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L'honneur et la honte: Leur expression dans les romans en prose du Lancelot-

Graal (XIIe-XIIIe siecles)

Article in Speculum · July 1983

DOI: 10.2307/2849004

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Review
Reviewed Work(s): L'honneur et la honte: Leur expression dans les romans en prose du
Lancelot-Graal (XIIe-XIIIe siècles) by Yvonne Robreau
Review by: William D. Paden, Jr.
Source: Speculum, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Jul., 1983), pp. 809-811
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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 Reviews 809

SayIes about Parliament, medievalists such as Harriss and Maddicott are too prone to
take parliamentary ideology at face value, or at least to be less skeptical about Whig
parliamentary history than Russell has taught us to be. For they could not easily
prove to everyone's satisfaction that in the later Middle Ages (or indeed in any other
era) Parliament really expressed "'the concerns of the political nation" (Maddicott,
p. 87) or that its role was "at all timnes co-operative, critical and constructive" (Harriss,
p. 60). One should also ask whether these same medievalists, when they write about
"parliamentary opposition" or "legislative supremacy," are really talking about pre-
cisely the same phenomena as the historians who have used these same terms in
discussing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century parliamentary history. Revisionist his-
torians who are learned and ingenious enough to apply the popular American term
of the 1950s, "consensus politics," to early Stuart politics could conceivably find ways
of using it to characterize later medieval parliamentary politics as well, while the legal
historians who have traced the development of parliamentary suprem,nacy or
sovereignty during the Tudor-Stuart period may not have been using this term in the
same way as Harriss does. In other words, it may not be as easy as Pennington
suggests to mate the anti-Whig revisionism of Russell and his followers to the
anti-anti-Whig position of several other contributors to the Roskell volume.
Finally, bearing in mind Harriss's perceptive remarks about the propensity of
parliamentary historians to introduce a normative or ideological element into their
writings on parliamentary history, to show concern about "what parliament ought to
have been or done," one should ask whether revisionist scholarship will itself turn out
to be totally immune to this kind of criticism. Given the well-documented tendency of
parliamentary historians to dismiss even carefully documented work as "ideological,"
"teleological," "anachronistic," tainted by "hindsight," and thus unacceptable, it seems
somehow unlikely that all forms of revisionism will prove completely invulnerable to
the sorts of attacks that Richardson and Sayles directed at Stubbs, that Harriss directs
at Stubbs, Richardson and Sayles, and Elton, and that the revisionists now direct at
virtually all their predecessors. In fact, such attacks have already been directed
against the revisionists; shortly after the Roskell volume appeared, one perceptive
historian was already calling for the formulation of a "post-revisionist" interpretation
of English parliamentary history.6
STEPHEN D. WHITE
Wesleyan University

6 For this kind of attack on revisionism, see Hexter, "Power Struggle," pp. 48-50; and
Lawrence Stone, "The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History," Past and Present
85 (1979), 3-24 at 20-2 1. On "post-revisionists," see Hill, "Parliament and People," p. 118.

YVONNE ROBREAU, L'honneur et la honte: Leur expression dans les romans en prose du
Lancelot-Graal (XIIe-XIIIe siecles). (Publications romanes et francaises, 157.)
Geneva: Droz, 1981. Pp. 207.

THIS BOOK presents a conscientious analysis of the vocabulary of honor in the

Vulgate Cycle, as edited by Sommer (L'estoire del Saint Graal, Lancelot, Le livre d'Artus
G. Paris and T. Ulrich (Merlin, Suite du Merlin), Pauphilet (La queste del Saint Graal),
Frappier (La mort le Roi Artu), Roach (Didot Perceval and "The Modena Text of the

