Madness in Medieval French Literature: Identities Found and Lost

by Sylvia Huot

Overview

Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199252121
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2003
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sylvia Huot is Reader in Medieval French Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has held teaching positions at University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University and is a leading scholar of French Medieval literature. Her publications include From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Cornell UP 1987), The 'Romance of the Rose' and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (CUP 1993), and Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford UP 1997). She has also written numerous articles in scholarly journals and in edited collections of essays.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Abject insanity, madness sublime2. The specular madman3. Madness and social exclusion4. Heterosexuality and its discontents5. The living dead6. Madness and the bodyConclusionBibliographyIndex

Editorial Reviews

"When Sylvia Huot publishes a book, it is always an occasion for reencountering medieval French literature through one of the most thoughtful minds in the field. Her newest book is no exception.... Huot's analyses remain admirably tuned to the specificities of her texts.... Readers of those texts, whether medievalists or generalists, will greatly benefit from the general frame that Huot's book now furnishes, and modernists—we can hope—may now learn something more useful to fill in the blanks left by Foucault."—Speculum

From the Publisher