Medieval Didactic Literature

Okay, I’ll admit it: for a so-called ‘PhD blog’, my contributions so far have been very much focused on the last of those three little letters (‘D’ stands for ‘digressions’, right?). In an attempt to redress the balance slightly, the next few blog posts will constitute my attempt to put things right. Over the next couple of weeks, I’d like to set the stage for discussing what this blog’s (allegedly) ‘all about’: being a PhD student in medieval French.

First, though, let’s set our own, rather more personal, stage. Let’s imagine that we’re both at a social event. Let’s also imagine that, for some reason, you’ve asked me what it is I’m doing from September. After thanking you profusely for actually coming and talking to me, I’d reply with the short version: ‘I’m studying medieval Anglo-Norman didactic literature.’

As you’ve probably noticed, there are at least two notions that need unpacking in that phrase, of which the most immediately apparent is probably the first – what is ‘Anglo-Norman’, anyway? That will be the topic of next week’s blog post, as will the precise nature of the all-important ‘research questions’. For today, let’s content ourselves with the second, more universally-applicable concept:  didactic literature, and particularly that of the medieval period. What is ‘didactic literature’, exactly, and why bother studying it?

When I was an undergraduate student, ‘medieval French’ was to me synonymous with the study of medieval French narrative literature. This might sound like a fairly subtle nuance, but it had important consequences for how I conceived of the subject area as a whole. It wasn’t until my Master’s year that I started to realise how much there was beyond the confines of the canonically-defined ‘literary text’. Not all medieval French texts, I learned, were written to tell a story with characters and a definable ‘plot’. Indeed, some of the most fun that I had on my Master’s was unpicking medieval chess treatises, and discovering that even the most technical of genres incorporated a great deal of moralization in spite of its lack of narrative.

Of course, literary narratives à la modern fiction have their uses. We’re all familiar with fiction, and the importance of narrative in constructing it, so studying medieval narratives is a very productive exercise, and one that allows us to draw intriguing parallels with how audiences’ expectations have changed. In the case of certain medieval French narratives, such as the cycles of Arthurian romance, we can observe how basic elements gave rise to a vast corpus of texts that spanned continents and straddled genres.

A reductive focus on exclusively narrative literature, though, has obvious deleterious consequences on how we understand textuality. Frédéric Duval acknowledges this in a very stylish manner in his introduction to a late-medieval literary anthology:

‘Cet héritage du XIXe siècle conduit à privéligier les textes proches de nos critères normatifs et qualitatifs […] la fiction est valorisée tandis que la didactique est négligée […] en contradiction avec l’écriture et la récéption médiévales.’^[1]

Duval goes on to claim that if he had chosen the texts in his anthology according to the number of manuscript witnesses that each one had, he would have been forced to include almost exclusively Books of Hours. While this may be an exaggeration, it certainly communicates a crucial point: texts outside the ‘canon’ are essential to our understanding of medieval textuality. In my research proposal, I used the term ‘para-literature’ to refer to such texts – texts that would not meet the criteria of narration and subject matter that unite texts in the ‘canon’, but play an important role in the body of medieval French literature – and I’m looking forward to developing this idea further throughout the PhD.

This is where I hope to carve out my little niche in the world of academic research. The texts that I’ll be looking at are all explicitly instructional, and many of them don’t (at first glance) make use of a narrative to convey their message. They range from language manuals (on which I have previously written a post for a wonderful Oxford outreach blog) to sermons on human mortality, but they all feel very different from the texts that I’ve spent most of my time studying in the past. They’re wonderfully practical, and offer a unique insight into how their subjects conceived of their world; when reading them in manuscript form, you can almost feel the breath of the scribe on the back of your neck. I’m not quite sure, but perhaps it’s that which makes the prospect of researching them so exciting.

¹ ‘This nineteenth-century heritage leads us to focus on texts that correspond to our own normative and qualitative judgements […] fiction is valued whereas dicactic texts are neglected […] contrary to medieval writing and its reception.’ Frédéric Duval, Lectures françaises de la fin du Moyen Age. Petite anthologie commentée de succès littéraires, Textes littéraires français (Geneva: Droz, 2007), pp. 9-10.[↵]

Cover image: a detail from the manuscript of one of the sermons mentioned above. This one’s pretty graphic: the text translates (roughly) as ‘Sperm … is where we all begin / It is made from two things […] Do not be ashamed at these words / For all people are created thus’. From Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 210 (fol. 15r).