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.

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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. When the children are twelve years old,
   Floire's parents unsuccessfully attempt to separate them.
   They try a number of ruses, and eventually sell
   Blancheflor to a fleet of merchants headed east, build an
   elaborate tomb for her, and pass her off as dead. Floire,
   threatening suicide, learns the truth from his parents and
   pursues Blancheflor. After a long journey he finds her in
   Babylon, in the emir's tower. From among the women
   locked in a tower, the emir marries one each year, and
   after one year he beheads her and weds another. Floire
   uses his ingenuity to convince a porter to smuggle him
   into the tower in a basket of flowers, where he is reunited
   with Blancheflor. There, they live happily until they
   are discovered in bed by the emir. The emir becomes very
   angry, and after a cursory trial places the lovers on a pyre
   to be burnt. His subjects, who are moved by their youth
   and beauty, and especially by their mutual expressions of
   devotion, eventually persuade the emir to take mercy on
   Floire and Blancheflor. Once released, they convince the
   emir to give up his habit of beheading wives, and marry
   him off to Blancheflor's friend Claris. Though the emir
   asks Floire and Blancheflor to remain with him in his
   country, they instead depart for Floire's home kingdom.
   On the way, Floire converts to Christianity in order to
   please Blancheflor. When he returns to his home kingdom,
   he finds that his father, the king, has died, that he is
   king of Spain, and that Blancheflor's lineage makes him
   king of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor. Once home,
   he forcibly converts his subjects to Christianity. The story
   ends as their union gives rise to the birth of Bertha
   Broadfoot, the mother of Charlemagne, and the beginning
   of the Carolingian line.

This aristocratic version makes some important changes to the Cronica version, and the fact that two new, significantly different, and very well circulated redactions (the popular and the Middle English versions) appeared so soon after the aristocratic version attests not only to wide interest in the tale, but also to an objection to certain changes made in this telling. Almost all of the subsequent versions are shorter, and as such many contain less detail than the Cronica versions. However, despite the fact that most of the later versions are shorter, many of them contain embellishments on themes central to the work, such as genealogy, the lovers' role in communal history, and the Christian motifs of pilgrimage and religious conversion. The aristocratic version makes some important changes to the text of the Cronica version both by way of omission and by manipulation of sacred rhetoric, with significant differences in the treatment of chivalric and political violence, maternal lineage, and the meaning of Floire's conversion. The following aspects of the earlier Cronica version are worthy of note in this context:

1. In the Cronica version Flores's father, Fines, ransacks the coast of Galicia as part of establishing his sovereignty over the recently granted territory of Spain. In the aristocratic version no reason is given for the raid.

2. In the Cronica version Blancheflor's mother is named, and as such her historical significance is greater. The fact that she is called Berta is also significant in that it is the same name given to the daughter of Flores and Blancheflor, who will eventually be Charlemagne's mother. In this version Berta nurses both the children, laying some of the groundwork for Flores's later conversion to Christianity.

3. In the Cronica version Flores's actions take place in a wider political and historical context. Here, he fights to free the king of Babilonia (the emir of the aristocratic version) from imprisonment in one of the castles of the caliph, with whom he is at war. The chronicler tells us that this will be important later, when Flores is discovered with Blancaflor and accused of betraying the king.

4. In the Cronica version the king of Babylon spares the lovers because Flores once saved his life, and not, as in the aristocratic version, because he is moved by their love.

5. In the Cronica version Flores's conversion is spiritually motivated. In this version, when Flores and Blancaflor return to Spain, their boat is shipwrecked and separated from all the others. They land on an island inhabited by monks of the order of Saint Augustine, to whom Saint Augustine himself appears to tell the monks not to fear the invaders, and that they will ask to be baptized the next day. The couple ask to be baptized--Blancaflor, because she remembers her mother's talk about Christianity, and decides that they owe their recent good fortune to Christ, and Flores, because he believes Christianity was imparted to him with Blancaflor's mother's milk.

6. In the Cronica version, back in Almeria, Flores tells his parents that he has become a Christian, and he embarks on a mission to convert all the pagans by verbal persuasion or by the sword. There is much discussion in the text of the various cities and regions converted by the newly baptized Christians, and of the many churches and bishoprics that are established. The aristocratic vesrion devotes precisely one sentence to Floire's conversion to Christianity.

7. In the Cronica version the kingdom survives 18 years, after which it is overtaken by Muslims once again. (7)

In evaluating these differences it is assumed, first, that the Cronica version preceded the Old French versions; second, that later redactors had access to the Cronica version; and third, that the changes they made are in many cases deliberate interventions meant to convey a particular ideological and/or aesthetic agenda. Thus, the redactor of the aristocratic version makes important changes by removing details that in the Cronica version supply historical context, minimizing the role of Blancheflor's Christian mother, omitting violence from the tale in all but the end, after Floire's conversion, and eliminating the spiritual content of Floire's conversion, assigning it an amorous content instead.

The changes wrought in the aristocratic version traverse four main areas; they affect depictions of communal identity, relation to the Muslim other, the construction of historical meaning, and finally, representations of the Church and its doctrines with particular attention to crusade and forced conversion. The slightly later popular and Middle English versions reverse some of these changes, in many cases restoring historical detail and an emphasis on violence in political context. By comparing the treatment of the sacred and its history in this redaction of the romance to those immediately preceding and succeeding it, it is possible to understand these changes as social commentary.

Given the very different social and historical contexts of the two versions, there are bound to be differences in their constructions of communal identity. The Cronica version, a thirteenth century version of what is probably a ninth-century tale, is heavily invested in justifying and celebrating the Christian rule of Spain. It appears as a part of what is essentially a winners' history, amidst Alfonso el Sabio's account of his own mission, the Spanish, Christian reconquest of Muslim Spain (hereafter, Reconquista). As such, it must elaborate a different relation not only to history, but also to the subject of this history, Christians and Muslims in Spain. The Old French aristocratic version was written in the heavily Albigensian region of Southern France either just prior to, or at the height of the Albigensian persecutions launched by the Church. The Albigensians had been a strong presence in Southern France since at least 1167, and they had met with Church resistance from the beginning. These persecutions took the form, first, of institutional pressure for conversion to Catholicism, and later, of the Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209 and lasted 45 years. This crusade resulted in the wholesale slaughter of Catholics and Albigensians alike, with a death toll in the tens of thousands. (8) As such, it is not difficult to imagine a deeply entrenched regional hostility toward the Church as an institution. This hostility has clearly left its mark in the telling of the aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor, which was most likely composed at the height of these persecutions.

In the aristocratic version, the writer asserts an alternative vision of communal identity by depicting it as a product of intercultural relation. This can be seen in direct contrast to the treatment of communal identity in the Spanish versions, which are instead focused on depicting a community that is racially pure. In the Spanish versions, the lovers are used for the proto-nationalist purposes of establishing the credibility of the Spanish dynastic line and its connection to the land. Therefore, great attention is paid not only to affinity between the lovers, but differences in faith, background, and genealogy are minimized. Religious difference is eradicated through sincere, spiritually-based religious conversion, and the lovers are depicted as part of the same genealogical community as they are both linked biologically to Blancheflor's Christian mother by sharing her breast milk. (9) In the Cronica version, therefore, the community depicted is monoculturally constituted and genealogically pure, and local culture is not a product of intercultural interaction but of unbroken Spanish, Christian succession.

When the aristocratic version eliminates the above elements, differences in faith, background, and genealogy are allowed to surface. Here, attention to Blancheflor's mother is diminished as her name is omitted from the text. At the same time, great attention is paid to the education of the children, which goes to emphasize the ways in which acculturation affects human relation. The children do not share Blancheflor's mother's milk, and the conversion element of the tale is completely devoid of both spirituality and genealogy, serving instead as a tribute to Floire's love for Blancheflor, and to question the Church agenda of erasure of difference through conversion. In this way the teller of the aristocratic version modifies the monocultural constitution of community, which, in the Cronica version, tacitly supports the agenda of Reconquista to create a hybrid community whose diversity speaks against the impulses fueling Christian conquest.

The most important consequence of the affinity between the lovers and the heterogeneity of their social world in the aristocratic version is a recasting of cosmological modes of history in the mode of the mundane. The Christian cosmological understanding of history in its final apocalyptic vision depends on the annihilation of pagans and the conversion of the Jews. It is my contention that by emptying conversion of spiritual content, this version of the tale points to the violence that forms the kernel of Christian cosmological understanding of history, and, as it portrays Floire's love-conversion and the violence of the forced conversions that follow, it criticizes the entire notion of the institutional drive toward conversion. While the Cronica versions, and many others that follow them, present the main characters and their conversions in a hagiographical mode, this particular redaction subverts what Patricia Grieve calls the 'hagiographic potential of the text' 10 by making these conventions serve to valorize love, and asserting the possibility of relation to the other as other, rather than as other made same. This privileges the mundane over the eschatological.

