Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred by Barbara Newman (review)

In the preface to her most recent book, Barbara Newman explains that “for us, the secular is the normative, unmarked default category, while the sacred is the marked asymmetrical Other. In the Middle Ages it was the reverse” (viii). As her subsequent analysis demonstrates, in the medieval period, the secular was “always already in dialogue with the sacred” (ix). In place of a theory that privileges the sacred, as was favored by exegetical critics like D. W. Robertson, Newman proposes a “more symmetrical model.” She theorizes the dialectical relationship between secular and sacred through the term “crossover,” which, as in the modern music industry, “is not a genre in itself, but a mode of interaction, an openness to the meeting or even merger of sacred and secular in a wide variety of forms”(ix).

In her first chapter, having identified “crossover” as her larger conceptual framework, Newman further clarifies the principles that shape the interaction between sacred and secular. The first of these is the sic et non principle, or hermeneutics of both/and, which she defines as “when sacred and secular meanings both present themselves in a text, yet cannot be harmoniously reconciled” (7). Her second theoretical apparatus is the principle of double judgment, governed by the paradox of felix culpa (fortunate fault), which appears in the “fortunate” sins of David, Eve, and Judas. Her final two principles are the meeting of pagan and Christian in Arthurian romances, which we find in episodes like the challenge scenario and the beheading game, and convergent idealism (“everything rises”) in hagiographic romance.

Her subsequent chapters apply these principles to a wide range of canonical and lesser know medieval texts. Chapter 2 examines the play of sacred and secular, pagan and Christian first in Chretien de Troyes’ Le Chevalier de la Charrette and then in the Grail romances Perlesvaus and la Queste del Saint Graal. This Lancelot-grail material, she demonstrates, affords many instances of double coding, both in the overlay of pagan matiere with Christian sen and in the ambiguity or duplicity of moral judgment. The chapter culminates in an examination of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Arthur, about which Newman observes, “when Malory is forced to choose between sacred and secular values, he chooses both” (109). Her third chapter focuses on the dialogue between courtly and spiritual discourses on love in Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls. Newman identifies three sets of intertexts for Marguerite’s work. She begins by looking at the relationship between The Mirror and love songs and religious poems presented at the puy de Nostre Dame, the literary society of Valenciennes. She then examines the connections between Marguerite’s work and the mystique courtoise poems written by or for beguines in the same period, examining both the formal correspondences between The Mirror and these works and their common focus on fin-amor. Finally, Newman examines the surprising relationship between The Mirror and The Romance of the Rose, to which she argues Marguerite responds in the literary form of her work, in its title, in the core concept of ‘mirroring’ and in its treatment of the androgynous Beloved. Newman ends this chapter by looking at how, soon after Marguerite’s execution, the Council of Vienne’s decrees unexpectedly linked the Mirror’s insistence on taking leave of virtues and owing no more service to reason with the conflict between Love and Reason in the Rose.

In her fourth chapter, Newman looks at three lesser-known parodies of the sacred Le Lai d’Ignaure (ca. 1200), an old French lay that mocks women’s Eucharistic devotion, The Passion of the Jews of Prague (1389), an inversion of Christ’s Passion to celebrate a progrom, and Dispute between God and his Mother (1450), a comic debate poem that ridicules excessive Marian piety. Newman provides translations of the latter two of these in the book’s appendixes. Here, she contends that all three texts allow for the principle of double...