Description
Book SynopsisJohan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested
Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga’s perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.
The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some “cultural form,” to borrow Huizinga’s expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Working with Huizinga’s Legacy
Tracy Adams and Charles-Louis Morand-Mètivier 1 Color Values, or Life with Grey
Andrea Tarnowski 2 Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-Century Culture
Stephen G. Nichols 3 Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-Denis
Derek R. Whaley 4 “Present en sa personne”: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Burgundian Literature
Helen Swift 5 Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception
Anneliese Pollock Renck 6 The Rhètoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print
Cynthia J. Brown 7 François Villon and France: Emotional (De)constructions
Charles-Louis Morand-Mètivier 8 La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts: Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier
Joan E. McRae 9 Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late Medieval French Visual Culture
Tracy Adams 10 No Job for a Man: Fifteenth-Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency
Zita Eva Rohr Conclusion: French Historians in Search of the Historiographical Identity of the French Fifteenth Century
Franck Collard (translated by Tracy Adams)
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