While the aristocratic version works on many levels to subvert the hagiographic elements that appear to motivate other redactions of the tale, Christian conversion helps to form both its ideological and imaginative center. Here, sacred vocabulary is 'converted' to serve the profane. Because romances so often use the narrative conventions of religious conversion, it would seem at first that there is nothing unusual in this formation. But many of these conventions are used untraditionally. At the same time that use of the sacred accomplishes, as Susan Crane asserts, the substitution of "worldly victories for legendary transcendence, and ... valid[ation of] secular concerns," (11) the sacred is also devalued in ways that are not easily dismissed. In many romances that employ sacred rhetoric to elevate the love relation, the characters are reintegrated through marriage into a society that more or less conforms to Christian ideals. A prime example can be found in the Cronica versions, in which the married couple return to Floire's still living parents, announce Floire's decision, and with their cooperation spread Christianity with conviction. The parents are killed off in the Old French aristocratic version, and the chance for integration of the characters and their religion into an organic community is lost. The military action that follows Floire's conversion is abrupt, casting the drive to convert as an act of violence devoid of spiritual content.

Genre and History

The Old French aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor is, unlike the versions preceding and following it, known as a roman idyllique, an idyllic romance. This genre is revisionist in that both earlier and later versions often took the form of history, epic, or conventional romance. According to Erich Auerbach, in his classic work, Mimesis, "the fundamental purpose of the courtly romance" is "a self-portrayal of feudal knighthood with its mores and ideals." (12) Thus, while romance does not faithfully represent reality, it does mime ideality, dramatizing identity, difference, and cultural conflicts and priorities central to the community in question. It does this through a more or less standard set of narrative conventions, as Northrop Frye's old but accurate description attests:

   In the Greek romances we find stories of mysterious
   birth, oracular prophesies about future contortions of the
   plot, foster parents, adventures which involve capture by
   pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the
   true identity of the hero, and his eventual marriage with
   the heroine. (13)

Medieval romance is often written in dialogue with Christian doctrine, and if we modify this description to include an acute attention to the elaboration of gender relations, love relations, and power relations among the knightly class and between knights and their monarchic superiors, we approach a more or less satisfactory description of twelfth and thirteenth century European romance.

It goes without saying that form influences content, and that genre works to a certain extent to shape meaning. Moreover, it is clear that this definition is at its base comparative, resting on the notion that genre is itself, like the work in question, revisionist in nature. It is prudent to note here that its redactor uses the roman idyllique to express some ideas perhaps specific to his time and place, and perhaps rather far from the mainstream.

Merton Jerome Hubert cites Mme. Myrrha Lot-Borodine as the first to apply the term "roman idyllique," to Floire et Blancheflor, and according to her "they are stories of love, and always of youthful love ...." Hubert defines the romans idyllique as stories whose "essential characteristic perhaps is the unsophisticated, innocent, and artless nature of the love affair." (14) Inherent to the roman idyllique is the amor vincit omnia motif, with its "wide range of secular and religious interpretations." (15) The roman idyllique is also distinguished from the roman courtois by the unquestioned faithfulness of both lovers. The roman idyllique is therefore positioned as a corrective to the roman courtois, which were characteristically centered on the development of the male hero, and dedicated to his characterization through prowess, bravery, and ingenuity or engin. (16) In this way, the roman idyllique emerged as a counter-current to the increasingly complicated, male-focused, and rule-bound codes of love developed and codified just prior to the composition of the aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor. (17)

However, the generic modifications effected in the aristocratic version determine more than the nature of the relationship between the lovers. The choice of genre signals a deliberate departure from courtly romance, and from the epics circulating at the time. The roman idyllique is used to question chivalric values and assert others in their place. One characteristic common to both the epics and romans courtois is an emphasis on chivalry, often enacted in historical context. Epics are by nature more overtly historical, and tend to mythologize the actions of historical persons, though both maintain this connection to history either as an end to, or in the course of, storytelling. (18) Even later redactions of Floire et Blancheflor tend to take more pains to situate the characters in familiar historical paradigms, by playing up, or reinventing, scenes of conflict between Saracen and Christian. (19) In this way, it is most significant that the aristocratic version revises the genre of the legend, from either epic or romance, so often later rewritten into emergent national history, to roman idyllique, thereby weakening historical connections and specificity.

Therefore, the primary effect of revision from epic or roman courtois to roman idyllique is the alteration of the tale's relation to the material world. The Cronica version, as noted above, was inserted directly into one of the first Spanish national histories, written at the request of Alfonso el Sabio and replacing the history of his namesake Alfonso I. The first Alfonso, known as "el Catholico," began the Reconquista by successfully fighting to regain the northwest of Spain from Muslim forces. (20) The chapters preceding it deal with the Muslim conquest of Spain, and as Flores and Blancaflor replace Alfonso I, they carry out his historical function by establishing Christian rule. (21) The chronicler positions the tale as truth bearing a direct relation to the material world outside the text when he "attempts to reconcile, whenever possible, the historical events as we know them with the love story that he incorporates." (22) Because the chronicler works so hard to integrate this romance into the history of Christian Spain, he positions the text to relate transparently to the historical world--if the chronicler is telling the 'real' history of Spain, then these characters, Flor and Blancaflor, are portrayed as part of it. And because the Primera Cronica General was produced by a Spanish long committed to Reconquista, the story of Flores y Blancaflor as told in it must be understood in terms of this agenda. Conversely, when the Cronica de Flores y Blancaflor is retold in the aristocratic version in the form of a roman idyllique, most specific historical references are omitted. By removing the tale from the context of the chronicle and eliminating the attendant historical details, this redactor establishes a significant distance from the expansionist Christian, Spanish agenda. (23)

The aristocratic version poet works assiduously to remove particular historical references, such as rime, place, name, and details of events, replacing them with abstract allusions, at best assimilated to historical categories rather than identified as specific events. The most important effect of the change from pseudo-history to dehistoricized fiction is to render the material of human experience more conventional, and in this, more amenable to cosmological categories. The conventionality of hagiographic and cosmological schema was well known to medieval thinkers. According to Magdalena Carrasco, "medieval hagiographers were well aware of the important role played by convention and stereotype in their writings." (24) She interprets the lack of detail in the vitae, along with the "consistent repetition of conventional motifs" as elements, which "minimize.... the unique spatiotemporal details of historical experience, stressing instead the collective identity of all the saints in fulfilling a divinely ordained pattern originally established by Christ." (25) In this way, conventionality in both the vitae and in romance signals amenability to cosmic design.

This pattern is borne out in the treatment of time and space in the aristocratic version. While the Cronica is logical and faithful to the topography of Spain and its history, the names of the places are at best muddled and in some cases imaginary in the aristocratic version. The time line of the story is implausible and sometimes inconsistent. Where details are included, they are the sorts most easily assimilated into a historical or cosmological paradigm, rather than those which describe a material reality, a singular event authored by and befalling a group of individuals.

The most geographically accurate information contained in this version pertains to the Muslim raid in Christian land which separated Blancheflor's mother from the group and begins the story. In it, a king, (26) later named as Fenix, set forth from an undisclosed location in Spain, and landed on Galicia's coast (27) to "waylay such pilgrims as may come your way" (28) on their way to visit "my Lord Saint James." (29) It required nearly forty lines to elucidate the location of this raid, in part because the actions of the raid were far more important than its location, its coordinates coming to light only incidentally in the description of the attack. This action is easily assimilated to a paradigm, yet does not provide any more material specifics than absolutely necessary. The king returns only to 'his city' (or Noples, according to Margaret Pelan, an imaginary place) (30) the vagueness of which is strange because it is the birthplace of the hero, and the setting of the beginning and end of the story. When Floire's parents attempt to separate the lovers, his mother sends him to her sister Sybil at Montoire, a French-sounding, but unlocatable place, assumed by its editors to be entirely imaginary. (31) When Blancheflor is sold as a slave, she is conveyed to Babylon, a seemingly specific place name, but used in the tradition of romance and exempla to specify any number of major Eastern cities, including Cairo or Baghdad. (32) Other places named include Bauduc, Frelle, and Montfelix, and both Pelan and Hubert have been unable to identify any of them. (33)

Time is equally fluid in this work--the children are simultaneously born on Pasque Florie, or Palm Sunday. The span of the narrative totals fourteen years, from birth to marriage, but the marking of time is arbitrary in the mundane and on a larger scale. For example, in the course of the Floire's quest to find Blancheflor, he encounters all of her former hosts, some of whom have seen her very recently, and others less so. One unnamed hostess exclaims to Floire: "Autretel vi ge l'autre jour/De damoisele Blancheflor" (lines 1096-7) ["The other day I saw the same behavior in the girl Blancheflor"] and another hostess, Licoris saw her "Ele fu quinze jours ceanz/Moult fesoit granz dolomenz" (lines 1549-50)[two weeks ago], and still another, a few months ago. Yet, from the time of Blancheflor's sale, and Floire's journey to recover her, "as far as the audience is aware, a very short period of time passes, yet it is enough for Floire to age four years, and therefore to reach the age at which marriage is allowable." (34) It is clear here that there is little attempt to reconcile the chronology of the events of the story. This stands in direct contrast to the Cronica version, which creates a chronology that is historically plausible despite the fact that the dates sometimes fail to dovetail with the events narrated in the chronicle as a whole. (35)

Jane Gilbert argues that this occurs to call attention to the age of the children and thereby to question the categories of childhood and adulthood. She writes: "The text draws attention to the ideological importance of the boy's age precisely by highlighting its narrative arbitrariness." (36) She and others find evidence of contemporary discomfort with this scheme in the fact that "Floire and Blancheflor was rewritten within the space of perhaps twenty years in such a way as to make Floire behave like a proper, combative adult hero." (37) This treatment of rime, however, is consistent with the treatment of space in such a way that the youth of the hero cannot be the only point; rather it is to strip the narrative of such detail that would render it inassimilable to category or archetype.

