In his six-volume
In a first step, Ziolkowski provides his own modern translation (“Our Lady’s Tumbler”) of the earliest (c. 1230) Old French manuscript containing the juggler narrative. As with so many medieval texts, this one had disappeared for hundreds of years before it was brought (back) into circulation right after the Franco-Prussian War, a time ripe with nationalist medievalisms and also the founding period of academic medieval studies. The modern version stays fairly true to the original, but without making the English translation sound antiquated. Like TEAMS editions of medieval texts, the endnotes (links in the online version) offer helpful explication for those without a formal education in medieval studies, and I would be comfortable to have undergraduate students peruse this text to reach a thorough understanding of content and context.
The translation is followed with important contexts that medievalists may no longer take
for granted among their students, biblical and apocryphal analogues to the Old French
narrative that offered impactful associations for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
reception: “The Dancing of David before the Ark,” “The Dancing of Mary before the
Altar,” and “Widow’s Mite;” sections from
A longer section at the center of the volume is dedicated to Latin, Old French, Galician-Portuguese versions of the wondrous tale of “The Jongleurs of the Holy Candle,” which originated in and around the city of Arras, when the Artois region was plagued with ergotism, a kind of poisoning caused by consuming contaminated grains. According to these narratives, it is only by the intercession of the Virgin, who appears and offers a miraculous candle, that the afflicted find relief and healing. Two jongleurs, who assist the Virgin, later commemorate the miracle by founding a kind of guild, the “Confraternity of Jongleurs and Townspeople,” which offered support with healthcare and funerals. Ziolkowski notes how in this regional tradition the stories surrounding jugglers increase in narrative granularity and individualization, reveal their creators’ intent to resolve “the longstanding division of society among ecclesiastics, knights, and peasants,” and demonstrate “that jongleurs were a cause of anxiety, as other classes sought to control them or appropriate their perquisites, while they endeavored to defend themselves and their interests” (89).
Other related short or more substantial analogues of medieval, early modern, and some
modern folktales in which jugglers (or similar performers) play a role come from Italy
(“The Fiddler and the Holy Face of Luca”), Germany (“The Fiddler and the Bearded Lady;”
“The Dancer Musa;”), Persia (“The Old Harper”), Hungary (“The Fool”), France
(“Péquelé”), and include Spain’s Saint Paschal Baylon, Italy’s Saint John Bosco and
Sister Anna Nobili, American dancer Ruth St. Denis, France’s ballerina Mireille Nègre,
and the Hasidic tale of
The second half of Ziolkowski’s anthology-cum-commentary focuses on providing readers
with essential materials exemplifying the reception of the thirteenth-century poem from
the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, specifically in fin-de-siècle
France and North America. After giving credit to Romance philologists Wendelin Foerster
and Gaston Paris for bringing the medieval poem to the attention of modern academic
readers, he shows how the poem may well have remained behind the philological firewall
of learned journals if it had not been for the efforts of one Félix Brun, who decided to
publish an abridged and adapted prose translation in a public-facing booklet in 1883. In
the introduction to the 1890 edition of his volume, he distinguished himself in the same
way in which medievalists at the time began to demarcate themselves from non-academic
enthusiasts, stating that, while academic institutions formed “medievalists,” he was
only a “medievalizer” (in French:
Even Brun’s efforts at promulgating the juggler narrative might have failed, had it not
been for a literary version of the story crafted and published by Anatole France, one of
the most famous Frenchmen of the fin-de-siècle. Poet, journalist, and widely read
novelist, he was in the habit of adapting numerous aspects and themes of Late Antiquity
and the Middle Ages for his own day and age, including saints’ lives and miracle tales,
with a preference for those including the Virgin Mary. His short story, “The Juggler of
Notre Dame,” was published in the newspaper
The volume ends on exemplifying the early twentieth-century American literary reception, mostly with examples from shorter poetic adaptations, including by Wellesley professor Katharine Lee Bates, philosopher-historian Henry Adams, poet Edwin Markham, children’s book writer Violet Moore Higgins, radio narrator John Booth Nesbitt, and five mid to late twentieth-century poets: Patrick Kavanagh, W. H. Auden, Virginia Nyhart, Turner Cassity, and Virginia Hamilton Adair.
Jan Ziolkowski’s volume commands the admiration and gratitude of anyone who has ever even
dabbled in reception history. Revealing first the first version and analogues of the
premodern textual history, then the successful survival of the thirteenth-century
miracle of the Virgin in the downright Darwinian competition among freshly discovered
medieval literature in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, is a major feat of
archival research, translation, and cultural contextualization.