Reception and Memory: A Cognitive Approach to the Chansons de geste

This book is the first cognitive literary analysis in the field of medieval French literature. As such, it focuses on the question of audience in the Old French epic poems known as chansons de geste. Bringing to bear evidence from historical, literary, and manuscript sources, from the perspective of cognitive theory, Leverage demonstrates that there were multiple, complex audiences of the poems, and that common to each was a more personal, engaged, emotive relationship with the poems than h...