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- Jeff Rider (7)
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Articles 1 - 27 of 27
Full-Text Articles in French and Francophone Literature
Queer Not: Medieval Romance's Toll On Queerness, Kyle Gaydo
Queer Not: Medieval Romance's Toll On Queerness, Kyle Gaydo
Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)
How does a contemporary audience handle medieval queerness? What, exactly, constitutes medieval queerness, and how does the medieval literary genre of romance impact it? This thesis attempts to grapple with these questions, and many more, utilizing the 13th-century Old French romance Le Roman de Silence by Heldris de Cornuälle. Medieval romances are particularly fruitful for this analysis because, on one hand, the genre consistently re/turns to cisheteronormativity, and, on the other, because scholarship generally has not applied queer theory to the study of romance. Silence follows Silence, a young Englishwoman who is raised as a boy to protect her family’s …
Figures Du Père Et Parenté Littéraire Dans La Vie De Saint Alexis Et Le Livre De La Cité Des Dames, Marie Bellec
Figures Du Père Et Parenté Littéraire Dans La Vie De Saint Alexis Et Le Livre De La Cité Des Dames, Marie Bellec
Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture
Cet article examine la figure paternelle dans trois récits de la vie des saints, La Vie de Saint Alexis, « Sainte Marine » et « Sainte Euphrosine » dans Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, de Christine de Pizan. Les pères respectifs des saints incarnent certaines attentes sociales et familiales, ils exercent notamment sur leurs enfants une pression pour qu’ils se marient. Les contraintes ne sont pas les mêmes selon le genre des saints : alors que la piété d’Alexis l’empêche de convoler, l’oppression sociale se déplace vers celle du genre pour nos hagiographies au féminin. Par …
Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen
Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen
Doctoral Dissertations
The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative …
Warrior Women And The Shaping Of Narrative In Medieval French Literature, Sara Rychtarik
Warrior Women And The Shaping Of Narrative In Medieval French Literature, Sara Rychtarik
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Warrior Women and the Shaping of Narrative in Medieval French Literature focuses on the representation of women warriors in medieval French literature, but it is also concerned with contemporaneous historical accounts and texts. Additionally, it examines representations of the woman as warrior in a different medium, which is still narrative-based, showing the impact of illuminated manuscripts on visual culture. The study looks at a specific character in medieval French literature – the woman warrior – in order to see how her existence in a text contributes to its narrative shape and to the production of the text itself. Through close …
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …
Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie
Wild Wales: How Cultural Discrimination Transformed Merlin From Brittonic Legends To French Arthurian Romances, Viveca Calista Lawrie
Senior Projects Spring 2021
The legend of King Arthur and his knights of the round table is one of the best-known stories in the Western world. Generally people tend to associate Arthurian legend with fifteenth-century English writing or French romances, but in reality, Arthurian legend has its origins in Brittonic oral tradition. Merlin, specifically, represents the concepts of Brittonic paganism and wildness more than any other Arthurian character. The changes made in the character and the narrative of Merlin, from Brittonic legend to Latin writing and then to French romances, reflect a political and cultural shift in Britain and France. An examination of Merlin …
Not Your Average Rose: Cultural Inversion In Pizan’S 'City Of Ladies', Alex Donley
Not Your Average Rose: Cultural Inversion In Pizan’S 'City Of Ladies', Alex Donley
Montview Journal of Research & Scholarship
This research addresses Le Livre de la Cité des Dames—translated into English as The Book of the City of Ladies—as an outstanding work of proto-feminist literature from 1405. It is written by a woman, in defense of women. Christine de Pizan plays the central character in her own work, in which she combats misogyny with a revised account of history. She battles prevalent ideals of courtly love and gender inequality as things that are not merely repulsive or immoral, but wholly heretical. Rather than focusing on historical accuracy, de Pizan uses the literary power of her narrative to …
Medieval Trans Lives In Anamorphosis: Looking Back And Seeing Differently (Pregnant Men And Backward Birth), Blake Gutt
Medieval Trans Lives In Anamorphosis: Looking Back And Seeing Differently (Pregnant Men And Backward Birth), Blake Gutt
