The political poetics of the chanson de geste in France and Italy: 1130--1532

In this dissertation, I argue that the chanson de geste addressed local political problems by placing them in a broad historical and geographic context. Far from celebrating monarchical power or the feudal hierarchy, the poems engaged in comparative European politics, juxtaposing French institutions with the political and economic systems of the German Empire, the Mediterranean south, or Papal Italy. Chapter one argues that the Couronnement de Louis responds to the power struggle between the French king and the feudal aristocracy by grounding the monarchy's legitimacy in the authority of the church. Chapter two turns to the mid-twelfth-century Charroi de Nimes, arguing that the poem intervenes in a feudal ideology that precludes the participation of aristocrats in commercial activity. Chapter three examines the Chanson d'Aspremont, an Old French poem composed in the kingdom of Sicily c. 1190 which, under the cover of a crusade narrative, produces a critique of conquest and expansionism in response to contemporary political conflicts in the French and English kingdoms. The dissertation's last two chapters track the epic genre's movement from France to the city-states of northeastern Italy. Chapter four analyzes a fourteenth-century, Franco-Italian version of the Chanson de Roland. I show that the poem's reimagining of the feudal aristocrat became a potent symbol for the Italian aristocratic families who were founding new and newly feudal principalities in the region. The concluding chapter focuses on Ludovico Ariosto's incorporation of medieval epic themes (specifically from the rich tradition of the Chanson d'Aspremont) in his early-sixteenth-century Orlando furioso. I argue that the Furioso's deployment of representational strategies inherited from the chanson de geste shapes the poem's approach to a contemporary historical threat: the rise and expansion of the Ottoman Turks. Beyond accounting for one strand of the Orlando furioso's highly complex and generically mixed narrative, my reading highlights the continuing ideological efficacy of the chanson de geste well beyond what we now see as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance or Early Modern period.