Le Roman De Research Articles

La navigation dans les romans de Tristan au Moyen-Âge

Abstract. In this article we propose to study navigation in the novels of Tristan in verse and prose to try to have a precise idea of the practice of navigation in the Middle Ages. To do this, we devoted the first part of our study to the place given to the sailors who are involved in the crossing. They direct the ships according to the weather, in the face of which they often find themselves quite helpless with prayer as their only weapon. During bad weather they invoke God and the saints to get out of trouble. Their condition is very unenviable so much so that for a long they did not appear in the journals of states of the world. The second part of this study is devoted to the conditions of the crossing and the third part to the description of the crossing. We find elliptical formulas which refer to the crossings in Le roman de Tristan en prose while the texts of Thomas and Folies Tristan bespeak of a more in -depth knowledge of the fact of navigation. These texts written in Anglo-Norman are very rich from the standpoint of the vocabulary used to describe navigation, vocabulary on which we also dwell in our third part.

Chronologia, kalendarz i datowanie Roman de Flamenca – próba bilansu

This article aims to review and summarise previous research on the chronology of the medieval occitan narrative text Le Roman de Flamenca in two aspects: dating the text and dating the time of the action. The state of research makes it possible to identify the main ways of interpreting the chronology of the text: in terms of the time of its composition, as a work from the first or second half of the 13th century; while in terms of determining the time of the plot of Flamenca, it is dated by various authors to the first half of the 12th century, the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries, or the first half of the 13th century. Among the main arguments used to support these hypotheses are the organisation of the text’s chronology around the liturgical calendar and the absence of the feast of Corpus Christi in that calendar, the description of the coat of arms of the Bourbons, attempts to identify the characters of the text as historical figures, and references to political events of the period. On the basis of an analysis of the data collected, the rejection of implausible and poorly argued concepts, and additional arguments related to the participation of the novel’s protagonist Guillaume in the war in Flanders, the author establishes the most probable dating range of Le Roman de Flamenca as 1287–1293, and the time of action as 1217–1224. In conclusion, an interpretative problem is presented that is closely related to the chronological issue of the text: the different perspectives on the novel as a current novel of manners or a novel of historical character. The analysis carried out here supports the conclusion that Le Roman de Flamenca is a text describing the golden age of the trobar from the perspective of its period of decline and decadence.

Arthurian intertexts: Le Roman de Laurin, the First Continuation of Perceval and the Prose Tristan

Abstract This article argues that elements from the First Continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval (or Le Conte du Graal) (c. 1190–1200) were remodelled in the anonymous late thirteenth-century text Le Roman de Laurin, which belongs to the cycle of the Seven Sages of Rome, to create the pseudo-Gawain episode (or episode of the White Knight). This is followed by a consideration of the reasons the author may have had for making use of these Arthurian elements. These include the idea that this section of the Laurin may have formed part of the apparent literary backlash against the denigration of Gawain found in the Prose Tristan (c. 1230), the probable desire of the author to enhance his hero’s status by making him Gawain’s equal, and perhaps the desire to create a text blending the matière de Rome with the matière de Bretagne. The article then looks briefly at how some of the same elements are also found in the Prose Tristan and presents a view on the possible relationship(s) between the various works in the context of these intertextual components. Finally, there is a consideration of what these intertexts may tell us about contemporary audiences and the reception of the Laurin, in the context of a widespread engagement with the Perceval-corpus. This leads to the suggestion that, in the way it interacts with other texts, this part of Laurin might be considered typical of thirteenth-century Arthurian romance. I am indebted to the two anonymous readers of the original draft of this article for various suggested improvements.

