Genre and Intergenre in Medieval French Literature* Sara Sturm-Maddox & Donald Maddox T HE FACT THAT modern genre theory often pays scant attention to the literary production of the Middle Ages, or avoids it altogether, may be due in part to the special, particularly prob lematic case created by the vast universe of medieval textualities. On the one hand, the criterion of form common to many theoretical statements is singularly unhelpful with regard to the earliest phase of vernacular lit erature in Europe, in which verse, very often octosyllabic verse, was the almost exclusive literary medium, not only of the lyric but of works rang ing in their conventional classification from hagiography to epic to romance to historiography; on the other hand, various and shifting publics and performative contexts—oral/written, learned/popular— render descriptive categorization highly speculative. Early vernacular literary production, moreover, took place in the virtual absence of theo retical pronouncements concerning generic properties.1 One finds sporadic evidence of systems of classification founded on matières, as in Jehan Bodel’s distinction among the matières de France, de Rome, and de Bretagne.2While such divisions may be identified as components of certain genres, they are not in themselves determinants of genre; Wace’s Brut, introducing the Arthurian material into the vernacular, identifies his own work as both “geste” and “ romanz.” 3 As the critical attention of recent decades has focused diversely on these questions, entrenched assumptions about how individual texts relate to the larger literary system have increasingly come to be perceived as inadequate for our understanding of medieval literary practice. From a diachronic perspective, for example, it is apparent that “ it is the literary masterpiece, not the learned treatise, that provides the rules of the genre.” 4 Seminal texts—the Hildesheim manuscript of the Vie de Saint Alexis, the Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, the Harley manuscript of the lais of Marie de France, etc.—become the measure for those that follow; a spate of “imitations,” “ rewritings,” and “ continuations” affirm that the earliest romans “ define” the genre, both for poets and for audiences. Yet there are early and significant Vol. XXXIII, No. 4 3 L ’E sprit C réateur movements away from the norms that might be inferred from this early corpus, and difficulties of classification soon arise as successive texts assert their individuality. As the list of texts subjected to critical scrutiny lengthens to include more and more “ non-canonical” works, it becomes apparent that the description and classification of medieval literary pro duction in the vernacular must be based, not on a set of liminal cate gories afforded by established poetic conventions, but on the works themselves. For these reasons, Hans Robert Jauss’s lament that surveys of litera ture still adhere to nineteenth-century generic classifications, themselves based on canons founded in Antiquity and revived in the modern “ classical” period, was nothing less than a challenge to reframe the ques tion of genre (art. cit.). Since then, the question has opened onto a broad cross-section of sometimes complementary, yet often competing theo retical perspectives. In the case of medieval works, the traditional generic designations have been augmented by sub-categories, e.g., “ historical romance” or “ religious romance,” 5 and new categories have been pro posed, e.g., in this issue, “ genealogy” and “ pseudo-autobiography.” 6 Attention has been called to the mobility of matière among genres, as in the case of “ romance” elements introduced into “ epic” texts.7Among other recent suggestions, Paul Zumthor distinguished between “ registre” and “genre littéraire”: while he characterizes a lyric genre as “ un groupement de thèmes, actualisés dans une certaine forme très générale,” a “registre” is a lexical, rhetorical, and stylistic level of coherence which may cut across, or “traverse,” several genres without becoming com pletely identified with any one of them.8 Eugene Vance, on the other hand, invokes “ la problématique du signe” with regard to the evolution of medieval literary genres and the creation of works that appear to be anomalous.9Jauss, arguing that a “ process of the continuous establish ing and altering of horizons... determines the relationship of the indi vidual text to...