Courtly Love Research Articles

Between love and law: Feudal vocabulary in medieval Catalan and Valencian courtly love lyric

The use of feudal vocabulary is the most innovative feature of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Occitan troubadour love lyric. The Catalan and Valencian poets who continued and reworked this tradition over the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries preserved this convention with varying degrees of fi delity. The aim of this paper is to identify trends in the use of feudal vocabulary in the works of Catalan and Valencian poets, and to interpret these tendencies in the light of contemporary historic developments. The poets’ choices in selecting materials from the previous tradition provide valuable information about their strategies of adaptation to the requirements of their audiences. This analysis will allow delimitating similarities and differences between classical troubadour lyric and the works of later Catalan and Valencian poets, an essential step towards the defi nition of Catalan poetry in the late Middle Ages. The specifi c identity of this poetic expression has yet to be outlined, since it has traditionally been described in the context of disparaging comparisons with other earlier and contemporary poetic traditions.

La laus dominae tra la tradizione trobadorica e la corte di Federico II

This articles analyses the evolution of positive moral features attributed to the lady at court by poets serving Frederick II, comparing the way in which such a theme is dealt with by these poets and by a group of troubadours considered by scholars to have greatly influenced the former. The results of the analysis reveal a reduced attention on the part of the Sicilian poets to the moral fibre and manners of the lady at court, especially those regarding certain particular aspects. Moreover, they seem to favour vague terms over those more defined in nature. Such tendencies seem more accentuated in poets from an inferior social sphere belonging to the lower rungs of the hierarchy, whereas those closest to the emperor seem to give heightened value to some positive qualities in the lady at court which extend beyond the very limited rules of courtly love.

Hermeneutik der Minne: Liebesdichtung und religiöser Diskurs bei Dante und Petrarca

AbstractAn important characteristic of Italian minne-poetry in the late Middle Ages is the negotiation of the Sacred and the Profane. Nonetheless, Dante and Petrarch, the most important representatives of Italian minne-poetry, enter this negotiation in very different ways. Dante proposes to align mundane minne-poetry - as a form of minne-theology - with sacralization; with that, Dante seems to be in perfect harmony with his epoch, commonly referred to as Christian or theocentric Middle Ages. But looking more closely, Dante’s sacralization of courtly love reveals itself to be an outrageous provocation of Christian orthodoxy: Dante’s minne-poetry presents itself as a supplement to the Gospel’s promise of Salvation, and thus obviously competes with the institutionalized religion. Petrarch, very much concerned to be perceived as the one to overcome the ‘Dark Ages’ represented by Dante and from there as the founding authority of what we call Renaissance, quotes Dante’s sacralization of the courtly love in order to cancel demonstratively its claim to ontological substance. Different to Dante, Petrarch avoids all heretic appearance by presenting the divinization of the minne-lady as a mere phantasm which is finally recognized as the result of a morally erroneous conception of love. Therefore with Petrarch, Christian orthodoxy is not overtly contested. This paradoxically clears the way for a genuine worldly poetry in which art itself gains the aura of the sacred: thus with Petrarch, the will to balance religion and love becomes a driving force of secularization.

Ortaçağ’da Hristiyan felsefesi, aşk öğretisi ve edebiyat: Gülün Romansı

The concept of love, examined in various works from the classical ages onwards, gained an ethical meaning in the Middle Ages. Accordingly, love is not a sexual urge, but a virtue acquired by coping with some difficulties. The concept best reflecting the issue of love is “courtly love”. The term suggests the lovers to show earnestness and courtesy while it also offers them to avoid avarice and pride. It emphasises as well that lovers should suffer insomnia for their beloved person or object. Thus, one of the best examples for the medieval view of love is The Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris. Andreas Capellanus’ doctrines in The Art of Court Love shape the work’s content, while Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy influences its form. So, this study will examine the courtly love in the joint poem in relation to the effects of continental literature.

Chaucer's <em>Troilus and Criseyde</em> and the Danger of Masculine Interiority

Abstract Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is deeply suspicious of the idea of a fully independent interior self. With his depiction of Trojan men, Chaucer critiques the fourteenth-century aristocracy's increasing interest in interiority, particularly the courtly love rhetoric associated with the court of Richard II. He suggests that the court's obsession with interiority is a way for powerful men to ignore the destructive public consequences of their political authority. One of the hallmarks of masculinity in the poem is a refusal to recognize the political implications of what appear to be merely internal desires. Through sustained attention to the rhetoric of interiority and repeated allusions to Ovid's story of Philomela, Chaucer reveals to his court audience that such a separation between public and private is illusory.

