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Disciplinary Porosity

Translating Technology in the Middle English Floris and Blancheflour

Traduire la technologie dans le Floris and Blancheflour moyen anglais
Alicia Haniford
p. 85-99

Abstracts

Studies of the Middle English romance Floris and Blancheflour often approach it in relation to other medieval versions of this popular story, particularly its Old French source, and focus on the significance of changes that occurred during the process of translation. While this approach offers a productive avenue for considering the specific contexts and priorities of Middle English audiences, it also risks obscuring the significance of consistency as a deliberate translation choice, one that could nonetheless produce transformative readings as texts circulated in new social settings. This article argues that the urban environments and interests of a more socially diverse Middle English audience overwrote the foreign exoticism of the intricate Islamic hydraulic engineering that has been attributed to the French Floire et Blancheflor. Instead, the social and material context in which Floris was produced and read allows these technological details to be connected with localized concerns over resource management, complicating the text’s interest in questions of mercantilism, finance, and class identity.

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  • 1  The earliest extant copy of the Middle English Floris and Blancheflour is dated to the second half (...)
  • 2  Within the Old French tradition, for instance, the development of the “popular” version shortly af (...)

1When the Middle English romance Floris and Blancheflour began circulating in the mid to late thirteenth century,1 it joined what was already becoming a prolific and multilingual tradition across medieval Europe. Romance, already a porous genre, rendered visible the permeability and instability of cultural and political boundaries, both in its internal narrative interests and in its power to catch the imagination of audiences distinguished by distance, time, language, social background, and religion. Floris came from a tradition that was particularly well-travelled: by the end of the Middle Ages, versions of this tale existed in virtually every vernacular in Latin Christendom, including Old French, Low German, Old Icelandic, Old Norse, Ladino, Italian, Middle Dutch, and Old Spanish (Segol, 2003: 233). During the course of Floris’s transmission and reception, changes in form, structure, and narrative detail attest to the various social and cultural contexts in which the story was read and written, with the general narrative adapted to suit audience interests.2 While evidence of obvious adaptation suggests explicit divergences in the priorities and expectations of the tale’s audiences, it is more challenging to identify the inevitable differences that occurred in reading experiences as versions of the Floris story circulated through time and space. In other words, even where the text seems to have stayed superficially consistent, its passage across social, physical, and temporal borders was inflected by the distinct contexts of its diverse audiences.

  • 3  A growing body of scholarship has also begun to focus on the Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor, the n (...)
  • 4  For discussions of the broader meaning and use of gin/engin within and beyond romance, see Ingham (...)
  • 5  Grieve argues that the focus on engin in the French and Middle English versions of the text is con (...)

2Critical attention to texts within the Floris tradition has generally been dominated by the Old French aristocratic version of the text as well as its Middle English “translation,” including an interest in comparing these two versions of the story.3 Patricia Grieve and Patricia Ingham, among others, have both attended to the ways in which the Middle English Floris followed and diverged from its French source, focusing in particular on the textual role played by ingenuity (gin in Middle English, or engin in French).4 Grieve observes that the Middle English Floris retains from the French an emphasis on engin over divine intervention to drive the action of the narrative (1997: 55-56),5 while Ingham identifies descriptive details changed and eliminated by the Middle English poet to argue that the “repeated use of charm, of moderation, and of the modest sufficiency of youthful ingenuity works to establish a defanged, domesticated version of ingenium” (2015: 92). Gin and engin, terms that describe human ingenuity as well as the physical machines and devices that human ingenuity can produce, are central to the French and Middle English versions of this story, which feature fabulous crafted objects, elaborate Islamic architecture, and (in the French) mechanical statues, as well as a hero who succeeds through strategy and deception rather than martial prowess. Ingham’s work on Floris positions it in a broader medieval conversation about the status of the new, one that she argues was inflected by “radical expansions of possibility in realms of art and science” as well as ethical questions about invention and novelty (2015: 3-4).

3In addition to the text’s shifting engagement with its descriptions of physical and mental engin, the geographic and temporal translation from the aristocratic courts of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France to an increasingly urbanized fourteenth-century England produced a change in the material conditions in which audiences encountered Floris. That is, even where the Middle English Floris follows the French Floire quite closely, it was being written, read, and heard in a different social context, by audiences who had a different social, material, and ecological framework against which to set the text. My interest in Floris is in exploring how this context produced meaning; drawing on what Robert Rouse describes as a “spatial approach to the study of medieval texts” (2015: 41), I consider here how Floris’s crossing of geographic, temporal, linguistic, and social borders could produce a substantial transformation that was rooted in its audience reception, rather than its textual revision. Specifically, in a text so patently interested in invention, engineering, and economics, I suggest that the urban environments and interests of a more socially diverse Middle English audience overwrote the foreign exoticism of intricate Islamic engineering, instead connecting these textual details with localized concerns over resource management and complicating the text’s interest in questions of mercantilism, finance, and class identity.

