Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence’s "Vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr": A study in Medieval genre and literary opportunism

309 Pages·1991·11.12 MB·English

by  Timothy Andrew Peters

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Order Number 9113518
Gamier de Pont-Ste-Maxence’s “Vie de Saint Thomas Le
Martyr”: A study in Medieval genre and literary opportunism
Peters, Timothy Andrew, Ph.D.
Boston University, 1991
U M I
300 N.ZeebRd.
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE SCHOOL
Dissertation
GARNIER DE PONT-STE-MAXENCE'S
VIE DE SAINT THOMAS LE MARTYR;
A STUDY IN MEDIEVAL GENRE AND LITERARY OPPORTUNISM
by
TIMOTHY ANDREW PETERS
B.A., Boston University, 1978
M.A., New York University, 1983
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
1991
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Approved by
First Reader
Robert Levine, Ph.D.
Professor of English
JL.
&
Second Reader
Eugene Green, Ph.D.
Professor of English
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Acknowledgments
I should like to thank the two primary readers of
this study: Professor Robert Levine, for kindnesses
and encouragement extending back many years; and
Professor Eugene Green, for numerous suggestions and
much gracious criticism. I should also like to thank
Professor Celia Millward for advice and assistance on
a host of matters, medieval and otherwise. This
dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Mr. and Mrs.
James M. Peters, of Marlton, New Jersey.
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iv
GARNIER DE PONT-STE-MAXENCE’S
VIE DE SAINT THOMAS LE MARTYR:
A STUDY IN MEDIEVAL GENRE AND LITERARY OPPORTUNISM
(Order No. )
TIMOTHY ANDREW PETERS
Boston University Graduate School, 1991
Major Professor: Robert Levine, Professor of English
Abstract
This study takes up Hans Robert Jauss's challenge to
medievalists to examine the "reciprocal relations that make
up the literary system of a given historical moment." The
historical moment of Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence's 6180 line
Vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr (circa 1174) is the struggle
between Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and King
Henry II of England, culminating in Becket's murder in
Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170. The generic
elements within the poem constitute an ideological as well
as aesthetic stance, a stance rooted in the nature of the
controversy the poem details. In that conflict between
Thomas and Henry we may discern one locus of the medieval
shift from oral to textual modes of authority. Garnier's
poem acts out that shift by narrating the life of a saint
who, in the poem's view, resisted it. Chapters 1 and 2
delineate Garnier's affinities for the structural
oppositions of epic, arguing that he partially assimilates
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his work into the chanson de geste tradition, but that he
spurns the emergent romance model of narrative. Chapter 2
includes an extended commentary on the romance-inflected
South English Legendary life of Saint Thomas. Chapters 3
and 4 explore a set of polarities implicit in the opposition
of epic and romance: orality versus textuality. Thomas
refused to countenance Henry's conversion of oral "customs"
into written law. Garnier adapts the binary oppositions of
medieval hagiography and chanson de geste to exploit
contemporary anxiety over Henry's administrative and legal
revolution. Garnier's Becket and Garnier himself emerge as
symbol and spokesman, respectively, for the now vanishing
values of an older, oral, feudal order. At the same time,
the narrator reveals himself as a literary opportunist who
has shrewdly packaged the Becket drama as commodity: the
poet's commercial instincts - real or rhetorical -
deconstruct his own hagiographical enterprise. This study
is, then, both an examination of medieval genre as process
and a re-discovery of a wily, precocious narrative artist,
at work in England two centuries before Chaucer.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter One— Hagiography as Epic
Chapter Two— Hagiography as Romance: Structures
of Opposition
Chapter Three— Ecclesiastical Epic: Protest as
Entertainment
Chapter Four— "Guarniers, ou vas?": The Poet
in the Poem
Bibliography
Curriculum Vitae
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