"Every Valley Shall Be Exalted": The Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought (review)

Admired for her finely crafted studies of social, economic, and ecclesiastical history in twelfth-century Burgundy and her impeccable editions of monastic cartularies, Constance Bouchard now essays an interdisciplinary study, addressing scholasticism, vernacular literature, monastic conversion, conflict resolution, and gender roles. Twelfth-century discourse in all these areas, she argues, engaged in exploring paired opposites, whether polar or binary. Rather than trying to resolve tensions between them or to split the difference, contemporaries sought to maintain oppositions, as a conscious strategy for organizing thought and experience. The principles on which they drew were the coincidentia oppositorum theme in Plato's Symposium and Phaedo (although she does not explain how these texts were mediated to Latinophones), Aristotelian-Boethian dialectic, the urge to counter Catharist dualism with orthodox pairings of opposites, and, above all, the paradoxes intrinsic to Christian doctrine and ethics. Her attempt to interpret twelfth-century culture in these terms is far from fully convincing.

Bouchard's star turn is her chapter on conflict resolution in a gift and counter-gift society. She demonstrates that plaintiffs, by yielding as their opening gambit,could thereby extract gains from opponents of equal value to what they conceded, without loss of dignity or mutual good will. This finding does, for twelfth-century Burgundy, what Adam Kosto, Geoffrey Koziol, and Barbara Rosenwein have done for dispute analysis in other medieval venues and centuries.

On the other hand, Bouchard's success in treating gender, literature, and monastic conversion is only partial. Problems result from her highly selective and not always representative examples and the thinness of her data base. On gender, she holds, in a society still innocent of Aristotle's concept of females as defective males, women might be regarded as more physical than men and subordinated to them, but gender roles were viewed as complementary and, to some extent, interchangeable. Bouchard's sole spokeswoman is Hildegard of Bingen, although she does not consider Hildegard's sui generis qualities. Bouchard does not acknowledge the findings of Amy Hollywood,¹ who shows that, unlike their male hagiographers, female mystics described their religious experience as spiritual, not physical. Refreshingly, Bouchard recognizes that Andreas Capellanus' De amore recuperates Ovid's dyptich, the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, although she does not flag Andreas' rhetorical argumentation in utramque partem and the fact that he satirizes both sides of the debate. For Bouchard, courtly literature influenced mores for the better; she is unaware of Joachim Bumke's argument² that it was transgressive, a literary escape from the grim realities of male-female relations.

In treating romance and epic as expressing unreconciled tensions between love and honor and between conflicting loyalties, half of Bouchard's examples (Lancelot and Raoul de Cambrai) fully support her thesis, while the other half (Erec et Enide and the Chanson de Roland) do not. Robert Hanning³ could have shown her how the heroes in Erec and its companion piece Yvain internalize, reconcile, and balance the chivalric duties of uxoriousness and exploits. In Roland, only one of the text's three opposing doubtlets remains unresolved, Roland's impulsiveness and Oliver's caution, for Charlemagne vanquishes his Muslim enemy while Roland's loyalty and Ganelon's treachery, to which Bouchard does not refer, cannot coexist in the same breast.

In understanding the status inversions involved in abandoning the world for the cloister, Bouchard's thesis is not a good fit except for knights who joined the militia Christi as members of military orders. There is a real parallel here with Augustine taking the gold and silver of his pagan learning into the Promised Land, although Bouchard finds his model irrelevant. She views monastic conversion largely from Bernard of Clairvaux's perspective and accurately sees his penchant for paired opposites as a feature of the...