This collection considers the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in numerous ways. The works analyzed span genres—epic, romance, lyric poetry, hagiography, fabliaux—and historical periods from the twelfth century to the late Middle Ages. Contributors examine the complexity of the notion of self through a wide range of lenses, from marginal characters to gender to questions of voice and naming. Studying a variety of texts—including Conte du Graal, Roman de la Rose, Huon de Bordeaux, and the Oxford Roland—they conceptualize the Other Within as an individual who simultaneously exists within a group while remaining foreign to it. They explore the complex interactions between and among individuals and groups, and demonstrate how identity can be imposed and self-imposed not only by characters but by authors and audiences. Taken together, these essays highlight the fluidity and complexity of identity in medieval French texts, and underscore both the richness of the literature and its engagement with questions that are at once more and less modern than they initially appear. Contributors: Adrian P. Tudor | Kristin L. Burr | William Burgwinkle | Jane Gilbert | Francis Gingras | Sara I. James | Douglas Kelly | Mary Jane Schenck | James R. Simpson | Jane H.M. Taylor

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. These always arresting and highly significant moments of 'specular' encounter are examined in numerous Old and Middle French romances, hagiographic texts, epics and brief narratives. Maddox discloses the key role of identity in an original reading of the Lais of Marie de France as a unified collection, as well as in Arthurian literature, fictions of the courtly tryst, genealogies and medieval family romance. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, Maddox considers the construction of identity in a range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood.

Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.

A thirteenth-century text purporting to represent a debate between a Jew and a Christian begins with the latter's exposition of the virgin birth, something the Jew finds incomprehensible at the most basic level, for reasons other than theological: "Speak to me in French and explain your words!" he says. "Gloss for me in French what you are saying in Latin!" While the Christian and the Jew of the debate both inhabit the so-called Latin Middle Ages, the Jew is no more comfortable with Latin than the Christian would be with Hebrew. Communication between the two is possible only through the vernacular. In Vernacular Voices, Kirsten Fudeman looks at the roles played by language, and especially medieval French and Hebrew, in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect the way Jews thought, how they interacted with one another and with Christians, and who they perceived themselves to be? What circumstances and forces led to the rise of a medieval Jewish tradition in French? Who were the writers, and why did they sometimes choose to write in the vernacular rather than Hebrew? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community? Drawing on a variety of texts written in medieval French and Hebrew, including biblical glosses, medical and culinary recipes, incantations, prayers for the dead, wedding songs, and letters, Fudeman challenges readers to open their ears to the everyday voices of medieval French-speaking Jews and to consider French elements in Hebrew manuscripts not as a marginal phenomenon but as reflections of a vibrant and full vernacular existence. Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, she demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

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

Transforming Tales argues that the study of transformation is crucial for understanding a wide range of canonical work in medieval French literature. From the lais and Arthurian romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, through the Roman de la Rose and its widespread influence, to the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé and the vast prose cycles of the late Middle Ages, metamorphosis is a recurrent theme, resulting in some of the best-known and most powerful literature of the era. Transforming Tales is the first book in English to explore in detail the importance of ideas of metamorphosis in French literature from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. This book's purpose is twofold: it traces a series of figures (the werewolf, the snake-woman, the nymph, the magician, amongst others) as they are transformed within individual texts; and it also examines the way in which the stories of transformation themselves become rewritten during the course of the Middle Ages. Griffin's approach combines close readings and comparisons of literary texts with readings informed by modern critical theories which are grounded in many of the ideas raised by medieval metamorphosis: the body, gender, identity and categories of life. Literary depictions and reworkings of transformation raise questions about medieval understandings of the differences between human and animal, man and woman, God and man, life and death—these are the questions explored in Transforming Tales.