CONGRESS CANCELED Sacred and Profane, Clerical and Courtly: The Worlds of Love in the Age of Jean Gerson and Alain Chartier
Description
Contemporaries Jean Gerson and Alain Chartier are exciting subjects for collaborative study. Both authors were foundational to vernacular literary culture at the dawn of fifteenth-century French humanism, Gerson in popular preaching and Catholic education, and Chartier in poetry equally engaged with the contemporary world, but promulgating an ethic of love with a questionable relationship to Christian morality. Intrigued by this complexity, our Societies decided to explore the theme of love in particular with a focus on how the sacred and profane, the clerical and courtly coexisted in dialogue between many vernacular sources directed at a wide reading public, including women.
Our topic naturally invites a range of scholarly approaches to Gerson, Chartier, and their contemporaries. Manuscript study gives us many collections where the licentious (such as the Belle Dame and its cycle) and orthodox devotional writings (such as Le Miroir des dames) were assembled in the same volume with no apparent sense of contradiction. Both of our authors also flourished at the dawn of print culture. We expect close textual analysis of works by these authors using approaches indebted to literary criticism, literary theory, history of ideas, and more. Linda Burke
CONGRESS CANCELED Sacred and Profane, Clerical and Courtly: The Worlds of Love in the Age of Jean Gerson and Alain Chartier
Bernhard 212
Contemporaries Jean Gerson and Alain Chartier are exciting subjects for collaborative study. Both authors were foundational to vernacular literary culture at the dawn of fifteenth-century French humanism, Gerson in popular preaching and Catholic education, and Chartier in poetry equally engaged with the contemporary world, but promulgating an ethic of love with a questionable relationship to Christian morality. Intrigued by this complexity, our Societies decided to explore the theme of love in particular with a focus on how the sacred and profane, the clerical and courtly coexisted in dialogue between many vernacular sources directed at a wide reading public, including women.
Our topic naturally invites a range of scholarly approaches to Gerson, Chartier, and their contemporaries. Manuscript study gives us many collections where the licentious (such as the Belle Dame and its cycle) and orthodox devotional writings (such as Le Miroir des dames) were assembled in the same volume with no apparent sense of contradiction. Both of our authors also flourished at the dawn of print culture. We expect close textual analysis of works by these authors using approaches indebted to literary criticism, literary theory, history of ideas, and more. Linda Burke