Christian Encodings of Romance Space
摘要
The present chapter focuses on the Christian structuration of space, examining first the complex imbrications of aristocratic and clerical spaces in the Middle English Breton lays. Connections between the ordinary space of the “storyworld” and the Christian “metaspace” are shown to support aristocratic pre-eminence, while the position of the Church of Rome is obliquely questioned in the lays. The Christian hermeneutic understanding of space is nevertheless consistently upheld in the lays, tending in some poems towards the reconstruction of narrative space as a unified, orderly whole in which benevolent supernatural powers prevail. Breton lays thus stage the uneasy cohabitations between two competing articulations of religious space and aristocratic space.