Un début dans la vie par Mathieu Bermann

Reviewed by: Un début dans la vie par Mathieu Bermann Ann Williams Bermann, Mathieu. Un début dans la vie. P.O.L, 2022. ISBN 978-2-8180-5521-2. Pp. 176. Questioning one's own perspectives is never easy but is necessary, as human interactions show time and time again. Un début dans la vie reminds readers of this from the outset and quickly pulls us out of complacency and into self-reflection. Readers soon discover that the narrator is a writer himself and quite introspective, and they realize that this novel will not simply guide them through a Balzacian plot or character development (despite the hommage in the title). There will be much more. The intertwined stories of all the characters focus on a provincial French family drama, with at its heart, Malo, a horrid child. At four and a half years old he already has a vile reputation that has reached even the narrator, a close friend of Valentin, the creature's uncle. In the hands of a less-gifted writer the rather banal plot twists would not excite. The real richness of the book, however, resides in the questioning of perspectives that Bermann proposes throughout. At first glance, it seems he is giving us permission to judge his characters quite harshly. In the first chapter, "La barbarie," he sets up Valentin as the gossiping and somewhat unkind uncle responsible for the narrator's negative preconceptions of the little boy (whose actions, nonetheless, deserve the criticism they receive). He gives little quarter to Marie, Malo's mother, narcissistic and inattentive to her two children, and in the second chapter, aptly entitled "Disparaître," she does just that; she runs away, leaving her parents to watch over her children. But here's the rub: the author-Bermann does not let the narrator-author-maybe-Bermann get off scot-free. Malo, Marie, and all the characters have redeeming qualities, reasons for being who they are. And the narrator sees that he can't just go with what he's been told. And so, neither can we. By the time we get to chapter four, "Le roman de Malo," we know that there is a self-reflexive writer in charge of this book, and we see that he's taken over the literary encounter we're having. The somewhat disconcerting switch from the first-person narrator to an omniscient one was heralded by the chapter title, but we do have to pause to adjust as we read Malo's story and follow him through episodes in his life unknown to our initial narrator. In chapter five (and at this point, readers are sincerely grateful for the chapter divisions), our first narrator returns, and we relive moments, even with similar wording, from the beginning of the novel. But, and here's where Bermann excels, we cannot help but have a different perspective. In a sense, we know too much. The narrator-author takes responsibility for writing this life and even proposes a series of ninety-nine numbered optional events that Malo might live. The novel's last chapter explores the question "Pourquoi écrit-on?" (167) and the effect that writing has on reader and writer alike. One certainty? In writing this book a very real author takes us on a literary adventure that we will not soon forget. [End Page 220] Ann Williams Metropolitan State University of Denver (CO), emerita Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

L’argent du libertinage. Actes de la journée d’étude virtuelle du 31 juillet 2021 ed. par Éric Turcat