Receptaculum Amoris. Annäherung an den Topos Minne über das Konzept des mentalen Diagramms (Burkhard von Hohenfels, KLD XI–Konrad von Würzburg, Das Herzmære). Receptaculum Amoris

This article traces the concept of ›mental diagram‹ back to medieval poetics (Galfred of Vinsauf) within the framework of the liberal arts and discusses its implications against the backdrop of diverse literary patterns of thought, such as abductive inference, the use of exempla, and allegory. It uncovers the implicit epistemological schemes governing the invention of motifs and plots which help to make the virtually unseizable phenomenon of courtly love (minne) accessible to imagination and ratiocination, memory and consentaneous judgement. In presenting a close reading of a canzone by Burkhard von Hohenfels (KLD XI) and of an exemplum by Konrad von Wurzburg (Herzmaere) the effects of mental diagrams are tracked down, as they operate implicitely in the lyrical or narrative adaptation of a given matter directing the topics, dynamics and the economy of each poem.

Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel T. Kline (review)

Reviewed by: Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages ed. by Daniel T. Kline Andrew B.R. Elliott daniel t. kline, ed., Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages. Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. xiii, 298. isbn: 978–0–415–63091–7. $125. With Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages, Kline and his various contributors have collectively fired the first volley in what will be, one hopes, a new and exciting [End Page 145] chapter in medievalism. However, the book is important not only because it is the first in this new subfield, but also because it is excellent in itself; the contributions are well-argued and clear, the collection has been carefully assembled and edited, and the whole contains a wide range of consistently insightful chapters. William J. White opens the collection with an interesting study of the emergence of video games by examining tabletop RPGs as the early forerunners of medieval videogames. While some might perhaps take issue with the implicit suggestion that video games are a mere extension of tabletop versions, this suggestion is not really his point, and his argument neatly brings out the themes often established as tropes of the medieval video game and ‘part of a broader fantasy and science fiction theme that is itself a component of geek culture’ (15). Candace Barrington and Timothy English’s essay on Beowulf offers an example of the best kinds of scholarship that are on offer in this new field. Rather than lamenting the inaccuracies (which are to be expected in a game based not on the poem but Zemeckis’ 2007 film), the essay instead examines why such changes were made and looks at players’ motivations and the narrative needs established by the gameplay. Their approach sidesteps tired old debates about fidelity and accuracy, examining instead how an Old English epic can be updated and made relevant to twenty-first-century audiences. In their ability to relate theoretical approaches, such as gender theory, to debates taking place in online fantasy worlds, Stone, Kudenov, and Combs also offer a remarkable contribution. Their imaginative analysis of the performance of gender roles in MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Play Games) reveals that, rather than challenging gender normativity, a deeply engrained application of traditional (though wholly imaginary) chivalric gender roles has been transferred to a very modern forum. As they argue, ‘high fantasy MMORPGs are designed to support medievalist notions of courtly love and romance’ (114), which are played out in assumed gender roles according to the player’s avatar (irrespective of the actual gender of the player). However, the standout chapter of the whole collection is Serina Patterson’s study of the ways in which social gaming’s use of the Middle Ages on Facebook, Twitter, and mobile devices integrates a memory of the period and incorporates it into users’ everyday lives. Patterson’s argument that casual medieval games ‘form pseudomedieval worlds’ (245) ‘that serve a variety of social and emotional needs’ (254) draws out a subtle argument that it is not merely a clique of hard-core gamers who ‘re-imagine the Middle Ages,’ but rather that to some extent we all engage with digital games and their various medievalisms. One minor criticism, which is in fact common to most books which open up new fields, is that from the outset several of the essays adopt a defensive mode and use their introductions to emphasize the importance, relevance, and scholarly justifications of studying videogames. Over time this posturing becomes a little repetitive, since not only is it likely that anyone having bought the book is already sympathetic to such approaches, but also, given the quality of both contributors and editor, it quickly becomes apparent that there is great scope for this kind of analysis. A second minor criticism is the perhaps inevitable repetition and disproportionate emphasis on certain games over others. It is perfectly logical that, with something [End Page 146] like 10 million subscribers, World of Warcraft should warrant a whole case study with 4 chapters devoted to it, but similar weight is given to Dante’s Inferno, a less obvious candidate and a game which even Welsh...