Sacred as well as secular literary forms are revised in the course of the development of Floire et Blancheflor. Much of the imagery contributing to the imaginative unity of Floire and Blancheflor is derived in part from Christian iconography. These images are mostly related, as Grieve points out, to the Christian motifs of pilgrimage, conversion, and the garden of paradise. (38) Despite the reliance on these Christian-derived motifs, and unlike other versions of the legend, "[t]he Middle English and Old French versions do not intend to highlight the religious quality of the narrative components of the work." (39) Just the same, "it is a mistake to deny their presence in the work." (40) Grieve suggests that reduced emphasis on elements of conversion in the tale may act to make the tale more courtly.

This increased courtliness, however, has wider implications. The sacred motifs of the garden of paradise, pilgrimage and conversion are recruited instead to point to the ability of the love experience to develop and sanctify the self, and to demonstrate the history of courtly conceptions of individual relations. Each of these motifs belongs to its own genre, the conventions of which are utilized and transformed in the course of the work. The revision of genre, romance on one level, and on another, the various conventions of Christian narrative, partakes in the larger project of the creation of a revisionist history.

The motifs of pilgrimage, the garden of paradise, and conversion assume central importance at various points in the plot. Pilgrimage both frames the tale and dominates its middle section. The pilgrimage frame closes twice, first with Floire's arrival at the desired port of his love-object, (pre-climactic) and second with his conversion to Christianity, presented incidentally as an extension of the attainment of his first object (post-climactic). The incidental completion of the frame maintains unity in the tale, but downplays the religious content of Christian pilgrimage. The gardens provide the various settings for the work, dictating the social conditions within it from the opening of the plot to the climax.

The denouement of the tale is saturated with images of conversion, preceded and inspired by the potential martyrdom of the lovers. This third section, beginning at the climax with the emir's en flagrante delicto discovery of the lovers, evokes most pointedly the exemplary plot line, playing on its conventions to achieve the ideological ends of the story. As a whole, then, the work uses and transforms three Christian narratives, using the pilgrimage motif to structure the tale. It begins with the seemingly timeless and innocent state of the garden of Eden, progresses to the movements of pilgrimage in an attempt to regain the lost wholeness of that Edenic state (demonstrated, simultaneously, with movement over time and space and with the construction of alternate, more corrupted gardens), and ends in the exemplary mode with a focus on conversion to the cult of amor, followed by Christian conversion.

The Pilgrimage Frame

The archetypes of pilgrimage and holy war are dominant throughout the work. Pilgrimage frames this work and forms its center, first accounting for the incident which set the plot in motion, with implications to be realized and fulfilled in its completion, and second, causing the rising action of the plot which culminates just prior to the climax with Floire's and Blancheflor's reunion.

The mimetic quality of pilgrimage speaks for the purposes of the work in many ways, demonstrating the role of mimesis in the creation of culture, as well as the utility of pre-existing ideological structures in the elaboration and communication of new ones. The pilgrimage motif is especially important to the author's validation of earthly history over the cosmic. The images of pilgrimage, while inarguably present, are consistently mixed with other traditions from classical lore and courtly romance. For example, at the same time that Floire's quest for Blancheflor is seen to participate in the mission of Blancheflor's mother's initial pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostela (they were both inspired by Blancheflor, and jointly culminate in Floire's and his country's conversion to Christianity), the second pilgrimage is focused on earthly concerns and culminates in sexual union. This second, metaphorical pilgrimage, takes up a larger portion of the book and defeats the aims of the first at the same time that it fulfills them.

The pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint James at Compostela coincides with an unexplained Muslim raid in Christian land. The pilgrimage motif gains momentum, meaning, and power over the course of the work, while the notion of holy war is (in this version) quickly subsumed by the mimetic power of pilgrimage. It is only significant in its validation of the pilgrims' mission; it is necessary in its representation of cosmological forces in conflict. The pilgrimage is undertaken in thanks for a life event--the conception of a child--but the participants are unnamed members of a crowd, specified only by the barest outlines of rank and circumstance. For instance,

   Among them there was a French knight
   Urbane, noble and upright
   My Lord Saint James's shrine he sought

   En la conpaigne ot un Francois
   Chevaliers ert preuz et courtois
   Cil au baron Saint Jaque aloit. (41)

and his daughter, who made the pilgrimage in honor of vows to the saint:

   ... for her husband who had died
   and whose child she now bore inside

   Pour son mari qui morz estoit
   De cui ou ventre enfant avoit (42)

Despite the small number of characters in this story, the centrality of the mother's role in educating the children, and the historical importance of the maternal line, these two characters--Blancheflor's mother and maternal grandfather--are never named, and we are never given so much as a birthplace to expand our conceptions of them. They are, in this way, easily understood to represent the Christian 'everyman.'

While the purpose of the pilgrimage is clear but the characters unnamed, when it comes to Muslim actions against Christians, we learn at least the names of the perpetrators but not the time, place, or motives for action. King Fenix has come into the

   Christian country ...
   To burn the towns to ashes and to plunder,
   Rob, and despoil, and rip asunder.

   Passe ot mer sus crestiens

   Pour u pais la praie prendre
   Et les viles torner en cendre. (43)

In this way the Muslims are presented as the stereotypical enemy, perpetrating evil for its own sake. But their evil is not so purposeless as it may seem. In the immediate present, the Muslims validate the holiness of the pilgrims' mission by making them martyrs. Just such people as these are responsible for the martyrdom of St. James of Compostela. This serves to connect the pilgrims of the story to the saint to whom they offer homage, especially in their initial ignorance of the size and scope of their undertaking, as well as its later fruitfulness. St. James's martyrdom is relevant here because he undertook it as an act of imitatio christi, which he grew to understand only as he experienced it. He prayed, before he knew the true meaning of the prayer, "to drink the chalice that He drinks of" ... and to "share his sufferings" (Mark 5:389). The French knight shares St. James's fate of martyrdom, and Blancheflor's mother partakes in his fecundity. The pregnant young woman unwittingly becomes, as he was, a "fisher of men" (Matthew 4:22) when her Christian daughter converts her lover, and with him, his entire people. Thus the fictional pilgrims to Saint James unwittingly partake of his sufferings, sharing his experience between them. The Saracen enemies work to background the necessity of the Christian mimetic endeavor, but lose importance once their stage-setting mission has been fulfilled.

To go this route would seem, at first, to fulfill what Grieve has designated "the hagiographic potential of the tale" characteristic of most redactions of this work, interpreting it, as previous and subsequent redactors have done, as sacred history instructing in Christian ideals. (44) Such treatments often employ the conventions of hagiographic and exemplary literature--like scenes of effective religious disputation, divine inspiration, and miracles--to assert the power of Christian ideals in the work. Due, however, to the reduced emphasis on sacred rhetoric, and its repeated subversion to elaborate and serve the courtly ideal, this is not the case. These depictions of conversion show that the poet, paradoxically, harnesses the power of the cosmological, in which "the individual earthly event is not regarded as a self-sufficient reality ... but is viewed primarily in immediate vertical connection with a divine order" (45) to validate events in the lives of individuals. The aim of the tale is introduced in the frame, and borne out in the progression of the plot, in which religious conversion is accomplished via sexual, rather than divine, love. In the path of this transmission, the cosmological struggle between Christian and Muslim, between good and evil, is developed and translated. The imitatio christi of St. James, propagated by the martyrdom of Blancheflor's maternal grandfather, and Blancheflor's proselytization, is in the path of its transmission eventually translated to imitatio amori.

Another important Christian text adapted in this work to express a courtly ideology is Augustine's Confessions. As noted above, the focus of Floire and Blancheflor's education was integration into the culture of love. In the Confessions, the didactic aim is integration into the Church. In the vitae Augustine includes in his Confessions, his heroes describe their course of action by referring to Luke, who admonishes his readers to "buil[d] their tower at the cost which had to be paid, that is, at the cost of giving up all they possessed and following you [Christ]." (46) This is no less than a call to pilgrimage and a delineation of its goal of nearness to God. Floire et Blancheflor employs a similar structure in its description of Floire's mission. While he does not give up all he has (he brings with him a rich store of goods for the purpose of repurchasing Blancheflor) (47) he does abandon his family, his identity, and all the privileges accompanying his position in order to pursue his beloved: (48)

   To seeking her he will devote himself.
   No land is so remote
   But that he'll find her there

   Puis se vante qu'il l'ira querre;
   Ja n'iert en si estrange terre
   Qu'il ne la truis ... (49)

The association with Luke's call to pilgrimage is underscored by the use of language denoting the single-mindedness of his quest.

The second structural likeness to the call for pilgrimage is round later in the plot, when Floire presents as the object of his journey, or pilgrimage, the building of a tower like the emir's. When the emir's watchman accuses him of spying,

   You, fellow, who have got your eye
   on our tower, I think you're a spy

   Ge te cuit estre aguetor
   Qui si esgardes nostre tor (50)

Floire swears to him, "par foi" echoing Luke's instructions on building a tower: (51)

   Indeed I'm not, sir, that I swear.
   I'm looking at it with great care
   When I return home, if I'm able,
   I mean to build one comparable.

