Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures

Narrating Time in the Twelfth Century

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The essays that make up this special issue of Interfaces share a common interest in the narration and representation of time in twelfth-century texts. The volume focuses primarily on works that we would now regard as 'literary:' writing that prompts an affective response in its audience through the tactical use of rhetoric and form. The issue is primarily concerned with writers operating in England, France and Germany, a cultural zone bound together in the central Middle Ages by the relatively fluid circulation of people, books and ideas across territorial boundaries. While the focus is on the literatures and languages of these regions (vernacular and Latin), the contributors have worked up their essays with an awareness that this is an editorial choice with respect to scope and scale, a choice that brings certain patterns into view at the expense of others. England, France and Germany are conceived of here as a cultural zone nested within a series of larger spaces, with graduations including, but not limited to, western Christendom (overlaying the world of Roman antiquity), eastern Christendom (overlaying the ancient Greek world), and a larger Afro-Eurasian frame.

In the broadest terms, what brings these essays together is a common interest in the representation of time and temporal structures in twelfth-century narrative. All concern the way in which different kinds of texts, written in different languages yet in the same period, organize and structure their content so as to depict temporal process, order or change. Across these essays, the authors explore how twelfth-century writers employed literary techniques (be they rhetorical, allegorical or narratological) with the aim of organizing time or engaging creatively and intellectually with theories of time and eternity.

Cover image: Robert Hardy, Engel, 2023, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 cm – https://roberthardyartist.com

Time in the Twelfth Century

Sarah Bowden, Lea Braun, George Younge — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Guest editors Sarah Bowden, Lea Braun and George Younge introduce Issue No. 10 of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, dedicated to the theme of 'Time in the Twelfth Century,' and offer a general overview of the matter and contents of the contributions.

Jenseits der Zeit? Konzepte zur Ritualisierung von Ewigkeit im monastischen Leben des 12. Jahrhunderts

Jörg Sonntag — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article analyses monastic concepts of ritualising eternity within the Benedictine tradition of the twelfth century. It explores monastic time arrangements and discusses paradigmatically chosen rituals to investigate why and how religious communities strove for a detemporalization within time. It argues that monks not only created and ritually performed a complex 'circle time' where past, present and future were perceptible, but also charged themselves with sacred aura by means of a ritual internalisation of the holiness of different holy role models from the past and the future at the same time. The decisive key to success lay in the phenomenon of hybrid imitation on a horizontal as well as on a vertical level. In this way, time could even be suspended, at least for a moment in time.

Time and Textuality in Visionary Writing: Narrating the Afterlife in Alber's 'Tnugdalus'

Sarah Bowden — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay explores the temporal complexity of medieval visionary narrative through the example of Alber's Tnugdalus, a twelfth-century German-language retelling of the Visio Tnugdali. It considers first eschatological time – that is, the temporal status of the afterlife depicted –, before turning to the narratological construction of time to show how pasts, presents and futures are collapsed in visionary narrative. Finally, it turns to the temporality of the text itself. The composition of the text is presented as part of a chain of telling and mediated retelling, and narrates a journey to the afterlife that transforms the life of the traveller (Tnugdalus) as well as the lives of those who hear it in the moment of retelling, a moment that is potentially infinitely repeatable.

Folding Time: Honorius Augustodunensis' 'Imago Mundi'

George Younge — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Imago mundi or "Image of the World" was composed around 1110 by Honorius Augustodunensis, one of the most prolific authors of his age. Presented in the form of a mappa mundi, the Imago offers its reader a verbal 'image' of the cosmos, covering topics ranging from the atom to the heavenly spheres. Despite being one of the most popular works of the central Middle Ages, scholars rarely regard the Imago as a text possessing serious literary merit, dismissing it instead as a derivative exercise in compilation. This essay argues that the Imago is in fact an ambitious literary undertaking with a coherent spiritual agenda. While Honorius recycles (like many of his peers) earlier medieval and especially Neoplatonic cosmological ideas, his text shapes that material in new ways – into a spiritually transformative journey through and above the cosmos, and into the self. At the same time, throughout the work Honorius deploys a range of strikingly material metaphors to describe the world from the perspective of eternity – most notably, the rope of time. In this further literary sense, the ascent to eternity entails a recognition that we dwell in images.

The Limits of the Present: Hugh of Saint-Victor's 'Pictura' of Noah's Ark and Augustine's 'Distentio Animi'

Anya Burgon — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Imagining the universe from the perspective of providence, the size and complexity of Hugh of Saint-Victor's pictura of Noah's Ark, described in De Pictura Arche (c. 1125–31), has long confused scholars. Many have suggested the text describes a now-lost, real, physical painting; for others it reads as an exclusively verbal picture, an ekphrasis, in the tradition of monastic memory practice. Proponents of the former interpretation argue the density of description defies memory and imagination. But, this paper argues, the pressure the pictura exerts on memory and imagination, as an ekphrasis, might also be seen as central to its rhetorical-spiritual efficacy. In his longer works on the Ark, De Arche Noe Morali and De Vanitate Mundi, Hugh envisages ascent in Augustinian terms, as a stretching of the soul's (or memory's) attention to hold passing times 'as present,' that simulates God's 'eternal present.' Hugh intends, I propose, in keeping with Augustine's distentio animi, that we achieve the pictura's eternal view in the distension of our awareness, our struggle to hold as pictorially 'present' what is described in the time of narrative. As a reworking of the classical, simultaneous 'view from above' along Augustinian lines – as an inner labour, and time-bound exercise – the pictura may also be situated in a new historical-intellectual context: not just as an astonishing example of monastic map-making or mnemotechnical practice, but as part of a later-medieval shift towards thinking about ascent as a coming to terms with time, and eternity as discoverable in the here and now, in the 'limits of the present.'

