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Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field.

First English translation of one of the most influential French poems of the Middle Ages.

First English translation of the complete versions of three chansons de geste inspired by the Romance epic, the Song of Roland.

Ideas of translation and adaptation in the middle ages investigated through the lens of the Merlin tradition.The medieval figure of Merlin is intriguing, enigmatic, and riddled with contradictions. Half human, half devil, he possesses a supernatural knowledge that allows him to prophesy the future. This book examines the reinterpretationof Merlin's character in French and Italian Arthurian literature, in which chivalric romance and political prophecy become increasingly intertwined. As the Merlin story crosses the fluid cultural and linguistic boundaries between vernacular dialects on either side of the Alps, the protagonist accumulates histories, futures, and discourses from multiple texts within his omniscient knowledge. From his first appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's HistoriaRegum Britanniae, through thirteenth-century French romance, to fifteenth-century Venice, Merlin is the voice of political and spiritual truths that originate beyond the sphere of human comprehension. The study also shows howthe conversion of Merlin's prophetic speech from his omniscient mind into human languages parallels the work of the medieval translator. At the same time, the transmission of the Merlin story between vernacular French and Italiandialects presents an alternative model of translation, one that relies not on the displacement of previous texts, but instead on the accretion of information from text to text. Laura Chuhan Campbell is Assistant Professor of French at Durham University.

An examination of how the dead were memorialised in late medieval French literature.Awarded a commendation in the Society for French Studies R. Gapper Book Prize for the best book published in 2016 by a scholar working in French studies in Britain or Ireland. Who am I when I am dead? Several late-medieval French writers used literary representation of the dead as a springboard for exploring the nature of human being. Death is a critical moment for identity definition: one is remembered, forgotten or, worse, misremembered. Works in prose and verse by authors from Alain Chartier to Jean Bouchet record characters' deaths, but what distinguishes them as epitaph fictions is not their commemoration of the deceased, so much as their interrogation of how, by whom, and to what purpose posthumous identity is constituted. Far from rigidly memorialising the dead, they exhibit a productive messiness in the processes by which identity is composed in the moment of its decomposition as a complex interplay between body, voice and text. The cemeteries, hospitals, temples and testaments of fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century literature, from the "e;Belle Dame sans mercy"e; querelle to Le Jugement poetic de l'honneur femenin, present a wealth of ambulant corpses, disembodied voices, animated effigies, martyrs for love and material echoes of the past which invite readers to approach epitaphic identity as a challenging question: here lies who, exactly? In its broadest context, this study casts fresh light on ideas of selfhood in medieval culture as well as on contemporary conceptions of the capacities and purposes of literary representation itself. Helen Swift is Associate Professor of Medieval French at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

A new study of the continuations to Chretien's Conte du Graal shows their crucial influence on the development of Arthurian literature.Chretien de Troyes's late twelfth-century Conte du Graal has inspired writers and scholars from the moment of its composition to the present day. The challenge represented by its unfinished state was quickly taken up, and over the next fifty years the romance was supplemented by a number of continuations and prologues, which eventually came to dwarf Chretien's text. In one of the first studies to treat the Conte du Graal and its continuations as a unified work, Thomas Hinton considers the whole corpus as a narrative cycle. Through a combination of close textual readings and manuscript analysis, the author argues that the unity of the narrative depends on a balanced tension between centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. He traces how the authors, scribes and illuminators of the cycle worked to produce coherence, even as they contended with potentially disruptive forces: multiple authorship,differences of intention, and changes in the relation between text, audience and book. Finally, he tackles the long-held orthodoxy that places the Perceval Continuations on the margins of literary history. Widening the scope of enquiry to consider the corpus's influence on thirteenth-century verse romances, this study re-situates the Conte du Graal cycle as a vital element in the evolution of Arthurian literature. Thomas Hinton isJunior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at Jesus College, Oxford.

First comprehensive examination of the ways in which printers, publishers and booksellers adapted and rewrote Arthurian romance in early modern France, for new audiences and in new forms.Arthurian romance in Renaissance France has long been treated by modern critics as marginal - although manuscripts and printed volumes, adaptations and rewritings, show just how much writers, and especially publishers, saw its potential attractions for readers. This book is the first full-length study of what happens to Arthur at the beginning of the age of print. It explores the fascinations of Arthurian romance in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, from the magnificent presentation volumes offered by Antoine Verard or Galliot du Pre in the early years of the century to the perfunctory abbreviated Lancelot published by Benoit Rigaud in Lyon in 1591; from PierreSala's dutiful "e;translation"e; of Yvain to Jean Maugin's exuberant rewriting of the prose Tristan; from attempts at "e;new"e; romance like the little-known Giglan to the runaway best-seller Amadis de Gaule.The book's primary focus is the techniques and stratagems employed by publishers and their workshops to renew Arthurian romance for a new readership: the ways in which the publishers, the translators and the adapters of the Renaissance tailor romance to fit new cultural contexts. Their story - which is the story of the rise and fall of one of the great genres of the Middle Ages - allows privileged insights into socio-cultural and ideological attitudes in the France of the Renaissance, and into issues of literary taste, particular patterns of choice and preference. Jane H.M. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University.

First detailed reconstruction of Anne de Graville's library, establishing her as one of the most well-read and erudite poets of the period.

A new exploration of the complexities and resolutions at play in the writings of Marguerite de Navarre, offering insights into how her work reflected the turbulence, uncertainties, and assurances of her historical period.

An exciting new approach to one of the most important texts of medieval Europe.

A major reconsideration of the relationship between warrior aristocrats, epics, and heroes in medieval culture.

A major contribution to knowledge of medieval Occitan literature.

Modern theoretical approaches throw new light on the concepts of face and faciality in the Roman de la Rose and other French texts from the Middle Ages.

A sensitive investigation into how French writers, including Descartes and Racine, treated a central preoccupation in early modern writings.

An exploration of the medieval mind as a machine, and how it might be affected and immobiled, in textual reactions to the madness of Charles VI of France.

First English translation of an important twelfth-century romance, giving an account of the Trojan war and its consequences.

Essays using feminist approaches to offer fresh insights into aspects of the texts and the material culture of the middle ages.

A study of the immensely popular "lives" of Christ and the Virgin in medieval France.

New examinations of the role storytelling played in medieval life.

This new companion to the works of Marie de France offers fresh insights into the standard critical debates.

An indepth examination of the presentation of Constantinople and its complex relationship with the west in medieval French texts.

Survey of one of the most important surviving medieval manuscripts reveals much of its contemporary cultural, literary and social milieu.

The first book in English to examine one of the most important and influential texts from a literary perspective.