   "Sire," dist il, "non sui, par foi,
   Mes pour ce la regart et voi
   Qu'en mon pais tel la feroie
   Se je venir mes i pooie." (52)

Thus, outwardly, Floire fulfills Luke's instructions for pilgrimage. He abandons his family, gives up all he has (more or less), and expresses an intention to use his remaining resources to build a tower. The difference, of course, is the object of his devotions. While building the tower is only Floire's stated goal, access to it and his beloved who is held within it constitute his real object. In this way, like Augustine and the friends whose stories he tells in the Confessions, Floire is launched on a pilgrimage to build a tower, the main difference being that Floire's is a pilgrimage of love, literalized by its culmination in sensual union with one of the tower's residents.

Gardens

The three gardens appearing in the aristocratic version act as sites of negotiation for individual and social identity. On the individual level, the children's relation to each garden landscape is used to elaborate their progression toward adulthood. In the social realm, each garden landscape is constructed according to varying mixtures of Western European and Iberian Muslim aesthetics. In their capacity as sites of cultural interanimation, these landscapes act as a microcosm for medieval southern French society. Just as the ideal landscape is a hybrid of Eastern and Western aesthetics, so too is the ideal culture.

Cultural interanimation is acted out on the garden landscapes as they are informed by varying proportions of Christian, Muslim, and classical aesthetics and theology. The first garden, the garden of youth, is created in the image of the Garden of Eden, and acts as a site of formation in the Augustinian tradition. However, the knowledge imparted in this setting is classical. The second garden, installed around Blancheflor's empty tomb, is constructed according to typically Iberian aesthetics which celebrate a blurring of the boundaries between the artificial and the real. This Iberian aesthetic is layered over a shared Edenic model. This formulation shows the sometimes troubling effects of the differing backgrounds of the lovers. The third garden, the garden of the emir, is modeled on a distortion of the Islamic conception of paradise. This last garden, purged of its necromantic purposes, enacts the lovers' rite of passage to adulthood as it is used to describe the restoration of a modified ideal state through cultural fusion.

The detailed description of these successively more exotic settings, the garden of youth, the false-tomb, and the emir's garden serve many purposes fundamental to the work as a whole. As Jocelyn Price shows in her article, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love,"

   the assumption that the oriental elements, the 'merveilles
   de l'Orient'--the marvelous artefacts locales, and
   schemes of the romance--are an intrusion and a blemish
   ... need[s] revision in light of the more recent work on
   medieval ... Western knowledge of, and attitudes
   towards, the East ... (53)

While Price dismisses the notion that these elements could come from direct knowledge of Eastern culture, she makes a case for their derivation from Western traditions of Eastern knowledge, and their subsequent function as a means of self-reflection. While they certainly do serve in this work as a means of self-reflection, research completed within the past fifteen years proves direct interactions between Southern French Christians and Iberian Muslims. (54) This link is substantiated by the appearance in Christianized European medieval fiction of descriptive passages reflecting accurate knowledge of Arabic literary and material culture. This proves either the direct transmission of some of the romance material or familiarity through experience with the aesthetics explored in the story, or perhaps a combination of the two. In this way it is possible to theorize the garden settings as vehicles for communication of cultural knowledge and history.

The physical setting of the garden of youth employs a variety of traditions, including Biblical or Edenic, classical, romance, and Iberian:

   Floire's father has an orchard
   Mandragora was planted there,
   And all of the herbs and flowers
   In all of the many colors. (55)

   Un vergier ot le pere Floire
   Ou plante ot la mandegloire
   Toute les herbes et les flours
   Qui sont de diverses coulors. (56)

In this garden the first and most dominant tradition is Edenic--the emphasis on the variety of vegetation (herbs and flowers of every kind) echoes the biblical description of its plantings, which included "every herb yielding seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed...." (57) The fact that this orchard is planted by Floire's father serves to underscore that association. However, the presence of mandragora, or mandrake, with its well-known reproductive uses, muddies the pool a bit. In the book of Genesis the barren Rachel offers her sister Leah a night with their husband in exchange for mandrakes, so that she too can bear a child, concluding: "therefore he shall lie with thee tonight for thy son's mandrakes." (58) This usage maintains the biblical association, but removes it to the post-Edenic. The presence of sensuality is set off above by mention of birds, singing "sweet and amorous melodies," a romance tradition. The variety of biblical references establishes this garden, first, with the Edenic references, as an ideal and original setting. But as the references wander away from Eden through space and time, it becomes clear that this is a setting of fecundity and formation for purposes external to the biblical tradition. The treatment of this garden and the Christian ideals it conveys demonstrates, on a small scale, how, throughout the work, Christian symbolism functions as a basis upon which secular ideals are built, but the religious meanings of the symbols are downplayed once they have served their purpose.

This garden of youth also serves educational purposes; it is established as the setting for a sentimental education, and the pathway to integration into a culture defined by love. The children repair to their garden after their daily studies of the literature of love:

   Authors they read and books of old
   About love's ways and how folks loved.
   Livres lisoient et autours
   Et quant parler oient l'amours. (59)

It is this literature that is shown to inspire their love:

   It is this
   That makes them pause, embrace, and kiss.

   Quant il reperent de l'escole
   Li uns beise l'autre et acole. (60)

Here, love and the love literature taught in school become associated with the garden, which is taken as the proper setting for application of this knowledge. The content of the children's education is suited to its goals. They study the Latin classical underpinnings of courtly culture, focusing on Ovid. (61) Their Muslim tutor transmits these writings, (62) which demonstrates privileged access to classical tradition and serves to draw attention to the role of Muslims in creating literate courtly culture. This is underscored by their reaction to the text--they immediately mime what they believe to be the precepts of Ovid's writings:

   These books on love that they heard,
   These books hastened them even more
   To know it better
   And enter into it.

   Es ouvres de'amours qu'il ooient
   Le livres fist plus haster
   Ce sachiez bien,
   d'euls entramer. (63)

The content, therefore, is aimed at integration into a learned culture of courtly love, to which men and women have equal access, and its practical function is to enrich their relationship to one another.

The children's education, like its Christian model, possesses a moral dimension, with wide-ranging implications in the process of conversion. Christian formation occurs over the course of a lifetime and ends only with death. Romance typically borrows this model of education as a means of spiritual formation to account for the development of the male hero, its conventions made structurally analogous to those elaborated by the early Church fathers. As John Freccero describes it in "Infernal Inversion and Christian Conversion," the Christian idea of formation--derived from the writings of Gregory of Nyssa--consists in

   a development of human personality through grace and a
   new type of education founded on the reading of the
   Bible. The goal was the restoration of the image of God
   in man. (64)

In this way, education through exposure to and engagement with sacred writing made visible what was previously invisible. It invoked and manifested the buried image of God. Education in romance typically draws on the models of education provided by the Church, replacing Christian texts and icons with those of courtly love. Its goals were to facilitate the transformation of the young man to a hero of fully realized rank and accomplishment, restoring in him a previously hidden idealized image of chivalry.

Because the garden is the setting for mimesis, it evokes the Augustinian model, (65) alluding rather thickly to its scenery and methodology. While the works of Augustine were not generally known in their entirety, parts of the Confessions were known to the educated through collections, or floreligiae, and his conversion in the garden was circulated in just this way.

The garden, a scene of conversion in Augustine's Confessions, is first and foremost a literary scene. Augustine hears the story of the conversion of Victorinus from Simplicianus, which inspires him to study Paul's epistles in his own garden. When Augustine's friend Ponticianus visits him in his garden, he "was greatly surprised to find that it [the book] contained Paul's epistles," (66) and his happiness, combined with the apprehension of his friend's ignorance of his intended subject, leads him into detailed relation of yet another conversion narrative set in a garden. Ponticianus's story concerns the conversion of a companion who, while strolling in the gardens outside the city, stumbles upon the vita of Antony. This companion, "fascinated and thrilled by the story," was "all at once ... filled with love of holiness." The story ends with his companions' conversion: "So these two, now your servants, built their tower at the cost which had to be paid, that is, at the cost of giving up all they possessed and following you." (67) The experience of Ponticianus's companion with this vita, his change of heart, and his new resolve demonstrate the outcome of following the instructions included in the vita. His experience also provides instructions for initiates. Their stories in turn direct Saint Augustine who, finally, "found [him]self driven by the tumult in [his] breast to take refuge in this garden," (68) and after a long struggle, yielded to the child's voice singing "take it and read, take it and read," (69) marking a new phase in the long process of his conversion. It is significant to note here that all of the conversions related by Augustine, including his own, contain scenes of reading enacted in a garden. Therefore, the garden is not only the setting of his conversion narrative, but of a genre delineated within his narration. By connecting the education of the children in the garden with the Augustinian tradition, the writer imbues this formation process with some of its moral content, redirected to the service of love.