Reviewed by: L’argent du libertinage. Actes de la journée d’étude virtuelle du 31 juillet 2021 ed. par Éric Turcat Theresa Varney Kennedy Turcat, Éric, éd. L’argent du libertinage. Actes de la journée d’étude virtuelle du 31 juillet 2021. L’Harmattan, 2021. ISBN 978-2-343-2-4677-2. Pp. 188. This book is a fascinating collection of essays that examine the relationship between libertine culture and money over time. The first three essays, by Kathryn A. Hoffman, Alice Brown, and Claire Quaglia, show how aristocrats struck the right balance between lavish spending and prudent budgeting. Hoffman’s intriguing essay, “Le libertinage doré: la culture matérielle de l’inclination au XVIIe siècle,” broadens our understanding of the “honest” man or woman in the seventeenth century, and the kinds of expenses that propelled one’s social standing. Brown’s “L’avare de Molière: richesse et ascension sociale face au libertinage” explains how Molière’s play demonstrated that greed was incompatible with social advancement. Quaglia’s essay, “L’argent du libertinage dans Les mémoires de Brienne le Jeune,” shows how libertinism could go overboard—that the pursuit of pleasure could become obsessive and quickly lead to one’s downfall. Other contributions explore how bourgeois female libertinism affected eighteenth-century France. Julia Abramson undertakes a broad analysis of the protagonist’s relationship to the new economy in Marivaux’s Le paysan parvenu and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut. Éric Turcat’s essay, cleverly titled “Manon des ressources? Le roman de Prévost comme livre de raison,” debunks the idea that Manon is an excellent businesswoman by blaming her bankruptcy on her inability to effectively manage her resources and maintain a budget. By contrast, Denis Grélé depicts Fougeret de Montbron’s Margot la ravadeuse as a more successful heroine who reaches personal financial independence. That said, as the final essays show, money does not always lead to satisfaction. Encarnación Medina Arjona’s essay, “Zola ou le libertinage des Rougon sous le Second Empire,” warns how social corruption, materialism, and obsession with power and wealth can lead to sexual perversion. Similarly, Giovanni Dotoli’s piece on Léon Bloy shows how the author uses money as an allegory for the world’s tendency toward evil, and its need for God’s redemption. Covering a wide period, this collection of essays is a welcome addition to students and scholars of French literature. Each piece stands on its own and adds to our knowledge of early modern France. But the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Taken together, Turcat’s edited volume not only provides scintillating detail about libertine culture, it also delves into contemporary advice and admonishments about the limits and perils of that culture. The book should be equally praised for its thought-provoking analyses of the literature. Furthermore, it admirably engages a variety of sources. It alludes to some of the best-known authors and works (e.g., Molière’s L’avare and Prévost’s Manon Lescaut) as well as lesser known, yet still important, authors (e.g., Brienne le Jeune and Fougeret de Montbron). The book is both a series of stand-alone essays and a comprehensive contribution. It is both engaging and delightful. [End Page 275] Theresa Varney Kennedy Baylor University (TX) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

The Face and Faciality in Medieval French Literature, 1170–1390. By Alice Hazard

This book is a challenging and inventive study of the face and faciality in medieval French literature. Alice Hazard’s core project is to rethink faciality, defined here as ‘the quality of being a face’ (p. 202), in a way that destabilizes and uncouples this concept from its associations and apparent affinities with the physiological face. Hazard also challenges the traditional view that the human face in medieval literature might offer any kind of reliable guide to individual subjectivity or interiority. She is more interested in the philosophy of faciality and the shifting planes and patterns of perception in medieval literature — its ‘engagement with the productive illusion of interiority’ (p. 146) — than, for example, the face as the site of gesture, physiognomic character, the expression of emotion, or the marker of ethnic or racial difference. The book’s conclusion makes it clear that, for Hazard, the face is not a text to be deciphered; but, in its mutability and instability, it is a ‘literary motif, a cultural model and a philosophical construct’ (p. 206). Four core chapters consider the face in Arthurian romance, in ‘doodles’ in the decorated margins of manuscripts (p. 82), in the opening scenes of Le Roman de la Rose, and in selected fabliaux. All four chapters explore the inherent and productive instability of faciality. Hazard draws her theoretical inspiration variously from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Silvan S. Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others, while also engaging with recent scholarship and criticism on medieval French literature. Most of her primary texts and her theoretical approaches are oriented towards secular literature. This means that her reading of Levinas, for example, is somewhat selective, as she interprets his conception of otherness through the face primarily as a relationship with another subject, not with the divine. Throughout this book, Hazard consistently steers us away from the face as a stable sign that might be confined to or co-extensive with the physiological features on the front of our heads. For instance, her reading of the armed and helmeted combatants in Old French romances leads to a very subtle argument about the dispersal of faciality onto ‘codified facial surfaces’ such as the knight’s helmet and shield which both constitute the ‘facing surface’ of the knight and therefore, his face (pp. 148, 207). The chapter on Le Roman de la Rose uses Deleuze and Guattari to read the wall around the garden of Deduit as an example of faciality, while the discussion of the relationship between faces and genitalia in the fabliaux affirms how little one needs, in the surreal and improbable world of these stories, to make a face (p. 176). This book reads like a PhD that has been adapted — not entirely successfully — for publication as a monograph. It is somewhat weighed down by the burden of its theoretical material, and its prose is careful and dutiful rather than elegant or lively; nevertheless, it is a strikingly original book that makes a powerful intervention into contemporary theories of the face and faciality.

