Effet de parlé and effet d’écrit: The Authorial Strategies of Medieval French Historians

Summary

Milman Parry's seminal work on Homeric verse introduced the idea that voice and performance may have played a part in the creation and reception of medieval histories and chronicles, thus opening a new field of scholarly exploration. Known by different names – orality, vocality, performance – this was an area where the written word was surrounded by allegedly uneducated, illiterate or semi-literate voices, and did not have absolute authority. Evelyn Birge Vitz has been among the most avid listeners and interpreters of these voices, and has also actively helped younger colleagues to hear and examine them. After reading her Orality and Performance in Early French Romance, I began to pay closer attention to oral aspects of medieval historical texts and noted that in historical writings, references to orality appear to be both distinct from and related to writing. Until recently, scholars have asked primarily whether represented speech in written historical texts is ‘true’ or ‘false’, but by focusing instead on the effects produced by these references within the texts, it becomes apparent that medieval authors self-consciously used them to strategically position themselves within textual communities vis-à-vis their work and patrons, their different audiences and fellow authors. Far from being just nostalgic, fictional or a locus of literary play as they are in some literary works, references to the voice and writing in medieval historical works expose the complex structure of different textual communities, their diverse workings and dynamic constructs of authority.

To examine the effects of references to the voice and writing in medieval chronicles and histories – which I call effets de parlé and effets d’écrit – I focus on the works of four writers who represent two authorial qualities, that of the clerkly and non-clerkly writer, within two periods: the central Middle Ages (the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) and the late Middle Ages (the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Geffrei Gaimar and Geoffrey of Villehardouin wrote in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, respectively, while Jean Froissart and Christine de Pizan wrote in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Gaimar and Froissart were clerks, while Villehardouin and Pizan were not (though this does not mean that they were uneducated). For the purposes of this essay, the works of these four authors represent the ways oral and written effects were used by French writers of vernacular histories during the Middle Ages.