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Faculty Advisory Board

Daisy Delogu

Howard L. Willett Professor of French Literature, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures University of Chicago

Biography

Daisy Delogu is a leading scholar of medieval literature who specializes in vernacular texts of the Middle Ages. She researches the ongoing relevance of medieval works for our own times by showing how the practices of figuration that characterize the literary—such as metaphor and allegory—convey ideas about human political society that remain relevant. Her current book project, a monograph in progress titled The Political Pastoral: Shepherds, Sheep, and Wolves between Late Medieval France and Burgundy (1364-1461), explores questions related to political organization and the exercise of power which continue to resonate in our current moment, when concerns about leadership may evoke the familiar metaphor of the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The trials faced by Charles V, Charles VI, and Charles VII of France – including foreign invasion, mental illness, and civil war – and the broader concerns to which they gave rise, were often negotiated figuratively, via a staging of shepherd, sheep, and wolf. The complex cultural imaginary surrounding these figures produces a robust range of potential meanings which writers freely deployed and recombined. The Political Pastoral shows how, unconstrained by generic norms, late medieval French and Burgundian authors used the pastoral mode both to delineate theoretical premises of political philosophy and to respond to urgent challenges.