Marco Nievergelt - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Marco Nievergelt

Arthurian Literature XXXII, 2015

Fifteenth Century Studies, 2011

Johan Huizinga's characterization of the fifteenth century as the "Waning" or &quot... more Johan Huizinga's characterization of the fifteenth century as the "Waning" or "Autumn" of the Middle Ages has been as influential as it has been controversial, and despite the amount of criticism and skepticism the portrayal has elicited from its scholarly readers over the last ninety years, this conceptualization has largely stood its ground, invariably stimulating debate and further research. The present case study is at once a tribute to Huizinga's unique perceptiveness as an "intuitive historian," but also an attempt to flesh out some of his intuitions by focusing more sharply on two figures that in different ways may be seen as symptomatic of the wider process of transition and transformation which Huizinga describes. Both Olivier de la Marche and Rene d'Anjou figure prominently in Huizinga's account, but deserve to be isolated from Huizinga's master-narrative for a moment to be seen as critical observers of their immediate cultural environment, articulating their own sense of the "waning" of the chivalric ideal. Both figures were closely involved with the courtly culture of their day: Olivier de la Marche (1425-1502) held a variety of offices at the Burgundian court under Philip, Charles, and Mary, later entering the service of Maximilian I. A remarkable practitioner and theoretician of Burgundian chivalry, he was also the author of the Memoires as well as a number of ceremonial and more strictly literary works. Rene d'Anjou (1409-80), King of Naples and Jerusalem; Duke of Anjou, Bar, and Lorraine; as well as Count of Maine and Provence, was equally an enthusiastic patron of knightly culture who organized tournaments, founded the Order of the Croissant, wrote a treatise on the manner of conducting an ideal tournament, and also composed poetry in the courtly and romance tradition. The broad analogies between de la Marche's and Rene's situations are revealing: both move in circles close to the centers of power, are closely involved with aristocratic traditions and institutions of their day such as the orders of the Golden Fleece and the Croissant, witness the decline of the political framework of which they are a part, and most importantly in the present context, both articulate their own sense of the decline of knighthood by resorting to allegorical quest narratives. These narratives, rather than serving as romance-like quests in the conventional sense, become theoretical, speculative quests in search of the elusive nature of chivalry itself. Deprived of a clear objective to direct his efforts, the questing hero turns back on himself to scrutinize his own values, ambitions, desires, hopes, and delusions. Rene d'Anjou in the Cuer d'Amour Espris and Olivier de la Marche in the Chevalier Delibere0 reflect on the possibility of pursuing such a speculative "quest for knighthood" in the rapidly changing political, social, and ideological context of the later fifteenth century, and thus unwittingly provide highly revealing, precise, often intimately autobiographical contemporary "glosses" on the supposedly universal experience of disenchantment with traditional structures of thought that characterizes the fifteenth century, according to Huizinga. Written literary evidence articulating or problematizing such disenchantment is often left untapped by Huizinga, who in his identification of the dreamlike, aestheticizing nature of fifteenth-century chivalry is primarily visual. His sense for taking the pulse of the mentality behind practices and institutions such as the vows, pas d'armes, and orders of knighthood is masterful and perceptive, but mostly avoids taking into consideration the voices of the actors themselves, often, it is true, relegated beyond the margins of what constituted traditional historical evidence for the study of aristocratic culture and society in the earlier twentieth century: historical records, chronicles, descriptions of tournaments, statutes, armorials, and visual representations. Despite our now increased sensitivity to the complexities of medieval chivalric literature, and in the face of the many calls for inter- or transdisciplinarity voiced by recent generations of cultural historians, the writings of "minor" authors who are also primarily historical, "political" figures such as Rene d'Anjou and Olivier de la Marche, are still often confined to the province of the ornamental, thus becoming virtually dismissed as courtly delights affording a momentary escape from the more tangible realities of politics, war, and diplomacy. …

The Chaucer Review, 2015

Two Middle English poems are placed within the context of the papal Schism of 1378–1415, itself f... more Two Middle English poems are placed within the context of the papal Schism of 1378–1415, itself framed by the rising tension between the nations of France and England during the Hundred Years’ War. Both poems imagine a fictional triumph of Christians over a religious Other—Saracens in the Sege of Melayne, Jews in the Siege of Jerusalem—and, through such crusading fantasies, seek to restore a sense of unified Christendom eroded by the papal Schism. Other contemporary developments also complicate the binarism of identity associated with the ideals of Holy War, notably the emergence of national crusades that encouraged contemporaries to view the largely dynastic and political conflict between France and England through a religious lens. Both poems thus attempt to imagine a unified Christian community regenerated by the experience of warfare, but because of the increasing difficulty in sorting out national and religious identities, they also exacerbate the internal fractures they set ou...

