Le Livre Research Articles

The Tractatus de iride “Inter omnes impressiones” Formerly Attributed to Oresme and Its Grossetestian Milieu: Introduction and Edition

Abstract This article presents a study and a critical edition of the short anonymous treatise on the rainbow starting with the incipit Inter omnes impressiones. The text was known to Nicole Oresme who engages with it twice: in his Questiones in Meteorologica de prima lectura and in Le livre du ciel et du monde. This Tractatus de iride, previously unknown to scholars, is transmitted in three late thirteenth-century manuscripts. It uses Robert Grosseteste’s theories of the rainbow as caused by the refraction of sunlight and of colour as light incorporated in aereal particles. However, contrary to Grosseteste, the Tractatus de iride adopts the idea of different degrees of incorporation of light, which is also found in the scientific writings by Adam of Exeter, a Franciscan scholar belonging to the same Oxonian circle as Grosseteste. Moreover, the Tractatus de iride develops original propositions in regard to the role of individual raindrops, the importance of the angle from which the rainbow is observed, and the idea of the spirituality of the colours in the medium, which were central also for Roger Bacon’s and Nicole Oresme’s own theories of the rainbow.

Reconstructed and neo-slave narratives in French: Filling the gap through literature and archives

This article examines Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard’s Freedom Papers and Marie-Célie Agnant’s novel Le livre d’Emma as two important contributions geared towards filling the lacunae that exist in the historical record given the lack of slave narratives in French. This study argues that these narratives are important because they approach slavery in the French empire from a fresh angle. Freedom Papers reconstructs the existence of a woman named Rosalie from her entry into the slave trade through her life in Haiti. Such a biographical approach allows researchers to put an individual face on what has mostly been studied as an abstract institution. Similarly, Agnant traces the family history of Emma back to her first ancestor to make the transatlantic journey. Although Agnant’s contribution is fictional, Emma’s story captures a perspective similar to the experience of many whose ancestors were enslaved. Both stories stress the importance of writing – veritable ink on paper. It was through writing that biased historical narrative was created by former empires. It is therefore through writing that Rosalie succeeded in injecting herself into the historical record, and through writing that Emma ensures her ancestors’ story is never forgotten.

De Le livre rouge a El libro rojo: la mexicanización de un proyecto literario francés

The article peruses the influence of Le livre rouge (1863) in Vicente Riva Palacio’s and Manuel Payno’s El libro rojo (1870). It expounds how those responsible for El libro rojo , instead of just copying the French model, adapted it into a certain written and visual representation of history: violent, liberal, and providential. The article’s structure follows the Mexican version’s four innovations: martyrological hagiographies were elaborated instead of disquieting biographies; lithography, of greater expressive power, was substituted for the engraving technique; a taxonomy of violence was discarded in favor of a periodization based on the spillage of blood; lastly, the oeuvre was endowed with a liberal optimism absent from the French text. Thus, El libro rojo is situated within a context of transatlantic influences, which highlights its uniqueness, and illuminates the liberal and triumphalistic representation of Mexican history.

De Le livre rouge a El libro rojo: la mexicanización de un proyecto literario francés

The article peruses the influence of Le livre rouge (1863) in Vicente Riva Palacio’s and Manuel Payno’s El libro rojo (1870). It expounds how those responsible for El libro rojo, instead of just copying the French model, adapted it into a certain written and visual representation of history: violent, liberal, and providential. The article’s structure follows the Mexican version’s four innovations: martyrological hagiographies were elaborated instead of disquieting biographies; lithography, of greater expressive power, was substituted for the engraving technique; a taxonomy of violence was discarded in favor of a periodization based on the spillage of blood; lastly, the oeuvre was endowed with a liberal optimism absent from the French text. Thus, El libro rojo is situated within a context of transatlantic influences, which highlights its uniqueness, and illuminates the liberal and triumphalistic representation of Mexican history.

