This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts f... more This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts for women, the Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and the Ménagier de Paris. It argues that the dysphoric emotional states felt by the Legend's women not only make erotic love illegible as an ennobling emotional experience, but also embody disturbing states of obstructed agency that threaten to undo established affective relations between the aesthetics of love and the social. In contrast, contemporary conduct texts for women construct emotion in ideologically satisfying ways by writing women good in their roles as wives and household managers, thereby providing a clearly legible alternative to fin' amor and its definitions of noble subjectivity.
Page 1. MAPS IDENTITY AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger Lesley B. Cormack Jonathan Hart Natalia Pylypiuk ed... more Page 1. MAPS IDENTITY AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger Lesley B. Cormack Jonathan Hart Natalia Pylypiuk ed1tors - ... (Contact MAPS, IDENTITY, AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger, Lesley B. Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylypiuk, editors THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS ...
were the result of the “backwardness and weakness” of communal policing and court systems. What t... more were the result of the “backwardness and weakness” of communal policing and court systems. What to previous scholars seemed extralegal or private procedures, are shown to be an integral part of the functioning legal system. I found the contrast with the reconciliations of the “Great Devotion,” usually referred to as “The Alleluia,” that I studied striking. While that process was in the hands of a commissioned arbiter, who dictated the terms, Jansen’s parties settle their differences among themselves and then have the peace contract formalized by a notary. This seems true even when the matter is murder or political violence. The last chapter, for me among the most interesting, is first a study of the rituals of peacemaking, in particular the essential component of a public ritual kiss on the lips between the reconciled parties (something borrowed from the Catholic Mass). This ritual study is complemented by an art historical section, which survey’s images of peacemaking in Italy from the thirteenth to fifteen centuries. These often take the form of ex voto wall paintings commissioned in churches by the parties, another example of the “sacral” understanding of peacemaking. Professor Jansen shows that, already in the late 1200s, the iconography was settled: the reconciled parties kneel, with arms crossed over their chests, and kiss on the lips, while an “Angel of Peace” spreads its wings over them and, putting its hands on their shoulders, guides them toward one another. While principally focused on Florence, where the archival sources are especially rich, Professor Jansen’s conclusions seem to this reviewer valid for the other cities of communal Italy, and, for them, up to the earlysixteenth century. All future work on the rituals and realities of peacemaking in medieval Italy will have to begin with this superb study.
By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arv... more By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arveragus departs for England, the Franklin's Tale reorients the romance conventions of the Breton lai to follow the logic of contemporary conduct texts for good wives. Chaucer thereby explores how masculine sympathy for the good wife appropriates the structures of feeling at work in conduct texts in order to forge new associations between men as disparate as Arveragus, Aurelius, and the clerk of Orléans. But Chaucer also encourages us to linger and continue to feel alongside Dorigen, and as a result to feel the emotional costs women must bear to make such feminine virtue and masculine sympathy possible.
This paper focuses on two related moments of hybridity in late medieval conduct literature concer... more This paper focuses on two related moments of hybridity in late medieval conduct literature concerned with the management of the conduct of the good wife's daily life. First, it examines the fusion of clerical and lay authority found in the so-called journées chrétiennes, a group of texts written by clerics to help lay people lead a contemplative life from within the married estate. Second, it considers the epistemological confusion evident in a similar attempt to navigate the interpenetration of lay and clerical experience in the opening sections of Le Menagier de Paris. It concludes that such texts make possible, through the labour of their performative reading practices, a process of textual and cultural enrichment that allows their readers to engage with the social in new ways.
... Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); ... more ... Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations ...
