Download or read book Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World written by Noah D. Guynn and published by D. S. Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of medieval historican writings through the prism of violence. The concept of medieval historiography as "usable past" is here challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a memorable and usable past. The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of genres (chansons de geste, histories, chronicles, travel writing, and lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery, humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation, each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern conceptions of historical intelligibility. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo, Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt
Download or read book Knight for the Ages A written by Elizabeth Morrison and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2018 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing (Book of the Deeds of Jacques de Lalaing), a famous Flemish illuminated manuscript, relays the audacious life of Jacques de Lalaing (1421–1453), a story that reads more like a fast-paced adventure novel. Produced in the tradition of chivalric biography, a genre developed in the mid-fifteenth century to celebrate the great personalities of the day, the manuscript’s text and illuminations begin with a magnificent frontispiece by the most acclaimed Flemish illuminator of the sixteenth century, Simon Bening. A Knight for the Ages: Jacques de Lalaing and the Art of Chivalry presents a kaleidoscopic view of the manuscript with essays written by the world’s leading medievalists, adding rich texture and providing a greater understanding of the many aspects of the manuscript’s background, creation, and reception, revealing for the first time the full complexity of this illuminated romance. The texts are accompanied by stunning reproductions of all of the manuscripts’ miniatures—never before published in color—as well as a plot summary and translations, allowing the reader to follow Jacques de Lalaing on his knightly journeys and experience the thrilling triumphs of his legendary tournaments and battles.
Download or read book The Logic of Idolatry in Seventeenth century French Literature written by Ellen McClure and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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'Urf , Descartes, La Fontaine, S vign , 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.
Download or read book Inscribing Knowledge in the Medieval Book written by Rosalind Brown-Grant and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays examines how the paratextual apparatus of medieval manuscripts both inscribes and expresses power relations between the producers and consumers of knowledge in this important period of intellectual history. It seeks to define which paratextual features – annotations, commentaries, corrections, glosses, images, prologues, rubrics, and titles – are common to manuscripts from different branches of medieval knowledge and how they function in any particular discipline. It reveals how these visual expressions of power that organize and compile thought on the written page are consciously applied, negotiated or resisted by authors, scribes, artists, patrons and readers. This collection, which brings together scholars from the history of the book, law, science, medicine, literature, art, philosophy and music, interrogates the role played by paratexts in establishing authority, constructing bodies of knowledge, promoting education, shaping reader response, and preserving or subverting tradition in medieval manuscript culture.
Download or read book Lives Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages written by Julie Barrau and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did medieval people define themselves? And how did they balance their identities as individuals with the demands of their communities? Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages intertwines the study of identities with current scholarship to reveal their multi-layered, sometimes contradictory dimensions. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from legal texts to hagiographies and biblical exegesis, and diverse cultural and social approaches, this volume enriches our understanding of medieval people's identities - as defined by themselves and by others, as individuals and as members of groups and communities. It adopts a complex and wide-ranging understanding of what constituted 'identities' beyond family and regional or national belonging, such as social status, gender, age, literacy levels, and displacement. New figures and new concepts of 'identities' thus emerge from the dialogue between the chapters, through an approach based on life-histories, lived experience, ethnogenesis, theories of diaspora, cultural memory and generational change.
Download or read book Living with Disfigurement in Early Medieval Europe written by Patricia Skinner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-21 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC-BY 4.0 license. This book examines social and medical responses to the disfigured face in early medieval Europe, arguing that the study of head and facial injuries can offer a new contribution to the history of early medieval medicine and culture, as well as exploring the language of violence and social interactions. Despite the prevalence of warfare and conflict in early medieval society, and a veritable industry of medieval historians studying it, there has in fact been very little attention paid to the subject of head wounds and facial damage in the course of war and/or punitive justice. The impact of acquired disfigurement —for the individual, and for her or his family and community—is barely registered, and only recently has there been any attempt to explore the question of how damaged tissue and bone might be treated medically or surgically. In the wake of new work on disability and the emotions in the medieval period, this study documents how acquired disfigurement is recorded across different geographical and chronological contexts in the period.
