The pastourelle is a genre of medieval lyric poetry which existed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in Northern France and Occitania. Most pastourelles recount dialogues between knights and shepherdesses in which the knight attempts to seduce the shepherdess and detail their ensuing encounter. This genre has been called monotonous, most notably by Alfred Jeanroy in his 1889 Les Origines de la poesie lyrique en France au moyen age because the characters are archetypal and there are few significant plot twists. There were variations on this prototype, however, both formally and thematically. The most significant of these were Guiraut Riquier's pastorela cycle and Adam de la Halle's thirteenth century play, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion. This dissertation consecrates two chapters to the analysis of these variations, both as individual works and in the context of pastourelle and lyric poetry production This dissertation studies the permutations on the paradigm of the pastourelle which occur both with regard to the individual texts and to the genre using Old French and Occitan texts from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. This examination calls into question the nature of genre itself and shows that the pastourelle occurred as part of a system of lyric genres within a complex socio-historic dynamic. The pastourelle was in fact essential to the existence of this system and to other forms of medieval lyric poetry, most notably the canso. In fact the pastourelle is not monotonous at all, but rather a genre rich in variety. The repetitiveness of characters and situation existed in order to propagate this system and allow the canso and other genres to flourish. In the course of this dissertation the major avatars of the genre in Northern France and Occitania are studied. Appendices detailing the major plot variations of the individual Old French and Occitan texts and listing the titles of the concerned texts follow the dissertation / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_25432 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Contributors | Kerley, Melissa S (Author), Poe, Elizabeth W (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Access requires a license to the Dissertations and Theses (ProQuest) database., Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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