English, 2013

"Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Age... more "Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblem of shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals." Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pelerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed over the next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maitre Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Universite de Lausanne

The question of the epistemological status of poetic language is a central concern in the <em&... more The question of the epistemological status of poetic language is a central concern in the Roman de la Rose. The Rose itself is in fact conceived as an extended reflection on the ability of poetry to convey philosophical and transcendent truths. While Jean de Meun invokes this possibility, his poem finally foregrounds the fictional and fabricated nature of his own poetic vision, and highlights the poet's role as an producer of counterfeit truths. This role is explored in particular through the character of Faux Semblant, who acts as an embodiment of the liar-paradox, and becomes an emblem for the elusive and paradoxical poetics of truth/deception that sustain the Roman de la Rose in its entirety. This exploration of the intrinsic deceptiveness of poetic art and the problematic role of the poet, crystallises in a series of recurrent motifs and concerns that haunt late medieval vernacular poetry mor...

Medium Aevum, 2015

This dissertation traces a major trope of later medieval literature: the self-representation of t... more This dissertation traces a major trope of later medieval literature: the self-representation of the poet as a defendant who must answer for his poetry before God. In tracing this trope of divine judgment on poetry from the late thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century in France, I argue that the later medieval author's relationship to his audience is portrayed as a site of eschatological judgment, where God's scrutiny is always taking place through the reader's reception of the work of art. While the conceit of the poet on trial before a divine readership is a distinct rhetorical gesture, it is also an expression of ethical anxiety in many ways unique to later medieval vernacular literature. Through the exploration of five major instances of the trope of eschatological judgment on literature-in the work of Marian confraternal poets, Guillaume de Deguileville, Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan-I follow the trope's development as a rhetorical device during the period. At the same time, I show how the ways in which this rhetorical device was used can illuminate our understanding of later medieval authors' conception of the ethical stakes of literature, of their own authority, and of their connection to audiences.

The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval l... more The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.

Modern critics on the whole have found it rather difficult to account for the success of Guillaum... more Modern critics on the whole have found it rather difficult to account for the success of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de Vie Humaine with medieval readers, and the poem is still widely misunderstood whenever it is not overlooked or dismissed out of hand. Things have begun to improve over the last decade, with the appearance of a number of studies on the circulation, translation, and reception of Deguileville. This is a welcome development, but it may also have distracted our attention from the internal workings of this influential, rich, and complex allegory, still insufficiently studied in terms of its place within multiple overlapping contexts – intellectual, literary, cultural, and political. The survival of two rather different versions of the poem, PVH1 from 1331, and PVH2 from 1355–6, further complicates the picture, but affords us the rare opportunity to trace the internal tensions, shifts, and transformations of an author's poetic vision over time.

This collection of essays focuses on the ubiquity of the allegorical imagination in pre-modern we... more This collection of essays focuses on the ubiquity of the allegorical imagination in pre-modern western culture, and participates in a recent wave of resurgence of interest in the complex practices and ideas usually defined by the word "allegory". The contributors study the impact of the allegorical imagination on the production, reception and interpretation of literature, as well as its function as a tool of philosophical and theological enquiry, and its role in shaping the visual arts. Essays focus on subjects as varied as the general theories on allegory, allegory's relation to the human imagination, its usefulness or even inevitability as a human mode of cognition and its potential for the encoding of meanings that may be political, historical, religious and amorous. They discuss canonical figures such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boethius, Hans Memling, Pico della Mirandola, King James I and John Donne, but extend to include neglected but equally important figures such ...

Journal of Religious History

Arthurian Literature XXXII, 2015

Fifteenth Century Studies, 2011

The Chaucer Review, 2015

English, 2013

Medium Aevum, 2015

Journal of Religious History