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''Prise'' is part of the ''[[Guillaume d'Orange cycle|Geste de Guillaume d'Orange]]'', a cycle of 24 ''chansons'' about [[William of Gellone]] (Guillaume) and his relations.{{sfn|Hasenohr|Zink|1992|pp=1204–1205}}{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|pp=9–10}} The ''Geste'' is a "complete [[Epic poetry|epic]] biography" of Guillaume,{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}} from youth to old age.{{Sfn|Régnier|1977|p=7}} The historical Guillaume held military and civil offices under [[Charlemagne]], becoming a monk in later life.{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}} The Guillaume of the ''Geste'', an epic [[hero]]{{Sfn|Kinoshita|2006|p=47}} guided by divine inspiration, defends [[Christendom]] against Muslim leaders of [[al-Andalus]].{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}}
''Prise'' is part of the ''[[Guillaume d'Orange cycle|Geste de Guillaume d'Orange]]'', a cycle of 24 ''chansons'' about [[William of Gellone]] (Guillaume) and his relations.{{sfn|Hasenohr|Zink|1992|pp=1204–1205}}{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|pp=9–10}} The ''Geste'' is a "complete [[Epic poetry|epic]] biography" of Guillaume,{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}} from youth to old age.{{Sfn|Régnier|1977|p=7}} The historical Guillaume held military and civil offices under [[Charlemagne]], becoming a monk in later life.{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}} The Guillaume of the ''Geste'', an epic [[hero]]{{Sfn|Kinoshita|2006|p=47}} guided by divine inspiration, defends [[Christendom]] against Muslim leaders of [[al-Andalus]].{{Sfn|Ferrante|1974|p=1}}


''Prise'' is "ostensibly" set in the reign of [[Louis the Pious]].{{Sfn|Kinoshita|2006|p=46}} The narrative is not based on historical events: although Orange was occupied by the [[Moors]] of al-Andalus in the early 8th century, the historical Guillaume never reconquered the city from them.{{Sfn|Régnier|1977|p=36}} Tibaut is entirely fictional; the Muslim leaders of Orange during Guillaume's life were [[Al-Hakam I]], Abd al-Wahid ibn Mughith, Abdallah ibn Abd al-Malik, Abu Tahir, Futays ibn Sulayman, Bahlul, and Zaydun.{{sfn|Gautier|1868|p=366}}
''Prise'' is "ostensibly" set in the reign of [[Louis the Pious]].{{Sfn|Kinoshita|2006|p=46}} The narrative is not based on historical events: although Orange was occupied by the [[Moors]] of al-Andalus in the early 8th century, the historical Guillaume never reconquered the city from them.{{Sfn|Régnier|1977|p=36}} Tibaut is entirely fictional.{{sfn|Gautier|1868|p=366}}{{Efn|The Muslim leaders of Orange during Guillaume's life were [[Al-Hakam I]], Abd al-Wahid ibn Mughith, Abdallah ibn Abd al-Malik, Abu Tahir, Futays ibn Sulayman, Bahlul, and Zaydun.{{sfn|Gautier|1868|p=366}}}}


==Plot==
==Plot==

Revision as of 14:57, 16 January 2022

Prise d'Orange (lit. 'Taking of Orange')[a] is a mid-12th century Old French chanson de geste. Prise concerns William of Gellone's conquest of the city of Orange from the Saracens and his marriage to its queen Orable, renamed Guibourc upon her baptism. Other characters include Arragon, the king of Orange, and Tibaut, Orable's erstwhile husband and Arragon's father.

The anonymously written poem consists of 1,888 decasyllable verses in laisses. It combines motifs of courtly love with an epic story of military conquest. The narrative is humorous and parodies the tropes of epic poetry. The surviving version of Prise was likely based on an earlier version, composed at the beginning of the 12th century, which emphasized war over love and contained a section describing Tibaut's military campaign to recapture Orange from Guillaume.

