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38 results in Gallica

Page 2 of 2

Fashion in Medieval France
  • Sarah-Grace Heller
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    13 April 2017
    Print publication:
    19 April 2007
  • How are we to distinguish between a culture organized around fashion, and one where the desire for novel adornment is latent, intermittent, or prohibited? How do fashion systems organize social hierarchies, individual psychology, creativity, and production? Medieval French culture offers a case study of "systematic fashion", demonstrating desire for novelty, rejection of the old in favor of the new, and criticism of outrageous display. Texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries describe how cleverly-cut garments or unique possessions make a character distinctive, and even offer advice on how to look attractive on a budget or gain enough spending money to shop for oneself. Such descriptions suggest fashion's presence, yet accepted notions date the birth of Western fashion to the mid-fourteenth-century revolution in men's clothing styles. A fashion system must have been present prior to this 'revolution' in styles to facilitate such changes, and abundant evidence for the existence of such a system is cogently set out in this study. Ultimately, fashion is a conceptual system expressed by words evaluating a style's ephemeral worth, and changes in visual details are symptomatic, rather than determinative.

    SARAH-GRACE HELLER is an associate professor in Medieval French at Ohio State University.

Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies
  • Essays in Honor of E. Jane Burns
  • Edited by Laine E. Doggett, Daniel E. O'Sullivan
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2016
    Print publication:
    17 March 2016
  • Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensionsinto early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female,East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them.
    Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. JaneBurns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding theSociety for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars.

    Laine E. Doggett is Associate Professor of French at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City; Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi.

    Contributors: Cynthia J. Brown, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Kristin L. Burr, Madeline H. Caviness, Laine E. Doggett, Sarah-Grace Heller, Ruth Mazo Karras, Roberta L. Krueger, Sharon Kinoshita, Tom Linkinen, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Lisa Perfetti, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Elizabeth Robertson, Helen Solterer

Unsettling Montaigne
  • Poetics, Ethics and Affect in the Essais and Other Writings
  • Elizabeth Guild
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    17 April 2014
  • Montaigne's Essais (1580-1592) are one of the most remarkable works of the European Renaissance. The Essais' innovative open-mindedness is at odds with the dogmatism and intolerance of their times, the decades of civil and religious wars in France, and their tolerant and searching human questions and ethics of difference remain compelling for twenty-first century readers. But the sceptical open-endedness that vitalizes this writing is also often troubled and troubling: personal losses and the collapse of cultural ideals moved Montaigne to write, and their attendant anxieties are not resolved into tranquil reflection. Unsettling Montaigne reassesses Montaigne's scepticism. Informed by psychoanalytic and related theory, its close attention to Montaigne's complex uses of metaphor illuminates the psychic economy of his scepticism and tolerance and their poetics, while new readings ofhis Essais and other texts reveal the significance of disquieting questions, thought and affect for the ethos his writing fosters. The analysis deals with figures such as cannibals and cannibalism, hunger, shaking, tickling, place, the brother, and haunting in Montaigne's exploration of concepts which tested his understanding and self-understanding. The volume also demonstrates how figuration supports openness to difference for both writer and readers, and is fundamental to this writing's aesthetic, psychic and ethical creativity. Elizabeth Guild lectures in French at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Robinson College.

Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France
  • Publishing from Manuscript to Book
  • Jane H. M. Taylor
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    16 January 2014
  • Arthurian romance in Renaissance France has long been treated by modern critics as marginal - although manuscripts and printed volumes, adaptations and rewritings, show just how much writers, and especially publishers, saw its potential attractions for readers. This book is the first full-length study of what happens to Arthur at the beginning of the age of print. It explores the fascinations of Arthurian romance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the magnificent presentation volumes offered by Antoine Vérard or Galliot du Pré in the early years of the century to the perfunctory abbreviated Lancelot published by Benoît Rigaud in Lyon in 1591; from PierreSala's dutiful "translation" of Yvain to Jean Maugin's exuberant rewriting of the prose Tristan; from attempts at "new" romance like the little-known Giglan to the runaway best-seller Amadis de Gaule.The book's primary focus is the techniques and stratagems employed by publishers and their workshops to renew Arthurian romance for a new readership: the ways in which the publishers, the translators and the adapters of the Renaissance tailor romance to fit new cultural contexts. Their story - which is the story of the rise and fall of one of the great genres of the Middle Ages - allows privileged insights into socio-cultural and ideological attitudes in the France of the Renaissance, and into issues of literary taste, particular patterns of choice and preference. Jane H.M. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University.

