The Geste Francor is a collection of Franco-Italian texts surviving only in the acephalic codex Venice, Marciana Fondo Francese 256 (known as V13). Produced in the Veneto in the first half of the fourteenth century, the Geste is made up, in order of appearance, of Enfances Bovo, Berta da li pe grant, Chevalerie Bovo, Karleto (an Enfances Charlemagne), Berta e Milone, Enfances Ogier le Danois, Orlandino (an Enfances Roland), Chevalerie Ogier le Danois and Macario. Some of these texts are versions of Old French chansons de geste (Morgan Geste 73-254 lists sources and analogues), but the Geste itself is hard to classify: although its subject matter-the feats of Pepin and Charlemagne, kings of France, and of their barons-relates it to the chanson de geste tradition, it is by no means a canonical epic. Its erratic meter means that it does not meet poetic ideals, and it has features of a roman. Like other "late" epics, it integrates elements of diverse origins (Roussel); 1 it could be considered a chanson d'aventures (Kibler) or a parody of the epic (Capusso "Mescidanze"; Cingolani; Negri). The Geste is partly a unified cycle, partly a hotchpotch of diverse material. Though critics have argued for its codicological coherency (Cingolani) and unity of ideology (Krauss Epica), the text disrupts the mechanisms that hold together other cycles: unity of lineage, or moral frameworks, or thematic togetherness. It is perhaps a "zibaldone" (Rosellini Geste 62; miscellany), with some misfit poems (Cremonesi "A proposito"). Overall, a vast set of thematic

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This article proposes a comparison between the ethics of rebellion developed in recent publications by Julia Kristeva and in the medieval poetry of Bertran de Born. Both Kristeva and Bertran see revolt as a continuous and crucial process of transformation and questioning, of renewal and regeneration, rather than mindless, nihilistic rejection and destruction. Neither has a purely political conception of revolt; instead, they define it as an ethical, artistic, and psychic activity that is the ultimate guarantee of man's dignity, integrity, independence, and creative capacities. In both writers' works we see an ambivalent relationship to father figures and a desire to challenge the Oedipal pact demanded by the symbolic by means of a literary act of defiance that involves a move beyond meaning and sense. Moving away from her earlier focus on poetry, Kristeva turns to Louis Aragon, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Paul Sartre for examples of this defiance. Yet Aragon himself looked to Bertran de Born as a poet in revolt, and the poetic form remains a better venue for the expression of what Kristeva terms the semiotic—that is, the rhythmic bodily forces that resist reduction to the symbolic. Bertran envisages a vital and bellicose society in which violent impulses are given free rein. His poems earned him a place in the medieval imagination as a highly dangerous figure bent on provoking uprisings: thus Dante placed him in Hell, carrying his own severed head. Bertran's oeuvre, then, demonstrates the role literature can play within a culture of revolt. Ultimately, the article argues that a politics of resistance to dominant cultural forces transcends differences in time and form and suggests a new “use” for the Middle Ages within modern theory.

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