Out of Time: Ekphrasis, Narration, and Temporal Experience in Twelfth-Century Romances of Antiquity

Jonathan Morton — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This article considers the affective and conceptual work demanded in sophisticated moments of ekphrasis that abound in twelfth-century Old French romances, with particular attention to Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (1180s) and to two of the trio of romans d'antiquité, composed in French at the court of Henry II in England: the Roman de Thebes (c. 1150) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (1165). Of concern is the description of mechanical artefacts or tents that are depicted with representations of temporal progression, in the light of Virgil, Aeneid 8, and Homer, Iliad 18, available to twelfth-century Latins via Baebius's abbreviated Latin epitome. Narrative time stops for these ekphrastic moments which describe the pictorial representation of time. Henri Bergson's concept of duration (durée) and Boethius's representation of human and divine time in Consolation of Philosophy, 4 are used to think through the productive tension between time as forward movement, as represented through narration, and time as juxtaposed stasis, by which events all happen simultaneously, as represented through pictorial representation. Beyond that, the cosmic implications of these temporal questions bring out the relationship between twelfth-century literary ekphrasis and the medieval reception of the cosmogony of Plato's Timaeus. Particular attention is paid to the marvellous tents of Adrastus in the Thebes and of Alexander the Great in the Alexandre; to the chariot of Amphiaraus in the Thebes with its depiction of Ovidian myth and Macrobian cosmos; and to the astonishing cosmogrammatical automaton in the Troie's Chamber of Beauties. Ekphrases of artefacts representing time and the world clearly resonated with medieval audiences; rather than being superfluous to the action, they appear as fundamental to the composition and performance of historical narrative in French romance.

Zukünfte im Konjunktiv. Versuche der Antizipation und Modellierung von Kommendem im 'König Rother'

Lea Braun — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Middle High German König Rother, written in the second half of the twelfth century, tells the story of a dangerous bridal quest that creates conflicts between the Christian West and East, touching themes of correct governance, the role of violence in ruling, as well as the stabilization of society through political interaction. One of its dominant features is the intense modelling of possible future events and the optimal reactions to them. Attempting to anticipate this dangerous future, Rother and his men are depicted in the process of detailed and risk-aware planning. In a close reading of the text, this article shows how the future is conceptualized by both extradiegetic narrator and intradiegetic characters. It traces how these efforts to model the future change in the course of the narrative – from a risk-aware avoidance of contingencies to a relaxed trust in the stability of Rother's rule and divine providence. This reading offers a new understanding of König Rother's narrative complexity beyond the questions of structure and 'Literarisierung' that have dominated criticism on the text so far.

Sequence and Simultaneity in Wace and Chrétien de Troyes

Daniel Reeve — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This essay considers the forms and temporal structures of twelfth-century romance and historiography, focusing on Wace's Roman de Brut and Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain and Lancelot. It argues, drawing upon theoretical perspectives from Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog, that Wace's poem can be understood in terms of a twelfth-century "regime of historicity" (Hartog) that seeks to produce an ordered, "synchronous" (Koselleck) historical time. Chrétien, taken here as writing against Wace in a close, dialectical repudiation of his predecessor's narrative forms, adopts a temporal structure that is incommensurable with Wace's, and in doing so expands the space of possibility for the narrative representation of the past.

Columns of Time: Imagined 'Spolia' and Historical Meaning in the 'Kaiserchronik'

Christoph Pretzer — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Middle High German Kaiserchronik, written by an anonymous author in the middle of the twelfth century, focuses at strategic moments of its historiographical narrative on columns in the city of Rome. Drawing on critical literature relating to columns and spolia, this article presents a reading of the columns in the Kaiserchronik as markers of continuity, connected to what Mikhail Bakhtin called chronotopes: mutually semanticising combinations of space and time. In the case of the Kaiserchronik, these chronotopes are the pagan Roman past on the one hand – as a sphere of reference valued for its auctoritas, and as a source of political prestige and legitimacy – and on the other hand the Christian medieval present of the twelfth century: a sphere of reception, interested in benefitting from this prestige and legitimacy, and retrospectively confirming and constructing it in turn. The article uses the concept of allelopoiesis to describe this process as one of reciprocal transformation, and uses Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope to illustrate the complex relationship between the shifting semantic charges of the Roman Empire. As a result, it becomes apparent how – connected through time by columns as meaningful spolia – antiquity and the Middle Ages emerge as two chronotopes: intertwined as mutually semanticising spheres that, for all their differences (above all in religion), can infuse each other with new meaning.