In The Medieval Poetics of Contraries, Michelle Bolduc argues that a consideration of the interplay of sacred and secular in vernacular literature is a site upon which poetic agency unfolds and is made manifest. Her signaled aim is to move away from what she calls the "hermeneutic" approach of scholars such as Constance Brittain Bouchard, Catherine Brown, James Burke and Sarah Kay. Those scholars, according to Bolduc, have attempted to unpack contraries through the prism of either a unique philosophical paradigm, or genre, or the concept of a national literature. Instead, Bolduc wants to explore contraries as modes to poiesis, as fundamentally constituent of the poetic authorial act. To do this, Bolduc use four case studies taken from Old French, Occitan and Italian. Each of her examples is of a somewhat indeterminate genre. Her point seems to be--as far as I could tell--that we need not look for an overall frame within which to position the jostling contraries between sacred and secular that dynamize much vernacular literature. Rather, the placing of these contraries in medieval literature can be understood as the mode to the invention of literary authority in her period. That is, medieval vernacular contraries are not underscored by an overarching ontology, but by the poetic agent bringing them together.
The first work she considers is the Miracles de Nostre Dame of Gautier de Coinci. In this work, Bolduc argues, Gautier's use of contraries establishes him a Marian trouvère. Drawing on the Song of Songs, he writes relatively standard affective lyrics to praise the Virgin. He does this, however, in the vernacular and with the addition of lyrics that praise the Virgin as a Lady. He writes of Mary as a religious, imploring the readers to meditate upon her goodness and her intercessory powers. But he also writes of Mary by constructing himself as her poet, her trouvère. Bolduc contends that this use of contraries is a "displacement" (63), from secular to sacred, from eros to caritas. In so displacing the courtly with the ecclesiastical, she argues that Gautier is in fact calling attention to himself as author, as a creative manager of contraries.
Contraries exist visually as well, of course. The relationship between text and picture can be a contrary, and contraries can reside together on the pictorial plane, even if this plane only exists as described in language rather than depicted. Consequently, Bolduc argues that attention must also be paid to the manuscript tradition of her examples, arguing that the way in which the text is framed in images often bears strong witness of the notion of poetic agency conveyed by the language of the lyric or prose. This notion is particularly important for her reading of Matfre Ermengaud's work in Occitan, the Breviari d'amor. This work is an encyclopedia of love that juxtaposes doctrinal theories of love with the fin'amors of troubadour lyric. Matfre's use of lyric is striking in this spiritual context, he names his last section "The Perilous Treatise on the love of women according to what the troubadours have said in their songs" (96), allowing the troubadours to be his interlocutors for the section on secular love. A strong pair of contraries is thereby established, according to Bolduc. And these contraries are made coherent by the implied author Matfre. They are united by the central motif of the Breviari, that of the Tree of Love. This Tree, according to the author of the Breviari, depicts the "genealogy of love"(93). This has the effect, argues Bolduc, of uniting secular and sacred visually and thereby providing a cosmic frame for the contraries within the text. The Tree of Love is a mode of poetic agency, the poet provides the philosophical and genealogical system by which the contraries are resolved. Bolduc writes that "Rather than signifying puzzling incongruity, moreover the sacred and secular here portray the implied author Matfre as having a solid foundation for an unequivocally polyvalent poetic identity: theologian, lover, and troubadour" (127).
Bolduc then turns her attention to the version of the Roman de Fauvel found in Paris, BnF MS 146. This version distinguishes between a primary author, Gervès du Bas, and a continuator, Chaillou de Pesstain. In the manuscript Chaillou is credited with extending the narrative and adding 169 musical interpolations. Bolduc's focus in this chapter are the additions of Chaillou, since they demonstrate a "generic hybridism" between sacred and secular (133). What interests her about this hybridism is that unlike in the previously mentioned works, Chaillou does not create a hierarchy that subordinates the earthly to the heavenly. Instead, she argues, a process of literary dissociation occurs that forces the reader to look for meaning beyond the manuscript. The figure of the author, as well as the momentum of poetic agency, is created here through the refusal of resolution. The reader is forced to conduct their own arbitration between registers, and so recognize the overarching hand of the author in laying them out.
Finally, Bolduc considers Dante's Commedia. For her, this text represents the apotheosis of her story. In the Commedia she sees contraries deployed with precision in order to reveal the sacred imagination of the poet/prophet, what she calls a "transcendent form of auctoritas" (172). Bolduc tells us how Dante tells the reader in Paradiso 19 of his experience of heaven, "And that which I must now tell, never did voice report nor ink record, nor was it ever comprised by phantasy" (204). Dante is expressing a voice and a vision singularly that of the poet, and yet authorized as sacred.
Bolduc's account of the journey on which she has taken her readers is towards a new understanding of contraries in medieval literature as productive of the figures of medieval authors. That is, medieval authors, albeit implied, are made evident to the reader through their strategic deployment of contraries. Contraries, she argues, are the site of invention, and concomitantly, a bridge to authorial self-fashioning.
To a point, this is borne out in her analysis. Bolduc's close readings of her four case-studies bear out the differences in the way each manages the inter-play of sacred and secular, and, how this leads to different representations of the author and his agency in the text. But her argument falls short, I am afraid, on the larger scale. Her aim is to problematize the hermeneutical approach that sees medieval literature and its use of contraries as explicable in terms of a medieval meta-language. That is, she wants to circumvent a reading of contraries that merely sees them resolved through a reading of medieval signification that has the One supplying meaning to the Many, that has God as the author of creation and unifier of diversity. Certainly, Bolduc's argument about contraries in the vernacular as a mode to the depiction of poetic agency might destabilise this hermeneutical position, or at least complicate it. The extension she aims for is, potentially possible to my eyes. But Bolduc never gets there analytically, she does not set up the stakes of this reading. She performs it adequately, and occasionally stylishly. But the readings are not framed with precision or purpose. The nature of her quarrel or departure from those that she names is never significantly unpacked. All too often her intellectual brio fades out before she properly frames the issue or her targets.
There are two parts to this book, which mingle together throughout the text. One is the deft reading of texts, which subtly describes the use of contraries through two sets of marvelous translations. The first is Bolduc's own translations of her texts from the vernacular into modern English. The second is her evocative explanations of the diverse registers of her texts and how they function as wholes. The second part of the book is Bolduc's ultimately clumsy attempt to render the relevance of her reading to contemporary, scholarly ways of thinking about medieval literature. I have no doubt that a contribution has been made due to the subtlety of the readings performed in situ. But the precise nature of what this contribution might be remains somewhat opaque to this reader.