Reading Romance in Place

  • 6  Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1, produced around 1330-1340 in London. (...)
  • 7  The other manuscripts in which Floris is extant are London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius D (...)
  • 8  See F.C. de Vries’s introduction to his edition of Floris for further explanation of the relations (...)
  • 9  See Murray McGillivray’s argument for the possibility of an oral tradition in the transmission of (...)

4Rouse’s “emplaced reading” of the Middle English narratives of St Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian in fifteenth-century London aims to “reconstruct what a particular narrative may have meant to a community of readers in a particular place at a particular time” (2015: 41). The Middle English Floris does not lend itself well to the specificity of this approach: of the four manuscripts in which it is extant, only one—the Auchinleck manuscript6—can be definitively traced in time and space; its other three extant manuscripts cannot be traced so precisely.7 Nonetheless, these manuscripts were read and heard by people who lived in specific social communities and material environments, as were the manuscripts of this popular text that are no longer extant but that must have existed. In Middle English alone, the temporal spread of Floris’s four extant manuscripts across the late thirteenth to around the start of the fifteenth century demonstrates the longevity of its popularity. While none of these four manuscripts served as a source for any of the others, three out of the four (Auchinleck, Egerton, and Vitellius) contain enough common readings that they have traditionally been approached as representing one version of the text, while Cambridge represents another version.8 This suggests the existence of two versions within fifty years of the text’s initial composition in English, with this rapid divergence possibly indicative of a strong oral tradition.9 Taken together with the widespread popularity of the tale in other languages, some versions of which may have been familiar to Middle English audiences, it is clear that the Middle English Floris was a popular story read and heard beyond the limited geographic range represented by its four extant manuscripts, and that there are thus a wide variety of local contexts in England across the fourteenth century in which this story, in various forms, might have been encountered.

  • 10  Similarly, Wacks observes differences between French and Iberian romance in how authors imagine ph (...)

5As Sharon Kinoshita observes of the French Floire, the complexity of its textual tradition seems to make it “resist identification with specific temporal or spatial coordinates” (2006: 78). Her own work historicizes and contextualizes the French Floire by demonstrating its engagement with the trade routes and interreligious relationships that connected the medieval Mediterranean, which functions not as “the uncharted space of exile and conquest, but as a world of cross-confessional contact and long-distance trade” (2006: 78). Other textual moments in the Floris tradition demonstrate an interest in reflecting some degree of realism that helps to contextualize the narrative for specific audiences. For instance, the Castilian Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor addresses the problem of language in its account of the meeting between Blancaflor’s French-speaking mother and the Arabic-speaking queen, an issue that other versions of the narrative gloss over. The Crónica explains that both women immediately warmed to each other, despite their language barrier, and that they taught each other their languages (Grieve, 1997: 8). Grieve suggests that this detail “indicates the Spanish chronicler’s awareness of what the public would question immediately: the linguistic barrier was clearly a familiar problem and not one to be glossed over without narratorial comment,” adding that the inclusion also points to the chronicler’s understanding of their text as one in which historicity and “realistic truth” mattered (1997: 8). Emily Houlik-Ritchey’s reading of the Crónica also suggests an awareness of, and interest in, the “extensive and complex Muslim geopolitics in the south and west Mediterranean,” with Flores “circulat[ing] within a Muslim prestige culture that extends from al-Andalus across to the North African Maghreb and eastward into Egypt” (2023: 134).10 As Rouse has argued, evaluating romance geography on the basis of what we would consider its accuracy misunderstands the priorities of medieval geography (2012: 136); without arguing for the “accuracy” of the Crónica’s geography over that of Floris, it is worth acknowledging that the Crónica’s geography is conceptualized differently in depicting a space that is more “local” and immediate than it would have been to Middle English audiences.

  • 11  Roy Michael Liuzza attributes to Havelok a unique “bourgeois realism,” characterized by its focus (...)
  • 12  See Susan Crane’s discussion of how this episode functions in Isumbras to “integrate faith with in (...)
  • 13  See Megan G. Leitch’s discussion of the roles played by merchants in Middle English romances and h (...)

