Le Lai du conseil.

A giver of gifts and generous to a fault, the knight of the Lanval narrative has always been a noble, or, as Marie de France describes him, -un mut gentil vassal‖ 1 (Rychner 72, ln. 3). In Marie de France's text, Lanval maintains his noble status-he is poor only briefly, and he never loses his quintessential quality of courtoisie. As many critics agree, however, Sir Landevale (the poem's early 14 th century translation) and Sir Launfal (the poem's late 14 th century adaptation), drop the knight's courtliness. 2 Indeed, by the time of Thomas Chestre's adaptation, the titular knight's courtoisie seems to have disappeared, along with many of the poem's oral conventions;

2021

Poetry plays a vital role in both early music as well as modern music; thus, in order to understand the music, one must first understand the social, historical, and emotional context of a poem and what brought the poet to write the way they did. The purpose of this research project is to explore poems and stories similar to those in Roman de Fauvel. This topic allows for a deeper understanding of the context behind the stories that helped shape Fauvel. Three poets from the time period will be discussed: Blondel de Nesle, Chastelain de Couci, and Chrétien de Troyes. In our analysis, we will see the techniques used to shape their poetry

Published in Claudia Lange, Beatrix Weber and Göran Wolf (eds.). 2012. Communicative Spaces: Variation, Contact, and Change. Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 91-114.

Text and Readers in Marie de France's Lais, 1980

The connection between the joie d'amor and the bleeding wound defines a proper Pathos formel, an iconic set based on the predetermined connection between a pleasurable emotion and a painful bodily state, that summarizes the dialectic of love on which both Beroul's Tristan and Chrétien's Charrette are based. Résumé: La relation entre la joie d'amour et la blessure sanglante met en place un pathos particulier, un ensemble figuré fondé sur une relation prédéterminée entre une émotion pouvant procurer du plaisir et un état de souffrance physique, qui résume la dialectique de l'amour sur laquelle sont fondés à la fois le Tristan de Béroul et le Roman de la Charrette de Chrétien. Zusammenfassung: Die Verbindung zwischen den Liebesfreuden und der bluten-den Wunde bildet eine regelrechte Pathosformel, ein Zeichenpaar, das auf einer vorab bestimmten Verbindung zwischen einer angenehmen Emotion und einem schmerzhaften körperlichen Zustand beruht und das die Dialektik der Liebe zusammenfasst, auf welcher Bérouls Tristan und Chrétiens Lancelot aufbauen.

Neophilologus, 1995

The publication of Tottel's M i s c e l l a n y in 1557 is commonly considered the start of a new era] one which brought "blessed relief "2 from stale repetition, "deadly mediocrity ''3 and literary poverty-phrases frequently used to belittle fifteenth-and early-sixteenth-century literature, because courtly love poems seem to repeat subjects, forms and themes already traditional in Chaucer's time. 4 The point is that medieval and early Tudor audiences did not expect originality. On the contrary, what they appreciated was precisely the highly stereotyped form and content of the love lyrics. Educated listeners/readers were, as it were, conditioned by the continuous repetition of the same forms, subjects and treatments. 5 Wimsatt speaks for a number of scholars in suggesting that the audience was chiefly interested in how [the poet] handled a given form and material, and the tact with which he presented their ideals. 6 Originality was therefore not the primary concern of the poet, nor did he need personal amorous experiences to feed his inspiration: a deep grounding in the possible topoi, motifs, images sufficed] The familiarity of themes and formulae was further heightened by the courtly technique of "a stringing-together of words, figures, and other meaningful elements (sounds, grammatical forms)". 8 These key features allowed a well-defined thematic construction of the poem: 9 the audience listened out for certain recurring expressions or phrases which indicated the presence of a certain motif or development of a theme. Short well-chosen phrases, even a single word then sufficed to conjure up a wealth of traditional detail. Speaking of the chanson d'aventure opening, Davidoff concedes that [i]t is most probable that, because the motif was conventional, the complete signal was received by the audience even when it was sent in partial form. ~° This is the 'court game of poetry' so well explored by John Stevens: ~ the poet merely needed to outline, evoke a theme by means of a few key terms and the audience could be counted upon to identify the motif in question. The cooperation of the poet and the reader/listener is harmonious and absolute: both create the lyric in unison. Yet, the use of conventional language and themes does not preclude originality; it can create precisely the situation a particular type of poetic creativity requires. The poet's activity was concentrated on finding new concretizations, fresh turns of phrase, new wording, cautious modifications lz (without losing recognizability), as well as on selecting and arranging the conventional material. Several conventions and traditions can thus become

Arthuriana, 1996

Perhaps the most useful description of the style of The Book of the Duchess is that of Wolfgang Clemen (Clemen,. Throughout the poem, he observes, flights of rhetoric wrought to "the pitch of exaggeration" alternate, not always gracefully, with colloquial passages full of "sudden cries and pious ejaculations," vows, protestations, asides, and an elliptical syntax where relatives are "'swallowed' as it were, in the hasty and emotional pressure of the narrative." 1 Chaucer's versification is experimental in a complementary way: bold, pungent, and aiming always at "variety and urgency." Unlike the subtle fluency of Gower, whose dialogue preserves its animation without requiring us to supply so much as an exclamation point, reading aloud a Chaucerian passage like that which reveals the fact of the lady's death (BD 1298(BD -1310 can leave one breathless.