La La Chastelaine de Vergi by Sophie Marnette

La La Chastelaine de Vergi by Sophie Marnette

Traces the literary history and cultural afterlife of a thirteenth-century French romance from its medieval origins to early modern and modern reinventions.


How do you tell the story of a tale that must not be told? The thirteenth-century French courtly narrative poem La Chastelaine de Vergi centres on an injunction to secrecy. But the cultural fascination with this 958-line untellable tale prompted multiple retellings which this book traces materially, intertextually, geographically, and chronologically across networks of texts and artefacts. Chapters range across the Francophone Middle Ages from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, through verse and prose and across manuscript and print, offering detailed codicological and iconographic analyses, examining gendered discourse strategies and literary citation. Multimedial materiality is explored in French ivory caskets and Italian Trecento frescoes; also later interpretations in twentieth-century surrealist song and a twenty-first-century English play. This volume both establishes the Chastelaine's literary significance - hitherto under-recognised - and its cultural impact; and models a novel way of mapping reception history through the lens of "encounters", privileging the physical, affective, spatial, and temporal experience of the work by audiences medieval and modern. Overall, it refreshes and advances the critical conversations in medieval Francophone studies as a whole on such key issues as narrative voice, genre, material translation, the act of reading, and the writing of literary history itself.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781843848370
ISBN 10	1843848376
Title	La La Chastelaine de Vergi
Author	Sophie Marnette
Series	Gallica
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Boydell & Brewer
Year published	2026-12-08
Number of pages	292
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.