6Where Middle English romances engage with more immediately proximate settings and activities, they often show a similar interest in contextual details, including a particular interest in details related to the performance of lower-class labour integral to the support of the broader local economy. Havelok the Dane describes Grim’s work as a fisherman, including a list of the specific types of fish caught and sold, as well as various other details of non-aristocratic life made relevant by Havelok’s humble social position in England.11 Sir Isumbras similarly subjects its hero to lower-class work, demonstrating a familiarity with the details of ironworking as it describes Isumbras’s seven-year journey from apprentice smith to journeyman that culminates with him making his own weapons and armour and riding into battle on a blacksmith’s horse.12 Moving beyond the traditional forms of physical labour shown in Havelok and Isumbras, many Middle English romances, including Floris, also show an interest in depicting merchants and mercantile activities in varying levels of detail.13 As Grieve suggests of the Crónica, the inclusion of these details reflects the knowledge of the texts’ creators, which is often assumed to come from their connections within their local community, in addition to reflecting their understanding of the expectations and interests of their audiences. Grieve remarks on the discussion of language in Crónica because it is a detail unique to this version of the narrative, one added to help translate the story for its audience; however, continuity between texts is also a deliberate creative choice, particularly when the process of translation and reinvention involves such extensive trimming and condensing of a text as the Middle English Floris. During the process of translation and composition, the decision to retain descriptive details similarly reflects an understanding on the part of the redactor that these details are important to the narrative overall, and that they would be of particular interest to the text’s new audiences.

Luxury, Necessity, and the Reality of Urban Hydraulics

  • 14  Not the ancient city in Iraq, but al-Qāhira (Cairo), the Fatimid capital until the late 1100s, whi (...)
  • 15  These mechanical statues warrant a lavish description in the French Floire, but disappear in the M (...)

7In his introduction to Floris, Erik Kooper observes that the condensing of the French Floire into the Middle English Floris is at times an imperfect process that leaves all versions of the text with “abrupt transitions, hiatuses, and loose ends” (2005: 1). The example he points to is the pillar in the Emir’s garden that contains a hydraulic pipe system designed to carry water to the maidens living in the tower. In the French Floire, and in the Cambridge version of Floris, the pillar is introduced in the lengthy description Darys provides to Floris outlining the details of the city of Babylon14 and the Emir’s garden and palace within the city. In the context of the French Floire, Kinoshita refers to this pillar as “an engineering marvel that conjoins the beauty of Fatimid rock crystal with the wonder of Islamic hydraulic technology” (2006: 93); it joins a collection of other textual moments that draw on the exoticism of marvellous Islamic technologies, including the mechanical birds that line the walls of the Emir’s garden and the mechanical statues of Floire and Blancheflor that adorn Blancheflor’s false tomb in the French text.15 After Darys’s initial description of the pillar, the plumbing system reappears when Claris draws water from it. Although the scene with Claris is present in all four Middle English versions, only Cambridge sets it up with Darys’s description; Auchinleck, Egerton, and Vitellius leave this detail out of Darys’s description of the Emir’s palace, so that Kooper describes the appearance of the pillar when Claris uses it coming as a “complete surprise” (2005: 1).

  • 16  This is not to say that Middle English text creators and audiences did not care about narrative co (...)
  • 17  “A well wrought with much ingenuity.” All quotations from Floris are taken from Kooper’s 2005 TEAM (...)
  • 18  The range of possible dates for the composition of the French Floire makes it challenging to consi (...)

8Middle English romance—indeed, medieval romance in general—often exhibits a general comfort with varying degrees of textual messiness, which should be recognized in any discussion of narrative confusion.16 Nonetheless, the narrative and social context in which this detail was omitted from some versions of Floris might have made the omission particularly acceptable in a way that had to do with the changing cultural resonance of the type of technology involved. Looking at the narrative context, although Auchinleck, Egerton, and Vitellius all omit Darys’s description of the pillar inside the tower, they do describe other hydraulic features of the Emir’s garden, notably the “welle” (656) “wrowt with mochel ginne” (657)17 that carries a stream from Paradise over a channel of gravel composed of “preciouse stone” (660), which imbue the water with the power to determine the status of a woman’s virginity when she washes her hands. Although this is distinct from the pillar in the tower, the ingeniously constructed stream in the garden gives a general sense that the Emir’s palace includes sophisticated water engineering systems. Turning to the social context, the Middle English Floris was written and copied over a period in England that saw rapid urbanization accompanied by significant population growth, two processes that put increased pressure on the ability of urban communities to supply their citizens with critical resources and public infrastructure, including water. As Roberta Magnusson explains, the eleventh century began to see the construction of new complex water systems, mostly concentrated in palaces and monasteries; the growth of cities in the thirteenth century, combined with the increasing power and organization of municipal governments, produced conditions where complex urban hydraulic systems that could supply cities with clean water were increasingly appealing and became administrative possibilities (2001: 6-7). Traditional methods of water distribution and access remained important alongside new hydraulic systems; not every community had the favourable geographical conditions, unobstructed access to land, collective political willpower, or access to resources required to invest in building new hydraulic systems. Still, Magnusson writes that “a significant minority of medieval communities did decide to take the risk of building complex hydraulic systems” (2001: 35). Their public placement as urban infrastructure, in addition to the communal effort involved in producing these systems and the circulation of knowledge and skilled labour that these projects necessitated, suggests a relative familiarity with these systems as public infrastructure with a material presence in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England.18

