Mercredi 11 mars 2026 (14h-18h)

Salle Crozet – Hôtel Berthelot, 24 rue de la Chaîne, Poitiers

Programme :

Non ouvert au public

10h-12h : table ronde

(présentation des centres de recherche, des orientations de recherche, et discussion des synergies possibles entre les quatre universités)

Ouvert au public

14h-18h: conférences

(40 mn de temps de parole plus 10 mn de questions/réponses)

sujet au choix libre des participants

Anne-Hélène Miller (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies – Medieval and Sixteenth-Century French Language and Literature) : Philippe de Mézières’ Crusade and The Frankish Identity

Mike Rodmanjones (University of Nottingham, (School of English & Institute for Medieval Research, University of Nottingham) : Historical Poetry in the 1590s and England’s Pre-Reformation Past: Memory, Time, and Tragedy

Frédérique Fouassier (Université de Tours, CESR – Early Modern Literature) : “Pucelle or puzzel”: Joan of Arc in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part One and Fronton Du Duc’s L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orléans

Pascale Drouet (Université de Poitiers, CESCM – Early Modern Literature) : Love’s Labours Lost : From Shakespeare’s Early Modern Comedy (1594-1595) to Branagh’s Hollywood Musical

Abstracts and Notices on Speakers

Philippe de Mézières’ Crusade and The Frankish Identity  

By the Fourteenth-Century, crusades in the Levant are no longer a main concern for the kings of France otherwise embroiled in more pressing dynastic battles with the English over the French crown. But to the French families who had taken a lead in most crusading efforts and had the most important settlements in that region, this past remained very present and in fact an essential component of their identity. A text such as Les Lignages d’Outremer (1369) is a compelling example of the persistence of this complex attachment aristocratic families had with the Levant and the relevance of a Frankish identity in Fourteenth-Century France. In this presentation, I will discuss more particularly how the knight Philippe de Mézières, who had retained his title of Chancellor of Cyprus long after he had left this position, embodied this idea of a Frankish identity that resurfaces as an intriguing yet powerful argument not only in an attempt to recruit for another crusade to Jerusalem, but also to negotiate with the English amid the conflicts  of the Hundred Years’ War.

Anne-Hélène Miller est professeur de lettres médiévales à l’Université du Tennessee, Knoxville, où elle occupe actuellement le poste de directrice du Marco Institute pour les études du Moyen Âge et de la Renaissance. Elle a publié de nombreux essais, chapitres, éditions et a contribué à des traductions d’œuvres médiévales et du début de la Renaissance. Récemment, elle a coédité avec Daisy Delogu un volume pour le MLA « Approaches to Teaching the ‘Roman de la Rose » et a complété un livre grâce à un NEH, intitulé The Invention of Frenchness: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries in the Literary Languages of Medieval France, qui sera publiée par Liverpool University Press en 2026.

Elle consacre actuellement son temps de recherche à deux projets. L’un, en collaboration avec Thomas Herron, consiste en une édition critique de la réception du geste hiberno-normand de la Conquête de l’Irlande par l’antiquaire anglais George Carew au XVII^e siècle sous contrat avec Four Courts Press. L’autre est un livre qui explore les campagnes militaires et les effets traumatiques des dernières croisades aux XV^e et XVI^e siècles. Elle sera en résidence à l’Académie américaine de Rome l’année prochaine pour avancer sa recherche sur ce projet.

Historical Poetry in the 1590s and England’s Pre-Reformation Past: Memory, Time, and Tragedy

My paper focuses on the literary vogue for medievalist historical poetry in the 1590s, most notably in the work of Samuel Daniel (especially his Complaint of Rosamund, published as part of Daniel’s Poems in 1592), and the long writing career of Daniel’s (and Shakespeare’s) contemporary Michael Drayton, which reached from 1593 with the publication of The Legend of Piers Gaveston and well into the Jacobean reign.

The paper makes a sequence of observations about the curiosity of this nascent literary and historiographical form. Firstly, I argue that this poetry allowed readers to hear the voices of the medieval past in ways which would not have been doctrinally possible after the Reformation in England, allowing readers to hear the voices of the historical past which were no longer theologically audible or accessible in a period of Protestant opposition to the existence of Purgatory. Secondly, this poetry frequently rendered its own poetics in ways analogous to the funerary memorialisation of tomb-building, a verbal form of architecture which promised to both protect and maintain the ethical status and memory of its medieval (and often female) subjects. Finally, I focus on the way that this poetry was ‘multiply’, and sometimes awkwardly, medievalist in using the textual remains of the medieval period (especially poems such as Chaucer’s House of Fame and Langland’s Piers Plowman) to re-narrate both medieval episodes and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, a historical event frequently thought to bring an end to the medieval period in England.

Mike Rodman Jones is Associate Professor in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Nottingham, and teaches broadly in the areas of Medieval Literature (especially Middle English Literature) and Early Modern Literature and Drama. He is author of two monographs on the relationships between Literature and Cultural change, 1350-1600: Radical Pastoral, 1381-1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy (Palgrave, 2011) andLiterature and Medievalism in Early Modern England: Strange Histories (D. S. Brewer, 2024). He has published widely in journals such as The Review of English Studies, Exemplaria, The Sixteenth Century Journal, New Medieval Literatures, and Leeds Studies in English, as well as essays in edited collections on topics such as adaptations of the Psalms in Middle English Poetry, the early Modern Reception of Chaucer, and the aesthetics of Middle English verse. He has organised conference research strands at major conferences the UK, US, and Australia, such as The International Piers Plowman Society Conference, Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, and Leeds IMC. He is currently working on the following projects: Uses of Ekphrasis in Middle English Poetry, adaptations of the Griselda Narrative from Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer to the Tudor Period in Poetry and Drama, and on Franciscan Lyric poetry in the Fourteenth Century. He is currently editor (Literature) for the Interdisciplinary journal Nottingham Medieval Studies and regularly acts as a peer-reviewer for UK, US, and Australian academic journals and publishers.

