Madness in Medieval French Literature Identities Found and Lost

Written by one of the leading critics in medieval studies, this new book explores the representations of madness in medieval French literature. Drawing on a range of modern psychoanalytic theories and an impressive range of texts from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, Sylvia Huot focuses on the relationship between madness and identity, both personal and collective, and demonstrates the cultural significance of madness in the Middle Ages.

Sylvia Huot is Reader in Medieval French Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She has held teaching positions at University of Chicago and Northern Illinois University and is a leading scholar of French Medieval literature. Her publications include From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Cornell UP 1987), The 'Romance of the Rose' and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (CUP 1993), and Allegorical Play in the Old French Motet: The Sacred and the Profane in Thirteenth-Century Polyphony (Stanford UP 1997). She has also written numerous articles in scholarly journals and in edited collections of essays.