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Playing at crusading: cultural memory and its (re)creation in Jean Bodel's Jeu de St Nicolas

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03044181.2014.917833

1873-1279

Sarah Lambert,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

AbstractThis article is an analysis of the text of a play written by Jean Bodel, c.1200 (surviving in a manuscript of c.1288), in which the late classical legend of St Nicolas is updated within the context of the crusades. After a massacre of a Christian army, a statue of St Nicolas is charged with the protection of an African king's treasure, and when he ultimately proves successful, the pagan king and his followers convert to Christianity, abandoning their statue of Tervagant. The article explores the ways in which memories of crusade wars, both accurate and mythologised, can be traced in the writing of the play and thus how its construction, performance, copying and preservation can be seen as contributing to the further reconstruction, preservation and circulation of those memories. The play can be seen as a vital step in the process of ‘social memory’.Keywords: crusadesmemoryplaySaracensTervagantJean BodelSt Nicolas Notes1A. Jeanroy, Jean Bodel, Le jeu de St Nicolas (Paris: Champion, 1925). This edition is used for the text in this article; the translations are largely those of the author, with considerable assistance from F.J. Warne, ed., Le jeu de Saint Nicolas (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951).2 T.B.W. Reid, ‘On the Text of St Nicolas’, in Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewart in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday, ed. E.A. Francis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 96–120. Reid also discusses the date of the manuscript.3 Caroline Smith, ‘Martyrdom and Crusading in the Thirteenth Century: Remembering the Dead of Louis IX's Crusades’, Al-Masaq 15 (2003): 189–96.4 Carol Symes, A Common Stage: Theatre and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 241.5 Symes, Common Stage, 1–27.6 There are many discussions of the play, focusing on its origins, literary style and production. See, for example, Reid, ‘On the Text of St Nicolas’; C.W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); P.R. Vincent, The Jeu de Saint Nicholas of Jean Bodel of Arras: a Literary Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954). On the Fleury versions of the play, and older models, see O.E. Albrecht, Four Latin Plays of St Nicholas from the 12th Century Fleury Play-book: Text and Commentary, with a Study of the Music of the Plays, and of the Sources and Iconography of the Legends (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935).7 M. Bloch, ‘Collective Memory, Custom and Tradition: About a Recent Book’, in The Collective Memory Reader, eds. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Serouss and Daniel Levy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 151; and see Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Michel Albin, 1997), 51–96.8 Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 18.9 C.E. Cousins, ‘Tavern Bills in the Jeu de Saint Nicolas’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 56 (1936): 85–93.19 Ralph of Caen, The Gesta Tancredi, trans. Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Svetlana Luchitskaja, ‘Les idoles mussulmanes: images et realités’, in Historische Zeitschrift 279 (2004): 283–98.43 John Victor Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan: the Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).44 Pierre Dubois, The Recovery of the Holy Land, trans. Walther I. Brandt (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). See discussion by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, ‘Roles for Women in Colonial Fantasies of Fourteenth-Century France: Pierre Dubois and Philippe de Mézières on the Reconquest and Settlement of the Holy Land’, unpublished paper presented at Columbia University Medieval and Renaissance Studies Seminar, November 2012.45 H. Hagenmeyer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100 (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner'schen Universitäts-Buchhandlung, 1901), 144.46 On biblical history, see for example Nicholas Morton, ‘The Defence of the Holy Land and the Memory of the Maccabees’, Journal of Medieval History 36 (2010): 275–93. For the memory of Carolingian legend, see amongst many others Mary-Jane Schenck, ‘The Charlemagne Window at Chartres: Visual Chronicle of a Royal Life’, Word & Image 28, no. 2 (2012): 135–60; and William J. Purkis, ‘The Past as a Precedent: Crusade, Reconquest and Twelfth-Century Memories of a Christian Iberia’, in The Making of Memory in the Middle Ages, ed. Lucie Dolezalova (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 439–62.47 Discussed in Nicholas Paul and Suzanne M. Yeager, ‘Introduction’, in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, eds. Nicholas Paul and Suzanne M. Yeager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1–25.48 Cf. n. 3 above.Additional informationSarah Lambert has taught medieval history at Goldsmiths, University of London, for over 20 years, and has been a regular contributor to seminars at the Institute of Historical research during that time. She has published on gender, the crusades and the kingdom of Jerusalem, and has research interests in gender, political ideas, national identity and race, medieval historiography and vernacular and popular literature.