Bloodless Genealogies Of The French Middle Ages

Zrinka Stahuljak reevaluates, in Old French literature and art, two concepts fundamental for the medieval period: genealogy and translatio. She argues that literary criticism has inherited the definition of genealogy developed by historians, wherein genealogy is defined as a bloodline linking fathers and sons from generation to generation. Similarly, she maintains, literary criticism has interpreted medieval translatio, a concept fundamental for understanding all forms of intellectual and political transmission in the Middle Ages, as a genealogy. Through an analysis of the romances of antiquity, Arthurian prose romances, the Charlemagne window at Chartres, and the iconography of the Tree of Jesse, covering the period between 1150 and 1250, she challenges both these notions at the core of medieval scholarship. Because she addresses such basic concepts of medieval literature and culture that transcend national and linguistic boundaries, Stahuljak’s study, drawing on literary, historical, and visual sources, has implications well beyond French medieval studies. Her examination of canonical texts and traditional, long-held notions of how genealogy works in literature and of the medieval theory of translation will provide interesting, fresh analysis and methodology for the classroom and a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship of linguistics, history, and anthropology in the 12th century.

Uncovering the many striking female alternatives to patrilineal narratives in medieval texts, Emma O. Bérat explores strategies of writing and illustration that creatively and purposefully depict women's legacies. Genealogy, used to justify a character's present power and project it onto the future, was crucial to medieval political, literary, and historical thought. While patrilineage often limited women to exceptional or passive roles, other genealogical forms that represent and promote women's claims are widespread in medieval texts. Female characters transmit power through book patronage and reading, enduring landmarks, and international travel, as well as childbearing and succession. These flexible – if messy – genealogies reflect the web of political, biological, and spiritual relations that frequently characterized elite women's lives. Examining hagiography, chronicles, genealogical rolls, and French, English, and Latin romances, as well as associated codices and images, Bérat highlights the centrality of female characters and historical women to this fundamental aspect of medieval consciousness.

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue--in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science--but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media, and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality; ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.

A groundbreaking assessment of the use medieval English history-writers made of saints' lives.

The most comprehensive history of literature written in French ever produced in English.

Appearing in all figural media from the mid-twelfth century, family trees and lineages made political claims for their patrons.

In Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation, Zrinka Stahuljak explores the connections and fissures between the history of sexuality, nineteenth-century views of the Middle Ages, and the conceptualization of modern France. This cultural history uncovers the determinant role that the sexuality of the Middle Ages played in nineteenth-century French identity. Stahuljak's provocative study of sex, blood, race, and love in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical and historical literature demonstrates how French medicine's obsession with the medieval past helped to define European sexuality, race, public health policy, marriage, family, and the conceptualization of the Middle Ages. Stahuljak reveals the connections between the medieval military order of the Templars and the 1830 colonization of Algeria, between a fifteenth-century French marshal and the development of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's theory of sadism, between courtly love and the 1884 law on divorce. Although the developing discipline of medieval studies eventually rejected the influence of these medical philologists, the convergence of medievalism and medicine shaped modern capitalist French society and established a vision of the Middle Ages that survives today.

The articles in this collection, written by medievalists and Renaissance scholars, are part of the recent "cultural turn" in translation studies, which approaches translation as an activity that is powerfully affected by its socio-political context and the demands of the translating culture. The links made between culture, politics, and translation in these texts highlight the impact of ideological and political forces on cultural transfer in early European thought. While the personalities of powerful thinkers and translators such as Erasmus, Etienne Dolet, Montaigne, and Leo Africanus play into these texts, historical events and intellectual fashions are equally important: moments such as the Hundred Years War, whose events were partially recorded in translation by Jean Froissart; the Political tussles around the issues of lay readers and rewriters of biblical texts; the theological and philosophical shift from scholasticism to Renaissance relativism; or European relations with the Muslim world add to the interest of these articles. Throughout this volume, translation is treated as a form of writing, as the production of text and meaning, carried out in a certain cultural and political ambiance, and for identifiable - though not always stated - reasons. No translation, this collection argues, is an innocent, transparent rendering of the original.