Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War by Elizaveta Strakhov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War by Elizaveta Strakhov Rory G. Critten Elizaveta Strakhov. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years' War. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 252. $99.95 cloth; $49.95 e-book. Elizaveta Strakhov's ambitious new study is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on England's continental connections that follows upon Ardis Butterfield's Familiar Enemy (2009). One of the achievements of that book was to raise into suspension a set of arguments that previous writers had chosen between—for example, that French was either for the French (continental French) or the English (Anglo-Norman). In contrast, Continental England sets out to prove a thesis. Strakhov argues that while the Hundred Years War threatened to tear apart the northwest corner of Europe, a group of poets was intent on repairing the damage wrought by fostering a shared repertory of poetic forms, the formes fixes lyrics. This focus on form, as opposed to language, allows Strakhov to trace a series of relationships running between England and the Continent long after the adoption of English by Chaucer and the poets writing in his wake. The [End Page 429] resulting arguments are extensive in their geographical as well as their chronological scope, taking in texts written in France, England, and Italy. Strakhov treads this ground with confidence in a book that impresses as much by the optimism of its outlook as by its philological acumen and the originality of its readings. Strakhov develops her argument over five chapters. Chapter 1 sets the scene by highlighting the community-forming function of lyric exchange as well as the interest in the minute codification of the formes fixes that is expressed in manuscript anthologies and poetic treatises. Chapter 2 affords special attention to debates regarding the uses of the classical past in a broader discussion of the integrity of the francophone cultural arena. In a set of poems that will be familiar to Butterfield's readers, Strakhov shows that Philippe de Vitry warns against a breakdown in communications as the result of diversions from standard mythography, whereas Jean de le Mote presents creative engagement with this inheritance as the condition of its survival. Strakhov's focus on classical reception in a book about form is licensed by the attention devoted to mythological elements in the repertories of formes fixes lyrics discussed in Chapter 1. The book's remaining chapters focus on writing within England. Chapter 3 addresses the propensity of Chaucer's poetry to repair connections between England and the Continent by continuing continental traditions in English. Strakhov argues that this is the hope underpinning both Deschamps's famous ballade to Chaucer and the F-Prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Chapter 4 contrasts the strategies of lyric compilation deployed by Gower and Hoccleve. Whereas Gower's retellings of popular myth in his Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz constitutes a lesson on the slippery relations between French and Latin and text and gloss, in his holograph paratexts, Hoccleve aligns his mastery of French forms with Henry V's progressive mastery of France. Finally, Chapter 5 considers the French atmosphere of Chaucer's reception in the fifteenth century. Special attention is afforded to Shirley's deliberate presentation of the poet via paratexts as a French translator; Lydgate's French debts also come in for consideration as Strakhov demonstrates the role of French as the intermediary language giving the monk of Bury access to Italian humanist thought. Much more is going on in Continental England than these summaries can capture. The arguments that subtend the book's thesis are wideranging and introduce readers to connections between multiple texts and [End Page 430] languages. Vitry critiques de le Mote in terms that Petrarch uses to critique Vitry (in Chapter 2) and Deschamps praises Chaucer in terms that Deschamps also uses for Machaut, while Chaucer praises Petrarch in the terms that Deschamps had used to praise the English poet (in Chapter 3). There are also skillful renditions of overlooked backgrounds to later medieval English literature that subsequent researchers will find suggestive...