Originally published in 1990, this book contains the full text and translation of razos and troubadour songs. The coupling of the razos and songs in this edition is based on the conviction that though the lyrics should first be read on their own, it is highly instructive to read the two together, as the razo authors intended. This allows the reader to attempt to read as a thirteenth-century contemporary might have.

Originally published in 1990, this book contains the full text and translation of razos and troubadour songs. The coupling of the razos and songs in this edition is based on the conviction that though the lyrics should first be read on their own, it is highly instructive to read the two together, as the razo authors intended. This allows the reader to attempt to read as a thirteenth-century contemporary might have.

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.

From Occitan poetry to Francophone writing produced in the Caribbean and North Africa, from intellectual history to current films, and from medieval manuscripts to bandes dessinees, this History covers French literature from its beginnings to the present day. With equal attention to all genres, historical periods and registers, this is the most comprehensive guide to literature written in French ever produced in English, and the first in decades to offer such an array of topics and perspectives. Contributors attend to issues of orality, history, peripheries, visual culture, alterity, sexuality, religion, politics, autobiography and testimony. The result is a collection that, despite the wide variety of topics and perspectives, presents a unified view of the richness of French-speaking cultures. This History gives support to the idea that French writing will continue to prosper in the twenty-first century as it adapts, adds to, and refocuses the rich legacy of its past.