Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval 'chansons de geste', through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.
Author(s): Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin (eds.)
Series: Gallica, 46
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 400
City: Cambridge
List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xiii
List of Abbreviations xv
Introduction / Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin 1
Part I: Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry
Introduction / Ruth Harvey 15
Third Gender Solace / William Burgwinkle 19
Troubadour Selves under Debate / Miriam Cabré 34
'Je tiens ma personne morte': Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry / Helen Swift 49
Part II: The 'Chansons de geste' in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions
Introduction / Jane Gilbert 67
'He wishes that everyone were leprous like him': Infectious Counternarratives in 'Ami et Amile' / Charlie Samuelson 71
Feminism-plus: 'Sarah Kay’s The 'Chansons de geste' in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions and the 'Roman de Waldef'' / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne 85
Connected Literature: 'Chansons de geste', Burgundian 'livres de gestes', and the Writing of Literary Theory Today / Zrinka Stahuljak 99
Part III: Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century
Introduction / Peggy McCracken 115
Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier / Susan Boynton 119
At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love / Joseph R. Johnson 150
Logic, Meaning, and Imagination / Virginie Greene 166
Part IV: The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature
Introduction / Nicolette Zeeman 181
Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts / Stephen G. Nichols 185
The Disembodied Tongue; or, The Place of the Book in the 'Livre de la Cité des Dames' / Christine Bourgeois 200
The Place of Pain: Confronting the Trauma and Complexity of Kingship in the Political Dream Narrative / Deborah McGrady 213
Part V: Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry
Introduction / Simon Gaunt 229
Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities in the 'Chastelaine de Vergy' / Sophie Marnette 233
Troubadour Attachments / Emily Kate Price 250
Forms of Repetition: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century / Simone Ventura 264
Part VI: Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries
Introduction / Miranda Griffin 283
Between Skin(s), Between Faiths: Caesura, Animality, and Comedy in Thirteenth-Century Christian–Jewish Relations / James R. Simpson 287
Rupturing Skin through the Power of Vox / Elizabeth Eva Leach 301
Sheep, Elephants, and Marco Polo’s 'Devisement du monde' / Sharon Kinoshita 314
Afterword 329
Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken
General Bibliography 333
List of Manuscripts 359
Bibliography of Work by Sarah Kay 361
Index 369
