Legends, tales, and mysteries featuring saints captivated the French at the end of the nineteenth century. As Jean Lorrain pointed out in an 1891 article for the popular weekly Le Courrier Francais, the seemingly simple language of the saints' lives, their noble battles between good and evil, and the atmosphere of religious mysticism appealed to many, especially those involved in the visual and performing arts. The Third Republic (1870-1940), a regime that claimed to reinforce and institute the secular ideas of the French Revolution, was ironically witness to this great popular interest in...

Synopsis: In his autobiography Joseph Turmel (1859-1943) has left an intensely personal account of his struggles to reconcile his Catholic faith with the results of historical-critical methods as those impacted biblical exegesis and the history of dogma. Having lost his faith in 1886, he chose to remain as a priest in the Church, even while he worked to undermine its teachings. He did so initially in writings published under his own name and, as his conclusions became increasingly radical, under a veritable team of pseudonyms. He was excommunicated in 1930. His account of his life is less a...

The storyteller stands at the crossroads of orality and performance, surrounded by a circle of rapt listeners. Evelyn Birge Vitz has challenged a generation of scholars to join the circle, listen as they read, and exchange pen for performance. A tribute to her work, the fifteen essays in this volume attend to the qualities of voice, their registers and dynamics, whether practiced or impromptu, falsified, overlapping, interrupted or whispered. They examine how the book became a performance venue and reshaped the storyteller's image and authority, and they investigate the mutability of stories...

Enthusiasm for the operas of composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) flourished in fin-de-siecle France, fed by fascination for the medieval history and literature that inspired his work. Philosopher Marcel Hebert developed his Religious Experience in the Work of Richard Wagner (1895) from this background of sustained popular interest in Wagner.

The discipline of medievalism has produced a great deal of scholarship acknowledging the "makers" of the Middle Ages: those who re-discovered the period from 500 to 1500 by engaging with its cultural works, seeking inspiration from them, or fantasizing about them. Yet such approaches - organized by time period, geography, or theme - often lack an overarching critical framework. This volume aims to provide such a framework, by calling into question the problematic yet commonly accepted vocabulary used in Medievalism Studies. The contributions, by leading scholars in the field, define and...