, Brepols, 2023 Hardback, 309 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:21 b/w, 17 col., 4 tables b/w., 1 maps b/w, Language: English. ISBN 9782503585994.
Summary A collaborative investigation of one of the best-known works of late medieval European literature, the Franco-Burgundian collection of short stories known as the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. Modelled loosely on Boccaccio's Decameron and incorporating elements from Old French fabliaux as well as Poggio Bracciolini's Liber Facetiarum, the anonymous collection attributes its morally challenging and frequently humorous tales to named narrators including Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Luxembourg, Count of Saint Pol. The contribution of this new volume of essays is threefold: - empirical, in that it brings entirely new interdisciplinary insights into the study of the genesis and reception of the work; - methodological, in that it integrates study of the text within a 360-degree evaluation of the work's manuscript and early printed context; and - conceptual, in that it seeks to understand the social dimensions of textual production and consumption. These approaches unite ten principal contributions by specialists in the fields of art history, book history, court history and linguistics from France, the Netherlands, the USA and the UK. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Graeme Small Part I - The manuscript witness Chapter 1. Les Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. The physical fabric of the fables Richard Gameson Chapter 2. MS Hunter 252: precursors, date and patronage Hanno Wijsman Part II - Reception in manuscript and print Chapter 3. Printing the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. Anthoine V rard's 1486 edition and its sixteenth-century successors Mary Beth Winn Chapter 4. Opening and closing the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles. Paratext, context and reception, 1469- c. 1550 Graeme Small Part III - Reading text and image in manuscript form Chapter 5. Storytelling through architecture. The miniatures of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles Maud Perez-Simon Chapter 6. Narratological readings of the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (CNN3, 21, 27). Text and image in MS Hunter 252 Alexandra Velissariou ? Part IV - The text as a site of language use Chapter 7. Toward a scriptology of Middle French. The case of MS Hunter 252 Geoffrey Roger Chapter 8. Stylistic implications of linguistic archaism and contemporaneity in MS Hunter 252 Peter V. Davies ? Part V - Archives in the fiction Chapter 9. Locating storytelling in time and space (Hainaut-Brussels, 1458-59). A Decameronian moment Edgar de Blieck & Graeme Small Chapter 10. Tales from the chamber. The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles between Burgundy and Luxembourg Graeme Small Conclusions Graeme Small