The Familiar Enemy
The Familiar Enemy re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two profoundly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. This special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. Ardis Butterfield reassesses the concept of 'nation' in this period through a wide-ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce, or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this conflict created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. She considers authors writing in French, 'Anglo-Norman', English, and the comic tradition of Anglo-French 'jargon', including Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans, as well as many lesser-known or anonymous works. Traditionally Chaucer has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus suggests that a modern understanding of what 'English' might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from 'French', and that this has far-reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.
Queenship Gender and Reputation in the Medieval and Early Modern West 1060 1600
This edited collection opens new ways to look at queenship in areas and countries not usually studied and reflects the increasingly interdisciplinary work and geographic range of the field. This book is a forerunner in queenship and re-invents the reputations of the women and some of the men. The contributors answers questions about the nature of queenship, reputation of queens, and gender roles in the medieval and early modern west. The essays question the viability of propaganda, gossip, and rumor that still characterizes some queens in modern histories. The wide geographic range covered by the contributors moves queenship studies beyond France and England to understudied places such as Sweden and Hungary. Even the essays on more familiar countries explores areas not usually studied, such as the role of Edward II’s stepmother, Margaret of France in Gaveston’s downfall. The chapters clearly have a common thread and the editors’ summary and description of the collection is valuable in assisting the reader. The collection is divided into two sections “Biography, Gossip, and History” and “Politics, Ambition, and Scandal.” The editors and contributors, including Zita Eva Rohr and Elena Woodacre, are scholars at the top of their field and several and engage and debate with recent scholarship. This collection will appeal internationally to literary scholars and gender studies scholars as well historians interested in the countries included in the collection.
Authority and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles
This volume is an attempt to discuss the ways in which themes of authority and gender can be traced in the writing of chronicles and chronicle-like writings from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. With major contributions by fourteen authors, each of them specialists in the field, this study spans full across the compass of medieval and early modern Europe, from England and Scandinavia, to Byzantium and the Crusader Kingdoms; embraces a variety of media and methods; and touches evidence from diverse branches of learning such as language and literature, history and art, to name just a few. This is an important collection which will be of the highest utility for students and scholars of language, literature, and history for many years to come.
Textual and Visual Representations of Power and Justice in Medieval France
Thoroughly interdisciplinary in approach, this volume examines how the exercising of power, the distribution of justice, and transgression against the law were portrayed in both textual and pictorial terms in works produced and circulated in medieval French manuscripts and early printed books. The essays analyse a wide variety of texts to offer new insights into the ways in which the language and imagery of politics and justice permeated medieval French culture.
Autour du XVe si cle
This volume is the fruit of the closing symposium of the International Franqui Chair, which was held by Alberto Varvaro in 2003-2004. Under the impetus of the University of Liège, represented by Paola Moreno and Giovanni Palumbo, and with the participation of colleagues, students and friends from Belgium and beyond, the conference was a collective analysis and development of the most recent research concerning not only Jean Froissart, but also historiography, novel and lyric production at the end of the Middle Ages, in France and the rest of the Romance world.
La vois des hiraus
In my dissertation I discuss the textual conventions employed to describe tournaments and their accompanying festivities, such as banquets and processions. In this study I outline these conventions and propose that the method of close examination of their variations offers fresh insights into the medieval texts of my corpus taken both individually and in their wider intertextual context. Furthermore, I perform this of analysis in its codicological context through first-hand examination of the manuscript illuminations and mise en page of the tournament scenes in my corpus. The works of my corpus reflect a wide variety of European courts in both the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are written in both verse and prose, and include romance, chivalric biography, and chronicle. These works are Jehan de Saintre, Perceforest, Ysaye le Triste, Froissart's Meliador, Le livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, Froissart's Chroniques, Olivier de La Marche's Memoires, a selection of les Grandes Chroniques de France as well as excerpts from chronicles by Michel Pintoin, Pierre Cochon, Jean Chartier, Guillaume Leseur, Enguerrand de Monstrelet, and Jean Le Fevre de Saint-Remy. I use these texts, as well as several extant pas d 'armes accounts, to identify and analyze the romance tournament convention, the entry convention, and the pas d'armes convention. The conclusions I reach are manifold. First, analysis of the variations of these conventions in their codicological context offers interpretations of many of these texts which may better approximate authorial intent and contemporary reception than previous readings. Second, the investigation of less-commonly examined chronicles underscores the need to recognize and appreciate the nature of heraldic documents and their impact on fifteenth-century tournament accounts. Third, the results of these analyses sometimes challenge assumptions regarding the nature of some Burgundian works as well as tournaments in general. Finally, this study emphasizes the need to venture beyond the usual confines of "literary" genres and to recognize that textual patterns crossed these boundaries regularly in the middle ages.