This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analyzed span genres—epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux—and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts—including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland—they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear. Contributors: Adrian P. Tudor | Kristin L. Burr | William Burgwinkle | Jane Gilbert | Francis Gingras | Sara I. James | Douglas Kelly | Mary Jane Schenck | James R. Simpson | Jane H.M. Taylor

This collection of essays argues that literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed, and that one may exist within a group while remaining foreign to it. Contributors examine this theme through a wide range of lenses--from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming--in works that span genres and historical periods.

This long tradition would certainly not be a reason in itself to keep or restore the subject, had it not something to do with the subject itself. All of the associations between the past and literature, all of the signs that point towards an essential link between the notion of literature and a feeling for the past, are crystallized in medieval literature. The curiosity that medieval literature has aroused since it was rediscovered at the dawn of Romanticism presupposes such associations. The very forms of this literature bear indications of them. They encourage us to consider jointly the interest of modern times in the medieval past and the signs of the past with which the Middle Ages marked its own literature. Even more, they invite us to seek in the relationship with the past a defining criterion for literature, a most necessary task with reference to a time when words are not understood in their modern sense, and there is no guarantee that a corresponding notion exists. The best reason to continue with this hundred-and-fifty-year-old teaching is that its object may not even exist.

Remembering Boethius explores the rich intersection between the reception of Boethius and the literary construction of aristocratic identity, focusing on a body of late-medieval vernacular literature that draws on the Consolation of Philosophy to represent and reimagine contemporary experiences of exile and imprisonment. Elizabeth Elliott presents new interpretations of English, French, and Scottish texts, including Machaut's Confort d'ami, Remede de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse, Jean Froissart's Prison amoureuse, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, and The Kingis Quair, reading these texts as sources contributing to the development of the reader's moral character. These writers evoke Boethius in order to articulate and shape personal identities for public consumption, and Elliott's careful examination demonstrates that these texts often write not one life, but two, depicting the relationship between poet and aristocratic patron. These works associate the reception of wisdom with the cultivation of memory, and in turn, illuminate the contemporary reception of the Consolation as a text that itself focuses on memory and describes a visionary process of education that takes place within Boethius's own mind. In asking how and why writers remember Boethius in the Middle Ages, this book sheds new light on how medieval people imagined, and reimagined, themselves.

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

German identity, a key force in history, took shape during the late Middle Ages. This book explains how and why.

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

Sarah Kay s interests in this book are, first, to examine how medieval bestiaries depict and challenge the boundary between humans and other animals; and second, to register the effects on readers of bestiaries by the simple fact that parchment, the writing support of virtually all medieval texts, is a refined form of animal skin. Surveying the most important works created from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries, Kay connects nature to behavior to Christian doctrine or moral teaching across a range of texts. As Kay shows, medieval thought (like today) was fraught with competing theories about human exceptionalism within creation. Given that medieval bestiaries involve the inscription of texts about and images of animals onto animal hides, these texts, she argues, invite readers to reflect on the inherent fragility of bodies, both human and animal, and the difficulty of distinguishing between skin as a site of mere inscription and skin as a containing envelope for sentient life. It has been more than fifty years since the last major consideration of medieval Latin and French bestiaries was published. Kay brings us up to date in the archive, and contributes to current discussions among animal studies theorists, manuscript studies scholars, historians of the book, and medievalists of many stripes."

This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralise and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death--these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.