Browse

This book explores the relations between humans and other animals as they appear to a reader of medieval bestiaries, given that almost all of them are realized as parchment books and that parchment, although made from animal skin, looks much like human skin. Using Didier Anzieu’s concept of the Skin Ego and a theory of reading as assuming a second skin, the book explores how a supposedly human identity can be challenged by a reading process that inserts the reader into an animal skin. It examines the treatment of bestiary creatures in relation to the pages on which their entries are copied, showing how bestiarists’ teachings may be confirmed or undermined by the interaction between a text’s content, which is often focused on animals’ skins, their illustrations, which often outline or highlight those skins, and its material support, an actual instance of skin. The pages of many different manuscripts, transmitting numerous bestiary versions, are read closely in order to bring out possible interconnections between word, image, and parchment. Each chapter addresses an aspect of human-animal relations that is thematized both by medieval bestiaries and by modern theorists of the posthuman such as Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. In-depth coverage of Latin and French bestiary versions produces a new overall account of the development of the Physiologus tradition in Western Europe, one which attributes more importance to Continental traditions than previous Anglophone scholarship.

This book offers a fundamental reconception of the person generally assumed to be the first woman writer in French, the author known as Marie de France. It considers all of the writing ascribed to Marie, including her famous Lais, her 103 animal fables, and the earliest vernacular Saint Patrick's Purgatory. Evidence about Marie de France's life is so meager that we know next to nothing about her—not where she was born and to what rank, who her parents were, whether she was married or single, where she lived and might have traveled, whether she dwelled in cloister or at court, nor whether in England or France. In the face of this great writer's near anonymity, scholars have assumed her to be a simple, naive, and modest Christian figure. This book's claim, in contrast, is that Marie is among the most self-conscious, sophisticated, complicated, and disturbing figures of her time—the Joyce of the twelfth century. At a moment of great historical turning, the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century, Marie was both a disrupter of prevailing cultural values and a founder of new ones. Her works, it is argued, reveal an author obsessed by writing, by memory, and by translation, and acutely aware not only of her role in the preservation of cultural memory, but of the transforming psychological, social, and political effects of writing within an oral tradition. Marie's intervention lies in her obsession with the performative capacities of literature.

This book argues that the problem of how to designate death produces a long tradition of literature about dying in Old and Middle English, a literature that intensively and self-reflexively imagines how the very terms of literature might solve the problem of the termination of life. The book ranges between close readings of literature’s attempts to imagine a relation with death in major poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and the Pearl­­ poet, and philosophical attempts to designate death despite its impossibility: the relation between finitude and form. The book also explores the relation between crypt and archive, the philosophy of language and logic, and contemporary theorizing about death and dying, from Martin Heidegger to Maurice Blanchot and Gillian Rose.

Since the first appearance of “romance” (roman) in mid-twelfth-century France, this genre of literature has been condemned by learned readers, who view it as failing to represent reality as it truly is and, in doing so, as leading its readers astray. While lengthy, narrative literary works in the vernacular at this time could treat the history of Rome or of France, it was those that addressed the history of Britain—that is, Arthurian romance—that came in for special censure. In the fictions they recounted about Merlin, it was argued, these works constituted bad science; in those about King Arthur, bad history; in those about Lancelot, bad morality; and in those about the Holy Grail, bad religion. This book argues that Arthurian romance implicitly recognizes and responds to the criticisms that were being made against it. The works of Chrétien de Troyes, the Grail Continuators, Robert de Boron, and the authors of the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, by replaying the ongoing debates in their pages, all affirm that they are promoting good science, good history, good morality, and good religion, but in a way that asks us to reconceptualize each of these categories. If romance has always appealed to readers despite the criticisms to which it has been subject, it is because it offers a distinctive theory as to what reality is like, at odds with the dominant learned discourses of its time.

