[In the following essay, Dunn focuses on the setting and plot of Guillaume de Palerne. Dunn comments on the author's adaptation of Sicilian source legends into the French romance.]

Now that we have established the probability that Guillaume derives its setting from geographical facts and its plot from national Sicilian legends, we are in a position to analyse the romancer's methods by asking how he obtained his material, why it appealed to him, and how he converted it into romance.

The use of a Sicilian setting and legend by a writer in the service of a countess from Hainaut may be readily explained by the close contact preserved between France and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the period of Norman and Hohenstaufen rule. Crusaders, adventurers, diplomats, clerics, and merchants all contributed to the circulation in France, even as far north as Flanders (and Hainaut within the Holy Roman Empire), of oral and written reports concerning the fabulous Kingdom of the South.¹ Some of the chronicles already mentioned demonstrate the general interest taken by northerners in Sicilian affairs, and an impression of the intimate contacts possible between Countess Yolande's entourage and a land which she herself had presumably never visited can be gleaned from the following chronologically arranged list of events, miscellaneous though they are.

In 1151 Beatrice of Rethel, who was daughter of the Count of Rethel and related to the counts of Flanders, became the third wife of King Roger of Sicily and in 1154 bore him Constance, later Queen of Sicily.²

Peter of Blois joined a band of 37 travellers led by Stephen, son of the Count of Perche, which reached Palermo in 1166. He was appointed preceptor to the young King William II, but because of a rebellion against Stephen of Perche, two years later he returned most willingly to France, where he recorded in his letters his tumultuous experiences at the royal court.³

When Henry VI left Germany in 1185 for Milan, where on January 27, 1186, he married Constance, the heir apparent to the Sicilian throne, he was accompanied by Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders, the brother-in-law of Baldwin V.⁴

Constance of Sicily supported her French kinsmen after her marriage, interceding in 1188 on behalf of Yolande's brother, Count Baldwin V, and in 1192 on behalf of Albert, Count of Rethel, the kinsman and ally of Count Baldwin VI of Hainaut.⁵

On the Third Crusade (1189-92) the French forces under Philip Augustus, sailing from Genoa to Palestine, reached the Straits of Messina just after the death of King William II and the election of King Tancred;⁶ and, as Miss McKeehan points out, Hugh of Saint-Pol, Countess Yolande's husband, who was with them, may have landed on Sicily;⁷ and, it may be added, he undoubtedly had a clerk at his disposal.⁸

In view of the romancer's detailed references to Sicily and southern Italy, it is tempting to argue that he had personally visited his mise en scène during this crusade. His description of the devastation of Apulia recalls the fact that when Philip Augustus' forces returned in 1191 from their crusade, they found that Emperor Henry VI had laid Campania waste.⁹ His special reference to the imperial rights over the papal city of Benevento may reflect a first-hand knowledge of the fact that the emperor had just granted the city new privileges in June of 1191, four months before the French visited it on their way to Rome.¹⁰

But the description of the siege of Palermo and especially the statement that the invaders had killed off most of the animals in the park recalls the later events of 1194, when Henry VI attacked Palermo and slaughtered the beasts in the Royal Park to feed his troops.¹¹ The romancer may have been present at this occasion, for Flanders was subject to the emperor and sent him ships to aid him in his conquest.¹²

Baldwin VI, in common with his father before him, supported the Hohenstaufen emperors and enjoyed their favours.¹³ He must have been well acquainted with the attempts to defeat the election of both Tancred and William III as Sicilian kings. Hence the story which, according to the prose Guillaume, Baldwin obtained for the romancer was perhaps a Romulus ecotype vindicating the Hohenstaufen claims to the Sicilian throne. But, since the poet does not seem to have attempted to preserve any political propaganda in his use of the Romulus Type, some legend which favoured the Norman cause may just as well have provided suitable material for his romance.

If the poet had lived nearer to the source of his plot, his inclination might then have been to refer the legend more specifically to historical figures, in the same way, for instance, that Gautier of Tournai dealt with the local traditions of Hainaut in Gilles de Chyn.¹⁴ But the chief appeal of the legend for the romancer obviously lay in its wonder-elements; in it the poet saw fresh narrative material which he could turn to his own advantage. He did not think of the rescue of a royal child by a werwolf as proof of a divine providence guiding the destiny of a national hero but rather as a marvel which would delight those in search of romance.

