Jonathan Beck

Abstract: The oldest and most representative of French religious morality plays (as opposed to the political ones). Bien Avisé and Mal Avisé (Good Judgment and Bad Judgment) personify strength and weakness in scenes staged to act out moral choices of human behavior. The audience comes to grips with virtue (self-discipline, responsibility, charity) and vice, mainly represented by overindulgence of the appetites (sex, food and wine, fine clothes, money). Gallimard�s Bibliothèque de la Pléiade publishes definitive editions of the classics of French literature. Théâtre français du Moyen Age, nearing completion by a seven-member research team under the direction of Jean-Pierre Bordier, was originally planned by Daniel Poirion to present an anthology of major genres & works of medieval French theater.

Abstract: List of titles and projected dates of publication attached.

Abstract: Publication d'abord prévue pour un ouvrage collectif, "La réforme française avant Calvin. Les imprimés de polémique religieuse de Pierre de Vingle (1533-1535)." Ed. sous la dir. de Diane Desrosiers-Bonin et William Kemp (Montréal), Jean-François Gilmont (Louvain), et Francis Higman (Genève), avec le soutien du Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines du Canada (CRSH) et du Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). Projet de réédition d�une douzaine d�oeuvres de polémique et de provocation qui caractérisent une phase militante, et déterminante, pour la Réforme française. Devenues aujourd�hui extrêmement rares, elles sortirent des presses de Pierre de Vingle qui en 1533 s�unit à l�avant-garde des réformateurs français exilés à Neuchâtel (Farel, Marcourt, Viret, Olivétan, Malingre) pour y diriger la publication de la célèbre Bible d�Olivétan ainsi que celle des ouvrages du présent recueil dont les formes et formats revêtent la plus grande diversité � traités, théâtre, chansons, débat, livre d�images, ainsi que les placards fatidiques de 1534. Ceux-ci, ayant déclenché la plus violente vague de répression à s�abattre sur la France avant les guerres de Religion (1562-1598), avaient disparu sans traces jusqu�en... 1943. . (Notice BNF: http://gallica.bnf.fr/anthologie/notices/01011.htm )

Abstract: Publication d'abord prévue pour un ouvrage collectif, "La réforme française avant Calvin. Les imprimés de polémique religieuse de Pierre de Vingle (1533-1535)." Ed. sous la dir. de Diane Desrosiers-Bonin et William Kemp (Montréal), Jean-François Gilmont (Louvain), et Francis Higman (Genève), avec le soutien du Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines du Canada (CRSH) et du Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). Projet de réédition d�une douzaine d�oeuvres de polémique et de provocation qui caractérisent une phase militante, et déterminante, pour la Réforme française. Devenues aujourd�hui extrêmement rares, elles sortirent des presses de Pierre de Vingle qui en 1533 s�unit à l�avant-garde des réformateurs français exilés à Neuchâtel (Farel, Marcourt, Viret, Olivétan, Malingre) pour y diriger la publication de la célèbre Bible d�Olivétan ainsi que celle des ouvrages du présent recueil dont les formes et formats revêtent la plus grande diversité � traités, théâtre, chansons, débat, livre d�images, ainsi que les placards fatidiques de 1534. Ceux-ci, ayant déclenché la plus violente vague de répression à s�abattre sur la France avant les guerres de Religion (1562-1598), avaient disparu sans traces jusqu�en... 1943. . (Notice BNF: http://gallica.bnf.fr/anthologie/notices/01011.htm )

Abstract: In early modern Europe�with no newspapers and few books�the major forms of what we call �mass media� were performance genres: preaching and theater. Both illustrate how popular culture acts out collective anxiety and aggression. Popular theater�skits and plays�does more than the word �play� implies. Acting out cultural crises, performing them before local audiences reflects and inflects�gives shape and meaning to �fears about life and death, and life after death. In 16th-c. France, no issue more urgently raises these questions than open adherence to militant Protestantism (the subject of these plays), which in France was punishable by death. Yet by the beginning of the Religious Wars (45 years after Luther�s theses), there are three million Protestants in France, 15% of the population. How can such large numbers be explained? In an age of minimal literacy (5-10% in urban areas), three million new Protestants were not converted by reading Farel or Viret (in French), nor the learned treatises of Luther, Erasmus, Lefèvre, and Calvin. But a reforming preacher, or group of actors staging an outdoor performance of a play of the type included here, could reach in a single day a larger audience than all the books published in Paris in an entire year (88 in 1501, to be exact; 332 in 1549). Six of the most trenchant of the surviving "moralités polémiques" are edited here with historical and theoretical background situating them in the tradition of polemical religious theater or �propaganda� plays (originally the word means "ad propagandam fidem")�that spans the Reformation in France from its roots in 15th-century conciliarism. CONTENTS: {I} Préliminaires : Comment, pourquoi lire les "moralités polémiques" ? : l'horizon des préventions. {II} Arrière-plan littéraire (1) Le recueil La Vallière; (2) Le genre : qu'est-ce qu'une "moralité polémique"? (3) Recherches antérieures sur le théâtre réformiste et gallican. {III} Arrière-plan historique : (1) Propagation de la Réforme en Normandie; (2) Rouen et le théâtre polémique ca 1520-1560; (3) Orientation confessionnelle et contenu doctrinal des pièces (conservatisme orthodoxe, gallicanisme, réformisme, luthéranisme); (4) Orthodoxie et hérésie : "Ce qui est à croire" en 25 points, d'après la Sorbonne (1543). THE PLAYS: Edited here each with an Introduction and critical notes : (1) L'Eglise et le commun, (2) L'Eglise, Noblesse, et Povreté qui fait la lessive, (3) Le Ministre de l'Eglise, (4) Science, son clerq, Annerye, et son clerc, (5) Heressye, Frere Symonye, Force, Scandalle, Proces, et l'Eglise, (6) Le Maistre d'escolle.

Abstract: In 1967 Franco Simone (1913-1976), founding editor of �Studi Francesi,� published a collection of essays, �Miscellanea sul Quattrocento francese� on the French 15th century, the liminal period of the Renaissance in France. The present sequel, �Seconda Miscellanea,� contains twelve contributions by distinguished scholars, assembled by Franco Simone during his years at Harvard in the 1970s. Focusing on art, literature, and politics, the collection includes five essays on Christine de Pisan, her writings, her intellectual milieu, and the early feminist texts in the pro- and anti-female �Querelle de la Rose� ; an analysis of Eustache Deschamps� notoriously misogynist �Miroir de mariage� ; and a study of the image of women as reflected in the proverbs of the French comic theater. The remaining five essays examine the iconography of medallions of the Duc de Berry ; various editions of Renaissance �rondeaux� ; the emergent interest in antiquity as manifested in a mid-fifteenth century epitaph by Jacques Milet ; François Villon�s satirical feminization of proper names in the �Testament� ; and Montaigne�s ill-natured refusal to acknowledge his literary debt to Philippe de Commynes. Forewards by Enrica Simone Forni and editors Gianni Mombello and Jonathan Beck provide introductory perspectives on this significant contribution to European Humanism. Published by the Centre d�Etudes Franco-Italien (Chambéry-Torino). Authors: J. Beck (preface), G.H. Bumgardner, J. Demers, J. Dufournet, M. Engel, M. Françon, E. Hicks, L. Inz, G. Mombello, C. Reno, M.N. Rosenfeld, C. Schaefer, E. Simone Forni, T.E. Wareham, C.C. Willard.

Abstract: The earliest use of the theater in Europe for partisan political ends. First critical edition of "Le Concil de Basle", an anonymous morality play written by a member (or members) of the antipapal conciliarist faction at the Council of Basel (1431-1437), to urge support of French policies formulated at the council to restore unity to the Catholic church riven by political and doctrinal struggles, and peace to Capetian France torn by civil strife and continuing wars with England. The Basel reformers were instrumental in ending these wars (�Hundred Years War�) through trilateral negotiations (France, England, Burgundy) initiated and coordinated by its peace-making delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Arras in 1435.

