Cet élégant ouvrage de 218 pages, paru en 2019, est consacré à Johan Huizinga, figure incontournable et dans le même temps marginalisée voire oubliée du paysage de la médiévistique française. L’année ...2019 correspond au centième anniversaire de la parution d’un des ouvrages d’histoire médiévale les plus connus Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen. Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden. D’abord traduit en anglais et en allemand dès 1924, i...
One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more ...pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.
This article revisits the letters written by readers of the Mercure galant who responded to the “gallant question,” posed by the periodical's editor in an April 1678 issue, regarding a central plot ...twist of Madame de Lafayette's novel La Princesse de Clèves. Highlighting the expansive, democratic, and participatory nature of this readership that connected with the unprecedented complexity of the novel's characters, scholars have imputed to this public a modernity reflecting that of the novel itself, often considered “the first modern novel” in French. Closely analyzing the letters in light of their arguments and of the novel's editorial history, this essay explores the implications of a disconnect between the work and the readers in question, who had perhaps not read the text and did not, in any case, empathize with its protagonist's dilemma as presented by the Mercure.
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