Overview

This book is a study of authorial, first-person prologues and epilogues to medieval writings from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The author focuses on genuinely prefatory material, separable from, yet linked to, the text it introduces, in which the author addresses his audience or patron directly, and the author excludes those prologues that act as the opening scene of a fiction. The texts are selected historical, literary, and didactic works from England and France, written in medieval Latin, Old French, and Middle English (the author also discusses a few Old English prologues). One chapter focuses on luxury illuminated presentation manuscripts of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which the prologue is preceded by a miniature of the author offering his or her work to a royal or noble patron, thus utilizing both verbal and visual means of presentation. Medieval prologues and epilogues can be viewed as paratexts before the advent of printing. Gerard Genette terms the 'paratext'--'an undecided zone between the inside and the outside', or 'the fringe of the printed text which, in reality, controls the whole reading'. This 'fringe . . . constitutes, between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition, but of transaction; the privileged site of a pragmatics and of a strategy, of an action on the public in the service . . . of a better reception of the text'. Medieval writers inherited from classical rhetoric a repertoire of rhetorical conventions and linguistic strategies that enabled them to enact the transaction required of the paratext, to establish in first-person prologues a relationship with their readers or patrons, and secure their attention and good-will. Such prefatory strategies as formulas of submission, compliments to the patron, and accounts of the genesis of the work are common features crossing generic boundaries. Similar strategies are also utilized in medieval epilogues; thus prologue and epilogue together constitute a liminal frame to the work. One of the most frequently employed conventions of the medieval liminal frame is the humility topos, in which the author apologizes for his inadequacy and lack of skill, his reluctance to engage on the project. Yet, at the same time, he is also concerned to provide his credentials, to establish his authority to write. Submission does not mean self-effacement: on the contrary, the direct and often personal relationship of the author with his reader or patron invites, even requires, self-definition. Thus many prologues become self-referential, even autobiographical. It is in the liminal discourse that the author can fashion a role for him- or herself, and construct a relationship with both the reader and the text. This study focuses on the individual writers' use of the conventions a) to create an individual voice, b) to authorize themselves as writers, and c) to manipulate their readers' response to the text that is framed.

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