The Pèlerinage Allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville
  • Tradition, Authority and Influence
  • Edited by Marco Nievergelt, Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath
  • With contributions by Flor Maria Bango de la Campa , Robert L. A. Clark , Graham Robert Edwards , Dolores Grmaca , Andreas Kablitz , John Moreau , Ursula Peters , Fabienne Pomel , Pamela Sheingorn , Sara V. Torres and Géraldine Veysseyre
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 December 2013
    Print publication:
    18 December 2013
  • The fourteenth-century French pilgrimage allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville (or "Digulleville") shaped late medieval and early modern European culture. Portions of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, Pèlerinage de l'Ame and Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist survive in more than eighty medieval manuscripts and translations into English, German, Dutch, Castilian and Latin appeared by the early sixteenth century, along with adaptations into French prose and dramatic forms and numerous early printed editions. This volume furnishes a better understanding of the allegories' circulation, creation and importance from the 1330s into the 1560s, via trans-national, multilingual and interdisciplinary perspectives. The collection's first section, on "Tradition", identifies the patterns that developed as Deguileville's corpus captured the attentions of adaptors, annotators and illustrators. The second section, on "Authority", addresses the cultural context of Deguileville himself, his approach to poetic craft and the status of his French and Latin poetry. The third section, on "Influence", closely examines selected connections between the Pèlerinages and the literary productions of later authors, translators and reading communities, including the French verse of Philippe de Mézières, Castilian print adaptation, and the early modern Croatian novel. Overall, the collection provides a variety of approaches to examining literary reception, attending not only to texts but also to evidence of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, and providing new insights into a rich and complex allegorical corpus and its impact on European literary history. Marco Nievergelt is a Maître-Assistant in Early English Literature in the English department of the University of Lausanne.Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath studies English and French medieval literature, with a particular interest in allegory, translation studies, and the history of the material text. Contributors: Flor Maria Bango de la Campa, Robert L.A. Clark, Graham Robert Edwards, Dolores Grmaca, Andreas Kablitz, John Moreau, Ursula Peters, Fabienne Pomel, Pamela Sheingorn, Sara V. Torres, Géraldine Veysseyre

Marco Polo's Le Devisement du Monde
  • Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity
  • Simon Gaunt
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    18 July 2013
  • Le Devisement du Monde' (1298), better though inaccurately known in English as 'Marco Polo's Travels', is one of only a handful of medieval texts that remain iconic today for European cultural history, and Marco Polo is one of only a handful of medieval writers who still enjoys instant name-recognition. Yet there is little awareness of the 'Devisement's' complex history and development. This book examines the text from a fresh, literary viewpoint, drawing upon a range of different disciplines and approaches: philology, manuscript studies, narratology, cultural history, postcolonial studies and theory. It contains comparative readings of multiple versions of the text in French, Italian and Latin, Rather than offering a Eurocentric vision of the world grounded in a sense of the absolute alterity of the non-Christian world as is often asserted, the author shows how the 'Devisement' expounds a sense of the relative nature of difference, crucially positioning Marco uncannily between two worlds (East and West), just as he is positioned awkwardly between two languages, French and Italian, and (in modern reception at least) awkwardly between two literary histories. The author also calls into question traditional accounts of the use of French outside France in the Middle Ages and offers a re-assessment of Marco Polo's position in the evolution of European travel writing. Simon Gaunt is Professor of French Language and Literature at King's College London.

