From Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century to Christine de
Pizan in the early fifteenth, medieval French poets often aimed to
impart theological, philosophical, or moral ideas. To unify their
thought, and to make its outline visible to readers, the poets
created vivid images of place, such as gardens, paths, idyllic
landscapes, cities, trees, and fountains. For Sarah Kay, these
spatial images are a prop of "monologism," helping to communicate
(or impose) unity of meaning and interpretation by summoning
readers to occupy the same "place" in their thinking as the
authors. Because of this monologism, Kay contends, didactic poetry
has been ill served by a critical tradition that favors difference,
plurality, and dialogism. In The Place of Thought, she seeks
radically to reassess this literature and reappraise the pleasure
to be derived from reading it. Kay argues that one meaning is not
inherently simpler or less interesting than many meanings. Using
specific works as examples, she demonstrates that this "one-ness"
of thought in French didactic poems can be an excitingly complex
and challenging notion, and that it strains the images in which it
is placed to the point where they become difficult to visualize.
Herein lies the poems' simultaneous intellectual and aesthetic
appeal. Focusing on the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, the
Breviari d'amor by Matfre Ermengaud, the Ovide moralise, Pelerinage
de vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville's, Le Jugement dou roy
de Navarre by Guillaume de Machaut, Le Joli buisson de Jonece by
Jean Froissart, and Le Livre du Chemin de long estude by Christine
de Pizan, Kay traces the works' backgrounds in scholastic thinking,
illuminating them when appropriate with modern reflections on the
same ideas.
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