532 Reviews relevant enough for theFrench King Charles V theLearned (I 364-80) to ask Denis Foulechat to translate it.The king was then setting up his famous library and had put his finest translators towork in an unprecedented endeavour which was toweigh on the evolution of theFrench language. Charles Brucker, from theUniversity ofNancy, has enjoyed a forty-yearacquain tancewith John and hismedieval translator,publishing in instalments practically the whole of Denis Foulechat's work (note, by theway, that the English language still lacks itsown complete translation of thePolicraticus). This scholarlyvolume isa richly annotated edition ofmore than nine hundred pages, of Book v only, inwhich John, quoting an apocryphal letter fromPlutarch to theRoman emperor Trajan (entitled InstitutioTraiani inChapter II), elaborates on theorganic metaphor for the state: the prince is thehead, his appointed officials are the eyes andmouth, thecitizenry consti tute the feet,etc., and of course theChurch is the soul.What will make Brucker's work invaluable forhistorians of the French language is that it also provides the original Latin text (and a competent modern French translation of itforgood measure), which allows one to assess the importance of its influence on the target language. Close to 250 informative introductory pages on John's social philosophy and Foulechat's lan guage and translating skills are accompanied by various indexes and a state-of-the-art glossary of over I700 entries (remember, Nancy is the birthplace of the Tresor de la languefranfaise aswell as of theDictionnaire dumoyenfranfais). It is,however, unfor tunate that the publisher could not be persuaded to display the Latin textopposite Foulechat's Middle French version rather than opposite itsmodern translation: this would have led to some rationalizing of the footnotes. A consequence is thatwe are actually given two books in one, one definitely essential to historians of the French language, theother reasonably useful tounderstanding medieval thought. UNIVERSITE MARC BLOCH, STRASBOURG DOMINIQUE PIERRE GERNER Book and Text inFrance, I400-I600: Poetry on thePage. Ed. by ADRIAN ARMSTRONG and MALCOLM QUAINTON. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007. 236 pp. ?50. ISBN 978 0-7546-5590-9. Several monographs and collections of essays discussing the relationships between authors, texts, contexts, and readers have appeared over the last two decades, and Adrian Armstrong, one of the two editors of thisvolume, has been an important con tributor to this trend. Focusing on the period 1400-i600, which saw the transition frommanuscript culture toprint culture, the essays in this latest volume cover both aspects, but dealing onlywith poetry and concentrating more heavily on works dating from the earlier part of theperiod than on the later sixteenth century. Of the nine essays, only Malcolm Quainton's analysis of the increasing use of parenthesis and lunulae by Ronsard in successive editions of theHynne de Calays et deZethes from 1556 to I584 belongs wholly to the second half of the sixteenth century. Armstrong's essay on woodcut illustration in editions of Jean Bouchet's Amoureux transinotes thateditions were produced up toas late as I599, but deals mainly with the earlier editions. Three essays focus on themid-sixteenth century: Richard Cooper's study of illustration inClement Marot's poetry; Fran,ois Rigolot's study of the socio cultural context ofmid-sixteenth-century Lyon, which, he argues, enabled a female writer frommodest origins to have her poetry published by a distinguished Lyon printer, Jean de Tournes; and Tom Conley's analysis of the relationship between Bernard Salomon's woodcuts for Maurice Sceve's 1547 Saulsaye (again published by de Tournes) and the text itself. The remaining fiveessays relate either to the fifteenth century or to the early sixteenth century. In 'CourtlyGatherings and Poetic Games: MLR, I03.2, 2oo8 533 "Coterie" Anthologies in theLate Middle Ages inFrance' JaneTaylor demonstrates persuasively fromanalysis of a group ofmanuscript verse anthologies associated with Charles d'Orleans and his circle that farfrombeing loosely constructed 'miscellanies', such anthologies were carefully ordered compilations, put togetherby court poets for themselves and their own coteries of fellow poets. JeanMiihlethaler's contribution also relates toCharles d'Orleans, analysing theway inwhich the early Paris publisher Anthoine Verard selected for inclusion inhis edition of theChasse etdepart d'amours only those ballades by Charles d'Orleans which offered an 'exemplary expression of courtly values' (p. 46...