The Medieval Poetics of Contraries (review)

This bold and original first book is a study of how authorship is molded in four medieval texts, which are taken as exemplary for the ways in which they approach the relation between the “contraries” referred to in Bolduc’s title, namely the sacred and the secular. The texts studied are Gautier de Coinci’s early thirteenth-century French collection of Mary miracles, which is framed by contrafacta or adaptations of trouvère lyrics; the late thirteenth-century Occitan Breviari d’amor of Matfre Ermengaud, which likewise uses vernacular lyrics, citing them verbatim in an encyclopedia about divine love; the early fourteenth-century Roman de Fauvel in manuscript BnF fr. 146 that contains pious and other interpolations by an otherwise unknown Chaillou de Pestain; and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The authority to which these various authors lay claim in these writings is shown to result from different kinds of interplay between secular (typically vernacular) and sacred (typically Latin) textual traditions. The form this interplay takes is seen as different in each case, Dante being awarded the accolade of “transcending” the opposition between the contraries. Building a book out of such materials, given that Bolduc’s first three works are relatively unstudied whereas with Dante the reverse is the problem, is nothing short of courageous. As a result, The Medieval Poetics of Contraries is both wide-ranging in terms of the languages and genres which it studies, and also focused in terms of its preoccupations and chronological range. Effectively turning its back on many conventional medievalist topoi, such as the treatment of Latin in the context of the Renaissance of the twelfth century and translatio studii, it points instead to a vernacular poetics of scholasticism, and indeed of scholastic theology.

I regret that I am not a Dantist, since an assessment of the value of the Dante chapter would be the best test of this book’s achievements. Nor do I have first-hand knowledge of the Fauvel manuscript. My evaluation of Bolduc’s substantive textual analyses is restricted, then, to Gautier de Coinci (chapter 2) and Matfre Ermengaud (chapter 3). Both chapters are detailed, scholarly, and interesting. In her treatment of the former, however, Bolduc consistently downplays the originality and value of Gautier’s treatment of the miracles, whether in relation to earlier vernacular collections such as Adgar’s or those in Latin. She dismisses them from consideration, claiming the image they give of the Virgin is “rather traditional” (55) and that their composition is that of “conventional hagiography” (88). This seems to me to be very far from the truth. Indeed, Gautier’s elaboration of vernacular poetics in the miracles is arguably a lot more interesting and creative than his rather pedestrian lyric contrafacta. I also have reservations about the way she treats as disconnected from the rest of the encyclopedia the section of the Breviari which discusses troubadour poetry. From the outset, Matfre has said that he will explain the meaning of true love to the troubadours, and the section on sexual love, while apparently unfinished, fits exactly into the plan as prefigured in the “tree of love.” I admit, however, that the structure of the Breviari lends itself to disagreement, and the more this astonishing text is discussed the better.

In regard to the intellectual framework of the whole book, there is a problem, in my view, with Bolduc’s central identification of the terms (notions?) “sacred” and “secular” as contraries. I would say that the contrary of “secular” is “eternal” (except when speaking of the clergy, when it would be “regular”), while the contrary of “sacred” is “profane,” or possibly “sacrilegious.” It is possible, without any element of paradox, for something to be at the same time both secular and sacred; thus the terms are not contraries. A sacrament, for example, is both a sacred event and a secular one: it belongs in both domains simultaneously, by definition. Bolduc sometimes equates the relationship between “sacred” and “secular” with that between “religious” and “secular,” a move...