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 are we to distinguish between a culture organized around fashion, and one where the desire for novel adornment is latent, intermittent, or prohibi...
Christine de Pizan's Changing Opinion examines the evolution of Christine's thought on true and false opinion. She reflected deeply on the subject of opinion while analyzing, evaluating, challenging, and changing her own and others' opinions in her lifelong quest for certain truth. Parsing opinion in Christine's writings gives us insight into her thought on controversial issues while highlighting opinions that were and, indeed, often still are, subjective and controversial. Especially compelling are those instances in which she changed or modified an opinion. The first two chapters treat her...
Christine de Pizan's Changing Opinion examines the evolution of Christine's thought on true and false opinion. She reflected deeply on the subject of ...
Joseph Bdier's 1893 definition of the fabliaux as 'funny stories in verse' is still widely accepted as the best brief and general description for a heterogeneous collection of texts. But the heterogeneity creates difficulties and at the periphery of the canon all three of the criteria included in Bdier's definition are open to question. The inventory proposed in the current study is based on a new structural definition, a conjointure, akin to that of romance, combining a logical episteme with a rhetorical narreme. The episteme features a contradictory taken from Boolean algebra, and assumes...
Joseph Bdier's 1893 definition of the fabliaux as 'funny stories in verse' is still widely accepted as the best brief and general description for a he...
The process of identity formation during the central Middle Ages (10th-12th centuries) among the warrior aristocracy was fundamentally centered on the paired practices of gift giving and violent taking, inextricably linked elements of the same basic symbolic economy. These performative practices cannot be understood without reference to a concept of the sacred, which anchored and governed the performances, providing the goal and rationale of social and military action. After focussing on anthropological theory, social history, and chronicles, the author turns to the -literary- persona of the...
The process of identity formation during the central Middle Ages (10th-12th centuries) among the warrior aristocracy was fundamentally centered on the...
Over fifty chansons de geste were reworked into prose between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries for patrons and audiences who demanded updated, de-rhymed versions of heroic songs. While most prose translations were commissioned by noble patrons, Philippe de Vigneulles (1471-1527), a cloth merchant of Metz, operated outside the system of patronage on self-imposed projects with a pronounced civic bias. His translation of the monumental Lorraine epic cycle into Middle French prose afforded him an opportunity to reconfigure the city's legendary past and validate the concerns of a prosperous...
Over fifty chansons de geste were reworked into prose between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries for patrons and audiences who demanded updated, d...
This study brings the songs of the trouveres to an encounter with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of signification, sexual difference and unconscious desire. In trouvere song desire functions as a means of generic and -genderic- differentiation. The trouveres distinguished between sexual need or lust and desire, the latter usually confined to the masculine voice in high style. Less exalted persons, in whose company women were already implicitly included, appear as incapable of desire in the fin'amors register. Critics have treated the issue of desire as represented in the courtly chanson...
This study brings the songs of the trouveres to an encounter with Lacanian psychoanalytic theories of signification, sexual difference and unconscious...
Chartier in Europe is the first sustained enquiry into the distinctive influence of the fifteenth-century French poet and diplomat, Alain Chartier, on the reading and writing cultures of England, Italy, Scotland, and Spain, as well as France. Opening with essays that assess Chartier's own construction of an authoritative voice, the volume then analyses the transmission and reception context of his Latin and French prose and poetry, and examines the ways in which the translation of his work into other vernaculars shaped his burgeoning reputation. Established and younger scholars from the...
Chartier in Europe is the first sustained enquiry into the distinctive influence of the fifteenth-century French poet and diplomat, Alain Chartier, on...
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...
Contending that the study of hagiography is significant both for a consideration of medieval literature and for current theoretical debates in medieva...