9Floris was thus translated into a social setting and time in which the type of hydraulic system that Kinoshita connects to the marvels of Islamic engineering had become less fantastic and exotic. This helps to contextualize the “loose end” Kooper points to in the Auchinleck, Egerton, and Vitellius versions of Floris; the general suggestion of hydraulic engineering in the Emir’s garden was perhaps sufficient to reduce confusion when the plumbing inside the tower is introduced without context. Considering this new social and material context has consequences for understanding how the presence of details like the garden description in the text might have shifted the meaning of the text for Middle English readers without the process of translation making substantive changes to the actual material of the text. The descriptions of the water systems in the garden that the Middle English redactors chose to keep helped to develop an emphasis on the relationship between the city of Babylon and the Emir in terms of resource distribution and management, an emphasis that might have been of particular interest to the audiences of Middle English romance, and one that connected to the broader set of social and economic concerns drawn out in the Middle English version of this story.

  • 19  Such marks of favour were not always granted willingly, demonstrating a keen awareness of the pres (...)

10With complex hydraulic systems becoming more familiar as material objects that had a real presence in medieval communities, they traded their exoticism for an entanglement with the real resources, labour, landscapes, and usage practices that their physical presence produced. Magnusson catalogues some of the challenges that accompanied the adoption of these systems: they were expensive, requiring extensive materials and skilled labour to construct; they required the acquisition of land or land access for the conveyance of water; their construction and repair sometimes damaged other public infrastructure, such as buildings and roads; they required organizing and overseeing ongoing maintenance; and they necessitated administrative regulation over usage rights (2001: 35). Once an urban hydraulic system had been adopted into a community, it quickly became popular amongst a wide variety of users, prompting constant demands for expanded services (2001: 31). In association with its convenience, infrastructure that facilitated private usage and delivery of water from public systems became a marker of favour and prestige. Beginning in the thirteenth century, private branch pipes that brought water from the urban system into personal residences began to appear, granted as marks of privilege; Magnusson cites the example of the warden of the king’s works at Westminster, whom Henry III granted “the right to take a private pipe the diameter of a goose quill to his court in Westminster” in 1244, possibly in gratitude for the warden’s oversight of the construction of Westminster Palace’s conduit and the large sum of money the warden had supplied to support the project (2001: 31).19 The technology that made such legitimate luxuries possible could also, of course, be adopted illicitly, leading to instances in which water was diverted for private use without permission. One late example of this kind of illicit use in London demonstrates the administrative interest in making a public example of perpetrators by explicitly broadcasting the nature of their crimes. In 1478, William Campion was found to have illicitly attached a pipe to the public conduit to bring water to his house; his public punishment involved being made to ride through the streets with ‘‘a vessel like unto a conduit full of water upon his head, the same water running by small pipes out of the same vessel,” which was refilled whenever it ran dry (quoted in Magnusson, 2001: 32). Literally and figuratively, his punishment re-enacted the misuse of public resources for personal use.

  • 20  The charge of stream diversion brought against John Snake et al. (a group of defendants that inclu (...)
  • 21  In addition to arguing that the villagers’ use of the Nenewater was legitimate, Triplet turns the (...)

11In addition to individual acts of illicit water siphoning, like William Campion’s, larger groups of citizens might mobilize to construct and protect unlicensed hydraulic infrastructure that served a communal network of private homes. In 1387 at Emneth, in Norfolk, John Snake and other villagers were brought to the king’s court by Sir Reynold Hagbech for trespass for diverting a stream known as the Nenewater and “distributing the water in turn among their dwellings through a subterranean network of lead and wood pipes” (Magnusson, 2001: 32). The villagers openly admitted to diverting the stream to distribute water via the pipe system, but also argued that they had a right to do so, “on the grounds that everyone in the village had done so from time immemorial” (Magnusson, 2001: 32).20 The record of the case presented by John Triplet, their lawyer, lays out the details of the environmental circumstances in which this practice was undertaken (in times of drought, when the stream in Emneth had dried up); the method of diversion (an “old course” through the commons between the villages of Well and Emneth); the infrastructure through which water would be delivered to private dwellings in the village (“if anyone wanted to draw [the water] to his dwelling by the highway or some higher route he ought to draw it by underground leaden and wooden pipes, thus not interfering with common ways or cultivation of anyone’s land there”); and the cooperative practices by which water was distributed equally (a villager would draw sufficient water for their needs, then block up the pipe and allow another villager to do the same, and so on) (Arnold, 1987: 356).21 The argument presented here positions the villagers’ use of the stream, and the infrastructure that facilitated that use, as a communal and cooperative project in times of adverse environmental conditions. Moreover, in subsuming the hydraulic system into the broader argument about the permissibility of the villagers’ behaviour, the case makes a deliberate effort to position both technology and practice as established, accepted, and unremarkable. Hydraulic infrastructure here is naturalized and stripped of its novelty through efforts to position it retrospectively, a move motivated by a legal dispute over resource usage rights.

