In recent work on the trobairitz, the female troubadours, scholars have been exploring how the emergence of the female poetic voice affects the power relationship traditionally constituted by the feudal model which underlies fin’amor. Critics have attempted to determine whether the lady continues to represent herself as occupying the superior position in the hierarchy, appropriates “the masculine role” as the humble vassal, or represents herself as an equal partner as her position within the text shifts from object of desire to loving subject. The thirteenth-century Old Occitan romance Le Roman de Flamenca, a text long recognized as being strongly influenced by the lyric, provides an additional fertile site in which to examine the effect of the female poetic voice on power relationships. Although there is no internal evidence either that the Flamenca poet was familiar with the lyrics or that the trobairitz were familiar with Flamenca, and although Flamenca was almost certainly composed by a male poet, making the title character's voice an example of what Pierre Bec terms féminité textuelle, the romance was likely composed during the same time as many of the trobairitz lyrics, and Flamenca's self-representation during her extensive discussion of appropriate behavior for lovers and ladies offers additional insight into the female perspective on the power struggle implicit in the game of love. Focusing both on selected trobairitz and Flamenca herself, this paper will explore how Flamenca's discourse can be construed as representing the female poetic voice and how her voice resembles and differs from the voices of the trobairitz.

For about the first third of the romance, despite being the title character and the object of Guilhem's love and her husband's jealousy, Flamenca is not only enclosed in a tower and physically covered when allowed to attend church services, but her voice is almost entirely absent from the text as well. We are informed that Flamenca is greatly distressed by being confined in the tower, but unlike her husband, her soon-to-be lover and the narrator, who repeatedly expound upon their feelings in painstaking detail, Flamenca is exiled from the text by another man, this time the author, as her pain is merely recounted through narratorial exposition.

The thirteenth century was one of the most fruitful periods in the history of medieval narrative fiction. It was not only the time when the twelfth-century Arthurian and Tristan verse romances were turned into prose, but when previously unconnected themes were adapted to form parts of larger cycles. Robert de Boron who himself wrote in verse at the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century, and who inherited on the one hand from Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace the stories of Merlin and Arthur's kingdom, and on the other hand from Chrétien de Troyes the theme of the Grail, was the first writer to endeavour to combine these themes into a coherent narrative. Of Robert's verse romances, conceived as a trilogy, only the first part, the early history of the Grail, known as the Joseph or Le Roman de l’Estoire du Graal, and the beginning of the second part, the Estoire de Merlin, have been preserved in their original verse form. There is no evidence that Robert himself ever wrote a ‘third’ part, but shortly after the composition of the first two they were reworked in prose and in two of the prose manuscripts of the Joseph-Merlin the latter is followed by a third section, the so-called Didot Perceval, which is an account of Perceval's quest for the Grail followed by an account of Arthur's death, composed by a writer closely acquainted not only with Robert's Joseph-Merlin, but also with Chrétien's Conte du Graal and its First Continuation, as well as Geoffrey's and Wace's accounts of the final years of Arthur's reign.

Although one of Chrétien's romances centres on Perceval's search for the Grail and another of his works deals with a portion of Lancelot's life (Le Chevalier de la Charrette), Chrétien did not attempt to combine the themes of Lancelot and Guinevere with that of the Grail; and while Robert de Boron and his anonymous continuator, the author of the Didot Perceval, linked the themes of the Grail, Merlin, and Arthur, they did not bring into their work the story of Lancelot. It was the writers of the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romances (or Lancelot-Grail Cycle) who for the first time assigned an important function to the Lancelot-Guinevere story in the Arthur-Merlin-Grail complex.

The Lancelot-Grail Cycle as we know it was not fully planned from the start. It is generally acknowledged that the Estoire del Saint Graal and the Estoire de Merlin were later additions to the Cycle, carefully presented to prepare the way for later events. However, the development of the romance from the account of the childhood of Lancelot, beginning ‘En la marche de Gaule et de la Petite Bretaigne’ (LK 1) [In the borderland between Gaul and Brittany], to the death of Arthur has given rise to greater controversy. In contrast with some early scholars such as Brugger and Bruce who ascribed a major role to vanished cycles or interpolators, Ferdinand Lot stressed the careful links made between the various branches and argued that a single author wrote the Cycle, apart from the Merlin, Jean Frappier maintained that an ‘architect’ had planned the Cycle from the account of Lancelot's childhood to the death of Arthur. Micha too argues for the unity of the Cycle.

