Author: Ellen McClure
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845504
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255
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Book Description
Idolatry was one of the dominant and most contentious themes of early modern religious polemics. This book argues that many of the best-known literary and philosophical works of the French seventeenth century were deeply engaged and concerned with the theme. In a series of case studies and close readings, it shows that authors used the logic of idolatry to interrogate the fractured and fragile relationship between the divine and the human, with particular attention to the increasingly fraught question of the legitimacy of human agency. Reading d'Urfé, Descartes, La Fontaine, Sévigné, Molire, and Racine through the lens of idolatry reveals heretofore hidden aspects of their work, all while demonstrating the link between the emergent autonomy of literature and philosophy and the confessional conflicts that dominated the period. In so doing, Professor McClure illustrates how religion can become a source of interpretive complexity, and how this dynamism can and should be taken into account in early modern French studies and beyond. ELLEN MCCLURE is Associate Professor of History and French, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Author: Hélène E. Bilis
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603295321
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 428
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Book Description
Tragedy has been reborn many times since antiquity. Seventeenth-century French playwrights composed tragedies marked by neoclassical aesthetics and the divine-right absolutism of the Grand Siècle. But their works also speak to the modern imagination, inspiring reactions from Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault; adaptations and reworkings by Césaire and Kushner; and new productions by francophone and anglophone directors. This volume addresses both the history of French neoclassical tragedy--its audiences, performance practice, and development as a genre--and the ideas these works raise, such as necessity, free will, desire, power, and moral behavior in the face of limited choices. Essays demonstrate ways to teach the plays through a variety of lenses, such as performance, spectatorship, aesthetics, rhetoric, and affect. The book also explores postcolonial engagement, by writers and directors both in and outside France, with these works.
Author: Alice Hazard
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845873
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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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.
Author: Kathrina Ann LaPorta
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 1644532115
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 438
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Book Description
Performative Polemic is the first literary historical study to analyze the “war of words” unleashed in the pamphlets denouncing Louis XIV’s absolute monarchy between 1667 and 1715. As conflict erupted between the French ruler and his political enemies, pamphlet writers across Europe penned scathing assaults on the Sun King’s bellicose impulses and expansionist policies. This book investigates how pamphlet writers challenged the monarchy’s monopoly over the performance of sovereignty by contesting the very mechanisms through which the crown legitimized its authority at home and abroad. Author Kathrina LaPorta offers a new conceptual framework for reading pamphlets as political interventions, asserting that an analysis of the pamphlet’s form is crucial to understanding how pamphleteers seduced readers by capitalizing on existing markets in literature, legal writing, and journalism. Pamphlet writers appeal to the theater-going public that would have been attending plays by Molière and Racine, as well as to readers of historical novels and periodicals. Pamphleteers entertained readers as they attacked the performative circuitry behind the curtain of monarchy.
Author: Joy Palacios
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512822779
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
By the end of France’s long seventeenth century, the seminary-trained, reform-minded Catholic priest had crystalized into a type recognizable by his clothing, gestures, and ceremonial skill. Although critics denounced these priests as hypocrites or models for Molière’s Tartuffe, seminaries associated the features of this priestly identity with the idea of the vray ecclésiastique, or true churchman. Ceremonial Splendor examines the way France’s early seminaries promoted the emergence and construction of the true churchman as a mode of embodiment and ecclesiastical ideal between approximately 1630 and 1730. Based on an analysis of sources that regulated priestly training in France, such as seminary rules and manuals, liturgical handbooks, ecclesiastical pamphlets and conferences, and episcopal edicts, the book uses theories of performance to reconstruct the way clergymen learned to conduct liturgical ceremonies, abide by clerical norms, and aspire to perfection. Joy Palacios shows how the process of crafting a priestly identity involved a wide range of performances, including improvisation, role-playing, and the display of skills. In isolation, any one of these performance obligations, if executed in a way that drew attention to the self, could undermine a clergyman’s priestly persona and threaten the institution of the priesthood more broadly. Seminaries counteracted the ever-present threat of theatricality by ceremonializing the clergyman’s daily life, rendering his body and gestures contiguous with the mass. Through its focus on priestly identity, Ceremonial Splendor reconsiders the relationship between Church and theater in early modern France and uncovers ritual strategies that continue to shape religious authority today.
