Jan M. Ziolkowski

Obscenity : social control and artistic creation in the European Middle Ages

Introducing obscenity the rhetoric of obscenity visualizing obscenity performing obscenity legal obscenity courting obscenity in Old French.

Straparola and the Fairy Tale: Between Literary and Oral Traditions

Against Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s argument that the sixteenth-century Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola originated fairy tale in its best-known form, this article maintains that ancient and medieval texts contain earlier literary adaptations of folktales that qualify as fairy tales. Particular attention is paid to similarities between Straparola’s “Il re porco” and the Medieval Latin Asinarius. Such affinities suggest that oral tradition is not as difficult to document before the print era as Bottigheimer asserts. With regard to her theory that Straparola invented the narrative pattern that she calls “rise tales,” this article offers evidence that one such tale may be found as early as the second century CE, in Apuleius’s famous “Cupid and Psyche.” In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries folklorists were deeply concerned with studying the distribution of folktales across space and time; their key preoccupations were questions about origins and about the relationship between orality and literacy. These issues deserve to retain a central place in folklore studies.

Lost and Not Yet Found: Heloise, Abelard, and the Epistolae duorum amantium

Abelard and Heloise hold a prominent place in legend as tragic lovers. The affair that they had while he was her tutor and she his tutee was discovered by her uncle, probably long after it had become common knowledge to many others. The aftermath of the secret marriage that was meant to assuage the uncle’s anger only inflamed it further, to the extent that he had hoodlums castrate Abelard. Heloise, who had borne a child by Abelard, entered a nunnery at the bidding of her former lover and husband, whereupon Abelard himself became a monk. All of this happened around 1116–1117. Abelard would have been in his mid-thirties. Heloise’s age has been fixed variously. Until recently it was assumed that she was in her teens, “about seventeen,” but lately there have been efforts to recalibrate the chronology so that she would have been in even her mid-twenties. The main texts on which information about the affair and the relationship between Heloise and Abelard rests are an extensive sketch of his life that Peter Abelard wrote (known generally as the Historia calamitatum), in the form of a letter of consolation to an unidentified male friend, and the correspondence (three letters from Heloise and four from Abelard) that Heloise initiated after she had read the letter of consolation. The dating of the letters and the ages of Abelard and Heloise when they were written have not been pinpointed exactly, but Abelard seems to have composed the Historia calamitatum in 1132. He would have been in his early fifties, while Heloise (if we follow the traditional chronology) would have been