marche’s Chevalier délibéré (1483). 94 Like Pierre de Nesson’s Vigiles des morts, George Chastelain’s Miroir de mort or Jean Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes: see Martineau-Génieys, Thème, pp. 145–5, 194–205, 263–9; on the Miroir, see the edition by Tania Van Hemelryck (Louvain-la-Neuve: Publications de l’Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1995). 95 See Thiry, Plainte; Garnier, ‘Rhétorique’; Christine Scollen-Jimack, ‘Funereal Poetry in France: From Octovien de Saint-Gelais to Clément Marot’, in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century: France, England and Scotland, ed. Jennifer Britnell and Richard Britnell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 153–70: Scollen-Jimack sees there to be ‘remarkable continuity in laments for the dead throughout the Middle Ages’ (p. 155). 96 Most famously, René d’Anjou’s Livre du cœur d’amour épris, but also, for example, Saint-Gelais’s Séjour d’honneur or Desmoulins’s Cymetiere des malheureux. 90



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testaments;97 lyrics and dits centred on an amant martir figure or a bereaved persona.98 The most prolific and virtuosic producers of epitaph fictions were historiographers and secretaries of ducal courts, for whom military, political and curial activities often furnished material for chronicle writing as well as for commemorative verse whenever a patron, a member of the princely family retinue or a fellow writer died. At least one, and possibly more, memorialisations would be required, perhaps to serve different functions – I mentioned above Molinet’s two epitaph poems for Philip the Good and Bouchet’s collection of texts in honour of Renée of Bourbon. I shall thus draw from the works of George Chastelain, Olivier de La Marche and Jean Molinet as Burgundians; Simon Gréban, André de La Vigne and Octovien de Saint-Gelais for the French court; 99 and Jean Bouchet and Jean Lemaire, whose service and dedications to patrons span several noble families.100 Other authors of the period between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries have been seen to share affinity with the so-called rhétoriqueurs owing to perceived shared formal traits, specifically a fondness for linguistic invention and imaginative elaboration, such as René d’Anjou, Jacques Milet and, in the context of ‘precursors’ to this grouping, Alain Chartier, Martin Le Franc, Pierre de Hauteville and François Villon.101 Whilst rhétoriqueur texts make up the majority of my corpus, I intend to nuance conception of these writers as a body of work in two ways. First, I wish to disrupt any sense of teleological development between generations of rhétoriqueurs in respect of their attitudes towards death. In a broad-ranging study of the theme of death in the (very baggy) genre of the déploration funèbre from 1450 to 1550, Christine Martineau-Génieys discerns movement from a late-medieval ‘littérature funèbre’ [funereral literature], characterised by a macabre emphasis on death, to a pre-Renaissance ‘littérature funéraire’ [funerary literature] more oriented towards life, 97 We have already mentioned those by François Villon and Pierre de Hauteville; see Cerquiglini-Toulet, Écriture. For historical wills, see Jacques Chiffoleau. La Comptabilité de l’au-delà: les hommes, la mort et la religion dans la région d’Avignon à la fin du moyen âge (vers 1320 – vers 1480) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011). 98 For the earlier medieval period, see Simon Gaunt, Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love (Oxford: OUP, 2006). 99 I recognise that it is somewhat artificial to classify a writer as belonging to one or other court, given the mobility of writers between patrons: for example, de La Vigne was Charles VIII’s ‘facteur royal’ from 1494 for the military campaign in Italy, documented in his Voyage de Naples, but wrote CERB having moved into the service of the Duke of Savoy following Charles VIII’s death in 1498, before returning to the French court as secretary to Anne of Brittany in 1504. On Bouchet’s patronage, see Britnell, Jean Bouchet, pp. 5–7. 100 Regarding his texts considered here, Lemaire composed his Temple d’Honneur et de vertus (1503) in memory of his former employer, Pierre II of Bourbon, dedicating the work to his widow, Anne of Beaujeu, before moving in 1504 into the service of Margaret of Austria, during which period he wrote the Epitaphe for Chastelain and Molinet. See A. Armstrong, Technique, pp. 124, 139. In 1512, he became indiciaire to Anne of Brittany. 101 On continuity between rhétoriqueurs and their predecessors, see Adrian Armstrong, The Virtuoso Circle: Competition, Collaboration, and Complexity in Late Medieval French Poetry (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2012), p. xviii.

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fame through apotheosis, and characterised by a less serious treatment of the theme.102 Teleology may be a necessary evil in survey studies, which need to have recourse to some connecting thread; whilst potentially messier, it is intellectually more satisfying, and more fruitful for yielding perhaps less expected connections, to resist imposing a narrative of progression or consistent development.103 A good reason for resisting this temptation introduces the second way in which I wish to provide a nuanced approach to rhétoriqueur verse: the material contexts that collected such texts together forged their own interconnections, which straddled and thereby blurred any sense of generational division. I will address in the second part of Chapter 2 the early print anthology Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique ([1501]), which brings together, amongst others, Chartier and several contributions to the querelle de ‘La Belle Dame sans mercy’, Chastelain, de Hauteville, Milet, Molinet, de La Vigne and Villon, and invites us to construct some quite imbricated relationships between clusters of items in the volume. Examination of the Belle Dame querelle thus extends backward the date parameters of my corpus to the 1420s. Other, less familiar writers will also be introduced to set better-known texts in fresh company, such as the under-considered Portail du Temple de Bocace by Antitus and the hardly-at-all-considered Cymetiere malheureux by Desmoulins, alongside Chastelain’s Temple de Bocace. A chronology of my corpus of epitaph fictions is supplied at the front of this book. Representing the dead (I): medieval messiness I mentioned above my resistance to imposing a schematic framework on these texts and also, earlier on, some of the complexity that comes from studying representations of the dead when the meaning of ‘dead’ is potentially quite variable. Representing the dead in the later Middle Ages – or, at very least, our understanding of those processes – is a messy business, and I wish to expose and unpack certain aspects of that messiness, which is, I posit, one of the key factors in its fecundity for literary invention. Something of a crucible for reflecting on the relationship between the dead and representation is critical debate surrounding the use of effigies in the fifteenth century and their relationship to the person whose tomb they adorn.104 In funerary documentation and literary texts alike, we encounter the terms ‘representacion’ and ‘simulacre’, which have often Thème, esp. p. 353. Good examples of this non-teleological but still broad-ranging scholarship would be Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), and articles by Cerquiglini-Toulet that address several late-medieval authors around a particular theme, such as ‘Portraits of Authors at the End of the Middle Ages: Tombs in Majesty and Carnivalesque Epitaphs’, in The Medieval Author in Medieval French Literature, ed. Virginie Greene (Gordonsville, GA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 157–71. 104 On the context for and widespread, sustained popularity of the medieval resurgence of an effigial tradition dating back to Antiquity, see Nigel Saul, English Church Monuments in the Middle Ages: History and Representation (Oxford: OUP, 2009), pp. 28–32. 102

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been seen to designate effigial sculptures,105 and which give rise to the question of how realistic such a representation was intended to be: whether it was an effort at copying life,106 either as part of an increasing interest in portraying the individual rather than a generic statue107 and/or part of a movement towards greater realism and naturalism,108 or whether it was a deliberately artful ‘counterfeit’ as part of the tomb’s role as a piece of theatre,109 an item whose significance was ideological rather than figurative.110 We saw above, in de La Vigne’s CERB, use of the term ‘simulacre’: does the phrase ‘est et sera pourtraict le simulacre’ denote the existence of an object (some kind of effigy?) that will be viewed by the ‘passans du long de cest ambulacre’, or the manner in which a reading of language itself constructs a mental image of the deceased? Should we be seeing terms that can designate material realities to have their own, separate discursive economy when they form part of literary representation?111 The vocabulary of tombal monuments proliferates in epitaph fictions: tombe/tombeau, lame, cercueil, sarcophage, sepulture, biere, ymage … and such numerous variety incites us to wonder how we should interpret them in their textual environments, and how epitaphe (or escripture) relates to these other elements of funerary furniture.112 As we shall see in Chapter 4, reading for visual coherence is not a productive approach to making

105 There has been particular debate as to how to interpret ‘representacion’ in the will of Louis d’Orléans (1403): in favour of a reading as ‘effigy’, and therefore arguing for an earlier re-introduction of tombal sculpture, see Camille, Master, p. 186; against such a reading, see Brown, ‘Royal Bodies’, p. 446, n. 2. On the wealth of vocabulary for designating different kinds of figural representation in the Middle Ages, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Introduction’, in Les Images dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Jérôme Baschet and Pierre-Olivier Dittmar (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 7–18, p. 9. 106 Colette Beaune, ‘Mourir noblement à la fin du moyen âge’, in Colloque de la société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public: la mort au moyen âge (Strasbourg: Istra, 1977), pp. 125–43, p. 129. 107 Ariès, L’Homme, p. 255. 108 See Binski, Medieval Death, p. 150; Camille, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: mumia in Medieval Herbal Illustrations’, Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 297–318, p. 318; Camille, ‘Image’, p. 62. 109 Binski, Medieval Death, pp. 103, 99. 110 Ibid., p. 99; Brown, ‘Royal Bodies’, p. 486. 111 Cf. Urbain, Archipel, pp. 36–8. A further complication arises when we consider these texts in their material manuscript/incunable context, which may feature illustrations of effigial sculpture or images that are presented as effigies, as in Jean Bouchet’s Les Anciennes et modernes gesnealogies des Roys de France (Poitiers: Jacques Bouchet, 1528), which offers itself as an art of memory of French kings including ‘leurs effigies faictes selon la mutacion des temps’ ([their effigies made according to the passage of time]). These ‘effigies’ are woodcuts showing the head and shoulders, usually in profile, of each monarch (e.g. Pharamond, fol. 43r). On these specially produced woodcuts, see A. Armstrong, Technique, pp. 196–8; on the term ‘effigie’ as ‘portrait’, see Schmitt, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 112 On the diversity of terms for death furniture, see Cécile Treffort, ‘Les Meubles de la mort: lit funéraire, cercueil et natte de paille’, in À réveiller les morts: la mort au quotidien dans l’Occident médiéval, ed. Danièle Alexandre-Bidon and Cécile Treffort (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993), pp. 207–21.

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sense of this vocabulary’s deployment; arguing for less coherence – or, at least, for a different appreciation of what sort of coherence is being sought – is a more fruitful critical endeavour.113 We are dealing with a literary reality of death: ‘la mort est ici objet de langage’ [death is here the object of language],114 which can at once conjure with it as a definitive frontier and make of this passage a shifting threshold that raises questions about the relationship between represented death and identity. Are you dead simply because you are recorded as officially ‘feu’ ([deceased]), as in Gréban’s Epitaphe du feu roy Charles septiesme; or because you are reported to be buried (‘cy gist’); or because you are being treated as having died, like the reportedly deceased suitor at the end of Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy; or because death is now the primary force dictating your narrative existence, such as when the protagonist of Le Livre du cœur d’amour épris confines himself to a hospice for the rest of his days; or because you say that you are dead, like the persona of de Hauteville’s Confession determining, ‘je tiens ma personne morte’ ([I hold myself to be dead]),115 or the first-person voice of an epitaph in Bouchet’s JPHF stating, ‘pacïemment ceste mort je supporte’ ([patiently I endure this death]);116 or because your name is dead, your reputation having received irreparable damage, as afflicts the heirs of the Belle Dame in Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy?117 Or does the very fact that you are shown in any of these stances and are either delivering an epitaph or have one attributed to you, invalidate any claim to be dead, since your existence now occupies a different mode entirely: that of literary representation, like the speaker of Molinet’s first-person epitaph for the painter Simon Marmion: ‘Aux vivans suis de la mort pourtraicture’ ([To the living I am the image of death])?118 Reading the represented dead A significant body of scholarship already exists on medieval death; the sceptical reader might ask why we stand in need of another book to add to the pile of monographs and edited volumes.119 The present endeavour is quite specific: it does not 113 On the value of arguing for less coherence as a critical manoeuvre in medieval literary studies, see A. C. Spearing, Medieval Autographies: The ‘I’ of the Text (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), p. 3. 114 Poèmes de la mort, p. 9. 115 Ed. Rose Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1982), v. 528. 116 Penthesilea: JPHF, v. 1799. 117 In Alain Chartier: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy, ed. and trans. Joan E. McRae (London/New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 295–364, v. 287. 118 Faictz et ditz, II (1937), pp. 824–5, v. 8. cf. Urbain, Archipel, p. 39. 119 Helpful summaries of previous scholarship may be found in the introductions to essay collections edited by Edelgard Dubruck and Barbara Gusick (Death and Dying in the Middle Ages (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), pp. 1–19) and by Jane H. M. Taylor (Dies Illa: Death in the Middle Ages (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984) pp. 6–11). Greene offers a very useful commentary on critical trends (Sujet, pp. 9–47).



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cover the whole Middle Ages, nor does it attempt a new history of medieval mentalities by trying to answer the question of why death was so prominent (or, as some would have it, all-pervasive) as a topic of cultural representation in the ‘long fifteenth century’.120 My business is literary representation, albeit inevitably also with interest in visual representation through the presentation of texts in their material context.121 That said, it is impossible not to take at least some account of cultural history – burial practices, funerary monuments, Christian belief in an afterlife – when considering its refractions in textual fictionalisation. When teasing out such connections, it is essential to bear in mind, following critics such as Paul Binski, Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Ian D. McFarlane, the plurality and diversity of medieval attitudes, creeds and customs: whether simple multiplicity (concerning ideas of selfhood or the status of relics in relation to body/soul)122 or differences between canonical, sanctioned views and popular practice (for instance, regarding the division of the corpse for multiple burial).123 The historical narrative can be as untidy as its literary interpretation. This book is thus quite different from much previous scholarship: whether the wealth of collected volumes that embrace an interdisciplinary approach to the Middle Ages, compiling together essays, sometimes with a particular topic focus,124 from across humanities subjects, often as the outcome of a conference;125or single-discipline volumes taking a broad chronological spread,126

120 On why we should approach with caution arguments of causality relating historical events (the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, a supposed crisis of faith, etc.) to the incidence of cultural phenomena, see Appleford, Learning, p. 11; Binski, Medieval Death, pp. 127–30; Peter Burke, ‘Death in the Renaissance, 1347–1656’, in Dies Illa, pp. 59–66, p. 63; Camille, ‘Image’, p. 83; Samuel K. Cohn Jnr, ‘The Place of the Dead in Flanders and Tuscany: Towards a Comparative History of the Black Death’, in The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall (Cambridge: CUP, 2000), pp. 17–43, p. 22; Taylor, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 121 My study of visual culture is necessarily limited to a selective examination of book illustration, given constraints of space. For broader studies, see Binski, Medieval Death; Camille, Master; Gertsman, Dance. 122 Binski, Medieval Death, p. 16. 123 Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse’, in The Monarchy of Capetian France and Royal Ceremonial (Aldershot: Variorum, 1991), pp. 221–70. 124 Micrologus, 7 (1999) is a journal special issue on the corpse. 125 Death and Dying, ed. Dubruck and Gusick; Death in the Middle Ages, ed. Herman Braet and Werner Verbeke (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1983); Dies Illa, ed. Taylor; Les Funérailles, ed. Balsamo; Le Sentiment de la mort au moyen âge, ed. Claude Sutto (Quebec: Univers, 1979); À réveiller les morts, ed. Alexandre-Bidon and Treffort. 126 In literary studies, De bonne vie, ed. Eichel-Lojkine and Martin-Ulrich (embracing récits from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) and La Mort en toutes lettres, ed. Gilles Ernst (Nancy: Presses universitaires de Nancy, 1983) (covering the sixteenth to twentieth centuries); in history, Faces of Death: Visualising History, ed. Andrea Petö and Klaartje Schrijvers (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2009) (mostly on the modern period, but featuring one pre-modern essay (on medieval Italy)), and The Place of the Dead, ed. Gordon and Marshall (embracing the late-medieval and early modern periods).

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specific to the medieval period127 and/or oriented around a particular theme.128 Such studies are largely engaged in what Virginie Greene has called ‘l’aventure exploratrice’ [exploratory adventure], accumulating and exhibiting material, whilst those offering a more thematically specific approach undertake some ‘mise en ordre conceptuelle’ [conceptual ordering] of the period;129 Greene proposes that the more valuable line of work for future research is the latter, and it is to that sort of conceptual reflection that this book is devoted. ‘Mise en ordre’ of a more rigid kind may be seen to characterise the grand narratives of historians such as Johan Huizinga and Philippe Ariès, whose magisterial volumes on shifting attitudes across the Middle Ages are still valuable and historiographically important works,130 but whose generalising arguments have rightly received criticism and qualification from more recent scholars: Huizinga’s paradigmatic understanding of late-medieval culture as ‘decadence, decline and death’ engaged in morbid contemplation;131 and Ariès’s account of a transition from ‘la mort apprivoisée’ ([unproblematised death]) to ‘la mort ensauvagée’ ([terror-inducing death]),132 which is accompanied by an increasing preoccupation with individual destiny and the death of the self (‘la mort de soi’).133 Within pre-modern French literary studies, order of a kind has been imposed by chronologically overlapping surveys – Martineau-Génieys, Le Thème de

127 La Mort dans la littérature française du moyen âge, ed. Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine (Villers-Cotterêts: Ressouvenances, 2013) (approaches medieval French literature across a range of genres). 128 Amongst literary volumes, Mourir pour des idées, ed. Caroline Cazanave and France Marchal-Ninosque (Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2008), considers sacrificial and exemplary death, encompassing different periods, but with a good number of medieval pieces; La Mort écrite, ed. Doudet, looks at the medieval relationship between death and writing. 129 Sujet, p. 161. 130 For a historiographical study of Ariès’s work on attitudes towards death, see Patrick H. Hutton, Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History (Amherst/Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), pp. 113–28. For Huizinga’s influence (alongside Burckhardt) on later scholars, see Cohn Jnr, ‘Place’. 131 Camille, Master, pp. 1–2; Taylor, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 132 L’Homme, pp. 13–36; 289–595. For comparative discussion of Ariès and Alberto Tenenti on the nature of this transition, see Claudia Bertazzo, ‘Images of the Dead in the Middle Ages: The Capitals of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice’, in Faces of Death, pp. 190–206, p. 191. For methodological criticism of Ariès’s personal investment in his scholarly views, and more general theoretical shortcomings of his brand of ‘anthropologie-thanatologie’, see Greene, Sujet, pp. 15–16, 47–53. For dissatisfaction with Ariès’s (and others’) use of visual evidence, see Camille, ‘Corpse’, p. 318; Master, p. 2. 133 L’Homme, p. 602. For a challenge to Ariès’s ‘mort personnelle’, see Brown, ‘Death and the Human Body’, pp. 266–7; Michel Vovelle, La Mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 107. Whilst Vovelle’s study is similarly broad-ranging, and thus inevitably broad-brushstroke in some of its statements, he reflects on the methodological challenges of undertaking a synthetic study (pp. 7–26), and responds with some nuance to Ariès. His treatment of literary texts and visual evidence, however, lacks sophistication, treating them more as illustration of/witnesses to cultural historical themes and trends. For Ariès’s dialogue with Vovelle in the 1970s and 1980s, see Hutton, Philippe Ariès, pp. 113–28.



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la mort dans la poésie française de 1450 à 1550 (1978) and Claude Blum, La Représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (1989) – which take, as we shall see, quite different approaches to the topic, perhaps in part accounted for by the decade that elapsed between the two publications. Martineau-Génieys’s aforementioned thesis of a transition from ‘littérature funèbre’ to ‘littérature funéraire’ across the generations of rhétoriqueurs both subscribes to Ariès’s movement from ‘aucune angoisse de la mort’ [no fear of death] to ‘hantise de la mort’ [obsessive fear of death] to a pre-Renaissance ‘la mort est dominée’ [death is overcome], and maps onto the curve traced by Georges Duby’s study of the economic and social evolution of France from the twelfth to the mid-sixteenth century.134 In and amongst this teleological reading, she furnishes some insightful interpretations, as well, most obviously, as doing important work of compilation (Greene’s ‘aventure exploratrice’). Her selections from certain rhétoriqueurs’ work differ significantly from mine, indicating a different approach to what constitutes a work ‘about’ death: treatment of Chastelain privileges Le Miroir de mort, mentioning TB only briefly with reference to the theme of the grave;135 for Saint-Gelais, only his Translation au chant de misère is deemed to be about death per se, whereas his Séjour d’honneur (1494) is my focus;136 and she excludes La Marche’s Chevalier délibéré (1483), whose text and images I shall examine in the Afterword, for allegedly being behind the times.137 Whereas Martineau-Génieys’s study is held together by an idea of death as ‘theme’, which itself seems loosely synonymous with ‘topoi’, Blum states explicitly to prefer ‘representation’ to ‘theme’ or ‘idea’, because he is wanting to trace a dialogue between latent understandings of, and dominant discourses on, death: ‘les figurations [littéraires] de la mort sont, par elles-mêmes, porteuses de significations dont l’époque n’a pas encore clairement pris conscience’ [[literary] figurations of death are, in themselves, carriers of meanings of which the historical period has not yet become clearly aware].138 Blum’s ‘mise en ordre conceptuelle’ is more interrogative than Martineau-Génieys’s, using his book’s introduction less to set down a scheme of interpretation and more to raise questions: what do we mean by death? Why use the term ‘representation’ to frame study of it in literature? In this latter regard, Blum is more in line with my own approach, which seeks to emphasise conceptual opening up rather than closing down, and takes ‘mise en ordre’ as a structural condition for presenting ordered analysis rather than an injunction to impose (undue) tidiness of ideas.

134 Thème, p. 7. In similar vein, Dubruck’s earlier study of the theme of death in medieval French poetry (1964 – before Ariès’s major publications on death, but after Tenenti) concludes that the later Middle Ages ‘generally envisaged [death] with fear and horror’ (Theme, p. 150). 135 Thème, p. 212. 136 Ibid., p. 287. 137 Ibid., p. 259. 138 Représentation, I, pp. 11–12. Blum’s primary corpus is evangelical literature, with Clément Marot acting as fulcrum between medieval and Renaissance, and primary evidence drawn from between 1180 and 1616.

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Representing the dead (II): ‘question[s] […] comme questions’ Amongst recent scholarship on representing the dead, my intellectual sympathies lie, within medieval literary studies, with Jane Gilbert (Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (2011)), Kenneth Rooney (Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature (2011)) and Virginie Greene (Le Sujet et la mort dans ‘La mort Artu’ (2002)); and, more broadly, with Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (ed. Death and Representation (1993)).139 The common thread linking these studies is the taking of a conceptual ‘step back’ from specific materials, which is facilitated to varying degrees by engagement with critical theory and a questioning approach to death/ the dead, representation and their interrelation.140 Gilbert and Rooney scrutinise ‘the dynamic interface between life and death’141 in its ‘literary, rhetorical and imaginative conception’,142 including ‘figures at the cusp of representability’.143 Both critics thereby probe literary permutations of a medieval understanding of death as ‘a transition, a change in status, not an end’.144 Goodwin and Bronfen direct attention more widely to relations between death and culture, addressing head-on the fact that ‘death […] is always only represented’,145 and extrapolating metatextually to the question of what it therefore means to represent death, since there cannot be an original presence or experience as model;146 does a representation display its artifice or camouflage its mediation?147 If, Goodwin and Bronfen reason, every representation of death is thereby always a misrepresentation, then it carries the ability to represent something else,148 which may, for example, be a metatropic function figuring the process of representation itself.149 In a medieval literary context, ‘something else’ is also likely to be a didactic message, but, as we have already seen, representing the dead is more than simply a means to a 139 ‘Introduction’, in Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore, MD/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 3–25. 140 I would also signal here, as scholarship demonstrating an interrogative conceptual approach, aspects of Cerquiglini-Toulet, Écriture, and article-length studies by Miranda Griffin: ‘The Space of Transformation: Merlin between Two Deaths’, Medium Ævum, 80.1 (2011), 85–103, and Julie Singer: ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses in the Debate of the Belle Dame sans Mercy: Achille Caulier’s Cruelle Femme en Amour and Hôpital d’Amour’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 46.1 (2016), 89–115. 141 Gilbert, Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 2011), p. 1. 142 Rooney, Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), p. ix. 143 Gilbert, Living Death, p. 221. An important theoretical tool for Gilbert’s study of this interface is Jacques Lacan’s notion of ‘entre-deux-morts’ (Seminar VII [between-two-deaths]), pp. 6–7. 144 Petö and Schrijvers, in Faces of Death, p. xviii. 145 Goodwin and Bronfen, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 146 Ibid., p. 7. 147 See Killeen, En souffrance, p. 148. 148 Goodwin and Bronfen, ‘Introduction’, p. 21. 149 Ibid., p. 4. See also La Mort écrite.



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moralising end – it also concerns, in epitaph fictions, the construction of identity and modalities of memorialisation.150 In respect of identity, the status and role of the text is important insofar as it substitutes for the deceased body: ‘the text inaugurates the presence of the subject at the same time that it effects an erasure of that presence.’151 It is on the relationship between death and the constitution of the textual subject that Greene focuses in her study of Arthurian romance. As part of her promotion of a conceptualising and questioning approach, she cites Jacques Derrida’s identification of what he feels to be missing from the ‘mises en ordre’ of Ariès and co.: La question du sens de la mort et du mot ‘mort’, la question ‘Qu’est-ce que la mort en général?’, ‘Qu’est-ce que l’expérience de la mort ?’, la question de savoir si la mort ‘est’ – et ce que la mort ‘est’ – restent radicalement absentes comme questions. D’avance elles sont supposées résolues par ce savoir anthropologico-historique comme tel, au moment où il s’institue et se donne ses limites.152 [The question of the meaning of death and of the word ‘death’, the question ‘What is death in general?’, ‘What is the experience of death?’, the question of knowing if death ‘is’ – and what death ‘is’ – remain completely absent as questions. From the outset they are presumed to been resolved by this anthropologico-historical knowledge as such, at the moment when it establishes itself and sets its parameters.]

Death needs to be posed as a question, and the existence of aporias – difficulties, sources of puzzlement, gaps in understanding, uncertainties, impossibilities – embraced. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers have engaged in considerable questioning of aporias regarding the representation of the dead, from Roland Barthes’s and Derrida’s debate at a 1966 symposium over the (im)possible utterance ‘je suis mort’ and its potential ramifications for understanding human subjecthood and the subject’s relation to language,153 to Maurice Blanchot’s interrogation of the relationship between death and writing,154 to reflections by, amongst others, Paul de Man,155 Dominique

150 A similar kind of counterbalancing of didactic value by issues of textual self-consciousness is ventured by A. Armstrong, Technique. 151 Goodwin and Bronfen, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 152 Apories: mourir – s’attendre aux ‘limites de la vérité’ (Paris: Galilée, 1996), p. 54; quoted in Greene, pp. 47–53. Derrida elsewhere groups Ariès together with Michel Vovelle and Louis-Vincent Thomas (p. 1). 153 This debate is documented and helpfully glossed by Gilbert, Living Death, pp. 116–22. 154 See, in particular, ‘L’Œuvre et l’espace de la mort’ in L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 83–166. 155 ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, Modern Language Notes, 94.5 (1979), 919–30, pp. 923–30: de Man reflects on prosopopoeia through consideration of William Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs.

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Rabaté156 and Paul Ricoeur157 on the implications of fictionally staging voices from beyond the grave, and on the consequences of death for narrative identity in life writing. The domain of narrative and linguistic theory more broadly yields helpful tools for unpicking epitaphic textual identity (‘je suis’ and ‘cy gist’) through its study of utterance in terms of tense158 and of deixis in its personal, spatial and temporal dimensions.159 A range of theoretical material will be drawn upon in the following chapters to assist the critical endeavour of ‘mise en ordre conceptuelle’, understood as an encouragement to question, to uncover what I see to have been the questioning, experimental approach of late-medieval writers to relations between death and identity in their epitaph fictions and to appreciate the rhetorical, linguistic and imaginative richness of their manoeuvres in doing so. Alongside exploration of a specifically literary sense of representation, we shall also see writers engaging with theatrical and juridical dimensions of what it means to represent the dead: to animate them as embodied entities in ‘misteres’ that dramatise the processes by which identity is composed, and to raise questions of narrative control over that composition through courtroom fictions (as in the Belle Dame querelle) and situations of arbitration (such as where characters are clamouring to a narrating persona to have their case recorded in Chastelain’s TB and Antitus’s PTB). In sum, this book treats ‘representing the dead’ as an approach to exploring narrative identity/identity as narrative, rather than as a compilation of funerary themes and deceased individuals. It sees late-medieval French writers to have adopted such an approach not simply as a fictional means to a didactic end but as a narrative strategy of interest in its own right for raising important questions about subjectivity, voice and the powers, processes and precarities of storytelling through which a person’s epitaphic tale is told. In its broadest context, this study should tell us something about ideas of selfhood in medieval culture as well as 156 Poétiques, pp. 55–75. In En souffrance, Killeen builds on the theoretical work of Derrida, de Man, Rabaté and others to explore disembodied voices, including from beyond the grave, across a range of media. See also, for the trope of the posthumous from Dante to Nietzsche, and in post-Nietzschean criticism, Jeremy Tambling, Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 157 Soi-même, pp. 190–3. 158 Ricoeur, Temps et récit, II: La configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1984); Suzanne Fleischman, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 113–39, 143–54. For an application of Fleischman’s work to early modern tense-use for the dead, see Kenny, Death and Tenses, pp. 53–78. 159 Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), pp. 91–166; Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 218–20; Claude Buridant, Grammaire nouvelle de l’ancien français (Paris: SEDES, 2000), pp. 407, 424–33, 528, 531–2; Dominique Maingueneau, Éléments de linguistique pour le texte littéraire, 3rd edn (Paris: Dunod, 1993), pp. 4–7, 17; Michèle Perret, Le Signe et la mention: adverbes embrayeurs ci, ça, la, ilvec en moyen français (XIVè–XVè siècles) (Geneva: Droz, 1988). I am indebted to Sophie Marnette for her guidance in navigating linguistic theory.



introduction

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about contemporary conceptions of the capacities and purposes of literary representation itself. ‘mise en ordre’ into chapters The logic behind the order that the main body of this book will follow is intended to reflect the approach espoused above of opening up conceptual avenues of enquiry. To that end, Chapter 1 draws on works from across the corpus to interrogate the smallest and basic syntactic units of epitaphic utterance: ‘je suis’ and ‘cy gist’. It uncovers thereby a richness of semantic and pragmatic development, seeing these syntagms to have been deployed not simply as introductory formulae but as contributing elements to the framing of identity as a play of presence and absence rather than a more rigid fixing. They operate in several literary contexts, less to state an identity than to invite reflection on the deictic constitution of their subject. What appears at first glance to be a declamatory and emphatically singular affirmation is subsequently revealed as a porous, plural and performative utterance, defined not simply as a ‘je’ or an ‘il’, but also as a ‘tu’ by the audience – ‘les passans du long de cest ambulacre’ of de La Vigne’s CERB – who hears or reads the epitaph from her/his point of view. Following this analytical overview of the stakes at play in epitaphic utterance, the remaining chapters consider the working out of these issues in their fictional contexts, clustered together as intertextually and/or materially related groups of texts. The backbone of Chapter 2 is the Belle Dame querelle, in which death itself is a question mark: the Belle Dame and her spurned Lover are not definitely, definitively, determined to be dead until late on in the series of responses to Chartier’s original poem. Epitaphic formulations in one of the very latest responses, Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy, attest to both characters’ demise, but do so in a way that, far from closing down their story and wrapping up their identity, unravels the whole fabric of the querelle to lay bare not only the processes by which identity is constructed but also the very nature of identity itself as performative, not based on a unitary, originary self. The essence of identity as a constitutive echo is explored by tracing associations in querelle responses between the Lady and Lover, on the one hand, and the legend of Echo and Narcissus, on the other. There is crossover in these associations such that both the Lady and the Lover are cast as each Ovidian character, which points to the porous boundaries of literary identity and how, in an intertextually intensive environment, it exists as interaction and slippage, a double movement of dispersal and assembly. An analogous situation is found in material form in the early print anthology Le Jardin de plaisance ([1501]), whose concluding item is an Epitaphe whose presentation and intertextual connections with several of the narrative poems that immediately precede it open up the question of whose identity the epitaph commemorates, and respond by proposing an approach to identity that privileges its relational constitution rather than correspondence to an individual figure. JdP is itself caught up intertextually with the Belle Dame sans mercy through several querelle contributions that feature in the volume.

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The Belle Dame echoes through JdP, encapsulating as she does so the potent persistence but precarious fragility of literary name and renown. The Belle Dame’s heirs strive to clear her name to establish positive renown, but in Chapter 3 we find characters whose efforts are directed towards the preservation in written record of the story of their life and death as a negative exemplum. These are the deceased unfortunates of late-medieval responses to Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium. Boccaccio’s vision, in which dead figures address his persona, is developed as a fictional framework by later French writers into an interplay of narrative voices that exhibits significant interest in the process by which a given person’s identity narrative (histoire) becomes an example (cas), and in the control of that process of transmutation and transmission. This interest entails a questioning of the status of the speaking, ambulant dead as dead-in-life/ living-in-death. Chastelain’s TB, Antitus’s PTB and Desmoulins’s CM entertain an intricate and varied dialogue with Boccaccio and with each other, which leads us to conceive of a continuum or spectrum of epitaph fictions according to their degree of interest in identity and its communication. The chapter concludes with a spectacular elaboration of DCVI’s framework that treats deceased women instead of men and positive rather than negative reputations, Du Pré’s PND. Its dramatisation of women who died in childbirth, some of whom then revived, could also be seen to key us back into concerns from Chapters 1 and 2 regarding the nature of literary representation (whether language itself has resuscitatory power) and the plural circulation of identity, since certain women are seen to occupy several rooms in the palace at the same time. The idea of death operating as a framing device for representing identity is recurrent in this book: the framing syntagms (‘je suis, ‘cy gist’) in Chapter 1, the orienting role of an epitaph at the end of a sequence of poems in Chapter 2 and the fictional framework of dialogue in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 pursues framing by stepping back from epitaphs themselves and the voices who articulate them to consider instead the spatial structures in which these fictional narratives play out and are witnessed by a persona/protagonist: cemeteries (Achille Caulier’s Ospital d’amour, Le Franc’s Champion des dames, René d’Anjou’s LCAE, Milet’s Forest de Tristesse, La Marche’s CD, Saint-Gelais’s SH, Antitus’s PTB and Desmoulins’s CM); hospitals (a tight intertextual interrelation between HA, CdD and LCAE) and temples/palaces (Chastelain, TB; Molinet, TH; Lemaire, Temple d’Honneur et de vertus; Bouchet, Temple de Bonne Renommée and JPHF). These structures place the dead and are thereby caught up in subtle negotiations between presence and absence, life, death and afterlife, as well as entailing a quite complex understanding of the act of seeing on the part of the character whose sight sites the dead: physically witnessing, imaginatively extrapolating and morally contemplating. I seek to challenge commonplace assumptions about the functioning of such architectural frames – such as their monumentalising, containing role or the literary reflexive significance of cemeteries as libraries – to promote appreciation of aporias: the deliberate visual incoherence of burial sites; the malleability, extensibility and polymorphic quality of cemeteries which may



introduction

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house both the dead and the living; the riddling ways in which temples tease out the identity of the person whom they honour. We find ourselves, in conclusion, grappling with the productive messiness of epitaph fictions that I evoked above. In a final Afterword, I explore further the malleability of spatial structures with reference to selected illustrations from manuscripts and early printed editions of four works from across the chronological range of the study: Le Franc’s CdD, La Marche’s CD, Saint-Gelais’s SH and Desmoulins’s CM. These visual images seem to corroborate the importance of insisting upon, in textual depictions of the dead, how their representation is being mobilised: not to offer a fixed literary monument as an accomplished product but to open up and explore questions of identity understood as a process of composition.

1 Framing Identity: ‘je suis’ and ‘cy gist’ As we have seen, a literary epitaph is essentially a statement of identity from a posthumous perspective. As we have also seen, however, the threshold between life and death is not secure, especially given the capacities of fictional writing to blur passage between the two, dwell on a liminal state in-between or experiment with multiple definitions of death. This means that ‘a posthumous perspective’ is not, strictly speaking, exclusive to someone who is depicted her-/himself already to have died or to a third party speaking about the deceased.1 The popular late-medieval genre of the literary testament is typically constituted, as Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet has described, of three elements: confession, bequests and the prescription of an epitaph.2 It is with two such wills that I wish to begin an interrogation of the basic syntactic units of the epitaph that introduce its (usually) human subject. These syntagms are, in the case of first-person presentations, ‘[je] suis’,3 and, for third-person witnesses, ‘cy gist’:4 for example, the ‘epigramme’ of Sappho in the palace of illustrious ladies of Bouchet’s Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (1538): ‘Je suys Sapho poetrice Lybique’ (v. 1936 [I am Sappho, the Aeolic poetess]), or the ‘epitaphe’ for Saint-Gelais’s father in SH: ‘Cy gist Pierre, nommé de Saint Gelais’ ([Here lies Pierre, called of St Gelais]).5 We should first reflect a little on the units themselves before examining their deployment. In the Introduction, I noted that estre and gesir are frequently the only main verbs to feature in an epitaph (certainly in the case of short inscriptions), with the remainder of the exposition of identity consisting of a series of descriptive components (nouns, adjectives, figurative expressions) arranged in

1 Tambling reflects on the very word ‘posthumous’ as positing an undecidability that allows thoughts of either state, life or death, to intrude on the other: Becoming Posthumous, p. 24. 2 Écriture, p. 7. 3 I bracket the first-person pronoun in recognition that the articulation of personal pronouns was not mandatory in medieval French; in the context of epitaphs, though, there is often not only articulation but also repetition of the pronoun to insist on the inscription of an individual’s will and/or agency. To add a further caveat, I do not pretend here that the precise syntagm [je] suis is used ubiquitously for first-person epitaphs, or that it is uniformly positioned at the start of an epitaph. However, there is sufficient sense of [je] suis as the underpinning basic kit (e.g. in cases of je fuz as the incipit) to make it a valuable crucible for probing identity construction in epitaph fictions. 4 Derived from the Latin epitaphic formula hic iacet [here lies]. 5 Ed. Frédéric Duval (Geneva: Droz, 2002), III.ii.140.

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asyndetonic apposition. I want here to explore the resonances of each syntagm, showing, especially in the case of ‘[je] suis’, how medieval writers’ manipulation of its component elements demonstrates a keen awareness of the stakes at play in defining identity epitaphically. In the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett’s novel L’Innommable opens with an interrogative narrative voice of uncertain, possibly posthumous, status: ‘Où maintenant? Quand maintenant? Qui maintenant? Sans se le demander. Dire je’ [Where now? When now? Who now? Without questioning. Say I].6 Such deictic questions concerning place, time and person of utterance are similarly key to medieval writers’ reflection on ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’, not least given that both phrases can be read as fundamentally paradoxical. Since the personal subject to whom they refer is deceased, both imply their opposite and stand in some sense as negations or, at least, as affirmations of that subject’s absence: ‘I am not (because I am alive no longer)’ and ‘here does not lie (because only the body, or part thereof, remains in this place)’. It will also be instructive to consider to what extent the syntagms may be interchangeable: can the latter stand simply as a third-person permutation of the former, or do writers conceive of a marked difference between designating an essential identity through estre (without reference to a body, and so disembodied?) and asserting a specified position for an identity’s physical remains through gesir (if, indeed, gesir is understood to be restricted in scope of reference to the buried corpse)? That we are considering epitaphs as they appear inserted in narrative contexts, rather than as single-standing lyric items, will be important, because narrative elaboration of an epitaph’s situation – its physical location, such as in a cemetery or temple (detailed in Chapter 4), and its discursive circumstance (of particular interest in Chapter 3), being seen/heard/transcribed by a third party – both opens up and complicates the scope and implications of the two syntactic units. I am, of course, not claiming that all writers using either of these syntagms in epitaph fictions were consciously playing with their semantic and pragmatic meaning as a form of reflection on the literary composition of identity or that each usage is consistently freighted with the same range of resonances. However, I think it is clear, especially in the case of texts which feature quite substantial verse epitaphs for well-known figures (from ancient or contemporary history or Classical mythology), that writers’ interest is directed towards the shaping role of form rather than just that form’s content: how a given life/death is framed, rather than simply that it is included, since there is obviously no fear that X and Y famous figures will be forgotten and therefore need their memory preserving in the present instance. The basic building block of the form, its first-person or third-person incipit, constitutes a significant aspect of this interest. My focus in this chapter is thus on teasing out of two syntagms and their immediate contexts, across almost the full range of texts encompassed by this book, issues to be explored in the specific fictional contexts of those works when they are addressed in subsequent chapters in subdivided groupings. I therefore as it were throw up

6

(Paris: Minuit, 1953), p. 7.



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all my balls now, so as to catch them in a more orderly fashion later,7 and begin with two literary wills. Testamentary epitaphs: ‘Je suis ung povre substantif’ That late-medieval writers used their literary fictions to explore complex questions of identity and the nature of (human) being is well attested, as studies of metamorphosis, human/animal boundaries and forms of corporeal hybridity and instability have shown.8 It is not, therefore, surprising that epitaphs should be infused by this interest, but my point is more that the epitaph brings distinctive questions to bear about the nature of being in the context of no longer being alive and the articulation of that mode of existence: what does it mean to say ‘I am’ when I am dead? In his Donnet baillié au roy Charles VIII,9 Jean Molinet dramatises a relationship between language, identity and death. The poem is cast as an instructive manual on grammar,10 which, in order to speak (in particular) about verb tenses, adopts the format of the confession and testament of ‘ung bon compaignon’ (v. 120 [a good friend]) of the persona (l’Acteur). The testamentary section begins with a first-person portrait of/by the friend, which we may see to stand as his prescribed epitaph.11 The speaker grammatically unpicks ‘je’ before tackling ‘suis’ in this unusual self-presentation. He first addresses his gender: 7 The reader should thus not feel disconcerted by lack of knowledge of specific plot structures in the present chapter; fuller summaries will be provided when the works are addressed in turn. 8 For example, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); M. Griffin, Transforming Tales; Sarah Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self (forthcoming); Maddox, Specular Encounters. 9 In Maria Colombo, ‘“Le Donnet baillé au feu roy Charles huytiesme de ce nom”’, in ‘Il n’est nul si beau passe temps / Que se jouer a sa Pensee’: studi di filologia e letteratura francese in onore di Anna Maria Finoli (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1995), pp. 135–71; see also Molinet, Faictz et ditz, II (1937), pp. 681–703. The Donnet appears in print in the poetic anthology Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique ([1501]) (Reproduction en fac-similé de l’édition publiée par Antoine Vérard vers 1501, ed. Eugénie Droz and Arthur Piaget, 2 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1910–24), I (1910), fols. [21v]–[25v]). Dupire, following sixteenth-century manuscript copies, uses the title Le Donet baillié au roy Louis XII, offering a date of composition after April 1498 (p. 681). Droz and Piaget state that both the dedication to Louis XII and attribution to Molinet are incorrect, proposing instead Charles VIII as intended dedicatee, 1491 as date of composition and Regnaud Le Queux as author (II (1924), pp. 87–90). That the poem is a significant item in JdP is indicated by its inclusion in the extended title of the volume on the title page of its fifth, sixth and seventh editions: ‘S’ensuyt le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethoricque contenant pluiseurs beaulx livres, comme le donnet de noblesse baillé au roy Charles viii […]’ (see Appendix for my numbering of JdP editions). A. Armstrong (in a private communication) does not dispute Molinet’s authorship, but concurs with Droz and Piaget (and Colombo) on the more likely dedication, which I also follow. 10 For ‘donnet’ as the name of a standard grammatical primer (Donatus’s Ars minor) in medieval schools, see Colombo, ‘“Donnet”’, p. 136, and Jane H. M. Taylor, The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 260, n. 78. 11 The epitaph is more usually, as Cerquiglini-Toulet notes, located towards the end of the will: Écriture, p. 7.

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Je suis mon gendre congnoissant, Qui est masculin, touteffoys Je me suis trouvé fort pensant Au feminin aucuneffoys. (Donnet, vv. 181–4) [I am well aware of my gender, which is masculine, although I have sometimes found myself thinking very intently in/of the feminine.]

Rather than implying any hermaphroditism, he is, as elaboration in the following strophe makes clear, alluding ironically to his erotic attraction to women: he admits to having ‘thought of’ them in the plural, not just the singular. He goes on to present the physical decomposition of his body, which introduces consideration of how he appears to others – definition of his ‘je’ in relation to ‘tu’: Aussi la seconde personne Ne me fait que tendre le groing. (Donnet, vv. 199–200) [And so the second person only ever turns its nose up at me.]

This self-derisory presentation of diminished being is summarised in the following exposition, which moves him from dissection of ‘je’ to examination of ‘suis’: Je suis ung povre substantif, Qui tout par moy bien me decline; Je n’ay que faire de adjectif Qui ma substance determine. Je suis en vieillesse chagrine, Gouteux, foible, pelé devant. Il ne me fault que la chopine Plaine de vin dorenavant. (Donnet, vv. 201–8) [I am a poor substantive who am greatly declining all on my own; I have no need of adjective to determine my being. I am, in bitter old age, gouty, weak and bald at the front. All I need from now on is the tankard full of wine.]

He depicts himself as impoverished in all senses: pared down to a simple, solitary noun deprived of any adjective to enrich it – except for the epithet ‘povre’ and a series of terms, complementing the second ‘je suis’ in the above quotation (v. 205), which reinforce a sense of the erosion and degradation of that very being. ‘Me decline’ is the acme moment of this self-exposition, since its ambiguity as ‘I deteriorate’ physically and ‘I decline myself’ in a grammatical sense captures the underpinning logic of the poem: it uses an instance of corporeal decomposition to fuel literary composition viewed in terms of its very nuts and bolts of language. The companion proceeds to parse his being into a narrative history that accords especial attention to his amorous pursuits, and thereby embraces concerns of spatial and temporal deixis:



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Je vy le temps qu’estoie verbe: Les noms et pronoms gouvernoye, Mais souvent avoye ung adverbe Par qui je me determinoye. L’adverbe de lieu demandoye, Ut hic vel ibi, pour sçavoir Ou il y avoit quelque proye, Affin que je la peusse avoir […] Adoncques temps luy assignoye, Hodie, nunc, nuper, hery; Et quant ainsi je ne pouvoye Pensés que je estoye marry. (Donnet, vv. 209–16, 221–4) [I remember when I was a verb: I governed nouns and pronouns, but sometimes I had an adverb by which I defined myself. I requested the adverb of place either here or there, to find out where there was some prey, so that I might have it/her […]. And so I assigned time to it/her, today, now, lately, yesterday; and when I couldn’t do so, imagine how distressed I was.]

Whilst he used to be active and exercise mastery, he is now the passive subject of deponent verbs: Present suis ung simple passif Sans erreur qui estre soloye, Gouvernant le nominatif Quand force de personne avoye. (Donnet, vv. 553–6) [Now I am, there’s no mistake, a simple passive who used to govern the nominative when I had strength of being.]

He thus presents his (love-)life as a story of encounters with grammatical components, moving from having been served by adverbs and prepositions (vv. 289, 393–4) to being obstructed and thwarted, such that now his conquests are confined to his past: ‘[il fault] que je descline amavi’ (v. 456 [[I must] decline I have loved]). Through virtuosic play of verb tense and mood across French and Latin, Molinet evokes a narrative of debauched decline towards old age,12 concluding with the speaker’s explicit expression of penitence: Je pretens confession faire Des accidens que j’ay comprins Seulement en simple grammaire. (Donnet, vv. 590–2)

12 I say ‘evokes’, since few precise events or activities are disclosed; oscillation between different tenses is suggestive of a rich history, but is no more specific than that.

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[I intend to make confession of the accidents that I have occasioned – only in basic grammar.]

Verse 592’s qualification surely compromises the apparently sincere confession of sins, using the poem’s slippage between actions in life and grammatical acts to get the speaker partially off the hook for offences in/against love (‘accidens’ as ‘accidents’ or ‘unfortunate events’) by casting these neutrally as mere morphological variation (‘accidens’ as ‘accidence’ or ‘grammatical inflection’). The same language/life interface is deployed as the persona punningly picks up the narrative thread from his companion: Ainsy fina le penitent Des accidens du temps passé, […] Lesquelz je me suis appensé D’escrire en ce livre present. (Donnet, vv. 641–2, 645–6) [And so the penitent came to the end of the accidents (1) in/of the past tense / (2) of times past, […] which I have decided to record in the present book.]

