Sarah Kay

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.

Gender and status

Troubadour poetry is composed for public performance; it concerns the pursuit of alleged courtship, or discusses matters of courtly interest. Of constant importance in it, therefore, is a vast vocabulary, rhetoric and thematic of social insertion. I shall consider some of these in order to investigate how far the first-person position in the songs is bound up with group identities of various kinds, such as gender, social peer groups, patrons and audiences. The relevance of this inquiry has already emerged in the discussion of Kohlers view of the subject as a synecdoche for the social group (Chapter 1); in the question of how far allegories of the ‘self’ are individualizing and how far they are generalizing; in the construction of a gender hierarchy; and in the splitting of the subject voice by interventions that seem to represent forces of social control, courtly or clerical (Chapter 2). It is evident that the self with which the subject, however uneasily, identifies, is historically and politically produced in ways that need to be analysed. This analysis is divided between two chapters. In Chapter 4, the focus is on the poet as performer and on the first persons transactions with audiences, patrons, rivals and lovers.

Surface and Symptom on a Bestiary Page: Orifices on Folios 61v–62r of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20

Abstract This essay explores how a “surface reading” can at the same time be a “symptomatic reading” when the surface in question is skin. Via a close reading of a double page containing the chapters on the weasel and the aspic in a fourteenth-century French copy of Guillaume le Clerc’s Bestiaire (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 20), it examines the treatment of bodily orifices in the text and the copy, including uncanny parallels between them and the parchment of these pages. The skins in question — those of the bestiary creatures, their readers, and the facing pages — are not flat but marked with recesses and gaps that function as symptoms of anxiety about excess as animal and that become overlaid with fantasy, which, however, remains informed by this anxiety. The bestiary page both jars bodily origins against cultural aspirations and exposes their collision, processes that the writings of Didier Anzieu can help to illumine.

The Troubadours: Introduction

The dazzling culture of the troubadours – the virtuosity of their songs, the subtlety of their exploration of love, and the glamorous international careers some troubadours enjoyed – fascinated contemporaries and had a lasting influence on European life and literature. Apart from the refined love songs for which the troubadours are renowned, the tradition includes political and satirical poetry, devotional lyrics and bawdy or zany poems. It is also in the troubadour song-books that the only substantial collection of medieval lyrics by women is preserved. This book offers a general introduction to the troubadours. Its sixteen newly commissioned essays, written by leading scholars from Britain, the US, France, Italy and Spain, trace the historical development and setting of troubadour song, engage with the main trends in troubadour criticism, and examine the reception of troubadour poetry. Appendices offer an invaluable guide to the troubadours, to technical vocabulary, to research tools and to surviving manuscripts.