Although Monica McAlpine’s The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters’ appeared in PMLA in 1... more Although Monica McAlpine’s The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters’ appeared in PMLA in 1980, the same year as John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, it was not really until the 1990s that gay/ lesbian/queer studies began to have a major impact on medieval literary criticism.1 And here, probably Chaucer studies has been in the forefront of queer approaches, as shown by the work of John M. Bowers, Glenn Burger, Catherine Cox, Carolyn Dinshaw, Steven F. Kruger, Karma Lochrie, Susan Schibanoff, Robert S. Sturges, and others.2 The most important queer theorists for this reconsideration of Chaucer studies and sexuality have been Jonathan Dollimore (Sexual Dissidence), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Between Men, Epistemology of the Closet, Tendencies, and ‘Queer Performativity’), and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter).3
Although little known today, La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient, written by the Cilician... more Although little known today, La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient, written by the Cilician Armenian prince Hetoum of Korikos, was a popular text throughout the late medieval and early modern period. Fifteen manuscript copies of the original French text and thirty-one copies of the scribal Latin translation survive.1 The Latin text was later translated back into French: anonymously in British Library MS Cotton Otho.D.V. and then in 1351 by the monk Jean le Long, as part of a collection of Eastern travel literature and works relating to the Mongols.2 Hetoum s work enjoyed a similar popularity with the early European printers.There were three undated, early sixteenth-century printings of the original French text, under the tide Sensuyrent les fleurs des histoires de la terre Dori- ent: first in Paris by Philippe Le Noir, second in Paris by Denys Janot after Le Noir, and third in Lyon, also after Le Noir, for Benoist Rigaud. These editions show that Hetoum’s text was considered more than a historical curiosity, for Le Noir attempts to bring the book up to date by replacing the original Book IV and its plan to reconquer the Holy Land with a new book entitled “des Sarrazins e desTurcz depuis le premier iusqus aux pre-sens q’ont conqueste Rhodes Hongrye et dernierement assailli Austriche” [A history from the beginning to the present of the Turks who had conquered Rhodes, Hungary, and lately besieged Austria]. Also, in 1529, Le Long’s French translation of the Latin text was published under the title L’Hysloire merueilleuse plaisante et recreatiw du grand Empereur de Tartaric. Editions of the Latin text were published six times throughout the sixteenth centurv.3
This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts f... more This article reads the Legend of Good Women alongside two late-fourteenth-century conduct texts for women, the Livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry and the Ménagier de Paris. It argues that the dysphoric emotional states felt by the Legend's women not only make erotic love illegible as an ennobling emotional experience, but also embody disturbing states of obstructed agency that threaten to undo established affective relations between the aesthetics of love and the social. In contrast, contemporary conduct texts for women construct emotion in ideologically satisfying ways by writing women good in their roles as wives and household managers, thereby providing a clearly legible alternative to fin' amor and its definitions of noble subjectivity.
Page 1. MAPS IDENTITY AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger Lesley B. Cormack Jonathan Hart Natalia Pylypiuk ed... more Page 1. MAPS IDENTITY AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger Lesley B. Cormack Jonathan Hart Natalia Pylypiuk ed1tors - ... (Contact MAPS, IDENTITY, AND TRAVEL Glenn Burger, Lesley B. Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylypiuk, editors THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA PRESS ...
were the result of the “backwardness and weakness” of communal policing and court systems. What t... more were the result of the “backwardness and weakness” of communal policing and court systems. What to previous scholars seemed extralegal or private procedures, are shown to be an integral part of the functioning legal system. I found the contrast with the reconciliations of the “Great Devotion,” usually referred to as “The Alleluia,” that I studied striking. While that process was in the hands of a commissioned arbiter, who dictated the terms, Jansen’s parties settle their differences among themselves and then have the peace contract formalized by a notary. This seems true even when the matter is murder or political violence. The last chapter, for me among the most interesting, is first a study of the rituals of peacemaking, in particular the essential component of a public ritual kiss on the lips between the reconciled parties (something borrowed from the Catholic Mass). This ritual study is complemented by an art historical section, which survey’s images of peacemaking in Italy from the thirteenth to fifteen centuries. These often take the form of ex voto wall paintings commissioned in churches by the parties, another example of the “sacral” understanding of peacemaking. Professor Jansen shows that, already in the late 1200s, the iconography was settled: the reconciled parties kneel, with arms crossed over their chests, and kiss on the lips, while an “Angel of Peace” spreads its wings over them and, putting its hands on their shoulders, guides them toward one another. While principally focused on Florence, where the archival sources are especially rich, Professor Jansen’s conclusions seem to this reviewer valid for the other cities of communal Italy, and, for them, up to the earlysixteenth century. All future work on the rituals and realities of peacemaking in medieval Italy will have to begin with this superb study.
