La Pucelle Research Articles

Bewitching The Shrew

When Paulina boldly demands that he acknowledge the newborn Perdita as his child, Leontes vilifies her as both shrew and witch who shames her husband and threatens social order. Antigonus is said to be womantir'd or hen-pecked, unroosted by his Dame Partlet and worthy to be hang'd for control[ing] her tongue. Paulina herself is an audacious lady, a mankind a callet / Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, / And now baits me, and a gross hag. Finally, Leontes threatens her with a witch's death: I'll ha' thee burnt.1 The seeming irrationality of this name-calling is not merely a register of Leontes' misogyny and hysterical jealousy. For early moderns, these categories of female deviance (shrew, mannish diabolist, scold or callet, hag or witch) were conceptually rooted in a scheme of moral and social inversions that overlapped and often converged. Catherine Belsey has shown how in Tudor and Stuart drama transgressive (i.e., unwomanly) women demonized; and how, conversely, contemporary women actually convicted of witchcraft were characterized as unwomanly in appearance and demeanor especially in their volubility (184-91). While these patterns striking in later tragedies like Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, and in numerous Jacobean witch-plays,2 they also prominent in Shakespeare's earliest works. The Ephesian women of The Comedy of Errors perceived as socially anomalous and consequently are termed, with mounting anxiety and violence, siren, witch, sorceress and devil (Roberts, 198). Witchcraft is intertwined with both gender transgression and treason in the earliest history plays, most obviously through Joan la Pucelle and Margery Jourdain (2,2 Henry VI) and in the witchcraft metaphors and accusations of witchcraft in 3 Henry VI and Richard III (see Howard and Rackin; Willis, ch. 6; Cox, Devils and Power, 57-64). My argument here is that another early play, The Taming of the Shrew, also exploits these linkages by representing Katherina through the Elizabethan cultural practices, the popular literary and dramatic types, and the political and theological discourses that identified scolds or shrews with witches. The play engages with these ideological manifestations of patriarchy in such a way, however, as to expose their internal contradictions

Iran, War, Displacement and my choice of Joan of Arc

This paper discusses the personal perceptions that have shaped my poetics in writing La Pucelle: an Epic of Joan of Arc as part of a PhD candidature in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University.

Rewriting Joan: Schiller's Johanna

The article analyses Friedrich Schiller’s play, The Maid from Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans [1801]) as a response to Voltaire’s ribald satire, La Pucelle d’Orleans (1762). Schiller rejected Voltaire’s satire as celebrating reason at the expense of the heart. Using Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 1, as well as a variety of other sources (the Bible, his own translation of Macbeth, his notion of romanticism, etc.), Schiller attempted to rewrite St Joan to clarify his aesthetics. Rewriting is thus enacted by Schiller on several levels: he ‘corrects’ Voltaire and the Enlightenment; he rewrites Shakespeare’s version of Joan (and of Macbeth) for the German stage; he rewrites fifteenth-century France into the German states of 1800; he completely changes Joan’s story to fit his own notion of tragedy; and he rewrites the notion of religion by eliding it with what he sees as the high aims of fiction. For Schiller, Joan of Arc is the embodiment of beauty and the sublime, precisely because of her contradictions (fier...

