Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Laurie Postlewate (éds.), Telling the Story in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz

Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Laurie Postlewate (éds.), Telling the Story in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of Evelyn Birge Vitz, D.S.Brewer, 282 p., 60 £
ISBN: 9781843843917

The storyteller stands at the crossroads of orality and performance, surrounded by a circle of rapt listeners. Evelyn Birge Vitz has challenged a generation of scholars to join the circle, listen as they read, and exchange pen for performance. A tribute to her work, the fifteen essays in this volume attend to the qualities of voice, their registers and dynamics, whether practiced or impromptu, falsified, overlapping, interrupted or whispered. They examine how the book became a performance venue and reshaped the storyteller's image and authority, and they investigate the mutability of stories that move from book to book, place to place and among competing cultures to stimulate cultural and political change. They show storytelling as far more than entertainment, but central to law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. Themes that crisscross the volume include tensions among amateurs and professionals, dominant and minority languages and cultures, women and children's engagement with storytelling, animality, religion, translation, travel, didacticism and entertainment.

Kathryn A. Duys is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University; Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer in French at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Maureen Boulton, Cristian Bratu, Simonetta Cochis, Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, Kathryn A. Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Marilyn Lawrence, Kathleen Loysen, Laurie Postlewate, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Samuel N. Rosenberg, E. Gordon Whatley, Linda Marie Zaerr

Contents

• 1  Introduction
• 2  'Of Aunters They Began to Tell': Informal Story in Medieval England and Modern America
• 3  The Storyteller's Verbal Jonglerie in 'Renart jongleur'
• 4  Plusurs en ai oïz conter: Performance and the Dramatic Poetics of Voice in the Lais of Marie de France
• 5  Who Tells the Stories of Poetry? Villon and his Readers
• 6  The Audience in the Story: Novices Respond to History in Gautier de Coinci's Chasteé as nonains
• 7  Effet de parlé and Effet d'écrit: The Authorial Strategies of Medieval French Historians
• 8  Or, Entendez!: Jacques Tahureau and the Staging of the Storytelling Scene
• 9  Telling the Story of the Christ Child: Text and Image in Two Fourteenth-Century Manuscripts
• 10  Authorizing the Story: Guillaume de Machaut as Doctor of Love
• 11  Retelling the Story: Intertextuality, Sacred and Profane, in the Late Roman Legend of St Eugenia
• 12  Ruodlieb and Romance in Latin: Audience and Authorship
• 13  Turner a pru: Conversion and Translation in the Vie de seint Clement
• 14  Stories for the King: Narration and Authority in the 'Crusade Compilation' of Philippe VI of France (London, British Library, Royal 19.D.i)
• 15  Le Berceau de la littérature française: Medieval Literature as Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century France
• 16  Retelling the Old Story