Darling Miranda: courtly love in Picnic at Hanging Rock

2015 will mark 40 years since the release of Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock. The film, based on the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsay, concerns the inexplicable disappearance of three schoolgirls and a governess from a picnicking party on Valentine's Day in 1900. The film is characterized in criticism and cultural theory alike as a meditation on the stirrings of twentieth-century Australian society, whereby the trappings of Victorian England (figured as the ‘old world’) are gradually giving way to the new, Australian-born settler culture. These binary contrasts, populating the narrative and visual style of the film, have in turn driven a large portion of the criticism and literature produced in response. This paper considers Picnic at Hanging Rock as a love story, taking as its central focus the ‘unconsummated’ relationship between disappeared schoolgirl Miranda and recently arrived young English aristocrat Michael Fitzhubert. This is a relationship figured through courtly love: an admiration from afar. Miranda's subsequent, permanent disappearance from the narrative of the film means that for Michael, the brief moment of encounter forms the basis for every dream and remembrance occurring thereafter. The courtly love current through the film is enhanced by the setting of Valentine's Day, thereby cloaking the film in the rituals of love – albeit often unrequited. Jacques Lacan's and Slavoj Žižek's works on courtly love and beauty are drawn on to site the film in a critical landscape beyond the either/or of a binaric structuralist convention.

Romancing feminism: From women’s studies to women’s fiction

Abstract After more than a decade as a feminist researcher and teaching women’s studies at tertiary level, I decided to investigate a new direction. Driven in part by the demise of women’s studies in universities – an international phenomenon – and looking for something completely different, I attended my first Romance Writers of Australia conference. To my surprise, the scene was all too familiar: predominantly female participants and presenters, a collaborative leadership model, a supportive atmosphere and lots of purple. In this article I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism. Now also a published romance novelist, I chart my own Harlequin Escape from the ivory tower to the boudoir.

Julia Boffey Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475-1530Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475–1530. Julia Boffey. London: British Library, 2012. Pp. vi+246.

<i>Julia Boffey</i> Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475-1530<i>Manuscript and Print in London, c. 1475–1530</i>. Julia Boffey. London: British Library, 2012. Pp. vi+246.

Façonner sa dame : amour et idolâtrie1

The 'lady as idol' is a cliche of troubadour poetry, and of courtly love in general. Moving beyond the psychoanalytical theories of desire that have informed troubadour studies in the past few decades, this article examines a selection of poems by the troubadour Jausbert de Poicibot, as well as their well-known illustrations in one 14th-c. manuscript, in order to explore how the complex medieval understanding of idolatry interacted with that of fin'amor.

Encountering Nature, Experiencing Courtly Love, and Romance of the Rose: Generic Standpoints, Interpretive Practices, and Human Interchange in 12th-13th Century French Poetics

Whereas the fields of poetic expression and pragmatist philosophy may seem some distance apart, a closer examination of the poetics literature from the early Greeks onward provides testimony to the more general viability of the pragmatist analysis of community life, particularly as this has come to be associated with pragmatism’s sociological derivative, symbolic interaction. Following a brief overview of the Greek, Roman, and Christian roots of contemporary fictional representations, attention is given to the ways that pragmatist concerns with human activity were addressed within the context of poetic expression in 12th-13th century France. Whereas the pre-Renaissance texts considered here exhibit pronounced attentiveness to Christian theology, they also build heavily on Latin sources (especially Virgil and Ovid [see Prus 2013a]). Among the early French poets who address the matters of human knowing and acting in more direct and consequential terms are: Alan de Lille (c. 1120-1203) who wrote The Plaint of Nature and Anticlaudianus; Andreas Capellanus (text, c. 1185) the author of The Art of Courtly Love; and Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1212-1237) and Jean de Meun (c. 1235-1305) who, in sequence, co-authored The Romance of the Rose. Given our interest in the ways in which those in the poetic community helped sustain an analytic focus on human lived experience, particular consideration is given to these early French authors’ attentiveness to (1) the relationships, identities, activities, and tactical engagements that people develop around romantic relationships; (2) the sense-making activities of those about whom they write, as well as their own interpretive practices as authors and analysts; (3) the ways in which the people within the communities that they portray knowingly grapple with religious and secular morality (and deviance); and (4) more generic features of human standpoints and relationships. Clearly, the poets referenced here are not the first to pursue matters of these sorts. However, their materials are important not only for their popular intrigues, creativity, and effectiveness in “moving poetics out of the dark ages” but also for encouraging a broader interest in considerations of the human condition than that defined by philosophy and rhetoric.

