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.

This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as "insincere" or "mere intellectual games," Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and engage with the particular rhetorical and historical contexts of these works. Edited and as yet unedited texts by Martin Le Franc, Jacques Milet, Pierre Michault, and Jean Bouchet-catalogues of women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems-are brought together and analysed in detail for the first time in order to explore, for example, how such works address the misogynistic spectre of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose.
The book seeks to understand the contemporary popularity of the case for women (la querelle des femmes) as literary subject matter. It investigates the publication history across this period, from manuscript to print, of Le Franc's Le Champion des dames. Swift further aims to show how these texts hold interest for modern audiences. A nexus of theoretical concerns centred on performance - Judith Butler's gender performativity, Derrida's re-working of Austin's linguistic performativity through spectrality, and dramatic performance - is enlisted to articulate the interpretative engagement expected by querelle writers of their audience. The reading strategies proposed foster a nuanced andenriched perspective on the question of a male author's "sincerity" when writing in defence of women.

An examination of how the dead were memorialised in late medieval French literature. Awarded a commendation in the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize for the best book published in 2016 by a scholar working in French studies in Britain or Ireland. Who am I when I am dead? Several late-medieval French writers used literary representation of the dead as a springboard for exploring the nature of human being. Death is a critical moment for identity definition: one is remembered, forgotten or, worse, misremembered. Works in prose and verse by authors from Alain Chartier to Jean Bouchet record characters' deaths, but what distinguishes them as epitaph fictions is not their commemoration of the deceased, so much as their interrogation of how, by whom, and to what purpose posthumous identity is constituted. Far from rigidly memorialising the dead, they exhibit a productive messiness in the processes by which identity is composed in the moment of its decomposition as a complex interplay between body, voice and text. The cemeteries, hospitals, temples and testaments of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century literature, from the "Belle Dame sans mercy" querelle to Le Jugement poetic de l'honneur femenin, present a wealth of ambulant corpses, disembodied voices, animated effigies, martyrs for love and material echoes of the past which invite readers to approach epitaphic identity as a challenging question: here lies who, exactly? In its broadest context, this study casts fresh light on ideas of selfhood in medieval culture as well as on contemporary conceptions of the capacities and purposes of literary representation itself. Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French at St Hilda's College, Oxford.