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The Virgin and the Cosmographer: On Notions of Space in Jean Parmentier's Chants Royaux

If the demise of a vertical notion of space marks the beginning of modernity, characterized by a "a reduction of our perspective to the horizontal," then the chants royaux of Jean Parmentier (1494-1529) can be understood as having been composed at the very point where medieval and modern space meet.2 These poems bring the horizontal dimensions of cosmographers and discoverers of the "new world" into the vertical space of Marian poetry, a genre which traditionally extolled the glory of the Virgin Mary from the vantage point of the fallen and imperfect state of the poem's narrator. The vertical axis of the Marian poems, rising from an imperfect narrative "je" to the perfect "vous" or "toi" of the Virgin, was not limited to Marian poems, but was a general characteristic of the high Middle Ages which has been said to "valorize elevation and depth."3 Parmentier's chants royaux convert this vertical space into a more horizontal one through their use of cosmographical images. The narratives of cosmographers and "discoverers" of the New World such as Cartier, Thevet, Columbus et alia describe the horizontal