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French Literature notes - La Chatelaine de Vergy

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University Of St Andrews

Comprehensive notes on the medieval French text 'La Chatelaine de Vergy'. Contains literary analysis, historical context and background to the form of medieval French verse.

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Uploaded on December 20, 2019
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Written in 2017/2018
Type Study guide

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La Chatelaine de Vergy
What is it?
 13th century
 Anonymous
 Many manuscripts
 Manner of telling vs content – highly regarded to retell another
work, innovation/ originality comes from the way the story is told
rather than the story itself
 Scribe X author – medieval texts copied out by scribes trained to
write (but not necessarily monks, perhaps someone trained to write
in a school run by monks), scribe not necessarily the author (but
possibly), scribe could alter the manuscript (add or subtract
details, sometimes to please the noble commissioner) therefore
huge variation across the 20 surviving manuscripts
 Manuscripts incredibly expensive to produce – usually
commissioned by nobles

Genre
 A lai?
- Quite short (e.g. 500 lines)
- Octosyllabes (8 per line)
- Framed by a prologue/ epilogue
- Love story – vocabulary of courtly love
- Usually has a hint of the supernatural (fairies, a magic ring) but La
Chatelelaine de Vergy is very realistic
 A novella?
 A verse romance
 A tragic romance
 Struggle to categorise the text because medieval authors didn’t
consider genre in the same way

Medieval Romance
 Here un roman = a ‘romance’ NOT a ‘novel’
 A text written in a romance language
 ‘romance’ used as an adjective e.g. a romance work – not
‘romantic’, and Romanticism as a literary movement was nit until
much later
 Characterised by courtliness/ courtly love/ courtly romance
 Contrast with the epic texts of the 11 th/12th centuries e.g. Song of
Roland
- Knights (not warriors)
- Women (courtly ladies)
- The representation of love

,  Focus on adventures and quests

La Chatelaine: a typical romance work?
 No
- The knight does not undertake a quest
- Their love predates the narrative

 Yes
- A detached narrator (no explicit moral) – may judge the characters
at points but does not
- The division of the text into episodes (perhaps)
- Typical characters of romance

The characters
 Aristocrats
 The court of Burgundy
 Been suggested that La Chatelaine was a real woman – Laure de
Lorraine (niece of the Duke of Burgundy) and her husband
Guillaume de Vergy BUT dating is wrong, unlikely that an
unflattering text depicting two such powerful people would have
circulated so widely
 Title and social status – interesting that none of the characters are
named, makes it resemble a cautionary tale
- The knight
- The chatelaine
- The duke
- The duchess
- = a feudal society

Feudalism
 A system of government and society
 Like a pyramid
 Homage
 Auxilium (military aid) and consilium (advice) – given to the king by
the nobility and to the nobility by knights
 Lords and vassals – knights indebted to lords of higher rank
 In reality, these levels of society were very interconnected and not
entirely stratified – existence of feudal bonds between classes
(especially nearer the top, the peasants were indebted to everyone)
 Feudal bonds referenced vv. 332-339

The chatelaine
 Lacks a precise portrait

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