It is difficult to know what estimate one may make of the credulity of the poet's audience. The twelfth century witnessed in western Europe a vigorous growth of intellectualism, it is true; but even an emperor so enlightened and inquiring as Frederick II did not entirely succeed in throwing off the beliefs inherited from the Dark Ages; and the ladies of fashion for whom Guillaume was written, though perhaps also intellectually curious, certainly never attained an enlightenment comparable to that of the ruler who came to be called the stupor mundi. Andreas Capellanus, for instance, complains of their superstitious practices:

… there is not a woman living in this world, not even the empress or the queen, who does not waste her whole life on auguries and the various practitioners of divination, as the heathen do, and so long as she lives she persists in this credulousness and sins without measure again and again with the art of astrology. Indeed, no woman does anything without considering the proper day and hour for beginning it and without inaugurating it with incantations. They will not marry, or hold funeral rites for the dead, or start their sowing, or move into a new house, or begin anything else without consulting this feminine augury and having their actions approved by these witches.¹⁵

It seems likely, then, that the romancer's marvels were readily acceptable and that, for his audience, suspension of disbelief was an effortless gesture.

Similar considerations presumably lay behind the poet's development of the Sicilian setting. He must have sensed the potential appeal inherent in a portrayal of the exotic splendour of the royal gardens, the sumptuous palace, and the thronging harbour of Palermo. For his northern audience, the warm south was an enchanted country, exercising then somewhat the same fascination which Goethe six centuries later was to ascribe to the land where the citrons bloom; and the romancer knew how to utilize this charm.

Nothing could better reveal the nature of poetic creation than a comparison between the French romancer's dispassionate adaptation of Sicilian legend and the violently partisan literature composed by residents in the south who were directly involved in the national crises of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. For instance, the Tacitus of Sicily, Hugo Falcandus, himself a strong opponent of the Hohenstaufen claims, crystallizes in his eloquent prose all the foreboding felt by a once peaceful country on the eve of its invasion by Henry VI. Shortly after the death (1189) of his royal pupil King William II, he wrote:

I had resolved, … once the harsh winter had been mellowed by the benignancy of a milder breeze, to write you something cheering and pleasant which could be dedicated to you as a first offering of the awakening spring. But now that I have heard the news of the king's death and have begun to think over and foresee in my own mind how great a calamity this reversal of events might bring about and how much the deep quiet of the realm would either be shattered by the uproar of an enemy invasion or disturbed by the grave unrest of civil rebellions, then in my consternation of mind I have abruptly given up my attempt; and, retuning my lyre for lament, I have felt more inclined to compose doleful melodies and a lugubrious song of lamentations. … Indeed, just as it is difficult to restrain a child from mourning after the death of his nurse, so, I admit, I cannot hold back my tears, I cannot pass over in silence or record with dry eyes the desolation of Sicily, which has nurtured, reared, and raised me, taking me kindly to her most beloved breast.

Already I seem to see the disorderly files of barbarians breaking in wherever their onrush carries them, and the opulent cities and the lands which have blossomed under a lasting peace being shaken with horror, desolated by slaughter, laid waste by pillage, and defiled by lust. … For the Teutonic frenzy, which is born of an innate madness, stimulated by rapacity, and aggravated by lust, can neither be controlled by reason, nor deflected by compassion, nor awed by religion.¹⁶

Peter of Eboli, on the other hand, a violent advocate of the Hohenstaufen cause, scornfully mocks “little Tancred” (Tancredulus), Henry's Norman rival. His invective, perhaps inartistic in its excesses, at times reaches truly great satiric heights. The phrase he applies to Tancred, for instance, “Embrion infelix et detestabile monstrum” (Unhappy embryo and detestable monstrosity, v. 208), condenses within the confines of a single hexameter an astonishingly suggestive characterization of the hated pretender to the throne. The extreme sycophancy pervading his encomium of Henry VI is best illustrated by a brief excerpt of his breathless elegiacs, to which an English translation can hardly do justice:

Felix nostra dies nec ea felicior ulla,
          Lecior aut locuples a Salomone fuit.
Evomuit serpens virus sub fauce repostum
          Aruit in vires mesta cicuta suas.
Nec sonipes griphes nec oves assueta luporum
          Ora timent: ut ovis stat lupus inter oves.
Una fonte bibunt, eadem pascuntur et arva
          Bos, leo, grus, aquila, sus, canis, ursus, aper.
Non erit in nostris, moveat qui bella, diebus;
          Amodo perpetue tempora pacis erunt,
Nulla manent hodie veteris vestigia fraudis,
          Qua tancridinus polluit error humum,
Ipsaque transibant derisi tempora regis.
          Nam meus Augustus solus et unus erit,
Unus amor, commune bonum, rex omnibus unus,
          Unus sol, unus pastor et una fides.(17)

(Fortunate is our day, nor was there ever any such from the time of Solomon more fortunate or happy or prosperous. The serpent has voided the venom from under his jaws; the hemlock, mowed down, is sapped of its power. Those of the sounding hooves, no longer fear the familiar jaws of the griffons, nor the sheep the jaws of the wolves; like a sheep the wolf stands among sheep. The cow, the lion, the crane, the eagle, the pig, the hound, the bear, the boar drink from one spring and crop the same fields. There will be no one in our time who will wage war; instead there will be an era of perpetual peace. No traces of the old guile remain today by which the Tancredine delusion prevailed over the land; those times of the ridiculous king have passed away. For my Augustus will be the one and only, the one love, the common good, the one king for all, one sun, one shepherd, and one faith.)

The author of Guillaume, remote from such political stresses, ignores the possibilities of propaganda offered by tales of the Romulus Type. The romance becomes in his hands, to translate Myrrha Lot-Borodine's phrase, “a courtly idyll encased in an adventure story.”¹⁸ The conflicts of the plot are produced through no fault in the protagonists but by the unrestrained lust for power exhibited in differing degrees by the various villains—Guillaume's uncle, Queen Brande, the Duke of Saxony, the King of Spain, and Brandin.

In the world which the romance portrays, not only do the good and the innocent blissfully surmount the schemes of the ambitious, but even the evil escape punishment. The poet's faith in the potency of goodness and the bounty of human forgiveness is remarkably sanguine. When the rebellious Duke of Saxony is captured, the Emperor of Rome spares his life, and the duke dies from grief over his own pride (2415-32). After Queen Brande repents for having transformed Alphonse and disenchants him, there is not even any suggestion that she might deserve punishment; and, although Alphonse rebukes his father for having tried to force Florence into marriage with Brandin, the invading king remarks that everything will be restored (8055-63) and apparently feels that his revelation of Guillaume's identity will be sufficient recompense to the Queen of Sicily for all the loss her lands have suffered from the Spaniards. The treacherous Gloriande and Acelone are spared by Guillaume and allowed to enter “the hermitage” (8393-5).¹⁹

By contrast, fairy stories, even those circulating in the most enlightened countries, traditionally allow that the evil-doer shall be killed; and certainly during the Middle Ages in the real world of fact, a culprit was invariably made to suffer, often much beyond his deserts. Henry VI's treatment of the Norman-Sicilian conspirators in their second uprising (1197) against the Hohenstaufen forces illustrates the measures actually employed in the twelfth century by a ruler intent on preserving his power. The hostages whom Henry had previously sent to Germany after the conspiracy of 1194 he ordered to be blinded. Those who were arrested in Sicily suffered a variety of fates: some were drowned, some severed with the saw, some covered with pitch and burned, and some pinned out upon the ground with pointed stakes; and Queen Constance, as the penalty for her complicity in the conspiracy against her husband, was forced to watch the punishment of the lord of Castrogiovanni, the leader of the rebellion, while the executioners nailed a molten-red crown of metal upon his head. Yet as Toeche points out, Henry's contemporaries saw in this violent revenge only an expedient punishment. Arnold of Lübeck unexcitedly remarks that Henry “had the good fortune to capture his opponents and exact a deserved vengeance upon them.”²⁰ Such firmness was indeed advocated by the emperor's tutor, Geoffrey of Viterbo, as the proper means of preserving peace in the realm.²¹

When we have mentioned both the marvellous and the idyllic in Guillaume, we have by no means exhausted the ingredients of the romance produced by the poet from the raw materials of plot and setting. George Saintsbury has suggested that romance is compounded of all three of Dante's touchstones of poetic material—religion, love, and war—salus, venus, and virtus.²² All three features are certainly important in Guillaume, and each is developed by the romancer in the way established by his predecessors. He not only borrows details from Chrétien de Troyes²³ and Marie de France;²⁴ he perpetuates their spirit.