According to the persona, his friend may be seen as a true penitent. The activity of the persona is of interest in terms of how we construe the companion’s ‘je’: the former furnishes a first-person narrative frame for the first-person direct speech that he reports. This frame itself draws attention to questions of person: shortly before the persona introduces ‘the situation of a good friend’ (v. 120), he offers an exposition of personal pronouns: Ego est premiere personne Du pronom qui parle de soy; Le seconde est a qui on donne Or ou argent, tibi a toy; Ille est la tierce de quoy Des deux la parole peult ystre, Si se fait bon tenir a coy De peur de ille, car il est traistre. (Donnet, vv. 105–12) [I is the first person of the pronoun that speaks of self; the second is to whom one gives gold or silver, to you to you; he is the third, from whom the speech of the two may stem, and so it’s a good idea not to say anything, for fear of him, since he is a traitor.]

The terms of this exposition have fascinating pertinence to the discursive situation of the Donnet: the friend is presented in first-person direct speech talking about himself (ego: ‘je suis’, v. 201); he is represented at points addressing an audience (whether imagined or actual within the diegesis) through use of the second person (tibi: ‘pensés’, v. 224), whom we may construe to have been, at one point, the persona. However, the persona’s primary role is now that of relaying



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his friend’s speech as a third person (ille: ‘ainsy fina’, v. 641), and the quotation invites us to consider whether, in this capacity, he may be treacherous, perhaps falsifying the latter’s ‘accidens’.13 In that light, affirmations of first-person being by the friend, such as ‘present suis ung simple passif’, could acquire a layer of ironic meaning if we see the persona to be acting as primary ‘je’, ventriloquising the other’s words, and thereby asserting himself as active subject of what he reports, making the friend doubly ‘a simple passive’: in relation both to his own past and to his narrative present. Were the persona to have been depicted as a different gender from the speaker, this could also have ironised ‘je suis mon gendre congnoissant’. In Jean Bouchet’s JPHF, for example, the male persona ‘Le Traverseur’ (Bouchet’s habitual textual pseudonym) relays the epitaphs of first-person ladies, and, as we shall see in Chapter 2’s discussion of the Jardin de plaisance, gender ambiguity can be created in epitaphs through the use of gender-indeterminate encomiastic discourse. Drawing on the narrative conventions of late-medieval dits – such as the framing of reported speech with first-person narrative and the figure of the questionable secretary-witness – Molinet’s gloriously ingenious Donnet sets his virtuosic interlacing of life and language within the specific fiction of a testament, generating a vibrant exploration of identity: the processes by which it is constructed in language as well as the potential instabilities and porousness of this first-person composition. We may see simmering in Molinet’s poem several issues articulated by modern theorists of subjectivity: the nature of personal pronouns (thinking, for instance, of Benveniste’s objection to classifying the third person as a person);14 the potential non-unity or discontinuity of je (for example, Ricoeur’s consideration of it as, on the one hand, an empty term, a ‘shifter’, but, on the other, anchored in the act of speaking);15 the temporality of identity (as in Ricoeur’s terms of ipséité and mêmeté);16 as well, of course, as the relationship between identity, narrative and death (such as Rabaté’s discussion of autothanatography).17 The particular flavour of personal identity communicated through the Donnet, with its gleefully provocative wordplay, its plaintive accent on poverty and its potentially defiant, or, at least, resigned coup de vin, calls to mind a slightly

13 Playing off the long and lively history of unscrupulous narrator-reporter personae in medieval dits: see Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘L’Écriture louche: la voie oblique chez les Grands Rhétoriqueurs’, in Les Grands Rhétoriqueurs: actes du Vè colloque international sur le moyen français, Milan, 6–8 mai 1985, 3 vols (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1985), I, pp. 21–31. 14 On the grounds that it lies outside the relationship (the ‘correlation of personality’) je-tu; that the third ‘person’ may be whatever is talked about, whether human, animal or thing; and also that it is inconsistent: on, chascun, il: Problems, pp. 195–204, 217–22. For a challenge to Benveniste’s distinction in relation to literary speech situations, see Maingueneau, Éléments, p. 7. For relations between je/tu/il, see also Ricoeur, Soi-même, p. 56. 15 Soi-même, p. 65. 16 Ibid., pp. 137–66; see also pp. 167–98 with regard to narrative identity. I return to both sections below. 17 Poétiques, pp. 55–75, p. 57.

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earlier, more well-known testamentary nexus of enquiry into relations between language, identity and death: François Villon’s Testament. Villon presents a complex first-person persona whose prescriptions for his death are compromised by his character’s slipperiness, as encapsulated in the assertion: De viel porte voix et le ton Et ne suis q’un jeune cocquart. (Testament, vv. 735–6) [I carry the voice and accent of an old man, when I’m only a young fool.]

These verses pick up on a fundamental paradox of the poem: the testator laments his old age and reports as signa mortis multifarious facets of corporeal decay, yet he speaks ‘en l’an de mon trentiesme aage’ (v. 1 [in the year of my thirtieth age]), a wilfully obscure statement of his age. Verses 735–6 ensure the impossibility of resolving the paradox by offering a kind of Möbius strip of uncertain identity: if elderliness is a mask, then youth is surely also ruled out as a straightforward identification – and how do we know when to stop trying to peel away the layers? The testator’s penchant for ironies of all kinds brings us radically to doubt the trustworthiness of a seemingly transparent and univocal syntagm: ‘[je] suis’. Any readerly desire to access authentic selfhood (unless we construe that authenticity as itself constructed) is thwarted. Hence our difficulty in assessing the validity of any identity asserted by the persona’s self-authored third-person epitaph, beginning: ‘Cy gist et dort en ce sollier’ (vv. 1884ff [Here lies and sleeps in this attic]). Furthermore, the spatial deixis ‘cy’ is itself problematic, since the testator has just accorded himself an impossible burial location in a chapel not situated at ground level (st. CLXXVI). Villon seems to be raising, in literary reflexive vein, the very question of interment: how can a textual body be buried? Especially if that body has not, in fact, died, since the most virtuosic pirouette of the entire poem is its erasure of the moment of death between the penultimate and final ballades of the work. We see the testator begging mercy in the ‘Ballade de merci’ in the first person, and then immediately transition to a posthumous moment in the ‘Ballade de conclusion’, in which a third party invites us to his (impossible, as we just saw) interment: Icy se clost le testament Et finist du povre Villon. Venez a son enterrement. (Testament, vv. 1996–8) [Here ends and concludes the testament of poor Villon. Come to his burial.]

What – temporally, spatially and ontologically – has occurred between the two ballades? Villon stages, through silent omission, ‘[cet instant insaisissable] entre “je meurs” et “je suis mort”’ [[this ungraspable moment] between ‘I am dying’ and ‘I have died’].18 Whilst we have moved into a(n unnamed) third-person voice, 18

Ibid., p. 59.



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the echo of the first-person persona ‘Villon’, itself echoing the name of the poet, still resonates throughout the ‘Ballade de conclusion’ via its dominant rich rhyme in ‘-illon’. ‘[Je] suis’ emerges from the Testament as a marker of plurality, indeterminacy and uncertainty in relation to death; indeed, it comes to be construed less as an affirmation than as a challenging interrogative to us as readers to try (and fail) to unravel it: ‘qui suis-je?’ Posthumous deictics The above testamentary examples of epitaphic writing, whilst useful for raising several issues that concern us throughout this book, could be said to fall short of being epitaphs ‘proper’, in that the ‘je’ stating ‘[je] suis’ is not, at the time of utterance, presented as being dead.19 However much they are steeped in markers of death-in-life, such figures – like Pierre de Hauteville’s persona in his Confession, who ‘meur[t] et transi[t] en vivant’ (v. 115: [die[s] and expire[s] whilst still alive]) – are not actually deceased, which makes a difference when we read ‘je suis’ in epitaph fictions. Although, as we saw in the Introduction, death is conceived of by the medieval mind-set as a passage or transition rather than an end, it does impose boundaries for the composition of identity: temporally, ‘[je] suis’ becomes implicitly (or explicitly) marked out in distinction to ‘[je] fus’;20 spatially, ‘cy’ evokes a different domain from that in life (whether a specific site of burial or a more general statement about posthumous mode of being). The very nature of selfhood is thrown into question as we consider whether ‘je’ beyond the grave is continuous with ‘je’ in life, or is in fact constituted of several ‘je’, an assemblage of first-person markers designating a range of ways of defining identity; or whether posthumous ‘je’ is a signifier of presence or absence. Death is clearly not the end of an epitaphic speaker’s story, but should it and what follows that moment chronologically be construed to mark a new chapter in the story or a completely new kind of story? Other works by Molinet and Villon give us dead voices. The latter’s freestanding ballade L’Epitaphe Villon is a stimulating case for expanding and deepening our reflections on the deictic implications of ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’.21 L’Epitaphe suffers in its modern editions from the imposition of an alternative title, La Ballade des pendus, which spoils entirely the riddling aspect of a work that does not disclose definitively the post-mortem position of its speaker until verse 19’s decisive monosyllabic declaration: ‘nous sommes mors’ ([we are

19 Though see below, p. 49, for a further problematisation when the ‘je’ of epitaphs recorded in literary cemeteries is still alive. 20 See Kenny, Death and Tenses, pp. 118–26. 21 Cerquiglini-Toulet notes textual similarities between L’Epitaphe and a longer Molinet ballade, ‘Complainte des trespassés’: Œuvres, p. 815.

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dead]).22 So we do not, before this point, know exactly what is going on: accumulated deictics of person, time and space build up suggestively in the first strophe: Freres humains, qui aprés nous vivez, […] Car, se pitié de nous povres avez, […] Vous nous voiez cy attachez, cinq, six: […] [La chair] est pieça devoree et pourrie. (Epitaphe, vv. 1, 3, 5, 7) [Human brothers who live on after us, […] if you have pity on us who are wretched, […] you see five or six of us attached here: […] [the flesh] has been decayed and putrefied for some time.]

But we are denied any situation to which to relate them. Even when the posthumous position is clarified, not all becomes clear: what is the ‘cy’ (v. 5) of utterance of corpses swinging from a gibbet? The epitaph is established as a communication with ‘vous’, so should we construe the deictic centre to lie with the ‘freres humains’, the living passers-by viewing the hanged bodies, and thereby us as readers receiving their words? With the corporeal being of ‘nous’ having rotted, ossified and now in the course of desiccating: ‘nous, les os, devenons cendre et pouldre’ (v. 8 [we, the bones, become ashes and dust]), how do we relate speaker(s) to body? The corpses, stripped of their flesh, are deprived of identifying marks: birds have pecked out their eyes and ripped off beard and eyebrows (vv. 23–4); their bodies are rendered anonymous. It thus seems that the only thing holding the dismembered skeletal remains together are the words of the poem, forming composition out of decomposition – but imperfectly so, as no defined or secure identity is thereby established.23 Our sense of ‘nous’ crumbles into ashes and dust at the same time as we try to stick its bones together. ‘Cy’ thus comes to denote most pertinently the ‘here’ of the text itself in which the deceased’s identity is posed as a question and is not coherently answered. Representing the dead representing themselves raises several conceptual questions that may helpfully be grouped under headings designating the three different (but inevitably intersecting) domains of deixis that comprise a situation of

22 In Œuvres, pp. 214–17, v. 19. See Taylor, Poetry, pp. 137–8. The bespoke woodcut at the start of the poem in its editio princeps – where it carries the rubric ‘Epitaphe dudit Villon’ – could also be seen to spoil the suspense: it shows three male bodies suspended from a gibbet: (Paris: Pierre Levet, 1489), fol. G3r; reproduced in Œuvres, p. 389 (see also p. 857). 23 As Martineau-Génièys notes (Thème, p. 172), there is a logistical problem with envisaging a flesh-stripped skeleton still suspended in the air, rather than its bones all having collapsed in a heap like the fate of those consigned to the ossuary in the Cemetery of the Innocents, whose ‘bones crumble into dust’ (Testament, v. 1765). The bodies in Levet’s woodcut (see above, n. 22), two of which are still clothed, are not skeletal; a similar image features in the Vergier d’honneur (fol. l6r), with bone fragments (a femur, a skull …) scattered on the ground beneath the hanged men.



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utterance: personal, temporal and spatial.24 Death puts a spanner in the works of deictic value in an interesting way, given, as we have already seen, the frequency of deictic demonstratives in epitaph fictions, which suggests that a very particular situation of utterance is being set up. With reference to the first-person pronoun, Benveniste insists: ‘I can only be identified by the instance of discourse that contains it and by that alone’.25 Dominique Maingueneau explains that spatial deictics (such as cy) change meaning depending on the position of the speaker’s body and temporal deictics (like maintenant) vary according to the time of the utterance.26 What happens, though, when the speaker is dead? The epitaphs’ ‘fundamental deictic coordinates’ ‘draw the reader into the place and time occupied by the deceased’s body and soul’.27 But what do we understand to constitute her/ his body in that instance of discourse? In what sense do we have a moment of utterance since earthly temporality has terminated, and from what position, in what state, do we construe the speaker to be speaking or the body lying? Person deixis: ‘[je] suis mort’ Before analysing person deixis in medieval texts, I wish briefly to engage with a phrase that has featured prominently in modern theoretical reflections on relations between language, identity and death: ‘je suis mort’. In our properly posthumous epitaphs, ‘je suis’ effectively stands for ‘je suis mort’ (the singular form of Villon’s Epitaphe’s ‘nous sommes mors’): both ‘I have died (since I am now speaking from beyond the point of my demise)’28 and ‘I am dead (since my body is no longer alive)’. Saying ‘je suis mort’ outside the domain of fictional writing was noted as an invalid use of language by Roland Barthes during a now infamous academic conference in 1966, at which his brief remark provoked Jacques Derrida to argue the possibility of this impossibility and, moreover, to see it as the foundational condition for a true act of language. For Derrida, language (taking the written word, écriture, rather than parole, the spoken word, as its primary form) is independent both of its user and of the referential world, which renders saying ‘je suis mort’ both entirely possible and a recognition of the human subject’s state of alienation from ‘its essential supports – language,

24 For a brief exposition of deixis in general terms of discourse analysis, see Maingueneau, ‘Déictique’, in Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours, ed. Patrick Charaudeau and Dominique Maingueneau (Paris: Seuil, 2002), pp. 158–60; a more detailed and technical discussion may be found in Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, L’Énonciation de la subjectivité dans le langage (Paris: Armand Colin, 1980), pp. 34–70. With specific reference to literary texts, see Maingueneau, Éléments, pp. 4–25. In the context of Old French, see Buridant, Grammaire, p. 404 § 325; p. 528 § 427; pp. 531–2 § 430–1. 25 Problems, p. 218. 26 Éléments, p. 4. 27 Kenny, Death and Tenses, pp. 118, 117. 28 Given that the example that I have just discussed is speech apparently delivered from the gibbet, prior to any burial/consignment to the charnel house, I resist using here the commonplace expression ‘from beyond the grave’.

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the body, the voice, objective knowledgeable discourse, civic society’:29 ‘ma mort est structurellement nécessaire au prononcé du Je. […] [N]ous entendons le “je suis” à partir du “je suis mort”’ [my death is structurally necessary to the uttering of I. […] [W]e understand the ‘I am’ from the ‘I am dead’].30 Derrida references the character of Valdemar in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, in which ‘I am dead’ are the final words uttered by Valdemar’s tongue after his clinical death has already been verified. Derrida sees nothing extraordinary in that posthumous utterance, simply ‘l’histoire ordinaire du langage’ [the ordinary tale of language].31 Valdemar features prominently in several other discussions of ‘je suis mort’: Rabaté, in a chapter on voices from beyond the grave from Poe to Thomas Bernhard, sees the phrase to be at the heart of modern writing, and views fiction as the site for realising this impossible proposition;32 Killeen, quoting Rabaté, proposes Villon as an antecedent of this kind of utterance.33 A relationship between death and writing is also central to Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on literary activity and artistic mastery, especially in the genre of autobiography,34 and on the relationship between language and the human subject who speaks/writes: ‘du fait que l’homme parle […] l’homme est déjà mort, est, du moins, en instance de mourir’ [by the fact that man speaks […] he is already dead, is, at least, approaching death].35 The (im)possibility of death – ‘a signifier with an incessantly receding, ungraspable signified’, according to Goodwin and Bronfen – lends it central metatextual importance in literary reflection on the very activity of writing: ‘representations of death thus often serve as metatropes for the process of representation itself.’36 Whilst I am not wanting to posit any wholesale application to my medieval texts of modern theoretical formulations of the relationship between death, language and identity in the context of literary representation, I feel strongly that there is common ground between these articulations of that relationship and the stakes at play in late-medieval epitaph fictions in which, quite explicitly, ‘tout graphème est d’essence testamentaire’ [every grapheme is in essence testamentary].37 The epitaph and its narrative context act as a crucible for questions of

29 I quote here Gilbert’s excellently lucid discussion of debate between Barthes and Derrida: Living Death, pp. 116–22. 30 La Voix et le phénomène, 4th edn (Paris: PUF, 1983), p. 108. 31 Ibid. 32 Poétiques, pp. 56, 59. 33 En souffrance, p. 23; see also pp. 52, 193. Rabaté concedes that the trope can be found prior to the end of the eighteenth century, but deems those earlier instances not to have carried the same meaning (Poétiques, p. 56). 34 Notably as articulated in L’Espace littéraire; for Blanchot’s response in that work (in the section ‘La Mort possible’) to Franz Kafka’s statement ‘in order to write, it is necessary to die’, see John Gregg, ‘Blanchot’s Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)possibility of Death’, SubStance, 55 (1988), 47–58. 35 La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 48. 36 Goodwin and Bronfen, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 37 Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 100.



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representation, for example in terms of the ‘representacion’ of the dead person that is the effigy (‘ymage’) that often features as an (implied) visual complement to the verbal portrait.38 Furthermore, the Derridean sense of the self as dislocated from language can be seen to chime with the ways in which we have already seen Molinet and Villon to view ‘[je] suis’ not as a transparent, singular and unitary declamation of selfhood but as a constructed, porous linguistic process that is a projection of identity intended to be appreciated as such: ‘le constituant et le disloquant à la fois, l’écriture est autre que le sujet’ [constituting it and dislocating it at the same time, writing is other than the subject].39 Building on fourteenth-century dits, whose personae’s ‘je’ is conceived as ‘disjonction, blanc, discontinu’ [disjuncture, blank, fragmented],40 epitaph writers can be seen to accord with Derrida’s rejection of the ideas of straightforward presence and self-presentness associated with parole: [he] attacks the fantasies of self-determination, straightforward interlocution, social integration and direct interaction with the non-linguistic environment that attend the spoken word, emblematised by the utterance ‘je suis’.41

To illustrate, we may consider René d’Anjou’s LCAE, in which, amongst the several douzain epitaphs populating the cemetery of the hospital of Love, we encounter an epitaph of the still living author himself, opening: Je suis René d’Anjou, qui se vault acquitter Comme coquin d’Amours, servant de caymander. (LCAE, vv. 1483–4) [I am René d’Anjou, who wishes to acquit himself as a beggar for Love, serving with cap in hand.]

The remaining ten verses of the epitaph indulge in intensive annominatio on ‘coquin’ and ‘caymander’ in what is clearly intended to constitute a theatrical self-presentation, deliberately distanced from any sense of authentic self-revelation.42 An alternative douzain exists in one manuscript of the poem, which makes more explicit the identity of ‘je’ understood as a construct, dislocated from any originary voice: Je suis René d’Anjou, qui me viens presenter Comme coquin d’Amours, a la fin de compter Mon fait entierement, sans en riens mescompter,

38

See Introduction, p. 24–5. De la grammatologie, p. 100. 40 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Écriture, p. 15. 41 Gilbert, Living Death, p. 117. I consider later the question of epitaphs’ orality, especially in Chapter 3. 42 In a note to her edition, F. Bouchet approaches the epitaph as a self-portrait, and is thus puzzled by this chosen self-presentation: LCAE, p. 343, n. 2. 39 Derrida,

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Envers le dieu d’Amours, qui m’a voulu tempter Plus qu’autre son subgect, pour le vray racompter.43 [I am René d’Anjou, coming to present myself as a beggar for Love, with the aim of giving full account of my situation, without misrepresenting anything, to the god of Love, whose wish it has been, to tell the truth, to put me to the test more than any of his other subjects.]

The key term of annominatio here being ‘compter’, je, the ‘subgect’, is cast as a term of storytelling, with the asseveration ‘pour le vray racompter’ thereby raising a question mark as to the extent to which a ‘conte’ [tale] may or may not relay truth (and what kind of truth?), in manner reminiscent in wordplay of the fourteenth-century poet Guillaume de Machaut’s provocatively titled narrative poem Le Livre du voir dit [The Book of the True Tale]. René’s epitaph for Machaut later in LCAE nods to that poem and the questions of truth value that it opens up, through repetition in the epitaph of ‘voir’ [true/truth], including the asseveration ‘pour vous dire le voir’ ([to tell you the truth]).44 Cautioning against any attempt to view je transparently, Cerquiglini-Toulet dissuades us from reading epitaphs autobiographically in the context of their presentation in literary wills: Le je reçoit alors une coloration, une épaisseur qu’il ne faudrait pas trop s’empresser pourtant de lire comme autobiographie. Le testament est une composition, sur la décomposition, la personne, une persona.45 [The I acquires a colouring, a substantiality that one should not, however, be too quick to read as autobiography. The will is a composition, on decomposition, the person, a persona.]

We can apply her counsel more generally to posthumous literary epitaphs, those that invite us to be seduced by an ‘épaisseur’ as well as those that display their constructedness. We may see Villon’s compellingly vivid, whilst at the same time self-undermining, portrait of hanging bodies in his Epitaphe to do both. What lend this apparent substantiality are deictics of person, time and place, which seemingly flesh out ‘[je] suis’, but in fact only point to its essential performativity and theatricality. Cerquiglini-Toulet speaks of ‘persona’ above, meaning ‘mask’, and a current of dramatic self-projection may be seen to run through many epitaph fictions. The term ‘mistere’ is applied by Chastelain, Lemaire and Bouchet to several of their representations of dead voices that involve dialogue, and evokes a theatrical dimension.46 In Chastelain’s TB, the procession of dead 43 Quoted in LCAE, p. 344, n. 1. F. Bouchet, however (p. 343, n. 2), sees this later version as ‘sensiblement plus sage’ [markedly more conventional] than the other epitaph. 44 LCAE, vv. 1567–78, v. 1572. 45 Écriture, pp. 6–7. 46 Les Epitaphes d’Hector; La Mort du roy Charles VII; Temple de Bocace; Temple d’Honneur et de vertus; Temple de Bonne Renommée. The scope of meaning of ‘mistere’, as a



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historical people who address the writer’s persona in the eponymous temple where Boccaccio is buried are called ‘mors personnages’ [dead characters],47 with their task of self-representation, in body and speech, being termed ‘faire le[ur] personnage’ (pp. 35, 41).48 The case of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is pertinent here; he is described choosing to present his demise in a particular way: […] affin de faire sembler sa mort venir de nature, car fu mis depuis entre deux drapz, tout nud, pour faire le personnage. (TB, p. 41) [[…] in order to make his death appear to occur naturally, for he was then placed between two sheets, quite naked, to play the part.]

The sense of deliberate purpose (‘affin de’) draws attention to the fact that conflicting accounts exist, including within Chastelain’s oeuvre, of the manner of Humphrey’s death: rather than show himself as murdered, he opts here to perform death by natural causes,49 with ‘performance’ understood as both a dramatic act and conduct constitutive of identity.50 Chastelain collapses the apparent ‘épaisseur’ accrued by each dead character when he compares their existence to that of the living Margaret of Anjou, who arrives in the temple to consult the deceased Boccaccio, along with her husband ‘[…] en vie aussy par difference de toutes les aultres presentacions contees dont les ymages ne faisoient que fiction’ (TB, p. 79 [[…] who was also alive, in contrast to all the other representations recounted whose appearances were only fiction]). The deceased’s physical appearance is dismissed as fabrication, but the implication for what they have said as speaking subjects is not specified. What is clear is that Chastelain was intrigued by the mode of being of these dead characters, which in each case both precedes, and is partly constituted by, their verbal articulation of identity, ‘[je] suis’, as we shall see in Chapter 3. term for theatrical representation, ranged more broadly than the specific dramatic genre of the mystery play. For the significance of the term for Chastelain, see Doudet, Poétique, p. 681. 47 Ed. Susanna Bliggenstorfer, Romanica Helvetica, 104 (Bern: Francke, 1988), p. 193. 48 Bliggenstorfer suggests that, beyond a general theatrical association, ‘personnage’ prompts us to see the series of dead people in the particular performance light of a royal entry procession (TB, p. 36). See also Brown’s discussion of funerary practice and the persona or ‘personal essence’ of the king as an entity existing somewhere between his corpse and his royal office (‘Royal Bodies’, pp. 486–7), and Maupeu’s observation that ‘parler de soi à la première personne c’est, pour le “moi médiéval”, […] se faire personnage’ (Pèlerins, p. 597 [to speak of oneself in the first person is, for the ‘medieval I’, […] to make oneself a character]). 49 See Bliggenstorfer’s note: TB, p. 42. 50 Hence my use of ‘performativity’ and ‘theatricality’ as distinct but complementary notions: mindful of Judith Butler’s influential conceptualisation of identity constructedness in the context of gender (see, for example, Undoing Gender (New York/London: Routledge, 2004)), I use ‘performativity’ to denote the manner in which ‘je suis’ is itself an utterance constitutive of identity rather than the expression of a unitary, originary self; ‘theatricality’ evokes both the flamboyance of this enunciation (as we saw in the rhetorical virtuosity of René d’Anjou’s alternative epitaph in LCAE) and medieval writers’ recourse to the discourse of dramatic representation in how they define the state of being of their characters.

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A further source of ‘épaisseur’ lies not in the physical presentation of character but in the scope of a voice’s ‘[je] suis’ when it is extended beyond reference to any individual figure. Epitaphs, especially those composed in the moralising tradition of Boccaccio’s DCVI, presenting a series of unfortunates as negative exempla, carry didactic import, which is sometimes communicated via thirdperson narrative commentary and at other times by the first-person speakers of the epitaphs themselves. The speakers may depict how events in the narrative of their life have led them to become exemplary: in LCAE, Mark Antony moves from describing himself directly in the first person, through hyperbaton in the opening verse of his epitaph (‘Marc Anthoine empereur suys’, LCAE, v. 1243 [I am the emperor Mark Antony]), to using an indirect formulation in the last verse of the douzain, treating himself as an exemplary victim of love, telling how he came to the cemetery porch of the hospital of Love ‘si qu’on voye mon cas après mon finement’ (v. 254 [so that one may see my case/downfall after my death]).51 The deceased may also offer their very being as exemplary, and in a more positive tone, as when, in Bouchet’s JPHF, Judith states: ‘Je suys Judich d’Israël tout l’espoir’ (JPHF, v. 1467 [I am Judith, the entire hope of Israel]), or Dido declares: ‘Des veufves suys la doctrine et l’exemple’ (v. 1900 [Amongst widows I am the model and the example]). Both female speakers thus open their epitaph with an affirmation of the scope of meaning of their ‘suys’ extending beyond a definition of individual identity: Judith posits a symbolic reality for her name (which may, we infer, be held to resonate beyond her death); Dido announces through an emphatic binomial pair her emblematic status as the paragon chaste widow.52 It would also be possible to read Dido’s ‘suys’ as a firstperson present-tense form of ‘suivre’, affirming that, rather than herself setting the example, she follows an existing model of conduct, which would present her identity as constituted by adherence to a particular course of behaviour, a further source of ‘épaisseur’ adding temporal depth.53 Whether ‘estre’ or ‘suivre’, the emphatic nature of Dido’s pronouncement in JPHF, like the deliberate choice of manner of death made by Humphrey of Gloucester in TB, feels almost overdetermined, suggesting an awareness of alternative versions of identity that are being rejected in favour of the version here put forward by the character. Dido, of course, in the repository of tales told about her in the Middle Ages, has an alternative story which relates to her precisely not having remained a chaste widow and having instead fallen destructively in love with Aeneas. Bouchet alludes to this version of her narrative later in JPHF when his persona mentions ‘Cupid who so tormented Dido for Aeneas’ (vv. 3498–9). In her epitaph, Dido shuns this construction of herself in favour of a more favourable exemplary 51 On the productive polysemy of cas, see Chapter 2, pp. 105–6, and Chapter 3, pp. 148–52. 52 Cf. Matrine: ‘De chasteté je donnay la doctrine’ (JPHF, v. 2203 [I set the model for chastity]). On the uncertain identity of Matrine, see JPHF, pp. 465–6. 53 Cf. St Eustacia: ‘suyvoys de Paule la doctrine / Qui fut ma mere’ (JPHF, vv. 2631–2 [I followed the model of Paula, who was my mother]).



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portrait.54 We have thus seen how the apparently singular, unitary first-person ‘je’ is in fact more extensive in scope – whether positing a representative function as example, or in implicitly containing within it several narratives of identity. In the remainder of this section on person deixis, I should like to treat in turn several aspects of this plurality and their implications for how the structure of the epitaph shapes identity. Selfhood in dialogue: ‘combien que moy’ The cases of Humphrey and Dido have made clear that we should approach the ‘[je] suis’ of an epitaph not as an originary, self-determined statement of identity but as a response to an implied question, ‘qui es-tu?’, which thus defines itself in relation to other voices’ (potential or existing) definitions of that figure’s selfhood.55 The epitaph is a snapshot: whilst it may not necessarily have epigrammatic brevity, it is a digest of identity – as is dramatised, for instance, in Bouchet’s Anciennes et modernes gesnealogies des Roys de France (1528),56 in which epitaphs crafted by the persona are presented as distillations of historiographers’ accounts of each king’s life. For each monarch, a third-person prose narrative is followed by a first-person verse epitaph in decasyllabic rhyming couplets. Each epitaph must therefore capture ‘the essentials’ (whoever’s version of these it follows) of the monarch’s life. For instance, the fundamentals for the early Frankish King Pharamond are neatly captured in forty-two verses, whose opening ten verses summarise his dates, the duration of his reign and its major events, such as the first enactment of Salic Law.57 Overall in epitaph fictions, there is not normally room for explicit debate between competing representations; instead, whether in a relationship of contrariety or confirmation, the ghosts of other voices’ interventions are felt to bristle in the linguistic surface of the verse/prose. This bristling may be detected in fairly innocuous formulations indicating a third-party voice: ‘suys dicte’, ‘on m’appelle’, ‘chacun dit’. With regard to characters’ names, in JPHF, Nicostrata opens: ‘Nicostrata je suys dicte Carmente’ (v. 1840 [Nicostrata am I, called Carmenta]), with the implication that the name by which she identifies herself and that which others have accorded her (in recognition of her erudition) are complementary. In similar vein, Diana distinguishes between her titles – the name given to her at birth and that attributed subsequently:

54 For more detailed discussion of the rhetorical manoeuvrings in Dido’s epitaph, see Helen J. Swift, ‘Points of Tension: Performing Je in Jean Bouchet’s Jugement poetic de l’honneur femenin (1538)’, in Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts, ed. Elina Gertsman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 207–22. 55 Cf. linguists’ discussions of the first-person subject as essentially intersubjective, always already caught up in a dialogue of je-tu: Benveniste, Problems, pp. 224–5; Bühler, Theory, pp. 93, 129. 56 On the popularity and production history of AMG, see A. Armstrong, Technique, pp. 191–205. 57 (Poitiers: Jacques Bouchet, 1528), fols 43r–43v. The verse epitaphs vary considerably in length: that for Charles VII (fol. 142r), for example, extends over 126 verses.

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Diane ay nom, en ma nativité: On me nomma secondement la Lune. (JPHF, vv. 1761–2) [I have the name Diana, from my birth: later, I was named Luna.]

In LCAE, René accords Tristan’s epitaph a teasing opening: ‘Je suys nommé Tristan, dont chascun scet la vie’ (LCAE, v. 1375 [I am called Tristan, whose life story everyone knows]). This apparently straightforward incipit for a figure who exists in multiple, sometimes conflicting narratives in medieval France (varying, for instance, in terms of his knightly career or the light in which his adulterous relationship with Iseult is portrayed) may be read ironically to indicate that the author is quite consciously juggling plural story threads in his composition of epitaphs; he is fully aware that there is no unitary ‘la vie’. This irony is increased, since the particular version of Tristan’s ‘vie’ that René opts for is not actually discernible from the allusive generality that follows in the body of his epitaph: we learn only that he became a prisoner of love ‘for love of Iseut, Queen of Cornwall’ (v. 1386). A bristling of other voices may also indicate an implied challenge to asserted identity, and is revealed through ‘pressure points’ in the epitaph’s surface. In JPHF, the virgin Claudia begins with a concessive expression that suggests she is defending her position against an implied, oppositional interlocutor: Combien que moy qu’on appelle Claudie Fusse pucelle, et de l’ordre vestal, Fuz neantmoins si forte et si hardye … (JPHF, vv. 2016–18) [Albeit that I, who am called Claudia, was a virgin, and of the Vestal order, I was nonetheless so strong and brave …]

Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony, conveys a similar impression of having been boxed in by an objectionable dominant narrative, which she tackles explicitly, devoting the majority of her epitaph to defensively defining herself against the shadow of her parents’ debauchery: Jaçoit que soys extraicte et procedée [De Marc Antoine et d’Octavie] […] Ce nonobstant dès mon adolescence Qui dicte suys Antoinette la Sage, Chaste je fuz […]. (JPHF, vv. 2150, 2157–9) [Albeit that I am born of and descended [from Mark Anthony and Octavia] […]. This notwithstanding, since my adolescence, I, who am called Antonia the Wise, remained chaste.]

She crowns this kick-back against her lineage with the vehement hyperbaton of her insistence on a pure identity in v. 2159. One can view this sort of jostling between identity narratives in relation to Maddox’s notion of ‘specular



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encounters’ in medieval French fiction, in which a character is ‘placed before a mirror that reflects unsettling circumstances and aspects of selfhood’.58 This mirror consists of an informant (a person, a voice or a representation) relaying to the subject crucial new knowledge about her/his identity; as a result, we come to perceive the subject as having a ‘“conflictualizable” subjectivity’.59 Humphrey, Dido, Claudia and Antonia could all be seen to carry this kind of subjectivity: the information they hold about themselves may not be newly received, but is newly grappled with in any given epitaphic representation, and in that context the figures act as their own informant: the ‘other’ is present in the ‘self’, since the ‘self’ is, far from being a unitary and fixed identity, a cluster of possible identity narratives.60 Maddox devotes a chapter in Fictions of Identity to specular encounters in fictions of lineage, and we could see all four of my characters’ ‘specular’ moments to be ones in which they recognise that they are in dialogue with, struggling against, the textual genealogy of their own identity. I stated above that bristling is usually implicit rather than explicit, but I wish to flag up two imaginative cases of a dialogue between shaping narratives being dramatised within an epitaph fiction: Molinet’s Epitaphe de Philippe de Crèvecoeur (after 22 April 1494),61 in memory of the military commander who switched political allegiance from Burgundy to France, and Bouchet’s Labirynth de fortune et Sejour des trois nobles dames (1522). Molinet’s Epitaphe is structured as a sort of dialogue, in alexandrine quatrains, between the deceased Philip and the personified figure La Bourgongne, who, acting as critical commentator on what Philip says, contradicts him on several points pertaining to his defection on the death of Charles the Bold to serve instead Louis XI and, later, Charles VIII. Philip proceeds serenely through a chronological presentation of his life, unruffled by (indeed ignorant of?)62 the interventions of his interlocutor. The latter’s speeches thus appear as interruptions, the first of which, teasingly, agrees with Philip’s self-portrayal: ‘Philippes de Crevecoeur, ton parler et tes dicts / Veritables je tiens’ (vv. 13–14 [Philip of Crèvecœur, I hold to be true what you speak and say]). However, La Bourgongne’s responses quickly become more abrupt and contestatory: ‘Je coppe ton parler, car en ce point a faulte’ (v. 21 [I interrupt your speech, because on this point there is something wrong]), as well

Fictions of Identity, p. 201. Ibid., p. 212. 60 Cf. Maupeu’s discussion of autobiography in allegorical narrative: ‘le je […] se construit dans la confrontation conflictuelle à l’autre’ (Pèlerins, p. 197 [the I […] constructs itself in the conflictual confrontation with the other]). 61 In Lewis Thorpe, ‘Philippe de Crèvecoeur, seigneur d’Esquerdes: Two Epitaphs by Jean Molinet and Nicaise Ladam’, Bulletin de la Commission Royale d’Histoire, 119 (1954), 183–206. 62 Molinet does not explicitly define this poem’s structure as ‘dialogue’, by contrast, for instance, with Chastelain’s Mort du roy Charles VII (Fortune and Charles ‘parlent ensemble par dyalogue’, in Œuvres, VI, pp. 437–57, p. 437). Instead, he states that La Bourgogne ‘respond’ (v. 6) to what is said, potentially casting her as an after-the-event audience to Philip’s first-person epitaph. 58

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as impatient: when Philip speaks of his faithful service as ecuyer to Charles the Bold, his interlocutor, whilst concurring, already anticipates things turning sour: Touchant ce pourpos-la, tu as dis verité […] Mais peu de tempz aprés ung terrible dommaige As fais en ses paÿs […]. (EPC, vv. 29, 31–2) [Regarding what you said there, you’ve spoke the truth […]. But shortly afterwards you committed a terrible violation in his lands […].]

Philip depicts his transition from one court to another as seamless and unproblematic: he ends one strophe reporting Charles the Bold’s death, and picks up at the start of the next strophe: ‘Au roy Loÿs fis foy pour servir loyaulment’ (v. 57 [I gave my pledge to King Louis to serve him faithfully]). La Bourgongne’s contrasting perspective on this move as turncoat treachery (v. 22) suggests a measure of strategic ellipsis in Philip’s account. Thereafter, whenever Philip glosses his conduct positively, for his respondent the only possible meaning is negative: ‘subtle intelligence’ (v. 91) is seen as deceitful ‘cunning’ (v. 136); ‘in Auvergne, I was universally loved’ (v. 161) is countered with: ‘you were far more feared than loved in Auvergne’ (v. 165). Faced with these competing versions of Philip’s story, we see the simultaneous construction and deconstruction/reconstruction of an identity narrative, which brings us to consider the strategic shaping role of je in epitaph fictions more generally. As A. Armstrong muses: La structure du poème nous fait douter […] du bien-fondé des épitaphes en général. À quel point peut-on si fier à un nécrologue? Que sait-il vraiment de celui qu’il regrette, et comment est-il qu’il sélectionne et interprète ce qu’il sait?63 [The structure of the poem makes us doubt […] the soundness of epitaphs in general. To what extent can one trust a necrologist? What does he really know about the person whom he is mourning, and how does he select and interpret what he knows?]

Since I am not approaching ‘[je] suis’ as a transparent autobiographical revelation, I am less concerned by the moral scrupulousness (or otherwise) of our speakers than with the processes by which how they shape what they say constitutes who they are. As Ricoeur notes, ‘le récit construit l’identité du personnage, qu’on peut appeler son identité narrative, en construisant celle de l’histoire racontée’ [the narrative constructs the identity of the character, which one can call her/his narrative identity, in constructing that of the story recounted];64 each epitaph, like that of Philip, may thus be read as a malleable identity narrative. 63 ‘Un cimetière bigarré’, p. 193. See also Jean Devaux, Jean Molinet, indiciaire bourguignon (Paris: Champion, 1996), pp. 410–24. 64 Soi-même, p. 175.



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The shaping forces of an identity narrative are imagined in personified form in Bouchet’s Labirynth de fortune. In a dream, Bouchet’s persona arrives at the throne of Fortune, where he overhears two captains – Good Fortune and Ill Fortune – debating each exemplary figure commemorated therein; their dispute over their respective influence on the person’s fate constitutes that figure’s identity narrative. Each call-and-response exchange thereby describes the rise and fall of Fortune’s wheel – for instance, in the case of Hannibal: Bon eur Fut pas eureux Hannibal de Cartaige Qui les Rommains assaillit par oultraige Et Cannes prinst, où tant de gens occist Que des anneaulx des Rommains il emplist Deux muys et plus où Romme eut grant dommage. Maleur Dommage eut grant à la fin Hannibal Car chassé fut à course de cheval Et surmonté par la force rommaine Et luy captif hors son propre dommaine Se empoisonna, et mourut de ce mal.65 [Good Fortune: ‘Was not Hannibal of Carthage happy, who attacked the Romans with temerity and captured Cannae, where he killed so many people that he filled more than two muids with Roman rings, while Rome suffered greatly?’ Ill Fortune: ‘Hannibal suffered greatly in the end, for he was hunted down on horseback and overcome by Roman strength; captive in exile from his own lands, he poisoned himself and died of this ill.’]

Strophic anadiplosis between the captains’ speeches is the pivot around which turns the reversal of fortune in the story of Hannibal’s life and death. In firstperson epitaph fictions, we see the speaker her/himself taking charge of articulating the trajectory of her/his life and death, and using the verse structure of the epitaph to do so. In LCAE, Nero, presented alongside other victims of love in the cemetery porch, depicts his exercise of power in life followed by his powerlessness against love, with the middle verse of his douzain serving as hinge between the two: ‘Si ay je esté vaincu par les tours amoureux’ (LCAE, v. 1236 [So have I been defeated by amorous wiles]). An unexpected transition from being vigorously active to helplessly passive is insisted upon in the porch epitaphs: Achilles concludes almost every verse of his dixain with a first-person, past historic form affirming his action: ‘[…] regnay / […] je portay / […] le tuay /…’ (vv. 1291–300), but this cannot stave off acknowledgment of having been vanquished by love for Polixena:

65 Ed. Pascale Chiron and Nathalie Dauvois (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), vv. 1364– 74. On the production history of the Labirynth, see A. Armstrong, Technique, pp. 175–91.

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Mais touteffoiz je fuz, oncques ne le celay, Subgiet au dieu d’Amours, car je fu, il est vray, Vaincu par Polissaine, laquelle tant amay. (LCAE, vv. 1297–9) [But nonetheless I was – I never hid it – subject to the god of Love, for I was, it is true, defeated by Polixena, whom I loved so much.]

The difficulty of conceding defeat, and a fall into ‘malheur’ from ‘bon eur’, is expressed through the separation of the auxiliary verbs (‘fuz’, ‘fu’) from their complement/past participle (‘subgiet’, ‘vaincu’) by interjected parenthetical comments at the end of verses 1297–8. It is as if Achilles is both struggling to recount his fate and resigned to recognising his ultimate defeat. He seems to speak as both author of and witness to his own identity: ‘Archiles ay je nom’ (v. 1291 [Achilles is my name]).66 The epitaph sculpts through words the image that the speaker presents: the ‘[je] suis’ that s/he wants to shape, but which must also take account of the narrative threads that s/he cannot avoid in telling her/his tale. The je thus emerges out of a range of ils and retains a certain witnessing distance on itself. ‘Je’ as shaping agency: ‘je monstray bien’ The shaping of identity in an epitaph sometimes privileges the articulation of personal agency above personal name.67 In JPHF, Rebecca, wife of Isaac, and Minerva assert a life-defining action in the main clause of their epitaph’s opening, relegating their self-naming to a parenthetical relative sub-clause: Je monstray bien (qui suys Rebecca dicte) Au serviteur d’Abraham ma doulceur. (JPHF, vv. 1405–6) [I showed well (who am called Rebecca) my kindness to the servant of Abraham.] Premier trouvay, qui suys dicte Pallas Minerve aussi, l’art de filler, et tixtre. (JPHF, vv. 1692–3) [I first invented – who am called Pallas and also Minerva – the art of spinning and weaving.]

Rebecca, furthermore, frames her epitaph with her action, concluding with inverted word order: ‘[…] caulte me monstray’ (v. 1416 [[…] I showed myself to be shrewd]), presenting a quality that qualifies and complements her earlier ‘doulceur’. In the case of Minerva, naming is, of course, no straightforward thing, given the range of her possible appellations according to different mythographic traditions; in that light, it makes sense for her to insist on the work she Pèlerins, p. 265. cf. Gregg, ‘Blanchot’, p. 51. We shall see in Desmoulins’s CM a different context for personal name being subordinated in significance: Chapter 3, pp. 170–2. 66 Maupeu, 67



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accomplished as the more significant constitutive component of her identity. Agency can be asserted in a range of ways. Most obviously it is exercised through a display of control: Tertia Emilia and Clotilde both, after brief initial first-person self-identification, defer any further first-person form for several verses until they have set out in a relative sub-clause the situation in life to which they were required to respond (Scipion’s decline in old age and adultery, for Emilia; Clovis’s espousal of paganism, for Clotilde). The expression of agency that follows thus portrays as especially incisive the wife’s authoritative taking charge of events: Je feiz semblant comme cil qui muse, oyt, De rien n’y veoir pour saulver son bon fame. (JPHF, vv. 2059–60)68 [I pretended – like one who is deceived – not to see anything so as to protect his good name.] Je le priay, dont il ne feit reffuz, Prendre la Loy de Jesus que j’avoye. (JPHF, vv. 2695–6) [I begged him, and he did not refuse, to adopt the Law of Jesus that I observed.]

Control over one’s biography is also asserted by figures such as Dido and Judith, mentioned above, in how the opening verse of their epitaph captures the essential value of their identity in what Michel Leiris would call an embracing ‘regard unique’: ‘J’aimerais, plutôt que reconstituer ma vie en la suivant pas à pas, la dominer en l’embrassant d’un regard unique (un regard situé dans le temps mais déjà hors du temps)’ [‘Instead of reconstructing my life by following it step by step, I would rather dominate it by encompassing it in a single gaze (a gaze situated in time but already outside time)].69 Similarly in JPHF, we find characters such as St Catherine, who, concluding her epitaph with report of her torture and execution, does not simply mention them as events, but situates them in the trajectory of her life and death as a martyr: ‘[…] pour fin de mon martyre’ (v. 2517 [[…] for the purpose of my martyrdom]). A posthumous perspective here equates precisely to a broadening of perspective on one’s identity narrative, since it can be appreciated as a whole: ‘se dire comme totalité achevée’ [to speak of oneself as a completed whole].70 In contrast to these energetic assertions of agency, we find cases where agency is wielded through an apparent surrender of authority. Eve crafts her self-presentation through what we might see to be a strategic denial of active agency in the use of passive verb forms – strategic, in that it exculpates her from blame for the

68

See also Swift, ‘Points of Tension’. La Règle du jeu III: Fibrilles (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 223. 70 Rabaté, Poétiques, p. 57. Though I qualify this below, p. 74, when considering temporal deixis. 69

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Fall, and also gesture towards an overarching divine Providence that is the true agent designing individual fates: Eve je suys des os d’Adam produicte Avecq lequel le hault Dieu m’espousa: Bien tost après par Sathan fuz seduycte Et par luy fuz avec Adam induycte Gouster d’un fruict […]. (JPHF, vv. 1367–71) [I am Eve produced from the bones of Adam, with whom the almighty God married me; soon after, I was seduced by Satan and by him was induced, together with Adam, to taste a fruit […].]

I mentioned St Catherine exercising control in recounting her life narrative (her narration or discours); at the same time, however, in the events recounted in that narrative (the récit), she and other canonised figures defer to God’s authority, such as through parenthetical interjection: ‘Dieu le voullant’ (St Helena, v. 2531 [God willing]). In this way, they communicate a sense of knowing retrospectively the arc of their own life, but do not claim responsibility for that overall trajectory. It is amongst sanctified figures in particular (though not exclusively) that we find a perhaps unexpected feature of epitaphic ‘[je] suis’ presentation, namely the final focus of the epitaph being less on its speaker than on the identity of others related to that individual. St Felicia concludes by naming her seven children (JPHF, vv. 2354–7) who were martyred shortly before her own death: ‘moy après eux’ (v. 2351 [me after them]). Having died after them, she uses the possibility of posthumous utterance to commemorate them in priority above herself. A less selfless, but quite justifiable, use of shifting focus to another person, is found in Pompeia Paulina’s epitaph: she uses her last verse to point the finger at Nero and inculpate him for having betrayed her husband Seneca, identifying Le tort vilain, abhomminable, et salle, Qu’à mon mary feit Neron par contempts. (JPHF, vv. 2172–3) [The villainous, abominable and wicked wrong that Nero contemptuously did to my husband.]

