Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-16T18:54:43.377Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Na Maria: Courtliness and Marian Devotion in Old Occitan Lyric

from Part III - Shaping Women's Voices in Medieval France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2013

Daniel E. O'Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
Daniel E. O'Sullivan
Affiliation:
University of Mississippi
Laurie Shepard
Affiliation:
Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

When I undertook a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, a work that would become my first book, I had observed that the mere mention of the Virgin Mary or of Marian song elicited flat responses from critics, both alive and long gone. According to them, it was a foregone conclusion and therefore the end of analysis to say that Marian song in Old French was merely the product of substituting the Virgin Mary for the Lady of secular courtly song. Bruckner herself took on a similar problem of “flattening out” in her 1986 article, “Jaufré Rudel and Lyric Reception: The Problem of Abusive Generalization”:

Lured by the enigma of Jaufré's amor de lonh, many scholars have sought to explain or identify that elusive love and decipher (or invent) some satisfactory narrative that will account for, order, and classify the six poems of his corpus into a unified structure. The trouble is, such unity usually comes at the price of flattening out our appreciation of Jaufré's poetic variety, since most of these critical efforts, from the vida on, focus on the two poems of far-off love and consider the other songs as either buildup to or distraction from the poetic heights of amor de lonh.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France
Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
, pp. 183 - 200
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×