Abstract: {1} Qu�est-ce qu�une moralité? // «Courte pièce de théâtre, souvent allégorique, à l�intention édifiante» (Petit Robert). Retenons surtout "édifiant", attribut qui réserve au lecteur moderne d'agréables surprises, car on trouve souvent dans la morale de la moralité, l'éthique de la modernité en ce qui concerne les rapports humains. {2} On prétend que "La Maladie de Chrétienté" et "La Vérité cachée" appartiendraient à une catégorie dite �moralité polémique� ; de quoi s�agit-il? // Le terme �moralités polémiques� remonte à une série d�études publiées entre 1887-1906 dans le Bulletin de la Société de l�Histoire du Protestantisme français, et présentées par l�éditeur, Nathanël Weiss, dans ces termes: «A part quelques notions vagues et superficielles, on ne sait rien sur la propagande des protestants du XVIe et de leurs précurseurs du XVe siècle *par le théâtre* [c�est Weiss qui souligne]. Le nombre même, de plus de vingt pièces pour le XVIe siècle seulement, ... prouve que l�on s�est souvent servi de ce moyen pour populariser des critiques, exprimer des besoins, traduire des aspirations qui étaient au fond de bien des coeurs... [Pourtant il est] difficile d�apprécier l�influence que durent exercer ces pièces ... extrêmement goûtées des contemporains ». Jean-Pierre Bordier (2001) note à ce propos qu�en France au XVIe siècle, �le théâtre constitue encore, après la prédication mais plus que l�imprimerie, un moyen de communication, de propagande et d�action de premier ordre�. {3} �Plus que l�imprimerie�? // En France au XVIe siècle, le livre a joué un grand rôle auprès d�un petit public. Le public du théâtre a été plus grand et plus divers, et, selon l�époque et le lieu où ces pièces ont été jouées, plus ou moins réceptif à la Réforme (comme l�a fait observer Imbart de la Tour). {4} Elles ont réellement été jouées en public? // Sans aucun doute. Dans la clandestinité toutefois, quand on ne jouait pas dans une ville protestante. "La Maladie de Chrétienté", en particulier, a été représentée à La Rochelle en 1558, «en présence et sous les auspices du Roi et de la Reine de Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon et Jeanne d�Albret» (Petit de Julleville). Déjà dans les années 1530 elle «dut être représentée à Neuchâtel où Malingre était établi et où il exerçait même, à ce que l�on croit, des fonctions pastorales; mais elle paraît avoir eu, même dans d�autres villes, un succès durable. Il n�est guère douteux en effet qu�une moralité jouée à Genève le 2 mai 1546 sous ce titre : "La Chrestienté malade", ne soit la pièce de Malingre» (Picot), ainsi que "La Chrétienté qui est malade" représentée à Baulmes (Vaud) en 1549 (Bonet-Maury). {5} Y a-t-il beaucoup de moralités �polémiques�? Quel pourcentage représentent-elles par rapport aux moralités �classiques�, c�est-à-dire édifiantes et homilétiques? // On en dénombre 23, soit le tiers du répertoire subsistant des moralités. En fait, les moralités politiques et polémiques sont bien plus nombreuses en France que les moralités �homilétiques et édifiantes� qu�on considère à tort comme représentatives du genre. {6} Par rapport à l�ensemble des moralités polémiques, de quelle façon convient-il de caractériser "La Maladie de Chrétienté" et "La Vérité cachée"? // Les moralités polémiques revêtent une grande diversité. Les deux pièces du corpus vinglien sont notables avant tout pour la qualité de leur facture, et la vivacité de la mise en scène. On y remarque en particulier la cohérence et l�ingéniosité de la mise en scène allégorique des thèses évangéliques, ainsi que la fluidité (relativement parlant) du dialogue et du déroulement de l�action. On a l�habitude, dans l�histoire littéraire, de parler de la «violence» et de la «virulence» de la critique et de la satire dans les moralités polémiques; à ce propos nous préférons prendre la mesure de la force et de l�efficacité des moyens d�expression mis en oeuvre dans un contexte donné, et cela non dans la recherche (illusoire) d�une quelconque «neutralité» ou objectivité» (ficitives), mais en tâchant d�objectiver dans la mesure du possible l�emploi descriptif d�un langage forcément empreint de jugements de valeur. {7} Comment caractériser alors la rhétorique évangélique dans ces moralités de combat? // Sans prendre parti, on peut parler d�une rhétorique de revendication. Une rhétorique d�édification et de libération dirigée contre erreurs, abus et persécution. Une rhétorique d�espoir face à la répression, où bravade et truculence ont longtemps été perçues par les historiens comme �violence� et �virulence�. Espérance en foi, joie, exaltation esquissent dans ces pièces une rhétorique, une esthétique et une psyschologie de la parole libératrice. Avec pour toile de fond les bûchers. Car l�envers de la médaille revendicatrice de cette propagande �de cette propagation militante de la vérité�, c�est la hantise de la peine capitale réservée aux fauteurs de discorde, et exemplairement aux imprimeurs, libraires, clercs et comédiens hérétiques.

Abstract: Syntax and semantics of complementaton with "à" and "de"; pedagogy and method. �Word processing� in French is "traitement de texte," but official pronouncements disagree on what the machine should be called that does word processing: "machine à traitement de texte" (Oxford-Hachette 1994)? or "machine de traitement de texte" (Collins-Robert 1993)? Native speakers are similarly divided, and analogy provides little help. The lexical question is less interesting in itself than as a means to show students how to approach such a question not as a grammarian (which is correct, X or Y?), but as a linguist (how is it that X and Y could have come into competition?). Here both contenders ("à" and "de") are consistent with ingrained but conflicting patterns of prepositional compounding for words meaning �tool or device used for X.� Choice of preposition in constructions of the type {N + à or de + NP} and {N + à + VP} is determined by a grammaticalized distinction that is rarely semantic alone, and usually involves interaction between semantic and morphosyntactic considerations. Both �wordprocessor� neologisms have support among native informants, and though some strongly believe one is right and the other wrong, such preferences are founded on considerations only obliquely connected to the grammar. Knowing how to organize the steps in the process of answering such a question is more important than the immediate answers themselves.

Abstract: Face à la mondialisation du commerce et de la culture, les vieux arts libéraux, les augustes «Humanités» qui occupaient jusqu�aux années 1960 la place centrale dans nos universités, ont subi dans les 30 dernières années de massifs «désinvestissements» sur tous les plans (effectifs, crédits, prestige). Ces déperditions viennent d�être scrutées de près par deux chercheurs de Harvard qui, après en avoir dressé l�abondant et pénible bilan, concluent, non les premiers, à la disparition imminente de la traditionnelle culture occidentale désormais surnuméraire sur une scène globale qui ne se tiendrait plus que par l�argent. (�If nothing changes,� we will soon be looking not at a weakened tradition of humanistic learning and education, but a defunct one�; «The Market-Model University-Humanities in the Age of Money», www.harvard-magazine.com). Crise, déclin, disparition? Mais crise par rapport à quand, par rapport à quoi? Clin d�oeil sur de récents �bilans� de modernistes et de médiévistes francisants. Mais c�est surtout à propos du «déclin des Humanités» dans le cadre du Moyen Français --cadre privilégié de par sa situation aux origines mêmes des �studia humanitatis� -- que nous tâchons de redresser la perspective sur ce problème pour le spectateur contemporain en confrontant les prophéties de nos actuels humanistes apocalyptiques avec les plaintes et les craintes sur le même sujet (études et argent) émises par quelques-uns des premiers humanistes européens, aux 15e -16e siècles: �rasme, Lefèvre, Budé, Rabelais, Montaigne, Dolet, Aleandro� Qu�en conclure s�il se trouvait que les «Humanités» ont *toujours* évolué au sein d�un «âge d�argent»? Si les barbares ont *toujours* été déjà à l�intérieur de nos portes? Que perdre �et que gagner?-- si nous cessions de confondre entre eux les arts libéraux anciens et modernes, et de confondre ceux-là avec «les humanités»? Et de confondre la pratique professionnelle de ces dernières en tant que disciplines universitaires à l�intérieur de structures institutionnelles modernes, avec l�esprit sans âge qui les anime, une certaine façon de faire et de dire, de penser et de croire, et de faire penser et croire � une certaine façon enfin d�entendre et d�entendre vivre la vie humaine? Trente ans de crise vont-ils démanteler 3000 ans d�héritage humaniste? Cela fait cependant 400 ans qu�on dit des choses semblables.

Abstract: Politics & sociology of language & literature study as institutionalized in the U.S. This article was written for graduate students. It asks "How do you see you future in language & literature studies? Do you know what's currently "in" and what's "out" in this field? Do you know who decides, and how the process works? And how it has evolved over the last half-century? What do you expect will happen over the next 10 years, 20 years, to the field that you've chosen in language & literature studies?" As background, my point of departure (and the MLA allusion in the title) was provided by an amazing statistic: In language and literature studies, what was "in" in 1981 (per the MLA's "Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures," first ed.), and was still among the works recommended a decade later in the revised 2nd edition of the same title (1992), constituted only 3% of the new total: 43 books out of 1,428. My analysis had two goals: to assess where the "language and literature" field is going and why, and to suggest how attempts to understand the changing shape of the construct "language and literature studies" (as defined by the MLA in four successive rewrites since 1938 of manuals designed as introductions to "the Profession") can benefit from a perspective more sharply focused on the economic realities (the "currencies of academic exchange") of today's professionals in language and literature departments, particularly the younger ones, to whom the 15 chapters of the new MLA "Introduction to Scholarship" are ostensibly addressed.

Abstract: The "literature vs. theory" controversy. By Robert Alter's account, we live in an "ideological age" in which "the pleasures of reading" are increasingly compromised by political considerations extraneous to literature. Who is responsible for this state of affairs, and what should be done about it are the questions this book attempts to answer. "Ideological" is not a neutral epithet. Most often it is used to refer with hostility to someone else's beliefs or claims. Like the related word "propaganda," which in contemporary usage has narrowed to mean "ideology our side disagrees with," the term "ideology" has become --as in this book about "literature in an ideological age"-- shorthand for "the mistaken beliefs our side rejects." Thus the essential job of the propagandist (a.k.a. "apologist," "defender") is not to define and defend what is true, just, and good, but to make sure his or her audience feels that they do belong, and want to remain, on "our side." Is Robert Alter an ideologue because he has written a book in which he assumes the role of an apologist for literature and defender of tradition?