Romance of the Rose (Excerpt)

Romance of the Rose (Excerpt)

Le Roman de Troie en prose: prose 5. Édition critique par Anne Rochebouet

Résultat d’une thèse de doctorat, cette première édition critique complète de la cinquième mise en prose du Roman de Troie est accompagnée par un apparat critique minutieux et bien organisé. La matière troyenne en prose, dérivée du roman de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, comprend cinq adaptations composées à partir de la seconde moitié du treizième siècle. Par rapport aux autres versions, Prose 5 se fait remarquer par son contenu mais aussi par sa féconde diffusion dans le monde méditerranéen, jusqu’au seizième siècle. Composée en Italie vers 1330–40, elle combine Prose 1 et 3, auxquelles s’ajoutent l’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César et les Héroïdes. La tradition manuscrite est soigneusement présentée dans l’Introduction qui a le mérite d’esquisser une image globale de tous les témoins, tout en établissant des couples de manuscrits apparentés. Cette étude s’ajoute aux travaux partiels de François Avril, pour les cycles iconographiques, et de Luca Barbieri et Marc-René Jung, et reprend les conclusions d’une recherche plus ample dédiée aux hypotextes du roman, que Rochebouet est en train de publier. Le plus ancien témoin sur un total de dix-sept existants, Londres, British Library, MS Royal 20 D I, a servi de base pour l’établissement du texte, sans qu’il soit l’ancêtre commun dont descend l’ensemble de la leçon manuscrite. L’analyse linguistique soulève quelques problèmes liés à la langue et au caractère supposé italienisant du texte, tout en soulignant l’intérêt de la tradition manuscrite pour l’observation du passage de l’ancien au moyen français. L’hypothèse d’un scribe italianophone est rejetée en faveur de celle de la production du manuscrit dans le milieu francophone de la cour angevine de Naples. L’appartenance du manuscrit de base au foyer napolitain fait l’objet d’une soigneuse étude visant à montrer les particularités du français utilisé à la cour de Naples, où il est, à la fois, une langue véhiculaire et prestigieuse, liée à une production écrite tout aussi prestigieuse. La particularité linguistique du plus ancien manuscrit de Prose 5 est également le résultat de facteurs internes, liés à la genèse du texte et à la pratique de la compilation qui a comme effet l’hétérogénéité de la langue. C’est une langue conservatrice qui manifeste plutôt l’influence du français d’Outremer que des influences locales. L’apparat critique est organisé sur trois étages et s’avère un outil précieux pour le lecteur. Le premier étage contient les variantes rejetées, tandis que le deuxième offre une place privilégiée aux variantes à trouver dans les manuscrits de contrôle, visant à offrir une image complète de la tradition textuelle. Au troisième sont signalés les hypotextes, permettant au lecteur de situer chaque fragment dans la matière troyenne. Le texte est suivi par une consistante section de notes critiques, tout aussi riches que le reste de l’apparat critique, et par un glossaire très utile. Les notes dédiées aux références géographiques et aux realia sont particulièrement pertinentes, car elles offrent au lecteur l’accès aux contours spatiaux du roman et de dégager les références au contexte politique contemporain.

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama

The crystal reveals the whole: medieval dreamscapes and cinematic space as virtual media

This article examines the rich visual culture of the medieval period in order to better understand dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. The author explores the theoretical connections between the oneiric qualities of cinema and the visual culture of medieval dreams, dealing in turn with the following themes: (i) media and mediation; (ii) projection and premonition; (iii) virtual spatiality; and (iv) automata and other animated objects. The wide swath of medieval literary dream texts, with their mobile perspectives, sensory plentitude, and gnostic mission, resonate with the cinematic in the structuring of the gaze. Investigating the codes of medieval culture provides us with an unusually rich episteme for thinking about how the dreamscapes of the Middle Ages evoke media dispositifs. Opening up these thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining objects, spaces, sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary cinematic and digital landscapes are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing. Whether stoking religious fear and veneration or providing sensual pleasure as in Le Roman de la Rose, the dreamworlds of the Middle Ages have bequeathed us a number of an extraordinarily rich creative works that are the imaginative building blocks of media worlds-in-the-making, as speculative in many ways as current discourses around new media.

