Chansons de geste and Chansons d'aventures: Recent Perspectives on the Evolution of a Genre

This article will concentrate on recent developments in research into the Old and Middle French epic, concentrating very specifically on the French area but with some consideration given to Occitan and to Franco-Italian. The French domain naturally includes the insular French of the medieval British Isles, generally called Anglo-Norman, but translations and adaptations of Anglo-French poems into Middle English Charlemagne romances will be left to one side, as will their German, Dutch, and Scandinavian equivalents. French material does not enter Spain as epic poetry, surfacing only in the later romancero or appearing in chronicles: this material is also beyond the scope of the present article. A sound overview of international scholarship on all these manifestations of the matière de France can be found in the annual descriptive bibliography published by the Société Internationale Rencesvals.¹ A more analytical account of activity between 1955 and 2005 can be found in the volume of essays published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Société Rencesvals.² Equally important for identifying longer-term trends, as well as new departures, in chanson de geste studies are the fascicules of the Grundriß der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters devoted to the topic.³ Finally, the very recent survey of the whole field by François Suard gives both his own particularly acute assessments of poems and of current research on Old French epic and its prolongations in several areas.⁴

The starting point for this survey of recent scholarship is the paper given by William W. Kibler to the ninth international congress of the Société Rencesvals in 1982.⁵ The significance of this paper, which effectively launched the term chanson d'aventures to describe the poems that arose from the revival of interest in epic poetry as an actively creative genre in France in the mid-fourteenth century, lies in the way in which it focused attention on what was original and distinctive in these texts. Kibler enabled scholars to resituate them in the cultural context of the chivalric romances, also called romans d'aventure, which arose at the same period and which had a similar relationship to the earlier Arthurian romance as the chansons d'aventures had to twelfth- and early thirteenth-century chansons de geste. His intervention was timely, because it coincided with the increasing awareness among scholars in the field that the centuries between c. 1100 and c. 1500 could no longer be considered a homogeneous period: cultural and political evolution was so rapid across much of Western Europe between c. 1250 and c. 1350 that the previous habit of treating the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a decadent and etiolated extension of the 'glorious' twelfth and thirteenth centuries had become inadmissible. The understanding of the distinctiveness of compositional modes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been explored more recently by Hans-Erich Keller and Dorothea Kullmann, both of whom stress the importance of écriture in the discourse adopted by authors of epic poems and of the prose adaptations of them: while Kullmann explores the application of epic discourse to the biographical chronicle La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin, Keller emphasizes the distinction between celebratory discourse in the poems and the assimilation of epic to exemplary history in prose versions.⁶

This new interest in the culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has produced some significant editions of poems, previously edited, if at all, only by antiquarians in the mid-nineteenth century. Larry S. Crist and Robert Francis Cook, who were precursors in this field, published the first scientific edition of Baudouin de Sebourc in 2002.⁷ Other recent editions of chansons d'aventures are La Belle Hélène de Constantinople and Hugues Capet.⁸ These later poems are broadly differentiated from their twelfth- and thirteenth-century counterparts by the incorporation of important elements of plot and characterization, which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, will be the mark of the picaresque: heroes of obscure or illegitimate birth; rapid shifts of geographical location; adventures blending sexual exploits more akin to those found...