Abstract: Does reading construct meaning, or merely extract it? What people refer to in ordinary language as �reading in� (finding in a text or discourse what one wants to find there) used to be considered an avoidable artifact of careless or under-informed reading or listening (known in Biblical text-criticism as �eisegesis� as opposed to �exegesis�). More recent accounts from cognitive science as well as from literary linguistics (narratology, grammatology, discourse pragmatics) convince us that �reading in� is not an optional or deviant mode of reading, but the normal and necessary one�as Harold Bloom�s puts it: �all reading is misreading�. From objective experimental data, cognitive science registers the fact that human readers do not operate the way an optical scanner reads a bar-code; all human reading is �filtered� and reconstructed such that there is never anything other�for us�than �reading in�. With this in mind, we look at how two sensitive and skilled readers, one in the 19th century, one in the 20th, both misread the same play�from the 15th century�similarly, and with similar conviction. In �La Satire en France au Moyen-Age� (1859) Charles Lenient imagined the existence in Paris during the Hundred Years War of what today would be called �guerrilla theater�: �Tandis que la querelle des Armagnacs et des Bourguignons ensanglantait les rues de Paris, les clercs de la Basoche et les Enfants sans soucy durent fournir [�must have furnished�, hypothetical] un redoutable appoint aux factions politiques. Le théâtre devint un champ de bataille [devint �became,� �did become� -- in fact?] où les partis prenaient plaisir à se déchirer: on dressa tréteaux contre tréteaux, comme on avait dressé chaire contre chaire, trône contre trône...� Not much attention has been paid to Lenient�s hypothesis since no textes exist which would either confirm or dispel it, as he admitted: �On n�a conservé aucun de ces drames armagnacs et bourguignons, empreints de toutes les passions du temps ... ils ressemblaient sans doute à ces farces furieuses que huguenots et catholiques échangeaient un siècle et demi plus tard comme autant de coups de pistolet� [referring to the political morality plays referred to elsewhere here]. Scenarios of the type imagined by Lenient, featuring insurrection and violent assassinations cast in a �medieval� setting, were indeed popular in the �drames historiques� of the late 18th and early 19th c. (Lemercier, Vitet, Dumas, Hugo), but they did not exist in the Middle Ages. Recently, however, Jean-Claude Aubailly lent an air of plausibility to Lenient�s �coup de pistolet� thesis by his interpretation of a play known as the "Moralité de 1427" (éd. Bossuat). Aubailly sees the work as the oldest surviving representative of a class of plays constituting what he calls a medieval �théâtre engagé�, �une arme de combat...politique qui se veut explicitement contestataire�. Such plays express, he writes, �le désir de s�attaquer aux problèmes fondamentaux de la vie sociale et politique et de susciter, derrière le paravant immunisateur d�une folie simulée, une prise de conscience et un engagement du spectateur�. Aubailly�s treatment of the "Moralité de 1427" is based primarily on selected passages from the introduction and notes of the Bossuat edition, but these are not supported by the text, or by the historical situation of the Navarre College in the 1420s (and specifically in 1427) which did not represent or express an anti-Angloburgundian or �loyalist� position (as shown by the example of Nicolas de Clémanges). The question is not *whether* we are in the presence of �eisegesis� but only *what* is read in, *how much*, and *why*. Partial answers for the case at hand are provided by Lenient�s account of how his views were shaped by the events of 1848 and Aubailly�s by the events of 1968...

Abstract: Was Eve smarter than Adam? Why did the anonymous author of the �Jeu d'Adam� in rewriting Genesis 2-3 for dramatic performance, present the Fall of Man as both cause and effect of the antagonism of male and female? This metalepsis (reciprocal substitution of cause and effect) recapitulates a more basic dialectic in Western thought and representation. Posited here in rhetorical terms, a dialectic of "narrative" and "drama" is seen as the playing out, in literary art, of the competition (or continuum) between primary- and secondary-process signification in which (as in the Adam play) the logic of consciousness (and of narrativity) is bypassed and undone by the skips and lapses that more regularly mark the signifying processes of dream and drama -- "drama," that is, as the name of those affects that characterize playing-like, and acting (or acting out) the impossible narratives of the Other. Conclusion: the dramatization of the Fall of Man in the �Jeu d'Adam� achieved its much admired "dramatic realism" only by dint of an imperceptible sleight, a slight slippage or momentary forgetting that invisibly reversed (as Milton was later to do in �Paradise Lost�) the narrative logic of the biblical source. The essay explores various facets of this slippage. Posed essentially as a writer�s dilemma�the problem of the pragmatics and ideology of evangelical composition: "how does one adapt a sacred narrative for dramatic performance?"-- is reframed (a) theoretically as the question of reading and origins (if all reading is a kind of writing and reading therefore IS (re)creation, what happens in reading "THE Creation"?); and b) rhetorically: analysis of a particular Genesis rewritten according to general (universal?) types and strategies of displacement and substitution which include: metonymies of blame (how Eve changed from deceived to deceiver, tempted to temptress, victim to devil); theological poetics of belief-substitution that here (sporadically) transcends misogyny; "realism" or reality effect in biblical narrative; theodicy as trick or "setup"; etiology of desire and its tokens: "revolt," "will to power," "domination," "mastery," and sexual antagonism ("The creator made the couple badly" line 231). "You have everything," says God to the couple in this play -- "except some things. There IS more; but not for you. Submit; and be equal." If the only origins we can think arise in contradictions (sayings against), hinge of all thought and language elaborated as systems of contraries and opposites --couples--, then the �mal cuple� hypothesis of the �Jeu d'Adam� has more to offer than just another (patriarchal) myth of origins.

Abstract: [CSA Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts: 5111 descriptive linguistics; diachronic linguistics, 200310] Historical grammar for understanding literary texts. Modern readers cannot make sense of Old French until they overcome modern reflexes triggered by interaction of tense and aspect. This article explores the linguistics of oral narrative (or oral-performed stories) as distinct from the narratology of written texts. In the latter category, H. Weinrich's analysis of French narrative (Tempus: besprochene und erzählte Welt [Tense: Spoken and Narrated World) has received much attention. Weinrich contrasts "commentative" tenses (present and present perfect) to "narrative" ones (preterite, imperfect, pluperfect). Attempts to apply this distinction to OFr have yielded bizarre results because Weinrich's categories were developed (1) for analysis of *written* narratives (and OFr texts preserve linguistic features of oral performance); and (2) for texts written in *Modern* French, where "verb tenses" function differently from those that historical grammar calls by the same names in OFr. In particular, the system of oppositions in the encoding of tense /aspect/mood information on verb forms is more fixed and stable in Modern French than in OFr, and the correlations of form & function in the two differ more than has been generally recognized. This article specifies *functional overlaps* in the tense-aspect forms of OFr; these do not consistently do the same work, but switch and share the various FUNCTIONS of narration, commentary, & discourse pragmatics according to conventions of oral narrative significantly different from those of written narrative. The analysis draws on the linguistics of oral-performed stories developed by William Labov for contemporary English and adapted to (features of) oral performance in OFr texts by Suzanne Fleischman. Based on a large sample of texts from Old- (12th-13th cc.) and Middle French (14th-16th cc.), it is shown that (1) narrative manipulation of speech-event time (S-time or �temps de l�énonciation�) and narrative-event time (E-time or �temps de l�énoncé�) allows for tokens of present, passé composé, and imperfect to switch in and out between the two temporal frames, blurring their boundaries (whence the audience�s illusion of �actually being there� [in E-time]; functional overlap in the verbal system provokes a split-second spasm of contrary grammatical reflexes such that the audience actually IS simultaenously in the IS/WAS of both E- and S-time); (2) the OFr passé simple functions in narrative as preterite and imperfect and exceptionally even as PERFECT (disrupting the perfect/preterite contrast); and (3) the OFr passé composé functions mainly as perfect, but also as preterite as it already begins in OFr to move into the aspectual territory it will occupy in Modern French. The problem of so-called irregular tense usage in early texts has eluded satisfactory explanation because scholars equate verb "tenses," ie, tense/aspect/mood-forms, with too limited a range of functions. Traditional literary history and philology must incorporate insights from discourse analysis and the pragmatics & sociolinguistics of performed texts. 2 Tables, 31 References.

Abstract: La violence dans les médias, et les effets sur les enfants (France, 16e siècle.) Divers historiens ont étudié les moyens de socialisation (endoctrinement, lavage de cerveau) par lesquels en France au 16e siècle les enfants et les adolescents, âgés souvent de 12 ans et moins, ont été amenés à participer à la violence confessionnelle des guerres de Religion depuis Vassy (1562) jusqu�au massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy (1572). En voici un écho, et une étude de cas: �La farce joyeuse ... du maistre d�escolle, la mere et les troys escolliers� (éd. J. Beck, 1986). A Rouen, vers 1540, un mâitre d�école organise une bande de jeunes zélotes pour la défense de la foi catholique. Il leur enseigne �bonne doctrine et science� (antiluthérienne) pour les envoyer en raids de nettoyage contre les indésirables du lieu (�Je les ay envoyés sur les champs / Coriger un tas de meschans...�). La morale de la pièce est clairement énoncée : la �pollution� luthérienne qui menace de détruire l�Eglise catholique doit être combattue activement, par tous les moyens.

