Narrating Power The Conventions of Kingship in Twelfth-Century France, 1100-1223

This dissertation analyzes the conventions of French royal power during the long twelfth century. It utilizes a combination of narrative texts, such as a work of political theory, Latin chronicles, and French vernacular romances, the latter of which are especially undervalued by scholars as works of fiction. These sources are read through a lens of narratology, which is a corpus of scholarship that is concerned with the creation of meaning through storytelling. It argues that the ways in which French kings operate, as evidenced by their roles in a given narrative, suggest that kingship and its construction was a topic that many people explored, and understood in the same way, during the twelfth century. Chapter One analyzes the ways in which a work of political theory, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, describes medieval government and the role of the king, both as an ideal ruler (the princeps) and his opposite, the tyrant. His construction of the ideal royal government is then compared with narrative sources in Chapter Two, which argues that twelfth-century authors who lived before and after John shared, at a fundamental level, expectations of the convention role of an ideal king, which tend to emphasize the monarch’s role as a protector of the kingdom’s people and churches. Chapter Three demonstrates that authors of the twelfth century understood tyrants with the same criteria as John and that the behaviors that they note of a dysfunctional king follow an exact inversion of the conventions of kingship. Chapter Four argues that when a king is distanced from the bureaucratic apparatus that supports his power, especially as seen in crusade narratives, his duties remain consistent, if perhaps more violent. Together, these chapters suggest that one may judge a king according to his attempt to act according to the conventions of his office, which are predicated upon a complex relationship between the incumbent monarch, his subjects, and the Church.