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The role of poetry in the transmission and shaping of knowledge in
late medieval France. Covering the period from the late thirteenth
to the early sixteenth century, Poetry, Knowledge, and Community
examines the role of poetry in French culture in transmitting and
shaping knowledge. The volume reveals the interplay between poet,
text, and audience, and explores the key dynamics of later medieval
French poetry and of the communities in which it was produced.
Essays in both English and French are organised into three
inter-related sections, "Learned Poetry/ Poetry and Learning",
"Poetry or Prose?", and "Poetic Communities", and address both
canonical and less well-known French and Occitan verse literature,
together with a wide range of complementary subjectareas. The
international cast of contributors to the volume includes many of
the best-known scholars in the field: the introductory essay is by
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet (Universite de Paris IV, Sorbonne),
and keynote essays are provided by David F. Hult (University of
California, Berkeley), Michel Zink (College de France), and Nancy
Freeman Regalado (New York University). Edited by REBECCA DIXON
(University of Manchester) and FINN E. SINCLAIR (University of
Cambridge), with Adrian Armstrong (University of Manchester),
Sylvia Huot (University of Cambridge), and Sarah Kay (University of
Princeton). CONTRIBUTORS: Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Mishtooni Bose,
Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Rebecca Dixon, Thelma Fenster, Denis
Hue, David Hult, Stephanie Kamath, Deborah McGrady, Amandine
Mussou, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Jennifer Saltzstein, Finn E.
Sinclair, Lori J. Walters, David Wrisley, Michel Zink
Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge and Desire in
the "Roman De La Rose"
The Romance of the Rose has been a controversial text since it was
written in the thirteenth century. There is evidence for radically
different readings as as early as the first half of the fourteenth
century. The text provided inspiration for both courtly and
didactic poets. Some read it as a celebration of human love; others
as an erudite philosophical work; still others as a satirical
representation of social and sexual follies. On one hand it was
praised as an edifying treatise, on the other condemned as
lascivious and misogynistic. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot and the
contributors to this volume-Pierre-Yves Badel, Emmanuele
Baumgartner, John V. Fleming, Robert Pogue Harrison, David F. Hult,
Stephen G. Nichols, Lee Patterson, Daniel Poirion, Karl D. Uitti,
Dieuwke E. van der Poel, and Lori Walters-represent all the major
areas of current work on the Romance of the Rose, both in American
and in Europe. The volume will be of value to students and scholars
of medieval literature, intellectual history, and art history.
The motet began as a form of sacred vocal music in several parts; a
cantus firmus or tenor, drawn from sacred Latin chant, served as a
foundation for one or more upper voices. The French motet was a
well-established form by the middle of the thirteenth century, as
were bilingual motets that combined at least one French and one
Latin text among the upper voices.
Though some attention is paid to melodic structure and the
relationship between text and music, this book focuses on the
literary artistry of the texts of French and bilingual motets,
notably the special feature of motets that distinguished them from
other medieval lyric forms: the phenomenon of polytextuality. The
author analyzes both the interaction of the texts within a motet
(when there is more than one texted voice) and the relationship
between the texted voice(s) and the tenor.
Although some French motets employ vernacular refrains as tenors,
the vast majority use Latin tenors, thus maintaining an explicit
tie to the liturgical origins of the genre. This presence of sacred
and profane elements within a single motet presents an interpretive
dilemma that the author suggests can be resolved through an
allegorical or parodic reading; indeed, she argues that the tension
between allegory and parody is an essential feature of the French
motet.
The book examines the creative juxtaposition of sacred tenors and
vernacular lyric motifs, and the resulting interplay of allegorical
and parodic meanings, focusing in particular on the female persona
as object of desire and as desiring subject, and on the motives of
the separation and reunion of lovers. The author's analysis also
discusses the links between the French motet and the secular lyric,
the allegorization of love poetry in sermons and mystical texts,
sacred parody, and the playful use of liturgical and biblical
citations in erotic poetry.
As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia
Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a
theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between
implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental
aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this
generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both
from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise,
or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary
tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the
evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which
incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was
responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a
written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary
tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first
investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout,
rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then
describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in
specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors
such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de
Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de
Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers'
characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing
and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or
writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways
in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and
illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and
book-makers conceived their common project, and how they
distinguished their respective roles.
Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of
a British prehistory prior to the civilization established,
according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his
Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric
culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute
savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit
against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders:
The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose
Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for
fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the
presentation-and suppression-of alternative narrative and
historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a
very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and
drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role
of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human
subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot
and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le
Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By
asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond
to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot
demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the
issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern
perspective.
Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of
a British prehistory prior to the civilization established,
according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his
Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric
culture of the romance world. Whether they are portrayed as brute
savages or as tyrannical pagan lords, giants serve as a limit
against which the chivalric hero can measure himself. In Outsiders:
The Humanity and Inhumanity of Giants in Medieval French Prose
Romance, Sylvia Huot argues that the presence of giants allows for
fantasies of ethnic and cultural conflict and conquest, and for the
presentation—and suppression—of alternative narrative and
historical trajectories that might have made Arthurian Britain a
very different place. Focusing on medieval French prose romance and
drawing on aspects of postcolonial theory, Huot examines the role
of giants in constructions of race, class, gender, and human
subjectivity. She selects for study the well-known prose Lancelot
and the prose Tristan, as well as the lesser known Perceforest, Le
Conte du papegau, Guiron le Courtois, and Des Grantz Geants. By
asking to what extent views of giants in Arthurian romance respond
to questions that concern twenty-first-century readers, Huot
demonstrates the usefulness of current theoretical concepts and the
issues they raise for rethinking medieval literature from a modern
perspective.
The Romance of the Rose was one of the most important works of
medieval vernacular literature. It was composed in the thirteenth
century and exerted a profound influence on literature in France,
England, the Netherlands and Italy for the next 200 years. In this
book, Sylvia Huot investigates how medieval readers understood the
text, assessing the evidence to be found in well over 200 surviving
manuscripts: annotations, glosses, illuminations, marginal doodles,
rewritings, expansions and abridgements. This allows a picture to
emerge of the interests and concerns of its readers, including such
important fourteenth-century figures as the monastic author
Guillaume de Deguilleville and the court poet Guillaume de Machaut.
The book contains analyses of individual versions of the poem. It
offers an interesting perspective on the interpretative
difficulties of this learned and complex poem.
The Roman de Perceforestexplores issues of ethnic and cultural
conflict and fusion, identity and hybridity in an imaginary
pre-Arthurian Britain, ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander
the Great. The Roman de Perceforest was composed about 1340 for
William I, Count of Hainaut. The vast romance, building on the
prose romance cycles of the thirteenth century, chronicles an
imaginary era of pre-Arthurian British history when Britain was
ruled by a dynasty established by Alexander the Great. Its story of
cultural rise, decline, and regeneration offers a fascinating
exploration of medieval ideas about ethnic and cultural conflict
and fusion, identity and hybridity. Drawing on the insights of
contemporary postcolonial theory, Sylvia Huot examines the author's
treatment of basic concepts such as "nature" and "culture",
"savagery" and "civilisation". Particular attention isgiven to the
text's treatment of gender and sexuality as focal points of
cultural identity, to its construction of the ethnic categories of
"Greek" and "Trojan", and to its exposition of the ideological
biases inherent in any historical narrative. Written in the
fourteenth century, revived at the fifteenth-century Burgundian
court, and twice printed in sixteenth-century Paris, Perceforest is
both a masterpiece of medieval literature and a vehicle for the
transmission of medieval thought into the early modern era of
global exploration and colonisation. SYLVIA HUOT is Reader in
Medieval French Literature and Fellow of Pembroke College,
Cambridge.
Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.
The Roman de la Rose explicitly offers an 'art of love', while also
repeatedly asserting that the experience of love is impossible to
put into words. An examination of the intertextual density of the
Rose, with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin
authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and
trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation of
sources. Huot's new book focuses on Guillaume de Lorris's use of
the Ovidian corpus, and on Jean de Meun's dazzling orchestration of
allusions to a wider range of Latin writers: principally Ovid,
Boethius, and Virgil, but also including John of Salisbury and
Alain de Lille. In both parts of the Rose, poetic allegory is a
language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable.
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