(review)

Abstract

772 Reviews (La Cort d'Amor': A Critical Edition. Ed. by Matthew Bardell. (Research Monographs in French Studies, ii). Oxford: Legenda. 2002. x+169 pp. ?19.50; $29.50. ISBN 1-900755-66-1. Matthew Bardell's critical edition of La Cort d'Amor will bring a wider scholarly readership to this little-known medieval Occitan allegorical romance. A likely precursor to Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, this unfinished, 1721-line text has an important place in the tradition of allegorical literature, and has numerous points of contact with amatory treatises such as Ovid's Ars amatoria and Andreas Capellanus's De amore. In his introduction Bardell argues that the Ovidian and the courtly codes of love are in fact pitted against each other in the Cort dAmor, and that the oppositional scheme of gender fleshed out by the allegorical personifications in the text sustains this dialectic, the feminine allying with the courtly and the mascu? line with the Ovidian. Bardell's reading of gender in the text acquires more nuance in relation to the personifications of Corteszia (Courtliness) and Cortesa d'Amor (Courtliness of Love), both feminine and yet discursively antagonistic, or 'two types of courtliness relating to two species of love united by a common genus' (p. 18). Love itselfis subject to gender variation: as Amor it is gendered masculine but as amor it is gendered feminine, the only exception being its firstappearance in the text, where the masculine noun has feminine adjectives?Amors la dousa e la bona' (1. 30), a commingling which is hard to convey in translation (Bardell gives ' "Lady" Love the sweet and the good'). The personifications of Larguesza (Largesse), Proessa (Prowess [in love]), and Merce (Mercy [as the elusive reward oflove]) similarly equivocate between grammatical gender and semantic gender. As well as having a thought-provoking introduction, Bardell's edition comes with a carefully delineated statement of editorial principles, a facing-page translation, twenty-one pages of textual notes, a glossary of both Occitan terms and the Old French terms or 'Gallicisms' to be found in the text (this linguistic intrusion reinforces Bardell's belief that the Cort d'Amor was at least partly composed in northern France), four pages of bibliography, and an index. The Occitan text?an unicum from MS M.819, commonly referredto as chansonnier N, at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, compiled towards the end of the thirteenth century?has been meticulously edited by Bardell. His editorial interventions are signalled throughout, and where he departs from the manuscript orthography he cites the original at the foot of the page. To the right of the text he gives not just the folio reference but the column reference and changes of scribal hand. His priority in translating the text has been to represent it as faithfullyas possible, and although at times there are proliferations of square brackets for expansions or alternative translations, the English version reads reasonably well. There can be no doubt that Bardell's edition of La Cort d'Amor will supplant the pitifully inaccurate one by Lowanne E. Jones (The 'Cort dAmor': A Thirteenth-Century Allegorical Art of Love (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro? lina Press, 1977)), which has until now been the only modern one available. Editing the Cort d'Amor has long been a personal project forBardell, but, to pick up on his ten? dency to speak of 'our poem' or 'our text' (pp. 4, 12, 27, and 29 n. 12), let us hope that critics will indeed make the Cort dAmor their own thanks to this admirable edition. Christ's College, Cambridge Francesca Nicholson Cite des hommes,cite de Dieu: travaux sur la litteraturede la Renaissance en Vhonneur de Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz. 2003. 623 pp. ISBN 2-600-00824-1. It is a testimony to the scholarship, popularity, and respect enjoyed by the dedicatee of this bulky Festschrift that no fewer than forty-nine scholars have contributed to MLRy 99.3, 2004 773 it. Some are colleagues of Daniel Menager at Nanterre while others are drawn from France, Canada, England, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, and the USA. All the essays are in French except for Nuccio Ordine's piece...