Search Results

The publication of the Polity was initially a damp squib, but the Reformed hostility of the writer of the Christian Letter combined with a Catholic desire to see Hooker as representative of the English Church helped define a distinctive religious position for him. William Covell’s defence of Hooker took the opportunity to remould him further in support of a growing distaste for the earlier style of the English reformation. Whilst there was still a desire to claim Hooker as a Reformed figure, he was increasingly favoured by avant-garde churchmen.

This chapter compares the heroes Tristan and Lancelot, examining their treatment in a range of medieval French texts with particular reference to the motif of dying for love. It also offers a reading of the Tristan intertext in Chrétien de Troyes' Cligès.

This chapter uses critical models deriving from Lacan's seminar XX, Encore, to suggest that some rather exceptional male characters in medieval texts (notably Galehaut in the Lancelot en prose) offer a queer paradigm of dying for love. Particular attention is paid to the reception of the story of Narcissus, including the most famous account in the Roman de la Rose, and to the psychoanalytic concept of the gaze.

This chapter discusses the Stanley internees' activities during internment at the camp. It describes how kindergarten and transition classes were set up in St Stephen's College Hall for children five to eight years old, as well as junior school classes for eight to twelve year-olds and senior school for those up to eighteen. It notes that for the first few weeks the American children received separate instruction, but beginning in April 1942, the schools were combined. It observes that with more than two hundred children in the Camp as well as teachers and administrators from the Education Department, the University of Hong Kong and a number of primary, middle, and other schools, it is not surprising that very early on internment plans were made for education. It reports that Lancelot Forster was the chairman of the Education Committee which was subsequently formed and held weekly meetings throughout internment.

This chapter examines the portrayal of the madman as a member of a community. In Arthurian romance, the court fool Daguenet offers a parody of knighthood, while heroic figures such as Lancelot and Tristan stand at the pinnacle of greatness; these figures define the outer limits of the chivalric identity adopted by ‘normal’ knights. When Lancelot and Tristan lapse into madness, their role at court changes while retaining its liminal quality. Comparative analysis of their madness, together with the character of Daguenet, brings out the variety of ways that madness serves as a literary device to characterise the culture and ethos of a royal court. Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la Feuillee features a madman in an urban setting whose antics mask a more serious commentary on the ways that social exclusion operates in defining communal identity.

The chapter analyzes Lancelot as an unrepentant crusader in the prose romance Perlesvaus: Lancelot is represented as a crusader who advances the New Law despite lacking access to the Grail as in the Vulgate Cycle; further, in a confessional scene with a hermit, he is explicitly depicted as unrepentant for his sin of loving Guinevere. The Perlesvaus develops the potential of Lancelot seen in lyric. Without deflating the lyrical suspension of the lover caught between earthly and spiritual models of chivalry, it extends his professional avowal by asking how his competing loves for God and the lady can be sustained through a romance that advocates holy warfare. Placing Lancelot and the Perlesvaus within the context of other romances, the chapter argues that Lancelot’s unrepentance and his status as a crusader without complete conversion speaks the idiom. The chapter ends by explaining how an unrepentant Lancelot serves as an ethical model for nobility, such as Jean de Nesle, a patron of the romance.

This chapter begins by introducing the most significant features of Scottish literary manuscript miscellanies, such as: their relatively late date, in comparison with surviving miscellanies from elsewhere in the British Isles; their copying by scribes who also functioned as notary publics, writers to the signet, and merchants; their links to some of Scotland’s most prominent book-owning families; and their inclusion of material derived from print and from south of the border. The remainder of the chapter offers a necessarily brief case study of one particular Older Scots literary manuscript miscellany (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5) in which the Older Scots romance, Lancelot of the Laik, is placed alongside a selection of Scottish courtesy texts and legal material, a series of English and Scottish prophecies, several acts of the Scottish parliament, an English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, and the only surviving manuscript copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia.

In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, Francesca explains that she and her lover Paolo first became aware of their passion when they read of the famous first kiss between Lancelot and Guinevere and were inspired to imitate these characters. In attributing Francesca’s sin to her reading of the Book of Galehaut (or the Prose Lancelot), Dante is said to criticize her for confusing literature and life and, by extension, the ideal and the real. In the Prose Lancelot, some knights and ladies, like “realist” critics of romance, doubt that Lancelot is as great a knight and lover as he is alleged to be, but their skepticism is shown to be grounded in their own resentment. As intolerable as it may be for Lancelot’s opponents to acknowledge his superiority to themselves or their lovers, it is no less difficult for his supporters to acknowledge that excellence, as they can neither be nor possess the man who stands above all others. In the end, the only way to approach Lancelot is with the aim not of surpassing him, as his rivals do, nor of possessing him, as his admirers do, but of contemplating his excellence, as the audience does in reading this work.

