Marcelle Thiébaux is the author of books and articles on medieval literature, among them, The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature; The Writings of Medieval Women; and Dhuoda: Handbook for her Warrior Son. She has written about women of all centuries, including British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and American Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Glasgow.
A graduate of Smith College with a doctorate from Columbia University, a former Professor of English at St. John’s University, New York, Marcelle Thiébaux taught a seminar on medieval women at The Central European University in Budapest, where she began research on Princess Margit of Hungary at the National Széchényi Library. Her articles and short stories have appeared in literary magazines. She was an editor, studied acting and music and worked in a theater agency. She reviewed fiction as a non-staff writer for Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review. At work on her next novel, Marcelle Thiébaux lives with her photographer husband in Sag Harbor and New York.
BOOKS (listed in reverse, newest to earliest)
Dhuoda, Handbook for her Warrior Son. Liber Manualis. Edited and translated by Marcelle Thiébaux. Cambridge Medieval Classics 8. Cambridge University Press. 1998. Paperback, 2007. Notes and bibliography. 249pp.
This conduct-of-life guide for a teenage boy ranks as the earliest Western treatise on childhood education. The 9th century mother Dhuoda counsels William, 15, on how to survive in turbulent times and how prudently to stay on the good sides of the Church, the Emperor and his own unpredictable father, Count Bernard. The author’s introduction offers fresh views of Dhuoda’s individuality as a woman and her relationship to her husband, Bernard, a reckless, luckless brawler willing to hand over his son William as a hostage while he, Bernard, conducted an affair with the Emperor’s ravishing wife. The Introduction also discloses how William took his mother’s advice. The story of this calamity-ridden family became sensational enough to make its way into French, German and English romances of the later Middle Ages.
As an annotated scholarly edition of Dhuoda’s handbook of warnings to William, this volume provides the only complete translation in English accompanied with the Latin original.
The Writings of Medieval Women. An Anthology of women writers from the 5th to the 15th centuries. 2nd edition revised and enlarged with new texts, updated notes and commentaries. Garland Publishing, New York. 1994. Routledge, New York.
A stunning array of the literary works of 36 women whose lives were serene, adventurous, harried, or dangerous. The chapters begin with Perpetua of Carthage, a young nursing mother of 22 who dictated her strange dreams before being thrown into the arena in the year 203. The final chapter presents four 15th century English women, among them Margery Kempe, who in the midst of her busy chores brewing and tending the horses in her corn-grinding mill, recorded visions of the love she experienced in the Lord’s celestial marriage bed.
Reviews:
“An attractive anthology of literature in translation. . . . Much of this material has not been previously available in English, and Thiébaux adds helpful introductory bibliographical leads for further study.” The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, Modern Humanities Research Association.
“A valuable contribution to the ongoing project of making works authored by women in the Middle Ages accessible to a general audience. . . . An impressive display of the range of medieval women’s spiritual, political, and literary abilities.” Envoi: Review Journal of Medieval Literature
The Passion of Saint Ursula. (co-authored) This brief saints life, translated here for the first time into English from Passio II (Regnante Domino, 1100) hovers between history and fairy tale. A band of women presumably sailed from Britain on a pilgrimage to Rome before the 4th century. They never made it back. Legend eventually put their number at 11,000, all highborn virgins massacred by Huns in Cologne where their bones remain in St Ursula’s Church to this day. Peregrina Publishing Co., Toronto, Ontario, 1991. Introduction, text, notes, 40pp.
Ellen Glasgow. A literary biography of Pulitzer Prize winning Virginia novelist of the new industrial South, this study provides new critical reassessments of each of Glasgow’s fictional works. It demonstrates their strengths in a scheme that includes the radically changing role of women. Glasgow’s novels offer caustic views of the conditions, choices and neuroses of women as she saw them, and indicts the patriarchal social controls they endured. In her unforgettable women characters, Ellen Glasgow antipates the writings of Faulkner and Tennesee Williams. Throughout the novels runs a feminist discourse like a dark current of ambivalence. Notes, bibliography. Frederick Ungar, 1982. 222pp.
The Stag of Love: The Chase in Medieval Literature. Cornell University Press 1974. 249pp. 19 illustrations.
An avidly practiced sport and military exercise, the hunt became a forceful underlying metaphor in hundreds of literary texts, from classical antiquity to the medieval romances of French, German and English writers. Hunting could represent any eager pursuit, or disaster, but none so prevalent as the art and mystique of love. Cupid stalked men and women, who ran after each other with yearnings like deadly weapons. Girls became quarry, men suffered torment from their own dog-like passions. After a detailed chapter on how people hunted, this compelling study offers discussions on works ranging from Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with acclaimed and little-known examples from the continent between the 13th and 15th centuries.
