Si Griseldis m’était conté : entre attendrissement et enseignement

My intention is to show in this article the role of emotions in the reception and dissemination of the Griselda story. Petrarch’s affective reactions to Boccaccio’s tale opened the path that many authors would pursue. I propose to trace the transition from the strange and confusing story to didactic and exemplary and explain the place of Griselda in courtesy literature addressed to women in the late Middle Ages.

Isabel of Aragon (d. 1336): Model Queen or Model Saint?

Very little work has been done on Iberian queens and even less on Iberian saints. This study of Isabel of Aragon (c. 1270–1336), wife of King Dinis of Portugal (1279–1325), who was venerated as a saint from shortly after her death, aims to explore the relationship between Isabel's queenship and her sainthood. It engages with recent research, and critiques obvious comparisons between Isabel and her great-aunt St Elizabeth of Thuringia. Isabel may also be compared with numerous other medieval European queens and her main vita displays striking similarities to royal courtesy literature found elsewhere.

Merit in Courtly Literature: Castiglione, Rabelais, Marguerite de Navarre, and Le Caron

Spesse volte mi viene un dubbio, s'é dato dal nascimento (come nell'altre cose ancora) ch'i Principi siano propitii & favorevoli verso questi, iniqui & crudeli verso quegli altri, o se pure è posto nella industria nostra…. (Francesco Sansovino,Propositioni in materia di cose di Stato, Vinegia, 1583, fol. 110)Castiglione'sLibro del cortegiano(1528) and Renaissance courtesy literature in general chart an uneven course between the description of an illustrious courtly ideal never fully incarnate and the establishment of a set of rules enabling courtly practice and prescription. These two intentions, one roughly Platonic and the other roughly Aristotelian, are in the end contradictory, for the more substantial the ideal becomes, the less can it accommodate varying experience and therefore practice. The impulse to set forth an ideal as something outside of variety through which experience is to be judged is incompatible with the production of that ideal through the experiential mean of varying extremes.