The Futures of Medieval French

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

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.

Introduction - Jane Gilbert and Miranda Griffin
Third Gender Solace - William Burgwinkle
Troubadour Selves under Debate - Miriam Cabré
'Je tiens ma personne morte': Subjectivity in Fifteenth-Century Courtly Poetry - Helen J. Swift
'He wishes that everyone were leprous like him': Infectious Counternarratives inAmi et Amile - Charlie Samuelson
Feminism-plus: Sarah Kay'sThe 'Chansons de geste' in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions and the'Roman de' Waldef' - Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Connected literature:Chansons de geste, Burgundianlivres de gestes, and the Writing of Literary Theory Today - Zrinka Stahuljak
Finding Contradiction in Guiraut Riquier - Susan Boynton
At the Bleeding Edge of Courtly Love - Joseph R. Johnson
Logic, Meaning, and Imagination - Virginie Greene
Places of Thought: Environment, Perception, and Textual Identity in Medieval Vernacular Manuscripts - Stephen G. Nichols
The Disembodied Tongue; or, The Place of the Book in theLivre de la Cité des dames - Christine Bourgeois
The Place of Pain: Confronting the Trauma and Complexity of Kingship in the Political Dream Narrative - Deborah McGrady
Quoting Lyrics and Subjectivities in theChastelaine de Vergy - Sophie Marnette
Troubadour Attachments - Emily Kate Price
Forms of Repetition: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century - Simone Ventura
Between Skin(s), Between Faiths: Caesura, Animality and Comedy in Thirteenth-Century Christian-Jewish Relations - James R. Simpson
Rupturing Skin through the Power ofVox - Elizabeth Eva Leach
Sheep, Elephants, and Marco Polo'sDevisement du monde - Sharon Kinoshita
Afterword - Simon Gaunt and Peggy McCracken
General Bibliography
Bibliography of work by Sarah Kay