Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9812464
Charles Samuelson
{"title":"Erec et Enide and the Concept of Consent","authors":"Charles Samuelson","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812464","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812464","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide is about a husband’s appalling and disturbing mistreatment of his wife. Yet, this article contends, it can also be understood as a (perhaps surprisingly) critical reflection on sexual consent, which overlaps with key concerns of both medieval canon law and modern consent theory. In dialogue with each of these domains, this essay studies, first, how particular episodes not only call attention to the importance of sexual consent but also to factors that mitigate it—as well as to the more general limitations of the concept. Second, the article explores how the larger adventure series, which makes up the core of the romance, is persistently engaging with some of the knottiest issues in both medieval and modern thinking on sexual consent, such as its relation to equality, silence, volition, and the active/passive binary. Finally, the article reflects on the implications of considering this courtly romance alongside modern consent theory. On the one hand, modern theory pushes the medievalist to confront what is at stake in deeming Enide unable meaningfully to consent to the terms of her union with Erec. On the other, this medieval romance responds with crucial insights on, in particular, the history of the relationship between patriarchy and the concept of sexual consent.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"99 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85815850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9812484
Célia Abele
{"title":"Rousseau on the Île Saint-Pierre","authors":"Célia Abele","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812484","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812484","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay shows that the pre-Romantic conception of the late Rousseau as alone in nature has led to misunderstandings of the project of the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire as an exclusively solipsistic text about Rousseau’s self turning inward. Focusing on the central “Fifth Promenade” of the Rêveries, this article argues that, on the contrary, it is an early enactment of the literary realism of the nineteenth-century novel that faces outward by describing both society and nature. The article shows how society and the state are included within its narrative, which employs several features typical of realism. The presence of details describing the natural and social environment is linked to how the “Promenade” centers his scientific attention to plant life on the island. That fact points to the deep epistemological connection between science and realism. Rousseau’s text, which is explicitly bound up with his practice of collecting plants to preserve them in herbaria, achieves this through an epistemology of synecdoche and the microcosm that makes it possible to move between part and whole.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82956602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9812474
Giulia Boitani
{"title":"Tristan’s Origins","authors":"Giulia Boitani","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812474","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The initial section of the thirteenth-century Tristan en prose has been the subject of multiple critical investigations, mostly devoted to identifying its teleological purpose or figurative function in relation to the rest of the romance. This article proposes to reframe the question by reading the narrative of incest that dominates the “prehistory” of the prose Tristan against two key concepts that inform Michel Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire.” First, Foucault’s focus on the succession of discursive formations allows for a reinterpretation of the “guerre des récits” that traverses the Tristan: within this critical framework, Foucault’s work on judicial forms permits the identification of the points of emergence of new power/knowledge relationships within the prehistory, with the advent of ecclesiastical authority embodied by Saint Augustine and affirmed in the context of the saint’s public ordeal. Second, Foucault’s reading of the body as the surface of inscription of such discursive conflicts sheds light on the ways in which the saint’s discourse rewrites the bodies of the two protagonists, Apollo and Chelinde, and frames them within the lines of lineage. However, once Augustine’s narrative of “origin” is reinscribed in its discursive context, it clearly appears as purposefully chimeric. Because Tristan’s Arimathean lineage is founded on the revelation of Apollo and Chelinde’s incest, the very idea of unbroken continuity and ordered descent within genealogy is revealed as an illusion: it is a genealogical stemma that only exists in virtue of an archetypal error—the “bad grammar” of incest.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79761792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9812554
T. Pavel
{"title":"A Story with Characters and Action","authors":"T. Pavel","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812554","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"139 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76850867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9812594
G. Williams
{"title":"Ovid: A Very Short Introduction","authors":"G. Williams","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9812594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9812594","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88298197","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9560676
Maggie Fritz-Morkin
