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Reversing the Tapestry: Prison of Love in Text, Image, and Textile*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Emily C. Francomano
Emily C. Francomano*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

In the 1520s the internationally popular romance Prison of Love was adapted as a series of tapestries known as L'Histoire de Lérian et Lauréolle. This article explores the translation of the romance to a larger-than-life, three-dimensional narrative object created from sumptuous materials that literally enveloped courtly life. Unlike previous studies of Prison of Love's international reach, this article reads the tapestry chamber as an integral part of the romance's complex history of transmission among the princely courts of Europe in the early sixteenth century. Further, study of the textiles’ production, use, and reception will show that the tapestry chamber, though incomplete, is material evidence of a particular sixteenth-century reading of the romance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , Winter 2011 , pp. 1059 - 1105
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

Support for this project came from an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (Spring 2008), a Summer Academic Research Grant from Georgetown University (2008), and from the Georgetown University Medieval Studies Program. Research for this project was also undertaken in the context of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, The Reformation of the Book: 1450–1650 (2009). I wish to express my gratitude to colleagues who commented upon earlier versions of this article presented at the Northwestern University Medieval Studies Colloquium (November 2008) and at the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities (March 2010). I am also grateful to colleagues Sarah McNamer, Jonathan Ray, Isidro Rivera, and Patricia Manning, and to the anonymous evaluators for this journal, whose insights were extremely helpful in the preparation of the present study. Translations are the author's unless otherwise noted.

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