• Home
• Study
• Study Information
• Modules
• Module Information

Sex and the Text: Gender and Authority in Late Medieval France

Module description

Late medieval France was a transitional period for French history and culture. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the era of the Hundred Years War and Joan of Arc, France struggled to free herself from the English threat and bloody civil war, while women struggled to find a voice. Many socio-cultural norms were being challenged at this time, including misogynous stereotypes perpetuated by literary and non-literary writings. You’ll encounter some of the most important sexual and textual debates of this era, their origins, development, and repercussions for French identity and society; their historical context; and their modern visual legacy.

Module aims - intentions of the module

• To trace the roles of key authors in debates about gender, sex and authority
• To examine the ways in which medieval authors and poets operated, competed, and composed within communities
• To trace the legacy of these debates and conflicts in visual culture of the period, of the nineteenth century, and of the modern day (manuscript illumination, painting, film etc.)
• To evaluate the dynamics of a debating culture in late medieval France, with particular reference to two important literary quarrels: the Querelle de la Rose and the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy
• To identify a range of misogynous and pro-feminine moves made in these quarrels against the backdrop of the long-running debate about the value vs. the worthlessness of women (the Querelle des Femmes)
• To examine how texts and images were produced and circulated in a pre-modern culture

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of key poems and prose texts in the field of late medieval French literature, as well as a broader understanding of the transmission of these texts.
• 2. Demonstrate competence in reading and analysing Middle French.
• 3. Discuss the ways in which authors/poets challenge received textual/sexual authority and adopt debating positions in their texts.

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Analyse texts as culturally produced artefacts, showing an awareness of their relation to the socio-cultural and historical context in which they were written and circulated.
• 5. Argue at length and in detail about an aspect of the topic, supporting the argument with evidence from the text and with opinions from secondary literature.
• 6. Use a range of (literary-) critical terminology, applying it to independently researched material as well as to material introduced by the module tutor.
• 7. Using recommended bibliographical tools, present a critical bibliography giving a balanced overview of an aspect of the subject

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 8. Manage own learning time and learning activities with limited guidance from module tutor.
• 9. Undertake independent research on the basis of the taught module.
• 10. Present information and arguments on a designated or negotiated topic to a group of listeners and respond to questions.
• 11. Using bibliographical material provided, select, plan, and carry out a programme of study leading to an essay on a chosen topic, to a specified length and deadline.

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:

Starting with theoretical definitions of sex and gender, and the Querelle de la Rose, we examine the interdependent traditions of the defamation and defence of women through text. We shall first see how, in the course of this largely epistolary quarrel, intellectual male authors close ranks to exclude a female author, Christine de Pizan, and then we investigate the ways in which she turns the tables.

This major literary event sets the scene for a much longer quarrel in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy, on which we shall concentrate. Anti-courtly and pro-feminine feeling is expressed through Alain Chartier's famously controversial poem, La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424), in which a feisty lady defends her right to a free choice of lover. Chartier's poem spawned a series of fictional sequels and imitations which debated both the right of the eponymous Belle Dame or any lady to reject her suitor, and the rights of authors over their creations.

We will then concentrate on the afterlife of the Belle Dame sans mercy and assess nearly six centuries of critical and artistic responses to Chartier's femme fatale, including those of the nineteenth-century Romantic poet John Keats and the Pre-Raphaelite painters Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John William Waterhouse and Frank Dicksee. We will also look more generally at the modern depiction of medieval women in art and on film. As part of the module there will be a film screening of Luc Besson's Joan of Arc, as well as an optional trip to view Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian paintings at Bristol Art Gallery.

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Le Debat sur le Roman de la Rose, ed. and trans. Virginie Greene (Paris: Champion, 2006). OR in English translation (please also consult French version on ELE): David Hult (ed. and trans.), Debate of the Romance of the Rose (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• Alain Chartier, Le Cycle de La Belle Dame sans Mercy. Une anthologie potique du XVe sicle (BNF MS FR. 1131), eds. David F. Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003).     The following poems/texts are set from this cycle: 
• Alain Chartier, La Belle Dame sans mercy, pp. 15-83.
• Anon, Coppie de la requeste faicte et baillee aux dames contre Maistre Alain, pp. 86-8.
• Anon, Coppie des lettres envoyees par les dames a Maistre Alain, pp. 88-9.
• Alain Chartier, Excusacion, pp. 91-113.
• Baudet Herenc, Accusation contre la Belle Dame sans mercy, 115-67. 
• Anon, La Dame loyale en Amour, pp. 169-243. Achille Caulier, La Cruelle Femme en Amour, pp. 245-325. 
• John Keats, La Belle Dame sans merci, in John Keats: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 334-36. Available on ELE.

Secondary texts (see module bibliography for further reading): 

• Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 
  Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women: Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).
• Emma Cayley, Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 
  Emma Cayley and Ashby Kinch eds., Chartier in Europe (Gallica, Boydell and Brewer, 2008).
• Daisy Delogu, Joan E. McRae and Emma Cayley, A Companion to Alain Chartier (c. 1385-1430): Father of French Eloquence (Brill, 2015).
• Grant F. Scott, ‘Language Strange: A Visual History of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci”’, Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 503-35. Available on JSTOR.
• Helen Solterer, The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture 
  (Berkeley/London: University of California Press, 1995).
• Sarah Wootton, Consuming Keats: Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), esp. chapter 4, “Keats’ Belle Dame as femme fatale”, pp. 107-45.

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1369

Key words search

Middle Ages, medieval, gender, France