Background

Prise is part of the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange, a cycle of 24 chansons about William of Gellone (Guillaume) and his relations.[1][2] The Geste is a "complete epic biography" of Guillaume,[3] from youth to old age.[4] The historical Guillaume held military and civil offices under Charlemagne, becoming a monk in later life.[3] The Guillaume of the Geste, an epic hero[5] guided by divine inspiration, defends Christendom against Muslim leaders of al-Andalus.[3]

Prise is "ostensibly" set in the reign of Louis the Pious.[6] The narrative is not based on historical events: although Orange was occupied by the Moors of al-Andalus in the early 8th century, the historical Guillaume never reconquered the city from them.[7] Tibaut is entirely fictional.[8][b]

Plot

San Guillermo de Aquitania by Antonio de Pereda (1671)
San Guillermo de Aquitania (1671), portrait of William of Gellone by Antonio de Pereda

Guillebert de Laon, an escaped prisoner from Orange, comes to Guillaume in Nîmes. He describes the beauties of the Saracen-held city, defended by 20,000 men, led by King Arragon, son of Tibaut. Guillebert also tells of Orable, queen of Orange and Tibaut's stunningly beautiful wife.[9][10]

Guillaume is growing restless at Nîmes: there are no minstrels or women to distract him, no rivals to fight.[11] So he decides to see Orange for himself, resolving to take "la dame et la cité" (the woman and the city).[12] He and a few associates disguise themselves as Turks and travel along the Rhône and Sorgue until they reach the walled city of Orange.[12] They successfully infiltrate it under the pretence of having news of King Arragon from Africa.[10]

Disguised as a Turk, Guillaume meets Orable and charms her with stories of the great Guillaume of Nîmes. His ruse is eventually discovered. Guillaume and his henchmen kill the queen's guards and take the palace for themselves. Orable is won over to Guillaume's side and, out of pity,[13] gives him her husband's armour.[10]

The fighting has not yet ended. Orange's Saracen defenders enter the palace through a secret entrance. They retake the palace and imprison Guillaume, Guillebert and Guielin, another associate. Orable frees them in exchange for Guillaume's hand in marriage, which he accepts. Meanwhile, Guillebert is sent back to Nîmes for reinforcements.[14]

When King Arragon returns and finds out what has happened, he has Guillaume, Orable, and Guielin imprisoned again, but they again escape. Nîmes's forces, led by Bertran, arrive and take the city.[15] Guillaume and Orable marry; she is baptized Guibourc. They live (mostly) happily ever after, remaining in Orange while fighting off the Saracens regularly.[16][17]

Structure

Prise comprises 1,888 decasyllable verses in assonanced laisses.[1][17] Scholar Joan M. Ferrante groups it with Charroi de Nîmes, Chanson de Guillaume, and Aliscans as accounts of the early narrative chronology of Guillaume's life, dominated by his campaigns against Saracens.[18] Prise comes after Charroi de Nîmes in the narrative time of the Geste.[10]

The verse of Prise is repetitive and formulaic.[19] It contains over 3,700 hemistichs, about 1,500 of which are repeated.[20] One motif used in Prise is the planctus, which occurs when Bertran (back in Nîmes) thinks that Guielin (his brother) and Guillaume (his uncle) have been killed in Orange. A similar planctus occurs in The Song of Roland.[21]

Textual history

Folio 41 of manuscript français 774, Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing the opening lines of Prise d'Orange
Folio 41 of manuscript français 774, Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing the opening lines of Prise d'Orange

The text of Prise dates from the mid-12th century, circa 1160–1165.[22] Nine manuscripts survive that contain Prise d'Orange and other poems in the part of the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange dealing with Guillaume himself and his exploits.[23][24] Five of the nine are housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.[25] The manuscripts were likely compiled by more than one poet;[26] Prise itself is anonymous.[27]

The version of Prise that survives is based on a lost version of the same story.[17][28] The earlier Prise was probably composed at the beginning of the 12th century, before the surviving versions of Li coronemenz Looïs and Charroi de Nîmes,[16] and was more focused on war than on romance and adventure.[29] Scholars have inferred the existence of a proto-Prise from discussion in Vita sancti Wilhelmi, an account of Guillaume written in the 1120s, and other texts including the Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois (1213), Chanson de Guillaume, Siège de Barbastre, and Nerbonesi, a work by Andrea da Barberino.[30][17]

One element of the older, lost Prise is a siege of Orange by Tibaut, Arragon's father and (the now) Guibourc's husband.[17] In this section of the narrative, called Siège d'Orange,[31] Tibaut returns to recapture the city and wife that he lost to Guillaume in the portions of the narrative that survive intact.[32] As Madeleine Tyssens points out, it would be odd if the "prideful" Tibaut did not try to avenge Guillaume's conquest.[32] Siège was thought to be completely lost until 2021, when the scholar Tamara Atkin discovered a 47-line fragment of the missing section in the binding of a 1528 book in the Bodleian Library.[33]

