Rosaline Brown-Grant – Anne D.
Hedeman / Bernad Ribemont (eds.)
Textual and Visual. Representations
of Power and Justice in Medieval France. Manuscripts and Early Printed Books
Routledge, London/New York,2015, 344 pp.
ISBN: 9781472415707
Thoroughly interdisciplinary in approach, this volume examines how
concepts such as the exercising of power, the distribution of justice, and
transgression against the law were treated in both textual and pictorial terms
in works produced and circulated in medieval French manuscripts and early printed
books. Analysing texts ranging from romances, political allegories, chivalric
biographies, and catalogues of famous men and women, through saints’ lives,
mystery plays and Books of Hours, to works of Roman, canon and customary law,
these studies offer new insights into the diverse ways in which the language
and imagery of politics and justice permeated French culture, particularly in
the later Middle Ages. Organized around three closely related themes – the
prince as a just ruler, the figure of the judge, and the role of the queen in
relation to matters of justice – the issues addressed in these studies, such as
what constitutes a just war, what treatment should be meted out to prisoners,
what personal qualities are needed for the role of lawgiver, and what limits
are placed on women’s participation in judicial processes, are ones that are
still the subject of debate today. What the contributors show above all is the
degree of political engagement on the part of writers and artists responsible
for cultural production in this period. With their textual strategies of
exemplification, allegorization, and satirical deprecation, and their visual
strategies of hierarchical ordering, spatial organization and symbolic
allusion, these figures aimed to show that the pen and paintbrush could aspire
to being as mighty as the sword wielded by Lady Justice herself.
– Introduction / Rosalind Brown-Grant (University of Leeds)
– Translating power for the princes of the blood : Laurent de Premierfait’s Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes / Anne D. Hedeman (University of Kansas)
– How to wield power with justice : the fifteenth-century Roman de Florimont as a Burgundian – «Mirror for princes» / Rosalind Brown-Grant (University of Leeds)
– The just captain in the Jouvencel by Jean de Bueil / Michelle Szkilnik (Université de Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle)
– Reconfiguring Queen Truth in Paris, BnF, Ms. fr. 22542 (Songe du Vieil Pelerin) / Kristin Bourassa (University of York)
– Allegorical design and political image-making in late medieval France / Cynthia J. Brown (University of California, Santa Barbara)
– The wolf, the shepherd, and the whale : critiquing the King through metaphor in the reign of Louis XI / Lydwine Scordia (Université de Rouen)
– Passing sentence : variations on the figure of the judge in French political, legal, and historical texts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century / Barbara Denis-Morel (Bibliothèque d’Avranches)
– The judge and the martyr : images of power and justice in religious manuscripts from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries / Maïté Billoré (Université de Lyon 3) and Esther Dehoux (Université de Lille 3 Charles-de-Gaulle)
– Beastly power, holy justice in late medieval France : from Robert Gobin’s Loups ravissans to Books of hours / Mary Beth Winn (State University of New York, Albany)
– The Queen on trial : spectacle of innocence, performance of beauty / Yasmina Foehr-Janssens (Université de Genève)
– Claude of France : justice, power, and the Queen as advocate for her people / Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier (American University of Paris)
List of manuscripts and early printed editions cited.
Rosalind Brown-Grantis Professor of Late Medieval French
Literature at the University of Leeds, UK. Anne
D. Hedeman is Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History
at the University of Kansas, USA. Bernard
Ribermont is Professor of the History of Medieval Literature and Culture at
theUniversité d’Orleans. France.
