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The Roman Middle Ages:

Aspects of Late Antique Medieval Cultural Continuity in Old French Hagiography

Peter Leonid Chekin

Springfield, Virginia

M.A. in French, University of Virginia, 2013

B.A. in French, James Madison University, 2011

A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty

of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of French

University of Virginia

June, 2017

1

Contents

Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................... 4

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 6

1. Background ........................................................................................................................................... 6

1. Oral-formulaic poetry, cultural memory, and the Vie de saint Alexis ................................................. 16

2. Linguistic identity, Latin-Romance continuity, and the Vie de saint Laurent .................................... 21

3. Frankish rule, hagiography, and the Vie de saint Léger ...................................................................... 27

4. Preliminary remarks ............................................................................................................................ 33

I. Oral Poetry and Cultural Memory: the Vie de saint Alexis ...................................................................... 34

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 34

2. Defining the text ................................................................................................................................. 36

3. The manuscript tradition ..................................................................................................................... 42

4. Orality and the Vie de saint Alexis ...................................................................................................... 49

5. Late antiquity in the Vie de saint Alexis .............................................................................................. 63

6. Cultural memory in the French middle ages ....................................................................................... 81

7. Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 96

II. Latinity and Cultural Identity: the Vie de saint Laurent ......................................................................... 98

1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 98

2. The cult of St Lawrence .................................................................................................................... 110

3. Sources for the Vie de saint Laurent ................................................................................................. 113

4. Latinity in the Vie de saint Laurent .................................................................................................. 115

5. Latin and Romance ........................................................................................................................... 118

6. The dual register of the Vie de saint Laurent .................................................................................... 136

7. Peristephanon II and the Vie de saint Laurent .................................................................................. 144

8. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 151

III. Romanity under the Franks: the Vie de saint Léger ............................................................................ 153

1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 153

2. The cult of Leudegar of Autun .......................................................................................................... 157

3. Manuscript, editions, and language................................................................................................... 163

4. The Vie de saint Léger ...................................................................................................................... 167

5. Romans and Franks in cultural memory ........................................................................................... 179

2

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................................ 188

Final remarks ........................................................................................................................................ 188

Further steps .......................................................................................................................................... 193

Appendix: The Paris VSA .......................................................................................................................... 196

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 196

Principles of editing .............................................................................................................................. 197

La vie de saint Alexis ............................................................................................................................ 203

The Life of St Alexis .............................................................................................................................. 217

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 231

Manuscripts ........................................................................................................................................... 231

Primary sources ..................................................................................................................................... 231

Secondary sources ................................................................................................................................. 234

3

To my father.

4

Abstract

Using three Old French hagiographical texts recorded between the late tenth and thirteenth

centuries, this dissertation demonstrates a continuity of identity between Roman late antiquity and the

francophone high middle ages. Calling upon a range of historical evidence and modern linguistic, poetic,

and cultural theories, I argue that medieval francophone culture, as a direct outgrowth of the common

Latinate culture of the Roman world, retained traits of common identity. This Romanity is self-identification with the Roman past, as well as in a conscious

continuity of spoken language between Late Latin and Old French that they reveal. Moreover, I provide

reasons why hagiography as a genre, unlike aristocratic literature such as chansons de geste, would have

been the vehicle best suited to convey such a Roman identity. The first chapter proposes a historical re-contextualization of the Vie de saint Alexis using a

thirteenth-century manuscript version (Paris, BnF fr. 19525), transcribed and translated into English in the

Appendix. In the light of oral-poetic theory, I argue first that the available evidence should not lead us to

consider the Vie to be a translation of a Latin prose text as previously assumed. Second, I show that its

late Roman setting in a number of ways anachronistic to

the high medieval context in which it was composed. The two paths of inquiry then join, linking the Vie de

saint Alexisin the audience identifies with the past that it portrays. The second chapter demonstrates that the Vie de saint Laurent reflects a continuity of language between medieval Francophones and the Roman world. Inspired by diachronic linguistic research that

suggests that Latin and the vernacular first began to be distinguished only after Carolingian educational

reforms brought Latin out of line with spoken practice, I situate the Vie de saint Laurent within this

emergence of new linguistic paradigmsDe

vulgari eloquentia. I argue that the Vie de saint Laurent uses the vernacular and Latin as complementary

and related modes of expression in a way that identifies Old French with the common spoken language of

the Roman world. 5 The third chapter synthesizes the approaches of the first two with the aid of one of the earliest

extant Old French texts, the Vie de saint Léger, which is preserved in a single late tenth-century manuscript.

