Ebook: Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence’s "Vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr": A study in Medieval genre and literary opportunism

This study takes up Hans Robert Jauss's challenge to medievalists to examine the "reciprocal relations that make up the literary system of a given historical moment." The historical moment of Garnier de Pont-Ste-Maxence's 6180 line Vie de Saint Thomas Le Martyr (circa 1174) is the struggle between Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket and King Henry II of England, culminating in Becket's murder in Canterbury Cathedral on December 29, 1170. The generic elements within the poem constitute an ideological as well as aesthetic stance, a stance rooted in the nature of the controversy the poem details. In that conflict between Thomas and Henry we may discern one locus of the medieval shift from oral to textual modes of authority. Garnier's poem acts out that shift by narrating the life of a saint who, in the poem's view, resisted it. Chapters 1 and 2 delineate Garnier's affinities for the structural oppositions of epic, arguing that he partially assimilates his work into the chanson de geste tradition, but that he spurns the emergent romance model of narrative. Chapter 2 includes an extended commentary on the romance-inflected South English Legendary life of Saint Thomas. Chapters 3 and 4 explore a set of polarities implicit in the opposition of epic and romance: orality versus textuality. Thomas refused to countenance Henry's conversion of oral "customs" into written law. Garnier adapts the binary oppositions of medieval hagiography and chanson de geste to exploit contemporary anxiety over Henry's administrative and legal revolution. Garnier's Becket and Garnier himself emerge as symbol and spokesman, respectively, for the now vanishing values of an older, oral, feudal order. At the same time, the narrator reveals himself as a literary opportunist who has shrewdly packaged the Becket drama as commodity: the poet's commercial instincts--real or rhetorical--deconstruct his own hagiographical enterprise. This study is, then, both an examination of medieval genre as process and a re-discovery of a wily, precocious narrative artist, at work in England two centuries before Chaucer.