Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form

2 Economies of Romance Systems of Value in Chr

59 m 2 Economies of Romance Systems of Value in Chrétien de Troyes When can we begin to speak of medieval “culture”? This question is essentially the same as asking when Western society became aesthetically self-conscious, when, like Narcissus before the pool, it first ventured a collective “Iste ego sum.” For Georg Simmel, the moment of acculturation is always narcissistic. It starts with an awareness of form in which bodies of practice and patterns of behavior, liberated from the unthinking blur of quotidian ritual, take shape as socially valuable objects of cultivation in themselves. What we call culture is thus the stage in societal development in which, for example, music recognizes modes, technical knowledge sciences, law ethics, story­telling genres.1 Distant from the historical particulars of cultural production, however, Simmel’s sociology provides only part of an answer.2 Culture for Marx (although he does not address the subject directly) is a form of social consciousness born at the moment when mental labor differentiates itself from manual labor.3 In claiming to transcend the truck and struggle of material production, mental labor, for him, conferred specious substance and illusory value upon ahistorical, purely aesthetic representations of society. Mental labor, in other words, was the stuff of romance. It is not surprising, therefore, that the awakening of medieval culture in the twelfth century coincided both with sudden evolutions in the division of labor and a market economy and with the advent of a new literary genre in romance.4 In an age of rapid urbanization and the rise of the city, the medieval West was experiencing a Copernican 60 the sociology of romance moment of self-awareness. The feudal ethos, its martial imperatives subsidized by epic, had always perceived individual masculine values as if they existed in their own hermetic universe of chivalry. Romance, however, saw chivalric codes as part of the culture at large and understood individual cultural values as subordinate to a larger value of culture . More precisely, what romance seized upon was that this value of culture, indeed value tout court, could be construed as simultaneously quantitative (economic) and qualitative (ethical), that is one of price and one of worth. Each system of valuation contends with, yet is contingent upon, the other. Romance in particular appropriated this idea as its signal province. Romancers as mental laborers and manufacturers of culture, foremost among them Chrétien de Troyes, suddenly had power and a place in the economy. From this point on, chivalry and its ideology would cease to be an independent sociopolitical phenomenon with sure and settled values and would be instead a fief to the fictions in which its values were negotiated. In positing causes and consequences of this romance renaissance of value, I do not intend to observe an order of factual precedence for so impalpable an event or to procrusteanize its unruly influences to fit a single perspective. Multiple histories—social, economic, literary—have equal claim. From a Marxist perspective, the roots of the revaluation of value lie largely in developments in agriculture that produced for the first time a leisure economy in which work was no longer synonymous with manual labor. The large-scale adoption of the horse-drawn plow coupled with an ergonomic harness significantly increased the amount of land that could be cultivated in a day over the far slower oxen team.5 Cultivators learned more reliably to use legumes in crop rotation to return higher quantities of nitrogen to the soil, reducing fallow land and increasing yields by up to a third. The foundation of the Cistercians in 1098, an order dedicated to manual labor and cultivation as a moral alternative to the inactivity of prayer, dramatically increased assarts throughout Europe in the twelfth century, bringing more land under cultivation and administering it more effectively through a system of granges. Cistercians also joined local monarchs in minting new coin, part of the twelfth-century monetary revolution. With myriad new coinage vying for acceptance on a European market, its value now became a corollary of confidence in the issuing body rather than in mere weight, Economies of Romance 61 shifting the criterion of value from an unchanging metric to a variable one and causing what one critic has called an “economic nominalism” in which money, “divested of universal value . . . became free to float— a floating signifier—according to prevailing market price.”6 Prominent churchmen, including Albert the Great...