The Old French and Old Occitan epic poems, called chansons de geste, have long been held up as a celebration of the medieval warrior elite. Although they build a world of great deeds and noble families, the epics are nonetheless a poetry of violence whose outlook challenges prescriptive notions of ideality and perfection. This thesis problematizes the laudatory view by asking readers to reconsider the fine line the chansons de geste present between heroism and catastrophe. It does this by reframing how the chansons de geste conceive of the passage of time in their own narratives, how they move through the world as cultural artifacts, how they enter into conversation with their immediate cultural surroundings, how they straddle past and present, and how they contribute to imagined futures across eras.

The first chapter uses Roland Barthes to read repetition and death in the Roland tradition and in the Chanson de Guillaume, and contends that when death scenes are repeated, they create an echo that brings the past forward and renders time uncertain. The second chapter employs Kristevan abjection to read selections from the Old French Crusade Cycle as a locus for memory and a focus for anxieties about the extremities of violence. In a departure from previous scholarship, it frames abjection as being dependent on proximity, or temporal closeness, which relies on ‘witnessing’ as a process of repetition in which events are re-lived and re-presented. The third chapter reads the thirteenth-century Canso de la crozada through selections from philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy with a focus on ‘mythic thinking’ and community-formation. Through its analysis of the unfinished manuscript decorations and the presence of two politically opposed poets, it shows that the creation of myth in chansons de geste is the result of historical desires. The final chapter applies medieval biblical exegesis and the senses of scripture to the subgenre of Enfances, reading them as a philosophical exercise in which temporal layering and mythmaking come full circle when poets take up the practice of writing predictive histories for the epic heroes, turning both triumph and catastrophe into destiny.

Time in the chansons de geste, whether narrative, historical, or grammatical, is not neutral, nor are the myriad ways in which the passages and movements of time are marked. The experiences of time that the chansons de geste underpin are necessarily affective and the possible degrees of temporal affectivity are malleable depending on the content of the poems themselves and the context in which they are received. Reading these affective temporalities as signs is one way to test the limits of violence in the epic tradition, and, critically, to rethink how experiences of violence alter the role the epic poems play in either supporting or challenging historicizing narratives.