French Romance Research Articles

Fugitive Figures

Abstract Through a study of early French romances, especially the Conte de Floire et Blancheflor and Alexandre de Paris’s Roman d’Alexandre, this essay offers a new approach to the automaton in medieval literature. Bruno Latour’s plural ontology, which elaborates on the earlier work of Gilbert Simondon and Étienne Souriau, provides a way to break down the division between the human mind and the world (and hence the mind and the machine), offering a rich understanding of the way in which the beings of technology [TEC], fiction [FIC], and religion [REL] act in concert upon us to inspire our desire for technological fictions.

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

Melusine's Footprint: Tracing the Legacy of a Medieval Myth

EL GRECO IN RUSSIAN POETRY

The name El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) is rarely found in Russian poetry, although French romanticism included him in the canon of world classics. This article assumes that El Greco’s reception in Russian poetry is due not so much to the infl uence of French romanticism or Spanish surrealism as to the stylistic features of the artist himself, who inherited Cretan icon painting, while in his mature period he followed the Renaissance principles of life-like and rivalry. As a result, El Greco is perceived in Russian culture as a classic imitating nature, and stylistic features are then interpreted as existentially signifi cant rather than a strange and bizarre artist. El Greco is then compared with the characters of his paintings, such as the apostles and evangelists, and is considered to be an artist, communicating something existentially signifi cant about fate. His landscape style was then interpreted as the transformation of artistic conventions into ontologically signifi cant constructions. A close reading of poetic texts dedicated to El Greco (Konstantin Balmont, Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Viktor Krivulin, Bella Akhmadulina, Svetlana Kekova), and taking into account the theoretical statements about El Greco (Alexandre Benois, Dmitry Likhachov) allows us to show that El Greco was not perceived within the framework of expressionism or surrealism, but in the key of icon-painting ontologism. The techniques of El Greco were then understood in Russian poetry as plotsignifi cant: chiaroscuro and colour turned out to be symbols of life’s upheavals, and the mission of the apostle and Orpheus was then identifi ed as a model for a poetic attitude to everyday life.

Benjamin Constant’s history of philosophy

The article analyses the concept of a prominent representative of early French Romanticism, considers his division of the historical process into periods and his idea on the meaning of history. According to Constant, history is not uniform in a political sense. The lack of understanding this important truth by the rulers has always brought untold sufferings to their subjects. Constant’s philosophy of history is based on the idea of improving the human race, typical for the intellectual culture of the Age of Enlightenment, to which he gave a new sound, contraposing the spirit of war with the spirit of trade. Distinguishing between two types of freedom, he associated the first variety with the tradition of ancient people’s assemblies, collective direct decisions, and the second with the system of representative government. His periodization of world history concretizes the idea of progress as a fundamental law of nature. He included psychological elements into his interpretation of the meaning of revolutionary events. Treating inequality as the basis of social adversity, he attributed independence in deeds, choice of life’s priorities, personal security, the right to own property, and the ability to express and defend different opinions as the most important human freedoms. Expressed clearly in a number of Constant’s works is the desire to distance himself from the various opposing parties, to appear as an unbiased observer, and a sage guiding his efforts to the common good. This corresponded greatly to the ideal of a philosopher represented on the pages of d’Alembert and Diderot’s famous “Encyclopédie.” At the same time, his doctrine represents a certain rethinking of the Enlightenment legacy, carried out through the lens of the experience of revolutionary times. Hence the demand to limit popular sovereignty, criticism of Russoism, a unique concept of the evolution of religion.

Robert the Devil: The First Modern English Translation of Robert le Diable, an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century trans. by Samuel N. Rosenberg

