The Constance Saga in the First Half of the 14th Century: Plot and Genre Transformations

Examines the evolution of a plot that emerged and developed in Western European literature in the 13th century and was later called The Constance Saga . Over the past century of research into stories that embody this plot and that form a unity based on the motif of the ‘accused queen’ or ‘calumniated wife’, no single plot formula has been presented for them and no trends in the plot genesis of this Saga have been identified. In this article, the author assumes that the formula for the plot common for stories in this unity consists of two fundamental situations: 1) ‘separation from the family’, consists of the motifs marriage, pregnancy, the husband leaves his wife for a long time on business, substitution of letters between spouses, unfair accusation of the wife and her punishment by exile; 2) ‘reunion’, represents recognition and a meeting after a long time.Each of these situations is preceded by its own motivational complex. Our task was to trace the extent to which the elements of the motivational complexes were fixed, whether new free motives appeared among them and whether they were associated with the choice of genre form for a specific text that embodied this plot with its four-part formula. The material for the study was the works of the first half of the 14th century: The History of the Countess of Anjou by Jean Maillard, the story of Marguerite from Scala Coeli by Jean Goby the Younger, the anonymous History of the Daughter of the King of Hungary and the story of Constance from The Chronicles by Nicholas Trevet. The main conclusions of the study: in the first three stories, minor introduced motives did not violate the established formula and at the same time turned out to be associated with a new genre form, and in Trevet’s work, revolutionary transformations were discovered that did not violate the two plot-forming events, but redefined the initial motivational complex, eliminating the theme of incest from the traditional story, and at the same time demonstrated the multi-genre nature of the story.