French Romance Research Articles

The Roots of Fencing from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries in the French Language Area

Abstract This article offers a partial overview on fencing, as recognized through archive records, as well as French epics and romances from the twelfth to the early fourteenth century. In the twelfth century, fencing was only attested through knightly vocabulary as a way to describe actions performed during single combats involving a combination of shield and another weapon, most commonly a sword. Fencing was progressively dissociated from the knightly arts and there were even few mentions of its use by common people. There are archive records from the thirteenth century of individuals bearing the nickname “fencer”, although there is rarely enough context to be certain that they were really practicing the art. At the end of the thirteenth century, archives and narrative fiction show an established fashion for a certain form of fencing with a short round shield, the buckler. This is clearly established in London where surviving manuscripts include many regulations on fencing, however the fashion was also spread in the continent, even though it seems to be less documented.

Medieval dress and textiles in Britain: a multilingual sourcebook

Texts (with modern English translation) offering insights into the place of cloth and clothing in everyday life are presented here. Covering a wide range of genres, they include documents from the royal wardrobe accounts and petitions to king and Parliament, previously available only in manuscript form. The accounts detail royal expenditure on fabrics and garments, while the petitions demand the restoration of livery, for example, or protest about the need for winter clothing for children who are wards of the king. In addition, the volume includes extracts from wills, inventories and rolls of livery, sumptuary laws, moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions, an Old English epic, and English and French romances. The texts themselves are in Old and Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman French, with some of the documents switching between more than one of these languages. They are presented with introduction, glossary and detailed notes. Louise M. Sylvester is Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster; Mark Chambers is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester.

From Guinevere to Isabel: Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Transformations of Oriana in Amadís de Gaula

From Guinevere to Isabel:Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Transformations of Oriana in Amadís de Gaula Stacey Triplette The 1508 romance of chivalry Amadís de Gaula provides some of the best evidence for the transmission of Arthurian legend to the Iberian Peninsula. Though Guiraut de Cabrera references the matter of Britain as essential repertoire for jongleurs in 1170, many scholars consider the Iberian Peninsula “an Arthurian backwater”, to borrow Michael Harney’s term (Lida de Malkiel, “Arthurian Literature” 405; Harney, “Spanish Lancelot” 188). Two partial translations of the prose Lancelot survive in Iberian languages: the sixteenth century Castilian Lanzarote del Lago, a manuscript copy of a 1414 codex, and a shorter, unrelated manuscript fragment in Catalán (Contreras Martín and Sharrer xii). The story of Lancelot is also preserved in references in other texts.1 For example, the popular Lancelot ballad “Nunca fuera caballero de [End Page 29] damas tan bien servido”, which Don Quijote mentions in his discussion of Lancelot and Guinevere, dates to the fourteenth century and survives in four sixteenth-century variants (Contreras Martín and Sharrer xi; Sharrer 180–81). Carlos Alvar notes that two Lancelot ballads were sung at the court of the Reyes Católicos (“Materia de Bretaña” 43). Amadís, a belated Arthurian text, imitates the plotline of the French Lancelot en prose but rewrites its love triangle, substituting juvenile disobedience for adultery. This change has prompted scholars to classify the Amadís’s values as bourgeois or “middle class” (Entwistle 216). Michael Harney, citing Fogelquist, explains that “[t]he shift in the locus of control over the female converts the triangle of the jealous husband (Arthur), his wife (Guinevere), and her lover (Lancelot), into that of the domineering father (Lisuarte), his daughter (Oriana), and her suitor (Amadís)” (“Spanish Lancelot” 192; Fogelquist 103). Edwin Williamson argues that the purpose of the revision is moral, as the Amadís participates in a “Christianizing process” typical of both the French Post-Vulgate and the Iberian tradition (39). While these readings are all valid, they do not tell the whole story. In this article, I contend that the transformation of the mal mariée into the rebellious daughter also has political implications. Peggy McCracken, referencing medieval French romance, notes that stories of adulterous queens “respond, sometimes indirectly, to issues raised by the evolving shape of queenship during the period of their production: the role of the queen in government, the importance of childbirth and succession in the royal family, and the importance of the queen’s chastity in the rituals and symbolic structures of the royal court” (Romance of Adultery 15). Oriana’s sexual transgressions, though they fall short of adultery, leave her vulnerable to criticism as her political power increases, as is often the case in the romances McCracken studies (Romance of Adultery 26; “Queen’s Secret” 289–90). Montalvo, in his 1508 revision of Amadís, redeems the sinful princess through marriage to Amadís in order to legitimate the political power that the two share as the co-rulers of Britain and Gaul. Oriana evokes at certain moments the image [End Page 30] of Isabel, and the chivalric dual monarchy provides a fictional echo for the kingdom of the Reyes Católicos. Imitation of Isabel Though she differs from Isabel in her sentimental life, Montalvo’s Oriana comes to resemble the monarch of Castilla in her role as heiress to the throne of Britain. Montalvo’s topical references reveal that he revised Amadís during the last decades of the fifteenth century and likely concluded it around the time of the conquest of Granada (Avalle-Arce 133). Barbara Weissberger asserts that the depiction of female characters during Isabel’s reign is “deeply affected by the presence on the throne of an absolutist monarch who is also a woman” (xiv). Isabel ruled Castilla from 1474 to her death in 1504, and her frequent travels made her a familiar public figure. Montalvo was a regidor of Medina del Campo and thus on the periphery of Isabeline bureaucracy. According to Frank Pierce, “Medina del Campo was a place especially favored by Isabella and her husband (the queen died there in 1504...

Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance

Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance

A Man is Crying: The Progression of Heterosexual Trouble in Gómez de Avellaneda’s Dos Mugeres

This analysis of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s second novel, Dos Mugeres, articulates two contributions in the fields of gender studies and Spanish Romanticism. Avellaneda’s feminist critique of masculine domination in Dos Mugeres focuses on the concept of heterosexual trouble, through which the norm of the heterosexual couple proves to be dysfunctional and problematic as far as gender and sexual standards are concerned. The concept of heterosexual trouble enables us to consider the ambivalent situation of the male heterosexual lover caught between the social privilege of masculinity and the mandate to reinvent love requested by his female lover. The originality of Dos Mugeres within Spanish Romanticism relies in part on the reception of four texts from French Romanticism: Paul et Virginie, Delphine, Corinne ou l’Italie, and Lélia. It is this unique reworking of four canonical texts in relation to a critique of heterosexual love that gives Dos Mugeres a special signature within Spanish Romanticism.

Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance

Exchanges in Exoticism: Cross-Cultural Marriage and the Making of the Mediterranean in Old French Romance

Traveling Companions: Narrative Diffusion of <em>Floire et Blancheflor</em> in Medieval Miscellany, 1325–1400

All models are wrong, but some are useful.-George BoxThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.-Mark TwainIntroductionIdentifying how a narrative travels from one place and time to another, and hence from one culture or community to another, remains a persistent problem in both folklore studies and literary history. Often, the movement of narratives must be triangulated and approximated from the surviving evidence. For the medieval period, such evidence is often scant and difffijicult to evaluate-of the narratives that survive in written material at all, many of those survive in only a handful of manuscripts. This article contends that when the manuscript corpus of a medieval narrative is found largely in a specifijic type of manuscript-the vernacular anthology or miscellany-one can use the increased context provided by the anthology to trace the geographic and temporal difffusion of a narrative across literary communities and to see what companion narratives travel with a given story. Using the foundational European tale of Floire and Blancheflor, I explore what a narrative's traveling companions across its surviving corpus can tell us about the narrative cultures through which it traveled.Floire and Blancheflor fijirst appears in the written record as the twelfth-century Old French romance Floire et Blancheflor. It possesses a moderate number of manuscript witnesses, but so many or so few as to render it an outlier among surviving Old French narratives. Further, the manuscript witnesses appear across a wide swath of geographic and linguistic areas, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Ultimately, I suggest four iterations of traveling companions for the tale: (1) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Mainete; (2) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Claris and Laris; (3) Floire and Blancheflor, Amadas and Ydoine, and Partonopeus of Blois, and (4) Floire and Blancheflor, Blancandin and Orgeuilleuse d'Amour, and Partonopeus of Blois. Viewing Floire and Blancheflor as fundamentally tied to these sets of stories in a given narrative community changes our understanding of the narrative's reception in its time.With the rapidly increasing commercialization of manuscript production over the thirteenth century, bespoke vernacular manuscripts were increasingly available to the wealthy, secular public. While some of these codices contained only a single text, many were what are now referred to as vernacular literary anthologies. It now appears that a great deal of the so-called miscellany manuscripts are, in fact, organized according to principles ranging from rudimentary groupings of thematically related texts to an elaborate overall design (Huot 11). Who, exactly, was doing that organizing is open to question; however, it would have necessitated a complex interaction between bookseller, scribe, and patron. As the written trace of a complex narrative culture, manuscripts were assembled not casually but deliberately, as a result of someone's decision that it should exist, as a result of common or group decision that it should be made in this fashion and another (Rouse and Rouse 3). This intentionality does discount the possibility that such seemingly random collections of texts simply existed for the sake of convenience, or so that the reader would have more than one story at hand. However, when patterns of association between individual narratives crop up repeatedly across multiple such manuscripts, we can make begin to hypothesize about the potential thematic, cultural, or historic connections between them.New Codicology1 values the codex as an object of inquiry rather than the corpus, treating each codex as a living artifact rich with multiple sites of meaning (material, textual, and historical). In this scenario, each book is an idiosyncratic individual, capable of being parsed only when confronted as a whole. …

