Abstract
The earliest poem of the Old French Crusade Cycle, the Chanson d ’Antioche, the first in a set of three central poems of that cycle which will be the focus of this study, describes two distinct female reactions to the call of Pope Urban II at Clermont that began the First Crusade.1 After a few future heroes are listed as taking the cross (Antioche, 11. 819–21), the first reaction is the lament of the women who will be left behind and fear being widowed, abandoned, and forgotten (Antioche, 11. 828–43), which corresponds to the themes and tone of a body of extant lyric crusade poetry. Following the depiction of the tears, however, the poet notes a different female reaction to the crusade:
Des dames i ot maintes qui les crois ont fermees
Et les frances puceles, que Dex a tant amees,
Od lor p ères en vont.
(Antiodie, 11. 844–46)
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Notes
Suzanne Duparc-Quioc, ed., La Chanson d’Antioche. Edition du texte d’après la version ancienne (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1976). Hereafter abbreviated Antioche. Translations are my own. The other central poems are Geoffrey M. Myers, ed., The Old French Crusade Cycle, vol. 5: Les Chétifs (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981); Nigel R. Thorp, ed., The Old French Crusade Cycle, vol. 6: La Chanson de Jérusalem (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992).
Geoffrey M. Myers, “The Manuscripts of the Cycle,” in The Old French Crusade Cycle, vol. 1: La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, eds. Emanuel Mickel and Jan Nelson (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1977), pp. xiii–lxxxviii.
Carol Sweetenham and Linda Paterson, The Canso d’Antioca: An Occitan Epic Chronicle of the First Crusade (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).
Louis Cooper and Franklin M. Waltman, eds., La Gran Conquista de Ultramar, Biblioteca Nadonal MS 1187. Edition con introduction, notas y glosario (Madison: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1989).
Anouar Hatem, Les poèmesépiques des croisades: genèse—historicité—localisation: Essai sur l’activité littéraire dans les colonies franques de Syrie au Moyen Age (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1932), p. 83.
Robert Francis Cook, “Chanson d’Antioche,” Chanson de geste: le cycle de la croisade est-ilépique?, vol. 2, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980), pp. 5–8.
On the later part of the cycle, see Robert Francis Cook and Larry Stuart Crist, Le Deuxième Cycle de la Croisade: Deuxétudes sur son développement (Geneva: Droz, 1972).
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 35, 51, 88.
Régine Pernoud, La femme au temps des croisades (Paris: Stock, 1990), pp. 95–112. Virginia Gingerick Berry, ed., Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII in orientem (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
On how thirteenth-century leaders sought women’s financial support for crusades but urged them to stay at home, James Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213–1221 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 20–21 and 93.
Sharon Farmer, Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 23–24.
Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Chicago, IL Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 348–49.
On proto-nationalism, see Sarah B. Buchanan, “A Nascent National Identity in La Chanson d’Antioche,” The French Review 76.5 (2003): 918–32.
Francesco Gabrielli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans. E. J. Costello (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), pp. 77–78; Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, pp. 347–51.
Alexander Haggerty Krappe, “L’Anthropophagie des Thafurs,” Neophilologus 15 (1930): 274–78; Lewis Sumberg, “The Tafurs and the First Crusade,” Mediaeval Studies 21 (1959): 224–46.
Sarah Kay, The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1–7, 30–31. See also F. M. Warren, “The Enamored Moslem Princess in Orderic Vital and the French Epic,” PMLA 29 (1914): 341–58.
Jacqueline de Weever, “Marriages between Muslims and Christians, attitudes toward,” in Trade, Travel, and Exploration in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, eds. John Block Friedman and Kristen Mossier Figg (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 376–78.
Paul Bancourt, Les Musulmans des les chansons de geste du cycle du roi, 2 vols. (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1982), pp. 571–792; Micheline de Combarieu du Grès, “Un personnageépique: la jeune musulmane,” in Mélanges de langue et littérature françaises du Moyen-Age offertsà Pierre Jonin, (Aix-en-Provence: CUERMA, 1979), pp. 183–96; Hans-Erich Keller, “La belle Sarrasine dans Fierabras et ses dérivés,” in Charlemagne in the North: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference of the Société Rencesvals, Edinburgh 4th to 11th August 1991, eds. Philip E. Bennett, Anne Elizabeth Lobby, and Graham A. Runnalls (Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 1993), pp. 299–307; Sharon Kinoshita, “The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d’Orange and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen,” The Romanic Review 86, 2 (1995): 265–87.
Géraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 21–35.
Simon Gaunt, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 22–70, especially 26.
Emanuel J. Mickel, ed., The Old French Crusade Cycle, vol. 3: Les enfances Godefroi and Le retour de Comumarant (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), kisses 83–92, 113–15, 37–42.
Michel Zink, ed., Rutebeuf Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Librairie générale française, 1989), p. 774.
Philippe Ménard, “Tradition antique et tradition celtique dans une plaisanterie du Dit de l’Herberie,” Bulletin bibliographique de. la société internationale Arthurienne 17 (1965): 103–12.
P. Henry, Les enfances Guillaume, chanson de geste du XIII siècle (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1935). C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942): 218–19 [201–25]; Salvatore Luongo, “La femme magicienne: Orable tra epopea e folclore,” in Charlemagne in the North: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference of the Société Rencesvals, Edinburgh 4th to 11th August 1991, eds. Philip E. Bennett, Anne Elizabeth Lobby, and Graham A. Runnalls (Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 1993), pp. 345–59.
Sarahlies Johnston, “Magic,” in Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide, ed. Sarahlies Johnston (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004), pp. 149–50 [139–52].
Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 67–108.
The link to Herod is interesting, especially since the popular tradition of the “Vengeance Jesus Christ” texts and plays representing the crucifixion and later destruction of Jerusalem. This tradition invents the character of Herod’s wife who plays a similar role to these mother figures, arguing the negative position so that Herod can be shown as anguished in his sinful decision. See Stephen K. Wright, ed., The Vengeance of Our Lord: Medieval Dramatizations of the Destruction of Jerusalem (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1989).
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© 2007 Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman
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Heller, SG. (2007). Surprisingly Historical Women in the Old French Crusade Cycle. In: Poor, S.S., Schulman, J.K. (eds) Women and Medieval Epic. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06637-4_3
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