Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (review)

This book starts with the observation that many of Old French literature's greatest works are set on, or beyond, the borders of the French-speaking world, and should therefore be read in their historical context of cross-cultural contact. By providing just such a reading, Sharon Kinoshita sets out to avoid a drawback she sees in much postcolonial criticism: that of considering medieval texts as proto-modern anticipations of expansionist ideology. Instead, through analysis of a corpus of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts — to wit, La Chanson de Roland, La Prise d'Orange, Floire et Blancheflor, the Lais of Marie de France, La Conquête de Constantinople, La Fille du comte de Pontieu and La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise—she demonstrates that vernacular literature did the work of negotiating a complex contemporary environment of political, economic and socio-cultural interaction. Particularly pleasing is her analysis of the Roland, a text often read as a clash of civilizations narrative, partly because of the binary opposition of its famous line 1015: 'Paien unt tort e crestïens unt dreit'. Firstly, by paying as much attention to the cultural accommodation of the first part of the text as to the great battles at its heart, and secondly, by reconsidering the role of female characters, Kinoshita is able to demonstrate that the text operates a complicated dynamic imbricating 'questions of self and other, gender and genre', and that it constructs crusade ideology rather than reflecting it. Elsewhere, however, Kinoshita is a little too quick to historicize the texts, and the phrase 'contemporary audiences would have recognized ...' almost becomes a refrain; occasionally, some unconvincing parallels between text and contemporary reality are thus drawn. Indeed, audiences might in fact have recognized some elements of the texts as literary topoi rather than as reflections of the outside world. For example, the rich description of medieval Cairo given in Floire et Blancheflor might have been more evocative of the commonplace of the exotic luxury of the East than of genuine accounts of travel to the city. This aside, the wonderfully subtle and engaging analysis offered here make this a key contribution to the nascent field of postcolonial medievalism.