Wide-ranging study of gender and the underlying ideologies of Old French and Occitan literature.

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, including the Occitanian region, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities. The contributors to this volume argue that because medieval texts were often read or sung aloud, voice is central for understanding the performance, transmission, and reception of work from the period across a wide variety of genres. These essays offer close readings of narrative and lyric poetry, chivalric romance, sermons, letters, political writing, motets, troubadour and trouvère lyric, crusade songs, love songs, and debate songs. Through literary, musical, and historiographical analyses, contributors highlight the voicing of gendered perspectives, expressions of sexuality, and power dynamics. The volume includes feminist readings, investigations of masculinity, queer theory, and intersectional approaches. The contributors interpret literary or musical works by Chrétien de Troyes, Aimeric de Peguilhan, Hue de la Ferté, the Chastelain de Couci, Jacques de Vitry, Christine de Pizan, Anne de Graville, Alain Chartier, and Giovanni Boccaccio, among others. Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song offers a valuable interdisciplinary approach and contributes to the history of women’s voices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. It illuminates the critical role of voice in negotiating culture, celebrating and innovating traditions, advancing personal and political projects, and defining the literary and musical developments that shaped medieval France. Contributors: Lisa Colton | Emily J Hutchinson | Daisy Delogu | Tamara Bentley Caudill | Katherine Kong | Meghan Quinlan | Lydia M Walker | Rachel May Golden | Anna Kathryn Grau | Anne Adele Levitsky

This book explores the historical and imaginary representation of the Saracen, or Muslim, in French writings from 1100 to 1500.

This collection, comprising nine critical essays from prominent and emerging medievalists, seeks to explore the different ways in which French authors of the Middle Ages transgress normative social and cultural gender codes in their literary works Offering fresh approaches to texts that have long been subjected to polarized critical analyses, the essays challenge traditional interpretations of gender roles in Old French literature, especially in the thematic areas of sexual deviation and transgression. This corpus emerges as possessing multiple shades and subtleties of meaning, long buried or ignored by conventional approaches to these texts. This is a conclusion much more in accord with what we know about the ability of the medieval imagination to grasp multiple meaning from a single word or act. The collection provides many examples of this multi-layering of transgressive meaning. Through the detailed studies of gender transgressions such as incest, cross-dressing, rape and homoeroticism, the reader will come to understand the many facets of the literary expression of sexuality in selected Old French texts, products of a society that was at least as diverse and complex as our own. These studies will be of particular value to those interested in Old French and gender studies by dint of accessible analyses of texts both familiar and arcane. The provocative subject matter makes the studies original and eminently readable.

This introduction to French medieval literature sets out to show that medieval writers were not merely 'recording' an oral tradition but were in fact very aware that they were retelling tales in a new medium.

In this study of sexual violence and rape in French medieval literature and law, Kathryn Gravdal examines an array of famous works never before analyzed in connection with sexual violence. Gravdal demonstrates the variety of techniques through which medieval discourse made rape acceptable: sometimes through humor and aestheticization, sometimes through the use of social and political themes, but especially through the romanticism of rape scenes.

Examining French literature from the medieval period, Findley revises our understanding of medieval literary composition as a largely masculine activity, suggesting instead that writing is seen in these texts as problematically gendered and often feminizing.