In the period known as the long fourteenth century, the French kingdom and its people suffered unprecedented violence, corruption, and loss. Imbricating vulnerabilities exposed by plague, the Hundred Years’ war, civil war, pillaging, famine, mental illness, and greed created an increasingly untenable crisis of care. Equally unprecedented was the sensitivity of late medieval literary writers to these events. Far from serving as mouthpieces to the powerful or entertainers who distract from reality, the literary community spoke out, whether by constructing alternative narratives, meditating on experiences of fragility and trauma, exposing hidden inequities that target the most vulnerable, or cultivating cultures of care. What can the literature of this period tell us about what it means to be vulnerable? Or what it means to encounter vulnerability with care? Can the intimate activities of writing and reading become a means of expressing, exposing, soliciting, enacting, or provoking such encounters? In this course we will explore these questions through selected works of poetry, prose, music, manuscript documentary evidence, and modern criticism to discover a shared commitment among late medieval literary writers to challenge dominant discourses of power and resiliency, asserting the value of different forms of vulnerability and calling for urgently needed ethics and politics of care.
Course conducted in French.
