Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France

Generically complex texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often characterized as "hybrids" blending lyric, prose, and narrative verse. However, closer consideration of a corpus of French "hybrids" centering on Temperance and her recently invented attribute, the mechanical clock, casts doubt on the applicability of the hybrid designation to these works. Texts such as jean Froissart's Orloge amoureus and Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea, as well as the novel visual iconography of Temperance that emerges in the mid fifteenth century, employ the figure of Temperance's clock to lay bare the mechanics of genre; indeed, the composite text is, like the mechanical clock, constructed as a dynamic system of interlocking parts. A fresh reading of the interplay between generic components in these texts, and between textual and visual images of Temperance, offers new perspectives on medieval genre and leads us to propose an alternative terminology and conceptual framework of not hybrid but articulated genres.