L’idéologie incarnée: représentations du corps dans le premier cycle de la croisade (Chanson d’Antioche, Chanson de Jérusalem, Chétifs) par Magali Janet (review)

Reviews 259 Janet, Magali. L’idéologie incarnée: représentations du corps dans le premier cycle de la croisade (Chanson d’Antioche, Chanson de Jérusalem, Chétifs). Paris: Champion, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7453-2667-6. Pp. 585. 85,50 a. These three chansons de geste written in the twelfth century give similar but significantly different accounts of the First Crusade (1096–99). Janet brings into focus these similarities and differences through her meticulous examination of the large number of words associated with the body that include not only body parts, but also internal organs, blood, and tears as well as physical movements in combat and religious acts. The variety of words referring to the body and their placement at the rhyme or the hemistich prove their importance. The participants in the Crusade were divided into three groups: Saracens, Christian knights, and the Tafurs, a marginal quasiautonomous group, who were North French and Flemish Christian peasants described in animalistic terms and led by Pierre l’Ermite. They ate roots and weeds, were extremely thin, fought naked and barefoot armed with rocks, knives, axes, and hatches and indulged in cannibalism and rape. These Christian crusaders did not possess the warrior ethics associated with the Christian knights or even the Saracens. The Saracen knights’ body parts are also presented in animalistic terms because they are pagans. Linked to the devil, they are ugly, savage, and bestial not unlike the Tafurs but for different reasons.Vocabulary associated with the Saracens’bodies consistently demonstrates their inevitable defeat and the Christians’ inevitable victory. The appetites of the body also distinguish the three groups of Crusaders. The Christian knights substitute superior values, the love of God and the passion of combat, for pleasures of the body by practicing abstinence from sex and food while the Saracens and Tafurs indulge in these pleasures whenever possible. The suffering of the Christian knights from exile, famine, heat, and thirst is linked to the suffering of Christ on the cross; however, their suffering from wounds is seldom mentioned since the martyrdom of the knights was exalted by their suffering physically in silence. The vocabulary associated with killing and dying delineates the stages of dying from the moment the crusader envisages his own death to his actual death and the departure of his soul. It is the Saracens who cry loudly in the fear of death that demonstrates their inferiority. The critical apparatus of the volume will be quite useful to scholars. It includes an extensive bibliography (529–75), an index of proper names, places, and characters, forty-seven “Tableaux” that document the episodes in each chanson de geste, the vocabulary used in each chanson to refer to body parts (with the number of occurrences ), the occurrences of the vocabulary of the head, the face and its parts according to the individuals and contexts, etc. This book will be particularly interesting to all scholars who specialize in the study of the French epic genre. Scholars who study the words and expressions used to refer to the body in Old French literature will also find this work an excellent and detailed resource because of the extensive statistics and also the examination of the contexts of usage. Rice University (TX) Deborah Nelson-Campbell ...