Reviewed by: Robert the Devil: The First Modern English Translation of Robert le Diable, an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century trans. by Samuel N. Rosenberg Nicholas D. Brodie Rosenberg, Samuel N., trans., Robert the Devil: The First Modern English Translation of Robert le Diable, an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018; paperback; pp. 168; R.R.P. US $19.95; ISBN 9780271080161. In describing this text, translator Samuel N. Rosenberg describes it as 'basically the tale of a boy born to a childless noble couple only after the mother has secretly called on Satan to help her conceive' (p. 1). This dark start, the reader soon learns, is borne out by a week-long labour. While handsome, Robert is a violent child. He is prone to biting while nursing, frightening his teachers, and attacking the poor. The naughty boy grows into a troublesome man, causing the Pope to deny Robert communion and ultimately leading Robert's father to boot him out of home. Robert then takes to the forest and a career in highway robbery. As knighthood is seen as a potential cure of his wicked ways, Robert is knighted. Yet while he then tourneys with brutal effectiveness, he remains a malevolent force. Evidencing this is the fact that he does not pray, and a shocking event where he massacres a house of nuns. Only then, with a moment of self-reflection, does Robert question his path in life. Seeking answers, Robert threatens his mother before heading to Rome. There the Pope redirects him to a hermit in the mountains where, with tears and mass, Robert seeks salvation and is put under a strict penitential regime. Robert must play at being mad, be silent, and fast. And so he does, all the way to the Emperor's palace, where he becomes a court fool. Which proves just as well, for from there he three times rescues Rome. Incognito, Robert turns the tide of each battle, riding a fine white horse and slipping back into penitential disguise afterwards, observed only by a mute princess whose tale of Robert's heroics is disbelieved. Throw in a side story of a scheming and disloyal seneschal, and you have the gist of the narrative arc, leading ultimately to a decidedly medieval twist. Translations should be measured against their purpose, and Rosenberg easily meets his declared intentions. This is 'a work suitable for recitation, a work whose rhythms and sonorities bespeak the presence […] of a storyteller' (p. 5). Whether as teaching aid or pleasure read, this translation of Robert's tale brings medieval Europe to life with aplomb. [End Page 304] Nicholas D. Brodie Hobart, Tasmania Copyright © 2020 Nicholas D. Brodie

From French Romances to Music for Benjamin Franklin: An Examination of the D'Artois Collection from the House of the Countess of Artois, Wife of King Charles X of France

The D'Artois Collection presumably belonged to Maria Theresa of Savoy, Countess of Artois, wife of future King Charles X of France. It provides valuable insights into domestic musical repertoire in a French royal household in the late-eighteenth century. The Collection includes three volumes for a total of 130 pieces spanning a wide variety of genres, from romances and Italian operatic arias (the two most common genres in the Collection), to Masonic pieces, settings of sacred Latin texts, fables, drinking songs, and a few instrumental pieces. The format and history of the three volumes are discussed, as well as concordances for all the pieces. The Collection is examined in the light of the countess's upbringing at the court in Turin and the musical culture at Versailles in the last two decades of the Ancien Régime, with a particular emphasis on operatic arias. This essay unveils new information on Louis Charles Demignaux and other individuals holding offices in the house of Artois, whose names appear in the manuscripts as authors or composers of some of the pieces. It also includes a discussion of one of the most remarkable pieces in the Collection, Demignaux's 'Hymne à l'amitié', a rare example of an extant Masonic cantata. This piece was performed for Benjamin Franklin during his visit to the Masonic lodge Les Trois Frères Unis at the court in Versailles in June 1783, only a few months before the Peace of Paris, which marked the end of the American Revolutionary War.

The Returns of the Roman de la Terre : Défricheurs and their Migrant Others in the Canadien Imaginary

The theme “parler la terre” presents an opportunity to reconsider Québec’s romans de la terre—farm novels from the turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth that are often considered to be the inaugural works of the province’s literary canon. Variously known as the “roman du territoire” or the “roman paysan”, this genre, with its idealized depictions of colonization and rural life, helped articulate what literary historian Dorothee Scholl would call the mythe du terroir—or in her own words, “the mythologizing of the soil as the site of French-Canadian national identity (103).” At the height of their popularity, these novels were heavily patronized by Catholic clergy, provincial politicians, and nationalist literary circles, who promoted the productions in order to discourage the rural flight of francophone Canadiens,1 encouraging them to instead migrate internally and agriculturally exploit the Laurentians region north of Montréal. There is now a vast body of critique that examines how the agriculturalist ideology expressed through these farm novels helped reify notions of Franco-Canadian identity and territoriality. Transcending these studies, critics have also begun to read romans de la terre against the grain, highlighting the multi-dimensionality of the discourses of land in this genre. Some critics even diverge from the agriculturalist debate all together—for example, Sudarsan Rangarajan who does so in order to draw links between the roman de la terre and the contemporaneous French roman d’aventures (767). My paper, however, maintains that there remains work to be done in complicating the novels’ agriculturalist fixation on land, in particular by reckoning with the settler-colonialist implications of this discourse. Before me, geographer Caroline Desbiens productively proposed that certain romans de la terre may be emphasized as romans de ressources—and rightfully so, as many of them do extol the extraction and economic mobilization of natural resources from newly colonized land (121). However, remarking that this exploitation is mediated by the movement of colonists across the national terroir, the question I raise instead is how romans de la terre may also be read as economic récits de la migration. Doing so will allow us to comprehend the place of human migration in the settler-colonialist imaginaries that informed Canadiens of their relationship with the land in the past, and perhaps even continue to shape Québécois territoriality in the present day. As a case study, I turn to the emblematic roman de la terre, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine; understanding migration loosely as the displacement