The Roles of Guardians Deities of Book of Cavern from Scenes Texts of King Ramses Iv Tomb

This papers aims to focus the light on the role of the guardians deities of the book of the Cavern from the scenes and texts of the Tomb of King Ramses IV and their benefits for the soul of the King, The 1st and the 2nd division of the book of Cavern included the figure of the guardian deities, was depicted completely on the 3rd corridor {C} of the tomb Meanwhile the figures of the guardians deities from the 3rd to the 11th Cave were represented only in figures and its explaining texts explain their protective role for the soul of the deceased. (Piankoff,1941,1942,1943) in his Articles (Le livre des Querets) highlighted the description of the journey of the Sun god and the soul of the deceased accompanied him through the Cavern of the Underworld.(Hart,1986) mentioned only the names and epithets of these guardian deities ,So the researcher will highlight Why these guardian Deities was represented only in figures and mentioned in texts explaining their protective roles for the soul of the King in the Caves of the underworld ? instead of the depiction From the 3rd to 6th division of the book of the Cavern to inform the soul of the King about the role of these guardians deities of each Cave during his journey accompanied the Sun god through the Cavern of the Underworld.

Le temps signifiant et le Moyen Âge français

An analysis of “weather events” and their meaning in works of French medieval literature – La Chanson de Roland, Le Chevalier au lion, Le Roman de la rose, Le Livre du Cuer d’amours espris and Le Debat d’entre le gris et le noir – finds different forms of interaction between the outside world and human beings. Whether a connection between man and nature is mediated by God, set by the human arrangement of or incursion into a natural setting, or left so loose as to suggest nature’s indifference to human witness, weather contributes to the picture.

Lojalność wobec Boga i cnót rycerskich w Le livre de chevalerie Godfryda de Charny

[Loyalty towards God and chivalric virtues in Le livre de chevalerie of Godfryd de Charny] Godfryd de Charny is the author of the Book of Chivalry (Livre de chevalerie). The direct context of this work creation were multiple French defeats and the advantage of the Englishmen in the Hundred Years’ War, as well as the foundation of the Order of the Knights with the Red Star in 1352 and positive changes that this foundation triggered. The French knight, seeing multiple abuses, noticed the urgent need of the chivalric state reformation. Undoubtedly, his work is one of the most precious sources of knowledge for the medieval thought and customs. In the present article, based on the abovementioned work of Godfryd de Charny, the chivalric models have been presented. Those models are vocation and service, and they put on the first place honour, courage and bravery. All knights’ actions are subordinated to the superior principle of honourable conduct. A knight should be of noble birth and godly. He can earn the most considerable glory by the armed acts, heroism on the battlefield and loyalty.

Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalierie, ed. critique par Lucien Dugaz. Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge, 64. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021, 631 pp.

Abstract: Although it was one of the most unusual topics for a female writer, Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre des fais d’armes et de chevalerie from 1410 was a major success and can be counted among her masterpieces, although research has not yet paid enough attention to it. Written in the midst of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, Christine emerges as a genius author on the principles of waging a war and on the ideals of knighthood, drawing extensively from classical sources, as was typical in the pre-modern world, and also from oral accounts, maybe by military captains. Christine Moneera Laennec had produced a brief edition of Ms. A6 in her Ph.D. thesis from 1988, and Summer Willard and Charity Cannon Willard had already published an English translation of the Livre in 1999, but Lucien Dugaz now finally presents a very solid historical-critical edition which immediately proves to be of the finest quality. The extensive introduction does not only present the large number of available manuscript copies (25 altogether), but also situates Christine’s text within the cultural-historical context, discussing, for example, whom the poet probably addressed, how she used her classical sources, and the major themes and concepts pursued by her.

Too Good to Be True: Debating Constancy in Chaucer's Legend and Christine's Cité

Abstract This article creates a thought experiment considering how Geoffrey Chaucer and Christine de Pizan use the larger cultural milieu of the Debate about Women as something “good to think with.” Whereas critics have often approached the Legend of Good Women (ca. 1386) and Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405) as examples of how authors in the Debate tradition rewrote women's stories to make bad women good, this article applies recent work in cognitive science, which studies how humans create categories, to argue that both Chaucer and Christine are thinking beyond taxonomic categories to depict their “good women” as active participants in an ethical inquiry. Using ad hoc categories to enact the extreme ideals of the Debate, both authors demonstrate that such an overly active constancy is the opposite of reason. Ultimately, they reveal that a too-constant female good proves, paradoxically, to be both destructive and disloyal.

