When I See That Skylark Lift

Martin Best, The Dawn of Romance, HMV, 1978

Bernard de Ventadourn

Now when I see the skylark lift
His wings for joy in dawn’s first ray
Then let himself, oblivious, drift
For all his heart is glad and gay,
Ay! such great envies seize my thought
To see the rapture that others find,
I marvel that desire does not
Consume away this heart of mine.

Alas, I thought I’d grown so wise;
In love I had so much to learn:
I can’t control this heart that flies
To her who pays love no return.
Ay! now she steals, through love’s sweet theft,
My heart, my self, my world entire;
She steals herself and I am left
Only this longing and desire.

Losing control, I’ve lost all right
To rule my life; my life’s her prize
Since first she showed me true delight
In those bright mirrors, her two eyes.
Ay! once I’d caught myself inside
Her glances, I’ve been drowned in sighs,
Dying as fair Narcissus died
In streams that mirror captive skies.

Deep in despair, I’ll place no trust
In women though I did before;
I’ve been their champion so it’s just
That I renounce them evermore;
When none will lift me from my fall
When she has cast me down in shame,
Now I distrust them, one and all,
I’ve learned too wee they’re all the same.

She acts as any woman would—
No wonder I’m dissatisfied;
She’ll never do the things she should;
She only wants all that’s denied.
Ay! now I fall in deep disgrace,
A fool upon love’s bridge am I;
No one knows how that could take place
Unless I dared to climb too high.

All mercy’s gone, all pity lost—
Though at the best I still knew none—
Since she who should yield mercy most
Shows me the least of anyone.
Wrongful it seems, now, in my view,
To see a creature love’s betrayed
Who’d seek no other good but you,
Then let him die without your aid.

Since she, my Lady, shows no care
To earn my thanks, nor pays Love’s rights
Since she’ll not hear my constant prayer
And my love yields her no delights,
I say no more; I silent go;
She gives me death; let death reply.
My Lady won’t embrace me so
I leave, exiled to pain for aye.

Tristan, you’ll hear no more from me:
I leave to wander, none knows where;
Henceforth all joys in love I’ll flee
And all my songs I Now forswear.

From: Kehew, Robert (ed.), Lark in the Morning: The verses of the Troubadours. A Bilingual Edition, 2005, The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, pp. 75-77.
(https://books.google.com.au/books?id=q41XiQ_OY-MC)

Date: 12^th century (original in Occitan); 1998 (translation in English)

Book review: Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, by Logan E Whelan.

Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory, by Logan E Whelan.

Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

We usually come to the memory arts through Frances Yates’s pioneering book The Art of Memory, 1966. (Bodley Head, ISBN 1847922929.)

What she presents us with there are the fully developed Renaissance systems, great visual wonders of concept. Was the Renaissance theatre of memory a working model, or the ultimate aim?

It is the tracing back of these arts that is most fascinating. 
We come to Cicero’s writings on rhetoric as one main source. The Ad Herenniumanother important source, has not yet been decisively tied to Cicero as author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorica_ad_Herennium

The Hispanic author Quintilian, first century AD, has also ben included in sources for development of the rhetorical arts that include memory techniques. He was a devotee of Cicero’s work, and yet his legal writings focus on the use of figurative language, as memory figures.
And here we see two possibly distinct paths: Cicero’s use of visual elements: the classic positioning of objects in space to deliberately trigger recognition and selected memorized content, and the use of figurative images in language. It is tempting to say that one is designed for the speaker to navigate his/her argument, and the other for the hearer to remember an oration.
The Latin writers call back to Aristotle’s Poetics, also.

That is all very well, for Renaissance scholars. But when we come to eleventh and twelfth centuries in Europe (yes, I include Britain here) then these classical sources were not yet available.
What then?

I, like many, have presumed that there was a well-defined path of transmission of these rhetorical arts from the Latin writers onwards, to the Renaissance.

Logan E Whelan throws all my confident presumptions to the wind. And what falls with certainty, is… well, let’s see.

Logan E Whalen makes very convincing arguments that writers of these periods did use memory arts. It was a time of a flowering of the arts, illustrative as well as textual.

Chretien de Troyes works, as we have them, show many instances of memory techniques. As do the works of his near contemporary Marie de France. 

Throughout her Prologues and Epilogues to The Lais, Marie de France constantly calls on the need for memory and remembering. This is even more explicit in her more popular, that is, more plenteously recopied, Fables.

And so, what are their sources for memory arts, and what systems do they employ?

