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The Visionary Queen: Justice, Reform, and the Labyrinth in Marguerite de Navarre
Theresa Brock
The Visionary Queen affirms Marguerite de Navarre’s status not only as a political figure, author, or proponent of nonschismatic reform but also as a visionary. In her life and writings, the queen of Navarre dissected the injustices that her society and its institutions perpetuated against women. We also see evidence that she used her literary texts, especially the Heptaméron, as an exploratory space in which to generate a creative vision for institutional reform. The Heptaméron’s approach to reform emerges from statistical analysis of the text’s seventy-two tales, which reveals new insights into trends within the work, including the different categories of wrongdoing by male, institutional representatives from the Church and aristocracy, as well as the varying responses to injustice that characters in the tales employ as they pursue reform. Throughout its chapters, The Visionary Queen foregrounds the trope of the labyrinth, a potent symbol in early modern Europe that encapsulated both the fallen world and redemption, two themes that underlie Marguerite's project of reform.
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Machine Plays in France: Between Italian Opera and French Tragedy in Music
Hélène Visentin
Book Abstract:
Since the nineteenth century, some of the most influential historians have portrayed opera and tragedy as wholly distinct cultural phenomena. These historians have denied a meaningful connection between the tragedy of the ancients and the efforts of early modern composers to arrive at styles that were intensely dramatic.
Drawing on a series of case studies, Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi traces the productive, if at times rivalrous, relationship between opera and tragedy from the institution of French regular tragedy under Richelieu in the 1630s to the reform of opera championed by Calzabigi and Gluck in the late eighteenth century. Blair Hoxby and his fellow contributors shed light on “neighbouring forms” of theatre, including pastoral drama, tragédie en machines, tragédie en musique, and Goldoni’s dramma giocoso. Their analysis includes famous masterpieces by Corneille, Voltaire, Metastasio, Goldoni, Calzabigi, Handel, and Gluck, as well as lesser-known artists such as Luisa Bergalli, the first female librettist to write for the public theatre in Italy. Opera, Tragedy, and Neighbouring Forms from Corneille to Calzabigi delves into a series of quarrels and debates in order to illuminate the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theatre.
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The Master
Patrick Rimbaud, David Ball, and Nicole Ball
The extraordinary life of Zhuang Zhou sits halfway between fable and philosophy.
"It was twenty-five centuries ago in the land of Song, between the Yellow River and the River Huai: Zhuang Zhou was born without a cry with his eyes wide open."
Welcome to China in the fifth century BCE, a colorful, violent, unstable world into which Zhuang is born. Here royals raise huge armies, constantly waging wars against one another. They have slaves, concubines. Gold is everywhere. And so is hunger. Born rich and entitled, Zhuang learns to refuse any official function. His travels bring him closer to ordinary people, from whom he learns how to live a simple and useful life. This is how he will become one of the greatest Chinese philosophers who gave his name to his legendary book, the Zhuangzi, one of the two foundational texts of Taoism--a magnificent procession of lively stories in which we meet dwarfs, virtuous bandits, butchers, powerful lords in their castles, turtles, charming concubines, and false sages. In this remarkable bildungsroman, award-winning French novelist Patrick Rambaud spins out the extraordinary life of Zhuang Zhou--a poetic, cruel, and often humorous tale, halfway between fable and philosophy. Source: Publisher
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La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age
Hélène E, Bilis; Jean-Vincent Blanchard; David Harrison; and Hélène Visentin
La Princesse de Clèves, written in 1678 by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, countess of Lafayette, is widely known as the first modern French novel. This open-access pedagogical translation and edition draws on the digital format to offer a rich variety of materials for readers of French and English. Translator’s notes enhance the fresh and lively translation, actively comparing the current version with earlier editions to heighten awareness of linguistic nuance and complexity. Interactive paragraphs and lexical definitions encourage readers to move with ease between the French and English texts. Accompanying didactic essays empower readers to reflect on Lafayette’s vocabulary and on practices of translation more broadly.
This ebook edition offers pedagogical dossiers and a variety of innovative resources influenced by the Digital Humanities, such as a mapping interface with georeferenced historical maps, word mining exercises, a digital timeline, and social network analyses. In addition to overviews of Lafayette’s milieu and adaptations of La Princesse de Clèves, the editors also include excerpts from rarely-translated letters published in an early modern gazette in response to the novel. These features enable a new generation of readers to grasp the seventeenth-century public’s reaction to Lafayette’s work.