12Ultimately, the reality of living in urban (and, sometimes, rural) spaces served by complex hydraulic systems meant understanding that these technologies, though intricate and impressive, did not magically produce unlimited resources, and were entangled in community politics about who was able to use them, and how. Both the technological systems and the broader tensions over resource usage in which they were involved would have helped to produce a referential framework for readers encountering and interpreting foreign locales described in romance, even when Middle English romances themselves chose not to linger over detailed descriptions. As Andrew Richmond argues, the landscapes and waterscapes of Middle English romance, “through the reflection of real-life experiences and anxieties, invited contemporary readers to layer their motif-laden narratives across real-world environments” (2021: 2). The ostensibly foreign setting of romances like Floris were not a barrier to identification with English landscapes and resource management practices; rather, these familiar features provide a lens through which to understand their foreignness.

Social Critique and the Gendering of the Social Body

  • 22  “Every day there is trading in; there is no day throughout the year that trading is not in progres (...)
  • 23  “Shines at night as the sun does during the day.”
  • 24  “Mortar made so well, no man might break it with any steel.”
  • 25  “To behold that same tower, and to learn and to try to make another [tower] in your land.”
  • 26  In medieval Europe, knowledge transfer for a variety of specialized streams of technological desig (...)

13In Floris, Darys’s description of Babylon foregrounds its dazzling splendour, but also its familiarity: it is a city with walls and gates that is the site of constant commercial activity, where “everich dai cheping is inne; / Nis no dai thourg the yer / That scheping nis therinne plener” (592-594).22 The centrality of trade in this description establishes Babylon as a transit point for the foreign goods that would have been recognizable literary and material objects to English audiences, but the sparsity of detail also invites comparison with English cities, including the material and social systems that supported the presence of trade and that would have been more immediately familiar to audiences. Right in the middle of Babylon stands the Emir’s palace, drawing the eye through its enormous height and the “pomel” at its peak that “schineth anight so adai doth the sonne” (619-620).23 Although located at the centre of the bustling city, the text’s focus on the details of the palace’s construction emphasizes its impenetrability; the tower consists of “morter […] maked so wel, / Ne mai no man hit breke with no stel” (613-614),24 and in addition to the physical impenetrability built into its architectural design, entrance and exit from the tower is carefully policed by guards. The contents of the palace, including the elaborate hydraulic engineering in its garden and tower, are thus segregated from the broader community and isolated for the personal pleasure of the Emir, just like the twenty-four maidens who live in the tower are kept for his personal marital use, rather than circulating in the broader feudal economy of matrimony and heterosexual reproduction. The sequestering of water and women are not just parallel behaviours, but intimately connected; the conduit in the garden polices the sexual behaviour of the Emir’s maidens, while the plumbing in the tower serves the needs of the maidens who live there. Moreover, this problem is not safely contained within the city of Babylon, but threatens to spread along the same networks of trade, travel, and cultural influence that have been so instrumental in moving both Floris and Blancheflour around the Mediterranean. When Darys instructs Floris on how to infiltrate the tower to reach Blancheflour, he advises Floris to tell the tower guard that he is a “ginour” (engineer) who has come “to biheld that ilche tour, / And for to lerne and for to fonde / To make another in thi londe” (712-713).25 Although this is another of Floris’s disguises, the social role he takes on here suggests the circulation of technical knowledge through the replication of existing material systems. Floris’s fib positions the tower as the object of his study and states his intention to copy its design in his own homeland, a proposal rooted in real practices of technical knowledge-exchange.26

  • 27  The stream through the garden, discussed above, is used to evaluate the virginity of the maidens i (...)