One of the remarkable features of the Cycle is indeed its complex interlacing structure, achieved by creating links between its various branches; but there are problems in relation to the theory of an uninterrupted development of the story of Lancelot, with a son Galahad designed from the beginning to be the chief Grail hero. This can be clearly shown through a study of the manuscript tradition in relation to a passage to be found early in the account of Lancelot's childhood and which lists the three most beautiful women. The first was Guinevere, and the second Helene san Per, who figures in an adventure of Hector before Lancelot becomes a knight of the Round Table. In MS Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 768, the third is described as follows:

The genesis of the Merlin is a complex romance project in the image of its eponymous character. It is a work with a history, firstly because it was fashioned from a variety of earlier texts, and secondly because it was inserted into one cycle, then into another. Like a polychrome print that needs several inkings before the final printing can be made, the romance combines figures and colors from earlier works, but the end result is a flawless landscape, a literary monument so tightly woven and self-contained that it fits almost intact into a very different textual environment, like a painting that serves first as the central panel of a triptych and then as the center of a polyptych. The romance's plasticity comes from the character of Merlin himself, whose literary representations evolved throughout the twelfth century until they melded solidly together in our romance, in a skillful combination of physical and moral traits, prophetic and magical powers that had hitherto been scattered widely in the texts. In their new environment they acquire a prodigious hierarchy and coherence, the hallmark of an outstanding fictional achievement.

The forty-six manuscripts and eight fragments in which it has survived suggest that the Roman de Merlin (written c. 1205) was a great success in the Middle Ages. But the character of Merlin himself, under the name of Myrddin, was already a glorious figure from the Celtic legends that must have circulated before the twelfth century. Merlin's Celtic ancestry has not always been obvious to critics, but today we accept it and acknowledge the importance of Celtic folklore in his makeup, even though so little remains from a literature that was primarily oral. SixWelsh poems found in manuscripts ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth century portray Myrddin as a warrior chief. Whether they give him the status of king or great lord, in all of them he goes mad after the battle of Arferdydd, where he witnesses the death of his lord and nephews. He flees civilization and lives in the woods in harmony with nature. In other sources he has the gift of prophecy, which he exercises from time to time in enigmatic language. Thus, the solitary figure we can glimpse in silhouette already combines the attributes of the wild man with those of the seer.

The reader approaching the end of the Queste del saint Graal learns that only Bors, Perceval, and Galahad are able, though to differing degrees, to achieve visions of the Holy Grail. We read of the death of Galahad, after which the Grail is taken up into heaven. Soon Perceval dies as well, leaving only Bors to tell the full story of the quest. He returns to Camelot, where the adventures he recounts are recorded in writing. And with that, we are told, ‘si se test a tant li contes, que plus n’en dist des Aventures del Seint Graal’ [the story falls silent and has nothing more to say about the adventures of the Holy Grail]. No conclusion could be more decisive.

But that is the conclusion to the Queste, not to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. An entire, if comparatively brief, romance remains. The Mort le Roi Artu, rather than the Queste, is the Cycle's ultimate conclusion, but its author's task is complicated by the apparent finality of the Grail quest. The Mort Artu is in effect a second conclusion and thus, almost by definition, an anti-climax, recounting events that follow the tribulations, triumphs, and tragedies of the Grail quest. It is in fact, as Pauphilet suggests, the Cycle's epilogue.

The fundamental promise of the Cycle, a promise made repeatedly in its early romances, has been kept: the Grail knight has come and has accomplished his quest. But the Arthurian court survives the quest, if only as a pale reflection of its formerly glorious presence. Many of the best knights are dead. Two of the greatest – Lancelot and Gawain – have survived, but their mutual antagonism will be one of the pivots on which the remaining story will turn and one of the principal keys to the terrible catastrophe that is to befall Arthur and his realm.

The text of this romance and, indeed, that of the preceding one offer abundant portents of that catastrophe. At the beginning of the Queste, Gawain and then all the other knights vow that they will set out in search of the Grail and will continue the quest ‘un an et un jor et encor plus se mestiers est’ (16) [a year and a day and even longer if need be].

