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c h a p t e r t h i r t e e n The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the Prologues u r s u l a p e t e r s Present-day medieval literature scholars have come to acknowledge the great extent to which medieval literature is a textual practice of rewriting.1 This concept exceeds by far what has, until recently, been taken as a feature of medieval literature production, performance, and manuscript tradition, subsumed under the notions of editing, multiple versions, or variance. In fact, it denotes the basic specificity of medieval textuality, which Stephen G. Nichols—as early as the late 1980s—defined as “Material Philology.”2 He illustrated this using example cases of textual productivity constitutive of medieval manuscripts. The implications of this textual concept have since been extensively and controversially debated in terms of the history of manuscript tradition and the theory and practice of text editing; however, not so much in terms of its implications regarding poetics and literary systematics. This can be clearly seen in the literary-historical treatment of texts, which— like the so-called Pèlerinage corpus—trace back to the work of one known author , namely the Pèlerinage de vie humaine, written around 1330 by the Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville,3 a Cistercian monk of Chaalis. The text was rewritten multiple times throughout the following centuries and unfurls in a variety of textual formations.4 However, in the world of scholarly research, the text still tends to be referred to under the name of Guillaume de Deguileville, the author of the original text; it is “simply” taken to have undergone an extraordinarily varied spread and development, ultimately triggered by the author himself. The internal transformation processes have only come into focus in recent years. In her seminal contribution from 2003, Fabienne Pomel5 illuminated The Pèlerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages 219 these processes, examining the prologues and incipits of some of the French Pèlerinage texts in terms of their poetological and functional historical aim. However, looking at the Pèlerinage corpus in particular, it does not make sense to limit one’s view only to the French section, since Pèlerinage texts have been translated into various other languages and were continually rewritten from the early fifteenth century onward. These texts must also be regarded as genuine constituents of the Pèlerinage corpus, giving it a decidedly European dimension .6 In the following, I would like to illustrate ten stages of these retextualization processes. Stage 1: From its very beginning, the textual history of the Pèlerinage corpus was one of retextualization. It did not undergo a material rewriting of an existing text as such, but was rewritten on a conceptual level of discourse traditions. The very first Pèlerinage text by Guillaume de Deguileville, the Pèlerinage de vie humaine written in 1330/31, is set upon the backdrop of the Roman de la Rose even in the opening verses of the prologue: “En veillant avoit lëu, / Considere et bien vëu / Le biau roumans de la Rose. / Bien croi que ce fu la chose / Qui plus m’esmut a ce songier / Qui ci apres vous vueil nuncier” (While I was awake, I had read, studied, and looked closely at the beautiful Romance of the Rose. I am sure that this was what moved me most to have the dream I will tell you about in a moment; 9–14; Clasby, 3). Thus it sets up a particular range of expectations, in which the following dream allegory positions itself anew. Simultaneously, there is a definite ideological recoding of the dream report typical of the genre: The Cistercian’s Jerusalem dream leads to an arduous path of the dreamt first-person pelerin persona, pointing to the spiritual perils of human life from birth to death. In any case, Guillaume de Deguileville systematically overwrites the Roman de la Rose adventures of the amant persona in the garden of love with the spiritual counter-concept of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine.7 Stage 2: Exactly at this point, the next stage of the rewriting sets in, since some of the many manuscripts offer a significantly different version, the socalled second edition. It seems to have undergone quite a pronounced editing process, even showing content-related changes from the first transcript of the Pèlerinage dream of...

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