Художествено слово и живопис

There are topics in art that always sound contemporary, so we often come back to them. One of them is Belles lettres and Painting. There are two perhaps even three different theses for this problem. The first is that fiction and fine arts are too far apart from each other as a type of art. The second thesis is that the arts have not only their major and significant differences, but also their undeniable similarities. Such is the perception of the French and German romantics. According to them, in the different historical eras, aesthetic trends and directions (genres) form close artistic styles, criteria and tastes as well as similar literary, plastic and musical imagery. And the third thesis is neutral. It seeks to harmonize the first two – different in expressive means, but similar in ideological and emotional impact respectively to the reader, viewer or listener.

Mary Harrod, From France with Love : Genre and Identity in French Romantic Comedy

A l’heure ou la comedie romantique hollywoodienne est dite en crise, l’ouvrage de Mary Harrod se penche sur le phenomene inverse outre-Atlantique : le veritable essor de ce genre cinematographique en France depuis les annees 1990 et 2000. L’ouvrage est sorti en 2015 et est adapte de la these doctorale de l’auteure. Sa question principale est la suivante : comment expliquer la proliferation et le succes « spectaculaire » (p. 2) de la comedie romantique francaise ces deux dernieres decennies ? ...

On Gabriel Pierné and his compositions for piano and orchestra

On Gabriel Pierné and his compositions for piano and orchestra

The Monstrous Birth of Alexander the Great

Alone among the French romances of Alexander the Great penned in the twelfth century, Thomas de Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie reproduces the story of Alexander’s illegitimate birth from the principal Latin source. According to this account, Alexander’s father was Nectanabus, a mage and astrologer who seduced Queen Olympias with an astronomy lesson, deceived her by using animal pelts to disguise himself as a god, and then used his magic arts to retard the child’s birth when his astrological calculations indicated the child would be born a hybrid man-beast. Thomas wrote his romance at the very moment when both astrology and paradoxography (the writing of marvels) were being reevaluated as means of understanding the world, and so Alexander’s odd birth offers a reflection — shaped by the romance genre — on the limitations and ethical implications of medieval natural science.

The Civil English War 1642-1649 "A Study of Its Origin, Occurrences and most Important Consequences"

The English historians agree that the civil English war had complex intellectual roots between the two most powerful forces in England, the parliament and the king. The struggle started between them when King Charles I dissolved the parliament in 1625. This happened because the parliament refused to provide the king with the money he asked for his war with Spain. Besides, the English Parliament, led by John Beam, felt that the king favored the Roman Catholic, especially after his marriage from the French Roman Catholic princess Henrietta Maria in the 1st of May 1625. It is worth mentioning that the English civil war constantly and directly held balance of powers between the king and the parliament in England. Power and politics were two vital factors for social standards in England in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century. This was the beginning of struggle between the parliament and the king. Although the discussions between the two sides continued until March 1641, the king’s insistence on his individual political decisions without taking the English parliament approval along with the religious conflicts referred to the inevitability of war between the two sides.  &nbsp

Roman Catholic Polemicists, Russian Orthodox Publicists, and the Tsar-Pope Myth in France, 1842–1862

Abstract In the mid-nineteenth century it was typical for French Roman Catholic publicists to allege that the tsar was the supreme head or “pope” of the Russian Church and that consequently, the Russian Church was completely enslaved to the state. While this idea was largely created by Catholic publicists, some Russian Orthodox individuals contributed intentionally or unintentionally to exaggerated notions of the Russian emperor’s spiritual authority, demonstrating that the Orthodox publicists who wanted to defend Russian interests did not always agree about what those interests really were or about how best to defend them. Following Italy’s national unification (1859–1860), French public figures used these narratives about the Russian tsar-pope to promote specific policies towards Rome and the papacy. For French Roman Catholic publicists, the tsar-pope myth proved that it was vital to preserve unity between the French Church and Rome and to defend the papacy’s temporal power as a guarantor of the Roman Catholic Church’s independence.