{"title":"Poetry and Poetics in Gilles of Corbeil and Gentile da Foligno’s Carmina de urinarum iudiciis","authors":"Maggie Fritz-Morkin","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9560676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9560676","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Some medical treatises from medieval France and Italy demonstrate surprising rhetorical exuberance, especially in the paratexts where an authorial persona can emerge in the first person. This essay launches from the scatological metaphors and epithets in the exordia of works and commentaries by the physicians Archimattheus, Gilles of Corbeil, and Gentile da Foligno. In captationes benevolentiae styled after Ciceronian precepts, these authors attack their rivals before presenting their own superior science. Their scurrilous invectives—“Hoc salernitani cacantes sanitatem nominant!” (This is what the shitting Salernitans call health!); “discursores alienis fecibus imbuti” (vagrants steeped in other dreck)—tap into carnivalesque modes where excrement is organic, filthy, vituperative, and comic, in contrast to the sterility of the treatises’ technical, Scholastic discourse. A close reading of Gilles’s twelfth-century Carmina de urinarum iudiciis (Songs on Judging Urine) and Gentile’s fourteenth-century commentary on this verse treatise shows that both of these experts in uroscopy tie their excremental imagery into a nuanced poetics that extends from the paratexts into the heart of the work. Both writers demonstrate acute metaliterary sensibility, and respectable training in classical and medieval theories of rhetoric and poetry. Gilles defends his choice to write in verse through a constellation of metaphors pitting the synthetic clarity of both urine and poetry against the muddled confusion of feces and prose. He further ennobles his work by comparing the hermeneutics of uroscopy with allegorical interpretation. Gentile assumes the role of exegete, interpreting Gilles’s verses and unveiling their philosophical and theoretical underpinnings.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83406251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9560692
Joseph R. Johnson
{"title":"The Physician’s Species","authors":"Joseph R. Johnson","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9560692","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9560692","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the physician’s species? In the vernacular beast fables and so-called beast epics that suddenly flourished in the twelfth century, medical (mal)practice forms a central concern. Nearly a tenth of the stories in Marie de France’s Aesopian fable collection deal with illnesses and their treatments; the Roman de Renart, for its part, finds Doctor Fox using his aura of medical authority to torture his fellow animals as part of a cruel and prolonged “cure.” Through an extended analysis of the figure of the doctor, who stands at the center of many of these medical narratives, this article argues that such texts draw their readers into the logic of the “animal clinic”: a conceptual space in which stakes of species difference and predation circulate alongside genuine medical knowledge, with the resulting instability calling into question everything from the nature of the cure to the desire of the sovereign.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"31 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86757394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9560724
Yonsoo Kim
{"title":"Teresa de Cartagena’s Illness and Disability as Embodied Knowledge","authors":"Yonsoo Kim","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9560724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9560724","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Physical illness may lead women to grow spiritually, reflect on their lives, and learn how to write about their unique experiences. A fifteenth-century Castilian writer, Teresa de Cartagena distinguishes herself for being a nun, a conversa, a member of a powerful Jewish family, and most of all a disabled (deaf) woman of letters. Her work Arboleda de los enfermos represents a hybrid paradigm in which literature, religion, and medicine interact with one another in medieval Europe. Teresa’s use of embodied metaphors to describe her experience of isolation and loneliness helps reorient readers’ understanding of the disability narrative. Suffering itself serves as an embodiment of consolation and as a medical and religious treatment that relieves her suffering. This article argues that to objectively examine her illness and disability, Teresa deploys intersectional knowledge to interpret her experience, and to empower herself and those who are suffering from the same condition, asserting that deafness, like any other physical impairment, is not a social or religious punishment but rather a “privileged” condition.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"79 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77509663","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Romanic ReviewPub Date : 2022-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00358118-9560708
K. Long
{"title":"Dining with the Hermaphrodites","authors":"K. Long","doi":"10.1215/00358118-9560708","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-9560708","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The régime de santé, already by the end of the medieval era a well-developed genre that offered advice on diet and other health practices, found new life in the sixteenth century as the Galenic works on food and hygiene that informed it were translated into Latin and even into vernacular languages. The precepts of this genre entered into the literary culture of early modern France primarily through the avenue of satire, in which characters were defined by the food they ate and by other aspects of the Galenic regimen. Because of its association with treatises on the education of princes, the régime de santé took a political turn, something that is also echoed in satirical literature. One clear example of the politics of the régime de santé is the banquet scene of L’Isle des hermaphrodites (The Island of Hermaphrodites), published in 1605 and circulated widely in Paris. This novel seems at first glance to be a fairly straightforward satire of the excesses of the court of Henri III of France (r. 1574–1589). Yet the banquet scene evokes the flexibility of diet and of other aspects of the Galenic regimen in the profusion and variety of food presented. In linking the practices of the hermaphrodites to contemporary works on the régime de santé, this novel suggests another possibility: a world where the needs of an individual living in a particular environment are met with a diet and way of life appropriate to those needs. In presenting this alternative view, the novel raises the question whether such individualized care is merely self-indulgent or whether it is very much needed in the aftermath of the massive trauma of the Wars of Religion.","PeriodicalId":39614,"journal":{"name":"Romanic Review","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74794695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}