Floire and Blancheflor: Courtly Hagiography or Radical Romance?

In the late twelfth-century Old French aristocratic version of Floire and Blancheflor, the writer employs sacred forms to subvert Church ideology. In this romance, the writer uses Christian iconography and narrative conventions to elaborate the courtly love relation, and to assert affinity between Christians and Muslims. In showing affinity across lines of religion and culture, the writer undermines the medieval Christian eschatological understanding of history based in radical difference between Christians and non-Christians. In so doing, the author also launches a critique of Catholic Church policy predicated on radical difference between Christians and non-Chrsitians, such as the drive toward Crusades and forced conversion. ********** The Old French aristocratic version of Floire and Blancheflor is generally considered a roman idyllique, an idyllic romance treating the adventures of two innocents, unconcerned with the courtly or the political. While the characters themselves are, in the beginning, seemingly uninterested in these matters, the romance as a whole advances some unconventional political opinions in the form of a counter-history. The redactor for the Old French aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor uses sacred conventions to rewrite a secularized communal history. This version of history expresses ancestral and cultural affinity to Muslims, a secularized view of human relations, and ultimately, a strong argument against crusade. Floire et Blancheflor was one of the most popular medieval romances, with a multitude of surviving manuscripts in Old French, Middle English, Low German, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Ladino, Italian, Middle Dutch, and Old Spanish. Historically, there has been significant contention over the derivation of this romance, with "some critics believing in its creation by a French poet, and others arguing for Persian, Byzantine, or otherwise undefined Oriental origins." (1) While the derivation of the tale has not been established, Patricia Grieve, in her recent book Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance, (2) definitively identifies the Spanish versions as the earliest strains of the tale, probably composed in about the ninth century. (3) The Cronica version with which Grieve worked, the Cronica de Flores y Blancaflor, was found interpolated at various points in a late-fourteenth or early fifteenth century manuscript of Alfonso el Sabio's thirteenth century history of Spain, the Primera Cronica General. Chronologically next are the two Old French versions, with the aristocratic version--the work under study here--dating from about 1150-1170, by some estimates, and about 1200-1225 by others, (4) with its earliest surviving manuscript in Old French dating from about 1288. (5) The popular version appears slightly later than the composition date of the aristocratic version, probably in the mid-thirteenth century. (6) Soon after these the Middle English version appears in about 1250. In the Old French aristocratic version of this story--hereafter the aristocratic version--the main events go something like this: A pregnant Christian woman loses her husband, her unborn baby's father. In thanks for the child she carries, she undertakes a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostela, during which the pilgrims are attacked in an unexplained Saracen raid. Her father is killed and the pregnant young woman is taken prisoner and given as a slave to the Saracen queen. In serving the queen she becomes close to her, and soon after her arrival they discover that they are both pregnant, and that the babies are due on the same day. The babies, a boy (the prince) and a girl (a slave), are indeed born on the same day, and they are given matching names, Floire and Blancheflor. Blancheflor's Christian mother cares for Floire but does not nurse him, and the two children are raised together in her quarters. …