Jeff Rider
Jeff Rider is a professor of the literature and history of medieval Europe at Wesleyan University. He specializes in Flemish history, the Arthurian legend and medievalism (the reception and uses of medieval artifacts in contemporary society). His study and edition of the The Earliest Genealogies and Histories of the Counts of Flanders (Brussels: Royal Historical Commission)is forthcoming. He is currently at work on a book on The Usefulness of the Middle Ages and an edition of Andreas of Marchiennes' Succinct History of the Deeds and Succession of the French Kings.
Professor Rider has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Philosophical Society, the Rotary Foundation, and the Belgian Fondation Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. He has held residential fellowships at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, St. Deiniol’s/Gladstone’s Library, the Fondation des Treilles, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, the University of Paris Est Créteil, the University of Lille III, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Charles University (Prague), the University of Ghent, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima).
A graduate of Yale University in combined French and English literature, he received a Diplôme d’études médiévales from the Université Catholique de Louvain and a master’s and doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He also attended Deep Springs College and took three years of courses at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. His teaching specialties are medieval and Renaissance French literature, the Arthurian legend, and medieval Flemish history.
Phone: 860 685 2830
Address: Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures
Wesleyan University
300 High St.
Middletown, CT 06459
Professor Rider has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the American Philosophical Society, the Rotary Foundation, and the Belgian Fondation Nationale de Recherche Scientifique. He has held residential fellowships at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, St. Deiniol’s/Gladstone’s Library, the Fondation des Treilles, and the Herzog August Bibliothek. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes – Saint-Denis, the University of Paris Est Créteil, the University of Lille III, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Charles University (Prague), the University of Ghent, the University of Southern Denmark, and the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima).
A graduate of Yale University in combined French and English literature, he received a Diplôme d’études médiévales from the Université Catholique de Louvain and a master’s and doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. He also attended Deep Springs College and took three years of courses at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. His teaching specialties are medieval and Renaissance French literature, the Arthurian legend, and medieval Flemish history.
Phone: 860 685 2830
Address: Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures
Wesleyan University
300 High St.
Middletown, CT 06459
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Books by Jeff Rider
-- from the review by Jean-Charles Bédague, Francia-Online, Recensio 2011-4, Mittelalter - Moyen Âge (500-1500) (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/francia/francia-recensio/2011-4/MA/rider_bedague)
“Jeff Rider’s new translation remains faithful to the journalistic organization and impulses of The Murder of Charles of Flanders, which enables him to bring out previously obscured elements of the text as well as the concerns that prompted Galbert to write his important chronicle in the first place. This is an outstanding piece of scholarship that all students of the Middle Ages will appreciate.”—Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University
“The 1959 translation of Galbert of Bruges by James Bruce Ross set a high bar for replacement, but it was time for one and Jeff Rider is the scholar who understands this crucial 12th-century text most thoroughly and profoundly. His lucid and readable translation rests on a deep foundation of historical and literary scholarship—all of which is made available to the reader. Rider has ensured that this fascinating book will remain central to medieval scholarship and teaching.”—Nancy Partner, McGill University
“More than just superseding the deeply flawed text of James Bruce Ross from 1959, this new translation is a serious contribution to knowledge, enhancing and advancing scholarship on the Middle Ages. Rider’s introduction is learned and thoughtful, adroitly establishing the context of the De Multro. His scholarly apparatus to the translation is wonderful, always detailed and rewarding to read, never descending into numbing pedantry.”— Mark Gregory Pegg, Washington University
"This is truly a splendid work. Users of the old translation by James Bruce Ross (1959) will be delighted by Jeff Rider’s text and adopt it for teaching. Rider’s unique knowledge of the book’s genesis and the historical figures that feature in it offers fresh insights without taking anything away from the pleasure of discovery that will await all readers."—Walter Simons, Dartmouth College
“This new English translation . . . is a triumph of scholarship . . . Essential.”—R. F. Berkhofer III, Choice
Rider’s translation is clear and accessible to students of all levels. The volume includes an in-depth introduction to the author, his complicated political context, and the character of his work, . . . It also boasts a short essay by Marc Ryckaert and James M. Murray on the history and physical features of the city of Bruges in the Middle Ages and copious notes by Rider to the translation itself. . . . The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders is unlike any other historical text from the twelfth century available in English translation. The author does not fit easily into the medieval tradition of history writing . . . [T]he text is tremendously appealing for the immediacy of its voice and the clarity of its details; it demands our attention because it seems to speak in an idiom that we understand.—Scott G. Bruce, Speculum
Scholars have long considered the De multro to be a true journal, written hastily as events unfolded and never revised. In God's Scribe, the first book devoted to Galbert and his chronicle, Jeff Rider challenges that view. He argues that the De multro is not the transparent and objective testimony it has been taken to be; rather it is a complex and sophisticated work of astonishing originality that is an outstanding example of medieval historical writing.