Drawing on the affordances of the digital format to promote multilingualism and humanistic inquiry, the edition simultaneously encourages active engagement with the specificities of a particular language and culture. This project results from a collaboration between four professors who teach at liberal arts colleges and argues for critical approaches to digital technologies to celebrate a classic text.
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Why Do You Dance When You Walk?
Abdourahman A. Waberi, David Bell, and Nicola Bell
One morning in Paris on the way to kindergarten, a little girl asks her father “Papa, why do you dance when you walk?” The question is innocent and serious. Why does her father limp, why can’t he ride a bicycle or a scooter? Her father feels compelled to answer, to bring back the memories of his childhood in Djibouti and tell her what happened to his leg. It was a place of sunlight and dust and sickness, a sickness that made him different, unique. They called him a skinflint and a runt, but he was the smartest kid in his school.
Waberi remembers the shifting desert of Djibouti, the Red Sea, the shanty roofs of the houses in his neighborhood, an immense loneliness and some unforgettable characters: Papa-la-Tige who sold baubles to tourists, his tough, silent mother Zahra who trembled, and his grandmother nicknamed Cochise. He tells of the moment when his life changed forever and the ensuing struggle that made him a man, a man who knows the value of poetry, silence and freedom, a man who is still dancing.
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Robert de Reims: Songs and Motets
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Gaël Saint-Cricq, and Samuel N. Rosenberg
Robert de Reims, also known as “La Chievre de Rains,” was among the earliest trouvères—poet-composers who were contemporaries of the troubadours but who wrote in the dialects of northern France. This critical edition provides new translations into English and modern French of all the songs and motets ascribed to him, along with the original texts, the extant music, and a substantive introduction.
Active sometime between 1190 and 1220, Robert was an influential figure in the literary circles of Arras. Thirteen compositions set to music are here attributed to him, including nine chansons and four polyphonic motets that were broadly disseminated in the thirteenth century and beyond. Robert’s work is exceptional on a number of fronts. He lavished particular care on the phonic harmony of his words. Acoustic luxuriance and expertise in rhyming, grounded in the play of echoes and variation (often extending into the music), constitute the hallmark of his poetry. Moreover, he is the earliest trouvère known to have composed a parodic sotte chanson contre Amours (silly song against Love).
Located clearly at the nexus of monophonic song and polyphony, Robert’s corpus also poses the intriguing question of trouvère participation in the development of the polyphonic repertory. The case of Robert de Reims jostles and tempers the standard history of the chanson and motet.
Accessible and instructive, this trilingual critical edition of his complete works makes the oeuvre of this innovative and consequential trouvère available in one volume for the first time.
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Les jeunesses en France: économie, culture, sociologie
Christiane Métral
Part of a collection of articles focusing on the issues facing contemporary France.
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Machine Plays
Hélène Visentin
This article focuses on the practice of machine theater that originated from courtly spectacles in Italy during the Renaissance and developed throughout Western and Central Europe during the seventeenth century. Defined by rapid scene changes and special effects, machine plays reflect the Baroque fascination with both mechanical devices and the law of optics—or scenery perspective—to produce wonder while displaying royal power and prestige. The aim of this article is threefold: to provide an overview of the origins and development of machine theater, to examine the transmission and dissemination of stagecraft knowledge, and to look at the changing nature of machine plays performed by public theater companies, which took advantage of stage machinery innovations to broaden their repertoire, attract a larger audience, and remain competitive.
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Motets from the Chansonnier de Noailles
Gaël Saint-Cricq, Eglal Doss-Quinby, and Samuel N. Rosenberg
The collection of motets in manuscript Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds fr. 12615, known as the “Chansonnier de Noailles,” brings together ninety-one thirteenth-century motets in two to four parts, whose upper voices are all sung to vernacular texts. It is one of six diverse collections contained in the manuscript; it shares space with three different compilations of monophonic songs, a collection of songs and dits, various nonlyric texts, and several later additions, all gathered in a codex closely tied to the former northern province of Artois and in particular to the city of Arras. The motet collection is notable in several respects: with its ninety-one pieces it is the fourth-largest repository of thirteenth-century motets and the third-largest of motets in French; it is one of only two sizable sets of polyphonic motets preserved in provincial songbooks rather than Parisian collections, a fact that broadly affects the style of several groups of its motets; finally, it transmits an unusually high number of unica, due to the anthology’s inclusion in an Artesian chansonnier. Although the Chansonnier de Noailles has sparked the interest of bibliophiles and scholars since the first half of the eighteenth century, its faulty polyphonic notation has made editing the motets difficult; past editions have thus been incomplete and relied heavily upon concordant readings. This volume presents the music and texts (with translations into English) of the motets from the Chansonnier de Noailles, for the first time published in a single, coordinated, comprehensive critical edition.
