Futures of Medieval French

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field. <p/>Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years making vital theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste through troubadour lyric to late medieval philosophy and poetry in French Occitan Latin and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies musicology temporality the material turn medieval textuality feminism queer theory voice medieval and modern intellectual formations psychoanalysis philology visual arts transversal criticism the literary object affect rhetoric body the past modern responses to medieval forms and tropes non-Christian texts and thought-patterns politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.