Narration as Commemoration: Writing the Chivalric Hero in Late Medieval Burgundian Historiography

作为纪念的叙事：中世纪晚期勃艮第史学中的骑士英雄

基本信息

批准号：
AH/H003606/1
负责人：
Rosalind Brown-Grant
金额：
$ 3.84万
依托单位：
University of Leeds
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2010
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2010 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FH003606%2F1
关键词：
Narration Commemoration Writing Chivalric Hero

项目摘要

Whilst modern historians have long acknowledged the importance of the immense body of historical writing that was produced at the court of late medieval Burgundy as a means of enhancing the cultural and political prestige of the Burgundian dukes themselves, their interest in these works is mainly limited to an assessment of the truth-value and political bias of the individual authors of such works, rather than to a discussion of the linguistic and stylistic means by which these authors created an effect of reality in their texts. Yet, these historical writings have received equally little attention from modern literary scholars who have likewise tended to ignore the ways in which authors working in the different sub-genres of medieval historiography developed particular narrative styles in order to achieve their own specific rhetorical and didactic purposes, whether they were writing as official chroniclers for the public at court, as memoirists offering their own personal view of historical events, as heralds producing meticulous records of blows exchanged in battle, or as biographers striving to turn the knights of the day into secular saints and heroes worthy of romance fiction. The aim of the proposed research project is to remedy this deficiency in the scholarship by showing how modern theories of narrative, as developed by literary scholars, can elucidate the way in which medieval authors used writing as a means of recording the past. By analysing a range of historical works all relating the same events, it aims to enable historians to see precisely how such stylistic and narrative conventions determined the way in which a chronicler, memoirist, herald or biographer constructed his version of reality so as to convince the reader of the veracity of his account. The project will thus analyse how works from each of these four sub-genres - chronicle, memoirs, heraldic accounts and biography -depicted the life and chivalric deeds of Jacques de Lalaing (1420-53), the most famous Burgundian knight of this period, in order to make a range of different moral and didactic points. Adopting a linguistic/narratological approach to the study of medieval narratives, it will examine such issues as the relationship established between narrator and implied reader, the representation of narratorial voice in the text, the modes by which reported speech is incorporated into the narrator's account, and the manipulation of point of view through the shift between the narrator's and the characters' focalisation. As an important complement to this type of theoretical analysis, the project will also seek to establish the part played by the material nature of these texts in their reception by the reader: by consulting the original manuscripts of these works which are held in libraries in Paris and Brussels, it will examine such matters as the quality of paper or parchment used, the meticulousness of the handwriting, the quantity of authorial corrections in the case of autograph manuscripts, and the presence and quality of any illuminations.

尽管现代历史学家早已认识到中世纪晚期勃艮第宫廷所创作的大量历史著作的重要性，认为这是提高勃艮第公爵本身的文化和政治声望的一种手段，但他们对这些作品的兴趣主要限于对此类作品的个别作者的真实价值和政治偏见的评估，而不是对这些作者在其文本中创造现实效果的语言和文体手段的讨论。然而，这些历史著作同样很少受到现代文学学者的关注，他们同样倾向于忽视中世纪史学不同流派的作者为了实现自己特定的修辞和说教目的而发展出特定的叙事风格的方式。，无论他们是作为法庭上的官方编年史家为公众写作，还是作为回忆录作家提供自己对历史事件的个人看法，作为对战斗中相互攻击进行细致记录的先驱者，还是作为努力改变历史的传记作家当今的骑士变成了世俗的圣人和浪漫小说中的英雄。拟议的研究项目的目的是通过展示文学学者发展的现代叙事理论如何阐明中世纪作家使用写作作为记录过去的手段的方式来弥补学术上的这一缺陷。通过分析一系列都涉及相同事件的历史著作，它的目的是使历史学家能够准确地看到这些风格和叙事惯例如何决定编年史家、回忆录作家、先驱者或传记作家构建他的现实版本的方式，从而使人们相信读者了解他的叙述的真实性。因此，该项目将分析这四个子类型（编年史、回忆录、纹章记述和传记）中的每一个作品如何描绘这一时期最著名的勃艮第骑士雅克·德·拉兰（Jacques de Lalaing，1420-53 年）的生活和骑士事迹，以便提出一系列不同的道德和说教观点。采用语言/叙事学方法来研究中世纪叙事，它将研究诸如叙述者和隐含读者之间建立的关系、文本中叙述声音的表示、将报道的言语纳入叙述者的叙述的模式等问题，以及通过叙述者和人物焦点之间的转变来操纵观点。作为此类理论分析的重要补充，该项目还将寻求确定这些文本的物质性质在读者接受中所扮演的角色：通过查阅巴黎图书馆中保存的这些作品的原始手稿在布鲁塞尔，它将检查所用纸张或羊皮纸的质量、笔迹的细致程度、亲笔手稿的作者更正数量以及任何插图的存在和质量等问题。