Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature
Author: Adrian P. Tudor
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2019-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813057191

This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analyzed span genres—epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux—and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts—including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland—they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear. Contributors: Adrian P. Tudor | Kristin L. Burr | William Burgwinkle | Jane Gilbert | Francis Gingras | Sara I. James | Douglas Kelly | Mary Jane Schenck | James R. Simpson | Jane H.M. Taylor

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature
Author: Adrian Tudor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2019
Genre: French literature
ISBN: 9780813056432

This collection of essays argues that literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed, and that one may exist within a group while remaining foreign to it. Contributors examine this theme through a wide range of lenses--from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming--in works that span genres and historical periods.

Remembering Boethius

Remembering Boethius
Author: Elizabeth Elliott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317066723

Remembering Boethius explores the rich intersection between the reception of Boethius and the literary construction of aristocratic identity, focusing on a body of late-medieval vernacular literature that draws on the Consolation of Philosophy to represent and reimagine contemporary experiences of exile and imprisonment. Elizabeth Elliott presents new interpretations of English, French, and Scottish texts, including Machaut's Confort d'ami, Remede de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse, Jean Froissart's Prison amoureuse, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, and The Kingis Quair, reading these texts as sources contributing to the development of the reader's moral character. These writers evoke Boethius in order to articulate and shape personal identities for public consumption, and Elliott's careful examination demonstrates that these texts often write not one life, but two, depicting the relationship between poet and aristocratic patron. These works associate the reception of wisdom with the cultivation of memory, and in turn, illuminate the contemporary reception of the Consolation as a text that itself focuses on memory and describes a visionary process of education that takes place within Boethius's own mind. In asking how and why writers remember Boethius in the Middle Ages, this book sheds new light on how medieval people imagined, and reimagined, themselves.

Literatures of Medieval France

Literatures of Medieval France
Author: Michel Zink
Publisher: Collège de France
Total Pages: 20
Release: 2017-02-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 2722604396

This long tradition would certainly not be a reason in itself to keep or restore the subject, had it not something to do with the subject itself. All of the associations between the past and literature, all of the signs that point towards an essential link between the notion of literature and a feeling for the past, are crystallized in medieval literature. The curiosity that medieval literature has aroused since it was rediscovered at the dawn of Romanticism presupposes such associations. The very forms of this literature bear indications of them. They encourage us to consider jointly the interest of modern times in the medieval past and the signs of the past with which the Middle Ages marked its own literature. Even more, they invite us to seek in the relationship with the past a defining criterion for literature, a most necessary task with reference to a time when words are not understood in their modern sense, and there is no guarantee that a corresponding notion exists. The best reason to continue with this hundred-and-fifty-year-old teaching is that its object may not even exist.

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song

Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song
Author: Rachel May Golden
Publisher:
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2021
Genre: LITERARY CRITICISM
ISBN: 9780813069036

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

The Shaping of German Identity

The Shaping of German Identity
Author: Len Scales
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2012-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521573335

German identity, a key force in history, took shape during the late Middle Ages. This book explains how and why.

The Futures of Medieval French

The Futures of Medieval French
Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1843845954

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries

Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries
Author: Sarah Kay
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022643673X

Sarah Kay s interests in this book are, first, to examine how medieval bestiaries depict and challenge the boundary between humans and other animals; and second, to register the effects on readers of bestiaries by the simple fact that parchment, the writing support of virtually all medieval texts, is a refined form of animal skin. Surveying the most important works created from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries, Kay connects nature to behavior to Christian doctrine or moral teaching across a range of texts. As Kay shows, medieval thought (like today) was fraught with competing theories about human exceptionalism within creation. Given that medieval bestiaries involve the inscription of texts about and images of animals onto animal hides, these texts, she argues, invite readers to reflect on the inherent fragility of bodies, both human and animal, and the difficulty of distinguishing between skin as a site of mere inscription and skin as a containing envelope for sentient life. It has been more than fifty years since the last major consideration of medieval Latin and French bestiaries was published. Kay brings us up to date in the archive, and contributes to current discussions among animal studies theorists, manuscript studies scholars, historians of the book, and medievalists of many stripes."

The Medieval Manuscript Book

The Medieval Manuscript Book
Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2015-08-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107066190

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.