Papers by Catherine Leglu
Penn State University Press eBooks, Nov 29, 2016
... Multilingualism and mother tongue in medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan narratives / Cathe... more ... Multilingualism and mother tongue in medieval French, Occitan, and Catalan narratives / Catherine E. Leglu. ... A porous borderland has produced striking examples of multilingual interaction, especially between French, Occitan, and Catalan,29 which I believe arc worth exploring ...
Springer eBooks, 2018
This chapter compares the different treatments of the story of Samson in three prose translations... more This chapter compares the different treatments of the story of Samson in three prose translations of the fourteenth century: an image cycle with rubrics in French produced for a royal owner, the Bible anglo-normande, and a summary translation that derives from the twelfth-century Poeme. The images are a series of translations, adaptations and mistranslations. The last section examines the case made by Richard Ingham for viewing monastic schools as key players in the transmission of Anglo-Norman French until the Black Death.
This chapter explores recent theories concerning the performance and transmission of medieval son... more This chapter explores recent theories concerning the performance and transmission of medieval song in vernacular troubadour lyric and Latin monastic traditions, engaging with other chapters in the themed volume. It explores in particular the subjective and emotive first-person voice, in terms of the Psalter, arguing for greater attention to be paid to the imbrication of secular and sacred musical practice. The second part of the chapter focuses on the Latin dramatic song 'Samson, dux fortissime', which is preserved in Germany, Sicily and England, including Harley 978 (Reading Abbey), and has an exclusively monastic manuscript tradition.
The 'lady as idol' is a cliche of troubadour poetry, and of courtly love in general. Movi... more The 'lady as idol' is a cliche of troubadour poetry, and of courtly love in general. Moving beyond the psychoanalytical theories of desire that have informed troubadour studies in the past few decades, this article examines a selection of poems by the troubadour Jausbert de Poicibot, as well as their well-known illustrations in one 14th-c. manuscript, in order to explore how the complex medieval understanding of idolatry interacted with that of "fin'amor"
Bernard Gui is known for his career as an inquisitor but he was also a prolific historian. His il... more Bernard Gui is known for his career as an inquisitor but he was also a prolific historian. His illustrated genealogical tree of the kings of France, revised over several decades in the early 14th c., foregrounds the anxieties and crises that affected the end of the direct Capetian line by stressing a single line of male succession. However, the reception of Bernard's Arbor in Avignon stresses the opposing idea, suggesting that genealogies are complex, discontinuous and multiple
Modern Humanities Research Association eBooks, Nov 1, 2017
Between Sequence and Sirventes, 2017
Revue des langues romanes, 2014
La dame-objet est un des poncifs de la poésie des troubadours. Les études publiées ces dernières ... more La dame-objet est un des poncifs de la poésie des troubadours. Les études publiées ces dernières années délaissent l'idée traditionnelle de la femme-idole en faveur d'une analyse de l'amour courtois fondée sur la psychanalyse. Sur les six articles de l'ouvrage De L'Amour, publié en 1999 sous la direction de L'École de la Cause freudienne, quatre traitent de l'amour courtois, dont trois se consacrent à la poésie des troubadours. Dans leurs contributions, J. Roubaud, Ch. Méla et A. Badiou proposent avant tout de concevoir la fin'amor comme la représentation d'un désir paradoxal d'union entre deux subjectivités. R.-P. Vinciguerra résume ce paradoxe en citant Lacan : « c'est son propre moi qu'on aime dans l'amour, son propre moi réalisé au niveau imaginaire 2 ». L'aphorisme bien connu de Lacan, « Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel », est ainsi commenté par É. Roudinesco : « …ce qui veut dire, plus simplement, que la relation amoureuse n'est pas un rapport mais plutôt une lutte entre deux contraires, chacun en position dissymétrique en regard de l'autre 3 ». L'incompatibilité entre le sujet masculin et le sujet féminin surgit parce que la femme n'existe pour l'amant que, pour ainsi dire, sous une forme fantasmée, et que l'amant en est fort conscient. Toujours selon É. Roudinesco : « Dans cette perspective, la femme n'est donc jamais l'incarnation d'une essence féminine. Elle n'existe pas comme une totalité invariante, identique à ellemême de toute éternité, pas plus que l'homme n'est un maître qui parviendrait à la dominer en se donnant l'illusion de sa toute-puissance ». Cette union impossible oblige le sujet aimant à façonner l'objet de son désir dans un espace imaginaire ou inaccessible. Façonner sa dame : amour et idolâtrie Revue des langues romanes, TOME CXVIII N°2 | 2014
New Readings, 1998
In early 1997, the Occitan-language magazine Occitans! published an interview with a new author, ... more In early 1997, the Occitan-language magazine Occitans! published an interview with a new author, Sergi Gairal. Gairal's interview opened with the question: 'Sergi, is your Occitanism the product of exile?' ' Gairal's response indicates that exile is a concept very much subject to interpretation: Like many teachers, I had to head North -or rather, East. I spent three years in Luxeuil-les-Bains. [...] I wouldn't say that my Occitanism is the child of this exile, it wasn't a reaction against anybody at the outset, but of course, over those years, it revived, it grew stronger. 2
The Erotics of Consolation, 2008
This chapter examines the generic and narrative treatment of a fifteenth-century consolation with... more This chapter examines the generic and narrative treatment of a fifteenth-century consolation with emphasis on the depiction of aristocratic feminine protagonists and addressees.