Logan E Whelan draws our attention to the wide a well-developed use of pictorial language of the period. Look at, he says at one point, the Bayeaux tapestry.
The skills and level of skill development tell of a long practice; and those skills and arts would continue in use for a great many generations to come. We find, then, also a well-developed knowledge of picture-reading. 
Similarly, with the recently burgeoning use of illustrative missals and psalm books. Earlier than these were monastic carvings and stained-glass windows. For the unlettered these were pictorial sermons writ large.

So much remains unknown about the person of Marie de France. Was she an abbess, as many suggest? And if so, at what part of her life? That is, before, during, or after producing her writing.
Nevertheless, this wide use of visual imagery to be read by congregations was a well-established practice. 

‘Throughout the Lais,’ writes Logan E Whelan, ‘Marie de France makes frequent use of vocabulary that supports a narrative program designed to call attention to certain textual elements.’ He gives an example of De Deus Enfanz where the introductory remarks constantly refer to the lai’s setting in Normandy.
‘It is clear…’ he continues after further investigation, ‘that Marie wanted her immediate audience to remember her story…’ He cites here the use of repetition. This is especially apparent in the lai, Lanval .
She also employs, he states, use of verbal, nonverbal, and quasi-verbal objects.  
‘These objects are more often than not the key to retention of the themes of the lai that contains them…. In other words, to memorise and remember the object and its attributes is to memorise and recall the lai as a whole.’ (page 77) 

I wrote an examination of two of the Lais of Marie de France in my Gifts of Gold and Ringsebook. 
Equitain, I found, is a very tightly structured work, based on ring-structure, and structural chiasmus.
But where did they learn such techniques?

Mary  Douglas, in her seminal book on ring-structure texts, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (The Terry Lectures), suggested that the Bible, in particular the Old Testament, has been a rich source for such structuraltechniques. That is not something I have looked at; I cannot say more.

The pointed arch of window or door of the period is a lesson in itself of interdependence of relationships. The lock that holds the arch in place is the central keystone, on the pinnacle of the arch. Each arm of the arch is held by the side pillar and the keystone.
In the ring text the central event is the key to the whole piece. The build up of the tale to that point is mirrored in the second half, mirrored but changed by what occurs in the central part. Each arch/story arch ends where it began, but all has changed.
This is most clearly explicit in the structure of the lai of Equitain.

Her laisexalt chivalry and the role of honour. We can read here a valuing of balance, idealised relationships, behaviour. This relates back to the idealising of the Arthurian values that she explores in some lais, and that French writers were to work up into great webs of tales of traditional honour and chivalry. 
This all attempts to lift contemporary times out of its cold, hard, greed-and-grab practicality.
You could almost say the real and the idealised mirrored each other, in their antipathies.
And the keystone? 
The text.

This explains why the Chronicles of later writers became so valued: Froissart, Chastellain et al. They gave the gloss to petty, sordid, dealings.

They gave it memory. Value.

There is far more to this book than I have indicated here. His reasoning is admirable, sources varied, research deep as well as wide. It is altogether a book of admirable scholarship, and goes a long way to re-evaluating the wonderful work of Marie de France.

The Lais of Marie de France: Bisclavret

Of all The Lais of Marie de France, Bisclavret has aroused much controversy.

Bisclavret, an early werewolf story, has gained comments as a misogynistic tale.
In Bisclavret the married king Bisclavret regularly absents himself several days a week from his castle. Eventually his wife gets him to unveil his secret, in a time honoured fashion that goes at least back the Bible. He reveals that he turns into a wolf; that as long as his clothes remain he can change back. His wife then steals his clothes so he cannot change back, and once the king is declared missing, marries her new suitor.
The deception is unmasked, king restored, and wife and new suitor/king suitably done away with. 

How are we to read Bisclavret?
This is deception of the worst kind: the loving embrace that then reveals one’s vulnerabilities to the world, as it were.
Is this tale a prime example of the misogyny of the time, and especially of Church attitudes? We cannot read well the signs of older cultural models.
As Dutch historian Johan Huizinga asserts in an excellent essay in Men and Ideas, the marriage of convenience was very much the model for nobles and people of rank. Woman were commodities, because vehicles for succession through child-bearing; in the case of lack of issue, as we see in other tales, the man would be advised Put your wife aside, choose another to ensure an heir – because, of course, it was always the woman who could not conceive.
I do suspect it was well-known that it was as much the man’s inability; this would never be stated in public, or the public place of text. The flip-side to this is, if a woman is so positioned with a man with doubtful proclivities, as in Bisclavret, the woman could be just as likely to ‘Put the man aside’ and find a mate better suited. And with all the elements of supplanting that goes with this. 

