Consolation Narratives in the 15th Century. RECITS DE CONSOLATION ET CONSOLATIONS DU RECIT DANS LA LITTERATURE DU Xve SIECLE

Abstract

In “Récits de consolation et consolation du récit dans la littérature du XVe siècle,” I argue that in consolation literature emotions are used as a language that defines civic as well as emotional communities. In Chapter 1, I first show the importance of Italian Humanist discourse for the rhetoric of consolation in late medieval France. Drawing on the notion of emotional communities and focusing on consolation letters written to grieving fathers, I use Gianozzo Manetti’s Consolatoria and Jacopo Antonio Marcello’s collection of consolation letters as exemplary of a secular discourse grounded in Christian-Stoic rhetoric that defines fatherhood as an intimate relationship with civic responsibilities. These texts influenced Antoine de La Sale who, in the Reconfort de Madame de Fresnes, addresses Catherine de Neufville’s bereavement in order to urge her to reintegrate into civic society and, I argue, to access authority through grief. Comparing these discourses I argue that similar emotions convey different images of ethical subjects and the communities in which they participate. In Chapter 2, I extend my analysis to consider communities of political subjects. In Philippe de Mezieres’s Epistre lamentable et consolatoire Christine de Pizan’s “Epistre a la Royne de France,” “Lamentacion sur les maux de la guerre civile” and “Epistre de vie humaine,” lament and consolation construe different positions in the defense of a community generated around shared feeling. Mezieres and Pizan assert the argumentative value of emotions in demands for political interventions that revisit social organization and call for institutional reform and the revalorization of the more vulnerable parts of the social body. In Chapter 3, I move from consolation literature as a literary genre to consolation as ensured by fictional narratives. With Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine ou la noble histoire de Lusignan and Coudrette’s Roman de Mélusine ou Histoire de Lusignan, the fictional representation of irrecoverable loss, aligned with the story of dynastic lineage, invites the reader to negotiate between the need for satisfaction and the impossibility of being solaced, and persistently underscores the role of the literature in this process.