The Futures of Medieval French: Essays in Honour of Sarah Kay

Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste, through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.

JANE GILBERT is Senior Lecturer in French at University College London; MIRANDA GRIFFIN is University Lecturer in Medieval French at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College.

Contributors: Christine Bourgeois, Susan Boynton, William Burgwinkle, Miriam Cabr , Simon Gaunt, Jane Gilbert, Virginie Greene, Miranda Griffin, Ruth Harvey, Joseph R. Johnson, Sharon Kinoshita, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Sophie Marnette, Peggy McCracken, Deborah McGrady, Stephen Nichols, Emily Kate Price, Charlie Samuelson, James R. Simpson, Zrinka Stahuljak, Helen Swift, Simone Ventura, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicolette Zeeman.