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Miraculous Rhymes: The Writing of Gautier De Coinci
Author(s): Tony Hunt (Author)
- Publisher: D. S. Brewer
- Publication Date: 19 Sept. 2007
- Language: English
- Print length: 224 pages
- ISBN-10: 1843841266
- ISBN-13: 9781843841265
Book Description
The first published general study of an unduly neglected writer whose stylistic legacy remains unique in the Middle Ages. The well-connected, northern-French monk and musician Gautier de Coinci (1177/8-1236) occupies an unassailable position as one of the most exceptional vernacular writers of the Middle Ages, concerning whom there is nevertheless nofull length study in English. In a meticulously planned and supervised collection of miracles of Our Lady, which survive in a remarkable number of manuscripts, some beautifully illustrated, Gautier deploys his outstanding talentsas a composer of songs, an acerbic satirist, an audacious inventor of rich and equivocal rhymes (of a virtuosity unparalleled before the “Grands Rhetoriqueurs” on the eve of the Renaissance), a confident lexical innovator, an exuberant exponent of rhetorical wordplay, an incisive observer of contemporary society, and a man of profound personal piety. This study of word-patterning in Gautier seeks to compensate for the dearth of stylistic studies ofOld French and to examine in detail the relationship between rhetoric and religion, “courtoisie” and Mariolatry, aristocratic tastes and the way to spiritual renewal. Gautier’s writing strategy is shown to be a means to rise beyond secular, aristocratic values by building on them and transcending them rather than opposing and rejecting them. TONY HUNT is a Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Will be essential to scholars of medieval French literature, from the troubadours to the ‘Grands Rhétoriqueurs’, and is already indispensable fro Gautier specialists of all disciplines.
–SPECULUM, January 2009
–SPECULUM, January 2009
Professor Hunt’s monograph, with its exhaustive cataloguing and commentary, will certainly interest students of medieval poetics and rhetoric, but Gautier scholars will doubtless wish to consult it.
— ENCOMIA, 2009