The second garden is created to give credence to a deception. When Floire's parents sell Blancheflor as a slave they try to convince their son that she is dead by building an elaborate false tomb that bears statues of the lovers that make music and kiss when the wind blows. The garden surrounding Blancheflor's tomb represents a fusion of an Iberian aesthetic, with its emphasis on artifice, with Christian iconography. The description of Blancheflor's tomb, and the garden surrounding it, is much more detailed than that of the childhood garden. A full 114 lines (from line 540-653) have been dedicated to its description, and as such the artistic/aesthetic traditions employed to create it are more fully elaborated. Christian imagery is used here ambivalently--doing double duty as both religious and courtly symbols. At the same time that the effects of the garden are created by necromancy, they utilize Christian symbols to characterize the lovers, who are depicted as the rose and the lily, representing in Christianity Mary and her son, and in courtly culture passion and purity. The fusion of these symbols in representing the love relation is no less than a demonstration of its imaginative origins. In representing Floire and Blancheflor's love, the poet draws on symbols from the classical tradition (apparently modified in the course of its transmission through the Islamic world), Iberian aesthetics, and symbols that fuse the Christian and the courtly. The features of this garden, too, work to point out the ability of art to shape behavior. Music and bird song are still more powerful in this passage, and the Iberian garden aesthetic, especially its appreciation of human artifice, are all the more evident here.

Though the poet employs a mixture of Christian and courtly iconography, he does so in accordance with an Iberian aesthetic which dominates, and comes to represent the incursion of adult cares into the childhood garden. Moreover, these representations of the Iberian aesthetic have the merit of existence. Some luxurious Iberian gardens contained automata, sketches and records of which still exist. The poet recalls the childhood garden, modeled in part on the garden of Eden, through the use of the cornucopia theme. On the tomb,

   There's no beast, no fowl of the air
   Whose image is not pictured there,
   Nor any creature serpentine
   Fish from fresh water or from brine.

   n'a souz ciel beste ne oisel
   Ne soit assis en ce tobmel
   Ne serpent c'on sache nonmer
   ne poisson d'iaue ne de mer. (70)

While this description uses the image of cornucopia, it is important to note that it is doubly removed; this description evokes not creatures that are present but merely their representations. The same is true of the lovers who formerly inhabited the Edenic childhood garden. The poet expresses marvel at the likeness of the statues to their models, as well as in their ability to dramatize the ideal love they stand for:

   One kissed the other and embraced
   By magic, seemingly this motion
   Expressed their love and their devotion.

   l'un besoit l'autre et acoloit
   Si disoient par nigromance
   Tretout lor bon et lor enfance. (71)

The 'magic' statues on the tomb so effectively represent the couple and their ideals that they inspire feelings of love in others:

   Who heard these sweet airs sung above
   And as they listened they'd be stirred
   To deepest love by what they heard.

   Ne pucele, pour qu'ele amast
   De ce douz chant que il ooient
   D'amours si forment esprenoient. (73)

This garden attests to the power of representation, (73) specifically the power of the representation of courtly love to shape social behavior, and in a larger sense to the educative function of the poem as a whole. Here, the goal stated in the frame, to teach lovers of love's ways, is enacted through the icon that is Blancheflor's false tomb. The tomb literally causes its viewers to participate in its story by feeling love. In this way, the appreciation of the plastic over the natural, inherent to an Iberian aesthetic clearly known to the writer, is shown to be both powerful and necessary in the creation of a culture of love, and to reaffirm the purpose of the work as a whole. On the other hand, this aesthetic is shown by the very motions of the plot to be inadequate on its own. Just as the tomb is devoid of the corpse, so too is the garden devoid of life. The sculpture garden favors representation over nature, thereby working to express the sentiments of Floire's parents, who feel that his natural (and naturalized) love for Blancheflor will ruin their family because of her debased lineage. Their attempt to replace the children's troubling love with its representation embodies the onslaught of adult cares.

The third and final garden, the emir's garden, provides the setting for the exemplary portion of the tale. At the end of Floire's search for Blancheflor, he discovers her imprisoned in a tower of maidens in the emir's garden. Unlike the other two gardens, the emir's garden is one of guilt and decadence rather than innocence, of male sensual pleasure, magic, terror, and death. Here, all possibility of innocent sexuality is banished. The garden is centered on male desire, erected around a giant phallus of a tower, imprisoning young and desirable women within it. Their job is to serve in the ritual celebrating his rising from bed:

   By order of the emir they
   Must wait on him at his levee

   L'amirant leur fist commander
   Qu'a lui soient a son lever. (74)

This service inspires fear in the maidens, because it is through their service here that the emir develops his impressions of the girls, and from these impressions, decides upon his next wife, whom he will eventually murder:

   It is the way of the emir
   to keep a concubine one single year
   One single year and no more. Then he brings
   Together all his dukes and kings
   She's then beheaded.

   Li amianz tel costume a
   C'une Came un seul an avra
   Un an plemier et neant plus
   Lors si li Cet le chief trenchier. (75)

The concubine is selected during a yearly procession under the tree of love, and across a stream. The ever-flowering trees in this garden serve only to fulfill the emir's murderous sexual desire. The water flowing through the garden is used to test the virginity of the women he chooses to wed. They are made to cross the stream, and if they are virgins, it passes untroubled; if not, it roils as they walk over it. This stream, rather than purifying, is essentially accusatory, used only to detect female sexual guilt. Regardless of the outcome, female sexuality is inescapably associated with death; if a woman is found to be sexually experienced, the penalty is death. If she is found to be a virgin, she is understood to be eligible for sexual union with the emir, which, after one year, will also result in death.

Here, then, is no trace of either the Garden of Eden or the classical locus amoenus. In the classical locus amoenus, the love affairs conducted there are voluntary and desire is mutual. In the Garden of Eden, Adarn and Eve engaged in sexuality free of both life and death. The emir's garden initially appears to be a corrupted variant of the locus amoenus model, damaged by the illicit desire of the emir. Price rather mildly points out that "[t]he features of the garden--stream, orchard, singing birds--are those of the traditional locus amoenus, or Earthly Paradise.... The exclusiveness of and security of the emir's tower [is purchased at] the cost of denying change and growth." (76) Her assertions are backed up in the following:

   A man who falls beneath the spell ...
   Might well believe that in some wise
   He's been brought to Paradise.

   Qui enz est et sent les odors ...
   Pour la douceur li est avis
   Du son qu'il soit en paradis. (77)

This garden is modeled on a paradise, but on the titillatingly well-circulated Muslim vision of heaven as a garden of sensual delights (for men). (78) The one tidbit of Muslim theology generally well known to medieval Christians was its sensual description of the afterlife. (79) This description generally included luxuriant natural surroundings, an abundance of wine that did not intoxicate, and sexual access to virgin houris, wide-eyed, small-waisted buxom women, who would immediately regain their virginity after the act. Medieval Christians were scandalized by their own depictions of this garden, and it figured largely in their imagination of the Islamic mindset.

The text posits that the emir's paradise is founded on a fundamental misvaluation. His paradise is neither natural nor cosmic, but supernatural; the emir creates its material splendor through necromancy:

   He was endowed with magic powers
   who planted it ...
   It was arranged by art supernal
   To make the blossoming eternal

   De fisique ot cil grant conseill
   Quil planta, car en l'aseoir ...
   Par fisique est si engignez
   Que touz tens ast de fleurs chargiez (80)

In describing the Tree of Love, forming both the center and the centerpiece of the garden, the poet explains:

   He makes them all walk, to decide
   which one this year will be his concubine--
   Beneath the tree. And she upon
   whom the blossom falls is the one ...

   Apres les fet toutes passer
   Desouz l'arbre pour acerter
   Laquel d'eles cel an avra
   cele seur qui la fleur charra. (81)

Though this ritual seems random, the Tree of Love exists for the sole purpose of legitimating the desires of the emir, who wishes to have it both ways:

   If by any chance there is one girl there
   Whom he loves most, or is most fair,
   He makes the flower, by necromancy
   Fall first on her who charms his fancy.

   Et se il i a damoisele
   Que il mielz aint ne soi plus bele
   Seyr li fwt par enchantement
   La fleur cheoir premierement. (82)

As Price points out:

   The idealising imagination that would see love as
   a quasi-sacred force, invading the personality
   from outside (cf. Chaucer's Troilus, Chretien's
   Alexandre) is paid tribute in the marvelous tree's
   apparently numinous capacity to choose for the emir. (83)

Here it is noted that if there is a woman the emir desires, he can influence the tree to carry out his wishes. The centerpiece of this garden is the emir's desire, mapped onto an extrenally conceived model of his culture, that is, Christian misunderstandings of the Muslim vision of the afterlife. The emir's garden, though it is modeled on an imagination of the Islmic tradition, cannot restore the virginity of his sexual conquests, and so he destroys and replaces them. His fundamental error lies in the application of a misconceived heavenly model, first, in a way that it cannot be applied, through human means, and, second, to living women to whom it cannot and should not be applied.

The lovers' intervention to transform the emir's fantasy world to one that accedes to the rules of society signifies their growing maturity, and their attendant entrance to the social world. When Noire and Blancheflor integrate the emir into society through marriage to Blancheflor's friend Claris they achieve a fusion of courtly order with Eastern landscape. This fusion of courtly order with Eastern landscape is positioned here as a social ideal.

Hagiographic and Exemplary Conventions

The climax and denouement of the story is modeled on the hagiographic vita and the exemplum. The story reaches a climax as the emir places the lovers upon a burning pyre. The climax is resolved as the emir is convinced through a series of hagiographically derived images to spare them, and the denouement begins as Blancheflor works to reform the emir, and to integrate him into courtly society. Floire's conversion and the forced conversion of his subjects (both for Blancheflor's sake) also take place in the denouement, and can as well be seen to use these sacred narrative conventions. However, the ending of the tale is somewhat atypical of the genre; this portion of the tale ends as the emir abandons his murderous habits and his necromantic garden is converted to a natural garden amenable to romantic love. If this tale were typical of exempla of the period, many of which were aimed at community mobilization for crusade, it would end either with the emir's grisly death, or with the emir's, rather than Floire's, conversion to Christianity.

