Marie de France, the Psalms, and the Construction of Romance Authorship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoff Rector
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Marie De France ◽  
Familial Relationships ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Lament Psalms ◽  
Authorial Persona

This chapter examines the influence of the Psalms on the development of vernacular authorial roles in the twelfth century. It argues that authors of courtly romances, in the period of the genre’s emergence, drew upon the Psalms and the figure of David to sanction a new authorial office. In particular, it argues that Marie de France, in both the General Prologue and the lais themselves, looks to the Psalms for notions of lament, remembrance, obscurity, and restoration that frame both her authorial persona and the purposes of her genre. In ‘Yonec’ in particular, we see a heroine’s lament that is carefully modelled on the lament Psalms but also reproduces the duties of authorship and genre that Marie claims for herself in the Prologue. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the Psalms, working through ‘neighbouring’ or ‘contrafactive’ rather than familial relationships, definitely shaped romance as a genre.

Marie De France's Eliduc: the Play of Aventure

2000 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 3-57
Author(s):  
Eve M. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Marie De France ◽  
Philosophical Consideration ◽  
Adult Lives

AbstractThis work proposes that for Eliduc, the culminating statement of her Lais, Marie de France selected a metaphor which was then new to Christianity: the game of chess. Eliduc is a "chess morality," marking the transition between the Muslim game and its varieties in western Europe. Like its Muslim ancestor, but explicating a central Christian text, it teaches philosophical consideration of human life in this world. This paper demonstrates the correspondences between the story of Eliduc and the twelfth century game of chess-its ancestry, objectives, strategies, and equipment, and then describes the game, as it proceeds, of the adult lives of three people.

CHARTING BOETHIUS: MUSIC AND THE DIAGRAMMATIC TREE IN THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY’S DE INSTITUTIONE ARITHMETICA, MS II.3.12

2015 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 207-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel K. S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Schematic Diagram ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Working Through ◽  
University Library ◽  
Full Page ◽  
Christ Church ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Mathematics

AbstractThis article discusses a full-page schematic diagram contained in a twelfth-century manuscript of Boethius’ De institutione arithmetica and De institutione musica from Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury (Cambridge University Library MS Ii.3.12), which has not yet been the subject of any significant musicological study despite its remarkable scope and comprehensiveness. This diagrammatic tree, or arbor, maps the precepts of the first book of De institutione arithmetica into a unified whole, depicting the ways music and arithmetic are interrelated as sub-branches of the quadrivium. I suggest that this schematic diagram served not only as a conceptual and interpretative device for the scribe working through Boethius’ complex theoretical material, but also as a mnemonic guide to assist the medieval pedagogue wishing to instruct students in the mathematics of musica speculativa. The diagram constitutes a fully developed theoretical exercise in its own right, while also demonstrating the roles Boethian philosophy and mathematics played in twelfth-century musical scholarship.

Reason, Season, or Life? Heterorelationality and the Limits of Intimacy between Women Friends

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maree Martinussen
Keyword(s):  
Personal Life ◽  
Sexual Partnership ◽  
Sexual Partnerships ◽  
Familial Relationships ◽  
The Past ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Competing Demands ◽  
Women Friends

Studies of personal life over the past three decades have provided rich accounts of new forms of togetherness, with some pointing to a loosening of hierarchical lines between friends, kin, family, and long-term sexual partnership. While acknowledging the importance of these queering perspectives, I suggest that asking how people use ‘traditional’ relationship distinctions remains valuable. Reporting on research centred on practices of intimacy between women friends in early midlife, I examine how the competing demands of long-term sexual partnerships and family are managed alongside friendship, asking what forms of intimacy between friends are sanctioned or disparaged. I show that the organising logics of heteroromantic orders prevail, working through the contemporary cultural pushes of postfeminism and individualisation. As a result, friendships become constructed as bonus entities in relational life – necessary, but always supplementary to the mainstays of sexual partnership and familial relationships.

scholarly journals Making Your Memory Mine: Marie de France and the Adventures of the Bretons

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Longard
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Marie De France ◽  
French Language ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Linguistic Structure ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Cultural Autonomy ◽  
Single Lens ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
The Relationship

The twelfth-century Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France undertook to preserve for posterity the adventures and romances embodied in a vanishing genre, the old Breton lais as she had heard them recounted by minstrels. That she succeeded is evidenced by the popularity of these lais for more than eight hundred years; that she perhaps succeeded too well is suggested by the fact that, within a century of her lifetime, the Breton lais had become exclusively a French form of literature, and whatever might have been the original form, linguistic structure and cultural content in Breton has been relegated to the realm of hypothesis. This raises questions about the relationship between translation and cultural autonomy. Marie’s purported memorial to the Bretons became instead an institution of French language and culture. Had the Breton features been totally effaced, this could be called assimilation; had they been preserved intact, it would have been literal translation. In fact, Marie’s work can be reduced to no such simple binary. Nor can her aims be analyzed through any single lens, whether political, religious, cultural or artistic. Rather, I argue that her unsettling and robust positioning of contradictory elements—sorcery, sensuality, feudality, religion—results from her strategy of adopting the memory of the Bretons: neither glossing over its strangeness nor highlighting it as foreign, but making its distant and exotic characteristics part of her own invented heritage. I conclude that her translation project is more effectively analyzed as an ethical process of incorporation and restitution (Steiner) than as a placement along the spectrum of foreignization versus domestication (Venuti).

The Posadnichestvo of Pskov: Some Aspects of Urban Administration in Medieval Russia

Slavic Review ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence N. Langer
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Considerable Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Male Population ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Urban Administration

To the Memory of Arcadius Kahan, 1920–1982Ever since the publication of V. L. Ianin's study of the Novgorodian mayors (posadniki) in 1962, the commonplace image of republican Novgorod with its political institutions grounded in the sovereignty of the veche—the “democratic” assembly of the city's free male population—has undergone considerable change. It is now generally conceded that Novgorod was essentially a boyar oligarchy, but controversy still surrounds Ianin's contention that the veche from its inception was primarily composed of boyars and other wealthy landowners, who in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were known as the well-to-do (zhit'i liudi). Most scholars are willing to accept the view that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the veche was dominated by a boyar oligarchy, but some, including Knud Rasmussen, Henrik Birnbaum, and Jörg Leuschner, believe that the composition of the veche in the twelfth century was more complex and that Novgorodian “democracy” was more evident, at least until the late thirteenth century, when the boyars working through the Council of Lords (Sovet gospod—first recorded in 1291) usurped the “rights” of the populace. Following the work of Klaus Zernack, Leuschner believes the veche was composed of all the free males including those from the subordinate towns (prigorody) outside Novgorod. But in the last two centuries of the republic's existence, certainly following the reforms of 1416 and 1417, Novgorod changed, in Birnbaum's words, “from a quasi-democratic form of government based on the veche to a purely oligarchic rule determined exclusively by the feudal lords.“ Having admitted that representation in the veche became limited to some forty “feudal” clans, Birnbaum accepts the contention of Carsten Goehrke that Pskov, the political and legal institutions of which are thought to have approximated those of Novgorod, retained its genuinely democratic veche throughout the fifteenth century. Thus Pskov is brought to the front lines to debunk the “extreme views” of Ianin, characterized by Goehrke as increasingly dogmatic and speculative, and is now caught in the controversy surrounding Novgorod.

Marie De France

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinoshita Sharon ◽  
McCracken Peggy
Keyword(s):  
Marie De France
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document