Download or read book Anne de Graville and Women s Literary Networks in Early Modern France written by Elizabeth L'Estrange and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period. In the 1520s, the French noblewoman Anne de Graville composed two poetic works, based on older, canonical, male-authored texts: Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida and Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. The first, the Beau roman, she offered to Claude, queen of France and wife of Francis I, and the second, the Rondeaux, to the king's mother, Louise of Savoy. With the pro-feminine spin of her rewritings, Anne developed the legacy of another woman writer from 100 years earlier, Christine de Pizan, by entering the on-going debate known as the querelle des femmes. Like Christine, Anne sought to redress the negative view of women found in much contemporary popular literature and to offer role models for both men and women at the contemporary court. This book is the first detailed reconstruction and interpretation of Anne's library and her collecting practice, showing how they relate to her own writings and her literary milieu. It also teases out her links to other women writers of the time interested in the querelle, such as Catherine d'Amboise and Margaret of Navarre. Paying close attention to literary, manuscript, and artistic sources, it establishes Anne's reputation as one of the most erudite poets of the period, and one keenly attuned to the position of women in society as well as to the political sensitivities of the French court.
Download or read book 2014 written by Raluca Radulescu and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of the BIAS is, year by year, to draw attention to all scholarly books and articles directly concerned with the matière de Bretagne. The bibliography aims to include all books, reviews and articles published in the year preceding its appearance, an exception being made for earlier studies which have been omitted inadvertently. The present volume contains over 700 entries on relevant publications that were published in 2013.
Download or read book Three Preludes to the Song of Roland written by and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-07-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Murder Betrayal and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles Count of Flanders written by Galbert of Bruges and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV In 1127 Charles the Good, count of Flanders, was surrounded by assassins while at prayer and killed by a sword blow to the forehead. His murder upset the fragile balance of power between England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire, giving rise to a bloody civil war while impacting the commercial life of medieval Europe. The eyewitness account by the Flemish cleric Galbert of Bruges of the assassination and the struggle for power that ensued is the only journal to have survived from twelfth century Europe. This new translation by medieval studies expert Jeff Rider greatly improves upon all previous versions, substantially advancing scholarship on the Middle Ages while granting new life and immediacy to Galbert’s well informed and courageously candid narrative. /div
Download or read book Translation and Temporality in Beno t de Sainte Maure s Roman de Troie written by Maud Burnett McInerney and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting new approach to one of the most important texts of medieval Europe. The story of the Trojan War has been told and retold across the ages, from Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid to recent film and television adaptations. The peoples of medieval Europe were especially enthralled with the tale of the siege of the great city by the Greeks, and by the fourteenth century virtually every royal house in Europe traced its ancestry to some long-ago Trojan warrior. The medieval West, however, had no access to Homer, and though Virgil was certainly read, the most influential version of the Troy story for centuries was that recounted in the Roman de Troie, by Benoît de Sainte Maure. This massive poem in Old French claimed to be a translation of two eyewitness accounts of the War, both actually late antique forgeries, but it is in reality a largely original tapestry of chivalric exploits, elaborate descriptions and marvellous creatures such as centaurs and Amazons. The love story of Troilus and Briseida was invented in its pages, later inspiring Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare. The huge popularity of the Roman de Troie allowed medieval dynasties to create new kinds of political authority by extending their pedigrees back into days of legend, and was an essential element in the inauguration of a new genre, romance. This book uses approaches from theories of translation and temporality to develop its analysis of the Roman de Troie and its context. It reads the text against Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to argue that Benoît is a participant in the Anglo-Norman invention of a new kind of history. It develops readings grounded in both gender studies and queer theory to demonstrate the ways in which the Roman de Troie participates in the invention of romance time, even as it uses its queer characters to cast doubt upon the optimistic genealogical fantasies of romance. Finally, it argues that the great series of ekphrastic passages so characteristic of the Roman de Troie operate as lieux de mémoire, epitomizing the potential of poetry to stop time, at least in the moment. The author also provides an overview of the complex manuscript tradition of the Roman de Troie in support of the contention that the text deserves to be central to any study of medieval literature.
Download or read book Villainy in France 1463 1610 written by Jonathan Patterson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Obscene poetry, servants' slanders against their masters, the diabolical acts of those who committed massacre and regicide. This is a book about the harmful, outward manifestation of inner malice—villainy—in French culture (1463-1610). In pre-modern France, villainous offences were countered, if never fully contained, by intersecting legal and literary responses. Combining the methods of legal anthropology with literary and historical analysis, this study examines villainy across juridical documents, criminal records, and literary texts. Whilst few people obtained justice through the law, many pursued out-of-court settlements of one kind or another. Literary texts commemorated villainies both fictitious and historical; literature sometimes instantiated the process of redress, and enabled the transmission of conflicts from one context to another. Villainy in France follows this overflowing current of pre-modern French culture, examining its impact within France and across the English Channel. Scholars and cultural critics of the Anglophone world have long been fascinated by villainy and villains. This book reveals the subject's significant 'Frenchness' and establishes a transcultural approach to it in law and literature. In this study, villainy's particular significance emerges through its representation in authors remembered for their less-than respectable, even criminal, activities: François Villon, Clément Marot, François Rabelais, Pierre de L'Estoile, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman. Villainy in France affords legal-literary comparison of these authors alongside many of their lesser-known contemporaries; in so doing, it reinterprets French conflicts within a wider European context, from the mid-fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century.