This would be the expected scenario because the emir is positioned as "other," while because of the affinity between the Christian Blancheflor and the Muslim Floire, Floire is positioned as "same." The fact of Floire's conversion, instead of the emir's, comes as something of an innovation. What is also striking about this particular tale is the object of conversion. While the lovers do change the emir through hagiographic imagery, it is his patterns of relation to people that are changed, rather than his relation to God. Neither the lovers nor the emir show any interest in human-divine relation. As such, when Floire converts solely for the love of Blancheflor, the true concern of this narration is apparent.

The redactor of the aristocratic version uses sacred conventions for his own purposes in a manner which ultimately subverts the meaning of those conventions. For example, the exemplary portion of the tale begins in the emir's garden, with the potential martyrdom of the lovers. Both are presented as potential martyrs, vying with one another for the right to die for love;

   He swears he'll die before she does
   even if God wills otherwise.

   Il jure, Dieu nu retendra
   Car ainz de li, s'il puet morra. (84)

Here, they assert their love irrespective of divine approval or disapproval--and they do so according to the conventions for attesting to Christian faith. The lovers offer themselves as martyrs for one another when each insists upon the right to die in the other's stead. Blancheflor, thrusting herself in front of the emir's sword, insists: "I by rights should die for you"--"Pour tant por vous morir deusse." (85) In other words, they assert their right to the use of Christian convention of martyrdom to defend and express their love.

A further instance of the subversion of sacred convention is the physical description of the protagonists. Despite their identical appearances, their portraits differ significantly; Floire's description is presented in terms of merely courtly conventions, but Blancheflor's combines courtly and hagiographic imagery. Both lovers embody the courtly ideal; they are well shaped with clear, bright eyes, and smooth skin. Considerably more attention is devoted to Blancheflor's portrait, with hers spanning thirty-three lines (2640-72), and Floire's a mere seventeen (2620-36). The greater focus on Blancheflor identifies her as the heroine of this portion of the tale, as does the use of hagiographic convention in her portrait. Like a saint's body, Blancheflor's body gives off a sweet sustaining scent:

   A man could live and be contented
   a whole week on her breath sweet-scented
   And if you kissed her on Monday, you
   would feel no hunger the whole week through

   De sa bouche ist sa doce alainne,
   vivre en puet en une samainne:
   Qui au lundi la beseroit
   En la semaine fain n'avroit. (86)

Blancheflor is portrayed at the center of both sacred and courtly discourses. In the courtly, she is shown as an ideal subject, worthy of worship because of her qualities of beauty and graciousness. The focus on her potential martyrdom, combined with hagiographic imagery works to depict her as a domina, venerated and powerful. In this way, the conventions for expressing Christian faith and devotion are harnessed for purposes of earthly love. This is further emphasized by the fact that the author chooses not to provide portraits of the lovers until very late in the tale--when they are quite dramatically naked on the funeral pyre.

On the one hand, delaying the portraiture until the funeral pyre scene pointedly follows the conventions of hagiographical portraits executed at the moment of crisis. In this way, the lovers' declaration of carnal love occurs in place of the declaration of Christian faith typical to hagiographical vitae. On the other hand, this use of sacred convention is hardly conventional. Because their portraiture is delayed until the moment of potential sanctification for human rather than divine love, the writer uses exemplary narrative structures to assert the power of earthly love in the stead of the divine.

The plot in the late climax and denouement of the tale bears a strong resemblance to plots typical of exempla circulated as propaganda for crusade. The emir's egocentrism and his uncontrolled desire are by no means uncommon in exemplary tales treating similar topoi. Most of the extant exempla were collected by the newly formed mendicant groups of the thirteenth century, but many of them date back to the twelfth century or earlier. According to Jeremy Cohen in his book, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism, exemplary tales were collected by the newly formed mendicant groups, the Dominicans and Franciscans, (officially recognized by the Church at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) in the early thirteenth century for the newly approved project to educate the laity. (87) Miri Rubin attests to their impact: "They provided a stock of tales, imagery, and iconography which was shared by preachers, painters, and parish priests all over Europe." (88) As such, exempla were a central part of the lore of medieval culture, increasingly so as they were collected and circulated by the newly emerged mendicant groups of the thirteenth century.

The use of hagiographic images both helps to establish Blancheflor's divinity within courtly discourse, as well as to prepare the reader for the menacing desire of the emir. From the uninitiated perspective of the emir (he is neither Christian nor courtly), this eroticized portrait of Blancheflor works to position her as a mere object of desire, significant only in her willingness and ability to gratify. This setup resembles the typical female martyrdom plot, with the emir falling into the category of pagan who menaces the saint's integrity and threatens her life through his sexual desire.

It is important to note here that the emir is doubly a pagan, first, in that he is not Christian, but a caricature of a Muslim, misguidedly enacting his heretical vision of a heavenly afterlife through necromancy here on earth, and second, that he does not understand the first thing about courtly love. The desire of such characters is often described in such a way as to evoke "the conventional iconography of the courtly suitor," but in excess, to the extent that it is "the kind that the truly courtois would find abhorrent ... transforming his domina into an object without taking any account of her will or wishes." (89) This suitor is a monster, but a familiar one, intended to demonstrate the limitlessness of human desire. As Evelyn Birge Vitz points out in her discussion of Saint Bernard's thinking on human desire, "concupiscence thinks its desire is finite, that some object will slake its thirst. But the point made by Bernard is that human desire is infinite while human objects ... are only finite." (90) In the vitae, such figures are usually consumed and destroyed by their own desires, and in exempla they are often reformed either through miracles, violence, or the good efforts of the heroine. The emir's murderous desire fits quite well into this paradigm, without even the illusion that it is limited to its object.

The emir's principal character traits are also comparable to those featured in exemplary tales used to encourage crusade. In a fairly typical exemplary tale treating the conversion of a Muslim king, King Cosdroe of Perce, the main character possesses flaws similar to those of the emir, such as pride, use of magic, and impersonation of God. We find him in Jerusalem in a universe of his own making, replete with a tower which, like the emir's tower, recalls that of Babel. He is characterized by pride, and hostility toward Christians: "Cristene men alle that he found--he broghte to ssame" (91) and doubt of the truth of the crucifixion "of the sepulcre he was in doute/Thare oure Louerde was on ileid," (92) and most importantly, sitting in his tower he impersonated God: "the Uader as thei it were/And Sone& Holi Gost biside--gret prute was there." (93) Thus, King Cosdroe of Perce, and the emir in our story share the same principal sin--pride, leading to the impersonation of God by creating an enchanted landscape. Typical of the exempla aimed at encouraging crusade, King Cosdroe's end is gory; he is killed, and his head mounted upon a pike. That our emir meets the much kinder fate of conversion to the courtly ideal through persuasion is indicative of the tale's agenda.

The emir is first persuaded to abandon his plan to execute the couple through his sensibility to Christian iconography, proving he is really more like Christians than unlike them. The description of the lovers is eroticized in a fashion similar to those of martyrs, especially as it takes place on the pyre. The emir's hostility is overcome by the public's and eventually his own merciful response to the lovers' beauty and devotion. When he sees Floire and Blancheflor insisting upon giving their lives for one another,

   The emir's mercy too was stirred
   Perhaps because he saw and heard
   Each of the two young people vie
   with the other for the right to die.

   Dont en prist l'amirant pitiez
   Ja soit ce que il fust iriez
   Quant chaucun voit amant saillir
   Pour ce que primes veult morir. (94)

The emir responds mercifully to Floire's and Blancheflor's potential love-martyrdom. The representation of their martyrdom is effectively shown to draw on Christian imagery by the intercession of a cleric. A bishop present softens the anger of the emir with these words:

   'Twould be a pity, 'twould be wrong
   To kill two youths so fair, so young

   Car donmages sera moult granz
   Se ociez les deuas enfanz (95)

The emir's resolve for revenge is finally dissolved by the tears of his people. They implore:

   "Forgive them, noble king."
   They cried for grace ...

   Tuit escrient: "Bien est a fere
   Pardonne lor, roi debonere"
   Moult li crient tretuit merci. (96)

The focus on the youth, beauty, and vulnerability of the lovers wins them the mercy of the king, who is merciful not out of chivalric obligation (as in the Cronica and popular versions) but out of generosity and his sensibility to Christian and courtly iconography. In demonstrating the emir's sensibility to Christian iconography through his emotional response to the martyr-like representation of the children, the writer of this romance argues for spiritual equality of Christians and pagans. This is directly counter to the beliefs of proponents of forced conversion, whose arguments depend on an assumption of the impossibility of conversion through polemic.

The next phase of the emir's conversion occurs when he agrees, quite rationally, to give up his grisly habits and settle down with one woman. Here, he shows himself to be easily converted through polemic rather than by force. It is important to note here that the emir is not converted to Christianity but to the culture of courtly love. The closest this version comes to the scenes of disputation and miraculous inspiration typical of hagiography and exemplary literature is the one that follows. Even so, the words used by Blancheflor to convince him are not included--the poet only reveals that

   Blancheflor made most earnest plea
   Urging by all the Gods ...
   That he not take Claris' life
   But keep her ever as his wife.

