Le Miroir de mariage: An Annotated Edition and Translation of Eustache Deschamps' 14th Century French Marriage Debate Poem

FAIN: RQ-230422-15

Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, NJ 07030-5906)
Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (Project Director: December 2014 to May 2017)

Preparation for publication of an edition and translation of The Mirror of Marriage, a medieval French debate poem by influential courtier Eustache Deschamps (1340-1406). (12 months)

The project is an edition and translation of Eustache Deschamps' Miroir de Mariage, a 12,000-line medieval debate-poem on marriage's (dis)advantages. Deschamps presents personal and learned insights into this topic, and detailed observations on the manners and ambitions of the medieval French and their lives, private and public. Stock and original misogyny and misogamy are presented in nuanced, satirical ways, animating a vanished world. Women fascinated him. Earlier scholarly condemnation of this work as hackneyed misogyny is unsound. The Miroir is a defense of marriage and a rebuttal of medieval antifeminism. No modern edition or translation of the Miroir exists. Scholars in many fields await: social scientists, historians, French and English medievalists. Many areas of study need a bi-lingual edition of a well-known text that few scholars have been able to access. It will be published electronically and in hard copy by METS (Middle English Text Series).