Paratopie de l’écrivain miraculé : Erwan Larher en quête du kairos

By crossing the analysis of discourse with the sociology of literature, I study in Le Livre que je ne voulais pas écrire (Larher, 2017) the tensions between, on the one hand, social assignment to a place (Bataclan) or a status (survivor) and, on the other hand, the need to build the non-place in which to do the work of a writer. Indeed, the book revolves around the kairos: what is the right moment to write about the Bataclan? What is the place to be when one presents oneself first and foremost as a novelist and not as a simple survivor? For the attack waits for the representation of the real, it destabilizes a uniform self-presentation and generic categories: should one testify or reserve oneself for a fictional production? The conflict between the distinctive ethos of the writer and the prior ethos of the victim seems to me conducive to rethinking the paradoxes of literary paratopia: less from the social margin, than from the (ephemeral) centrality of media overexposure. The issue is to identify a scenography of the miraculous writer in order to characterize its processes (enunciative, structural, and rhetorical).

La Victime et le rhapsode: Vers une poétique de la suture. Sur Philippe Lançon et Erwan Larher

While quite a few writing endeavors were sparked by the Paris attacks of 2015, both Philippe Lançon, whose Le Lambeau came out in 2018, and Erwan Larher, whose Le Livre que je ne voulais pas écrire came out in 2017, were already seasoned writers who were personally affected by these attacks. Philippe Lançon, in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and Erwan Larher, at the Bataclan, survived badly wounded. They came back to writing, in a vital move that is explored here. How does a victim become a bard? Through what metamorphoses? What constructs? To what extent can the threads of writing be made whole again? What are the reconfigurations that could make a return to writing conceivable? And what shape(s) would this take? In short: to what continuities and discontinuities, to what constancy and what fractures do Philippe Lançon’s and Erwan Larher’s accounts bear witness?

Mallarmé’s Digital Demon

How do Mallarmé’s writings speak to the present? To answer this question, this article establishes a dialogue between one of Mallarmé’s early prose poems, ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’, and texts by the contemporary media theorists Mark Hansen, Steven Shaviro and Eugene Thacker. The article argues that Mallarmé’s poem explores how it feels to be a body modulated by code. The poem puts twentieth-century phenomenology with its focus on human perception under pressure, and instead presents a very contemporary view of individuation (subject-formation) as a process that is both thoroughly bound up with the environment, and difficult to comprehend and unify. In a final section, the article considers ‘Le Démon de l'analogie’ in relation to the poet's dream about le Livre, and suggests that Mallarmé’s work as a whole brings together the utopian and the dystopian tendencies that have marked media studies from their inception, and that continue to characterize our relations to the technological object.

Approaches to Teaching the Works of Christine de Pizan. Edited by Andrea Tarnowski

This collection of essays opens with an excellent introduction by Andrea Tarnowski, which fully orients the reader within the field of Christine de Pizan studies. Teachers of Christine’s work from a variety of backgrounds will benefit from the ‘Instructor’s Library’, which serves as a guide with which to navigate the overwhelming Christine bibliography. Mark Aussem’s preliminary essay also offers some valuable advice on online resources teachers may wish to use (although it is worth noting that, across the volume, several of the URLs are no longer valid). Following these preliminaries, the essays are presented in three categories. The first eight pieces form a section entitled ‘Gender and Self-Representations: Cultural Contexts’, and address the teaching of some of the topics within which Christine more traditionally features, including gender (David F. Hult, Tarnowski) and autobiography (Jeff Rider), but also patronage (Deborah McGrady) and her treatment of sources (Julia Simms Holderness). The contributions by Mary Gibbons Landor and Tarnowski offer something refreshingly different, approaching Christine from the perspective of visual material — still very much an emergent field. Daisy Delogu’s chapter is of particular of note: it convincingly makes the case for Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, which rarely features on syllabi, as an excellent starting point for Christine studies, as it is pertinent to so many of the topics usually broached through her works. Overall, this section offers a good spread of articles on traditional and more novel approaches to teaching Christine. The six essays in the second section, ‘Christine across the Disciplines’, continue along this line, showing how Christine can be integrated into courses on art history (Benjamin M. Semple), political theory (Cary J. Nederman), and music (Patricia E. Black). The contributions by Susan J. Dudash and Barbara K. Altmann form an engaging pair of essays on textual analysis of Christine’s lyric poems; the former shows how one of the ballades can be used as a lens through which to examine a number of topics, whilst the latter uses another poem as a means of exploring medieval intertextuality. Finally, David Joseph Wrisley’s essay shows how digital mapping tools can be used to investigate notions of geography and space in Christine’s works. The essays in the third section, ‘Classroom Contexts’, largely discuss some of the challenges of teaching Christine’s works in different settings, and the opportunities these might present. Roberta L. Krueger’s essay on Le Livre des trois vertus is particularly notable for its suggestions on how to bring to life what might at first appear a rather dry instruction book. Meanwhile, Nadia Margolis shows how the Ditié Jehanne d’Arc can be used to explicate various aspects of the historical background of late medieval France and England. Aussem’s essay concludes by suggesting that the 350,000 results generated by searching online for ‘Christine de Pizan’ (that figure has since increased to over 481,000) need to be organized so as to make them more navigable. Until someone takes up that baton, this book will go some way towards helping teachers (and, I am tempted to say, students) of Christine navigate this vast field of research.