Paired Adjectives in the Middle Welsh Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn

One of the stylistic devices typical for Medieval Welsh literature is the usage of paired adjectives. It occurs not only in the native tales but also in the adaptations of Continental material, such as an Old French romance of chivalry Geste de Boeve de Haumtone. Predominantly, the paired adjectives in the Welsh source Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn neither have any equivalents in the French source nor correspond to “adverb mult, tut, si, plus, bien + adjective” construction. This fact is indicative of the translator’s independence in stylistic organization of the text; it also draws our attention to the emphatic nature of paired adjectives. An adjective pair usually consists of either two synonyms or two words denoting attributes of a certain character or object: cadarn-wychyr “strong and brave”. However, there can be more than two adjectives in a “pair”; this stylistic device also covers other parts of speech.

French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval

French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval

Domestication and its Discontents: Animals between Objects and Ethical Subjects in the Old French Roman de Dolopathos

In this paper, I undertake a reading of the ‘Canis’ story appearing in manuscript M of the Old French Roman de Dolopathos, with an eye to how passages present only in this version and the specific resources of the Old French language draw attention to the internal tensions of chivalric animal domestication. ‘Canis’ points to the contradictory or even suicidal consequences of an ideology that cannot properly account for the status of its animals: from an illusory subjective ground, a knight asserts murderous control over the same animal companions through whom he is constituted and derives his authority. When the knight’s greyhound emerges as an ethical subject in his absence, an unanswered question latent in the practice of domestication reaches a breaking point: are animals in knightly possession to be understood mainly as objects to be retained and discarded, or as living beings capable of independent ethical action? To account better for the uncanny status of a chivellier who murders his cheval, I draw both from the nascent field of critical animal studies and from the psychoanalytic theory of Alenka Zupančič.

Exchanging Symbols for Symbolic Exchange

This article examines recent articulations of Reformed sacramental theology by Michael Horton and Nicholas Wolterstorff, both of whom appropriate the insights of speech act theory in their accounts of Calvinist sacramentology. I put these expressions of Reformed thought into conversation with the fundamental theology of the French Roman Catholic, Louis-Marie Chauvet, noting areas of convergence. I contend that Chauvet’s sacramental theology provides the resources for the Reformed to develop their own sacramental theology in a considerably higher direction, while also remaining true to their fundamental commitments.

The Influence of the Trojan War Story on the Nibelungenlied: Motifs, Characters, Situations

Herbort von Fritzlar’s Liet von Troye was composed shortly after 1190, commissioned by Landgrave Hermann von Thüringen (1190 – 1217). It is presumed that this new German Trojan War story, based on the French Roman de Troie by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, was supposed to add the events preceding Heinrich von Veldeke’s Eneit. Veldeke was mentioned by Herbort. Since the Liet von Troye was the first German rendition of the Trojan Wars (although Konrad von Würzburg’s Trojanerkrieg became more famous in 1287), I believe that it could well have influenced the Nibelungenlied of 1200/1205. It seems to me that the idea for the final version of the Nibelungenlied by the anonymous Austrian poet, based on old Germanic sources, could have been to write an epic that was native to Germany, but which would have the epic dimensions and the model of the classic Trojan War story, the Iliad. There are no epics other than the Nibelungenlied and the Iliad which end in destruction like this. In the Iliad, the Greeks destroy Troy; in the Nibelungenlied, the Burgundians destroy Attila’s fortress. In both epics, hardly anybody of the royal dynasties and their friends stays alive, excepting Eneas in the Iliad and Dietrich von Bern in the Nibelungenlied. Although the two epics are not identical in their plots, enough similarities could be enumerated to show an influence of the Trojan Wars on the Nibelungenlied.

