The political significance of Christine de Pizan's third estate in the Livre du corps de policie

Although the general historical context of Christine de Pizan's Livre du corps de policie (LCP), the Orleanist-Burgundian feud occasioned by the periodic insanity of King Charles VI, has long been recognised, the precise argument that the author wages through her unique configuration of the third part of the body politic has not been explored. This essay reads the LCP as an intervention into the escalating struggle for power between Charles VI's brother, the duke of Orleans, and his cousin, the duke of Burgundy. Christine's purpose emerges most clearly in her peculiar arrangement of the third part of her body politic, le peuple, where two points bear particular consideration: her inclusion of the University and her division of the ‘merchants’ across two separate categories, a repartition which seems to refer to the contemporary distinction between the highly-placed merchants of Paris and the butchers. Christine seems to be arguing that if the University were to make common cause with the ruling burghers and well-placed merchants, they could force into submission their more restless brothers and sisters, the butchers and their thuggish followers, whom the duke of Burgundy would finally convince to rise up in 1413 in what has become known as the Cabochian Revolt.     

Teresa de Ávila: Portrait of the saint as a young woman

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (known as Teresa de Ávila in the English-speaking world) began life in a comfortable, merchant-class family. The daughter and granddaughter of conversos, she was one of twelve children (two from the first marriage of Don Alonso de Cepeda, Teresa's father, and ten from the second). She received a good education for a girl of her period and class, probably learning to read and write from parents and tutors, and then studying at a convent boarding school. She undoubtedly learned the importance of letter writing from her father, as business in early modern Europe was conducted largely through correspondence. Although traditional biographers paint a romanticized view of Teresa's girlhood, a careful reading of her Vida, letters, and other documents reveals that there were many strains on the Cedepa-Ahumada household. Among the causes were the Cepedas' deteriorating financial situation, societal pressures on conversos, the death of Teresa's mother, tensions among the siblings, the departure of Teresa's brothers for the New World, and Teresa's illness.     

'Le Pre´sident des Terres Australes': Charles de Brosses and the French Enlightenment Beginnings of Oceanic Anthropology

In 1756, Charles de Brosses, President of the Burgundy parliament, published his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes , the first systematic summary of voyaging narratives by European navigators in the Antipodes. While historians of Pacific exploration have long recognised the significance of this text, its reflections on the human inhabitants of the South Seas appear never to have attracted critical attention. The present essay focuses on de Brosses's division of the main part of this 'fifth part of the globe' into regions he named 'Australasia' and 'Polynesia', and his speculations on the racial derivation and societal types of their native populations. It will be shown that these ideas had a major impact on how subsequent writers, especially Bougainville and J.R. Forster, understood the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Similarly, Histoire des navigations aux terres australes will be considered in relation to de Brosses's wider ethnological corpus, and to a general flowering of anthropological thought in Enlightenment France.     

Challenging the Quimera (Sirena) Negra: Unamuno Reads Pardo Bazán

This article examines the literary relationship of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Miguel de Unamuno by analyzing Unamuno's 1905 review of La Quimera, as well as his tribute to Pardo Bazán on the occasion of her death in 1921. These two critical pieces, together with Unamuno's Dos madres and La tía Tula, reveal that while Unamuno dismisses Pardo Bazán's realism in his discussion of her works, he develops in his own fiction alter egos who struggle with dominant female figures, just as he competes with Pardo Bazán's model of authorship.     

Jean Lemaire de Belges's Rhetorical Masks in L’Amant Vert and “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée”

A prominent feature of the poetry of Franco-Burgundian poet and rhetorician Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–1524) is his use of a rhetorical mask—a persona—through which to proffer his utterances and assert his identity. Because the early sixteenth-century court poet's financially and politically subservient position vis-à-vis powerful aristocratic patrons demands an encomiastic rhetoric that leaves little room for the poet's self-assertion within the body of the poetic text, Lemaire must employ the indirect means of a narrative mask to assert his own existence and concerns. This article examines first the narrative mask of the parrot-lover in the 1505 Epîtres de l’Amant Vert, through which Lemaire is able to voice concerns about his precarious position as a writer almost entirely at the mercy of his patron's good health and good will. A discussion of “Les Regretz de la Dame Infortunée” (1506) follows, in which Lemaire takes an intriguing narratological stance that unites his voice to that of his patroness, Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), ultimately forging an authorial je that speaks for both poet and patron. This nearly mystical union of narrative voices allows Lemaire to express his own concerns about the volatility of the patronage system while concomitantly giving voice to Margaret's mourning at the death of her brother, Philip the Handsome (1478–1506).     

