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 Athelstan Gift Story: Its Influence on English Chronicles and Carolingian Romances

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-537
Author(s):  
Laura Hibbard Loomis
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Chanson De Roland ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
William Of Malmesbury

To saints and their relics in the Middle Ages great men did great reverence. The mighty Charlemagne zealously collected and distributed relics of Christ and the saints; so, too, did the noble King Athelstan of England, who was, to his own contemporaries, something of “an English Charlemagne.” Certain tales relating to these two famous rulers and the holy relics acquired by them, are full of interest in themselves and in the relationship, at special stages, of the stories to each other. The Continental Carolingian narratives—the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, the Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus clavum et coronam Domini a Constantino poli Aquis Grani detulerit, the Fierabras tell how Charlemagne, either on a fabulous journey to the East, or by warfare in Spain, got a hoard of precious relics which included some from the Crucifixion but never, in the oldest versions of these stories, any part of the Passion Lance. An ancient story, of English origin, tells how Athelstan received, as a gift from France, a hoard which likewise included some Passion relics. Among the gifts was the Passion Lance which was said to have belonged to Charlemagne; there was also the vexillum of St. Mauricius. For the Carolingian stories named above there is no extant text that antedates the latter half of the twelfth century, no conjectured source that antedates the latter half of the eleventh century. The Athelstan Gift Story, as we shall call it, was first set forth in an Anglo-Latin poem eulogizing the English king (d. 939). This panegyric was quoted and summarized by William of Malmesbury (1125) and is now accepted, though it was long ignored, as an authentic tenth century source. It may have been this almost unknown poem which inspired in the Chanson de Roland, in that earliest Anglo-Norman copy known as the Oxford Roland, four concepts connected with Charlemagne's reported possession of a bit of the Passion Lance. Our concern here, however, is not with the ancient Latin poem, but with the version of its Gift Story by William of Malmesbury. To it he gave new life, new currency; its influence can be traced in various chronicles and in certain English Carolingian romances. It throws new light on their development and relationships. Strangely enough, it was in these English Carolingian stories and not in their Continental sources and analogues that the idea that Charlemagne had once possessed the Passion Lance took root and flourished.

scholarly journals Lendo em Francês leio o mundo: significações produzidas por alunos de uma escola pública amapaense sobre o ensino da Língua Francesa para a comunicação interfronteiriça

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-435
Author(s):  
Mesaque Silva Correia ◽  
Neuton Alves Araújo ◽  
Paulo Renzo Guimarães Junior
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
French Guiana ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
French Language ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
French Culture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Research Show

In this text the objective is to analyze the meanings that students from a public school in Amapá have been producing on the teaching of the French language for cross-border communication. To achieve the proposed objective, we appropriate the theoreticalmethodological assumptions of Historical-Cultural Theory/Activity Theory. The question that guided this research was: In the speeches of students from a public school in Amapá, what are the possible meanings (senses and meanings) produced about the teaching of the French language for cross-border communication? Participated in the study 5 (five) students of the 3rd year of High School of a public school in Amapá, located on the border of Brazil/French Guiana, which has the French language as a mandatory curricular component. Specifically, on the production of the data, semi-structured interviews were used. The results of the research show that it is necessary to think about linguistic policies that value the teaching of languages with a focus on culturally marked proposals, which are based, above all, on the relationship between language and culture. In addition, the meanings produced, from the speeches of the investigated students, are demonstrative that, for these students, the learning of the French language mediates not only frank communication but also the learning of the elements of French culture.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

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.

The Earl, the Kings, and the Chronicler

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Full Length ◽  
English History ◽  
Cultural Revival ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Merchant Class ◽  
History Of ◽  
William The Conqueror

This book is the first full length biography of Robert (c.1088 × 90–1147), grandson of William the Conqueror and eldest son of King Henry I of England (1100–35). He could not succeed his father because he was a bastard. Instead, as the earl of Gloucester, Robert helped change the course of English history by keeping alive the prospects for an Angevin succession through his leadership of its supporters in the civil war known as the Anarchy against his father’s successor, King Stephen (1135–54). The earl is one of the great figures of Anglo-Norman History (1066–1154). He was one of only three landed super-magnates of his day, a model post-Conquest great baron, Marcher lord, borough developer, and patron of the rising merchant class. His trans-Channel barony stretched from western Lower Normandy across England to South Wales. He was both product as well as agent of the contemporary cultural revival known as the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, bilingual, well educated, and a significant literary patron. In this last role, he is especially notable for commissioning the greatest English historian since Bede, William of Malmesbury, to produce a history of their times which justified the Empress Matilda’s claim to the English throne and Earl Robert’s support of it.

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.

Theme et Variations: An Introduction to French Language and Culture

1990 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 104
Author(s):  
Jo Ann M. Recker ◽  
M. Peter Hagiwara ◽  
Francoise de Rocher
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Language And Culture

LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND POWER IN GUILLEM DE TORROELLA’S LA FAULA

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
JILL ROSS
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
French Language ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Power

This article examines the role of French language and culture in the fourteenth-century Arthurian text, La Faula, by the Mallorcan, Guillem de Torroella. Reading the appropriation of French language and literary models through the lens of earlier thirteenth-century Occitan resistance to French political and cultural hegemony, La Faula’s use of French dialogue becomes significant in light of the political tensions in the third quarter of the fourteenth century that saw the conquest of the Kingdom of Mallorca by that of Catalonia-Aragon and the subsequent imposition of Catalano-Aragonese political and cultural power. La Faula’s clear intertextual debt to French literary models and its simultaneous ambivalence about the authority and reliability of those models makes French language into a space for the exploration of the dynamics of cultural appropriation and political accommodation that were constitutive of late fourteenth-century Mallorca.

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