research overview
- Charlie Samuelson is a specialist of medieval French literature. My research uses close textual analysis and looks to both medieval learned culture and modern theory to take to task entrenched notions about the gender and sexual politics of medieval texts. My monograph, 'Courtly and Queer: Deconstruction, Desire, and Medieval French Literature' appeared in 2022 with the Ohio State University Press. This monograph considers in tandem two genres of verse narratives that have not previously been studied together: verse romances, best known for Chrétien de Troyes’s twelfth-century Arthurian fictions; and dits, associated with Guillaume de Machaut’s fourteenth-century narrative poetry. It makes the case for important continuities between these two genres both characterized by their extreme literary self-consciousness and studies how literary play and experimentation bleed, in these texts always about love, into issues of gender and sexual politics. Resisting the notion that medieval texts about “courtly love” are either (proto-)heteronormative or just unrelated to modern heteronormativity, as well as the tendency always to situate queerness at margins, this book explores how one facet of their “courtliness”—namely, their sophistication, as valued by medieval courts—maps in disruptive, even queer, ways onto influential modern conceptions of queerness. Recently, I have undertaken a new project on representations of sexual consent in high-medieval literature and culture, for which articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Romanic Review, Digital Philology, Speculum, and postmedieval. Drawing on medieval learned culture and modern work on consent, this project explores how looking back to medieval texts—where intricate reflection on consent has deeply ambivalent relations to feminist politics—can provide insights on if, how, and when emphasizing consent advances the cause of women. I am also an editor of the journal Exemplaria: Medieval/Early Modern/Theory.
