Narrative

Mary Franklin-Brown is an associate professor in the Department of French and Italian, where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in French and teaches courses in medieval culture, literature, and languages (Old French, Old Occitan). She also serves on the Graduate Faculty of the Center for Medieval Studies. With extensive experience working in European manuscript libraries, she directs the North American branch of the International Medieval Society, Paris. Professor Franklin-Brown's first book, "Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age," published by the University of Chicago Press in August 2012 with a subvention from the Medieval Academy of America, is the first book in English devoted to the encyclopedic movement of the thirteenth century. Working from manuscript and early print sources of the texts of Vincent of Beauvais, Ramon Llull, and Jean de Meun, she analyses the various discourses that are absorbed into the medieval encyclopedia (taking "discourse" in the Foucauldian sense of a paradigm authorized by institutional power that allows the construction of both the subjects and the objects of knowing), and the way in which their juxtaposition alters their interplay. This archaeological study of the scholastic encyclopedia allows her to situate encyclopedism at the heart of scholasticism, to open up the medieval compilation to new modes of reading, and to revise the claims made in Foucault's early work on the history of thought. Professor Franklin-Brown is now working on a second book, "Rewriting the Human in Twelfth-Century France: Matter, Form, Time," which reassesses the humanism of twelfth-century writers through readings of the Latin poetry of Bernard Silvester, Alan of Lille, and Peter of Blois, the prose of Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Old French translation/adaptations of classical epic known as the "Romances of Antiquity." In this new book, she argues that these texts' ambivalent representations of the human, which are fissured by the conflicting philosophical paradigms of the period and complicated by experiments in literary form, can both deepen our understanding of the twelfth-century "renaissance" and provide useful grounds for present-day debates (elicited by artificial intelligence, robotics, and science fiction) about the "post human." While working on this book on the human, Professor Franklin-Brown is also reflecting in a series of new articles on the nature of political speech, on sovereignty and rebellion in the twelfth-century genres of epic (the chanson de geste, cycle of the rebellious barons) and lyric (the troubadour sirventes, particularly those of Bertran de Born).