Elf Queens and Holy Friars. Richard Firth Green
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fringes of medieval society.
To give one final illustration: we have seen that in the spring of 1420 the French courtier Antoine de la Sale traveled to Montemonaco in the central Apennines to see for himself the famous paradise of Queen Sibyl, a magic realm that medieval popular imagination had clearly modeled on descriptions of fairyland. Almost as interesting as his report of the visit itself, however, is la Sale’s account of its early readership. It was written in the first instance, he tells us, as an ironic travel guide for his former pupil John of Calabria (the son of Duke René d’Anjou) and his new wife, Marie de Bourbon, but a second copy was promised to John’s mother-in-law, Agnès de Bourgogne, and her husband, the Duke de Bourbon, “si le plaisir de mondit seigneur et le vostre feust d’y aler, ainsi que souventffois après disner ou soupper avez acoustumé de vous esbatre” [in case my lord and you should be pleased to go there, an idea you have often amused yourselves with after dinner or supper].19 Such people were among the grandest magnates in France, and coupled with the Duke de Berri’s interest in Melusine, their evident fascination with Queen Sybil’s paradise confirms that the discourse of fairyland was far from being the exclusive preserve of the laboring classes.
When the higher nobility could evince such an interest in the existence of fairyland, we should not be surprised to discover that the lower aristocracy shared their concerns. We have already seen that the lords of Montfort were thought to invoke fairy aid to make it rain in Comper, and that some people believed that Bertrand du Guesclin, who despite his rise to the constableship came from the minor nobility, had married a fairy. Joan of Arc’s nullification proceedings offer two further examples of the ‘folklore’ of such petite aristocratie. Sir Albert d’Ourches, who met Joan in Vaucouleurs, was not a local (Ourches-sur-Meuse is some twenty miles to the north of Domrémy), and yet he was prepared to testify to having heard that in the old days fairies used to be seen beneath the Fairy Tree (“subtus illam arborem antiquitus fées solebant ire”), and then adds, by way of exonerating Joan, that this was twenty or thirty years before she was even heard of (or, in other words, fifty years earlier, when he was a young boy).20 Perhaps he had learned of the fairy tree on a visit to the de Bourlémont family (the lords of Domrémy), a family that with the death of Pierre de Bourlémont in 1412 had become extinct. Another deponent, the widow Jeanette de Veau, however, recalled hearing stories about the de Bourlémonts: the tree was called the Ladies Tree, she said, “because in the old days a certain lord, called Sir Peter Gravier, knight, lord of Bourlémont, and a lady who was called Fée would meet each other under that tree and speak together. And she said she heard these things read in a romance (‘hec in uno romano legi audivit’)” (pp. 264–65). Unless Jeanette was simply confused,21 we may possibly be dealing here with some local counterpart of the Melusine legend,22 but in any case four other witnesses specifically attested to an association between the de Bourlémont family and the Fairy Tree,23 and several more mentioned domini et domine temporales in connection with it. Taken as a whole, these testimonies convey a clear impression that fairy ‘folklore’ was far from being restricted to the laboring classes. There is no reason to suppose that things were any different in England nor that such attitudes were restricted to the late Middle Ages.24 Perhaps then, with Ferlampin-Acher, we should speak “rather of lore than folklore, or at least give to the term people a very wide interpretation.”25
A second important issue raised by the notion of popular culture concerns periodization. Obviously, vernacular culture did not remain static and unchanging across a thousand years of medieval history, and yet the bestknown attempt to supply a chronology for it, that of Jacques Le Goff, remains problematic. In an introductory sketch to the study of the marvelous in his Imaginaire médiéval Le Goff offers us a three-stage process:
1. The Dark Ages and the repression of the marvelous.
2. The explosion of the marvelous: twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
3. The aestheticization of the marvelous: fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.26
A few pages later he fills in this bare schema with a little more detail:
The very rough periodization which I have proposed applies essentially to learned marvels. In the first period, it seems to me that learned culture succeeded for the most part in occluding the marvelous element in popular culture, which certainly existed and which can be detected between the lines and in other texts. By contrast, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries learned culture is much more receptive to the popular marvelous [le merveilleux populaire], with the clear object of either reclaiming or distorting it. Finally, it seems to me that there is a kind of turn to aestheticization, where the dialogue (or the struggle) between the learned and the popular versions of the marvelous is no longer of the first importance. (p. 38)
While acknowledging the significance of Le Goff’s ground-clearing work here and recognizing the essential open-endedness of such terms as le merveilleux savant and le merveilleux populaire, I still have difficulty with this chronology. In fact it seems to me to suffer from precisely the weaknesses that Le Goff himself detects in the kind of study of popular culture that privileges cultural objects over cultural participants;27 when viewed from below, insofar as such a thing is possible, a somewhat different pattern emerges.
In the Dark Ages the church certainly repressed, in the sense of sought to eradicate, such aspects of popular culture as a belief in fairies, but in the British Isles, at least, good evidence for such beliefs, much of it in the vernacular, survives nonetheless.28 It is worth pointing out that this evidence derives almost entirely from the culture savante, since written material of clear lay provenance is virtually non existent.29 A survey of the pastoral literature of the period, however, leaves a strong impression that church discipline seems to have been relatively light-handed: local superstitions were as likely to be mocked for their folly as castigated for their wickedness. Furthermore, in Bernadette Filotas’s words, “Pastoral literature does not support the view that popular culture was a matter of class. References to social standing are rare, but when they appear, they reinforce the idea of a common culture.”30
This observation calls into question Le Goff’s contention that the explosion (irruption) of the marvelous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries reflects the “growth of lay popular culture, rushing into the breach opened during the eleventh and twelfth centuries by a lay aristocratic culture thoroughly imbued with the one available culture-system distinct from the clergy’s, namely the tradition of folklore.”31 Rather, I believe that the twelfth century witnessed the emergence of a bicultural system arising from a laity increasingly comfortable with the medium of letters and a clerisy “increasingly dependent on, and concerned with, the goodwill and co-operation of the whole population.”32 While it is tempting to locate the actual tipping point a little later, in the years immediately following the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the founding of the Dominican order (1216)—the period of Caesarius of Heisterbach, William of Auvergne, and Étienne of Bourbon—this can be done only by excluding such important figures as Gervase of Tilbury (whose writing is contemporary with the Fourth Lateran Council), and both Gerald of Wales and Walter Map (who were at work a generation earlier). Certainly writers such as William of Auvergne and Étienne of Bourbon convey the strong impression that fairy beliefs circulated primarily among the poor and ignorant: William, for instance, speaks of the old women who call demons of this kind ‘ladies’ (“huiusmodi demones, quas dominas vocant vetulae”), of the witlessness of old women who, amazingly enough, spread the belief that fairies steal children (“vetularum autem nostrarum desipientia opinionem istam mirabiliter disseminavit”), and of the debased language of the old crones who speak of ‘changelings’ (“quos vulgus cambiones nominant, de quibus vulgarissimi sunt sermones aniles”).33 The same is true of Étienne de Bourbon, who tells of a pauper vetula who tricked people into believing she was a prophetess; of a quidam rusticus, possibly a thief,34 who encountered Arthur’s house hold while prowling about at night; and of the group of homines rusticani who originated the cult of Saint Guinefort.35 On the other hand, both Walter Map and Gervase of Tilbury were writing for aristocratic audiences, and many of their stories concern noblemen and noblewomen; and even Caesarius