In the specific context of saintly women, Christ is the ‘other person’ on whom several epitaphs end: St Mary Salome presents her witness of the Crucifixion and concludes with His Resurrection: ‘[Ce bon Jesus vy] susciter par signes manifestes’ (v. 2283 [[This good Jesus I saw] rise by manifest signs]). Her epitaph, rather than closing on death, opens onto life. According to Tsagalis, in his study of fourth-century Attic funerary epigrams, ‘the aim of the epitaph is to report the event of death’.71 It is fruitful to apply his

71 Inscribing Sorrow: Fourth-Century Attic Funerary Epigrams (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2008), p. 254.



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remark to our body of epitaph fictions, since, whilst several are predominantly oriented around death as an event (such as the figures appearing before Chastelain in TB, whose bodies are envisaged (re)enacting their scene of death), and the majority follow a chronology that leads, at the end of the epitaph, to the end of life, some deliberately conclude by directing attention away from ‘the event of death’, such that it is barely reported, and look instead towards the afterlife, reorienting their identity narrative’s resolution.72 In JPHF, certain martyrs de-emphasise death by employing periphrastic expressions with an element of imitatio Christi: St Agatha’s last words are ‘je rendy l’esprit’ (v. 2405 [I gave up the spirit]), St Flavia Domitilla’s ‘dont souspira’ (v. 2393 [I breathed my last]). These endings evoke simplicity of passage from one life to the next, since the martyr’s emphasis falls on preserved purity and integrity of spirit, however macerated and mutilated their body may be, which St Juliana makes explicit: ‘Laissay mon corps tormenter, non l’esprit’ (v. 2456 [I let my body be tortured, not my soul]). More generally, several figures exploit a top-and-tail framing of their epitaph in order to counter the extinguishing of life, reported at the end, with an affirmation of continued identity at the beginning: Hypsicratea’s demise, ‘fuz extaincte’ (v. 2075 [I was killed]), is offset by her declamatory incipit averring her present place in the palace of noble ladies: Non sans propos d’honneur je tien le ranc Qui Royne suis nommée Hypsicretée. (JPHF, vv. 2064–5) [Not without honourable reason do I occupy this place, who am Queen, called Hypsicratea.]

We shall consider in the following section, on temporal deixis, how to construe relations between past- and present-tense ‘selves’, and whether the passage of trepas entails continuity or disjuncture between ‘who/what I was’ and ‘who/what I am’. A playful deployment of top-and-tail framing, with both using the present tense, occurs in the epitaph of Joan of Arc, which also illustrates the epitaph’s ‘[je] suis’ being conceived as a response rather than an originary utterance. She opens with a negation, qualifying the nature of her nobility as if in the face of a counterargument, Si je ne suis de noble sang extraicte, Noble je fuz de courage et de cœur, (JPHF, vv. 2872–3) [If I am not born of noble blood, I was noble of spirit and heart,]

and closes with an affirmation: ‘Je Jehanne suys, pucelle sans entorce’ (v. 2885 [I am Joan, maiden without spot]). One could argue here for the first-person subject 72 Fleischman sees ‘resolution’ as the component of the linguistic structure of narrative that responds to the question: ‘what finally happened?’ (Tense, pp. 142–3). For epitaphic life stories, ‘what finally happened’ is death, but this is not necessarily presented as the end of the narrative, so that the audience’s attention can be directed to other finalities.

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pronoun being expletive, but I think that its repeated use (four times in the epitaph’s quatorzain) underscores the speaker’s insistence on shaping her identity in her own way. She sandwiches her name in the closing verse between the two elements of ‘je suis’ as if to defend its integrity from further external assault, in the same way that she affirms the integrity of her maidenhood. ‘Je’ amplified and multiplied: ‘chascun de nous’ In contrast to Joan’s insistent first-person singular, we should also recognise that the amplified first-person nous,73 as featured in Villon’s Epitaphe, occurs in several epitaphs, both explicitly and implicitly. It is used explicitly in quite straightforward cases where more than one individual is encompassed in the speaking voice: Lydian innovators of monetary economy in the tabernacle of Humanity in Bouchet’s Temple de Bonne Renommée (1517): ‘[…] Nous sommes, / Qui achaptons et revendons aux hommes’ ([[…] We are [those] who buy and sell to men]);74 or when Anne, wife of Helcana, speaks on the collective behalf of herself and her husband in JPHF: ‘nostre vie’; ‘chascun de nous’ (vv. 1505–6 [our life; each of us]). By ‘implicit’ usage, I mean those cases where characters, especially in collections of epitaphs clustered together without narratorial intervention punctuating them, like in JPHF’s palace, can be seen to identify themselves in relation to others around them so as to forge a kind of networked ‘je’ in an implied collective ‘nous’: for instance, in the case of the textually and genealogically interrelated sequence of epitaphs for St Paula and her daughters Blesilla and Eustochia (JPHF, vv. 2602–37); or, less proximately, the implied typological correspondence between Eve and the Virgin Mary, with the former’s epitaph concluding: ‘qu’avoir [per] ne puys, fors une de seconde’ (v. 1380 [that I can have no [peer], except for one]), and the latter’s opening ‘Dieu me crea premier qu’il feist lumiere’ (v. 2232 [God created me before he made light]). It is also the case that, within a single epitaph, the network of a character’s identity can take priority over individual naming, as with Jeanne of Navarre, almost the first half of whose epitaph details the lineage that created the situation of her succession to the throne (vv. 2834–9).75 The final, and perhaps most obvious, aspect of the plurality of the ‘je’ in the ‘[je] suis’ of epitaph fictions concerns cases where multiple first-person epitaphs are accorded to an individual. This may arise in a recueil, such as the ‘fort beau petit livre’ (v. 3737: [very fine small book]) given by Mercury to Bouchet’s persona in the diegesis of JPHF when he is on the point of composing an epitaph

73 I follow Benveniste (Problems, pp. 201–3), Maingueneau (Éléments, pp. 6–7) and others in adopting the designation ‘amplified’ first person over first person ‘plural’, given that the plurality of je, i.e. ‘je + d’autres’, does not work in the same way as, for example, chevaux for the plural of cheval (p. 6); ‘Je + ‘d’autres’ can comprise ‘je + je’, ‘je + tu’, ‘je + il’ (p. 7). 74 Ed. Giovanna Bellati (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1992), vv. 3865–6. 75 There is also at least one instance of a singular individual adopting the amplified first person, in the porch of LCAE: ‘Nous, Augustes Cezar, des Rommains empereur’ (v. 1219 [We, Caesar Augustus, emperor of the Romans]).



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for Louise of Savoy, in whose honour JPHF was written. The book is said to contain commemorative pieces by a range of authors ‘congregez tous ensemble’ (v. 3751 [gathered all together]) and may, as A. Armstrong explores, correspond to a real volume of Epitaphes: a book of twenty poems published by Geoffroy Tory shortly after Louise’s death in 1531.76 Within a single work, we may also find more than one first-person epitaph: in the pastoral narrative opening of Gréban’s Epitaphe du feu roy Charles septiesme, one Thierry composes a rustic epitaph casting the late King as a shepherd, ventriloquising his voice: ‘Je suis le Pasteur qui jadis / Le jardin francoys deffendis’ ([I am the Shepherd who formerly defended the garden of France]).77 Later on, personified Prowess writes three epitaphs to be placed around the body of the deceased: one in the first person (a summary of his life), and two in the third person (lauding his leadership of France and his international reputation) (fol. G5r), which work as complementary portraits of different aspects of Charles’s royal identity. Complementarity also arises in Bouchet’s TBR, at the end of which, in addition to eleven third-person epitaphs for Charles de La Trémoille composed by personified virtues, the Traverseur (who is here not Bouchet’s textual persona, but the protagonist whose search for Charles’s burial site the narrating persona (l’Acteur) has been shadowing) writes a first-person douzain: ‘Epitaphe du Traverseur des voies perilleuses où le nom de l’acteur est contenu par les premieres lectres’ (TBR, before v. 4978 [Epitaph by the Peregrinator along perilous paths, in which the name of the author is contained in the initial letters]). As soon as this is affixed to the deceased’s tomb, the persona sees a thirteenth appear, also in the first person: his explicit disavowal of knowledge of its authorship ‘ne sçay par qui’ (v. 4995 [I don’t know by whom]) inclines us, contrariwise, to attribute it to the persona, albeit that he, as a figure for the extratextual author, has already been revealed as the author of the Traverseur’s, given the acrostic JEHAN BOUCHET that it featured. This final ‘Epitaphe en la personne du trespassé’ ([Epitaph in the person of the deceased]) is more lengthy, recounts the posthumous translation of Charles’ body to Thouars and also describes his personal qualities in a way that corroborates the third-person epitaphs offered by personified virtues, affirming thereby his worthiness of them. For example, in the thirteenth epitaph, ‘Charles’ professes his pursuit of knowledge (vv. 5034–5), testifying to the virtue of Science (epitaph: vv. 4970–7). Far less complementary are the several firstperson epitaphs of Villon (within and without the Testament, as we saw), which seem more to involve a kind of slippage that renders identity ungraspable and unfixable. Combining the complementarity of Gréban with the slipperiness of Villon, Du Pré’s PND exhibits an interesting case of plurality that I shall investigate in Chapter 3: instead of housing a given occupant once only, in a single room (such as ‘the chamber of loyal wives’), his palace accommodates several severally, such that multiple ‘selves’ of Minerva or Dido are witnessed by the persona. JPHF, pp. 415–17 nn. 531–2. Le Romant de la rose, codicille et testament de Maistre Jehan de Meun (Paris: Vérard [c.1501–3]), fols G2r–G6v, fol. G3v. 76

77 In

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Self-authorship and narrative voice : ‘qui es tu qui dis: “Ce suis je”?’ It is clear that the syntagm ‘[je] suis’ should be approached with a sense of its plurality in several important ways, and that the self-representation effected when a speaker pronounces the phrase is far from a simple self-determining utterance. An important context for, and further complicating factor in, the plurality of je in epitaph fictions is the framework of narrative voices into which the epitaphs are inserted. Maupeu states that ‘l’épitaphe est une forme close et syntaxiquement autonome’ [the epitaph is an enclosed and syntactically independent form],78 which is on the one hand entirely correct and renders each instance ripe for the sorts of intricate play with word order, versification and formal features that we have appreciated in Bouchet’s JPHF and René’s LCAE. On the other hand, Maupeu’s remark risks being misconstrued as asserting discrete structural self-containment, which is clearly not the case: even though I have thus far mostly been treating epitaphs’ speaking subjects as if they were themselves the sole authors of their self-presentation, we have already seen signs of how writers raise within their fictions questions of the authorship and transmission of the first-person voice, precisely making messier through narrative layering the seemingly tidy self-sufficiency of the epitaph form.79 Bouchet practises this in both JPHF and TBR: the relationship in the former between personified Honour en amont as ventriloquising author of the ladies’ epitaphs and the Traverseur persona en aval as scribe, copying, summarising and editing what he saw in his tour of the palace and recounting this tour in the present,80 and the further layer of complexity that we just saw in TBR, where narratorial agency is split (or, rather, entwined) between the Traverseur and l’Acteur,81 against a backdrop of the personification Good Renown claiming overall agency for the transmission of reputation: ‘Les bons je fais sans fin au monde vivre’ (TBR, v. 4637 [I make the good live on forever in the world]). The particular issues of narrative voice that are raised by a given epitaph fiction depend principally on its mode of speech presentation (reported direct discourse or indirect discourse) and, to some extent, on the written or (implied) oral nature of the epitaph’s text. JPHF and TBR may be seen as the same type of epitaph fiction: ‘[je] suis’ is voiced by a speaker in a virtual sense, which is to say that the epitaph’s text is not presented as an oral utterance, since it is inscribed in a tablet or board (‘tables’, JPHF, v. 1360; ‘tableaux’, TBR, v. 4876), Pèlerins, p. 575. I shall consider, in Chapter 2, a material dimension to this issue, in terms of how epitaph fictions are arranged in JdP. 80 Any straightforward division into ‘the time of the telling of the story and the time during which the events of the story are assumed to have taken place: speaker-now and story-now’ (Fleischman, Tense, p. 125) is thus not possible, since we are presented with multiple speaker-now temporalities, including the epitaphic first person’s as well as the Traverseur-­ persona’s. 81 Chastelain’s Oultré d’amour, Olivier de La Marche’s Chevalier délibéré and Saint-Gelais’s SH also develop ambiguity in their narratorial subjectivity, as we shall see in Chapters 2 and 4. 78

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and is dislocated as a speaking subject from any human body. In both works it is accompanied by some sort of effigy (‘ymage’, JPHF; ‘facture’, TBR, v. 4891) of the je, which arguably only underlines the absence of an embodied human consciousness through its presentation of a simulacrum. The contents of each epitaph are communicated through direct discourse, and patterns of versification as well as rubrication help to demarcate it from narratorial commentary. Within each fiction, we therefore have a fairly clear narrative structure: Honour/ Good Renown’s personified virtues/Traverseur/Acteur as author (émetteur); each deceased individual as speaker (énonciateur); and the narrator-persona (Traverseur/Acteur) as reporter (lecteur, but at the same time co-énonciateur). Apparent structural clarity does not, however, always convey a straightforward and transparent process of authorship and transmission. In LCAE, one of the features that René adopts from the Queste del Sainte Graal that he posits as one of his narrative models is the romance formula ‘Or dit ly contes’ (LCAE, III. line 1 [Now the tale says]). Similar oblique formulations feature in the rubrics prefacing epitaphs in its cemetery – e.g. ‘Les lectres de ladicte tombe disoient ainsi’ (before v. 1555 [The writing on the said tomb read as follows]) – which render somewhat opaque the question of epitaph authorship. In Chastelain’s Epitaphes d’Hector, Alexander the Great is presented mediating between deceased Hector and Achilles, since the former is aggrieved that the latter’s epitaph is more glorious than his own and that it omits any mention of the treacherous manner in which the Greek killed him. The agency of authorship behind Achilles’ epitaph is evoked allusively by both Alexander and Hector towards the end of the poem, when Alexander is apologising to the warrior for, in effect, having been a naïve reader of the Greek’s self-proclaimed excellence. Alexander refers obliquely to ‘qui que l’escript, ne qui y mit la graphe’ ([whoever wrote or inscribed it]),82 whilst Hector picks up on this dimension of agency as the cause of Alexander’s clouded judgement: […] cil qui mit les vers sur le tombeau, Céla le laid et n’y mit que le beau, Par quoy ton sens en fut par faulx décu. (EH, p. 185)83 [[…] the one who set those verses on the tomb hid the bad and only included the good, by which your understanding was treacherously deceived.]

We are reminded of Molinet’s EPC and the questionable trustworthiness of a ‘nécrologue’ in her/his posthumous manipulation of an identity narrative through strategic omission. The lines between author, speaker and reporter potentially become more blurred when the epitaph’s speaking subject is presented in oral communication with her/his secretary, but most of all when the speech being Œuvres, VI, pp. 167–202, p. 181. Though this agency (by analogy with a textual escripvain ([copyist])) may simply be responsible for engraving, rather than authoring the verse. 82

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relayed is conveyed as indirect discourse.84 The dialogue framework of Chastelain’s EH or even the ‘virtual’ dialogue of Molinet’s EPC imply oral situations (using the verb parler, exhibiting direct discourse features of interruption, etc.) and raise question marks over reliability, but they maintain, overall, a clear distinction between agencies, not least because of a clear formal demarcation of speeches, such as Molinet’s alternating quatrains in EPC. By contrast, the oral communication scenario of Chastelain’s TB proves more complicated on account of its integration of characters’ speech into the persona’s narrative prose, and its use of indirect discourse. Building on the narrative model of Boccaccio’s DCVI, Chastelain has a series of deceased historical figures appear and, in effect, pitch for their inclusion in the written record of unfortunates; each presents his ‘fall’ (cas). Boccaccio’s innovation in narrative structure in DCVI is seen to have been his use of a vision framework for staging this procession of individual fates yoked together by a didactic aim of instructing the living to avoid the ills to which their forebears succumbed. Chastelain and, later, Antitus develop the ensuing oral communication situation and issues of narratorial authority, as we shall see in Chapter 3. In his Portail du Temple de Bocace (1501), Antitus dramatises the conversion of the unfortunates’ oral claims into written epitaphs, deploying a combination of literary forms (prose and verse) and persons (first and third). In TB, one could simply say that the persona, who is charged to ‘narrer la substance du mistere et les paroles’ (TB, p. 195 [recount the content of the scene and the words spoken]), exercises ultimate, and thus unproblematic, control over the dead speakers. But Chastelain seems interested in complicating his position and attenuating an impression of easy authority. Complication arises through the persona’s status as ‘interposite personne’ (p. 125 [intermediary person]), as not only the audience to the unfortunates queuing to address Boccaccio, but also the witness to the text’s central situation of direct discourse communication: resuscitated Boccaccio’s conversation with Margaret of Anjou, the work’s dedicatee, who rouses him from his tomb. In a quasi-stichomythic exchange, their dialogue opens with his question as to who disturbs his rest, to which she replies: ‘Ce suis je, Jehan Bocace’ (p. 87 [It is I, Giovanni Boccaccio]). He immediately interrogates further: ‘Qui es tu qui dis: “Ce suis je”?’ ([Who are you who say ‘It is I’?]), thereby encapsulating several of the concerns of this chapter with regard to first-person enunciation of identity. As an intermediary, the persona’s authority is not absolute, and Chastelain inflects it with moments of doubt: for instance, whilst the deceased are in the weaker discursive position, since they are requesting that a place be granted to their story (‘demanderent […] la place de leur histoire estre octroyee’, p. 65), they are also imposing upon the persona. Their order of arrival determines the order of his experience, and that order is sometimes far from orderly:

84 I use the phrase ‘oral communication’ rather than ‘viva voce’, given the obviously problematic nature of the latter in the context of epitaph fictions: the speakers are dead voices.



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Vindrent en ung grant flot aprés tant et sy grant multitude de telz de tant de diverses regions et mannieres que possible ne m’estoit d’en faire nombre ne distinction […]. L’un boutoit sur l’autre pour haste d’avoir entrée, et come se chascun eust volu estre premier, n’y avoi(r)[t] ordre ne regle en leur tumulte. (TB, p. 67)85 [There then came in a large wave such a great multitude of people of so many diverse regions and appearances that it wasn’t possible for me to count them or distinguish between them […]. One charged into another in their haste to gain entry, and, as if everyone wanted to be first in line, there was no order or regulation in their throng.]

Chastelain also accords the persona a moment of nescience when he fails to recognise two figures: ‘comme celloient leurs personnes et leurs cas, me fis ignorant aussy de leurs noms’ (p. 35 [as they hid their person and their case, I was also ignorant of their names]).86 What they are concealing are their bodies, and the embodied representation of TB’s speakers combines with the indirect discourse via which most of their claims are communicated to yield an ambiguous impression of the mode of being of each je. On the one hand, Chastelain’s persona inserts frequent verba dicendi, indicating that his report of a figure’s identity is determined by what each person says: in the case of Prigent of Coetivy, admiral of France, ‘trayson estoit cause de son maleur, ce disoit’ (p. 53 [treachery was the cause of his misfortune, he said]). On the other, he also elaborates, sometimes quite extensively, the narrative of an individual’s life, in a way that suggests that this extrapolation derives from the persona’s own recollection of a figure, once he has recognised him; we thus understand the figure’s je to have been subsumed into the reporter’s discourse relaying him as an il. The apparent physical presence of the speakers in TB sometimes also poses logistical challenges to visualising them delivering their own speech, especially in cases where those who died by execution appear posthumously animated in a state of decapitation and dismemberment. Álvaro de Luna, constable of Castille: vint droit cy se remoustrer atout son hourt, le corpz en iiii. pieches dessus et la teste tollue et veullans preaviser les haulx montez en la roe de futur peril et leur estre figure et miroer de felicité mal usee, vint faire desrision de soy mesmes. (TB, p. 47)87

85 The procession thus becomes somewhat more chaotic than a royal entry ceremonial (see above, n. 48). 86 For Bliggenstorfer’s interpretation of this concealment, see TB, p. 34. A moment of ignorance is a frequent motif in these kind of texts, fleshing out the persona’s drama of recognition and adding an element of narrative intrigue to punctuate the enumeration of deceased figures, as I discuss regarding CD and SH in Chapter 4. 87 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, manages to come in whilst lying down on a table (TB, p. 39).

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[came straight here to show himself with his scaffold, his body in four pieces above it and his head cut off and, wanting to warn those risen high on the wheel of future peril and to be a figure and a mirror for them of good fortune ill-used, he came to scorn himself.]

We could interpret this incongruity to be acceptable as part of the suspension of disbelief entailed by the persona’s ‘misterieuse vision’ (p. 7 [mysterious/dramatic vision]), or as part of Chastelain’s dramatic embellishment of Boccaccio’s tale: gory vignettes of severed bodies add a splash of dramatic colour, and we should not worry about the logical impossibility that ensues (since we have already accepted without problem that the dead can speak …). However, I think that Chastelain is interested in using such cases of extreme corporeal fragmentation to reflect on questions of identity, storytelling and voice. Don Álvaro’s disorderly physical self enters ‘tout confus’ ([all confused]), and the tale of his life is said to have a ‘fin confuse’ (p. 47 [messy end]).88 His presentation thereby raises the question of how to order and shape a narrative identity out of the dispersed and messy fragments of an individual’s story. Dead bodies are triggers for stories, whether recounted pneumatically by them through prosopopoeia89 to ‘faire le[ur] personnaige’ [create the[ir] character] or told by others around them, appropriating their voice. We shall see this also in the cemeteries of Saint-Gelais’s SH and Desmoulins’s CM: the corpses, coffins, emblems an appurtenances that Saint-Gelais’s persona sees on his travels by land and sea combine with material furnished by Recollection (SH, III.x.147) to yield narratives of identity; in CM, what starts off as first-person self-presentation repeatedly slips unannounced into third-person narrative report. The impossible bodies of TB recall, in some measure, the paradoxical hanging skeletons of Villon’s Epitaphe. They appear in their postures of death, sometimes still dripping with blood: how are we to construe this state of being? Is it a continued enactment of their death, as if suspended in time, only to be concluded by their manner of death (and life) being included in written record, body laid to rest in text? Or is it a re-staging to render more persuasive their pitch? Or should we understand it less as a performance by the speaker and more a re-enactment of the manner of death in the imagination of the listener, Chastelain’s persona, as he pieces together the identity of each figure, working backwards from death into life? Rabaté defines speaking from beyond the grave as ‘tout texte écrit qui peut se proférer depuis le point de vue de la disparition de son “auteur”’ [any written text that can speak from the point of view of the disappearance of its ‘author’],90 which applies only partially to our epitaph fictions, where, as this section has

88 A degree of correlation between the person’s fate and their posthumous physical appearance could be seen to echo the logic of contrapasso observed in Dante’s Inferno, specifically the case of Bertran de Born, who holds his own talking head cut off from his body as punishment for his crime of severing the bond joining father and son: Inf. XXVIII.139–42. 89 Cf. Killeen, En souffrance, p. 139. 90 Poétiques, p. 74.



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shown, the very question of a voice’s authorship, understood as the origin en amont of a speaker’s je and the authority that relays that speech en aval, is problematised. Therefore, whilst we may continue to conceive of each epitaph as ‘l’unité narrative d’une vie’ [the narrative unity of a life],91 we must take careful account of the structures of narrative voice in which the first-person account of life and death is situated. Temporal deixis: ‘Pacïemment ceste mort je supporte’ A further factor fracturing any straightforward understanding of ‘[je] suis’ as ‘narrative unity’ is temporal deixis, which, to try to maintain clarity of focus, I shall treat separately from spatial deixis, whilst recognising the inevitable intersection of the two.92 As Mary Carruthers notes, quoting Augustine, ‘in order to conceive of time, […] we use a notion of space’:93 [I]f there be times past, and times to come; fain would I know where they be: which yet if I be not able to conceive, yet thus much I know, that wheresoever they now be, they are not there future or past, but present.94

Carruthers’s discussion of Augustinian time also draws attention to connections between time and tense: ‘tense usage is not always referential to time’, and to how ‘a sense of time is always personal’.95 Her comments are interesting to relate to my posthumous speakers: how do we construe in temporal terms the individual’s first-person present-tense utterance ‘[j]e suis’? Perhaps the obvious starting point is the implicit dialogue between ‘[je] suis’ and ‘[je] fuz’: defining who I am (now) in relation to who I was (then), taking, at least initially, the ‘now’ to mean ‘in death’ and ‘then’ to mean ‘when alive’. Do we understand the passage from one to the other as a kind of continuity, an autobiographical ‘comment je devins ce que je suis’ [how I became what I am],96 or does the act of passage from one state to the other institute a divide? It is a question mobilised in a moral context in Dante’s Inferno: Capaneus, a blasphemer, mistakenly posits continuity

Soi-même, p. 193. It was in preparation of this section on temporal deixis that I found my discussions with Neil Kenny most fruitful; I offer a general note of thanks here, as there are no specific references to his book below. 93 ‘Meditations on the “Historical Present” and “Collective Memory” in Chaucer and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), pp. 137–55, p. 148). It is also the case that certain medieval French deictics function both temporally and spatially, notably cy: ‘il signifie donc “ici”, pour l’espace, “maintenant” pour le temps’: Buridant, Grammaire, p. 532 § 431 [it signifies ‘here’ in terms of space and ‘now’ in terms of time]; see also Perret, Signe, pp. 185–90. 94 Confessions, XI.18. 95 ‘Meditations’, pp. 148, 152. 96 For discussion of this relationship in medieval autobiographical writing, see Maupeu, Pèlerins, pp. 246–51. 91 Ricoeur, 92

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of selfhood: ‘[…] Qual io fui vivo, tal son morto’ (XIV.51 [[…] What I was once, alive, I still am, dead]), indicating the posthumous petrification of his woeful conduct in life. A more correct attitude is represented by Virgil, who recognises the fissures in his existence: ‘[…] Non omo, omo già fui’ (I.67 [[…] No longer living man, though once I was]), and thereby the potential to repair his mortal cracks.97 In my epitaph fictions, several posthumous speakers make a clear distinction between their ‘now’ and ‘then’. Charles VII, in Chastelain’s Mort du roy Charles VII (1461), elaborates the implications of the temporal contrast: Roy jadis fus: or suys devenu terre,

Tourné à néant soubs reluisant couronne. (MRC, vv. 9–10). [A king once was I: now I am turned to dust, reduced to nothing beneath a gleaming crown.]

The overall chiastic structure of verse 9, which imposes a distance between ‘roy’ and ‘terre’ at either end of the decasyllable, encloses an isocolon that contrasts the King’s former, elevated worldly status to his present corporeal decline in a manner redolent of penitential discourse (‘for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return’).98 For Charles, ‘[je] suis’ is the state of bodily decay in which all titles and social rank are levelled. He is made to insist thereupon in a dialogue with Fortune, who contradicts the King, affirming encomiastically the posthumous survival of his status: ‘en toy s’estend tout le livre historieux’ (v. 8 [in you stretches out the whole history book]. These alternative understandings of ‘suis’ as the dead time of the decrepit corpse (like Villon’s macabre ‘nous sommes mors’) and/or the life-sustaining time of renown are variously pursued. In Chastelain’s Oultré d’amour, a lady speaks from the grave: ‘Je suis un corps viande à vers’ ([I am a body that is meat for worms]), as a consequence of having died a martyr for love.99 By contrast, in Bouchet’s TBR, an epitaph for Lydian innovators of monetary economy casts the ‘suis’ as that of sustained reputation:

97 Robin Kirkpatrick, Dante’s ‘Inferno’: Difficulty and Dead Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), pp. 200, 206. 98 Gen 3:19. Charles’s spatial location of his corporeal remains ‘soubs reluisant couronne’ could recall the architecture of the late-medieval transi tomb, in which a sculpture of the deceased’s decaying skeleton was positioned beneath an effigy of the person as a social body, shown in all her/his regalia of earthly life. Julie Singer reads this funereal monument in dialogue with textual representation of the dead in de Hauteville’s Confession: ‘“Mon corps on ouvrera”: l’amant en transi dans la Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil de Pierre de Hauteville’, in La Mort, ed. Kosta-Théfaine, pp. 411–28. 99 Œuvres, VI, pp. 67–128, pp. 77, 78. See Chapter 2 for more detailed discussion of OA and the implications of punning on ‘vers’ as ‘worms’ and ‘verse’. Translating the lady’s utterance into English raises an interesting vocabulary conundrum: should one render ‘corps’, which can designate both a living and a dead body, as ‘body’ or ‘corpse’? Medieval French writers had at their disposal alternative terms to specify a cadaver: cadavre, depouille (‘physical remains’), mors, etc.; exigencies of metre may also have influenced a writer’s choice. My practice is to be very selective in using ‘corpse’, especially given writers’ playful disruption



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[…] Nous sommes Qui achaptons et revendons aux hommes, Ditz Lidiens, et cest art nous trouvasmes Premierement, et nous y excerceasmes. (TBR, vv. 3865–8) [[…] We are [those] who buy and sell to men, called Lydians: we invented this practice first and we exercised it there.]

The speakers describe the process by which they have become what they now are, in the sense of their past actions (in life: ‘trouvasmes’, ‘exerceasmes’) having come to constitute their reputation in death: what they are known for having done, and thus stand in the present tense as emblems for doing (‘achaptons’, ‘revendons’, and so ‘sommes’) to those who view their grave. The Lydians’ use of the present tense to represent their identity alerts us that suis does not simply designate a contrast with fus in terms of state of being, but also/alternatively in terms of the perspective of retrospective vision on one’s life that posthumous suis enables in relation to fus.100 We saw above how Dido and Judith in JPHF embrace their life in a ‘regard unique’; they have the ability to ‘se dire comme totalité achevée’.101 Also in JPHF, Penthesilea recounts how she died for love of Hector, supporting him in battle: (‘J’aymay si bien’, v. 1792 [I loved so dearly]; ‘tumbay toute morte’, v. 1798 [I fell down quite dead]), and now casts herself in the present tense as patiently enduring both the event of death that she precipitated and the state of death in which she looks back on her life and her past love: Pacïemment ceste mort je supporte Pour l’amytié que j’avoys à Hector. (JPHF, vv. 1799–800) [Patiently I endure this death for the love that I bore Hector.]

Similarly, in LCAE’s cemetery porch, Demophontes casts an interpretative gaze on his life: having recounted his devotion in life to his wife Phyllis (‘tant en fu je sourprins’, v. 1359 [I was so besotted]), he explains how he brought his crest to the hospital of Love, his ultimate resting place: Moy meismes l’aportay et assis sur la porte; Celui qu’Amours mestroye, ainsi fault qu’il l’apporte. (LCAE, vv. 1361–2)102

of a living/dead binary when defining the status of someone deceased. I thus tend to opt for ‘body’, leaving precise status unresolved. 100 For the retrospective vision of narration, see Fleischman, Tense, pp. 127–8. 101 Rabaté, Poétiques, p. 57. 102 Demophontes’ adoption of a moralising perspective is all the more interesting in light of F. Bouchet’s observation that René’s portrait of the Greek King, like his epitaph for Theseus, Demophontes’ father, is more favourable than one might expect given the medieval currency of these two figures as unfaithful lovers: LCAE, pp. 307, n. 1; 319, n. 1. Is Demophontes, then, like Dido in JPHF, effortfully engineering a positive reputation?

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[I myself brought it and set it down on the porch; he whom Love masters must bring it thus.]

He thereby moralises his je into an il, extrapolating a sententia in the proverbial present tense from his own past actions. These various characters’ shifts in perspective touch on a way of conceiving a distinction between fus and suis that is somewhat akin to Harald Weinrich’s differentiation between ‘narrative’ discourse (and its attendant tenses: past historic, imperfect, pluperfect, conditional) and ‘commentative’ discourse (present, perfect, future):103 ‘Dans le commentaire, je m’occupe au présent d’une information rétrospective; les temps rétrospectifs ouvrent alors le passé à notre emprise, tandis que le récit l’y soustrait’ [In the commentary, I deal in the present with a piece of information from the past; retrospective tenses thus open up the past to our control, whilst narrative shields it from it].104 In my epitaphs, ‘[je] suis’ can signal a taking charge of the past, such as Bouchet’s St Cecilia’s ringing conclusion to her epitaph: ‘tousjours ay chaste esté’ (JPHF, v. 2369), using polysemy, word order and homophony to enable a double meaning – ‘I have always been chaste’ (‘chaste esté’ as adjective and past participle)’ and ‘I still have chastity’ (‘chast-esté’ as noun) – that adds vehemence to her self-definition and stretches the past into the present/the present into the past. ‘[J]e suis’ is thus an evaluative glossing of events and even an awareness of their posthumous survival as elements of narrative ready to be shaped.105 In LCAE, King David begins his epitaph by listing his achievements and qualities in life – e.g. ‘en batailles euz victoires’ (v. 1257 [in battle I had victories]), ‘Je fuz saiges et prudent’ (v. 1258 [I was wise and prudent]) – before demonstrating awareness of how these are now, posthumously, elements of stories that may be told about him and that he himself is already recounting by presenting them here in a narrative of identity: ‘Et après mon deschief [mes faiz] sont beaux a raconter’ (v. 1260 [and after my death [my deeds] are fine to recount]). The present is not just a perspective on the past, but is also a perspective on other, competing presents, as we saw above with different figures defining their je in relation to alternative versions of their identity, themselves derived from texts of the past and the present. The very utterance ‘suis’ may thus be seen to be thick with other ‘I am’s against which a given enunciation is implicitly defining itself (‘I am not those; I am this instead’), even attempting to future-proof itself against possible representations to come.106 103 See Ricoeur, Temps et récit, II, p. 102. I hedge here in light of Fleischman’s critique of the applicability of Weinrich’s model to medieval vernacular storytelling (Tense, pp. 113–18). 104 Ibid., p. 105. 105 I use the term ‘evaluative’ as a nod to Fleischman’s helpful category of ‘evaluation’ as a component of the linguistic structure of narrative (Tense, pp. 143–54). Her category ‘external evaluation’ (following William Labov) corresponds, for instance, to JPHF Dido’s self-assessment, setting herself up as an exemplum to the reader; ‘internal evaluation’, by which narrators ‘modalize’ textual elements to direct interpretation, may be seen in JPHF Eve’s use of passive verb forms. 106 Cf. Killeen, En souffrance, p. 188.



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Beyond ‘suis’ vs. ‘fuz’: ‘après mon finir’ Suis is not, therefore, simply defined in relation to fus, but exists in a more complex network of tenses and temporalities. This is pertinent to the situation of prophets and sibyls in Bouchet’s JPHF, whose identity as prophets and sibyls is constituted by the later fulfilment, after their life, of what they predicted when alive, which is then recorded retrospectively in their epitaph in the palace. The sibyl Agrippa predicted Christ’s Incarnation:107 Sibille suys dicte Agrippe de Perse, Qui ay predict que le Verbe invisible Prendroit vray corps […]: […] Lui qui estoit par nature impeccable. […] [Je] Qui ay predict chose tant admirable. (JPHF, vv. 1554–6, 1562, 1565) [I am the sibyl called Agrippa of Persia, who predicted that the invisible Word would take on true body […]: […] He who was by nature spotless. […] [I] who predicted such an astonishing thing.]

From her present position, she refers to her prediction of what would happen prospectively as well as to its (now) past realisation, all embraced by her present identity defined by what she has accomplished.108 Furthermore, one could see a certain concatenation in what she depicts as the invisible Word made flesh, which is now made visible word in the text of her epitaph. Temporality is even more imbricated in the case of the sibyl Albunea, since her epitaph ends not with events already completed but with matters still to come: she predicted (‘predis’, v. 1663) not only the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, but also the Last Judgement, to which she invites all readers of her epitaph (implied: at any moment in time) in the present tense: ‘où tous humains quelz qu’ilz soyent je convie’ (v. 1665 [to which I invite all people, whoever they may be]). The relationship between moment of enunciation and moment of death is further problematised in Molinet’s EPC. Towards the end of the poem, in which La Bourgongne treats Philip as having died, Philip speaks of his death in both future and past tenses, through moments of enunciation corresponding to the death-in-life of old age and, in subsequent quatrains, the life-in-death of a posthumous point of view: A ce suis conclus; bien say que je morray En mes vieux jours j’ay eu de labeur grosse somme. (EPC, vv. 202–3) [My end is determined; I am well aware that I shall die – in my later years I have known a great deal of suffering.]

On the identity of this sibyl, see JPHF, p. 430. For the relationship between retrospective discourse and prospective time, see Fleischman, Tense, pp. 127–31. 107

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A Lyon sus le Rosne par mort exterminay. […] Mon corpz fut inhumé a Boulongne-sur-Mer. (EPC, vv. 217, 233) [In Lyon above the Rhone I expired in death. […] My body was buried at Boulogne-sur-Mer.]

All epitaphs adopt a posthumous perspective on life until death, but what Philip also reveals is knowledge of events posterior to his death. We can no longer maintain that suis vs. fus corresponds to a distinction between dead and alive, since some characters are, by means of a kind of metalepsis, afforded knowledge of events now past, but which post-date their demise. The ‘unité narrative d’une vie’ is thus further destabilised as a self-contained unit, and the idea of a posthumous ability to ‘se dire comme totalité achevée’ disrupted, since there is no neatly completed life when its events are known to continue after death. In JPHF, Sarah, Manto, the Queen of Sheba, Lucretia, Faustina and Clotilde are aware of posthumous happenings: Manto reports how ‘[…] après mon finir / Mon filz bastit la cité de Mantoue’ (JPHF, vv. 1826–7 [[…] after my end, my son built the city of Mantua]), and Lucretia narrates ‘[…] moymesme à mort me livre / Dont grand vengence ont depuys prins Rommains’ (vv. 1972–3 [[…] I deliver myself to death, which the Romans have since greatly avenged]). None of the ladies explains how she came to acquire this kind of knowledge, though Faustina does make parenthetical allusion to having gleaned hers from others’ report ‘(ainsi qu’entendz)’ (v. 2196 [(so I hear)]).109 We could understand this metaleptic awareness as a further aspect of epitaphic ‘[je] suis’ affording a different perspective on ‘[je] fus’ by simply extending the scope of ‘[je] fus’ beyond the moment of death.110 In the context of an epitaph as an identity narrative, we may interestingly apply Fleischman’s reflections on the linguistic structure of narrative: As a rule, the sequence of events reported in a narrative does not extend up to actual present time. By means of a Coda the narrator can bridge the gap between the end of the story and the present.111

A function of JPHF’s metalepses indeed seems to be to connect past events to the speaker-now, or, at least, to extend them beyond the normal narrative end-point of the end of life.112 The temporality (and ontology) of the speaker-now is thereby thrown into question. In TB, Chastelain’s persona recounts how Álvaro de Luna has digested, after death, the reversal of fortune that struck him down in life:

Cf. Hecuba, JPHF, v. 1861. Cf. the posthumous knowledge of Dante’s shades in Inferno X.100–02, who explain, through analogy with long-sightedness, that they know of the future but not of the present. 111 Tense, pp. 138–9. 112 We recall JPHF Cecilia’s ‘tousjours ay chaste esté’, discussed above. 109

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[…] comme fortune, ce congnoissoit maintenant, luy avoit fait la moe en derriere ou tempz de son hault regner, presentement, ce sembloit, voloit faire la moe a gloire soudaine qui mené l’avoit a fin confuse. (TB, p. 47) [[…] since fortune, he now recognised, had mocked him secretly when he was reigning on high, at the present moment, it seemed, he wanted to mock the sudden glory that had brought him to a messy end.]

‘Maintenant’ and ‘presentement’ refer to the moment of his posthumous appearance before the persona, and the repetition of temporal markers reinforces the distinction between life and afterlife as one of a change in attitude. We shall return shortly to the question of precisely whose ‘maintenant’ is meant here. Before doing so, it is worth considering briefly how we should understand the temporal mode of being of our posthumous epitaph speakers: whatever the moment out of which they are speaking, is this itself still in time or outside time, atemporal? Epitaphic timelessness: ‘noms d’eternelle durée’ Whether we see ‘[je] suis’ as the time of the dead body or the time of renown, both could be seen as subject to the passage of time: the flesh disintegrates, leaving anonymous bones (the process depicted in Villon’s Epitaphe), and reputation is not necessarily stable and permanent, as Bouchet’s persona points out in JPHF: whilst the names of ladies in the palace will endure forever (‘les noms seront d’eternelle durée’, JPHF, v. 700), not everyone’s renown is secure when they die, since the information available about them may be incomplete; it is only ‘quant tous leurs faictz sont mis en evidence’ (v. 536 [when all their facts are brought to light]) that a sound judgement can be formed of good or ill repute. However, as the epitaphs of characters juggling ambiguous reputations (versions both positive and negative) illustrate, ‘faictz’ are not always easy to distinguish from opinion. Alternatively, a kind of atemporality of ‘[je] suis’ is suggested by JPHF Penthesilea’s suspended state of being ‘enduring’ death. Urbain invites us to see the text of historical epitaphs similarly, noting as the effect of an absence of verbs that ‘les qualités du défunt deviennent atemporelles: effacer les verbes, c’est chasser le temps hors de l’écriture’ [the qualities of the deceased become atemporal: removing verbs amounts to chasing time out of writing].113 For Urbain, this absence is a trait of modern epitaphs, but his remark is applicable to some of our medieval literary examples, notably with regard to the role of verse form. Several works combine different forms, whether as prosimetra (e.g. EH, EPC, LCAE, PTB, SH) or mixing narrative verse (typically in rhyming couplets) with intercalated fixed-form lyrics (e.g. CM, JPHF, PND). It is tempting to consider lyric items, especially those featuring a refrain, as effecting a suspension of/in time, which would fit with an expectation of literary form being enlisted to project an image of immutable renown. This is borne out in Chastelain’s

113

Archipel, p. 202.

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Epitaphe de Messire Pierre de Brezé (d.16 July 1465), whose rondeau refrain extolls its subject in a verb-less asyndetonic apposition of epithets: ‘le preu, le bon, le vaillant chevalier’ ([the brave, the good, the valiant knight]).114 In SH, in addition to strophes being accorded to individual famed authors, attesting to perdurance (the last verse of Jean de Meun’s states: ‘his good reputation remains in memory’ (SH, III.xii.117)), Saint-Gelais frequently uses anaphora to still narrative progression, such as in three ubi sunt strophes for deceased women (III.vii) or an almost incantatory presentation of Divine Grace around the strophe-incipit ‘C’est celle la que/qui’ (II.xxxii.41–72 [It is she whom/who]). But lyric moments may equally serve other functions: in SH, a combination of forms and rhetorical features creates ‘un complexe de temporalités hétérogènes qui ne se rassemblent pas dans l’unité d’une rétrospection subjective’ [a complex mix of heterogeneous temporalities which do not come together in the unity of a subjective retrospective gaze].115 In CM, the refrains of rondeaux or ballades are more concerned with the timelessness of their didactic message than an individual’s reputation, such as the rondeau ‘Prier ne fault jamais pour les dampnez’ ([One must never pray for the damned]).116 In PND, a variety of lyrics are heard uttered in its palace garden and clearly operate as textualisations of identity for each female figure who voices one (for example, ‘Cibelle en rondeau’);117 by dint of being fixed-form lyrics, they are less susceptible to editorial intervention from the persona who records them. However, their texts often privilege action and temporal movement, such as the incipit of Deborah’s rondeau refrain: ‘par mon sçavoir et esprit propheticque’ (v. 5081 [by my wisdom and prophetic spirit]). They fix an image, but one of activity rather than stasis, and such explicit reference to agency reminds us of the performative nature of each epitaph.118 I proposed in the Introduction that the most basic template for a literary epitaph is a form of estre or gesir plus a series of descriptive phrases in apposition; this could be seen to foster a stasis of ‘being’ rather than any sense of insertion into chronology or temporal progression. Whilst perhaps more common in third-person, ‘cy gist’-type, epitaphs, we do find this tendency also amongst first-person, ‘[je] suis’, examples. In LCAE, certain epitaphs, whilst they feature a number of verbs, only have one or two main verbs for their speaking subject. Julius Caesar’s douzain has no main verb until its fifth verse (v. 1211), and has only two further main verbs in reference to him (vv. 1216, 1218); the opening four verses accumulate a series of qualifiers, which may indeed give an impression of the timelessness of his identity, though we should consider what we mean by ‘timeless’: ‘eternal’, ‘temporally unspecified’ or ‘non-committed about time’?119

Œuvres, VII, pp. 67–73, pp. 72–3. Pèlerins, p. 574. 116 (Lyon: Olivier Arnoullet, 1534), fol. O4v. 117 Ed. Brenda Dunn-Lardeau (Paris: Champion, 2007), before v. 4753. 118 Performativity meaning that ‘it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject’: Benveniste, Problems, p. 224. 119 On these different senses of timelessness, see Fleischman, Tense, pp. 35, 105–6, 285–6. 114

115 Maupeu,



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Je Julles, dit Cezar, d’excercite ducteur, Et de la republique premier apprehendeur, Puissant et redoubté et preux et conquerant, Davant qui le mondë aloit de peur tremblant, Vins cy jadis […]. (LCAE, vv. 1207–11) [I Julius, called Caesar, commander of armies, and first leader of the Republic, powerful and feared, valiant and conquering, before whom the world trembled in dread, came here some time ago […].]

Julius’ ‘davant qui’ refers to those who looked upon him during his life, but may also evoke those whose gaze on his epitaph after his death defines his ‘[je] suis’. When we are considering the temporality of the epitaph, and its deictic reference more generally, should we, then, be considering not that of the speaker, but that of her/his audience – the passer-by – given the essential futurity of epigraphic composition? It is written to be read, and so the temporal and spatial markers of ‘maintenant’ and ‘cy droit’, for instance, are properly those of the reader in her/ his here and now. Epitaphic futurity: ‘par ce trespas vous passerez’ The epitaph’s ‘[je] suis’ is an act of communication rather than a self-contained statement.120 That this communication entails a future projection of audience can be seen by analogy with other deathful cultural phenomena, such as the texts and iconography of the Three Living and the Three Dead: the didactic dialogue in which the Living (in the verse/image as well as the viewer of that verse/image) is supplied with a memento mori by the Dead: ‘quod fuimus estis; quod sumus vos eritis’ ([what we once were you are; what we are you shall be]).121 Historical epitaphs in later medieval France, according to Ariès, were often designed to feature ‘une interpellation du passant’ [an appeal to the passer-by], as well as a commendation of one’s soul to God: Une communication s’est établie dans les deux sens, vers le mort pour le repos de son âme, et à partir du mort pour l’édification des vivants. L’inscription devint alors une leçon et un appel.122 [A communication is established in both directions: towards the deceased for the repose of his soul, and from the deceased for the edification of the living. The inscription thus became a moral lesson and an appeal.]

The words of the deceased (whether in the third or first person) exhort the living to be prepared for death (notably through repentance for sin) and invite prayers of intercession from them for the repose of their soul. We recall Villon’s ‘Ballade 120 On je itself as a communication in an exchange of signals between je and tu, see Bühler, Theory, p. 93; Benveniste, Problems, pp. 224–5. cf. Binski, Medieval Death, p. 93. 121 See Blum, ‘Recherches’, pp. 15–16; Binski, Medieval Death, p. 134. 122 L’Homme, pp. 216–18, p. 216.

