5 - Translatio Embodied? Renewal, Truth and the Status of Constantinople in Thirteenth-Century Didactic Texts

Summary

We have just been looking at twelfth- and early thirteenth-century texts that, by exploiting the themes of chivalry, crusade and East–West alliance, recount the potential or actual achievement of renewal through admiratio. Thirteenth-century didactic texts treat the same themes, but subordinate them to the poetic device of a debate between slander and sincerity. This debate raises questions about the reality and significance of a translatio from East to West. The extent to which the texts propose a solution to the ensuing dilemma of locating and embodying renewal, and the nature of that solution, depends upon their representation of the journey to Constantinople. The didactic prose romance Marques de Rome, with which we begin, dates from the second third of the thirteenth century, while two poems of political satire by rutebeuf, the ‘Bataille des vices contre les vertus’ and the ‘Complainte de Constantinople’, date from the 1260s. In Marques the device of embedded narratives is employed in order to question the possibility of ascertaining truth through bodily exposure, and this poses problems for the location and embodiment of Western renewal in the figure of the text's eponymous hero. In Rutebeuf hypocrisy is a key theme, and the poems exploit the device of allegorical personifications to show how the difficulty of locating truth leads to degeneration. Conflicting values are attributed to the journey to Constantinople and its role in renewing the West.