Warrior Women in the Plays of Cavendish and Killigrew

The figure of the Amazon or warrior woman repeatedly emerges from classical and Renaissance cultural documents as an integral part of the story of national identity and state formation. Travel narratives, epics, stage plays, masques--these diverse forms collectively mobilize the warrior woman to make issues of gender difference, chastity, and sexuality central to the imaginative construction of nationhood. For adventurers like Sir Walter Ralegh, "Amazons figure the sense in which boundaries between experience and fantasy are permeable," allowing the recuperation of classical models of heroism. 1 William Shakespeare might use Joan la Pucelle to denigrate French Catholicism and justify English military aggression, or offer his audience a subjugated Amazon such as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream to explore masculine anxiety over England's anomalous rule by a woman. 2 Similarly, Edmund Spenser's national epic, The Faerie Queene, imaginatively reconciles English civil order to its female ruler through conflicts between warrior women and associated conflicts over types of chastity. The appearance of a pantheon of Amazonian characters in Ben Jonson's Masque of Queens demonstrates that the importance of the figure of the Amazon was not limited to Elizabeth's reign. While a great deal has been written on Elizabethan and Stuart uses of the Amazon myth, there has been less consideration of how the figure of the Amazon develops through the Civil War and into the Restoration. For English writers of this later period, national identity again became a question of immediate and material importance; the reality of war gave the figure of the warrior woman greater ideological urgency and also changed the material pretexts for her representation. When real women fought on English soil, established relationships between the mythology of warrior women and the lived experiences of women at war were liable to dissolve quickly, making [End Page 413] those relationships susceptible to new and different meanings. History records the many heroic exploits of women during this period of social and political crisis; through their deeds, the warrior woman was temporarily liberated from her position within the safe prison of myth and metaphor to prove her currency, her power to inspire Royalist and Roundhead women, and her potential as flesh and bone. The anxieties and possibilities attendant on the figure of the warrior woman are charted in works by two Civil War exiles, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Killigrew. Similar in cultural position and political sympathies, Cavendish and Killigrew also wrote remarkably similar closet plays during their time away from England, addressing and imaginatively redressing the traumas of war. But their warrior women function quite differently, suggesting the ways that authorial gender influences the place of the warrior woman in their visions of restored nationhood.

La cacophonie des rires dans La Pucelle de Voltaire

The cacophony of laughter in Voltaire's La Pucelle. The gallant mockery in La Pucelle, so different from the burlesque parody hated by Voltaire for socio-aesthetic reasons, provides a good field for observing the different facets of Voltaire's laughter. This study, based on the internal representations of laughter (metapoetical as much as fictional) reveals contradictory postulates which border on cacophony. The outbursts that are staged in the work are mainly indicated as clearly pejorative, which reinforces the confusion as to the meaning of laughter. Some indirect light can be thrown on the question by the reflections in the article "Rire" in his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, in which the lost fullness of harmonious laughter, associated with childhood, is contrasted with debased social manifestations, confusing laughter and barracking. La Pucelle, whose writing alternates between these two comic poles, is part of the quest for lost euphoria, which is crystallised in the effect of feminine smiles, linked to a hedonistic celebration of the pleasures of mind and body.

Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women's Fashion in 1920s France

IN FRANCE DURING THE 1920s, FASHION WAS A HIGHLY CHARGED ISSUE. In 1925, an article in L'oeuvre jocularly described how fashion of short hair had completely overturned life in a small French village. After first woman in village cut her hair, accompanied by tears and grinding of teeth on part of her family, fashion had quickly become epidemic: from house to house, it took its victims. A gardener swore he would lock up his daughter until her hair grew back; a husband believed that his wife had dishonored him. A scandalized cure decided to preach a sermon about it, but unfortunately he had chosen wrong day, since it was feast of Jeanne d'Arc. As he began to condemn bobbed hair as indecent and unchristian, the most impudent young ladies of parish pointed insolently at statue of liberator.' By claiming bobbed-cutJoan of Arc as their mascot, these young women grounded their quest for liberation in rich, tangled mainstream of French history. They appealed to ambivalent yet strongly traditional image of Jeanne la pucelle (Joan Virgin), at once patriotic, fervently Christian, and sexually ambiguous. The fashion among young women for short, bobbed hair created enormous tensions within French family. Throughout decade, newspapers recorded lurid tales, including one husband in provinces who sequestered his wife for bobbing her hair and another father who reportedly killed his daughter for

Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women's Fashion in 1920s France

IN FRANCE DURING THE 1920s, FASHION WAS A HIGHLY CHARGED ISSUE. In 1925, an article in L'oeuvre jocularly described how the fashion of short hair had completely overturned life in a small French village. After the first woman in the village cut her hair, accompanied by "tears and grinding of teeth" on the part of her family, the fashion had quickly become "epidemic: from house to house, it took its victims." A gardener swore he would lock up his daughter until her hair grew back; a husband believed that his wife had dishonored him. A scandalized cure decided to preach a sermon about it, but "unfortunately he had chosen the wrong day, since it was the feast of Jeanne d'Arc." As he began to condemn bobbed hair as indecent and unchristian, "the most impudent young ladies of the parish pointed insolently at the statue of the liberator."' By claiming the bobbed-cutJoan of Arc as their mascot, these young women grounded their quest for "liberation" in the rich, tangled mainstream of French history. They appealed to the ambivalent yet strongly traditional image of Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Virgin), at once patriotic, fervently Christian, and sexually ambiguous. The fashion among young women for short, bobbed hair created enormous tensions within the French family. Throughout the decade, newspapers recorded lurid tales, including one husband in the provinces who sequestered his wife for bobbing her hair and another father who reportedly killed his daughter for the

