Talking Flowers and Living Chessmen:
Crafted and Cultivated Selves in the Late Medieval Courts of France and England

Abstract

This study investigates a surreal convergence between the discourses of self-conception, personification allegory, and material culture in the French and English courts of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. It examines a curious literary figure: the speaking, thinking, and acting object. The rich overlap between ideas of self-fabrication in courtly settings and the creation of imaginary selves in late medieval rhetoric promoted a mode of courtly allegory interested in cultivated and artificially assembled poetic bodies. This allegorical discourse leveraged the oscillating dynamics of ‘object’ and ‘subject’ to develop new expressions of late medieval courtly selfhood.
There are six chapters in all. The first, ‘Disguising Discourse’, exposes an open border between an anthropomorphic courtly material culture and a literature populated with lively objects. Within, literary models mingle with a material culture that encouraged imaginative elisions between courtiers’ bodies and material things. After this point, each chapter shines light on a different living object. The object personae of the study descend from a single provocative (and singularly provocative) work, the Roman de la Rose. The second chapter, ‘Rose’, investigates the Roman’s ‘courtaise parole’(courtly discourse) as a literary mode haunted by anthropomorphic objects. ‘Flower’ pursues the figure of the plant-persona. The chapter explores the ways court poets Jean Froissart and Guillaume de Machaut adapted the flower personifications of Latin certamina for mixed courtly audiences and used the floral dit to extend the Rose’s explorations of desiring clerkly selfhood. ‘Chessman’ reads the Black Knight and his chess narrative in The Book of the Duchess as an allegory of human subjectivity in the face of divine coercion. ‘Pearl’ explores its titular poem through metaphors of divine craft. The final chapter, ‘Crucible’, is a study of the mercurial figure of court writer Christine de Pizan read through her own self-shaping material metaphors.