Comic Incongruity in Medieval French Enfances

This article compares the use of nudity in the Carolingian romances Enrique Fi de Oliva and Carlos Maynes, which are both structured around the tale of a falsely accused woman. In Carlos Maynes, the protagonist Empress Sevilla is disrobed several times in her adventures and, at the end, strips of her own accord, along with her son Loui and their supporters, to reconcile with her husband Carlos Maynes. Enrique Fi de Oliva contains more scenes of nudity than Carlos Maynes does. In it, Pepino is reconciled with his sister Oliva, her son Enrique, and their supporters after they have disrobed multiple times. Both romances are about old, ineffective rulers who have perverse advisers. Only the innocence of the heroes and heroines, expressed through their nudity, can overcome the power of the aging leaders' evil allies. If, at the symbolic level, these scenes are about the political rebirth of the monarchy through generational change and new alliances, at the visual level they are quite risqué and often comic episodes that must have had great popular appeal. It is not surprising that Enrique Fi de Oliva, the more explicit of the two works in terms of nudity and humor, was praised by Miguel de Cervantes who, in Don Quixote de la Mancha, expressed admiration for the "exactness" with which it describes everything.     

Emmanuel de Martonne and the ethnographical cartography of central Europe (1917–1920)

Abstract

Emmanuel de Martonne is well known among geographers as the founding father of geomorphology and as one of Paul Vidal de la Blache's main disciples. He also played a central role as a geographical expert on the Comité d'études, a body set up by Deputy Charles Benoist during the First World War to prepare guidelines for the organization of peace and, in particular, the demarcation of boundaries. De Martonne's special expertise was the construction and comparison of ethnographical maps. He applied his theories on ethnic mapping and improved methods of representation of mixed minorities to his map of the Romanian nation published in 1919 by the Service Géographique de l'Armée. In his reports on Central Europe, de Martonne claimed neutrality, but the graphical options employed on his map offered a biased view of the Romanian nation, inspired mainly by the views of the French school of regional geography.     

Charles the bold and the crusade: politics and propaganda

The pressures on Charles the Bold (duke of Burgundy from 1467 to his death in 1477) to lead, or lend his support to, a crusade were many. His Italian allies and the papacy all pleaded for his help and participation; and these appeals were augmented by the exhortation contained in much of the literature popular at the Burgundian court and by the presence there of refugees from the East.Charles's response was mixed. Political and moral pressures made it impossible for him to ignore the question of the crusade, but, even if his attitude should be characterized as cautious rather than as indifferent, he never did go on crusade. Equally, however, he repeatedly justified his comparative inaction and, at the same time, made propaganda against his enemies by suggesting that their hostility alone prevented him from embarking on an expedition to drive back the infidel.This response, since it was not untypical of the princes of his generation, helps explain the West's failure to unite against the Turks. From the point of view of Burgundian history, Charles's cautious attitude towards the crusade tends to support the revisionists who argue that he was far less ‘rash’ than the traditional historical view allows.     

La virtud sospechosa: Teresa de Jesús y su condición femenina

ABSTRACT

Teresa de Jesús (1515–1582) lives in a patriarchal society opposed to the intellectual and spiritual development of women, something that she will not only not accept but also fight against, claiming a series of rights (the right to life, to expression, to autonomy, to the free development of her abilities, to have an active role in the Church, to relate to God through prayer, etc.) in spite of the restrictions of censorship and the cloud of suspicion that hung over her for being a mystic, the founder of convents, and the daughter and granddaughter of a converso. Furthermore, Teresa, with her reforms, would present an alternative life for women, as her convents would be spaces for freedom and women's solidarity.     

A Once and Future Greatness: Raymond Aron,Charles de Gaulle andthe Politics of Grandeur

Charles de Gaulle devoted his life to cultivating French grandeur, a politics that attempted to carve out an equal and independent role for France among the great powers of the world. One who frequently criticized de Gaulle's ideas of grandeur was the eminent social theorist, Raymond Aron. Although Aron was generally supportive of de Gaulle and supported him ‘every time there was a crisis’, he never hesitated to criticize de Gaulle, sometimes quite sharply. Aron's lifelong friendship with de Gaulle was thus marked by alternating bouts of mutual irritation and respect: Aron worried that de Gaulle's theatrics were sometimes detrimental to French national interests while de Gaulle fretted that Aron's commitment to French greatness was less enthusiastic than it should havebeen.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Aron's reaction to de Gaulle's politics of grandeur. Despite his reputation for ‘lucidity’, Aron was often ambivalent about de Gaulle's ambitions for France. We argue that Aron's ambivalence stemmed from his political creed, or from his commitment to a political philosophy that - as de Gaulle sensed - allowed for few settled convictions. This paper reviews Aron's assessment of two issues at the heart of de Gaulle's politics of grandeur, namely, the effort to promote a sense of national unity and the effort to create a nuclear force. In both areas, we witness a remarkably ambivalent Aron, one who struggled to soften the harsher edges of the excesses of what he considered to be the excesses of grandeur and find his way to a more moderate and coherent position.     