The preponderance of virtus in Guillaume may seem to be somewhat out of keeping with what has been said about the idyllic nature of the romance. Certainly the poet's descriptions of the Roman campaign against the Saxons and of Guillaume's three sorties against the besieging Spaniards abound with the noise and colour of battle: trumpets, horns, and tabors (1838-41), banners, ensigns, lances, pennons, swords, helmets, shields, mailed haubercs, and war-horses (1882-8). In the heat of combat, “brains, entrails, and bowels are spread over the field” (1908-9), and horses wander at large, riderless, with saddles reversed, trailing broken reins between their hooves (1934-40). Death comes violently and vividly. Heads are severed, and the ground is covered with blood (2030-1) and blackening bodies (2033). Guillaume with one blow cuts through a helmet and splits open the head, throat, chest, and spine of his adversary (2058-62). A Spanish horseman runs his lance through a Sicilian, point, stock, and pennon (5761); and he in turn is hewed down by Guillaume, so that his lifeless body falls from the saddle and his helmet rolls over the sand (5801).

Zingarelli has remarked that such descriptions are in language and imagery reminiscent of the Chanson de Roland,²⁵ and McKeehan has suggested a Norman influence behind the emphasis upon warfare.²⁶ We might add as further examples the historical works of the Norman chroniclers, who, as Chalandon has pointed out, are even more interested in individual combat than in the outcome of battle;²⁷ and, in a different sphere of art, the scenes of carnage on the Bayeux Tapestry. But in the twelfth century the fascination of slaughter was not limited to one locality in western Europe. The miniatures in Peter of Eboli's De rebus siculis, for instance, reflect exactly the same taste in southern Italy. In one battle-scene, the artist (probably Peter himself) is not satisfied merely to depict warriors falling severed in battle; with dogged realism he includes in the illustration a carter leading two oxen which are dragging a large two-wheeled cart laden with dismembered trunks, limbs, and heads, to be thrown into the river.²⁸ The author of Guillaume, it should be noted, hardly proceeds to such grotesque extremes. Pity softens his picture.

To be sure, the romancer, like his contemporaries, does not shun bloodshed, and he highly admires the prowess of his hero. In describing the part played by Guillaume in the battle against the Saxons, he writes:

Au brant d’acier tex cox lore done
Que tos les fent et decopone;
Fiert et ocit et acravente,
Les vis desor les mors adente;
Comme sanglers lor livre estal.
Diex, quel baron et quel vassal!

(2209-14)

(With sword of steel such blows he gives them that he hacks and hews them all. He strikes and kills and shatters; the living upon the dead he hurls. Like a boar he charges at them. Lord God, what a baron, what a vassal!)

Yet he does not forget the tragedy of slaughter:

Diex! tex frans hom i pert la vie,
Dont grans deus fu et grant dolors
A lor amis …

(1910-12)

(Lord God! So many a bold man lost his life there, for whom his friends felt sorrow and great grief …)

Nor does he overlook the grief even of the villains in the romance. When the Spaniards ride out for their second attack on Palermo and see the field of the previous day's battle under the light of the morning sun, the poet writes:

… grant duel faisoient
De lor amis qu’iluec gisoient,
Voient tant hiaume a or luisant
Et tant vassal souvin gisant
Et tant espiel et tante lance
Et tante bele connaissance.

(6067-72)

(They greatly mourned for their friends who were lying there, so many a helmet of shining gold they saw, so many a spear, so many a lance, so many a beautiful coat-of-arms.)

Under the heading of salus, one would characterize the romancer as being both pious and moral, though not moralistic. The good characters in Guillaume all exhibit decorously Christian behaviour. Consequently, prayers play an important part in the unfolding of the romance, as they do in other writings of this period.²⁹ The Emperor of Rome prays that God will not permit the disloyalty of the Duke of Saxony to prosper (1954-68). Alexandrine utters a moving prayer that God will aid Guillaume and Melior in their escape from Rome.