Rewriting Mythology, Reclaiming History: Christine de Pizan and Eva Gore-Booth on Gendered Performance and Equality

In 1405, the Italian-French poet and prose writer Christine de Pizan completed her most famous work, Le Livre de la Cite des Dames , translated into English as The Book of the City of Ladies (hence...

Eros and Poetic Ties to Talmudic Traditions in Bernard Vargaftig’s <em>Comme respirer</em>

The later poetry of Bernard Vargaftig (1934–2012) can pose challenges even to the advised reader. Mystical inner landscapes, strings of abstractions, and missing links in the semantic chain within and between brief lines make for variations that only partially resolve to recognizable themes. One means of examining such verse is to recognize his status as a survivor of wartime anti-Semitism who still faces the trauma of time spent in hiding during the Occupation. Another is to unpack the interplay of signs set into motion. The present analysis highlights spiritual-religious currents as further interpretive possibilities. It posits that Vargaftig’s interest in Talmudic traditions provides insights into his aims and methods. Far from asserting the presence of religious dogma, it explores how Judaic culture features in his writing, motivating him to engage with texts, alterity, and the sacred in significant, life-changing ways. It uses Comme respirer (2003) as a primary source, along with Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s Le Livre brûlé (1986) and Lire aux éclats (1989) as overviews of Talmudic history and interpretation. Commentary emphasizes excerpts from poems and interviews, as well as Judaic cultural, historical, and philosophical perspectives, in order to elucidate how Vargaftig’s ideas and techniques foreground the sacred.

‘La Belle Dame qui eust mercy’ and ‘Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame’: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems ed. and tr. by Joan Grenier-Winther

 Reviews (especially France’s government), and into her recommendations for a well-run society . e Cité itself is an engaged and erudite rebuke both to the historical method Christine knew and to the specific historical narratives of her time, which both justified and structured the assumptions, institutions, and political practices of the generations for whom they were written. Some recent studies by French researchers could have lent additional support to Bourgault and Kingston’s thesis. ese include Françoise Autrand, Christine de Pizan : une femme en politique (Paris: Fayard, ); Claire Le Ninan, Le Sage Roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, ); and Anne Paupert, ‘“Te donrai preuve par exemples”: statut et fonction des exemples dans Le Livre de la Cité des Dames de Christine de Pizan’, Elseneur,  (), –. Works by Christine translated or mentioned in this volume are unfortunately given by their English titles only; the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc is a curious exception but one misses any reference to the authoritative edition and translation of the poem by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Medium Ævum Monographs,   (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, )). is City is the third expert English translation of the work published in the last four decades. Hardy comments very briefly on how her translation differs from earlier ones by Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, , ) and Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, ), but some indication from the editors about the need for a new translation would have been helpful. Bourgault and Kingston correctly note that medieval writers, including Christine, depended on patronage; it should be noted, however, that men, by virtue of the formal education they could obtain (as women could not), generally enjoyed clerical or other appointments that gave them a living. As a woman, Christine was doubly victimized: shut out from the steady income an educated man might expect, then le without financial support when her husband died, she herself was evidence of the structural negligence and disdain of women she wrote about. As such, she depended far more than others on commissions and other individual acts of patronage, and her success in the teeth of such demands is all the more remarkable. F U T F ‘La Belle Dame qui eust mercy’ and ‘Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame’: A Critical Edition and English Translation of Two Anonymous Late-Medieval French Amorous Debate Poems. Ed. and trans. by J G-W. (Critical Texts, ) Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association. . lxxi+  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is new edition and translation of two of the poems that participate in the Quarrel of the Belle dame sans mercy is particularly interesting because of its coupling of two poems unique in their structure. Joan Grenier-Winther does an exhaustive job of examining the narrative, structure , and provenance of the two poems. She catalogues the twenty extant copies of MLR, .,   La Belle dame qui eust mercy and the four copies of Le Dialogue d’un amoureux et de sa dame and considers the early printed copies as well. e narrative of each poem is summarized and assessed within the context of the competitive and collaborative poetic communities (to borrow phrases from Emma Cayley and Adrian Armstrong) prevalent in mid to late fieenth-century France. Poetic structure is analysed with a focus on the details of versification; language, stylistics, and rhetorical elements are also examined. Grenier-Winther gives particular attention to the poems’ curious stanzaic form: eighteen stanzas of eight (La Belle Dame qui eust mercy) or ten (Le Dialogue d’amoureux et de sa dame) lines followed by eighteen of thirteen lines. ese poetic technicalities are meticulously considered for good reason. GrenierWinther uses her results to consider who might have composed the two poems. She concludes ultimately that Oton de Grandson was the author (p. xxiii), as had Arthur Piaget in a study published in Romania,  (before he seemingly retracted it later). If this attribution is correct, it means that the poems, or at least the first part of each, were written before Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, in contrast to the common assumption that they were written...

