Voice and species in the Ovide moralisé

Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies · 2024-06-17

In this article, I show that the author of the Ovide moralisé exaggerates vocal difference when compared to Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the case of most instances of non-human metamorphoses. The exceptions are winged animals, especially birds, where the author of Ovide moralisé instead minimizes vocal difference or suppresses it entirely. In the second section, I explore what this conception of shared human and avian vox might mean for the authorial conception of language in Ovide moralisé . I suggest that the author intended to emphasize humans’ frequent use of Jakobson’s phatic function of language, a function often attributed to birds by various thinkers (including Jakobson himself and Isidore of Seville). Moreover, I suggest he draws attention to a shared human and avian propensity for quotation and for sonic repetition. After noting the relevance of the question of intention in language production in the context of debates about large language models (LLMs), I suggest that we are, in the Ovide moralisé author’s view, probably all stochastic parrots.

Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French

2021 · 56 citations

• Art
• History

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs.Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the "Frenchness" of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history.Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools

Stolen Song

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020-03-15

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the "Frenchness" of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

Chrétien the Jay: Avian Rhetoric in Philomena

Rhetorica · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

I argue here that the medieval French Philomena, found exclusively within the Ovide moralisé, a fourteenth-century translation and adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, adumbrates a theory of vocal repetition as an aesthetic that is shared by both birds and humans. Various common rhetorical devices that foreground acoustic reduplication appear in high density in the text, where they are often collocated with evocations of birdsong. After exploring the parallels between these devices and the structure of avian vocalization, I show the presence of several passages in the text that can be read simultaneously as onomatopoeic evocations of birdsong and as standard referential language. I also propose a solution to the mysterious label associated with the text's author, “Chrétien li gois” (“Chrétien the jay”).

<i>Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor</i> . By <scp>Julie Singer</scp> <i>Representing Mental Illness in Late Medieval France: Machines, Madness, Metaphor</i> . By SingerJulie. (Gallica, 43.) Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018. 360 pp., ill.

French Studies · 2020-01-13

Despite its title, this book is less about representations of mental illness in late medieval France (a topic that is central only to Chapter 4) than it is about the metaphors used to describe processes of cognition. Julie Singer reveals that these metaphors often pertain to metal or to mechanics. Among other key insights of the book is an exposition of the way in which the changing technological landscape is reflected in the metaphors and symbols associated with figures that we would not immediately associate with technology, but that medieval writers did (for example, Fortune and the cardinal virtues — ‘cardinal’ coming from the Latin for ‘hinge’). Singer’s Introduction briefly surveys scholarship on mental illness in the Middle Ages before turning to medieval understandings of rust and finally to theories of metaphor. Her first chapter, ‘Of Metal and Men’, describes how the late medieval understanding of cognition as mechanical resonates with a longstanding conception of the mind as an engin, a polyvalent term that can mean a machine or a mechanical device. One of Singer’s key texts in this chapter is Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, which, she shows, reserves its most elaborately mechanistic punishments for crimes of the intellect. At the end of the chapter, Singer turns first to Fortune’s wheel, which becomes increasingly associated with cranks as crank technology proliferates in medieval Europe, and finally to the new iconography, which depicts the cardinal virtues alongside various mechanical objects. Chapter 2, ‘Une enroullure de sapience: Instituting Princely Virtues at the Court of Charles V’, is about mirrors of princes and the importance they accord to the cardinal virtues, especially prudence. Rust is associated, in the texts discussed here, not with mental illness, as Singer’s title might suggest, but rather with idleness, a poorly used intellect, or vice more broadly. Chapter 3, ‘Metaphors of the Body Politic’, gives a history of two metaphors: the polity as a human body with the king as the head, and Nebuchadnezzar’s metal statue. It ultimately demonstrates the fusion of these two metaphors in late medieval France. Chapter 4, ‘La fer en la playe’, turns to texts of various genres that allude (explicitly or obliquely) to Charles VI’s mental illness. Alain Chartier’s corpus is the topic of Chapter 5, ‘Alain Chartier’s rooil de oubliance’, in which Singer explores the ‘psychological effects of political engagement’ (p. 247). This book convincingly shows, as the author suggests in an epilogue, that ‘the human mind is quite commonly figured in metallic or machine-like terms in later medieval French texts’ (p. 291). Singer is at her strongest when she combines a methodology of close reading with her theoretical acumen, as she does, for instance, in a dazzling discussion of Chartier’s Livre d’Espérance as a Möbius strip. This reader wished for a tighter conceptualization of the study’s key terms. What qualifies as a ‘mental illness’ in the Middle Ages, for example? Melancholy is, as Singer acknowledges throughout, a topos. But Singer’s study will undoubtedly be of great interest to those working on the authors she discusses.

Chrétien the Jay: Avian Rhetoric in Philomena

Rhetorica · 2020-03-01 · 1 citations

I argue here that the medieval French Philomena, found exclusively within the Ovide moralisé, a fourteenth-century translation and adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, adumbrates a theory of vocal repetition as an aesthetic that is shared by both birds and humans. Various common rhetorical devices that foreground acoustic reduplication appear in high density in the text, where they are often collocated with evocations of birdsong. After exploring the parallels between these devices and the structure of avian vocalization, I show the presence of several passages in the text that can be read simultaneously as onomatopoeic evocations of birdsong and as standard referential language. I also propose a solution to the mysterious label associated with the text's author, "Chrétien li gois" ("Chretien the jay").

Stolen Song

2020 · 1 citations

• History

Stolen Song

Cornell University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

• Literature
• History
• Art

This book documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, this book shows that the “Frenchness” of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. The book makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. It shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.

Francophone Troubadours: Assimilating Occitan Lyric in Medieval France

Medieval texts and cultures of Northern Europe · 2019-01-01

The Poets of the North: Economies of Literature and Love

2019-05-15 · 1 citations