Histoire de la reine Berthe et du roy Pepin: mise en prose d'une chanson de geste by Piotr Tylus (review)

Abstract

978 Reviews Literature, ultimately derived from the reflections of Paul Zumthor and Bernard Cerquiglini on the instability of the medieval text, and from Barthes and Derrida on ecriture and the death of the author. Apart from discussing the role of the voice in communicating medieval literature to its audience, in the original sense, the main thrust of the book deals with questions of rewriting and adaptation. The introduction has brief sections on 'Literature', 'French', and 'Medieval', in that order, before a longer section on 'Orality and Literacy', but significantly the 'Selected Reading' at the end ofthe chapter?the volume has no general bibliography?lists thirteen books all dealing only with the last section: where does Gaunt's tiro go for guidance on historians' views of what constitutes the concept 'Middle Ages' or linguists' views on when 'French' developed? The firstthree chapters, dealing with the Chanson de Roland (Oxford version), Beroul, and Marie de France, all argue that medieval writers exploit the fiction of orality while insisting on the precellence of the written work. Typical of his attitude is the statement (p. 35) that the 'essentially bookish culture' of the Middle Ages shows the same 'nostalgia that leads some modern critics to privilege the supposed oral origins' of the works discussed. A notion, propounded by Michel Zink in Le Moyen Age et ses chansons (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1996), is here magnified to produce a travesty of much serious scholarship. The best of these chapters is that on Marie de France because it concentrates solely on Marie's Lais in a way that does allow the beginner to come to terms with key concepts in her work. The remaining chapters deal with the formation of cycles and with rewritings of various sorts, and all sufferfromalluding too brieflyto too many works: the Roman de Renard, the Prose Lancelot, the Roman de la Rose, Chretien's Lancelot, and Cliges pass in quick succession, mostly to challenge repeatedly notions of the authoritative text and the authority of the author. This is in many ways an interesting book forthe reader with the experience to supply background to Gaunt's discussions, but a dangerous one for the beginner, who may not realize that what is omitted?from selected reading lists as well as from discussions?is often as important as what is included for a balanced introduction to the topic of reading, writing, telling, and listening in medieval France. University of Edinburgh Philip E. Bennett Histoire de la reine Berthe et du royPepin: mise enprose d'une chanson de geste. Ed. by PiotrTylus. (Textes Litteraires Francais, 536) Geneva: Droz. 2001. 348 pp. ?31.21. ISBN 2-600-00498-x. This is an edition of the unique manuscript, MS Gall. Fol. 130, which was conserved in the PreuBische Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, until the end ofthe Second World War, and is now housed in the Jagellon Library in Krakow. While generally following the ac? cepted layout ofsuch editions, Piotr Tylus does offersome idiosyncrasies of approach. Thus a very detailed codicological description of the edited manuscript is interrupted to provide reflections on the probable origins of the text, not of the copy, at the court of the Dukes of Burgundy. The habitual analysis of the narrative content of the edited text is sandwiched between critical accounts of the three previous complete or partial editions of the work and of scholarship on the prose Berthe. Although one can guess at the logic imposing this order, the interdependence of the firstand third of these sections makes the intervention ofthe second unnecessarily awkward. The conclusion of the pair of resumes of scholarship is that the prose version derives principally from the poem by Adenet le Roi with contributions from a variety of other sources. The brief section on the language of the text is largely concerned with spellings, with little discussion of implications even where morphology rather than simply orthography seems to be concerned. It is particularly notable that, while the edition contains no MLR, 98.4, 2003 979 bibliography of works consulted, the rare footnotes to the linguistic section make no reference to standard manuals and the references in the critical notes are to dictionaries , not to manuals of Middle French language...