Abstract: When is a piece of creative writing �a play, for example�considered �literary�? Who decides, and why? On what grounds and by what authority? With what consequences? This article discusses biases against "popular culture" and presents a condensed overview of the Introduction to "Théâtre et propagande" (below, under "Books", 1986), along with a summary of the works contained therein: (1) L'Eglise et le commun, (2) L'Eglise, Noblesse, et Povreté qui fait la lessive, (3) Le Ministre de l'Eglise, (4) Science, son clerq, Annerye, et son clerc, (5) Heressye, Frere Symonye, Force, Scandalle, Proces, et l'Eglise, (6) Le Maistre d'escolle.

Abstract: The non-literary popular drama of the Middle Ages is the most important among the �mass media� of pre-modern Europe. It includes a large corpus of plays depicting the triumphs and suffering of saints, male and female. Among these sufferings are sexually oriented tortures and mutilations bordering on the pornographic. Why and to what extent are saints plays about women different from those about men? What conclusions (about gender, about historicity, about drama as "historical source" and as psychodynamic representation (relations between acting, acting like, acting out [�Agierung�]) can responsibly be drawn from those differences? The factual (quantifiable) questions posed by this study open onto theoretical questions involving inescapable interferences of our own historicity with that of the historical other. But In order to answer them --and to avoid premature conclusions and leaky generalizations about how women are portrayed in early mass media (and therefore in early modern society)-- two related questions must first be answered at least provisionally: What is the status of popular drama as historical "source"? With what other historical sources can our readings of these plays be usefully correlated? ("official" vs. "unofficial" sources; written vs. non-written, literary vs. non-literary sources -- bearing in mind that early popular theater (unlike drama in the modern period) is a non-literary or para-literary phenomenon where the functions of writing are external and accidental (called upon merely to preserve a trace of the performance). Regarding the status of these plays as historical "sources," recent historians (Le Roy Ladurie, J. Delumeau) have argued that *more than any other medium of expression*, the early popular theater "provides a view, difficult to find anywhere else, of the collective mentality of this predominantly rural and oral civilization, now essentially gone" (Delumeau). And yet this dimension of medieval popular culture has been almost completely unexplored in studies of the heroic spirituality expressed in (or projected onto) the lives of male and female saints. More work is needed to specify the extent to which (and why) women saints were presented in public (*to* the public, exhibited *before* the public of these plays) differently from the way male saints were. And differently from the way they were presented in *narrative* Saints Lives in verse, and in prose. And perhaps the most important difference : the *stage* and reality : Female martyr saints in the French Middle Ages constitute 3.8% in reality, but 23% in the passion plays.

Abstract: Amérique �land of opportunity.� Avec les moyens les plus modestes on arrive à tout. On devient président, directeur, professeur. Ce n�est pas la formation qui compte, c�est l�ambition. Vouloir c�est pouvoir. Les professeurs en langue et littérature notamment, n�ont pas à s�en tenir à la littérature, ils enseignent la psychanalyse, la sociologie, la philosophie, la linguistique. Ils font la leçon aux plus grands, et avec autorité. C�est hallucinant. A la grande foire annuelle de la �Modern Language Association� (8000 participants) les professeurs déterminent l�avenir de la Culture. Ils s�indignent de l�injustice, fustigent la bêtise du gouvernement, dénoncent la corruption des médias et des entreprises, s�apitoyent sur l�oppression, s�étonnent de la crédulité des imbéciles. Et font la leçon à tous et à toutes. Avec les moyens les plus modestes. Une fois j�ai été convoqué à une séance consacrée à la poésie lyrique du Moyen Age. On y parlait de psychanalyse et d�anthropologie, de sémantico-pragmatique et de sociologie, de méta-ceci et patata. Mais de poésie nulles nouvelles. Les textes de la lyrique médiévale, quand on en venait à parler de textes, ne servaient que de prétextes à des discours indifférents à la poésie, à vrai dire aux antipodes de la poésie. Ce sont là, me suis-je dit, des discours *cannibales*, le cannibalisme consistant à se nourrir monstreusement de la dépouille mortelle de ses semblables voire de ses ancêtres. Or *dépouiller* un texte (comme on dit), un �corpus�, une littérature en vue avant tout d�en extraire de quoi fabriquer un article ou un livre savant, voilà de quel cannibalisme on vit quand on vit de poésie sans aimer la poésie et sans savoir la lire ; mais n�est-ce pas le cannibalisme propre�sauf le respect du lecteur�à notre profession de littéraires? Sauf le respect de quel lecteur, demandez-vous. L�image d�une littérature ainsi cannibalisée aura de quoi irriter ou dégoûter un lecteur "cultivé� (il en existe encore), atteint et traversé du culte qui veut qu�on respecte les morts et les moeurs de la culture. S�en servir et s�en nourrir qui veut, à condition (dit-elle) de la servir et la nourrir à son tour. Le bon cannibale ne dessert, ne déserte pas, ne viole pas, comme on disait naguère, son alma mater. Culture n�est pas commerce. On n�écrit, chacun le sait, jamais bien sur les choses qui ne vous tiennent pas à l�âme et aux tripes ; aussi ne doit-on pas écrire sur la poésie, par exemple, à moins d�aimer la poésie. Mais à ce congrès j�ai entendu une conférence sur un poète-musicien du Moyen Age prononcée par un éminent membre de la savantesque qui avouait ne rien comprendre à la musique. Dégoisant d�improbables jets de terminologie rhétorique et grammaticale, il entendait déconstruire (mais au sens populaire, sans rapport avec les jeux menés de d�intérieur d�oppositions hiérarchiques) un texte dont les �oscillations polysémiques� et les délicieuses apories sur lesquelles il s�extasiait ne tenaient qu�à l�alternance (arbitraire) de certaines graphies anciennes. Les choses n�allaient guère mieux chez les modernistes ou chez les oracles de la postmodernité. Le plus étonnant c�était la transformation miraculeuse de ces gentils littéraires, sans compétences particulières, en philosophes, sociologues et psychiatres. Un peu comme au bordel de Genet. Hallucinant. Les notes consignées dans le présent article racontent en effet une hallucination : « Le temps passait. Il faisait chaud dans la salle, et j�étais fatigué. Je me suis laissé assoupir en m�abandonnant à l�effet irrésistiblement somnifère de ces soporifiques �analises�. J�ai dû m�endormir. Car tout à coup, en les regardant, il me semblait que les conférenciers s�étaient métamorphosés, où peut-être étaient-ils tout simplement rendus à leur vraie nature je n�en sais rien, mais au lieu de voir des collègues, des professeurs en costume et en cravate, je voyais... des oiseaux. Un paon, deux autruches, une espèce de petit pingouin. Le paon se pavanait pompeusement sur l�estrade arborant son beau plumage alors que les autruches se disputaient bruyamment au sujet d�un nouvel ouvrage où il semblait être question d�un historien allemand ou de langue allemande ce n�était pas clair qui avait eu l�audacieuse ineptie de ranger les poésies de Jean de Sponde sous la rubrique �maniériste� alors que dans l�ouvrage très connu d�un savant confrère de Neuchâtel Sponde était rangé sous la rubrique �baroque�. Pensant mettre fin à la clameur, le paon se leva pour prendre la parole... »

