Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier's Middle Ages

by Michelle R. Warren

Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) was one of the most famous scholars of his day. He held prestigious posts and lectured throughout Europe and the United States, an activity unusual for an academic of his time. A scholar of the French Middle Ages, he translated Tristan and Isolde as well as France's national epic, The Song of Roland . Bédier was publicly committed to French hegemony, yet he hailed from a culture that belied this ideal-the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean.


In Creole Medievalism , Michelle Warren demonstrates that Bédier's relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. Warren shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the "colonial novel," adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies. Probing the work of a once famous but little understood cultural figure, Creole Medievalism illustrates how postcolonial France and Réunion continue to grapple with histories too varied to meet expectations of national unity.

Genres: History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[nora · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive and cogent account of the intertwined relationship between colonialism and medievalism from the 19th century to the present, as particularly told through the biography of one white creole academic. I found Warren’s latter chapters a bit weaker as she breaks out of the arc of her narrative—in part because I haven’t read Roland—but nevertheless learned a lot about French nationalism and its medieval inflections.