La quête inachevée. Le sang sur la neige dans Kamouraska d’Anne Hébert et le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes

Cet article remet en question un intertexte qui, tout crucial qu’il soit, est passé presque entièrement inaperçu : celui entre Kamouraska d’Anne Hébert et Le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes. En interrogeant la façon dont Hébert remanie l’image clé chez Chrétien du sang sur la neige, nous soulignons, pour la première fois, le rôle indispensable que l’imaginaire du Graal occupe dans le corpus de cette auteure.

Visualizing Reading Practices in the Late Middle Ages: Images in a Book of Hours Held at Memorial University

This article studies the images and the Latin and French texts in a Book of Hours of Premonstratensian Use held at Memorial University Libraries. While the Annunciation scene in Books of Hours has been the subject of numerous studies, the Pentecost scene representing Mary reading to the Apostles has received limited attention in research. The article assesses the meaning of these images and their possible connection to reading practices in late medieval Europe.

A Common Clerk as Courtholder: Geoffrey Spirleng in Late Medieval Norwich

Courtholders presided over a variety of late medieval English courts. Like most courtholders before 1500, Geoffrey Spirleng, common clerk of Norwich, did not attend an inn of court or chancery. Nevertheless, his experiences as a courtholder and as common clerk qualified him as a legal professional. Because of the frequency of lawsuits, people of all backgrounds were impacted by courtholders’ actions. This article argues that courtholders played a crucial role in ensuring judicial efficiency and consistency.

Ciceronian Ethos and Clerical Masculinity in the Regensburg Rhetorical Letters

The Regensburg Rhetorical Letters are fictional letters composed in the 1080s at the Regensburg cathedral school. They imitate Ciceronian texts to fashion a valorized masculine identity based in learning, eloquence, and public service for secular clerics in civil administration who were attacked for idleness and effeminacy by reformers like Peter Damian. Centering textual and rhetorical expertise, the Letters reveal the heterogeneity of clerical society and an early development of a professional rather than spiritual role for the clergy.

The Book as Material Intercessor in Anne de Bretagne’s Library: Women’s Affective Reading in Late Medieval France

This article explores the materiality of the book in four codices owned by Anne de Bretagne at the end of the Middle Ages. Shedding light on the reading practices promoted by the library of one particular late-medieval female patron, I also provide a way into thinking more broadly about the ways in which reading practices were modelled to female readers by the secular and religious texts and images in their manuscripts.

Introduction: Material Matters and the Salzinnes Antiphonal

The three articles in this “In Focus” section originated as papers delivered at Material Matters, the tenth annual conference of the Atlantic Mediaeval Association held at Dalhousie University and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, September 22–23, 2017. The conference itself was inspired by, and timed to coincide with, a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia — Centuries of Silence: the Discovery of the Salzinnes Antiphonal, which ran from May 2017 to January 2018 and was curated by Judith Dietz. The three papers, by Marianne Gillion, Annaliese Renck and Sébastien Rossignol, situate the Salzinnes Antiphonal in myriad ways, by focusing on books from the decades stretching across the turn of the sixteenth century, from the 1490s to the 1510s.