The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translatio by Laura Chuhan Campbell (review)

The literary, religious, and political ambitions accompanying the transmission of Arthurian texts, in medieval France and Italy, are analyzed here through the character of Merlin. With Charles Sanders Peirce’s and Umberto Eco’s semiotics as the theoretical framework, Laura Chuhan Campbell makes the compelling argument that the activity of the translator is a comprehensive representation of medieval authorial agency and readership. The complex process of transposing the figure of Merlin, the contradictory mastermind of Arthurian texts, and a translator himself, from one vernacular to another, is a useful representation of Daniel Poirion’s seminal concept of ré-écriture. In her precise analysis, Campbell makes a distinction between medieval transposition and translatio, identifying the former as the more reciprocal and non-binary mode of rewriting between French and Italian.

Chapter One is a longer version of Campbell’s article on Merlin’s conception, published in Arthuriana 23 (2013). When tested by the devil, Merlin’s maternal family reacts differently in Robert de Boron’s Merlin en prose, in the Vulgate Cycle, and in La Storia di Merlino by Paulino Pieri. In the Italian text, the sins of the family are attenuated and Merlin’s mother shows signs of patientia, whereas Merlin’s ambiguity is emphasized in the French cycles. His background is made irreproachable in order to ensure his future credibility as a prophet in the Florentine text, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini. Chapter Two focuses on Merlin’s entombment motif in the Vulgate’s Estoire de Merlin, the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin, and the fifteenth-century Venetian La Historia di Merlino. In those texts, and for various internal reasons, the Dame du Lac clouds binary gender oppositions by hindering Merlin’s prophetic abilities, ending his direct intervention in the narrative, and appropriating his writings. While remaining misogynistic, different versions of the episode fault and then defend her actions. Campbell shows that the irreconcilable contradictions, inherent to the Dame du Lac and Merlin, are in turn projected onto Merlin’s own translation and writing process, as well as the transmission of his texts. In Chapter Three, using Peirce’s tripartite semiotic system, Campbell analyzes the obscurity of Merlin’s prophecies within the Arthurian universe of the French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate. In order to keep control of the chronology of events or to allow characters to use their free will, Merlin muddles his prophecies by using inconsistent animal symbolism or by disguising himself while revealing bits of the future. Merlin’s knowledge is a representation of Eco’s semiotic labyrinth, too vast for characters to grasp and impossible for scribes to include in one text. And this fragmented translation process mirrors the impossibility for human beings to comprehend God’s language. Chapter Four examines how prophecies are modified to refer to specific recent events in the texts written in Italy: the Prophecies, La Storia, and the fifteenth-century Venetian Lo Libero dello Savio Merlin. Scribes chose to guide, and therefore limit—or close, to use Eco’s term—the interpretation of certain prophecies: paratextual information, such as annotations and rubrics, offered Italian names and historical dates as the literal meaning of some prophecies in order to express political commentaries against Frederick II or the papacy, for example. Other prophecies were left open to the future reception of the texts.

This study provides very insightful close readings of numerous primary texts, while integrating a vast number of previous scholarly works on semiotics, theology, medieval translation and authorship, and the figure of Merlin (even though a few important works are missing from the bibliography). Not surprisingly, the reader can get lost in the labyrinth of primary texts and the author’s efforts to disambiguate the titles are not always quite sufficient. Nevertheless, this book is a great contribution to the research on Merlin, French and Italian Arthuriana...