Author: K. Sarah-Jane Murray
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1180
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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.
Author: Ann T. Delehanty
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000825264
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
This volume examines five early modern novels from the seventeenth century in Spain and France as examples of literature as a form of skeptical inquiry: Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos, Scarron’s Roman comique, Cyrano de Bergerac’s L’Autre Monde, and Mme. de Lafayette’s Zayde. These early modern novels encourage readers to take a critical stance toward accepted beliefs, through content that stages multiple encounters with the shockingly unfamiliar as well as through experiments in literary form, especially the interpolated story. At its broadest reach, this study asserts the fundamental value of literature as a means of encouraging discernment, recognizing the illusory, and honing critical acuity. In terms of the particularity of the historical moment, the volume also identifies the early modern novel as uniquely able to represent the conflicting value spheres of early modernity because of its ability to present multiple voices and its fascination with conflicting vantage points. Due to its interdisciplinary nature, Disenchantment, Skepticism, and the Early Modern Novel in Spain and France appeals to literary scholars and intellectual historians of the early modern period in Europe, as well as to advanced undergraduates and postgraduates studying the early novel, intellectual history, and philosophy of literature.
Author: Courtney Joseph Wells
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
New interpretations of different aspects of troubadour texts and lyrics, from their main themes and motifs to their reception and influence. Nearly a millennium after their songs of love, politics, war, satire, and redemption began to fill the courts of Europe, the troubadours continue to fascinate modern audiences. However, many aspects of their work, such as the supposedly adulterous nature of fin'amor, the "Frenchness" of the troubadours, the biographical veracity of the vidas, and the inherent misogyny of the troubadour lyric, have long been taken for granted. This volume takes a fresh look at these ideas, questioning many of the formative assumptions of troubadour scholarship, and proposing alternative readings of many canonical texts. Essays offer a reconsideration of the reception of works by such important figures as Guilhem IX, Jaufre Rudel, Peire Vidal, Pistoleta, Guilhem Adhemar, Giraut de Borneil, Perdigon, Fulk of Marseilles, and Arnaut Daniel. There are also examinations of the lexicon and cultural uses of chess, azure and tin, and the changing landscape of the Rhone delta, providing a deeper understanding of the imagery they furnished. Other essays consider the later life of the manuscripts, including the surprising story of how Napoleon demanded certain Occitan manuscripts after his conquest of Italy. The collection as a whole is thus a fitting tribute to the pioneering work of Wendy Pfeffer, who has made such a contribution to the field of troubadour studies.
Author: Noah D Guynn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843847353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135
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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.
Author:
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843846969
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
The first English translation of three chansons de geste inspired by the Romance epic, the Song of Roland. The success of the eleventh-century Song of Roland gave rise to a series of around twenty related chansons de geste, known collectively as the Cycle of the King. In addition to reworkings of the Song of Roland in Old French and other medieval languages, these poems are devoted to the numerous military campaigns of Charlemagne against the Muslims before and after the tragic Battle of Roncevaux. These texts provide valuable insights into the medieval reception of the Roland material, exemplifying the process of cycle formation and attesting to the diversity of the Romance epic. Far from presenting a simplistic view of the clash of civilizations, these chansons de geste display a web of contradictions, offering both a glorification and a critique of hatred and violence. This volume offers the first English translations of the three epic poems whose action directly precedes the events of the Song of Roland. Gui of Burgundy extends the period of time spent in Spain by Charles and his army from seven to twenty-six years, which gives the sons of the Twelve Peers the opportunity to reach adulthood and come to the rescue of their fathers. Roland at Saragossa, composed in Occitan, takes place in the days immediately preceding the decisive defeat and relates in an heroi-comic manner how Roland sneaks into Saragossa at the request of the pagan Queen Braslimonda, who has been enraptured by his strength and beauty. Finally, Otinel tells of a Saracen envoy who comes to Paris to challenge Charlemagne on behalf of the Emir Garsile, who has his capital in Lombardy. The action takes place in France and northern Italy in a lull between the capture of Pamplona and the defeat at Roncevaux. The translations are presented with notes, and the volume includes an introduction placing the poems in their wider historical and cultural contexts.