“Hé! vrais dous peres Jhesu Cris,
Rois sor tos rois poesteis,
Vraie paterne, omnipotent,
Biau sire Diex, si vraiement
Com ciel et terre et tout formas,
Et en la vierge t’aombras
Et preis incarnation,
Sire, par sainte anoncion,
Et forme d’ome et char humaine,
Et garesis en la balaine
Jonas qu’ele avoit englouti,
Si voir, sire, par ta merci
Ces dous enfans gart et deffent
D’anui, de mal et de torment,
Et remet en prosperité,
Sire, par ta sainte bonté.”

(3129-44)

(“O, true, kind Father of Jesus Christ, King empowered above all kings, true Parent, omnipotent, good Lord God, you truly formed heaven and earth and all things and were created in the Virgin and incarnated, Lord, by the holy annunciation, and took the form of man and human flesh, and protected Jonah in the whale which swallowed him, then, Lord, indeed by your mercy guard and defend these sweet children from harm, from evil, and from suffering, and restore them, Lord, to prosperity by your holy goodness.”)

The Queen of Sicily and her daughter likewise pray for protection from the Spanish invaders (4505-27); and the queen, as we have seen, seeks guidance from her priest. Similarly, Guillaume and Melior invariably refer their acts to God's approval (4922, 4928, 5861, 6532, etc.).

The poet ingeniously contrives, moreover, to prevent the paganism of the wonder-elements from clashing with the Christianity of his good characters. To realize what dangerous ground it is that the poet traverses, we have only to remember that in the version of The Pseudo-Turpin acquired by Baldwin VI, necromancy is classified as an adulterine art whose textbook is labelled Death of the Soul.³⁰

Thus, when the Queen of Sicily, disguised as a hart, accosts Guillaume, he answers the speaking animal with all the pious caution of Horatio addressing King Hamlet's ghost:

… “Je te conjur,
Beste, de par le roi du mont,
Se de par lui paroles dont,
Ne se c’est autres esperites,
Ne qui ce est que vos me dites,
Ne se par toi i arons mal.”

(5214-19)

(… “I conjure you, animal, by the King of the World, whether your words are of Him or of some other spirit, or what it is that you tell me, or whether we shall be harmed by you.”)

Likewise, when Moses the priest interprets the queen's dreams, he recognizes the aid of God (4803-4, 4883-6) and does not in any way take on the character of magician. Alexandrine the confidante, who plays a role in many respects identical with that of the Greek necromancer Thessala in Chrétien de Troyes' Cligès, also retains an unsullied character and at the end of the adventure is therefore fit to become the wife of a prince. She promises Melior a herb which will cure her love-sickness (1086-92). In Thessala's hands this remedy would certainly have been a magical aphrodisiac (Motif D 1355.2).³¹ But, although Melior seems to believe in the herb (1100-1104, 1352-3), the poet makes it clear that Alexandrine is only subtly encouraging her mistress to confess her ailment, the nature of which she has already guessed (1078-9, 1093-9).

Again, in Cligès, when Thessala the confidante aids the hero and heroine to escape, she resorts to magic:

Mes Thessala qui les an mainne,
Les conduit si seüremant
Par art et par anchantemant,
Que il n’ont crieme ne peor
De tot l’esforz l’anpereor.

(6660-4)

(But Thessala, who leads them away, guides them so securely by art and enchantment that they know neither worry nor fear despite all the forces of the emperor.)

Alexandrine, on the other hand, uses only her ingenuity and recommends the use of bearskin disguise;³² and the werwolf who completes the escape does not taint his character by resorting to the black arts, even though he himself is enchanted. Indeed, the poet remarks as the fugitives near Palermo that Christ has been aiding them (4551).

The sorcery of Queen Brande, on the other hand, is openly condemned by the poet:

Mult sot la dame engien et mal;
Sorceries et ingremance.
Avoit mult apris de s’enfance.

(286-8)

(Much the lady knew of malice and of evil; from her childhood she had learned much of sorceries and necromancy.)

When she appears before the tribunal at Palermo, the usually temperate Guillaume threatens that, if she does not confess, she will be burned to death and her ashes scattered to the winds (7664-5), presumably a time-honoured method for the disposal of witches.

