Documents found
-
3714.More information
The anonymous thirteenth-century poem La Châtelaine de Vergy, a courtly love story that ends in bloodshed after its central secret is divulged, was adapted as the 70th novella in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron (published 1558–1559). Matteo Bandello’s Italian adaptation of this version of the story (in his posthumously published Quarta parte delle novelle [1573]) introduces an important change by specifying that the lovers are now clandestinely married; this detail is retained in an anonymous French translation of Bandello’s reworking, which appeared in one of the volumes of the popular Histoires tragiques. While critics have been puzzled at this apparent narrative flaw (marriage needs no secrecy), this essay argues that the shift is intentional by considering it in light of the problem of clandestine marriages and post-Tridentine matrimonial reform. While Marguerite’s novella already recasts the Châtelaine de Vergy story in matrimonial terms, Bandello further exploits its drama of speech, in which tragic events are triggered through speaking and divulging secrets, to question the Church tradition of contracting matrimony merely by the partners’ spoken words. A number of textual ambiguities in the French translation reveal furthermore that the story has subsequently been re-interpreted from a new perspective on betrothal as a non-binding spoken promise that gained ground during the Counter-Reformation. The textual transformations introduced into these three versions, moreover, are examined in the context of the development of the “histoire tragique” as a literary genre during the second half of the sixteenth century. This study thus identifies a correlation between the characteristics of the “histoire tragique” and matrimony’s socio-historical dynamics.
-
3715.
-
3716.
-
3717.More information
ABSTRACTThis paper is a history of the Science Academy of the Royal Society of Canada, from its foundation in 1882 until the early 1990s. The RSC has always had an honorific role, but it has sought a more substantive one in science, in advising government, in scientific publication (a role that it has largely lost to the National Research Council and to other scientific societies and journals), in educating the public, in representing Canada internationally, and in undertaking scientific inquiries of public import, for example in assessing the risks associated with nuclear winter, or in the Canadian Global Change Program. Often, Fellows of the RSC have individually achieved more in science than the Society has achieved institutionally; but as this narrative shows, the dynamic between science, government, the RSC, and the Canadian public, has been important in Canadian science and in Canadian history.
-
-
3719.
-