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Knowing Poetry
In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued t...
The Cambridge History of French Literature
The most comprehensive history of literature written in French ever produced in English.
Medieval Allegory as Epistemology
In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of A...
Eastern Voyages, Western Visions
This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores the range of French and francophone encounters with the East from the medieval period to the present day. --book cover.
Telling the Story in the Middle Ages
Much of our modern understanding of medieval society and cultures comes through the stories people told and the way they told them. Storytelling was, for this period, not only entertainment; it was central to the law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. The essays in this volume raise and discuss a number of questions concerning the strategies, contexts and narratalogical features of medieval storytelling. They look particularly at who tells the story; the audience; how a story is told and performed; and the manuscript and social context for such tales. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College; Kathryn Duys is Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French, Montclair State University.
Marie de France
"Marie de France is the author of some of the most important and influential works of the French Middle Ages: the Lais, her best-known work, the Ysopë (a translation from the Aesopic tradition), and the Espurgatoire seint Patriz (St Patrick's Purgatory). Taking Marie less as a biographical subject than as author of these three texts, this Companion rethinks standard questions of interpretation through a variety of perspectives that highlight both the unity of Marie's oeuvre and the distinctiveness of the individual works attributed to her name."--Page 4 of cover.
The Logic of Idolatry in Seventeenth-century French Literature
Idolatry was one of the dominant and most contentious themes of early modern religious polemics. This book argues that many of the best-known literary and philosophical works of the French seventeenth century were deeply engaged and concerned with the theme. In a series of case studies and close readings, it shows that authors used the logic of idolatry to interrogate the fractured and fragile relationship between the divine and the human, with particular attention to the increasingly fraught question of the legitimacy of human agency. Reading d'Urfé, Descartes, La Fontaine, Sévigné, Molire, and Racine through the lens of idolatry reveals heretofore hidden aspects of their work, all while demonstrating the link between the emergent autonomy of literature and philosophy and the confessional conflicts that dominated the period. In so doing, Professor McClure illustrates how religion can become a source of interpretive complexity, and how this dynamism can and should be taken into account in early modern French studies and beyond. ELLEN MCCLURE is Associate Professor of History and French, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France
The question of what medieval "courtliness" was, both as a literary influence and as a historical "reality", is debated in this volume. The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and aliterary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore ...
The Futures of Medieval French
Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste, through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. T...
The Conte Du Graal Cycle
A new study of the continuations to Chrétien's Conte du Graal shows their crucial influence on the development of Arthurian literature. Chrétien de Troyes's late twelfth-century Conte du Graal has inspired writers and scholars from the moment of its composition to the present day. The challenge represented by its unfinished state was quickly taken up, and over the next fifty years the romance was supplemented by a number of continuations and prologues, which eventually came to dwarf Chrétien's text. In one of the first studies to treat the Conte du Graal and its continuations as a unified work, Thomas Hinton considers the whole corpus as a narrative cycle. Through a combination of close t...
