Tuesday 1st March 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Anna Wilmore (St Anne's) - ‘Cité de dieu en tout temps pure et belle’: The Virgin Mary as City in Oxford MS Douce 379

Douce 379 is a manuscript sitting in the Bodleian library containing 91 poems about the Virgin Mary presented at the Rouen Puy in 1511. During the late medieval period, many of the cities in Northern France had their own Puy, a confraternity dedicated to the Virgin Mary which organised poetry competitions in her honour. Rouen's Puy, specifically devoted to Mary as the Immaculate Conception, grew in grandeur and increasingly attracted poets from across France. In 1511, the year of this recueil, the King's Secretary, André de la Vigne, competed and won the most prestigious prize, but perhaps more interesting is that most of the entrants were local 'amateur' poets, committed to poetic production within the urban institution of the puy. In this presentation, I will use the collection of lyric in Douce 379 to examine how Marian poetry could be used as a vehicle for exploring urban identity and reflecting the urban space in which the competition took place. In particular, I will consider the importance of images of enclosure and the use of artisanal language within the poetry of the Puy to argue that the figure of Mary was particularly apt for such urban poetry and could represent the city itself.  

Roger Navas (Trinity) - The Interpretation of “Don Quijote” in France, 1790 – 1810 

In a 1673 Aristotelian treatise, René Rapin claimed that Cervantes, “ayant esté traitté avec quelque mépris par le Duc de Lerme, premier Ministre de Philippe III”, wrote Don Quijote as “une Satire très-fine de sa nation”. A satire of a prominent court figure, of the Spanish noble class in general and of the entire country, “Rapin’s Quijote” did not pose any ideological problems in early modern France: that version of Cervantes’ novel could be integrated into the dominant anti-Spanish discourse, which ran parallel to the geopolitical rivalry between the two countries. Indeed, Rapin’s ideas were hugely influential. It was not until the nineteenth century that the views on the novel substantially changed. Instead of a funny satire of Spanish nobility, a light book of entertainment that did not warrant special critical attention, it was then read as a timeless reflection on human condition, a complex work, both comic and tragic. This paper will examine texts on Don Quijote by Antoine-Vincent Arnault (1800) and Charles Marie de Féletz (1806) to argue that the concept of satire itself evolved at the start of the century, allowing for the Romantic rediscovery of Cervantes’s novel two decades later. 

 

  

 Tuesday 15th February 2022, 5:15-6:30pm

Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Michelle Hsu (Wadham) - Romancing the Chinese Empire and Gender in Victor Segalen and George Soulié de Morant 

    Victor Segalen (1878-1919) was a doctor of the French navy who taught medicine and carried out archeological missions in China. George Soulié de Morant (1878-1955) worked for the French diplomatic corps as an interpreter and is known for his introduction of acupuncture into France in the 1930s. Both of them were proficient in Chinese and wrote extensively about China, using the Chinese empire during the Boxer uprising or revolutionary upheavals as the decor of their novels. In this presentation, I look into how Segalen’s René Leys (1922) and Soulié de Morant’s Bijou-de-ceinture ou le Jeune Homme qui porte robe, se poudre et se farde (1925) stage various forms of gender crossings and alter the terms in which social and gender hierarchies are evoked through the shift of cultural perspective. I will first show how René Leys, the eponymous hero of Segalen’s novel, uses information as capital to gain leverage in his homosocial relationship with Segalen the narrator. Then, I will discuss how the effeminate masculinity of the transvestite performer of Chinese opera in Bijou-de-ceinture is endowed with nationalistic agency through the gaze of a European protector amidst xenophobic resentment. What kind of gender identities can be gleaned from these readings? Even if Segalen and Soulié de Morant belong to the same generation and share an interest in Chinese culture, their approaches to writing differ from each other significantly. They are both concerned with incorporating the culture of the Other, whether of class, ethnicity, language or sexuality. This paper explores how they position themselves within frameworks of representation marked by romance, fantasy, and sinologist knowledge.