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Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe's Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race. As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, society was already preoccupied with skin color. Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, the book explores the multitude of ways the coding of black as “evil” and white as “good” existed in medieval European societies.

The Old French fabliaux are humorous short stories from the 13th century that resemble some of the most memorable tales in Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron (1348-1351). Yet their humor and ostensible frivolity conceal a serious challenge to didactic literature. A century later, Boccaccio used these types of tales to promote the openness of literary interpretation as a choice for the reader. This study shows that the fabliaux had a greater influence on the Decameron than has previously been recognized. Boccaccio took from the fabliaux the use of reversal as a technique for manipulating narrative structure; in addition, the manuscripts in which the fabliaux were transmitted served as models for the organization of the Decameron. The use of reversal in both the fabliaux and the Decameron underscores a paradigm shift in medieval thinking away from purely didactic literature toward a literature of enjoyment. Reversal in the fabliaux brings together linguistic and thematic opposites and interchanges them in order to show that these opposites offer equally valid positions from which the stories can be interpreted. Reversal also allows the fabliaux to adapt to a variety of contemporaneous genres while still maintaining their fundamental character. The fabliaux's use of reversal disrupts the moral didacticism preserved with the texts in manuscript anthologies. As Boccaccio standardized the medieval short story in the Decameron, he drew from both the fabliaux tradition and from the manuscript anthologies in which they were transmitted in order to conjoin diverse genres and provoke a multiplicity of interpretations.

While covering all the major work produced by Geoffrey Chaucer in his pre-Canterbury Tales career, this book seeks to correct the traditional interpretations of these poems. The author provides new interpretations of the three “dream visions” — Book of the Duchess, Parliament of Fowls, and House of Fame — as well as Chaucer's early masterwork Troilus and Criseyde. He draws a series of portraits of Chaucer as glimpsed in his work: the fledgling poet who is seeking to master the artificial style of French love poetry, the passionate author attempting to rebut critics of his work, and, finally, the master of a naturalistic style entirely his own.

Machaut’s Legacy focuses on the influence, in both specific and broad senses, of Guillaume de Machaut’s Judgment Series on his contemporaries, especially English and French, and on the development of narrative fiction that, beginning in the fourteenth century with Machaut’s decisive reshaping of the dit or tale, eventually culminates in that multiform genre known to later generations as “the novel.” Featuring chapters, here published for the first time, by leading figures in the field, Machaut’s Legacy covers a wide swath of literary history, providing models for identifying and estimating the importance of “influence” as a key factor in the composition of new works.

One of the most popular genres created and performed by Medieval troubadours and trouvères was the pastourelle. Though it varied greatly in its details, the genre was dominated by the following theme: a passing knight encounters and attempts to seduce a shepherdess who, in turn, defends herself against his advances in a variety of ways. The brilliance of the artists who manipulated the genre was revealed in their ability to innovate, synthesize, and elaborate upon the constraints of the form. This book examines the genre in the hands of three Medieval masters: Adam de la Halle, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan. The author explores the very different ways in which these individuals engaged with the form and subject matter of the pastourelle and transformed it, variously, into a stage for their dramatic artistry, a forum for their responses to social and ideological conditions, and, ultimately, into a distinctive statement bearing their individual mark. The result sheds new light on the evolving concept of author in the Middle Ages.

This book focuses on the advent of hybrid mythography in the Middle Ages as a form of commentary in vernacular poetry and, alternatively, as restyled and reformatted Latin prose commentary that reflects allegorical authorial self-projection. The complexity of mythography leads to the compilation of myths unified by traditional means—genealogy and history—but also by new means, a focus on a seminal progenitor or epic hero or imaginary goddess who reflects a humanist ideal. Humanism carries with it a privileging of the individual, the personal and subjective, and, most interestingly, a democratization that spurns the aristocratic, the ecclesiastical, and the allegorical. Innovative strategies alter the traditional polyphonic basis of mythography by emphasizing the literal and historical in place of the allegorical. The rise of Italian (or Franco-Italian) commentators—Dante, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Salutati, and Landino, among others—and, with them, the emergence of Tuscan Italian as the descendant of medieval Latin, is accompanied by debate over appropriateness in learned texts. The major mythographic commentary traditions of Virgil, Ovid, and Boethius continue, joined by entirely new commentary-authors. New forms of mythographic and legendary manual, in which men or women are for the most part featured separately, usher in yet another sign of changing times: the education of women and their increasing role as an audience and as commentary authors. Finally, with the rise of the vernacular, the transmission of new works by manuscript copy and early printing spreads the awareness of both new and old commentary traditions.

The book Ogling Ladies examines gazing female characters in a selection of medieval texts. While female scopophilia is harshly condemned in conduct literature and religious texts, female ogling is a common motif in medieval art and literature. Are artists and writers chronicling a widespread behavioral practice, or are they inventing it? The book looks at how female scopophilia functions in the medieval narrative and what effect it has on the ogling lady and her world. The theoretical framework of this project relies on psychoanalytic theory, in particular the work of the object-relations theorists D. W. Winnicott and Nancy Chodorow. This research emphasizes the importance of the mother’s early engagement with the infant, which is productive in conceptualizing the female gaze and its binary division into “desirable” and “forbidden” in medieval texts like Eneasroman, Parzival, Erec, and Iwein. Social formation is negotiated through the female gaze or, more precisely, through its splitting into an approved/approving motherly gaze and a forbidden sexual gaze. Male gender identity, it appears, remains unstable, causing male subjects to seek continued visual approval from women while simultaneously dreading their critical gaze.

Contributors to Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature consider the multiplicity and instability of identity in medieval French literature, examining the ways in which literary identity can be created and re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Moreover, it is possible to take one’s place in a group while remaining foreign to it. Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du Graal provides the perfect example of the latter. The tale opens with Perceval hunting alone in the forest, absorbed in his own pursuits, world, and thoughts. His “alone-ness” and self-absorption are evident as he moves toward an integration into a society from which he emerges both accepted and yet even more “different.” The ability to exist simultaneously inside and outside of a community serves as the focal point for the volume, which illustrates the breadth of perspectives from which one may view the “Other Within.” The chapters study identity through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of religious difference and of voice and naming. The works analyzed span genres—chanson de geste, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography—and historical periods, ranging from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. In so doing, they highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, underscoring both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they may initially appear.

Signs That Sing argues that Anglo-Saxon poets wrote by drawing from a broad range of verbal resources: oral tradition, ecclesiastical literature, and Christian liturgy. Hybrid oral, written, and liturgical ways of speaking form a fundamental poetic strategy in Old English verse. In the field of medieval literature, written oral-traditional idioms, such as formulaic systems, themes, typescenes, and story patterns, are commonly recognized as hybrid expressions. Signs That Sing describes two other major types of hybrid poetic expression: ritual signs and idioms that fuse oral and literate modes of interpretation. This book demonstrates how hybrid expressions play meaningful roles in Advent Lyrics (Christ I), “Alms-Giving,” Andreas, The Battle of Maldon, Beowulf, Deor, The Dream of the Rood, Genesis A/B, The Gifts of Men, Soul and Body I and II, Thureth, Widsith, and select riddles. By viewing hybrid expressions as a creative resource for Anglo-Saxon poets, we are in a better position to appreciate the rhetorical complexity of their poems. Ultimately, Signs That Sing presents new ways of reading and interpreting Old English poems, while offering scholars of orality and ritual studies theoretical and practical implications for the study of hybrid texts.