Christ in the Banlieues

Abstract In this essay, I analyze the efforts of a French Roman Catholic organization committed to reproducing the ubiquity of Roman Catholic built space in the landscapes of Paris and its suburbs. Over its nearly 100-year-existence, the “Cardinal’s Construction Site” has variously advertised its efforts as those necessary to combat communism, modernism, and secular apathy. I argue that its labors demonstrate how two concepts central to the anthropological study of Roman Catholicism exist in powerful tension. While Roman Catholicism has the capacity to recede into the background—in part through the ubiquity of its built space—and appear as nothing more than the unmarked or normative culture in countries in which it is the majority religion, its power as a social “institution” is maintained by numerous practices that invoke the “passions.” That is, in order to uphold the status that allows it to go unmarked, Roman Catholicism must also function as what Valentina Napolitano has described as a “passionate machine.” It is in part Catholicism’s capacity to uphold the normative by way of the passions that explains its current role in the xenophobic politics of Europe in the present.

Samuel N. Rosenberg, “Robert the Devil”: The First Modern English Translation of “Robert le Diable,” an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Paper. Pp. 157; 1 black-and-white figure. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-08016-1.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsSamuel N. Rosenberg, “Robert the Devil”: The First Modern English Translation of “Robert le Diable,” an Anonymous French Romance of the Thirteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Paper. Pp. 157; 1 black-and-white figure. $19.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-08016-1.Stacey HahnStacey HahnOakland University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 94, Number 3July 2019 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703949 Views: 44Total views on this site Copyright 2019 by the Medieval Academy of America. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Le Songe d’une nuit d’été of Ambroise Thomas: L’éclat at the end of the tunnel

This article argues that Ambroise Thomas’s opera Le Songe d’une nuit d’été functions as a Romantic allegory of the coarse artistic genius elevated and sanctified by royal and spiritual powers in an attempt to glorify and justify Shakespeare. Simultaneously, and more importantly, the opera is an appeal to French artists to move away from their adherence to neoclassical symmetry, restraint, and stasis, which persisted even in the work and opinions of the French Romantics.

The Fantastic in Literature

Charles Nodier (1780–1844) holds the dismal distinction of being the most important French Romantic you have never heard of. A child prodigy, Nodier was reading Montaigne and Plutarch, and writing fluently in French and Latin, by the age of ten. By twenty-five he had vandalized a guillotine, founded the ironically Freemasonesque antiJacobin society called the Philadelphes, published one of the irst French works of scholarship on Shakespeare, and served a month in prison for criticizing Napoleon in the poem “La Napoléone.” It was only then that he got serious, and in 1806 Les tristes was published, a collection of short stories, poems, dialogues, and essays that marked him as a disciple of the Romanticism of Goethe and Schiller and hinted at his future affinity for the visionary, fantastic mode of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The naming of Byzantium and the Old FrenchPartonopeus de Blois

This paper draws attention to the twelfth-century French romance Partonopeus de Blois and its author's original use of the name ‘Byzantium’ instead of conventional ‘Greek’ or ‘Constantinopolitan Empire’. It investigates roots of the modern-day belief that the term has been applied as a designation of the medieval state only since the sixteenth century. A linguistic and literary analysis challenges the premise and explores possible scenarios of the name's introduction into the Old French text. A suggested interpretation de-emphasizes the popular east-west ideological context in favour of simpler story-telling concerns.

A Call to Mission—A History of the Jesuits in China 1842–1954. Volume 1: The French Romance. Volume 2: The Wider European and American Adventure. By David Strong SJ. Adelaide: ATF, 2018. pp. xxxi + 501, xvii + 388. $33.95, $34.95 paper.

A Call to Mission—A History of the Jesuits in China 1842–1954. Volume 1: The French Romance. Volume 2: The Wider European and American Adventure. By David Strong SJ. Adelaide: ATF, 2018. pp. xxxi + 501, xvii + 388. $33.95, $34.95 paper.

Eugène Delacroix et ses violons d’Ingres

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