   Mes Blancheflor mout li proia
   Et touz ses dieus li conjura ...
   Oue il ja Claris n'occira
   Ne autre fame ne prendre. (97)

We learn only that the emir seems to agree, crowning Claris as his empress. This passage serves to demonstrate both the emir's amenability to change through polemic and the ease of his integration into courtly society. In this way, the poet launches a critique of forcible conversion and of the movement to crusade.

The conversion of the emir to the culture of courtly love rather than to Christianity serves to criticize the ideals contained in exemplary tales advocating conversion by force, to demonstrate the emir's humanity through his sensibility to human suffering, beauty, and Christian iconography, and to elevate human love over divine. Floire's love-motivated conversion to Christianity follows through on this ideal. Though the Cronica version, and others that follow such as Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, do add scenes conventional to didactic and hagiographic literature, (98) there is nowhere in this version a miracle, a theological disputation, or a scene of divine inspiration. Floire's motivation to convert to Christianity is purely social. The poet informs us that he

   ... decided for the sake
   Of Blancheflor, his loved one, to take
   The Christian way of life ...

   Pour Blancheflor la soe amie
   A pris la chrestienne vie. (99)

This explanation of his motivation positions his conversion as a prop to prove his courtly devotion to Blancheflor.

Floire's love-conversion throws other elements of the exemplary plot into sharper focus. As noted above, Floire's conversion scene is conspicuously absent, as are the scenes of disputation conventional to the vita and exemplum. While the conversion scene of the emir is partially represented, both its ideological content and its cause are identical to those of Floire's conversion, thus creating a relationship between the two that is not present in other versions. Also missing in the body of the text are scenes of violence that fit into the matrices of chivalric action, political struggles, and crusade, which are very often linked together. Thus, much of the ideology attached to sacred narrative conventions is striking in its absence.

The fact that both Christian and chivalric ideology are absent throughout the body of the text serves to draw attention to their presence in the last part of the tale in which Floire converts his subjects at the sword. Because Floire has not raised a finger in violence before he became a Christian, this violent mass conversion is cast as a consequence of his new Christian identity. In this way, the elimination of the spiritual content from his conversion and the omission of the conversion scenes serve to assert the inherently violent character of Church and State as this redactor saw them.

All of this can again be clarified with a glance at the history books. The earliest Cronica versions were probably published after the first Christian reoccupations of Muslim territory in the late eighth century. The Christian communities of Spain valorized Charlemagne because of his Christianization and unification of the territories of France, and like him the Spanish Christians combined religious and proto-nationalist rhetoric to imagine themselves and their future. The copy of the Cronica version discussed here (100) dates from the second half of the Reconquista, and again combines these strains of rhetoric to facilitate an orderly royal succession and to justify Reconquista. Grieve points out that the tale of Floire and Blancheflor was probably incorporated into the Chronicles to intervene in a contemporary dispute over the succession to the Castilian throne after the death of Alfonso el Sabio in 1284. The rightful heir was the product of a union between Alfonso's eldest son, a Castilian, and the French Blanche, or Blanca, a descendant of Charlemagne. Thus, Charlemagne, another French-Spanish hybrid, is positioned as a precedent to this succession.

The Old French aristocratic version was composed at a rather different moment. At this time the heavily Albigensian community of Southern France, to which the writer belonged, was under attack by the Catholic Church and by the Northern French, who were collaborating to annex the territory in question. It is, therefore, quite natural that a victim of this aggression would work to undermine the ideologies justifying these endeavors, which he does throughout by appropriating their imagery and rhetoric for other purposes.

In this way, the religious structures inherent to the work are, rather than glorified in their own right, merely harnessed to illuminate the glory of courtly love, and to posit an ideal of identification across cultures. In Floire et Blancheflor Christian cosmology loses pride of place to courtly values in which human love is the cause and end of the events in the plot. Even the Iberian mass conversion is effected, not for love of God, but of Blancheflor. Because exemplary tales were freely circulated, even as early as the twelfth century, and the drive for crusade and its accompanying propaganda perhaps overly familiar, the conversion of this garden and its inhabitants amounts to a process of editing popular prejudices against Islam, demonstrating the desirability of contact and cultural exchange, and protesting the persecutions committed in the name of Church and monarchy.

Conclusions

In the Old French aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor the conventions of Christian narrative and iconography are harnessed to express earthly love. The same is true of Christian apprehensions of cosmological history. This is accomplished through three important steps; the first is the re-rendering of the Floire and Blancheflor story to shake it loose from the dictates of historical specificity that characterizes both earlier (and later) redactions of the text. Other redactions are embedded in the historical world through depictions of warfare between Christian and Saracen, thus reproducing the paradigm of extended battle between these two factions and the radical alterity of the Saracens.

Conventions of asserting the radical alterity of Saracens are, in a similar move, elided as the differences between the Christian and Saracen lovers, and between their respective families, are effaced to the point of insignificance. Other versions base the affinity of the interfaith couple in biology and genealogy, based in part on the sharing of Berta's breast milk. This elision of alterity sees its conclusion in the sensibility of the emir to Christian iconography, which changes his behavior without resulting in his religious conversion. Thus, sympathy, reason, and respect for others are dissociated from Christianity, and universal moral values extricated from race and culture.

This trend is furthered through the use of three different kinds of Christian narrative to tell the story of the lovers--narratives of pilgrimage, narratives connected with garden imagery, and exemplary conversion narratives. These structures are harnessed to celebrate the power of the sensual, earthly love of Floire and Blancheflor, as the ideological substance of Christian convention is absorbed into their allencompassing love. In these moves Floire et Blancheflor uses Christian narrative convention to pull itself loose from representations of alterity typical of epic and romance. It also frees itself from the political agendas often intertwined with the cosmological framing of history, such as the drive to homogenize culture encapsulated in such endeavors as the Reconquista and the Albigensian persecutions. The next move is to assert the specificity of the characters' love, thereby extricating the tale from the cosmological values carried by Christian conventions. Affinity between Christian and Saracen is established, French genealogy revised to include Arabic lineage and culture, distance from the political agenda of the Cronica versions is achieved, and the value of earthly love asserted over forces that seek to limit its importance.

In conclusion, it is important to note that the act of producing secular literature in this way necessitates an ambivalent reproduction of the sacred. On the one hand, the cosmologically rooted enmity between Muslim and Christian and the rhetoric of forcible conversion through crusade are both reproduced. But as the plot progresses the differences between Christian and Muslim are minimized to the point of erasure and the conception of history in which this enmity is rooted is gradually effaced by the immediacy of Floire and Blancheflor's love. But because of the co-presence of sacred and secular, sanctioned and unsanctioned history, the manipulation of sacred rhetoric cannot comprise an outright rejection of Christianity. Instead, its ideals are employed to carve out a space, perhaps within it, and perhaps outside it, for the expression of unsanctioned human kinships and emotions.

The fact that this occurs against its grain calls attention to the inherent tension between secular literature and the theology with which it is engaged.

Notes

(1) Patricia Grieve, Floire and Blancheflor and the European Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1997), 15.

(2) Grieve, 32.

(3) Grieve, 18.

(4) The later date is derived from the earliest French version of the tale, the Palatine Fragment. The earlier date relies on allusions to the Aeneas, usually dated about 1155, and the Low-German adaptation of the tale, dated about 1170, which shows some relation to the aristocratic version. However, if all the redactors had access to some form of the earlier Cronica versions, the resemblance between the tales might be a result of their common source rather than access to a pre-existing French text. However, the opposite might just as well be true.

(5) Dating by Margaret Pelan, in her critical edition, Floire et Blancheflor (Paris: Societe d'edition, 1937; rpt. 1956), 1. All references in this article are to this edition.

(6) See Roberto Giacone, "Floris and Blauncheflur: Critical Issues," Rivista di Studi Classici 27 (1979): 395-405 for a summary of critical opinions on the dating of the French versions.

(7) Much of this information is taken from Patricia Grieve's description of the Cronica versions, which remain unpublished.

(8) The tallying of death tolls for the Crusades is a notoriously controversial endeavor, with a wide range of scholars providing a wide range of numbers that often cannot be substantiated.

(9) In both medieval Christianity and Islam, breast milk was believed to convey faith. In Islam, shared breast milk created a kinship relation so that marriage was forbidden between 'milk' brothers and sisters.

(10) Grieve, 15.

(11) Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 131

(12) Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1973), 131.

(13) Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1976), 4.

(14) Merton Jerome Hubert, The Romance of Floire and Blanche-feur: A French Idyllic Poem of the Twelfth Century (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1966), xi.

(15) Geraldine Barnes, "Cunning and Ingenuity in the Middle English," Medium Aevum 53.1 (1984): 10.

(16) Sec Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale U P, 1977).

(17) While the dating of Floire et Blancheflor is open to debate, most agree that the codification of courtly love was undertaken with variously interpreted degrees of seriousness by the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (in France from about 1168-1204) and in the process of translation and circulation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria, and its variants such as Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Jita's Libro de Buen Amor and Andres Cappelanus's The Art of Courtly Love.