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de merci’ in the Testament and the opening invocation of his Epitaphe to ‘human brothers who live on after us’.123 In a more or less didactic vein, we see planted in the first-person voices of epitaph fictions an awareness of the viewer (whether of the text, in the case of inscribed epitaphs, or of the embodied person, in the case of the ambulant dead) and of her/his temporality. In La Marche’s Chevalier délibéré, after we are told that Mary of Burgundy has been struck down by Accident, a henchman of Death, there is a direct address which moralises her demise as a memento mori: O vous qui ce livre lisez Assavourez ceste aventure En ce beau miroir vous mirez Par ce trespas vous passerez Beauté deviendra pourreture.124 [Oh you who read this book, take well into account this adventure. Look at yourself in this fine mirror: through this transition you shall go; beauty will become decay.]

In LCAE, Troilus refers to the crest that he has brought to the cemetery porch, and how he has exhibited it: ‘Et l’ay ycy posé, ou chascun le peut veoir’ (LCAE, v. 1338 [And I have placed it here, where everyone can see it]). Hercules projects forward to and cautions those susceptible of being future occupants (implied: from amongst his audience): Celui qu’Amours sourprent aura ycy sa place: Prengne en gré qui vouldra, Amours vieult qu’il se face. (LCAE, vv. 1313–14) [He whom Love overcomes will have his place here: one had better accept it – Love wants it to be thus.]

What is required or solicited of the audience is sometimes not simply heeding an existing message or registering an epitaph’s content; a creative act may be enjoined,125 as in Chastelain’s EMPB, in which the speaker, Death, crafts an epitaph in the course of the poem, and seems to extend an invitation to others to compose likewise in praise of Pierre:

123 Cf. Binski’s discussion of how the medieval tomb’s strategies of representation implicated living and dead ‘in a new interactive relationship’ (Medieval Death, p. 93). 124 Ed. Sylviane Messerli (Paris: PUF, 2010), st. 265. English translations of CD are taken from Le Chevalier délibéré (The Resolute Knight), ed. Carleton W. Carroll, trans. Lois Hawley Wilson and Carleton W. Carroll (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 1999) (abbreviated hereafter to CDRK, to distinguish it from Messerli’s edition). 125 Cf. Colliot’s discussion of Arthurian epitaphs: ‘Épitaphes’.



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Les cieux l’ont mis au sommet de leurs èles, Sy faut droit-là son œil tourner son graffe Qui en veut faire à son droit l’épitaphe. (EMPB, p. 68)126 [The heavens have set him in their highest reaches; and so, whoever wants adequately to compose his epitaph, his eye must turn its pen in that direction.]

Within the narratives in which most of these epitaphs are embedded, a viewer-character (usually, but not solely, a first-person narrating persona) is normally provided to be the recipient, and often transcriber, of the inscriptions’ communication; their deictic references are thus activated by her/his articulation of their texts. In Saint-Gelais’s SH, for example, a layering of points of view is created: on the one hand, the persona mediates perception of the dead through an insistence on sight (‘la vy’ [there I saw]), such that the governing je appears to be that of the audience, aligned with the persona’s point of view; however, it is clear in the course of the tale that the persona needs to develop the intelligence underpinning his faculties of perception to lead him beyond literal seeing.127 In TB, inscriptions at the entrance to Boccaccio’s temple make clear the audience-oriented nature of the experience to ensue: Entre droit cy qui entens la matere, Tu es choisy pour veoir ung mistere En quel d’honneur et de fruit je t’asseure, Car diront gens cy apprés qu’en bonne heure Tu entras onc en cestui cymitere. (TB, p. 21) [Enter here, you who understand the matter; you have been chosen to see a mystery in which I assure you there will be honour and profit, for people will say hereafter that you entered this cemetery at a timely moment.]

What follows are apparently oral encounters with embodied dead figures, relayed by the persona. The deictics therefore relate to the persona’s experience of the playing out of these encounters, such as the ‘maintenant’ and ‘presentement’ used in reference to Álvaro de Luna’s posthumous shift in perspective regarding his fate at the hands of fortune. Spatial deixis: ‘voix narrative insituable’ If deictic value terms, such as ‘la’, ‘droit cy’ and ‘droit-la’, refer to the circumstances in which the epitaph or deceased person is being perceived, what sort of space is s/he held to inhabit after death?128 Where are the dead situated, or is it See Doudet, Poétique, p. 595. I explore in Chapter 4 the complexities of seeing in SH. 128 Cf. Maupeu’s consideration of a spatial dimension in respect of autobiographical writing (Pèlerins, p. 596). 126 127

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impossible or inappropriate to attempt to define them in these terms since each is, to quote Rabaté, a ‘voix narrative insituable’ [unlocatable narrative voice]?129 A ready and partial answer is provided by the spatialised frameworks that late-medieval writers supply to structure the viewing, hearing and reading of epitaphs: temples, cemeteries, thrones, palaces, tabernacles, etc. They provide a ‘cy’ for ‘cy gist’, a ‘la’ for ‘la je vy’. But what domain are these frameworks representing: where do they lie between earth and heaven (or even purgatory)130 and the fates of body and soul? Is each an essentially worldly structure, since it is concerned, for the most part, with reputation, or is it inflected by a more spiritual sense of honour? And what of the dead who are seen to reside in these zones: what is it of them that is seen – in what do we understand their spatial presence to consist? Furthermore, we should bear in mind that our modern inclination immediately to attach a concrete spatial referent to deictics such as ‘cy’ and ‘la’ may not correspond to their late-medieval usage: as Perret reminds us, ‘l’opération d’embrayage y effectuait l’ancrage situationnel de l’énoncé, la composante spatiale n’étant qu’un des éléments de cette opération’ [the operation of deixis gave the utterance its situational anchor, the spatial component being only one element in that operation].131 These issues will be probed in Chapter 4’s consideration of the architectural placing of the dead, and in Chapter 2’s examination of the dispersal and collection of deceased voices in the materiality of a print anthology. Several writers themselves raise the question of the implied location of their temple/palace, and this is often in relation to the medieval understanding of death not as an end but as a transition: it is accepted that the honourable deceased, like Pierre of Bourbon commemorated in Lemaire’s prosimetrum Le Temple d’Honneur et de vertus (1503), will have passed onwards and upwards, but precisely where? The figure of Entendement132 advises the persona that Pierre’s death is not ‘le trespas’ ([the passing over]), but ‘la transmigration de ton seigneur en meilleur lieu’ (line 847 [the transmigration of your lord to a better place]), before elaborating on this location: […] il a passé le commun mortel pas des vivans pour venir vivre immortellement en ce beau manoir, en ce souverain habitacle, et en ce divin temple. (THV, lines 911–12)

Poétiques, p. 67. For purgatory conceived of both temporally and spatially in medieval culture, see Binski, Medieval Death, pp. 193–8; Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv; Pomel, Voies, pp. 40, 300–05. 131 Signe, p. 267. Perret’s fine study of (spatial) deictics is anchored in mostly non-literary, prose texts. 132 Whereas I translate other character names into English, I retain the medieval French for ‘Entendement’, a personification who features in several epitaph fictions (CD, CM, HA, SH, THV) and whose scope of meaning embraces a range of elements: understanding, intelligence, judgement, knowledge, perception. In THV, he appears as a winged messenger, the ambassador (‘paranimphe’) of virtues: ed. Henri Hornik (Geneva: Droz, 1957), line 815. 129

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[[…] he has passed beyond the common mortal place of the living so as to come to live forever in this fine resting place, in this sovereign domain, and in this divine temple.]

Entendement’s collocation of terms of general virtue and specifically sanctified qualities, and the extensive description he proceeds to offer of the building’s construction by ‘la main des corps celestes’ (line 920 [the hand of heavenly bodies]), make clear that this particular temple is of a spiritual order.133 In the persona’s narrative in JPHF, Death, like Entendement in THV, ties in an exposition on place with the living/dead status of the person being commemorated, here Louise of Savoy; the personification explains to the Traverseur: Car morte n’est, mais bien est trespassée Et de ces lieux en aultres est passée. […] Bien est son corps sans vie tout transi: Mays de son ame il n’en est pas ainsi: Ne de son nom […] […] Touchant son nom jamais il ne mourra: Çà bas en terre à tousjours demoura. (JPHF, vv. 305–6, 311–13, 319–20) [For she is not dead, but she has certainly departed, and passed on from these places to others. […] Her body is certainly lifeless and entirely perished: but it is not the same for her soul, nor for her name […] […]. Regarding her name, it will never die: down there on earth it will last forever.]

The eternal soul ascends ‘lassus’ (v. 314 [above]), while eternal renown endures on earth ‘çà bas’ ([below]).134 The site of renown is the palace in which ‘et morte elle est pour tousjours icy vivre’ (v. 3673 [she died so as to live here forever]). Placing renown: ‘en quel lieu?’ Body, name and soul are the recurrent triad of concerns, and their specific relationship and spatialisation are resolved in different ways. In TBR, in Good Renown’s sermon, Bouchet proposes a conceptual schema that adumbrates a model of three lives lived by the virtuous: Considerons aussi que triplement Vit l’omme ou femme, et tout premierement De celle vie humaine surnommee Que mort deffait, voire totallement, Et puis après on vit secondement Building, p. 184. For compound deictic forms (e.g. là + adverb of direction), see Perret, Signe, pp. 94–101. 133 Cowling, 134

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Par grans vertuz en bonne renommee; La tierce vie, eternelle nommee, Les aultres deux passe pour verité, Car il n’y a fin en eternité. (TBR, vv. 4576–84) [Let us consider also that man or woman lives three-fold: first, that life known as human that death destroys, indeed totally; then afterwards one lives secondly through great virtues in good renown; the third life, called eternal, truly surpasses the other two, for there is no end in eternity.]

An unresolved point of interest in Good Renown’s proposal is the implied temporal relationship between the second and third lives: a clear chronological progression is stated between the first and second (‘et puis après’), and the third is said to exceed the other two in its eternity, but the second is also accorded a timeless duration when the speaker adds: ‘I make the good live on forever in the world’ (v. 4637). These three lives seem to correspond to three spatial structures: the tomb, an effigy and heaven, as we shall see further below. The question that motivates the whole of TBR’s 5,100 verses is a spatial one: the Traverseur wants to know where to find his deceased lord, Charles de La Trémoille: ‘en quel lieu l’auroit on emporté?’ (TBR, v. 571 [to what place would they have taken him?]). His search culminates in the temple of Good Renown, where it emerges, through her sermon and Charles’s epitaphs, that the answer is neither univocal nor straightforward. The Traverseur and persona arrive conveniently just in time for the obsequies of Charles’s ‘noble corps, duquel l’ame est là mont’ (v. 4473 [noble body, whose soul is there on high]). In terms of his ‘three lives’, his soul is thus accounted for as having risen to heaven; the end of his first life is being dealt with by the funeral ceremony, in which intercessory prayers are said over his corpse (to ensure the progression of his soul ‘là mont’, vv. 4499– 5005) before the body itself is transported elsewhere for burial, to the church of Our Lady in Thouars, his place of birth. Before departure for Thouars, an effigy is presented (which closely resembled Charles in the flush of life, vv. 4790–1), and the virtues who command the different tabernacles of the temple compete to claim it/him; Good Renown accords it to Prowess. The virtues, as mentioned above, each produce an epitaph to be affixed to the tomb, commending what it contains in various terms – for example: Cy gist le coeur d’un prince tresnotable (Public Faith, v. 4898) [Here lies the heart of a most notable prince.] Cy gist celuy qui tant ama la guerre (Military Discipline, v. 4906) [Here lies the one who so loved warfare.] Cy gist en cendre ung corps dessoubz la lame (Prudence, v. 4938) [Here lies in ashes a corpse beneath the tombstone.]



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Meanwhile, we are, by the powers of fiction, ourselves freshly transported (together with the Traverseur and persona) to Thouars, where the persona sees, by chance, the final, thirteenth epitaph ‘en la personne du trespassé’: Charles je suis de La Tremouille dict, Que Mort a mis par son tremoul edict Tout à l’envers et converty en terre Icy dessoubz où les miens on enterre. (TBR, vv. 4998–5001) [Charles I am, called of La Trémoille, whom Death has, by its fearful edict, set on my back and in the ground here beneath, where my kinsmen are buried.]

‘Icy dessoubz’ thus evokes the specific location of the church, a circumscribed architectural site. Having recounted his life, he details his circumstances of death on 16 September 1515, and reveals metaleptic knowledge of the posthumous translation of his body: Et puis en mars après fut à Thouars Porté mon corps: voz vouloirs soient tous ars Par charité, priez Jhesus pour l’ame Du noble corps qui cy gist soubz la lame. (TBR vv. 5056–9) [And then in March my body was conveyed to Thouars: may your wills all be moved by charity; pray to Jesus for the soul of the noble body which lies here beneath the tombstone.]

The final section of the poem thus pays particularly intensive attention to spatial location and deixis. The ‘cy gist’ formula in which the virtues’ epitaphs are couched only acquires its full ‘here and now’ sense once they have been attached to the new place of rest in Thouars, matching the ‘cy gist’ at the end of Charles’s own epitaph. The Traverseur has thus, by the end of TBR’s narrative, found his lord in respect of body, name and soul: he attends his burial, he witnesses his commemorative effigy being installed in the Temple and he is able to join in intercessory prayer for his salvation. However, surely a key irony of this search is that he doesn’t find Charles, at least not in any fixed or restrictive sense, since the point of his renown is not to be contained but to be disseminated; hence the Traverseur’s request of the persona at the very end to write down the epitaphs and publish them in honour of his master’s valour, eternal memory and for the glory of his soul. All three of his lives, in other words, are to be conveyed through textual work, ultimately manifested, of course, in Bouchet’s text itself. Text as epitaph: ‘soubz ceste marge’ A reminder that the true location of the dead is textual and lies in representation is also supplied by neat touches in Lemaire’s THV and Chastelain’s EMPB. At the end of THV, Entendement, as ambassador of virtues, is depicted flying off to publish and promote (‘publier et preconiser’, lines 1217–18) Pierre of Bourbon’s

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reputation. Whilst he does that, several sixain epitaphs are engraved in the wall of the Temple which function almost as anti-epitaphs, denying that Pierre can be found there: Cy ne gyst pas comme corps pourissant Mais regne en gloire et en bruit flourissant. […] Cy n’est pas mys soubz tumbe tenebreuse. […] Icy n’est pas enclose et sevelie. (THV, vv. 1243–4, 1249, 1261) [Here he does not lie as a rotting corpse, but reigns in glory and in flourishing reputation. […] Here he is not placed beneath a dark tomb. […] Here he is not enclosed and buried.]

The state of renown in which ‘[je] suis’ persists is, therefore, a ‘voix insituable’ insofar as it cannot be fixed and enclosed in a single location, but is a projection, a communication to be disseminated via a network of voices. Those commemorated thus ‘revivent et reflourissent de jour en jour et volent en la bouche des meilleurs’ (lines 857–8 [revive and flourish again day after day and spread through eminent tongues]). In EMPB, the refrain of Death’s epitaph for Pierre features the verse ‘C’est iceluy qui cy gist alosé’ (EMPB, pp. 72–3 [It is he who lies honoured here]), and I think that its deictics are deliberately allusive: who is ‘iceluy’ (or, rather, which aspect of Pierre does ‘iceluy’ denote)? And where is ‘cy’? The epitaph deals with a variety of places relating to Pierre’s identity: the world in general (‘icy en ce lieu pourvu de telle fame’, p. 69 [here in this place endowed with such renown]), his actual burial site (‘vaillant corps cy gist’, p. 70 [his valiant body lies here]), his afterlife (‘thrône où il loge et habite’, p. 69 [the throne that he occupies and inhabits]), and his heavenly resting place (‘âme en repos’, p. 72 [his soul at rest]). We thus discern that the refrain’s ‘cy’ refers reflexively to the epitaph itself, in a case of textual deixis,135 and to that text’s collation of elements of Pierre’s reputation to be transmitted. More specifically still, ‘cy’ may denote the particular material context in which a text appears, as in the ‘cy gist’ introducing epitaphs for Charles VII in Gréban’s EFRC: in a Vérard edition, the poem is bound together with the Roman de la rose and Jean de Meun’s Testament; the reason for this juxtaposition is revealed by the volume’s title-page rubric, which states that, after the Rose, there follows ‘Le codicille et testament de Maistre Jehan de Meun Avecques l’epitaphe du feu roy Charles septiesme qui trespassa audit Meun’ [The codicil and will of Master Jean de Meun, with the epitaph of the late King Charles VII, who died in aforementioned Meung].136 Meung-sur-Loire is thus the linking geography of the volume and accords a further resonance to the spatial deixis cy in epitaphs positioned around Charles

135 136

See Maingueneau, ‘embrayeurs’, in Dictionnaire, pp. 211–13. See above, n. 77.



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in the fiction of Gréban’s poem. In TBR, the material here-and-now of the book may be alluded to in the ‘Epitaphe du Traverseur’, whose first-person speaker identifies Charles to be lying in rest beneath a ‘rim’ or ‘margin’: ‘[…] qui gist soubz ceste marge’ (v. 4980). ‘Marge’ may denote here both the posited diegetic position of the epitaph ‘on top of the tomb’ (v. 4879) and the upper margin of the manuscript page beneath which the text of TBR appears in the written space, a double meaning particularly appropriate for an epitaph which contains acrostically the author’s, Jean Bouchet’s, name. We saw in the first section of this chapter how writers’ understanding of the identity represented by ‘[je] suis’, or in the above few examples by ‘cy gist’, is not singular and unitary. Both ‘je suis’ and cy gist’ designate less states of being than acts of doing in the context of epitaph fictions: they signal, as we just saw for Pierre de Brezé, a gathering together of facets of identity, with the key spatial location for that gathering being the epitaph text itself; hence, for example, its play with formal features of its own layout as a way of structuring the identity that it composes. We can thus see dramatised through the narrative in several epitaph fictions the processes by which identity is constructed, challenged, dismantled, revised, etc. To offer one example, when reading texts such as CD, SH, CM and TBR, in which the persona moves around as he looks at the deceased, we are frequently struck by a lack of clarity as to what he actually sees: is it their coffins, tombs, bodies or entrails that he is viewing? On the one hand, one could say that it does not matter, since what concerns the writer is denoting the presence (and, simultaneously, absence) of X or Y dead person rather than offering a consistent and visually coherent representation of them in A or B state; mention of ‘sarcueil’, ‘tombe’, ‘sepulture’, ‘biere’, ‘armoirie’, ‘sarcophague’, ‘corps’,137 ‘charongne’, etc. is simply evocative as narrative colour. Witness the relative paucity of illustrations of cemetery fictions, since rendering pictorially what is described becomes difficult, as we shall explore in greater detail in the Afterword. On the other hand, one could say that a disregard for visualisability and coherence is precisely what, in certain cases, does matter, in the same sense that we saw above with the impossible bodies of Chastelain’s TB and Villon’s Epitaphe: signs of physical fragmentation, dismemberment and dissemination invite, even incite, narrative work of gathering, remembering and collation, which we shall analyse further in Chapter 4. As a brief case in point, in SH, Saint-Gelais’s persona is confronted by material traces of the dead in all kinds of landscape settings, out of which he weaves posthumous identity narratives: epitaphs.138

137 Buridant notes that cors can function in Old French, through grammaticalisation, as a periphrasis for ‘person’, in addition to its meaning as ‘body’: Grammaire, pp. 412–13 § 329. See also above, n. 99. 138 Cf. the depiction of previous commemorative writing by the persona in Bouchet’s Labirynth: ‘[…] d’aultres gens de hault et noble priz / J’avoys tissu de leurs faitz epitaphes’ (vv. 343–4 [[…] for other persons of high and noble worth, I had woven epitaphs from their deeds]).

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What lies where: ‘cy gist et dort en ce sollier’ Several works, such as Chastelain’s EH, Gréban’s EFRC and Bouchet’s TBR, combine ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’ as epitaph-incipit formulae. We have already seen the two combining in our discussion of epitaph fictions as sites for exploring identity formation; in turning to focus on ‘cy gist’ specifically, it is worth considering what differences (in both form and application in context) constitute pertinent distinctions between them: could one consider ‘cy gist’, for instance, simply to be the impersonal permutation of ‘[je] suis’? ‘Cy gist’ seems principally to designate identity by reference to spatial position, gesir meaning to lie in a horizontal position and thus denoting specifically the inhumed body of the deceased (e.g. ‘gisoient les corps dessoubz tresdure lame’, TBR, v. 1988 [the bodies lay beneath a very hard tombstone]),139 rather than the more general evocation of person in ‘[je] suis’. However, things are not so clear-cut: for a start, what is lying horizontally may be either/both the corpse and/or an effigy, the one figuring mortality and decay into anonymous bones and the other the recollection and preservation of identity;140 furthermore, as we saw in EMPB and THV, and earlier in Villon’s Testament’s prescription of an impossible burial, what is designated is not necessarily the human form and ‘cy’ may not be the ground. In Gréban’s EFRC, the first of three epitaphs compiled by Prowess for Charles VII opens ‘je suis’, the other two, ‘cy gist’; all three adopt the same dizain verse form. There is a discernible difference in scope signified by the two types of incipit. ‘Je suis’ (epitaph one) introduces a personal history – a summary account of Charles’s life. ‘Cy gist’ gives way to broader reflection on Charles’ national and international role and reputation: ‘Cy gist des francs le puissant protecteur’ ([Here lies the powerful protector of the French]: epitaph two) and ‘Cy gist l’honneur des fins orientales’ ([Here lies the honour of oriental ambitions]: epitaph three) (fol. G5r). The second epitaph ends on the victorious note of how death cannot inhibit his immortal name, whereas the third concludes bathetically, comparing the grandeur of his worldly power to his present situation of mortal decay, in which all titles are extinguished. Both thus carry a didactic force, positing Charles as exemplary in contrasting ways – an exemplar of prowess and a figure of memento mori. However, it does not seem that ‘cy gist’ is essential to achieving a sense of broader scope. We saw in LCAE how certain first-person epitaph figures moralised their life/death by use of third-person or impersonal sentential expressions, and we also saw, in JPHF, characters who achieved this didactic dimension through first-person presentation, such as Dido and Judith. In EFRC, a further distinction between the two types of incipit is the greater amplitude of praise introduced by ‘cy gist’ than by ‘je suis’, through the second and third epitaphs’ accumulation of apposed titles of honour designating Charles. It seems logical that a third-person or impersonal form affords a greater capacity gesir, see Singer, ‘“Mon corps”’, p. 423. Cf. Urbain, Archipel, pp. 198–9.

139 For 140



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for legitimate laudation than self-praise in the first person, and this makes sense especially in the case of texts composed in honour of a deceased master/patron/ ruler, on whom third parties lavish praise, whilst the individual, if s/he appears as a speaking subject, affects humility: one thinks, for instance, of Charles VII’s self-deprecation and deference in Chastelain’s MRC. But again, this does not apply uniformly: JPHF’s ladies are far from lacking in assurance that they deserve honour, from legendary Hypsicratea to historical Queen Blanche (‘Honneurs, et loz sont de moy Blanche ouÿs / Et non à tort’, vv. 2827–8 [Honour and praise are heard of me, Blanche, and not wrongly]). It should also be borne in mind that the dead are not always presenting themselves in search of praise or claiming greatness; indeed, sometimes quite the contrary, as in responses to Boccaccio’s DCVI (TB, PTB, CM) or, to some extent, the victims of love in the cemetery porch of LCAE, where characters are more lamenting and confessional as they recount their falls and sticky ends. A final respect in which we might see ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’ to have different applications may be identified in Chastelain’s EH. Alexander reads the epitaphs engraved in the tombs of Hector and Achilles: each consists of eight quatrains that all open ‘cy-gist’; ‘gist’ is frequently the only main verb in these strophes, which, in a pattern with which we are now familiar, accumulate instances of antonomasia in apposition, such as in Hector’s first quatrain: Cy-gist Hector, l’artifice des dieux, Le très-haultain comblé trésor des cieux, L’espouventable exterminer des Grieux, Des bons l’eslitte et l’aogle des mortieux. (EH, p. 171) [Here lies Hector, the masterpiece of the gods, the most elevated rich treasure of the heavens, the fearsome destroyer of the Greeks, the best of the good and the most excellent mortal.]

After Alexander has, in his (mistaken) privileging of Achilles over Hector, uttered a four-strophe laudation of the Greek warrior (using the same verse form as the two ‘cy-gist’ epitaphs), Hector speaks out in dialogue with Alexander. He voices his complaint, which is itself effectively a first-person epitaph commencing ‘je fuz Hector’ (p. 175 [I was Hector]), an opening that both affirms his identity and credentials as a warrior and may imply a sense of loss of status through the past tense ‘fuz’, before focusing in detail on the treacherous manner of his death at Achilles’ hands (p. 176). The orality of Hector’s complaint is underscored by his plea to the princes and kings whom he addresses: ‘vers vous je viens à lamenteuse voix’ (p. 177 [I come to you with lamenting voice]).141 We might therefore conclude that ‘cy gist’ is an exclusively written formula whereas ‘[je] suis’ can 141 Note that EH was staged for Philip the Good’s court in 1454, realising dramatically the poem’s orality: Graeme Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell for the Royal Historical Society, 1997), pp. 99–100.

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also be presented as personal oral utterance, and this distinction is mostly borne out by the other epitaph fictions in our corpus: on the whole, ‘cy gist’ is not used by characters whom we understand to be speaking in some state of posthumous animation, especially the ambulant dead (who are thus not lying horizontal) who present themselves in TB and PND. However, I hedge slightly because there are a couple of interesting bendings of such a rule. First, in TB, we recall how Humphrey’s posture on entering the temple is effectively that of ‘cy gist’: ‘couchié tout nud sur une table, lié de cordes’ (TB, p. 39 [lying quite naked on a board, bound with ropes]). Secondly, in Antitus’s PTB, slippage between first and third person within a given verse or prose section creates ambiguity as to whether or not we have switched from the voice of an imploring character to that of the scribal persona. Things are perfectly clear when, for instance, Charles the Bold presents his first-person case for inclusion in the record of unfortunates in three dizains followed by a section of prose, and the persona accords him a thirdperson epitaph in a fresh verse section of three cinquains, opening ‘Cy gist et dort le Hardy Conquerant’ ([Here lies in rest the Bold Conqueror]).142 Lines are more blurred in the case of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, who initially has his life and death recounted in third-person prose (section 7), then shifts to first-person verse for two cinquains (‘Je suis le grant riche duc Galiache’, VIII.1 [I am the great rich Duke Galeazzo]) before we find a third strophe that starts off in its first four verses (VIII.11–14) observing the same verse form as the second cinquain (AABAB), but is articulated in the third person and, towards the end, diverges in form into a sixain (AABAAB): Cy gist celluy qui trop cruellement Fina ses jours […] […] Et si ne sceut eviter nullement Ce que Malheur luy gardoit pour sa part. (PTB, VIII.11–12, 15–16) [Here lies the one who ended his days most cruelly […] […] and thus was not at all able to avoid what Ill Fortune had in store for him for his part.]

Thereafter, we move immediately to third-person prose about Alfonso II of Naples (section 8). The third strophe of section VIII thus seems to straddle the oral discourse of the Duke and the written discourse of the persona, and to be legible as part of the former’s self-presentation and/or as the latter’s scribal digest of the character’s testimony. Far from standing as a detached, impersonal incipit, ‘cy gist’ may be invested with a personal point of view.

142 Ed. Manuela Python (Geneva: Droz, 1992), VI.1. Charles the Bold’s sections are numbered by Python V (first-person dizains), 5 (first-person prose) and VI (third-person cinquains). I echo Python’s practice of using arabic numerals for prose sections and roman numerals for verse sections.



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Conclusion: ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’ as identity frames The above exploration of two epitaph-incipit formulae, has, besides allowing us to sample the rich fruit of this study’s corpus, enabled us to appreciate some of the stakes at play in the composition of identity performed by epitaph fictions. On the one hand, ‘[je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’ could be seen as blanks or ciphers that simply cue in the identity construction carried out in the epitaph proper. On the other, the evidence that we have seen for productive wordplay on both syntagms argues for their more integral role as part of that construction process. ‘[Je] suis’ and ‘cy gist’ frame the identity performed by an epitaph, but do not fix it. Urbain views historical epigraphic writing as ‘une pratique mémoriale, embaumante, qui fixe, qui immobilise, qui retient, qui conserve’ [a memorialising, embalming practice that fixes, immobilises, retains and conserves].143 Whilst our literary permutations of epitaph formulae may justly be seen to be concerned with establishing a given version of an identity as definitive and ‘imperméable à l’histoire’ [impervious to history],144 in the same gesture they disclose its porousness, mobility and mutability. The sort of ‘fixing, but not fixing’ that concerns us, in verse epitaphs but also in the (re)stagings of mortality in the prose of TB, is somewhat akin to what Alain Badiou identifies when speaking of the power of poetic representation: ‘le pouvoir de fixer éternellement la disparition de ce qui se présente. Ou de produire la présence elle-même comme Idée par la retenue poétique de son disparaître’ [the power to capture forever the disappearance of what is presented. Or to produce presence itself as Idea through the poetic retention of its disappearance].145 Our epitaph fictions furnish a tangible absence rather than a substantial presence,146 and do so in a manner similar and yet contrary to the convention of ubi sunt laments. Both involve an ironic play of absence and presence. Ubi sunt laments effect this play through affirming in textual presence what they regret and question as absence, such as the strophes of ou est in SH deploring the disappearance of renowned women of whom ‘n’en est demouré que le nom’ (III.vi.37 [only their name remains]) whilst in the same gesture according them textual presence by dint of their names, like the enduring echo of Echo: ‘Ou est Echo, qui n’eust paix ne repos?’ (III.vi.41 [Where is Echo, who had no peace nor rest?]). Epitaph fictions, contrariwise, assert presence – ‘[je] suis’, ‘cy gist’ – but in doing so disclose its precarity, or, at least, invite a different understanding of what presence constitutes.147 We have come to see ‘[je] suis’ as essentially performative, plural and intersubjective, and ‘cy gist’ as contextually conditioned in its various spatio-temporal resonances. Both are dependent on and deictically defined by their audience: the Archipel, pp. 195–6. Ibid., p. 207. 145 Petit manuel d’inesthétique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), p. 43. 146 I explore this notion more fully in relation to Du Pré’s PND (in Chapter 3) and Saint-Gelais’s SH (in Chapter 4). 147 On ubi sunt as a motif in medieval French poetry, see Gilbert, Living Death, pp. 122–50; Taylor, Poetry, pp. 71–85. 143 144

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role of the passer-by within and without the fiction who may do anything from simply reading/hearing to wholly recasting the epitaph’s words. I referred at the start of this chapter to both syntagms as the building blocks of epitaph fictions: it may now seem that they make for potentially unstable foundations, but they do thereby cue us into the sort of interrogative approach that we need, are intended and are enjoined to adopt when examining their identity narratives, as we shall see in the following chapters.

2 Identity and/as Echo: the ‘Belle Dame’ querelle and Le Jardin de plaisance Mais toutesvois la court declaire Qu’il n’y aura tumbe ne escripteau. (Erreurs, vv. 1015–16) [However, the court declares that there will be no tombstone or epitaph.]

Chapter 1 encouraged us to approach posthumous identity interrogatively. Death itself as a question mark, and its implications for identity as a performative, echo-like entity, is particularly pertinent to the querelle de ‘La Belle Dame sans mercy’, the series of narrative poems responding to Alain Chartier’s original debate between a Lady and her spurned Lover, which will form the backbone of this chapter.1 Neither protagonist is determined definitely and definitively to be dead until late on in the querelle. Epitaphic formulations in one of the very latest responses, Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy, attest to both characters’ demise, but do so in a way that, far from closing down their story and wrapping up their identity, unravels the whole fabric of the querelle to lay bare the very nature of identity itself as performative, not based on a unitary, originary self. The first half of this chapter probes the nature of identity as a kind of constitutive echo. It charts associations in querelle responses between the Lady and Lover, on the one hand, and the legend of Echo and Narcissus, on the other. There is crossover in these associations such that both the Lady and the Lover are cast as each Ovidian character, which points to the porous boundaries of literary identity and how, in an intertextually intensive environment, it exists as interaction and slippage, a double movement of dispersal and assembly. Such a working out of identity is not unique to a virtuosic literary phenomenon like the querelle. More generally, late-medieval French writers are demanding in their expectations of audiences’ intertextual competence and sophisticated reading practices.2 This is evident in the early print anthology of lyric and narrative verse Le Jardin de plaisance ([1501]), which underpins the second half of

1 I am indebted to Emma Cayley’s seminal work unpicking the querelle’s threads, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 136–88, and to McRae’s edition of BDSM and its responses: Alain Chartier. 2 I follow here Taylor’s work on late-medieval reading practices in anthologies (Making) and in respect of Villon (Poetry).

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the chapter. Its narrative pieces date from around 1425 to 1470, and analysis of its closing sequence will carry further our thinking about identity in two respects: it pushes our understanding of how types (like Lady and Lover) function to foster an appreciation of characters not being single-body-bound figures but entities in flux; it also adds a material dimension – paratextual elements (title rubrics, page layout, woodcuts) and textual editing practices (ordering, editorial remaniement) – to our apprehension of identity composition as a process of continual decomposition and recomposition. Our cue, again, is death as a question mark: the concluding item of JdP is an Epitaphe whose presentation and intertextual connections with the narrative poems immediately preceding it pose the question of whose identity the epitaph commemorates, and respond by offering an approach to identity that privileges its relational constitution rather than correspondence to an individual figure. The chapter effectively comes full circle, in that JdP is itself caught up with BDSM through several querelle contributions included in the volume. Whilst representing the dead may not at first glance seem a primary focus for the BDSM querelle or JdP, I argue that viewing them as epitaph fictions opens up broader issues about the constitution of personhood, using the question of who someone is when they are dead to activate a range of concerns around identity formation. Death as question mark: the querelle de ‘La Belle Dame sans mercy’ as epitaph fiction Let us begin by recalling how Chartier’s Belle Dame acquires her eponymous name, and how debate in the querelle over the justness of this moniker becomes debate about the deaths of both Lady and Lover. In BDSM, when the Lady has repeatedly spurned the advances of her suitor, she is perceived, by the narrating persona who overheard their discussion, to merit her merciless title: Celle que m’oyez nommer cy, Qu’on peut appeller, se me samble, La belle dame sans mercy.3 [This lady whom you will now here me name, and who should be called, it seems to me, The Belle Dame Sans Mercy.]

Rumours of the Lover’s demise circulate immediately. According to BDSM’s persona, he perishes, wretchedly, in the aftermath of the Lady’s refusal, and this shores up the validity of her condemnation: Depuis ne sceüs qu’il devint Ne quel part il se transporta; 3 La Belle Dame sans mercy, in Alain Chartier, ed. and trans. McRae, vv. 798–800. All quotations from querelle contributions, and their English translations, refer to McRae’s edition, except where otherwise indicated.



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[…]. Et depuis on me rapporta Qu’il avoit ses cheveux desroups, Et que tant se desconforta Qu’il en estoit mort de courroux. (BDSM, vv. 777–8, 781–4) [I do not know what became of him afterward nor to where he fled; […] Not long after, someone told me that he had torn out all of his hair, and that he was so miserable, that finally he had died of his distress.]

The persona’s remarks of nescience cast a shade of uncertainty over the reported knowledge: he, personally, does not know, though others later told him … but he declines to evaluate the reliability of their witness. The door to doubt is left ajar, and this is picked up in certain responses which debate both whether or not he died and who was or was not responsible, though most assume that he died, and that the Lady effectively killed him through her refusal.4 Looking back at vv. 798–800, judgement of the Lady at the end of BDSM is also left insecure: that these verses present a single and partial point of view on her character is highlighted by the reiterated first-person pronoun, by repeated vocabulary of naming (casting naming as an act of interpretation and interpellation, in a performative sense, rather than a simple statement of being)5 and by features stressing both subjective opinion and a certain self-distancing from that opinion: the indirect formulation ‘she whom you will now hear me name’ (instead of ‘she whom I will name here’) and concessive expressions preceding the naming itself. Chartier seems, in this narrative coda on the fates of Lover and Lady, to invest particular effort in recounting what followed their debate,6 but to do so oddly by telling us nothing certainly. The tales of the two characters unravel into question marks. Notwithstanding the persona’s highly qualified pronouncement against the Lady, the majority of responses that take the form of trial poems, trying and re-trying her for alleged guilt in causing the Lover’s death, perpetuate as fact or even aggravate his verdict. We move initially through Baudet Herenc’s Accusation contre la Belle Dame sans mercy (1425–26) and the anonymous La Dame lealle en amours (1426–30), to Achille Caulier’s La Cruelle femme en amours (1430), in which she is sentenced to death by drowning. Neither she nor the (reportedly dead) Lover is afforded any epitaph; indeed, she is explicitly denied one by the court in one of the latest responses, the anonymous Les Erreurs du

4 Most modern critics accept without question his unequivocal death: Denis Hüe states emphatically: ‘rien n’est conclu ici, si ce n’est la mort de l’amant à la fin de l’œuvre’ [nothing is concluded here, except for the death of the lover at the end of the work]: ‘La Mort en appel et autres cas de jurisprudence’, Senefiance, 16 (1986), 165–81, p. 171. 5 For the performative force of interpellation, see Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York/London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 7–8. 6 It was far more usual for strophic debates to be framed by relatively brief narratorial comment (A. Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 7–8).

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jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy (before 1460).7 Her heirs see there to have been procedural failings in previous trials, and wish to redress their relative’s ignominious reputation which is, posthumously, tainting their own. The court dismisses their claims of error, but does concede them the right to gather together her bones and inter them in a consecrated, though otherwise unmarked grave: De grace si leur a premis Qu’ilz puissent lesdiz os en biere Enterrer dedans ung cymentiere Pres d’une croix ou d’un posteau, Mais toutesvois la court declaire Qu’il n’y aura tumbe ne escripteau. (Erreurs, vv. 1011–16)8 [[the court] has promised them, in grace, that they may bury on a bier the aforementioned bones in a cemetery, close to a cross or a post; however, the court declares that there will be no tombstone or epitaph.]

The Erreurs is the first response to treat both protagonists’ deaths as faits accomplis:9 the Lady has been long drowned, as only her bones remain, and, whilst responsibility for the Lover’s death is still hotly debated, that the demise itself occurred in the months following the refusal is accepted as fact.10 Most often viewed as a very late and minor contribution to the querelle, since it survives in only three manuscripts dating from the end of the fifteenth century,11 the Erreurs may nonetheless contribute importantly to our appreciation of the stakes at play in the debate. Its posthumous perspective on affairs, and especially on the figure of 7 I thus address what Cayley calls ‘the sequels proper’ to Chartier’s poem. She classifies responses into a series of cycles making up the overall querelle; the sequels proper correspond to her second cycle (whence use of the term ‘cycle’ in the title of David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae’s French language edition of the courtroom fictions: Le Cycle de ‘La Belle Dame sans Mercy’ (Paris: Champion, 2003)) (Debate, pp. 138–41). However, the emphasis of Cayley’s study, like mine, falls not on neat categorisation but on exploring the dynamic relationships entertained between more or less tightly connected texts. Cf. Singer, ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses’, p. 98. 8 ‘Biere’ could simply mean a kind of stretcher rather than a more substantial coffin (Treffort, ‘Les Meubles’, in À réveiller les morts, p. 210). The more modest sense seems the more appropriate here. 9 In CF, the Lady is said to have been cast into a prison of pain (v. 907), but only her initial incarceration is depicted, not her projected ensuing drowning in the well of tears (v. 910). A second poem by Caulier, L’Ospital d’amour, has its persona pass by the Lover’s tomb and the exposed corpse of the Lady. I consider HA (abbreviated thus to distinguish it from Chastelain’s Oultré d’amour (OA)) below, p. 107. 10 The precise time elapsed between refusal and death is unclear: the Lady’s heirs assert one month (Erreurs, v. 230), but it is later stated, by both characters’ heirs, to be three or more (vv. 470, 825–6). The Erreurs is the first querelle contribution to give voice to both sides of the debate (A. Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 11–12). 11 McRae, ‘A Community of Readers: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans mercy’, in A Companion to Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, ed. Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae and Emma Cayley (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 200–22, p. 219.



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the Belle Dame, foregrounds a contention that simmers throughout the querelle: that one’s name is a matter of life or death. It also highlights the principal connecting theme of these works – and thus perhaps what incited medieval poets to continue the debate – to be the construction of literary identity: its models, its values, its agents. The Erreurs, I argue, leads us to view the querelle as an epitaph fiction. Its court’s very refusal of an ‘escripteau’ (v. 1016) for the Lady operates as a reflexive manoeuvre to cast the Erreurs itself as an epitaph.12 The precise vocabulary chosen to report the verdict invites a double reading, in corporeal and textual terms: her relatives are granted leave De amasser en l’eaue et fouillier Ses os par morceaulx ou quartiers. (Erreurs, vv. 1007–8) [To look [in the water] for and collect her bones, whether scattered or in quarters.]

Gathering together her scattered remains is the diegetic heirs’ task of assembling an orderly presentation of the Belle Dame’s body; at the same time, we, as extradiegetic, figurative heirs to the body of poems about her, are called to sift through the various representations of her character in previous poems so as to determine our own textual record of her identity.13 The prohibition of any epitaph reminds us that no such plaque is in fact necessary – or perhaps even possible, given the several competing images projected of the Belle Dame; the text of the poem itself stands as an ‘escripteau’, both in the broader sense of an inscription and in the more specific sense of an epitaph. One can locate in the Erreurs two particular moments in which the identities of Lady and Lover are, by their respective heirs, crystallised in formulations that we have seen to characterise late-medieval literary epitaphs. Each side commences its arguments with a portrait commemorating the deceased: Ses heritiers si ont fait dire Qu’elle fut moult notable femme, Si belle qu’on pourroit eslire, Passant toutes sans blasmer ame, Jeune, gente, joyeuse dame, Nourrie ou service d’Amours. (Erreurs, vv. 9–14) [Her descendants have made it known that she was a very respected woman, so beautiful that one could easily affirm without slighting anyone that she surpassed all other women, young, noble, a joyful lady, brought up in the service of Love.]

12

We recall Chapter 1’s discussion of the text as epitaph, pp. 84–6. Could the terms ‘morceaulx’ and ‘quartiers’ evoke, perhaps, the quires within manuscripts that feature the various querelle poems? 13

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Il estoit tout premierement Tresbeau filz, courtois, amiable, Soy vestant tousjours gentement, Saige, sachant, fort piteable, Humble, gracïeux, serviable, De doulx parler et beau maintien. (Erreurs, vv. 297–302) [First of all, he was a beautiful son, courtly, friendly, always dressing himself as a gentleman, wise, knowing, and worthy of pity, humble, gracious, willing to serve, with a sweet manner of speaking and a pleasant demeanour.]

A single main verb (a past tense of être) is followed by an asyndetonic accumulation of adjectives and descriptive phrases in apposition. Description is, of course, never a neutral tool in debate poetry: the greater number of adjectives in the Lover’s portrait as it were outbids the Lady’s, and praise of his manner of speaking (v. 301) surely counters the Lady’s heirs’ earlier allegation that her suitor was a smooth-talking liar (v. 20). Death, name and renown: ‘mieulx vault [mort vivre] en ung bon nom’ The literary epitaph is a particularly charged site for determining identity: whatever it calls a given figure, that figure then is, for naming is a matter of life or death. This equation is affirmed in CF, where, on the one hand, the Lady, who is still alive but has been condemned to death, is stated already to be ‘plus morte que cendre’ (v. 850 [as gray as death [lit. more dead than ash]]), whilst, on the other, the Lover, accepted as lying dead (‘gist mors’, v. 905), is granted onomastic resurrection by the god of Love: Je voeul que l’amant qui est mort Soit suscités en ma lumiere, […] Y soit vif en gloire et en nom. (CF, vv. 891–2, 896)14 [I order that the lover who is now dead be resuscitated in my light […] [and] live [there] in glory and fame.]

As Caulier’s personification of Truth moralises:

14 One could apply interestingly here Gilbert’s usage of the Lacanian ‘entre-deux-morts’ ([between-two-deaths]), which acknowledges a distinction between corporeal death and ‘symbolic’ death (Living Death, p. 6). For the Lover, we see symbolic resurrection following symbolic death (the Lover having been treated by the majority of responses as deceased), with corporeal death never having (with certainty) occurred.



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Mieulx vault [mort vivre] en ung bon nom, Tant que le monde puet durer, Qu’estre vif en mauvais renom. (CF, vv. 617–19)15 [Better to [be dead and live] with a good name, as long as the world remains, than to live with a bad reputation.]

Naming is so significant in the BDSM querelle because we do not possess any identifier for the Lady beyond the various titles that she is accorded, and these titles are viewed in successive trial poems both to reflect her character (innocent or guilty of murder) and to determine that same character – she is understood to be that which she is called. Her very existence is, in that sense, performatively constituted, albeit by others rather than herself; as we shall see later, the gestures that she performs and speech that she herself deploys in Chartier’s original poem seem to have been deemed illegible, lending her an uncertainty that respondents choose to resolve by remodelling her into a more recognisable image. In the first poetic response, Herenc’s Accusation, her initial baptism as ‘la belle dams sans mercy’ is affirmed in terms which echo precisely, but not completely, the BDSM persona’s final words; Herenc’s court calls forward Celle qui, oultre la deffence D’Amours, avoit cuer endurci, Qu’on appelloit en ma presence La belle dame sans mercy. (Accusation, vv. 109–12) [[she] who, against the laws of Love, had a hardened heart, who was named in my presence ‘La belle dams sans mercy’.]

Herenc’s formulation lacks the hedging qualifiers of Chartier’s and asserts more forcefully her guilt and her inherent hard-heartedness (whether deemed such in consequence of her name or causally giving rise to it), though there is still a certain self-distancing on the part of the persona, who, in attendance at court, casts himself as audience-witness to others’ act of judgement. Herenc’s court further diminishes the Lady’s image by degrading her from ‘dame’ to ‘femme’ (vv. 471–2), and punningly sullying her reputation: ‘doit estre ditte infame’ (v. 475 [[she] should be hailed [infamous]]). By contrast, the following poem, the anonymous Dame lealle, pronounces against ‘[…] conclusions et du blasme / Contre elle prises comme infame’ (vv. 852–3 [the accusations and charges made against her as if she were [infamous]]). It supplies a backstory for the Lady that explains her refusal on account of her already having another lover, rather than,

15 McRae’s base manuscript for CF is Pn; I insert here a variant reading from Pc (the base manuscript in Hult and McRae’s Cycle), which formulates the relationship between life, death and name/renown even more sharply than Pn’s ‘Mieulx vault morir en ung bon nom’: Alain Chartier, p. 292; Cycle, p. 546.

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as Chartier’s Lady argued, her having opted out of the game of love entirely. On these grounds, it is argued that she Soit de son honneur reparee Et remise en sa bonne fame Et Lëalle Dame appellee, En revocant la renommee Qu’on lui a porté jusques cy. (DL, vv. 794–8) [be restored her honour as well as her good reputation and that she be called ‘loyal lady’ – revoking thus the bad name that she had been carrying up to this point.]

Recurrent interplay in BDSM responses between terms for reputation and for female personhood (fame/femme/diffame) highlights the extent to which the Lady’s identity is inextricable from her name. Notwithstanding the DL court’s wish that she should be signified by her new, recuperated title ‘tousjours’ (DL, v. 854 [from this time forward]), Caulier’s CF dismisses its grounds for re-establishing the Lady’s good reputation (‘bonne fame’, CF, v. 282),16 and reinstates the Accusation’s condemnation, reinforced by a death sentence. Restoring the Lady’s honour, as attempted by DL, amounts to restituting her very self, which is, as we saw in the case of the Lover in CF, a kind of resurrection. In the Erreurs, the Lady’s heirs do not seem to have grasped this equation when they downplay what it is that they are requesting of the court: Les mors ne vouloient susciter Ne ravoir la deffuncte morte, Mais il leur souffisoit d’oster Le faulx nom, le bruit, et la note Tournant a malureuse sorte. (Erreurs, vv. 793–7)17 [They did not wish to have the two dead lovers resuscitated, nor [to take possession of the deceased’s dead body], but it would have satisfied them to cast off the falsely attributed name, the scandal, and the gossip, which were causing their unhappy destiny.]

