Le roman médiéval d’expression française dans les anciens Pays-Bas entre 1550 et 1600

In recent years, the dissemination of medieval-inspired French texts through the printing press has received renewed attention from the scientific community. This research has shown, inter alia, that the Gutenberg revolution, although considered to be one of the thresholds of modernity, did not sound the death knell for the Middle Ages. On the contrary, the medieval legacy found an opportunity to perpetuate itself for several decades through this new medium. My own work in this field has made it possible to point out that the caesura of the years 1530-1540, often put forward as a moment of rupture with the literary tradition of the Middle Ages, was not as abrupt as some might have thought, at least in Hainaut. In the case of the former Low Countries, many areas still remain unexplored. This is notably the case for the production of medieval romances in French during the second half of the sixteenth century, which I propose to examine. This particular period is all the more interesting to study because it lies between the supposed rupture with the medieval literary tradition of the mid-16th century and the renewal brought about by the 17th-century publishing phenomenon known as the ‘Bibliothèque bleue’. An analysis of the titles printed between 1550 and 1600 and their peritexts, as well as the material examination of these editions, will contribute to a better understanding of this complex publishing phenomenon, navigating between ‘old romances’ and ‘new language’.

Romancing the Dance

This chapter addresses the relationship between religion and dance in popular, vernacular literature. While some scholars view secular and religious works as separate, unrelated phenomena, I demonstrate how medieval romances co-opted sacred dance motifs. In these texts, dance functioned as a ritual, deifying courtly love (including troubadour lyric) and conferring a sacred aura onto courtliness. The first section uses Guillaume de Lorris’s section of Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) to show how dance in romance championed aristocratic values (including the chivalry of medieval knights), the gift economy, and enchantment. The second section focuses on Jean de Meun’s section of Le Roman de la Rose. It shows how Jean co-opted the Rose’s dance content to critique the project of courtly love. The third section analyzes Dante’s poetry from the Paradiso (Paradise), in which the poeticization of dance enabled Dante to best express divine love.

Araltes: The Evolution of a Varangian Stereotype

In Old Norse texts, the legend of the Varangian is part of a larger trend in a positive textual relationship between the Nordic world and the Byzantine Empire. In this article, the subject of analysis is the evolution of the Varangian legend through the character of one of the best known Varangians, King Haraldr of Norway. The development of the narrative of Haraldr, from the earliest near-contemporary narratives to high medieval and late medieval romances, will be traced and used to highlight the evolution of the discourse on the Varangians and the development of certain narrative stereotypes.

Scholarly Enchantment

Mimi Winick, “Scholarly Enchantment” (pp. 187–226) This essay describes the “scholarly enchantment” of pioneering women writers who combined academic research and occultism in fin-de-siècle Britain. It focuses on Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), a study infamous for interpreting medieval romances as coded records of an ancient fertility cult. Through a reception history and formal analysis of Weston’s monograph, the essay identifies a set of shared characteristics that made both emerging humanities fields and occultism especially appealing to women, including a standard of coherence, a comparative methodology, and a tactic of conjecture. The same attributes constitute formal sources of enchantment in humanistic scholarship of the period that promised to reveal “real” spiritual meanings behind art and artifacts. In this sense, Weston does not analyze medieval romances as works of the human imagination, but claims to decode them to reveal spiritual facts. The essay goes on to show how the gendered appeal of these practices first fueled their popularity and then was eventually exploited to consolidate the masculine authority of professional, disenchanted literary scholarship. Ultimately, though a product of the early twentieth century, From Ritual to Romance helps us recognize not only unfamiliar disciplinary histories, but also Victorian-era narratives about religion other than secularization. In works such as Weston’s, modernization is not defined by a decline of religion in the world but by a process of spiritual intensification leading to a “New Age” of women’s prominence.

African Literature in the World: A Teacher's Report

IN Concluding the Editor's Foreword to the 1950 Edition of D. O. Fagunwa's First Novel, the Classic Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale, L. Murby spoke generally of the three novels the Yoruba author had published by then:[I]n their treatment of character and story, in their use of myth and legend and allegory, and in their proverbial and epigrammatic language [the novels] bear definite resemblances to the Odyssey and Beowulf and the early medieval romances on the one hand, and on the other hand to that great cornerstone of the English novel, Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.