Le Livre du Voir Dit (Le Dit veridique) (review)

Abstract

It is a pleasure to herald the recent publication of Paul Imbs' critical edition of the Voir Dit, perhaps the greatest work of the French fourteenth century and certainly one of the masterpieces of the vernacular literature of the European Middle Ages. The edition, which Imbs did not live to see published, appears now in the distinguished Lettres Gothiques series, introduced and fully revised by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet. The paperback volume thus constitutes the sole critical edition of Guillaume de Machaut's most famous work, which was first published in the willfully "non-scientific" and "non-philological" form given to it by Paulin Paris in his 1875 edition, 1 [End Page 830] and which has since appeared, in Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's diplomatic edition of one manuscript (BN fr 1584, fols. 221-306), in Middle French and English in the Garland Library of Medieval Literature. 2 As such, the "Livre de Poche" under consideration here represents the very work that, according to Ernst Hoepffner's original and unrealised plan for the publication of Machaut's works, was to have appeared as the fourth volume of his Œuvres de Guillaume de Machaut. 3 It offers the reader a faithful edition of the text of a good fourteenth-century manuscript (BN fr 22545), lightly corrected when necessary, and accompanied by footnotes that signal variants found in the other principal manuscripts of the work. The text of the Dit appears here with an excellent translation into modern French, an exhaustive index of proper names, and an extensive glossary.