The early thirteenth-century French Lancelot-Grail Cycle (or Vulgate Cycle) brings together the stories of Arthur with those of the Grail, a conjunction of materials that continues to fascinate the Western imagination today. It is a vast compendium of Arthurian literature whose importance for the development of European fiction is finally being appreciated. Representing what is probably the earliest large-scale use of prose for fiction in the West, it also exemplifies the taste for big cyclic compositions that shaped much of European narrative fiction for three centuries. Dante admired the meandering seductiveness of the Cycle's storytelling, Malory relied on it in large part for his fifteenth-century Arthuriad, and it spawned a progeny of adaptations in other languages. Despite its impressive medieval pedigree, the Lancelot-Grail's sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics pronounced it soporific, boring, worthless, while it fared no better with ‘scientific’ nineteenth-century critics who berated it for being repetitive, derivative, unfocused, and prosaic. Scholarship on the work was hampered until recently by the complexity of its manuscript tradition, the compilatory nature of the Cycle, its gigantic size, and its complex artistry. However, modern critical editions of all five branches of the Cycle have fanned scholarly interest in this vast text, while on a broader front the recent English translation of Sommer's Vulgate Cycle under the general direction of Norris J. Lacy (Lancelot-Grail: the Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, 5 vols. [New York: Garland, 1993–96]) opens up this medieval bestseller to a much wider audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

This volume attempts to convey to modern readers the appeal that such an unwieldy text must have had for its medieval audiences, and the richness of composition that made it compelling. The Lancelot-Grail Cycle could be described summarily as an anonymous text comprising at least five different works, possibly by five different authors, a text with no clear provenance although the majority of its manuscripts come from the north-east corner of France and what is now Belgium and Flanders. This description of the Cycle in terms of what it does not have, has the advantage of compelling us to focus largely, though not exclusively, on the text itself as our primary source of documentation.

In his Libre or book of songs, the thirteenth-century troubadour Guiraut Riquier has left us a rich implicit account of his professional peregrinations, hopes, ambitions, resentments, and anxieties. His cansos and vers, which he carefully dated and anthologized, indirectly chronicle the career of a poet who scoured the courts of Southern France and Spain, from 1254 to 1292, in quest of wealth and social standing. Riquier's self-compiled chansonnier discloses two framing stories. One is the simulated autobiography of a lover. Riquier pretends to have spent many years of his life in wooing an idealized, distant lady, to whom he gives the sobriquet or senhal of Belh Deport (fine comportment, fair pastime). He arranges for this fictive lady to expire in 1282, exactly two thirds of the way into the chronological series of twenty-seven cansos and twenty-seven vers (Bossy, “Cyclical Composition” 284–86). The plot device of her death enables Riquier to anticipate the canzonieri of Dante and Petrarch by dividing his book of lyrics into two major sections, which one might entitle respectively in vita and in morte (Bossy, “Cyclical” 286–90, “Twin Flocks” 155–59). The book's second framing story tells of Riquier's quixotic search for an ideal patron, during almost forty years of poetic activity (a span of time doubtless meant to recall the children of Israel's forty years of wandering in the desert before entering the Promised Land). The perfect patron, according to Riquier, would display two essential qualities. Firstly, he would fully recognize and value Riquier's talents. Secondly, he would provide generous subsidies, and on a regular basis.

Throughout the book, Riquier never ceases to yearn for this paragon of a benefactor. Alas, he never finds him in this world. The perfect patron remains out of reach, as does Lady Belh Deport. To be sure, in the book's closing chapter, which covers the years 1283 to 1292, Riquier presents Christ as the ideal courtly lord and the Virgin Mary as the true prototype of Belh Deport in the realm of heaven. On earth, however, Belh Deport and the ideal patron continue to be for him two sides of the same, elusive coin. As readers of Riquier's compilation, we come to see that the lover's entreaties to Belh Deport are, in fact, a transparent fable for the poet's tug-of-war with a succession of male patrons.

Much scholarly effort has gone into the study of the anagram (Jakobson, Kristeva, Wunderli), prompted by the writings of Saussure and following the 1971 publication of an (incomplete) edition of Saussure's notebooks by Starobinski. The difficulty has always been to furnish “proof “ – Saussure himself wondered if he were dealing with simple fortuitous coincidences (Jakobson 22). The challenge is to develop a reliable analytical approach permitting researchers to establish the presence of minimal phonemic units capable of operating in anagrammic procedures. In this article, we will present a computer-aided method of analysis (using the text retrieval program TACT) applied to a body of troubadour songs for the purpose of generating a classification of their phonetic content. The “phonetic blueprints” thus identified are used as a norm against which to measure the phonetic profiles of individual songs, leading to the detection of phonemic “agendas” the poets might be exploring. The results will be exemplified in the form of two brief analyses.