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« Sottes chansons contre Amours » : parodie et burlesque au Moyen Âge
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Marie-Geneviève Grossel, and Samuel N. Rosenberg
Contre-texte de la chanson courtoise des trouvères, la « sotte chanson contre Amours » est un genre parodique qui vise à subvertir le Grand Chant tout en le célébrant. Sa spécificité naît de la réflexion (à tous les sens du terme) menée par les mots sur une tradition dont la raillerie ne laisse jamais oublier la valeur. Tirées pour la plupart d’un chansonnier de provenance lorraine copié aux alentours de 1310 et d’une petite anthologie de chansons présentées au Puy de Valenciennes au dernier quart du XIIIe siècle ou au début du XIVe, les pièces que nous rassemblons ici se caractérisent par la distorsion, l’inversion et la dérision du système dominant ; elles séduiront tous ceux qui s’intéressent à la parodie, au burlesque, à l’obscénité, au non-sens et au réalisme au sein de la lyrique française du Moyen Âge. Souhaitant apporter un éclairage neuf sur le rire chez les trouvères, nous mettons ce corpus à la portée des lecteurs modernes en offrant une édition critique rigoureuse assortie d’une traduction en français moderne et d’une riche introduction qui met en relief les moyens de la parodie dans la sotte chanson aussi bien que le contexte culturel où celle-ci vit le jour.
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Cultural Performances in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Nancy Freeman Regalado
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Roberta L. Krueger, and E. Jane Burns
This collection of essays pays tribute to Nancy Freeman Regalado, a groundbreaking scholar in the field of medieval French literature whose research has always pushed beyond disciplinary boundaries. The articles in the volume reflect the depth and diversity of her scholarship, as well as her collaborations with literary critics, philologists, historians, art historians, musicologists, and vocalists — in France, England, and the United States. Inspired by her most recent work, these twenty-four essays are tied together by a single question, rich in ramifications: How does performance shape our understanding of medieval and pre-modern literature and culture, whether the nature of that performance is visual, linguistic, theatrical, musical, religious, didactic, socio-political, or editorial? The studies presented here invite us to look afresh at the interrelationship of audience, author, text, and artifact, to imagine new ways of conceptualizing the creation, transmission, and reception of medieval literature, music, and art.
Contributors: Anne Azéma, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Cynthia J. Brown, Elizabeth A. R. Brown, Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, E. Jane Burns, Ardis Butterfield, Kimberlee Campbell, Robert L. A. Clark, Mark Cruse, Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Sylvia Huot, Marilyn Lawrence, Kathleen A. Loysen, Laurie Postlewate, Edward H. Roesner, Samuel N. Rosenberg, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Pamela Sheingorn, Helen Solterer, Jane H. M. Taylor, Evelyn Birge Vitz, Lori J. Walters, and Michel Zink.
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French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth-Century: Event, Image, Text
Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin
The articles included in this volume use a variety of disciplinary approaches to examine each in its own way the interpretation of texts and archival documents that give accounts of French ceremonial entries in the sixteenth century. By their very nature, ceremonial entries require an interdisciplinary approach: they bring together a number of artistic media such as music, architecture, and literature, as well as a range of political concerns including international diplomacy and the relations between urban and royal power. Few cultural constructs offer such rich and varied terrain to the student of sixteenth-century France.
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The Old French Ballette: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Samuel N. Rosenberg, and Elizabeth Aubrey
L’important recueil de poésies conservé dans Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce 308, copié vers 1310, est le seul chansonnier des trouvères dont les pièces soient classées par genre, de préférence à d’autres critères. Sous la rubrique « Ci en comancent les balletes » sont regroupés cent quatre-vingt-huit textes anonymes, destinés à la danse bien que la musique n’y figure pas. Les ballettes ont joué un rôle déterminant dans le développement du lyrisme médiéval, notamment dans la genèse des formes fixes à refrain du XIVe siècle. Composé principalement de pièces uniques, le recueil qu’éditent Eglal Doss-Quinby, Samuel N. Rosenberg et Elizabeth Aubrey illustre une tradition lyrique élaborée en Lorraine, contemporaine du grand chant courtois des trouvères, mais que n’avaient pas reconnue, au XIIIe siècle, les compilateurs de chansonniers conventionnels. Précédée d’une introduction examinant avec méthode les problèmes de définition que pose le répertoire, cette édition critique rigoureuse est systématiquement enrichie de la traduction anglaise des ballettes et, pour vingt-six chansons, de la musique qui leur revient et a été identifiée dans d’autres sources manuscrites.