The Arthurian Legacy in Sweden

The Arthurian Legacy in Sweden Sofia Lodén The so-called Eufemiavisor, three translations into Old Swedish written at the behest of the Norwegian Queen Eufemia at the beginning of the fourteenth century, mark the beginning of Swedish literature. At least, there is no trace of earlier literary texts of the same scope as the Eufemiavisor: the runic inscriptions, law texts, and legends that precede them are really not narrative literary texts as extensive as the Eufemiavisor. This beginning of Swedish literature also signalled the arrival of King Arthur in Sweden. Two of the Eufemiavisor link up directly with the Arthurian tradition. Herr Ivan mainly recalls Chrétien de Troyes’s famous romance Le Chevalier au lion: the French text was the Swedish translator’s main source text, while the Old Norse translation of the romance, Ívens saga, served as occasional support.1 The source text of the second of the Eufemiavisor, Hertig Fredrik av Normandie, has not survived, but similarities with the German genre of the Spielmannsepos [End Page 62] have been pointed out by William Layher (1999), and the text presents a strong “Arthurian veneer” (Layher 1999, 247). Florian Bambeck, who has studied Hertig Fredrik av Normandie extensively, considers it as “ein nachklassischer Artusroman mit Brautwerbungsepisode, der seine Handlung in eine nacharturische Ära verlegt” (2009, 235) [a postclassical Arthurian romance with a courtship episode, whose plot is set in a post-Arthurian era].2 The third text that was written at the behest of Queen Eufemia, Flores och Blanzeflor, can hardly be considered an Arthurian text, since it goes back to the tradition of the French roman idyllique, a genre that was also known throughout medieval Europe. The Old Swedish Herr Ivan, the first of the three Eufemiavisor, presents both ideological and stylistic ideals, and simultaneously introduced the Arthurian legend to Sweden.3 When reading the becomes clear that King Arthur was not considered a well-known character by the new public but needed a careful presentation: J nampn fadhers oc sons oc thæs hælgha andhawil iak taka mik till handaforna saghu fram att førathem til skemptan ther a wilæ høraaff the werdhogasta konunga twather man æ hørdhe sakt j fra:Karlamagnus oc konung Artws;til dyghdh oc æro waro the fws.Artws war konung aff Ængland.Han van Rom medh swerdh oc brandok war ther keyser medh mykle æra.Han frælste Ængland aff hardhe kæra [End Page 63] ok skat ther romara førra giordho,swa at ængin han sidhen kreffwia thordhe.Annar war Karlamagnus aff Franz.Thet wil iak idher sighia til sanz,mot hedhna mæn for cristna at stridæwaro enge fræmbre j thera tidæ.Badhe the herra iak sigher j frathe haffwa thera framfærdh skipath swa,ower alla werldina gaar thera loffhwar herra och førstæ søkiæ hoff.Konunga synir the søkto thera heem,hertoghar, iærlar, greffuar thiænte them;riddara synir the giordo och swaoch alle the ther wider kunno na.Om thenne werdug konung Artus daghawaro kempæ starke thera liiff tordo wagafor ridderskap och frvr æræ.Thet ær illæ the æru nw færræfore frvor loff wilæ priis at winnæ;man kan them nw næplik finnæ. (Noreen 1931, vv. 1–32) In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I will take it upon myself to tell an old tale as entertainment for those who want to listen about the two most worthy kings about whom stories have ever been told: Charlemagne and King Arthur; they were eager for virtue and honor. Arthur was the king of England. He conquered Rome with sword and fire and was emperor there with great glory. He freed England from hardship and from tribute which the Romans formerly imposed, so that nobody has dared demand it since. Charlemagne was the other one. In truth I want to tell you: where Christians battled against the heathens none was more outstanding in those days. The two rulers I am telling you about have governed their actions in such a manner that their praise has spread over the entire earth...

Gender and Jealousy in Gereint uab Erbin and Le Roman de Silence

The medieval Welsh prose version of the story of Gereint (Erec) and Enid differs from its cognates in French and German by attributing the motive of jealousy to Gereint as the reason why he decides to test his wife’s devotion. This theme of jealousy draws attention to an uneasiness in the text about Enid’s noble status and the concept of gender. The story of Gereint and Enid, in common with the French Roman de Silence , finds itself demonstrating that both gender and class are constructed through a social performance that must be continually enacted.

