The Futures of Medieval French : Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste, through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies. List of Illustrations xi List of Contributors xiii List of Abbreviations xv Introduction / Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin 1 Part I: Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry Introduction / Ruth Harvey 15 Third Gender Solace / William Burgwinkle 19 Troubadour Selves under Debate / Miriam Cabré 34 'Je tiens ma personne morte': Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry / Helen Swift 49 Part II: The 'Chansons de geste' in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions Introduction / Jane Gilbert 67 'He wishes that everyone were leprous like him': Infectious Counternarratives in 'Ami et Amile' / Charlie Samuelson 71 Feminism-plus: 'Sarah Kay’s The 'Chansons de geste' in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions and the 'Roman de Waldef'' / Jocelyn Wogan-Browne 85 Connected Literature: 'Chansons de geste', Burgundian 'livres de gestes', and the Writing of Literary Theory Today / Zrinka Stahuljak 99 Part III: Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century Introduction / Peggy McCracken 115 Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier / Susan Boynton 119 At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love / Joseph R. Johnson 150 Logic, Meaning, and Imagination / Virginie Greene 166 Part IV: The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in French Didactic Literature Introduction / Nicolette Zeeman 181 Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts / Stephen G. Nichols 185 The Disembodied Tongue; or, The Place of the Book in the 'Livre de la Cité des Dames' / Christine Bourgeois 200 The Place of Pain: Confronting the Trauma and Complexity of Kingship in the Political Dream Narrative / Deborah McGrady 213 Part V: Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry Introduction / Simon Gaunt 229 Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities in the 'Chastelaine de Vergy' / Sophie Marnette 233 Troubadour Attachments / Emily Kate Price 250 Forms of Repetition: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century / Simone Ventura 264 Part VI: Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries Introduction / Miranda Griffin 283 Between Skin(s), Between Faiths: Caesura, Animality, and Comedy in Thirteenth-Century Christian–Jewish Relations / James R. Simpson 287 Rupturing Skin through the Power of Vox / Elizabeth Eva Leach 301 Sheep, Elephants, and Marco Polo’s 'Devisement du monde' / Sharon Kinoshita 314 Afterword 329 Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken General Bibliography 333 List of Manuscripts 359 Bibliography of Work by Sarah Kay 361 Index 369 Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste, through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with differentaspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medievaltexts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies. JANE GILBERT is Senior Lecturer in French at University College London; MIRANDA GRIFFIN is University Lecturer in Medieval French atthe University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Contributors: Christine Bourgeois, Susan Boynton, William Burgwinkle, Miriam Cabré, Simon Gaunt, Jane Gilbert, Virginie Greene, Miranda Griffin, RuthHarvey, Joseph R. Johnson, Sharon Kinoshita, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sophie Marnette, Peggy McCracken, Deborah McGrady, Stephen Nichols, Emily Kate Price, Charlie Samuelson, James R. Simpson, Zrinka Stahuljak, Helen Swift, Simone Ventura, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicolette Zeeman