16 This dismissal is a misreading of DL, alleging incorrectly that it shifted blame for the Lover’s death onto the Lover himself (CF, vv. 285–8). 17 Their request may be compared to what is asked by the heirs of a lover in the Arrêts d’amour (ed. Jean Rychner (Paris: SATF, 1951)), a prose collection of fifty-one reported judgements, of which five draw on material from the BDSM querelle (Cayley, Debate, pp. 151–2). Judgement XXXIV (Arrêts, pp. 151–6) sees a lover’s heirs put Death on trial ‘requesting that the said lover be restored to his original nature so that they may fashion a likeness of him in his memory’ (p. 151). They concede that if Death cannot ‘restore and return life to his body’, it can at least ‘restablir le corps par figure’ (p. 152): that is, provide some semblance or effigy of the deceased.



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But it is, of course, precisely the Lady’s dead body – or at least pieces thereof – that they need and are granted in the end to re-establish her good name, which is not only hers, given that the Erreurs poet introduces a testamentary dimension into the querelle through its concern for the Lady’s heirs’ ‘renommee amortie’ (v. 767 [reputation destroyed]).18 The persona sums up their wish: Aussi de sa vie et sequelle En vouloient croire renommee. (Erreurs, vv. 807–8) [[Thus] about her life and what followed they want[ed] to believe the [best] of her.]

Pithy wordplay encapsulates the range of concerns explored above: attention to the individual identity of the Lady, with her life (‘vie’) being constituted by her name and reputation (‘renommee’ as both noun, ‘renown’ and past participle, ‘renamed’), as well as to the impact of that reputation on her relatives (her ‘sequelle’ in the sense of her descendants), and to her intertextual legacy through responses to Chartier’s poem (‘sequelle’ as continuations/sequels). Death, judgement and identity: ‘le cas tant infame’ Twelve points are enumerated by the Lady’s heirs as procedural failings in previous trials, with three in particular, the ninth to the eleventh, pertaining to relations between death and identity for both protagonists. They argue that the Lady’s sentence was judged excessively cruel by everyone, even the executioner charged with drowning her (Erreurs, vv. 264, 269). Their contention spotlights a question that simmers in previous trials and is fundamentally linked to how the Lady is portrayed as a character: what punishment fits her alleged crime, and why, in CF, is drowning determined as her fate? Historically, death by drowning was meted out to traitors,19 and the Lady’s opponents see her to have betrayed Love’s commands in a crime of lèse-majesté (v. 443); but they claim that drowning is an unduly clement sentence, being the commutation of a more appropriate punishment of public execution and dismemberment: Deust estre pendu en ung horme, Au mains son chef decappité, Et le surplus du corps porté Au gibet, pour exemple prendre. (Erreurs, vv. 371–4)

18 Cf. Arrêts, judgement XXXVI: a lady who refused a suitor’s kiss and was excommunicated from Love is buried in unconsecrated ground, ‘which rebounded greatly to the shame and dishonour of all the relatives and friends of the said deceased’ (p. 160). A testamentary dimension is present more explicitly in the third cycle of the querelle, in which Cayley includes Pierre de Hauteville’s Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil (Debate, p. 145), which I discuss below. 19 Singer, ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses’, p. 95.

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[[She] should be hung on the boughs of an elm tree, or at least have her head cut off and the rest of her corpse carried out and hung on the gallows to serve as example.]

In their eyes, ‘elle devoit deux fois mourir’ (v. 608 [she should die two times]), a phrase that flags up the interrelation of death and identity formation: literally dying twice is impossible, though it may be that the Lover’s heirs are alluding to the idea of physical death (death #1) being followed, in the case of grave sinners, by eternal damnation of the soul (death #2).20 There is certainly a metatextual resonance to their remark, highlighting how the Lady has in fact been condemned to death/represented to have died at least twice (at the end of CF, in the Erreurs, as well as in Caulier’s HA), but how, by the same token, she has not died at all, in the sense of her literary life not having ended: indeed, it will continue long after the querelle – killing her off does not end her life.21 Similarly, as we shall see, reportedly dying is the most life-sustaining action that the Lover could have performed. But to return to the specific sentence of drowning, I should like to propose an implicit pertinence that is bound up with how Chartier’s poetic heirs dealt with his ambiguous presentation of the Lady. As a preface to her reply to the Lover’s opening volley of courtly love rhetoric in BDSM, the Lady’s physical demeanour and tone of voice are described in intriguing detail: Elle respondi bassement Sans müer couleur ne couraige, Mais tout amesureement. (BDSM, vv. 218–20) [She responded in a low voice, without changing color or comportment, but in an evenly measured fashion.]

This is an enigmatic vignette whose tenor is (to my mind, deliberately) difficult to discern: the lack of emotional reaction could suggest a propensity for being ‘sans mercy’, but speaking quietly and in a measured way could equally be considered noble rhetorical virtues – thinking, for instance, of the inclusion of ‘mesure’ in Chartier’s Breviaire des nobles.22 The Lady is very clear in what follows: she rejects her suitor because she has no desire to engage in the game of 20 The phrase ‘secunda mors’ derives from Revelation (2:11; 20:6,14; 21:8). It features in medieval writing: for example, in Boethius, Consolatio, II, m. vii.26, and Dante, Inf. I.115–17. It is also possible that the opponents are alluding to the formulation ‘cum fossa et furca’ ([with (drowning-)pit and gallows]), which was used in the pronouncement of death sentences. There exists an anthropological concept of negotiation between ‘first death’ (extinction of living breath) and ‘second death’ (mineralisation of the corpse to its hard remains – teeth and bones) (Camille, Master, p. 172), which is tantalisingly pertinent to the skeletal state of the Lady’s remains at the end of the Erreurs. 21 I examine her appearance in later-fifteenth-century texts in Chapter 4. 22 In The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. James C. Laidlaw (Cambridge: CUP, 1974), pp. 393–409. ‘Mesure’ is a constituent quality of ‘Droitture’ (v. 113 [Rectitude]).



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love, and she claims to bear him personally no ill will. There is far less clarity in the opening image of her, however, and Chartier’s successors (or, at least, their diegetic dramas) seem to have wrestled with a perceived illegibility of the Lady in the economy of female representation:23 she does not make sense, or, to take literally the words of Desire in Herenc’s Accusation, ‘elle changoit les dez’ (v. 508) – she changed the very rules of the game,24 in both her argumentation and her appearance. Consequently, her identity needs to be manipulated into legibility; from the self-composed enigma of BDSM, she is transformed by Herenc into a weeping wreck: Coulouree comme le feu Pour la honte qui lui advint; Et de fait perdre lui couvint Toute maniere et contenance En gettant pleurs et soupirs mains. (Accusation, vv. 115–19) [Her face colored like fire for the shame that had come upon her. Indeed, she completely lost her poise and composure and burst into great sobs.]

There is a precise pick-up on the Chartier passage’s reference to her colour and her composure, though here eliminating any possibility of positive virtue in her emotional collapse. Contrariwise, just before her supposed confession of guilt in CF, the inscrutability of BDSM becomes not open expression of emotion but closed hard-heartedness: Et ne vis de ses yeulx descendre Lermes: c’est bien pour condescendre Aux tesmoing de sa crüaulté. (CF, vv. 852–4) [I did not see fall from her eyes any tears, and that supports the testimony about her cruelty.]

This image of inhuman impassivity seems calibrated to realise the Lover’s imprecation of her as ‘cuer plus dur que le noir marbre’ (BDSM, v. 689 [heart harder than the blackest marble]).25 In this light, we see the meetness of her watery sentence:

23 For a gender-performative approach to the Belle Dame’s mastery of her emotions, see Daisy Delogu, ‘Performance and Polemic: Gender and Emotion in the Works of Alain Chartier’, in A Companion to Alain Chartier, pp. 121–40, pp. 130–1. 24 Idiomatically, the phrase means ‘was loading the dice’, implying that the Lady has not played straight with the Lover. 25 Truth alleges that the Lady may be ‘some sort of evil spirit who has taken the form of a woman’ (CF, vv. 684–5): could this accusation, in conjunction with execution by drowning, raise the idea of the Lady as a witch?

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Contens qu’en la chartre de dueil Soit plungie, contre son veul, Et noÿe ens eu puis de lermes. (CF, vv. 764–6) [I contend that in the prison of torment she be thrown, against her will, and then drowned in the well of tears.]

Death ostensibly silences her,26 but, moreover, it also assimilates her to a recognisable image of feminine frailty: tearful humiliation, saturating her alleged hardness with the emotion that she has failed to express in her failure to perform as a merciful ‘dame’. In the same way that the Lady’s identity is defined, albeit not straightforwardly, by her manner of death, the Lover’s continued existence as a character in the querelle is determined by his reported demise. In BDSM, he moralises that ‘qui plus tost meurt en languist moins’ (v. 264 [he who dies sooner suffers less]) so as to reinforce sententially the validity of his amant martir rhetoric (‘en loyaulté mourray’, v. 515 [[I will die] still loyal to my troth]). Applying his dictum to his own grief, death and textual life, we may conclude that whilst the character certainly (reportedly) dies early on in the querelle, his languishing, as well as the grief of others (such as a friend of his who pops up in CF or his heirs in Erreurs), endures through its repeated re-staging in successive poetic responses. His perdurance as a figure of textual interest lies in two irresolvable questions: did he or did he not die? And, if he did, who was responsible? For his heirs, the messy affair is reducible to a single question: did she do it? C’est assavoir touchant la mort Et c’elle commit le meffait, Car de la vint le droit ou tort. (Erreurs, vv. 902–4) [[That is to say] with regard to the death of the lover [and whether] she committed the crime, [since] from [that] was drawn right or wrong.]

They are made to present the nub of the matter in an overdeterminedly clear-cut fashion, casting the outcome in a straightforward binary opposition, and in impersonal terms, as if an objective determination would emerge of its own accord. This deliberate simplification functions ironically to point up precisely how there is no ready route to reaching a verdict in the querelle. It is impossible to furnish categorical and definitive judgement as to whether she killed him, because it is not possible to predicate that verdict on the definite fact that he is dead, in the same way that there cannot be any objective determination of the Lady’s identity, since her being is essentially performative. The Lover’s heirs comment that, if the judgement is sound:

26 See below, pp. 107–10, for drowning in connection with the myth of Echo and Narcissus.



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[…] si n’y a encre ne charbon Quy luy peult muer sa coleur. (Erreurs, vv. 915–16) [[…] There is no ink or charcoal that could alter its color.]

But everything about the Lady is, of course, a construction of ‘encre’ through her repeated inscription in each text of the querelle. There is a double meaning in these verses, prompted by v. 916’s echo of her response to the Lover in BDSM ‘sans müer couleur’ (v. 219): the heirs mean to say that, if she is found guilty, there is no possible revision of this verdict; but there is also, given the intertextual pick-up, a second, implied sense that it would be impossible then to change her demeanour from the composure-construed-as-hard-heartedness that she originally bore – her ‘true colours’, as it were, will have come through. However, I believe that what this pick-up is intended to signpost to us as readers, on a third level of meaning, is how there is precisely no true original, unitary identity of the Lady; she persists as an insoluble ambiguity. Poetic respondents to Chartier’s BDSM pick up on the uncertainty of the Lover’s death as one of the ways in which, far from closing down the debate, they seek ways of perpetuating it and relish opportunities to further complicate proceedings. The acme instance often cited by critics is CF’s manoeuvre, through the tools of poetic fiction, of claiming that the advocates Truth and Loyalty in DL were in fact being impersonated by Fiction and Falsity (CF, vv. 329–36), which thereby discredits their defence of the Lady.27 This manoeuvre reflects, more generally in Caulier’s poem, a concern for agency, thereby adding to the question of ‘did he or did he not die?’ the essential qualifier: ‘according to whom?’ Playfully, the question is not so much answered as muddled, with Truth invoking ‘l’acteur premier’ (v. 350 [the first author]) as his ultimate source of authority: a seemingly clear reference back to BDSM as the ‘first’ poem in the series, but whose referent remains ambiguous: does it denote the narrating persona or the author? Or, indeed, either agency in relation to a prior account of an encounter between this Lover and Lady, given that certain responses see the scenario of BDSM not to have been their initial meeting?28 Truth’s flattening out of fine distinctions in invoking ‘l’acteur premier’ is a provocative gesture on Caulier’s part intended precisely to bring such distinctions to the reader’s mind and to prompt us to discern the character’s misreadings. In the specific case of the Lover’s reported demise, Truth is both evasive and emphatic: Mais encores, celui qui ce blasme Lui mist sus, savoit de certain Qu’il estoit mort, Dieux en ait l’ame. (CF, vv. 489–91)

27 See, for instance, Taylor, Poetry, p. 11. I return below to the extraordinary literary reflexivity of CF. 28 See, for instance, DL, vv. 469–70; Erreurs, vv. 177–8.

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[Moreover, he [who put the blame on her knew for sure that he was dead], God rest his soul.]

As we saw at the start of this chapter, there is no simple certainty about the attribution of blame to the Lady or the event of the Lover’s death, and the indefiniteness of the variable demonstrative pronoun ‘celui qui’ only raises a further question mark as to the agency to which such (false) certitudes should be imputed. The flaws in Truth’s argument are gaping: on the one hand, the personification insists repeatedly, overdeterminedly, on the Lover’s death by affirming its physical reality: ‘L’amant que Mort en terre couche’ (v. 456 [The very same lover that Death has now lain in the earth]), or by using the formula ‘qui mort gist’ (v. 505).29 Truth even creates a syllogism in arguing that his (unproven) death stands as proof of his devotion in love: Sa mort fu approbacion Qu’il ne fu onques delinqueur. (CF, vv. 543–4)30 [His death is the proof that he never failed in his duty.]

On the other hand, Truth creates space for doubt when she moralises on the relationship between life, death and renown for the Lover: Que mieulx luy vault que chacun die Qu’il soit mort renonmé leal Que ce qu’il fust faulx et en vie. (CF, vv. 614–16) [That it is better for him that they say he died with a reputation for loyalty than that he have been unfaithful, yet still alive.]

Her remark shifts us from dealing with the Lover’s death itself to addressing what the status of this individual qua dead lover is held to be. Its chiastically arranged antitheses – mort/vie, leal/faulx – could initially be seen rhetorically to underscore how the Lover is definitely dead and loyal and is definitely not alive and false. However, there is no certain ‘is’ about it: rather, we are faced with what ‘is taken to be’ the case, with the subjunctive mood (‘soit’, ‘fust’) raising a question mark over his status. It is obviously better for his reputation as a martyr for love, not to mention for the integrity of his advocates’ case against the Lady, that he be both a faithful lover and dead, but as to whether he actually is either of these things is unresolved. The Lady’s advocate in DL points more straightforwardly to the uncertain record of the Lover’s demise, so as to expose the logical weakness in the case of her accusers who argue for her guilt:

A formula also used by Love in his verdict: CF, v. 905. One of the Lady’s stumbling blocks in even beginning to accept the Lover’s expressed devotion was the absence of any deed to prove the truth of his words: BDSM, vv. 554–60. 29 30



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Comment que ne sçavons nëant S’il est trespassé ou en vie. (DL, vv. 623–4) [Even though we know nothing really about his fate, whether he be dead or still alive.]

In reply to such emphatic negation and trenchant clarity, the Lady’s opponents fabricate a brief but elaborate narrative of the Lover’s post-refusal mortal suffering: cast as a struggle between personified agents, it tells of Hope yielding to Desire and leaving the way open for Death to claim the Lover’s life (vv. 777–84). Are we intended as readers to chuckle at the effortfulness of this contrivance, aimed at proving the reality of the Lover’s death through sheer force of narrative colour? Two things are clear: both protagonists’ identities are the products of competing judgements, and the judgements that are made assimilate these specific characters to general models for identity: the devoted lover, the merciless lady. The term ‘cas’ is useful here as a point of articulation between particular instance and exemplar, personal history and public message. We shall explore in Chapter 3 its importance for responses to Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium, where casus denotes both figures’ fall from grace and the tale of that fall, set up as a narrative carrying a moral message. The Erreurs features an especially intensive usage of ‘cas’ in a range of contexts which may helpfully inflect our understanding of the term in anticipation of discussion of the DCVI tradition, but will more immediately crystallise our appreciation in the querelle of non-unitary, non-originary identity. Identity is a story that is told and, in consequence, a type of story that is told, since a given character becomes configured as a type, which confers upon her/him a kind of immortality – a type, like a personification cannot die – but at the same time could be seen as a loss of identity in the movement from specific instance to exemplary model, whether positive or negative.31 The most obvious meaning of ‘cas’ in a courtroom fiction is legal: the ‘crime’ of treason against the god of Love (‘cas de leze majesté’, Erreurs, vv. 443, 922) of which the Lady stands accused, which results in the ‘cases’ pleading for and against her guilt.32 As well as functioning as part of the querelle’s juridical rhetorical scaffolding, ‘cas’ occurs in the discourse of exemplarity that the Lover’s heirs seek to construct to make a public demonstration of the Lady’s treachery: hence their aforecited wish to see her swing headless from the gibbet ‘pour exemple prendre’ (v. 374), to represent a type of crime: ‘le cas tant infame’ (v. 380 [the infamous case itself]). We can also view in this light the earlier responses’ tendency to integrate the peculiarity and ambiguity of the Lady’s conduct into a more conventional and unitary model of feminine behaviour, subsuming the particularity of her case under a desired didactic purpose. Likewise, the tendency

31 Cf. the exemplary posthumous self-presentations by Dido and Judith in JPHF, discussed in Chapter 1. 32 See also, for instance, Accusation, v. 141.

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to portray the Lover (or, in BDSM, for him to depict himself) as the type of the amant martir, exemplary in his devotion. Notwithstanding such assimilation of the protagonists’ situations to broader-brushstroke (mis)representations, speakers in the Erreurs repeatedly insist demonstratively on the specifics of the case at hand: ‘de ce cas [i]cy’ (vv. 54, 277, 584). The deictic gesture is largely an empty one, its pretended clarity of reference to ‘this case here’ blurred by at least two factors: first, its inflection by whichever agenda is informing its use (pro- or antiLady); second, its spurious designation of a unitary objective correlative – there is no single truth of the affair. In recognition of this spuriousness, the Erreurs sets up an interesting dialogue between ‘cas’ and ‘fait’. The Lover’s heirs, unsurprisingly, enlist ‘fact’ on their side – their relative is dead, the Lady is merciless – arguing for ‘les faiz d’icelui [= ‘le livre’ BDSM] veritables’ (v. 496 [the facts of this book]) and ‘ce fait [= her confession] qui est veritable’ (v. 936 [the facts, which are true]). But there are no true, in the sense of unequivocal, facts, and the Lady’s heirs object to counterfeit fact-creation: Erreur de fait, car le procés Si fut jugié par ung faulx fait, Coulouré de mort et excés, Que ceste dame n’avoit fait. (Erreurs, vv. 697–700) [There was an error of fact, for the trial was judged based on a false fact, coloured with death and outrageous action, something that this lady did not do.]

But the actual truth is, of course, that we can never know: we have competing ‘cas’, in several senses, and none is reducible to incontrovertible fact. Accordingly, even the Erreurs ends inconclusively. Its court President rules, in terms as definitive and in negatives as emphatic as those of CF’s:33 Que le jugement ainsi fait Ne se muera ne changera, Mais demourra en son effect, Tant que le monde durera. (Erreurs, vv. 993–6) [Therefore, the judgment thus declared will never be altered or changed but will remain in effect as long as the world shall last.]

However, things all get a bit messy: the court is disrupted by two escaped tercels, whose din prevents the President from being heard, delaying his pronouncement of all the ‘arrestz’ (v. 1045) such that an adjournment is required to complete proceedings. In the wake of this bathetic avian intrusion, what, then, are we left with at the end of the Erreurs, the self-cast epitaph of the Lady?

33 CF, vv. 924–6. Such superlative finality is, of course, at least partly provocative, challenging any subsequent writer to unpick the verdict.



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Body, voice and mythography: Ovidian echoes A plurality of character judgements that blur the line between fact and fiction or, indeed, seek to pass off opinion as truth, can leave identity feeling an unhelpfully fraught and precarious entity, circulating with too many, competing names that are all only ever partial versions of the individual in question. I wish to pursue in the present and following sections a more positive reading of identity in flux which focuses less on someone being determined by their name or reputation than on an individual’s bodily boundaries as a source of malleability and on the relationship between body and voice. I pursue this via an analogy between the tale of the Lady/Lover and that of Echo/Narcissus – both stories of failed couplings; whilst each duo, Chartier’s and Ovid’s, appears in a context of erotic desire and potential pairing, neither constitutes a successfully forged relationship. I am not the first to advance this analogy, since we find an intertwining of the medieval and the Classical myths already in Caulier’s Ospital d’amour (before 1441), a response to BDSM that I have left aside until now for two reasons: first, on account of HA’s broad intertextual engagement – response to BDSM is but one facet of this poem, which signals its difference from other responses by removing us from the scene of courtroom debate and transporting us to an infirmary and its surrounding cemeteries;34 second, because I wish to use its recasting of the BDSM tale to direct us towards the new aspect of identity formation that I just mentioned, which relates to death both literally and figuratively. Hitherto, whilst I have been recognising intertextual shifts in identity for the Lady and the Lover, treating them each as transtextual names, I have not considered how the two characters may, in fact, not occur solely in ‘their own’ bodies, but may slip into others’ during their passage between texts, the dead (if he is dead) Lover as it were resurrecting in another’s form. In HA, whilst there is no explicit relation of the querelle’s non-couple to the non-couple of the Metamorphoses, there are two strophes dedicated to the Ovidian tale which spell out its meaning in terms clearly paralleling the situation of the Lover and Lady, and a third reference that juxtaposes the dead bodies of the Lady and Narcissus. The first parallel arises as the persona walks through a wasteland traversed by rivers ‘filled to the brim with drowned bodies’ (v. 107); near by, he finds a fountain Ou Narcisus son umbre ama. Amours s’en venga de beau tour, Qui de tel rage l’enflamma: Ce fut pour ce qu’il reffusa Echo, qui mercy luy crioit.

34 Singer, ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses’, pp. 96–8; Cayley classifies it in the fourth cycle of responses to BDSM (Debate, p. 153). I return to its locational structures in Chapter 4.

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Trop fist pour luy a ce cop la Quant dame estoit, et si prioit. (HA, vv. 114–20)35 [where Narcissus fell in love with his reflection. Love used a really clever ploy to avenge himself when he inflamed Narcissus in such a rage! For he had rejected Echo whose cries had begged for his pity. (Though she really did go too far, being a woman, and yet begging him!)]

Caulier’s account echoes others’ in recording Love’s revenge on Narcissus,36 but there is an additional and particular echo here, that of his own earlier work CF, at the end of which it was Love who sentenced the Lady to death. This echo reinforces an enmeshing together of the two mythographies: the allegedly ‘cruelle femme’ is identified with Narcissus and, in consequence, the ‘mercy’-seeking Lover with pleading Echo; the reversal of genders effected in this parallel is perhaps flagged up ironically by the specification ‘quant dame estoit’ (v. 120),37 with reference to Echo/the Lover. The second, later analogy comes as HA’s persona, himself installed as a patient in the hospital in a state of lovesickness for a lady who has spurned his advances, prays to the god of Love: Et comme tu vengas Equo De Narcisus le renoyé, Qui tant ne sceust nayer ano Qu’a ton plaisir ne fust noyé, Son cueur estoit bien desnoyé Quant par son crüel pansement Avoit ton povoir guerroyé Et enfraint ton commandement. (HA, vv. 641–8) [Likewise you avenged Echo for the rebuff of Narcissus, who did not know how to swim well enough, and so drowned according to your pleasure. His heart was too defiant, when, by his pitiless preoccupation, he declared war on your authority and disobeyed your commandment.]

His invocation of Love’s power to intervene in lovers’ dilemmas like his own enlists a number of illustrative examples (Ulysses and Penelope, Pygmalion, Guillaume de Lorris’s persona in the Roman de la rose …), but only Echo and 35 Stumbling upon a fountain/source/spring of Narcissus is a frequent scenario in late-medieval texts following in the tradition of Le Roman de la rose, in which Guillaume de Lorris’s persona stumbles upon one such that initiates a parallel with his own amorous predicament (ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1992), vv. 1436–516). The Ovidian myth was also widely known, from the mid-fourteenth century, via the Ovide moralisé, 5 vols (ed. Cornelis de Boer (Amsterdam: Müller/Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1915–38)) I, III.1304–964). 36 In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller (London/Cambridge, MA: Heinemann/Harvard University Press, 1946)), III.406, it is Nemesis who hears the prayer of a nymph to avenge Narcissus; in OM, III.1577 and RR, v. 1486, it is Love who exacts vengeance. 37 Within the context of the Ovidian tale, the reference evokes, of course, Echo’s embodied existence before she is reduced to a bodiless voice (e.g. OM, III.1345–6).



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Narcissus are accorded a whole strophe, suggesting importance; 38 the sequence ends with a further, familiar case: Et si vray que tu condempnas La Crüelle Femme a noyer Et le crüel nom lui donnas. (HA, vv. 657–9) [And it is also true that you condemned the Cruel Woman to be drowned.]

We are thus referred explicitly back to the end of CF, reinforcing the implicit allusion earlier in HA. The parallel here offers a further logic for the meetness of the Lady’s mode of death, in imitation of her mythological forebear in haughty cruelty, Narcissus: ‘tant outrecuidiez, / Plains d’orgueil’ (OM, III.1507–8 [so presumptuous, full of pride]). Before pursuing the significance of this analogy further, a caveat is necessary: relating particular features of medieval tales to those of Classical myth, especially to one so multiply rehearsed, recycled and recast as that of Echo and Narcissus, is a potentially risky and certainly messy business; there is no univocal correlation or consistent correspondence.39 For example, Narcissus’s death is not always by drowning – in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as in the Ovide moralisé and Roman de la rose, two key medieval conduits for and glosses on the myth, precisely how he dies is not specified.40 This caveat does not, however, hinder the operation that I wish to perform in proposing that the Erreurs – whether in response to HA or independently – (re) activates associations with the Ovidian myth of tragic death(s), and does so in order to raise the sorts of questions with which this chapter has been preoccupied, concerning the shifting nature of identity, agency, name and renown, as well as adding the further issue of relations between body and voice. This (re-)activation occurs when the Lady’s heirs are granted leave, at the end of her series of trials, to gather up her bones,41 but not to mark her grave with an inscription. The heirs thereby (intentionally or otherwise on the part of the Erreurs author) pick up on the third mention of Narcissus in HA, when Caulier’s persona comes across the rotting cadavers of those excommunicated by Love that are scattered across a ‘[false] cemetery’ (‘faulx atre’, v. 449).42 In his ensuing list of characters sighted, he mentions in close proximity ‘[…] le 38

None of the other cases in this sequence concerns vengeance. For a subtle analysis of medieval French reception of the myth, with focus on Echo as a figure for rewriting, see M. Griffin, Transforming Tales, pp. 68–101. 40 In RR, he ‘fu morz en pou de termine’ (v. 1500 [died within a short time]); Met. and OM specify the where (on the green grass: III.502; III.1826), if not precisely the how (beyond stating that death claims him or that he wastes away). Given that he succumbs to desire for his own reflection in a pool, one could certainly see his death to be one by drowning in figurative terms. 41 A person was held to be fully dead only when the flesh had dissolved, exposing the bones: Brown, ‘Death’, p. 223; cf. Camille, ‘Image’, p. 84; Camille, Master, p. 133. 42 McRae’s translation is ‘makeshift’, but I opt for ‘false’ to chime in with the ‘faulx amants’ (v. 465), the false/unfaithful lovers, who occupy it as cursed corpses, and the spatial 39

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desdaigneux Narcisus, / De qui Echo fut refusee’ (vv. 462–3 [[…] the proud Narcissus, who rejected Echo]) and ‘la ditte dame que l’en dit / “Sans mercy” […]’ (vv. 466–7: [the aforementioned lady named ‘with no mercy’ […]]), who is described as having been recently drowned in tears, picking up on the ending of CF. The Erreurs heirs’ gathering and consecrated burial of her bones could thus be seen as a specific recollection (in all senses) of this moment in HA,43 tying in the Lady’s fate again with that of Narcissus, but not only his: I think that we are also prompted to recall that, as Paul Auster puts it, at the end of Echo’s life: ‘there was nothing left of her but a heap of bones and the wailing of her disembodied, inextinguishable voice’,44 and then only her voice, as her bones are said to have turned to stone: ‘sonus est, qui vivit in illa’ (Met., III.401 [voice alone still lives in her]). According to OM’s moralisation of the myth, Echo represents reputation: Echo, se la letre ne ment, Denote bone renomee. […] Echo fu en pur son muee, Quar son sans cors est renomee Nulz ne puet veoir bon renon, Quar ce n’est se parole non, Qui par la gent est puepliee. (OM, III.1464–5, 1515–19) [Echo, if the book does not lie, denotes good renown. […] Echo was changed into pure sound, for sound without body is reputation; no-one can see good renown, for it is nothing but the spoken word propagated by people.]

We begin to see a conjunction of concerns mobilised by the end of the Erreurs: the Lady’s bones may be assembled for burial, almost like relics, but it is her name/renown carried by the voices of characters in the textual, rather than sculptural, epitaph of the querelle that is most vital: as Eustache Deschamps remarked of Guillaume de Machaut, ‘vo nom sera precieuse relique’ ([your name will be a precious relic]).45 It is by name/renown that she continues to live, like Echo: ‘ses sons vit pardurablement’ ([her sound lives forever]).46 and ideological opposition that Caulier constructs between this cemetery and the resting place of true lovers: see Chapter 4. 43 Arrêts, judgement XXXVI (pp. 159–65) takes up the case of a woman who refused a suitor’s kiss and, unrepentant, was ‘buried in unconsecrated ground’ (p. 159). Her contesting heirs want those same officials who excommunicated her to revoke that judgement, ‘disinter her and carry her body and bones to a cemetery of Love’ (p. 161). The Arrêts author thus seems to respond to the intertextual dialogue opened up between HA and Erreurs. 44 Invisible (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2009), p. 108. I borrow the novelist’s turn of phrase in a moment of hommage, since it was the coincidence of my reading his book alongside re-reading the Erreurs that prompted me to explore connections with the Ovidian myth. What Auster states is borne out in Met., III.398–9, OM, III.1455–6. 45 Ballade II, v. 6. (Œuvres complètes, ed. Le Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire, 11 vols (Paris: SATF, 1878), I, p. 245). 46 OM, III.1463; Met., III.401.



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There are several ways in which thinking about Echo and Narcissus may enrich our reading of the Lover and Lady. It may, for instance, spotlight the issue of readerly sympathy for one or other protagonist: BDSM criticism has debated hotly whether we ought to be siding with either (or neither) party; an echo of the Ovidian myth only complicates this further since its retellings, even in the moralising context of OM, do not univocally or uniformly condemn Narcissus for proudly rebuffing Echo and vainly adoring his own reflection, nor do they leave Echo entirely flawless,47 albeit that she is the more pathos-inducing character.48 Could we, by analogy, come to see the Lady as pathetic in portrayals that we might otherwise dismiss as wholly anti-Belle Dame, perhaps opening up a gap between diegetic narratorial perspective and implied authorial voice? For instance, in CF, at the contentious moment of the Lady’s confession, we are told: Confessa ceste crüaulté Comme Verité le recense. (CF, vv. 863–4) [She confessed to her cruel act exactly as Truth had exposed it.]

Is she in some Echo-like sense compelled to repeat Truth’s words and thereby condemn herself? This was certainly the view of her heirs in the Erreurs who dispute the confession’s validity on account, they claim, of its having been extracted under duress. We might also consider in general terms her position as the desired Lady: the figure who (can only) answer(s) back rather than initiate dialogue; she certainly has considerable force of speech, but she cannot speak first:49 Et fu jangleresse et parliere, Mais ne pooit parlier premiere. (OM, III.1349–50) [And though she was loquacious and talkative, she could not speak first.]

If the Lady can be seen to mobilise elements of Echo as well as of Narcissus, can the Lover, a clear Echo figure in HA for his lovelorn longing and cruel 47 Echo’s fate of not being able to speak until spoken to, and only then echoing the words last spoken, was a punishment inflicted upon her by Hera/Juno: Met., III.359–69; OM, III.1352–74. 48 In RR, she is cast as a fully fledged amant martir: ‘[…] ele li [=Narcissus] dist qu’il li donroit / S’amor ou ele se morroit’ (vv. 1445–6 [[…] she told him that he should grant her his love or she would die]). One cannot, however, read this straightforwardly in terms of gender: as we learn later from the shock misogynistic moral of Guillaume’s version of the tale (instructing ladies not to mistreat their lovers by leaving them to die (vv. 1504–7)), he is not taking the woman’s part. 49 The Lover and Lady also engage at times in a kind of concatenated dialogue whereby a key term from the last verse of one speaker’s strophe is picked up in the first verse of the other’s, such as ‘paix’ (BDSM, vv. 224–5 [peace]) or ‘desdaing’ (vv. 248–9 [disdain]); this echo, which entails the second speaker wishing to revise understanding of the term, occurs with both characters in ‘call’ and ‘response’ positions.

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treatment by Narcissus, be seen as the latter figure also? A more critical stance on his character, one more in line with the Lady’s arguments in BDSM, could see him as precisely someone in love with his own shadow (who ‘son ombre aime et croit voirement’ (OM, III.1588 [loves and truly believes his reflection])), in the sense that he is, according to his interlocutor, self-absorbed and projecting an image of the Lady that is the product of his own imaginings (his mistaken perception of her eyes transmitting a ‘Doulx Regart’ (v. 229 [Sweet Look]), for example) rather than properly engaging with a being other than himself. In the same way that the Lady features in suggestive juxtaposition with the corpse of Narcissus in HA’s false cemetery, so the Lover appears in conjunction with Narcissus’ cadaver in another rough-and-ready resting place, the ‘fondriere / Laquelle avoit nom meurtriere’ ([bog known as deadly]) in the wasteland of Jacques Milet’s Forest de Tristesse (1459):50 Illec viz gesir lamoureux De celle qu’on dit sans mercy, Pensif estoit et langoureux Et dedans l’eaue tout transsi. Narcisus y congneuz aussi Et aussi des amans de France. Illec les vy en grant soucy Ainsi comme en desesperance. (FT, vv. 1614–21) [There I saw lying the lover of her who is said to be without mercy; he was pensive and languishing, and quite dead in the water. I also recognised Narcissus, as well as several French lovers. There I saw them in great distress, like people in despair.]

The Lover and Narcissus are grouped together as despairing lovers, which suggests an attitude of sympathy towards both, at least on the part of the persona, who is himself a lover. It is BDSM’s Lover who is submerged in water here, hence a circumstantial link with Narcissus, rather than the Lady.51

50 In Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique, I (1910), fols [203]v–224v. I give line numbers based on a personal transcription of the poem. 51 Milet was doubtless drawing on HA (see also Chapter 4, pp. 251–4), and it is interesting that he chose to replace the Lady with the Lover in association with Narcissus. A further conjunction in JdP between the BDSM story template and the tale of the mythological lovers arises in the Purgatoire d’amour, fols. 182v–[187]v: a spurned lover claiming he has suffered unjustly has his case thrown out of court and is instead sentenced to spend three days in purgatorial torment ‘in the lake of tears which causes much great suffering’ (fol. [187]r). In his defence, he aligned himself with Echo, whose Narcissus drowned ignominiously (fol. 185v), but PA’s court, in finding fault with him, accords him a flavour of Narcissus’ fate.



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Bodily boundaries: character slippage and narrative play Seeing the two querelle protagonists slipping between the models of their mythological forebears, each at times intersecting with either Echo or Narcissus,52 is useful for directing our attention to how we construe the boundaries of characterisation. Whilst we have happily accepted shifting identity within, indeed as constitutive of, the character of the Lady, we have effectively predicated this shifting on a stable and immutable sense of her as an individual figure, bound by a single body:53 is this an appropriate assumption to underpin our approach to character identity when we have already seen, in Chapter 1, the porousness of the simple syntagm ‘je suis’? Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has considered an array of figures in genres of early medieval literature that do not ‘respect the boundaries that are supposed to limit their form and to emplace agency within a controlling and singular subjectivity’.54 Looking at my late-medieval narrative poems, I do not see this ‘lack of respect’ to be a transgressive or peculiar phenomenon, so much as a principle of character construction normally operative across many works; or, at least, a perspective on identity composition that aids us as modern readers to grasp better the mechanics of late-medieval literary personhood. We are perfectly comfortable with intertextual reconstitution in the case of personified figures (for instance, in the extreme case of CF, how Truth became Fiction), but tend not to think this way in respect of (ostensibly) human individuals, however typified those individuals are as ‘l’amant’ or ‘la dame’. Caulier’s two contributions to BDSM debate offer clear examples of this kind of slippage which function to offer the reader a fresh point of view (in both narratological and ideological senses) on the debate through another voice. In CF’s courtroom, the Lover of BDSM is, as we saw above, (mostly) held emphatically to be dead; so whom is it that we encounter when the persona introduces an unknown figure dressed in black? Viz hors d’une salle wydier Ung gracïeux jenne escuier Vestu de noir et faisont dueil. (CF, vv. 228–30) [I saw coming out of a room a handsome young squire dressed in black and lamenting.]

Do we not inevitably recall the Lover of BDSM: the mournful ‘gracïeux’ (BDSM, v. 76) who ‘le noir portoit’ (v. 102 [was dressed all in black]), whom Chartier’s persona espied at a different kind of courtly gathering? Revelation of CF’s

52 Though this slippage might be seen in gendered terms, I do not think that gender is the point at issue (whereas it certainly is in Guillaume de Lorris’s persona’s moralisation of the tale: see above, n. 48, and M. Griffin, Transforming Tales, p. 93), at least not without careful interrelation with other factors. 53 Even if we see her to exceed this physical frame in her perdurance as voice/renown. 54 Medieval Identity Machines, p. xviii.

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squire’s identity is deliberately deferred: we are told what he did – he presented a formal complaint to the clerk to relay to the court – before learning who he is, via the clerk’s third-person report of his perspective on the case as Jadiz l’amy et bien veullant Du povre amant plain de simplesse. (CF, vv. 259–60) [the [former] friend and well-wisher of the poor sincere lover.]

The withholding of identity and the description of the figure in terms redolent of Chartier’s Lover invite us to see this friend as a kind of displacement self: an avatar or even, given the Lover’s demise, a reincarnation. I hesitate, however, about classifying this slippage as ‘displacement’, since the term implies movement from an original, established position. As we considered above in respect of the Lady, there is no certain, fixed original of the Lover, only competing cases for and against his sincerity, quite apart from his ambiguous death. The Lover’s story gets increasingly recursive, in the sense that increasing layers of backstory, preceding his appearance in Chartier’s poem, accrue as we move forward through the querelle: we ‘learn’ that BDSM was at least his second approach to the Lady, and might even have been beyond the seventh,55… depending on how we construe a further character slippage, in HA, to which I now turn. It has been noted that HA operates with a much broader frame of intertextual and conceptual reference than other contributions to the querelle;56 I do not, however, see this larger scope to dilute a sense of the poem proceeding in the shadow of BDSM, particularly given its frequent manuscript appearance in a querelle context and alongside CF.57 Indeed, especially in light of the narrative play just postulated in CF, one might even see a reader to be expected to approach HA with a ‘where’s Wally?’-like mentality, on the alert for cues to direct us to BDSM-related material and characters.58 HA opens unlike many other responses: its first-person persona is not in a state of anxiety but is ‘amply joyful’ (HA, v. 1). He attends a courtly gathering in good cheer, approaches the lady to whom he is devoted and boldly discloses his ardour, which she absolutely rejects; she tires of his repeated implorations and he eventually gives up. Grief-stricken, he surrenders himself to being an amant martir, and then experiences the dream vision which embarks him on the journey to the hospital of Love that constitutes

HA, v. 203. Singer, ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses’, pp. 96–8. 57 For the manuscript tradition of HA, see Cycle, p. 327. 58 I refer to the iconic figure in Martin Handford’s children’s books (also known as Waldo (US and Canada) or Charlie (France)), whose densely populated illustrations challenge the reader to seek out Wally’s distinctive character. A seek-out reflex is triggered in HA when the persona treks through a wasteland of drowned people: we thereby anticipate an encounter with the Lady, which is, however, postponed – except for an indirect encounter via the tale of drowned Narcissus (as discussed above) – until a later walk through the false cemetery in which her corpse lies exposed. 55 56



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the main body of the poem. Given what I saw in CF to be Caulier’s interest in offering us a new point of view on the tale, I see there to have been, in HA’s opening, a further shift: one that rolls up the narrative and takes us right back to ‘the beginning’ when the Lover first approached the Lady (prior to BDSM), such that what we have at the opening of HA is the backstory of his amorous grief (the emotional state in which we encounter him in BDSM), told from the Lover’s own perspective. Several points of textual detail prompt such a reading, and do so with a note of bathetic humour, not least in reducing the history of the affair from hundreds of strophes to four. When the lover-persona of HA first greets his lady, she offers no visible response: ‘sans faire grant semblant’ (v. 40 [her expression did not alter]): is this yet another (earlier) instance of the Lady’s problematically inscrutable composure, discussed above (BDSM, v. 219)? Once he has revealed to her his devotion, he gets pretty short shrift, at least according to how he perceives their conversation: Sur quoy elle me respondy En petiz de motz, grant reffuz. (HA, vv. 47–8) [And she gave me her response: in a few short words, she rejected me soundly.]

There is surely bathos in this terse synopsis of the pair’s interaction, made more pointed by its pithy antithesis: ‘petiz’ vs. ‘grant’. The tone in which the HA persona then recounts his repeated, vain attempts to win her over is quite laconic and resigned (st. VII): no emotional interjections or self-pitying rhetoric, no reported speech; just simple, fairly judgement-neutral statement: Finablement tant la requis Que de m’oÿr plus se lassa. (HA, vv. 49–50) [By the end, I had pled with her for so long that she tired of listening to me.]

‘Tant’ succinctly summarises each subsequent attempt to gain her favour, including that of BDSM. The following strophe becomes of especial interest since, according to the above reading, it furnishes us with information that Chartier’s poem could not supply because his persona did not know what became of the Lover after his unsuccessful interview in BDSM (vv. 777–8). Since HA merges Lover and persona, we get to know what happened next, namely that he abandoned himself to grief such that ‘[ma voulenté] mieulx aimoit mourir que vivre’ (v. 64 [my will] even preferr[ed] death to life]).59 He longs to die – seemingly initiating the trajectory towards death that he was reported to have followed at the end of BDSM – but does not, being instead transported in a vision to the hospital, where he laments to Lady Pity, the senior nurse: ‘car desja suis mort a 59

See also McRae, Alain Chartier, p. 446, n. 2.

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peu pres’ (v. 360 [because I am already as good as dead]). His exclamation, read literally, presents a discordant temporality and ontology, a disjuncture enabled by the positioning of adverbs either side of the main verb such that the order in which the reader/listener encounters them is: ‘already I am dead/have died almost’.60 It encapsulates beautifully – and with a hint of comic bathos in ‘a poy pres’ – the ambiguous state of the Lover throughout the querelle: held in nearly all responses already to have died, but not yet dead, both in the sense of his resurrection through a restored reputation (CF) or a grief-stricken avatar (CF, HA) and in the fact that he was never definitively reported to have died.61 Applying v. 360 to the specific situation of HA, we may understand it in relation to the way in which the grief-stricken-persona-reincarnation-of-Lover sees, in the cemetery of the hospital, the tomb of the dead Lover ‘himself’: Soubz une tumbe assez publique, Couchoit l’amant tresauctentique, Qui mourut sans le secours d’ame Par le regart du baselique Contre raison appellee dame. (HA, vv. 436–40) [In a tomb visible to all, [was buried] the illustrious and true lover who died, without the least gesture of help, by the fatal glance of that Basilisk who, against Reason, is called Lady.]

Unsurprisingly, he here takes the Lover’s side against the Lady, in an account of their interaction that carries a far stronger, and a more bitter-toned, value judgement than the report of his own attempts at seduction at the start of the poem. In the course of his supposed medical treatment, the persona reveals that he begged his lady’s mercy ‘more than seven times’ (HA, v. 203). Love advises him nonetheless to persevere, casting his failures as inevitable encounters with Resistance that any true lover must endure to prove his mettle, since a lady’s rejection is but a test of loyalty (vv. 1132–6); Love reminds him that he should expect ‘for every good thing, more than ten bad’ (v. 795). These patient–doctor exchanges seem to confirm retrospectively the status of BDSM as the dramatisation of one stage in this implied sequence of advances; but the fact that we saw in that encounter the categorical terms in which the Lady rejected her suitor inclines us to doubt the merits of Love’s counsel to try again. Indeed, I think that one of Caulier’s aims in HA in re-framing our relationship with Chartier’s poem (and the querelle more generally) was to mobilise elements of the BDSM story – and especially our appreciation of the HA persona’s perspective on his lady’s refusal of him in light of our knowledge of the experiences of the BDSM Lover 60 Depending on whether we construe ‘suis mort’ as verb + complement or auxiliary verb + past participle. For the paradox of being able to say ‘I am dead’, see Chapter 1, pp. 47–8. 61 We might also apply the quotation to the state of the BDSM Lover (‘l’amoureux’) sighted in Milet’s Forest (quoted above, vv. 1614–21), whose precise state of animation is unclear: see Chapter 4, pp. 253–4.



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– to enact a mise en question of erotic desire and of the sort of medicine that can be furnished by desire-fuelled hope. The persona, after all, is far from cured of his pangs after treatment by the physician Hope in HA; his kisses from Lady Pity only fuel his desire for his own lady when he wakes from his dream-vision, whose favour he still hopes to receive.62 As part of his supposed package of wise counsel, Love embarks on a lengthy consolatory narrative about … yet another lover: ‘le loyal qui grace dessert’ (v. 825 [the loyal man [who] merits grace]). The career of this exemplary figure is detailed as a lesson in perseverance, and his intersections with other lovers of the querelle are suggested in several ways. In the initial description of the exemplary lover, we find verbal echo of a phrase applied to the persona at the start of HA: ‘desplaisir passé’ (v. 843 [past unpleasantness]): ‘passé desplaisir’ (v. 7 [worry of the past]), which raises questions of which past and whose past that are also encouraged by Love’s comment that he made the exemplary lover reflect on his past and future: Au chemin le fayz deviser, Ou long derriere ou long devant. (HA, vv. 833–4) [Along the path, I make him cast his mind back into the past as well as far into the future.]

Do we understand by the distant past and far-off future a kind of intertextual recollection and anticipation, as the slippery, reconstitutable figure of ‘the lover’ – rather than any individual instantiation – treads ‘his’ textual path through the querelle? As to what the future will be, this is left unresolved: Love never concludes the tale of the exemplary lover, breaking off almost imperceptibly at v. 1136, and so fails to reveal whether his deservingness is in fact rewarded by his lady’s favour. This lover’s outcome is left as uncertain as Chartier’s. One could see the sort of slippages between Lover and narrating persona that I propose for HA to be readily in keeping with some existing readings of the querelle. For instance, Robert Giannasi suggested a productive interplay of doubling between Chartier’s Lover and narrating persona, 63 soldered by the latter’s observation, on first sighting the former in his grief: ‘autel fus je comme vous estez’ (BDSM, v. 120 [I was once as you are now]).64 Several responses play

62 Cf. Singer, ‘Penal and Palliative Discourses’, pp. 99–104. Much more could be said about such a mise en question and Caulier’s critical use of humour in HA. See also Chapter 4, p. 256. 63 ‘Chartier’s Deceptive Narrator: La Belle Dame sans Mercy as Delusion’, Romania, 114 (1996), 362–84, p. 383. 64 This remark could spark a further possible reading of slippage in HA: that it is dramatising the narrating persona’s experience that precedes his witness role in BDSM, albeit that his grief derived from his lady having died rather than having rejected him – but then, we do not know whether she accepted or refused him as her suitor before she died, or, indeed, whether the persona was telling the truth about his bereavement. Cf. Giannasi, ‘Chartier’s Deceptive Narrator’.

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on a resemblance between the two, which, given the Lover’s reportedly deceased state at the end of BDSM, potentially makes of each ‘new’ persona a resuscitation. In CF, the persona develops, albeit allusively, ‘his’ identity as lovelorn lover: Me commença a souvenir De ma gracïeuse maistresse. (CF, vv. 50–1) [I started to remember my gracious lady.]

