TY - JOUR
T1 - Patronage of the poetic Mélusine romance
T2 - Guillaume l'Archevêque's confrontation with dynastic crisis
AU - Colwell, Tania M.
PY - 2011/6
Y1 - 2011/6
N2 - In 1400 Guillaume l'Archevêque, the lord of Parthenay, commissioned the Roman de Parthenay (RP), a poetic ancestral romance affirming his family's descent from Mélusine, the mythic fairy-serpentine matriarch of the Poitevin Lusignan dynasty. Prevailing scholarship holds that Guillaume's commission was a political response to the earlier patronage of a prose Mélusine romance by Jean, duke of Berry, c. 1392. According to this view, Guillaume was an English partisan who sought to counter the French claims to Poitevin territories embedded in Berry's romance with a text that proclaimed his own (and therefore English) rights to lands in central France. After exploring textual and historical evidence for this conventional view, the paper argues that clues to understanding Guillaume's patronage lie in an analytical comparison of passages in the RP with the specific dynastic circumstances confronting l'Archevêque at the end of the fourteenth century. Examination of the romance in conjunction with evidence provided by feudal, financial, and legal sources suggests that Guillaume's literary patronage was motivated not by contemporary affairs of state but by his anxieties about the imminent extinction of the Parthenay dynasty.
AB - In 1400 Guillaume l'Archevêque, the lord of Parthenay, commissioned the Roman de Parthenay (RP), a poetic ancestral romance affirming his family's descent from Mélusine, the mythic fairy-serpentine matriarch of the Poitevin Lusignan dynasty. Prevailing scholarship holds that Guillaume's commission was a political response to the earlier patronage of a prose Mélusine romance by Jean, duke of Berry, c. 1392. According to this view, Guillaume was an English partisan who sought to counter the French claims to Poitevin territories embedded in Berry's romance with a text that proclaimed his own (and therefore English) rights to lands in central France. After exploring textual and historical evidence for this conventional view, the paper argues that clues to understanding Guillaume's patronage lie in an analytical comparison of passages in the RP with the specific dynastic circumstances confronting l'Archevêque at the end of the fourteenth century. Examination of the romance in conjunction with evidence provided by feudal, financial, and legal sources suggests that Guillaume's literary patronage was motivated not by contemporary affairs of state but by his anxieties about the imminent extinction of the Parthenay dynasty.
KW - Coudrette
KW - Guillaume l'Archevêque
KW - Lusignan
KW - Mélusine
KW - Patronage
KW - Roman de Parthenay
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79956220323&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.02.004
DO - 10.1016/j.jmedhist.2011.02.004
M3 - Article
SN - 0304-4181
VL - 37
SP - 215
EP - 229
JO - Journal of Medieval History
JF - Journal of Medieval History
IS - 2
ER -