Intended as a companion volume to the De multro, the book provides an outline of the Flemish crisis of 1127-28 and summarizes what is known about Galbert. It traces the elaboration of the De multro from a set of wax notes to a nearly completed chronicle. Rider studies Galbert's sources, the way he took and organized his notes, the distinct stages in which the chronicle was written, its literary qualities, and the conceptual tools he used to comprehend the events he related in it. Rider concludes that Galbert's efforts to understand an extended series of events in light of the theology of history and authority common in his day, and to apply that theology to the practice of historical writing, made the De multro one of the most intellectual and experimental histories of its time, while its style, form, and viewpoint made it one of the most popular ones.
The essays collected in this volume discuss the deliberate creation of obscurities within particular communities, the (often obscure) medieval strategies for interpreting obscurities, and contemporary interpretations of medieval obscurities, focusing on two kinds of persistent obscurity in medieval texts. One is an intentional enigma that seems to have been created to provoke interpretation. The second is found in texts that were probably not meant to be enigmatic but became obscure when transferred to a new community without any fixed interpretation attached to them. These obscure texts continued to be handed down perhaps through inertia or because of the authority attached to them."
The author of the lay was thoroughly familiar with the courtly love and literary traditions and he veils this touching moment of discovery in a largely conventional, although sometimes remarkably insightful, courtly discourse. His characters do something very similar. In a subtle play of ‘faces’, they hide — ‘couvrent’ in the language of the lay — their exploration of their feelings and those of the other person, their searching out and testing of one another, behind largely conventional discourses in order to escape the surveillance of the keen-eyed and omnipresent scandalmongers at court. This creates a realistic sort of quasi-allegorical discursive situation in which seemingly general statements, or statements about third parties, in fact allude allegorically, so to speak, to the two people in conversation. This tension or play between what is said, what the speaker anxiously hopes is being understood, and what the listener anxiously hopes or fears is being meant is the second main source of the poem’s charm.
The Lai du Conseil is a remarkably subtle story of two people who know one another a little, would like to get to know one another better, take advantage of an opportunity offered to them one Christmas Eve, and end up discovering a life-long companion. The match parallels in interesting and different ways both Lanval’s relation with his lady, and Caradoc’s relation with his wife in the Lai du Cor. Like the lady of the Lai du Conseil, Lanval’s lady, who is likewise presented as very noble and very rich, seeks him out, provides for the poor knight’s material needs, and eventually takes him away with her to live in her land. Like Caradoc, the knight of the Lai du Conseil owes his fortune, his ‘establishment’, his chasement to his powers of seduction and the marriage they win him with a noble and wealthy woman."
"The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Literature thus remind us of the formidable obstacles that prevented medieval women from giving full voice to their "inner life" and of the necessity of volumes such as the present one. By looking beyond the surface of female representations, by re- examining well-known emotional portraits, or by highlighting lesser-known writers, this collection portrays the richness, variety, and complexity of women's emotions in medieval literature. The volume's careful attention to nuances of emotional state, to subtle shifts in feelings or perspectives, and to repressed feminine identities maps out a dynamic emotionology worthy of a closer look. Although one could question whether women's emotional states are always displayed with more intensity than those of their brothers, paramours, and husbands, this volume's focus on the "inner life" of women in medieval literature is both productive and illuminating."
