Floire and Blancheflor and the European romance

Floire & Blancheflor and the European Romance. By Patricia E. Grieve. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. xiii + 240 pages. Professor Grieves Floire and Blancheflor (FB) is a construct rather than a "thing." To be sure, a paradigmatic plot unites all surviving versions: a Muslim boy and a Christian girl grow up together, they eventually fall in love, but religious and class differences render their union impossible, and they are forcibly separated from one another. Unbearably distressed, Floire goes in search of his beloved. After many adventures, the lovers are reunited and all ends well. Grieves forematter and initial chapter review scholarship devoted to the FB tale over the past century and a half. However, rather than propose alternative ways of looking at her material, as, e.g., Joseph Be dier did with respect to Gaston Paris' approach to the Old French fabliaux, she employs an essentially genetic, and "positivist," stance in order to situate a Spanish version of the story inserted in a fourteenth-c. reworking of the Alfonsine Estonia de Espana (Biblioteca Nacional Ms 7583, discovered by Jose Gomez Perez in the early 1960s), a text she labels the Cronica de Flores y Blancaflor. Grieve contends, then, that the existence of this Spanish work requires our reexamining issues of chronology and priority of the many texts reflecting her "European" Romance of Floire and Blancheflor. G6mez' discovery, she avers, hints at the anteriority of a lost Arabic, or (eventually Christianized) Hispano-Arabic, Ur-Roman predating the earliest surviving European versions-the two OFr verse traditions dating from the twelfth century. Certain traits of the Middle Dutch and Old Norse versions of FB are replicated in BN Ms 7583, and that fact suggests that all three eventually derive from a lost common source, probably Iberian. Many conjectures are embedded in this study; space limitations permit discussion of only one. As Grieve notes, while the lovers are together in bed (40-1), "Claris dissembles when the emir questions her about Blancheflor's lateness one morning: `Gloris respont: >' (Vv. 2534-36, ed. Leclanche MS A). `Chris, essaying to explain/Said, >' (Vv. 2332-5, Hubert [tr.]). Grieve further remarks that the kind of book read by our heroine is not mentioned, yet it is identified as a "religious book" in the Dutch, the Norse, the MHG, as well as in the "southern version" offered by MS BN 7583. This leads her to claim that "the southern version and the other northern versions derive from another strain." But nothing in Leclanche's OFr text contradicts one's imputing a religious nature to Blancheflor's book. On the contrary, OFr a joie, improperly Englished (for the rhyme's sake?) as `delight,' frequently carries the implication of spiritual wholeness and serenity in OFr, as in the pope's admonition to the Romans saddened by St. Alexis' death ("Cui que seit duels, a nostre ues est il joie") in OFr Life of Saint Alexis (ca. 10801100). Also, is it not quite proper that a young Christian maiden spend time browsing in her Psalter? Claris surely is attempting to convince a skeptical emir with regard to her friend's virtue by describing her as seeking his spiritual well-being. Furthermore, whereas in OFr a joie's spiritual connotations of joy would have been self-evident, thereby rendering the specification of the book's nature superfluous, Grieve does not make clear that the same prevails, or does not prevail, in the other languages she adduces. I know of no Castilian counterpart to OFr joi or joie apart from goce and its congeners; by the fourteenth century that term's other, erotically charged meanings may have rendered its use in this context hazardous. Meanwhile, the Provencalism gioia certainly thrived in thirteenth- and fourteenth-c. …