Texts in context: critical dialogues on significant episodes in American political rhetoric: with newly-edited speech texts by Anna E. Dickinson and by Martin Luther King, Jr

Contents: Preface. R.L. Scott, Foreword: Against Rhetorical Theory: Tripping to Serendip. Part I: Current Views of Public Address. D. Zarefsky, The State of the Art in Public Address Scholarship. M.J. Medhurst, Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges to the Rhetorical Renaissance. J.A. Aune, Public Address and Rhetorical Theory. Part II: Six Case Studies. S.H. Browne, Burke's Speech on Conciliation: The Pragmatic Basis of Rhetorical Judgment. J.L. Lucaites, Burke's Speech on Conciliation as Oppositional Discourse. K.K. Campbell, La Pucelle D'Orleans Becomes an American Girl: Anna Dickinson's W. Linkugel, R. Rowland, Response to Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's Anna E. Dickinson's Jeanne D'Arc: Divergent Views. R.L. Ivie, Metaphor and Motive in the Johnson Administration's Vietnam War Rhetoric. B. Brummett, Some Burkean Roads Not Taken: Response to Ivie. M. Osborn, Been to the Mountaintop: The Critic as Participant. J.W. Wenzel, A Dangerous Unselfishness: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech at Memphis, April 3, 1968: Response to Osborn. J.R. Cox, The Fulfillment of Time: King's I Have a Dream Speech (August 28, 1963). R. Hariman, Time and the Reconstitution of Gradualism in King's Address: Response to Cox. C.M. Condit, Nixon's Fund: Time as Ideological Resource in the Checkers Speech. T.B. Farrell, The Carnival as Confessional: Re-reading the Figurative Dimension in Nixon's 'Checkers' Speech. Part III: Epilogue. D.P. Gaonkar, Epilogue The Oratorical Text: The Enigma of Arrival. Part IV: Two Newly-Edited Speech Texts. A.E. Dickinson, Jeanne D'Arc. M.L. King, Jr., I've Been to the Mountaintop.

