6AAFF339 The Debate about Women in the Middle Ages
Course Bibliography
Primary Texts
Students will be expected to have read for this course Le Roman de la Rose, Three
Views of Women, Le Livre de Leësce, L’Epistre au dieu d’amours, selected letters
from the debate on the Rose, selections from Villon’s Testament including ‘les
Regrets de la belle Heaulmière’, ‘La Ballade des dames du temps jadis’, ‘La Ballade
de la grosse Margot’, etc. and an extract from Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillee.
Published editions:
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. A. Strubel
Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la Rose’, ed. E. Hicks (Paris, 1977)
Three Views of Women: La Contenance des fames, Le Bien des fames, le Blasme
des fames, transl. and ed. by Gloria Fiero, W. Pfeffer and Mathé Allain (New Haven
and London, 1989)
Jean Le Fèvre, Le Livre de Leësce, ed. A.-G. Van Hamel (Paris, 1905)
Christine de Pizan, Epistre au dieu d’amours in Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. by
T. Fenster and M. Erler (Leiden, 1990)
François Villon, Testament (Livre de Poche, etc)
Advice on procuring texts:
The coursepack contains a copy of the Livre de Leesce, a selection of letters from
the Debate on the Rose and an extract from Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillee.
The Three Views of Women is available in the library. Christine’s Epistre au dieu
d’amours can be downloaded here.
You will be expected to have your own copies of Le Roman de la Rose and Villon’s
Testament in any edition.
Secondary Literature
Badel, P.-Y., ‘Le Roman de la Rose’ au xive siècle: étude de la réception de l'oeuvre
(Geneva, 1980)
Blamires, A. with Karen Pratt and C.W. Marx (eds), Woman Defamed and Woman
Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992)
Blamires, A., The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford, 1997)
Bloch, R. Howard, ‘Medieval Misogyny’, Representations, 20 (1987), pp. 1-24
Bloch, R. Howard, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago, 1991)
Blumenfeld-Kosinski, R., ‘Jean le Fèvre’s Livre de Leësce: Praise or Blame of
Women?’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 705-25
Cadden, J., Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medecine, Science and
Culture
Huot, S., The 'Romance of the Rose' and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation,
Reception, Manuscript Transmission (Cambridge, 1993)
Kay, S., The Romance of the Rose (London, 1995)
Krueger, R., Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse
Romance (Cambridge, 1993), chapter 8
McWebb, Christine, Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’. A Critical Anthology.
Introduction and Latin Translations by Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York, Routledge,
2008).
Pratt, K., ‘Analogy or Logic; Authority or Experience? Rhetorical Strategies For and
Against Women’, i(Cambridge, 1993) n Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture, eds
Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 57-66
Pratt, K., ‘Translating Misogamy: The Authority of the Intertext in the Lamentationes
Matheoluli and Its Middle French Translation by Jean LeFèvre’, Forum for Modern
Language Studies, 35 (1999), pp. 421-35
Solterer, H., The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995)