Search results for ""Author Douglas Kelly""

Medieval writers frequently refer to the composition of their own verse and prose works. These authorial interventions are often cryptic and partial, bringing them together, like pieces in a puzzle, reveals a coherent picture of their art of poetry and prose. However, beyond the interest of this knowledge in its own right, it is also necessary to find out how it can be used to interpret, evaluate, and appreciate the works that exemplify it. As the French art of invention emerged from the medieval Latin tradition in rhetoric and poetics, vernacular authors, from Chretien de Troyes to Christine de Pizan, adapted it to the composition of their own narratives, lyric poems, and treatises. This book brings together a number of essays that show how medieval writers in the translatio studii invented, with subtlety and imagination, diverse, original, and even compelling works that conform to their literary art. Focusing on both well known and less well known authors and works, the essays are grouped under the following topics: the art of invention, the Roman de Troie, Arthurian verse romances and the matiere de Bretagne, prose romance on the knights of the Round Table and on the Seven Sages of Rome, Occitan and Old French lyric, and late medieval allegory and the Dit.

Read more less

A close examination of an important theme in Machaut's works. A milestone in Machaut studies and in late-medieval French literature in general. Machaut, already considered the seminal figure in late-medieval poetics and music, here comes across in these respects more clearly than ever. Kelly also further contextualises him within what we might call the authorial `apprenticeship tradition' of Boethius, the Roman de la Rose, Dante, and later Gower, Chaucer, and Christine de Pizan. The fruit of one of the field's most distinguished scholars today. Nadia Margolis, Mount Holyoke College. Guillaume de Machaut was celebrated in the later Middle Ages as a supreme poet and composer, and accordingly, his poetry was recommended as amodel for aspiring poets. In his Voir Dit, Toute Belle, a young, aspiring poet, convinces the Machaut figure to mentor her. This volume examines Toute Belle as she masters Machaut's dual arts of poetry and love, focusing onher successful apprenticeship in these arts; it also provides a thorough review of Machaut's art of love and art of poetry in his dits and lyricsm, and the previous scholarship on these topics. It goes on to treat Machaut's legacy among poets who, like Toute Belle, adapted his poetic craft in new and original ways. A concluding analysis of melodie identifies the synaesthetic pleasure that late medieval poets, including Machaut, offer their readers. Douglas Kelly is Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Read more less

First English translation of an important twelfth-century romance, giving an account of the Trojan war and its consequences. Winner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas, one of the three"romances of antiquity" (romans d'antiquité). These romances launched the plots, themes and structures of the genre, then blossoming in the hands of authors such as Chrétien de Troyes. As an account of the Trojan War, Benoît's work is of necessity a poem about war and its causes, how it was fought and what its consequences were for the combatants. But the author's choice of the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, his fondness for description, his abilityto recount the intensity of personal struggles, and above all his fascination with the trials and tribulations of Love, which affect some of the work's most prominent warriors (among them Paris and his love for Helen, and Troilusand his love for Briseida), all combine to fashion this romance - in which events from long ago are presented as a reflection of the poet's own feudal and courtly worlds. This translation, the first into English, aims to bring the poem and the author to a wider audience. It is accompanied by an introduction and notes. Glyn S. Burgess is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool; Douglas Kelly is Emeritus Professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Read more less

The two romances translated in this volume, the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d’Eneas, form, along with the Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, a group of texts that are of considerable importance within French and European literature and culture. Composed between c. 1150 and c. 1165, these romances create a bridge between classical tales (the Thèbes is based on the Thebaid of Statius, the Eneas on the Aeneid of Virgil) and the burgeoning vernacular romances, represented especially by Chrétien de Troyes. As a group, these three works are frequently known as the romances of antiquity (romans d’antiquité) and they introduce into French literature the dominant contemporary themes of chivalry and love. They are set against a feudal and courtly background in which themes such as war, prowess inheritance and the possession of land are crucial. As they adapt their Latin sources, these romances, especially the Eneas, exploit the works of Ovid, especially in the presentation of the theme of love, and they also make use of the principles of rhetorical composition as studied in the schools (both romances contain remarkable examples of descriptions of both people and objects).This is the first volume to contain two complete translations of the three romances of antiquity. The translation of the Roman d’Eneas is the first English translation of this text since that of John A. Yunck in 1974.

Read more less