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A new exploration of the complexities and resolutions at play in the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, offering insights into how her work reflected the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period.
Modern theoretical approaches thrown new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages.
An exploration of the medieval mind as a machine, and how it might be affected and immobiled, in textual reactions to the madness of Charles VI of France.
Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas, one of the three "romances of antiquity" (romans d'antiquité). These romances launched the plots, themes and structures of the genre, then blossoming in the hands of authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît's work is of necessity a poem about war and its causes, how it was fought and what its consequences were for the combatants. But the author's choice of the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, his fondness for description, his ability to recount the intensity of personal struggles, and above all his fascination with the trials and tribulations of Love, which affect some of the work's most prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilus and his love for Briseida), all combine to fashion this romance - in which events from long ago are presented as a reflection of the poet's own feudal and courtly worlds. This translation, the first into English, aims to bring the poem and the author to a wider audience. It is accompanied by an introduction and notes. Glyn S. Burgess is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool; Douglas Kelly is Emeritus Professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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 representationitself.
Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French at St Hilda's College, Oxford.
Feminist discourses have called into question axiomatic world views and shown how gender and sexuality inevitably shape our perceptions, both historically and in the present moment. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies advances that critical endeavour with new questions and insights relating to gender and queer studies, sexualities, the subaltern, margins, and blurred boundaries. The volume's contributions, from French literary studies as well as German, English, history and art history, evince a variety of modes of feminist analysis, primarily in medieval studies but with extensionsinto early modernism. Several interrogate the ethics of feminist hermeneutics, the function of women characters in various literary genres, and so-called "natural" binaries - sex/gender, male/female,East/West, etc. - that undergird our vision of the world. Others investigate learned women and notions of female readership, authorship, and patronage in the production and reception of texts and manuscripts. Still others look at bodies - male male, female, neither, and both - and how clothes cover and socially encode them. Founding Feminisms in Medieval Studies is a tribute to E. JaneBurns, whose important work has proven foundational to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Old French feminist studies. Through her scholarship, teaching, and leadership in co-founding theSociety for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, Burns has inspired a new generation of feminist scholars.
Laine E. Doggett is Associate Professor of French at St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City; Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Professor of French at the University of Mississippi.
Contributors: Cynthia J. Brown, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, Kristin L. Burr, Madeline H. Caviness, Laine E. Doggett, Sarah-Grace Heller, Ruth Mazo Karras, Roberta L. Krueger, Sharon Kinoshita, Tom Linkinen, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, Lisa Perfetti, Ann Marie Rasmussen, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Elizabeth Robertson, Helen Solterer
Much of our modern understanding of medieval society and cultures comes through the stories people told and the way they told them. Storytelling was, for this period, not only entertainment; it was central to the law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. The essays in this volume raise and discuss a number of questions concerning the strategies, contexts and narratalogical features of medieval storytelling. They look particularly at who tells the story; the audience; how a story is told and performed; and the manuscript and social context for such tales. Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer, Department of French, Barnard College; Kathryn Duys is Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, University of St Francis; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French, Montclair State University.
Montaigne's Essais (1580-1592) are one of the most remarkable works of the European Renaissance. The Essais' innovative open-mindedness is at odds with the dogmatism and intolerance of their times, the decades of civil and religious wars in France, and their tolerant and searching human questions and ethics of difference remain compelling for twenty-first century readers. But the sceptical open-endedness that vitalizes this writing is also often troubled and troubling: personal losses and the collapse of cultural ideals moved Montaigne to write, and their attendant anxieties are not resolved into tranquil reflection. Unsettling Montaigne reassesses Montaigne's scepticism. Informed by psychoanalytic and related theory, its close attention to Montaigne's complex uses of metaphor illuminates the psychic economy of his scepticism and tolerance and their poetics, while new readings ofhis Essais and other texts reveal the significance of disquieting questions, thought and affect for the ethos his writing fosters. The analysis deals with figures such as cannibals and cannibalism, hunger, shaking, tickling, place, the brother, and haunting in Montaigne's exploration of concepts which tested his understanding and self-understanding. The volume also demonstrates how figuration supports openness to difference for both writer and readers, and is fundamental to this writing's aesthetic, psychic and ethical creativity. Elizabeth Guild lectures in French at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Robinson College.
Arthurian romance in Renaissance France has long been treated by modern critics as marginal - although manuscripts and printed volumes, adaptations and rewritings, show just how much writers, and especially publishers, saw its potential attractions for readers. This book is the first full-length study of what happens to Arthur at the beginning of the age of print. It explores the fascinations of Arthurian romance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the magnificent presentation volumes offered by Antoine Vérard or Galliot du Pré in the early years of the century to the perfunctory abbreviated Lancelot published by Benoît Rigaud in Lyon in 1591; from PierreSala's dutiful "translation" of Yvain to Jean Maugin's exuberant rewriting of the prose Tristan; from attempts at "new" romance like the little-known Giglan to the runaway best-seller Amadis de Gaule.The book's primary focus is the techniques and stratagems employed by publishers and their workshops to renew Arthurian romance for a new readership: the ways in which the publishers, the translators and the adapters of the Renaissance tailor romance to fit new cultural contexts. Their story - which is the story of the rise and fall of one of the great genres of the Middle Ages - allows privileged insights into socio-cultural and ideological attitudes in the France of the Renaissance, and into issues of literary taste, particular patterns of choice and preference. Jane H.M. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University.