The Mist�re du si�ge d'Orl�ans as a Representational Drama

The Mistère du siège d'Orléans as a Representational Drama V. L. Hamblin Université de Haute Bretagne Since the rediscovery of its only known manuscript some 150 years ago, the Mistere du siège d'Orléans has provoked inquiry on two different though not entirely distinct levels: first, from scholars who gleaned from the text facts relevant to its historical narration; and second, from other scholars who dissected the text for clues pertaining to its composition and intended audience. In the first case, study was directed at the play's depiction of events in fifteenth-century Orléans and especially at the portrayal of a girl called "Jehanne la Pucelle." In both areas the text was judged to be historically accurate but of little interest because its chronological base was the contemporary history already recorded in the chronicles of the day. This chronicle in verse, as one historian called it (Quicherat 5: 79), was thereby relegated to the category of sociodrama . In the second case, study has been directed at the question of authorship as well as at the relationship between the text and the perennial celebrations held in Orléans. Like many other misteres, the Siège d'Orléans remains an anonymous composite with, in this case, sections deriving from about 1435 to the end of the fifteenth century. While evidence continues to build toward confirmation of its role in commemorative performances in Orléans, most interest has focused on problems encountered in dating the manuscript. In any case it is clear that the vast panorama presented on the folios of the Mistere du siège d'Orléans has attracted attention of a generally socio-historical nature, that is, in reference to what the play might reveal about the events themselves, about the 120 historical characters who parade through more than twenty sites, and about the customs and crises of the Orléanais population in the fifteenth century. All of the above are essential and valuable pursuits, but they have resulted in the trivialization of investigations into the dramatic or literary value of the text. In 1868, Henri Tivier reported that the Siège d'Orléans offered "une trame fort lâche et une singulière mobilité d'action" (175), because it dramatized events in an episodic or chronicle-like fashion. While Tivier conceded that the overall chronological plan provided a natural unity to the text (112) and that the author-compiler had successfully capitaliz >n the dramatic effect of the events (115), he added that "Ie principal intérêt consiste le plus souvent dans un rapport aussi exact que possible entre la chose et l'image qu'en offre la scène, où rien n'est donné à l'étalage de l'esprit, tout à la ressemblance pouss ée jusqu'à la plus fastidieuse exactitude" (116). One hundred years later, another analysis agreed that the Siège d'Orléans's "adherence to 61 62Rocky Mountain Review historical and chronological fact certainly mars the play as a literary work" (Krnacik 116). From such criticism it would appear that the drama's manipulation of facts, or more precisely the manner in which the historical facts are fictionalized, has disappointed scholars of medieval theater. This mistere is not alone on this count, of course, since critics have often lamented in other mysteries what they perceived to be naive presentation rendered interesting by complex staging. The Siège d'Orléans could be held guilty on both points. While the text contains some faulty poetry and is necessarily repetitive, it is spectacular in its production . Oceans, boats, break-away towers, bridges, and numerous dead bodies are only some of the many props and engins required by the action-filled scenes of this drama. However, it is precisely in its dependence on historical fact that the Siège d'Orléans departs from the standard subject matter of mystery plays. Rather than depicting a narrative selected from Biblical lore or the saints' lives, the authorcompiler chose contemporary events involving historical personages, some of whom may have participated in an initial performance of the drama. We might contrast this drama with another fifteenth-century play, the Mystère...

Some Italian Sources for La Pucelle d'Orleans

Some Italian Sources for La Pucelle d'Orleans

The Chancellor and Jeanne d'Arc: February-July, A. D. 1429

THE CHANCELLOR AND JEANNE D'ARC FEBRUARY—JULY, A. D. 1429 Scrutiny, in 1956, of a rare black-letter volume in Latin, printed in 1484 at Cologne, Germany, led to the suspicion that for five centuries the true opinion about Jeanne d'Arc, rendered in March, 1429, by John Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, had been hidden from historians. Collation of later editions and study of the sources used by historians ever since, forced the conclusion that a substitution had been contrived in 1429, by the machinations of politicians. These politicians, inimical to Chancellor Gerson and to La Pucelle, were partisans of England and of Burgundy, bent on crowning as King of France, the infant King Henry VI of England. It is, literally, a 'cloak-and-dagger story,' for Gerson, loyal to the cause of Charles VII of France, wrote his opinion in 1429 as an exile in Lyons, threatened with assassination by the Burgundians. Jeanne d'Arc, finally captured by Burgundians, sold to the English, was burned at the stake in Rouen, May 30, 1431. Here follows the story of the Chancellor and the Maid. I The politics of the Fifteenth Century in Europe were as complex in dynastic allegiances as ideological loyalties of the Twentieth.1 Mediaeval government was based on 'the divine right of kingship,' rather than on 'the consent of the governed.' Succession of rule was upheld by force of arms, instead of by self-determination with ballot or plebiscite. Powerpolitics revolved around royal marriages. England, pent in her island, time and again arranged marriages that would unite royal blood-lines for continental alliances. Henry V (1387—1422), dreamed of winning France as preliminary to leading a crusade to build again the walls of Jerusalem. He found the ambitious Duke of Burgundy 1 Ernest Lavisse: Histoire de France, Paris, 1911: IV, pt. 2, p. 8. "We cannot make any of these characters 'the villain' of this historical drama. Take the Duke of Bedford, John of Lancaster. In his own estimation he was a patriot, fighting for 'the divine right of kingship' for the baby king of England, Henry VI." (Tr.) 18 Franciscan Studies, 1957273 274D. G. WA YMAN an eager ally. Burgundy made himself master of Paris and of the insane king, Charles VI (1369—1422) and negotiated the Treaty of Troyes, May 21, 1420, by which Henry V espoused Catherine of France and was recognized as heir to the crown of France. In a matter of months, both Henry V and Charles VI were dead. The French king left an heir, the Dauphin (1403—1461) later Charles VII. The English king also left an heir, the infant Henry VI of England (1421—1471). John Gerson (1363—1431), Chancellor of the University of Paris, opponent of the Burgundian policies, in 1420 was living in exile in Lyons, France, avowed target for assassination. Many University professors were also in exile at Poitiers, France, loyal to Charles VII. In that same year of 1420, Jeanne d'Arc (1412 ?—1431) was a child in Domremy, eight or nine years old, hearing the discussions of her elders over the civil war, complicated by foreign invaders in her country. On the home side was the Armagnac party, those Frenchmen loyal to the house of Valois, ready to risk homes, fortunes and lives to uphold the lineal right of Charles VII as ruler of a unified France. On the opposite side, English men allied with the House of Burgundy, included such historic names as Talbot, the Duke of Bedford and Cardinal Beauvais, uncle to the baby Henry VI. They fought to crown the infant king of France in Notre Dame Cathedral. Ironically, they achieved this only in 1431, after Jeanne d'Arc was burned at the stake in Rouen. Catalyst between the opposing parties was Jeanne, born of country stock in Domremy in the province of Lorraine. A World War I Marshall of France, Ferdinand Foch, would hail her five centuries later as "un grand chef de guerre."2 An English university professor would write that "the wonderful mission of the Maid of Orleans taught Frenchmen that France was France and England England,"3 4 The Burgundian and English opinion...

