Dr. Lori Walters

Lori J. Walters, The Harry F. Williams Professor (Ph.D., Princeton University, 1986), specializes in French literature from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries. Her extensive publication list includes studies of Chrétien de Troyes, the Romance of the Rose, and Christine de Pizan. Her publications emphasize the manuscript context of medieval texts, an emphasis she developed while studying codicology and paleography at Paris’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1983-1984.

Dr. Walters has held year long NEH and Fulbright fellowships as well as a short-term NEH Travel to Collections Grant. She has served consecutive terms as North American Vice President and North American President of the International Christine de Pizan Society. In the second capacity, Dr. Walters has delivered plenary addresses at the International Conferences of the Society held in Salzburg, Austria in 2003, and in Paris, France in 2006. She has also been involved in the project to digitize manuscripts of the Romance of the Rose sponsored by Johns Hopkins University.

In June 2007 Dr. Walters presented a doctoral seminar at the Catholic University of Louvain on the theme of the book as gift of wisdom in manuscript collections containing the works of Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson. The ideas she presented there form the basis for her current book-length project. Bearing the provisional title, Books for Once and Future Queens: Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson, and the Formation of National Identities, her project explores how manuscripts and printed books displaying a virtuous image of the queen and other aristocratic ladies promoted the formation of national identities, both on French soil where the books were originally produced, and in the countries to which they were later transported.

One of the early founders of the HoTT program, Dr. Walters has designed courses in the French Division of the Modern Languages Department that reflect HoTT concerns. FRW 5419, Christine de Pizan in Context, examines how the court poet and political commentator Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364-1430) functioned in a variety of contexts--historical, theological, art historical, poetical, national, and supranational. Besides maintaining a thirty-year professional career during an antifeminist era, Christine was also exceptional in transcribing by hand and supervising the production of roughly one-fifth of the surviving two hundred manuscripts of her works. Dr. Walters’s seminar revolves around the so-called “Queen’s manuscript,” London, BL Harley 4431, a collection of her collected works assembled expressly by Christine herself for France’s Queen Ysabel de Bavière (http://www.pizan.lib.ed.ac.uk/index.html).

Another HoTT-related course designed by Dr. Walters is FRW 5415: Gender, Genre, Manuscript: Chrétien de Troyes in Context. The course locates the twelfth-century lyric poet and romancer within the context of the troubadour and romance traditions. It also focuses upon the way that later thirteenth-century manuscript compilers positioned Chrétien’s romances within a larger context having nationalistic overtones.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Christine de Pizan and the Book

“The Book as Gift of Wisdom: Le Chemin de long estude in the Queen’s Manuscript,” Teaching Christine de Pizan, ed. Andrea W. Tarnowski. New York: MLA, forthcoming.

"Le thème du livre comme don de sagesse dans le ms. BnF fr. 926." Le Livre où je mets toutes mes choses, Le Receuil à la Fin du Moyen Age, ed. Tania Van Hemelryck (Collection Texte, Codex et Contexte 4). Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, forthcoming.

"Anthoine Vérard's Reframing of Christine de Pizan's Doctrine in his 1497 Edition of Le Trésor de la Cité des Dames," ed. Cynthia J. Brown, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, forthcoming.

Chrétien de Troyes

“Holy Adultery: The Charrette, Crusader Queens, and the Guiot Manuscript (Paris, BNF fr. 794),”Dame Philology's Charrette: Approaching Medieval Textuality through Chrétien's Lancelot (Essays in Memory of Karl D. Uitti), ed. Gina L. Greco and Ellen M. Thorington, Arizona State University, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, forthcoming.

“The Formation of a Gauvain Cycle in Chantilly MS 472,” Neophilologus 78 (1994): 29-43, reprinted in Gawain: A Casebook, ed. Keith Busby and Raymond H. Thompson. N.Y.: Routledge, 2006, 157-172.

“Manuscript Compilations of Verse Romances,” Chapter XI, The Arthur of the French, ed. Glyn Burgess and Karen Pratt, Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 2006, 461-487.

“De-membrer pour remembrer: L’oeuvre chrétienne dans le ms. Chantilly 472,” Mouvances et Jointures. Du manuscrit au texte médiéval, ed. Milena Mikhaïlova, Orléans, Paradigme, collection Medievalia, 2005, 253-281.

“Female Figures in the Illustrated Manuscripts of Le conte du Graal and its Continuations: Ladies, Saints, Spectators, Mediators,” Text and Image: Studies in the French Illustrated Book from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, ed. David J. Adams and Adrian Armstrong. Special Issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Vol. 81, n. 3 (Autumn 1999): 7-54.

“Wonders and Illuminations: Pierart dou Tielt and the Queste del Saint Graal,” Word and Image in Arthurian Literature, ed. Keith Busby (New York: Garland, 1996): 339-72.

The Manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. Keith Busby, Terry Nixon, Alison Stones, and Lori Walters. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993.

“The Manuscript Context of Robert de Blois's Beaudous,” Manuscripta 37 (1993): 179-92.

“Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français, MS 1433: The Creation of a Super Romance,” The Arthurian Yearbook 1 (1991): 3-25.

“Le Rôle du scribe dans l'organisation des manuscrits des romans de Chrétien de Troyes,” Romania 106 (1985): 303-25.


The Romance of the Rose

“Marian Devotion in the Tournai Rose: From the Monastery to the Household,” De la Rose, ed. Herman Braet and Catherine Bel (Louvain/Paris: Peeters, 2006), 207-270.

“The Rose as Sign: Diacritical Marks in the Tournai Rose,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 83.3 (2005), 887-912.

“Reading the Rose: Literacy and the Presentation of the Roman de la Rose in Medieval Manuscripts,” Romanic Review 85 (1994): 1-26.

“Illuminating the Rose: Gui de Mori and the Illustrations of MS 101 of the Municipal Library, Tournai." Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 1992), 165-95.

“Author Portraits and Textual Demarcation in Manuscripts of the Romance of the Rose,” in Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 1992), 359-73.

“A Parisian Manuscript of the Romance of the Rose,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 51 (Autumn 1989): 31-55.