The Hypophone

Before we discuss corpus and methodology, we first need to define our terms. For the purpose of this paper, we will adopt Meylakh's definition of the anagram: ”… the phonetic structure of certain key-words, whose semantic contribution in the text is reinforced and valorised throughout the composition by the presence of phonemic fragments of these key-words” (149). What is described here is the non-linear anagram: the scattering, throughout a line of text, of the phonemes of a key word. Saussure and others have used a bewildering array of terms to describe phenomena related to the anagram, such as “paragrams,” “hypograms,” “cryptograms,” and “syllabograms.” Clearly, the common feature in all these terms is the suffix -gram: something that is written. But since the troubadour songs were meant to be heard rather than read, the use of the suffix -phone would appear to be more appropriate than -gram. It may be argued that the presence of anagrams in a text constitutes an added value over and above the meaning conveyed by the linear text and that for that reason, the term hyperphone would be more suitable. However, we elected to adopt the term hypophone, as it aptly expresses the idea of a subliminal meaning hidden below the surface of the linear text.

Introduction

In the year of Our Lord 1300 and in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, Edward I, king of England, laid siege to Caerlaverock Castle near Dumfries in Scotland. The short battle which ensued was part of a series of campaigns the English monarch led against the Scots in the course of which he eventually met his death in 1307. The castle still stands in a splendid setting overlooking the Solway Firth.

Caerlaverock was a clear victory for Edward and, after the surrender, Robert de Clifford, one of the king's most trusted captains, was made keeper of the castle. A contemporary 956-line French poem in octosyllabic verse entitled “Le Siege de Karlaverok” commemorates this event and is of particular concern to people specializing in heraldry as it provides accurate blazons of the coats of arms of over a hundred of the combatants on the English side (Eight … Rolls of Arms 101–22).

At the end of the poem, the author records that Edward ordered seven banners to be flown from the battlements. First, his own, i.e., England (Gules, three lions passant guardant or); also, the banners of three barons who played an important role in the siege, John de Segrave (Sable, a lion rampant argent crowned or ), Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and constable of England (Azure, a bend argent cotised and between six lions rampant or), and Clifford (Checky or and azure, a fess gules). Finally – and this is interesting – three other banners, those of St. Edmund (Azure, three crowns or), St. George (Argent, a cross gules), and Edward the Confessor (Azure, a cross patonce between five birds or) (Eight … Rolls of Arms lines 945–51).

That Edward, Segrave, Hereford, and Clifford bore the arms ascribed to them in the poem and were present at the siege of Caerlaverock Castle is a matter of historical record. But the three other coats of arms are attributed to individuals who lived before the rise of true heraldry in the second quarter of the twelfth century.

In 1066, the death of Edward the Confessor, king of the English, precipitated the Norman invasion. St. Edmund, king and martyr, died in 869. And the cult of St. George dates back to the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century (Attwater 148).

Ma recherche porte actuellement sur les serments et les promesses en ancien français. Cette recherche s’inscrit en pragmatique, pragmatique dite de troisième génération, autrement dit l’étude des actes de langage et des verbes performatifs. J’applique la théorie linguistique moderne aux verbes jurer et promettre en ancien français. Et, puisque ces verbes sont attestés respectivement depuis le neuvième siècle pour l’un et le dixième siècle pour l’autre, rien ne semble a priori distinguer leur fonctionnement en français moderne et en ancien français.

La notion de contexte

Rapidement, l’étude du contexte s’est avérée pertinente pour ma recherche. Le contexte en effet s’est révélé un instrument méthodologique efficace puisque c’est un élément déterminant dans le processus interprétatif. En ce qui me concerne, je ne me suis pas attachée au contexte, objet d’étude théorique en soi. Il convient pourtant de s’interroger sur la notion de contexte qui a une acception beaucoup trop large puisque depuis Kant on comprend par contexte le contexte historique, par exemple. En linguistique, le contexte, domaine privilégié de la pragmatique, a une définition plus précise.