Der Briefwechsel Karls des Kühnen: Ein editionsprojekt

In his inaugural lecture, delivered at the University fof Kiel on 23 January 1985, and here printed, the author describes some of the problems, and aims, of his project, already under way, to edit the surviving correspondence of Charles of Burgundy, who in 1467 succeeded his father as duke and died some ten years later on the battlefield of Nancy. The edition is to include all surviving letters written by or to Charles during his entire lifetime, and also all letters mentioned in the accounts or other sources. The proposed editorial techniques, hoping to make full use of the computer, are described, and attention is drawn to the historical significance of the edition.

Zusammenfassung

In seiner hier veröffentlichten Antrittsvorlesung an der Universität Kiel vom 23. Januar 1985, beschreibt der Autor einige der Ziele und Probleme seines schon begonnenen Vorhabens, den gesamten üherlieferten Briefwechsel Karls des Kühnen von Burgund herauszugeben, der 1467 seinem Vater als Herzog nachfolgte und knapp zehn Jahre später auf dem Schlachtfeld von Nancy umkam. Die Edition soll nicht nur die erhaltenen, bei Karl während seines gesamten Lebens ein- und von ihm ausgehenden Briefe erfassen, sondern auch alle Schreiben, die in Rechnungen and anderen Quellen erwähnt sind. Die vorgeschlagene Editionstechnik, die sich auf die elektronische Datenverarbeitung stützen möchte, wird vorgestellt und die historische Bedeutung der Edition erläutert.     

Spirituality,Politics, and the Maistrian Moment: Reflections on Themes from The French Idea of History

The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854 (Cornell, 2011) is a monograph by Carolina Armenteros describing the historical thought of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) and recounting its posterity among French traditionalist, socialist and positivist thinkers. This article presents Armenteros's reflections on some of her book's themes and on the place they occupy in current scholarly debates. She notes that commentators today tend to assume politics' primacy over spirituality as a human motivator. A product of the de-spiritualisation of human experience in late modernity, this view is associated with the polarisation of the concepts of tradition and Enlightenment, and with ideas of liberty and reason ill-adapted to interpreting Maistre's thought. Armenteros shows how her portrait of an anti-absolutist, empiricist and reasonable Maistre disappointed with kings and bent on resolving the problem of violence through spiritual means is the necessary consequence of investigating his historical and political thought in context.     

Review articles

Colette is not generally included in recent narratives of twentieth-century French neoclassicism. However, her contemporaries of various political and aesthetic persuasions considered Colette to be a classique of the first order. This article explores classification as classique by critics sympathetic to Charles Maurras and the aesthetics of the Action française as well as left-leaning critics associated with André Gide and the group surrounding the Nouvelle Revue française. The article shows that it is Colette's strong association with a particular type of femininity that allows her to be thought of as classique by critics of such different political and aesthetic commitments. The article also examines examples of resistance to Colette's categorisation as classique, and attempts to assert the modernity of her work, coining the term classique moderne as a way of bringing together diverse attempts to explain the harmony between classicism and modernity in Colette's work. The article suggests that Colette's incorporation in the canon of the classique is part of a larger solidifying of the role of femininity in French identity at that moment.     

Art,Transformation, Liberation: Balzac's Eugénie Grandet

Balzac's works about actual artists like Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu have long been studied to derive the author's ideas about the artistic creative process. Eugénie Grandet also deals with art, however, even though there is not a real artist in it. In telling the story of Eugénie and her cousin Charles, Balzac suggests his views on the effects of beauty created by artful arrangement as opposed to the beauty in nature uncrafted by human art.     

The (Ir)relevance of the Aside in Golden Age Drama

The professionalization of public theatre in late sixteenth-century Spain transformed the public street drama of playwrights and actors such as Lope de Rueda into an activity whose survival and success depended on ticket sales and attendance. It is within this context that the aside became one of the most popular dramatic techniques of Spain's Golden Age theater. This article seeks to answer two questions about the aside: (1) Do Golden Age playwrights utilize the aside in the same manner? and (2) Does the subgenre of a comedia dictate the use of a particular category of aside? I propose to answer these questions, focusing in particular on the different ways that the following comedias utilize the aside to transform the audience from mere spectators to active accomplices of what they witness on stage: Calderón de la Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea (comedia de honor), Antonio Mira de Amescua's El esclavo del demonio (comedia hagiográfica), and Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla (comedia moral).     