The good characters in Guillaume are not only pious but moral. The humble cowherd does not hesitate, even in the presence of the Emperor of Rome, to admonish his foster-son (546-81), following the best literary tradition of the Speculum Principis.³³ The emperor advises both his daughter and Alexandrine on how to behave as the wives of kings (9019-36, 9067-76); the Queen of Sicily gives similar counsel to her daughter (9504-20); and the poet enumerates Guillaume's virtues on three occasions (360-85, 726-816, 9611-21). The essence of the morality advocated in all these passages is courtesy, the courtesy which acts without pride towards the powerful and the weak, the rich and the poor, alike. In this way the poet not only reminds us of the salus of his characters but also counterbalances their virtus, the quality so strongly overemphasized in the chansons de geste.

It is, however, in the poet's treatment of love that he, in common with the other romancers of his age, makes the most influential contribution to the development of literature. Because of works such as Guillaume the latter part of the twelfth-century may be said to mark a turning point in the history of the narrative art. The audiences of this period probably resented Virgil's insensitivity in allowing Aeneas to prefer the founding of Rome to the love of Dido; they may even have come to regret the jongleur's brusque treatment of Aude in the Chanson de Roland; but with the advent of the romancers they no longer had cause to reproach the poets for neglecting love.

In Guillaume, venus shares equal place with salus and virtus. Even in the midst of battle the poet does not forget the heroine's anxiety for her lover (2453-2523, 7037-50). How this element of love entered the literature of the period is a problem beyond the scope of the present investigation. Suffice it to remark that the treatment in Guillaume does not coincide entirely with the system of courtly love expounded by Andreas Capellanus so highly favoured by the aristocrats of northern France, for the romancer completely ignores Andreas' cardinal rule that love cannot exist between married people.³⁴ Here is no sophisticated problem of illicit love. An unknown young prince falls in love with a princess, discovers his identity, marries her, and lives happily ever after.

In most respects, the poet follows contemporary convention.³⁵ Melior feels melancholy before she realizes that she is in love with Guillaume and then berates her heart and eyes for troubling her peace; and when Guillaume in turns falls in love with her, he can neither eat nor sleep but pines away.

In his treatment of love the author of Guillaume mingles the same light-hearted playfulness which in the twelfth century is represented at its best by a romance such as Chrétien de Troyes' Ivain. This type of humour, foreshadowed by the mock seriousness of Ovid's lyrics and culminating in the tragicomic genius of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, transcends the conventionality of Guillaume and makes the romance seem something much more than a curious specimen of an extinct literary species. In scope the humour varies from the ludicrous to the subtle. Guillaume, in his agony of longing, dreams that he is embracing Melior and awakens to find that what he holds in his arms is his pillow (1118-68).³⁶ Melior pretends not to know what ails Guillaume until Alexandrine tells her that he will die unless he can have her love; and when Melior hears what she has longed for, she innocently remarks to her go-between:

“Je ne voudroie pas de lui
Estre homecide ne d’autrui,
Ne pecheresse en tel maniere;
Por vos et por vostre proiere
Et por lui qu’en tel peril voi,
N’ains qu’il ensi muire por moi,
Moi et m’amor li otroi toute.”

(1691-7)

(“I shouldn’t wish to be his murderer or anyone else's and a sinner in such a manner; for you and your entreaty and for him whom I see in such peril, rather than that he should thus die on my account, I grant myself and my love to him entire.”)

When Guillaume once more relapses into misery after Melior's betrothal to Partenidon, Melior risks public criticism by going to see him; as the result of her visit he reappears at court cured of his mysterious malady, and the poet slyly remarks:

Mult par en est li pules liés;
Bien sevent tuit ceste novele
Que gari l’a la damoisele,
Et dient tuit que mult est sage,
Quant garir set de tel malage.

(2882-6)

(The people are greatly delighted; they all have learned the news that the young lady has cured him, and they all say that she is very wise in knowing how to cure such an ailment.)