14Darys’s description of the tower makes it apparent that the building and all its systems have been constructed for the purposes of policing the Emir’s collection of young women and allowing them to have their basic needs fulfilled in captivity. In proposing to copy the tower, therefore, Floris suggests the possibility that the work of the “ginour” may involve replicating not just the technical details of particular components but the entire architectural unit and the social arrangement of power and resources that it helps to shape. In addition to the localised grievances and disputes that the Emir’s elite extravagance might have evoked, Eleanor Johnson’s work on waste and ecosystemic thought in late medieval England suggests how the Emir’s overconsumption and its specific connection to the misuse of natural resources might have resonated with broader literary and cultural concerns. Bringing together legal and spiritual understandings of the concept of waste, Johnson describes waste as a social act that affects the community; misspending or misusing resources limits the availability of those resources for others in need. Johnson’s readings of Middle English texts point to an awareness that the overconsumption and misuse of land resources by the wealthy, in connection with the increasing privatisation of land, contributed to conditions of widespread food precarity that had been created through bad weather, degrading soil quality, and population growth (2023: 13). In Floris, overconsumption and misuse are precisely the Emir’s problems, framed in terms specific to romance: he hoards beautiful maidens, “misspending” them through his serial monogamy, which involves taking a new wife every year, only to have her executed at the start of the next year so he can marry again. The tower facilitates this misuse, allowing the enclosure of the women, diverting resources to support them, and dedicating further resources towards policing their purity and legitimizing the Emir’s annual selection of a new wife.27

  • 28  Brainerd suggests that the “hypergrieving” (2000: 83) of romance allows its lesser noble figures t (...)
  • 29  Houlik-Ritchey borrows the term “affective economy” from Sarah Ahmed, summarizing Ahmed’s concept (...)
  • 30  See Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s argument that Blancheflour’s enslavement is critical to the narrative a (...)

15The relationship suggested here between material infrastructure, resource misuse and heterosexual romance connects to a broader tendency of Middle English romance to map financial success (and failure) onto success (and failure) in love. Madeleine Brainerd reads early romance as conflating heterosexual love with financial wealth, with the pain and joy of love figuring financial anxiety and success.28 Houlik-Ritchey draws on Brainerd’s work in her own analysis of Floris, which she sees “conjoin[ing] the circulation and transmission of emotion to the circulation and transmission of love” to create an “affective economy,” literally “commodifying love itself” (2023: 104).29 For Houlik-Ritchey, Floris depicts a trade market in which Floris’s emotions can be commodified just as easily as Blancheflour’s body (2023: 111),30 with emotion operating “like an infinitely renewable resource or a savings account that accrues infinite interest” (2023: 126). Although Houlik-Ritchey is rightfully critical of the “disturbing” implications of this transformation (2023: 111), the contrast set up between Floris and the Emir in terms of their relationships with women also suggests a contrast between different models of resource usage. Blancheflour’s presence is critical to Floris’s wellbeing: as a child, he claims he is only able to attend lessons if Blancheflour accompanies him (18-22), and when his parents tell him Blancheflour has died, he is so distraught that he prepares to kill himself (271-288). Floris embodies the traditional values of a romance hero fully committed to a single woman, and, as Houlik-Ritchey’s reading suggests, in market terms this becomes a productive relationship, not only allowing Floris’s emotions to accrue value as he reiterates them across the Mediterranean but also circulating the literal wealth that he brings with him to support his initial “disguise” as a merchant. The emotional performance between Floris and Blancheflour when they are caught together by the Emir in Blancheflour’s bed produces the social capital not only to move the Emir to mercy in sparing them, but also to encourage him to reform his habitual hoarding of beautiful women. In the symbolic language of romance, socially responsible practices of usage are not just beneficial because they satisfy individual needs, but have the performative power to correct overconsumption in those who have the wealth, influence, and opportunity required to overconsume. That the Emir can be reformed without converting to Christianity demonstrates the text’s sense that this is not fundamentally a problem of faith but one that stems from a disconnect between individual elites and their broader social worlds.

16The social context in which the Middle English Floris was produced and read facilitates tying the Emir’s overconsumption to the broader networks of physical infrastructure and resource use that supported this category of behaviour, connecting a romance problem to broader literary and cultural concerns with misspending, privatisation, and other wasteful behaviours by the wealthy that exacerbated social suffering. In the Emir’s eventual decision to free Floris and Blancheflour, and to take Claris as his long-term wife, he demonstrates an ability to recognize the broader social consequences of his greed and a commitment to reorienting his appetite—both critical qualities in maintaining effective relationships between elites and the urban communities they governed. Yet the romance terms in which Floris establishes this critique rely on the commodification—figuratively and literally—of the bodies of Blancheflour, Claris, and the text’s other nameless women. In Brainerd’s discussion of the way romance hierarchizes the suffering of its knights above all other social groups, she argues that romance depictions of the suffering of peasants, women, exploited labourers, and shunned misfits produce “elements of social critique that remain in tension with [romance’s] final hoarding of the goods—martyrdom—for knighthood alone” (2000: 75). Floris presents a social critique that is deeply reliant upon this “hoarding of the goods,” cautioning against patterns of misuse and overconsumption that harm the greater (masculine) social body through the commodified bodies of women. In doing so, Floris prompts us as contemporary readers to consider the real bodies implicated in the figurative language of social reform, and to consider the complex and contentious interplay of identities involved in articulating visions of social responsibility.

