HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

392 PETER AINSWORTHname of the Lord and in the service of the Christian faith. It ishardly surprising that the Church did not discourage them. The chansonsde geste are thus, at least in part, a reflection or expression ofthe religious fervor of the crusades. Through their protagonists—Roland, Olivier or William of Orange—all the aspirations and dilemmasof a warrior caste could make themselves heard.The chansons des geste took the form of assonanced or rhyming laissesof variable length. The meter was usually decasyllabic, but alexandrinesor even octosyllabic lines are also found. The degree of poeticinvention encountered in texts such as the Oxford Roland is, to saythe least, impressive. Daniel Poirion has alerted us to the risks ofmodern interpretations that distort the meaning of these poems bymaking too little of the role played by the minstrel. 17 One cannotbut admire the sheer virtuosity implied by the almost instinctive generation,in the heat and immediacy of public performance, of eachfresh series of hemistichs, lines, and laisses—fed by the vast resourcesof motifs and formulae that any talented minstrel had at his disposal. 18That said, we would agree with Poirion that the process of writing,too, must have had its role to play from the moment it was decidedthat the best of these poems (or particular versions of them) shouldbe preserved from oblivion and copied onto parchment. It unquestionablyplayed a further role in their subsequent material developmentand transmission.The aesthetic of the chanson de geste is largely alien to modernnotions of harmony and unity. Poirion points out that these poemsaccommodate long prologues “as majestic as façades”, as well as “thejuxtaposition of episodes written in different styles and set alongsideeach other as though within the lead-bound panes of stained glasswindows, . . . with pauses and digressions, secondary repetitions andcontradictions—like so many side chapels”. 19 Michel Zink has drawnour attention to the hieratic to-and-fro movement so characteristicof the epic aesthetic:In the chanson de geste there is no pure narrativity as such, no linearityof narrative development, as if what mattered most were not inthe first instance knowing what is going to happen next. On the contrarythe epic seems to play on a perpetual ebb and flow that revels17Poirion (1992), 240.18Cf. Boutet (1993); Hindley and Levy (1983); Kay (1978); Martin (1987).19Poirion (1992), 241; my translation.