--from the review by Roberta L. Krueger, The Medieval Review 12.04.26 (<https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/14424/12.04.26.html?sequence=1>)
Articles and Chapters by Jeff Rider
-- From the Introduction to the volume by Vitctoria Blud and Juliana Dresvina
Jeff Rider considers the effects of spoons and whorls [and caroles] on cognitive processes in the past, and looks especially at processes stimulated by physical engagement with artefacts. The informal and informative journey Rider takes us on in this last contribution of the volume is a delightful and unusual final case study -- Merel Veldhuizen, Reviews in History, DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2443
-- from the review by Jean-Charles Bédague, Francia-Online, Recensio 2011-4, Mittelalter - Moyen Âge (500-1500) (http://www.perspectivia.net/content/publikationen/francia/francia-recensio/2011-4/MA/rider_bedague)
“Jeff Rider’s new translation remains faithful to the journalistic organization and impulses of The Murder of Charles of Flanders, which enables him to bring out previously obscured elements of the text as well as the concerns that prompted Galbert to write his important chronicle in the first place. This is an outstanding piece of scholarship that all students of the Middle Ages will appreciate.”—Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University
“The 1959 translation of Galbert of Bruges by James Bruce Ross set a high bar for replacement, but it was time for one and Jeff Rider is the scholar who understands this crucial 12th-century text most thoroughly and profoundly. His lucid and readable translation rests on a deep foundation of historical and literary scholarship—all of which is made available to the reader. Rider has ensured that this fascinating book will remain central to medieval scholarship and teaching.”—Nancy Partner, McGill University
“More than just superseding the deeply flawed text of James Bruce Ross from 1959, this new translation is a serious contribution to knowledge, enhancing and advancing scholarship on the Middle Ages. Rider’s introduction is learned and thoughtful, adroitly establishing the context of the De Multro. His scholarly apparatus to the translation is wonderful, always detailed and rewarding to read, never descending into numbing pedantry.”— Mark Gregory Pegg, Washington University
"This is truly a splendid work. Users of the old translation by James Bruce Ross (1959) will be delighted by Jeff Rider’s text and adopt it for teaching. Rider’s unique knowledge of the book’s genesis and the historical figures that feature in it offers fresh insights without taking anything away from the pleasure of discovery that will await all readers."—Walter Simons, Dartmouth College
“This new English translation . . . is a triumph of scholarship . . . Essential.”—R. F. Berkhofer III, Choice
Rider’s translation is clear and accessible to students of all levels. The volume includes an in-depth introduction to the author, his complicated political context, and the character of his work, . . . It also boasts a short essay by Marc Ryckaert and James M. Murray on the history and physical features of the city of Bruges in the Middle Ages and copious notes by Rider to the translation itself. . . . The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders is unlike any other historical text from the twelfth century available in English translation. The author does not fit easily into the medieval tradition of history writing . . . [T]he text is tremendously appealing for the immediacy of its voice and the clarity of its details; it demands our attention because it seems to speak in an idiom that we understand.—Scott G. Bruce, Speculum
Scholars have long considered the De multro to be a true journal, written hastily as events unfolded and never revised. In God's Scribe, the first book devoted to Galbert and his chronicle, Jeff Rider challenges that view. He argues that the De multro is not the transparent and objective testimony it has been taken to be; rather it is a complex and sophisticated work of astonishing originality that is an outstanding example of medieval historical writing.
Intended as a companion volume to the De multro, the book provides an outline of the Flemish crisis of 1127-28 and summarizes what is known about Galbert. It traces the elaboration of the De multro from a set of wax notes to a nearly completed chronicle. Rider studies Galbert's sources, the way he took and organized his notes, the distinct stages in which the chronicle was written, its literary qualities, and the conceptual tools he used to comprehend the events he related in it. Rider concludes that Galbert's efforts to understand an extended series of events in light of the theology of history and authority common in his day, and to apply that theology to the practice of historical writing, made the De multro one of the most intellectual and experimental histories of its time, while its style, form, and viewpoint made it one of the most popular ones.
The essays collected in this volume discuss the deliberate creation of obscurities within particular communities, the (often obscure) medieval strategies for interpreting obscurities, and contemporary interpretations of medieval obscurities, focusing on two kinds of persistent obscurity in medieval texts. One is an intentional enigma that seems to have been created to provoke interpretation. The second is found in texts that were probably not meant to be enigmatic but became obscure when transferred to a new community without any fixed interpretation attached to them. These obscure texts continued to be handed down perhaps through inertia or because of the authority attached to them."
The author of the lay was thoroughly familiar with the courtly love and literary traditions and he veils this touching moment of discovery in a largely conventional, although sometimes remarkably insightful, courtly discourse. His characters do something very similar. In a subtle play of ‘faces’, they hide — ‘couvrent’ in the language of the lay — their exploration of their feelings and those of the other person, their searching out and testing of one another, behind largely conventional discourses in order to escape the surveillance of the keen-eyed and omnipresent scandalmongers at court. This creates a realistic sort of quasi-allegorical discursive situation in which seemingly general statements, or statements about third parties, in fact allude allegorically, so to speak, to the two people in conversation. This tension or play between what is said, what the speaker anxiously hopes is being understood, and what the listener anxiously hopes or fears is being meant is the second main source of the poem’s charm.
