Women Poets of the Middle Ages in France and Italy: An Annotated Anthology with German Translations

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Claudia Jacobi
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 551592626

The aim of the project is an annotated anthology with German translations of Christine de Pizan's scarcely translated lyrical work and the poems of other – mostly forgotten – women writers of the Middle Ages. These include, for example, the Trobairitz Azalais d'Altier, Almuc de Castelnau and Iseut de Capion, the poets of the 'Duecento' Compiuta Donzella and Nina Siciliana, as well as the absolutely neglected 'poetesse marchigiane' Ortensia de Guglielmo, Eleonora della Genga and Livia del Chiavello. The anthology will be published both as a book and an online text by Metzler, in order to reach not only a scholarly audience but also students and other potentially interested readers. The anthology will not only compile the latest state of research, but also identify and systematically address existing research gaps. Each text will be preceded by an introduction, which presents the poet as well as the selected and translated work, contextualising it within her oeuvre as a whole, based on the latest research. The project will contribute to the feminist revision of the literary canon and focus on texts that have received little attention in past centuries due to the gender of their authors. Although the attempts of a feminist revision of the canon date back to the 1970s and are thus as old as feminist literary studies itself, this undertaking is far from being completed today. However, gender identity will not be the main criterion of the corpus selection. The main focus is the complex, multi-layered, and original reinterpretation that women poets present of courtly love rhetoric: While a large part of the few existing scholarly publications is reduced to traditional commonplaces that revolve around biographical speculations on the empirical identity of the poets and the supposedly 'heightened' emotionality of female writing, our compilation of about 25 medieval women poets shows that the expansion of the androcentric perspective of medieval poetry through female voices unfolds a subversive dynamic that reinterprets courtly discourse in remarkable ways which lead to significant innovations. The PhD student's knowledge of Occitan enables the project management to take a comparative approach that has become a rarity in contemporary medieval studies, whose future must be secured. In this way, the project also contributes to the continuation of Occitan studies within the framework of modern and gender-sensitive Romance studies, which must not lose sight of the historical beginnings of Romance literature in Occitania.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants