Search

This paper studies the textual, peritextual and codicological strategies implemented by the fifteenth-century French translators in order to write down their authorial figure into the materiality of their manuscripts. On the basis of the analyse of still visible clues left by translators, the paper aims to put the spotlight on the nature, the issues and the function of those "corpo-reality" strategies. It focuses on the case of Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Miélot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is agreed that the BnF fr. 12599 manuscript is one of the first examples of an editorial collaboration aiming to build up an arthurian compilation, since the prose Tristan is copied in it along with other narratives. This paper reconstructs in a different way the making of the manuscript : it was an incomplete copy of the Tristan, which two scribes split and filled up with missing parts of the Tristan and other excerpts, thus retrospectively transforming a copy of the Tristan into a cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the end of the Middle Ages, many authors like Martin Le Franc in Le Champion des Dames used a corporal metaphor, instead of traditional vegetal one, to personify and embody their own manuscript. This paper deals with the rhetorical implications of this evolution, and specially with the categories of ethos and actio, in connection with the development of auctorial manuscripts and autography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helinand's stanza is still in use in c.15 French Mystery plays, but only as a simple tool. This paper aims to explain the reasons of this mutation. It explores the traditional uses and the new roles of the metric form on stage. Helinand's stanza reveals the art of rewriting mystery plays, underlines the collaborations and the competitions between famous playwrights, and sheds a new light on the process of creating Medieval drama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To this day, there is no consensus as to the social background of the fourteenth-century French epics. Comparing the fourteenth-century re-writing of Renaut de Montauban with its late twelfth-century counterpart, this paper will demonstrate the growing importance of cities, burghers, and money, but will also show how a new idea of the castle emerged that seemed to belong more to the world of literature and myth than to reality, and which might also have been grounded in an urban context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the role of French epic stanzas known as laisses in La Chanson de Bertrand du Guesclin to determine the parts played by archaism and innovation in this late epic poem. The study reveals the structuring effect of the laisse, which retains its delimitative function but which is also part of larger narrative unities in the epic literature of the late Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument about the occult and its rational understanding is quite complicated. Here, I propose some reflections on the relationship between demonology and astrology in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This paper studies the demonological and astrological debate occurred between the 14th and 17th century; how this debate had an enormous influence on the process of rational understanding of the occult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an essay of comparative literature about three texts from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century, written by French or Spanish authors who depicted the life of beggars through the pseudo autobiography of a character living among them in different areas (Charente, Loire-Atlantique, Poitou, Seville, Rome). It compares the nature, diversity, intensity of the poor's passions, in the moral meaning this word had at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frontispiece image of the Livre de l'Espérance due to the Talbot Master 1435 (BnF fr. 126, ca 1435) shows the most remarkable attention paid to the details of the text. This paper studies how the painted image, by using the traditional somnium's iconographic syntax, underlines the powerful shift created by Alain Chartier in the topic. Nonetheless, the painter avoids pathetics effects: the crossed-arms "damoiselle encontenancee" features the modest allegory of a restrained pathos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1582, the Livre de l'Espérance and the French translation of De vita Curiali, the Curial, were printed in one volume under the title of Curial. It was not the first time that these two works of Alain Chartier were brought together. The objective of this paper is to analyze the manuscript and printed transmission of the Livre de l'Espérance and the Curial to try to discover the reasons that led to associate these two texts, to confuse one work with the other and even to unify them as a single work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconsiders the criticism levelled against the "debaz" in the Livre de l'Espérance, and argues that Alain Chartier does not reject in fact the principle of conflicting dialogue, so significant for the form of his poems: if this treatise gives way to the voice of religious authority, we can still hear a toned down protest against the world order, so that the movement of the debat, which is essential to human consciousness, represents a salutary experience of the limits of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Vatican B.A.V. Reg. lat. 1334 manuscript gives an example of the classification of scientific knowledge and magical practices in French in the Late Middle Ages. This paper considers the coherence of this particular codex by describing the miscellany and identifying the texts it contains. Indeed, even if the manuscript brings very diversified treatises together (medicine, alchemy, astrology, prophecy), it is organised around a central topic, the secret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]