Introduction

Introduction

Chapter 7 Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro: An Analysis of Clemency, Cruelty, and Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Castile

Chapter 7 Cárcel de amor by Diego de San Pedro:An Analysis of Clemency, Cruelty, and Justice in Late Fifteenth-Century Castile Ana M. Montero Cárcel de amor [Prison of Love], written by Diego de San Pedro, a servant of Don Juan Téllez-Girón, enjoyed extraordinary popularity in its own time.1 Its first publication in 1492 was followed by a continuation composed in 1496 by Nicolás Núñez and by “more than thirty prints and reprints in its original Castilian” in the first half of the sixteenth century, as well as five translations into other European languages—Catalan, Italian, French, English, and German—most of them done between 1493 and 1549.2 Nowadays, Cárcel de amor is studied as a complex analysis of courtly love and is often regarded as the major achievement in Castilian sentimental romance, an incipient genre in the Castile of the second half of the fifteenth century. Courtly love narratives, together with chronicles, works in verse, and other romances, provided entertainment at the court and among the nobility at a time when fiction and teaching were still deeply interconnected. At first sight, Cárcel de amor seems to be a sophisticated work of recreation rather than the vehicle of any lesson. The plot in Cárcel de amor reenacts a courtly love affair between a perfect, irreproachable lover and a perfect lady of idealized nature.3 At the onset of the story readers are invited to contemplate Leriano, the courageous son of a duke and a victim of unrequited love. Leriano is held captive in an allegorical palace that visually conveys the agony of his magnificent love for and obsession with the princess of the kingdom of Macedonia, Laureola—a version of the traditional belle dame sans merci. Painstaking, minute attention is paid to characters’ emotions and reactions in what has been heretofore mostly analyzed as an intriguing and analytical exposition of lovesickness imbued with the psychological lore of the time.4 At the denouement, in an apotheosis of tragedy, Leriano—rejected by Laureola—dies from lovesickness, a martyr of his unrelenting devotion to his lady. No doubt it was important for Diego de San Pedro to inspire awe through the construction of a most noble knight, unswerving in his emotional [End Page 97] attachment to a woman, spurred by yearning for her affection but thwarted by lack of hope and therefore doomed to death. Romances have generically been analyzed as an idealized, escapist form of literature for the aristocracy, a genre that vaunts the values of chivalry, courtliness, and a type of sophisticated, eminently tragic love that defied social conventions, especially Christian conventions. However, the literary ingredients that can be found in poetry and romances—such as fatal love, a highly charged masculine perspective, the cruel lady (sometimes reduced to silence), and allegory—were widely known by the end of the fifteenth century. Therefore, they may have been used as a means to encapsulate new messages under familiar themes. In fact, a few scholars have paid attention to references to ideological or historical events within Cárcel de amor, providing at least two perspectives from which this text can be discussed. First, the scholar Francisco Márquez Villanueva called Cárcel de amor a political novel and interpreted it as a literary response by a converso (a Christian convert of Jewish origin) to the launching of the Inquisition by the monarchy. Márquez Villanueva detected in Cárcel de amor “a tormented meditation on the limits of power and the right to rebellion of those mortally oppressed.”5 His conclusions have been accepted by a number of scholars, most especially by Manuel da Costa Fontes, who finds evidence in Cárcel de amor to suggest “very strongly that, besides focusing on courtly love, Diego de San Pedro is also portraying another Spain—the conflictive Spain in which he and other conversos had to live.”6 However, no definitive evidence of Diego de San Pedro’s convert status has been produced. What we know with certainty is that Diego de San Pedro was affiliated with one of the powerful noble families close to the Crown—the clan of Juan...

