After the plague, or time undone

Based on a cross-analysis of Guillaume de Machaut's Judgment of the King of Navarre , Boccaccio's Decameron and Petrarch's correspondence, this final lesson attempts to draw together the lessons of the lecture around the question of the organization of time. We encounter what we expected (the relationship between calamity and the fire of narrative), but also what we didn't expect (the question of female emancipation and the enigma of anti-Semitic violence). And the question remains: if there is a world after the plague, is it after it or after it?

Contents

• What did we hear? The thud of an epidemic storm ("Si que ces tempestes cesserrent...", Guillaume de Machaut, Le Jugement du roi de Navarre, ensemble Gilles Binchois, narrated by Jean-Paul Raccodon, 2001)
• Peste is the name of that which we cannot resist
• Guillaume de Machaut's melancholy, "poetry of tension, of agreement and disagreement" (Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, "Un engin si soutil". Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture au XIVe^siècle , Paris, 2001)
• "Ce fu des orribles merveilles": apocalyptic prologue and service to the prince (Dominique Boutet, "L'Éloge du Prince et l'expérience de la mélancolie. Réflexions sur les facteurs de cohérence du Jugement du roi de Navarre de Guillaume de Machaut", in Id. and Jacques Verger eds, Penser le pouvoir au Moyen Âge (^{VIIIe-XVesiècle} ). Études d'histoire et de littérature offertes à Françoise Autrand, Paris, 2000)
• Des intentions politiques au fonctionnement poétique: la métafiction d'une ancienne affaire "mal taillée" (Robert Barton Palmer, "The metafictional Machaut: Self-reflexivity and Self-mediation in the two Judgment poems", Studies in the Literary Imagination, 20, 1987)
• L'auctorialité débordée, or how Guillaume de Machaut struggles to control his readers (Deborah McGrady, Controlling readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his late Medieval audience, Toronto, University of Toronto press, 2006)
• Was Guillaume de Machaut so discourteous? Fictionner la fiction, refaire le procès (Laëtitia Tabard, "Contre-enquête au Moyen Âge : (re)faire le procès de Guillaume de Machaut", Premier symposium de critique policière. Autour de Pierre Bayard, 2017)
• In 1349, everything has to be redone
• The outbreak of war, the plague and the irruption of poetic language: since the Iliad, the founding novel of the West
• Boccaccio rewrites Thucydides, but he too saw what he saw
• Annotating Le Decameron as a text of knowledge (Enrica Zanin, "À la recherche de savoir. Les Marginalia dans les collections de nouvelles", in Carine Roudière-Sébastien ed, Quand Minerve passe les monts. Modalités littéraires de la circulation des savoirs (Italie-France, Renaissance-XVIIe^siècle ), Pessac, 2020)
• Boccaccio, la preservatio sanitatis and medical culture (Anne Robin, "Boccaccio et les médecins du Décaméron ". Chroniques italiennes, 2011)
• The description of the plague in Florence, a record of a past catastrophe and a philosophical myth (Kurt Flasch, Poesia dopo la peste. Saggio su Boccaccio, Rome-Bari, 1994)
• Epidemic turmoil lights the fire of storytelling
• Behind the frontispiece of the "horrible beginning", the prologue and the burning of a loving heart
• On the art of "not being dead" when something is dead inside you: the Decameron as literature of consolation
• Tuesday morning, Santa Maria Novella, " after many sighs, ceasing to say Pater, they began to converse of things and others touching the nature of the age "
• "What are we waiting for? What are we dreaming of?" Seven young women and three men: the end of mourning, or a slow revolt to come
• Here we go: Cat Power, "Black", Wanderer, 2018
• The grim reaper and the mass grave: in 1338, everything is already in place, visible in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of the Redemption
• L'acte de créer, résistance et honte d'être un homme (Gilles Deleuze, Abécédaire, "R for Resistance", 1989)
• On the palace that crowns the hill, the writer's coronation and political compromise
• "When suddenly": the irruption of the Carthusian friars makes Petrarch the narrator of the plague(Familières, XVI, 2)
• His brother, as a model and a reproach: " while my visitors were recounting these and many other such facts about you, the bishop looked at me with eyes wet with tears "
• "The year 1348 was for us a year of mourning. We now know that it was only the beginning of our mourning..." (Petrarch to Boccaccio, September 7, 1363, Lettres de vieillesse, III, 1)
• The year 1363, "the sixteenth since the beginning of our misfortunes": Petrarch's plague as a new era
• 1348 is "a fold in the order of time that splits the world" and institutes the work to come (Étienne Anheim, "Petrarch or the writing of a life", Seminar at the EHESS , November 25, 2020)
• "What shall we do now, my brother? We've already tried almost everything, and we haven't found rest anywhere. When can we expect it? Where to look for it? Time, as they say, has slipped through our fingers; our old hopes have been buried with our friends. The year 1348 has made us lonely and weak"(Familères, I, 1)
• Petrarch's plague, "the inaugural moment of temporality as motive" (Étienne Anheim)
• Back to Guillaume de Machaut and the Jugement du roi de Navarre : the plague does not order time, but undoes it
• Linearity of the spoken word, rhythmic arch of the motet: when time is compressed but not unrolled
• The archaic Tohu bohu of Guillaume de Machaut's prologue "orribles merveilles": storms, plagues and epidemics
• Calamitas et maladie du calame: écrire l'épaisseur des catastrophes (Thomas Labbé, Les Catastrophes naturelles au Moyen Âge, Paris, 2017)
• Underneath mortalitas, nothing but excess mortality
• A cry of hatred in a setting of beauty: the "ferocious beast" lurking in the cantus firmus of a motet by Guillaume de Machaut (Francesco Rocco Rossi, "Deux Cas paradigmatiques d'invective musicale dans la musique ancienne: "Fons totius superbiae/Livoris feritas/Fera pessima" by Guillaume de Machaut and "Sola caret monstris/Fera pessima" by Loyset Compère", in Les Discours de la haine : Récits et figures de la passion dans la Cité, Villeneuve d'Ascq, 2009)
• The anti-Semitic accusation before the outbreak of the epidemic: narrative order and political disorder
• Maintaining the enigma as an enigma
• Guillaume de Machaut's Le printemps à la fenêtre: qui nous préviendra qu'il faut se décamérer? (Nathalie Koble, Décamérez! Des nouvelles de Boccace, Paris, 2021)
• Thanks to the brigata, and salutations