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Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book. In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case s...
Pathologies of Love examines the role of medicine in the debate on women, known as the querelle des femmes, in early modern France. Questions concerning women's physical makeup and its psychological and moral consequences played an integral role in the querelle. This debate on the status of women and their role in society began in the fifteenth century and continued through the sixteenth and, as many critics would say, well beyond. In querelle works early modern medicine, women's sexual difference, literary reception, and gendered language often merge. Literary authors perpetuated medical ideas such as the notion of allegedly fatal lovesickness, and physicians published works that included d...
Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath examines how Ovid's Ars amatoria shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West. The Ars amatoria circulated in medieval France and England as an authoritative treatise on desire; consequently, the sexualities of the medieval West are haunted by the imperial Roman constructions of desire that emerge from Ovid's text. The Ars amatoria ironically proposes the erotic potential of violence, and this aspect of the Ars proved to be enormously influential. Ovid's discourse on erotic violence provides a script for Heloise's epistolary expression of desire for Abelard. The Roman de la Rose extends the directives of the Ars with a rhetorical flourish and poetic exces...
The Companion to Jean Gerson provides a guide to new research on Jean Gerson (1363-1429), theologian, chancellor of the University of Paris, and church reformer. Ten articles outline his life and works, contribution to lay devotion, place as biblical theologian, role as humanist, mystical theology, involvement in the conciliar movement, dilemmas as university master and conflicts with the mendicants, views on women and especially on female visionaries, participation in the debate on the "Roman de la Rose", and the afterlife of his works until the French Revolution. Some of the contributors are veterans of gersonian studies, while others have recently completed their dissertations. All map the relevance of Gerson to understanding late medieval and early modern culture, religion and spirituality.
Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) is one of the finest female poets ever to write in Italian. Although she was lauded for her singing during her lifetime, her success and critical reputation as a poet emerged only after her verse was republished in the early eighteenth century. Her poetry runs the gamut of human emotion, ranging from ecstasy over a consummated love affair to despair at its end. While these tormented works and their multiple male addressees have led to speculation that Stampa may have been one of Venice’s famous courtesans, they can also be read as a rebuttal of typical assumptions about women’s roles. Championed by Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, she has more recently been c...
In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces. In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice. The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.
Translation of Christine's autobiographical "Vision", both dealing with her own life and career, and offering a possible solution to the troubled state of France at the time.
First full-length study of what the manuscript contexts can reveal about early reactions to Chaucer, and in particular his treatment of women.
Women’s access to education over the centuries has been determined by many factors, including class, race, religion, and nationality. Although women’s experiences are marked by a rich diversity, women are in many ways united by their struggle to gain access to education. While previous essay collections that study this topic have tended to be more limited in scope, Dominant Culture and the Education of Women addresses the educational experiences of women from the fourth to the twenty-first century in Europe and the Americas. Because of its inclusive nature, this collection demonstrates not only that women have made great strides in education but also that certain challenges have yet to b...
New investigations into Charles d'Orléans' under-rated poem, its properties and its qualities.