Judy Kem

Judy Kem received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at Wake Forest, she taught courses in French language, literature, culture, and film, including “Camus and Algeria” (FRH 216: Studies in French and Francophone Literature and Culture) and “French and Francophone Singer-Songwriters: A Study in Cultural Identities” (FRH 370: Seminar). Dr. Kem’s most recent book, Pathologies of Love: Medicine, and the Woman Question in Early Modern France (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), is a study of courtly love, fatal lovesickness, medical discourse, and the Querelle des femmes in selected works by Christine de Pizan, Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges, Symphorien Champier, and Marguerite de Navarre.

She also is editor of a critical edition of Symphorien Champier’s Nef des dames vertueuses (Paris: Champion, 2007) and a Festschrift entitled Plaire et instruire (New York: Lang, 1993), and author of a monograph on Jean Lemaire de Belges’s Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye (New York: Lang, 1993). Her articles on French literature and French cinema have appeared in such journals as Fifteenth Century Studies, Sixteenth Century Journal, and French Review.

Books

Pathologies of Love: Medicine, and the Woman Question in Early Modern France. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

Symphorien Champier. La Nef des dames vertueuses. Crit. ed. Judy Kem. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007. 

Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Les Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye: The Trojan Legend in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

Edited Works

Women in the World and Works of Marguerite de Navarre in honor of Régine Reynolds Cornell. Guest editor of a special issue of Esprit Créateur (Fall 2017).

Plaire et instruire: Essays in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century French Literature in Honor of George B. Daniel, Jr. Ed. Judy Kem. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Articles 

“Teaching French and Francophone Cultural Identities in a Course on Chanson.” French Review 89.4 (2016): 37-55.

“Adaptation in Alain Resnais’s Cœurs (2006): Remaking L’Amour à mort (1984) through Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places.” Literature/Film Quarterly 42.4 (2014): 622-34. 

“Marguerite d’Autriche, Duchesse de Savoie, Gouvernante des Pays-Bas” Dictionnaire des Femmes de l’Ancienne France, SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l’Etude des Femmes de l’Ancien Régime), March 2011. 

“Fatal Lovesickness in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron,” Sixteenth-Century Journal XLI:2 (Summer 2010): 355-70. 

Est-ce qu’On connaît la chanson? Teaching the Langage commun of a French Musical.” French Review 81.3 (February 2008): 4-16. 

“Symphorien Champier” in Sixteenth-Century French Writers. Ed. Megan Conway, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 327. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2006. 98-104. 

“Malebouche, Metaphors of Misreadings, and the Querelle des femmes in Jean Molinet’s Le roman de la rose moralisé (1500),” Fifteenth-Century Studies 31 (April 2006): 123- 43.

“Symphorien Champier and Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la cité des dames,” Romance Notes 45.2 (Winter 2005): 225-34. 

“Franςois Villon,” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Volume 208: Literature of the French and Occitan Middle Ages: Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Deborah Sinnreich-Levi. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999. 272-79. 

“Sins of the Mother: Adultery, Lineage, and the Law in the Heptaméron,” Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. Ed. Dora Polachek. Amherst, MA: Hestia, 1993. 51-59.

“Moral Lessons for Women Readers of Les Illustration de Gaule et singularitez de Troye.” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Society 13 (1992): 67-83. 

“Jean Lemaire de Belges’ Illustrations: Revising Medieval Versions of the Trojan Legend,” Proceedings of the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Conference, Volume 14 (1989): 173-81.

“Allegorical Images of Prudence in the Works of the Rhétoriqueurs,” Romance Notes XXVIII, no. 3 (Spring 1988): 177-85.