‘His’ particular situation (unrequited, like the Lover, rather than bereaved, like Chartier’s persona) only becomes apparent in the final strophe of the poem, in which there is also a suggestive slippage enabled between ‘ceste dame’ (v. 954 [this lady]), referring back to the ‘crüelle femme’ (v. 945), and, two verses later, ‘la belle en qui tous biens habite’ (v. 956 [my beautiful lady, in whom all perfection is gathered]), from whom the persona seeks happiness: are we thereby led to challenge the wisdom of his persistent devotion? Slippages between narrative levels and points of view also recall the metaleptic shift in some verse epitaphs in Chapter 1 whose posthumous speakers’ perspective was informed by knowledge of events post-dating their death. In the querelle, the Lover’s reported death facilitates narrative play: elements of ‘his’ identity are available for reincarnation (in the case of the squire in CF) and the boots of ‘his’ love story can be filled by another (the persona of HA), whilst his prior existence still haunts these resuscitations and his ghost is, as it were, activated by each revisitation of aspects of ‘his’ life. I used scare quotes above to speak of each ‘new’ narrating persona: what these scare quotes should properly be spelled out to mean is ‘each successive incarnation of the narratorial role, whom we ought not to see, therefore, as an entirely fresh character bound within a singular text’. The Erreurs gives us a clear steer in this transtextual direction when its persona comments, once court proceedings have been adjourned: Si diz aparmoy que y seroye Quoy que coustast le sejourner. (Erreurs, vv. 1049–50) [And I said to myself that I would surely be there, no matter what the trip cost.]

We are invited to see ‘him’ as a continuity, straddling across texts/court sittings.65 A sense of looking both forward and backward in time and, in some sense, of rolling up the very textual fabric of the querelle, is generated in CF through literary reflexive imagery. The persona’s first port of call, on his way (through a vision, naturally) to the Palace of Justice over which Love presides, is another palace, whose architects are named at the end of a seven-strophe description: 65 This narratorial remark stands out in the context of the Erreurs, since it is otherwise a poem that has almost no narrative frame (A. Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, p. 21).



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Ce lieu de diverses pensees Firent Fantasie et Soussy. (CF, vv. 135–6) [This place of bizarre thoughts was made by Fantasy and Worry.]

That Caulier exploits a building to speak about textual creativity is not itself remarkable, given the late-medieval metaphoric commonplace of ‘building as text’.66 What does deserve particular attention, though, is how he deploys the architectural metaphor to elaborate a kind of lesson in how to read poems in the querelle. On entering the palace, the persona homes in on the wall decoration: Les murs estoient tous couvers D’ystoires, de diz et de vers, En grans ymages eslevéz. (CF, vv. 92–4) [The walls were covered with stories, writings, and poetry, painted on large mounted canvases.]

The very presence of artistic representation already triggers our literary reflexive impulse, especially as he focuses on ‘ces hystoires’ (v. 121 [these stories]), a term which, in medieval French, enjoys ambiguity in designating both verbal and visual representations,67 and whose demonstrative adjective here permits some flexibility of designation: referring back, diegetically, to the palace’s canvases but perhaps also, metatextually, evoking the tales being told in CF and in the querelle more broadly. What can be seen/read on the walls – providing, we are told, that one is an astute viewer/reader (‘d’avis […] pourveü’, v. 104 [in the proper state of mind]) – embraces past, present and future happenings as well as what could never happen and what has not happened (vv. 97–103). The image projected is impossible to visualise, thereby directing us to consider it more conceptually. Its ‘hystoires’ can be seen simultaneously, and what is witnessed is each slipping into another shape: Voit on chacun sa figure Transmüer en estat divers. (CF, vv. 127–8) [Each figure metamorphosed from one form to another.]

And the persona is unable to isolate discrete entities: he cannot ‘[s]on regard arrester / Sur une chose’ (vv. 118–19 [fix [his] eye on a single thing]). In respect of the querelle, we are invited to perceive its elements, including its characters, not as fixed or unitary, single-body-bound figures, but as entities in a continual flux. The CF persona channels pathways through the palace’s pictorial material:

Building. See also Chapter 4. See Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Histoire, image: accord et discord des sens à la fin du moyen âge’, Littérature, 74 (1989), 110–26. 66 Cowling, 67

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Ce lieu en pluseurs pars trachay Ou ces choses sont amasses. (CF, vv. 129–30) [I went from corner to corner in the place where these things were gathered.]

Similarly, we as textual readers follow the traces left by a given persona but also initiate our own paths through intertextual cues. As discussed above, we, like the Lady’s heirs, are called to ‘amasser’ and ‘fouillier’ (Erreurs, v. 1007) into some kind of shape – albeit a malleable one – the fragments (‘morceaulx ou quartiers’, v. 1008) of identity that we discover in each poem for the Lady, the Lover and even the persona ‘himself’. Epitaphic identity in print: Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique The sort of slippage between bodies that CF’s persona evokes, and that we have seen in operation in texts across the querelle, is found in material form – that is to say, with paratextual matter coming into play as well as questions of textual editing – within a celebrated late-medieval poetic anthology, Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rethorique ([1501]), in which both the Accusation and CF feature,68 together with a range of other BDSM-related material.69 First published by Antoine Vérard and extant in eight early editions,70 JdP is a compilation of lyric and narrative verse, the first such anthology to appear in print in France, and opens with a treatise on versification, L’Instructif de la seconde rhétorique (c.1470).71 The whole is loosely held together both by a thread of title rubrics that situate poems’ action in a pleasure garden and by strategies of contiguity creating ‘poetic “sequences”’.72 In the case of its lyric poems, Taylor has explored how,

Accusation, fols 139r–142r; CF, fols 142v–148r. My analysis of JdP is gratefully indebted to discussions at a journée d’étude on the anthology organised by Laëtitia Tabard at the University of Geneva on 14 June 2014. 70 I use as my primary reference Vérard’s first edition [c.1501–2], quoting from its early-twentieth-century facsimile reproduction by Droz and Piaget. To keep the main body of my discussion clear of bibliographical complications (the interrelations that I posit between texts being complex enough already), I confine to footnotes contextual remarks on other editions consulted; for my numbering of the editions, see the Appendix. As the first and second editions are identical in text, layout and page numbering, the phrase ‘Vérard’s editions’ accounts for both. 71 On L’Instructif, see Poétiques en transition: entre moyen âge et Renaissance, ed. JeanClaude Mühlethaler and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Études de lettres, 4 (2002), pp. 9–69; Taylor, Making, pp. 251–2. 72 Taylor, Making, p. 271. The identity of the compiler is uncertain. Regnaud Le Queux, author (or attributed author) of several pieces in the volume, including L’Instructif, is one possibility suggested by Droz and Piaget (JdP, II, p. 39). André de La Vigne is another, whom Droz and Piaget hypothesise as a possible compiler of the closing sequence of poems (II, p. 302). De La Vigne was the main author in/of the contemporary anthology Le Vergier d’honneur (see Frank Lestringant, ‘André de La Vigne et Le Vergier d’Honneur’, in Le Poète et son œuvre, de la composition à la publication, ed. Jean-Eudes Girot (Geneva: Droz, 2004), pp. 199–214), whose second half (after de La Vigne’s Ressource de la Chrestienté, Voyage de Naples and 68

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for instance, a cluster of ‘prison poems’ are perceived as a ‘poetic aggregate’, or how an amalgam of rondeaux by Chartier acquire what Zumthor would call a narrativité latente [latent narrativity] by dint of how they are edited: the order in which they are arranged and the suppression of each lyric’s refrain.73 I focus here on a sequence of (almost exclusively) narrative poems at the end of the volume which fall under a more or less developed shadow of death and collectively pose posthumous identity as a question.74 The texts concerned, insofar as titles and authors can be attributed separately from their title rubrics in JdP, are: Folios Texts (verse narratives, unless otherwise specified) [203]v75–224v Comment l’amant yssant du jardin de plaisance entra en la forest cuydant avoir plus de joye, et il entra en tristesse en plusieurs façons. Jacques Milet, La Forest de Tristesse. 225r–228v Comment une des dames qui est au jardin de plaisance fleur de rethorique envoye une epistre à son singulier amy, grant orateur. anon., pieces in prose and verse relating to debate between the ladies of Lyon and Paris, which make up a correspondence between a Lyonnaise Lady and a male rhetorician.76 229r–231r Comment au jardin de plaisance malebouche chasse le chevalier dudit jardin de plaisance dont la dame en meurt de courroux. anon., Lady dies of grief after being abandoned by Knight following Foul Mouth’s rumour-spreading that she is not a virgin.77

Louenges du Roy) merits comparative study with JdP, resembling it strongly in layout and in its construction of a minimal love narrative through rubricated headings (e.g. ‘Commant l’amoureux est au vergier d’onneur et prend congié de sa dame’, fol. Kr), and sharing some of its woodcuts (see below, n. 114). Towards the end of the Vergier, title rubrics refer to it as the ‘jardin d’onneur’ (fols O5r, P5v). For whether or not Vérard was involved in the production of Vergier editions, see Mary Beth Winn, Anthoine Vérard Parisian Publisher 1483–1512: Prologues, Poems and Presentations (Geneva: Droz, 1997), pp. 80, 200; for descriptions of the six surviving editions, see Le Catalogue des incunables, 2 vols (Paris: BnF, 1985), II, pp. 159–60. 73 Taylor, Making, pp. 271–83, 246–7. 74 For a differently angled discussion of five of these poems, which links them together around a central debate: ‘is death stronger than love?’, see Hüe, ‘Mort’, pp. 173–80. 75 The page numbering in Vérard’s editions is not wholly continuous: 203 and 204 do not exist; instead, the numbering 205–6 is repeated (so the numerical progression proceeds: 202, 205, 206, 205, 206, 207). I thereby create a page reference here so as to instate a continuous sequence between 202 and 205 ‘proper’. 76 Identification of this correspondent by the initials ‘A.V.’ (JdP, fol. 228v) led Droz and Piaget to propose André de La Vigne as a possible candidate, and also to consider him, given the other attributed item (see below, n. 78), potentially as the compiler of this sequence (see above, n. 72). Mühlethaler has suggested (during the journée d’étude: see above, n. 69), that ‘A.V.’ could equally refer to Antoine Vérard as a kind of editorial-cum-authorial self-inscription in the volume. 77 Droz and Piaget suggest as a possible title Le povre amant desconforté, citing the opening verse of the poem’s final strophe (JdP, II, p. 300).

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231r–234r  Comment la dame se complaignant douloureusement en requerant la mort et depriant, soubdainement la vint frapper de sa darde mortelle dont piteusement elle mourut. [André de La Vigne?], Lady longs for death, which comes and strikes her down.78 234r–244v Comment le chevalier est oultré de courroux pour l’amour de sa dame qui est allée de vie a trespas. Georges Chastelain, L’Oultré d’amour: Knight overcome by grief for deceased Lady.79 244v–247r Comment le cueur du chevalier oultré se debat contre son corps aprés sa doleance de la mort de sa dame. anon., debate between Knight’s heart and body following grief at death of Lady. 247r–258r Comment le chevalier oultré d’amours trespasse de dueil de sa dame. Pierre de Hauteville, Confession et testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil. 258v L’Epitaphe. anon., single-strophe quinzain epitaph for ‘l’oultré d’amours pour amour morte’ [the one overcome by love who died for love].80

78 Droz and Piaget propose de La Vigne as author on account of a possible signature in the poem’s penultimate verse: ‘Pres de la vigne en cler fruict my partie’ (JdP, II, p. 302 [Near to the vine split in two with luminous fruit]). They also suggest that it was composed or arranged as a prelude to Chastelain’s OA, which could support the hypothesis of de La Vigne as compiler, inserting an item of his own composition to facilitate the desired narrative order. 79 The poem is shorn of its final seven huitains, which are replaced by five others as a way of setting up the following debate between body and heart (JdP, II, p. 303). 80 As Droz and Piaget note, the last verse of this epitaph is the last verse of OA, which is not included in the version of Chastelain’s poem presented in JdP since it there lacks its original final strophes (see above, n. 79). They therefore propose that the author of L’Epitaphe is the arranger of OA (JdP, II, p. 318). The editors and I both list L’Epitaphe as a separate item from the Confession; this is not a straightforward decision. On the one hand, L’Epitaphe lacks a prefatory title rubric (of the type ‘Comment …’) that the other items are accorded, and, in the table of contents in Vérard’s editions, mention of it features as part of the title rubric of the Confession (‘Comment le chevalier oultré rend l’ame et de son epitaphe’ (fol. 259v)), which itself differs from the title rubric of the Confession provided in the main body of the volume by condensing the events of de Hauteville’s poem to its very last section, perhaps so as to smooth out the narrative ‘recounted’ by the sequence of title rubrics, furnishing it with a neat conclusion after the debate between body and heart? It is also the case that the Confession lacks in JdP the explicit that rounds it off in its four extant manuscript copies (Confession, p. 92). On the other hand, L’Epitaphe is separated from de Hauteville’s poem by a three-quarterpage woodcut of a crowned figure laid out on a tomb, being mourned by courtiers and ladies. Vérard’s are, of course, only two of eight extant editions of the anthology; for L’Epitaphe’s status in other JdP editions, see below, n. 114.



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From fols 229r to 258v there is a clear “‘narrative” backbone’:81 a Lady’s death, provoked by her knightly Lover, precipitates his death in turn. As Rose Bidler remarks, with specific reference to de Hauteville, but extrapolatable to the JdP closing sequence as a whole: ‘ce n’est plus le refus de la Dame qui anéantit l’Amant, mais sa disparition’.82 I include the two items immediately prior to this well-defined narrative trajectory (fols [203]v–228v), because they still fit within the arc towards sadness and death that commences in the rubric on fol. [203]v, where we are told of a decline from joy to sorrow for the knightly lover: ‘entra en tristesse en plusieurs façons’ ([[he] fell into sadness in several ways]).83 In the first half of Milet’s Forest, the first-person persona (whose rubric designation shifts from ‘Acteur’ to ‘Amant’ in the course of the poem) struggles through a wasteland of sadness governed by Lady Melancholy; he himself suffers ‘en piteux martire’ (FT, v. 1625 [in piteous martyrdom]) and encounters, as we saw above, the remains of the BDSM lover. In the second part of the poem, death crops up in seemingly quite a different context: the question of what suitable punishment to mete out to Matheolus and Jean de Meun, who stand in court awaiting sentencing for crimes of misogyny committed against ‘le chief des dames’ (FT, v. 267 [the paragon of ladies]). The prose and verse pieces pertaining to debate between the ladies of Lyon and Paris include a verse text, purportedly translated by a Lyonnaise lady, which seems to take as its subject the grief of Isabella of Aragon (here called Jehanne), who laments the deaths of her two sons. She dictates a short ‘epitaphe’ for one son, which commences with the usual formula (‘Cy gist l’enfant que nature estoffa’, fol. 227v [Here lies the child on whom Nature bestowed her gifts]) and rehearses her ongoing mourning in the cyclicality of rondeau form. The Forest and Lyon pieces can therefore be seen to broaden the context for death beyond the domain of erotic love, but do not thereby provoke

81 Taylor, Making, p. 275. Droz and Piaget comment more approximately: ‘trois ou quatre poèmes sont plus ou moins bien soudés ensemble’ [three or four poems are more or less tightly knitted together] (JdP, II, p. 302). 82 Confession, p. 15. The fifth, sixth and seventh editions make this arc even clearer through their use of running titles across the top of each page: FT and the correspondence are headed ‘De l’amant entrant en la forest de tristesse’ (fols 168v–195v: page numbers here and in subsequent references in this footnote relate to the fifth edition); the poem about Foul Mouth, ‘De malebouche qui chasse le chevalier’(fols 195v–198r); [de La Vigne?], ‘De la dame requerant la mort’ (fols 198r–201r); and the remaining items are all embraced under ‘Du chevalier oultré a qui sa dame est trespassee’ (fols 201r–224r). 83 ‘Le chevalier’, and, occasionally, ‘l’amant’, are the terms used in title rubrics to refer to the male protagonist of each text, who is sometimes the first-person persona (e.g. Confession) and sometimes another character (e.g. the disconsolate knight in OA). In stating that a particular arc of descent into sorrow begins on fol. [203]v, I do not seek artificially to smooth out the narrative direction of the volume, since elements of ‘tristesse’ are already present, both in earlier narrative poems, such as the Debat sans conclusion, in which a Lover is rejected by his Lady (fols 148r–153r: see below, p. 140), and in lyrics, such as Charles d’Orléans’ ballade ‘En la forest d’ennuyeuse tristesse’ (fol. 201v).

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any sense of incongruity; indeed, the rest of the sequence should certainly not be seen as a homogeneous unit in terms of tone and frame of reference.84 Whilst resisting homogeneity, I recognise, of course, that the very aim of the compiler – through the ordering of the items, through the additional contrivance of rubricated titles and through judicious editing of certain texts85 – was to present the poems as a smooth sequence, at least superficially, concluding with an epitaph after the deaths of both the Lady (at the end of the poem attributed to de La Vigne) and the Lover (after the end of the Confession).86 In the same way that explicit discussion of the provision of an epitaph in the Erreurs, at a late stage in the BDSM querelle, triggered us to consider the querelle itself as an epitaph fiction, so, I propose, L’Epitaphe at the end of JdP prompts a reading of its closing sequence in epitaphic terms. As became clear in Chapter 1, literary epitaphs, rather than functioning in a straightforward affirmative mode as statements of identity from a posthumous perspective, operate interrogatively, and we saw above the epitaph fiction of the BDSM querelle wrestling with the very constitution of selfhood and subjectivity. There are three key respects in which I see JdP’s versified fictions of death being activated to explore the nature of identity. The first is play on the interrelation of decomposition and composition: corporeal decline towards death being an ideal opportunity for declining – in the sense of constructing and inscribing – one’s name and renown. Such play exploits the capacities of poetic expression both to present and to prolong the final moments of death-in-life, elaborating the conventional amant martir paradox ‘je suis mort’ into something more experimental. The second respect concerns the implications of the poems’ material organisation and presentation for their interrogation of epitaphic identity. Third, on a related point, this particular collocation of texts plays on relations between body, text and identity, to develop the kind of slippages between bodies that I considered above in the context of the BDSM querelle, which will return us to issues of character typing and exemplarity. It is pertinent to view aspects of the JdP closing sequence in light of the BDSM querelle, given praise of Chartier in the anthology’s opening treatise on

84 Droz and Piaget claim that the inserted debate between the body and heart of the knight is out of place (JdP, II, p. 303), given its religious tenor as a moralising call to repentance (it cites authorities including Boethius, the Psalmist, etc.). But there is no necessary tension with what they term the surrounding ‘aventures galantes et amoureuses’ [chivalric and amorous adventures], not least because such ‘aventures’ (certainly in the case of Chastelain’s OA, which is the editors’ primary referent here) often also function as a context for exploring issues of identity, for debates about consolation, etc., thereby embracing a broader scope of concerns, as we shall see. 85 For example, the version of the Confession included in JdP acquires a few supplementary strophes at verses 181 and 727 (according to the verse numbers of the version preserved in its manuscript copies, relayed in Bidler’s edition) (Confession, pp. 93–5). See also above, n. 79. 86 A sense of smooth sequence was fostered in the fifth, sixth and seventh editions by their use of running titles: see above, n. 82.



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versification,87 and, more specifically, on account of a continued, more or less explicit indebtedness to the scenario of BDSM. Whilst, following Bidler, it is correct to affirm that in the Confession and its surrounding pieces we encounter, not the refusal of love, but loss of love through bereavement as the cause for grief, this can be construed not to be moving away from Chartier’s poem but, instead, to be following a different strand in it: the story thread of the narrating persona rather than that of the Lover protagonist. The BDSM persona’s narrative is one of bereavement: ‘la Mort m’a tollu ma maistresse’ (v. 6 [Death has taken my mistress from me]).88 De Hauteville’s persona cites this position quite precisely in his Confession: La mort de sa fureur perverse M’a tollu ma dame et maistresse. (Confession, fol. 248v (vv. 172–3))89 [Death, in its perverse fury, has taken my lady and mistress from me.]

Alongside such intertextual connections, we also have material witness of these poems being clustered together: for example, in Rome, Bibl. Vat., MS Vat. Reg. lat. 1363, BDSM, together with selected querelle texts, including the Erreurs, features alongside the Confession, and all of these poems are picked up in the collection of prose judgements known as the Arrêts d’amour (1460–6).90 It thus seems that our reading is intended to be informed by knowledge of the querelle, in the same way that, in so many late-medieval narrative poems, a shadow of the Roman de la rose is inescapable.91 Composition of decomposition: ‘sy meurs et transsis en vivant’ De Hauteville’s Confession, located immediately prior to the final Epitaphe in JdP, is a useful touchstone for unpicking concerns of death and identity in the whole sequence, especially in terms of its poetic protraction of the liminal

JdP, I, fol. 11v; see also II, p. 51. Itself a citation of the position of Chartier’s persona in his Complainte de la mort a la dame m. Alain: see Chapter 4, p. 217. See also above, n. 64. 89 I cite the texts as they appear in Vérard’s editions of JdP (all in vol. I of the facsimile) rather than according to their critical edition (where one exists). Verse numbers in brackets after the page number indicate the corresponding reference in a modern edition (here, Bidler’s edition of the Confession). In de Hauteville’s Inventaire (discussed below and in Chapter 4), a copy of BDSM is recovered posthumously amongst the persona’s effects. 90 Cayley groups both the Confession and the Arrêts in a third cycle of responses to BDSM (Debate, p. 145). For the Arrêts, see above, n. 17. 91 Taylor, ‘Inescapable Rose: Jean Le Sénéchal’s Livre des cent ballades and the Art of Cheerful Paradox’, Medium Ævum, 67 (1998), 60–84. Blame for the relationship breakdown between ‘le chevalier’ and ‘une dame’, early on in final sequence of JdP (fols 229r–231r), is imputed to Foul Mouth (Malebouche), a personification derived from RR, here used to epitomise the anti-courtly figure of slanderous losengiers, those who destroy the affairs of true lovers. 87

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moment of transition from life to death.92 The title rubric heading up the piece in JdP differs from the poem’s usual title by shifting verb tense from the past participle (‘trespassé’) to the present: ‘Comment le chevalier oultré d’amours trespasse de dueil de sa dame’ (fol. 247r [How the knight overcome by love dies of grief for his lady]).93 This tense change, besides integrating the poem into the narrative arc of JdP, represents more accurately how the poem stages a process of dying or, indeed, dying as a state of being. The persona defines his current life in terms of death, both through explicit statement – ‘[La mort] ennuye desja a ma vie’ (fol. 247v (v. 10) [[Death] already intrudes on my life]); ‘Car je tiens ma personne morte’ (fol. 250v (v. 528) [For I hold myself to be dead] – and through elaboration of the conventional amant martir topos of being irremediably stuck: Sy meurs et transsis en vivant, En souhaittant la mort souvent Et si ne puis mourir ne vivre, N’aller derriere ne devant. (Confession, fol. 248r (vv. 115–18)) [I die and perish whilst still alive, often wishing for death; and so I can neither die nor live, neither go backward nor forward.]

The paradox of verse 115 echoes the semantic suggestiveness of the poem’s opening strophe: Gysant au lict malade griefment, Transsy de dueil et d’annoy rigoureux. (Confession, fol. 247v (vv. 3–4)) [Lying gravely ill in my bed, paralysed by grief and severe distress.]

Neither participle – ‘gysant’ nor ‘transsy’ – necessarily or exclusively refers to a position in death,94 but their anaphoric juxtaposition, together with the absence of a main verb in the immediate vicinity, evokes a suspended state of animation

92 The status of the Confession as a significant item is perhaps reflected in the table of contents used in the fifth, sixth and seventh editions of JdP, in which the poem’s contents are spread across nine entries (the ninth being an amalgamation of the four last section rubrics of the poem, including mention of the ‘epitaphe’), in comparison to one entry in Vérard’s editions. However, at the same time, any sense of the work as a discrete entity is diminished, not simply by spreading its content across entries (not having, as is most often the case in Vérard, one entry per work), but also through the practice, observed in all other editions consulted, of not using a title rubric to preface the Confession where it appears in the main body of the volume: instead, it follows on directly from the debate between heart and body, with simply an inserted character name: ‘Le chevalier oultré’, to introduce de Hauteville’s persona’s first speech (see, for example, fol. 215r in the fifth edition). 93 That is, the title found in the explicit of its manuscript copies; on the lack of a title rubric altogether in editions other than Vérard’s, see above, n. 92. 94 Singer explores potential erotic wordplay on transi, and pursues an intriguing analogy between the narrative structure of the Confession and a transi tomb: ‘“Mon corps”’, pp. 417–24.



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and enacts lexically a certain ‘death wish’ on the part of the persona.95 This state of being ‘mort ja de surenté’ (fol. 247v (v. 77) [surely already dead])96 – redolent of the HA persona: ‘desja suis mort a peu pres’ – is sustained throughout the Confession, including his ultimate signa mortis. The Lady, earlier in the series, also experiences an extended demise. Her first physical signs of death (‘le visage pallé et noircy’, fol. 231v [her face pallid and darkened]), appear when she has been abandoned by her Lover in the first poem of the sequence ‘proper’: ‘Comment du jardin de plaisance Malebouche chasse le chevalier dudit jardin de plaisance dont sa dame en meurt de courroux’ (fol. 229r [How, in the pleasure garden, Foul Mouth chases the knight out of the aforesaid pleasure garden, on account of which his lady dies of sorrow]).97 As the present tense verb (‘meurt’) suggests, she remains some time in a state of dying, in fact until half-way through the following poem: ‘Comment la dame se complaignant douloureusement et requerant la mort et depriant, soubdainement la vint frapper de sa darde mortelle dont piteusement elle mourut’ (fol. 231v [How the lady, lamenting bitterly and begging for death beseechingly, was suddenly struck down by its lethal spear and consequently died piteously]). Her passage from life to death is deftly effected through gradual transition of narrative voice from first to third person: A ceste heure me convient rendre l’ame Disant a Dieu a tout loyal amant Luy suppliant que brief de ceste dame Preigne pitié veu q’honnorablement Son doulx amy ayma si loyaulment Que quant envye leur fit ung congié prendre Par desplaisir s’en courca tellement Qui tost aprés luy convint l’ame rendre. Acteur La noble dame sur ce point trespassa. ([de La Vigne?], fols 232v–233r) [Now I must breathe my last, addressing God and all faithful lovers, imploring Him, in short, to take pity on this lady, given that she honourably loved her sweet lover so faithfully that, when envy rancorously caused

95 Cf. Danielle Quéruel’s proposal that ‘l’amant trespassé de deuil’ constitutes ‘a new literary figure’: ‘“L’Amant trespassé de deuil” d’Alain Chartier à Pierre de Hauteville’, in Mourir pour des idées, pp. 409–28. Gilbert includes in her category of ‘the living dead’, ‘those who while alive exist under a deathly shadow that forecloses their engagement with life’ (Living Death, p. 1), a permutation of whom we could see in de Hauteville’s persona. 96 A sense of willed death is even stronger in manuscript readings of this verse, which attest, as recorded by Bidler, ‘mort ja de voulenté’ (Confession, v. 77 [willingly already dead]). 97 The strophe in which these signa mortis appear is seen by the facsimile editors (JdP, II, p. 301) to be an addition by the JdP compiler to create a seamless narrative continuity with the following item: the Lady’s direct discourse at the opening of the [de La Vigne?] poem imprecating death is introduced by a verbum dicendi in the final verse of the previous item: ‘Se prist a l[=Mort]’appeller ainsi’ (fol. 231r [She began to call upon Death as follows]).

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them to part, she was so grief-stricken that soon after she came to breathe her last. Acteur: At this point the noble lady died.]

The asymmetry of the huitain’s first and last verses – ‘me convient rendre l’ame’ and ‘luy convint l’ame rendre’ – crystallises the shift in perspective occasioned in the course of the strophe from first person to third person, and from present to past tense. The Lady envisages her identity obliquely as she foretells her death, projecting a posthumous perspective on her life and treating herself effectively as a ‘cas’: a case of ‘ceste dame’ and ‘son doulx amy’, a scenario. An expedient intervention by a narrating persona (which is also the first appearance of ‘l’Acteur’ in the rubrics of the poem) takes over the relay of narrative voice from the Lady, affirming her death in the third person. The Confession, by comparison, has no such expedient in its text to effect this transition; instead, it uses the rubric which precedes the final strophe to provide a third-person voice confirming the demise of the lover-persona: Comment il rend l’ame A ce coup l’esperit rendray, Ne point plus avant passeray, Car icy dois finer mon terme. Je m’en vois, plus je ne vivray;98 Adieu, jamais ne vous verray. Je vous recommande mon ame. (Confession, fol. 258r (vv. 1621–6)) [How he breathes his last: At this point I shall breathe my last and go on no further, for here I must end my term. I am leaving now, I shall live no longer; farewell, I shall never see you again. I commend to you my soul.]

The shift in verb tense (‘rendray’ > ‘rend’) reflects that of the [de La Vigne?] poem, but not precisely: we move here from the future (of the speaker) to the present (of the rubric), rather than from present to past, so we still, in fact, lack definite confirmation that the Lover’s life has ended. By contrast, the Lady is promptly and emphatically dispatched, since [de La Vigne?]’s Acteur witnesses preparation of her body for burial (‘le corps estoit d’ung fin drap d’or couvert’, fol. 233v [the body was wrapped in a fine gold sheet]) and its interment in front of an altar.99 The absence of confirmed departure for the Confession’s Lover is tantalising in at least two respects: in the transtextual context of de Hauteville’s oeuvre, and within the material context of JdP’s closing sequence. I address each in turn. There exist two ‘sequels’ by de Hauteville to the Confession: La Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil and the Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de

98 Bidler’s edition, representing the manuscript readings, offers ‘plus ne revenray’ ([I shall not return]); she reads the JdP variant as ‘vinray’ (Confession, p. 92). 99 Nobles were accorded burial within the church rather than in a cemetery: Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, pp. 153–211.



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l’amant trespassé de deuil.100 In the former, in tension with the past participle of the title (‘trespassé’), the Lover is still languishing in death-in-life (‘brief: je n’ay membre qui a mort si ne tire’, v. 298 [in short: every limb of my body inclines towards death]). He is there made to flag up how his physical dilapidation is an opportunity for poetic creativity: Las! maintenant mon corps se desassemble. […] Douleur sur moy de toutes pars s’assemble. […] L’esprit fuit, plus mort que vif ressemble. (Complainte, vv. 289, 291, 295) [Alas! Now my body is falling apart. […] Pain accumulates in every part of me. […] My spirit fails, I look more dead than alive.]

Through suggestive traductio (desassemble/assemble/ressemble), de Hauteville evokes how corporeal decomposition can trigger literary composition, constructing rather than dismantling identity. Since, like the Confession, and also by dint of its status as a lyric lament, the Complainte maintains the stasis of one who ‘meur[t] et transsi[t] en vivant’, this poem might more properly be called a ‘complement’ rather than a ‘sequel’. The Inventaire, on the other hand, is conclusively posthumous and retrospective from the outset: Aprés le doloreux trespas De l’Amant trespassé de dueil, Dont l’ame ait glorieux repas Ainsi que je desire et vueil. (Inventaire, vv. 1–4) [After the dolorous demise of the Lover who died of grief, may his soul find glorious relief, as I so desire and wish.]

A first-person persona bears third-person witness to the demise of the first person of the previous poems, whilst nonetheless carrying accents of that first person and manifesting keen interest (in all senses) in it/him.101 Text as epitaph in material context: ‘icy dois finer mon terme’ The second point of interest in the lack of confirmed death at the end of the Confession concerns the material context of its appearance in JdP, which we may see to be evoked within the final strophe of the poem itself: ‘icy dois finer mon terme’ (fol. 258r, cited above). The spatial deixis (‘icy’) may be taken to 100 The Complainte and Inventaire are edited together in the same volume by Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1986), in Le Moyen Français, 18. Both feature, following on from the Confession, in the Vatican manuscript mentioned above (p. 125), Vat. Reg. lat. 1363. For the manuscript presentation of all three poems, see Complainte/Inventaire, p. 13, and below, p. 142. 101 See below, p. 215.

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designate the placement of the poem prior to L’Epitaphe, which, in a manner that I shall explore later, supplies de Hauteville’s persona with his end, in its declaration: ‘Cy gist le corps de l’amant nonpareil’ (fol. 258v [Here lies the body of the peerless lover]).102 Affirmation of his interment, like that of the Lady earlier, seals his fate, but does not close down the question of his identity. [De La Vigne?]’s Lady is said to receive an epitaph: Puis y mist on ung tableau de cypres Comble et replet d’une griefve epytaphe. ([de La Vigne?], fol. 234r) [Then they placed there a cypress tablet adorned and replete with a woeful epitaph.]

However, its precise location (where it lies) and its substance (what it says) prove to be far more complex than this straightforward statement implies, in a way that prompts us to reflect on the scope of any such epitaph and on its possible plurality. First, given what we have seen to be the standard syntactic format of verse epitaphs, we could see the Lady already to have been accorded one earlier in [de La Vigne?]’s poem: when the persona took over the narrative relay from the expired Lady, he immediately offered a tribute to her in the epitaph mould of single main verb (past tense of être) followed by a succession of epithets or descriptive phrases in apposition: Et si estoit humble, prudente, sage, Tresadvenante, benigne, belle et bonne… ([de La Vigne?], fol. 233r) [For she was humble, prudent, wise, very gracious, benign, beautiful and good…]

Moreover, the actual content of the ‘griefve epytaphe’ is deferred in a further narrative relay: having mentioned its inscription in a cypress tablet, the persona breaks off his exposition and suspends his narrative agency in respect of its description: Plus amplement vous sera declairé Quant ce viendra au point et lieu requis Pour quoy present du surplus me tairay. ([de La Vigne?], fol. 234r) [[The epitaph] will be described in more detail when we come to the right time and place, and therefore I say nothing further about it now.]

The allusively imprecise designation of time and place: ‘au point et lieu requis’, admits a double referent: on the one hand, one could see the Lady’s ‘epytaphe’ to 102 In the later Middle Ages, people could have more than one burial if the body were divided for parts to be interred separately (Brown, ‘Death’, p. 228), which would similarly pluralise a deictic assertion ‘cy gist’.



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be manifested in L’Epitaphe at the end of JdP (which I shall explain shortly); on the other hand, more immediately and following the logic of the poetic sequence established by the compiler of JdP, time and place gesture towards the moment in L’Oultré d’amour, the following text, when its Knight encounters a tomb in the temple of Love. That the body lying therein is his deceased Lady’s is not immediately disclosed, and his/our deciphering of its identity is set up as a kind of riddle.103 This tomb, interestingly, has no epitaph, but bears two other forms of verbal inscription. First, Grosse escripture d’or brochée, En quoy estoit assez touchée Du mort la cause et vertu mainte, Qui commençoit par tel complainte. (OA, fol. 236r (p. 77)) [A large text decorated in gold, which detailed the situation and many virtues of the deceased, and began with the following complaint.]

The complaint lasts for six strophes and gradually reveals – indeed, composes – an identity. A teasing first strophe presents us with the brute corporeal reality of the body contained therein: Pour scavoir en lisant ces vers Qui gist en ceste sepulture, Je suis un corps viande aux vers. (OA, fols 236r–236v (p. 77)) [Whoever wants to know in reading these verses who lies in this tomb, I am a body that is meat for worms.]

Quite conventional macabre wordplay on ‘vers’ as ‘worm’ and ‘verse’ yields a sense of the body as poetic material that will at once nourish and be exceeded by the text that it generates,104 decomposition transformed into literary creation.105 The JdP compiler entitles Chastelain’s poem: ‘Comment le chevalier est oultré de courroux pour l’amour de sa dame qui est allée de vie a trespas’ (fol. 234r [How the knight is overcome with sorrow for love of his lady who has passed over from 103 Cf. the persona’s refusal to explain the much smaller casket (‘coffinet’) that he leaves as an offering in Love’s chapel: ‘Donc, quel tresor ne quelle chose / Qu’il y povoit avoir dedans, / Je vueil bien que chascun y glose; / Mais autrement je ne l’expose’ (fol. 238v (p. 91) [And so, I am very keen that everyone should infer what treasure and what contents there could have been inside; but I shall not otherwise describe it]). On the coffre in Chastelain’s writing, see Doudet, Poétique, pp. 538–41; on OA’s use of evasion, see ibid., p. 653. 104 Cf. Doudet, Poétique, p. 216. This topos is recycled in respect of the Knight in the five huitains added by the JdP compiler to the end of OA (above, n. 79): he is laid out in despair ‘tant que corps prest de mettre aux vers’ (fol. 244v [like a body ready to be given over to worms]). A sense of the body as poetic material is particularly apt, since this is itself an innovated passage, and has been innovated so as to introduce a further poem depicting the body in debate with the heart. 105 See Cerquiglini-Toulet, Écriture, pp. 14–15.

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life to death]), but we could perceive her identity, as constructed from beyond the grave, to be a movement in the opposite direction, from physical death to textual resuscitation, like the BDSM Lover in Caulier’s CF. There is, I think, an emphasis on process in the phrase ‘corps viande aux vers’: in providing meat to the worms, the corpse is still an enfleshed body; it is not yet a skeletal cadaver, a pile of anonymous and jumbled bones like the Belle Dame in the Erreurs or the desiccated remains of the hanged men in L’Epitaphe Villon. Thereby, we sense a gradual process of decomposition complemented by a progressive composition of identity through the rhetoric of the corpse’s tomb inscriptions. There is also an irony in having the first positive statement of identity by the speaker of the complaint (‘je suis un corps viande aux vers’) amount to a negative, in the sense that a corpse is ‘a strangely empty sign’:106 a negation of personal identity that entertains an uncertain, dislocated relationship with the individual now deceased.107 Part of this negation of identity, and a linguistic advantage of selecting ‘le corps’ as the first substantive to denote the tomb’s occupant, is its occlusion of the gender of the person whom it represents. Only in the complaint’s second strophe does the speaker’s gender become discernible as feminine, through a past participle agreement with a preceding direct object: ‘Nature qui m’avoit nourrie’ (fol. 236v (p. 77) [Nature who had nourished me]). We also learn that she is young, and, in the third strophe, she obliquely identifies herself as a noble lady in love: Mais ne déplaise a vivant ame Si d’amour tiltre m’attribue Car j’ay aymé de corps et d’ame [Autant que fit onc noble dame]. (OA, fol. 236v (p. 78))108 [But may it displease no living soul if I accord myself a title of love, since I have loved with body and soul as much as any noble lady ever did.]

A mixture of personal expressions (‘I have loved’) and indirect (‘if I accord myself’) or third-person (comparison with ‘any noble lady’) formulations sustains a blurriness of identity, whereas, in the final strophe, the complaint closes on an unequivocal and direct declamation: ‘Je suis morte en amour martire’ (fol. 236v (p. 78) [I died/am dead as a martyr for love]). Master, p. 56. According to Blanchot, ‘quelque chose est là devant nous, qui n’est ni le vivant en personne, ni une réalité quelconque, ni le même que celui qui était en vie, ni un autre, ni autre chose […] le défunt regretté commence à ressembler à lui-même. […] Mais à quoi ressemble-t-il? À rien’: ‘Les Deux versions de l’imaginaire’, in L’Espace littéraire, pp. 266–77, pp. 268–71 [something is there in front of us, which is not really the living person, nor is it any reality at all. It is not the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else […] the mourned deceased begins to resemble himself. […] But what is it like? Nothing]. I follow Ann Smock’s translation, The Space of Literature (Lincoln, NE/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), pp. 256–8. 108 The last verse of this quotation is missing from the huitain in JdP, which thus stands as a lone septain (ABABBCC) – presumably a printing error. 106 Camille, 107



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The second form of verbal inscription is a set of four scrolls (‘rouleaux’, fol. 236v (p. 79)), each supporting a candle held by one of four statues positioned around the tomb. The scrolls insist upon the excellence and exceptionality of the deceased lady, calling her ‘la plus vaillant et noble dame’ (fol. 236v (p. 79) [the most worthy and noble lady]), casting her as greater than any ‘au livre [De mulieribus claris] de Bocace’ (fol. 236v (p. 80) [in the book [Of Famous Women] by Boccaccio]), and noting that peerless rhetoric would be needed ‘pour en son epitaphe escrire’ (fol. 236v (p. 79) [to compose her epitaph]). But they do not otherwise particularise her identity. Chastelain flags up the sense of intrigue generated around her when he refers in the text of third scroll to: La ou le corps gist enterré Dont tout le monde quiert nouvelles (OA, fol. 236v (p. 80)). [There where the body lies buried, about which everyone wants to find out more.]

Given our intertextual context for reading OA in conjunction with the [de La Vigne?] poem and potentially also with L’Epitaphe in the material environment of the JdP anthology, the spatial deixis ‘la ou’ becomes intriguingly ambiguous. Epitaphic naming and character typing: ‘l’oultré d’amours pour amour morte’ If the identity of the Lady in Chastelain’s poem is rendered ‘ung si merveilleux merveille’ (OA, fol. 237r (p. 80) [such a wondrous wonder]), that of the Knight is also complicated: not, in his case, by being obscured through riddling mystification, but through pluralisation. There is a slipperiness regarding the lover-subject of the poem’s principal narrative: who is its ‘oultré d’amour’? We initially focus on a je who is trying to sleep, who then tells us of a third party who told his tale to the je: Le jour devant de son malheur S’estoit complaint ung autre a moy. (OA, fol. 234v (p. 68)) [The day before, someone else had complained to me of his misfortune.]

That ‘someone’s lady had died, and the je states how affected he was by his grief before revealing that his own lady has also died (fol. 235r (p. 70)). The je then sees a Knight who is similarly bereaved, and whose Lady posthumously proclaims herself ‘morte en amour martire’, as we just saw. So we seem already, before the main body of the narrative (a debate between the Knight and a squire who attempts to console him for his loss),109 to have too many ‘oultrés d’amour’. 109 At one point, Chastelain’s grief-stricken Knight resembles representations of the BDSM querelle Lover, when he declares his right to ‘[…] vivre en dueil / De porter dueil, de

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More precisely, we seem to have both too many and not enough, in the sense that the several bereft figures whom we encounter do not cohere into discrete identities. A purely quantitative approach fails to take account of the kinds of plurality and slippage that we discussed above in respect of the BDSM querelle, and that we see again in JdP around the figures of both Lady and Lover (whether knight or persona). We witness dispersal in how ‘her’ securely entombed body in the [de La Vigne?] poem does not prevent ‘her’ voice from speaking out through inscriptions in OA. Likewise, ‘he’ is far from unitary in ‘his’ activities over the course of the sequence: abandoning his Lady, mourning her, being anatomised into debate between heart and body, mourning some more and then dying. But there is also continuity: beyond the minimal narrative connections forged by the title rubrics, a cohering thread invites us to view ‘each’ Lover or ‘each’ Lady as interrelated through quite subtle slippage. In respect of the Lover, towards the end of OA, in one of five strophes contrived by the JdP compiler to effect transition between Chastelain’s poem and the following item, the narrating persona remarks of the Knight: ‘J’atendis la fin de sa plainte’ (fol. 244v [I waited for the end of his complaint]). This apparently straightforward statement is, I think, provocatively so, especially in the context of a passage that is grafted onto Chastelain’s original poem, which helps to undo any unitary understanding of ‘I’, ‘the’ end, ‘him’, and ‘his’ complaint, and renders ambiguous the duration of the ‘wait’. The lament of ‘le chevalier’ continues, as we have seen, through de Hauteville’s Confession (and, indeed, looking transtextually, into the same writer’s Complainte, albeit not in this anthology) and only ends in JdP in L’Epitaphe and in its concluding verse, which cites the final verse of OA which yielded the title of that work: ‘L’oultré d’amours pour amour morte’ (fol. 258v, v. 15 (OA, p. 128) [the one overcome by love who died for love]), prior to the JdP compiler’s editing of OA. The only adjustment to the last verse of OA in its appearance in L’Epitaphe is the addition at the start of the verse of ‘nommé’: […] il est pour verité Nommé L’oultré d’amours pour amour morte. (Epitaphe, fol. 258v, vv. 14–15) [[…] He is in truth called The one overcome by love who died for love.]

Beyond accommodating Chastelain’s octosyllable in L’Epitaphe’s decasyllabic verse, the particular word added helps to raise the question: whom is the epitaph commemorating? Who is its ‘oultré d’amours’, or is this an inappropriate question in light of our discussion of slippery, non-singular identity? A simple answer would be that the question is malposed, on the grounds that we are dealing with generic character types in these poems, and so one would not expect there to be

baisser l’oeil / Et de noyer mon cueur en larmes’ (fol. 238v [[…] live in mourning, to wear weeds, to lower my gaze, and to drown my heart in tears] (p. 89: the edition’s version has him speak of wearing black and of drowning his body)).



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any individual identity at issue.110 However, I think that the ways in which we see poets, in JdP’s closing sequence as well as in the BDSM querelle, exploiting death as an opportunity to explore issues of identity-formation, its processes and agencies, suggest both that there is a strong interest in identity and that one tool for developing this is precisely a self-conscious manipulation of character types deployed, as it were, as counters in a game; after all, a character type, like a personification, cannot actually die.111 In L’Epitaphe, the vocabulary describing its deceased subject invites us to see him as an exemplary type: Cy gist le corps de l’amant nompareil Qu’on doit sur tous tant en terre qu’en mer Plaindre, plorer, louer et estimer Car oncques doeil n’en fut veu le pareil. C’estoit des preux l’excellent appareil, Des vaillans gens le patron et l’exemple. (Epitaphe, fol. 258v, vv. 3–8) [Here lies the body of the peerless lover who should be lamented, mourned, praised and esteemed above any other on land or sea, for never was there seen a grief like his. He was the highest model of nobility, the template and example for honourable people.]

Emphasis falls on ‘his’ exceptional qualities and thus configures his identity in terms of his value as an example to others. The spatial deixis of ‘cy gist’ unites reader and compiler since ‘here’ – picking up on de Hauteville’s ‘icy dois finer mon terme’ – is the space of the anthology and L’Epitaphe’s place in it, which, coming at the end, invites connection with what precedes it, in two respects.112 First, and more broadly, we can see the generality of this presentation of ‘l’amant nompareil’ to make of ‘him’ a type representing all superlatively-suffering-for-love-lover-characters in the volume: their individual case-histories are amalgamated into one ‘exemple’, and their names signify in a continuity with that of L’Epitaphe’s subject as ‘nom-pareil’ ([name-same]). There is an interesting implication for locating identity in this homonymic play between

110 As with the woodcuts illustrating Vérard’s editions (and others), which show generic male and female figures whose banderoles, when completed with a character name to fit with a given poem’s scenario, themselves only offer a generic designation of status or role (chevalier, dame, dieu d’Amour, etc.). 111 Late-medieval poets frequently play on a literary reflexive awareness of the nature of personifications: for example, in HA, Love chides the persona for being discouraged by the obstructiveness of Resistance (‘Dangier’) since ‘[…] he acted as is his wont. He was made to be that way […]’ (HA, vv. 558–9). 112 Marie-Thérèse Lorcin notes that, in the vast majority of real testaments, a burial site is selected, and that electing one’s own final resting place amounts to the testator choosing also his neighbours, relatives or friends (‘Choisir un lieu de sépulture’, in À réveiller les morts, pp. 245–52, p. 246). One could see de Hauteville’s persona to be put in an analogous position regarding the textual company that he is given to keep in JdP. See also Chiffoleau, Comptabilité, p. 21.

