Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, 620 (572), f° 1
Congratulations to Dr. Patrick Moran, Associate Professor of French, for receiving a SSHRC Insight Grant to assist with his research project titled “The Celestial Emporium: An Essay on the Emergence of Narrative Literary Genres in the Middle Ages”.
About the research project:
In his 1942 essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”, Jorge Luis Borges mentions an ancient (and no doubt fictional) Chinese encyclopedia called the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which categorizes its objects in ways that seem haphazard and nonsensical. Subsequent commentators refer to Borges’s encyclopedia as an allegory for the impossibility of taxonomy: reality is always more complicated than the arbitrary categories we invent to describe and constrain it. To medieval scholars, Borges’s thought experiment feels painfully familiar: the starting point of this project is the similarity between his Celestial Emporium and the seemingly chaotic landscape of medieval literature.
This three-year project will fund the writing of a book on the emergence of narrative literary genres in the French Middle Ages, from the period of the oldest texts (late 9th century) to the dawn of the 13th century. The applicability of the notion of literary genre has often been disputed for medieval vernacular literature. It is undeniable that medieval works form groupings according to common features which are sometimes thematic, sometimes formal, sometimes functional, but these groupings often fluctuate and can seem hybrid or vague. The period of emergence of literature in French is particularly thorny, since it is characterized by a limited number of texts, which often share characteristics and don’t always fit into stable genres; the similarities between the first epic poems, hagiographies and romances make it difficult to identify watertight categories. I propose to examine this period of emergence at ground-level, so to speak, by attempting to restore the strangeness and experimental nature of these early literary manifestations.
The book project combines three approaches. The first is an anti-systematic view of genre that emphasizes genericity as a means of communication between writers and readers. Genres aren’t inherent to texts; they are flexible classes that help manage audience expectations and situate literary works in relation to each other. The second is based on material philology – the analysis of manuscripts, which are powerful indicators of generic practices during the medieval period, in particular through their paratext (titles, rubrics, tables of contents, headers and sub-headers, etc.). Finally, the third approach drawn from cognitive studies, particularly around the notions of categorization, concept formation and pattern recognition: a cognitive approach to generic questions makes it possible to highlight the general value of a reflection on genre, allowing a more global examination of the notion of category and the way we use and abuse it.
