Last visit with King Arthur

Review published with Arthuriana 35.1 (2025): 132-35. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/960022

Michel Pastoureau, Dernière visite chez le Roi Arthur. Histoire d'un premier livre. Paris: Seuil, 2023. Pp. 159. isbn: 978-2-02-151269-4. $19.90.

French medievalists have a habit of producing fascinating autobiographies when they get ready to engage in lampada tradere. Renowned historian Jacques Le Goff published A la recherche du moyen age (2003), a tour de force through his experience in the academy and medieval studies. Among many other fascinating stories, he situates his interest in medieval matters with his reading of Walter Scott's historical novel, Ivanhoe (1819), at the tender age of twelve. Michel Pastoureau, in his Dernière visite chez le Roi Arthur (2024), also traces the beginnings of his love for medievalia back to Ivanhoe, but to Richard Thorpe's 1952 movie version of Scott's novel, when he was only eight years old.

Beyond this parallel, a picture of two very different kinds of medievalists evolves. Le Goff hints at many general cultural, social, and political foundations for his choices throughout his career as a scholar, even while admitting that he might construe some of these connections only with hindsight. Pastoureau pretty much excludes factors external to discipline and academy, and his biography centers almost entirely around the story of his first book.

That first book belongs among the tradition of French academics who regularly share their highly specialized scholarship with larger audiences. This desire to disseminate academic expertise in readable form is called 'vulgarisation' in French but has nothing to do, except for shared etymology, with creating something 'vulgar.' Rather, the term should be understood as 'public scholarship' or 'scholarship accessible to non-academic audiences.' One of the most successful book series practicing the 'vulgarisation' of history and culture in France is Hachette Publishers' still ongoing [End Page 133] La Vie Quotidienne, and the title offered to Pastoureau four years after graduating from the École des chartes was La Vie quotidienne en France et en Angleterre au temps des chevaliers de la Table Ronde.

Pastoureau revisits some of the questions newly minted scholars had about publishing in the mid-1970s: do I write to the publisher, or do I call them? Will the topic, the knights of the Round Table, seduce the publishers to accept my proposal? What will it mean for my career if my first book targets a non-academic audience? Pastoureau decided to think of his own study as 'vulgarization savante,' a compromise of sorts. However, some years later, when the young Pastoureau prepared a curriculum vitae to join the prestigious École pratique des hautes études, two colleagues suggested he exclude the volume for La Vie Quotidienne from his list of achievements. To share some copies with friends and family, he purchased them two by two in different Paris bookshops to avoid humiliation and potential accusations of narcissism.

Pastoureau seems to have cared little for the reviews of his books in public magazines, and focuses on the three academic reviews, all by 'historians who really read my book' (p. 60). For a fourth review, the publisher had sent a review copy to one of the author's friends. The friend asked him to help him write the review: they had fun co-authoring the review, and Pastoureau was able to criticize his own publisher for selecting too long a title for the book and for not paying a professional translator for the numerous translations from medieval sources in his book. At least ten translations of his book have subsequently appeared, including into Polish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Korean, which attests to the global popularity of the Arthurian narratives in the twentieth century. He also received a prize for the book, and by none less than the Académie Française; but Pastoureau believes he received the recognition because of his great aunt, who happened to be Claude Lévi-Strauss' mother (and Lévi-Strauss was a member of the Académie).

His first book also led to his role as consultant for two films: Éric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois (1978) and Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose (1986). Pastoureau liked answering the filmmakers' questions, because they were the kinds of questions 'historians had only rarely considered' (p. 68). However, in general he cared little about this public engagement, just as he disliked larger academic conferences. Using a term coined by Jacques Le Goff, Pastoureau likens academic meetings to an illness of sorts, 'la colloquite' (pp. 85–96; an English translation would be 'conferencitis'), and the worst of these morbid encounters apparently happened at my own alma mater, the Universität Regensburg, in 1979. He abhorred even the non-academic features of that congress—tours, visits, and convivial get-togethers—and dismisses them as forced forms of 'Gemütlichkeit' (p. 92).

Unsurprisingly, he revisits, from a distance of more than half a century, the viability of employing works of the human (literary) imagination (the many medieval narratives of King Arthur and his knights) to offer a realistic picture of 'daily life' in medieval Europe. He decides to answer this vexing question by citing his fellow historian Le Goff, who told him: 'Please think of an ethnographer who investigates a non-European society and who would silence everything related to the value systems, sensibilities, representations, emotions, dreams, in short: the entirety of [End Page 134] that society's imaginary. This kind of ethnographer's observations would be entirely mangled … Well, the same is true for the historian of the European Middle Ages: The imaginary is not the antithesis of reality, but part of it' (p. 109). Pastoureau ends on a note condemning some of his professional pet peeves: he sees too many current colleagues confound the work of 'history' with that of 'memory'; and he despises all forms of teleological presentism because they instrumentalize historical fact for contemporary purposes. He also believes that the sins of presentism are committed predominantly in the United States.

Richard Utz, Georgia Institute of Technology