« X-Rated Letters : when the ABC turns you on »
BLE-BLL
- Uhlig, Marion ORCID Université de Fribourg
- 2022
Published in:
- The Politics of Obscenity in the Age of the Gutenberg Revolution: Obscene Means in Early Modern French and European Print Culture and Literature. - New York: Routledge. - 2022, p. 60-78
English
This chapter aims at reading two obscene ABC poems in Middle French of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the anonymous Ballade de l’ABC and the Alphabet du temps présent falsely attributed to Clément Marot. The first one, obviously the model for the second, was composed before the invention of printing and is hence designed to be transmitted through handwritten manuscripts, whereas the second one, composed afterwards, was meant to be printed from the moment of its composition around 1530. For what narrative, political and cultural purposes did the authors of these poems abandon the spiritual tradition of ABC prayers in order to focus on much more earthly realities? And what about the correlation between, on the one hand, the symbolism of the letters, and on the other hand the media for writing in the age of the Gutenbergian revolution? The chapter intends to answer these questions by analyzing and comparing both poems in close reading. In order to decipher, sometimes even to decode, the naughty, “bon-vivants”, and even scabrous puns hidden beneath the letters of the alphabet—much less innocent than one might have thought!—it mobilizes intertextual references to the medieval vogue of poetical ABCs and primers of the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries
- Faculty
- Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
- Department
- Département de français
- Language
-
- English
- Classification
- Literature
- License
- License undefined
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.4324/9781003083214-6
- ISBN 9781003083214
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/325226
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