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May 19, 2005

The Green Grass on the Other Side

I have a few months left of leave, so I should probably stop feeling so guilty about spending so much time reading Old French literature (mainly in translation and with the original at hand to check the word choice - my OF is slow nowadays). One of the great joys is that the plays are so short! Lots of the material is lost (yay, Medieval Scholarship of Loss!) and much of it goes quickly. So last night I reread Rutebeuf's Le miracle de Théophile* and Adam de la Halle's Le jeu de Robin et de Marion and found a brooch! A badge! A buckle?** Yay! And said brooch/badge/buckle is part of a lover's gift exchange -- double yay! I'm spending some time looking at all sorts of evidence (mainly literary at this point) for how people wore the little cast metal bits. Fun, fun, fun!

*which I'm teaching in the Fall anyway in European Studies. Don't know it? Ah! It's a pre-Faust! Theophilus is a recently-fired cathedral chapter official who makes a pact with the devil to get his job back (note that the Devil offers not a woman, but preferment -- you can tell it's medieval rather than "early modern" because sex was too easy to make a pact with the Devil over). 7 years later he prays to the Virgin and gets out of the deal. A useful tale of intercessors and the politics of patronage -- and the story turns up on the tympanum over the door to Notre-Dame, Paris, closest to the Canon's residences. Literature, art -- natural choice for Eust 101. And they'll read some version of Faust in Eust 102 and won't think it's an utterly new trope. I've talked about this recently and found one illustration on line.

** Vous averés ma çainturete,/M'aumosniere et mon fremalet,/Bergeronnete, Robin sings to Marions (in the Pléiade edition, Jeux et Sapience du Moyen Age, ed. Albert Pauphilet. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. p. 170. The translation I was looking at puts it between lines 170 and 183 in the Paris B.N. fr.25.566 ms). Unfortunately, "fremalet" may mean "belt-buckle," since Robin is giving Marions his belt and the pouch that hangs from it. Still, it's still a small, metal love gift. It's what we call "a start."

Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 19, 2005 11:45 AM