The First two Language Academies in Spanish America

Abstract

Jeffrey Mehlman. Genealogies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France. Cambridge University Press, 1995. 262 pp.

Lewis C. Seifert. Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690-1715: Nostalgic Utopias. (Cambridge Studies in French 55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii + 276 pp.

“Cher, très cher, admirable et charmant ami …” Correspondance Georges Perec &; Jacques Lederer. Jacques Lederer, preface. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. 617 pp.

Timothy Unwin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxiii + 281 pp. $59.95.

Sarah Kay. The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. 273 pp. $65.

Carrol F. Coates, ed. Repression and Expression: Literary and Social Coding in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. xv + 342 pp.

Charlotte Stern. The Medieval Theater in Castile. Binghamton, New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 156, 1996. 321 pp.

José Belmonte Serrano, Origen y proceso de la narrativa de José Luis Castillo-Puche. Murcia: Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia, 1997. 247 pp.

Brad Epps. Significant Violence. Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo, 1970-1990. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii + 513 pp. $82.00.

Francisco Javier, Díez de Revenga, and Mariano de Paco, eds. En círculos de lumbre. Estudios sobre Gerardo Diego. Murcia: CajaMurcia, Obra Cultural, 1997. 509 pp.

Charles F. Fraker. The Scope of History: Studies in the Historiography of Alfonso el Sabio. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. ix + 235 pp.

John A. Scott. Dante's Political Purgatory. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 295 pp.

Amoldo Carlos Vento. La Generación Hijo Pródigo: Renovación y Modernidad. Lanham: University Press of America, 1996. 301 pp.     

El pulso de Centro América a través de la novela

This article offers a new reading of Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Critics have traditionally focused on the question of the protagonist's supposed lack of faith and sought to relate San Manuel's doubts in the novel to Unamuno's own religious views. Although this novel is very much concerned with religion, eschatology, and social issues, it is also an extremely sophisticated literary narration wherein the use of irony and ambiguity remains perhaps unequalled in Spanish contemporary literature. By considering the principles of linguistic pragmatics, this article shows that in her account of San Manuel's life, the female narrator tells the dramatic story of the love she and San Manuel felt for each other. By means of a complex use of ambiguity, Unamuno writes a novel that can be read in two different ways: the religious novel and the love novel.     

Equal Rights and Individual Freedom: Enlightenment Intellectuals and the Lascasian Apology for Black African Slavery

Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Bartolomé de Las Casas's writings, Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, Don Bartolome de las Casas, defensor de la libertad de los Americanos, illustrates how Las Casas was perceived and condemned in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In this article, I seek to explain why and in what ways Bartolomé de Las Casas's early propositions on African slavery played a fundamental role in Juan Antonio Llorente's edition of Colección, an ambitious editorial work that involved much more than selection, editing, and publication. By approaching the Colección's production and reception from the perspective of book history, I explore how Llorente's Colección reflects the role that colonial affairs and race had in the challenges faced by European rule and white hegemony.     

Des Considérations inactuelles au coeur de l'Occupation: Le Cogito à rebours d'Hélène Berr

Written in Paris during the darkest moments of the German Occupation, but only published in 2008, Hélène Berr's Journal was immediately hailed for its dramatic testimony and striking insights. With precision and lucidity, the young Jewish student at the Sorbonne records the human tragedies unfolding all around her in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time reviewing her own manner of experiencing these traumatic events through her personal reflections and emotions. The present article analyses her astute and poignant observations in the light of Emmanuel Lévinas's notion of the ethically grounded subject. Beyond its documentary value, Hélène Berr's Journal thus takes on significant philosophical dimensions. At the same time, Lévinas's concept of the Other's incursion into the realm of the self proves to be firmly anchored in the firsthand experience of the twentieth century's greatest historical catastrophe.

Écrit aux jours les plus sombres de l'Occupation de Paris, mais publié en 2008 seulement, le Journal d'Hélène Berr s'est tout de suite présenté comme un insigne témoignage. De manière aussi précise que perspicace, Hélène note les drames qui se déroulent tout autour d'elle tout en revenant sur tout ce qu'elle parvient à vivre et à penser au jour le jour. Nous nous proposons de lire ce Journal à la lumière d'Emmanuel Lévinas et de découvrir ainsi la profondeur non seulement humaine mais aussi philosophique de ce carnet intime tout en confirmant l'ancrage de la pensée de l'Autre dans le vécu historique de la plus grande catastrophe du XXième siècle.