See also the home page of the Legenda book series Research Monographs in French Studies

Saints and Monsters in Medieval French and Occitan Literature: Sublime and Abject Bodies
Huw Grange
Research Monographs in French Studies 5317 May 2017

  • ‘The author moves with an impressive lightness of touch across a huge range of versions of four saints’ lives — those of Margaret, George, Honorat, and Enimia — covering verse and prose, and Latin, French, and Occitan, in mostly unpublished manuscript versions... a considerable accomplishment.’ — Luke Sunderland, French Studies 72.3, July 2018, 428-29
  • ‘This well-crafted book captures the goodwill of its audience from page one. Its author, Huw Grange, makes a simple inversion that rights a chronological wrong: saints are not the comic-book superheroes of the Middle Ages; rather today’s superheroes continue in the medieval saints’ tradition of extraordinary corporality... Saints and Monsters is what one would hope for a book of its kind insofar as its sophisticated engagement with theory is everywhere also an engagement with the literary object.’ — Brian J. Reilly, H-France 18.175, August 2018
  • ‘Grange’s final words affirm that the lives he’s described “want to live,” and in that want lies his book’s central thesis; but it is just possible that these saints are, thanks in part to Grange’s efforts at telling their stories, still living; and it is just possible that so are we.’ — Cary Howie, Speculum 95.1, January 2020, 249-50

Theorizing Medieval Race: Saracen Representations in Old French Literature
Victoria Turner
Research Monographs in French Studies 5523 September 2019

  • ‘She has created new paradigms for thinking about race and representation in the Middle Ages that should become part of the critical conversation. While Turner’s book focuses exclusively on French material, it is applicable to the European Middle Ages more widely and is particularly worthwhile because 1) she elaborates a comprehensive and sophisticated critical framework for her interrogation of medieval racial representation, and 2) her textual interpretations are original and imaginative, not simply repetitions of previous scholarly consensus.’ — Margaret Aziza Pappano, Speculum 98.1, January 2023, 339 (full text online)

The Philomena of Chrétien the Jew: The Semiotics of Evil
Peter Haidu, edited by Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner
Research Monographs in French Studies 5928 September 2020