Le bâtard conquérant: essor et expansion du genre romanesque au Moyen Âge by Francis Gingras

Reviews 263 and also certain philosophical arguments of Lacan related to death, particularly his readings of Antigone,and the Lacanian concept of entre-deux-morts.Chapter 1,“Roland and the second death,”is largely informed by Lacan’s ideas on the death drive, and also proposes different approaches to Roland’s death based on the major textual variants of the work. Chapter 2,“The knight as the Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot,” explores Lacan’s interpretation of courtly love, argues that the termination of the Arthurian order represents a kind of “collective death drive”(61), and considers some interesting ambiguities associated with Galehot, trapped in the state of entredeux -morts. The following portion of the study,“The ubi sunt topos in Middle French,” focuses on a ballade by Eustache Deschamps and the three ballades from Villon’s Testament related to the ubi sunt topos, including the famous Ballade des dames, highlighting complex patterns and tensions revolving around mortality and sexuality, and“Villon’s intense engagement with existence, extinction, and the literary”(150). In “Ceci n’est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl,” the author probes the rich symbolic connotations of the marguerite, which she finds“linked to a debate relating the complex of life, death, and life beyond death to that of desire, love, and poetry” (169). The final chapter treats two works by Chaucer, the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of the Good Women (particularly the prologue). Gilbert (with a nod to Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe) cleverly titles the chapter, “Becoming woman in Chaucer: on ne naît pas femme, on le devient en mourant,” and focuses on women who, in various senses, find themselves between two deaths. To characterize this as a difficult book would be an understatement. The work is intensely theoretical and abstract, weaving ideas from Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Butler, and others into an analysis of some important, and sometimes problematic French and English medieval texts. Readers who do not share Gilbert’s familiarity with these theorists may easily lose the thread of some of her most important arguments. Nevertheless, her attempt to apply certain aspects of Lacanian theory to these important texts yields original and revealing readings that are worth the intellectual effort. University of North Carolina, Greensboro David A. Fein Gingras, Francis. Le bâtard conquérant: essor et expansion du genre romanesque au Moyen Âge. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2304-0. Pp. 529. 107 a. Gingras has written an ambitious book; as his title and subtitle summarize, his subject is nothing less than the history of the medieval ‘roman’ from the earliest uses of the term through the fourteenth century. Largely focused on origins, the book also includes significant discussion of the genre’s coming of age and concomitant multiplication of forms in the thirteenth century. Given the enormity of the task, the fact that the study is“un peu tortueuse”(45) is almost to be expected. Nevertheless, the volume contains much excellent analysis, and will provide points of reference for medievalists for years to come. Gingras divides his study into three major sections. The first, “Une langue qui se donne un genre,” focuses on linguistics and genre, with chapters on the development of the term ‘roman,’ multilingual Normandy and England, translation, and the medieval concept of genre. Next, “Un genre à faire des histoires” examines thematic elements: history (and story), the protagonist, love, and adventure. The final four chapters consider “[l]es attraits d’un mauvais genre,” the appeal of a‘bad-boy’genre: (excessive) length,prose and verse,parody,and the reception of romance.Although his subject is essentially literary history, Gingras is more literary analyst than historian, and this leads to one of the volume’s great strengths. Moments of textual analysis punctuate the book,contributing to the larger argument and offering excellent micro-readings of individual texts. The result is a study that far exceeds the bounds of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the thematic analysis leads, more than once, to chronological confusion. Thus, in a section on the term ‘fable,’ the examples discussed move from the Brut, to Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, to the Chanson...

