New examinations of the role storytelling played in medieval life.

New examinations of the role storytelling played in medieval life.

The storyteller stands at the crossroads of orality and performance, surrounded by a circle of rapt listeners. Evelyn Birge Vitz has challenged a generation of scholars to join the circle, listen as they read, and exchange pen forperformance. A tribute to her work, the fifteen essays in this volume attend to the qualities of voice, their registers and dynamics, whether practiced or impromptu, falsified, overlapping, interrupted or whispered. They examinehow the book became a performance venue and reshaped the storyteller's image and authority, and they investigate the mutability of stories that move from book to book, place to place and among competing cultures to stimulate cultural and political change. They show storytelling as far more than entertainment, but central to law, religious ritual and teaching, as well as the primary mode of delivering news. Themes that crisscross the volume include tensionsamong amateurs and professionals, dominant and minority languages and cultures, women and children's engagement with storytelling, animality, religion, translation, travel, didacticism and entertainment.

Kathryn A. Duys is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois; Elizabeth Emery is Professor of French and Graduate Coordinator at Montclair State University; Laurie Postlewate is Senior Lecturer in French at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Maureen Boulton, Cristian Bratu, Simonetta Cochis, Joyce Coleman, Mark Cruse, Kathryn A.Duys, Elizabeth Emery, Marilyn Lawrence, Kathleen Loysen, Laurie Postlewate, Nancy Freeman Regalado, Samuel N. Rosenberg, E. Gordon Whatley, Linda Marie Zaerr.

Introduction
'Of Aunters They Began to Tell': Informal Story in Medieval England and Modern America - Linda Marie Zaerr
The Storyteller's VerbalJonglerie in 'Renart jongleur' - Marilyn Lawrence
Plusurs en ai oïz conter: Performance and the Dramatic Poetics of Voice in theLais of Marie de France - Simonetta Cochis
Who Tells the Stories of Poetry? Villon and his Readers - Nancy Freeman Regalado
The Audience in the Story: Novices Respond to History in Gautier de Coinci'sChasteé as nonains - Kathryn A. Duys
Effet de parlé andEffet d'écrit: The Authorial Strategies of Medieval French Historians - Cristian Bratu
Or, Entendez!: Jacques Tahureau and the Staging of the Storytelling Scene - Kathleen A. Loysen
Telling the Story of the Christ Child: Text and Image in Two Fourteenth-Century Manuscripts - Maureen Boulton
Authorizing the Story: Guillaume de Machaut as Doctor of Love - Joyce Coleman
Retelling the Story: Intertextuality, Sacred and Profane, in the Late Roman Legend of St Eugenia - E. Gordon Whatley
Ruodlieb and Romance in Latin: Audience and Authorship - Elizabeth Archibald
Turner a pru: Conversion and Translation in theVie de seint Clement - Laurie Postlewate
Stories for the King: Narration and Authority in the 'Crusade Compilation' of Philippe VI of France (London, British Library, Royal 19.D.i) - Mark Cruse
Le Berceau de la littérature française: Medieval Literature as Storytelling in Nineteenth-Century France - Elizabeth Emery
Retelling the Old Story - Samuel N. Rosenberg