Urban Drama, Part 2

Froissart’s Description

He who transcribes the Aggada has no portion in the world to come; he who expounds it is excommunicated; and he who listens to the exposition of it shall receive no reward.

Talmud. Yerushalmi P’sachim, Shabbat, xvi. Fol.30, col. 2

Queen Isabella’s Entry into Paris in 1389 formed an integral part of Jean Froissart’s Chronicles because in his imagination and in the conception of history available and developed during the fifteenth century in Western Europe ceremonial art—myth in its truest and root sense as a celebratory and transfigurative ritual event—was at least as important to the understanding of how individuals, states and the world worked as all those factors which our modern notion of history considers as exclusively real. This kind of ceremonial history in Froissart may seem odd to us because we are used to history being based on hard political realism, economic forces determining events and driving individuals, and social movements being rooted in hard-nosed materialism.  Froissart’s forte, the depiction of ritual events, such as tourneys and city welcomes, seems to us more appropriate in romances and allegorical poetry: it belongs to the realm of fantasy, or perhaps to propaganda as a form of mythic discourse.  All the other stuff—the cost (in money, as well as time, effort and “social capital”) of the displays, the political machinations behind their organization, the social and religious intentions and effects—are there, too.   However, the terms in which the meaning and the experience of the larger “historical picture” are expressed—the images shown, the actions ritualized, and the speeches made or sung, with accompanying dances and other physical activities, belong to a society that feels itself to be somewhere between new (that is, late medieval) philosophical or theological ideals and archaic mythical power (Christian and more ancient).  More than that, the expressive terms are not, for the fifteenth-century author and his audience, epiphenomena—not merely so: they are of the essence.

In point of fact, as we now conceive of history—history of mentalities and psychohistory—what has shifted to the centre of attention are feelings, sensations, shared experiences of dreams, anxieties, aspirations, hopes: indeed, when these large crowds that Froissart describes as part of the festivals—the special occasions that filled up far more of the time, energy, expenses and imaginative creativity in the lives of medieval society, whether in small villages, courts, religious communities or large cities—gathered their very cumulative presence transformed the ordinary into the special, often the profane into the sacred, the forgettable into the memorable, the meaningless into the meaningful.  But at the same time—in these moments that transfigure time itself and consolidate the experiences of space into ritual instances of being within the liminality of what separates this world from the next or the other—what is recorded can act at once as an aide de memoire, a projection into the future for the next performance, a memory of what happened as it is assimilated into the collective memory and thus corrected from the limitations of individual recall, as well as an ideal statement of what it all meant and means and can continue to mean, though even the careful verbalized text falls below the threshold of what was experienced in all its non-verbal fullness.

This long passage in The Chronicles is an account of an urban ritual to honour a visiting stranger, a dignity about be integrated into the idealized and real complexity of society, of city, court and ecclesia; in other words, to celebrate a wedding between two great dynastic families representing two great European and Christian nations, and to bond together the residents and citizens of Paris with their sovereigns, while indicating the power and loyalty of the city corporation.  The ostensible purpose in this festive celebration is not only for the city to display its power, its wealth and its loyalty to the royal sovereigns, but at the same time to receive these ruling outsiders into their own urban space and on its own terms, thus asserting the corporation’s  own rights and privileges, and bonding its members into a larger hierarchical unit—a body politic—that is greater than any of the royal personages or ecclesiastical dignitaries so involved as central spectators and participants of this entry procession.  The depiction (a term we shall have to parse and discuss soon enough since it signifies enargeia in its late classical sense) by Froissart is his way of reporting on these events in France, interpreting and evaluating them for his original English readers (who hear, read and imagine in their minds and discussions his work in the Anglo-French of the English court).  It is also the poet-historian’s way of standing outside of the Parisian event and transforming it into a discourse that treats it critically, that is, sees it as both mythic and as allegorical.  (The relationship between these two conceptions of myth and allegory will also be discussed later in this opening third of the essay, along with many other features that seem famikiar—that in fact, the more they seem familiar are necessarily and uncannily outside of our experience, and whose ordinary words and images exist in an allusionary grid we have to reconstruct since it no longer can be found out there in existential time and spade, except as a few monumental relics of stone, street alignments, and dead metaphors.)

At the same time, while the rights and privileges of the sovereign and his bride, as well as the binding matrix of Christian love, are also displayed and affirmed, there are other themes and images at play, at once in the streets and buildings of Paris decorated with a variety of aesthetic and instructive enhancements that provide momentary significance and more long-term transformations of political power and spiritual force as well as under the assumed eyes of heaven and the consciousness of history, on the pages of Froissart’s text where it forms part of the discursive history of his times and his own authorial response and interpretation of these events, and in the light of the historical influences, literary, intellectual, social and ecclesiastical that provide the matrix for this ways of active seeing and speaking of the world. 

Froissart’s chronicle text thus recounts the diverse processions, tableaux vivants, acrobatic performances, formal speeches, crowd reactions and other constituent elements of the city’s welcome of their new Queen and of the royal lady’s participation in that ritual, in her integration into the life and texture of Paris, of the kingdom of France, and of the royal family and of the Holy Church to which they all, severally, belong, in their diverse embodiments, reflections and representations of natural, divine and historical forces.  The processional play—or rather, suite of playlets and celebratory entertainments—is, then, in one sense, a spectacle, with actors, speakers, jugglers, acrobats, musicians, equestrians, and other performers; but, in another, a ritual theatre in which the whole city is involved, the streets, buildings and squares the painted scenery and temporarily-constructed props, and the articulation of social, political and religious commonplaces the primary text.  Or, as we shall have to explain later, too, of these explicit allusions to what is left unsaid, unseen, perhaps mostly unimagined, not least the role of the Jews of Paris, few though they might have been, and of the Jewish allusions so integrated into the discourses of Church and State that their ancient identities have been lost sight of and their resonances muted into Christian commonplace.

At the same time, though hardly in the same way, or through the same set of lenses, when we read other contemporary chronicles, annals and reports of the period, there was a more realistic, darker side to the transitional period between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.  The sense of a national consciousness was beginning to articulate itself and the need for institutions that make the state more coherent, consistent and efficient.  More important than that, to those living through the times and those attempting to write out the meaning of those experiences, there was the sense of a complex and complicated society, one that did not always conform to the ideal paradigms set forth by the laws of feudalism, the ideals of chivalry, the dogmas of the Church or the various and competing laws of the land.