A Pilgrimage to Purgatory

Telling the story of the exceptional penance of an Irish knight, the twelfthcentury Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii contends that it was possible to go on a bodily pilgrimage to purgatory. The Cistercian monk H. of Saltrey wrote his Tractatus at a historical moment when the fate of souls after death felt particularly urgent and important evidence for the afterlife was provided by spirits traveling back and forth between this life and the next. Insisting on a bodily experience of a spiritual space, rather than a visionary one, the knight Owein provided powerful eyewitness testimony about posthumous penance. This article uncovers how the Latin Tractatus engages the worries of its audience about the feasibility of the knight’s embodied visit to the afterlife by marshaling familiar narrative patterns from vernacular genres, including chansons de geste and romance. It shows that the Tractatus is an intricately designed text that uses these generic features to dispel doubt, thereby positioning Owein’s pilgrimage as a licit and potentially replicable penitential activity.

Introduction

The introductory chapter situates the three texts within the tradition of Old French epic poetry or chansons de geste. The reader is first introduced to the formal and thematic characteristics of the genre, with particular attention to formulaic style. Derived from orally transmitted heroic songs, the Old French epics celebrate memorable exploits using a repertory of standard motifs. The chapter also provides an overview of the William of Orange cycle as well as summaries and brief analyses of the three translated poems. A translators’ note explains the principles guiding the translation.

Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095-1291

Emotions in a Crusading Context is the first book-length study of the emotional rhetoric of crusading. It investigates the ways in which a number of emotions and affective displays—primarily fear, anger, and weeping—were understood, represented, and utilized in twelfth- and thirteenth-century western narratives of the crusades, making use of a broad range of comparative material to gauge the distinctiveness of those texts: crusader letters, papal encyclicals, model sermons, chansons de geste, lyrics, and an array of theological and philosophical treatises. In addition to charting continuities and changes over time in the emotional landscape of crusading, this book identifies the underlying influences which shaped how medieval authors represented and used emotions; analyses the passions crusade participants were expected to embrace and reject; and assesses whether the idea of crusading created a profoundly new set of attitudes towards emotions. Emotions in a Crusading Context calls on scholars of the crusades to reject the traditional methodological approach of taking the emotional descriptions embedded within historical narratives as straightforward reflections of protagonists’ lived feelings, and in so doing challenges the long historiographical tradition of reconstructing participants’ beliefs and experiences from these texts. Within the history of emotions, it demonstrates that, despite the ongoing drive to develop new methodologies for studying the emotional standards of the past, typified by recent experiments in ‘neurohistory’, the social constructionist (or cultural-historical) approach still has much to offer the historian of medieval emotions.

Ami et Amile and Jean-Luc Nancy

Noting that many important characters in chansons de geste are internal “outsiders” even as the genre displays a strong collectivist element, this chapter turns to Jean-Luc Nancy’s work to study both how it enhances our understanding of the heroes in Ami et Amile and the ways in which chanson de geste adds a new layer to Nancy’s analysis of community. The chapter demonstrates that reading Ami et Amile through the lens of Nancy’s concepts of “l’être-en-commun” and “la communauté”—rendered here as “communialty”—reveals the tensions rather than the harmony in the friendship between the titular characters. In the tale, the acts of each man, which could highlight sameness, instead testify to singularity and its associated ethical obligations. In the end, reading Nancy’s work and chanson de geste together teases out their nuances, allowing a deeper appreciation for both.