The "Gab" as a Latent Genre in Medieval French Literature: Drinking and Boasting in the Middle Ages. John L. Grigsby

Speculum ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 925-927
Author(s):  
Glyn S. Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages in French Literature 1851-1900

1977 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 447
Author(s):  
Garnet Rees ◽  
Janine R. Dakyns
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages

Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Literary Identity ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Conte Du Graal ◽  
Marginal Characters ◽  
French Texts

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

A Survey of French Literature. Volume I: The Middle Ages to 1800

1966 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Claude K. Abraham ◽  
Morris Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Middle Ages

scholarly journals THE LION IN MEDIEVAL WESTERN EUROPE: TOWARD AN INTERPRETIVE HISTORY

Traditio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 185-213
Author(s):  
NIGEL HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Creative Tension ◽  
History Of ◽  
Western European ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Middle Ages

Several scholars have studied meanings attributed to the lion in the western European Middle Ages, but their accounts have tended to be partial and fragmentary. A balanced, coherent interpretive history of the medieval lion has yet to be written. This article seeks to promote and initiate the process of composing such a history by briefly reviewing previous research, by proposing a thematic and chronological framework on which work on the lion might reliably be based, and by itself discussing numerous textual examples, not least from German, Latin, and French literature. The five categories of lion symbolism covered are, respectively, the threatening lion, the Christian lion, the noble lion, the sinful lion, and the clement lion. These meanings are shown successively to have constituted regnant fashions that at various times profoundly shaped people's understanding of the lion; but it is demonstrated also that they existed alongside, and in a state of creative tension with, a “ground bass” of lion meanings that changed relatively little. Lions nearly always, for example, represented important, imposing things and people (for example, kings); and the New Testament's polarized presentation of the lion as either Christ or the devil proved enormously influential both throughout and beyond the Middle Ages. As such any cultural history of the lion — and indeed of many other natural phenomena — must be continually sensitive to the co-existence and interaction of tradition and innovation, stability and dynamism.

Reading Medieval French Literature from a Global Perspective

PMLA ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 130 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sahar Amer
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Medieval French Literature ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Literature

Only in the last decade has the field of medieval french literature recognized the need for a critical gaze that looks outside France and beyond the persistent Eurocentric accounts of medieval French literary history. These accounts long viewed medieval French literary production primarily in relation to the Latin, Celtic, and Provençal traditions. My research over the last twenty years has called for a revisionist history of literature and of empires and has highlighted the fact that throughout the Middle Ages France entertained “inter-imperial” literary relations—not only with European traditions but also with extra-European cultures, specifically with the Islamicate world.

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