The Conte du Graal Cycle
  • Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance
  • Thomas Hinton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    19 January 2012
  • 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 textual readings and manuscript analysis, the author argues that the unity of the narrative depends on a balanced tension between centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. He traces how the authors, scribes and illuminators of the cycle worked to produce coherence, even as they contended with potentially disruptive forces: multiple authorship, differences of intention, and changes in the relation between text, audience and book. Finally, he tackles the long-held orthodoxy that places the Perceval Continuations on the margins of literary history. Widening the scope of enquiry to consider the corpus's influence on thirteenth-century verse romances, this study re-situates the Conte du Graal cycle as a vital element in the evolution of Arthurian literature. Thomas Hinton is Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Jesus College, Oxford.

The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry
  • Jennifer Saltzstein
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 July 2013
    Print publication:
    20 June 2013
  • The relationship between song quotation and the elevation of French as a literary language that could challenge the cultural authority of Latin is the focus of this book. It approaches this phenomenon through a close examination of the refrain, a short phrase of music and text quoted intertextually across thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century musical and poetic genres. The author draws on a wide range of case studies, from motets, trouvère song, plays, romance, vernacular translations, and proverb collections, to show that medieval composers quoted refrains as vernacular auctoritates; she argues that their appropriation of scholastic, Latinate writing techniques worked to authorize Old French music and poetry as media suitable for the transmission of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the quasi-scholastic usage of refrains in anonymous and less familiar clerical contexts, the book goes on to articulate a new framework for understanding the emergence of the first two named authors of vernacular polyphonic music, the cleric-trouvères Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. It shows how, by blending their craft with the writing practices of the universities, composers could use refrain quotation to assert their status as authors with a new self-consciousness, and to position works in the vernacular as worthy of study and interpretation. Jennifer Saltzstein is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma.

Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France
  • Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
  • Edited by Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Laurie Shepard
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    21 February 2013
  • 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 a literary 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 witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval 'courtliness' is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field. Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi; Laurie Shepard is Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Contributors: Peter Haidu, Donald Maddox, Michel-André Bossy, Kristin Burr, Joan Tasker Grimbert, David Hult, Virgine Greene, Logan Whalen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Elizabeth W. Poe, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, William Schenck, Nadia Margolis, Laine Doggett, E. Jane Burns, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Laurie Shephard, Sarah White.

Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World
  • Edited by Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    21 February 2013
  • The concept of medieval historiography as 'usable past' is here challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a memorable and usable past. The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of genres ('chansons de geste', histories, chronicles, travel writing, and lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery, humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation, each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern conceptions of historical intelligibility. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo, Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt.

Thinking Through Chrétien de Troyes
  • Zrinka Stahuljak, Virginie Greene, Sarah Kay, Sharon Kinoshita, Peggy McCracken
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    17 March 2011
  • This co-written, multi-stranded book challenges assumptions about Chrétien as the author of a canon of works. In a series of lively exchanges, its five authors reassess the relationship between lyric and romance, between individuality and social conditions, and between psychology and medieval philosophy. The idea of 'logical time' is used to open up such topics as adventure, memory, imagination, and textual variation. Recent research on Troyes and on the political agency of women leads to the reappraisal of subjectivity and gender. Throughout, the medieval texts associated with the name of Chrétien are highlighted as sites where thought emerges; the implications of this thought are historicized and further conceptualized with the help of recent theoretical works, including those of Lacan. ZRINKA STAHULJAK, VIRGINIE GREENE, SARAH KAY, SHARON KINOSHITA and PEGGY McCRACKEN are professors at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan respectively.

