Department of French

Objectives

Vernacular verse literature in late medieval France is inextricably bound up with knowledge. Much of this literature is explicitly didactic; its formal and rhetorical features insinuate supplementary forms of knowledge; authors, readers, commentators, and book producers treat these texts as themselves objects of knowledge.

The objectives of this project were

• To attain a comprehensive understanding of the distinctive ways in which the form and content of late medieval French verse convey and shape knowledge; and the ways in which this poetry's material context contributes to the knowledge that is transmitted.
• To thereby define a distinct vernacular poetic culture of knowledge in late medieval France.
• To disseminate our findings through seminars, a conference, and publications.

To these ends, we aimed to

• Survey the verse output in French between 1270 and 1530 and document how different verse genres (e.g. dits, encyclopaedias, historiography, satire, debates, poésies de circonstance) transmit and shape knowledge.
• Compare this corpus selectively with prose works and with didactic works composed prior to the period.
• Investigate fields of knowledge that overlap with and illuminate this corpus (e.g. theories of memory, authority, power, and indeed knowledge itself) or that are creatively bound up with it explicitly (e.g. commentary, arts of poetry), or implicitly (e.g. formal emulation).
• Analyse how the formal features of poetry in this period (e.g. personification, metre, rhyme, narrative schemata) both transmit and shape knowledge, perhaps in ways that are in tension with their explicit content, or with the content of 'official' learned culture.