The fourteenth-century French pilgrimage allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville (or "Digulleville") shaped late medieval and early modern European culture. Portions of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, Pèlerinage de l'Ame and Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist survive in more than eighty medieval manuscripts and translations into English, German, Dutch, Castilian and Latin appeared by the early sixteenth century, along with adaptations into French prose and dramatic forms and numerous early printed editions. This volume furnishes a better understanding of the allegories' circulation, creation and importance from the 1330s into the 1560s, via trans-national, multilingual and interdisciplinary perspectives. The collection's first section, on "Tradition", identifies the patterns that developed as Deguileville's corpus captured the attentions of adaptors, annotators and illustrators. The second section, on "Authority", addresses the cultural context of Deguileville himself, his approach to poetic craft and the status of his French and Latin poetry. The third section, on "Influence", closely examines selected connections between the Pèlerinages and the literary productions of later authors, translators and reading communities, including the French verse of Philippe de Mézières, Castilian print adaptation, and the early modern Croatian novel. Overall, the collection provides a variety of approaches to examining literary reception, attending not only to texts but also to evidence of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, and providing new insights into a rich and complex allegorical corpus and its impact on European literary history. Marco Nievergelt is a Maître-Assistant in Early English Literature in the English department of the University of Lausanne.Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath studies English and French medieval literature, with a particular interest in allegory, translation studies, and the history of the material text. Contributors: Flor Maria Bango de la Campa, Robert L.A. Clark, Graham Robert Edwards, Dolores Grmaca, Andreas Kablitz, John Moreau, Ursula Peters, Fabienne Pomel, Pamela Sheingorn, Sara V. Torres, Géraldine Veysseyre
Le Devisement du Monde' (1298), better though inaccurately known in English as 'Marco Polo's Travels', is one of only a handful of medieval texts that remain iconic today for European cultural history, and Marco Polo is one of only a handful of medieval writers who still enjoys instant name-recognition. Yet there is little awareness of the 'Devisement's' complex history and development. This book examines the text from a fresh, literary viewpoint, drawing upon a range of different disciplines and approaches: philology, manuscript studies, narratology, cultural history, postcolonial studies and theory. It contains comparative readings of multiple versions of the text in French, Italian and Latin, Rather than offering a Eurocentric vision of the world grounded in a sense of the absolute alterity of the non-Christian world as is often asserted, the author shows how the 'Devisement' expounds a sense of the relative nature of difference, crucially positioning Marco uncannily between two worlds (East and West), just as he is positioned awkwardly between two languages, French and Italian, and (in modern reception at least) awkwardly between two literary histories. The author also calls into question traditional accounts of the use of French outside France in the Middle Ages and offers a re-assessment of Marco Polo's position in the evolution of European travel writing. Simon Gaunt is Professor of French Language and Literature at King's College London.
The relationship between song quotation and the elevation of French as a literary language that could challenge the cultural authority of Latin is the focus of this book. It approaches this phenomenon through a close examination of the refrain, a short phrase of music and text quoted intertextually across thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century musical and poetic genres. The author draws on a wide range of case studies, from motets, trouvère song, plays, romance, vernacular translations, and proverb collections, to show that medieval composers quoted refrains as vernacular auctoritates; she argues that their appropriation of scholastic, Latinate writing techniques worked to authorize Old French music and poetry as media suitable for the transmission of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the quasi-scholastic usage of refrains in anonymous and less familiar clerical contexts, the book goes on to articulate a new framework for understanding the emergence of the first two named authors of vernacular polyphonic music, the cleric-trouvères Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. It shows how, by blending their craft with the writing practices of the universities, composers could use refrain quotation to assert their status as authors with a new self-consciousness, and to position works in the vernacular as worthy of study and interpretation. Jennifer Saltzstein is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma.
The concept of courtliness forms the theme of this collection of essays. Focused on works written in the Francophone world between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, they examine courtliness as both an historical privilege and a literary ideal, and as a concept that operated on and was informed by complex social and economic realities. Several essays reveal how courtliness is subject to satire or is the subject of exhortation in works intended for noblemen and women, not to mention ambitious bourgeois. Others, more strictly literary in their focus, explore the witty, thoughtful and innovative responses of writers engaged in the conscious process of elevating the new vernacular culture through the articulation of its complexities and contradictions. The volume as a whole, uniting philosophical, theoretical, philological, and cultural approaches, demonstrates that medieval 'courtliness' is an ideal that fascinates us to this day. It is thus a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, in its exploration of the prrofound and wide-ranging ideas that define her contribution to the field. Daniel E. O'Sullivan is Associate Professor of French at the University of Mississippi; Laurie Shepard is Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Contributors: Peter Haidu, Donald Maddox, Michel-André Bossy, Kristin Burr, Joan Tasker Grimbert, David Hult, Virgine Greene, Logan Whalen, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Elizabeth W. Poe, Daniel E. O'Sullivan, William Schenck, Nadia Margolis, Laine Doggett, E. Jane Burns, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Laurie Shephard, Sarah White.