Postcolonial Fictions in the 'Roman de Perceforest'
  • Cultural Identities and Hybridities
  • Sylvia Huot
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    18 January 2007
  • The 'Roman de Perceforest' explores issues of ethnic and cultural conflict and fusion, identity and hybridity in an imaginary pre-Arthurian Britain, ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander the Great. The 'Roman de Perceforest' was composed about 1340 for William I, Count of Hainaut. The vast romance, building on the prose romance cycles of the thirteenth century, chronicles an imaginary era of pre-Arthurian British history when Britain was ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander the Great. Its story of cultural rise, decline, and regeneration offers a fascinating exploration of medieval ideas about ethnic and cultural conflict and fusion, identity and hybridity. Drawing on the insights of contemporary postcolonial theory, Sylvia Huot examines the author's treatment of basic concepts such as 'nature' and 'culture', 'savagery' and 'civilisation'. Particular attention is given to the text's treatment of gender and sexuality as focal points of cultural identity, to its construction of the ethnic categories of 'Greek' and 'Trojan', and to its exposition of the ideological biases inherent in any historical narrative. SYLVIA HUOT is Reader in Medieval French Literature and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England
  • Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    17 May 2012
  • The emergence of vernacular allegories in the middle ages, recounted by a first-person narrator-protagonist, invites both abstract and specific interpretations of the author's role, since the protagonist who claims to compose the narrative also directs the reader to interpret such claims. Moreover, the specific attributes of the narrator-protagonist bring greater attention to individual identity. But as the actual authors of the allegories also adapted elements found in each other's works, their shared literary tradition unites differing perspectives: the most celebrated French first-person allegory, the erotic Roman de la Rose, quickly inspired an allegorical trilogy of spiritual pilgrimage narratives by Guillaume de Deguileville. English authors sought recognition for their own literary activity through adaptation and translation from a tradition inspired by both allegories. This account examines Deguileville's underexplored allegory before tracing the tradition's importance to the English authors Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate, with particular attention to the mediating influence of French authors, including Christine de Pizan and Laurent de Premierfait. Through comparative analysis of the late medieval authors who shaped French and English literary canons, it reveals the seminal, communal model of vernacular authorship established by the tradition of first-person allegory. Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Medieval Saints' Lives
  • The Gift, Kinship and Community in Old French Hagiography
  • Emma Campbell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 November 2008
  • Contending that the study of hagiography is significant both for a consideration of medieval literature and for current theoretical debates in medieval studies, this book considers a range of Old French and Anglo-Norman texts, using modern theories of kinship and community to show how saints' lives construe social and sexual relations. Focusing on the depiction of the gift, kinship and community, the book maintains that social and sexual systems play a key role in vernacular hagiography. Such systems, along with the desires they produce and control, are, it is argued, central to hagiography's religious functions, particularly its role as a vehicle of community formation. In attempting to think beyond the limits of human relationships, saints' lives nonetheless create an environment in which queer desires and modes of connection become possible, suggesting that, in this case at least, the orthodox nurtures the queer. This book thus suggests not only that medieval hagiography is worthy of greater attention but also that this corpus might provide an important resource for theorizing community in its medieval contexts and for thinking it in the present.EMMA CAMPBELL is Associate Professor of French at the University of Warwick.

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance
  • Edited by Phillip John Usher, Isabelle Fernbach
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    19 July 2012
  • Virgil's works, principally the ‘Bucolics’, the ‘Georgics’, and above all the ‘Aeneid’, were frequently read, translated and rewritten by authors of the French Renaissance. The contributors to this volume show how readers and writers entered into a dialogue with the texts, using them to grapple with such difficult questions as authorial, political and communitarian identities. Rather than simply imitating them, the writers are shown as vibrantly engaging with them, in a "conversation" central to the definition of literature at the time. In addition to discussing how Virgil influenced questions of identity for such authors as Jean Lemaire de Belges, Joachim du Bellay, Clément Marot, Pierre de Ronsard and Jacques Yver, the volume also offers perspectives on Virgil's French translators, on how French writers made quite different appropriations of Homer and Virgil, and on Virgil's reception in the arts. It provides a fresh understanding and assessment of how, in sixteenth-century France, Virgil and his texts moved beyond earlier allegorical interpretations to enter into the ideas espoused by a new and national literature. Phillip John Usher is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Barnard College, Columbia University; Isabelle Fernbach is Assistant Professor of French at Montana State University, Bozeman. Contributors: Timothy Hampton, Bernd Renner, Margaret Harp, Michael Randall, Stéphanie Lecompte, Isabelle Fernbach, Valerie Worth-Stylianou, Philip Ford, Phillip John Usher, Corinne Noirot-Maguire, Todd W. Reeser, Katherine Maynard.

