Birdsong and the Edges of the Empire

This chapter studies Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette (ca. 1230). Just like Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose, the Violette emphasizes the border to the east of Capetian France (the border with the Empire) rather than the border to the south (with Occitania). This suggests a greater interest on the part of thirteenth-century francophone writers in the Battle of Bouvines than in the Albigensian Crusade. In the Violette, however, the Holy Roman Empire has not been conquered by the “soft power” of francophone artistic traditions. Instead, it is marked as a dangerous space—a valence conveyed in part through the territory's association with hunting birds, especially the eagle, in recognition of the most commonly deployed imperial symbol. The chapter then documents a critical blind spot in Violette criticism: the saturation of imperial symbolism and geography within the romance. It then turns to the text's quotation of troubadour song, which is also placed within an avian typology. If the Empire is characterized mainly by hunting birds, Occitan song is, by contrast, associated with songbirds. Unlike in Jean Renart's Rose, where many grands chants foregrounded birdsong thematically, here this association between human song and birdsong is unique to the Occitan insertions within the romance.