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This article employs Lacan’s notion of anamorphosis, and the retrospection which Kathryn Bond Stockton presents as fundamental to the assumption of queer identity, as it demonstrates the functions and value of transgender readings of medieval texts. The article analyses two thirteenth-century literary works, Le Roman de Saint Fanuel and Aucassin et Nicolette, both of which feature pregnant male characters, alongside A.K. Summers’ 2014 graphic novel, Pregnant Butch. This juxtaposition reveals the resonances between these medieval and modern portrayals of gender non-conformity, as well as the highly gendered cultural norms surrounding pregnancy. Finally, attention to Janice Raymond’s transmisogynistic claims …
La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon
La Femme Bisclavret: The Female Of The Species?, Alison Langdon
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Conventional humanist readings of Bisclavret approach the lai from an anthropocentric perspective, in which animal nature is merely an allegory for human nature. In such a reading, the werewolf protagonist is a foil for his much more beastly if wholly human wife, with the underlying assumption being that animal nature is something to be rejected. That the marker of Lady Bisclavret's bestial nature—her noselessness—is transmitted through the generations of only female descendants seems to echo medieval antifeminist truisms about female perfidy. However, approaching the lai from a critical animal studies perspective can help dismantle conventional assumptions about the privileged status …
The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta
The Disperata, From Medieval Italy To Renaissance France, Gabriella Scarlatta
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Rich with morose invectives, the Italian lyric genre of the disperata builds toward a crescendo of despair, with the speakers damning and condemning their beloved, their enemy, their destiny, Fortune, Love, and often themselves. Although Petrarch and Petrarchism have been amply analyzed as fertile sources for late Renaissance poets in France, the influence of the Italian disperata in this context has yet to receive proper scholarly attention. This study explores how the language and themes of the disperata - including hopelessness, death, suicide, doomed love, collective trauma, and damnations - are creatively adopted by several generations of poets from its …
"Some Things Grew No Less With Time:" Tracing Atu 510b From The Thirteenth To The Twentieth Century, Rachel L. Maynard
"Some Things Grew No Less With Time:" Tracing Atu 510b From The Thirteenth To The Twentieth Century, Rachel L. Maynard
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This thesis provides a comparative analysis of seven different variants of the fairy tale commonly known as “Donkeyskin,” classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale motif index as ATU 510B. By comparing so many different iterations of one fairy tale, it is easier to recognize the inherent attitudes concerning women and their place in society contained in this tale. Additionally, reading multiple variants from different centuries lends a perspective on the way that these attitudes changed over the centuries. Each of the thirteenth century texts considered end with their heroines trapped in loveless marriages, much like the seventeenth-century fairy tale, “Donkeyskin,” their …
Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos
Seeking Holiness: The Contribution Of Nine Vernacular Narrative Texts From The Twelfth To The Fourteenth Centuries, Stephanie Grace Petinos
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Spirituality has been increasingly studied to determine the laity’s role within Church history in the Middle Ages. However, secular literature is often overlooked as a source of understanding lay spirituality, even though it is a crucial aspect of cultural and social history. I fill this gap by analyzing nine important vernacular texts to uncover several distinctive definitions of holiness, all of which blend the religious and the secular. Close reading of these texts reveals various paths to holiness, which undermine the Church’s attempts at sole control over spirituality. This study demonstrates that secular authors were concerned with exploring spiritual matters; …
Parables Of Love: Reading The Romances Of Chrétien De Troyes Through Bernard Of Clairvaux, Carrie D. Pagels
Parables Of Love: Reading The Romances Of Chrétien De Troyes Through Bernard Of Clairvaux, Carrie D. Pagels
Doctoral Dissertations
In three romances Yvain, Lancelot, and Perceval, Chrétien de Troyes utilizes the intimate relationships of his courtly knights and their lady loves to explore and present the Christian ideology of Bernard of Clairvaux as expressed by his four degrees of love in the treatise, On Loving God. Previous scholarly works have only examined the Christian ideology and symbolism in Chrétien's romances as isolated occurrences specific to a single text. In contrast, I argue Chrétien's romances form a progression mirroring the Bernardian steps (or degrees) man must make in order to draw closer to and deepen his relationship …
A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of The Troubadours And Old Occitan Literature, Robert A. Taylor
A Bibliographical Guide To The Study Of The Troubadours And Old Occitan Literature, Robert A. Taylor
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related …
