Abstract
This chapter is concerned with the relationship between texts and the imagined architectures they contain, showing how a book’s contents may take on the function of memorial architecture. While tombs have traditionally been conceptualised as frameworks intended to fix, monumentalise and immortalise, Swift reveals the limitations of such architectural ‘placing’ of the dead in the work of medieval French writers Octovien de Saint-Gelais and Jean Bouchet, arguing that memorialisation occurs more effectively within the works’ poetic fictions. The analysis of Pierre de Hauteville’s poetic inventory of a house formerly occupied by a deceased lover, with which her chapter concludes, demonstrates in detail how it is the process of describing the contents of the house that renders the vacated domestic space a memorial.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and Edmund Thirlkel (Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1999), Book IV, Lecture 2, para 421, p. 209. Aquinas’s ‘omne corpus est in loco, et in omni loco est corpus’ (In octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis expositio, ed. by P. M. Maggiòlo [Rome/Turin: Marietti, 1954], p. 207) echoes Aristotle’s ‘Έτι ώσπερ άπαν σωμα εν τόπω, ουτω και εν τόπω άπαντι σωμα’ (Physics, ed. and trans. by Francis M. Cornford and Philip H. Wicksteed, Loeb Classical Library 228, 2 vols. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957], I, IV.i. 209a, p. 284).
- 2.
Physics, I, IV.iv. 211a, p. 303. Subsequent references to the Physics will be given in parentheses in the text.
- 3.
Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 6.
- 4.
Some of the material for the first half of this chapter derives from Helen J. Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), Chapter 4: ‘Placing the Dead’, and I am grateful to Boydell & Brewer for permission to reproduce material here.
- 5.
Neil Kenny, Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- 6.
Octovien de Saint-Gelais, Sejour d’honneur, ed. by Frédéric Duval (Geneva: Droz, 2002), II.vi.
- 7.
The phrase ‘corps humain’ prompts an interesting vocabulary conundrum: should one render ‘corps’, which can designate both a living and a dead body, as ‘body’ or ‘corpse’? Medieval French writers had at their disposal alternative terms to specify a cadaver: cadavre, depouille (‘physical remains’), mors, etc.; exigencies of metre may also have influenced a writer’s choice in verse passages. Does ‘corps’ retain a useful existential ambiguity?
- 8.
Michael Camille, ‘The Corpse in the Garden: mumia in Medieval Herbal Illustrations’, Il Cadavere/The Corpse, Micrologus, 7 (1999), 297–318 (p. 318).
- 9.
Jean Bouchet, Le Temple de Bonne Renommee, ed. by Giovanna Bellati (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1992).
- 10.
On death not as an end, but as a transition, see, for example, Fabienne Pomel, Les Voies de l’au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au moyen âge (Paris: Champion, 2001), p. 11.
- 11.
On the sub-genre of mock wills, whose best-known proponent remains François Villon, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, L’Écriture testamentaire à la fin du moyen âge: identité, dispersion, trace (Oxford: Legenda, 1999). The reception and influence of Chartier’s Belle Dame has received increasing attention in recent years; see Joan E. McRae, ‘A Community of Readers: The Quarrel of the Belle Dame sans Mercy’, in A Companion to Alain Chartier (c.1385–1430): Father of French Eloquence, ed. by Daisy Delogu, Emma Cayley, and Joan E. McRae (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015), pp. 200–22.
- 12.
On de Hauteville himself, who presided over a literary circle in Tournai, and on his Confession’s place in the so-called ‘quarrel of the Belle Dame sans Mercy’, see Emma J. Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in His Cultural Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 145. On the attribution of all three works to de Hauteville, see Mary Beth Winn and Richard Wexler, ‘“L’Amant trespassé de dueil” and Music: A Note on Pierre de Hauteville’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 52.1 (1990), 89–96.
- 13.
On which, see Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Study of Wealth, Material Culture and Agricultural Development, ed. by Ad van der Woude and Anton Schuurman (Wageningen: Afdeling Agrarische Geschiedenis, Landbouwhogeschool, 1980). Fresh conceptualisation of such documentary material is provided by Katherine Anne Wilson, ‘The Household Inventory as Urban Theatre in Late Medieval Burgundy’, Social History, 40 (2015), 335–59.
- 14.
See Micheline Baulant, ‘Typologie des inventaires après décès’, in Probate Inventories, pp. 33–42.
- 15.
‘The Household Inventory’, p. 339.
- 16.
In La Complainte de l’amant trespassé de deuil; L’Inventaire des biens demourez du decés de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. by Rose Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1986).
- 17.
La Confession et Testament de l’amant trespassé de deuil, ed. by Rose Bidler (Montreal: CERES, 1982), lines 1200–16.
- 18.
On the figure of the ‘coffre’ in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literature, see Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie: la fréquentation des livres au XIVè siècle, 1300–1415 (Paris: Hatier, 1993), p. 67.
- 19.
For the metaphor of literary creation as weaving, see David J. Cowling, ‘Verbal and Visual Metaphors in the Cambridge Manuscript of the Douze Dames de Rhétorique (1463)’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 3 (2000), 94–118.
- 20.
Adrian Armstrong, ‘The Deferred Verdict: A Topos in Late-Medieval Poetic Debates?’ French Studies Bulletin, 64 (autumn 1997), 12–14.
- 21.
The catchphrase concluding the tour of the house of the mystery celebrity on the popular television gameshow Through the Keyhole: ‘Who lives in a house like this? [Studio host’s name], it’s over to you’.
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Swift, H. (2020). Placing the Dead: Architectural Imagination and Posthumous Identity in Medieval France. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_6
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