The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity

Jan M. Ziolkowski

Description

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life.

Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the twentieth century explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame and its place in mass culture today.

Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism deals with the influence of the tale in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and America, and the development of literary medievalism at this time.

Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski’s work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783745098
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 13 Mo

Extrait

Jan M. Ziolkowski







The Juggler of Notre Dame

Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism

and the Medievalizing of Modernity




THE JUGGLER OF NOTRE DAME
Volume 2


The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity
Vol. 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism
Jan M. Ziolkowski






https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski


The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the author(s), but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work. Attribution should include the following information:
Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity. Volume 2: Medieval Meets Medievalism . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0143
Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. Copyright and permissions information for images is provided separately in the List of Illustrations.
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/805#copyright
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/805#resources
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-506-7
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-507-4
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-508-1
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-509-8
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-510-4
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0143
Cover image: John Everett Millais, Mariana (1851), oil on mahogany, 59.7 x 49.5 cm, T07533, Tate Britain, London. Cover design: Anna Gatti.
All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative) and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified.
Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)


Contents
Note to the Reader
3
1.
Tumbling Back into France, by Way of Philology
5
A Medieval Poem Comforts a Modern Nation
5
The Simple Middle Ages
7
The Primitive and the Gothic
10
The Oriental and the Gothic
12
The Sacramental Middle Ages
16
The Franco-Prussian War
21
The Virtue of Old French
27
Gaston Paris and the Dance of Philology
30
Gaston Paris and Our Lady’s Tumbler
42
German Philologists
46
2.
Notre Dame: The Virgin in Nineteenth-Century France
51
The Age of Mary
51
The Fleur-de-Lis
57
The Apparitions of the Virgin
61
The Reactionary Revolution
69
Cathedralomania
72
Notre-Dame Cathedral and Eiffel Tower
87
3.
Franglais Juggling
97
The Anglicizing of the Tumbler
97
Thomas Bird Mosher and Reverend Wicksteed
104
Isabel Butler and Her Publisher
111
Reverend Cormack, Alice Kemp-Welch, and Eugene Mason
116
Katharine Lee Bates and Gothic Wellesley
121
Nostalgia for the Middle Ages
134
4.
Anatole France
137
The Local Historian Félix Brun
137
The Poetaster Raymond de Borrelli
149
The Hungarian Dezsö Malonyay
156
Anatole France and Gaston Paris
158
Mayday, Mayday
163
The Little Box of Mother-of-Pearl
164
The Golden Legend and the Irony of Philology
167
5.
Le Jongleur de Notre Dame
177
Bricabracomania
177
Saints and Miracles
188
Fantasy and Humility
196
Why Compiègne?
198
Why Barnaby?
201
Jongleur as Juggler
204
Anatole France as Juggler
210
Edwin Markham’s Working-Class Juggler
218
Notes
223
Notes to Chapter 1
223
Notes to Chapter 2
241
Notes to Chapter 3
252
Notes to Chapter 4
269
Notes to Chapter 5
283
Bibliography
297
Abbreviations
297
Archives
297
Referenced Works
297
List of Illustrations
325
Index
337


To Elizabeth Emery
I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.
—Mark Twain


Note to the Reader
This volume is the second of a half dozen. Together, the six form The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity . The book as a whole probes one medieval story, its reception in culture from the Franco-Prussian War until today, and the placement of that reception within medieval revivalism as a larger cultural phenomenon. The study has been designed to proceed largely in chronological order, but the progression across the centuries and decades is relieved by thematic chapters that deal with topics not restricted to any single time period.
This second installment, called “Medieval Meets Medievalism,” examines the reemergence of the medieval narrative after its edition in 1873, its translation into English, and its recasting as a short story by Anatole France. The third in the series, entitled “The American Middle Ages,” explores the reasons why the American not-so-public intellectual Henry Adams was drawn to the story and more largely why many of his compatriots in the Gilded Age found relief and relevance in the literature and architecture of the Middle Ages. Later volumes trace the story of the story down to the present day.
The chapters are followed by endnotes. Rather than being numbered, these notes are keyed to the words and phrases in the text that are presented in a different color. After the endnotes come the bibliography and illustration credits. In each volume-by-volume index, the names of most people have lifespans, regnal dates, or at least death dates.
One comment on the title of the story is in order. In proper French, Notre-Dame has a hyphen when the phrase refers to a building, institution, or place. Notre Dame, without the mark, refers to the woman, the mother of Jesus. In my own prose, the title is given in the form Le jongleur de Notre Dame , but the last two words will be found hyphenated in quotations and bibliographic citations if the original is so punctuated.
All translations are my own, unless otherwise specified.


1. Tumbling Back into France, by Way of Philology


© 2018 Jan M. Ziolkowski, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0143.01
Edit indeed ; Thank God they do. If it had not been for scholars working themselves blind copying and collating manuscripts, how many poems would be unavailable… and how many others full of lines that made no sense?… only the scholar with his unselfish courage to read the unreadable will retrieve the rare prize.
—W. H. Auden
A Medieval Poem Comforts a Modern Nation
The poetry of the Middle Ages definitely offers genuine pleasures even to the most sensitive and cultured souls, provided that they do not refuse out of bias to accept them.
—Gaston Paris
There is a saying that “books have their destiny.” The Latin of this hallowed aphorism has been chopped in half and wrenched from its original context, which was in a grammar book from the second century of the common era. The full verse reads: “ In proportion to the understanding of the reader ” and so forth. Let us do our utmost to make sense of what happened to Our Lady’s Tumbler after the Renaissance and Reformation beat down the jongleur and left him in the crypt for dead for approximately four centuries. Yet he and his tale declined to stay deceased. Medieval stories have leached into modern and postmodern Western culture at multifarious moments and in manifold manners. Innumerable ones have led nearly unruptured lives, even if they have passed in and out of vogue from one century to another. Romances from the Middle Ages have mutated into early modern chapbooks, those pamphlets have in turn been rearranged into ballads from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, and all these materials and more have been readapted in novels since the nineteenth century. So