Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance by Laine E. Doggett

Abstract

Serge Charchoune, Michel Matveev, Elsa Triolet, Joseph Kessel, Arthur Adamov, Romain Gary, Alain Bosquet, Piotr Rawicz, Luba Jurgenson, and Iegor Gran. Naming plays a significant role in the works of these writers who struggle to establish émigré identity. Some assume pseudonyms and heteronyms, such as Vladimir Nabokov who first wrote under the name of Sirine, or Michel Matveev and Romain Gary who employed heteronyms. Still others changed their names in an attempt to assimilate within the French social order, such as Henri Troyat (Lev Tarassoff) and Romain Gary (Roman Kacew). The instability of naming as a means by which to indicate identity is reflective of these authors’ own deracination , as Rafaelle Zanotti suggests in her insightful discussion on naming and émigr é identity in relation to the author of Les traqués, Michel Matveev. Écrivains franco-russes invites the reader to draw comparisons between writers who emigrated from Russia to France and adopted French as their literary language for multiple reasons. Much critical work could be achieved by comparing common themes between these authors, although this volume does not take a comparative approach. Rather, each essay presents a biographical section followed by an analysis of a single author’s oeuvre. The biographical element helps the reader to contextualize the ramifications of emigration and the hardships that led these authors to embrace French as their literary patrimony. Many of these authors are polyglots who transcend linguistic boundaries and offer a cosmopolitan perspective through literature. Some authors such as Alain Bosquet view French literature as both a homeland and an alternative to the Soviet regime. These essays focus particularly on language, investigating why writers would choose to write in French and how they capitalize on their plurilingualism. Sarah Page draws attention to the painful linguistic transfer these writers often experienced in her engaging essay on Elsa Triolet, who endured a challenging ten-year transition from Russian to French, evidenced by the Cyrillic annotations throughout her writing notebooks. Nabokov described his own transition to writing in multiple languages as a “verbal transmigration” (89). Agnès Edel-Roy aptly argues that Nabokov’s linguistic transmigrations enabled him to belong to Russian, American, and French literary orders. Nabokov and Sarraute are described as juxtaposing the unknown with the known by including two or more languages within literary texts. Sarah Anthony’s attention to Sarraute’s plurilinguistic texts as signifiers of the other are particularly pertinent for this volume in which otherness constitutes a commonality among these authors. This volume successfully illustrates that there is a striking concomitance between these Franco-Russian authors, that of a quest for linguistic, literary, and national identity. Hopefully, the advent of this volume and other recent publications on Eastern European Francophone literature will elicit further critical attention. University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Michelle B. Slater DOGGETT, LAINE E. Love Cures: Healing and Love Magic in Old French Romance. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009. ISBN 978-0-271-03531-4. Pp. x + 291. $39. In this appealing study, the author traces romantic love as a form of intoxication back to the Middle Ages and endeavors to demystify the concept of love magic through an analysis of several romances in which love and healing are Reviews 353 intertwined: Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés, Béroul’s and Thomas’s Tristan, the Folie Tristan de Berne, Heldris de Cornuälle’s Roman de Silence, and Amadas et Ydoine. The study focuses on women empirics who, though never formally trained in medicine, have extensive knowledge of the special properties of herbs. In chapter 1, Doggett provides a wealth of background material on medieval magic and medicine, touching briefly on the marvelous, to demonstrate that medieval women who practiced healing and “love magic” were neither witches nor charlatans ; rather, they possessed socially recognized skills. Chapters 2–4, containing a stimulating analysis of Cligés and the Tristan romances, form the heart of Doggett’s study because in these early works, the empiric’s skills are plied directly or indirectly in the service of love and can help the heroine impose her choice in marriage. Thessala, a key character, concocts two drinks to help Fenice: the first, imbibed by Alix on his wedding night...