Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature by Sarah Gordon (review)

Abstract

122Women in French Studies The anthology then takes us from the stronghold of the Reformation in southwestern France to the heart of humanism in sixteenth-century Lyon with Louise Labé's Débat de lafolie et de l'amour, a theatrical dialogue inspired by the theatrical innovations brought to France from Italy during this period. According to Evain, the play is both humorous and impertinent, as Labé couches biting critiques of the judicial system and the aristocracy behind an apparent bonhomie. More original, for Evain, is Labé criticism of the arbitrary nature of social inequality and the effects of male domination, and her affirmation of the absolute equality ofthe sexes. Catherine Des Roches, along with her mother Madeleine, held a prestigious literary salon during the 1570s in Poitiers which, like Lyon, had become a cultural center during the Renaissance. Four of her dramatic works are reproduced in this volume. Tobie is a tragi-comedy based on a passage from the Bible. However, Evain posits that the author was less interested in religious content of the play than its feminist message: of Sarra's eight husbands, only the last is not killed by an evil spirit because he was the only one who respected his wife. The second play, Bergerie, is a light pastoral comedy and final two plays, Placide et Sévère and Iris et Pasithée are short pedagogical dialogues on the subject ofwomen's education. Théâtre desfemmes de l 'Ancien Régime, XVT siècle is a well-edited and welldocumented anthology of plays by French women during the sixteenth century. The series as a whole will provide a greatly needed contribution to scholarship on women's theater in France as it will make a vast number of plays by women readily available and financially accessible for both research and teaching. Cecilia BeachAlfred University Gordon, Sarah. Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 37. W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007. Pp. [i]-ix; 220. ISBN 1-55753-430-6. $43.95 (Paper). This volume undertakes a literary examination of food references in medieval French texts, forging a connection between medieval studies and food history. Sarah Gordon notes in the introductory chapter that her study will not replicate the socio-historical work that has preceded it, but will explore the "comic literary use of food" in twelfth- to fourteenth-century French fictional narratives. Each of the four chapters is dedicated to a different genre of medieval literature: chapter one reads food fights and feasts in the prose/verse lyric; chapter two explores table etiquette in Arthurian romance; chapter three contrasts the city eating seen mfabliaux with the courtly feasts in the romances; and chapter four explores hunger in the Roman de Renart. The reliance on minor works of literature for much of the first and third chapters detracts somewhat from the impact of this study for the general reader, although it gives access to these texts to a non-specialist audience. The subject Book Reviews123 matter and Gordon's clear, virtually jargon-free prose seem to indicate that this volume is meant for the generalist, and it certainly would be appropriate for a wide public, from advanced undergraduates to specialists. That said, Gordon uses the un-translated term vilain in nearly every chapter; she might have laid the groundwork for the use of this term in her introduction, as she does with her opening remarks on thefabliaux in the third chapter. Gordon's work is most successful when she treats the major works of Arthurian romance in the second chapter, including Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval and Le Conte du Graal. Here she makes a clear connection between excessive eating and bad manners in literary texts and the disruption of chivalric and courtly conventions, with explicit textual references and a more obvious rendering of the comedie than in the previous chapter. She gives an extended examination of Guillaume de Clerc's Roman de Fergus as an anti-Arthurian text, and memorably describes an amnesiac Lancelot who turns from knight to chef in Jehan's Les merveilles de Rigomer. Her work on thefabliaux is similarly well-rooted in the texts, and allows a...