The Lai du Conseil is a remarkably subtle story of two people who know one another a little, would like to get to know one another better, take advantage of an opportunity offered to them one Christmas Eve, and end up discovering a life-long companion. The match parallels in interesting and different ways both Lanval’s relation with his lady, and Caradoc’s relation with his wife in the Lai du Cor. Like the lady of the Lai du Conseil, Lanval’s lady, who is likewise presented as very noble and very rich, seeks him out, provides for the poor knight’s material needs, and eventually takes him away with her to live in her land. Like Caradoc, the knight of the Lai du Conseil owes his fortune, his ‘establishment’, his chasement to his powers of seduction and the marriage they win him with a noble and wealthy woman."
"The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Literature thus remind us of the formidable obstacles that prevented medieval women from giving full voice to their "inner life" and of the necessity of volumes such as the present one. By looking beyond the surface of female representations, by re- examining well-known emotional portraits, or by highlighting lesser-known writers, this collection portrays the richness, variety, and complexity of women's emotions in medieval literature. The volume's careful attention to nuances of emotional state, to subtle shifts in feelings or perspectives, and to repressed feminine identities maps out a dynamic emotionology worthy of a closer look. Although one could question whether women's emotional states are always displayed with more intensity than those of their brothers, paramours, and husbands, this volume's focus on the "inner life" of women in medieval literature is both productive and illuminating."
--from the review by Roberta L. Krueger, The Medieval Review 12.04.26 (<https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/14424/12.04.26.html?sequence=1>)
-- From the Introduction to the volume by Vitctoria Blud and Juliana Dresvina
Jeff Rider considers the effects of spoons and whorls [and caroles] on cognitive processes in the past, and looks especially at processes stimulated by physical engagement with artefacts. The informal and informative journey Rider takes us on in this last contribution of the volume is a delightful and unusual final case study -- Merel Veldhuizen, Reviews in History, DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/2443
Given that narrative literature shares the structure of an emotion, reflects, purveys and plays with the ambient emotionology of the time and place in which it was created, and seeks to produce an emotional reaction in its public, moreover, it is more than a “fossil,” more than an “artifact,” more than a relic we can use to study a past emotionology. Insofar as we can surmount some very real cultural differences, we can hope that these stories will teach us their emotionology and produce an emotional reaction in us in the same way they did for their intended audiences. We can hope, that is, to experience the emotionology represented by these stories directly, even if only partially or poorly, and confront it with our own.
To the degree we can understand a past story, then, we too can, at least to some degree, feel the feelings it sought to provoke among its first audiences, learn its lessons, become conscious of the emotionology it purveys, and become honorary or corresponding members of the cultural tradition for which it was composed. To the degree we understand them, we can be educated by these stories in the same way their intended audiences were (although perhaps less effectively) and we can experience emotional effects analogous to those the stories produced in their intended audience. Understanding past stories requires and goes hand in hand with understanding their emotionology. We can understand a past story only to the degree we can understand its emotionology and can understand its emotionology only to the degree we can understand the story.
Marie de France says little about characters’ emotions in many of the most emotionally charged moments of the lais, encouraging audiences to draw on their experience to provide the emotional coloring of fraught moments. This reticence is part of what has made the lais successful beyond the twelfth-century francophone world.
Résumé:
Marie de France dit peu sur les émotions des personnages dans la plupart des moments les plus chargés émotionnellement des lais afin d’encourager le public de puiser dans sa propre expérience pour fournir la coloration émotionnelle de ces moments. Cette réticence a contribué beaucoup au succès des lais au-delà du monde francophone du XIIe siècle.
Zusammenfassung:
Marie de France sagt in ihren Lais in überaus emotional aufgeladenen Momenten so viel wie nichts über die Emotionen der Figuren. Damit provoziert sie, dass die Rezipienten ihre eigene Erfahrung einbringen und angespannte Situationen emotional ausmalen. Ihr Schweigen über Figurenemotionen hat dazu beigetragen, dass ihren Lais auch über das Frankreich des 12. Jahrhundert hinaus Erfolg beschert war.