Download or read book Rebel Barons written by Luke Sunderland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this ambivalence, which was especially acute in England, France, and Italy in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the modern ideology of sovereignty, arguing for monopolies on justice and the legitimate use of violence, was developed. Sovereign powers asserted themselves militarily and economically provoking complex phenomena of resistance by aristocrats. This volume argues that the chansons de geste, the key genre for disseminating models of violent noble opposition to sovereigns, offer a powerful way of understanding acts of resistance. Traditionally seen as France's epic literary monuments - the Chanson de Roland is often presented as foundational of French literature - chansons de geste in fact come from areas antagonistic to France, such as Burgundy, England, Flanders, Occitania, and Italy, where they were reworked repeatedly from the twelfth century to the fifteenth and recast into prose and chronicle forms. Rebel baron narratives were the principal vehicle for aristocratic concerns about tyranny, for models of violent opposition to sovereigns and for fantasies of escape from the Carolingian world via crusade and Oriental adventures. Rebel Barons reads this corpus across its full range of historical and geographical relevance, and through changes in form, as well as placing it in dialogue with medieval political theory, to bring out the contributions of literary texts to political debates. Revealing the widespread and long-lived importance of these anti-royalist works supporting regional aristocratic rights to feud and revolt, Rebel Barons reshapes our knowledge of reactions to changing political realities at a crux period in European history.
Download or read book Machaut and the Medieval Apprenticeship Tradition written by Douglas Kelly and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A milestone in Machaut studies and in late-medieval French literature in general. Machaut, already considered the seminal figure in late-medieval poetics and music, here comes across in these respects more clearly than ever. Kelly also further contextualises him within what we might call the authorial apprenticeship tradition' of Boethius, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, and later Gower, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan. The fruit of one of the field's most distinguished scholars today." Nadia Margolis, Mount Holyoke College. Guillaume de Machaut was celebrated in the later Middle Ages as a supreme poet and composer, and accordingly, his poetry was recommended as a model for aspiring poets. In his Voir Dit, Toute Belle, a young, aspiring poet, convinces the Machaut figure to mentor her. This volume examines Toute Belle as she masters Machaut's dual arts of poetry and love, focusing on her successful apprenticeship in these arts; it also provides a thorough review of Machaut's art of love and art of poetry in his dits and lyricsm, and the previous scholarship on these topics. It goes on to treat Machaut's legacy among poets who, like Toute Belle, adapted his poetic craft in new and original ways. A concluding analysis of melodie identifies the synaesthetic pleasure that late medieval poets, including Machaut, offer their readers. Douglas Kelly is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Download or read book A Chivalric Life written by Rosalind Brown-Grant and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English translation of the chivalric biography of the foremost knight of the late Middle Ages.
Download or read book Mobile Saints written by Kate M. Craig and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobile Saints examines the central medieval (ca. 950–1150 CE) practice of removing saints’ relics from rural monasteries in order to take them on out-and-back journeys, particularly within northern France and the Low Countries. Though the permanent displacements of relics—translations— have long been understood as politically and culturally significant activities, these temporary circulations have received relatively little attention. Yet the act of taking a medieval relic from its “home,” even for a short time, had the power to transform the object, the people it encountered, and the landscape it traveled through. Using hagiographical and liturgical texts, this study reveals both the opportunities and tensions associated with these movements: circulating relics extended the power of the saint into the wider world, but could also provoke public displays of competition, mockery, and resistance. By contextualizing these effects within the discourses and practices that surrounded traveling relics, Mobile Saints emphasizes the complexities of the central medieval cult of relics and its participants, while speaking to broader questions about the role of movement in negotiating the relationships between sacred objects, space, and people.
Download or read book Telling the Story in the Middle Ages written by Kathryn A. Duys and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of our modern understanding of medieval society and cultures comes through the stories people told and the way they told them. Storytelling was, for this period, not only entertainment; it was central to the law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. The essays in this volume raise and discuss a number of questions concerning the strategies, contexts and narratalogical features of medieval storytelling. They look particularly at who tells the story; the audience; how a story is told and performed; and the manuscript and social context for such tales. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College; Kathryn Duys is Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French, Montclair State University.