Abstract: {I} FORMALISM & VIRTUOSITY. What analogies can be drawn between the intricate poetics of the �grands rhétoriqueurs� on the one hand, and, on the other, the aesthetics and creative language of the Franco-Burgundian composers, painters, and decorative artists/artisans (engravers, miniaturists, tapestry weavers, tilesmiths) who were their contemporaries and collaborators ca. 1470-1520? What do these analogies tell us about the languages of poetry, music, and visual arts in this period when Middle Ages merges into Renaissance? To what extent can we compare and equate the functions (technical, private, public) and functionings (rules, conventions, constraints, conditions of signifying) of the highly formalized aesthetic constructions characteristic of Franco-Burgundian artistic expressiveness? These questions are illustrated from a small but important class of highly rhetorical compositional devices common to (but not equally characteristic of) poetry, music, and visual arts. These devices I have labeled �generative�; they include formal artifices of a mathematical, quasi-mechanical nature which enabled the late medieval poet, artisan, and composer/musician to generate �texts� (meaning-structures) which, through rigorously rule-governed manipulations of multiple (often, in principle, infinite) possibilites of recombination, resulted in realizations (�readings�) able serially or simultaneously to fulfill numerous functions. Some of these functions �philosophical, spiritual, aesthetic, narrative, decorative, lyric, ludic (not to mention self-reflexive, self-indulgent, and diversely autotherapeutic) are discussed. Poetry examples are from P. Zumthor�s �Anthologie des grands rhétoriqueurs�; musical examples (mostly from Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez) from G. Reese�s �Music in the Renaissance; visual arts examples aare from various works on Franco-Flemish painting and architectural decoration. {II} POETRY. By the end of the Middle Ages the poet in France & Burgundy, unlike the troubadours & trouvères, saw himself as an artisan of words, and no longer as a singer. He is now a craftsman, an �architecte de la parole,� a specialist in verbal *matter,* working words, sounds, metric & strophic forms into intricate patterns arranged in *blocks* of harmonious symmetry. From Machaut on, he is a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the architectural art of �carrelage� (tile designs) which adorned the princely châteaux where he worked and lived. The function of these �carrelages� was both decorative and narrative (the �visual� discourse sang the praises of the prince), just as panegyric constructivism was for the rhétoriqueur as well a poetics of *assemblage.* Less concerned with the phonic qualities of words than with their concrete materiality on the page, he arranged them in blocks, *carreaux.* The primary unit of poetic �assemblage� in this period was a perfect geometric block, the famous �carré�: in the �ballade� and �chant royal� the preferred strophic form is a square, a poem made up of as many lines as the lines are made up of syllables: octosyllabic huitains, decasyllabic dixains, dodecasyllabic douzains. Examples from (1) Destrées, a huitain composed in the shape of a square and readable forwards, backwards, down or up, in any of 48 combinations; and (2) from Gratien Du Pont in the shape of a chess-board : on each of the 64 squares is a moveable five-syllable phrase, manipulated according to the rules governing the movements of the pieces in a game of chess. The number of combinations is infinite, and due to the cleverly designed syntax, meter, and rhyme constraints, the meaning of the �poem� never changes. Conclusion: narrative poems of the rhétoriqueurs, exactly like the floors of the castles where they were composed, could be designed in blocks �squares-- with interchangeable recombinant elements manipulated at various levels of segmentation : phonemic & morphemic for rhyme (even graphemic for visual rhymes); lexemic for alternative semantic de-, re-, and con-structions; and even syntagmatic, where entire phrases are rearranged with no damage to rhyme, meter or syntax : Destrées� 64-syllable huitain (a 16th-c. verbal version of Rubik�s cube) or Du Pont's 64-square 'chessboard' contrafactum. {III} MUSIC. In the Renaissance polyphonic Mass and motet, elaborate compositions are constructed around melodic motifs as brief as 3 or 4 notes. Typically heard complete in one voice of a 3- or 4-voice setting, the phrase is then redistributed among the other voices either complete, or in segments, or in fragments, interwoven and *pieced together* in the various voices of a contrapuntal texture. Examples discussed: from musical rhymes and puns which parallel the word-play of the rhétoriqueurs, to compositional tricks wherein letters, numbers, syllables, words, phrases, and proper names provide a structural template that generates a text, spun out by systematic permutations or transformations of the initial sequence. E.g., Josquin�s �Missa super voces musicales� where in each successive movement of the Mass, the cantus firmus begins on the next higher scale step (a technique based on the same generative artifice as Destrées� �abécédaire� poem in which each word begins with the next successive letter of the alphabet). The examples become more complicated and illustrate (in works by Molinet, Loyset Compère, Josquin & Ockeghem) the sustained use of generative patterning devices at all levels of internal organization (exx. inversion, retrogradation, augmentative & diminutive mensuration). Comparisons with poetry & visual design suggest that in all three media compositional procedures generate �texts� according to a small number of rules; that these �canones� provide transformations of a statement (narrative, decorative-ornamental, melodic) by strictly patterned alterations & recombinations of the constituent units of its morphology & syntax; that the recombinations occur both as experiments in melodic (or narrative) and harmonic (or decorative) deconstruction�exploratory subversion and reconstitutive research�while still fulfilling the various social & artistic functions of courtly literary, musical & decorative expression. {IV} Conclusion: WHY formalism & virtuosity? How do we know (and define for others) the difference between �exercices de style� and Art (capital A)? Do the functions of poetic and musically creative behavior lend themselves to schematic representation, without (too much) reductive simplification? What are the functions of virtuosity? WHY did the rhétoriqueur take a year (as Molinet says) to write a �chant royal�? Or Josquin several years to perfect a Mass? Why formalism & virtuosity then and now? In the ebb & flow of styles and conventions, why do we have these periodically recurring moments of exploratory subversion and redefinition of form as function? Moments when the form (whatever the medium) is the message. Hypothesis: When on a cultural level a language ceases to mean, ceases to convey, or �vehiculate� the major ideas which formerly provided the spiritual scaffolding undergirding a culture, then the languages of the arts (the re-creative syntax & morphology of poetry, music, painting) will show signs of self-conscious inwardness, and self-reflexive probing. In the autodeictic (self-referential) mode, the mechanisms of the language continue to operate, but they operate �à vide,� turning out continuous clones of themselves as process, like a xerox machine run amuck. An early paradigm is the symptomatic ornamentalism and profligate syntax in the arts of combinatory composition characterizing the half-century of the �grands rhétoriqueurs,� until the Renaissance found its new language and poured new myths into the machine. This phenomenon is familiar in the 20th c., with the geometric re-visionings of Cubism, troped silly by Dada & Surrealism; in Serialism, borrowing in a dodecaphonic harmonic frame precisely the same patterning devices of Renaissance generative polyphony; and in Structuralism, isolating for analysis & descriptive re-formations the minimal functional units of any and all systems of related parts. But now, 500 years after the �jongleries� of Molinet & Destrées, Ockeghem & Josquin, digital technology delivers combinatory composition over to the computer, threatening to render irretrievably obsolete the cunning ingeniousness and painstaking anality of the latter-day �rhétoriqueurs.� Why should a young composer follow Cage, Stockhausen, Ussachefsky when he can write for a computer? As for literature, already in the early 1960s came perhaps the last palindromes, the last faint hurrahs of �la grande rhétorique� : a novel you structure yourself, by shuffling the unbound pages like a deck of cards before you read it (Marc Saporta); or Raymond Queneau�s sonnet machine for making, from a single template, 100,000 billion poems �Cent mille milliards de poèmes.� Against the threat posed by computerized competition, Queneau addresses his reader in a headnote basking conspicuously on a blank page: �Only a machine can appreciate the poetry of another machine.� And the inverse? Only a poet can appreciate the mechanisms of another poet?

Abstract: On sait avec quels soins Roland �compose� le tableau hiératique de sa mort. Sur l�herbe verte au sommet d�un tertre, au pied de deux grands arbres qui s�élancent à pic dans la solitude grandiose des montagnes vers un ciel où l�attendent saint Gabriel, Chérubin et saint Michel, Roland se couche : face à l�Espagne (« Que Carles diet, et trestute sa gent, li gentilz quens, qu�il fut mort cunquerant»), le chef enclin, les mains jointes. Et, pour comble d�inconfort, �desuz lui met s�espee e l�olifan�. Ces deux attributs de Roland en voie de martyre, l�épée et l�olifant, jouent chacun, dans la symbolique du poème, un rôle totalement différent. Cette différence, et sa �senefiance� pour la bonne lecture du poème, méritent d�être soulignées. Voici le noeud du problème (laisse 168): «Prist l�olifan, que reproce n�en ait / E Durendal s�espee en l�altre main ; / D�un arcbaleste ne poet traire un quarrel / Devers Espaigne en vait en un guaret�. Soulignons: �Prist l�olifan *que reproce n�en ait* � *non inde habeat* : il prit l�olifant pour être sans reproche *à son endroit, à son égard, à cause de lui.* Mais quel reproche couvre-t-il en se couchant sur son olifant? Evidemment celui même qu�Olivier lui a déjà fait et refait (�Ceux qui gisent là n�en doivent pas être blâmés [Cil ki la sunt n�en deivent aveir blasme] ... c�est votre faute ... Si les Français sont morts, c�est par votre imprudence [Franceis sunt morz par vostre legerie]�. Mais Olivier n�est plus, ainsi que tous les autres, et en se couchant sur son olifant Roland, désormais seul, aura été �mort cunquerant�, et *sans reproche*. Ainsi disparaissent �hunte� (1701,1707), �vergoigne� (1705), �repruver� (1706) et BLASME (1718): Roland le preux aura-t-il perdu l�armée en refusant de sonner? Qui le dira? Qui pourra le dire? L�honneur est sauf, la question ne se posera pas: Charles l�a entendu sonner, a trouvé Roland l�olifant à la main, la tempe brisée. Le reproche d�Olivier évaporé dans le silence de la mort, sur Roland ne sera chanté, grâce à l�olifant-témoin, aucune �male cançun�. Le signe efface l�histoire, et Roland meurt dans le mensonge... Ou peut-être pas. Peut-être préférera-t-on continuer de ne pas le voir. [En fait, au moment où cette note fut écrite, en 1980, aucun des innombrables commentateurs du poème n�en avait parlé.] Peut-être préférera-t-on dire que les réels défauts et faiblesses de Roland, loin de l�abaisser, lui confèrent plus de vérité humaine, donc plus de force; rapprochant le héros-martyr de nous autres mortels, ces attributs auraient fait de lui en son temps un "miles christianus" idéal mais pas trop� héroïque mais crédible. La nécessaire *imperfection humaine* (tautologie chrétienne qu�on oublie trop souvent au sujet de Roland) est rachetée par la grâce, comme sera �le péché de Charlemagne�. Pour fort qu�il soit, Roland est faible aussi; audacieux mais pusillanime; il s�abaisse pour sauver les apparences, et puis s�éleve pour être reçu au paradis, dans une scène d�apothéose sans égale dans la littérature médiévale. Ainsi dans le monde de Roland et celui du poète où Dieu est le seul être �ki onques ne mentit�, le mensonge de Roland et le �reproce� de l�olifant-témoin disparaissent en même temps que ce héros entaché non d�hybris mais d�humanitas.

