Madness in Medieval French Literature Identities Found and Lost [Hardcover]

Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.

Introduction
1. Abject insanity, madness sublime
2. The specular madman
3. Madness and social exclusion
4. Heterosexuality and its discontents
5. The living dead
6. Madness and the body
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

When Sylvia Huot publishes a book, it is always an occasion for reencountering medieval French literature through one of the most thoughtful minds in the field. Her newest book is no exception.... Huot's analyses remain admirably tuned to the specificities of her texts.... Readers of those texts, whether medievalists or generalists, will greatly benefit from the general frame that Huot's book now furnishes, and modernists--we can hope--may now learn something more useful to fill in the blanks left by Foucault. --Speculum

Sylvia Huot is Reader in Medieval French Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has held teaching positions at University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University and is a leading scholar of French Medieval literature. Her publications includeFrom Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing inOld French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry(Cornell UP 1987),The 'Romance of the Rose' and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission(CUP 1993), andAllegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony(Stanford UP 1997). She has also written numerous articles in scholarly journals and in edited collections of essays.