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature by Jane Gilbert

pieces stand out. Merete Stistrup Jensen’s “Le travestissement narratif dans les écrits d’Isabelle Eberhardt”explores the multiple voices in the recently restored manuscripts salvaged at the time of this young and enigmatic author’s death. Although Eberhardt does at times adopt a feminine narrative voice,it is only when writing—and dressing— as a man that she can overcome the social and physical limits of her sex and,consequently, experience broader intellectual and creative freedom. Jensen carefully demonstrates how the recurring motif in Eberhardt’s works of liberty resulting from the abandonment or killing of a woman mirrors the author’s own struggles, whereby writing is possible only after the female point of view has been neutralized.While Jane Dieulafoy shares her contemporary’s preference for male disguises,they have little else in common. As Natascha Ueckmann points out, far from the expectation that nineteenth-century European women travelers deal with colonialism differently because they themselves are both colonizer and colonized, Dieulafoy projects the same ethnocentrism as her male counterparts. Paradoxically, it is her emancipation from the constraints her own culture places on women that provides Dieulafoy with the opportunity to be an overt accomplice in Western efforts to subjugate other cultures.Although the second section, “Genre et altérité,”contains only one article on French travel writing, it is perhaps the most provocative of all. By examining George Sand’s Un hiver à Majorque and Flora Tristan’s Les pérégrinations d’une paria, Christine Planté shows how these two contemporaneous authors, both famous and considered similar in their time, are in fact polar opposites when read from the perspective of otherness. Despite her inexperience as both a traveler and a writer, Tristan is more conscious and accepting of all forms of alterity, whereas Sand, who generally highlights humanist values in her works, shows pronounced intolerance in her travel narrative. Hiding her gender, her own otherness, Planté argues, causes Sand to disregard or devalue the cultural, linguistic, and environmental differences encountered in her travels. The third and final section,“Formes du voyage et possibles narratifs,”is the weakest in terms of thematic cohesion and analytic quality. One article painstakingly attempts to define different categories of female travel writers only to conclude that it cannot be done. Another suggests that women publishing in geographic or scientific journals reinforce colonialism, a well-worn and somewhat superficial position. Minor shortcomings aside, Voyageuses européennes introduces us to several courageous women whose actions and words place them well ahead of their time. Ohio University Herta Rodina Gilbert, Jane. Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. ISBN 978-1107-00383-5. Pp. 283. $90. In her introduction, Gilbert sketches the basic theoretical foundation of her study, defining some of the medieval attitudes toward death that she intends to explore, 262 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 263 and also certain philosophical arguments of Lacan related to death, particularly his readings of Antigone,and the Lacanian concept of entre-deux-morts.Chapter 1,“Roland and the second death,”is largely informed by Lacan’s ideas on the death drive, and also proposes different approaches to Roland’s death based on the major textual variants of the work. Chapter 2,“The knight as the Thing: courtly love in the non-cyclic prose Lancelot,” explores Lacan’s interpretation of courtly love, argues that the termination of the Arthurian order represents a kind of “collective death drive”(61), and considers some interesting ambiguities associated with Galehot, trapped in the state of entredeux -morts. The following portion of the study,“The ubi sunt topos in Middle French,” focuses on a ballade by Eustache Deschamps and the three ballades from Villon’s Testament related to the ubi sunt topos, including the famous Ballade des dames, highlighting complex patterns and tensions revolving around mortality and sexuality, and“Villon’s intense engagement with existence, extinction, and the literary”(150). In “Ceci n’est pas une marguerite: anamorphosis in Pearl,” the author probes the rich symbolic connotations of the marguerite, which she finds“linked to a debate relating the complex of life, death, and life beyond death to that of desire, love, and poetry” (169). The final...

The Comic Image of the Courtly Love Ideals in Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory

The Arthurian legends have fascinated and inspired people for ages. Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is one of the best compilations of the stories about King Arthur and his peers. This romance deals with the enchanting world of knightly rituals and the ideals of the chivalric code. It is not a typical romance blindly glorifying the medieval world, though. Written in the time when these ideals are passing, the prose is dominated on the one hand, by melancholy and sentiment, but on the other, by irony and ambiguity. Malory seems to question the chivalric code through inconsistencies of his characters’ behaviour, and absurdity of some situations they are involved in. The paper will focus on the ambivalent and comic picture of the courtly love ideals in Malory’s prose. The main source of failure of some of the Arthurian knights in this aspect of knightly life is the clash between the real chivalric practice and the imagined ideals they pursue.

Passing Place, or the Elusive Spaces of Southern Whiteness in Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance

