Words, Emotions and Reading the Past II

In my last blog entry, I set out to tell you about my new research project on medieval romance translation but instead got carried away talking about words and emotions, which is typical of me!

In my new project I focus on medieval popular romance, a great genre of medieval texts where you’ll find knights, tournaments and ladies in distress, and a lot much weirder stuff too! Medieval romances were extraordinarily popular texts which travelled and got translated all around Europe. I’m working on a text called Partonopeu de Blois, which was first composed in Old French in the late twelfth century, and its translation into Middle English from the early fifteenth century. It tells of the many adventures the young Partonopeu experiences before he becomes a knight and emperor: from his secret relationship with the magical empress of Byzance, to his fighting with the French army, his suicidal despair in a forest and finally his prowess at a tournament.

Looking at these two versions, composed more than two centuries apart, I sometimes struggle to remember what I keep reminding my students of: the medieval period is long. And extremely diverse and not one big monolithic chunk. It is easy indeed to think of Partonopeu de Blois in both its Old French and Middle English versions as a ‘medieval text’ and therefore two iterations of the same thing from the same cultural period. But actually, the fifteenth century translator must have perceived their source as an old and foreign book, even though they may have found a lot in it that felt familiar. Just like when I read Jane Austen, there is a lot that feels old and foreign and a lot, like her wit, that speaks directly to me. It is this combination that makes her work so enjoyable for me. I love that it takes me to Regency England; a period which is very foreign to my own world but still feels familiar because it has been romanticised and brought to life so many times (yes, I watched Bridgerton, and yes, it was terrible).

I like to think of the fifteenth century English adaptor of Partonopeu de Blois in the same way: he was reading an old chivalric romance in a time when chivalry had become a fantasised ideal. He definitely would have been familiar with this type of material, which was still extremely popular, but which was now seen within a long and varied tradition of romance transmission and adaptation. This can explain, for example, the adaptor’s added emphasis on fame and reputation and the narrator’s self-conscious posture as a translator. The translation displays many other fascinating changes that I can’t wait to explore further. Why does the translator change the protagonist’s age from thirteen to eighteen? Why does he remove the long descriptions of his physical beauty?

Next time I blog I’ll look at some of these changes and how they can be read as a form of cultural adaptation.