Illuminating the 'Roman d'Alexandre': Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264
  • The Manuscript as Monument
  • Mark Cruse
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    20 October 2011
  • Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264 is one of the most famous and most sumptuous illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages. Completed in 1344 in Tournai, in what is now Belgium, the manuscript preserves the fullest version of the interpolated Old French 'Roman d'Alexandre' (Romance of Alexander the Great), and some of the most vivid illustrations of any medieval romance, ranking amongst the greatest achievements of the illuminator's art, its borders in particular offering a panorama of medieval society and imagination. A celebration of courtliness, a commemoration of urban chivalry, a mirror for the prince instructing in the arts of rule, and a meditation on crusade, it manifests the extraordinary richness and creativity of late medieval manuscript culture. This study examines the manuscript as a monumental expression of the beliefs and social practices of its day, placing it in its historical and artistic context; it also analyzes its later reception in England, where the addition of a Middle English Alexander poem and of Marco Polo's 'Voyages' reflects changing concepts of language, historiography, and geography. Mark Cruse is Assistant Professor of French, School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University.

Constantinople and the West in Medieval French Literature
  • Renewal and Utopia
  • Rima Devereaux
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    19 April 2012
  • Medieval France saw Constantinople as something of a quintessential ideal city. Aspects of Byzantine life were imitated in and assimilated to the West in a movement of political and cultural renewal, but the Byzantine capital was also celebrated as the locus of a categorical and inimitable difference. This book analyses the debate between renewal and utopia in Western attitudes to Constantinople as it evolved through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a series of vernacular (Old French, Occitan and Franco-Italian) texts, including the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, Girart de Roussillon, Partonopeus de Blois, the poetry of Rutebeuf, and the chronicles by Geoffroy de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari, both known as the Conquête de Constantinople. It establishes how the texts' representation of the West's relationship with Constantinople enacts this debate between renewal and utopia; demonstrates that analysis of this relationship can contribute to a discussion on the generic status of the texts themselves; and shows that the texts both react to the socio-cultural context in which they were produced, and fulfil a role within that context. Dr Rima Devereaux is an independent scholar based in London.

Marie de France
  • A Critical Companion
  • Sharon Kinoshita, Peggy McCracken
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 September 2012
    Print publication:
    19 April 2012
  • Marie de France is the author of some of the most influential and important works to survive from the middle ages; arguably best-known for her 'Lais', she also translated Aesop's Fables (the 'Ysopë'), and wrote the 'Espurgatoire seint Patriz' (St Patrick's Purgatory), based on a Latin text. The aim of this Companion is both to provide information on what can be gleaned of her life, and on her poetry, and to rethink standard questions of interpretation, through topics with special relevance to medieval literature and culture. The variety of perspectives used highlights both the unity of Marie's 'oeuvre' and the distinctiveness of the individual texts. After situating her writings in their Anglo-Norman political, linguistic, and literary context, this volume considers her treatment of questions of literary composition in relation to the circulation, transmission, and interpretation of her works. Her social and historical engagements are illuminated by the prominence of feudal vocabulary, while her representation of movement across different geographical and imaginary spaces opens a window on plot construction. Repetition and variation are considered as a narrative technique within Marie's work, and as a cultural practice linking her texts to a network of twelfth-century textual traditions. The Conclusion, on the posterity of her 'oeuvre', combines a consideration of manuscript context with the ways in which later authors rewrote Marie's works. Sharon Kinoshita is Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz; Peggy McCracken is Professor of French, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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