Gender, Circulation, and Re-Invention in Medieval French Literature and Lyric

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Special Session

Organizer Name

Rachel May Golden; Katherine Kong

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville; Independent Scholar

Presider Name

Katherine Kong

Paper Title 1

Re-Inventing Courtly Gender in La Vie de Sainte Marie l’Egyptienne

Presenter 1 Name

Margaret Cotter-Lynch

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Southeastern Oklahoma State Univ.

Paper Title 2

The (Re-)Invention of Silence: Agency, Power, and Genderqueerness in Le Roman de Silence

Presenter 2 Name

Adam McLain

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Harvard Divinity School

Paper Title 3

Real Men Preach: Constructions of Clerical Masculinity in the Context of Thirteenth-Century Crusade Preaching

Presenter 3 Name

Lydia Walker

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville

Start Date

9-5-2019 1:30 PM

Session Location

Schneider 1335

Description

This session employs gender as a critical category of analysis to interpret aspects of circulation and re-invention in medieval French literature, lyric, and song.

We construe circulation broadly, as it describes the movement and return of melodic lines; vocal transmission, performance, or memory; contrafacture practices; generic re-purposing and innovation; and the physical travel and returning home of bodies, manuscripts, and chansonniers. Circulation’s insistence on the notion of return invites interrogation of the relationship of origin to destination—a movement that variously parallels processes of re-invention, as seen in interconnections among source texts, their interpretations, translations, and re-inventions. Since writing, performance, and travel were gendered and embodied activities in medieval France, we query how lyric, literary, ­and musical repertories demonstrate these inflections. Rachel M. Golden