Browse by Subject: Medieval/Renaissance

In this book, Lynn Ramey explores the life and works of Jean Bodel, a twelfth-century French poet, playwright, and epic writer, providing translations and summaries of works never published before in English while delving into Bodel’s historical and cultural context.

This volume immerses readers in a debate tradition that flourished in France during the late Middle Ages, focusing on two works that were both popular and controversial in their time and the discussions they sparked surrounding questions of women’s agency, love, marriage, and honor.

This book examines the rise of an influential new family of poetry in the late Middle Ages, analyzing why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries.

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.

This volume offers a broad and rich view of the tradition of Old French epic poetry, or chansons de geste, by providing an updated English translation of three central poems from the twelfth-century Guillaume d’Orange cycle.

This new and provocative interpretation examines the formal similarities between the Decameron’s tales of wit, wisdom, and practical jokes and the popular thirteenth-century fabliaux.

Contributors to this collection consider the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in many different ways. Inherently unstable, identity is created, re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Additionally, taken together the essays posit that an individual may identify with a group, existing within it, and yet remain foreign to it.  

The love of looking, or scopophilia, is a common motif among female figures in medieval art and literature where it is usually expressed as a motherly or sexually interested gaze--one sanctioned, the other forbidden. Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors.

These essays explore the various manifestations of the heroine in medieval French literature and her multiple relationships with discourse, both medieval and modern. From a discussion of 12th-century saints’ lives to an examination of 15th-century farce, they span the Middle Ages, both chronologically and generically. Focused yet considering a wide range of texts, they shine new light on the heroine and how she behaves, including how she herself uses discourse.