Female Intercession and the Shaping of Male Heroism in the Roman d’Enéas and Le chevalier au lion

or some time now, feminist literary scholarship has demonstrated how the leading female figures of medieval French romance are often constructed to emphasize the heroism of the male protagonist. 1 While romance challenges the model of male homosociality of the chanson de geste by expanding the discourses of heterosexual desire and by recognizing female desire, in particular, women gain prominence in this narrative form because femininity becomes the “metaphor” which male authors newly use to develop male subjectivity. 2 As Simon Gaunt writes, “romance does not ‘discover’ women, or femininity, or the individual, it constructs models of them.” 3

Love and Marriage in the Breton Lays

Love is usually said to be the central concern of the Middle English Breton lays, as of the French ones. But in fact the English poems pay relatively little attention to romantic love, and are more concerned with identity, family separation and reunion, loyalty and justice. In the French lays, as in French romances, adultery is often accepted, and the happiness of the malmariee put before moral considerations. It is often argued that the English in the Middle Ages were not keen on stories of adultery. There are some striking exceptions – for instance Malory’s focus on Lancelot and Guinevere – but it is certainly not a common theme in the English lays, though it is notable that the two lays by Marie which survive in English versions are both about extra-marital love affairs.

La mise en place de la philologie et de la linguistique romanes dans l’Allemagne du 19e siècle

AbstractThe outstanding evolution of Romance linguistics from Lorenz Diefenbach’s first comparative morphological study (1831) to the Grundriss der romanischen Philologie (1904), edited by Gustav Gröber, can be explained by four factors: (1) the amount of “linguistic monuments” inventoried from the 16th century onwards, (2) the adherence of all German Romance scholars, first of all Friedrich Diez, to the principles of comparative historical linguistics as initiated by Bopp and Grimm, (3) the establishment of comparative Indo- European, German, Romance and Slavic linguistics at German universities, and (4) the early emancipation of linguistics from philology in Germany. Despite Gaston Paris and Graziadio Ascoli, neither French nor Italian Romance scholars where able to compete with the German (including Austrian and Swiss) researchers. Moreover, between the first and the second comparative enterprises which combined historical grammar and etymological lexicography, respectively by Friedrich Diez and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, the work of Hugo Schuchardt on Romance dialectology and creolistics opened up the field of geolinguistics as developed by the Swiss Jules Gilliéron.

Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde – Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity by Simon Gaunt (review)

Reviewed by: Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde – Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity by Simon Gaunt Mihaela L. Florescu Simon Gaunt, Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde – Narrative Voice, Language and Diversity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2013) 199 pp., ill. Simon Gaunt, professor of French language and literature at King’s College London sheds new light on Le Devisement du Monde (1298), better known in English as Marco Polo’s Travels, analyzing the work through the lens of a multi-disciplinary approach applying concepts in philology, manuscript studies, narratology, cultural history and post-colonial studies. The illustration on the cover, taken from the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, depicts Marco Polo’s departure from Venice. This image opens the pages of Gaunt’s research with a lush, colorful rendering of a city of white washed turrets, sailing vessels of gleaming wood gliding on the gentle ripples of a light gray river, as if competing for attention with larger than life white swans, and nobles and merchants in jewel colored robes pontificating on cobbled through fares. This is an apt imagining of the beginning of the much celebrated voyage, whose telling has survived for hundreds of years, long after its novelty and use as a real time travelogue had expired. Who exactly was Marco Polo? Was he even a real person? If yes, were his adventures in the East just figments of an overactive imagination? Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant who lived between 1254 and 1324. He remains a recognizable European figure even today, and is closely associated with relations between Europe and the lands of the East. Other contemporaries had travelled to the East, but none produced an account of their travels as enduring as Marco Polo’s Le Devisement du Monde (Description of the World). The book recounts the twenty-four years Marco spent living in Asia. The text was originally written in an Italianate French hybrid and was co-authored with Rusticello da Pisa, an author and compiler of Old French romances. Marco was the son of a prominent Venetian merchant family who had long had had ties with Asia through their trade with that region. Along with his father and uncle, Marco travelled through the territories of a hegemonic Mongol empire, eventually becoming a favored administrator of the Mongol Khan. Marco traveled the length of the empire on behalf of the Khan, tasked to return to the Mongol court to describe his travels and state of affairs in the provinces. As a trusted advisor of the Khan, Marco was in a unique position to travel an empire stretching from Russia and the Black Sea to the South China Sea. On a mission for the Khan to take a Mongol princess to marry the new Persian Ilkhan, Arghun, Marco even sailed around the Indian subcontinent, stopping in many places. Marco Polo eventually returned to Europe in 1298, and in lieu of a real welcome he was held in a Genoese prison subsequent a naval battle between Venice and Genoa. It was during this time when he was held captive that the Devisement was written. Marco eventually returned to Venice where he lived out the remainder of his days as a prosperous merchant and celebrity author of the hugely popular Devisement. [End Page 253] The Devisement has inspired much debate and analysis, scholarly and popular alike. Many books have explored topics as varied as: translation surveys, adaptation of the Devisement, reconstructions of the physical journey, biographies of Marco Polo’s life, scholarly analysis of the Devisement text for content of travels and biography, scholarship on the medieval European representation of Asia, philological studies, semantic studies, studies of the iconography of the illustrated manuscripts of the Devisement, literary studies in relation to narrative voice, treatment of marvels, analysis through post-colonial approaches. Simon Gaunt trains an insightful eye on the Devisement text focusing on literary criticism, style, narrative voice and modes of representation. His contribution is most welcome as this approach has been underrepresented in the field. Gaunt analyzes the different versions of the text, from the Franco-Italian redaction of 1298, proving that this was most likely the original, to the L redaction Latin translation of the...

