Description
Book SynopsisReading a range of texts significant in their own time but little studied today, the author presents a view of late medieval French poetry in all its subtle variety: its quirkiness, its rhyming, its frequent moral seriousness, its occasional bawdiness, and the ambiguities of its authorial I.
Trade Review'Johnson's book breaks important new ground in both medieval and Renaissance studies. he focuses on a era that is just beginning to be considered on its own terms by scholars, and he presents a provocative and - to my mind - wholly justified rethinking of traditional units of literary periodization. By stressing the dynamic interrelationships between late medieval and Renaissance developments in France, he not only sheds new light on both but also suggests a more profitable and historically valid way of conceiving of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries as constituting a whole. Johnson's close readings illuminate a number of little-known but important texts, and his concept of literary and verbal play gives interpretive coherence and unity to the brilliantly heterogeneous literary corpus he studies, which ranges from courtly lyric poetry to didactic prose.' Kevin Brownlee, University of Pennsylvania
Table of ContentsA note on the texts; Prologue: to the reader; 1. Les Regles du jeu: Guillaume de Machaut and poetic practice; 2. Playing with the 'I': Christine de Pizan and the virgin; 3. 'J'est un autre': Alain Chartier and the game of love and death; 4. The play of rhyme with Raison: Jean meschinot and the 'I' of everyman; 5. Playing dirty: Jean Molinet and Bawdy Verse; Epilogue: connections; Notes; Index.
