Dr. Roberta Krueger // Chancellor's Distinguished Visitors // University of Missouri

As the Burgess Professor of French at Hamilton College, Dr. Krueger is an internationally-renowned scholar and teacher of medieval French literature and gender studies. She is not only a highly-regarded scholar, but she has also contributed to significantly shifting the terms of analysis in medieval studies by complicating our discussions of medieval identity through gendered analysis, in a time (the 1980s) largely dominated by work on medieval men as preceptors of the highest kinds of learning, scholarship, and teaching. Her work is not only highly-regarded, but is also a model for intellectual creativity and engagement in public scholarship.

Dr. Krueger will give a public lecture from 4-5:30pm in the Student Center 2501 on April 7, 2016 entitled, “Piety and Profanity in Medieval Conduct Books: The Case of Antoine de la Sale’sJean de Saintré” Krueger flier

The talk will examine the interplay of didactic discourse and secular fictions within manuscript codices that conveyed the instructional literature of the late Middle Ages. As moral treatises and religious texts rubbed shoulders with courtly romances and fabliaux in certain manuscript compilations and conduct books, a complicated ethical landscape emerged. A brief survey of earlier compilations will lead us to Antoine de la Sale’s intriguing Jean de Saintré, of 1456. With its blend of chivalric romance, pseudo-historical narrative, didactic discourse, and bawdy fabliau, Jean de Saintré constitutes one of the last great French medieval didactic compilations, even as it questions the very pedagogic strategies it promotes.