medievalists for years to come. Gingras divides his study into three major sections. The first, “Une langue qui se donne un genre,” focuses on linguistics and genre, with chapters on the development of the term ‘roman,’ multilingual Normandy and England, translation, and the medieval concept of genre. Next, “Un genre à faire des histoires” examines thematic elements: history (and story), the protagonist, love, and adventure. The final four chapters consider “[l]es attraits d’un mauvais genre,” the appeal of a‘bad-boy’genre: (excessive) length,prose and verse,parody,and the reception of romance.Although his subject is essentially literary history, Gingras is more literary analyst than historian, and this leads to one of the volume’s great strengths. Moments of textual analysis punctuate the book,contributing to the larger argument and offering excellent micro-readings of individual texts. The result is a study that far exceeds the bounds of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the thematic analysis leads, more than once, to chronological confusion. Thus, in a section on the term ‘fable,’ the examples discussed move from the Brut, to Chrétien’s Conte du Graal, to the Chanson de Guillaume, then Gautier de Coinci, followed by the Roman de Thèbes et al. Gingras’s argument here is not purely historical (or developmental), but a more rigorous sense of chronology would have made it stronger. One other minor problem is similarly linked to the study’s vast scope: in a number of places, Gingras formulates interesting arguments based on specific manuscripts, yet in others, he refers to modern editions, with no mention of manuscripts. Thus, in a passage on“errance”(278–86), the discussion opens with an examination of manuscript rubrics in the prose Lancelot, but then considers the relationship between ‘aventure’ and ‘merveille’ via a series of analyses often hinging on a single word or line of text, yet with no mention of the possibility of variants. Here, the juxtaposition draws attention to the lack of manuscript information in the latter section, but similar passages exist throughout. Including manuscript information for every passage is clearly impossible, however it is unfortunate some solution other than complete silence could not have been found.Despite a few infelicities arising from the sheer mass of material (and from a lack of good copy-editing),Gingras’s well-written study is a major contribution to the field of Old French romance studies. University of Missouri, Kansas City Kathy M. Krause Grande, Nathalie. Le rire galant: usages du comique dans les fictions narratives de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2116-9. Pp. 332. 66 a. Roche, Bruno. Le rire des libertins dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7453-2092-6. Pp. 622. 122 a. As these two books demonstrate,the scholarly study of humor is no laughing matter. The public execution of Lucilio Vanini in 1619 and the imprisonment of Théophile de Viau in 1623 created a dangerous social and political landscape for libertine satirists of 264 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 265 the early seventeenth century.As Roche explains, the libertine’s laughter of superiority and lucidity, what he terms the katagelos, gives way as the century unfolds to more subtle and less easily detected practices of irony. The argument culminates in the exegesis of a third, existential mode of laughter that unifies epicurean bodily pleasures with a corresponding philosophy. Covering the period between the first publication of Théophile’s Œuvres in 1621 and the death of Gassendi in 1655, Le rire des libertins extensively and carefully analyzes the work of freethinkers and comic writers including Cyrano, Sorel, La Mothe LeVayer, Naudé, Dassoucy, and Tristan L’Hermite. In addition to Christian doctrine, the libertines’ main targets were pedantry, scholasticism, and Aristotelian philosophy.Alternatives toAristotle were found in Epicureanism,skepticism, and cynicism.The sacrilegious creator of an inverted world,Cyrano emerges as perhaps the most interesting figure in this study; Cyrano’s ridicule of anthropocentrism robustly anticipated what is now increasingly termed posthumanism. Like Cyrano, Naudé attacked dogma and prejudice, specifically targeting the obscurantism and false claims of the Rosicrucians. Laughter became a critical...
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Jul 10, 2024
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