Resenha: Granereau, A. (2020). O Livro de Lauzun: onde começou a Pedagogia da Alternância. Fortaleza: Edições UFC.

A Obra de Abbé Granereau, Le livre de Lauzun - Une histoire des premières Maisons Familiales Rurales, publicada pela Editora Gerbert à Áurillac, Paris, 1969, com segunda edição pela Editora L’Harmattan, Paris, 2007, é fruto do diário que produziu consecutivamente descrevendo o processo de criação e expansão das escolas de formação em alternância, as Maisons Familiales Rurales (MFR). O presente trabalho é uma resenha dessa Obra publicada em 2020 no Brasil pelas Edições UFC, que pode ser apontada como a “Certidão de Nascimento” da Pedagogia da Alternância. Granereau discorre como, administrativa, filosófica e pedagogicamente foi sendo estruturada uma nova modalidade de cunho político-educacional em favor dos agricultores historicamente até então reféns de uma escola que decanta os valores urbanos. O livro retrata em detalhes a gênese da Pedagogia da Alternância, através da chamada Fórmula Pedagógica de Lauzun, enfocando: as dificuldades de implementação de novas ideias que diferem das fórmulas pedagógicas arraigadas; alternância de formação entre o tempo espaço escolar e o tempo espaço familiar-comunitário; organização didático-pedagógica interligando os dois momentos de estudo e trabalho; e a assunção dos agricultores da gestão da escola camponesa.
 Palavras-chaves: Maison Familiale Rurale, Fórmula Pedagógica de Lauzun, Escola Camponesa.
 
 Review: Granereau, A. (2020). O Livro de Lauzun: onde começou a Pedagogia da Alternância. Fortaleza: Edições UFC.
 ABSTRACT. The work of Abbé Granereau, Le livre de Lauzun - Une histoire des premières Maisons Familiales Rurales, published by Editora Gerbert à Áurillac, Paris, 1969, with a second edition by Editora L'Harmattan, Paris, 2007, is the result of the diary he produced consecutively describing the process of creating and expanding alternating training schools, the Maisons Familiales Rurales (MFR). The present work is a review of this work published in 2020 in Brazil by UFC Editions, which can be identified as the “Birth Certificate” of Pedagogy of Alternation. Granereau discusses how, philosophically and pedagogically, a new modality of political and educational nature was being structured in favor of farmers historically hitherto held hostage by a school that decanted urban values. The book portrays in detail the genesis of Pedagogy of Alternation, through the so-called Pedagogical Formula of Lauzun, focusing on: the difficulties of implementing new ideas that differ from ingrained pedagogical formulas; alternation of training between school and family-community time; didactic-pedagogical organization linking the two moments of study and work; and, the farmers taking over the management of the peasant school.
 Keywords: Maison Familiale Rurale, Pedagogical Formula of Lauzun, Peasant School.
 
