Gender And Voice In Medieval French Literature And Song

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analyses, contributors highlight the voicing of gendered perspectives, expressions of sexuality, and power dynamics. The volume includes feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. The contributors interpret literary or musical works by Chrétien de Troyes, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Hue de la Ferté, the Chastelain de Couci, Jacques de Vitry, Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Alain Chartier, and Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song offers a valuable interdisciplinary approach and contributes to the history of women’s voices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. It illuminates the critical role of voice in negotiating culture, celebrating and innovating traditions, advancing personal and political projects, and defining the literary and musical developments that shaped medieval France. Contributors: Lisa Colton | Emily J Hutchinson | Daisy Delogu | Tamara Bentley Caudill | Katherine Kong | Meghan Quinlan | Lydia M Walker | Rachel May Golden | Anna Kathryn Grau | Anne Adele Levitsky

Wide-ranging study of gender and the underlying ideologies of Old French and Occitan literature.

Examining French literature from the medieval period, Findley revises our understanding of medieval literary composition as a largely masculine activity, suggesting instead that writing is seen in these texts as problematically gendered and often feminizing.

This collection presents fresh evidence and new perspectives on the diverse ways in which women created and interacted with cultures of song between c. 600 and c. 1500.

Song, Landscape, and Identity in Medieval Northern France offers a new perspective on how medieval song expressed relationships between people and their environments. Informed by environmental history and harnessing musicological and ecocritical approaches, author Jennifer Saltzstein draws connections between the nature imagery that pervades songs written by the trouvères of northern France to the physical terrain and climate of the lands on which their authors lived. In doing so, she analyzes the different ways in which composers' lived environments related to their songs and categorizes their use of nature imagery as realistic, aspirational, or nostalgic. Demonstrating a cycle of mutual impact between nature and culture, Saltzstein argues that trouvère songs influenced the ways particular groups of medieval people defined their identities, encouraging them to view themselves as belonging to specific landscapes. The book offers close readings of love songs, pastourelles, motets, and rondets from the likes of Gace Brulé, Adam de la Halle, Guillaume de Machaut, and many others. Saltzstein shows how their music-text relationships illuminate the ways in which song helped to foster identities tied to specific landscapes among the knightly classes, the clergy, aristocratic women, and peasants. By connecting social types to topographies, trouvère songs and the manuscripts in which they were preserved presented models of identity for later generations of songwriters, performers, listeners, patrons, and readers to emulate, thereby projecting into the future specific ways of being on the land. Written in the long thirteenth century during the last major era of climate change, trouvère songs, as Saltzstein demonstrates, shape our understanding of how identity formation has rested on relationships between nature, culture, and change.

This collection, comprising nine critical essays from prominent and emerging medievalists, seeks to explore the different ways in which French authors of the Middle Ages transgress normative social and cultural gender codes in their literary works Offering fresh approaches to texts that have long been subjected to polarized critical analyses, the essays challenge traditional interpretations of gender roles in Old French literature, especially in the thematic areas of sexual deviation and transgression. This corpus emerges as possessing multiple shades and subtleties of meaning, long buried or ignored by conventional approaches to these texts. This is a conclusion much more in accord with what we know about the ability of the medieval imagination to grasp multiple meaning from a single word or act. The collection provides many examples of this multi-layering of transgressive meaning. Through the detailed studies of gender transgressions such as incest, cross-dressing, rape and homoeroticism, the reader will come to understand the many facets of the literary expression of sexuality in selected Old French texts, products of a society that was at least as diverse and complex as our own. These studies will be of particular value to those interested in Old French and gender studies by dint of accessible analyses of texts both familiar and arcane. The provocative subject matter makes the studies original and eminently readable.

In medieval Occitania (southern France), troubadours and monastic creators fostered a vibrant musical culture. In response to the early Crusade campaigns of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians of the region turned to producing monophonic, poetic song, encompassing both secular and sacred genres. These works assert shifting regional identities and worldviews, exploring devotional practices and religious beliefs, overlaid with notions of contemporaneous geopolitics and secular, intellectual interests. Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song demonstrates the profound impact the Crusades had on two seemingly discrete musical-poetic practices: the Latin, sacred Aquitanian versus, associated with Christian devotion, and the vernacular troubadour lyric, associated with courtly love. Rachel May Golden investigates how such Crusade songs distinctively arose out of their geographic environment, uncovering intersections between the beginning of Holy War and the emergence of new styles of poetic-musical composition. She brings together sacred and secular genres of the region to reveal the inventiveness of new composition and the imaginative scope of the Crusades within medieval culture. These songs reflect both the outer world and interior lives, and often their conjunction, giving shape and expression to concerns with the Occitanian homeland, spatial aspects of the Crusades, and newly emerging positions within socio-political history. Drawing on approaches from cultural geography, literary studies, and musicology, Mapping Medieval Identities in Occitanian Crusade Song provides a timely perspective on geopolitical and cultural interactions between nations.

First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period. In the 1520s, the French noblewoman Anne de Graville composed two poetic works, based on older, canonical, male-authored texts: Giovanni Boccaccio's Teseida and Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy. The first, the Beau roman, she offered to Claude, queen of France and wife of Francis I, and the second, the Rondeaux, to the king's mother, Louise of Savoy. With the pro-feminine spin of her rewritings, Anne developed the legacy of another woman writer from 100 years earlier, Christine de Pizan, by entering the on-going debate known as the querelle des femmes. Like Christine, Anne sought to redress the negative view of women found in much contemporary popular literature and to offer role models for both men and women at the contemporary court. This book is the first detailed reconstruction and interpretation of Anne's library and her collecting practice, showing how they relate to her own writings and her literary milieu. It also teases out her links to other women writers of the time interested in the querelle, such as Catherine d'Amboise and Margaret of Navarre. Paying close attention to literary, manuscript, and artistic sources, it establishes Anne's reputation as one of the most erudite poets of the period, and one keenly attuned to the position of women in society as well as to the political sensitivities of the French court.