11 - Rewriting Divine Favour

Summary

Tangible manifestations of divine favour abound in popular romances. Visible and invisible heavenly messengers offer advice, warning and admonition, and otherwise intervene in the affairs of the hero. At times unsolicited and even unwelcome, such interventions are more often the result of a direct request for assistance from above. Like many other elements of the popular romance, the hero's plea for divine help tends to be formulated in fairly conventional terms. It elicits a response that is invariably positive but can assume a variety of forms, the variability helping to maintain narrative tension in a genre that needs to make intelligent and nuanced use of predictability in order to keep the listener listening and the reader reading. The relationship between God and hero thus changes from text to text, but it changes diachronically too, so that over time a gradual shift is observed in the representation of divine favour. The thirteenth century sees especially pointed changes. Roughly speaking, and with due awareness of the dangers of generalisation, a reasonably sharp distinction can be made between texts written around 1200 and those written after 1300, with a more mixed picture in the intervening years. I would like to sketch out some of these changes in very broad terms by looking at a handful of prominent instances of divine favour in multiple versions of two popular, widespread, and very different narratives: the stories of Amis and Amiloun and of Bevis (Boeve in his Anglo-Norman incarnation) of Hampton.

In the Middle English Amis and Amiloun, a romance with two heroes rather than one, divine meddling is so prominent that the narrative has often been described as a ‘secular hagiography’. Three divine interventions mark turning points in the narrative: two appearances of angelic messengers and one miracle, performed in answer to a specific plea. In (1) below, as Amiloun is riding to the place appointed for the judicial combat in which he is to impersonate his friend, he hears a voice from heaven warning him that he will be made a leper if he undertakes the battle. In (2) an angel appears to Amis in his sleep to tell him that he can cure the leprosy-stricken Amiloun if he kills his two children and anoints his friend with their blood.