Abstract:

Abstract: How historical grammar can help resolve textual obscurities; in particular, how consonantal dissimilation works in Middle French, and how copyist-redactors worked.

Abstract: "Sociological" approaches to literature can be usefully adapted to medieval French drama. Theater in the Middle Ages is a preeminently *social* medium, more so than a literary one. Theater is often said to reflect (to 'mirror') the attitudes, beliefs & preoccupations of a community. But theater in the Middle Ages (like film & television today) is more than a 'mirror' of the values of its public; it also served to affirm, reinforce and modify those values. Its social functions are both passive (as a 'mirror') and active, as a 'motor' for change. Militant forms of medieval French drama traditionally described in the language of rhetoric and literary history (satire, polemic, literary propaganda) can be more usefully objectified by specifying the functions they performed in a given society at a particular time and place.

Abstract: A �breakthrough� recording of troubadour lyric. And why music historians and literature historians have different repertoires.

Abstract: [Language & Language Behavior Abstracts : discourse analysis / text linguistics : 00662] Politics & philology: a new reading of the oldest text in French (842). The Strasbourg Oaths (SO) formalizing a mutual protection alliance sworn in 842 by Charles the Bald�s and Louis the German�s armies against Lothair I, contain the oldest surviving specimen of connected discourse in the Romance languages. Due to the vernacular�s archaic state in the Romance oaths, none of the readings proposed by translators and commentators in the 400 years since the first French translation (1576) by J.Bodin has been able satisfactorily to resolve the ambiguities in the opening phrase, �Pro deo amur & pro christian poblo & nostro commun salvament...� Oblique-case �christian poblo� has been variously read as an ablative governed by �pro�, or as a genitive with �pro� governing �salvament�. Crucial to a proper understanding of the Oaths is the term �salvament�. Does it mean �safety, protection�, or does it mean �salvation�? Or does it mean (or ambiguously imply) both temporal safety and spiritual salvation? The phraseology of the SO is based on the Latin oath formulae preserved in the �Capitularia regum Francorum�. Investigation of the context in which the terms �salvamentum�, �salus� and �salvatio� occur in the prototypic formulae of the Capitularies reveals: (1) that the three terms apply, interchangeably, to people both as subjects and as Christians, to princes, and to the state, and (2) that all three serve, interchangeably, to denote �safety, protection, preservation�, on the one hand, and, on the other, �eternal salvation�, according to the context. In the Capitularies,�safety� prevails over �salvation.� It now becomes possible to examine the SO and corollary documents in their historical context to determine whether the evidence justifies the hypothesis that the ambiguity inherent in the term �salvament� was consciously exploited by the redactor of the SO for partisan purposes. What relation was there understood to prevail among God, the Christian people, and the �us� of �nostro�, associated by anaphora in the frame �pro ... et pro ... et (pro [understood])�? A complex pattern of connotations and resonances could be established in the auditors� minds by means not only of the double value of �salvament� with its temporal and spiritual meanings, but also by the semantic and syntactic ambiguity of �pro� and the nouns it governs in the anaphoric frame. The association of the three notions of love of God, the Christian people, and �our� common safety syntactically joined together and mutually related to convey the eternal partisan truth that �God is on our side against our enenmies�, hinges not only on the double spiritual/temporal meaning of �salvament� but also on the semantic flexibility (or flaccidity) of the preposition �pro�.

Abstract: «CEUX QUI IGNORENT LES ERREURS DU PASS� sont condamnés à les répéter» nous répétait-on à l�école. Face à ce poncif une évidence : Est-ce parce qu�on connaît les erreurs du passé qu�on saurait les éviter? Et quand on aura tout compris... on n�aura fait que comprendre. // Cancrétude invétérée de l�Humanité devant les �Leçons de l�Histoire� dont certaines -- déterminantes-- resteraient en définitive inapprenables? Cette question tant impondérable qu'actuelle sert de cadre à la présente étude du fanatique auteur des Placards de 1534, Antoine Marcourt, expatrié avec quelques comparses à Neuchâtel en1533-34 où furent imprimées sinon composées les deux Moralités qui nous occupent. // Courage du martyr et du fanatique animés du même principe : « Combattre pour la vérité jusqu'à la mort » (Ecclesiasticus, Sahih Muslim, Saint Augustin, Jean Hus... et puis Antoine Marcourt : « Par tous bons moyens fault à l�oeuvre de Dieu pour sa maintenance et publication de verité, jusque à la mort se exposer et employer » (1534). // Donc jusqu�à la mort défendre la vérité. Laquelle reste, malgré tout, multiple. Courage du martyr mirage du fanatique. Calvin pour sa part ne les confondait pas, disant que zèle sans discernement n�était que folie et «frénésie». // Octobre 1534, l�Affaire des Placards. �vénement charnière qui fait basculer la première réforme française dans le chaos et l�échec en faisant muer la provisoire tolérance de François Ier en rage et représailles? Cette affaire aurait déclenché la pire vague de répression qu�on ait vu s�abattre sur la France avant les guerres de Religion, selon une tradition historiographique longtemps admise, et fortement colorée par les récits des martyrologes. Les Placards auraient donc fait des centaines de victimes, des milliers, des dizaines de milliers, comme la Saint-Barthélemy? Pas du tout. Une vingtaine, une trentaine entre novembre 1534 et mai 1535. Ce n�est pas le nombre qui a impressionné les contemporains; tout comme les historiens modernes, ils ont été moins émus par le nombre que par la manière des exécutions : �On dépensa des trésors d�ingéniosité pour faire bellement souffrir les hérétiques; bagatelles que, selon la coutume, de percer les langues au fer chaud, d�arracher les joues par des crochets, de couper les poings, de brûler vif. On perfectionna un supplice appliqué ... pour la première fois en 1528 à l�endroit de Denis de Rieux, qui consistait en une utilisation astucieuse de l�estrapade : le condamné était suspendu à une potence au-dessus des flammes et plongé à plusieurs reprises dans le bûcher de façon que sa mort ne fût pas trop rapide. Excellent moyen de prouver la supériorité de la «religion chrestienne» sur les autres, et d�instruire efficacement badauds et belles dames, friands de ce spectacle de choix, sur le sort qui les attendait s�ils avaient la velléité de quitter le giron de l�Eglise� (R. Hari). Aujourd�hui à défaut d�estrapades, c�est une pendaison ignominieuse captée sur un téléphone portable qu�on propose au public «friand de ce spectacle de choix», ou quelque horrible décapitation au rasoir. // Dans les quatre coins du monde se jouent sans discontinuer des reprises du même drame, dans divers pays dans diverses langues mais toujours dans le même style autour des mêmes luttes contre l�oppression et la persécution où «durs» et «mous» réincarnent Robespierre et Danton rejouant Marcourt et Farel ...

Abstract: La question des dialectes du français médiéval peut peser lourd quand on édite un texte ancien pour une collection destinée à un large public de lecteurs non initiés. Il en va ainsi de la rédaction manuscrite de Bien Avisé Mal Avisé (ca. 1490), plus d�une fois caractérisée comme « nettement dialectale ». En réalité les traits dialectaux y sont moins compliqués qu�ils ne paraissent au premier abord. A la différence des grands textes du théâtre arrageois du 13e siècle où H. Lewicka discernait en proportions différentes un mélange de 23 traits phonétiques, Bien Avisé n�en présente que le vestige d�un seul. Une étude des formes dialectales (qu�il faut appeler plutôt « d�origine dialectale ») dans ce texte confrontées à des formes françaises des mêmes mots dans le même texte montre que les « picardismes » qu�on lui attribue ne sont rien de plus que de simples variantes orthographiques sans incidence sur la prononciation ; elles se limitent pour la grande majorité à des mots où on lit ch (ou c) là où on attend [s] ou [ �] en français, ou l�inverse. L�analyse des « rimes mixtes » dans ce texte montre que les formes d�origine dialectale (provenant, du moins en partie, de copies antérieures) correspondent à une prononciation qui ne devait pas être sensiblement différente du français du rédacteur, ou pas différente du tout. Conclusion : si à leur égard on veut croire à une double prononciation (Långfors, Gossen, Régnier), soit à une alternance entre deux sons distincts ou distinguables, il faudrait, selon lieu et époque, envisager l�opposition (en l�occurrence [s] ~ [�] ), comme une zone de variance de plus en plus réduite, en voie de neutralisation vers [s] et aboutissant à ce son en français après �et pour un temps à côté de� un [s�] à peine palatalisé, qu�on prononce à un cheveu (seveu) en amont ou en aval, selon le cas, de la frontière chuintant-sifflant. Analogie avec la neutralisation en français moderne de voyelles de moyenne aperture (o, e) ouvertes et fermées en syllabes inaccentuées et la gêne des phonologues contraints de consigner dans les dictionnaires (Le Petit Robert p.ex.) la réalité mouvante : mauvais [m�v�] [mov�], maison [m�zõ] [mezõ], automne [�t�n] [ot�n] etc. Ainsi comme ainsi on ne parlera pas de « double prononciations » ni même de compromis notationnels, mais d�un nécessaire abandon dans certains environnements de distinctions fondamentales pour la phonologie d�un état de langue dans son ensemble.