In his graceful treatment of salus, venus, and virtus, the nameless poet obviously learned much from Chrétien de Troyes. He does not, it is true, achieve any greater literary subtlety than his master, nor does he introduce any new element into the genre of romance established by Chrétien. Yet he was more than a mere imitator. The measure of his success is suggested by the fact that his work, like Chrétien's, was perpetuated in the mainstream of European fiction by later translators.

Presumably the chief appeal of Guillaume lay in those elements which have formed the core of this investigation, namely the plot and the setting. The plot is traditional and age-old and, to a comparative folklorist, even trite; but this very fact may partly explain its perennial charm. The wondrous tale of an animal's nursling has been repeatedly adapted into myth and legend and romance because it has always seemed satisfying. This ancient literary invention is, as it were, too appealing to fall into oblivion and is in its transmuted forms ever capable of exciting its audience anew.

The setting of Guillaume, on the other hand, is specific, immediate, and unique and is especially suited to the romancer's aristocratic patroness and her circle. More real to French crusading families than Chrétien's never-never land of Caerleon, it was for them, at one and the same time, both familiar and fantastic. They had seen or heard enough of Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria to recognize the scenery of the romance as something resembling a known realm, and yet their familiarity was not sufficient to dispel their awe for the storied marvels of the enchanted South.

Notes

1. For northern Frenchmen in Sicily, see G. Paris, “La Sicile”; Diehl, Palerme, p. 63; Haskins, Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science, pp. 188-9; and Antonio de Stefano, La cultura in Sicilia nel periodo normanno (Palermo, 1938), pp. 59-71. Concerning reports of Sicily circulated outside, see Schlauch, “Literary Exchange,” and Evelyn Jamison, “The Sicilian Norman Kingdom in the Mind of Anglo-Norman Contemporaries,” Proceedings of the British Academy, XXIV (1938), 237-85.

2. Petrus de Ebulo, De rebus siculis, ed. Rota, p. 8n. (line 32).

3. Chalandon, Histoire, II, 320-1, 346.

4. Toeche, Kaiser Heinrich, pp. 53, 637.

5. Ibid., pp. 100, 220.

6. The route is marked in Shepherd, Historical Atlas, pp. 70-1.

7. McKeehan, “Guillaume a Best Seller,” p. 803.

8. Two letters written by Hugh of Saint-Pol and eight letters by his nephew Baldwin VI survive from the Fourth Crusade (1202-4). Dom Brial suggests in “Hugues Camp-D’Avenne, Comte de Saint-Paul; et Jean de Noyon,” and “Baudouin, Comte de Flandre et de Hainaut, puis Empereur de Constantinople,” Histoire littéraire de la France, XVI (Paris, 1824), 490-4 and 521-8 respectively, that the actual writer may have been Baldwin VI's chronicler Jean de Noyon, Bishop of Soissons (who died in 1204). Baldwin maintained his cultural contacts with France to the very end of his life. In 1205, through Pope Innocent III, he appealed to the masters and scholars of Paris “to come to Greece [i.e., Constantinople] and strive to reform the study of letters there.” Chartularium universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Chatelain (Paris, 1889-97), I, 63; the editors' identification, p. 63 n. 1, with “Balduinus I (1204-1237)” seems to be wrong.

9. See p. 82 above, and cf. “Chronici ab Ottone Frisingensi conscripti continuatio auctore … Ottone S. Blasii monacho,” ed. Roger Wilmans, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptorum, XX (Hanover, 1868), p. 323 (chap. 37).

10. The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II. and Richard I., ed. W. Stubbs (“Rolls Series,” 49) (London, 1867), II, 227. See also p. 82 above.

11. Chronici ab Ottone … continuatio, p. 325 (chap. 40). Cf. pp. 49-50 above.

12. Petrus de Ebulo, De rebus siculis, plate L (p. 100) and v. 1132 (p. 150).

13. Toeche, Kaiser Heinrich, pp. 50, 100, 308, 479, 600, 606.

14. Gautier de Tournay, L’Histore de Gille de Chyn, ed. Edwin B. Place (“Northwestern University Studies in the Humanities,” No. 7) (Evanston and Chicago, 1941), pp. 5-11.

15. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, tr. Parry, pp. 208-9.

16. Ugo Falcando, La historia e la epistola, pp. 169, 170 (quotation translated from Latin original). Evelyn Jamison, Admiral Eugenius of Sicily (London, 1957), identifies Falcandus as the Eugenius who became Admiral in 1190 and died ca. 1202-3.