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.

Anne Rochebouet, ed., Le Roman de Troie en prose, Prose 5. Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021. 1038 pp.

Abstract: Anne Rochebouet offers here a valuable edition of an important medieval French work, a prose version of one of the foundational romans d’antiquité, the story of Troy as it was contained in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The narrative poem Le Roman de Troie, as recounted by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the late twelfth century, inspired the prose version edited here (along with 4 other versions) in the following two centuries. The base manuscript used for this edition is ms. London, BL, Royal 20 D.I., the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, copied in Naples at the Angevin court, sometime between 1335‐1340 with illustrations by Cristoforo Orimina. This version, known as Prose 5, forming one part of the Histoire ancienne, circulated at least until the sixteenth century. It exists in seventeen manuscripts described by Rochebouet in her most thorough introduction. Her linguistic analysis of ms. Royal 20 D.I. addresses the evolution of medieval French into Middle French as used in an Angevin Italian region during the reign of Robert I.

Anne Rochebouet, ed., Le Roman de Troie en prose, Prose 5. Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021, 1038 pp.

Abstract: Anne Rochebouet offers here a valuable edition of an important medieval French work, a prose version of one of the foundational romans d’antiquité (Thèbes, Troie, Énéas, Alexandre), specifically the story of Troy as it was contained in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. The narrative poem Le Roman de Troie, as recounted by Benoît de Sainte-Maure in the late twelfth century, inspired the prose version edited here (along with 4 other versions) in the following two centuries. This version, known as Prose 5, forming one part of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, circulated at least until the sixteenth century. The base manuscript used for this edition is ms. London, BL, Royal 20 D.I., the Histoire ancienne, copied in Naples at the Angevin court, sometime between 1335‐1340 with illustrations by Cristoforo Orimina. Prose 5 exists in seventeen manuscripts described by Rochebouet in her most thorough introduction. Her linguistic analysis of ms. Royal 20 D.I. addresses the evolution of medieval French into Middle French as used in an Angevin Italian region during the reign of Robert I.

From Socially Distant to Socially Engaged: Exploring the Soundscape and Material Environment of Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune

Ostensibly a story about gaining confidence in love, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune has been explored as a summa of contemporary musical styles and a treatise on the memorial arts. It has also been examined as an important example of the use of citation and allusion in the fourteenth century because it incorporates references to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le roman de la Rose. This essay enhances these studies by focusing on a particular aspect of the narrative: the use of soundscape and material environment to express the protagonist’s emotional growth. After exploring key concepts such as soundscape, authorial self-presentation, and melancholy, it considers how sound is introduced and presented in relation to the narrator’s emotional world and how music is woven through the narrative. An analysis of how sound and touch play a role in the narrator’s interaction with Lady Hope leads to a discussion of the use of soundscape and material environment in the description of the Park of Hesdin and the festivities at the manor house. As this examination of soundscape and environment will show, Machaut chooses to use them as a means to convey the narrator’s burgeoning confidence: he gives a minimal and cliched description of the wonderful park when the narrator is mired in melancholy yet offers an elaborate, exciting treatment of the manor house after the narrator’s confidence-building interaction with Lady Hope. The essay closes with a consideration of how the presentation of sound and material environment relates to Machaut’s use of Boethius. In the context of the material turn within medieval studies, I argue that we can view sound and objects within medieval literature as media for the communication of ideas about narrative and character development and that this form of analysis sits comfortably with other lenses of interpretation.

