Pour une littérature médiévale moderne: Gaston Paris, l’amour courtois et les enjeux de la modernité by Ji-hyun Philippa Kim (review)

The topic of this book is not medieval literature in its own right, but the reception of medieval literature in France in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is a stimulating read for anyone curious about how the discipline of Old French studies was formed. Concise and cogent, the volume provides an overview of the influential scholar Gaston Paris and his intellectual milieu, before homing in on what would become his most famous contribution to critical discourse: the notion of amour courtois. Analysing the curious mixture of philology and romanticism that motivated Paris, Ji-hyun Kim defines the origins of the controversial term with new precision and convincingly demonstrates its links to the literary movement of Decadence. The first two chapters survey the French Decadent movement and the Sunday salons that Paris hosted, where luminaries of the day met to converse (women, Kim notes, were conspicuously absent). Paris’s role as pioneer of Old French philology was informed by his Decadent perspective on modernity and nostalgia for the past. Kim’s citations from other fin-de-siècle critics like Ferdinand Brunetière, who dismissed medieval literature as primitive, highlight the groundbreaking nature of Paris’s enterprise. Yet Paris’s commitment to what he perceived as the objective modern science of philology was paired with an idealized vision of the Middle Ages: if philology was the product of reason, rules, and civilization, the Middle Ages represented ‘la vitalité naturelle’ (p. 93), poetry, spontaneity, and heart. With this backdrop in place, the book’s crucial third chapter shows that Paris’s notion of amour courtois relied on a similar contrast between nature and art. Paris’s seminal 1883 article ‘Etudes sur les romans de la Table Ronde’ (Romania, 12) opposed the ‘passion simple, ardente, naturelle’ of Tristan and Iseut to the later, rule-bound amour courtois of Lancelot and Guinevere (p. 110); in order to construct this narrative, Paris glossed over bits of literary history that did not fit. Kim concludes by discussing Paris’s attempts to synthesize medieval and modern, nature and art; he admired Wagner and Frédéric Mistral for restoring passion to a decadent modern world. As a whole, Kim’s thought-provoking study does not patronize Paris, but places his scholarship within its historical context, and forcefully reminds us that there is no neutral way of looking at a text, as Paris himself was well aware. The question Kim does not answer, apart from implicitly, is to what degree her historical analysis of amour courtois as a nineteenth-century phenomenon should affect our interpretation of the medieval texts themselves, and our understanding of erotic desire in medieval France. While her book contains a usefully full bibliography on amour courtois, it largely sidesteps the vast polemic that has surrounded the concept in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her scrupulous investigation of the term’s original resonance provides impetus for scholars not only to return again to the Arthurian romances, but also to write the next chapters of the term’s literary history: to see how its changing définitions have continued to mirror the concerns of different countries, critical camps, and scholarly generations.