Dante’s literary-theoretical framework is simultaneously and manifestly a legal one. Contemporary juridical rituals of everyday experience such as testimony, litigation, punishment, and confession permeate the Commedia. Yet they do so with a specific purpose. Though it may seem paradoxical, Dante invents this elaborate legal normative system to explore its capacity to comprehend exceptions; he deliberately embeds certain incongruities or anomalies in his construction of divine justice (such as the salvation of the pagan suicide Cato) to probe the limits of the law. Lacking a historicized understanding of this legal landscape, Dante scholars often seek to domesticate what Dante intended to unsettle. Unlike medieval readers, we are accustomed to a post-enlightenment legal perspective that reads exceptions as suspending the constitutional legal order (as Carl Schmitt and later Giorgio Agamben theorized in the “state of exception”). In a medieval conception of ius commune law, however, individual exceptions such as dispensations, privileges, and immunities ensure the legal order’s continued vitality by reconciling universal normative principles with the contingencies of history. Whether considering legal or literary laws, judicial discretion or poetic license, Dante explores through his poetry the imaginative preconditions underlying “regulated exceptions.” Above all, in his response to the institutional crises of Church and Empire, he recognizes that poetic fictions will be necessary to supplement legal ones if this threatened system of exception is to survive.

Though Alexander the Great lived more than seventeen centuries before the onset of Iberian expansion into Muslim Africa and Asia, he loomed large in the literature of late medieval and early modern Portugal and Spain. Exploring little-studied chronicles, chivalric romances, novels, travelogues, and crypto-Muslim texts, this book shows that the story of Alexander not only sowed the seeds of Iberian empire but foreshadowed the decline of Portuguese and Spanish influence in the centuries to come. It depicts Alexander as a complex symbol of Western domination, immortality, dissolution, heroism, villainy, and death, but also shows that texts ostensibly celebrating the conqueror were haunted by failure. Examining literary and historical works in Aljamiado, Castilian, Catalan, Greek, Latin, and Portuguese, the book develops a view of empire and modernity informed by the ethical metaphysics of French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas.

This book expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, it argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city's literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London's literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, the book uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.

This book revises the history of medieval imagination with a detailed analysis of its role in the period's meditations and theories of cognition. The book understands imagination in its technical, philosophical sense, taking its cue from Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century scholastic theologian and philosopher who provided the first sustained account of how the philosophical imagination could be transformed into a devotional one. The book examines Bonaventure's meditational works, the Meditationes vitae Christi, the Stimulis amoris, Piers Plowman, and Nicholas Love's Myrrour, among others, and argues that the cognitive importance that imagination enjoyed in scholastic philosophy informed its importance in medieval meditations on the life of Christ. Emphasizing the cognitive significance of both imagination and the meditations that relied on it, this book revises a long-standing association of imagination with the Middle Ages. In this account, imagination was not simply an object of suspicion but also a crucial intellectual, spiritual, and literary resource that exercised considerable authority.

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. The book discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty, lineage and gender among them, are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God's order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality. At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. This book examines two such texts—Alain de Lille's De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose–-arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. The book concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue and Tale.

Over the course of the Middle Ages, the economies of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa became more closely integrated, fostering the international and intercontinental journeys of merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers. During a time in history when travel was often difficult, expensive, and fraught with danger, these wayfarers composed accounts of their experiences in unprecedented numbers and transformed traditional conceptions of human mobility. The Medieval Invention of Travel argues that the Middle Ages inherited a Greco-Roman model of heroic travel, which viewed the ideal journey as a triumph over temptation and bodily travail. Medieval travel writers revolutionized this ancient paradigm by incorporating practices of reading and writing into the ascetic regime of the heroic voyager, fashioning a bold new conception of travel that would endure into modern times. Engaging methods and insights from a range of disciplines, The Medieval Invention of Travel offers a comprehensive account of how medieval travel writers and their audiences reshaped the intellectual and material culture of Europe for centuries to come.

Over fifty years ago, it became unfashionable—even forbidden—for students of literature to talk about an author's intentions for a given work. This book resurrects the long-disgraced concept of intentionality, especially as it relates to the theater. Drawing on four medieval events in which a theatrical performance precipitated deadly consequences, the author contends that the marginalization of intention in critical discourse is a mirror for the marginalization—and misunderstanding—of theater. The book revisits the legal, moral, ethical, and aesthetic limits of the living arts of the past, pairing them with examples from the present, whether they be reality television, snuff films, the “accidental” live broadcast of a suicide on a Los Angeles freeway, or an actor who jokingly fired a stage revolver at his temple, causing his eventual death. This book will force scholars and students to rethink their assumptions about theory, intention, and performance, both past and present.

Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work's sociopolitical heft and meaning. This book reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. It brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. The book argues that Boethius's text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. It demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, John Gower's Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve's autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the “century of the encyclopedias.” Variously referred to as a speculum, thesaurus, or imago mundi—the term encyclopedia was not commonly applied to such books until the eighteenth century—these texts were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. Because they reproduced, rather than simply summarized, parts of prior texts, these compilations became libraries in miniature. This study examines writings in Latin, Catalan, and French that are connected to the encyclopedic movement: Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum maius; Ramon Llull's Libre de meravelles, Arbor scientiae, and Arbre de filosofia d'amor; and Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. It analyzes the order of knowledge in these challenging texts, describing the wide-ranging interests, textual practices—including commentary, compilation, and organization—and diverse discourses they absorb from preexisting classical, patristic, and medieval writing. The book demonstrates how these encyclopedias, like libraries, became “heterotopias” of knowledge—spaces where many possible ways of knowing are juxtaposed. The book shows how encyclopedists employed the same practices of figuration, narrative, and citation as poets and romanciers.

Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. This book treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category “poetry”: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. This book analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. The book reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook's role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.

Staging Contemplation draws together traditionally disparate types of literature—prose devotional treatises, spiritual memoirs, alliterative poems, cycle dramas, and morality plays—to argue for a broad, inclusive, and theologically and literarily sophisticated contemplative genre in the late English Middle Ages. Contemplative literature in this period is characterized by its drive to use the poetic facets of literary language to create for a reader or hearer a simulacrum of the experience of divine contemplation. That is, these contemplative works all manifest a sustained and shaping investment in staging—performing in a gradual manner—a participatory experience of contemplative knowing for their audiences. “Participation” means two things: first, a sensory participation in the written or performed literary works and, second, a contemplative participation in God that arises from the participatory experience in the literary. By serving as sensory proxies for or preparatory enactments of participation in the divine, these texts—some of them notoriously difficult, some notoriously grotesque—offer up new theories of how and why literature may in fact be an ideal proving ground for contemplative ideas. In some, the sonic properties of poetic language dovetail and are cast as the building blocks of understanding God; in others, comedy is deployed as a counterintuitive but enormously powerful tool for staging divine contemplation. In the end, the book also reveals the centrality of the Middle English vernacular itself—on formal, poetic grounds—for the efflorescence of this participatory genre of contemplation, thereby retheorizing the rise of the contemplative vernacular.

When medieval people went to war over religion, they prayed, took up arms, bade farewell to their families—and sometimes wrote lyric poetry. These warrior-artisans expressed their culture in poetry as live performance as well as in other art forms, from gold-illuminated manuscripts and tombstones to elaborate embroidered tapestries. More than historical documents or expressions of a common spirit of crusade, these fundamentally lyric works enabled their makers to process experiences of popular piety and personal sacrifice related to holy war. This book argues that these poetic articulations are crucial for understanding the crusades as a complex cultural and historical phenomenon. In a period during which the Church imagined the need to recover the Holy Land as inseparable from the individual and collective moral reform of its believers, the crusader subject of vernacular literature and art sought to reconcile competing ideals of earthly love and chivalry with crusade as a penitential pilgrimage. For some, such a reconciliation was untroubled; certainly there are many chronicles, sermons, works of art, and narrative poems (e.g. chansons de geste) that affirm the preaching of the Church to reclaim the Holy Land. This book concerns another version of speaking crusades, in which courtly art forms, such as lyric, and romance, and material objects, such as tapestries and textiles, manifest ambivalence about crusade ideals.

This book discusses two intertwined themes. The first is the growth of commercial culture and its interest in aristocratic romance. The second lies behind the first and concerns the simultaneous development of trade across Asia conducted by merchants, first made possible by the Mongol Eurasian system. In the Renaissance, the Portuguese reopened Asia by a sea route to India and East Asia. Later, the English tried to reopen the caravan route, sending agents to travel with the Russians to Inner Asia. Such trade brought a new dimension to romance, since some writers sent their heroes to Asia. In so doing, these writers celebrated mercantile adventure under an aristocratic guise. The book focuses mostly on the imagination and attitudes that still affect Western thinking about Asia to this day.