Proto-Féminisme Dans L'Epistre Othéa De Christine De Pizan: Appropriation Et Réinterprétation De Deux Figures Mythologiques, Minerve Et Médée., Nathalie D. Lacarriere
Proto-Féminisme Dans L'Epistre Othéa De Christine De Pizan: Appropriation Et Réinterprétation De Deux Figures Mythologiques, Minerve Et Médée., Nathalie D. Lacarriere
Masters Theses
This thesis focuses on Christine de Pizan’s mythological allegoric work entitled Epistre Othéa, written around 1400. True to the beliefs she portrays in many of her later seminal works, such as The Book of the City of Ladies, or The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine displays in this piece a strong didactic vision. The crucial pairing of text and image in the two manuscripts that I chose to focus on prove the power she exerted as a woman and as an artist but also mark her intention to strengthen her moral and political message through …
Questing The Beast: From Malory To Milton, Malorie A. Sponseller
Questing The Beast: From Malory To Milton, Malorie A. Sponseller
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The Questing Beast is a Medieval creature that has received little scholarly attention. Because of her labile nature, she is difficult to identify and therefore challenging to study. When previously analyzed, she has been considered only in her Medieval context. By comparing the Questing Beast from Perlesvaus, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and the Prose Tristan, four identifying characteristics can be found: she is symbolic, she is multi-formed, she is a mother that gives birth, and she produces a barking noise most often made by her unborn young. Of these four signs, the last is the most prevalent and identifiable. …
The Medieval Forms And Meanings Of Francois: The Political And Cultural Vicissitudes Of An Ethnonym, Levilson C. Reis
The Medieval Forms And Meanings Of Francois: The Political And Cultural Vicissitudes Of An Ethnonym, Levilson C. Reis
Modern Languages & Cultures Faculty Scholarship
The article looks at the evolution of the ethnonym Francois in the Middle Ages and its significance to Germanic peoples known as Franks in the context of their cross-cultural relations with Muslim, Byzantine and British people. The author analyzes chronicles of the First Crusade and examines the use of Francois as an exonym and an autonym, and its role in the development of the French identity.
The »Other« Medieval French Alexander: Arthurian Orientalism, Cross-Cultural Contact, And Transcultural Assimilation In Chrétien De Troyes’S Cligés, Levilson C. Reis
The »Other« Medieval French Alexander: Arthurian Orientalism, Cross-Cultural Contact, And Transcultural Assimilation In Chrétien De Troyes’S Cligés, Levilson C. Reis
Modern Languages & Cultures Faculty Scholarship
En tenant compte du climat xénophobe des croisades cet article recense la réception de Cligés, roman de Chrétien de Troyes dont la plus grande partie de l’action se passe en Grèce, et explore les stratégies dont l’auteur se serait servi pour en déjouer un mauvais accueil. On examine d’abord les idées que les Francs se faisaient des Grecs par le biais de la réception contemporaine de l’Énéide et du Roman d’Alexandre. On examine par la suite comment Cligés cadre avec ces perspectives. Cet article pose en principe que, par le truchement du père de Cligés, prince grec …
Obscurity In Medieval Texts, Lucie Doležalová, Jeff Rider, Alessandro Zironi
Obscurity In Medieval Texts, Lucie Doležalová, Jeff Rider, Alessandro Zironi
Jeff Rider
Modern readers of medieval texts often find them obscure. Some of this obscurity is accidental and inevitable due to the historical and cultural distance that separates modern readers from medieval authors, but medieval readers and authors also appear to have simply had a higher tolerance for textual obscurity than we do and even to have viewed obscurity as desirable and a virtue. They did not believe that obscurity could ever be eradicated and were not scared of the indescribable, indivisible, and ungraspable; they accepted reality as complex and ultimately unintelligible. Obscurity was not simply a riddle to be solved. It …
Lai Du Conseil, Brinduşa Grigoriu, Catharina Peersman, Jeff Rider
Lai Du Conseil, Brinduşa Grigoriu, Catharina Peersman, Jeff Rider
Jeff Rider
This is an edition of the thirteenth-century, northern French Lai du conseil by Brinduşa Elena Grigoriu, Catharina Peersman and Jeff Rider, with an Introduction and notes by Brinduşa Elena Grigoriu and Jeff Rider. The Lai du Conseil is a remarkable artistic achievement that offers us a realistic, sophisticated, sensitive and touching portrait of the most important moment in the imagined relationship of its two principal characters, the moment when they realize and confess their love for one another. The success of the poem, indeed, springs first and foremost from its author’s decision to focus on this emotionally charged, universally familiar …
Vice, Tyranny, Violence, And The Usurpation Of Flanders (1071) In Flemish Historiography From 1093 To 1294, Jeff Rider
Vice, Tyranny, Violence, And The Usurpation Of Flanders (1071) In Flemish Historiography From 1093 To 1294, Jeff Rider
Jeff Rider
No abstract provided.
