The Waxing of the Middle Ages

Revisiting Late Medieval France

Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier, Tracy Adams

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781644532904, 9781644532911
• eBook ISBN: 9781644532928
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Art
• Index: Literature

Johan Huizinga's much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. Many studies, particularly literary studies, have challenged Huizinga's perceptions of individual works or genres. Still, the vision of the Late French and Burgundian Middle Ages as a sad transitional phase between the High Middle Ages and the Renaissance persists. Yet, a series of exceptionally significant cultural developments mark the period.

The Waxing of the Middle Ages sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study of these developments and to reassert that late medieval France is crucial in its own right. The collection argues for an approach that views the late medieval period not as an afterthought, or a blind spot, but as a period that is key in understanding the fluidity of time, traditions, culture, and history. Each essay explores some "cultural form," to borrow Huizinga's expression, to expose the false divide that has dominated modern scholarship. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Working with Huizinga’s Legacy
• 1. Color Values, or Life with Grey
• 2. Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-Century Culture
• 3. Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-Denis
• 4. “Present en sa personne”: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Burgundian Literature
• 5. Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception
• 6. The Rhétoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print
• 7. François Villon and France: Emotional (De)constructions
• 8. La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts: Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier
• 9. Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late Medieval French Visual Culture
• 10. No Job for a Man: Fifteenth-Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency
• Conclusion: French Historians in Search of the Historiographical Identity of the French Fifteenth Century
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index