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L’Invraisemblance du Pouvoir. Mises en scène de la souveraineté au XVIIe siècle en France
Jean-Vincent Blanchard and Hélène Visentin
Contents
Introduction: la souveraineté est-elle une poétique de l’exception? / Jean-Vincent Blanchard et Hélène Visentin
Le spectacle du sang, l’incapacité des rois et l’impuissance du public: représentation de la souveraineté et spectacle violent dans les tragédies du tout premier XVIIe siècle; Scédase d’Alexandre Hardy / Christian Biet
La vérité tyrannique / John D. Lyons
De l’invraisemblance du pouvoir au pouvoir de l’invraisemblance / Bénédicte Louvat-Molozay
Reines, invraisemblables rois? Reines vierges et épouses célibataires dans le théâtre du XVIIe siècle / Derval Conroy
Vraisemblance dramatique, invraisemblable homotexte? Bérénice de Racine / Ralph Heyndels
Écrire le roi au seuil de l’âge classique: pouvoir et fiction des entrées royales; de quelques fausses entrées / Marie-France Wagner
Pouvoir, police, récit: sur Clélie de Madeleine de Scudéry et Le Roman Bourgeois d’Antoine Furetière / Daniel Vaillancourt
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La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, tragédie (1640)
François de Chapoton and Hélène Visentin
Créée en 1639 à l'Hôtel de Bourgogne, l'un des deux grands théâtres publics parisiens de l'époque, jamais rééditée depuis le XVIIe siècle, La Descente d'Orphée aux enfers de Chapoton remporta un vif succès, confirmé par la représentation d'une version remaniée en 1647 puis en 1662, toujours à Paris. Mais cette œuvre mythologique, qui s'apparente à la tragédie à machines, a connu le sort de ce genre dramatique : à l'exception notable des pièces à grand spectacle de Pierre Corneille (Andromède, La Conquête de la Toison d'or) ou de Molière (Amphitryon, Dom Juan, Psyché), qui ont gardé ou retrouvé les faveurs de la critique, des metteurs en scène et du public, ce genre a longtemps été délaissé, voire totalement ignoré, au profit de la tragédie unie rationnelle, à côté de laquelle pourtant il s'épanouit tout au long du siècle. Si Chapoton reste un auteur mineur, La Descente d'Orphée aux enfers témoigne, plus que bien d'autres œuvres du même genre, d'une évolution de la scénographie de plus en plus adaptée aux techniques de l'illusion théâtrale ; outre son intérêt propre, qui doit être aussi mesuré à l'aune du devenir de la tragédie mythologique contemporaine, elle mérite à ce titre une attention particulière. La présente édition entend ainsi contribuer aux travaux qui, depuis vingt-cinq ans, ont réhabilité la tragédie à machines au sein de la production dramatique du Grand Siècle, c'est-à-dire cherché à éclairer d'un jour plus nuancé l'esthétique théâtrale du XVIIe siècle dans son ensemble.
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Songs of the Women Trouvères
Eglal Doss-Quinby, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubrey
This groundbreaking anthology brings together for the first time the works of women poet-composers, or trouvères, in northern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Refuting the long-held notion that there are no extant Old French lyrics by women from this period, the editors of the volume present songs attributed to eight named female trouvères along with a varied selection of anonymous compositions in the feminine voice that may have been composed by women. The book includes the Old French texts of seventy-five compositions, extant music for eighteen monophonic songs and nineteen polyphonic motets, English translations, and a substantial introduction.
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Les refrains chez les trouvères du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe
Eglal Doss-Quinby
La conception courante du refrain comme répétition périodique à l’intérieur d’une forme chantée ne rend pas compte des divers principes de composition qui règlent la mise en œuvre d’un genre qui a joué un rôle capital dans la constitution de la lyrique médiévale. Malgré l’intérêt et la complexité de la matière en raison de sa re-création à chaque reprise intra- ou inter-textuelle une étude intégrale des refrains chez les trouvères, voire une définition (le pluriel s’avère plus exact), fait défaut. Tel est précisément l’objet de cet ouvrage: proposer des critères d’identification permettant d’opérer un classement rigoureux du corpus (vérifié à partir d’un échantillon statistique) et analyser la formulation, les manifestations, les modes d’intégration du refrain ainsi que ses fonctions structurales et poétiques.
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