Journal of Literary Multilingualism
The late medieval Danse Macabre, a bilingual word-and-image tradition, may be understood through ... more The late medieval Danse Macabre, a bilingual word-and-image tradition, may be understood through the theoretical lens of translanguaging. This article begins with an analysis of the visual reception of this tradition in a public art installation in Luxembourg City during the coronavirus pandemic, and is followed by the challenges of applying paratranslation to a page of the early printed Danse Macabre (1486). Returning to the earliest translations of the Danse, the article also examines evidence of untranslatability and tensions between three literary languages in the Catalan Dança de la Mort (c. 1490).
A 7000 word chapter on the literary production, chiefly in Occitan, of Toulouse and adjacent regi... more A 7000 word chapter on the literary production, chiefly in Occitan, of Toulouse and adjacent regions (including the Crown of Aragon) in the 14th-15th centuries
This article examines the use of Anglo-Norman genealogical rolls in Fra Paolino Veneto's L... more This article examines the use of Anglo-Norman genealogical rolls in Fra Paolino Veneto's L'Abreujamen de las estorias (Eg. MS. 1500), a diagrammatic world history that was composed in the Occitan vernacular in papal Avignon, circa 1321-1326 (see eBLJ articles by Botana and Ibarz). That such documents were available as a source in an international context raises new questions about the uses to which genealogies of rulers were put. The king list of Britain and England includes passages that were translated from Anglo-Norman French. Its omissions and inaccuracies betray a bias against the Post-Conquest kings of England but in favour of English rule over Ireland. Such evidence supports the idea that a genealogical roll had a political and cross-cultural function outside its insular or dynastic context. In turn, this enquiry leads to further consideration of the intended readership of the Abreujamen.
The encounter of the three living and three dead is one of the most famous traditions in medieval... more The encounter of the three living and three dead is one of the most famous traditions in medieval European art as well as in French and English literature. This article explores a rare image of an encounter between three women and three dead (in manuscript Paris, BNF fr. 378), which illustrates a French poem about masculine protagonists, in order to develop further the debates concerning this meditative tradition and the role of images in the macabre.
Nos sumus joculatores Domini, et pro iis volumus in hoc remunerari a vobis, videlicet ut stetis i... more Nos sumus joculatores Domini, et pro iis volumus in hoc remunerari a vobis, videlicet ut stetis in vera paenitentia. 2 [We are minstrels of the Lord, and this is what we want as payment: that you live in true penance.] The Languedoc fostered a distinctive movement within the first and third orders of the Friars Minor, who broke away from the mainstream Franciscan community not only over the poverty controversy, but also through their cult of the apocalyptic and other writings of Petrus Johannis Olivi. Inquisition and other historiographical records are the main sources for the ideas of the adherents of the Languedoc's Spiritual Franciscans and Beguins between the papal bull Exiit qui seminat of 1279, and their virtual disappearance in the mid-fourteenth century. A number of major studies, most recently by David Burr, Sylvain Piron and Louisa Burnham, have considerably developed knowledge of this movement. 3 In addition to this rich 1 This paper was revised in the light of my participation in the Leeds IMC, and in the workshop 'La fi dels trobadors? L'espai occitanocatalà als segles XIII I XIV: velles preguntes i noves interpretacions', at the University of Girona, 25-26 November 2010, organised by Miriam Cabré and Sadurni Martí. My grateful thanks to them, as well as to Marina Navàs, Louisa Burnham, Georges Passerat and Gilda Caïti-Russo for their comments and suggestions. I was able to complete work on this article thanks to a research project grant from the Leverhulme Trust.
A study of the translations of Judges 16-18 into Old French verse and prose from the twelfth to t... more A study of the translations of Judges 16-18 into Old French verse and prose from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, as well as a comparison with musical versions on the same narrative. The book examines the interpretations of Samson and of his relationship with Delilah up to the present day, then addresses the visual arts (ch.1), poetry and music (ch.2), prose translation (ch.3) and 14th-c. descriptions and illustrations of the narrative in psalters.
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Papers by Catherine Leglu