One of the key writers on these topics, Johan Huizinga, also commented: It is manifest that the political and military history of the last centuries of the Middle Ages as described by Froissart, Monstrelet, Chastellain… reveals very little chivalry and a great deal of covetousness, cruelty, cold calculation, well-understood self-interest, and diplomatic subtlety. The reality of history seems constantly to disavow the fanciful ideal of chivalry (Chivalric Ideals in the Middle Ages). In Equitan the relationship of the seneschal and his wife perhaps fell under these last designations. That she is described in the text by Equitan, as a lady who needs love: the marriage, as most of the period was one of convenience and arrangement 

We cannot, I suspect, judge Bisclavret’s wife by any standards than what we know of those of the time. It probably was not actually accepted practice for the wife to do this, and hence its appearance in this tale: we glimpse something perhaps of Marie de France’s originality in her choice of content here. In this tale could we say then that the dynamic is in the discord between the reality of the mores of the time, and those of the chivalric mores some attempted to re-introduce? Is this the source of the dynamic of the Lais as a whole: discord and the search for harmony? We see the novelty and great success of Marie de France in writing about amour courtois against this background. This new perspective does seem to be the gestalt behind Marie de France writing-up, and presenting these Lais. 

If we apply Huizinga’s assertion we can perhaps see a more contemporaneous interpretation that gives an alternative reading.
We dabble here with intentionality: how can we gauge Marie de France’s intentionality in this tale? When we look again at Equitan we see how the writer valued romantic love above the mores of her time, we see in the central part of the tale, the ‘heart’ of the tale where the story was leading, and from where the consequences derive, how the constancy of the affair between Equitan and the seneschal’s wife was lauded: in all that time he neither took another lover nor neglected her, that he was willing to kill for her so they could take up an honourable relationship in marriage. But is there anything in here that shows her ‘bucking the trend’, rather than producing a romantic fantasy? In the tale of Equitan we hear the wife’s fears and doubts, and they are indeed given full expression: they match the king’s for intensity and responsible awareness. She is no member of the ‘lower orders’ struck dumb, abashed or overawed by being feted by the king; she is her own woman, and well aware of the responsibilities of her and, later we see, his position. So, yes, I think we do see here cause for reading intentionality in the Tales. 

Le Roman de Silence. A 13th Century French tale with a twist.

In Woollaton hall, Nottingham, UK, was a crate labelled ‘Unimportant Documents.’
It was only rediscovered in 1911. Among these documents was a letter by King Henry VIII. Also there, was the only surviving copy of an old French roman, dating from the latter half of the Thirteenth Century. That was La Romance de Silence, written in octosyllabic verse, and coming in at around 365 pages.
A translation was published for the first time in 1927, and another edition in 1972.

See, also, Sarah Roche-Mahdi’s book on the work from 1992, with facing-page translation:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silence-Thirteenth-century-Romance-Medieval-Studies/dp/0870135430

1

Le Roman de Silence is unique, so far, in romance literature.

Silence is a girl who is brought up as a boy, and sworn to silence lest she betray her real gender, and lose all inheritance rights.
It is a tale of cross-dressing and gender-transformation, as modern parlance would cast it. These descriptions do not do justice to the tale, though.

Silence was the daughter of Cador, Earl of Cornwall, and his wife, King Evan’s daughter, Eufemie.
The English king of the time, Evan, did not recognise female inheritance of titles or estates.
In order for the line of Cador to continue, their daughter, who had no name up to that point, had to therefore assume male roles, and take on a male heir’s character and duties. These included a knight’s training.
Nature had stepped in early on and made Silence of most beautiful appearance. One characteristic he/she was also known for was the ability to sing and play the harp with great sweetness. This was the accomplishment of the aristocratic knight, of course, but in this as in courage and fighting ability, Silence proved  more than capable.

It would become necessary, in time, to marry; the complications of the role built up as time went on and social and familial duties and demands become more urgent.
And always, in the sidelines, Nature personified, was reaching out an imperious hand in order to right the order of things.

What was the right order of things? Was it right for King Evan to disinherit women? The ‘order’ of the time of composition was already being questioned in such works as this. Earlier, Marie de France had set her own period against the reflection of an older more noble, chivalrous time: the Arthurian template. No doubt Arthurian times, had they existed, would have been found wanting against another, older period.

The narrative goes on: Silence absconded with a group of Jongleurs her mother and father had invited to their court. In grief all Jongleurs were banished from the land. For four years under the name of Malduit, Silence learned their trade, but outshone them. Jealousy crept in, and to avoid being killed by them once again he/she had to run. She re-entered her father’s court unrecognised. Her mother took a fancy, however, and tried to seduce him/her. Silence once again had to leave – this time to the French court. His/her mother had sent a letter requesting the French king behead Malduit/Silence.
War had broken out in England, and Silence the knight was summoned home. The story was then discovered.

