The Medieval Fold

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiv

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Suzanne Verderber

   Pages 1-24

3. The Gregorian Reform, Pastoral Power, and Subjection

   • Suzanne Verderber

   Pages 25-60

4. The Courtly Fold: The Subjectivation of Pastoral Power and the Invention of Modern Eroticism

   • Suzanne Verderber

   Pages 61-115

5. Chrétien de Troyes’s Diagram of Power: Perceval

   • Suzanne Verderber

   Pages 117-162

6. Conclusion

   • Suzanne Verderber

   Pages 163-167

7. Back Matter

   Pages 169-198

   PDF

Striking cultural developments took place in the twelfth century which led to what historians have termed 'the emergence of the individual.' The Medieval Fold demonstrates how cultural developments typically associated with this twelfth-century renaissance autobiography, lyric, courtly love, romance can be traced to the Church's cultivation of individualism. However, subjects did not submit to pastoral power passively, they constructed fantasies and behaviors, redeploying or 'folding' it to create new forms of life and culture. Incorporating the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze, Suzanne Verderber presents a model of the subject in which the opposition between interior self and external world is dislodged.

• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Gilles Deleuze
• individual
• Jacques Lacan
• Medieval Literature
• Michel Foucault
• Middle Ages
• reform
• subject

"The Medieval Fold may be the first and only study of its kind discerning the emergence of subjectivity through fold-theory. Through limpid readings in theology, history, and literature Verderber utterly changes received ideas about the twelfth-century Renaissance. Showing how various documents attest to a process where individuals, turning subjection back upon itself, acquire subjectivity, she makes clear how a radical reflexivity marks a culture at once remote and at the core of our being. Elegantly written, the book invites us to read the medieval canon as we never have before.' Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor, Departments of Romance Languages and Visual/Environmental Studies, Harvard University, USA

"The Medieval Fold, as an interesting and profound interdisciplinary study, sheds considerable light on the controversial twelfth century and the relationship between the Middle Ages and modernity." - Mediaevistik

"The Medieval Fold is a significant contribution to the history of the human subject in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance . . . . [and] is important reading for anyone who is interested in medieval cultural studies, the question of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, courtly love, and for anyone who seeks to understand the way that language becomes discourse." - The Medieval Review

"An intellectual tour de force synthesizing master concepts of Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lacan in a stunning analysis of emerging sacred and vernacular cultural practices in Old French lyric and romance. Original and bold, this account reveals the permeability of categories separating individual and institution, subjectivity and ritual in medieval French culture." - Stephen G. Nichols, James M. Beall Professor Emeritus of French and Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, USA

"In The Medieval Fold, Suzanne Verderber convincingly complicates scholarship on the emergence of the individual in the twelfth century, situating herself from previous work by exploring the causes as well as evidence of this emergence, pointing primarily to the Gregorian Reform and utilizing a careful patchwork of analytic lenses to do so . . . . The Medieval Fold is certainly an essential book for any scholar of medieval subjectivity, particularly for scholars who relish carefully-drawn theoretical approaches to medieval studies." - Comitatus

Suzanne M. Verderber is an associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute.

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