‘L’estoire d’Alixandre vos veul par vers traitier […]’: Passions and Polemics in Latin and Vernacular Alexander Literature of the Later Twelfth Century

This article analyses two poems about Alexander the Great from the 1180s, the Latin epic Alexandreis and the French Roman d’Alexandre, suggesting that they are participating in an ongoing and passionate literary debate about how to perform translatio studii in northern France. Using a comparison of their tomb ecphrases as an example, the paper claims that the poems take opposing stances in this culture war. It also suggests that the conflict is not primarily between Latin and vernacular material, but transcends linguistic barriers.

Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner

Shaping Courtliness is a highly personal volume, littered with dedications to Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and praise of her work (it even contains a poem composed in her honour (‘Envoi’, p. 285)). This does not, however, detract from the fact that the eighteen essays within contain a substantial quantity of rigorous and exciting work, with considerable appeal for readers who may have no personal connection with their dedicatee. Bruckner's preoccupations with twelfth-century French romance and lais, and with the afterlife of Chrétien de Troyes's romances, are reflected by the volume's content, which includes pieces on Thomas's Anglo-Norman Tristan, Marie de France's Guigemar, the Burgundian prose adaptation of Cligès, and the process of literary evolution from Chrétien to Christine de Pizan. Meanwhile, her interest in human–animal relations is echoed by contributions examining the Conte du Papegau and Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire d'amours. Very impressively, the volume avoids being either restricted to Bruckner's immediate subfields, or becoming a motley collection of essays with no unifying theme. Peter Haidu's vitriolic opening piece sets up the guiding interest, though not the general tone or explicit politics, of the rest of the collection: ‘Psychic denial of reality is perfectly understandable, given the murderously totalizing greed that accompanies the contemporary collapse of late-capitalist civilization in its proto-fascist aftermath. […] Authentic critique relocates the text in its social co-text, over and against which the concrete text defines itself’ (pp. 43–44). From among Haidu's furious prose (which is, unfortunately, often wilfully opaque) emerges the question of relocating the ideological, literary construct of the court within its political, social, legal, and economic context. What results is a collective New Historicist account of medieval courts, guided by the relationship between the historical circumstances of the court and Old and Middle French literary productions. This intermingling of historical and literary studies occurs within individual articles such as Michel-André Bossy's piece on the British Library's MS Royal 16 F II (which contains 164 poems by Charles d'Orléans) in the context of the Wars of the Roses. Equally stimulating, however, is the fruitful juxtaposition of mutually complementary articles by specialists from different fields. An excellent example of this comes in Part III (‘Shaping Women's Voices in Medieval France’), which takes essays by two of Bruckner's ex-doctoral students, William Schenck and Daniel O'Sullivan, and the troubadour expert Elizabeth Poe. Of these three, Schenck's is the standout piece, analysing Ermengarde d'Anjou's oscillation between court and convent using hagiography, charters, and clerical letters to paint a vivid, nuanced picture of the cultural factors determining the choices and limitations facing Ermengarde as an aristocratic woman of the twelfth century. This incredibly rich account itself follows the (also excellent) essays by Poe and O'Sullivan, which, respectively, continue Bruckner's work on the female troubadours (here Na Lombarda) and explore the nature of Marian devotion in Old Occitan song. The sophisticated, pluridisciplinary examination of courtly womanhood that is the outcome of such a combination is a highlight of this superbly eclectic but also very coherent collection.