Adrian Armstrong

Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval France from the "Rose" to the "Rhétoriqueurs"

This book, jointly authored by two distinguished French medievalists, re-examines the nature and role of poetry during the period c. 1270– c. 1530. The supposed ‘opposition’ between verse and prose, the origins of which are usually traced to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century in histories of French literature, is by no means as clear-cut as received opinion would have us believe. The rise of prose, it is argued here, led to a reinvigoration and transformation of verse, rather than to its decline. One of the great merits of this book is its revisionist and open approach to the problem, which allows for the kind of nuanced observations rare in other treatments of the topic. Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay are aware that the delimitation of the period and the choice of texts they examine are, while justifiable, flexible, highly selective, and subject to question. The period is essentially that from the tail end of the ‘classical’ age of Old French literature to the middle of the reign of François I. Some better-known texts chosen as exemplary and paradigmatic include Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose, the Ovide moralisé, the French versions of Boethius’s De consolatione, the poetry of Christine de Pisan, Machaut, Froissart, Deschamps, and Bouchet, together with later dramatic works. There are also welcome pages on Matfre Ermengaud’s Occitan encyclopedic Breviari d’amor. Indeed, one of the most refreshing aspects of this book is its treatment of a good number of additional ‘non-canonical’ texts, of which most scholars have heard but to which not all will have given much more than a passing thought. After an ample Introduction laying out the book’s premises and structure, the two principal parts of the work each contain three chapters. The chapters of ‘Situating Knowledge’ examine the links between verse (not always to be equated with poetry) and the institutions that transmit knowledge. Foremost among these are the modalities of performance, patronage, and mediation by means of learned poetry. In ‘Transmitting and Shaping Knowledge’, Armstrong and Kay examine the different kinds of knowledge transmitted by the texts in their corpus. In turn, they consider encyclopedic verse texts and the encyclopedic tendency of narrative verse, verse that deals with poetics and poetic forms, and the relationship between late medieval verse and its publics or textual communities. The book is written in a clear and uncluttered style, its arguments supported by a deft balance of the theoretical and the textual (with the occasional brief excursion into the codicological). It is difficult in a summary review to do justice to the stimulating richness of this book, which deserves to be widely read. While not all scholars will accept all of its premises and conclusions, it is a welcome and indispensable contribution to the recent rehabilitation of late medieval French literature.

Technique and technology : script, print, and poetics in France, 1470-1550

Introduction 1. Manuscripts of Molinets poetry 2. Editions of Molinets poetry 3. Manuscripts of Lemaires poetry 4. Editions of Lemaires poetry Conclusion Bibliography Index

Reception and interference: reading Jean Molinet's rebus-poems

Abstract Northern French culture in the late Middle Ages is marked not only by a proliferation of visual images, but also by the knowledge which these images convey, very often in the form of figurative discourse. Traditional coded or symbolic visual forms include heraldry, where tinctures and charges often accumulate particular connotations, and typological stained-glass windows, which establish relationships between episodes from the Old and New Testaments. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, further traditions develop which endow images with second-order meanings: the frequent use of allegorical tableaux at court and municipal festivities, the profusion of illustrated didactic literature in which allegory is a dominant mode of expression.1 The question of how viewers make sense of such images — clearly a crucial issue for the study not only of visual culture, but also of the transmission of knowledge, in the period — is particularly complex when the images are accompanied by texts. This study seeks to illuminate the epistemic and interpretive challenges posed by the combination of text and symbolic image, by analysing a small but fascinating corpus: the rebus-poems of the major Burgundian poet and chronicler Jean Molinet (1435–1507).2

« Half dicht, half prose gheordineert » : vers et prose de moyen français en moyen néerlandais

Dans les cultures litteraires francophone et neerlandophone de la fin du Moyen Âge, des interactions concurrentielles entre poetes produisent une expertise collective en matiere de poesie. Dans quelle mesure peut-on donc identifier ces interactions entre les deux cultures, dans les traductions de vers ou prosimetres de moyen francais en moyen neerlandais? L’etude des traductions neerlandaises revele que, pour la culture cible comme la culture source, le vers est a la fois moyen de savoir et objet d’un savoir. La diversite des traductions indique que le vers est non seulement un systeme qu’on peut chercher a maitriser, mais aussi un supplement formel auquel la prose ne peut pretendre.

Yearning and Learning: Spaces of Desire in Jean Lemaire de Belges's Concorde des deux langages (1511)

This chapter examines the psychic trajectory of Lemaire’s protagonist, demonstrating the intertwining of Imaginary and Symbolic registers and thereby illuminating Lemaire’s treatment of consolatory rhetoric.