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.