The Waxing of the Middle Ages

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. 

Johan Huizinga’s much-loved and much-contested Autumn of the Middle Ages, first published in 1919 and in print ever since, encouraged an image of the Late French Middle Ages as a flamboyant but empty period of decline and nostalgia. This collection sets out to provide a rich, complex, and diverse study showing that this often maligned and frequently ignored period is crucial in its own right.

Tracy Adams is a professor in European languages and literatures at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She is the author of Violent Passions: Managing Love in the Old French Verse Romance, The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria, Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France, and Agnès Sorel and the French Monarchy: History, Gallantry, and National Identity. With Christine Adams, she edited Female Beauty Systems: Beauty as Social Capital in Western Europe and the US, Middle Ages to the Present and, also with Christine Adams, coauthored The Creation of the French Royal Mistress from Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry.
Charles-Louis Morand-Métivier is an associate professor of French at the University of Vermont. He is coeditor, with Andreea Marculescu, of Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. His translation and critical edition of the anonymous Tragédie du sac de Cabrières is forthcoming with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2022. 
 
 

Introduction: Working with Huizinga’s Legacy 
Tracy Adams and Charles-Louis Morand-Mètivier  
1 Color Values, or Life with Grey 
Andrea Tarnowski  
2 Jean de Meun and Visual Eroticism in Fifteenth-Century Culture 
Stephen G. Nichols  
3 Jean Chartier and the End of the Historical Tradition at Saint-Denis 
Derek R. Whaley  
4 “Present en sa personne”: Identity and Celebrity in Fifteenth-Century Franco-Burgundian Literature 
Helen Swift  
5 Rethinking Patronage in Late Medieval France: Networks of Influence in Manuscript Production and Reception 
Anneliese Pollock Renck  
6 The Rhètoriqueurs and the Transition from Manuscript to Print 
Cynthia J. Brown  
7 François Villon and France: Emotional (De)constructions 
Charles-Louis Morand-Mètivier  
8 La Belle Dame of Chartier Manuscripts: Beinecke 1216, the Clumber Park Chartier 
Joan E. McRae  
9 Agnès Sorel, Celebrity, and Late Medieval French Visual Culture 
Tracy Adams  
10 No Job for a Man: Fifteenth-Century France and the Invention of the Institution of Female Regency 
Zita Eva Rohr  
Conclusion: French Historians in Search of the Historiographical Identity of the French Fifteenth Century 
Franck Collard (translated by Tracy Adams)
 
Bibliography 
 
Contributors 
 
Index