Donald Maddox

Sara Sturm-Maddox

Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe is a series which opens up a dedicated forum for comparative work on northern European medieval literature, history and society and their significance in the modern world, It promotes dialogue between anglophone and continental medievalists, and addresses the need for transcultural perspectives on Europe's medieval origins in a way that is distinctive both in scope and academic orientation. The focus is on the medieval texts and cultures of the British Isles, northern and central mainland Europe, and Scandinavia. The chronological range of the series is from c. 800 AD to c. 1600 AD. Each volume makes available to an international readership excellent new work, offering ways of reading rexts, cultures and institutions that speak to the contemporary world.

The Miracles de Nostre Dame Par Personnages

Parisian Confraternity Drama of the Fourteenth Century

Overall, the collection offers a provocative rethinking of the monumental medieval French tradition of Alexander the Great, as well as valuable insight into the emergence and transformations of French literature between the early twelfth century and the end of the Middle Ages."--BOOK JACKET.

The Medieval French Alexander

Chrétien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance. While examining individually each of Chretien's five Arthurian romances, Donald Maddox looks at their coherence as a group, suggesting that their intertextual relations lend a harmony of meaning and design to the ensemble as a whole. Central to his argument is the focus on customs, which provide unity within as well as among the works while conveying an acute sense of the vulnerability and dissolution of feudal institutions in an age of social crisis and transition.

Once and Future Fictions

The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes

The Systematic Kingdom in Chrétien's Erec Et Enide

Structure and Sacring

Jean d'Arras

"An annotated English translation of the fourteenth-century French prose romance Melusine, by Jean d'Arras"--Provided by publisher.

Or, The Noble History of Lusignan

Melusine

Explores the significance of Alexander the Great in French medieval literature and culture.

This volume of original essays is the first collection devoted to the monumental Roman de Melusine (1393) by Jean d'Arras. A masterwork of late fourteenth-century French prose fiction, Melusine tells of the powerful medieval dynasty of Lusignan from its founding as a city by the legendary Melusine, an enigmatic fairy-figure subject to periodic monstrous transformations, through its expansion in Europe and the Near East, to its ultimate evanescence. Melusine offers a singular blend of history and fiction as it upholds the proprietary claims to Lusignan of the work's illustrious patron, Jean, Duc de Berry. The great deeds of Melusine, her forebears, and her progeny unfold in a narrative that blends elements of myth, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, Crusade narrative, romance, and theological doctrine. Advancing a wealth of new material and fresh insight, the essays in this volume address the complex interplay of the conventions of medieval fictional, historical, and genealogical writing from a wide variety of critical perspectives. Together, they offer a new, more balanced and comprehensive understanding of one of the most significant literary works of late medieval European culture.

Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France

Melusine of Lusignan

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. These always arresting and highly significant moments of 'specular' encounter are examined in numerous Old and Middle French romances, hagiographic texts, epics and brief narratives. Maddox discloses the key role of identity in an original reading of the Lais of Marie de France as a unified collection, as well as in Arthurian literature, fictions of the courtly tryst, genealogies and medieval family romance. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

Donald Maddox

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