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Bibliography

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Notes

1  The earliest extant copy of the Middle English Floris and Blancheflour is dated to the second half of the thirteenth century, although it has been suggested Floris might first have been composed earlier, around 1250. This could place it only a few decades after the composition of its source, the “aristocratic” Floire et Blancheflor, which some scholars date to 1200-1225; other scholars have suggested an earlier composition, around 1150-1170. For an explanation of these dates, see Maria Segol (2003: 233-234) and Patricia Grieve (1997: 15-50). See also Sofia Lodén and Vanessa Obry’s discussion of the diversity of possible influences behind Floire (2022: 7).

2  Within the Old French tradition, for instance, the development of the “popular” version shortly after its earlier “aristocratic” source suggests the different reading interests of a more socially diverse audience. In contrast to the “aristocratic” Floire, which scholars consider a roman idyllique, the “popular” French Floire shows greater influence from the chansons de geste tradition and places a greater emphasis on military achievement. See Grieve’s analysis of the textual variants in the Floire tradition for an overview of some of the key differences (1997: 15-50). Unless otherwise noted, references to the French Floire in this paper will refer to the aristocratic version.

3  A growing body of scholarship has also begun to focus on the Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor, the name given by Grieve to the version of this story interpolated into the Estoria de España. See Grieve (1997); Segol (2003); David Wacks (2015); and Emily Houlik-Ritchey (2023: 99-165).

4  For discussions of the broader meaning and use of gin/engin within and beyond romance, see Ingham (2015: 7-12) and Jonathan Morton (2020).

5  Grieve argues that the focus on engin in the French and Middle English versions of the text is converted into a focus on the power of divine intervention in later translations, transforming the roman idyllique into a religious romance (54). Also notable is the substitution of military strength for engin in the French popular Floris and the Crónica; in the context of the Crónica, Houlik-Ritchey describes how the emphasis on Flores’s public performance of military power supports his accrual of social capital in the political world of Muslim Iberia (152).

6  Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1, produced around 1330-1340 in London. For an overview of research on this manuscript, see Susanna Fein (2016: 1-10).

7  The other manuscripts in which Floris is extant are London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius D.iii, dated to before 1300; Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27, dated to around 1300; and London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862, dated to the late fourteenth century.

8  See F.C. de Vries’s introduction to his edition of Floris for further explanation of the relationships between the manuscripts (1996).

9  See Murray McGillivray’s argument for the possibility of an oral tradition in the transmission of Middle English romance (1990).

10  Similarly, Wacks observes differences between French and Iberian romance in how authors imagine physiological differences between Muslims and Christians. The French Aucassin and Nicolette depicts Christians chemically darkening their skin to “pass” as Saracens; in contrast, in the Iberian Paris y Viana, “passing” as a Muslim just requires changing clothes, growing facial hair, and speaking Arabic (2015: 5).

11  Roy Michael Liuzza attributes to Havelok a unique “bourgeois realism,” characterized by its focus on “non-courtly characters, town life, labor and money, pathos and poverty” (1994: 504).

12  See Susan Crane’s discussion of how this episode functions in Isumbras to “integrate faith with involvement in profane affairs” (1986: 129). See also Lee Manion’s argument that this element of Isumbras contributes to the articulation of a vision of “crusading reform and action for a mixed audience of lesser knights and non-nobles” (2010: 66).

13  See Megan G. Leitch’s discussion of the roles played by merchants in Middle English romances and how these roles might reflect the changing social makeup of audiences (2022).

14  Not the ancient city in Iraq, but al-Qāhira (Cairo), the Fatimid capital until the late 1100s, which was referred to as Babylon by medieval Europeans (Kinoshita, 2006: 91).

15  These mechanical statues warrant a lavish description in the French Floire, but disappear in the Middle English Floris to be replaced with a simple plaque. See Ingham’s discussion of the significance of this substitution (2015: 92).

16  This is not to say that Middle English text creators and audiences did not care about narrative consistency, or that all text creators had the same priorities. For instance, see Judith Weiss’s description of the narrative inconsistencies in the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone and the efforts made by Middle English redactors to smooth over some of these issues (1986: 240).

17  “A well wrought with much ingenuity.” All quotations from Floris are taken from Kooper’s 2005 TEAMS edition of the text.

18  The range of possible dates for the composition of the French Floire makes it challenging to consider the material details of the social contexts in which the text’s earliest French audiences would have encountered it, although the more precise dating of the extant manuscripts of Floire can at least offer a temporal setting in which later copies would have been read. The purpose of this article is not to establish a French context to contrast against the English context; however, it is worth noting some additional textual and paratextual details of the French Floire that might have influenced its reception. Firstly, as is suggested by its designation as the “aristocratic” French Floire, a courtly audience likely had a different relationship to any material hydraulic infrastructure that might have been familiar to them. Secondly, the description of the elaborate tomb with its surrounding garden and mechanical statues in the French is an obvious parallel to the Emir’s palace, which would have inflected the narrative framework in which the Emir’s palace and its various features are encountered; the English Floris simplifies and condenses the tomb description considerably, eliminating this parallel.