(18) See Eric Auerbach's "Roland Against Ganelon," Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 96-122. Here, he concludes: "For the audiences of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the heroic epic was history; in it, the historical tradition of the earlier ages was alive" (122). Auerbach continues: "This historico-political element is abandoned by the courtly novel, which consequently has a completely new relationship to the objective world of reality." Auerbach is certainly correct in pointing to a lack of historical and material specificity in courtly romance; however, in the examples he provides, romance retains at least the historical/ideological categories of the epic, especially in asserting the radical difference of Muslims from Christians through violence, even while maintaining its ideals without explicit reference to material reality. Because romances retain the assertion of the radical difference of Muslims through violence, they tend to support the political agenda of crusade and forced conversion that attends this assertion. Thus, while romances generally leave out details that provide historical context, they very often reproduce ideology that is used to make history. Thus, in the Old French aristocratic version of Floire et Blancheflor, the removal of fighting along with most historical detail is to effectively remove material used to support the agenda of Christian conquest. Also see W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature (New York: Dover Publications, 1957). For a different opinion, see Sarah Kay, Chansons de Geste in the Age of Romance (Oxford, England: Oxford U P, 1995).

(19) Auerbach charcterizes the views and principles of the medieval French epic in the following: "The knightly will to fight, the concept of honour, the mutual loyalty of brothers in arms, the community of the clan, the Christian dogma, the allocation of right and wrong to Christians and infidels, are probably the most important of these views" (101).

(20) Auerbach, 23.

(21) In this version the Christian rule lasts eighteen years.

(22) Grieve, 22.

(23) This is especially clear in that while the popular and Middle English versions are told in romance form, they reincorporate historical detail and materials from epic sources. French and Middle English epics are characteristically concerned with the Christian struggle against Islam, and the ideological bent of Spanish versions is restored.

(24) Magdalena Carrasco, "Sanctity and Experience in Pictorial Hagiography: Two Illustrated Lives of Saints from Romanesque France," Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, eds. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Klara Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1991), 33.

(25) Carrasco, 34.

(26) Floire et Blancheflor, line 57: "Uns rois estoit d'Espaigne."

(27) Floire et Blancheflor, line 60: "En Galice estoit arrivez."

(28) Floire et Blancheflor, line 84: "Guetier por rober pelerins."

(29) Floire et Blancheflor, line 95: "Cil au baron Saint Jaque aloit."

(30) Floire et Blancheflor, line 129. Hubert cites Pelan, Floire et Blancheflor (Paris: Societe d'edition, 1937; rpt. 1956), 141, note 121: "Peut-etre Noples, ville dont la prise a fait l'objet d'une chanson de geste perdue, ville d'ailleurs que L. Demaison, editeur d'Aymeri de Narbonne, serait tente de considerer comme 'purement legendaire.' Voir son introduction S.A.T. 1887 I, p. CC."

(31) Hubert, 16.

(32) The biblical tradition, very much alive in romance, uses the city of Babylon as a catch word for corruption--political, social, and lingual. Additionally, in the twelfth century Baghdad was known as a scholarly center and a storehouse of valuable books.

(33) Hubert, 20.

(34) Jane Gilbert, "Boys will be What? Gender, Sexuality and Childhood in Floire et Blancheflor and Floris and Lyriopei," Exemplaria 9 (1998): 49.

(35) Grieve, 22.

(36) Gilbert, 49.

(37) Grieve, 49.

(38) Grieve, 87.

(39) Grieve, 68.

(40) Grieve, 68.

(41) Lines 93-95. All translations are from Hubert, The Romance. I have modified the translation to achieve accuracy.

(42) Lines 99-100.

(43) Lines 63-65.

(44) Grieve writes that "in 1661, Roman authorities added to the Index of Forbidden Books the vita of one Rosana," whose story is clearly patterned after that of Blancheflor. The vita was forbidden because it was one of an imaginary saint, falling into the "curious category of saints whose only provenance is literary texts" (2-3).

(45) Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim, Catherine Garvin, and Erich Auerbach (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954; rpt. 1984), 72.

(46) Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), 168 [Book VIII: 6]. See also Luke 14:28-34.

(47) See lines 935-48 and 968-1007.

(48) Grieve notes: "In renouncing his family and upbringing (almost as saints such as Alexis do) to search for Blancheflor, Floire embarks on a love-pilgrimage that serves, in all cases in the story, as the literal road to his eventual salvation" (55).

(49) Lines 886-88.

(50) Lines 1970-71.

(51) Jocelyn Price, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love," Reading Medieval Studies 8 (1982). Price notes that "A century of investigation has failed to disclose a specific source for the emir's tower and garden" (15). Luke may not be the source for the tower, as the "woman in the tower" is a common motif in Arabic literature as well as later European stories, but its apparent resonance with Luke, especially in the context of Augustine's Confessions, cannot be dismissed.

(52) Lines 1972-75.

(53) Price, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love," 12.

(54) For more information on this subject, see F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis, eds., An Introduction to the Troubadours (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Specifically, consult Joseph T. Snow's article: "The Iberian Peninsula," 271-78, for a current bibliography on this subject. See also: Simon Gaunt and Sarah Kay, eds., The Troubadours: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1999).

(55) The translation of these lines is mine.

(56) Lines 239-42.

(57) Genesis, The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917), 1: 29.

(58) Genesis: 30:15.

(59) Lines 226-27.

(60) Lines 235-36. Literally: when they returned from school, they would kiss each other and embrace.

(61) Lines 227-28: "Ovide, ou moult de delioient/Es ouvres d'amours qu'il oient."

(62) It is clear here that the tutor is Arab because he is a clerk in the house of Floire's family: "Gaidons le comande a un mestre/Moult iert bons clers et de bon estre/se parenz iert, de sa meison" (lines 199-201). In other versions, such as the Spanish Cronica and Boccaccio's Filocolo, Gaidon the Arab clerk, is the only member of Floire's party to resist conversion to Christianity on ideological grounds.

(63) Lines 227-30. The English translation is mine

(64) John Freccero and Rachel Jacoff, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1986), 181.

(65) Grieve notes Augustinian allusions in the Cronica and Filocolo versions, 99. She points out the literal appearance of Saint Augustine in the two texts and the parallel promises made and fulfilled for Augustine's mother, Saint Monica, and Blancheflor's mother, named Giulia in these versions.

(66) Confession, 166 [Book VIII: 6].

(67) Confessions, 168 [Book VIII: 6]. See also Luke 14:28-34. This is a double-layered quote.

(68) Confessions, 171 [Book VIII: 8].

(69) Confessions, 177 [Book VIII: 12].

(70) Lines 544-47.

(71) Lines 585-87.

(72) Lines 627-29.

(73) There is evidence of the existence of automata just such as those described here, demonstrating that the poet is expressing cultural knowledge culled either from pesonal experience or accurate hearsay. See John Hooper Harvey's Mediaeval Gardens (London: B.T. Batsford, 1981), 45-47. The fourteenth century Navarrese king Carlos III built gardens in the Moorish style by hiring Moorish architects and craftsmen to design and complete the work. One of these well-known gardens, Tafalla, included automata which survived until 1865, when the ruins were destroyed to create a Renaissance style overlay. The ruins were sketched by Pedro de Madrazo just before their destruction in 1865. These sketches include automata and can be found on pp. 46-47 of Harvey's book. For a discussion of the aesthetics of automata in gardens, see Amnon Shiloah's Music in the World of Islam: A Socio-Cultural Study (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 1995.

(74) Lines 1703-04.

(75) Lines 1730-34.

(76) Price, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love," 14.

(77) Lines 1793; 1798-99.

(78) This description of the Muslim vision of the afterlife was continually cited by medieval theologians as evidence of Islamic heresy and decadence. See Benjamin Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton U P, 1984).

(79) Price, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love," 16.

(80) Lines 1811-12; 1818-19.

(81) Lines 1836-39.

(82) Lines 1848-51.

(83) Price, "Floire et Blancheflor: the Magic and Mechanics of Love," 15.

(84) Lines 2600-01.

(85) Line 2595.

(86) Lines 2660-63.

(87) Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca and London: Cornell U P, 1982), 39.

(88) Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge U P, 1992), 109.

(89) Jocelyn Price uses these sentences to describe the desires of Eleusius of the Middle English Liflade of Seinte Juliene; see her "The Liflade of Seinte Iuliene and Hagiographic Convention," Medievalia et Humanistica 14 (1986): 42.

(90) From Price, "The Liflade of Seinte Iuliene and Hagiographic Convention," 42. See Evelyn Birg Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York U P, 1989), 2.

(91) Charlotte D'Evelyn, South English Legendary: Exaltation of the Holy Cross (London: Early English Text Society, 1956), 6.

(92) D'Evelyn, lines 8-9.

(93) D'Evelyn, lines 31-32

(94) Floire et Blancheflor, lines 2754-57.

(95) Lines 2822-23.

(96) Lines 2826-28.

(97) Lines 2898-99; 2902-03.

(98) In Il Filocolo, the characters are shipwrecked on an island inhabited by monks, who are informed of Flor's imminent arrival. The monks are also informed that Saint Augustine himself will see to the lovers' conversion. There, Flor is inspired to convert, as are many of his cohorts.

(99) Lines 3009-10.

(100) This is a late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century text of the Alfonsine Chronicles. The version of Floire and Blancheflor inserted into the thirteenth-century text is believed to descend from a ninth-century version.