Repatriating Romance: Politics of Textual Transmission in Early Modern France

This dissertation reveals the central role that transcultural literary exchange plays in the imagining of a continuous French literary history. The traditional narrative of French literary history describes the vernacular canon as built on the imitation of the ancients. However, this dissertation demonstrates that Early Modern French canon formation also depends, to a startling extent, on claims of inter-vernacular literary theft. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a central preoccupation of French authors, translators, and literary theorists was the repatriation of the romance genre. Romance was portrayed as a cornerstone of French literary patrimony that Italian and Spanish authors had stolen. The repatriation of individual romance texts entailed a skillful co-opting of the language of humanist philology, alongside practices of translation and continuation usually associated with the medieval period. By looking at romance translation as part of a project of national canon formation, this dissertation sheds new light on the role that chivalric romance plays in national and international politics. We see that during this period, chivalric romance emerges as a French nationalist alternative to humanist history. The four chapters of the dissertation trace the phenomenon of romance repatriation from its origins in French humanist theories of genre, through its expression in translations of Spanish and Italian romance. In Chapter One, the Renaissance reception of the medieval Pseudo-Turpin is read alongside theories of genre by humanists like Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim Du Bellay, in order to illustrate the tension between two humanist projects: the philological reexamination of historical source texts, and the construction of national canons. In Chapters Two and Three, I trace the use of translation to transform foreign romances into French nationalist histories, looking at French translations of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato. And finally, in Chapter Four I look at how the use of translation as a tool of nationalist annexation broadens beyond romance source texts. This dynamic comes to characterize French-Spanish literary exchange in general, as we see in French translations of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and a Spanish translation of Alain-René Lesage’s picaresque Gil Blas. By showing that translation played a central role in the construction of the national canon during the Early Modern period, the dissertation challenges myths about the linguistic and literary origins of the French nation that remain potent today