Here, I examine the ways in which a Roman-based identity would have negotiated the period of Frankish

rule (496-843), when Romanity contended with a new and inferior sociopolitical role. Seeing in the Vie de

saint Léger the descendant of a mostly unwritten popular oral-poetic tradition, I claim that it uses the

memory of St Leudegar (c. 679) to discuss sociopolitical questions in a situation where a legally subordinate population could most readily find recourse with the episcopate. The poem

reflects an undercurrent of Roman identity throughout the Frankish period and beyond, an identity

maintained and expressed in vernacular hagiographic poetry.

Keywords: cultural memory, diachronic Romance linguistics, hagiography, medieval identity, Old French

poetry, oral poetry, Roman identity, Vie de saint Alexis, Vie de saint Laurent, Vie de saint Léger.

6

Introduction

1. Background

This is a study meant to explore Old French hagiographic poetry in the context of enduring cultural continuity with the world of the Roman Empire. Continuity between late antiquity and the middle ages is invoked directly by every textbook of medieval history or chrestomathy of medieval

Latin that takes the time of Diocletian and Constantine as its starting point,1 and indirectly by the

editors of the Oxford Latin Dictionary who drew their cutoff line for the classical language at 200 CE.2 The concrete expression of this continuity, however beyond the new and fundamental importance of Christianity is difficult to pin down, especially in the later middle ages before the

Renaissance revalorization of classical Roman and Greek culture, but also during the high

medieval period (c. 1100-1300), when the Old French language first became an important medium of written literary expression. When I sought to understand what this continuity would have meant on a lived level to inhabitants of the high medieval francophone world, it quickly became apparent that their relationship with the Roman past would largely have been a question of identity. In the pages that follow, I will attempt both to demonstrate the presence, in select texts composed in

dialects of Old French between the late tenth and thirteenth centuries, of signs of this late antique-

medieval continuity of identity and to convey the importance of this Romanity for our understanding of medieval culture. Central to this study is the question of how such an identity would likely have found cultural expression, as well as the question of the methodological tools

1 For some recent examples of such textbooks, see Wim Blockmans and Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Introduction to

Medieval Europe, 300-1500, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014); Helen Nicholson, Medieval Warfare: Theory and

Practice of War in Europe, 300-1500 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2004); John M. Riddle, A History of the Middle

Ages, 300-1500, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); David Rollason, Early Medieval Europe

300-1050: The Birth of Western Society (New York: Routledge, 2012).

2 F.R.D. GoodyearThe Oxford Latin Dictionary, in Papers on Latin Literature, ed. K.M. Coleman et al. (London:

Duckworth, 1992), 281.

7 needed in order to discern past identities from our present vantage point, peering as we do through a relative paucity of available sources. This study has arisen out of a persistent sense that our understanding of premodern European history and culture, despite the wealth of detail revealed in the light of the past two centur complete grasp of the big picture that would allow all of its individual elements to come into place together in a coherent narrative i.e. as they seem to have done for the narrower field of classical antiquity. One major and inspiring exception immediately comes to mind in the form of the scholarship of Peter Brown, whose remarkable studies of late antique culture consistently deploy a range of evidence from a wide variety of domains, from the archaeological to the literary to the theological, resulting in seemingly seamless synthesis sweeping narratives highlighting late a loving attention to detail and his celebrated empathy for every personality that he encounters: from much the objects of cold and dispassionate dissection as they do friends of the scholar (regardless of what they might, or indeed did, think of one another) rigor, sweep with detail, breadth with focus, is unrivalled and may well remain so. In my study of the hagiographic literature of the francophone middle ages, I shall attempt

I will not be overly constrained by field

boundaries as I attempt to describe a major, indeed fundamental aspect of Western medieval culture that has in many ways escaped study: the persistent influence of the idea and of the reality of the Roman Empire, which had imposed upon Western Europe a cultural and political unity that it has never seen again since. By Rome, I mean not so much the urbs and its particular mythology, from Aeneas to Caesar, which elicited a fascination all of its own during the middle ages and ever 8 after, but rather the orbis, the Empire as a sociopolitical reality that for centuries united the Mediterranean world, and remained strongly felt even after its institutional reach shrank to what we now know as the Byzantine realm. Despite the progress that modern scholarship has made in modulating simplistic narratives about

example, it can still be difficult not to imagine a swift and definitive fading of the classical ancient

world, historically speaking, wherein one epoch ended and another began. Part of the reason for this lies in our teleological view of history, in which we look back upon the middle ages from a modern perspective that takes the political parceling of Europe into nation-states for granted. We

live in the wake of an era, after all, of conscious efforts to project national histories as far back in

time as possiblequotesdbs_dbs46.pdfusesText_46

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