L'Art de la philologie: mélanges en l'honneur de Leena Löfstedt. (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, 70) by Juhani Härmä, Elina Suomela-Härmä, Olli Välikangas

Abstract

REVIEWS VArt de la philologie: melanges en Vhonneur de Leena Lofstedt. Ed. by Juhani Harma, Elina Suomela-Harma, and Olli Valikangas. (Memoires de la Societe Neophilologique de Helsinki, 70) Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique. 2007. xiii+3i9pp. 45. ISBN 978-951-9040-26-4. The present work bringing together some twenty-four contributions from an inter national range of scholars provides a substantial tribute to a distinguished Finnish medieval philologist. Themain focus of thehonorand over her long career has fallen on French, with her detailed five-volume edition of the late thirteenth-century translation of theLatin Decree ofGratian (Decret de Gratien, 5vols (Helsinki: Soci etas Scientiarum Fennica, 1992-2001)) representing perhaps hermost outstanding achievement. It is therefore fitting that a substantial number of the essays as sembled here address topics directly related tomedieval French, ormore generally Gallo-Romance, philology. These are, however, accompanied by other essays whose subject-matter can on occasions stray some distance away from this field of study. Dealing firstwith Gallo-Romance-based contributions, we find six attractive and interesting studies of a rathermore linguistic bent exploring topics relating to specific medieval texts. Bernard Combettes investigates discourse patterns for indicating nominal referents in Jehan de Saintre; Annick Englebert considers the expression of instructions in two culinary texts of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries;William D. Paden engages in a close study of the earliest known Occitan literary texts, two brief tenth-century charms whose existence was first revealed by Bischoff in 1984; Olli Valikangas addresses the use of ja+ne . ..pas in renderings of Latin questions introduced by num(quid) in theDecret de Gratien, interpreting ja as a discourse argumentational particle; and finally there are two lexically oriented essays, by Gilles Roques on regionalisms in theDecret de Gratien and by David Trotter,who highlights the lexical innovativeness seen in theAnglo-French Mirror of Justices. Similarly text-based but more philological in character are six fur ther contributions: Jean-Pierre Chambon identifies two curacies in tenth-century Rouergue; Barbara De Marco and Jerry R. Craddock present an edition of eleven of the fifteen legends recounting themiracles attributed to Peter ofVerona (the other four appear in theRicketts Festschrift (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005 (1, 141-52)); Peter F.Dembowski offersa fascinating discussion of the interpretation of a piece of text byRobert de Clari and its linkswith the controversy over theTurin Shroud; Barbara Frank-Job provides a concise overview of the three phases in the practice adopted by scribes in the early stages ofwritten Romance; Takeshi Matsumura enumerates in detail the shortcomings in Pinders 1995 edition of La Vie de saint Francois d'Assise; and Elisabeth Schulze-Busacker argues for the originality and significance of the three surviving works of theAnglo-Norman poet Chardi (fl. c. 1200). Standing a littleapart are four essays of a broader linguistic sweep. Pierre Flobert provides an interesting vignette of the semantic evolution of tueryforwhich he identifies two different trajectories of development from the etymon tutare. MLR, 104.4, 2009 1099 Iwona Piechnik contrastively discusses adposition development in Balto-Finnish and Romance, or more particularly French, noting a trend from postposition to preposition in the former and an opposite drift in the latter. Mariana Tutescu con siders themedieval opposition de revs de dicto and its fundamental importance in the expression ofmodality in logic and language, and Maria Iliescu offers a brief account of the lexical trajectories ofpartenaire, entrevue, budget fromOld French into English and back into French before entering Romanian. The other contributions are of a rather different character and may appeal less to the French specialist. Three consider Latin topics: Hannah Rosen exa mines earlier editorial emendations of the conjunction sed; Heikki Solin calls attention to two second-century ad attestations involving pronominal te in a context demanding the nominative tu and suggests these are early examples of the generalization of the accusative; and Tuomo Pekkanen explores the sources of Horace's references to northern lands, identifying especially the Greek writ ers Aristeas and Pytheas. The five remaining essays are highly varied in na ture.Anna Bochnakowa presents a seventeenth-century Polish multilingual dic tionary; Juhani Harma and Elina Suomela-Harma investigate dedications and textes d'hommage in theses defended at the University of Turku 1640-1828; Witold...