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superlative singularity (‘nompareil’ as ‘peerless’) and exemplary representativeness (‘nompareil’ as ‘sharing the same name’): it makes of the commemorated Knight in L’Epitaphe at once everybody (with whom he shares the title ‘chevalier’) and nobody (since he is different from everybody else, whilst being at the same time only definable in terms of his relationship to others). He is in that sense the epitome of the kind of relationally constituted identity in continual flux that I have been exploring in this chapter. Second, I think there is a more particular connection between L’Epitaphe’s deceased and the lover-figures in the sequence of poems immediately before it, not least given its quotation of the last verse of OA.113 I perceive in JdP’s L’Epitaphe something of the riddling quality discerned in the deceased Lady’s complaint in OA, and see the generic exemplarity of the commemorated figure to be perhaps intentionally overdetermined, to incite us to make connections with the preceding poems.114 The sequence is made to operate as a sequence by the compiler having ensured – through rubrication and/or textual editing – that each text ties in neatly with the scenario and narrative structure of the one that follows, so as to foster continuity.115 It is therefore reasonable to assume that such a link was intended between

113 I am positing an intertextually agile readership (see above, p. 91) who would be apt to recognise the last verse of OA from its citation in L’Epitaphe, not least given the recurrence of ‘oultré’ in the poems’ rubrics. 114 This argument certainly holds for the layout of Vérard’s editions, which present L’Epitaphe as a discrete item, separated from the preceding Confession by a three-quarter-page woodcut. Subsequent editions vary in their presentation of this poem, whereas there is consistency regarding other items in the sequence. As noted above (n. 80), in the table of contents to Vérard’s editions, L’Epitaphe features as part of the entry for the Confession; this also applies in the fifth, sixth and seventh editions (the third and fourth lack such a table). In the main body of the volume, in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh editions, L’Epitaphe appears not as a separate item but as a further, final section heading in the Confession (which can thus, in the fifth, sixth and seventh, be seen to correspond to its listing in the table of contents). In the fifth, there seems to be some hesitation over the status of L’Epitaphe (fol. 224r), since a gap is inserted between it and the previous section of de Hauteville’s poem (‘Comment il rend l’ame’); this gap is noteworthy, given that the edition uses blank space very sparingly – the rubricated title of each new text follows on directly after the end of the previous item. The third edition’s presentation of L’Epitaphe (fol. II8v) repeats the layout of Vérard’s fol. 258v, including its woodcut (here covering more like two-thirds of the page), but this appears not to have been entirely coordinated with the production of the volume, whose colophon features on the previous page, at the end of the Confession (fol. II8r). The same woodcut is also found in a neat parallel situation heading up ‘Les Epytaphes et complaintes du duc de Vendosme’ in certain editions of the Vergier d’honneur (fol. o3v). In a late edition of the Vergier by Philippe Le Noir, the woodcut is used twice, heading up not only de La Vigne’s funerary poem (fol. J2v), but also Saint-Gelais’s ‘La Complainte et l’epitaphe du feu roy Charles dernier trespassé’ (fol. K3r); this repetition is striking, given both the sparseness of illustration in this edition and the two-third-page size of the image, since other woodcuts used are smaller. See also Introduction, n. 48. 115 On the extent of JdP’s architectural design and coherence, see Taylor, Making, pp. 231–3, 289–90.



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de Hauteville’s Confession and L’Epitaphe.116 In the course of the Confession, the bereaved persona makes quite extensive, precise, indeed peculiar, prescriptions for funeral and burial arrangements (Confession, fols 254v–256v (vv. 1129–379)).117 He requests a commemorative tomb (fol. 256v (v. 1349)) and asks that two scrolls on it bear inscriptions addressing God and passers-by. He also specifies an epitaph, but using a plural rather than a singular form of the habitual incipit formula: ‘cy gisent deux corps entassez’ (fol. 256v (v. 1357) [here lie two bodies on top of one another]), since the underlying principle of all his instructions is ensuring that he and his Lady are remembered together: Mais ensemble ce [s]era Pour moy et pour ma dicte dame. (Confession, fol. 255v (vv. 1253–4)) [But it will be for me and for my aforesaid lady together.]

So entwined does he wish them to be that he longs to be buried wrapped in the very sheet in which she died. The epitaph supplied by JdP’s L’Epitaphe is singular: ‘Cy gist le corps de l’amant nompareil’, catering only for the Lover. However, I think it somewhat fruitful, as a way of furthering our reflections on identity slippage, to consider the Lady as being in some measure also contained within this final poem: an implicit, collective ‘cy gisent’ accounted for by ‘cy gist’. I have mentioned already how the final verse of L’Epitaphe quotes the last verse of Chastelain’s OA in respect of the Knight, but we could also see in this verse an echo of the last of the Lady’s words from beyond the grave: ‘Je suis morte en amour martire’ (OA, fol. 236v (p. 78)). We recall in addition that her ‘griefve epytaphe’, promised by [de La Vigne?] to be delivered ‘au point et lieu requis’ (fol. 234r), has not yet been properly realised, since whilst OA furnished a complaint and tomb inscriptions, it only gestured towards provision of an epitaph in the inscriptions’ reference to the peerless (‘nompareil’?) rhetoric that would be needed for such an undertaking. Does L’Epitaphe, then, in some sense mark the anticipated ‘point et lieu requis’ for it to appear? Whilst grammatical gender would argue against this (we clearly have ‘l’amant’ and ‘l’oultré’ as masculine forms), most nouns used in L’Epitaphe refer not to an individual but to the example set by – the exemplary perdurance of – that individual: ‘le patron’, ‘l’exemple’, etc. Since the Lady of [de La Vigne?] and OA is also lauded in superlative terms (‘la fleur des Françoises’ (OA, fol. 236r (p. 77) [the flower of French ladies]), she could be understood to participate in a composite exemplary projection in L’Epitaphe. We recall, back in FT, how the figure connecting the two sections of Milet’s poem is the epitome of noble womanhood: ‘le patron et 116 On the question of discerning intentional design in a sixteenth-century anthology’s organisation, see Taylor, Making, pp. 263, 265, 286, 290–1. See also Le Recueil au moyen âge: la fin du moyen âge, ed. Tania Van Hemelryck and Stefania Marzano (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). 117 For instance, he commands that mourners wear, instead of black, bright red coats with yellow hoods (Confession, fol. 255r (vv. 1147–9)).

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le chief des dames’ (fol. 205v, v. 267), whom the persona encounters imprisoned in the forest in the first part, and witnesses acting as plaintiff in the trial of Matheolus and Jean de Meun in the second.118 Exemplarity seems here to yield anonymity, a nameless ‘nompareil’, and it is perhaps striking in this light that another of de Hauteville’s Lover’s prescriptions was for any posthumous proclamation not to use his name: Je veulx qu’on me voise crier Et publier ma sepulture […] Mais par le cry deffens en somme Que mon nom noble on ne nomme. (Confession, fol. 254v (vv. 1077–8, 1081–2)) [I want to be proclaimed and to have my burial place broadcast […] but I totally prohibit any proclamation from naming my noble name.]

He asks instead that the cry identify him simply as an amorous type: ‘povre amant feal’ (fol. 254v [poor faithful lover]).119 This fits neatly with the presentation of identity in L’Epitaphe: its emphasis on public reception (‘qu’on doit […] / Plaindre, plorer, louer, estimer […]’, vv. 4–5) and its omission of any specific name beyond having ‘him’ ‘nommé l’oultré d’amours pour amours morte’ (v. 15). Recomposing identity: fragments of La Belle Dame sans mercy in Le Jardin de plaisance The above reading of L’Epitaphe sees it to be inviting a similar approach to the composition of identity to the BDSM querelle, especially, as we saw, in CF and the Erreurs. The decomposition and dispersal of the body are accompanied by a gathering together of elements that construct identity not as a fixed, immutable and individually bounded unit but as a more flexible, relationally constituted entity. Such an approach is also fostered by the third poem in de Hauteville’s ‘amant trespassé’ series, the Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant trespassé de deuil, which offers an intriguing posthumous gaze on the material remains of the Lover’s life. As noted above, the point of view from which we experience the inventory – which amounts to a tour of his property 118 She is elsewhere lauded in the Forest as ‘patron du sexe femenin’ (fol. 221v, v. 3012 [the model of womanhood]), and her complaint is introduced by a rubric qualifying her representatively as ‘advocate of every faithful lady in the world’ (fol. 207v, preceding v. 596). 119 The manuscript reading here is ‘ung amant feal’ (v. 1087). Is it conceivable that ‘povre’ was introduced into the incunable by analogy with the prominence of the epithet in portraits of Villon’s persona? The version of the Confession in JdP features two strophes, absent from manuscript witnesses, which echo remarkably closely the Testament, suggesting that the compiler edited de Hauteville’s poem for inclusion in the volume in light of the later work; several of Villon’s fixed-form lyrics, including L’Epitaphe Villon (discussed in Chapter 1), feature in JdP. See Taylor, Poetry, pp. 23–4.



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by his friends, spatially dramatising the enumeration process – is uncertain in terms of its relationship to the deceased Lover ‘himself’. L’Inventaire marks a slippage from first person to third person, analogous to the infamous shift in the so-called ‘Ballade de conclusion’ of Villon’s Testament, which invites us to the funeral of the poem’s apparently now deceased je.120 De Hauteville’s Lover’s physical absence from the setting of L’Inventaire is emphasised through detailed description of the furnishings, fabrics and decoration of his bedchamber, evoking a vivid material context from which the subject has, simply and starkly, departed: ‘ou le dit Amant trespassa’ (Inventaire, v. 110 [where the said Lover died]). The termination of his life is affirmed through insistent reference to him within the text as ‘l’Amant trespassé’ ([the dead Lover]) and as ‘le Defunt’ ([the Deceased]), now that he is definitely dead: he is described in the terms of death that he wished upon himself whilst still in the final stages of life. The tour of his house does not furnish a neat biography or consistent, coherent portrait of his life as Lover: indeed, there is bathetic emphasis on mundane accoutrements: Item après, en la cuisine, Trois paeles, une grant chaudiere, Une cassete clere et fine Avec une bassinouere. (Inventaire, vv. 49–52) [And next, in the kitchen, three frying pans, one large cooking pot, a polished and handsome bed wagon (?) with a warming pan.]

Following the precision of the Lover’s prescriptions in the Confession, there is almost a disappointing messiness to the Inventaire, which simply lists items and does not distinguish which elements should or should not be privileged.121 There is, however, some indication of a judging, ordering gaze on objects’ worth, as the persona mentions an unsentimental debate over whether to keep or discard a damaged letter (‘brevet’, v. 480) in which his Lady promised him a kiss: Les ungs pour ce qu’estoit rayé Le vouloient mectre en nonchaloir, Mais il fut inventorié Pour servir ce qu’il peut valoir. (Inventaire, vv. 493–6) [Some, because it was crossed through, wanted to cast it aside, but it was inventoried to be of use according to its worth.]

But these items’ value remains undetermined; there is no evocation of them acting as relics, for instance. A literary reflexive dimension arises most forcibly

Testament, vv. 1996–2023; see Chapter 1, pp. 44–5. Quéruel views as a paradox the fact that it is only after the Lover’s death that we receive a portrait of him (‘“L’Amant trespassé”’, p. 423); whilst this is so, the ‘portrait’ itself is far from clearly delineated – the task of shaping remains to be accomplished by the reader. 120

121

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through the contents of the late Lover’s book collection: Lancelot du Lac, Le Roman de la rose, Le Livre des joies et douleurs, Du Jenne amoureux sans soucy, La Belle Dame sans mercy, L’Ospital d’amour, Michault Taillevent’s Passe temps, L’Amant rendu cordelier a l’observance d’amours (vv. 429–44). In its titles one could perceive the episodes of an erotic trajectory, the chapters of a love life, like the texts of the BDSM querelle constituting the Belle Dame’s name and renown.122 As this is an inventory, what is described is the material form and presentation of the books rather than any details of story content: Lancelot is ‘ung cartulat / En François rond sans quelque gloze’ (vv. 429–30 [a book in French in a round hand, without any gloss]); these are, therefore, the bones (‘os’, Erreurs, v. 1008), the physical fragments, that one would ‘amasser’ and ‘fouillier’ (v. 1007) to construct the Lover’s identity. The narrative poems included within JdP, composed mostly, as far as we know, between 1425 and 1470, locate themselves in an intertextual network that extends beyond the anthology, creeping out of its pages – across de Hauteville’s oeuvre, into Villon’s Testament123 and through texts of the BDSM querelle. Indeed, one could claim that the most significant text in terms of its influence on, and intertextual presence in, the poems of JdP lies outside its covers, namely BDSM itself: it is a loud and persistent echo in the volume, for example in an anonymous further contribution to the querelle that appears directly after Herenc’s Accusation and Caulier’s CF: ‘La relation faicte au jardin de plaisance du debat de l’amant et de la dame qui est sans conclusion’ (fol. 148r [The report made in the pleasure garden of the debate between the lover and the lady which is without end]).124 Philippe Frieden speaks of how the BDSM querelle is to be found dispersed ‘de manière fragmentaire’ [in a fragmentary way] in JdP, with intentional allusion to Barthes’s 1977 essay Fragments d’un discours amoureux.125 Frieden recognises that, as we have seen, the very nature of the querelle is fragmentary, both in its material record and in how responses to BDSM do not (nor do they aim to) knit together a seamless coherent narrative. ‘Fragments’ are

122 See also Chapter 4, p. 214. In CF, Truth shows an awareness of the querelle as a textual sequence by referring to DL as ‘le tiers livre’ (v. 361 [the third book]). 123 For the relationship between de Hauteville’s and Villon’s texts, see Confession, pp. 10–12; Taylor, Poetry, pp. 20–4; and above, n. 119. 124 A strong echo may be discerned paratextually in the running title used in the fifth, sixth and seventh editions of JdP across all three items (Accusation, CF, Debat): ‘Le parlement d’amours et de la dame sans mercy’ (fols 100v–115r (fifth and sixth); fols 89r–102r (seventh)), as well as in the woodblock used in the third edition before the Accusation (fol. S4v): the standard template of a knight and lady addressing each other (separated by a shrubbery) that is used punctually throughout this edition, but whose banderole for the lady is labelled specifically ‘sans mercy’ rather than the generic ‘dame’ found elsewhere. Cayley classifies the Debat in the fourth cycle of responses to BDSM (Debate, p. 154). I shall consider elsewhere how the Debat, together with the Purgatoire d’amour (see above, n. 51), anticipates the closing sequence of JdP. 125 ‘Le Jardin de plaisance et les fragments d’un discours amoureux’, presentation at the journée d’étude on JdP (above, n. 69) and in a subsequent private communication.



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to be understood neither as constituent parts of a unitary whole nor as entities in opposition to wholeness; what determines how they are to be construed in JdP is ‘le mouvement biographique de la compilation’ [the biographical movement of the compilation], tracing the articulation of a Lover’s life through the volume’s rubrics, which themselves exercise a double movement of ‘fragmentation et défragmentation’ [fragmentation and defragmentation].126 Frieden’s discussion corresponds closely to my own sense of how a biographical process – tracing and intermeshing the identities of Lover and narrating persona, as well as of the Belle Dame – permeates the querelle as well as the closing items of JdP. That this process is more precisely epitaphic than biographical is established by the significant role played by death in both cases: not simply the fact, in JdP, that the anthology’s trajectory of identity ends in death, but, more substantially, how dying and being dead, passing towards and through death, is interwoven with the definition and interrogation of identity. The BDSM Lover is treated as having died and is judged accordingly; the Belle Dame is condemned to die before her remains are exhumed for burial; the entombed body of the lady in OA has its posthumous position deployed to riddle its identity; de Hauteville’s persona in the Confession conceives of his life in terms of death; L’Epitaphe opens up to plural identities in its apparent commemoration of a singular deceased who ‘cy gist’. Conclusion: identity as echo Death is a trigger for intensive reflection on identity: it is, in that sense, the beginning (or continuation) of a process rather than in any sense an end; and the process itself does not find definitive conclusion, however definite a character’s assertion may be that a final verdict has been reached, that a body is dead and buried or that no-one will ever see him again: Ne point plus avant passeray, Car icy dois finer mon terme. Je m’en vois, plus je ne vivray; Adieu, jamais ne vous verray. (Confession, fol. 258r (vv. 1622–5)) [I shall go on no further, for here I must end my term. I am leaving now, I shall live no longer; farewell, I shall never see you again.]

De Hauteville’s persona returns, of course, in an intertextual sense, in the same author’s Complainte and Inventaire, but also, in the context of JdP, in L’Epitaphe, in which his memory lives on. In JdP’s rubrication of Chastelain’s OA, the Lady may have ‘allée de vie a trespas’, but this ‘trespas’ itself opens up a further stage of life. She has gone ‘de mort a vie’ [from death to life], as Villon’s Testament persona wittily quips,127 irreverently playing on a religious sense of passage

126 Ibid. 127

Testament, v. 1861.

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to the spiritual afterlife, whilst targeting the life of posthumous literary adventure that the author intends for his character. The final eight items in JdP incline towards death but also, at the same time, to the life assured by textual legacy. Similarly, in the material context of Paris, Arsenal, MS 3523, a late-fifteenth-century poetic anthology of some thirty-five items, featuring BDSM, Accusation, CF and HA, the Belle Dame’s adventure continues in conjunction with a cluster of pieces (items 24 to 30) linked by a concern with death, including notable epitaph fictions: Gréban’s EFRC, de Hauteville’s Confession and Villon’s Testament.128 But we should beware of distinguishing too easily between ‘life’ and ‘death’; as we saw in de Hauteville, there is an unstable relationship between the two, with the persona articulating himself as both straddling and negating the two categories: living and dead at same time (‘sy meurs et transsis en vivant’ (Confession, v. 115)), neither dead nor alive (‘et si ne puis mourir ne vivre’ (v. 117)).129 If we see our deceased characters as not definitively dead, owing to the perdurance of some form of posthumous assembled memory record of their life, should we properly call this survival ‘life’? For Jean-François Lyotard, it is more a sign of death, since ‘la mort est matière d’archive. On est mort quand on est narré et qu’on n’est plus que narré’ [death is a matter of archives. You are dead when stories are told about you, and when only stories are told about you].130 And the truth value of those narratives, together with the points of view from which they are told, is far from fixed. But is the survival of name and renown in the BDSM querelle perhaps neither death, because there is continuation of identity, nor life, because there is no personal agency? The voice of the Belle Dame is only in others’ mouths once she is silenced after BDSM. Is her survival not rather, in fact, construable as echo? I stated above that, like Echo, ‘ses sons vit pardurablement’, in terms of her identity living on, but equally, like Echo, she ‘ends up in the paradoxical situation of having her voice taken from her, yet surviving only as voice’.131 A positive aspect of this paradox would be her continued existence as a resonating ‘sons’ in later writers’ quotation of her words, notably her famously pragmatic one-liner: ‘les yeulx sont faiz pour regarder’ (BDSM, v. 238 [eyes were made for looking]).132 A negative dimension would be the way in which, in the querelle, the Lady’s words of refusal may be cited, but their initially intended import (no harm to the Lover, self-preservation from love) is lost (she is cruel (Accusation, CF); she has another lover (DL)); as M. Griffin notes, in relation to 128 See Cayley, Debate, p. 186, and her Appendix 1, pp. 200–01, for a complete list of the manuscript’s contents. 129 See also Singer, ‘“Mon corps”’, p. 424. 130 Instructions païennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977), p. 19; ‘Lessons in Paganism’, trans. David Macey, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 122–54, p. 126. 131 M. Griffin, Transforming Tales, p. 81. 132 See Pierre-Yves Badel, ‘“Les Yeux sont faits pour regarder”: sur la fortune d’un vers d’Alain Chartier’, in ‘Ce est li fruis selonc la letre’: mélanges offerts à Charles Méla, ed. Olivier Collet, Yasmine Foehr-Janssens and Sylviane Messerli (Paris: Champion, 2002), pp. 99–109.



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Echo, her ‘words show that there can never be plenitude of meaning, only jarring, inadequate imitation’.133 Is this a less optimistic version of Lemaire’s epitaph for Molinet and Chastelain in its assertion that their memory (‘monumentz et precieux tumbeaux’) will live on ‘en la bouche des bons’?134 The monument of the Lady’s memory is, as we have seen, friable and contested, and she herself maintained in BDSM that one risks finding behind a ‘bouche courtoise’ a ‘villain cueur’ (BDSM, v. 361: [courteous tongue]; [base heart]). A perception of language as a reviving force, such that speaking of the dead is a way of bringing them (back) to life, is current in modern criticism as well as in medieval rhétoriqueur poetry: Urbain remarks, for example: ‘parler des morts, c’est encore les faire exister, les faire être’ [speaking of the dead is again to make them exist, to make them be]. 135 But what sort of ‘life’ does this constitute? If the dead are being spoken of in divergent ways, then this at least means they cannot ‘be’ in any unitary sense, as does the potential plurality of the figure commemorated by a given epitaph, such as L’Epitaphe in JdP. And if their existence is determined (only) by others’ stories, there is in that dependence an inevitable loss of agency.136 I quoted above, in respect of the survival of the Lady’s name, Deschamps’s promise to deceased Machaut: ‘vo nom sera precieuse relique’. A relic is, as Michael Camille comments, something powerfully affirming the integrity of the once living person: […] though it was often just a fragment of a body or its trace, a bone, a tooth, or a bit of wood clotted with blood, it was more powerfully present than any human figure could ever be. It was metonymic, standing in for the once great wholeness of a person – the opposite of death, which dissolved and destroyed the whole body.137

To see the Lady’s name in this light now seems too confident or perhaps just too simple a vision: her heirs are not left with a metonymic bone in the Erreurs,

Transforming Tales, p. 79. See Introduction, p. 6. 135 Archipel, p. 36; see also Goodwin and Bronfen, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. cf. Lyotard: ‘Les morts ne sont pas morts tant que les vivants n’ont pas enregistré leur mort dans des récits’: Instructions, p. 19 [The dead aren’t dead until the living have recorded their deaths in narrative] (‘Lessons in Paganism’, p. 126). 136 My thinking about the qualified sense of posthumous life constituted by renown is informed by Blanchot’s meditation on a verse from one of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: ‘au fond de cet ordre, “[sois] toujours mort [en Eurydice]” a pour écho “[afin d’être] toujours vivant [en Orphée]”, et vivant ne signifie plus ici la vie, mais, sous les couleurs de l’ambiguïté rassurante, signifie la perte du pouvoir de mourir’: ‘L’Expérience originelle’, in Espace littéraire, pp. 245–60, p. 254 [deep in this order ‘[be] dead ever more [in Eurydice]’ is echoed by ‘[so as to be] alive forever [in Orpheus]’, and here ‘alive’ does not signify life, but – in the guise of a reassuring ambiguity – the loss of the power to die] (Space of Literature, p. 242). 137 Master, p. 208. Binski discusses the same ‘part conjuring the whole’ dynamic in terms of synecdoche: Medieval Death, pp. 16, 124, 202. 133 134

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but a jumble of bones otherwise destined for an ossuary.138 The concession of a minimally marked, but not individually identified burial ground could be seen as a powerfully bathetic way to put an end to the whole debate of nom/renom by removing any name completely. There is no longer ground for debate about which name to give her, jostling between negative and positive monikers, since there is no nameable entity left to discuss: her grave, whilst individual rather than collective (i.e. not several dead all heaped in together), is anonymous and impersonal. In his discussion of the uneasy relationship of resemblance between the cadaver and the living person, Blanchot notes as unusual the case of someone resembling themselves whilst still alive (‘aux rares instants où il montre une similitude avec lui-même’ [in the rare instances when a living person shows similitude with himself]): he does not offer an illustrative example, but could be thinking, for instance, of people who have experienced physical disfigurement viewing the image of themselves ‘after’ (the accident/illness/etc.) from the point of view of their sense of themselves ‘before’.139 He terms this phenomenon the state of being ‘son propre revenant, n’ayant plus d’autre vie que celle du retour’ [like his own ghost already: he seems to return no longer having any but an echo life].140 The English translator’s turn of phrase ‘an echo life’ could be applied interestingly to the Lady in the querelle: in life as well as death (that this, throughout her textual existence), she leads an echo life, since each representation of her is only ever a version constitutive of her identity which itself has no originary personhood: ‘La Belle Dame sans mercy’ is taken to be the basic currency of ‘who she is’, but is already a judgement of ‘her’; ‘she’ exists only as a semblance or as a resemblance: ‘mais à quoi ressemble-t-[elle]? À rien’ [but what is [she] like? Nothing].141 The above quotations from Blanchot and Lyotard can, as a sort of coda to this chapter, prompt us to consider the degree to which the foregoing analysis of literary identities of the dead and dying can reveal anything about actual personhood and the identity of living humans. One could see Lyotard’s remark that you are dead when stories are told about you, and when only stories are told about you, to presuppose that what distinguishes that state is that one is no longer around oneself to do the telling and live out identity through body, gesture and voice: one is dead when one has lost narrative agency over one’s life. But the distinction is not so clear, in that the agency that one possesses in life, according to a performative conception of identity, is far from determining, unitary or definitive: if our so-called ‘own’ identity has no originary personhood, then the tales that we tell about ourselves – through what we say and do, the character types that we embrace or eschew – are but one part of a broader network of identity 138 Camille notes that most people’s bodies would rot in unmarked graves and then, after a year, be exhumed, and the bones piled up in a charnel house: Master, p. 177. 139 Blanchot, ‘Les Deux versions de l’imaginaire’, pp. 266–77, p. 271; Space of Literature, p. 258. 140 Ibid. 141 See above, n. 107.



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narratives and narrators that define who we are.142 When Blanchot points to the uneasy resemblance between living person and cadaver, he could actually be seen to be identifying a dislocation in identity that is already present within the living person. As I mentioned in the Introduction, identity, the configuration of someone’s personhood, is always belated in relation to a person’s individual existence – it is always in that sense epitaphic. Hence the usefulness of the effigy as a concrete correlative, not just for the posthumous reconstruction of someone’s persona, but more generally for the processes in life of identity construction and projection: locating someone’s selfhood between the particularities of their individual existence and an idea or type of them that is audience-oriented in its composition – it is identity made legible to and for its reader/viewer. As was indicated in the first half of this chapter, the following chapter will develop discussion of the location of identity between individual instance and exemplary model through detailed examination of ‘cas’ as narrative form in late-medieval French responses to Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium – another intertextually rich context of literary continuation, but one which has been far less appreciated than the BDSM querelle. Moreover, whereas we interrogated in the BDSM querelle how the dead (or, indeed, the reportedly dead, or the already-but-not-yet dead) are spoken about by third parties, we shall look instead in Chapter 3 at how the deceased themselves speak and impose their stories on the voice and pen of those still living.

142

Cf. Lyotard, Instructions, pp. 18–19; ‘Lessons in Paganism’, p. 126.

3 Dying to be told: storytelling and exemplarity ‘selon le stile Jehan Bocace’ ex alienis casibus quam in lubrico positi sitis advertite. (DCVI, IX.xxvii, p. 868) [From the fates of others realize how perilous your state is.] (Fates, p. 242)

In the BDSM querelle, we saw characters posthumously being spoken about in an attempt to redeem their renown and establish their identity for its own sake (or for the sake of their heirs). A contemporary cluster of similarly intertextually linked epitaph fictions features subjects presenting themselves in order to underscore their poor reputation, accept their unfortunate fate and put themselves forward as negative exempla; their identity and the value of their life story derive from their fall, ultimately towards death. This kind of self-promotion, whilst still competitive (with figures jostling for representative pre-eminence: the most wretched, the most degenerate …), is thus intended to serve others: their exemplary tales are marshalled didactically as a cautionary warning against Fortune, an exhortation to ‘rappeller au droit chemin ceulx qui sont desvoiez’ [to recall to the right path those who have strayed]).1 In TB, for instance, according to its narrating persona Georges, Othon de Grandson ‘desiroit fort, ce sembloit, pour estre exemple a ceux qui se presument en vanité de leurs corpz, ester recheu droit cy et mis en ascout, car s’y presentoit a ceste cause’ (TB, p. 37 [was very keen, it seemed, in order to serve as example to those who are presumptuous through physical vanity, to be received here and heard, since he presented himself here for that reason]). Such figures are, therefore, dying to be told: becoming story by dint of being posthumous (recalling Lyotard), but also seeking energetically to ensure record of their fate by a third party, the persona of the text in question. The cluster consists of texts published between 1400 and 1513 in translation of, or response to, Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: Laurent de Premierfait’s two translations, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes (1400 and 1409); George Chastelain’s Temple de Bocace (1463–65); Antitus’s Portail du Temple de Bocace (1501); and Laurent Desmoulins’s Cymetiere des malheureux (1511; re-edited 1513). This is by no means a complete list of fifteenth-century and early-sixteenth-century literary texts that stand in some measure as

1 Laurent de Premierfait’s ‘Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes’, ed. Patricia May Gathercole (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), Prologue ii, p. 92.



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remaniements of DCVI;2 as the Italian author’s most numerously produced work in late-medieval France, its impact was well disseminated.3 Towards the end of this chapter, we see the influence of its fictional framework of a vision of dead people passing beyond the subject matter of lamented fates to nourish a fictional structure advancing positive, laudatory examples of human excellence, in Jean Du Pré’s Palais des nobles dames (1534).4 It is through examination of the narrative implications of this shared fictional framework, and how those are developed by different writers, that I shall explore the kind of reflection on the relationship between death and identity that I believe them to have been pursuing. Staging the dead being perceived by a living persona who, as direct or indirect audience, variously sees, hears and speaks with the deceased, creates a complex interplay of narrative voices that I probe in two respects. First, the significant interest this interplay exhibits in the process by which a given person’s individual life and death becomes an example, and in the control of that process of transmutation and transmission: who gets to tell the story of who someone ‘is’ – how, why and to whom? Second, this interest in narrative structures entails a questioning of the status of the speaking, ambulant subject, which raises issues explored in both previous chapters as to the ontology and temporality of the represented dead: the relationship between voice, body and identity, and the definition of someone’s existence in terms of a shaky binary between living and dead. Before presenting in detail this chapter’s corpus of texts – which are most likely unfamiliar to modern readers, though for a contemporary, fifteenth-century audience, TB was Chastelain’s most widely known prose work5 – it will be helpful to bring to the fore a key concept underpinning their narrative design: the term ‘cas’, its role in focusing attention on how a given life/death becomes story and exemplar and its flexible movement between particular instance and general model.

2 For a different approach to identifying ‘a De casibus tradition’, primarily regarding late-medieval English texts, see Scanlon, Narrative, pp. 119–34. 3 Carla Bozzolo, Manuscrits des traductions françaises d’œuvres de Boccace: XVè siècle (Padua: Antenore, 1973), pp. 37–45. 4 I am not positing DCVI as the sole work by Boccaccio to be of significance for the format of the later texts; several commentators have noted how DCVI’s framework recalls his Amorosa visione (Guyda Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto/ Buffalo/London: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p. 33; Vittorio Zaccaria, Boccaccio narratore, storico, moralista e mitografo (Florence: Olschki, 2001), p. 41), in which great figures of the past appear to the persona as he moves through the rooms of a castle, a scenario echoed in PND’s tour through the chambers of a palace occupied by renowned deceased ladies. 5 TB, p.   23. Bliggenstorfer’s edition has two sequences of page numbers: one for her introduction (where an asterisk precedes each page number), and one for the text itself.

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From story to example: the polysemy of ‘cas’ ‘Cas’ is a frequent and significant term in DCVI responses. Most obviously, of course, it means ‘fall’, ‘downfall’ or ‘(unhappy) fate’,6 indicating a topographical decline from high to low status, a curve of descent on Fortune’s wheel. It may also, however, carry juridical and rhetorical meanings. We saw in Chapter 2 a legal colouring of ‘cas’ involving the judgement of someone’s identity, which we may also discern in Antitus’s arbiter-persona’s activity of assessing each figure’s self-presentation.7 The sense in which I wish primarily to explore the term is in some respects akin to André Jolles’s classification of casus as a specific narrative form that mediates between an individual story-event and the generality of a principle, which both leads towards an example and can be seen to derive illustratively from it.8 This status is demonstrated by the very narrative structure of Boccaccio’s (and Laurent’s) texts, where focus on an individual case is followed by a chapter on the vice/virtue exemplified by that case, which itself furnishes further ‘cases in point’ of that quality. I propose that late-medieval respondents to DCVI use their epitaph fictions to explore, through ‘cas’, the processes by which the incidents and events of a person’s life become exemplary (whether positively or, mostly here, negatively). This exploration is a further feature that distinguishes epitaph fictions from plaintes funèbres; in the latter, ‘l’intention se veut surtout moralisante et exemplaire’ [the intention is claimed, above all, to be moralising and exemplary],9 but whilst we may see individual plaints being exemplary, we find in epitaph fictions a staging of the processes by which exemplarity is (or is not) achieved,10 and its relationship with death. A thematisation of this process can be seen in two works by Chastelain that lie outside the present chapter’s core corpus, but which help to clarify the activity I mean here before we see it dramatised. In Chastelain’s EMPB, the speaker, personified Death, claims that now the Seneschal of Normandy is dead and his epitaph (in the process of being) composed, his exemplary value has changed:

6 E.g. ‘cas maleureux’ (Des cas, p. 126). In Laurent’s ‘prologue du translateur’, ‘cas’ is used in a binomial pair with ‘fortune’ (p. 93). An incunable edition of the French text introduces a further doublet, entitling it Des cas et ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes reversez par fortune (Paris: Jean Du Pré, 1483). 7 And, in TB, in Chastelain’s presentation of an ongoing dispute between Richard of York and Edmund Beaufort: the two characters ‘vindrent droit cy mettre en terme leur cas’ (p. 65 [came here to bring their case to a close]). 8 Forme semplici (1930), in I travestimenti della letteratura: saggi critici e teorici (1897–1932), ed. Silvia Contarini (Milan: Mondadori, 2003). I do not, however, apply Jolles’s distinction between casus and exemplum, which holds the former to be what puts an established norm into question. See also Marchesi, ‘Boccaccio on Fortune’, in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham, Michael Sherberg and Janet Levarie Smarr (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press, 2013) pp. 245–54, p. 251. 9 Thiry, Plainte, p. 33. 10 Cf. Scanlon, Narrative, p. 327.



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Vif, il estoit exemple de bien faire, Et mort, exemple à tous bons de mérite. (EMPB, p. 69) [Alive, he was an example of good conduct, and dead, an example to all those worthy of being good.]

The distinction delineated between life and death is that, alive, Pierre was an example, in the sense of an illustrative case, whereas after his death he may be held up as himself the model for others to follow.11 We are reminded of Dido in JPHF, who stated: ‘des veufves suys la doctrine et l’exemple’, and may be construed both/either as what sets the example posthumously (reading ‘suys’ as part of estre) and/or an instance of a model being followed (‘suys’ as part of suivre). Slippage between the two possibilities defines the identity involved as a ‘cas’. In the Déprécation pour Pierre de Brezé that precedes EMPB, Pierre’s son is imagined speculating on the fate of his captured father,12 conjecturing his death and assimilating this eventuality to the fate of a martyr: ‘aprièmes, à la mort du martir, voit-on resplendir ses faits’ ([later, after the death of the martyr, one sees his deeds shine glorious]).13 He elaborates, addressing Fortune, and with specific reference to transition from life to death: ‘tu auras d’un vif homme plein de rayans titres, fait un glorieux resplendissant mort’ (p. 44 [out of a living man endowed with gleaming titles, you will have made a gloriously resplendent deceased]). The transition articulates a movement from an individual identity to an exemplary state, effected by a shift from life to death. Doudet remarks that ‘en perdant la vie, le défunt s’épure dans une “figure” […]. Il devient un symbole’ [in losing life, the deceased is refined into a ‘figure’ […]. He becomes a symbol];14 I shall explore later the ontological implications of this shift when considering the status of those posthumous figures who are apparently physically present and animate in our epitaph fictions. Doudet’s choice of verb, ‘devient un symbole’ [becomes a symbol [my italics]], is key to the articulation of movement between life and death, individual and example, that we find in Chastelain’s EH. As Doudet herself notes, the writer contrives a lexical symmetry between the opening and closing sections of narratorial commentary in the poem, which frame Alexander the Great’s encounter with the epitaphs of Hector and Achilles discussed in Chapter 1. This symmetry affects words falling at the rhyme to create a book-ending sequence: histoires > memoires > vivre > livre: livre < vivre < mémoire < hystoire.15 The mirrored progression from individual tales to the book, and back again, highlights the textualisation that underpins a shift in status from example as illustrative instance – a lived narrative – to example as model, and vice versa. Further analysis of these 11 Chastelain’s admiration for Pierre is discernible in reference or allusion to the seneschal in several works: Doudet, Poétique, pp. 452–5. 12 For Pierre’s arrest, see Chastelain’s Chroniques (Œuvres, IV, pp. 176–85). 13 Œuvres, VII, pp. 37–65, p. 43. 14 Poétique, pp. 215–17, p. 217. 15 Poétique, pp. 564–5.

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sections of the poem will develop our sense of ‘cas’. In the opening prologue, the persona builds up in general terms to the specific case in point of Hector, whose story should promote him as a symbolic, exemplary figure: ‘vray escarboucle et hautesse florie’ (EH, p. 168 [flawless carbuncle and flower of nobility]), but who was treacherously killed by Achilles and unavenged for this, which, to the persona’s mind, will portray him in this particular poem ‘en cas qui est à plaindre et à douloir’ (p. 170 [as a case to be regretted and lamented]). The prologue begins with an emphasis on the malleability of histoires ([tales]), given the number and range of instances of their telling: En divers temps et lieux diversement Et par divers contraire entendement. (EH, p. 167) [In different times and different places, and by different, contrary understandings.]

Histoires are not facts,16 but are flexible identity narratives proliferating multiple versions of an individual’s life (and death), as we saw in Chapters 1 and 2. The persona is building up here to the alleged injustice of Achilles being honoured above Hector, so it is key to his agenda that he highlight the slipperiness of stories, with ‘divers’ potentially carrying a sense of ‘perverse’ (i.e. working contrary to positive judgement of Hector) as well as ‘diverse’.17 Memoires ([human memories]) are thus not necessarily reliable repositories, since what is recorded is not necessarily accurate. Nonetheless, what is yielded is ‘matière’ (p. 168), the literary subject matter of a textualised life (vivre > livre), and that subject is then animated within Chastelain’s text through ‘figure vive’ (p. 170 [animated figures]) in a ‘mistere’ ([mystery], in the sense of [theatrical representation]). Therefore, progression through the sequence histoire > memoire > vivre > livre is shown as far less tidy and stable than one might expect. At the end of the poem, its final section introduces into the livre < vivre < memoire < histoire nexus of terms of exemplarity. The persona exhorts his audience of noble lords: Icy vous est baillé vielle matière, Cas d’un grant poix et d’un très-haut mystère, Du quel, qui bien le veut en soy comprendre, Grant bien, grand fruit en peut tirer et prendre. Sy lui doibt bien savourer et luy plaire Et à ses yeulx l’avoir pour exemplaire. (EH, p. 200)

16

See Chapter 2, p. 106. Doudet notes a contemporary political opposition represented by the two Classical characters: Achilles as Charles VII and Hector as a defender of Burgundy (John the Fearless or Philip the Good) (Poétique, p. 349). This adds an allegorical sense to the phrase ‘vive figure’, quoted below. 17



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[Here you are given old subject matter, a very weighty and most mysterious case, from which, for whoever wishes and is able to understand it well, great good and great fruit may be drawn and derived. So he should greatly savour and enjoy it, and hold it before his eyes as an exemplar.]

His address reminds us that the transformation from individual to example (‘matière’ > ‘cas’ > ‘exemplaire’) is effected by the listener/reader, which in turn reminds us of the specificity of written epitaphs, such as those featured in EH: the identity that they convey is not a statement but a communication oriented towards the passer-by, the audience, as discussed in Chapter 1. The persona concludes: Vous en avez exemple de mémoire Pour à jamais, en la présente hystoire. (EH, p. 201) [You have a memorable example forever, in the present tale.]

The present tale and its subject are thus presented as an example in both senses: to be material furnishing an illustrative case that may serve as a paradigm (of nobility), and a particular tale that may be told forever more as an example of that model.18 If the translation into exemplarity depends upon a reader, then the potential for this translation to occur, for there to be a ‘cas’ in the first place, requires a writer to have produced a record of the ‘histoire’, which is why characters in epitaph fictions are, as my chapter title puts it, both literally and figuratively dying to be told: death transforms their life into narrative, so long as there is someone to record that narrative, for which they long. It is not necessary, of course, for someone to be dead in order for them to be recounted,19 but posthumous storytelling comes with a peculiar potency: ‘on est mort quand on […] n’est plus que narré’ [you are dead when […] only stories are told about you].20 Death brings an end-point to a life and, at the same time, a trigger for storytelling about that life. The recording of death in narrative entails an interaction with life, as we saw with interplay between vivre and livre, and also in Chapters 1 and 2. As story, the individual takes on an existence as a figure, a symbol or example, and that existence depends on a telling by someone other than the deceased subject her/himself. Larry Scanlon notes of the relationship between narrative and exemplarity, that ‘a person who serves as an example becomes

18 On the duality of exemplum as both ‘the model to be copied and the copy or representation of that model’, see John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 11. For the essential relationship between exemplarity and narrative, see Scanlon, Narrative, pp. 33–4. 19 A curious illustration may be found in CM: to exemplify fidelity in love, the persona tells the tale of a happily married tyrant who sent a message to his wife reporting (falsely) his death, to test her love; on receiving the news she was overcome with grief (fols F7v–F8r). He thus both was dead (to her), and was not (in fact) dead. 20 Lyotard, Instructions, p. 19; ‘Lessons in Paganism’, p. 126: quoted in Chapter 2, p. 142.

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exemplary precisely by transforming his or her actions into a moral narrative’.21 In Boccaccian epitaph fictions, we often see such transformation happening as an interaction between the voice of the deceased and the pen of her/his listener. In this light, we may understand the status of ‘cas’ in terms that Doudet uses to describe the epitaph: ‘[il] apparaît comme une écriture de l’intermédiaire, entre vie et mort, entre fixité gravée et mouvement de glose qu’elle inspire’ [the epitaph appears as a kind of liminal writing, between life and death, between engraved fixity and the commentative movement that it inspires],22 and, I add, between histoire and exemple. DCVI as narrative source and epitaph fiction: ‘ecce ante oculos meos […] deduxit’ Referring to DCVI as a unitary source for French responses is potentially misleading in two respects. First, any reference to ‘the influence of the fictional framework of a vision of dead people’ must also take into account Dante’s Commedia.23 As discussed in the Introduction, Boccaccio and Dante can be seen to have offered alternative models for staging the dead in terms of how they define the status of the deceased, and I shall pick apart that and other differences in the course of this chapter in respect of the Italian writers’ potential structural influence on later French epitaph fictions. Second, DCVI itself survives in two redactions, the first completed around 1360 and the second by 1373, when this longer version was dedicated to Mainardo Cavalcanti.24 It is a collection of biographies, divided into nine books, recounting the fates of illustrious men (and some women) from the birth of mankind to the author’s present day.25 Compositionally, as Simone Marchesi notes, the prose text comprises three main elements: summary review of short catalogues of unfortunate characters; longer narrative analyses of individuals’ tales, selected as superlative examples; highly rhetorical sections of invective against a particular vice or group linked to a preceding narrative.26 DCVI’s most distinctive feature, and what may be seen to differentiate it formally from other compilations of great men, is its fictional framework of the dead appearing before Boccaccio-persona in his study: they appear to him in extremis, in their state of having fallen to the bottom of Fortune’s Narrative, p. 34. Poétique, p. 593. 23 DCVI itself bears marks of Dantean influence in the Inferno-like procession of miserable dead, and Dante himself, of course, makes an appearance in conversation with Boccaccio-persona: see G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, p. 33. 24 For DCVI’s textual history and production context, see G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, pp. 24–32; Zaccaria, Boccaccio, pp. 34–89. 25 The most recent biography is that of John II the Good, who died at Poitiers in 1356 (DCVI, IX.xxvii). 26 ‘Boccaccio’, p. 246. The third element is sometimes a discrete chapter (e.g. I.xiv. ‘Contra superbos’ [Against the proud]) and sometimes integrated into the narrative of a given character. 21 22



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wheel – impoverished, diminished, degenerate, old. This literary device enables Boccaccio to develop the narrative of his work as narrative, and vigorously: vignettes of decrepitude add macabre colour and what Guyda Armstrong calls ‘affective realism’27 – Marius of Arpinum is conjured up before the persona’s eyes by personified Fortune: Nec mora; et ecce ante oculos meos mulier imperiosa deduxit, madidis gemitu genis, squalida barba, incompositis canis, funesta veste, adhuc civili sanguine respersum. (DCVI, VI.i, p. 476) [Without delay, this regal woman made Marius of Arpinum appear in front of my eyes. He was […] still spattered with the blood of Roman citizens, very somberly dressed, his hair snarled, his beard filthy, and his face covered with mournful tears.] (Fates, p. 142)

Scenes of chaotic clamour develop the implied spatial dimension of the vision and provide dramatic movement: he is overwhelmed by a cacophony of voices (‘longus erat ordo, et confuse plurium querele, tollentes ne satis possem que dicebantur assummere’, I.xii, p. 66 [it was a long column, and they all wailed at the same time, so that I could not [sufficiently make out] what they were saying] (Fates, p. 27)), besieged by a throng of princes interrupting his invective against lust (‘Nondum satis in libidinem oblocutus eram, et ecce a principibus obsessus sum’, III.v, p. 216 [I still had not said enough against lust when suddenly I was besieged by many rulers] (Fates, p. 81)), and accosted by Brunhilda, who drags him away from Mahomet (‘mulier quedam, imo demon, adveniens me his abstulit’, IX.i, p. 748 [a woman, more a she-devil, came and dragged me away from him] (Fates, p. 219)).28 Above all, this ‘framing superstructure based on the illusion of interaction and conversation’29 allows for variety in the presentation of narrative voice, in terms of who pronounces an individual character’s identity narrative. As G. Armstrong notes, we find a mix of third-person and first-person discourse.30 At times, the persona operates as a ‘remote narrative voice’, offering the account of a character’s life seemingly unprompted by any imagined encounter; at others, characters appear in front of him before having their story taken in charge by him. Walter, once Duke of Athens, is pointed out by Dante (‘Ecce, igitur, vide postergantem me’, IX.xxiii, p. 836 [So look […] to the one following me] (Fates, p. 227)) and his tale of ruin recounted by

English Boccaccio, p. 38. Cf. Dante’s Commedia, in which, rather than accosting him, shades are more often approached or summoned by the pilgrim, who asks to hear particulars of their tale (e.g. Francesca da Rimini and Paulo Malatesta in Inf. V; the shades of Italians in Inf. XXIX). He does, however, appreciate the numerousness and visual impressiveness of those whom he sees, such as the overwhelming sight of mutilated bodies (‘la molta gente e le didiverse piaghe’, Inf. XXIX.1 [the crowds, the countless, different mutilations]). 29 G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, p. 32. 30 Ibid., p. 39. 27

28

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Boccaccio-persona in the following chapter: ‘Gualterius, Athenarum dux, cuius semitexturi sumus hystoriam’ (IX.xxiv, p. 838 [Walter, Duke of Athens, whose story we are about to construct] (Fates, p. 228)); the choice of verb, semitexo, indicates the persona’s creative agency in weaving Walter’s narrative, with the amplified first person also indicating the audience’s participation in this constructive act. First-person speech by the characters themselves occurs when they are described arguing (the brothers Atreus and Thyestes, for instance (I.ix)), or when they address the persona directly. Direct address sometimes results in a shift to the third person – that is, back to the persona – for completion of the figure’s narrative, the direct discourse having served simply as an introduction to draw her/him to the persona’s attention, as with Adam and Eve, who propose themselves as a fitting commencement to his book (I.i, p. 12)). At other times, it gives rise to a more sustained dialogue, such as between the persona and Brunhilda.31 The pair have a heated debate about the truth of Brunhilda’s version of her life; for instance, whilst she avers her marriage to Sigebert, he interjects: ‘Cave quid dixeris: Chilperico aut Childeperto audiveram – . Illa vero: – Scio quosdam sic arbitrantes existere’ (IX.i, p. 752 [‘Be careful of what you say. I heard you were married to Chilperic or Childepert.’ ‘I know that some people think this’, she replied] (Fates, p. 221)). We are reminded of figures in my Chapter 1 who possessed disputed life narratives: Dido in JPHF, and especially, given the dramatised ‘assertion-and-response’ form of DCVI, IX.i, Philip of Crèvecoeur in Molinet’s EPC. I referred above to the individual tales that we find in DCVI, in whomever’s voice they are communicated, as identity narratives: what makes these classifiable as epitaph fictions rather than simply exemplary biographies? My working definition of a literary epitaph – a statement of identity from a posthumous perspective – could be seen to encompass all biographical writing composed from a point in time after its subject’s death. To explain the pertinence of my appellation ‘epitaph fictions’ to DCVI, it may be helpful briefly to compare this compendium of (mostly) men with Boccaccio’s collection of women’s biographies De mulieribus claris (first drafted in 1361, and redacted in phases until 1375). In the latter, there is no fictional framing device constituting a scenario of interacting narrative voices: each biography stands as a narratively discrete unit, employing G. Armstrong’s ‘remote’ third-person narrative voice recounting each woman’s life and its significance. By consequence, there is no development of the female subjects’ status as anything more than the narrative object of their tale: they are not imagined visually, nor is their status as dead raised as a narrative issue. By contrast, in DCVI, whilst the specific status of the characters who appear so pungently (in how they look/move and what they say) is not discussed (and for the most part Boccaccio, unlike Dante, avoids applying any ontological label

31 Scanlon notes how ‘colloquies […] interrupt the parade of exempla’ (Narrative, p. 129), but does not mention this chapter, which is surprising in light of his earlier observation of the work being ‘marked at every level by confrontation and conflict’ (p. 127).