Abstract: I. �Dieu est mort�? Autour de nous, fidèles et extrémistes à couteaux tirés, ainsi qu�adeptes et fanatiques de l�irreligion. Entre les extrêmes l�incroyant modéré prétend-il se détourner du problème? En vain. «Dieu existe, oui et même pour vous, dès le moment et dans l�exacte mesure que son existence chez D'AUTRES est capable d�avoir sur vous des effets catastrophiques». A ce postulat néopascalien s�ajoutent ici deux autres, plus précis, plus techniques: 1) Dualisme. Dans l�ancien théâtre français (Moyen Age, Renaissance) on ne met pas en scène Dieu sans le diable; 2) Désemantisation. Cependant le mot �dieu� perd sa charge sémantique, devient vide, vain. La langue moderne en garde de nombreuses épaves, Dieu sait combien d�expressions conservent la trace plus ou moins effacée de son souvenir. Cela remonte loin. La moralité de «Bien Avisé Mal Avisé» (15e-16e siècles) présente de nombreuses expressions désémantisées ou en voie de «blanchissage sémantique», comme dans le syntagme "adieu" ou l�interjection "pardieu!" Analyse des processus (réductions, particularisations) affectant mots et expressions avec "dieu" et "diable" regroupés par catégories: sens plein (biblique), sens vide (expressif), et zone de transition et de bascule. II. La scène du «festin du diable» comme anti-cène : inversion systématique du «sens» (signification, direction) d�un texte particulier de la Bible mais aussi de tout un sémantisme théologique, poursuivie selon les modèles prônés dans les artes praedicandi. Conclusion: désémantisations et inversions sémantiques de "dieu" et "diable" vont plus loin que la théologie et la morale qui les fondent et qu�ils contestent, pour rejoindre des questions permanentes. Rien de plus humanisés, en effet, que Dieu et le diable dans cette moralité, humanisation à propos de quoi on se trompe en parlant d�«anthropomorphisme». Derrière ces dualismes, ces codes binaires que l'homme traîne depuis ses grottes préhistoriques jusque dans les grotesques bunkers de sa possible posthistoire, on entrevoit quelque chose de plus sinistre qu'on devine permanent et indélible chez l�homme car ressortissant à la structure même de la différence, de la différentiation, chez l�être humain, et qui se manifeste toujours et partout de la même simple façon: appeler eux tout ce qui n�est pas nous, appeler autre, étranger, ennemi, tout ce qui n�est pas familier et qu�on n�arrive pas à ramener à soi, appeler Mal finalement, tout ce qu�on n�arrive pas à comprendre et à maîtriser dans l�autre qui est en nous. «Dualisme» en somme constitutif du processus identitaire, et qu�on appelait naguère «structure de la différence».

Abstract: On myths of priority and origins. How is it that today, 400 years after the Religious Wars, French literary history still prefers ascribing to the Catholic author �tienne Jodelle (1553) and not to the Protestant Théodore de Bèze (1549), the honor of having written the first French "tragédie," the genre destined to become the most noble among the Classical genres of the «Grand Siècle» and considered to the present day emblematic of French neo-classicism in literature.

Abstract: Hundreds of reform-minded Catholics in France were burned at the stake between 1523 and 1560 for heresy, including Rabelais�s editor Etienne Dolet. In 1543 Francis I issued a royal ordinance enjoining �inquisitors of the faith to pursue Lutherans and heretics as seditious, disruptors of the public peace, and conspirators against the security of the State.� How would an inquisitor know who was a �Lutheran� and what exactly was a �heretic�? A response from the Paris Faculty of Theology (25 articles of faith), translated here with commentary, was included with the 1543 Ordinance.

Abstract: On editing Old- and Middle-French texts.

Abstract: On evidentiality and the discourse pragmatics of legal testimony and theater. �Pathelin� (15th c.) is the earliest masterpiece of comic literature and theater in medieval Europe, praised for its subtlety and psychological realism, its humor and ingenious plot. Recent studies have focused on "surprisingly modern� questions it raises about language and what language is �supposed to do.� The main character is a cocky lawyer proud of his ability to manipulate evidence by ingenious tricks with language. Everyday reference to �what language is supposed to do� refers to its �communicative function,� where hinderances to clear and accurate linguistic representation, such as ambiguity and indeterminacy, are considered undesirable. But in everyday life clear and accurate representation is often avoided on purpose (as when an attorney considers it �damaging� in a court case). Speakers purposely use language for MISrepresentation in ways that are more or less DIRECT (inexact statements, errors, lies), or INDIRECT (insinuation, innuendo). Lawyers and their clients (among others) create false implications by manipulating voice, gesture, and context in reported speech, or by otherwise skewing the *assumed grounds of inference* in a given speech situation. Pragmatics (in linguistics and philosophy) stipulates that *common grounds for making inferences* are generally assumed, implicitly defined by the contextual knowledge and assumptions shared by the participants in a given speech situation. Pragmatic analysis aims to make explicit the procedures (not all of which are conscious and most of which are deniable) used by speakers when negotiating meaning in contextually conditioned �gray areas� resistant to formal analysis, such as insinuation and innuendo. This paper analyzes INDIRECT (but intentional) verbal misrepresentation in �Pathelin� produced by two types of �ricochet� utterances: (1) statements in which the speaker creates the illusion (as in reported speech) that the SOURCE of his or her utterance is a voice other than his or her own; and (2) utterances for which the TARGET or intended receiver(s) is other than the one(s) ostensibly addressed. The analysis draws on disciplines that converge on the topic of verbal misrepresentation: literary studies ( �polyphony� as the detectable presence of prior voices in the utterances of a speaker, or speaking persona); linguistics (evidentiality and epistemic modality); law (admissible evidence, ordinary vs. expert testimony); and ethnography: evasion or assumption of responsibility in everyday �performance rituals� that regulate social interactions and group cohesiveness. By adapting a widely-used functional model of human communication (speaker-message-receiver) to the discourse pragmatics of ritualized public performance (theater, cinema, criminal court forensics), any attentive non-specialist reader (you don't have to be a lawyer or a linguist) can do two things in the �gray area� speech situations defined above: 1) specify ambiguous or occulted contextual information, and 2) make explicit the implicit pragmatic functions of all participants in the speech situation, especially those who may not be actually present at the moment-of-speech including real and fictitious prior locutors (in instances of reported speech), and various �pragmatic addressees� -- receivers OTHER than the �formal addressees� to whom a verbal message is ostensibly addressed.

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Abstract: The theme of blindness in literature & literary history. Humor in the Middle Ages has often been said to be darkly tinged with "cruelty" because medieval authors made fun of subjects we consider taboo, like the blind and infirm. Jean Dufournet surveyed a wide selection of information --literary, sociological, demographic, medical, psychological-- documenting the ambiguous status of the blind and infirm in medieval society. Ambiguous because on the one hand there was no lack of sympathy and respect for the blind (alms and charity were encouraged and even required by a social system whose stability depended on the tautness of its moorings in Christian thought), and yet the blind person remained essentially "un marginal plus ou moins suspect, méprisé, ridiculisé" mostly out of fear and superstition. Rather than blindness as a "theme" (content structure), the present article looks at it in 2 other guises: (1) blindness textualized as a narrative strategy (in the paradigm of invisible or disguised, the pair unseen-unseeing appears as a metonymic mirror-image of each other and functionally interchangeable in certain plot structures); and (2) blindness theorized as a problem in reading, or rather, as Paul de Man argued, *the* problem of reading. Both strands of my argument converge in rejecting the view of medieval comic irony as an instance of "cruelty." The study focuses on "Le Garçon et l'aveugle" ("The Blind Beggar and his Valet") the oldest comic text extant from French drama (13th c.), with glances at attitudes toward blindness in antiquity (New Testament, Sophocles, Aristotle, Quintilian); the Middle Ages (Roman de Thèbes, Chrétien de Troyes); and the modern period both in theater (Shakespeare, Molière, Cocteau, Beckett, Ionesco) and theory -- Baudelaire ("De l'essence du rire"), Brentano ("Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte"), and Paul de Man ("Blindness & Insight").

