L’Architecture Épique

Abstract

This article considers how the chansons de geste, for the most part composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, depict a number of architectural elements more or less related to the socio-political values that constitute the background of the genre. It would be vain to look for realistic, precise renditions of feudal architecture in the poems. The historian’s task is to follow the traces left by reality in the imaginary world of the chansons. A study of the changing architectural conditions in the real world allows us to determine how the same words (château, donjon, perron, salle, etc.) in different texts reflect an ideological evolution, one that takes into account, for instance, the opening of the Western world to the Eastern during the Crusades, and the adoption of a number of architectural forms at first perceived as foreign.