By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arv... more By focusing on the problems that Dorigen faces in maintaining her status as a good wife after Arveragus departs for England, the Franklin's Tale reorients the romance conventions of the Breton lai to follow the logic of contemporary conduct texts for good wives. Chaucer thereby explores how masculine sympathy for the good wife appropriates the structures of feeling at work in conduct texts in order to forge new associations between men as disparate as Arveragus, Aurelius, and the clerk of Orléans. But Chaucer also encourages us to linger and continue to feel alongside Dorigen, and as a result to feel the emotional costs women must bear to make such feminine virtue and masculine sympathy possible.
This paper focuses on two related moments of hybridity in late medieval conduct literature concer... more This paper focuses on two related moments of hybridity in late medieval conduct literature concerned with the management of the conduct of the good wife's daily life. First, it examines the fusion of clerical and lay authority found in the so-called journées chrétiennes, a group of texts written by clerics to help lay people lead a contemplative life from within the married estate. Second, it considers the epistemological confusion evident in a similar attempt to navigate the interpenetration of lay and clerical experience in the opening sections of Le Menagier de Paris. It concludes that such texts make possible, through the labour of their performative reading practices, a process of textual and cultural enrichment that allows their readers to engage with the social in new ways.
... Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); ... more ... Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations ...
Although Monica McAlpine’s The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters’ appeared in PMLA in 1... more Although Monica McAlpine’s The Pardoner’s Homosexuality and How It Matters’ appeared in PMLA in 1980, the same year as John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, it was not really until the 1990s that gay/ lesbian/queer studies began to have a major impact on medieval literary criticism.1 And here, probably Chaucer studies has been in the forefront of queer approaches, as shown by the work of John M. Bowers, Glenn Burger, Catherine Cox, Carolyn Dinshaw, Steven F. Kruger, Karma Lochrie, Susan Schibanoff, Robert S. Sturges, and others.2 The most important queer theorists for this reconsideration of Chaucer studies and sexuality have been Jonathan Dollimore (Sexual Dissidence), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Between Men, Epistemology of the Closet, Tendencies, and ‘Queer Performativity’), and Judith Butler (Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter).3
Although little known today, La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient, written by the Cilician... more Although little known today, La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient, written by the Cilician Armenian prince Hetoum of Korikos, was a popular text throughout the late medieval and early modern period. Fifteen manuscript copies of the original French text and thirty-one copies of the scribal Latin translation survive.1 The Latin text was later translated back into French: anonymously in British Library MS Cotton Otho.D.V. and then in 1351 by the monk Jean le Long, as part of a collection of Eastern travel literature and works relating to the Mongols.2 Hetoum s work enjoyed a similar popularity with the early European printers.There were three undated, early sixteenth-century printings of the original French text, under the tide Sensuyrent les fleurs des histoires de la terre Dori- ent: first in Paris by Philippe Le Noir, second in Paris by Denys Janot after Le Noir, and third in Lyon, also after Le Noir, for Benoist Rigaud. These editions show that Hetoum’s text was considered more than a historical curiosity, for Le Noir attempts to bring the book up to date by replacing the original Book IV and its plan to reconquer the Holy Land with a new book entitled “des Sarrazins e desTurcz depuis le premier iusqus aux pre-sens q’ont conqueste Rhodes Hongrye et dernierement assailli Austriche” [A history from the beginning to the present of the Turks who had conquered Rhodes, Hungary, and lately besieged Austria]. Also, in 1529, Le Long’s French translation of the Latin text was published under the title L’Hysloire merueilleuse plaisante et recreatiw du grand Empereur de Tartaric. Editions of the Latin text were published six times throughout the sixteenth centurv.3
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