The Idea of the Wilderness: Gender and Resistance in Le Roman de Silence

The Idea of the Wilderness: Gender and Resistance in Le Roman de Silence

<em>Edward Said</em>, the Novel

Edward Said, the Novel H. Aram Veeser (bio) Review of Dominique Eddé, Edward Said: His Thought as a Novel, trans. Ros Schwartz and Trista Selous Verso Books, 2019), 224 pp. Dominique Eddé, a journalist who contributes to Le Monde and other venues, has also written novels and published a book of interviews with a psychoanalyst. Her book that I am reviewing here, Edward Said: His Thought As a Novel; first published as Edward Said: Le roman de sa pensée, 2017), compellingly novelizes her own life's intersections with life of the renowned literary-cultural public intellectual, Edward Said. Most interesting as a limit-case of supercharged relationships between acolyte and mentor, this book can be read as a less-than-usually-repressed account of the way one electrifying person can irrevocably change another person's career, perceptions, and life itself. Eddé has already written one novel (Kite, 2003) that presents her relationship with Said in roman à clef style. She also has patterned much of her reading and pursuit of musical interests along lines suggested by Said's own preferences. She opens with the tantalizing vow: "There are many reasons why my attempts to write a book about him [Said] have failed in the last ten years. I do not want to betray us by offering up things that belong to us alone" (7). But she also promises to reveal "the happiness and pain, extreme in both cases, that I owe to our relationship" (14). As for juicy details about Said's personal life, Eddé's book provides a rich archive. We are treated to many examples of Said's "overwhelming power of seduction and bravura" (21), his charm (13), his emotional confusion. We learn that he wrote daily to his mother and kept carbon copies of these letters, that he complained to Eddé, "Why don't we have the right to love two women at once?" and that he actually forgot that she had cancer: "'Ah yes, by the way, you've had cancer too!' said Edward, with barely a flicker of embarrassment at having forgotten." Eddé accepts all this, saying "this dual emotional, sexual, and cultural life" is a "distillation of so many love affairs experienced in the same and subsequent periods within the more or less cosmopolitan bourgeoisie of the Middle East in ways that are hard for westerners of comparable generations and social milieus to imagine." Eddé accepts all this as unproblematic. She is not a Me, Too feminist. [End Page 513] Concealing "things that belong to us alone" means that the reader has to piece things together. The whole graph of this relationship with its great moments, turning points, absences, and betrayals emerges in scattered revelations such as "After we got back together in 1993" (63) and this passage : When I suggested selling my apartment in Paris, so that we could rent somewhere to live in New York, he replied, "Yes, but the apartment will be small. Where shall I put my second piano?" I recall him saying this with tenderness now. He was undoubtedly less keen to live with me, and more attached to life with his family, than he cared to confess. (98) A statement like this helpfully balances Eddé's generally more hopeful view of the relationship, expressed in benign terms such as "trust served to heal us within and beyond passion" (14). Her novelist's "desire to create an alternative world" (79) is checked when, as here, she is forced to admit that he has an idea of the relationship that starkly differs from her own view. Amidst all the hopes and disappointments so beautifully described in this book, a more ambitious and interesting project emerges. The project is to define just what form a bourgeois rebellion may valuably take. "We were bourgeois rebels, opponents of the established order, rather than revolutionaries" (158), she declares, and this is very true—perhaps truer than most assessments of Edward Said. "He preferred to describe himself as engaged, rather than militant," she observes. "He never stopped feeding and increasing his intellectual capital" (158). She calls herself "more anarchistic and marginal, less solid and balanced than him" (158), and it is true that she took...

Nguyen Phan Long's Le roman de mademoiselle Lys: "L'éducation de nos filles" in Colonial French Indochina

This article examines the problematization of, and the proposed solutions to, cultural métissage in the first published Vietnamese Francophone novel, Le roman de mademoiselle Lys (1921). It investigates how the author, Nguyen Phan Long, founder of the Constitutionalist Party of Cochinchina, uses French syntax as a rhetorical means of disciplining Vietnamese women in French Indochina. I interpret his use of French literary traditions of novelistic and fictionalized diary-writing to impose Confucian ideals on Vietnamese women, and read his mirroring of French "diary-novels" as a reflection of his desire to respond to journaux-romans and their French male authors.