IZABELA HOPKINS Birmingham City University Passing Place, or the Elusive Spaces of Southern Whiteness in Thomas Nelson Page’s Red Rock and Ellen Glasgow’s The Deliverance IN HIS ATTEMPT TO DEFINE WHITENESS IN MOBY-DICK, HERMAN MELVILLE concedes that “not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul” (169). Melville struggles gamely with the proliferation of its transcultural significations that include innocence, blankness, mourning, and alterity. Though inconclusive, Melville’s endeavor to define whiteness is not a failure; rather, it reveals what Mike Hill terms the concept’s “epistemological stickiness and ontological wiggling” (3). Rather than seek a remedy, current scholarship on whiteness has succumbed to two maladies of its own. The first is the overwhelming urge to explain whiteness in conjunction with the exploitation and subjugation of the racial other resulting from Western colonialism and imperialism that has led to “commonplace” assumptions “in cultural theory that whiteness requires blackness in order to define itself” (Adams 164). The other is a tendency to generalize that results in vague definitions of whiteness as “largely an inventedconstructblendinghistory,culture,assumptions,andattitudes” (Babb 10) and “a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (Frankenberg 1). In attempting the impossible, which is the formulation of a universal definition, such propositions reduce the complexity of whiteness and compound its “epistemological stickiness” (Hill 3). For Peter Kolchin, the solution lies in paying closer attention to “historical and geographical context” (172). What is required is an approach to whiteness that will demonstrate its inherently differential nature through an engagement with a particular place and time. The South, as a region instrumental in “shaping American notions of race” through the presence of the peculiar institution of slavery, has inadvertently contributed to the homogenization of whiteness that reduces it to the confines of the black-white dichotomy (Kolchin 172). Confining the analysis of the construct to the post-Reconstruction South 214 Izabela Hopkins will move beyond the limitations imposed by this binary opposition and allow for an examination of the influence of the notion of place—in historical, cultural, and regional terms—on both the conceptions of the Southern variety of whiteness and its literary reconstructions. For Virginia-born Thomas Nelson Page in Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction and Ellen Glasgow in The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields, the imagined space of the fictional narrative provides fertile ground for pondering this elusive concept. That both Page and Glasgow see whiteness as a place-specific construct is hardly surprising considering their shared social and cultural legacy and place among the South’s elite. What merits scrutiny, however, is the way they negotiate whiteness through a web of historically loaded tangible and phantom spaces that resist simplistic reductions to the black-white binary. To understand the significance of these spaces to Page’s and Glasgow’s interrogations of whiteness requires the formulation of a definition of Southern whiteness. Among the constituent components of whiteness, Valerie Babb includes “civility, cultivation [and] piousness,” as well as “sexual restraint” in men mirrored by the asexuality and weakness of women (68, 76). These attributes have historically been associated with the upper classes, reverberating in nostalgic echoes of courtly love and chivalry. In the South, they became part of the Southern aristocratic myth that rested on “the conviction that the region’s slaveholders had descended almost entirely from the English Cavalier aristocracy” (Watson 15). To preserve the aristocratic myth, the self-styled descendants of Cavaliers espoused the European model of parental kinship, whereby “we are defined by where and whom we came from” (Turner 48).1 Thanks to the valorization of this historic model of descent, the notions of heredity, blood, and tradition constitute inextricable components of Southern whiteness that become synonymous with hereditary gentility. And the gentleman planter and Southern belle are cast as the living embodiments of Southern whiteness who, replete with the lofty qualities of culturation, civility, chastity, and piety, serenely dwell on their plantations. The upheaval of the post-Reconstruction years—“the era [which] represented the worst abuses heaped upon a 1 For historical accounts of the founding of the colony see Theodore...

“Cries and cracks”: “animal” rhythms in Ezra Pound’s translations from Arnaut Daniel

This article looks at Ezra Pound’s translation of the troubadour Arnaut Daniel’s canso “L’aura amara” as a way of studying what Pound’s practice of translation shows us about his conception and practice of rhythm. According to Pound, the interest in Daniel’s canso lies in its onomatopoeia, its imitation of birdsong; this view accords with suggestions in Pound’s writings that rhythm in language is a manifestation of physiology. But Pound also sees rhythm through the prism of translation, suggesting for example that foreign-language poems may be a source of rhythms for English verse. The article thus looks at the way Pound’s translation builds on the sound patterning of Arnaut’s canso to distort and specify the rhythms of English. The purpose of the article is to show that rhythm in Arnaut Daniel’s canso may be described as the interaction of phonemic composition, accentual prominence, and syntax; and that Pound’s translation works with several aspects of Arnaut’s writing—the use of short lines, enjambment, and the specific prosodic treatment of the pronoun mi—to make his translation a prosodic experiment, inseparable from contemporary work on the possibilities of free verse. In that it makes English speech rhythms “unnatural” and ambiguous, Pound’s “L’aura amara” invents a specific subject of self-estrangement refracted through the discourse of courtly love, a translating subject.

Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections: Troubadour Literature and the Medieval Construction of the Modern World

Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections: Troubadour Literature and the Medieval Construction of the Modern World