Читать книгу Die dänischen Eufemiaviser und die Rezeption höfischer Kultur im spätmittelalterlichen Dänemark – The Eufemiaviser and the Reception of Courtly Culture in Late Medieval Denmark - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Before we move on with the analysis of the early printed book culture in Denmark, it is necessary to consider which texts should be included in the discussion and how the term ʻromanceʼ should be understood and used. It also requires a discussion on the concept of genre.1

The EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.) text group took its departure from the emblematic romance of YvainYvain ou le Chevalier au lion, but came to include perhaps less typical romance works of Hertig FredrikHertig Fredrik af Normandie (schwed.) and FloresFlores og Blanseflor (dän.) och Blanzeflor. They were, however, shaped in the same form of knittel verse regardless of the character of their original, and an intended convergence is also visible in the translation of Flores och Blanzeflor, which is rewritten in a more courtly direction than the original (Bampi 2018/2019). Even if the three texts originally belonged to different traditions, they merge into a more closely connected group of texts as the Eufemiavisor.

The fifteenth century Danish knightly verse tales are obviously related to the EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.), but they were held in a new, less courtly key, as the analysis of their vocabulary in Akhøj Nielsen (2017) has shown. There seems thus to have been a drift away from some of the typical features of the courtly language and content of the Eufemiavisor. In Sweden, we find no similar extension of the Eufemiavisor romance verse literature, but the literary corpus of secular narratives was expanded with prose works of other traditions, such as Valentine et Orson or the Septem sapientesSeptem sapientes.2 The question is thus: are the new texts of the fifteenth century so different from the Eufemiavisor that it is no longer relevant to speak of the same kind of text? Is it a genre that changes or becomes more inclusive, or do the new texts form a new genre of their own?3 Are even the Eufemiavisor to be regarded as one genre? These questions are complex and challenging, and the answers also depend on how we understand the concept of genre.

In a theoretical discussion on genre evolution and emergence, Miller (2016) points out that genre has traditionally been discussed either deductively from normative definitions, such as for instance the different kinds of speeches of Aristotle, or from an inductive analysis of traits in a given group of texts. Both these approaches aim at formulating the essence of a genre: what a genre actually is in terms of textual properties. In the case of romance, there are several such essentialistic definitions, such as the following example: “[a] fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized characters in some remote or enchanted setting” (Baldick 2008: 291). The consequence of such a definition is that some of the textual innovations we find in late medieval texts must be seen as an abandonment of the initial genre and the emergence of new genres, or the evolution of new sub-genres. However, such a rigid essentialism has been criticised for being anachronistic and not taking the contemporary views among the audience of the Middle Ages into consideration.4 Would the late medieval readers agree upon the same definitions that we apply?

Miller has shown a way from such essentialism in her seminal article “Genre as social action” (1984), further developed in the discussion in Miller (2016), in which genre is treated as a social category. Genre is then not defined by specific traits in a group of texts but is instead based on habits and opinions among speakers, writers and readers. This leads to an interest in, for instance, how genres are named by their users (2016: 13). In the Scandinavian medieval context, where there is a shortage, or even an absence, of any meta-discussion about and literary terminology for vernacular texts, one might instead trace ideas about genres with respect to how texts were arranged in multi-text manuscripts.5

This social approach makes the concept of genre a dependent variable rather than an independent one, thus not postulating the existence of a genre but rather exploring genre as a possible, socially construed way of communication among the users and producers of text within a textual culture. This also means that it is necessary to be open to changing textual properties within the same genre in a growing corpus of texts.6 As long as texts are treated as a certain genre by their users, this is enough reason to speak of it as such, even if originally typical genre traits are replaced by innovations. However, if texts start to be read and used and categorised in new ways, one would have reasons to argue that a genre change is occurring. The religious reading of classical romance texts, which we touched upon in the last part, would then represent a possible genre change even if the texts themselves did not change at all.

Thus, genre development can be discussed from either a textual or a social viewpoint, and from positions between these two typical approaches. Whetter (2008) takes the essentialistic genre definitions as realities for the medieval audience, arguing that, for example, genre parodies would be impossible without the audience having a clear idea of the typical characteristics of the genre in question. From another perspective, Brown-Grant (2008: 7) argues that the general use of prose in the fifteenth century levelled out some generic distinctions, and with less distinct textual characteristics, like prose instead of a certain metre, genre categories became open for debate. It is clear that a thorough understanding of a genre and its evolution requires attention to the complex interplay between the textual properties and ideas underlying social categorisation in a continual negotiation of categories in a textual culture.

In the following discussion, I am less concerned with the textual properties of specific works than with the corpus as a whole. I will, as indicated above, speak about the EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.) as a group of texts that, despite their internal differences, formed an identifiable group and potential category of texts for the medieval readers. I believe we cannot expect that the readers in medieval Sweden had a thorough knowledge of the relation each of these works had to the different international traditions of narratives to which they belonged. Most of them probably perceived them as one kind of text, be it a genre or some other text category. For the sake of simplicity, I speak of them as examples of East Scandinavian romance. When new narrative works of fictional character show up in the fifteenth century, it is reasonable to believe that people saw the differences between them and the Eufemiavisor – or the similarities, as in the case of the Danish knightly verse-tales. The difference could be on the formal level, like prose in contrast to knittel verse, but one would also need to consider content, values, motives etc. It is, however, not clear if they saw these new texts as a different category or as variants of the same basic kind of text. This is a field that needs further exploration and a more in-depth theoretical discussion.

Essentialistic definitions, like the one cited above, can be used as a methodological starting point, but one also must consider the historical circumstances and manuscript contexts. Most importantly, it is necessary to treat such definitions as prototype categories, that is a category with a core and with blurred boundaries.7 Some texts undoubtedly belong to the core while others linger on the fringes or appear to be on the outside.

One type of text that has been excluded from the present investigation is historical verse-chronicles. Even though they were influenced by the EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.) in terms of literary form and style, they represent another epistemological discourse that connects to the readersʼ political and geographical real-world horizon of experiences, in contrast to the more or less far-away settings of romance adventures. An adjacent group of texts are the texts about Alexander the Great, Theoderic or Charlemagne, the ‘heroic epics’, which carry a greater weight of historical substance than, for instance, the Arthurian stories, but which still take place far away and long ago and are not rarely spiced with supernatural elements.8 These texts are kept in the investigation, even if they to some extent belong to historiography. The new prose narratives that appear in late Middle Ages are, however, kept in the investigation regardless of how closely or distantly related they might be to prototypical romance definitions.

To summarise, when I ask the question of what happens to romance in East Scandinavia, I am not primarily interested in discussing the change in the properties of certain texts and how they relate to any definition of a genre. Rather, I wish to follow the fate of a historically defined group of texts, the EufemiavisorEufemiavisor (schwed.), and the kind of text they represent within a broader group of related secular narratives by investigating continuity, variation and change in the corpus.