Christine de Pizan

Adams, Tracy

doi:10.1093/fs/knx129

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Cited by 5 publications

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Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette

2021

The Cambridge History of the Novel in French

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Beginnings: From the Late Medieval to Madame de Lafayette

2021

The Cambridge History of the Novel in French

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Late Medieval Precursors to the Novel: ‘aucune chose de nouvel’

Swift¹

2021

The Cambridge History of the Novel in French

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There are no novels in medieval France, nor should we look for them. Establishing bootlessness straightaway makes us interrogate what we are doing when thinking about 'beginnings', why we are doing it, and what we mean by 'the novel' in the first place. This chapter's aim must be two-fold: to ensure that the medieval period is not unduly omitted from, or has possible pertinence unjustly disparaged in, a history of the novel in French, but also to avoid the period being falsely positioned or approached unhelpfully teleologically. Our interests are thus historical, methodological and theoretical, which introduces a third desirable outcome: to use dialogue between medieval and more modern perspectives to refine our reflection on a genre held to be 'a vast and perhaps ultimately unclassifiable area'. 1 Histories of the novel generally do one of three things to medieval literature: exclude, appropriate or both. They may dismiss the medieval period as totally lacking in pertinence, as when Ian Watt, defining formal realism as the novel's key criterion, perceived the genre's modernity to be 'decisively separated from its classical and mediaeval heritage'. 2 Its literary culture is construed as irretrievably alien: 3 a predominantly socially elite readership; the pre-print absence of any kind of mass production; oral transmission rather than written literarity; authority deriving from a body

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