Charles Kingsley had a great deal of interest in geological science. His work provides direct links to the gentleman geologist who had pioneered its “heroic age.” Kingsley secured honorary membership upon his founding of the Society of Natural Science, where scientific instruction was delivered to the middle-class men of Chester. He was later greatly influenced by Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, whereby his studies on geology interrogated his practice as a novelist. His fictional heroes were practitioners of geology, from Yeast's Lancelot Smith, to Alton Locke in the 1850 novel of the same name. This seeping of his scientific musing with the craft of literature brought about the censure of Kingsley's work in literary criticism for it seemed he was more interested in making statements than the conventions of plot. This chapter explores Kingsley's works and how they have influenced the development of geology.

This chapter considers the exercise of voice as constitutive of masculine privilege in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la charrette. Through an examination of Lancelot’s varied speech acts—including extravagant promises and anguished silences—it examines how the exercise and withholding of voice reveal the limits of submission to authority, illustrating the productive nature of constraint. Reading across the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, this chapter also interrogates the gendered nature of silence and speech.  While silence might be coded as feminine and submissive, as in Erec et Enide, Lancelot’s silences emphasize the elective, and therefore privileged, nature of his submission. His strategic performances of speech and silence operate under the illusion of a gendered powerlessness—exemplified by his submission to the queen—, exploring what it means to be a male subject both subjected to and seemingly abjected by the caprices of his lordly lady.

The origin of research on the interaction of nature and nurture is really a story of origins. For, in the 1920s and 1930s, two British biologists separately considered how nature and nurture might interact to bring about the development of human traits and differences in those traits. R. A. Fisher introduced what came to be the “biometric concept of interaction”, while Lancelot Hogben introduced what came to be the “developmental concept of interaction”. Most importantly, Fisher came to think of interaction as a nuisance and rare in nature, while Hogben thought of interaction as common in nature and vitally important to biological explanation. Fisher and Hogben, vehemently arguing during the height of the eugenics controversy, laid the framework for all future debates about the interaction of nature and nurture.

This chapter considers the incorporation of the courtly love ideal into the verse narratives of some Arthurian romances. It also examines the question of how widely the principles of courtly love were actually put into practice in the twelfth century. The discussions cover the source material of Arthurian romance; a reading of Chrétien's “Lancelot”; aristocratic speech in the Tristan myth; the Lais of Marie de France; more real-life romances of the late twelfth century; and courtly love conventions' satirical treatment in fabliaux.

This chapter looks at a variety of phenomena including folkloric dance that contained old regime materials, the ballet itself, and the scholarly research and collecting devoted to the grand siècle at the turn of the century. Three distinct seventeenth centuries were under construction in the historical imagination of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century dance. Research conducted in the early 1970s shows that elements of la belle danse found their way into regional folkloric performance; the seventeenth century became a predominant subject of ballets; musicology—a nascent discipline in France—turned to the discovery and reading of texts of musical theater that were no longer performed. These three activities engendered three versions of the seventeenth century in dance that I refer to as survival, revival, and archival. Survival corresponds to the emergence of ethnography thanks to Van Gennep and later Guilcher; revival refers to the principles of ballet evidenced in the writings of Volynsky on the basis of which new work could be created; archival refers to the discovery of the past as other in the research of Henry Prunières. These led in turn to concepts of performance as artifact, myth, and document, which together constituted the dispersed field of neoclassicism as I understand it in this book. Each of these versions of the seventeenth century came with a political potential with respect to questions of national identity.

This chapter begins with an overview of Lifar’s postwar career at the Paris Opera. It then traces the development in the postwar era of a French notion of the baroque that had remained unacknowledged under interwar neoclassicism. This chapter tracks the gradual emergence of the French baroque as an idea from the early 1950s through the 1980s when it exerted a decisive impact on choreographic culture in France, as well as elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. I view the baroque in the postwar period not as a cyclical or structural response to interwar neoclassicism but as a historic reaction in historical terms. This trend is investigated in literature and literary criticism, philosophy, and dance. Baroquism is understood as a historically conjunctural concept related to articulation and theatricality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Francine Lancelot’s company Ris et Danceries in the 1980s and the emergence of the baroque as a choreographic paradigm of postmodernity.

Considers historiographical texts in both verse and prose that incorporate the civil “troubles” into their representation of the French past, paying special attention to the relationship between memory and history that they posit, as well as to the rhetorical techniques for representing the past that they either endorse or employ. On the whole, these techniques are designed to create distance between readers and their own recent past, making of them spectators to rather than participants in history. To this end, conciliatory historians of the immediate post-war period, appropriating the stance of the critical historiographer, explicitly disavow “passion.” At the same time, however, they employ a wide range of affective terms associated with tragedy and the tragic in their representations of the French civil wars, and ultimately solicit an emotional response to their account of the troubles.