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Controlling Readers
Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book. In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case s...
The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure?
The Writer's Gift or the Patron's Pleasure? introduces a new approach to literary patronage through a reassessment of the medieval paragon of literary sponsorship, Charles V of France. Traditionally celebrated for his book commissions that promoted the vernacular, Charles V also deserves credit for having profoundly altered the literary economy when bypassing the traditional system of acquiring books through gifting to favor the commission. When upturning literary dynamics by soliciting works to satisfy his stated desires, the king triggered a multi-generational literary debate concerned with the effect a work's status as a solicited or unsolicited text had in determining the value and purpose of the literary enterprise. Treating first the king's commissioned writers and then canonical French late medieval authors, Deborah McGrady argues that continued discussion of these competing literary economies engendered the concept of the "writer's gift," which vernacular writers used to claim a distinctive role in society based on their triple gift of knowledge, wisdom, and literary talent.
Debate of the Romance of the Rose
In 1401, Christine de Pizan (1365–1430?), one of the most renowned and prolific woman writers of the Middle Ages, wrote a letter to the provost of Lille criticizing the highly popular and widely read Romance of the Rose for its blatant and unwarranted misogynistic depictions of women. The debate that ensued, over not only the merits of the treatise but also of the place of women in society, started Europe on the long path to gender parity. Pizan’s criticism sparked a continent-wide discussion of issues that is still alive today in disputes about art and morality, especially the civic responsibility of a writer or artist for the works he or she produces. In Debate of the “Romance of the Rose,” David Hult collects, along with the debate documents themselves, letters, sermons, and excerpts from other works of Pizan, including one from City of Ladies—her major defense of women and their rights—that give context to this debate. Here, Pizan’s supporters and detractors are heard alongside her own formidable, protofeminist voice. The resulting volume affords a rare look at the way people read and thought about literature in the period immediately preceding the era of print.
Christine de Pizan in Bruges. The Flemish Codex of Le Livre de la Cité Des Dames (London, British Library, MS Add. 20698).
Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430) composed 'Le Livre de la Cité des Dames' as a response to the misogynistic writings of the time. In 1475, Jan de Baenst, a descendant of a Bruges family, ordered a translation, 'Het Bouc van de Stede der Vrauwen'. This book tells the story of this codex by focusing on the background of the commissioner, the codicological aspects, the illumination program (41 miniatures), and the translator's personal epilogue. With a summary in Dutch and French.
Authorship and First-person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England
An examination of medieval vernacular allegories, across a number of languages, offers a new idea of what authorship meant in the late middle ages. The emergence of vernacular allegories in the middle ages, recounted by a first-person narrator-protagonist, invites both abstract and specific interpretations of the author's role, since the protagonist who claims to compose thenarrative also directs the reader to interpret such claims. Moreover, the specific attributes of the narrator-protagonist bring greater attention to individual identity. But as the actual authors of the allegories also adapted elements found in each other's works, their shared literary tradition unites differing perspecti...
The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy
The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy celebrates the ways in which musicians have historically called upon philosophy as a source of inspiration and encouragement, and scholars of music through the ages have turned to philosophy for insight into music and into the worlds that sustain it.
Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages
This is a set of essays from many of the leading scholars in the world of medieval studies, which addresses a wide diversity of texts and genres and their diverse perspectives on love. Attention is given to interaction between English writings and putative continental and international influences, with particular emphasis on the works of Chaucer.
Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde
This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explore...
Machaut's Legacy
Machaut's Legacy offers the first comprehensive discussion of the artistic legacy of Guillaume de Machaut, the most important poet and musician of the later Middle Ages, with the book offering twelve chapters detailing his influence on and connection to writers from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Roth.
Christine de Pizan and Biblical Wisdom
The fifteen-century writer Christine de Pizan very adeptly used various aspects of the religious traditions of her day in her confrontation of misogynous beliefs and attitudes. In this book the insights of today's feminist scholars in religion are used to demonstrate that one of the more intriguing religious elements Christine drew upon was the female figure of biblical Wisdom. While the use of Wisdom in the Medieval era in a general theological and literary sense was quite prevalent, Christine took a significant step beyond customary symbolic usage in that Wisdom was called upon as a metaphor for deity to creatively fortify her efforts to claim justice and honor for herself and for all women. Wisdom appeared to function, for Christine, as a reflection in the divine realm of ideal female and male realities in the human. This book serves to add a newly discovered source of inspiration for Christine de Pizan's development of her literary-theological creations, and serves as well to add Christine's remarkable feminist appropriation of the female figure of biblical Wisdom to current feminist-theological discussions.
