Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry

Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry PDF Author: Julie Singer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843842726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of the ways in which late medieval lyric poetry can be seen to engage with contemporary medical theory. This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d'Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoraltheory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that according to the theories of love that predominated in the late medieval West foreclosed the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets' circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Julie Singer is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.

Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry

Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry PDF Author: Julie Singer
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843842726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of the ways in which late medieval lyric poetry can be seen to engage with contemporary medical theory. This book argues that late medieval love poets, from Petrarch to Machaut and Charles d'Orléans, exploit scientific models as a broad framework within which to redefine the limits of the lyric subject and his body. Just as humoraltheory depends upon principles of likes and contraries in order to heal, poetry makes possible a parallel therapeutic system in which verbal oppositions and substitutions counter or rewrite received medical wisdom. The specific case of blindness, a disability that according to the theories of love that predominated in the late medieval West foreclosed the possibility of love, serves as a laboratory in which to explore poets' circumvention of the logical limits of contemporary medical theory. Reclaiming the power of remedy from physicians, these late medieval French and Italian poets prompt us to rethink not only the relationship between scientific and literary authority at the close of the middle ages, but, more broadly speaking, the very notion of therapy. Julie Singer is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University, St Louis.

Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England

Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England PDF Author: Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843137
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of medieval vernacular allegories, across a number of languages, offers a new idea of what authorship meant in the late middle ages. 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 thenarrative 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.

Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative

Poet Heroines in Medieval French Narrative PDF Author: B. Findley
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137113065
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining French literature from the medieval period, Findley revises our understanding of medieval literary composition as a largely masculine activity, suggesting instead that writing is seen in these texts as problematically gendered and often feminizing.

The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé

The Medieval French Ovide Moralisé PDF Author: K. Sarah-Jane Murray
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1180

Get Book Here

Book Description
First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages. The anonymous Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid), composed in France in the fourteenth century, retells and explicates Ovid's Metamorphoses, with generous helpings of related texts, for a Christian audience. Working from the premise that everything in the universe, including the pagan authors of Graeco-Roman Antiquity, is part of God's plan and expresses God's truth even without knowing it, the Ovide moralisé is a massive and influential work of synthesis and creativity, a remarkable window into a certain kind of medieval thinking. It is of major importance across time and across many disciplines, including literature, philosophy, theology, and art history. This three volume set offers an English translation of this hugely significant text - the first into any modern language. Based on the only complete edition to date, that by Cornelis de Boer and others completed in 1938, it also reflects more recent editions and numerous manuscripts. The translation is accompanied by a substantial introduction, situating the Ovide moralisé in terms of the reception of Ovid, the mythographical tradition, and its medieval French religious and intellectual milieu. Notes discuss textual problems and sources, and relate the text to key issues in the thought of theologians such as Bonaventure and Aquinas.

The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry

The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry PDF Author: Jennifer Saltzstein
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843498
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book Here

Book Description
A survey of the use of the refrain in thirteenth and fourteenth-century French music and poetry, showing how it was skilfully deployed to assert the validity of the vernacular. 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 workedto 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 goeson 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 craftwith 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.

The Futures of Medieval French

The Futures of Medieval French PDF Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845954
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Get Book Here

Book Description
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. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.dy, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.dy, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.dy, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.l-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170-1390 PDF Author: Alice Hazard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845873
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
Modern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages.

Constantinople and the West in Medieval French Literature

Constantinople and the West in Medieval French Literature PDF Author: Rima Devereaux
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 1843843021
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
An indepth examination of the presentation of Constantinople and its complex relationship with the west in medieval French texts. 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 wasalso 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 andutopia; 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.

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance

Virgilian Identities in the French Renaissance PDF Author: Phillip John Usher
Publisher: DS Brewer
ISBN: 184384317X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
"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. It is demonstrated how Virgil's works are more than Ancient models to be imitated. They reveal themselves, instead, to be part of a vibrant moment of exchange central to the definition of literature at the time."--Back cover.

Verginia, Lucretia, and the Medieval Livy

Verginia, Lucretia, and the Medieval Livy PDF Author: Noah D Guynn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book Here

Book Description
The tragic stories of Lucretia and Verginia, taken from the fourteenth-century French version of Livy's History of Rome, presented with facing page English translation. Livy was famous in the Middle Ages for what Dante called his "unerring" history of Rome. Within that history, two episodes were especially well-known, both promoting female virtue while also suggesting how sexual violence could trigger political change. Lucretia commits suicide after her rape, precipitating the fall of the monarchy. Verginia is murdered by her father, who prefers to see her die than be seized by the corrupt judge Appius; her death then inspires an uprising that overthrows the decemvirs, republican officials who abused the very laws they had codified. While these stories circulated widely in the medieval period, access to the Latin Livy was impeded by a scarcity of manuscripts. There is nonetheless evidence that some poets, notably Chaucer and Gower, knew Livy through the Tite-Live, a French translation by Pierre Bersuire that was completed around 1358, and borrowed from it for their own works. There are many manuscripts of the Tite-Live, though little of it is available to modern readers. This book helps fill that gap by supplying critical editions and English translations of Bersuire's Verginia and Lucretia episodes, along with those in the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, one of the earliest vernacular writers to show interest in Livy. Each text features a substantial critical apparatus, which glosses difficult terms and concepts and elucidates historical events and social contexts, while an introduction provides other contextual information.