Abstract
Just after their marriage, Chrétien de Troyes’s protagonists Erec and Enide lead a procession to church, where Erec donates 60 silver marks and a gold crucifix containing a piece of the True Cross once belonging to Emperor Constantine. Enide then approaches the altar, prays for the birth of an heir, and makes her offering:1
Puis a ofert desor l’autel
un paisle vert, nus ne vit tel,
et une grant chasuble ovree;
tote a fin or estoit brosdee,
et ce fu veritez provee
que l’uevre an fist Morgue la fee
el Val Perilleus, ou estoit;
grant antante mise i avoit.
D’or fu de soie d’Aumarie;
la fee fet ne l’avoit mie
a oes chasuble por chanter,
mes son ami la volt doner
por feire riche vestemant,
car a mervoille ert avenant;
Ganievre, par engin molt grant,
la fame Artus le roi puissant,
l’ot par l’empereor Gassa;
une chasuble feite an a,
si l’ot maint jor en sa chapele
por ce que boene estoit et bele;
quant Enide de li torna,
cele chasuble li dona;
qui la verité an diroit,
plus de cent mars d’argent valoit. (2353-76, emphasis added)
[Then she placed on the altar a green paille, the likes of which no one had seen, and a great embroidered chasuble all embroidered in pure gold. It was well known that Morgan la Fay had made it in Val Perilleus. She had taken great care over it. It was of gold Almería silk. The fairy hadn’t at all made it to be a chasuble to sing mass in, but wanted to give it to her lover to make a rich garment out of. Through a clever scheme, Guenevere, wife of the powerful King Arthur, got it through Emperor Gassa. She had a chasuble made from it, and had kept it in her chapel for a long time, for it was good and beautiful. When Enide left her, she gave her this chasuble; in truth, it was worth more than a hundred silver marks.]
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Notes
This passage occurs in an interpolation unique to BN 794, attributed to the scribe Guiot of Provins. Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1976), p. xlix.
Anna Muthesius, Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving (London: Pindar Press, 1995) p. 142. On silk chasubles, see p. 122.
E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chapter 6. My focus on silks from Islamic Almería complements Burns’ study of eastern, Islamic and particularly Byzantine, silks, pp. 182–97.
See also Evelyne Patlagean, “L’Histoire de l’imaginaire” in La Nouvelle Histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Retz CEPL, 1978; repr. Editions Complexe, 1988), pp. 307–34.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). In Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), John V. Tolan traces permutations in the medieval textual tradition.
See Robert Bartlett, “Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:1 (2001): 39–56.
R. B. Serjeant, Islamic Textiles: Material for a History up to the Mongol Conquest (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), p. 165.
May, Silk Textiles of Spain: Eighth to Fifteenth Century (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1957), p. 12;
On the shroud of Saint Lazarus, the falconer roundels alternate with roundels containing a sphinx. Les Andalousies: de Damas à Cordoue (Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2000), pp. 136–37. The inscription “al-Muzaffar” on the falconer’s belt, an honorific title granted to the Córdoban vizier Abd al-Malik, dates the silk to 1007-1008. Eva Baer, “The Suaire de St. Lazare: An Early Datable Hispano-Islamic Embroidery” Oriental Art 13 (1967): 36–37 [36–48]. An inscription on the Becket
For the Durham silk, see Muthesius, Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving, pp. 89–93. The other examples are from Cristina Partearroyo, ‘Almoravid and Almohad Textiles,’ in Al-Andalus: The Art of Islamic Spain, ed.Jerrilynn D. Dodds (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 106–7 [105–13].
Though Edmund Rich, archbishop of Canterbury died in 1241, the silk is dated to the twelfth century on stylistic grounds. Daniel Walker, “Chasuble of Saint Edmund,” in The Art of Medieval Spain, A.D. 500–1200 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), p. 107. For a technical description of lampas weave, see Scott, Book of Silk (London: Thames and Hudson, 1933), pp. 101, 238.
Robert S. Lopez, “Mohammed and Charlemagne: A Revision,” Speculum 18:1 (1943): 37 [14–38].
R. A. Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain c. 1050–1150,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 37 (1987): 35–36.