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 810 Reviews

Prose 'Joseph d'Arimathie,'" in Romance Philology 9 [1956], 313-42), and Nitze

(Perlesvaus). (Micha's Lancelot [1978-80] and his Merlin [1980] were not available
when the project was begun.) Robreau's work continues that of K. J. Hollyman (1957)
on the development of feudal terminology and that of G. S. Burgess (1970) on the
lexicon of pre-courtoisie. Her method is inspired by the example of G. Lavis (1972) on
the semantics of emotion in Old French lyric and shaped by the teaching of
K. Baldinger, whose formulation of the semasiological and onomasiological perspec-
tives provides her ground plan. She studies first the meanings of honor, then the
alternative expressions for it; filling out the semiotic rectangle, she then turns to honte
and its substitutes. These four parts, containing three chapters apiece, are set within
a concise introduction, an equally concise conclusion, and a bibliography.
The author's examination of some thirty-five hundred pages of text has produced
a wealth of citations, and she interprets them with finesse. Assuming a progressive
loss of the concrete senses of honor, which have disappeared in Modern French, she
begins by showing that the word can mean a fief, even a small one; or property,
whether held in fief or not; or a conspicuous social situation, gained by high office or
the like. Its abstract senses include courtesy and civility, self-respect, fame (honor
conquerre refers to gradual acquisition of fame on the basis of knightly exploits,
whereas venir a honor means to accede to the state of confirmed fame), and high social
rank by birth. Faire honor and honorer are both concrete and abstract, since they
indicate overt demonstration of respect such as could be expressed by an elaborate
ritual for the reception of a guest. Porter honor is not overt, but means to feel respect
for someone; tenir a honor suggests the consideration granted by a superior to an
inferior, for example, by a future husband to his bride-to-be (!); en l'onour de means
"in memory of." Alternatives to honor include gloire, except that the latter term
designates exclusively, in these texts, an attribute of divinity; the words nearest to
honor in its sense of fame are nom, renom, renommee, los; hautesce is a partial substitute
for honor indicating either privileged social rank due to birth or nobility of soul.
That honte is indeed the antonym of honor is suggested by their use together in
antitheses and oxymora. Honte is felt by one who is the object of impoliteness
except that Kay is so unworthy that his rude behavior does not produce shame
- or insult, either to one's courage or (worse) to one's loyalty. Faire honte is more
general than hounir, which is reserved for irremediable humiliation such as rape.
Honor may usually be recovered by vengeance, but when shame arises from one's
own conduct it results in exclusion from society, an exclusion manifested in the
punitive ceremony of exposure in the charrette of infamy. This social aspect of shame
corresponds to the social aspect of honor (as is well expressed on pages 156 f.),
without obscuring the inner feeling of distress which accompanies it. Honte as an
emotion means timidity in young people, embarrassment caused by nudity, or fear of
losing one's self-respect; one who feels it is rendered speechless or blushes; it is
related to grief or anger, depending on the cause; it is invariably experienced in
public, never by a character in solitude. Alternatives to honte include vergoigne, which
may mean embarrassment, designate the sexual organs, or serve simply as a
synonym. Vilain may function as a synonym of honteus, quite bereft of its etymological
social reference; when its meaning approaches that of "sordid" it becomes nearly
synonymous with vil, though vilain remains more concrete and vil more abstract.
Vilanie refers to conduct unworthy of a member of the nobility, never to the condi-
tion of the peasant; vilte means "baseness, misery, abjection."
In her concluson Robreau draws diachronic implications from her synchronic

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 Reviews 811

evidence, but she does so less persuasively than she could have. She claims that the
relative infrequence of the concrete senses of honor indicates an evolution toward a
more abstract ideal. The reader's assent is hindered by his difficulty in grasping just
what the frequencies in question are. To the 30-odd instances (p. 18) of the meanings
"fief" and 'property" must be added the 20-odd (p. 21) of "conspicuous social
situation," concrete according to Robreau; against these are balanced 4 examples (p.
25) of the abstract sense "courtesy, civility," 30-odd (p. 27) of "self-respect," either
70-odd (p. 41) or 80-odd (pp. 69, 76) of "fame," and 2, by my count, of "high rank by
birth" (pp. 37-40). The 250 instances offaire honneur, and so on, are both concrete
and abstract according to Robreau. The totals of about 50 concrete instances against
about 110 (106 or 116) abstract ones indicate a predominantly abstract use, but
provide no reason in themselves to suppose that usage was in the process of shifting
from concrete to abstract during the period when these texts were composed. How-
ever, the contrast is marked with the precourtly texts studied by Burgess (pp. 68-90),
who insists tendentiously on the concrete value of honor in the early vernacular
saints' lives (even in a line such as Alexis 500: "Com felix cels ki parfeit l'enorerent"
[italics mine]), the Song of Roland, and the romans antiques.
If, despite his exaggeration, we grant Burgess's claim, the evolution of honor
toward a more spiritual sense in the Vulgate is demonstrated; but it remains to ask
whether this evolution might be a literary one, strongly conditioned by genre, rather
than a social reality. Robreau creates a reservation in this reviewer's mind because, by
assuming that the Vulgate Cycle is a mirror of the nobility for whom it was written (p.
3), she seems to equate the society described by her storytellers with real medieval
civilization (p. 2). But the world of these romances is Arthurian, not Capetian, and
their idealizing fiction may be supposed to depart from contemporary reality spe-
cifically in regard to the nature of honor. One easily imagines that living men may
have clung more tightly to honor-as-possession than did the wandering knights of
already legendary lore. Real people were presumably entertained by these fictions, of
course, but their sense of real honor must be studied as well in sources which are
intended to be true.
A third cavil must be raised over the obvious typographrical errors, which are
frequent enough to make the reader wonder how many more are concealed in the
abundant documentation. But despite these flaws, we must thank the author for her
thorough and persuasive study of the lexicon of honor in her chosen texts.

WILLIAM D. PADEN, JR.

Northwestern University

GREGORY H. Roscow, Syntax and Style in Chaucer's Poetry. (Chaucer Studies, 6.) Cam-
bridge, Eng.: D. S. Brewer, 1981; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982. Pp.
x, 158. $40.

THE ARGUMENT Gregory Roscow presents in the introduction to this book deserves
attention. We can misread a passage in Chaucer by giving modern values to its syntax,
just as we can misread a passage in Chaucer by giving modern values to its vocabu-
lary. We ought not to assume that "loose syntax" is colloquial syntax or that the main
literary function of various loose constructions will likely be the characterization of
speakers who employ them. We should be alert to other artistic uses of syntax,

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