17. Petrus de Ebulo, “De rebus siculis,” p. 198, vv. 1523-38.

18. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, Le Roman idyllique au moyen âge (Paris, 1913), p. 265.

19. See further the comments on Guillaume in F. C. Riedel, Crime and Punishment in the Old French Romances (New York, 1938), pp. 6, 107-8, 109-10, 112, 115.

20. Arnoldus abbas Lubecensis, “Chronica,” V, xxvi, ed. Baron Lappenberg in Monumenta Germaniae historica, ed. Georg H. Pertz, Scriptorum, XXI (Hanover 1869), 203.

21. Toeche, Kaiser Heinrich, pp. 455-6.

22. George Saintsbury, “Romance,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (14th ed.; London and New York, 1929), XIX, 425 d. Though he does not name Dante, he is presumably reinterpreting the three topics described in the De vulgare eloquentia, II, ii, 5; II, iv, 6, as the proper subjects of poetry. See also Margaret A. Gist, Love and War in the Middle English Romances (Philadelphia, 1947), pp. 29, 39, 43, 65, 73, 120 n. 34, 126.

23. Possible borrowings or echoes have already been mentioned above, pp. 27 n. 6, 44, 68, 71, 74, and 113. Besides these and the parallels still to be mentioned in this chapter, two others may be mentioned. Chretien's Cligès, v. 315, may have suggested Guillaume, vv. 2577-8; and Cligès, vv. 6430-2, Guillaume, vv. 2088-9.

24. See pp. 26, 30 n. 11, 62 n. 60 and 117.

25. Zingarelli, “Il ‘Guillaume,’” pp. 260-1.

26. McKeehan, “Guillaume a Best Seller,” p. 790.

27. Chalandon, Histoire, I, 91-2.

28. Petrus de Ebulo, “De rebus siculis,” plate XXIX.

29. Cf. Sister Marie Pierre Koch, An Analysis of the Long Prayers in Old French Literature (Washington, D.C., 1940); Guillaume is not included.

30. The Pseudo-Turpin, p. 94.

31. It seems to become so in William (vv. 633-9, 643-6, 797-802) under the less subtle treatment of the English poet, who likewise attributes William's dream to Alexandrine's sorcery (vv. 653-8), although the dream occurs naturally in Guillaume (vv. 1118-24).

32. It is possible that the escape by disguise represents the romancer's rationalization of a common folktale motif, the supernatural transformation of the fugitive into animal form in order to evade capture. (See the “Motifs not in Guillaume” listed above, D531, D642.3, D671.) The non-supernatural counterpart, K521.1, Escape by dressing in animal (bird) skin, is, however, well attested in folk literature, and might just as well have suggested the device to the poet. Those who see Byzantine influence in Guillaume might cite the instance in Daphnis and Chloe when Dorcon lies in wait for Chloe wearing a wolfskin and is attacked by the sheep-dogs, who mistake him for a real wolf (I, xx-xxii). Such use of an isolated folklore motif to establish specific literary influence would, however, be hazardous.

33. For a historical survey of this theme see Born's introduction to Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, tr. Lester K. Born (“Records of Civilization Sources and Studies,” XXVII) (New York, 1936), pp. 44-130.

34. Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, tr. Parry, pp. 107, 156, 184. The author explicitly rejects the doctrine, however, in the last chapter of his peculiarly ambiguous work (p. 196).

35. See Lot-Borodine, Le Roman idyllique, pp. 233-65; Sarah F. Barrow, The Medieval Society Romances (New York, 1924), pp. 14, 16, 33, 115; Donnell van de Voort, Love and Marriage in the English Medieval Romances (Nashville, Tennessee, 1938), pp. 116-17; and Gist, Love and War, as cited above p. 131 n. 22.

36. Lot-Borodine in Le Roman idyllique, p. 249 n. 1, points out that this feature is probably inspired by a passage in the Roman d’Enéas which was derived in turn, as Edmond Faral has shown (in his Recherches sur les sources latines des contes et romans courtois du moyen âge [Paris, 1913], pp. 137-8), from Ovid. The facetious tone of Guillaume is lacking, however, in the two sources.