The Tournaments at Le Hem and Chauvency

The Tournaments at Le Hem and Chauvency PDF

Author: Nigel Bryant

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 178327459X

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First translation of two vivid accounts of French thirteenth-century tournaments, rich in detail and an impassioned defence of tournaments and their importance.

Medieval Sex Lives

Medieval Sex Lives PDF

Author: Elizabeth Eva Leach

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-12-15

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1501771884

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Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript—a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament—Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

NEW REYNARD.

NEW REYNARD. PDF

Author:

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-04-04

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1783277386

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A translation of three works from the second half of the 13th century: Rutebeuf's Renart le Bestourné, the anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart and Jacquemart Gielée's Renart le Nouvel. These savage and highly entertaining satires are in a league of their own, and Renart le Nouvel contains important music which is reproduced in the text. Rarely can a medieval work have resonated with the mood of the present as uncannily as do these three satires. Acerbic, raging and finally apocalyptic, these poems from the second half of the thirteenth century, richly entertaining and wickedly comic though they are, express a vision of the world and its descent into corruption and disaster which mirrors our own state of rampant alarm. The animal tales of the 12th- and 13th-century Roman de Renart - the Romance of Reynard the Fox - were immensely popular. Any satire in those original tales was generally light of touch, but the characters created in them, fox and wolf and ass and lion to name but four, were an open invitation to anyone of a more scathing satirical bent. The poet Rutebeuf, in his short but startling Renart le Bestourné ('Reynard Transformed'), deploys the beasts to make a venomous attack on the mendicant orders and on 'Saint' Louis IX of France. The anonymous Le Couronnement de Renart ('Reynard Crowned') then has the Fox crowned king, establishing a reign of every vice. And most ambitiously of all, Jacquemart Gielée in his Renart le Nouvel ('The New Reynard'), gripped by an increasingly pervasive sense of apocalypse, ends his poem with the Fox, the epitome of deceit and lying, not merely crowned king, but seated in permanent, malign control of the world atop a chocked, unturning Fortune's Wheel. The New Reynard is of special interest not only to students of medieval literature but also to musicologists. Music, in the form of numerous songs, plays an important part in Renart le Nouvel's satirical and apocalyptic message, and the poem is renowned as the most abundant source of late medieval refrains. The notations have survived, and the music is edited in this volume by Matthew P. Thomson.

A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword

A Cultural History of the Medieval Sword PDF

Author: Robert W. Jones

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-05-23

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1837650365

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This study takes the sword beyond it functional role as a tool for killing, considering it as a cultural artifact and the broader meaning and significance it had to its bearer.

Performing Medieval Narrative

Performing Medieval Narrative PDF

Author: Evelyn Birge Vitz

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9781843840398

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A survey of an investigation into whether medieval narrative was designed for performance.

Routledge Revivals: Medieval France (1995)

Routledge Revivals: Medieval France (1995) PDF

Author: William W. Kibler

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 1078

ISBN-13: 1351665669

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First published in 1995, Medieval France: An Encyclopedia is the first single-volume reference work on the history and culture of medieval France. It covers the political, intellectual, literary, and musical history of the country from the early fifth to the late fifteenth century. The shorter entries offer succinct summaries of the lives of individuals, events, works, cities, monuments, and other important subjects, followed by essential bibliographies. Longer essay-length articles provide interpretive comments about significant institutions and important periods or events. The Encyclopedia is thoroughly cross-referenced and includes a generous selection of illustrations, maps, charts, and genealogies. It is especially strong in its coverage of economic issues, women, music, religion and literature. This comprehensive work of over 2,400 entries will be of key interest to students and scholars, as well as general readers.

Chrétien's Equal: Raoul de Houdenc

Chrétien's Equal: Raoul de Houdenc PDF

Author: Raoul de Houdenc

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 1843846039

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By his contemporaries, Raoul de Houdenc was 'mentioned in the same breath as Chrétien de Troyes as one of the masters of French poetry' (Keith Busby, The New Arthurian Encyclopaedia).

Violence in Medieval Society

Violence in Medieval Society PDF

Author: Richard W. Kaeuper

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780851157740

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Studies of ways in which the rapidly evolving society of medieval Europe developed social, legal and practical responses to public and private violence. Violence was endemic in the medieval world, to an extent most modern people find shocking. Violence was part and parcel of the public world of institutions [church, state, chivalry] and the private world of households. In an age of dynamic expansion it was present everywhere, and contemporary response to it was contradictory: it was both wrong and at the same time a regulatory feature of society. This book brings together the views of a number of scholarson aspects of violence in medieval society, in England and the larger canvas of western Europe, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. There is analysis of the tension between the practice of violence and hopes for reform; discussion of violence in literature; examination of assertive political acts and judicial duels and tournaments; and observations on the domestic scene and resistance to seigneurial impositions. Professor RICHARD W. KAEUPER teaches in the Department of History at the University of Rochester. Contributors: SARAH KAY, RICHARD W. KAEUPER, MATTHEW STRICKLAND, SEYMOUR PHILLIPS, M.L. BOHNA, PAUL HYAMS, AMY PHELAN, JULIET VALE, MALCOLM VALE, JAMES A.BRUNDAGE, BARBARA A. HANAWALT, EDMUND FRYDE

Acts and Texts

Acts and Texts PDF

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 9401204314

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For the Middle Ages and Renaissance, meaning and power were created and propagated through public performance. Processions, coronations, speeches, trials, and executions are all types of public performance that were both acts and texts: acts that originated in the texts that gave them their ideological grounding; texts that bring to us today a trace of their actual performance. Literature, as well, was for the pre-modern public a type of performance: throughout the medieval and early modern periods we see a constant tension and negotiation between the oral/aural delivery of the literary work and the eventual silent/read reception of its written text. The current volume of essays examines the plurality of forms and meanings given to performance in the Middle Ages and Renaissance through discussion of the essential performance/text relationship. The authors of the essays represent a variety of scholarly disciplines and subject matter: from the “performed” life of the Dominican preacher, to coronation processions, to book presentations; from satirical music speeches, to the rendering of widow portraits, to the performance of romance and pious narrative. Diverse in their objects of study, the essays in this volume all examine the links between the actual events of public performance and the textual origins and subsequent representation of those performances.