 Revisión: Granereau, A. (2020). O Livro de Lauzun: onde começou a Pedagogia da Alternância. Fortaleza: Edições UFC.
 RESUMEN. La obra del Abbé Granereau, Le livre de Lauzun - Une histoire des premières Maisons Familiales Rurales, editada por Editora Gerbert à Áurillac, París, 1969, con una segunda edición de Editora L'Harmattan, París, 2007, es el resultado del diario que producido consecutivamente describiendo el proceso de creación y expansión de las escuelas de formación alterna, las Maisons Familiales Rurales (MFR). El presente trabajo es una revisión de este trabajo publicado en 2020 en Brasil por UFC Editions, que puede ser identificado como el “Certificado de Nacimiento” de la Pedagogía de la Alternancia. Granereau analiza cómo, filosófica y pedagógicamente, se estaba estructurando una nueva modalidad de carácter político y educativo a favor de los campesinos históricamente rehén de una escuela que decantó los valores urbanos. El libro retrata en detalle la génesis de la Pedagogía de la Alternancia, a través de la denominada Fórmula Pedagógica de Lauzun, centrándose en: las dificultades para implementar nuevas ideas que difieran de las fórmulas pedagógicas arraigadas; alternancia de formación entre tiempo escolar y familiar-comunitario; organización didáctico-pedagógica que vincula los dos momentos de estudio y trabajo; y los agricultores asumiendo la dirección de la escuela campesina.
 Palabras clave: Maison Familiale Rurale, Fórmula Pedagógica de Lauzun, Escuela Campesina.

Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger

Reviewed by: Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages by Glenn D. Burger Mary-Rose McLaren Burger, Glenn D., Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Middle Ages Series), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 272; 4 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$65.00, £54.00; ISBN 9780812249606. This book is a challenging and important contribution to the understanding of ‘thinking’ in the later Middle Ages. Analysing the purpose of texts that focus on the behaviour of women and men is fraught with difficulty in the context of twenty-first-century feminism. Frequently, I found myself rising to challenge Glenn D. Burger’s paradigms, only to have him add another, richer layer of interpretation. The book is logically constructed. Burger lays the foundations of the study by identifying the significance of texts that move the ‘good wife front and center’ (p. 2) to become a model; the negotiation of new social responsibilities that this opens up; and the fusion of new and old ideologies that can be observed in the texts. One implication of such texts is the transformation of morality to ethics. Burger sets the scene for the analysis and examination of specific texts with a discussion of embodied reading, where the action of reading itself helps to bring about the sought-after behaviour. He argues several ideas that build on each other: that an affective contract lies at the core of medieval developments in thinking about marriage as a sacrament; that conduct literature for women ‘mainstreamed’ thinking about married relations and households and transmitted this across Europe and across social classes during the fourteenth century; that literature aimed at the good wife provides the context for ‘a new model of heterosexuality’ (p. 24); that love of the marrying kind constituted an affective, rather than an erotic or feudal, contract, and that this kind of love ‘empowered new forms of social activity’ (p. 24). Burger further argues that conduct texts had the capacity to reconfigure female identity, which, in turn, created a space for a new authority for men as husbands and fathers, creating new patterns of social recognition and engagement. Consequently, this literature provides ‘a powerful medium for such a rethinking of gender and sexual relations’ (p. 25). He presents this conduct literature as a hinge, or turning point, between marriage as it had been known and developed during the medieval period, and the beginning of a new understanding of heterosexuality that can be seen emerging during the early modern period. Central to this notion is the transformative power of the ‘revisioning of female embodiment’ (p. 26) and the tension which this generates within the social context. Burger then analyses specific texts, each of which adds a further layer to his interpretation of the role of conduct literature as determining functions and [End Page 184] behaviours within both the family and wider society. Such texts as the Journées chrétiennes provide a recognized role for women beyond that of an enclosed religious life (Chapter 1). Les Enseignements de Saint Louis à sa fille Isabelle, the Speculum dominarum, and Le Miroir des bonne femmes present a new belief in the capacity of women’s nature for improvement, just as men are capable of improvement. They reflect changing marital relations and authorize the aristocratic household as ‘a new model for the social’ (p. 31; Chapter 2). Burger then uses Le Menagier de Paris, a household book, to examine what happens when the newly understood social function of marriage, as constructed via conduct literature, is played out in an urban merchant’s household. The bedchamber becomes the rehearsal space for the more public playing out of the couple’s marriage, which centres on the good conduct of the wife under the authority of her husband (Chapter 3). The final layer added by Burger is a discussion of the earliest iterations of the Griselda story. Boccaccio and Petrarch’s versions are examined, as well as Philippe de Mézière’s French translation, and the inclusion of this into Le Livre de la vertu du sacrament de mariage and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. In these texts, shaping narratives of...

‘The Book of the City of Ladies’ and Other Writings by Christine de Pizan

MLR, .,   and understanding of the theorists with whom Germana puts him in conversation. (e extended discussion of how Ellison was so influenced by Northrop Frye’s book e Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy in itself makes the book worth reading.) e major chapters focus on, in order: Invisible Man and the historical/temporal concepts of Nietzsche and Bergson; Invisible Man and the historical figure of Henry Box Brown (as far as I am aware, this correspondence has never been remarked in Ellison scholarship); Ellison’s extensive collection of Polaroid pictures and his unfinished second novel; Ellison’s ‘polyrhythmic and metric techniques’ (p. ) both in his short fiction and in ree Days before the Shooting . . .; and finally Ellison’s substantial body of music criticism and musicology and how that work interweaves with his fiction writing throughout his career. e close readings and textual discussions are suggestive and learned. Although certain terms and concepts are at times confusing or perhaps overdone, the dense philosophical web of allusions and concepts does yield new readings of Ellison’s primary writings. e results are indeed profound, as Germana concludes that Ellison’s ‘commitment to reclaiming the protean within the persistent, the chaos within certainty’ is precisely what ‘makes his work not merely relevant, but truly indispensable in the twenty-first century’ (p. ). W  L U M C. C ‘e Book of the City of Ladies’ and Other Writings. By C  P. Ed. by S B and R K. Trans. by I H. Indianapolis: Hackett. . $; £. (pbk $; £.). ISBN –– –– (pbk ––––). is new English translation of Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames is accompanied by selections from her Advision Cristine (Christine’s Vision), Corps de Policie (Book of the Body Politic) and Lamentation sur les maux de la France (Lamentation on France’s Ills), all of which are a pleasure to read in Ineke Hardy’s renderings. In a stimulating introductory essay, editors Sophie Bourgault and Rebecca Kingston argue that the Cité, a work generally read for its defence of women, also makes ‘a worthy contribution’ to ‘traditions of political reflection’ and to ‘philosophical debates about the nature of the virtues and their place in the well lived life’ (p. xviii). at welcome orientation takes us further into understanding the work of this brilliant fieenth-century writer. Substantive modern interest in Christine and her work, which initially coincided with the attention brought to women’s issues in the s and s, at first focused on her writing about women, and especially on the Cité. While the Cité remains a centrepiece of Christine Studies, scholars have now broadened their enquiry to examine other texts from Christine’s large body of writing, especially those that illuminate her political views and her strong interest in virtue ethics. One rewarding result has been concentrated research into Christine’s thoughts about government  Reviews (especially France’s government), and into her recommendations for a well-run society . e Cité itself is an engaged and erudite rebuke both to the historical method Christine knew and to the specific historical narratives of her time, which both justified and structured the assumptions, institutions, and political practices of the generations for whom they were written. Some recent studies by French researchers could have lent additional support to Bourgault and Kingston’s thesis. ese include Françoise Autrand, Christine de Pizan : une femme en politique (Paris: Fayard, ); Claire Le Ninan, Le Sage Roi et la clergesse: l’écriture du politique dans l’œuvre de Christine de Pizan (Paris: Champion, ); and Anne Paupert, ‘“Te donrai preuve par exemples”: statut et fonction des exemples dans Le Livre de la Cité des Dames de Christine de Pizan’, Elseneur,  (), –. Works by Christine translated or mentioned in this volume are unfortunately given by their English titles only; the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc is a curious exception but one misses any reference to the authoritative edition and translation of the poem by Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Medium Ævum Monographs,   (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, )). is City is the third expert English translation of the work published in the last four decades. Hardy comments very briefly on how her translation...

Édouard Glissant lecteur de Claudel

Among the several volumes of essays published by Edouard Glissant from 1956 to 2010, the passages dedicated to other writers, poets, essayists and philosophers are numerous. Together with Saint-John Perse, Faulkner and Césaire, the name of Paul Claudel insistently returns, and in particular the commentary on the IV Ode, La Muse qui est la grâce. We propose here to reconstruct from one essay to another the path of Glissant’s thought on Claudel and to investigate the reasons that led Glissant towards a constant and passionate reading despite the intellectual distance that separates the two poets. The character of Christopher Columbus, whom Glissant engages with in the epic poem Les Indes and in the novel Ormerod and is also present in Claudel’s play Le Livre de Christophe Colomb, allows us to establish a comparison between the poetics of the two writers and synthesises commonality and distance between them.