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Traces the literary history and cultural afterlife of a thirteenth-century French romance from its medieval origins to early modern and modern reinventions.
How do you tell the story of a tale that must not be told? The thirteenth-century French courtly narrative poem La Chastelaine de Vergi centres on an injunction to secrecy. But the cultural fascination with this 958-line untellable tale prompted multiple retellings which this book traces materially, intertextually, geographically, and chronologically across networks of texts and artefacts. Chapters range across the Francophone Middle Ages from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, through verse and prose and across manuscript and print, offering detailed codicological and iconographic analyses, examining gendered discourse strategies and literary citation. Multimedial materiality is explored in French ivory caskets and Italian Trecento frescoes; also later interpretations in twentieth-century surrealist song and a twenty-first-century English play. This volume both establishes the Chastelaine's literary significance - hitherto under-recognised - and its cultural impact; and models a novel way of mapping reception history through the lens of "encounters", privileging the physical, affective, spatial, and temporal experience of the work by audiences medieval and modern. Overall, it refreshes and advances the critical conversations in medieval Francophone studies as a whole on such key issues as narrative voice, genre, material translation, the act of reading, and the writing of literary history itself.
How do you tell the story of a tale that must not be told? The thirteenth-century French courtly narrative poem La Chastelaine de Vergi centres on an injunction to secrecy. But the cultural fascination with this 958-line untellable tale prompted multiple retellings which this book traces materially, intertextually, geographically, and chronologically across networks of texts and artefacts. Chapters range across the Francophone Middle Ages from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, through verse and prose and across manuscript and print, offering detailed codicological and iconographic analyses, examining gendered discourse strategies and literary citation. Multimedial materiality is explored in French ivory caskets and Italian Trecento frescoes; also later interpretations in twentieth-century surrealist song and a twenty-first-century English play. This volume both establishes the Chastelaine's literary significance - hitherto under-recognised - and its cultural impact; and models a novel way of mapping reception history through the lens of "encounters", privileging the physical, affective, spatial, and temporal experience of the work by audiences medieval and modern. Overall, it refreshes and advances the critical conversations in medieval Francophone studies as a whole on such key issues as narrative voice, genre, material translation, the act of reading, and the writing of literary history itself.
Price: $120.00
Pages: 256
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Inc.
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Publication Date:
08 December 2026
Trim Size: 9.21 X 6.14 in
ISBN: 9781843848370
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
LITERARY CRITICISM / Medieval, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Plates
Introduction: Encountering La Chastelaine de Vergi
Helen J. Swift
Part I: Intratextual and Intertextual Dialogue
1. En-gendering Titles in Manuscript Contexts
Sophie Marnette
2. Short Stories, Genre, and Gendered Discourse Strategies
Sophie Marnette
3. 'Et par cest example': The Problematics of Exemplarity in Late-Medieval Poetry
Helen J. Swift
Part II: Mapping Material Spaces
4. Enclosure and Disclosure in Parchment and Ivory
Miranda Griffin
5. Re-positioning La Chastelaine de Vergi in Florence: Choreographing Literary Space
Emily Kate Price
6. Encounters with La Chastelaine de Vergi in Modern Retellings and Performance
Liam Lewis
Part III: Literary Love Networks
7. Encountering Song: Indicative and Subjunctive Realism in La Chastelaine de Vergi and L'Istoire de la Chastelaine du Vergier et de Tristan le Chevalier
Jane Gilbert
8. (Con)testing Models of Love: La Chastelaine de Vergi Retold in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron
Chimène Bateman
9. Denis Janot's Chastelaine du Vergier: Ethics and the Spaces of Print Culture in the French Renaissance
Jack Nunn
Epilogue: Encountering the Future of La Chastelaine de Vergi
Sophie Marnette
Appendices1. Medieval Manuscripts Containing La Chastelaine de Vergi
2. Chronology of Versions of La Chastelaine de Vergi
3. Lyric Poem: Châtelain de Couci, 'A vos, amant, plus k'a nule autre gent'
General Bibliography
Index
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Plates
Introduction: Encountering La Chastelaine de Vergi
Helen J. Swift
Part I: Intratextual and Intertextual Dialogue
1. En-gendering Titles in Manuscript Contexts
Sophie Marnette
2. Short Stories, Genre, and Gendered Discourse Strategies
Sophie Marnette
3. 'Et par cest example': The Problematics of Exemplarity in Late-Medieval Poetry
Helen J. Swift
Part II: Mapping Material Spaces
4. Enclosure and Disclosure in Parchment and Ivory
Miranda Griffin
5. Re-positioning La Chastelaine de Vergi in Florence: Choreographing Literary Space
Emily Kate Price
6. Encounters with La Chastelaine de Vergi in Modern Retellings and Performance
Liam Lewis
Part III: Literary Love Networks
7. Encountering Song: Indicative and Subjunctive Realism in La Chastelaine de Vergi and L'Istoire de la Chastelaine du Vergier et de Tristan le Chevalier
Jane Gilbert
8. (Con)testing Models of Love: La Chastelaine de Vergi Retold in Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron
Chimène Bateman
9. Denis Janot's Chastelaine du Vergier: Ethics and the Spaces of Print Culture in the French Renaissance
Jack Nunn
Epilogue: Encountering the Future of La Chastelaine de Vergi
Sophie Marnette
Appendices1. Medieval Manuscripts Containing La Chastelaine de Vergi
2. Chronology of Versions of La Chastelaine de Vergi
3. Lyric Poem: Châtelain de Couci, 'A vos, amant, plus k'a nule autre gent'
General Bibliography
Index