Somewhere undisclosed along the line of the narrative Cador and Eufemie, Count and Countess of Cornwall, had become the English King and Queen.
Why this new king did not revoke the inheritance ruling is not questioned. The order of things must be kept, perhaps, and such as a revocation was seen as a contrary measure. War, fighting, and beheading of suitors who reject advances was normal.
Normality, it is indicated, was violated early-on when Cador was struck low by dragon venom before he and Eufemie were married, and Silence conceived. Here is the source of the tragedy, the supernatural agency of a dragon.

To get back to Silence: the Queen once again, even knowing his/her identity, made a pass at Silence in his/her role as a hugely successful knight. It had to be rejected. Thereby began the undoing: she cajoled the King to send Silence on a mission to capture Merlin. Which she also accomplished – however, it was part of Merlin’s magic that he could only be captured by a woman.
In turn, though, Merlin revealed that the Queen was having an affair, and that her lover was a man who was able to meet her because he dressed as a nun.

Silentius, the man, was revealed publicly to be Silentia, a woman.

2

There are a number of literary instances of women taking on men’s guises – often in pirating, to enter that most hyper-male of male roles: Anne Bonny; the ballad Sweet Polly Oliver…. Shakespeare makes heavy use of instances of ambivalence. But men taking on women’s guise? That is portrayed as a great deal more unsettling.

To assume a male role is to step up; to assume a female’s role, to step down. Status. Female impersonatators are a source of fun, ridicule, mockery, and beyond ‘normal’. They are funny because they mock further the ‘weak’ who cannot protect themselves. Women’s only armour is their tongue: a woman’s tongue. Here we hear echoes of the split tongue of the snake, of That snake. But the woman of the Roman is silenced; this is a further subversion of roles. Without the power of position, as Queen, Silence must take on the strength and skill of a man. And that can be learned, by either gender.
This is what G R R Martin fudged, with Arya Stark in Song of Ice and Fire: she never quite achieved the bodily strength to be a knight. An assassin’s role was very different.

Male impersonators carry a different charge, also unsettling but to a different degree, and more dangerous because more hidden. It is as though the sacrosanct has been sacked, secrets raided. Tiresias is a classic example; here we have all the indications of the deepest secrets that hold order in place being revealed. Tiresias is the Prometheus of the social rather than cosmic order.

The classic Scottish ballad, The Wife of Auctermuchty, is a case of role reversal. As usual with ballads of this type the wife in the male role outdoes him in strength, skill and endurance.
It could be said that these ballads help stabilise order by preventing male engrandisement from tipping the keen and even balance between the sexes. The male has to learn to laugh at his pretensions, that way the tension is eased, and relations find a more sure, I would like to say equal, footing.

A work like La Roman de Silence uses the basic structure of these ballads, but develops it, complicates the issues, introduces wider references and ramifications.

So what of our own call for greater acceptance of diversity? Trans and gender ambivalence have always been part of humanity: degrees of gender identity are all that exist. And even those degrees fluctuate constantly; all is in motion. Do we conceive of the universe in our image, or our image in what we discover of the universe?
Ambivalence, surely, is the real natural order.

3

Arthurian names and scenes permeate the romance. It is probably a later off-shoot of the French Arthurian vulgate of material.
The author of the Romance is credited to be Heldris of Cornwall, and the Cornish setting and connections tie-in with the Arthurian settings, as well as the great work, Tristan and Iseault.
I think we need not trouble ourselves over the character of G R R Martin’s Brienne of Tark, from his Songs of Ice and Fire marathon. Brienne’s gender identity was never in question, whereas Silence has none of the recognised woman-identifiers such as sewing, which was so essential a craft-necessity of the period.

Henrietta Leyser, in Medieval Women, A Social History of Women in England 450-1500 (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1995), writes:
‘… the triumph of Nurture over Nature, in the form of Silence’s successes as a hero, serves to demonstrate that, however different the parameters, medieval interest in debates about the roles which women and men were brought up to play could be every bit as keen as our own.‘ (P 141)

For further resources, see:
http://medievalsourcesbibliography.org/sources.php?id=2146115303

For stylistic analyses promising to resolve some of the inherent ambivalences of the character role of Silence, see:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27870893?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Here are many stimulating essays on the work:
https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/22811

Wiki, as always, has much valuable material, as well as links, on the work:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Roman_de_Silence