Reception

Compared to earlier chansons de geste, the tone of Prise is frequently playful, comic, and parodic.[1] Claude Régnier, who reconstructed a version of Prise from manuscript sources, called it a "masterpiece of humour", noting its "discreetly parodic" use of tropes of the epic genre.[34] Prise is more concerned with romance than with recounting historical detail.[35] The poem is a blend of a romance of courtly love and an epic tale of military conquest;[6] it includes some tropes of the courtly love genre, but does not conform completely to the type.[1][16]

Other scholars have not generally been fond of Prise.[13] Raymond Weeks calls it "stupid and impossible".[15] John Fox argues that Prise is worse than The Song of Roland because the latter's characters have strong and clear motivations, whereas Prise looks more like a mere "adventure story".[13] Joseph J. Duggan, dismissing Régnier's suggestion, says Prise's "unimaginative" use of epic tropes "approaches self-parody".[36]

Sharon Kinoshita argues that the connection between military conquest and the love plot is not accidental. Rather, describing Prise as a tale of "conquest-by-seduction", she suggests that the poem treats love and war as two sides of the same coin.[37] Further, Kinoshita notes, Orable—the Saracen queen—serves as an emblem of the foreign world to be conquered and converted by Christendom: "to seduce Orable and to convert her to Christianity is to assimilate Orange to Frankish Christendom, under the tutelage of the intrepid Count Guillaume".[5]

Notes

Endnotes

  1. ^ "Prise" is the noun form of "prendre". See "prise". Dictionnaire étymologique de l'ancien français. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) "Prendre" means "to take" or "to seize". See Urwin, Kenneth (1985) [1946]. A Short Old French Dictionary for Students. Basil Blackwell. p. 79. ISBN 9780631079705. OCLC 1036943872.
  2. ^ The Muslim leaders of Orange during Guillaume's life were Al-Hakam I, Abd al-Wahid ibn Mughith, Abdallah ibn Abd al-Malik, Abu Tahir, Futays ibn Sulayman, Bahlul, and Zaydun.[8]

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d Hasenohr & Zink 1992, pp. 1204–1205.
  2. ^ Ferrante 1974, pp. 9–10.
  3. ^ a b c Ferrante 1974, p. 1.
  4. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 7.
  5. ^ a b Kinoshita 2006, p. 47.
  6. ^ a b Kinoshita 2006, p. 46.
  7. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 36.
  8. ^ a b Gautier 1868, p. 366.
  9. ^ Bédier 1908, p. 73.
  10. ^ a b c d Fox 1974, p. 89.
  11. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 22.
  12. ^ a b Régnier 1977, p. 23.
  13. ^ a b c Fox 1974, p. 91.
  14. ^ Fox 1974, pp. 89–90.
  15. ^ a b Weeks 1901, p. 364.
  16. ^ a b c Fox 1974, p. 90.
  17. ^ a b c d e Suard, François (1995). "Prise d'Orange". In Kibler, William W.; Zinn, Grover A. (eds.). Medieval France: An Encyclopedia. Garland Publishing. pp. 759–760. ISBN 0-8240-4444-4. OCLC 31937909.
  18. ^ Ferrante 1974, pp. 10, 12.
  19. ^ Duggan 1973, p. 25, 27.
  20. ^ Duggan 1973, p. 23.
  21. ^ Duggan 1973, pp. 168–171.
  22. ^ Ferrante 1974, p. 15.
  23. ^ Ferrante 1974, p. 12.
  24. ^ Régnier 1977, pp. 7–9.
  25. ^ Ferrante 1974, pp. 12–13.
  26. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 10.
  27. ^ Gautier 1868, p. 363.
  28. ^ Bédier 1908, pp. 294–296.
  29. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 34.
  30. ^ Régnier 1977, pp. 31–32.
  31. ^ Moreno 2001, p. 481.
  32. ^ a b Tyssens 1967, p. 321.
  33. ^ Flood, Alison (18 November 2021). "Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book's binding". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 November 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  34. ^ Régnier 1977, p. 31: "Bref, grâce à une utilisation discrètement parodique de la technique épique ... et à un art personnel d'exploiter le comique de situation, le renouveleur anonyme de la Prise d'Orange nous a legué un chef d'œuvre d'humour."
  35. ^ Ferrante 1974, p. 14.
  36. ^ Duggan 1973, p. 172.
  37. ^ Kinoshita 2006, pp. 47–48.

Sources

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