For a literary representation of such an alliance, see Sharon Kinoshita, “Fraternizing with the Enemy: The Crusader Imaginary in Raoul de Cambrai,” In L’Epopée médiévale: Actes du XVe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals. Vol. 2 (Poitiers: Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, 2002), pp. 695–703. For an inverse example, see Brian A. Catlos, “‘Mahomet Abenadalill’: A Muslim Mercenary in the Service of the Kings of Aragon (1290–1291),” in In and Around the Medieval Crown of Aragon: Studies in Honor of Professor Elena Lourie, ed. Harvey Hames (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, forthcoming).
Joseph F. O’Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 127;
see Kathleen Biddick, “Coming Out of Exile: Dante on the Orient Express” in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 16, n49 [35–52],
and Bruce Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002): 1202–03 [1195–1227].
Ebles was a Champenois noble who took part in the campaign Pope Gregory VII called against Spanish Muslims. His sister Félicie married King Sancho (1063–1094) of Aragon, making him the maternal uncle of kings Peter I and Alfonso the Battler. Rotrou of Perche (in Normandy), who served in Alfonso’s Ebro valley campaigns, was another nephew, son of Ebles’s sister Béatrice. Marcelin Defour-neaux, Les Français en Espagne aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
Alice E. Lasater, Spain to England: A Comparative Study of Arabic, European, and English Literature of the Middle Ages (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1974), 3;
Contrast the notorious Pesme Avanture episode of Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier au Lion, in which the manufacture of silk is shown to be the work of three hundred exploited captive maidens. Le Chevalier au Lion, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1978), ll. 5182–5340.
Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Champion, 1978), ll. 6248–51 (emphasis added). Tudela, in the Ebro valley, had been conquered by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1119.
Silk was often the object of official trade embargoes, “calculated to inflict maximum economic damage.” Patricia L. Baker, Islamic Textiles (London: British Museum Press, 1995), pp. 14–15.
Baker, Islamic Textiles, p. 15. On investiture as a “metalanguage” of power with a long genealogy, originating in Asia and widespread throughout the medieval Mediterranean, see the essays collected in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Alexandre de Paris, Le Roman d’Alexandre, ed. E. C. Armstrong, trans. Laurence Harf-Lancner, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994), pp. 159–65. Antioch was known for its brocades with fantastic animals and birds, highlighted in gold. Philippa Scott, Book of Silk, p. 96. On the complicated history and etymology of “siglaton” (from the Arabic siqlatun), see Lombard, Textiles, pp. 242–43 (but contrast Scott, Book of Silk, p. 99). According to Lombard, the siqlatun of Almería, like that of Antioch, was red.
Oleg Grabar, “The Shared Culture of Objects,” Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204, ed. Henry Maguire (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997), pp. 115–29.
Eva R. Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” Art History 24:1 (2001): 22 [17–50].
Oleg and André Grabar, “L’Essor des arts inspirés par les cours princières à la fin du premier millénaire: princes musulmans et princes chrétiens,” in L’Occidente e l’Islam nell’alto Medioevo (Spoleto: Presso la Sede del Centro, 1965), pp. 846, 882.
Grabar, “Shared Culture,” pp. 608–9. On the importance of the so-called “minor arts” in the Islamic world, see Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Islamic Arts (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p. 10.
The term muqarnas refers to the distinctive stalactite or honeycomb vaulting widespread in Islamic architecture between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. For their development and symbolic associations, see Yasser Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), chapter 5. William Tronzo, The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Cappella Palatina in Palermo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 142–43, Trésors fatimides du Caire, pp. 220–21;
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
See Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989), pp. 8, 10–11.
S. D. Goitein, “The Unity of the Mediterranan World in the ‘Middle’ Middle Ages,” Studies in Islamic History & Institutions (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1966).
Olivia Remie Constable, “Genoa and Spain in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Notarial Evidence for a Shift in Patterns of Trade,” Journal of European Economic History 19.3 (1990): 637 [635–56].
Steven Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 26.
Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 6;
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© 2004 E. Jane Burns
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Kinoshita, S. (2004). Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary. In: Burns, E.J. (eds) Medieval Fabrications. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3_11
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