(Hi)story-telling and Holy War: Narrating the Crusades from Medieval to Early Modern France

Abstract

“(Hi)story-telling and Holy War: Narrating the Crusades from Medieval to Early Modern France” traces how, and to what effect, stories of crusade were written across medieval and early modern French literature to create visions of French history, community, and political sovereignty. Bringing together the literary echoes of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), and the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) in prose, poetry, and frontispieces I analyze how literature navigates the writing of crusade and creates its own “poetics of crusade.” “(Hi)story-telling and Holy War” argues that these poetics of crusade forge textual representations of community. Thus, this dissertation ultimately argues literary representations of crusade violence are a key site for the construction of “France” as a body politic and as a (proto-)nation. The first chapter of the dissertation is dedicated to the old Occitan song Canso de la crozada (1208?-1219) and medieval French crusader Jean de Joinville’s Histoire de Saint Louis (1305-1309) to establish how these texts portray the violence of the Albigensian and Seventh Crusades, respectively. The second, third, and fourth chapters turn to the reimaginations of the Albigensian and Seventh Crusades before, during, and after the Wars of Religion. As such, the second chapter focuses on Pléiade poet Pierre de Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps (1562) and its Continuation (1562; 1563); the third reads Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Protestant epic Les Tragiques (1616); and the fourth chapter analyzes the frontispieces and preface of Claude Ménard’s 1617 edition of the Histoire de Saint Louis for its construction of seventeenth-century kingship on the model of Saint Louis. Taken together, the four chapters of this dissertation speak across periodization to highlight the enduring but flexible and adaptive work of the poetics of crusade, bring attention to the importance of crusade in early modern French literature, and center a methodology of reading for violence.