Epic to Romance

RW Southern (Making of the Middle Ages) sees a commonality between the romances of of the high middle ages and the theological and spiritual movements of the 11th-12th centuries. It’s a shift from an epic mentality to the thought-world of romance.

Southern argues that this movement is evident in life as well as literature: “Briefly, we find less talk of life as an exercise in endurance, and of death in a hopeless cause; and we hear more of life as a seeking and a journeying. Men begin to order their experience more consciously in accord with a plan; they think of themselves less as stationary objects of attack by spiritual foes, and more as pilgrims and seekers. Of course, the idea of pilgrimage had long held an important place in the Christian life, and some of the greatest exponents of the spiritual advantages of physical journeying were the English and Irish missionaries and travelers of te seventh and eighth centuries. But their spiritual ideal was not movement so much as exile: a removal from friends and homeland rather than a search for new experiences and adventures. It was not until the twelfth century that the imagery of journeying became a popular expression of a spiritual quest. Then indeed it meets us on all sides — in the Arthurian Romances, in allegories of love, in descriptions of the ascent of the soul towards God. The imagery of movement seemed at this time to lay hold on the imagination, and it invaded secular as well as religious literature.”

This is connected, he says, to a marked new emphasis on the humanity of Jesus that is evident in the statuary and painting of the period. Instead of an exalted heavenly being, there are images of a very human Christ undergoing very human sufferings on the cross. This humanist emphasis is found in Anselm’s theory of the atonement, according to which it is necessary that a God-man redeem us. The devil is left to the side, and the atonement becomes an issue between God and humanity. 

Specifically, he sees a shift from the thought-world reflected in Roland with the thought-world of Chretien de Troyes: “The barons of the Song of Roland would have been considered unimaginative by a later age, and the limits within which the imagination worked were certainly narrow. It was circumscribed by the ties of lordship and vassalage, by the recollection of fiefs and honours and well-known shrines, by the sacred bond of comradeship…both enemies, the traitor Guanelon and the Moslem king Marilie, were enemies of society, endangering the Christian commonwealth. They were both external enemies in the sense that they were otuside the pale of society, and the opprobrious word ‘felon’ was applied indifferently to each.”

By contrast. “With the work of Chretien de Troyes, who was writing in the third quarter of the twelfth century, we enter a new world. His romances are the secular counterpart to the piety of Citeaux. Of both, love is the theme. . . . The Song of Roland told the story of an actio in which each man had a part to play, and played it well or ill. Chretien’s knights are engaged, not in an action, but in a quest, which each man must undertake alone. A quest for what? Ostensibly for knightly adventure, but really for adventures of the heart.”