Le contexte en effet peut se définir selon deux axes: « Par rapport à un élément quelconque d’une suite linguistique, le contexte est, d’après la définition de La Grammaire d’aujourd’hui, l’ensemble des unités qui le précèdent et le suivent » (Arrivé 185). C’est aussi dans une seconde acception du terme « l’ensemble des éléments situationnels – extralinguistiques – au sein desquels se situe l’acte d’énonciation de la séquence linguistique » (185). L’analyse contextuelle implique donc non seulement le contexte linguistique – elle consiste alors à prendre en considération le contexte gauche, le contexte droit, mais aussi le contexte étroit et le contexte élargi – mais encore le contexte extralinguistique. Autant d’éléments qui concourent à une meilleure approche de notre thème en particulier et de la langue médiévale en général.

Les marques d’un engagement spécifique: le serment. Le recours au contexte Extralinguistique

Au Moyen Age, l’acte religieux qu’est le serment connaît une « éclatante carrière », pour reprendre l’expression de Robert Fossier (64). Dans la société chrétienne médiévale en effet, le serment, fondement de la société, rythme la vie publique, sociale, économique …

Among courtly romances, Philippe de Remy's Roman de la Manekine is a rare example of a male-authored narrative of adventure with a female protagonist. Nevertheless, the quest it plots of the protagonist's initiation and integration into society is typical of the received romance tradition. Medieval romance, says Bloch,

La Manekine follows the fortunes of its protagonist, Joïe, from her birth as the Princess of Hungary, through innumerable vicissitudes (she is threatened with an incestuous marriage, twice cast adrift on the ocean, twice exiled in foreign lands and falsely accused of monstrous birth) to her eventual restoration as the rightful queen of Hungary, Armenia and Scotland. Some critics have read this courtly romance as an exemplum, a didactic work for the education and edification of the public; and indeed Joïe is represented from beginning to end as a young woman of great piety. Others see it as a plea for exogamous marriage, whereby a man is bound to take a wife outside his own group. My own inclination is to view La Manekine as a multi-layered romance that can be read at many levels.

Beyond the story of Joïe's initiation and final successful integration into society, however, the romance engages with issues of name and identity in ways that are subtly different from those of standard romances with male heroes. It confronts the problems of identity as a social construct, conferred upon individuals by virtue of their birth or rank in society; it shows that external or public perception may be at variance with a character's sense of selfhood, or private identity. In light of such concerns, La Manekine can profitably be read as a courtly romance in which the main character's social identity is subverted by the decidedly uncourtly conduct of some of the key players. Thelma Fenster's article “Beaumanoir's La Manekine: Kin D(r)ead: Incest, Doubling and Death” offers such a reading, based on Freudian psychoanalytical theory.

The “falsely accused queen” story, an adjunct to numerous epic enfances, is more than a folktale borrowed into late medieval literary narrative. It is a reflection of social concerns about inheritance, family and marriage conditions similar to those seen in male enfances which it parallels, as well as being a dilatory plot technique which allows interlace in the form of a further character to be followed, and finally, it is a model specular episode for “expansion by variation” favored by both romance and epic. These tales are indeed “female enfances” because of their relationship to male enfances accounts and because of the integration of the female protagonist into an adult societal position.

Suard has described late chansons de geste (fourteenth- to fifteenth-century texts) by four essential characteristics (I change the order): 1. new types of characters; 2. new importance of folkloric and marvelous elements; 3. great length; and 4. strong didactic interest (449). These characteristics begin to appear in the thirteenth century. The increasingly frequent appearance of women among these new character types in the chanson de geste during the thirteenth century has been linked to the influence of courtly literature, though differences in women's roles between Arthurian and Carolingian plots are noticeable (cf. Vitz; Kay; Sinclair). The number of women protagonists increases with the number of young protagonists, of enfants.

Among the gestes which include female protagonists are those of Nanteuil and Charlemagne. Formally chansons de geste – that is, assonanced or rhymed laisses of decasyllables or alexandrines – they are frequently called chansons d’aventures or even romances. In the Charlemagne cycle, Berte aux grands pieds, Macario (Reine Sibille), Berta e Milone are dominated by female protagonists; in the geste of Nanteuil, Aye d’Avignon and Parise la duchesse are protagonists of the eponymous poems. Non-cyclical poems based on the same motif are also difficult to place by genre: Kibler calls La Belle Hélène de Constantinople a chanson de geste in form only (“Epic to Romance” 332); Wallensköld subtitles Florence de Rome a chanson d’aventure; and Kay calls the same poem “a limit-text of the genre” (“Chansons de geste” 158).