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to them),32 they are understood to have a presence that is defined in terms of their death, and their very biography, by dint of being a ‘downfall’ narrative, is end-oriented: their life is being defined in terms of their death. Dido, for instance, who receives particularly extensive treatment in DCVI, is seen by the persona, in the chapter preceding her biography, as she appeared on the final day of her life and in a pose that anticipates the moment and manner of her death: Video enim eam eo in habitu quo ultima sua die conscendit in rogum accedere, et pio pallore respersam lacrimis interdum ora rigantibus sua fata deflentem. (DCVI, II.ix, p. 132) [For I saw she was dressed as she had been on the last day of her life when she ascended her funeral pyre. Although her face was calm and pale, it was lined with tears as she bemoaned her fate.] (Fates, p. 51)

Her biography (II.x) concludes with an account of her death, whose envisaged scenario of her virtuous suicide is dramatically heightened through precise rendering of her actions and use of direct discourse: […] pyram conscendit, prospectantique populo quidnam actum esset inquit: – Cives optimi, ut iussistis ad virum vado – et illico gladio superincubuit; et sic, honestate ac pudicitia servata, omnia expirans circumadiacentia innocuo maculavit sanguine. (DCVI, II.x, p. 142) [[…] mounting the pyre in the sight of the people, she spoke: ‘Oh, great citizens, as you commanded, I am going to my husband’, and right there she fell upon the sword. Having saved her honour and chastity, she stained all the surroundings with her innocent blood.] (Fates, p. 56)

The following chapter (II.xi. ‘In laudem Didonis’) praises her chastity as encapsulated in her death blow, which itself accords her lasting renown: ‘Uno quippe ictu veneranda plurimum regina mortales terminasti labores, famam occupasti perennem’ (II.xi, p. 142 [Truly with one blow you, [most] venerable queen, put an end to mortal travail and achieved immortal fame] (Fates, p. 57)). The three chapters touching on Dido therefore embrace anticipation, account and commemoration of her death. Whereas she appears to the persona in a pre-death physical state, Sardanapalus, the following case in Book II, is already posthumous in the manner of his appearance:

32 Boccaccio seems almost scrupulously to avoid any status label in terms of life/death, preferring instead nouns designating their state in downfall as ‘senes’ (I.i, p. 10 [the elderly]), ‘fluentes’ (rubric for IX.xxvii: [mourners]) or ‘infelices’ (rubric for III.viii [unhappy men]). Modern critics refer to them variously as ‘ghostly shades’; ‘ghosts’ (G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, pp. 32, 38), ‘personages’ (Brewer Hall, Fates, p. xiii), ‘ombre di personaggi illustri’ (Zaccaria, Boccaccio, p. 41); ‘figures’ (Scanlon, Narrative, p. 129). Choice of the term ‘shades’ or ‘ombre’ is perhaps influenced by analogy with Dante’s ombre (Purg. II.79), who, as I noted in the Introduction (p. 18), are usually clearly defined as ‘morti’ (Inf. III.89).

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Non equidem unguentis madens, et fulgens purpura, verum fumosa facie extremi adhuc rogi, insignia ferens, querebatur anxie. (DCVI, II.xii, p. 144) [Not perfumed nor dressed in shining purple robes, but [still blackened] in appearance [from his funeral pyre, showing the royal insignia, he complained bitterly].] (Fates, p. 57)

It is such a perspective of death – the sense of a first-person deceased speaking in a death-oriented way about themselves, and of any third-person account having proximity (temporally, spatially, through some staged (re-)enactment) to the deceased’s moment of demise – that makes epitaphs of DCVI’s biographical narratives, in conjunction with an urgent imperative (expressed in direct discourse via Brunhilda) to establish an authorised version of the deceased’s life as written record via the scribal agency of Boccaccio-persona: an inscription of identity, or, indeed, an inscription as identity.33 This textual monument is not usually laudatory, as one might normally expect of an epitaph,34 but is critical in its recollection of the person’s life: the point of the identity narrative being to communicate a cautionary message against Fortune and morally disorderly conduct. Whilst it would be false to view DCVI’s characters as uniform and homogeneous, there is certainly greater consistency of purport than in DMC, where, as many critics have noted, the scope of ‘claris’ includes both virtuous renown and infamy.35 It is in part this consistency that lends a sense of epitaphic pithiness to each person’s narrative in DCVI, even in the longer chapters: the identity narrative is not a ‘histoire’ so much as a ‘cas’; it is a digested account of events. Such pithiness we find elsewhere furnished through formal means in the case of verse epitaphs, as we shall see in PTB and PND, and as we have already witnessed, in Chapter 1, in JPHF and LCAE. The cemetery porch epitaphs in LCAE are a pertinent analogue to DCVI’s chapters; notwithstanding the contrast in form (alexandrine douzains rather than prose) and context (LCAE’s porch epitaphs being specifically concerned with fates in love), there is a shared structural pattern of rise (or, at least,

33 Cf. Dante’s shades in Inf., account of whose death is rarely offered (see Kirkpatrick, Dante’s ‘Inferno’, p. 186), and whose aim is less to establish a general record via the pilgrim than to prompt local recollection amongst those familiar with the person as relatives or friends (e.g. Ciacco VI.88–90; Pier delle Vigne, XIII.76–8; three citizens of Florence, XVI.85–6) or, in Purg., to seek relatives’ intercessory prayer (e.g. Manfred, III.142–5; Jacopo del Cassero, V.70–2). In Paradiso, however, it is more a case of names of great stature and general renown being offered as examples; Cacciaguida claims, inaccurately, that all the souls featured in the Commedia are ‘anime che son di fama note’ (ed. Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 11th edn (Milan: Garzanti, 2006), XVII.138 [souls whose names are known to fame]). 34 Or, indeed, of a plainte funèbre, in which a figure’s unfortunate and inopportune death only enhances praise of the subject’s life and qualities (Thiry, Plainte, pp. 36, 44); in most cases in DCVI (Dido is a notable exception), the manner of death is congruent with the shame of the subject’s life: Xerxes’ murder is the consequence of his extravagant pride, which leads the Persians to despise him (III.vi). 35 Deanna Shemek, ‘Doing and Undoing: Boccaccio’s Feminism’, in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide, pp. 195–204.



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already achieved height on Fortune’s wheel) and fall: ‘revolutionem Fortune’ (DCVI, II.xii, p. 144) or what Marchesi has felicitously called ‘parabolic graphs of […] individual life-stories’; ‘the vertex of the parabola […] acts as a tipping point’,36 which may mark a moral flaw or a less obviously merited reversal of fortune. In the case of LCAE’s Nero (discussed in Chapter 1), his assertions of might and authoritative sway give way, as of the mid-point of his douzain, to his admission of surrendered power, having been defeated by amorous wiles (LCAE, v. 1236). Consideration of DCVI’s fictional framework and of its biographies’ status as epitaphs inevitably raises the question of the extent to which Boccaccio was interested in developing the ontological and narrative possibilities afforded by his chosen fictional frame: the death-in-life and life-in-death status of his characters and the enmeshing of their tales in a mixed structure of narrative voice. Did he envisage the literary device primarily as decoration, to add cosmetic variety as an aspect of delectatio sustaining the reader’s engagement with the ethical utilitas of his work? He certainly presents in this light his division of the book into different types of chapter: Porro, ne continua hystoriarum series legenti possit fastidium aliquod inferre, morsus in vitia et ad virtutem suasiones inseruisse quandoque tam delectabile quam utile arbitratus adnectam. (DCVI, Prohemium, p. 10) [In order that an unbroken succession of stories be not tiresome to the reader, I think it will be both more pleasant and useful from time to time to add inducements to virtue and dissuasions from vice.] (Fates, p. 2)

Critics’ synopses of DCVI and of its French translations privilege a serious moral purpose, defining its chapters as ‘moralizing biographies’, ‘biographies exemplaires’, and highlighting its ‘moralizing vein’.37 For some, this slots into a conception of Boccaccio’s later work as unremittingly serious, seeing him to have composed no ‘fictional or playful work’ after c.1355.38 It is, as Scanlon notes, possible to see DCVI as ‘nothing more than medieval didacticism of the most static variety’.39 G. Armstrong, however, whilst recognising its moralising

36 ‘Boccaccio’, p. 249. Fortune as a structuring shape for identity narratives is also evident in Bouchet’s Labirynth: see Chapter 1, p. 57. 37 Anne D. Hedeman, ‘Visual Translation: Illustrating Laurent de Premierfait’s French Versions of Boccaccio’s De casibus’, in Un traducteur et un humaniste de l’époque de Charles VI, Laurent de Premierfait, ed. Carla Bozzolo, pref. Ezio Ornato (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2004), pp. 83–113, p. 84; Marie-Hélène Tesnière, ‘La Perception du temps à la fin du moyen âge: l’exemple des Cas des nobles hommes et femmes de Boccace’, Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 4 (2000), 58–64, p. 58; Marchesi, ‘Boccaccio’, p. 245. 38 Shemek, ‘Doing’, p. 199. 39 Narrative, p. 121. Scanlon opposes this view as ahistorical, as disregarding Boccaccio’s careful negotiation of the role of Fortune as both moral sententia and rhetorical figure (pp. 121–31).

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frame and humanist orientation, sees it to have affinity with the Certaldan’s earlier fictions: Despite its sententious title and theme, and its conscious self-presentation as a classicizing work of Latin scholarship, the De casibus shares many of the characteristics of Boccaccio’s better-known and more accessible vernacular works.40

My sense of the work’s narrative interest as narrative, which we have sampled above, and its exploration of the processes of its own composition, for instance through the conversation between the persona and Brunhilda, inclines me to concur with G. Armstrong.41 However, given what is to follow in the present chapter, I concur cautiously so as to avoid retroactive misreading: I see my late-medieval respondents to DCVI to have been most interested in developing its narrative aspects; far from simple cap-doffing to an illustrious forebear or mere appropriation of DCVI’s moralising framework to add ethical weight to a collection of biographies, I see Chastelain, Antitus and Du Pré,42 writers whose epitaph fictions are themselves often seen as ‘textes à dominante morale’ [predominantly moral texts],43 to have capitalised on two main aspects of narrative interest: first, the process by which a given life/death becomes an example, and how the posthumous account of an individual entails a negotiation between the particular and the universal; second, the question of who controls this process of transmission, demonstrated through development of interactions of narrative voice, further dramatisation of the persona’s encounters with the dead (in a manner that elaborates oral/aural communication as well as, or sometimes more than, visual representation) and an interest in the status of those dead-in-life/living-in-death. Overall, of course, it should not surprise us that authors of these compilatory works were interested in the how as well as the what that they recount, since they are in the main not dealing with obscure figures who need monumental commemoration to avoid being forgotten. In DCVI itself, Boccaccio plays with ignorance of a wellknown character when the persona apparently fails to recognise or even to have heard of Brunhilda: ‘Nam fortunas tuas nec nomen, preter nunc, audisse memini’ (IX.i, p. 750 [For even now I do not remember ever hearing your name, nor about your fortunes] (Fates, p. 220)).44 40 English Boccaccio, p. 32. Shemek, by contrast, sees increasing seriousness in the 1350s to be part of a marked movement away from a medieval tradition of vernacular fiction towards participation in a new humanist culture (‘Doing’, p. 199). 41 And also with Marchesi’s view of the appropriateness of applying a metaliterary reading to certain sections of DCVI (‘Boccaccio’, pp. 251–4). 42 I omit Desmoulins from this list, given what I conclude later, p. 190. 43 Doudet classifies Chastelain’s TB as one such: Poétique, p. 510; Martineau-Génieys sees late-medieval French poetic treatment of themes of death only to become ludic (with the exception of Villon) in the later generation of rhétoriqueurs, with Lemaire (Thème, pp. 289–90, 353–6). 44 Ricci and Zaccaria state that Boccaccio is alluding here to the fact that many medieval universal histories did not mention the Frankish Queen (DCVI, p. 1035, n. 7).



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Presenting the corpus: narrative development in DCVI responses Development of both ethical and aesthetic dimensions of DCVI is evident in Laurent de Premierfait’s translations of the work at the turn of the fifteenth century, and it was, as Anne D. Hedeman remarks, ‘Laurent’s translation that made Boccaccio’s reputation in medieval France’.45 This reputation, as Hedeman and, in an earlier, seminal work, Carla Bozzolo, explore,46 was both textual and visual, given the rich tradition of illustrated manuscripts of Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes.47 The ‘translation’ in question that had such an extensive impact was Laurent’s second redaction of Des cas, produced in 1409 for Jean de Berry, of which eighty copies are known.48 His first, in 1400, seems to have had limited success, surviving in fewer than ten extant manuscripts.49 Its weaknesses are seen to derive from its attempt at literal translation and from Laurent’s not having adequately remediated the work for a French elite readership.50 The 1409 version, accompanied by a programme of miniatures, significantly amplifies Boccaccio’s text (Marzano calls it a commentary or paraphrase of the original rather than a strict translation)51 and is almost twice as long as the 1400 redaction. This amplification consists of stylistic expansion, the addition of place names, biographies giving background to proper names and other forms of explication, together with the insertion of a second ‘translator’s’ prologue.52 The overall thrust of these changes and their relationship to Boccaccio’s text is, in G. Armstrong’s view, to ‘promote a more moralistic viewpoint, that the wider ills of society have come about as a result of a collapse in private morality’.53 In other words, Laurent broadens the social application of the work’s message and expands the text’s readership; he also shifts the audience of noble rulers’ anticipated moral starting point in relation to DCVI’s:

45 Translating the Past: Laurent de Premierfait and Boccaccio’s ‘De casibus’ (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008), p. xi. Marzano notes that it was the first complete translation in France of a work by Boccaccio (‘La Traduction du De casibus virorum illustrium de Boccace par Laurent de Premierfait (1400): entre le latin et le français’, in La Traduction vers le moyen français: actes du IIè colloque de l’AIEMF, Poitiers, 27–29 avril 2006 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 283–95, p. 283). 46 Bozzolo, Manuscrits; see also Boccaccio visualizzato: narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, ed. Vittore Branca, 3 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1999), III. 47 Hedeman records over fifty illuminated copies of the 1409 version (Translating, p. 12). For the production context of Des cas, see G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, pp. 42–8. 48 Marzano, ‘Traduction’, p. 286. 49 Marzano records seven (‘Traduction’, p. 286); G. Armstrong records six (English Boccaccio, p. 47), and in 2012 discovered a further copy in the John Rylands Library. Hedeman goes as far as to see the 1400 version as a failure (Translating, p. 11); Marzano notes that it formed the basis of the first printed edition, by Colard Mansion in 1476 (‘Traduction’, p. 286). 50 See also Taylor, ‘Translation as Reception: Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris and Des cleres et nobles femmes’, in ‘Por le soie amisté’: Essays in Honor of Norris J. Lacy, ed. Keith Busby and Catherine M. Jones (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 491–507. 51 ‘Traduction’, p. 291. 52 See G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, pp. 48–65; Hedeman, Translating, pp. 17–21. 53 English Boccaccio, pp. 48–9.

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Boccaccio, as roving diplomat for the Florentine commune […] considers them to be essentially corrupt and degenerate, while Laurent the court official sees them as essentially good men, whose bad behaviour is a deviation from this norm.54

It is clear, therefore, that Laurent was closely engaged with the ethical dimension of his predecessor’s text in presenting his own. But he also seems at least to some degree interested in the ‘framing superstructure’ of interaction and communication: for example, in an addition made to the presentation of Adam and Eve at the start of Book I. When Adam has spoken in direct discourse on the couple’s behalf, claiming that they constitute the ideal opening (‘principium’/ ‘comencement’ (DCVI, I.i, p. 12; Des cas, I.i, p. 96)), both Boccaccio’s and Laurent’s persona wonders at the figures’ decrepit state: Ego intueri decrepitos, mirari homines extra nature officinam productos. (DCVI, p. 12) [I stared at these decrepit souls, wondering about them. They were born not according to nature.] (Fates, p. 3) Je fu moult esbahy et commencay merveilleusement regarder ces deux vieillars qui a peine pouvoient parler. (Des cas, p. 96) [I was greatly taken aback and started staring in wonder at these two old people who could scarcely speak.]

Only Laurent comments on their ability to speak, his remark supporting the narrative logic of the chapter, in which the persona can be seen to take up the couple’s tale as a third-person account because of Adam and Eve’s failing capacity for self-expression. Laurent has clearly reflected on narrative voice as an issue, given his decision to identify the addressee of characters’ direct discourse as Boccaccio: Adam ‘me arraisonna et dist: “Beau nepveu Jehan Boccace …”’ (Des cas, p. 96 [Adam addressed me and said: ‘Fair nephew, Giovanni Boccaccio …’]).55 Illustrative programmes of Des cas manuscripts at times work to underscore moral meaning, making its figures into ‘exempla for fifteenth-century Christian readers’,56 or having its images function as an art of living well and dying well.57 But they also express interest in narrative structure, using innovative spatial staging to draw the viewer into a scene,58 or setting up speaker and listener in a space architecturally demarcated from depiction of the content of their discussion.59

54

Ibid., p. 63. See also Hedeman, ‘Visual Translation’, p. 89. See G. Armstrong, English Boccaccio, p. 64. 56 Hedeman, ‘Visual Translation’, p. 95; see also Translating. 57 Tesnière, ‘Perception’, p. 61. 58 Hedeman, Translating, p. 211. 59 Such as in the illustration of Poverty arguing with Fortune (III.i) in London, BL, MS Add. 35321, fol. 67r. This manuscript’s Des cas miniatures feature an imaginative use of 55



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We shall see later in this chapter a manuscript of Chastelain’s TB in which the miniaturist seems closely engaged with questions of voice, communication and audience, reflecting similar concerns for the control of discourse and identity in the Burgundian writer’s text. Before exploring the detailed workings of each late-medieval response to Boccaccio, it is helpful to offer plot synopses of these less familiar texts. At the opening of TB, which survives in sixteen manuscripts and a printed edition from 1517,60 his persona recounts how the work’s dedicatee, Margaret of Anjou, anxiously requests him to compose for her a little treatise on fortune (TB, p. 5). That night, whilst he lies wondering what to write, he experiences a ‘misterieuse vision’ (p. 7 [mysterious/dramatic vision]) in which a voice summons him to get up. He finds himself in a walled cemetery and sees in the middle a temple, above whose doorway a handy inscription identifies the building as ‘le temple du noble historien’ (p. 17 [the temple of the noble historian]) and describes its commemoration of the wretched who put their faith in worldly affairs. Inside, he sees paintings and murals representing the tales of these unfortunates, as well as a tomb. Suddenly, a king, Richard II of England, enters, ‘demandant incorporacion au temple’ (p. 27 [requesting incorporation into the temple]); a succession of figures follow suit and install themselves on benches.61 Unlike Boccaccio’s and Laurent’s, Chastelain’s text is a continuous narrative, in that it is not subdivided into books and chapters denoting each new arrival.62 Margaret of Anjou then enters the temple and addresses Boccaccio, whom only now do we learn to be the occupant of the tomb, requesting inclusion in his book. He ‘se ressuscita’ (p. 83 [revived]) and the pair debate Margaret’s misfortunes. Boccaccio denies her request on the grounds that she is not yet dead, and so still has the chance to change her fortune; as he punningly and pithly summarises, ‘toy […] qui es morse, mais non a mort, tu en gariras’ (p. 125 [you […] who are bitten [morse < mordre], but not mortally wounded, will recover from it]). He advises her how to accomplish this, assisted by an apparition of virtues who console the Queen. Before she can reply, the vision evaporates and the persona hears the mysterious voice instructing him to ‘narrer la substance du mistere’ (p. 195 [recount the content of the mystery]) following the example of Boccaccio and Petrarch.63

spaces that are multiply divided by architectural or natural (landscape) boundaries: see Boccaccio visualizzato, III, p. 160. 60 TB, p.   23. 61 Chastelain’s description of the figures seating themselves on benches may put us in mind of Jean Fouquet’s splendid illustration of Laurent’s Des cas (‘The Munich Boccaccio’), which shows Boccaccio enthroned at his writing desk before a row of seated kings and several ranks of standing figures: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Gallicus 369, fol. 122v. 62 Though there are a few sub-headings; see below, pp. 180–1, for discussion of manuscripts of the work. 63 Petrarch also composed a collection of moral biographies of great men, De viris illustribus, treating heroes of Greek and Roman Antiquity (book I) and Biblical and mythical figures (book II). Scanlon proposes that this work, which nonetheless lends its title to Boccaccio’s, differs from the Certaldan’s project, in that De viris is not centrally concerned with Fortune and

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Antitus’s prosimetrum PTB, surviving in a single manuscript, extends Chastelain’s temple textually and architecturally.64 Of Antitus himself we know very little; from 1499 at the latest he was in the service of the prince-bishop of Lausanne, Aymon of Montfaucon, and PTB is the third of three works dedicated to him by Antitus. It is written in memory of Aymon’s nephew, Louis, who died aged six, having been bitten by a rabid dog.65 Antitus’s persona is transported in a dream to a dark valley (PTB, II.21), where he sees a temple built by Fortune (II.28) bordering a cemetery in which lie unburied corpses and, beyond, the bodies of suicides strewn across an open wasteland space.66 He identifies Boccaccio as the founder (‘fondateur’, II.41) of the temple and Chastelain of the cemetery. He then hears voices ‘[…] sans epytaphes / Et sans tombeaux de bien fresche memoire’ (II.57–8 [[…] without epitaphs and without tombs, of very recent memory]), who are apostrophising in despair Boccaccio, Chastelain and also Chartier, since those rhetoricians are dead and cannot record their ‘cas’ (II. 51). So they instead ask Antitus’s persona to […] rediger, sans interlocutoire, Leur piteux cas, tant en prose que metre. (PTB, II.63–4) [[…] set down definitively their piteous fates, in both prose and verse.]

Embracing in full the familiar late-medieval text-as-building metaphor, Antitus has his persona compose a porch consonant with the ‘matiere’ (2.2: both building material and subject matter) of the temple and cemetery, with help from the builder Ill Fortune (2.12). Louis of Montfaucon is installed as its foundation stone, and a succession of characters who died between 1476 and 1497 then address the persona,67 in verse and prose, and have their tales rendered into epitaphs by him – usually in a third-person verse form commencing ‘cy gist’. Not everyone is granted a place in the porch; the persona thus not only records, digests and reformulates their identity narratives into epitaphs but also acts as

its identity narratives are longer and more biographical than exemplary (Narrative, p. 121). For Petrarch’s sources and influences, see Martin McLaughlin, ‘Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance’, in Mapping Lives, pp. 37–65, pp. 38–41. McLaughlin contrasts Petrarch’s ‘antiquarian stance’ with the tendency of his followers (amongst whom, regarding collections of lives, he does not list Boccaccio’s DCVI) to draw their lives from the recent past or contemporary present (p. 41). 64 As Cowling notes (in respect of Lemaire’s THV), rhétoriqueur buildings containing historical or dynastic material are extensible: Building, pp. 181–2. 65 PTB, pp. vii–viii, xxvi. 66 Alexander Murray notes the historical practice of burying suicides in unconsecrated ground and specifically, from the evidence of French records, in the open field (‘au chans’): Suicide in the Middle Ages, 2 vols (Oxford: OUP, 2008–11), II, The Curse on Self-Murder (2011), p. 43. 67 Marc-René Jung, ‘Maître Antitus, rhétoriqueur’, in Études seiziémistes offertes à M. le Professeur V.-L. Saulnier par plusieurs de ses anciens doctorants (Geneva: Droz, 1980), pp. 181–92, p. 192.

George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 68r

Plate 2 (right) The persona and Margaret of Anjou in conversation

George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 7r

Plate 1 (left) The persona and Margaret of Anjou in conversation

Plate 3  Unfortunates enter the temple George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 15v

Plate 4  Unfortunates enter the temple George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 24r

Plate 5  Margaret of Anjou addresses the resuscitated Boccaccio George Chastelain, Le Temple de Bocace, Paris, BnF, fr. 1226, fol. 29r



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arbiter (like Chastelain’s Boccaccio),68 determining whether a figure/his epitaph should instead be cast into the open space, hung on a tree near the porch or rejected outright since he is not yet dead. Antitus’s work is left deliberately unfinished: the text breaks off abruptly with no pick-up of the persona’s dream framework (unlike Chastelain’s concluding unpeeling of TB’s different narrative layers), which seems to reflect the persona’s statement earlier in the text that the foundations of the porch are so deep that he cannot here complete its composition: ‘ay deliberé […] commencer seullement et laisser a noz successeurs la fin et perfection du dict pourtail’ (2.17–20 [I’ve decided […] only to make a start and to leave to our successors the end and completion of the said porch]). The aforementioned apostrophe to Chartier is interesting in this light, and inevitably so after my preceding chapter on the BDSM querelle: is Antitus’s self-positioning in a ‘théorie du non-fini’ [theory of the unfinished] in any way linked to Chartier’s stimulation of continuation/response?69 We might detect an echo of the querelle’s juridical fictions in the dead voices’ appeal to have their tales recounted ‘sans interlocutoire’ (II.63): that is, in definitive form, without any intermediate or provisional judgement. The locus of the cemetery that simmers in the background of both TB and PTB becomes the primary site of action in Desmoulins’s Cymetiere des malheureux, also known as Le Catholicon des mal advisés. The poem was first published in 1511 by Jean Petit and Michel Le Noir, apparently without the author’s consent; Desmoulins, a priest in the diocese of Chartres, complains of this in the prefatory epistle to a later, authorised edition, also by Jean Petit, in 1513, addressed to Milles Dilliers and Monseigneur Pigart, Bishop and Canon of Chartres.70 The text of the poem opens with Desmoulins’s persona wandering around a bleak landscape in a sorry state, ‘comme celluy qui cuydoit estre mort’ (fol. A3r [like someone who thought he was dead]). In a valley at nightfall, he sees a chapel and falls asleep on its doorstep. The personification Entendement appears next to him and instructs him to write down what he is about to see. A crowd gather for mass in the chapel, at which point the subverted nature of this institution is revealed: in its Chapel of Suffering, the chaplain is Discomfort and the deacon Sorrow (fol. A4r). Entendement also shows him the cemetery ‘ou maint homme

68 Cowling, who sees Antitus overall as a ‘disappointing’ reader of Chastelain (Building, p. 163), concedes that his persona is more active than his Burgundian predecessor’s ‘passive observer’ (p. 192) – insofar as any late-medieval scribal narrator-persona can be seen as ‘passive’… 69 Jung would say not, as he views PTB’s incompletion to relate solely to its content (its commemoration of dead nobles) rather than to any artistic consideration (‘Maître’, p. 186). 70 Francis M. Higman records four editions of the poem, including one by Veuve Jean Trepperel and Jean Jehannot, which follows the text of the 1511 edition and is suggested to have been published in 1512 prior to the first revised/authorised edition appearing in 1513; a Lyon edition of the 1513 version, by Olivier Arnoullet, appeared in 1534: Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French 1511–1551 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 172. I have viewed the 1511, 1513 and 1534 editions. All references relate to the 1534 edition (available in full via Gallica), unless otherwise stated. See also the Afterword below.

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malheureux se repose’ (fol. A4v [where many a wretched man rests]), where the bodies of men and women of the Biblical and mythical past lie strewn across the ground. The personified guide tells the persona not to get preoccupied with recording the names of the dead, since he should concentrate on speaking of those still living who have the opportunity still to mend their ways. At this point, he sees a throng of not-yet-dead people, representing all estates and speaking in a variety of verse forms, hurrying towards him, and is commanded to write down their ‘complainte’ (fol. A7r). They present themselves in thematic clusters, linked together by particular vices noted in rubricated sub-headings, such as ‘yvrongnes et gourmans’ (fol. A8v [drunkards and gluttons]) or ‘joueurs qui jouent voulentiers et perdent souvent’ (fol. C5r [gamers who play frequently and lose often]). After quoting each fixed-form complaint, the persona returns to his narrative rimes plates to offer moral counsel of temperance and virtue: ‘pouvres gourmans prenez quelque refrain’ (fol. A9r [poor gluttons, have some restraint]), citing authorities (Boethius, the Psalmist, etc.) and illustrating his didactic discourse with anonymous examples (signalled by the rubric ‘exemple’). He advises: Ung chascun doit metre en son cas raison Sans democquer les correcteurs des vices. (CM, fol. O4r) [Everyone should season their situation with reason, and not mock the correctors of vice.]

Eventually, when the persona is flagging, Entendement intervenes, deeming that he has done enough recording, and allots him the remaining task of writing a ‘gloss’ of the cemetery (‘glosture du cymetiere’, fol. P3v). Description of the poem’s fictional locus is thus unusually deferred until almost the very end of the poem. Finally, Entendement asks him to conclude with ballades and rondeaux encouraging moral health. The persona offers one of each to each social estate: the Church, nobles and labourers. Then he wakes up, finds that it is morning and re-reads his redaction, reporting that he went on to share it with everyone ‘a celle fin que on advise a bien vivre’ (fol. Q2v [with the aim of counselling virtuous living]). The above summaries hopefully start to indicate the complexity of these texts’ response to DCVI. Two preliminary observations emerge. First, we note the works’ varying combination of moral seriousness and fictional play in their treatment of ‘cas’ as a vehicle for didactic instruction, but also a site of narrative interest in its own right; whilst CM is in many respects the most emphatically and prominently moralising of the three (for instance, ending each speech with a one-verse sententia, such as ‘Qui follement ayme en fin il luy nuyst’, fol. A5v [Anyone madly in love is brought down by it in the end]),71 it still evidences interest in narrative voice, fashioning a very typically late-medieval narratorpersona. Second, we remark their development of DCVI’s biography collection 71

Higman classifies CM as a ‘memento mori in verse’ (Piety, p. 172).



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into ‘fully fledged’ epitaph fictions, locating the persona’s imagination in a cemetery, a site evoking both presence and absence of the dead through commemoration; considering the status of speaking subjects as living and/or dead; dramatising negotiation of an individual’s identity; and/or explicitly attributing the dead with ‘epitaphes’ through epigrammatic verse composition. For the rest of this chapter, I shall tease out in detail the responses’ handling of ‘cas’, followed by their elaboration of narrative structures with particular regard to the envisaged status of the dead. In a final section, I shall turn to Du Pré’s PND as an extrapolation of the latter into a catalogue of positive examples, rather than the DCVI context of misfortune. Identity narrative and exemplarity: ‘Me viens a toy, que mon cas tu contemple’ Scanlon’s sense of an exemplary person and an exemplary narrative as the same thing is germane to the construction and presentation of ‘cas’ in Chastelain’s TB. The two characters whom the persona fails to recognise, and thus whose story he is unable to record, are said to ‘cell[er] leurs personnes et leurs cas’ (TB, p. 35 [hide their person and their case]).72 That the deceased are themselves undertaking to transform their life into narrative is evident in Chastelain’s innovation of having some figures come into the temple carrying documentary evidence of their fate. James I of Scotland, ‘portant par escript la maniere du detestable pechié commis en ly, vint demander lieu aussy et commemoration de son cas’ (p. 29 [bringing, in writing, the category of detestable sin committed against him, also came to request a place and commemoration of his fate]). His ‘escript’, which receives no further description, is presumably a narrative, but is also clearly focused on a specific vice (murder through regicide), reminding us perhaps of those chapters by Boccaccio and Laurent which took as their topic a particular ‘pechié’. James seems already to have moralised his own life and death, but the relationship between his own written account (a third-person account? A firstperson testimony?) and that compiled by the persona remains unclear. That such documentary witness is understood to complement oral testimony is made clear by Giles of Brittany, who, ‘criant icelluy ploramment dés l’entrée du temple sur fortune, allega crudelité estre commise en son corpz la plus griefve dont oncques fu trouvé escript’ (p. 41 [protesting in tears against fortune as soon as he stepped foot into the temple, alleged that there had been committed against his person the most severe cruelty that had [n]ever been recorded]). It seems to follow quite logically that he should carry with him a written account of this matter: ‘portoit en rolle la nature de son cas […] priant pour audience en tempz et en lieu et d’estre mis au registre (pp. 41–3 [he carried in a scroll the nature of his case […] begging

72 The collocation occurs again when resuscitated Boccaccio advises Margaret of Anjou that he speaks ‘par pité de ton cas et de ta personne’ (TB, p. 189 [out of compassion for your case and you yourself]).

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to be heard in a timely fashion and to be included in the written record]). He wants his personal report, in his ‘rolle’, to be formalised in Boccaccio’s book, ‘au registre’.73 Why characters wish to be recorded is itself a mix of individual and universal concern, egoism and altruism. There is doubtless a competitive spirit and regard for self-preservation: each rushes in ‘come se chascun eust volu estre premier’ (p. 67 [as if everyone wanted to be first in line]) and asserts himself; for example, John of Coimbra ‘remonstroit place luy appartenir au temple et point n’y mettoit de doubte’ (p. 67 [showed that a place in the temple belonged to him and had no doubt about it]). But there is also an eye to the exemplary value of their narrative for others via the record of their fate. Corneille, bastard of Burgundy, and Jacques de Lalaing sy se vindrent remoustrer droit cy aveucques les aultres, non pour eux doloir de leur mort ne des facteurs, mes arguer contre fortune […] allegans devoir estre recheus en ce temple, prouverent leur estat mettable aussy en record de livre. (TB, p. 49) [came here to present their case along with the others, not to lament over their death or those who caused it, but to argue against fortune […] claiming that they should be received into this temple, and proved their situation to be includable in the book’s record.]

The extent to which these figures are presented as individuals, and not simply onomastically distinguished emblems of a given fate, is a question raised by the contrast in TB between quite individualising portraits detailing characters’ appearance (as we saw in Chapter 1 with Humphrey of Gloucester) and a more collective characterisation of figures according to type of death: for example, Pierre of Giac, Alexander, bastard of Bourbon, Louis Bourdon ‘et maintz aultres qui apportoient les sacqz de leur mort’ (p. 77 [and many others who brought with them the sack of their death]) come bearing a sack as a token of death by drowning. The most spectacular imbrication of individual identity, narrative and exemplarity arises in Margaret of Anjou’s self-presentation to Boccaccio. A remarkably detailed description of her preparation to speak and gain a hearing from the deceased writer focuses attention on her words and her manner of delivery – on the fact that she is engaging oral communication with an apparently inanimate and entombed corpse:74 emprés la tomb(a)[e] pallisoit tel fois en couleur, tel foi rougissoit comme perplex entre dire et taire, s’arr[e]sta a l’endroit des piez, ung peu en soy

73 On the relationship between scroll (associated with orality) and book (as written record), see Sylvia Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1987). 74 She exhorts him: ‘prepare l’organe de ta bouce pour me prester parolle’ (TB, p. 85 [prepare the instrument of your mouth to speak to me]).



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apuiant a i. coute sur le marbre, fist semblant de reprendre alaine et rasseurement de manniere dont, après courte pose tantost commencha en souspirant a dire ces mos. (TB, p. 81) [nearing the tomb, at times she grew pale and at times blushed, caught between speaking and remaining silent; she stopped by its feet, leaning a little with one elbow on the marble, and appeared to get her breath back and recover her composure such that, after a brief pause, she promptly began, in a whisper, to speak these words.]

She presents herself as a particular case (in all senses): ‘de singulier regart et dont le cas pend en ung extreme’ (p. 83 [of a singular nature, whose case hangs in extremis]), but also adopts a broader perspective on her existence, relating recollection of her own life to the future lives of others: Sy en est ja l’exemple et commencement, helas! venu sur moy, et lequel en tempz a venir sera matere et occasion de faire semblable sur une aultre et de faire toudis insurrections nouvelles par nouveaux tirans. (TB, pp. 91–3) [Alas, the proof and initial consequences have already come upon me, which will in times to come be matter and cause to do likewise to someone else, and always to prompt new insurrections by new tyrants.]

She envisages her identity narrative from a pivotal position between past, present and future, trying, to use Rabaté’s phrase, to ‘se dire comme totalité achevée’ and project forward from this point to those coming after her. However, Margaret is not like one of the epitaph first persons in JPHF who adopt a globalising perspective on their identity: she cannot speak of herself as a completed totality because her life is not yet complete. The sticking point in her self-presentation is ‘ja’ (p. 91 [already/yet]), which is precisely what Boccaccio picks up on in his verdict: ‘finablement voy je ton cas en possible’ (p. 129 [in conclusion, I see that your situation can be changed]): in other words, her case is not yet fixed, and so she cannot claim already to have a definitive fate. Her insistence on ‘je suis’ – the incipit of the first eight sentences in her address to Boccaccio – is exposed as flawed: her identity narrative and its exemplary value are not yet determined. A ‘plus vif exemple’ (p. 131 [a more cogent example]) is, according to Boccaccio, someone who is already dead (in this case, Charles VII); indeed, he includes several illustrative instantiations of the message that he wishes to convey to Margaret, and reflects methodologically on the rhetorical effectiveness, or otherwise, of persuading through example: Mes voiant iii ou iiii exemples pooir souffire droit cy et que multitude d’allegations donne plustost tannance que fruict. (TB, p. 121) [Seeing three or four examples to suffice here, and that a multitude of illustrative cases yields fatigue rather than benefit.]

At the end of TB, the mysterious voice which enjoins the persona to write down

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what he has seen speaks in terms of relations between the particular and the universal. He should write: En ensievant doncques la nature du cas et dont tu es seul secretaire, seul auditeur et le seul ycy choisy, affin que la memoire n’en perisse et que ta vision peust autre part donner fruit. (TB, p. 193) [According to the specific nature of the case, of which you alone are the scribe, the only witness and the only one chosen here, so that memory of it should not fade and so that your vision may be of benefit to others.]

The singularity of the persona’s experience is underlined and contrasted with the broader didactic value of these tales. Of their ‘fruit’, the voice elaborates: ‘le fruit en est universel quoy que la royne que tu as veu droit cy en soit cause motive par son particulier fait’ (p. 193 [the benefit of it is universal, notwithstanding that the queen whom you have seen here was the motivating cause through her particular circumstances]). What is being alluded to is the allegedly self-inflicted misfortune of Margaret, with punning on ‘royne’ ([queen]) and ‘ruyne’ ([ruin]) – ruyne being a term that featured in a doublet with cas in the title of a later-fifteenth-century edition of Laurent’s text: Des cas et ruyne des nobles hommes et femmes reversez par fortune.75 Whilst Margaret is disqualified from being a ‘cas’ by still being alive at the time of her conversation with Boccaccio, in Antitus’s PTB we find a safely dead character in an identical discursive situation, asserting transformation into exemplarity with similar brio: Me viens a toy, que mon cas tu contemple, Affin que soye, pour ung futeur exemple, Couché ou nombre des trop infortunez. (PTB, III.44–6) [I come to you so that you may consider my fate, in order that I may be counted amongst the most unfortunate men, to serve as a future example.]

Louis of Montfaucon’s addressee at this point is Antitus’s persona, who is acting in Boccaccio’s stead, since the latter is dead – we recall the piteous voice heard by the persona lamenting the passing of Antitus’s forebears: ‘Ou est Bocace, que mon cas ne contemple?’ (II.51 [Where is Boccaccio, that he cannot consider my case?]). However, Louis also addresses the Certaldan directly when he is considering where his ‘cas’ should most appropriately be located, for his status as son of a noble knight (III.90) fits neither with the temple, designed for kings and princes, nor with the cemetery; hence his plea for inclusion in the porch: Saige Bocace, qui jadis recitas Les piteux cas des nobles univers,

75

See above, n. 6.



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Tes successeurs ad ce faire incitas, Pour les futeurs fortuiz cas divers. (PTB, III.77–80) [Wise Boccaccio, who formerly recorded the pitiable fates of nobles the world over, you incited your successors to do the same for future cases of ill fortune.]

Louis evokes a continuity of ‘cas’, perceiving Boccaccio actively to have provoked sequels to DCVI, and thereby locates Antitus’s endeavour in the extended lineage. This figurative location is manifested concretely in PTB’s architectural extension to the temple, which is left open, as the work’s prologue states, to ‘des cas fortuiz futurs’ (1.56 [future cases of misfortune]). When Louis goes on to speak of ‘ton portail’ (III.93 [your porch]), it is unclear whether he is now addressing Boccaccio or Antitus’s persona – there seems to have been some slippage:76 it is the persona who engages in dialogue with him, debates the nature of his case and determines its inclusion, turning ‘toy’ (III.122) back on Louis; but the latter’s declaration ‘[…] je suis cil qui te viens reveiller’ (III.95 [[…] I am the one who comes to awaken you]) tantalisingly echoes TB’s scenario of Margaret resuscitating Boccaccio (‘sy te resveille’, p. 85 [so I awaken you]) rather than simply designating Louis’s act of waking Antitus’s persona from/in his dream (II.18). What is totally clear is how meticulously and insistently Louis shapes his identity narrative in order for it to qualify as a suitable ‘cas’. Lexically, he presses all the right buttons, speaking, for instance, of ‘le cruel cas’ (III.8 [cruel fate]), ‘mon dolent cas’ (III.15 [my sorry fate]), personified Ill Fortune and Fortune (III.29, 31), ‘mon cas doloreux’ (III.65 [my dolorous fate]), ‘piteuse sorte’ (III.94 [pitiable type]), and emphasising the finality of his fate through punning on mort as ‘dead’ and ‘bitten’ (‘mort d’ung chien enrage et infeit’ (III.101 [killed by a rabid and foul dog])). When the persona challenges the extent of the misfortune in his premature demise, when compared, for instance, with the horrific murder of Medea’s children, Louis’s response is incisive, explaining that his ‘cas’ is of a different tenor: not ‘abhominable’ like theirs, but ‘piteable’ (III.129, 131), though equally valid. In sum, Louis offers a virtuosic transformation of his life into moral narrative – […] On en voit l’exemplaire Car sus tous aultres je suis le plus dolent (PTB, III.111–12) [[…] One sees emerge from it the exemplary model, for I am the most wretched above all others]

– and Antitus’s use of Louis’s self-presentation as a vehicle for staging this transmutation indicates the writer’s interest in the rhetorical processes of exemplary narrative shaping. 76 The lack of clarity is not helped by the second half of the preceding huitain (what would have been verses 85–8) not being legible on fol. 30r of the extant manuscript.

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As mentioned above in the plot summary of PTB, the persona acts as a transformative conduit for each character’s identity narrative; whilst we shall reserve for the following section discussion of interplay of narrative voice per se, we should consider here any effect of transitions from first-person je suis utterance to third-person cy gist epitaph on the figure’s status as ‘cas’.77 Charles the Bold presents himself in both verse (V) and prose (5) before the persona accords him a verse epitaph (VI). Both first-person and third-person accounts assert exemplarity, though a difference is discernible between the framework of Charles’s verse account, which is chronological and includes historical details of person and place, and that of his epitaph, which stands more as a lyric reflection devoid of specific references. Each of the latter’s three cinquains commences ‘Cy gist […]’ (VI.1, 6, 11), with the first two effecting a legendary transformation of the character, progressing from ‘cy gist et dort le Hardy Conquerant’ (VI.1 [here lies in rest the Bold Conqueror]) to ‘Cy gist et dort le second Alexandre’ (VI.6 [here lies in rest the second Alexander]), contextualising his exemplarity almost typologically, as a continuity between ‘cas’ of different eras. By contrast, the next case, Henry VI, takes in charge both his first-person prose identity narrative (6) and dictation of his third-person verse epitaph, a pair of sixains commencing ‘Cy dessoubz gist Henry, roy d’Engleterre’ (VII.1 [Here beneath lies Henry, King of England]). The sort of at-a-distance perspective on exemplarity demonstrated in Charles the Bold’s epitaph (VI) is already present in Henry’s own self-presentation, as he apostrophises himself: ‘Quel dur exemple et par trop admirable est ce pour les posteres! Quelle recordation pour les presens!’ (6.15–17 [What a harsh and most awful example is this for those to come! What a reminder for those here now!]). An essential aspect of existence as ‘cas’ in PTB is provision of a character’s name, which operates itself as a mediator between the individual person and his representative value, as Charles the Bold’s epitaph just mentioned illustrates: Charles is both ‘le Hardy Conquerant’ and ‘le second Alexandre’. Antitus’s persona insists on this provision: ‘il est necessaire nommer par nom et surnom ceulx qui en ce dict seront mis’ (PTB, 2.24–5 [it is necessary to name by name and title those who will be included in this account]). By contrast, Desmoulins’s persona is expressly forbidden by Entendement from recording both the names of bodies strewn across the cemetery – […] Amy, ne les nomme de fait; Dire ne fault a chascun ce qu’on scet (CM, fol. A6v) [[…] Friend, don’t include their names, in fact; there is no need to tell people what they already know]

77 As we are working with only ten asserted ‘cas’ in the Portail, and three of these are excluded from the porch by the persona, our sample size is very small and the structures of narrative voice use vary between them, so we can observe only tendencies.



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– and the names of those who address their lament to him: […] Amy, ne te chault nullement Scavoir leurs noms car trop long il feroit Qui de chascun le nom sçavoir vouldroit; Te suffise rediger leur complainte. (CM, fol. A7v) [[…] Friend, knowing their names doesn’t concern you at all, for it would take too long if someone wanted to find out everyone’s name; let it suffice you to write down their complaint.]

The reasons for this interdiction are different in each instance: in the cemetery, Entendement implies that the scattered dead are already so well known (Dido, Sardanapalus, Hector, Lucretia, etc.) that to supply their names here would be redundant; for the procession of those not yet dead but presently inclined towards ‘malheur’ in life (fol. A6v), their identities are subordinated to the purport of their laments, which can then be harnessed for moral instruction. The persona is, however, keen on particularising detail, curious to learn the manner, motivation and reason for each person’s ‘mal’: Desquelz voulus congnoistre la façon Et pour quel cause ne pour quel achoyson Couroyent ainsi en dueil et desespoir. (CM, fol. A7v) [About whom I wanted to know how, why and for what reason they were hastening thus in grief and despair.]

In his secretary role, redolent of the late-medieval dits of Machaut, Froissart or Chartier, he is interested in narrative specifics: the whys and wherefores of histoires, and he gets to include these when he enlists and narrates analogous cases to the ones presented to him in the cemetery, concerning people who died of a given vice or ill. Headed up by the rubric ‘exemple’, and intended to encapsulate a didactic nugget, these additional cases are often dynamic narratives animated by dialogue, such as the tale of a daughter who converses in a dream with her deceased debauched mother, who suffers in bitterest torment, and with her late pious father, who rests in honour (fols B7r–B8v); or enlivened by vivid description, like the tale of an unrepentant gambler whose monastery tomb emits an intolerable cry, forcing the monks to exhume his body: […] le dit corps detestable Fut gecté et en lieu abhominable: Dedans les champs en ung fosse fut mis. (CM, fol. C6v) [[…] the said detestable corpse was thrown out into an abominable place: it was cast into a ditch in the open fields.]

The ‘exemple’ may thus be seen as reversible, like the movement between top and tail of Chastelain’s EH: histoire > exemple