The Subject of Crusade by Marisa Galvez;

Author:Marisa Galvez; [Galvez, Marisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Thibaut de Champagne and the Adjacency of the “Trouvère-Crusader-Lord”

Adjacent: having a common boundary, abutting, touching, contiguous, nearest in space or position, immediately adjoining without intervening space; or, near or close but not necessarily touching, from Latin, adjacere—“to lie near”

Thibaut de Champagne IV’s role as a crusader and rich lord of Champagne during the thirteenth century is well documented. He was also a celebrated trouvère, having composed courtly lyrics on moral and amorous themes, including a number treating crusade. The adjacency of archival material concerning Thibaut as a trouvère-crusader-lord helps us construct possibilities about our subject of crusade; these mobile frameworks make visible an idiom that might not be disclosed when “Thibaut de Champagne” is interpreted from separate domains of the literary and the historical or relegated to a historical existence who composed a lyric corpus. There are two ways that adjacency occurs in Thibaut’s work. The first is within the thirteenth-century French compendium of mostly prose works in the Bibliothèque Nationale (BN français 12581), dated 1288 in a colophon, in which Thibaut’s lyric texts occur next to a listing of Champagne’s foires, or fairs (“Feodorum Campanie Rotuli”, in the manuscript as “La devisions des foires de Champaigne,” fol. 312r–312v), and the second is in his commissioned Rôles des fiefs de Champagne that documents annual incomes, components of the fiefs, names, titles, and possessions of fief holders.15 I define adjacency as a quality of nearness outside conventions of manuscript compilation and analogue.16 Adjacency happens precisely because it does not follow the conventions of compilation nor acknowledge the status of poetic texts. What occurs is a quality of archival nearness that seems almost arbitrary except for the bringing together of texts having to do with Thibaut de Champagne in some way (poetry of Thibaut and foires of Champagne). In his study of this manuscript, Daniel O’Sullivan has noted that Thibaut’s songs in the first section of the compendium (folios 1–22) follow the grouping of the known libellum of Thibaut but with a different succession. He also argues that Thibaut’s placement at the beginning of this “collection arrageoise” indicates that he was considered a vernacular authority of Arras, where the manuscript was compiled.17 In addition to works by Thibaut, BN fr. 12581 also includes a treaty on falconry, a long fragment of the Roman du Saint Graal, and Le Livres dou Trésor of Brunetto Latini. The colocation in this compendium of the fairs and lyric texts occurs on folio 312v (fig. 5). The listing of foires indicates the place and time of the fairs that depend on localized context. For example, “La foire de Laingni est livrée landemain de l’an reneuf” means that the Laingni fair takes place the day after the New Year. This listing of fairs might be seen as the conventional medieval scholarly practice of ordinatio and compilatio in which texts are ordered, collated, and glossed together under a conceptual framework. Yet the gathering of people, places, and lyric that occurs in relation to Thibaut does not follow the conventional

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