“La Pucelle” Exhibited

“La Pucelle” Exhibited

Psychology of Joan of Arc

IN a paper entitled “A Medico-psychological Revision of the Story of Jehanne La Pucelle” read before the Section of the History of Medicine of the Royal Society of Medicine on December 4, Dr. H. P. Bayon said that modern historians, by interpreting medieval religious conceptions according to the dictates of contemporary critical doctrines, have failed to examine the voices and visions of La Pucelle in their proper light and sequence. The first voices heard at the age of thirteen were, according to him, connected with endocrine activity tinged by intense religious fervour and could not be rightly diagnosed as morbid, even if they ranked as somewhat abnormal. A couple of years after, the simple monitions of the voices were followed by visions and commands, directing the Maid to perform valiant military deeds for a patriotic service; these must be classified as something additional, since their purpose was creative and constructive and furthered the accomplishment of a certain preconceived plan by providing confidence in her mission and obtaining authority for her message. Joan of Arc thus became instinctively the first protagonist of that form of national patriotism which was to play such a part in arranging States and dynasties in Europe during succeeding centuries.

Chapelain and the Genesis of the French Academy

N CONSIDERING the part played by Chapelaini in the establishment of the French Academy one must forget the satires of Boileau and, what is more difficult, La Pucelle. In the 1630's Chapelain's prestige was very great. His Lettre ou discours which served as a preface to the Adone (1623) of Marini had convinced everybody that he was an authority on poetic doctrine. It was generally believed that the national epic he was going to write would make him immortal. Balzac hailed him in 1634 as veritablement un grand Porte, et qui reiississe esgalement en toutes sortes de genres,' and five years later wrote to M. de Bellejoie: C'est un personnage de haute vertu, qui est tout Intelligence et tout Raison.2 In 1632, the year in which we find the first mention of an Academy in Chapelain's correspondence, Chapelain came into personal relations with Richelieu. The occasion was a letter to Granier de Maul6on3 in

IX. An account of a monstrous double birth in Lorrain. Communicated to the publisher by Mr. Colin Mac Laurin, Prof, Math. Abredon. R. S. S.

I the Underwritten, Surgeon in Ordinary to his Royal Highness the Duke of <italic>Lorrain</italic>, certify, that on the last of <italic>December</italic>, 1722, I went by his Orders to <italic>Domp Remy la Pucelle</italic>, to see there <italic>Sebastiana Camus</italic>, aged 44 Years, delivered on the 24th of the said Month, being <italic>Christmas Eve</italic>, about eight o'clock in the Evening, of two Children, or Twins, joined together in the Manner as appears by the Draughts