“Pucelle or puzzel”: Joan of Arc in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part One and Fronton Du Duc’s L’Histoire tragique de la Pucelle d’Orléans

Almost devoid of fixed meaning, the figure of Joan of Arc has been repeatedly appropriated by writers from sometimes diametrically opposed ideological camps. As a French woman, Joan appears from the outset as doubly other In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI (1589–1590). To this fundamental double alterity are added further traits reinforcing it, most notably witchcraft and an “extreme” sexuality: Joan is seen either as a virgin or a prostitute, both making her a figure outside the norm.

I will here examine the different forms of otherness shaping Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc and explore how these differences intersect, overlap, and sometimes merge. In 1 Henry VI, being a woman — itself a problematic category — also means being French, Catholic, a witch, and a prostitute. These overlapping identities help construct and reinforce the play’s English, male, and Protestant dominant discourse, particularly through an allegorical confrontation with Talbot, who embodies English manly courage and honor.

Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan will be compared to that in a French play written ten years earlier, L’Histoire tragique de la pucelle d’Orléans (1580) by the Lorraine Jesuit Fronton Du Duc, to show how the same historical figure can be interpreted in radically different ways depending on ideological perspective and historical context.

Frédérique Fouassier is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature and Civilization at the University of Tours and have been a member of the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance since 2007.

Her main area of research is Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, with a particular focus on strategies of character representation and their reception. She studies the construction of characters through discourse, primarily using the perspectives of gender studies, as well as historicist and materialist criticism. Her aim is above all to analyze the devices used by early modern English playwrights to represent otherness. To support her analyses, she contextualizes dramatic texts alongside other contemporary discourses. Her approach therefore lies at the intersection of several disciplines and fields of research: literature but also history, the history of ideas, the history of medicine, etc., in order to obtain a more comprehensive perspective on texts.

 In 2014, she co-authored with Sujata Iyengar of the University of Georgia (USA), the monograph ‘Not Like an Old Play’: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Among her most significant articles: “‘Thou art my warrior, / I holp to frame thee’: The Construction of Masculine Identity in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus” (Men’s Studies Press, 2012); “Amnésie collective et réécritures de l’histoire dans les deux tétralogies historiques de Shakespeare” (Textes et Contextes, 2014); and “’[An] undutiful wife is a home-rebel, a house-traitor’ : la construction du personnage de l’épouse meurtrière dans Arden of Faversham (1592) et A Warning for Fair Women (1599)” (Peter Lang, 2016).

“Love’s Labours Lost: From Shakespeare’s Early Modern Comedy (1594-1595) to Branagh’s Hollywood Musical (2000)”

Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is a festive Christmas comedy and, as such, expected to be entertaining and include improvisation and dancing sequences inspired both by popular holidays and more aristocratic festivities. And yet we never see any characters dance on stage; there is no choreography. But dancing is not absent from the characters’ cues, whether in the plot or in the subplot, and can mostly be found on the metaphorical register. These dancing metaphors never, however, find any extension to the literal level.

Thus, Kenneth Branagh’s 2000 screen adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost as a musical seems quite surprising, not to say paradoxical, at first sight. How is this possible for a play in which the female characters refuse to dance and, instead, call the tune only metaphorically speaking?

 This paper will first examine the dance motif in Shakespeare’s comedy, with a special focus on dance as a strategy of seduction, as a missing instrument of reconciliation and unifying element, and ultimately as an improvised jig. It will then turn to Branagh’s “romantic musical comedy”, question the appropriateness of the genre, and see how the dance motif is transposed and literalized, how poetic fantasies and verbal jousting give way to counterpointing choreographies – “I’d Rather Charleston” versus “No Strings (I’m Fancy Free)” – and include choreographic teasing and burlesque parodies – “I Won’t Dance (Don’t Ask me)” and “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”.

Pascale Drouet is a Professor of early modern British literature at the University of Poitiers and the author of several monographs on Renaissance drama, including De la filouterie dans l’Angleterre de la Renaissance (PUM, 2013) and Shakespeare and the Denial of Territory (MUP, 2021). She has co-edited many collections of essays, including Shakespeare au risque de la philosophie (Hermann, 2016), The Duchess of Malfi : Webster’s Tragedy of Blood (Belin, 2020) and Dante et Shakespeare: Cosmologie, Politique, Poétique (CG, 2020).

She has translated and edited Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (PUFR, 2020) and Robert Greene’s A Notable Discovery of Cozenage (CG, 2022). Her articles in English include “Filiation and the Ethical Relationship: Lear through the Lens of Levinas”, Levinas Studies, Volume 16 (2022), “‘The pleasure of your Bedlam’: Mismanaging Insanity in The Changeling”, in The Changeling: The State of Play (Arden Shakespeare, 2022), and “The ‘(De)territorialising’ Power of Cleopatra’s Barge (Plutarch, Shakespeare, Mankiewicz)”, Cahiers Élisabéthains (2022).

She is the general editor of the online journal Shakespeare en devenir.

She has just completed a translation and critical edition of John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge (forthcoming with Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais).

Source: CESCM