Medieval Fair Free Lectures Series
Friday, Feb. 21st, 6:15pm – 7:30pm CST (Seating at 6:15pm, Lecture starts at 6:30pm)
Norman Public Library East, Community Room, 3051 E Alameda St., Norman, OK 73071.
If you can’t be there in person, the presentation will also be available on Zoom at https://oklahoma.zoom.us/j/91497925617
“A Standard to Rouse the People Against Foreign Domination”: Agnès Sorel and the Hundred Years’ War in Nineteenth-Century French Song
Presented by Dr. Nathan Dougherty with musical accompaniment by Carey Morrow
Agnès Sorel (1422-1450), mistress of Charles VII, has enjoyed celebrity status for centuries. As the story goes, Agnès and king carried on a clandestine affair during the Hundred Years’ War when England occupied much of France. Growing concerned that Charles VII had forgotten his duty, she encouraged him to fight the English, restoring both his throne and the country. In later centuries, Agnès was often eroticized, perhaps most famously in Voltaire’s scandalous poem The Maid of Orleans (1762). In the nineteenth century, however, she transformed from the sexualized butt of a joke into a national heroine. She even became a popular figure in salon songs whose primary audience was bourgeois women and girls. Why this sudden shift and newfound respectability?
In this talk, I propose that nineteenth-century songwriters recast her as a heroine because she suited the political and social moment. Composers linked her actions to current events (particularly the fall of Napoleon) to argue that the best way to resist the English occupation of Paris in 1814 was to follow Agnès’s example and restore the Bourbon monarchy. I suggest that they could do so because, unlike her contemporary Joan of Arc, Agnès’s actions occurred in the private sphere, allowing composers to reinforce bourgeois models of feminine decorum and justify emerging beliefs that a woman’s morality (when safely confined to the home) could influence men’s actions and thus regenerate society. To bring these arguments to life, attendees will have an opportunity to hear these songs performed live accompanied by a guitar built in the early nineteenth century.
The Medieval Fair Free Lecture Series is cosponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies University of Oklahoma.
Come learn more about the middle ages just for the fun of learning! No papers, no test, just interesting information about life long ago.
This event is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Norman Arts Council Hotel Tax Grant Program.