The Enigmatic Style In Twelfth-Century French Literature, Jeff Rider
The Enigmatic Style In Twelfth-Century French Literature, Jeff Rider
Jeff Rider
No abstract provided.
Les Métamorphoses Historiographiques Chez Jean Molinet, Jeff Rider
Les Métamorphoses Historiographiques Chez Jean Molinet, Jeff Rider
Jeff Rider
No abstract provided.
The Paratext To Chrétien De Troyes's Cligés: A Reappraisal Of The Question Of Authorship And Readership In The Prologue, Levilson C. Reis
The Paratext To Chrétien De Troyes's Cligés: A Reappraisal Of The Question Of Authorship And Readership In The Prologue, Levilson C. Reis
Modern Languages & Cultures Faculty Scholarship
Starting with the premise that medieval manuscripts exhibit paratextual vestiges of their auctores, redactors, copyists, and readers, this article re-examines the question of authorship and readership in Chrétien de Troyes's prologue to Cligés (c. 1176-80) through the lens of paratextual references to the implied author's signature, allusions to possible titles of his previous works, marginal annotations of interpretative readings, and cases of significant manuscript variance. Firmly grounded in the manuscript, editorial, and critical tradition of Cligés, this reading re-evaluates the tripartite thematic structure of the prologue, hypothesizing the paratextual effect that the opening list of literary tides, …
Clergie , Clerkly Studium , And The Medieval Literary History Of Chréétien De Troyes's Romances, Levilson C. Reis
Clergie , Clerkly Studium , And The Medieval Literary History Of Chréétien De Troyes's Romances, Levilson C. Reis
Modern Languages & Cultures Faculty Scholarship
This article traces the development of medieval literary history across the thirteenth century through manuscript readings of Chréétien de Troyes's romances. Redefining clergie as the clerkly pursuit of learning, the author argues that scribes played an important role in shaping Chréétien's romances and establishing their place in medieval literary history. Examining manuscript collections centred on Cligéés, the author delineates synchronic and diachronic shifts in the organization and presentation of Chréétien's manuscripts, evaluating the roles that different scribes and compilers played in the formation of a Chréétien corpus and the development of a romance genre.
The Inner Life Of Women In Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt And Hypocrisy, Jeff Rider, Jamie Friedman
The Inner Life Of Women In Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt And Hypocrisy, Jeff Rider, Jamie Friedman
Jeff Rider
Recent research suggests that emotions are largely constructed and performed and that narrative is one of the most important practices through which people become emotionally aware. Narrative literature thus offers a privileged means of exploring the emotional standards and styles of the past. The essays collected here explore medieval, romance emotional communities through both fictional and non-fictional narratives in French, Spanish, and Italian texts ranging from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. By following these women characters in their considerations, we can hope both to learn something about the times the women were writing in, while to enriching and enlarging our …
Medieval French Literature: An Introduction, Michel Zink
Medieval French Literature: An Introduction, Michel Zink
Jeff Rider
Zink's book critically reviews and reforges everything that is currently known about medieval French literature and its development. Rider's translation will be useful for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels.