The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
Language: English
Pages: 302
ISBN: 0521679753
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances. Featuring a chronology and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal companion for students and scholars in other fields wishing to discover the riches of the French medieval tradition.
Inappropriate conflict. These texts conclusively bury Roland while resisting the loss of an ideal which threatens the assonanced tradition, for they provide alternative candidates for the role of model hero and leader – better men, they imply, than Roland ever was. Sacrificing the character and myth of Roland allows text and society to move on from an unsatisfactory past to a brighter future. To summarize: the texts examined offer three distinct treatments of Roland’s loss. The rhymed tradition.
With a national as well as generic purpose. Oxford, Bodl., Canon Misc. 74 (early thirteenth century) includes versions of the legends of St Patrick’s Purgatory and the Antichrist, as well as a poem on the Last Judgement alongside saints’ lives proper in what could best be described as a relaxation or expansion of the genre beyond the hagiographical. Other manuscripts, however, locate saints’ lives in a more worldly context, underlining the dangers of making too strict a scholarly separation.
Bruges to the court of Louis de Maˆle, count of Flanders, and that there he read (not sang) one of the ballades from the romance, to great acclaim;7 Jean Froissart claims, in one of his pseudo-autobiographical dits, L’Espinette amoureuse, to have read (not sung) a virelai aloud to a lady to solicit permission to leave her country.8 The implication, here, is that verbal virtuosity, ease even, was a response to the requirements and preferences and practices of an informed and sophisticated.
Author-portraits, ringing claims to poetic preeminence, and sumptuous presentation copies. In highlighting sprezzatura, and ‘artlessness’, moreover, I risk misrepresenting late medieval verse. Anyone who has spent time on the rhetorical treatises (Arts de seconde rhe´torique) of this period will have been struck by the labyrinthine prosodic complexities which many of them recommend to their readers. Certainly, all of them make recommendations as to the structure and patterning of the rondeau and.
Little octosyllabic poems turned around a refrain. Molinet’s rondeaux – rondeaux simples, he calls them – are considerably more demanding, and much more spectacular. They can, he says, have any number of dictions et sillabes (words and syllables); each line can consist of one, or two, or three, or five, or more syllables; they can be single or double, or jumeaulx (twinned); in the right hands – surely not those of the amateur – they can be almost unbearably complex: Souffrons a point Bourgois.