Abstract: Theories and (mis)practices of reading in Art History and Literature. Jean Fouquet's famous miniature portraying the �Martyrdom of Saint Apollina� is assumed to depict a climactic moment in a late medieval Saint's play, but no text of any such play survives. In widely divergent �readings� of the image, theater historians have imagined various �mises en scène� by analogy with other plays seen and read. Little attention has been paid to public spectacles of this type simulating sexual violence. DISCUSSION: 1) Divergent readings and Saint Apollina's "realism": If Fouquet's painting "is a true photograph, a veritable reportorial snapshot" ["c'est en fait une vraie photographie, un véritable instantané de reportage" Rey-Flaud], how do we account for widely differing interpretations of the non-realistic elements it contains: non-human characters (devils, angels) and quasi-human ones (wild men, mannequin [?]) represented without discrimination on the same plane of "reality" as human characters. (2) Reading across media: traps of the "reality effect" (descriptive and narrative) in painting; late medieval/early Renaissance conventions of religious painting; the problem of hypothetically reconstituting narrative "by extension" from a fragment; the problem of faulty analogizing of experience from incompatible orders. (3) "History" and "situation models" (van Dijk). There is no text of any �Mystère de Sainte Apolline.� But we can examine Fouquet's painting in the light of other plays dealing with female saints. And by resituating the discussion in the broader context of late medieval theatrical representation of male and female saints' lives, we can confront theory with practice: the theoretical distinction sketched above between realism and reality effect (specifically as regards how canonization, official and popular, occurred in reality) discloses fantasies in the construction of the saint as a figure or character type in the theater, with respect to (a) mutilation and martyrdom: to what extent can one validate the common claim that French mystery plays "reflect the reality of the period," and what sort(s) of reality are implied by this claim? (b) misogyny: is the treatment of female saints in hagiographic drama more brutal than the treatment of male saints? How do we account for the fascination for bodily mutilation these plays demonstrate? CONCLUSION: Characterized by corporal mutilation and a mutilated corpus (texts lost or preserved only in fragments), hagiographic drama coincides imperfectly in its reality effects with the historical reality of material facts. However, the necessary deformation of the latter affords glimpses, unsettling ones, into the reality constructing processes of the human mind.

Abstract: Before �interdisciplinary studies� or �pluridisciplinarité� Lovejoy viewed the �History of ideas� as ranging freely �through all the provinces of history...whether these are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion or politics.� Politics and literature however do not figure in the chapter Lovejoy devotes to the Middle Ages in his major work �The Great Chain of Being� devoted to the history of the idea of �hierarchy.� In the present essay texts from all major genres of late medieval French literature provide evidence of hierarchy-in-crisis: challenges to political and ecclesiastical hierarchies during the Hundred Years War (politics) and the Great Schism & Conciliar Movement (politics and religion). These challenges, both material and theoretical, undid the philosophical justifications for the exercise of power in the �great chains of COMMAND� in the Church and in secular politics, and in doing so formed the great link that joined the political thought of Antiquity to Modernity�the main result of which was to reshape, against oligarchy, classical theories of natural law into the first modern versions of representative parliamentary government on a large scale as it leveled the hierarchic governing structure of the Catholic church through the principle and practice of Conciliarism. The literary convention of the �estats du monde� (satire & criticism of the various social classes�essentially the foibles of the poor and evils of the rich) served as a vehicle not only for protesting abuses; it also allowed for powerful critiques questioning the validity of the contemporary social and ecclesiastical hierarchies themselves, questioning in particular whether the popes�and at the time there were two�or the General Council is the supreme authority in the Church. So against the �great chain� model there appear two salient metaphors of hierarchy-in-crisis: (1) violent and disobedient children in revolt against their mother (mother Church, mother France); and (2) the body (�tête et membres�) used to redefine the nature of ecclesiological hierarchy. Literary manifestations of the conjunction of legal & mystical metaphors (deriving from the coalition of canon lawyers and theologians attempting to deal with the Schism) convey contemporary outcries (14th-15th cc.) against the Schism and abuses of papal power, and appeals to the General Council to end them. Examples from literary works by well-known writers (Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pisan, Alain Chartier, Jean Juvenal des Ursins), and obscure anonymous ones.

Abstract: Political theater and �traditions renouvelées...� *Renewal * of traditions, unbroken since Antiquity�rather than their �rebirth��was the theme of Franco Simone�s view of the Renaissance in France (�Il Rinascimento francese� 1961, Eng. trans. 1969), a work that contributed much to the redefinition of the French 15th century not as a period of decline and decadence, the end point of the old (�medieval�) culture and the threshold of the new, but as a period of �creative syntheses� and energetic renewal. The present study sketches a piece of the picture previously unexplored by Prof. Simone (one of my mentors in graduate school), the invention in the 15th c. of the political drama in France. This is a topic now well established; but it was not so in 1970 when Franco Simone, presiding over a colloquium at the Collège de France on �L�originalité du 15e siècle�, replied to a question from Raymond Lebègue regarding the conspicuous absence of the theater from any sessions at the conference: �Yes, the theater... we�re not there yet.� Political theater, which flourished in the 16th c. and beyond as a vehicle for the propaganda of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, began life in the 15th century amidst the artistic and intellectual ferment characterizing what Franco Simone considered the hallmark of the period: recombinations and modifications of disparate elements from the traditions of antiquity and medieval Christianity in new syntheses appropriate to a new age marked by intense questioning and turmoil, an age that not only renewed and modified but truly reinvented its political, religious and esthetic traditions. This is also the age that saw the transformation of the morality play into a vehicle of political persuasion; that reinvention occurred in a play based on the Council of Basel (1431-1437), and called, appropriately enough, �Le Concil de Basle�, the earliest known example in French of the use of the theater for the propagation of partisan political and ecclesiastical doctrines. Written in 1434 by an anonymous French cleric, it combines the form and techniques of the morality play with the subject matter of the political & ecclesiological treatise. This combination, apparently simple, is unknown in medieval French drama prior to the �Concil de Basle� of 1434. The purpose of the play was to promote the partisan doctrines of the conciliarist reform movement in the Church, and of the pro-French (anti-Angloburgundian) peace-commission of the council, which in the following year was instrumental in negotiating the Paix d�Arras (1435). By ending the civil war in France (Armagnacs & Bourguignons, 1417-1435), the Paix d�Arras marked the beginning of the end of the Hundred Years War, and the realization of the desire of the author�and his colleagues in the peace-commission�for the restoration of peace. By its successful intervention, as a sort of medieval United Nations, in the domain of civil politics, and by the success it achieved in its struggle for administrative supremacy in the Catholic church, the council of Basel is itself also exemplary of the �originality of the 15th c.� in civil & ecclesiastical politics. In implementing its radically expanded formulation of the �conciliar theses��a tour de force of recombined juridical principles and precedents already existing in the traditions of civil and Canon law�the council of Basel laid the theoretical foundations for�and achieved in practice the first successful application on a large scale of�representative democratic constitutionalism, effectively challenging and constraining a supreme monarchical authority without recourse to force of arms. For the first time in Western history. The subsequent impact and repercussions of Baslean conciliarism in secular political theory were significant and far-reaching�to 1688, 1776, 1789 and beyond...The present essay summarizes the major ingredients�literary, political, ecclesiological�entering into the composition of these two exemplary 15th-c. �creative syntheses�: (1) the council of Basel, less important for having deposed Eugene IV than for having negotiated the Paix d�Arras and for having furnished principles & precedents for later theoreticians of secular constitutional parliamentarianism, and (2) �Le Concil de Basle�, the oldest extant example of a partisan political dramatic work in French, less important for its particular subject matter than for having extended the expressive possibilities of the medieval drama in the same way philosophers, theologians and writers in other literary genres in the 15th c. manifested the �originality of the 15th c.�: renewal of selected aspects of tradition and creative recombinations of disparate elements from a thousand years of cultural heritage, remodeled in original configurations appropriate to the needs & aspirations of 15th-c. France, including a model for modern representative governments, within and outside the Church.

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Abstract: La moralité du �Nouveau monde avec l�estrif du pourveu et de l�ellectif� fut jouée à Paris en 1508 dans le cadre d�une campagne de publicité antipapale menée par Louis XII. Le sujet de la pièce�l�abolition de la Pragmatique Sanction de Bourges (1438) et la défense des libertés gallicanes n�a cependant rien à voir avec l�actualité politique : en 1508 il n�est pas question d�aboloir la Pragmatique et les libertés gallicanes ne sont aucunement menacées. Peu importe, Louis XII voyait dans cette pièce une bonne et utile raillerie du pape, qu�on voit tourner en ridicule et représenter sur la scène comme un agresseur. Voilà qui colle parfaitement à l�actualité, car en 1507 le roi accusait Jules II de soutenir la révolte de Gênes et menaçait de marcher sur Rome. Dès lors rien de plus propice, pour rallier l�opinion contre le pape, qu�une manifestation théâtrale patriotique et antiromaine. Louis XII a non seulement parrainé la représentation du "Nouveau monde" en 1508, il l'a fait imprimer (par son propre imprimeur royal) en demandant que soient tirés sur vélin plusieurs exemplaires de luxe. Cette propagande par le théâtre lui a-t-elle réussi? On le voit quatre ans plus tard commanditer à Pierre Gringore le "Jeu du Prince des sots", autre pièce férocement antipapale. Or si �Le Nouveau Monde� n�est pas de 1508, de quand date-t-elle? L�histoire des fortunes gallicanes porte à croire que cette pièce qui soulève �l�estrif du pourveu et de l�ellectif� serait mieux à sa place au temps de Louis XI, lequel a carrément aboli la Pragmatique Sanction en 1461 (quitte à la rétablir peu après) en disant que les concessions qu�elle laissait à Rome portait à l�autorité royale une atteinte intolérable. Dans cette perspective l�attribution à Andrieu de la Vigne, né vers 1460, devient impossible; mais déjà pour Petit de Julleville cette attribution paraissait peu sûre.