Who’s to Blame?: Chivalric Projection and the Gender of Guilt

To what extent did chivalry promote a power difference between the sexes? In romantic works of medieval English literature, knights are commonly seen to project their values onto a female counterpart, which consequently leads them to pin their narrative successes or failures onto that person. This article examines “Le Roman de Tristan” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” under the framework Stephen Ahern presents in “Listening to Guinevere”. The chivalric Tristan idolizes his beloved Ysolt to the point of delusion, causing him to condemn her when she fails to meet his unrealistic expectations, and thus to illustrate the temperamental nature of the relationship between knight and lady. “Sir Gawain” complicates the issue, as Gawain lacks the expected devotion to a lady. Using Amy S. Kaufman and Michelle Sweeney’s models of the configuration of power as lenses, I analyze Lady Bertilack’s manipulation of Sir Gawain’s chivalric values, and his resulting display of frustration towards himself, as a critique of gendered morals. By comparing these knights and their respective treatments of failure, I argue that the chivalric code’s inconstant values ultimately encourage its followers to see any female-encoded morals, whether external or internal, as the cause of knightly failure. Faculty Sponsor: Elizabeth Tavares

Crossing The Atlantic: Bouqui and Malice, a Caribbean Counterpoetics

This article is a comparative study of trickster tales from a Haitian collection (Le Roman de Bouqui, by Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain) and a Senegalese collection (La Belle histoire de Leuk-le-lièvre, by Léopold Sédar Senghor and Abdoulaye Sadji). The analysis traces the transformation the stories underwent when they were transmitted as oral literature to slaves in the New World. Drawing on Maryse Condé's work, I relate Bouqui and Malice, two of the most famous characters of Caribbean folklore, to the bossale and the créole, two figures associated with slavery as well as with continuing social divisions in Haitian society. Using Glissant's concept of the contre-poétique, I investigate Bouqui and Malice's countercultural values as embedded in their stories, arguing that the storytellers crafted a form of fictional revenge through their folktales: by subverting the plot of the African tale, they confronted and challenged the dominant colonial discourse.

Wędka króla Rusinów (Gall Anonim, ks. 1, rozdz. 7)

A fi shing rod of the king of the Ruthenians (Gallus Anonymus, Book I, chapt. 7) The purpose of the article is an attempt to solve the following question: why did Gallus Anonymus present the king of the Ruthenians fishing with a fishing rod at the very moment of Boleslaw Chrobry’s attack, which inflicted a catastrophic defeat upon Rus’? In the Chronicle the king of the Ruthenians is presented as an unwarlike and cowardly man, but this in itself does not explain, why the chronicler placed him in a boat, fishing. The matter is not made clear by the medieval adaptations of this anecdote by Wincenty Kadlubek and Jan Dlugosz. None of them understood the sense Gallus gave to the motif of fishing rod and both changed its meaning. Also the cases of fishing described in the Bible have a different character altogether. But a useful context is given by motif of fishing rod and fishing people in stories certainly unknown to Gallus Anonymus. The article presents a choice of texts where fishing refers to military matters and brings disgrace to the king or hero: Le roman de Perceval ou le conte du Graal by Chretien de Troyes (the Fisher King), Plutarch’s Life of Antony , Waltharius , the story about Arnulf conquering Rome in the Antapodosis by Liudprand of Cremona. The comparison makes it possible to say that in the medieval literature the fishing rode quite often plays the role of anti-attribute that given to a king or warlike hero becomes a clear sign of the lacked or lost ability to command the army and fight war, or of the betrayal of the honour of a brave soldier. On the other hand, the association with fishing or with using a fishing rod is not disgraceful for people who do not aspire to military functions or actions, as illustrated by the examples of Wanda-Weda in the Chronica Poloniae maioris ( Chronicle of Greater Poland ), and of Saint Zeno of Verona in De Zenonis vita sermo Coronati Notarii .