19  Such marks of favour were not always granted willingly, demonstrating a keen awareness of the pressure that private pipes put on the capacity of the system as a whole. Magnusson describes the archdeacon of Chester in 1280 “badger[ing] the dean and the chapter until they granted him permission to attach a small pipe to their main line [of the Lichfield Cathedral conduit] and run it to his house on Beacon Street,” adding that “the reluctant grantors did their best to limit the damage: the archdeacon was allowed to open his pipe only when he was actually at Lichfield, and ‘when he retires or dies this pipe shall be removed and no successor of his shall have any claim to it’” (2001: 31).

20  The charge of stream diversion brought against John Snake et al. (a group of defendants that included another knight, John de Ingoldisthorpe) was part of a larger case, in which John Snake et al. were also accused of assaulting Reynold’s servants and preventing them from undertaking agricultural labour for Reynold, resulting in lost profits (Arnold, 1987: 354-355). Reynold’s specific complaints about the stream were that its diversion meant he could not use it for his animals, for conducting business such as brewing, and for repairing mud walls (1987: 356-357). The villagers denied the other charges, but agreed that they had diverted the stream (1987: 356-357).

21  In addition to arguing that the villagers’ use of the Nenewater was legitimate, Triplet turns the problem back on Reynold by claiming that Reynold had created a pond that drew water out of stream for his own use, interfering with John de Ingoldisthorpe’s lands; this compelled John de Ingoldisthorpe to dam the pond so that the stream was returned to its usual course, which he did with the aid of the villagers (Arnold, 1987: 356-357).

22  “Every day there is trading in; there is no day throughout the year that trading is not in progress there.”

23  “Shines at night as the sun does during the day.”

24  “Mortar made so well, no man might break it with any steel.”

25  “To behold that same tower, and to learn and to try to make another [tower] in your land.”

26  In medieval Europe, knowledge transfer for a variety of specialized streams of technological design lacked codified training programs or manuals, and knowledge transfer seems to have occurred through informal networks; see Magnusson’s discussion of knowledge transfer in relation to the construction of hydraulic systems (2001: 19-20). Magnusson’s work points to the circulation of skilled craftsmen and opportunities for them to observe existing works as critical channels through which technical knowledge spread. Moreover, the direction of transmission in Floris, with the “ginour” Floris coming from Iberia to observe architectural work in Cairo, suggests an awareness of the geographical direction in which technical knowledge was perceived as flowing.

27  The stream through the garden, discussed above, is used to evaluate the virginity of the maidens in the tower. When choosing his new wife for the coming year, the Emir relies on the power of the “Tre of Love” (678), a beautiful, ever-flowering tree that stands “at the welle heved” (“at the well head,” 676). “Thourh art and thourgh enchantement” (“through cunning and through enchantment,” 687), the Emir can influence the workings of the tree so that its flowers fall upon his preferred maiden.

28  Brainerd suggests that the “hypergrieving” (2000: 83) of romance allows its lesser noble figures to “steal” pain from other groups, such as women and lower-class townspeople, “reshaping and condensing” this pain for the “dispossessed men of the lesser nobility” (2000: 86). Placing romance in the context of the waning social and economic power of knights from the late 1100s onwards, Brainerd suggests that “romance’s production of hierarchized suffering […] formed, in part, a contribution to the compensatory self-representation of the knightly subclass in crisis” (2000: 76).

29  Houlik-Ritchey borrows the term “affective economy” from Sarah Ahmed, summarizing Ahmed’s concept as a process “wherein emotions are produced, and accrue increased potency and value, as an effect of their circulation” (2023: 103). Houlik-Ritchey points out that while Ahmed uses the financial aspect metaphorically, the Middle English Floris “conjoins the circulation and transmission of emotion to the circulation and exchange of money, literalizing the analogy” (2023: 104).

30  See Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s argument that Blancheflour’s enslavement is critical to the narrative and her critique of the “charm” conventionally associated with Floris (1994: 101-102).

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References

Bibliographical reference

Alicia Haniford, “Translating Technology in the Middle English Floris and BlancheflourRecherches anglaises et nord-américaines, 59 | 2025, 85-99.

Electronic reference

Alicia Haniford, “Translating Technology in the Middle English Floris and BlancheflourRecherches anglaises et nord-américaines [Online], 59 | 2025, Online since 30 June 2025, connection on 17 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ranam/1779; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/148d1

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About the author

Alicia Haniford

University of British Columbia.

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